Part 2 (2/2)

He swallowed hard, forced himself to think it through.

The coin was cold as ice. With one fingernail he sc.r.a.ped away a veneer of encrusted glacier dust. It had been lying here for years, even decades or centuries. The more he thought about it, the more his horror mounted.

The trap was nothing personal. It had nothing to do with drawing him, Ike Crockett, into the depths. To the contrary, this was just random opportunism. Time was not a consideration. Even patience had nothing to do with it. The way trash fishermen did, someone was chumming the occasional traveler. You threw down a handful of sc.r.a.ps and maybe something came, and maybe it didn't. But who came here? That was easy. People like him: monks, traders, lost souls. But why lure them? To where?

His bait a.n.a.logy evolved. This was less like trash fis.h.i.+ng than bearbaiting. Ike's dad used to do it in the Wind River Range for Texans who paid to sit in a blind and 'hunt' browns and blacks. All the outfitters did it, standard operating procedure, like working cattle. You cultivated a garbage heap maybe ten minutes by horse from the cabins, so that the bears got used to regular feeding. As the season neared, you started putting out tastier tidbits. In an effort at making them feel included, Ike and his sister were called upon each Easter to surrender their marshmallow bunnies. As he neared ten, Ike was required to accompany his father, and that was when he saw where his candy went.

The images cascaded. A child's pink candy left in the silent woods. Dead bears hanging in the autumn light, skins falling heavily as by magic where the knives traced lines. And underneath, bodies like men almost, as slick as swimmers.

Out, thought Ike. Get out.

Not daring to take his light off the inner mountain, Ike climbed back through the slot, cursing his loud jacket, cursing the rocks that s.h.i.+fted underfoot, cursing his greed. He heard noises that he knew didn't exist. Jumped at shadows, he cast himself. The dread wouldn't leave him. All he could think of was exit.

He got back to the main chamber out of breath, skin still crawling. His return couldn't have taken more than fifteen minutes. Without checking his watch, he guessed his round trip at less than an hour.

The chamber was pitch black. He was alone. He stopped to listen as his heartbeat slowed, and there was not a sound, not a shuffle. He could see the fluorescent writing hovering at the far edge of the chamber. It entwined the dark corpse like some lovely exotic serpent. He lashed his light across the chamber. The gold nose ring glinted. And something else. As if returning to a thought, he pulled his light back to the face.

The dead man was smiling.

Ike wiggled his light, jimmied the shadows. It had to be an optical trick, that or his memory was failing. He remembered a tight grimace, nothing like this wild smile. Where before he'd seen only the tips of a few teeth, joy - open glee - now played in his light. Get a grip, Crockett.

His mind wouldn't quit racing. What if the corpse itself was bait? Suddenly the text took on a grotesque clarity. I am Isaac. The son who gave himself to sacrifice. For love of the Father. In exile. In my agony of Light. But what could this all mean?

He'd done his share of hardcore rescues and knew the drill - not that there was much of a drill for this one. Ike grabbed his coil of 9-mm rope and stuffed his last four AA batteries into a pocket, then looked around. What else? Two protein bars, a Velcro ankle brace, his med kit. It seemed as if there should have been more to carry. The cupboard was pretty much bare, though.

Just before departing the main chamber, Ike cast his light across the room. Sleeping bags lay scattered on the floor like empty coc.o.o.ns. He entered the right-hand tunnel. The pa.s.sage snaked downward at an even pitch, left, then right, then became steeper. What a mistake, sending them off, even all together. Ike couldn't believe he'd put his little flock at this kind of risk. For that matter, he couldn't believe the risk they'd taken. But of course they'd taken it. They didn't know better.

'h.e.l.lo!' he called. His guilt deepened by the vertical foot. Was it his fault they'd put their faith in a counterculture buccaneer?

The going slowed. The walls and ceiling grew corrupt with long sheets of delaminating rock. Pull the wrong piece, and the whole ma.s.s might slide. Ike pendulumed from admiration to resentment. His pilgrims were brave. His pilgrims were foolhardy. And he was in danger.

If not for Kora, he would have talked himself out of further descent. In a sense, she became a scapegoat for his courage. He wanted to turn around and flee. The same foreboding that had paralyzed him in the other tunnel flared up again. His very bones seemed ready to lock in rebellion, limb by limb, joint by joint. He forced himself deeper.

At last he reached a plunging shaft and came to a halt. Like an invisible waterfall, a column of freezing air streamed past from reaches too high for his flashlight beam. He held his hand out, and the cold current poured through his fingers.

At the very edge of the precipice, Ike looked down around his feet and found one of his six-inch chemical candles. The green glow was so faint he had almost missed it.

He lifted the plastic tube by one end and turned off his headlamp, trying to judge how long ago they had activated the mixture. More than three hours, less than six. Time was racing out of his control. On the off-chance, he sniffed the plastic. Impossibly, it seemed to hold a trace of her coconut scent.

'Kora!' he bellowed into the tube of air.

Where outcrops disturbed the flow of wind, a tiny symphony of whistles and sirens and bird cries answered back, a music of stone. Ike stuffed the candle into one pocket.

The air smelled fresh, like the outside of a mountain. Eke filled his lungs with it. A rush of instincts collided in what could only be called heartache. In that instant, he wanted what he had never really missed. He wanted the sun.

He searched the sides of the shaft with his light - up and down - for signs that his group had gone this way. Here and there he spotted a possible handhold or a shelf to rest upon, though no one - not even Ike in his prime - could have climbed down into the shaft and survived.

The shaft's difficulties exceeded even his group's talent for blind faith. They must have turned around and gone some other way. Ike started out.

A hundred meters farther back, he found their detour.

He had walked right past the opening on his way down. On the return, the hole was practically blatant - especially the green glow ebbing from its canted throat. He had to take his pack off in order to get through the small aperture. Just inside lay the second of his chemical candles.

By comparing the two candles - this one was much brighter - Ike fixed the group's chronology. Here indeed was their deviation. He tried to imagine which pioneer spirit had piloted the group into this side tunnel, and knew it could only have been one person.

'Kora,' he whispered. She would not have left Owen for dead any more than he. It was she who would be insisting on probing deeper and deeper into the tunnel system.

The detour led to others. Ike followed the side tunnel to one fork, then another, then another. The unfolding network horrified him. Kora had unwittingly led them - him, too - deep into an underground maze.

'Wait!' he shouted.

At first the group had taken the time to mark their choices. Some of the branches were marked with a simple arrow arranged with rocks. A few showed the right way or the left way with a big X scratched on the wall. But soon the marks ended. No doubt emboldened by their progress, the group had quit blazing its path. Ike had few clues other than a black scuff mark or a fresh patch of rock where someone had pulled loose a handhold.

Second-guessing their choices devoured the time. Ike checked his watch. Well past midnight. He'd been hunting Kora and the lost pilgrims for over nine hours now. That meant they were desperately lost.

His head hurt. He was tired. The adrenaline was long gone. The air no longer had the smell of summits or jetstream. This was an interior scent, the inside of the mountain's lungs, the smell of darkness. He made himself chew and swallow a protein bar. Ike wasn't sure he could find his way out again.

Yet he kept his mountaineer's presence of mind. Thousands of physical details clamored for his attention. Some he absorbed, most he simply pa.s.sed between. The trick was to see simply.

He came upon a glory hole, a huge, unlikely void within the mountain. His light beam withered in the depths and towering height of it.

Even worn down, he was awed. Great columns of b.u.t.tery limestone dangled from the arched ceiling. A huge Om had been carved into one wall. And dozens, maybe hundreds, of suits of ancient Mongolian armor hung from rawhide thongs knotted to k.n.o.bs and outcrops. It looked like an entire army of ghosts. A vanquished army.

The wheat-colored stone was gorgeous in his headlamp. The armor twisted in a slight breeze and fractured the light into a million points.

Ike admired the soft leather thangka paintings pinned to the walls, then lifted a fringed corner and discovered that the fringe was made of human fingers. He dropped it, horrified. The leather was flayed human skins. He backed away, counting the thangkas. Fifty at least. Could they have belonged to the Mongolian horde?

He looked down. His boots had tracked halfway across yet another mandala, this one twenty feet across and made of colored sand. He'd seen some of these in Tibetan monasteries before, but never so large. Like the one beside Isaac in the cave chamber, it held details that looked less architectural than like organic worms. His were not the only footprints spoiling the artwork. Others had trampled it, and recently. Kora and the gang had come this way.

At one junction he ran out of signs altogether. Ike faced the branching tunnels and, from somewhere in his childhood, remembered the answer to all labyrinths: consistency. Go to your left or to your right, but always stay true. This being Tibet - the land of clockwise circ.u.mambulation around sacred temples and mountains - he chose left. It was the correct choice. He found the first of them ten minutes later.

Ike had entered a stratum of limestone so pure and slick it practically swallowed the shadows. The walls curved without angles. There were no cracks or ledging in the rock, only rugosities and gentle waves. Nothing caught at the light, nothing cast darkness. The result was unadulterated light. Wherever Ike turned his lamp beam, he was surrounded by radiance the color of milk.

Cleopatra was there. Ike rounded the wing and her light joined with his. She was sitting in a lotus position in the center of the luminous pa.s.sage. With ten gold coins spread before her, she could have been a beggar.

'Are you hurt?' Ike asked her.

'Just my ankle,' Cleo replied, smiling. Her eyes had that holy gleam they all aspired to, part wisdom, part soul. Ike wasn't fooled.

'Let's go,' he ordered.

'You go ahead,' Cleo breathed with her angel voice. 'I'll stay a bit longer.'

Some people can handle solitude. Most just think they can. Ike had seen its victims in the mountains and monasteries, and once in a jail. Sometimes it was the isolation that undid them. Sometimes it was the cold or famine or even amateur meditation. With Cleo it was a little of all of the above.

Ike checked his watch: 3:00 A.M. 'What about the rest of you? Where did they go?'

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