White Peak

by Ronan Frost

  Rye shook his head. “It’s more than that. It’s … rot. Can’t you smell it?” And now he’d named it, that was all he could smell.

  “How did it even get here?” the thief said. “I mean, look at it. Can you imagine how long it must have taken to hollow out the mountain to create this?”

  “Generations,” Rye offered, thinking about other man-made triumphs, like Notre-Dame, a single grand cathedral that took nigh on two hundred years from groundbreaking to completion. There was no way this wonderland could have been constructed in less time.

  He thought about the story Rask had shared, about the chest that supposedly fell from the sky and the stones of power that were a gift from the Sun God himself. One given to Solomon, and set in his ring, granting him the ability to summon and speak with demons. One given to Muhammad, protecting the land from natural disasters; flood, drought, earthquake, and famine. And one, which offered the gift of healing, given over to the Dzyan Brotherhood, protectors of Shambhala.

  The dead monks.

  “I just can’t imagine people actually living here…,” he said, shaking his head as he tried to wrap his mind around the concept of this being an actual city. “I mean, how did they farm and grow food? How did they function day to day, drawing water and not seeing daylight? I don’t understand how this could ever be a functioning society.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t,” Vic mused, his words muffled by his mask. “At least not in the way we expect societies to function?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe it was only ever a place of worship? Somewhere the faithful made a pilgrimage to, not somewhere they stayed?”

  “Or maybe those magic stones Rask has us looking for actually work?” the Russian said. “Wasn’t one supposed to make sure no one went hungry?”

  Rye shook his head. “Not quite. It was supposed to stave off natural disasters, like famine, not create food.”

  “Same difference,” the Russian said, unconvinced. “Whichever way you cut it, it sounds like a fairy tale. Magical stones don’t stop hungry people from starving or translate for demons.”

  “Unless they’re not magical stones in the way we think of them.” Again the big man offered a contradiction. Vic said, “It would explain the vegetation here if there was some sort of nourishment to be found in the earth. It doesn’t have to be magical, purely mineral.”

  “But the smell? It reeks,” Carter said.

  Vic didn’t argue with that.

  Instead, he walked past Rye and down the long descent to the viaduct that spanned the gulf between them and the temple.

  Rye followed him down.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  Rye scrambled down behind the others, cradling his damaged hand to his chest. The injury made the descent far more demanding that it might otherwise have been, but he made it, constantly scuffing his heels and dragging his feet to stop himself from plunging down the steep decline at a full run.

  It quickly became obvious that there was a symmetry to Shambhala, with buildings and monuments matched and replicated again and again to create an eight-sided pattern, like a lotus blossom, with the incredible temple at its heart.

  The stench thickened as they reached the viaduct.

  It was already eye-wateringly sharp as they started across its span, and it only got worse the deeper into the incredible city they ventured.

  It didn’t smell like a pure land or spiritual kingdom.

  The reek gradually thickened until it became a choking miasma, and with no breeze to circulate the dead air it wasn’t about to get better.

  Rye walked with his good hand to his mouth and nose as they ventured deeper into the ruins.

  Every once in a while he stopped to peer in through the black slashes of shadow that were the windows, but saw nothing inside.

  It was unnerving.

  It wasn’t like Pompeii, where life had ended in the time it took for hot toxic gases to spill from the volcanic eruption, but there was something equally desolate about peering into those empty rooms and seeing only dust.

  Rye caught himself stopping midstep several times trying to hear some hint of life hidden away behind the walls, because no matter how deserted the streets appeared, he couldn’t shake the feeling they weren’t alone down there.

  He couldn’t say why, but crossing certain terraces as they made their way to the temple had his skin prickling, and more than once a chill to the stale air made his flesh creep, but every time he turned back or looked around, hoping to catch out their follower, there was no one to be seen.

  “I’m not going crazy, am I?” he whispered to Carter as they traversed a narrow span of a stone footbridge. Beneath them he saw only shades of black. “We are being watched, aren’t we?”

  “The old Spidey sense has been tingling pretty much since we got down here,” the thief agreed. “This place is off. There’s something really weird about it. Weirder than just being a lost city weird, too.”

  Rye wasn’t about to argue with him. That was exactly how he felt. It was an incredible place, no doubting that, but it was wrong on some fundamental level, and the all-pervasive stench of death just reinforced that.

  They walked on.

  Rye crouched to pick off some of the lichen from the stone wall and run it through the fingertips of his good hand. They came away smeared with green stains as it powdered. The stuff itself felt just as wrong as the rest of the place, unlike the fluffy moss he was used to back home. It was thicker and denser in consistency, almost like creamed mushroom as it smeared across his fingers.

  Rye rose slowly, and in that moment heard what sounded like a single stone skitter off the edge of one of the many terraces and fall away into the gaping chasm beneath them.

  The sound echoed from everywhere and nowhere at once, making it impossible to place.

  He touched his ear as though to say: Did you hear that?

  The others all nodded.

  He furrowed his brow pointedly, meaning: Was that one of you?

  This time it was shaking heads.

  They kept walking, but with a heightened sense of awareness, listening for the slightest sound out there, even the soft scuff of a shoe’s sole on the stone or the whisper of fabric as arms brushed against sides. But the abandoned city was suffocated beneath absolute silence.

  Rye trailed his fingers across the stone beside him, lingering on the arch of the footbridge a few seconds longer than need be, listening for some fresh telltale proof they were not alone.

  Nothing.

  The silence now was somehow worse for knowing that none of them had dislodged that stone.

  His breathing came deep and slow, but the skin at the nape of his neck was clammy with sweat, belying his calm. He was rattled. He clenched his good hand into a fist.

  The smell of death was all the more potent on the far side of the footbridge. Something huge had died down here, surely? It couldn’t just be some snow leopard that had crawled into the caves to die. That kind of decomposition couldn’t have owned such an immense space.

  So, what could? That was a question he didn’t want to know the answer to.

  Rye caught himself digging his nails into the palm of his good hand and forced himself to stop.

  Up ahead, the iconic shape of the temple loomed, seven stories high, each one smaller than the one below, until the final levels rose into a tower. The pinnacle still fell some way short of the cavernous ceiling of rock, no matter how it clawed its way up, up, up.

  The lichen, he realized, gave off a soft phosphorescence, adding to the unreal light of the place, which went a long way toward making it feel haunted.

  Rye cradled his burned hand again, not wanting to think about how he was meant to make the ascent back to the surface with only one good hand to haul himself up.

  On either side of the next terrace stood twin statues of an eight-armed elephant god. The stone gods kept vigilant watch over the dead city, but if they were meant to be protecting it, they’d obviously failed in t
heir duty, because there was nothing left to loot. As he got close enough, Rye saw different weapons in each of the god’s hands. There was no mistaking this for some peaceful deity. It was a declaration of strength, or had been, once upon a time. The stone around the base of the statues was thick with the same bilious green lichen that grew everywhere else.

  Ten steps ahead, the thief picked up a stone the size of his fist. He walked to the edge of the terrace, leaned out over the side and dropped it.

  Rye listened for the shatter of impact, which took an alarming time to echo back up to them, so much louder than it ought to have been.

  “Well, that’s gone and woken the Balrog up,” Carter said, grinning at him as if that were a good thing.

  “I wouldn’t be so quick to laugh if I were you,” Vic offered, his voice pitched softly in the resumed silence. “We are walking through the streets of a place that may well be the foundation for our understanding of Hell. Why shouldn’t we encounter demons here?”

  “Thanks for that, big guy,” Carter said, shaking his head. “Way to creep me the fuck out. I was just having a laugh.”

  It took another quarter of an hour to reach the temple in the heart of the lotus blossom of terraces, balconies, and viaducts, climbing hundreds of stairs, both up and down, to get there.

  The lichen thickened around them as the stench intensified, causing Rye to wonder if there could be some sort of connection between the two.

  The door of the temple echoed the design he’d first seen at the monkey temple in Kathmandu. Similar, but with a few marked differences, notably the way the three spheres of the Jing, Chi, and Shen made up the base and the archway, with the licks of flames intricately carved into the stone. Again, he couldn’t help but touch the wall as he crossed the threshold. It was almost like a superstition now.

  The interior was decorated with the same faded colors they’d seen up in the cavern of the crystal tree and replicated on the walls during their descent. Like those other temples he’d seen, there was a central prayer wheel that dominated the chamber as well as dozens of smaller drums that lined the room around it, but it was different than those others, and not merely because of its immense size.

  Carter couldn’t help himself.

  He walked across the temple floor and spun three of the discs of the small copper prayer wheels. The wheels rattled on fossilized wooden supports as they turned, the sound echoing back into the vast under-mountain sky of Shambhala and telling the world where they were.

  “I don’t see any magical stones,” he said, giving voice to Rye’s thoughts.

  He looked up, thinking that perhaps the fragment of the Cintāmani stone was in one of the floors farther up inside the tower, but the construction of the building was entirely hollow. There were no more rooms up there, just the big empty vault.

  Carter approached the huge main copper drum and placed both of his hands on either side of the prayer wheel—and recoiled as a charge shocked through him. It was considerably more powerful than the shock the sigil had delivered. He looked down at his hands as though he couldn’t quite grasp how the drum had sent current pulsing through them, and like a curious drunk had to put them back on the copper drum again. This time he didn’t recoil, but it was obvious some sort of current still surged through the surface into him, though, because his hair slowly rose up to stand on end.

  Carter grinned at the others, and before Vic could tell him to grow up, gave the drum one massive heave to send it spinning.

  It didn’t move in the way Rye expected. Only one section rotated, clicking loudly as it did, like a combination lock cycling through its teeth until it fell on the open tumbler and stopped turning.

  Rye went to examine the cylinder, which dwarfed him. It was easily six feet taller than he was, and what he saw in the beam of his head flashlight was quite unlike any prayer wheel he’d encountered thus far. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of corrosion-like dots and indentations pitting the surface. He could just about make out the shadow lines that marked the seven segments that made up the rings of the drum. They were like a stack of huge donuts one atop another. The seven segments of the pillar, he quickly realized, were capable of independent movement, meaning they could be aligned in any number of combinations like a massive lock mechanism. There were several concentric rings embossed on the surface that, when viewed from a certain angle, looked like “A star map,” Rye said, recognizing one of the constellations in the metal drum.

  He stepped back, and told Carter, “Do that again.”

  Rye counted the clicks as the drum cycled slowly through a full revolution, losing count close to twenty-five.

  With seven separate rings to the drum, each with at least twenty-five possible tumblers to fall into place, they were looking at one complex combination lock if they couldn’t solve the puzzle of the star chart embossed into it. With millions of possible arrangements, it wasn’t as if they could simply stand there and work their way through all of the permutations, either.

  “Let me see,” Vic demanded, moving closer to the drum. He turned a couple of the rings slowly one way then the other, studying the patterns in the metal as though he saw something familiar in them. “I’ve seen this before,” he said after a moment, tracing his fingers over one of the constellations. “So have you,” he told Rye. “In Guérin’s chateau.”

  Rye nodded.

  Vic stripped his pack off his back and rooted around in it for the page Rye had found from the stack of maps they’d found there, and less than a minute later was looking at the drawing labeled LA-MA that they’d stolen from Sébastien Guérin’s study. Vic smoothed it out on the floor and hunched over it with his flashlight, offering them all a decent look at the strange constellations on the perimeter of the page. “It’s the same,” Iskra agreed, pointing out several similarities on the front of the drum against those marked on the drawing. It was the same drum that Guérin had drawn, right down to the thousands of tiny indentations representing unknown star systems.

  “It has to be some sort of combination,” he said.

  “Let’s hope we’re looking at the combination,” the thief said, already moving to match one of the lower drums up against its position in the drawing.

  But even with the combination to guide them it took longer than they could have expected to align the seven rings.

  “I wonder if there is a significance behind the seven rings,” the Russian mused. “Seven deadly sins, seven heavens, seven classical planets, seven colors in the rainbow, seven seas, seven continents.”

  “Seven was a god number in ancient Egypt,” Vic said. “They wouldn’t write it out in many cases, so why wouldn’t the number be significant here?”

  “Turn the top one to the right,” Rye said. “Slowly. A little more.… More.” He kept his eye on the drum as Carter manipulated it, until the indentations matched the alignment on the drawing perfectly, and the deep satisfying click as the hidden tumblers fell into place a final time. “Stop!” He nodded to himself, checking the pattern on the drum against the pattern on the paper. It aligned perfectly.

  The second and third rings of the drum locked into place fairly quickly, but with the creases from the folded drawing smudging the ink on the paper, and the shadows cast by the flashlights making it difficult to see all of the indentations properly, the others were more difficult to line up.

  They worked slowly and methodically through them.

  The only indentations in the last cylinder appeared to be some sort of ring galaxy with an oversized rust-colored nucleus at its core.

  Vic and Carter manipulated the rings while Rye talked them through the minute permutations the drum offered.

  Iskra ventured outside, watching their backs.

  “Again,” Rye said. “It’s off. It needs to come around about half an inch.”

  Carter worked the ring, feeling the charge sing through his hands as he did, before the final stars of the Lindsay-Shapley Ring galaxy fell into place and he felt the drum begin to
vibrate beneath his hands.

  “What’s happening?” Carter asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Rye put down the drawing and put his hands on the drum as it began to emit a high-pitched whine.

  He felt it shift beneath his hands.

  Rye jumped back as the drum opened, again like a lotus blossom, each of the eight petals lowering to create a metal flower on the ground in the heart of the lost temple.

  Rye stared at it, not sure what he was looking at.

  There was a copper dais in the center.

  It looked like the seed pod of the flower.

  “What is that?” Carter asked this time.

  “I still don’t know,” he said, doing his best to mask his exasperation as he moved closer to investigate.

  “Can you see the stone?”

  Which of course was what he’d thought they’d find if they cracked the metal drum’s cypher.

  He shook his head.

  “No. There’s something,” he said, edging forward closer still. “But it’s not the stone.” He saw the same pattern of Jing, Chi, and Shen engraved in the heart of the lotus, but it looked different this time.

  Without thinking, Rye stepped onto the dais and knelt to get a better look at the engraving.

  As he put his weight on the metal, a soft click echoed out, like a landmine being primed, and the petals of the lotus sprung back, closing in around him like a copper Venus flytrap, plunging him into darkness.

  And then he fell.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Rye landed badly, taking the full impact on his damaged hand as he instinctively reached out to break his fall.

  Black agony lanced from his hand the length of his forearm, causing it to buckle at the elbow.

  Rye pitched forward.

  His face hit the ground.

  He lay there for a moment in the darkness.

  The flashlight bulb must have broken in the fall.

  His surroundings were pitch-black.

  He had nothing to change that.

  Rye crawled forward on his hands and knees, conscious that one of the others could come plummeting down the shaft at any moment. He didn’t want to be lying there to break their fall.