by Ronan Frost
The steps were crudely carved into the bedrock.
They rose into darkness, but he noticed several places where iron rings had been driven into the wall. He assumed this was where reed torches were set to light the way.
He started to climb, not sure what he expected to find at the top. The steps rose several stories without showing any sign of ending, before he saw a wooden door bearing the familiar three burning spheres of the Jing, Chi, and Shen. He pushed open the door and crossed the threshold into the lower reaches of Dzyan temple.
There was a chill about the chambers that made them feel unlived in, and it grew worse the more he explored.
Rye moved throughout the lower level, listening for signs of movement above, for any sign of brothers sworn to keep the secrets of Shambhala, or anyone else, including Cressida Mohr’s kill squad.
Nothing.
The place was desolate.
The cold was unbearable. Worse, even, than outside, as though the walls worked as some sort of insulation that kept the icy chill inside them.
But that didn’t stop him going through the entire structure. He walked the narrow hallways, checking each chamber. He found empty cots and prayer mats. There was precious little in the way of personality about the place, and no ornamentation bar the repeated sigils of the Jing, Chi, and Shen on several of the walls. He moved from room to room, finding another bare kitchen. Unlike Guérin’s chateau, there was no stockpile of canned goods in the pantry, either.
Leaving the kitchens, he climbed another set of stairs, following the light. The hallway opened onto a gallery that looked down over what must have been the heart of the ancient temple. On the wall, a giant rendition of the three burning spheres engulfed what could only have been the Vril whose bones they had found built into the walls of the Shrine of the Black Sun. It was an imposing creature, utterly alien in its nature. The Vril’s bulbous head and distended jawline were accentuated by haunting deep-set black eyes that looked impossibly large in the already impossibly large skull.
Rye couldn’t take his eyes off the thing.
A biting wind blew in through the empty frame of the enormous central window. The window looked out over the imposing landscape. A rime of frost and ice clung to everything in the room. Rye didn’t have the Blavatsky to compare, but he was willing to bet Rask’s life on the fact that he was looking out over the reality behind the occultist’s crude drawing.
He couldn’t see a single spire or rooftop, but why should he? It wasn’t as though the earth was simply going to surrender its secrets because he had found the place where X was supposed to mark the spot. Life didn’t work like that.
According to Rask, the city, if it had ever existed, was the genesis for several of the Hell legends every bit as much as it was the source of so-called Paradise tales. It was never going to be there, like some mountaintop nirvana. The treasures—and horrors—of Shambhala lay beneath the mountains, buried down in the deep places of the earth.
Rye leaned out over the gallery to get a better look at the space beneath him.
He counted a dozen pews lined up to face the broken window.
There were six people down there.
One sat, head down in prayer, on the first row of pews. There were four more, all wearing the same shades of red vestments, all with their heads bowed in prayer in the other pews. The last man was on his knees before the Vril idol, forehead pressed to the floor. The frost rimed the creases in the fabric of their robes, giving them a peculiar glittering luminescence as the sunlight shimmered across them.
It was unnaturally quiet in the chamber, not even the mumbled whisper of a prayer reaching him.
They hadn’t noticed him.
Rye watched for a full two minutes, not daring to breathe.
They didn’t move.
They didn’t say a word.
Rye looked down at the last of the Brotherhood of Dzyan, the caretakers of this strange temple, and knew that the line had died out in this room.
At the far side of the gallery, he found a stair leading down to the main floor. Each step was frosted with a layer of ice. The descent was treacherous. He went down with care, holding the handrail until he emerged on the temple floor. From here both the window and the Vril were considerably more daunting than they had been from the higher vantage.
Standing in the shadow of the Vril, Rye looked at the downturned faces of the monks in the front few pews. Their skin was a dark freezer-burn black, leathery and heavy with deep creases that marked them as ancient. Ice crystals had frosted around their lips. The hairs of the one bearded monk had frozen into a thick white mask. Every brittle hair was encased in ice.
Rye moved closer, unable to take his eyes off the dead monks.
The wind cried around him, a haunting elegy as it whispered across the prayer floor and climbed up to the gallery.
Rye reached out, touching the dead monk’s face. The crust of ice crackled beneath his fingers. As the ice flaked away, it took with it a layer of tissue, exposing the bone beneath in one horrifying second. The ice shattered on the tiled floor, the fallen flesh cracking into a dozen shards.
He backed away from the dead man.
He stood over the monk who was on his knees with his forehead pressed to the floor. He could see the wound that had killed him. The bullet holes in the base of his skull, mirroring the pattern of the Jing, Chi, and Shen.
Standing over the dead man, he heard someone bark, “Freeze!”
SIXTY-EIGHT
“Jesus Christ, I nearly shit myself,” Rye said, laughing at the sight of Carter Vickers’ amusement. He leaned against the pew, shaking his head. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Nothing a good stiff drink wouldn’t cure,” the thief said, walking toward him. “What the hell is this place?” The chiaroscuro of shadows made his bruises look even more impressive. Vic and Iskra were behind him and looked equally battered.
“All that remains of the Brotherhood, I think.”
“Six people sitting in their pews praying, all mysteriously die at the same time?”
“Not so mysterious,” Rye said. “Bullet to the back of the head. Looks like the expedition found its way this far and put an end to the monks’ line.”
“Signs of torture?”
“Not that I saw, but honestly. Double-tap to the back of the head, that’d make most people talk.” Rye raised an eyebrow at that. “Okay, not the person being shot, but you know what I mean.”
“It’s pretty grim,” Iskra said, walking the line of dead penitents, shaking her head as she checked each one for bullet holes.
Each of the bodies slumped in their seat as she passed.
“I’m not sure how a bunch of monks are meant to defend against a Mauser or an MP 40.”
“They aren’t,” Vic said. “They took the secret of Shambhala with them to the grave.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because the expedition failed,” the big man said.
Rye nodded. It made sense.
“What happened to you, Carter?”
“Your girlfriend’s thugs weren’t too happy after Vic blew up their helicopter,” Carter said. “Let’s just say that after you fell down that hole things started to get interesting.”
“It was convenient they chose to attack in what was already a graveyard. Saved us the effort of burying them afterward,” Iskra said.
Rye quite liked this new, more talkative woman, even if her sense of humor veered to the macabre end of the spectrum.
“Then pretty boy here told us what had happened to you, so we shadowed the fissure as long as we could, hoping to find a point of entry where it leveled out. It didn’t. So, we went on to the rendezvous point, and here we are.”
“And isn’t this just the creepiest fucking place in the world,” the thief said. “An abandoned temple in the middle of the most inhospitable mountain range in the world, looking at six executed monks. Rask should be paying us danger money.”
“
He does,” the Russian said. “So, how did you get in here?” she asked Rye.
“I followed the fissures and ended up at a crude stairway that led up from the tunnels.”
She nodded. “Given we need to descend, that feels like a good place to start looking for the lost city.”
No one argued.
He took them down to the tunnels.
“There’s something you should see,” he said, as they emerged from the man-made stair.
“What am I looking for?”
Rye led them to where the familiar symbols of the Jing, Chi, and Shen were carved into the wall, and told the Russian, “Touch it.”
Iskra laid her palm flat against the rock, then recoiled. “Okay, that’s just wrong. It feels … alive.”
That was the same word that had occurred to Rye. Alive.
“Doesn’t it just? Which makes me think we are in the right place. The problem is I don’t see where we go from here? I’m not seeing a lost city. I don’t know about you but I kinda hoped we’d find a second stair, or maybe a gaping maw into hell or something down here. There has to be something.”
“You mean like this?” the thief said. He shone his flashlight down a crack so thin Rye had missed it.
The problem was that there was no way they could possibly squeeze through the crack, but the flashlight’s beam teased a darker descent on the other side.
“I didn’t see that,” Rye said.
“That’s because it wasn’t there until Iskra put her hand on the sigil.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. I saw it open with my own two eyes. Vic, put your hand on it, see what happens?”
The big man moved forward, deliberately placing his palm flat against the rock on the third sphere in the design.
Rye felt rather than heard the deep rumble in the mountain and looked at the others for confirmation they’d heard it, too. “Landslide?”
The big man shook his head. “It felt like it came from deeper down, not above us, more like the rumblings of an earthquake.”
He was right.
It was in the rocks around them as much as it was above and below them, like they were in the belly of the beast.
Rye moved to peer in through the crack.
It hadn’t mysteriously widened in response to Vic’s hand on the rock. There was no way any one of them could squeeze through, but there was definitely something on the other side. He could see the distinct shadows of a stair, the steps themselves so well defined they had to be man-made, like the ones leading down from the temple.
The thief stood behind him, close enough to peer over Rye’s shoulder. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“A way down?”
“That’s the one.”
“But there’s no way we’re getting in there.” He pointed out the obvious problem.
“You say that,” Carter said, smile grinning, “but I know something you don’t know.”
“God, you can be an annoying bastard,” Rye said. “Spit it out.”
“Follow the moisture on the ground,” he said, shining his light down at the small slick of moisture that ran away to the right, away from the hidden stair.
Rye did.
What he found was a deep shaft that dropped deeper than his flashlight could shine, but about halfway down was a stone gallery that, if his sense of direction was right, ran back far enough to link up with the stair.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s a long way down.”
“And I’m the annoying one?” Carter said. “I mean do you think you can climb it?”
“Sure, and I can rig up ropes so you can, too.”
“That won’t be necessary, honestly. One person scouting out an area is fine,” the thief said.
“I wouldn’t want you missing out on the fun,” Rye said, already looking for somewhere that could work as a belay point to secure the ropes as he began setting up a line down.
Vic was the first into a harness.
Rye worked the line while the big man descended, walking slowly down the wall of rock a step at a time as he played out the line. When Vic reached the gallery, he unclipped the harness so that Rye could pull the rope back up for Iskra to follow him down. As Rye was setting up the line for the next one to go, the big man disappeared from sight, taking his light from the gallery. A moment later he returned, leaning out over the edge to shout up, “He’s right, it leads through to the stairs, but there’s a problem.”
“Problem how?” Iskra called down, stepping out over the edge.
“Best you see for yourself,” Vic said, stepping back from the edge so she could walk down to him.
It took another ten minutes to get Carter Vickers down to the ledge, and for Rye to stow the ropes and free-climb down the shaft, working his way down the narrowest of cracks and holds without being able to see where he was going most of the time. He worked his way by feel.
Vic leaned out and shone the flashlight against the last few feet of his descent, then gathered him in, lifting Rye lightly off the wall. In that one moment, as he swung in to the ledge, he really appreciated just how incredibly strong Vic was.
“What do I need to see?”
Rye walked through the narrow tunnel between the shaft and the stair and saw the problem long before he reached the first step. The descent was dizzying, again disappearing into darkness far beyond the edge of his flashlight’s beam, but in between where they were and where they needed to be was a gulf where a huge section of the stairway had caved in.
“Well, it was never going to be easy, was it?” Carter said, coming to join him.
Again, that deep bass rumble shook through the mountain. Loose shale on the steps fell away, spinning down into the black.
He didn’t hear it hit the bottom.
“Are we even sure we’re going the right way?”
Rye looked at him like he’d just said the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “Seriously? We are hundreds of miles from civilization, almost directly beneath a monastery that isn’t visible on satellite images, directly in line with the mountaintop points of a unique view that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else in the world, and we’ve found a man-made stair leading down into the heart of the mountain that is signposted by a mystical sigil we’ve been following from France … and you wonder if we’re going the right way?”
“When you put it like that,” Carter said ruefully. “So how do we get down?”
“Same way we got this far: we climb,” he said.
“I knew you were going to say that.”
It was harder to set up the ropes this time; Rye was forced to hammer in the belay pins as he free-climbed his way spiderlike across the gulf, threading the rope as he went. It was a thirty-foot gap across an unknown drop. He was comfortable making the climb, but for someone like Vic it was asking a lot of him, despite his strength.
Vic fastened his harness onto the guide rope and crabbed his way across the gap. Halfway, a chunk of rock flaked away from the rock face and, unbalanced, he lost his grip and fell.
The sudden weight on the rope nearly pulled Rye off his feet as he struggled to brace himself against the steps to arrest his fall. Even so, Vic dropped twenty feet like a stone, his cries deafening as they echoed down the stone chimney.
Every muscle in his body tensed, straining against the pull of Vic’s weight as he swung there helplessly, the beam from his flashlight roving wildly across the shaft as his head whipped around frantically looking for somewhere to cling onto.
Rye caught a glimpse of something in the shadows of the roof of the deep shaft that he couldn’t explain, something he’d seen before somewhere else.…
In that Blavatsky painting.
It was one of the core images of the esoteric painting—the peculiarly unnatural tree of glass wrapped in pastel-shaded angel wings and lit by a triangle of three gloriously golden suns—one ablaze—and it was carved deep into the stone, like a demon watching over the descent.
It was creepy as hell.
It disappeared into shadow as Vic’s gaze turned downward.
Rye felt the belay pin slip an inch as Vic’s weight pulled it free of the rock.
“I need you to find a foothold,” he called down to Vic. “You’re going to have to take some of the weight off the pin, or it’s coming out of the rock and we’re both going down,” he said bluntly, no time for softening the message.
Vic grunted, and Rye felt his weight shift beneath him as he turned in to face the wall of rock.
“Any time you like,” he called down.
The big man scrabbled about the rock face trying to find something, anything, to take his weight. The twist of his body against the rope was enough to pull the pin free with a ping of tortured metal, and he fell another ten feet, Rye’s grip on the rope the only thing stopping him from falling a lot farther.
There was no way he could hold him.
The rope slipped inches through his grip, burning across his palm as he struggled to hold his balance.
But he refused to let go.
“I’ve got you,” he promised, even as the pendulum of Vic’s weight threatened to pull him over the edge. His feet scraped against the stone step as he shuffled remorselessly toward the drop.
He didn’t dare look down.
All he could do was grit his teeth and pull back on the rope with all of his might and pray that the big man found some sort of purchase on the rock face to take some of the burden from him.
“If he drops you can I have your car?” the thief called across the chasm. It was a lame attempt at humor, but it was exactly the kind of thing he needed to hear at that moment. And damned if he didn’t laugh. There was a slightly hysterical edge to it, but it was laughter just the same.
“I’m glad you’re finding my impending death so amusing,” Vic grumbled, and that just made him laugh harder. Right up until the rope slipped a full foot through his grasp and the big man juddered down the same foot so abruptly Rye pitched forward and came face-to-face with the dizzying drop.
The laughter died.