The Broken Sword Page 2

  She turned the cup over in her hands. It was the simplest of containers, a plain bowl small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. Its exterior was bumpy, like a rock whose sharp projections had been worn away by time, but the interior was perfectly scooped, without a single chip or flaw. Its color was a deep blackish green and was translucent when held to the light, as if it were actually made of glass.

  "Beatrice, are you sure..."

  "Yes, Grams. I'm not making it up."

  "Oh, I didn't mean—"

  "No, of course not." She smiled at the old woman's guilty expression, and understood it. Her condition had been diagnosed as retinopathy prematura—massive hemorrhage in the retinal capillaries at birth—and was incurable. There had never been any hope that Beatrice would see. The doctors had made that very clear to the family from the beginning, and they had accepted Beatrice's blindness as she herself had.

  But this was a miracle. As soon as the cup had warmed in her hands, it had become a part of her, as much a part of her as her arms or her organs. It was Beatrice's private miracle, and she would not let it go. Not ever.

  Someone knocked, and the sound sent a jolt of terror through her. She had experienced the feeling only once before, on the night her parents were killed on a rain-slicked road twenty miles from home. Beatrice had been in bed, but the terror had been enough to send her screaming into the hallway.

  She had been eight years old. Later, the psychiatrists who would become such a large and unwanted part of her life would say that she had imagined the premonition after the fact of her parents' death. They would explain away all of her special knowledge with the word "imagination."

  But the danger inherent in the knock at the hotel room door was not imaginary, any more than Beatrice's certainty of her parents' doom had been. "Don't answer it, Grams!" she shouted, but by the time she'd found her voice, her grandmother was already turning the knob.

  "No!" Beatrice ran toward her grandmother.

  The door slammed inward, hitting the old woman's head. A gray-bearded man in Arab robes caught her as she fell with one hand and turned her frail, small body away from him. Then, pulling a long knife from the sleeve of his robe, he slashed once, powerfully, against her throat.

  For a moment Grams hung suspended in the man's arms, her blood bubbling out of her, shooting across the room. A spray, ripe with the odor of her grandmother's warm blood, hit Beatrice's face.

  For a moment the girl stood frozen, too shocked to utter a sound. Then she saw Gram's body slide out of the man's hands toward the floor.

  Oh God, no, no, she thought as she backed away from the Arab.

  He approached her slowly, his face as expressionless and efficient as the manner in which he had killed Grams. He lifted his robes as he stepped over the pool of blood that had shot out of the old woman's neck. With an almost elegant gesture, he flicked the blood from the long blade away from him so that it would not stain his garments. His eyes narrowed slightly.

  He was trying to figure out how to kill her, Beatrice realized. She retreated further. Her back struck the open window; she could feel her buttocks trembling against the sill. Then the man's forehead cleared, and he took one step to the right. He had calculated the exact angle of his attack.

  His arm drew back slowly, a small, economical movement in which Beatrice felt the man's complete concentration focus to a pinpoint. With a gasp, she scrambled onto the sill. Then, as he reached for her, she fell with a shriek toward the pavement four stories below.

  She struck the stones of the courtyard with a thud and the sickening crack of broken bones. A smattering of people—a European nurse sitting on a bench beside a stroller, an old man reading, a young couple holding hands—leapt up at the intrusion. The young woman screamed. Beatrice sighed once, aware of the pain streaking through her body. When she opened her eyes, she saw the flap of a white robe from inside her hotel room. The man was coming after her.

  Got to get up, she thought, dazed. The people in the courtyard were moving toward her, their movements slowed as if she were experiencing a dream. And while they were moving, their expressions stunned, their hands trembling, Beatrice felt her bones knitting, the warmth of the cup spreading through her injuries, healing the broken blood vessels, pulling her cells back together.

  The cup. She was still holding it, clutching it so hard that her fingers were white. It throbbed hotly in her hands, singing to her as it did its work. The cup was what the man wanted. He had killed Grams just to get to Beatrice, to this.

  Get up, she screamed at herself. Get up now.

  Groaning, she pulled herself to her feet. The onlookers in the courtyard halted in their slow-motion pilgrimage toward her. The young woman fell to her knees, either in prayer or simple astonishment; the old man blinked owlishly. Around Beatrice were scattered droplets of her own blood, from wounds now entirely healed. She stared at them for a moment, struggling to believe her eyes, then lit out from the garden into the streets of the city.

  Beatrice tore through the cluttered street, stumbling as she crashed into a stall where gaily colored scarves danced lazily in the hot desert air.

  The stall owner shrieked at her in Arabic. Across the serpentine market street, two veiled women turned to one another, giggling. Beside them, squatting before a blanket strewn with trinkets and glass beads, an old crone in a filthy burnoose directed a gesture toward Beatrice, hands brushing together as protection against whatever spirit had driven the European girl with the long golden hair crazy.

  This might be a dream, she thought hopefully. It certainly seemed like a dream, from the shooting in the bazaar onward. Maybe she hadn't seen her grandmother murdered in front of her. Maybe she hadn't fallen four stories to a stone pavement and broken nearly every bone in her body. Maybe there was no cold-eyed Arab who moved with the grace of a dancer chasing her.

  Let this be a dream, she prayed. Oh God, yes. She would wake up in the small squishy bed next to Grams', and daylight would be streaming through the window, and...

  And I'd still be blind.

  She pumped her legs faster, gulping for air. No, she had never dreamed like this. She had had running dreams before, but the landscape had been entirely different. It had been the amorphous nightmare world of the blind, in which menace exuded from hidden sounds and smells and shapes that bumped her as she passed. This was different. Color screamed at her from every inch of the universe. Shapes were not something you felt when you drew near to them, but real objects that assaulted and intruded into you from a far distance. The buildings she saw were not the perfect monolithic structures she had imagined, but crumbling towers of stone and wood. And people in this new world were all strangers.

  Behind her a shot rang out. Someone screamed.

  Beatrice cast a glance backward and saw a woman fall. The people on the street looked wildly around to see where the shot had come from. Voices rose in a frenzied crescendo as the mob of terrified pedestrians trapped in the tight bottleneck of the ancient street sought to get clear. They ducked into doorways and flattened themselves against the sides of the narrow buildings, trying to make themselves invisible to the invisible gunman.

  That was for me, Beatrice thought as she watched the woman's still body sprawled on the garbage-strewn street. The man in the white robes knew exactly where she was, and would kill whomever he needed to get to her. Her only hope was to manage somehow to melt into the panicked crowd.

  "Thanatos," a woman shrilled as she crossed in front of Beatrice.

  A man responded in English. "He's here?"

  The woman nodded tearfully. "That is what they say. At the bazaar today, an American diplomat was shot. Assassination."

  Just then Beatrice caught sight of her reflection in a small mirror hanging outside a rickety stall. The sight was terrifying. Blood painted one entire side of her face. Her yellow hair was matted with it. For a moment she stood still, frozen at the sight of herself.

  It was no wonder the man could spot her. Quickly she grabbed
a loose garment from inside the unattended stall. The soft fabric stuck to her blood-sticky fingers.

  Her grandmother's blood.

  Beatrice choked back a sob. She had died in Beatrice's place, just as another woman had now died.

  Leave the cup, she told herself. Leave it and hide. He won't search for you in this crowd once he has the cup. You'll he safe.

  Her fingers trembled.

  And blind.

  "No," she whispered, her face set. The cup belonged to her, and so did her sight. If the Arab wanted either, he was going to have to kill her first.

  As she ran back toward the crowd, an old beggar carrying a large sack over his shoulder crashed directly into her. Then everything happened almost too quickly for Beatrice to follow. A second shot rang out, this time very close. She felt a thud as the bullet tore into the rag bag the beggar had slung over his shoulder.

  "Who... what..." she began, but the beggar fell with his full weight on top of her, then picked Beatrice up and ran with her toward the cluster of buildings just beyond the panic-stricken crowd. She struggled to get loose, but the old man's strength was astonishing.

  There are two of them, she thought. "Help me!" she shouted, but the crowd of onlookers was too terrified to respond to her plea. She still held the cup in her hand. She brought it up and crashed it down on the old man's head with all her strength. The beggar staggered, and Beatrice struggled to wriggle free, but at that moment another bullet cracked behind them.

  This time it smashed into the old man's back. Beatrice saw the coarse fabric of his robe fly apart in a gaping, smoking hole where the bullet entered. She screamed. She was still screaming when the old man fell at the mouth of a narrow alleyway.

  Stumbling to her feet, Beatrice looked down at the old man, then in the other direction, toward the far end of the alley. Out there was freedom; the alley was certain capture and death at the hands of the white-robed man.

  Hesitantly, she touched the old man's head. A vein throbbed in his temple. He wasn't dead yet, though with the bullet wound in his back, he would surely die soon.

  Unless she helped him with the cup.

  Three dead for me, she thought. How many others will I allow to die so that I can keep the cup? She looked again at the sunlight at the end of the alley.

  Three is too many.

  With a sigh, she knelt beside the beggar and gently turned him over. At least the cup would do some good before it was taken from her.

  Then the old man sat up with surprising agility and smiled. He had wonderful teeth, Beatrice noticed. "Thank you," he said in perfect King's English.

  Chapter Three

  Hal pushed the last of the small change to the center of the table. "Three hundred eighteen dirham. How much is that in dollars?"

  "Fifty-eight," the boy said automatically. "And thirty-two cents, at yesterday's exchange rate."

  Arthur Blessing stood at the window in the cheap room the two had rented in the Medina, the Old City of Marrakesh. In the street, a crowd of people was shouting, running in all directions. "Something's going on. I heard gunshots."

  "This place is getting to be as bad as the States," Hal said. He stretched on the rickety chair he was sitting on. It creaked portentously. "Speaking of which, maybe it's time we headed back." He said it as casually as he could, but he saw the boy tense. "We're not going to find her, Arthur," he added gently. "Not here, anyway. We've looked everywhere."

  Arthur turned toward him. "But your old boss at the FBI said she'd come to Marrakesh..."

  "That was more than six months ago," Hal said. "And his information was old then."

  "So maybe you could ask him again."

  Hal shook his head. "I've tried. Koehler's retired." He forced himself to meet Arthur's eyes. "I didn't tell you because I thought you'd be upset."

  "When?" the boy asked dully.

  "A couple months ago." He fiddled with the coins on the table. "I couldn't get anyone else at the Bureau to talk to me." He smiled ruefully. Cashiered federal agents were as easily forgotten as dust under a bed. "I guess part-time auto mechanics don't carry a lot of clout in Washington."

  In silhouette against the bright light from the window, the boy's shoulders slumped. "Do you think Emily's dead?" he asked.

  Arthur was thirteen and small for his age, a redheaded urchin far from manhood, despite his lightning-quick mind. Sometimes it was hard for Hal to remember that the boy wasn't still the ten-year-old child who had followed him so trustingly through most of Europe and North Africa.

  "No, she's not dead. She got herself lost, that's all. You told her how to do it."

  "But three years..."

  "Listen, Arthur, your aunt's all right. No one's come after us, have they?"

  The boy shook his head.

  "Then they haven't come after her, either."

  Hal wished he could feel as certain as he sounded. Three years ago, when all their lives had become tangled in a nightmare too strange even for the police to sort out, the two of them had left Arthur's legal guardian, Emily Blessing, behind in a small village in England with instructions on how to erase her identity if that became necessary. Hal, meanwhile, took the boy into hiding.

  After six months, when the danger to them had passed, they began to look for Emily. They'd been looking ever since.

  "I just thought that by now she'd..." His voice trailed away.

  She'd go back to her life, Hal thought.

  That was how it was supposed to be. Emily had had a good career with a solid future. Her only drawback had been Arthur. She had never wanted to raise a child in the first place; her sister had left the boy to her when she killed herself. It would not have been fair to take her from everything she knew to go to ground with a boy she had never wanted to raise and a man she had never wanted to love.

  "Take it easy," Hal said. He got up and tried to put his arm around Arthur, but the boy shrugged him off. As a teenager, he considered himself too old for such overt affection.

  And Hal? Was he too old, too? Emily Blessing had kindled a spark in Hal that he had believed to be long dead. The spark had flamed into one night of love before it had scared them both away.

  It's too late, Emily had said as they lay in one another's arms. Too late for both of them.

  And so he had let her go. Taken his unwanted love and her unwanted child and set out on a new life for them all.

  Only it hadn't worked out that way. Emily had not returned to the think tank in Chicago where she had worked. As far as they could tell—with the help of Hal's former boss in the FBI—she hadn't even returned to the United States. Hal and Arthur had spent three years following a series of cold trails leading from London to Paris to Morocco. The last trail had ended here.

  "With this money, plus what we've got socked away in the bank, we have enough to fly home."

  "Home," Arthur said disdainfully. "Where's that, Hal? Chicago, where those people first started trying to kill me?"

  "Nobody's trying to kill you now."

  "Do you plan to drop me off in some orphanage in Chicago? Is that what you're going to do if we can't find Emily?"

  "Arthur..." Hal frowned, stunned by the boy's sudden vehemence.

  "I suppose you've had enough of dragging a kid around with you," he spat. "A crazy kid."

  "Hey." He tried to approach Arthur again, but the boy's angry scowl held him off. "Look, if you're crazy, then that makes two of us. I had the cup, too, remember?"

  That was what had started it all, the cup. An unassuming little metal bowl that had changed their lives forever.

  The boy stared out the window, then raised his hands to cover his face.

  "It's gone now," Hal said softly. "The cup's gone. No one's going to try to hurt you anymore. And I'm not going anywhere without you."

  This time it was Arthur's arms that flung around Hal. "I'm sorry for being such a baby," the boy said, sobbing into Hal's neck. "It's just that I don't want to be alone."

  "You won't be," Hal said. "I'll
never leave you. Never, as long as you need me. That's a promise."

  There was a thump at the door. Hal scooped all the money off the table into his pockets.

  "Lahaza shweia," he growled in Arabic. "Hold your hor—" Before he could finish, the door burst open and a filthy old man tumbled inside.

  Hal was on him in an instant, the crook of his arm around the beggar's throat. "I think you got the wrong room, buddy," he said.

  "Gaaa," said the old man.

  Arthur walked closer. "Hal, let him go."

  "Oh, I'll do that, all right." He propelled the beggar into the hallway.

  "No, stop. Hal! It's—"

  The hood of the old man's robe fell backward, revealing a pair of bright blue eyes beneath a shock of white hair. "Taliesin," he said, dropping the old man at the threshold.

  "Good heavens," the old man said, rubbing his neck, "what a coarse creature you turned out to be."

  Hal crossed his arms. "After three years, you might have waited for me to answer the door."

  "I was in a hurry." A broad smile lit up the old man's face. "Arthur! You've grown, boy."

  "Where've you been?" Hal went on accusingly. "You said you'd catch up to us."

  "So I have," Taliesin said. "Here I am. By the way, I've brought someone with me."

  Hal peered out the door. The hallway was empty. "Someone invisible?"

  "Of course she's visible. Beatrice?" He crooked his finger. "Come along, dear."

  Hesitantly, the girl emerged from a doorway down the dimly lit corridor.

  "Now, now, no one here's going to hurt you."

  As she walked toward them, Hal and Arthur exchanged a glance. The girl was wrapped in some sort of cotton shawl with the price tag hanging prominently near her right ear. Her face, or what they could see of it, was streaked with dirt and what looked like dried blood. She entered the room without speaking, her eyes downcast.

  Hal glared at Taliesin. "How old is she?" he asked.

  "Why, I'm sure I don't know," the old man said. "We've only just met. How old are you, child?"

  "Twelve," Beatrice answered in a whisper. The shawl fell off her head, showing a cascade of long blonde hair. Arthur swallowed. Her eyes swept over him and he blushed, suddenly realizing that he'd been staring.