by Alex Archer
“I’d rather not, thanks.” Annja compressed her lips. “Still, I had the absolute conviction he was really, physically there. That I could have hit him with my…fist…if I’d only been quick enough.”
Dan laughed again, in a lighter tone. “Publico said you were a martial-arts expert with more than a little rough-and-tumble experience. I like that in a woman. And yeah, I had the same sense about the woman in my room. Although it didn’t occur to me to hit her. But which impossibility is going to upset your worldview the most? Astral projection, some kind of technological projection, or teleportation?”
“I think I’ll just go back to bed,” she said, “and try not to speculate in the absence of sufficient data.”
“Or an overabundance of uncomfortable data.”
“I thought you were the hardheaded, skeptical type, too,” she said.
He shrugged. “Maybe I’m more a reflex skeptic. Sometimes being a skeptic means distrusting the official explanation. Especially when you’ve seen official explanations revealed as flat-out lies as often as I have.”
Standing in the hallway there was a sudden sense of awkwardness between them.
Dan grinned. “Guess I’ll go back to bed, too,” he said. He tipped his head from side to side, stretching his neck muscles.
They stood there a moment longer, not precisely looking at each other, not precisely looking away. The dingy off-white wallpaper was starting to come away in patches on the wall, she noticed. No wonder, in this humidity.
“Well,” he said, drawing it out just a little, “good night.” He turned and padded on his bare feet into his room and shut the door.
“Night,” she said. She stood looking at his door for a couple of breaths longer. Then she went into her own room.
She shut the door with more force than necessary.
“OLÁ, MAFALDA!” Annja called as the little brass bells strung on the inside of the door jingled merrily to announce their entrance. “Where are you?”
Followed closely by Dan, she pushed inside. Outside it was full noon. Their eyes, dazzled by the brightness of the equatorial sun, took time adjusting to the darkness within the shop.
“Maybe she’s stepped out,” Dan said dubiously.
“And left the door unlocked?” Annja said. “This may not be Rio de Janeiro, but that’d be pressing her luck even here.”
“Maybe the locals are afraid of her magic,” Dan said.
“You don’t believe in magic.”
“But they do.” He stopped as the door jangled shut behind them and sniffed. “What’s that smell?”
It hit Annja, too. Beneath the astringent smells of herbs and powders, of dust and the moldering bindings of old books, lay a smell of sweetness. And something foul.
“Christ—” The word came from Dan’s throat as though around something choking him.
On the counter to the right of the door Mafalda lay with her head, still wrapped in its bright turban, propped on the cash register. Otherwise she was nude. She stared fixedly at the ceiling.
Feathers had been stuffed in her mouth. Mystic symbols had been scrawled on her bare belly in blood.
Her blood. Her throat had been slit.
8
Fast motion caught the corner of Annja’s eye. She spun, reflexively bringing up her right forearm in a deflecting block.
A wooden pole struck her forearm. It was the haft of a spear, and its bright metal tip slid forward to graze her ear. A bundle of feathers tied behind the spear tip slapped her cheek.
Above the far end of the spear she saw the eyes of her visitor of the night before, burning in the gloom like dark stars.
Before she could react further the spear was withdrawn. With lightning speed it darted straight for her eyes. She twisted her body clockwise and leaned back, allowing the weapon to thrust past her.
She caught a flash impression that Dan was struggling with an opponent of his own. She had no attention to spare him. Her own foe was remarkably fast and determined.
His third thrust came low. Annja jumped high into the air to avoid the strike at her legs. She lashed out with her right foot, kicking a set of stout jars filled with different-colored powders and crushed leaves off the top shelf of a display toward her attacker. As one heavy jar tumbled toward his head, spilling orange powder that glittered even in the gloom, he reflexively jerked the spear back to interpose the haft.
Annja used some of the energy of her fall to add momentum to a spinning straight-legged reverse kick. The back of her heel caught the spear haft and wrenched it right out of the man’s hands.
He spun and darted toward the back of the shop. Annja chased him. A pair of machetes hung crossed on the back wall. The man snatched down not one but both at once, and turned on his pursuer. He waved the heavy two-foot blades in a whistling figure-eight before him.
He advanced on her, apparently unconcerned that she was unarmed. Should I expect chivalry from someone who’d ritually murder a harmless shopkeeper? she thought. Unless she intended to flee—or die where she stood—he wasn’t leaving her any choice.
Hoping Dan was too busy with his own assailant to notice anything else unusual she held her right hand as if gripping something, focused her will, reached…
The sword appeared in her hand.
The man’s eyes widened to see the broadsword materialize from thin air. But the two big single-edged blades never faltered in their complex dance of death. Annja was pretty sure his moves were intended to hypnotize or intimidate her, as well as pose a daunting problem in attack or defense. She didn’t doubt he could trap a longer blade between his and twitch the sword right out of her hands if she got careless.
Annja opted for the direct approach. She simply whacked at one of those dervish-whirling blades with her sword.
There was a jar of impact up her arm, a strangely musical clang. More than a foot of dark steel blade shot away to embed itself in the wall, between tattered posters for local samba clubs. The man stopped to stare in amazement at the surface where his machete had been chopped off at an angle as neatly as a bamboo stalk.
Annja’s strike to sever the blade had been forehand. She flowed forward and whipped the sword around in a horizontal backhand stroke that should have separated the long-haired head from wide copper shoulders. Instead the man bent his upper body to his left, away from the stroke. The blade whizzed just over his head, slashing free a lock of hair that floated downward in the heavy air like a feather.
He thrust for Annja’s flat belly with his remaining machete. The speed and fury of this strike would have impaled her had she not leaped back and left like a cat.
Unfortunately the motion slammed her hip into another counter laden with Mafalda’s exotic merchandise. A choking cloud of dust and bits of ground herb and tiny wisps of feather floated up to surround Annja’s head as jars jostled her arm. She sneezed, eyes filling with tears.
He rushed her, raising the machete to chop her down. In dodging, she had turned half away from him clockwise. She gripped the long hilt of her sword with both hands and thrust almost blindly toward the onrushing figure.
She felt a momentary resistance as he ran onto the blade.
His eyes blazing with determination, he drove himself onward. The sword’s point came out his back with a sickening sound. He fought to bring his raised weapon down in a self-avenging death stroke.
Fading strength betrayed his will. The machete fell from fingers that could no longer grip. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. A look of infinite sadness, almost apology, came into the blazing black eyes.
Then all light went out of them. They became dull as stones. He slumped in death.
Annja grimaced. She had killed many times. And almost every time before she had killed someone who richly deserved it—at the least a violent aggressor, and sometimes a serial predator upon human prey.
She knew somehow this man was none of those. He was a good man fighting with all his strength and will for something he truly believed was righ
t. Deluded he may have been—must have been—but fighting for the right nonetheless.
Her head spun with confusion. Doesn’t that make him innocent? Her mission in life—as much as she could understand it—was to protect the innocent, to preserve innocence, at all costs. Even the cost of her life. Yet she had just killed a man acting for reasons she could not reproach.
He attacked you, a voice inside her head reminded her. And that fact seems to establish pretty definitively that he either killed Mafalda or had guilty knowledge of the deed. Virtuous he might have been. Innocent, no.
All this passed through her mind in a flash, a wheel of spiritual and stomach sickness, as she released her grip on the sword. It returned to its otherwhere, infinitely far yet no farther than the palm of her hand. The dead Amazonian warrior slumped to the plank floor.
Loud crashes snapped Annja back to the moment. She spun in time to see Dan flying upside down into a tall bookcase against one wall, having evidently crashed through a long table and a crowded set of shelves. The broken remnants of these and their contents were still falling toward and clattering off the floor in an immense swirl of dust and magic powders.
Standing at the apparent launch point of his flight was a tall, wiry, African-looking woman in a headdress like a flare-topped white can. She seemed to be in the follow-through stages of having executed some kind of throw. But Annja had never seen any woman throw a grown man like that. Nor any man.
The woman straightened. For a moment she stood facing Annja. Annja felt her gaze slide past, take in the dead man sprawled on his face on the floor right behind her. The woman’s handsome features twisted in a grimace of grief that tore at Annja’s heart.
The woman’s right hand whipped up with striking-viper speed. The very nature of the movement triggered Annja’s reflexes, already set on hair trigger. She was in motion, diving over the counter she had slammed against mere seconds before, before the woman’s hand came level with her dark eyes.
Annja had learned that she could dodge gunshots. Not because she could move faster than bullets, but because she’d found herself adept at reading the body motions of an opponent. She could see the motion of muscle and tendons in a gun hand, the paling of a trigger-finger knuckle as pressure was applied. When she had such warning she simply got out from in front of the muzzle before the shot was fired. It was a foolproof way of being missed.
And now it was fortunate that she acted before the shot was fired.
A green flash suddenly filled the shop. It filled Annja’s head with what seemed like emerald needles, stabbing and ricocheting inside her skull. The backs of her eyes hurt. A crack like thunder seemed almost incidental.
Impossible as it seemed, she knew what had happened. In college a careless classmate had flashed a laser pointer in her eyes from across the quadrangle. Although it was a low-power device and rated safe, the headache and vision disruption had persisted for hours. The aftereffects hadn’t completely gone away for two days.
This was no mere pointer. She had gotten only side-scatters of coherent light and it had severe effects. Dazzled, she hit the far side of the counter. She smelled smoke and heard the crackling of flames.
She came up onto all fours, moved cautiously forward. Another green flare lit the shop with an accompanying crack of ionized air. The counter’s bulk had absorbed a shot meant for her.
She called back the sword. Her mind raced. She realized the energy weapon had some limitations, probably including a recharge time. Otherwise the woman would simply hold down the trigger and slash through Annja’s concealing counter until she found flesh.
The thought chilled Annja with a dread that threatened to sap her strength. She remembered the oft-spoken words of her teachers—it was not the weapon but the wielder!
Crouching with one hand on the floor, gritty with spilled powders, she stuck her head around the counter’s end. A green flash blew a corner from the counter and set the wood to smoldering. But Annja had plotted her moves in her mind. She had withdrawn her head before the other woman could fire. Now Annja launched herself in a low dive, turning it into a forward roll that carried her past the foot of the main counter, where Mafalda lay. Fortunately her blood had pooled at the other end.
A second shot shattered the middle of that counter into flaming splinters, so close that spinning fragments seared Annja’s bare leg. She gathered her limbs under her and, with all the strength that fear and fury could lend her, leaped over the counter and Mafalda’s body.
The energy hand weapon apparently cycled quicker than Annja had estimated. She was met by a dazzling flash that sent more emerald needles stabbing through her brain to the back of her skull.
9
Dazzling though it was, the beam itself missed Annja. Screaming, she slashed blindly with the sword. She felt it bite and pass through the scarcely yielding solidity of wood, not flesh. Blinking wildly at tears of agony, she pressed forward.
When she could see again, it was to glimpse her opponent’s sandaled heel vanishing into an oblong of brilliance that must have been a back door.
A quick glance revealed Dan sitting up amid a jagged jumble of broken wood and glass, hair and shoulders dusted with bits of iridescent feather. He was holding his head in his hands and moaning.
Without further thought she followed her instinct—which was to pursue. She sprinted toward the light. She burst out into the heat and glare at full speed and shot across the narrow alley, slamming into a wall.
A green flash, blindingly bright even in the sun’s full glare, blasted a gouge in the wall. Annja saw her opponent running just before she disappeared around a right turn in the narrow way. The woman had snapped a shot toward where she judged her opponent would appear, not calculating that Annja would blow right through the doorway kill zone to the alley’s far side. Annja felt a cold twinge in her belly at the realization the woman could just as easily have foreseen Annja’s move had she been experienced in fighting instead of merely skilled.
But every choice, she knew, could go either way. You had to take your pick—and pray.
Annja ran after the vanished woman. She put the sword away as she raced along the alley. A tall white woman chasing a black one was likely to attract enough unwelcome attention. If she was waving a sword, things would spiral a lot further out of control.
She pounded around the corner. As she did she dimly remembered something she’d read somewhere, or maybe been told—that police departments trained their officers not to pursue a firearm-wielding suspect on foot. The reason was the officer might race around a corner to find herself confronted with a felon already braced and aiming, waiting for her to show in the gun’s sights.
Instead, Annja found herself confronting a broad street full of people in bright clothes staring in some consternation after the tall woman who had just plowed through them.
“Thief!” Annja shouted. It wasn’t true, so far as she knew. But to call her what she apparently was, a murderer, would only bring official scrutiny she definitely did not want. At least the baseless call of thief would give some context to her pursuit in the minds of the crowd.
The fleeing woman glanced back over her shoulder. She saw Annja through the crowd. Her handsome face twisted in dismay. Already slowed by looking backward, she stopped, turned and brought up her hand. The muscles of Annja’s face contracted in anticipation of a green death bolt. But she kept doggedly moving forward, slowed to a jog by the desire not to jostle the passersby.
The woman in the flared turban pointed her hand at Annja. Annja couldn’t see what she held. Her brain screamed for her to duck, dodge, dive to the sidewalk. Instead she made herself forge on, slowly closing the gap, already less than thirty yards—a long shot for a handgun.
She made her eyes hold the other woman’s gaze. She could see indecision ripple across the beautifully chiseled dark features like wavelets across a pond, followed by frustration.
The woman dropped her arm and stepped sideways into a door.
Murd
erer or not, she has scruples about shooting into a crowd, and the self-control to heed them, Annja thought. The Promessan had some conscience, at least.
The doorway had a warped wooden jamb covered in peeling blue paint. The door had not closed all the way. Annja plunged inside.
It was dark. A bit of light fell on the floor from a flyspecked, yellow-stained window at the far end of the corridor she found herself in. Annja smelled strange spices, things boiling, some eye-searing kind of chemical cleanser. She was in an obvious tenement. Infants cried, voices sounded, music jangled and sang to her in a dozen melodies from behind doors with tarnished brass numbers nailed to them. She found the effect strangely pleasing.
But she wasn’t there to savor the atmosphere. From the look and feel of the hallway the fleeing woman had not ducked into any of the apartments. Annja raced up a narrow wood stairway to her left.
She heard footsteps drumming above. A shadow fell as someone leaned into the light spilling from above. Annja ducked to the wall as a brilliant green lance stabbed down, blasting the railing to splinters a few feet from her and sending up a curl of stinking blue smoke.
She summoned the sword. She wasn’t sure what good it would do her against a laser. But it made her feel better. She heard the footsteps dwindle above. Apparently her quarry had taken off down the third-floor hallway.
Annja raced after her. The sweat streamed down her face and body, and her breath burned in her lungs. She was in excellent shape but combat drained a body like nothing else. Especially the strain of mortal combat—and against some kind of superweapon to boot.
She reached the top of the stairs. The woman was almost at the corridor’s end. Sensing Annja, she spun. She shouted something Annja could not understand. It sounded like an African dialect. She fired. Annja leaned over the wooden railing, almost toppling back down the stairs to avoid the shot.
