Ike's head lifted slightly.
'No,' Thomas said, 'you don't understand. Ike doesn't know who he is anymore. Do you realize how dangerous that is? He's become an animal for others to use. The armies use him to kill us. The corporations use him to lay bare our territory and to guide murderers who plant it with disease. With plague. And he hides from his own evil by leaping back and forth from one race to the other.'
Beside him, the monster Isaac smiled.
'Plague?' said Ali, in part to digress from Thomas's finality. But also because he kept mentioning it, and she had no idea what he meant.
'You've brought desolation onto my people. It follows you.'
'What plague?'
Thomas's eyes flashed at her. 'No more deceptions,' he thundered.
Ali shrank from him.
'My sentiments exactly,' a reedy voice piped out from the laptop computer.
Thomas turned his head as if hearing a fly buzzing. He scowled at the computer. 'What's this?' he hissed.
'A man called Shoat,' Ike said. 'He wants to talk with you.'
'Montgomery Shoat?' Thomas spoke the name as if expelling a fetid stench. 'I know you.'
'I don't know how,' Shoat said. 'But we do have mutual concerns.'
Thomas grabbed Ike's arm and spun him face-out to the distant cliffs. 'Where is this man? Is he near? Is he watching us?'
'Ah-ah, careful, Ike. Not a word more,' Shoat warned. His finger wagged at them from the screen.
Thomas stood rooted behind Ike, motionless except for his head switching from side to side, piercing the twilight. 'Join us, please, Mr Shoat,' he said.
'Thanks anyhow,' Shoat's image said on the screen. 'This is close enough for me.'
The surreality was breathtaking, a computer screen in this underworld. The ancient speaking to the modern. Then Ali noticed Ike's eyes darting about. He was gathering in the broken chamber, estimating it.
'You'll be down soon enough, Mr Shoat,' Thomas said to the computer. 'Until then, there's something you wanted to talk about?'
'A piece of Helios property has fallen into your hands.'
'What does this fool want?' Thomas asked Ike.
'It's a locator. A homing device,' Ike said. 'He claims it was taken from him.'
'I'm lost without it,' Shoat said. 'Return it to me and I'll be out of your hair.'
'That's all you want?' asked Thomas.
Shoat considered. 'A head start?'
Thomas's face filled with rage, but he regulated his voice. 'I know what you've done, Shoat. I know what Prion-9 is. You're going to show me where you've placed it. Every single location.'
Ali glanced at Ike, and he looked equally puzzled.
'Common ground,' Shoat enthused, 'the basis for every negotiation. I've got information you want, and you've got a guarantee of my safe passage. Quid pro quo.'
'You mustn't fear for your life, Mr Shoat,' Thomas stated. 'You're going to live a very long time in our company. Longer than you ever dreamed possible.'
It was plain to Ali that he was stalling, searching. Beside him, Isaac, too, was scanning the gloom for any evidence of the hidden man. The girl stood at one shoulder, whispering, guiding his examination.
'My homing device,' Shoat said.
'I visited your mother recently,' Thomas said, as if just remembering a courtesy.
Murmuring to the side, Isaac had begun dispatching hadal warriors. Their fluid shapes were indiscernible from the shadows. They streamed down from the ruins.
'My mother?' Shoat was disconcerted.
'Eva. Three months ago. An elegant hostess. It was at her estate in the Hamptons. We had a long chat about you, Montgomery. She was dismayed to hear about what you've been up to.'
'That's not possible.'
'Come down, Monty. We have things to talk about.'
'What have you done to my mother?'
'Why make this difficult? We're going to find you. In an hour or a week, it doesn't matter. You're not leaving, though.'
'I asked you about my mother.'
Ike's eyes quit roaming. Ali saw them fix on hers, intent, waiting. She took a breath and tried to still her confusion and fear. She anchored herself to his eyes.
'Quid pro quo?' said Thomas.
'What have you done to her?'
'Where to begin,' Thomas said lightly. 'In the beginning? Your beginning? You were born by C-section...'
'My mother would never share such a -'
Thomas's voice grew hard. 'She didn't, Monty.'
'Then how...' Shoat's voice faded.
'I found the scar myself,' Thomas said. 'And then I opened it. That wound through which you crept into the world.'
Shoat had fallen silent.
'Come down,' Thomas repeated. 'I'll tell you which landfill I left her in.'
Shoat's eyes filled the screen, then backed away. The screen went blank.
What now? wondered Ali.
'He's started to run,' Thomas said to Isaac. 'Bring him to me. Alive.'
A look of peace flickered across Ike's face. With Thomas lurking over one shoulder, he raised his eyes to the faraway cliffs. Ali had no idea what he was searching for. She looked around at the dark cliffs, and there it was, a twinkle of light. A momentary north star.
Ike dove.
In the same instant, Thomas ignited.
The hadal armor and Crusader's chain mail and the shirt of gold did nothing to shield him. Normally the round would have punched through his back and then quickened into a fireball and phosphorous shrapnel. But in Thomas, clad in back as well as in front, it found no exit. The heat and flechettes went wild inside him. His flesh burst into flame. His spine snapped. And yet his fall seemed infinite.
Ali was mesmerized. Flames leaped up from the neck of Thomas's armor, and he drew in a great gasp. The fire poured down his throat. He exhaled, and the flames shot from his mouth. His vocal cords seared, Thomas was silent. There was a soft clatter of jade scales falling to earth as the gold sutures holding them together melted.
The warlord towered above her. It seemed he had to topple. But his will was strong. His eyes fixed on the heights as if to fly. At last his knees sagged. Ali felt herself plucked from the ground.
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.
28 - THE ASCENT.
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.
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 on drumming and murmuring. The children went on crying. Shoat went on writhing and mewling. Off to one side, the daughter of Isaac continued her fascination with the computer, tapping at keys endlessly, a monkey with a typewriter.
Thomas closed his eyes against the nightmare he had become.
After a week of climbing, Ike and Ali reached the serpentine sea. The last of the Helios rafts rested near the lip of its discharge, which plunged into a waterfall, miles deep. It circled in an eddy by the shore like a faithful steed. A single paddle was still lashed to one pontoon.
'Climb in,' whispered Ike, and- Al gratefully lowered herself onto the rubber flooring. Ike had kept them moving almost constantly since their escape. There had been no time to hunt or forage, and she was weak with hunger.
Ike pushed the raft out from shore, but did not begin paddling. 'Do you recognize any of this?' he asked her.
She shook her head.
'The trails go in every direction. I've lost my thread, Ali. I don't know which way to go.'
'Maybe this will help,' said Ali. She opened a thin leather sack tied around her waist, and drew out Shoat's homing device.
'It was you,' Ike said. 'You stole it.'