Aubrey stood up and walked to his easel. "A little more yellow, you said?"
"Cadmium. Mix some burnt sienna into it."
Aubrey added a splash to the painting. "Saladin," he asked brightly, "what did you wish for?"
The tall man stretched in his chair. "Haven't you guessed?"
Aubrey turned around, the brush poised in mid-air. Saladin's face was as unlined as the day he had first met him, his hair as black, his knowledge as profound. "You said the chant last night came from Nineteenth Dynasty Egypt."
Saladin nodded. "The reign of Ramses the Second."
"Now, how would you know that?" Aubrey demanded. "No written music from Pharaonic Egypt exists. No one's ever heard it."
"Perhaps someone."
Aubrey closed his eyes with dawning understanding. "Good God, you were there," he whispered. "Your wish was to live forever."
Saladin rose and walked across the room.
"But that's brilliant! What do you care about losing your soul? You'll never know what it's like to die."
"I might."
"How? What can harm you?"
"Only magic stronger than my own. If there is such a thing."
"I doubt that."
"Hmm." He leaned against the doorway. "It might be nice if there were."
"Nice? To die?"
The tall man shrugged. "A life that goes on too long ceases to seem precious. It becomes a burden, like an overdue pregnancy."
Aubrey snorted. "Give it to me, then. I'll take it."
"Yes," Saladin said slowly, his ancient eyes shining with malevolent humor. "I imagine you would."
Two months later Saladin was arrested in England for the murder of the washerwoman in the sculpture and eighteen others whose bodies had been similarly preserved. Aubrey never saw him again.
The paintings which had begun to take shape on the night of Aubrey's initiation into the coven in Tangier sold almost immediately. The name Katsuleris circulated quickly, first through esoteric European art circles, then on a broader scale. Within six months, a prominent gallery in Milan offered Aubrey a month-long exhibit for which people waited hours in line. Time magazine ran an article about the phenomenal resurgence of interest in the field of abstract art.
Through it all, Aubrey continued to participate in the rites of the coven. The rituals filled the places in his psyche that his work did not. They suffused him with energy and purpose; they focused his mind. They led him to a series of teachers around the world, all of them soulless as he was, all masters of the dark ways.
He excelled as a student. When he returned to the coven in Tangier, he took over as its leader, wearing the inverted silver pentagram that Saladin had once worn.
He became comfortable with the two lives he led, painting by day, then celebrating in the thick of night the magic rituals that brought him into deep communion with the powers of the demon gods.
And afterward, after each rite, he killed.
The killings were the great exultation of his new life. At first he murdered only women, and only for the pleasure it brought him. But women, he soon learned, were too easy to kill, and too easy to get away with killing. Aubrey longed to explore new frontiers in murder, to develop his skill to the level of an art form and to be recognized for his artistry.
And so, through contacts made in the coven, he added a third component to his life: He became an assassin known as Thanatos, and not even the people who sought his services ever connected him with the dapper young artist named Aubrey Katsuleris.
It came as a shock, then, when a young Arab appeared in the doorway of an apartment in New York City where Aubrey was staying.
"What do you want?" he hissed, maneuvering the man so that he would fall silently into the apartment when Aubrey killed him.
The Arab immediately prostrated himself on the floor, offering up a battered leather case.
Aubrey ignored it. "Who sent you?"
"My uncle, Hamid Lagouat, who follows the instructions of our patriarch, the High Lord Saladin."
For a moment, Aubrey could only stare at the man. Then, flinging himself onto a sofa, he burst out laughing. This was no terrorist seeking Thanatos. It was only one of Saladin's pesky relatives.
"I should have known. Well, get up, get up. What does Saladin have in mind now? Where the devil is he, anyway?"
The Arab raised his face from the carpet. "He is dead, Sire."
Aubrey blinked. "Dead? Did you say he was dead?"
"He was killed by an American FBI agent."
"But..." Aubrey fell dizzy. Saladin wasn't supposed to die, not ever. It was his wish, a wish granted in exchange for eternity. "How was it done?"
"He was beheaded, Sire."
"Beheaded? By the FBI?"
"My uncle saw it with his own eyes." He approached Aubrey once again with the leather case. "As Saladin's heir, the document in here is for you, Sire."
Slowly Aubrey took it. "That's right, he made me his heir, didn't he?" he mused.
"Yes, Sire. As such, my entire family—and there are many of us—stands ready to assist you in any way."
"Yes, yes." From the case Aubrey extracted a small notebook. It was a diary of some sort, its pages handwritten with a quill pen and interspersed with Saladin's breathtakingly realistic drawings. Among them were portraits of a man, a woman, and a preadolescent boy, as well as many pages—over twenty, rendered in colored pencil—of an oddly shaped container of some kind.
Aubrey flipped through the entire book first, then went back to the beginning. On the first pages was a letter to him.
My dear Aubrey,
I am writing to you because it is possible that I may at last have the good fortune to die. After you accept the gift implicit in my story—and you will, no doubt, accept it—you may also, one day millennia hence, come to long for death as I do.
My story is about a cup. A quite ordinary artifact, from its appearance, a small bowl of greenish metal; yet countless men have died for it. Wars have been fought, legends grown, kingdoms fallen over its existence.
At one time it was known as the Holy Grail, and in this connection was it stolen from me by a sorcerer named Merlin, who understood well the ways of magic. It was not for himself that Merlin took the cup, but for a king who, perhaps alone of all the multitudes who have ever lived upon this earth, did not desire to possess it and its wonderful gift. He feared that eternal life would corrupt him, as it had me. He never did embrace the darkness, which you and I have come to love so well. Rather than succumb to the temptation of the cup, he threw it away, and died young for his pains.
I wonder now if that king were not wiser than the rest of us.
His name was Arthur of Britain. You no doubt have heard the legend about the once and future king—the great ruler who would one day return to finish out his reign. For sixteen hundred years, the legend has been told and retold until it has become little more than a fairy story. Even among those who accept the possibility of reincarnation, no one believes that an individual can be reborn as himself, to continue a life begun in the distant past.
And yet that is what has happened. Arthur has come back.
He is a boy again these days, far from royal, and far from the land where he once ruled. What the gods have planned for him I do not know, but they have seen to it that the cup which I have possessed for five thousand years is now in his keeping.
The gods. The ancient gods, Aubrey. Are you familiar with them? Or are there no records of them left at all? The ancient gods, long vanquished and forgotten … I smell their presence in the air. Their magic.
If I die, it will be their doing.
And the cup will be yours—if you can find it and keep it. So you must find it, Aubrey. Find it and kill the boy. Discover, if you can, the instrument of my death and destroy it, for whatever the object is, the most terrible gods of all have placed their power in it.
And now, dear chap, farewell. If you are reading this, then I have already gone to the void, the nothing I
was taught to expect. That is my only fear about dying—that there might be something other than a void waiting for me.
I do not wish to meet the ancient gods.
Aubrey closed the book. He tried to speak, but found that his lips and tongue were dry. He nodded curtly to the young man in dismissal.
"There is one more article I have been instructed to leave with you, Sire," the messenger said, producing an envelope. After handing it to Aubrey, he bowed. "Should you desire the assistance of my family, I will be nearby."
"Nearby where?"
"Wherever you are, Lord." The messenger performed a graceful salaam, then left.
The envelope contained a map. A map of a rural area in England, near the ruins of a fifth-century castle where Hamid Lagouat, who had ridden with Saladin on his last day of life, had seen a sword in a stone.
Aubrey left immediately for England, but he did not find the boy whom Saladin had described so well in his diary, nor the American FBI agent who apparently had cut himself loose from all ties to his past in order to protect him.
He did spot the woman in the drawings, however. She had remained for some time near the place where Arthur Blessing and Hal Woczniak had disappeared, although it quickly became clear from her actions that she knew nothing of their whereabouts.
He also saw the messenger who had visited him in New York to bring news of Saladin's death.
They may prove to be useful one day, Saladin had said of his relatives. He had been right. When the woman left the country in her own search for her nephew, Aubrey called upon Saladin's—now Aubrey's own—private army to track Emily Blessing in her wanderings.
She placed personal ads to Arthur in the newspapers of every place she visited. These the Arabs collected and sent to Aubrey. He instructed them to deliver copies of those newspapers to every village and community within a fifty-mile radius of those cities. It was a long shot, he knew, but worth the small effort. The woman was the key. Sooner or later, the boy would come to her. Aubrey would keep her in abeyance until then.
Meanwhile, there was the sword.
Find the cup... Kill the boy... Destroy the instrument of my death.
Of the three directives with which Saladin had charged his heir, only the third had been possible so far, and that had taken three years.
The weapon had not even been visible at first. Without the map, Aubrey would never have thought to look for it in the woods surrounding a field of ancient ruins. He would never have noticed one boulder among many, hidden in an overgrown thicket.
But he had Lagouat's map, and though he was skeptical about its authenticity, he followed it to the boulder and then dutifully broke up the five-foot-tall stone with a sledgehammer until its interior was exposed to reveal the hilt of a sword.
It was magnificent, made of pure gold inlaid with precious stones that had not chipped or lost their luster when the rock had been smashed around it. But no matter how hard Aubrey struck it with the sledgehammer, the blade would not come free. It was as if the steel were bonded to the stone itself. Sweating, intensely disliking the hard work and the effect it was having on his sensitive hands, Aubrey finally tossed the sledgehammer away and grasped the hilt, hoping to break it from the blade.
Its touch was like an explosion. With a cry of pain, Aubrey flew backward, his feet off the ground, and crashed into a tree trunk.
When his head cleared, he got on all fours to examine the ground. Someone—Lagouat himself, perhaps—had obviously planted a device, a land mine of some kind. But the ground was unbroken.
Then, with his magician's senses, he heard the hum of the buried blade, saw the tendrils of energy curling like smoke up the golden hilt.
The ancient gods, long vanquished and forgotten... Was this their work? Had the terrible gods whom Sala-din so feared forged this sword against him and his kind?
He was certain of two things: that this was the weapon that had killed Saladin, and that nothing short of the strongest magic he could summon would destroy its power.
For the task, Aubrey collected twelve of the most deadly magicians he knew. They were difficult to find, even more difficult to persuade to help him. But three years and several million dollars later, they arrived.
In a rite that began at midnight, the thirteen sorcerers circled the sword, chanting, calling on their demon deities, building their power until Aubrey felt the dark forces inside him spill out of his eyes and ears and mouth like oily liquid. He became Thanatos the death god, ruler of the soulless places. His senses quickened until they were those of a beast; his very hands seemed to transmute into claws. With them he grasped the golden hilt and poured his evil into it.
The sword crumbled under his touch.
Later, after the magicians had gone, Aubrey went back to collect the dun-colored fragments. Why, it wasn't even real gold, he thought. The gems had been shattered; their dust lay sparkling in the dirt. The rock that had once encased the long blade so tightly now fell away beneath his fingers like rotten plaster.
He felt slightly cheated. After spending a fortune to bring the magicians to this place, the sword had given up its power almost at once. Aubrey wanted to kick himself for assuming he needed the help of those greedy old men. The thing had probably given off its last spurt of magic on the day he'd discovered it.
It had all been so damnably, disappointingly easy.
As he swept the last particles of the sword into a pouch, he imagined Saladin at the end of his life, fearful, cowering at the thought of retribution by some ancient and forgotten gods.
"They were nothing," he said aloud, hefting the pouch. "Here's the proof of it."
Shortly after the ritual with the twelve magicians, Aubrey was called to Marrakesh for a fairly routine assassination. He would not normally have accepted the assignment—he was rapidly becoming bored with his gun-for-hire hobby and, besides, he was acquainted with the family of the man he would have to kill—but he agreed, finally, because he thought it might distract him for a time from his frustrated quest for the cup.
He was beginning to wonder if Saladin hadn't made the whole story up just to send him on a lifelong wild goose chase when he saw William Marshall sit up after experiencing the impact of a bullet in his chest. A green metal cup which exactly matched Saladin's detailed drawings had rolled off Marshall's body as he was carried into the ambulance.
Aubrey very nearly shouted with delight then and there, before remembering that he was viewing these events through the telescopic sight of a semiautomatic rifle. He would have to wait, he decided. Not long, just until the police and those Secret Service fools left.
And then, just as he was about to discard the rifle, he saw a young blind girl pick up the cup.
Aubrey groaned. The look on the girl's face was unmistakable. She knew what she had.
Doggedly, seething with impatience, he got rid of the weapon, exchanged one disguise for another, then followed the girl and the old woman with her to their hotel where, to his eternal shame, he had failed both to secure the cup and to kill the girl. The very memory made him writhe with embarrassment.
Nevertheless, some good had come of the encounter. He knew where the cup was. He had found Arthur Blessing and his protector. And by a stroke of luck, the Arabs had just informed him that morning that the whole carload of runaways had spent the night in Ait Haddus, where a nine-month-old newspaper containing a personals ad for "Arthur B" had been used to wrap a pound of dates.
Things were looking better, after all.
Aubrey uncoiled himself from his chair and dialed two numbers. The first was to the nearest of the Arab relatives, to whom he dictated a letter. The second was to a woman in London, a woman whose friendship Aubrey had been cultivating for the past month in anticipation of this day.
Her name was Emily Blessing.
He would wear silk tonight, he decided, doodling idly while he waited for the clicks and pauses in the telephone connection to end.
"Hello?" Emily answered, sounding, as she always
did, like a scared mouse.
"Emily," he purred. "This is Aubrey Katsuleris."
He heard her soft intake of air. Then a deferential "Yes?"
What a bloodless woman, Aubrey thought. American, intellectual, and thoroughly dull. "I've found your nephew," he said.
"Oh, my God," she whispered. "Is he with you?"
"No, he's in Tangier. We'll meet him tonight."
"Tangier!"
"I'll pick you up."
"I... I don't know how to thank you, Mr. Katsuleris."
"Aubrey, please. I told you I'd find him, didn't I?"
"Yes, but I never imagined—"
"I'll come for you at five o'clock. We'll have dinner at the Victoria Hotel." He hung up.
He would take her to Tangier, and make love to her beneath the Arabian moon. Then, after she got the cup to him, he would kill her.
Chapter Eight
Arthur!
Emily sat down and clasped her trembling hands together. Was it possible? Had the search finally come to an end?
She tried not to hope. Yes, Aubrey Katsuleris was a rich and influential man with contacts all around the world, but how could he have found Arthur within a month when she herself, in three years of constant effort, had not?
It's got to be the wrong boy, she told herself. All she had given Mr. Katsuleris was one photograph taken when Arthur was ten years old. He would be thirteen now. He had probably changed a great deal....
If he's still alive.
Emily shut her eyes, trying not to hope too much.
Arthur had left a note for her presupposing his and Hal's death. The note said that if the man named Saladin who had been pursuing them for Arthur's cup managed to kill them, then Emily's own life would still be in danger. The secret of the cup was too great to trust to even one other human being. Saladin would make sure that everyone who knew about it did not survive. And Saladin had had a great number of men at his disposal.
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