The Descent Part 29

'What?'

'I confess,' he said. 'You're an old weakness of mine.' He didn't qualify between the universe of blondes and the singularity of this one.

It took Ali's breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling.

'That's it, then,' she said. 'End of mystery.'

'Why say that?' he said.

This was turning out to be a nice dance.

'I like her singing,' she said.

He took in her long body. It was a quick glance. She saw it, and remembered his scrutiny of the periwinkles on her sundress. He said, 'You do live dangerously.'

'And you don't?'

'There's a difference. I'm not a dedicated, you know,' he faltered, 'a professional...'

'Virgin?' she boldly finished. The wine was talking. His back muscles reflexed.

'I was going to say "recluse."'

Ike pulled her tighter and stroked his front across hers, a languorous swipe that moved her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. It drew a small gasp out of her.

'Mister Crockett,' she scolded, and started to pull away. Instantly he let go, and his release startled her more. There was no time for elaborate decisions. Scapegoating the wine, she scooped him close again, got his hand seated at the hollow of her spine.

They danced without words for another minute. Ali tried to let herself be taken away by the music. But eventually the songs would stop and they would have to leave the safety of this brightly lit floor and resume their investigation of the dark places.

'Now it's your turn to explain,' he said. 'Just how did you end up here?'

Unsure how much he really wanted to hear, she edited herself. He kept asking questions, and soon she found herself defining protolanguage and the mother tongue. 'Water,' she said, 'in Old German is wa.s.sar, in Latin aqua. Go deeper into the daughter languages, and the root starts to appear. In Indo-European and Amerind, water is hakw, in Dene-Caucasian kwa. The furthest back is haku, a computer-simulated proto-word. Not that anyone uses it anymore. It's a buried word, a root. But you can see how a word gets reborn through time.'

'Haku,' Ike said, though differently than she had, with a glottal stress on the first syllable. 'I know that word.'

Ali glanced at him. 'From them?' she asked. His hadal captors. Exactly as she'd hoped, he had a glossary in him.

He winced, as with a phantom pain, and she caught her breath. The memory pa.s.sed, if that's what it was. She decided not to pursue it for the moment, and returned to her own tale, explaining how she had come to collect and decipher hadal glyphs and remnant text. 'All we need is one translator who can read their writings,' she said. 'It could unlock their whole civilization to us.'

Ike misunderstood. 'Are you asking me to teach you?'

She kept her voice flat. 'Do you know how to, Ike?'

He clicked his tongue in the negative. Ali instantly recognized the sound from her time among the San Bushmen in southern Africa. That, too? she wondered. Click language? Her excitement was building.

'Even hadals don't know how to read hadal,' he said.

'Then you've never actually seen a hadal reading,' she clarified. 'The ones you met were illiterate.'

'They can't read hadal writings,' Ike repeated. 'It's lost to them. I knew one once. He could read English and j.a.panese. But the old hadal writing was alien to him. It was a great frustration for him.'

'Wait.' Ali stopped, dumbfounded. No one had ever suggested such a thing. 'You're saying the hadals read modern human languages? Do they speak our languages too?'

'He did,' said Ike. 'He was a genius. A leader. The rest are... much less than him.'

'You knew him?' Her pulse raced. Who else could he be speaking of except the historical Satan?

Ike stopped. He was looking at her, or through her, with those impenetrable glacier gla.s.ses. She couldn't begin to read his thoughts. 'Ike?'

'Why are you doing this?'

'I have a secret.' She wanted to trust him. They were still touching, and that seemed a good start. 'What if I told you my purpose was to get a positive identification of that man, whatever he is? To get more information about him. A description of his face. Clues to his behavior. Even to meet him.'

'You won't.' Ike's voice sounded dead.

'But anything's possible.'

'No,' he said. 'I mean you won't. By the time you ever got that close, it wouldn't be you anymore.'

She brooded. He knew something, but wasn't telling. 'You're making him up,' she declared. It was peevish, a last resort.

The dancers flowed around them.

Ike held out one arm. Turned just so in the light, Ali could see the raised scars where a glyph had been branded in the flesh. To the naked eye, the scars lay hidden beneath more superficial markings. She touched them with her fingertips... the way a hadal might in complete darkness. 'What does it mean?' she asked.

'It's a claim mark,' he said. 'The name they gave me. Beyond that, I don't have a clue. And the thing is, the hadals don't, either. They just imitate drawings their ancestors left a long time ago.'

Ali traced her fingers across the scarring. 'What do you mean by a claim mark?'

He shrugged, regarding the arm as if it belonged to someone else. 'There's probably a better term for it. That's what I call them. Each clan has its own, and then each member his own.' He looked at her. 'I can show you others,' he said.

Ali kept her expression calm. Inside, she was ready to shout. All this time, her quest had held Ike for its answer. Why had no one else asked this man these questions in years past? Perhaps they had, and he hadn't been ready.

'Wait, let me get my notebook.' She could barely contain herself. Here was the beginning of her glossary. The start of a Rosetta stone. By cracking the hadal code, she would open a whole new language to human understanding.

'Notebook?' he said.

'To draw the markings.'

'But I have them with me.'

'You have what?'

He started to unb.u.t.ton his pocket, then stopped. 'You're sure about this?'

She stared impatiently at the pocket, willing it to fly open. 'Yes.'

He pulled out a small packet of leather patches, each roughly the size of a baseball card, and handed them to her. They had been sliced in a neat rectangle and tanned to stay soft. At first Ali thought the leather was vellum of some kind, and that Ike had used them to trace or write on. There were faint colored designs on one side. Then she saw that the colors came from tattooing, and the weltlike ridges were keloid scars, and there were tiny, pallid hairs. It was skin, all right. Human skin. Hadal skin. Whatever this was. Ike did not see her misgivings; he was too busy arranging the strips on her still, cupped palms. He gave a running commentary, intent, even scholarly. 'Two weeks old,' he said of one. 'Notice the twisted serpents. I've never come across that motif. You can feel them twining together, very skillful, whoever incised him.'

He laid a pair of patches side by side. 'These two I got off a fresh kill. You can tell from the linked circles, they'd been travelers from a long way off, from the same region. It's a pattern I used to see on Afghans and Pakis. Captures, you know. Down beneath the Karakoram.'

Ali was staring as much at him as at the skin pieces. She had never been squeamish, but she was stilled by his collection.

'Now here's the shape of a beetle, can you make that out? See how the wings are just opening? That's a different clan from others I've known, closed wings, wings wide. And this one here has got me stumped, it's nothing but dots. Footprints, maybe? A counting of time? Seasons? I don't know.

'Obviously this is a cave-fish design. See the light stalks dangling in front of its mouth? I've eaten fish like that. They're easy to catch by hand in shallow pools. Wait for the light to flash, then grab them by the stalks. Like pulling carrots or onions.'

He set down the last of his patches. 'Here's some of the geometries you see on the borders of their mandalas. They're pretty standard for down here, a way to ritually enclose the outer circle and hold in the mandala's information. You've seen them on the walls. I'm hoping someone in our bunch can figure them out. We've got a lot of smart people here.'

'Ike.' Ali stopped him. 'What do you mean "fresh kill"?'

Ike picked up the two patches she was referring to. 'A day old. Maybe two.'

'I mean, what. What was killed? A hadal?'

'One of the porters. I don't know his name.'

'We're missing a porter?'

'More like ten or twelve,' Ike said. 'You haven't noticed? In twos and threes, over the past week. They're sick of Walker's bullying.'

'Does anyone else know?' No one had remarked on this to her. It signified a whole other level of the expedition, one that was darker and more violent than she - or the other scientists - had comprehended.

'Of course. That's a lot of hands to lose.' Ike could have been talking about animals in a mule train. 'Walker's got more of his troops patrolling the rear than the front. He keeps sending them off to catch one of the runaways. He wants to make an example.'

'To punish them? For quitting a job?'

Ike looked queerly at her. 'When you're running a string of men,' he said, 'one runaway can turn you inside out. The whole bunch can come apart on you. Walker knows that. What he can't seem to get through his skull, though, is that by the time they run away, it's too late to keep them. If they were mine,' he added frankly, 'it would be different.'

The stories about Ike's slaving were true then. In some capacity or another, he'd ruled over his fellow captives. She could try his dark alleys another time. 'And so they caught one of the runaways,' Ali stated.

'Walker's guys?' Ike stopped. 'They're mercenaries. Herd mentality rules. They're not going to spread themselves out or search deep. They're afraid. They drop an hour behind, stay cl.u.s.tered, come back in again.'

That left one option, as far as Ali could see. It made her sad. 'You did it then?' she said.

He frowned, not understanding.

'Killed the porter,' she said.

'Why would I do that?'

'You just said, to make an example. For Colonel Walker.'

'Walker,' Ike snorted. 'He'll have to do his own killing.'

She was relieved. For a moment.

'This poor fella didn't make it far,' Ike said. 'I doubt any of them did. I found him mostly rendered.'

Rendered? That was something you did to slaughtered cattle. Again, Ike was matter-of-fact.

'What are you talking about?' she asked. Had one of the escaped porters turned psychotic?

'It's these two, I have no doubt,' Ike said. He held up the paired leather patches with the linked circles of scar tissue. 'I tracked them tracking him. They took him together, one from the front, one from above.'

'And then you found them.'

'Yes.'

'And you couldn't bring them back to us?'

The absurdity shocked him. 'Hadals?' he said.

Now she understood. This hadn't been a murder. He'd told her the first time. Fresh kill. It hit her. 'Hadals?' she said. 'There were hadals? Here?'

'Not anymore.'

'Don't try to placate me,' she said. 'I want to know.'

'We're in their house now. What do you expect?'

'But Shoat told us it was uninhabited through this tunnel.'

'Blind faith.'

'And you haven't told anybody?'

'I took care of the problem. Now we're clear again.'

Part of her was glad. Live hadals! Dead now. 'What did you do?' she asked quietly, not sure she really wanted the details.

He chose not to give any. 'I left them in a way that will speak to any others. We won't have trouble.'

'Then where do these come from?' she asked, pointing at his collection.

'Other places. Other times.'

'But you think there may be more.'

'Nothing organized. Not in any numbers. They're just drifters. Wanderers. Opportunists.'

She was shaken. 'Do you carry these around with you everywhere?' she asked.

'Think of it as taking their driver's license or dogtag. It helps me get the bigger picture. Movement. Migrations. I learn from them, almost like they were talking to me.' He held one patch to his nose and smelled. Then he licked it. 'This one came from very deep. You can tell by the cleanness of him.'

'What are you talking about?'

He offered it to her, and she turned her head. 'Have you ever eaten range-fed beef? It tastes different from a cow that's been eating grain and hormones. Same here. This guy had never eaten sunlight. He'd never been to the surface. Never eaten an animal that had gone up top. It was probably his first time away from the tribe.'