by Ronan Frost
Rye couldn’t tell if he was joking, though the landscape promised to transform a bit sooner into something approaching days of punishing trek if they were forced to abandon the vehicles.
Off far, far in the distance, a white horizon foreshadowed the glacial peaks of their ultimate destination. They were still a full day’s drive and more from their intended base camp.
FIFTY-ONE
The temple was half a mile off the road.
The short trek was a taste of what the hostile environment had to offer them. With the thin air, it was more debilitating than it would have been under ordinary circumstances. The small temple was the only building for miles around, sheltered in a cleft in the valley several hundred feet down the mountainside from the road.
As they approached, Rye couldn’t see what was supposed to be so remarkable about it. It looked like nothing more than a small round chapel set in miles of grassy tundra. It wasn’t until they were much closer that he began noticing some of the more macabre details of the façade, including curious little gargoyles and more demonic faces that seemed to peer out through the stonework.
The way the sun reflected against the walls emphasized the dark hollows of their empty eyes.
“I guess this is what Byrne meant by saying we needed to see it,” Rye said, as the thief tried a heavy iron-banded door that hadn’t been opened in half a century.
“Not even close,” Carter Vickers said as he went inside.
Rye followed him in, needing to duck slightly to negotiate the low lintel. Inside was dark, but the dusty light filtering in through the three windows along the side wall revealed a vault that appeared to have been fashioned from bones. Rye moved deeper inside. Not just bones, he realized. Children’s bones. They were so small, nowhere close to fully formed. There were femurs and tibias, jaws and skulls, and so much more. The ceiling was a latticework of discolored femurs that formed an oppressive ivory crisscross vault overhead, while the walls were row upon row of tiny skulls piled one on top of another. None of the skulls were broader than the span of his outstretched fingers. Children. Several were missing jawbones. The fontanel of others had been caved in, bearing the wounds of whatever had killed them.
The altar had been constructed from rib cages, the brittle bones interlaced to create a stronger support, with more of those skulls, many misshapen, Rye saw, used as ornamentation.
But what stopped him dead in his tracks was the insignia, which he described for the benefit of the Byrne, who was back listening in his ear. “Irminsul,” the other man said. “Irmin was an aspect of Wodan. Odin to us. In Old Norse it means Jörmunr, and linguistically, Jacob Grimm believed that Irminsul meant The World Tree, or The Great Pillar of Odin. It was the emblem of the Ahnenerbe.”
It was only then that Rye noticed more Norse runes had been incorporated into the construction of the place, including the life rune, another sigil with strong links back to the Germans’ obsession with the occult.
“It’s an Aryan temple,” Rye said.
“It’s ghoulish is what it is,” Carter contradicted him.
“It’s a reminder that we are walking in the footsteps of men and monsters,” Vic said from the doorway. And that was hard to deny. “There is no distinction between the two to be made.”
“These were people obsessed with the idea that this stuff, the Ark of the Covenant, the Spear of Destiny, the Holy Grail—they believed they were literal treasures that could be found, their powers harnessed,” Byrne said in their ears. “Remember, the Ahnenerbe believed that Aryans were a creation of the Black Sun—this superior race was descended from aliens. They were searching for the divine, and in this case, the divine, more often than not, originated in a galaxy far, far away. They came here looking for their Aryan forefathers, in hidden cities like Shambhala and Agartha, as well as for the fossilized remains of giants to prove the World Ice Theory. Is it any wonder they build a temple in their honor?”
“From dead children,” the thief said.
“It just gets more and more batshit,” Rye said, shaking his head as he crouched down beside a peculiar construction of bones that had caught his eye. There appeared to be several rather crude triangles carved into four of the bones; a triangle divided into two horizontally, the point facing up, another identical divided triangle inverted so that the narrow tip pointed down into the ground, and two simple equilateral triangles, again one tip pointing to the ceiling, the other the ground. There was a fifth bone with what looked like a crude wheel with eight spokes.
“The elements,” Vic said, seeing what he was looking at. “Earth, air, fire, and water. The wheel represents the spirit. They come together in the traditional pentagram. Together they are the essence of all things, including the physical body.”
Around the small chamber they found several other similarly carved bones, some bearing runes, but if there was any doubting the identity of the temple’s builders it was dispelled by a single splash of light illuminating the black sun hidden within the floor tiles, the black sphere radiating jagged streaks of black lightning.
“This place is seriously creepy,” the thief said, holding up a baby’s skull. It was vaguely deformed, suggesting the plates of bone had been damaged during a forceps birth and had never managed to settle back into place. It looked almost alien in nature. He put the skull down. Iskra hadn’t said anything since she set foot in the place. The quiet Russian had found something.
“Did you know about this?” she said finally. She wasn’t talking to any of them. She had her finger to her ear and was talking to Byrne, who answered, “I told you, you needed to see it for yourself.”
“See what?” the thief asked, then saw what the Russian had found. “That can’t be real.”
Trapped within the middle of the wall, half hidden in shadow, was a complete skeleton that stood a full three feet taller than Rye, with huge elongated phalanxes and phalanges, massively oversized fibulas and tibias that were twice the length of an average man’s, a spinal column that seemed to contain a dozen more vertebrae than was human, and curved exaggeratedly at the top as it supported a massively distended mandible on its axis. The head was like nothing Rye had ever seen outside of a cinema. It was more reptilian than human, a bulbous dome with slanted eye sockets and an enormous cavity in the center that was lined with fine filaments of crab-like bones where there should have been teeth.
“They called it Vril,” Byrne said, giving the thing a name. “They believed it was proof of alien life and the link between their ideals and the so-called Übermensch, the Aryan superman. The Shrine of the Black Sun, which is what you are standing in, was constructed to hold the bones discovered by Edmund Kiss on his first expedition into the region. Kiss claimed that even in death the bones of Vril contained an essential energy we lack the ability to harness, so call it magic in our ignorance. Blavatsky had another name for the thing. Writing almost half a century before Kiss found proof of its existence, she named it Asuras.”
Rye said, “This thing is Rask’s demon?”
FIFTY-TWO
They didn’t mention the Vril as they returned to the vehicles.
It was too much to think about—certainly too much to give credence to. But all Rye could think was that they had just witnessed a colossal fraud. The bones couldn’t possibly be real. There was no such beast, demon, or whatever the fuck that thing had been. There couldn’t be. There was no place for that in any sort of evolutionary history of the world. The Nazis had built that thing to perpetuate some grand hoax. That was the only thing that made any sort of sense to him. Though why do it so far from civilization? And why, eighty years on, hadn’t any of the locals torn the place down? There were signs very much to the contrary that suggested some made pilgrimages to the strange little bone shrine, offering their devotions to the eerie skeleton.
For the next couple of hours they were the only two vehicles on the road.
Until they weren’t.
Carter had pulled over to the side of the road and
was busy siphoning gas into the tank from one of the two canisters, when Rye marked the three black, ant-like smears against the green of the mountainside. He watched them for a full minute and more, shielding his eyes from the sun. It was hard to be sure. They were a long way back.
“Do you see them?” he asked Carter as he finished and wiped the mouth of the canister with a rag. The thief joined him at the hood and followed the direction of his finger as he pointed the tiny staccato smears off in the distance.
“Not sure,” he said. “What am I looking for?”
“Three cars. At least I think that’s what they are.”
It took him a moment, and in that time the front car navigated a switchback, the sunlight reflecting off its windshield, confirming what they were looking at. “I see them. It doesn’t mean they’re following us.”
“Three cars, close together, driving faster than we dared. It doesn’t mean they aren’t following us, either.”
He reached into the cab for his earbud, hoping he’d be able to raise Vic on the comm-link. He slipped it into his ear and pressed down on it to wake the little device from sleep, only to be greeted by a harsh burst of static. “Shit,” he said. Carter didn’t have to ask what was wrong.
“Come on, we’ve got to catch up with the others. We’re not letting them pick us off one by one.”
“Assuming they are following us.”
“You know they are as well as I do,” he said. And he was right. Rye knew they were. He watched them a little while longer, wishing he’d thought to add binoculars to their kit. In terms of weapons, ice axes against Uzis didn’t feel like much in the way of a fair fight.
They drove faster than was safe on the narrow road.
Rye didn’t look out of the side window. He didn’t want to know how close they were to the edge. The engine whined frequently as Carter burned through the gas, closing the distance between them and the SUV. It took them ten minutes of reckless driving and one eyes-closed moment as the thief negotiated another girder bridge, before they saw the black SUV on the road up ahead of them.
Carter flashed his lights, but the afternoon sun killed any chance of Vic seeing them from that distance. He was reluctant to hit the horn because he had no idea how the sound would travel and the last thing he wanted to do was let on that they knew they were being followed. It was their only slight advantage in the grand scheme of things, so he wasn’t about to waste it. Instead, he pushed his foot flat to the floor, gassing the engine again, and changed up through the gears. The old truck rattled as though it was struggling to hold itself together.
They could hear the groans of the wooden sidings inside the cab as well as the tormented shrieks of the chassis as the suspension struggled to cope with the rutted road.
Carter flashed the lights again as the distance closed between them.
This time Vic answered with a flash of his own, or rather three sharp flares of the brake lights as he slowed. There wasn’t room for the two cars to pull up side by side, so Vic slowed to a halt in the middle of the road and clambered out.
Carter pulled up behind him.
Rye was out of the cab before the truck had stopped moving. “We’ve got company,” he called, all thoughts of alien bones forgotten as he pointed back over his shoulder. He walked toward Vic. “Three cars. Coming fast.”
“How far back?” the big man asked.
“Maybe fifteen miles behind us, it’s hard to tell.” It sounded like a long way, but in reality that meant they were no more than twenty minutes behind them, and if he was wrong it could be a lot less than that.
Vic rubbed at his scalp, thinking.
The chase had taken them around the curve of another peak, meaning there was no way for Vic to confirm his guess. “Three cars?”
Rye nodded. “Four people per car, that’s a likelihood of twelve guns being pointed at us in the next fifteen minutes or so.” Vic turned his attention to the road ahead. Rye realized he was looking for a choke point, somewhere they could turn the savage terrain to their advantage. Four against twelve wasn’t great odds, but they were hardly insurmountable if they turned the mountain to their advantage.
He tried to look at the mountainside the same way, but he wasn’t a strategist and had no experience of combat in any way, shape, or form, not even on the PlayStation.
It was hard to see anywhere that wasn’t horribly exposed, and impossible to see anywhere they might hide the two vehicles.
He wished he knew what Vic was seeing.
“There,” Vic said, pointing.
Rye wasn’t sure what marked that particular spot out from the rest of the road, or why it was preferable for what could well be their last stand, but he nodded like he could read his mind. Vic seemed to be pointing at yet another stretch of road where the rock was being reinforced by a timber wall. “We have ropes and hooks in the truck?”
Rye nodded again.
“Then let’s go and bring down a mountain on their heads.”
FIFTY-THREE
They retrieved a fifty-foot-long coil of high-tensile rope, a metal carabiner to lock it off, and two of the ice axes.
The makeshift retaining wall was constructed of tree trunks, most of them so large Rye wouldn’t have been able to interlace his fingers if he tried to wrap his arms around them. They towered over him, easily twice as tall again as he was.
He didn’t want to imagine the wall coming down on top of them before they got out of there.
The trunks were bound in place by a chain-link wire fence that worked like a safety net, pinning them against the loose rocks behind them.
Ideally, they would have used wire cutters to clip through the fence but, forced to improvise, Vic hacked away at several of the links with the ice ax while Rye and the thief worked the climbing rope behind the thick bole of a tree trunk. It wasn’t easy, but by dint of the natural materials they were working with they found a part of the wooden barrier that didn’t fit flush to the cliff. Rye fed the fused nylon end of the rope behind the wood inch by inch, willing it to keep going even as it butted up against the stone. He worked it, teasing it up and down and up again, looking for the kind of angle that would force the hard head of the rope to go sideways because it couldn’t go forward.
No one rushed him, but he was conscious of the seconds ticking and what each one meant.
It took more than two minutes for him to finally work the rope around the trunk and lock it off.
Moving quickly, Carter tied off the other end around the truck’s tow hook.
“How’s it going with the fence?” he asked the big man as he labored with the ice ax. Vic had fallen into a rhythm, no longer just hacking savagely at the chain link. He rocked back on his heels, raised the ax, turned his shoulder, and stepped forward into the swing, metal hitting metal, rocked back on his heels, raised the ax again, turned his shoulder, and stepped forward into another swing. He didn’t break rhythm, answering on the backstep. “Painfully slowly,” he admitted. “But hopefully there are enough broken or weakened links that the metal will sheer beneath the sudden weight.”
It was fine in theory, but they didn’t have the luxury of testing the hypothesis; their pursuers would catch up with them in less than ten minutes. Which wasn’t long and definitely not long enough.
Rye laid a hand on Vic’s muscular shoulder, causing him to break the rhythm finally. “It’s got to be enough. We need to go.”
He didn’t argue. He handed Rye the ice ax, but instead of walking back to the SUV, Vic took another step up to the cliff and gripped the chain-link fence with both hands, curling his fingers around the metal links. He breathed deeply, once, and straightened, drawing his shoulders back before putting every ounce of strength he could muster into one savage pull, trying to tear the fence apart by sheer force of will.
Rye heard several of the links give, the metal snapping beneath the strain.
Satisfied, Vic clambered back into the SUV.
Iskra had taken over driving duties.
Rye tested the rope, then rushed around to the driver’s side. It was his turn to spell Carter, who was already in the passenger seat waiting. He gunned the engine, easing down on the gas. The truck rocked forward, taking up the slack. The rope locked tight, and for a moment Rye worried the engine wouldn’t have the torque to do the job. He gave it more gas. The engine strained against the sheer weight of the tree and the resistance of the chain-link fence. Then suddenly a vicious snap cut across the engine’s whines and the truck lurched forward, bringing the tree and half of the mountainside with it.
Half a dozen of the retaining timbers tore away from the cliff wall as the center piece was pulled free.
The wire fence buckled beneath the incredible weight, and within seconds the massive tree trunks had spilled out onto the narrow road, leaving it impassable.
Huge boulders—the smallest still bigger than his head—spilled out behind the trees as the years of monsoon undermining the slope’s integrity gave way to gravity. Tons of rock and mud slid onto the asphalt, tearing more trees away from the retaining wall as the safety net ripped apart.
The noise of the landslide was a huge elemental scream of the land crying out.
Rye gave the truck more gas, dragging the tree trunk clear of the debris before he killed the engine and hopped out to cut the rope free. By the time he was back in the cab, Vic’s SUV was five hundred yards away. He looked back at the debris blocking the mountain road. It might not stop them, but it would slow them down.
A lot.
That was preferable to going into a gunfight with an ice ax.
He coiled the climbing rope up and put it back with the rest of their gear.
They had a long road ahead of them, and none of it was meant for driving on.