The Descent

by Jeff Long

  It took several minutes, even with Shoat describing the landmarks while looking through the rifle scope. “See the pillars?”

  “Are those Walker’s men?” Two men hung, slumped. Neither was Ali. Yet.

  “Just taking a rest,” Shoat said. “They’ve been getting some rough treatment. And there’s another prisoner, too. I’ve seen him with Ali. They keep taking him away, though.”

  Ike searched higher.

  “She’s there,” Shoat encouraged. “I can see her. Unbelievable, it looks like she’s writing in her field book. Notes from the underground?”

  Ike went on searching. A hill of flowstone knobbed above the masses, enfolding all but the upper stories of a carved stone building. The walls had collapsed on Ike’s side of the building, exposing to view a spacious room with no roof. And there she was, sitting on a chunk of rubble. They had freed her hands and legs; why not? Two stories below, she was surrounded by the hadal nation.

  “Locked in?”

  “I see her.” They hadn’t started her rites of passage yet. The branding and shackles and mutilations were usually started in the first few days. Recovery could take years. But Ali looked whole, untouched.

  “Good.” Shoat yanked the binoculars away. “Now you’ve got your scent. You know where you need to go.”

  “You want me to infiltrate an entire city of hadals and steal back your homing device?”

  “Give me some credit, man. You’re mortal. There are some things even you can’t do. Besides, why sneak when you can make a grand entrance?”

  “You want me to just walk in and ask for your property?”

  “Better you than me.”

  “Even if Ali has it, then what?”

  “I’m a businessman, Ike. I live and die by negotiation. Let’s see where we can get with them. A little bit of old-fashioned bartering.”

  “With them? Down there?”

  “You’ll be my proxy. My private ambassador.”

  “They’ll never let Ali go.”

  “All I want is my box.”

  Ike was truly mystified. “Why would they give it to you?”

  “That’s what I want to talk to them about.” Shoat reached over to his rucksack and pulled out a thin, battered laptop computer embossed with the Helios logo. “Our walkie-talkies are all gone. But I’ve got a two-way comm device set up with my laptop. We’re going to have a video conference.”

  Shoat opened the lid and turned the machine on. He stepped back, plugging a portable earphone into one ear, and held a small camera/speaker ball in front of his face. On screen, his face rotated and mugged. “Testing, testing,” his voice spoke over the computer speaker.

  Against the wall, the feral girl grunted, eyes wide with fear, a stranger to such magic.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do, Ike. Take the laptop down into night-town there. Once you reach Ali, open the laptop up. Make sure the computer’s in line of sight, a straight shot from you to me. I don’t want to lose transmission. Then get their presidente on the horn for me. While you’re at it, give this whelp back to them. A good-faith gesture. I’ll take it from there.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  Shoat grinned. “That’s my man. What would you like? Your life? Or Ali’s? Wanna bet I know the answer?”

  It was exactly the chance Ike had wanted for her. “All right,” he said. “You’re the boss.”

  “Good to have you on board, Ike.”

  “Cut my ropes.”

  “Of course.” Shoat wagged the knife as if Ike were a naughty child, then tossed it on the ground. “But first we need to understand each other. It’s going to take you a while to crawl over here and cut yourself loose. And by that time I’ll be locked and loaded in a cozy sniper’s nest not too far away. You’re going to escort this cannibal down through that rabble and back to her people. And set up my link with their CEO, whoever that guy is.”

  Shoat set the computer on the floor and backed toward a tall, jagged hole in the wall. Ike had his eyes on the knife.

  “No tricks, no detours, no deceit. The laptop’s switched on. Don’t turn it off. I want to be able to hear everything you say,” Shoat said. “And don’t come looking for me. From my cubbyhole, I’ve got a clear shot all the way down the trail. Screw up, and the fireworks begin. But I won’t shoot you, Ike. It’s Ali that pays for your sins. I’ll kill her first. And next, just to piss them off, their leader. After that I’ll work through targets of opportunity. But there’s not going to be a bullet for you. I promise. You can live with yourself. You can live with them. Hell can have you back. Are we clear?”

  Ike started crawling.

  And in the lowest deep, a lower deep

  Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,

  To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.

  —JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

  27

  SHANGRI-LA

  BENEATH THE INTERSECTION OF

  THE PHILIPPINE, JAVA, AND PALU TRENCHES

  Ike descended into the ancient city, leading his daughter by a rope. The city loomed in the organic twilight, a puzzle of remnants, fused architecture, and eyeless windows.

  On the floor of the vast canyon, at the ruins’ edge, Ike slung Shoat’s laptop computer on one shoulder and bent the plastic candle he had been given, breaking the vial inside. The wand came alive with green light. Even without his sniperscope, Shoat would be able to track his progress through the city.

  For the first half-mile or so there was no outright challenge, although animals scuttled along the flowstone. With each step, Ike tried to piece together some alternative to what was already in motion. Shoat’s spiderweb seemed unbreakable. Ike could practically see the back of his own head through the electronic scope. If only he were the prey, he thought. He could duck the bullet, or take it. But Shoat had clearly pronounced his targets: Ali first. Ike continued through the fossilized city.

  News of human trespass was rippling forward through the city. In the penumbra of his green light, shapes that normally would have appeared as silhouettes against the pale glow of stone now lurked as shadows. The candle’s neon glow was devastating his night vision. Then again, from the beginning of this doomed expedition, he’d been squandering his nocturnal powers, even eating human food. There was no disguising his origins anymore.

  Click language cricketed in the gloom. He could smell hadals crowding the penumbra, musky and smeared with ochre. A rock thrown from the shadows struck him on the arm, not hard, just to goad him.

  Winged beasts swept inches overhead. Ike maintained his stoic gait. Several others circled out of reach. He felt warm spittle dribbling down his neck.

  A monstrosity came racing from ahead and blocked the way. Squat, encrusted with fluorescent mud, he sported a penis sheath and battle scars and brandished an ax. He flicked his tongue like a reptile and bulged his eyes, all challenge. Ike kept his motions passive and the beast let them pass.

  The plastic slicks and mineral convolutions of the city floor began to angle upward. Ike approached that rise in the city’s center which he had spied through the binoculars. The camp grew dense with refugees, and the canals were fouled with their raw offal and sewage. They lay on the bare ground, ill and hungry.

  In his years of captivity, Ike had never seen a fraction of the traits and styles gathered here. Some had flippers for arms, others feet that were tantamount to hands. There were heads flattened by binding, eye sockets genetically emptied. The variety of body art and clothing was wild. Some went naked, some wore armor or chain mail. He passed eunuchs proudly scalped at the groin, warriors with hair woven with beads and horns woven with scalps, and females bred for their smallness or fatness.

  Through it all, Ike kept his expression impassive. He climbed the pathway winding toward the hilltop, and the mass of hadals thickened. Here and there, stripped rib cages arched above ravaged carcasses. In times of such want, he knew, human chattel went first.

  Behind him, the girl kept pace. His daught
er was his passport. There were no challenges to Ike’s advance, and he continued through the city. From the cliffs above, Ike had seen how the pit didn’t bottom out, but only paused. And yet the entire race seemed to have rooted here. They showed no signs of taking their nomad spirit deeper. It made him want to plunge farther into the hole, to scale the inverse mountain, just to see what new sights there might be. His curiosity made him sad, because it was unlikely he’d live to see another hour, much less another land.

  A pile of ruins projected from the top of the heaped flowstone, and Ike aimed for the highest structure. Climbing higher, Ike and the girl reached Walker’s men. The two mercenaries were lashed to broken columns, not with rope, but with their own entrails. Seeing her enemy, the girl capered. Ike let her. One lifted his eyeless face to the jubilation. They had taken his lower jaw off, too. The tongue lay spastic on his throat.

  After a minute they continued. They crested the mound. The ruins on the flat top occupied several acres. Hadals lay or sat about on the amorphous folds of stone, but, strangely, had not taken up residence in the crowning structure itself. Again, Ike was struck by their sense of waiting.

  The wall on one side of the main building had crumbled, and Ike and the girl clambered up its rubble. Warriors bluffed charges and hooted threats and insults. None came closer than the edges of his light, though, and the effect was a riptide of greenish shadows.

  They reached that top floor of the ruins Ike had seen through the binoculars. The roof had caved in or been peeled off, and the result was a high stage open to Shoat’s sniperscope. The gallery was more spacious than Ike had expected. In fact, he saw that it was some kind of library, dense with holdings.

  Ike stopped in the center of the room. This was where he’d sighted Ali reading, though she was gone now. The floor was flat, but listing, like a ship beginning to sink. This was as good a place as any. It gave him a sense of space, exposed to the equivalent of sky. If he had his choice, Ike didn’t want to die in some little tube of a cavity. Let it be in the open. Also, as instructed, he needed to stay in Shoat’s line of sight.

  While he waited, Ike was furiously gathering information, patching together contingency plans and dead-reckoning trajectories, trying to locate the players and weapons in this new arena, searching for exits and hiding places. It was a matter of habit, not hope.

  He found a broken stele and placed the computer on top, at eye level. He opened the lid. The screen was lit with Shoat’s face, a miniature Wizard of Oz. “What are they waiting for?” Shoat’s voice spoke from the monitor. The feral girl backed away from it. Nearby hadals scurried into the shadows and softly hooted their alarm.

  “There’s a hadal pace to things,” Ike said.

  He glanced around. Scores of stone tablets were propped side by side against one wall, codices lay open like long road maps, and scrolls and skins painted with glyphs and script lay in piles. To enhance her readings, they had provided Ali with Helios flashlights taken from the expedition. She was hard on the trail of the mother tongue. Another ten minutes passed. Then Ali was sent out from the jumbled interior. She came to a halt fifteen or twenty feet away. Tears were running down her face. “Ike.” She had mourned him. Now she was mourning him all over again. “I thought you were dead. I prayed for you. Then I prayed some more, that if you were somehow alive, you’d know not to come for me.”

  “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 ownership 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 assurances. Let me talk to them. You and I—”

  “Assurances? You’re still treating them like noble 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 damned, 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 god-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 ancien
t 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, a caudillo 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.