“You’re crazy, Erik.”
Erik looked at the author of this statement – George, his good, old friend of too many decades to be kind towards him – with an expression of disdain for his pedestrian views. “’Course.”
“No, no, more than usual I mean. You’re not just a loony, you’re not even using common sense anymore.”
Erik busied himself with buckling and rebuckling the elaborately sealed and insulated snowsuit he was wearing and checking all of its some hundred pockets with speed approaching a cobra’s. A small, well-sealed cylinder was tucked into the deepest of them – which, to all appearances, it was much too large to fit into. “Sure I am.”
“No you’re not.”
“Am so.”
“Cut it out. You’re heading for a summit climb on the most dangerous peak on the planet, you’re doing it solo, you’re doing it without any ropes or anything, and you’re doing it because you’re mentally ill and I should’ve taken the advice of all your old girlfriends and locked you in an asylum and thrown away the key.”
“You never listened to them before.”
“Only because they were barmier than you were,” George admitted. “Look, just give it up, eh? Take a guide. Or something.”
“There are no guides – no one’s been up there before and come down alive but me, remember?”
“Half-way. At best!”
“Trifles. And the ropes and pulleys and all that jazz would just slow me down. The only time I’ve ever used them was when I climbed Olympus, remember? Fierce winds up there. This is old hat.”
“That was because you bet Zeus that he couldn’t blow you off partway up.”
“See? Nothing to it.”
“Erik, you lost the bet.”
“Only on a technicality. I still made the summit. Eventually.”
George took a deep breath – as deep as possible for a very large and annoyed Newfoundlander. Erik had never been a cat person, to his tutor’s irritation. “No appreciation for the classic familiar,” she said. Well fie on her too, the bitter ol’ hedge-witch. There’s a reason theyre called man’s best friend.
“The point I’m trying to make,” said George, “is that at least every other time you knew what you were getting into. You’ve climbed a lot of places, you’ve done it in a lot of ways no one’d ever thought possible –”
“Please, I’m blushing.”
“Shut up. But you’ve never climbed something like this before.”
“Yes I have. Twice.”
“Half-way. Just swallow your pride and use some assets beyond those antiques. Sentimental value or no, you’re going to need a lot more than your basic kit.”
“Swallow my pride? I’d choke in a flash. And besides,” – and here Erik grinned very alarmingly – “these aren’t antiques. Antiques don’t do anything.” He stamped his boots three times and headed for the tentflap.
“Damned psychotic,” said George, tail wagging a monomolecular amount entirely against his will. “I’ll keep your dinner ready.”
“Doubting, dreary, dour Thomas,” said Erik with a happy wave, and he was off into the teeth of a blizzard that could eat cities.
It was the middle of July, comfortably in the midst of Antarctica’s sunless, cheerless winter. The only living things for miles and miles were him, George, and the unidentified little bird that was probably a petrel that had just shat on him. The temperature was cold enough to crack rocks, the wind was low, bitter, and alone, and all these things meant it was time for Erik to go and try to climb the Missing Mountain, which wasn’t.
It was a very strange mountain, and this was by the standards of Erik, who had climbed the slopes of Atlantis, Mount Olympus, the ruined stub of the Tower of Babel, Yggdrasil, and Mt Fuji (three times in one day, just to see what would happen – he’d still rather not talk about it).
Most of the year, it fulfilled its name. But on a few special weeks, right in the belly of Antarctica’s winter, it rose out and up out of time and mind and the ice itself, slinking back into place like a cat that had just fallen over and was trying to pretend that reality didn’t work like that. There were a few other mountains that normally filled the small depression it sat in, but they always seemed to slide away just before it could pop up, never when you were paying attention.
There it was. It was a bunch of thousands of feet tall, a couple million tons or something, and made of rock that wasn’t quite like any other on the planet. Erik had grudgingly chipped off a small piece for George to take a look at during his previous ascent and had been forced to restrain it at least eight times before it would consent to analysis. The comparative sample of limestone he’d placed next to it had gone missing after he took a break for coffee, and he had a sneaking suspicion it had been eaten. In any case, the whole experiment had been botched after he realized that every note he attempted to make on the rock was forestalled by his pencil breaking, his pen running dry, his computer freezing, or a violent sneezing fit.
None of that was important anyways. Erik wasn’t there to study the thing, he was there to climb it. Third time’s the charm, after all. He braced himself, put his best foot forwards on the slope (his left), fought off a brief wave of transdimensional disruption that threatened to tear him into four separate schizophrenics, gave the finger to the still-circling petrel, and up he went.
The first few hundred feet were easy, a veritable vertical stroll in the park. He ambled freely through small dips and valleys, each filled with conical, unpleasant things that were almost trees but not really, and just barely not ice. Eyes stared out at him from their insides now and again, but he ignored them. Whatever it was had been frozen dead for a few million years at minimum, and if it hadn’t bothered to move yet he doubted it would now. He wasn’t that tasty-looking.
Ah, and the easy trek was over, up came the cliff face, sheer and grim. The wind played strange tunes upon its peculiarly fluted hollows, making sounds somewhere between an angry cassowary, a mating antenna, and a frightened mist. For three heart-stopping seconds Erik nearly paid attention to it, and the air looked like lime and tasted like purple. It was only with the greatest of efforts and the most vividly pornographic of his memories that he managed to distract himself long enough to slip in a pair of beeswax ear plugs, dropping the cliff’s whispering down to a bare murmur in the back of his head that registered only as an abstract announcement of unwelcomeness.
“Charming,” he grumbled to himself. He set himself to attaching his crampons – huge, ugly things cobbled out of blackened metal he’d scavenged, shattered, from an old, old gate in a deep, deep cave somewhere or other. They’d broken several of George’s diamond sampling drills, so he figured they were pretty solid.
Erik’s pitons, now, they were a little less obscure in origin to him. Just little pieces of ice from Niflheim, sheathed lightly in very cold iron and stashed in a favourite thermos of his. He never touched them without at least two layers of comfortably thick gloves – just one left him slightly chilly, and bare-handed he could lose fingers.
He slid one of them against the angrily mumbling stone and selected his hammer. It was from some hardware store and had been selected both for its relative cheapness and its attractive red handle. He’d had to replace the stainless steel hammerhead with an extremely old and durable rock made by some towering Paleolithic genius or another, of course, but it was still the same hammer in principle.
Whack, whack. Check the strength. Oh good, it’s safe. Up we go, careful on the footing. Whack, whack. Theeeereeee we are. Whack, whack. Up and up and up and up we go. Step lively now – those ice splinters melt about five minutes after exposure to air without leaving so much as a nick on the stone (Erik had been an early proponent of clean climbing). Yes, they reappear inside the thermos, but do you want to be standing on one when it goes?
Up and still up. Those peculiar cones looked awfully small from all the way up here, and the mountain above still seemed pretty big. The wall sloped into a pettily vicious little overhang for some distance, giving Erik a wonderful five minutes spent hanging by his fingers and toes and distracting himself by counting to prime numbers whenever he started thinking about exactly what he was doing.
At last he breached the cliff face and came face to face with greener pastures. He wasn’t quite sure what had coloured the rock here that way, but it had left it startling translucent: he could see right inside the mountain’s skin for scores of feet before opacity set in. The complete skeleton of something five times the size of an elephant and eighty times as malevolent leered at him with toothy suggestiveness, giving him stark flashbacks to his third honeymoon. Shuddering, he pressed on, eyes passing over bones upon bones, jumbled and whole, some that schoolchildren could name like clockwork and some that would’ve baffled a paleontologist of forty years or more. Occasionally, one breached the sanctity of its jade-tinted cell by some degree or another, and at least four times he was strangely pleased to find himself using some exposed leg or another as a climbing grip. The last of these was an enormous claw, which attempted to grab him and succeeded in claiming a chunk of his pants.
“Sloppy,” he scolded himself, inches away from the waving, quartz-tipped claws. “Sloppy.” Strange that it hadn’t happened on either of his prior attempts. Maybe it had been asleep.
He left the fossils behind in body and mind – with the exception of his chilly right leg – and pressed upwards. Another pause in the cliffs came, this time a veritable plateau, a strange little glacial valley cloven into the mountainside.
Erik looked to his left. Sheer, sheer, sheerest wall. He looked to his right. A cliff that rivaled glass in pure slickness. He looked forwards. A strange and mysterious city the likes of which no man had seen and lived. Except him, so far.
Forwards, of course. It looked interesting. Especially since this was where all his memories of previous attempts faded out and vanished up until the hospital bed.
The first thing Erik noticed was that the shadows were all wrong. As soon as his foot passed the gigantic, spiked column that marked the city’s borders, every sense of proportion that involved darkness and light seemed to be off by an amount just fractionally tinier than measurable. To compound this, all of it seemed to be made out of the oddly shaped whisperstone from the mountain’s base. How they’d lugged it all the way up here was something he wasn’t sure he could guess. And to top it all off, he kept moving in circles and finding himself back at where he’d just been ten minutes ago. Including when he sat down to take a break.
Erik’s compass was old and beaten and consisted of a crude tin cup that a chip of rock was dropped into. It worked best filled with water, but ice worked in a pinch. A quick shake, rattle and roll told him that north was that way, up was that other way, his house was over there, George was still in his tent, the next time he would taste waffles was either in two weeks or never depending on whether or not he lived that long, and that to get himself out of the mess he was in would require shimmying up one of the buildings and jumping off.
He frowned at the last instruction, but accepted it. If his compass wanted him dead, it’d had plenty of other opportunities to kill him with less fuss and drama. That didn’t comfort him as he hugged close to the leaning, geometrically dubious frame of a hundred-foot, three-story tower not built by human hands, but it provided the illusion of hope, which was nearly as good. He closed his eyes, counted to seven, jumped in a somersault, and landed knee-deep in a snowdrift overlooking the softly-glistening city from a far-above ledge.
“Hah!” he proclaimed triumphantly, then fell into a pit.
The pit wasn’t nearly as deep a drop as the tower-dive had promised to be, but it made up for it in surprise value. Erik brushed himself off with a few brisk and businesslike curses, gathered his wits, set on his way, and immediately fell into the much deeper and even more surprising shaft one footstep away, which had been beautifully covered with an inch-thick snow lattice. Frantic and instinctive use of his ice axe – a cobbled-together thing made from mammoth ivory and ash – left him dangling above a drop that was anywhere from two hundred to infinity in depth. Somewhere far beneath his gently-waving boots, something that he could only hope was merely an unspeakable, sightless horror gurgled, producing a lovely and obscene echo that reminded him of opera.
Climbing out was the work of five minutes: two to clamber and three to convince his body to move instead of put down terror-induced roots. His feet – ever-treacherous bastards – had led the revolt. From there a moment’s illumination showed his options: climb back up to his original entrance point, which appear to be an entirely blank, featureless ceiling with no exit whatsoever, or take an ominous and stalactite-mawed tunnel. Reassuring himself that he was only playing along and that in spirit he was rebelling against this, Erik took the tunnel.
It went up, reassuringly. Well, and a little bit down. Very little. Half-masked things glowed just past the edges of the walls in pockets chipped in the rock by strange drills and stranger claws. There were hieroglyphs that had ceased to be petroglyphs and now hung about an eighth of an inch off the stone they were carved into, ceremoniously describing the end times or idly discussing the sexual prolectivities of the foreman, depending on their status as holy text or graffiti, which Erik was unable to determine. The one with the fish eating a second fish that was eating the first fish that was eating a third, completely different fish was a real eyeball-twister though.
At some point or another the walls were switched from bare rock to fitted stone. To be more specific, poorly-fitted stone. Not a single slab lay square with any other, producing an odd, jointed sort of tunnel like a suit of knight’s armour made by a blacksmith with rheumatism, rickets, and a habit of nervous twitching under pressure. To make matters odder faint wind came through the cracks, as if they weren’t overlaid on rock but empty space.
Erik thought about this, then about the pit that had been opened under his feet. He wondered if, given that the mountain was somewhere else than Antarctica for four-fifths of the year, it was technically possible that it was not even sitting on Antarctica right now and was just pretending to. Then he wondered what it was that was sitting on. Then he began loudly singing old Disney songs to force his brain to shut the hell up.
The aimless, empty little frilly tunes squeezed out through the cracks above, below, and beyond, echoing out for possibly forever. The sound that leaked back at him from all sides was technically music in the same way that a Deinonychus was technically a bird, and he stopped singing.
The sound wouldn’t go away. His head tingled, and possibly wasn’t there.
Too long later, there were footsteps behind him. Very small ones, quick and fast and light, narrow and too thin to be his, or to anyone with proper feet.
Oh damnit.
He broke into a run, a sliding dive. The slabs whistled and groaned under his clutching toes as he hurried, cursing him out and drawing a bright-burning beacon to his location. An intersection-that-wasn’t appeared (one path crumbled and crushed, the other with no floor and no ceiling) and he cursed, for the eightieth thousand time in his life, his species’ lack of wings.
His pursuer called out something in a rattling voice, a complicated, wobbling cry rising from what sounded like a musical instrument stabbed through a lump of meat.
He ran faster. The footsteps neared with almost casual inevitability. Crying through all of his eyes, he dropped to fours and began to gallop, tearing the sensitive skin on his hands away and making him hiss.
Slap-slap-trip-trap-slap-smack-footsteps. He dropped to all sixes and began to slide on his belly, grasping all sides of the corridor at once and bobsledding his way down, gills flaring at the harsh intake of the air.
The footsteps dropped away, and for one brief, pure moment he knew exultation before he ran nosefirst into a stone in the corridor that was precisely one inch above its fellows, flipping him halfway through a somersault, most of the way into a cartwheel, and one hundred percent into the floor. From under the tangled nest of his limbs he saw his pursuer overtake him – a hideous, bipedal thing, coated in layers and layers of screamingly wrong colours – and then he was Erik again, in a very small cave, facing the sunlight with a black tunnel behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw a single, upraised stone with a smear of goo on it that wasn’t a colour he could recognize in this particular spectrum.
“Well,” he said to himself. “It’s a good thing I’m a fast runner.” His legs hurt, and he didn’t want to guess at what would’ve happened if he’d managed to make it all the way out of the halls ahead of his body. Maybe he would’ve never stopped running. Or maybe he would’ve just woken up in a hospital bed with George yelling at him again and no clue what had happened. That might’ve been more irritating.
A cautious poking of Erik’s head outwards from the cave revealed two rather surprising facts: first, he was nearly at the top of the peak; second, there was a very astonished face inside the snow storm watching him. Before he could even get as far as species, never mind details, it had vanished.
“Screw you,” said Erik, on general principle. It made him feel better.
The final climb was interesting. There was no rock, only ice. Really good ice too, the kind that even his Niflheim pitons squeaked against and his crampons moaned on. His ice axe screeched in protest with each hold it cut, his gloves audibly sizzled as they freeze-dried themselves against their chiseled grips, and only his hammer remained stolidly uncomplaining as it bonked in piton after piton. It had been made by someone who figured that rocks lasted forever in the brief moments before he had realized what his own project’s completion implied, and that brief moment, especially as rare as it was nowadays, held a lot of power. Nobody had ever really believed in permanency that purely since average brain size had topped 600 cubic centimeters. It would probably outlast Mount Rushmore, and possibly even the contents of Erik’s fridge, assuming that the bindings placed on its locks stayed potent enough to keep it shut and the mountain he’d placed above it wasn’t removed unexpectedly.
Erik was keeping such a careful eye on his equipment because it was being continually coated with sleet that stuck like cathair, which he had to remove while clinging to the rock with all available limbs in a wind that wanted to pluck him like a chicken.
“I can do this,” he pronounced, and immediately had the equivalent of at least four slushballs rammed down his throat. I can do this, he repeated more internally. I scaled Mount Olympus with Zeus chucking every wind he could dig out of the bottom of his sock drawer at me, even if he was drunk enough to aim left half the time.
Of course, I did have ropes.
Goddamnit George, this is exactly why it’s hard for us to be friends.
Whack, whack, smack, crack, whoops there goes a handhold, whoops a foothold, there’s the other, dangle by your left hand for a minute or two and then get yourself sorted out, spit in the eye of the blizzard (hah, didn’t expect that – he flinched, cyclopean bastard) and haul yourself up like your tail’s on fire. Then Erik’s hands felt solid rock and the wail of the snowstorm dropped away behind him, defeated, furious, and despairing.
He looked up. There it was, a bodylength away and maybe ten feet around. A tiny, narrow peak, a perfect tapering point of an almost perfectly conical profile. He vaguely remembered why he’d been disappointed to learn that the Missing Mountain was already named in some long-dead book or another: he’d wanted to call it the Murderhorn.
Erik got to his feet. Then hobbled one step, and another step. He pulled loose a small and well-protected cylinder from the depths of his jacket’s deepest pocket (wincing against frostbite), which was still much too large to fit in there. It twisted open under his hands, into an elegant, serviceable flag, firm of pole, pointed-tipped, topped with the national banner of someplace no one knew about anymore. It was so perfectly balanced that it could’ve been used to win an Olympic javelin throw, and had on four separate occasions over the past nine hundred years.
He raised his arm in anticipation, allowing – to his pride – only the faintest suggestion of a wobble.
A small, vaguely familiar shape bobbed out of the wind and settled neatly on the peak ten feet ahead of him. It was probably some sort of petrel.
There was a very long moment. It stared innocently at Erik.
Despite his best effort, he was no javelin thrower, and missed by about a meter.