White Peak

by Ronan Frost

  “I’m not going to let go,” he said.

  When he looked up, he saw that Carter was already beginning to edge out to the broken belay point. Rye realized what he was planning on doing and willed him on.

  He made it as far as the crack where the broken belay pin had sheared through and started casting about for an alternative.

  It all felt like it was happening so slowly and taking far too long in the process.

  Every muscle along Rye’s arms and across his shoulders burned, hyperextending and struggling.

  He was moving beyond the limits of his strength, fast, but he wasn’t giving up. He looked down at the excess rope coiled at his feet and wrapped it around his ankle, giving himself another point to share the burden.

  Carter took the ice ax from the clip at his belt and flipped it, using the adze to quickly chip out another foothold to help him bridge the distance. Rye realized he’d given up on trying to secure a new belay pin and was going to join him on the rope. All Rye had to do was hold on for maybe thirty seconds more, then Carter could take some of the strain.

  The tremors tore through his arms.

  His forearm flexed like he was wrestling with a jackhammer. And every spasm abraded the rope across the flint-edge of the rock as it fell away into the drop, sawing at it.

  Carter hand-traversed the face, his eyes fixed on a horn of rock that was just out of reach. He was going to need to find some sort of push-off point to make a grab for it, and that meant going down to a single point of contact with the rock, which was suicidal.

  Before Rye could stop him, the thief did the unthinkable: relying purely on friction to push off with his heel, he threw himself at the horn, grasping it desperately. For a long second the thief hung there looking for anything to give him support, until his toe caught on a jib. The minute toehold was barely there, but it allowed him to support his weight as he looked across to where Rye wrestled with the rope.

  He locked-off the move, using tendon strength to support his weight without putting added burden on his muscles, and looked for a way up and over Rye so that he could come down behind him on the mantle shelf and add his strength to the rope. Carter scrambled sideways.

  Rye couldn’t see the holds he utilized, but the thief crabbed across the gulf with confidence.

  Carter was above him when the rope began to pendulum again, with Vic trying to help but only succeeding in making it so much more difficult to hold his weight.

  Rye felt himself going over the edge, his feet scuffing on the scree that had built up around the ledge, Vic’s wild panicked swings dragging his right foot out over the lip.

  He leaned all of his weight backward, the rope burning through his palms, and knew the only thing he could do was let go, but then they both died, because he’d looped the rope around his standing foot.

  Another sudden lurch on the rope jerked his foot out from under him.

  Rye fell.

  SIXTY-NINE

  Carter grabbed Rye around the waist and hauled him back from the edge, fighting the added weight on the end of the rope.

  When he had him, Rye was able to pull the rope up one hand at a time, but it was slick in his hands with blood from the friction burns, so Carter had to help him, taking most of the weight, until the big man’s hands reached up over the ledge and clung onto the stone step for dear life.

  “Well, that was unnecessarily exciting,” the thief said, sinking back down against the rock wall, breathing hard.

  Rye joined him, looking down at his ruined hand.

  “I’m in trouble,” he said, seeing just how badly the skin of one of his palms was stripped. In part of the index finger on one hand, he could see bone where friction had burned the meat away from the nub of the distal phalanx. The skin was blackened around the edges where the nylon rope had fused with it. He was going to need to get it treated, and that wasn’t happening here.

  All he could do was bind it up and hope that the extreme cold didn’t make things worse.

  They waited for Iskra to free-climb across with the pack that had the first-aid materials, then Vic helped Rye bind his hand up, debriding the wound and disinfecting it with a slug of vodka the Russian had in a silver flask stashed in her pack. The alcohol stung, but that was better than gangrene. When he was taped up, they continued their descent.

  They weren’t really stairs that the team walked down, but they served the purpose. It took two full minutes of methodical descent to reach the bottom, which wasn’t the bottom at all, but rather an ocular opening in the ceiling of a vast cavernous space. There was no way they could jump. The fall would break bones. They were going to have to rappel from the roof, which meant setting up an anchor to support the weight on the belay rope. It was hard for Rye to do anything practical with the ropes because of his burned hand, but he was able to direct the others, explaining what they needed to do and how to test the integrity of the pin before they lowered themselves down.

  He went last.

  Rye gloved up, using his good hand to guide himself down, and his burned hand to trigger the descender, in a controlled descent as he dropped the forty feet to the ground below.

  They left the rope, assuming they were going to need to climb back up on the way out.

  The cavern was vast, easily too big to see end to end in the light from their head flashlights. The walls were rough-hewn, the cracks and crevices cast in deeper shadow like the crags of an ancient weathered face. Rye saw lichen clinging to one patch of rock and realized there must be some form of water—or at least condensation—down here for the fungus to grow.

  Carter walked away from the group, his light finding a scintillating column of crystal that caught and reflected the flashlight’s beam in a rainbow of colors, casting the light across the vast chamber. The crystal column spilled from another opening in the roof, cascading down like some frozen waterfall. No. Not a waterfall. Like a huge glass tree. Seeing it properly this time, Rye was again struck by its similarity to the central image from Blavatsky’s painting. It had to be the inspiration, surely?

  It was a breath-stealing sight.

  The striations in the crystal wall came down in waves, each subsequent tier in the descent thicker and fuller than the last as it cascaded to the cavern floor, glass roots going far beneath the surface.

  A shaft of purplish light ran through the center of the weird rock formation, meaning somewhere up above there was an opening to the sky.

  Carter turned to look back their way. The amplified illusion of his flashlight was broken the moment he looked away, smothering the far end of the enormous cavern in darkness. Rye looked at the roof directly above his head. There were dozens of long stalactites that looked like molasses dripping from a treacle pot. As he looked back down, he saw the Russian had broken away to cross to a different part of the vaulted space and was locked in the study of images daubed onto the walls. Rye crossed the cavern to join Iskra, his footsteps echoing hollowly. In the distance he could hear the drip of thawing water or condensation coming off the stalactites. In places, they had formed thick pillars of rock, creating the illusion that they were somehow holding up the immense weight of the world.

  “What have you found?”

  “Rask’s aliens,” she said, pointing at a crudely painted Vril with its disproportionately large head and thick oval sweeps for eyes. The Vril looked like a crude rendition of the old gods in many ways, with the three spheres of the faith carefully worked into the image, as well as the holy cleansing fire that seemed to represent the Cintāmani stone they were searching for.

  Like the Vitruvian man and the Hindu goddess, he had too many arms, each seemingly invoking some aspect of his divinity, with flowers growing out of one upturned palm and the burning stone cupped in prayer between two more of his hands. There was a suggestion of balance, of the earthly flower and the grains of sand that might have been measuring out life as they spilled through the fingers of another hand. The image was heavy with symbolism, but simplistic in the execut
ion, too, marking it as old.

  “A lot of red and ocher,” Iskra observed, “which is unsurprising as it’s one of the oldest pigments we know, dating back to prehistoric cave paintings. But there are traces of much younger color.” She indicated a smear of pale yellow and a stark blue. “The cost of the lapis lazuli needed to make blue was as great as the cost of gold, because for centuries the stone needed to make the color could only be found in a single mountain range in Afghanistan. It was used in the funeral art of Egyptian pharaohs and for the Virgin Mary’s clothes in religious art purely because it was so expensive to make.”

  “And here it is,” Rye said.

  He wouldn’t have even thought about the presence of such subdued colors on the walls.

  The quiet Russian was a surprising woman.

  “I wouldn’t touch the image, given the bright green of the flower’s stem. That pigment is among the most poisonous hues, often laced with deadly toxins. Green paint was responsible for Cézanne’s diabetes and Monet’s blindness. Some even credit Napoleon’s death to the presence of the green pigment in the wallpaper of his room. Which all goes to say it really shouldn’t be here.”

  “So, you think these Asuras are real?” Rye asked, giving the demon the name Rask had used.

  “I have absolutely no idea. A few days ago I’d have laughed at you for even suggesting we’d find evidence of civilization under the mountains, but then there was the shrine, and the bones there … but even so, the idea of finding some sort of demonic alien painted in hues that have no right being here? We are in a vast cavern hundreds of feet beneath a supposedly haunted mountain. At this point I’d have to say, what the fuck do I know? Maybe they are fucking real…?”

  “Over here,” Carter called, from the foot of the crystal tree. “I’ve found something.”

  SEVENTY

  Something, in this instance, was a narrow, steep, spiral descent hidden so perfectly within the folds of crystal it wasn’t immediately visible from a distance.

  It was so precise in nature, and perfectly carved, it surely had to have been deliberately fashioned out of the hollow mountain.

  The honeycomb of runnels shaped all through the tree accounted in some part for the ghostly legends. Rye heard the low moan of the drafts sighing through the deep. It sounded utterly tortured and undeniably human. The sound made his skin crawl.

  He followed the spiral as it curled around within the tangled roots of the immense crystal tree of Blavatsky’s painting. Every now and then, his flashlight beam picked out the distorted image of some fresh iconic cave painting on the hewn stone beyond the crystal, though if there was some sort of narrative, he couldn’t decipher it.

  Vic and Iskra walked behind him, with Carter bringing up the rear.

  The striations in the rock belied the sheer crushing forces that must have come together to form the mountains, though how such an immense cathedral-like hollow could have survived those remorseless forces defied explanation.

  But it was nothing compared with the sight waiting for them as they emerged from the final twist of the spiral. The stair within the crystal tree opened into a vast cavern. The chamber was alive with fungus—all manner of weird, poisonous, and peculiar mushrooms and toadstools, and even blooms, actual flowers of fungal matter with weird petals and twisted roots. It was like looking down upon a meadow of poisonous growth, both beautiful and deadly. In the light of the flashlights Rye saw several puffs of vapor rise, spores dispersing throughout the cavern.

  “What is this place?” Iskra breathed, obviously uncomfortable.

  Vic didn’t answer. Instead he shrugged out of his pack and rooted through it for the face mask they’d brought as a shield against the extreme cold. It wouldn’t filter out whatever poisons were spread by the spores, but it couldn’t hurt, either.

  The others did likewise.

  Rye was the last to raise his mask from around his neck to cover his mouth.

  He was too busy looking beyond the mushroom field at what appeared to be a huge fungal wall to realize what he was walking through. It was Iskra who saw it first, and called, “Wait.”

  She dropped to one knee and brushed aside some of the large fungus. Over her shoulder, Rye saw the ivory of bone and realized he was looking into a splayed rib cage which was serving as compost for the charcoal-colored fungi which overran the corpse. They looked like dead men’s fingers reaching out from within the body. There was very little of the corpse that hadn’t been degraded into compost, but several bones were recognizable, and on a second corpse Rye found a fragment of the Ahnenerbe insignia, suggesting they were standing within a mushroom field that had grown out of the rest of the last expedition.

  “There must have been a hundred people down here,” the Russian said, looking at the spread of mushrooms around the vast cavern. She shook her head.

  “How could no one know about this?” the thief said, echoing their sentiments in the Bone Garden.

  “How many mass fatalities do we ever hear about?” Vic said solemnly. “How many times do we look surprised when we finally learn of slaughter and genocides? Too often is the answer, Carter, too often. The Ahnenerbe controlled the flow of information. They would not report their failures, and such catastrophic losses would be buried, reports destroyed. Nothing could undermine the Reich. There could be no failures. Even in the pursuit of esoterica like the Grail. That is why the supposed Holy Lance is in a museum in Vienna. It doesn’t matter if it is the genuine artifact or not. All that mattered was the symbolic power the relic had as a rallying point for the Nazis. Hitler recognized that. He considered the imperial insignia to be magical relics. They were symbolic rather than real. The power is in what people believe, not whatever the truth is.”

  “You sound like a politician,” the thief said.

  Rye stared at the living wall.

  He couldn’t understand what he was looking at.

  He’d expected—if anything—to find crumbled old cave-like buildings, maybe a honeycomb of tunnels like the funeral chambers they’d found up above, or a grander fissure than the one he’d navigated, everything on a grander scale. Perhaps a crumbling ruin of a broken-down temple? A few shantytown-like dwellings hollowed into the walls?

  But not this.

  Rye wondered if it might once have been a living thing.

  It took him a moment to realize that there was a break in the serpentine wall, which, when he stood again and left the others beside the composting fungal corpses to walk across the mushroom field to investigate, proved to be a gateway marked with the same symbols of body and spirit they’d encountered previously on their quest.

  There was no gate. The inside of the archway was thick with more of the dead men’s fingers reaching out to brush at his hair as he ducked beneath the arch. More spores powdered from the slight contact, hanging in the still air.

  Rye looked behind him to be sure the others were following him.

  Before him a vast crumbling ruin of a city spread out, with viaducts and temples, with hundreds upon hundreds of buildings and towers, each being choked beneath lush vegetation.

  He couldn’t understand how any flora could flourish without light, and it took him a heartbeat to realize just how far he was able to see across the buried cityscape and what that meant. Because it wasn’t the light of his flashlight offering up the incredible view. No, he realized, looking at the walls closest to him, not vegetation, but rather bioluminescent lichen and moss.

  That accounted for the vibrant color.

  The stuff clung to every stone, alive.

  Closest to him, an immense viaduct spanned a seemingly bottomless chasm. Through the arches of the bridge Rye saw waterfalls that, he realized, weren’t waterfalls at all, but more coruscating crystal like the esoteric tree Blavatsky had painted. The crystal falls plunged down and down into the deep.

  It was a breathtaking sight, and more than anything accounted for every single painting of Hell he’d ever seen. Because no matter how miraculous it might be,
this place wasn’t heaven.

  “Holy shit,” Carter said, beside him.

  “Shambhala,” Vic breathed, and surely it had to be.

  Amid the ruins, Rye saw choking vines that were quite possibly the root system of long dead vegetation run wild. The lost city was built across dozens of levels, not so much in streets like a normal city but rather in walkways, all manner of buildings joined along stone terraces and by balconies now desperately unsafe through centuries of abandonment and decay.

  The windows were dark slashes across the sheer stone.

  All the pathways seemed to lead to what must surely have been the grand temple, an impressive structure that mirrored some of the holy buildings he’d seen in this part of the world. It was easily a rival for them in size, too.

  “And just where the hell are we supposed to start looking for a handful of magical stones?” Carter asked no one in particular. “Hello haystack, now where’s that needle?”

  Rye pointed to the huge temple. “Where else would you put sacred relics?”

  “Then let’s get down there.”

  “Not so fast,” Rye said. “Can’t you smell it?”

  “Smell what?”

  “Death. It smells like death,” he said.

  “Chirpy little soul, aren’t you?” the thief said, but he stopped walking.

  “He’s right,” Iskra said, joining them on the other side of the gateway. “There is something in the air. I thought it was a result of the spores, but it isn’t. This is different. It’s an older smell. A lot of dying has been done here.”

  “We just left a hundred decomposed corpses back there.”

  “Not that,” the Russian said.

  “Christ, are you two the happiness patrol?” Carter Vickers shook his head, but he didn’t take another step down to the viaduct. It was the only way across the chasm to the temple. “We are looking down upon a dead city. It’s hardly surprising it doesn’t smell of cinnamon and fresh coffee. Who knows how long this place has been abandoned. Centuries. Abandoned places have a smell about them. It’s stale air.”