The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One

by Sean Williams

  Where the hell am I?

  He “stood,” planting his feet firmly and stretching himself warily “upright” so that his head pointed down into the void.

  He tried taking a step and sent himself floating precipitously away from the ceiling like an astronaut in very low gravity.

  Great, he thought to himself, fighting vertigo. I can set some long-distance records while waiting to croak.

  A sound—harsh and metallic, like the scrape of blades against each other—came from somewhere to his right. He crouched and made himself small. The darkness was thick and cloying, and the thought that there might be something else out there changed everything. Although a void might try to suck his brains out or drive him mad, at least, by definition, it was empty of things that could hurt him.

  But what would hunt a dead man? Of what possible nourishment was the soul?

  The sound came again, this time from his left. Seth swiveled to face it but could still see nothing. He froze, convinced something was there.

  On the very edges of his vision, two tiny points appeared. Mere motes, they hung motionless before him, one slightly above the other. A hint of light gleamed off them, like eyes in a cocked head—tiny pinprick eyes that glowed silver-grey and might have been looking right at him.

  Seth's legs went from frozen to aching to run in an instant. He tensed to spring. The pinpricks swayed, grew marginally brighter, then seemed to retreat, as though they were stepping back to take stock. They were hard and cold, and definitely not human.

  Imaginary or not, he didn't want to find out what sort of creature had eyes like that.

  He leapt, pushing outwards from the wall with all his strength. As he launched into the void, he saw the eyes loom out of the darkness at him, growing from points, not into circles, but lines—gleaming silver edges that flashed at him with the same vicious scraping sound as before. They weren't eyes, he realised in horror, but the tips of scissor blades as long as his arm; evil points built to impale and slice flesh into ribbons. The blades snapped and stabbed at him, cutting the air in two. He spun wildly away from them, unable to do more than windmill and hope for the best. The blades snipped and missed. He screamed as the creature on the other end of the blades came out of the darkness. It was long-limbed, glass-eyed, and as grey as the metal it wielded. He saw, as it lunged for him a third time, that it was the scissors. Its arms terminated in two giant sets of blades that snapped and clashed at him with a sound like cymbals exploding.

  He tried to swim through the air, and only succeeded in adding twist to his tumble. The creature, sensing his helplessness, brought the blades together.

  Pain seared in Seth's left wrist. The creature leered in triumph, revealing a mouth full of sharp black teeth. Desperately, refusing to let the pain get the better of him, Seth kicked against the metallic flesh and pushed himself away. The monster's eyes widened in surprise as though it had not expected such an elementary tactic. It howled as he shot out of range of its frantically snipping blades.

  The pain caught up with him as the creature vanished into the void. Tumbling erratically, he wrapped himself around his wrist and discovered to his horror that his left hand was gone. It had been neatly, completely, severed. He could feel the stump of bone where his forearm terminated and a thin wrap of flesh loose around it. He tried clenching his fingers and only ghost memories responded. There was no blood.

  He screamed in agony. The creature caught and echoed the sound on a rising note. Another shriek answered it, then a third. Seth's trajectory took him in a long, flat arc across the roof with a cacophony of inhuman calls following him. The sounds were terrifying, no less so for their wordlessness. He felt as though he was flying over the Big Cat enclosure of a zoo. He couldn't see the animals, but he could hear them. He was floating over them in a balloon, and the balloon was beginning to sink. As it sank, the cats began to stir. Blinking, growling, scratching at the air, they woke to see him descending towards them, a tasty meal conveniently dropping out of the sky.

  Sparks flickered on the roof and burst into flame. Torches lit in long, guttering lines, creating geometric patterns uncannily like the streetlights of a vast, flat city. Seth saw shapes moving among the lights, feeding them, tending them, using them to hunt for him. Not big cats at all, but far worse. Angular, twisted limbs pointed up at him, waving threateningly. Some jumped into the air in clumsy attempts to catch him before he landed. Fights broke out among scrawny winged creatures with holes for eyes and tubular mouths. He kicked out and up again to protect himself from a fat beast with too many arms and claws as sharp as the Swede's dagger, but that was the only one that came close. The greater threat remained on the ground ahead.

  As the roof approached, its apparent smoothness resolved into detail. He saw structures open to the void, decorated with curved hooks and grapnels glinting evilly in the dull light. Tunnel mouths gaped in the roof itself, surrounded by squat, upside-down battlements. Inverted bridges spanned wide cracks that spread across the surface of the roof in jagged lines, their depths—heights, Seth corrected himself—shrouded in darkness. In the distance, three needle-thin towers loomed, piercing the void like dangling icicles. Their bases were invisible. As Seth watched, light flashed from the tip of one and was answered from another. The third chimed in a moment later, issuing a series of rapid, stuttering signals that set the other two off again.

  Then there was no more time to sightsee. The closer he came to the torches, the faster they streamed by. Steadying himself like a skydiver—never questioning exactly how the physics of it worked—he swung his legs beneath him. The ground ahead was mercifully clear of creatures, consisting of low walls and steps with a ruined look to them. As the rugged surface rushed at him, he tucked his injured arm under the opposite armpit and held up his good hand to protect his face.

  He skidded, tumbled, tripped, tumbled again. Yelling, he pulled himself into a ball, wondering where all his extra speed had come from. He bounded off a stub of a wall into a crumbling pillar, then finally rolled to a halt along a flat stretch that might once have been a thoroughfare. Dust rose up in wing-shaped sprays along his path and vanished into the sky.

  Wincing, he rose painfully to his feet and looked about him. Screeching sounds and other alien calls came closer by the second. There was no time to bemoan his lot; he had to get moving again. Fighting the urge to kick off too hard, he headed along the thoroughfare for a larger structure in the same direction as the towers.

  The growling and snarling drew closer. Low shapes swarmed around the landing spot Seth had recently vacated. White-grey spines swayed and clashed from the backs of sluglike creatures as they sniffed at the roof and hunted his spoor.

  Something howled off to his right. Flickering firelight threw a nest of snakes into sharp relief. Sinuous silhouettes writhed and danced. An answering scrape of metal blades came from his left, and Seth pushed harder, taking longer, loping strides towards what he had at first assumed to be a building but was in fact a thick ramparted barrier that looked like something from the Middle Ages. Its summit was uninhabited. His best hope was to get onto it or over it and put the mob behind him.

  The howls and shrieks grew louder. He sensed the lust of the creatures as clearly as he heard their cries. The words they bellowed eluded him, but their meanings were absolutely clear. The cries became keener as pursuit drew closer and he became too afraid to look behind for fear of what he might see.

  “Catch it!” they said.

  “Run it down!”

  “Eat it!”

  The great wall rose higher over him. Seth leaned backwards to judge the leap. In his haste, he misstepped and flew headlong into the wall. He ricocheted into the grasp of one of the scissor creatures. It hissed in surprise and brought its blades around to slice him to pieces. Seth punched against the creature's chin with his good hand. The recoil forced him flat against the roof while the creature flew out into the void. Silver blades missed his upraised arm by bare millimetres as it shot away from hi
m.

  He didn't waste time congratulating himself. He rolled and leapt for the top of the wall. Halfway there, something cold and flexible wrapped around his ankle. It gripped him tight, but his momentum was great enough to pull it after him, off the roof. He kicked and twisted as they rose into the air. More cold tentacles joined the first and began climbing up his legs. Seth looked down into a swirling mass of translucent cilia.

  “Get off me!” He tore off his sweatshirt and flailed at the cilia as best he could. The creature grabbed it and wrenched it from his grasp. It disappeared with a sucking sound.

  Giving up on attack, he concentrated on reaching for the top of the wall. Unless he found a way to push himself higher, he was going to miss it by about half a metre.

  A dark shape, barely visible against the void, leaned over the edge. Seth had time to register broad, flat features with gold eyes and what looked like swept-back feathers radiating in bold lines from its face. A thickset arm thrust towards him.

  “Your hand—give it to me! Quickly!”

  The voice was sibilant and urgent. Seth obeyed automatically. Strong fingers gripped his, and he felt himself hauled into the air. The creature squirming up his leg came along for the ride, dragged awkwardly behind him as his rescuer heaved him across the lip of the wall. There was a sound like a cough, followed by a flash of glassy light and a thin scream. The weight fell away. Seth collapsed on top of the wall in a cloud of settling smoke. The howls of his pursuers took on a frustrated pitch.

  “Thank you.” Seth gaped up in amazement at his rescuer. Two enormously thick legs spread at an ungainly angle supported a barrel trunk and equally strong arms. A spray of bladelike protuberances—which Seth had initially mistaken for feathers—radiated from behind the creature's head and spread in a crest down its back. They shook as the creature leaned over the edge of the wall and hissed a warning at the other monsters below. Seth glimpsed a forwards-thrust face and wickedly curved canines, like those of a cobra.

  “We don't have long,” said the creature. “They'll be up here in a moment, and more besides. Word is spreading of the chase you've given them.” The snakelike head twisted to look over the other side of the wall. One thick hand reached down for him again.

  Seth didn't want to tarnish his gratitude with second thoughts, but looking up at the being that had rescued him did give him cause to reconsider. Just for a moment.

  Then Seth took the offered hand and was hauled to his feet.

  “This way.”

  Only as Seth automatically went to follow did he realise what he had just done. The creature had taken his hand—his left hand, the hand that had been severed by the monster with the scissors.

  He stopped and stared dumbly at it, seeing by the distant firelight that it looked exactly as always. Had he imagined its severance? Had it grown back without him noticing?

  Both possibilities seemed beyond reason. Everything seemed beyond reason.

  “Where am I?” he asked, his body dead wood, unable to accept the need to run now that the immediate urgency had passed. His mind was beginning to catch up. “What's happening to me?”

  “This is the underworld,” said the creature, thrusting its face into his. The yellow eyes were metallic and cold. Flat, brassy scales gleamed on taut skin. “You will find no welcome here.”

  “But you—” Seth stared into the inhuman face. “You helped me.”

  “Yes. I was human once, and am now of the dimane.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “You will have to. And you will have to trust me a moment longer, at least until we are out of immediate danger.” The creature took him by the shoulder and shoved him, forcing him to run. The creature's long, loping strides were perfectly accustomed to the low, inverted gravity. Seth had to concentrate to stay ahead. The impression of being upside-down and the surrealism of the view didn't make it any easier. From the vantage point of the wall, he could see dozens of fiercely shaped creatures still striving to catch him, leaping and scrabbling at the wall. Some worked together to scale the height, but competition from below always brought them down. In the distance, the lights atop the three needle-towers flashed in furious asynchrony.

  Seth felt the cool breath of the creature at his back. His thoughts were a tangle of frank disbelief and utter confusion.

  “My brother—he's here too, I think. What if those things catch him? What will they do to him? What would they have done to me if you hadn't saved me?”

  “Your brother is not here,” came the blunt reply.

  “You know for sure?” The Swede and the knife were as vivid in his mind as the massive creature at his back. “How can you know that?”

  “I feel it in the realm: under my feet, in my head, all around me. Your twin brother lives.”

  Seth had barely enough time to think—or duck—as, with a rattle of bones, a creature sporting scythe-like hands and a nose as long as a railway spike scrambled over the wall nearby. Something liquid and red detached itself from Seth's guide and shot with startling acceleration into the face of their attacker. It reared back with a howl, clutching its eyes. Seeing an opening, Seth swept its legs out from under it with a clumsy kick. Seth's rescuer crushed its skull against the edge of the wall and tipped the body over the edge for good measure.

  “Quickly! There are more coming!”

  They hurried to a junction, where the wall they had been following joined another that looped and curved off to Seth's right. A tapered turret stood there, and his rescuer brought Seth to a halt within its circular walls, safe for the moment from the baying mob. The wide face confronted him unblinkingly. Two large hands gripped him.

  Seth gaped up at the alien face. “How?” he asked. “How did you know Hadrian was my twin?”

  “Your brother lives,” the creature repeated slowly, explaining something very important and refusing to be tangled in details. “You, however, are dead. Can you accept this?”

  Seth nodded, although the insanity of the conversation wasn't lost on him. His mind was filled with monsters, impossible landscapes, riddles…Was he in hell, or dreaming some increasingly elaborate fantasy? The latter seemed most likely, yet he simply couldn't have survived that knife-blow to the chest, not even if a paramedic team had been standing right next to him, ready to begin emergency treatment. And if he was dead and still thinking, then that meant that there had to be something after life, be it hell or whatever.

  Life after the body stopped working? He wasn't so immersed in his agnosticism that he would defend it against all the evidence available to him. While his thoughts continued, he would fight to preserve them by whatever means available.

  I'm the strong one, he told himself. I can do whatever I set my mind to.

  “My name is Xol,” said the creature. “I will explain as best as I am able to. For now, Seth, we must move. Please, trust me.”

  Seth let himself be manhandled out of the turret and back onto the wall. His legs moved numbly, as though at a great distance from his body. His left hand clenched and unclenched. Your brother lives. He ran with Xol and clung to those words—just as he clung to the feeling inside him that told him they were truthful.

  That didn't help ease the tearing, sickening lurch of separation, though. Not one little bit.

  The wall snaked ahead into an impenetrable distance, seeming to grow longer as they walked or ran. The creatures pursuing them weren't deterred by the fall of two of their kind. The defeat of the skeleton-thing and others had drawn the attention of many more who joined the chase with grotesque enthusiasm. New creatures snapped from the air, whipped at them from the ground, tried to head them off or catch up with them on the wall. Every time one came too close, Xol managed to find a way to deflect them, using physical strength or something that looked very much like magic.

  However Xol did it, Seth was very glad. The longer he survived the more his senses acclimatised to the strange and threatening world around him. The wall they followed was just one of many covering the ro
of on which the underworld had been built. Crossing and re-crossing, the walls divided the roof into numerous irregularly shaped and irregularly sized sections. Sometimes the intersections were adorned with parapets; others were bare. When the walls encountered a crack, Seth and Xol either pulled away or boldly leapt over it. Xol avoided particularly low sections, where the horde at their heels could reach.

  How long they ran, Seth couldn't tell. There was no way to measure time. He wondered at first if they were heading for the needle-towers, but all three of them were falling away to his right, still flashing lights at their summits.

  “Are you sure you know where you're going?” he asked as they took a left turn at the next junction.

  “The way through lies ahead.” Xol's spines were lying flat against his skull and back, and bounced as he ran.

  “The way through what to where?”

  “I can't explain, Seth. You don't have the knowledge.”

  “How am I going to get the knowledge if you don't tell me?”

  “There are some things here that can't be told. You just know. Perhaps not immediately but eventually, the same as it is in the First Realm.”

  “The what?”

  “The First Realm is the life you enjoyed before death. Dying, for humans, is simply a way of getting from one sort of life to another. You are on the boundary of the Second Realm, where your life will continue.”

  “And this sort of knowledge will just fall into my head?” That sounded like an unlikely arrangement to him. “I don't remember that ever happening to me before.”

  “Your soul has inbuilt mechanisms designed to help it survive in the Second Realm. These instincts will be stirring. Flesh-and-blood babies breathe and grip when they are born; they acquire new reflexes as their brain matures. The process is similar here.”

  “I'm a baby, then.”

  “Yes. Metaphorically speaking.”

  “What sort of reflexes do I have?”