Page 66 of Katabasis
She therefore accepted a smoking rat leg, if only to be polite. But then her stomach took over and she dispensed with the silverware entirely, ramming the corpse against her mouth so her teeth could get in between the bones.
“There you are.” Elspeth helped more onto Alice’s plate. “Don’t forget to hydrate. Isn’t that better?”
Alice was doingmuchbetter. A fog was clearing from her head. It was the first home-cooked meal she’d had in ages—at the department, it was all Lembas Bread and cold tea—and she ate with such enthusiasm that soon all that was left was a neat pile of bones sucked clean.
She set her plate down. A wet burp escaped her mouth. “Sorry.”
“Excuse yourself.” Elspeth looked very pleased. “I’m glad you liked it.”
“So, Elspeth.” Peter set his fork down. He had not looked once at Alice since Elspeth’s return; now he spoke as if she were not there. “I’ve been wondering. How are you and the Kripkes using magick?”
“How do you mean?”
“We thought—perhaps it doesn’t work down here. The sand eats it up.”
“Oh.” Elspeth laughed. “You haven’t figured that out?”
She drew out a knife from her belt. Alice and Peter both instinctively shrank back, but Elspeth held the point to her own wrist and pressed. What bubbled out was not blood, precisely, but a thick, black-blue sludge.
Elspeth extended her other hand. “Chalk?”
Peter fished about in his pocket and handed her a stick.
“Anything you need patched up?”
“Cuts and bruises,” said Peter.
“Of course. Will Curry’s Paradox do?”
“Probably, yeah.”
They both watched in awed silence as Elspeth dipped the chalk in her not-blood like it was an inkwell and drew a perfect circle on the deck around her ankles. The pentagram was not a pristine white but a phosphorescent green that cast a pallid light around her ankles. But it did not sink away.
Curry’s Paradox. Commonly taught in Introduction to Analytic Magick classes, this was a silly play on conditional statements and self-reference that could, just for an instant, make true any arbitrary claim. Consider:If this statement is true, then pigs can fly. Call this statement S. Statement S has the structure “If S, then P.” If you write it out as a logic proof, you will discover you do end up proving S true, for you do end up writing “If S, then P.” So the statement S is true, and pigs can fly. The statement is S true, and Peter has no wound.
“There you go,” said Elspeth.
Peter withdrew his arm, running fingers over soothed skin. “Thanks.”
“I figured that out long ago,” said Elspeth. “It’s the only thing that makes the chalk take effect—some kind of life force. It congeals with the living-dead force of the chalk. Adds some sort of... insulation, I suppose, against the silt. Though it doesn’t work so well with my blood. Whatever this is”—she patted her pale, not-bleeding arm—“seems a pale approximation of the real thing. It’s vital force that’s the key, it seems. Not much force one can draw from a Shade. But your blood... it’s warm, it’s bursting.”
She blinked at the knife, then blinked at Peter and Alice with an uncomfortably hungry look. Alice slid her sleeve over her wrist.
“Just a little dip, then?” Peter asked. “That’s all you need?”
“The more, the better. The effect seems proportional to—well, the sacrifice.” Elspeth blinked again, then set the knife down. “Curry is easy. Doesn’t take much.”
“How much would a harder spell take?”
“Depends on your blood,” said Elspeth. “With Shade’s blood, quite a lot. Living blood, I don’t know.”
“Should we try it?”
“Do Banach-Tarski.” Alice spoke up. “Do Banach-Tarski on your flask.”
The Banach-Tarski Paradox proved you could cut apart a ball into a finite number of subsets of points and reassemble them into two balls equal in volume to the first. Alice could not perform it herself; she understood only that it involved heavy maths, and had something to do with set theory and little infinities. But she knew Peter knew it, and that was good enough.
The thought had been lurking at the back of her mind. She needed a working flask. Hers was soiled. Peter’s was fine. Alone she would quickly die of thirst, but with a copied flask she would be all right, independent—free to go her own way.
