The Scent of Death

by Brian K. Lowe

  Quickly, she looked around. The walls of the alley were not smooth, but punctuated with occasional doorways, even windows--now boarded up. Some of the doorways were deeper than others, but none would hold all three of them.

  "There," she pointed. "We'll try to hold them off from there."

  It was a slim hope, just a deeper entrance than most, perhaps large enough for Kate and Quanyu to pack into, but it was the best she could find. If they could keep their attackers from surrounding them, or if someone behind the door would let them in… Kate knew the boys would be looking for her; maybe she could hold off these guys long enough for help to arrive. Surely someone would see what was going on…!

  She pushed Quanyu into the small space while she and Hano sheltered her. Quanyu began banging on the door with her open palm, but none of them expected it to do any good. Next to Kate, Hano was trembling as the men drew close. Four of them, while the other four watched the ends of the alley to deal with any potential interference.

  They approached slowly, carefully, armed loosely held at their sides. Kate's heart sank as she watched them. They showed evidence of martial arts training, perhaps not as good as hers, but they were not novices. Her hopes that Hano might be able to fend off one or two disappeared, and she knew that her own chances of a sustained defense were dwindling. She kept her own hands loose as they crept forward, trying not to betray herself through the same cues that had betrayed them. The element of surprise was the best weapon left to her. She had only enough time to regret that she had never found her parents when the four men charged.

  And then there were three.

  Hano had met the attack by catapulting into the man on the far right and delivering a screaming straight-leg kick so hard that the crack of the man's ribs could be heard above Hano's shriek. His victim flew backward and rolled into a dead heap. The others froze for an instant, then all of them ignored the girls and leaped for Hano. He greeted them with a roundhouse kick that permanently rearranged another man's face and dropped into what looked to Kate like a tiger stance, daring the remaining pair to come at him.

  But they waited until the other four ran up to surround Hano, and all six moved in on him, ignoring Quanyu--and Kate.

  The moment they turned away, Kate launched herself at the nearest thug and almost literally ran right up his back. Planting her knees between his shoulder blades, she reached under his chin and pulled. He fell forward, cushioning his fall with his face. Kate leaped off him and at another, who barely swiveled in time to take a kick to the side of the knee that sent him down screaming in pain.

  By now only three of the foe were standing, and all three were trying to reach Hano, who had become a dervish of flying hands and feet. He clipped one of the goons, who spun away, right into Kate, who used his momentum to send him flying, landing flat on his back. In an second, she had silenced him with an unladylike kick to the head.

  Suddenly the man whose knee she had ruined stopped shrieking. Kate looked up to Quanyu standing over him with a rock in her hand. She glanced back to Hano, but he did not need her help. The last of their assailants fell in a twirling heap as she watched.

  He looked at her, breathing heavily, and grinned. "That was wonderful!" He glanced around. "Is that it?" And for the first time she realized that he had not been trembling in fear, but excitement.

  "Are you all right, princess?" Kate asked.

  Quanyu was staring at the rock in her hand as if she did not know how it had gotten there. She dropped it and stepped back from the man she had brained.

  "You see?" she demanded of Kate. "They will teach him how to fight! Even you know how to fight! But me--?"

  Hano squared his shoulders and walked over to her, offering his arm. "Your highness, may I escort you home?" No dime novel hero could have done better.

  "Ahh--!" Quanyu threw her hands in the air. "Stay away from me!" She stalked off in the direction they had been heading. After a blank look at Kate, Hano hurried after her.

  "Kate! Kate, are you all right?"

  Ted, T.J., Damien, and Sums thundered to a halt, staring at the scattered and bloody bodies, some starting to moan with returning consciousness.

  "Wow!" T.J. said. "What happened here?"

  Kate looked down the alley to where Hano was trailing Quanyu at a respectful distance.

  "If you ask me, I think it's love."

  Chapter Twenty-six

  A Mysterious Message

  To say that the king was furious was to describe the Himalayas as "hilly."

  If the princess had hoped to return to the palace with her friends' bloody faces and her priestly escort unnoticed, it was in vain. The first sentries to sight them blanched with fear, and the captain of the guard sent word inside immediately. Before they could clear the steps leading to the main doorway, there was a rush of serving women carrying towels and tubs of hot water, a fidgety older man with the unmistakable air of a physician, and finally the king himself, sending all of the palace guards to rigid attention.

  "How did this happen?" King Quanyu demanded of the hapless captain, who could only shrug helplessly. The princess came to his rescue.

  "We were attacked in the market, father. Miss Reinhold and Hano and I were ambushed by men in an alley when we tried to escape. Miss Reinhold fought them off."

  Quanyu stared at Kate. "All of them?"

  Kate gulped and shrank a bit under the king's glare. "Mostly it was Hano, your majesty. Her highness and I helped, but he fought off at least six of them."

  Princess Quanyu and Hano froze, and Kate was instantly aware she had said something she should not.

  "Is this true, Hano?" asked the king quietly. Hano nodded quickly, and bowed. The king looked around at them all. "Bring them inside. This is no place to address their wounds." He smiled at the priests, standing silently in the street, and inclined his head to them. As one, they bowed, turned, and walked away in single file.

  The king led his own parade back inside, pausing only to whisper to his daughter, who answered quickly, and to issue quiet orders to the guard captain. As they passed through the doors, the Americans could hear soldiers being dispatched at a run to the marketplace.

  The boys' injuries were slight, and swiftly tended. The palace physician spent more time on the princess than any of them, and she was completely untouched. The king went around and placed a hand on each one's shoulder in turn.

  "You have my thanks. My house is blessed by your presence, each of you. Any aid that is in my power is yours." Although his face was stern, there was moisture lurking at the corners of his eyes, tears that he was fighting to hold in. "Please go to your rooms and rest now. You will have honored places at my daughter's celebration."

  Following Kate's example, they all bowed and filed out. Before they could get far, however, they heard raised voices behind them speaking in Mandarin, and they stopped to listen.

  "The king is furious that Quanyu went out without guards," Kate reported. "She's saying she didn't think she needed them." She paused. "Now the king's saying that if it weren't for us, she could've been killed, and that putting their guests in that kind of position is extremely shameful… Uh-oh, look out."

  A door banged and Quanyu stalked down the corridor, breathing steam, with Chang close on her heels. The Americans had to scatter to make room for him. Quanyu passed them without a word.

  "I think he said she was to go to her rooms, and she said she might never come out," Kate told them.

  "Yeah," T.J. said. "We kinda got that impression."

  "What was going on with Hano?" Damien asked. "I got the feeling there was something there we were missing."

  "Yeah," Sums put in. "I think maybe Kate said something wrong." The other men glared at him, but Kate put up a hand.

  "No, he might be right, and I think I know why. Let's all get some rest and we can talk about it later."

  The entire palace was walking on eggshells. The king was not shouting, he was not raving, he had not ordered anyone deprived of his hea
d. After the shock of the initial reports and the relief that his daughter, nephew, and foreign guests were all safe, he had tamped his anger down into a very small ember deep within his eyes, and now he stalked the halls of his home like a dragon prowling his cave for treasure hunters.

  By the time soldiers had been dispatched to the alleyway where the brawl had taken place, it was empty but for the blood. The guards had been doubled, and Chang had been set outside the princess's door like an unblinking gargoyle. Only Quanyu's maids were allowed to pass, and any who attempted entry were repelled by vigorous denunciations from within.

  "Honestly, I'm not sure which she thought was worse, the fact that someone in the temple has been training Hano all these years, or the fact that I could take on those mugs and she couldn't."

  T.J. shook his head, his face showing a rare display of sympathy. "Poor guy, he's been in love with Quanyu all this time, but she doesn't have any use for him because she thought he'd never amount to anything. Now he's saved her life, and she wants less to do with him than ever."

  Damien started to speak, but was interrupted by a small, sharp rapping on the door. Kate, whose suite they were again using as their base, got up to answer it, blinking in surprise at the figure standing in the hall.

  "Deng Zhongshu! What a lovely surprise." She stepped back. "Please come in. My friends and I were just chatting about what happened today."

  The little scholar scuttled in, nodding his head to the Americans. "Please forgive me for interrupting you, but a tiny bird told me that I would find you here. The palace is rampant with rumors, the king is breathing fire, and the princess has made a prisoner of herself. I knew that if I were to search out the truth, it would most likely be found here."

  "Of course," Kate said. "Please, come sit by the fire."

  T.J. surrendered his chair so the old man could sit near the warmth of the flames, and flounced on the huge, soft bed. Deng Zhongshu settled in with a sigh.

  "Thank you, young man. The longer we can walk, the shorter we can stand." He beamed at the assemblage as though they had all just come to hear him speak, rather than the obverse. "Please, indulge an old man with a story of young heroes."

  Of them all, Professor Death was the grandest storyteller and this was too open an invitation for him to resist. Before anyone else could speak, he launched into his own version of how the marketplace had suddenly turned violent, with dozens of knife-wielding assassins descending from all directions, their poisoned blades--

  "Wait a second!" Ted cut in. "Nobody had a knife, let alone a poisoned one."

  Professor Death sniffed. "You tell it your way, I'll tell it mine."

  Deng Zhongshu was perched on the edge of his seat, quivering. "Please, someone, continue! My bones may break from the tension!"

  "All right," the Professor said. "I guess there weren't any knives--that I could see! But we were surrounded, and Ted was knocking guys sideways, and Damien was socking them left and right, and even Sums was giving as good as he got."

  "Yes?" Deng Zhongshu begged. "This is very exciting!"

  Even the others had to admit that when the Professor told the story, it seemed a great deal more interesting and fun than while it was actually happening.

  "Well…" the Professor went on. "That's about as much as I know. We laid into them, they ran off, and then we saw that Kate and the princess and Hano were gone. We looked, but we couldn't find them."

  Deng Zhongshu turned a horrified expression on Kate. "Oh, no! What happened?"

  "Hano tried to lead us to safety. He wanted to get us to the temple, but we were trapped in an alley. There were men waiting for us at both ends."

  Deng Zhongshu frowned. "How did they know where to find you?"

  "That," Ted interjected, "is a very good question."

  "Perhaps they knew you would try to reach the temple if you escaped them," Deng Zhongshu ventured. "If the temple is closer than the palace, it is a logical assumption."

  Ted considered this for a moment. "Maybe you're right," he admitted, but he did not sound convinced.

  "Anyway," Kate resumed after a moment, "there were eight of them. Four of them came at us while the other four kept watch. I pushed Quanyu back into a doorway, but it didn't look like we had much of a chance, when suddenly Hano comes out like a ninja warrior and takes two of them down before they have a chance to blink."

  Deng Zhongshu's brows shot up. "Hano? He--but only the royal family is supposed to study at the temple!" Everyone shot him a look. "I mean, it is natural to assume that is where he learned the martial arts, and the histories are very clear that only the priests and the royal family are so trained."

  Kate shrugged. "Wherever he learned them, he's very good. I jumped a couple when they weren't looking, but he did most of the work. Six men by himself. That's excellent."

  "You could take him," T.J. asserted.

  "I don't know that I could."

  "Pardon me," said the ancient scholar, "but are you, too, a student of the martial arts?" When Kate admitted that she was, he whistled. "Americans. So full of surprises!" He tried to rise, and failed, but succeeded with a groan on the second try. "A lady trained in the martial arts. Perhaps one day you can walk on my back."

  "So now we know why Hano's so into hiking and getting out of town all the time," Damien said. "Quanyu thought he was just trying to evade his responsibilities, but he was actually practicing his self-defense."

  Deng Zhongshu had departed, but his insistence that only members of the royal family had ever received training from the temple priests still hung in the air.

  "So you're saying he was practicing in secret," T.J. said. "That would go along with what the old guy was saying. If the priests are giving lessons to people they're not supposed to, that would make sense."

  "It also indicates the priests may not be in as much awe of the king as they used to be," Ted mused. "And maybe that they're more closely tied to Xi than they are to the king. If the two of them combined to bring down the royal family, they'd have a lot of leverage."

  "But then why ambush us if we were already on our way to the temple?" Kate asked. "Whoever these jokers were, they didn't want us going anywhere."

  "Actually," Ted replied, "they definitely wanted you to go somewhere. This was obviously a kidnap attempt. If they'd been bent on assassination, they would have been armed."

  Kate threw up her hands. "Another kidnapping? You know how tired I am of being kidnapped? And for once couldn't I be kidnapped by some dashing young bandit chief who looks like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.?"

  Ted chuckled. "I meant they were planning to kidnap the princess. I doubt they cared much what happened to you."

  Kate harrumphed. "Well, I guess they won't make that mistake again, will they?"

  "It's time we started making some moves," Ted decided. "The princess's celebration is coming up, and if today taught us anything, it's that the rebel forces in Quanyu are getting ready to act. If they could have gotten the heir to the throne in their hands, they might have short-circuited the entire process and brought down the government in one move, but they didn't. I'll bet my pension they're going to raise a ruckus during the celebration."

  "What can we do about that?" Damien asked. "We have no idea who's behind it, and no way of finding out. Nobody's going to talk to us, and we don't even speak the language to begin with."

  "You're absolutely right. If this plot is going to be stopped ahead of time, the king will have to do it himself. I'm sure he's got people working on it, and we'd just be in their way. Not to mention we're already known; we don't have to go out of our way to make ourselves targets.

  "No, we're going to take another tack. It's reasonable to assume that if the Reinholds are being held prisoner, it's related to the planned coup. Which means that once the coup is over…" Out of consideration for Kate's feelings, he did not finish his thought, but everyone understood.

  "So where does that leave us?" the Professor asked. "We can't go searching for Kate's parents any m
ore than we can start looking for rebels."

  Ted jabbed a finger at him. "That, my friend, is where you are wrong. It's a lot easier to look for missing persons than for criminals. First, the criminals can be anywhere, standing right in front of you, and you wouldn't know it. But hostages, hostages require a place to stash them, and you have to feed them. And these are very valuable hostages. You wouldn't just stick them in a house on the edge of town and leave a couple of joes to watch them. You'd want to keep them close, and you'd want to keep the number of people who know about them as small as possible. That limits the number of places you can hide them, especially in a small country like this."

  Kate started to count on her fingers. "Okay, there's the temple, it's probably got a lot of chambers, maybe underground. There's Ruyan's mansion--that's outside of town! It's perfect for hiding people."

  T.J. looked around. "And there's this place."

  Everyone stopped and followed his gaze. They knew from staying there the thickness of the walls, and a 500-year-old palace was guaranteed to hold storage rooms, unused suites, maybe even dungeons.

  "But why would the king want to kidnap my parents?" Kate wondered. "They were supposed to take his daughter back to the States. And why would he need hostages anyway?"

  Ted nodded slowly. "I think we can cross the king off our list of suspects. You're right; he has no motive. If he changed his mind about Quanyu going to America, he could just say so."

  "So what were your other reasons? You said I was wrong about looking for missing persons, but you stopped at 'first.'"

  "You're right. Second, we have leads. Both Sums and Kuragawa attached themselves to us when they found out we were going to Quanyu. They said they were coming here for their own innocent reasons, but I don't believe them. It's too coincidental. Now, we don't know that they have anything to do with the Reinholds' disappearance, but like I said, it's quite a coincidence that they should show up now. And both of them have been sneaking off in the middle of the night. I think we should follow them tomorrow, find out where they go during the day. It's a slim chance, but I don't see that we have anything better."