Page 2 of Katabasis
Alice had stashed in her bag a brand-new Perpetual Flask (an enchanted water bottle that wouldn’t run out for weeks) and Lembas Bread (stale, cardboard-y nutrition strips popular among graduate students because they took seconds to eat and kept one sated for hours. There was nothing enchanted about Lembas Bread; it was just the extracted protein of tons of peanuts and an ungodly percentage of sugar). She had flashlights, iodine, matches, rope, bandages, and a hypothermia blanket. She had a new, sparkling pack of Barkles’ Chalk and every reliable map of Hell she could find in the university library carefully reproduced in a laminated binder. (Alas, they all claimed different topographies—she figured she would get somewhere high up and choose a map when she arrived.) She had a switchblade and two sharp hunting knives. And she had a volume of Proust, in case at night she ever got bored. (To be honest she had never gotten round to trying Proust, but Cambridge had made her the kind of person who wanted to have read Proust, and she figured Hell was a good place to start.) “I’m all set.”
“You’ll still need help puzzling through the courts,” Peter said. “Hell’s very metaphysically tricky, you know. Anscombe claims the constant spatial reorientations alone—”
Alice rolled her eyes. “Please don’t insinuate I’m not clever enough to go to Hell.”
“Do you have a copy ofCleary’s?”
“Of course.” Alice wouldn’t forgetCleary’s Templates. She didn’t forget anything.
“Have you cross-checked all twelve authoritative versions of Orpheus’s journey?”
“Of course I did Orpheus, it’s the obvious place to start—”
“Do you know how to cross the Lethe?”
“Please, Murdoch.”
“Do you know how to tame Cerberus?”
Alice hesitated. She knew this was a possible obstruction—she’d seen the threat of Cerberus mentioned in a letter from Dante to Bernardo Canaccio, only she hadn’t seen it referenced in any other materials she found, and the one book that might have contained a clue—Vandick’sDante and the Literal Inferno—was already missing from the stacks.
In fact, quite a few books she needed had kept disappearing from the library these past few months, often checked out on the very morning she’d gone in. Every translation of theAeneid. All the medieval scholarship on Lazarus. It was like some poltergeist haunted the stacks, anticipating her project’s every turn.
Realization dawned. “You’ve—”
“Been researching the same thing,” said Peter. “We’re too far into these degrees, Alice. No one else could supervise our dissertations. No one else is clever enough. And there’s still so much he hasn’t taught us. We have to bring him back. And two minds are better than one here.”
Alice had to laugh. All this time. Every empty slot on the shelves, every missing puzzle piece. It was Peter all along.
“Tell me how to tame Cerberus, then.”
“Nice try, Law.” Lightly, Peter punched her shoulder. “Come on. You know we’re always better together.”
Now this, Alice thought, was really laying it on thick.
He didn’t mean it. She knew he didn’t mean it because it was not true. It had not been true in well over a year, and that had been entirely Peter’s choice. She recalled it well. So how could he act so chummy, toss those words out so casually, as if they were still first-years giggling in the lab, as if time had never passed?
But then, this was Peter’s modus operandi. He was like this with everyone. All warmth and cheer—but the moment you tried to step closer, solid ground gave way to empty space.
Two bad options, then. Imperfect knowledge, or Peter. She supposed she could demand the relevant books—Peter was annoying, but he didn’t hoard resources—and figure it all out on her own. But her funding clock was ticking, and certain body parts were rotting in a basement. There simply wasn’t time.
“Fine,” she said. “I hope you brought your own chalk.”
“Two new packs of Shropley’s,” he said happily.
Yes, she knew he preferred Shropley’s. Evidence of bad character. At least she wouldn’t have to share.
She arranged her rucksack next to her feet, checking that none of the straps lay outside the pentagram. “Then all that’s left is the incantation. Are you ready?”
“Hold on,” said Peter. “You do know the price?”
Of course Alice knew. This was why scholars rarely ever went to Hell. It wasn’t that getting there was so veryhard. You only had to dig up all the right proofs and master them. It was that a trip down below rarely justified the price.
“Half my remaining lifespan,” she said. Entering Hell meant crashing through borders between worlds, and this demanded a kind of organic energy that mere chalk could not contain. “Thirty years or so, gone. I know.”
But she had hardly struggled with the choice. Would she rather graduate, produce brilliant research, and go out in a blaze of glory? Or would she rather live out her natural lifespan, gray haired and drooling, fading into irrelevance, consumed by regret? Had not Achilles chosen to die in battle? She had met professors emeriti at department receptions, those poor aphasic props, and she did not think old age an attractive prospect. She knew this choice would horrify anyone outside the academy. But no one outside the academy could possibly understand. She would sacrifice her firstborn for a professorial post. She would sever a limb. She would give anything, so long as she still had her mind, so long as she could still think.
“I want to be a magician,” she said. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
