Midway between the fortress and the water, a patch of beach bulged and grew into a small mountain. The hump rose up and took on the dimensions of an animal. The sand guttered from its shoulders and he became a man. The mercenaries were too astounded to lay waste to him.

He was not muscular the way an athlete or bodybuilder is. But the flesh on him stretched in ropy plates. It seemed to have grown on his bones out of need, and then grown some more, with little symmetry. Ali stared down at him.

His bulk and height and the silver bands on his arms evinced pedigree of some sort. He was imposing, as tall as most of the mercenaries, even majestic. For an instant she wondered if this barbaric deformity might not be the Satan she was seeking.

The mercenaries' spotlights fixed his details for all to see. Ali was close enough to recognize him as a warrior simply from the distribution of his scars. It was a forensic fact that primitive fighters cla.s.sically presented their left side in battle. From foot to shoulder this barbarian's left hemisphere showed twice the old injuries as his right. His left forearm had been sliced and broken from parrying blows. The calcific growth sprouting from his head had a fluted texture, and the tip of one horn had been snapped in battle.

In his right hand he carried a samurai sword stolen in the sixteenth century. With his ferocious eyes and earth-painted skin, he could have been one of the terra-cotta statues inside the fortress keep. A demon guarding the sanctum. Then he spoke, and it was London-accented. 'Will you beg, lad?' he said to his first kill. She had heard this voice over the radio. She had seen Ike's eyes grow wide at the remembrance of him.

Isaac shook the sand from his body and faced the fortress, oblivious to his enemies. He searched the heights, dragging ma.s.ses of air in through his nostrils to catch a scent. He smelled something. Then he called back to the girl, and there was no question what was happening.

They had stolen the beast's daughter. Now h.e.l.l wanted her back.

Before the soldiers could pull their triggers, the trap closed. Isaac leaped on the first soldier and snapped his neck.

The main raft pitched upward and dawdled on edge, its occupants windmilling into the black water.

More lances harpooned up through the raft floors, and a desperate man machine-gunned his own feet.

Spotlights slewed.

Strobes auto-activated.

Obsidian hailed down on hadals and humans alike. The last of Walker's outfit faced their own weapons here and there, taken from their dead comrades over the past months. Those who could figure out the safety mechanisms and triggers wreaked as much havoc on their own kind as on the soldiers. Many simply used the rifles as clubs.

The three soldiers trapped near the fortress tried for the doorway, but hadals pounced from the walls and blocked their way. Backed against the wall, one bellowed 'Remember the Alamo!' and his partner, a macho from Miami, said, 'f.u.c.k the Alamo, viva la Raza,' and nailed him through his brainpan. The third soldier shot the gang-banger on principle, then sucked the barrel and triggered his last round. The hadals were properly impressed by the suicides.

Out on the water, the chain gun hosed arcs of light into the black horizon. When the belt feed finally jammed, the lone last gunner grabbed a paddle and set out across the sea. In the silence that followed, you could hear his dogged flight, stroke by stroke, like the beating of wings.

Inside the fortress, Colonel Walker was feasted upon alive. They didn't bother cutting him down from the wall, but simply carved pieces off while he raved scripture.

High in the honeycombed fortress, Ike raced in search of Ali. The minute he'd heard the wild girl cry out, he'd started his race. Still dripping water from his hiding place at the edge of the sea, he sprinted up stairs and down corridors.

He might have known Ali would use his knife to free the others. Of course a nun wouldn't know when to let well enough alone. If only she had done as he'd meant and left the others hog-tied to their fates, her disappearance would have been immaculate. This storm of hadals would have swept through like a summer shower. They would have had their washing of spears, then gone on and left Ike hidden with Ali, none the wiser. Instead the People were now combing this cliff structure, hunting for their property, that feral girl. They would not stop until they got what they wanted, he knew, and that would include Ali now. One way or another, that girl would betray her, no matter what kindness Ali had shown her.

He had to find Ali first, and take it from there.

The hadal a.s.sault 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. Antic.i.p.ating 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. G.o.d 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.d,' 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 G.o.d. 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 turned 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l 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 gla.s.ses. 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.

26 - THE PIT.

Here I stand; I can do no other. G.o.d help me.

Amen.

-MARTIN LUTHER, Speech at the Diet of Worms 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 pa.s.sage. She saw him puzzling over the jumble of stone, watched him spy the hole near his feet. He got down and wormed into the pa.s.s. She darted forward to hamstring him while his legs were still exposed. As if antic.i.p.ating 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 pa.s.sages, she had usually won.

The squeeze pa.s.sage 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 bottle-necked 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 pa.s.sage 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 rehea.r.s.ed. 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s were immaculate and unpainted, two white fruits standing out from the acc.u.mulation 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.w.a.tch still attached. Much of the good meat was gone. She'd been getting down to the bone. Ike had pa.s.sed 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.

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 a.s.sault 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 ma.s.sing 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 succ.u.mbed 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.