The Crooked Letter (54 page)

The imp scrambled off him and wrapped the sack around his shoulders. The narrow alien face was screwed up with displeasure.

‘And before you claim that I tricked you into coming here, think on this: unless we find a way to stop Yod, I’ll be the first to be eaten. If there’s one place on Earth I’d rather not be, it’s right here.’ Pukje snuffled and tucked himself into a small, heat-conserving ball. ‘Still, it’s better than facing the Swarm back there. Anything that delays death, even for a moment, gets my automatic approval.’

Hadrian sat on the camp bed. ‘What would happen if you died? Wouldn’t you just go to the Second Realm?’

‘No. I’m a one-off, I’m afraid. A genomoi through and through. You humans may not spend long in each realm, but your journeys between them make up for that. You’ve done things in your other lives that I can only imagine. We shouldn’t envy each other.’

‘I have past lives?’

‘Not past lives.
Other
lives. There’s an important difference.’

Hadrian couldn’t see it. ‘Why don’t I remember them?’

‘When you move a chair from one room to another, is it in both rooms at once? Of course not. Although it has undeniably been in both rooms, and is definitely the same chair, it’s only in either one room or the other. Human memory is much like that. Or so I’m given to understand.’

The mountain lurched. A dust of rotted wood driftec down from the unsteady roof. Hadrian thought of the human-made mountains of the city, its buildings, and wondered how far they were from his present location — if that was still a meaningful question. The surface of the Earth had been tied in knots and rearranged along arbitrary lines. If space in general had been tied with it, the usual means of measuring distance might no longer be relevant.

‘How long?’ he asked instead, glad there was no snow above them to form an avalanche. ‘Days? Hours?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine, I’m afraid.’

‘Do you know how to stop Yod from coming through?’

‘There’s only one definite way.’

Hadrian nodded slowly. ‘Killing me. The cold will do that soon enough.’

‘Only if you let it.’ The imp looked sharply at him from the depths of his canvas cowl. ‘There might be other, less drastic, ways of getting you to the Second Realm.’

‘Like what?’

‘Again, that’s something I can’t tell you. We’re on the edge of my knowledge, Hadrian. I’ve been around a while and seen a lot, but there has never been a time like this. Cataclysms normally happen by accident, not design. Who knows what safeguards Yod has in place?’ Pukje snorted. ‘On the other hand, Yod could be winging it too. For all its size and power, it’s just another creature like you and me. There are limits to its knowledge. It can’t possibly have considered every angle, every contingency.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Hadrian.

‘You have to do better than hope, my boy.’

And that was the nub of it, Hadrian concluded. He had to do something, and fast, otherwise Yod would burst into the First Realm and clinch its domination of humanity.

‘Let me think,’ he said, rubbing absently at his chest where the scar was slowly closing over the bone of his brother. ‘It’s all about geometry, right?’

‘All,’ said the imp, curling up under the canvas and closing his eyes.

He nodded. In the angular landscape of the mountains, there was no shortage of that.

* * * *

Flying unassisted wasn’t as impossible as Seth had imagined it might be. It was, like everything else in the Second Realm, a matter of will — and of balancing and fine-tuning. The illusion of gravity had to be subverted, and that was a very hard habit to overcome.

Next, the apparently weightless body had to be moved. This process too had its unexpected quirks. He couldn’t just flap his arms and rely on friction with the air — because there was no air. Even if he had proper lifting surfaces and everything else required for flight in the First Realm, it would only work if he was convinced he was flying. It wouldn’t
actually
make it any easier.

Under perfect conditions he imagined that adopting a meditative pose and concentrating hard on the task would be enough to achieve it — like walking a plank, which was easy if the plank was suspended only a metre off the ground. If the plank was higher — at the top of a ten-storey building, with nothing but empty air below — the task became very nearly impossible.

So it was with the ghost of Xol’s twin brother watching their attempts. Quetzalcoatl was an ominous, brooding presence, pacing around the sphere with the wicked-looking pike held at the ready. Seth couldn’t get the image out of his head of making it halfway to safety only to lose his concentration and ending up spitted on that terrible weapon.

The Holy Immortals made it look easy. Seth enviously watched them rise sedately into the air — eyes closed and arms folded across their chests. Some of them slid in opposite directions, following their own uniquely twisted routes through time. They disappeared into or appeared out of the sphere without fuss, as though it was as insubstantial as a cloud.

The three remaining kaia refused to fly until Seth did. Agatha insisted on going last. Xol said nothing. Ellis and Synett nervously eyed the gap.

‘Ellis?’ said Seth. ‘Do you want to go next?’

Her veiled face inclined slightly towards the brooding figure of Quetzalcoatl.

‘I don’t trust him,’ she said.

Seth knew what she meant. Quetzalcoatl had called her Moyo, the name of the woman Xol had loved enough to betray his brother. That fact carried with it so many implications it was hard to think beyond them.

‘Damn you all,’ said Synett. The bald man smoothed out his white clothes with bandaged hands, leaving smears of blood in their wake. ‘I’ll go.’

He adopted a poised stance, his head tilted up at the sphere. Grunting, he took four bounding steps, then launched himself upward. With as little grace as a beginner at the high jump, he flailed and tumbled in a wide arc around the sphere. His trajectory was wide. With a despairing cry he disappeared behind the sphere, grabbing futilely at it. Quetzalcoatl tensed, ready to spear the helpless man out of the sky if he fell.

When he swung back around into view, Synett had managed to level himself out and begin spiralling slowly into the sphere. As soon as his grasping fingers touched its surface, he slowed and hauled himself inside, visibly relieved.

‘If he can do it,’ said Seth, ‘anyone can.’

‘That’s a perfectly good theory,’ Ellis said. ‘Why aren’t I convinced?’

‘I’ll go with you,’ he said. ‘If we join forces —’

‘No,’ said the ghost, the flat negative ending the suggestion before he had completely expressed it.

‘Thanks anyway, Seth,’ Ellis said. ‘At least I won’t take you down with me if I fall.’

‘You won’t fall.’

She tilted her face back to look directly upward. 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 upward — 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 unless he disturbed 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 upward, 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 mid-air, 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 upward. 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 forward 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!