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Yet something had happened. The other men cast occasional furtive glances at the place where the ghost
monks had daily beaten their invisible master to death and disassembled their monastery. Sergeant Minh
stared fixedly, moodily, at the spot and finally spoke. "They did not come today."
"No. Perhaps they were afraid of the snow," Huan Po said, trying to make a joke.
Fu Ping cleared his throat. "They were supposed to lead us. And she said she would return."
"Perhaps it was all a delusion," said Shao."A snow mirage or something."
"It only started snowing today," Wu-Lan pointed out.
"Well, another sort of delusion then. Ghosts, after all..."
"We saw them, though, and the woman," Sergeant Minh said. That gave Fu Ping courage. Sergeant
Minh was a very realistic man.
Fu Ping said, "Yes. And we do not see them today. I think the woman released them."
"Yes, I got that impression too," Wu-Lan said. "In the old stories, the ones my grandmother told me
before I had to turn her in for being reactionary, once the spirits are released they disappear. Perhaps
once they were released they couldnot stay."
"But the girl was coming back for us."
"Perhaps she couldn't either."
Fu Ping shivered more violently as a blast of wind swept snow into his face. "She told us which direction
to travel. I think we should start."
"But will she find us?"
"If she is coming, I think she will find us wherever we are. She thought to meet us anyway. She said we
might all come together at Mount Kailas, which is west of here, near where they built the Fire-Bone
Dragon Power Plant." He paused a moment and added, "It's a long walk, but if we are walking, we will
be warmer."
"Yes," Sergeant Minh said. "There is that. Pack up the remaining food then, men, and move out."
When Chime's thoughts ceased to reach her, the old blind woman stopped, feeling even more sightless
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without the strong psychic signals to guide her across the valley. Locana Hoa Chung had not left her cave
in years, but all those years she lived there, she knew that this day would come. She had not known that
when the time came she would be blind and without Vajra to guide her, but using thelung-gom
technique, she traveled above the surface of the ground anyway, so what she needed was a mental goal.
Chime's signals were the easiest to follow, but Mike's were also very clear. It had been Mike who
caught her attention with his cry for help from far away. Fortunately, Chime had been able to respond.
Dr. Chung and Vajra could not because, although they were among the beings who answered the code
word "Kalagiya" with assistance, their sphere of influence was specifically within the Himalayan and Kun
Lun region. Vajra had been very agitated to be unable to assist a Shambala being in distress, and Dr.
Chung had tried to comfort him by saying, "It is sometimes hard to have big ears and short legs, but we
must be patient." They had been, and Chime Cincinnati-whose limitations were less strict than their
own-had broadened her own astral search and reeled them in.
Chime's signal was as clear as the sacred lakes of Tibet had once been, and Locana Hoa Chung had
followed the girl's progress with interest.
Dr. Chung had known when the girl first set out on her astral travels, and had followed her spiritual
progress in finding the monks, the ghosts of the mutilated mothers in Lhasa, the nomads and the soldiers.
She and Vajra were impressed by the great surge of energy Chime had emitted to travel from Tibet and
back again with her friends. Because she and Vajra had been following the girl's spiritual progress,
Locana had been as unaware at first of what was happening to Chime's body as Chime had been. But
the older, more experienced woman recognized the symptoms when Chime began weakening and
wavering, her astral projection disturbed by the loss of its home.
She had been far more disturbed than Chime when the spirits of the three young people returned to the
ledge above the crystal lens to find nothing but blood and broken spirit traps where Chime's body should
have been. Chime was too young and had had too little knowledge of the dangers of astral travel to
realize that the astral traveler's worst nightmare had just befallen her-her body had been taken, inhabited
by another. Drawing nearer to the place where the body was, Locana sensed an evil presence, and Vajra
recognized it as that emanating from the now-open hole where he had first guided Mike and Chime, not
knowing that a demon, rather than a real man, dwelt there.
The demon had Chime's body, Chime's signals had faded entirely, and the two young ghosts were trying
to carry out the mission of the Terton alone. Dr. Chung packed extra Spam in her backpack, pulled on
her coat, hat, mittens, and boots, and picked up a soul catcher for a staff. "The time has come, Vajra,"
she told the yeti, and he led her down the mountain and up the next.
At the foot of the mountain where Mike had died, she cocked her big ears and heard him and
Toni-Marie arguing with the ghosts near Mount Kailas. On hearing his decision to continue to find the
living beings Chime had located, Dr. Chung had told Vajra, "Go. Help him. Take your secret paths and
shortcuts, listen for the boy's psychic emanations and assist him." Vajra could not speak, but she knew he
felt the emanations of the two Shambala people as strongly as she did. He too had big ears-and
furthermore, had ways of reaching distant places that she did not, as she had learned in the past when he
suddenly arrived with something they needed from a distant place.
When he left, she continued across the valley,lung-gom style, guided by a chaos of lower-frequency
psychic mutterings, though she still could not read Chime.
After a while she heard something more useful-not with her mind this time, but with her ears. The sound
was one she had heard before, a man whistling a tune she remembered from long ago the very way she
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remembered him whistling it before. She had asked this man about the tune, and he had told her it was a
Christian gospel song, one he liked not so much because it was religious as because the tune was catchy
and he liked the title, "I'll Fly Away."
The night that Mike and Toni-Marie attempted to reenter Shambala alone, Chime's parents, who had
been lying awake talking after making love, broached the subject at almost the same time: of starting to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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