by Alex Archer
The wind whistled in the space above her head. The wooden walls creaked and thumped uneasily. Beneath her feet the floorboards squeaked. The place sure sounded deserted. Possibly for centuries.
But someone had put those torches outside the door and lit them. Not too long ago, either. The same went for the lamps.
“Hello,” she said again. “My name is Annja Creed. I don’t want to go anywhere I’m not supposed to be.”
A groan came from down the hall. She flinched. She almost formed her right hand to summon the sword.
She saw a hint of motion. It was deliberate enough not to feel threatening. She walked forward.
When she was about halfway down the corridor, as far as she could tell, she made out a vertical slit of gray in the darkness in front of her. It suggested a door had opened a crack.
She ran her fingers along the dark-painted wall to her right. Its texture felt rough. She detected expressed cross beams and posts. She got the impression there might be doors in one or both walls. She couldn’t tell for sure.
The door ahead seemed to beckon her. She shrugged and walked forward.
At the door she paused. “Hello,” she called out. Then louder, “Hello? Anybody here?”
The rustle of the wind and the creaking of the wooden structure around her was her only answer.
She stepped through. The dim gold gleam of a pair of bowl lamps illuminated another doorway. The dark wood door was open.
Annja went to it, pushed open the door. Inside was a chamber about twelve feet square. A circle of the bronze or copper bowls had been set out in the middle of it, with a diameter of perhaps nine feet. At its center waited remarkable objects. She glimpsed other items laid against the far wall, indistinct in the gloom outside the circle of tiny yellow flames.
The objects within the circle held her attention. To the right lay what appeared to be a book, hefty, its pages warped and cover blackened and cracked with age and perusal. On the left a pile of golden coins glittered.
At the edge of the circle she paused. She wasn’t sure why. She knew circles often served as ritual barriers. I don’t believe in any of that, she chided herself, so why the hesitation?
Leaving the matter hanging for the moment, she sidled around the circle to the far wall. A rolled pallet lay there. Shrugging, she squirmed out of her pack straps. She let the bag down softly to the floor beside the pallet and sighed and stretched with relief. It was awfully heavy, and her shoulders were sore from bearing the weight. Getting free of the straps always made her feel better; she didn’t care for confinement of any kind.
Taking a deep breath, Annja stepped into the circle and knelt facing the door. It had shut without a sound. She put it from her mind.
It felt as if she were alone in the lamasery. But it had to be occupied and the occupants were choosing to remain unseen.
At least there’s four walls and a roof, she thought, as the wind began to howl and a curl of cold air seemed to pass through her jacket and muscles and bone to her marrow like a chill scythe. She wondered what kind of accommodations Prasad and the others would find to pass the night. She hoped they’d be comfortable. If anyone can find decent shelter it’s got to be Prasad, she thought.
Sitting back on her heels with hands on thighs she studied the curious display before her by the yellow lamplight. Then her breath caught in her throat as if she’d swallowed a burr.
Lying atop the small pile of golden glittery disks was one showing the unmistakable head of Alexander the Great. Eyes wide, she reached for it.
She stopped with her fingers hovering just above it. For a moment her hand looked like a pale spider, its underside turned scarcely less golden than the ancient Macedonian coins by the light of burning butter.
She sucked in a deep breath. Reluctantly she withdrew her hand and studied the two displays.
“Someone went to a lot of trouble to set up this whole tableau,” she told herself aloud. She no longer felt as if speech was a violation of sanctity.
“It has to be a test,” she said. “So I guess I better pass it.”
Looked at in that light it seemed fairly obvious. Simplistic, even. Material desires versus longing for enlightenment. “Easy for you to say now,” she told herself, “after your first response was to go grabbing like a magpie for the nice shiny gold thing.”
She didn’t know whether her invisible audience would understand her words. She took for granted she had one now. The lamas wanted to see how their test subject performed, after all. She didn’t care what they might make of her words. Either she’d passed the test or was hopelessly adrift.
She carefully lifted her pack over the lamps and dug around. From an outer pocket came a digital camera.
“If you lamas don’t want me doing this,” she said, focusing and snapping a picture of the pile of coins, “feel free to speak right up. Or ask me before I leave to erase the images from the card. I’ll do that if you want.”
Only the wind’s buffeting answered her. She moved around the pile of coins, taking pictures from various angles. She took care not to upset any of the butter bowls. She also did her best to expose the ancient book to the flash as little as possible. It was unlikely the brief glare would damage it, but especially given what she intended next, she wanted to minimize the risk.
When at last she’d taken sufficient shots of the coins, concentrating on the Alexander piece, she wrote everything down in her spiral-bound notebook. Then she turned her attention to the book.
To avoid contaminating the binding or pages with finger oils she pulled on thin latex gloves from her bag.
She pulled over a couple of bowl lamps, being careful not to spill them, for light to work by. The book’s cover was bound in thin, very fine-grained hide, blackened by age and probably finger grease. In fact the grain was so fine it made her shudder. Then again, she reminded herself, this wouldn’t be the first old tome bound in human skin you’ve handled.
Cautiously she opened the book. She was unsure what to expect. So she felt neither surprise nor disappointment to see she couldn’t read any of it. Even if the writing had been transliterated into Latin characters it was almost certainly a tongue she didn’t know. She wished she could transcribe some of it, so that she could get it to a translator and find at least a clue as to what this was all about. And why it had been presented to her with such showmanship by the brothers of the Lamasery of the Woods. But she didn’t dare use her flash for fear of degrading the brittle paper.
Despite her lack of comprehension the sinuous characters seemed to entice her eyes, draw them in and then along as with the flow of a stream. She scanned the first page, then turned it and worked her way down the next.
A strange sense of peace suffused her. Her mind a meditative blank, she paged through the ancient volume. She lost track of time, of location, of the sounds of the wind and the squeak of wooden joints. She lost all sense of self in the waterlike rippling of unknowable words. It was as if the dancing letters conveyed some message directly to her subconscious without passing through her conscious mind.
She found herself at the end. Closing the book, she sat back. She became aware of ferocious aches in her thighs and lower back.
“Just how long did I spend at that?” she wondered aloud.
Instead of checking the time on her cell phone she stood and stretched. That helped, but her feet prickled as blood flowed back into them, and her joints still felt stiff. She returned the butter lamps to their original position in the circle. Then, working around lamps and relics, she performed some yoga poses.
As well as gently unkinking her joints and muscles, the moves allowed her to slip into a familiar meditative space. She was aware without forming thoughts that this was different from the trance state in which she had read through the whole book without understanding a single character. It was as if she was somehow processing.
For all her skepticism about the mystical, Annja had learned to respect the power of the human subconscious. In fact she a
ttributed much of what some people called extrasensory perception to the subconscious processing normal sensory inputs of which the conscious mind was unaware. She perceived that something of the sort was happening and she was content to let it.
When she finished she realized she smelled smoke. Looking around quickly in alarm, she saw a brazier of glowing coals and several covered porcelain bowls had been placed just inside the door.
“Is that really a good idea?” she asked aloud, but softly. “This whole place is wood.” The bowl lamps didn’t worry her much. The wood was dense and tough. She doubted a spill of cool-burning butter would make the floor take light. But a brazier full of hot coals…
“The lamas have run this place a long time,” she reminded herself aloud, “and they’ve got no electricity, much less natural gas. If they haven’t burned the lamasery down by now, what’re the odds of them doing it tonight?”
Then again, how often did they host long-legged Western adventuresses who might inadvertently kick the brazier over in her sleep? Oh, well, she thought. That’s why they call it adventure.
She discovered she was intensely hungry. She brought the bowls and then the brazier, holding on by a pair of wooden handles, over to the wall outside the circle of lamps. She opened the bowls to find steamed rice and beans. The standard daily Nepali fare.
She ate, finding the food anything but bland as it might appear. It wasn’t just hunger that added flavor to food, she’d found. It was also strangeness.
And this was high strangeness indeed.
When she replaced the intricately painted lids on the bowls they were all empty. Almost at once she felt her eyelids sag. A strange lassitude overcame her.
Not so strange, she assured herself. It’s been a day. And she was far from used to the altitude yet.
Yet she was used to far greater exertions, physical and mental. Or so she thought. She found herself barely able to unroll the bedding and slip inside before her eyes fell shut.
IN THE MORNING SHE FOUND the brazier glowing red with renewed coals. White sunlight slanted down from windows up beneath the rafters she hadn’t known were there before. The coins, the book and the butter lamps were gone.
She smelled food. More legumes and rice awaited her in bowls, steaming hot. To the side was tea, flavored with rancid yak butter.
Oh, well. She was ravenous again.
As she ate Annja tried to parse out exactly what had happened to her. As she finished the meal she decided she had no idea. But the monks had staged a truly elaborate show on her behalf.
“I guess,” she said, standing up and stretching, “I’ll have to wait to find out.”
To her surprise she felt well rested and not at all sore, given she’d passed the night on a hard plank floor with only a thin pad beneath her.
The door opened suddenly. She froze.
A monk appeared. He wore yellow robes. His shaved head was painted with dots and lines in white. He smiled shyly, pressed palms together and bowed to her.
Recovering, she returned the greeting.
He presented her with an envelope. It was a normal-appearing manila envelope about six inches by eight, with the metal clasp fastened. She accepted it with a thank-you and a brow creased in puzzlement.
With clumsy fingers she fumbled to open the clasp. She put her lack of dexterity down to the room’s chill. Even though the brazier had been replenished during the night it basically, so far as she could tell, prevented frost from forming on the walls, icicles dripping from the heavy rafters and Annja from freezing into a woman-shaped plank. And not much more. Her breath still produced dragon puffs of condensation.
Finally she got the flap open and looked inside. She gasped. It contained a scrap of paper, almost orange with age and dried to brittleness. She could clearly see that the writing on it, faded to a faint violet, was in Greek characters.
She looked up. She was alone in the room. The door was closed. She felt an eerie sense the lama had never been real at all.
Nonsense, she told herself. This paper is real enough.
Feeling a stab of annoyance at the monks for such cavalierly improper treatment of a clearly invaluable document, she fumbled in a cargo pocket for a plastic bag, friend to specimen takers and evidence techs around the world. When she had the paper sealed safely away she replaced it in the envelope.
She hesitated. She wasn’t about to entrust the frail scrap to a pocket. Much less fold it to fit. She wanted to keep it immobilized and protected. One classic field-expedient method was to close it in the middle of a big book, preferably hardcover. But she was traveling much too lightly to carry anything that weighed that much and used up so much precious pack space.
Kneeling, she placed the envelope carefully on the dark floor boards. Then she opened her pack and pulled out her computer. The manila envelope fit handily between the screen and the keyboard. The clasp wouldn’t quite catch but a couple of strips of the tape she carried as another frequently handy item secured the top well enough to satisfy her. Being stuffed in the pack would help hold the lid shut.
After zipping the computer back into her backpack she donned her heavy jacket, shouldered her pack and stood. Clearly it was time to go.
In daytime the lamasery corridors remained dim. The friendly glow of butter lamps burning in their niches showed her the way out.
Brilliant morning sunshine made her blink. Chill air hit her in the face like a bucket of ice water.
She barely noticed. Because sitting on a rock not twenty yards from her, with one long leg cocked over another and swinging idly, was Pantheras Katramados.
14
At the sound of the little copper bells, Baglung District Commissioner Chatura sighed, set down his tea on his Spartan, scrupulously ordered desk and rose. He walked through the room divider and stepped into the waiting room.
What he saw brought him up short. The two figures looming there crowded the room all by themselves. Clearly foreign, each topped him by at least a head. One was lean and lupine; the other was so wide, especially in his heavily padded jacket, he resembled one of the legendary ape-human monsters, the so-called bonmanche or yeti, which the absurdly superstitious had recently begun reporting seeing again around Dhaulagiri.
Chatura grunted. “Come on, then,” he said in English. He turned briskly about and made himself strut back into his office as if neither surprised nor concerned.
Inside he seethed.
ANNJA CREED RAN to embrace Pan. His strong arms felt good around her. His long wiry presence was a reassuring solidity in the warm sunlight, after the unreality of the night before.
The embrace broke. Annja stepped back. “What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.
He laughed. “I’m happy to see you, too, Annja. I hope you’re pleasantly surprised.”
Behind him Prasad, Lal and the two Sherpas sat smoking and chatting. Their cousin Bahadur sat with them, his wounded arm in a sling.
“Well,” she said, “yes. But I’m still surprised.”
Pan nodded. He wore a padded jacket in green and yellow over a pair of well-worn blue jeans and hiking boots. He was also wearing a holster beneath his left arm.
“I suppose I owe you an explanation, Annja,” he said.
“I don’t know about owe,” she said. “But it’d be nice if you gave me one anyway.”
“The special antiquities task force has decided to extend their investigation of the Bajraktari artifact-smuggling ring to Nepal,” he said. “For some reason they chose me for the job.”
He grinned as he spoke. For all his modest manner he knew as well as she did how uniquely qualified he was for this mission.
His presence still seemed odd. “I didn’t think they had the budget for this kind of junket,” she said.
“Not on the basis of what we knew at the time you left,” he said. His voice had deepened and his face had hardened. It was as if a cloud had passed before the sun. “But we have received new intelligence. Enver Bajraktari, his henchman,
Duka, and a number of his gunmen have come to Nepal. Specifically to hunt you down.”
Annja pressed her lips to a line. “How did they know I was here?”
He winced. “Apparently their spies have penetrated the Greek military or law-enforcement community more deeply than we even feared. None of the task force’s members has been corrupted—I think. Unfortunately, we are required to pass certain information on. Both laterally and up the chain of command.”
“You think they might’ve got to some of your bosses?” Annja asked in alarm.
“Anything is possible, I’m afraid. But it could also be that no one in the Hellenic police deliberately shared this information with the gangsters. Somebody boasting in a taverna, a police bureaucrat trying to impress his mistress…And our government shares much information with other governments. Especially where international terrorism might come into play. The leak may have originated elsewhere entirely.”
“So that’s what brings you to Nepal,” Annja said, sounding lighter than she felt. “But how did you happen to wind up here, at this allegedly hidden lamasery in the middle of a Brothers Grimm forest?”
He smiled, although she could see in his dark, expressive eyes that the implications of what he had told her worried him. Me, too, she thought.
“On my own initiative—and telling no one else—I contacted the Japan Buddha Federation and explained to them that you were in great danger.”
Annja smiled at him. “So now you’ve got an international reputation as a fighter of antiquities trafficking?”
He shrugged. “In a minor way, perhaps. The Buddhists satisfied themselves of my bona fides. They provided me contacts that led me to Baglung and this gentleman.”
He gestured. “Bahadur,” Annja said, nodding and smiling at the Nepali. He grinned back.
“Despite his help,” Pan said, “I’ve searched for you for several days. It may sound paranoid, but I got the distinct feeling I was being tested somehow.”
“I have the same feeling,” she said. “And I suspect we’re both right. Take a look at this.”