Dagger Magic

The forces thus channelled represented a formidable defense against any form of unauthorized intrusion, and set up a subtle interference that would make it difficult to initiate any action in opposition to its focus. Resigning himself to a passive role in the coming encounter, at least magically, Raeburn set his mind to keeping all the flexibility it could, as the bonds of the maze drew more closely around him.

A bewildering sequence of doublings and turnings brought them in due course to a different doorway than the one he had essayed in his only other visit to this place. Like the greater doorway, this one was likewise flanked by a pair of massive votive daggers. What most unsettled him, however, as he made his ritual salute and passed between them, was that the pommels crowning the two giant hilts were carved in the form of four makara serpents knotted together in the shape of a swastika.

There were more swastikas in the room beyond - a square stone chamber palely lit by an assemblage of butter lamps, fuming like burning chalices in niches ranged round about the walls. Between the niches, long, narrow banners of emerald-green silk hung in static cascades from ceiling to floor, each one charged with a white roundel overlaid by a black swastika in the form of two interlocking S's.

But the focus of the room was not the swastikas or the banners or even the green-draped dais that dominated the center; it was the figure seated amid a scattering of flat silk cushions, who clearly was master in this place. Raeburn would have known him anywhere, even after more than a quarter century.

And there was no mistaking that it was Abbot Dorje Rinpoche, not Siegfried Hasselkuss, who presided from the dais. In the years since Raeburn last had seen him, his old rival even seemed to have acquired an Oriental cast to his features, so striking as to suggest surgical enhancement beyond the illusion fostered by the shaven head and exotic attire - though the skin was still Nordic-pale, and he had not gone so far as to disguise the blue of his eyes. The illusion was strong enough to suggest that there was something to the old rumors, always discounted in the past: that not only had Siegfried Hasselkuss been Lebensborn, racially pure offspring of an SS officer embodying the Aryan ideal and a mother of similarly impeccable pedigree, but he had been deliberately conceived as a fitting vessel to receive the soul of the dying monk carrying the appellation Green Gloves.

The current bearer of this title, if not the dark force behind it, was presently arrayed in vestments befitting his station: a sleeveless jacket of cloth-of-gold over a black brocaded chuba, the whole accentuated by a mantle of brocaded green silk, a mitre-like hat, and a pair of gauntlet-cuffed green gloves. On a chased silver tray at his right hand reposed a teapot of translucent Fukien porcelain together with an attendant pair of eggshell-thin drinking bowls, each lidded with jade-inlaid gold. Scented steam, wafting up from the spout of the teapot, mingled lazily with the gauzy tendrils of perfumed smoke emanating from an incense-burner of enamelled bronze. The blended fragrance was subtly redolent of opium.

Advancing with Raeburn to the foot of the dais, the monks Nagpo and Kurkar paid their master the profound obeisance befitting a tulku - a lama of the highest rank - reminding Raeburn that, however improbable it might seem to Western minds, this scion of the Master Race commanded the unswerving loyalty of his followers here at Tolung Tserphug as Abbot Dorje Rinpoche, the recognized current incarnation of the legendary Man with Green Gloves. In acknowledgement of Dorje's temporal authority within these walls, Raeburn sank to both knees and inclined his head stiffly, but it was no gesture of homage of his own. He waited without speaking until the monks had received their master's gesture of dismissal and withdrawn. Only then did he counter the silent scrutiny of the man on the dais with a bland smile.

"Hello, Siegfried," he ventured, continuing in German, "It's been a while."

The use of his German name brought a flicker of displeasure to the abbot's ice-blue eyes.

"Absence has done little to mend your manners," he said coldly, in the same language. "I shall thank you to remember to whom you are speaking."

Raeburn inclined his head again, carefully correct, but bordering on insolence. ' 'Of course, Rinpoche. You must forgive me if I indulge in nostalgia. Not having been present to witness the crowning glory of your ascendancy, when you reached your majority, I still find it a trifle difficult at times to forget past associations."

The abbot's classically Nordic features hardened. "Do not think to trifle with me, Gyatso. My patience is short-lived when it comes to dealing with men who so consistently fail to reckon with their own limitations."