A day later, Branch realized he was being stalked.
He could actually smell them on the airstream, and that disturbed him. It meant they had to be close, for his nose was not keen. Ike would have sensed them long before. Again he felt old.
He had the same two choices every animal does, fight or flight. Branch ran.
Three hours later he reached the river. He saw the trail leading along the water, but it was too late for that. He faced around, and there were four of them fanning out in the talus above, as pale as larvae.
A slender spear – reed tipped with obsidian – shattered on the rock next to him. Another pierced the water. It would have been easy to shoot the one youngster nearing on his left. That still would have left three, and the same necessity for what he now did.
The leap was clumsy, impaired by his rifle and the tube of maps wrapped in waterproofing. He had meant to strike open water, but his right foot caught a stone. He heard his right knee snap. He clung to the rifle, but dropped the maps on shore. Momentum alone carried him into the current. The current sucked him under.
For as long as he could hold his breath, Branch let the river have him. At last he triggered the survival suit and felt its bladders fill. He was buoyed to the surface like a cork.
The fastest hadal was still tracking him alongside the river. The moment Branch's head popped above water, the hadal made a hurried cast.
The spear lodged deep just as Branch fired a burst from underwater, and the water chopped upward in long rooster tails. The hadal spun, was killed, and hit the water flat.
The river flowed on, taking him around bends and crooks, away from the danger. For the next five days, Branch had the dead hadal for company as they both drifted to the sea. The river was like a mother, impartial to her children's differences. He drank her water. His fever cooled.
The spear fell out of him eventually.
Parasitic eels gently sucked at him. They took his blood, but his wound stayed clean. Somewhere along the way, he got his knee back in joint.
With all that pain, it was no wonder he dreamed so much as he drifted to the sea. Back along the riverbank, a monstrosity, painted and inked and ridged with scars, picked up the tube of maps. He unrolled them from the waterproofing and pinned their corners with rocks while hadals gathered around. They had no eye for such things. But Isaac could see the care and detail the cartographer had lavished on these pages. 'There is hope,' he said in hadal.
For days they had been remarking on a nebulous gleam the color of milk, occupying the rump of their horizon. They thought it might be a cloudbank or steam from a waterfall or perhaps a beached iceberg. Ali feared they were suffering collective hunger delusions, for they'd begun stumbling on the trail and talking to themselves. No one imagined a seaside fortress carved from phosphorescent cliffs.
Five stories high, its walls were as smooth as Egyptian alabaster. It had been whittled from solid rock. Beerstone, Twiggs told them. The Romans used to quarry it in ancient Britain. Westminster Abbey was made of it. A creamy white calcite, it came out of the ground as soft as soap and over the years dried to a hardness perfect for sculpting. He adored it for its pollen residues.
Long ago, hadals had skinned away the face of this wall, denuding its softer stone to cut out a complex of rooms and ramparts and statues, all of one piece. Not one block or brick had been added to it, a single huge monument.
Three times as broad as it was tall, the dwelling was empty and largely in collapse. It breasted the sea and was clearly a bulwark anchoring the commerce of some great vanished empire. You could see what was left of stone docks and pier slips submerged an inch beneath the water.
Even weak with hunger, they were beguiled. They wandered through the warren of rooms looking across the night sea and, to the fortress's rear, onto the crags below. Stairs had been cut into the cliff sides, seemingly thousands of them, leading off into new depths.
Whoever – or whatever – the hadals had built this defensive monster against, it was not humans. Ali estimated the fortress dated back at least fifteen thousand years, probably more. 'Man was still chipping flint in caves while this hadal civilization was engaged in riverine trade across thousands of miles. I doubt we were much of a threat to them.'
'But where did they go?' Troy asked. 'What could have destroyed them?'
As they wandered through the crumbling hulk, they encountered a people from another time. The fortress rooms and parapets were built to Homo scale, with ceilings planed at a remarkably standard six feet.
The walls held traces of engraved images and script and glyphs, and Ali pronounced the writings even older than what they had seen before. She was sure no epigrapher had ever laid eyes on such script.
Deep in the cavernous interior stood a freestanding column, rising twenty meters into a large domed chamber in the heart of the building. A high platform separated them from the spire's base. They made a complete circuit around the immense room, following the narrow walkway and shining their lights on the spire's upper section. There were no doors or stairways leading onto the platform.
'The spire could be a king's tomb,' said Ali.
'Or a castle keep,' said Troy.
'Or a good old-fashioned phallic symbol,' said Pia, who was there because her lover, the primatologist Spurrier, trusted Gitner even less than he trusted Ike. 'Like a Siva rock, or a pharaoh's obelisk.'
'We need to find out,' Ali said. 'It could be relevant.' Relevant, she did not say, to her search for the missing Satan.
'What do you propose, growing wings?' asked Spurrier. 'There are no stairs.'
With a pencil-thin beam of light, Ike traced a set of handholds carved into the upper half of the platform's circular wall. He opened his hundred-pound pack and laid out the contents, and they all took a peek.
'You're still carrying rope?' marveled Ruiz. 'How many coils do you have in there?' Ali saw a pair of clean socks. After all these months?
'Look at all those MREs,' said Twiggs. 'You've been holding out on us.'
'Shut up, Twiggy,' Pia said. 'It's his food.'
'Here, I've been waiting,' said Ike. He handed around the food packets. 'That's the last of them. Happy Thanksgiving.' And it was, November 24.