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 ancient 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
