Iceblood Page 8

  As he rose, the warriors groaned in disappointment. "Grant can finish it," Kane said with a grin. "He was there, too."

  "Right," Grant drawled. "In my version, I'll be the hero." Kane joined Brigid, taking her by the elbow and guided her away from the fire. "Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to interrupt the story hour."

  He chuckled. "Diplomacy again. These guys judge your worth by how daring you are. I embellished a little, but they expect that."

  Brigid gazed up into his face. The knife cut on his cheek was a bright red line, like a streak of war paint. "You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

  "It beats sitting around Cerberus waiting for Lakesh to concoct another crisis that only we can deal with."

  Brigid didn't reply.

  "Did Beth-Li tell you why she and Auerbach did this?" "Yes. She was trying to get your attention. She took Auerbach along as a pack mule and to make you jealous."

  He stood silently even after Brigid had completed the story. "Well?" she prompted.

  Kane knuckled his eyes. "Fits with what Auerbach said." He heaved a deep sigh. "Something is going to have be done with Rouch. She's becoming a menace."

  "I agree."

  "Any suggestions?"

  "Cooperate," answered Brigid quietly.

  Dropping his hands from his eyes, Kane stared at her incredulously.

  "Don't look so astonished," she said crossly. "There's no point to this game any longer. It's getting dangerous, not much different than the macho game you played with Salvo."

  At the mention of his mortal enemy and genetic twin, whose driving passion in life was to humiliate and control him, the incredulity in Kane's eyes gave way to anger.

  "You're psychoanalyzing again," he snapped. "You know how I hate that, Baptiste."

  "Hate it or not, you'd better accept it. You don't find Beth-Li repulsive. The only reason you've been so stubborn is because Lakesh created the project. You don't like the idea of being controlled."

  Kane glanced away and cleared his throat. "That's not the only reason, Baptiste. You know that."

  She nodded. "Probably not. The other reasons are all mixed up in you — guilt over my exile, feeling responsible for ruining my life, turning me into an outlander. You know that's not true, Kane. Lakesh had already set me up when he slipped me the Wyeth Codex anonymously. He had already planned to bring me into Cerberus. You just bumped up his timetable. I would've been part of Cerberus by now even if you hadn't involved yourself."

  Pushing out a deep breath, Brigid said, "You spent most of your life taking orders and you'll be damned if you'll obey this one, even if all you have to do is make love to a beautiful woman and impregnate her."

  Kane uttered a mirthless chuckle and kicked at a loose stone. "It's nice that everything I do is so simple and transparent."

  Brigid shook her head in annoyance. "I'm tired of dealing with this, Kane, of being dragged into a triangle, of talking around it. I'm barren, all right? The radiation I was exposed to in Mongolia damaged my reproductive system, maybe inflicted irreparable harm to my chromosomal structure."

  Kane didn't look at her. His gaze was fixed on a faraway point in the lengthening shadows.

  "You knew, didn't you?" Brigid demanded.

  "Rouch made a comment about it a while back," he answered faintly. "So I asked Lakesh. I figured you'd tell me when you were ready."

  The two people stood in silence as twilight deepened around them.

  "Thank you for respecting my privacy," Brigid said after a few moments.

  "Is your condition permanent?"

  "I don't know. DeFore doesn't know, either. She wants to begin a regimen of biochemical therapy, but there hasn't been enough time.

  "Now you know, Kane. There's no reason to oppose the program out of misplaced loyalty to me. I promised Lakesh I wouldn't interfere and I'm as good as my word."

  She made a move to step around him, but Kane laid a gentle hand on her arm. "Anam-chara."

  She stiffened, but not to pull away from his touch. Nor did she turn to face him. Both of them had learned the old Gaelic term, which meant "soul friend," during the mission to Ireland. Morrigan, the beautiful, sightless telepath had told Brigid that she and Kane were anam-charas, but she had never found out where he had picked up the word. She decided to ask him.

  "Did Morrigan teach you that, what it meant?"

  "Yes, and other things I never told you about."

  She repressed a shiver, but it was not due to the gusting breeze. In a voice barely above a whisper, she asked, "Like what?"

  Kane didn't respond for such a long time she wondered if he had heard her. Then in a low, almost embarrassed voice, he said, "You saw Morrigan kiss me on the deck of the Cromwell."

  "I don't know about that. I know I saw you kissing each other."

  Kane uttered a soft, irritated sound. "Whatever. She said you would forgive me because you're my anam-chara. I told her there was nothing to forgive because there was nothing between you and me."

  Kane took a breath, then said in a rush of words, "Morrigan said there was much between us, much we had to forgive, much we had to understand. Much to live through. And then she said, 'Always together.'"

  Brigid didn't move, but she asked, "Did you believe her?"

  "I didn't know what to believe, Baptiste. I guess I'm scared to believe it."

  "Why?"

  He didn't answer and Brigid knew why. Both of them remembered the mat-trans jump to Russia, which had gone very, very wrong. Both of them had suffered from extreme jump sickness, the primary symptoms of which were nausea and frighteningly vivid hallucinations.

  But in that instance, they had shared the same hallucination or revelation — that Brigid and Kane were somehow joined by spiritual chains, linked to each other and the same destiny.

  Kane was more pragmatic and literal-minded than Brigid, so the concept that their souls had been together for a thousand years or more seemed so unbelievable he feared to consciously examine it. However, he didn't believe in coincidence, either, so the fact they had shared the same hallucination — or revelation — couldn't be ascribed only to jump sickness.

  "Why?" she asked again.

  He groped for a response that sounded reasonable, but couldn't find one. "Because it might be true."

  Carefully, Brigid disengaged herself from his hand, turned and looked levelly into his face. She felt a jolt when she saw the genuine pain, longing and confusion in his eyes. She knew it was only a dim reflection of her own.

  "Believe what you want to," she said in a low voice. "But believe it because you feel it. Don't worry about how I enter into it. In the grand scheme of things, we don't owe one another anything. You don't need my permission to participate in Lakesh's plan. You never did, even if Beth-Li thinks otherwise. One thing I don't need is another enemy."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "Beth-Li told me she'd get me out of the way one way or the other. Like you said, at this point we can't afford to have anyone but allies at our doorstep. Go to Beth-Li or don't go, but remove me from the decision."

  With that, Brigid walked away from him. She skirted the cooking fire, then wended her way between the tepees.

  Kane watched until her figure was swallowed up by the creeping shadows of dusk. He stood for a long time, despising the painful heaviness in his chest and the quivering in his belly. Then, turning on his heel, he marched through the village.

  Beth-Li didn't look surprised when he pushed his way into her lodge. She had changed from the fringed smock to her khakis and greeted him with a knowing smile.

  "You talked to Baptiste?" she inquired, gliding toward him on bare feet.

  He nodded.

  "Good. It took a little doing, but I think she finally saw reason. Is she stepping aside?"

  "Yes." Kane bit out the word.

  Rouch sidled up against him, sliding one arm around his waist. Her other hand caressed his thigh, then her fingernails dug through the fabric of his trousers, lightly gripping
his manhood. She stood on tiptoes, moist lips parting, her dark eyes bright with desire.

  "I haven't thanked you yet for rescuing me from that stinking savage," she whispered. "Let me do it now."

  Gently, Kane cupped her rounded cheeks between his hands, bending his head to nuzzle the side of her face, touching her delicate earlobe with the tip of his tongue. She leaned her body into his, breathing, "Kane…"

  Into her ear, he whispered, "Beth-Li… if you ever threaten Baptiste again, I'll chill you."

  His hands clamped cruelly tight on her face, trapping it between them, squeezing her features, distorting her full lips. Drawing back his head, he glared into her eyes, all the desire washed out of them by sudden tears of pain.

  Between clenched teeth, voice so thick with fury it sounded like an animal's guttural growl, he said, "I'll break your beautiful little neck."

  He gave her head a hard little jerk to the left, dragging an aspirated cry from her. "As easy as that, Beth-Li."

  Kane stared at her for a few more seconds, then pushed her aside and stepped out of the lodge. Releasing his breath in a prolonged hiss, he glanced up at the first stars of the evening. He wished he could be up there among them, far and remote from humanity. At that moment, he wished he were anywhere else, even the Tartarus Pits of Cobaltville. At least life there, though brutal, was simple.

  He started walking back toward the cooking fire. On the one hand, he regretted terrorizing Beth-Li. On the other hand, he regretted not simply snapping her neck instead of telling her about it. All he had actually accomplished was to make another enemy, but he was used to that.

  7

  Grigori Zakat stood on the open balcony, gazing down into the shadow-streaked valley below as light swiftly drained from the sky. The thin air at such a high altitude rendered the transition from day to night startlingly short and abrupt. Only a brief period of twilight marked the demarcation between sunset and nightfall.

  Spring took a long time to arrive on the Byang-thang Plateau, and the dry, almost rarefied air was still frigid. Zakat figured his chest was a shade larger from breathing it these past five months.

  His wounds had healed completely. Trai's daily application of herbal poultices and tinctures quickly repaired the tissue damage caused by frostbite. The only reminder of his stab wound was a faint scar high on his belly.

  Although Zakat had fully recovered, he kept that fact from Dorjieff and the other monks. Only Trai and Gyatso knew he had regained his strength and powers. He had made them his confidants, although Gyatso was more than that. The shaman had sought out Zakat, not the other way around.

  Trai was different. She had been ridiculously easy to seduce, pathetically grateful for a man who treated her as something resembling a human being and not as a bipedal mule or as an outlet for lust. Although only a peasant, she was far brighter than she appeared, despite her illiteracy. She was also passionate, an aspect of her personality Zakat recognized and manipulated.

  Gyatso had told him not to concern himself with the other monks, especially the Dob-Dobs. They were distrustful of him, but they feared the power of the black shaman even more. Zakat's mission was to ingratiate himself with Dorjieff.

  He touched the wood-and-crystal phallus beneath his robe and began his breathing exercise, deepening and regulating his respiration, opening his chakra points in order to receive the summons from Gyatso. Every night for the past month, he stood at the balcony, preparing his mind for Gyatso's signal that all was in readiness. Night after night, he waited, but the signal had not come. He never questioned the Bon-po shaman. Infinite patience was one of the prime articles of Khlysty faith.

  After all, Saint Rasputin had not been accepted by the family of the czar overnight. He had waited, performing trivial miracles to earn first the czarina's trust, then her bed.

  It always amused Zakat to think about the haughty Alexandra submitting to the unkempt holy man from western Siberia. Rumors of her affair with Rasputin had been one of the triggers for the October Revolution, when the starving Russian masses finally understood that the royal family were flesh and blood, not gods and goddesses.

  Of course, those rumors led to Rasputin's assassination by royal retainers, but he had accomplished his mission nevertheless. In Khlysty texts, it was known as the power of causitry — persuasion and seduction to achieve an objective.

  Texts, he thought. Zakat remembered prowling the lamasery late at night and how, in a rear vestry, he found ceiling-high shelves sagging beneath the weight of hundreds of crumbling scrolls. Most of them were Buddhist doctrines, but a very few bore odd, unidentifiable cryptograms. There were drawings of geometric shapes such as trapezohedrons, polyhedrons and eye-confusing spiral patterns.

  A cold breeze gusted up from below, ruffling Zakat's hair, grown long during his stay in the Trasilunpo lamasery. He pushed a windblown strand back from his high forehead, once more surprised by the wide streak of white that extended from his hairline over the crown of his head to the nape of his neck. Though Zakat possessed no real vanity to speak of, he was a little disconcerted when he noticed the change. He assumed it was an outward manifestation of his physical sufferings out on the plateau. Sometimes, he suspected it was due to Gyatso's assault of tsal energy, but either way, he didn't worry about it.

  Compared to the journey upon which he and the shaman were prepared to embark, the change in his hair color meant less than a sparrow's tears. He closed his eyes, tightening his long fingers around the balcony's rail, visualizing again the images Gyatso had imparted to him of the vault beneath the lamasery, the "center of the Earth," as Dorjieff had said.

  Dorjieff had lived in Tibet for over twenty years, spending the first five of them crushing bandit bands, ragtag revolutionaries and Chinese expeditionary forces. The brutality and utter ruthlessness he employed had earned him the title of Tsyansis Khan-po, the king of fear. But over the course of the past decade and a half, Dorjieff had himself been ruled by fear.

  Zakat smiled thinly, recollecting how Dorjieff had been pathetically grateful to have a fellow countryman as first a patient, then as a guest. He still retained a few tatters of patriotism and, when drunk, which was often, would sing the old motherland songs — songs that had ceased to have any meaning nearly two centuries ago when the terrible fire had swept over the face of the planet.

  Whatever past accomplishments had earned him a high rank in District Twelve had been drowned in a sea of wine and self-indulgence years before. The king of fear was now a fat, pompous drunkard and, by way of Gyatso's thinking, an utter coward.

  Zakat didn't completely agree with that assessment. Cowards were not admitted into District Twelve, and if Dorjieff was fearful of the power pent-up in the vault, it was born of a need to protect Mother Russia and what remained of humanity.

  Zakat cared little for Mother Russia and even less for the masses of humankind. The primary reason he had volunteered for duty in the Black Gobi was the opportunity to seize the power that had so obsessed the late Colonel Piotr Sverdlovosk. He had never learned the source of that obsession, but Gyatso claimed whatever was buried in the ruins of Kharo-Khoto was nothing compared to what lay in the subterranean vault.

  After five months, Grigori Zakat still wasn't certain what Gyatso truly represented. The Bon-po religion in which he held high status predated Tibet's conversion to Buddhism by five hundred years. Buddhists sought to exterminate the Bon-po exponents, decrying it as an occult sect that followed the left-hand path of black sorcery, and accusing it of practicing rituals that required human flesh and blood.

  He and Gyatso shared a common link there, both adepts and adherents of outlawed religions, both forced to conceal their beliefs and faith.

  But Gyatso was something other than a priest, and Zakat was not sure what. Dorjieff had referred to him as an emissary, but had never expanded on the comment. Gyatso dropped only the broadest of hints, promising that all would be revealed once the vault was taken.

  The strange, almost empathic bond Za
kat shared with the Bon-po shaman did not allow him to receive actual thought images, only emotional resonances. Always those emotions swirled with determination, touched with anger and a sense of betrayal.

  Why Gyatso felt that Dorjieff had broken faith with him was never made clear to Zakat, but he entertained his own suspicions. The old Russian had promised to deliver something to Gyatso — an object, a symbol, a birthright — and then reneged. Whatever the object actually was, Zakat always received the confusing impression of a dark, yet somehow shining trapezohedron.

  Suddenly, a cold cobweb seemed to lightly stroke his mind, then creep down the base of his spine. The touch instantly vanished, leaving the imprint of a single word: Now.

  Zakat left the balcony, closing and double-latching the door to cut off even the most unlikely means of escape. He strode through the sleep-stilled halls of the lamasery, his yak-skin boots making only the faintest whisper of sound on the stone floor. The cold gray corridor was lit by pine-knot torches sputtering in wall brackets. The overpowering stench of resin and wood smoke had sunk deep into the stonework.

  He walked through the assembly hall, keeping close to the bare wall. The roof beams overhead were exquisitely adorned with images of saints and demons. At the right side of the room was a low table at which a dozen lamas sat murmuring over ancient Buddhist texts hand printed on parchment. A monk lifted his face from the scroll and scowled at the intrusion, but said nothing.

  Zakat passed through a narrow doorway on the far side of the chamber and into a short stretch of hallway. Turning a corner, he heard a pained, feminine cry and he knew just where to find Dorjieff.

  He walked down the gloomy corridor to the closed door at the far end of it. Grasping the handle, he turned it and carefully shouldered the door open.

  He saw Trai's fragile frame bent half over the top of an ornately carved oaken desk. Her trousers had been torn away and lay wadded up on the floor. The face she turned toward Zakat showed the first swellings of a welt. Tears glistened on her cheeks.

  Dorjieff stood grunting behind her, grasping her buttocks. Though he still wore his silken tunic, his pants were down about his pale hairy legs. On his bearded, drunken face was a dreamy expression.