The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  He cooled his mind and prepared himself for an exhilarating ride.

  * * *

  "Tom?"

  Alexandra lifted her head from the pillow.

  It was not a noise that had awakened her but the absence of one. Her internal clocks, balanced and calibrated by a long lifetime of travel, told her that Tom Gurden should be done with his last set and coming to bed by now. In fact—she checked her watch on the nightstand—he was twelve minutes overdue.

  Had he dallied at the bar with a customer or one of those attractive waitresses? Not likely. Not after a night in the pool.

  Was he somewhere out on deck, romantically communing with the moon? Not unless he was doing it bare-assed with only a thin paper robe and a layer of grease to keep out the wind. If he had come back to the room for clothes, she would have heard him.

  Alexandra came fully awake immediately.

  She could turn the ship out and search it. Hasan would provide the manpower if she insisted. But that would take time. She would exhaust her own resources first.

  Going to the closet, she dragged out her suitcase, opened it, and popped out the lining. The tracker unit was a clear glass plate, fifteen centimeters on a side. The electronics, antennae, and power source were concealed in the bezel around it, leaving the glass empty like a frame after the picture has been removed.

  Its signal would hardly register inside the room, surrounded on six sides by steel bulkheads. Vaele shrugged into her robe, jammed on her slippers, and ran out into the passageway. She turned right for the stairs to the promenade deck. From there, she went around by the main concourse, then up and up, to the bridge deck. Because the Holiday Hull was an inert hulk, grounded in the mud at low tide, it kept no watches and she would not have to explain herself to any officers.

  On the flying bridge, standing beside the broken binnacle and the faceless engine telegraph, she paused before activating the unit.

  She could do it only once. The device would send out an electromagnetic shriek that would turn on a radio capsule she had long ago inserted beneath Gurden's skin during some rough loveplay. After activation, the capsule would emit at ten-point-two-two megahertz with a range of about sixty kilometers. It would send for nine hours; after that he was lost.

  Alexandra breathed out slowly and pressed the contact.

  An electroluminescent grid lit up, its bull's-eye calibrated in tens of meters. She let the internal compass align itself while the finder band sought out Tom's return signal.

  A tiny orange bead formed on the extreme edge of the grid and winked out.

  She quickly reset the tracker to hundreds of meters. The bead showed stronger, moving east and north, very fast.

  Vaele raised her eyes and scanned in that direction.

  Nothing... Nothing... Then a pleasure boat, leaving a narrow wake of pin-scratch white in the moonlight, pointing on the same heading as her luminous bead.

  Setting the tracker carefully down on the rail, so that it might not lose the signal, Alexandra went below to dress and call Hasan.

  * * *

  The turbine boat was steadier than Gurden expected.

  As they gained speed, it rose out of the water. The hull was not just hydroplaning across the waves but riding a good meter above them. Some sort of natural ground effect or ducted fan system seemed unlikely. The simplest answer was a hydrofoil: they were riding on a water wing thrust deep below the boat's elaborate hull.

  That gave them a top speed, Tom figured, of more like 200 kilometers an hour.

  The high, dark cliff of the Holiday Hull was far behind them, and the jostling lights of Atlantic City's spires were visibly falling behind his left shoulder. The boat was heading out into the ocean, trading inland chop for a long sea swell.

  "Where are we going?" he called back over the incredible whine of the engine. "Bermuda?"

  "Not so far."

  And that was all the answer he got.

  When they had passed beyond some invisible limit, the boat banked into a gentle curve to the left. It zipped up the coast, passing the clustered lights of the beach towns like tiny island galaxies in the great darkness of wave and sand: Brigantine, Little Egg, Beach Haven, Beach Haven Terrace, Beach Haven Crest, Brant Beach, Ship Bottom, Surf City.

  And between these island galaxies, drawn by an unseen beacon, the boat turned again to the left and drove straight for the shore.

  In the moonlight Tom could make out a single white line of surf, with gray lines of beach and mounded dunes beyond it.

  The swell beneath them shortened, became thudding rollers and then a bucking chop.

  "You're going to lose your underwater gear if you don't slow down," Gurden shouted.

  In reply, the whine of the engine increased. Beneath them, he heard a loose clash, like a steel gate closing. The engine died out in a feathering wheeze, and the hull settled on a broad roller with its bow tipped high. The boat surfed expertly in toward shore and, when the wave broke, flopped down on the sand with an echo of grating metal. The engine spit and crackled as a secondary wave played around the exhaust outlet.

  "You get out here." His captor unlocked the safety harness. "Now, please."

  Gurden scrambled over the flaring side of the hull. His handmade leather shoes and real wool socks went into the brine to the ankles, but he was standing on firm sand, ready to run. He paused.

  "Aren't you coming with me?"

  "That is not necessary."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "Go to the light." The man pointed toward a glimmering, like the light of one candle, half-hidden among the dunes.

  "What if I run? Will you shoot me?"

  "Have you seen any guns?"

  "No, I guess not."

  "Go to the light. It is the only sensible direction for you now."

  Tom walked out of the surf line, bent to shake out his pant leg and squeeze the water from his socks.

  Like a piece of driftwood the boat lifted on the seventh wave, the master wave, and slid back into the sea. When it was well clear of the land, its engine started up with a climbing whine. With a flare of orange afterburner, it spun and was gone.

  "Go to the light," Gurden repeated and began walking through the fine, white, clinging sand.

  * * *

  Alexandra settled back into the molded foam of the Porsche's bucket seats. She took the primary accelerations with the small of her back and braced with her knees pushing against the center console and door to counteract sideways thrusts. In her lap the tracker blinked placidly. Now that they were on the open road, the orange bead no longer outpaced them.

  She glanced across at the speedometer: 195 kilometers per hour. Perhaps it was not a boat she had seen at all, but a small seaplane taking off. That would complicate matters.

  "All we can do is follow the coast roads and try to keep his transmitter in range," Hasan said softly, as if reading her mind.

  "What if we lose him?"

  "Then a lifetime's work will be, as the Americans say, 'down the tubes'. I am trying to decide what I should do with you then."

  "We could wait for another incarnation."

  "You could wait, perhaps. I cannot."

  "We could test for another subject. Surely there are other sensitives, somewhere in the world."

  "We have our sensitive here." Hasan reached over and tapped the glass plate for emphasis. "The original and not to be duplicated."

  "We haven't proven that yet." Her voice sounded weak and querulous to her own ears.

  "We don't have to. The Frenchmen themselves prove it by their actions."

  Hasan picked up the telephone handset and punched in a call with one finger. He waited for it to ring and be answered, then started speaking in Arabic. His soft, commanding gush of words gave directions, placed rally and fallback points, and specified equipment, personnel, and rules of engagement. Then he listened, probably while the orders were repeated for clarity. "Tufadhdhal," he co
ncluded and hung up.

  "If you get Gurden back—" Hasan said to Alexandra.

  "When we get him," she corrected.

  "If... You may have to try threatening him yourself. Take him to the point of death, until you can see it shining in his eyes. That may serve to focus him and bring him back to awareness."

  "I don't know if that's a good idea, Hasan." She paused. She had never actually refused an order of his, not even one phrased as a suggestion.

  "And why not?" The Damascus steel, supple yet strong, sounded in his voice.

  "This one is lucky. He has grown subtle and swift, since I introduced him to the Stone. He is no longer a simple animal, reacting to immediate sensation. He thinks. He begins to see. He is dangerous."

  "So?"

  "He might kill me, Hasan!"

  "So? You are older than he, and more wily. You will think of some way to protect yourself."

  "Yes, I should be well out of his reach and beyond his awareness at the point at which someone finally comes that close to taking him out."

  They drove on for some minutes in silence. The flashing light from the orange bead lit her chin.

  "Would it bother you if he killed me?" she finally asked.

  "It would bother me, yes. But would it stop me? No."

  "And if it helped you move the subject along ... ?"

  "Then it might not even bother me."

  "I see."

  The darkness of the car closed in around her.

  * * *

  Sura 5

  Pursuit in the Desert

  And that inverted bowl they call the sky,

  Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die,

  Lift not your hands to it for help—for it

  As impotently moves as you and I.

  —Omar Khayyam

  * * *

  The old ones lay about on perfumed cushions, their bodies so relaxed that their robes had tugged open, exposing grizzled chest hair to match their gray-shot beards.

  Deep in the cloying smoke of his drug, Masud One-Eye giggled at nothing. His spasm went on and on, until it ended in a shallow cough.

  Hasan, who was both the youngest and the oldest man in the room, watched them with hooded eyes. In the young days, when he had called forth the Assassins from the sand, the hemp smoking had been a tool. It was the quickest way to wean young men from the lifestream of their families, to make them warm when the rocks of their hideout had seemed coldest, to comfort their lusts when they discovered—as all eventually did—that the attachments of husband and father were denied to them forever as outlaws.

  Hasan himself had spun the myth of the Secret Garden. The promise of Paradise was not enough for those who belonged to the Hashishiyun. To have a paradise on earth, brought forth from the smoke, was what these wild and desperate men craved. And Hasan gave it to them.

  He had chosen his themes well. The new Sufi mysticism and the Dervish way of devotion through dancing to exhaustion had both blended well with the smoke. The Garden itself, an annex to Paradise from which all but the most obedient were to be excluded, became the ultimate reward for those who had killed successfully upon command of the leader. Severing and succumbing, devotion and duty, these had been the bonds that had held his little band together—through his first lifetime anyway.

  Now see what the Hashishiyun had become. Old Sinan, once a crafty fighter, had fallen into his dotage. He sucked the smoke as if it were air on a high mountain. He and his cronies lived like caliphs: sleeping and eating, fucking and farting, and always smoking. It had been months since Sinan had carried out—or even begun to plan—a strategic assassination.

  Sinan raised himself on an elbow and motioned to Hasan with a bent hand. "Wine."

  Hasan dipped a cup of the astringent red liquor from the ewer beside his chiefs hand and held it to the old man's lips.

  Sinan drank deeply and smacked his lips. With a weak shove he pushed his lieutenant's hand away.

  "Do you see what that upstart, Saladin, is collecting?" the old sheikh said to the air.

  "Such a display of metal and horsehide," another said dreamily.

  "All to put an end to one Frankish braggart who, with the placing of a single well-honed blade, would trouble us no more."

  "Is that a suggestion, Master?" Hasan asked quietly.

  "No, it is not." A cough rumbled through Sinan's lungs and he sat up straighter, pulling his jellaba closer about his shoulders. "None of the Hashishiyun are to soil themselves with this foolish jihad. That is my order... Indeed, for the next twelve-month, all Frankish heads shall be sacred. Let none of them be harmed."

  Without thinking the matter through, the other Assassins in the room murmured their assent to this pronouncement.

  "A good joke on the Ayyubites."

  "Teach Saladin to pick fights he cannot win."

  "Send him back to Egypt."

  "Cool his ass in Nile water."

  "But—" Hasan's voice cut across this mist of self-congratulation."—we may be missing an opportunity."

  Sinan turned his face to the younger man, his shaggy eyebrows drawing together like two caterpillars coupling.

  "With the weight of arms Saladin can put in the field," Hasan continued, his voice still strong, "he might indeed sweep the Franks out of this corner of Islam. Reynald the Braggart is only the worst of them, but a sovereign example is he. A pig in a rotting sty, with blood on his hands and mud on his boots. Willfully blind to the Prophet and his exacting way of life." Here the younger man's eyes strayed to the wine cup, which he had filled with his own hand. "Reynald is a conqueror with no sense of governance—only of rape and plunder."

  "Then the wind should blow him away," Sinan sneered.

  "Were it not for the Knights of the Temple and other hardy fighters, the wind would do just that. Now, here, is our chance to stamp them all out. To leave them with broken backs and twitching legs, like a scorpion trod by a horse's hoof, for the sun to dry them out and the wind to hurry them from the land of Palestine."

  "Eloquent words, child. But there are thousands of them. And each carries a great steel sword and rides a heavy-muscled horse."

  "And Saladin raises tens of thousands to trample them with. He will do it, too," Hasan's eyes filled with that sense of certainty that, in other men, passed for prophecy.

  "And then," he went on, "with one invader gone, we might see these long-beaten farmers and shepherds acquire the taste for freedom. How long, after that, can the Abbasids, the Seljuks, and even the Ayyubites themselves hope to withstand the will of the people of Palestine to govern their own affairs in their own land? For a thousand years and more, this land has been overgrazed and sweated down to produce its 'milk and honey' for the benefit of foreign lords. It is time Palestine was allowed to give something back to its own people."

  "Govern their own affairs!" cried one of the old men.

  "Foreign lords! The Abbasids?"

  "That's a good one."

  "Sinan, your apprentice is a jokester."

  "Such ideas!"

  Sinan glared at Hasan and cut him off with a chopping motion of the hand.

  "Enough of this breeze from the mouth," the Assassin leader commanded. "We are men of action, after all, not men of words."

  His withered old hand, which occasionally showed the shakings of palsy, found its way to the hashish bowl. With practiced fingers he stuffed the lumps of resinous fiber into his pipe and signaled to Hasan. The latter gathered a glowing coal from the fire and held it to the drug while Sinan drew greedily on the smoke.

  * * *

  A column of dust rose against the sky where Saladin's army had passed.

  The Sultan, sitting his white Arabian stallion in the van of this host, looked back up the valley. He, of course, could not see the dust column. It was gathered in puffs and billows, from the hooves of his mailed lancers and the boots of his foot soldiers. In the foreground, individual spurts of powder hung about the knee
s of this horse, of that man. In the middle distance, a soft fog drifted past the plumes of his mounted warriors and softened the toothed lines of the upraised pikes held by his infantry. On the far horizon, a wall of yellow haze cut off the surrounding hills and hid the bobbing heads of more horses, the burnished steel of more conical helmets.

  Saladin looked into this ground-level fog and knew that it was drifting many thousands of feet into the air. And that would tell any trailing force, such as the Christians might raise for Reynald's defense, where the army of Saladin was riding.

  But any tongue in the bazaar could tell them that.

  The Kerak of Moab had once been a hill fort. It was established in a gentler time, when shepherds slept beneath the stars and disputed their grazing rights and the ownership of strayed lambs with the sharp end of a crook. Now, under the Christian onslaught, it had been strengthened with walls of dressed stone and ditches whose scarps and counterscarps fell in cunning angles. English archers would defend the far side of those ditches with bows that could launch a clothyard shaft accurately over a distance of 500 paces. But did Reynald's archers, Saladin wondered, have a hundred thousand arrows at hand within those walls?

  The Kerak waited at the far end of the valley, where two mountain ranges came almost together. The back side of the fortress was less heavily defended, Saladin knew, with only one course of ramparts, ditch, covert, and earthworks. But an army approaching from that direction would have to thin its ranks and squeeze between those outerworks and the foothills of the encroaching mountains. A battalion of Christians, riding out of sight beyond those hills, could easily dash across and apply cruel pressure at any point they might choose.

  Saladin, in any case, preferred the frontal approach, announced as he was by his column of dust.

  * * *

  "Is that a stormcloud ahead?"