The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One

by Sean Williams

  Hadrian hesitated, just for a moment. He knew that the door couldn't possibly lead anywhere. The building wasn't wide enough. He was already at the edge.

  Still, he opened it and went through into another office, almost identical to the first. This one was L-shaped and had once been extensively greened. A series of desiccated indoor trees led him to the corner of the L, where he turned. Only then did he notice that the light was angling in from another direction—proof, if he needed it, that he hadn't crossed a bridge to another building. Not a physical bridge, anyway.

  Another door. Another stairwell, wider and cleaner than the first. He went up again—five floors this time—then took the exit he found there. Yet more offices, as sterile and lonely as the others. He felt like an intruder, a ghost confined to urban spaces once familiar from sitcoms and shows about lawyers, but now alien and lifeless. He half-expected the howl of the Swarm to start up at any moment, but the spaces through which he travelled were silent.

  The view through the windows was of endless buildings marching off to the horizon, with banks of warped, tortured clouds overhead and occasional beams of sunlight stabbing down at hidden streets. Here and there were signs of supernatural activity: skyscrapers connected by sheets of translucent material that cast eerie rainbows when sunlight struck them; numerous towers painted with the eyes of the Kerubim; a single column of continuous lightning that danced back and forth from one end of a distant street to the other, with no obvious purpose.

  Creatures that might have been albatrosses but could easily have been giant bats—he ruled out nothing—banked over a communications tower. The tower's delicate dishes had all been dashed to the roadside far below. Fire damage was commonplace, and wide swathes of the city lay crumbling or torn down by the battle between Mot and Baal.

  Where was Kybele? he wondered. Why was she standing for this?

  The streets were hidden from his sight by the bulk of the buildings. The only ones he could see were the ones directly beneath him, and they were deserted. Of the Swarm—or anything else—there was no sign.

  “Kybele is dead,” he said, thinking it but not really believing it.

  “Perhaps,” said Pukje in response. “Your guess is as good as mine on that score—and on who would rule the towers in her wake. Maybe no one. They are a relatively new phenomenon that many genomoi feel uncomfortable with.”

  “The humans who built them could take them back.”

  Pukje just laughed.

  “Why is that so funny?” Hadrian asked.

  “Humans are like ants. Would you give them ownership of the houses they invade?”

  “Ants build nests that extend for kilometres—thousands of kilometres. They don't just invade.”

  “Perhaps not, but they're still just ants.”

  Hadrian stared out at the jumbled, angular landscape a moment longer. There truly was no end or break to it, no matter how far he looked. The air was clear without any traffic to foul it up. The view was surprisingly beautiful.

  He wondered what the rest of the world was like, outside the city. Was everything else amalgamated, too? Was there one giant harbour, one enormous industrial sector, one rolling suburb, one endless plastic mall? One farm, one sea, one river? One desert?

  He didn't have the stomach to ask that question, so he turned away from the view and continued on his way.

  And so it went, alternating offices and stairwells until the necessity for offices somehow became less important and he stuck just to stairs, changing flights whenever his gut feeling told him to. He started tallying floors at twenty, and lost count past a hundred. He took frequent rests, kneading the aching muscles in his thighs and stretching his tortured back. The bruises and burns from the draci itched like the devil. When his stomach complained, he stopped to eat a small meal of chocolate from the bag he had brought.

  “How much further?” he asked at around one hundred and fifty floors—surely, he thought, much higher than the world's tallest building.

  “I don't know,” said Pukje. “You'll know when you get there.”

  “But how will I know? What's telling me?”

  “You're telling yourself.”

  “By magic?”

  “How else could it be?”

  He didn't know, hence the question. “This doesn't feel like magic.”

  “What does it feel like, then?”

  “I don't know. Like I'm seeing the world differently, or it's showing me things I couldn't see before.”

  “And that can't be magic because…?”

  “I don't know. The word ‘magic’ makes it sound so cliché.”

  “Don't call it magic, then. Call it something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “That's entirely up to you,” the imp said unhelpfully. “A spell by any other name…”

  Hadrian paused to think, breathing heavily and wiping sweat from his face. A residue of Utu's silver threads still clung to his hand, no matter how he rubbed at them. The weapon Kybele had given him was obviously magic—but the word still sounded wrong. “Magic” came with connotations of wizards and witches and kids’ stories. It didn't speak of the dark power he had seen Kybele and Lascowicz wield; it didn't hint at the subtlety of what he was feeling; and it said nothing at all about the creatures that had woken and now prowled the streets.

  Magic is the art of causing change by an act of will, Kybele had told him. That was a quote, he suspected; he had heard something like it before. It came close to all that he had experienced in recent days. What she and Pukje called “magic” was different to technology. Although it was used to enforce someone's will upon the world, as technology was used, so much of it came from within rather than without. Hadrian hadn't needed a tool to kill the draci beyond the metaphor he had forged in his mind. Similarly, he didn't need a compass to know that he was going in the right direction now. He had some new sense or unconscious process that gave him what he wanted, what he willed from the world.

  The fives senses had proper names. He felt strongly that this one should, too.

  He mulled Kybele's words over in his mind as he went back to climbing. Soon he was repeating them like a mantra, unconsciously falling into their rhythm.

  Causing change. An act of will.

  Causing change. An act of will.

  Magic was analogous to getting rid of the middleman. It was cutting right to the heart of the problem and fixing it directly, making things happen. In a sense, it was change. It was the very essence of cause and effect. Nothing happened without a reason. Will supplied that reason, and magic did the rest.

  Magic was change. It was a process, an argument; neither beginning nor end; and not the stages in between, either, but something else entirely. If one froze the universe in time, took away the change, it would be lifeless, dead. But if one took all the matter and energy out of the universe instead, one wouldn't have anything left that one could point at and say: this is the change. It was in the flow from moment to moment; it was Time's forgotten but vital sibling—for without it, Time couldn't be measured. It was life itself. Change was magic.

  The Change.

  He liked the ring of that. He could think of using something called the Change and not feel like a complete goose.

  At around the two hundredth floor, he went to leave the endless stairwell to find a toilet.

  “Don't,” said Pukje, whom he assumed had fallen asleep again. “Don't leave the path until you are certain it's the right place to do so.”

  He shrugged, thinking of all the times he had gone into a parking lot stairwell and been disgusted to find that someone had used it as a urinal. He supposed there would be no one to curse him now—except the Swarm, and it seemed fitting to leave them such a gesture if they were still following him.

  “Where's this taking me?” he asked as they resumed their climb. Only the thought that there might be a purpose to it kept him going.

  “Where you need to be,” said the imp.

  “My knees tell me
they need me to stop soon.”

  “We have more important things to worry about than your knees.”

  “Maybe if I could ditch some ballast, it'd be easier.”

  Pukje chuckled. “It hardly befits one of my stature to walk.”

  “And why would that be? Who are you when you're at home, anyway?”

  “I am no one of consequence.”

  “Then you can walk on your own here, too.”

  “Remember that I am in an excellent position to strangle you.”

  “Either way, you walk.”

  “Very well, then. If you insist.” The imp wriggled disgruntledly and dismounted. Hadrian stretched, relishing the freedom. Pukje didn't weigh much, but it had been a long haul, and the bruises left by the imp's bony knees might take weeks to heal.

  “Thank you.”

  The imp cracked various joints while limbering up. “Let's not dawdle, lad. Onwards and—”

  “Don't say it.” Hadrian swung the bag over his shoulder and resumed his climb.

  Seth and Ellis tumbled with supernatural speed, as though sucked down by a force stronger than gravity. He caught a glimpse of the skyship dwindling into the distance behind them. The enormous vessel was soon just a dot in the sky. Sheol burned it away a moment later.

  Then the world vanished. The familiar, distorted confines of the Path of Life enclosed them, rising around them like the walls of a waterslide. It curved, and they curved with it, carried onwards by their considerable momentum. They skidded and slid, completely out of control. Disoriented, unable to keep track of up or down—or even, eventually, to tell if he was travelling forwards or backwards—Seth could only hang onto Ellis's hand with grim determination and hope for the best.

  (He fell to his knees before her, shot by her imaginary six-shooter after saying, “Reach for the sky-y-y.”)

  A fleeting fear that there might be a dead end at the end of the way was soon dispelled. The headlong luge-like ride ended with a flash of bright light, a brief but terrifying moment of weightlessness, then a bone-jarring impact. They had shot almost vertically out of the Path with enough momentum to carry them away from its mouth and crash to solid ground. He and Ellis were wrenched apart and tumbled to quite separate points, where they unfolded and recovered in their own ways.

  Green light entered his field of view. Mannah, one of the Immortals, helped him to his feet. Agatha lent a hand to Ellis. He looked around, struggling to comprehend exactly where he was. He was standing at the centre of a large transparent bubble. The “floor” curved up around him, like the Second Realm in miniature, many dozens of metres across. There was nothing beneath his feet but down—and a terribly large amount of it.

  Above him, within the transparent bubble, was another bubble, a gleaming sphere hanging far above his head, as wide as a two-storey building.

  “Sheol?” said Ellis, craning her neck to look up at it.

  “That is our destination,” said the kaia.

  “Where's the light gone?”

  Seth looked down again. Although the view was terrifying, he was able to remind himself that he would have fallen already, if he was going to. The air directly below his feet, on the other side of the invisible boundary, was thick with energy.

  “We're inside the light,” he said. “That is, the light's out there. We're above it.”

  “The roof of the world,” she said, looking around her in amazement. “I've always wondered what it's like inside a lightbulb.”

  A terrified wail, faint at first but growing rapidly louder, cut off anything else they might've asked. A hole materialised in the boundary between them, and Synett shot out of it. The bald man flew into the air, flailing helplessly, and landed several metres away with a squawk. Agatha helped him to his feet as she had Ellis. He looked around shakily.

  “What I want to know,” said Seth, looking up at the heart of the realm, “is how do we get from here to there?”

  “You must fly,” said a familiar voice.

  Seth turned. Xol was standing behind him, back straight and spines erect.

  “Fly? Again?” He forced himself to see the humour in the situation. “What's it going to be this time: giant bees or magical helicopters?”

  “Nothing but your will.”

  “‘O that I had wings like a dove,’” said Synett, brushing himself down and staring sceptically up at the globe, “‘I would fly away and be at rest.’”

  Seth waved at him to be silent and looked at Xol closely. There was something different about him, something grimmer, more solid. His muscular shoulders were bunched, as though holding the world aloft.

  Agatha was staring at him with a shocked look on her face.

  “You're not Xol,” she said. “You're his brother.”

  “I am Quetzalcoatl.”

  “The ghost?” asked Synett.

  “Yes.”

  Seth gaped at him, not sure what to make of this new development. Quetzalcoatl's appearance was unexpected and fraught with potential complications. “What are you doing here?”

  “The Sisters sent me to meet you.”

  “Do they know that Xol is with us? Is that why they sent you?”

  Quetzalcoatl didn't respond. His gold eyes slid away from Seth as the exit from the Path of Life opened again and his brother appeared out of it. The dimane rolled gracefully on contact with the solid surface and came to a halt on one knee, balancing himself with his knuckles. As he straightened, he caught sight of Quetzalcoatl, and froze.

  He uttered a single syllable in a language Seth didn't understand. It could have been “You.” Equally, it could have been the vilest curse imaginable.

  “He says the Sisters sent him,” Seth said in a hopeless attempt to earth the tension sparking between them. “He's going to show us how to get the rest of the way.”

  Four identical flat eyes turned on him.

  “No, he's not,” said Xol with matter-of-fact fatality. “He's here to kill those who fail.”

  The path opened again, and a Holy Immortal somersaulted gracefully out of it.

  “Is that right?” asked Ellis. “If we can't magically fly up there, he's going to—?” She drew a finger across her black-veiled throat.

  “This is correct,” said Quetzalcoatl, and there was something in the way he flexed his muscles that left Seth in no doubt at all that he could carry out that promise on whoever deserved it.

  “Excuse me,” said Synett. “I've changed my mind. I'm more scared of the Sisters now than I ever was of Barbelo, so if you could just let me go back down the Path…”

  “Me, too,” said Ellis. “And I've never even met Barbelo.”

  Quetzalcoatl shook his head once. “You have come this far,” said the ghost. “You cannot go back without the blessing of the Sisters.”

  “Just great.”

  The Path disgorged Horva and another of the Holy Immortals. Their numbers were gradually increasing, and there was no way to warn those who remained behind.

  “Did you know about this all along?” Seth asked Xol.

  “Yes,” said the dimane, his voice wooden.

  “Why didn't you tell us?”

  “We all knew that the Path would be difficult. As long as you make it to the end, our journey will be a success.”

  “I didn't know this,” Ellis protested. Horva put a soothing hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off and swung around to confront Quetzalcoatl. “This is ridiculous. I didn't ask to be caught up in this. I want to go back, and I want to go back now.”

  “You cannot,” said Quetzalcoatl. “I am sorry.”

  “I bet you are,” she snarled. “You're nothing but a bloodthirsty demon just itching to dice someone weaker than you. Well, I'm not going to roll over and let you do it. Go back up there and tell your precious Sisters that they can stick their rules where Sheol doesn't shine and pick on someone else.”

  Quetzalcoatl just stared at her. As the Path threw a kaia out of its depths, he raised one hand as though to touch her—but not
in anger. His expression was almost one of anguish.

  “Moyo,” he said, “do you remember nothing?”

  Seth's heart tripped. Ellis went pale.

  “My name,” she said, slowly and firmly, “is Ellis.”

  Before Quetzalcoatl could respond, an impact rocked them. All eyes turned upwards, to where something had struck the globe in which they stood. A dark shape, folding and unfolding like a stricken pterodactyl and smoking like a meteor, tumbled rapidly away from Sheol and plummeted back to the realm below.

  “You wanted this,” said Agatha to Xol, a look of realisation growing on her face. “You've been anticipating it ever since Barbelo told us we were coming here!”

  “It is the only way,” said the dimane. “I have no other hope left.”

  “No more talk,” said Quetzalcoatl, turning away from Ellis with pain in his eyes. “The foundations and firmament of this world are under simultaneous attack. If you would see this done, I suggest you start soon.”

  The ghost clapped his hands, and a glass pike appeared between them. It was a full metre longer than Quetzalcoatl and topped with a wicked, angular barb.

  “Fly,” Quetzalcoatl said, his gaze fixed on his brother. “I dare you.”

  “The face of the world has changed many times. Continents move; rivers shift course; mountains rise and fall. Humanity changes with them, struggling or prospering as best it can. We like to believe that we are responsible for the good times, but in bad times the finger points elsewhere. Reality is more complex than we would like it to be, especially when gods walk the Earth.”