The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One
Page 19
Hekau was both a blessing and a curse in such an environment. Seth caught snatches of words that half made sense from those attempting to keep their conversations a secret. That wasn't a problem. What was a problem was the combined output of numerous hawkers and beggars who wanted nothing more than to be completely understood by as many people as possible. It didn't help that he had no idea what they were trying to sell or beg for. That crucial information was lost in the ceaseless babble filling the street.
Every ten minutes or so a slender white shape glided silently across the sky, glowing like a meteor. These Seth knew to be fomore, one of the many strange life-forms native to the Second Realm. The exit from the underground tunnels had been guarded by seven such creatures, as Nehelennia had warned would be the case. Skeletal wraiths with long, eyeless faces and teeth resembling those of a deep-sea angler fish, they had been easier to evade than Seth had feared. A distraction cast by Xol sent them sweeping away from the entrance while Seth and the others had scurried through under cover of a glamour into the city.
The fomore sent waves of misgiving through the populace whenever they appeared. The scruffier elements ducked for cover where they could find it and a hush fell over the streets. Only once did Seth see the fomore actually do anything to any of the denizens of Abaddon, and that was in response to a fearfully large creature, like a bulldozer on legs, with a wide, hammer-shaped head that bellowed obscenities at the sky. Two of the fomore swooped upon it, raking its thick skin with needle-sharp claws. It tried to bat them away, without success. Either the claws were poisoned or the lines they cast over the creature's skin formed some sort of inhibitory charm. Either way, the creature almost immediately quietened. Staggering slightly, it found a nearby wall and slumped against it, capable of little more than a bemused wail. Within seconds, it had slumped into a drift of brownish dust that the wind picked at and scattered afar.
Satisfied, the fomore had returned to their patrol, ignoring the looks of hatred cast at them by the bystanders.
Police, Seth thought, more startled by the mundanity of the fomore's function than by their supernatural appearance. Some things, it seemed, never changed.
“Through here.” Agatha peeled back a charred rubbery sheet and guided them into a V-shaped trench that wound around the bases of several lumpy dwellings. The trench sloped downwards, and its floor was liberally coated with tiny gelatinous beads that reminded Seth of fish eggs and made slight popping noises when trodden on. He tried to avoid them, but there were too many. His feet were soon coated with goo that smelled of antiseptic. Although he had yet to see evidence of bacterial infections in the Second Realm, he instinctively avoided touching the slime with his hands.
The sound of the crowd fell behind them, muffled by the walls of the trench. More of the ragged, blackened sheets hung overhead, swaying in an unfelt breeze. Seth kept his revulsion carefully in check, although it was difficult at times; he felt as though he was crawling through the guts of an enormous beast, competing for space with all manner of parasites. Even Agatha was starting to look a little frayed around the edges. Quite literally. There was a blurriness to her that he hadn't seen before, a lack of focus, as though she was liable at any moment to dissolve into nothing. Was that what happened in the Second Realm, he wondered, when one pushed oneself too hard? In his world, hearts failed or arteries burst. In the afterlife, perhaps exhaustion meant risking literal disintegration of the self.
Or maybe it was just the way of her kind. Agatha wasn't human. That fact was easy to forget, since she seemed perfectly normal to him. She looked barely his age, in fact, but her skill fighting the egrigor in Bethel had impressed him.
During their subterranean voyage from the pipe, Seth had broached the subject of her nature with Xol.
“She is a defender of the realm,” the dimane had told him. “To your eyes, she is beautiful. Yes?”
He confessed that she was.
“To mine also—although were we to describe her to each other, our descriptions would not match. We see her the way she sees the realm. She reflects her love of her home so all may witness it. That is the way of her people.”
Walking through the slums of Abaddon, Seth wondered what justified Agatha's opinion that the Second Realm was beautiful and worthy of love. All he had seen so far was strangeness and threat. But the thought immediately made him feel churlish. Someone stuck in a rough area of Sydney or Los Angeles might similarly wonder what people saw in the First Realm. He'd hardly seen enough on which to base an informed opinion.
Agatha glanced over her shoulder at him, as though she could tell he was thinking about her. He clenched his left fist and concentrated firmly on the rotating squares on his forearm.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“I'm taking you to the kaia.”
“Where are they, exactly?”
“Along here, if my memory serves me correctly.”
They turned left at a Y-shaped intersection. Something buzzed at Seth's neck and he brushed it away, cursing in annoyance. Who had expected flies in the afterlife, too?
“Will they be able to help us?” he persisted.
“My understanding of them is that they will side against Yod.”
“It beats me why anyone is on its side,” Seth said. “After all, it's not making things terribly pleasant.”
“There are always those,” said Xol, “who plan to profit from disaster. Dominion over a ruin is better than being a slave.”
“Do you believe that?”
The dimane shook his head. “Not I. Not any more.”
“What about Barbelo?” he asked Synett, walking moodily silent behind him. “Any word?”
“None,” was the simple reply.
They walked on in silence.
Two vast towers made fangs of the skyline under the bar of a nearby T-junction. From a distance they looked like sentinels, watching over the city; close up, they looked more like cathedral spires, yearning for the sublime. A broad square marched off into the distance, populated only by works of art resembling stocky obelisks. A war memorial, Hadrian thought.
The sun had begun its slow creep down the sky when they came to a halt. He felt a slight chill as shadows lengthened around him. Behind them, along the street they had followed, a vast bank of clouds was building, subtly encroaching on the brick-and-glass landscape below. The sun caught the cloud bank at an angle, casting it into stark relief. Light gleamed off a distant glass building.
“Storm coming,” he said, wondering if he could feel the electricity rising, or if that was something else. The Cataclysm, perhaps.
“Sure is,” Kybele replied. She wasn't wasting any time. Barely had the car stopped than she was out the door and striding purposefully to where two blackened wrecks lay tangled together in the centre of the intersection. “This configuration is not optimal.” She clapped her hands, and seven Bes hurried past Hadrian to do her will. There were more of them every time he counted, as though they sprang whole from the Galloi's pockets while no one was looking. “Clear this mess and prepare the ground. We don't have much time.”
“What are you planning to do?” Hadrian asked her.
“More magic.”
“I guessed that. What sort?”
She glanced at him, but her attention soon returned to the skyscrapers around them. Although they showed no sign of the giant eyes that afflicted so many of the towers in the cityscape, he still felt uneasy.
“This is a war,” Kybele said. “I don't know if you fully appreciate it, even after all I've shown you. It's not just about you and your brother. It's not about the people who died here. This is about power, Hadrian, nothing else, and power turns around minutiae. The war began when Lascowicz drew the line. Someone had to throw the first stone, and that stone just happens to be Ellis. I intend to throw the stone back by rescuing her. So don't take it personally, either way. Understand? And don't be offended if I don't explain every step we take before we take it, because I don't have time to
accommodate your feelings.”
He nodded. A flush crept up his neck. He felt as though he'd been slapped down by his brother. “Got it.”
She glanced fleetingly at the growing thunderhead, then turned back to the Bes. The half-men had stood patiently by.
“Get a move on, you,” she snapped, clapping her hands together. The sound echoed off building fronts like a thunderbolt. “The end of the world won't wait for us to be ready, you know.”
The sun seemed to sink faster than it should. Loud scrapes and crashes came from where the Bes busied themselves separating the two burnt cars. Hadrian glanced at what they were doing, then looked away. There were bodies in the wreckage, twisted and blackened by heat but recognisably human. He'd seen enough death.
Something moved across the sunset. Hadrian spied a lone bird flying parallel to the crossbar of the T-junction, its wings snapping with liquid strength. He thought nothing of it at first, until he remembered that every other bird in the city had either fled or been killed when the Cataclysm had begun. No planes or helicopters had flown either. He studied the bird with closer interest, then.
Kybele had seen it, too. She whistled piercingly, and the bird altered its course. It wheeled once around them, then dived.
The Bes scattered as it flapped heavily over them. Snapping feathers and tendons sounded like primitive drumbeats as it settled onto a blackened automobile frame and composed itself. Its back was impossibly broad and tapered down to a glossy, flawless tail. Black eyes studied them with naked intelligence over a wickedly sharp beak.
A raven, thought Hadrian, knowing little about birds, or a giant crow. Either way, it was clearly supernatural.
“Kutkinnaku,” said Kybele in greeting.
The bird dipped its head and croaked something in a harsh, guttural language Hadrian couldn't understand.
“Magnetic north is shifting,” Kybele responded. “I feel it, too. Something's on the rise—and if it's not Baal, I don't know what it is. What news of our enemy?”
The bird looked at Hadrian, then back to Kybele. It croaked again, finishing on a rising inflection.
“You don't have to worry about that. It's being taken care of as we speak. Don't you trust me?”
The bird emitted a tapering deep-throated raspberry.
“Fine. You'll see. Tell the others to be ready. The call will come by nightfall.”
The bird nodded. It shifted on its fire-scarred perch and, cocking its head towards the clouds building in the distance, uttered a sound very much like “tlah-lock.”
“Yes, yes. I'm aware of it. It changes nothing.”
The bird shook its head, sceptical of Kybele's claim, then shrugged in a distinctly avian fashion.
“Go,” she told it. “You've told me everything you can, and you have a long way yet to travel. But be careful. Mimir claims that the Swarm is stirring. If that's true, then even the winged ones have reason to be afraid.”
The bird stared at her for a long moment. Clearly she had taken it by surprise. Its gaze shifted to Hadrian again, then to the tangled wreckage beneath it. For an awful moment, Hadrian thought it might jump down and pick a scrap from the body crushed within it: a glazed eye, perhaps, or a shrivelled ear.
Then its gleaming black eyes were back on him. “Don't be fooled, boy,” it said clearly, in English. “There is a third way.”
Startled, he could only stammer, “W—what—?”
Before Hadrian could manage more than that, the raven unfolded its wings and hopped into the air. Long muscles flexed; feathers cracked. With two mighty flaps, it was speeding away from them and gaining altitude. In seconds it had become a black dot shrinking against a sheer glass cliff face, then it vanished entirely.
Kybele watched it go with a thoughtful expression on her face.
“What did it say to you?” she asked him. He told her, and she shook her head. “I'll have its feathers for a boa before this is over. Are you going to ask me how it could speak English?”
“I guess I was wondering.” The truth was that he had just accepted it, as he had accepted so many other things in recent days. His credulity was growing apace.
“It wasn't speaking English at all,” she said. “You were understanding what it said because it wanted you to understand. And I couldn't because it didn't want me to. It—the process of understanding—is called Hekau.”
“Magic again?”
“Another aspect of the Second Realm creeping into the First. You'll get used to it.”
That he was still unsure of. “What did he tell you?”
“Nothing I didn't already know.”
When the cars and the bodies were cleared, Kybele paced out an area at the exact centre of the intersection, checking the landmarks around her and dropping angular, polished stones to mark specific points. Hadrian watched her, remembering what she had said once about “geometries of the Second Realm” bleeding into the First. Was that all magic was? he wondered. Drawing shapes and bending reality around them?
The sky above steadily darkened. Through cracks between the buildings, Hadrian caught glimpses of the sun setting, deepening to a rich yellow and casting the approaching storm clouds a deep purple colour. He thought he saw flashes of lightning reflecting from the cloud tops. The occasional gusts of wind grew stronger, chasing parades of ash and dead leaves along the sidewalks. The gutters were full of detritus. He dreaded to think what a heavy shower would do to the tangled drains of the megacity.
Kybele snapped her fingers and the Galloi joined her in her efforts. She muttered under her breath, chanting strange vowel-laden phrases as she traced a complex symbol on the tarmac. Hadrian didn't know much about traditional magic, but he'd watched enough TV to know what he might see: circles and pentagrams marked out with chalk, coloured sand or blood; candles, ceremonial knives, herbs, skulls, and Latin incantations.
Kybele's chanting didn't sound anything like Latin, and she had none of the other paraphernalia, yet he sensed a potency in her actions. Her every move lent weight to a growing conviction that, not only did she know what she was doing, but reality did too—and while it might not like bending to her will, it had no choice but to obey.
Slowly, glossy black lines began to appear in the tarmac, as though Kybele's footprints, winding backwards and forwards, over and over, were melting it. The shape made by the lines was jagged and intricate, like nothing he'd ever seen. Large arrows and triangles pointed inwards to an asymmetrical heart. It looked something like a mandala with a strange Amerindian aesthetic, or an absurd electrical diagram; combined with the shape of the intersection, the rhythm of Kybele's words, and the darkness creeping over the city, it made him distinctly nervous. He knew better than to interrupt and ask what it was.
Finally she stopped. Breathing heavily, Kybele left the borders of the pattern—the lines of which were now glowing a dull red—and crossed to the car. Opening the trunk, she lugged out a heavy canvas bag and placed it on the ground. It unrolled with a series of heavy metal clangs to expose a collection of metal rods ranging in size from the length of Hadrian's forearm to Kybele's full height. They were all roughly the same thickness—not much more than a thumb's width across—and kinked at one end like an elongated L. The other end terminated in a blunt knob the size of a clenched fist.
The Bes crowded like eager children around Kybele's bent form as she began handing them out, one by one. The Galloi took the largest and hefted it in one massive hand with the kink upwards. Hadrian noticed thin carvings wrapping around its smooth surface. Light stuck to them like water, giving them a faint silver sheen.
“Here.” Hadrian tore his gaze away and focussed on Kybele. She was offering him one of the metal staffs. “You'll need this.”
He took it and was surprised by its lightness. It had the rugged, notched coldness of iron but the weight of aluminum. Reflected cloud-light danced as he turned it over in his hands. “What is it?”
“A lituus. It has a name, but I'll let it tell you about that.”
“It'll save your life, if you allow it to.”
I am Utu, said a silken voice in his head. I am ready to serve you, my wielder.
“You—what?” Hadrian stared at the thing. “You can talk?”
I can fight. We will fight together, you and I. And we will win.
Hadrian looked to where his hand gripped the metal staff. The glittering lines were spreading from the metal onto his skin, like silver veins. He almost dropped the staff in revulsion. Only the staff's quick explanation halted the automatic impulse.
So I will not easily be lost in battle! To release me, simply let go.
He did so, experimentally, and the staff fell with a musical clang to the ground.
Kybele reached out with a staff of her own and nudged it back towards him. She had rolled the canvas away and stood in a ring of Bes with Hadrian slightly off-centre.
“I said you'll need it,” she said. “I wasn't joking.”
“What for?” he asked. “What's happening?” What does this have to do with Ellis?
“Tlaloc.” It was the same word the raven had croaked. She indicated the thunderhead with the tip of her staff. “That isn't an ordinary storm. We need to be ready—to fight, not to stand around discussing things. I'm calling for help, and it isn't going to be easy. Pick it up.”
The whiplash of command had him bending to wrap his hand around the cool metal staff before he consciously formed the intention to do so.
Do not be afraid, said the staff. I am with you.
“Thanks,” he said, backing away from Kybele. “I think.”