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 wristwatch 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.
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.
