I'm going to regret this, he thought as, in a rush of feet and limbs, the bizarre procession guided him to the massive vehicle and hurried him inside.
The interior of the car, large though it was, was thick with the licorice smell of the Bes, the half-sized creatures who had pinned him to the ground. Squat, heavy-set, and of indeterminate sex, four of them shared the backseat with the larger version, the one Kybele called “the Galloi.” Hadrian sat with her, behind an enormous dashboard that appeared to have been carved from a single piece of ivory. The windshield was wider than he was long, and the bonnet seemed to go on forever.
The giant car swam under Kybele's steady hand like a killer whale through the darkening city, avoiding streets blocked by abandoned trucks or traffic jams. Steep, narrow roads wound around the legs of elevated freeways and train tracks, following intricate paths that Hadrian could never have retraced. Empty footbridges dangled banners proclaiming something in an alphabet he didn't recognise.
He felt as though he was dreaming: at any moment he might be back on the floor of the hotel, prior to smashed windows, the chase through the alleys and Locyta's severed head hitting the ground with a wet thud. Or in Sweden, going out for a walk with Seth then doubling back to be with Ellis…
Your brother is dead.
Your brother is alive.
He didn't know what to believe any more.
Kybele watched him out of the corner of her eye as she drove. The speedometer cast a ghastly green glow across her face. It was she who broke the silence.
“I need you to tell me everything that has happened to you since your brother died. And before that, too. Leave nothing out, no matter how inconsequential it might seem.”
Hadrian shook his head with underwater slowness. He felt as fragile as a soap bubble on the verge of collapse.
“There's nothing to be frightened of,” she insisted. “I mean you no harm.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“If I'd wanted you dead I could have killed you the moment I laid eyes on you.”
“Like you killed Locyta?”
“I told you: I didn't kill him,” she said. “He had his uses sometimes.”
The car swept around a corner, catching a human-shaped figure square in its powerful headlights. Kybele braked sharply, and the thing flinched. Its steps were leaden, as though dragging heavy weights behind its heels; its head bent forwards and its arms swung with effort. It looked like someone walking determinedly through ankle-deep water against a heavy wind.
Kybele swung the wheel to go past it. Hadrian expected its features to resolve as it went by, but they did not. It was a walking blur, a hole in the dark background.
Then it was gone, lurching zombielike up the street behind them.
“What was that?” His heart was suddenly racing. For a moment he had thought it was the ghost of his brother.
“A shade.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“As dangerous as anything you're likely to meet out here. Its kind rarely attack if unprovoked, for we have little they desire. But they can be clumsy. An idiot god can be as damaging as a clever one.”
His mind tripped over that comment, remembering what Pukje had said about monsters. “That was a god?”
She chuckled low in her throat. “No, but just about everything that's not human has been worshipped by you humans at some point. Shades—and me—included.”
“Who are you?”
“I told you. I'm Kybele.”
“I'm sorry,” he said, feeling vagueness slip over him again. “I don't know what that means.”
“Well, the Phrygians used to call me the Great Mother. I was originally the goddess of the Earth and its caverns, but later I graduated to towns and cities. Moving up with your species, if you like; we've always had a lot in common.” She assessed him out of the corner of her eye. “Doesn't anyone study the classics any more?”
They passed a street sign written in Chinese, then another. He assumed at first that the car was passing through the local version of Chinatown, but a quick glance at the license plates of abandoned cars immediately ruled out that possibility. They were in Chinese too, as were the window displays, and the posters, and the billboards…
The shaking of the ground had lessened not long after Kybele had picked him up. He seemed to feel it again. All this talk of gods and goddesses made him dull-witted, as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of the car.
“Tell me how you came to be here, Hadrian,” Kybele repeated, “and in return I'll explain. It looks to me like you need to understand the world a little better.”
Hadrian swallowed his frustration and fear and did as he was told. Beginning with the train and the Swede, he described waking in the hospital and his interview with Lascowicz, then finding Seth's body and his escape from the hospital.
“Volker Lascowicz. Is that what he's calling himself now?” she said. “And Neith Bechard, too. The energumen are siding against me. I should have guessed.”
“Energu—what?”
“Some people are more than they seem, although even they might not know it. Neith Bechard is one such. All his life, he has been linked to a creature in the Second Realm, a devel called Aldinach. This devel whispered to him in his sleep, gave him visions in the dead of night. Now, though, it is growing stronger; Bechard has become a demoniac, two minds in one body. They are bonded together, possessed by each other, one might say, and their strength will only increase.
“Lascowicz is the same, only his real name is Vilkata, not Volker. His rider is a daktyloi called Upuaut, one of the lords of the dead of ancient Abyddos. You encountered it in the hospital: its form is that of a giant wolf.
“You should know that it was probably Lascowicz who killed Locyta. The Wolf would have had no use for him once he had nothing left to reveal.”
Hadrian shivered, remembering the sound of claws tearing at linoleum. Not a police dog, then. Her explanation was even more outlandish. The detective had interrogated, unnerved, and threatened, and his personality had changed in just hours, but Hadrian had never imagined him capable of tearing someone's head off.
Possessed by a devil, he thought to himself. Am I really accepting this?
For a moment, his grip on the situation wavered. Monsters, gods, strange creatures chasing him in the night—it was entirely possible that Kybele was crazy in the same way as Pukje, and that he was crazy for listening to them. But it all made a seductive kind of sense.
Although he didn't know whether he could trust Kybele, he was one hundred percent certain that he didn't want to meet any of these energumen again.
Give in now and deny us the pleasure of hunting you. I dare you.
He forced himself to keep talking. When he described the creature that had rescued him from Lascowicz and Bechard, she nodded impatiently.
“Yes, yes. I knew Pukje had his pointy nose in this somewhere, right up to his cheeks.” She indicated the notched stone sitting on the seat between them, where he had dropped it. “This is one of his. He led you to me.”
“He's on your side?”
She barked a short laugh. “I have allegiances with most of the duergar clans. Pukje doesn't belong to any of them now, except when it suits him. You'd do well to remember that.” The steering wheel spun smoothly through her strong hands. “Don't let the imp do you any favours if you can avoid it. It'll cost you.”
Hadrian nodded, although Pukje's words, You can owe me, suddenly took on a sinister cast. I'll be back. That's a promise.
Lastly, he told her about the retrieval of Seth's bone and his determination to find Ellis, if she were still alive.
“It's not Ellie's fault she got caught up in this,” he concluded. “I need to know that she's okay.” His efforts to accomplish this had been paltry so far. He was the first to admit it. “Can you help me?”
“That depends. You have a deep connection with this woman?”
“Yes.”
“And your brother did, t
oo?”
He didn't see the point in denying it, even though talking about it still brought a raft of awkward emotions to the surface.
“Yes. I have to find her.”
“Well, I'll see what we can do. She may yet live.”
Hope stirred in him for the first time. “You will help me?”
“Of course, Hadrian. I can't very well leave you out here on your own. You wouldn't last another day.”
“What can I do?”
“Don't worry about that. For now, I suggest you concentrate on regaining your strength. We'll get you some food. There may be precious little opportunity later to sit back and relax.”
“I can't relax,” he said. “I need to know what we're doing to find her, where we're going.”
“We're going to where we need to be. Nothing more and nothing less.”
“But where is that? What will we do when we get there?”
“Questions, questions…” She tut-tutted and nudged the car up a gear. “The city is my place, Hadrian. Its black roads and caverns belong to me, and I am stronger for the way it is changing. My networks are merging; my senses ring in ways I haven't felt for a long, long time. I love this world, but it's been a bitter and cold one since the last Cataclysm. At last, the heat is returning. I feel my blood quickening. It's like spring, Hadrian. Can you feel it too?”
He opened his mouth to protest that he could feel nothing of the sort. The darkness behind his lids still held flashes of gaping wounds and mouths open in silent screams. That wasn't a good thing. It was awful.
He wrenched his gaze away, acutely conscious of the Galloi and the Bes watching silently from the back. Outside, the streets were grim and gloomy. Deep shadows sliced the world into segments, a crazy Escher grid with no units, no axes, and no clear meaning. Yet, he did sense meaning to it. There was something behind it that hadn't been there before.
An echo of Seth teased him, danced like a dream on the edge of consciousness.
“What,” he asked, “do you mean by ‘the last Cataclysm’?”
She smiled.
“Sit back and let me drive for a spell,” she said. “I have to concentrate. Then I'll tell you everything you need to know. It's quite a story.”
He nodded and did as he was told. For the time being, he had nothing to lose.
“There is magic in a lover's eyes. A single glance contains worlds of possibility.”
THE BOOK OF TOWERS, FRAGMENT 301
Seth and Xol fell slowly at first, but with steadily mounting speed. Although the strange gravity was slight, the abyss was deep. Seth had time to look around him and marvel. The walls of this massive rent in the land were ragged and dangerous. Changeable shadows played across sharp spurs as meteors lanced down through the void behind them, making the walls seem to reach out greedily. The slender shapes Seth had glimpsed waving over the edge of the rent thrashed at them like storm-swept tree trunks as they fell out of reach. If not for the strength of Xol's grip, the two of them would have been wrenched apart almost immediately.
“There is one thing you must know,” shouted Xol.
“What's that?”
“The reflexes of the First Realm do not always apply here. Some of them are irrelevant. You do not need to breathe, for instance.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” Seth asked, the sinking feeling growing stronger.
Xol pointed ahead, to what lay below them. By the light of the underworld's “sky”—ablaze with falling comets—Seth saw the surface of an immense river rising up to greet them. Undulating, turbulent, grey, it covered the entire floor of the rift, and was rushing towards them with terrifying speed.
“You're insane.”
“What did you say, Seth?” It was hard to hear over the noise of the water, growing louder with every second.
“I said, you're insane!”
“Sanity is relative.” Seth couldn't tell, but the feral gleam of Xol's white teeth might have been a grin. “Look behind us.”
He did so, and saw the void full of dark figures leaping to meet the meteors as they fell. Showers of sparks marked each collision. A booming, crackling roar grew all around them, like a storm rising on the updraughts of a bushfire.
For the moment, Seth had been forgotten. That was one thing to be thankful for—although the thought that he was apparently plummeting to his second death took some of the shine off it.
He struggled to orient himself in a diving pose, in order to present as small a surface area as possible. Xol, definitely enjoying the ride more than Seth thought appropriate, laughed and clutched his hand more tightly.
“Will yourself to fall safely,” Xol said, “or let me do it for both of us. Don't fight me, and we'll come to no harm.”
“Just like that?”
“Not ‘just like that,’ Seth. But will is what matters here. Understand that, and much becomes easier.”
Seth fought the urge to shout in alarm as the river ballooned in front of them. Giant waves roiled on the surface. At the final instant, Seth put a hand over his eyes and held his breath. He couldn't help it. He braced himself for a bloodying impact as the river swatted them out of the sky.
They shot through the surface like bullets. Fluid parted around them in a smooth stream and left slender corkscrews in their wake. Seth's gasp was snatched from him and tumbled unheard into the turbulence.
Xol's grip was strong. It steadied them as they plummeted through the river's depths.
“I told you,” Xol said, his voice clear in Seth's mind. “Your old reflexes are inappropriate here. This isn't water, and you have no body to worry about. You are perfectly safe.”
Xol was sleek and streamlined; his spines rose and fell like fins, guiding their fall. Seth's body was enveloped by a smooth rushing sensation as the water—or whatever it was—swept by.
He pointed with his free hand. “‘Perfectly’?”
A dark shadow rose up before them: a net steered by creatures with the undulating fins of giant Siamese fighting fish, tipped with red-glowing thorns.
Xol banked sharply to avoid the net. The river hissed around them, and Seth resisted the feeling that he was nothing but a dead weight dragged along in Xol's wake. He added his impetus to the turn, urged it to tighten. The net opened to enfold them, began to close. A circle of clear space lay ahead, and they rocketed for it, stretching like porpoises.
The two of them shot through to safety with centimetres to spare. Seth found himself whooping with excitement. He turned back to see the graceful balloon of the net collapsing in on itself, empty. The creatures guiding it were going to go hungry for the time being.
Looking back up through the rent, he saw a faint, rippling aurora: the void above the underworld, still burning with meteors.
“This is all a trap,” said Seth, feeling as though he was beginning to understand. “Those creatures—the daevas—they want us to think in the old ways. They use them to confuse us, to make us vulnerable.”
“And every newly dead is a willing collaborator in that confusion. Why would you not be? You spend your entire life thinking one way. It is never easy to change.” Xol led them in a sweeping curve into the deep. Gloom thickened around them. “When you arrived and wished to see where you were, you couldn't have known that you were making yourself vulnerable in the process. In order to see, you must be seen, by foes as well as friends.”
Seth remembered a young child he had played with once. Her inability to hide properly had been amusing at the time. If she couldn't see him, her young mind reasoned, then he couldn't see her either. This had seemed no more significant than a matter of the child's growing mind, something she had yet to learn. He wondered now if it was in fact something she was trying hard to unlearn.
He wondered what else a child would intuitively understand; that would kill Seth if Xol left him behind?
Darkness thickened around them. He felt their headlong rush ebb. Had this been a real river, friction and their rising buoyancy would have contrived to slow
them down long ago. He kicked against the current to propel himself forwards. It might or might not be water surrounding them and he wouldn't drown, but he didn't want to stall and hang suspended for eternity, waiting for another net.
Xol swung him around so they were face to face, and shook his head. “Remember what I just told you about being seen. This is the most dangerous leg of our journey thus far. You must hold tight and do nothing to reveal yourself.”
Seth shivered, unable to fight the impression that they were sinking to silent, icy deaths at the bottom of an ocean. The walls of the abyss had fallen away. He had no point of reference apart from the friction of the fluid around them. And Xol, watching him with suddenly small, golden eyes. Even as Seth stared at them, they faded into the dark, melting into an inky infinite blackness…
Seth forced himself to concentrate on Xol's hand, still gripping his. You must hold tight…He did just that, clutching his guide's fingers and feeling them clutch his in return.
The two of them spun gently as their speed decreased. Seth felt the fluid brushing his cheeks, his arms, his exposed back and chest. Anything could reach out from the depths to touch him, and there could be any number of things just metres away from him. Without light—without willing to see and therefore be seen in return—there was no way of knowing.
They slowed to a crawl. Something brushed against him in the dark. He flinched away, recoiling from the feel of ridged hide and thorny protrusions. He would have cried out but for Xol's hand suddenly over his mouth. All four of his guide's limbs wrapped around him and held him tight although he tried to kick away. The thing that had touched him swept by, moving with long, sinuous strength. Silent, as powerful as a whale but elongated like a serpent, it sent currents dancing around them. Each stroke of its massive flippers set them swaying. Xol barely moved a finger, and he kept Seth motionless as well.
The creature made no sound as it passed, apart from a faint crack from the tip of its tail. They were sucked into its wake and sent spinning. Seth imagined that he could taste its spoor in the water around them. His limbs were shaking. Xol let his mouth go, and he swallowed a sob of shock and relief mingled together.
The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One Page 10
