The Kaisho by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online Page A

the deadly path of shadows. He was perhaps the only man on earth who had faced and defeated two Kshira adepts. This he had done partly by utilizing the gift So-Peng had passed down to him, the mystic emeralds of the tanjian. They had become a kind of psychic weapon that had penetrated even Kansatsu’s Kshira and, at Nicholas’s bidding, had destroyed him.
    Kansatsu had instructed Nicholas in Akshara, but all the while he was also secretly an adept in Kshira, and it was Kshira that had almost destroyed Nicholas. In a very real way, it was Kshira that had destroyed Kansatsu. He had believed himself capable of containing the two separate disciplines inside himself; he had believed himself powerful enough to keep Kshira harnessed, using it only when required, but he was wrong. Its pollutant had seeped out, and, so slowly that he had not been able to recognize it, it had poisoned him, turning him from good to evil.
    The more Nicholas studied Akshara the more he understood Kansatsu’s temptation, for it was becoming clear to him that the Way of Light was in some aspects an incomplete discipline. No records existed that far back in time, but he suspected that in the first days of Tau-tau the two disciplines were part of one whole. At what point they were riven in two—or why—he could not say. Perhaps at some date now long forgotten the mind of man—even a tanjian mind—could no longer be trusted to use the knowledge of Kshira in a prudent fashion; perhaps the lure of massive power became too great even for these ancient mages of the mind.
    In any event, what was once one was now forever separated by such a profound philosophical abyss that proponents of Akshara were forbidden to plunge into the dark mysteries of Kshira.
    Once, Kansatsu had spoken of koryoku —the Illuminating Power—with the kind of reverence he reserved only for gods. If there had ever been a focal point—real or imagined—between Akshara and Kshira, Kansatsu had been convinced koryoku was it. His anguish that for all his expertise in Tau-tau he could not achieve the Illuminating Power must have been a crushing blow to him—one so deeply felt that he had not allowed anyone to suspect.
    In his studies after Kansatsu’s death Nicholas had come to believe that koryoku might be the Path, the needlelike fulcrum from which the whole would open up like a flower.
    He had named this whole Shuken—the Dominion: where one mind could contain Akshara and Kshira, both hemispheres of Tau-tau, without being destroyed by the dark side.
    But koryoku was not like other states of deep meditation. Though little was known about it, it seemed clear that one needed to be born with a kind of psychic trigger that would access the doorway. Without that trigger, no amount of study, concentration, or incantation at kokoro would prove useful.
    Nicholas had never encountered anyone with koryoku and so had never been able to test his theories. He did not even know whether he himself possessed the trigger that would access the doorway. Only another so gifted could tell him.
    Sometimes, lying in the shallows of night, Nicholas started awake to discover that he had been dreaming. In his dream world, he existed in Shuken, as he believed his forebears had once done, open to the full limits of Tau-tau—the full sphere of Akshara and Kshira at his command. And he knew with the certainty that comes in dreams that koryoku was the sole path to Shuken.
    As he rose out of theta, parted from his dream, he could almost reach out and touch koryoku, the doorway, just another second and...
    But when he would become fully awake, the knowledge was lost to him, and he could not help but feel an acute sense of loss that brought tears to his eyes.
    Still, he knew he had an entire new world to explore. This reason perhaps more than any other had compelled him to remain in Japan, even though this was a source of increasing friction between him and his wife, Justine, who longed to return to America.
    The