Forever the Road (A Rucksack Universe Fantasy Novel) (13 page)

Jade listened now as she did every night, her final check before turning in. As her head lifted, Jade’s thoughts and feelings quieted. As they faded away, the Everest Base Camp spoke, and so did all inside.

In a second-floor dorm, a bubbling vengeance had taken hold of someone who had eaten a bad curry. The pale green flames and haze of their feelings were dashed with red. Jade turned her attention away as the poor bugger ran into the toilet again.
I don’t need to listen to
everything
, she thought. But she did make a note to have the cleaning staff pay extra attention to that loo on their next visit.

In a third-floor dorm, sighs, gasps, and giggles burned bright from a bottom bunk. The guy in the bunk above them was deciding between trying to ignore it and go to sleep, or dump his water bottle onto the happy couple.

The Brazilians were arguing. A silver-and-gold light shone from inside one of them, and Jade recognized the woman from earlier. She must have just explained her plans to go away for a few days on her own. The others were trying to convince her not to, but no confusion muddied the woman’s light.
Good on you,
Jade thought.

Gray fogs dotted many of the rooms. Typical, given those people had also just left the pub. A large, thick fog hung like a stale thunderhead in one of the third-floor dorms. She pitied how hung over that person would feel in the morning. Despite that, excitement and electricity arced through the fog in bright red, like lightning in a cloud.
Curious,
she thought, listening more closely.

It was a man. He was asleep but his mind burned with adventures new and friends just made. And it burned with what could only be kissing.

New kissing too, the kissing of first touches of soul to soul, skin to skin, sun to sky, water to earth, direction to path, tonight to tomorrow, hope to forever. For a moment, she felt like she was in the dream, as if she had waded in slowly. The dream washed over her gently, gradually, like waves at her ankles, then her thighs, then…

She opened her dream-eyes and grinned to see who she was kissing.

Jay answered her smile with his own.

Jade opened her real eyes and jumped back.

“Too close,” she said, shaking her head, years of training and experience jumping to attention after being caught slacking on the job. “Too close. What are you doing? You know not to get that close.”

She walked to the mirror at the desk by her bed and looked deep into her own eyes. “Okay,” she said. “He’s attractive. There’s clearly… something about him. But he is who he is. I am who I am. And the only kissing for a Jade is in someone else’s dreams.”

More than ever, she wanted to fall into bed, but the job wasn’t done. She stood and closed her eyes again. After making sure Jay’s stout intake had kept him pleasantly awash in drunken dreams, she turned her attention away from the dorms. Everything there was clearly fine and no different from usual.

Over the rest of the building, she listened. Three men were pissing up against the outside wall. Nothing unusual there. A yellow sparkle in the walls drew her close. A frayed wire hissed and flashed in the wall between the pub and the foyer.
That could start a fire,
she thought, making a note to get it fixed.

Her thoughts crossed into the pub itself, the heart of the building—the heart of the city, some said throughout India and the rest of the world. Even Guru Deep, who famously wouldn’t set foot in India, had said in his guidebook that the Everest Base Camp was “the heart, soul, and pulse of Agamuskara, where the rivers of lives from all the world come together.”

She couldn’t help but feel proud of that.

At this time of night, the pub was usually as quiet as it was dark and empty. Normally, the tables, bottles, walls, and bar all faded quickly, practiced sponges at absorbing emotion and conversation. Not tonight, though. Tonight the pub was awake. Tonight there was too much to absorb. Feeling and intensity filled the pub like water in a flooded basement.

Ancient and new had mingled tonight in ways she had never seen before. She had seen an older gentleman from Bangalore clink glasses with a family traveling from Brazil. He was old. This... entity was ancient. Beyond the usual scope of life. Beyond the age of the city. But what was it?

Over the last few months, Jade had grown accustomed to a slightly off feeling from the pub. That was Rucksack, and from what little The Management had told her about his oddity, she expected the pub to be a bit uneasy with him. Overall, the place liked him. He drank out of a love she didn’t comprehend, and with a joy that filled a soul hollowed out by deeper sorrow. The pub tolerated him but didn’t quite know what to make of him. Then again, neither did she or The Management.

Jade thought back over the evening. So many people from so many places. So many ages and desires. So many decisions. So many destinies. But as she reflected on the different people in the pub that evening, four stood out.

“That’s one of my favorite drinks too,” Jade had said to the woman when she ordered a glass of water with lime. “Where are you visiting from?”

“Far away,” the woman replied, her accent beyond Jade’s recognition. She seemed to be in her late twenties or early thirties. The woman’s thick black hair fell in waves over her shoulders, and she peered at Jade with her large brown eyes. Her simple sari looked well made, but its deep brown-and-black was completely unlike the vibrant colors Jade usually saw on the streets of Agamuskara.

“Are you from India?”

The woman bobbed her head. “India. Himalaya. Here and there, you would say.”

“Where in India?”

“A small village.”

Jade handed over the water with lime. The woman sat at a table near the wall, and she cast a wary glance at the two men sitting with their pitcher of Deep’s Special Lager. A look of recognition, perhaps?
Unusually well guarded,
Jade thought as she tried to listen to the woman’s feelings.
The only thing I can tell is she’s older than she looks.

And she’s nervous.

The woman took out an envelope, opened up a sheet of paper, and read it over and over and over. Jade regularly brought her more waters with lime.

“If you don’t mind my saying,” Jade said, “you look like you’re waiting for someone.”

The woman folded the paper and set it on the envelope. “I wait on a dream,” she replied. She gazed deeply into Jade; it was like being tested, evaluated, measured. Only when the woman spoke again did Jade realize she must have passed the test.

“Have you ever been presented with something you knew was impossible,” the woman said in a voice bright and flowing yet also ancient and sad, “but all the same you had to see if you were wrong—that it could be possible after all?”

Every day,
Jade thought,
except for the second part.
“Lots of people wait on dreams in a pub. Are you sure I can’t bring you something else to soothe your nerves?” Jade hoped she would say yes; a drop of hope and two of confidence would give the woman the steadiness and sight she needed to see through whatever she was anticipating and waiting for.

“Only the waters, please,” the woman said.

“We have food too,” Jade said.
I can influence food no more than I can water,
she thought.
But it’s only right to offer.

“Yes, that does sound good. Do you know
thukpa
?”

The training took over. “Barley noodles,” Jade said, “plus vegetables and meat in broth, right?”

The woman nodded.

“Okay.” She started to walk away but stopped herself. “If you need anything,” she said, “my name is Jade. I don’t want to pry, but if you want to talk, I’m around.”

“You are very busy,” the woman replied. “Many to serve.”

“And always time to help someone who needs it.”

The woman nodded. “Thank you, Jade,” she said. “My name is Kailash.”

“That’s a wonderful name,” Jade replied. “Like in Tibet, right? Mount Kailash, the holy mountain?”

She smiled. “You know much, Jade. Yes, like the holy mountain. The world mountain, some say. The mountain that moves, that travels the world and tells of things to come, of dreams that are to be real.”

“I thought that was Mount Meru. Besides, isn’t that a myth?”

“Some would say a myth is only a truth that is not a fact,” the woman replied. “Many say that Kailash and Meru are the same mountain, one rooted in Tibet, the other a manifestation that moves throughout the world, in dreams, visions, and plain sight.”

“And you are named for it. What do you believe, Kailash?”

Kailash smiled. “I believe that the mountain Kailash sits in Tibet, far away yet close as a dream. Yet since I cannot see it myself, I cannot truly know it is there. So I must believe. But I know that the mountain moves.”

“I wonder what it has to tell us.”

“Until it speaks, the mountain is silent.”

The women looked at each other, saying nothing.

Jade went back to the bar, put in the food order, and then brought it over when it was ready, but Kailash only smiled and nothing. The crowd grew. As Jade served and listened, influenced and directed, she still kept an eye on Kailash, alone at her table. Despite seven glasses of water, Jade noticed, not once had Kailash gotten up to pee. She just read her sheet of paper over and over.

Until Rucksack came in. Jade saw that Kailash kept staring at him.

Jay came down and Jade sent him over to where Rucksack was sitting. The next time Jade glanced at Kailash’s table, Rucksack and Jay were looking at the woman. Soon, Kailash was on her way out the door.

I have much to tell Rucksack,
Jade thought in her room, her mind drifting back to his letter and the matching envelope that Kailash had left behind. A pang of guilt passed through her.
Maybe I shouldn’t have acted as if I knew nothing.

No,
she thought.
There’s much that he’d better start telling me, if he wants me to be more forthcoming too.

The guilt passed.

Something about the woman seemed ancient, the pub told her—older than the city, older than India. She is who she seems, the pub said, and she is not who she seems.

That’s not much help,
Jade thought.

When she opened her eyes for a moment, the weariness was nearly overwhelming. The pub’s extra intensity had been more fatiguing than usual. After the long day, she needed to get off her feet. Jade sat at her desk next to the bed, ignoring the absence of photos and keepsakes, extra things that would have needed dusting. Her shelves held only files, notes, manuals from her training and from Guru Deep’s
The Bartender
.

Jade closed her eyes again and listened to the pub’s recollection of the evening.

If the Everest Base Camp were a person, then Rucksack had made the pub merely uneasy, as if it had a touch of vertigo. In comparison, the two loud men had made it violently ill.

From the moment they came through the door, Jade noticed them but saw no need to pay them much attention. Their cockiness said they already knew the world. They knew where they were going when they got there, and their place in the world was wherever they were. Rarely did such people need any help from a Jake or Jade.

But they did need beer. It fueled their big laughs, which rang off the walls no matter how full the pub got. Their laughter deepened the lines around their eyes, though their faces told her they seemed just on the edge of early middle age. Light shone like hazy halos off of their clean-shaven heads and the thick, squarish glasses they both wore. They looked like they could be from anywhere, but Jade suspected they were from India, perhaps even nearby. Their blue button-down shirts reminded Jade of the blue statues all around the city.
Some say there are more gods than people in Agamuskara,
Jade thought.

As the pub filled, Jade noticed that people kept tripping or stumbling around the two men’s table, though no one ever actually hit the floor. Sometimes they righted themselves. Sometimes, like with Jay, one of the men caught an arm or helped them regain their footing.

This has to stop,
Jade thought. She added a dash of Purple #8 to a fresh pitcher of Deep’s Special Lager. As Jade set the pitcher on their table, her feet remained steady and never thought once of betraying her.

“Where are you lads in from?” she asked.

“We lose track!” said one of the men in a thick bubbling accent. He laughed loudly and reached across the table to slap his friend on the shoulder. The other man laughed too.

“New Delhi. Varanasi. Everest. Zhangmu. Kathmandu,” the second man said.

“You get around.”

Their heads bobbed. “We do as we must for what we will,” the second man said. “That is the life of those who work for the Office of World Light and Foreign Visitors.”

“The office of what?” Jade asked. “That sounds government. Is this a surprise inspection?”

“It is!” the first man said.

Surprise indeed shot through Jade. They’d just been inspected a month ago, and as always had passed. “What are you inspecting this time?”

“Your beer!” the first man said with another laugh. “And it passes twice. Pim, have you ever had such a fine a pint as what is poured at the Everest Base Camp?”