Kiai! & Mistress of Death

by Piers Anthony

  But this was twice the height of the others. I could not get my fingers over the edge; I had to scale the sheer wall. Unless I wanted to go around to the steps.

  Ha! Pedro just might have picked off all the snipers by now, but I was hardly going to risk my life on that assumption. And anyway, the machine gun nest at the top still had command of that section.

  There was a crash to the front. Pedro had picked off another sniper, but how many more were there?

  I felt along the wall. My fingers slid over irregularities; the whole face of it was covered with pictures and inscriptions. What an archaeological treasure was here, wasted on modern drug addicts. I remembered reading somewhere that the Mayan decorations were not art at all, but science, with every symbol carrying specific meaning. I was becoming more ready to believe that the drug could have originated here, a thousand or two thousand years ago.

  But those inscriptions helped me get a grip. I dug my claws into the stone, wincing for more than archaeological reason as large flakes crumbled and fell noisily to the terrace. I braced my feet against the artistic contours of the ancients, and climbed. The stone cracked off, and I fell back. Now I was glad for that broad platform, because without it I would have tumbled over the edge and bounced down the other tiers to the ground. Then it would have required no sniper's bullet to finish me.

  I tried again, and made it up a good yard or so before the stone betrayed me again. This time I landed on my feet, almost silently. But I knew this could not go on long. My arms, already tired from the climb up the lower terraces, were suffering. The moon was getting higher, diminishing my shadow. And the longer I took, the more likely I was to be discovered.

  Then the image of Chiyako reappeared in my mind, and I tried once more, and climbed to the next ledge.

  There was a small stone enclosure at the top, the remnant of the Mayan pinnacle, a temple or observatory. Inside that was the .30 caliber machine gun, its barrel poking out to cover the long steep staircase.

  I crossed to the back of the structure and climbed to its roof. Then I braced myself on the ledge just above the snout of the machine gun. My first job was to put that out of commission.

  My luck had held for a long time, allowing me to get all the way up here, but now it reversed. As I braced to leap, the stone gave way. I tumbled ignominiously down—on top of five suddenly alert demons.

  I rolled aside, feeling pain in the hip from my fall, and flung the sickle at the head of the man directly behind the machine gun. The blade thrust into the top of his bent head, killing him instantly. But now it was caught. I should have used the ball first; my reflexes were wrong for this weapon.

  I hauled on the chain, using the leverage to pull myself to my feet. As I drew close to the dead man, a demon recovered his feet and charged me with a machete. I blocked his downward swing with my forearm, and with my other hand gripped his loosefitting khaki shirt. I did a tomoe-nage, putting my foot in his stomach as I fell on my back, and threw him over the edge and down the side of the pyramid.

  Still there were three, and my weapon remained entangled in the skull of its victim. This would never have happened with the nunchaku. All three came at me, two with knives and one drawing a pistol.

  This was a common weakness among the demons: they attacked without fear and without proper organization. It was another break for me. Had the gunman stayed back to take careful aim while the other two engaged me, I would have been finished.

  I swung the reverse end of the chain. The ball missed the first, smashed the nose of the second, and slammed into the ear of the third, the gunman. Then I put my foot on the head of the demon behind the machine gun and wrenched out my blade in time to parry the thrust of the unhurt demon. I caught his knife in the crook of my sickle, whipped the ball at his ear, and as he ducked, my rising knee caught him under the chin. His reflexes had been fast, but my planning had foiled him.

  I looked anxiously around for Chiyako, but she was not here. I charged outside, waving to Pedro somewhere in the dark below, searching for some other place where the girl might be prisoner. But there was nothing.

  A bullet zinged by my ear. I dropped to the stone; not all the snipers were gone yet!

  A man came out of the enclosure. It was the demon with the smashed nose. I had forgotten that these people felt no pain; I had to knock them out or completely disable them before they would quit.

  He saw me and grabbed for the machine gun. Now I had to move. I launched myself at him as the muzzle swung around. But as I rose, the unseen sniper below fired again, forcing me down. I hurled the kusarigama, but it clattered against the machine gun harmlessly. There was nothing else to do; I had to risk the sniper. Maybe Pedro would bring him down before he got me.

  I scrambled for the machine gun, and got my hand on the barrel, shoving it aside as it fired. I felt the heat of the passing bullets and the displacement of air they made. The barrel heated, burning my hand. Then I grappled with the smash-nosed demon. His face was a mask of blood, black in this poor light, but he was high on Kill-13, and his strength was awful. I tried to take him down with a judo throw, but I was tired from my climb and the fight, while he had the power of insane concentration. He pushed me back across the roof toward the dark edge.

  It would have been impossible for the sniper below to pick me out; the two of us were too close together, moving about too rapidly. A bullet could strike either of us, or both. But the sniper was a demon; he did not care about losses, so long as he got me. He fired, and kept on firing, the bullets chipping away at the stone structure behind us. Some were tracers; they looked like a fireworks display as they bounced off the stone and sailed high in the air.

  This was an impossible situation. But it gave me an idea. I hugged my opponent to me and waltzed him around to the side of the structure, out of the sniper's line of fire. Now I had only one enemy to deal with.

  He caught my leg and boosted me over the edge. I scrambled wildly as I felt myself falling, and one hand caught the rim. I was still wearing the shukos! Those claws must have. been gouging the demon cruelly, yet it had made no difference. My hand scraped along the stone, the claw digging in, and I broke my descent.

  He thought he had me. His demon overconfidence was a liability. It took him a moment to realize that I was still clinging there. Then he stamped at my hands, but I was already swinging back up, away from the gulf. I caught at his foot, trying to topple him over, but he was still too fast and too strong for me. He fell on top of me, his knees striking my chest crushingly.

  I squirmed away. This demon was simply too tough; I could not, in my present condition, overcome him. So I got up and ran. Right to the machine gun, where my kusarigama lay. I snatched it up and kept running, the demon hot after me. Another sniper's bullet spanged into the stone. Why hadn't Pedro neutralized that one yet? I ducked around to the other side of the structure, but the bullets still came, and so did the demon.

  One more corner, out of the reach of the sniper, and now I was at the rear of the pyramid. And it was a sheer drop off of over a hundred feet. I didn't know whether it had been built that way, or damaged in back, but there was hardly room to stand.

  The demon skidded around the corner. Unawed by the height, he dived at me, as if seeking to hurl us both off the edge. I swung the sickle with all my remaining strength. The blade sliced into his neck and through it, and the point dug into the stone. Something flew through the air and struck my chest. It was his head. The thing bounced gruesomely on the stone, then rolled over the edge and dropped out of sight.

  I slumped weakly beside the decapitated body, glad I could not see it clearly. I had won—but where was Chiyako?

  CHAPTER 13

  EARTHQUAKE

  We cleaned out the pyramid, losing two of our remaining four men in the process. Some demons were almost dead, not from our action, but from the debilitating endstages of the addiction. Blind and emaciated, they nevertheless fought, ambushing us from crannies. This horrified me for another reason:
they could not have been addicted for more than a couple of years, yet had progressed to this stage. What a price a demon paid for his habit.

  There were a number of internal passages, and chambers where sundry items were stored: poppy seeds, coca leaves, marijuana leaves, hashish blocks, dried mushrooms and peyote buttons, together with assorted chemicals and steroidlike drugs. There really did seem to be thirteen major ingredients.

  In the deepest room was a laboratory, modern in most respects, powered by a generator. This showed one reason the demons must have set up a dummy company to import materials; such equipment could not be purchased locally. No doubt they had floated supplies up the Coco River and handcarried them here. Thus they had avoided contacts in the Honduras, so that there would be little evidence of their location or purpose.

  The laboratory was overlooked by a huge figure of the four armed goddess Kali. The black cast-iron statue was set up in such a way that humans or animals could be sacrificed and their blood channeled into the Kill-13 equipment.

  "The secret ingredient," Pedro said wisely. "Sacrifice. There must be a chemical, an enzyme, a catalyst, that modifies the other ingredients and unites them into a stable and tremendously potent drug."

  "Kali will punish," I said, echoing Miko's words. "The old demons go to make substance for the new."

  "There are no written records," he said. "We shall never know the exact formula, or the proper processing of the blood, unless we find a living demon. One who knows."

  "None will talk," I said. "We've been through that. Only the leaders have real information, and they are too smart to yield anything."

  He looked at the Mayan hieroglyphs decorating the walls of the room. "I wonder if it is written here?"

  I shrugged. "The same thought passed through my mind. But you told me that no one could read Mayan."

  "Partly true. They are working on it, and many symbols have been deciphered. Perhaps some enterprising scholar—"

  "Discovered the ancient secret," I finished. "No, it does not make sense. Why would he have brought in a Hindu god for a Mayan temple? That's no scholar. Ignorant men must have put this together, after stumbling on the formula by blind luck."

  "Perhaps it was a scholar from India, demented."

  I looked at him, and he shrugged, embarrassed. "No doubt you are correct," he said.

  "Pedro, you aren't planning to research that formula yourself!" I said, alarmed by his attitude.

  He shook his head regretfully. "I admit to having considered it. But these demons, they live two, maybe three years, then go to the pot to make new drug. Perhaps only the careless ones go so soon, the ones that over-indulge. But the end is plain. It is simply too dangerous. One slip, and I am on the greased channel to the black goddess."

  "Then let's break up this infernal laboratory and get out of here! One grenade should do it."

  Pedro shook his head. "A popular misconception, for those not familiar with explosives. A grenade is a mankilling weapon. It hurls pieces of shrapnel around; not good for material damage, except for delicate things like radio equipment."

  "Oh," I said, embarrassed. "They could replace the glass tubes and things."

  "Yes. So we want to collapse the whole passage. I have a pack full of explosives, bars of C3 strung on detonator cord. Twenty of those properly placed and the job will be adequate. Shame to do it to this palace, though."

  "More shame to have the demon cult regenerate within it."

  He nodded sadly. I wasn't certain whether his regret was for the waste of good archaeological prospects, or for the lost millions that control of Kill-13 might have made.

  We got the C3. I looked at the blocks of explosive nervously. I was sure it would not go off prematurely, for Pedro would not have gambled that way. But: "Suppose some, of it doesn't go off? You have only one detonator."

  "When one block goes, it all goes," he said with certainty. It was arranged: a delayed explosion, to give us time to get clear of the pyramid. When it went off, the whole edifice settled a little, filling in the network of passages. There would be no more Kill-13 from here.

  But in all the pyramid, and in all the cleared buildings of the city, there was no sign of Chiyako. Or of any woman. She wasn't here, and seemed never to have been.

  Pedro well understood my concern. "It was only your black woman's guess that she was here," he pointed out. "These things happen. But the search is not over. They must have depots, supply routes, supervisory personnel. Somewhere in that chain she remains. We have only to discover where."

  "With no leads?" I demanded bitterly. "They don't make written records, they don't talk, they only fight to the death. We may have destroyed Kill-Thirteen, but they will have the last laugh."

  "There are written records," he said.

  "I don't mean the Mayan writing!"

  "Written in Spanish."

  Suddenly he had my full attention. "Where?"

  "In Managua. It is the only route out of this region, if they want large, fast shipment."

  "Why not a Honduran city?" I asked, brightening. I had pretty much worked it out for myself, but was hungry for confirmation.

  "I would have heard of it, and I have heard nothing. Now that I have seen their enterprise, I know how they do it. When they set up here, the Salvador-Honduras war was raging. Not the time for making contacts there. And Honduras is backward and corrupt at best. So it was down the river to the sea, down the coast to Bluefields, then across to—"

  "Blueflelds! You' mean I was right where the demons were?"

  "No doubt. But only in Managua have the orange-eyes been seen. They use commercial flights for their packages. There will be official records, bills of lading, names, addresses. Someone has to pay, to sign the customs declarations, even false ones."

  "Pedro, you're a genius!" I exclaimed. "Why didn't you mention this before?"

  "We were not going in that direction before," he pointed out. "We sought the source, not the terminus." He glanced about the ruined city once more. "If only the drug were not so dangerous," he sighed.

  Pedro dropped me off at Managua and departed with alacrity for other business. I had no doubt that business was Amalita. But he loaned me one of his clerks, who had been told nothing about my mission but who was conversant with the city and its government. After a good, sorely needed night's rest, we would commence the quiet search for demon records.

  It was now the very height of the Christmas season. The festivities had intensified. The city seemed to be one big fiesta. There was music and dancing and drinking everywhere, and the churches were busy. In five days the Christ would be born again. I wished I were home, but I had little desire to celebrate in any way until I recovered Chiyako.

  The mills of officialdom grind slowly. I did not realize that the secret to success was money: frequent greasing of palms. Because of the language barrier, Pedro's clerk did not know of my ignorance. He must have assumed that I was too poor or honest to play it the Latin way, and I dare say that was correct. Still, it was frustrating, this inexplicable delay. We worked for two days before finally approaching access to the records we needed.

  We visited the Customs Building at the airport, the Telephone Company, and at the end learned that the records I needed were kept in the Camara de Comercio, Chamber of Commerce. That was an office building in the middle of the downtown area. We finally got hold of the right official and the right file. I saw the name on it: Kan-Sen. But the official paused, giving me a last opportunity to proffer some lubricating cash—and I still didn't catch on.

  "Sorry, Señor," he said then. "Official hours are over today." He closed the file.

  "But—"

  "Come back tomorrow. Or after the holidays."

  That was when I realized that he wanted money. Extra money from me, just for doing the job the state paid him to do. Furious, I refused. I would come back tomorrow. If need be, I would camp all day in his office.

  Pedro's clerk shook his head as we left. "This is as far as I can ta
ke you, Señor Striker," he said regretfully in his halting English. "Now you know where the information is."

  "Right!" I told him wrathfully. "Go on home. I'll take it from here, my own way."

  Grateful for the release, he departed. I dare say he was out of town within the hour. I could hardly blame him; my attitude must have seemed the height of folly to him.

  So I went back to my room and turned in, early.

  "Bah! Humbug!" I muttered as I ground into sleep.

  I woke with alarm. The whole room was shaking. Items were falling off the dresser, and the bed itself was dancing on the floor. Then the glass of the window shattered. I felt seasick; my sense of balance seemed to be shot.

  I had been dreaming some weird thing about the Ghost of Christmas Past, Scrooge and all that. Was I really having a visitation by the ghost, because of my surly refusal to be generous with graft for the poor local officials?

  My head cleared. Good God! I thought. The demons must have bombed the building!

  But there was no smoke, no flame. I scrambled into my trousers as the room swayed drunkenly, tossing me back on the bed. I didn't know what was happening, but I knew I had to get out of here. I was on the third floor!

  Plaster fell like hail as I staggered down the hall. People were crowding toward the elevator, as bemused as I. Many were in nightclothes; this was some time in the night. Exactly what hour was impossible to tell; I had lost my watch. I didn't trust the elevator; I ran for the stairs, putting out my hands to brace myself against the walls as I went.

  Somewhere in that mad lunge downward, I stumbled over something. There were people crowded all along the stairs, but I noticed this anyway. It was a child, a small girl, huddled on one step. "Terremoto!" she cried. "Earthquake!"

  Managua was in the throes of an earthquake—a bad one!

  A worse shudder came. The stairs twisted and creaked, and cracks appeared in the wall. People screamed and fell down the stairs. Without thinking, I picked up the girl—she weighed about fifty pounds—and hurdled the unsafe-looking steps and dashed on.