Corruption

by Adam Vine

  We knelt in the shadows of the gate and waited for Barn Owl’s signal. It was a clear shot to the prisoner’s barracks, but we’d have to time it correctly if we were going to avoid the floodlights. Their paths sliced wandering half-moons from the dark stretches of rock and ice. Snowmen carrying glowmoss torches patrolled the perimeter walls with slow, clockwork gaits. I still couldn’t see any Lice, but I knew how fast those things could move across open ground.

  Barn Owl gave a wave and we broke cover. The cluster of buildings was farther than it looked, but before I knew it, I was diving behind the stairs of the nearest barracks. A guard came around the corner walking with that careful, suspicious prowl that is the trademark of a clueless henchman who’s about to get dropped. Cheese Eater did the honors, smacking the creature’s head off with his sword and sending a rain of hissing blood to freeze on the cracked, flinty soil.

  We waited under the stairs until Barn Owl was sure no other patrols were coming, then split into two groups. Cheese Eater, Bunny, Squirrel, and Vole set about trying to find a way into the barracks. Barn Owl, Gator, Zaea, and I headed straight for the main hall, nestled in its midnight nook at the base of Mount Gezel.

  The main doors of the tower were unguarded. A large glowmoss lamp in an archaic glass casket brightened automatically as we approached. Barn Owl waved it off, but not before I saw the inscription carved into the ornate stone archway above the door.

  The building’s name was written in the same, pseudo-Cyrillic script I’d seen in the Royal Crypts and everywhere else in the Night City, which I knew now was called Old Ithic, the ancient common tongue of this world.

  The name above the door read Ganheim Military Academy. Beneath it, in smaller script, there was an oxidized bronze plaque bearing the warning: Access restricted. The punishment for trespassing is death. Imperial Army of Yesaeda.

  A queasy sensation drifted up from my stomach, to my neck, ears, and fingertips. Ganheim… where have I heard that name before? Wasn’t that the name of Zaea’s school? I turned to face her, and the hollow look in her eyes told me everything I needed to know.

  Her legs wilted and I lunged to catch her, but she held out a hand and shook her head.

  “I’m fine,” Zaea said.

  “The hell’s the matter?” Barn Owl hissed. “Get your cover, you two. Now!”

  Zaea pulled her eyes away from the inscription and we both slid into the protective shadows under the monstrous archway of the door. The stone was black and pitted like petrified wood, all covered with thousands of tiny facets that caught the light like a miniature manifold sky.

  Barn Owl tested the door with her fist. “Locked,” she said, unsurprised.

  The door was perfectly smooth, not made of wood or stone, but carved from a single, giant slab of some translucent, blood-red metal. Not metal, I realized. Amber. I didn’t see a latch.

  “I can open it,” Zaea said. She gave a pained little gasp and clutched her forearm until the agony passed.

  Barn Owl scratched under her cowl. “Do your magic.”

  Zaea left the shadows of the archway, trailing her fingers along the smooth surface of the door. She placed her palm on the center and closed her eyes. There was a sound like distant glass breaking, so soft I second-guessed if I’d heard it at all, but the accompanying shiver of the air and the door swinging suddenly inward confirmed that it hadn’t been my imagination. The ghost’s slim, fuliginous blade slithered back into Zaea’s palm.

  Without a word, she stepped inside.

  “Wait!” Barn Owl said, but Zaea was already gone. “Shit. Who the hell she think she is, walking in like she owns the place? Don’t you dare follow her in there, Leech, or I will court-martial your ass. Goddamn. I knew bringing that uppity bitch was a bad idea...”

  “I say she’s confident about what she wants. Walks with purpose, like she knows where she’s going,” Gator said.

  “Yeah, you could learn a thing or two from her,” Barn Owl said. “Goddammit. This is horseshit. Gator, you get our perimeter on lock. Make sure that stupid idiot didn’t set off any silent alarms. Leech, I changed my mind. Go find her. Mouse is now your personal responsibility. You’d better get this under control fast, or we are all dead. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Then get your ass in there.”

  BENEATH THE MASK

  THE WOMAN on the operating table moaned, drawing his eyes from the pages of the Glass Book. It was normal for those undergoing Transformation – or those aiding the process of new research so that others could be Transformed, like this Brave One - to get fussy and cry out in their dreams, but this was different. It wasn't the fear in her moan that alarmed him, but something else.

  He set the book down on the chair and rose to her, checking her vital signs and the placement of the pins keeping her open. She was still semi-conscious, held in that otherworld between dreams and fully-formed thoughts that Hyro knew so well. From the readouts, it looked as though the woman had had a nightmare. Not uncommon for his patients, no. There was a characteristic sheen of cool sweat on her forehead. Her lips trembled, opening and shutting in unheard, indecipherable prayer.

  What worried Hyro wasn't the fact his patient had an upsetting dream, but why. Under this particular cocktail of anesthetics, she should have been all but immune to stimuli from the outside world. But stimuli from the Spiral…

  Someone could contact her that way, yes. Or if she was sensitive enough, and slipped into the proper dream-state, as the drugs no doubt were capable of creating, she could sense their presence.

  But why not him? He was a Blotling. One of the first. One of the oldest sentient beings to ascend and travel the Great Spiral at will. His strength in the Blot had grown over the centuries to such proportions that he and the Little Lord Master's small, tribal people back on Home would have called him a god. They had low standards for that word, yes, as he once did himself. That was plain to see from the other side of it. But he should have felt the unbalancing long before it touched the woman's dreams.

  One of the first talents Hyro-called-Ratkeeper had learned was being able to sense others like him. Another Blotling, one who had mastered this art and path; or perhaps a Visitor, one with raw ability but no idea of how to control it; even just one of the more dangerous tools leftover from the Twilight Age that flirted with harnessing this immense power; Hyro should have felt it.

  But he hadn't?

  Was his grasp on the Blot weakening, as the mask's grip was weakening on him?

  How could that be possible? Hyro was the strongest he'd ever been. His skill was almost parallel with the Little Lord Master’s. Maybe even surpassed it.

  No. Such thoughts were...

  The woman moaned again, louder this time, and twitched in the throes of another nightmare. He felt it too, this time.

  The Visitor was here, inside Ganheim. He had a ghost with him. No. One of his party did. The girl, yes, the Special Brave One who had run.

  Someone had been shielding them from him, but Hyro couldn't tell if that concealment had been done from within their party, or from a distance. It made no difference now. They were too close for such amateur’s tricks to work. And he had little time to waste.

  He had to put the book away, yes. That was the most important thing. There was time for fighting, time for killing and dying, a thousand little deaths if he must, but without the book all of it was pointless, just another meaningless spinning.

  Whether the rebels or the Lord Master found it in the end, Hyro's only hope of waking up from the dream was to finish the Glass Book. Perhaps he wouldn't remember all of it, or any of it, but the secrets it contained might finally provide the impetus for him to...

  For him to...

  A sound, somewhere else in the facility. A door opening, then closing, too soft for human ears to detect. But Hyro felt the wrongness of it, could almost see the trespassers through the dream-weaving sight of the mask. They were close. Too close. He had to act.

 
The machines would keep his patient alive long enough for him to spare a few minutes away.

  He couldn't bring the book with him in Slow Time, no. It was too delicate. He had to walk like a true analog, the way his old self had in the dreams of dreams of his memories that came to him through the Blot. Walking was a cumbersome thing, but at least this old fortress had many secret ways, nooks and crannies and artfully hidden passages that led anywhere one needed to go without being seen.

  He made for the Archives.

  A memory bubbled up to him through the Blot while he was en route. One of the earliest, from when he'd been a child back on Home.

  In the memory, he was reading a book by candlelight, a book much like the one his present self was carrying, only thicker and bound in deer leather rather than stained glass.

  Even as a boy of ten or maybe eleven years old, he knew this book was sacred... and that it was forbidden. It had no title, only the simple image of a Spiral on its cover.

  The Mainland People, who wanted the True People of the island where Hyro and the Little Lord Master had seeded from to change their religion - a movement which was quite unpopular with the True People, and which Hyro's own adoptive parents violently protested - they called this book The Patrios. But that was an awfully big word for Hyro, even at ten, so he simply called it the Spiral Book.

  It spoke of a Great Spiral, upon which the world, and all other worlds which had ever been or would ever be spun in tandem, a Spiral made of a multitude of stories. For what was matter but the crucible of life, and what was life but the crucible of stories? It spoke of great men and fathers and grandfathers, of strength and bravery and courage and war, all subjects which the Mothers of Home found to be intolerable, the filth of the Mainland not meant to infect their precious, pure island of True People.

  But Hyro loved the stories. Even as a child, they gave him something much deeper than the kind of joy or comfort or permissible sorrow other stories, even religious ones, seemed limited to.

  The stories of the Spiral Book gave him meaning. Purpose. What the Spiral Book called "the gravity of the soul." He only read it by candlelight, in the darkest corners of the night, when he could build a blanket fort next to his bed and hide himself from the world.

  He kept the book stashed on the highest eaves of his room, where his mother couldn't see, let alone reach. If his mother found it, she'd beat him. If his father found it, Hyro would be dead, a sacrifice to the Old Mothers, who recoiled from the spilling of blood, but somehow still demanded it for certain transgressions.

  Hyro was abnormally tall even as a boy, already over two meters by his tenth birthday, with long, dangly limbs and huge feet and a veritable carpet of coarse black body hair that looked strange on his midnight-colored skin. His appearance made him self-conscious, but without it, he never would have learned how to fight and defend himself from the crueler, smoother, and lighter-skinned children of Home.

  Those fights had lasted years. Some had never truly ended.

  In the memory, his mother's footsteps echoed down the hall. She'd heard him moving about. Quick as he could, Hyro hid the Spiral Book once more on its high eave and raced back to his bed, where he pretended to be sleeping. A crack of light slipped in through the open door, stayed for a moment, then went.

  The memory faded.

  Deep in the bowels of the facility at Ganheim, the Ratkeeper set to hiding a much different, rarer, and perhaps even more powerful book. It felt remarkably like the first time.

  GANHEIM

  METATRON’S HANDLE rattled in my grip as I followed Zaea through the amber door into the bowels of the tower. The place looked as dead as anywhere else in the Night City, the branching hallways leading to the east and west wings all empty mouths of shadow yawning wide as I passed by. There was dust everywhere, covering the furniture, the lights, and the checkered flagstone tiles of the floor in a thick cloak of pale ash.

  I found Zaea less than a hundred paces from the front door, standing in a large ballroom at the foot of a grand, teardrop-shaped staircase that wound upward to the second floor. Her clenched fists shook violently with the sudden remembrance of memories long forgotten.

  Did she used to call this place home? I wondered. It can’t just be a coincidence. I can’t imagine what she’s feeling right now. What if this was my home city, and I was just now seeing it for the first time? What if it was me, walking through the long-dead ruins of San Francisco… or… or Arcata?

  Zaea’s eyes never left the giant teardrop of the stairs as she said to me over her shoulder: “Don’t worry, Daniel. We’re safe, for now. They’re all on floors B3 to B6. They can’t hear us up here, but we should be careful. This entire place is monitored, and the systems are still running.”

  “Zaea, was this your school?” I said.

  Zaea rubbed at her temples. She shook her head. “No. I went to school at New Ganheim, in Neen. This is the old Ganheim. It hasn’t been used as an academy for over a hundred years. But I’ve been here before.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I’m so confused. I’m so… oh god, this hurts.”

  “What hurts? Is it your arm?”

  “Everywhere. Everywhere hurts,” Zaea said.

  “Because of the ghost?” I said.

  Tears slid down the frost-flushed balls of her cheeks. Zaea squeezed her eyes shut and hastily wiped them dry. “I don’t know. I don’t...”

  Barn Owl put her arm around my shoulder. “Hi.” I jumped, drawing snickers from Gator and even a reluctant one from Zaea. I hadn’t heard the two of them approach.

  Barn Owl looked at me like I was the most hopeless greenboots she had ever brought into the field. “Battle senses, Leech. Work on ‘em.”

  “Really, sir? Because I don’t see much of a battle going on,” I said, trying to recover some of the face I’d lost.

  Barn Owl crouched to examine the staircase. “That’s what I’m worried about.” She ran her fingers through the fragile skin of dust that covered the stairs, banisters, and everything, then paused and retracted her hand when reason got the better of her.

  “Anyway, the perimeter’s clear. I’m guessing neither of you found anything, either. No guards. No alarms. Not even a pair of goddamned footprints. This is supposed to be a top-secret prison camp. Seems to me like intel was wrong, and they ain’t even using this place to store their dirty laundry anymore.

  “Trouble is, we know they brought our people here, at least three hundred over the last year, if not more. The fence is still guarded enough that some uncritical asshole might look at it and think whoever’s in charge of this place simply let his guard down. But that ain’t us. I’m inclined to think you were right about what you said earlier, Leech.”

  “My intel’s never wrong,” Gator said under his breath. Barn Owl ignored him.

  “You think this is a trap,” I said.

  Barn Owl’s eyes narrowed. “Honey, I know this is a trap. The question is when it’s gonna spring, and who’s gonna spring it. As long as I can rely on you and Miss Mouse here when it does, I’m not worried.”

  “What is the name of this planet?” Zaea said, her eyes finally parting from where they’d been fixed for the last five minutes, at the top of the stairs.

  Barn Owl cleared her throat. “Why you ask? We got all sorts of names for it. You already know the Night Country. There’s also the Iceberg, the Ice Cube, the Ice, the Big Freeze, sometimes just the Tundra, or the Cold-As-Fuck. The name our ancestors called it was Yesaeda. It means…”

  “I know what it means. Yesaeda means Paradise in old Ithic, which this world was before the True Night,” Zaea said.

  Barn Owl unslung her spear, rolling it cautiously through her hands. I didn’t think she would attack Zaea, but the look in the tall woman’s eyes made me nervous. “Where did you say you were from, again?” Barn Owl said.

  Zaea’s voice was almost too quiet to hear. “I’ve been here before. Inside this building. I know it like the ba
ck of my hand.” Her voice wavered. “How did this happen? I don’t remember any of it. That floating city. These monsters you call the Snowmen. Why?”

  “This same building, huh?” Barn Owl said. Her gloved fingers closed tighter around the shaft of her spear.

  She thinks Zaea is a spy, I realized. A bead of cold perspiration slid down my forehead.

  Zaea gazed at Barn Owl’s spear, then at the taller woman’s eyes, then at Gator and me. “Yes. I lived here, in the west wing. Did a medical survey on level B4. It must’ve been a long time ago. It looked... different.”

  We all fell into an uncomfortable silence as we tried to puzzle out the paradox of Zaea’s words. I knew she wasn’t lying. The only conclusion I could draw was that whatever had brought her here not only acted across vast distances of space, but of time, too.

  Maybe the Night Country isn’t a different world for her at all, I thought. It is her world, only in the future. Or rather, in her future.

  The sound of a door opening echoed from somewhere in the building. In an instant, Barn Owl’s spear was poised over her shoulder, ready to throw. Gator and I both drew our swords, too.

  Zaea’s features were gripped by an eerie calm. “It’s automated,” she said. “That blast door you heard opening leads to the stairs that go to the basement. We always took the lift, because we usually had specimens to move, but the lift seems to be out of commission.”

  Zaea pointed toward the back of the ballroom, behind the teardrop staircase. Barn Owl clicked her tongue at me to go look. I raised my sword next to my right ear so I could easily thrust it through anything that jumped out at me, and went. I found the elevator where Zaea indicated I would, in the deeper shadows behind the stairs. The doors were gone, and the elevator shaft had been filled in with several tons of rubble.

  “She’s right,” I reported back. “Elevator’s filled. We can’t go down that way.”

  Barn Owl gave me an affirmative nod, then said to Zaea, “How did you do that?” She made no attempt to mask her suspicion this time.