The Descent Part 52

'Then what? Tell me.'

'You are dying,' said de l'Orme.

'But you're mistaken.' Santos laughed with relief. 'I'm perfectly well.'

'No,' said de l'Orme. 'I poisoned your wine.'

'What a terrible joke.'

'No joke.'

Just then Santos clutched his stomach. He stood, and his wooden stool cracked on the slabs. 'What have you done?' he gasped.

There was no drama to it. He did not fall to the floor. Gently he knelt on the stone and laid himself down. 'Is it true?' he asked.

'Yes,' said de l'Orme. 'Ever since Bordubur I've suspected you of mischief.'

'What?'

'It was you who defaced the carving. And who killed that poor guard.'

'No.' Santos's protest was little more than a respiration.

'No? Who, then? Me? Thomas? There was no one else. But you.'

Santos groaned. His beloved white shirt would be soiled from the floor, de l'Orme imagined.

'It is you who have set about dismantling your image among man,' he continued.

The respiration threaded up from the floor.

'I can't explain how you were able to choose me so long ago,' said de l'Orme. 'All I know is that I was your pathway to Thomas. I led you to him.'

Santos rallied, for the s.p.a.ce of one breath. '...all wrong,' he whispered.

'What's your name?' asked de l'Orme.

But it was too late.

Santos, or Satan, was no more.

He had meant to keep his vigil over the body all night. Santos weighed too much for him to lift onto the cot, and so when the air grew cold and he could not stay awake any longer, de l'Orme wrapped the blanket around himself and lay on the floor beside the corpse. In the morning he would explain his murder to the monks. Beyond that, he didn't care.

And so he fell asleep, shoulder to shoulder with his victim.

The incision across his abdomen woke him.

The pain was so sudden and extreme, he registered it as a bad dream, nothing to panic about.

Then he felt the animal climb inside his chest wall, and realized it was no animal but a hand. It navigated upward with a surgeon's dexterity. He tried to flatten himself, palms against the stone, but his head arched back and his body could not retreat, could not, from that awful trespa.s.s.

'Santos!' he gasped with his one and only sac of air.

'No, not him,' murmured a voice he knew.

De l'Orme's eyes stared into the night.

They did it this way in Mongolia. The nomad makes a slit in the belly of his sheep and darts his hand inside and reaches high through all the slippery organs and drives straight to the beating heart. Done properly, it was considered an all but painless death.

It took a strong hand to squeeze the organ to stillness. This hand was strong.

De l'Orme did not fight. That was one other advantage to the method. By the time the hand was inside, there was nothing more to fight. The body itself cooperated, shocked by the unthinkable violation. No instinct could rehea.r.s.e a man for such a moment. To feel the fingers wrap around your heart... He waited while his slaughterer held the chalice of life.

It took less than a minute.

He rolled his head to the left and Santos was there beside him, as cold as wax, de l'Orme's own creation. His horror was complete. He had sinned against himself. In the name of goodness he had killed goodness. Year upon year he had received the young man's goodness, and he had rebuked and tested it and never believed such a thing could be real. And he had been wrong.

His mouth formed the name of love, but there was no air left to make the word.

To a stranger, it might have seemed de l'Orme now gave himself to the sacrifice. He gave a small heave, and it drove the arm deeper. Like a puppet, he reached for the hand that manipulated him, and it was a phantom within the bones of his chest. Gently he laid his own hands above his heart. His defenseless heart.

Lord have mercy.

The fist closed.

In his last instant, a song came to him. It surged upon his hearing, all but impossible, so beautiful. A child monk's pure voice? A tourist's radio, a bit of opera? He realized it was the parakeet caged in the courtyard. In his mind, he saw the moon rise full above the mountains. But of course the animals would wake to it. Of course they would offer their morning song to such a radiance. De l'Orme had never known such light, even in his imagination.

Beneath the Sinai Peninsula Through the wound, entrance.

Through the veins, retreat.

His quest was done.

In the nature of true searching, he had found himself. Now his people needed him as they gathered in their desolation. It was his destiny to lead them into a new land, for he was their savior.

Down he sped.

Down from the Egypt eye of the sun, in from the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all sh.e.l.l and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own human image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death. Their presence had become the world, and their presence was the presence of jackals that strip the muscle from your legs even as you try to outrun them.

The earth closed over him. With each twist and bend, it sealed shut behind him. It resurrected senses long buried.

Solitude! Quiet! Darkness was light.

Once again he could hear the planet's joints and lifeblood. Stirrings in the stone. Ancient events. Here, time was like water. The tiniest creatures were his fathers and mothers. The fossils were his children. It made him into remembrance itself.

He let his bare palms ricochet upon the walls, drawing in the heat and the cold, the sharp and the smooth. Plunging, galloping, he pawed at the flesh of G.o.d. This magnificent rock. This fortress of their being. This was the Word. Earth.

Moment by moment, step by step, he felt himself becoming prehistoric. It was a blessed release from human habits. In this vast, capillaried monastery, through these openings and fretted spillways and yawning chthonic fistulae, drinking from pools of water older than mammal life altogether, memory was simply memory. It was not something to be marked on calendars or stored in books or labeled in graphs or drawn on maps. You did not memorize memory any more than you memorized existence.

He remembered his way deeper by the taste of the soil and by the drag of air currents that had no cardinal direction. He left behind the cartography of the Holy Land and its entry caves through Jebel el Lawz in the elusive Midian. He forgot the name of the Indian Ocean as he pa.s.sed beneath it. He felt gold, soft and serpentine, standing from the walls, but no longer recognized it as gold. Time pa.s.sed, but he gave up counting it. Days? Weeks? He lost his memory even as he gained it.

He saw himself and did not know it was himself. It was in a sheet of black obsidian. His image rose up as a black silhouette within the blackness. He went to it and laid his hands on the volcanic gla.s.s and stared at his face reflecting back. Something about the eyes seemed familiar.

Onward he hurtled, weary, yet refreshed. The depths gave flesh to his strength. Occasional animals provided him the gift of their meat. More and more, he witnessed life in the darkness, heard its chirps and rustling. He found evidence of his refugees and, long before them, of hadal nomads and religious travelers. Their markings on the walls filled him with grief for the lost glory of his empire.

His people had fallen from grace, steeply and deep and for so long they were hardly aware of their own descent. Yet now, even in their emptiness and misery, they were being pursued in the name of G.o.d, and that could not be. For they were G.o.d's children, and had lived in the wilderness long enough to wash their sins into amnesty. They had paid for their pride or independence or whatever else it was that had offended the natural order, and now, after an exile of a hundred eons, they had been returned to their innocence.

For G.o.d to continue punishing them was wrong. To allow them to be hunted into extinction was a sacrilege. But then, from the very beginning, his people had challenged the notion that G.o.d ever showed mercy. They were his lie. They were his sin. It had always been a false hope that G.o.d might deliver them from His own wrath into love. No, deliverance had to come from some other soul.

25 - PANDEMONIUM.

The dead have no rights.

-THOMAS JEFFERSON, near the end of his life January 5 The end began with a small thing Ali spied on the ground. It could have been an angel lying there, invisible to all but her, telling her to be ready. Not missing a step, she landed her foot on the message and crushed it to bits. It was probably unnecessary. Who else would have read so much in a red MM?

Not much later, while crouched awkwardly in the shadowy nook designated their latrine, Ali discovered another red candy, this time lodged in a crack in the wall above their sewage. Squatting above the pool of muck, her wrists roped tight by the mercenaries, Ali could still get the fingers of one hand down the crack. Expecting a note, she felt a hard, smooth k.n.o.b. What she slid from the stone was a knife, black for night work, with a blood gutter and utilitarian weight. Even the handle looked cruel.

'What are you doing in there?' the guard called. Ali slipped the knife into her clothing, and the guard returned her to the little side room that was their dungeon. Heart knocking in her ears, Ali took her place beside the girl. She was afraid, but joyous. Here was her chance.

And now? Ali wondered. Would there be another sign? Should she cut her ropes now or wait? And what did Ike think she was capable of? He had to know there were limits. She was a woman of G.o.d.

Three mercenaries stalked ten feet apart through the terracotta army surrounding the spire. 'This is a waste of time,' said one. 'He's gone. If I was him, I'd be gone.'

'What are we doing anyway, stuck here? The colonel wants more fight?'

'It's a deathwatch, man. He wants us to hold his hand while he rots. And the whole time we're feeding prisoners. I didn't see no grocery on the way in.'

'The best target's the one standing still. We're just beautiful, man. Sitting ducks.'

'My very thoughts.'

There was a pause. They were still feeling one another out.

'So what's the word?'

'Desperate times, man. Desperate measures. The colonel's eating our time. The civilians are eating our food. And the dying are dead. It's called limited resources.'

'Makes sense to me.'

'So who else is in?'

'You two make twelve. Plus the mope, Shoat. He won't let go of the code for his homing device.'

'Give me an hour with Shoat, I'll give you his code. And his mama's phone number.'

'You're wasting your time. He gives that up, he knows he's dead. We just have to wait until he activates the box. Then he's dog food.'

'When do we do it?'

'Pack your toothbrush. Soon, real soon.'

'Ow,' barked one. 'f.u.c.king statues.'

'Be glad they ain't real.'

'Hang on, girls. What have we here?'

'Coins! Look at this.'

'These are handmade. See the cut edges? They're old.'

'f.u.c.k old. This stuff's gold.'

'About time. And there's more this way.'

'And over here, too. About time we found some booty.'

The three separated, plucking coins from the ground with all the elegance of chickens in a yard. They worked farther and farther apart from one another.

Finally the one with a backward Raiders cap got down into a duckwalk with his rifle across his lap, which freed both hands to s.n.a.t.c.h at the treasure. 'Hey, guys,' he called, 'my pockets are full. Rent me some s.p.a.ce in your rack.'

Another minute pa.s.sed. 'Hey,' he yelled again, and froze. 'Guys?' His hands opened. The coins dropped. Slowly he reached for his rifle.

Too late, he heard the tinkling of jade.

The Chinese had a special word, ling-lung, to describe the musical jingling that jade jewelry made as aristocrats walked by. There was no telling what the hadals might have called it twenty eons earlier. But as the statue next to him came alive, the sound was identical.

The mercenary started to rise. The proto-Aztec war club met him on the downstroke. His head popped clear with surgical neatness. Obsidian really was sharper than modern scalpels. The statue shed its jade armor and became a man. Ike socketed the club back into its terra-cotta hands, and hefted the rifle. Fair exchange, he thought.

The mutineers carried the rafts down to the sea and loaded them with the expedition supplies. This was done in full view of their commander, whom they had bound into a wire coc.o.o.n and hung raving from the wall. 'Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor princ.i.p.alities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the vengeance of G.o.d,' he shouted at them.

In their side room the prisoners could hear Walker. Love, not vengeance, thought Ali, lying on the floor. The colonel had it wrong. The quotation was Romans, and it had to do with the love of G.o.d, not His vengeance. A moot point.

Their guard left to help load the getaway vessels. He knew the civilians weren't going anywhere.

The time had come. Ike had given her all the advantage he could. She was going to have to improvise from here on.

Ali drew out the knife.

Troy lifted his head. She laid it against her wrist bonds and the blade was sharp. The rope practically disintegrated. She rolled to face Troy.

Spurrier heard them and looked over. 'What are you doing?' he hissed. 'Are you crazy?'

She flexed her wrists and shoulders and got to her knees to unravel the wire leashing her neck to the wall.

'If you make them mad, they won't take us with them,' Spurrier said.