TWENTY-EIGHT
Something inserted into the Sigma Field with a shock that jarred Tenzin Geshe out of the group trance. Briefly he sat stunned, then looked arouna One of the Circle lay unconscious, another was on his knees, retching. The rest appeared shaken, as he was himself.
He didn’t need to enter a trance again to know that what had entered the fabric of the Tao was not the wolf elemental. It was something far more powerful. Something depraved. And his immediate fear was that they could not get it out.
Tentatively he felt for it, and psychically touched it. Just now it seemed inert, as if it too had been shocked by what had happened. A demon, he thought. The emperor has asked for demons. Now it seems we have one. Though how it had happened . . .
However it had happened, they had a demon in a position of power, or potential power, beyond any that anyone, man or demon, had even approached before, it seemed to Tenzin. A position that he had given it.
He would not tell the emperor until he’d had time to probe the situation and learn more about it. He felt a
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deep foreboding. It seemed to him that he had brought about a terrible misfortune, a calamity for more than himself, for more than the emperor. A calamity for mankind.
How long, he wondered, might it take to work off the karma he’d earned this night?
TWENTY-NINE
For several days after he’d lost Hans and Baver, Nils traveled in the same direction the road had been going, but at some distance away. His wound gave him no trouble. The trance he’d sat in, in the ger at Urga, had been a healing trance taught him by his wife, Ilse, whom the Neovikings called the German witch. Healing had progressed considerably in the hours before he’d left.
He might have returned to the road to ride by night, but the days were too hot for sleeping on the ground, in either shelter tent or sun.
After several days, the country became desert, and both Nils and his horses suffered from dehydration. So presuming there’d be water there for travelers and their animals, he returned to the road. But when evening came, he left the road to sleep, and let his hobbled horses nibble on what little growth of grass and shrubs there was. He didn’t picket them; they’d have starved there, constrained to a rope’s length.
Meanwhile marmots had become nonexistent, and the big Northman ate only the occasional small lizard he could catch. His only option was to tap a vein on one of
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the horses and drink the blood, but he needed their strength more than he did his own. His belly complained, but he ignored it.
Beside the road there were dug wells, one or more a day, marked by the low trees that grew near them, their roots tapping ground water. Each well had a windlass, a large leather pail with a weighted rim to raise the water, and a horse trough to pour it in. It was obvious that someone maintained them.
On this third day back on the road, he saw a low streamer of dust well ahead: travelers. He left the road to watch them pass from a distance. There were perhaps two score horsemen, and a long train of strange, tall, ungainly animals piled high with packs. They were the first travelers Nils had seen, or sensed, since he’d left the road to avoid his friends.
Finally there were hills again. The grass thickened and stood taller, though still there were no springs along the road. The wells continued. There were marmots again, too, and Nils filled his belly.
A day later, in late afternoon, he came to the first shallow draws where the Mongolian Plateau began to break toward the Chinese lowlands. With a barbarian’s sense of nature, he knew that ahead would be low mountains, probably rugged, whose crests would be lower, or mostly lower, than the plateau he’d been crossing.
The highway began to drop, entering a broad rounded lobe, offshoot of a canyon. Now and men he saw a pine sapling, or several, with their tops above the grass. As he rode down it, he saw to his left, about a kilometer away, a small stand of well-grown pines in a side draw of the lobe. Immediately below the stand, near the mouth of the draw, stood a grove of leafy trees suggesting water there.