The Crooked Letter (53 page)

Quetzalcoatl just stared at her. As the Path threw a kaia out of its depths, he raised one hand as though to touch her — but not in anger. His expression was almost one of anguish.

‘Moyo,’ he said, ‘do you remember nothing?’

Seth’s heart tripped. Ellis went pale.

‘My name,’ she said, slowly and firmly, ‘is Ellis.’

Before Quetzalcoatl could respond, an impact rocked them. All eyes turned upward, to where something had struck the globe in which they stood. A dark shape, folding and unfolding like a stricken pterodactyl and smoking like a meteor, tumbled rapidly away from Sheol and plummeted back to the realm below.

‘You wanted this,’ said Agatha to Xol, a look of realisation growing on her face. ‘You’ve been anticipating it ever since Barbelo told us we were coming here!’

‘It is the only way,’ said the dimane. ‘I have no other hope left.’

‘No more talk,’ said Quetzalcoatl, turning away from Ellis with pain in his eyes. ‘The foundations and firmament of this world are under simultaneous attack. If you would see this done, I suggest you start soon.’

The ghost clapped his hands, and a glass pike appeared between them. It was a full metre longer than Quetzalcoatl and topped with a wicked, angular barb.

‘Fly,’ Quetzalcoatl said, his gaze fixed on his brother. ‘I dare you.’

* * * *

‘The face of the world has changed many times.

Continents move; rivers shift course; mountains

rise and fall. Humanity changes with them,

struggling or prospering as best it can. We like to

believe that we are responsible for the good times,

but in bad times the finger points elsewhere.

Reality is more complex than we would like it to

be, especially when gods walk the Earth.’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS.
EXEGESIS 6:1

n the three or four hundredth level, Hadrian stopped to sleep. He wasn’t even sure precisely which number it was. His vision was a blur of stairs, and his head spun from constantly turning right. His muscles had gone beyond pain to a deep, bone-weary ache he suspected he’d never be rid of. As unlikely as it seemed, the filthy concrete floor looked almost inviting. He was unconscious within seconds of laying his head down on the bag.

Seth came to him in his dream. Lucidly aware that he was asleep, Hadrian was also aware that this manifestation of his brother was unusual. Normally the images were fragmented and confusing, most likely because he wasn’t able to fully comprehend the Second Realm — a world without matter of any kind, one where will counted for more than any of the physical forces. What he saw of the Second Realm suffered, therefore, from transmission errors. It was no wonder they came across as nightmares.

This time, it was just Seth. He didn’t say or do anything. He just appeared and stood with him for a while. Everything around them was dark. Seth looked as he always had — spookily like Hadrian’s reflection — and he didn’t seem hurt in any way. He wasn’t a monster. They didn’t look at each other or say anything. They just were.

They stayed that way for some time. Hadrian didn’t know how long; in the dream his watch was working again, but it jumped from hour to hour at random, black LCD digits shifting backwards and forwards without rest. Looking at it made him feel agitated, so he took it off and put it in his pocket.

A noise broke the silence, a distant booming.

Seth stirred, looked over his shoulder.

‘I have to go.’

‘Thanks for visiting,’ Hadrian said. He still knew it was a dream. He could accept that this conversation didn’t have to be entirely logical, or even honest. ‘It’s good to see you.’

‘I’ve been worried about you.’

‘Me too. About you, I mean. As well.’

Seth nodded. ‘We’re in a bit of a mess.’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you join me, later?’

‘Would you like that?’

‘Yes. I think —’ Seth hesitated. ‘I think some other people want you here, too.’

‘Then, yes.’ Hadrian had no idea how he would accommodate his brother’s dream-request, short of dying. Still, it was simpler to give Seth the assurance he wanted than wrangle over the ifs and how-tos. ‘I’ll come.’

Seth walked away into shadow.

Hadrian woke to the sound of the Swarm boiling up the stairwells below him and Pukje’s bony finger in his gut.

‘Huh — what?’

‘Your snoring attracted them.’ The imp tugged at his hand. ‘Up. We mustn’t let them catch us here.’

The stairwell’s dead fluorescent lights were flickering with a ghostly purple light. ‘Not letting them catch us anywhere would be my preference.’

‘That’s entirely up to you.’ Pukje scrambled onto his back and clung tightly while Hadrian did his best to wake up. He was sore all over; his neck had a kink in it from sleeping on the hard surface. Something about Seth nagged at him ...

‘Run now,’ said Pukje. ‘Wake up later.’

He did as he was told, egged on by the cacophony growing louder beneath them. It didn’t sound as though the Swarm had reached the stairwell he and Pukje occupied, but they were definitely in one nearby. He hurried to put as much distance as possible between them and him, hoping at the same time that his preternatural instinct was still working. He felt numb on the inside. Not even his fear was truly working yet.

A door called to him. He went through it, into another stairwell. Here, too, the lights flickered, making it hard to see. He could rely on neither ordinary sight nor his new senses; impressions from each interfered with each other, confusing him. As long as he didn’t slip and hurt himself, he supposed it didn’t matter just how much he could see.

Upward.

‘Could we bring the stairs down behind us?’ he asked. ‘Cut them off?’

‘No. This way is a whole. Break any part of it, and you break all of it.’

A new means of thinking about the world brought new rules with it. He could accept that. But there had to be a means of getting the Swarm off his back, otherwise they would chase him forever.

‘Can we change ways, then?’

‘When we have reached the end of this one, we can explore our options.’

‘We
will
have options, then?’

‘I believe so.’

‘And you’d know.’

‘I have confidence in your ability to get us where we need to be.’

‘That’s great,’ he said, not sharing that confidence at all. Thus far it seemed he had done little more than get them lost. The muscles in his legs were burning. His heartbeat throbbed in his ears and throat. The sound of the Swarm didn’t seem to be falling behind at all.

He could only run and hope for the best.

‘Did you really go to all that trouble just so I could help you get out of the city?’ he asked Pukje.

‘Mainly. Also to frustrate the people looking for you. I’m no friend of theirs.’

‘You’ve made that pretty obvious. Why not?’

‘I’m not a people-person. I don’t do teamwork very well. I have my own agenda, and I’m happy enough to plug away at it on my own.’

‘What’s your agenda now?’

He felt the imp shrug. ‘To survive.’

Another door called him, but it led to another stairwell, not a way out. More climbing.

‘What would you do if I wasn’t here?’

‘That’s something of a meaningless question, since we wouldn’t be in this situation if it wasn’t for the Cataclysm, and there wouldn’t be a Cataclysm if there wasn’t someone like you about the place.’

‘So whoever they were, you’d find them, follow them, make sure they went where they were supposed to go, wait until they really needed your help, and then pounce. Right?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And once they were in your debt, you’d use them to get away?’

‘Again, something like that.’

Hadrian wondered if Pukje could have avoided the attack of the draci that had nearly killed him, or spared him the heartbreak of finding Ellis only to have her snatched away again. If so, he was tempted to toss the imp down the centre of the stairwell and let the Swarm use his bones as toothpicks. But he had to wonder what he would have done had the imp suddenly appeared and tried to tell him that Ellis was evil, not Ellis at all.

Hadrian doubted it would have had the effect required. Probably the exact opposite.

‘We all do what we can,’ he said, ‘to survive.’

‘Exactly. We all have our own agenda.’ The imp’s breath was rank in his ear. ‘What’s
your
agenda, Hadrian? What are you hoping to get out of all of this? To what end are
you
using
me?’

He didn’t answer. Not just because he didn’t know the answer, but because there was something ahead. Something new. He slowed his pace, rounding two turns of the staircase with greater care than usual. The flickering light was increasing in frequency, and the sound of the Swarm had become a constant, echoing howl. Could they possibly have got ahead of him? He didn’t think so, but it paid not to take any chances.

He turned the last corner, and realised what it was. The stairwell ended in a grey metal door with three characters — possibly Korean, he thought — painted on it in flaky red. He didn’t know what the characters meant, but he knew what the door meant to him.

The exit.

He ran up the last few steps and put his hand on the metal. It was freezing cold, and that was enough to make him wonder if opening it was the right thing to do.

‘I’ve no idea where this is going to take us,’ he told the imp.

‘I have an inkling.’

‘Want to share it?’

‘Just open it and I’ll tell you if I was right.’

Hadrian tried the knob. It turned freely. He tugged gently at first. The hinges resisted. He put more muscle and weight into it. The door opened a crack, allowing a chill wind access to the stairwell. Flakes of white followed, as fine as dandruff, leaving tiny pinpricks of cold where they touched his skin.

Snow.

‘Yes,’ breathed Pukje. ‘Yesss ...’

Hadrian put his whole weight into it, and the door jerked open with a loud scraping sound. If the Swarm hadn’t already filled with stairwell with their booming howls, he would have feared drawing attention to himself. As it was, he had bigger things to worry about. The cold pouring through the doorway was biting and the clothes Pukje had brought for him were about as effective as tissue paper against it. Hugging himself, clutching the bag to his chest and grateful for the imp’s insulating warmth against his back, he stepped through the door and into a world of ice and rock.

There were mountains. That was his first impression. His view was filled with walls of jagged, sundered rock spearing up into the sky as though taking personal affront at it. The stone was dark grey and looked very, very hard. The occasional patch of dirty snow didn’t soften it at all, serving only to throw the backdrop into sharper relief. Behind the mighty shoulders more peaks were visible, and more beyond them. The earth beneath him was tortured, splintered, violated.

He was standing on the side of the largest mountain of all, a monstrous peak thrusting out of the ground with so much innate violence that it seemed to be visibly moving. The frosty ground beneath his feet led three paces to the front door of a small, battered weather station — the same door through which he had arrived. It now led to the station’s darkened interior, not the endless stairwell. The metal-clad hut seemed to be uninhabited. A satellite dish dangled, broken, from a strut on its roof, pointing at the vast edifice rather than up at the stars.

He shivered. It was night. The air was thin and smelled of rock. Gusts snatched at him with icy fingers. There were a few clouds, above and below. The stars were bright and hard. Liquid, rippling aurora painted the sky in blue and green waves. The mountains were alien, redolent with hostility — although he wasn’t sure if that hostility was real or his own reaction to the cold landscape.

So much for meeting survivors,
he thought.

The ground beneath his feet shifted with a sudden jerk.

‘Damn it!’ Alarmed and already half-frozen, he ducked back through the door, into the hut, and shut it behind him. Anything to get out of the wind. ‘Why couldn’t we have gone to the Gold Coast?’

‘The Gold Coast doesn’t exist any more. Not as you knew it.’

‘Somewhere warm, then!’

‘Because that’s not where Yod plans to emerge into this world.’

Hadrian looked around him, clutching himself to keep from freezing. The room was cluttered with abandoned gear: two camp beds; a wooden bench covered with old notebooks; a broken stool; an empty canvas sack. Pale light leaked through a tiny, cracked windowpane, high up on the opposite wall.

‘Here?’

‘This is the epicentre, the heart of every mountain range in the world. It is here that the First and Second Realms will collide, just as the continental plates that made these mountains are colliding right now. You are drawn to this place, since Yod is using you to break through. You are as much a part of the process as anything else.’