The Shadow Read Free Page A

to be fifty feet wide.
    Ying Ko’s own mouth had fallen open. He cut his eyes to the Tibetans.
    “The clouded mind sees nothing,” one of the men answered through his scarf.
    Roughly, they escorted him to the mouth’s sculpted tongue, where they stripped him of the goat’s hair cape and flung him toward a pair of Brobdingnagian doors, which rose between snarling bronze lions. Eighteen feet high, the doors were studded with plate-sized gold lozenges, and their outsize vertical handles appeared to have been carved from the thigh bones of a brontosaurus. From behind them came the slow, almost funereal beat of kettle drums.
    Pulled by unseen hands, the door opened inward, revealing a long room that ended in a canopied, golden altar, surmounted by effulgent golden curtains. Two rows of painted columns supported the room’s central nave, from the ceiling of which hung short, square-cut crimson and gold banners. Paralleling the colonnades stood two lines of monks, each man wearing a drum at chest height and holding a wooden beater. The lamas wore saffron and crimson robes and ceremonial headdresses topped by tall Mohawks of mustard-colored napping. Several bare-headed acolytes faced Ying Ko from the foot of the altar, some holding silver bells, two with their mouths pressed to eight-foot-long ragdong trumpets, whose sound boxes rested on the gilded floor. None of them acknowledged Ying Ko as he approached the altar, but when he was within a few feet of it, the plangent drumming ceased on a double strike, the bells sounded, and the lamas turned without word and disappeared behind the columns.
    Ying Ko regarded the altar with stifled awe. Golden cobras spiraled around the canopy’s forward support posts, and on the floor were several small, golden tables, replete with ritual objects. But Ying Ko’s attention was fixed on the translucent curtain that hung over the three-foot-high altar, rippling in a breeze he couldn’t feel. Behind it, a large golden disk could be distinguished, and emerging from that disk—as if levitated above the altar—was the form of a human figure seated in a lotus position.
    The seated figure was a young boy, clothed in robes that blended impeccably with the sumptuousness of his surroundings. He had narrow eyes, a wide nose, and full lips. Small bumps along the forehead were all that marred a cleanly shaved skull. Ying Ko’s dream from the previous night returned with unsettling swiftness as the youth seemed to float toward him.
    “Who are you?” Ying Ko demanded in Tibetan, only to be answered in English.
    “I am Marpa Tulku,” the boy said. “You recognize me.”
    It wasn’t a question, but Ying Ko denied the assertion. “I’ve never seen you before.” He brushed strands of hair from his face.
    The boy’s face betrayed nothing. “You have seen me—as pictures in your mind. I am your teacher.”
    Ying Ko gaped at him in amused disbelief. “My what?”
    “Your teacher. You have been chosen.”
    “Chosen for what?”
    “You will see.”
    Ying Ko sneered. “Like I told your pals, you’ve made a serious mistake.”
    “There is no mistake.”
    Ying Ko’s hands brushed at the dusty thighs and knees of his loose trousers. “Do you have any idea who you’ve kidnapped?”
    “Cranston,” the boy said.
    Ying Ko froze. Cranston wasn’t his real name, though it was the name he had arrived in Tibet wearing. When he looked up, the tulku was standing directly in front of him.
    “Lamont Cranston,” the boy said.
    Ying Ko forced a fearless grin and touched his hirsute chest. “So you know my real moniker.”
    “I also know that for as long as you can remember you’ve struggled against your own black heart, and that you have always lost the battle.” The boy was circling him now, gazing at him—through him, it seemed. “You’ve watched your spirit, your very face change when the beast claws its way from inside you. You are in great pain, aren’t you?”
    Cranston bristled. “I’ll