Fiddleback Trilogy 2 - Evil Ascending

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Coyote drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes. He let it out slowly and forced himself to ignore the dull ache in his ribs from where a getsul had kicked him during the morning exercises. It hurts, but my counterstrike would have killed him had I not pulled it. He did not expect his attack to get through and was preparing a counter to my parry. He thought too far ahead and paid.

  Coyote heard the whisper of Mong's bare feet on the stone floor of his room, but he did not open his eyes. Instead, he concentrated and drank in all the clues to the man's presence. He knew enough about Mong to know that the noise had been intentional, but Coyote wondered if the monk could control the ticklish chill of the air currents swirling around him, or the faint scent of dried sweat. He didn't think so, but he discovered he'd not have been surprised if the monk had that ability.

  "You fought well this morning, Kyi-can. You combine the grace of aikido with a very lethal form of karate."

  "Thank you, Lama Mong. Your acolytes are very skilled." Coyote forced his fists open and laid them palm-up in his lap. "Only their reticence to kill prevents them from defeating me." Coyote opened his eyes and felt pleased his head was turned to face Mong exactly.

  "Perhaps, Kyi-can, perhaps." The wizened monk's almond eyes narrowed. "They view the martial arts and weapons training as a means toward an end."

  "As do I."

  "They pursue self-discovery and awareness instead of death. The discipline and exercise fuses body and soul and spirit into a single union that becomes the core of each student's being." Mong's hands described a globe that he compressed into a tight, small ball. "This knowledge of self is vital because, in its compressed form, it is stripped of labels and tags and only comprises that which one truly is."

  The monastery's visitor frowned. "I am not certain I follow this."

  Mong smiled benevolently. "The average man—and I assure you that you are not average—would respond to being asked, 'Who are you?' in a very predictable way. He would say his name, then note that he had a degree in history from, say, the University of Vermont, or that he had won an industry award for something he did, or that he was on the board of this corporation or that, and so on. It is much akin to describing the nature of an automobile by noting the color of its paint and the brand of its tires. It speaks to the trappings of its nature, but not the truth of its nature itself."

  Coyote nodded. The sum and total of his knowledge about himself came down to facts contained in two very slim files. The first said he was Tycho Caine, an assassin trained in a highly secret place in Japan. He liked fast cars, gambling and was one of the best assassins in the world. Everything else beyond that was a fraud created by himself, his former master or the previous Coyote. The second file, the one that detailed his life as Michael Loring, he knew to be less than a month old and put together through cooperation between Nero Loring and Jytte Ravel.

  Both identities would check fully within the technological world. Caine and Loring had superior credit ratings and a string of transcripts that made him seem a genius who blew through schools like bullets through crêpe paper. Because the information concerning those identities had been encrypted and duplicated, infused into magnetic tape strips and matched with laser disks and barcodes, he existed and was real. Because of that data, and who it said he was supposed to be, people he had never met would claim to be his classmates and others would confess to having known him for a long time.

  Still, despite that real-world legitimacy, his core had been shaped quite differently. As Mong spoke, Coyote realized he did not have much in the way of the tags and labels associated with him. Those who trained me stripped that away and prevented its accretion so I would not have to work past it later. I was being groomed for what I will be taught here.

  What he could tell about himself did make him proud. As the physical training with the acolytes had shown, he had a union of self and body that made him a most deadly opponent. He knew, from the adventure that culminated in frustrating Fiddleback, that his training had made him quick of mind and capable of acting ruthlessly when the situation demanded it. Even so, by his reluctance to engage in wholesale slaughter, a slaughter of which he was very capable, he knew that he had some internal brake on the darker side of his being.

  "Sunyata is the name we give to the discipline of studying nonbeing or the void. This is necessary because the little tags and labels serve as hooks and anchors to keep us in our reality. As we define ourselves in association with things in this world, we bind ourselves to this world. While Mi-ma-yin introduced me as the khenpo of Kanggenpo, I think of myself only as Mong. Like a hot-air balloon wishing to fly up from the ground, anchor lines must be cut and ballast must be cast off."

  Coyote nodded. "As I have little baggage in this regard, I hope this will be possible. I know better than to hope it will be simple."

  "Discovery is simple, but mastery is torture itself." Mong folded his arms across his chest. "Mi-ma-yin learned quickly but, like you, his anchors were few. His mastery likewise came quickly, but that was because he had a need that drove him. Have you such a need?"

  The images of Fiddleback and the empty skull of an innocent girl fused in his brain. "Yes."

  "Excellent. Then we shall begin simply." The hint of a smile tugged at the corners of Mong's mouth. "Here is an old Zen koan that should help you: What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

  As the monk left the room, Coyote's eyes closed. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Instantly, his mind flashed to the sound made when he slapped a hand against a thigh or when fingers slapped down against his palm. Those sound like claps, but the first is not a hand acting alone, and the second is not really a clap. Those are wrong.

  His mind raced as he approached the question in a logical manner. It is possible for a single hand to clap? The question suggests it is, and that a sound results. Is a hand arcing through the air toward a phantom partner in a clap really clapping? He sifted and searched through a dozen different ways he could clap with one hand, but rejected them all. Either they involved hitting something else to create a sound, or he felt they were not truly claps.

  In his meditation, he swerved off onto another course of thought. What is the nature of this exercise? It is the annihilation of self and the compression of self to free me of all the things holding me in this reality. Perhaps the Western paradigm of logical and scientific thinking is merely a construct of this world. There were things I saw in other dimensions that seemed to defy the very physical laws we use to define our world, so perhaps that is holding me back.

  With that realization, he began to think consciously in illogical and abstract ways. As he came up with answers to the question like the 'color of entropy' or the 'death of death,' he found himself thinking in terms he had not before. Wading through oceans of non sequiturs, he knew he was approaching the goal that would be the answer to that question, but he discovered other problems. The first was that his construction of non sequiturs was thought—not natural or felt. He was, in short, being logical in his illogic.

  He also discovered that logic was a part of his core being. As he knew that logic would help him discover the true nature of any of the other dimensions he would visit, he knew it could not be what hampered him. Even if I discover that there is no rhyme or reason to a place, it will be my logical mind that will help me make that discovery. This is not a hindrance, but a survival trait.

  Moreover, it struck him that the answer to that question would have to be broader than the focus of his inquiry so far. He had been concentrating on mechanisms for creating the sound so he could follow what the sound would be. In reality, he had been asked what that sound was.

  I know of no method by which a hand can clap by itself or produce a sound. It is impossible for a hand to clap by itself. It follows then that there is no sound that can be made by a single hand clapping. So, the sound of one hand clapping is nothing!

  The concept of nothing detonated in his brain with the force of a 10-megaton bomb. The sea of non seq
uiturs dried up, leaving desiccated phrases in the mental mud that its head then fused into stone. Pressure built and pushed his consciousness outside, letting his world fragment and fray until it projected his mental eye out of his skull and sent it jetting up through the ceiling of the room.

  As his sense of self flew above him, the whole monastery became like glass to him. He could see distorted shapes and shadows through the thick bricks. Only the dark heart of the temple itself remained opaque to his sight, and that disturbed him. That is the Gonkhang which is where the Yidam is supposed to dwell. I cannot see there, but what I feel . . .

  Utterly hostile sensations pulsed out from the black rectangle representing the underground chapel. They stung him like fragments from a grenade, and his attempt to evade them almost shocked him back into his body. Coyote focused his mind on nothingness and the pain lessened.

  Coyote willed himself forward and down toward the blackness, then realized that in doing so he projected his own sensations out and into that block. He saw a reddish sphere push out and around himself, then merge with the darkness. As it did so, the sensations he had been feeling immediately vanished and the rectangle cleared to show an empty place cast in ghostly twilight tones.

  The sudden and sharp shifting from dangerous and alien to harmless confused Coyote. In that instant, he snapped his eyes open. He found himself, sweat-soaked and chest heaving, still kneeling in his chamber. The thin sliver of daylight that normally slashed through his doorway had vanished. The sweat on his flesh conducted the night's chill straight through him, yet his shiver came from more than the cold.

  Night. I've meditated for the better part of the day. His stomach rumbled loudly. Or days.

  He rose to his feet and pulled on a black, sleeveless T-shirt. In bare feet, he padded down the stone hallway. He let the darkness embrace him and, as he passed before each darkened doorway of a monk's cell, he sensed the sleeping man within. Beyond them, like the omnipresent crash of waves on the beach, he felt the power radiating out from the monks at each gate. Yet, despite all he was sensing, the heart of the temple seemed a great void to him and that, he knew, was as unnatural as he once would have supposed feeling anything at all was.

  Letting his right hand brush against the corridor's wall, he stalked through the ancient buildings and toward the temple. He assumed he could gain access to the Gonkhang through the Dukhang. Even though he had told Mong he would respect the Gonkhang's sanctity, the urgency he felt to unravel the mystery there overrode his need to keep his promise. He had survived in battling Fiddleback by leaving nothing to chance, and a void in the center of the lamasery would not do.

  The whistled hiss of a weapon being swung through the air echoed up and out of the training area as Coyote swept past it. He stopped and listened for a moment, but heard nothing. He concentrated and forced himself to wait passively for any sensation in the room, but it remained psychically silent. No feelings, no sound, nothing.

  He smiled to himself. The sound of one hand clapping.

  Silently, he slipped into the shadowed training room and slowly descended the stairs. He moved so painstakingly slow that tired and tight muscles threatened to cramp on him, but he persisted. Step by step he went down. He let the cold of the stones bleed up through his feet, and he visualized his outline vanishing within the darkness.

  After 30 minutes, he had reached the halfway point in his descent. A dozen steps remained in his trek, and with each step his feeling of closing on his prey increased. He sensed himself the hunter, yet did all he could to banish that feeling. He knew for certain, because of its ability to mask itself, that the thing he sought had skills beyond those he himself possessed. In an instant, this thing could turn on me and, doubtlessly, destroy me.

  His eyes took a long time to adjust, due to the near-absence of light. Coyote looked out into the long, deep room, searching for any hint of his adversary. As happens when one stares out into the darkness for a long time, he saw shapes flit past. He could not be immediately certain they were not just floaters in his eyes, but when they resolved themselves into consistent, if odd, patterns, he decided they were not.

  Again he heard a sound. The light snap seemed, to him, to be the sound of a silken sleeve slapping itself around the haft of a pole weapon, or otherwise being stressed into making a whip-crack sound. He immediately turned his head to lock onto the sound, and he saw the black shape dart off through the pillars. Then another snap sounded from the far left, and a third from deep to the right.

  Without conscious thought, Coyote knew that three such sounds after so much silence was not a mistake. It was a trap and, in that, he was meant to orient on the final sound. If I am supposed to look there, then . . .

  He launched himself from the steps and out into the darkness to his left. He snapped his left foot up through where he sensed a momentary spark of surprise. His foot met resistance, then the thick wooden shaft of a naginata snapped. His leap carried him beyond the broken weapon and through the echoes of the thunder crack.

  He landed in a low crouch, then pulled his head back and let his body roll into a backward somersault. Ending on all fours, he did a right-shoulder roll back toward the stairs. He brought his left arm up, forearm perpendicular to his upper arm, but parallel to the floor, and swept it up in an arc to protect his head. It deflected a kick wide and Coyote rolled out from under it.

  His arm stung. That would easily have fractured my skull had it landed. Clutching his left arm to his chest, he started a left-shoulder roll back the way he had come. Slapping his left hand flat against the stone, he stopped the roll in the middle and pivoted his body so both his legs scythed through the space parallel to the course of his roll.

  His opponent somehow saw enough of what was coming that he leaped up above the attack, but did not clear it entirely. Coyote caught an ankle, and he felt the creature's center of balance shift. He heard his foe land on the floor, but not heavily enough to cause injury, then it rolled away in the whisper of silken robes.

  Coyote pushed himself off the floor and leaped to his feet, but his fatigue left him feeling disoriented in the darkness. He half-turned to the left, seeking any clue that could help place him in the room, then stars exploded before his eyes as a kick caught him above the left eye. His head snapped around to the right and his stunned body tumbled off in that direction.

  He hit the ground and bounced once. Regaining momentary control of himself, he let his body spin, and then twisted around so he could let the momentum bring him to his feet again. As he did so, however, he ran into the side of the stairs and smacked his head against the stone.

  Huge shimmering balls of light burst like fireworks in his vision. He shook his head and closed his eyes, but nothing would banish them. His left hand snaked back and felt blood coming from the wound in the back of his head. I need help.

  Something in the darkness grabbed him by the armpits and lifted him like a child onto the steps. Coyote opened his eyes and stared at the thing, but the light balls made seeing anything clearly impossible. "What are you?" The thing's eyes burned with a scarlet light. Coyote succumbed to the sudden and overwhelming desire to sleep.

  Coyote's eyes opened as Mong prodded him. Lying at the base of the stairs, Coyote saw three of the monks standing around him, and he felt the pressure of a bandage around his head. "Did you see?"

  Mong held his hand out. "Quiet. You took a nasty fall. You should have gotten something to eat after your meditation. You were weak and took a misstep."

  "I did?"

  Mong nodded slowly. "A getsul heard you cry out as you fell. We came immediately and stitched you up. I don't know what you dreamt about while you lay here, but it is time to return to your room."

  Coyote closed his eyes. Nice try, Mong, but the dream remark went too far. There was something here. Something more substantial than the sound of one hand clapping.

  Despite the throbbing pain in the back of his head, Coyote forced himself to conjure up the last image he had seen. He me
lded all the views of it he had seen into one, then deleted the distortion caused by the balls. Piece after piece slid into place, and he suddenly realized where he had seen the black face with white tusks and red eyes before.

  I fought the Yidam down here. He opened his eyes and saw his thought confirmed by Mong's unguarded glance at him. Fine, Mong. You play your game, and I'll play mine. Do what you will, but I guarantee this: In the end, I'll know why a Buddhist demon exists in the heart of this monastery and why you keep this such a deep, dark secret.

  Sin lay back in bed as Erika sat up and reached for a cigarette and her lighter. He stroked her back with his right hand. She smiled at him, the lit her cigarette, drew deeply on it and sent a plume of smoke up toward the ceiling.

  She offered him the cigarette, but he shook his head. "Never developed the habit, I'm afraid."

  She smiled, the cherry on the end of the cigarette putting a rosy glow on her face. "I quit a long time ago, but a cigarette still tastes great after sex." She raked the fingernails of her left hand through the damp hair on his chest. "With you around, though, I could become a regular chain-smoker."