This ongoing work in progress is entirely a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed within are entirely fictional and any resemblance to people, living or dead is coincidental.
No part of the work may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.
Copyright Ion Fyr 2022
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The corpse looked as if it had been freeze dried. The skin was tight around his face, and perhaps a little moldy, but had pulled back from his teeth exposing desiccated gums.
The man wore a heavy coat, that he had crumpled to the floor wearing, and strangely a captain’s hat–not exactly the kind that the Empire’s Admiralty wore, but a fanciful interpretation of it. A bony hand limply held a length of paper, as one pulls from a spool, long and narrow. This Pool gingerly removed from the dead captain’s fingers.
The back of the chamber was the rockface itself. The mountain provided a slight overhang, and into this pitons had been hammered from which to drape the fabric of the great tent.
Along with light-tubes, some glowing and some not, hung electrical wires, dipping lazily from insulator to insulator which protruded high up on the wall, out of reach of those standing on the floor of the room. Also onto this wall had been hung a plaque–pitons through what appeared to be former screw holes.
The plaque was a sheet of etched copper on a polished and stained would backing picturing a grand airship, labeled the Karnak in the original process–the letters of the name matching the depth and style of the airship pictured above, though at some later point a small sheet of brass had been affixed to the plaque at the bottom and not bothering to cover the earlier name, reading Tehuti’s Revenge, and these letters, were not acid-etched into the smaller rectangle of metal, but engraved, or rather hammered into it with chisels. It was clear that the image of the airship in front of him was a representation of the wreck just outside, and that the skin of the envelope had been repurposed to form the tent in which he now stood.
Pool still held in his hand the scroll of paper, not having looked at it after removing it from the dead man’s fingers.
He would read it, but first he wanted to take care of a few things, namely burying the captain’s body, then moving his camp to inside the tent for at least tonight, if not for several days, or however long his food lasted. (There wasn’t a lot of it left.)
He rolled the scroll of paper up into a tight bundle and placed it in his pocket, then began a search for a length of tarp to use to wrap the body in.
In one of the chambers–there were dozens of the–Pool found a length of several meters that would suffice, along with some cord.
As he explored the space, he could tell that it was intended to house a lot more than one man, probably the entire crew, though was no sign of them now, except for perhaps some mounds outside, that might be graves.
In an extreme turn of luck (not that he had experienced bad luck except for his infortuitous fall into the hole outside) the far-ranging Constable Pool found a pair of store rooms, one stocked with food, water (which turned out to be beer) and another with stacks of cut birch, apparently halled up from the lowland areas.
The heavy length of tarp was dragged to the room of the mechanism, and squeamishly without touching the corpse itself, Pool hefted it by the coat onto the spread material.
It was stiff, but unexpectedly light, and intending no disrespect to the departed captain, Pool did a meagre pat-down before wrapping him up.
The heavy outer coat had gloves in the pockets, which Pool left, as he did not intend to winter here.
As he manhandled the body onto the tarp, trying to arrange it in an orientation which would allow the tarp to be rolled around it and tied into a bundle, he felt a hard object under the man’s matted and stiff coat, beneath the overcoat.
With his fingertips he undid all three of the coat’s buttons, recoiling at the greasy texture, hoping it wasn’t the man’s own adipose that his fingers were slipping over. He then peeled the coat open by the lapel and reached inside the upraised portion and felt inside the inner breast pocket for the object with his fingers.
A book, a notebook not dissimilar to his own, though with a more rigid binding and twice the thickness. Unlike his own this one had a small brass clasp holding it shut.
Pool set it aside on the floor along with the captain’s hat, and after a brief pat on the opposite breast of the jacket which revealed nothing, refastened the corpse’s buttons. Within a minute the corpse was wrapped tightly (although still bent from the mummified position) and then tied above and below the head and feet.
He stood and took the book to the card catalogue and laid it on the dusty surface. He would inspect that upon his return. That along with the scroll of paper, which he set on edge next to it.
Pool then returned to the body with it’s improvised death-veil, took it by the feet and dragged it out of the tent, bringing the hat as well.
He had passed some mounds of smaller stones on the way in, which he had presumed to be burial mounds. They were low, only 25 centimeters high, but the width and length, each corresponding to the size of a body entombed on ground too hard to dig into. Once there, he cleared a space roughly large enough to cover the captain’s corpse.
The better part of the hour was spent collecting stones from as nearest he could without disturbing the other mounds, and piling these on the new member of the cold community.
When he was finished, he lay the hat on the pile over the man’s chest and stood over it for a moment, his own hat in his hands. After a mumbled prayer to gods in which he did not believe, he went to the cold, alpine lake and thoroughly washed his hands of the grease and dust and death.
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Ion Fyr 