about.
Then he felt the animal climb inside his chest wall, and realized it was no animal but a hand. It navigated upward with a surgeon's dexterity. He tried to flatten himself, palms against the stone, but his head arched back and his body could not retreat, could not, from that awful trespass.
'Santos!' he gasped with his one and only sac of air.
'No, not him,' murmured a voice he knew. De l'Orme's eyes stared into the night.
They did it this way in Mongolia. The nomad makes a slit in the belly of his sheep and darts his hand inside and reaches high through all the slippery organs and drives straight to the beating heart. Done properly, it was considered an all but painless death.
It took a strong hand to squeeze the organ to stillness. This hand was strong.
De l'Orme did not fight. That was one other advantage to the method. By the time the hand was inside, there was nothing more to fight. The body itself cooperated, shocked by the unthinkable violation. No instinct could rehearse a man for such a moment. To feel the fingers wrap around your heart... He waited while his slaughterer held the chalice of life.
It took less than a minute.
He rolled his head to the left and Santos was there beside him, as cold as wax, de l'Orme's own creation. His horror was complete. He had sinned against himself. In the name of goodness he had killed goodness. Year upon year he had received the young man's goodness, and he had rebuked and tested it and never believed such a thing could be real. And he had been wrong.
His mouth formed the name of love, but there was no air left to make the word.
To a stranger, it might have seemed de l'Orme now gave himself to the sacrifice. He gave a small heave, and it drove the arm deeper. Like a puppet, he reached for the hand that manipulated him, and it was a phantom within the bones of his chest. Gently he laid his own hands above his heart. His defenseless heart.
Lord have mercy. The fist closed.
In his last instant, a song came to him. It surged upon his hearing, all but impossible, so beautiful. A child monk's pure voice? A tourist's radio, a bit of opera? He realized it was the parakeet caged in the courtyard. In his mind, he saw the moon rise full above the mountains. But of course the animals would wake to it. Of course they would offer their morning song to such a radiance. De l'Orme had never known such light, even in his imagination.
Beneath the Sinai Peninsula Through the wound, entrance. Through the veins, retreat.
His quest was done.
In the nature of true searching, he had found himself. Now his people needed him as they gathered in their desolation. It was his destiny to lead them into a new land, for he was their savior.
Down he sped.
Down from the Egypt eye of the sun, in from the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own human image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death. Their presence had become the world, and their presence was the presence of jackals that strip the muscle from your legs even as you try to outrun them.
The earth closed over him. With each twist and bend, it sealed shut behind him. It resurrected senses long buried.
Solitude! Quiet! Darkness was light.
Once again he could hear the planet's joints and lifeblood. Stirrings in the stone.
Ancient events. Here, time was like water. The tiniest creatures were his fathers and mothers. The fossils were his children. It made him into remembrance itself.
He let his bare palms ricochet upon the walls, drawing in the heat and the cold, the sharp and the smooth. Plunging, galloping, he pawed at the flesh of God. This magnificent rock. This fortress of their being. This was the Word. Earth.
Moment by moment, step by step, he felt himself becoming prehistoric. It was a blessed release from human habits. In this vast, capillaried monastery, through these openings and fretted spillways and yawning chthonic fistulae, drinking from pools of water older than mammal life altogether, memory was simply memory. It was not something to be marked on calendars or stored in books or labeled in graphs or drawn on maps. You did not memorize memory any more than you memorized existence.
He remembered his way deeper by the taste of the soil and by the drag of air currents that had no cardinal direction. He left behind the cartography of the Holy Land and its entry caves through Jebel el Lawz in the elusive Midian. He forgot the name of the Indian Ocean as he passed beneath it. He felt gold, soft and serpentine, standing from the walls, but no longer recognized it as gold. Time passed, but he gave up counting it. Days? Weeks? He lost his memory even as he gained it.
He saw himself and did not know it was himself. It was in a sheet of black obsidian. His image rose up as a black silhouette within the blackness. He went to it and laid his hands on the volcanic glass and stared at his face reflecting back. Something about the eyes seemed familiar.
Onward he hurtled, weary, yet refreshed. The depths gave flesh to his strength. Occasional animals provided him the gift of their meat. More and more, he witnessed life in the darkness, heard its chirps and rustling. He found evidence of his refugees and, long before them, of hadal nomads and religious travelers. Their markings on the walls filled him with grief for the lost glory of his empire.
His people had fallen from grace, steeply and deep and for so long they were hardly aware of their own descent. Yet now, even in their emptiness and misery, they were being pursued in the name of God, and that could not be. For they were God's children, and had lived in the wilderness long enough to wash their sins into amnesty. They had paid for their pride or independence or whatever else it was that had offended the natural order, and now, after an exile of a hundred eons, they had been returned to their innocence.
For God to continue punishing them was wrong. To allow them to be hunted into extinction was a sacrilege. But then, from the very beginning, his people had challenged the notion that God ever showed mercy. They were his lie. They were his sin. It had always been a false hope that God might deliver them from His own wrath into love. No, deliverance had to come from some other soul.
The dead have no rights.
– THOMAS JEFFERSON, near the end of his life
25
PANDEMONIUM
January 5
The end began with a small thing Ali spied on the ground. It could have been an angel lying there, invisible to all but her, telling her to be ready. Not missing a step, she landed her foot on the message and crushed it to bits. It was probably unnecessary. Who else would have read so much in a red M&M?
Not much later, while crouched awkwardly in the shadowy nook designated their latrine, Ali discovered another red candy, this time lodged in a crack in the wall above their sewage. Squatting above the pool of muck, her wrists roped tight by the mercenaries, Ali could still get the fingers of one hand down the crack. Expecting a note, she felt a hard, smooth knob. What she slid from the stone was a knife, black for night work, with a blood gutter and utilitarian weight. Even the handle looked cruel.
'What are you doing in there?' the guard called. Ali slipped the knife into her clothing, and the guard returned her to the little side room that was their dungeon. Heart knocking in her ears, Ali took her place beside the girl. She was afraid, but joyous. Here was her chance.
And now? Ali wondered. Would there be another sign? Should she cut her ropes now or wait? And what did Ike think she was capable of? He had to know there were limits. She was a woman of God.
Three mercenaries stalked ten feet apart through the terracotta army surrounding the spire. 'This is a
