Tsongkhapa sighed. There was no guarantee she could be mended but he would have Rinpoche try bufo alvarius as a first option: maybe the only option, unless Rinpoche could cut a deal with Axl. And Tsongkhapa didn’t need telling that for this to happen Axl would first have to cut a deal with himself.
Unrolling the dried toad skin, Rinpoche pulled a broken razor blade from where one hadn’t previously existed and did the same for a small square of glass. The silver monkey didn’t need a lighter, it could do flame from its fingers. 5-MEO-DMT, to be taken nightly until cured. Rinpoche shrugged, whatever.
‘Hey,’ the monkey tapped Mai on her shoulder and stepped back hastily as she came awake fast, reaching into her boot for a knife that wasn’t there and hadn’t been for five years, maybe more.
The girl blinked at the animal, then glanced at Axl lent back against a rock and smiled sourly. ‘So much for standing guard.’
‘Methamphetamine,’ the silver monkey said, ‘you’ve no idea how fucking hard it is to unpick. I practically had to disconnect those neurons one at a time.’
‘You put him to sleep?’
‘Well, someone had to,’ Rinpoche said slyly. ‘How else were we going to talk?’
Later, when the giant flowers that caught the sun were beginning to open their petals, Rinpoche gave Mai the glass knife he’d casually picked from Axl’s pocket as he briefly slept and watched her face light like the dawn. Her faith in her abilities shamed him. And as she slipped the knife’s cord over her head and began to unbutton her red jacket to rest the blade between her slight breasts, Rinpoche turned away in embarrassment.
When next Axl awoke, dungchen trumpet filled his head and Mai was sitting next to the cooling embers of the fire, mumbling to herself. Only it wasn’t with the furious, PCP-enhanced intensity of some dustout. Her words were quiet and reasoned, though just too soft for Axl to work out who Mai thought she was talking to.
Axl wasn’t too sure what had been going on inside his own head either, but his body was bathed with sweat and he felt more tired than before he had slept.
Everybody was already awake and watching him. No one had slipped away in the darkness. Even fat little Louis had sat out the stink, the distant howl of wolves heading towards the slaughter ground and the dying down to embers of the small fire that was all there was to keep predators at bay. All of them had survived the night, hovering on the insomniac edge of anxiety-apart from Axl, who felt like sleep had crept up behind him with a cosh.
Maybe they’d been afraid he’d wake before they escaped, or perhaps it was the silver monkey sitting shaking glass straws of amphetamine from a tiny compartment in the zytel butt of his snubPup who’d kept them in order. Axl was sure he’d checked that compartment and the last time he looked it contained a cleaning kit for the Browning.
‘Have a good night?’ Kate asked.
A day came and went. Most of the time Axl rode holding Mai’s bridle, Ketzia and Kate riding close behind, like silent shadows. Occasionally they all walked the rocky track that led across the bleak, windswept plateau, leading the exhausted animals behind them.
No one talked. What breath they had was needed for breathing.
All the same, enough water gathered in pools for the ponies to be able to drink. It was grass that was scarce. What little there was looked half-hearted, yellowing and spindly, filling the flat spaces between scrub and moss-covered rock.
They did that next night without fire, Axl and Rinpoche staying awake to keep guard. Mai slept in Kate’s arms and both Tukten and Axl tried not to notice. By morning Rinpoche was gone again and Axl was so exhausted he could hardly ride in a straight line.
‘Wolf,’ said Tukten and Axl stopped. The shag-haired boy was pointing to where a grey shadow slunk between altars on the distant charnel ground.
‘And there,’ Axl muttered, ‘and…’ Oh, sweet fuck. Axl was about to point again when a flash of sunlight kicked him suddenly awake, an adrenaline rush snapping his eyes wide open with a squeal of violin. Someone was watching them from a low wooded hill on the far side of the charnel ground and Axl had a nasty feeling he knew exactly who it was.
‘Problems?’ Kate asked unkindly, drawing alongside. She was holding Mai’s rein, though Tukten still stood at the pony’s head holding its bridle. They’d spent a lot of that morning scowling at each other and pulling the bewildered animal in opposite directions.
Axl shook his head, wondering why anyone would bother with field glasses. But no sooner was the question asked than Axl knew the answer. Samsara didn’t provide PaxForce with GPS, no chain of spySat hung up there running stealth mode. If anyone wanted to track him they weren’t going to squat at some satellite-feeding JCIT deck, focusing in close enough to see if he’d shaved, while their thumb hovered over some floating trackball that picked out options between blind and vaporise.
PaxForce wanted Mai and so did the Cardinal. At least, he wanted Joan and if the kid really did have Joan’s dreams stacked up inside her head…
‘It’s getting messy, isn’t it?’ The voice was amused, kind but a little contemptuous. It was Mai all right, but not really any version he knew. Her clothes were the same, that red jacket, mud-splattered felt trousers. The childish mouth was still both downturned and pouty and her hips soft with puppy-fat but her expression was more intense. And if Axl didn’t know better, he’d say her eyes had changed colour. Or maybe it wasn’t a hue change, just a rearrangement of the fractal dust that made up her iris pattern. Whatever was looking out at him, it wasn’t a fourteen-year-old girl, or not entirely.
Axl found himself nodding. Yeah, messy was one way to put it. If his guess was right, Colonel Emilio and half a dozen conscripts were camped in the other side of the charnel ground.
And if they weren’t armed to the teeth they were still a hell of lot better-equipped than his group.
‘Your group?’ Mai snorted. ‘You think half the people here wouldn’t slit your throat in the night if they got the chance?’
No, he didn’t. Without intending to Axl glanced over to where Kate crouched, retying the laces of her Caterpillars while she pretended not to be trying to listen in.
‘She’d be first in the line,’ Mai’s voice was regretful. ‘You hurt her, you know. . . And just because you’re broken doesn’t mean that everyone else is ... Of course,’ Mai nodded at Kate, ‘it doesn’t mean they’re not either.’
She was gone before Axl could reply, her hand reaching out to stroke Kate’s cheek as she went past, leaving Kate staring after her with something like disbelief in her blushing face.
‘Aren’t you going to stop her?’ Kate’s voice grated on Axl’s thoughts. He was about to ask stop who? But he didn’t need to. Mai was walking steadily towards a pile of corpses while ahead of her grey shadows raised their heads, as if they could pick up her scent over the sickening miasma of rotting bodies.
Axl grabbed his snubPup and rolled to his feet, pounding after Mai. 148 shots to a magazine and he had one magazine rammed up through the butt of the Browning and a spare tapped alongside. About seven and half seconds of full-on killing time, not like he really had bullets to spare.
Only he didn’t need the gun. Axl didn’t even need to pull back the ratchet that jacked the first shot into the breech, though he did it anyway. It was the combat equivalent of sucking his thumb.