Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 02 (6 page)

”Mickey, say ‘thank you’ to this nice woman for helping us.”

“Ang ou,” he whispered from the darkness. He slowly made his way into the firelight and watched the dancing flames with bright fascination in his eyes. When he looked up and made eye contact with Rajani, she saw the flesh on his cheeks rise up around his eyes in a smile, but he kept his face half hidden with the blanket.

“How old are you, Mickey?”

Half the blanket slipped back over his left shoulder as his hand came out and displayed all his fingers. Rajani smiled. “Five?”

The boy nodded emphatically.

Dorothy reached out and stroked his brown hair, “It’s okay, Mickey. She’s a good person. If she weren’t, Rex woulda bitten her.”

Rajani smiled reassuringly at Mickey, then glanced around the camp. “The truck has Arizona plates. You’re not that far from your home, are you?”

Dorothy shook her head. “No, we’re from...”

“Phlaya,” Mickey shouted. As he did so, he pulled his right hand away from his face. Though she did not need it, the firelight fully illuminated the tangle of teeth in Mickey’s misshapen face. They lined up like warped bowling pins behind one crooked incisor. His upper lip rose up and parted as if curtains on a stage, unable to hide
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his cleft palate or allow him to close his lips to speak.

With Mickey’s revelation, Rajani immediately caught Dorothy’s hawklike scrutiny of her reaction. Over and above that, she sensed Mickey’s courage dropping pre-cipitously toward panic if she rejected him as had so many others. She wanted to reach out to him, but she held back for fear the boy might take any motion toward him as aggression.

She looked at his sister. “Your mother died when Mickey was born?”

Dorothy nodded. “There was lots of blood. I was seven.

I’ve taken care of him since then. Dad had a girlfriend who helped for a while, but it’s pretty much just been Mickey and me.” She patted him on the head. “If you didn’t catch it, he said ‘Flagstaff’ in reply to your question.”

Rajani nodded to Mickey.«
Thank you, Mickey,
» she sent to him telepathically.

The boy looked at her, then tugged at his right ear. His sister looked at him with a concerned frown on her face.

”Do you have another earache, Mickey? Because of his teeth and all, he had trouble with them. I think he has trouble hearing because of them, too.”

“I think he’s okay, Dorothy.” Rajani held her hands out to the fire. “No one has gotten medical help for your brother?”

“Orfey!” Mickey beamed.

The girl shook her head. “My father signed on as a proxxer for Daizaimoku Corp in Flag when my mom got pregnant with Mickey. Trying to save her ran up some bills, which Daisymuck said they’d cover, but at the expense of care for Mickey. They said if my mom had lived and they had her vote, too, they would have taken care of things. Mickey keeps getting sick, so that uses up what little credit my dad has built up with Daisymuck. Andy talked him into selling me to get the money to fix Mickey, but I knew that wouldn’t happen, so I brought Mickey with me.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed. “So, what’s your story? Black skin, gold stripes and some really hot eye-mods. You one of them exotic dancers from Vegas or something? Or are you a gangbanger from Eclipse way out of your turf?”

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Rajani was pretty certain Dorothy was speaking English. She understood the first question and would have gone with it except that she knew nothing about Las Vegas and Dorothy seemed to feel the second explanation was more plausible by the feelings she gave off. “The latter.

Got tricked into visiting Vegas, then abandoned.”

Dorothy smiled broadly. “Figured you were from Phoenix. You going back?” Insecurity poured from her as she continued. “We have to go back to Flag now, so we could travel together. Safety in numbers and all.”

Fenix?“I go to Pah-he-o-e-nicks.”

Dorothy shrugged. “Whatever, gangslang ain’t my Jones. Flag’s on the way to Phoenix, so you can come with us, ‘kay?” The plea Dorothy managed to keep out of her voice rang off her emotionally like peals from a bell.

So, Eclipse and Phoenix are synonymous. “Yes, traveling with you would be fine with me.” Rajani reached out and gave Dorothy a big hug. Clearly, the world has changed during the time I spent in stasis. I went in hoping I could come out to help save the world from Fiddleback but, ifithas changed so radically that fathers canselltheir children, perhaps it is too late.

Looking at the ancient and beautiful monastery clinging to the mountainside, Coyote felt as if he had traveled a thousand years back through time on his journey to Tibet. Adjusting his Serengeti Vermillion sunglasses, he glanced over at Crowley. He wanted to see if the sight awed his companion, but instead caught the dark-haired occultist studying him for his reaction to it. They both laughed, then urged their little ponies onward along the narrow, winding trail.

From Phoenix they had flown to LA and caught a flight direct to Tokyo. From there they transferred to a flight to New Delhi. That led to another flight to Guwahati, then to Paro, Bhutan and finally into Gonggar, Tibet. Each leg had been completed in smaller and smaller planes, including the last in which they flew in an old People’s Liberation
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Army plane that had been repainted after Tibet reasserted its independence in 1999.

At Gonggar they took a bus on the 60-mile trip into Lhasa. Crowley had commented that the capital looked a lot more festive than the last time he had been there. “In 1985, when the Chinese hosted a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Tibet’s autonomy, you couldn’t see any signs that weren’t written in Chinese. Now look at it; everything is Tibetan.”

Coyote had probed a bit more aboutCrowley’spres-ence in Tibet at that time, but his companion seemed reluctant to expand upon his comments. Coyote knew there had been riots in the late 1980s to protest the Chinese domination of the region. Restrictions on foreign travel through the area had been fierce, and had remained so until 1997 when the Second Cultural Revolution had created so many problems for Beijing that they relaxed their grip on the outlying regions. Nei Mongol, Manchuria and Tibet revolted, kicking out the Han settlers through which the central government had tried to colonize their nations. After two years of bloody fighting in Tibet, the 14thDalai Lama returned on June 6, his birthday, and proclaimed Tibet free again.

Throughout the journey from Lhasa to Shigaste and up to Namling, Coyote had seen plenty of evidence of the Tibetan war for independence. Maoist statues had been toppled, then left to be weathered by the sandblasting winds of Tibet. As Crowley explained when driving through Shigaste, “The people have left the Chinese monuments and buildings in the same state of repair that the First Cultural Revolution left Tibetan temples. They have devoted themselves to restoring their history and have left the Chinese things to rot.”

They abandoned their rented Range Rover in Namling and were met by a yellow-hatted monk with six horses.

Crowley introduced the man as Getsul Khedrup, explaining that he was not yet a full monk, but well on his way to his final ordination. Following Khedrup, they rode their shaggy ponies up and out of the fertile central Yarlung Valley. For the next two days they continued up and away from civilization, seeing only nomads tending large herds of yaks as they went.

The weather cooled as they climbed in altitude, but Coyote remained surprised at how seasonable the cli-mate was. He had expected to need cold weather gear, but
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they were not assaulting Mount Everest. The thick yak-hair blankets their guide had brought with them were more than enough to ward off the chilly night air. During the day, a thin shirt or jacket proved more than sufficient, especially since the desert plateau on which they traveled got so little rain.

Coyote turned to Crowley as they approached the monastery. “It is beautiful. By the looks of it, it must have been one of the first restoration projects of the new government.”

Crowley shared a smile with Khedrup, then shook his head. “No restoration needed. The Chinese never shelled it like they did Norbulinka, the Jokhang, Sera Monastery orthePotala.”

This is a rather remote area. I guess getting here would have been difficult.”

“Actually, the Chinese wanted Kanggenpo destroyed
very
badly. The Dalai Lama stopped here on his way out of Tibet in March of 1959.” Crowley pointed to some scars on the landscape. “It’s been a good 50 years, but you can still see evidence of the elite mechanized division they sent out to get him and his family. Because he had escaped from Norbulinka disguised as a soldier, Mao Zedong put a crack unit on him.”

Coyote’s eyes narrowed. “How could this monastery avoid damage?” He dropped a hand to the stainless steel pistol riding on his right hip. “I could hit the walls from here with my Wildey.”

“Ah, but you can see it; they could not. Even during the First Cultural Revolution, Mao wanted this place destroyed, but again his hunters could not find it.”

Coyote considered his words for a moment. “I take it this has something to do with my empathic abilities, my being a
sensitive
? When you explained it all to me before, you likened it to being able to see in the ultraviolet range.

I take it this place is rendered in ultraviolet, for all intents and purposes?”

“Close and logical, but no.” Crowley frowned for a moment, then pointedbacktowardthemonastery. “What do you see?”

Coyote looked up, then removed his glasses. Where he
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had once seen the tall ochre walls of the monastery, with tiled roofs and colorful banners flying from them, he saw nothing. “It’s gone.”

“To continue your sight analogy, what would you see in a place where there was no light at all?”

“Nothing.”

“Exactly.” Crowley closed his eyes and Kanggenpo materialized out of thin air and again hung from the sheer mountainside. “Kanggenpoisoneof a number of spots on the Earth in which empathic abilities are muted. Right now I am sending to you the image that I am getting from Khedrup—he can see it because those shielding the lamasery are permitting him to see it. If I so desired, I could change the image in subtle ways, so you would only see what I passed on.”

“But if this place deadens my abilities, how will I learn what you are bringing me here to leam?”

Crowley smiled easily. “I said
muted,
not deadened.

Imagine weight training on a world with greater gravity than Earth. You will have to work harderto be able to break through. They will show you how. Kanggenpo is probably the only place on the planet where you can learn what you must know. And the only way you get here is to be led by someone who knows the way.”

The taller man settled his sunglasses over his eyes again. “Kanggenpo. You said it means ‘ice temple.’ If one has to be led here, how was it founded and how did you find it?”

“I think the
khenpo
can better explain the history of Kanggenpo than I.” Crowley gloved left hand strayed to his goatee and stroked it unconsciously. “I got here because I helped foil an assassination attempt on the Dalai Lama in the summer of 1989—the Chinese government was trying to corner the market on stupid repression tactics that year. Word went out and I was brought to Kanggenpo much as you are being brought now.”

As their ponies struggled up the last steep section of the trail, the massive bronze gates in the monastery wall swung inward. Coming around a curve in the trail, Coyote caught his first glimpse of the lamasery’s cobbled courtyard and the twin stone lions stretched down a long stairway to form the railings. Through the narrow viewing port the gate made, Coyote saw tantalizing bits and pieces
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of vast murals painted on the interior walls.

Red-robed monks and their brown-robed students traveled in tiny knots throughout the ancient fortress.

While he saw a few individuals that were not the typical black-haired ethnic Tibetans, that surprised Coyote less than another detail he noticed. “No women?”

Crowley shook his head. “No women, which is a bit odd since Gelukpa Buddhism is a tradition built out of the Vajrayana tradition, which is known in the West as Tantric Buddhism. Tantric practices include esoteric sexual rituals and meditations, which outraged many missionaries and right-thinking folks in the West when they heard of it.

Once monks in the Geluk tradition have mastered all five disciplines, tantric studies are open to them. Until that time, which will take a minimum of 20 years, they are strictly celibate and abstain from alcohol and narcotics.”

“What you’ve brought me here to study won’t take 20