The Wailing Piano
It all started as a routine excavation in Palestine. But soon you find yourself racing across the desert on a mission to track down a legendary ancient relic before the Nazis can get their hands on it. And that's just the beginning. The Third Reich is mobilizing across the world in search of mysterious ancient Hallows of Power, objects that could put unimaginable supernatural forces into the hands of the armies of darkness. And the only thing standing in their way is you. Put on the worn boots of a 1930s braggart archaeologist and prepare for a wild journey around the world, encountering adventure, romance and mystery at every step. Do you have what it takes to locate the relics, defeat your enemies and save the world from a thousand years of darkness?
82
"Shambala? What a load of hooey!"
"I am not, of course, talking about the absurd bedtime story of the lost kingdom. I mean another Shambala. Let me tell you another bedtime story, Dr. Spillane. One you will not have heard. One not told outside of Tibet."
He puts his teacup on the ground in front of him, clasps his hands together, and begins.
"It is a story about a great religious teacher, Yeshe Tsultrim Rinpoche, who lived, on the Western reckoning, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries, a time when Tibet was fractured by the power of feuding warlords. One day, Yeshe decided to withdraw from the town and go to the high mountains for a period of reflection. He left, taking with him only one solitary disciple to assist him on the arduous journey. But in the wild peaks, he found the entrance to a hidden cave, a cave filled with marvels of light and sound and radiant form.
"He gave that cave the only name he knew which could do justice to its wonders. He called it Shambala. And in Shambala, on a stone pedestal in the center of the chamber, he found a radiant green stone, the like of which he had never before seen. And when he touched it, it reached out for his consciousness, and grasped it, and he knew its power and how to wield it. His disciple had been born with an ailment, a withered arm; Yeshe held the stone, and reached out to the disciple in his mind with pure love, and lo, his arm was healed!"
Zhu's face remains entirely immobile; you have no sense of whether he believes any of this story or not.
"So Yeshe took the stone back to the town, and showed his lord, and the lord installed him in a wing of his palace, and opened it to all. And the people came from miles around, the lame and the leprous and the blind and the possessed, and, year after year, Yeshe, with the power of the Stone of Shambala, healed them one and all."