The Arms of Kali td-59

by Warren Murphy

  And in the Fourth Miracle, the sign appeared. On the forehead of the Old One appeared a faint dot of blue. As the villagers gaped in wonder, the dot grew darker.

  "It is the Old One she has chosen," the villagers shouted.

  "No!" Lu struggled to pull away from the statue and the terrible power that filled him. "I will not . . . kill . . ."

  But the Old One knew that the goddess he and his people had created would be satisfied only with his death, so he bowed before the Master Lu and exposed his throat.

  Lu cried out in anguish, but the knowledge of right and wrong could not stop the goddess's wrath that coursed through his blood and directed his powerful hands. He took again the yellow cloth from inside his robe and wrapped it around the man's neck, and with one powerful wrench, the Old One lay dead at the feet of the statue.

  Lu collapsed on the earth, a wail of defeat issuing from his now corrupt soul.

  And the statue smiled again.

  "C'mon, Chiun," Remo said in disgust. "A statue? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but statues you can shove."

  "Some things are real even before they take form," Chiun said. "Look. I will show you." He lifted the small wooden chair from the writing desk of the hotel suite. "This, you say, is a chair. Correct?"

  "Right. Chair," Remo said.

  Chiun leaned over the desk, and with a pen and a piece of hotel stationery quickly executed a sketch of the same wooden chair.

  "And this too is a chair?"

  "Yeah. I guess so," Remo said cautiously.

  Chiun folded his hands into his sleeves. "And there, Remo, is the failure of your thinking. For neither these pieces of wood nor this piece of paper decorated with ink is a chair. They only appear as chairs because you choose to believe that they are."

  "Huh?"

  "The true chair is in your mind, my son. And that too is a mere imitation. The original chair was an idea in the mind of someone long forgotten. But the idea is what is real. The solid object is no more than a house for the idea."

  "That's too heavy for me," Remo said. "I'm not supposed to be a philosopher. I'm just supposed to kill people."

  "No. You are supposed to be an assassin. It is just your ineptitude that reduces it to 'killing people.' But that is what Master Lu became at the bidding of the goddess Kali. No longer an assassin, he became a killer of people. Under the power of the real goddess, the formless force which had been encased in clay. But the force was before the clay."

  "Why are you telling me this?" Remo asked.

  Chiun's face was anxious. "I want you to understand, Remo. Because I believe that you are now facing the same power that Master Lu faced."

  "I don't plan to visit Ceylon before Christmas," Remo said.

  Chiun sighed. "If you feel Kali's presence here, then She is not in Ceylon," he said patiently.

  "Who says I feel anybody's presence? I smell something. There's nothing supernatural about that. Maybe I just ought to change deodorants."

  "Silence your face while I resume the tale," Chiun said.

  "All right. I just don't see what any of this has to do with me."

  "You will. Later. You will understand later, but first you will listen."

  Lu continued to kill for the goddess, and with each death, more of his strength and skill diminished. Each time, as the bodies with their blue-marked foreheads lay still warm at his feet, Lu fell weeping to the ground, spent as if he had copulated with the stone image and delivered his seed into it. Each morning, after the kills, the goddess grew a new arm, while Lu was taken to rest in a bed of flowers. He slept for days on end, so drained was he of his powers. He belonged to Kali now, and all the discipline of Sinanju which Lu had spent a lifetime learning was used only to serve his mistress.

  After two years, nearly the entire village of Bathasgata had been sacrificed to the goddess, and Lu found himself a sick, weak man, old before his time.

  One who had watched his degeneration was a girl who lived in service to Kali. She was young and beautiful and loved the goddess she served, but the sight of the once powerful stranger reduced to a mass of skin and bones who left his bed only to kill at the statue's bidding saddened her. Although the others of the village feared Master Lu and did not come into his presence except on occasions of celebration, this young girl ventured at night into Lu's house of straw and flowers and began to nurse him back to health.

  She could not much improve his physical condition, but the companionship of the young woman gladdened Lu's broken heart.

  "Do you not fear me?" he asked.

  "Why? Because you will kill me?"

  "I will never kill you," Lu promised.

  But the girl knew better. "You will surely kill me," she said, "as you will kill all of us. Kali is stronger than the will of a man, even a man such as you. But death comes to all who live, and if I were to fear death, I would also fear life. No, I do not fear you, Master Lu."

  And then Lu wept, for even in the depth of his degradation, when he had betrayed all the teachings of his life, the gods of Sinanju had seen fit to bring love to him.

  "I must leave this place," he told the girl. "Will you help me?"

  "I will go with you," she answered.

  "But Kali?"

  "Kali has brought only death and sadness to us. She is our god, but I will leave Her. We will go to your homeland, where men like you may walk in peace."

  Lu took the young woman in his arms and embraced her. She opened herself to him, and there, in the silence of Lu's sickroom, he gave her his true seed. Not the wretched parts of his strength that Kali took, but the inviolate essence of his own clean soul.

  They left that night, in the darkness, and journeyed for moon upon moon toward Sinanju. Sometimes the fever of Kali would come upon Lu and he would cry out to his wife to tie him with weighted ropes until the terrible feeling passed and until the scent had left his nostrils.

  She obeyed, glad that Lu trusted her. The seed in her belly had swollen and she was soon to deliver a child to him.

  "Your son," she said when she presented Lu with their child. Lu had never been happier in his life. He wanted to cry out the news, but he was still a stranger who knew no one in this new land to which they had journeyed. He walked for miles, reveling in his good fortune at finding a woman who loved him enough to take him away from the evil goddess, a woman who had given him a son.

  The countryside he walked through grew more familiar with each step. Sinanju? he wondered. But it did not look like the place of his birth. It was lush, while Sananju was cold and harsh. It was not anything like Sinanju. It was ...

  He screamed when he reached the crest of the hill he was climbing. For below, in a shallow mountain valley, was the village of Bathasgata.

  "Kali has brought me back," Lu whispered. His hopes shattered. There was no escape from Kali.

  He went back to the crude camp where his wife had delivered their son to tell her the horrible news. When he saw her, he began to tremble like a palsied man. There was a blue dot on her forehead. "Not her," Lu screamed.

  "Lu ... Lu . . ." His good wife tried to raise herself to find the ropes to tie him down, but she was weak from birthing and moved clumsily. She implored him to be strong, but his strength was as nothing compared with the power of Kali. He tried to cut off his own arm to prevent what he knew would happen, but Kali would not allow it. Slowly he pulled the yellow cloth from his kimono and wound it around the neck of his beloved, and then inexorably tightened it and squeezed the life from her body.

  When it was done and Lu lay close to death beside the body of the beautiful woman who had loved him, he knew what he must do. He took a ring from the finger of the woman he had loved and killed, then buried her by the light of the moon. After saying a prayer to the old gods of Sinanju, he took his infant son in his arms and walked into the village. At the first house, he delivered the baby to the occupants. "Raise him as your own," he said, "for I will not live to see the sun rise."

  Then he went alone to s
tand before the statue of Kali. The statue was smiling.

  "You have destroyed me," Lu said.

  And in the quiet of the still night, the statue answered him from a place deep within his own mind: "You tried to betray me. It was a just punishment."

  "I am prepared to die." He touched his wife's ring and felt it give him strength.

  "You will die when I command it," Kali said.

  "No," Lu said, and for a moment the old power returned to him, and he said, "I am the Master of Sinanju. You will die when I command it. And I command it now."

  With those words, he put his arms around the statue and uprooted it from the ground. Kali burned him with Her stone flesh, and Her many arms reached out to gouge his eyes, but Lu would not stop. He carried the statue down the mountain to the sea and with each step he was mutilated by the terrible force of the goddess. And with each step did he remember the love that had given him life, the love he had killed with his own hands, and he walked onward.

  When he reached the cliffs overlooking the sea, the goddess spoke to him again.

  "You cannot destroy me, fool. I will come back."

  "It will be too late. I will be dead with you," Lu said.

  "I will not come back for you, but for your son. Your descendant. One who follows your line will be mine, and I will exact my revenge on him, though it take many thousands of moons. He will be my instrument of revenge and my wrath will be mighty through him."

  With the last of his strength, Lu cast the statue over the cliff. It sank into the blue water without a ripple. Then, as dawn sent out its first rays of light, the Master Lu wrote his story with his own blood on reeds that grew along the cliff's edge. With his final breath he wound the reeds through the ring which had belonged to his wife, and there he died.

  "The Brothers Grimmsville," Remo said. "A fairy tale."

  "We have the reeds," Chiun said.

  "How? If Lu died in this mythical spot in Ceylon, how'd you get them back to Korea?"

  "Fate works in strange ways," the old Oriental said. "Lu's body was found by a merchant who spoke many tongues. He delivered the reeds to Sinanju."

  "I bet it was great for the merchant," Remo said. "Knowing your village, I suppose they slit his throat."

  "He was not killed. He lived a long life of wealth and luxury with many wives and concubines."

  "But he was never allowed to leave town, right?" Remo said.

  Chiun shrugged. "Who would want to leave Sinanju?"

  Far below, a horn sounded in the street and Remo parted the curtains and looked out. "It's Smitty. I recognize the Rent-a-Wreck. I thought he left an hour ago."

  "He wishes for me to travel with him," Chiun said. "Where are you going?"

  "I told you. I must journey to Sinanju."

  "I'll wait here until you get back," Remo promised. Chiun smiled sadly. "Would that were true, my son. When you leave, leave a mark for me so that I may follow."

  "Why should I leave? I can go nuts in Denver just as well as anywhere else."

  "You will leave," Chiun said. "Just do not forget the story of Lu."

  The old man gathered his kimono about him and glided toward the door. "Promise? You will not forget, Remo?"

  "I don't know what any of this is about," Remo said. "I'm not Lu's descendant. I'm from New Jersey."

  "You are the next Master of Sinanju. An unbroken line of thousands of years connects you with Lu the Disgraced."

  "You're wasting your time on this trip," Remo said.

  "Remember Lu. And try not to do anything stupid while I am gone," Chiun said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  If Ban Sar Din had learned one thing during his reign as head of an Indian religion, it was never to trust anybody who believed in an Indian religion.

  So he had his doubts about A. H. Baynes, but the problem was that he could not figure out why. Because going against the tradition of centuries of his family and telling the truth-Ban Sar Din had to admit that Kali had no more loyal follower than the airline executive.

  Baynes had taken to sleeping inside the ashram each night now, huddled on the floor at the foot of the statue, just "so no crazies come in and try to harm Our Lady." And all his waking hours, too, were spent in the ashram, and when Ban Sar Din asked him, if he didn't have an airline to run, Baynes had just smiled and said:

  "It's running itself. We're the safe airline. No deaths. We don't even have to advertise anymore. The people are waiting in line for tickets on just Folks."

  But was that all Baynes wanted? Ban Sar Din wondered. So the American had struck a deal with Ban Sar Din and now there were no more killings aboard just Folks. But Baynes could have had more. He could have had a cut of the proceeds. He could have used the killers as instruments of revenge on people who had offended him.

  But he seemed to want none of those things. He said he wanted only to serve Kali. "I've served Mammon, big business, all these years, " Baynes told him, and clapped a big hand on the small round Indian's shoulder. "It's time I served something I believed in. Something bigger than myself."

  He had sounded sure of himself when he said that, and this morning, he was even more convinced. He had come running into the small yet luxurious apartment Ban Sar Din had built inside a garage across the alley, waving a fistful of tickets.

  "She provided. She provided," Baynes was shouting.

  "She provided what?" asked Ban Sar Din. "And who's She?"

  "O blessed Kali," Baynes said. There were tears of joy streaming down his cheeks. "I slept all night under the statue. No one else was there. And when I woke up this morning, these were in Her hand." He waved the tickets. "A miracle," he said. "She blessed us with a miracle."

  Ban Sar Din checked the tickets. They were all on Air Europa, all round trips, enough for an entire plane. A telephone call to the airline confirmed that they had all been paid for, in cash, but no one remembered who had purchased them. Ban Sar Din was nervous. God was one thing, but miracles, real miracles, were something else.

  "Isn't it wonderful?" Baynes said.

  "Well, it saves us some money anyway," Ban Sar Din said. "We'll give them out tonight. Along with a lot of rumals."

  "A lot of rumals out," Baynes said. "A lot of cash coming back. And all through the grace of Kali. O Kali be praised." And he had left Ban Sar Din's apartment to go back to the burgeoning office he had set up in the small room behind the ashram where Ban Sar Din had been living.

  Later in the day, when Bar Sar Din went into the office, Baynes had a finger stuck in his ear and was shouting into the telephone.

  "Sure thing, Herb, old buddy," he yelled. He was yelling because the chanting in the outer room would have registered on a seismograph.

  "No," Baynes shouted. "I can't go. I've got my religious work. But I thought it would be good for Evelyn and the kids to get away for a while, and they get along so well with you and Emmie."

  "Kill for Kali," came the chant from the outer room. "Kill, kill, kill."

  Baynes hung up the phone, and when Ban Sar Din's eyes questioned him, he explained: "That was my next-door neighbor, Herb Palmer. I'm sending the wife and kids and him and his wife on vacation to Paris. I don't think Kali wants us only to work and ... well, these tickets came into our hands ... so why not?"

  "Why not indeed?" Ban Sar Din said. This was something he understood. Petty theft. Baynes was taking five of the ashram's tickets for personal use. It was worth it, just to know that the man was human after all.

  "Unless you think I shouldn't?" Baynes said. "Unless you think there's something wrong?"

  "No, no," Ban Sar Din singsonged back. "Nothing wrong. A vacation will do your family good."

  He was brushed aside by Baynes's two children, who marched into the office, followed by Mrs. Baynes. "Kill for Kali," Joshua Baynes intoned in his most serious voice. He picked up a bottle of ink and upended it on Baynes' desk.

  "Isn't he cute?" Mrs. Baynes said.

  "Kill, kill, kill." Joshua made a paper airplane out of Baynes
' computer printout.

  "He sounds so darned grown-up already," Mrs. Baynes said, her eyes moistening.

  The Baynes girl belched.

  "They've lost so many of their inhibitions since they got here," Mrs. Baynes said, blowing kisses to her youngsters. "All this killing talk is keeping them off the streets, A. H. I am absolutely positive that Joshua has no desire to drink hard liquor or to experiment with girls."

  "Kill," Joshua chanted.

  "Isn't that sweet?" said Mrs. Baynes.

  "Warms my heart," Baynes said.

  "And you haven't noticed," the woman said accusingly.

  "Noticed what?"

  "My sari." She twirled in the center of the office. "You see, I've adapted to my new life-style, A.H. I don't need designer clothes or charity balls or a live-in maid. That motel down the block is fine for me. I've followed my husband to enjoy the spiritual fruits of a simpler life. Aren't you proud of me, dear?"

  The chanting from the outside room was so loud now that Ban Sar Din went out to ask them to quiet down before someone called the police. His request resulted in an incense pot being thrown in his general direction, and he went back into the office, just as Baynes was telling his wife: "And Herb Palmer and Emmie are going too. I thought it would be a nice break for you and the kids."

  "I want to stay here and kill for Kali," Joshua said sullenly.

  "Me too," said the daughter.

  "How they go on," Mrs. Baynes said with a smile.

  "Don't worry," Baynes said. "I'll convince them."

  He ushered his wife out of the office and looked at Ban Sar Din, who said, "They don't even listen to me anymore. Someone's going to call the police."

  "Maybe they'll listen to me," Baynes said. "They know I'm one of them."

  "Why should they listen to you?" said Ban Sar Din. "You're not even holy."

  "Then make me holy," Baynes said.

  The Indian shook his head. "You come in here, a walk-in, you take over my office with your computers, you encourage other walk-ins at our services. I don't think you're ready to be a Holy One."

  "Maybe I should ask the people outside?" Baynes said. He started for the door.

  "Welcome to the ranks of the holy, O Chief Phansigar," Ban Sar Din said, then sullenly traipsed out of the office to go back to his apartment across the alley. He saw Baynes put a big arm around the shoulders of his two children and pull them to him, just before he closed the office door.