Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  Maksim stared at her, his eyes filled with unabashed pity, and he shook his head.

  ‘My grandmother had Alzheimer’s,’ he confessed, his formerly brash joviality all but dissipated, replaced now by a sombre severity. ‘I know how it is. What about the boy, anything I should know about him?’

  ‘I do not think he wishes to leave Parvati’s side. You needn’t worry about him.’

  ‘I understand. Go, go, my friend, have a walk. It is beautiful out there, and it will do you good. And you are safe; my men are patrolling the grounds. A helicopter is being readied to fly you two out of here in the early hours of the morning; it is the soonest I could arrange one. From there William has arranged you passage to somewhere else. I don’t know where; he wouldn’t say, and it’s not for me to know anyway. I understand this. But don’t worry, while you’re here you’ll be safe, so make yourself at home. What is it the Spanish say? Mi casa, su casa.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lightning Bird murmured, dipping his head in a gesture of gratitude. After this he turned and, taking slow, loping strides, headed out of the opulent front doors of the entrance hall, exiting onto the expansive grounds of the estate.

  He strolled down to the perimeter fence, where the huddled-together trees peered over the steel bars, like curious onlookers staring into a zoo enclosure containing a hidden animal. When he reached the border he paused, glancing left and then right over his shoulder, making sure none of the men were watching him. Assured that he had some privacy, he dropped down and dug his fingers into the soil, and immediately felt a jolt of energy crackling through his fingers, and then running up his arm and spreading throughout his body.

  ‘Mm, yes,’ he whispered, ‘it is immensely strong here, as it is in the old forests where we Chimariko once roamed. Very few places like this remain in the world.’

  He stood up, feeling energised and recharged after this brief communion, and knew at once what he needed to do. With an intense focus directing his every step he headed back up to the mansion, returning a few minutes later with Parvati following in her chair, gently awoken from her slumber. Jun trailed along behind the pair of them, mute and expressionless, but his eyes never once left the woman in the wheelchair. Daekwon, meanwhile, was training on a heavy bag in the mansion’s gym with some of Maksim’s men.

  When they reached the edge of the trees, Lightning Bird indicated that Parvati should stop. When she did, he took one of her stiff hands in his right hand and then plunged his left hand into the soil. Closing his eyes to enhance his concentration, he was able to see the network of colours and lights that linked every one of the trees, stretched out in long, innumerable strands of glowing, ethereal spider silk from every single leaf and bough, each connected to all the others, all shimmering with a dazzling array of all the colours of the spectrum and more. And there, below the rich, moist boundary of topsoil the roots probed, delving like slow miners into the subterranean depths, each root a blazing lightning vein of coloured neon, frozen in motion as it streaked forever down toward the hot core far beneath, or connecting, like a paralysed charge of electricity, with the roots of other trees.

  Lightning Bird, falling into a deep trance, began to draw the light up through the soil and out of the air, plucking it from between the leaves and boughs, dragging it up from under the earth, and filtering it through the conductor that was his body. He focused all of the disparate strands into one thick, blindingly bright beam of power, and this he directed into Parvati’s body.

  She shuddered as the energy surged from his skin to hers, plunging through this tenuous membrane into the depths of her being, but almost immediately her stone-stiff hand started to relax as the power coursed through her system, revitalising weary cells and loosening up the fibrous, leathery bindings of old scar tissue.

  What Lightning Bird really wanted the energy to do, however, was to work its magic on her brain, that most valuable of organs housed inside her wispy-haired cranium. His fervent desire was that this power from the old forest would pry open the locks and strike off the rusty chains that kept all the secrets Parvati had once known locked in inaccessible dungeons, and haul them once more into the light of conscious knowing.

  Through this trance he thought he heard her whispering; was her mind coming back to her? Was the power of the forest working its restorative magic in the crumbling ruins of that once glorious, bustling city between her ears?

  Then he felt it: a pulsating inferno, fierce enough that his hands started blistering from the building heat … but it was coming not from the earth, but from her.

  It was working.

  The pain, however, was starting to become unbearable, for the heat of Parvati’s fire seemed to be intensifying at an exponential rate, and for Lightning Bird, it rapidly began to reach a point at which it seemed that his meat was about to slough off of his bones, which themselves felt as if they were on the verge of being pulverised to dust.

  With a cry of agony, he yanked his fingers from the soil, jerked his hand away from hers and collapsed onto the grass, breathing hard and groaning with pain, and curling slowly into a foetal ball. Jun, meanwhile, observed the entire spectacle without moving a single muscle on his mask-like visage.

  ‘I am the sky, I am the earth, I am the ocean. I am everything that has ever lived and everything that is yet to live.’

  The words were spoken with such clarity, such conviction and such confidence Lightning Bird at once sat bolt upright, despite his suffering, and stared in wonder at Parvati, who was smiling down at him with an aura of shimmering gold radiating from her face. Jun took notice of this too, his blank expression morphing into one of unabashed awe. Parvati’s eyes were alive now with raw, energy-charged life. Lightning Bird observed this, and his spirit soared despite the blasts of agony that were raging within his system.

  And then a fact of even greater significance hit him: she was smiling. Her face was no longer paralysed.

  ‘By all the powers in the universe!’ he gasped, shocked and panting from the overwhelmingness of it all. ‘Parvati! You’re … you’re … you’re back!’

  ‘I feel … new,’ she said slowly, peering around her with the fresh wonder of a newborn. ‘Released after centuries in a dark jail. Reborn … resurrected.’ She narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow with concentration, and managed to lift her bone-thin arm up from the armrest of the chair. She curled her formerly frozen fingers into a fist, and then uncurled them again. ‘Yes…’ she whispered, her smile broadening. ‘It is … returning.’

  Lightning Bird, soaked with sweat and shaking as if caught in the grips of a deadly fever, scrambled to his feet.

  ‘This is, this is incredible,’ he managed to utter, his mouth hanging open with both surprise and joy. ‘We must tell the others at once.’

  ‘It’s … a miracle,’ Jun gasped. ‘I, I never believed in miracles … but this, this is one! I saw it, no, I’m seeing it, seeing it with my own eyes!’

  ‘I am not fully restored,’ Parvati cautioned. ‘There is still a long way to go. We have, however, taken the first steps up the mountain.’

  ‘The first steps are all that is needed for the moment,’ Lightning Bird said. ‘The fact that we could take them at all, after all these decades of trying, has filled me with a joy and a new hope that is impossible to describe! Come, hurry, let us go.’

  Parvati smiled again, taking great delight at being able to do so after so many long years of paralysis, and turned her chair around to head back up to the mansion.

  ***

  ‘I just received word that the chopper is on its way to pick you up,’ Maksim said, blowing out a voluminous puff of cigar smoke as he spoke to Lightning Bird, Jun and Parvati.

  The three of them were seated on a balcony that overlooked the estate’s lush, rolling grounds, which were wet with silver-blue moonlight, pouring in a silent deluge from the effulgent white disc in the sky above them. Daekwon, though, was absent; he had gone to assist the men who were guarding the mansion, even though Maksim
had insisted that his men needed no help.

  ‘Thank you, my friend,’ Lightning Bird said.

  Maksim took another drag on his cigar and then glanced at his phone again.

  ‘It should be here in less than an hour. There is a helipad on the upper level of the roof back there,’ he said, pointing behind him at a tower that extended up towards the dark, star-sprayed sky.

  ‘It couldn’t get here any sooner,’ Lightning Bird muttered, his words taking on a sense of foreboding. ‘I have a feeling that something terrible is about to happen.’

  Maksim puffed on his cigar and extended an arm in a sweeping gesture outwards.

  ‘It is a full moon, so visibility is excellent. My men are armed and alert, Lightning Bird; nobody is going to be getting in here without an army backing them up.’

  ‘What if that person is an army?’

  Maksim chuckled dryly.

  ‘Ha. I’d still like to see him try.’

  ‘He will, if he finds us.’

  ‘You worry too much! Come, let’s go inside. I want to show you some of my violins before you leave. It will take your mind off this constant worrying, I think.’

  A kilometre away from the mansion grounds, a black Ford Mustang rumbled to a stop on a dirt track in the woods. As the headlights faded out, causing the sight of the formerly lit wall of trees to melt into a dense mass of shadows, the driver, a massive man clad in a business suit, opened the door and stepped out. He pulled out his phone, double-checked the time, and then chuckled softly.

  ‘I love a good game of cat-and-mouse,’ Sigurd muttered. ‘Especially when I’m the cat, and I’ve found the mouse’s lair.’

  He stepped out of the car into a pond of moonlight, leaked onto the soil through a gap in the trees, and went around to the boot of the car, from which he retrieved a shovel. He took out his phone again and checked some GPS coordinates to make sure he was in the right place, and then started digging. After about twenty minutes of labour his shovel finally clanged against steel. With a grin he took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his brow, and then probed through the loose dirt, removing spadefuls of soil and pebbles from around the object he was uncovering: a metal door, leading down into the earth.

  Eventually the entire door was exposed, so Sigurd tossed the shovel into the bushes nearby and then headed back to his car to retrieve a blowtorch and a welding mask. It didn’t take much effort to cut through the steel and get to the mechanism that kept the door locked from the inside. Sigurd took the blowtorch to the mechanism, and with an echoing clang the severed lock dropped out of the door and fell into the tunnel underneath – the secret tunnel that led into the heart of the mansion.

  ‘It makes the game so much more interesting when you have access to most of the country’s architectural blueprints, secret or not,’ Sigurd said to himself, an impish grin contorting his features into those of a medieval devil’s as he hauled open the heavy door. He strapped a headlamp to his head and flicked it on – for even with his polar bear eyes, the impenetrable blackness of the underground tunnel was too dense for him – and then he climbed down into it, shutting the door behind him.

  Time was running short; he needed to get inside and acquire his target before the helicopter arrived. He hurried through the passage, keeping his footfalls light but swift, and wondered briefly whether Maksim knew about this tunnel. Glancing down at the thick layer of dust, which looked as if it had been undisturbed for decades, he surmised that the Ukrainian probably had no idea about the existence of this passage.

  Within five minutes he had covered the kilometre between the tunnel entrance and the mansion, and he found himself at the foot of a ladder that went up a chimney-like passage leading to the centre of the old house. The time for battle had drawn near, and this knowledge caused a heat to infuse his blood with a stirring, primordial fire. With vicious anticipation hissing and bubbling in his diaphragm and stomach he ascended the ladder, and when he got to the top, he found himself peering through two slits in the stone into a darkened library. A door handle was built into the granite slab, and he cranked it with slow, gradual pressure, making sure that it did not creak.

  It opened outwards, and he crawled through the opening, finding himself in a fireplace. He gave the room a quick visual sweep, making sure both that it was empty and that he was not being observed by any security cameras. When he was satisfied that all was safe, he crawled out of the fireplace and stood up, brushing the dust off of the knees of his suit pants.

  ‘And now the cat is amongst the pigeons,’ he whispered.

  He unbuttoned his suit coat and reached inside it to loosen his Desert Eagle in its holster; he would most certainly be needing it before the evening was through. Still, though, he wanted to make use of stealth over and above anything else, and he only intended to bring out the pistol in the event of an emergency. Silence and shadows were powerful allies in this situation, and he intended to make maximum use of them.

  To this end he reached into his trouser pockets, inside which he slipped his fingers through the knuckle-duster grips of two trench knives. He pulled the weapons out; one he held with the eight-inch blade extending up in an underhand grip, the other the opposite way in an overhand grip, with each grip offering a number of unique moves and attacks.

  Sigurd pressed his back against a bookshelf, drawing in a voluminous breath as he prepared for battle. There would be at least ten guards posted throughout the building, enough to pose a serious challenge to him. It would have been easy enough to have told his Huntsmen allies of the situation and have them storm the building with their troops, eliminating the guards and the Rebel within at no risk to himself – but that would not have been in line with his purposes. In fact, he did not want them to know anything of this at all.

  ‘I know things that you fuckers don’t,’ he growled to himself as he contemplated all of this. ‘You Huntsmen think you’ve got the Ice Bear caged and declawed, you think you’ve pulled his fangs out with pliers, you think you’ve withered his muscles and have him on a leash like a fucking lap-dog. That’s what you think, you fucks … but I’ve got you pricks just where I want you.’

  He grinned then, swiftly and maniacally. He wanted to cackle with self-satisfied laughter, but instead he held it in with the overriding calm, collected control that governed all of his actions, knowing with utter certainty that silence and stealth had to be maintained for the time being. After performing some breathing exercises, he bent and cracked his neck with a satisfying pop, and then shrugged his shoulders and clenched and unclenched all the muscles of his upper body, and finally he shook out his arms and wrists to loosen them up. When this was complete, he did the same for his hips, legs and his lower body.

  With a momentary pang of what was not quite longing, and not quite fear – but close – he wished that he could have had his shield-brother, Hrothgar, by his side for the oncoming fight. Hrothgar, however, was busy with equally important matters, and should both of them succeed in their separate endeavours, things would then be looking very, very good for the pair of thousand-year-old warriors.

  ‘Ten opponents,’ Sigurd murmured to the shadows. ‘Ten more lives to add to a tally of thousands … tens of thousands. Ten more nothings. Ten more worthless mortals. Ten more pigs beneath the butcher’s blade.’

  He smiled evilly as he rolled up the sleeves of his suit coat, exposing the four gas-loaded ballistic knives strapped to his heavily muscled forearms – forearms crisscrossed with innumerable scars from thousands of battles over ten centuries of warfare and violence. He had been practicing a lot with the ballistic knives in recent days and was now confident in his ability to direct the flying blades with a great degree of accuracy, at least for what they were. Only accurate enough for effective use within a range of a few metres, they would nonetheless suit his purposes here, in this confined space, where silent takedowns would be of the essence.

  ‘Trust not in men,’ he whispered, ‘trust only in steel. I am the terror in the
night…’

  He then pulled out the trigger switch and wire from the side of his shirt collar where it had been dangling, and put it in his mouth. Each bite on the trigger button would detonate a pneumatic charge that would shoot out one of the knife blades, all in a sequence he had committed flawlessly to both muscle and mental memory: top right, top left, bottom left, bottom right.

  Four silent shots, four lives.

  The trench knives he gripped loosely in each other hand would take care of the rest, and if things got really hairy the Desert Eagle would come into play.

  He checked his watch. It was time. With a madman’s grin smeared across his scarred face he drew in one last deep breath, and then opened the library door, slipping out into the subtly lit hallway beyond.

  The battle had begun.

  ***

  Igor pulled heavily on the hand-rolled cigarette before handing it to Daekwon, who declined and passed it on to the Ukrainian’s younger brother, Stas. The twenty-two-year-old held the smoke in his lungs for a few drawn-out moments, watching how his younger sibling’s sandy blonde dreadlocks dangled over his face as he too dragged on the cigarette, the smoke wisps weaving a lazy trail through the shadows of the balcony, which overlooked the mansion grounds. Igor leaned back against the slatted doors but took care to not put too much weight on the wood, for it protested against this unwanted pressure with an alarmingly loud creak, which echoed up and down the stairwell in the house behind them.

  ‘The boss doesn’t think we will have trouble,’ Igor grunted as he stroked the forestock of his AK-47, ‘even though the Indian is shaking in his boots about some crazy assassin coming here to ice him and that cripple. We’ve made this some top-secret shit, bro. Even the old KGB wouldn’t have been able to find us here.’