Glimmering

“Don’t you look at me like that.” His tone startled Jack: not Leonard’s usual imperious command, but something that held a warning. Leonard looked distinctly uncomfortable, almost frightened. And that worried Jack most of all, because Leonard Thrope made his art, and his living, by not being afraid of anything.

“Jackie, I am doing you a favor. A very big favor. I think.” He glanced down at the cloth bag.

“Oh.” Jack swallowed. He imagined any number of horrors that Leonard might have brought back from Tibet—scorpions, a mummified penis, a chunk of uranium. “Well. Maybe you shouldn’t have.”

Leonard sighed. His fingers closed around the sack. For an instant Jack’s heart leapt: he wouldn’t be able to part with it, after all. But then Leonard let out his breath and, leaning forward, opened Jack’s hand and placed the cloth pouch inside it.

“Okay. There—I’ve done it. It’s yours, now.”

Jack tried to shove the thing back at Leonard. Leonard shook his head.

“Hey! Relax, Jack—it’s not a goddamn monkey’s paw—”

“Leonard, I don’t really—”

“Just open it, okay? For chrissake.” Leonard stared at his friend in disgust. “And be careful—”

Jack looked down at his open palm. The pouch lay there, small and oddly heavy.

“Open it,” Leonard urged.

The pouch was closed with a narrow strip of leather. Jack teased it loose, his heart beating much too fast. He turned so that Leonard would not see how his hands trembled.

“Right,” Jack whispered. Now the pouch was open. He tilted it above his palm, half-expecting something to spill forth, bones or stones or magic beans. But whatever it held was too big. Jack bit his lip, then stuck his finger and thumb into the pouch and pulled whatever was inside, out.

“There!” Leonard grinned triumphantly, the same expression he’d had when he first talked Jack into visiting the Anvil with him oh, a hundred years ago.

Jack held a small bottle up to the light. A brown-glass medical vial, of the sort Jack had become too familiar with over the last few years, wide-mouthed and stoppered with a lump of soft lead and a wax seal. A neatly hand-lettered label was pasted across it. Jack squinted, trying to read, but it was covered with Japanese characters. Only at the very bottom someone had written in a shaky hand.

FUSARIUM APERIAX SPOROTRICHELLIA

FUSAX 687

Jack turned to Leonard. “What is it?”

Leonard hesitated. “It’s an experimental drug. Dr. Hanada calls it Fusax. The 687 is a batch number—it’s the most recent one.”

“Dr. who ?” Jack shook his head. “Leonard—what the hell is this?”

Leonard smoothed his leather kilt, fiddled with a gold chain dangling from a sleeve.

“I have a client, a CEO at Zeising, who collects birds,” he said, “Apparently there was a sighting a few months ago of a Himalayan griffon. Of course they’re supposed to be extinct, like everything else, but you’d be surprised what turns up.

“Anyway, my client arranged for me to go to Gyantse. Private jet, fake visas—the usual shit. Only when I got there the guide who’d been arranged for me had mysteriously disappeared—I never found out what happened—and I was stranded for two weeks in Lhasa. Just as well, since I needed the extra time to acclimate, so I wouldn’t get altitude sickness. I spent most of my time at Nechung Monastery. The monks weren’t crazy about having me at first, but eventually we came to an understanding and they allowed me to live there for several days.

“It was the griffon that did it. Sky burials, you know. In Tibet they chop you up and put the pieces on a mountaintop for the vultures, unless you’re a lama, in which case you’re cremated or buried. I—”

Jack sighed. “I remember.” Five years earlier, Leonard’s customarily graphic Cemetery of the 84 Mahasiddhas had caused some problems at Sundance. With a grim expression, Jack held up the vial of Fusax. “Leonard. What does this have to—”

“—I told them about the griffon,” Leonard went on. “They consider it sacred in Nechung. It’s a holdover from the Bon faith. Very rarely, holy men are given sky burial; if the griffon comes to the funeral, it’s considered a sign that the dead man has been accepted into the highest level of existence in the afterlife, and will not be reborn. Griffons oversee the passage between this world and the world of the dead. Really, it’s just a vulture—a very beautiful vulture.

“One night, a monk came to my room. He spoke a little English, and he understood that I didn’t want to hunt the griffon, or to kill it—they’d seen all my equipment, helped me hide it, as a matter of fact, in case the PSB came looking for me. He told me that there was a place I should visit, another monastery on an island in the sacred lake of Yandrok-tso. He said I might see the griffon there; but he also said there was a man I should meet. A monk. Someone who had been waiting many years for me to come.”