Authors: Eric Van Lustbader
Second Skin (72 page)
As her strong and knowing hands flowed over him like oil, he said, ‘It’s a luxury to have you with me. And a reminder. I have had many enemies in my time, but none of them have lived long.’ He sighed as her hands did wonders for his mind and body. ‘All have come with one thought – to destroy me. All have tried, in more ways than I can now count.’ He chuckled. ‘And here I am, the sole survivor. Even Mikio Okami, the Kaisho, is dead. Yes, indeed. I went to his funeral. Well, why not? He deserved to be honored, if not in life then certainly in death.’ He cackled like an old woman whom the gods have made mad. ‘And I must say it was a pleasure to confront Nicholas Linnear, to know he cannot touch me. He has no proof against me, he knows nothing but what I have told him. I played with him like a monkey in a zoo. Poor bastard.’ Akinaga sighed. ‘Londa, you are worth your weight in –’
‘Shut up.’
Honniko, in her guise as Londa the dominatrix, pulled the silken cord tight around his neck. A shudder of sexual arousal went through him, and suddenly, he was as hard as a bar of iron. Ah, the sheer ecstasy of being helpless. Like a child again at his mother’s breast, soft and warm and cozy and helpless. He sniffed the air for the flowery, milky scent of her. His mother. He closed his eyes.
The cord tightened, and with the pain, the near asphyxia, he felt ecstasy coming, creeping along his spine to his groin, pooling there like liquid iron. He could feel the power of his erection thundering through him, vibrating like a stroke of lightning landing between his feet. Sweet pain. She was good, very good. Oh, yes!
His eyes flew open, blinking like a child’s in the sun. Was it his imagination or was the cord just a bit too tight? He opened his mouth to say something and gagged as the cord was tightened still further. His head jerked up, the veins at the sides of his neck popping. He tried to scrabble up, but she had planted her knee firmly in the small of his back, and like an adder that can be picked up once impaled just behind its head, he could thrash but not get up or roll over.
What was going on? He tried to force air into his burning lungs, but he could not. If he did not get oxygen soon...
He saw the persimmon moon grow larger and larger, like a balloon filling with air, expanding until its very outline became distorted, until it no longer looked like the moon at all.
Honniko, watching Akinaga’s hateful face fill with blood and darken like the harvest moon, felt her blood singing. When he was dead, she, too, stared up at the moon and, thinking of Nicholas Linnear, of his grief and his rage, of him standing alone and empty on the stage of the temple, sang again the last refrain of the song:
‘I knew myself completely – no part left out.’
Her voice, soft and ineffably sweet, carried up into the inky sky like a plover, suffused with the divine animation of God.
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An invitation from the publisher
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Bravo Shaw always knew his father had secrets, he just didn’t realise how dangerous they were…
When Bravo’s father dies in mysterious circumstances, his hidden life is laid bare. Dexter Shaw belonged to a secret religious order long thought extinct. For centuries, the sect has guarded a lost Testament that could end Christianity as we know it. Dexter was the Keeper of the Testament – now his son must take his place.
Bravo has to solve the clues his father left behind, locate this precious document and ward off those who want it destroyed. But his enemies are powerful, and will stop at nothing to keep their secrets buried...
August, 1442—
Sumela Monastery,
Trebizond
On a blazingly hot late afternoon in high summer, three Franciscan Gnostic Observatine monks foraged in the midst of their daily perimeter patrol. They were grateful for the dappled shade and the heavy emerald light as they stepped carefully through the dense woods surrounding the Sumela Monastery, where they currently hid. The monastery was an altogether fitting place for their forced and rather desperate retreat—it had been founded during the reign of Theodosius I by the Greek Orthodox, with whom the Order had a special bond.
Though the men wore the plain, undyed muslin robes of their ascetic order, they patrolled heavily armed with swords, daggers and longbows. They were Guardians, trained in weaponry and hand-to-hand combat as well as the words of Christ and St. Francis. It was their sacred duty to guard the other members of the Order, especially those of the inner circle who ruled the Order, the Haute Cour.
The brutal sun, on its slow journey to the horizon, had by this time heated even the normally cool mountain air, so that the Guardians’ robes were shot through with sweat stains, spreading from their armpits and down the center of their broad, muscular backs. They moved in the same way they said their prayers three times a day—the way they held themselves, the wariness of eye and foot as they quartered the western wedge of tangled land under their jurisdiction, could only be described as ritualistic.
Nearing the seventh and final hour of their shift, their muscles ached, their vertebrae cracking now and again as they bent to examine some track or spoor to make certain that it was made by an animal and not by their fellow man. Their training demanded they be careful, as did the history of the Order, for so long under threat from the Pope and his strong mailed fist, the Knights of St. Clement of the Holy Blood. Since the time of the first crusade, which had been launched in 1095, the Knights had made the island of Rhodes their base. Danger arose in the Order’s having secreted itself so close to the Holy Land, where its enemies teemed, but they well knew the wisdom in hiding in plain sight. Over the year and a half that the Order had been at Sumela, no Knight of St. Clement had ventured to the monastery, which was not and never had been in their domain. It belonged to the Emperor Justinian, and then to the Comnenos, the emperor-dynasty of Trebizond, on the southwestern shore of the Black Sea, with Anatolia and the highly lucrative camel route to Isfahan and Tabriz at its back, an eight-day journey by ship from Byzantium.
At the edge of a clearing, the three Guardians paused to take water and a bite of unleavened bread. Yet even in this moment of relative ease, their iron discipline forbade any talk, and their eyes in faces lined with tension were never at rest. As they chewed and swallowed, they scanned the glade into which the lowering hulk of the sun spilled ruddy light. Hands at their foreheads, they squinted into the glare.
Birds twittered and swooped, insects droned sullenly, butterflies and bees crisscrossed the glade. The air sat exhausted and sweating, beaten down by the sun glare. The Guardians’ attention momentarily shifted as a brief rustling came from the underbrush perhaps fifty yards distant. They waited, immobile and staring, their hearts pounding as the sweat formed in the hollows of their necks and crept down their spines. The rustling came again, closer this time, and one of them went into a crouch, put fletched shaft to bowstring, pulling it back taut, the forged iron arrowhead aimed and ready.
A small form appeared, and the archer grinned in relief. Only a small mammal foraging through the underbrush. Another of the Guardians laughed under his breath, raised his hand to his companion’s tautly arced bow, as if to lower it.
He never got the chance. A brief evil humming made itself heard above the drowsing chitter of the insects as a crossbow bolt flashed through the air. The Guardian, impaled through the chest, flew into shadow, his arms flung wide. His archer compatriot, crouched still, drew back his bow, frantically trying to draw a bead on the hidden enemy, but before he could loose his arrow, another bolt flew out of the sun’s glare and pierced his neck. Flung onto his back by the force of the arrow, he lost his grip on the bowstring, and his arrow shot skyward in a crazy arc.
Fra Martin, spattered with his brothers’ blood, dove for cover, drew his broadsword and gathered his wits about him. His brothers were dead, both killed in a matter of seconds by a hidden assassin. But from the way they fell, he knew where the archer had secreted himself.
He now had a crucial decision to make. He could either circle his way forward, keeping to the shadows while he skirted the glare of the forest glade, engage the Knights and avenge the murders of his brothers, or he could discreetly withdraw, making all haste back to the monastery to warn the
Magister Regens
and to gain reinforcements with which to hunt the enemy. The sun glare within which the archer had so cleverly cloaked himself mitigated against immediate engagement.
However, if the archer was, indeed, a Knight of St. Clement, he had surely identified his prey as members of the Gnostic Observatine Order. If he escaped and returned to Rhodes with news of the Order’s whereabouts, a veritable army would be sent against the monks. Then they would be facing an all-out assault, against which they surely could not stand. No, there was no time to seek reinforcements from within the monastery—he had to find the enemy now, identify him and kill him before he could inform the Knights of the Order’s hiding place.
Fra Martin knew the forest well, remembered that just beyond the glade a sheer drop-off into the deep ravine, guarded on either side by naked cliffs and jagged boulders, snaked its way back to the treasure-laden city of Trebizond on the southern coast of the Black Sea. Picking his way to the left, he described a rough semicircle. All the while, he kept the glade in view, through which ripples of wind caused a succession of rustlings. Muscles bunched, ready with his sword, he kept moving crabwise to his left, always keeping the sun-dazzle of the glade in the periphery of his vision.
A swift sat on a branch above and just ahead of him, its head cocked as it warily eyed him. All at once, it took off in a flutter, and with a prickle at the nape of his neck, he whirled to his left. As he did so, he flipped his sword to his left hand, swept it around in a flat, vicious arc. As forged steel bit into bone and flesh, he heard the scream even before he identified his foe as a Knight of St. Clement. The Knight staggered under his blow, began to bring his own sword down toward Fra Martin’s head in a skull-cleaving blow. Fra Martin, slipping inside the other’s guard, stayed his opponent’s arm with one hand while he drove his own sword hilt-deep into the Knight. The Knight watched him malevolently out of bloodshot eyes. Then his lips curled back from bared teeth and a laugh spilled out from deep inside him just before the death-rattle overtook him.
Fra Martin kicked the corpse aside. The imminent danger dealt with, he moved with greater confidence along the edge of the ridge. He could not discount the possibility that there might be other Knights stalking through the forest. No matter, he would become the stalker now. All his senses rose to their most heightened level.
Quite soon he came to an area that had eroded in the last rainstorm. A large tree had been uprooted and others partially so, leaving great clots of red earth exposed like wounds. This afforded him a hitherto impossible view into the deep ravine, the only way to and from Sumela.
The sight below turned his blood cold. Lines of the Knights of St. Clement marched in concert, heading toward the monastery, the last bastion of his Order. He had made a fatal mistake. The Knight who had attacked him and his compatriots had not been alone but was an advance raider sent to destroy the Order’s sentinels. He had to assume that other such assassins had been dispatched to deal with the other Guardians on patrol. There could be no doubt, the Knights had launched a full-scale attack.
As he turned, on his way back to the monastery, a crossbow bolt sliced through the flesh of his arm. He staggered sideways, his booted right foot sliding on the bare earth, and he went over the edge.
He slammed into a tangle of tree roots jutting out from the side of the earthfall and almost had his breath taken away. Still, he had the presence of mind to reach out and grab on. Panting, he swung in midair, dizzy and nauseated, a thousand-meter drop yawning at his feet. Far below him, the line of Knights continued their march. Blood leaked from his wound, and pain lanced through his arm all the way up into his shoulder. He tried to pull himself up, succeeded only in tearing open the wound. It was only a matter of time before his blood, running more freely now, would drip down, giving him away to the enemy below.
He began to pray, gathering himself into the essential core of his being. But though his soul spoke to God, at some point he could not help but notice that the huge uprooted tree above him rolled as if of its own accord, slowly at first, then more quickly, until it shot out and down, amid cries of dismay and pain, onto the marching enemy.
