Namaste (24 page)

He found the warrior monks training in the open, led by a man with silver-white hair.
 

All but Woo wore masks: smooth white moons strapped at the backs of their heads with a pair of eye holes. The monks were performing exercises Amit recognized, somewhere between a moving meditation and a marital art. He’d done the same during his long years at the other monastery. If he watched for long enough, they’d surely move into more specific, disciplined, and focused exercises — those that would teach the monks where to insert blades, paralyze, or kill, that would show them how to snap a neck without wasted movement. Amit had trained in most of those ways. It had always bothered him — the idea that he was training like a soldier, yet being ordered to refrain. Here, it almost seemed as if they’d accepted what they were. Train like a killer, and become one. If they had to wear masks and feign shame, so be it.
 

There was a pile of masks on a small wooden table near where Amit stood at the group’s rear. Out of Woo’s line of sight, he retrieved one. The thing was large; it covered the entire front of his head from chin to scalp. It was hard, but thin and light, like a delicate ceramic. There was an outdent for his nose, but was otherwise featureless.
 

Amit put it on, securing the strap behind his head with a strange bamboo-and-loop fastener. Once adjusted, he found that the mask was snug for something so rigid. It didn’t move around as he imagined, and the eye holes were large and close enough that his peripheral vision was unimpeded.
 

He peeked around the corner, watching the monks, seeing how they moved not just in place, but as a whole around the gardens. When the group came close enough, he slipped into the back row and began the familiar exercises. Muscle memory took over. Complex maneuvers became more complicated, and Amit found that he couldn’t think. Motion felt right — almost comforting. He’d put his training to work in the outside world over the past few weeks, but had done little formal practice. Movements now gave him a sense of purpose. It reminded him who he was and what he could do. Earlier anger receded into an emotionless gray inside him. Suni had been right; Amit
was
strong, he
was
fast, and he
was
precise. Exercises reminded his muscles of their ability, and watching what his body and mind could do, he began to feel his power. Amit was among killers, willing to do what must be done. He had a duty, to karma and Nisha. If karma refused to strike Woo for what he’d done, then Amit must.
 

The repetition stirred dormant pathways in his brain. Amit remembered his strength. He remembered his precision. Anger was not in the way. The group exercises disbanded, and they moved on to sparring. Amit easily bested his opponent. There was no animosity. His partner was a problem to be solved, and every time he tried to strike, Amit answered the flash of his riddling. A punch was too high. Amit ducked, countered, laid the other man flat.
 

At the front of the group, Woo sparred with one of his students. There was no mercy. Woo was more experienced and faster, but was not lowering his game or allowing another to win. Among the shadow monks — and Amit had seen this firsthand for most of his life — you learned through failure or not at all. There was no beginner level when it came to sparring. Elders and senseis would teach the boys and girls, then challenge them to use their skills to battle a random adversary. Sometimes, Amit drew an opponent his age and easily won. Sometimes, he drew an adult and returned to the dormitory battered and bruised. The adults and older children made a mockery of Amit’s acquired skills. They knew the countermovements, and Amit felt ridiculous trying his simple tricks to beat them. But because those adults never flinched from their counters, Amit learned to improvise and developed counters of his own. He taught himself to attack in unexpected ways. He’d thought he’d been doing what was sensible, but one day the abbot had called him aside and chastised him for striking too roughly. As a 9-year-old, he’d sent a man in his 20s to the infirmary. The abbot said he wasn’t fighting fair. Amit had asked if “fair” meant allowing himself to be easily bested. The abbot had no answer beyond his muttering.
 

Amit felled one monk after another. He grew more aggressive. His anger stayed buried, but his confidence — which had taken a hit after his non-battle with the abbot — was starting to return. The trick was to forget the rules. There were conventions in fighting, and winning came from discarding the laws. Amit had been taught attacks. He questioned their efficacy. He improvised his own, even here and now, as an adult whose training would typically have been fully entrenched and unchanging. His opponents — watching before they faced him, even while fighting others — began to look over. The mood in Amit’s immediate circle took on a tinge, as if charged with electricity. Heads turned more than they should have. By Amit’s fifth partner, those he fought had begun to anticipate his unconventional attacks. He changed them again, and made some conventional, spearing the throat of one man with two fingers — a basic move he’d learned when 6, when he’d been humiliatingly defeated by elders who’d learned the counterattack decades earlier.
 

Instinct took over. Amit couldn’t be hit, or even touched. He found a space inside of himself where everything moved like sap. He had all the time in the world. His sparring partner would launch a strike, and it would feel to Amit as if he paused the world before responding — as if watching from outside himself. He had eyes above and below, to the right and the left. Everything was simple to dodge and parry.
 

While fighting his seventh or eighth partner, Amit caught a flash of something that disarmed him: a large birthmark that looked almost like a spill of blood.

The second’s hesitation cost him. His opponent’s fist struck him hard in the cheek. It was the first strike of any size to touch him, and his aggressive sparring caused the other to shove his entire body behind the strike.
 

Her
entire body.
 

Amit’s mask cracked at the strap, hung for a moment, wanting to balance on his nose, then fell.
 

A female voice behind his opponent’s mask said, “Amit?”

Amala removed her mask.
 

“Amit, is that you?”
 

Amala wasn’t asking because she was unsure; she couldn’t believe it.
 

One after another, monks around them stopped fighting. Amit looked toward Woo, and saw a small smile light the old man’s mouth at the corners.

“Brothers and sisters,” he said. “An old friend has returned.”
 

The other monks turned to look at Woo, then Amit.
 

“For a sacrifice drill,” Woo added.
 

Chapter 26

T
HE
MONKS
,
ALL
IN
THEIR
masks except for Amala, turned toward Amit. There was no malice in what he could see of their eyes or body language, nor was there hesitation. Amit had never heard of a sacrifice drill (it didn’t exist at the other compound), but he had a good idea of what it must be. If these monks were only barely willing to do what was required, then high-stakes drills — drills that ended with one pilgrim dead — would serve to remind them of what was at risk, and keep them practiced in what mattered most.
 

“Amit,”
said Amala. There was much in that word. But she wasn’t able to say more, because others moved around her, squeezing her back like the slow surge of a thick liquid. They gave him space, but stood ready. Giving first move courtesy to the sacrifice.
 

Amit stood still. “I do not wish to fight.”
 

“Oh, come on,” said Woo from the gathering’s head. “Most of us know you better than that.”
 

The stalemate broke. A big man came at him, and although Amit hadn’t seen him in years and couldn’t see his face around the mask, he knew the attacker as Rafi. He hadn’t changed. The others were waiting, but Rafi was surging in, more stupid than mean. It was his weakness. Anger was Amit’s. Rage had allowed Rafi to beat him many times in his youth, in many informal battles. Amit was not angry now. He had stuffed it down, and his mind was still buzzing from his earlier flow. Rafi was still stupid.
 

The charge was, for a shadow monk, large, brash, and arrogant: a kill strike, coming for the head. Amit could see what would happen next as if his attacker had flashed a giant sign: He would take his arm, twist it across his body, then drive a pair of knuckles into the back of Amit’s neck at the spine. In the past, burdened by the baggage of years, Amit would have been weakened by Rafi’s aggression. This time he was ready. The attack was laughably obvious. He allowed Rafi to take his arm, then pivoted away, pulled, and rolled the big man across his back. Rafi struck the circle on the opposite side.
 

Amit stood tall, his face set. None of this was making him nervous or angry. It was what it was; what would be, would be. Any outcome was fine. The moment was his, but karma and fate owned the rest. If he died, he died, and it was good, because he would be reborn. If he won, he won, and it was good, because he’d be able to take the next step. But Amit didn’t think he would win. They were too many, and wouldn’t wait to face him one by one. This wasn’t a drill of delicacy and precision; it was one of blunt force.
 

The shadow monks buried their shame behind masks. They didn’t
want
to kill, but were
willing
to kill when needed. A sacrifice drill would remind them of what it meant to end a life, but it wouldn’t be savored.
 

Woo had taught Amit to question the obvious. To try new approaches, no matter how odd, and easily outmaneuver his adversaries by capitalizing on their resistance.
 

If they could only come all at once with a brute force attack. No one would land a precise blow, because there would be too many. They would simply converge, then crush him. They would step on him if they had to; they would wrap their many hands around his neck and squeeze. They would batter him with a fusillade of small punches because there would be no room for large ones. They would not be able to kick him, sweep his legs, or strike him broadside. He’d be able to see everything coming.
 

Hands reached for him. Arms cocked back. Eyes widened.
 

Fight
, said a voice inside him.

Amit would fight if he could. He was good at sparring: strong, fast, and precise. He’d done all of the kill drills himself, on practice dummies or halfway on real opponents. He’d taken the old drills in new directions, ending the lives of those who’d ended Nisha’s. Fighting true meant fighting with honor, but it would be useless. You couldn’t overwhelm a circle of 10 once inside your radius, or when another 10 were coming right behind them.
 

You have to fight
.
 

Inside him, like a coward, another voice said,
Run
.

He couldn’t run. They were all around him.

Amit could control his voluntary muscles (and plenty of the supposedly involuntary ones) to a degree most people could never imagine. Even among the shadow monks, Amit was one of the best. That advantage was nullified with so many against him, but that was only true if he fought. If instead he turned strength, speed and precision toward flight …
 

He ducked. His legs scissored to the sides, into a split, and Amit descended like a dropping stone. He struck at two of the encroaching monks on his way down, but wasn’t trying to fight. He drove his fists upward so that the counteraction would drive his body downward faster than gravity alone. Once down, in a split second, Amit brought his spread legs back together and tucked them up, becoming like a small round ball. He couldn’t roll like a marble to freedom, but could surprise the first shadow monk whose legs he tucked between, then find himself behind the first row and in front of the second.
 

Amit searched his mind, scrolling through a lifetime of training in less than a second. He wasn’t searching for what he’d been taught. He was searching for what he hadn’t been. Amit knew hundreds of strikes using his hands and hundreds more using his legs. He also knew how to fight a tall man or a short one, a fat man or a thin woman, an attacker with a knife, and an attacker with one gun or several. But Amit couldn’t think of a single time he’d been taught to fight someone crawling around his feet, and he’d never been taught to deflect a blow from below.
 

Shameless, Amit drove his fist hard into the monk’s crotch nearest to him. Robes were mostly genderless and the monks thin and lean, so it was difficult to tell men from women when faces were concealed. This one was a man; he crumpled like a wad of cheap paper.
 

Amit let the monk fall on top of him, draping him as he scampered like a horse’s saddle. A second later, all attention turned down, and the monks started to stomp like children. It wasn’t that no one knew how to defeat an enemy at their feet; it was that everyone knew the bluntest ways to try. In close quarters, they could only swing their feet in minute arcs, stomp and punch as far as the sea of others around them allowed. Superior numbers had been turned into a disadvantage. More was better until it wasn’t.