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galloping wild asses-kiang;her memory provided the archaic Tibetan word. The wild asses had been
extinct for decades, even before the missiles struck. Overhunting for sport and food had killed off the
breed.
These must be the ghosts ofkiang then, she thought, though she continued following them with no less
enthusiasm. Her present eyes had never seen these animals before. In Shambala there was insufficient
room for the animals that lived there to roam so freely across the plains. The bounding of their bodies
was like music to her.
She ran behind them until she was winded, and when they plunged on ahead of her, she watched them
grow smaller with a sadness that blossomed quickly into grief, the grief and regret she still felt for Mike's
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passing, the loneliness of being out here in this desolate and hostile world alone.
We are always alone at thecore,her former incarnations informed her sternly.In the end there is nothing
but the kernel of self. All places are new and strange when seen for the first time. And all people
who pass are merely journeying momentarily on another plane.
"Pretty permanently, I'd say," Chime's current self responded. "These souls are stuck. Where is
Meekay? Let's send out a call for him-"
Meekay is in the ghost realm with the others, and both he and they will all remain there until I do that
which I came to do. I must follow thekiang. Imust find and aid the others who still live. I will best
serve Meekay by serving my purpose.
"But I can't go much farther-"
Practice correct breathing. This body knows the rhythms. Send the mind ahead and follow thekiang,
swiftly, swiftly. I sense this is important.
Chime's body was indeed trained in the breathing, though she had never in this life practiced the walking
trance used by ancient adepts. Once within this trance, called thelung-gom, a human being could
tirelessly walk great distances with inhuman swiftness. Ama-La, Chime's former self, had been an
accomplishedlung-gom-pas, and both Chime's own father and Mike's mother, as well as others,
reported having been hypnotized by Ama-La so that they could make the long and hazardous journey to
Tibet in alung-gom state.
Chime spent several minutes adjusting her breathing, and visualizedherself flying over the valley. When
she began walking again, her gait was no longer bouncing or wearied. She moved in a swift flow after the
kiang, her feet barely brushing the streams and barren rocky earth.
She smelled the char in the air, she saw the moon rise and set, she saw the stars blinking and falling
above the valley, their reflections mirrored in the ripples of the streams, she felt the silken scarves of wind
brush her face and heard it singing around her with the voices of a thousand ghosts, she tasted-nothing,
dryness, a hint of ashes. Thekiang kicked and leapt ahead of her, leaving no odor, no scat, not so much
as a hair floating on the breeze.
Then, as if no time had passed, she found herself about to walk into the face of the mountain on the far
side of the valley, where the last of thekiang had disappeared half a heartbeat before.
She sat down abruptly, staring back where she had come. She could not make out Mike's grave on top
of the distant peak. She could not see another being following her. That was good.
"Stretch," her former self commanded, and she rolled over to find that she waslaying in a bed of
wildflowers, the first vegetation she had seen in the valley. She stretched her back, legs, arms, and
shoulders, while her eyes drank in the color of the blossoms.
She never before had seen this brilliant color in a blossom. The flowers were the color of the sacred
lake, blue-green, teal, turquoise, but with an iridescence that made them appear to be many other colors
at the same time. Each blossom was at least as large as her hand, many larger than her head.
The flower patch was triangular in shape, and the point of the triangle ended at the cliff wall before her, a
foot or two from where she sat. The base of the triangle spread out about ten yards beyond her. From a
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distance, she thought, these flowers might be mistaken for a pond or a streamlet.
They seemed to be growing directly from the rock in a most unnatural manner. She lay down again,
staring through the stems and leaves toward the mountain, and beheld-more stems and leaves. Brushing
the flowers aside, she saw that they concealed an opening beneath their foliage, an opening that would
require crawling, certainly, but one that must certainly not be ignored, if for no other reason, as the
mountain climbers used to say, than because it wasthere.
She crawled with her elbows and her knees, her belly flat on the ground, and her head passed through
the flowers and beneath rock that bumped her skull as she crawled.
For a time the passage narrowed. Beneath her she felt small rocks, their sharp edges pressing through
the mounds of flower petals and through her torn pants and gloves into her already abraded flesh. The
ground seemed to tilt downward, then more sharply down until her blood rushed into her head and
hands. The coat tangled around her and she thought she should have removed it before trying this.
She began to worry lest she crawl into a place so narrow that she would be stuck in it head first. But she
still felt flower petals between her and the rocks, and that encouraged her. The flowers would not be here
without light or air. She pulled herself one more wriggle forward.
Abruptly, she smelt a breath of air-not especially fragrant, as she would have expected from the flowers,
but more of a stench tainted with excrement. But her nose told her that nevertheless it was relativelyfresh
stench signifyingmore air, which she had smelled previously. When she raised her head to sniff further,
her head no longer bumped the top of the aperture.
Experimentally, she rose onto her elbows and still didn't touch the top. Ahead of her the darkness gave
way to light, the shadowed flowers, flowing far in front of her, bursting into teal brilliance just ahead.
Greatly heartened, she crawled forward more rapidly,then found she was able to stoop, then stand, and
she walked quite confidently out of the cave into the bowl of a deep crater open to the sky. From a
massive snow mountain opposite her an ice field flowed down toward her, culminating in a deep blue
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