Corruption

by Adam Vine

  The Vermin, I realized.

  Their leader stepped forward, carelessly slinging her spear behind her neck and resting both hands on it. She was tall and slender as bones. The face she revealed when she slipped off her mask and blew a long, disappointed sigh at me was a chiseled oblong with cappuccino skin bedecked with scars, a crooked nose, and unfriendly eyes of frozen fire.

  I recognized her voice when she spoke. She was the woman who had led the attack on the riverbank. “Good evening. You’re not supposed to be here, are you? This is a sacred place. And it’s ours. Trespassing is a crime punishable by death in the Burrow… at least, for your kind. But, before we get this done, I’m curious. Somehow, you freaks still look smart enough to talk. Where the hell are you from, anyway?”

  “Neen,” Zaea said.

  I added quickly, “I-I-I’m from California.”

  The woman burst out laughing.

  A woman in a bunny mask said, “See? They can talk! Y’ever hear of a Frosty talking before?” The other Vermin shook their heads. “Cheese Eater, you ever hear of a Frosty talking?”

  The rest of the Vermin removed their masks.

  A short, wiry youth with a pathetic stubble beard creeping over the edge of his bandanna and a rusty short sword in each of his hands, shrugged and kicked snow. “Hell no I ain’t,” the one called Cheese Eater said.

  The girl behind the bunny mask was a skinny ginger with apish arms and a galaxy of freckles covering the bridge of her nose. “They look a lot different than in the picture books,” she said, slipping out of her mask.

  “Come on a few more of these little outings with me, and you won’t be so surprised, Bunny Rabbit. Will she, Vermin?” the leader said.

  “Hell no, sir,” the other Vermin responded in unison. Bunny Rabbit retreated obediently.

  The tall woman raised her arms. “Anything can happen out on the ice, can it not?”

  “Anything and everything, sir!” the Vermin said.

  “Very good.” The leader turned her attention back to Zaea and me. “Now, I don’t know what the hell the Oppressor – excuse me, our Beloved Sovereign - did to you to make you two all smart and shit, but that doesn’t change what you are. And Frosties who cross into the Burrow get their heads and hands put on the Fence, to discourage more of your kind from tryin’ to come here. Maybe that’s fair and maybe it isn’t, but that’s the way it is.”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  I felt the Vermin leader’s spear in my gut before I saw it. I only had time to let out a painful hiccup before I fell to the snow. I thought she’d stabbed me, but she’d only hit me with the butt. It hurt like hell. Cheese Eater kept me down by pointing one of his swords in my face. We’d learned a few disarms in kendo, but his wrist was just barely too far away for me to grab, and he looked like the kind of guy who wouldn’t let me take his sword easily.

  Zaea sobbed. “Please, don’t kill us! We were only…”

  “Shut your goddamned mouth.” The tall woman’s words boomed across the mall. “Now. You can call me Barn Owl. What I say goes around here. So here’s what’s gonna happen. I ain’t gonna kill you yet. You’ll have the chance to explain yourself. My boss is gonna wanna see you, anyway. But don’t get your hopes up. You crossed the Fence, and that means someone is gonna question the shit out of you, torture you, then hang you as an example to your fellow scum-sucking, flesh-eating brethren. And that someone is probably gonna be me.”

  “We didn’t cross any fence,” I said.

  The woman called Barn Owl cast me a raised eyebrow. “Prepare for the opportunity of a lifetime, pusbags. You two are on your way to meet Our Lady of the Revolution, Queen Rat.”

  THE CITY

  I SHIVERED and pulled the blankets closer under my chin. My brain hurt and my mouth was sour with the taste of alcohol. A warm, steadily breathing shape was curled up naked against me. Pounding pressure nagged at my bladder, too painful to ignore, despite that I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and go back to sleep.

  Clumsily, achingly, I rose from my bed, a Cartesian mind separated from my body by a trillion miles of space and time. I made my way to the bathroom where I pissed for a minute straight on the floor, the toilet seat, all. I had to brace myself against the wall so I wouldn’t fall down. A shooting pain spiraled down my shoulder, through my arm, to the tips of my fingers.

  Must’ve fallen asleep on it, I thought. Fell asleep drunk on my own arm. Damage may be permanent. Great. Goddamn Kashka. Goddamn stupid hard mattress.

  I crashed into my kitchen table on the way back to bed. I was too drunk to feel the angled wooden corner of the table leg gash open the skin on my shin, too drunk to feel much of anything.

  Kashka stirred as I slid back under the blankets. I lay on my back, watching the ceiling spin. She tried to cuddle with me, but every time she tried to roll over my arm to put her head on my chest, I pushed her away.

  THE NIGHT COUNTRY

  MY EYES rolled and there was a thousand-ton iron weight in my head, turning my nerves into gouts of fire. I didn’t know who, or where I was. There were voices whispering around me, filtered through milk. A foggy haze of ground moved under me. When I tried to speak, my tongue was in the way. The simple act of opening and closing my mouth took superhuman concentration.

  “Dan,” someone whispered into my ear, so loud it could have been a bullhorn. I knew that voice. It was Zaea’s. “Dan. Are you all right?”

  Painfully, I nodded. The vague, pale shadows in the murk of my vision began to form distinct shapes. There was Zaea, walking next to me amidst the Vermin. Barn Owl was taking point. We were back in the ruined city, walking down a street that looked familiar. But as my vision cleared, I realized most of the ruins looked pretty much identical, and there was no way of knowing if I’d been here before. I also wasn’t walking. Someone was carrying me.

  As soon as that thought occurred to me, Cheese Eater shrugged me off his shoulders and I fell gasping into the snow. He had me in a fireman’s carry, and I couldn’t put my hands or feet down to break my fall. I was lucky he threw me down into a snowbank; otherwise, I would’ve broken something.

  Ow SHIT

  Cheese Eater loomed over me, grinning. “Like the taste of that, do ya? Don’t fuck with me, mate, or I’ll smash you again. And this time, it won’t be with the blunt end of my blade. That’s a promise.”

  I wriggled and tried to stand up, but it was no use. My hands and feet were tied. “Why… why?” I asked no one in particular.

  Barn Owl’s disembodied voice drifted back to me from up the street. “You looked like you were going to try something stupid, so we took precautions. By the book, Cannibal Man. Get back on your feet and keep moving.”

  “Cannibal Man,” someone else said, chuckling.

  Another responded, “He’s no man.”

  The girl called Bunny Rabbit said, “He might sound like us, but Boss is right. He’s one o’ them! They both are. Look at that axe head he’s got. And her coat! They’ll try to eat us, first chance they get! We ought to roast their guts!”

  “You don’t roast guts, Bunny,” the first Vermin said, taking on a tutorial tone. “You throw the guts out, and roast everything else.”

  Bunny scratched her head. “You do? I always thought they kept the intestines as a sort o’ storage unit to dry meat in. How else would you make sausage?”

  “She’s got you there, Squirrel,” another Vermin said.

  Squirrel sounded horrified. “Sausage is made o’ intestines? Oh, sweet Wanderer’s wisdom. Vole, tell me she’s havin’ a laugh at me. I’m like to get sick if that’s true.”

  Vole cleared his throat. “Actually, she’s right. What did you think sausage was made of? You grind up the leftover meat after you separate the scraps from the good cuts, and then stuff ‘em inside an intestine and smoke the whole thing. Goat. Pig. Sometimes cat or snake. Any intestine will do. But naturally, different animals are going to produce sausage of different sizes and flavors. My personal favori
te is frost elk. But, those are hard to get. That’s why we only eat it once a year, on Saintsfall.”

  “I’m going vegetarian,” Squirrel muttered.

  Zaea’s clouded shape knelt down beside me. Cold fingers brushed the hair from my forehead. When Zaea’s hand retracted, her fingertips were sticky with blood. “Dan, you have to get up,” Zaea whispered. “Hurry. They’ll kill us.”

  “It’s not us you have to worry about, Dearest. At least, not out here,” Barn Owl said, somewhere along the snowy road. Her voice carried like she was standing directly beside us.

  Zaea helped me to my feet. It took me a moment to realize that her hands were free. “Wait. You tied me up, but not her? That’s not very fair,” I said.

  Barn Owl chuckled. “She’s smart enough not to fight us.”

  Zaea held onto my arm as we marched. I got weak a few times, and Zaea helped steady me so I wouldn’t fall. I was so tired it was hard to keep my eyes open. Every time I closed them, the nagging, horrible pain in my skull, and a soft squeeze from Zaea made me open them again. Someone had wrapped me in a fur jacket while I was unconscious, which I guessed was a spare they kept for prisoners. It didn’t do much to keep the cold away.

  It wasn’t until we’d been walking for at least an hour that I noticed the day wasn’t getting any brighter. The sky was still the gloomy, charcoal gray of early dawn. There was barely enough light to navigate by as we threaded ruined street after ruined street, the buildings hollow shadows standing ten stories tall to either side, windows like empty, backlit eyes, the walls black murals of devastation.

  We mounted the ridge of a small hill topped with a crenelated line of one-walled ruins. Woven through them was a shoddy fence made of sharpened spear butts, salvaged wood planks, and broken swords thrust deep into the snow, each bearing the severed head or hand of a Snowman.

  The Fence, as Barn Owl called it, was a fence in name only, nothing but a series of disconnected markers running for perhaps four or five city blocks from what I could see in that dim, pre-morning light. The markers stood about twenty feet apart, with nothing to connect them. The heads had all been skewered through the neck and eye, the hands through the wrist and thumb webbing. All of the remains were frozen and crusted with frost, some beyond the point of recognition.

  I caught a glimpse of the inside of one of the Snowmen’s eyes. The sharpened pole it was impaled on had broken the stitches holding the eye shut, and the heavy, scar-covered lid had frozen open, revealing a deep, black hole inside. The Snowmen didn’t simply sew their eyes shut. They cut them out entirely.

  Zaea gasped, squeezing my arm hard. I swallowed back a bubble of vomit.

  Beyond the Fence, the ground rapidly fell away to the white, sloping walls of a familiar valley, pock-marked by the open wounds of exposed subway tunnels and piles of stone that had once been houses.

  The same giant, black disc I’d seen the night before hung in the sky above us. Its sheer size was finally apparent in the wan light of daybreak. The disc consisted of three parts. The disc itself was a huge obsidian plate, hanging a mile or two above the ground. Above the plate was a riddle of amber spires that I hadn’t been able to see before, a gleaming skyline of smooth, radiant towers all redder than gold that stood tall enough to threaten the heavens.

  There’s a city up there, miles above us. An amber city floating above the clouds.

  For an instant, the clouds had parted to reveal that shining metropolis, and the sight was so incredible I gave an involuntary sigh. It was more beautiful than anything I could’ve imagined.

  “Ooh, pretty,” Zaea said.

  And I, “Impossible.”

  The clouds agreed, billowing to conceal their secret paradise once more. The cloud cover left most of the plate itself visible, though. I finally got a good look at what was hanging under it, a colossal, broken cone of tangled stone and twisted metal, held airborne by the plate’s gravity.

  In the grim, gray light, the cone appeared like the corrupted mirror image of the city it supported. Gnarled towers hung from tangled, upside-down battlements. Inverted buildings grew from inverted streets, lampposts dangling like desecrated baubles. Its lowest point nearly scraped the valley floor. No lights glimmered within that nightmare wreckage, only shadows casting deeper shadows.

  “That is the Echelon,” Barn Owl said, pointing at the plate. She had manifested beside me at some point while I was enjoying the view. The tall woman lowered her scarf and took off her hood, scrunching and wrinkling her nose and lips as she freed them from the furs. Her head was bald and covered with scars.

  “Five minutes,” she told the other Vermin. The Vermin obeyed, taking off their hoods and scarves, too. A few bent over to stretch. The others found somewhere to sit and check their weapons.

  I counted three men and three women, including Barn Owl. The other two women were Bunny Rabbit, the thin, freckled girl with ginger hair and jade green eyes, and a silent, stocky woman with cutting brown eyes whose scalp was stricken by pattern baldness. The others called her Mongoose. The men were Cheese Eater, Squirrel, and Vole. Squirrel and Vole were complete physical opposites. Vole was freakishly tall, lean and hard, his neck full of veins and muscle, with black skin shot through with old scars. Squirrel was short, squat and had babyish cheeks and a diminutive button nose. His skin was deep olive, like a person from the Mediterranean’s would’ve been, although I suspected there was no such thing as the Mediterranean on this world.

  All of them were bald or their hair shorn so short it made no difference.

  I didn’t look at Cheese Eater’s face for very long. His eyes were different colors, and one of his front teeth was missing. Every time I glanced his direction, he was staring at me.

  “It’s so much clearer in daylight.” I said, gesturing toward the Echelon. “I couldn’t see that there was a city up there the first time I saw it.” I didn’t want to get the shit kicked out of me again for saying something stupid.

  Barn Owl narrowed her eyes. “Daylight? You think this is daylight?”

  “It’s not?” I said.

  I thought Barn Owl would hit me, but she didn’t. She only cracked her knuckles and said, “It is a false day, a passing lie, nothing more. They happen every once in a while. Sometimes they last minutes, sometimes weeks. But they always end.”

  “You’re telling me the sun isn’t going to come up soon and become morning?” I said.

  Barn Owl glared at me with one eye cocked. No, she thinks I’m testing her. “Don’t take that incredulous tone with me, Cannibal Man. There is no way of knowing when, or for how long, the false day will last. The brightness can be a rough indicator once it has already arrived, but it isn’t exact. This one is dim. It will be dark again in an hour.”

  “Look, I think you’ve got me mistaken for someone else,” I started. “Zaea, too. I’m not a cannibal. Never had the desire to eat human meat, or even the chance. I’m not one of those things. I’m not from here. Neither is she. So I really don’t know what the hell any of what you just said means.”

  “Did you fall and smack yourself on the head? Where do you think you are?” Barn Owl said.

  “His head looks fine to me. Maybe the Frosties threw him out because he was too stupid,” Cheese Eater rasped.

  Barn Owl gave a dry laugh. “No, he's not stupid. He's terrified, because he's lost. You lied to me boy. California, huh? Where the fuck is California? Tell me where you’re really from. Which tribe? Or maybe you’re both spies for the Amber City, and I should cut you open right now and steam you on the ice before you get the chance to run back to your master. You have seen our faces, after all,” Barn Owl said.

  “They have indeed,” Cheese Eater said.

  “We already told you where we’re from,” Zaea said.

  Barn Owl shot her a look. “Shut your mouth.”

  “Right, he’s from California,” Squirrel hooted.

  “And she’s from the Monksblood Moons,” Vole howled.

  They all shut up instan
tly when Mongoose said, low and clearly, “He’s lying. She’s telling the truth.” It was the first time I’d heard her speak.

  Barn Owl seemed satisfied by that. More to Zaea than to me, she swept her hand across the horizon and explained, “This is the Surface. This side of the river is the remains of our capital. Down below us, in the tunnels, we call the Burrow. That black shadow in the sky is the Echelon, and that utopian metropolis you saw oh-so-gloriously shining atop of it is the home of our enemies, the Amber City. I don't recommend trying to go there, or anywhere up here on the Surface unless you fancy being burned alive by a company of Shells, or eaten while you're still conscious by a pack of your fellow Snowmen, or captured by the Amber Guard and taken up there to be turned into a doll for our Beloved Sovereign.”

  The tall woman smiled at me. “When True Night returns, and it will return, you best pray we're already underground.”

  “What is True Night?” Zaea said.

  Barn Owl spoke slowly and softly. “True Night is this. The world we live in. Or, I should say usually live in until the random passing of a false day. It is the curse of our time, the Darkness Eternal. The Age without Sun.”

  “Where did the sun go? Has it gone missing?” I said.

  “It was stolen,” Barn Owl said.

  “By who?” Zaea and I both said at the same time.

  Barn Owl gave the slightest nod in the direction of the Echelon. “By him.”

  “Someone up there?” I said.

  “Aye,” Barn Owl said, “He who sits high where the light still shines in his Palace of Dolls. You must not say his name aloud, or death shall be upon you. You must never refer to him by anything but his title, or his Lice will come running.”

  Zaea and I exchanged a look. I thought she would be the one to ask, but when she didn’t, I said, “So who is he?

  Three words fell from Barn Owl’s lips, barely more than a whisper. “The Crippled King.”

  None of us spoke, each lost in our own thoughts and the gnawing sting of the wind, until Barn Owl shrugged, spat, and started hiking down the ridge. “All right, Vermin. Get your hands out of your pants and your feet moving. Let’s take advantage of this false daylight while it lasts.”