The hole in the floor was almost eight meters across, cut as if to permit an army to descend together underground, and the tetravisaged statue supporting the block of flooring had the girth of a good-sized tree. The pillar had been hewn from a carnelian-colored rock with the texture of granite. The eyes of the statue – the two pairs that I could see, at any rate – were nothing but empty sockets, as if someone had long ago removed the stones or picked away the intricate lapidary work filling them. A tier of stone steps commencing at the lip of the hole’s northern hemisphere led into the abyss. Peering into the hole from several meters away, I could see that beneath its rim was a pedestal – a thick stone sheath – from which the Asadi statue had risen and into which it would once again sink when it came time for the great circular floor section to fall counterclockwise back into place.
The huri atop the elevated block of floor suddenly swooped down and affixed itself possessively to The Bachelor’s mane. Immediately, The Bachelor’s nervousness and uncertainty seemed to evaporate. As the huri tiptoed to a perch on his right shoulder, the Asadi turned calmly toward us.
‘Egan Chaney,’ Elegy said again, a four-syllable litany. ‘You know where he is – don’t you?’
The Bachelor’s first response was a dead, grey stare. Then, pivoting, he strode to the lip of the hole and dropped one foot onto the first semicircular tier. He looked back at us in invitation, then descended several more steps and halted again.
‘Let’s go,’ Elegy urged Kretzoi and me.
‘One of us stays behind,’ I said. ‘In fact, we’d probably be smart just to get the hell out of here.’
‘You stay, then.’
‘Make it Kretzoi and we’re off.’
Elegy looked at Kretzoi and gestured wearily toward the pagoda’s tall, half-open door. ‘Wait out there for Jaafar,’ she said. ‘We’ll be back as soon as we can, just as soon as we—’ She stopped.
The Bachelor was gone. The warring angels underground beckoned.
As Kretzoi sidled obediently toward the door, casting accusatory, baffled glances our way, I touched Elegy’s shoulder and led her toward the pit. Then, beneath the massive elevated wheel of the floor, we went apprehensively down the tier of steps. A monster with four faces watched us with a cold eyeless gaze . . .
The steps formed a horseshoe – an inverted, steeply terraced U – against the northern half of the pit. This horseshoe arrangement persisted to a depth of about four meters, whereupon we could continue to descend only by walking along the bottommost tier until we had reached a narrow set of steps corkscrewing widdershins downward from the eastern base of the U.
Fortunately, we had The Bachelor going before us as a guide and enough pale, phosphorescent light to see him. Still, the going was hazardous, and I kept imagining that the wheel overhead was about to click stridently, rotate counterclockwise atop the countenances of the blind Asadi effigy, and grind into place like a colossal manhole cover, sealing us beneath the pagoda forever. That didn’t happen, but each time I looked back up the well of the pit, the faces of the statue appeared to be turning and I was startled and discomfited anew – until I reminded myself that our own steady widdershins descent was responsible for the statue’s apparent motion.
More agile than I, Elegy now had the lead. I kept my hand on her shoulder and squinted into the abyss, whose contours and dimensions were perpetually changing – at first because the pit opened out into a vast Plutonian cavern, and then because the stone steps gave way to smooth concrete platforms that had been reinforced with steel or titanium. The Bachelor, his huri settled comfortably on his right shoulder, was negotiating the fifth or six platform beneath ours. I gripped Elegy’s shoulder hard and indicated that I wanted to sit down. The heat had caused me to sweat through my clinging undergarment, and a bout of nausea seemed imminent.
‘We’ll lose him,’ Elegy protested, peering downward – but she let me squat gracelessly at her side and put my head between my knees in an attempt to stave off my queasiness. Given five minutes, the treatment worked. I raised my head and tried to wipe the sweat from my face with the sleeve of my jumpsuit.
‘It’s not The Bachelor we’ve lost,’ I told Elegy. ‘It’s the huri – the huri’s navigating for him, sending out ultrasonic pulses and constructing temporal and spatial holograms from their feedback.’
‘We’ve lost the huri, then. The result’s the same.’ Elegy sat down beside me on the smooth cantilevered platform and began idly to rub my back. ‘You’re drenched through,’ she informed me, removing her hand to pick fastidiously at the cloth of her own jumpsuit. ‘So am I, for that matter.’
‘They won’t leave us up here,’ I said. ‘Otherwise, they’d have never admitted us in the first place.’
‘They?’
‘Not The Bachelor and the huri. The huri and all its cata-combpent relatives, that’s the “they” I’m talking about.’
Elegy didn’t reply. As we sat in the high, hot dark, the sound of warring angels we had heard in the pagoda suddenly reasserted itself, and there wheeled before us in the divided cavern a vast, smoky cloud of huri – thousands upon thousands of them convoluting in the air in a shape reminiscent of a single prodigious member of the species, a superorganism duplicating on an Olympian scale the morphology and movements of its constituent organisms. Like herrings or mackerals, the huri were schooling,
