Secret of the Slaves (23 page)

Publico let Patrizinho go. The beautiful young man fell back dead.

“No!”
Annja screamed.

Fury rose in a flood through her body, her mind. She summoned the sword. Reversing it, she drove it point downward toward where Mladko's thick neck joined the swell of his trapezius muscle.

Through the neck hole of his armor the blade plunged. Mladko gurgled, then he dropped first to his knees, then onto his face.

Springing free, Annja tore loose her sword. As nimbly as they could, the guards to left and right sprang to form a new wall between her and Publico.

Goran had struggled to a sitting position. He some-how managed to disengage his shield from his ruined left arm. He reached with his good hand for the gun holstered on his right hip.

Reversing the sword again, Annja slashed at his head left-handed. The helmet was not thick enough to trap the blade as Goran's shield had. Nor was it strong enough to resist being neatly split by the powerful weapon.

He went down for good.

Three of Publico's remaining armored guards stood between Annja and the billionaire, who stood astride Patrizinho's corpse grinning at her. Two others hung behind him, still guarding against reinforcements. Utterly absorbed in events inside the tent, Annja wasn't even aware if the sabotage charges the other team were supposed to set had detonated yet.

She wouldn't have counted on reinforcements—had she been capable of thought.

Screaming, she feinted right, then lunged left. The men were big and strong and obviously practiced in their armor. But it still rendered them clumsy—and disrupted their sense of balance.

The left-most man had fallen for Annja's feint, stepped forward with his left foot and committed his weight to it. Before he could shift his balance back, Annja had run past his right side. His unshielded side.

As she went by she slashed backhanded at the small of the guard's back. He shrieked as the end of the blade bit through the soft flesh between hips and ribs.

One of the guards standing behind Publico charged past his master, drawing his baton for an overhand strike. Annja tipped the blade of her broadsword back over her own right shoulder and thrust the pommel straight for the angry gray eyes behind the visor.

Reflexively the guard raised the shield to protect his face. Then just as automatically he lowered it to clear his counterstroke.

But Annja hadn't swung her sword—merely feinted with the hilt. Taking the sword in both hands she swung it around, up, down.

It came down in the center of his helmet just as the rim of the thick shield dropped to expose it.

There was a hideous squeaking crunch. The guard dropped.

Another guard charged from her right. She ducked under a horizontal swing of his baton and slashed him across his right shin. He howled and fell with a tremendous racket.

“That's enough.” Sir Iain Moran did not shout. But his voice filled the tent like the report of a grenade going off. He hadn't been a professional performer for a quarter of a century without learning to project.

His two remaining men stopped in place. Even the man whose tibia Annja had just slashed whimpered more quietly, rolling to his side and coiling into a knot of agony.

“I'll handle this from here,” Publico said in a softer voice. “You want a piece of me, don't you, Annja?”

He had shed his jacket. His fight with Patrizinho had torn his shirt open, revealing his powerful torso. In his right hand he held one of the long black shock batons. In his left he held Patrizinho's sword.

“What good do you think those will do you?” Annja said. “Whatever happens, even if you try to surrender now, I will kill you. I swear it!”

“Talk is cheap, dear girl,” Publico said. “Cheaper even than your friends' lives. Show me what you've got.”

If he'd meant to taunt her into a blind-angry attack he failed. She couldn't be any more focused. She took up an
en garde
position like a modern fencer, left hand on hip, sword thrust toward his face.

The baton clacked against the flat of her blade. She was already withdrawing the sword, coiling her legs for her real attack, a slash to take the legs right out from under him. Instead he spun toward her. Whirlwind fast he came out of it slashing with the blade in his left hand at the unprotected left side of her head.

She had no graceful defense for the unexpected move. She only escaped by flinging herself in a dive to her right. She was able to get her shoulder down, rolled and snapped up to her feet with her back to the tent wall.

Publico stood with his stolen short sword held out before him and his baton tipped negligently back over his right shoulder. “You see, Annja dear, at the end of the day you're just an ordinary girl who's happened to luck into possession of a fascinating sword,” he said. “An exceptionally resourceful girl, not to mention athletic and alarmingly skilled at combat. But still just a girl.”

Annja had worked her way away from the wall to give herself some room to fight. Obedient to their master's command the two armored men still on their feet had pulled back to the rear of the tent to clear the floor. They had dragged the injured man with them.

Publico grinned a wild grin and launched a whirlwind two-weapon assault. He was fast. He might have defeated her with sheer strength. But for all his speed and power Publico had one very serious problem—his drug did nothing for his weapons. All she had to do was get an edge on one and she'd chop it off like a skinny dry twig. So he was forced to pull his blows unless he was certain they'd connect with either Annja or the flat of her blade.

Like a skilled boxer, she managed to keep moving in a circle rather than backing straight away from him. She was fit, and knew how to use her resources in combat. But if all she did was defend and give ground he would sooner or later get lucky or just smash down her defenses. And she knew with terrible certainty that one solid hit would incapacitate her.

But he made an amateur's mistake. He tended to fall into predictable patterns. And his timing was regular as clockwork.

Annja's blade flicked out. His reflexes saved him. He danced back with a red line across his left cheek that slowly blurred downward as it bled.

He laughed, but it rang hollow. “You're good,” he said, “I'll give you that.” He couldn't help his words turning to a snarl at the end. He had obviously not expected to get stung.

Annja wasn't cocky about drawing first blood. She had aimed for his forehead. She'd intended either to split his skull and end it, or more likely, to open a cut that would fill his eyes with blood and blind him. As it was, she knew she was lucky to have tagged him at all.

Nonetheless when he roared back to the attack his strikes were that much clumsier. They came faster, though. The sword sliced through Annja's tough suit and her skin just below the short ribs on her left. The pain was bright as a camera flash. But she didn't let it distract her. Adrenaline quickly dulled its edge. And Publico's days as a street-fighting man lay decades in the past. She'd been hurt in battle a lot more recently than he had.

His minor success led him to redouble his attacks. That came at the expense of such technique as he had. In a moment she translated the rebound energy from blocking a transverse stroke of the baton into a quick cut down and left that caught the flat of his sword with her edge.

With a high, pure note her sword cut through the other blade two inches from the round handguard.

“Ho-ho!” Publico shouted, dancing back just in time to avoid being eviscerated by a whistling horizontal stroke of Annja's sword. “Well done!”

He tossed away the useless stub. Then he took up his own exaggerated fencer's pose, right side on to Annja. The contacts at the tip of the shock baton were aimed straight at her right eye. His left hand was held up behind him.

She thrust toward his eyes. The baton parried with a clack. She thrust again, stopped short in a feint, thrust for true. With the prodigious strength of his wrist he whipped the baton in a tight circle around her blade, outside to in. Then he knocked the hard sword to Annja's right, throwing wide her arm and leaving her open.

Laughing he swung the baton high and charged to club her down.

And again lack of skill at this kind of fighting played him false. Vulnerable as she was, a strike could have taken her down. But Publico raised the baton high overhead as if winding up to split a log.

She just got the sword up, hilt gripped in both hands. She had to catch the blow on the flat. She feared that with his speed he could jam the stub of his baton into her belly if she chopped it off.

It was like parrying a falling car. The blow's incredible power drove her down. She had to use her back leg, her left, as a shock absorber, bending it until the knee touched the floor.

Publico leaned far over her. “I knew you'd come, Annja dear,” he told her. “And I knew that everything I desired, you would bring to me. You wouldn't consent to surrender now, and save yourself some pain?”

She went limp.

As she let herself fall toward the floor she thrust her left leg between his feet. Crossing her legs she stuck her right foot just to the outside of his right calf. She landed hard then, shoulders first, then whiplashing her head into the plank floor so hard she saw sparks behind her eyes. Undeterred she rolled hard to her left.

The scissor sweep twisted Publico's legs right out from under him. He went down hard.

Annja leaped to her feet. He had lost his shock baton. He lay on his back, with his shoulders held just off the floor.

His eyes were wide as they stared at the sword tip just six inches in front of them.

“Why not finish it, then, Annja?” he said. “You were filled with self-righteous bloodlust a moment a moment ago.”

“I can always kill you,” she said. “For now—”

She heard the click of plate on plate as a guard prepared to intervene to save his master, and turned a glare on the men by the back wall.

“Stand back or I'll open his third eye!” she snarled. Both bodyguards stepped back and raised their hands. The effect was almost comical, like cartoon robots surrendering.

Like a rattlesnake striking, Sir Iain moved. His left palm slapped the sword away. His right hand dived behind his back.

Screaming in frustrated anger, Annja raised the sword to cut him dead.

He raised a Taser and shot her in the belly. Chained lightning flashed through her body. The pain was unbelievable. She found herself on her knees.

The sword had gone. When her concentration broke it had returned to its otherwhere.

“Call it back, my love,” Sir Iain said, climbing to his feet. “I've got plenty of charges in this little beauty. And I do love to watch that lovely face when the current hits you!”

He loomed above her like an ancient colossus. “Not only do I get the hidden city with all its secrets. But I've discovered a beautiful woman running about the world fighting evil with a magic sword. How very sweet.”

“You can't believe everything you see,” Annja said. She thought furiously, seeking a course of action. Nothing suggested itself. With Moran's enhanced reflexes he would shock her insensible with laughable ease if she brought back the sword. Nor did she think she was quick enough to rip the barbed contacts out of the skin over her ribs before he triggered the device.

“Feel free to go ahead and kill me,” she said dully. “Then you'll never get the sword,” she said, not sure if that was even true.

He looked past her. His smile broadened.

“In any event,” he said, “I won't need to try any such desperate measures.”

The tent flap opened. Two of the huge armored guardsmen entered. They held Xia by her arms between them. Her long black hair had been torn loose and hung in her beautiful face. Her hands were bound behind her back.

“Splendid work, gentlemen. The others?”

“Dead,” a guard said.

Xia stared at Patrizinho's body. He lay sprawled on his back, just a few feet from the man on her left. She raised her face slowly to look at Publico with chilling hatred.

“Your lover?” Publico shrugged. “I'm sorry I had to kill him.”

“At least spare us the crocodile tears,” Annja snapped.

He laughed. “But you do wrong me, my dear! You see, I know you don't fear death. And I suspect you'd show the most wearisome resistance to torture. The martyr type, clearly.

“But you've a glaring weakness.” He turned a meaningful look to Xia.

Annja felt all the blood drain from her face.

“I only have one of your friends captive—for now. It's only a matter of time before I capture more. As well as the city called Promise itself, with all its wonderful, wonderful trove of secrets.

She looked sideways at Xia. Seeing her former enemy, now friend, so vibrant and resourceful, held helplessly captive by these thugs, forced to look at the body of her friend—her lover—broke Annja's heart.