Page 79 of Katabasis
Something black seeped into Elspeth’s eyes. They seemed to rot in her head, whites turning green, then black, years of decay squeezed into seconds. Suddenly butterflies flew out the sockets; a horde of them, awful rustling violet. Alice and Peter skittered back, but Elspeth approached, butterflies doubling with every step, until she was not a person but a rustling mass of velvet, dark and reproachful. Her spear whipped out; the point rested just beneath Peter’s chin.
“Step inside.”
Peter’s neck bobbed. “Why don’t—”
“Step inside, love.”
Peter obeyed.
“You know, it’s not the cruelty that gets me.” Elspeth pulled out a stick of chalk, dipped it in a pouch at her belt, and fixed it to the end of her staff. “It’s the disrespect. I’m a Grimes student, you might recall.” She kicked the mat away and began etching alterations into Peter’s work. She wrote with furious speed, muttering in Greek as she went along. This was terrifically impressive magick—very few magicians could inscribe and incant simultaneously.Sheisgood, Alice thought;sheisworthy of Grimes. “You think I have been down here for decades, dancing with the Kripkes, and I don’t know my way around the goddamn Liar Paradox?” She closed the circle with a final, vicious stroke. “The Liar Paradox is child’s play. But advanced magick, kids—that’s making one tell the truth.”
She banged her staff against the deck. Alice choked. Two invisible hands gripped the sides of her face, wrenching her jaw open.
Elspeth demanded, “What is your purpose?”
The invisible hands pressed harder. Alice gurgled an answer and tried to choke it down.
“Grimes,” Peter gasped.
“Excuse me?”
“Professor Grimes—our advisor, he died, we have to bring him back—”
“You’re here for Grimes?”
Elspeth howled then, a howl that doubled, tripled, multiplied into an impossible chorus, a thousand Elspeths shrieking from nowhere. Tiny black lines spread rapidly across her skin, and then the top layer of her skin seemed to peel away. Dark fragments coalesced, whirled—but Elspeth was not gone, only shielded now by a horde of butterflies, which swirled agitated around her, whipping up winds, whirling faster and faster until the force of the gale seemed about to rip the ship apart. She-the-chorus screamed, resounding over the winds. “You gave up half your lives, and journeyed to the underworld”—the butterflies enveloped her like a shield, encasing her in a semihuman form until she was not a human Shade but some singular-plural god, speaking with a voice like thunder—“for that miserable, godforsakenclown?”
Elspeth pointed her staff. All at once the butterflies stormed outward. Alice flung her arms over her head, but it did not matter; the creatures were like a velvet wall, pushing until she and Peter were forced against the prow, bent at the knee, for the circling winds were too strong for them to lift their heads.
“Get off my boat,” said Elspeth.
“Please,” said Peter. “Please don’t—”
“You dare to beg?”
“What would you do?” Alice cried. “If your advisor died? If you were in our position?”
The butterflies parted. Elspeth’s face was again revealed, pale and terrible. “I’dquit, you moron. I’d find another one.” For just a moment her voice was human. Alice thought she heard it break. “I’d doliterally anything else.”
“But there is nothing else,” Alice croaked. “Can’t you understand?”
Butterflies closed over Elspeth’s face like a helmet.
The mass surged. Alice writhed, but it was pointless. She reached for Peter, but the mass pulled them apart. All she could see or hear was beating black wings and beneath that, a hissing cloud of wrath. A million bursts of wind carried her up and flung her out. She flailed suspended in the air, blind and disoriented, before crashing hard against the ground. By the time the butterflies released her, spiraling away in formation, Elspeth and Archimedes and theNeurathwere a dot against the horizon, shooting spitefully out of sight.
Chapter Nineteen
Right.” Peter hoisted his rucksack over his shoulder and turned to trudge up the shore. “Good luck to you.”
Alice scrambled to her feet. “Where are you going?”
He did not reply. She watched him for a moment, baffled, and then hastened up the shore behind him. “What are you doing?”
Still he did not reply. She seized his sleeve. “Murdoch!”
“Let go.”
“Tell me where you’re going.”
