Part 55 (2/2)

'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 h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d'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 ma.s.s of writings had acc.u.mulated 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 j.a.panese 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 s.p.a.cious, 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 scholars.h.i.+p, 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 authors.h.i.+p 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 dest.i.tute. 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. Ca.n.a.ls had harrowed the avenues deep, carving meandering canyons. Much was in collapse or flooded or had been overrun with flowstone. Several giant stalact.i.tes 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 mult.i.tudes. 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.

<script>