I looked up, and for one extremely brief moment I saw an ice-covered ledge jutting out of a massive black wall of forbidding stone. I didn’t have time to take in any further details before friction announced that there was nothing more it could do for me and I began to slide backwards.
I scrabbled in vain for something vaguely holdable. The rock and ice of the mountain had been pummeled into perfect smoothness by millennia of vicious weather cycles. Soon enough I ran out of ledge and my legs swung into empty air in a swarm of disturbed snow.
Time seemed to slow down. This tends to happen in dangerous situations to help the brain think of an escape route, but at that point all I could think of was cartwheeling in slow motion down the mountain, bouncing off every jagged rock along the way until my finely-sandpapered torso finally came to rest in the middle of a snowdrift that I would have to call home for the next five million years.
I was so engrossed by this thought that it took me several moments to notice that I wasn’t falling. Something was holding onto my arm, gripping it fiercely like an extremely poorly-fitting wristwatch.
“Thmmph wmmmph mmmph mmmmmph,” said Thaddeus, my wrist between his teeth.
A long pause followed, aptly filled by the roaring wind.
“Are you going to pull me up, then?” I said.
He shook his head and grumbled at length, his eyes darting around madly. I tried to clench my free hand; it wouldn’t move either. My fingers were a useless bundle of rock-hard blue twigs on the end of my arm. The freezing cold temperatures had made all our undead joints seize up.
“Slippery John saves the day again,” said Slippery John, whose face suddenly moved into view above the ledge. His voice was confident but his blue-cheeked grin seemed a little forced.
He grabbed Thaddeus around the waist and pulled him backwards with surprising strength. My body slid onto a reassuringly horizontal surface. I made to conjure a fireball, but my fingers were frozen into place and unable to make the mandatory waggles.
“Gather round the portal’s after-effect,” advised Slippery John, warming his hands in the glowing magical smear. “Normally Slippery John would suggest sharing bodily warmth but Slippery John doesn’t think you two would contribute much to that.”
The bare amount of warmth emanating from the portal was just enough to separate Thaddeus’s jaws from my arm. Every time I stopped moving one of my muscles for more than a second it started to freeze in place. The cold at this height could have flash-frozen a lava golem.
The phrase “at this height” sparked a few freezing brain cells. Out of some morbid desire to fully acquaint myself with my problems I shuffled around the magical flame until I was near the edge, then carefully peered down.
I very swiftly regretted doing so. We were mesmerizingly high up. Then I realized that what I had thought was snow-covered ground was, in fact, the cloud layer, and I felt the vertigo scuttle all the way up my body from my feet to my head, digging its prickly claws deep.
I turned my back on the drop and looked up. That wasn’t helpful, either. A slight overhang offered meagre shelter, and beyond that a sheer vertical wall of unblemished black rock plunged into the sky for what seemed like infinity. The stars looked thickly clustered as if they’d had to be shifted around to accommodate Murdercruel’s mass.
“Something went wrong!” I announced, huddling close to the glow again. “We’re nowhere near the top!”
Slippery John’s grin was fixed, now. Saliva was crystallizing around his gums. “Chrrr urp. We crn wait ’til Dub crms back to lrrf.”
“No, we can’t!” I yelled. The wind was deafening. “He didn’t finish the spell! It got misaimed! He’ll have no idea where we are! WE don’t know where the hell we are!”
“Thrn we’d brttrr grt clrmbrng.”
I pointed upwards. “We can’t climb this!” I pointed a loosely-hanging frozen hand at Thaddeus. “He’s lost both his arms! And we’re all freezing!”
“The crld shrldn’t be too mrch rf a prrblrm,” he said. “Jrst keep mrving arrnd.”
Thaddeus immediately started jogging on the spot. I broke into a ragged Charleston. “What about the climb?”
“Slrppery Jrn is ahrd of the grrm agrrn.” He wobbled left and right a little before extending his flimsy black sleeves and shaking out a few items that clanged metallically on the ground. Then he immediately re-hunched his shoulders and his arms snapped back around his torso. “Enchrrnted crrrmpons.”
They were rigid black spikes with leather straps, and little streaks of blue light shone off the reflections. I stared at them for a few thoughtful moments, making no motion to pick them up, then turned to Slippery John. “Why do you have enchanted crampons on you?”
“Prrtty standrrd rogue grrr. Slrppry Jrn wrld lrrv to discrss thrm frrthrr but Slrppry Jrn is abrrt tr frrrze tr drrth.” He made a heroic effort and managed to separate his teeth with an eye-watering crack. “Nearest church is on another continent. Slippery John’s ghost is gonna have a bit of a walk after this. This is probably another reason why God wanted yrr blrrks trr trke crrr rrf thrrs.”
He had a point. Besides the fact that our muscles went rock-solid if we stopped gyrating for a few seconds, the cold wasn’t having any lethal effect on me or Thaddeus. But I felt Slippery John was trying to change the subject. “I get that the crampons are standard rogue gear. I just don’t get why you brought two sets, unless you’d planned for . . .”
I stared at him. A few moments passed, silent for the ceaselessly upsetting wind and the tramp-tramp of two undead people jogging on the spot.
“Did you plan for this?” I said finally. Having said that, a few other notions rolled together in my head. “I’ve been following you on and off since all this began. You’re very obviously stupid and incompetent but somehow things have ended up going your way, right?”
His face betrayed nothing but a vacant, slightly baffled smile and a nasty case of frostbite. The heat reserves stored in his mustache were clearly running low.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I cocked my head. “The Deleters only take over the most skilled and noble adventurers. So if you want to survive as an adventurer and avoid the Syndrome you have to put on a façade of incompetence and creepiness when you’re secretly a devious little prick who knows exactly what they’re doing. And that’s you, isn’t it?”
He kept smiling.
I noticed that his eyes had glazed over. Investigatively I tapped him in the forehead. There was a sharp “crack,” a seam appeared in his face, then he toppled backwards and fell off the mountain, disappearing from sight in a puff of water vapor.
“We have wasted enough time,” said Thaddeus, his face steadfastly gazing upwards while the rest of his body from the neck down danced madly on the spot. “Our annihilation awaits.”
I took up a set of enchanted crampons and weighed them in my hands. “Shall we a-climb?”
THREE
Our progress up the mountain face was swift. Once the enchanted crampons were attached to our feet, all we had to do was touch the spikes to the wall and gravity shifted ninety degrees, so a devastatingly hard climb became more like walking slowly and carefully across a flat plain while wearing big high heels. Through some patient hand-jiving, I had finally gotten my fingers loose enough to waggle, and I could conjure the odd fireball to abate the cold, although they didn’t last long. After the first few hundred yards I was pretty sure the air had become unbreathable at some point, but that had never been an issue. All in all, Mount Murdercruel’s fearsome reputation was taking quite a beating.
Thaddeus was slightly ahead of me. He was getting along surprisingly well without arms, only occasionally losing his balance as he walked and faceplanting into the rock. So far we had both been climbing in stoic, determined silence, partly because the wind drowned out most sound, partly because I still didn’t like him very much. I tried to zone out and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. Or rather, above the other. It was confu
sing, but then no-one ever employed magic to make life easier to understand.
The snow was everywhere. It fluttered about like swarms of little white bees. With my feet on the wall and the rest of my body sticking out like a flagpole the flakes gathered in my clothing, nostrils, and under my eyelids. After irritably rubbing it out of my face for the third time, I froze—in surprise, this time. “Hey!” I called. “Wait a minute!”
Thaddeus stopped and glared over his shoulder. The wind and the rock was effectively smoothing the wrinkles out of his face. “Why do you delay us?!” he boomed.
“Look at the snow!”
He frowned. “It has been snowing for some time! This is a mountaintop! It is to be expected!”
“But where’s it coming from?!”
I could see his mouth begin to form the words “the clouds,” and the rest of his face contort into the usual sneer of patronising contempt, but then he glanced over my shoulder and realized the same thing I had—that we had been a considerable distance above the clouds from the moment we’d arrived.
The wind was harsh but not harsh enough to be blowing the snow this far up. I glanced up (or straight ahead), and managed to blink the snow out of my eyes for long enough to take a good look.
The snow was definitely coming from above, but the night sky was completely clear. The stars shone brightly. Weirdly brightly, in fact. They also seemed to be a little more spread out than they’d been from the ledge. This high up in the world there was a disorienting tang of unreality in the air. I didn’t know what to make of any of it.
The snow seemed to be intensifying. The flakes that rushed down towards us were getting bigger. In fact, they were starting to resemble big jagged chunks of ice—
“DOWN!” commanded Thaddeus.
I flung myself to the floor/wall just as a solid mass of impacted snow the size of a brick chimney whooshed past, brushing the few remaining straggly hairs on my head. I tried to look up again, caught a glimpse of more incoming missiles, and quickly flattened myself back down.
“Avalanche?!” I guessed aloud. That didn’t seem right; it was too localized and too vindictive.
“Fear not!” said Thaddeus, crouching a few feet away. “The missiles of the dark ones will not impede our quest!”
“How do you figure that?!”
“Our path is one of righteousness! It is the will of the LORD that our wretched bodies of filth and dirt be destroyed, and—”
His point was immediately illustrated when a particularly large slab of ice struck him right in the face, tearing him from the wall like a poster for something the world no longer liked. The moment both his crampons came away from the rock, plain old regular boring gravity returned for him, and he plunged backwards out of sight.
I gritted my teeth and continued climbing, crawling on all fours, hugging the wall like a child at his mother’s thigh.
The tactic served me pretty well, and being so thin probably didn’t hurt. The big chunks of ice kept shooting past just behind me, upsetting nothing more than the label on the back of my collar. Looking up, I saw a narrow ledge that seemed to be sheltering me from the bombardment. Unfortunately, it was also blocking my view. I leaned back to try and get a better look, whereupon a slab of ice slammed into my shoulder.
Fortunately it was a brittle chunk that shattered wetly on impact, but it took me by surprise. My hands came away from the wall and I was pushed back onto my feet and into full exposure. Another chunk clipped my waist and one of my feet came free, leaving me splayed with three limbs in the air, connected to the wall with a single crampon.
Another cluster was coming right for me. Panic seized my brain like the fist of a farmer’s wife around a chicken’s throat. My hand shot out reflexively— ARCANUSINFERUSTELECHUS —and I sent off a firebolt.
It only deflected one of the missiles, but the force of the blast pushed me back until I was against the wall again,
crab-walking upside down. The rest of the ice fell past harmlessly, doing nothing worse than embedding a few jagged chips into my kneecaps.
I didn’t wait for my heart to ooze sluggishly back into place. Once the current storm of ice had passed I pushed back on the wall as hard as I could, swung my body up and over, slammed heavily onto my face, then scuttled on all fours under the overhang like a cockroach fleeing for the shadows.
No more ice seemed to be falling. All was still—“still” in this case being an extremely relative term, given that it was still as windy as hell and the snow was piling up in my earholes—and the assault seemed to be temporarily over. I carefully placed my hands around the ledge—with the crampons it was like preparing to vault over a short wall—and pulled myself up.
A butterfly knife slammed down into my left hand, pinning it to the rock. My crampons detached with the surprise, normal gravity was restored, and I was dangling by my arms from the highest mountain in the world.
“Or, if the ice doesn’t work, we could just wait for him to climb up here and stab him up,” said Mr. Wonderful, standing over me and twirling a knife in each hand.
An orange temperature-regulating aura shimmered closely around his body, and he was wearing a glass breathing mask hooked up to a leather gasbag on his back, which could only just contain his omnipresent grin. He didn’t have enchanted crampons, so he’d tied a butterfly knife to each of his ankles, one of which was now pinning my hand to the rock.
“What’re you doing here?!” I yelled.
“We’re a little bit upset with you, Jimbo! We give you a lovely thoughtful gift of a tracking Reetle and then you leave it on a dead tosspot at the bottom of a mountain! THAT’S THE SORT OF THING WE MIGHT TAKE PERSONALLY!!”
I’d forgotten to tell Slippery John to get rid of the Reetle. I had only myself to blame, but I blamed him as well for good measure.
Mr. Wonderful’s use of the word “we” gave me cause to look behind him. Bowg was there, too. He was wearing the same breathing equipment, as well as enchanted crampons, so presumably Mr. Wonderful had just preferred to challenge himself.
“So, my little mountain goat,” said Mr. Wonderful, playfully rocking his foot back and forth to twist the knife. “Will you be coming quietly, or will we have to scrape you off the jagged rocks at the bottom?”
“Why?!” I yelled.
Mr. Wonderful idly tapped his foot, further mangling the bone and muscle of my hand. “Well, that’s quite an existential question, isn’t it, Jimbo.”
“Do you know what’s at the top of this mountain?!” I yelled. I had no idea where I was going with this line of conversation, but my usually reliable animal instincts had started it so I was running with it.
“What do we look like, geologists?” said Mr. Wonderful irritably.
“Why do you think no-one’s ever climbed to the top?! Even with aura spells and magic crampons?!” I continued. “This is where they’re hiding it! The center of the Infusion!!”
“Oh, give it a rest,” said Mr. Wonderful, but he seemed to be thinking about it.
“We are prepared to reiterate your options,” said Bowg, quickly. “The opportunity to surrender yourself for transportation back to Lolede and research is still available.”
I tried shifting my grip. Pointless. Even disregarding the knife, the cold was seizing my hands up again. I could just about wiggle the fingers of my unstabbed one. I turned to my animal instincts again, but they shrugged, out of ideas. I was going to have to come up with an actual solution.
“Ar kay,” I said, with difficulty. “Nuh sweat.”
“You will be dissected and interrogated at exhaustive length,” clarified Bowg, apparently confused by my answer.
“In fer a silver piece, in for a gold, that’s what my dad used to say. Just one little thing.”
“State it.”
“Telechus,” I finished, putting all the effort I had left into the finger waggles.
A jet of flame shot across the ledge, rather small and weak, but enough to set Mr. Wonderful’s turn-ups on fire. H
e reacted with a yelp and a reflexive hop, pulling the knife out of my hand.
The only thing that was reliably anchoring me to the ledge was gone. I concentrated as hard as I could, trying to force my hands closed, to no avail. The cold had taken me right back to those first few uncoordinated hours of undeath, an alien in my own body.
I fell.
The ledge and the angry faces of Bowg and Mr. Wonderful slipped away. The mountain wall rolled upwards like a high-speed conveyor belt. Time slowed again, snowflakes holding in the air like glittering diamonds on a sheet of black velvet. The extra thinking time helped me remember that I was wearing magical crampons, and all I had to do was touch them to the wall.
I waved my arms to move closer to the mountain, somersaulting in the air, and kicked my toes into the rock as hard as I could.
Had I actually paid attention in science class rather than spending every lesson drawing breasts and flicking elastic bands at Frobisher, I might have been more familiar with the effects of sudden deceleration. Time slowed down yet again just to give me the chance to fully take in the visceral sight of the crampons staying on the wall while the rest of me kept right on going, leaving behind a torn cloth boot and a dog-eared wooden leg.
I fell, again.
FOUR
Something that felt suspiciously like the ground slammed into my side, pulverizing all my remaining internal organs. I bounced several feet back upwards, then hung in mid-air. When I didn’t come back down I realized that my body hadn’t come with me.
The grim, empty, gray-tinted afterlife might have been a little disheartening, but I was beginning to seriously miss it. Between the snowstorm, the constant flickering and the chittering of the tiny Deleters scuttling across my spirit body, this particular visit to the dead world felt like being trapped in a crowded nightclub during a volcanic eruption.
Through the disorienting madness of sound and visuals I could only barely see where my body was. It was lying in an ugly pile on yet another icy ledge. I’d been fortunate; I hadn’t fallen as far as I’d thought, and was still a good distance above the clouds, insofar as such a distance could be described as “good.”
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