“Well, only theoretically. I don’t actually expect, uh, people of your caliber to submit to a body search. But I’ll bet a dead frog the person who hired that killer is wearing nose filters. He or she knew the killer would be covering his escape with death gas, and might have been forced to flee past his employer. Nose filters that go in far enough to be invisible aren’t easily removed.”
Hathaway objected. “That wouldn’t prove a thing. Any of us might be wearing nose filters out of simple paranoia. In light of events, it would seem an intelligent precaution.”
Eva nodded. “But you’re probably not all filtered. I said ‘narrow the list,’ not nail it down. Irrelevant anyway; none of you will tolerate a search on principle—and I don’t blame you.”
“Then why did you bring it up?” Hathaway snapped.
Eva did not answer. But she was already enjoying the mental picture. As the word spread, the five would spend the next hour discreetly trying to peer up each other’s nostrils. Victoria Hathaway might actually not look down her nose at anyone for the rest of the night.
Reb escorted her home. They took double-bulbs of Irish coffee to the window, and sat looking out at Mother Terra in companionable silence for some time.
“Jeeves,” she said then, “is Jay awake?”
“He and Master Jacques are both sound asleep, madam.”
“Thank you. Let me know if he wakes.” He shimmered away again, and she turned to Reb. “That bedroom is soundproof anyhow.”
Reb nodded. “Go ahead.”
“I need a better cover story for him. About why I’m still using up air. Oh, you did a good job. But I heard his voice, and he didn’t really buy it, deep down. I’m afraid I shot my mouth off to him about why I was planning to take a cab. He’s not going to be satisfied with what you told him. And I don’t know what else to say. The boy knows me too well. And he spent a whole month trying to change my mind: his pride demands a convincing explanation.”
“Not just pride, Eva. He loves you.”
“So what do I tell him? I can’t tell him about—”
“No. I suggest you stall as long as possible. With everything that’s happened tonight, he’ll be too busy to remember the question for a few days. When he does, you can be unavailable for some additional time. It may be weeks before he has time and opportunity to brace you about it.”
“And what then?”
“You tell him I promised you entertaining surprises were still in store for you—and proved it the very next day.”
“And if he persists?”
“Let icicles form on your brow and tell him it’s personal. A shame to hurt his feelings, of course, but I don’t see what else you can do.”
She sighed, and sipped her drink. “You’re right. I can’t tell him.”
“No, you cannot. I should not have told you, Eva. But you are my oldest living friend, and I could not see you leave just before everything changed.”
She found her eyes stinging, and shut up. They shared more silence for a time.
“Do you think it was Chen?” she asked at last.
“Behind tonight’s violence, you mean? I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I think an inartistic hit would be a very artistic touch indeed. But it’s hard to refute his essential point. If he’d done it, it would have worked, however garishly.”
“Apparently it was only by incredible chance that it didn’t.”
“And I tend to find incredible chance incredible. But I’d bet my life both Jay and Rand are straight.” She glanced over her shoulder at the bedroom door. “You know what I mean. They’re both honest.”
“The gods have blessed us,” Reb said cheerfully.
“They have?”
“Of course. How often does life hand you a really good puzzle?”
She blinked, and grinned. “You’re right. Not often enough these days. I feel like a sixty-year-old again.”
12
Kechar Dzong
Lo Monthang
The Kingdom of Lo, Nepal
12 January 2065
“There was a time,” the old monk said above the howling of the late afternoon wind, “when this kingdom controlled all trade throughout the Himalayas. It was the top of the roof of the world.”
Gunter Schmidt thought, I will not kill my travel agent. That is far too merciful. I will sue him until he bleeds from the eyes.
“Of course,” the old man said with magnificent redundance, “all that was long ago.” He underlined the unnecessary words with a sweeping and equally superfluous gesture. Every square inch of the immense fortress-cum-temple within which they stood shouted that the structure had already been a long-abandoned ruin on the day Johann Sebastian Bach died.
From their vantage point on one of its flat rooftops, they could see Lo itself laid out below them in the merciless sunlight of a cloudless December afternoon, a collection of flat-roofed, log-laddered earthen dwellings at the base of the hill on which this crumbling castle of Kechar Dzong stood. Even by Fourth World standards, the Kingdom of Lo was unimpressive. The land was parched, supporting nothing higher than thornbushes; a few carefully nurtured stands of poplar and willow saplings were to be found in the village itself, but wood had been too precious to burn here for centuries. The brief growing season was over, and even the Himalayan vista in the distance could not overcome the bleakness and desolation of the landscape. The kingdom was permitted to exist, semiautonomously with its own king and queen, within the larger kingdom of Nepal—largely because there was nothing here worth arguing over.
“What happened?” Gunter asked, not because he wanted to know, but because he wanted to hear the old monk say something he didn’t know already.
“Calamity. The Kali Gandaki moved.”
“I hate when that happens.”
The old man actually seemed to catch the sarcasm. “The Kali Gandaki was the river from which the strength of Kechar Dzong flowed. It once passed by right there—” He indicated a vague gully meandering through a section of rocky outcroppings no more or less desolate than any other, a few hundred meters downslope. “But when it changed its location at the end of the sixteenth century…”
Gunter understood now, and his anger deepened. “And ever since, you have been praying for its return—”
“—in the Tiji ceremony, the elaborate and beautiful ritual I told you of earlier, yes,” the old monk agreed happily. “Dorje Jono, the son of the demon who moved the river, repels his father with the power of his magical dancing, and brings water back to the land. The Tiji ceremony takes three full days, and involves every member of the kingdom who is well enough to travel. We summon them with the two mountain horns I showed you downstairs, each of them four meters long. For three days Lo becomes the most magical place in the Himalayas, with damyin music and feasting and dancing and singing and beautiful costumes and pageantry and—”
“In May,” Gunter said through his teeth.
His rhapsody interrupted, the old man blinked at the venom in Gunter’s tone. “Well, yes, as I said, that is when foreigners usually visit us. We seldom see a European this late in the year.”
“Really?” Gunter said, pulling his parka tighter at his throat against the sharp and icy wind. He mentally replayed the conversation with his travel agent, realizing in hindsight that while the man had waxed eloquent about the Tiji festival, he had never specifically said when it was held. He had only seemed to suggest, somehow, that Gunter barely had time to book his passage if he wanted to be there in time. The trip here had been quite arduous. The last fifty kilometers had been accomplished on horseback, following a guide with whom Gunter had no languages in common. So I can’t sue the bastard, and killing him is too good for him. Ah, but what about torture?