Tim Powers - Declare

At least she didn’t look up and see me, that afternoon at the Normandy bar, he thought now, bitterly. At least she didn’t see me. That’s warming consolation to take with me to…to “the house whence no one issues.”

At least the Babylonian myths hadn’t said anything about it being cold there! The tightness in his chest, a feeling like the useless urge to breathe underwater against a resolutely closed throat, was stronger.

He had been daydreaming, and he only realized that he had passed the crest of the glacier and was now plodding through calf-deep snow on the lee side when a hard yank at the waist of his harness webbing snapped his head back and pulled him forward off his feet; he jerked his head back down and saw that he was falling toward snow, but the snow surface was breaking up in chunks and tumbling away below him into deep shadow, and the rope was a tight line slanting steeply down.

Hale landed with his knees on snow-padded ice but his chest out across the rope, over a black abyss; and an instant later his hands had clamped like vises onto the rope’s taut length. He was hanging over the pit of a bottomless-looking crevasse, and he was stable as long as he didn’t move: he was a downward-pointing triangle, with his solidly braced knees being the two secure points of it. He had hit the rope with his face, and his snow-goggles had been knocked down over his chin-his eyes were stinging in the sudden cold.

From behind him he could hear a rapid metallic hammering, and from far away ahead, on the other side of the abyss, he could hear Mammalian shouting English words at him; but most of Hale’s weight was on the rope, and he was squinting straight down into the darkness, watching the diminishing fragments of white snowpack fade into the black.

Hale didn’t breathe, or think. Coils of intenser blackness were moving, far away down there, like gleams of reflected absence-of-light on vast shoulders and ribs and thighs. The mountain wasn’t tall enough to encompass the downward distance Hale’s gaze seemed to be plumbing-he must be looking down into the heart of the earth. He became aware of two spots of a blackness so absolute that he had to look away, dazzled, fearing that he would blind himself by staring straight into them; and then he was glad that he had looked away, and he clung even more tightly to the quivering rope, for he realized that the two astronomically distant orbs of blackness were eyes.

Wisps of radiant vapor flicked up past his face, but he knew they indicated no heat below-he guessed they were simply the chunks of ice and snow that had fallen in, twisted by tidal forces until their very molecules had been wrung apart and the atoms dispelled in all directions.

Hale’s own eyes were blinded by frozen tears. Even though he was not looking down into the pit, he could feel the attention of the thing down there stretching his identity.

What was down there would unmake him, though afterward the stuff that had been him would fly away into the sky here, into the upper air, perhaps to trouble radio broadcasts with idiot recitations of nursery rhymes.

Pot’s right, no more bets, showdown.

The Destroyer of Delights, the Sunderer of Companies, “he who layeth waste the palaces and peopleth the tombs”-call it Death, call it the Devil who had brought Death to Adam and Eve. I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself. He would never be found, if he hid here. He needn’t fire the derringer at all.

Lay down your losing hand, he told himself, and forfeit everything.

A line from Rupert Brooke echoed in his head: And I should sleep, and I should sleep. How much longer could he have been expected to keep on being Andrew Hale, alone?

It would be easy to free himself from the rope and plummet down to what waited; and in this vertiginous instant it seemed to be inevitable. I’ve lost my father, I’ve lost Elena-I can save Theodora the trouble of verifying me, and lose myself, at last. Already one of his hands, without his volition, had shucked its mitten and crawled to his waist, and was clutching the carabiner snap-ring. One squeeze of the spring-loaded gate, and then all he would have to do would be shift his weight to one side or the other.

He had been aware of Mammalian’s voice shouting at him, as if from the other side of the sky, but now he heard a phrase- for God’s sake, man!

And it seemed as if he could hear him because Hale had surfaced from deep, cold water. His throat could now open at last in surrender to the insistence of his lungs, and he was breathing in great gasps while his lips formed unvoiced syllables; and when he made himself listen to what he was saying, he heard, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done…

Hale strained to raise his head, blinking and squinting to see around the frozen tears. He was just able to lift his head high enough to make out Mammalian, sitting twenty feet away in the snow on the far side of the fissure. “What?” shouted Hale to him, in a rusty voice.

“Do you want to live, or die? Please be honest.”

One more bet, after all. Double or nothing.

Hale bared his teeth at him before letting his head drop back down. “To live, Hakob.” He could feel that his innermost shirt was slick with sweat.

“Then go ahead and unsnap your harness,” Mammalian called to him patiently, “but then grab the line again, and crawl backward.”

Hale’s hand was already on the carabiner, and now he squeezed the gate and freed himself from the link lashed to the rope; instantly his hand was back on the rope, and with infinite care he pushed himself backward, feeling his knees slide back up the slope behind him, inch by inch, until the edge of the ice crevasse was under the heels of his hands and he was able to crawl back across the glacier surface on all fours.

Then strong hands had grabbed him under the arms and pulled him back up the slope. He saw the shaft of an ice-axe standing up from the snow, and the taut uphill length of the rope was looped around it and then moored to a piton that had been hammered into the ice a yard away-clearly the Spetsnaz behind him had managed to use the axe as an anchor, and had then protected the mooring with the piton. Several of the commandos were on this side of the crevasse now, and Hale could see by their tracks in the snow that they had freed themselves from the lead section of the rope and walked around the uphill side of the hole.

Their faces were snow-dusted white masks below the crusted lenses of the snow-goggles, no more human-looking than their steel and nylon equipment, and Hale quickly pulled his own goggles up into place to hide behind a similar mask.

The rope was still bent sharply into the hole-Philby was hanging at the low point in the middle, and he was upside-down. All Hale could see of him was the baggy knees of his white climbing pants.

A new rope had been spliced onto the old one on this side, and now four of the Spetsnaz held it taut while another of them pried up the piton. Then they were slowly feeding the newly extended rope out, hand over hand, while their companions on the far side of the hole pulled the other end in; Philby’s knees began to wobble away, toward where Mammalian sat.

The Spetsnaz who had levered the piton out of the ice now scuffed across the snow to Hale and stared at him through white-powdered snow-goggles. Then he pointed from Hale to himself and waved back along the tracks that led around the crevasse to the other men on the far side. “Hah?”

Hale nodded.

The two of them trudged uphill and along the crest of the glacier for several yards, and then back down to the snowy lee side. The Spetsnaz was leading, and by pointing he conveyed to Hale that they were to follow the already trodden track, presumably to avoid another collapse-which would be fatal, since the two of them were unroped at the moment. Hale nodded to show that he understood, but reflected that the bit of ice that had given way under Philby had already been walked over by ten pairs of boots. Like the Russian ahead of him, Hale walked in a tense crouch, with his ice-axe half-raised in his right hand.