Paradox

by Alex Archer

  Great. That's totally what I need. More to worry about.

  She looked to Levi and found herself gazing into his wide eyes. They watched her steadily through goggles and glasses. The young rabbi seemed perfectly calm and at peace.

  On sudden impulse she kissed him on the tip of his cold nose. He blinked.

  "What was that for?" he asked. His voice had a rusty-hinge creak to it. If he was like her it was raw from breathing the thin, icy air.

  "For trusting me." She hoped that hadn't been cruel. She felt no romantic or physical attraction to him and she wasn't going to. But she felt a great surge of something like love for him. As if he were a younger brother.

  He's ten years older than you, she reminded herself. But in real-world experience, she knew, she was far his senior.

  Feels like centuries, she thought, as she began to disentangle them.

  She checked their anchors and replaced a couple she didn't trust. Then she expanded the length of safety rope tethering them to one another to twenty feet. It should give her some room to explore for a route down. Although last night, anyway, the only route she'd been able to detect dead-ended pretty decisively against that wide icy crack in the mountain rock.

  "What a difference a day makes," she muttered. "Or a little daylight." Being able to see where she was going struck her as an almost decadent luxury.

  But shortly she began to frown in dismay. The ugly realization slowly suffused her mind that the only possible paths were back up over the overhang, whose underside she now saw was slick with ice, or across the yawning gap, too far to leap with any degree of safety, to a surface that looked as hard and slippery as glass. Have I trapped us here? she wondered.

  Instantly her mind rebelled. There's always a way, she told herself fiercely. And I always find it.

  Yet was that mere childish bravado? Her resourcefulness had always served her in tight situations. Otherwise she'd never have lived to be doing her fly imitation up here on a sheer cliff with several thousand feet to anything resembling a decent-sized nonvertical surface below the thick soles of her boots.

  Everything has limits, she thought glumly. Had her resourcefulness at last done a fatal face-plant against its own boundaries?

  From not far enough above her a shout pealed out like a morning bell. "There she is! There's the filthy apostate who killed my brother!"

  Chapter 25

  Annja Creed looked up. Fifty feet above their precarious perch she saw three figures peering over another black rock shelf. Despite their hoods and goggles she recognized Leif Baron, Josh Fairlie and Jeb Higgins. Jeb was clearly the one who had alerted the others by screaming at them. Each wore a distinctive colored jacket, but by this time Annja could have distinguished the Young Wolves from each other anyway, by little more than the way they moved and carried themselves.

  "So they did keep searching throughout the night," she said. "Levi, we have to go."

  "Where?" The question was neither a challenge nor a cry of desperation. It was simply a good question.

  She shook her head and sighed. She wanted to cry in desperation. There was only one way.

  Thunder cracked. It reverberated between the walls of the ice chasm before them and made the whole great mountain seem to tremble. Amid the colossal racket the lesser crack of something passing them by faster than the speed of sound was scarcely perceptible. But Annja, who knew the sound too well, didn't miss it.

  "What's that?" Levi shouted, grimacing at the sharp noise hurting his ears.

  "They're shooting at us!" Annja said.

  Another pistol shot crashed. She never heard that bullet pass. As the echoes died she heard Baron shouting, "Accursed fool, you'll bring the whole mountain down on our heads!"

  She risked another look up. Jeb was leaning way out from his perch, clutching a safety rope with one gloved hand while firing his pistol at her with the other. His face was red with rage.

  "Oh, no," Annja said.

  "What do we do?" Levi asked.

  "Hold on," she said. She launched herself into space.

  Thunder roared a third time as she flew, feeling weightless. She tried to relax so that she wouldn't break any bones as she hit. She couldn't keep her shoulder blades from pinching toward each other with anticipation of a bullet biting between them.

  But Jeb's aim, already wild from passion, was thrown off even farther by the utter unexpectedness of her flying-squirrel jump.

  To a wall of sheer, slick ice.

  In her brief mad flight Annja dropped several feet. Screaming, she visualized and summoned her sword. She gave herself just enough time to reverse it and grasp it with both hands. Then she thrust, forward and down.

  Through thick ice the blade bit. So great was Annja's momentum that all but a foot of the steel vanished into the translucent sheet of ice and snow.

  She heard shouting. No words penetrated her consciousness; she had no awareness to spare as, clinging like a drowning woman with her right hand to the sword, she let go with the other to pull her ice ax from its loop in her belt and slam the spiked side of its head into the ice. Her forward-faced crampons bit home then, and she was almost secured.

  She held her breath and let the sword go. She sagged alarmingly but with three points of contact kept her grip like a fly on the slippery wall. Groping at her harness, she fumbled an ice picket free and rammed it home. Then she snapped one carabiner off a quickdraw from her harness onto the picket. She was safe.

  As safe as she could be dangling over a thousand-foot drop. With a group of murderous religious fanatics hanging over her head. One of whom was shooting at her.

  She turned her head. "Levi," she said, trying not to scream. "Jump!"

  "Jump where?"

  "Across! Just unsnap and push off as hard as you can. Brake yourself with arms and legs when you hit. I've got you. I won't let you fall!"

  I hope.

  Shots roared again. Their head-bursting noise echoed across the whole face of Ararat. This time bullets pitted the sheer face in minieruptions of powdered ice and stone not ten feet from her.

  Goaded by the fresh fusillade of gunfire, Levi unhooked from the piton that secured him to the ledge and flung himself across the abyss.

  Unfortunately in his excitement the rabbi forgot to put out his hands and feet to arrest his momentum. Instead he did a face-plant six feet to Annja's right with a pronounced splat. Limply he slid down to the end of his twenty-foot slack.

  Already wincing in sympathy and dread, Annja barely remembered to brace for the shock.

  Fortunately it didn't peel her.

  She heard a scream like an angry eagle. She looked up. Eluding Baron's hand, outstretched to drag him back, Jeb Higgins jumped outward from the outcrop to fall with his auto-pistol extended toward Annja. Yellow fire flashed from the muzzle as he triggered more shots.

  It did not make for a stable firing platform. Jeb wasn't aiming well. Or at all. Still, Annja plastered herself to the wall and thought flat thoughts.

  Jeb reached his tether's end. Annja winced as she heard ribs crack. Nonetheless, he did remember to hit the wall feet-first. His legs flexed and he pushed himself away to close the range. His rage-contorted face was barely a dozen feet from hers as he raised the gun to point at her.

  She got ready to die.

  Suddenly a sheet of ice, ten feet by twelve and probably weighing upward of a ton, broken loose by vibration somewhere overhead from the gunshots, fell like a guillotine blade on the small of Jeb Higgins's back.

  Its leading edge was like a shard of broken glass—sharper than any razor.

  Just missing his safety rope, the ice mass sliced his body clean in half. Jeb's eyes went wide as his hips and legs went pinwheeling away below him. Their greater air resistance made them fall at a slower rate than the ice-blade, separating from it. A vast final gush of red hit the cliff behind him like a thrown bucket of blood as his heart made one last spastic pulse.

  The light went out of his furious blue eyes. He slumped to
hang by his harness from the safety line. The weapon dropped from limp fingers to vanish down the mountainside.

  Annja bit down on the sour vomit, stinging with acid, that tried to burst from her lips. She swallowed the vileness, spat to clear her mouth. Even as she did so she was planting an anchor and hastily changing her hookup. Clamping a descender onto the secured line she fast-roped down.

  As she approached the rabbi, who hung limply and spun slowly at the end of his rope, she risked an upward glance. She saw Baron and Fairlie still on hands and knees on the overhang. They seemed to be holding a furious debate, but she couldn't hear them, though their mouths moved animatedly. They seemed to be communicating as much with frenetic gestures as words anyway.

  She understood. They dare not speak aloud, much less fire any more shots at their quarry. Where one lethal chunk of ice had been loosened enough to break free, another might be on the verge of following. Hanging, literally, by a whisper.

  Levi stirred even as Annja reached him. He had blood streaming from his nose, turning his beard to a red mess. His goggles were askew on his face.

  "Anything broken?" she asked quietly.

  "Gee," he said, "I was supposed to stop myself, wasn't I?"

  "Next time. Did you break any bones?"

  "Only my nose I think. But it doesn't hurt now as much as it did. I think I blacked out momentarily from the pain."

  Annja hoped that was true, and that he hadn't blacked out from concussion. That could be bad. Especially if he'd hit hard enough to make his brain bleed. The slow buildup of hydraulic pressure from a subdural hematoma would inexorably crush his brain inside the skull. Well, she thought as detachedly as she could, we'll know soon enough.

  "As long as your legs and hands work, we're good," she reassured him.

  "Oh. I'm fine, Annja."

  "I doubt that. But we have to move," she replied.

  She secured him to the wall of ice. Then as the red dawn light turned tawny and the land around them brightened she began to work her way north around the mountainside, out of sight of Baron and Fairlie.

  * * *

  SOME BREATHLESS INTERVAL LATER they rested together on a shelf of black rock with their legs dangling in space.

  "So, you've got some kind of sword, then, I take it?" Levi said. He took a mouthful of water from a plastic bottle. He was showing no signs of slow brain implosion, so that was one less worry.

  Annja looked away from him. She shrugged. "I guess so. No point trying to hide it now, is there?"

  His face split in a big happy grin. "Cool!"

  She looked at him seriously. "If we make it out of here, Levi, please keep it a deep dark secret. For me. For my sake."

  "Well, of course, Annja. Whatever you say." He seemed hurt she'd even suggest he'd blab. But he brightened quickly.

  "Anyway, who am I going to tell? I'm already regarded as a total fringie in Biblical scholarship and ancient archaeology circles. So if I said I'd hung out with a woman who possessed a magic sword, it'd be a total feeding frenzy. Right?"

  "I guess so."

  "What about them, though?" He bobbed his head and wagged his eyebrows up and left, in the general direction of their pursuers. "They had to see you pull that sword out of nowhere."

  "Either they catch us and kill us. Or we get down off the mountain alive. Which almost by definition means we've by some totally unlikely means managed to kill all of them. Either way, we're not in much danger from them telling people about the sword, are we?"

  "Oh. That's true."

  "Better take it easy on that water," she said, rousting herself to her feet. "I'm going to have to ask you to take some risks if we're going to have any chance of staying clear of our friends up there. Can you do that for me?"

  "Sure, Annja. How could I help but trust someone the Creator has chosen to carry one of his gifts?"

  He grinned as if to show he was half joking. With a sinking feeling she suspected it was no more than half.

  "Would it make any difference to you if I told you the last possessor of the sword was Joan of Arc?" Annja asked.

  "I'd say maybe this time the Creator has decided to trust it to more sophisticated hands."

  Annja shook her head. "You're incorrigible, Levi."

  From somewhere above once more they heard voices. Annja could make out no words but the sounds came sharp and angry. Jeb's death had slowed the pursuit. But only for a while.

  "Time to go," she said.

  "Annja?"

  "Yes?"

  "Do we have any chance? I mean, seriously?" Levi asked.

  She frowned. Then she shrugged and laughed.

  "We're not dead yet," she said.

  "You're right," he said.

  * * *

  ANNJA WAS AS GOOD AS HER WORD. When she could she had them rappel down long casts, a hundred feet at a time. Even if it did eat up her dwindling necklace of anchors. They were coming at last down to less precipitous terrain where they wouldn't need anchors much anyway. And if Bostitch's bad boys caught them they'd have no more need for them at all.

  Levi proved as good as his word, too. When Annja leapt from perch to doubtful perch he followed her unhesitatingly, flinging himself through space with abandon. She wanted to warn him not to take the notion that some god or gods were looking out for him too literally. On the other hand she didn't want him to start doubting, either.

  The day was mercifully clear. It was afternoon; the sun shone brightly on the west face, where Annja and Levi made their tortuous way down. It was at best a mixed blessing for Annja. Sunshine did lift the spirits—at least alleviate the sense of leaden doom that had been pressing down on her, acknowledged or not, since she'd first heard the muffled sound of gunshots inside the Anomaly.

  But the sun's arrival over the top of the peak made it harder to exert herself without overheating, muffled as she was against the high-altitude cold. And it brought increased risk that ice melting or rock expanding in its heat would make the purchase treacherous, even for pitons or camming devices.

  They made rapid progress down. Reaching slopes that were anything other than sheer walls would make descent enormously less stressful, if not so quick as fast-roping. It was the same for their opponents, too, of course. But Annja and the rabbi still seemed to maintain a substantial lead over the pursuers.

  Then as Annja waited at the top of what looked like the last sheer face they had to negotiate before the slope grew gentler, belaying for Levi as he climbed down to her, shots started cracking out from above. If the bullets came anywhere close Annja saw no evidence.

  But the sudden terrifying noise startled the young scholar and made him lose his grip. He fell fifteen feet to the sloping, iced-over ledge like a sack of meal.

  The sound of his ankle breaking was like a handgun going off.

  Chapter 26

  Annja crouched over him. Another rock overhang ten feet above shielded them both momentarily from gunfire from above. It was a tiny blessing. "Levi?"

  He smiled weakly. "Are you going to ask me if I'm all right?"

  Though a good six feet wide—which felt broad as an aircraft carrier's flight deck after some of the hair-thin purchases they'd used—the ledge slanted perilously outward. Feeling herself begin to slide down the surface, slippery with a thin film of meltwater from the sunshine despite the fact the air remained below freezing, Annja yanked her ice ax from her belt and drove its pointy end through the ice to anchor her.

  "Of course you're not all right. Your ankle's broken. Here, let me—"

  Boots thumped on the ice behind her.

  She heard the man grunt as he landed, then the beginnings of a triumphant intake of breath. He had obviously jumped down from the overhang directly above them.

  Annja was already in motion, rising and turning in a single fluid motion. The ice ax made a soft squealing sound as she yanked it free of the ice.

  She didn't know exactly who it was behind her. It didn't matter anymore. There were no friends above them on this mounta
in of death. Nor neutrals. Only enemies, thirsting for innocent blood.

  "All, right, Annja," she heard Josh Fairlie's voice say as she spun. "I have you—"

  She aimed the pointy end of her ax at his temple. Despite his own grinding exertions he was young and wired, with reflexes like steel springs. He swerved away from her stroke.

  Unfortunately for him, if he jumped back far enough to completely avoid the vicious backhand blow he'd have hopped right off the edge. Annja saw he wasn't tied to a safety line, so eager had he been to score the kill.