Tenzin answered carefully. “I have heard of it, Your Magnificence, but from no one who knows how.”
The emperor’s face tightened. “Find out!” he snapped. As if at the end of his patience with this difficult geshe. “Find out how to do it, and see it done! Put one into an eagle and send it forth to find this man and follow him. And keep me informed as to the man’s location and activities.’
A final deep bow. “As Your Magnificence orders.”
Tenzin Geshe maintained the obeisance until the emperor dismissed him, which, given the emperor’s frame of mind, took a long half minute. Then he turned and left.
“Does the geshe have cause to worry about this wizard?” Drukpa asked.
“It’s very doubtful. My good geshe is perhaps the most potent adept in the empire, aside from Jampa Lodro,
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who is old and very holy. But Tenzin is one-sided. He overlooks the physical factor.”
“What was he thinking when he left?”
“He wasn’t. He was carefully avoiding thought.”
“And yet you trust him?”
“I will know at once if he ceases to be loyal. I do not need to read his thoughts to know that. Only his aura.”
“But he withholds his mind from you!”
The elder brother’s gaze, suddenly cool, found the younger’s, and Drukpa lowered his to his knees. “There is a level,” the emperor answered, “at which you must allow a man that, or you destroy his usefulness. Remember that, brother. And I know of no one else who can do for me what Tenzin does.” Except, he added to himself, old Jampa, who refused, and is too holy to punish. And perhaps—the thought took him by surprise—perhaps the man he seeks for me. Might I be able to attach the barbarian’s loyalty? . . . Could that be why he comes here? To serve me? The notion sparked a cautious excitement in Songtsan Gampo.
Tenzin kept his mind essentially still until he’d distanced himself enough that he could think behind a screen without being obvious, should the emperor return his attention to him. He strode out of the Inner Garden almost without noticing the great ogre, the “yeti,” guarding the gate in the privacy wall. The ogre stood 225 centimeters tall and weighed 200 kilos. Watchful but incurious, its red eyes followed the geshe across the palace’s outer grounds, which were almost as much a garden as the Inner Garden was.
Tenzin had a problem. For a demon, he had little doubt, could not be effectively housed within an actual, material animal. He knew of several attempts by powerful wizards; all had failed. With focus by someone sufficiently adept, a demon could form for itself an animal likeness from spirit stuff, but it was neither very stable nor reliably controllable. Certainly it would not fool the wizard they watched for.
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Arriving at the gomba, he sat on a bench beneath the thujas, briefly brooding. Then a possible solution occurred to him, one that quickened his pulse, though there might be difficulties in carrying it through. For
each species of plant and animal there was a pool of species beingness, of a higher order than the beingness of storms. A mind/spirit beingness far more difficult to manipulate, but with more potential. With the Circle to work with, it may be possible to gather an elemental from the pool of some species—some species which forms packs or flocks . . . Ana if I could then implant that concentrated beingness into one physical individual… It would be an animal elemental incarnate, more intelligent than a storm could possibly be.
It should probably be a bird, he decided, for the mobility needed, but an eagle wouldn’t do. They were too solitary; their largest association was the mated pair. They gathered at carrion, on occasion, but such behavior was opportunistic and accidental, not social; they seemed to do nothing in concert except tend their nest. Then there was the question of how much intelligence one bird could house without burning out. It seemed to him it should be something fairly large, with considerable individual intelligence. Wolves were supposedly intelligent, and great wanderers, he’d heard. Might they be suitable? Perhaps the wizard and his companions would shoot a wolf out of hand though.