by Jeff Long
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 assault 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 massing 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 succumbed 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.
Their path snaked across the shield of olive stone, carved into solid rock, where the natural fissures gave out. Chunks of enormous stalactite bridged a section. Iron chains traversed blank spots.
The climb down took all of Ike’s attention. The pathway was old and bordered by a precipice falling a thousand feet to the floor. The girl decided this was her opportunity to terminate the relationship. She abruptly pitched herself off the edge, body and soul. It was a good effort and almost took Ike over with her, but he managed to pull her kicking and thrashing back to safety. For the next three days he had to be on constant guard against any further such episodes.
Near the bottom, fog drifted in big ragged islands, like New Mexico clouds. Ike thought the waterfalls must be feeding the fog. They came to a series of broken columns forming a sprawling course of polygonal stairs. Each column had snapped off at a ninety-degree angle, exposing neat, flat tops. Ike noticed the girl’s thighs trembling from the descent, and gave her a rest.
They were eating little, mostly insects and some of the shoots topping reeds that grew by the water. Ike could have gone scavenging, but chose not to. Progress aside, he was using the hunger to make the girl more pliable. They were deep in enemy territory, and he meant to get deeper without her setting off any alarms. He figured hunger was kinder than tightened ropes.
The sound of waterfalls pouring from the walls made a steady thunder. They moved among fins of rock that sliced the fog and menaced them with false trails. They passed skeletons of animals that had grown exhausted in the maze.
The fog had a pulse to it, ebbing and flowing. Sometimes it lowered around their heads or feet. It was only by chance that Ike heard a party of hadals approaching through one such tidal bank of fog.
Ike wasted no time bulldogging his prisoner to the ground before she could make any trouble. They stretched flat, bellies to the stone, and then for good measure he climbed on top of her and clamped one hand over her mouth. She struggled, but quickly ran out of breath. He settled his cheek onto her thick hair, and his eyes ranged beneath the ceiling of fog. Its cold mass hung just inches above the stone.
Suddenly a foot appeared by Ike’s head. It seemed to reach down from the fog. He could have grabbed the ankle without reaching. Its toes were long. The foot gripped the stone floor as if shoveling gravity. The arch had flattened wide over a lifetime of travels. Ike looked at his own fingers, and they appeared thin and weak next to that brute testament of cracked and yellow nails and veined weight.
The foot relinquished its hold upon the earth as its mate set down just ahead. The creature walked on, soft as a ballerina. Ike’s mind raced. Size sixteen, at least.
The creature was followed by others. Ike counted six. Or seven. Or eight. Were they searching for him and the girl? He doubted it. Probably it was a hunting party, or interceptors, their stone-age equivalent of centurions.
The padding of feet stopped not far ahead. Soon Ike could hear the hadals at the site of a kill, cracking sticks. Bones, he knew. By the sound of it, their prey had been larger than hominid. Then he heard what sounded like strips of carpet being torn. It was skin, he realized. They were rawhiding the dead thing, whatever it was. He was tempted to wait until they left, then go scavenge the remains. But while the fog held, he got the girl on her feet and they made a broad arc around the party.
The panels of stone grew wild with aboriginal scrawl, old and new. The hadal script—cut or painted ten thousand years ago—overlaid images overlaid on other images. It was like text foxing through text in old books, a ghost language.
They continued through the labyrinth, Ike leading his hostage by the rope. Like barbarians approaching Rome, they passed increasingly sophisticated landmarks. They walked beneath eroded archways carved from the bedrock. The trail became a tangle of once smoothly laid pavers buckled by eons of earth movement. Along one untouched portion, the path lay perfectly flat, and they walked for half a mile upon a mosaic of luminous cobbles.
Among these fins of rock, the thunder of waterfalls was muted. The canyon floor would have been flooded if not for canals that cleverly channeled the water along the sides of their path. Here and there the acequias had broken down with time and they waded through water. For the most part the system was intact. Occasionally they heard music, and it was water passing through the remains of instruments that were built into the walkway.
They were getting close to the center, Ike could tell from the girl’s apprehension. Also, they reached a long bank of human mummies bracketing the trail.
Ike and the girl made their way between them. What was left of Walker and his men had been tied standing up, thirty of them. Their thighs and biceps had been ritually mutilated. They looked ba
rrel-chested because their abdomens had been emptied. The eyes had been scooped out and replaced with marble orbs, round and white. The stone eyes were slightly too large, which gave them a ferocious, bulging, insect stare. Calvino was there, and the black lieutenant, and finally Walker’s head. As an act of contempt, they had laced Walker’s dried heart into his beard for all to see. If they had respected him as an enemy, it would have been eaten on the spot.
Ike was glad now that he’d starved his prisoner. At full strength, she would have presented a serious challenge to his stealth. As it was, she could barely walk a mile without resting. Soon she could feast and be free, he hoped. And Ali—the visitor in his dreams each night—would be restored to him.
On January 23, the girl attempted to drown herself in one of the canals, leaping into the water and wedging her body under an outcrop. Ike had to drag her out, and it was almost too late. He cut the rope gag and finally got the water out of her lungs. She lay limp by his knees, defeated and ill. Exhausted by their battle, both rested.
Somewhat later she began singing. Her eyes were still closed. It was a song for her own comfort, sung softly, in hadal, with the clicks and intonations of a private verse. At first Ike had no idea what it was, her singing was so small. Then he heard, and it was like being shot through the heart.
Ike rocked back on his heels, disbelieving. He listened more closely. The words were too intricate for his small lexicon. But the tune was there, scarcely a whisper: “Amazing Grace.”
The song sent him reeling. It was familiar to her, and beloved, he could tell, as it was to him. This was the last thing he had ever heard from Kora, her singing as she sank into the abyss beneath Tibet so many years ago. It was the very anthem he had cast himself into the darkness for. I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see. She had put her own words to it, but the tune was identical.
He had taken Isaac’s claim of fatherhood to be the truth, but saw no resemblance to that beast at all. Prompted by the song, Ike now recognized Kora’s features in the girl. Ike groped for other explanations. Perhaps the girl had been taught the melody by Kora. Or Ali had sung it to her. But for days, he had been carrying a vague, troubling sense of already knowing her.
There was something about her cheekbones and forehead, the way that jaw thrust forward in moments of obstinacy, and the general length of her body. Other details drew his attention, too. Could it really be? So much was the image of her mother. But so much was not, her eyes, the shape of her hands, that jaw.
Wearily she opened her eyes. He had not seen Kora in them because they were not Kora’s turquoise eyes. Maybe he was wrong. And yet the eyes were familiar. Then it struck him. She had his eyes. This was his own daughter.
Ike sagged against the wall. Her age was right. The color of her hair. He compared their hands, and she had his same long fingers, his same nails. “God,” he whispered. What now?
“Ma. You. Where,” he said in his fractured hadal.
She quit singing. Her eyes rode up to his, and her thoughts were easy to read. She saw his daze, and it suggested an opportunity. But when she tried prying herself from the wet stone, her body refused to cooperate.
“Please speak more clearly, animal man,” she said politely, in high dialect.
To Ike’s ear, she had expressed something like What? He tried again, reversing his question and fumbling for the right syntax and possessive. “Where. You own. Mother. To be.”
She snorted, and he knew his attempts sounded like grunting to her. All the while she kept her eyes directed away from his knife with the black blade. That was her object of desire, Ike knew. She wanted to kill him.
This time he traced a sign on the ground, then linked it with another sign. “You,” he said. “Mother.”
She made a gentle sweeping motion with her fingers, and that was his answer. One did not speak about the dead. They became someone—or something—else. And since you could never be sure who or what form that reincarnation might have taken, it was most judicious to give the dead no mention. Ike let it go at that.
Of course Kora was dead. And if she was not, there would probably be no recognizing what was left. Yet here was their legacy. And he needed her as a pawn to trade away for Ali. That had been his working plan. Suddenly it felt as though the life raft he had crafted from wreckage had just wrecked all over again.
It was excruciating, the appearance of a daughter he had never known, changed into what he had almost been changed into. What was he supposed to do now, rescue her? And what then? Obviously the hadals had taken her in and made her one of them. She had no idea who he was or what world he came from. To be honest, he had little idea himself. What kind of rescue was that?
He looked at the girl’s thin, painted back. Since capturing her, he had treated her like chattel. The only thing good to say was that he had not beaten or raped or killed her. My daughter? He hung his head.
How could he possibly trade away his own flesh and blood, even for a woman he loved? But if he did not, Ali would remain in their bondage forever. Ike tried to clear his mind. The girl was ignorant of her past. However harsh, she had a life among the hadals. To take her out of here would mean tearing her by the roots from the only people she knew. And to leave Ali meant … what? Ali could not possibly know he had survived the fortress explosion, much less that he was searching for her. Likewise, she would never know if he turned around and dragged this child away from the darkness. Indeed, knowing her, even if she did know, Ali would approve. And where would that leave him? He had become a curse. Everyone he loved disappeared.
He considered letting the girl go. But that would only be cowardice on his part. The decision was his to make. He had to make it. It was one or the other, at best. He was too much of a realist to waste a moment imagining the whole happy family could make it out. He was tormented the rest of that night.
When the girl awoke, Ike presented her with a meal of larvae and pallid tubers, and loosened her ropes. He knew it would only complicate matters to restore her strength, and that the slightest guilt at having depleted the child was a dangerous moralism. But he could no longer go on starving his own daughter.
Guessing she would never tell it to him, he asked her name. She averted her eyes at the rudeness. No hadal would give such power to a slave. Soon after he started her downward on the trail, though more slowly in consideration of her fatigue.
The revelation tortured him. After his return to the human side, Ike had vowed to keep his choices black and white. Stick to your code. Stray, and you died. If you couldn’t decide a matter in three seconds, it was too complicated.
The simplest thing by far, the safest thing, would have been to cut loose and escape while he could. Ike had never been a believer in predestination. God didn’t do it to you, you did it to yourself. But the present situation contradicted him.
The mystery of it weighed on Ike, and their slow descent slowed more. The heaviness he felt had nothing to do with their altitude, now eleven miles deep. To the contrary, as the air pressure thickened, he was engorged with more oxygen, and the effect was a hardy lightness of the kind one felt coming down off a mountain. But now the unwanted effect of so much oxygen in his brain was more thoughts and more questions.
Though he couldn’t say exactly how, Ike was certain he must have selected each circumstance leading to his own downfall. And yet what choices had his daughter made to be born in darkness and never know the light or her true father or her own people?
The journey down was a journey of water sounds. Blindfolded, Ali passed the first number of days listening to the sea scythe by as amphibians drew their raft on. The next days were spent descending alongside cascades and behind immense falls. Finally, reaching more even ground, she walked across streams bridged with stones. The water was her thread.
They kept her separate from the two mercenaries who’d been captured alive. But on one occasion her blindfold slipped and she saw them in the perpetual twilight cast by phosphorescent lichen. Th
e men were bound with ropes of braided rawhide, and arrows still projected from their wounds. One looked at Ali with horrified eyes, and she made the sign of the cross for his benefit. Then her hadal escort cinched the blindfold over her eyes again, and they went on. Only later did Ali realize why the mercenaries weren’t blindfolded, too. The hadals didn’t care if the two soldiers saw the path down, because neither would ever have the opportunity to climb back out.
That was the beginning of her hope. They weren’t going to kill her anytime soon. Thinking of the two soldiers’ certain fate, she felt guilty for her optimism. But Ali clung to it with a greed she’d never known. It had never occurred to her before how base a thing survival was. There was nothing heroic about it.
Prodded, tugged, carried, pushed, she staggered into a cavity that could have been the center of her being. She wasn’t harmed. They didn’t violate her. But she suffered.
For one thing, she was famished, not that they didn’t try to feed her. Ali refused the meat they offered, though. The monster who led them came to her. “But you have to eat, my dear,” he said in perfect King’s English. “How else will you finish the hajj?”
“I know where the meat came from,” she answered. “I knew those people.”
“Ah, of course. You’re not hungry enough.”
“Who are you?” she rasped. “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 carried more scars, and there was something about his eyes that declared a knowledge of life she didn’t want to know.