What would Tam make of all this? What would he think of her if he'd seen the way she'd acted? She'd kowtowed to a patrol of corpse-chewing Limiters! She was supposed to be finding out whether Will was really to blame for her brother's death, and also getting Cal safely back to his home in the Colony. She was a long way from achieving either of those aims. She felt she had failed miserably. Why didn't I stand up to them? she asked herself. "Too weak," she said aloud. "That's why!"
If the Limiters took Will alive, and she were to come face-to-face with him after he'd been captured, what would she do? The Limiters would probably expect her to kill him in cold blood. She couldn't do that, not without knowing whether he was really to blame for her brother's death.
But if she didn't, the alternative for him would be worse… unthinkably worse. Death would be a picnic compared to the tortures he would endure at the hands of Rebecca and the Styx. As she pondered her dilemma for the umpteenth time, she realized how strong her feelings were for her son, despite everything he supposedly had done. She was his mother! Could he be capable of betraying his own family? Not knowing the truth was driving her mad.
She suddenly became so angry that her brother had lost his life. Rage boiled up inside her, and she arched her back, pressing her head hard into the sand.
"TAM!" she cried.
Alarmed at her outburst, Bartleby scrambled to his feet. He watched as she sank back onto the beach in a sullen, helpless silence. Her wrath had no outlet, nowhere to go. She was like some clockwork toy that Rebecca and her cronies had wound up, letting it run only so far before stopping it short.
Bartleby finished washing himself and made several dry, hacking sounds as he spat grains of sand from his mouth, then yawned exuberantly. He sat back fully on his haunches and, as he did so, broke wind with the volume of a bugler trumpeting an urgent retreat.
It came as no surprise to Sarah; she'd noticed the cat had been supplementing his diet by chewing on the moldy remains of unidentifiable things he found along the way. Evidently at least one of them hadn't agreed with him.
"Couldn't have put it better myself," Sarah mumbled through her clenched teeth, squeezing her eyes shut in frustration.
42
Following the flight of stone steps wherever they took him, Dr. Burrows had eventually emerged into another vast space. Here he found that the path of regularly laid slabs continued, and he went with it, moving down a gentle incline. For as far as he could see, menhirs peppered the ground. Dumpy, teardrop-shaped boulders up to twelve feet high, with rounded tops — it was a bizarre sight, as if some semi-deity had been randomly chucking large dollops of dough all over the place.
Given the uniformity of the menhirs' shapes, thought, Dr. Burrows began to ask himself if they had been positioned not by nature but by design. He muttered various theories about their origin as he went, every so often jumping when his light, falling across the nearest boulder, cast shadows on those behind, giving the impression that something was lurking in wait. After his close calls with the winged creature and the hungry bug army, he wasn't going to take any more chances with the local fauna.
But another part of his brain was also whirring away on the images he'd seen in the triptych, trying to make sense of them. He cursed his luck that he hadn't been able to fully decipher the inscription on the center panel in time. At least he had seen the letters that formed the remaining words. Now he was trying his hardest to recall them.
Using the technique that usually worked, he forced himself to think about something unrelated, hoping this would unlock the images in his memory. He directed all his attention to the Coprolite map, much of which was still an enigma to him.
All that he'd encountered so far, the chocolate cavern and then the temple, was on the map, clear as day, once he'd examined it again. The problem was, the rather strange icons that represented them were so small as to be almost microscopic, and he'd misplaced his magnifying glass somewhere along the way. It probably wouldn't have made much difference even if he did still have it, because there was no legend on the map to tell him what any of the features were. Interpreting them came down to pure guesswork.
Nevertheless, at least the Coprolite map gave him some notion of the sheer scale of the Deeps. It had two major features on it: the Great Plain and its surrounding areas to the left, and to the right something that could very well be a huge hole in the ground — he didn't need a magnifying glass to determine that! The same hole as portrayed in the triptych, he assumed.
Numerous tracks radiated from the Great Plain, and many of these eventually converged at the hole, as if it was a street map of the center of some large conurbation back up on the earth's surface. And he was on one of those tracks right now.
Quite a number of routes led off the hole and over to the far right of the map, where they all seemed to terminate in dead ends. Whether this was because the Coprolites never used them, or because they had never explored them, he didn't know. But this race had lived in these parts for how many generations he could only guess, and given that they were master miners, he would have been mighty surprised if they'd left any stone unturned or quarter unexplored. The Coprolites, from what he could gather, were not only master miners but master prospectors — the two went hand in hand — so they would have surveyed all the outlying areas in case precious stones or something similar were to be found there.
Dr. Burrows wondered if his expedition, his "grand tour" of the subterranean lands, was going to culminate in him going up and down a series of these cul-de-sacs. Provided he could find some food and, more crucially, some clean water, his time would be occupied with exploring all the areas marked on the Coprolite map, combing them for ancient settlements and any artifacts of note.
If this was the case, his journey had a finite end, and there was no way he would be reaching deeper levels in the earth's mantle, where untold archaeological treasures might lie or past civilizations beyond anyone's imagination might have once lived — or still live.
He knew he shouldn't be disappointed. Despite all the danger he'd faced, he'd already made some of the most remarkable discoveries of the century, probably of any century. If he ever made it back home, he'd be lauded as one of the greats of the archaeological fraternity.
When he'd set out from Highfield on that day so long ago, heaving back the shelves in his cellar to begin down the tunnel he'd dug, as if he'd been a character from some farfetched children's story, he'd had absolutely no conception of what he was getting himself into. But he had got this far, and in the course of his journey he'd overcome everything that had been thrown at him, surprising himself in the process.
And now, as he thought about it, he realized he'd developed a taste for adventure, for taking risks. As he strolled down the dark path, his shoulders straightened and he allowed himself a swagger.
"Move over, Howard Carter," he declared in a loud voice. "Tutankhamen's tomb is nothing compared to my discoveries!"
Dr. Burrows could almost hear the thunderous applause, the accolades, and imagine the many television appearances and the…
His shoulders suddenly slumped again, and the swagger evaporated.
Somehow it wasn't enough.
Sure, he had a mammoth task ahead of him. Just documenting everything on the Coprolite map would be enough to keep him busy for many lifetimes — and require a huge research team — but still, he felt a profound sense of disappointment.