Destroyer - Master's Challenge Part 7

He set them free and lifted one of the containers to his lips. The milk was warm but good. He drank greedily.

Something moved. There was a sound like a wail, quickly m.u.f.fled. With a start, he set down the container and s.h.i.+fted the dried gra.s.s inside the cart. At the back, hidden behind the tall containers and half covered with gra.s.s, was a thin young woman holding an infant in her arms. Her shoulders shook. With jerky movements, she tried to put the baby behind her. Its fat brown legs kicked out at the air.

He felt something stirring within him. Colors, a strange music, a heightened awareness. The little brown legs seemed to glow, blocking out everything around them.

No, he told himself. He would not let it happen. He had felt the same wild longing nearly all his life. It heralded the unleas.h.i.+ng of the inhuman beast he carried inside him. He had watched a pig explode when he was ten years old, and had realized even then that somehow he had made it happen. He was born with the gift of death. He had set his own parents on fire just by imagining it. He had transformed a beautiful girl into a ma.s.s of boils with the hideous power of his mind. And now he saw the baby's fat brown legs charred black to the bone, disappearing into ash . . .

The baby cried, jarring his thoughts. It was too late to stop the power, but he could divert it if he . . . tried. . . .

"Go," he shouted in Turkish. "Take the baby. Now."

Feeling as if every muscle and nerve in his body were being ripped apart, he forced his gaze away from the baby 71.and onto one of the uninhabited stone mountains. It had been so difficult, just the slight turning of his head, that he thought he would die from the effort. He knew it would not be long before he would be unable to control the power even that much.

Relaxing, allowing his eyes to rest on the great peak of gray rock, he exhaled slowly. The mountain changed before his eyes to a glowing, jagged ma.s.s of electric blue. Dissonant music, sounding like a choir of tormented souls, rose up around him. The mountain glowed green, then orange, outlined with an aura of bright white. The air smelled acrid and oppressive. The power had engulfed the mountain.

"Nuihc, why have you done this to me?" he cried. If he had been left alone, he might have died in childhood, as other mutants did. He should not have been permitted to develop to his capabilities. He should never have been privy to the teachings of Sinanju, which strengthened a mind that was already too strong to live among men. But his teacher, Nuihc, the man who had saved him from the world of men, had not allowed him to die. For Nuihc had seen in young Jeremiah Purcell a being who could help him to conquer the earth. In Jeremiah, Nuihc had created the Dutchman, homeless, mad, doomed. And now Nuihc was dead.

"You may serve me in only one way," Nuihc had said a thousand times before his death.

The Dutchman still remembered the first time he heard the conditions of his life under the strange Oriental teacher.

"How may I serve you, Master?" he had asked.

"Kill him who rules the destiny of Sinanju. Should 1 die, bring to death by your own hands the Master Chiun. Only then will you find rest."

Kill Chiun. Find the Master of Sinanju and kill him, or live forever in torment.

72.The distant peak quivered and trembled like a piece of crumpled paper. Then, its sides heaving apart, the mountain exploded in a crash of flying rock that blackened the sky.

When it was over, he fell on the ground and sobbed.

Chapter Seven.

Even before Remo got to Peru, he knew that he never wanted to see that country again. It had been the worst trip of his life. The small boat he had set sail in broke apart during a storm in the Sea of Okhotsk. He was picked up near dawn by a Russian freighter, whose captain was going to turn him over to Soviet authorities until Remo uncovered several crates filled with eight-millimeter p.o.r.no films. The Russian captain didn't understand much English, but "contraband" was a word he understood. So was "Siberia."

Thus was Remo dumped overboard somewhere in the vicinity of the Aleutian Islands, where he was rescued by an American seaplane and carted as far as Juneau, Alaska. Slogging on foot to a U.S. military base some fifty miles away, he stowed away on an experimental supersonic fighter on a test run to Houston. At the Gulf of Mexico, he hitched a ride on a Mexican fis.h.i.+ng boat in exchange for labor.

Several thousand mackerel later, he arrived in Merida, Mexico, stinking but richer by twelve dollars-enough to 73.74.get him on a series of second-cla.s.s buses crammed to bursting with chickens and pigs, through the middle American countries. It was touch and go at the borders of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Equador. By the time he arrived in the vast, unpopulated Peruvian highlands, he knew he'd been right. The Master's Trial was an exercise in lunacy. No one would ever find him in this place. He sat beneath a yew tree and slept.

He awoke in the middle of a sea of painted faces. Nearly a hundred men surrounded him, all of them decked out in feathers and tunics of bright cloth. They carried spears. The spears were pointed straight at him.

"Wait a second," Remo said, staggering to his feet. "Whoever you think I am, you're wrong. Donde est-" His high school Spanish deserted him. Not that it mattered. He didn't know where he was going, anyway.

He searched his mind for the name of the man he had come to see. Jildo? No, Jildo was the Viking. There was someone named Kirby, or Kibbee, and then the guy in Wales, Emory or something. Why didn't these people have ordinary names?

"Me Remo," he said, pulling out his jade stone.

The leader of the group took it out of his hand and examined it. He nodded to the others, then gave it back, motioning Remo forward.

"Ancion," Remo said, remembering. "That's the name of the guy I'm supposed to meet."

At the mention of the name, the warriors all laid down their spears and knelt. "Ancion," they chanted, bowing low.

"Ancion must be a big cheese."

"Ancion," they intoned.

They walked for half a day through the hills, over a rope bridge spanning a large river, and finally up a narrow footpath winding in a spiral around a high mountain. At 75.the apex was a bank of stone steps leading to a ma.s.sive building painted brightly and adorned with carved friezes. In the floor outside the main entrance was a smooth, domed rock bearing the same three characters as Remo's rock. The warrior leader took Remo inside, into a large stone chamber. In addition to the warriors, more than a hundred others were present, kowtowing toward a gold throne placed atop a pyramid of steps twenty feet high. On it sat a young man with refined, chiseled features. He was dressed in a checkered tunic weighted heavily with gold and silver, and a cape of what Remo recognized as bat fur. He wore a wide band of colored cloth around his head, and two large gold discs five inches wide over his ears. In his hand was a feathered scepter.

The warrior who had brought Remo held out his, hand and slapped the palm with two fingers. Uncertain of what he wanted, Remo gave him the piece of jade. It seemed to satisfy the warrior. He presented it to the man on the throne.

"You are the heir to the Master of Sinanju?" the one in bat fur asked. "A white man?"

"n.o.body's perfect," Remo said. "Are you Ancion?"

"Ancion," the crowd murmured.

"Is that the only word they know?"

The eyes of the man on the throne flashed. "The name of the Inca is sacred. It is not to be spoken by outsiders."

Remo looked around. "Which Inca?"

"There is but one Inca. He who rules the Inca peoples, descended from a hundred generations of kings. Our ways are not like yours, where even a mongrel white American is designated to take the place of the Master of Sinanju." He stared at Remo contemptuously. "Do not dare to use my name again."

Remo fought down the urge to jog up the stairs and punch Ancion in the nose. "Whatever makes you happy,"

76.he said. "Say, whoozis, it's about this fight we're supposed to have."

"The Master's Trial is not a 'fight.' "

"Well, it's not exactly a tea party. Look, You may not know this, but I'm supposed to kill you."

Ancion smiled coldly. "If you can, white man."

"Okay, okay. Maybe you'll kill me. The point is, this makes about as much sense as a circle jerk at the North Pole. Let's talk it over, okay?"

"If you are afraid to fight me, then acknowledge your defeat."

"Fine," Remo said. "You're the winner. Congrats. See you in church." He ambled away.

"Stop," Ancion shouted.

"What now? I told you you won."

"In the Master's Trial, only the victor lives. If you will not fight, you will be executed."

Remo said, "Hey, what's with you, anyway? I'm offering you an easy way out. We've both got better things to do than beat each other up like a couple of Tenth Avenue hoods. I just want to talk."

"The talking was done twelve centuries ago. Make your choice. The arena or the gallows?"

The man's English was definitely accented, but the accent wasn't Spanish. "How come you sound just like the Kennedys?" Remo asked.

"I was educated at Harvard. What is your choice, white man?"

"Harvard? Did they teach you there that it's okay to murder strangers?"

"I went to your country to study the ways of so-called civilized men. What I found was that civilization breeds war above all other things."

"And what do you think the Master's Trial breeds, hamsters?"

77."What we do today is not war, but a sacred tradition to avert war among the great remaining societies of the world. Without the Master's Trial, our peoples would fight one another openly. We would become known to the outside world. We would be absorbed into the huge, useless nations of the planet, wallowing in mediocrity. Without our traditions, we would lose our past. Do you not understand?"

"We don't have to fight each other in the first place," Remo said. "We can just mind our own business."

"That is not the nature of our peoples."

"How do you know? This dumb contest's been going on for a thousand years. Maybe ten thousand. Maybe we ought to try and get along."

"This is a useless argument," Ancion said. "We are not here to abolish the Master's Trial."

"Why not?"

"What is your choice, coward?"

Remo sighed. "I'll fight you," he said at last. "What a pain in the a.s.s you are."

As the Inca rose, the people in the room prostrated themselves on the floor. Ancion glided regally down the long staircase to a covered palanquin held by four stocky men on their knees. At a signal, they rose and carried Ancion outside.

Remo followed him into a stone amphitheater on the grounds behind the palace. Ancion's subjects, numbering nearly a thousand now, gathered around to watch.

"What happens if I win?" Remo asked, indicating the crowd.

"They will only kill you if you use magic."

"You learned a lot of terrific things at Harvard."

"They will watch for sorcery," Ancion said. An aide handed him what looked like a large ball made of leather strips.

78."I hate to break it to you, but there's no such thing as sorcery," Remo said.

The Inca didn't iook at him. "Now I see you are ignorant as well as arrogant."

"Knock it off, Ancion."

"Ancion," the crowd chanted.

"Will you guys cut that out?" Remo yelled. "So I'm ignorant because 1 don't believe in magic, huh? Well, this isn't the Middle Ages, you know. Which is what I've been trying to tell you since I got here."

"There is sorcery," Ancion said. "If you do not recognize it, then it will defeat you."

"Oh, I see. Is that what you're going to do, put the old whammy on me?"

"I have no magic," Ancion said quietly. "H'si T'ang has. The Other has."

Remo started. "The Other?"

"The one of legend, whom only magic can conquer."

"What's his name?"

"He has no name. He is the Other. But you will not meet him, because I will kill you first."

He grasped the end of a leather string protruding from the ball in his hands and snapped his arm outward. The ball unraveled with a crack into a long whip ending in a baseball-sized sphere that glittered with green light. It sang as Ancion twirled it above his head.

"My weapon is a bola of cut emeralds in mortar. What is yours?"

Remo watched the flying stone twirl in expert figure-eights in the sky. He knew by its speed that it could slice him in two in a fraction of a second. Ancion's face was set in deadly earnest. There was no way to talk him out of the Master's Trial now.

"What is your weapon?" the Inca repeated.

79.Remo readied himself, relaxing his muscles, focusing his energy, preparing his mind. "Sinanju," he said.

The crowd hushed. Ancion's bola whistled as it swung low, the first attack. Remo leaped over it. The Inca turned effortlessly, keeping the sparkling green ball taut at a distance of ten feet between himself and Remo. Then, the whip advancing like a snake, the second attack came. Small fluttering circles that sent Remo flying backward. When Remo was almost at the edge of the spectators, Ancion pulled the bola back into a huge, shrieking ellipse that cut through the air at different levels on each lightning-fast rotation.

The ball came at Remo's knees, then his neck, then his stomach. There was no way to get close to Ancion, unless he timed his attack with the rhythm of the bola. He waited, he counted. He felt the beating of the sailing ball, and prepared himself to advance when it was farthest from him. Then he moved quickly, straight ahead.

In the split second before he went down, Remo saw the hint of a smile on Ancion's face. For in that moment, just as Remo's feet twitched to advance forward, the Inca changed the rhythm of the flying weighted whip in his hand. With a jerk he shortened the length of leather cord. Before Remo could react to the movement, he felt the cut gems slit three deep grooves in his back.

"Are you still so sure you will kill me, American?" He pulled the bola back.

Remo got to his feet, feeling the throb in the flesh of his back. "Why-why didn't you kill me? You had the chance."

"The Master's Trial is a contest of skill, not a ma.s.sacre. I will not harm a man on the ground." He swung the weapon forward.

Remo dodged it, but barely. It came at him again. He rolled, scattering the crowd. Again he was on the ground, 80.and again Ancion stepped back, waiting. His aristocratic features were impa.s.sive.

Who is this man? Remo thought. Ancion had sworn to kill him, and yet he had spared his life twice in five minutes. This wasn't the kind of fighting Remo was used to. It was clean. It was fair. And it was good. Weapon or no weapon, Ancion knew how to handle himself.

"All right," Remo said. "You've made your point."

Ancion moved in, the bola forming a complex pattern in the air.