Tenzin and the Circle waited till morning to gather a raven elemental. When it was done, and they had given it its purpose, through it they called a great raven to them, the largest in the Yan Mountains, and the bird came and was possessed by it, becoming the quintessential raven, dominant over all the rest. Tenzin considered it superior to Svartvinge: It was more closely instructed, and proof against any affinity with the barbarian. When it found him, it would read him from a little distance, and the Circle would know all that the great bird saw and read.
At once it flew forth, and before long, every raven as far north as Gil’ui and Baikal, and as far west as the Altai received its request, relayed through the field of raven beingness. They were to watch for three men. Also from the elemental, each received an image of the three, accessed from the collective raven experience.
Surely the three would be found, for ravens cruise almost constantly by day, looking for anything dead, small or large, and in the process see the living.
Tenzin Geshe was not concerned when, for several days, he’d heard nothing from them. Miyun was very far from Urga, 1,200 kilometers, most of it open, steppe or desert, while ravens are birds of the forests and mountains. But after ten days he began to be anxious, for he felt sure that the Northman had intended to come to Miyun. And over the centuries since the Great Death, forests had spread westward, especially during the climatic cooling of the last hundred years. Some 400 kilometers west, the Northman would enter a rough land with numerous groves and woods on slopes that faced north and east, a land where ravens hunted. The Northman should have reached there by now, and been reported.
Was my premonition wrong? Tenzin wondered. It had been strong enough. The Northman could have changed his mind later, but then where to? Surely not into the Gobi. To cross it westward would be a journey of death in any season but spring. While if he d turned northward—By now that should have taken him into woodlands too, where the ravens would have discovered him.
Or—if the Northman made it far enough east, he’d reach forest where large areas had few openings. There, conceivably, the ravens might miss him for days, if he kept carefully to cover. But . . .
Could he be traveling by night? Ravens roosted by night! And it was the sort of thing he might do!
He’d overlooked the possibility! And he had the emperor’s strict injunction!
Abruptly he left his shady balcony and went into the Sanctuary, where he sat aside from the Circle to contemplate the problem.
Tenzin contemplated a problem not by pondering. Rather, he dispelled all other thoughts, defined his problem clearly, then entered a trance to let happen what would.
As a novice, long years earlier, the procedure would have been impossible to him. To sit quietly to meditate had meant opening the door to every anxiety, every aggravation and idle thought, every grudge and grief. And if his mind began to quiet, sleep was likely to slip in and claim him. But over the years he’d looked at them all: anxieties, aggravations . . . the roots of all his most intrusive thoughts. Old grudges had died, old griefs had lost their force, and confidence grown from experience quieted what was left. Seldom now did anything disturb the stillness of his meditation, and drowsiness rarely intervened.
This day he sat in deep trance for nearly three hours, and came back aware of things he’d never before noticed.
The Sigma Field had been somewhat known eight hundred years earlier, though imperfectly and incompletely. It had been defined and described mathematically with equations that enabled a technology to grow out of it. Equations that gave rise first to the sublight-speed warp drive, which actually was a drive, and later to the hyperdrive, which was no drive at all, but could transfer a ship to a remote point with a lapsed time differing from zero (very substantially from zero) only because of the limitations of matter, especially life forms.
Tenzin’s knowledge of the Sigma Field was far less precise, but it was broader, more comprehensive. He couldn’t have begun to design a warp drive with what he knew, let alone a hyperdrive, but he saw possibilities that Hampton and Mazour and their graduate students, some eight hundred years earlier, had not. To him the Sigma Field was not a complex of esoteric equations. It was like a mesh, a kind of net that clothed reality, and a template that gave it form. In a way it was alive, like a river is alive, flowing over and through and around. And like a stream, it was aware only at a very primitive level.
He thought of it as “the fabric of Tao,” which it is not.
It also seemed to him that like a net, the strands might be separated somewhat, not by hands but by his focused intent, powered by the Circle. And into the mesh something inserted which was highly aware. An elemental.
Besides Tenzin there were twelve members of the Circle now, Songtsan Gampo having dipped deeper into the list of adepts compiled for him some years earlier. This permitted seating no fewer than four at any time, while still allowing adequate rest.
But seven, plus Tenzin as the director and manipulator, was the optimum number, called upon for special needs. And it was seven that the geshe seated now.
Ravens would not do for his newly recognized need. They were not assertive enough, not aggressive enough, probably not intelligent enough. What he needed was an elemental with a sufficient innate sense of the mesh that individuals of the species communed with one another psychically. Like ravens, but something more intelligent. He decided to gather a wolf elemental. Once in the mesh, it seemed to him it might “permeate” an area of it and become aware of all life over a considerable region. And after learning to function in the mesh, hopefully it could identify whatever it found.
Thus a wolf elemental was gathered: aware, intelligent, vibrant with fear, and for awhile he calmed it. When it seemed to Tenzin sufficiently calm, he held it as with a hand, and with the other opened the mesh. Then he urged the elemental to enter. It touched the field and resisted. He pushed, and the resistance increased; clearly an obedience command had its limits. Carefully he opened the mesh wider, but the resistance remained. And wider . . .