The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One

by Sean Williams

  Seth did, vividly. The sky had been alive with meteors of every colour, raining down—or falling up, depending on one's viewpoint—into the afterlife.

  “They were souls,” he said, voicing a hunch he had barely dared think before. “The dead.”

  Xol nodded. “There are many of them, and there will be many more. The First Realm is in turmoil. It will get worse before it gets better.”

  “Why?”

  “The current dei of the Second Realm has grown powerful on the souls of the dead,” Agatha said. “Yod eats the ability to exercise will: the thing that makes us conscious living beings, in this realm; that allows us to see a goal and work towards it. Everything else—memories, personality, dreams—Yod tosses away, as you once threw scraps in the garbage.

  “Yod takes the will of the dead and becomes stronger as a result. Now it seeks more lives to consume, and uses every tool at its disposal to achieve this end. We are pawns in its game, destined to be devoured unless we defy its plan. And so we must resist, in order to save the realms from utter devastation.”

  Seth wanted to object to Agatha's use of the word “pawn,” still stung by her description of him as “nothing special.” But there was something else: having heard Xol mention Yod, the name of the Second Realm's dei twice before this, it struck an even stronger chord now.

  The Swede had said it, he was sure. Seth remembered the cold, translucent features looming over him in the train, the pain of his arms held firmly behind his back, the fear that Hadrian would be hurt.

  (Then the knifepoint was suddenly swinging his way, and the Swede's eyes tightened. “Det gör ingen skillnad till Yod.”)

  Seth jerked at the memory of the knife-blow and the words that had accompanied it. Xol clutched Seth's back as the pain swept through him, doubling him over, almost throwing him off the ledge and down into the jagged depths of the fault. A fear of falling suddenly gripped him. His body would tumble a long way before hitting the bottom. Each sharp edge or corner would be like another stab from the one who had sent him here.

  “Yod,” he managed, through clenched teeth. His voice was a whisper matching the grimness of Xol's face. “Yod sent the Swede. Yod was the one who killed me.”

  “Yes.” The gold eyes hung in front of him, swaying like lanterns.

  “Why? To eat my soul?”

  “No, Seth,” Xol explained. “You are much more important than that. You are a mirror twin: you and your brother are united by the reflections of your souls. The connection between you is bringing the First and Second Realms together. Yod attempts through you to do what no one else has managed to do so far: reunite the First and Second Realms, and make them one again.”

  “In order to take them both over,” Agatha said, her voice raised. Echoes danced around the hard consonants, seeming to make the vowels fragile. “When Yod controls the First Realm, it will harvest lives with even more impunity than it does now. No one will be safe. Not human, daktyloi, genomoi—no one. It will kill everyone in order to slake its terrible hunger, then go on to find more realms to plunder, more lives to crush. I will not allow that to happen.”

  The passion in Agatha's voice was cold like steel. It sent gooseflesh down Seth's exposed skin. He looked up at her. She had taken a perch and looked down at him in return, expectantly. He bit down on a wave of self-doubt that suddenly flooded through him. I am not a pawn, he told himself. I am not anyone's tool.

  But he couldn't deny his senses. Although Seth had now been dead for some time, Hadrian seemed to be constantly nearby; Seth still felt as though he could turn around and Hadrian would be there, standing just by his shoulder. If such a psychic connection was real, even though the twins were in separate realms, Seth thought, who knew what it would do to life and afterlife? Could it really make them one, as Agatha suggested?

  Yod thought so. It had sent the Swede to dispatch one of the twins to the Second Realm—to kill one of them—and leave the other alive. While they remained that way, on either side of Bardo, Yod's plan was proceeding perfectly.

  His heart went out to his brother, alone in the middle of the Cataclysm—whatever form it was taking in the First Realm—ignorant of what was really happening.

  “I have to go back,” said Seth. “While I'm here, Yod is winning.”

  “We know,” said Xol. “That's exactly what we intend to attempt.”

  “And worse!” Seth ignored the reassuring tone in the dimane's voice. A terrible thought had just occurred to him. “There's another way to break the connection—and that's for someone in the First Realm to kill Hadrian!”

  To bring him here, with me!

  He found no reassurance in Xol's eyes this time. When he glanced up at Agatha, her expression was wooden.

  “We know,” she said.

  He felt a terrible coldness. “If you hurt him—”

  She laughed bitterly. “What happens in the First Realm is beyond my control. The Second Realm is what concerns me. It is my home, my responsibility. This is what I am fighting for. The existence of other realms would be irrelevant to me, except for the fact that they have the capacity to destroy the world I love. I will resist such destruction with every fibre of my being, through every means at my disposal.”

  Seth wasn't reassured. “You'd kill Hadrian if you could, if you had the chance.”

  “Perhaps I would. The sooner we arrive at Bethel, the less likely we will be to resort to such desperate measures.”

  “Give him a moment,” said Xol, still playing good cop to Agatha's bad cop. “He has learned a lot in a very short time.”

  “And he has much yet to learn.” She pursed her lips. “He may have a short time to gather himself. But when I leave here, I will not look back to see if you are following.”

  Seth stared at her, filled with resentment. To Agatha, Seth was irrelevant. Her problems could be solved by the murder of his brother, back in the First Realm. Why had Xol talked her into helping him? Was it just to keep him out of others’ hands—others who might find a better use for him than as dead weight?

  “Teach him to keep his thoughts to himself,” she said. “I am tired of his suspicions. You deserve better. We all do, who fight to save the realm.”

  She looked away, closing herself off to them. Seth glared at her in frustration.

  “It's true,” whispered Xol. “We are not the only players in this game, although we are your best hope of seeing your brother safe. I promise you on my own brother's name that I will find a solution for you that does not require Hadrian's death. There is a way.”

  Seth reached out to grasp the arm of his guide. Xol's skin was cool and waxy and seemed utterly dead to his touch, but he could feel life surging through the strange flesh, and he willed himself to see deeper, to probe Xol's motivations. He didn't know what honesty or trustworthiness tasted like, but his new senses did. Unfamiliar reflexes stirred, drew upon parts of him he had never known existed. It felt as though he was seeing Xol for the first time: seeing him as a person twisted from true rather than a monster with a human voice. And that person was not lying.

  Seth let go. His mind was in a turmoil of emotions and doubts, and the others could sense it as clearly as looking at him. Agatha was right on that point: he needed to learn how to hide his feelings, or he would stand out. He remembered the daevas and their pursuit of him in the underworld. He didn't want a repeat of that experience any time soon.

  “Teach me,” he said. “Show me what I need to know.”

  Xol nodded.

  “And then,” Seth added, directing his voice up the fault, “I'll decide the best thing to do next.”

  Agatha glanced sharply down at him, but said nothing.

  “A mouth opened up in the world and swallowed the city whole. Where many thousands once walked, none remained alive. Then the mouth turned itself inside-out and disgorged a god intent on destroying the survivors. Outside the city, people were afraid.”

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, FRAGMENT 65

  Hadrian thought dizzil
y of bubbles in a glass of soft drink, not drifting upwards towards the top of the glass, but swirling chaotically all about. As they bumped into each other, some stuck together to form larger bubbles, while others bounced apart. Entirely new bubbles were sometimes created in the collisions, leaving three or more where there were previously just two.

  “How long ago was the last Cataclysm?” he asked Kybele, focussing on that aspect of her explanation while he tried to assimilate the rest.

  “The last full Cataclysm? Long enough that it is not measured in years, although it still lies in human memory. You tell stories about it.”

  “Not that I've heard.”

  “No? There was a deluge. Human civilisation was nearly scoured from the face of the Earth. Only a handful of people survived.”

  “The Flood? Noah's Ark, the animals—all that? Are you telling me that was real?”

  “Not as you remember it. The Ark and the animals are an attempt at an explanation. The Cataclysm sundered the First and Second Realms, killing or driving into dormancy many of the dominant powers of the time. Baal ascended, became dei in their wake—and I've never been entirely sure if he brought about the Cataclysm on his own or not. He might have had help, as Geb did in the previous Cataclysm.”

  “Another one?”

  “You call it the Fall.” She was clearly enjoying his astonishment. “Satan cast out of Heaven, the War of the Angels, the Fruit of Knowledge, blah blah. That was the Third Realm splitting from the first two. Before that, all three realms were one.”

  Hadrian felt himself goggling at her, even though he tried not to. “Are you serious? I thought they were—well, stories.”

  “Yes, they are stories, but they're also memories. A thousand years is only about forty human generations. Stories—‘high stories,’ or histories—can easily persist that long, and longer, whether they're made up or based on something real. Word of mouth can outlast paper and ink. The only thing it can't outlast is stone—and even then, written languages fall into disuse and are forgotten, whereas stories are told over and over again. They are always fresh.”

  She glanced at him, and her grey eyes were no longer amused. “Humans tell tales of secret forces and hidden histories. Both exist, but they are usually not what you expect. Authority shifts among the genomoi just as it does among your people. Resources dry up; rules change. Nothing is fixed, not even the world itself, and there are no deep truths. The quest for illumination will ever be fruitless while you insist on looking for simple answers.”

  “So it's all been for nothing,” he said, shaking his head in amazement.

  “All what?”

  “All the religions, the philosophers, the…” He stumbled for words, surprised at the bitterness in his voice. “…the alchemists and magicians.”

  “For nothing? I wouldn't say that. Life is change, Hadrian. That is the deep truth, if you want it. Weathering change is a powerful skill, one you'll need to survive. Just because it's difficult to survive doesn't mean the effort is for nothing.” She reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. “The last two Cataclysms changed the world utterly, and this one will do the same. It's time you accepted the fact that the life you once knew is gone. You have to let it go, and make the most of what's to come. That's what I intend to do.”

  “How?”

  “By forging connections with those who were strong in the old days, and might be again.” She shrugged. “It's early days yet. We have no way of knowing how things will turn out. One thing's for certain: doing nothing isn't going to get us anywhere. And neither will burying your head in the sand, as you were trying to do. If you want to help your Ellis, you'll have to do better than that.”

  He bristled, but didn't take her to task. There were more important things to get his head around.

  “Tell me about this Yod,” he said, the word tasting foul in his mouth. Previously he had heard only Locyta and Lascowicz say it, then Kybele. Now himself. The madness was spreading. “I still don't know where he fits in.”

  “Not ‘he.’ It,” she corrected him. “Not every place in the First Realm is equidistant from the Second. At vulnerable points, the boundaries are thinner. You'd call these places ‘psychic hot spots’ or build churches on them. People see ghosts, angels, or UFOs at times when the boundary is strained. They feel spooked. Such hot spots can be caused by a high local death rate, when the passage of souls from one realm to the other wears Bardo thin between them. Cities are always such places, for just that reason. Once, people sacrificed animals or other people to the forces they sensed there—and there was always something hungry on the other side, hoping to be on the receiving end of such a boon. There used to be many such mouths to feed. Now there is just one, and it has a plan: to harvest human souls at the source, rather than wait for them to die and ascend willy-nilly.”

  Hadrian pictured a giant cartoon devil with a belly as big as a million boilers, and thousands of attendant demons shovelling bodies as if they were logs through its hatch.

  “That's Yod.”

  “Exactly. Think of it as a parasite, a disease. It gets into a realm and immediately sets about taking it over, by any means possible. Once it has achieved that end, it starts looking elsewhere. It can either jump to another realm or try to join two realms together. Do you see where this is going?”

  He nodded, even though many mysteries were colliding much faster than he could keep up with.

  “Understand, Hadrian, that I have no problem with predation per se. It always amazed me that so few religious philosophers ever wondered what the soul was for. I mean, if it exists, it has to fit in with everything else. A lion eats a deer, and a lion's blood is drunk by ticks. An ant milks the secretions of an aphid, and is in turn eaten by an anteater. Nothing else escapes the food cycle, so why should the soul? Why should it pop into existence, pristine and clean like nothing else in nature, then exist for eternity when the body is done with it? That's not the way things work—here or in any of the realms. If you stand still, waiting for a halo, you get eaten.”

  Her voice was impassioned. “What has happened was inevitable, looking back on it. An overabundance of anything in nature always prompts a response. Food doesn't sit around rotting for long. Yod is the hidden cost of overpopulation, if you like. Every second, hundreds, thousands of people die and they have to go somewhere. The rise of humanity has fuelled the rise of Yod, step for step. You've brought your own doom upon you, and all those who helped you.

  “Oh, you can claim ignorance, of course, and that's a fair defence. It's not like the old days, when people at least had an inkling of the other realms and a healthy respect for the creatures inhabiting them. But in recent centuries Baal, the dei of the First Realm, has lost his grip on the world, though there are few who would challenge his supremacy. Few who are sane, anyway. That Baal's rule could be threatened from the Second Realm, by Yod, is taking the powers of this realm completely off guard. All may fall as a result. Having only one top predator is dangerous, whether it's Baal or Mot or Yod, or anyone else. We need competition, speciation, and diversity in order to flourish. The recurring patterns of life are the one great unifier, across the realms. We will always be subject to them.”

  “So we just give in?” Hadrian asked, reacting strongly to her fatalistic message. He wasn't an animal; he didn't feel shackled to any bestial code of conduct. Yet what she said made a dark kind of sense. He could understand in his head that the world might work the way she said it did, even though he had never suspected it in anything but his darkest fantasies. “We sit back and let Yod do this?”

  “Of course not. That would be stupid. We do what we must, as always, in order to survive.”

  Too late for some, he thought. The torn throats and bellies of the people in the cool-room reminded him of Lascowicz and the creature that had hunted him through the hospital.

  We're the good guys, Hadrian. We're trying to save the world.

  A lie, he thought. Hadrian was appalled at how easily he could accept
what he was being told. Kybele looked like an ordinary woman, but her mouth spouted extraordinary things. He wondered what his brother would have made of them. Would he accept the notion of different realms beyond the one he knew? Would he accept that a giant predator had grown fat and greedy on humanity and was ambitious for more? Would he accept that he and Seth were at the centre of this plan, somehow, although they had known nothing about it? Could he live with the knowledge that Ellis was nothing but collateral damage—an innocent bystander—to a plot she alone had seen coming?

  “Why me?” he asked, forcing himself to try to understand. “Why us?”

  “Because of the bond you and your brother share. Yod is using it to bring the First and Second Realms together. You feel this. I know you do.

  “The denizens of the underworld may have tried to incapacitate Seth upon his arrival on Bardo's far shore, and it may be that he is in Yod's thrall even as we speak. But he's definitely still alive. Yod wants him alive, so that the connection between the two of you will remain intact. It cannot be broken, even by death.”

  Alive, he thought, still unsure whether to be relieved by that thought. The truth wrapped him in a shroud. The idea that the relationship with his mirror twin—a relationship he had resented all his life—was being exploited to destroy the world galled him. On its shoulders, ultimately, rested the deaths of untold numbers of innocent people.

  If Kybele was right, everyone in the city had been killed in order to punch a hole in the world he knew—a hole through Bardo to the afterlife—a hole large enough for a monster to squeeze through to finish off the rest of humanity.

  If Kybele was right…

  “Locyta—” The name brought sickening images of the knife slamming home, and of a severed head dropping heavily onto concrete. “He was working for Yod?”

  “He was charged with the task of killing one of you. It didn't matter which one. I didn't know who he had chosen until I found you.”

  Hadrian remembered Kybele calling him “Seth” when they had first met. “And you were looking for me—why?”