The Descent Part 46

'Then leave,' came de l'Orme's voice.

Out the window behind his head, dark thunderheads were piling for an afternoon storm. His face was positively radiant with the reflected flames. His tone was stern. 'You may hand the torch on,' he told Thomas, 'but you may not extinguish it.'

'We're too d.a.m.ned close, Thomas,' January said.

'Close to what?' Thomas asked. 'Among us, we have over five hundred years of combined scholars.h.i.+p and experience. And where have we gotten with it in a year and a half of searching?' He dropped the strand of Lynch's teeth into the box, like so many rosary beads. 'That one of us is Satan. My friends, we've looked into the dark water so long it has become a mirror.'

A streak of lightning lanced between two limestone towers in the middle distance. Its thunder cracked through the room. Down below, the hired drivers and nurses fled for the cars just as a mountain squall attacked.

'You can't stop us, Thomas,' said de l'Orme. 'We have our own resources. We have our own imperatives. We'll follow the path you opened to us, wherever it may lead.'

Thomas closed the box and rested his fingers on the cardboard.

'Follow it then,' he said. 'This pains me to say. But from this day on you follow your path without the blessing and imprimatur of the Holy Father. And you follow it without me. My friends, I lack your strength. I lack your conviction. Forgive me my doubt. May G.o.d bless you.' He picked up the box.

'Don't go,' whispered January.

'Good-bye,' he said to them, and walked into the storm.

23 - THE SEA.

It had ceased to be a blank s.p.a.ce of delightful mystery...

-JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness Beneath the Mariana and Yap Trenches, 6,010 fathoms

The sea stretched on. They had been walking for twenty-one days. Ike kept them on a short leash. He set the pace, resting every half hour, circulating among them like Gunga Din, filling their water bottles, congratulating them on their endurance. 'Man, where were you guys when I needed you on Makalu?' he would say.

Next to Ike, the strongest was Troy, the forensics kid, who'd probably been watching Sesame Street at the time Ike was battling his Himalayan peaks. He did a fine job trying to be Ike-like, solicitous and useful. But he was wearing down, too. Sometimes Ike posted him at the front, a place of trust, his way of honoring the boy.

Ali decided the best help she could be was to walk with Twiggs, whom everyone else wanted to hogtie and leave. From the moment he woke, the man whined and begged and committed petty thefts. The microbotanist was a born panhandler. Only Ali could deal with him. She treated him like a teenage novitiate with pimples. When Pia or Chelsea marveled at her patience, Ali explained that if it wasn't Twiggs, it would be someone else. She had never seen a tribe without a scapegoat.

Their tents were history. They slept on thin sleeping pads as a pretense of their former civilization. Only three of them had sleeping bags, because the three pounds of weight had proven too much for the rest. When the temperature cooled, they pressed together and draped the bags over their collective body. Ike rarely slept with them. Usually he took his shotgun and wandered away, returning in the morning.

On one such morning, before Ike came in from his night patrolling, Ali woke and walked down to the sea to clean her face. A boggy mist had come in off the water, but she could see to place her feet on the phosph.o.r.escent sand. Just as she was about to skirt a large boulder, she heard noises.

The sounds were delicate and bony. Instantly she knew this was not English, probably not human. She listened more keenly, then gently worked ahead several more steps to the flank of the boulder and kept herself hidden.

There seemed to be two figures down there. In silence she listened to the voices murmur and click and slowly dial her into a different horizon of existence. There was no question they were hadals.

She was breathless. One sounded little different from the water lightly lapping against the sh.o.r.e. The other was less joined at the vowels, more cut and dried at the edges of his word strings. They sounded polite or old. She stepped from around the rock to see them.

There weren't two, but three. One was a gargoyle similar to those that Shoat and Ike had killed. It was perched upon the very skin of the water, hands flat, while its wings fanned languidly up and down. The other two appeared to be amphibians, or close to it, like fishermen who have no memory but the sea, half man, half fish. One lay on his side on the sand, feet in the water, while the other drifted in repose. They had the sleek heads and large eyes of seals, but with sharpened teeth. Their flesh was slick and white, with small black hairs fletching their backs.

She had been afraid they would flee.

Abruptly she was afraid they would not.

One of the amphibians stirred and twisted to see her, showing his thick pizzle. It was erect. He'd been stroking himself, she realized. The gargoyle flexed his mouth like a baboon, and the dental arcade looked vicious.

'Oh,' Ali said foolishly.

What had she been thinking, to come here alone?

They watched her with the composure of philosophers in a glen. One of the amphibians went ahead and finished his thought in their soft language, still looking at her.

Ali considered running back to the group. She set one foot behind her to turn and go. The gargoyle cut the briefest of side glances at her.

'Don't move,' muttered Ike.

He was hunkered on top of the boulder to her left, balanced on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet. The pistol in one hand hung relaxed.

The hadals didn't speak anymore. They had that peculiar Oriental ease with long silences. The one went on stroking himself with apelike bemus.e.m.e.nt, not at all self-conscious or purposeful. There was nothing to hear but the water licking sand, and the skin sound of the one fondling himself.

After a while, the gargoyle cast one more glance at Ali, then pushed forward against the water's surface and departed on slow wings, never rising more than a few inches above the sea. He diagonaled into the mist and was gone.

By the time Ali brought her attention back to the amphibians, one had vanished. The last one - the masturbator - reached a state of boredom and quit. He slid below the water, and it was as if he had been drawn into a mouth. The lips of the sea sealed over him.

'Did that really happen?' Ali asked in a low voice. Her heart was pounding. She started forward to verify the handprints in the sand, to confirm the reality.

'Don't go near that water,' Ike warned her. 'He's waiting for you.'

'He's still there?' Her Zen hadals, lurking? But they were so pacific.

'You want to back up, please. You're making me nervous, Sister.'

'Ike,' she suddenly bubbled, 'you can understand them?'

'Not a word. Not these.'

'There are others?'

'I keep telling you, we're not alone.'

'But to actually see them...'

'Ali, we've been pa.s.sing among them the whole time.'

'Ones like those?'

'And ones you don't want to know about.'

'But they looked so peaceful. Like three poets.'

Ike tsk'ed.

'Then why didn't they attack us?' she said.

'I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out. It's almost like they knew me.' He hesitated. 'Or you.'

Branch lagged, weary.

He kept cutting their trail, but their spoor wandered, or else he did. It was likely him, he knew. Insect bites had made him sick, and the best thing would be to find a burrow and wait until the fever pa.s.sed. With so much human presence around, he didn't trust the burrowing, though.

To stop would be to attract predators from many miles around. If one found him convalescing in a cubbyhole, it would be all over. And so Branch kept on his feet.

A lifetime of wounds hampered his pace. Delirium sapped his attention. He felt very old. It seemed as though he'd been voyaging since the beginning of time.

He came to a narrow sinkhole with a skinny rivulet trickling down. Rifle across his back, Branch roped into the abyss. At the bottom, he pulled the line and coiled it and moved on. He was new to this region, but was not a neophyte.

He came upon a woman's skeleton. Her long black hair lay by the skull, which was unusual, because it made good cordage when braided. That it had been left told him there were many more such humans available. That was good. Predators would be less p.r.o.ne to hunt him.

Through the day, Branch found more evidence of humans: whole skeletons, ribs, a footprint, a dried patch of urine, or the distinctive smell of H. sapiens in hadal dung. Someone had scratched his name on the wall, along with a date. One date from only two weeks before gave him hope.

Then he found the blubbery pile of survival suits, of which a number had been speared or hacked. To a hadal, the neoprene suits would seem like supernatural skins or even live animals. He rummaged through the pile and dressed in one that was whole and fit.

Shortly afterward, Branch found the rolls of paper with Ali's maps. He raced through them in chronological order. At the end, someone else's hand had scrawled in Walker's treachery at the sea, and the group's dispersal. It all came together for him, why this band had become separated and vulnerable, why Ike was nowhere to be found among them. Branch saw now where he needed to go, that subterranean sea. From there he might find more signs. Ali's chronicle made perfect sense to him. He took the maps and went on.

A day later, Branch realized he was being stalked.

He could actually smell them on the airstream, and that disturbed him. It meant they had to be close, for his nose was not keen. Ike would have sensed them long before. Again he felt old.

He had the same two choices every animal does, fight or flight. Branch ran.

Three hours later he reached the river. He saw the trail leading along the water, but it was too late for that. He faced around, and there were four of them fanning out in the talus above, as pale as larvae.

A slender spear - reed tipped with obsidian - shattered on the rock next to him. Another pierced the water. It would have been easy to shoot the one youngster nearing on his left. That still would have left three, and the same necessity for what he now did.

The leap was clumsy, impaired by his rifle and the tube of maps wrapped in waterproofing. He had meant to strike open water, but his right foot caught a stone. He heard his right knee snap. He clung to the rifle, but dropped the maps on sh.o.r.e. Momentum alone carried him into the current. The current sucked him under.

For as long as he could hold his breath, Branch let the river have him. At last he triggered the survival suit and felt its bladders fill. He was buoyed to the surface like a cork.

The fastest hadal was still tracking him alongside the river. The moment Branch's head popped above water, the hadal made a hurried cast.

The spear lodged deep just as Branch fired a burst from underwater, and the water chopped upward in long rooster tails. The hadal spun, was killed, and hit the water flat.

The river flowed on, taking him around bends and crooks, away from the danger.

For the next five days, Branch had the dead hadal for company as they both drifted to the sea. The river was like a mother, impartial to her children's differences. He drank her water. His fever cooled.

The spear fell out of him eventually.

Parasitic eels gently sucked at him. They took his blood, but his wound stayed clean. Somewhere along the way, he got his knee back in joint.

With all that pain, it was no wonder he dreamed so much as he drifted to the sea.

Back along the riverbank, a monstrosity, painted and inked and ridged with scars, picked up the tube of maps. He unrolled them from the waterproofing and pinned their corners with rocks while hadals gathered around. They had no eye for such things. But Isaac could see the care and detail the cartographer had lavished on these pages. 'There is hope,' he said in hadal.

For days they had been remarking on a nebulous gleam the color of milk, occupying the rump of their horizon. They thought it might be a cloudbank or steam from a waterfall or perhaps a beached iceberg. Ali feared they were suffering collective hunger delusions, for they'd begun stumbling on the trail and talking to themselves. No one imagined a seaside fortress carved from phosph.o.r.escent cliffs.

Five stories high, its walls were as smooth as Egyptian alabaster. It had been whittled from solid rock. Beerstone, Twiggs told them. The Romans used to quarry it in ancient Britain. Westminster Abbey was made of it. A creamy white calcite, it came out of the ground as soft as soap and over the years dried to a hardness perfect for sculpting. He adored it for its pollen residues.

Long ago, hadals had skinned away the face of this wall, denuding its softer stone to cut out a complex of rooms and ramparts and statues, all of one piece. Not one block or brick had been added to it, a single huge monument.

Three times as broad as it was tall, the dwelling was empty and largely in collapse. It breasted the sea and was clearly a bulwark anchoring the commerce of some great vanished empire. You could see what was left of stone docks and pier slips submerged an inch beneath the water.

Even weak with hunger, they were beguiled. They wandered through the warren of rooms looking across the night sea and, to the fortress's rear, onto the crags below. Stairs had been cut into the cliff sides, seemingly thousands of them, leading off into new depths.

Whoever - or whatever - the hadals had built this defensive monster against, it was not humans. Ali estimated the fortress dated back at least fifteen thousand years, probably more. 'Man was still chipping flint in caves while this hadal civilization was engaged in riverine trade across thousands of miles. I doubt we were much of a threat to them.'

'But where did they go?' Troy asked. 'What could have destroyed them?'

As they wandered through the crumbling hulk, they encountered a people from another time. The fortress rooms and parapets were built to h.o.m.o scale, with ceilings planed at a remarkably standard six feet.

The walls held traces of engraved images and script and glyphs, and Ali p.r.o.nounced the writings even older than what they had seen before. She was sure no epigrapher had ever laid eyes on such script.

Deep in the cavernous interior stood a freestanding column, rising twenty meters into a large domed chamber in the heart of the building. A high platform separated them from the spire's base. They made a complete circuit around the immense room, following the narrow walkway and s.h.i.+ning their lights on the spire's upper section. There were no doors or stairways leading onto the platform.

'The spire could be a king's tomb,' said Ali.

'Or a castle keep,' said Troy.

'Or a good old-fas.h.i.+oned phallic symbol,' said Pia, who was there because her lover, the primatologist Spurrier, trusted Gitner even less than he trusted Ike. 'Like a Siva rock, or a pharaoh's obelisk.'

'We need to find out,' Ali said. 'It could be relevant.' Relevant, she did not say, to her search for the missing Satan.

'What do you propose, growing wings?' asked Spurrier. 'There are no stairs.'

With a pencil-thin beam of light, Ike traced a set of handholds carved into the upper half of the platform's circular wall. He opened his hundred-pound pack and laid out the contents, and they all took a peek.

'You're still carrying rope?' marveled Ruiz. 'How many coils do you have in there?'

Ali saw a pair of clean socks. After all these months?

'Look at all those MREs,' said Twiggs. 'You've been holding out on us.'

'Shut up, Twiggy,' Pia said. 'It's his food.'