Eliza: I don't think I understand. Are you describing several different personalities who try to share your body, Tom?
Gurden: Naw. Its nothing like that. [Yawns.] Look, I gotta go. It's four in the a-yem and I've played three full sets tonight. You have a nice voice, for a computer. Maybe I'll call again.
Eliza: Tom! Don't hang up! Please. I need to know—
Gurden: Yeah, but I'm really bushed, falling asleep here in the booth. I've still got your number.
Eliza: Tom! Tom!
Click!
* * *
Tom Gurden released the mechanical dogs and slid the door back. The smell of the Atlantic hit him: mussels, kelp, and black mud at low tide, mixed with accents of gasoline and tar. It quickly cleaned out the stuffy funk of his own breath, collected and potted inside the psych booth.
He raised a long finger to the misty inside of the glass and drew an eighth note there, idly sketched in a staff: middle C, a triplet running up to E, two grace notes—and he wiped the whole passage out with staccato swipes of his palm.
Too tired right now to get involved.
Gurden stepped out onto the sidewalk. The pavement was wet; the leather soles of his dress pumps made sucking and smacking sounds as he began to walk, stirring a froth of bubbles in the film of water.
In this city, even at this hour, even in a sector of only six million people, the background hum never quite died out: subway shuttles streaking through bedrock; patrol drones turning their ellipses at 1,000 meters; traffic grids clicking through their patterns. The small and faraway sounds blended with the random noises of a window opening here, a cat crying its lust there, a taxi huff-puffing its way down a sidestreet two avenues over.
Random noises. Random shadows.
Tom Gurden's ears were tuned to hear patterns—and the exceptions to pattern. Behind him, as he made his way home along Main Street in Manhasset, he could hear steps following his. Not his own echoes against the wet buildings. Not someone else going home, too. These steps were following him, walking as he walked, pausing when he paused.
He turned in a patch of shadow and searched the niches of streetlight with his eyes. Nothing moved. Nothing stopped moving.
Gurden scented the air behind him using the sense that went beyond smell. He sent a probe of awareness back along his path, whiffing danger, bad thoughts, needles of steel in the fog of nobody-there.
Nothing revealed itself.
He stayed ten seconds longer. To look at him, anyone would have thought he was undecided and afraid. Actually, he was listening for a premature first step.
Nothing.
Gurden slid his fingers down behind his evening suit's cummerbund and pulled out his sonic knife. It was a sophisticates weapon, mostly defensive, but still illegal. A piece of thin plastic the size of a pass card or bank balance, the knife projected a blast of sound warbling between 60,000 and 120,000 Hertz at 1,500 decibels across a band one centimeter wide and a millimeter thick. The "blade" had an effective range of three meters. Up close, a sound like that broke weak molecular bonds, such as those in long-chain organic molecules. At the limit of range, it burned steel and flash-boiled water. The film battery in the card powered the knife for a max of ninety seconds, but that was time enough to bubble some blood in the right places.
He held the card right-handed, between the tips of his thumb and first two fingers, with the joint of this thumb poised above the switch blister.
Now armed, Tom Gurden started walking again, as if he heard and suspected nothing.
The footsteps started up again almost immediately, coming from nowhere in particular.
He decided that the assailant must be using an old street watcher's trick: following by leading. The footsteps could be coming from someone ahead of him, who tracked him by reflections in shop windows and bumper chrome, and looked back often enough to keep him in range.
Gurden scented forward along his path, again using that sense behind his nose that was half listening, half smelling, and total awareness.
Someone there. A tension, like muscles poised to run.
He walked forward slowly, with the knife held low in front of him. The skin of his thumb brushed the blister.
The footsteps still matched his pace for pace, but their timbre changed. A sharp clicking announced itself as he drew nearer.
There, ahead, a shadow slipped around the edge of a streetlight's corona and fell into the darker shadows against a building.
Gurden picked up his pace, rising to the balls of his feet and lifting his knees like a sprinter.
The clicking, the echo of the other footsteps stopped.
Gurden ran forward into the circle of light.
Off to the right, something scraped the pavement—a foot shifting weight?
He spun to the left—toward the open, street side of the walkway—backing out of the spot of overhead light. The keyway of his sonic knife, concealed in the shadows under his arm, quartered the darkness across from him.
"Would you buy a girl a drink, for God's sake?"
That voice! The same words! Sandy had used them that first night, four years ago, when she came into the Old Greenwich Inn in Stamford.
"Sandy?"
"You didn't expect me, Tom? You know I can't keep away from you."
"Why are you hiding in the shadows?" Gurden lifted his right hand, pretending to shield his eyes, and slipped the knife into the side pocket of his tux.
"And why have you been hiding, Tom?"
"It's been a bad couple of weeks. Step forward. Let me see you."
In answer, she laughed. Then she walked forward: grace and curves, supple movements and steady eyes. A molecular-film rainsheet wrapped around her like a sari and headscarf. Its surface radiated violet to green with the motions of her breathing. Beneath it she wore a gray parasilk dress, evening cut, with bare shoulders. It was the same dress she had worn then, four years ago. He let out a sigh.
"You do remember!" she said.
"Of course... But why now?"
"I was such a foolish girl." The smile. "I was afraid of you, Tom. Afraid of your dreams. They were so—so strange and absorbing. You needed me because of them, but all I could think about was you slipping away to somewhere I couldn't follow, somewhere I was afraid to follow.
"So, instead of helping you, I made space. I thought I had to cut out on my own. I made it for a day or two, got a day job, even. But I found out how empty and cold the world really is—without you."
While she said this, Sandy had her head forward and down. It hid her eyes. Gurden remembered that Sandy couldn't tell a lie while looking him in the eyes. Any lie, from "The cleaners accidentally ruined that awful yellow jacket of yours" to "I don't know what happened to the Rolex time-ring Ms. Weems gave you." When she told him a lie, she bent her head and looked at her shoes. Sandy only looked up when she thought she had him believing it.
"What do you want, Sandy?" he asked softly.
"Time with you. A life. To share with you, dreams and all." She looked up at him, her eyes hollowed to sockets by the shadows of the overhead light. And in those sockets, her gray eyes would be gleaming with secret triumph.
"Sure," he said quietly. "Buy you breakfast?"
"Where's good around here?"
"Found a place where the crab fishermen feed before they go out. They'll have a good pot of coffee and a panful of biscuits going about now."
"Feed me, Tom."
She came to him across the ring of light. Her hands, with their long, delicate fingers and nails curved and polished like ruby shards, reached up around the back of his neck. Her body curved into his. She led into the kiss with the tip of her tongue, as always.
* * *
Sura 2
Wraiths of Sand
Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the cup with sweet or bitter run,
The wine of life keeps oozing drop by drop.
The leaves of life kee
p falling one by one.
—Omar Khayyam
* * *
The Old Man dipped up an ember of hardened thorn root with a pair of steel tongs and touched it to the lump of resin in his bowl. The resin smoked. He quickly drew the acrid fumes down, through the wine-and-water in the hookahs bulb to sweeten them, then up the long pipe and into his lungs.
The walls of the room rushed in to meet him, like the sudden end of a long fall, but without impact. He floated bonelessly on the cushions, the aches of his joints and the pulling throb of his scars quieted by the smoke. A grin curved his lips around until his mouth opened in a mighty "O" of a yawn. His eyes closed.
Golden houris, limbed like women and clothed in smoke, brushed cool fingers across his forehead and down into his beard. Other fingers stroked his limbs and kneaded the loose muscles of his belly.
Somewhere waters tumbled, speaking to Sheikh Sinan with chiming voices. The voices whispered to him of fruits as big as his clenched fist and ripe as a maiden's breasts. Broad leaves moved in the breeze and whispered of thighs stroking one against another. The juice of those fruits—
A cold breeze touched the Old Man's face, drying the film of sweat there. Somewhere nearby a rug, hung before an archway, slid back against stone. Fingers locked into the smooth fabric over his chest, digging into skin and pulling the white hairs there.
"Wake up, Old Man!"
Sheikh Rashid ed-Din Sinan's eyelids flew open.
The hard, black eyes of young Hasan stared back at him. He was the youngest of the Hashishiyun, newly inducted. And yet he moved with decisiveness and spoke shortly even to Sinan himself, who was Master of the Order. It was as if the weight of his name, Hasan—the same as that of Hasan as-Sabah, long-dead founder of the Order of Assassins—had given this boy an authority that his years and rank did not.
"What do you want?" Sinan quavered.
"I want you awake, Old Man, and with your wits intact."
"Why? What has happened?"
"There are Christians at the gates."
"More Christians? Did you rouse me only for that?"
"These seem likely to stay. They are camped as for a siege."
"Have they made any of their tiresome demands?"
"Only the usual: that we come out and fight."
"Then why do you bother me?"
"There are Templars with them."
"Ah! Led by Brother Gerard, do you think?"
"Not—not that I have seen."
"Then you have just looked down from the walls."
"That is true." The young man came as close to embarrassment as he ever had.
Sheikh Sinan stiffened his own voice. "Go and look through their tent flaps, and then call me back from the Secret Garden."
"Yes, My Lord Sinan." The young Hasan bowed his head once, shallowly, and withdrew.
* * *
Bertrand du Chambord began to suspect that he had been tricked.
He stood before his tent on the third morning of the Siege of Alamut. The red rays of the dawn sun climbed out of the crotch of mountain behind him and lit the truncated spire that rose in front of him. The light stained the gray-beige stone to a color like the autumn leaves which would be hanging in the valleys of Orleanais at this time of year. The native stone of the mountain rose and blended invisibly into the cut stones of walls and parapets above him. Only a sharp eye could tell when the vertical grooving of eroded gullies gave way to the cross hatching of laid masonry.
With the base of the mountain as their footing, those walls, themselves just forty feet high, had an effective height of more than two hundred feet. Bertrand had neither ladder nor grapnel and line to reach the top. And, even if he had, no man would scale that height against bowmen and rock throwers.
All about him, the straight peaks of his army's canvas tents lay still in shadow, deep in a cleft of mountain between Alamut and its opposing hills. The cleft held the only road to the fortress—at least the only one he had seen or been told about—and a watercourse with a feeble trickle of a stream. That stream might or might not feed wells within the fortress. Between road and water, hemmed in by sheer rock walls, was a space barely a hundred paces wide to hold tents for the men and picket lines for the horses.
It had taken Bertrand a day and a half to convince all of his newly recruited troops that they should try to drink and draw water from the upstream side, wash and piss downstream. Some of them still did not bother with the distinction. Such were the basics of generalship.
The list of things Bertrand could not do was longer than his list of possibilities.
He could not build siege engines. Not only was there no room in this gully to construct and maneuver them, but there was no wood—or none that his 1,200 Syrian dinars could buy. This was a land where Christian men at arms and horses were bought dear, but simple planks and timbers were dearer still.
He could not launch a frontal assault. The road up to the citadel wound off to the north—that is, to his right as he faced the mountain—then switched back to go south, then north again, then south... And at every turn, the Saracens waited. Just before the turn, they had shaved the side of the hill below the road into a steep precipice. They had blocked the hillside above the road with walls of stone. That left a narrow passage barely wide enough for two mounted men to ride abreast. A hundred paces beyond each of these defiles, a band of Saracen archers lounged beneath staked awnings, sipped cool juices, ate fruits and sweetmeats, and placed arrows through the eyesockets of any Christian who tried to ride through. Well back from the passage, Bertrand du Chambord could see them wagering on the shots. It was a game to them.
He could not climb the broken land that separated each turning and straightaway of the road. Again, with a hundred years of war in this land, the Saracens had cut and carved out the rock until even a Swiss herdsman would think twice about the ascent. Bertrand's knights fought best on horseback, although they might, for glory, consent to climb a wall with ladder or moving tower. They would never agree to a slow, methodical charge with picks and pitons, ropes and rappelling gear, against an enemy that could roll down stones or summon archers from their bivouacs at the north and south turnings of the road. As a general, Bertrand might count the odds and determine that, of each ten who so climbed, two might reach the citadel's gates. Each of his knights could count the odds themselves and had refused the wager.
He could not conduct a proper siege, because he could not control all routes into the fortress. Bertrand had no way of knowing if his enemy was starving, facing the prospect of starvation anytime within the year, or laughing behind their hands atop the walls.
He could not find another way into the citadel of Alamut. Perhaps there was a goat trail his men could follow to discover an unguarded entrance, but Bertrand would need a cooperative native of these hills to tell him about it. Cooperative natives were all themselves Saracens. For a fee in gold, they would tell him anything he wished and then lead him into an archer's ambush, preferably by night.
He could not know for certain the state of the enemy's mind, the key ingredient of a successful siege. Bertrand could, however, guess that Sheikh Sinan and his Hashishiyun were not greatly concerned about the Christians who waited in his valley.
So Bertrand du Chambord, on the third morning, returned to his tent before the sun became too strong and counted his money and his days before Alamut. His men were content to feed the horses, sharpen their swords, oil their mail, and eat his rations. They would do so until the rations and the dinars ran out, and then they would leave.
And what would Bertrand do then?
* * *
The first man died at midnight. The exact time was disputed between Bertrand and his field surgeon. The physician pointed to the blackness of the blood about the wounds in Thorvald de Harfleur's neck, to the stiffness of the knight's limbs, and to the purpling darkness—which the physician described as a seepage of blood—marking the underside of his hams and backfat.
To counter him, Bertrand pointed to the proposed hour—midnight, or thereabouts—when all the camp had been fast asleep. All, that is, except the allotted guards, who swore they had stood wakeful along the road and by the horse pickets. If any Saracen had come down among the camp to place three-four-five separate knife thrusts into Sir Thorvald, then he would have awakened the whole valley with his yells and thrashings. The deed must have been done earlier, Bertrand said, when the other men at arms were at their games and drinking. Or later, when they were rising with the jingling of mail and banging of pots.
"Not so, My Lord," the surgeon demurred. "Note the placement of these strokes. Note the aggravation of the wound. The thrust enters vertically, to pass between the tendons and the blood vessels of the neck. Then, as the point touches the vertebrae, the blade turns to pass between one bone and another."
"What's your point, man?" Bertrand growled.
"This was not done by Norman knife, cold iron with an edge put to it by a blacksmith. This was a blade you could shave with, My Lord, wielded by a man who had the skill to remove your bladder from out your belly and you not feel but a pinch of pain."
"So?"
"You are a fighting man, Sir Bertrand. You understand the art of knocking a man off his horse and cudgeling him to his knees while he wears a steel helmet and a coat of iron rings. The assassin who held this blade understood the muscles, bone, and sinews of the human body as well as any surgeon. He knew how to slip a dagger—a very keen dagger—into a sleeping man and assure that he would never wake again."
"And how did he get into this tent?"
"He kept to the shadows. He watched his feet and did not stumble over the equipment of war which your men leave piled between the tents. A man with a will to silence can so move and not raise a stir."
"Fantasies," Bertrand scoffed. "No Saracen found this camp last night. This murder was done by one from inside the lines. Perhaps he had a grudge against Sir Thorvald, nursed from an earlier campaign."
The Mask of Loki Page 4