She tilted her face back to look directly upwards. The veil covering her features made her look blind, but he knew she could see perfectly well through it. One hand reached up above her head and clenched on nothing. She bent her arm as though pulling herself upwards—and she did rise up off the ground. She hung in thin air with her fist at chest-level as her other hand then came up to grab at air a bit higher than the first. So she repeated the process, hand-over-hand, rising steadily into the air.
Seth watched her go, unwilling even to breathe lest he disturb her concentration. She ascended smoothly, a black silhouette standing out against the cool pearly ambience of the sphere. By ignoring the illusion of up-down, Seth was able to pretend that she was freestyling in slow motion to Sheol. He wished he'd paid more attention in swimming classes.
“Now you, Seth,” said Agatha when Ellis had climbed safely inside the sphere. “No arguments.”
“I'm not arguing,” he said, taking a deep, imaginary breath. “I just don't know if I can do it.”
She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. It was the first time she had touched him, except to point him in the right direction or to hurry him along.
“I know you can, Seth.”
“I'm glad one of us is so confident.”
“It's not a matter of being confident,” she said, “but of doing what has to be done—the way it has to be done, no matter what the cost might be.”
He thought of her stoically leaping out of the Goad into thin air, bowing before Tatenen even when he sneered at her, and arguing with Nehelennia despite risking the disapproval of her kin. He remembered her saying that love sometimes meant standing apart from the thing you wanted to protect in order to save it. He noted the fuzziness still evident around her edges, even though he had seen her taking time out to pray on the skyship.
He realised only then something he should have noticed much earlier.
“It's rejected you,” he said, a great sadness rising up in him. “The realm doesn't want anything to do with you, because of me.”
“It's not that simple, Seth.”
“But it is! You're breaking the rules by helping me, and now you're paying for it.”
“I am not breaking the rules,” she retorted. “Quite the opposite. We are going about this exactly the way we have to. If this is what it takes to ensure the survival of the realm, then I will do it happily, to the very end.”
Seth shook his head. “But what is the end, Agatha? Will you burn yourself out? Will you just fade away? How long can you survive like this without the realm to keep you going?”
“That is irrelevant. I only need to survive long enough to see our mission through. Beyond that point, I cannot predict what will be needed of me.”
“Is there anything I can do? Can I give you any of my strength?”
She shook her head. “I am a creature of the Second Realm. There is nothing you can give me that I need—except a successful flight.”
Compassion for the woman's plight filled him. She couldn't defend the realm by breaking its rules. That would defeat the purpose. He took her shoulder and held it, just as she was holding his.
“Will you watch my back?” he asked her.
“That won't be necessary.” She smiled. “But I will. I promise.”
He nodded in gratitude and stepped back.
“All right.” Like the others, he looked up at the sphere, mentally preparing himself to cross the distance. It wasn't that far, really. He could walk it in seconds. The only thing stopping him from doing so was the belief that he couldn't.
Agatha and the others tightened in around him. If Quetzalcoatl's brother made a move for Seth, it wouldn't go unchallenged.
Okay, he thought. Time to get out of here.
A short walk. That was all it was. He kicked gently upwards, and tried not to notice when his toes and the ground parted company. He wasn't flying; he was simply not falling. His gaze didn't leave the sphere for a microsecond. He pictured himself relaxing in a warm sea, drifting gently on the waves. There was no reason to do anything other than float. He was weightless, unfettered—and it was only another illusion that the sphere was getting closer, as though he was rising up to meet it. If he allowed himself to notice any progress at all, it was out of the corner of his eye. All thoughts of Quetzalcoatl were completely verboten…
At approximately halfway, a wave of giddiness swept through him. He did his best to ignore it, but it came again, accompanied this time by a feeling of intense cold. He gasped, feeling as though something had reached into him and pulled him inside out. He wobbled in midair, and slipped back a metre. With a furious effort, he managed to halt the fall, clinging to the air itself. The effort made his head spin. He could feel gravity reclaiming him, no matter how hard he tried to hang onto the fragile mental state required to keep going.
Whatever was happening to him, it couldn't have happened at a worse time. Was he under attack? He considered the possibility for a feverish instant. Many hostile minds were focussed on Sheol at that very moment. At least one was hot on his heels. All it would take was a nudge at the wrong moment and he could fall. If Quetzalcoatl struck the blow that killed him, it might even seem like an accident. Reprisals would be minimised. And he would be dead, again.
He fought the disorientation, striving for the sphere with renewed determination. He refused to fall. Imitating Ellis, he reached out a hand to symbolically draw the sphere closer. If he squinted, it looked like a shiny Christmas bauble hanging just out of his reach. All he had to do was strain ever so slightly and it would be in his grasp.
With a faint tinkling sound, his right hand began to dissolve from the fingernails down. His fingers foreshortened like sugar cubes in hot water. He screamed at the pain and violation as his substance was forcibly ripped from him. The tide of dissolution passed his knuckles and started eating into his palm. All too quickly, it reached his wrist and started working its way up his arm. At the rate it was moving, it would soon reach his elbow, his shoulder, his head.
He fell. Not until something hard struck him from below did he realise that his efforts at flying had been completely forgotten. The sphere had dropped well out of his reach. He struggled belatedly to correct the mistake. Something—someone—was pushing him up from below, and as the terrible tide slowed and halted up his arm, he tried to ignore the pain and restore the altitude he had lost.
A long, glassy shape flashed in front of his eyes: Quetzalcoatl's pike had struck. Part of his support fell away with a sigh. He dared to look down, at the two kaia bearing him upwards. Their stony skins glowed red-hot as Quetzalcoatl raised his weapon and tried again. Seth lurched as another kaia dropped to its death. Xol lunged forwards to block the next blow, but his ghostly twin shoved him back. As the pike came up to strike a third time, Seth pushed desperately away from his one remaining escort and kicked himself up into the sky, away from Agatha, Xol, and the kaia, delivered by fear and pain where patience and surety had failed.
The pike missed. He rose precipitously, shouting wordlessly, to the sphere at the centre of Sheol, defying anything else to go wrong. The mirrored surface grew large before him. His reflected face ballooned to meet him. He covered his eyes as he crashed into it, thinking: Hadrian!
The mirror parted smoothly for him, allowing him into its heart. He tumbled awkwardly, betrayed by his missing right hand.
Hadrian had done this to him. Not an enemy or someone trying to stop Yod's plan. His own brother.
Hands steadied him, helped him to stand. The sole remaining kaia followed him into Sheol, unharmed.
Hadrian had almost killed him. Why?
“Do you enjoy making us worry like that?” asked Ellis, standing in front of him to inspect his wounded arm.
“Son of a bitch!”
The curse was directed less at Hadrian than at what Seth saw where his hand had once been: instead of a stump, there was only empty space.
He held his arm up to see it from another angle, horror making him
doubt what he initially perceived. The side facing him looked perfectly normal, as solid as ever. When he turned it that side appeared as normal, too. When he tilted it to look down upon the stump, he could see the truth. The side facing him, the side he could see, was the only part of his arm that existed. The rest was just air.
He looked up at Ellis and saw the lack of surprise in her eyes. There was only concern. He had lost his hand; that was all. The rest had always been there. Or not been there, as the case might be.
He was a shell, a paper-thin impersonation designed to fool him and him alone. The more you try to hide your true shape, Barbelo had said, the more it erupts from within you.
“No,” he said. “No!”
“Yes,” said Synett, holding out bandaged hands as though in supplication. “Welcome to your stigmata.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“Would you have wanted to hear it?” Ellis said, her face utterly obscured by the black folds of her veil.
“People rarely do,” said a woman's voice, measured and dignified. “You have climbed great heights, Seth Castillo, and plumbed great depths. You have found your stigmata, as we all must. You will learn to live with it.”
“Or not,” added a second woman, her voice as light and amused as the other's was formal. “Let's keep the boy's options open, sister dear.”
“Of course. After all, that's what this is all about.”
Two blurry shapes appeared. He blinked and they came into focus. They were perfectly ordinary-looking middle-aged women, one tall and broad-shouldered, the other slight and birdlike. The tall one had long white hair plaited and coiled into buns. The other had a nimbus of grey hair shot through with black that stuck out from her scalp like a halo. Their skin was lined but otherwise unblemished. Dressed in simple, dark-blue robes that left their arms free, unadorned by jewellery and possessing eyes of a deep, potent green, they managed to look simultaneously ordinary and utterly unique.
He knew who they were before they told him. That knowledge managed to push what had happened to him out of his mind, just for a moment.
“We are the Semnai Theai, the Sisters of the Flame,” said the tall one. Although her mouth was hard, almost stern, her lips curved into a welcoming smile. “I am Meg. This is Ana.”
“Your arrival is opportune,” said her smaller companion.
“Come,” said Meg, “it's time to see what you're here for.”
She took his one remaining, hollow, hand and helped him to his feet. He moved as though hypnotised, conscious of everyone's eyes on him.
He was just a shell. Hadrian had almost killed him.
The Sisters took him from where he had fallen, and brought him face to face, at last, with the Flame.
Hadrian steeled himself to explore outside the hut.
He had combed its interior from top to bottom in less than five minutes. It was perhaps twenty years old: nothing compared to the age of the stone on which it sat, but long enough to have drawn the local ambience into every pore and rust-pocked crack. The air within stank of sodden wood, mildew, and rust. He flicked through the notebooks lying on the bench and found pages of notes in French and the occasional hand-drawn sketch. Under the bed was a long wooden crate containing an empty Coke bottle, a single climber's boot, and a pencil. There were no cobwebs.
The wind had died down a little, but the occasional quake still made the ground rock beneath him. He explored the immediate area with exaggerated care, conscious that a slip could send him plummeting to his death, then ventured further afield. He thought warm thoughts as he climbed from rock to rock, marvelling at the angular slabs protruding like crooked teeth from the mountain. The hut was very close to the summit. He reached it in less than half an hour, and was surprised at how flat it was. There were no markers or cairns. There was just bare black rock, and an endless landscape of similar mountains stretching to the horizon.
He felt as though he was standing on the surface of an alien planet. He thought of the endless city, and registered that here, too, there was no sign of life and little colour. It would be gloomy in the depths of the valleys, just as it had been at street level. He still felt as though he was being watched, although the hut was well out of sight. If Pukje had followed him, the imp was nowhere to be seen.
A full moon rose, painting the mountains silver.
He momentarily lost his grip on the warm thoughts he had been maintaining, and cold flooded through him. The picture he had drawn in pencil on his sweatshirt—of a six-rayed star with a circle around it—was rubbing away. His grasp of the Change was sketchy, and he didn't have time to refine it. He would be a blunt instrument at best. He could only hope that would be enough.
He squatted down on the summit of the mountain, and removed from his pocket the things he had collected: the Coke bottle; a rusted nail pried from the wall of the hut; a page from one of the notebooks on which someone had drawn a graph; a fragment of shale; the pencil. He put them on the ground before him and contemplated the order in which they should be assembled. He could feel himself as part of the equation, crouched at the intersection of the mountain's sides. All its angles and planes terminated precisely at the point he occupied.
He put the nail in the bottle, point downwards, and balanced the bottle on the shale. A taste rose up in the back of his throat: bitter like bile, but also sweet and faintly oily. The taste had been there when he had helped Kybele repel Lascowicz, and again when he had killed the draci. It was the flavour of magic, the taste of the Change. He repressed the urge to spit, then gave into it, adding it to the list of ingredients he had available to him.
He dipped one finger in the spittle and smeared it into a somewhat irregular circle around the patch of rock on which he squatted. When the circle was complete, he felt as though the world's contrast had turned down a notch. The blacks were less black, the whites less white. The sky was grey from horizon to horizon, with faint stars painted on as though an afterthought.
Within the circle, he could feel another world bubbling up from underneath. No, he corrected himself; not underneath at all. From within. The Second Realm wasn't a literal underworld, buried beneath rock in hellish magma. It wasn't above, either, in the clouds or in space. It wasn't anywhere physical. The Second Realm existed in every part of the First Realm, like a parallel universe—under every stone, behind every molecule, at the heart of every atom. It had no dimensions, no physicality; it was smaller than a point, a singularity; yet it contained all the complexity of an entire universe, wrapped up in a knot no human could ever untie.
He could feel that knot loosening. He could feel the singularity swelling up like a balloon, threatening to burst. He could feel the Second Realm colliding with the First Realm as, far away, all over the city, the eyes of the Kerubim were opening.
Yod was coming.
If the realms did become one, it would be like every cell bursting at once in a human body. It would be like every star in the sky going nova. It would be like every drop of water in the ocean flashing into steam, and he would be at the heart of it, this wondrous and terrible Cataclysm. He and his brother.
Riding that connection between the twins like some hideous tightrope walker was Yod, the creature from beyond the realms who would make his world its personal food trough. He felt its hunger like a physical thing, gnawing at his belly. He rocked back and forth, humming inaudibly under his breath. This glimpse of Yod was dangerous; he knew that much. Its mind was too big for him to encompass its entirety; if he tried, he might explode.
He concentrated on geometry instead, tearing the piece of paper into a series of rough triangles and placing them so they pointed at the summits of the nearby mountains. He was at the centre of a giant web, at the focus of the lens of the world. He wondered if humans had been able to access this sort of intuition and power in the past—and what would happen if that ability returned. Would humans join together against Yod and drive it back, or would it usher in an era of arcane mass warfare far more dangerous than
anything he had ever read about in history?
He imagined the First World War but with armies of Bes and Feie wielding weapons like Utu, and worse. He pictured Mot and Baal and other wannabe-gods making a battleground of all the Earth, not just the megacity.
He shuddered. The potential for Yod blared out of the mountains like a thousand dissonant trumpet calls. Its presence unsettled the bedrock, made it shake and flex like a squirming cat. On geological scales, the movement Hadrian felt beneath his soles was the equivalent of mass panic.
He picked up the pencil and wondered why he had felt compelled to bring it with him.
“You have come a long way,” said a familiar, faintly accented voice. “I am not easily impressed.”
Hadrian looked up from his work. Lascowicz's solid frame stood silhouetted against the grey sky, the ghostly wolf-form of Upuaut hugging his body like a shroud.
“How did you get here?”
“We came the same way you did. It simply took us a little longer.”
Nine black shapes rose up around him in a wide circle: elongated twisted forms that might once have looked like women but were now monsters. Their hands and feet tapered to points; their faces were all sharp teeth and hard eyes. Two of them wore helmets made from yellowing human craniums. They moved sinuously, in a weirdly syncopated synchrony, like midnight candle flames. Theirs was a dance barely held in check—a dance of death and destruction.
He understood that they had come through the door in the hut. He could feel it hanging open below, now he knew to look. The passage was an open wound in the fabric of the world. Hadrian only hoped Pukje had heard them coming in time to hide.
He felt surprisingly little fear now that the worst was upon him.
“If you're here to kill me—”
“There is no ‘if.’”
Lascowicz gestured and the Swarm rushed him. He reacted instinctively, ducking down to create a smaller target. His left hand pressed flat against the stone of the mountain. His right hand thrust upwards with the pencil held crosswise. He rotated that wrist as though turning a handle.
The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One Page 41
