by Jeff Long
He had to find Ali first, and take it from there.
The hadal assault had been crystallizing for days. In their ignorance, Walker and his mercenaries had failed to see the signs. But tucked in a cubbyhole in the cliffs, Ike had been watching hadals arrive almost from the hour Walker landed, and their strategy was clear. They would wait for the soldiers to begin departing on boats, and during the transition from land to sea, they would attack. Anticipating all of that, Ike had arranged diversions and scouted hiding places and selected what parts of the human depot he wanted for himself. In addition to Ali, he wanted two hundred pounds of military rations and a raft. They didn’t need more. Two hundred pounds would feed her to the surface. And he would live off the land.
Ike’s one hope was his disguise. The hadals did not know he was operating on their fringe, dressed like them, in powdered rock and ochre and rags of the human enemy. For months he had been eating as they ate, harvesting creatures of all kinds, feeding on the meat, warm or cold, raw or jerked. He had their smell now, and some of their strengths. His spoor was hadal spoor. His sweat tasted like hadal sweat. They would not be looking for him. Yet.
He reached the tower stairs and dashed to the top. Embellished like the savage, rigged with war gear, all but naked, Ike burst into the room.
Chelsea was perched in the window, legs out, waiting as if for a bus ride.
To her, what entered was a hadal beast. Chelsea tipped herself outward just as Ike yelled, “Wait!” In the final instant she heard him.
“Ike?” she said. But there was no getting back from gravity what she had given. She tumbled from the window.
Ike didn’t waste a second glance. He went straight to the vault in the floor, and it was empty. Ali had left. Troy and the girl were nowhere to be seen.
The great circle was wrapping him again. That was the way. Everyone had a circle. He had lost a woman once, and now was losing Ali. Was that his fate, to play Orpheus to his own heart?
He had almost surfaced from the maze with Ali, and now the maze was beginning all over again. God help me, he thought. He looked down, and it seemed that the new labyrinth was growing from his feet, extending in Daedelian twists, his next million miles. Start from scratch, he told himself. It was the old paradox. He had to lose his path in order to find it.
Ali had left no clues. He looked. No footprints. No blood trail. No blaze marks with her fingernails.
He ranged the room, trying to get a sense of things. Who had been here. When. What had motivated their leaving. Little came to him. Maybe she had taken Troy and the girl with her, though it seemed unlikely Ali would have left Chelsea alone. It came to Ike. Ali had gone searching for him.
The realization was not immaterial. It meant Ali would be looking for him in places she thought he might be. If he could anticipate her guesswork, then he might yet find her. But the prospect was bleak. She wouldn’t know to look in the cliffside pockets, two hundred feet off the deck, or in his hideout, burrowed among sand worms and tuber clams. She’d be looking throughout the fortress, now swarming with hadals.
Ike weighed his options. Discretion was safer, but a waste of precious time. He could creep and steal through the building, but this was a race, not hide-and-seek. The only alternative was to reveal himself and hope she would do the same.
“Ali!” he yelled. He went to the doorway and shouted her name and listened, then went to the window and shouted again.
Far below, hadals crouching around their human windfall glanced up at him. The boats were being stripped. Supplies were being looted. Rifles were chattering in long, random bursts, all for the noise and fireworks.
Some of the bigger mercenaries were under the knife, he saw, providing impressive strings of meat that would be cured over heat sources or pickled in brine. At least two had been captured alive and were being bound for transport. Chelsea’s body was in use by a pack of skinny fighters pretending she was a live captive. Clan leaders often gave deceased property to their followers as a vicarious experience, a way of amplifying their own prestige.
There were a good hundred or more hadals on the beach, probably that many more wending through the fortress proper. It was a huge number of warriors to bring together in one place. Already Ike had counted eleven different clans. They had laid their trap well; it suggested a knowledge of humans that was extraordinary.
Ike darted his head out the window. Hadals were scaling the fortress face, all merging toward him. He took quick, careful aim at the amphorae he had strung along the fortress crown, and fired three times, each time rupturing a clay vessel and igniting its oil. In sheets of flame, the oil poured down the wall. The hadals scrambled right and left on the vertical face. Some jumped, but several were caught in the first phase.
The blue flames curdled down the stone in diminishing streams. A storm of arrows and stones rattled against the wall outside his window. Some arced inside. He had their attention now.
Ike could hear more scurrying up the tower stairs, and calmly stepped to the doorway. He put a single shot through the mass of amphorae roped above the landing. Oil from twenty jars gushed down the stairs, a cataract of fire. Hadal screams guttered up.
Ike went to the rear window and called Ali’s name again. This time he saw a single tiny light working down the corkscrew trail, a half-mile deep. That would be human, he knew. But which human? He reached for his stolen M-16. He’d shot the clip dry, but its sniperscope still worked. He thumbed the On switch and swung it through the depths and found the light. It was Troy down there, with the feral girl. Ike smeared his cheek against the rifle stock. Ali was nowhere to be seen.
That was when he heard her.
Her echo seemed to rise up inside his skull, and through the flames in the landing and from deep within the building. He put his ear against the stone. Her voice was still vibrating, coming through the walls.
“Oh, dear God,” she suddenly groaned, and his heart twisted in his chest.
They had her.
“Just wait,” she pleaded. This time her voice was more distinct. She was trying to be courageous, he knew her. And he knew them.
Then she said something that froze him. She spoke the name of God. In hadal.
There was no mistaking it. She placed the clicks and glottal halt and words just right. Ike was stunned. Where could she have learned that? And what effect would it have? He waited, head tight against the stone.
Ike was wild with fear for her. He was helpless here. He had no idea where she was, on the floor below or in some deeper room. Her voice seemed to be coming from throughout the fortress. He wanted to run in search of her, but didn’t dare leave this one sweet spot on the wall. He lifted his ear, and her voice ended. He set it back on the planed stone, and she was there again. “Here,” she said. “I have this.”
“Keep talking,” he murmured, hoping to unravel her location.
Instead she started playing a flute.
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 scraping 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 tu
rned 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 passed 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 hell 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 glasses. 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.
Here I stand; I can do no
other. God help me. Amen.
—MARTIN LUTHER,
Speech at the Diet of Worms
26
THE PIT
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 passage. She saw him puzzling over the jumble of stone, watched him spy the hole near his feet. He got down and wormed into the pass. She darted forward to hamstring him while his legs were still exposed. As if anticipating 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 passages, she had usually won.
The squeeze passage 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 bottlenecked 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 passage tightened, and there was an awkward kink sideways and up. It was the kind of bend that took a contortionist shift. 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 rehearsed. 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 pronunciation 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 vanishing. 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 breasts were immaculate and unpainted, two white fruits standing out from the accumulation 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, washing 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-watch still attached. Much of the good meat was gone. She’d been getting down to the bone. Ike had passed 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.