“I think you may be Master Bai’s ultimate weapon.”
“I’m not evil, Chant!” Soussan snapped, an edge of what appeared to be genuine anger and chagrin in her tone.
Chant said nothing.
Soussan sighed, gripped Chant’s penis more firmly. “Well, my enemy, at least there’s one area in which we communicate perfectly. Are you ready yet?”
“From the feel of things, I’d say so.”
“How would you like me this time?”
“I’d like you any way you’d like to be liked.”
She took him in her mouth.
When they had finished, Soussan giggled. “Maybe Grandfather’s real purpose is that I should fuck you to death.”
“You’re certainly working on it.”
“I’m afraid it’s the other way around; you’re fucking me to death.”
“I hope not.”
“It’s so easy to forget everything else when we’re making love, isn’t it?”
“No, Soussan. I never forget.”
“Lie,” Soussan said softly “Lie.”
Chant was silent for some time. “You’re right,” he said at last “That was a lie.
“What’s supposed to happen next?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m supposed to just sit around here and wait until I receive instructions?”
“Yes, Chant. If you try to act on your own, Hmong will die. Please believe that.”
“I do Who’s next? Yabu or Kiyama?”
“I don’t know It could be Ko again.”
“I thought I was finished with Ko—or he was finished with me.”
Soussan shrugged. “A man the size of Ko is still a formidable opponent, even with one eye.”
“What do Yabu and Kiyama do?”
“Many things—all of which kill.”
“Did you really go to Harvard?”
“I still go. I’m in graduate school.”
“What are you studying?”
“Law.”
Chant laughed. “I love it.”
“Grandfather says that, in the United States, law is the only truly valuable academic course of study for a warrior—at least the only one that’s available in universities.”
“Interesting.”
“Are you surprised?”
“Why should I be surprised?”
“Do you care?”
“No. I was just making conversation.”
“I don’t believe you. I think you do care—or are beginning to.”
“I thought it would be interesting to talk about something besides screwing.”
“We talk about many things besides screwing.”
“Sure. We also talk about how your grandfather, with Ko, Yabu, Kiyama—and you—is enjoying himself while he orchestrates my death.”
“Aren’t you going to try to convince me that I should go to work for General Motors, or some other corporation, and give up this assassination business?”
“I’ve read consumer advocates who maintain they’re the same thing. The difference is that you’ll live longer working for General Motors—if the work you do, whatever it is, is life affirming.”
Soussan laughed, raised her eyebrows. “Now you’re being condescending. You’ve seen what I can do with a bow and arrow, and I have almost comparable skills with other weapons. Live longer? Who’s going to kill me? How many warriors are there like you?”
“Black Flame will kill you.”
“Ha. I should live as long as Grandfather.”
“You still don’t understand that Master Bai is dead, Soussan.”
“That’s not even worth being called a lie; it’s just silly.”
“When you’re able to find a master who can teach you how to absorb and survive a killing blow from a man the size of Ko, then you’ll be in a position to know whether anything I say to you is silly.”
“Chant, could you fall in love with me?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you. I’m beginning to understand now that Grandfather was right again; I could certainly fall in love with you.”
“How do you know that if you’ve never been in love?”
Soussan was silent for some time. “You’ve got me,” she said at last. “I don’t know the answer to that question.”
“That’s the best answer.”
Soussan kissed his left nipple. “Thank you for asking, Chant.”
“If Master Bai were the Pope, and you and I had met in church instead of on a killing ground, I’d still be too old for you.”
“You’re old like a samurai sword is old. I do appreciate fine things, Chant.”
“Fine things are always destroyed when they’re surrounded by Black Flame, Soussan. That includes—or will include—you.”
“Tell me the truth, Chant. Do you think all this chitchat about the possibility of us falling in love and marrying, of you winning me away from my grandfather and Black Flame, is bullshit?”
“Yes.”
“You think that everything I’m saying and doing is on the instructions of my grandfather?”
“Yes.”
“You’re wrong, Chant,” the woman said simply. “You’re so wrong. What if the real test of whether you win or lose, live or die, is whether or not you can accept me in your heart?”
“You’re not a test, Soussan; you’re a trap. I had to accept the challenge of you. You were right; I would have been just as distracted if I hadn’t.”
“Why is Grandfather doing this?”
“You know. Even if you didn’t know, I’ve already told you.”
“Tell me again. Please. Humor your enemy.”
“The lesson is that your grandfather is a superior warrior who doesn’t have to take me by surprise to kill me. He’s flexing his muscles, working out, using people—you, Ko, Yabu and Kiyama, Baldauf and me—as part of an elaborate Black Flame kata. The greatest battles are won by manipulation, not force, and he wants you to understand this. He wants you to learn, first, that it can be done, and second, how it is done. He is a master warrior and teacher, Soussan, but he draws power from and teaches Black Flame. You are his apprentice. Any words you use to excite me, to offer hope or solace, are lies intended to distract and weaken. My father risked his soul, and gave his life, to send me to Bai precisely so that I could learn and understand this face of evil in order to defend and fight against it.”
“But you manipulate people all the time.”
“Yes.”
“You kill. My God, how you kill.”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the difference between you and Grandfather?”
“The difference between your Grandfather and me is in who and what we work for.”
“You search for power, just as he does.”
“No.”
“What, then? Certainly not money.”
“Satisfaction.”
“You really believe that talk about love between us is a lie?” Soussan’s dreamy whisper in the darkness was muffled by his flesh.
“Absolutely.”
Chant waited, but Soussan did not speak again. After a few minutes, he realized that she had fallen asleep.
“I’m not sure,” Chant whispered to himself, pulling the covers up over her.
As before, Soussan rose with the first rays of dawn and dressed without speaking, as before, she walked to the door, opened it, then turned back to him.
“Rest well, Chant,” the woman said, looking down at the floor. “Tonight you meet Yabu.”
“Where?”
“In the high country. As before, Grandfather says that you’ll find each other.”
“Time?”
“When you feel the time is right for you.”
“Am I allowed to bring any weapons of my own?”
“No.”
Chant sat up on the edge of the bed, studied her. “You lied when you said you didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
“Yes,” Soussan murmured,
“I lied about that.”
“Everything you say is a lie, sweetie.”
Now Soussan looked up at him, and tears glistened in her eyes. “No, Chant. There are certain things I must do for my grandfather, and this lie was one of them. I’m so confused, Chant.…”
“Whatever happens tonight, sweetie, this little duel between you and me is over. Don’t come back here again, don’t expose yourself to me. If you do, I’ll kill you.”
FIFTEEN
Chant waited at the lumber camp for an hour and half, then, when no one appeared, followed a sluice down to the frozen river and walked along its banks. He stopped when he came abreast of a log that was frozen in the ice, near the bank.
Draped over the log, chain-tether gleaming like the ice, were nunchaku. Chant bent down to pick up the fighting sticks. When he straightened, the long-armed man with the topknot had appeared on the opposite bank. Yabu was flanked by Bai and Soussan, who were again dressed in ceremonial robes.
Yabu’s dark eyes gleamed with hate and determination as the big man stepped out on the ice and, rhythmically swinging his own set of nunchaku, slowly advanced across the river.
As usual, Chant thought, Bai had shown exceptional guile in his choice of opponent and weapons. A basic rule of nunchaku combat was that you did not attempt to use them against a similarly armed opponent who had a significantly longer reach. Chant estimated that Yabu’s reach exceeded his own by at least a foot, which gave the other man a crucial advantage.
If the match were fought on the open ice.
It was, Chant thought, time to see how much latitude Bai would give him.
Fifty yards upriver the dark, jagged blot of a frozen logjam extended from one bank to the other, and it was toward this tangled jumble of wood and ice that Chant now headed, shuffling along on the open ice where Bai could see him so that the sensei would not misunderstand the purpose of his flight.
No arrow flew through the air to stop him.
Chant purposely slowed as he neared the logjam, and he dived over the first, thick log with Yabu barely five yards behind him. He instantly rolled to his left, parallel to the log, came up with his nunchaku singing, the sticks at full extension over his head.
Yabu, well trained, was unwilling even for a few seconds to follow Chant into a place where Yabu could not see him, and he had stopped on the other side of the log and backed away a few steps. With the log serving as a barrier between them, Chant straightened up and switched the pattern of his nunchaku into a relaxed kata. He stood and waited.
Robes billowing in a rising wind from the north, Bai and Soussan glided unhurriedly up the ice, then sat like two silent, gray birds of prey on a log near the bank.
Yabu glanced over at his master, and Bai casually motioned for the big man with the long arms to enter the log pack.
As Yabu warily stepped over the log, Chant leaped up on it and swung at the other man’s head. Yabu ducked under the stick and swung at Chant’s knees, but Chant had already leaped off the log, rolled over another, and slithered on his belly ten yards to his right.
Chant rose to his feet, swinging his nunchaku in a wide extension to keep the other man at bay. When he saw that Yabu was a safe distance away, Chant whipped the nunchaku in a figure-eight pattern to gain velocity, then brought the end of the free stick down on the ice, next to the log.
There was a sharp, explosive crack, and the ice close to the log spider-webbed.
With his peripheral vision, Chant saw Yabu up on the log, running at him. Chant struck the same spot on the ice again, then darted away just as a nunchaku stick whipped through the space where his head had been.
Chant jumped over another log, heading deeper into the tangle of logs. This time Yabu followed, sticks swinging around his head as he ran.
Chant pretended to slip and slide as he proceeded into the logjam, keeping himself just out of range of the deadly hardwood sticks. When he had gone twenty-five yards, he abruptly cut to his left, hopped up on a log, and, leaping nimbly from log to log, quickly made it back to where he had been, well ahead of the other man.
Again, Chant whipped his sticks around his head to achieve maximum velocity, then struck the ice where it was already spider-webbed Again and again he struck the spot, and as Yabu approached a thin geyser of icy water shot up between them.
Puzzled, Yabu stopped a few paces away, then suddenly lunged forward and swung through the geyser. But Chant had moved back a few steps and was pounding at the ice in another spot. Yabu grunted in frustration at not being able to close with Chant, then turned to look at his master.
Bai and Soussan sat motionless, watching, their bows resting in their laps.
In the time that Yabu had taken to stop and look around, Chant had broken through the ice in a second place. The log shuddered slightly, and the ice creaked. Chant leaped up in the air, used both feet to kick at the high end of the log. It was enough. Resting atop another log, frozen into the ice at an unstable angle, the first log abruptly broke free and crashed down through the ice, taking the second one with it.
Yabu barely managed to leap to safety as the ice beneath his feet groaned, vibrated, disintegrated.
The two free logs, rolling and sloshing up and down in a narrow channel of water, began to have a cumulative, juggernaut effect on the ice and wood around them; the rocking logs broke off great chunks of ice, which in turn freed more logs.
When the roaring cataclysm finally subsided, close to a dozen logs floated in an ice-clotted pool of open water perhaps thirty yards across.
Chant stood on a log in the very center of the pool, lazily swinging his nunchaku, beckoning to Yabu.
The other man hesitated, and a sharp command in Japanese shot like an arrow from Bai’s bow across the ice.
Yabu leaped onto the closest log, then hopped to the next, tentatively making his way toward Chant. When he reached the log on which Chant was standing, Chant nimbly leaped to another—always keeping just out of reach of the long-armed man’s whirling nunchaku.
In a bobbing, weaving ballet of death, both men moved back and forth across the open water, Yabu in pursuit of the elusive Chant—until suddenly Chant reversed his direction and leaped back on the end of the log on which Yabu was standing. Too late, Yabu recognized the danger. He cried out in alarm as Chant began to roll the log with his feet. Yabu tried unsuccessfully to get his own feet moving synchronously with Chant’s, then desperately leaped out over the water for another log. He never even came close.
The long-armed man with the topknot flipped in the air, then came down with a great splash in the frigid water and disappeared under the black surface.
Burling the log to maintain balance and stability, keeping his nunchaku constantly in motion, Chant waited, scanning the surface.
A hand, already tinted blue and with fingers curled like talons, broke the surface, trembled, reached for the log.
Chant whipped his nunchaku and struck the hand, instantly transforming the member into a pulpy mess of blood and bone splinters that slowly sank back beneath the black surface.
Again, Chant waited. Almost a minute passed, and then, incredibly, the other man’s head and shoulders broke the surface fifteen yards away, close to the edge of the unbroken ice shelf.
Chant was about to leap to another log closer to the other man when an arrow thunked into the log at his feet, quivered. Chant draped the nunchaku around his neck, waited and watched.
Slowly, torturously, Yabu struggled to pull himself from the water. Reaching out with his undamaged hand, trailing the ruined one in the water behind him, he clawed at the ice. Then, moving like a wounded walrus, he lurched, kicked his feet, and got his torso up over the edge.
Both Bai and Soussan were standing, but neither made a move to help Yabu. Bai, his bow strung with a second arrow, watched Chant.
The edge of the ice shelf broke, and Yabu disappeared from sight. Then, freezing, he was up again, clawing, lurching—finally heaving himself up on the ice. He somehow managed to ge
t to his feet. He swayed, body steaming in the open air, then staggered across the ice toward Bai and Soussan. Shuddering, he passed between them and disappeared into the forest. After a few seconds, Bai turned and went after him.
As before, Soussan stood alone on the ice staring at Chant.
He did not want to kill her, Chant thought. Indeed, he doubted that he could kill her. Now that the combat with Yabu was finished, there was no thrill of victory; there was only a deep, yawning ache within him that he knew only Soussan could fill. He wanted to tell her this, wanted to tell her that he wanted to continue the duel with her that he had already lost.
Something was very wrong, Chant thought. And he didn’t care. As he had told Kim Chi, he was only a man … and this man needed Soussan if he were to be able to continue struggling against her grandfather.
Chant began leaping from log to log, heading toward the safety of the ice shelf and angling toward Soussan. However, when he reached the edge of the unbroken ice he looked up to discover that Soussan, too, had vanished.
She came to him in the morning.
“What will be will be,” Soussan said as Chant opened the door and she reached out to gently stroke his chest. “You always say that. You think Grandfather has done something, perhaps drugged you, to make it so that you can’t stop wanting me. Then he’s done something to me, too—or you have. All I know is that I don’t want to live without you, Chant. I’m still very confused, and I still feel that I must do certain things my grandfather asks; if ever I wanted to lie to you, it would be about that. But I can’t lie to you any longer. This relationship with you is the greatest adventure of my life. I feel things stirring in my heart that are more powerful than anything I could have imagined before I met you. Without you, I know my heart will close and I will never feel these things again. Grandfather risked my life in sending me to you so that I might begin to feel these things; now that I do, I risk my own life to keep those feelings alive. So kill me, Chant—or love me and continue to fight for me.”
“How much is Baldauf paying your grandfather?” Chant asked after they had made love for the second time.
“A very large piece of the action in Baldauf Industries, with the stock certificates already transferred. You just about wiped out the poor thing’s cash reserves, and he needed help in a hurry.”
Chant Page 15
