The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [15]
We are Six.
Don't have a clue what it means. Sounds somewhat encouraging, though, doesn't it?
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
The Canton made port in San Francisco by the middle of the afternoon, but night had fallen before the authorities let the first workers off the ship. Better for the city's white citizens not to see so many Asians setting foot on their shores in the light of day, thought Kanazuchi.
As the mob pressed forward to disembark, he made his way to the back of the pack where he could observe activity on the pier. Two Chinese at the base of the gangway shouted instructions in Mandarin as the workers left the ship—straight ahead, no talking, into the building! Guards in black uniforms carrying long sticks framed a loose corridor, and the immigrants massed along it like cattle toward the high entrance of a long processing shed.
Inside the shed, following more barked orders, they obediently fell into lines and produced their papers for a row of white officials sitting on high benches. At wide tables leading to the benches, the workers' belongings were taken by the guards and opened for inspection.
Kanazuchi realized he would have to make other arrangements.
Three slovenly crew members on the foredeck above him were braying about their coming shore leave; using his second sight, Kanazuchi could see the anticipated drunkenness and debauchery already stimulating their lower centers. He slipped back into the shadows as the last of the Chinese were herded down the gangway.
With the steel strength of his fingers, he shimmied twenty feet up a halyard, dropped silently behind the crew members, and waited until one of them broke away, a muscular, bandy-legged engineer's mate, moving to the sea-side rail to empty his bladder. As the mate finished urinating, two hands clamped onto his face with the strength of bear claws; whip motion, a quiet crack, the man's neck snapped. His clothes stripped in thirty seconds, body hoisted and carried over the side on the Holy Man's back.
Kanazuchi used the rail to slide sideways along the ship's bulwark until he reached the anchor line, then lowered himself and the engineer's mate down along the heavy chain to the water, where he gently set the body adrift in the oily bay. Holding his clothes and the bundle that carried his weapons, powders, and herbs dry above the water, he swam a quarter mile along the pier to an empty berth and scaled a ladder to the wharf.
The clothes were a reasonable fit. A small amount of American money in the pockets. So far the gods were smiling, but his journey had only begun. Kanazuchi did not neglect to thank the dead man for the gift of his life and prayed that he was already enjoying his reward.
He climbed over a fence undetected, slipped the pack that held the Grass Cutter over his shoulder, and started walking toward San Francisco. He knew his conscious mind need not worry about where he was going or how he would arrive: Sensei had said the vision which had chosen him for this task would lead him to the missing Book.
A dark tower rising from the sand.
A black labyrinth beneath the ground.
Chinese coolies digging a tunnel.
An old thin man with a white beard and a round black hat.
We are Six.
As he walked Kanazuchi repeated the phrase he used to begin his meditation: Life is a dream from which we are trying to awaken.
BUTTE, MONTANA
"Now they will never return me alive to that cursed black tower of Zenda! And I have you to thank for my life, my best
and dearest friend, Cousin Rudolfo, and for my return to the throne of Ruritania!"
Bendigo Rymer dropped heavily to his knees beside the king's sickbed, and as usual the shock shimmied the moth-eaten backdrop of the lush, cartoonish Ruritanian Alps. Rymer windmilled his arms, indicating the depths of emotion he wrestled with; speech, just this once, deserting him.
"Come on, you ridiculous cow, don't flog it to death," muttered Eileen, watching from the wings as she waited for her entrance; she checked the pins in her hair