Seeker’s Curse

by Alex Archer

  “So you know what we’re looking for,” Annja said, hoping to derail the conversation before it vanished utterly into mystic navel gazing. “Can you help us find it?”

  “I can point out signposts. But only you can find your way.” He shook his head and laughed. “Sorry. Coming off all mystical and cryptic just goes with the job. Anyway, you already know that twenty-some centuries ago, this young punk came out of the West, crashing into India breaking things and killing people.”

  Pan exclaimed angrily in a language Annja didn’t understand. It sounded Greek, most likely in the accent of his remote home village. But it sounded…archaic, somehow.

  Ricky regarded him calmly. The Greek cop, eyes staring, face still flushed, gathered himself and said in hoarse English, “You cannot speak that way of Megas Alexandros! He was a great man. He built cities and carried civilization!”

  “We had civilization around here already. You know what I mean?”

  Pan drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “But he, he was my—” He stopped and passed a hand over his face. “Childhood idol,” he finished weakly.

  “Right,” Ricky said.

  Pan slumped. He seemed slightly abashed and mostly confused.

  After a moment the lama continued. “You know how he found out about the Highest Shrine, away up the White Mountain. And he sent his most trusted general to go and grab it for him. You’ve been following in his footsteps. Right?”

  Neither of the visitors said anything.

  “So, you still are,” Ricky said. “He was found worthy to come this far. Now, so have you.”

  Annja frowned. “You—your predecessors—found him worthy to steal your greatest treasure?”

  “If that ancient warrior Pantheras had succeeded in his quest, he’d have found a treasure valuable beyond his wildest imaginings,” Ricky said.

  “Did he…take the treasure, then?” Pan asked, as if speaking through glass shards in his throat.

  “Do the histories talk about him getting a fabulous treasure back to Alex?”

  Pan shook his head. “They don’t recount that he ever returned at all. He was a Macedonian. One of the elite. He would not have come slinking back a failure. As the cliché goes, he would have come back with his shield, or on it.”

  “But that doesn’t mean he never found the treasure,” Annja said. She said it softly, uncharacteristically hesitant. She felt a strong sense of intruding.

  Wait, she told herself sternly. This is my quest, too. If I hadn’t started out on it in the first place we wouldn’t even be sitting here.

  “No,” Ricky said, some of his perkiness coming back. “It’s not my place to tell you that, either. All I’m here for is to provide you with—”

  He reached behind himself and produced a beaten-brass tray. On it rested a scroll tied with a dusty scarlet ribbon.

  “This.”

  An exhalation came from deep within Pan. It seemed to speak of infinite weariness and sadness.

  “You know the drill by now,” Ricky said, rising. “General Pantheras left behind a written record of his journey up the White Mountain to find the highest treasure. The monks copied it carefully and faithfully, time and again across the centuries. And now—” he bowed “—I leave you to your studies. If you need anything, let one of the brothers know and they’ll get it for you.”

  Annja got to her feet and started to speak. “Your men have been shown to rooms of their own and are being fed,” Ricky said, reading her question correctly. “When you’re finished reading, a lama will show you to your own room.”

  He walked out. The soft falls of his footsteps echoed in the mostly empty room. Pan still sat. His eyes were fixed on the scroll.

  Although she’d eaten little, Annja forgot hunger in her eagerness to learn what was in the fragment. From her pack she produced thin disposable gloves for them both. Carefully Pan untied the ribbon. He unrolled the scroll and began to read.

  For several minutes Annja sat in silence. Her eyes never left his as they tracked line by line down the yellowed, brittle parchment. Then, almost as if in a trance, he began to speak aloud in a low voice.

  “Pantheras has learned that his path from here leads high up the mountain. To a place called the Lost Lamasery. It is a place even the monks speak of with trepidation. Terrible dangers guard it, natural and otherwise. He’s even heard rumors it is guarded by demons.”

  “Demons,” Annja echoed with a little laugh.

  Pan didn’t respond to her. “It is, he writes, a destination from which the unworthy never return.

  “By the time he reached here the general had lost most of his party, the greater part to a recent avalanche. He writes of growing disillusionment. With slaughter, with Alexander, with the world. Madness and fear seem to be overcoming the few remaining members of his expedition.

  “He has lost his taste for treasure. He seeks now for peace within his soul. It seems strange to him, but the teachings of this land’s people offer just that—not the favor of fickle deities, but lasting serenity. Something he’s never imagined before.

  “But…he is a true son of Macedonia. He will carry out his orders. Whatever the danger. Whatever the cost to himself. He will deliver the treasure, as charged, to the highest and most powerful lord.”

  Slowly he rerolled the scroll. He tied the ribbon around it again and set it back on the tray. Then he settled back with his hands on his thighs and his chin sunk to his clavicle.

  “The avalanche struck them as they were crossing the site of the present bazaar town,” he said, not looking at her. “A huge snowpack slid from the great granite shield above the town. Pantheras’s men called upon him to save them, called upon the gods. But he and the gods alike were powerless to help them. They were swept away down the mountain, crushed and buried.”

  “That’s in the fragment, too?” Annja asked.

  “No,” Pan said. “I saw it last night in my dreams.”

  THE TORCHES OF THE NIGHT before were extinguished. The white light of morning shone down into the chamber from windows set high up in the rafters. Annja and Pan sat eating breakfast with Dzogchen Rinpoche, born Richard Yamazaki in Cleveland, who had resumed his earlier place on the low dais.

  “You’ve learned what you came to learn,” he said with a gentle smile. It was not a question.

  Annja noticed he did not ask if they’d slept well. She got the very strong impression that he knew.

  It doesn’t take any kind of mystic second sight to know that, she thought. Just good enough eyesight to see the bags under our eyes.

  “I suppose so,” Annja said.

  Although they shared a room, it hadn’t been any kind of happy recreation that kept them awake. Annja was willing to maintain their relationship as strictly business until their search was settled. But if Pan had wanted to press the issue…she probably would not have said no.

  She felt a strong attraction to her companion. And yet now that circumstances had conspired to bring them close together, he was receding.

  Emotionally, at least. Mentally. He seemed to find himself drawn irresistibly back into the past. For all that he seemed as solidly grounded in reality as any man she’d known, the coincidence that the general Alexander had sent to seize the treasure was also named Pantheras had caught hold of his imagination with claws of iron and would not let go.

  Once more he’d spent the night tossing and turning and crying out in a strange tongue. Annja feared his fantasy of a past lifetime had trapped him and was dragging him inexorably in.

  “What can you tell me of this Lost Lamasery?” Pan asked. Annja thought even his voice sounded different—deeper. Older, somehow. “Does it still exist?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ricky said. “Still there. Still lost.”

  “But surely there’s no danger in trying to reach it anymore?” Annja said.

  “Oh, yeah,” the lama said. “Yes to the danger, that is. It’s a very holy place. Its keepers can’t risk allowing it to be plundered and defiled by every str
ay conquering thug—sorry, sergeant—bandit, or doctrinaire atheist guerrilla who wanders by. And somehow, you know, millennium in, millennium out, there’s always been people like that running loose in this part of the world. Must be the air. Or maybe the height.”

  He shook his head. “It’s a very perilous journey. And just like General Pantheras, you’ve got to pass through the Lost Lamasery to complete your journey.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Annja said.

  The young man showed her a toothy grin. “Nope. That’s karma—the real deal, not the wishy-washy watered-down New Age kind we hear about back in the States, you know? Sometimes it’s your duty, sometimes it’s your fate. Sometimes it just sucks.”

  Pan nodded as if these words held deep meaning for him. “Duty is something I can understand,” he said. “Something we both understand.”

  Thanks for remembering I’m involved in this, too, Annja thought, a little sharply.

  “So if this place is really so lost,” Annja said slowly, “how are we ever going to find it?”

  “I will tell you,” Ricky said.

  24

  The sun hadn’t quite reached the zenith when a cry in Gorkhali brought Annja’s head whipping around.

  Lal was marching just in front of her and Pan as they climbed Dhaulagiri. The dark figures winding around the mountainside half a mile behind them filled them all with dread.

  “I hope they do not shoot,” Prasad said from point position. He spoke softly but his words carried down the rising wind. “It could bring the mountain down on all our heads.”

  The slope above them was steep and white. To their left it dropped away dizzyingly into depths hidden by clouds of snow blown by a stiff wind that fortunately didn’t reach this high.

  “We should move,” Prasad said.

  Annja swallowed and nodded. The little procession began to wind its tortured way along the face of the mountain once more.

  She looked at Pan. She was pretty experienced in combat herself—more so, she realized, than most men in frontline combat units. Pan had been stuck deep into the most harrowing and constant special ops in Afghanistan. And he was the professional, after all.

  “Well?” she asked. “What do we do now?”

  “Keep moving,” he said. “That’s all I can see. And the only ways to go are forward—or back.”

  “It does simplify our choices,” Annja said.

  “Lal?” Pan said. He pitched his voice low but managed to make it carry. With a cringing, contracting feeling in the pit of her belly Annja knew how dangerous it would be to shout up here with tons of snow hanging over you. “What do you think?”

  For once young Lal wasn’t smiling. “You’re right, Sergeant,” he said. “But we and they each hold a blade.”

  “What do you mean?” Annja asked as they studied the group pursuing them.

  “They can move faster than we can,” he said. “There are more of them, and they’re more lightly laden.”

  “What about the newbies?” Annja asked. Jagannatha and his men had been following them for some time but a new and less disciplined-looking group had joined them.

  Lal shrugged. “If they fall, their comrades won’t even stop to watch.”

  “So what’s our advantage?” Pan asked. “That’s the part I want to hear.”

  “Out here on the narrow trail neither side dares shoot. Even without the avalanche threat we’d just slaughter each other out here in the open with no hiding places.”

  “Jagannatha might risk that,” Prasad said. “He hates the Western influence. He fears what you’ll do to the country and the people if you find the treasure. He’d rather die than see you turn the Highest Shrine into Disneyland.”

  “Like I’d do that!” Annja exclaimed indignantly.

  “Voice,” Pan said.

  Annja put her hand to her mouth. “Sorry.”

  “In his way the major is a true fanatic,” Prasad said.

  “I thought you said he’d lapsed from his Communist faith,” Pan said.

  “And so he has, Sergeant. Yet what he believes, he believes in with a convert’s fervor. And he believes he stands alone against the forces of what you call globalization.”

  “Why haven’t they just opened up and finished it, then?” Annja asked.

  “Because,” their guide said, forging steadily along as if he hadn’t a worry in the world, “he’s no longer alone. Nor, it is probable, in charge. Lowlanders have recently joined them—his political officer and followers, no doubt.”

  “Wouldn’t a devoted Maoist want to stop us at any cost, too?” Annja asked.

  Prasad translated that. He and his nephew and the Sherpas all laughed. The sound was barely perceptible; Annja could mostly tell they were laughing because their smiles widened and their bodies seemed to shake. She got the idea that was, under the circumstances, their version of busting a gut.

  “They want the gold, Annja Creed!” Prasad said. “No one lusts after gold like a Communist.”

  “They’ll want to catch us and use their kukris,” Lal said.

  “Note also the much taller figures who walk among them,” Prasad said.

  “Bajraktari,” Pan spit.

  “It would certainly appear your outlaw countrymen walk among them,” Lal said.

  “Not my countrymen. Once we hunted them with spears, like wild beasts….”

  He broke off, noting the way Annja was staring at him.

  “Pan,” she said, low and urgent. “Stay in the present. We need you here and now.”

  For a moment his eyes blazed with anger. It was replaced quickly with confusion, then contrition. He lowered his head.

  “You’re right. I cannot afford to slip.”

  They came to a frightening choke point where they had to turn faces to the rock and inch along. Despite her precarious foothold Annja risked a look back. It seemed their pursuers had closed the distance somewhat.

  “So, I still haven’t heard what our advantage is,” Annja said, trying not to sound too hopeful.

  “The path won’t stay narrow forever,” Lal said. “Sooner or later, we’ll reach a spot where we can leave it, fan out and find cover to shoot from.”

  “So it’s basically a race,” she said.

  “Between their knives and our rifles, yes.”

  AS THE AFTERNOON BEGAN to wear on them, the trail never widened much beyond shoulder width, narrowing all too often to something little more than a dubious toehold. The pursuers were gaining, but glacially.

  A distant cry brought Annja’s head around. She saw a dark figure plummeting away from the narrow string of pursuers. She cringed in what had become reflexive fear that the man’s wail of terminal despair would bring on an avalanche. She noticed she wasn’t the only one. These high-mountain men were hard-core, but they were still human.

  “That’s two in the last hour,” Pan said. “That one was a local, I think.” The first pursuer to fall had been taller than most of the enemy party. They were close enough now Annja could recognize the tall gaunt shape of Bajraktari still with them, the bear-like bulk of his shadow, Duka, limping painfully and determinedly along. Apparently the kneecap she’d displaced had gotten treatment. But it had to hurt like a monster to walk on. Especially like this.

  “Prasad,” she said, “how much farther?”

  “Not far,” Prasad said. “Another hour or two.”

  “That may be too long,” Pan said. “They’re getting close. If too many of them slip and go over, they may do something desperate.”

  Their guide shrugged beneath the straps of his bulky pack. “What will happen, will happen. If you are worthy, nothing will stop you reaching your destination.”

  “What about you?” Pan asked.

  Prasad grinned. “It is not our spiritual quest,” he said. “What happens to us matters much to us, but little to fate.”

  Annja heard a whisper from Lal, out of sight around a two-story granite boulder. “Storm clouds ahead,” Prasad translated. “We s
hall be in it soon.”

  Pan said something under his breath in his native tongue. Annja wasn’t sure if it was a prayer, a curse or a little of both.

  “Sounds like we’re in trouble,” she said.

  But her guide shook his head. “No. It can be good for us. It will shield us from our enemies’ eyes and make their hearts quail.”

  It’s sure having that effect on my heart, she thought, but she decided not to say it.

  They edged around the boulder. Annja hugged the harsh stone tightly. She felt air beneath her heels. The weight of her pack seemed to try to peel her off backward.

  Then she was around. The trail widened to a luxurious five feet. Safe as the living room of her loft back in Brooklyn, it seemed.

  But ahead the storm clouds piled higher than the great mountain and grayer than the rocks. Whiteness swirled no more than a quarter mile ahead, obliterating sight.

  From behind Annja heard a mutter among the porters. Despite the alien intonations she caught the impression of a debate between fear and something a lot like eagerness.

  “What are they saying, Prasad?”

  “They say the storm is brought by the mountain spirits who protect the Lost Lamasery,” he answered calmly. “Some think they’re there to help us.”

  “And the others?” Pan asked.

  Prasad shrugged. “They say the demons come to prevent us from reaching the monastery alive.”

  25

  “How long must we wait for vengeance?”

  Enver Bajraktari kept his concentration until he finished inching his way around the big rock protrusion that reduced the trail to little more than a suggestion. Then he stepped out where it widened. In front of him one of Chatura’s men armed with a black British submachine gun and one of Jagannatha’s with a Kalashnikov walked point, with their two leaders moving just as suspiciously behind them.

  The tall Kosovar helped Duka around the last of the narrow shelf and aided him in limping to the wider area. Then he looked back and snarled an answer to his giant bodyguard. “Can’t you at least wait to whine until I’m off that damned knife edge?” He was trying to keep his voice down. Their local helpers had impressed on them the necessity of keeping loud noises to a minimum up here.