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 fléchettes 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 fléchettes. 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.