Page 83 of Katabasis
He vanished.
Alice had time to shout, just before the ground opened beneath her too. She fell a short distance, then landed with awhumphon her back. Stars exploded behind her eyes. But the dirt was soft, and the pain passed quickly. Soon she was able to sit up and wipe the sand from her eyes.
“You all right?” Peter’s torchlight danced above her. She saw his face, wan and scared.
“Yes,” she breathed. “But where...”
Peter arced his torch in a circle around them.
They were in a pit. Man-made, not natural; its sides were too flat, and they met the pit’s bottom at clean, ninety-degree angles. They were about fifteen, twenty feet deep. The surface seemed tantalizingly near but clearly too high to jump to, and still too high even if Alice balanced perfectly on Peter’s shoulders and stood on her tiptoes.
Alice felt around in the dirt until she grasped her own torch. Together they scanned the smooth dirt walls until Alice’s light landed on something angular, protrusions in the corner.
“Steps,” she breathed. She swung her torch round the walls, following them up. Thank God—they led all the way to the surface. They were not nice steps; they were short blocks embedded in the dirt, just thick enough to balance one foot at a time. But they went up.
They climbed, pressing their chests against the wall for balance. And Alice should have known they would never reach the top—she should have known the moment she saw that circle in the dirt—but still dread pooled in her stomach when they turned the first corner, and the surface still looked as far away as before. They kept going round a second corner, then a third, for fool’s hope, but the distance never changed. They were still less than a foot off the ground.
“Damn it.” Peter jumped down. He smacked a hand against the wall. “It’s Penrose stairs.”
She recognized the patterns as soon as he said it. They’d been thrust into a nil-geometry space; they’d been spinning around an illusion. The stairs were never going to lead them out; for the stairs, impossibly, made constant ninety-degree turns in a continuous loop. They were stuck in someone’s Escher trap.
Maurits Cornelius Escher, a Dutch architect turned experimental artist, became well-known in the mid-twentieth century for his illustrations depicting physical planes that could not exist. His work founded an entire subfield of visual magick that used illusions to warp physical space. Few found success with Escher techniques, as they required artistic proficiency, speed, and the ability to translate multidimensional artistic representations into algorithmic language. Until the late seventies, that subfield was dominated by Nick and Magnolia Kripke.
“Find the pentagram,” Alice whispered. “Find the flaws.”
Peter was already on his hands and knees, poking through dirt and upturning stones hoping for any trace of telltale chalk. But Alice knew it would be futile. Any magician worth their salt would have hidden the pentagram beneath layers and layers of dirt.
Cuck-oo.
They both jumped.
Cuck-oo.
“Jesus,” said Peter.
He shone his torch to the surface. High above them, nestled within a boulder’s groove, was a cuckoo bird on a spring; the insides torn out of a clock.Cuck-oo.There was one just like it in the graduate students’ lounge, its sound set excruciatingly high. And when the bird came out, on the hour, it had the effect of motivating everyone to put down their teacups, get up, and leave. No one could bear that sound, reminding them the day was dwindling, marking wasted time. This one hovered back and forth on its rusted spring, peeking out in thirty-second intervals. Its call was not loud, but it spread and spread; the pert chirp fading into wind howling across the sands.A signal, thought Alice.Come here. We’ve found something.
Elspeth’s grim smile rose unbidden in her mind.
Why do you think they love the living?
Alice tried to slow her breathing.
You couldn’t think when panicked—this lesson was drilled into every young magician. She tried to straitjacket her mind into the focus needed to solve an exam set. Because this was just an exam set, a very difficult one, and it wouldn’t do to lose her head. She had only to ignore the stakes, and remain calm as she went through all the standard routine of undoing another magician’s handiwork. Find the pentagram, find its flaws—weak phrasing, awkward constructions—and then undo the unreality with another layer of artifice...
But there was no point. The Kripkes had had a very long time to perfect their arts. Their work was seamless. It showed in their bold, sure lines; the cleverness with which they’d embedded every stroke into the landscape. And the longer she searched, the more a pressure built in her chest.
Alice was well familiar with this creeping dread. There came a point with almost every research project where you understood it was time to stop trying—that all that time and effort sunk into a once-hopeful hypothesis were simply leading nowhere. And maybe you could try to forge ahead, but once that seed of doubt was lodged within you it only kept spreading, its tendrils growing through your lungs so that you couldn’t breathe or think, and that the more you tried to scrape some positive result from your efforts the more the threads of the project kept coming loose, the sands shifting beneath you, until all the artifice fell away and you were forced to acknowledge that this simply wasn’t going to work.
A trained magician was accustomed to this kind of panic. Science just meant failure, as Thomas Edison had shown; science meant knowing when to cut your losses and start over and accumulate new funding, new hypotheses, new materials and ideas. You could always go to bat again, if you knew how to play the game. You could always come up with something else.
Only this time it was a matter of life and death, and there was nowhere to start over. There was only the inevitability of the Kripkes and their blood-hungry chalk.
“No,” Alice whispered. “No, no, please...”
But it didn’t matter. The search turned up nothing, and everywhere she pointed her torch she found only seamless illusion, not a speck of chalk in sight.
Peter had given up. He was slumped against the wall, his head held between his hands. He was trembling all over, but it took Alice a moment to realize he was laughing.
