Secret of the Slaves (15 page)

“Now is when you are supposed to remember,” she said. She was improvising. It was a desperate game—if he spotted any inconsistency, any falsehood, he would shut up and no influence she could bring to bear on him would restart the flow of information she so desperately needed.

But hope betrayed him, as hope so often does. He wanted to believe. So whatever might have rung false about Annja or her words—he did not hear them. Hope of redemption, of homecoming, was all that remained to him.

“You must know the way,” she said.

He smiled. “Yes. And the outside people can never find it.” Again he smiled a terrible smile.

“Only by proving that you know,” Annja said, “can you earn what you desire.”

She felt Lidia's gaze boring between her shoulder blades like laser beams. Well, Annja thought, the cause is greater than you know. Greater than we dare tell you.

“I will try,” the man said. The strength with which he clung to her wrist was astounding. Either he had been inhumanly strong in full health, or his will was simply that strong. “I see the tree.”

“The tree,” Annja said. She heard Dan's sharp exhalation at her side. A tree? That's what we have to go on. Among all the billions of trees in the Amazon?

The dying man nodded. His eyes gleamed. They looked past Annja, seeing the glories of the City of Promise. “The tree with nine trunks. On the right bank. That marks the border. The city lies mere leagues beyond.”

He sat up and looked at her. She realized for the first time his eyes were bright blue.

“Do I pass the test? I want so much to come home. Can I—?”

The staring blue eyes rolled back in his skull. He melted onto the stained, sodden pile of rags. The woman slowly raised her head. The look she gave Annja was pure hate.

“You filthy beast!” a female voice cried in Portuguese from behind. “What have you done to him?”

The voice did not belong to Dr. Lidia do Carvalho. Annja knew at once who it must be.

The real Promessans had come to collect their own. Or to still his tongue. In either case they were too late.

For anything but vengeance.

Annja spun away from the corpse, straightening to confront the woman who had spoken. She was a tall, lean, young African-looking woman with a dark green band around bushy hair, a loose olive-drab blouse worn tails out over khaki shorts and athletic shoes. Her eyes blazed with outrage.

Annja realized it was the woman she had pursued from the murdered Mafalda's shop in Belém.

“Go,” Annja said to Lidia from the corner of her mouth. Without looking up, the doctor grabbed the squatting woman by the arm. The woman resisted. With surprising strength Lidia hauled her to her feet, away from the corpse of the man she had tended so lovingly and out into the merciless sunlight. The little doctor lived in a state of pure terror and seemed all but totally beaten down by life. Yet she kept on, kept doing what she could. For that Annja admired her.

“Don't cause problems for her,” Annja told the Promessan woman when the other two had gone. “She had no choice.”

“There is always a choice,” the woman all but spit. “Why did you kill him?”

“What, are you mad because we beat you to it?” Dan asked.

“We didn't kill him,” Annja said.

“What did he say to you?” she asked.

Frantically Annja weighed their options. If the newcomer really was Promessan, Annja doubted that either she or Dan had any prospect of talking their way past her. And although she was wiry, it was the wiriness of strength, not privation, meaning she wasn't of the colony.

“Enough,” Annja finally said. “You won't be able to selfishly hoard your secrets away from the world for very much longer.”

“So you are just another colonialist, Annja Creed, come to steal what we have made by our own sweat and suffering. Come to enslave us again!”

Annja frowned. How does she know my name?

Dan's hand dipped under the loose tails of his shirt. It came out holding the same handgun he'd used in the warehouse in Manaus.

“They're surrounding the hootch!” he shouted as he raised the handgun to point at the tall newcomer.

With startling speed she crescent kicked the pistol. She failed to knock the weapon from his hand but did kick it aside. It went off with a noise that seemed to billow the torn cloth hangings that served as part of the shack's walls.

She spun rapidly into a back kick that caught the young activist in the stomach and knocked him crashing out into daylight. Other figures moved outside. Even in a glimpse Annja could see they lacked the scarecrow gauntness and feral furtiveness that characterized colony inhabitants, even the armed gang members.

Shots went off outside. But Annja snapped her attention back to the tall woman as the most immediate threat. Reaching behind her shoulder, the woman produced a machete and swung it at Annja's head.

Off balance and with no time to concentrate the sword into being, Annja fell over to her right. She landed hard on her right hip. The floor was packed earth topped by a layer of unidentifiable muck.

The Promessan rushed at her, raising the machete for a killing downstroke. Just as simply Annja fired out with both feet, kicking her attacker in both shins and knocking her legs right out from under her.

Annja rolled to her right as the woman sprawled across the corpse. Immediately Annja reversed, rolling back to use her right hand wrapped over her left fist to piledrive her left elbow into her opponent's kidney. The woman screamed in pain and arched her back as if being electrocuted. The machete flew from her hand.

Annja sprang to her feet. Motion blurred in the extreme right corner of her peripheral vision. She ducked left and spun away. The motion took her farther from the doorway to outside. An interior wall, augmented like the exterior walls with random sheets of drab cloth, partitioned the shack into at least two rooms. From a dark doorway in the wall something long and mottled and as thick as Annja's thigh appeared.

It crashed against the outer wall. Annja straightened to find herself confronting a giant anaconda. She knew anacondas were contenders for largest snakes in the world. But its sheer size was almost as great a shock as the fact it had appeared from nowhere.

The snake reared up to fully her height and turned to gaze at her with large golden eyes. It sent a chill down her spine.

The serpent opened its mouth wide. It was pink and edged with an alarming array of back-curving teeth. It struck right for Annja's face.

She dived to her right, back toward the dead body and the writhing woman. She put a shoulder down and rolled as the anaconda struck the wall. Planks cracked loudly.

Annja came to her feet. The woman suddenly rolled and tried to grab her legs. Annja kicked her hard in the face, felt as much as heard her jaw break.

The sword filled Annja's hand. The anaconda coiled by the wall, preparing for another strike. It seemed to recognize the sword as a threat. With a speed that belied its bulk it turned to its right and slithered out through a low gap in the wall. Momentarily transfixed by the creature's length, Annja leaped forward to slash belatedly at its tail. She missed. Her blade bit deep into the mud-scummed earth floor.

She heard noises behind her. She ripped the sword loose and turned in time to smash a machete blade descending toward her head with a clumsy forehand stroke. She put her shoulder down and slammed it into her attacker's chest. He was so surprised that Annja virtually clotheslined him, despite hitting him so close to his center of gravity. His legs ran out from under him and he fell with a squelch in the mud.

Outside she heard shots. Several from close by she guessed were Dan's. Other guns were clearly firing, too. What's going on? she wondered.

As she was distracted a second man swung a machete diagonally at her. She barely managed to block it with the flat of her blade.

The man looked European, possibly even American. He was taller than Annja, with rippling spare muscles in arms left bare by a tan shirt with the arms torn off, a stubble of dark blond beard, glaring green eyes. Those eyes widened in surprise.

Nobody expects a broadsword, she thought. She took advantage of his lapse to get her right knee up to her chest. She pushed hard with the sole of her shoe against his sternum, throwing him back.

The sound of the thin scum of mud sucking at a shoe brought her around fast. The first man, whose machete she had smashed, was trying to plant a combat knife between her shoulder blades. She ran him through the heart with her sword. He gasped and goggled at her as life fled him. She tore the blade free and turned to meet the attack she knew was coming.

The blond man cried out hoarsely as he saw his comrade die. Annja's blow slashed his descending forearm and connected with his chest. He fell, pumping blood into the muck.

More men crowded in through the hut's entrance. They held weapons of various sorts. She turned and hacked at the planks of the wall and snapped a way clear into the unforgiving light of day.

Not four yards away she saw Dan crouched behind a line of big red plastic drums. He was jamming a fresh magazine into his gun. Two bodies lay in the street. A wide, grooved trail with hints of red led to the mouth of an alley across the road, suggesting someone may have been hit and dragged to cover.

“Get down!” Dan whispered. As he glanced toward her she made the sword disappear. She dived toward the barrels.

A boom buffeted her ears. Something clattered above her as she tucked and rolled and came up next to Dan, trying not to be aware of the hideous stinking muck that smeared her from knees to hair. Glancing up, she saw a pattern of small holes in the planking. She knew instantly it was buckshot.

“The Promessans are using shotguns?” she asked.

Dan leaned around the side of the barrel barrier and fired twice at a target Annja couldn't see. “I don't think so.”

“I thought the camp guards didn't come here.”

“I don't think it's them, either. This looks more like gangs, converging to defend their turf.”

Annja was looking back toward the hole she'd made in the wall. She was surprised the Promessans hadn't come boiling right out after her. Perhaps they were tending to their fallen comrades inside. Just as likely they were none too eager to blunder after somebody who'd single-handedly put three of them down, two probably for good.

“We have to go,” she said.

From somewhere behind and to their right a green beam winked. A corner of a plank structure exploded into a gout of steam.

“Right,” Dan said. He jumped up and ran for the far side of the street.

The shotgunner, a feral-looking man in a filthy headband whose refugee gauntness clearly marked him as a denizen of the colony, leaned out to take a shot at them as they broke cover. A green beam speared into his right eye. There came a grenade-like bang and he fell. Annja did not look too closely as she and Dan flashed through the open, uneven doorway of the hovel across from the one in which the wounded Promessan exile had died.

From her left Annja heard a snarl. Hair rising at the nape of her neck, she turned.

A big cat stood ten feet away. It was heavy bodied, although no more than two yards from nose to tip of thick, twitching tail. Its fur seemed almost to glow with a light of its own through rosettes like sunspots; its eyes were huge and green. It was clearly what the natives called a golden
onza,
a beast the educated city folks at least affected to believe was mythical.

What it was doing in the midst of this man-made hell made Annja's brain ring with cognitive dissonance. Yet it was no more strange than the twenty-foot anaconda.

Dan snapped two shots at the cat. The creature spun away and vanished into a back room.

“What the hell was that?” Dan demanded.

Annja shook her head. For a moment she had been entranced by impossible thoughts. Can't give into fantasy, she told herself sternly.
Especially now.

From the street came angry shouts. Annja heard gunshots and the sharper snaps of energy beams ionizing air. “Nothing,” she said. “We need to keep moving.”

The look he shot her was skeptical. She knew it was nothing to what he'd look like if she told him what she'd dared imagine, just for an instant. “We're right up against the jungle here,” she said.

“If you say so.”

“I do. Now, go. We need to get back to the citadel before the whole colony lands on our heads!”

He nodded. A passageway lay open right before them. As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom again after the dazzle of outdoors, Annja could make out that it led back to what seemed a jog or juncture, for dozens of yards. They ran down it.

From all around them came the sound of fighting. They heard it through the makeshift walls and ragged filthy hangings all around—the ringing clash of metal on metal, shots, curses, the screams and groans of the wounded. Annja wondered how many fighters the Promessans had infiltrated into the camp.

A figure appeared in front of them. His eyes were wild in a skull-like face. He pointed a sawed-off single-barreled shotgun at them.

Dan shot him twice in the chest. The short slight man fell backward, discharging his weapon into the ceiling with a crash that brought a cascade of dust, rank with mold spores, raining down on their heads.

“The gangs are starting to fight with each other,” Dan said, as if discerning Annja's thoughts of a moment before. “Like packs of jackals fighting over a water-hole—just flashing into rage because they've blundered into each other. This is all getting way out of hand.”

They ran on through the cramped, gloomy, reeking space. As they reached the end of the passage to find themselves in a dogleg right they heard a whomp and instantly smelled gasoline burning. Annja had seen for herself the energy pistols were poor fire starters, especially in this waterlogged environment. But now she heard the greedy crackle of flames, smelled cloth and wood burning, as well as petroleum.

“Somebody threw a Molotov,” Dan said. “Or maybe one of those lasers set off stored gas. Either way, we've got to get out of this maze quick or fry!”

Around the dogleg they faced more claustrophobic corridor with doors or rough hangings to either side.
Maze
seemed about right. Despite bad light and headlong flight Annja had the impression that rather than one big purpose-built building, they ran through a warren of shacks that had simply sprung up together, following some obscure logic of the builders or none at all. The ceiling changed level, from flat to pitched to slanting at a crazy angle as they rounded random jogs and junctions and stumbled over thresholds of varying heights. The passage twisted and turned without perceptible plan.

“It's like a bad wooden model of someone's intestines,” Dan grunted.

A shot bellowed behind them. The bullet gouged a furrow in a plank by Annja's shoulder before punching out. Dan spun to shoot back as Annja's ears rang from the noise.