The Crooked Letter (15 page)

‘I’ve brought him here because he needs our help,’ said Xol to her, squat and broad-shouldered in the face of the woman’s slim poise.

More gibberish flowed in response, guttural and nasal at the same time, as though the back of her throat wasn’t working properly. The set of her brows was peevish.

‘Agatha, you know what’s happening,’ said Xol. ‘You can read the signs as well as I. From devel to ekhi, the realm is ringing with the news. Yod has made its move.’

The young woman’s sly jade eyes glanced at Seth. He felt himself instantly appraised by that quick look.

‘He is nothing special,’ she said, startling him. Her voice, when comprehensible, had the tones of a British newsreader: clear and imperious, precisely measured.

‘Neither was I.’ Xol’s golden eyes gleamed.

‘Are you saying he could become like you?’ The woman called Agatha looked at Xol in concern, but didn’t acknowledge Seth at all.

I’m right here,
he started to say — then was struck by the memory of Ellis saying exactly that, in the train carriage before he died.

Concentrate ...

‘By ignoring him you only make that possibility more likely,’ Xol was saying.

‘It is not permissible.’

‘I agree.’

‘You have taken a great risk bringing him here. I have no choice, now, but to align myself with him.’

‘You have as much choice as ever, my friend.’

‘Would that it were so.’

The woman acknowledged Seth at last.

‘We are in danger,’ she said, her green eyes fixing him like a butterfly collector’s pin. ‘You must come with us to Bethel, where we will speak with Barbelo. She will have more information. She will tell us what to do.’

The situation had reversed too suddenly for Seth to follow. ‘First you didn’t want to help me, and now you do. Why doesn’t someone ask me what
I
want?’

‘Very well.’ She stepped back. She was not much taller than Seth, but her stare seemed to come from much higher up. ‘What do you want, Seth Castillo?’

‘I want to be with my brother,’ he said, the words blurting out before he thought them through. ‘No, wait. I don’t want him here, because that would mean he’d have to die. I want him to be safe. I want ...’He stopped, confused. ‘I want to make sure that he and El are okay.’

Agatha nodded. Her expression remained hard. ‘We can try to do that, but not here. Not now. Come.’

She repeated the demand with wooden authority. Seth glanced at Xol, who nodded. Although there was no immediate danger that he could see — no creatures snapping at his heels, trying to slice him into a thousand tiny pieces — the urgency with which Xol and Agatha discussed his situation was contagious. And the dimane
had
led him thus far without betraying him.

He granted her his begrudging acquiescence.

The three of them headed off across the strange landscape. Agatha led them away from the river and into the hills, following a narrow ravine separating two near-vertical sheets of ‘earth’. Seth was sandwiched between his two guides, all control of his fate temporarily — and uncomfortably — out of his hands.

The way became darker as the sheets rose around them, the strange matted texture of the soil richer. Threads became ropes, multicoloured roots snaking in loops just above his head, branching and merging in complex tangles. Flat patches of colour slid along the roots, some occasionally slipping free to explore nearby knots and junctions. Were they living things? He couldn’t tell. When he reached out to touch one, the coloured patch slid a centimetre up his finger, as though he’d dipped his hand in dye. He instinctively pulled away. The patch detached itself and slid back into its root. He felt nothing but a slight tingling.

Again a sense of unreality flowed over him.
From devel to ekhi,
Xol had said. Xol the dimane.

Devils. Demons. The river Styx.

‘Who is she?’ he whispered to Xol.

‘A friend. She helped me in my darkest hour. But for her word, the dimane would have rejected me as everyone else had.’

‘Why?’

‘My past holds things of which I am not proud. I have struggled to atone for them. It has not been easy.’

‘What sort of things?’ Instinct made Seth ask, ‘Is this something to do with your brother?’

‘I would save that story for another time,’ Xol said. ‘You have more important things to learn.’

Seth disagreed, but didn’t want to argue the point. ‘So Agatha stuck up for you. Good on her.’

‘Yes. Together we have smuggled numerous victims of the daevas to safety. She’s not human, but she’s on your side. We need her because she understands the Second Realm better than I do. That’s really all you need to know.’

A hardness in the dimane’s tone told him to stop talking and concentrate on walking. He took the hint, even though there were a dozen questions he could have asked. How were they going to check on Hadrian and Ellis? What did Xol mean when he said that ‘Yod’ had ‘made its move’? Who or what
was
Yod, and what did it have to do with anything?

He tried to put such questions out of his head for the time being. Agatha led them through the ravine with the confidence of one who had been that way many times before. They proceeded in silence, their footfalls vanishing into the deadening air like clods of earth down a well. Seth kept his eyes on the transparent clasp that kept Agatha’s long hair in check. The clasp had no seam and her hair seemed to flow right through it, as though it had once been permeable and had set around the ponytail. The tip of each hair glittered in the faint light, reminiscent of a fibre-optic lamp his mother had had when he was a child. The effect was hypnotic.

Not human,
he thought. If that was true, she was doing a good job of impersonating one.

* * * *

Ahead, the landscape twisted and sheared under unknowable forces, creating a tangled vertical fault. The ravine they followed crossed another and vanished without trace into a mess of tears and folds. There was no clear way to proceed.

Agatha slowed and Seth almost walked into her back.

‘Now where?’ Seth asked. The words shattered into a million reflections and returned to him with the sound of breaking glass.

‘We climb.’ Agatha waved Xol forward. ‘Check that the way is clear.’

Xol pressed past Seth, his massive shoulders swinging from side to side like a weightlifter stepping up to his mark. He knelt at the base of the fault, a penitent genuflecting before the altar of a fractured god, and flexed the broad muscles of his back.

Blue sparks shot from the dimane’s fingertips and spread across the planes and splinters of the fault. Ghostly fluorescence gleamed from angled facets until the entire space before them was alive with light, giving it a strange, hyper-real air.

Then Xol relaxed, and the fault fell dark again.

‘The way is clear,’ Xol affirmed, straightening.

‘What did you just do?’ Set asked him. ‘What was all that?’

‘That was magic,’ came the flat reply.

‘No, seriously. What was it?’

‘He
is
being serious,’ said Agatha in a scolding tone. ‘You would call it magic, so that’s what it is.’

‘Hekau gives me no control over the words through which you hear the meaning I am trying to convey,’ Xol explained more patiently. ‘There is no analogy in the First Realm for what I do here, except in superstitions, so it is in those terms that you hear me explaining it to you. Our cultures were very different, but I don’t doubt that yours, like mine, had tales of wizards and genies and gods, all capable of extraordinary acts. Such acts are possible here in the Second Realm, even fundamental — but the language you retain is that of the First Realm, and it is through that filter you must come to understand what you see.’

‘And what I hear as magic is actually — what?’

‘Everywhere, Seth. I have told you that will is important here; it is as important in the Second Realm as matter is in the First Realm. Everyone must learn the art of will before they can interact properly with the people around them. For instance, it is will that facilitates or forbids communication, or stops someone from touching that which belongs to another, or from touching those who do not want to be touched. Without will, nothing at all would happen — the realm would be dead, and so would we. That is magic.’

Seth nodded slowly. ‘So what did you do just then?’ he asked the dimane again.

‘Exactly as Agatha requested,’ Xol said. ‘I ensured that the way ahead was clear of observers. If any but us saw the light I cast, I would have known.’

‘And now we must proceed.’ Agatha had watched the exchange with impatience.

Seth was irritated by her attitude. If she didn’t want to help him, why was she bothering? ‘Not until you tell me where we’re going — and why. And what could have been watching up there that you’re so afraid of.’

Her eyes widened. ‘I fear nothing.’

‘You do,’ said Xol. ‘It is foolish to hide the fact from anyone, especially yourself. We all fear what’s coming. Seth needs to understand why and he needs to know where he fits in.’

Agatha’s lips tightened into a thin line. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I will explain as we climb. The longer we delay, the more at risk we are.’

With stiff economy, she stepped into the fault and began ascending its irregular face, using the many jagged edges as handholds and ledges to haul herself upward.

* * * *

Seth, an inexperienced climber, reminded himself of Xol’s words: nothing was physical about the Second Realm; it was all metaphor, filtered through the preconceptions of his mind. He encountered a strange topology reminiscent of ‘natural’ landscape, so that was how he saw it. A fracture in that landscape was a chimney they could climb through.

Metaphor or otherwise, the fractured shelf material felt like fibreglass under his fingers, rough and brittle yet strong enough to hold his weight.

‘There is a story,’ said Agatha as they climbed, ‘of the way the realms came to be. When time began, it is said, the realms were one. The dei of the ur-Realm was called Ymir, and his shadow, the Molek, was the great enemy of peace. Ymir and the Molek fought a protracted war, and both died. Ymir was dismembered in the process, and his remains became the worlds we know today: Ymir’s body is the First Realm, his soul the Second Realm, and the span of his life the Third Realm. His shadow is the devachan, the endless gulfs between the realms.’

Seth was glad he hadn’t had to sit through the long version of the story. Her talk of shadows rang too close to some of Hadrian’s half-baked notions of twinship.

‘There’s a Third Realm?’ he asked.

‘There are as many realms as there are stars in the sky. Some are impossible for us to reach; others brush by closely, requiring only a slight push to overlap. There are exchanges between the other realms, just as there are exchanges between the Three. The break-up of the ur-Realm was probably not the first such disintegration, and neither was it the last. Some hope that the fragments of Ymir will one day be reunited and the ur-Realm reborn.’

‘Realms can collide as well as break apart,’ said Xol, levering himself up alongside Seth. ‘We refer to such collisions or disintegrations as Cataclysms. There have been several times of Cataclysm since the fall of Ymir — and other deii too, for as old power structures fail, new ones inevitably rise to take their place. New worlds demand new masters.’

‘Now I’m really confused,’ Seth said, glancing into Xol’s wide-set golden eyes. ‘What does this have to do with me?’

A pained expression flickered across Xol’s feral features. The spines down his back rippled. ‘A new Cataclysm is upon us. We must move carefully to avoid being overtaken by it.’

‘A new Cataclysm? How can you tell?’

‘I have seen it with my eyes. When you looked back at Bardo from the underworld, at the void between this realm and the First, do you remember what you saw?’

Seth did, vividly. The sky had been alive with meteors of every colour, raining down — or falling up, depending on one’s viewpoint — into the afterlife.

‘They were souls,’ he said, voicing a hunch he had barely dared think before. ‘The dead.’

Xol nodded. ‘There are many of them, and there will be many more. The First Realm is in turmoil. It will get worse before it gets better.’

‘Why?’

‘The current dei of the Second Realm has grown powerful on the souls of the dead,’ Agatha said. ‘Yod eats the ability to exercise will: the thing that makes us conscious living beings, in this realm; that allows us to see a goal and work towards it. Everything else — memories, personality, dreams — Yod tosses away, as you once threw scraps in the garbage.

‘Yod takes the will of the dead and becomes stronger as a result. Now it seeks more lives to consume, and uses every tool at its disposal to achieve this end. We are pawns in its game, destined to be devoured unless we defy its plan. And so we must resist, in order to save the realms from utter devastation.’

Seth wanted to object to Agatha’s use of the word ‘pawn’, still stung by her description of him as ‘nothing special’. But there was something else: having heard Xol mention Yod, the name of the Second Realm’s dei twice before this, it struck an even stronger chord now.

The Swede had said it, he was sure. Seth remembered the cold, translucent features looming over him in the train, the pain of his arms held firmly behind his back, the fear that Hadrian would be hurt.

(Then the knifepoint was suddenly swinging his way, and the Swede’s eyes tightened. ‘Det gor ingen skillnad till Yod.’)

Seth jerked at the memory of the knife-blow and the words that had accompanied it. Xol clutched Seth’s back as the pain swept through him, doubling him over, almost throwing him off the ledge and down into the jagged depths of the fault. A fear of falling suddenly gripped him. His body would tumble a long way before hitting the bottom. Each sharp edge or corner would be like another stab from the one who had sent him here.

‘Yod,’ he managed, through clenched teeth. His voice was a whisper matching the grimness of Xol’s face. ‘Yod sent the Swede. Yod was the one who killed me.’