Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 02 (27 page)

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Using a hammered-silver mirror, Coyote placed a new strip of white adhesive tape over his nose. After he had stumbled to his chamber upon his return from the clutch dimensions, he had slept for the better part of a day.

Sometime during that day, he discovered when he woke up, he had been bathed and bandaged. Already the swelling in his face had gone down, and the outer edges of the bruising beneath his eyes had begun to turn a jaundiced yellow.

“You heal quickly, Kyi-can.”

Coyote turned slowly. “So it appears, Lama Mong.

When do I resume my training?”

“Whenever you feel physically able, Kyi-can.” The monk watched him serenely. “The way you mend, it should only be a couple of days.”

“I’m physically able now, Mong. You know as well as I do that I could go out into your main courtyard and take on everything you care to throw at me.”

“Really?” Mong’s face hardened. “Your bruises would seem to suggest something to the contrary.”

The tall man leaned back against the stone wall and let the cold, rough stone leech heat from his body. “Physically, I’m ready, but I need answers to some questions before I decide to continue. First and foremost, why the charade?”

“Charade?” Mong folded his hands into the sleeves of his red robe. “What charade is this?”

“This shell game about training me to walk through dimensions.” Coyote held his right hand up and started ticking things off on his fingers. “I have learned in weeks—

I have
mastered
in weeks—skills it takes your monks a minimum of five years to learn—longer in most cases.

Those monks adhere to strict rules of conduct to cleanse themselves spiritually. They can be expelled from the monastery for lying, stealing, fornicating and murdering,
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yet I have done all of these things, and the reason I killed was for money. In four hours of contemplation, I manage to attain a knowledge and understanding of the universe many would envy after a lifetime of meditations.”

“I have often praised your prowess, Kyi-can, and I have told you that, as an outsider, there are things about you that are unimportant.”

“That’s bullshit, pure and simple, Mong, and you know it.” Coyote’s right hand closed into a fist. “The fact is that you’ve not taught me anything here, really. All you’ve done is reacquaintme with skills I already possessed. And you’ve done this while keeping me under a microscope.

You’ve been watching me and testing me. Why?”

The old man’s voice took on an angry edge Coyote had never heard before. “You are the one spinning this fantasy.

Why do you think I would agree to open Kanggenpo to you, then participate in this testing?”

The tall man pushed off the wall and paced through his small cell. “You trained Crowley and, through him, learned of me. From him, you learned I had been one of Fiddleback’s pets. He told you what I had done to defeat Fiddleback and, from the last journey he and I took together, he realized that my training had gone even further than the original Coyote had dared guess.”

He looked over at the monk. “You were afraid I was still one of Fiddleback’s minions. If I was, you would stop me, is that it?”

“You are every bit as quick as Mi-ma-yin told me.”

“Why?”

Mong seemed to shrink as he sighed. “In 1989,I was sent as an envoy from Tibet to Beijing to plead with the government to stop the dilution of our population. I had hoped, with the reforms sweeping the world, that the spirit of freedom had truly come to my homeland. In Beijing, I saw many things, wondrous things, from which I had been isolated in Kanggenpo. I became swept up in the fervor and intoxicated by the prospects of liberty.

“I was in Tiananmen Square on the 3rdand 4thof June.

Yes, I had seen death before, but never like this. I watched as freedom-drunk students stepped bravely before tanks, knowing in their hearts that their countrymen could never run them over. I watched others march singing into the
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face of machinegun fire. And I was dragooned to help burn the bodies and hide the evidence of what happened, then I returned home to a new wave of repression.”

Mong wore the pain of years on his face as he looked at Coyote. There, in Tiananmen Square, I felt the first touch of the Dark Lords. I do not know if that was Fiddleback or another of his misbegotten brethren, but it showed me that malign forces did inhabit the universe.

When Mi-ma-yin said you had been forged by one of them, I felt no choice but to bring you here so I could see for myself what you were.If, as Mi-ma-yin felt certain, you had been broken away from the Dark Lord’s control, you could serve as a hideously powerful weapon to use against any and all of them.”

Coyote clasped his hands behind his back. “What do you think? Do I still belong to Fiddleback?”

“If I thought that, you would not have recovered from your injuries.” The monk smiled grimly. “I am not, however, the court of final arbitration.”

“The Yidam.” Coyote rubbed his chin with his left hand.

”This begins to make sense. The night we fought in the training area, he sought evidence of any special ability Fiddleback might have given. He thought, because of the advantage he had over me, I would use it. Then he had to save me from the gorfash because he had not made his decision about me yet. But why was he...” Coyote’s head came up. “The red pulse that you shot back into Kanggenpo, that alerted the Yidam to the
getsul’s
distress.

That’s why you tried to stall me and keep me back.”

“He has fought gorfash before.”

“I see. Then, two days ago, in the clutch, he came to provoke me and get me to betray myself. He threatened to kill me, but did not.” Coyote gingerly brushed the fingertips of his right hand overthe tape on his nose. “Why not?”

The monk shook his head. That is a question I cannot answer. Only he can answer it.”

Coyote pressed his lips together into a flat line. “And I know where he is, so the only question I have now is how do I get there?”

Mong smiled. “You knew much before you came here,
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but the exercises I forced upon you honed your skills. You know what you are; that is your strength. As the Yidam has said, if you are worthy of the answer to your question, you will find the way to obtain it.”

The setting sun cast the
Dokhang’s
long shadow over Coyote like a shroud. He stood there with his back to the east gate, concentrating on the Yidam’s portrait. Clad in boots, fatigue pants and a sleeveless black T-shirt, he tugged on black leather gloves and flexed his hands. A breeze tousled his dark hair, then died abruptly.

You
know what you are; that is your strength.
In Mong’s words, Coyote found the key that unlocked a huge portion of the mystery he still was to himself. He had known, both through what the original Coyote had told him and through evidence of his skills, that Fiddleback had been behind his training as an assassin. His predecessor as Coyote noted that he was one of the top 10

assassins in the world and especially effective against targets that had to be hunted down.
Iam not merely an
assassin. Fiddleback made me into a hunter who could
move through the dimensions with a singleness of purpose: killing his enemies.

That realization brought other things into perspective.

When he shifted into Slide, he had appeared behind the
getsul
notby chance, but by unconscious design. He had used the man’s probes to track back on him, and he appeared in Slide at a point where he could have killed the man with ease. Coyote also realized that the stronger and more able the foe, the easier the time he would have tracking him.

Other things confirmed for him the narrow purpose to which he had been directed. He had seen Crowley move things by the force of his mind, orcause things to burst into flame with a thought. He also knew Crowley could use psychometry to gain impressions about people from things they had worn or owned or touched. Crowley could also lift thoughts from the brains of others, yet another skill denied him. Coyote knew he could do none of these things, and he suspected that Fiddleback, when the time came, would have provided him with the empathic equivalent of bloodhounds to let him begin the chase on a target.

Coyote closed his eyes and summoned into his mind the image of the Yidam standing over him. Locking that firmly in place, he opened his eyes and began to modify the mental picture until it merged with the one on the wall
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of the
Dukhong.
He layered in the solid feeling he’d had in hitting the creature in Storm. He added the sound of its mental contact with him and the ferocity of its attacks.

Lastly, he overlaid the tactical diagram he’d imagined in the clutch and changed it to fit and enfold the Yidam.

The daylight and wind world slowly dissolved around Coyote. Darkness seeped in at the edges and, even though he remained motionless, he sensed himself moving forward and down into the black void he had seen in the temple.
This isthe
Gonkhang—
the lair of the Yidam.

Though he had not given any thought to where a creature like that might live, the place in which he found himself surprised him. The basic architecture proved this place to have been part of the temple since its construction. Thick stone pillars supported the ceiling, and hanging oil lamps provided dim balls of illumination within the cavernous room. The dry, dusty air made the
Gonkhang
feel more like a crypt than place of worship, yet Coyote still felt the place once deserved reverence and respect.

Throughout the room, Coyote saw hundreds upon hundreds of tiny tableaux arranged on shelves and tables.

Some of the tables were little more than rectangular boxes filled with sand and rocks that had been molded into rolling landscapes. On these Coyote saw vast armies of tiny figures arrayed in battle lines, as if frozen in some tangible holograph on the eve of battle.

Moving through the room in silence, Coyote recognized some of the armies that had been painstakingly rendered in miniature. Blue and gray forces vied for supremacy in a battle he guessed had taken place during the American Civil War. Brightly colored troops from a Napoleonic conflict dominated another shrunken battlefield. What could have been the bold Spartans bedeviling the Persians at Thermopolae appeared at his left and scale model of Stalingrad’s tractor factory appeared on his right.

Walking deeper and deeper into the
Gonkhang,
he saw many more battles and discovered he recognized few of them. Troops had been painted with strange colors, and their shapes had been modified so they no longer resembled any creature he could recognize. While part of him wanted to dismiss these new displays as fantasy encounters, the adherence to detail in the creation of the armies and the care with which they had been laid out told him that they were every bit as real as the conflicts he recognized.

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As he moved past huge conflagrations featuring giant robots and skirmishes between hordes of dinosaurian combatants, a shiver ran down his spine.
These fights
must have taken place in other dimensions. The scale of
destruction is unimaginable.

A yellow corona surrounded the Yidam’s cloaked figure. Coyote found himself approaching the creature from behind, but somehow he knew the Yidam was aware of his presence. Still, the monster kept his head down and continued to work on something sitting on the table before him. Getting closer, Coyote saw several lines of shiny metal figures waiting to be painted and realized what the Yidam was doing.

Coyote stopped. “What are you?”

The Yidam half-turned in his chair and raised the wire-rimmed glasses up onto his forehead. “You really mean to ask what
was
I, for this work is not that which a Yidam could accomplish. I
was
a military officer, a tactician and a historian.”

Coyote nodded slowly. “I can see that. I recognize some of these battles, but not others. I know you can travel through the dimensions. These others took place there?”

“Other places, other times.” The Yidam removed the glasses and set them on the table. “I found in myself a fascination with conflict, and I became well known among my peers as a brilliant theoretician. I studied everything I could about war and, eventually, I came to develop a comprehensive theory of war that turned previous admiration into scorn.”

Coyote took a step backward as the Yidam stood. “You saw a common element in wars, or those things that triggered them? You saw something that you could not explain.”

The oil lamps’ light stained the Yidam’s tusks a dull yellow. “Two things really, but they were related. The first was a spark of insanity that started conflicts. It takes one of two forms: an unreasoning confidence in the assurance of total victory or the unwavering conviction that unseen enemies will destroy you if you do not strike out first. The second thing proved more disturbing to me, and that was the transformation of perfectly normal and sane individuals into savages bent on creating as much pain and horror and suffering as possible.”