hind legs.
Bruckner’s screams put the thunder of battle to shame.
More motion snapped Silva’s attention away from the nightmare spectacle. His own machine lurched to a final stop.
A young man stood before him, fifteen yards away, clearly visible through a gap in the grass. He was nude, tall and lean and muscled like a god. His long, handsome, high-cheekboned features were impassive. Dark brown dreadlocks cascaded about his broad shoulders.
“Bastard!” Silva shrieked. He clutched the Uzi in both hands and ripped a burst from right to left. It should have stitched the man across his washboard belly. But even as the associate secretary brought his weapon up, the man sidestepped into the high grass and was gone.
Silva sprayed the grass with bullets. The tall stems might shield the naked savage from view, but they wouldn’t keep copper-jacketed lead out of his golden hide. The Uzi’s heavy bolt locked back as the magazine ran dry. Cursing, weeping in frustrated fury, Silva fumbled in his pockets for a backup magazine.
Triumph thrilled through him as his fingers closed around a cold steel bar. “Ha! Ha!” he shouted, pressing the latch and dropping the spent magazine from its well in the Uzi’s pistol grip.
A figure reared up beside him as from the depths of his own nightmares. An anaconda, a huge serpent with mottled brown-and-yellow scales glistened in the hateful sun. Its head was as large as a bull mastiff’s. The eyes were huge and golden and seemed to glow with terrible intelligence.
For a moment it stared straight into Silva’s eyes. He tried to jam the fresh magazine home. Trembling hands could not find the opening. But he could not tear his eyes from that golden gaze.
The serpent opened its mouth. It was like some kind of trap opening. A pink trap, edged with yellow-white.
Silva screamed and tried to swing his otherwise useless Uzi like a club.
The anaconda darted its head forward and crushed Silva’s face with a single grip of its jaws.
1
Pain jabbed the muscle of Annja Creed’s right forearm as she slammed it into the hardwood limb jutting from the trunk-like pole before her.
Good, she thought savagely. She slammed a palm into the slick-polished wood of the trunk itself even as her left forearm blocked into another protrusion.
Faster and faster her hands moved, in and out, over and under the blunt wooden posts stuck in sockets on the central pole. She practiced blocks, traps, strikes with stiffened fingers and fists and palms. A drum-beat rose as muscle and bone met wood with jarring impact.
Annja was a tall, fit woman in her midtwenties. She wore a green sports bra and gray shorts. The humming air conditioner kept her Brooklyn loft cool.
She paused to brush away a vagrant strand of chestnut hair that had worked loose from the bun she had pinned it in. Her scowl deepened.
The stout wooden apparatus rocked to a palm-heel thrust, despite the fact its wide base was weighed down by heavy sandbags. Annja’s sparring partner was a training dummy used as an adjunct to wing chun –style gongfu. She had taken up the study because it was supposed to be highly effective and easy to learn, while giving her another option for nonlethal use of force.
She had plenty of lethal options available. The deadliest was currently invisible to the naked eye. But it was not intangible, not like her rapier-quick intellect or boundless resourcefulness, which she knew could be as deadly as any physical weapons.
She whipped the back of her right hand against a wooden arm. She let the hand flop over it in a trapping move, fired a punch that made the post rock. As she worked into a blinding-fast pattern of blocks and strikes, all oriented toward the centerline of the post, as they would be to the centerline of an opponent’s torso, she found herself worrying about the turn her life had taken.
She thought about the sword—her sword.
She had learned that it had once belonged to Joan of Arc. And that she was the inheritor of the long-ago martyr’s mantle. On a research trip to France she had, seemingly by chance, found the final piece of St. Joan’s sword, broken to pieces by the English captors who burned her. At more or less the same time she had met the man named Roux. He was spry for his gray beard—and even sprier for the fact he claimed Joan had been protégée. He and his apprentice Garin Braden had failed to rescue her from execution. As a result they had been cursed—or blessed—with agelessness.
Roux had spent the half millennium since Joan’s death trying to reassemble the saint’s shattered sword. At first he’d regarded Annja as an interloper and tried to steal the final fragment from her. Yet when she came into the presence of the other pieces, in Roux’s chateau in France, the sword had spontaneously reforged itself at her touch.
It was a bitter pill for a lifelong rationalist to swallow. Especially one who made most of her income as the resident skeptic on the notably credulous cable series Chasing History’s Monsters , on the Knowledge Channel.
Her arms and hands now moved too fast for the eye to follow. The tough, seasoned hardwood creaked and strained to the mounting fury of her blows. Human bone would give way long before that old wood did.
The sword. It had come to dominate her life.
It rested now in its accustomed location—what she thought of as the otherwhere. It was not present in this world, except at her command. To summon it, she had learned, all she needed was to form a hand as if to grasp its hilt, and exert her will. And her hand was filled.
But her life, it seemed, had correspondingly emptied since the sword came into it.
Sweat soaked her hair and flew from her face. Her wrists and knuckles and elbows sounded like machine-gun fire as they struck the muk-jong.
Orphaned at an early age, raised at an orphanage in New Orleans, Annja had always been alone. She was always apart, somehow, different, although she never tried to be. And it didn’t often bother her.
She had never felt as if she couldn’t enjoy companionship. But she didn’t actively seek it. She’d had close friends at college, on digs, among the crew of Chasing History’s Monsters . She had had lovers. But, she had to admit, no truly lasting loves.
And now she figured she never would. At least so long as she bore her illustrious predecessor’s sacred sword.
She was an archaeologist. Her period of concentration was the later Middle Ages and Renaissance Europe. She spoke all the major modern Romance languages, and Latin, and studied any number of archaic forms—and weapons.
She wasn’t sure why she was feeling a sudden gap in her life left by the lack of a lasting relationship. She had her mentor, Roux, and her sometime enemy, Garin. But she didn’t really think those relationships counted. She didn’t want them to.
Great, she thought as she slammed her forearms against the projecting limbs. She recognized the rare feeling she was experiencing.
“I’m lonely!” she said to her empty loft. She slammed an elbow smash into the upright on the last word. It broke free from its base and toppled backward.
“Nice,” she said in disgust. She rubbed her elbow, the pain corresponding to her mood.
