Page 33 of Katabasis
Alice squinted, following the creatures down the dune as far as she could. In seconds they were over the horizon, hidden from sight.
Not a single sojourner’s account made mention of creatures of bone and chalk. Nothing on the record came close.
Her tranquility cratered. The beach was no longer a fantastical and lulling retreat but an anxious and overexposed plane. The sight of chalk meant the presence of another magician. A frightfully talented one at that, one capable of techniques not even Professor Grimes had ever dared attempt. Chalk meant a creator, another keen rational mind whose motives were unknown, save for one thing.
He was watching.
On Chalk
In all the myths and lore it is assumed that magicians use a variety of special implements: scepters, staffs, cauldrons, wands. But those in the learned sciences know that a proper magician needs only one tool, and that is a humble stick of chalk.
Chalk is the foundation of all analytic magick. Easy to write with, easy to fix mistakes. Chalk is made of limestone in turn made by compressed, tiny fragments of ancient sea creatures that died millions of years ago, and therefore possesses the curious, still-mysterious quality of manifesting magical statements. Chalk is, as wrote the magician-philosopher Aldous Huxley, a link to the abyss of the remote past, the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe. Some evidence indicates that the Cerne Abbas Giant, a massive chalk drawing of a naked man holding a club, is prehistoric evidence of a vast and terrifying work of magick. (Though in the absence of a recognizable paradox, any evidence of its intent is lost to history, and probably for the best.)
The efficacy of chalk depends on where you dug it up. In England, the trusted standard for magick chalk is the Barkles brand, mined from closely guarded deneholes along the Thames. The most expensive chalk, used only in very important public demonstrations and dissertation defenses and the like, is Shropley’s Premium—produced by the Shropley’s company from deposits at Grime’s Graves in Norfolk. Shropley’s also issues a more affordable line of chalk mined in Hangman’s Wood—Shropley’s Standard—which carries a signature yellowish tint. Most English magicians bear allegiance either to Barkles or to Shropley’s Standard, and debates over which is superior have ruined friendships.
Whatever your preference, what distinguishes everyday chalk and magical chalk is that magical chalk writes on almost every surface. Magicians do not always enjoy the ideal conditions of blackboards in lab rooms. For practical effects, they must be able to draw pentagrams in all sorts of conditions—on concrete, grassy hills, plastic boards, wooden floors, and cobblestones. Magician’s chalk glides beautifully on every texture, no matter how wet or dry, crumbly or slick. The highest-quality Shropley’s can even activate successfully on sand.
This is perhaps why, in all their research, Alice and Peter had overlooked one crucial detail: nowhere in any records, mythical or scholarly, has there ever been evidence of chalk working in Hell.
Chapter Eight
They made camp when they were too tired to keep walking. Alice checked the time—one in the morning, much later than they ought to have slept, but they had both kept pushing through that last stretch of their hike, forcing numb feet onward along the banks. They were both rattled by the bone-things. Alice was unable to shake the creeping, sticky fear from her throat, the certainty they were being watched, and the only solution seemed to be putting as much distance between them and the bone-things as they could. This, despite Hell’s purported infinitude and unreliable topology. Despite the fact that for all their efforts, whoever or whatever it was might still appear before them in a blink of an eye.
Alice sat, chewed through a stick of Lembas Bread, and tried not to let her despair creep. Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair. Everything was always falling apart; nothing in lab went right; you couldn’t afford groceries, your cottage had a rat problem, all your instructors hated you, you were always one step away from flushing all your life’s work down the toilet. You shoved it to the side of your mind and went to sleep and deferred it all to tomorrow when your brain again functioned well enough to pretend.
Peter hissed as he pulled a strip of gauze from his arm.
“How’s it look?” she asked.
“Not infected, I don’t think.” He held his wrist over the fire, examining the wound. “You’d be able to tell at this point, wouldn’t you?”
“Want some more antiseptic? Just in case?”
“Yeah, all right.” She passed him her travel bottle of merbromin. He dabbed a droplet onto his arm, then held out his wrist so she could rewrap it in gauze. “Thank you.”
She settled back against her pack and closed her eyes. “Of course.”
“Hey—let’s try something.” Peter pulled a box of chalk from his bag. “I wonder if we might speed things up.”
Reluctantly Alice lifted her head. “How do you mean?”
“Well, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen Professor Grimes do?”
“We’ve already had this conversation.”
“I’m not saying we should find the end point,” said Peter. “I’m just saying, maybe there’s another shortcut across the courts. Let’s just assume we have a good guess where he is. Suppose this—he’s done worse than greed, surely?” Peter drew an enviously perfect little circle by his feet. These were called test circles: pentagrams drawn in miniature for safety checks before you stepped inside the real thing. These were best practice for spells that involved any movement or bodily alteration. You put your hand in the test circle, and if you didn’t lose your fingers, then you could chance putting your whole self in. “Worse than wrath?”
Alice thought of flying spittle, of mugs smashed across tiled floors. Rare instances—but clear in her memory nonetheless. Professor Grimes never had patience for stupidity. “Probably, yes.”
“Then we ought to just skip ahead to cruelty, shouldn’t we?” Rapidly Peter scribbled a series of algorithms around the circle. It seemed to involve a lot of maths. Alice saw more geometry than she did Greek, and this made her head hurt. Peter set down his chalk. “What do you think, Law?”
“Hold on,” she said. “Backtrack. How does your shortcut work?”
He pulled his notebook out of his rucksack, opened it to a page in the middle, and tossed it at her. She took one glance and instantly her thinking mind shut down, as it always did when confronted with a lot of numbers. “You need to explain that to me like I’m five.”
“Gabriel’s Horn,” he said happily. “Also called Torricelli’s Trumpet. It’s a mathematical paradox that bounds a finite volume within an infinite surface area. The plane of Hell is that infinite area, and in configuring us as the volume inside the horn, we could make a finite shortcut...”
“Sorry, what?”
