Page 131 of Katabasis
She squeezed tight the hilt of her knife.
For a moment she was ready to fight the horde whole. She had forgotten that her spells did indeed work, and she was quite a good magician, until she saw the evidence. She had been right. The bone-things could not do calculus, and could not tell Zeno from God. A third of the horde slowed, and slowed again, and slowed down infinitely until their spindly little legs beat pointlessly into degrees of diminishing fractions. Only a lucky few skirted round the piles of their incapacitated friends, and when they got up the hill this number was whittled to a mere handful.
The bravest among them approached her sniffing, cautious now. It had the slender, trembling build of a whippet.
“Stop it,” she told it sternly. “Go. Sit.”
The bone-thing yipped and sprang.
Alice smashed her blade against its side. It fell, and before it could get up Alice slammed the knife down again and again until its ribs cracked open and its limbs splayed at its sides.
Alice rose. “Anyone else?”
They all sprang at once.
But they were soslow! Alice could not believe how easy this was. Snorting chalk had done something to her vision, had altered her perception of time and space. Her sight broadened and sharpened both at once. She could see every little bit of them, all the chalk that animated their joints, every stroke of the Kripkes’ meticulous handwriting. And she knew precisely where to hit them, so that the rest would fall apart. She knew when they would spring, where they were aiming, and where they would be. She knew to get there first.
Thwack. Thwack.She wielded a blade in her right arm and a flask in her left, sprinkling the air like a priest sprinkles holy water. The water dissolved their joints, and her knife did the rest, and a pile of bones began building up around her ankles as she danced.
God, what couldn’t she do? It was exactly that manic feeling she got when she’d drunk five cups of coffee and felt suddenly confident that she could master any field if she put her mind to it—that very brief high always followed by a dreadful crash. Only here the crash never came, and with each movement, as Alice’s blood pumped hotter, the world grew slower and slower until she had the frightening sensation that her mind might race right out of her body. But sanity held, and her mind and body did not come apart. She hung there at the brink of transcendence, when all the world stood still and its fault lines pulsed visible. She had a flashback to those late nights in the lab, every time she’d blinked and seen the hidden world—and now it was all laid out in front of her, not in abstract, but in terrible concreteness. Just bones to shatter. Spines to break.
If only Elspeth could have seen her! She recalled Elspeth dancing with her spear along the shore, and imagined her own movements now were just as graceful. This was fun! She didn’t only defend herself from their hacking jaws, she made an art of it. She swung her blade in the prettiest, most elegant arcs. The philosopher Zhuangzi once met a butcher who was so practiced in his arts that his blade never dulled; he slid his cleaver through the hollow spaces, where he met no resistance.This is the Way, thought Alice;I see those hollow spaces. She sliced so cleanly through their spines she carved them apart in one blow. One poor runt she bounced off the hilt of her knife and decapitated in midair as it fell. This must have been how lumberjacks felt. Every time they swung an axe and wood cleaved in two. What a pleasure, this tactile competence. Clean destruction—and the earth cracks beneath your hands.
When she’d dispensed with her attackers she descended the hill and dispensed with the trapped things, too. She felt it prudent to be thorough. The Kripkes might free them, and then she’d be in trouble. But the Kripkes were as yet hidden, and her targets frozen in place, and their spines gave so easily when she chopped them clean through.
She thought she read fear in their bones. Yes, they actually trembled. They could not move their legs, but they could quiver, duck their heads, shrink back in every imitation of living things fearing the whip. And this might have stilled her, but then she saw layered over their heads Peter’s wan face, and the knives grinding in midair. She swung. When the blade met their spines, the cracks sounded so pleasing that her delight drowned out everything else. She had never before felt the high of sheer entropy. Indeed it felt so good to just make things fall apart. She wanted it to go on forever—was disappointed, indeed, when she realized her targets had run out; there was nothing more to attack.
Alice stood, chest heaving, and stared over the empty dunes. At her feet, a disembodied skull nipped at her ankle. She gave it a savage kick. It rolled, tumbling down the hill, then came to a stop amidst the carnage.
She’d demolished the horde. The fields were silent.
“Come on,” she panted. Chalk burned her nostrils. She had a wild vision of eating the Kripkes alive; of plucking their heads off their necks and chewing through them whole. “Come on out.”
They appeared seconds later—three figures boundingon the hill, their eyes black, and their bodies encased in armor made of bone. Papa and Mama and Baby Bear, come back from our vacation. Goldilocks has been very bad in our house. Goldilocks must be stuck like a pig. Pouches hung at their waists—wet, full-to-bursting pouches that jiggled when they moved—and their arms glistened with fresh, red blood. Peter’s blood.
The Kripkes paused a moment to take in the carnage.
They conferred among themselves. Alice wished she could hear what they said, because they probably involved some compliments. Skilled magician. Oh, yes, very skilled. Probably trained at Oxbridge. We must be careful.
Then the Kripkes swept through the field.
Alice should have known her silly spells would hardly dissuade them. And yet, the speed of their demolition dismayed her. Nick Kripke seemed not even to read what she’d written. One look at the exposed chalk, and that was enough. Blood arced freely from his pouch, and he tossed counter-spells onto the sand, dismantling her proofs without looking. He never broke his stride; even the White Horse Paradox hardly fazed him, and here Alice was certain that Nick had never studied Chinese. Theophrastus and Magnolia followed in his footsteps as one by one Alice’s defenses melted away.
Theophrastus paused briefly at the two-step Liar Paradox—his feet rocked back and forth as he sounded out the words—but then Magnolia tugged him aside and kicked the red sand away.
They looked up. They saw her now, standing atop her hill.
She saw them clearly too; their rangy, lean forms, their spiked and shining armor. The top halves of their faces were hidden under helmets made of bone, and the eyes she saw through the dead creatures’ sockets gleamed with sinister intelligence. They wore identical leers; thin lips stretched back to reveal sharpened, black-rimmed teeth. Magnolia’s lips looked so vibrantly red, the scarlet shine of department store lipstick. Though Alice could not imagine where in Hell she found such bright pigment, except in blood.
Primitivewas not the word. They had not devolved, like a family lost for months on a hike; they had not lost their faculties in despair. Neither did they resemble Elspeth, whose piecemeal attire was junk scraps made pathetic, homespun art. The Kripkes’ armor was flawless, tailored to indecipherable purpose.They are aliens now, thought Alice. They did not move like humans; they did not think like humans. They had evolved and adapted to their terrain, become the apex predators the underworld lacked.
Every inch of her body wanted to flee. She had to shout down her instincts with her tinny rational mind.Run, and Gradus willmock you. Run, and you prolong what must come. Run, and yourback is to the beast.
The Kripkes stopped at the base of the hill.
They watched her for the longest moment, all three heads tilted left to identical degrees. Nick and Magnolia conferred. Then Magnolia trudged up first, Theophrastus in her wake.
Alice’s mind went unbidden to the acknowledgments of so many monographs. Last of all, many thanks to my loving wife, who kept our house, set our tables, fed our children, typed up all my notes, and came up with most of my original ideas as well. My dear, you make our lives possible; your love inspires me.
