by Alex Archer
Nezuma unholstered the UMP and brought it up to Shuko’s heart. He looked into her eyes but found only contempt staring back. Her lips parted one more time.
“Please.”
Nezuma’s finger tightened around the trigger, but he wouldn’t shoot. She’ll be dead soon anyway, he thought.
He watched her face for another moment before reholstering his UMP and moving on. No sense wasting good bullets on her. There’d be plenty of other people to kill soon enough.
Nezuma scampered forward. This complicated things, though—he would have to deal with Kennichi and Creed on his own, rather than have the backup that Shuko had provided.
He thought about going back and taking her weapon, as well, but disregarded it. The G-36 was too big. And dragging a bag of worthless gear might weigh him down.
He moved on, careful now because of the booby traps.
He didn’t want to end up like Shuko.
“WHAT EXACTLY DID YOU MEAN when you said we’d find out?” Annja asked as Eiji led them down yet another corridor that seemed to take them farther into the mountain. The air seemed still, almost as if very little of the fresh air they circulated into the mountain made it this far in.
“It’s why you are here,” Eiji said. “And it’s where you’re destined to go. Everyone who seeks the vajra must seek it in the same way. There are no shortcuts.”
“Too bad,” Ken said. “I was hoping I’d show you the tattoo and maybe you would roll it out here for me.”
Eiji looked at him. “That was a joke, correct?”
“Apparently not a very good one,” Ken said.
Eiji pointed down the corridor to a door. “That is where you must go now if you truly seek the vajra.”
“Through the door?” Annja asked. “That’s it?”
“The door,” Eiji said, “will lead you to a series of caves and a labyrinth built into the mountain. There are numerous options and only by choosing wisely will you find the vajra at the end of it.”
Ken sighed. “Have you ever been in there?”
Eiji smirked. “You aren’t the first person to think that putting a weapon to my skull and forcing me to reveal the path to the vajra would save a lot of time and energy.”
“You haven’t,” Annja said. “The vajra was placed inside long before you were born. And to safeguard it properly, there’s no way they’d reveal how to get to it.”
Eiji nodded. “The secret died many, many years ago. And none are alive who would know how to get past the various obstacles. I can only tell you the same thing I’ve told the others who came here—be careful.”
“Great,” Ken said. He looked at Annja. “Are you ready for this?”
Annja felt her shoulder, which seemed much better since she’d had Eiji’s tea. “Yeah, I think so,” she said, feeling excited by the challenge.
Eiji bowed once more to them. “Weapons are not allowed inside. Otherwise I would return your supplies to you. They will be here for when you return. If you return.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Annja said.
Eiji bowed a final time and then strode off, leaving Annja and Ken alone in the silent corridor. The torches flickered and cast shadows that leaped from the wall to the floor and back again. Each time the light illuminated a different section of the rock wall, revealing the many facets of it.
Ken took a deep breath. “I guess there’s not much more to do, is there?”
“Except to go in and get it,” Annja said. “We’ve come this far. To turn back now—”
“I can’t turn back,” Ken said. “This is where my destiny lies. My search either ends here or else it opens up a whole new world for me.”
“I’m hoping for option two myself,” Annja said.
He smiled. “As am I.”
They walked down the hall to the door. Like all the other doors in the mountain monastery, this one was also made of stone. Ken looked at the hinge work and shook his head. “I wouldn’t even know how to imagine creating a working hinge made out of stone like this. It’s amazing.”
“The whole concept of this place is amazing,” Annja said. “Who would ever believe that such places existed? With all the technology we have and all the places we’ve explored, there are things still right beneath our noses that we don’t know anything about.”
“Live and learn,” Ken said. “Here we go.”
He grasped the latch and pulled back the door. Annja expected to see him have to pull hard to get the door to open, but it swung back easily, revealing a gaping maw of darkness that seemed ready to devour them whole.
Ken peered inside. “Smells musty.”
Annja got two torches from the brackets on the walls and handed one to Ken. “This might help.”
The torches immediately lit up the area beyond the door. But rather than anything remarkable, the only thing they found waiting for them was yet another corridor.
“This place is built like a pyramid,” Annja said. “Miles and miles of corridors with very few real rooms. You could get lost and never know how to get out if you were in here alone.”
Ken ducked inside with her. The roof was lower and the smoke from the torches billowed up and spilled across the stone above them.
“It looks like it runs about a hundred feet before there’s a wall farther down,” he said
Annja followed his gaze and nodded. “Shall we?”
Ken stopped her. “You don’t think there’d be any booby traps at this stage, do you?”
Annja halted. “Honestly, no. I don’t think this is the official start of anything. Eiji said this door would take us to a place where there was a series of caves that would then lead us to a labyrinth, right?”
“Yes,” Ken said.
“Then I think we’re safe here.”
Ken sighed. “Nothing ventured.”
They walked down the corridor. As they did, Annja hoped that she hadn’t been wrong, that she wouldn’t suddenly hear some sort of rushing air that might signal poison darts or hidden scythes swooping down to kill them.
They made their way slowly and carefully. But nothing surprised them.
They reached the end of the corridor and saw that it turned to the left and sloped upward.
“I guess we go up,” Ken said.
Annja followed him up the hallway, discovering that they both had to duck as they rose in height since the roof seemed to get lower and lower as they progressed.
“Who built this?” Annja said. “A drunk engineer?”
Ken pointed. “Look.”
Annja held her torch higher and could see farther ahead. “Looks like it levels off.”
Ken nodded. “Yes. And beyond that, I see dark openings.”
Annja’s heart quickened. Finally, it seemed as if they were close to the final stage of their search. If they could make it past the traps and obstacles and actually retrieve the vajra, all would be good. Then they’d only have to figure out a way to take care of the people waiting to take it from them.
She shivered, thinking about the voice in her ear back at the hotel room. He’d sounded so utterly evil, as if he knew just what he would do before he killed her if she didn’t give him what he wanted.
“You okay?”
She snapped back to reality. Ken was staring at her. “Annja?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Just daydreaming for a second there. Sorry.”
Ken nodded. “As long as it’s out of your system now. From here on out, things are going to get tricky. We need total concentration.”
They arrived at the end of the corridor and stood on a level patch of stonework in front of three cave entrances. Ken and Annja examined all of them, looking for any obvious signs that one would be a better choice than the others.
They could find nothing.
“Each one seems identical to the other,” Annja said after another examination of all three.
“I suppose they’d have to be,” Ken replied. “No sense bothering if they couldn’t make the very f
irst obstacle a challenge.”
Annja nodded. “This is an obstacle, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Ken said. “Not in the traditional sense, but choosing the wrong path could quite obviously kill us. This may actually be the toughest part of the entire search to get the vajra.”
“You really think so?”
Ken shrugged. “Nah, there are probably worse things inside.”
Annja smiled. “Great.”
“You have any thoughts on this?” he asked.
“Would tossing a coin be bad form?”
Ken held up his hands. “It might not do wonders for your career if people found out you’d chosen something based on a coin toss rather than exhaustive scientific analysis and historical perspective, but it’s fine by me.”
“Great,” Annja said. She held up a coin. “Heads or tails?”
34
“Annja?”
Annja held up the coin. “Yes?”
“There are three cave entrances here,” Ken said.
“I know that.”
“Your coin only has two sides.”
“I—” She frowned. “Nuts, I forgot about that.” She slid the coin back into her pocket and leaned against the wall. “So much for that idea.”
Ken stepped away from the entrances and frowned. “Any thoughts from a historical perspective you think might be important here?”
Annja sighed. “I wish I had my laptop. I could punch this whole situation in and see what comes up.”
Ken stood in front of the first entrance and closed his eyes. Annja watched at him.
“What are you doing?”
He motioned her over. “Stand here and close your eyes. Remember what we were talking about at the waterfall? Go inside and check yourself against using this as the way in.”
Annja closed her eyes and saw herself walking into the cave. Almost immediately, she felt a vague stab of pain in her stomach. “No,” she said, almost shouting.
She opened her eyes. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
Ken shook his head. “Don’t apologize. I got the same feeling. This is not the one to use.”
They moved down to the next entrance and repeated the process. Again they both got a bad feeling.
At the entrance to the third, Annja smiled. “Do we even need to do this with this one? It’s the only one left.”
Ken nodded. “Just to be sure.”
Annja closed her eyes again and walked into the entrance in her mind. This time she found it perfectly comfortable. She opened her eyes to tell Ken this was definitely the one to use.
“Ken—hey!”
She was already standing in the cave entrance with her torch. Ken stood next to her smiling.
“Cool, huh?”
“How did that happen?”
Ken shrugged. “The only way I could explain that is that our bodies took over and moved us in there in order to show it was safe. Much of this next stage might be a willingness on our part to almost switch off our conscious minds and let our instincts take over.”
Annja frowned. “I wish I could do that easily. But honestly, I don’t know if I can turn it off.”
Ken put a hand on her shoulder. “The fact that you’re standing in the cave with me right now proves that you can. Just relax and pay attention to how you feel physically as we proceed. That will be the best source of answers, I think.”
They moved deeper into the cave, walking slowly. The walls closed in as they advanced, forcing them to switch to single file.
“I’ll go first,” Ken said. “No sense in making you trip any traps. This is my family’s relic, after all.”
“We’ll swap it out every so often,” Annja said. “I knew the risks going into this thing. It’s not fair for you to take them all.”
He nodded and then continued along. The cave walls suddenly opened up, and then in front of them, they saw a huge chasm. Swirling air rushed around them, emanating from somewhere far below and continuing up for hundreds of feet.
“Looks like we’ve arrived at our first challenge,” Annja said.
“Second,” Ken said. “The first was getting in here, remember?”
Annja stood near the lip of the chasm. “It’s too far to jump to the other side. We’d never make it.”
Ken looked at the rim. “Our ledge ends just down there. There’s no way to skirt across to the other side. And we don’t have climbing gear to attempt the walls.”
“They look pretty smooth, anyway,” Annja said. “Probably worn that way by the air and water over the years.”
Ken crossed his arms. “I guess we’ll have to think of something else, then.”
“Or not think about it at all,” Annja said.
Without hesitating, she walked off the ledge into the chasm.
NEZUMA SQUIRMED his way deeper into the mountain. He was rather surprised that Shuko’s death hadn’t affected him all that much. He smirked. I must be even more coldhearted than I thought.
He heard movement ahead of him. The cave had narrowed significantly as he got farther in, forcing him to keep his arms pinned by his sides and use his torso to do all the work.
But up ahead, he could see flickering lights. Torches, judging by the smell. And he heard people talking, too.
Guards?
He frowned. Taking them out in his current position would prove suicidal if he even attempted it. He’d need to get himself into better position in order to do it and live.
But as he was trying to figure out how to do that, the voices dwindled. Nezuma could hear footsteps and realized he was most likely nearing a corridor of some sort.
All he’d need to do was make sure it was clear before he exited.
Then he could track down the dorje. And kill Kennichi and Annja Creed.
He still wished he had backup with him. Shuko would have easily held her own against either one of them, freeing Nezuma to enjoy himself rather than leave him to do all the work.
Still, he was satisfied with how the events seemed to be unfolding. If the gods smiled on him, he’d recover the dorje and be back home within the next few hours.
And tomorrow, he could go out searching for a suitable candidate to replace Shuko.
Life was about to get good.
“ANNJA!”
Ken ran to the edge of the chasm and looked down, expecting to see nothing but blackness. Instead, he saw Annja staring back up at him.
“Hey,” she said, smiling.
He shook his head. “How the hell did you know to do that?”
She shrugged. “It was the only thing that made sense. I closed my eyes and just walked forward. It’s a rock bridge of some sort, but it’s wide enough to allow the air current to come up on either side, helping the overall appearance look like one giant bottomless pit.”
Ken hopped down. “You’re amazing.”
“You taught me how to do it.”
Ken looked toward the other side. “You sure this goes all the way across?”
“Nope, but I guess we’ll find out.”
Ken stopped her. “You’re closing your eyes?”
Annja smiled. “It’s worked so far.” She shut her eyes and started walking. She heard Ken sigh and knew he had done the same thing.
Each step she took made her feel more amazed than the last. Who would believe that her instincts could guide her like this? They were facing certain death if they made the wrong choice, and yet twice her instincts now had saved her.
There’s probably more than that, she thought, but I’m only really becoming aware of it now.
She stopped suddenly. Annja opened her eyes. Ken stood beside her in exactly the same position.
“What happened?” she asked.
Ken shook his head. “I don’t know. I just stopped suddenly. Like my body didn’t want to go on anymore.”
Annja knelt and felt the ground in front of her.
She nearly toppled off the edge into the pit.
Ken grabbed her and pulled her back.
Annja breathed out. “So much for the bridge going all the way across. I guess it ends there.”
“It’s a trap,” Ken said. “To lull us into a sense of complacency. If we got to this point, we might not have trusted our instincts to stop us and simply walked over the edge.”
Annja nodded. “Incredible. I wonder who built this thing.”
“Someone keenly interested in making sure the vajra was well protected, apparently,” Ken said. “Maybe a crazy old monk, maybe a samurai, maybe a ninja. Who knows?”
Annja sat down. “Now what?”
Ken sat down, too. “I wish I knew.”
NEZUMA SLID OUT of the narrow duct and dropped to the floor twelve feet below. He immediately brought the UMP out and kept it at the ready. The last thing he wanted was to start a gun battle with anyone. But he couldn’t afford to let anyone know he was inside the mountain.
Not yet.
He moved quickly down the corridor, making sure his shadow never fell in front of him. This necessitated his moving from one side of the hall to the other in order to keep the torches and their flames from betraying his presence.
At the end of the corridor, he had two options—left or right.
He chose left.
Down at the far end of the corridor, he saw another door.
He headed straight for it.
“HOW FAR AWAY do you think it is?”
Ken shrugged. “It looks like it’s maybe ten feet or so.”
“You think we could jump it?” Annja asked.
“Maybe. But what if it’s another optical illusion? We run and try to make a ten-foot jump only to find ourselves flying off into the great void. Not exactly how I saw myself going out, you know?”
“I don’t know what else to do,” Annja said. “I’ve tried closing my eyes and I’m not getting anything. I don’t see any clear indication as to how we’re supposed to proceed.”
“Neither do I,” Ken said. “And for some reason, I can’t figure out why it would end like this. There has to be a way across. A way to continue forward. But how? And where?”
Annja frowned. “Wait,” she said.
“What?”
“What did you just say? About going forward.”
