by Dakota Banks
The car turned in at a narrow driveway. Maliha followed. When the car pulled into a circular drive and the two occupants got out, she was already poised behind a pillar near the door. Maliha picked up the woman’s name, Florence. It was nearly dark and suddenly lights around the estate flickered on for the night. Maliha was hidden, but her shadow was not.
Holding her breath, she watched as Scott and Florence walked within a couple of feet of part of her shadow. She needed to remain in position because she was going to run inside when Florence opened the door, and had to be at the correct angle to make it in.
I can’t believe I’m doing this. I should be back in my hotel room planning my expedition to Ethiopia.
Maliha was following a hunch and most of the time, her hunches panned out. Florence paused outside the door, leaning against the door frame.
Maybe she’s having second thoughts. Run, Florence! I’ll make sure he doesn’t follow you.
Scott, trying to look cool, had one hand on the frame above Florence’s head and was gesturing with the other as they talked. With the couple in that position, Maliha wouldn’t be able to make it through the door without knocking them aside. She was close enough to hear the conversation, which was about Scott’s export business. Finally, they turned to go inside. Scott opened the door, stepped in, and typed the password into the alarm system panel inside the door to disengage the alarm. Florence entered the front hall and Maliha followed as soon as she could without being seen. The door nipped her heel as she dashed in and found the first available room to hide in—an old-fashioned parlor for greeting guests. The couple passed her and leaned against the outer wall of the parlor.
Maliha heard some panting and moaning going on, and from her vantage point she saw articles of clothing flying onto the floor. There was low talk that she strained to hear but couldn’t quite make out, and she couldn’t stick her head out into the hall. Then, instead of their footsteps going upstairs, where she assumed the bedrooms would be, she heard a door being opened nearby. They’d disappeared into the lower level.
Maliha emerged from the parlor. The door they’d gone through wasn’t fully closed and she sidled up to it to listen. She felt a bit ridiculous. Worse than the usual Peeping Tom, she was inside where the action was. She thought she heard sounds of lovemaking coming from the slightly open door to the basement. She quickly ducked back into the parlor.
Maliha had almost convinced herself to leave, when she was astonished to see Scott come up from the basement. He was nude, and she could see hundreds of small scars on his body, everywhere that would be covered by clothing. She got a queasy feeling in her stomach. She’d seen that before, only all the cuts were bleeding at once: an old Chinese method of execution known as língchí, death by a thousand cuts.
Scott came back with a large knife and went into the basement, confirming Maliha’s fears.
She pushed the basement door open with her foot wide enough to see Florence, naked and spread-eagled, tied on a bed. Scott straddled her and began cutting with the knife. Cutting his own arms, letting the blood run down Florence’s breasts.
What the fuck?
Maliha had the feeling that Scott was in his warm-up phase, and that soon he’d be cutting Florence rather than himself. She kicked the door open and ran down the stairs. Scott, still astride, looked over at the intrusion wide-eyed. He was just starting to react when she reached the edge of the bed and lunged for his knife-wielding arm. Grabbing his wrist, she twisted it and heard bones snap. The knife fell to the bed and Scott screamed in pain.
Yanking his broken wrist, she pulled him off the bed. She wrapped her arm around his neck, then pressed hard on her arm with her other hand, making a very efficient noose. She had him in a blood choke, compressing his carotid arteries. He raised his good hand to try to pull her arm away, but it was too late. In seconds, he was unconscious and she let him drop to the floor. If she’d continued the choke longer, he would have been dead.
Maliha drew a small knife from its sheath at her waist and cut the ropes binding Florence to the bedposts. Florence sat up with her legs over the edge of the bed, rubbing her wrists.
“He was going to kill me.”
Maliha nodded. She didn’t feel the need to explain that Scott would have killed her slowly, over two or three days, with hundreds of small cuts like the ones he bore on his body. “Here’s what we do now. We go upstairs—”
Florence grabbed the knife from the bed and ran at Scott’s unconscious body. Maliha blocked her.
“You don’t want to do that.”
Florence tried to slip by. “How the hell do you know what I want? Let go of me!”
“I’m not trying to minimize what you went through. Right now you can get counseling. Pull your friends around you and get your life back. If you kill him, he owns you. Even if you get away with self-defense, you’ll think about him every day for the rest of your life. Put the knife back.”
Instead Florence offered Maliha the knife. “You do it then.”
Maliha inhaled deeply. She stared at the knife, which already had Scott’s blood on it. She could easily add more. She could be the instrument of Florence’s revenge and wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over it either.
“Your goal is to strike with no chance of recovery,” Master Liu taught. “An underhanded strike is always best. Point the tip up under the ribs, aiming for the heart. Be sure to enter below the ribs or the point may be deflected. A sudden jab overcomes the resistance of the skin and membrane beneath. Visualize the passage of the blade through the body as though you were guiding it with your mind. Continue upward until the heart is reached. With practice, you can feel this entry. Give the blade a twist to enlarge the heart wound. Always pull out the knife to allow a path for the blood to flow out of the body. If time permits, you may also slice the throat to speed bleed out.”
Maliha’s brain played out the practiced movements in muscle memory. She started to reach for the knife.
Then she shook her head. “No. The law can handle this. Come upstairs with me, or don’t.”
She went up the stairs and into the hall. A few tense seconds later, Florence came after her.
“I didn’t do it.”
“I’ll block the basement door. No, don’t touch your clothes. Let the police give you a blanket.” Maliha took a chair from the dining room across the hall and tucked the top of it under the doorknob to form a brace. “This is going to be a tough time for you, but you’re a strong woman. You already showed that.”
“What shall I say about you?”
“Say someone must have heard your screams. I’m going to break in the door so it will look like your rescuer came in that way and left before the police arrived.”
Maliha went outside. It was a heavy door with a strong lock. She backed up about thirty feet, took a run at the door, and flew through the air to strike it with a powerful blow from both feet. She crashed into the hallway, with the door flat on the floor beneath her.
“Call the police now.”
Maliha waited outside until she heard sirens, then started to walk to the hotel, thinking that maybe she should give up casually checking peoples’ auras as she had in the Lemon Tree Café.
The pain started on her abdomen, and she sat down on a bench to wait until it passed. She leaned back as figures walked across her belly from one pan to another, leaving burning footprints in her skin, her reward for saving Florence’s life and future lives that Scott would have taken if he’d remained out of prison.
Maliha wrapped the Black Ghost around her again and let it sink in deeply.
Chapter Twenty-Six
At the hotel, she cleaned up and slept for hours. In the middle of the night, she got up and spread the copy of the treasure map out on the desk to study it.
There were hundreds of map copies out there, maybe thousands, depending on how long the shop had been selling them. There was bound to be a certain small percentage of buyers who believed the woman’s story and set off to find the
treasure. The majority would have turned back after a few days in southwestern Ethiopia. There are some expeditions on the Omo River but nothing like the tourist tours on the Nile. And an expedition wouldn’t go into the areas indicated on the map: up tributary streams and into the territories of tribes who have little or no contact with outsiders.
But there were plenty of adventurous treasure hunters in the world who could hire local guides and go off the beaten track. What if someone had already claimed the shard? It could be in some private collector’s display case.
Or worse, in the hands of some demon? I might not be the only one Lucius is tracking. And what if the council reaches their launch point for the hitchhikers while I’m out running around in the wilderness? I could stay here and beat the bushes like everyone else. Try more long-shot sources. Abiyram’s working on it, though, and that’s the best I can do.
The pull to go to Ethiopia was strong, but there was a dilemma. On the one hand, there was the search for information on the location of the council members. On the other, a clear path, literally a map, to something that would move her closer to the greatest goal she could accomplish. Objectively, it was a tough decision, but her instincts had already made the choice.
She phoned Amaro and told him the basics of what had gone on with Abiyram. The conversation was a bit stiff but he didn’t raise any of the complaints from their last talk.
“So you’re on hold with the hitchhikers?” Amaro said.
“Until I come up with locations for the two remaining council members and the Leader, I guess so. I want you to keep digging.”
“Oh, I am. Are you sure you should be doing this?”
“Going after the shard? I feel I have to.”
Maliha’s attempt to buy a packraft and go alone into the Omo wilderness was met with laughter by the outfitter in Addis Ababa, but money prevailed.
She had no time to spend days driving across Ethiopia to get to the point where she could begin using the map. Using Hound’s contacts, Amaro rented a helicopter for her.
Her pilot was a Canadian nicknamed Cargo. He’d ferried food relief across Eritrea to starving Ethiopians in the mid 1980s famine and decided to stay on. He knew the countryside well. He kept up a conversation extolling his own adventures in Africa when he was younger. Now in his early sixties, he claimed he’d still be on those adventures if he didn’t have a bum knee, which he slapped regularly during the conversation as if to punish it. Finally, he got around to curiosity about his passenger.
“Where you headed?”
“To do some white-water rafting.”
“Eh, you could take one of the tours.”
“I like the solo challenge.”
He looked Maliha up and down.
“You done this kind of thing before?”
“I’m an old hand at wilderness adventuring. It’s a wonder our paths didn’t cross back in the eighties.”
Cargo frowned for a minute, then burst out laughing. “A good joke! Okay, I’ll stay out of your business. Just wanted to make sure you knew what you were getting into.”
She gave him the coordinates for her drop-off and pickup spots. He shook his head.
“Drop-off’s okay, pickup isn’t. You need to be farther down, where the valley opens up into savannah.”
“You tell me then.”
They settled on a spot. “How much time?”
“A week.”
When Cargo landed the copter, they were about a mile away from a put-in point. Maliha strapped throwing knives to her thighs and put the whip sword around her waist. The packraft, rolled into a tight bundle, rode low on her back with two backpacks above it. Last to go on were the foldable paddles on either side of the two backpacks. Cargo whistled in amazement.
“I guess you do know what you’re doing. You got guns somewhere in all that stuff? This isn’t the zoo, you know. The shit out here takes big bites out of you. What about fresh water? You drink that river water, you’re gonna regret it.”
“I’ve got everything I need. I’ll see you downstream in a week.”
She waited until he’d taken off, then started out at a fast walk on the path to the river. Maliha didn’t expect to meet anyone because it was a little-used entry point, allowing practically zero float time before entering a stretch of rapids. Most tourists liked a combination of floating and running. She inflated her raft at the edge of the Omo River. Repeatedly filling the inflation bag, like blowing up a beach ball, she squeezed the air into the raft. She unfolded one of the paddles and tied it to the raft. The other one, a spare, was fastened in the bow of the boat with her other supplies. She made sure the map was secure in its waterproof container. The river’s center channel was showing some rough water and rocks, and it was going to be difficult to get out there into a clear passage. With a packraft only five feet long, she wore it as an extension of herself as well as paddled it, meaning her body movement made a lot of difference. Out she went into the swirling river, paddling and maneuvering hard, and got the raft oriented before the water got worse.
The Crayne expedition is launched.
The first day was routine. The river passed through heavily forested hills. Between rapids, there were deep pools where hippos and crocodiles sunned themselves. Shrieks of colobus monkeys came from the trees and butterflies coasted lazily over the river. She spent the night on a sandy beach, but expected it to be the last beach she’d run across. She ate packaged food and drank from the river, in spite of Cargo’s warning. The traveler’s disease didn’t strike Maliha. Her immune system wouldn’t allow it.
The night under the stars was peaceful. She was comfortable with the jungle sounds around her.
In the morning Maliha sat cross-legged in the sand and examined the map. Her first key point was the mouth of a tributary and she believed she was close. If she didn’t spot it today or at the latest tomorrow, she’d missed it and would have to start all over. It was unlikely she could hike back and put the raft in again in time, so that meant she’d lose her chance on this trip. The map was drawn in a rough three-dimensional manner, but not like an artist would render it accurately. It was more like a child’s version, an attempt to use perspective to draw cliffs and hills and forests and the sheer-sided gorges that the river passed through.
She tried aura vision on the map, although she thought it was a long shot. Plants and animals had auras, subdued ones but there, but non-living things didn’t. She turned the map over, held it to the sun, experimented with overlapping one portion of it onto another—nothing worked.
The map was simple. There were only two landmarks on it to get to the shard, not a complex series of them. At times her search felt hopeless—surely someone would have beaten her to the spot by now, with directions as simple as go to Point A, go to Point B, claim the prize.
There was something else she needed to be thinking about, but she wanted to wait until she’d passed the first milestone. She had to assume that somewhere out there, Lucius was following her, possibly running the riverbank as she ran the rapids, and that he intended to steal the shard if she found one.
Back in the river, she watched the shores intently. She entered a run of white water of a higher classification than she’d encountered the day before, probably a level V. Large waves pummeled her little raft, and it was hard to find the passage among the large boulders. It was the type of rapids she should have scouted first or even portaged, because she wasn’t here for the thrills. The raft dipped and rose as she guided it expertly. Maneuvering around rocks, water flooded over her and she could barely see. Shaking the water from her face, her eyes widened as she caught sight of water pouring into the river from a narrow canyon on her left—the tributary!
She worked her way through the rest of the rapids and when the water calmed, she put in to shore on the west side of the river, where she’d seen the canyon. There was no sandy beach here, but a steep incline leading directly into the forest. She wouldn’t be going any farther down the Omo until it was time to go t
o her pickup destination. It was late afternoon, but she broke everything down for trekking and loaded the packs on her back. With several hours of daylight left, she started walking back upstream. The noise of the rapids drowned out the jungle sounds, drowned out everything, including her thoughts.
She reached the canyon’s edge and walked along it. Mist rose from the water at the bottom of the canyon as it tumbled over boulders on its way to join the Omo. The forest closed in around her and it felt like a primeval place, as it could have been—many archaeological finds had been made in southeastern Ethiopia. A leopard paced nearby, curious, close enough to take her measure but far enough away that she just caught glimpses of it. Birds called and flew and displayed their exotic colors. She spent the second night under a canopy of leaves so dense it was as if there were no stars.
How to keep the shard from Lucius? I could run with it but he can catch me. Appeal to his sense of fairness? Hasn’t worked yet.
She had brought along with her something that she hoped might give her a chance. It was a tranquilizer gun, loaded with a dart that could be used on large animals.
Large animals. Giraffes. Hippos. Roman centurions? Would it work on him, or delay him long enough so I can break his neck again? I don’t think he’d let me get close enough to do it otherwise.
She stopped for lunch, packaged hiker’s food and bottled water. Afterward she examined the map again. Her next milestone was a cleft in the canyon wall shaped like a snake’s head. That was it, point B, where the shard was hidden. She ran her fingers over the cuneiform writing, marveling again that Anu had in some fashion written it. To her amazement, the design on the map blurred as she did so, just like the writing on the Tablet of the Overload that spun by too quickly to read without the Great Lens. She watched it until her eyes hurt trying to follow the movement, and all of a sudden it stopped.
She blinked. Another section of the map had been revealed. The snake’s-head cleft was the starting point of another journey. Maliha grinned. All those copies of the map that had been sold meant nothing. The heirloom that had been passed down in the shop woman’s family hadn’t done any of her adventurous family members any good. Nothing had. Not until Maliha, who had translated Anu’s writing, brought the map here had anyone seen the secret portion.