For a moment the geshe hesitated, which in itself told Songtsan Gampo the answer. “Your Magnificence, I—I
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did not place any. It would destroy me if I tried. I would be vulnerable.”
For just a moment the emperor scowled, facially and mentally. He did not try! But the man was no doubt right. Surely he was if he thought so, and such a tactic would be dangerous at best. What particularly vexed Son-gtsan Gampo was that Tenzin, a geshe, lacked the tran-quility to face the danger without fear. The man had great talent—he’d created Maamo!—but in the face of danger, he lacked spiritual strength.
At that moment the emperor knew what he needed to do. “Well. I will bring Jampa Lodro here. By force if necessary, though I don’t imagine it will be. I’ll send guards, human and yeti. And Maamo, in case the demon should exercise his powers while they’re enroute.
“Meanwhile I have something you can do. Return to the Circle; reach out and find Jampa. Presumably he’s at his gomba, but find out. Let him know about the demon and find out how he was affected by it, how his people were. But don’t let him know I’m sending for him. I am entirely unable to predict that man. I suspect he’ll come willingly, but he might conceivably go into the mountains, ii he knows, and leave us to cope as best we can without him.”
He fixed the geshe with his gaze. “Can you do that?”
Tenzin colored not in anger but embarrassment. “Yes, Your Magnificence, I can do that.”
“Very well then; you are excused. Return to the Circle and see to it at once.”
Tenzin reported back within minutes: Jampa was at home. The demon’s morning outrage had shaken the novices somewhat, but the adepts had been little affected.
The demon had spread itself as widely, and thus as thinly in the Sigma Field as it dared, constrained by the fear that it might lose its unity and disperse, a dispersal that might well prove irreversible. It felt good spread
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thin though, as if it was absorbing knowledge from the Field, receiving it subliminally, learning what it needed to know about it, and how it related to the physical world. It would yet learn to shake mountains and tumble buildings.
Days earlier the demon had affixed an attention unit, a part of itself, on Maamo, to serve as a homing unit. It was analogous to a transponder of ancient times, but simple and inconspicuous, without physical existence, and through it he became aware that Maamo had left his customary bounds.
The demon gathered itself to see what was going on. It approached the interface cautiously though, for often a telepath, the great king himself, was near the ogre. Not that the demon felt any threat to itself in that, but if a telepath was present, to probe or even closely monitor Maamo would expose the connection. Which might result in Maamo being Killed, and the demon had plans for the ogre.
At its remove from the interface, the demon discerned a number of faint swirls in the Field; Maamo was traveling, transecting the field as part of a group of large life forms. Three were the sort of single swirls he was familiar with, and had the flavor of ogre. The others were unfamiliar, some of them doubled, like a figure eight. These made him curious, and slightly uneasy.
After a time, he approached the interface near enough to discern whether there was a telepath near. In this he was very careful. If there’d been even a trace of the psychic “flavor of telepaths,” he’d have drawn back, hopefully before he was detected. But there wasn’t. He moved in until the swirls became living beings, seen as if with eyes.
What he discovered were one splendidly uniformed officer—the emperor’s adjutant—five soldiers from the emperor’s human elite guard, and three ogres, including, of course, Maamo. The humans were on horseback, and had a string of remounts. The mounted men were what he’d perceived as double swirls. The horses were trotting,
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the ogres keeping pace with them effortlessly. The demon put its attention on Maamo’s mind then, transferring his viewpoint to the ogre’s eyes, or actually to its imaging center.