Page 40 of Katabasis
“I know.” She leaned back against the concrete wall, letting the rain wash over her face. Lembas Bread was disgusting the second time around. She felt like she’d swallowed a handful of wood dust. It sat in her throat like acrid, concrete sludge, and no amount of swallowing could resolve the lump.
Archimedes twirled figure eights around her legs, which was just then the most comforting feeling in the world. She bent down and scratched him behind the ears. She wished she could lie down quietly and dissolve in the storm.
Peter did not ask what had happened, which was a mercy. “Let’s just walk around, like you said.”
“Yes, okay.”
“I think it’ll pass soon, anyways.” Peter squinted against the storm. “We’ve just got to get out of the range of the building. Do you think you can make it?”
Alice was already striding on.
The storm felt a mercy this time. It all felt cleansing, the screaming winds, the sheets of rain, and even if it couldn’t wash out her memory, then it could for the moment drown it out, overwhelm her senses so she could think of nothing but struggling forward. And because they walked with heads bent, eyes squeezed shut against the rain, they did not see the pack until it was far too close.
Movement across the dunes; a rippling sheen of white. A moment longer, and the white disambiguated into all different shapes. A whole pack of bone-things, nearly a dozen.
Peter saw it too. “Oh, Christ.”
Archimedes leapt out of Peter’s arms and took off at a full sprint for the dunes. This seemed a decent idea, so Alice turned round toward Desire. If they could just get inside, they might bolt the doors shut, or lean against them—but they’d already come so far. The bone-things moved horrifically fast. In seconds they’d halved the distance between them. They were about a hundred meters away now.
“The water,” Peter shouted. “Get to—”
Alice followed him, rifling frantically through her rucksack as they ran. She felt she had to dosomething, that she could not just stand there while their doom impended. She pushed past piles of chalk—useless—her blanket—useless—iodine, books, all useless. All she had was her hunting knives.
“Do you even know how to use those?” Peter asked.
“No.” Alice handed him the longer one, hilt-first. She’d bought them last-minute at the charity shop; she’d only unsheathed them once. “Would you like to figure it out?”
He hefted it in his hands, frowned, and held the blade awkwardly before him in a way that did not inspire confidence.
The bone-things halted in a line. They seemed much less afraid of the Lethe than their predecessors, for they had come right up to the shore, sandwiching Alice and Peter between them and the waters. They were of a greater variety this time—some as tiny as kittens, a few the size of wolves, and their skulls cobbled from every kind of animal. A few tilted their heads in a way that could have been cute; if only there were more than nothing in their eye sockets, if only their limbs were not magically enhanced with claws and fangs from other species stitched into every joint.
Alice crouched, since she’d read once in a martial arts novel that this helped in a fight. Bend your knees, lower your center of gravity, that sort of thing. She felt stupid.
“Hold on,” said Peter. “We might still—he might want to talk.”
Indeed the creatures had not moved. Their neck joints kept clicking as their gaze roved over Peter and Alice, as if processing every detail about them. Alice wondered where their creator was now. Whether he was waiting beyond for their dispatch, or controlling these things through some magical connection, seeing through their empty sockets.
“Hello,” Alice called tentatively. “Do—do you understand what we’re saying?”
The bone-things made no indication that they did.
“We’re just passing through,” said Peter. “We’re—we’re alive, as you can see. But we don’t mean you any harm.”
The bone-things crouched, preparing to pounce.
“Maybe we can talk,” Peter said. “See if we might help each other.”
Alice said, “We’re magicians too.”
The creatures sprang forth.
Alice slashed about, but it was hard to get purchase with her blade when the things came from so many angles. Blindly she waved the knife, and it seemed a good thing that metal clanged against bone—she thought maybe she was succeeding in fending them off. But there were so many of them, she didn’t know where to look, could only try to keep them from her neck, her face, her chest. Something landed on her shoulder. Pain exploded, white-hot, blinding. Alice cried out and slashed wildly at the bone-thing. Her blade hit something by sheer luck—something critical, even, because the bone-thing flopped through the air and landed beside the water.
“Get the spines.” Peter was hacking at two creatures clinging to his legs. A pile of bones lay at his feet. “Weak spots, try—”
Alice adjusted her grip on her knife and took a breath, bracing herself for the next flurry. But she noticed something then. The creature she’d flung away was not getting up. Instead it lay belly-up by the water, tail flailing, back legs skittering like some horrible overgrown cockroach.
She had a wild idea then.
