Asura by R P L Johnson

Author:R P L Johnson [Johnson, R P L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-16T22:00:00+00:00

Rebecca McCarthy hauled herself another few feet up the rope. The technique was exhausting—like climbing a twisting rope ladder using only one arm and one leg. McCarthy had always considered herself to be in good physical shape, but hours of exertion in the thin mountain air were proving her wrong. She was exhausted, spent, running on nothing but thin, cold oxygen and adrenaline.

But that was enough.

She looked below her dangling free leg at Rose and Yvonne as they hung, stranded away from the face of the cliff.

What do I do? They didn’t have much time.

Gritting her teeth, she hauled herself up another step. She was almost up to the level of the rock bolt that held her lifeline. She needed to think.

With another lung-bursting effort she brought herself level with the stainless steel rock bolt. Her rope, the thin vector that defined her one dimensional freedom up and down the face of the cliff, looped through and eye and carabiner assembly fixed to the screw.

This was it. This was as far as she was going to get. Now what?

About six feet above her to the left, steel glinted in the middle of a patch of hard-blue ice. It was Rose’s ice screw from which hung the double weight of both Rose and Yvonne. Although the screw was rated for the impact of a falling climber, any fixing was only as good as the material in which it was set and McCarthy could see that the ice around the screw’s bolt-like head was frosted with fine cracks.

Bracing one boot against the cliff to keep from spinning, McCarthy reached out as far as she could.

It was no use. She was at least a metre short. What was she going to do anyway? Hold on to the rope? Tie their lifeline to her own and triple the weight suspended from her anchor?

She looked around for anything that could help. Her gaze traced the route that Yvonne had taken just before she fell: across the face of the mountain and towards—

She saw what had caught Yvonne’s eye. Away to her left further up the cliff was one of the most unusual sights she had ever seen. A pair of icy protuberances flanked a rock ledge. Each was about three metres tall and craggy with wind-sculpted ice. The tremor had shaken some of the ice loose and from the nearest buttress a human head stuck proudly above the cloak of opaque ice that shrouded the rest of its body.

McCarthy had seen similar sights many times during her time in the Hindu Kush: shrines and idols carved out of the bare rock at the side of the road. Ancient waypoints on some long-forgotten pilgrimage trail. But she had never seen one sculpted so exquisitely out of the side of a mountain face thousands of feet above sea level.

The head was larger than life—almost twice life size—but apart from the scale every detail had been captured with photographic accuracy. It was adorned with an ornate piece of

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