Father to Son td-129

by Warren Murphy

  There were silver coins minted for Master Lik. They had been stamped with the symbol of the House by Themistocles-thanks from the Greek statesman for Sinanju's aid in his success in battle against the Persians at Salamis. Twelve bronze urns filled with flawless diamonds showed the gratitude of the Roman Emperor Vespasian for a Sinanju service. Bolts of uncut silk from every Chinese dynasty were rolled tightly and bound with gilded ribbon.

  On a corner shelf sat gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, presented without condition to a Master two thousand years before by a trio of Zoroastrian mystics. A reward to Sinanju for a prophesied vision, as yet unfulfilled.

  Pullyang passed through room after room, making certain nothing had been disturbed. As he did evry day, he took special care at the door of the library. A few years before someone had entered the house and stolen an old wood carving from that room.

  As his tired eyes searched the corners of the library, Pullyang's heart sang a quiet song of thanksgiving. Everything was where it should be. Feeling great relief, the old caretaker left the Master's House.

  It was two hours since he had awakened. There was life in the village now. Men and women were in the square. As he walked along, Pullyang smiled at the playing children.

  A group of people had clustered together in front of the cobbler's house. In the middle of them stood one of the women of the village. She seemed greatly disturbed.

  "I saw it when I took my washing down to the shore," the woman was insisting. She was out of breath.

  "What did you see?" a man asked.

  "The shore," the woman said fearfully. "The shore is like blood. It stains the rocks. Come quickly! It is already washing away."

  She grabbed the man by the wrist and began dragging him along. A few others went along with her. Such idle time-wasting was common in Sinanju. The people had nothing better to do than invent foolishness to occupy their days. Pullyang alone had important work to do.

  While the group led by the agitated woman went to the shore, Pullyang headed out of the village. At the outskirts he left the main road. He shuffled up a weed-choked path into the black hills that overlooked the shore.

  At his age it was rough going, but he eventually made it to the top. The hill became a plateau. Behind him the West Korean Bay stretched out to greet the cloud-smeared sky. Two curving columns of rock framed the bay.

  The Horns of Welcome had been placed above the bay centuries ago so that visitors searching for the glory of Sinanju would know that they had reached their destination. The twin stones raked the sky above frail old Pullyang.

  At the top of the plateau opened the black mouth of a deep cave. Pullyang was not permitted to enter the cave, for it was a sacred place. Indeed, he rarely ventured up this high as part of his professional duties.

  There were three trees at the cave's entrance. Bamboo, pine and plum blossom. It was Pullyang's responsibility to keep them healthy throughout the changing seasons.

  The three trees had survived the windy night intact. Bending, the old caretaker swept some needles from the ground around the pine into his coarse hand. Shuffling over to the edge of the plateau, he brushed them away.

  He was slapping the dirt from his hand and was turning back to the path when something caught his eye.

  Squinting in the weak sunlight, Pullyang peered down the far side of the hill.

  The hill rolled more quickly down to flatland on this side. A short distance from the bottom was a plain stone hut. It was far away from the main village.

  The family that had lived there for centuries had died out. The house had been abandoned for almost two years.

  And yet, on this cold morning, old Pullyang saw a thin wisp of smoke slipping from the stone chimney. For a moment the old man hesitated.

  His stomach grumbled loud from hunger. By now Hyunsil was probably wondering where her father was.

  He was hungry, but in the end duty won out. Pullyang picked his careful way down the short side of the hill. He was relieved when his sandals reached flat ground. He hurried across the frozen mud to the hut.

  He felt his will dissolve with every step. The house was a place of evil.

  A wicked family had lived there. It had for countless years been residence to shaman. More recently Nuihc, the current Master of Sinanju's nephew and the greatest enemy of modern Sinanju, had been born and raised there.

  For some reason lost in the mists of ancient time, the family that had lived there had rejected direct assistance from the Masters of Sinanju. The shamans took payment from the other villagers for their spells and tonics.

  Pullyang was certain that the Masters of Sinanju knew why the occupants of this house alone in all the village rejected the generosity of their protectors, but the reason was never told. If the family of the last shaman who had lived there knew, the secret had died when his daughter disappeared two years ago.

  The hut was in disrepair. Here and there the mud-and-thatch roof was falling in.

  Pullyang no longer saw smoke coming from the chimney. The warming sun burned steam from the rotting roof.

  Maybe he had been mistaken. His eyes had remained strong all his life, but it was possible he had confused the steam with smoke.

  The path to the front door was overgrown with weeds. There was no indication that a single human foot had touched the ground from the old road to the dilapidated house since the dwelling had been abandoned two years before.

  Old Pullyang felt his nerve grow stronger.

  He had to have been mistaken. He had exerted himself too much this morning. He was hungry. That, coupled with the strangeness of the night before, had caused his tired old eyes to leap to flights of fancy.

  It was time for breakfast. He would take a single peek inside the hut before heading back to his daughter's home.

  His belly growling at thoughts of food, Pullyang rested a shrunken hand of bone on the door frame and leaned his face inside the open doorway.

  Nothing. As he had now expected.

  No one lived there any longer. He was foolish to have imagined seeing any sign of life in that unholy place.

  The fireplace was black.

  Wait. There was something. Specks of orange glowing amid the ash. They became clearer as his eyes adjusted to the dark interior of the hut.

  Someone had been here. Pullyang's heart tightened. Movement. Something to his right.

  Startled, Pullyang whipped his head to the source. He saw something in the dark. A flat face. Sinister eyes drawn up like those of a cat.

  And then Pullyang's turning head kept going. It was off his neck before he knew what had happened. The decapitated head hit the frozen floor of the hut with a dull thud.

  Shocked old eyes already growing dull in death, the head of the Master of Sinanju's loyal caretaker rolled into the corner of the abandoned hovel.

  The body fell. Slowly. With great and lingering purpose. As if reluctant to leave the life it had clung to for so many years. The clutching old hand slipped away from the wooden door frame, and the body toppled forward.

  For a moment all was still.

  A scratching sound came from within the hut. Pullyang's body shook as an unseen hand took hold of his clothing.

  Toes dragging in the dirt of the abandoned front path, the body of the Master of Sinanju's caretaker disappeared inside the squalid hut.

  Chapter 4

  Remo turned off the city street. A wooden barrier across the road blocked his way. Slowing to a stop before the lowered gate, he leaned out the car window, passing the security card he retrieved from his dashboard through the scanner. The gate lifted and he drove onto the private main road of the development complex that he and the Master of Sinanju were currently calling home.

  The roads were laid out as carefully as a Monopoly board. The street names strained to be cute. Remo turned down Gingerbread Lane to Hopscotch Road.

  Half of the community was for rent, while the rest were condos for sale. Every building looked exactly like the one next door. Remo's
rented town house was a simple duplex with absolutely no distinguishing features whatsoever. It was a plain gray-sided number with tidy white trim, a green-turning-to-brown lawn and a private one-stall garage.

  As places went, it wasn't so bad. It beat the old hotel ritual Upstairs used to make him engage in back in the early days. A few days or a week in one place and he had to move on. But, thank goodness, that had eventually changed. He and the Master of Sinanju had lived in two houses for a number of years without incident. The last had been home for a decade and, even though it fell victim to arsonists, the burning of that house hadn't really been work related.

  At first Upstairs resisted the idea of another more-or-less permanent home, but Remo insisted. In the end he won out. Remo, for one, was grateful. He hadn't looked forward to living out of suitcases again. Not that he ever actually technically owned a suitcase, but it was the principle of the thing.

  Remo parked in the garage and headed around to the side door of the duplex.

  The Master of Sinanju wasn't in the living room. The big-screen TV was off.

  He didn't need to call out. There was a pulsing vibration in the air, like the plucked string on some musical instrument in tune with the very forces of nature.

  Remo followed the thrum of life through the kitchen and out the sliding doors to the small garden patio.

  Chiun was sitting cross-legged on the colored flagstones. The old Korean had been sitting in the same spot when Remo had left for Milford earlier in the afternoon. His shimmering scarlet day kimono was arranged carefully around his bony knees.

  "Hey, Chiun. Anything happen when I was out?" The Master of Sinanju's leathery face was upturned to catch the dying rays of the cold white sun. He did not bother to open his eyes.

  "No," the wizened figure said.

  "You sure? Everything was quiet while I was gone?"

  "The only time that it is quiet around here is when you are gone," the old man replied.

  "It's just that when I was heading down the street I thought I saw what's-her-name. Becky? Barky? Binky? That woman that keeps trying to show the place next door."

  The complex had been trying to rent the vacant side of their duplex ever since Remo and Chiun had moved in six months before. The woman who had rented them their place had tried showing the adjacent town house a number of times.

  The first time she made the mistake of trying to rent to a Japanese businessman and his family. The afternoon they came for a look, Chiun stood on his tiptoes on the stone birdbath, his nose thrust over the fence that divided the property. In flawless Japanese the old man offered something in calm and certain tones that at first might have been mistaken for a welcome to the neighborhood. Becky wasn't sure what Chiun had said to them-after all, she didn't speak Japanese-but by the time they left, the wife and children were in tears and the husband was shouting a stream of what could only have been Japanese obscenities.

  The next two times she tried to show the place to American couples, each of whom had mysterious, unexplained problems with their cars while they were inside the house. The first car had all its tires flattened and its seats ripped out. The second couple's vehicle had somehow rolled down the hill and landed upside down in the complex swimming pool.

  Each time when they asked the old man who had been sitting on the lawn out front the whole time if he had seen anyone suspicious, Chiun replied that the only suspicious people he had seen recently in the neighborhood was a family of Japs.

  "Check their embassy," he suggested. "But leave your wallets at home."

  After the last time, word got out. Becky ran the other way whenever she saw Chiun, and no one else came to see the little duplex at the lonely end of Billy Goat's Bluff.

  "So was she up here, or what?" Remo asked.

  "She might have stopped by," Chiun admitted. "That's what I was afraid of. Was she showing next door again? You've got to stop scaring everyone off, Chiun."

  As he spoke, Remo peeked over the fence. He didn't see any severed arms or legs.

  The Master of Sinanju finally opened his eyes. "I?" Chiun asked, his voice straining with insulted innocence. "I? What makes you think I would scare, nay that I could scare anyone? Me? Scare? I am but a humble, sweet and kindly old man. Scare? How could I scare? My heart is filled to overflowing with goodness. I do not scare anyone. People like me. I, Remo, am a people person."

  "I don't exactly see them flocking to you in droves," Remo commented. There weren't any bodies in the small yard. Maybe Chiun had stuffed them in a closet inside.

  "They used to," Chiun sniffed. "Then I met you, and the droves started flocking in the other direction." Remo decided that there probably weren't any bodies. If people had been looking at the next-door unit, there would have been some cars parked out front. The pool at the bottom of the hill was already covered for winter. No one had been fishing out any runaway cars when he drove by.

  "Okay," he said, turning back to his teacher. "If she wasn't showing the house, what was she doing up here?"

  "Not everyone is like you, Remo Williams," the Master of Sinanju said. "Some people are givers, not takers. They are more than happy to do favors for the Master."

  "Are you kidding? She ducks and covers every time she sees you. How'd you get her to do favors for you?"

  "Because, unlike you, Remo, I take an interest in my community. Had you attended last week's rental board meeting as I did, you would know that the board unanimously voted that I was a wonderful human being and that, because I am old and frail and have a son who would rather run off all afternoon without even bothering to tell me where he is going, I have special needs that require special attention."

  Remo knew Chiun had started to attend the informal Tuesday-night board meetings in the rec hall a month ago. Remo figured there was an angle. For weeks Remo had been worrying about intimidation and hospital bills. Now he realized Chiun had been pulling a slow con job on the board members.

  "I get it. You went and whined for elderly privileges and managed to get poor Becky gofering for you."

  "Poor nothing," Chiun sniffed. "She is rewarded handsomely as an employee of this complex. My rent money pays her salary. Therefore she works for me."

  "I'm paying our rent," Remo pointed out.

  "And I am paying every day of my life for putting up with you."

  "Let's call it square," Remo conceded. "So what was she doing here? Light dusting? Typing? Stacking bodies?"

  "She was delivering my mail," the Master of Sinanju said. There was a strange lilt in his voice.

  Remo frowned. "I already got today's mail."

  "Not the garbage mail," Chiun said, waving a weathered hand. "This was my own personal mail." Remo understood. For years the Master of Sinanju had kept a post-office box for special correspondence. Remo mostly didn't pay attention to that stuff, but he got the impression that Chiun had moved into the cyber age, hiring someone to collect and forward mail for him from a special Internet address. That mail was printed and sent along with all other personal correspondence to Chiun's P.O. box.

  "You got them to make her do the post-office run for you?" Remo asked, impressed. "Wow. You must've really laid the snow job on thick with the board." He crossed his arms. "So what did you get? I'm guessing not another hardware-store flier."

  A smile toyed just beneath the surface of the Master of Sinanju's wrinkled lips. When he nodded, the tufts of hair above his ears did a soft dance of weighty appreciation. When he finally opened his mouth, he spoke only three words.

  "It is time," the Reigning Master of Sinanju announced.

  His reverent tone caught Remo off guard.

  In their many years together there were only a few times in training-very few in Remo's memory-that the Master of Sinanju had shown true pride in the way his pupil performed a given task. Words of praise, or even something as simple as a smile or a nod, were rare indeed. They came only when the Master of Sinanju was so overwhelmed by pride that he dropped his cynical guard and lost himself to the momen
t.

  Those three simple words, delivered on the patio of their small town house, were spoken with just such pride. And with a touch of quiet reverence thrown in for good measure.

  Remo slowly uncrossed his arms. "Time for what?"

  In reply Chiun reached deep inside a billowing kimono sleeve. The old man pulled out a single white envelope, which he held aloft like some great and treasured prize.

  Remo took the offered envelope.

  The paper was heavy. The envelope wasn't a cheapie. On the back was a wax seal. A shield topped by what looked like a knight's helmet was flanked by a lion and a unicorn. A banner at the bottom read Dieu Et Mon Droit.

  The seal had not been broken.

  There were no mailing or return addresses on the envelope. If it had come to Chiun's post-office box, it had to have been sent inside something else.

  Remo looked up, puzzled. "Open it," Chiun encouraged.

  Still confused, Remo did as he was told. Inside he found a single sheet of folded parchment. The paper felt old to the touch. In the center were written four simple words: "We are expecting you."

  Nothing more.

  It was a woman's handwriting. The script was crisp and sure. The woman who had written the words was obviously confident and unused to making mistakes. She had used an old ink-dipped quill, not a disposable instrument. Remo knew the difference. He had seen the same sort of strokes used by Chiun when recording the Sinanju histories.

  "Okay," Remo said, looking up. "I give. What's this supposed to mean?"

  "It means, O dim one, that it is time. That is the last. It will be the first." Chiun rose in a single fluid motion that barely disturbed the hems of his flowing robes. "Call Emperor Smith," he instructed. "Inform him the time is at hand and that we are leaving." He swept for the sliding glass patio doors that led into the kitchen.

  "Whoa, Chiun. Where are we leaving to? What time is this supposed to be? What the ding-dang is going on?"

  "Must everything be spelled out for you?" Chiun said impatiently. "The Time of Succession is finally here."