The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One

by Sean Williams

  Then they were moving again—falling upwards, it seemed, out of the depths. The creature had passed them by, as unaware of them as they might have been of tiny fish brushing against their legs in a real ocean. What it would have done had it noticed them didn't bear thinking about, Seth decided.

  At last a faint glimmer of light returned, and the grip of Xol's hand on his eased. They were definitely rising with mounting speed.

  “What was the point of all that?” he asked. “We went down; we're coming back up. We'll soon be exactly where we started.”

  “Not even remotely near,” said Xol. “Look closely. Is the light the same to your eyes as it was before?”

  Seth peered ahead. Now that Xol mentioned it, there was none of the multicoloured flashing that there had been. A single bright light illuminated the sky above, unrefracted and pure.

  “We've passed through,” said Xol, surging ahead. “There are many barriers between the ascendant soul and the Second Realm proper. Bardo, the void, is one. The underworld and the daevas, in all their forms, are another. You and I have almost crossed the river of death.”

  Seth felt a wave of dizziness pass through him as he struggled to accept what he was being told. The river of death?

  For a moment, his grip on the afterlife loosened.

  “You're taking the piss,” he said. “Styx is a legend. I read about it in primary school. It's not real. Where's the boatman? Where's the ferry?”

  “Legends are stories,” said Xol with a trace of compassion in his voice, “but sometimes they do hold some truth. They are echoes of a reality that cannot be described in the vocabulary of the First Realm. The underworld and its inhabitants are the source of all sacred experience. They lie at the heart of every religion. What you call Styx, others call Sangarios or Phlegethon. Dante wrote of the nine circles of hell. There are those who would think of me as a monster. All are partly right.” The broad snake-face stretched into something like a smile, although the sharp teeth could equally have been bared in a challenge. “It might surprise you to learn that the daktyloi and other long-term residents here regard the First Realm with similar inaccuracy. That which is unknown, or at best partly known, is ever the subject of misconception and myth.”

  Xol pointed ahead. The light was growing brighter and warmer: gold and red and orange predominated. “The waters here—as you see them—have no bottom. People can pass through them if they have the courage and the will. There is no ferryman and there is no price. Much is lost in translation, you see, through self-memories, hallucinations, and dreams.”

  Seth's uncertainty eased in the face of something he could confront; there was another side to the river, and they were coming closer to it. That so many legends and fables had got it wrong was less important than the fact that he was experiencing it.

  “We'll be safe on the other side?”

  “No.”

  “I just knew you were going to say that.”

  Xol turned to look upwards. “It's my fear that you won't be safe again, anywhere.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Xol didn't answer. Before Seth could press him on the point, the waters of the river parted before them and they were propelled out into the light of the Second Realm.

  They surfaced near a riverbank—or so it appeared to him from a distance. No river bottom rose up to meet them as they swam closer. Although its constitution was similar to soil, it was composed of numerous entangled threads of red and orange and blue mixed with and into fuzzier patches of yellow and green.

  They easily clambered from the river, not truly wet, and made for nearby cover. As they crossed the strange landscape, an indefinable something passed through him. He put a hand to his temple, struggling to catch the elusive feeling.

  Hadrian?

  No answer, of course. The twins had tried telepathy as children, but much to their disappointment they had never got it to work: a twinge here and there; an occasional insight that could have come from body language or guesswork; nothing that would have hit the front pages and made them instant celebrities. With no incentive to continue, they had soon dropped the game. But, in spite of it all, a sense of connection was apparent. They had an uncanny ability to find each other, no matter where they were. They had the same dreams. They liked the same girls…

  Concentrate, he told himself. He couldn't afford to let his First Realm experiences distract him. Just one mistake could be fatal.

  “Are you well?” asked Xol, coming up beside him and putting a hand on his shoulder.

  Seth didn't know how to answer. He was dead, and this wasn't Earth, with its dirt and its rivers and the sun hanging high above.

  The river meandered through a valley between two distant lines of hills, each layered like terrace farms. The sky was an unusual blue-grey colour, and the bright light hanging in it, directly above him, was definitely not the sun. It left a branching, twisted image on his retina when he looked away—like a fluorescent purple octopus with dozens of legs and one eye in the exact centre of its body, distinctly darker than the rest. An eye, Seth thought, squinting, or a mouth.

  “That,” Xol said, “is Sheol. It is the heart of this realm, as the sun is the heart of the First. But it does not give life. It takes it.”

  “So does the sun if you get too close.”

  The dimane's wide, thin-lipped mouth stretched into another of his disturbing smiles. “The analogy works well, then.”

  Seth touched his chest where the knife had gone in. The physical damage may have disappeared, but the memory remained heavy in his mind, like a weight bearing him down. He would always have that, he supposed.

  A woman's voice startled him out of his thoughts. Her tone was demanding but her words were gibberish. Seth looked up from examining his chest to see a tall, reed-thin young woman step out of the landscape in front of them, as though from nowhere. Dressed in orange cotton clothing strapped tightly with cords and leather bands, she had smooth golden hair that swept back from her forehead into a clasp behind her high head. Her eyes were a surprisingly light green, almost transparent.

  “I've brought him here because he needs our help,” said Xol to her, squat and broad-shouldered in the face of the woman's slim poise.

  More gibberish flowed in response, guttural and nasal at the same time, as though the back of her throat wasn't working properly. The set of her brows was peevish.

  “Agatha, you know what's happening,” said Xol. “You can read the signs as well as I. From devel to ekhi, the realm is ringing with the news. Yod has made its move.”

  The young woman's sly jade eyes glanced at Seth. He felt himself instantly appraised by that quick look.

  “He is nothing special,” she said, startling him. Her voice, when comprehensible, had the tones of a British newsreader: clear and imperious, precisely measured.

  “Neither was I.” Xol's golden eyes gleamed.

  “Are you saying he could become like you?” The woman called Agatha looked at Xol in concern, but didn't acknowledge Seth at all.

  I'm right here, he started to say—then was struck by the memory of Ellis saying exactly that, in the train carriage before he died.

  Concentrate…

  “By ignoring him you only make that possibility more likely,” Xol was saying.

  “It is not permissible.”

  “I agree.”

  “You have taken a great risk bringing him here. I have no choice, now, but to align myself with him.”

  “You have as much choice as ever, my friend.”

  “Would that it were so.”

  The woman acknowledged Seth at last.

  “We are in danger,” she said, her green eyes fixing him like a butterfly collector's pin. “You must come with us to Bethel, where we will speak with Barbelo. She will have more information. She will tell us what to do.”

  The situation had reversed too suddenly for Seth to follow. “First you didn't want to help me, and now you do. Why doesn't someone ask me what I want?”


  “Very well.” She stepped back. She was not much taller than Seth, but her stare seemed to come from much higher up. “What do you want, Seth Castillo?”

  “I want to be with my brother,” he said, the words blurting out before he thought them through. “No, wait. I don't want him here, because that would mean he'd have to die. I want him to be safe. I want…” He stopped, confused. “I want to make sure that he and El are okay.”

  Agatha nodded. Her expression remained hard. “We can try to do that, but not here. Not now. Come.”

  She repeated the demand with wooden authority. Seth glanced at Xol, who nodded. Although there was no immediate danger that he could see—no creatures snapping at his heels, trying to slice him into a thousand tiny pieces—the urgency with which Xol and Agatha discussed his situation was contagious. And the dimane had led him thus far without betraying him.

  He granted her his begrudging acquiescence.

  The three of them headed off across the strange landscape. Agatha led them away from the river and into the hills, following a narrow ravine separating two near-vertical sheets of “earth.” Seth was sandwiched between his two guides, all control of his fate temporarily—and uncomfortably—out of his hands.

  The way became darker as the sheets rose around them, the strange matted texture of the soil richer. Threads became ropes, multicoloured roots snaking in loops just above his head, branching and merging in complex tangles. Flat patches of colour slid along the roots, some occasionally slipping free to explore nearby knots and junctions. Were they living things? He couldn't tell. When he reached out to touch one, the coloured patch slid a centimetre up his finger, as though he'd dipped his hand in dye. He instinctively pulled away. The patch detached itself and slid back into its root. He felt nothing but a slight tingling.

  Again a sense of unreality flowed over him. From devel to ekhi, Xol had said. Xol the dimane.

  Devils. Demons. The river Styx.

  “Who is she?” he whispered to Xol.

  “A friend. She helped me in my darkest hour. But for her word, the dimane would have rejected me as everyone else had.”

  “Why?”

  “My past holds things of which I am not proud. I have struggled to atone for them. It has not been easy.”

  “What sort of things?” Instinct made Seth ask, “Is this something to do with your brother?”

  “I would save that story for another time,” Xol said. “You have more important things to learn.”

  Seth disagreed, but didn't want to argue the point. “So Agatha stuck up for you. Good on her.”

  “Yes. Together we have smuggled numerous victims of the daevas to safety. She's not human, but she's on your side. We need her because she understands the Second Realm better than I do. That's really all you need to know.”

  A hardness in the dimane's tone told him to stop talking and concentrate on walking. He took the hint, even though there were a dozen questions he could have asked. How were they going to check on Hadrian and Ellis? What did Xol mean when he said that “Yod” had “made its move”? Who or what was Yod, and what did it have to do with anything?

  He tried to put such questions out of his head for the time being. Agatha led them through the ravine with the confidence of one who had been that way many times before. They proceeded in silence, their footfalls vanishing into the deadening air like clods of earth down a well. Seth kept his eyes on the transparent clasp that kept Agatha's long hair in check. The clasp had no seam and her hair seemed to flow right through it, as though it had once been permeable and had set around the ponytail. The tip of each hair glittered in the faint light, reminiscent of a fibre-optic lamp his mother had had when he was a child. The effect was hypnotic.

  Not human, he thought. If that was true, she was doing a good job of impersonating one.

  Ahead, the landscape twisted and sheared under unknowable forces, creating a tangled vertical fault. The ravine they followed crossed another and vanished without trace into a mess of tears and folds. There was no clear way to proceed.

  Agatha slowed and Seth almost walked into her back.

  “Now where?” Seth asked. The words shattered into a million reflections and returned to him with the sound of breaking glass.

  “We climb.” Agatha waved Xol forwards. “Check that the way is clear.”

  Xol pressed past Seth, his massive shoulders swinging from side to side like a weightlifter stepping up to his mark. He knelt at the base of the fault, a penitent genuflecting before the altar of a fractured god, and flexed the broad muscles of his back.

  Blue sparks shot from the dimane's fingertips and spread across the planes and splinters of the fault. Ghostly fluorescence gleamed from angled facets until the entire space before them was alive with light, giving it a strange, hyperreal air.

  Then Xol relaxed, and the fault fell dark again.

  “The way is clear,” Xol affirmed, straightening.

  “What did you just do?” Set asked him. “What was all that?”

  “That was magic,” came the flat reply.

  “No, seriously. What was it?”

  “He is being serious,” said Agatha in a scolding tone. “You would call it magic, so that's what it is.”

  “Hekau gives me no control over the words through which you hear the meaning I am trying to convey,” Xol explained more patiently. “There is no analogy in the First Realm for what I do here, except in superstitions, so it is in those terms that you hear me explaining it to you. Our cultures were very different, but I don't doubt that yours, like mine, had tales of wizards and genies and gods, all capable of extraordinary acts. Such acts are possible here in the Second Realm, even fundamental—but the language you retain is that of the First Realm, and it is through that filter you must come to understand what you see.”

  “And what I hear as magic is actually—what?”

  “Everywhere, Seth. I have told you that will is important here; it is as important in the Second Realm as matter is in the First Realm. Everyone must learn the art of will before they can interact properly with the people around them. For instance, it is will that facilitates or forbids communication, or stops someone from touching that which belongs to another, or from touching those who do not want to be touched. Without will, nothing at all would happen—the realm would be dead, and so would we. That is magic.”

  Seth nodded slowly. “So what did you do just then?” he asked the dimane again.

  “Exactly as Agatha requested,” Xol said. “I ensured that the way ahead was clear of observers. If any but us saw the light I cast, I would have known.”

  “And now we must proceed.” Agatha had watched the exchange with impatience.

  Seth was irritated by her attitude. If she didn't want to help him, why was she bothering? “Not until you tell me where we're going—and why. And what could have been watching up there that you're so afraid of.”

  Her eyes widened. “I fear nothing.”

  “You do,” said Xol. “It is foolish to hide the fact from anyone, especially yourself. We all fear what's coming. Seth needs to understand why and he needs to know where he fits in.”

  Agatha's lips tightened into a thin line. “Very well,” she said. “I will explain as we climb. The longer we delay, the more at risk we are.”

  With stiff economy, she stepped into the fault and began ascending its irregular face, using the many jagged edges as handholds and ledges to haul herself upwards.

  Seth, an inexperienced climber, reminded himself of Xol's words: nothing was physical about the Second Realm; it was all metaphor, filtered through the preconceptions of his mind. He encountered a strange topology reminiscent of “natural” landscape, so that was how he saw it. A fracture in that landscape was a chimney they could climb through.

  Metaphor or otherwise, the fractured shelf material felt like fibreglass under his fingers, rough and brittle yet strong enough to hold his weight.

  “There is a story,” said Agatha as they climbe
d, “of the way the realms came to be. When time began, it is said, the realms were one. The dei of the ur-Realm was called Ymir, and his shadow, the Molek, was the great enemy of peace. Ymir and the Molek fought a protracted war, and both died. Ymir was dismembered in the process, and his remains became the worlds we know today: Ymir's body is the First Realm, his soul the Second Realm, and the span of his life the Third Realm. His shadow is the devachan, the endless gulfs between the realms.”

  Seth was glad he hadn't had to sit through the long version of the story. Her talk of shadows rang too close to some of Hadrian's half-baked notions of twinship.

  “There's a Third Realm?” he asked.

  “There are as many realms as there are stars in the sky. Some are impossible for us to reach; others brush by closely, requiring only a slight push to overlap. There are exchanges between the other realms, just as there are exchanges between the Three. The breakup of the ur-Realm was probably not the first such disintegration, and neither was it the last. Some hope that the fragments of Ymir will one day be reunited and the ur-Realm reborn.”

  “Realms can collide as well as break apart,” said Xol, levering himself up alongside Seth. “We refer to such collisions or disintegrations as Cataclysms. There have been several times of Cataclysm since the fall of Ymir—and other deii too, for as old power structures fail, new ones inevitably rise to take their place. New worlds demand new masters.”

  “Now I'm really confused,” Seth said, glancing into Xol's wide-set golden eyes. “What does this have to do with me?”

  A pained expression flickered across Xol's feral features. The spines down his back rippled. “A new Cataclysm is upon us. We must move carefully to avoid being overtaken by it.”

  “A new Cataclysm? How can you tell?”

  “I have seen it with my eyes. When you looked back at Bardo from the underworld, at the void between this realm and the First, do you remember what you saw?”