Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

Alice Law set out to rescue her advisor’s soul from the Eight Courts of Hell.

She wanted the golden recommendation letter that opened every door. She wanted to be at the top of every pile. This meant Alice had to go to Hell, and she had to go today.

Peter never crowed or condescended, he was just guilelessly better than, and that made everyone feel so much worse.

“Half my remaining lifespan,” she said. Entering Hell meant crashing through borders between worlds, and this demanded a kind of organic energy that mere chalk could not contain. “Thirty years or so, gone. I know.”

What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.

Good jobs were vanishingly rare in academia. Alice very much wanted one. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself otherwise. She had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live. So the next morning after Professor Grimes’s death, once his body was discovered and all the dust had settled, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to begin researching ways to go to Hell.

She’d expected more tortured screaming, sulfur, and brimstone, but it turned out that perhaps the American theologists had been exaggerating. Meteorologically, Hell didn’t seem much worse than an English spring.

The trick of magick is to defy, trouble, or, at the very least, dislodge belief. Magick succeeds by casting confusion and doubt. Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.

All the ghost stories were wrong; hauntings were so rarely malicious. The dead only wanted to feel included.

This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional. “I’m sure it’s very nice below.”

She spoke as if in a dream, half-unaware of the words coming out her own mouth. “I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious.” “I know,” said Peter. Such heavy feet. Like dragging rocks. “And I think anything would be easier. Anything at all.” “There’s time for that.” Peter grasped her by the elbow; firm, but gentle. His voice was soft. “It’ll always be waiting, Law. But we’ve got things to do.”

Alice sat, chewed through a stick of Lembas Bread, and tried not to let her despair creep. Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair. Everything was always falling apart; nothing in lab went right; you couldn’t afford groceries, your cottage had a rat problem, all your instructors hated you, you were always one step away from flushing all your life’s work down the toilet. You shoved it to the side of your mind and went to sleep and deferred it all to tomorrow when your brain again functioned well enough to pretend.

talented magicians could create enchantments that lasted hours, even weeks in the case of Perpetual

But of course it was worth it. It was the only thing that was worth it. She had been fortunate to find a vocation that made irrelevant everything else, and anything that made you forget to eat, drink, sleep, or maintain basic relationships—anything that made you so inhumanly excited—had to be pursued with single-minded devotion.

All her life she had bumbled through social contact like the only actor who’d forgotten to look at the script. She had been the weird one, the troubled one, the one no one wanted to sit with. But they were all the weird ones here. And here no one punished you for caring too much, thinking too deeply. Here you could jump down any rabbit hole you liked, and everyone would tunnel down with you.

Alice didn’t find this so awful. Why wouldn’t everyone strip away the parts of their selves that caused them pain? She’d like to learn that trick, she thought. If she could sift through that mess in her head, pull out the files that kept torturing her, and burn them. Every small humiliation, every shred of guilt—if only she could unclutter her mind so that all that was left was the elements she wanted to keep: the burning core, the hunger for knowledge, the skills to gain it. You could achieve so much without the burdens of personhood. Who wouldn’t wash away the rest?

“What they wanted was to be better than everyone else,” said Elspeth. “And now they’ve got the chance to prove it. They get to go wrestling in the muck. Proving their might and vanquishing weaker minds. Every single day. They’re probably in paradise. The upshot is, Hell’s not so bad for the people who are in it. They’re exactly where they wanted to be.”

That the academy was sexist was such a boring truism that Alice was no longer disturbed by the fact.

Anyway, dying seemed perfectly acceptable on moral grounds. The best argument Socrates could make against suicide in the Phaedo was that mortals were like possessions of the gods, and that the gods would be irritated if one of their possessions freed itself from their mortal prison by self-destruction. The Christian injunction against suicide only seemed to be a reframing of that. But God’s interests did not seem relevant here. Probably her friends and family would be upset—her mind wandered vaguely to her parents in Colorado, sobbing as they hung up the telephone—but she could not imagine anyone would miss her that much. There simply didn’t seem much to go on for.

How could she explain it? What was devastating was not the touch—he had hardly been violent with her. No, what hurt was how easily he could reduce her to a thing. No longer a student, a mind, an inquisitive being growing and learning and becoming under him—but just the barest identity she had been afraid to be all along, which was a mere woman.

If she died, they would think she had failed.

What she knew was that she didn’t fear death anymore. She had seen the other side in that Escher trap, and like a child receiving her first flu jab, or emerging intact from the dentist’s office, she understood there was nothing much to fear. Death was just nothing. A twinge of pain, and that was it. And she had it better than any Shades, for she didn’t even have the afterlife to contend with. Only the vanishing of the self, and the end of all obligations.

“You may take confessions if freely offered. That is permitted. But if you wish to survive, remember this one rule about Dis. Never ask.”

Cerberus is the most exciting thing to happen down here.” Gradus looked so pleased with himself. “We hope he will trample us. We beg him to maul us.” “Why?” “Because it’s interesting,” said Gradus. “Pain is interesting, and you can bear anything as long as it’s interesting.” “But how—” “It’s all just sensations in the end, Alice Law. Pain or pleasure, mirror images of each other. And both preferable to dead time. Time crawls here. You do anything to feel.”

For here, without the distractions of hunger or exhaustion or a million mysteries trying to kill her, Alice realized she was facing down the greatest horror of all, and that was the agony of stony spaces. Where all was silent, and you could not run from the thunder of your mind.

Immortality here was no gift. Nothing was fleeting, precious, and so nothing was valuable. Not even thoughts, for none of their thoughts were original, but mere echoes of one another, everything they would ever be capable of thinking in a gilded box with the spotlight merely roving. Nothing added; no discovery, no delight. No growth here. Just withered stumps of time.

A dozen butterflies ringed the door, brilliant glowing things. They all fluttered aside when Alice reached for the trapdoor save for one, which lingered on the cellar door’s lock, its wings wafting gently. Alice stroked her finger along one wing. It was so velvety soft. The memory of a kiss. “Thanks, Elspeth,” she murmured. “I know.”

The world was full of so many things! Sunlight in college gardens; hall dinners of new potatoes in butter and herbs. Rain tapping the cottage rooftops; water pooling in the street, fat drops sending little ripples arcing about. Squishing boots, wet gloves, hot cups of tea, escaped leaves bobbing to the top. She could not believe she could have all those things back. It seemed too good a deal to be true, one little pomegranate tree for all the myriad blossoms in the world. How could she deserve life? Who ever deserved life? But you could not question such gifts. Elspeth had taught her this. There was no answer, only wondrous and inexplicable grace, and the only thing to do in return was simply to live. She took a breath. “Ready?” Peter squeezed her hand tight. “After you.” Alice climbed up, Peter close behind her. And together they emerged, to rebehold the stars.