by Adam Vine
CORRUPTION
The Corruption Cycle
Book one
by
Adam Vine
Copyright 2017 Adam Christopher Kennedy
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
PRINT ISBN 978-1541022140
For Hannah, ever my light in the darkness.
Through me you go to the grief-wracked city.
Through me you go to everlasting pain.
Through me you go and pass among lost souls.
- Dante, The Inferno
PROLOGUE
ONE BY ONE the old bricks fell. “Almost got it,” Katherine said, pushing hard into the broken wall until her arm slid through. The hiss and splash of bricks falling into water whispered through the ancient tunnels. “You owe me a bottle of good vodka,” she told the one-eyed man watching from the shadows.
Vojciek attempted to scowl, but the cracked dolomite of his face betrayed a quiet satisfaction. “Ho-hoo! One bottle? Make it three. You’ve done well today, Kat.”
Katherine’s nickname among her fellow Vermin was Meerkat – often shortened to Little Kat, or just Kat. Meerkats were burrowing rodents supposed to have lived on the Surface before the Last Day of Sun. Bookmother had read her a story about them once. Since she was a little girl falling over on Vojciek’s mats, Katherine had tried to emulate how she imagined such small, springy creatures must have fought, all sniping limbs and devious balance.
She raised her heel and kicked the broken wall, once, twice, then three times, the old stones spilling from their dusty crypts until the hole was wide enough for her and the old man to fit through.
“Let me guess. I’m taking point?” Katherine said.
Vojciek poked his torch through the hole, his white, bottlebrush eyebrows folding down into a hard squint. The light shied beyond the broken bulwark of the wall, where a few scattered glimmers revealed a canal snaking away into the darkness. A rank cloud enveloped them as the old, unseen bowels of the Night City breathed once more.
Katherine had always imagined such a discovery would be exciting, but all she could think about was the smell.
“That is a good guess,” her teacher said.
The old man stopped her as she was sliding her foot through the jagged bricks. He offered her the torch. “We’re just little Vermin sneaking through his halls, trying to steal a bite of cheese. And we know his cure for little Vermin. But though Vermin we may be, we are also the fire. No matter what awaits us in there…” Vojciek said.
“We know what awaits us in there,” Katherine said, taking the torch.
Vojciek drew a deep breath, pulled his shawl up over his nose, and nodded for her to move. Katherine mounted the broken wall and vaulted into the darkness.
Her legs splashed into cold, oily water. The shadows retreated and advanced from the flickering nimbus of her torchlight like unsure combatants. Black islands of questionable composition floated by her in the gloom.
“Look what we’ve found! Another tunnel!” Vojciek said. “What a strange and mystical thing to find hidden a kilometer beneath the Surface! Ho-hoo! Is something wrong, Kat? Worried we might wake up some ancient, eldritch thing set down here to guard our Beloved Ruler’s secrets? Feel any tentacles brush against your leg yet?”
“No. Can’t say that I did.”
“You never know down here. Better stay on your toes…”
“Ugh.”
Katherine paused, holding the torch close to the tunnel’s low, curving wall. Unlike the other passages, this one wasn’t made of brick, but carved straight from the slick, pale rock. “Have you noticed the walls?” she said.
“Aye. Either we’re standing in a very shoddily-delved mineshaft, or whoever built this passage did so in a hurry,” Vojciek said.
The tunnel branched every twenty or thirty steps, a spider-web network of yawning, black mouths all waiting to devour the scarce light of Katherine’s torch. They were all dead ends, Katherine knew. She had studied the manuscripts in Bookmother’s library enough to know that once they passed the false wall, it was a straight shot to the cavern. The other passages were blinds meant to mislead potential grave robbers.
The tunnel ended abruptly around the next bend, and the two of them stepped into a cavern so large Katherine’s torchlight barely touched the ceiling.
They were standing on a slender crescent of beach winding around the shores of a vast subterranean lake. There was an island rising in the distance, upon which stood the largest building Katherine had ever seen.
It was a great cathedral, all wrought from red brick and white marble. Its shadow-shrouded spires were so tall they interlocked with the gargantuan dripstones of the cave ceiling like twisted puzzle pieces. Katherine had to crane her neck to take in its full, nauseating height.
Her pulse quickened as the realization sank in. The Lost Cathedral of Saint Aram. It actually exists.
“Ho-hoo! Three bottles of vodka, indeed. Your mother would be proud, Kat. I wish she was here,” Vojciek said.
“It’s hard to believe I’m finally looking at it,” Katherine said. “Feels a bit surreal.”
“On that note...” The old man pulled a leather flask out of a secret pocket stitched into the lining of his coat, took a deep swig, and offered it to Katherine. “Distilled it myself, you know.”
She took a drink and gave it back.
Vojciek put the flask away, unslung his Wyvernwood spear from where it rested on his shoulder. “Since this is your show, I trust you know how we’re getting across that.” He pointed his spear across the lake.
The serene, midnight water ran far past the tiny halo of her torchlight, as motionless as black stained glass. They could swim, but the lake was deep, and icy cold. It’s too warm this far down to freeze. Too bad. Some thick ice would have helped.
“I have a plan,” she said.
The old man gestured for her to demonstrate. Katherine raised her hand and released the ghost from where it rested in the casket embedded within her palm. The world gave a little scream, and a crushing pressure enveloped her. A black, shivering line bloomed from her fist. She aimed it at one of the giant stalagmites growing from the cave floor.
Katherine flicked her wrist, slicing the monstrous stone pillar from its base. The upper segment began to slide, down, down, down, until it toppled. She made another quick slash, and another, slicing angled portions from the base. The pillar rolled into the frigid water with barely more than a splash. A maze of ripples cascaded across the lake, lapping the shore with a gentle elegy of waves.
The pillar had fallen to form a natural bridge between the beach and the island that they could easily wade across. Only after did Katherine wonder if the sound could have been heard up on the Surface.
The old man frowned at her.
“We’re deep enough,” Katherine said.
"That was thoughtless,” Vojciek said.
Katherine bedded the ghost in her palm and started across the beach. “We can handle a few s
hells, master. Besides, we’ll be gone before they ever know we were here.”
Vojciek shook his head. “It’s not shells we need to worry about. They won’t send a purging party. Not down here.”
Katherine’s eyes drifted to the empty socket where her master’s eye had been, hidden under a ragged leather eye patch. The ghost shot a knife of pain up her arm at the thought. “If we’re on borrowed time, then we’d best hurry.”
The old man stroked his mustache. “We’re all on borrowed time, Kat. One of the great secrets of life is that it can end at any instant. Realizing that will both free and condemn you. But no matter what chains the Oppressor may put on us, he cannot take away our fate.”
“I thought you said fate was a choice.”
“Precisely my point. Now, before we go on, I can see the ghost is giving you some discomfort. It is reacting to your fear. The People of the Sun were masterful architects, most of all when it came to weaponry. It’s one of the reasons they’re not here anymore. I thought you were better prepared for this. Remember your drills. You must empty your mind to avoid being stung. You must become the fire. Kat…?”
She stepped out onto the pillar, walking on the balls of her feet so she wouldn’t slip and fall in. It was no different than walking on the balance beam in the mat room back at the Last Station, something she’d done a thousand times since she was a child.
Far beneath the surface of the lake, the shelf of the shore dropped away to limitless depths of black. Katherine’s reflection on that mirrored surface was one she hardly recognized. Her once-smooth, pale skin was now yellow from malnutrition. Her close-cropped hair was spotting white. Her cheeks looked sunken, and there were deep circles under her eyes from camping in the Undersprawl for more than a week.
Yet even living the hard, likely short life of a Vermin, she was far more fortunate than most girls her age in the Burrow, already married and bearing children before their eighteenth birthdays.
So many lives I’ll never live. But I chose this, didn’t I? I knew what I was giving up, just like mom did.
Vojciek whistled as he set foot on the rocky shore of the island. They both took a moment to soak in the magnificent sight of the Lost Cathedral up close.
Its brick-and-marble façade rose in layers, reminding Katherine of an enormous gingerbread palace. Each of its twin bell towers was topped with a giant gumdrop of verdant bronze. The main door was carved from a single slab of pure amber, the frame adorned with hundreds of life-sized marble statues depicting choirs of angels singing and marching to war. Most other churches in the Night City had long since fallen to ruin, their statues and marble dressings stolen by time. But this cathedral was perfectly intact.
The people of the Twilight Age built this. It’s like a window into another world.
“Ho-hoo! Almost makes an old atheist want to believe again,” the old man said.
Katherine felt it, too, though she did not share her master’s skepticism. “How old do you think it is?”
“If the legends are true, older than anything still standing on the Surface.” A hint of sadness tinged the old man’s voice. “But I’m still not entirely convinced they are.”
“What would convince you?” Katherine said, gazing up at the cathedral’s bulbous, twinkling spires. “Do you not think this is Saint Aram’s?” She wanted to say, are you mad? But kept the thought to herself.
Vojciek picked something from his mustache and flung it off into the darkness. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it? If we found the church where our Oppressor lived before his rise to power, when he was merely an acolyte; if we found his diary, that terrible trove of secrets so powerful it could undermine his rule, even make the Amber City fall…
“We have found a real, physical structure, which someone really hid – or built - a kilometer underground. Does that mean it was moved here by magic, or that the Crippled King was the one who did the moving, like the stories say? Or that this discovery will win us the war, and herald a glorious new age of daylight?”
The old man didn’t wait for her to answer. “Now, I don’t know much about any of that, but here’s what I’ve observed in my six decades on this iceberg. Myths are always about what we want to believe, and never about what is. Suppose we discover some proof the Crippled King is not who he claims. Will our position have improved? Will it stop the Amber City from hunting us down like little rats? No. We’ll still be Vermin to them. We will always be Vermin to them. Hate doesn’t need a reason.”
“I see,” Katherine said.
The old man spat. “Oh, don’t give me that face. You’ve found something incredible, Kat. I give you all the credit. I certainly don’t want any. Fame would go right to my head. Can you imagine? I’d become as insufferable as a full bladder multiplied by a hangnail. Ho-hoo!”
She forced a smile.
Vojciek took another swig from his flask, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and casually extended a long, bony finger toward the door of the cathedral. “But don’t take my word for it. Open it. That way, when you prove me wrong and win this war, you can look back on this moment and say, I told that old fool. I always knew I’d surpass him. What’s that old saying again? To the master goes the blade?”
Katherine took a deep breath and placed her hand on the door. There was no handle. She merely had to press her fingertips to the cool, smooth amber and a crack opened in its center. The door swung inward.
The old man’s cackle echoed through the cathedral’s dark, voluminous innards. “Ho-hoo!”
Katherine stepped inside and gasped.
She was washed in blinding light, then the resounding boom of organ music. A hundred airborne lamps flickered to life all floating between dozens of ornate pillars, which held aloft a great domed ceiling swathed with paintings of the saints and their sacred stories from the Sol Firma. The walls were a robber’s trove of countless golden statues and icons gazing out at her from every nook and sepulcher.
Most of the vast interior of the church was occupied by a colossal black ship resting on a crystal bier, like some behemoth display in a museum built for giants. It reminded Katherine of the stories she’d heard as a child of the Twilight Age, when brave men and women still sailed the unfrozen seas all the way to the edges of the world. From a distance, the shining, ebony hull appeared mirror-smooth, but up close it was covered with thousands of tiny pockmarks.
The music thundered its final note, dwindled, and started over from the beginning. The song was a military march played in a major key. She’d heard it before, but couldn’t remember when.
“The Battle Hymn of the New Republic,” Vojciek shouted over the din. “One of my favorite tunes. The title refers to the new New Republic, not the old New Republic, or the old Old Republic, or the Great Old Republic, or the Grand Old Republic, or the Federation, or the Paradigm, or the republic that called itself a republic but was actually a fascist empire. No, no, the one to which this song refers is the one our Beloved Ruler usurped on the Last Day of Sun, before the fall of the True Night…”
“Master.”
“Sorry. I’m rambling again. Piss on it. The point was – and I did have a point – I haven’t heard this tune in decades. I still remember some of the lyrics.”
The old man conducted an invisible choir with one hand as he sang:
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…
“He is knocking down the silos where the grains of wrath are stored…
“Doot doot doot doot doot doot doot doot, I can’t recall the words…
“...His day is marching on.”
The old man’s voice trembled and quieted, leaving only the heart-pounding percussion of the organ, then he said, “Your mother used to hum it to you. That’s why you remember it. It was the only way to get you to fall asleep so she and I could train. But I doubt you’ve heard it since. This piece of music was banned a hundred years before you were born.”
“We should turn it off,” Katherine said.
; Vojciek struck the ground twice with the butt of his spear. The music ceased. The old master gave Katherine a gap-ridden smirk. “Most buildings from the Twilight Age were fully automated. Some call it magic. I call it sound engineering.”
“What’s that?” Katherine said, venturing closer to the altar.
“Well, well. Now that is a pretty thing,” Vojciek said.
He followed her up the marble dais to where a huge statue of a faceless man in white robes levitated with one palm outraised, the universal symbol of the Wanderer.
The statue was four times as tall as a man, all grown from a single vein of solarite crystal. The artist had left the face blank, but had covered the Wanderer’s arms and legs with intricate spirals where they poked from beneath his tunic.
“The Wanderer, memory be upon him,” Katherine whispered. She knelt and touched the tip of her thumb to her forehead, ears, and mouth. Vojciek remained silently on his feet, glowering until she stood.
“Yes, yes. Son of the Spiral, Sower of Seeds, the Gardener of Worlds, the source of as many unutterable curses as revelatory visions. Legend tells that the People of the Sun used to make these statues from solid gold. Solarite would’ve been a more decadent option. Gods always mirror the societies who create them.”
Katherine had no desire to debate the flaws and virtues of organized religion with the old man here.
She climbed the dais and ran her fingers along the fat, smooth nodules of the statue’s toes. They were surprisingly warm. “It’s magnificent.”
Vojciek uncapped his flask and drank. “Suppose so. Suppose not. Boo. I suppose nothing matters less than an old man’s sorrow.”
Katherine turned. “What?”
Her master’s voice fell to a crack. “I may not get another chance to say this, Kat. S-something… I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time.”