The Crooked Letter (11 page)

He skidded, tumbled, tripped, tumbled again. Yelling, he pulled himself into a ball, wondering where all his extra speed had come from. He bounded off a stub of a wall into a crumbling pillar, then finally rolled to a halt along a flat stretch that might once have been a thoroughfare. Dust rose up in wing-shaped sprays along his path and vanished into the sky.

Wincing, he rose painfully to his feet and looked about him. Screeching sounds and other alien calls came closer by the second. There was no time to bemoan his lot; he had to get moving again. Fighting the urge to kick off too hard, he headed along the thoroughfare for a larger structure in the same direction as the towers.

The growling and snarling drew closer. Low shapes swarmed around the landing spot Seth had recently vacated. White-grey spines swayed and clashed from the backs of slug-like creatures as they sniffed at the roof and hunted his spoor.

Something howled off to his right. Flickering firelight threw a nest of snakes into sharp relief.

Sinuous silhouettes writhed and danced. An answering scrape of metal blades came from his left, and Seth pushed harder, taking longer, loping strides towards what he had at first assumed to be a building but was in fact a thick ramparted barrier that looked like something from the Middle Ages. Its summit was uninhabited. His best hope was to get onto it or over it and put the mob behind him.

The howls and shrieks grew louder. He sensed the lust of the creatures as clearly as he heard their cries. The words they bellowed eluded him, but their meanings were absolutely clear. The cries became keener as pursuit drew closer and he became too afraid to look behind for fear of what he might see.

‘Catch it!’ they said.

‘Run it down!’

‘Eat it!’

The great wall rose higher over him. Seth leaned backwards to judge the leap. In his haste, he misstepped and flew headlong into the wall. He ricocheted into the grasp of one of the scissor creatures. It hissed in surprise and brought its blades around to slice him to pieces. Seth punched against the creature’s chin with his good hand. The recoil forced him flat against the roof while the creature flew out into the void. Silver blades missed his upraised arm by bare millimetres as it shot away from him.

He didn’t waste time congratulating himself. He rolled and leapt for the top of the wall. Halfway there, something cold and flexible wrapped around his ankle. It gripped him tight, but his momentum was great enough to pull it after him, off the roof. He kicked and twisted as they rose into the air.

More cold tentacles joined the first and began climbing up his legs. Seth looked down into a swirling mass of translucent cilia.

‘Get off me!’ He tore off his sweatshirt and flailed at the cilia as best he could. The creature grabbed it and wrenched it from his grasp. It disappeared with a sucking sound.

Giving up on attack, he concentrated on reaching for the top of the wall. Unless he found a way to push himself higher, he was going to miss it by about half a metre.

A dark shape, barely visible against the void, leaned over the edge. Seth had time to register broad, flat features with gold eyes and what looked like swept-back feathers radiating in bold lines from its face. A thickset arm thrust towards him.

‘Your hand — give it to me! Quickly!’

The voice was sibilant and urgent. Seth obeyed automatically. Strong fingers gripped his, and he felt himself hauled into the air. The creature squirming up his leg came along for the ride, dragged awkwardly behind him as his rescuer heaved him across the lip of the wall. There was a sound like a cough, followed by a flash of glassy light and a thin scream. The weight fell away. Seth collapsed on top of the wall in a cloud of settling smoke. The howls of his pursuers took on a frustrated pitch.

‘Thank you.’ Seth gaped up in amazement at his rescuer. Two enormously thick legs spread at an ungainly angle supported a barrel trunk and equally strong arms. A spray of blade-like protuberances — which Seth had initially mistaken for feathers — radiated from behind the creature’s head and spread in a crest down its back. They shook as the creature leaned over the edge of the wall and hissed a warning at the other monsters below. Seth glimpsed a forward-thrust face and wickedly curved canines, like those of a cobra.

‘We don’t have long,’ said the creature. ‘They’ll be up here in a moment, and more besides. Word is spreading of the chase you’ve given them.’ The snakelike head twisted to look over the other side of the wall. One thick hand reached down for him again.

Seth didn’t want to tarnish his gratitude with second thoughts, but looking up at the being that had rescued him did give him cause to reconsider. Just for a moment.

Then Seth took the offered hand and was hauled to his feet.

‘This way.’

Only as Seth automatically went to follow did he realise what he had just done. The creature had taken his hand — his left hand, the hand that had been severed by the monster with the scissors.

He stopped and stared dumbly at it, seeing by the distant firelight that it looked exactly as always. Had he imagined its severance? Had it grown back without him noticing?

Both possibilities seemed beyond reason. Everything seemed beyond reason.

‘Where am I?’ he asked, his body dead wood, unable to accept the need to run now that the immediate urgency had passed. His mind was beginning to catch up. ‘What’s happening to me?’

‘This is the underworld,’ said the creature, thrusting its face into his. The yellow eyes were metallic and cold. Flat, brassy scales gleamed on taut skin. ‘You will find no welcome here.’

‘But you —’ Seth stared into the inhuman face. ‘You helped me.’

‘Yes. I was human once, and am now of the dimane.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You will have to. And you will have to trust me a moment longer, at least until we are out of immediate danger.’ The creature took him by the shoulder and shoved him, forcing him to run. The creature’s long, loping strides were perfectly accustomed to the low, inverted gravity. Seth had to concentrate to stay ahead. The impression of being upside-down and the surrealism of the view didn’t make it any easier. From the vantage point of the wall, he could see dozens of fiercely-shaped creatures still striving to catch him, leaping and scrabbling at the wall. Some worked together to scale the height, but competition from below always brought them down. In the distance, the lights atop the three needle-towers flashed in furious asynchrony.

Seth felt the cool breath of the creature at his back. His thoughts were a tangle of frank disbelief and utter confusion.

‘My brother — he’s here too, I think. What if those things catch him? What will they do to him? What would they have done to me if you hadn’t saved me?’

‘Your brother is not here,’ came the blunt reply.

‘You know for sure?’ The Swede and the knife were as vivid in his mind as the massive creature at his back. ‘How can you know that?’

‘I feel it in the realm: under my feet, in my head, all around me. Your twin brother lives.’

Seth had barely enough time to think — or duck — as, with a rattle of bones, a creature sporting scythelike hands and a nose as long as a railway spike scrambled over the wall nearby. Something liquid and red detached itself from Seth’s guide and shot with startling acceleration into the face of their attacker. It reared back with a howl, clutching its eyes. Seeing an opening, Seth swept its legs out from under it with a clumsy kick. Seth’s rescuer crushed its skull against the edge of the wall and tipped the body over the edge for good measure.

‘Quickly! There are more coming!’

They hurried to a junction, where the wall they had been following joined another that looped and curved off to Seth’s right. A tapered turret stood there, and his rescuer brought Seth to a halt within its circular walls, safe for the moment from the baying mob. The wide face confronted him unblinkingly. Two large hands gripped him.

Seth gaped up at the alien face. ‘How?’ he asked. ‘How did you know Hadrian was my twin?’

‘Your brother lives,’ the creature repeated slowly, explaining something very important and refusing to be tangled in details. ‘You, however, are dead. Can you accept this?’

Seth nodded, although the insanity of the conversation wasn’t lost on him. His mind was filled with monsters, impossible landscapes, riddles ... Was he in hell, or dreaming some increasingly elaborate fantasy? The latter seemed most likely, yet he simply couldn’t have survived that knife-blow to the chest, not even if a paramedic team had been standing right next to him, ready to begin emergency treatment. And if he was dead and still thinking, then that meant that there had to be something after life, be it hell or whatever.

Life after the body stopped working? He wasn’t so immersed in his agnosticism that he would defend it against all the evidence available to him. While his thoughts continued, he would fight to preserve them by whatever means available.

I’m the strong one,
he told himself.
I
can do whatever I set my mind to.

‘My name is Xol,’ said the creature. ‘I will explain as best as I am able to. For now, Seth, we must move. Please, trust me.’

Seth let himself be manhandled out of the turret and back onto the wall. His legs moved numbly, as though at a great distance from his body. His left hand clenched and unclenched.
Your brother lives.
He ran with Xol and clung to those words — just as he clung to the feeling inside him that told him they were truthful.

That didn’t help ease the tearing, sickening lurch of separation, though. Not one little bit.

* * * *

The wall snaked ahead into an impenetrable distance, seeming to grow longer as they walked or ran. The creatures pursuing them weren’t deterred by the fall of two of their kind. The defeat of the skeleton-thing and others had drawn the attention of many more who joined the chase with grotesque enthusiasm. New creatures snapped from the air, whipped at them from the ground, tried to head them off or catch up with them on the wall. Every time one came too close, Xol managed to find a way to deflect them, using physical strength or something that looked very much like magic.

However Xol did it, Seth was very glad. The longer he survived the more his senses acclimatised to the strange and threatening world around him. The wall they followed was just one of many covering the roof on which the underworld had been built. Crossing and re-crossing, the walls divided the roof into numerous irregularly shaped and irregularly sized sections. Sometimes the intersections were adorned with parapets; others were bare. When the walls encountered a crack, Seth and Xol either pulled away or boldly leapt over it. Xol avoided particularly low sections, where the horde at their heels could reach.

How long they ran, Seth couldn’t tell. There was no way to measure time. He wondered at first if they were heading for the needle-towers, but all three of them were falling away to his right, still flashing lights at their summits.

‘Are you sure you know where you’re going?’ he asked as they took a left turn at the next junction.

‘The way through lies ahead.’ Xol’s spines were lying flat against his skull and back, and bounced as he ran.

‘The way through what to where?’

‘I can’t explain, Seth. You don’t have the knowledge.’

‘How am I going to get the knowledge if you don’t tell me?’

‘There are some things here that can’t be told. You just know. Perhaps not immediately but eventually, the same as it is in the First Realm.’

‘The what?’

‘The First Realm is the life you enjoyed before death. Dying, for humans, is simply a way of getting from one sort of life to another. You are on the boundary of the Second Realm, where your life will continue.’

‘And this sort of knowledge will just fall into my head?’ That sounded like an unlikely arrangement to him. ‘I don’t remember that ever happening to me before.’

‘Your soul has inbuilt mechanisms designed to help it survive in the Second Realm. These instincts will be stirring. Flesh-and-blood babies breathe and grip when they are born; they acquire new reflexes as their brain matures. The process is similar here.’

‘I’m a baby, then.’

‘Yes. Metaphorically speaking.’

‘What sort of reflexes do I have?’

‘Well, you can see the world around you. You can understand me. You have a keen sense of your own presence.’

Seth’s left hand unconsciously clenched. ‘What do you mean, I can understand you? Of course I can understand you. You’re speaking English as well as I do.’

‘I’m not speaking any tongue you would know, Seth.’ The great snakehead turned to glance at him. Xol’s eyes gleamed brassily. ‘And you are not speaking mine. You understand me because I wish you to, just as you cannot understand our pursuers because they do not wish you to. This process is called Hekau.’

‘Is it telepathy?’

‘No.’ The hard eyes would allow him nothing familiar. ‘It is a skill you will need to understand in order to hide yourself. As it is, you are vulnerable here. Your ignorance betrays you. Your presence resonates through the realms. Those Yod-dogs back there would hunt you from one end of the underworld to the other, given the chance. You have much to learn, and I will teach you what I can. I would prevent you from becoming like me.’

Like me ...

‘What
are
you?’ Seth asked.

‘I told you.’ The creature’s gleaming eyes reproached him. ‘I am of the dimane. We oppose the daevas — the ones who hunt you as they hunt all who are new to this realm. We are merciful where they are cruel. We are free where they are slaves. We know what it is like to be victims.’

‘You said you were human once. You didn’t look like this then, did you?’

‘Of course not. In every physical sense, I was perfectly ordinary.’ The great snakehead dipped in what might have been a humble bow. ‘My face in the Second Realm is to my previous face the way my previous face was to my skull. It’s a whole new law, and a deeper truth at the same time. I can’t explain it any better than that.’

‘There’s more,’ said Seth, wondering if he had misheard the word
demon
twice now. Was that what a ‘dimane’ was? ‘You’re not telling me everything.’