White Peak

by Ronan Frost

  He twisted slightly, finding another toehold.

  That changed everything.

  Two points of contact meant he was going to survive.

  He felt out with his fingers for a third before he let go of the strap.

  The pack hung over his head, dangling from the hooked finger of stone, as Rye worked his way down the fissure until it narrowed enough that he could span it side to side, taking his weight on his feet.

  Foot by foot, he crabbed his way down another ninety feet of rock chimney until he stood on solid ground again, still very much alive. Breathless, high on the adrenaline coursing through his system and dizzy from the lack of oxygen in his blood, but alive.

  He’d lost everything in the fall.

  And he couldn’t hear anything from up above.

  The only reason he could see anything was because he still had the head flashlight on, and the only reason he still had that was because he’d put it on his hat last night when they’d gone to explore the caves and hadn’t bothered to take it off this morning when they set out walking. It was nothing but luck that he hadn’t. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred he would have stashed it back among his kit last night, but the half-mummified corpses and the cave paintings had weirded him out.

  And saved his life.

  Now, as he looked around, the narrow beam showed Rye just how few options he had. The fissure seemed to run a long way, which put him in mind of the pinkish line Byrne had highlighted on his topographical satellite shots. He tried to recall the exact path it ran, but without his phone to confirm his memories, all he could do was follow the fissure to wherever it ended, hoping that if it didn’t reach the temple it at least offered a reasonable escape.

  He had to trust that the others would keep going without him and hope to rendezvous somewhere around the Dzyan temple.

  SIXTY-SIX

  Not knowing what was going on with the others was torture. Not knowing where he was going or when he might find food and water again, hell. A very different kind of hell to the brimstone and lava hells of Christian mythology, but much more real for its earthly nature.

  Rye walked on.

  There was no light up above here, meaning at some point the fissure had failed to split the rock all the way to the surface and now he was in an icy tunnel network, walking blindly toward where he hoped he’d find a way out.

  He wasn’t feeling great about his chances.

  The ravine narrowed around him, so tight in places Rye was forced to shuffle sideways to keep moving forward. The stone was sheened with moisture. When he reached out to touch it with his fingertips he realized it had frozen into a thin skin of ice. After a minute of shuffling, he discovered that the ravine had widened again, presenting him with a different challenge.

  It looked for all the world as though he had reached a dead end, though looking up Rye realized the reality was that whatever tectonic pressure had formed the fissure had broken the rock more than twenty feet above his head but not down here.

  He had no choice but to scale the obstruction.

  The crampons made it considerably more difficult than it needed to be, but bouldering was one of the climbing exercises he’d always enjoyed for its discipline. It wasn’t about getting to the top or being the fastest or the most daring, it simply allowed Rye to focus on the rock and moving with grace and precision.

  The edges around the fissure where the stone had sheared were sharp enough to offer easy handholds.

  He looked up, tracing the route with his flashlight, and began to climb.

  It only took a few minutes, and the shelf itself ran less than fifteen meters before he was forced to descend again.

  He moved lightly, on the balls of his feet, and continued on.

  What he hadn’t expected was to be presented with choices. Up ahead the ravine opened up, and he saw not one but four paths diverging before him, each going deeper into the mountain, and the widest of them was simply no guarantee it would run the farthest or ever reach open ground.

  He struggled to orient himself, but he’d been turned around a dozen times in the fall and had no easy way of gauging which shaft went where he needed to go. So, he had no choice but to pick one and push on, trying to hold the map and the pink line of the fissure in his mind.

  But it was pointless.

  Down here every twist and every turn was disorienting, and there was nothing to say that the path he was on was the right one, or that it wouldn’t simply dead-end around the next curve. All he could do was follow it.

  He heard an eerie sigh as the wind lost its hold on this place, blowing out to nothing.

  He realized he was moving awkwardly, favoring his left side. He’d hurt something on the way down; how badly, he had no real way of knowing, but it was interfering with his freedom of movement, which wasn’t good.

  Rye felt out his side, pushing and probing as best he could through the thick parka, but it was impossible to isolate the source of the pain. As long as it was a dull ache rather than a sharp stabbing pain he could live with it.

  The flashlight’s beam picked out the dark contours of cracks and crevices along the walls.

  The scrape of his crampon’s metal teeth grated in his ears as he walked on, the sound made deafeningly loud by the tight confines and weird acoustics of the tunnel.

  He wouldn’t be sneaking up on anyone.

  More jewellike seams glittered in the flashlight’s glare.

  Time quickly became meaningless as he lost any sense of how long he’d been down there. He’d climbed five similar blockages in the shafts and been forced to bridge two more where the cave floor disappeared beneath him. In that time, he’d found another dozen or so possible passageways leading off what he thought of as the core fissure.

  He’d covered no more than half a mile in that time. With at least twenty times that to go, there was no way of knowing just how many paths he’d have to ignore and how many more they could in turn lead to before he reached the end.

  Rye realized, as he walked on, that the ground beneath his feet was on a gentle decline, taking him deeper into the Seven Brothers, and presumably away from where he needed to be.

  He tried to think.

  Had he been turned around by the choices, and somehow branched off the main passage without realizing that was what had happened? Or, more distressingly, given his predicament, was it in his head? His mind playing tricks on him in the dark?

  He stopped.

  Somewhere in the blind distance he heard the tink, tink, tink of water dripping from the ceiling, improbably loud. A peculiar moss clung to part of the rock wall. It possessed a weird luminescent quality, not in any way enough to offer illumination by itself but caught in the flashlight’s beam it seemed to glow, adding to the light in the tunnel.

  You do realize that’s going to run out, don’t you? His sarcastic savior chirped up, reminding him that batteries didn’t last forever. You’ll be lucky if you get another couple of hours out of it. No way it’s going to last while you stumble around in the dark for ten miles.

  “It’s not like I’ve got a choice,” Rye said, his voice chasing away through the honeycomb of tunnels. He was painfully aware of just how much shit he was in. The weight of the mountain pressed down metaphorically on him as he wrestled with a whole string of bad choices looking for a least-bad option. He knew he had no realistic alternative but to carry on, and hope it took him close to the rendezvous point, because he wasn’t getting up the side of the ravine where he fell; not without the right equipment. And there was no telling what would be waiting for him up top even if he tried.

  Twelve heavily armed hunters looking to end his life wasn’t a particularly enticing incentive when it came to making the climb.

  This way at least there was the illusion of a chance.

  But with no equipment, no rations, no water—though there was ice on the walls, which meant he wouldn’t die of thirst—and no real clue where he was, it could only ever be an illusion, and no amount of stubbo
rnness and promises that he didn’t want to die could change the outcome if he didn’t find a way out of this place. And soon.

  Before his flashlight died.

  He needed to think smart.

  He pulled off the crampons and used one to score the rock, marking his passage.

  He repeated the mark at every choice in the warren of tunnels, marking the one he chose so that he could easily double back and change his route under the mountain without getting lost.

  But it was hard.

  There was no life down here, and every crack and crevice looked like it could have gone on for miles beyond the flashlight’s narrow beam.

  It didn’t help that every time he turned his head the motion caused a hundred tiny shadows to jump around and trade places like capering fools trying their damnedest to turn him about and about again.

  Rye listened for anything out there, any possible sound that could suggest someone was coming to find him, but beyond the tink of droplets of water and the faint hum—which in all probability was the echo of the blood in his own head—there was nothing.

  Up top, ten miles was two and a half hours. But that was going in a straight line and keeping to a steady pace. Down here a mile could take an hour with all the obstacles he had to navigate. Depending upon the cells in his flashlight, he could reasonably expect it to last for four or five hours.

  He wished he knew what was going on up there.

  If Vic and the others were all right, or if they were sprawled out across the snow, cold.

  He needed to believe the three of them were more than a match for a dozen mercenaries, armed or not. The little he knew of Vic’s story and the stuff he’d been through in Africa was enough for Rye to back him in any fight, no matter the odds, and he’d seen Iskra in action firsthand in the monkey temple. But Carter wasn’t a fighter, not like the other two, and that meant they were looking at dealing with six each, which outside of Hollywood was a hellish challenge. Unarmed, it ought to be impossible.

  But Vic had brought an attack helicopter down, so who was to say what was really impossible?

  After another hour in the darkness, Rye began to feel his injuries. The adrenaline had worn off, leaving him battered and raw. There was more of the peculiar moss on the wall. It gathered where the ice melt ran down through the cracks. It lent the tunnel an ethereal, haunted quality that was exacerbated by the low resonating hum he’d noticed a while back. It didn’t get any louder, though it showed no signs of fading either. When he rested his hand against the stone, Rye felt the very slight vibration running through the mountain.

  He crouched, putting his hand flat to the stone floor.

  It was warmer than he had expected.

  He wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but given the fact he was still probably close to fifteen thousand feet above sea level, with several hundred feet of rock above him, it should have been colder.

  Much colder.

  He stood slowly and walked on to the next possible fork in the tunnels, scoring his choice into the stone before he took it. Ten paces into the tunnel, he crouched again to feel out the stone floor, and again it felt warmer to the touch than he would have believed possible.

  All sorts of reasons ran through his head, one of which was some sort of weakness along the collision edge from where the two tectonic plates had come together to fold the land into these incredible mountains. But the crust here was so thick, thicker than along any of the fault lines, there was no chance of superheated steam or volcanic eruptions penetrating the rock. There wasn’t a single volcanic weakness, active or dormant, throughout the entire Himalayan range, with the two nearest being the Barren and Narcondam Islands. But, deeper down, it was possible, surely? With subduction and the gradual melting of the northern collision edge of the Indian tectonic plate? But even if it was happening, any sort of volcanic activity would be way too far down for it to have any residual heating effect on the stone around him.

  And yet the rock was undeniably warm to the touch.

  He felt a shiver thrill through the stone beneath his fingertips.

  The mountain range may not be volcanic, but it was most certainly a very active seismic zone and prone to devastating earthquakes.

  Was that what he was feeling here? The buildup of seismic forces that would eventually blow and send shock waves throughout the region?

  Rye pushed on, letting his fingers trail across the stone, as though by being connected to the low-frequency vibration he could somehow hope to decipher it.

  The sound made no rational sense. But that didn’t stop his mind from racing. He knew very little about the practicalities of geology and what something this deep in the mountain itself signified, but could only assume the vibrations intensified the closer he got to their source, and dissipated the farther away he got, but did that mean he was walking toward some sort of breaking point? A place where the fissure was in the process of tearing itself wider, or even collapsing the side of the mountain itself? Were the vibrations the rock’s response to something more seismic beneath him? Deeper down in the mantle, was the crust tearing itself apart under the incredible strains on the mountain range? Or was the source aboveground? An avalanche bringing one of the Seven Brothers to its knees?

  And if it was, what happened then?

  Did he die down here, slowly, starving to death, another corpse for the mountain to call its own?

  Those kinds of external forces dictating his survival weren’t worth worrying about. If an earthquake brought the whole mountain down on his head, it brought the whole mountain down on his head. It wasn’t as though he could influence the outcome by worrying about it, or even planning for it.

  Over the next mile or so, the quality of air changed. It was hard to say what was different, but he felt his breathing become more and more labored, each breath nourishing him a little less than the last.

  All he could do was walk on, letting the tunnels lead him wherever they would.

  The echoes and silences grew.

  There was another sound down here, he realized, unsure of how long he’d actually been listening to it before he was aware of what it was: the steady dubdub-dubdub of a heart beating.

  Again, when Rye put his hand against the tunnel wall, he felt that echo in the vibrations, making them less like the cold stone of Gangkhar Puensum and more like the belly of a huge, hungry beast.

  And still he walked on, the flashlight beam moving endlessly ahead of him, the shadows it cast in a permanent sense of agitation. Heavy shadows picked out a marking on the cave wall. At first, he assumed it was just some sort of deformity in the rock formation, a scar left over from the shearing of the fissure, but as he moved closer to investigate, he found it was much more man-made than that.

  The now-familiar tripartite image of the three burning spheres of the Jing, Chi, and Shen had been chiseled into the tunnel wall, each flame intricately rendered with clean lines that defied any crude hammer and chisel but rather suggested the kind of precision cutting tools of the modern age. The delicacy of the work was exquisite.

  Studying it closely, Rye realized it was subtly different from the image he had seen on the Nazi pendants. The three spheres overlapped slightly, like a Venn diagram, and in those points of overlap there was a symbol he didn’t recognize. He wished he had his phone or some way to record the carving. The fact that it was so close to what they were familiar with, but different, felt important.

  He traced the flames with his fingertips.

  An electric thrill shivered through him, the charge strong enough to cause Rye to pull his hand away from the carving.

  He tried it again and was immediately shocked by the charge.

  Rye looked down at his hand, seeing the very slight welt where he’d been burned by the rock and the echo of the flame’s outline on his fingertip.

  He kept on walking, hearing the dubdub of the mountain’s heartbeat increasing, scoring the wall with his crampons every so often to mark his passage, feeling the chill creep
into his blood and the hunger gnaw away at his gut.

  He began to doubt he’d ever find his way out of this place.

  It was hard to imagine some lost city down here, harder still to believe there could ever have been a civilization that would choose to build its so-called paradise in such a place.

  But that was what Rask was banking on; a whisper of legend, the idea that there was a faith based around wisdom that somehow fell from the stars.

  Rye knew that the man was clutching at straws.

  He’d admitted as much himself.

  But the notion that something here could somehow save him had never felt more ridiculous.

  Magic stones? Magic beans more like, that inner voice chimed, but for once the doubter was only saying what Rye had felt all along. There was no such thing. This was a world as devoid of magic as there could ever be, and the idea of some superior technology feeling like magic was just wishful thinking.

  He scored another deep gash into the tunnel wall, and as the shriek of metal echoed out, felt the wall give beneath his weight.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  The seam where the two sections of rock met was near perfect, but the flashlight revealed a thin dark line of shadow. Rye pushed and pressed around the seam, trying to replicate the sensation of the rock moving inward against his touch, but it wasn’t happening. He was beginning to think he’d imagined it, when his fingers found a series of slight imperfections in the rock—little pinpricks in the rough surface that he would otherwise have missed—but once he noticed two or three of them he couldn’t help but notice more, until he felt out a whole constellation of imperfections in the rock wall, and knew that was exactly what he was feeling out. His fingers brushed up against marks that represented the swirl of the Milky Way, which felt like a galaxy of braille beneath his fingers.

  As Rye pressed and pushed at the imperfections he heard a heavy clunk deep within the rock as something disengaged. A moment later he felt the entire wall move inward to reveal a stone stair leading up. The mechanism was crude. The wood behind it had rotted in several places, but the release still worked. Putting his shoulder into it, Rye pushed the heavy stone door aside.