The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  A fold of the smoke sketched a sharp outline across the surface of it. Amnet knew not what to make of it until a boot-shape caught his attention. Maps of the Mediterranean showed that shape as the Italian Peninsula. And there, to its right, and moving west to the front of the orb, was the hanging bull's-pizzle of Greece, tucked under the jutting rump-shape of Asia Minor. These images were fluid, like the historic outlines of empires and dominions, of influence and hegemony.

  The orb continued turning, putting the wrinkled land below Asia Minor to the front. The globe continued to swell, bringing the smallest features into sharper focus. Here was the curve of the Sinai. There the dimple of the Dead Sea, the breadth of Galilee, the straight line of the River Jordan running between them.

  As Amnet watched, the Valley of the Jordan widened and spread. The river became a rift down the globe, like a vertical slice cut out of an orange. The eyeball collapsed in an outflowing of dark smoke. And beneath the smoke, glinting with fire, was the surface of the Stone, which Amnet believed coordinated the visions. In a display he had never before witnessed, the Stone threw off rays of red and purple light, erupting like gobbets of liquid rock and sparks from the vent of a volcano. Amnet felt the heat against his face. At the focus of the rays was something bright and golden, like a ladle of molten metal held up to him. Without moving, he felt himself pitching forward, drawn down by a pull that was separate from gravity, separate from distance, space, and time. The heat grew more intense. The light more blinding. The angle of his upper body slid from the perpendicular. He was burning. He was falling...

  Amnet shook himself.

  The Stone, still nestled in the sand, was an inch from his face. Its surface was dark and opaque. The fire among the twigs had burned out. The alembic was clear of smoke, with a puddle of blackened gum at its bottom.

  Amnet shook himself again.

  What did a vision of the end of the world portend?

  And what could a simple aromancer do about it?

  Quickly, his hands snaking with the fragmented ends of vision, he gathered the Stone into its purse. It was cool to the touch, and he hardly noticed as his enlightened fingertips changed the thong-ends into gold-plated tassels. Amnet rose to his feet and arranged his tunic.

  He considered the alembic, sitting in its bed of ash; it was still too hot to touch. It would take an hour to clean it and pack it away, should he later need to make another vision. With a decisive movement of his foot, he brought the thick heel of his boot crashing down, splintering the green glass. With a sweep to the side he scattered that and the ash across the wadi.

  He gathered up the bundle of potted essences and other useful tools, put the Stone back in its place of safety.

  Amnet looked around, as if seeing the desert for the first time. He knew now the direction he had to go. He needed a horse. And his sword. His armor.

  Had Leo indeed left him the horse? Had any other Templar gathered up the arms Amnet had abandoned in camp? He climbed out of the wadi and began walking back toward the empty space where the army of King Guy had passed on that day. The pressure of time was upon him. He started to run.

  * * *

  File 05

  Identity Crisis

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow at morning striding behind you.

  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you.

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust

  —Thomas Stearns Eliot

  * * *

  The house among the dunes was an antique, with a foundation of cast blocks supporting a frame of real wood. Its skin also was wood: long boards that overlapped themselves like a caravel-built ship's hull from the Crusader times. The boards may once have been painted but, as Gurden could see when he got closer, they were now weathered a smooth gray, shining brightly in the moonlight. They had the tight, papery surface which old wood takes on before the rot underneath works through and collapses it into dust.

  The house once had large windows to look at the ocean. Now they were glassless, sagging frames, their last panes long ago shot out by boys with repeating rifles. These window holes showed a vague and wavering light, like candles, somewhere inside.

  As he approached, Gurden found in the sand against one foundation wall the remains of a fire: charred logs, food wrappers, beer bulbs. The smoke stained the gray blocks and lapped at the wood, which had begun to burn. Long ago.

  Spread more widely through the sand he found fragments of red paper tubes, no bigger around than his little finger. Their broken ends were tattered, like fresh pastry clawed by a fork. Gurden picked one up and studied it. The paper was not leeched and bleached by the sun but looked blood-dark, fresh and new. It was not paper then, but some kind of synthetic sheet. Was this a miniaturized grenade? A warning device? Then he remembered Fourth of July: fireworks on the beach—more tricks from small boys.

  He avoided the surf side of the house with its open patio and clear field of fire through the missing window walls. Better to walk around the house and enter by the door that faced the roadway. It would offer more protection.

  That entrance was wide open, he found. The door still hung on its hinges and even moved when he pushed it back with his knuckles.

  Inside, Gurden paused, though he knew this made him a perfect target, silhouetted as he was against the moon-bright dunes outside.

  The upper floor had fallen inside the house. The joists, broken off about half a meter from the near wall, had dropped onto the lower floor. The main crosswise girder, straining to hold the weight and sagging in the middle, had curved the broken floorboards into an amphitheater; the wall from which the floor had sheared off served as backdrop to its stage.

  The light was coming from candles arrayed around this amphitheater. They were thick candles, such as a church uses, with their butts softened and melted to the wood. The boards, as bleached and gray as those outside, threw their light down upon the stage.

  Gurden, standing in the doorway, was poised on the edge of that light.

  "Thomas of Amnet!"

  The voice, old and strong, had the metallic ring of a room that was all hard surfaces without drapery or carpeting to soften it. The voice came from the shadows at the other side of the stage—or Gurden thought they were shadows until, peering hard, he saw hooded and robed figures.

  "Thomas—yes," he called back. "Hammet—never heard of him. My name's Gurden."

  "Of course. Thomas Gurden is the name under which you were born. But does the other mean nothing to you?"

  "Hammet? No, should it?"

  "Amnet!"

  "Not that, either. What's it from—something Arabic?"

  "The derivation is Greek. The root means 'to forget'."

  Gurden came slowly forward, into the light. The hooded figures—there were five of them—moved to array themselves in a fan before him. That put their backs to the candles, plunging their faces into deeper shadows. This close before him, he could see these were small, compact men. Like the attacker in chain mail.

  "Amnesia," Gurden said. "And amnesty ... Thomas the Forgotten One. Or Thomas the Forgiven, if you like. Is this some kind of riddle? If so, it's very clever."

  "You understand, then?"

  "No, I don't. I've done nothing for which I ought to be forgotten—or need to be forgiven. So why is it that you men want to kill me?"

  "You have recognized us? That could be a good sign!"

  "Not at all. Not to me. The man in my apartment, with the knife, was one of you. Why are you trying to kill me?"

  The leader, at the center of the semicircle, pushed back his hood. His face was weathered and deeply lined, but it was an intelligent face, like a scholar's or a cleric's. His hair was white and full, bound with a leather thong at the neck. His eyes were like black glass, glimmering but still half-hidden in the shadows of his face.

  "We have waited a long time for you, Thomas Gurden. We who are mortal have sought the immo
rtal. We who watch the world changing around us have looked after the things that do not change.

  "Our weapons, our traditions, our resources—all are older than your young self can imagine. But there is a part of you as old as they, and eight hundred years older than any one of us. That part has been set to walk in the wide world, among its changing ways, many times.

  "You come like a clean, copper dipper into the well, each time drawing up a fresh sip of water. We are like frogs, sitting among the coping stones and watching the water's murky depths for the flash of your metal. We have the long wait."

  Gurden shook his head. "More riddles, old man."

  "Do you want to hear it in—how do you say—'straight talk'?"

  "That would be refreshing."

  "You are the hope of our Order, Thomas Gurden, and our despair. With your help, we can hope to bind up the wounds of time and make right the wrongs that were done—that we did to ourselves, perhaps.

  "Each time you are reborn on earth, however, you come in a new shape and a mortal quantity. We must test you anew. Sometimes you are weak and tangled in the ways of the flesh. Then, with a dry eye, we can only watch you go on your way to death.

  "Sometimes you are powerful and quick, with a stabbing mind and a bright awareness. Then we reach out to you eagerly. Always in the past you have slipped out of our hand.

  "But once, this time, you are at the balance point. Strong but not aware—or perhaps unwilling to know. Not weak enough to die, not strong enough to live. And always there are the others, who will take you and use you against us.

  "We have debated upon you for many months, Thomas Gurden. Some among us would take you out of this life. They would spirit you away to hiding places, to see if you can be forced awake. Some also would take you out of life—but more permanently."

  Gurden heard all of this with a hard frown on his face. He was halfway convinced these old men were a band of escapees from an Enforced Rest Center. That would account for five of them being in one place—if five men could share the same delusions and not all be raving at once. But this theory would not account for the dead man in the apartment. Nor did it explain the coincidences he had told Eliza about: the near-misses, the body-blocking saves, and the clear assassination attempts. Crazy men would have no sense of organization or persistence to carry out such plots.

  Take it at face value. These men, for whatever reason, believed he was someone they both needed and feared. And they had reached some kind of decision about him.

  "You mentioned 'our Order'," he ventured. "What is that?"

  "We are Knights of the Temple. Our brothers took an oath once, long ago, to free the Holy Land. We were to rescue the Temple of Solomon from the infidels' grasp and rebuild it, stone on stone."

  "There are no more knights," Gurden said.

  "You're right. They are no more."

  "Then how do you ... propagate?"

  "Through secular lodges, fraternal organizations, various brotherhoods—Freemasons, Old Norse, the Shrine. Every now and then a Rotarian slips in. We wait for the believers, the romantics, the ones who would have it be as the legends say. We separate them from the shopkeepers and insurance agents. We recruit and train. We test and we weed out. We watch. And we wait."

  Ah ha! Gurden understood now: organized crazy men.

  "Waiting for me?" he asked.

  "For the spark of Thomas of Amnet who may be in you... And still you say you have no memories?"

  "Was I a friend of Robespierre, during the French Revolution?"

  The old man turned to his followers. They nodded in deference to him.

  "Robespierre had no friends, only followers—for a while," he said. "Amnet was one of these."

  "Was I a country gentleman of Louisiana? A dissolute gambler and drunkard who found his salvation in religion?"

  "It was not salvation but an act of contrition."

  "And was your Amnet a tunnel rat in Vietnam? Didn't he die there, trying to save one of your Templars who climbed down a hole with him?"

  "Amnet has been valorous in most incarnations. The Great Gift was in him."

  "Was that man in the tunnels trying to protect me? Or hurry me along to death?"

  "You can tell us better than—"

  The old man paused, and his tongue seemed to take a long wolf-lick sideways, as if he were tasting the air. Then he staggered, his cloak flipped around his knees. As he fell and turned into the light, Gurden could see that the man's jaw and part of his throat were blown away.

  The sound of the rifle shot came as an afterthought.

  "Hashishiyun!" one of the remaining Templars screamed. His hand moved to his belt, and Gurden expected to see him pull out a sword or a dagger. What came out with his hand was a blocky antique submachine gun with a long cartridge clip that extended twenty centimeters below its pistol grip. The man turned toward the seaward windowframes, where the shot had come from, and loosed a burst of yellow glare and chattering noise.

  The other Templars fanned out to the corners of the room, taking cover and drawing varied weapons: a sawn-off shotgun, a short grenade launcher, a crossbow with bulb-tipped—explosive?—bolts, a laser rifle with a battery pack and a calibrated focusing ring. Their weapons boomed, blasted, whiffed, and thrummed at the gray shadows which crept among the dunes in the coming dawnlight.

  Gurden felt no compulsion to stand with the Templars and die in their fight. He did not know what hashishiyun were, but he had no interest in killing any, even if he had the means.

  The candlelight trembled and swayed in the bee swarm of bullets that peppered the room. The house's dry old wood offered no resistance to them, only a screen against the accuracy of the shooters outside.

  Gurden did not wait standing near the door. As soon as the old man was still, Tom did a forward diving roll across his body and up against the curving edge of the fallen upper floor. The floorboards were gapped and cracked, offering good hand- and toeholds. Gurden scrambled and swayed like a monkey up to the level remains of the second floor. From there he jumped and swung up into the joists above—for the ceiling below the attic had fallen in, if this summer house ever had a finished ceiling. He ran along the joists six meters above the gun battle and found shelter against the brickwork of the chimney, on the seaward side of the house.

  Huddled in the shadows, Gurden might escape detection. His dark slacks and shoes would not give him away to the light from below, but his white linen shirt would reveal him if anyone looked up. He contrived to fold his arms and shoulders down between his legs, so that only the outside of his shin and thigh were exposed to the light.

  Up here near the peak of the roof, the baked air was dead and flavored with old mouse droppings and birds' nests. Gurden dared not poke his pale face out to take a fresh breath and see what was happening below.

  The defense by the Templars quieted by stages, as the particular voice of each weapon was stilled. Finally, the shotgun spoke one last time. Gurden waited for the ratchet of the ejector slide and the next boom, but none came. Somewhere between firing and preparing to fire, the would-be knight had taken his own bullet.

  Silence. Not a shout or call from outside.

  Gurden still resisted the urge to look down.

  Then he heard footsteps on the board floor. A piece of wood creaked as someone pushed aside one of the Templar's hastily drawn up barricades. More footsteps. It sounded like a squad of men in heavy boots.

  "Not here, My Lady."

  "Identify each one."

  "We have. All strangers."

  "Then he slipped outside. Search the area."

  "He could have run off."

  "And I tell you he has not. Now go."

  The woman's voice was definitely Sandy's.

  The other—a man—spoke precise but faintly accented English. It took Gurden only a few seconds, with his musician's ear, to place the voice: the Palestinian-trained commando, Ithnain, who had appeared in his apartment.
r />   Many booted feet moved out of the house.

  Gurden again resisted the impulse to move his head and look down.

  After he had counted ten breaths, he heard a solitary pair of footsteps walk across the floor. Were they moving outside, or simply wandering around in the amphitheater? Right up inside the roofs ridgeline, the acoustics blurred the origin and direction of sounds from below.

  After another ten breaths, Gurden decided to risk a peek. With his head tucked between his legs, he moved his exposed knee out and down so that he could peer beneath the crook of it and still keep his face mostly in shadow.

  Six meters below, Sandy knelt beside the old man, inspecting his wound. She wore a white silk blouse, black jodhpurs, and stiletto boots. Her hair was loose about her shoulders. It shone red gold, lit more by the sunrise beyond the window wall than by the last flickering of the candles.

  Gurden wanted to call out to her, but something stopped his throat from even a whisper. What? Why did he not want to be found by the woman he loved? Because she had a pack of armed men, hashishiyun, at her beck and call? Because she was estranged from him, and now he knew it?

  She relieved the man's belt of an oblong object—some weapon or cartridge clip, probably—and tucked it into her own belt. Then she stood up and turned on one heel, quartering the room with her eyes and other senses. Having covered the ground floor, she tilted her head and made the same sweep along the broken line of the second floor.

  Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, Gurden raised his knee back to the vertical to shield himself. He stopped his breathing and went still.

  Would she see the scuff marks left by his hands and feet on the sloping floorboards? Would she see the disturbed dust on the joist where he had swung himself up? She had the intelligence to work out the path of his flight, if only she suspected it.

  Ten ... twenty long breaths went by.

  "My Lady! Outside!" A loud clatter—a pair of boots on the wooden floor.