The Broken Sword (8 page)

But he had Lagouat's map, and though he was skeptical about its authenticity, he followed it to the boulder and then dutifully broke up the five-foot-tall stone with a sledgehammer until its interior was exposed to reveal the hilt of a sword.

It was magnificent, made of pure gold inlaid with precious stones that had not chipped or lost their luster when the rock had been smashed around it. But no matter how hard Aubrey struck it with the sledgehammer, the blade would not come free. It was as if the steel were bonded to the stone itself. Sweating, intensely disliking the hard work and the effect it was having on his sensitive hands, Aubrey finally tossed the sledgehammer away and grasped the hilt, hoping to break it from the blade.

Its touch was like an explosion. With a cry of pain, Aubrey flew backward, his feet off the ground, and crashed into a tree trunk.

When his head cleared, he got on all fours to examine the ground. Someone—Lagouat himself, perhaps—had obviously planted a device, a land mine of some kind. But the ground was unbroken.

Then, with his magician's senses, he heard the hum of the buried blade, saw the tendrils of energy curling like smoke up the golden hilt.

The ancient gods, long vanquished and forgotten
... Was this their work? Had the terrible gods whom Sala-din so feared forged this sword against him and his kind?

He was certain of two things: that this was the weapon that had killed Saladin, and that nothing short of the strongest magic he could summon would destroy its power.

F
or the task, Aubrey
collected twelve of the most deadly magicians he knew. They were difficult to find, even more difficult to persuade to help him. But three years and several million dollars later, they arrived.

In a rite that began at midnight, the thirteen sorcerers circled the sword, chanting, calling on their demon deities, building their power until Aubrey felt the dark forces inside him spill out of his eyes and ears and mouth like oily liquid. He became Thanatos the death god, ruler of the soulless places. His senses quickened until they were those of a beast; his very hands seemed to transmute into claws. With them he grasped the golden hilt and poured his evil into it.

The sword crumbled under his touch.

Later, after the magicians had gone, Aubrey went back to collect the dun-colored fragments. Why, it wasn't even real gold, he thought. The gems had been shattered; their dust lay sparkling in the dirt. The rock that had once encased the long blade so tightly now fell away beneath his fingers like rotten plaster.

He felt slightly cheated. After spending a fortune to bring the magicians to this place, the sword had given up its power almost at once. Aubrey wanted to kick himself for assuming he needed the help of those greedy old men. The thing had probably given off its last spurt of magic on the day he'd discovered it.

It had all been so damnably, disappointingly easy.

As he swept the last particles of the sword into a pouch, he imagined Saladin at the end of his life, fearful, cowering at the thought of retribution by some ancient and forgotten gods.

"They were nothing," he said aloud, hefting the pouch. "Here's the proof of it."

S
hortly after the ritual
with the twelve magicians, Aubrey was called to Marrakesh for a fairly routine assassination. He would not normally have accepted the assignment—he was rapidly becoming bored with his gun-for-hire hobby and, besides, he was acquainted with the family of the man he would have to kill—but he agreed, finally, because he thought it might distract him for a time from his frustrated quest for the cup.

He was beginning to wonder if Saladin hadn't made the whole story up just to send him on a lifelong wild goose chase when he saw William Marshall sit up after experiencing the impact of a bullet in his chest. A green metal cup which exactly matched Saladin's detailed drawings had rolled off Marshall's body as he was carried into the ambulance.

Aubrey very nearly shouted with delight then and there, before remembering that he was viewing these events through the telescopic sight of a semiautomatic rifle. He would have to wait, he decided. Not long, just until the police and those Secret Service fools left.

And then, just as he was about to discard the rifle, he saw a young blind girl pick up the cup.

Aubrey groaned. The look on the girl's face was unmistakable. She knew what she had.

Doggedly, seething with impatience, he got rid of the weapon, exchanged one disguise for another, then followed the girl and the old woman with her to their hotel where, to his eternal shame, he had failed both to secure the cup and to kill the girl. The very memory made him writhe with embarrassment.

Nevertheless, some good had come of the encounter. He knew where the cup was. He had found Arthur Blessing and his protector. And by a stroke of luck, the Arabs had just informed him that morning that the whole carload of runaways had spent the night in Ait Haddus, where a nine-month-old newspaper containing a personals ad for "Arthur B" had been used to wrap a pound of dates.

Things were looking better, after all.

Aubrey uncoiled himself from his chair and dialed two numbers. The first was to the nearest of the Arab relatives, to whom he dictated a letter. The second was to a woman in London, a woman whose friendship Aubrey had been cultivating for the past month in anticipation of this day.

Her name was Emily Blessing.

He would wear silk tonight, he decided, doodling idly while he waited for the clicks and pauses in the telephone connection to end.

"Hello?" Emily answered, sounding, as she always did, like a scared mouse.

"Emily," he purred. "This is Aubrey Katsuleris."

He heard her soft intake of air. Then a deferential "Yes?"

What a bloodless woman, Aubrey thought. American, intellectual, and thoroughly dull. "I've found your nephew," he said.

"Oh, my God," she whispered. "Is he with you?"

"No, he's in Tangier. We'll meet him tonight."

"Tangier!"

"I'll pick you up."

"I... I don't know how to thank you, Mr. Katsuleris."

"Aubrey, please. I told you I'd find him, didn't I?"

"Yes, but I never imagined—"

"I'll come for you at five o'clock. We'll have dinner at the Victoria Hotel." He hung up.

He would take her to Tangier, and make love to her beneath the Arabian moon. Then, after she got the cup to him, he would kill her.

A
rthur!

Emily sat down and clasped her trembling hands together. Was it possible? Had the search finally come to an end?

She tried not to hope. Yes, Aubrey Katsuleris was a rich and influential man with contacts all around the world, but how could he have found Arthur within a month when she herself, in three years of constant effort, had not?

It's got to be the wrong boy, she told herself. All she had given Mr. Katsuleris was one photograph taken when Arthur was ten years old. He would be thirteen now. He had probably changed a great deal....

If he's still alive.

Emily shut her eyes, trying not to hope too much.

Arthur had left a note for her presupposing his and Hal's death. The note said that if the man named Saladin who had been pursuing them for Arthur's cup managed to kill them, then Emily's own life would still be in danger. The secret of the cup was too great to trust to even one other human being. Saladin would make sure that everyone who knew about it did not survive. And Saladin had had a great number of men at his disposal.

Arthur, meticulously brilliant as always, gave detailed instructions on how she could lose herself in any large city. "After a year," he finished, "you'll be free to go back to work and try to have some kind of normal life. I know now that will never be possible for me. I'm sorry that I've put you through so much grief. Love, Arthur."

They had drugged her before they left, so that when she first read the note, she could not fully grasp its content. But she did not sleep. Through that night she sat awake at the window of the inn where she and Arthur and Hal had stayed, staring at the bed where Hal had made love to her once, only once…

At dawn the next day she had read the note again, and howled with grief.

"Arthur," she sobbed, hating herself for her belated concern. Where had she been during all the years he'd needed her? Where had her love for the boy been then?

He had known that she resented his presence. When Emily's sister jumped off a bridge five days after giving birth to Arthur, the burden of raising the child had gone to Emily. She had been on the fast track at a national think tank at the time, assisting a scientist who later earned a Nobel Prize for the work Emily had done. With her new responsibilities as an unwilling mother, her career had virtually ground to a halt. She was no longer able to work the long hours that were necessary for advancement in the competitive field of pure science.

Her anger at having had her career interrupted by the burden of raising her dead sister's child had been all too clear from the beginning. Arthur had spent most of his life with strangers, waiting for her to return from work, and the other half watching her boil with self-pity for the time she was forced to spend with him. If it had not been for the cup, their lives might still be forming that same dull, aching pattern.

But the cup had changed everything. It had made her realize that Arthur was more important to her than the lost Nobel. And it had brought her the love of a man. It had, for the briefest moment, connected Emily Blessing with the human race.

And then the cup had taken it all away.

T
he police found the
smoldering remains of a burned mansion inside of which were several bodies. None of them had been children; neither was one the remains of a seven-foot-tall man named Saladin. Some distance away, perhaps coincidentally, an abandoned field bore the hoof prints of hundreds of horses, although no one in the area had seen them. Scotland Yard sent a man to investigate, but after three months he had turned up nothing except the weird account of a village boy who claimed to have witnessed a great battle on the site, with knights on horseback and Saracens wielding scimitars.

"The villagers here are superstitious," the investigator told her. "They believe this was the site of the original Camelot, you know."

"Oh?" Emily said without interest.

The detective smiled. "Part of the legend is that on St. John's Eve, the ghosts of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table go out riding, looking for their missing king. Arthur was supposed to come back, you know. Rather like the Second Coming."

"So they think ghosts made the hoofprints."

"I'm afraid not much goes on in Wilson-on-Hamble," he said apologetically.

The Yard called their investigator back shortly afterward. Their conclusion was that Saladin had died, probably in transit with the bodies of Arthur Blessing and Hal Woczniak.

"I'm sorry," the Scotland Yard man told her on the day he left the village. "We might be wrong. We'll keep the case open."

Emily nodded dully.

That afternoon, she went back to the meadow. It was September. The summer had been dry, and the muddy earth, churned by the hooves of those never-found horses, had dried as a testament to the mystery that had occurred there.

She cried. For the past, for the future which would be just like it, and for the tiny window of hope in which Hal and Arthur and Emily would be together again, a window which now was closed forever.

"Excuse me, m'um," a youthful voice said behind her. Emily gasped at the stark interruption of her thoughts, and the boy quickly removed his hat and bobbed at her.

"What do you want?" she asked, embarrassed by her tears.

He was around twelve or thirteen years old, she had guessed, a little older than Arthur at the time. His pants were worn and too short for his lanky legs by a good three inches. The sight of the boy's exposed pink ankles broke Emily's heart. She would never see Arthur during the coltish, awkward years of adolescence. Back in Chicago, his room would be filled with reminders of how much Emily had missed.

"I'm Tom Rodgers, m'um, and you'd be the lady from America," he said nervously. "There's been talk that the police have done aught to find your boy."

"The inspector from Scotland Yard just left," she said. "The investigation is over."

"Aye. I'm sorry to hear it, too. That's why when I seen you I decided to come talk."

"About what?" she asked. Then she remembered what the inspector had said. A local boy had claimed to see the ghost-horses in this meadow. "Look, Tom Rodgers, or whoever you are," she snapped. "You probably thought it was fun to joke with the police, but it's, damn cruel to try it with me."

Tom backed away from her as if her words had been physical blows, removing his cap and clutching it over his stomach. "I know as how you might not take me serious," he said meekly. "There's most in the village think I'm daft. But I seen what I seen. And so I won't trouble you except to say that your boy's all right." He tipped his hat and walked away.

"Wait!" Emily called, running after him. "Please wait." She grabbed his arm. "What do you mean he's all right? Did you see him?"

"Aye, I did. Him and the American bloke, and the old man, too."

"What old man?"

"I don't know what his name was, but he's some kind of wizard, I'll tell you that," the boy said. "And there was a castle, and knights in armor, and a bunch of wogs that looked like Ali Baba's forty thieves—"

Emily shook her head. She did not want to hear the boy's fantasies. "Tell me about the boy," she said. "Where did he go?"

"Dunno." He shrugged. "Him and the American took off down the road after it was all over. The castle disappeared, and so did the knights and the others. Only the old man was left." The boy chuckled. "And he was laughing like a loon."

"Did they—the boy and the American—did they have anything with them?" Emily asked. "Like a cup, or a bowl?"

"No." The boy frowned, thinking. "No. they got rid of that. Birds come for it."

Emily stood in silence for a long moment, a thousand thoughts racing through her mind. If they were alive, why hadn't Hal and Arthur come back for her? Where had they gone? Who was the old man?

And where was the cup?

She shook her head. This was ridiculous, she told herself. Young Tom here was obviously demented. Knights. Ali Baba. "Thank you," she said, and watched him as he walked away across the field. It was as easy to be crazy in a small town as in a big city, she decided. With a sigh, she went back to the hotel.

There was nothing for her to do besides go home. Back to Chicago and her job at the Katzenbaum Institute.

How little that meant to her now.

Him and the American took off down the road after it was all over.

What if Tom Rodgers wasn't crazy? she thought, her heart racing. What if he really had seen them leave?

Then he was just looking for attention, she told herself. Or playing with the emotions of a tourist.

And who was the old man?

She had only met one old man since their arrival in England, a professor named Taliesin who had vanished at the same time Arthur had been kidnapped. The police had never found him, either.

And then, with utter certainty, she knew. Arthur and Hal—and perhaps Taliesin, too—had left her at the inn because they were still in danger. The danger was to themselves; Emily herself knew next to nothing about Saladin or the cup. They had abandoned her in order to spare her life.

The village boy was telling the truth.

Emily finished packing her bag and left the inn. But instead of heading back to Chicago, she took a train to London and began her own search for her nephew.

That search had continued for the past three years.

When her savings ran out, she took a job as a chemist in a small London paint company specializing in artists' oils to support herself while she scoured the streets and took out ads in every newspaper in Great Britain and the Continent searching for them. She never bothered to change her name or find a new identity. No one was interested enough in her to kill her.

And if they did, Emily didn't really care.

T
hen, just one month
ago, she had met Aubrey Katsuleris. He had come to the paint company to commission a new color. He wanted a Ted the exact color of human blood.

When he was escorted into the small laboratory where Emily worked, he had begun to explain, then stopped in frustration. "The problem with blood," he said exasperated, "is that it changes color with each moment of exposure to air. I can make those changes; it will be the point of my painting. But I need the original color to begin with."

Patiently Emily had shown him the palette of reds, trying to arrive at a base color, when Katsuleris suddenly grasped an X-Acto knife and cut open the vein of his left wrist. Blood poured onto the white countertop in a gush.

While the president of the company scurried away screaming for bandages, Emily could only stare at the artist in shock, watching with fascination as his blood poured out of him.

"That is the color I want," he said.

She considered for a moment, then picked up a beaker and mixed into it a compound made from different tubes and vials in the lab. Then she poured it on top of the spilled blood.

When the president and his secretary arrived back with a bottle of iodine and some gauze bandage, Emily had gone back to her desk.

"What did she do?" the artist asked as he offered up his arm to the clucking secretary.

"Who?" the president asked. "You mean Emily? I'm sure I've no idea. Emily, call someone to have this mess cleaned up."

"Don't touch it!" Aubrey shouted. "Don't you see? The color is exactly the same as it was when it came out of my vein. See this blood, here." He pointed with his chin toward another spattering of blood. "And here. It's already darkened. But this!" He touched his finger to it and drew a line of red across the countertop. The president and his secretary exchanged disgusted glances.

"Er... Quite right," the president said. "And you say Miss Blessing had something to do with this?"

"I applied a fixative to it," the mousy woman answered. She had an American accent. "He wanted the exact color."

"He doesn't want to paint with blood!" the president hissed.

"Oh, but I do," Aubrey said. He dipped his finger in the color again. "I do very much."

The president's face broke into an ingratiating grin. "Then we shall by all means provide you with all the color—"

"I can prepare the fixative," Emily said. "But I will not mix the blood."

"Fine," Katuleris said, smiling dreamily at her. "I'll take a pint."

Her eyebrows raised. "That would be enough for twenty or thirty gallons."

He shrugged.

"Where will you get the blood?" she asked.

"I'm sure that's none of your business, Miss Blessing," the president said, ushering the artist out of the lab.

That had been the beginning of her relationship with the artist. She had tried to forget the incident, but found Aubrey Katsuleris' face returning to her again and again.

For one thing, he was famous. Even Emily, who had never taken any interest in the arts or in popular culture, had heard of him. He had been called the Picasso of the jet age. Many critics said that Katsuleris was overrated and that the prices of his paintings were out of proportion to their intrinsic value, but others touted his work as a pure reflection of the post-Vietnam generation. Even the British Museum had purchased some of his canvasses.

For another—and Emily was ashamed to admit this to herself—she found him charming. Of that there was no doubt. Aubrey Katsuleris was as well known for his good looks and success with women as he was for his talent.

He had come into the paint company several times after that first encounter, each time bringing with him some small but lovely gift for her: a box of chocolates from Geneva, a single rose which he claimed to have plucked with his own hands from the gardens of the Duchess of Kent. Nothing expensive or personal enough to warrant returning; just enough to keep her awake nights with thoughts of him.

Through it all, she continually asked herself what on earth he could possibly see in her. She was no beauty. Oh, she had felt like one once, when she had been with Hal. She had even given in to one night of abandon in a creaky bed at a roadside inn.

Hal had thought she was beautiful.