Act 3, Chapter 119: Climbing up the throat

Day in the story: 1st February (Sunday), past 14:30 p.m.—approximately 1 hour and 51 minutes remain until the record time is lost

Elle Erikson

The elevator proved so thoroughly hostile that I didn’t even need to bring up my aversion to that particular mode of transportation to convince the team not to step inside. The moment we drew closer—keeping watch in case the hunter returned to find out what we tasted like—the doors slid open. A horrible, vomit-inducing stench poured from the shaft, followed by a barrage of fingers, each as large as one of Kito’s arms.

Kito, incidentally, was the first to react, slicing through them with the blades of his mantis-like forelimbs. Milo joined him a moment later, breaking most of the remaining fingers with several swings of his bat.

It quickly became clear that we wouldn’t be riding upward. Our only option was to climb over a surface of a shaft made of writhing tongues, which was exactly what we had been doing for the past three hours.

My birds circled through the air around us, vigilantly scanning the area for danger. Liora illuminated our path and assisted the birds, while a smaller swarm of bees belonging to Liana seemed to be doing much the same thing in some manner of its own.

Each of us was tethered to the other climbers by ropes I had woven from spider silk. Kito, half-transformed into something resembling an enormous beetle-man, moved at the front, clearing the way and supporting the weight of most of us as we hung below him.

“I have a bad feeling about this…” Patricia began, then paused to catch her breath.

Because of her larger size and the Authority that came from being a Seer—which did not strengthen her body nearly as much as the one granted by being a mage—she had struggled the most with the hours-long climb. It was because of her that we had taken breaks before, and why we were stopping again now, giving her time to recover and catch her breath.

Suspended mostly from the ropes attached to Piotr, she hung beneath him, allowing her arms to rest at her sides while her feet alone pressed against one of the tongues protruding farther from the wall.

Milo, meanwhile, hung with every muscle strained to its limit. His outstretched arms gleamed in the light of the shadowlight coating surrounding him, slick with sweat that acted like a prism, splitting his magic’s natural white glow into the more rainbow-like hues characteristic of my own.

“…tower,” Patricia finished. “We’ve been climbing for so long, and nothing has tried to eat us. Swallow us or do anything else. It’s very strange.”

“Patricia,” Liana said. “I feel the same way, but now that we’ve started climbing, we should finish it properly.”

While they chatted, I used the power offered by my Animation soulmark to direct a group of web-slingers moving through the shaft ahead of us. They had been working hard to anchor lines every few meters we climbed, ensuring that if any of us fell, we wouldn’t plunge all the way to the bottom but would instead be caught by one of the lines they had prepared.

Now, I guided them past Piotr to relieve some of the strain on him. The moment he felt his weight settle onto the secured lines, he allowed his arms to rest as well—but not before performing the step that was apparently the most important to him: checking whether his baseball bat was still wedged behind his back, beneath his shirt. It had been there for so long that his skin had probably gotten used to it and stopped registering it as a foreign object.

“We’re getting close to the ceiling,” I said, guided by the images relayed through the eyes I had placed on Liora and the birds. “At our current pace, we have about another hour of climbing left. I haven’t seen that centipede monster anywhere along the way, either. It looks like it fled somewhere else entirely.”

“Good news,” Laurent replied as he settled into the lines my spiders had just prepared for him. “My fingers definitely need a rest. I’m also never going to look at French kissing the same way again.” He glanced at his hands, slick with the saliva produced by all the tongues we had been climbing over, then flicked it off into the darkness somewhere below us.

“Just knowing you’re thinking about kissing under these conditions makes me feel even sicker than when that disgusting elevator opened,” Patricia replied. “Revolting.”

“Where’s your usual ‘men are pigs,’ Pat?” Milo asked with a quiet laugh. At some point during the climb, he had eased off his attempt to break the record, perhaps realizing that we weren’t going to make it—or perhaps still hoping we would, only in silence.

“Everyone knows it’s true. There’s no point repeating it.”

“It’s nice listening to you in a good mood,” Kito called from above. He was a good twenty-five feet above the rest of us and still climbing. He had taken the lead because the appendages his arms and legs had transformed into were well suited both for holding him against the wall and for cutting holes through the tongues all the way to the elevator shaft beneath them, creating handholds and footholds that allowed the rest of the team to keep climbing. He had already used three of the four pills he had brought with him. They reduced the strain the transformation placed on his body, allowing him to maintain it for longer. “We should get moving, as soon as you can.”

“Especially since there’s a solid ceiling waiting for us at the top. Liora and my birds haven’t found anything that could serve as a way through to the other side. We’ll have to make one ourselves.”

“Gladly,” Piotr replied me. “I’ve had enough of all this hanging around. How much longer can this go on? This isn’t the kind of glory I had in mind.”

“Do you think the catacombs will be any different?” Bastien asked, pushing off the wall of tongues behind him with his feet and swinging from the ropes suspended by my minions. “According to every explorer who went there and returned, as well as the maps they made and the journals found inside, the place is enormous. Most of our time will be spent traveling from one place to another, searching for routes, walking, swimming, climbing, and looking for food. This expedition will last for months, perhaps even years.”

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“Laurent, I’ll give you credit where it’s due. Nobody else could motivate people to abandon their former lives, come to another country, and wade through Nazi filth as part of their ‘training’”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“only to take whatever motivation was still somehow clinging desperately to my will and toss it down a garbage chute straight into a landfill. Man, that is not what we want to hear right now, even though we’re all perfectly aware of it.”

“Get ready!” I shouted at the top of my lungs as I saw the upper membrane separating us from whatever lay above tense and bulge upward. At the same time, through the eyes positioned nearby, I noticed the soft tissue opening in several places and drawing in air from the space surrounding the tower. “Another exhale is coming!”

The same event that had snuffed out the fire I had created earlier had already thrown us against the walls once during this climb. Thanks to our quick reactions and the ropes holding us, however, we had managed to maintain our positions.

Everyone around me tensed their arms, gripping whatever part of the walls they could reach and pressing their feet as hard as possible against whatever support they had. I took advantage of the spiderlike adhesion offered by my suit while directing my spiders above us, ordering them to wedge themselves into the gaps between the tongues.

A moment later, the openings in the taut membrane above us parted again, this time much wider, and the entire structure flexed in the opposite direction, exhaling an enormous mass of air down the shaft.

Liora assumed a form of pure shadowlight and, thanks either to that or to his usual lack of respect for any rules dictating his position in space, remained unmoved by the force that was determined to inform him he should be hurtling toward the ground at full speed.

My birds possessed neither his luck nor his stubbornness. They were hurled downward with such force and violence that they tore apart, returning all the Authority contained within them to me.

The wave reached us a moment later, flinging us against the walls like puppets on strings. Whenever the howl of the wind briefly died down, I could hear my companions groaning, but while the exhale continued, it was so loud and shrill that it sounded like a jet engine had been placed directly beside my ears. To make matters worse, everything reeked of the stale breath of someone who had never held a toothbrush in their life.

To survive the assault on my senses, I focused on two things.

The first was Ali-Ani, with whom Aleksandra was having a conversation in our Domain. Unfortunately, despite the successful combination of the intellect offered by Anansi and everything else forcibly extracted from the soul core, the resulting being possessed only fragmentary memories of her former life, despite being convinced that she was what Shadow Ali had been before becoming our source of magic.

Even those memories focused more on how she had felt and the principles by which she had lived than on specific events. She remembered that long, long ago, when she had first arrived at the orphanage, she had been visited by a man she now knew, thanks to us, as Penrose. Beyond that first visit, however, he had never set foot in the orphanage again, leaving her to fend for herself so she could focus on developing her artistic talent and nurturing her empathy for human suffering—something her life had provided no shortage of examples of.

The second thing I focused on was the Authority returning to me from my destroyed minions. Only now did I truly trace how the process worked, and what I found refused to leave me alone.

Authority was produced by the Psyche and used to fuel magic and the changes Alexandra imposed upon the Universe through her will. It functioned much like a muscle. Simple actions that required little effort placed only minor strain on that spiritual organ, allowing its condition to sustain them. Other actions, such as teleporting against another mage’s resistance or altering an Identity in opposition to someone’s will, demanded strength from the Psyche, straining it to a greater or lesser degree.

In my case, as with the other Personas, the Authority granted to us at the moment of our creation somehow also simulated the function of a Psyche, allowing us to use magic. Curiously, however, returning Authority replenished the reservoir we possessed, pouring that Authority back into it.

Alexandra had no such reservoir to my knowledge. All the will she created was released and distributed at the moment of creation. Where, then, did it return when something ceased to exist—or when she simply willed it back remained a mystery to be solved.

Generally, according to our current understanding, the soul consisted of the Anima, which served as its brain—the conscious and subconscious means of controlling magic; the Psyche, which we had only recently learned how to name; the Aura, which functioned as the soul’s senses; and shadowlight, which, for simplicity’s sake, could be treated as the soul’s physical body, allowing it both to sustain magic over great distances and to place it wherever we wished.

Perhaps, however, there were other organs responsible for things such as what happened to Authority when it returned to a mage. And if such organs existed, perhaps something could be done with Authority recovered in that way.

Unfortunately, the book on the fundamentals of shadowlight control that I had stolen from Eveline mentioned nothing of the sort. Neither had the Lebens.

“Hey,” I said once the wind died down. “Does anyone know what happens to Authority when it returns to a mage?”

Piotr spat out a piece of tongue he had somehow bitten from the wall he’d been thrown against. “I read about it somewhere once. I don’t remember what it’s called, but there’s some organ that metabolizes it into smaller components. Some of it is stored around the shadowlight and used alongside the Authority produced by the Psyche, sort of like fat reserves, while the rest is converted into essence, I think. I’m not sure. Why do you ask?”

“I was thinking about it to pass the time.”

“Let’s save this conversation for later,” Liana interrupted us. “Everyone accounted for?”

She called out to each of us in turn, and we all confirmed that we were alive and still safely secured. Then, as one, we resumed our climb.

**********

About fifty minutes later, my spiders were finishing the web that would serve as a floor for us to stand on safely, and one by one, we climbed down from the tower wall onto the hastily constructed platform.

When Patricia stepped onto it, she looked down and gripped Piotr’s arm tightly. A blush appeared on his face, and he hurriedly turned his head away from her, scratching it as he pretended to examine the support I had created.

“Good work, Elle. This is really sturdy,” he remarked casually. Then he bent down and ran a hand across the web, pulling himself free of Patricia’s embrace and causing her to lose her balance.

I caught her by the arm and helped her back upright.

Kito had waited patiently until the rest of us were safely above him, so he was the last to climb onto the web. Meanwhile, his sister used the ants she had sent across the ceiling to examine the membrane separating us from the next stage of our journey.

Laurent circled the elevator shaft we had just climbed through, undoubtedly wondering whether we could use it to reach the floor above.

“We could try tearing a hole through it, or wait for the next ‘breath’ and pass through the openings you mentioned,” Liana said to me.

“That tissue is about sixteen feet thick,” Liora replied. “Above it is a spacious chamber surrounded by something resembling an organic aquarium, filled with suspended liquid and strange shapes swimming inside it. In the center hangs something that looks like a pair of enormous human hands woven together. I flew through the walls of the chamber.” Everyone listened with complete attention, including Kito, who had just climbed onto the platform. “And it’s the final room in this place. There’s nothing beyond it, so whatever is up there is the end.”

“Pat, can you sense any particular energy coming from that place?” Liana asked, but Patricia shook her head.

“I’d be happy to make us a way through,” Piotr said, waving his baseball bat through the air.