State of War

20

Alone, Jay Gridley meditated in the Place of the Dead.

Or, rather, he tried to meditate. He shivered as he exhaled. His eyes were closed, but he knew if he opened them he would see his breath cloud the air before him. It was always cold here at the top of the world, where the snows lay deep and eternal. In the summer the top layers were stale and crisp, crusted into snow-cone ice, and the daylight hours were longer — but the cold never went away. Even inside, out of the wind, with fires and lamps burning, warmth was far more illusion than reality.

Jay smiled ruefully. It was all an illusion, of course, but it made Saji happy, and he was glad he had created this scenario for her. He just wished he could get the place to work for him as well as it did for her.

Seated upon a reed mat worn thin by generations of student monks, Jay felt the smooth rock floor claim what meager heat his flesh generated: It was cold.

The patchouli incense smoldered in a big clump on the altar in front of him. Along with the rendered-yak-fat oil lamps, they sent entwined tendrils of greasy smoke up to paint yet another layer of soot on the already tar-colored ceiling forty feet up. The carbon must be a centimeter thick up there, Jay thought.

Most of the lamps in the monastery used kerosene or white petrol. The fuel for them had to be carried dozens of miles up the mountain trails in ten-liter plastic bottles. Here in the traditional meditation chambers, however, the ancient, smelly, smoky oil lamps were still used. The combined aroma of bundled incense and burning fat was an oily, metallic odor, powerful but not unpleasant.

Nice touches, if he did say so himself.

Jay took another deep breath and exhaled slowly. He was supposed to be calm. He was also supposed to be finding out about the Supreme Court justice’s clerk, and not focused on some small-time programmer’s inconsequential net viruses. But it was personal now, after his own computer was infected—

He would never achieve a still mind this way. He opened his eyes.

The legions of the dead surrounded him.

The four walls were lined with shelves made of long planks stained a dark green, from a time when wood was not so scarce in the region. And on those shelves were—artifacts, Jay thought, repressing another shiver. Artifacts — a safely ambiguous term.

Artifacts — which had once been human beings.

Tibetan Buddhism taught that there was no worth in a dead body, except whatever use it might be to those left behind to dispose of it. A corpse was like a house destroyed in a storm — once the spirit was gone, a body was not to be revered any more than an empty, wrecked building would be. And if somebody had need of the timbers or shingles or window glass of that building? Why, then, let them make what use they could of it.

Which is what the monks of the Avalokiteshvara Monastery had done. There on the top shelf, visible in the flickering yellow light of the largest of the brass lamps, was a prayer wheel. It was an ingeniously constructed device, a cylinder inscribed with prayers and litanies designed to spin during devotions.

The shaft of the wheel had been made from the thigh bone of the first head of the Avalokiteshvara Order. The wheel itself was cleverly carved from sections of that same holy man’s skull. Both had been overlaid with fine layers of hammered gold leaf, but there was no mistaking what they had once been. Next to the prayer wheel was a drinking cup, also made from the trepanned top of a monk’s skull. And next to that was a scroll composed of human skin, counting beads made from finger bones, a necklace fashioned of yellowed teeth…

The shelves surrounding him were full of such mementos mori, dozens of them, all neatly dusted and arranged.

Brrr. Jay shivered again, but this time the involuntary reflex was not caused entirely by the cold. He was alone physically, but not spiritually. The dead swirled around him unseen, traces of their essences clinging to that which had once been part of them.

Of course, before he met Saji, his western, rational, scientific mind would have been amused at such things, would have laughed at the idea of ghosts and revenants. But here in the depths of the monastery, science ran into its limits. Here, in this charnel dug deep into the raw stone heart of Mount Changjunga, here, in the bottom levels of these labyrinthine tunnels and chambers, here, in the Place of the Dead, Jay had more than once thought he heard the spirits call to him when, on rare occasions, he had managed to still his thoughts long enough to slip into meditation.

Spooky.

To sit alone in the Place of the Dead was definitely that.

Some of those who had left parts of themselves here had not been quite so holy as their contemporaries had thought them to be. Some of them had not advanced so far along the path as they had pretended. Their essences were strong and sinister, it was whispered, still full of unfinished business, of lusts and hatreds and fears, and woe to the initiate who sat among them unprepared. Legend had it that they would beat upon the walls of a student’s mind, clamoring to be let in, to experience once more the red pulse of life, to leach warmth from his spirit as the floor did from his body.

Saji had spoken to him of the fear Jay had felt on such occasions, especially when he had been recovering from his stroke.

“But of course you will be afraid,” she had said. “Fear is natural. Confront it often enough and it will lose its power over you. There will come a day when you will embrace fear as you would a woman, and it will serve you as well as the warmest love.”

Uh-huh. Right.

Jay realized that his breathing had become more rapid and shallow. He could feel fear rising in him like the mercury in a thermometer. He concentrated on breathing deeply and slowly, focusing his awareness on his breath.

It seemed to him that the light had grown even more wan and pallid, that the darkness was pressing in hungrily around him. He noticed the skull of some ancient monk sitting on a nearby shelf at eye level. An unnamed artisan — perhaps existing at the same time as the monk, perhaps centuries later, there was no way of knowing — had outlined the skull’s eye sockets with filigreed silver and placed within them a pair of faceted rubies, each worth a king’s ransom. The gems glittered in the weak light, seeming somehow to focus on Jay with malign intensity…

Jeez, how good were you at creating a scenario when you could scare yourself with something you had made?

Jay turned his gaze from the skull, trying to still his mind, to concentrate on following the breath as it entered and left his body.

He sighed. There was no denying it — the monkey mind was in full control now. His thoughts scampered from one subject to another like primates leaping from tree to tree. Before his mental eye arose the image of his own infected computer, and of the anger he had felt at that. He wanted to hurt somebody. Oh, boy, did he.

He also wanted very much to be able to be calm, and to not let his emotions run away with him, and so he kept trying to get there. And if that had to include sitting on a frigid stone floor among human body parts, meditating and fighting off the attacks of restless spirits, then so be it. Saji could do it. He could learn how to do it, too.

Jay closed his eyes again. He blew his breath out through his left nostril, inhaled slowly through his right nostril. Once more he blanked his mind as best he could and sought the “om,” the sound of all sounds, the drone of the entire universe as it spoke with a single voice.

In the embrace of the “om,” it was said, all things were possible.

Even tracking down the lowly little hacker who’d created that virus—

He shook his head. There he went again. He was never going to get this. Never. Maybe he should—

His priority alarm chimed, kicking him abruptly out of the meditation scenario—

“What?”

“WE HAVE FOUND THE EVIL ONE,” his tracker imp said.

Jay grinned. He could get his head together later. Right now, he had a criminal to catch and a very personal score to settle.