The Crooked Letter (49 page)

‘Where
are
we going?’

‘Out of the city. It’s too dangerous here, with Mot and Baal running rampant and the Swarm on your scent. It’s not as if there’s much keeping you here now.’

The thought threw him. He remembered what Mimir had said about the possibility of survivors beyond the city’s borders, and the ‘many forces’ stirring. There could be worse things out there than rampant gods: vigilante groups and posses looking for the cause of the catastrophe, for instance. ‘What if I don’t want to go?’

‘I’m all ears to alternatives. Literally.’ Pukje waggled his long lobes.

Hadrian didn’t smile. ‘You might listen, but I doubt it would make a difference.’

‘I’d listen if you made sense. Believe me,’ said the imp, ‘we’re in this together. I’m not Kybele or Lascowicz. I’ve got better things to do than order you around.’

Hadrian sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t have any other suggestions.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Just ... wait. I want to know
why
we’re in this together. Why are you helping me? What’s in it for you? You could leave the city any time you wanted.’

‘Actually,’ said the imp, ‘I couldn’t. I don’t know the way. But I think you can help me find it. That’s why I’m here.’

‘So why did you guide me to Kybele, if that’s what you’ve wanted all along?’

‘Because she was the only person who could help you find your friend; what was left of her, anyway. I knew you’d never leave without trying to get her back.’ Pukje nodded. ‘I’ve been following you from the beginning: watching you; helping you when I had to; assessing your chances. You’re growing dangerous, and the powers that be — or would be, given the chance — know it full well. I can’t wait for you to stumble out on your own. You’d never make it. We do it together now, or neither of us does. Does that ring true to you, boy?’

Hadrian could sense no deception in the imp’s words — not that that meant anything, given his previous experience with liars. ‘True enough.’

‘Good. The only way to find out if I’m lying is to put me to the test.’

Pukje scurried around behind him and scrambled up onto his shoulder. The imp’s weight was less than the bag he carried, but the two together challenged his returning strength. He put a hand on the rough patch on his chest, as though to hold his determination in, and limped out of the room.

Ellis’s body was tied spread-eagled to a bedframe with ropes of glutinous spittle, the origins of which he preferred not to know. Her face was deeply cloven, once above her left eye and twice through her throat. Blood obscured what remained. Her hair was a matted tangle. She was almost unrecognisable.

‘Jesus.’

The body twitched at the sound of his voice. Her mouth moved, but nothing came out of it except thick, black blood.

‘Hurting the body doesn’t kill the thing inside it, although it can slow it down for a while.’ Pukje clung to his shoulders like a child and whispered in his ear. ‘You have to kill it magically.’

‘How?’

‘See if you can work that out. You’re in a better position to do that than you’ve been told. No one’s wanted you to know what you’re capable of, just in case you turned on them.’

Hadrian twisted his neck in a vain attempt to look at the imp on his back. ‘Are you sure that’s not what you really want from me? To turn on your enemies?’

‘If I did, I wouldn’t be encouraging you to leave the city. Would I?’

Hadrian accepted that, although inside he didn’t feel powerful. He felt hollow and bruised. Too many betrayals in a short time had left him cynically sure that Pukje would betray him, yet at the same time he felt inured to the possibility. He would deal with it when, or if, it happened. He was getting plenty of practice at doing that.

Of more immediate importance was the draci. He had to face it. He couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it behind in Ellis’s body. It was a foul violation, and he wanted to erase it from the face of the First Realm.

Looking at the body in better light — or perhaps with hindsight and a willingness to open his eyes to the truth — he could see the thing coiled within it, wrapped up like a snake in a burrow. It wasn’t something physical — there were no special-effect bulges in Ellis’s throat or stomach — but it was there all the same, like a foul smell in the air, or poison dissolved in water. At Pukje’s encouragement, his sight was unfettered.

The draci was a creature of constant motion, curling and uncurling with relentless determination. If it could find a way out, it would leave immediately and find something else to inhabit. Whatever he did, he couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t let it remain free to kill again.

A dulcet evil, ill and blind ...

The image of a snake in a burrow returned, although he knew it couldn’t be literally true. Ellis’s body had felt perfectly normal in his arms, apart from being too hot at first then cooling as the draci’s energy ran low. There had been no suggestion that something metaphysical lurked inside it. The snake image therefore was purely metaphorical. Could he use that metaphor against what it was trying to describe, he wondered? If he treated the draci like a snake, maybe it would respond as a snake would respond.

Snakes were cold-blooded. They couldn’t regulate their temperature.

Taking the metaphor to its absolute limit, he stepped forward and, with his thumb, drew three lines on the body’s stomach (not
Ellis’s
stomach, he told himself firmly), making a star. With his index finger, he drew another star, overlapping the first, and another. Not sure exactly where to go from there, he simply expanded outwards using both index fingers, building on the six-pointed symmetry as best he could. He kept expanding until his fingers grew numb with cold and his breath frosted in the air.

‘A snowflake,’ whispered Pukje. ‘Very good. Did you know that, with a triangle around it, the first symbol you drew once meant “extreme heat”?’

He shook his head, too busy concentrating to have a conversation. He couldn’t see the lines he was drawing on Ellis’s debased body; there was too much blood. But he could feel them. With every addition, the creature grew more sluggish, more crippled by frost. Real or imagined, actual or metaphorical — it didn’t matter either way. It was having the required effect.

He kept drawing even when the draci stopped moving, just in case it was faking or merely quiescent. His elaborate hexagonal motif stretched from her throat to her hips, and looped down both her sides. When he sensed the creature slipping away, decrepitating into nothingness, he broke symmetry to touch Ellis’s lips and her eyes in one last farewell.

He stepped back and wiped frozen tears from his cheek. The taste in his mouth was bitter.

I did that.

‘Nicely done,’ Pukje said. ‘Your intuition is acute and your will strong.’

‘Spare me the compliments. Just tell me which way to run.’

‘Out the door would be the first step, my boy. Out the door, and quickly.’

He didn’t look back. A wind was rising when he hit the outside, throwing dust and light debris into the air. The night was deep and starless. He felt as though there might never be a dawn again.

Left,
an instinct told him, so he went that way before Pukje could tell him to.

The night grew darker. Behind them the wind made a sound like a rising howl.

* * * *

While they waited for the skyship to reach the next juncture, Seth found himself at a frustratingly loose end. Ellis was avoiding him, and so was Xol. All attempts to communicate with either of them were gently but firmly rebuffed. Agatha was in an attitude of prayer, still recovering her strength, and the kaia just stared blankly at him. Horva and Shathra were busy with the other Immortals, rushing about like bees preparing for a mating flight.

He asked for permission from the king to explore, intending to find someone who would talk to him. Once he was away from the others, he headed for the upper levels of the scaffolding, seeking out the crew member who had greeted him on his arrival at the skyship. She had no distinguishing features that he could remember, beyond a scent of raspberries. He followed his nose and trusted in his will to find her.

She was rotating a handle at the base of the skyship, right on the edge of the void. The handle turned a screw that placed pressure on the ship’s metal skin, deforming it. A line of crewmen performed similar tasks along the ship’s starboard side, relaying instructions to and from the pilot by calling to each other in a strange hooting code. Wind swirled around them, brisk in the wake of the skyship’s leading edge. Turbulent gusts encouraged Seth to hang on tight as he came up behind her.

‘I want to ask you something,’ he said. One of the kaia followed him, dogging him to make sure he didn’t fall. It maintained a discreet distance once he made it clear he needed some privacy. ‘Something the others won’t know the answer to, and might not tell me even if they did.’

She didn’t look up from her work but her posture wasn’t unwelcoming. ‘Feel free, Seth. I’ll answer if I can.’

‘You might not know either.’ He hesitated. ‘I feel awkward coming here at all, and worse for not knowing your name. Everyone seems to know who
I
am...’

‘My name is Simapesiel,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘What do you wish to ask me?’

‘It’s about Shathra and Horva.’

She turned then. ‘You want to know what happens to them, and why.’

Her eyes were a startling shade of blue. ‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because —’ It was hard to explain. He didn’t know where to start. He simply remembered Shathra’s words on leaving Horva:
We’re nothing more than puppets, dancing at the Sisters’ whim.
Those words bothered him, made him even more nervous of where he was heading than before.

Does he know who he is?

‘It’s about destiny,’ she said. ‘You’re grappling with the notion that you might not have free will, that all has been determined in advance, as it appears to have been for Shathra and Horva, and that nothing you can do will change your own fate.’

He nodded. She had come as close to summing up his feelings as he was ever likely to get.
What has been done cannot be so easily undone,
Horva had said. There had to be a way around that.

‘Shathra left Horva,’ he said. ‘I know that. I saw it happen. Now it’s in their future, and they don’t know about it. Could they avoid it even though I saw it happen? Is there anything we can do to help them?’

Simapesiel looked sympathetic. ‘All who serve with the handsome king grapple with this question. The Immortals are regular guests here. Their lives are intricately tangled with our own. Trying to unravel those tangles has led some to madness. It’s a path not lightly trodden.’

‘You must have an opinion on the subject,’ he pressed. ‘There must be an answer.’

‘Some answers aren’t simple, Seth. “We are limited beings, and the universe is boundless in its complexity. Maybe the deii understand these matters; maybe they are confounded by mysteries like this at some point in their long lives. I don’t know. I’m just a sailor on a ship in the sky. Survival on a day-to-day basis is enough for me.’

‘That’s the answer, then? We can’t know if trying to make a difference will actually make a difference, so we shouldn’t try at all?’

‘Let me tell you this.’ Simapesiel took one of his hands in hers. Her skin was calloused but soft like cured leather. ‘From your point of view, Ellis and Shathra arrived together; from Shathra’s point of view, he left with her. From Ellis’s point of view, she fell into the Second Realm and was caught by Shathra; from his point of view, Shathra left Horva here to take Ellis to the point at which she departed the Second Realm. Both routes led via Tatenen and the Ogdoad, who would not let them pass. Both routes were taken by people believing they had free will. Which is right and which is wrong? Perhaps both are right and both are wrong. I cannot say.

‘But I do know that we
feel
as though we make our own choices, even if we wonder that we do not. That is the only freedom we have in this realm. Choices literally change the course of universes. Decide to get up early one morning, and you miss the accident that would have killed you ten minutes later. Befriend the wrong person and they might betray you. Our lives are filled with choices, and the question, “What if I had chosen differently?” is perennial. Some say that for every choice between two options, two lives have diverged from each other: one in which the first choice was taken, the other following the second.’

‘Parallel universes,’ said Seth. ‘Quantum physics and all that.’

‘Perhaps. And perhaps these multiple universes explain why it seems that
this
universe — the only one that this version of me can see — is altogether unlikely. There has to be one such universe out there somewhere; I just happen to be in it.’

Simapesiel smiled as though enjoying a long-favoured joke.

Seth had a hard time appreciating the humour. He could easily see how trying to untangle such a web of causality might lead someone to mental breakdown, and finding succour in bizarre multidimensional theories wasn’t really solving the problem. If he had become so confused after only a few hours, what would it be like to cross paths with the Immortals many times in a long life? How did the king keep track of it all?

‘So what happens to Shathra after he meets — met — Ellis?’ he asked, determined to find his way to the heart of the problem. ‘Where does he go from there?’

‘He vanishes from our knowledge. Without the grace of the king, he cannot interact with people moving in our direction through time. He is lost to us.’

There was room in Seth for sympathy. He imagined Shathra walking through the realms, able only to look at the worlds around him but never to interact. It would be a lonely, frustrating existence. Unless there were others of his kind following similar routes, perhaps even entire populations of people living backwards through time, invisible to people like Seth. That was a very strange thought.

‘What about Horva?’ he asked.

‘The Holy Immortals have been here for several days,’ his ape friend said, bending back to her chore. ‘Maitreya, their leader, comes through here regularly, too, but didn’t come this time. I don’t know why; perhaps this is connected to the Cataclysm. Your future is their past, Seth, in whatever universe. What will happen at Sheol has profoundly affected them. They have much to decide before leaving — into our past, their future. They have ways to chart, decisions to make. They do so with the assistance of the king, who is to them a prophet. With his guidance they will begin their trek anew, just as we will do in our future, with their guidance.’ She shrugged, indicating her powerlessness in the face of such mysteries. ‘We balance precariously on the cusp of causality. To either side lies insanity. We strive not to fall. Sometimes I wonder that we do not. Perhaps that we don’t is the proof that all things are determined in advance; perhaps it is proof that all things are malleable. I cannot tell the difference.’