Outlanders 32 Evil Abyss, page 16
Her hands were untied so she could eat, and three times a day she was escorted to a place where she could relieve herself, little more than a hole in the stone floor. Her escort considerately turned his back when she was so occupied, but he inserted a hand into the belled sleeve of his robe, a silent warning he kept a weapon there. If the weapon was a knife, Brigid doubted the blade could penetrate her shadow suit, but she wasn't inclined to escape until she gathered more information. She learned the language quickly and overhead whispers of the imminent arrival of someone in authority named Brother Javalara.
She wondered if he was the reason she had not eaten all day. She tried to be stoic about it, but finally she leaned forward as far as the leather cords permitted and called to the men at the fire. "Gentlemen, I have an excellent time sense, and I think I haven't eaten in at least twelve hours."
Her pronunciation of a few of the words might have been less than perfect, but the Magickers seemed to understand her nevertheless. One of them, a young man called Brother Yasovar, walked over to where she sat trussed.
"I am sorry," he said in a soft, almost feminine voice. "You must be patient. These are difficult times. Many people in Phnom Kuleh go hungry. It is particularly difficult for us, the guild of Magickers."
"If you were any kind of decent sorcerers," Brigid answered wryly, "you'd conjure up something to eat."
"We're not those kind of magicians. You must wait until Brother Javalara arrives. He will see to all your needs."
Brigid stopped short of muttering, "That's what I'm afraid of," but she did inquire, "May I ask you something, Yasovar?"
"Does it have to do with food?"
She chuckled in spite of herself. "No, not this time." The hooded head inclined in a nod. "Proceed."
"Why are you holding me prisoner in the first place? You scarcely seem able to look after yourselves."
"We believe you can do much to aid the Magickers' cause." The response was quick, almost by rote.
"What cause is that?"
"Brother Javalara will be here soon to explain. You can dine with him, and he'll tell you what he deems suitable."
"I hope he brings something suitable to dine on," Brigid retorted. "Unless you consider what you've been feeding me a delicacy."
Yasovar stiffened as if offended by the remark. "We lived in Kumudvati's court before Colonel Poyang had us banished."
"And who would Kumudvati be again?"
Sounding slightly surprised that she had to ask, Yasovar answered, "The Devi-Naga, the serpent princess. She outlawed my guild."
Brigid's lips quirked in a smile. "Her administration didn't care for your brand of magic? I know I can see some areas of improvement."
Sadly, Yasovar stated; "We were not always sorcerers."
"But were you always Magickers Brigid pressed. Before Yasovar could reply, a male voice cut in. "You must overlook the young brother's tendency to overdo the bitter-exile routine. It's been several years, and he's yet to come to terms with it."
The tone of voice was pleasant and conversational. A tall, gaunt man carrying a burlap bag strode toward her. He wore a thin leather skullcap on his hairless head, the forepart curving down toward the bridge of his nose like a widow's peak. It bore a golden starburst symbol but without the addition of the spiral. The ends of a down-sweeping mustache joined with a wispy goatee on his chin.
"I am Brother Javalara."
He gestured toward her wrists and said to Yasovar, "Release her."
The younger man bent over Brigid, withdrawing a slender knife from his sleeve, he began sawing at the bonds encircling her wrists.
"You know," Brigid suggested helpfully, “if you just untie me, you can use the thongs to tie up another woman.”
To her surprise, Yasovar laughed apologetically. "I'm no good with knots. We'd be here all night."
"I hope you don't mind dining on rabbit," Javalara said. "At this point," Brigid replied, "I eat most anything." She paused and added quickly, "Within reason, that is." Yasovar finished slicing through the thongs binding her wrists and ankles. Javalara stepped forward, extending a hand. Brigid waved him away and stood, rubbing her wrists to restore the circulation. She realized she was almost as tall as Javalara.
"I am sorry we had to treat a woman of your obvious intellectual capacity in such a fashion," Javalara said. He sounded sincere. "What is your name?" She tossed her tangled red-gold mane over her shoulders, noting sourly the dire need for a shampoo."Baptiste."
He bowed his head respectfully. "I'm happy to have you among us, Baptiste."
"But not," she countered dourly, "happy enough to let me go so I can find my friends."
"I am afraid for the time being we must keep you with us."
Javalara handed the bag to Yasovar. "Prepare this, my brother"
As the young man walked toward the fire, Javalara said quietly, "There is a certain and ongoing problem we need to find a solution to, and you appear to be qualified to help us. Tomorrow morning we will begin our journey to Angkor Thom"
Brushing off her shadow suit, Brigid asked, "What kind of problem are you talking about?"
Javalara hesitated a second before answering, “It has to do with the generation, balance and manipulation of energy."
Brigid stared at him, her mind racing. When he didn't elaborate, she said flatly, "That doesn't tell me much." "I realize that, Baptiste. You will learn more, I assure you.”
Another one of the Magickers approached, carrying a cloth-covered bundle in his arms. Coming to stand beside Javalara, he whispered into his ear for a few seconds. Javalara nodded gravely.
With an edge in her voice, Brigid asked, "Do you know anything about the two people who were with me when we were set upon?"
Javalara nodded dolefully. "The news is not encouraging. The man was captured by the Cobra Guard, the Devi-Naga’s royal police. The woman, as best as I can adjudge, is in the custody of the general."
Brigid narrowed her eyes. "The general? I take it he has nothing to do with the Devi-Naga?”
Javalara snorted out a laugh. "No, indeed."
"Do you know if they're alive?" she demanded impatiently.
The man shook his head, lips creased in a frown. "I haven't heard anything one way or the other as to their fates. I'm sorry."
A cold knot of angry frustration tightened in the pit of Brigid's belly. Between clenched teeth she said, "For Magickers, you're about the most incompetent and poorly organized group of sorcerers I ever heard of."
Javalara drew himself up in an attitude of wounded dignity. Sadly, he replied, "I cannot debate you on that observation, Baptiste. But like Brother Yasovar said, we were not always sorcerers."
"Then what were you" she snapped.
Quietly, but with a touch of pride, Javalara intoned, "Scientists."
He turned to the Magicker standing at his side and whisked away the cloth. The man held the interphaser, balanced carefully on the flats of both hands.
"As, apparently, are you,"
Chapter 16
The trading post wasn't quite what Kane expected. Built of ornately carved and decorated wood, the structure reminded him more of one of the temples he had glimpsed in his flyover of the Angkor plain.
Upon a second, closer look he realized his assessment had been correct. The building had once been a temple. Pinnacled towers rose from the river like masts of submerged ships. Part of the structure had sunk and broken away, tilting into the river beneath the waterline. The sections made of wood were obviously added at a much later date.
A small settlement had grown up around the trading post Thatch-and-reed huts were scattered along on the bank, and the smoke of cooking fires lay in planes across the water. Half-naked children, browned by the sun, played at the river's edge. People of both sexes and all ages moved among the huts, going about their daily business. Most of them were dressed in similar fashion to Chou Chan. A half- dozen wooden docks extended from the riverbank. Fishing boats, dugout canoes and skiffs were tied up at them or being paddled out into the brown water of the Siemrap. Chou Chan cocked his head toward the partially submerged building. "We have arrived at the trading center safely."
Kane resisted the impulse to tell him his evaluation might be premature. A group of Asian men lounged in the shade of a tarp tacked to a bamboo arbor near the entrance of the trading post They were a bit too obvious in their lack of interest in Kane and his guide. All relatively young men, they were dressed much like the other people in the village but they didn't exude an indolent personality. They reminded Kane of watchdogs, tense and ready to raise an alarm. Their poses of studied indifference and sideways glances toward Kane bespoke sec men.
"Who did you say runs this trading post?" Kane asked uneasily.
"I didn't," Chou Chan responded brusquely.
“Right, and that's why I'm asking now.”
Chou Chan hesitated a second before saying, "His name is Zhou Tzu."
Zow Zoo" Kane echoed.
The little man nodded. "He is very well respected in these parts and will not cheat you."
"I'm not worried about being cheated," Kane muttered as they walked past the Asian youths.
Thunder boomed in the near distance, a rumbling roll. Kane glanced up at the gray clouds gathering in the sky. "It rains several times a day this time of year," Chou Chan remarked.
Kane followed the little man up the stone steps leading to a beaded curtain that served as a door. The room they entered was large, with a high, beamed ceiling, and it resembled nothing so much as a storage warehouse that had exploded due to the pressure of shoving far too many objects into it.
Kane swept his gaze over the freestanding shelves, cases, racks and bins. He could make no sense of the order in which the items were displayed but he doubted there ever had been one. Shelves laden with ceramic jars, unidentifiable bits of rust-flaked metal, bins containing bolts and scraps of cloth and freestanding racks holding a variety of small statues occupied almost every inch of floor space.
Most of the figurines depicted a fat-bellied Buddha, but many others were worn by the weathering of the ages, so it was impossible to tell what they were meant to represent, animal, mineral, human or otherwise. None of the items Kane glimpsed looked like viable trade goods, they more closely resembled a sampling of objects dug out of a garbage pit.
The trading post apparently provided double service as a tavern or café. Two men wearing dark tunics and high-topped laced boots sat at a table near an open door that led out to a deck. One of them wore a scarlet headband with a strange spiral symbol embroidered on it. The other had a single loop of silver dangling from his left ear. Both looked to be in their early twenties. A fat man wearing a leather vest that concealed only a portion of his flabby torso made a lazy effort to oil the blade of a short sword. Its edge showed numerous V-shaped nicks. He nodded toward Chou Chan sleepily,
Gesturing at Kane, the little man said, "My friend Kane has traveled a long way, from a far-off territory. He has valuable treasures from his land to trade for quills."
The fat man looked at Kane with a sudden, penetrating interest. His eyes darted to the pack strapped to his back and then to the Copperhead dangling from a lanyard stretched across his chest. "My name is Pheng-Ki. I review all the merchandise before any business is done." "I thought a guy named Zhou Tzu ran this operation," Kane said nonchalantly.
Pheng-Ki's lips pursed disapprovingly. "Zhou Tzu is responsible for the disbursement of quills. He is far too busy to look at every piece of junk brought in by vagabonds."
Kane decided to ignore the implications of the remark but he asked, "Maybe you can tell me what quills are." Pheng-Ki grunted and turned toward a small desk set against the wall. Kane saw a narrow curtained doorway to the left of the man. Flickering light glowed feebly on the other side of it.
The fat man opened a drawer, rummaged around inside it for a moment, then withdrew a long white feather, apparently one from the wing of a large waterfowl. He held it out toward Kane, who frowned in puzzlement. Then light glinted from a sprinkling of gold dust within the vanes.
"Now do you understand our currency, outlander?" Chou Chan asked. "You owe me five of those...or something of equal value."
The hard edge to his voice and the reversion to addressing him as `outlander’ raised Kane's nape hairs. At the same instant he heard the scuff of leather against Floorboards. Wheeling on the ball of his right foot, he drove the toe of his left between the thighs of the man wearing the red headband.
The man grunted, jackknifed at the waist, and Kane hammered him face first to the floor with a blow from his Sin Eater-weighted forearm. He kicked him in the side of the head, rendering him unconscious.
The man with the silver earring reached for Kane's backpack, securing a grip on a strap. He tried to wrestle Kane into a corner. Both Pheng-Ki and Chou Chan began shouting instructions and screeching in outrage. Kane leaned in the direction of the pull, grabbed a handful of tunic and butted the man in the face with his forehead. His attacker's nose collapsed with a wet crunch of cartilage. Blood squirted from his nostrils as from a squashed tick. Staggering the width of the room, he stumbled out on the deck, where his heels snagged on a loose board and he collapsed heavily onto his back. Bellowing in wordless fury Pheng-Ki swung at Kane with the notched knife. Kane shifted to the left, and the blade crashed into a shelf, causing small items to jump from it and thump to the floor. It took all of Kane's willpower to restrain himself from unleathering his Sin Eater and deflating the man's swag belly with a 9 mm triburst.
Pheng-Ki lunged at him, and lifted his arms, depending on the tough fabric of his shadow suit to turn the blade. As the nicked edge sawed uselessly against his sleeves, Kane drove a knee into the man's ballooning stomach.
Pheng-Ki uttered a noise between a belch and a squawk and stepped backward. He managed to stay on his feet and renew his attack with the knife. Kane ducked a vicious roundhouse from the blade. The force of his unconnected blow turned Pheng-Ki completely, and Kane dropped, sweeping the fat man's feet out from under him with his right leg. As Pheng-Ki sat heavily on the floor, Kane bounced erect and hooked the corner of a freestanding cabinet with the fingers of his right hand and heaved.
The case tottered, cabinet swayed and items fell from the shelves, clattering to the floor, pelting Pheng-Ki. The man raised an arm and his lips parted, but only a high-pitched keening wail issued from them as the heavy case crashed down atop him.
Teeth bared in a silent snarl, Kane whirled toward Chou Chan, who made a shambling run around him toward the curtained doorway. Kane clothes-lined him in the throat with his left arm, lifting him up and dropping him hard on his back. Bending over and grabbing him by a handful of his greasy hair, Kane jerked the little man to his feet and swung him around. The man squealed in pain, reaching up to prize Kane's fingers open.
"You misunderstand, outlander—"
"That's my line, you sawed-off little turd," Kane snapped, the Sin Eater sliding into his hand. He jammed the bore against the side of the little man's head. "Why'd you bring me here? You've got about three seconds to talk or you won't tell anything to anybody ever again." Despite the temptation, Kane had no intention of killing the man, but he knew such a bluff would work well with a sleazy con artist like Chou Chan.
"You said you sought a girl, Kane! I sought only to help you!" he bleated.
"It's 'Kane' again, now, is it?" He laughed scornfully. "Let's go back to outlander...and back to the girl."
The female voice was sharp, strident and familiar.
His head swiveled so fast his neck tendons twanged in protest. Nora Pennick stood before the curtained doorway, her right arm supported by a sling. The left leg of her bodysuit was torn, showing a white, crimson-splotched bandage on the thigh beneath. Although her hair was in disarray and her eyes dark-ringed, she appeared to be in fairly good condition.
Kane shoved Chou Chan away from him. The bent little man stumbled backward, tripped over a fallen statue and fell heavily. Kane paid him no attention, as with two long strides he crossed the room to where Nora stood. "Are you all right?" he asked, looking her up and down.
She smiled wanly, touching her arm in its sling and shifting her left leg. "It's not quite as bad as it looks...dislocated arm, gash on my thigh." Her voice was soft, almost subdued. "I have been well cared for."
“By who?” Kane demanded,
"By me, Mr. Kane," The quiet male voice floating out of the doorway was fluid, his English free of any hint of an accent, it was as if the speaker had learned the language from a computer's speech program, because there was a certain sterility of tone, an almost machinelike lack of tonal inflections.
Kane snapped up his Sin Eater, pointing it at the shadowy figure standing just behind Nora. "Who the hell are you?”
"You may kill me, but that will do no good," the man said. "You will never find your other two friends."
"You didn't answer my question."
The man stepped forward into the light, thrusting aside the curtain. He was almost a head taller than Nora Pennick, his clean-shaved face impassive and hard, the softness of youth long vanished from it. His eyes, narrowed by the Asian epicanthic fold, glittered with a cold determination. Jet-black hair hung loose about his lean face in a tangle of witch locks. A long thin white scar crooked down from his hairline to bisect his right eyebrow. He was a striking figure in his bright red Chinese robe, embroidered with heavy gold thread in dragon forms and tiny figures of Mandolin nobility from a past epoch of Asian history. The high collar and velvet- trimmed belled sleeves didn't detract from the charismatic force he radiated. A tigerish force burned within him, the fire of a dangerous, professional warrior with a purpose. The gaze Nora directed toward him was one of complete adoration.
In the same quiet, cultured tone, the man said, "My name is Zhou Tzu. General Thou Tzu."
Kane's finger hovered over the Sin Eater's trigger stud, his eyes slitting in an effort to conceal his confusion. At that second, the tramp of running feet filled the big room. Kane turned slightly as the young men he had seen lounging outside rushed into the trading post, enclosing him in a semicircle. They moved swiftly, with military precision. The manner in which they wielded small, wicked-looking subguns, aiming the bores only on him showed they had been exceptionally well trained in the use of small arms.
