Corruption

by Adam Vine

  At the second collapse, we took a detour that led us to a place where the ground had opened and broken the tunnel into a deep fissure. My heart sank when I looked down. The bottom was hidden by thick, impenetrable darkness. The crevasse may as well have been bottomless.

  “How will we get across?” Zaea said.

  “We’re about to find out,” Barn Owl said. “Do your squirrel thing, Squirrel.”

  The short, stocky Vermin saluted her. “Yes, sir, right away, sir, without a rope, sir, I’ll happily engage in a risky climb with no anchor person to ascertain that tiny but important bit of information for you, sir.”

  “For us. And leave your lip up there, while you’re at it,” Barn Owl said.

  “Pity I forgot to bring my detachable ones,” Squirrel said, then gracefully shimmied out onto the furthest part of the ledge, where our path dropped off into fuliginous abyss. Squirrel grabbed a handhold and started to climb. I craned my neck to watch until his flashing baldpate disappeared above the jagged wound of the tunnel mouth.

  A moment later, a disembodied echo called down to us, “There’s a rope fixed between the cliffs. It’s about four meters above where you’re standing. I can’t see the far anchor point, but the rope feels taught.”

  There was a loud twang and Squirrel hissed happily. “It’s stable enough to hold my weight. There’s a rope ladder bolted here, too - still coiled. I’m going to drop it down. Nobody stab it. Or, maybe stab it, if it attacks you.”

  The bottom rungs of a rope ladder appeared in front of the tunnel mouth. Barn Owl tugged the ladder. “We love you too, Uncle Termite. All right, Vermin. There’s a zip-line up there with our names on it. We can’t see it, because it’s too dark, so consider this a test of faith in your fellow Vermin. When was the last time everyone rode a zip-line? Never mind; don’t answer that.

  “The procedure is simple. You climb up, put your sword, spear, bow, or dagger over the rope, take a grip with both hands on each side of your weapon, then kick off and ride it all the way to the other side. For you people using blades, make sure to hold them with both hands on the scabbard. Let me repeat, do not grab the handle of your blade while you are flying. Otherwise, it will unsheathe while you’re in mid-flight and deposit you very quickly at the bottom of a probably long and definitely fatal fall into that there perilous ravine. We go one at a time. Squirrel, you ready?” Barn Owl said.

  “Ready to fly,” Squirrel said.

  “Fly on,” Barn Owl said.

  A rush of air whooshed over our heads, and the shooting star of Squirrel’s torch descended twenty or thirty feet in front of us. The scrape of boots scrambling on stone echoed from the far wall of the canyon. Squirrel’s light dropped five or six feet, then stopped dead.

  “Is it a clear drop?” Barn Owl said.

  Squirrel’s answer came a few seconds later. “Clear as vodka. Look at this.” Squirrel flung his torch a few feet deeper into the opposite tunnel mouth, so we could see it from our side of the rift.

  “Beautiful,” Barn Owl said. “All right, Vermin. Volunteers. Who’s first?”

  Zaea went next. I went second to last. The scariest part was the actual descent. The darkness above and below me was so absolute, it was like falling into a black hole. I kept my eyes set on the distant flicker of Barn Owl’s torch as I slid down.

  Zaea stifled a laugh as she and Gator pulled me in. “Daniel, are you afraid of heights? You’re white as ship rock.”

  I didn’t answer. “Aye. Shakin’ like a couple of snow elk mating, he is,” Gator said, squeezing my shoulder with a big, greasy hand. “Don’t worry, son. No one’s brave their first time across this chasm. It’s the next one that will really get your insides active.”

  THE NIGHT COUNTRY

  WE MADE the Surface an hour later under an inverted black mountain of sky, ascending into perilous lunar fields of ash-colored snow and glacial fingers of ice all glowing with their nascent, ghoulish light. The weather was as clear as it got in the Night Country, which is only to say that there wasn’t a storm, but a stinging wind howled across the plain like a cloud of knives, sending bitter snow devils to dance hellishly in our path.

  Some of the Vermin used their weapons as walking poles. I was hesitant to use such a beautifully crafted blade as the Archangel at first, but after so many hours of walking, and so many of them on sketchy terrain that strained my ankles and made my lower back ache, I relented.

  In daylight, we would’ve seen the Icefall from the moment we left the tunnels, rising over the world like a floating island. But the eternal, coal-gray gloom hid the Icefall under the shadow of Mount Gezel until we were almost upon it, when a sudden blue brilliance caught our torchlight. It was as tall as a skyscraper, its surface an uneven mirror of deep cerulean glass.

  We ascended a span of switchbacks snaking up the shallow grade of the glacier’s base. The snow giving our boots traction thinned down to bare, slippery ice, and the ground split beneath our feet into hidden crevasses. We descended into the shallower rifts, but had to cross the deeper ones using makeshift bridges made of wooden ladders lashed together. Thankfully, the man the other Vermin had called Termite had already set those for us, and all we had to do was find them. Most of the chasms were only a few, breathless feet across, but all of them were deep enough that a fall would be fatal. I tried not to look down.

  The higher we climbed, the steeper the grade became. Ragged forests of seracs like the up-thrust fingers of buried ice giants towered all around us, threatening to fall at any moment. Gator told Zaea and me that those freestanding pillars of ice were the biggest killer on the glacier. The seracs slept under camouflaging blankets of snow that made them indistinguishable from the rest of the icefall – you could be climbing one, thinking you were on stable footing, and you wouldn’t know you were wrong until it was too late.

  The second big fissure was twice as large as the first, and we didn’t have the aid of a zip-line to cross it. Instead, there were three ladders lashed together and laid lengthwise across the gorge, with two long ropes fixed to poles driven deep into the ice on either side to use for handholds. The ladders looked like little toothpicks that would buckle and snap the second someone set foot on them.

  Barn Owl wasted no time in crossing the makeshift bridge. She pulled an oilcloth bag from where it was secreted in a nearby crack in the ice, removed one of the sets of toe blades Termite had left for us, and started strapping into them. I didn’t understand why until she stepped out onto the ladder. The climbing blades on her boots extended the length of Barn Owl’s step, acting like little hooks that grabbed onto each rung where her boot alone would’ve fallen through.

  Slowly, but steadily, Barn Owl overcame the gaping maw in the ice, while the rest of us hurried to get our blades on.

  Once she was safely on the other side, Barn Owl held the ropes to make it easier for the next person to cross. My blades were already on, and I was still salty about Zaea and Gator insinuating I was a coward, so I volunteered. From my first step onto that rickety bridge of ladders, I wanted nothing more than to turn around.

  The conventional advice given to people who are afraid of heights is to never look down. That’s impossible when you’re crossing an ice crevasse on a bridge made of ladders. If you don’t look down, you can’t set your boots properly between the rungs, and you fall and die. But being able to see how deep the abyss is that you’re trying to cross – or not seeing it, which is worse – fills your mind with images of slipping and falling, which doesn’t exactly help you stay calm.

  I did some technical climbing back when I was in Boy Scouts, and while all of that knowledge and experience didn’t immediately come flooding back to me, I had retained enough of it to matter. I clung to those ropes like a true believer, taking one step and then another until I was across.

  Before I knew it, my feet were back on solid ice, and Barn Owl was giving me a high five. I was so jittery from the adrenaline that the full weight of the accomplishment didn’t really sink in
until later, but damn, did it feel good… so good that I raised my arm up over the chasm and flipped Gator and Zaea the bird.

  Mongoose crossed next, then Zaea, Gator, and Vole. Squirrel took the rear guard, and only went once all of us were to safety.

  When all the Vermin had crossed and our short rest was over, we started back up the blue spine of the icefall, ropes and ice axes quickly replacing cut backs and walking poles. I was the worst climber among us second to Zaea, but I kept up, and only managed to endanger the lives of my friends on one occasion. I lost my footing, fell on my ass, and slid about twenty feet down the slope. I rolled onto my stomach and slammed my ice axe into the snow to break my slide like they taught us to do in the Scouts, and came to a skittering halt just before I would’ve crashed into Vole, who was next in line behind me.

  No one except Zaea was overly impressed by my save. “Do they have many mountains in California?” she said to me, as she struggled over the ledge of a low gully the group was currently working to cross.

  I helped Zaea over the ledge. “Yes, we do. There’s the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, which has Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the continental United States. There’s also Mount Shasta to the north. That’s closer to where I grew up.”

  “Five minute break,” Barn Owl called down to us. “Rest up, get your gear tight, take a piss, do whatever it is you need to do. This will be your last chance until after the objective.”

  “Have you climbed it?” Zaea asked me, brushing clumped snow off her furs.

  “Which one? Mount Whitney? Or Shasta?” I said.

  Zaea hmmed. “The taller one.”

  I couldn’t help but smile as those distant memories resurfaced: the emptiness of my lungs and the camaraderie of my fellow scouts, all huffing and puffing like tired dogs, sharing Cliff bars and going to the bathroom in plastic Ziploc bags as we toiled our way up wastelands of gray granite and naked sky. “I have, actually. I was part of a group called the Boy Scouts from the time I was a little kid until my eighteenth birthday. I earned the rank of Eagle Scout,” I said.

  “Is that high?” Zaea said.

  “It’s the highest rank we had. My troop went on several mountaineering trips every year. It was my favorite thing to do, other than take my twenty-two shooting at the rifle range.” Zaea nodded like she knew what a twenty-two was. “We climbed Mount Whitney in a single day,” I added.

  “And how old were you?” Zaea said.

  “I was sixteen.”

  “Sounds like quite the accomplishment.”

  “It’s a difficult hike, but most people can do it with the right training, as long as they don’t get altitude sickness. It’s a hell of a lot safer than this,” I said, looking down. “The view at the top, though… you can see for miles and miles, just mountains, nothing else, running all the way to the horizon.”

  Zaea heaved a sigh of accepted discomfort. “That sounds lovely.”

  “How about you, Zaea? Where’d you learn how to climb? You’ve obviously had some practice.”

  Zaea kneeled to tighten the blade straps on one of her boots. “We didn’t have organizations like yours at my school. I learned to climb in our Combat Fitness and Readiness program. It was mandatory.”

  “I’ll bet. Didn’t you say it was a military academy?”

  “Good memory. Yes, it was. It was called New Ganheim. I can’t say I ever enjoyed climbing indoors, but now that I’m finally putting it to use in the field, I’d like to do this again someday, preferably in daylight. Really feel the nature, y’know? Maybe catch a view like the one you’re describing. That is, if we survive, of course,” Zaea said.

  “If we survive,” I said. “How about this, then. I’ll make you deal…”

  “Dan,” she cut me off, her voice growing fraught with exhaustion. “As much as I’d love for us to make a pact to find each other when this is all over, and climb some far-flung mountain together, we both know that won’t happen. I don’t mean to shoot your idea down. It really is something I’d want to do in a different life, and when I say I’d want to, I mean really want to. But now isn’t the time for wishful thinking.”

  “You’re probably right. It was a dumb idea,” I said.

  Zaea’s voice became soft as vapor. “Look. Nothing would make me happier than climbing with you under different circumstances. But something about this place is messing with my head. I don’t only mean in the obvious ways.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Zaea lowered her scarf, exposing her nose and mouth to the cold to wash her face through her hands. She returned the scarf over her face. “Ever since the briefing, I’ve had this unshakeable feeling that I’ve been here before. I had it when we first came to the Burrow, as well. Something about these streets, this architecture, even the way people speak here – specifically, the idioms they use – gives me the feeling that this is not the first time I’ve visited this land. Only, I can’t remember when I was here.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Uh, nothing. Are you sure? Do you think that maybe…”

  A shout cut me off, echoing from the cliffs above. “All right, Vermin. This is the big one, the final push up the frozen ass crack of Hell. So what do you say, Vermin? You all still hard enough for the task?” Barn Owl said.

  The Vermin answered, “Sir, yes sir!”

  “You don’t look hard to me. And you sure as crotch rot ain’t gonna look hard after climbing that.” Barn Owl waved her thumb at the wall of ice behind her, a sheer, hundred-foot face of midnight blue where a single, black strand of rope hung from the scattered abutments.

  “The name of the game is watch where you put your goddamn feet. You climb no faster, or safer, than the Vermin above and below you,” Barn Owl said. “I’m going to pass a rope around. Tie it once around your waist, and then hand it to the person next to you. This is your lifeline. It’s going to keep you, me, and all of us alive. So be nice to it.”

  “We’ll talk more later,” I whispered to Zaea. She nodded.

  Once the other Vermin had all finished tying themselves in, Gator tossed the rope down to Zaea. The order was her, then me, and then finally Mongoose at the bottom of the line. A sharp tug traveled down to us as the other Vermin started climbing, and the rope slowly floated upwards until it grew taught.

  The climb was easier than I’d imagined, at least until the halfway point. The blades on my boots and the dual-line system we used to ascend helped negate the slipperiness of the ice. There was also the comfort of knowing that all of us were in it together, undertaking such a dangerous task as a group. Despite the wind lashing at my face and the constant fear I was going to fall and die, I didn’t feel that cold or tired.

  Len must have been a damned good climber, I thought.

  Around the halfway point, I realized the tiny, dark shadow standing directly above us at the very top of the cliff wasn’t some kind of metal anchor, but a strong, wiry little man who was holding our rope steady so that it wouldn’t blow asunder in the wind.

  Termite-

  A hand grabbed my ankle and yanked it off the ice. “Traitor!” Mongoose shouted above the howling of the wind.

  I slid, nearly losing my grip on the rope, but I caught it and held on. “What are you doing?” I yelled, as Mongoose began overtaking my section of the rope.

  She grabbed the base line above my feet, then hooked my legs with her own in a scissor. She let go of the rope and took hold of the knot anchoring my waist to the line. A weight like a ton of bricks suddenly pulled me down. It took every ounce of strength I had just to hang on.

  Trying to cut me off the line, I realized. She’s trying to kill me. Mongoose is the spy.

  But there was nothing I could do. I tried to kick away from the cliff and throw Mongoose off me, but she had control of my legs. I tried to pull myself higher on the line, but couldn’t. I couldn’t draw the Archangel, because I needed both hands to hold onto the line. Like her namesake viciously t
aking down some poisonous snake, Mongoose had taken me by surprise when I was most vulnerable and wouldn’t let go until I was dead.

  None of the Vermin looked down or even noticed our struggle. My cries for help went lost in the aural siege of the wind. I was on my own.

  In one quick motion, Mongoose took her hand off my rope and pushed us away from the wall. We slid about ten feet, taking all the slack out of the line above us. A small, curved knife appeared in Mongoose’s fist. She slid the knife under the rope around my waist, and I gasped as the iron bit deep into me. She shouted into my ear, “Best regards from the Amber City!” and slashed.

  An arrow sprouted from Mongoose’s eye.

  A guttural hiss escaped my assassin’s throat, as the knife, and the hand holding it, fell limply away. Mongoose’s legs released their hold and the dead woman fell back to her old position at the bottom of the line.

  I instinctively braced myself for the hit, holding on for dear life as her weight yanked the line taut again. I thought the force would tear me in half, but somehow, miraculously, the last remaining threads of my rope belt held.

  Thanks, Uncle. I glanced up in time to see the old man at the top of the cliff lower his bow and throw me a casual salute.

  Mongoose’s corpse dangled ten or twenty feet below me, an impossible weight that neither I, nor the remaining cord about my waist could bear much longer.

  Somewhere above me, Zaea shouted my name. A powerful gust of wind pushed me sideways, causing me to scramble laterally along the slippery ice. That sudden wall of black noise drowned out the rest of what Zaea said, but I could read her lips:

  “Dan! Cut! The! Rope!”

  I drew the dagger I’d taken from the armory as a sidearm, reached down, and slashed off Mongoose’s dead weight. The line instantly went light. My hands were shaking so violently that I couldn’t get the dagger back in its sheath, so I let it drop.