The Crooked Letter (14 page)

‘There is magic in a lover’s eyes. A single glance

contains worlds of possibility.’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS.
FRAGMENT 301

eth and Xol fell slowly at first, but with steadily mounting speed. Although the strange gravity was slight, the abyss was deep. Seth had time to look around him and marvel. The walls of this massive rent in the land were ragged and dangerous. Changeable shadows played across sharp spurs as meteors lanced down through the void behind them, making the walls seem to reach out greedily. The slender shapes Seth had glimpsed waving over the edge of the rent thrashed at them like storm-swept tree trunks as they fell out of reach. If not for the strength of Xol’s grip, the two of them would have been wrenched apart almost immediately.

‘There is one thing you must know,’ shouted Xol.

‘What’s that?’

‘The reflexes of the First Realm do not always apply here. Some of them are irrelevant. You do not need to breathe, for instance.’

‘Why are you telling me this now?’ Seth asked, the sinking feeling growing stronger.

Xol pointed ahead, to what lay below them. By the light of the underworld’s ‘sky’ — ablaze with falling comets — Seth saw the surface of an immense river rising up to greet them. Undulating, turbulent, grey, it covered the entire floor of the rift, and was rushing toward them with terrifying speed.

‘You’re insane.’

‘What did you say, Seth?’ It was hard to hear over the noise of the water, growing louder with every second.

‘I said, you’re insane!’

‘Sanity is relative.’ Seth couldn’t tell, but the feral gleam of Xol’s white teeth might have been a grin. ‘Look behind us.’

He did so, and saw the void full of dark figures leaping to meet the meteors as they fell. Showers of sparks marked each collision. A booming, crackling roar grew all around them, like a storm rising on the updraughts of a bushfire.

For the moment, Seth had been forgotten. That was one thing to be thankful for — although the thought that he was apparently plummeting to his second death took some of the shine off it.

He struggled to orient himself in a diving pose, in order to present as small a surface area as possible. Xol, definitely enjoying the ride more than Seth thought appropriate, laughed and clutched his hand more tightly.

‘Will yourself to fall safely,’ Xol said, ‘or let me do it for both of us. Don’t fight me, and we’ll come to no harm.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Not “just like that”, Seth. But will is what matters here. Understand that, and much becomes easier.’

Seth fought the urge to shout in alarm as the river ballooned in front of them. Giant waves roiled on the surface. At the final instant, Seth put a hand over his eyes and held his breath. He couldn’t help it. He braced himself for a bloodying impact as the river swatted them out of the sky.

They shot through the surface like bullets. Fluid parted around them in a smooth stream and left slender corkscrews in their wake. Seth’s gasp was snatched from him and tumbled unheard into the turbulence.

Xol’s grip was strong. It steadied them as they plummeted through the river’s depths.

‘I told you,’ Xol said, his voice clear in Seth’s mind. ‘Your old reflexes are inappropriate here. This isn’t water, and you have no body to worry about. You are perfectly safe.’

Xol was sleek and streamlined; his spines rose and fell like fins, guiding their fall. Seth’s body was enveloped by a smooth rushing sensation as the water — or whatever it was — swept by.

He pointed with his free hand. ‘“Perfectly”?’

A dark shadow rose up before them: a net steered by creatures with the undulating fins of giant Siamese fighting fish, tipped with red-glowing thorns.

Xol banked sharply to avoid the net. The river hissed around them, and Seth resisted the feeling that he was nothing but a dead weight dragged along in Xol’s wake. He added his impetus to the turn, urged it to tighten. The net opened to enfold them, began to close. A circle of clear space lay ahead, and they rocketed for it, stretching like porpoises.

The two of them shot through to safety with centimetres to spare. Seth found himself whooping with excitement. He turned back to see the graceful balloon of the net collapsing in on itself, empty. The creatures guiding it were going to go hungry for the time being.

Looking back up through the rent, he saw a faint, rippling aurora: the void above the underworld, still burning with meteors.

‘This is all a trap,’ said Seth, feeling as though he was beginning to understand. ‘Those creatures — the daevas — they want us to think in the old ways. They use them to confuse us, to make us vulnerable.’

‘And every newly-dead is a willing collaborator in that confusion. Why would you not be? You spend your entire life thinking one way. It is never easy to change.’ Xol led them in a sweeping curve into the deep. Gloom thickened around them. ‘When you arrived and wished to see where you were, you couldn’t have known that you were making yourself vulnerable in the process. In order to see, you must be seen, by foes as well as friends.’

Seth remembered a young child he had played with once. Her inability to hide properly had been amusing at the time. If she couldn’t see him, her young mind reasoned, then he couldn’t see her either. This had seemed no more significant than a matter of the child’s growing mind, something she had yet to learn. He wondered now if it was in fact something she was trying hard to
unlearn.

He wondered what else a child would intuitively understand; that would kill Seth if Xol left him behind?

Darkness thickened around them. He felt their headlong rush ebb. Had this been a real river, friction and their rising buoyancy would have contrived to slow them down long ago. He kicked against the current to propel himself forward. It might or might not be water surrounding them and he wouldn’t drown, but he didn’t want to stall and hang suspended for eternity, waiting for another net.

Xol swung him around so they were face to face, and shook his head. ‘Remember what I just told you about being seen. This is the most dangerous leg of our journey thus far. You must hold tight and do nothing to reveal yourself.’

Seth shivered, unable to fight the impression that they were sinking to silent, icy deaths at the bottom of an ocean. The walls of the abyss had fallen away. He had no point of reference apart from the friction of the fluid around them. And Xol, watching him with suddenly small, golden eyes. Even as Seth stared at them, they faded into the dark, melting into an inky infinite blackness ...

Seth forced himself to concentrate on Xol’s hand, still gripping his.
You must hold tight...
He did just that, clutching his guide’s fingers and feeling them clutch his in return.

The two of them spun gently as their speed decreased. Seth felt the fluid brushing his cheeks, his arms, his exposed back and chest. Anything could reach out from the depths to touch him, and there could be any number of things just metres away from him. Without light — without willing to see and therefore be seen in return — there was no way of knowing.

They slowed to a crawl. Something brushed against him in the dark. He flinched away, recoiling from the feel of ridged hide and thorny protrusions. He would have cried out but for Xol’s hand suddenly over his mouth. All four of his guide’s limbs wrapped around him and held him tight although he tried to kick away. The thing that had touched him swept by, moving with long, sinuous strength. Silent, as powerful as a whale but elongated like a serpent, it sent currents dancing around them. Each stroke of its massive flippers set them swaying. Xol barely moved a finger, and he kept Seth motionless as well.

The creature made no sound as it passed, apart from a faint crack from the tip of its tail. They were sucked into its wake and sent spinning. Seth imagined that he could taste its spoor in the water around them. His limbs were shaking. Xol let his mouth go, and he swallowed a sob of shock and relief mingled together.

Then they were moving again — falling upward, it seemed, out of the depths. The creature had passed them by, as unaware of them as they might have been of tiny fish brushing against their legs in a real ocean. What it would have done had it noticed them didn’t bear thinking about, Seth decided.

At last a faint glimmer of light returned, and the grip of Xol’s hand on his eased. They were definitely rising with mounting speed.

‘What was the point of all that?’ he asked. ‘We went down; we’re coming back up. We’ll soon be exactly where we started.’

‘Not even remotely near,’ said Xol. ‘Look closely. Is the light the same to your eyes as it was before?’

Seth peered ahead. Now that Xol mentioned it, there was none of the multicoloured flashing that there had been. A single bright light illuminated the sky above, unrefracted and pure.

‘We’ve passed through,’ said Xol, surging ahead. ‘There are many barriers between the ascendant soul and the Second Realm proper. Bardo, the void, is one. The underworld and the daevas, in all their forms, are another. You and I have almost crossed the river of death.’

Seth felt a wave of dizziness pass through him as he struggled to accept what he was being told.
The river of death
?

For a moment, his grip on the afterlife loosened.

‘You’re taking the piss,’ he said. ‘Styx is a legend. I read about it in primary school. It’s not real. Where’s the boatman? Where’s the ferry?’

‘Legends are stories,’ said Xol with a trace of compassion in his voice, ‘but sometimes they do hold some truth. They are echoes of a reality that cannot be described in the vocabulary of the First Realm. The underworld and its inhabitants are the source of all sacred experience. They lie at the heart of every religion. What you call Styx, others call Sangarios or Phlegethon. Dante wrote of the nine circles of hell. There are those who would think of me as a monster. All are partly right.’ The broad snake-face stretched into something like a smile, although the sharp teeth could equally have been bared in a challenge. ‘It might surprise you to learn that the daktyloi and other long-term residents here regard the First Realm with similar inaccuracy. That which is unknown, or at best partly known, is ever the subject of misconception and myth.’

Xol pointed ahead. The light was growing brighter and warmer: gold and red and orange predominated. ‘The waters here — as you see them — have no bottom. People can pass through them if they have the courage and the will. There is no ferryman and there is no price. Much is lost in translation, you see, through self-memories, hallucinations and dreams.’

Seth’s uncertainty eased in the face of something he could confront; there was another side to the river, and they were coming closer to it. That so many legends and fables had got it wrong was less important than the fact that he was experiencing it.

‘We’ll be safe on the other side?’

‘No.’

‘I just knew you were going to say that.’

Xol turned to look upward. ‘It’s my fear that you won’t be safe again, anywhere.’

‘What does that mean?’

Xol didn’t answer. Before Seth could press him on the point, the waters of the river parted before them and they were propelled out into the light of the Second Realm.

* * * *

They surfaced near a riverbank — or so it appeared to him from a distance. No river bottom rose up to meet them as they swam closer. Although its constitution was similar to soil, it was composed of numerous entangled threads of red and orange and blue mixed with and into fuzzier patches of yellow and green.

They easily clambered from the river, not truly wet, and made for nearby cover. As they crossed the strange landscape, an indefinable something passed through him. He put a hand to his temple, struggling to catch the elusive feeling.

Hadrian?

No answer, of course. The twins had tried telepathy as children, but much to their disappointment they had never got it to work: a twinge here and there; an occasional insight that could have come from body language or guesswork; nothing that would have hit the front pages and made them instant celebrities. With no incentive to continue, they had soon dropped the game. But, in spite of it all, a sense of connection was apparent. They had an uncanny ability to find each other, no matter where they were. They had the same dreams. They liked the same girls ...

Concentrate,
he told himself. He couldn’t afford to let his First Realm experiences distract him. Just one mistake could be fatal.

‘Are you well?’ asked Xol, coming up beside him and putting a hand on his shoulder.

Seth didn’t know how to answer. He was dead, and this wasn’t Earth, with its dirt and its rivers and the sun hanging high above.

The river meandered through a valley between two distant lines of hills, each layered like terrace farms. The sky was an unusual blue-grey colour, and the bright light hanging in it, directly above him, was definitely not the sun. It left a branching, twisted image on his retina when he looked away — like a fluorescent purple octopus with dozens of legs and one eye in the exact centre of its body, distinctly darker than the rest. An eye, Seth thought, squinting, or a mouth.

‘That,’ Xol said, ‘is Sheol. It is the heart of this realm, as the sun is the heart of the First. But it does not give life. It takes it.’

‘So does the sun if you get too close.’

The dimane’s wide, thin-lipped mouth stretched into another of his disturbing smiles. ‘The analogy works well, then.’

Seth touched his chest where the knife had gone in. The physical damage may have disappeared, but the memory remained heavy in his mind, like a weight bearing him down. He would always have that, he supposed.

A woman’s voice startled him out of his thoughts. Her tone was demanding but her words were gibberish. Seth looked up from examining his chest to see a tall, reed-thin young woman step out of the landscape in front of them, as though from nowhere. Dressed in orange cotton clothing strapped tightly with cords and leather bands, she had smooth golden hair that swept back from her forehead into a clasp behind her high head. Her eyes were a surprisingly light green, almost transparent.