Dagger Magic

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.

He followed Nagpo and Kurkar into the maze. As he and his escort penetrated deeper, Raeburn became increasingly aware of the menacing presence of manifold dark energies, subliminally held in check beyond the bounds of conventional perception. Lengthening exposure and the mastery of parallel disciplines made him aware that the agency restraining those energies was the design of the labyrinth itself, the walls of which had been laid out in the form of a Tantric ideogram.