Corruption

by Adam Vine

  “The target location lies within a sector of the Old City all of us are familiar with, but few have actually been to. Yes, you know which one. Back when this fine city was sundrenched and carefree, it was called Heroes’ Park. We know it as the Icefall Maze: thirty square kilometers of treacherous glacier flowing off the foothills of Mount Gezel, where there are no ruins to use as landmarks, only sinkholes, crevasses, and freestanding pillars of ice big enough to crush a building, that can fall out from under you – or on top of you – at any minute.

  “We’ll enter the Maze through the tunnels to the northwest. Then we take the Plaszov Route south under the river. After that, we cross most of the way underground, but as most of you already know, these tunnels have opened up in places due to the movement of the ice, and those canyons are deep. We’ll have to do some climbing. Anyone here not know how to climb?”

  No one raised a hand.

  “Good. I was hoping we wouldn’t have a worst-case scenario. The facility itself is nestled up under the cliffs past the icefall, so once we make the Surface, we’ll have to climb from there, as well. You all got ropes?”

  A unanimous “No, sir,” echoed through the tunnels.

  “Just yanking your chains. I know you ain’t got ropes,” Barn Owl said. “Speed is the name of this game, and I don’t want anyone getting exhausted from carrying a bunch of heavy-ass shit before we even get a chance to fight. That’s why I sent our favorite Uncle Termite out ahead of us two torches ago to set the ropes and ladders. He’s also laid a few stashes of ice axes and boot blades in case we need them.

  “The facility is protected on two sides: to the north side by Lake Bagra, and to the south by the mountain itself. The east and west sides both have rail access, but we won’t be going that way. We’re going across the lake. Intel confirms the ice is thick enough. You all better pray that report was accurate.

  “Once we get to the facility, we follow the usual protocol for a search and rescue. We hit the place hard and fast, entering and exiting through the back gate on the northwest side of the fence. We need to be out of there with the prisoners before anyone knows we’re there. Kill anyone, human or otherwise, who might raise an alarm or compromise the mission – that is an order.

  “Now, does anyone have any questions?”

  Each of the Vermin looked around the room, making eye contact with the others. We all shook our heads no.

  “I have one,” Barn Owl said. “Where’s Zaea?”

  I hadn’t noticed Zaea leave. The main door was still shut, and hadn’t opened or closed while Barn Owl was speaking. There was only one place she could’ve gone.

  A scream echoed from the catacombs’ depths.

  OSSUARY OF THE VOICES

  I SPRINTED into that hungry darkness, diving through an arterial expanse of shadow and bone toward the sound of Zaea’s cries. Somewhere else, Barn Owl shouted, “Goddammit, people! Move!”

  The Vermin’s footfalls fell in behind me. The light of someone’s torch let me see far enough ahead to avoid crashing into the blankets of cobwebs and the sudden piles of ancient bones sprouting up from the ground like stalagmites.

  “The Little Princess… (huff)... found the ghost… (puff)...” Gator said.

  “Already? That was fast,” Bunny Rabbit replied.

  “Think she’ll be dead by the time we get there?” Cheese Eater said.

  “Donno... (puff)... Maybe. But maybe... not… (puff puff)... The waif is tougher… than she looks… (wheeze)...”

  Another scream pierced the ruddy shadows, followed by a guttural groan of extreme agony. Light appeared at the end of the tunnel.

  Zaea was standing with her back to the tunnel mouth, clutching her head like she was trying to self-exorcise a demon lodged deep in her brain. I dashed for her, entering a small Y-intersection where three tunnels conjoined. The domed chamber was lit by a smattering of torches. The walls were built from human bone.

  Zaea was doubled over afore what appeared to be a waist-high marble birdbath fixed on a dais in the center of the room. The water in the pool was dirty and old, a verdant mirror bedecked with floating islands of sludge. Zaea must have heard me enter, because, without turning around, she held a soaking wet hand up to signal me not to come any closer.

  I slid to a halt, almost eating a mouthful of dusty flagstone. Zaea didn’t say anything. Her breathing was labored and excruciatingly slow. “Zaea?” I said.

  A shriek exploded from Zaea’s lips. She thrust the hand that had warned me away back into the scummy water.

  I lunged for her, but Zaea growled, “Stay… back.” I stopped dead in my tracks.

  The Vermin flooded into the chamber and surrounded me. “I’ve almost… got it…” she said, grasping her own submerged wrist. Her voice was wrong.

  Bunny Rabbit rushed to help her, but Barn Owl held her back. “Wait,” Barn Owl said.

  “Wait? Sir? It’s going to kill her!” Bunny said.

  “I said wait. Let’s see how it reacts,” Barn Owl said.

  The Vermin and I watched in silence as Zaea rose and removed her trembling hand from the pool and closed a fist. Violent tremors jerked through her entire body, her left arm flailing like a thing possessed. She held it with her free hand until the demonic spasms subsided. When she turned to face us, her cheeks were drained and pale as frost, her eyes two bloodshot orbs.

  She gasped and gave us all a bedraggled smile. “That hurt,” Zaea said.

  Barn Owl was the first to break the thick, electrified silence. She started clapping. “Who is this bitch?”

  The other Vermin erupted in a chorus of applause.

  “Woo-hoo! I cannot believe you did that!” Bunny Rabbit said.

  “Bravo,” Mongoose said.

  Squirrel poked Vole in the side. “What a day this is, eh? Someone drew the bloody ghost! Bet you didn’t think you’d live to see that again, did you, Vole?”

  “Twice in one lifetime… makes me feel old,” Vole said, sadly.

  “Seems we might’ve been wrong about our new guest. This one, anyway,” Cheese Eater said, pointing his thumb at Zaea.

  “Speak for yourself, Cheese. I knew there was something special about her from the moment I laid eyes on her,” Barn Owl said.

  “Now wait just a damned minute, sir. Don’t stand here and try to pretend that one minute ago, you didn’t think she was going to fry, like the rest of us did. How old was Katherine when she drew it? Four, five years old? How many others have died in the attempt?”

  “That’ll be all, Cheese. Zaea, are you all right?” Barn Owl said.

  Zaea gave a weak nod and steadied herself on the edge of the marble pool.

  “Do you know what it is you just pulled out of that nasty-ass puddle?”

  “I think so,” Zaea said, massaging the meat of her left thumb. “But… these voices… (gasp) these… (ow!)… It’s hard to think… hard to…”

  “You were just chosen by one of the last weapons from the Twilight Age,” Barn Owl said. “I say chosen by, because you can’t decide to wield the ghost any more than I can decide to shoot fire out of my ass. The ghost picks you. Anyone who tries to draw it that the ghost doesn’t like gets cooked alive from the inside out. We’ve lost more than a few new recruits that way. Yes, I admit I am surprised, and that when I realized you’d stumbled in here, I thought you were dead. It’s safe to say we all did. But I am not above admitting when I’m wrong.

  “And I was wrong about you, Zaea. If the ghost chose you, it means that it sees something great in you. It is an immaterial blade that functions by splitting the fabric of existence itself. The length and obedience of the weapon is determined by the will power of the one wielding it.

  “Like Cheese said, the last person it chose was a child. That was more than a decade ago. She grew up to be one of our finest warriors.” A note of sadness dimmed the excitement from Barn Owl’s words. Tears gathered under the slate orbs of her eyes. “She died for us. Went missing in action during an incredibly important miss
ion. Her name was Katherine, alias Meerkat. She was very brave.”

  “I’m… (ah!)… I’m s-sorry for your loss,” Zaea said.

  “We didn’t just lose one of our best scouts. We also lost our only other ghost. Now that weapon has fallen into the hands of the Crippled King. The one in your hand is the last one that exists in the Burrow.”

  Zaea’s lips tightened into a solemn line. “I will… (ow!)… do my best… (ssss) not to lose… this one.”

  Barn Owl approached the marble pool and took Zaea’s hand in her own, gently rubbing her palm with three fingers. “The old man taught me how to do this. Katherine would get these pains, too. Grandfather Mouse used to tell Meerkat that it was the weapon’s way of warning you of danger. Right now, I think it’s just adapting to your body.”

  “Adapting?…(ssss… ow!)”

  “Yes. You need time to get used to each other,” Barn Owl said, letting Zaea’s hand go. Whatever she’d done seemed to work, because Zaea shook her hand out and stared at it, raising her eyebrows in surprise. Barn Owl didn’t let her get a word in. “Unfortunately, time is a luxury that we don’t have. Nor is there anyone here who can train you how to use that thing. We’ll have to go to Salt Town for that… after the mission.”

  “What? Are you… (ow!)... saying I’m not coming?”

  “I’m sorry, Zaea. I can’t risk it. That is the most powerful weapon we have. I can’t risk one of our people being harmed by putting you in the field with it before you’re ready. I also can’t risk letting it fall into the enemy’s hands. You’re sitting this one out, okay?”

  The princess’s brow furrowed. She extended her hand, aiming toward the Vermin gathered by the door of the ossuary. They scattered with a cloud of yelps and frightened protests. The air around Zaea’s hand shivered, and a slender, nearly imperceptible black line shot out of her palm. That hypnotic, penumbral blade split the world in two. There was a hiss of extinguishing glowmoss and a clatter of severed iron as Zaea cut the lantern off the wall like a wick. The Vermin glared at the perfectly bisected lamp lying piecemeal on the floor, glared at Zaea, then back at the smoldering ruins of the lamp.

  Zaea sheathed the ghost and bowed to Barn Owl. “With all due respect, sir, I’d rather not sit this one out.”

  Someone clapped.

  “Beginner’s luck,” Cheese Eater spat.

  Barn Owl stepped toe-to-toe with Zaea, towering over the smaller, fairer-haired woman, and put a goliath finger on her chest. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but if any of my Vermin get hurt up there because of somethin’ you do, I promise you, it’ll be your ass that gets snuffed out. We clear?”

  “Yes sir,” Zaea said.

  Barn Owl turned to address the rest of the group. “Order rescinded. The princess is back on. All right, Vermin. We ain’t got time for any more of this legendary bullshit. Who are we?”

  “The Vermin, sir!”

  “And what do Vermin do?”

  “Survive and kill our enemies, sir!”

  “And who are our enemies?”

  “The Amber City, sir!”

  “Why are they our enemies?”

  “They murdered our kin! Put us in chains! Would hunt us to extermination, like they did all humankind!”

  Barn Owl clicked her heels and threw us a hard salute. “Very good. Let’s haul ass, folks. Break your boots. We’ve got shit to do.”

  We ran in a snaking column through the narrow, shadow-bitten tunnels, falling in two-by-two behind Barn Owl and Cheese Eater. I ran next to Zaea, in the second to last row. We chanted and hooted as we passed through the Last Station, mostly to psyche ourselves up, but also to let everyone else know that we were coming so they’d get the hell out of our way.

  We passed the barrier of junked subway cars into the unpopulated part of the Burrow called the Undersprawl. The group spread out a little, adjusting to the slower, jogging pace set by our leaders. Safely out of their earshot, I said to Zaea, “So, how did you do all that? Did you already know how to use one of those things? I mean… how, or why did you even find the ghost in the first place?”

  I couldn’t see Zaea’s matter-of-fact expression in the scarce light of the tunnels, but the tone of her voice was clear as day.

  “Because it told me to,” Zaea said.

  THE BURROW

  “ONE THING I couldn’t help wondering back there, when I was seeing all those weapons, is why there weren’t any firearms. The civilization that was here before was pretty advanced, right? It had to be if it built something like the Echelon. Not only that, but you say it has its own sun. The only thing I can think of that could act like the sun, but on a much smaller scale, is a stable fusion reaction, or a really big lamp – and I mean really big, like, the size of the city itself. That’s all extremely advanced technology, more advanced than what we have on the world I’m from, and we have guns. So… why no guns?” I said.

  We were taking a rest break near a five-point intersection of dank, dilapidated tunnels, one of which led to the Icefall Maze.

  Barn Owl glanced up from where she was reading a set of hidden directions in her navigation mirror. “I don’t know what the hell any of that means. But here’s the thing, Leech. Wherever you’re from, I’m sure it’s probably a pretty nice place. Things work. Society functions. When society stops functioning, all of that precious knowledge you have in your universities and libraries burns. The only place it stays is in people’s heads, and people’s heads aren’t exactly reliable media for storing information.”

  “So you’re saying you used to have guns, but you lost them?” I said.

  “At least an entire level of scientific understanding is lost completely during a cataclysm event simply due to media destruction and people dying,” Barn Owl said. “Another will be lost as soon as the first generation of survivors passes. So we lost pretty much everything except the things necessary for us to survive: tunnel architecture, sustainable hydroponic farming, mining, medicine, methods to survive long-term exposure to the cold,” Barn Owl said.

  “I guess that explains why there aren’t many advanced weapons lying around. But what about personal weapons? Family heirlooms, that sort of thing? Surely those didn’t all just up and vanish,” I said.

  Barn Owl must’ve thought I was being pedantic. She gave me a dismissive wave. “Legend has it that the civilian population willingly disarmed and destroyed their guns long before the Crippled King took power and the world grew dark. Not that it would’ve mattered much if they hadn’t. Regular weapons can’t penetrate the Lice’s armor, and by extension, the armor worn by the Amber Guard. Only Wyvernwood can… or a grenade housed in Wyvernwood that shoots Wyvernwood shrapnel. And before you say it, no, there ain't anywhere near enough Wyvernwood lying around for us to make bullets.”

  The tall woman snapped her mirror shut and pointed into the tunnel to her right. “It’s that way. Tails up, folks.”

  We formed ranks and followed Barn Owl into the passage. I thought she was going to let the subject rest there, but she didn’t.

  “Look, Leech. I understand I don’t know is never a highly satisfying answer. Believe me, we’d love to get our hands on whatever forms of weaponry the Amber City is using and reverse engineer it. The stories tell us that the kinds of weapons that once covered the world with hatred, violence, and mass death before the coming of the Wanderer were more advanced than you or I could possibly imagine. No doubt many of them fired some kind of high speed projectile. And you can bet your ass plenty of those are still being used to keep the peace up in the Amber City. We’d kill to get our hands on a cache of those, let our own weapons scientists have at ‘em, but we can’t exactly just knock on their doors and ask. You see what I mean?” Barn Owl said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  A grim silence fell over the group at the end of the next tunnel as we exited into a large, man-made cavern held aloft by dozens of fat, round pillars each the size of a building. Burned mud and brick houses lined the cobwebbed avenues, an empty v
illage sitting silent in the gloom, complete with market stalls crowding the central common, an open-air church where the Wanderer’s image was carved into the otherwise smooth face of one of the pillars, pens and lean-tos for the animals now holding nothing but ash, a vegetable garden watched over by the charred gargoyles of dim glowmoss lamps where miniature black blizzards of flies swarmed.

  An ancient waterline marked the pillars evenly at waist-height. This place had been a cistern once. The wind at my back told me that whoever had built the tunnels connecting this place to the rest of the Burrow had built them so that the air flowed continuously through, creating a natural ventilation system. I remembered watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel about how ant colonies were engineered the same way.

  We all stopped and shared a moment of silence. The looks on the Vermin’s faces told me everything I needed to know. The people who had lived here had been their friends and families. For all I knew, some of the men and women I was marching with could have even grown up here.

  Barn Owl knelt and picked something up out of the mud. It was a child’s doll fashioned in the shape of rat with a crown on its head. A tear formed in the corner of her eye, but she blinked it back, wiped the doll clean on the front of her furs, and shoved it into her satchel.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Nobody spoke again until we were a long way away, when Zaea cleared her throat and asked no one in particular, “Who were they?”

  Barn Owl replied without taking her eyes from the tunnel ahead. “They were us.”

  That was the last anyone said on the subject of the burned village.

  The walls of the tunnels started showing greater signs of stress and disrepair. Most sections of the Undersprawl were still pristine. Even the oldest passages were stable and well maintained. But here, piles of broken bricks lay in discarded heaps where they’d been spat from the withering walls, every few steps revealing newer and larger chunks of bare, frozen earth. Some wept and dusted us with cold soil as the world above trembled and shivered. At one point the tunnel had collapsed entirely, and we had to clear the bricks and hard, stony soil by hand.