The Descent

Along with the road that led to its high walls, St. Catherine's was falling into disrepair. De l'Orme had listened to the scandalized abbot tell how a number of the monks had turned idiorhythmic, acquiring property in the now-abandoned tourist village, eating meat, putting icons and mirrors and rugs in their monastic apartments. Such corruption led to disobedience, of course. And what was a monastery without obedience? Even the shapeless bramble tree in St. Catherine's courtyard, said to be Moses' burning bush, was dying.

De l'Orme drew a lungful of the evening breeze, breathing the incense like oxygen. He could smell an almond tree nearby, even now, in winter. Someone was growing a small pot of basil. And there was a sweet odor, ever so faint: the bodies of dead saints. Anthropologists called it second burial, this practice of disinterring their dead after several years and adding the bones and skulls of monks to the monastery's collection. The enamel house was jokingly called the University. The dead go on teaching through their memory, so went the tradition. And what will you teach them, Thomas? de l'Orme wondered. Grace? Forgiveness? Or a warning against the darkness? Evening vespers was beginning. Remarkably, a caged parakeet had been allowed into the courtyard. Its song matched the monks' Kyrie eleison, the notes of a tiny angel.

At moments like this, de l'Orme longed to return to the cloth, or at least to the

hermit's cell. If you let it be just as it was, the world was a surfeit of riches. Hold still, and the entire universe was your lover. But it was too late for that.

Santos arrived in a Jeep that rattled on the corrugated dirt. He disturbed a herd of goats, you could hear the bells and scurry of hooves. De l'Orme listened. Santos was alone. His stride was powerful and wide.

The parakeet stopped. The Kyrie eleisons did not. De l'Orme let him find his own way.

After a few minutes, Santos put his head inside de l'Orme's chamber. 'There you are,' he said.

'Come in,' said de l'Orme. 'I didn't know if you'd make it before nightfall.'

'Here I am,' said Santos. 'And look, you have our supper. I brought nothing.'

'Sit, you must be tired.'

'It was a long trip,' Santos admitted.

'You've been busy.'

'I came as quickly as I could. Is he buried, then?'

'Today. In the cemetery.'

'It was good?'

'They treated him as one of their own. He would have been pleased.'

'I didn't like him much. But you loved him, I know. Are you all right?'

'Certainly,' said de l'Orme. He made himself rise and opened his arms and gave Santos an embrace. The smell of the younger man's sweat and the barren Mosaic desert was good. Santos had the sun trapped in his pores, it seemed.

'He led a full life,' Santos sympathized.

'Who knows what more he might have discovered?' said de l'Orme. He gave the broad back a tap and they parted the embrace. De l'Orme sat carefully on his three-legged wooden stool. Santos lowered his satchel to the floor and took the stool de l'Orme had arranged on the far side of the table.

'And now? Where do we go from here? What do we do?'

'Let's eat,' said de l'Orme. 'We can discuss tomorrow over our meal.'

'Olives. Goat cheese. An orange. Bread. A jug of wine,' Santos said. 'All the makings for a Last Supper.'

'If you wish to mock Christ, that's your business. But don't mock your food,' de l'Orme said. 'You don't need to eat if you're not hungry.'

'Just a little joke. I'm famished.'

'There should be a candle, too,' said de l'Orme. 'It must be dark. But I had no matches.'

'It's still twilight,' said Santos. 'There's light enough. I prefer the atmosphere.'

'Then pour the wine.'

'What could have brought him here, I wonder,' said Santos. 'You told me Thomas had finished with the search.'

'It's clear now, Thomas was never going to be finished with the search.'

'Was there something here he was looking for?' De l'Orme could hear Santos's puzzlement. He was really asking why de l'Orme had instructed him to come all this way.

'I thought at first he had come for the Codex Sinaiticus,' de l'Orme answered. Santos would know that the Codex was one of the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament. It totaled three thousand volumes, only a few of which still remained in this library.

'But now I think otherwise.'

'Yes?'

'I believe Satan lured him here,' de l'Orme answered.

'Lured him? How?'

'Perhaps with his presence. Or a message. I don't know.'

'He has a sense of theater, then,' Santos remarked between bites of food. 'The

mountain of God.'

'So it appears.'

'You're not hungry?'

'I have no appetite tonight.'

The monks were hard at work in the church. Their deep chant reverberated through the stone. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy. Domine Deus.

'Are you crying for Thomas?' Santos suddenly asked.

De l'Orme made no move to wipe away the tears flowing down his cheeks. 'No,' he said. 'For you.'

'Me? But why? I'm here with you now.'

'Yes.'

Santos grew quieter. 'You're not happy with me.'

'It's not that.'

'Then what? Tell me.'

'You are dying,' said de l'Orme.

'But you're mistaken.' Santos laughed with relief. 'I'm perfectly well.'

'No,' said de l'Orme. 'I poisoned your wine.'

'What a terrible joke.'

'No joke.'

Just then Santos clutched his stomach. He stood, and his wooden stool cracked on the slabs. 'What have you done?' he gasped.

There was no drama to it. He did not fall to the floor. Gently he knelt on the stone and laid himself down. 'Is it true?' he asked.

'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'Ever since Bordubur I've suspected you of mischief.'

'What?'

'It was you who defaced the carving. And who killed that poor guard.'

'No.' Santos's protest was little more than a respiration.

'No? Who, then? Me? Thomas? There was no one else. But you.'

Santos groaned. His beloved white shirt would be soiled from the floor, de l'Orme imagined.

'It is you who have set about dismantling your image among man,' he continued. The respiration threaded up from the floor.

'I can't explain how you were able to choose me so long ago,' said de l'Orme. 'All I

know is that I was your pathway to Thomas. I led you to him.'

Santos rallied, for the space of one breath. '...all wrong,' he whispered.

'What's your name?' asked de l'Orme. But it was too late.

Santos, or Satan, was no more.

He had meant to keep his vigil over the body all night. Santos weighed too much for him to lift onto the cot, and so when the air grew cold and he could not stay awake any longer, de l'Orme wrapped the blanket around himself and lay on the floor beside the corpse. In the morning he would explain his murder to the monks. Beyond that, he didn't care.

And so he fell asleep, shoulder to shoulder with his victim. The incision across his abdomen woke him.

The pain was so sudden and extreme, he registered it as a bad dream, nothing to panic about.

Then he felt the animal climb inside his chest wall, and realized it was no animal but a hand. It navigated upward with a surgeon's dexterity. He tried to flatten himself, palms against the stone, but his head arched back and his body could not retreat, could not, from that awful trespass.

'Santos!' he gasped with his one and only sac of air.

'No, not him,' murmured a voice he knew. De l'Orme's eyes stared into the night.

They did it this way in Mongolia. The nomad makes a slit in the belly of his sheep and darts his hand inside and reaches high through all the slippery organs and drives straight to the beating heart. Done properly, it was considered an all but painless death.

It took a strong hand to squeeze the organ to stillness. This hand was strong.

De l'Orme did not fight. That was one other advantage to the method. By the time the hand was inside, there was nothing more to fight. The body itself cooperated, shocked by the unthinkable violation. No instinct could rehearse a man for such a moment. To feel the fingers wrap around your heart... He waited while his slaughterer held the chalice of life.

It took less than a minute.

He rolled his head to the left and Santos was there beside him, as cold as wax, de l'Orme's own creation. His horror was complete. He had sinned against himself. In the name of goodness he had killed goodness. Year upon year he had received the young man's goodness, and he had rebuked and tested it and never believed such a thing could be real. And he had been wrong.

His mouth formed the name of love, but there was no air left to make the word.

To a stranger, it might have seemed de l'Orme now gave himself to the sacrifice. He gave a small heave, and it drove the arm deeper. Like a puppet, he reached for the hand that manipulated him, and it was a phantom within the bones of his chest. Gently he laid his own hands above his heart. His defenseless heart.

Lord have mercy. The fist closed.

In his last instant, a song came to him. It surged upon his hearing, all but impossible, so beautiful. A child monk's pure voice? A tourist's radio, a bit of opera? He realized it was the parakeet caged in the courtyard. In his mind, he saw the moon rise full above the mountains. But of course the animals would wake to it. Of course they would offer their morning song to such a radiance. De l'Orme had never known such light, even in his imagination.

Beneath the Sinai Peninsula Through the wound, entrance. Through the veins, retreat.

His quest was done.

In the nature of true searching, he had found himself. Now his people needed him as they gathered in their desolation. It was his destiny to lead them into a new land, for he was their savior.

Down he sped.

Down from the Egypt eye of the sun, in from the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own human image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death. Their presence had become the world, and their presence was the presence of jackals that strip the muscle from your legs even as you try to outrun them.

The earth closed over him. With each twist and bend, it sealed shut behind him. It resurrected senses long buried.

Solitude! Quiet! Darkness was light.

Once again he could hear the planet's joints and lifeblood. Stirrings in the stone.

Ancient events. Here, time was like water. The tiniest creatures were his fathers and mothers. The fossils were his children. It made him into remembrance itself.

He let his bare palms ricochet upon the walls, drawing in the heat and the cold, the sharp and the smooth. Plunging, galloping, he pawed at the flesh of God. This magnificent rock. This fortress of their being. This was the Word. Earth.

Moment by moment, step by step, he felt himself becoming prehistoric. It was a blessed release from human habits. In this vast, capillaried monastery, through these openings and fretted spillways and yawning chthonic fistulae, drinking from pools of water older than mammal life altogether, memory was simply memory. It was not something to be marked on calendars or stored in books or labeled in graphs or drawn on maps. You did not memorize memory any more than you memorized existence.

He remembered his way deeper by the taste of the soil and by the drag of air currents that had no cardinal direction. He left behind the cartography of the Holy Land and its entry caves through Jebel el Lawz in the elusive Midian. He forgot the name of the Indian Ocean as he passed beneath it. He felt gold, soft and serpentine, standing from the walls, but no longer recognized it as gold. Time passed, but he gave up counting it. Days? Weeks? He lost his memory even as he gained it.

He saw himself and did not know it was himself. It was in a sheet of black obsidian. His image rose up as a black silhouette within the blackness. He went to it and laid his hands on the volcanic glass and stared at his face reflecting back. Something about the eyes seemed familiar.

Onward he hurtled, weary, yet refreshed. The depths gave flesh to his strength. Occasional animals provided him the gift of their meat. More and more, he witnessed life in the darkness, heard its chirps and rustling. He found evidence of his refugees and, long before them, of hadal nomads and religious travelers. Their markings on the walls filled him with grief for the lost glory of his empire.

His people had fallen from grace, steeply and deep and for so long they were hardly aware of their own descent. Yet now, even in their emptiness and misery, they were being pursued in the name of God, and that could not be. For they were God's children, and had lived in the wilderness long enough to wash their sins into amnesty. They had paid for their pride or independence or whatever else it was that had offended the natural order, and now, after an exile of a hundred eons, they had been returned to their innocence.

For God to continue punishing them was wrong. To allow them to be hunted into extinction was a sacrilege. But then, from the very beginning, his people had challenged the notion that God ever showed mercy. They were his lie. They were his sin. It had always been a false hope that God might deliver them from His own wrath into love. No, deliverance had to come from some other soul.

The dead have no rights.

– THOMAS JEFFERSON, near the end of his life

25

PANDEMONIUM

January 5

The end began with a small thing Ali spied on the ground. It could have been an angel lying there, invisible to all but her, telling her to be ready. Not missing a step, she landed her foot on the message and crushed it to bits. It was probably unnecessary. Who else would have read so much in a red M&M?

Not much later, while crouched awkwardly in the shadowy nook designated their latrine, Ali discovered another red candy, this time lodged in a crack in the wall above their sewage. Squatting above the pool of muck, her wrists roped tight by the mercenaries, Ali could still get the fingers of one hand down the crack. Expecting a note, she felt a hard, smooth knob. What she slid from the stone was a knife, black for night work, with a blood gutter and utilitarian weight. Even the handle looked cruel.

'What are you doing in there?' the guard called. Ali slipped the knife into her clothing, and the guard returned her to the little side room that was their dungeon. Heart knocking in her ears, Ali took her place beside the girl. She was afraid, but joyous. Here was her chance.

And now? Ali wondered. Would there be another sign? Should she cut her ropes now or wait? And what did Ike think she was capable of? He had to know there were limits. She was a woman of God.

Three mercenaries stalked ten feet apart through the terracotta army surrounding the spire. 'This is a waste of time,' said one. 'He's gone. If I was him, I'd be gone.'

'What are we doing anyway, stuck here? The colonel wants more fight?'

'It's a deathwatch, man. He wants us to hold his hand while he rots. And the whole time we're feeding prisoners. I didn't see no grocery on the way in.'

'The best target's the one standing still. We're just beautiful, man. Sitting ducks.'

'My very thoughts.'

There was a pause. They were still feeling one another out.

'So what's the word?'

'Desperate times, man. Desperate measures. The colonel's eating our time. The civilians are eating our food. And the dying are dead. It's called limited resources.'

'Makes sense to me.'

'So who else is in?'

'You two make twelve. Plus the mope, Shoat. He won't let go of the code for his homing device.'

'Give me an hour with Shoat, I'll give you his code. And his mama's phone number.'

'You're wasting your time. He gives that up, he knows he's dead. We just have to wait until he activates the box. Then he's dog food.'

'When do we do it?'

'Pack your toothbrush. Soon, real soon.'

'Ow,' barked one. 'Fucking statues.'

'Be glad they ain't real.'

'Hang on, girls. What have we here?'

'Coins! Look at this.'

'These are handmade. See the cut edges? They're old.'

'Fuck old. This stuff's gold.'

'About time. And there's more this way.'

'And over here, too. About time we found some booty.'

The three separated, plucking coins from the ground with all the elegance of chickens in a yard. They worked farther and farther apart from one another.

Finally the one with a backward Raiders cap got down into a duckwalk with his rifle across his lap, which freed both hands to snatch at the treasure. 'Hey, guys,' he called,

'my pockets are full. Rent me some space in your rack.'

Another minute passed. 'Hey,' he yelled again, and froze. 'Guys?' His hands opened. The coins dropped. Slowly he reached for his rifle.

Too late, he heard the tinkling of jade.

The Chinese had a special word, ling-lung, to describe the musical jingling that jade jewelry made as aristocrats walked by. There was no telling what the hadals might have called it twenty eons earlier. But as the statue next to him came alive, the sound was identical.

The mercenary started to rise. The proto-Aztec war club met him on the downstroke. His head popped clear with surgical neatness. Obsidian really was sharper than modern scalpels. The statue shed its jade armor and became a man. Ike socketed the club back into its terra-cotta hands, and hefted the rifle. Fair exchange, he thought.

The mutineers carried the rafts down to the sea and loaded them with the expedition supplies. This was done in full view of their commander, whom they had bound into a wire cocoon and hung raving from the wall. 'Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the vengeance of God,' he shouted at them.

In their side room the prisoners could hear Walker. Love, not vengeance, thought Ali, lying on the floor. The colonel had it wrong. The quotation was Romans, and it had to do with the love of God, not His vengeance. A moot point.

Their guard left to help load the getaway vessels. He knew the civilians weren't going anywhere.

The time had come. Ike had given her all the advantage he could. She was going to have to improvise from here on.

Ali drew out the knife.

Troy lifted his head. She laid it against her wrist bonds and the blade was sharp. The rope practically disintegrated. She rolled to face Troy.

Spurrier heard them and looked over. 'What are you doing?' he hissed. 'Are you crazy?'

She flexed her wrists and shoulders and got to her knees to unravel the wire leashing her neck to the wall.

'If you make them mad, they won't take us with them,' Spurrier said. She frowned at him. 'They're not taking us with them.'

'Of course they are,' Spurrier said. But she had shattered his hope. 'Just wait.'

'They'll be back,' Ali said. 'And we don't want to be here.'

Troy had the knife, and went over to Chelsea and Pia and Spurrier.

'Get away from me,' Spurrier said.

Pia grabbed Ali's hands and pulled her close. She stared at Ali, eyes wild. Her breath smelled like something buried. Beside her, Spurrier said, 'We shouldn't make them mad, Pia.'

'Stay, then,' Ali said.

'What about her?' Troy was kneeling by the captive girl. Her eyes were on his, unwavering, watchful.

The girl might bolt for the entrance or start screaming or even turn on her liberators. On the other hand, leaving her was a death sentence. 'Bring her,' said Ali.

'Leave the tape on her mouth, though. And keep her hands tied. And the wire around her neck, too.'

Troy had the knife blade under her rope, ready to cut. He hesitated. The girl's eyes flickered to Ali. Tinged with jaundice, her eyes were catlike. 'You keep her tied, Troy. That's all I'll say.'

Spurrier refused to escape. 'Fools,' he hissed.

Pia started out the door, then turned back. 'I can't,' she said to Ali.

'You can't stay here,' said Ali.

'How can I leave him?'

Ali grasped Pia's arm to pull her, then let go.

'I'm sorry,'. Pia said. 'Be careful.' Ali kissed her forehead.

The fugitives stole from the room into the interior fortress. They had no lights, but the walls' luminescence fostered their progress.

'I know a place,' Ali told them. They followed her without question. She found the stairs Ike had shown her.

Chelsea was limping badly from whatever the mercenaries had done. Ali helped her, and Troy helped the girl. At the top of the stairs, Ali led them through Ike's secret entrance into the lighthouse room.

It was dark in the room, except for one tiny flame. Someone had pried open the floor vault and emptied it. And left a single clay lamp burning. Ali lowered herself into the vault, and helped Chelsea descend. Troy lowered the captive girl. Ali was surprised at how light she was.

'Ike's been here,' she said.

'It feels like a tomb,' said Chelsea. She had started shivering. 'I don't want to be here.'

'It was a storage vault with jars,' Ali said. 'They were filled with oil. Ike's taken them somewhere.'

'Where is he now?'

'Stay here,' she said. 'I'll find him.'

'I'll go with you,' said Troy, but reluctantly. He didn't want to leave the girl. He had developed some kind of obsession with her during the past few days. Ali looked at Chelsea: she was in terrible shape. Troy would have to stay with them. Ali tried to think the way Ike would.

'Wait in here,' she said. 'Keep low. Don't make any sounds. We'll come back for you when it's safe.'

The tiny flame lit their drawn faces. Ali wanted to remain here with them, safe with the light. But Ike was out there, and he might need her.

'Take the knife,' Troy said.

'I wouldn't know what to do with it,' Ali said.

She cherished Troy's and Chelsea's looks of hope. 'See you soon,' she said.

Their rafts rocked on the seiche. You couldn't feel or hear the tremors, but deeper designs were stirring the sea with swells. The food and gear were lashed with muleskinner knots. They had the chain gun mounted, the spotlights on. It was going to be heavy going for eleven men, but their cornucopia promised months of sustenance and would lighten as they exited.

Half of the soldiers waited on the rafts while half went back to tidy up. They had drawn straws for the wet work. It was disgusting to them that Shoat asked to watch. You didn't leave witnesses alive, not even the walking dead. Long before they died of starvation, any one of the survivors might pen some damning deposition. Things like that could haunt you. It might be ten years before any colonist found this fortress, but why risk the testimony of ghosts? That was what had confounded them about the colonel. He'd treated this as a calling, when all along it was just a crime.

They worked from front to back and kept it professional. Each of their wounded comrades got a well-placed mercy shot behind the eyes. Walker they left alive, strung to the wall, babbling scripture. Fuck him. In a million years, he wasn't going anywhere.

All that remained were the civilians in the side room. Two entered. 'What's this bull?' one shouted.

Spurrier looked up, shielding Pia. 'They ran away. We could have gone with them,'

he said. 'But look, we stayed.'

'Dumb fuck,' the other soldier said.

They rolled two fragmentation grenades into the room and hugged the outer wall, then hosed what was left with a clip each. They returned to the front room. It was quiet, now that the wounded had finished pleading. Only Walker still moaned.

'That sucked,' said one of the mercenaries.

'You ain't seen nothing yet,' Shoat said. He was just finishing inserting another of his homing capsules into the wall.

'What are you talking about?'

'Visualize whirled peas,' Shoat said.

'Hey, Shoat,' called another. 'Why keep stringing those homers? We ain't ever coming back this way.'

'He who plants a tree, plants posterity,' Shoat pronounced.

'Shut up, mope.'

They watched from just below the water. Others occupied the heights, camouflaged with powdered rock, stone-still. Their composure was reptilian. Or insect. A matter of clans. Isaac had arranged them just so.

Had the mercenaries thought to illuminate the cliffside, they might have detected a faint pulse, the ripple of many lungs respirating. Their lights on the water simply ricocheted off the oscillating surface. The humans thought they were alone.

The party of executioners appeared at the fortress gate, in no hurry. They walked with heavy legs, like peasants at the end of the day. Until you've done it, you have no idea: Killing is a form of gravity.

'Vengeance will be mine,' Walker's mad voice bellowed from the fortress.

'Have a nice day,' someone muttered.

The flicker of fire coruscated through the doorway. Someone had started a bonfire with the last of the scientists' papers.

'We're going home, boys,' the lieutenant called to his men as he welcomed them.

The lance that impaled him bore a beautiful example of Solutrean Ice Age technology. The flint blade was long and leaf-shaped, with exquisite pressure flaking and a smear of toxic poison milked from abyssal rays.

It was a classic impalement, driving straight up from the water and penetrating the lieutenant's anus precisely, pithing him the way, long ago, the lieutenant had readied frogs in junior high school science lab.

No one suspected. The lieutenant stayed erect, or nearly so. His head bowed slightly, but otherwise his eyes stayed open, the smile pinned wide.

'Made in the shade, Lewt,' one of the soldiers replied to him.

Down at the far end of the line of boats, a shooter called Grief sat straddling the rubber pontoon. He heard a sound like oil separating and turned and the sea was sliding open. There was just enough time to see a wall-eyed happy face before he was seized and pulled under. The water sealed shut above his heels.

The mercenaries spread out across the sand, angling for different boats beached along the shore. Two carried their rifles by the handle-sight. One draped his, cruciform, across his shoulders.

'Let's go, pendejos,' called one of the boat men. 'I can feel their ghosts.'

It was said that Roman slingers could hit a man-sized target at 185 meters. For the record, the stone that cored Boom-Boom Jefferson was slung from 235 meters. His neighbor heard the watermelon-like thump through Boom-Boom's chest wall, and looked to see the once-notorious center for the Utah Jazz stiffen and drop like a huge tree deciding it was time.

Ten seconds had passed.

'Haddie!' cried the neighbor.

They'd been through this before, so the surprise was not surprising. They knew to react with no thought, to simply pull the trigger and make noise and light. They had no targets yet, but you didn't wait for targets, not with the hadals. In the first few moments, firepower was your one chance at jumbling their puzzle pieces and turning the picture around.

And so they fired at the cliff walls. They fired at the sand. They fired at the water. They fired at the sky. They tried not to fire on one another, but that was the collateral risk.

Their special loads gave spectacular results. The Lucifer rounds struck rock and shattered into splinters of brilliant light, July Fourth with intent to kill. They plowed the sand, blew up the water in arcing gouts. High overhead, the ceiling sparkled with lethal constellations, and bits of stone rained down.

It worked. Haddie quit. For a minute.

'Hold fire,' yelled a man. 'Count out. I'm one.'

'Two,' yelled another.

'Three.'

There were only seven left.

The mercenaries closest to the boats raced downshore. Three forged back toward the fortress through molasses-thick sand.

'I'm hit.'

'The lieutenant's dead.'

'Grief?'

'Gone.'

'Boom-Boom?'

'Is it over? Did Haddie leave?' This had been the pattern for weeks, hit and run. The hadals owned the night in a place where night was forever.

'Fucking Haddie. How'd they find us?'

Huddled just inside the fortress gate, Shoat took in the scene and converted the odds. He had not quite left when the attack began, and saw no reason to announce his good health. He touched the pouch containing his homing device. It was like a talisman to him, a source of comfort and great power. A way to make this dangerous world vanish.

With a few simple taps on the keypad, he could eliminate the threat altogether. The hadals would turn into illusions. But so would the mercenaries, and they were still useful to him. Among other things, Shoat didn't enjoy paddling. He held his apocalypse pouch and considered: Use you now or use you later? Later, he decided. No harm in waiting a few minutes more to see how the dust settled out there. It seemed the hadals might have driven home their point, so to speak, and boogied back into the darkness.

'What should we do?' shouted a soldier.

'Leave. We got to leave,' yelled another. 'Everybody get onto the boats. We're safe on the water.'

Several of the rafts were drifting unmanned. The chain gunner was paddling his own boat back to shore. 'Let's go, let's go!' he shouted to three comrades crouched against

the fortress wall.

Uncertain, the three landbound men stood and peered around for any more ambushers. Seeing no one, they snapped fresh clips into their rifles and tried to prepare themselves for the sprint. The soldiers in the boats kept waving at them to come along.

'A hundred meters,' one of the trapped mercenaries estimated. 'I did that in nine-point-nine once.'

'Not in sand you didn't.'

'Watch me.'

They offloaded their packs and shed every extra ounce, their grenades and knives and lights and inflatable vests.

'Ready?'

'Nine-point-nine? You're really that slow?' They were ready.

'Set.'

A woman's cry fell upon them from the highest reaches of the fortress. Everyone heard it. Even Ali, winding her way down through the fortress, stopped to listen, and knew that Troy had disobeyed her.

The mercenaries looked up. It was the feral girl, leaning from the window of the tower overlooking the sea. With the tape pulled from her mouth, she unleashed a second call from deep in her throat. Her ululation echoed upon them. It felt like their own hearts lifting across the waters.

She could have been calling to the earth or the sea. Or invoking God. As if summoned, the sand came to life.

Ali reached a window in time to see.

Midway between the fortress and the water, a patch of beach bulged and grew into a small mountain. The hump rose up and took on the dimensions of an animal. The sand guttered from its shoulders and he became a man. The mercenaries were too astounded to lay waste to him.

He was not muscular the way an athlete or bodybuilder is. But the flesh on him stretched in ropy plates. It seemed to have grown on his bones out of need, and then grown some more, with little symmetry. Ali stared down at him.

His bulk and height and the silver bands on his arms evinced pedigree of some sort. He was imposing, as tall as most of the mercenaries, even majestic. For an instant she wondered if this barbaric deformity might not be the Satan she was seeking.

The mercenaries' spotlights fixed his details for all to see. Ali was close enough to recognize him as a warrior simply from the distribution of his scars. It was a forensic fact that primitive fighters classically presented their left side in battle. From foot to shoulder this barbarian's left hemisphere showed twice the old injuries as his right. His left forearm had been sliced and broken from parrying blows. The calcific growth sprouting from his head had a fluted texture, and the tip of one horn had been snapped in battle.

In his right hand he carried a samurai sword stolen in the sixteenth century. With his ferocious eyes and earth-painted skin, he could have been one of the terra-cotta statues inside the fortress keep. A demon guarding the sanctum. Then he spoke, and it was London-accented. 'Will you beg, lad?' he said to his first kill. She had heard this voice over the radio. She had seen Ike's eyes grow wide at the remembrance of him. Isaac shook the sand from his body and faced the fortress, oblivious to his enemies. He searched the heights, dragging masses of air in through his nostrils to catch a scent. He smelled something. Then he called back to the girl, and there was no question what was happening.

They had stolen the beast's daughter. Now hell wanted her back.

Before the soldiers could pull their triggers, the trap closed. Isaac leaped on the first

soldier and snapped his neck.

The main raft pitched upward and dawdled on edge, its occupants windmilling into the black water.

More lances harpooned up through the raft floors, and a desperate man machine-gunned his own feet.

Spotlights slewed. Strobes auto-activated.

Obsidian hailed down on hadals and humans alike. The last of Walker's outfit faced their own weapons here and there, taken from their dead comrades over the past months. Those who could figure out the safety mechanisms and triggers wreaked as much havoc on their own kind as on the soldiers. Many simply used the rifles as clubs. The three soldiers trapped near the fortress tried for the doorway, but hadals pounced from the walls and blocked their way. Backed against the wall, one bellowed

'Remember the Alamo!' and his partner, a macho from Miami, said, 'Fuck the Alamo, viva la Raza,' and nailed him through his brainpan. The third soldier shot the gang-banger on principle, then sucked the barrel and triggered his last round. The hadals were properly impressed by the suicides.

Out on the water, the chain gun hosed arcs of light into the black horizon. When the belt feed finally jammed, the lone last gunner grabbed a paddle and set out across the sea. In the silence that followed, you could hear his dogged flight, stroke by stroke, like the beating of wings.

Inside the fortress, Colonel Walker was feasted upon alive. They didn't bother cutting him down from the wall, but simply carved pieces off while he raved scripture.

High in the honeycombed fortress, Ike raced in search of Ali. The minute he'd heard the wild girl cry out, he'd started his race. Still dripping water from his hiding place at the edge of the sea, he sprinted up stairs and down corridors.

He might have known Ali would use his knife to free the others. Of course a nun wouldn't know when to let well enough alone. If only she had done as he'd meant and left the others hog-tied to their fates, her disappearance would have been immaculate. This storm of hadals would have swept through like a summer shower. They would have had their washing of spears, then gone on and left Ike hidden with Ali, none the wiser. Instead the People were now combing this cliff structure, hunting for their property, that feral girl. They would not stop until they got what they wanted, he knew, and that would include Ali now. One way or another, that girl would betray her, no matter what kindness Ali had shown her.

He had to find Ali first, and take it from there.

The hadal assault had been crystallizing for days. In their ignorance, Walker and his mercenaries had failed to see the signs. But tucked in a cubbyhole in the cliffs, Ike had been watching hadals arrive almost from the hour Walker landed, and their strategy was clear. They would wait for the soldiers to begin departing on boats, and during the transition from land to sea, they would attack. Anticipating all of that, Ike had arranged diversions and scouted hiding places and selected what parts of the human depot he wanted for himself. In addition to Ali, he wanted two hundred pounds of military rations and a raft. They didn't need more. Two hundred pounds would feed her to the surface. And he would live off the land.

Ike's one hope was his disguise. The hadals did not know he was operating on their fringe, dressed like them, in powdered rock and ochre and rags of the human enemy. For months he had been eating as they ate, harvesting creatures of all kinds, feeding on the meat, warm or cold, raw or jerked. He had their smell now, and some of their strengths. His spoor was hadal spoor. His sweat tasted like hadal sweat. They would not be looking for him. Yet.

He reached the tower stairs and dashed to the top. Embellished like the savage,

rigged with war gear, all but naked, Ike burst into the room.

Chelsea was perched in the window, legs out, waiting as if for a bus ride.

To her, what entered was a hadal beast. Chelsea tipped herself outward just as Ike yelled, 'Wait!' In the final instant she heard him.

'Ike?' she said. But there was no getting back from gravity what she had given. She tumbled from the window.

Ike didn't waste a second glance. He went straight to the vault in the floor, and it was empty. Ali had left. Troy and the girl were nowhere to be seen.

The great circle was wrapping him again. That was the way. Everyone had a circle. He had lost a woman once, and now was losing Ali. Was that his fate, to play Orpheus to his own heart?

He had almost surfaced from the maze with Ali, and now the maze was beginning all over again. God help me, he thought. He looked down, and it seemed that the new labyrinth was growing from his feet, extending in Daedelian twists, his next million miles. Start from scratch, he told himself. It was the old paradox. He had to lose his path in order to find it.

Ali had left no clues. He looked. No footprints. No blood trail. No blaze marks with her fingernails.

He ranged the room, trying to get a sense of things. Who had been here. When. What had motivated their leaving. Little came to him. Maybe she had taken Troy and the girl with her, though it seemed unlikely Ali would have left Chelsea alone. It came to Ike. Ali had gone searching for him.

The realization was not immaterial. It meant Ali would be looking for him in places she thought he might be. If he could anticipate her guesswork, then he might yet find her. But the prospect was bleak. She wouldn't know to look in the cliffside pockets, two hundred feet off the deck, or in his hideout, burrowed among sand worms and tuber clams. She'd be looking throughout the fortress, now swarming with hadals.

Ike weighed his options. Discretion was safer, but a waste of precious time. He could creep and steal through the building, but this was a race, not hide-and-seek. The only alternative was to reveal himself and hope she would do the same.

'Ali!' he yelled. He went to the doorway and shouted her name and listened, then went to the window and shouted again.

Far below, hadals crouching around their human windfall glanced up at him. The boats were being stripped. Supplies were being looted. Rifles were chattering in long, random bursts, all for the noise and fireworks.

Some of the bigger mercenaries were under the knife, he saw, providing impressive strings of meat that would be cured over heat sources or pickled in brine. At least two had been captured alive and were being bound for transport. Chelsea's body was in use by a pack of skinny fighters pretending she was a live captive. Clan leaders often gave deceased property to their followers as a vicarious experience, a way of amplifying their own prestige.

There were a good hundred or more hadals on the beach, probably that many more wending through the fortress proper. It was a huge number of warriors to bring together in one place. Already Ike had counted eleven different clans. They had laid their trap well; it suggested a knowledge of humans that was extraordinary.

Ike darted his head out the window. Hadals were scaling the fortress face, all merging toward him. He took quick, careful aim at the amphorae he had strung along the fortress crown, and fired three times, each time rupturing a clay vessel and igniting its oil. In sheets of flame, the oil poured down the wall. The hadals scrambled right and left on the vertical face. Some jumped, but several were caught in the first phase.

The blue flames curdled down the stone in diminishing streams. A storm of arrows and stones rattled against the wall outside his window. Some arced inside. He had

their attention now.

Ike could hear more scurrying up the tower stairs, and calmly stepped to the doorway. He put a single shot through the mass of amphorae roped above the landing. Oil from twenty jars gushed down the stairs, a cataract of fire. Hadal screams guttered up.

Ike went to the rear window and called Ali's name again. This time he saw a single tiny light working down the corkscrew trail, a half-mile deep. That would be human, he knew. But which human? He reached for his stolen M-16. He'd shot the clip dry, but its sniperscope still worked. He thumbed the On switch and swung it through the depths and found the light. It was Troy down there, with the feral girl. Ike smeared his cheek against the rifle stock. Ali was nowhere to be seen.

That was when he heard her.

Her echo seemed to rise up inside his skull, and through the flames in the landing and from deep within the building. He put his ear against the stone. Her voice was still vibrating, coming through the walls.

'Oh, dear God,' she suddenly groaned, and his heart twisted in his chest. They had her.

'Just wait,' she pleaded. This time her voice was more distinct. She was trying to be courageous, he knew her. And he knew them.

Then she said something that froze him. She spoke the name of God. In hadal.

There was no mistaking it. She placed the clicks and glottal halt and words just right. Ike was stunned. Where could she have learned that? And what effect would it have? He waited, head tight against the stone.

Ike was wild with fear for her. He was helpless here. He had no idea where she was, on the floor below or in some deeper room. Her voice seemed to be coming from throughout the fortress. He wanted to run in search of her, but didn't dare leave this one sweet spot on the wall. He lifted his ear, and her voice ended. He set it back on the planed stone, and she was there again. 'Here,' she said. 'I have this.'

'Keep talking,' he murmured, hoping to unravel her location. Instead she started playing a flute.

He recognized that sound. It was that bone flute Ike had discarded months ago on the river. Ali must have kept it as a memento or artifact. Her effort was little more than a few toots and a whistle. Did she really think that would speak to them?

'Well, Ike,' she suddenly said. But she was talking to herself. Saying good-bye. Ike got to his feet. What was happening?

He rushed to the opposite window as a group emerged from the gateway. Ali was in their center. As they crossed the beach, she was tied and limping, but alive.

'Ali,' he shouted.

She looked up at his voice.

Abruptly a simian shape reared up in the window, toes scraping for purchase on the sill. Ike tumbled backward, but it had him, ripping long furrows with its nails. Ike pulled the pink sling across his chest and slid his shotgun underarm, from back to hand, and pulled the trigger.

When he saw her again, Ali was on one of the rafts, and not alone. The raft was moving away from the beach, drawn from beneath by amphibians. She sat in the prow, looking up at him. Ali's captor turned to follow her glance, but was too distant for Ike to identify. He reached for the night scope and panned across the water, in vain. The raft had passed around the cliffside.

That was all Ike had time for.

He was the last of their enemy, and they were climbing the walls to get him. Quickly now, Ike fished above the window. The primacord lay where he'd tucked it in a niche. Stealing a demolition kit from the mercenaries had been disgracefully simple. He'd had days to place the C-4 and hide the wires and rig the heavy jars of oil. With two

deft motions, he spliced the leads to the hell box and gave the handle a sharp twist and a pull-out and a push-in.

The fortress seemed to melt in upon itself. The amphorae of oil erupted like sunlight along the crown of the building, even as the crown shattered to rubble.

There had never been such pure golden light in this benighted cavity. For the first time in 160 million years, the chamber became visible in its entirety; and it was like the inside of a womb, with the matrix of stress fractures for veins.

Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her, wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. That put a smile on her face. In death, he had become the light. Then the darkness heaved in again, and the figure was not Ike but this other mutilated being, and Ali was more afraid than ever.

Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me. Amen.

– MARTIN LUTHER, Speech at the Diet of Worms

26

THE PIT

Beneath the Yap and Palau Trenches

She had been stalking him for two days, gaining insights as long and winding as the trail into the great pit. The human was limping. He had a wound, possibly several. Time and again he exhibited fear.

Was he in true flight or not, though? She didn't know this human well. In the brief moments she'd seen him in action, he'd seemed more adept than the others. But outwardly he appeared to be wearing down. The tortuous path was catching up with her, too.

She licked the wall where he had leaned, and his taste quickened her decision. She still lacked information, but was hungry, and his salt and meat were suddenly too tempting. She gave in to her stomach. It was time to make the kill. She began to close the gap.

It took another day of careful pursuit. She nursed their distance, careful not to startle him. There were too many hunter tales of animals taking fright and bolting into some abyss, never to be retrieved. Also, she didn't want to run him any more than necessary. That wasted the energy in his flesh, and already she considered his flesh hers.

Finally they reached a squeeze, where boulders had all but choked the passage. She saw him puzzling over the jumble of stone, watched him spy the hole near his feet. He

got down and wormed into the pass. She darted forward to hamstring him while his legs were still exposed. As if anticipating her, he drew his legs in quickly. She lowered the knife and squatted down, waiting while his sounds diminished as he went deeper. At last it grew quiet in there, and she knelt and thrust herself into the opening. The stone felt slightly soapy and amphibian from so many bodies, hadal and animal, slithering through. She prided herself for being nearly as quick horizontally as on her feet. In childhood races through such narrow passages, she had usually won.

The squeeze passage was longer than she'd thought, though not as long as some, which could go on for days. There were legends about those, too. And ghost stories, of whole tribes snaking their way into a thin vein, one behind the other, only to reach the feet of a skeleton that bottle-necked the tunnel. She had no qualms about this one: there was too much fresh animal smell for it to be a cul-de-sac.

The passage tightened, and there was an awkward kink sideways and up. It was the kind of bend that took a contortionist shift. Every now and then she'd encountered these puzzles, where your knees or shoulders might pop out of joint if the move wasn't carefully rehearsed. She was limber and small, and even so it took two false starts to decipher the move. She torqued through on her back, surprised that the larger man had made it through with such facility.

She emerged, knife first.

She was just clambering to her feet when he stepped from behind. He dropped a rope around her throat and pulled. She slashed backward, but he kneed her in the spine and that flattened her. He was fast and strong, noosing her wrists and elbows and cinching the rope tight.

The capture took ten seconds. It was accomplished in complete silence. Only now did she realize who had been stalking whom. The limp, the awkward visibility, the fear

– all a ploy. He'd offered himself as a weakling, and she'd fallen for it. She started to screech her outrage, only to taste the rope across her tongue as he finished gagging and trussing her.

It occurred to her that he might be a hadal disguised with human frailties. Then she saw by the faint light of the stone that he was indeed a human, and was indeed wounded. By his markings she read that he had been a captive once, and immediately knew which one. From their legends, she recognized the renegade who had caused so much destruction to her people. He was renowned. Feared and despised. They considered him a devil, and the story of his deception was taught to children as an example of estrangement and disorder.

He spoke to her in pidgin hadal, his clicks and utterances almost impenetrable. His pronunciation was barbaric, and his question was stupid. If she understood correctly, the traitor wanted to know which way the center lay, and that alarmed her, for the People could scarcely bear more harm. He gestured downward in the direction they were already headed. Thinking he might be lost, and could be made more lost, she calmly indicated the opposite direction. He smiled knowingly and patted her head – an egregious if playful insult – and said something in his flat language. Then he tugged at her leash and started her down the trail.

At no time in the mercenaries' captivity had the girl been very concerned. She had been alone among them, and that was like being a shadow to your own body. Her life was simply a part of the greater sangha, or community, and without the sangha she was essentially dead to herself. That was the way. But now this terrible enemy was bringing her back to life, back into the People's midst, and she knew he meant to use her against the sangha in some way. And that would be worse than a thousand deaths.

Ike had spent a week finding the girl, and then another week baiting her. Where the trail led, he could only guess. But she had seemed set on following it, and so Ike

trusted it somehow led to where he wanted to go.

For seven months he had been gathering evidence of the hadals' diaspora. Stop, open your senses, and you could feel the whole underworld in motion, almost as if it were draining into a deeper recess. This deepening pit, he felt certain, was that recess. It was reasonable to think it might lead to the center of that mandala map they had found in the fortress. Somewhere down here must lie the hub of all subterranean roads. There he would find an answer to the riddle of the People's vanishing. There he would find Ali. With the girl in hand, Ike felt ready at last to proceed.

Knowing she would try to kill herself rather than abet his invasion, Ike searched the naked girl twice. He ran his fingers along her flesh and found three obsidian flakes embedded subcutaneously – one along the inside of her bicep, the other two on her inner thighs – for just such an emergency. With the knife, he made quick incisions just large enough to extrude the tiny razor blades and rid her of those options.

This was the hostage he'd needed, but also she was a hadal captive who, like himself, had managed to thrive among the hadals. Ike studied her. Virtually every human prisoner he'd encountered down here had been sickly and demented and merely waiting for use as pack animals, meat, or sacrifice, or to bait other humans down. Not this one. As much as one could command her own destiny, she commanded. Thirteen years old, Ike guessed.

The girl was not as imposing as she looked. In fact, she was almost slight. Her secret lay in her stately presence and wonderful self-sufficiency. Ike saw the clan marks around her eyes and along her arms, but didn't recognize the clan. Clearly she had been raised a hadal from early on.

Just as clearly she had been cultivated for important breeding. Her breasts were immaculate and unpainted, two white fruits standing out from the accumulation of tribal symbols covering the rest of her body. In that way, suckling infants were granted peace for their first month or so of life. With time the child would begin learning the way by reading her mother's flesh.

Over the past two weeks he had watched her purify herself with blood and water repeatedly, washing the mercenaries' sins off her body. She smelled clean, and her bruises were healing quickly.

Her only other possession besides the obsidian blades was her trail food, a poorly cured forearm and clawed hand with the Helios wristwatch still attached. Much of the good meat was gone. She'd been getting down to the bone. Ike had passed the rest of Troy twelve days ago.

His own watch had been ruined in the destruction of the fortress, so he took this one. It was January 14 at 0240 hours, not that time had relevance anymore. The altimeter read 7,950 fathoms. They were over nine miles below sea level, deeper by miles than any recorded human descent. That in itself was significant. For the depth itself held promise of a hadal ark, or stronghold.

Much the way Ali and her handlers – that Jesuit and his bunch – had hypothesized a centralized hadal warlord through sheer deduction, Ike had been piecing together a primary refuge to closet all the vanished hordes. They had to have gone somewhere. It wasn't likely they had scattered to multiple hiding places, or armies and colonists would have been straying across them. He had seen a rendezvous of several clans once, a matter of a few dozen hadals squatting in a chamber. The meeting had lasted many days while they told stories to one another and exchanged gifts. It was a cyclical event, Ike had figured out, part of a nomadic seasonal round dictated by the availability of food or water along an established route.

He'd learned in the Himalayas that there were circles within circles. The circle, or kor, around the central temple in Lhasa, for instance, lay within the kor around the whole city, which lay within the kor around the whole country. He was more than ever convinced that hadals adhered to some ancient kor down here, a circle that

revisited some traditional asylum or ark.

The fortress had strengthened his theory with its antiquity and its obvious purpose as a way station along a trade route. Above all, the assault on the fortress had sealed his hunch. Against such a small group of human marauders, the hadals had mounted an attack in unusually abundant numbers. More important, they had attacked with an extraordinary variety of clans. Haddie was massing down here in a place they meant to keep secure, a place as old as their racial memory.

And so, rather than return to the sea and try to track Ali's captors at a disadvantage of weeks, Ike chose to keep descending. If he was right, they would all be meeting sooner rather than later, and now he wouldn't be showing up empty-handed. In the meantime, whether it was days or months or years, Ali would need to use her wits and inner strength to survive without him. He could not spare her from what he had suffered at the beginning of his captivity, and he could not afford despair, so he tried to make his memory blank. He tried to forget Ali altogether.

One morning, Ike woke dreaming of Ali. It was the girl, though, her arms bound, straddling him, kneading him through his pants. She was offering herself for his pleasure, her body ripe, chest high. Her loins moved sinuously in a figure-eight, and Ike was tempted, but only for a moment.

'You're a good one,' he whispered with genuine admiration. The girl used every advantage, every means. And she utterly despised him. That had been young Troy's downfall, his inability to see past his infatuation. The boy had succumbed to this same seduction, Ike was sure, and that had meant his end.

Ike lifted the girl to one side. It was not her blatant manipulation or her menace that gave him pause, or his dream of Ali. Rather, the girl was familiar to him somehow. He had met her before, and it unsettled him, because it must have been during his captivity and she would have been a young child. But he couldn't remember such a child.

Day by day, they plunged deeper. Ike remembered the geologists' belief that a million years ago a bubble of sulfuric acid had blossomed from the mantle and ravaged these cavities into the upper lithosphere. As they wended into the vast, uneven pit, Ike wondered if this might not have been the very avenue that acid bloom had cut in rising up from the deeps. It appealed to the mountaineer in him, the physical mystery of it. How deep could this pit be? Where did the abyss become unbearable?

The girl finished the arm bone. Ike located a nest of snakes, and that gave them food for another week. A stream of water joined their trail one day, and thereafter they had fresh water. It tasted like the abyssal sea, which suggested the sea leaked into this pit as it was fed by higher rivers.

At 8,700 fathoms – almost ten miles deep – they reached a ledge overlooking a canyon. The stream of water joined others and became a waterfall that leaped into freefall. The stone was shot through with fluorines, providing a ghostly luminescence. They were standing at the rim of a hanging valley, partway up the wall. Their waterfall was one of hundreds threading the walls.

Their path snaked across the shield of olive stone, carved into solid rock, where the natural fissures gave out. Chunks of enormous stalactite bridged a section. Iron chains traversed blank spots.

The climb down took all of Ike's attention. The pathway was old and bordered by a precipice falling a thousand feet to the floor. The girl decided this was her opportunity to terminate the relationship. She abruptly pitched herself off the edge, body and soul. It was a good effort and almost took Ike over with her, but he managed to pull her kicking and thrashing back to safety. For the next three days he had to be on constant guard against any further such episodes.

Near the bottom, fog drifted in big ragged islands, like New Mexico clouds. Ike thought the waterfalls must be feeding the fog. They came to a series of broken

columns forming a sprawling course of polygonal stairs. Each column had snapped off at a ninety-degree angle, exposing neat, flat tops. Ike noticed the girl's thighs trembling from the descent, and gave her a rest.

They were eating little, mostly insects and some of the shoots topping reeds that grew by the water. Ike could have gone scavenging, but chose not to. Progress aside, he was using the hunger to make the girl more pliable. They were deep in enemy territory, and he meant to get deeper without her setting off any alarms. He figured hunger was kinder than tightened ropes.

The sound of waterfalls pouring from the walls made a steady thunder. They moved among fins of rock that sliced the fog and menaced them with false trails. They passed skeletons of animals that had grown exhausted in the maze.

The fog had a pulse to it, ebbing and flowing. Sometimes it lowered around their heads or feet. It was only by chance that Ike heard a party of hadals approaching through one such tidal bank of fog.

Ike wasted no time bulldogging his prisoner to the ground before she could make any trouble. They stretched flat, bellies to the stone, and then for good measure he climbed on top of her and clamped one hand over her mouth. She struggled, but quickly ran out of breath. He settled his cheek onto her thick hair, and his eyes ranged beneath the ceiling of fog. Its cold mass hung just inches above the stone.

Suddenly a foot appeared by Ike's head. It seemed to reach down from the fog. He could have grabbed the ankle without reaching. Its toes were long. The foot gripped the stone floor as if shoveling gravity. The arch had flattened wide over a lifetime of travels. Ike looked at his own fingers, and they appeared thin and weak next to that brute testament of cracked and yellow nails and veined weight.

The foot relinquished its hold upon the earth as its mate set down just ahead. The creature walked on, soft as a ballerina. Ike's mind raced. Size sixteen, at least.

The creature was followed by others. Ike counted six. Or seven. Or eight. Were they searching for him and the girl? He doubted it. Probably it was a hunting party, or interceptors, their stone-age equivalent of centurions.

The padding of feet stopped not far ahead. Soon Ike could hear the hadals at the site of a kill, cracking sticks. Bones, he knew. By the sound of it, their prey had been larger than hominid. Then he heard what sounded like strips of carpet being torn. It was skin, he realized. They were rawhiding the dead thing, whatever it was. He was tempted to wait until they left, then go scavenge the remains. But while the fog held, he got the girl on her feet and they made a broad arc around the party.

The panels of stone grew wild with aboriginal scrawl, old and new. The hadal script

– cut or painted ten thousand years ago – overlaid images overlaid on other images. It was like text foxing through text in old books, a ghost language.

They continued through the labyrinth, Ike leading his hostage by the rope. Like barbarians approaching Rome, they passed increasingly sophisticated landmarks. They walked beneath eroded archways carved from the bedrock. The trail became a tangle of once smoothly laid pavers buckled by eons of earth movement. Along one untouched portion, the path lay perfectly flat, and they walked for half a mile upon a mosaic of luminous cobbles.

Among these fins of rock, the thunder of waterfalls was muted. The canyon floor would have been flooded if not for canals that cleverly channeled the water along the sides of their path. Here and there the acequias had broken down with time and they waded through water. For the most part the system was intact. Occasionally they heard music, and it was water passing through the remains of instruments that were built into the walkway.

They were getting close to the center, Ike could tell from the girl's apprehension. Also, they reached a long bank of human mummies bracketing the trail.

Ike and the girl made their way between them. What was left of Walker and his men

had been tied standing up, thirty of them. Their thighs and biceps had been ritually mutilated. They looked barrel-chested because their abdomens had been emptied. The eyes had been scooped out and replaced with marble orbs, round and white. The stone eyes were slightly too large, which gave them a ferocious, bulging, insect stare. Calvino was there, and the black lieutenant, and finally Walker's head. As an act of contempt, they had laced Walker's dried heart into his beard for all to see. If they had respected him as an enemy, it would have been eaten on the spot.

Ike was glad now that he'd starved his prisoner. At full strength, she would have presented a serious challenge to his stealth. As it was, she could barely walk a mile without resting. Soon she could feast and be free, he hoped. And Ali – the visitor in his dreams each night – would be restored to him.

On January 23, the girl attempted to drown herself in one of the canals, leaping into the water and wedging her body under an outcrop. Ike had to drag her out, and it was almost too late. He cut the rope gag and finally got the water out of her lungs. She lay limp by his knees, defeated and ill. Exhausted by their battle, both rested.

Somewhat later she began singing. Her eyes were still closed. It was a song for her own comfort, sung softly, in hadal, with the clicks and intonations of a private verse. At first Ike had no idea what it was, her singing was so small. Then he heard, and it was like being shot through the heart.

Ike rocked back on his heels, disbelieving. He listened more closely. The words were too intricate for his small lexicon. But the tune was there, scarcely a whisper:

'Amazing Grace.'

The song sent him reeling. It was familiar to her, and beloved, he could tell, as it was to him. This was the last thing he had ever heard from Kora, her singing as she sank into the abyss beneath Tibet so many years ago. It was the very anthem he had cast himself into the darkness for. I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see. She had put her own words to it, but the tune was identical.

He had taken Isaac's claim of fatherhood to be the truth, but saw no resemblance to that beast at all. Prompted by the song, Ike now recognized Kora's features in the girl. Ike groped for other explanations. Perhaps the girl had been taught the melody by Kora. Or Ali had sung it to her. But for days, he had been carrying a vague, troubling sense of already knowing her.

There was something about her cheekbones and forehead, the way that jaw thrust forward in moments of obstinacy, and the general length of her body. Other details drew his attention, too. Could it really be? So much was the image of her mother. But so much was not, her eyes, the shape of her hands, that jaw.

Wearily she opened her eyes. He had not seen Kora in them because they were not Kora's turquoise eyes. Maybe he was wrong. And yet the eyes were familiar. Then it struck him. She had his eyes. This was his own daughter.

Ike sagged against the wall. Her age was right. The color of her hair. He compared their hands, and she had his same long fingers, his same nails. 'God,' he whispered. What now?

'Ma. You. Where,' he said in his fractured hadal.

She quit singing. Her eyes rode up to his, and her thoughts were easy to read. She saw his daze, and it suggested an opportunity. But when she tried prying herself from the wet stone, her body refused to cooperate.

'Please speak more clearly, animal man,' she said politely, in high dialect.

To Ike's ear, she had expressed something like What? He tried again, reversing his question and fumbling for the right syntax and possessive. 'Where. You own. Mother. To be.'

She snorted, and he knew his attempts sounded like grunting to her. All the while she kept her eyes directed away from his knife with the black blade. That was her object of desire, Ike knew. She wanted to kill him.

This time he traced a sign on the ground, then linked it with another sign. 'You,' he said. 'Mother.'

She made a gentle sweeping motion with her fingers, and that was his answer. One did not speak about the dead. They became someone – or something – else. And since you could never be sure who or what form that reincarnation might have taken, it was most judicious to give the dead no mention. Ike let it go at that.

Of course Kora was dead. And if she was not, there would probably be no recognizing what was left. Yet here was their legacy. And he needed her as a pawn to trade away for Ali. That had been his working plan. Suddenly it felt as though the life raft he had crafted from wreckage had just wrecked all over again.

It was excruciating, the appearance of a daughter he had never known, changed into what he had almost been changed into. What was he supposed to do now, rescue her? And what then? Obviously the hadals had taken her in and made her one of them. She had no idea who he was or what world he came from. To be honest, he had little idea himself. What kind of rescue was that?

He looked at the girl's thin, painted back. Since capturing her, he had treated her like chattel. The only thing good to say was that he had not beaten or raped or killed her. My daughter? He hung his head.

How could he possibly trade away his own flesh and blood, even for a woman he loved? But if he did not, Ali would remain in their bondage forever. Ike tried to clear his mind. The girl was ignorant of her past. However harsh, she had a life among the hadals. To take her out of here would mean tearing her by the roots from the only people she knew. And to leave Ali meant... what? Ali could not possibly know he had survived the fortress explosion, much less that he was searching for her. Likewise, she would never know if he turned around and dragged this child away from the darkness. Indeed, knowing her, even if she did know, Ali would approve. And where would that leave him? He had become a curse. Everyone he loved disappeared.

He considered letting the girl go. But that would only be cowardice on his part. The decision was his to make. He had to make it. It was one or the other, at best. He was too much of a realist to waste a moment imagining the whole happy family could make it out. He was tormented the rest of that night.

When the girl awoke, Ike presented her with a meal of larvae and pallid tubers, and loosened her ropes. He knew it would only complicate matters to restore her strength, and that the slightest guilt at having depleted the child was a dangerous moralism. But he could no longer go on starving his own daughter.

Guessing she would never tell it to him, he asked her name. She averted her eyes at the rudeness. No hadal would give such power to a slave. Soon after he started her downward on the trail, though more slowly in consideration of her fatigue.

The revelation tortured him. After his return to the human side, Ike had vowed to keep his choices black and white. Stick to your code. Stray, and you died. If you couldn't decide a matter in three seconds, it was too complicated.

The simplest thing by far, the safest thing, would have been to cut loose and escape while he could. Ike had never been a believer in predestination. God didn't do it to you, you did it to yourself. But the present situation contradicted him.

The mystery of it weighed on Ike, and their slow descent slowed more. The heaviness he felt had nothing to do with their altitude, now eleven miles deep. To the contrary, as the air pressure thickened, he was engorged with more oxygen, and the effect was a hardy lightness of the kind one felt coming down off a mountain. But now the unwanted effect of so much oxygen in his brain was more thoughts and more questions.

Though he couldn't say exactly how, Ike was certain he must have selected each circumstance leading to his own downfall. And yet what choices had his daughter made to be born in darkness and never know the light or her true father or her own

people?

*

The journey down was a journey of water sounds. Blindfolded, Ali passed the first number of days listening to the sea scythe by as amphibians drew their raft on. The next days were spent descending alongside cascades and behind immense falls. Finally, reaching more even ground, she walked across streams bridged with stones. The water was her thread.

They kept her separate from the two mercenaries who'd been captured alive. But on one occasion her blindfold slipped and she saw them in the perpetual twilight cast by phosphorescent lichen. The men were bound with ropes of braided rawhide, and arrows still projected from their wounds. One looked at Ali with horrified eyes, and she made the sign of the cross for his benefit. Then her hadal escort cinched the blindfold over her eyes again, and they went on. Only later did Ali realize why the mercenaries weren't blindfolded, too. The hadals didn't care if the two soldiers saw the path down, because neither would ever have the opportunity to climb back out.

That was the beginning of her hope. They weren't going to kill her anytime soon. Thinking of the two soldiers' certain fate, she felt guilty for her optimism. But Ali clung to it with a greed she'd never known. It had never occurred to her before how base a thing survival was. There was nothing heroic about it.

Prodded, tugged, carried, pushed, she staggered into a cavity that could have been the center of her being. She wasn't harmed. They didn't violate her. But she suffered. For one thing, she was famished, not that they didn't try to feed her. Ali refused the meat they offered, though. The monster who led them came to her. 'But you have to eat, my dear,' he said in perfect King's English. 'How else will you finish the hajj?'

'I know where the meat came from,' she answered. 'I knew those people.'

'Ah, of course. You're not hungry enough.'

'Who are you?' she rasped.

'A pilgrim, like you.'

But Ali knew. Before the blindfold, she'd seen him orchestrating the hadals, commanding them, delegating tasks. Even without such evidence, he certainly looked the way Satan might, with his cowled brow and the twist of asymmetrical horns and the script drawn upon his flesh. He stood taller than most of the hadals, and earned more scars, and there was something about his eyes that declared a knowledge of life she didn't want to know.

After that, Ali was given a diet of insects and small fish. She forced it down. The trek went on. Her legs ached at night from striking against rocks. Ali welcomed the pain. It was a way not to mourn for a while. Perhaps if she'd been carrying arrows like the mercenaries were, it would have been possible not to mourn at all. But the reality was always there, waiting. Ike was dead.

At last they reached the remains of a city so old it was more like a mountain in collapse. This was their destination. Ali knew because they finally took off her blindfold and she was able to walk without being guided.

Weary, frightened, mesmerized, Ali picked her way higher. The city was up to its neck in a tropical glacier of flowstone, which spun off a faint incandescence. The result was less light than gloom, and that was enough. Ali could see that the city lay at the bottom of an enormous chasm. A slow mineral flood had all but swallowed much of the city, but many of the structures were erect and honeycombed with rooms. The walls and colonnades were embellished with carved animals and depictions of ancient hadal life, all of it blended in subtle arabesques.

Debauched by time and geological siege, the city was nevertheless inhabited, or at least in use. To Ali's shock, thousands of hadals – tens of thousands, for all she knew –

had come to rest in this place. Here lay the answer to where the hadals had gone. From around the world, they had poured down to this sanctuary. Just as Ike had said, they were in flight. This was their exodus.

As the war party threaded through the city, Ali saw toddlers resting against their mothers' thighs, exhausted with flu. She looked, but there were very few infants or aged in the listless mob. Weapons of all types lay on the ground, apparently too heavy to lift.

In their listlessness, the hadals imparted a sense of having reached the end of the earth. It had always been a mystery to Ali why refugees – no matter what race – stopped where they did, why they didn't keep going on. There was a fine line between a refugee and a pioneer; and it had to do with momentum once you crossed a certain border. Why had these hadals not continued deeper? she wondered.

They climbed a hill in the center of the city. At the top, the remnants of a building stood above the amberlike flowstone. Ali was led into a hallway that spiraled within the ruins. Her prison cell was a library. They left her alone.

Ali looked around, astounded by the treasury. This was to be her hell, then, a library of undeciphered text? If so, they'd matched the wrong punishment with her. They had left a clay lamp for her like those Ike had lit. A small flame twitched at the snout of oil.

Ali started to explore by its light, but wasn't careful enough carrying it, and the flame guttered out. She stood in the darkness, filled with uncertainty, scared and lonely. Suddenly the journey caught up with her, and she simply lay down and fell asleep.

When Ali woke, hours later, a second lamp was flickering in the room's far corner. As she approached the flame, a figure rose against the wall, wrapped in rags and a burlap cloak. 'Who are you?' a man's voice demanded. He sounded weary and spiritless, like a ghost. Ali rejoiced. Clearly he was a fellow prisoner. She wasn't alone!

'Who are you?' she asked, and folded the man's hood back from his face. It was beyond belief. 'Thomas!' she cried.

'Ali!' he grated. 'Can it be?'

She embraced him, and felt the bones of his back and rib cage.

The Jesuit had the same furrowed face as when she'd first met him at the museum in New York. But his brow had thickened and he had weeks of grizzled beard, and his hair was long and gray and thick with filth. Crusted blood matted his hair. His eyes were unchanged. They'd always been deeply traveled.

'What have they done to you?' she asked. 'How long have you been here? Why are you in this place?'

She helped the old man sit, and brought water for him to drink. He rested against the wall and kept patting her hand, overjoyed. 'It's the Lord's will,' he kept repeating. For hours they exchanged their stories. He had come looking for her, Thomas said, once news of the expedition's disappearance reached the surface. 'Your benefactor, January, was tireless in reminding me of the Beowulf group's responsibilities to you. Finally I decided there was only one thing to do. Search for you myself.'

'But that's absurd,' said Ali. A man his age, and all alone.

'And yet, look,' said Thomas.

He'd descended from a tunnel in Javanese ruins, praying against the darkness, guessing at the expedition's trajectory. 'I wasn't very good at it,' he confessed. 'In no time I got lost. My batteries wore down. I ran out of food. When the hadals found me, it was more an act of charity than capture. Who can say why they didn't kill me? Or you?'

Ever since, Thomas had languished among these mounds of text. 'I thought they'd leave my bones here among the books,' he said. 'But now you're here!'

In turn, Ali told of the expedition's sad demise. She related Ike's self-immolation in

the hadal fortress. 'But are you sure he died?' Thomas asked.

'I saw it myself.' Her voice caught. Thomas expressed his condolences.

'It was God's will,' Ali recovered. 'And it was His will that led us here, to this library. Now we shall attempt to accomplish the work we were meant for. Together we may come closer to the original word.'

'You are a remarkable woman,' Thomas said.

They set about the task with acute focus, grouping texts and comparing observations. At first delicately, then avidly, they examined the books, leaves, codices, scrolls, and tablets. None of it was shelved neatly. It was almost as if the mass of writings had accumulated here like a pile of snowflakes. Setting the lamp to one side, they burrowed into the largest pile.

The material on top was the most current, some in English or Japanese or Chinese. The deeper they worked, the older the writings were. Pages disintegrated in Ali's fingers. On others, the ink had foxed through layer after layer of writings. Some books were locked tight with mineral seep. But much of it yielded lettering and glyphs. Luckily the room was spacious, because they soon had a virtual tree of languages laid out on the floor, pile by pile of books.

At the end of five days, Ali and Thomas had excavated alphabets no linguist had ever seen. Stepping back from their work, it was obvious to Ali they'd barely made a dent in the heaped writings. Here lay the beginnings of all literature, all history. In a sense, it promised to contain the beginnings of memory, human and hadal both. What might lie at its center?

'We need to rest. We need to pace ourselves,' Thomas cautioned. He had a bad cough. Ali helped him to his corner, and forced herself to sit, too. But she was excited.

'Ike told me once, the hadals want to be like us,' she said. 'But they're already like us. And we're like them. This is the key to their Eden. It won't give them back their ancient regime. But it can bind them, and give them concordance as a people. It can bridge the gap between them and us. This is the beginning of their return to the light. Or at least of the sovereignty of their race. Maybe we can find a mutual language. Maybe we can make a place for them among us. Or they can make a place for us among them. But it all starts here.'

The torture of Walker's men began. Their screams drifted up to Ali and Thomas. Periodically the sounds tapered off. After a night of silence, Ali was certain the men had died. But then the screaming started again. With pauses, it would go on for many days.

Before they could continue their scholarship, Ali and Thomas received a visitor. 'He's the one I told you about,' she whispered to him. 'He leads them, I think.'

'You might be right about him,' Thomas said. 'But what does he want with us?'

The monster approached with a plastic tube marked HELIOS. It was badly scratched. Ali immediately recognized her map case. He went directly to her, and she could smell fresh blood on him. His feet were bare. He shook out the roll of maps and opened them. 'These came into my possession,' he said in his crisp English.

Ali wanted to ask how, but thought better of it. Obviously, Gitner and his band of scientists had failed to escape. 'They're mine,' she said.

'Yes, I know. The soldiers told me. Also, I've studied the maps, and your authorship is clear. Unfortunately they're not real maps, but only your approximation of things. They show how your expedition proceeded in general. I need more. Details. Detours. Side trips. Diversions. And camps, every camp, every night. Who was in them, who wasn't. I need everything. You have to re-create the entire expedition for me. It's crucial.'

Ali glanced at Thomas, fearful. How could she possibly remember it all? 'I can try,'

she said.

'Try?' The monster was smelling her. 'But your very existence depends on your

memory. I would do more than try.'

Thomas stepped forward. 'I'll help her,' he volunteered.

'Help her quickly, then,' the monster said. 'Now your life depends on it, too.'

On February 11, at 1420 hours and 9,856 fathoms, they reached a cliff overlooking a valley. It was not the bottom of the pit; you could see a gaping hole in the far distance. But it was a geological pause in that abyss they had been following.

Before she tried again to martyr herself, Ike tied his nameless daughter to a horn of rock along the wall. Then he flopped on his stomach along the edge to get a view of the land and sort through his options.

It had the shape and size of a crater, lit with a sienna gloom. Veins of luminous minerals spidered through the encircling walls, and the fog was lambent, flickering like tongues. He could make out the architecture of this enormous hollow, two or three miles across, and its honeycombed walls and the vast, intricate city it cupped.

Five hundred meters beneath his perch, the city occupied the entire floor. It was at once magnificent and destitute. From this height he could clearly see the whole obsolete metropolis.

Spires and pyramids stood in ruins. In the distance, one or two towering structures rose nearly as high as the rim, though their tops had crumbled away. Canals had harrowed the avenues deep, carving meandering canyons. Much was in collapse or flooded or had been overrun with flowstone. Several giant stalactites had grown so heavy they had fallen from the invisible ceiling and speared buildings.

It took Ike time to adjust to the scale of this place. Only then did he begin to distinguish the multitudes. They were so numerous and packed together and enfeebled that all he saw at first was a broad stain upon the floor. But the stain had a slight motion to it, like the slow agitation of glaciers. Here and there, winged creatures launched from cliffside aeries, darting through the fog.

In effect, the refugees were camping not in but atop the old city. He couldn't make out individual figures from this distance, but he guessed there had to be thousands down there. Tens of thousands. He had been right about the sanctuary.

They must have come from throughout the planet to this single place. Even though Ike had guessed they were migrating to a central location, their numbers astounded him. Haddie was a solitary race, as willing to demolish one another as their enemy, prone to wandering in small, paranoid packs. He'd decided there were probably no more than a few thousand left in the entire subplanet. There had to be fifty times that right here. For them to have gathered this way, and in apparent armistice, it had to be like the end of the world.

Their abundance was good news and bad. It all but guaranteed that Ali would end up in the refugee horde, if she was not already among them. Ike had devised no specific gambit, but had been relying on a much smaller mob to deal with. Finding her from a distance was going to be impossible, and infiltrating them a lengthy nightmare. Just locating her could take months. And all the while he would have to tend the hostage, his daughter. The prospect threw him into a downward spiral. He looked at his watch – Troy's watch – and noted the time and date and altitude.

He heard the pad of feet, and started to rise up, knife in hand. He had time to see a rifle butt. Then it axed into his face, he felt it clip his temple, and all the brawl went out of him.

By the time Ike revived, he was bound hand to foot with his own rope. He pried his eyes open. His captor was waiting, seated five feet away, barefoot and in rags, sighting on Ike's face through a US Army night-vision sniperscope. A pair of binoculars hung from his neck. Ike sighed. The Rangers had finally hounded him to earth.

'Wait,' Ike said. 'Before you shoot.'

'Sure,' said the man, his face still burrowed behind the rifle and sight.

'Just tell me why.' What had he done to deserve their vengeance?

'Why what, Ike?' The executioner lifted his head. Ike was thunderstruck. This was no Ranger.

'Surprise,' Shoat said. 'I didn't think it was possible, either, an ordinary joe trumping the great Ike Crockett. But you were easy. Talk about bragging rights. I mug Superman and get the girl.'

Ike couldn't think of what to say. He looked across at his daughter. Shoat had tightened her bonds. That was significant. He hadn't shot the girl outright.

Bearded and emaciated, Shoat had not lost his daft grin. He was very pleased with himself. 'In certain ways,' he said, 'we're the same guy, you and me. Bottom feeders. We can live off other people's shit. And we always make sure we know where the back door is. Back at the presidio, I was ready, just like you.'

Ike's face ached from the rifle butt, but what hurt most was his pride. 'You tracked me?' he said.

Shoat patted the rifle with the sniperscope. 'Superior technology,' he said. 'I could see you from a mile off, clear as day. And once you netted our little bird, things were even easier. I don't know, Ike, you got slow and you got sloppy. Maybe you're getting old. Anyhow' – he glanced behind him over the precipice – 'we've reached the heart of the matter, haven't we?'

While Shoat talked, Ike gathered the few clues. A rucksack sat against the wall, half empty. Over near the watchful girl, Shoat had scattered the plastic refuse from a single military rations packet. It told Ike he had been unconscious long enough to be tied, and for Shoat to finish a meal. More important, the man had come alone; there was just one pack and the remains of one MRE. And the MRE meant he was not feeding off the land, probably because he didn't know how to.

Obviously, Shoat had foraged through the destroyed fortress and found a few essentials: the rifle, some MREs. Ike was mystified. The man had his ticket home; why pursue the depths?

'You should have taken a raft or just started walking,' Ike said. 'You could have been partway out of here.'

'I would have, but someone took my most vital asset.' He lifted the leather pouch that hung from his neck like an amulet. Everyone knew it held his homing device. 'It guarantees my exit. I didn't even know it was gone until I needed it. When I opened the pouch, there was only this.' He unlaced the top and shook out a flat jade plate.

Sure enough, Ike saw, someone had stolen his device and replaced it with a piece of antique hadal armor. 'Now you want me to guide you out,' he guessed.

'I don't think that would work very well, Ike. How far could we get before Haddie found us? Or you did me in.'

'What do you want then?'

'My box. That would be nice.'

'Even if we found it, what's that do for you now?' With or without his homing device, the hadals could still find the man. And Ike could, too.

Shoat smiled cryptically and aimed the jade plate like a TV remote control. 'It lets me change the channel.' He made a click sound. 'Hate to sound like Mr Zen, but you're just an illusion, Ike. And the girl. And all of them down there. None of you exists.'

'But you do?' Ike wasn't taunting him. This was a key to Shoat's strangeness.

'Yeah. Yeah, I do. I'm like the prime mover. The first cause. Or the last. When all of you are gone, I'll still be around.'

Shoat knew something, or thought he did, but Ike couldn't begin to guess what. The man had recklessly followed them into the center of the abyss, and now, surrounded by the enemy, had waylaid his only possible ally in getting out. He could have shot them from a distance at any time over the past several weeks. Instead, he'd saved them for something. There was a logic at work here. Shoat was smart and sane, and

dangerous. Ike blamed himself. He'd underestimated the man.

'You've got the wrong guy,' Ike said. 'I didn't take your box.'

'Of course not. I've thought a lot about it. Walker's boys wouldn't have bothered with any tricks. They would have just put a bullet through me. You would have, too. So it was someone else, someone who needed to keep the theft quiet. Someone who thinks she knows my code. I've got it figured out, Ike. Who it was, and when she took it.'

'The girl?'

'You think I'd let that wild animal close to me? No. I mean Ali.'

'Ali? She's a nun.' Ike snorted to deride the notion. But who else could it be?

'A very bad nun. Don't deny it, Ike. I know she's been playing hide-the-snake with you. I can tell these things, I've got good people sense.'

Ike watched him. 'So you followed me to follow her.'

'Good boy.'

'I didn't find her, though.'

'Actually, Ike, you did.'

Shoat grabbed a loop of rope and dragged him to the edge. He draped his binoculars around Ike's neck, and cautiously loosened the rope binding Ike's hands to his feet, then backed away, aiming his pistol.

'Take a look,' Shoat announced. 'Someone you know is down there. Her and our two-bit warlord. His satanic majesty. The guy who ran off with her.'

Ike wrestled to a sitting position. The news of Ali energized him. His hands were numb from the ropes, but he managed to paw the binoculars into place. He scanned up and down the canals and choked avenues and ruins lit green by the night vision.

'Look for a spire, then go left,' Shoat instructed.

It took several minutes, even with Shoat describing the landmarks while looking through the rifle scope. 'See the pillars?'

'Are those Walker's men?' Two men hung, slumped. Neither was Ali. Yet.

'Just taking a rest,' Shoat said. 'They've been getting some rough treatment. And there's another prisoner, too. I've seen him with Ali. They keep taking him away, though.'

Ike searched higher.

'She's there,' Shoat encouraged. 'I can see her. Unbelievable, it looks like she's writing in her field book. Notes from the underground?'

Ike went on searching. A hill of flowstone knobbed above the masses, enfolding all but the upper stories of a carved stone building. The walls had collapsed on Ike's side of the building, exposing to view a spacious room with no roof. And there she was, sitting on a chunk of rubble. They had freed her hands and legs; why not? Two stories below, she was surrounded by the hadal nation.

'Locked in?'

'I see her.' They hadn't started her rites of passage yet. The branding and shackles and mutilations were usually started in the first few days. Recovery could take years. But Ali looked whole, untouched.

'Good.' Shoat yanked the binoculars away. 'Now you've got your scent. You know where you need to go.'

'You want me to infiltrate an entire city of hadals and steal back your homing device?'

'Give me some credit, man. You're mortal. There are some things even you can't do. Besides, why sneak when you can make a grand entrance?'

'You want me to just walk in and ask for your property?'

'Better you than me.'

'Even if Ali has it, then what?'

'I'm a businessman, Ike. I live and die by negotiation. Let's see where we can get

with them. A little bit of old-fashioned bartering.'

'With them? Down there?'

'You'll be my proxy. My private ambassador.'

'They'll never let Ali go.'

'All I want is my box.'

Ike was truly mystified. 'Why would they give it to you?'

'That's what I want to talk to them about.' Shoat reached over to his rucksack and pulled out a thin, battered laptop computer embossed with the Helios logo. 'Our walkie-talkies are all gone. But I've got a two-way comm device set up with my laptop. We're going to have a video conference.'

Shoat opened the lid and turned the machine on. He stepped back, plugging a portable earphone into one ear, and held a small camera/speaker ball in front of his face. On screen, his face rotated and mugged. 'Testing, testing,' his voice spoke over the computer speaker.

Against the wall, the feral girl grunted, eyes wide with fear, a stranger to such magic.

'Here's what you're going to do, Ike. Take the laptop down into night-town there. Once you reach Ali, open the laptop up. Make sure the computer's in line of sight, a straight shot from you to me. I don't want to lose transmission. Then get their presidente on the horn for me. While you're at it, give this whelp back to them. A good-faith gesture. I'll take it from there.'

'What's in it for me?'

Shoat grinned. 'That's my man. What would you like? Your life? Or Ali's? Wanna bet

I know the answer?'

It was exactly the chance Ike had wanted for her. 'All right,' he said. 'You're the boss.'

'Good to have you on board, Ike.'

'Cut my ropes.'

'Of course.' Shoat wagged the knife as if Ike were a naughty child, then tossed it on the ground. 'But first we need to understand each other. It's going to take you a while to crawl over here and cut yourself loose. And by that time I'll be locked and loaded in a cozy sniper's nest not too far away. You're going to escort this cannibal down through that rabble and back to her people. And set up my link with their CEO, whoever that guy is.'

Shoat set the computer on the floor and backed toward a tall, jagged hole in the wall. Ike had his eyes on the knife.

'No tricks, no detours, no deceit. The laptop's switched on. Don't turn it off. I want to be able to hear everything you say,' Shoat said. 'And don't come looking for me. From my cubbyhole, I've got a clear shot all the way down the trail. Screw up, and the fireworks begin. But I won't shoot you, Ike. It's Ali that pays for your sins. I'll kill her first. And next, just to piss them off, their leader. After that I'll work through targets of opportunity. But there's not going to be a bullet for you. I promise. You can live with yourself. You can live with them. Hell can have you back. Are we clear?'

Ike started crawling.

And in the lowest deep, a lower deep

Still threat'ning to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n.

– JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

27

SHANGRI-LA

Beneath the intersection of

the Philippine, Java, and Palu Trenches

Ike descended into the ancient city, leading his daughter by a rope. The city loomed in the organic twilight, a puzzle of remnants, fused architecture, and eyeless windows.

On the floor of the vast canyon, at the ruins' edge, Ike slung Shoat's laptop computer on one shoulder and bent the plastic candle he had been given, breaking the vial inside. The wand came alive with green light. Even without his sniperscope, Shoat would be able to track his progress through the city.

For the first half-mile or so there was no outright challenge, although animals scuttled along the flowstone. With each step, Ike tried to piece together some alternative to what was already in motion. Shoat's spiderweb seemed unbreakable. Ike could practically see the back of his own head through the electronic scope. If only he were the prey, he thought. He could duck the bullet, or take it. But Shoat had clearly pronounced his targets: Ali first. Ike continued through the fossilized city. News of human trespass was rippling forward through the city. In the penumbra of his green light, shapes that normally would have appeared as silhouettes against the pale glow of stone now lurked as shadows. The candle's neon glow was devastating his night vision. Then again, from the beginning of this doomed expedition, he'd been squandering his nocturnal powers, even eating human food. There was no disguising his origins anymore.

Click language cricketed in the gloom. He could smell hadals crowding the penumbra, musky and smeared with ochre. A rock thrown from the shadows struck him on the arm, not hard, just to goad him.

Winged beasts swept inches overhead. Ike maintained his stoic gait. Several others circled out of reach. He felt warm spittle dribbling down his neck.

A monstrosity came racing from ahead and blocked the way. Squat, encrusted with fluorescent mud, he sported a penis sheath and battle scars and brandished an ax. He flicked his tongue like a reptile and bulged his eyes, all challenge. Ike kept his motions passive and the beast let them pass.

The plastic slicks and mineral convolutions of the city floor began to angle upward. Ike approached that rise in the city's center which he had spied through the binoculars. The camp grew dense with refugees, and the canals were fouled with their raw offal and sewage. They lay on the bare ground, ill and hungry.

In his years of captivity, Ike had never seen a fraction of the traits and styles gathered here. Some had flippers for arms, others feet that were tantamount to hands. There were heads flattened by binding, eye sockets genetically emptied. The variety of body art and clothing was wild. Some went naked, some wore armor or chain mail. He passed eunuchs proudly scalped at the groin, warriors with hair woven with beads and horns woven with scalps, and females bred for their smallness or

fatness.

Through it all, Ike kept his expression impassive. He climbed the pathway winding toward the hilltop, and the mass of hadals thickened. Here and there, stripped rib cages arched above ravaged carcasses. In times of such want, he knew, human chattel went first.

Behind him, the girl kept pace. His daughter was his passport. There were no challenges to Ike's advance, and he continued through the city. From the cliffs above, Ike had seen how the pit didn't bottom out, but only paused. And yet the entire race seemed to have rooted here. They showed no signs of taking their nomad spirit deeper. It made him want to plunge farther into the hole, to scale the inverse mountain, just to see what new sights there might be. His curiosity made him sad, because it was unlikely he'd live to see another hour, much less another land.

A pile of ruins projected from the top of the heaped flowstone, and Ike aimed for the highest structure. Climbing higher, Ike and the girl reached Walker's men. The two mercenaries were lashed to broken columns, not with rope, but with their own entrails. Seeing her enemy, the girl capered. Ike let her. One lifted his eyeless face to the jubilation. They had taken his lower jaw off, too. The tongue lay spastic on his throat.

After a minute they continued. They crested the mound. The ruins on the flat top occupied several acres. Hadals lay or sat about on the amorphous folds of stone, but, strangely, had not taken up residence in the crowning structure itself. Again, Ike was struck by their sense of waiting.

The wall on one side of the main building had crumbled, and Ike and the girl clambered up its rubble. Warriors bluffed charges and hooted threats and insults. None came closer than the edges of his light, though, and the effect was a riptide of greenish shadows.

They reached that top floor of the ruins Ike had seen through the binoculars. The roof had caved in or been peeled off, and the result was a high stage open to Shoat's sniperscope. The gallery was more spacious than Ike had expected. In fact, he saw that it was some kind of library, dense with holdings.

Ike stopped in the center of the room. This was where he'd sighted Ali reading, though she was gone now. The floor was flat, but listing, like a ship beginning to sink. This was as good a place as any. It gave him a sense of space, exposed to the equivalent of sky. If he had his choice, Ike didn't want to die in some little tube of a cavity. Let it be in the open. Also, as instructed, he needed to stay in Shoat's line of sight.

While he waited, Ike was furiously gathering information, patching together contingency plans and dead-reckoning trajectories, trying to locate the players and weapons in this new arena, searching for exits and hiding places. It was a matter of habit, not hope.

He found a broken stele and placed the computer on top, at eye level. He opened the lid. The screen was lit with Shoat's face, a miniature Wizard of Oz. 'What are they waiting for?' Shoat's voice spoke from the monitor. The feral girl backed away from it. Nearby hadals scurried into the shadows and softly hooted their alarm.

'There's a hadal pace to things,' Ike said.

He glanced around. Scores of stone tablets were propped side by side against one wall, codices lay open like long road maps, and scrolls and skins painted with glyphs and script lay in piles. To enhance her readings, they had provided Ali with Helios flashlights taken from the expedition. She was hard on the trail of the mother tongue. Another ten minutes passed. Then Ali was sent out from the jumbled interior. She came to a halt fifteen or twenty feet away. Tears were running down her face. 'Ike.' She had mourned him. Now she was mourning him all over again. 'I thought you were dead. I prayed for you. Then I prayed some more, that if you were somehow alive,

you'd know not to come for me.'

'I must have missed that last one,' Ike said. 'Are you okay?' As he'd noted through the binoculars, they hadn't started inscribing her yet, nothing that he could see. She had been among them for over three weeks now. By this time they had usually knocked out the women captives' front teeth and begun other initiations. The fact that Ali bore no ownership marks gave him hope. Maybe a bargain was still possible.

'But I kept hearing Walker's soldiers. Are they dead?'

'Don't mind them. What about you?'

'They've been good to me, considering. Until you showed up, I was thinking there might be a place for me here.'

'Don't say that,' Ike snapped.

Their seduction of her had begun. No great mystery there. It was the seduction of a storybook land, the seduction of becoming an expatriate. You fell for a place like darkest Africa or Paris or Kathmandu, and soon you had no nation of your own, and you were simply a citizen of time. He'd learned that down here. Among the human captives there were always slaves, the walking dead. And then there were the rare few like him – or Isaac – who had lost their souls to this place.

'But I'm so near to the word. The first word. I can feel it. It's here, Ike.'

Their lives were on the line. Shoat's storm was about to rage, and she was talking about primal language? The word was her seduction. She was his. 'Out of the question,' he said.

'Hi, Ali,' Shoat said through the computer. 'You've been a naughty girl.'

'Shoat?' said Ali, staring at the screen.

'Stay calm,' Ike said.

'What are you doing?'

'Don't blame him,' Shoat's image said. 'He's just the pizza delivery boy.'

'Ike, please,' she whispered. 'What is he up to? Whatever you're doing, I've been given assurances. Let me talk to them. You and I –'

'Assurances? You're still treating them like noble savages.'

'I can help save them from this.'

'Save them? Look around.'

'I have a gift.' Ali gestured at the scrolls and glyphs and codices. 'The treasure is here, the secrets of their past, their racial memory, it's all here.'

'They're illiterate. They're inbred. Starving.'

'That's why they need me,' she said. 'We can bring their greatness to life again. It will take time, but now I know we can do it. The interconnections are braided within their writings. It's as different from modern hadal as ancient Egyptian is from English. But this place is the key, a giant Rosetta stone. All the clues are here, in one place. It's possible I can decipher a civilization twenty thousand years dead.'

'We?' said Ike.

'There's another prisoner here. It's the most extraordinary coincidence. I know him. We've started the work.'

'You can't return them to what they were. They don't need stories from the golden days.' Ike drew the air through his nostrils. 'Smell, Ali. That's death and decay. This is the city of the damned, not Shangri-la. I don't know why the hadals have all gathered here. It doesn't matter. They're dying off. That's why they take our women and children. It's why they've kept you alive. You're a breeder. We're stock. Nothing more.'

'Folks?' Shoat's tiny voice interrupted. 'My meter's running. Let's get this over with.' Ali faced the screen, not knowing he was seeing her through the crosshairs of his scope. 'What do you want, Shoat?'

'One, the head honcho. Two, my property. Let's start with One. Patch me through.' She looked at Ike.

'He wants to deal. He thinks he can. Let him try. Who's in charge here?'

'The one I came looking for, Ike. The one you've been looking for. They're one and the same.'

'But they're not the same.'

'They are. He's the one. I spoke to him. He knows you.' Using click language, Ali spoke the hadal name for their mythical god-king. 'Older-than-Old,' she said in English.

It was a forbidden name, and the feral girl gave a sharp, astonished look at her.

'Him.' Ali gestured at the claim mark tattooed on Ike's arm, and he grew cold.

'Satan.'

His eyes went racing through the hadal shapes lurking in the hollow behind Ali. Could it be? Here?

Suddenly the girl gave a small cry. 'Batr,' she said in hadal. It caught Ike off guard. Father, she had said. His heart jumped at the address, and he turned to see her face. But she was smelling the shadows. A moment later, Ike caught the scent, too. Except for one glimpse of the fiend as the ancient hadal fortress was being sieged, Ike had not seen this man since the cave system in Tibet.

If anything, Isaac had grown more imposing. Gone was the sticklike ascetic's body. He had put on muscle weight, meaning the hadals had granted him higher status and, with it, greater shares of meat. Calcium outgrowths formed a twisted horn on one side of his painted head, and his eyes had an abyssal bulge. He moved with the grace of a t'ai chi master. From the silver bands cinching his biceps to the protruding demon stare and the antique samurai sword in one hand, Isaac looked born to rule down here, a caudillo for the underworld.

'Our renegade,' Isaac greeted him. His grin was ravenous. 'And bearing gifts? My daughter. And a machine.'

The girl bucked forward. Ike hauled her back, making another wrap of rope around his fist. Isaac's lip peeled back over his filed teeth. He said something in hadal too intricate for Ike to understand.

Ike gripped the knife, stifled his fear. This was Ali's Satan? It would be like him to deceive her into thinking he was the khan. To deceive Ike's own daughter into believing in a false father.

'Ali,' Ike murmured, 'he's not the one.' He didn't speak the name of Older-than-Old, even as a whisper. He touched his claim mark to indicate who he meant.

'Of course he is.'

'No. He's only a man. A captive like me.'

'But they obey him.'

'Because he obeys their king. He's a lieutenant. A favorite.' Ali frowned. 'Then who is the king?'

Ike heard a faint jingling. He knew that sound from the fortress, the tinkling of jade against jade. Warrior armor, ten thousand years old. Ali turned to peer into the shadows.

A terrible gravity began pulling at Ike, a feeling you got when your holds failed and the depths peeled you away.

'We've missed you,' a voice spoke out of the ruins.

As a familiar figure surfaced from the darkness, Ike lowered his knife hand. He let go of his daughter's rope, and she darted from his side. His mind filled. His heart emptied. He gave himself to the abyss.

At last, thought Ike, falling to his knees.

Him.

Shoat hummed tunelessly in his sniper's nest, his rifle nested in a stone groove overlooking the abyss. He kept his eye to the scope, watching the tiny figures play out

his script. 'Tick-tock,' he whispered.

Time to nail the coffin shut and start the long road back out. With the exit tunnel sterilized by synthetic virus, there would be no critters left to dodge or run from. His worst dangers would be solitude and boredom. Basically, he faced a lonely half-year of walking with a diet of Power Bars, which he'd secreted at caches all along the way. Finding the hadals mobbed together in this foul pit had been a stroke of good luck. Helios researchers had projected it would take upward of a decade for the prion contagion to filter throughout the sub-Pacific network and exterminate the entire abyssal food chain, including the hadals. But now, with his last five capsules taped inside the laptop computer shell, Shoat could eradicate the nuisance population years ahead of schedule. It was the ultimate Trojan horse.

Shoat felt the high of a survivor. Sure, there'd been some rough spots, and there were bound to be more ahead. But overall, serendipity had favored him. The expedition had self-destructed, though not before carrying him deep. The mercenaries had unraveled, but only after he'd largely run out of uses for them. And now Ike had conveyed the apocalypse straight into the heart of the enemy. 'And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,' he muttered, setting his eye to the sniperscope once again.

Just a minute ago, it had seemed Ike was ready to run off. Now, oddly, he was on his knees, groveling in front of some character emerging from the inner building. Now there was a sight, Crockett servile, head glued to the floor.

Shoat wished for a more powerful scope. Who could this be? It would have been interesting to see the hadal's face in detail. The crosshairs would have to do.

Pleased to meet you, Shoat hummed. Hope you guessed my name.

'So you've returned to me,' the voice said from the shadows. 'Stand up.' Ike didn't even raise his head.

She stared down at Ike's bare back, frightened by his subjugation. It upended her universe. He had always seemed the ultimate free spirit, the original rebel. Yet now he knelt in abject surrender, offering no resistance, no protest.

The hadal khan – their rex, or mahdi, or king of kings, however it translated – stood motionless with Ike at his feet. He wore armor made of jade and crystal plates, and under that a Crusader's chain-mail shirt, sleeves short, each link oiled against rust.

She felt sick with realization. This was Satan? This was the one Ike had been seeking, face by face, in all those hadal dead? Not to destroy, as she'd thought, but to worship. Ike kowtowed blankly, his fear – and shame – transparent. He ground his forehead against the flowstone.

'What are you doing?' she said, but not to Ike.

Thomas solemnly opened his arms, and from throughout the city the hadal nations roared up to him. Ali sagged to her knees, speechless. She couldn't begin to fathom the depths of his deceptions. The moment she comprehended one, another cropped up that was more outrageous, from pretending to be her fellow prisoner to manipulating January's group, to posing as human when all along he was hadal.

And yet, even seeing him here, draped in ancient battle gear, receiving the hadal celebration, Ali could not help but see him as the Jesuit, austere and rigorous and humane. It was impossible to simply purge the trust and companionship they'd built over these past weeks.

'Stand up,' Thomas ordered, then looked at Ali, and his tone softened. 'Tell him, if you please, to get off his knees. I have questions.'

Ali knelt beside Ike, her head by his so that they could hear each other over the roar of the hadals' adulation. She ran her hand across his knotted shoulders, over the scars at his neck where the iron ring had cinched his vertebrae.

'Get up,' Thomas repeated.

Ali looked up at Thomas. 'He's not your enemy,' she said. An instinct urged her to advocate for Ike. It had to do with more than Ike's submission and fear. Suddenly she had her own grounds for fear. If Thomas was truly their ruler, then it was he who'd permitted Walker's soldiers to be tortured through all these days. And Ike was a soldier.

'Not in the beginning,' Thomas conceded. 'In the beginning, when we first brought him in, he was more like an orphan. And I brought him into our people. And our reward? He brings war and famine and disease. We gave him life and taught him the way. And he brought soldiers, and guided colonists. Now he's come home to us. But as our prodigal son, or our mortal enemy? Answer me. Stand up.'

Ike stood.

Thomas took Ike's left hand and lifted it to his mouth. Ali thought he meant to kiss the sinner's hand, to reconcile, and she felt hope. Instead he parted Ike's fingers and put the index finger into his mouth. Then he sucked it. Ali blinked at the lewdness of it. The old man took the finger in all the way to the bottom knuckle and wrapped his lips around the root.

Ike looked over at Ali, jaws bunching. Close your eyes, he signaled. She didn't.

Thomas bit.

His teeth snapped through the bone. He yanked Ike's hand to one side.

Ike's blood slashed across Thomas's jade armor and into Ali's hair. She yelped. His body shivered. Otherwise he gave no reaction except to lower his head in supplication. His arm remained outstretched. More fingers? Ali thought.

'What are you doing?' she cried out.

Thomas looked at her with bloody lips. He removed the finger from his mouth as if it were a fishbone, and wrapped it in Ike's mutilated hand, which he then released.

'What would you have me do with this faithless lamb?' Now Ali saw. Here was the real Satan.

He'd misled her from the start. She'd misled herself. With their systematic study of her maps, and their promising interpretation of the hadal alphabets, glyphs, and history, Ali had tricked herself into thinking she understood the terms of this place. It was the scholar's illusion, that words might be the world. But here was the legend with a thousand faces. Kindly, then angry; giving, then taking. Human, then hadal.

Ike knelt, his head still bent. 'Spare this woman,' he asked. The pain told in his voice. Thomas was cold. 'So gallant.'

'You have uses for her.'

Ali was astonished, less by Ike trying to save the day than by the fact her day needed saving. Until a few minutes ago, her safety had seemed a reasonable bet. Now Ike's blood was in her hair. No matter how deeply she penetrated with her scholarship, it seemed, the cruelty of this place was adamant.

'I do,' said Thomas. 'Many uses.' He stroked Ali's hair, and the armor tinkled like chandelier glass. She started at the proprietary gesture.

'She will restore my memory. She'll tell me a thousand stories. Through her, I'll remember all the things time has stolen from me. How to read the old writings, how to dream an empire, how to carry a people to greatness. So much has slid from my mind. What it was like in the beginning. The face of God. His voice. His words.'

'God?' she murmured.

'Whatever you want to call him. The shekinah who existed before me. The divine incarnate. Before history ever began. At the farthest edge of my memory.'

'You saw him?'

'I am him. The memory of him. An ugly brute, as I recall. More ape than Moses. But, you see, I've forgotten. It's like trying to remember the moment of my own birth. My first birth as who I am.' His voice grew as faint as dust.

First birth? The voice of God? Ali couldn't fathom his tales, and suddenly she didn't want to. She wanted to go home, to leave this awful place. She wanted Ike. But fate had sewn her into the planet's belly. A lifetime of prayers, and here she was, surrounded by monsters.

'Father Thomas,' she said, less afraid than unable to use his other name. 'Since we first met, I've been faithful to your desires. I left behind my own past and traveled here to restore your past. And I'll stay here, just as we discussed. I'll help master your dead language. That won't change.'

'I knew I could count on you.' But her devotion was simply one more of his possessions, she saw that now.

Ali folded her hands obediently, trying not to see Ike's blood staining his beard. 'You can depend on me until the end of my life. But in return, you must not harm this man.'

'Is that a demand?'

'He has his uses, too. Ike can clarify my maps. Fill in my blanks. He can guide you wherever you want me to take you.'

Ike's head lifted slightly.

'No,' Thomas said, 'you don't understand. Ike doesn't know who he is anymore. Do you realize how dangerous that is? He's become an animal for others to use. The armies use him to kill us. The corporations use him to lay bare our territory and to guide murderers who plant it with disease. With plague. And he hides from his own evil by leaping back and forth from one race to the other.'

Beside him, the monster Isaac smiled.

'Plague?' said Ali, in part to digress from Thomas's finality. But also because he kept mentioning it, and she had no idea what he meant.

'You've brought desolation onto my people. It follows you.'

'What plague?'

Thomas's eyes flashed at her. 'No more deceptions,' he thundered. Ali shrank from him.

'My sentiments exactly,' a reedy voice piped out from the laptop computer.

Thomas turned his head as if hearing a fly buzzing. He scowled at the computer.

'What's this?' he hissed.

'A man called Shoat,' Ike said. 'He wants to talk with you.'

'Montgomery Shoat?' Thomas spoke the name as if expelling a fetid stench. 'I know you.'

'I don't know how,' Shoat said. 'But we do have mutual concerns.'

Thomas grabbed Ike's arm and spun him face-out to the distant cliffs. 'Where is this man? Is he near? Is he watching us?'

'Ah-ah, careful, Ike. Not a word more,' Shoat warned. His finger wagged at them from the screen.

Thomas stood rooted behind Ike, motionless except for his head switching from side to side, piercing the twilight. 'Join us, please, Mr Shoat,' he said.

'Thanks anyhow,' Shoat's image said on the screen. 'This is close enough for me.'

The surreality was breathtaking, a computer screen in this underworld. The ancient speaking to the modern. Then Ali noticed Ike's eyes darting about. He was gathering in the broken chamber, estimating it.

'You'll be down soon enough, Mr Shoat,' Thomas said to the computer. 'Until then, there's something you wanted to talk about?'

'A piece of Helios property has fallen into your hands.'

'What does this fool want?' Thomas asked Ike.

'It's a locator. A homing device,' Ike said. 'He claims it was taken from him.'

'I'm lost without it,' Shoat said. 'Return it to me and I'll be out of your hair.'

'That's all you want?' asked Thomas. Shoat considered. 'A head start?'

Thomas's face filled with rage, but he regulated his voice. 'I know what you've done, Shoat. I know what Prion-9 is. You're going to show me where you've placed it. Every single location.'

Ali glanced at Ike, and he looked equally puzzled.

'Common ground,' Shoat enthused, 'the basis for every negotiation. I've got information you want, and you've got a guarantee of my safe passage. Quid pro quo.'

'You mustn't fear for your life, Mr Shoat,' Thomas stated. 'You're going to live a very long time in our company. Longer than you ever dreamed possible.'

It was plain to Ali that he was stalling, searching. Beside him, Isaac, too, was scanning the gloom for any evidence of the hidden man. The girl stood at one shoulder, whispering, guiding his examination.

'My homing device,' Shoat said.

'I visited your mother recently,' Thomas said, as if just remembering a courtesy. Murmuring to the side, Isaac had begun dispatching hadal warriors. Their fluid shapes were indiscernible from the shadows. They streamed down from the ruins.

'My mother?' Shoat was disconcerted.

'Eva. Three months ago. An elegant hostess. It was at her estate in the Hamptons. We had a long chat about you, Montgomery. She was dismayed to hear about what you've been up to.'

'That's not possible.'

'Come down, Monty. We have things to talk about.'

'What have you done to my mother?'

'Why make this difficult? We're going to find you. In an hour or a week, it doesn't matter. You're not leaving, though.'

'I asked you about my mother.'

Ike's eyes quit roaming. Ali saw them fix on hers, intent, waiting. She took a breath and tried to still her confusion and fear. She anchored herself to his eyes.

'Quid pro quo?' said Thomas.

'What have you done to her?'

'Where to begin,' Thomas said lightly. 'In the beginning? Your beginning? You were born by C-section...'

'My mother would never share such a –' Thomas's voice grew hard. 'She didn't, Monty.'

'Then how...' Shoat's voice faded.

'I found the scar myself,' Thomas said. 'And then I opened it. That wound through which you crept into the world.'

Shoat had fallen silent.

'Come down,' Thomas repeated. 'I'll tell you which landfill I left her in.' Shoat's eyes filled the screen, then backed away. The screen went blank. What now? wondered Ali.

'He's started to run,' Thomas said to Isaac. 'Bring him to me. Alive.'

A look of peace flickered across Ike's face. With Thomas lurking over one shoulder, he raised his eyes to the faraway cliffs. Ali had no idea what he was searching for. She looked around at the dark cliffs, and there it was, a twinkle of light. A momentary north star.

Ike dove.

In the same instant, Thomas ignited.

The hadal armor and Crusader's chain mail and the shirt of gold did nothing to shield him. Normally the round would have punched through his back and then quickened into a fireball and phosphorous shrapnel. But in Thomas, clad in back as well as in front, it found no exit. The heat and fléchettes went wild inside him. His flesh burst into flame. His spine snapped. And yet his fall seemed infinite.

Ali was mesmerized. Flames leaped up from the neck of Thomas's armor, and he

drew in a great gasp. The fire poured down his throat. He exhaled, and the flames shot from his mouth. His vocal cords seared, Thomas was silent. There was a soft clatter of jade scales falling to earth as the gold sutures holding them together melted. The warlord towered above her. It seemed he had to topple. But his will was strong. His eyes fixed on the heights as if to fly. At last his knees sagged. Ali felt herself plucked from the ground.

Ike carried her, racing for a toppled pillar in the gloom. He threw her behind the pillar and leaped to join her as Shoat's havoc commenced in earnest. He was an army unto himself, it seemed. His ammunition struck like lightning bolts, detonating in bursts of white light and raking the library with lethal splinters. Back and forth, he strafed the ruins and hadals fell.

The carved pillar gave cover from incoming rounds, but not from the ricochet of fléchettes. Ike pulled bodies on top of them like sandbags.

Ali cried out as precious codices and inscriptions and scrolls were shredded and burst into fire. Delicate glass globes, etched with writings on the inside through some lost process, shattered. Clay tablets, describing satans and gods and cities ten times older than the Mesopotamian creation myth of Emannu Elish, turned to dust. The conflagration spread into the bowels of the library, feeding on vellum and rice paper and papyrus and desiccated wooden artifacts.

The city itself seemed to howl. The masses fled downhill from the ruins, even as martyrs piled around Thomas in an attempt to protect their lord from further desecration. With a shriek, Isaac launched into the darkness in search of the assassins, and warriors sped after him.

Ali peered around the pillar. Shoat's muzzle flash was still sparkling at the eye of his distant sniper nest. A single shot would have accomplished everything Shoat needed to escape. Instead, his rage had gotten the better of him.

While the chaos still held, Ike went to work transforming Ali. He was rough. The flames, the blood, the destruction of ancient lore and science and histories: it was too much for her. Ike began yanking her clothes away and smearing her with ochre grease from the bodies around them.

He used his knife to cut tanned skins and hair ropes from the dead. He dressed her like them, and stiffened her hair into horn shapes with the gore. Just an hour ago she had been a scholar excavating texts, a guest of the empire. Now she was filthy with death. 'What are you doing?' she wept.

'It's over. We're leaving. Just wait.' The shooting stopped.

They'd found Shoat. Ike stood.

Crouched against the bonfire of writings, while the wounded still thrashed about and minced blindly across the needlelike shrapnel, he pulled Ali to her feet. 'Quickly,' he said, and draped rags across her head.

They passed near Thomas, who lay heaped with his faithful, burned and bleeding, paralyzed within his armor. His face was singed, but intact. Incredibly, he was still alive. His eyes were open and he was staring all around.

The bullet must have cut his spinal column, Ali decided. He could only move his head. Half-buried with Shoat's other victims, he recognized Ike and Ali as they looked down at him. His mouth worked to denounce them, but his vocal cords had been seared and no sound came.

More hadals arrived to tend their god-king. Ike ducked his head and started down the ramp, towing Ali. They were going to make a clean getaway, it seemed. Then Ali felt her arm grabbed from behind.

It was the feral girl. Her face was streaked with blood, and she was injured and aghast. Immediately she saw their scheme, the hadal disguise, their run for the exit.

All she had to do was cry out.

Ike gripped his knife. The girl looked at the black blade, and Ali guessed what she was thinking. Raised hadal, she would immediately suspect the most murderous intention.

Instead, Ike offered the knife to her. Ali watched the girl's eyes cut back and forth from him to her. Perhaps she was recalling some kindness they had done for her, or a mercy shown. Perhaps she saw something in Ike's face that belonged to her, a connection with her own mirror. Whatever her equation, she made her decision.

The girl turned her head away for a moment. When she looked back, the barbarians were gone.

I went down to the moorings of the mountains; The earth with its bars closed behind me forever; Yet You have brought up my life from the pit.

– JONAH 2:6

28

THE ASCENT

Like a fish with beautiful green scales, Thomas lay beached on the stone floor, mouth gaping, wordless, dying, surely. His strings were cut. Below the neck, he could not move a muscle or feel his body, which was a mercy, given the scorched wreckage left by Shoat's bullet. And yet he was in agony.

With every labored breath he could smell the burnt meat on his bones. Open his eyes, and his assassin hung before him. Close them, and he could hear his nations stubbornly waiting for his great transition. His greatest torment was that the fire had seared his larynx and he could not command his people to disperse.

He opened his eyes and there was Shoat on the cross, teeth bared. They had done an exquisite job of it, driving the nails through the holes in his wrists, arranging small ledges for his buttocks and feet so that he would not hang by his arms and asphyxiate. The crucifix had been positioned at Thomas's feet so that he could enjoy the human's agony.

Shoat was going to last for weeks up there. A hank of meat dangled at his shoulder so that he could feed himself. His elbows had been dislocated and his genitals mutilated; otherwise he was relatively intact. Decorations had been cut into his flesh. His ears and nostrils had been jingle-bobbed. Lest anyone think the prisoner had no owner, the symbol for Older-than-Old had been branded onto his face.

Thomas turned his head away from the grim creation. They could not know that Shoat's presence gave him no pleasure. Each view only enraged him more. It was this man who had been planting the contagion along the Helios expedition's trail, yet

Thomas could not interrogate him to learn the insidious details. He could not abort the genocide. He could not warn his children and send them fleeing into the deeper unknown. Finally, most enraging, he could not let go of this ravaged shell and cross into a new body. He could not die and be reborn.

It was not for lack of new receptacles. For days now, Thomas had been surrounded by rings of females in every stage of pregnancy or new motherhood, and the smell of their scented bodies and breast milk was in the air. For a minute he saw not living women, but Stone Age Venuses.

In the hadal tradition, they were overfed and gloriously pampered during their maternity. Like women of any great tribe, they wore wealth upon their naked bodies: plastic poker chips or coins from a dozen nations had been stitched together for necklaces, colored string and feathers and seashells had been woven into their hair. Some were covered in dried mud and looked like the earth itself coming to life.

Their waiting was a form of deathwatch, but also of nativity. They were offering the contents of their wombs for his use. Those with newborns periodically held them aloft, hoping to catch his attention. Each mother's greatest desire was that the messiah would enter her own child, even though it would mean his obliterating the soul already in formation.

But Thomas was holding himself back. He saw no alternative. Shoat's presence was a minute-by-minute reminder that the virus was out there, set to annihilate his people. To try and inhabit a developed mind meant risking his own memory. And what was the use of reincarnating into the body of an infant, if he was helpless to warn about the impending plague? No, he was better residing in this body. As a precaution, he – and January and Branch – had been vaccinated by a military doctor at that Antarctic base many months ago, when the presence of prion capsules was first being revealed. Even racked and paralyzed, this shot, burned shell was at least inoculated against the contagion.

And so their king lay in a body that was a tomb, caught between choices. Death was sorrow. But as the Buddha had once said, birth was sorrow, too. Priests and shamans from throughout the hadal world went on drumming and murmuring. The children went on crying. Shoat went on writhing and mewling. Off to one side, the daughter of Isaac continued her fascination with the computer, tapping at keys endlessly, a monkey with a typewriter.

Thomas closed his eyes against the nightmare he had become.

After a week of climbing, Ike and Ali reached the serpentine sea. The last of the Helios rafts rested near the lip of its discharge, which plunged into a waterfall, miles deep. It circled in an eddy by the shore like a faithful steed. A single paddle was still lashed to one pontoon.

'Climb in,' whispered Ike, and- Al gratefully lowered herself onto the rubber flooring. Ike had kept them moving almost constantly since their escape. There had been no time to hunt or forage, and she was weak with hunger.

Ike pushed the raft out from shore, but did not begin paddling. 'Do you recognize any of this?' he asked her.

She shook her head.

'The trails go in every direction. I've lost my thread, Ali. I don't know which way to go.'

'Maybe this will help,' said Ali. She opened a thin leather sack tied around her waist, and drew out Shoat's homing device.

'It was you,' Ike said. 'You stole it.'

'Walker's men kept beating Shoat. I thought they might kill him. This seemed like something we might need someday.'

'But the code...'

'He kept repeating a sequence of numbers in his delirium. I don't know if it was the code or not, but I memorized it.'

Ike squatted on his heels beside her. 'See what happens.'

Ali hesitated. What if it didn't work? She carefully touched the numbers on the keypad and waited. 'Nothing's happening.'

'Try again.'

This time a red light flashed for ten seconds. The tiny display read ARMED. There was a single high-pitched beep, and the display read DEPLOYED. After that the red light died out.

'Now what?' Ali despaired.

'It's not the end of the world,' Ike said, and threw the box in the water. He fished out a square coin he'd found on the trail. It was very old, with a dragon on one side and Chinese calligraphy on the other. 'Heads, we go left. Tails, right.' He gave it a flip.

They climbed away from the luminescent waters of the sea and its rivers and streams into a dead zone separating their worlds. They had bypassed the region on their descent via the Galápagos elevator system, but Ike had dipped into this barrier zone on other travels. It was too deep for photosynthesis to support a surficial food chain, and yet too contaminated by the surface for the subplanetary biosphere to survive. Few animals passed up or down between those worlds, none by accident. Only the desperate crossed through this lifeless, tubular desert.

Ike backed them away from the dead zone, found a cavity that Ali could capably defend, then went hunting. At the end of a week he returned with long strings of dried meat, and she did not ask its source. With these provisions, they reentered the dead zone.

Their progress was hampered by boulder chokes, hadal fetishes, and booby traps. It was also made difficult by their gain in altitude. The air pressure was decreasing as they approached sea level. Physiologically they were climbing a mountain, and simple walking became an exertion. Where the path turned vertical and they had to scale cracks or inside tubes, Ali's lungs sometimes felt near to bursting.

She sat up gasping for air one night. After that, Ike employed an old Himalayan rule of thumb: climb high, sleep low. They would ascend through the tunnels to a high point, then descend a thousand feet or so for the night. In that way, neither of them developed pulmonary or cerebral edema. Nevertheless, Ali suffered headaches and was visited by occasional hallucinations.

They had no way to track time or chart their elevation. She found their ignorance liberating. With no calendar or hour to mark, she was forced into the moment. With every turn, they might see sunlight. But after a thousand turns without an end in sight, she relinquished that preoccupation, too.

Next Thomas heard silence. The plainsong and chants and drumming, the sound of children, the talk of women: it had stopped. All was still. Everywhere the People were asleep, to all appearances exhausted by their vigil and rapture. Their silence was a relief to the ears of a trained monk.

Quiet, he wanted to command the crucified lunatic. You'll wake them.

Only then did he hear the hiss of aerosol, the fine mist leaking from Shoat's laptop computer. Thomas worked the air into his scarred lungs, then worked to thrust it out as a shout or a whistle. His people were never waking, though.

He stared in horror at Shoat. Taking a bite of the meat hanging by his cheek, Shoat stared right back at him.

Ike's beard grew. Ali's golden hair fell almost to her waist. They were not really lost, because they had started their escape with little idea where they were anyway. Ali

found comfort in her prayers each morning, but also in her growing closeness with this man. She dreamed of him, even lying in his arms.

One morning she woke to find Ike facing the wall in his lotus position, much the way she'd first seen him. In the blackness of the dead zone, she could make out the faint glow of a circle painted on the wall. It could have represented some aborigine's dreamtime or a prehistoric mandala, but she knew from the fortress that it was a map. She entered Ike's same contemplation, and the lines snaking and crossing one another within the circle took on dimension and direction. Their memory of the wall painting guided them for days to come.

Badly lamed, Branch entered the ruins of the city of the damned. He had given up finding Ike alive. In truth, fevers and delirium and the poison on that hadal spear had harrowed him so that he could barely remember Ike at all. His wanderings wound deeper less from his initial search than because the earth's core had become his moon, subtly pulling him into a new orbit. The myriad pathways had reduced to one in his mind. Now here he was.

All lay still. By the thousands.

In his confusion, he was reminded of a Bosnian night long ago. Skeletons lay tangled in final embrace. Flowstone had absorbed many of the dead back into the plastic floor. The putrescence had become an atmosphere all its own. Currents of stench whipped around building corners like squalls of rowdy ghosts. The one sound, besides the whistle of abyssal wind, was of water in canals slicing away at the city's underbelly. Branch meandered through the apocalypse.

In the center of the city he came to a hill studded with the ruins of an edifice. He scanned it through his night scope. There was a cross on top, and it held a body. The cross drew him as a childhood relic, a vestige of some Arthurian impulse.

His bad leg, plus the closely packed dead, made the climb arduous. That reminded him of Ike, who had talked about his Himalayas with such love. He wondered if Ike might be somewhere around here, perhaps even on that cross.

The creature on their crucifix had died much more recently than the rest of them, unkindly sustained by a shank of meat. Nearby, a Ranger's sniper rifle lay broken in pieces beside a laptop computer. Branch couldn't say whether he'd been a soldier or a scientist. One thing was certain, this was not Ike. He had been newly marked, and the grimace held a jumble of bad teeth.

As he turned to leave, Branch noticed the corpse of a hadal dressed in a suit of regal jade. Unlike the others, this one was perfectly preserved, at least from the neck up. That curiosity led to another. The man's face looked familiar to him. Bending closer, he recognized the priest. How could he have come to be here? It was he who'd called with information of Ike's innocence, and Branch wondered if he'd descended to save Ike, too. What a shock hell must have been for a Jesuit. He stared at the face, straining to summon the good man's name.

'Thomas,' he suddenly remembered. And Thomas opened his eyes.

New Guinea

They stood stock-still in the mouth of a nameless cave, with the jungle spread before them. All but naked, a little raving, Ali resorted to what she knew, and began to offer a hoarse prayer of thanks.

Like her, Ike was blinded and shaken and afraid, not of the sun above the ropelike canopy, or of the animals, or of whatever waited for him out there. It was not the world that frightened him. Rather, he did not know who he was about to become. There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a

border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer – and no matter how many mountains he had left behind – it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace.

Not trusting his voice, he circled Ali with his arms.