Ike carried her, racing for a toppled pillar in the gloom. He threw her behind the pillar and leaped to join her as Shoat's havoc commenced in earnest. He was an army unto himself, it seemed. His ammunition struck like lightning bolts, detonating in bursts of white light and raking the library with lethal splinters. Back and forth, he strafed the ruins and hadals fell.
The carved pillar gave cover from incoming rounds, but not from the ricochet of flechettes. Ike pulled bodies on top of them like sandbags.
Ali cried out as precious codices and inscriptions and scrolls were shredded and burst into fire. Delicate glass globes, etched with writings on the inside through some lost process, shattered. Clay tablets, describing satans and gods and cities ten times older than the Mesopotamian creation myth of Emannu Elish, turned to dust. The conflagration spread into the bowels of the library, feeding on vellum and rice paper and papyrus and desiccated wooden artifacts.
The city itself seemed to howl. The masses fled downhill from the ruins, even as martyrs piled around Thomas in an attempt to protect their lord from further desecration. With a shriek, Isaac launched into the darkness in search of the assassins, and warriors sped after him.
Ali peered around the pillar. Shoat's muzzle flash was still sparkling at the eye of his distant sniper nest. A single shot would have accomplished everything Shoat needed to escape. Instead, his rage had gotten the better of him.
While the chaos still held, Ike went to work transforming Ali. He was rough. The flames, the blood, the destruction of ancient lore and science and histories: it was too much for her. Ike began yanking her clothes away and smearing her with ochre grease from the bodies around them.
He used his knife to cut tanned skins and hair ropes from the dead. He dressed her like them, and stiffened her hair into horn shapes with the gore. Just an hour ago she had been a scholar excavating texts, a guest of the empire. Now she was filthy with death. 'What are you doing?' she wept.
'It's over. We're leaving. Just wait.' The shooting stopped.
They'd found Shoat. Ike stood.
Crouched against the bonfire of writings, while the wounded still thrashed about and minced blindly across the needlelike shrapnel, he pulled Ali to her feet. 'Quickly,' he said, and draped rags across her head.
They passed near Thomas, who lay heaped with his faithful, burned and bleeding, paralyzed within his armor. His face was singed, but intact. Incredibly, he was still alive. His eyes were open and he was staring all around.
The bullet must have cut his spinal column, Ali decided. He could only move his head. Half-buried with Shoat's other victims, he recognized Ike and Ali as they looked down at him. His mouth worked to denounce them, but his vocal cords had been seared and no sound came.
More hadals arrived to tend their god-king. Ike ducked his head and started down the ramp, towing Ali. They were going to make a clean getaway, it seemed. Then Ali felt her arm grabbed from behind.
It was the feral girl. Her face was streaked with blood, and she was injured and aghast. Immediately she saw their scheme, the hadal disguise, their run for the exit.
All she had to do was cry out.
Ike gripped his knife. The girl looked at the black blade, and Ali guessed what she was thinking. Raised hadal, she would immediately suspect the most murderous intention.
Instead, Ike offered the knife to her. Ali watched the girl's eyes cut back and forth from him to her. Perhaps she was recalling some kindness they had done for her, or a mercy shown. Perhaps she saw something in Ike's face that belonged to her, a connection with her own mirror. Whatever her equation, she made her decision.
The girl turned her head away for a moment. When she looked back, the barbarians were gone.
I went down to the moorings of the mountains; The earth with its bars closed behind me forever; Yet You have brought up my life from the pit.
– JONAH 2:6
28
THE ASCENT
Like a fish with beautiful green scales, Thomas lay beached on the stone floor, mouth gaping, wordless, dying, surely. His strings were cut. Below the neck, he could not move a muscle or feel his body, which was a mercy, given the scorched wreckage left by Shoat's bullet. And yet he was in agony.
With every labored breath he could smell the burnt meat on his bones. Open his eyes, and his assassin hung before him. Close them, and he could hear his nations stubbornly waiting for his great transition. His greatest torment was that the fire had seared his larynx and he could not command his people to disperse.
He opened his eyes and there was Shoat on the cross, teeth bared. They had done an exquisite job of it, driving the nails through the holes in his wrists, arranging small ledges for his buttocks and feet so that he would not hang by his arms and asphyxiate. The crucifix had been positioned at Thomas's feet so that he could enjoy the human's agony.
Shoat was going to last for weeks up there. A hank of meat dangled at his shoulder so that he could feed himself. His elbows had been dislocated and his genitals mutilated; otherwise he was relatively intact. Decorations had been cut into his flesh. His ears and nostrils had been jingle-bobbed. Lest anyone think the prisoner had no owner, the symbol for Older-than-Old had been branded onto his face.
Thomas turned his head away from the grim creation. They could not know that Shoat's presence gave him no pleasure. Each view only enraged him more. It was this man who had been planting the contagion along the Helios expedition's trail, yet
Thomas could not interrogate him to learn the insidious details. He could not abort the genocide. He could not warn his children and send them fleeing into the deeper unknown. Finally, most enraging, he could not let go of this ravaged shell and cross into a new body. He could not die and be reborn.
It was not for lack of new receptacles. For days now, Thomas had been surrounded by rings of females in every stage of pregnancy or new motherhood, and the smell of their scented bodies and breast milk was in the air. For a minute he saw not living women, but Stone Age Venuses.
In the hadal tradition, they were overfed and gloriously pampered during their maternity. Like women of any great tribe, they wore wealth upon their naked bodies: plastic poker chips or coins from a dozen nations had been stitched together for necklaces, colored string and feathers and seashells had been woven into their hair. Some were covered in dried mud and looked like the earth itself coming to life.
Their waiting was a form of deathwatch, but also of nativity. They were offering the contents of their wombs for his use. Those with newborns periodically held them aloft, hoping to catch his attention. Each mother's greatest desire was that the messiah would enter her own child, even though it would mean his obliterating the soul already in formation.
But Thomas was holding himself back. He saw no alternative. Shoat's presence was a minute-by- minute reminder that the virus was out there, set to annihilate his people. To try and inhabit a developed mind meant risking his own memory. And what was the use of reincarnating into the body of an infant, if he was helpless to warn about the impending plague? No, he was better residing in this body. As a precaution, he – and January and Branch – had been vaccinated by a military doctor at that Antarctic base many months ago, when the presence of prion capsules was first being revealed. Even racked and paralyzed, this shot, burned shell was at least inoculated against the contagion.
And so their king lay in a body that was a tomb, caught between choices. Death was sorrow. But as the Buddha had once said, birth was sorrow, too. Priests and shamans from throughout the hadal world went
