Page 130 of Katabasis
The effect was immediate. She felt like she’d stuffed wasabi up her nostrils. Sharp stabs of pain spread through her nose into her skull. Tears welled at her eyes. She reeled back, clutching her temples, just as spots of color exploded in her mind. A cacophony of memories, memories she didn’t even know she had—memories she still couldn’t place, entirely foreign except for their intensity. A woman laughing. A deer startling. A giant’s stride. A midnight streak into the lake, and the plunging cold. All the axioms in the world swirling and dancing above her. Here was the hidden world revealed and written clear; no shadows, no veils. She stretched her arms above her head in some primal bearlike stance, and in that moment Alice felt capable of devouring the universe.
“Jesus.” An icy burn spread through her limbs.I’m burning, she thought;I’m on a pyre, and it feels delicious. “JesusChrist.”
Gradus howled with laughter. “I told you.”
She took a step and reeled. Each movement sent the universe spinning sideways on its axis, sent ripples across Hell. She was afraid to breathe, for she did not want to cause the apocalypse.
The cuckoo skull cooed once more. Alice seized it, hurled it down, and crushed it beneath her foot.
She thought she could hear the alarm—the invisible signal now a humming perceptible to her ears. She felt from across the dunes a sharp, hostile awareness turned suddenly toward her, and this exhilarated her. At last, a challenge.
“Come on,” she shrieked to the desert. “Come get me, I’m right here.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Alice was no wartime magician, but all the military histories she’d ever read made a big deal about finding the high ground. So she tracked first to the river, and then she found a spot on a bluff where she could see the Kripkes coming from all directions. This bluff stretched into jagged overhangs that loomed above Lethe, and so she formulated a plan: to lure the Kripkes to the top and find some way of tricking them over the edge. The drop was not far, but she didn’t need the fall to kill. She only needed to get them wet.
Then she roved the surrounding hills with a bucket of cat’s blood, dipping and drawing pentagrams on every spare inch of sand she could find.
This work was quite calming. It gave her somewhere to focus her chalk-screaming mind. Always it was so lovely to have a well-defined objective and clear parameters for success. In her college years Alice had participated in several Magick Olympiads, in which contestants were given half an hour to inscribe pentagrams to accomplish a series of tasks. Make the bowling ball rise to the ceiling. Move this pin from one end of a field to the next. She’d racked up a half dozen medals for her talent in inscribing quickly and accurately under pressure. The old thrill of competition came back to her now. Forget the Kripkes for a moment, forget the likelihood of impending death, and win the game at hand. Here is a board, and here is your objective: to obstruct your opponents more than they obstruct you.
She pulled out the standard repertoire. At intervals across the field she inscribed all of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion: Achilles and the tortoise, Atalanta on the racetrack, the arrow in flight. If Atalanta wished to cross a racetrack—if the bone-things wished to cross the field to the bluff—she had to first get halfway there, and then halfway to halfway there, and then halfway to halfway to halfway there. But if you kept dividing the distances by half, then Atalanta had to accomplish an infinite number of tasks, and so she probably couldn’t budge at all. And if the bone-things wished to even move—if they, like an arrow, wished to traverse space from point A to point B—they must grapple with the fact that at any given moment in time, if you took a freeze frame of their movements, they would be standing still. The time it would take them to reach Alice was composed of such given moments, but that meant they were always standing still, and never moving. And they could never harm Alice if they could not move.
This was all silly stuff, as long as you had beginner calculus. But the bone-things did not have calculus.
Where the ground sloped toward the hill, Alice wrote out an expanded version of the Liar Paradox. This was a practical joke within the department that often had undergraduates stepping back and forth on the stairways, stuck like rocking horses:
THE NEXT STATEMENT IS FALSE
THE PRECEDING STATEMENT IS TRUE
At the top of the mound, right against the ledge, she drew from memory a most special paradox. She had no clue whether this one would work, but she didn’t strictly need it to work. She only needed to show Nick and Magnolia something they’d never seen before. Something interesting enough to give them pause.
“You seem very prepared.” Gradus had been drifting at her heels as she worked, murmuring in appreciation all the while.
“You could help me fight them,” said Alice.
“What, and huff and puff until they all blow down?” Gradus blurred himself all over, as if to emphasize his insubstantiality. “I’m only a Shade, remember.”
“I’m sure you’re good for lots of things,” said Alice. “You could distract them, for instance. You could swoop and billow and yell very loudly.”
But she could tell she had overestimated the strength of their bond. Gradus was fond of her only when it was amusing to be. And while she considered their time together very special, she was only a fraction of his deep time. In one thousand years he would likely only chuckle at her name.
“Ah... well.” Gradus made the sound of a throat clearing. She thought Gradus might say something more. For a moment it really did seem like he was considering it. But it was so much less awkward not to. Goodbyes were worth the effort only when you meant to see someone again. Gradus merely dissolved where he stood, solid grays fading to a shadow. There was a slight breeze, then he was gone. And Alice might have felt abandoned, but she thought about it for a moment, and then concluded she didn’t have any real grounds to be upset.
Humming, she returned to her work.
She checked all her pentagrams, made sure all the circles were closed. She sprinkled sand across her handiwork, enough to hide it from a casual glance, not enough to interfere with the pentagrams’ range. She stood back, surveyed the now-smooth terrain, and nodded in satisfaction. She had laid a very good chessboard. It was the best anyone could do with a cat carcass and waterlogged chalk.
Then she retreated up the hill and watched for the bone army’s coming.
The wait was interminable.
Alice was filled with bloodlust and chalk dust, with nowhere yet to put them. She was long past the point of fear. She felt she was on a speeding train, fast approaching the crash, and she hated to feel the minutes pass because it was all putting off the end. Several times she thought or hoped she heard clicking, but they were only memories become too vivid. Each time she shook her head, like a dog shaking off water, and the clicking ceased.
At last she saw that roving line of white. No Kripkes in sight. Just a menagerie of reconstructed bones; dogs and cats and what looked like a small cavalry of raccoons.
This was a much larger horde than had attacked her and Peter outside Greed. She wondered if the Kripkes knew she was something special, if they had assembled all their best forces specially for her. They drew closer, covering the distance with astonishing speed. She counted under her breath.Thirty white horses upon a red hill, she thought.First they champ. Then they stamp.The bone-things reached the base of the hill.And now they stand still.
