Secret Of The Slaves. Alex Archer
on the inside of the door jingled merrily to announce their entrance. “Where are you?”
Followed closely by Dan, she pushed inside. Outside it was full noon. Their eyes, dazzled by the brightness of the equatorial sun, took time adjusting to the darkness within the shop.
“Maybe she’s stepped out,” Dan said dubiously.
“And left the door unlocked?” Annja said. “This may not be Rio de Janeiro, but that’d be pressing her luck even here.”
“Maybe the locals are afraid of her magic,” Dan said.
“You don’t believe in magic.”
“But they do.” He stopped as the door jangled shut behind them and sniffed. “What’s that smell?”
It hit Annja, too. Beneath the astringent smells of herbs and powders, of dust and the moldering bindings of old books, lay a smell of sweetness. And something foul.
“Christ—” The word came from Dan’s throat as though around something choking him.
On the counter to the right of the door Mafalda lay with her head, still wrapped in its bright turban, propped on the cash register. Otherwise she was nude. She stared fixedly at the ceiling.
Feathers had been stuffed in her mouth. Mystic symbols had been scrawled on her bare belly in blood.
Her blood. Her throat had been slit.
8
Fast motion caught the corner of Annja’s eye. She spun, reflexively bringing up her right forearm in a deflecting block.
A wooden pole struck her forearm. It was the haft of a spear, and its bright metal tip slid forward to graze her ear. A bundle of feathers tied behind the spear tip slapped her cheek.
Above the far end of the spear she saw the eyes of her visitor of the night before, burning in the gloom like dark stars.
Before she could react further the spear was withdrawn. With lightning speed it darted straight for her eyes. She twisted her body clockwise and leaned back, allowing the weapon to thrust past her.
She caught a flash impression that Dan was struggling with an opponent of his own. She had no attention to spare him. Her own foe was remarkably fast and determined.
His third thrust came low. Annja jumped high into the air to avoid the strike at her legs. She lashed out with her right foot, kicking a set of stout jars filled with different-colored powders and crushed leaves off the top shelf of a display toward her attacker. As one heavy jar tumbled toward his head, spilling orange powder that glittered even in the gloom, he reflexively jerked the spear back to interpose the haft.
Annja used some of the energy of her fall to add momentum to a spinning straight-legged reverse kick. The back of her heel caught the spear haft and wrenched it right out of the man’s hands.
He spun and darted toward the back of the shop. Annja chased him. A pair of machetes hung crossed on the back wall. The man snatched down not one but both at once, and turned on his pursuer. He waved the heavy two-foot blades in a whistling figure-eight before him.
He advanced on her, apparently unconcerned that she was unarmed. Should I expect chivalry from someone who’d ritually murder a harmless shopkeeper? she thought. Unless she intended to flee—or die where she stood—he wasn’t leaving her any choice.
Hoping Dan was too busy with his own assailant to notice anything else unusual she held her right hand as if gripping something, focused her will, reached…
The sword appeared in her hand.
The man’s eyes widened to see the broadsword materialize from thin air. But the two big single-edged blades never faltered in their complex dance of death. Annja was pretty sure his moves were intended to hypnotize or intimidate her, as well as pose a daunting problem in attack or defense. She didn’t doubt he could trap a longer blade between his and twitch the sword right out of her hands if she got careless.
Annja opted for the direct approach. She simply whacked at one of those dervish-whirling blades with her sword.
There was a jar of impact up her arm, a strangely musical clang. More than a foot of dark steel blade shot away to embed itself in the wall, between tattered posters for local samba clubs. The man stopped to stare in amazement at the surface where his machete had been chopped off at an angle as neatly as a bamboo stalk.
Annja’s strike to sever the blade had been forehand. She flowed forward and whipped the sword around in a horizontal backhand stroke that should have separated the long-haired head from wide copper shoulders. Instead the man bent his upper body to his left, away from the stroke. The blade whizzed just over his head, slashing free a lock of hair that floated downward in the heavy air like a feather.
He thrust for Annja’s flat belly with his remaining machete. The speed and fury of this strike would have impaled her had she not leaped back and left like a cat.
Unfortunately the motion slammed her hip into another counter laden with Mafalda’s exotic merchandise. A choking cloud of dust and bits of ground herb and tiny wisps of feather floated up to surround Annja’s head as jars jostled her arm. She sneezed, eyes filling with tears.
He rushed her, raising the machete to chop her down. In dodging, she had turned half away from him clockwise. She gripped the long hilt of her sword with both hands and thrust almost blindly toward the onrushing figure.
She felt a momentary resistance as he ran onto the blade.
His eyes blazing with determination, he drove himself onward. The sword’s point came out his back with a sickening sound. He fought to bring his raised weapon down in a self-avenging death stroke.
Fading strength betrayed his will. The machete fell from fingers that could no longer grip. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. A look of infinite sadness, almost apology, came into the blazing black eyes.
Then all light went out of them. They became dull as stones. He slumped in death.
Annja grimaced. She had killed many times. And almost every time before she had killed someone who richly deserved it—at the least a violent aggressor, and sometimes a serial predator upon human prey.
She knew somehow this man was none of those. He was a good man fighting with all his strength and will for something he truly believed was right. Deluded he may have been—must have been—but fighting for the right nonetheless.
Her head spun with confusion. Doesn’t that make him innocent? Her mission in life—as much as she could understand it—was to protect the innocent, to preserve innocence, at all costs. Even the cost of her life. Yet she had just killed a man acting for reasons she could not reproach.
He attacked you, a voice inside her head reminded her. And that fact seems to establish pretty definitively that he either killed Mafalda or had guilty knowledge of the deed. Virtuous he might have been. Innocent, no.
All this passed through her mind in a flash, a wheel of spiritual and stomach sickness, as she released her grip on the sword. It returned to its otherwhere, infinitely far yet no farther than the palm of her hand. The dead Amazonian warrior slumped to the plank floor.
Loud crashes snapped Annja back to the moment. She spun in time to see Dan flying upside down into a tall bookcase against one wall, having evidently crashed through a long table and a crowded set of shelves. The broken remnants of these and their contents were still falling toward and clattering off the floor in an immense swirl of dust and magic powders.
Standing at the apparent launch point of his flight was a tall, wiry, African-looking woman in a headdress like a flare-topped white can. She seemed to be in the follow-through stages of having executed some kind of throw. But Annja had never seen any woman throw a grown man like that. Nor any man.
The woman straightened. For a moment she stood facing Annja. Annja felt her gaze slide past, take in the dead man sprawled on his face on the floor right behind her. The woman’s