The Descent Part 57

'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 owners.h.i.+p 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 a.s.surances. Let me talk to them. You and I -'

'a.s.surances? You're still treating them like n.o.ble 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 d.a.m.ned, 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 G.o.d-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, acaudillo 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 wors.h.i.+p. 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 clinched 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 s.h.i.+vered. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 scholars.h.i.+p, 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 gla.s.s. 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 G.o.d. His voice. His words.'

'G.o.d?' 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 G.o.d? 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.'