Turn of the Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  “No! They need me. They love me.”

  “So do I,” Eric said with a rueful grin. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  She hugged him fiercely then, and her tears ran hot down his neck. “Oh, Eric, I’ve missed you so! But I could not stand what was happening at the camp, what we were turning into”

  Gently he pushed her away. “I told you before,” he said softly. “We’re in a war for survival. There’s no room for sentiment.”

  She tossed her head to clear her eyes of tears. “There is always room for compassion.”

  “You talk easily enough of compassion, Ms. Moon,” Sobel said. “How much compassion will the nats show us when you’ve broken the back of our solidarity?”

  Us? she thought. She wanted to scream at him, You’re a nat! What would you know about it? But she still felt toward him as if he were a parent. She could not show anger to a parent; she could only hope to change his mind, to make him see…

  “The lynch mobs are out there in the night, Isis,” Eric said in a low, intense voice. “The hounds are baying for our blood. Don’t bring them down on our necks, my love. Don’t be a party to —”

  Her mind filled with horrific images, burning babies and shredded women. “No!” she screamed, holding futile hands over her ears. “Eric, stop! I won’t let you in my mind anymore! That’s rape.”

  Eric stepped back, ruined face stark, hands held out from his sides. He looked to Sobel.

  “I’m sorry you see things that way,” the Colonel said.

  The room filled with jokers and guns.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Moonchild’s first thought was, I must keep them from hurting each other.

  Beyond that her main concern was to keep from getting shot up too badly for her healing to handle. She was careful not to underestimate people who lacked ace powers: Bruce Lee said that in the martial arts all skills are learned skills. A nat or joker might be her master. Besides, some of the New Joker Brigade were aces as well as jokers.

  But there were just too many of them, a dozen or more in close confines, bumping elbows and getting in each other’s way. She moved swiftly, decisively, twisting weapons away, aiming nerve-center strikes to numb arms and legs — which has a real mystic-Asian-fighting-arts ring to it, though nerve centers shouldn’t seem too damned esoteric to anyone who’s ever banged a funny-bone.

  Her brain filled with terrible pictures again, momentarily overwhelming her vision. A wooden rifle butt cracked against the side of her head. She dropped to her knees.

  The mind-tearing pictures were gone, replaced by heartbeat pulses of white light. She thrust a leg out, swept it around. The man who’d clubbed her went down in the act of raising his weapon for another crack, tangling with half a dozen others, kicking and cursing and flailing.

  She head Sobel’s voice bellowing like an angry carabao above the noise. A weight landed on her back. She jackknifed forward in a throw made more of expediency than art, sending her attacker flying into a phalanx of his fellows.

  An image came into her mind: herself held down on the wood floor of the ravaged temple, her uniform in shreds about her, while jokers pinned her wrists and ankles, and others knelt between her legs and by her head to ravage her. “No!” she screamed, shaking her head, her black hair whipping paint and sweat-streaked faces.

  As she was distracted, a youth stepped forward and jammed the muzzle of his Kalashnikov into her belly. Even the ugliest dream Eric could generate couldn’t slow her reflexes; her left hand whipped up under the muzzle brake, snapped the barrel toward the ceiling before finger could clench trigger.

  The boy had his weapon set to full automatic. The noise was enough to implode your head. Everybody froze comically in place, fixed by the gut realization of what a burst of 7.62mm bullets could do in a room jammed full of bodies. Coughing and blinking in the rain of red dust dislodged from the rafters by the gunfire, the ambushers momentarily lost interest in Moonchild as they frantically checked themselves over for perforations.

  It was time to leave. Time to leave the Colonel, her would-be father, and his betrayed trust, time to leave Eric and his poisoned dreams, time to leave the New Joker Brigade cursing and fighting in its madness. She made for a window, delivering hammer-fists and backhands to temples, hard enough to temporarily blind the recipient with the sparks behind his eyes, not hard enough to shake anything permanently loose. She reached the wall.

  It fell in on her in a cascade of masonry and plaster dust.

  A masked and black-clad figure stepped stiffly through the hole. It towered above her like a redwood, gazing down on her with a single eye.

  A horrible smell of decay enfolded her. Behind her she heard a snarling: “Get out of my way, you morons! If you hadn’t fucking jumped the gun, the bitch would be toast!” She glanced back to see a savage threshing-machine fury of motion, and jokers flying in all directions.

  The essence of command, as J. Robert liked to point out, lay in the ability to take snap decisions. Moonchild took a couple here. She decided that the hole in the wall was her handiest exit, especially since its lone guardian seemed none too agile. She also decided he must be one of Colonel Sobel’s vaunted new aces and that she therefore ran small risk of the eternal shame of taking a life by delivering a strike to his midsection with every gram of strength and every milliwatt of ki she could focus.

  She stepped right into him and punched. He took a step back, turned the blank, dark eye of the filter that covered his eyehole upon her. Then his right arm lashed around backhand with the awful, inevitable majesty of an avalanche.

  Nobody and nothing had ever take a full-force blow from her unscathed. Not Durg at’ Morakh, the toughest and deadliest opponent she had ever known. Not second-stage Swarmlings tall as young houses. Nothing. She was so completely shocked that she stood there dumbly to receive the counterstroke.

  It swept her right past the giant figure and out into the hot-black night. She landed on clay tamped to tennis-court consistency by the sandals of the furtive faithful. Too stunned to make a good landing of it, she hit on her cheek and shoulder and rolled over like a log.

  Stench. She gagged and opened her eyes. A shadow blotted the stars. A monstrous hand reached down to her.

  She kicked at his legs, trying to sweep him. It was like the muay Thai toughening exercise of kicking palm trees: the most fanatically savage kick-boxer never brought the tree down. Neither did she.

  He grunted, bent low, grabbed her by the shoulder. Pain blazed through her shoulder like a flash-fire. She rolled right, breaking his grip, came up to her knees.

  The cloth of her uniform had melted away where he touched her. Smoke rose in thin wisps. The skin exposed was reddened and beginning to blister.

  “Ah can hurt you if Ah want,” the being said in a voice like sand in the gears.

  He was working his way around her, trying to pin her against the temple wall. The pain that flamed in Moonchild’s shoulder was lighting up an emotion highly unfamiliar to her — an emotion Mark Meadows himself always repressed when he could: anger She had been betrayed, manhandled, and psychically raped. Now this weird monster in the mask had burned her and spoiled her costume. She was getting royally pissed off.

  “I’m glad you leave me no other way,” she said, rising to her feet in a spasm of motion, “than straight over you.”

  She sprinted toward him, driving herself with all the fury in her quick-firing ace muscles. She didn’t get much runway, but she didn’t need it. As he stood there with arms outstretched to capture, she jumped high in the air and delivered a jumping sidekick with both feet to the notch of the creature’s clavicle. She felt a dull snap, and he toppled over with the grandeur of a felled tree.

  She fell back to the ground, sprang up, hurled herself through the air in a forward snap-roll right over his supine body. She sprinted toward the enfolding safety of the woods and their shadows.

  She had almost reached them when something seized her long hair from behi
nd and brought her up short like a dog on a leash, with such violence that her neck almost snapped.

  Light-needles stabbed through her brain. She reacted without thought, without intention, flowing with the momentum her own inertia and the sudden grasp on her hair provided. She flung herself up in a back-flip, using the gripping hand as a pivot, snapped around to stand momentarily upon the broad not-quite-even shoulders of the man behind her. A second back-flip set her on the ground facing him.

  He spun, tossed away a handful of black hair. “That was a pretty cute trick,” he rasped, in a strange, raw voice. “Nobody plays cute with Carnifex twice, babe.”

  He wore all white. His eyes were a green blaze of anger and hate and savage joy. He seemed at some point in the past to have been disassembled and then put back together by a careless child. Another might have taken him for a joker, but Moonchild’s warrior eye recognized him for what he was: a mass of old hurts, imperfectly if completely healed.

  He watched her scrutiny with a smile that would probably have been twisted if his mouth were perfect. “Normally I pull up my hood for fighting,” he said, gesturing toward the back of his neck. “But I thought a fox like you deserved the sight of my handsome face.”

  “You’re the one the German ace Mackie Messer killed, at the Democratic convention in Atlanta,” she said.

  His face twisted. “He didn’t kill me, babe. He just messed me up some. I came back; I always do. And I kicked his twisted faggot ass for him good when we had our rematch on the Rox.”

  That made no sense to her. The youthful assassin had exploded on live TV moments after gutting Carnifex with his buzz-saw hands. An estimated billion people worldwide had seen it.

  Carnifex was grinning at her. “Reminding me of him is going to cost you extra in pain,” he said.

  She slid into Bom-So-Ki, cat stance, weight on rear foot, right front forward and cocked, hands bladed and held before left shoulder and face to strike or to defend. “We shall see,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he snarled, “and you’ll feel.”

  He lunged for her. Firing blows from what seemed a hundred random directions. With blinding speed she blocked them. In moments her forearms were numb from slamming against his, her right thigh was a mass of bruises from intercepting kicks to belly and groin — a vulnerable target for a woman, too, though not quite as crippling as for a man.

  She knew at once that he was stronger than she was.

  Normally that wouldn’t have mattered — all skills are learned skills! — since he was not devastatingly more powerful, Starshine or Golden Boy or Harlem Hammer powerful, the way the unwieldy one who reeked of death was. She was quicker, if only slightly, and her skill was vastly greater.

  As she curled up like a boxer under his untiring blow-storm, the realization hit her that it didn’t matter. Carnifex on the attack was like Croyd at chess: complete abandon. But this wasn’t the wildness of an amateur who knew no better, who didn’t know enough to fear. This man was skilled and seasoned. He just didn’t feel he had to fear.

  As soon as she learned how fast and strong he was, her thought was to defend and let his fury spend itself on her defenses. She had been kicked in the belly once, in the left knee once, a cut was vomiting blood from her forehead near the hairline, her left eye was swelling. His attack was as ferocious as ever.

  She had jabbed a few times, launched tentative kicks, more to feed his flames so he’d burn out more quickly than as serious attacks. That was obviously not working. He had started out pretty heedless of defense, though, and her lack of response was only making him more careless.

  So be it, she thought. She stepped into him, her right hand lashing up and around in a back-fist that caved in his right cheek.

  He didn’t flinch, didn’t pause. He came back with a straight right that caught her in the nose and sent her sprawling on her rump with blood pouring over her mouth.

  He lunged for her. She jumped to her feet, turned a sidekick, a perfect stop-thrust to his solar plexus that blasted the air from his lungs and sat him down on his butt in turn.

  “So you’re not invincible,” she said, circling.

  She glanced around, looking for an opening to quick escape. Jokers had formed a leering ring around the combatants. They drove back the shadows with flashlights and torches. Eric betrayed me, she thought. The realization made her sag as if all her joints had loosened at once.

  “Kill her!” the jokers screamed. “Rip her tits off!”

  Carnifex wiped his mouth with his hand, looked at the blood on it, laughed. “Tae kwon do, uh?” he said. “Well, try a little ass-kick fu.”

  He drove himself at her headlong off the ground, like a guard trying to cut down a rushing tackle. She brought double fists down on the crown of his skull. At the same time she brought a knee up hard in his face.

  He uttered a groan and collapsed to his knees before her. His right hand lashed out, seized the great muscle of her thigh, pinched. It was an attack she had never experienced, never even contemplated. Unexpectedness as much as pain made her gasp and drop her guard. He drove a left into her belly.

  She fell. He was on top of her, hot breath and hard muscle, groping for a pin. By sheer synapse-speed and desperation more than skill she threw him off, rolled over and over. She jumped to her feet, stood swaying to the head-rush. Waves of pain washed over her.

  He took his own sweet time standing.

  “Had enough?” he asked.

  She flicked glances left and right. Jokers with lights and guns, backed up by the tall man, who was back on his feet and standing calm as if she had never snapped his collarbone. She lowered herself, as if into fighting stance, and suddenly leapt straight up.

  Carnifex grunted, “I hoped not,” and jumped with her. Twenty feet in the air they soared, face-to-face, arms clashing like sabers.

  They hit and rolled. She was quicker to recover. Spread-eagled facedown in a spider position, she whipped three quick kicks into his face. They weren’t strong blows; they couldn’t be from that posture. They were meant to disorient him, give her space.

  She leapt up. He rose with her, but he was swaying now, ever so slightly. He tipped toward her, reaching.

  She brought her open palms violently together on the sides of his head, an eardrum-bursting blow. He bellowed. She turned to run.

  He seized her right wrist with his right hand, put his left hand on her ribcage, and wrenched the arm from its socket.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  For the third time in ten minutes Belew checked his pocket watch. For the third time in ten minutes a whole hour had failed to pass. He grimaced and put the watch away.

  I’ve been out of the bush too long, he chided himself. I’m turning into a Nervous Nellie.

  From the southwest, where three kilometers away lay the temple in which Moonchild was to meet with Colonel Sobel, came the pop-pop-popping of gunfire, distance-faint. It rose to a crescendo, faded, came back strong, in irregular pulses. The rhythm of a firefight.

  “Maybe I’m not so nervous after all,” he said. The jokers and Viet rebels who stood clustered before the main house of the derelict plantation turned nervous faces toward him, then looked back to the noise, as if by sheer concentration they could see through ten thousand feet of trees and brush.

  Belew picked up the hand-mike of the radiotelephone resting on the ground by his feet. He spoke into it with the falling inflection of Cambodian.

  Nothing. No reply, not even a hum to announce that the Khmer squad he’d sent to shadow Mark to the rendezvous were even on the air. Their radio might have malfunctioned — common enough even in the high-tech nineties, and the radio was more sixties — but his old-soldier’s gut told him they had joined their erstwhile victims in whatever lay Beyond.

  “Ave atque vale, boys,” he murmured. They had been good troop and loyal comrades in their way, but he suspected the world would not much miss them. He put them from his mind, turned and walked toward a corner of the great. Peeling-whitewash
villa.

  There was somebody who could see across three klicks, or at least hear. Crenson insisted he needed isolation so that he could concentrate, so he had stashed himself away in a tool-shed behind the main house. Belew wondered if this incarnations olfactory senses were diminished to nothing as a minor balance to its unprecedented array of powers: a tribe of rock apes had inhabited the shed until the guerrillas had chased them off this afternoon. The stink was enough to stun a goat.

  The gunfire was beginning to die away as Belew reached the door of the shed. It stood slightly ajar. I’ll miss the boy, f that was it for him, he realized. Remembering to breathe through his mouth, he stuck his head inside.

  “Croyd? Crenson?”

  A snore answered him.

  “Holy shit!” He jumped inside, bringing up the penlight he carried in a pocket of his trousers.

  Croyd the magnificent, in all probability the most multitalented and powerful ace the wild card world had known, lay curled in a ball on a pile of faded-out Playboys that the monkeys had shredded and shat upon, blissfully asleep.

  “Hey, bitch! Do you like the taste of joker cock? It’s all-you-can-eat time coming up!”

  Desperately Moonchild held her hands before her face, trying to escape the horrible blinding pressure of the flashlight beam. The tiny cage gave her nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The light seemed to blister her palms.

  The sweating jokers pressing in on the cage from all sides hooted and jeered. Their faces were twisted like modeling clay into reifications of hate. Their lusts washed over her unimpeded, like the glare of the flashlight.

  Isis Moon was a creature of night, of shadow. To be exposed like this, helpless before a mob of jokers screaming for her body and her blood, was an agony as keen as having her arm dislocated.

  “That’s enough, boys.” It was the voice of Colonel Charles Sobel, smooth and solid as hand-rubbed mahogany. “Don’t use her all up. We have to save something for later.”