Corruption

by Adam Vine

  I chose the other chair closest to Zaea, the three of us forming a crowded triangle at the end of a table that could’ve held thirty, the kind of table meant for huge feasts like weddings or Christmas dinners.

  Zaea clutched my arm.. “Dan, are you all right?” she whispered.

  I placed my free hand on top of hers and said, “Yes, although, I didn’t really want a haircut. But they still gave me one.”

  Zaea’s eyes brimmed with tears. She lowered them and stuffed a spoonful of soup into her mouth.

  They cut her scalp, too. She still looks a little bit like Carly, even though I never saw Carly bald.

  “Did they hurt you?” I said. Zaea shook her head no and dried her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

  “Don’t worry,” the amber-eyed woman interrupted us. Her voice was warm and motherly, but with a deep note of gravel that suggested she wasn’t someone you wanted to mess with. “We didn’t harm your friend. I personally saw to her grooming myself. Didn’t I, dear one?”

  Zaea nodded.

  “She did seem a bit overly attached to that beautiful golden braid, though,” the amber woman said. “Unfortunately, long hair is an extreme liability here in the Burrow. Not only does it go up like kindling whenever one walks too close to a torch, but we have a recurring problem with lice. Not just the big kind you met up on the Surface, but the little ones, those microscopic bastards who crawl everywhere and make you itch like they’re trying to dig tunnels to Hell through your skin. We’ve found that the simplest way to avoid an outbreak is to keep everyone’s hair short. The only exception is beards and mustaches. I’ve had to make concessions there; one, because the kinds of bugs who live in beards and mustaches aren’t typically parasitic – lice prefer the scalp and pubic regions – but also, because the men would revolt if I took them away. The beards, not the bugs.”

  Zaea squeezed my hand while she ate. Not knowing what else to say, I said, “I see.”

  The amber-eyed woman clapped. “Forgive me. Where are my manners? You must be starving.” She picked up a bowl off the table and served me from the pot with a scummy wooden ladle. “Dig in,” she said, pushing the bowl toward me.

  Any attempt at being polite and not stuffing my face flew out the window the second the steaming broth passed my lips. It tasted strange, like watery beef stew gone wrong. There were root vegetables like potatoes and carrots, and a soggy leaf cluster I thought might be cabbage. The meat was stringy, gamey, and lean. It tasted familiar, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I was almost to the bottom of the bowl when I realized it was mutton. The only time I’d ever had mutton was up on my grandma’s farm in Chico when I was a little kid.

  The amber-eyed woman studied me while I ate. When Zaea and I were both finished, she took our bowls away and gave us each a small, leather cup the size of a shot glass, filling it with a clear, pungent liquor she poured from a flask. Her cup was already full.

  “Alas, we are not as blessed with fallow fields and wide, sunlit golden pastures where we can farm cash crops and raise endless tribes of slovenly cattle and birds of meaty breast as is no doubt the case wherever you two are from,” the amber woman said. “But there is always vodka. To your health,” she said, and slammed back her drink. Hesitantly, Zaea and I both did the same. I frowned through that old, familiar burn. Zaea hissed.

  The amber woman wiped a few errant vodka droplets from her mouth. “On the subject of where you’re from. Tell me where that is, exactly?”

  “Neen, the City Arcanum,” Zaea muttered into her empty soup bowl, rolling it on its side so the final drops gathered and she could slurp them out. The amber woman hummed.

  “I’m from California,” I said.

  “Well, no surprises there. I’m happy Barn Owl didn’t kill you when she found you out there in… where was it that she found you, again?” the amber woman said.

  “It was outside the Royal Crypts,” I said.

  “Oh, right… the tombs of my great, great, great, great ancestors, where I too might’ve been buried, if things had gone differently. Alas! Bats in the night, as we say here in the Burrow. I’m happy I wasn’t deprived of so many interesting future conversations about your home worlds, and about why you’ve come to this one, over a simple misunderstanding.”

  She poured us all another shot.

  “We’re both pretty confused about what’s going on too, to be honest. Why exactly are we here?” I said. The amber woman refilled my cup. “Hey, Gator said there was hot beer. Think I could I get one of those? The vodka is burning my throat a little.”

  The amber woman gazed at me like a cat stalking an oblivious bird, then surprised me with a loud, brow-raising cackle. “What makes you think I’m confused?”

  My face flushed. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. I shook my head. “Uh, never mind. I guess you probably know everything, and you’re going to tell us what we’re doing here. Right?”

  “You guess correctly - half-correctly, anyway. Drink,” she commanded us, and we all turned our cup bottoms to the ceiling.

  I bit back a cough as the caustic moonshine stripped my throat raw. When I’d collected myself, the amber woman folded her hands on the table and said, “I’m not confused at all about why you’re here. I know perfectly well. Which is why I’m so embarrassed about the way my people treated you. It should’ve been obvious to them at first glance you are not our enemies. You are nothing but two unfortunate children who got lost in the snow. And you have no idea how or why, just as you have no idea where, or when, you are.”

  “I’m twenty-six,” I said.

  The amber woman ignored me. “There are some answers I can give you. Others, I cannot, and certainly none before we trust each other. You have no reason to trust me, as I have no reason to trust you… yet. I’ve given you bread, and yes, young man, I shall provide you with hot beer, which we must drink here instead of water, because we have no way to adequately purify our wells, and neither ice nor snowmelt are safe to drink so close to the Night City. Our beer isn’t strong. There’s barely enough alcohol in it to kill the critters you might be drinking, much less get you drunk. That’s what this is for.”

  She tipped her flask to my cup yet again, and poured me another shot of vodka. Zaea tried to turn her cup over to signal she was done, but the amber woman flipped it back up and poured her one anyway. Zaea threw me a pleading look.

  “That is, unless you’re fool enough to drink the wyvern piss Gator brews in his hovel. But if his sanity is any indication, I wouldn’t suggest it. Half the men have their own little distilleries hidden in the nooks and crannies of this place – a military establishment where there are more carboys and empty bottles than swords. Can you imagine that?”

  The amber woman cracked her neck to each side, yawning into the back of one sable glove. “Shall we?” We drank a third time.

  “However,” she said, rolling her knuckles on the table, “I wouldn’t put it past the Crippled King to send me a few young, wide-eyed reindeer pups like you two, who he had brainwashed and implanted with false memories, to infiltrate us. You may truly believe you are who you say you are. You both bear the Spiral, and you, at least, young man, come clothed in the corpse of one of our dearest recently departed soldiers. I bet you wondered why you were able to survive so long in a blizzard. Or maybe you didn’t.

  “If so, there’s your answer. The few Visitors we’ve had over the years, at least according to Bookmother, have all been well-adapted to the cold. My theory is that since the bodies your kind have reanimated all died by freezing, you’re able to tolerate longer exposure to the cold, as the Snowmen can.”

  This body is dead. The image of the other man’s face in the mirror replayed in my mind’s eye like an apparition. A dead, human, body. I’m a walking, breathing, thinking corpse.

  The amber woman must’ve noticed me shivering, because she said, with a note of scorn in her voice, “Oh, yes, Sleepwalker. You, whom the Great Spiral has chosen, have come to us bound in the eart
hly remains of my own recently departed godson Len, may the Wanderer rest his soul. The men didn’t believe it until they saw you with their own eyes. Word travels fast here in the Burrow. They didn’t recognize you at first, when they saw you with hair. But once you were shaved, it was a different story. Within minutes, everyone knew that Len had returned to us bearing a Spiral in his eye.”

  She poured herself another shot, neglecting Zaea and me this time. “This has given some of our people hope, but has caused panic in far more. You must realize, most people here are not old enough to remember the last time we had such a Visitor. It was more than twenty years ago. And, you come to us at a difficult time. We lost both Len and his father, a man called Vojciek, who was my brother by marriage as well as this outpost’s Master of Mats, within the space of a single week. We also lost our most promising ranger, a girl of immense talent named Katherine, who went by the alias Meerkat.”

  The amber woman’s eyes fell deep into her cup. She went to pour me another round, found the flask was empty, blew a raspberry with her lips and put it away. “I knew the moment I saw you. I remember the last time one of you came here - a man who called himself Helm. On his world, every boy was called Helm until he distinguished himself in battle and earned the right to choose a name. I was only a child, a girl of thirteen, but Helm befriended me. He told me where he went when he fell asleep and no one could wake him up, when the Spiral would glow impossibly beneath his sleeping right eyelid. He told me how he sleepwalked home, back somewhere across the Endless Night, and resumed the life he lived there as if he’d never left. Then, when he went to sleep there, he’d return here.

  “Helm’s story matched what was written in Bookmother’s tomes, and in the Sol Firma, our most sacred text, about the Spiral sending spirits across great distances of space and time into the bodies of the dead to serve its unknowable plans. Though I pride myself on being a woman of reason, I never questioned that particular point.”

  Zaea and I exchanged a skeptical look, but I wasn’t about to start a debate about theology. “Well at least I know I’m not the only one going crazy,” I said.

  The amber woman hummed. “I didn’t know the man whose body the Spiral chose for Helm to inhabit when he visited us, nor did anyone else. It was probably that of some refugee, one among millions who froze to death on their long march to the capital during the Last Day of Sun. It was, of course, a figurative Last Day. In truth, it lasted for many years. But when it ended, the world grew dark, and there was no light or warmth to be found anywhere but here, in these tunnels… and upon the Echelon, where only the Crippled King’s elect were invited to live.”

  “What about her?” I pointed to Zaea. “You said this… person I’m inhabiting, who isn’t me, but whose body I’m borrowing, was someone you knew. And I believe you. I didn’t recognize myself when I looked in the mirror. This face isn’t mine. These eyes aren’t mine. Nor are these hands.”

  I held them up and gazed at them for dramatic effect, then set them back down on the table. “I’m pretty creeped out by all this, but I’ll buy it for the time being. The thing that really bothers me is Zaea. She hasn’t mentioned being in a different body.”

  “Curious,” the amber woman said. “I’ve never seen this girl before in my life. And indeed, she may not have needed a new pile of flesh the way you did to serve the Spiral’s purpose. But that means little. The Spiral has chosen her, as it chose you. She has come here for a reason, as you have.”

  “What reason?” Zaea and I both said simultaneously.

  The amber woman rose. “Everything in time, my dearies.” She stretched, yawned, and sadly checked her flask again for any drops she might’ve missed. She tossed the empty flask on the table and beckoned for Zaea and me to stand. “Come. We’ll get that beer now. I owe you as much for listening to me prattle on like a sour girl who’s just been impregnated by her village boyfriend and left to die in the snow. Just kidding, we don’t have villages anymore. The last one in the Burrow was just found empty. Oh, joy. Who doesn’t relish a good pogrom? Our enemies in the Amber City certainly enjoy them. For them, it’s a time-honored tradition. Joyful, goody, candied gumdrops, looks like we’re next. And that’s where you two come in.”

  The amber woman yawned. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we begin negotiations, I feel the need to stretch my legs. You didn’t think you’d be able to escape negotiating with me, did you? Please, grow up. Ninety-five percent of interactions between adults involve negotiation of some kind. The other five percent is sex. What do you say? Shall we have a walk and a talk? I bet no one’s given you a tour of this place yet, the lazy slugabeds…”

  “No, they haven’t,” I said. “What do you think, Zaea? Want to go explore? This nice lady wants to show us around.”

  Zaea pursed her lips, glaring as if her vision could penetrate the smokescreen of the amber woman’s friendly, drunken disposition. At last Zaea nodded and we both stood. I noticed her discreetly hide her soup spoon inside the belt of her tunic.

  As we followed the amber woman out of the hall, the hairs on the back of my neck stood. We were being followed. I glanced back over my shoulder to see four men sliding silently out from behind the shadows of the pillars, one from underneath the table where we’d just been sitting. I let out an involuntary gasp. The amber woman chuckled.

  The men following us wore black, hooded garments with soot camouflaging their faces. They carried cruel, curved daggers that looked like giant fishhooks, as well as ropes, throwing knives, and thin garroting wires tucked into their black, leather belts. Their boots and gloves were sable, like the amber woman’s; only theirs were worn and ragged from years of hard use. They’d been watching and listening to our conversation the entire time. The thought that I’d been so close to someone who could reach out and slash my throat without me even knowing terrified me.

  The shadow-men moved with us toward the rear door of the hall, as silent as the darkness that had borne them. The amber woman called them off with a quick snap of her fingers.

  “Thank you, gentlemen. That will be all. You’ve sufficiently impressed our new guests. They are certainly too busy shitting their scratchy underpants to try anything now. Mommy loves you. You can take your one hour break. Good Moles. Nice Moles. Have a bite of stew, find yourselves something to drink, and be merry. I’ll be fine. Please don’t follow us.”

  The Moles halted in the middle of the room and removed their hands from their weapons to stand straight at attention. They saluted the amber woman and said in deep, booming unison, “Yes, Your Highness.”

  THE BURROW

  OUR FIRST STOP was the subway platform from which the Last Station had taken its name. It was a few tunnels over from the Mess Hall. The Queen explained that the underground structures had existed for centuries, if not millennia before the True Night, as grain cellars, vaults, crypts, catacombs, sewers, and subway lines. Her people had repurposed them when the surface was abandoned on the Last Day of Sun. They had built new tunnels to connect the old, creating a self-sufficient matrix that spread for miles beneath the ruins of the city.

  The Last Station wasn’t as grand as the subway stop at the Royal Crypts, but it was a million times better maintained. The high, heaving arches were washed clean of dust and ash. The illustrious mosaics on the ceilings and walls were still bright and resplendent, their winged knights, fallen angels, and gingerbread churches all detailed in eye-popping color.

  The platform was made of clean, polished marble, and the subway tracks still held their spit-shined gleam. There was a junked subway car on the train tracks completely blocking the subway tunnel in one direction. The other remained clear.

  “Where does it go?” I said. My words reverberated back to me through the curtain of shadows. I pulled my weight off my toes at the last second before I lost balance, avoiding an embarrassing spill off the edge of the platform.

  “That is the way to Salt Town,” Queen Rat said, pointing down the empty tunnel with her thumb. Ges
turing back toward the blockade, she said, “That way goes back to the ruins. Unfortunately, this little checkpoint is rather weak. If the enemy ever truly learned where we are, it would be very easy to overrun us. That is also the reason why this entire station, which I hope you’ve realized is a strategic choke point, is wired with explosives at every juncture.

  “We can collapse the whole place at a moment’s notice. Doing so wouldn’t protect our own necks, of course, but it might give the people of Salt Town a chance to escape. To where, I have no idea. It’s a last resort. But we are living in a time of last resorts. If this place is ever attacked, my life, and the lives of my Vermin will be forfeit.”

  “I’m guessing Salt Town is somewhere pretty important,” I said.

  Queen Rat gave me a look like she wanted to push me off the platform. “It’s the last major human settlement in the Burrow. All others have been emptied or destroyed by the Crippled King.”

  “Why?” Zaea said.

  “We’re at war,” Queen Rat said. “We always have been. We always will be. Our scouts found a village only last week where the home fires were still warm, the kettles still whistling. The people vanished as if everyone up and decided to drop what they were doing and leave.”

  “Where did he take them?” I said.

  “Our information is admittedly limited,” Queen Rat said. “There are records of settlements and villages in decades past being wiped out by disease, or poison in their food or water supply. But for the last several years, the Amber City has been ramping up the raids and taking more prisoners alive. We don’t know why.”

  “But Zaea and I are supposed to find out?” I said.

  Queen Rat smiled so wide the fillings on her back molars bled orange in the torchlight. “I only intend to make you an offer. Whether or not you take it is up to you. Now, let’s not waste more time here. There’s plenty more I wish to show you.”