The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One

by Sean Williams

  THE BOOK OF TOWERS, EXEGESIS 6:1

  On the three or four hundredth level, Hadrian stopped to sleep. He wasn't even sure precisely which number it was. His vision was a blur of stairs, and his head spun from constantly turning right. His muscles had gone beyond pain to a deep, bone-weary ache he suspected he'd never be rid of. As unlikely as it seemed, the filthy concrete floor looked almost inviting. He was unconscious within seconds of laying his head down on the bag.

  Seth came to him in his dream. Lucidly aware that he was asleep, Hadrian was also aware that this manifestation of his brother was unusual. Normally the images were fragmented and confusing, most likely because he wasn't able to fully comprehend the Second Realm—a world without matter of any kind, one where will counted for more than any of the physical forces. What he saw of the Second Realm suffered, therefore, from transmission errors. It was no wonder they came across as nightmares.

  This time, it was just Seth. He didn't say or do anything. He just appeared and stood with him for a while. Everything around them was dark. Seth looked as he always had—spookily like Hadrian's reflection—and he didn't seem hurt in any way. He wasn't a monster. They didn't look at each other or say anything. They just were.

  They stayed that way for some time. Hadrian didn't know how long; in the dream his watch was working again, but it jumped from hour to hour at random, black LCD digits shifting backwards and forwards without rest. Looking at it made him feel agitated, so he took it off and put it in his pocket.

  A noise broke the silence, a distant booming.

  Seth stirred, looked over his shoulder.

  “I have to go.”

  “Thanks for visiting,” Hadrian said. He still knew it was a dream. He could accept that this conversation didn't have to be entirely logical, or even honest. “It's good to see you.”

  “I've been worried about you.”

  “Me, too. About you, I mean. As well.”

  Seth nodded. “We're in a bit of a mess.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you join me, later?”

  “Would you like that?”

  “Yes. I think—” Seth hesitated. “I think some other people want you here, too.”

  “Then, yes.” Hadrian had no idea how he would accommodate his brother's dream-request, short of dying. Still, it was simpler to give Seth the assurance he wanted than wrangle over the ifs and how-tos. “I'll come.”

  Seth walked away into shadow.

  Hadrian woke to the sound of the Swarm boiling up the stairwells below him and Pukje's bony finger in his gut.

  “Huh—what?”

  “Your snoring attracted them.” The imp tugged at his hand. “Up. We mustn't let them catch us here.”

  The stairwell's dead fluorescent lights were flickering with a ghostly purple light. “Not letting them catch us anywhere would be my preference.”

  “That's entirely up to you.” Pukje scrambled onto his back and clung tightly while Hadrian did his best to wake up. He was sore all over; his neck had a kink in it from sleeping on the hard surface. Something about Seth nagged at him…

  “Run now,” said Pukje. “Wake up later.”

  He did as he was told, egged on by the cacophony growing louder beneath them. It didn't sound as though the Swarm had reached the stairwell he and Pukje occupied, but they were definitely in one nearby. He hurried to put as much distance as possible between them and him, hoping at the same time that his preternatural instinct was still working. He felt numb on the inside. Not even his fear was truly working yet.

  A door called to him. He went through it, into another stairwell. Here, too, the lights flickered, making it hard to see. He could rely on neither ordinary sight nor his new senses; impressions from each interfered with each other, confusing him. As long as he didn't slip and hurt himself, he supposed it didn't matter just how much he could see.

  Upwards.

  “Could we bring the stairs down behind us?” he asked. “Cut them off?”

  “No. This way is a whole. Break any part of it, and you break all of it.”

  A new means of thinking about the world brought new rules with it. He could accept that. But there had to be a means of getting the Swarm off his back, otherwise they would chase him forever.

  “Can we change ways, then?”

  “When we have reached the end of this one, we can explore our options.”

  “We will have options, then?”

  “I believe so.”

  “And you'd know.”

  “I have confidence in your ability to get us where we need to be.”

  “That's great,” he said, not sharing that confidence at all. Thus far it seemed he had done little more than get them lost. The muscles in his legs were burning. His heartbeat throbbed in his ears and throat. The sound of the Swarm didn't seem to be falling behind at all.

  He could only run and hope for the best.

  “Did you really go to all that trouble just so I could help you get out of the city?” he asked Pukje.

  “Mainly. Also to frustrate the people looking for you. I'm no friend of theirs.”

  “You've made that pretty obvious. Why not?”

  “I'm not a people person. I don't do teamwork very well. I have my own agenda, and I'm happy enough to plug away at it on my own.”

  “What's your agenda now?”

  He felt the imp shrug. “To survive.”

  Another door called him, but it led to another stairwell, not a way out. More climbing.

  “What would you do if I wasn't here?”

  “That's something of a meaningless question, since we wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for the Cataclysm, and there wouldn't be a Cataclysm if there wasn't someone like you about the place.”

  “So whoever they were, you'd find them, follow them, make sure they went where they were supposed to go, wait until they really needed your help, and then pounce. Right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And once they were in your debt, you'd use them to get away?”

  “Again, something like that.”

  Hadrian wondered if Pukje could have avoided the attack of the draci that had nearly killed him, or spared him the heartbreak of finding Ellis only to have her snatched away again. If so, he was tempted to toss the imp down the centre of the stairwell and let the Swarm use his bones as toothpicks. But he had to wonder what he would have done had the imp suddenly appeared and tried to tell him that Ellis was evil, not Ellis at all. Hadrian doubted it would have had the effect required. Probably the exact opposite.

  “We all do what we can,” he said, “to survive.”

  “Exactly. We all have our own agenda.” The imp's breath was rank in his ear. “What's your agenda, Hadrian? What are you hoping to get out of all of this? To what end are you using me?”

  He didn't answer. Not just because he didn't know the answer, but because there was something ahead. Something new. He slowed his pace, rounding two turns of the staircase with greater care than usual. The flickering light was increasing in frequency, and the sound of the Swarm had become a constant, echoing howl. Could they possibly have got ahead of him? He didn't think so, but it paid not to take any chances.

  He turned the last corner, and realised what it was. The stairwell ended in a grey metal door with three characters—possibly Korean, he thought—painted on it in flaky red. He didn't know what the characters meant, but he knew what the door meant to him.

  The exit.

  He ran up the last few steps and put his hand on the metal. It was freezing cold, and that was enough to make him wonder if opening it was the right thing to do.

  “I've no idea where this is going to take us,” he told the imp.

  “I have an inkling.”

  “Want to share it?”

  “Just open it and I'll tell you if I was right.”

  Hadrian tried the knob. It turned freely. He tugged gently at first. The hinges resisted. He put more muscle and weight into it. The door opened
a crack, allowing a chill wind access to the stairwell. Flakes of white followed, as fine as dandruff, leaving tiny pinpricks of cold where they touched his skin.

  Snow.

  “Yes,” breathed Pukje. “Yesss…”

  Hadrian put his whole weight into it, and the door jerked open with a loud scraping sound. If the Swarm hadn't already filled with stairwell with their booming howls, he would have feared drawing attention to himself. As it was, he had bigger things to worry about. The cold pouring through the doorway was biting and the clothes Pukje had brought for him were about as effective as tissue paper against it. Hugging himself, clutching the bag to his chest and grateful for the imp's insulating warmth against his back, he stepped through the door and into a world of ice and rock.

  There were mountains. That was his first impression. His view was filled with walls of jagged, sundered rock spearing up into the sky as though taking personal affront at it. The stone was dark grey and looked very, very hard. The occasional patch of dirty snow didn't soften it at all, serving only to throw the backdrop into sharper relief. Behind the mighty shoulders more peaks were visible, and more beyond them. The earth beneath him was tortured, splintered, violated.

  He was standing on the side of the largest mountain of all, a monstrous peak thrusting out of the ground with so much innate violence that it seemed to be visibly moving. The frosty ground beneath his feet led three paces to the front door of a small, battered weather station—the same door through which he had arrived. It now led to the station's darkened interior, not the endless stairwell. The metal-clad hut seemed to be uninhabited. A satellite dish dangled, broken, from a strut on its roof, pointing at the vast edifice rather than up at the stars.

  He shivered. It was night. The air was thin and smelled of rock. Gusts snatched at him with icy fingers. There were a few clouds, above and below. The stars were bright and hard. Liquid, rippling aurora painted the sky in blue and green waves. The mountains were alien, redolent with hostility—although he wasn't sure if that hostility was real or his own reaction to the cold landscape.

  So much for meeting survivors, he thought.

  The ground beneath his feet shifted with a sudden jerk.

  “Damn it!” Alarmed and already half-frozen, he ducked back through the door, into the hut, and shut it behind him. Anything to get out of the wind. “Why couldn't we have gone to the Gold Coast?”

  “The Gold Coast doesn't exist any more. Not as you knew it.”

  “Somewhere warm, then!”

  “Because that's not where Yod plans to emerge into this world.”

  Hadrian looked around him, clutching himself to keep from freezing. The room was cluttered with abandoned gear: two camp beds; a wooden bench covered with old notebooks; a broken stool; an empty canvas sack. Pale light leaked through a tiny, cracked windowpane, high up on the opposite wall.

  “Here?”

  “This is the epicentre, the heart of every mountain range in the world. It is here that the First and Second Realms will collide, just as the continental plates that made these mountains are colliding right now. You are drawn to this place, since Yod is using you to break through. You are as much a part of the process as anything else.”

  The imp scrambled off him and wrapped the sack around his shoulders. The narrow alien face was screwed up with displeasure.

  “And before you claim that I tricked you into coming here, think on this: unless we find a way to stop Yod, I'll be the first to be eaten. If there's one place on Earth I'd rather not be, it's right here.” Pukje snuffled and tucked himself into a small, heat-conserving ball. “Still, it's better than facing the Swarm back there. Anything that delays death, even for a moment, gets my automatic approval.”

  Hadrian sat on the camp bed. “What would happen if you died? Wouldn't you just go to the Second Realm?”

  “No. I'm a one-off, I'm afraid. A genomoi through and through. You humans may not spend long in each realm, but your journeys between them make up for that. You've done things in your other lives that I can only imagine. We shouldn't envy each other.”

  “I have past lives?”

  “Not past lives. Other lives. There's an important difference.”

  Hadrian couldn't see it. “Why don't I remember them?”

  “When you move a chair from one room to another, is it in both rooms at once? Of course not. Although it has undeniably been in both rooms, and is definitely the same chair, it's only in either one room or the other. Human memory is much like that. Or so I'm given to understand.”

  The mountain lurched. A dust of rotted wood drifted down from the unsteady roof. Hadrian thought of the human-made mountains of the city, its buildings, and wondered how far they were from his present location—if that was still a meaningful question. The surface of the Earth had been tied in knots and rearranged along arbitrary lines. If space in general had been tied with it, the usual means of measuring distance might no longer be relevant.

  “How long?” he asked instead, glad there was no snow above them to form an avalanche. “Days? Hours?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, I'm afraid.”

  “Do you know how to stop Yod from coming through?”

  “There's only one definite way.”

  Hadrian nodded slowly. “Killing me. The cold will do that soon enough.”

  “Only if you let it.” The imp looked sharply at him from the depths of his canvas cowl. “There might be other, less drastic, ways of getting you to the Second Realm.”

  “Like what?”

  “Again, that's something I can't tell you. We're on the edge of my knowledge, Hadrian. I've been around a while and seen a lot, but there has never been a time like this. Cataclysms normally happen by accident, not design. Who knows what safeguards Yod has in place?” Pukje snorted. “On the other hand, Yod could be winging it, too. For all its size and power, it's just another creature like you and me. There are limits to its knowledge. It can't possibly have considered every angle, every contingency.”

  “I hope you're right,” said Hadrian.

  “You have to do better than hope, my boy.”

  And that was the nub of it, Hadrian concluded. He had to do something, and fast, otherwise Yod would burst into the First Realm and clinch its domination of humanity.

  “Let me think,” he said, rubbing absently at his chest where the scar was slowly closing over the bone of his brother. “It's all about geometry, right?”

  “All,” said the imp, curling up under the canvas and closing his eyes.

  He nodded. In the angular landscape of the mountains, there was no shortage of that.

  Flying unassisted wasn't as impossible as Seth had imagined it might be. It was, like everything else in the Second Realm, a matter of will—and of balancing and fine-tuning. The illusion of gravity had to be subverted, and that was a very hard habit to overcome.

  Next, the apparently weightless body had to be moved. This process, too, had its unexpected quirks. He couldn't just flap his arms and rely on friction with the air—because there was no air. Even if he had proper lifting surfaces and everything else required for flight in the First Realm, it would only work if he was convinced he was flying. It wouldn't actually make it any easier.

  Under perfect conditions he imagined that adopting a meditative pose and concentrating hard on the task would be enough to achieve it—like walking a plank, which was easy if the plank was suspended only a metre off the ground. If the plank was higher—at the top of a ten-storey building, with nothing but empty air below—the task became very nearly impossible.

  So it was with the ghost of Xol's twin brother watching their attempts. Quetzalcoatl was an ominous, brooding presence, pacing around the sphere with the wicked-looking pike held at the ready. Seth couldn't get the image out of his head of making it halfway to safety only to lose his concentration and ending up spitted on that terrible weapon.

  The Holy Immortals made it look easy. Seth enviously watched them rise sedately into the air�
��eyes closed and arms folded across their chests. Some of them slid in opposite directions, following their own uniquely twisted routes through time. They disappeared into or appeared out of the sphere without fuss, as though it was as insubstantial as a cloud.

  The three remaining kaia refused to fly until Seth did. Agatha insisted on going last. Xol said nothing. Ellis and Synett nervously eyed the gap.

  “El Cid?” said Seth. “Do you want to go next?”

  Her veiled face inclined slightly towards the brooding figure of Quetzalcoatl.

  “I don't trust him,” she said.

  Seth knew what she meant. Quetzalcoatl had called her Moyo, the name of the woman Xol had loved enough to betray his brother. That fact carried with it so many implications it was hard to think beyond them.

  “Damn you all,” said Synett. The bald man smoothed out his white clothes with bandaged hands, leaving smears of blood in their wake. “I'll go.”

  He adopted a poised stance, his head tilted up at the sphere. Grunting, he took four bounding steps, then launched himself upwards. With as little grace as a beginner at the high jump, he flailed and tumbled in a wide arc around the sphere. His trajectory was wide. With a despairing cry he disappeared behind the sphere, grabbing futilely at it. Quetzalcoatl tensed, ready to spear the helpless man out of the sky if he fell.

  When he swung back around into view, Synett had managed to level himself out and begin spiralling slowly into the sphere. As soon as his grasping fingers touched its surface, he slowed and hauled himself inside, visibly relieved.

  “If he can do it,” said Seth, “anyone can.”

  “That's a perfectly good theory,” Ellis said. “Why aren't I convinced?”

  “I'll go with you,” he said. “If we join forces—”

  “No,” said the ghost, the flat negative ending the suggestion before he had completely expressed it.

  “Thanks anyway, Seth,” Ellis said. “At least I won't take you down with me if I fall.”

  “You won't fall.”