Part 54 (2/2)

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 sc.r.a.ping 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l 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 gla.s.ses. 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.

26 - THE PIT.

Here I stand; I can do no other. G.o.d help me.

Amen.

-MARTIN LUTHER, Speech at the Diet of Worms 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 pa.s.sage. She saw him puzzling over the jumble of stone, watched him spy the hole near his feet. He got down and wormed into the pa.s.s. She darted forward to hamstring him while his legs were still exposed. As if antic.i.p.ating 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 pa.s.sages, she had usually won.

The squeeze pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage tightened, and there was an awkward kink sideways and up. It was the kind of bend that took a contortionist s.h.i.+ft. 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 rehea.r.s.ed. 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 vanis.h.i.+ng. 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s were immaculate and unpainted, two white fruits standing out from the acc.u.mulation 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, was.h.i.+ng 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 wrist.w.a.tch still attached. Much of the good meat was gone. She'd been getting down to the bone. Ike had pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sault 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 ma.s.sing 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 succ.u.mbed 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.

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