by Ronan Frost
Asuras.
Demons descended from the stars.…
Beside him another pilgrim rattled a prayer wheel.
THIRTY-NINE
He didn’t have a lot of choices, but that in itself led to indecision. Narrowed down to left or right the wrong call became a toss of a metaphorical coin. Rye zigged left.
He should have zagged right.
The dead man followed him, coming fast.
He ducked into a shaded area that might have been a smaller shrine among the more obvious holy places on the hill. He kept trying to picture the long stair down in his mind and get his bearings even as he ran. People were looking at him. He couldn’t think about that. He darted across an open alleyway between two of the shops and was confronted by a grinning Buddha and the same binary choice, left or right. He chose left again, knowing it would bring him around toward the white-domed stupa. He was deliberately trying to work his way back toward the main square and, from there, to the pool with the bathing monkeys and down. He had no intention of taking the stairs, though, not with the anonymity of trees promising him somewhere to hide as he descended.
But first he had to get past the dead man.
And that wasn’t going to be easy.
Dawa stood in the alleyway ahead of him. His face, half in shadow, looked remarkably bullet-hole free.
Rye’s heart hammered in his chest.
His hands were clammy with sweat.
He clenched the right in a fist, not sure what good knuckles would be against a man who could survive bullets.
He shuffled one step back as Dawa took one step forward, matching him again as he took a second and then a third step toward him.
The pilgrims in the next street sounded a million miles away.
He backed up another step as the dead man flew at him.
Rye needed to use his head—and his natural talents—if he was going to get out of this alive. That meant thinking on the fly. He ran, arms and legs pumping furiously, but with his head up, looking for a different kind of path out of the monkey temple.
Monkey see, Rye do, he thought madly, as he ran at a stucco-covered wall, planted his foot, and pushed himself up.
He reached toward the roof, his hands slapping against the edge of the overhang and slipping on the clay tiles.
For one horrible second, he thought he’d misjudged it and was about to come crashing back down to earth in a helpless sprawl, but his fingers found purchase on the wooden timber at the edge and, kicking out, Rye hauled himself up and levered his body over the edge, so he lay on his back looking at the sun. He didn’t have the luxury of time to think about what he was doing. He pushed himself to his feet and ran across the red clay tiles, then launched himself into the air like one of those rhesus monkeys, arms and legs pinwheeling as he tried to squeeze every inch of distance out of his wild jump, and came down hard on the roof of the next building, staggered forward two clumsy steps, and then was up and running again, not looking back.
He ran across the rooftops, climbing to greater heights as the buildings before him rose, dropping to a single story above the ground, never slowing down, never looking back. The monkeys took interest in him, running along beside Rye, hooting and screeching as they mirrored his leaps from building to building, and making it obvious to anyone below which way he was running.
Which was a problem.
So was the fact he was running out of rooftops to run to.
He was twenty feet above the ground when he reached the edge of the last roof and had no choice but to gamble he’d guessed right.
Rye took a huge leap of faith, using all of his momentum to hurl himself forward and upward, kicked out to try and claw extra precious inches from the jump, praying to the monkey gods that the sacred pool was waiting for his splashdown.
He came down hard, slapping against the skin of the shallow water. It felt like concrete beneath him as he went sprawling. The shock of pain was agonizing. The impact shivered up the twin bones of his forearms as they took the full weight of his fall.
When he looked up, still on his hands and knees in the shallow pool, he saw the dead man looking down at him.
FORTY
“You shouldn’t be here,” Dawa said. “Go home. Forget about the Cintāmani. Only death awaits you in the mountains—”
Before he could say anymore, or Rye could question him, one of the monkeys launched itself at the man, clinging to his hair and clawing at his face as it hung on for dear life as Dawa twisted, trying to shake free. A second and third monkey latched onto his legs as he struggled, and for a moment it looked almost comical until the side of the dead man’s head exploded in a spray of blood and bone.
He stood there for a moment, the look of shock on his face half-obscured by the blood-spattered rhesus monkey on his shoulder, then he pitched forward, falling into the sacred pool.
Rye splashed back, trying to get away from the dead man as his blood spread out around him in a watery halo.
The blood pulsed out, turning the sacred pool red.
Someone screamed. That one voice brought more screams. The monkeys joined in the cacophony, their howls echoing across the hillside.
Still on his hands and knees, Rye saw Iskra Zima walk up to the pool’s edge and hold out a hand for him to take.
“We need to go. Now,” the Russian said, closing her hand around Rye’s wrist as he reached up.
Iskra hauled him up to his feet.
Several monkeys were already in the water, splashing about in the blood. More joined them. They moved like piranha in the grips of a feeding frenzy as they descended on the dead man.
Rye stood at the edge of the pool, trying to unravel what had just happened.
“How did you know—?”
“Where you were? That you were in trouble? That the dead just won’t stay dead?” She tapped her ear. “Byrne tracked you.” It took Rye a moment to realize the Russian was actually tapping her earbud. The Russian joined him in the pool and went through the dead man’s pockets looking for some form of ID. “It’s not the same man,” she said, rolling him over. “Look at his face. It’s similar, frighteningly so, but it isn’t him.”
She was right.
The resemblance was uncanny. Genetically, they probably shared familial DNA; there was more than a passing resemblance between them. But it wasn’t the same man they’d killed in the hospital, which quite possibly meant it wasn’t the same man they’d killed in the chateau.
Rye stepped out of the pool as a pair of the site’s guards came to investigate the screams.
“Now we really do need to go,” Iskra said, pulling him toward the tree line.
They ran down the embankment, pushing off between the crowded tree trunks like pinballs ricocheting off the bumpers, half-hurdling, half-stumbling over protruding roots that tried to drag them down, and they didn’t slow down until they were at the base of the hill with the entire city opening up before them.
A siren wailed out, but they were long gone before the police descended on the scene.
The trick was looking innocent as they followed the main tourist thoroughfares back to the hotel, and that meant talking like they didn’t have a care in the world, which wasn’t easy given the fact they’d left a sacrifice up on the temple steps.
“That’s the second person I’ve seen die this afternoon,” Rye said.
“Lucky you,” the Russian said.
“Not really, the first one burned himself alive.”
“Last time I was here I watched a policeman cut a monk’s tongue out. The stuff you don’t hear about,” Iskra said, and shrugged like she didn’t have an answer for the woes of the world after all. “Don’t let it get you down.”
Rye checked her watch. It was almost 5:30, meaning he had ninety minutes before he was due to meet Cressida in the hotel bar. The last thing he felt like doing was wasting an evening making small talk. But he didn’t want to go to sleep, and maybe for once alcohol would be a decent solution?
It took them fifteen minutes to walk back to the Moonlight.
Iskra went to report in, but the first thing Rye wanted to do was get out of his wet clothes and take a long hot shower. He set the spray running so hot it steamed up the mirrors of his luxurious bathroom, and stripped. Even if he spent every minute from now until Cressida Mohr arrived under the spray, there was no chance he’d even begin to feel clean.
FORTY-ONE
She sat in a soft leather armchair by the huge window that overlooked the view that gave the hotel its name. The gibbous moon hung silver over the hillside, casting a radiant gleam across the treetops. It was reflected perfectly in the still waters of the swimming pool.
“It really is quite beautiful,” she said, not looking up at Rye. She saw his reflection in the glass and smiled through it at him.
The German woman nursed a single malt. There was a folded copy of Bild on the table beside her bearing today’s date. Once upon a time, getting a foreign newspaper abroad was an expedition in itself, but globalization had made the world so small it hardly warranted a raised eyebrow now. The fact that the hotel bar twelve thousand miles from home was piping in a lounge act rendition of Adele’s latest proved, if anything ever could, that the West had won the war of hearts and minds across the world.
Rye took the seat across from her. A keen waiter was already at his shoulder, white towel draped across his forearm. “What can I get for you?”
“A gin and tonic,” he said.
“We have William Chase, Tanqueray, Bombay Sapphire, Hendricks, Hayman’s, and Beefeater. Do you have a preference?”
“The Chase,” Cressida answered for him. “Trust me on this.” The smile was self-deprecating, but the fact she’d taken the choice away from him was a refreshing change. He liked a woman who knew what she wanted out of life, even if it was something simple like a drink order. He wasn’t old-fashioned. He was happy to bow to her greater experience. Right now, he just wanted to forget about the day he’d lived through, and the gin would help with that, whatever label it had on the bottle.
“I’ll take your word for it,” he said.
As it turned out, she was right. The drink was rich with juniper, apple, and elderflower, but subtly undercut with a citrus tang. It came served with a slice of apple, which he had never seen before.
“So, Uncouth American, if I may be so bold, what brings you to this colorful and not so pleasant land?”
“The mountains,” he said, without missing a beat. They hadn’t talked about any sort of cover story, so it felt easiest to stick as closely to the truth as he could without admitting they’d come in search of a lost civilization’s magical space rocks.
“Ah, yes, they are rather spectacular. Everest, I presume? Most visitors seem to want to make the pilgrimage to base camp these days.”
“In part,” he said. “We’re looking at the Khumbu region and the Everest massif: Everest, Lhotse, Nuptse, and Changtse. And if the weather allows, moving west to see Pumori and Cho Oyu.”
“That’s quite the trek,” Cressida said. “You intend to make the climbs?”
Rye nodded. “It’s something I always promised my wife I would do.”
“Ah, you’re married?”
“Widowed,” he said.
“Oh Lord, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine. It’s still raw. I’m not sure I’ve even started to process it yet.”
“Might I ask what happened? Was it an illness?”
“No,” Rye said, without elaborating.
“She was a climber, I assume?” He nodded. It was easier to let the woman think it was an accident than admit to the truth. He didn’t want a long conversation raking over what it felt like to pay to listen to the love of your life being gunned down. “So this is a pilgrimage?”
“I suppose it is.”
“Forgive me if this sounds indelicate, but are you thinking about scattering her ashes in the peaks?”
“It crossed my mind,” he admitted, without explaining why it would be impossible to do so. Instead, he raised his glass in a silent toast to Hannah and took a deep swallow, emptying the glass. He caught the waiter’s eye and raised a finger to ask for one more. The waiter nodded, and a moment later was back at their table with a fresh drink. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Oh, of course. Absolutely. I’ll be honest, I’m just trying to avoid talking about how you feel after watching a man burn to death this afternoon, because frankly I’m a little.…” She shrugged, not finishing the sentence.
“I can drink to that,” Rye agreed, and found himself polishing off that second gin with all the eagerness of an alcoholic embarking on a three-day bender. “So, tell me, German embassy, what’s life like here, you know, besides self-immolating monks and the police cutting protesters’ tongues out to silence them?” She furrowed her brow at that. “Something a friend told me.”
“Well, to be honest, it’s all a bit ‘last days of the Raj.’ It can feel like we’re the last bastion of civilization some days, what with the constant tension between the Chinese and the Nepalese, and the protests of the monks. But I must confess I rather like the turmoil. It keeps things interesting. Life would be so very dull if we were all just friends.” There was a mischievous undertone to the “just friends” line that left him in no doubt that she wasn’t talking about the geopolitical trials of the locals.
He ordered a third drink.
She showed no interest in matching him, but rather savored the flavor of hers, making the one glass last through three of his.
“We should eat,” she said. “Assuming you are hungry?”
“I could eat a horse.”
“Well, much of the food is more Westernized, pizza, burgers, fries, and sizzling steaks,” she said, with a slight smile. “But if you’ve got your heart set on horse, we’ll just have to see what we can do. Failing that, I do know a wonderful Thakali place that does a wonderful daal baht.”
The place was hidden behind a curtain. There was nothing on the door from the street to indicate it was a restaurant, and inside it was dark to the point of being conspiratorial, lit by a few tea lights in brass table lanterns. There were no menus. The waitstaff greeted Cressida like an old friend, matching her namaste with a warm smile and “Namaste Cressida-ji.” Within a few minutes, they were seated with drinks in front of them. There was no flatware on the table.
“You eat with your right hand,” Cressida explained. “The left is meant for wiping yourself after.” She inclined her head toward the rear of the small restaurant, where he assumed the toilets were. “Using your left hand for anything is the height of bad manners.”
“And hygiene,” Rye assumed.
“Well, yes, exactly.”
The food, when it came, was served on a silver platter. He wasn’t entirely sure how he was meant to eat it with his fingers, but followed Cressida’s lead as she took the daal and other condiments and added them to the rice, kneading the mixture into a neat ball with her right hand, and pushed it from her fingertips into her mouth without it touching her lips.
Each mouthful was delicious.
They talked through the meal, running the gamut of first-date conversations, trading stories about where they grew up and the oddities of their lives that had led them to this point in time. They didn’t talk about Hannah or burning men or his relic quest. She was the perfect dinner companion. He, sadly, wasn’t. But if she noticed, she didn’t let on.
It was late by the time she walked him back to the hotel doors. She made no move to go inside.
“It’s been a rare pleasure,” she told Rye. “But this is where I must wish you sweet dreams.”
“Are you always so…” He caught himself before he could finish the thought. The gin had loosened his tongue, which wasn’t always a good thing.
“So?”
“Prissy,” he said, earning a proper gut-laugh from the German woman.
“Ah, my Uncouth American friend,�
�� Cressida said. “Would you care for a nightcap?”
“No,” he said, taking her hand and leading her toward the bank of elevators. “Right now, all I want to do is fuck and forget about everything.”
FORTY-TWO
She was gone before he woke up, but the memories of the night were still written on the sheets in the tangled outline of their bodies.
Rye was in no hurry to get up.
He lay there hating himself. Part of him wanted to reach over to the minibar and drown the guilt he felt, but he knew that was a bad idea. Instead, he forced himself into the shower and stood under the stinging spray for as long as he could bear, trying to wash every trace of the German woman from his skin. He was fucked up and he knew he was. The last time he’d lathered up, sex had been the furthest thing from his mind. The act of soaking had been a purge, sluicing the day from his body like a second skin. But standing outside the hotel it had felt right. Sex and death were intrinsically linked. It was more about the burning man and Dawa than it was about Cressida Mohr, but that didn’t change the way he felt now. He lathered the soap up and worked it into his skin, and when it washed away under the spray, lathered up more, staying in the shower.
He emerged, wrapped himself in a towel, and went through to the room. He used the television to put some music on, not wanting to be alone with his thoughts, and sat on the edge of the bed.
Something on the carpet caught his eye.
He got down onto his hands and knees and fished it out from beneath the desk. It was Cressida’s slim card wallet. It must have fallen out of her pocket during their frantic undressing. He remembered throwing her up against the wall and her willingly giving in to his aggression. And there was no mistaking that he was the aggressor. She surrendered to his lead at every stage of the seduction—though that was far too nice a word for what he’d done. The belt had come undone before the shirt had come off, and even as he’d pressed his palm against the flat lines of her stomach, her trousers had fallen from her hips. Somewhere after that, as she’d kicked them off her feet, the wallet must have fallen out of her pocket.
