Pendergast [07] The Book of the Dead(162)

79





Aloysius Pendergast paused at the fork in the trail, listening intently. Not five minutes before, he had distinctly heard shots—ten of them in all—over the thundering of the volcano. He knelt and examined the ground with his light, quickly determining that Diogenes—and Diogenes alone—had taken the fork blocked by a fence.

There was much about this situation that he had not yet untangled, enigmas wrapped in mysteries. There had been very few footprints—only where dust or sand had blown into pockets of the rock—but even so, Constance’s prints had ceased, almost at the beginning of the trail. And yet Diogenes had continued on. Why? Pendergast had been forced to make a choice: search for Constance’s prints or follow Diogenes’s. And this was no choice at all—Diogenes was the danger, he needed to be found first.

And then, there had been gunshots—but whose? And why so many? Only a person in the grip of panic would fire ten shots in a row like that.

Pendergast scaled the fence and continued up the ancient trail, which had fallen into dangerous ruin. The top of the ridge was perhaps a quarter mile distant, and beyond that he could see only the sky, stained by an angry orange glow. He had to move fast—but with care.

The trail came to a steep part of the ridge, carved into a staircase that ran up the rough lava itself. But the staircase was badly eroded, and Pendergast was forced to holster his sidearm and use both hands to climb it. Just before cresting the top, he leaned into the slope, paused, and removed his gun again, listening. But it was hopeless: the roar and bellow of the volcano was even louder here, and the wind howled ever more fiercely.

He crawled to the top of the ridge, into the stinging wind, and paused once again to reconnoiter. The exposed trail ran along the crest before turning and disappearing around a spike of frozen lava. He jumped to his feet, ran across the exposed ground, and took cover behind the lava, peering ahead. He could see now that a great chasm must lie to his right—no doubt the Sciara del Fuoco. The reddish glow coming up from it provided an excellent backdrop against which to identify a figure.

He edged around the lava spike, and the Sciara suddenly appeared on his right: a sheer cliff falling away into a steeply pitched chasm, like a huge cleft in the side of the island: half a mile broad, plunging precipitously into a churning, boiling sea hundreds of feet below. Heated air came roaring up the chasm, screaming diagonally over the ridge, carrying with it stinging particles of ash and clouds of sulfurous fumes. And now, in addition to the roar from the mountain, Pendergast could hear a new sound: the crackling and rumbling of huge blocks of living lava, some glowing red-hot, that came bounding down from the crater above, leaping and tumbling into the sea below, where they blossomed into dim white flowers.

He staggered forward into the tearing wind, finding his balance while compensating for the hellish force pushing him back from the brink of the cliff. He examined the ground, but all possible tracks had been scoured away by the wind. He sprinted along the ragged trail, taking cover behind old blocks of lava whenever possible, keeping his center of gravity low. The trail continued, still climbing the ridgeline. Ahead stood an enormous pile of lava blocks, an arrested rockfall, which the trail skirted around, making a sharp right toward the cliff’s edge.

He crouched in the shelter of the lava fall, gun at the ready. If there was anyone on this trail, they would be directly ahead of him, at the edge of the cliff.

He spun around the edge of the rock, gun in both hands—and saw a terrifying sight.

At the very edge of the chasm, he could see two figures, silhouetted against the dull glow of the volcano. They were locked in a curious, almost passionate embrace. And yet these were not lovers—these were enemies, joined in mortal struggle, heedless of the wind, or the roar of the volcano, or the extreme peril of the cliff edge on which they stood.

“Constance!” he cried, racing forward. But even as he ran, they began to tip off balance, each raking and clawing at the other, each pulling the other into the abyss—

And then, with a silence worse than any cry, they were gone.

Pendergast rushed up to the edge, almost blown onto his back by the force of the wind. He dropped to his knees, shielding his eyes, trying to peer into the abyss. A thousand feet below, hardened blocks of dull red lava the size of houses rolled and bounced like pebbles, shedding clouds of orange sparks, the wind screaming up from the volcano’s flanks like the wail of the collective damned. He remained on his knees, the wind whipping salt tears from his eyes.

He could barely comprehend what he had seen. It was incredible to him, an impossibility, that Constance—sheltered, fragile, confused Constance—could have pursued his brother to the very ends of the earth, driven him up this volcano, and flung herself into it with him…