The Messiah Secret - James Becker [4]
Sonam stood up as he approached, and Je-tsun bowed down in front of him. ‘You are unhurt, my lord?’ he asked, standing erect again.
Sonam nodded. ‘Yes, but Akar is bleeding badly from his thigh. The arrow has cut through several blood vessels, I think.’
Je-tsun nodded, clasped the younger man by the shoulders and then bent down to look at the injured man.
Akar looked up as Je-tsun knelt beside him. He was quivering with shock, and blood was pumping out of both sides of his thigh – the arrow had penetrated right through his leg, and was still lodged in the wound.
Je-tsun looked at the pain-racked face of the man he’d known for decades and shook his head. He knew that the injury was life-threatening simply because of the blood loss, but there was more to it than that. The bandits were known to smear the tips of their arrows with poison or excrement and, even if the wound wasn’t fatal in itself, there was a good chance that infection would follow in the days to come, killing the victim more slowly but just as surely.
Akar stared at Je-tsun, knowledge of the reality of his situation written on his face. He nodded slowly, lifted his right hand and seized the other man’s arm. ‘Make it quick, my friend,’ he said. Then he leaned back on the rocky ground and closed his eyes.
Je-tsun nodded in his turn, drew a short dagger from the scabbard at his belt and swiftly drove it into Akar’s chest, straight through his heart. The man on the ground shuddered once, then lay still, his features growing slack as the pain ebbed away for the last time.
About half an hour later, the small caravan, now three men down, moved off again. For the rest of the journey the remaining men neither saw nor met anyone else, and finally they reached their destination, high up the valley, just after sunset.
Je-tsun ordered torches lit, then sent two of his men inside to check the structure thoroughly, and to ensure that nobody else had taken refuge there, though at that altitude it was unlikely. They emerged a few minutes later, to report that the place was exactly as it had been the previous year, when they’d found it for the first time, and when they’d spent almost six months preparing it, a task that had proved to be physically demanding and had also required considerable ingenuity.
Je-tsun nodded in satisfaction. He ordered the yaks to be unhitched from the cart and had them turned loose, together with the remaining donkeys. They wouldn’t need those animals again. But the two camels were tethered securely on a patch of level ground nearby, where scrubby bushes would provide them with something to eat.
The men removed all the furs and other goods from the cart to expose the heavy wooden crate, lifted it between them and carried it into the entrance, where they laid it on the ground. Then they lit more torches to provide enough light to start their work. Baulks of timber had been piled against the opposite wall, and it took over an hour to remove them all, and to reveal the inner chamber.
Before they entered, Je-tsun walked in and inspected it. The small room was almost square, and for obvious reasons devoid of windows or any other openings. At one end was what looked almost like an altar, an oblong shape made from hewn chunks of solid stone, the gaps between them filled with some kind of mortar, and the top covered with half a dozen slabs of stone.
The men picked up the heavy box again, carried it into the chamber and set it down beside the stone structure. Je-tsun issued another order, and his men began removing the slabs, leaning the heavy pieces of stone against the wall. Their actions revealed that the structure was completely empty, just an oblong cavity formed from shaped rocks. When they’d removed the last slab, Je-tsun peered inside, ran the tips of his fingers along the inner surfaces and nodded in satisfaction.
Building this cavity of stone had been one of the tasks he and his men had carried out the previous year, and his only concern had been the possibility of damp inside it, because their treasure was very fragile. But he