by Ronan Frost
“Well, we’ve got the bodies to prove it,” Rye said. “Plenty of them.”
“I’m not arguing that, I’m just saying it’s not the burial ground Byrne identified. That makes a lot of dead bodies up here.”
Rye nodded, putting the half-mummified child back in what remained of its box. “These have been here a long time. The man-made caves suggest some sort of ancient burial rite, not Christian maybe, but there’s a definite reverence for the dead. So, who built these caves? It’s not the Nazis, the bones are too old. So, the same people who build the bridge? Their antecedents?”
“The ghosts under the mountains,” Carter offered helpfully.
“The demons,” Iskra Zima said, shutting the pair of them up.
Carter knelt beside the second box and ran his glove across the surface of the lid as though feeling out for the life force of whoever was inside. “Want to open another one?”
Rye turned to look at him. “Why on earth would you want to do that?”
“Knowledge,” the thief said.
He didn’t believe him for a second.
“We aren’t tomb raiders,” Vic said, echoing his doubt. “There is no need to make this worse than it already is.”
“What do you take me for? Sheesh. Honestly. We’re looking for some mystical treasure hidden away in some of the world’s most inhospitable mountains, and we’ve stumbled across what looks to be a—what?—century, two centuries, old mausoleum, and you don’t want to crack every damn coffin open just in case there’s something in there that ends up being the difference between us finding what we’re looking for and going home empty-handed? Shame on you. Seriously. I say we don’t leave any stone unturned. We tear the place apart looking for proof of Rask’s demons.”
He didn’t wait for permission.
He took his own ice ax to the side of the slightly larger container, prying it open. The nails were red with rust, meaning they were iron. He stood up and stepped back, pushing the lid aside. “Well, fuck me,” the thief muttered, looking at the contents of the box.
It was another body, but this one had been bent, bones broken to fold it up so that it fit into a coffin the same size as the dead child’s despite the fact it was a fully grown adult male. The man’s skin was black, not the pigment of an African American but rather blackened by exposure to the freezer burn of the elements without the natural decay that would have caused decomposition back down in the valley. The man was naked, and given the way his bones had been broken to fit him into the box, there was no obvious cause of death. The shriveled state of his skin made it impossible to age him.
“What’s that?” Iskra said, looking into the casket. She reached in, teasing something out of the leathery folds of skin around the man’s neck. It was a teardrop-shaped pendant, though the curves of the drop were fashioned to resemble flames.
Rye had seen the image before—or at least something very like it.
And he remembered where: woven into the ironwork of the gate into Sébastien Guérin’s chateau. The engravings within the teardrop resembled three spheres shrouded in flame. The three forces of life: the Jing, or body essence; the Chi, or life force; and the Shen, or spiritual force.
“Aren’t you glad we opened the box now?” Carter said, recognizing the pendant. “These tombs—or at least the bodies in them—link back to that chateau in Paris and our immortal assassin, Dawa. See, me, I’d say that’s knowledge worth defiling a grave for.”
“You seriously want us to open every single coffin?”
“You got anything better to do?”
“Fine,” Rye muttered, turning his ax on the cave’s final box. This one was a woman, or so he thought at first, seeing the smooth scalp and smoother genitalia. Closer inspection corrected his misconception. The man in this box had been gelded.
“A eunuch?”
“Brutal,” Carter said. “Why do that to someone?”
“Lots of reasons, culturally speaking,” Vic told him. “Eunuchs fulfilled many roles in society, from courtiers to singers, religious adherents or royal guards. Castration removed the hormonal drive that might otherwise make them unreliable or unsuitable for certain duties. Eunuch priests featured heavily in several religious cults, predating Christianity, including several Indian, Tibetan, and Nepalese sects. They call them Hijra. In many of the lands in this region the Hijra are recognized legally as a third sex. It’s about being neither man or woman, meaning they are of a special caste.”
“So, you think this is a holy thing?” Carter asked.
“It makes as much sense as any other answer as to why we have three bodies here, a man, a Hijra, and a baby. It isn’t exactly a traditional family unit.”
“It’s not like we are ever likely to know,” the Russian said, offering a pragmatic solution, “so why should it matter? They are dead whether they were lovers or holy men. They still ended up in a box.”
“I’m inclined to agree,” Vic said. “It isn’t as though Tenzin Dawa buried these people here, even if they worshiped the same demons. At best, it means that we are getting closer to Shambhala.”
For once it was Rye that disagreed with Rask’s Number Two. He wasn’t sure he wanted to admit it out loud, but Carter had a point. There was knowledge to be had from interrogating the dead, even if it wasn’t the kind of knowledge anyone might have been comfortable learning.
He pushed himself to his feet, the light from his head flashlight turning on each of their faces as he looked from Vic to Iskra to Carter. “God help me, but I think he’s right. I think we need to explore at least one more cave. That pendant links this body to our search—which just gives us more questions than answers. And I want to know. I want to know what we are walking into. I want to know if we’re being hunted by religious zealots who practice genital mutilation to prove their purity and faith. I want to know if he’s the only one or if every cave is filled with eunuchs. And if so, I want to know why. What does it mean? What’s the significance to the Asuras or the Brotherhood of Dzyan? Because that’s what I think we’ve stumbled upon here, the Brotherhood’s death house.”
Vic nodded slowly, considering his words. “It is possible,” he said after a moment.
“And if this is their mausoleum,” Carter offered, “where is their temple? Carved deeper in the mountain? Is one of these caves the front door? Fuck it, I’m in, let’s explore.”
“I’m in no hurry to eat another bowl of reconstituted mulch,” Iskra said. “I vote we explore.”
“That’s three to one,” Rye said.
“This isn’t a democracy,” Vic told him, but despite that, he agreed. “But I do think Mr. Vickers makes a strong argument. You explore. I shall see about building a fire and preparing the campsite here, assuming no one objects to sleeping with the dead?”
“It’s better than joining them because we froze to death out there,” Carter said.
SIXTY-TWO
Over the next two hours they moved from cave to cave, working their way across the cliff face. Every cave contained at least two boxes, every box contained more bones. Adult male bones, male child bones, Hijra bones, but in all of those boxes in all of those tombs, there wasn’t a single female corpse.
Rye didn’t know what to make of that, but Carter had a theory. “Eunuchs and men. It’s a religious thing. A cult. It’s the Brotherhood. It’s the only thing that makes any sense when you think about all of it, big picture. They castrate the boys, train them, turn them into hunters like Tenzin Dawa, and bind them to this secret. Without hormones raging through their bodies, the boys can focus with deadly concentration on learning what it takes to become priests of the demons or ghosts or whatever it is that haunts these mountains, and they dedicate their lives to protecting their secrets. This is where they bury their dead.”
“So how do they recruit more boys into their ranks if there are no women in their number?” Rye asked, but he knew there were a hundred ways around that, starting with the most basic and obvious solution—they took children
from the neighboring tribes and children of the nomads, and put them into servitude. They made slaves of them before they castrated them and transformed them into spiritual warriors.
Each fully grown adult body wore the same teardrop pendant around its neck, which only served to support the religious monk-warrior argument. And all the bodies seemed to have reached the same level of held-off decomposition and begun a natural mummification process, but without the right equipment there was no way of knowing for sure how long they’d been buried in this place.
In several of the caves, Rye found crude paintings on the walls, and though these didn’t depict the tribal hunter-gatherer stories of the Lascaux cave’s famous paintings, there was a basic sense of narrative to them.
One, in the tomb of four adult males and one Hijra, was of a roughly outlined man sitting cross-legged, arms open wide. Where his head should have been blazed the three spheres of the forces of life, the Jing, the Chi, and the Shen, and his skull had been replaced by the flame-wreathed teardrop of their pendants. In another, the three spheres were borne on the back of a beast of burden, the ethereal flame of the Jing, Chi, and Shen rippling across its back. In a third, the sitting man had his own head, though it was disproportionately large—like the head of the skeleton they’d found in the Shrine of the Black Sun—set on narrow shoulders, and in each upturned palm the three spheres burned as though he juggled them. In his left hand they burned blue; in his right, red.
The two caves that had the most mundane images were farthest from the stone stair.
In the first, a sphere with illegible script running around its circumference contained a triangle, the three points touching the edge of the sphere, and within the triangle, the three familiar burning globes of the Jing, Chi, and Shen. Rye couldn’t decipher any of the writing, though he assumed it must be some form of esoterica linked either to the Dzyan Brotherhood’s arcane beliefs, or to Blavatsky herself.
The second cave contained a variant symbol, with a much grander sphere, though instead of writing curling around the circumference, the three burning globes of the Jing, Chi, and Shen had been separated and split the circle equidistantly around its circumference. Again, within the circle was an equilateral triangle, its angles touching the inner edge of the grand circle. Inside the triangle this time he saw a many-armed goddess, much like the one he’d seen back in the temple just before Tenzin Dawa attacked. Though this one, with red-pigmented skin, looked more demonic than the idol of Kali he’d seen there.
SIXTY-THREE
First light on the fifth day they pushed on.
The sky was clear blue, the air colder than it had been in all their time on the mountains. The clear skies offered a view that stretched on for miles. Far off in the distance Rye could see the familiar spine of the White Peaks of the Seven Brothers. Gangkhar Puensum was maybe thirty miles away. Mercifully, they weren’t climbing the holy mountain, but even so there were several peaks up above the fifteen-thousand-foot range.
There was something about the mountain itself that caught his eye, an anomaly in the snowcapped peaks within the permafrost.
He couldn’t see what it was properly from this distance, but something on the mountainside kept catching the sunlight and glinting like a precious jewel.
It had to be the temple Byrne had turned up on the satellite imagery.
“This way,” the thief said, leading them toward the shallow declivity that Byrne had marked as a potential burial site. Rye followed him over the edge and started down the slope. The way down was far from easy, most of it being a huge boulder field. The rocks were loose. They shifted under his feet as he scrambled down the slope.
Above him, Vic slipped, causing a sudden slide. Hundreds of smaller stones skittered down the slope around him, forcing Rye to crouch and reach out with his right hand for balance against one of the bigger boulders. The noise increased tenfold as the sound waves bounced back upon each other, amplified by the curious acoustics of the valley’s walls.
He turned back to see Iskra Zima silhouetted against the brilliant blue. The Russian didn’t move to follow Vic until the last of the rockslide had settled, and when she did, it was with a grace that was a match for Rye’s own. The woman moved from boulder to boulder, descending in a quick zigzag down the slope. She didn’t lose her footing once, and barely scuffed up loose shale.
The boulder field went on for more than five hundred feet, bringing them down to a sheltered valley where some stubborn vegetation still clung to the mountainside. There were a few juniper bushes and several patches of thick grass showing through the snow.
“It should be here,” Carter called over his shoulder as he reached the bottom.
“It is,” Rye called down from his vantage point. There was an area thirty or forty feet from where the thief stood where the snow was discolored, something obviously beneath it.
He pointed.
Carter followed the direction of his hand, picking out the subtle changes in the white once they were pointed out to him, and nodded. He scrambled across the scree that Vic’s clumsy descent had dislodged.
The rumble of the rockslide still echoed around the valley, the sound seeming to roll on and on long after the last stone had settled.
Rye followed Carter to the discolored snow, reaching him as he crouched, brushing his glove across the surface to dust away the finer snowfall. At first there was nothing to see, but the more insistently he brushed away the snow, the more the ground beneath his glove darkened until the back and forth exposed cloth.
There was a body under the snow.
More than one.
The discovery only caused Carter to work harder at clearing the snow that crusted the corpse. He uncovered a hand. The skin was remarkably well preserved. There was no sign of decomposition, or the dried-out leathery hide of the bodies back in the mountain’s mausoleum. A thin crust of ice had preserved the vitality of the corpse, so much so it was almost possible to believe the meat was still fresh.
Carter brushed away more of the snow, exposing more of the dead man’s uniform.
Standing over him, Rye recognized the insignia on the dead man’s lapel before the thief did: written in a runic script the words Deutsches Ahnenerbe circled a sword and ribbon, and over his right breast Rye saw a silver pin with a circular swastika embossed upon it, marking the dead Ahnenerbe officer as a member of the Thule Society.
“These aren’t ancient bodies,” Carter said, recognizing the Nazi emblem for what it was.
“Nope. I think we just found some of the Nazi expedition.”
“Some, or all of it,” Carter agreed, looking at the vast plain of discolored snow around them.
The Russian reached them before the more cautious Vic, who was very careful now about where he put each foot down. Iskra skirted the ridge, scanning the discolored snow back and forth before she said, “At least fifty. Maybe more.”
Rye moved deeper into the Bone Garden and set to work clearing away more of the snow. He uncovered two bodies close together, both belonging to the expedition’s Sherpas. There was no obvious sign of what killed either of them, but it didn’t make sense that so many men should have chosen this valley high up in the sacred mountains to simply drop dead. The fabric of their furs had crusted hard and turned brittle in the process. They’d been left with the kit bags they’d been carrying.
The photograph he’d found in Guérin’s chateau could have been taken on this very spot.
It didn’t make sense.
He hated things that didn’t make sense.
“They’re not all SS,” Rye called across to the others. “These two are natives. Sherpas. They’ve still got their kit bags strapped to their backs.” He shook his head.
Iskra confirmed another dead member of the Thule Society, though he was not wearing the uniform of a soldier. Instead, he was wrapped up against the elements in layers of woolen sweaters and a thick sheepskin greatcoat. When she cleared the snow away from his hands, she found a death’s-head ring on the
dead man’s ring finger.
The SS-Ehrenring was a personal gift bestowed by Himmler, marking the dead man as someone of some rank. To the right of the skull there was a small rune framed by a triangle, not dissimilar to the cave painting.
“Got something,” she called, drawing the others over.
She showed them the ring. “It’s an honor ring,” the Russian explained. “They were only given to Himmler’s chosen few, and under normal circumstances, if the wearer died the ring would be returned to Himmler himself. I guess this one never went home to the Third Reich. Help me get it off him.”
The metal had contracted under the extreme cold, making it impossible to pry free. Carter didn’t waste time trying. He used his ice ax to cut the corpse’s finger off and picked up the ring where it fell in the snow.
He handed it to Iskra, who looked inside the silver band, reading the inscription. “Markos Vogel. Third of September 1938,” she said, naming the dead man.
She tossed the ring to Carter.
“A keepsake.”
They checked a few more dark shadows, uncovering more Nazi officers among the dead.
“This didn’t make it into the history books,” Rye noted, more to himself than anyone else as he found another Thule pin.
“Why would it?” the Russian said. “My people understand the power of propaganda. You do not record your failures, only your triumphs, and if you lose men along the way you turn them into part of the grander lie, the greater triumph. You do not dwell upon something as inconvenient as the truth. No one cares, anyway. If the Nazis lost half of their expedition here, what does it matter in the grand scheme of things?”
“It hardly proves the superiority of their so-called master race,” Carter said, palming the ring.
“No race is genetically superior,” Iskra said. “We are all just aspects of divergent evolution. We adapt to our environment. We are all inherently the same. That is the only truth worth knowing. None of this superior species bullshit. Someone evolved to survive these altitudes would cope better with the thinning oxygen. Someone evolved to live under the baking desert sun would develop pigment protections against UV rays. Because we as a species are survivors. We always have been.”
