Page 82 of Katabasis
“That still doesn’t solve the problem of how we’ll get back.”
“But then at least we’ll have the three of us, won’t we?” Alice forced her voice to brighten. “I’m sure he’ll be able to think of something, he’s probably got all sorts of tricks we don’t know about—”
Something shifted in Peter’s face, but it passed just as soon as she noticed.
“Fine.” His voice was carefully level. “I’ll carry the pack.”
Her fingers closed reflexively around her straps. “It’s my pack.”
“I mean only that it’s heavy,” said Peter. “We can take turns.”
She hesitated, and then shrugged it off and handed it over. Peter strapped it on, stretched his arms out, and without another word began to plod forward.
Alice could just make out a path through the bog ahead; a winding line thin as a pencil tracing. It trickled up through a dip between the distant peaks, beyond which all she could see was thunder.
Four courts left. Violence, Cruelty, Tyranny, and the last—the nameless, final court. Orpheus would not speak of it at all. The Buddhist accounts referred to it only as the final Hell, the dwelling place of nameless evil. Dante claimed it was heresy, but like so much of Dante, this seemed like Christian dogma getting in the way.
Alice hoped they did not get that far. Cruelty had to be the end of it. Tyranny, at the worst. Professor Grimes’s sins were many, yes. She was not in denial about that. But Alice could only understand him as tragically flawed, a man who made mistakes on his journey to greatness. Never malicious. Only careless. Only a man whose mind was larger than the rest, a genius burdened with purpose, who couldn’t spare attention for the damage he left in his wake.
They settled into a miserable rhythmplodding through the valley; Alice leading, Peter following, stepping gingerly across the tenuous, snaking strip of solid ground. The bog bubbled and boiled about them. Every now and then Alice could see through the translucence to a horrid tangle of Shades beneath, clawing and climbing over one another like crabs in a barrel. But so long as they kept to their path and did not disturb the water, the dead did not disturb them.
Soon they passed into Violence, a barren desert punctuated by rocks. The bog dried up, and the rocky ground smoothed into sliding silt. The mountains grew smaller and smaller in the distance as they walked, and by sunset all they could see for miles around them was flat ground. Every now and then something howled in the distance. Alice and Peter did not care to investigate.
Night fell. They did not stop; only switched on their torches and kept plodding along. Dimly Alice registered that her legs were aching, her neck and shoulders throbbing. She forged on. She was glad she at least had practice in ignoring her body’s protests. Night after night in that office she had ignored her own need to eat, sleep, or sit down. She was just a mind, floating in the dark, soaring over the terrain. As long as she convinced herself this was true, she could almost forget her body existed at all.
“Alice.” Peter stopped walking. He pointed his torch straight in front of him. “Look.”
Alice drew up beside him. “What?”
“Those boulders,” said Peter. “They’re arranged in the same configuration as the ones we’ve just passed.”
Alice waved her torchlight between the boulders. A short, round ball and a long, rectangular slab. Had she seen them before? She hadn’t noticed; all she had been looking at for the past mile was the ground before her feet.
“Probably there’s lots of rocks in Hell,” said Alice. “Probably there’s lots in this shape.”
They kept walking. Five minutes later they arrived at the same boulders. The little man and the tall man. She couldn’t fail to notice them this time. They matched precisely her memory—the cracks atop the sphere, the long groove along the slab.
“We’re going in a circle,” said Peter.
“But we can’t be.” Alice felt a tingle of dread. “Wrath is behind us, the sun was before us, the river on the left, I don’t understand...”
Peter dug into his pocket and pulled out a soggy lump of Lembas Bread. This he crumbled in his palm and scattered at the base of the boulders. With the remaining crumbs he left a little trail out from the base.
“There,” he said. “That will settle it.”
They trudged on. In five minutes they came back upon the boulders and the crumbs.
Peter touched a hand to his temple. “I feel—I don’t feel right.”
Alice felt it too; a faint roil in her gut, a dizzying lightness in her head. At each individual moment her bearings seemed to make absolute sense, with a clear path forward, but every time she took a step it all changed.
“Look,” Peter said. “Do you see that line, there?”
He slung off the rucksack, knelt, and crawled forward on his hands and knees, feeling around in the sand. Alice had to squint a moment before she saw it too—a curved, slightly raised line in the sand, forming a barrier around the boulders. She followed the arc of the curve in a great loop behind them, encompassing the ground from which they’d come.
A perfect circle, she bet. All magicians could draw a perfect circle.
“Mother of God.” Peter spread his hands around in the dirt. “It’s an Escher—”
