The Crooked Letter (17 page)

‘So we just give in?’ Hadrian asked, reacting strongly to her fatalistic message. He wasn’t an animal; he didn’t feel shackled to any bestial code of conduct. Yet what she said made a dark kind of sense. He could understand in his head that the world might work the way she said it did, even though he had never suspected it in anything but his darkest fantasies. ‘We sit back and let Yod do this?’

‘Of course not. That would be stupid. We do what we must, as always, in order to survive.’

Too late for some,
he thought. The torn throats and bellies of the people in the cool-room reminded him of Lascowicz and the creature that had hunted him through the hospital.

We’re the good guys, Hadrian. We’re trying to save the world.

A lie, he thought. Hadrian was appalled at how easily he could accept what he was being told.

Kybele looked like an ordinary woman, but her mouth spouted extraordinary things. He wondered what his brother would have made of them. Would he accept the notion of different realms beyond the one he knew? Would he accept that a giant predator had grown fat and greedy on humanity and was ambitious for more? Would he accept that he and Seth were at the centre of this plan, somehow, although they had known nothing about it? Could he live with the knowledge that Ellis was nothing but collateral damage — an innocent bystander — to a plot she alone had seen coming?

‘Why me?’ he asked, forcing himself to try to understand. ‘Why us?’

‘Because of the bond you and your brother share. Yod is using it to bring the First and Second Realms together. You feel this. I know you do.

‘The denizens of the underworld may have tried to incapacitate Seth upon his arrival on Bardo’s far shore, and it may be that he is in Yod’s thrall even as we speak. But he’s definitely still alive. Yod wants him alive, so that the connection between the two of you will remain intact. It cannot be broken, even by death.’

Alive,
he thought, still unsure whether to be relieved by that thought. The truth wrapped him in a shroud. The idea that the relationship with his mirror twin — a relationship he had resented all his life — was being exploited to destroy the world galled him. On its shoulders, ultimately, rested the deaths of untold numbers of innocent people.

If Kybele was right, everyone in the city had been killed in order to punch a hole in the world he knew — a hole through Bardo to the afterlife — a hole large enough for a monster to squeeze through to finish off the rest of humanity.

If Kybele was right...

‘Locyta —’ The name brought sickening images of the knife slamming home, and of a severed head dropping heavily onto concrete. ‘He was working for Yod?’

‘He was charged with the task of killing one of you. It didn’t matter which one. I didn’t know who he had chosen until I found you.’

Hadrian remembered Kybele calling him “Seth” when they had first met. ‘And you were looking for me — why?’

‘Because everyone is.’

‘But I haven’t done anything. I’m not involved in this.’

‘You are, whether you want to be or not. The only way out is to kill yourself. I don’t know about you, but suicide has never been an option for me.’

Seth’s finger bone suddenly seemed to weigh tons where it lay tucked in his pocket. A fire began to burn in his belly. He felt sick. He had considered suicide many times in his life — his early teens had been a nightmare of self-doubt and self-loathing — but he had never attempted it, and he had certainly never been told by someone that it was an option he could seriously consider.

Tears coursed down his cheeks, and he did nothing to quench them.
Kill yourself and save the world.
It wasn’t a terribly heroic option.

‘I don’t want you dead,’ she said, ‘and I’m pretty sure you don’t, either, but I can tell you don’t entirely believe me. The only way to earn your trust is to — well, to earn it. To give you proof. And I will. Remember, I haven’t hurt you.’

He looked away, out into the darkened city, and wished he could get out of the car. The interior smelt strongly of aniseed. The Galloi behind him shifted position, provoking a loud creak from the seat. Hadrian wondered if the giant cared one way or another about the people who had died in the last forty-eight hours and those who might yet die if some way wasn’t found to stop Yod in its tracks.

He felt eyes on him. The Bes were staring at him from behind their identical pug noses.

He looked back to Kybele.

‘I’m talking about magic,’ she said. ‘Are you interested now?’

* * * *

They came to a junction between five major roads just as the sun was coming up. There they stopped. Kybele put the engine in neutral and the handbrake on. Doors opened in the rear, and the Galloi guided him out of the car. The giant remained mute, but made it perfectly clear that Hadrian had no option but to obey: one big hand pressed like a saddle on his shoulder.

The nearest of the roads stretched east with only a slight kink along its length, and Hadrian was able to view the dawn through a thicket of skyscrapers at the road’s end. Light echoed and refracted off canyon walls of glass and aluminum, throwing strange reflections in all directions and turning the facades of the buildings to blood.

Everywhere he looked he saw buildings. The city seemed to stretch forever, rising and falling in step with the underlying geography. The numberplates on the nearest cars proudly declared an American origin.

‘What city is this?’ he asked again, determined to get an answer this time. ‘I don’t recognise any of it.’

‘The old names and fealties mean nothing,’ Kybele said. ‘The city is in a fluid state, like the rest of the world. The ground is literally shifting underfoot. That’s what it means to be in a time of Cataclysm, Hadrian. As the geometries of the Second Realm bleed into the First, the usual boundaries blur; the logic and structure of dreams replace the material. We are, therefore, not in a specific city. We’re in
the
city, every city at once. Behind the names and the municipal borders, that’s what it has been for tens of thousands of years, and what it will remain until the Earth is a blasted cinder under a swollen sun.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, despairing at the number of times he had said or thought that phrase in the previous day.

‘Look behind you,’ Kybele said.

He turned. The intersection was deserted, like all the others. Abandoned cars and trucks lay in their dozens. Something large had come this way in the recent past and shunted them to one side. Several deep impressions marred the road’s smooth blackness as though wide, circular feet had planted themselves there while the rest of the creature rose up to look around.

But that wasn’t what Kybele was trying to show him. Her outstretched finger led his gaze up from the street to the building facing them, a narrow silver tower, two sides of which met in a wedge. Behind it was a giant glass and steel box that stabbed at the sky like an upraised middle finger. A stylised company logo at its top reminded Hadrian of the arcane symbol he had seen spraypainted at the bus stop the previous day.

On the side of the building, marring its perfect reflectivity, were two wide black rings with nothing at their hearts.

He shivered. They looked like eyes. The eyes of gods, fixed eternally on the rising sun. Although their stare passed over his head, suddenly he felt he was being watched.

‘Kerubim,’ said Kybele. ‘The invasion has begun in earnest.’

‘Are they dangerous?’ Hadrian asked.

‘Not now, but they will be.’ She breathed deeply as though tasting the air. The air was chilly and carried a faint tang of rot. Many clouds in a hundred different shapes and colours scudded across the sky. The last of the stars vanished into blue with the rising of the sun.

‘What do you want me to do?’ He assumed they had come to the intersection for a reason, not just to sightsee. The sooner they got down to it, the sooner they would find Ellis. That was the most important thing.

‘Be patient.’ Kybele reached into a pocket and produced a complicated brass instrument, reminiscent of an astrolabe crossed with a spray can. It had a handle which Kybele pumped in and out, making a soft clicking noise, and a glass tube that glowed a muted pink. There was a flared nozzle at one end. Kybele pointed it at the ground, at Hadrian, at the giant eyes she had called Kerubim and at random points in the air, pumping the handle all the while.

‘Yes. As I thought.’ She pumped a few more times before putting the device back into her pocket, apparently satisfied with what it had told her. ‘Come with me.’

Taking his hand, she led him across the empty intersection to its centre. The sun was creeping steadily to fullness as she positioned him facing it, shifting him to his left so he was exactly where she wanted him to be. Then she reached into her other pocket and took out a glass disc.

‘Good. Hold this and tap the ground beneath your feet with it. No,’ she said when he didn’t obey her commands exactly, ‘don’t step forward. Bend over right where you’re standing. Tap three times, times three. Nine times in all. Like this.’ She knocked on her knee.

‘Why?’

‘I said I’d show you some magic, remember?’

Hadrian eyed her sceptically, hefting the disc in his left hand. It was heavy, and when he shifted his gaze to it, he noticed faint carvings around its outer edge. They weren’t in any language he recognised.

He felt a sudden lightheadedness, as if everything around him was about to peel away and expose itself for the cheap rubber mask it had always been. What would lie behind it? A large part of him was afraid to find out.

‘Quickly,’ she said. ‘Dawn’s almost over.’

Crouching on the balls of his feet, he reached down and tapped the disc three times on the rough surface of the road. Nothing happened. Feeling like an idiot, he repeated the three knocks, then repeated them again.

He stood up and looked around. ‘Now what?’

‘Five ways converge in the shape of a sign that once symbolised the Second Realm,’ Kybele said. ‘And these five roads meet over a well that used to be the home of —’ She stopped. ‘Ah. Here he is. Come out and say hello, old one.’

Hadrian felt the air move about him. The movement came again, as if something large and invisible was sliding through him.

I
would not speak to you,
whispered an ancient, dry voice between his ears, making him jump.

‘No?’ Kybele chuckled. ‘I thought you’d be glad to be here. Glad to
be
at all.’

This is not your doing.
The air shifted again, and this time Hadrian caught the flat lines and planes of the buildings around him shifting slightly, like light bending through a lens. Reminded of the glass disc in his hand, he raised it to his left eye.

He gasped and almost dropped the disc. A monstrous head eight metres across had materialised in the middle of the intersection, and he was standing inside it.

You haven’t the will to reunite the realms,
the voice said. Hadrian turned, seeing the head’s exterior bulging around him. There were two ears swept back like bat wings. The nose was broad and hooked like a beak. The wide mouth was filled with spade-like teeth. The eyes — Again Hadrian jumped. The eyes, although he was seeing them from the inside, were looking right at him.

‘My god,’ he breathed.

‘Not a god,’ hissed Kybele. ‘Remember what I told you about that.’

This one has much to learn,
said the creature.
He calls me but asks nothing.

‘The young of today — and many of the old, too — have forgotten the way things used to be,’ Kybele said. ‘It has been a long time since you last gave any advice.’

I have slept.
The air itself seemed to age as the creature strained it through its translucent lips and teeth.
The time between Cataclysms is an eternity of nothingness.

‘I thought you’d be grateful for company, then.’ Kybele nudged Hadrian with a sharp elbow. ‘Go on. Ask!’

‘What should I ask?’ he ventured, wondering for a feverish moment if he was about to be granted three wishes.

That is not a question I can answer. Is there nothing your heart desires to know?

‘Where’s Ellie? Is my brother okay?’

I know nothing of these people.

Hadrian swallowed his disappointment. ‘What happened to the people in the city?’

They were sacrificed to Yod.

That accorded with what Pukje had said. ‘Everyone in every city?’

Yes.

‘What about the people outside?’

The world is in a chaotic state. Many forces are stirring.

‘Does that mean they’re alive?’

For the moment.

Hadrian was glad to learn that he wasn’t the last person alive on the planet, although his relief was short-lived.

‘What about Lascowicz? Do you know where he is?’

He is seeking you. The Swarm stirs at his call.

‘What’s the Swarm?’

They are hunters. They wake as I do, now the Cataclysm is upon us.

Hadrian glanced at Kybele. Her expression was very serious.

‘What can I do to stop Yod invading the First Realm?’

You can do nothing in this realm. Only the Sisters can grant that which you desire.

‘How do I find them, whoever they are?’

All roads lead to Sheol, in the end.

Kybele’s hand came down on Hadrian’s shoulder.

‘Gibberish as always,’ she said to the ghostly head. ‘I thought the years in blackness might have sharpened your sight, but you’re as useless as ever.’

I speak the truth,
said the creature, its monstrous head turning slightly to focus its eyes on her.
You know it as well as I.

She made an exasperated noise and took the glass disc from Hadrian. The rising sun caught it, casting a dancing rainbow ring across the black surface of the road. Without it, Hadrian could no longer see the head, but he could feel its form turning agitatedly in the air around him.