Chen made his deal and moved aside. The farmer clucked to his horses, and Hans raised his buttocks till
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his belly was as close to the cart box as quiver and bow allowed. The cart rolled slowly toward the gate while the apprentice poet groaned inwardly and ground his teeth. Holding himself spreadeagled below the cart was even harder than he’d expected.
FORTY-NINE
Nils had not kept his “third eye” closed. Early on, mind still, he’d peeked. And found the ogre—the “troll” as he thought of it—with its own third eye closed. Smoothly, like a stealthy tendril, he’d slipped an awareness unit into its mind and discovered what kind of entity he had to deal with. For hours the awareness unit had laid quietly, absorbing what there was to learn. He’d come to know the child, the jungle cult leader, and the demon of the Sigma Field, as well as the beingness of the elemental ogre, Maamo.
He also sensed the power the demon would command with its third eye open, far more than he himself could overcome in any simple duel. For even outside the Sigma Field, the demon—the master and his merged acolytes— had the skills it had gained there, and the power of its own composite nature.
Thus as his horse carried him up the hill, Nils had no plan at all.
Demon-Maamo peered uphill. In darkness his eyesight was more penetrating than a human’s, though in daylight
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its resolution was no better, if as good. The hint of dawn in the sky had scarcely influenced visibility, but he could see the gomba plainly enough, up the moderate slope across night-shadowed gardens. The broad graveled path he walked curved, and would come little nearer to it than it was then.
He spoke, and the other ogres stopped the two horses. Demon-Maamo stepped to one of them. With his great ogre hands, he grasped the blind man and lifted him from the saddle, then hoisted him across one shoulder and left the gravel path, uphill toward the temple.
He was more tired than he’d realized, and the blind man was heavy. It might have been better after all, he thought, to have stayed with the horses and approached from above. The older human was soon puffing, and Demon-Maamo growled an order. With a slight grunt, one of the other ogres picked Jampa up and carried him too. Three times they encountered low stone walls, built for aesthetics, not defense. They lifted their long legs over them without setting down their burdens.
At the gomba, the yeti guards on the encircling porch watched them come. When Demon-Maamo was thirty meters away, their sergeant called firmly to him to halt. Demon-Maamo looked at the half-drawn bows, then at the sword in the sergeant’s fist. Then, especially, he looked the sergeant in the eye. But he did not stop till he was two strides from the steps.
“The emperor is threatened by the monks!” he said quietly. “I have come to save him from them.”
“The emperor says you are not allowed to enter this place,” the sergeant countered. His voice was not as firm now. The warrior he faced, he’d grown up with, and even as a cub had recognized him as the pack leader, so to speak. Not long since, there’d been a change in Maamo; his dominance then had grown beyond challenge. Now it seemed he’d changed again; his dominance intensified, grown threatening.
Demon-Maamo swung the blind man off his shoulder and flopped him roughly to the ground, then drew his
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sword. The ogre carrying Jampa put the older master down on his feet. Then both of Demon-Maamo’s ogres drew their swords; though less decisively than Maamo had. All of this felt uncanny to them, this uncertainty of duty and counter-duty, this threatening other yeti guards with weapons.
“Would you prevent me from saving our emperor?” Demon-Maamo demanded, then started up the steps.
The sergeant gave way. The contradictions troubled him, but he was reluctant to disbelieve Maamo; Yunnan ogres do not easily lie.
Also, his orders had been to avoid fighting Maamo, to delay him only. The emperor’s strategy, unstated, was to keep the demon in the body and occupied until the Circle of Power had closed to him the fabric of the Tao.