He looked at the girl's thin, painted back. Since capturing her, he had treated her like chattel. The only thing good to say was that he had not beaten or raped or killed her. My daughter? He hung his head.
How could he possibly trade away his own flesh and blood, even for a woman he loved? But if he did not, Ali would remain in their bondage forever. Ike tried to clear his mind. The girl was ignorant of her past. However harsh, she had a life among the hadals. To take her out of here would mean tearing her by the roots from the only people she knew. And to leave Ali meant... what? Ali could not possibly know he had survived the fortress explosion, much less that he was searching for her. Likewise, she would never know if he turned around and dragged this child away from the darkness. Indeed, knowing her, even if she did know, Ali would approve. And where would that leave him? He had become a curse. Everyone he loved disappeared.
He considered letting the girl go. But that would only be cowardice on his part. The decision was his to make. He had to make it. It was one or the other, at best. He was too much of a realist to waste a moment imagining the whole happy family could make it out. He was tormented the rest of that night.
When the girl awoke, Ike presented her with a meal of larvae and pallid tubers, and loosened her ropes. He knew it would only complicate matters to restore her strength, and that the slightest guilt at having depleted the child was a dangerous moralism. But he could no longer go on starving his own daughter.
Guessing she would never tell it to him, he asked her name. She averted her eyes at the rudeness. No hadal would give such power to a slave. Soon after he started her downward on the trail, though more slowly in consideration of her fatigue.
The revelation tortured him. After his return to the human side, Ike had vowed to keep his choices black and white. Stick to your code. Stray, and you died. If you couldn't decide a matter in three seconds, it was too complicated.
The simplest thing by far, the safest thing, would have been to cut loose and escape while he could. Ike had never been a believer in predestination. God didn't do it to you, you did it to yourself. But the present situation contradicted him.
The mystery of it weighed on Ike, and their slow descent slowed more. The heaviness he felt had nothing to do with their altitude, now eleven miles deep. To the contrary, as the air pressure thickened, he was engorged with more oxygen, and the effect was a hardy lightness of the kind one felt coming down off a mountain. But now the unwanted effect of so much oxygen in his brain was more thoughts and more questions.
Though he couldn't say exactly how, Ike was certain he must have selected each circumstance leading to his own downfall. And yet what choices had his daughter made to be born in darkness and never know the light or her true father or her own
people?
*
The journey down was a journey of water sounds. Blindfolded, Ali passed the first number of days listening to the sea scythe by as amphibians drew their raft on. The next days were spent descending alongside cascades and behind immense falls. Finally, reaching more even ground, she walked across streams bridged with stones. The water was her thread.
They kept her separate from the two mercenaries who'd been captured alive. But on one occasion her blindfold slipped and she saw them in the perpetual twilight cast by phosphorescent lichen. The men were bound with ropes of braided rawhide, and arrows still projected from their wounds. One looked at Ali with horrified eyes, and she made the sign of the cross for his benefit. Then her hadal escort cinched the blindfold over her eyes again, and they went on. Only later did Ali realize why the mercenaries weren't blindfolded, too. The hadals didn't care if the two soldiers saw the path down, because neither would ever have the opportunity to climb back out.
That was the beginning of her hope. They weren't going to kill her anytime soon. Thinking of the two soldiers' certain fate, she felt guilty for her optimism. But Ali clung to it with a greed she'd never known. It had never occurred to her before how base a thing survival was. There was nothing heroic about it.
Prodded, tugged, carried, pushed, she staggered into a cavity that could have been the center of her being. She wasn't harmed. They didn't violate her. But she suffered. For one thing, she was famished, not that they didn't try to feed her. Ali refused the meat they offered, though. The monster who led them came to her. 'But you have to eat, my dear,' he said in perfect King's English. 'How else will you finish the hajj?'
'I know where the meat came from,' she answered. 'I knew those people.'
'Ah, of course. You're not hungry enough.'
'Who are you?' she rasped.
'A pilgrim, like you.'
But Ali knew. Before the blindfold, she'd seen him orchestrating the hadals, commanding them, delegating tasks. Even without such evidence, he certainly looked the way Satan might, with his cowled brow and the twist of asymmetrical horns and the script drawn upon his flesh. He stood taller than most of the hadals, and earned more scars, and there was something about his eyes that declared a knowledge of life she didn't want to know.
After that, Ali was given a diet of insects and small fish. She forced it down. The trek went on. Her legs ached at night from striking against rocks. Ali welcomed the pain. It was a way not to mourn for a while. Perhaps if she'd been carrying arrows like the mercenaries were, it would have been possible not to mourn at all. But the reality was always there, waiting. Ike was dead.
At last they reached the remains of a city so old it was more like a mountain in collapse. This was their destination. Ali knew because they finally took off her blindfold and she was able to walk without being guided.
Weary, frightened, mesmerized, Ali picked her way higher. The city was up to its neck in a tropical glacier of flowstone, which spun off a faint incandescence. The result was less light than gloom, and that was enough. Ali could see that the city lay at the bottom of an enormous chasm. A slow mineral flood had all but swallowed much of the city, but many of the structures were erect and honeycombed with rooms. The walls and colonnades were embellished with carved animals and depictions of ancient hadal life, all of it blended in subtle arabesques.