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. The 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 earned more scars, and there was something about his eyes that declared a knowledge of life she didn't want to know.
After that, Ali was given a diet of insects and small fish. She forced it down. The trek went on. Her legs ached at night from striking against rocks. Ali welcomed the pain. It was a way not to mourn for a while. Perhaps if she'd been carrying arrows like the mercenaries were, it would have been possible not to mourn at all. But the reality was always there, waiting. Ike was dead.
At last they reached the remains of a city so old it was more like a mountain in collapse. This was their destination. Ali knew because they finally took off her blindfold and she was able to walk without being guided.
Weary, frightened, mesmerized, Ali picked her way higher. The city was up to its neck in a tropical glacier of flowstone, which spun off a faint incandescence. The result was less light than gloom, and that was enough. Ali could see that the city lay at the bottom of an enormous chasm. A slow mineral flood had all but swallowed much of the city, but many of the structures were erect and honeycombed with rooms. The walls and colonnades were embellished with carved animals and depictions of ancient hadal life, all of it blended in subtle arabesques.
Debauched by time and geological siege, the city was nevertheless inhabited, or at least in use. To Ali's shock, thousands of hadals – tens of thousands, for all she knew –
had come to rest in this place. Here lay the answer to where the hadals had gone. From around the world, they had poured down to this sanctuary. Just as Ike had said, they were in flight. This was their exodus.
As the war party threaded through the city, Ali saw toddlers resting against their mothers' thighs, exhausted with flu. She looked, but there were very few infants or aged in the listless mob. Weapons of all types lay on the ground, apparently too heavy to lift.
In their listlessness, the hadals imparted a sense of having reached the end of the earth. It had always been a mystery to Ali why refugees – no matter what race – stopped where they did, why they didn't keep going on. There was a fine line between a refugee and a pioneer; and it had to do with momentum once you crossed a certain border. Why had these hadals not continued deeper? she wondered.
They climbed a hill in the center of the city. At the top, the remnants of a building stood above the amberlike flowstone. Ali was led into a hallway that spiraled within the ruins. Her prison cell was a library. They left her alone.
Ali looked around, astounded by the treasury. This was to be her hell, then, a library of undeciphered text? If so, they'd matched the wrong punishment with her. They had left a clay lamp for her like those Ike had lit. A small flame twitched at the snout of oil.
Ali started to explore by its light, but wasn't careful enough carrying it, and the flame guttered out. She stood in the darkness, filled with uncertainty, scared and lonely. Suddenly the journey caught up with her, and she simply lay down and fell asleep.
When Ali woke, hours later, a second lamp was flickering in the room's far corner. As she approached the flame, a figure rose against the wall, wrapped in rags and a burlap cloak. 'Who are you?' a man's voice demanded. He sounded weary and spiritless, like a ghost. Ali rejoiced. Clearly he was a fellow prisoner. She wasn't alone!
'Who are you?' she asked, and folded the man's hood back from his face. It was beyond belief. 'Thomas!' she cried.
'Ali!' he grated. 'Can it be?'
She embraced him, and felt the bones of his back and rib cage.
The Jesuit had the same furrowed face as when she'd first met him at the museum in New York. But his brow had thickened and he had weeks of grizzled beard, and his hair was long and gray and thick with filth. Crusted blood matted his hair. His eyes were unchanged. They'd always been deeply traveled.
'What have they done to you?' she asked. 'How long have you been here? Why are you in this place?'
She helped the old man sit, and brought water for him to drink. He rested against the wall and kept patting her hand, overjoyed. 'It's the Lord's will,' he kept repeating. For hours they exchanged their stories. He had come looking for her, Thomas said, once news of the expedition's disappearance reached the surface. 'Your benefactor, January, was tireless in reminding me of the Beowulf group's responsibilities to you. Finally I decided there was only one thing to do. Search for you myself.'
'But that's absurd,' said Ali. A man his age, and all alone.
'And yet, look,' said Thomas.
He'd descended from a tunnel in Javanese ruins, praying against the darkness, guessing at the expedition's trajectory. 'I wasn't very good at it,' he confessed. 'In no time I got lost. My batteries wore down. I ran out of food. When the hadals found me, it was more an act of charity than capture. Who can say why they didn't kill me? Or you?'
Ever since, Thomas had languished among these mounds of text. 'I thought they'd leave my bones
