"What are you doing here?" Maddas demanded, yanking off his veil. It did not matter that the man had discovered him in an abayuh. They were entombed together in the bunker. The old man would not live to reveal the secrets of Maddas.
"I am Chiun," he said quietly. "I entered with you."
"I entered alone."
"Did not your shadow follow you in?" asked the old one.
"Of course. But what has that to do with you?"
"I am your shadow," said the old Oriental, padding forward on silent white sandals. He might have been a little yellow ghost in a shroud of bone. His eyes were unreadable slits.
"Who are you really, old one?" Maddas demanded, slipping one hand into a gap in the folds of his black garment. It closed about his ivory-handled revolver.
"I am Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju."
"That title means nothing to me," Maddas spat.
The little wisp of a man stopped not six feet away from the Scimitar of the Arabs.
"I am he who trained the assassin who fell into your power," he said without emotion.
"The American?"
"His name was Remo. And he was the greatest pupil a Master of Sinanju could ever have."
"This Sinanju, why have I never heard of it?"
"Perhaps," said the old man, "because you are ignorant and unread."
Maddas Hinsein knew an insult when he heard one. The pistol came out like a viper's head, muzzle zeroing in on the Oriental's sunken chest.
"You would not shoot me, an old man," the Master of Sinanju said simply.
"Why not? I have shot so many." And Maddas laughed.
"Because I have seen fit to present you with one of the treasures of the House of Sinanju, the finest house of assassins ever to walk this ancient land."
A yellow claw of a hand emerged from the joined white kimono sleeves to gesture to the seven-foot-long sword lying swathed in burlap on the desktop.
"You! You sent this fine blade to me?"
"Yes," said the Master of Sinanju, padding up to the weapon. "I trust you have treated it with respect, for it has been in my family for over two thousand years."
"You say you are an assassin," Maddas asked, interest silvering his suspicious tone.
The one called Chiun drew himself up proudly. "No, I am the assassin. The last of my line."
"I have need of an assassin," Maddas said thoughtfully. "The American President has caused me much trouble. I would like him killed. Could you do this?"
"Easily," said the Master of Sinanju, carefully laying the burlap folds aside to expose the gleaming blade. He examined the rubies and emeralds on the hilt with a critical eye.
Maddas Hinsein absorbed this answer with interest. "Could you assassinate the American President with that very sword and return it to me with the President's blood upon the blade?"
"With the President's head impaled upon the tip of the blade, were it my wish to please you so."
Maddas Hinsein's brown eyes glowed with pleasure. "It would please me greatly. I think we can do business, Master of . . . what was that name?"
"How quickly they forget," said the Master of Sinanju. "Bong must be doubly shamed that his service has made no impression on you Mesopotamians."
"Names do not matter," Maddas said impatiently. "Only deeds. Will you cut off the President's head with that sword for me, or not?"
"No." The old Oriental's voice was distant. He did not look up from his examination.
Maddas Hinsein was not used to the word "no." It startled him so much that instead of shooting the old man then and there, he sputtered a question: "Why not?"
"Because this sword is reserved for the execution of common criminals, not dispatching emperors," said the Master of Sinanju, who laid careful hands upon the hilt. He seemed only to touch it, and the blade lifted into the air as if weightless.
But Maddas Hinsein knew full well that it was not weightless. He had worked up a sweat carrying it, and the Scimitar of the Arabs was built like the Bull of Bashan.
"Then how would you kill the President?" he asked.
"With the only proper instrument-my hands," replied Chiun.
"I would accept this," said Maddas Hinsein, thinking the old Oriental meant slow strangulation.
"But I would not," said the Master of Sinanju, turning to face the Scimitar of the Arabs, the weapon held balanced before him, the flared tip less than a foot from Maddas' still-sweaty face. He could not believe the little man possessed such strength.
"There is not enough gold on the face of the earth to entice me to work for one such as you," the old man went on in a tone whose coldness matched that of the blade. "I may be the last of my line, a childless old man, but I still have my pride."
Maddas Hinsein blinked stupidly. That was a second no. Did this unbeliever not comprehend with whom he was treating?
"I demand that you work for me!" he roared, cocking his pistol.
"And I refuse."
"I do not understand. If you do not wish to sell your services to the Scimitar of the Arabs, why did you send me such a magnificent sword?"
"Because," said the Master of Sinanju, drawing the blade back over his shoulder with a sharp whisk of steel cutting air, "it was too heavy to carry."
Maddas Hinsein registered the abrupt drawing back of the blade. His first thought was to pull the trigger at once. No conscious thought was involved in this snap decision. It was pure reflex.
But it came too late.
For as his brain processed the first danger signal, the old Master of Sinanju swept the blade around. His sandaled feet left the floor. And the old man became a floating flower of spinning skirts, with the sword becoming a long pistil of flashing silver beneath the overhead lights.
Maddas Hinsein realized the stroke had completed itself when the Master of Sinanju alighted on his feet, his back to him, the sword momentarily lost to his sight.
He felt the soft breeze of the blade's passing. But he knew that it had accomplished nothing. He had felt nothing, save for that gentle breeze. His eyes still saw. His feet still stood firmly, supporting his strong body.
"You missed," Maddas Hinsein's brain commanded his tongue to taunt. But what came out of his throat instead was a bubbling sound oddly unlike human speech.
And as the Master of Sinanju turned to face him once more, the long blade came up before his unreadable Oriental face. The tip was scarlet with gore, and as it lifted ceilingward, blood ran down it like cough syrup.
Out of the corner of his eyes, the Scimitar of the Arabs caught sight of his own throat in the long wall mirror. A thin red line was visible there. It seemed to go around to the back of his neck. As his eyes grew startled, the line exuded blood like more thick cough syrup dripping from a glass jar rim.
"My son has been avenged," said the Master of Sinanju coldly.
They were the last words Maddas Hinsein ever heard in life.
His legs finally got the message that no more commands would ever come from his disconnected brain. They buckled at the knees. And as he fell, his head, severed so expertly that no vertebra was injured by the razorlike blade, so swiftly that the stump to his neck kept it balanced in place, simply fell off like a shaggy hat.
The Scimitar of the Arabs felt nothing. But before the light went out in his moist eyes, his tumbling head caught sight of his falling body and the ugly red orifice that was his exposed neck.
A single tear escaped his right eye.
It was the only tear ever shed over the passing of Maddas Hinsein, self-styled Scimitar of the Arabs. And it was red.
The Master of Sinanju took his time wiping the tainted blood from the blade of his ancestors. Then he left the bunker like a ghost from the storied past of doomed Abominadad.
Chapter 43
On the roof of the Palace of Sorrows, Kali danced.
Clasping her mate, her lover, and her dancing partner all in one to her corpse-black bosom, she turned and spun. Her naked feet made dry rustling sounds on the limestone roo
f, like the dead leaves of autumn skittering along pavement.
She led, because her dancing partner hung limp in her four-limbed embrace. His slipper-clad feet dragged uselessly. His head hung low, bobbing on a boneless neck like that of a strangled chicken.
"Dance! Why do you not dance, lover?" Kali whispered. "I need for you to dance. For without your mighty feet moving in concert with mine, dancing the Tandava, this world of woe will toil on as before. Dance, O Red One. The Red Abyss awaits us both."
Though no reply came from her mate's blackened lips, she danced on, her limbs shaking and quivering in death throes that would never end.
Tears flowed from Kali's blood-red eyes. The tears were a poisonous whitish-yellow, like pus. She was thinking of all the hot fluids she would drink from the Caldron of Blood, if only Shiva would lead.
Chapter 44
Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, ascended to the roof of the Palace of Sorrows to watch the fall of Abominadad by starlight.
He found instead a macabre dance, and the body of his dead pupil clasped in the scorpion's grip of the demoness that, as much as the Arab tyrant Maddas, had brought him to the end of all happiness.
As she went through her impotent motions, Kali's scarlet eyes stared blindly through him. She might have been oblivious of all the universe.
Yet she spoke. "Begone, old one. There is nothing for you here." Her voice was akin to a death rattle.
"This is the body of my son, whom I now claim," said the Master of Sinanju in an austere voice.
Kali expelled a rude laugh. "If he will not dance, then I shall split his bones, lick of his marrow, and depart this body to await the next avatar of Shiva."
The Master of Sinanju noticed the palsied twitching of her black features, the shivering of her limbs. She almost dropped her limp consort, whose head lolled so pitifully. Her anchorless head, too, whipped from side to side in her mad gyrations. They were two corpses dancing in a mockery of life.
The sight filled Chiun with the ice of bitterness.
Twenty years of love and discipline, and it had come to this sick end. He lifted his voice.
"Though you are Kali the Terrible, and I but an old man," Chiun warned, "I will expend the last of my essence before I allow you to despoil my son's body further. "
Kali laughed mockingly. "You are but a mortal husk, bereft of virility, devoid of power. I will gnaw the living flesh from your old bones if you do not begone."
"Bare your teeth, then, harlot," said the Master of Sinanju, advancing, the great sword of Sinanju before him. "For you face a fury more implacable than the hell from which you sprang."
Kali swept to a stop, Remo's head bobbing ghoulishly. Her blind scarlet eyes fixed upon the old Korean. A corpse grin twitched her lips into a death rictus.
"I hunger for blood, but living flesh may suffice, " she said, dropping Remo into a pitiful pile. Her quivering arms lifted in unison, like an optical illusion.
"And I yearn for vengeance," said Chiun, sweeping in.
The Master of Sinanju shook his pipestem arms free from billowing kimono sleeves, the better to wield his mighty blade.
Kali's outspread arms closed like a Venus's-flytrap.
The sword's spade-shaped point clicked against a dead black forearm. The Master of Sinanju thought this would be the final blow he was destined to land in life.
But it was not. A black hand, like a spider descending a strand of silk, simply dropped off the attacking wrist.
Recovering his balance, Chiun slashed defensively.
An elbow splintered like a dried tree branch, causing the lower left arm of the demon Kali to suddenly hang down at a crazy, useless angle, as if hinged.
"Aiee!" cried the demon. And her bloodless stump descended for the Master of Sinanju's bald head.
Chiun planted a foot with a hard stamp, pivoted, and using the centrifugal force of the moving blade, flicked away from the blow. He felt its breeze. But there was no force behind it.
Withdrawing several paces, he turned to face anew his opponent. A wan smile brought grim humor to his cold hazel eyes.
"You are mighty, O Kali. But your host is not. The girl's sinews are poisoned from the Arab's death gas. She is dying. Just as my Remo has perished. You will join him in death."
And he laid aside his great weapon. It was weighing him down. He was still not recovered from his long ordeal of water and undeath.
"I will kill you first!" screamed Kali. Yellowed teeth bare, she sprang at him like a dog.
Chiun darted from the lunge, hurling a taunt over his shoulder.
"You will kill me never, carrion thing," he spat. "You were born dead and you will die forever."
"I will eat you!"
Sweeping around, the Master of Sinanju paused only to take up Kali's severed hand. It was cold to the touch. Still, it twisted with tarantula animation.
"Eat you this!" called Chiun, hurling the member in the face of his attacker.
Kali screamed anew. Blood oozed from the corners of her mouth, as if the lungs had ruptured from the very violence of her cry. She caught the hand and began to gnaw upon it like a bone.
"I will consume your hands," she said through a mouthful of her own fingers. "Just as I consume my own."
"Only a cannibal speaks empty words through a full mouth," Chiun jeered.
At that, Kali the Terrible threw away the fingerless hand and came at him screaming.
Chiun stood his ground, his eyes resolute, his thoughts cold.
Yes. Come, Kali. Come to your doom, he told himself. And he set himself to flick from her path so that Kali would hurl herself to her own death.
Kali undoubtedly would have done exactly that, except for one obstacle-the cold corpse of Remo Williams. He lay in her path. One of her naked feet stubbed Remo's unresponsive head. Kali stumbled.
And like a bear trap that had been sprung, Remo's arms lifted, digging deep into the cold dead flesh of her legs.
"You tricked me!" Kali howled. "You live!"
"And you die," a remorseless voice returned, beginning to drag her down to him.
As Chiun watched, his wrinkled features twisting in horror, the lolling head of his pupil strained upward on its unstable neck. Three eyes burned in his face. They were as black as balls of polished ebony. They locked with those of Kali, and the mouth, roaring, snapped and snarled at Kali's astonished face with the fury of a wild dog. The third eye began to glow, emitting a pulsing purplish beam of light.
Inexorably, Kali was wrestled to the ground. Shiva-for that was the true name of the entity that animated the remains of Remo Williams, Chiun understood-assumed a superior position, straddling the kicking, screaming corpse-thing. The purple beam bathed it like hard radiation.
"What are you doing?" Kali screamed, averting her face from the awful light. "I only wanted to dance! This is our shared destiny!"
"My hour has not yet come," Shiva said in metallic tones. "The day of the Tandava has not yet dawned. You desire blood? I give you bile. "
And with that, Shiva's mouth yawned to its fullest and began extruding a black bile that was like cold tar streaked with blood.
The viscous matter poured over Kali's unprotected face. She kicked, she fought, howling like a cur. But in the end her nerve-damaged limbs lacked the power to resist.
Quivering and twitching, she subsided.
As Chiun watched, true fear a cold stone in his belly, Shiva dismounted his consort. He turned slowly. The three black eyes seemed to regard the Master of Sinanju like a doom.
"I do not fear you, Supreme Lord," Chiun said in a quavering voice.
"Then you are not worthy to call yourself a Master of Sinanju," Shiva intoned.
Chiun swallowed. "What is your will?"
Shiva raised both hands to his forehead. They swept down to his thighs like a benediction. "That this fleshly throne remain whole until I claim the right to sit upon it, " he said.
Chiun's facial hair quivered. "Remo is not dead?" he gasped. His eyes
went round and unbelieving.
"The gas of death is strong, but my will is stronger."
Chiun indicated the prostrate form of Kali. "What of her?"
"She has tasted the excretions that, now purged, allow my avatar to breathe the air of this realm anew. "
The Master of Sinanju trembled, and fought back welling tears.
"Give me back my son, O Shiva, and any wish you desire, I will swear to fulfill."
"Remember that vow, Sinanju," said Shiva. "You may come to regret it. But on this day, in this hour, I need only to return to Chidambarum, the center of the universe, where I sleep. "
Chiun nodded. It was more than he could ever have dreamed. A lump rose in his throat and the air coming into his lungs was inexplicably hot.
Then, assuming a lotus position on the limestone roof, Shiva the Destroyer laid his wrists upon his knees and closed all three eyes. A wave of color, like the wind worrying sailcloth, rippled over the flesh of Remo Williams. Another. The slaty color began to fade. Magically, the lopsided head reoriented itself to the vertical, the livid blue bruise of the throat lessening, fading, growing pink and healthy once more.
Remo Williams opened his uncomprehending brown eyes. They blinked, focused, and seemed to accept the pale vision that was the Master of Sinanju standing before him.
"Little Father . . ." he began, his voice a bullfrog croak.
Chiun said nothing. He could not. His every thought was focused on holding back unseemly tears.
"I thought you were . . . dead," Remo said slowly, seeming not to know where he was. He looked around. At every point of the compass, smoke lifted into the intensely black sky, and fires raged.
"Is this . . . the Void?" Remo asked tightly. "The last thing I remember was killing Maddas Hinsein. Then Kimberly grabbed me by the . . ."
His gaze suddenly alighted on the prostrate form of Kimberly Baynes, only a yard away.
"Is she dead too?"
Before the Master of Sinanju could summon up an answer, the blackened arms of Kali flung upward. Her spine coiled and her legs jackknifed. Her tottering body came erect, surviving arms outflung as if for balance.
"What's this?" Remo asked nervously.
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