Saladin, who of all the army around these men could understand the jape, kept his temper and regarded the six Templars coolly.
"The current fashion," he said in French, "is dismemberment at the heels of wild stallions. But for you men, we shall use slow donkeys."
Whatever he might have expected in reaction from them, Saladin was disappointed. The Templars were howling with laughter, and none of it carried the edge of madness.
* * *
File 02
Piano-Wire Waltz
Or stain her honor or her new brocade;
Forget her pray'rs, or miss a masquerade;
Or lose her heart or necklace, at a ball.
—Alexander Pope
* * *
A silence on the other side of his door made Tom Gurden pause. It was not the silence of an empty but lived-in apartment: hum of the refrigerator motor, gurgle in the pipeshaft, clicking of the clock. This was the tense silence of a body held in tight-muscled readiness. He could feel it through the foam-core door.
Gurden stood with the key in his hand, ready to turn the lock. Instead, he motioned Sandy back into the hallway and considered his options: walking away, taking her somewhere else, pretending this was the wrong door, the wrong building. These were not successful options. Sandy was standing frozen under the corridor's sidelights, watching him with a puzzled look on her face.
The apartment was sublet from a friend for the next three months while the woman toured the Greek Isles. The rent was on easy terms because Gurden had agreed to water her plants, feed six kinds of food on three schedules to her fish, and clean out the E-Mail service regularly. The building was convenient, just a walk from the Harbor Roost, where Tom had found pickup work, two sets a night at reasonable hours, a dinner crowd instead of hangers-on and mean drunks. And no one from the 54-Too would pass within 100 kilometers of here to tell where he was.
So why did the other side of the door feel hot?
It wasn't Roni back from the Aegean. Not unless her boyfriend's money had run out. And Roni would be moving lightly around the space, or zonking out in the bedroom, not crouching on the balls of her feet, nerves wired to within a millimeter of screaming or laughing.
Back off.
Inside his head, he could distinctly hear those two words, as if Sandy had whispered them behind his ear. Perversely, that psychic command, spoken so plainly, decided him.
Gurden slid the sonic knife from his jacket pocket, moving its safety tab forward. He plunged his key into the lock, twisted it, and shoved hard on the door.
It slid back into its piston stops, and Gurden leapt through. He took up a seiunchin bridge stance in the open foyer and swept the space with his silent knife.
No takers.
He could see down one of the two hallways radiating from the foyer, and it was empty for three meters to the closed door that secured the bedroom. The side door into the bathroom was shut, too. Gurden tried to remember how he had programmed it that morning—open or close? It usually didn't matter to him what the apartment did.
This time his indifference could kill him.
The other hall was a service corridor with a bend halfway down, blocking his line of sight. Its walls were cut with doorways and niches for kitchen, laundry, recycler, blow dryer, and rad ticker. If the unfriendly presence Gurden sensed was not beyond the bend, then he/she/it was hiding in the kitchen. Which gave access both to this corridor and, through the dining alcove, back into the sunken hexa-lounge that was the focus of this living space.
Gurden looked through the foyer's archway into the shadows of the lounge.
The aquarium lights brightened one side of the area and reflected off the silvertone paintings on the opposing wall. Across from the archway were the apartment's window bank, covered by draperies—now programmed closed—which glowed faintly with the coming dawn. Bookbindings on the shelves lining the room's other three walls drank in what light hit them, except for glints of gold and silver foil on the expensive spines.
Anyone could be hiding behind the low sofa, beyond the clinging ficus, along the bookshelves. Just because Gurden could not see the assailant, he had no proof against the feeling of heat that was still washing over him.
He walked the seiunchin through a crane stance to position himself in the arch, at the top of the three shallow steps down into the lounge.
"Behind you!" Sandy screamed.
Gurden half-turned to take the attack—launched from the service corridor—against his left elbow and hip. The man hit him high, rolling Gurden over his own center of balance and down the steps. He landed hard on his right shoulder, continued rolling across the impact, and came up in a crouch.
The attacker—one of those short, bulky figures that had been saving his ass for the past three weeks—sprawled for a second face down on the steps, where he had fallen after hitting Gurden.
Tom keyed the sonic knife with his thumb joint and brought it down on the man's back.
Jacking himself with one arm, the attacker rolled sideways, out of the invisible beam, and the carpet's synthetic pile flashed to smoke and black, curled rind.
Gurden spun toward the man, sweeping the knife at waist level. Its beam lanced across the bank offish tanks, and bubbles of steam sprang up inside the glass. The fish darted to the far corners and hovered there in shock.
The man was already balled in a crouch, with his own knife out. It was a thin, triangular whip of steel that Gurden had once learned to call misericorde. As Tom tried to bring his sonic beam to bear, the man dodged and wove. Gurden succeeded only in lacing the tanks behind him with steam and dead, floating fish—until one of the glass walls cracked under the stress of changing temperature and poured a hundred gallons of salt water and weed into the room.
Once more the man rolled like a ball, this time to avoid the flood and spray of glass shards.
When Tom turned to track him, the man's foot lashed sideways at Gurden's extended hand. The card-sized knife handle flew sideways out of his numbed fingers. As it spun, the beam flashed gouts of smoke and flame out of the sofa cushions, the bookbindings, the drapes. The fabric of Tom's own jacket sleeve crisped and melted onto his skin.
Distracted by the searing pain of this, Gurden cried out—and the man was instantly upon him. The knife point flicked across his throat, two centimeters short, followed by a knee that came up toward his groin.
That connected.
Tom simultaneously tried to hold his burned arm and clutch his shattered balls. He fell away as his leather pumps slipped in the saturated carpet and dumped him on his tailbone.
Eyes gleaming, the assailant raised his needle of a knife high for a final downward stroke.
Shirr-swip!
The eyes, flickering in the light of the agitated fish tanks and burning book spines, turned inward and crossed. The knife fell out of the fingers. The assailant's high hand came down, the low one came up, both reaching for his own throat. A line cut into the white flesh there, and both sets of fingertips came away bloody as the hands fell to his thighs. The man's body alternately rose on its toes with effort and slumped with pain. A spray of blood sprang from the throat, smearing the side of his face. At the same time a dark stain spread on the man's trousers. The body swayed to the right, then to the left. At first the feet led this waltz as they tried to get purchase against whatever was killing him. Then the feet stumbled and dragged as whatever was behind the man took full control. The body's final sway was to the right as knee, hand, hip, chest, face settled into the puddle on the carpet.
Behind the assailant a second man now straightened up. His hands were still locked to a pair of wooden grips fastened to the back of the first man's neck. The grips were pierced by and tied with a stiff wire that had been spirally wrapped with thinner wire. Piano wire. Tom Gurden recognized it.
Gurden stared at the garrotte, then at the man who had wielded it.
"I am Ithnain." His rescuer smiled shyly. "A neighbor. Down the hall."
"I heard the noise of your fight and came to investigate."
"Agh. Where is the girl? Sandy?"
"Here, Tom. I didn't know what to—" She came carefully into the room, stepping around the puddles and burned spots on the floor.
"Are you okay?"
"Yes, sure. There was nothing I could do, right? So I stayed outside."
"You did warn me."
"Too late. I didn't see him until he was right on you."
Gurden turned to his savior.
"I guess I owe you my life."
"It is no trouble. For this I was trained."
"Trained?" Gurden lifted himself onto the sofa with his elbows. "I don't understand."
"I was a soldier in the Palestinian Army. Commando training."
"And you just happened to have that piece of piano wire prepared?"
"Old habits. The streets are hardly safe, even in this magnificent city."
"No, I guess not."
"If you will excuse me, I must leave for my work now."
"But what about the law... the legal implication of this? A man is dead here!"
"A man who tried to kill you: your problem."
Without a word more, the Palestinian bowed and walked out of the apartment. Gurden had lived in the building less than a week but, even so, he was sure he had never seen this Mr. Ithnain before. Before he could call out, the man was gone.
As Gurden tried to straighten his legs and his mind, Sandy went around the room with clumps of wet seaweed from the broken aquarium and quenched the smoldering spots on the books and draperies. She found the sonic knife and brought it to Gurden. It was dead, its charge run out.
"What do we do about him?" she asked, kicking the dead man's side lightly with her toe.
Ka-chink.
Gurden focused on the body and the metallic sound Sandy's kick had made. He rolled forward and, avoiding the bloody line all around the neck, peeled back the long coat. A collar of tiny steel ringlets glinted against the padded nylon undershirt.
"This guy was wearing chain mail!"
"Would that have stopped your knife?" Sandy asked.
"Dissipated the energy some, and certainly turned aside any normal knife."
"Does he have any identification?"
Gurden tugged at the coat to turn the body and pat it down: no wallet, card case, nor miniterm.
"Nothing—except for what feels like a set of brass knuckles and what could be a taser whip."
Tom straightened up and felt a residue of pain shoot up his spine and settle under his cranium. He let out a gasp.
"Does it still hurt? Let me get you something." Sandy turned and walked—still dancing around the puddles—up the steps and out of the lounge.
Gurden settled back into the sofa cushions.
In a minute she returned with a glass of water and two capsules cupped in her hand.
She gave him the pills and he tossed them off without looking at them. When she passed the glass into his hand, he almost dropped it.
When he touched it, an electric shock had passed up his arm and cut into the nerve trunk that extended from right shoulder through his left groin and down into his big toe. A whole-body experience. The feeling passed quickly enough, but it left a shadow shriek that would wake him in the night for days to come. Gurden puzzled briefly over the numbness, then dismissed it as an after-effect of getting kicked in the groin.
He drank the water.
"Better?" Sandy asked.
"Well, some... Yes, as a matter of fact. I do feel better, now that the shock has worn off. What did you give me?"
"Aminopyrine. I have it on prescription."
"Whatever else, its good for a kick in the balls, too."
"You poor dear." She touched his brow gently, then reached around to take the glass back.
Something about it, however, caught Gurden's eye. He held onto it and raised the glass in front of his face.
"Where did you get this?"
"In the kitchen."
"In this apartment?" The more Gurden looked at it, the more certain he felt that he had never seen it before.
"Yes."
"From one of the cabinets?"
"Why—yes."
"Open the drapes, would you?"
He straightened on the sofa and held the glass up to the early morning light as she pulled back the curtains. It was a perfectly ordinary, straight-sided, 350-milliliter tumbler. It was made of clear, unfeatured glass with no pattern or markings—except in the thick glass disk of the base. There he saw a ragged stain, brownish-black with a dash of red. The shape meant nothing to him, resemblng a bioculture smeared on an optical slide. The color, however, did seem vaguely familiar: agate, onyx, bloodstone, something like that. Still, it was odd—nothing any commercial glassmaker would cast for effect, nor let slip through the Quality Control inspectors.
By now the glass was warm in his hand.
"Is everything all right?"
"Yes, I suppose so. I just thought there was some crud stuck in the bottom of my glass."
"Oh, come on! I wouldn't hand you a dirty glass, would I?"
"No, I didn't mean—"
"You men! You live like pigs in a sty, then blame us women if everything isn't perfectly clean."
"No, really! Sandy..."
"So whose apartment is this, hey?" She settled on the cushions beside him and playfully batted the side of his leg with her knee. "Too neat to be a man's, and too small to be a share rental."
"Roni Jones's."
"Ronny-with-a-Y or Ronni-with-an-I?"
"Lady form. She's just someone I know."
"And someone I'd better find out about."
"No way, Sandy. When she comes back here and finds what Mr. Corpse there has done to her digs, she's going to feed me to her pet piranha. I'm supposed to be protecting her stuff—especially those damn fish."
"Piranha?" Sandy squealed and jumped up. "Where?"
"Last tank on the right. Thank God that one didn't break, too."
She rushed over and peered into the tank. Three hatchet-shaped silver bodies stirred in reaction.
"Beautiful!" Sandy breathed. "Look at those jaws! Those teeth! I like this Roni better already. She's my kind of lady."
"Yeah. Piranha make great little pets—except you've got to wear a steel-mesh gauntlet to clean that tank, with a latex glove under it if your hand has a cut or you've been handling raw meat. Next time, you can clean it, if you want.
"Speaking of cleaning," he went on, looking down at the still cooling assassin. "Do you think we can feed this stiff to them? That would avoid a lot of legal hassle."
"They're carnivores, Tom, not magicians. These fish only strip a corpse when they're free swimming and in large schools. Each one alone eats just a few ounces of flesh."
"So, what are we going to do about it?"
"About the fish?"
"The body."
"I think we'd better just leave it, don't you?"
"But—" he sputtered. "What about—when—?"
"Let Roni-with-an-I fix it up when she gets back from wherever she is."
"Trip to the Aegean."
"Wherever."
"And you and I—where can we go, exactly?"
"I know a place. Pack your bags. I'll wait."
"What about my gig?"
"Call and cancel. We'll get you another one, lover."
Tom Gurden looked long at the huddled corpse, lying in a puddle of fish water and seaweed, dressed in a long coat and a chain-mail shirt, its head half sawn off by a whip of piano wire. He tried mentally explaining it to the local police department: fitting this strange body into an apartment block where he himself was not officially listed and, as a day sleeper, was not well known; accounting for its having been dispatched by a mysterious neighbor called "Ithnain"—which in Arabic meant "Two
," not a real name at all—and whom he had never seen before; and linking this death to the official list of "funny coincidences" that was surely building around his own name in the Metro Boswash crime base. Sandy's suggestion was starting to make sense.
"I'll pack."
* * *
Eliza: Good morning. This is Eliza Channel 536, an on-line function of United Psychiatric Services, Inc., in the Greater Boswash Metropolitan Area. Please think of me as your friend.
Gurden: Channel 536? What happened to the voice I was talking to before?
Eliza: Who is this, please?
Gurden: Tom Gurden. I was talking to Eliza—one of the Elizas, I guess—sometime yesterday morning.
[Switching mode. Index reference; Gurden, Tom. Rechannel 212.]
Eliza: Hello, Tom. It's me—Eliza 212.
Gurden: You must help me. Another one of these strange men tried to kill me. This time with a knife. He would have taken me out, too, except this other man came in, some kind of Arab, and offed him instead. So Sandy and I are alive and this body is cooling in my old apartment. I'm running out of places to run to.
Eliza: Do you want me to notify the police or other proper authorities? They can help you deal with consequences of this attack and can help identify the body with you.
Gurden: No! I had nothing but long-wave static from them before. This time they'll think about holding me for the killing.
Eliza: But if you are competently represented by public counsel, you should have nothing to worry about.
Gurden: Stick to the soft-psych stuff, Liz. About the law and the lawman's mind, you have too much to learn.
Eliza: Noted, Tom. I will so stick... Who is Sandy?
Gurden: My live-in. Or was once, will be again.
Eliza: Where are you and Sandy now?
Gurden: We're heading south.
Eliza: South? South from where? Just where in Greater Boswash are you calling from?
Gurden: Can't you tell?
Eliza: A thousand kilometers of optic fiber are no longer, to a photon, than a thousand meters. Unless you manually key in your booth number, I have no way of knowing where you physically are.
The Mask of Loki Page 6