Leaving Barclay to shut down the engine and secure the chopper, Raeburn drew a deep lungful of the cold, pure air and looked around him, using this brief respite to get his bearings as he compared the citadel of the present day with his memories of thirty years before.
Designedly remote, the place had always been impressive, as much a fortress as a spiritual retreat. The concentric complex of buildings was perched on the brink of a precipice, alien to this part of the world yet somehow at one with the soaring vastness of such heights.
As a former inmate of the establishment's inner circle, Raeburn was in a position to appreciate how seamlessly the dual nature of the monastery had been integrated in outward appearance, with the casual visitor never the wiser. The outer bailey, with its communal residence halls, meditation cells, library, and reading and tutorial rooms, provided a scholarly environment in which innocent seekers from the outside world could acquaint themselves with the language and religious teachings of Tibet.
But beyond the shared opulence of the great temple, where anyone might sample Tolung Tserphug's public teachings, lay the guarded precincts of the inner court, adytums of sorcery where the darker, more seductive mysteries of black Tibetan magic were fostered on a far smaller number of carefully chosen initiates.
That much would not have changed since Raeburn's day, though technology had left its mark. Privileged to view the whole of the compound from the air as they came in, he had been interested to note an array of highly sophisticated telecommunications equipment on the roof of the abbot's residence, discreetly masked behind parapets and towers. The residence itself had been significantly enlarged since Raeburn's last visit, and embellished as well with a gilded roof to rival that of the temple.
Which did not surprise Francis Raeburn. Siegfried Hasselkuss had always cherished an inordinately high regard for his own importance.
A sonorous horn-call jarred Raeburn from his reflections, heralding a stirring of motion beneath the groined and shadowed arch of the monastery's entrance. Impelled by invisible hands, the heavy iron gate swung ponderously open on a small contingent of orange-clad monks, who emerged on the alpine meadow and began heading toward the helicopter with purpose. They arrived just as Barclay was lifting down the bags from the chopper's cockpit, one of them wordlessly taking the bags from him and two more setting their hands beneath his elbows to begin chivvying him toward the monastery entrance. The remaining two exchanged bows and a few murmured words in Tibetan with Raeburn's escorts.
"Stop a moment," Raeburn said sharply, catching the alarmed look Barclay cast back at him. ' 'Where are you taking my pilot?"
"You need not be alarmed," said the eldest of the newly arrived monks, though a hand was on the Phurba thrust through the front of his belt. "Your servant will be taken along to the dining hall and offered refreshment after his labors. Thereafter he may sleep, if he desires. He will be returned to you in due course, once Dorje Rinpoche has spoken with you."
"I see." Raeburn did not bother to hide his irritation. "And when might that be?"
"Rinpoche will see you at once," said the second new monk, who also bore a Phurba, but on a cord across his breast, so that it hung beneath his left arm almost like a shoulder holster. "If you will please accompany us, we will take you to him."
Though the request was civil enough, it was not an invitation but a command. Seeing little choice but to comply, Raeburn allowed himself to be escorted inside the compound between Nagpo and Kurkar, old resentments fanned by the new presumption of the past twenty-four hours.
Beyond the gate lay an open courtyard paved with cobblestones, dominated by the temple with its golden pagoda roof. In keeping with Tibetan architectural design, the angles of all the buildings fronting the courtyard were trapezoidal rather than square, with stone walls sloping inward from a broad base. The effect was both exotic and benign, designed to foster the illusion that in entering Tolung Tserphug, the beholder was effectively turning his back on the fleeting present in favor of an ageless past.
But it was the immediate future that concerned Raeburn now, as a touch at his elbow reminded him of his vulnerability as a most reluctant guest. Avoiding the broad, flag-decked approach to the temple steps, his escorts turned him instead up a narrow passage between two lesser edifices, passing then through a succession of two more open courtyards to emerge before the great gateway that gave access to inner sanctums, where the senior members of the community were accustomed to hold court.
He gazed up at the gateway with something like respect while one of his escort spoke in rapid Tibetan with the keeper of the gate. It was fashioned in the form of the Tibetan monument known as a chorten, this one a conscious imitation of the gatehouse guarding the entrance to the holy city of Lhasa. Like its Lhasan counterpart, this entrance embraced a square, block-like chamber, perforated by an archway and surmounted by a dome and spire. But where the Lhasan spire was crowned with a crescent moon surrounded by flames, betokening purity, the spire of this gateway was capped with a lightning bolt wreathed in clouds of thunder, a device which initiates of many different paths would recognize as a potent symbol of death and destruction.
Nor was the destructive potential vested in the gateway merely symbolic. Raeburn required no special effort of perception to sense the brooding energies emanating from the mouth of the arch, like exhalations from a dragon's lair. Sufficiently well schooled to recognize the nature of the forces at work, he was equally well acquainted with the measures necessary to counter them - though he had no intention of making a gratuitous display of his capabilities, thereby betraying his strength to his monkish guardians. On the contrary, the less Siegfried knew about what he had become, the better. Whatever else might transpire in the course of the next little while, Raeburn intended to retain the element of surprise in his own favor.
At a gesture of command from the gate's keeper, the power in the gateway smoothly shifted, like a veil being parted, and Raeburn's attendants hurried him through. Beyond a vaulted and lamplit corridor lay a windowless antechamber where he was instructed to remove his shoes and coat and don one of the toga-like orange mantles worn by all the other inhabitants of the place. The concession told him that he still had some standing here, despite his thirty-year absence. Once he had completed this change of attire, only Nagpo and Kurkar ushered him through another doorway onto a stone landing at the top of a descending spiral of broad stone steps.
He followed his escorts downward. Only once before, as a youth of sixteen, had he been privileged to come so far. After the initiation that followed, the last he had been allowed, his dreams had been haunted by images, simultaneously frightful and fascinating, of endless shadowy corridors full of lurking half-seen entities that knew no fixed form. Returning here now as an adult, veteran of many initiations in many dark traditions, he found those impressions both enhanced and clarified in the light of knowledge since acquired.
A doorway at the foot of the stair gave access to a maze of interconnecting passageways, the entrance guarded on either hand by a large triple-edged wooden dagger, taller than a man, supported point-downward in triangular mountings of meteoric iron. The faces carved around the hilts leered down at them in malevolent scrutiny, the eyes almost alive in the nickering light of butter lamps set in niches beside them.
Reverently, both Nagpo and Kurkar paused to salute each of the daggers in turn, raising both arms over their heads before pressing palms together and touching fingertips lightly to forehead, throat, and heart. As the two stepped through the doorway and beckoned him to follow, Raeburn performed the salute as protection rather than devotion, also drawing upon his own resources for reinforcement, for though not himself a dagger practitioner, he knew enough to recognize the force behind the dagger symbols as a focus of dangerous power. The initiation he had taken so long ago might preserve his life within the maze, but Dorje Rinpoche had never allowed him to receive the further empowerments that would have allowed him to function freely within the web of power he now entered.