The Crooked Letter (28 page)

He shook his head and turned away, stung by her tone. She was treating him as Seth did, despite everything. He didn’t like it. We
are together,
whispered Utu into his mind. We
can conquer all.
He didn’t respond, thinking of the words of the famous psalm: ‘Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.’

The ancient words resonated with something, somewhere, but he couldn’t tell what.

Is that you, Seth?
he wondered.
Are you as lost as I am?

* * * *

‘You look puzzled, Seth,’ said Synett.

‘Nothing new there,’ said Seth, snapping out of a strange daydream about mud men and silver swords. ‘Frustrated, too, if you want to know the truth.’

The bald man smiled, not without sympathy. ‘“With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break bone.”‘

‘Thanks, but I’ve had about all the proverbs I can take for one day.’

Synett regarded him with something oddly like delight, and Seth stared defiantly back at him. Synett’s appearance was that of a man in his mid-forties, with lines enough to show his years but not so many as to make him look old. Seth wondered if that was what Synett had looked like when he had died, or if that was simply the way he imagined himself to look, no matter how old.

Maybe, he thought, it was just how Synett
wanted
to be seen.

The kaia had been as good as their word. Behind the semicircular entrance chamber were a number of small cubicles in which the kaia dwelt. Cramped and utterly devoid of individuality, they surrounded a central area which housed several odd items: tall, spindly artifacts, like DNA spirals that had been twisted from true. They boasted more colours than Seth had ever imagined and hurt the eye to look at for long. Seth puzzled over them until realising that they were works of art designed to be seen from many angles at once. He simply didn’t have enough eyes to comprehend them.

There were lumpy cushions scattered across the floor. On their arrival, the kaia had invited them to sit and had then left them alone. Immediately, Agatha had sunk to the floor in a kneeling position and folded her hands in front of her. It appeared uncannily as if she were praying. Seth had been puzzled by this until he felt something moving through the room, as softly as a breeze. His skin had tingled at the touch of it, reminding him of the egrigor he had crushed in Bethel. He had realised then that Agatha was recovering by drawing strength into her directly from the realm. What he was feeling was the flow of will, raw and wild, through the world around her.

Not long after this, the kaia had returned and taken Xol and Agatha off to look for information. He hadn’t been invited, and he hadn’t seen them since.

‘How long until we hear from Barbelo?’ Seth asked restlessly.

‘Hard to say,’ Synett replied. ‘Barbelo has information to gather, and the realm is disrupted. What might once have taken hours could now take days.’

Days.
The thought made Seth groan on the inside. The prospect of being cooped up in the kaia’s hideout for any length of time was not a pleasant one.

He gathered two cushions and, placing them side by side, lay down on them to rest. Synett sat with his knees drawn up. From above, a silver light, not unlike that cast by a full moon, bathed them with cool fragility. Seth could feel no hints that Synett was presenting a false face, but he didn’t trust his new instincts well enough to be confident.

A motion at the edge of his vision drew his attention back to Synett. The man was picking at his bandages as though itching to take them off. The bloodstains had disappeared, but the wounds clearly still caused him discomfort.

‘Are they your stigmata,’ Seth asked him, ‘or have you been injured?’

Synett put his hands in his lap. ‘You don’t bleed here,’ he said, ‘not blood, anyway.’ He shook his head. ‘No, this is for appearances only. One of many things beyond my control.’

Seth noted that Synett hadn’t answered the question, but didn’t push the point. At least the man was talking. ‘Have you been in the Second Realm long?’

‘Long enough. Travelled through most of it on Barbelo’s business or my own. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen.’

Seth settled back on an elbow, seeing an opportunity to learn something. ‘Try me.’

Synett looked at him from under beetled brows, as though measuring his sincerity. ‘Okay.’ He shuffled over to settle within arm’s reach. ‘Give me your hand.’

Seth nervously extended his left arm. Synett took it. The bandages were rough against his fingers.

‘The Second Realm is an impossible place. You’ve noticed that. It’s a hollow world, the exact opposite of where we come from. All the madmen and mystics who had ever looked for holes in the Earth’s crust were part-right and part-wrong. They were simply looking in the wrong place. They should have been looking within themselves.’

Seth felt a slight tingling in his palm, but didn’t pull away.

‘It doesn’t get any simpler, the closer you examine it,’ Synett went on. ‘The underworld is a flat world with no edges, right? Pansophists have tried to measure a curve to it, but it’s always just flat and endless, and filled with devels and their deii. But here’s the strange thing: if you pick a point in the underworld — any point at all — and dig down, you’ll find yourself inside the Second Realm. Walk a million years in one direction then do the same, perfectly straight, and you wouldn’t change a thing. Somehow, although it’s so flat, the underworld wraps right around the Second Realm, keeping all of us in, and all of the living out.’

Synett raised his free hand and passed it over Seth’s. The tingling grew stronger, and Seth experienced a weird sensation, as though his eyes were trying to see something that wasn’t there.

‘“How many dwellings are in the heart of the sea, or how many streams are above the firmament?”‘ Synett said. ‘“Which are the exits of hell, which the entrances of paradise?” It’s hard to imagine, Seth. People leaving life in the First Realm centuries ago must have seen the Earth as one layer, the underworld as another, and the Second Realm as another still. That’s easy enough if you don’t have to worry about curves and the like. But when you start trying to work out how the underworld wraps around the Earth while at the same time wrapping around the Second Realm, you find yourself going a little crazy. So the best thing to do is stop worrying, and take a look at the scenery. That’s what I do. See.’

Seth’s vision suddenly stretched into long tunnels of distorted light. He jerked his head back in alarm and tried to pull his hand away. Synett’s grip was strong, despite his wounds. Before Seth could insist that he let go, his vision flattened and took on normal perspectives, but he wasn’t looking at Synett and the interior of the kaia’s hideout any more. Instead he was looking out over the chthonian murk.

The view was perfect. The surface of the underworld with all its hook-like buildings and inverted bridges stretched out into the infinite distance beneath him, cracked and buckled like a city after an earthquake. He resisted an impulse to flinch at the memory of the scissor-handed creature which had sliced off his hand when he first entered the underworld.

‘I spent a long time, longer than I care to remember,’ Synett’s voice came from beyond the illusion, ‘in the domain of Iblis, bonded to engineers seeking a mechanical bridge to the First Realm. I was a slave like the others, down among the serpents, the brood of vipers sentenced to hell. We didn’t know it, but the towers played a critical role in the Nail’s attempts to cross the gap. They make the metaphysical leap across Bardo easier, and that helped find the mirror twins when they were born. We all know what happened next.’ The view shifted, swooped in on the three needle-thin towers Seth had noticed on his arrival in the underworld. Viewed in close-up, their surfaces were scarred in lines as though by wood-boring insects. There were no windows. People and creatures in gangs of up to thirty scaled the exterior surfaces with the help of ropes, pseudo-mechanical wings or willpower. As Seth’s viewpoint moved higher, he was buffeted by an irregular throbbing from the top of the nearest tower. Each throb coincided with an intense flash of light. He realised, when he came alongside the source of the light, that it wasn’t a signal as he had initially assumed, but the byproduct of some arcane magical process. Hordes of devels attended the source, hurling raw material into the mouths of vast cauldrons. There were dozens of them, glowing red-hot. Magic potential grew steadily from the devels’ stoking until the presence of it made the air feel saturated with will. The flash, when it came, was both inevitable and a relief. Although over in a split second, it left Seth blinded and swept his mind clean of all thought.

When he recovered from the flash, it was apparent that the tower had grown in height. The extra altitude was small, perhaps a metre, but appreciable. Even as he watched, the devels were preparing for the next effort, hurling more strange powders and fluids into the cauldrons. To his left and right the second and third towers, smaller but catching up fast, echoed the flashes of the first, inching their way toward the First Realm like drill bits through solid rock, only in reverse.

‘“They said, Come, let us build ourselves a city, a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.”‘ Synett’s voice held equal parts dread and admiration for the project. ‘It was here, among the Babel gangs, that I learned the truth about the Nail and its plans. The enemy didn’t seem to care that half the daktyloi working on its foul scheme were humans — and in truth, half of
them
didn’t care either. But the ones who did staged a revolt. We sabotaged the line feeds and triggered a chain reaction in Tower Aleph. We almost brought down the entire thing from within.’ In the vision, rings of fire raced up the outside of the tower, sending short-lived haloes and auroras sparking into the blackness. Vast sheets of energy rolled through Seth, tossing him end over end. His viewpoint tumbled to a point directly over the tip of the tower and showed a deep crater. The tower was hollow, like a hypodermic needle, and he shot down into the interior. Giant sparks arced around him. great cracking sheets of lightning that made the entire structure shake.

‘We weren’t successful,’ Synett stated. ‘The Nail’s will was too great. It quenched the fire, stopped the damage from spreading. Tower Aleph did not fall, and we were hunted. “The earth reeled and rocked; the foundations of the heavens trembled and quaked, because He was angry.”‘

Seth plummeted down into the heart of the tower, gathering speed with a roaring, blistering shockwave behind him. The interior of the tower widened, ballooning out into a giant chamber buried deep in the foundations of the underworld. There he sped into a narrow capillary that wound, twisting and branching with impossible complexity, away from the tower. The shockwave of Yod’s anger followed him, howling like a pack of dogs, but gradually lost impetus. Over time and distance, its heat faded; the relentless hunger of revenge that fuelled it cooled. In the end, it boiled away to nothing, and he was safe.

Synett continued: ‘I came to the Second Realm on the lam, afraid of showing my face for fear of drawing the enemy’s retribution down upon me. Egrigor scoured the land, seeking the ringleaders of that rebellion. I wasn’t one of them. I was just a grunt, but that wouldn’t have stopped me from being tortured, pumped for every piece of information I had on those who did make the decisions, those whose will had clashed with the Nails. I came to the Second Realm to hide, and the best way to do that was to keep moving. A fugitive unto death, burdened with the blood of another, I was no Joseph, no prophet in the wilderness. I sought inspiration in my solitude, and I found it.’

Seth’s point of view followed Synett’s words with bewildering rapidity. The underworld grew like mould on a ceiling, digging down into the fabric of the realm. He crawled through a maze of faults and subterranean chambers until he despaired of ever seeing another being again. A chance breakthrough into a lightless trickle that emptied into a river finally gave him a route to the interior of the Second Realm. On the banks of a pool ringed by slender obelisks, Synett emerged into the light of Sheol as Seth and Xol had not so long ago.

From there, Synett had simply walked from place to place, jealous of his anonymity and careful to display nothing that might lead the search parties to guess that he was one of the escaped Babel mutineers.

Synett’s second-hand memories were seductively powerful. Seth was completely caught up in them, unable any longer to separate his own feelings from those of the man telling the story.

He climbed through spectacular mountainous regions that bulged into the hollow world of the realm. Flocks of living clouds darted between the branches of grasping trees, laying their eggs in silver sheets in the hearts of narrow ravines. What looked like snow on the summits of the tallest mountains was in fact the bodies of expired cloud-creatures; their vast, white graveyards stretched as far as the eye could see. Synett had explored them, even though discovery would have carried the penalty of death by smothering. He had evaded the cloud-patrols by venturing abroad only when the light was at its dimmest, greedily choked by creatures living further up, closer to Sheol.

He travelled on a precarious ski-barge across a sea of black ice. The surface was as slippery as frozen water, but it wasn’t cold and didn’t melt when touched. Long ice dunes rose and fell across their path, glitteringly beautiful. The sound of the barge’s passage was high pitched and peaked as they mounted each crest and skidded down the far side. Locked in the depths of the ice, only visible from rare angles, were creatures with giant gleaming eyes and mouths full of teeth. The barge took ten minutes to traverse one from tail to snout. Synett couldn’t take his eyes off it, afraid that it would move.

There was a desert made from purple-black grains that moved without reference to the wind. Dust storms large and small wandered at will within its borders, kicking up the purple sand and scouring any signs of vegetation from its pristine surface. Synett found himself swept up into the maw of one that would have been considered quite small by its peers, yet could have swallowed an army without straining. He tried to run, but it easily outpaced him, catching him in mid-step and yanking him into the sky. Spun like a sock in a dryer, he was unceremoniously dumped out of the desert and forced to wander elsewhere.