Seeker’s Curse

by Alex Archer

  After a lengthy moment during which she failed to develop X-ray vision, Annja sighed. She felt much put-upon. I need sleep, dammit, she thought bitterly. In the morning they were headed up to the heights, inside the Dhorpatan Hunting Preserve. There would be much trudging, and little oxygen to breathe.

  I doubt the bomb squad’s going to want to turn out in this wind at oh-dark-thirty, she thought, on the off chance Baglung has a bomb squad. Besides, she felt a moral certainty that if she successfully summoned demolitions specialists she’d wind up with what turned out to be a soggy note from the night porter.

  Trying to suppress dark thoughts of exotic contact poisons as way too pulp novel, she walked over, bent down and picked up the envelope.

  It wasn’t sealed. Inside was a scrap of blue-lined paper that had obviously been torn from a pocket notebook. On it a couple of lines of the script used in Nepal had been handwritten in purple ink.

  Annja stared at it. Momentarily she drew a blank. Am I being threatened by somebody who’s not so bright? she wondered. Am I the victim of a wrong address?

  It struck her as entirely plausible that this might be a totally innocent message, intended for someone who actually read Gorkhali, that it had been pushed under the wrong door.

  She sighed again. Her initial sense of alarm had almost entirely faded. In its place was a wool-blanket itch of curiosity.

  Yeah, she thought, and if I get somebody up to translate at this hour, it’ll be a laundry list meant for the guy across the hall, and I’ll look like a total fool.

  Reluctantly she set it on the bedside table, lay down and turned out the light. One useful trick she’d learned was how to blank her mind, with the help of deep abdominal breathing exercises. If she didn’t have that skill she’d never get any sleep, considering the sort of life she led.

  Inside of three breaths she was asleep.

  IN THE MORNING Annja drank coffee that, even well whitened with cream, grabbed her by the scruff and shook her back into place. She ate big chunks of fresh, tough-crusted bread for breakfast.

  “Annja Creed?”

  She looked up. Prasad and Lal stood outlined in the doorway, blinking dubiously at the gloom. She smiled and greeted them. They advanced into the tourist-friendly café as if it were enemy territory. Clearly they felt as out of place as they looked.

  “How’s Bahadur?” she asked when they sat, a bit reluctantly, at her invitation. They refused refreshment. Annja and some French tourists, now bickering in Lyonnais accents, were the only customers in the place.

  Prasad smiled. “He rests at his mother’s house in the hills,” he said. “He should recover soon.”

  The arm wound, which turned out to be more ugly than serious, had been stitched up at the same clinic that tended Annja’s finger.

  She smiled. “I’m glad.”

  “You seem troubled,” Prasad said. He smiled at her. But his eyes were more penetrating than she cared for behind his thick round glasses. It was still hard to think of this skinny self-effacing man as a battle-hardened Gurkha veteran. Even though she’d seen him leap into action like a tiger from the Dhorpatan woods.

  Annja described her nighttime adventure. Prasad and Lal looked at each other. They said nothing—aloud. She had the impression a whole extensive conversation took place in indecipherable and, to her, mostly undetectable body language, right before her eyes.

  “May I see the letter?” Prasad asked mildly, turning back to her.

  She already had it out. She slid it across the white tablecloth to him. He flattened it carefully with both hands and bent to read it.

  She expected anger, outrage, perhaps even fear. Instead a look of wonder spread across his rather delicate features. He turned and spoke to his sister’s son in what she could only think of as tones of awe.

  They both looked at her with eyes agleam. “You are invited to the Lamasery of the Woods,” her guide said. “You have passed the first test.”

  12

  A battered white Land Cruiser hauled them wheezing up the flank of the Dhaulagiri Himal to Dhorpatan village, north and west of Baglung. There they picked up two new porters, called Sherpas after the eastern Nepali ethnic group, from Prasad’s extended family.

  The day was clear, the sky a dazzling blue, with just a few fluffy clouds flirting with the peaks of the great mountains, as they headed out on foot into the hunting preserve. Annja couldn’t help but notice they did not check in with the game park’s administration in the small, picturesque village.

  She supposed it was obvious they weren’t hunting game, even though Lal carried his inevitable Enfield, and a similar battered old bolt-action rifle was slung over the shoulder of one of the Sherpas, whose names Annja had never quite caught.

  They crossed a rounded wooden footbridge arcing over a stream, and set out along a very well-trodden path into the hills. The air was crisp. Birds flashed gaudy colors in the branches and sang eerie songs. The trees were evergreen, but some of the scrub was leafing out. The air had an astringent scent from the trees, as well as the weight and chill edge of the perpetual snows of the peaks.

  Their destination, Annja’s guides had not yet disclosed.

  “I have heard of this Agrabat,” Prasad said as they hiked between gnarly-trunked rhododendrons with sprays of evergreen leaves like spearheads. They had not yet begun to flower.

  He and his nephew usually conversed in English out of courtesy to their employer. Of course, it made their occasional exchanges in their native tongue seem more purposeful and possibly alarming. Less so when they spoke to the porters, who seemed not to know English.

  “He does not come from a bad family. But they fell on hard times.”

  “Hard times fall on all of us, Uncle. We don’t all become bandits,” Lal said.

  “No, indeed. Yet when you are as old as I, you might find yourself not so quick to judge others. It is easier to feel compassion when one’s blood has cooled from the fires of youth.”

  His nephew was scandalized. “You killed him.”

  Prasad shrugged his narrow shoulders. “That is different. That was a matter of defending myself—and our employer. But it does not mean I would presume to judge him.”

  Annja’s mind wandered. She couldn’t help worrying about the note’s reference to her passing a test. She’d killed two men and played a pretty direct role in getting another killed. She thought of Buddhism as an intrinsically peaceful religion.

  She wrenched her attention back to the present—the cool fresh air smelling of chilled distant stone, the sun warm on her face, the burble of water over the smooth-pebbled bottom of the brook that wound for a time alongside their path.

  “The way he talked,” she said. “Agrabat, I mean. Were they really Maoists?”

  Prasad laughed softly. “Not likely. Bandits have long been a problem here. Even during the war we spent as much time hunting them as we did fighting the Communist guerrillas.”

  “There’s a distinction?” she asked.

  Lal laughed. “The guerrillas tend to be better organized.” She couldn’t help noticing the use of the present tense. “Although it’s not always easy to tell. Sometimes the bandits pretend to be Communists. And the Communists are seldom reluctant to plunder. ‘Expropriation,’ they call it. But Agrabat and his lot were clearly just vicious fools.”

  Annja was edging around a subject that had bothered her since the encounter with Agrabat, reluctant to confront it internally or externally. But now it seemed she couldn’t avoid it any longer.

  “How do you think they found out about us?” she asked. “If Agrabat was such a low-level bandit, how did he know what we were doing?”

  The only logical conclusion seemed to be that someone had blabbed. The question was frankly making her worried about trusting Prasad and Lal. She could trust no one, Roux always assured her with a sort of world-weary glee that he loved to affect when unloading an unpleasantly weighty time-gleaned truth on his reluctant protégée. Yet she had to trust people to help h
er. No one could do everything by herself.

  Even at her most paranoid Annja couldn’t quite twist things around so that Prasad, Lal and Bahadur—who would rest at home for at least a week to recover from his injuries—could be in cahoots with the late bandits.

  Lal laughed. “Do you think we can take a single step without the people of the country knowing? This land seems unsettled to people who don’t know it. But our folk live everywhere, and see everywhere.”

  “This land is us,” Prasad said. “We are this land. Its stone makes our bones—our flesh makes its earth. The peasants know we walk it the way you know a mosquito walks on your arm.”

  “But what made Agrabat think we might be hunting treasure?” She was, in fact, even though not for the conventional reasons. It struck her she hadn’t confided that to Prasad and Lal, either. That only deepened the mystery of how an opportunistic bandit would know.

  “In these hard days,” Prasad said, “the people assume all expeditions hunt ancient treasure.”

  “It’s a poor country, Ms. Creed,” Lal said. “Now maybe more than ever, with the war starting up again and the global economy coming apart.”

  “Then what about the real Maoists? What do they think we’re up to? I mean—Commissioner Chatura’s one of them, isn’t he?”

  “He is a Party man,” Prasad said. “Never a warrior. An organizer, he was. Administrator.”

  “Schemer,” Lal supplied.

  “Are the Maoist guerrillas active in the area again?” Annja asked.

  “Still,” Lal said. He seemed more comfortable contradicting their employer than his uncle, although his manner had never been anything but friendly and respectful. It had gotten more so since they fought together by the lost hillside shrine. “They never went away—never demobilized. Much less laid down their guns. As yet there’s no open fighting in the district. Who knows how long that will last?”

  Annja had a sinking feeling. “You think they might be interested in us?”

  Prasad shook his head. “Not think, missy,” he said. “Not think. Know. Major Jagannatha is an old leopard and a wily one.”

  “Major Jagannatha?” she said. That doesn’t sound good, she thought. She had no idea who he was but she knew what the word meant.

  “He’s another former Gurkha. Many of the guerrillas are, too.”

  Annja nodded. The jagannatha was an immense cart used to haul an outsized idol of a Hindu god on religious festival days. The British colonizers had believed, or claimed to, that people flung themselves under the big wheels to allow themselves to be crushed as sacrifices. Modern Indians dismissed that angrily as racist twaddle, although Annja suspected that, given the nature of crowds and how crowded Indian cities had been throughout known history, people getting inadvertently run over was anything but rare.

  “He sounds like a dangerous man,” she said. “Let’s hope we don’t meet him.”

  “We will pray,” Prasad said seriously.

  “At the least,” Lal said with a lopsided grin, “it can’t hurt.”

  THEY HIKED STEEP HILLS and narrow valleys, thickly forested. Climbing higher, they had left the rhododendron forests behind and come into a region of dark, shaggy conifers. Prasad identified them as hemlocks.

  Annja had noticed that, while Lal deferred to his elder relative when explanations were called for, and Prasad duly supplied them, most times Prasad said little while Lal chatted. Meanwhile the two Sherpas conversed happily in Gorkhali. It made Annja’s lower back ache just to look at the packs they carried, but to them, clearly, this was literally just a walk in the park. Her respect for their sturdiness of body and spirit increased.

  She found these woods spooky. They were more like the ancient German forests that had so unnerved the Romans than anything Annja ever associated with Nepal. The photos and videos she’d seen of the country were all snowy peaks and Sherpas. Not dense, dark woods. Not that the White Mountain wasn’t making its presence felt. Even when she couldn’t see it Annja felt it threatening to topple on her.

  Daylight in the mountains was fleeting at best. In these claustrophobic valleys the sun dropped from sight and the shadows began to thicken into twilight not terribly long after midday.

  “Where are we going?” Annja asked, not for the first time.

  She didn’t really want to be caught out in the woods at night. She wasn’t afraid of wild animals or even bad men, although knowing Major Jagannatha might be taking an interest in her could get to be a concern pretty quickly. Mainly she was sure it wouldn’t be very comfortable in a forest that daylight barely brushed at this time of year. Particularly once the wind began to whistle through the valleys, down from the eternal ice fields of the greatest mountain range on Earth.

  “We go where we are summoned,” Prasad said, as always politely, yet with a certain brisk finality that told her it was all she was going to get. Some guide, a snarky part of her said. But in truth he was doing what he was paid to—guiding her.

  He just wouldn’t say where.

  Particle by particle the shadows condensed around them into dusk. Though the sky overhead remained a brilliant blue, the few cirrus clouds only beginning to blush with the pink of sunset, down here among the rustling hemlock boughs it was getting to be dark. The hiking party came around the side of a steep ridge and Annja glimpsed a warm orange glow ahead.

  “Is that where we’re headed?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Prasad said.

  The porters began to mutter in their native tongue. They seemed nervous, although they continued to forge on stolidly beneath packs that looked as big as they were. Not briskly but relentlessly, as if they could keep this pace up all night and all day tomorrow, and for all Annja knew, all week.

  Her own lean-muscled legs were beginning to ache. Her feet were sore and she felt a little flutter in her quadriceps from the constant climbing along scanty trails. And I thought I was in shape, she thought ruefully.

  The glow vanished beyond a twist of the trail. Prasad and Lal picked up the pace. The rising sense of mystery actually invigorated Annja. And the change of pace itself provided a welcome break from the steady upward trudge of the past couple of hours.

  The trail wound around another bend and they saw before them a tall wooden structure, with a steeply pitched roof of wooden shakes and sweeping eaves. Torches burned to either side of the entrance, casting a wavering glow across a door painted red with gilded dragon figures twining up it.

  Annja’s first thought was that it was an inn or maybe a hunting lodge. But Prasad said, as if in invocation, “The Lamasery of the Woods.”

  13

  “Go on, Annja Creed,” Prasad said, gesturing with a knobbed and weathered hand. “You are expected.”

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “We will be provided for. You must go inside.”

  “Alone?”

  “One always walks the path alone.”

  Trying to look bolder than she felt, Annja approached the door. The dirt of the path, packed and well swept, crunched softly beneath the soles of her shoes. As she mounted the warped wooden steps the torches made soft popping and rushing sounds. The wind, rising, whistled in the flaring eaves and made the dark hemlock branches swoop and sigh.

  Annja knocked on the door. Nothing happened. She turned back to look at her companions. The porters had shed their packs and squatted beside them, featureless shadows against gloom. Lal showed pale teeth in a smile Annja thought was supposed to be encouraging. Prasad simply stood, unmoving as a stone, gazing at her. The round lenses of his glasses were unreadable disks of reflected flame.

  She turned back to the door. She gazed at the two dragons carved on it, sinuous bodies intertwined like a DNA double helix. They seemed to writhe in the torchlight.

  She put a tentative hand to the heavy black iron latch. It opened. The big door creaked inward on its hinges. She cringed.

  “Hello,” she called. The word seemed to echo softly into the darkness. Knowing firsthand how active
ly Buddhist monks could express their resentment at unwanted intrusions, she stuck her head reluctantly inside.

  All she could see was that a narrow corridor moved away from her. Little copper dishes of oil, or yak butter, held burning wicks. They glowed yellow but without actually casting much light. It was only the slight gleams from massive roof beams and polished floorboards that gave Annja any hint of the dimensions and solidity of the corridor.

  The little lamps flickered alarmingly in the breeze she was letting in. She was going to have to make up her mind quickly. If she let the wicks blow out she did not want to try groping her way into the monastery in suffocating darkness.

  She took a deep breath, stepped into the lamasery and closed the door behind her. It shut with a final-sounding thump and clatter of the latch.

  Somewhere in her pack she carried a small flashlight. She didn’t fumble for it now. She felt nervous, uninvited. She did not want to literally highlight her invasion of this holy sanctum by blasting bright artificial light into it.

  Someone wanted you to come here, she told herself. If the monks wanted to keep strangers out, they could always lock their doors.

  Cautiously she advanced.

  Could it be a trap? she wondered. If Prasad or Lal wanted her dead, or secretly worked for someone who wanted her dead, they’d had plenty of opportunities to make her disappear in the time she’d spent combing central Nepal with them. Maybe there were villagers, farmers and hill herdsfolk everywhere, unseen by foreign eyes. But there were so many narrow crevasses and caves hidden among rocks it couldn’t be that hard to stash a body without anyone knowing.

  No. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a trap meant to kill her. At least not at first. That raised the hairs at the nape of her neck. She knew there really were worse things than death that could happen to you. She’d encountered way too many of them in the past few years.