The Crooked Letter (26 page)

Something moved across the sunset. Hadrian spied a lone bird flying parallel to the crossbar of the T-junction, its wings snapping with liquid strength. He thought nothing of it at first, until he remembered that every other bird in the city had either fled or been killed when the Cataclysm had begun. No planes or helicopters had flown either. He studied the bird with closer interest, then.

Kybele had seen it, too. She whistled piercingly, and the bird altered its course. It wheeled once around them, then dived.

The Bes scattered as it flapped heavily over them. Snapping feathers and tendons sounded like primitive drumbeats as it settled onto a blackened automobile frame and composed itself. Its back was impossibly broad and tapered down to a glossy, flawless tail. Black eyes studied them with naked intelligence over a wickedly sharp beak.

A raven, thought Hadrian, knowing little about birds, or a giant crow. Either way, it was clearly supernatural.

‘Kutkinnaku,’ said Kybele in greeting.

The bird dipped its head and croaked something in a harsh, guttural language Hadrian couldn’t understand.

‘Magnetic north is shifting,’ Kybele responded. ‘I feel it, too. Something’s on the rise — and if it’s not Baal. I don’t know what it is. What news of our enemy?’

The bird looked at Hadrian, then back to Kybele. It croaked again, finishing on a rising inflection.

‘You don’t have to worry about that. It’s being taken care of as we speak. Don’t you trust me?’

The bird emitted a tapering deep-throated raspberry.

‘Fine. You’ll see. Tell the others to be ready. The call will come by nightfall.’

The bird nodded. It shifted on its fire-scarred perch and, cocking its head toward the clouds building in the distance, uttered a sound very much like ‘tlah-lock’.

‘Yes, yes. I’m aware of it. It changes nothing.’

The bird shook its head, sceptical of Kybele’s claim, then shrugged in a distinctly avian fashion.

‘Go,’ she told it. ‘You’ve told me everything you can, and you have a long way yet to travel. But be careful. Mimir claims that the Swarm is stirring. If that’s true, then even the winged ones have reason to be afraid.’

The bird stared at her for a long moment. Clearly she had taken it by surprise. Its gaze shifted to Hadrian again, then to the tangled wreckage beneath it. For an awful moment, Hadrian thought it might jump down and pick a scrap from the body crushed within it: a glazed eye, perhaps, or a shrivelled ear.

Then its gleaming black eyes were back on him. ‘Don’t be fooled, boy,’ it said clearly, in English. ‘There is a third way.’

Startled, he could only stammer, ‘W— what —?’

Before Hadrian could manage more than that, the raven unfolded its wings and hopped into the air. Long muscles flexed; feathers cracked. With two mighty flaps, it was speeding away from them and gaining altitude. In seconds it had become a black dot shrinking against a sheer glass cliff face, then it vanished entirely.

Kybele watched it go with a thoughtful expression on her face.

‘What did it say to you?’ she asked him. He told her, and she shook her head. ‘I’ll have its feathers for a boa before this is over. Are you going to ask me how it could speak English?’

‘I guess I was wondering.’ The truth was that he had just accepted it, as he had accepted so many other things in recent days. His credulity was growing apace.

‘It wasn’t speaking English at all,’ she said. ‘You were understanding what it said because it wanted you to understand. And I couldn’t because it didn’t want me to. It — the process of understanding — is called Hekau.’

‘Magic again?’

‘Another aspect of the Second Realm creeping into the First. You’ll get used to it.’

That he was still unsure of. ‘What did he tell you?’

‘Nothing I didn’t already know.’

* * * *

When the cars and the bodies were cleared, Kybele paced out an area at the exact centre of the intersection, checking the landmarks around her and dropping angular, polished stones to mark specific points. Hadrian watched her, remembering what she had said once about ‘geometries of the Second Realm’ bleeding into the First. Was that all magic was? he wondered. Drawing shapes and bending reality around them?

The sky above steadily darkened. Through cracks between the buildings, Hadrian caught glimpses of the sun setting, deepening to a rich yellow and casting the approaching storm clouds a deep purple colour. He thought he saw flashes of lightning reflecting from the cloud tops. The occasional gusts of wind grew stronger, chasing parades of ash and dead leaves along the sidewalks. The gutters were full of detritus. He dreaded to think what a heavy shower would do to the tangled drains of the mega-city.

Kybele snapped her fingers and the Galloi joined her in her efforts. She muttered under her breath, chanting strange vowel-laden phrases as she traced a complex symbol on the tarmac. Hadrian didn’t know much about traditional magic, but he’d watched enough TV to know what he might see: circles and pentagrams marked out with chalk, coloured sand or blood; candles, ceremonial knives, herbs, skulls and Latin incantations.

Kybele’s chanting didn’t sound anything like Latin, and she had none of the other paraphernalia, yet he sensed a potency in her actions. Her every move lent weight to a growing conviction that, not only did she know what she was doing, but reality did too — and while it might not like bending to her will, it had no choice but to obey.

Slowly, glossy black lines began to appear in the tarmac, as though Kybele’s footprints, winding backwards and forwards, over and over, were melting it. The shape made by the lines was jagged and intricate, like nothing he’d ever seen. Large arrows and triangles pointed inward to an asymmetrical heart. It looked something like a mandala with a strange Amerindian aesthetic, or an absurd electrical diagram; combined with the shape of the intersection, the rhythm of Kybele’s words, and the darkness creeping over the city, it made him distinctly nervous. He knew better than to interrupt and ask what it was.

Finally she stopped. Breathing heavily, Kybele left the borders of the pattern — the lines of which were now glowing a dull red — and crossed to the car. Opening the boot, she lugged out a heavy canvas bag and placed it on the ground. It unrolled with a series of heavy metal clangs to expose a collection of metal rods ranging in size from the length of Hadrian’s forearm to Kybele’s full height. They were all roughly the same thickness — not much more than a thumb’s width across — and kinked at one end like an elongated L. The other end terminated in a blunt knob the size of a clenched fist.

The Bes crowded like eager children around Kybele’s bent form as she began handing them out, one by one. The Galloi took the largest and hefted it in one massive hand with the kink upwards. Hadrian noticed thin carvings wrapping around its smooth surface. Light stuck to them like water, giving them a faint silver sheen.

‘Here.’ Hadrian tore his gaze away and focussed on Kybele. She was offering him one of the metal staffs. ‘You’ll need this.’

He took it and was surprised by its lightness. It had the rugged, notched coldness of iron but the weight of aluminum. Reflected cloud-light danced as he turned it over in his hands. ‘What is it?’

‘A lituus. It has a name, but I’ll let it tell you about that.’

I’ll let it tell you
...? He shrugged, credulity still intact. ‘What does it do?’

‘It’ll save your life, if you allow it to.’

I am Utu,
said a silken voice in his head.
I am ready to serve you, my wielder.

‘You — what?’ Hadrian stared at the thing. ‘You can talk?’

I
can fight. We will fight together, you and I. And we will win.

Hadrian looked to where his hand gripped the metal staff. The glittering lines were spreading from the metal onto his skin, like silver veins. He almost dropped the staff in revulsion. Only the staff’s quick explanation halted the automatic impulse.

So I will not easily be lost in battle! To release me, simply let go.

He did so, experimentally, and the staff fell with a musical clang to the ground.

Kybele reached out with a staff of her own and nudged it back towards him. She had rolled the canvas away and stood in a ring of Bes with Hadrian slightly off-centre.

‘I said you’ll need it,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t joking.’

‘What for?’ he asked. ‘What’s happening?’
What does this have to do with Ellis?

‘Tlaloc’ It was the same word the raven had croaked. She indicated the thunderhead with the tip of her staff. ‘That isn’t an ordinary storm. We need to be ready — to fight, not to stand around discussing things. I’m calling for help, and it isn’t going to be easy.
Pick it up.’

The whiplash of command had him bending to wrap his hand around the cool metal staff before he consciously formed the intention to do so.

Do not be afraid,
said the staff.
I am with you.

‘Thanks,’ he said, backing away from Kybele. ‘I think.’

There is no need to speak aloud. Call me Utu. Wield me, and I will strike on your behalf. That is my purpose.

Hadrian pictured himself battering his enemies to death with a crowbar in his hands, and wasn’t reassured.

‘Right.’ Kybele was heading back toward the diagram she had drawn in the surface of the intersection. The Galloi strode, tall and impossibly solid at her side, bald head gleaming. The Bes moved as one with them, keeping perfect formation with lithe, miniature movements; there were now so many of them that it was difficult to keep count. The sun had set behind the buildings, and the sky above was dark with thunderclouds. Hadrian hesitated, but the Bes pushed him along, keeping him firmly inside their ring by means of shoves, linked arms, or pokes with their staffs.

They stepped onto the diagram. He could feel the power of it in his feet and calves, as though the ground was hot. The Bes shepherded him with Kybele and the Galloi into the central circle. There the heat, the power, was strongest. Dry, baked air made Hadrian sneeze twice, and the sound of it fell flat and echoless into nothing. He straightened and looked around, seeing properly for the first time how diagram and intersection were in harmony. One was drawn on the other, but it couldn’t exist without the other: two and three dimensions combined. Together they formed an elaborate pattern that interacted synergistically with the world around it. Flexing it.

Hadrian saw the landscape outside the circle as though through a heat-haze. The straight lines of buildings danced; the curves of kerbs fluttered; non-functioning traffic lights shivered in their concrete boots. Through the illusion, he thought he saw a number of insubstantial, white-clad forms encircling them, leaping and waving their arms. He didn’t know what they were, and was too afraid after Kybele’s admonishments to ask. They didn’t seem to be attacking, so he assumed that they weren’t a danger. Maybe, he thought, they had always been there and only in the presence of such concentrated magic could their presence be known.

Kybele took her staff and, in the exact centre of the circle, raised the kinked end of it above her head. The mantle of clouds gathered above flashed white. Lightning had struck somewhere nearby; a long roll of thunder treacled over him, agitating the heat-shimmers. Kybele kissed the handle of the staff, then lowered it knob-first to the ground. It slid into the tarmac like a key. The ground shook.

Rain began to fall, lightly at first, but with increasing urgency as the ground outside the circle buckled and split in a thousand places. Blunt hands groped up through shattered road, seeking purchase. Hadrian watched in horror as wet, glistening bodies squirmed up from the earth like maggots. Grey, brown and lime-white, one by one they clambered heavily to their feet, waving their fists and encircling the diagram. Hoarse voices, unused to the near-vacuum of the surface, bellowed. The noise of rent earth was like an avalanche to Hadrian’s ears: painfully loud and filled with the threat of violence. He put his hands over his head in a vain attempt to keep it at bay as, with one uncanny movement, all the creatures turned inward to glare at him and the others in their midst.

‘Who calls us?’ growled one, its face a series of vicious cracks on an ovoid boulder shot through with yellow.

‘I do,’ said Kybele, stepping forward with her staff out of the ground and upraised before her, ‘and you will obey me.’

‘Not without good reason,’ the creature responded. A gnarled fist stabbed the air.

Roaring deafeningly, the creatures rushed inward from all directions at once.

* * * *

‘Ye Creatures of Stone that walk the Earth, ye

Creatures of the Air that steal the Mind and

devour the Heart: what manner of World is this?

What Hope is there for Mankind?’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS,
FRAGMENT 30

he kaia turned out to be a tribe of skinny, childlike beings with pockmarked skin the colour of cooled lava and strange, oval-shaped eyes the same shade as their flesh. Seth was reminded of the aliens from the
X-Files
called Greys, except their heads were human-sized and instead of clothes they were adorned with brown, purple and gold threads. They congregated in a circular building half-buried in the foundations of Abaddon. Strange structures crowded in on all sides; the only access was through a tunnel consisting of sudden turns and sharp edges. Seth had to shuffle sideways through most of it to avoid banging his head. With his broad shoulders and splayed legs, Seth couldn’t imagine how Xol managed to pass unscathed. The dimane was the last one through the dimly lit passage.