Master's Challenge td-55

by Warren Murphy

  The bola sped by Remo's face. He swallowed. He couldn't move in forward. Ancion knew all those tricks. And he couldn't get to him from behind, because Ancion could control that, too. He had to stop . . . the arm. The easy, effortless swinging had to stop first. Then they could talk. Or something. Just stop the arm . . .

  The bola came around on another pass. Remo waited. On the third, he leaped directly over the ball into a backward spin and landed hard on the Inca's shoulder. The bola spun wildly, but it never left Ancion's grasp. Remo arched backward, out of the way, as Ancion jerked the leather whip in crazy directions. His shoulder was broken, but he kept the weapon moving.

  "Stop it!" Remo shouted. "You're hurt."

  With a cry of pain, Ancion thrust the bola out once more.

  The people watching scrambled out of the way. The ball hit a rock and careened backward at tremendous speed,

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  thudding into Ancion's chest. With a groan, the Inca dropped to the ground.

  Remo went to him. Ancion's chest was exploded open, the blood pouring in rhythmic spurts from the large wound.

  "Where's a doctor?" Remo shouted.

  "They do not understand your language," Ancion said slowly. "There is no need, anyway." He closed his eyes, then opened them again. "You were not a coward, after all."

  "I've never seen anyone fight like you before," Remo said.

  The Inca shifted painfully. "You will," he said. "The opponents of the Master's Trial are worthy, as you are worthy. You used no magic."

  "1 don't have magic," Remo said.

  "Then beware. The Other has magic. The Other will come for you. This is the year. He will come."

  "I'm not going to fight anyone else."

  "You must. It is the law of the Master's Trial. The other warriors will be killed by their people if you do not fight them, after vanquishing rne. It will be a grave insult."

  Remo couldn't believe his words. "Are you saying you're glad this happened?"

  "It was fair," Ancion said. "I die honorably. That is all any warrior can ask.''

  Remo slipped his arms beneath the Inca's back. "I'll take you inside," he said.

  "No. Leave me here. My people will see to me. They have buried their kings for five thousand years." His head fell back.

  Remo rose, looking at the lifeless body of Ancion. There was a soft rumbling among the crowd of spectators.

  "Hold it," Remo said to the advancing mob. "This was his idea, not mine."

  The man Remo recognized as the warrior who led him

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  to the palace stepped forward and fell on his knees before him. The others bowed, too, until Remo was surrounded by kneeling subjects.

  Remo stared at them, horrified. "Get up!" he shouted. "Can't you see I've just killed your king? What's wrong with all of you?"

  But no one moved. The law of the Master's Trial had prevailed.

  Disgusted, he picked his way through the prostrate bodies of the people and walked away. He never looked back.

  Chapter Eight

  Sinanju.

  It was the only purpose in the Dutchman's life now, a beacon signaling in the darkness.

  Find Chiun. Find Nuihc's sworn enemy. Then he would find rest.

  The moon was fuli, its light coating the budding trees in the Russian steppes where he walked. He had already come.a thousand miles, but he felt no fatigue. Nuihc's training had seen to that.

  Nuihc had himself been trained to become Master of Sinanju, following the reign of Ghiun, his uncle. He had spent a lifetime of preparation learning the intricacies of the most difficult and effective of the martial arts. But Chiun had cast him out of the village before the title of Master could be bestowed on him.

  Nuihc spent the rest of his life trying to regain the legacy that was rightfully his, but Chiun had bested him again and again. Even in his old age, the Master of Sinanju had devised a secret weapon against Nuihc. He trained another pupil, an American, to carry out his will.

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  The Dutchman had heard Nuihc's story many times. His teacher had grown bitter and spiteful with failure. The disappointment of being cheated out of his destiny aged him before his time. Whenever Nuihc told the story, his eyes would glint with hatred.

  And triumph. For even with his own skills lessened by the gnawing hate for his uncle, Nuihc had found a way to avenge Chiun's unfairness.

  He got the idea when he heard of Chiun's new protegee. It was a perfect plan, a way to ensure his success even if he himself were to die. He would find his own heir, another to whom he would teach all the secrets of Sinanju that he had learned from Chiun.

  But this heir could not be an ordinary man, as Chiun's was. The legacy of Nuihc would go only to one so powerful that neither Chiun nor his American "son" could defeat him. He searched around the world for such an heir. And one day, on a train in the plains of Iowa, he found him.

  Jeremiah Purcell was just a boy then, but a boy such as Nuihc had never seen. He could direct others to do his will without speaking a word. An amazing boy who could set people on fire by thought alone.

  The boy was a freak, doomed to a life of imprisonment, a laboratory rat whose tremendous power would be studied and written about behind glass walls. The boy himself had wanted to die, even at the age of ten.

  But Nuihc changed everything. He took Jeremiah away from civilization and nurtured him. He secretly taught him the entire discipline of Sinanju. The boy was a magnificent pupil, made even more formidable by the dangerous abilities of his mind. And if those abilities caused the boy to suffer, it was of no concern to him. Jeremiah was a weapon, not a son to be coddled.

  Nuihc protected himself from his creation by staying

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  away from the boy as much as possible, teaching him the methods of killing that were the essence of Sinanju, and then leaving him to practice alone for months on end. As Jeremiah grew, his exercises became more difficult. Nuihc would absent himself for years at a stretch, returning only to check on the boy's progress and remind him of the debt he owed him.

  Should I die, bring to death by your own hands the Master Chiun.

  And then, after years of silence, Jeremiah learned that Nuihc was dead. The mission of his life had begun.

  He panicked. He was still too young. He took himself to the small Dutch island to train with all the power at his disposal. He ranged his mind along the empty seacoast, perfecting its destructiveness. But something began to happen, something he had not counted on. The more he used his mind, the more he needed the awesome horror it begat. The episodes of mental work left him exhausted and frightened, but he couldn't stop. As the madness grew, it overtook his sanity.

  He needed to kill, the way he needed to breathe. The power became an overwhelming thing, a wild beast that lived inside him, uncontrollable, unpredictable. He had to learn how to rein it in, make it manageable, before the beast destroyed him. He needed time.

  Time was the one thing he didn't have. By sheerest accident, Chiun and his pupil came to the island, and the Dutchman met his destiny.

  He was too young. It had come to nothing. He failed to carry out Nuihc's demand. He had not found the rest he so needed. He traveled around the world, confused and terrified. The beast had won. He was helpless in its presence.

  Until Cappadocia. Then he knew. It was time. The beast was going to destroy him anyway. Perhaps he would find

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  Chiun before it did. Perhaps, once he accomplished his task, he would be free.

  As long as he did not allow the madness to take root, he reminded himself. Keep the beast caged, and you'll find your way. He took pains to keep away from civilization. No people. People were too strong a temptation for the beast. It needed to kill, and once it started, it couldn't stop.

  He foraged for his food. He ate no meat, drank nothing but water. He walked and ran each day toward the east until he fell with exhaustion. The days were long, his periods of rest short. He made good time.
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  Keep the beast caged. . . .

  He heard a sound. In the leaves on the forest floor behind him were footsteps, small and unself-conscious. A girl's voice sang a pretty Russian folk tune.

  He ran.

  "Ho," the girl called, laughing.

  He closed his eyes in despair. It was already too late.

  She was young, no more than twenty, with dark, curly hair and smiling eyes. She wore a red shawl over her dress and carried in her hands a basket filled with mushrooms. "Are you lost?" she asked in Russian.

  The language was familiar to him, as nearly all were. Part of his training had been to learn every major language spoken on earth. It had been the easiest part of his schooling, and the most pleasurable.

  "I'm-I'm just walking," he said.

  It had been so long since he'd held a woman. Mixed with the fragrance of the forest, he could smell her, warm and sweet and female.

  "Do you live in the village?" she asked, smiling. It was an invitation.

  He tried to talk, to utter some pleasantry and then depart, but his eyes couldn't leave hers.

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  "I said-"

  He stepped forward and took her in his arms.

  She intoxicated him. Her lips were ripe and hot. The skin on her neck was as smooth as alabaster. Beneath it, blue veins throbbed with her heartbeat.

  She pulled away from him in a tease. He was a handsome man, lean and tall, with eyes of an extraordinary electric blue color, and women liked him. Women who didn't know what he was.

  "Please go," he whispered.

  She laughed. "Are you frightened? No one will see us." Setting down her basket, she unknotted the shawl around her shoulders and let it slip to the ground. Beneath her dress he could see the outline of her erect nipples in the bright moonlight. She held out her hands to him, sturdy working hands that knew how to please a man. A prostitute, he thought.

  "How much?"

  "No more than a few kopeks. For my family. You will not regret it." She smoothed her hands over him, lingering expertly over the growing hardness between his legs. "You will please me, too."

  She undressed him and put her mouth on him. He closed his eyes and allowed the colors to wash over him. Bright, familiar colors . . . The beast was unlocking its cage and stretching its muscles.

  He groaned. "Stop . . . you must stop."

  "But I've just begun," she teased. Her tongue flicked over him as softly as a moth's wings.

  The beast was laughing at him. It would never be caged again.

  With a yank, he pulled her up by her hair and tore her dress from top to bottom. She shrieked.

  "Look what you've done! You are too rough. My dress ..."

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  He slapped her, knocking her to the ground. She lay there, stunned, her ripped clothing spread out behind her. Her breasts were large, and quivered with her short, frightened breathing. Her legs were covered by an absurd pair of long cotton bloomers.

  As he watched her, she backed away slowly, on her elbows. "Please," she said, holding up one hand as she tried to get to her feet.

  He fell on her, pinning her arms over her head, tearing off the pants she wore while she lashed her legs. The struggle enflamed him. When she cried out, he slapped her, again and again, until her face was swollen and bruised. At last she stopped, her wide, terrified eyes spilling over with silent tears.

  He entered her in a frenzy, thrusting wildly. She screamed with the pain.

  "The police will come for you. My brothers will come-"

  He slammed his fist into her mouth. Two teeth broke with a crack and lodged in the back of her throat. She choked, gagging and spitting blood on his face.

  He stopped, shaking. The blood. He could taste it. Deadly nectar for the beast.

  The girl's eyes rolled back in her head. She stopped struggling, and her clenched fists opened. A sound, deep and rasping, came from her throat. Her blood-smeared mouth froze into an open O.

  The Dutchman exploded.

  With his teeth, he gouged the blue vein, no longer throbbing, in her neck, and pressed his lips to it, sucking the red juice while he spilled his own fluid into her.

  In the distance, a tree cracked and splintered apart in a shower of sparks. The small animals of the forest shrieked and darted for cover.

  When he was done, it was nearly dawn. The round moon was high in the graying sky. On the forest floor lay

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  the dead girl's body, caked with dried blood, her face unrecognizable. Beside her were the silly cotton bloomers, now dark with blood.

  He staggered away. There was no remembrance, no regret. The ravaged body in the woods meant nothing to him. The beast had won. In the Dutchman's mind was only a feeling of deep, everlasting weariness, and one thought. A word: Sinanju.

  Chapter Nine

  As the president of the United States was flying to Europe for a special meeting with the German president, Harold Smith was attending his first lecture sponsored by the Earth Goodness Society.

  Its president was a British physician named Mildred Pensoitte, who was speaking to a school assembly at Revvers College in Massachusetts, where just days before, the American ambassador to the United Nations had not been allowed to speak because her views did not coincide with those of the Revvers english and sociology departments.

  As one female student explained to the middle-aged man in the three-piece gray suit:

  "We keep bad things from being said here. We have freedom of speech. Some things just shouldn't be said."

  "No doubt," said Smith.

  "We do have freedom of speech. I disagree all the time. Some of us think America is the most evil nation in history. But then there's the opposite view. Others think it's the second most evil. They think Nazi Germany was the most evil. What do you think?"

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  "I think many good people died, young lady, so you would have the freedom and comfort to be so absurdly stupid," said Smith who did not usually bother with retorts like that.

  The first thing Smith noticed about Revvers College was the vast green lawns and magnificent trees. The second thing he noticed was the vast number of expensive cars. The third thing he noticed were the obscene scrawlings in day-glo paint, calling for an end to manicured lawns and expensive cars.

  Dr. Mildred Pensoitte was a handsome woman in her mid-thirties. She spoke in clear tones, making grammatical statements.

  There was the earth, she told her enraptured audience. And the earth was good. Everything about it was good. The air was good, or had been once. The grass was pure, or had been once. And the rain was good. Or had been, once.

  "And then something happened. Then people who did not care whether anything of the earth, other than their bank accounts, survived, began poisoning it all. We broke our basic contract with nature. And what is that contract, that simple obvious contract? That we are a part of it. A part of nature.

  "What right do we have to assume that, just because we can make lawns, we have a right to kill the grass's natural growth? What right do we have to poison the air for all living things? What right do we have to carve the coal from the earth's tender skin and then burn it into poisoned fumes? What right does man-centered man have to murder anything he wishes to help his bank account?"' .

  But Dr. Pensoitte did not hate all men. Only a few men-those who ran America. Not included in Dr. Pensoitte's hates were men who burned people. After all, hadn't the Nazis tried to destroy America? And the Khmer

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  Rouge, which slaughtered tens of thousands of their own kind-didn't they have a right to mass murder because an American secretary of state once tried to bomb the murderers and didn't confess it all to American reporters before the bombers took off?

  At the end, one student stood up and asked, "If America is such a rotten place, why is everyone trying to get in? And if those socialist countries are so good, why is everyone trying to get out?"

  There were a few boos. Some of the students said t
hat they wished they had known the other student was going to ask that question so that they could walk out and not listen to it.

  But Dr. Pensoitte's cool beauty rode above the anger. She wove a tale of poor, one-crop countries, struggling against imperialistic America. She turned lands that had always had famines into lands that now, somehow, only had famines because of America. Anything the Third World did was a natural right because Americans owned more than one shirt.

  Therefore any disasters of socialism were not the fault of socialism but of capitalism. Smith had heard similar reasoning by Nazis against Jews, by Khomeini against Satan, and from fringe preachers about radio stations that wouldn't let them broadcast nonsense without paying for it first.

  It was the old devil theory very prominent in the Dark Ages and now with major liberal columnists. It was the new alchemy, the new attempt to make gold from lead, the one piece of thing that would explain everything.

  Being young, Smith realized, most of Dr. Pensoitte's audience had not have enough time on earth to realize the nonsense of such simplicity.

  She was still talking.

  "It is not surprising that a country which would make

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  enough atomic weapons to destroy the world seven times over would not leave the grass alone. Would someone here tell me how it improves earth to level the grass?"

  There were condescending chuckles.

  "We not only level grass with hand-pushed rotating blades. We have machines that can do it and poison the air at the same time. We burn electricity from nuclear reactors to do it. And what for? Has the world ever been made one jot better for grass growing in one direction rather than another?"

  More chuckles.

  "Grass itself is not the problem, of course," Dr. Pensoitte said. "It's the symbol. The person who feels compelled to reduce the earth's growth for the convenience of his feet is precisely the sort of person who has caused all the misery in the world."

  Applause.

  "We didn't have atomic bombs and acid rain in the Ice Age and we didn't have something else. We didn't have lawns. We didn't have exploitation by madmen. We didn't have the sort of secretary of the interior who daily rapes your mother, the earth."