'They're not like this anymore,' Ike said. 'They're similar, but they've changed.' Ali and Troy looked at each other.
'How do you mean?' Ali thought he would speak to some of the physical differences she and Troy had noticed.
Ike raised his hands to the entire tableaux. 'Look at this. This is – this was – greatness. Magnificence. In all my time among them, there was never any hint of that. Magnificence? Never.'
They spent the rest of the first day and the next exploring. Flowstone oozed from doorways, collapsing sections. Deeper in, they found a wealth of relics, most of them human. There were ancient coins from Stygia and Crete mixed with American buffalo
nickels and Spanish doubloons minted in Mexico City. They found Coke bottles, Japanese baseball cards, and a flintlock. There were books written in dead languages, a set of samurai armor, an Incan mirror, and, beneath that, figurines and clay tablets and bone carvings from civilizations long forgotten. One of their strangest discoveries was an armillary, a Renaissance-era teaching device with metal spheres inside one another to depict planetary revolutions. 'What in God's name is a hadal doing with something like this?' Ruiz wanted to know.
What kept drawing them back was the circular platform with its army surrounding the stone spire. However priceless the human artifacts were, scattered through the fortress, they were mundane compared with the tower display. On the second morning, Ike found a series of hidden nubbins on the tower itself. Using these, he made a daring, unprotected ascent to the top of the column.
They watched him balance atop the spire. For the longest time he just stood there. Then he called down for them to turn off their lights. They sat in the darkness for half an hour, bathed by the faintly incandescent floor.
When he roped down again, Ike looked shaken.
'We're standing on their world,' he said. 'This whole platform is a giant map. The spire was built as a viewing station.'
They glanced around at their feet, and all they saw were wiggling cutmarks on a flat, unpainted surface. But through the afternoon, Ike led them one at a time up the ropes and they saw with their own eyes. By the time he took Ali up for her view, Ike had made the trip six times and was becoming familiar with parts of the map. Ali found the top flat and small, just three feet square. Apparently no one but Ike had felt comfortable standing on top, so he had rigged a pair of loops for people to sit in while hanging alongside. Ali hung beside Ike, sixty feet up, while her night vision adapted.
'It's like a giant sand mandala, but without the sand,' Ike said. 'It's weird how I keep running across pieces of mandalas down here. I'm talking about places like sub-Iran or under Gibraltar. I thought Haddie must have kidnapped a bunch of monks and put them to work decorating. But now I see.'
And so did she. In a giant circle all around her, the platform beneath them began to radiate ghostly colors.
'It's some kind of pigment worked into the stone,' said Ike. 'Maybe it was visible at ground level at one time. I like the idea of an invisible map, though. Probably commoners like us would never have had access to this knowledge. Only the elite would have been permitted to come up here and get the whole picture.'
The longer she waited, the more her vision adjusted. Details clarified. The incisions flowing with mercury became tiny rivers veining across the surface. Lines of turquoise and red and green intertwined and branched in wild patterns: tunnels.
'I think that big stain mark is our sea,' said Ike.
The black shape lay quite close to the tower base. Paths threaded in from far-flung regions. If this was reality, then there were whole worlds down here. Whether they had once been known as provinces or nations or frontiers, the gaping cavities stood like air sacs within a great round lung.
'What's happening?' Ali gasped. 'It's coming alive.'
'Your eyes are still catching up,' Ike said. 'Just wait. It's three-dimensional.'
The flatness suddenly swelled with contours and depth. The color lines no longer overlapped but had levels all their own, dipping and rising among other lines.
'Oh,' Ali murmured, 'I feel like I'm falling.'
'I know. It opens and opens and opens. It's all in the art. Somehow, Himalayan cultures must have plagiarized it a long time ago. Now the Buddhists use it just to draw blueprints for Dharma palaces. Meditate long enough, and the geometries turn into an optical illusion of a building. But here you get the original intent. A map of the whole inner earth.'
Even the black blot of the sea had dimensions. Ali could see its flat surface and, underneath it, the jagged contours of its floor. The river lines looked suspended in midspace.
'I'm not sure how to read this thing. There's no north-south, no scale,' said Ike. 'But there's a definite logic here. Look at the coastline of our sea. You can pretty much see how we came.'
It was different from the way she had been drawing her own maps. Lacking compass bearings, the maps she continued to make were projections of her westward desire, essentially a straight line with bends. These lines were more languorous and full. Now she could see how tightly she had been disciplining her fear of this space. The subterranean world was practically infinite, more like the sky than the earth.
The sea was shaped like an elongated pear. Ali tried in vain to distinguish any features along the right-hand route Walker had taken. Other than extrapolating that rivers intersected his route, she couldn't read its hazards.
'This spire must represent the map's center, this fortress,' Ali said. 'An X to mark the spot. But it's not actually touching the sea. In fact the sea is some distance away.'
'That had me stumped, too,' Ike said. 'But you see how all the lines converge here, at the spire? We've all looked outside and there isn't that kind of convergence. The trail we came on continues following the shoreline. And one path leads down from the back, a single path. Now I'm thinking we're just a spot on one of many roads.' He pointed to where a single green line departed from the sea. 'That spot on that road.'
If Ike was right, and if the map's proportions were true, then their party had covered less than a fifth of the sea's circumference.
'Then what could this spire represent?' Ali asked.
'I've been thinking about it. You know the adage, all roads lead to...' He let her finish it.
'Rome?' she breathed. Could it be?