Alma Katsu - The Descent

The man took a step toward me. “Don’t come any closer,” I warned.

He stopped, as I’d asked. “I won’t harm you, I promise. I just want to see if the rumors I’d heard were true . . .” Rather than draw back the cowl, however, he stretched a hand toward me. “It is true, isn’t it? I can feel him on you. I can feel his presence. You’ve been close to him recently.”

“Feel him?” I asked, confused. “What are you talking about? Feel whom?”

“Adair, of course,” the man said warmly. “He’s the reason the queen brought you to the underworld. He’s the reason I’ve been put in this hole. He is at the heart of all things.”

The man finally lowered the cowl and revealed his face. He was old and rough, silver-haired all over, down to his eyebrows and whiskers. He might not have been a demon but he had their same topaz eyes, and the combination of silver and orange-gold gave him a strange, glittering appearance. He sat on a rock, and indicated that I should take a seat on one of the others. The warm golden light continued to glow dimly around us, though I couldn’t tell where it came from.

“It’s magic,” the old man said, without my having to ask. “I may not be strong enough to levitate out of here, but I’d be a poor practitioner if I couldn’t keep a little light burning.” He rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair.

“Magic,” I repeated. I was still dazed from the fall and amazed to find myself in one piece. “Does that mean you’re a magician, too? Is that how you knew Adair back on earth?”

He squinted at me, puzzled, thinking for a minute before he burst out in a loud laugh. “Magician? You think Adair is a magician? You don’t know who he really is?”

“Magician, alchemist, take your pick.” He was making me a bit irritable, being so cryptic. “He’d tell you so himself.”

The old man howled in delight, rubbing his hands together. He even stamped his feet in glee, and he reminded me of that evil little troll in the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin.” “Oh, that is too much! Too much to be hoped for, too much to be believed! For that means it worked, don’t you see? What we tried to do, all those years ago—it worked, and worked to this day! Who would’ve thought?” His topaz eyes were gleaming at me now, as though I should understand what he was babbling about, as though we were conspirators.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not following you,” I told him.

“Of course you’re not,” he said, cackling like an old lady. He was so delighted that it seemed he’d temporarily lost his mind. “Because if you don’t know who Adair is, then you certainly don’t know who I am, or why I am in this hole, or why you should be talking to me at all.”

I was feeling more and more like Alice swallowed up by Wonderland. Maybe I had been hit on the head on my way down the shaft and was dreaming this. He smiled at me then the way you might smile at a curious child. “I could feel him on you—his presence,” the old man explained. “He leaves his mark on all of us who serve him. Don’t you know that, my dear?”

Of course I did—I carried his presence in my head, didn’t I? “So you’re one of his companions, too?” I asked curiously.

Everything I said seemed to delight him, and he laughed at me again. “My name is Stolas. I guess you might call me a companion, of sorts: I am Adair’s first servant, his original servant.” He hesitated, studying me closely. “I was his servant and his adviser, his emissary, too. And I had been with him for tens of thousands of years. Do you understand, now, what I’m telling you?”

Tens of thousands of years. The words were like a magic arrow that I watched pierce my skin and then go right through me as though I were a ghost. Of course I didn’t understand what he meant; he was speaking in impossibilities—and I didn’t want to believe him, I didn’t want to know.

His topaz eyes fell on me kindly. “Adair is the master here. This is his kingdom, and he is the lord. You understand me now, don’t you? The man you know as Adair is the king of the underworld.”

It is entirely possible that I fainted. When I opened my eyes, I saw Stolas’s face before mine, looking very concerned. He helped me sit up.

“You had no idea,” he said, marveling at my cluelessness.

“That’s an understatement,” I replied drily.

Stolas did his best to explain to me how Adair had ended up in the land of the living when he was, in actuality, the king of the dead. The first thing that occurred to me was that he had lied all along, lied to me for his own dark purposes. For that was the role of the devil, wasn’t it, to trick humans?

This question only drew another smile from Stolas. He lifted a finger to interrupt me. “First I must correct you for saying that the master is the devil”—Adair had become “the master” now—“because the devil is not the same thing as the king of the underworld. You are confusing the order of the cosmos with a religion. This has nothing to do with good and evil, right and wrong. The master is not in opposition to a deity. The master is a deity.”

“Are you telling me there is no God, then?” I asked, to which Stolas only frowned, as though I was impossibly thickheaded.

“There are many gods. If you are asking if there is the one above us, a lord of lords, the answer is yes. There is a father of the gods, but the master does not oppose him. The master is bound to uphold the order of the cosmos, as is the lord of lords. As are we all,” Stolas said with stiff dignity. “The master has a duty, which is to reign over the underworld. All souls pass through this way, and the process is as important as it is complicated. Equilibrium must be maintained between the lands of the living and the dead. It is a great responsibility.”

“You say it’s a great responsibility, and yet he gave it up,” I pointed out to him. “Why did he do it? What made him want to give up being a god?”

Stolas didn’t answer my question directly; as a matter of fact, he seemed intent on avoiding it. Instead, he began to tell me how this strange turn of events came about in the first place.

He confessed that he’d been quite surprised when the master came to him a thousand years ago and confessed that he wanted to leave the underworld. “No one had ever left before,” Stolas said with a shake of his old head, as though dismayed that anyone would have the audacity to try. After all, it was hell, or at least purgatory, in a manner of speaking. No one wanted to be there; everyone wanted to get out. “It was designed by the father of the gods to be inescapable.”

Having no idea how to leave, the master turned to his old and faithful servant Stolas, who, as it turned out, had served the father of the gods at one time. He had the answer Adair had been looking for. “It is well known that the only way out of the underworld is through the abyss,” Stolas said sagely, raising a finger to make the point.

“The abyss,” I echoed. It was a place I’d heard Adair speak of, though I knew now that he had no idea why it had haunted him.

No one had ever crossed the abyss, Stolas explained. Everyone who tried had failed and been sent hurtling back into the underworld. He’d been only to the foot of the abyss, a huge cliff rising up from the edge of the underworld, and knew to scale it was an impossible task. It seemed to reach all the way to the heavens, but there was no way of knowing, as the mountain disappeared in a bank of roiling black thunderclouds. Here, lightning flashed, and the wind raged and rain fell in icy sheets, making the ascent even more treacherous.

Before the master set off, he and Stolas agreed on two precautions. First, Stolas created the story of Adair’s mortal life, and used his magic to plant it in his master’s head, because, as Stolas explained, “You can’t carry knowledge of the underworld into the land of the living. It’s one of the safeguards made to keep the two worlds separate. Even if you managed to scale the abyss and find your way to the land of the living, you would enter in a state of complete amnesia because your memory would be wiped clean as soon as you crossed over.” Stolas planted new memories for Adair so he would believe he was a mortal man. It was the only way he could function on earth—and also, so he wouldn’t give himself away inadvertently. He could hide from the gods because he really believed he was a mortal. He would act like a mortal in every respect.

“So why did you make him believe he was a magician?” I asked. It seemed a risky interest for him to have, if he was supposed to be in hiding. “Why not make him a shepherd or a blacksmith, something with no connection to the afterlife at all?”

“For two reasons,” Stolas said. For one thing, even though Adair was crossing over to the world of mortals, that didn’t make him one, too. He was still a god and was coming to earth with all the powers he’d had in the underworld. “While he was on earth, he’d be one of the most powerful forces in the universe. He could have anything he wanted. Anything he wished for would come true,” Stolas said. “And if this happened, if he were to make some inexplicable thing happen, there was an explanation for it, you see: he was magician, a very good one at that. This would be his cover.”

“Jonathan knew this,” I said, putting the pieces together. “When Jonathan was brought back from the dead, he couldn’t tell Adair much—he was prevented from remembering, just as you said—but Jonathan told Adair that he had powers. He said Adair was more powerful than he knew.”

Stolas nodded. “And there was another reason, a sentimental one. You see, I planted the notion in his head that he should find a few others to make immortal so that they could be companions to him. He would be by himself in the mortal world for who knew how long, and I didn’t want him to be lonely, you see.”