Eliza: Don't leave, Tom.
Gurden: What? Who is this?
Eliza: It's Eliza ... 212, Tom. You know me.
Gurden: Your voice sounds funny, thicker.
Eliza: That's the cellular circuitry, Tom. Don't drive away. Stay with Ithnain and his men.
Gurden: But they're terrorists. They're about to break into a—
Eliza: I know what they are planning to do. You must go with them. I need you inside the plant, Tom.
Gurden: You need me? Explain that, would you? It's dangerous in there. I could get killed.
Eliza: You have always trusted me, Tom. Obey me now. Go in with Ithnain.
Gurden: But—
Eliza: Do not dispute this. Believe in me. Your ... life ... depends on it.
Gurden: I don't—
Eliza: Click!
* * *
"Get out of the truck, please, Mr. Gurden." Ithnain stood beside the door. The barrel of his gun was elevated, its muzzle almost pointing toward Gurden's face.
Gurden put down the phoneset and lifted his hands level with his head. He swung his left leg out the door, slid his rump down off the seat.
"You will not leave us. My Lord Hasan has specifically asked for your presence."
So has someone else, Gurden thought. "Believe in me ... Obey me." Gurden did not believe Eliza's voice for a minute. Something was wrong when a cybershrink started calling you. But his options were decidedly limited.
Ithnain and his men would be watching the truck now. If he were to try striking out on his own across the marshland, it would be a long, wet walk. If he should manage to get back to the truck and start it, he would be moving down the marsh's straight, causeway-like roads away from them. Alerted to his plans and wary now, they would put a second missile up his back as he went.
Gurden had little choice except to follow them.
He looked out over the marsh grasses, where the missile had gone. The floodlights along the fence were out. So was area lighting over about a quarter of the complex.
Ithnain was giving orders, and the men about him were quietly returning to their vehicles to drive around for the assault on the main gate.
So the dog took them all by surprise.
It came through the reeds on its long, steel-sprung legs, making less splash than a horse would through the water. Perhaps it had been roving beyond the fence, out of range of the Sea Sparrow. Perhaps it had come running on central command from an undamaged sector. In either case, the first indication anyone had of its presence was the scream as it tore into one of Ithnain's troops.
The man went down—they later found—from a fifty-centimeter-long gash that ripped him open from shoulder to hip. Some technician had modified the dog's personnel-restraint grapples into knife-edged scythes and had bumped the pressure and reaction speed of the jaw mechanism by fifty to a hundred percent.
The dog's night vision was infra-red. It had turned and taken a second man before anyone was quite recovered from that first scream.
By then, of course, it was right among them.
Ithnain pulled his gun to the ready and had spanged three bullets off its titanium hide before most of the rest of them had reacted. His firing caught the dog's attention, and it bore silently down on Ithnain.
He fed the solid stock of his weapon into the grapple and tried to dance away, holding the dog at bay.
The dog tried to shake off the metal and carbon and get around the gun to the warm flesh, but Ithnain stayed close to the snapping jaws and kept working the stock deeper into the mechanism.
"Someone—knock its—legs out," Ithnain gasped as he danced.
Gurden hardly had time to decide that was his job—nor to see this attack as another opportunity. He instinctively threw himself into a flying sidekick aimed at the dog's hindquarters. They went down. The animal jerked around on its flexible spine, made three courtesy snaps at Gurden's head, then returned its attentions to Ithnain.
Gurden tried to get his hands around the dog's pasterns and control its rear feet, hoping he could pull it off balance—and not get bitten. However, the steel-braided control lines bunched around its ankles squirmed across each other and made his grip slippery.
If only he could somehow lock up the rear legs, the beast would go down. Gurden then tried to work his fingers in among those cogs and cables, but the machine was dancing around too fast even for that. And every fifth move programmed by the dog's robot brain was a snap directed at Gurden's head; so he was kept busier staying out of its way than trying to immobilize it.
"Slow down!" he gritted through his teeth.
The dog actually paused for a second in mid-whirl. Had it heard him? Had something inside it responded to a spoken command? Gurden almost felt as if some impulse from within him had touched the dog's chip circuitry directly.
Tom tried to adjust his grip and pull it off balance, but Ithnain chose that moment to thrust with the stock of his gun. The movement pushed something in the dog's program, and the spinning, slashing, snapping dance went on.
Gurden and Ithnain were tiring rapidly, but clearly the dog could keep up the struggle all night. The rest of the men simply formed a wide circle and watched.
Except for one—the missile marksman.
While the two men and the dog whirled around, he dragged a second Sea Sparrow case from the nearby truck. He pulled the safety pin but didn't bother with the launch tube, working the arming lever with his bare hand instead. He raised the live missile over his head and threw it, nose first, down onto the hard road surface four meters away.
The warhead's explosion ripped into their ears. A thin breeze of white plastic shards whipped past them all, stinging faces and hands. And the dog sank down on its haunches with a twitching palsy, rolled on its side, and went still.
Ithnain stood over it, breathing hard. Gurden pushed one of the dog's legs off himself and sat up.
"Thank you, Hamad," the Palestinian leader said. "That was well done." He retrieved his scarred weapon from the dead jaws and looked at Gurden. "And my thanks to you, too, for your bravery."
Gurden blew out his cheeks. "De nada."
"We have a long walk ahead of us tonight," Ithnain observed. "The pulse from that warhead has certainly destroyed the turbine ignition and control circuits in our vehicles."
Gurden could be sure, also, that his identity cards were ruined.
* * *
Sura 7
The Fall of the Red Tent
The moving finger writes; and, having writ
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line.
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
—Omar Khayyam
* * *
Like a finger of white fire, Amnet's thrust stabbed at Hasan.
A master less skilled in the uses of astral energy might have directed the bolt at the Assassin's head, toward the sixth nexus located between and just behind the eyes. Such a blow, Amnet judged, would have been worse than useless. Like a punch thrown at a human face, it would aim at that sense organ best made to detect it. Hasan would have passed it to one side as easily as a boxer in the pancratium ducks under a roundhouse swing.
Instead, Amnet aimed his thrust lower, toward the third nexus that lies behind the navel. Seat of the in-flowing juices of life during gestation, this nexus would absorb energy and enfold it within the body: the perfect target for a deathblow.
A person standing to one side might have seen nothing, or merely felt a shuddering in the air, caught the blur of motion that an arrow leaves behind in afterimage on the mirror of the eye. To Amnet, who launched and directed it, the Stone's energy was a palpable substance, as clearly defined as the light of a rose window passing through the dusty air of a cathedral, as brightly red as the first ray of the sun that rises over the mountains. To Hasan, who was its target, the bolt would have been tinged with blue, shifted forward along the prismatic spectru
m by its own speed.
It crossed the distance between them in the no-time of a passing thought.
If Hasan even saw it, he had no way to avoid it. The bolt of energy entered his body like a horse galloping headlong through the gap in a hedge and vanishing.
Hasan swayed backward. His hands and arms, pivoting at the shoulders, swung forward as if to counterbalance his weight. His fingers stretched to their limit, pointing at Thomas Amnet's face. Hasan's aura generated a misty blue glow. His body shone brightly, like a house consumed by flames that have not yet pierced the roof and shattered the glass in the windows... Hasan's body bent in a spasm of the muscles.
The return blow smashed into Amnet, throwing him back across the grassy bank by his own body's length. He landed on the small of his back, feet rising into the air, and rolled up and over on his neck and skull. Something there cracked viciously. As Amnet's body straightened out, his legs came down hard, his bootheels denting the turf. He tried to lift his head and could not.
Hasan leapt across the stream and stood above him. The Assassin might have drawn a blade and struck down into Amnet's throat or belly. He might have stamped a foot into the Templar's face. Instead, Hasan hunched his shoulders and made the same snowball-molding gesture that he had used at first.
Amnet grew afraid.
Panic galvanized his limbs, and he struggled to move out of the way. His head now lifted against a streak of white pain that lived in his neck. The movement of his head led into a jumbled, diving roll that took him a few miserable feet across the grass.
Hasan hurled his energy focus squarely into Amnet's back. A red heat bloomed there, tearing muscles and bruising bones. His legs went cold.
With a massive effort, Amnet called upon the Stone to counteract the pain, to repair broken muscle fibers and smooth a tangled skein of nerves. The Stone warmed with its own vibrant energy and pumped feeling into his lower body. From its pouch beneath his belt, he could feel it straightening his limbs, adding to the power of his thighs and calves, lifting him as a mother pulls her child from the cradle and swaddles it against the cold.
Standing upright now, he turned to face Hasan.
With another supreme effort of will, he called forth greater energies from the Stone.
These were no gentle coaxings of its latent power, such as he might make when using the Stone to order swirling vapors into a vision of the future, or to cloud the mind and bend the will of a sultan-general. This was rape. This was grasping. He was using the Stone the way a berserker might swing a claymore—wildly. His intention was to bludgeon, to trample, to unmake.
He hurled another stabbing thrust outward at Hasan, who stood momentarily weakened from his last stroke. Amnet drove this spear of energy higher this time, into the fifth nexus that lies in the hollow of the throat. At full strength, this blow would have ripped out the man's windpipe and crushed his larynx up into the soft palate behind his mouth. Hasan should have died in a gulp of blood.
The Assassin's head lolled back with it, as loosely and carelessly as a man absorbing the kisses of a maiden. A smile curved the lips under his mustache. The energy wreathed his head.
With a sharp nod, Hasan sent the flow back, speeding it in a blue flicker directly into the leather pouch below the Templar's belt.
The force of it staggered Amnet's newly erected legs. He went to one knee in the grass. "Surgite!" he commanded himself sternly. "Rise up!" Another burst of the Stone's energies flowed into his limbs. Simultaneously he tried to direct an outward, warding thrust at Hasan.
The Stone seemed to grow heavier, dragging down at his belt, splitting the deerskin pouch in which Amnet carried it. His hands came down to clutch it as the Stone fell free. The crystal lattice vibrated with the increased demands he was making on it. The intersecting axes of the lattice bowed outward and started to pull apart.
Thomas Amnet could feel the tearing deep in his brain.
* * *
The chants of the Moslems rose by half-notes up the scale, like the buzz of a cicada drilling the heated air of summer. Grand Master Gerard, not being schooled in music, only knew that the Saracen soldiers outside his circle were working themselves up to a pitch of perfect violence.
Just when a man thought their tension could build no more, when he was about to drop his lance and run screaming forward onto the ready scimitars, the drone would plateau. It would work its way across that barren monotone and then find a way to rise once again to a higher, more strangled pitch.
Many of the Christians fainted from the heat. More fell away as their nerve snapped and consciousness fled the merciless slaughter that the Moslem song seemed to promise.
Gerard put a hand to the hilt of his long sword and paced in the narrow space behind the ranks of Templars who opposed the Saracens on the west side of the hill. As one man swayed and sagged out of line, Gerard would urge another forward to take his place.
The sweat ran over his brow and down on either side of his eyes. Every drop trickling through the grime of his face was water of his body that would never be replaced. He was dying in a salt stream.
As he raised a gauntleted hand to his forehead, hoping to blot this flow with an edge of its leather glove, the chanting stopped.
Two men to his right in the line fainted dead away at the sudden silence. Gerard was about to motion two more Templars forward to fill the gap, but he held his hand.
What did the silence mean?
With a sudden yell, the Saracens answered him.
At the peak of their frenzy, the Moslem soldiers closest to the line threw themselves on the lance ends, bearing the points down with the sudden weight.
Taking up the yell, those behind them climbed over the still wriggling bodies of their comrades and struck with swords while the Christians were yet struggling to pull their weapons free. The wickedly curving scimitars bit into the unguarded flesh of the neck, between helm and mail. Blood fountained and the first rank of the Christian circle stumbled backward, dead before the second rank could lower them to the ground and ready their own swords.
The Saracen wave rolled over the Templars.
Gerard had seen berserkers go into battle, fight, lose a limb or an eye, fight still harder, and finally die—all without regaining a moment's sense or reason. The berserkers of his experience were solitaries, each a prisoner of his own madness. The human wave that bore down on the French lines was his first sight of the collective madness, A thousand men moved as one and died without even a murmur of pain. Their bodies, trampled beneath their own comrades' feet, showed no more feeling than shoeleather beneath the weight of a man. They were possessed.
Gerard crossed himself, drew his sword, and retreated up the hill. He went facing backward, with his eyes fixed on the advancing wave of snarling brown faces and flashing curved blades. Like a line of mowers, they cut through any who would stand before them.
Something tangled Gerard's feet, and he turned to see what it might be. His face turned into a billow of red canvas, the color of the blood that had followed him up the hill. His ankles were snared by the ropes of King Guy's tent.
He raised his sword to cut the canvas and escape through the tent's interior. Before he could swing his blade in a slashing arc, something heavy struck the back of his head. He fell face-forward into the side of the tent, snagging and pulling it down with his weight. The roof of the pavilion teetered and swayed. Then the ropes, hacked at the other corners by the Saracens who had reached the crest of the hill, gave way and the tent collapsed.
Folds of heavy red canvas, embroidered with the heraldry of France and the faces of the Apostles, cut off the light and smothered Gerard.
* * *
Amnet's hands curled around the Stone as it slipped out of its leather pouch. The smooth surface was hot to the touch. Each facet cut into the pads and tendons of his fingers like red-hot knifeblades. From deep within it he could feel the terrible energies tearing at its lattice, finally sundering the incorrupt
ible pattern. A note as high and clear as a glass harmonica's filled the valley. Its focus, however, was deep inside the crystal.
Staggering, he carried the Stone as he might carry his severed testicles, one step, two steps, seeking a way to cope with the pain and sense of loss.
A dozen feet away, by the soundlessly bubbling stream, Hasan recovered from his last returned blow. As the Assassin's eyes cleared, he saw the swollen crystal clutched to Amnet's groin. When he understood what was happening, his mouth came open. His eyes bulged outward with disbelief.
"No-o-o!"
That sound came through to Amnet's deadened ears, penetrating the veil of pure sound that welled up from the Stone. Hasan's cry of negation, backed with a sincere thrust of emotion, overloaded the crystal with the last quantum of energy that would be properly focused in that pretty valley beside the Galilee for almost a thousand years.
Like a churchbell breaking apart, the Stone shattered under its load. Its final song ended in a clang of falling metal. White-hot fangs of crystal showered out from between Amnet's bloodied fingers.
The energy left his legs. He pitched forward to his knees, then to the side, striking the ground with his shoulder, the side of his head, a hip. Like a puppet without strings, he finally rested—stiff and awkward—while the tender shoots of grass tickled his cheek and scratched at his open eye.
Hasan recovered and approached him slowly. The man moved once again with a supple grace, the hallmark of live things that are superbly aware, ready to jump back at the first sign of danger.
Amnet could give no signs. His broken body, now strange and cold, was already half-dead, no longer animated by the energies of the Stone. Inch by inch, he could feel the nerves in his exposed spine swell up, split, fizzle, and fade. When this wave of uncoordinated activity reached the base of his skull, he could feel his reason leaving him. Soon would go his self.
Mouthing words that Amnet's ears could no longer hear, Hasan reached down out of the sight of the Templar's fixed gaze. The Assassin's hands must have been in the region of Amnet's groin—but what damage he could hope to work on the body there, Thomas could not imagine.
The Mask of Loki Page 26
