Secret of the Slaves (19 page)

She nodded. For some reason she was too suffused with emotion to speak.

“You've done well by me,” he told her, as they walked back in the general direction of the plantation house.

Annja held an internal debate as to whether she should tell him what had just happened in the ruined chapel. Before she came to a resolution he said, “I've a proposition for you, Annja. You're a remarkable young woman. You've achieved great things. And you're really very beautiful, you know. So here's my offer—become my consort, and we'll rule the world together.”

She laughed. He frowned. To her utter astonishment he seemed genuinely annoyed.

“I thought you meant to give the whole world the gift of immortality,” she said half-facetiously.

“Are you daft? To hold such power, only to give it away? I'd have to be a fool.”

It was her turn to frown. “You can't be serious.”

“I'm deadly serious,” he said, although he smiled once more. “You've put the power of the ages into these hands.” He held them up before her.

“Why me?” she asked, to give herself time to think. Or more accurately, to try to bring her whirling thoughts into something resembling order. “What you said about me is very nice. But I don't have any illusions I'm anything special. Especially in the looks department. You've got to see that. You have beautiful women throwing themselves at you all the time.”

“Don't sell yourself short,” he said, not bothering to deny her assertion. “Your appearance is quite striking. And intelligence as incisive as yours is an aphrodisiac. That and tenacious will and competence such as you've displayed. They'd set you apart from a sea of pretty faces, if those eyes and those cheekbones didn't do the job.”

He stopped. They stood at the border of field and brush. A stand of trees stood between them and a derelict field that adjoined the old plantation house. He ran the back of his right hand down her left cheek.

She thrilled to the contact. There was a magnetism to the man, she had to admit. And yet—what he was saying went beyond bizarre. If he meant it, it was monstrous.

But she couldn't believe. Wouldn't believe. Surely we didn't go through so much—surely Dan didn't die, for some kind of B-movie megalomaniac?

She reached up, took his big hard hand, pulled it gently but definitely away from her face.

“What are we really talking about here, Sir Iain?”

“With the secrets we're about to wrest from these selfish holdouts come power. Infinite power. With it, quite frankly, I shall force the world to put me in charge.”

“You really think—”

“Who better to lead the Earth into a new era than an immortal philosopher king, an undying humanitarian? I shall use the carrot of eternal life—and the stick of denying it—to make myself undisputed ruler of all humanity. And then—”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Well, the human race wants paring back. The Earth demands no less. It will all be for the best. You'll see.”

“You mean you'll promise the masses immortality,” Annja said, “and not deliver?”

“Oh, bloody hell. Of course I won't. It would be like giving an infant an automatic weapon. The height of irresponsibility.”

“So all this happened—all these people died—Dan died, he died in my arms—” for a moment the words clotted in her throat, choking her, but she shook tears from her eyes and plowed on “—just for your
ambition?
”

“If you care to reduce it to such sordid terms.”

“You lied to me.”

He shrugged. “You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

“I'll stop you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Please, dear child. You're a girl alone in the wilderness. I have a squad of armed men at my back. Don't let my glowing assessment of your capabilities go to that pretty head!”

She stepped back. The anger was ice within her now, not fire. The sword sprang into being in her hand.

“I have capabilities you've never dreamed of,” she said.

He laughed in her face. Then before she could react he flowed forward, quicksilver, and punched her in the sternum.

She was stunned for a moment. Her back slammed against a tree. The wind was blasted from her lungs. The sword had vanished as consciousness flickered.

Publico stood twenty feet away, grinning a wolf's grin.

“So have I, my dear.”

It was agony to breathe. The effort sent hot needles through her chest. She didn't know if she had broken ribs. She felt broken. She slumped like an abandoned rag doll at the foot of the tree.

He strode up to her. “I may not have the secret of rejuvenation yet,” he told her. He reached down, grabbed her beneath the chin, raised her up, sliding her back up the tree's rough bark. She grabbed his forearm to try to ease the pressure on her windpipe. It was like grabbing a steel tube.

“But as I think I've hinted, love, I
do
have access to certain technologies you've been told were decades in the future—if they were possible at all. Among these are the means to give a human extraordinary strength and speed and endurance, temporarily. How very fortunate that, unsure what I might be flying into out here on the very fringe of the enemy's domain, I thought to dose myself right before landing.”

She kicked him in the crotch.

Evidently his wonder drugs didn't armor him there. Nor render the target impossibly small, the way steroids were reputed to. He doubled over with an entirely human—and entirely satisfactory—gasp, clutching at himself with both hands.

The sword, she knew, was more powerful than all of treacherous Sir Iain's wonder drugs. But not even it could shield her from a couple of dozen mercenaries with automatic weapons. They were boiling out of their riverbank cantonment now, weapons ready. Goran and Mladko were running toward her from the aircraft with guns in their hands.

She turned and ran. Through the underbrush and the stand of woods, out again into the long-fallow field. The soil beneath her soles was black—the black Indian earth, so rich and mysterious, in a realm where no natural topsoil existed.

Ahead of her rose the jungle, shore of a green sea that stretched unbroken as far as the eye could see. If she got into the dense brush of the transition zone she could lose herself. Clumsy Western mercs and Croat war criminals could never match her in the bush. She'd eluded such before.

But she could not outrun bullets. As she reached the far side of the field, the green refuge mere tantalizing steps away, a sledgehammer force struck her back. Only then did she hear the rippling snarl of the shots that hit her.

Momentum carried her on into the brush. She crashed through. She fell down a short slope, rolled. She felt nothing. She scrambled up. Her limbs obeyed reluctantly, almost at random, like a newborn foal's.

Another burst of gunfire. She felt another powerful impact low in her back. Lightning agony flared through her right side. She got up, ran up the far side of a small gully with a trickle of stream down the middle, into more brush.

She ran and ran, desperate, incapable of thought. Until she ran head-on into blackness, and knew no more.

Annja opened her eyes. “I'm not dead,” she said.

“Not yet,” Patrizinho said with a wide smile.

He and Xia sat beside her bed. Both wore long loose robes. His was maroon in the center and black down the sides. Hers was shades of blue in diagonal swirls. Her hair was twisted into a complicated knot atop her head, and she wore large turquoise earrings. His dreads hung loose about his shoulders.

Annja sighed. “Are you going to say ‘I told you so'?”

“No,” Xia said. “We only
tried
to tell you so.”

Annja sat up. A moment later she felt the bed press itself gently against her back, mold to her ever so slightly, so as to continue to support her. She raised an eyebrow.

The bed lay at one side of the room, in a sort of alcove. The floor and bedspread were deep maroon. The walls were pale tan that showed a pearlescent undertone in the sunlight streaming in the pointed-arched window. Rain forest plants, or so she took them for, sprang up in profusion about the room. It was comfortable, warm rather than hot. For the first time in what felt like forever she was aware of not being oppressed by a humidity a percentage point or two less than the bottom of a swimming pool. Yet the window apparently stood open—gauzy cream-yellow curtains moved slightly in a breeze, and the air smelled fresh.

She let herself relax back into the bed. “How?” she asked.

“How is it you're still alive?” Patrizinho said. He crossed one long leg over the other. “We healed you, of course.”

She sat bolt upright.

“Relax,” he said with a smile, holding up a pink palm.

“But, my God! They shot me! I'm—I'm sure I felt bullets hit.”

“Not to put too fine an edge on it,” Xia said, lounging like a cat in her chair, “you were mortally wounded.”

The bed had not angled up to meet her this time. She let herself fall back to what she realized was a very comfortable angle, one that didn't put undue pressure on her lower back and tailbone. “Smart beds,” she said softly. “This is what Moran was willing to kill for?”

“Very possibly,” Xia said. “Among other things, I'm sure.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Three days.”

“Three
days?
I must be dosed to the eyeballs on painkillers!”

“No need,” Xia said. “Patrizinho told you—we healed you. You might feel some residual pains. We can block those. If they keep recurring, we can teach you meditation techniques to make the pain go away. But you should feel no lasting effects.”

“But that's—”

“Impossible?” Patrizinho looked at her blankly for a moment. Then he laughed.

After another moment she laughed, too. She had to. He just had that kind of effect.

“How did you ever get me out alive? I know they chased me into the undergrowth, the mercenaries. Did I just pass out and fall into some bush where they overlooked me?”

Xia laughed softly. “We ambushed them about the time you dropped.”

“The old plantation is in what you might call a buffer zone,” Patrizinho said. “It gives us room to maneuver on familiar ground against intruders without letting them in among our crops and homes.”

“Okay,” Annja said. “You know, it's really hard trying to prioritize the questions. They're all crowding toward the turnstiles at once and it seems important none of them gets trampled.”

“Take your time,” Xia said. “We have a little breathing room.”

“All right. Why?”

“Why?” Patrizinho made a gesture beckoning her to elaborate.

“I was going to ask why you saved me. And that's probably what surprises me most. But it's all suddenly starting to land on me—why did you bring me here?”

The two Promessans looked at one another and laughed. “In part for the reason you just demonstrated, Annja,” Patrizinho said. “Your remarkable agility of mind.”

“When you don't let your habitual skepticism bind you,” Xia said.

“Well, perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions—I guess it does kind of verge on paranoia—”

“The way it's starting to bind you now,” Xia said. Annja piped down.

“Why did we bring you here?” Patrizinho said. “I take it you don't just mean why we spirited you away from the place where you fell wounded.”

“No. I meant what you thought—why did you permit me to find you? Or lead me here. Whatever.”

“Why do you suspect we led you to us?” Patrizinho asked.

“Is he always like this?” Annja asked Xia.

“Except when he's worse,” Xia said. “That's why he's laughing all the time. It makes it harder to throttle him for being such a pain.”

Annja looked back at the tall and muscular Promessan. She thought anyone would face quite a challenge trying to throttle him. She forced from her mind an image of his crushing Dan's heart with a blow of one of those fists, so relaxed now it seemed they'd be hard-pressed to do anything more militant than pet a kitten. She had a great deal of assimilating to do. And she sensed there was going to be a great deal more to assimilate. She knew she probably didn't have much time to process everything.

“We kept conveniently finding just one more scrap of evidence that led us up the river,” she said. “I began to suspect in Manaus that Moran knew more than he let on—”

“He did,” Xia said. “Our poor friend Herr Lindmüller was able to remember enough to provide him a general idea of where the city lies. Enough so Moran felt compelled to kill him to keep him from telling anyone else. Our mental techniques are not infallible, sadly—he should never have had those dreams.”

“You brainwashed him?” Although it chilled her to hear the claim Moran had murdered his friend Lindmüller, she realized that the germ of suspicion had entered her mind in the River of Dreams offices, where the representative mentioned he had fallen to his death—supposedly rock climbing, despite his fear of heights.

“We conditioned him,” Xia said, “as he agreed to before he was ever brought here. That was our bargain. He could come here, make deals—highly profitable to both sides—and even receive various restorative treatments. But in return he had to give up any memories of our existence.”

“So what did Publico need
me
for?”

Patrizinho smiled again. “Amazonia is vast. And Sir Iain obviously guessed we had means of preventing detection from above. So he needed your skills to pin down our location. He had no way of knowing where along the way you might pick up the vital clues. But he did act, subtly, to keep you moving in the right direction.”

“Also,” Xia said, “it appears he was auditioning you, so to speak. Testing your suitability for his larger plans.”

Annja felt her cheeks get hot. “You eavesdropped on us at the airfield?”

“Of course we did,” Xia said. “This is our land. We do what we must to defend it.”

Annja pressed her lips together. So many questions. “I keep coming back to why you brought me here,” she said, after brief hesitation.

“We may have much to teach each other,” Patrizinho said.

“Your sword,” Xia said. “We sensed it had been restored.”

“You sensed it?”

“It's an artifact of tremendous power,” Patrizinho said. “When such an event happens—when something so powerful is made whole again after such a long time broken—the world rings like a bell for those who know how to listen.”

Annja frowned. She opened her mouth to argue then shut it quickly. She realized the sword's existence was going to be a sticking point to any attempts at debunking she might make. “Is that what you want?” she asked, suddenly suspicious. “To get the sword away from me?”

After a moment she relaxed slightly. “Fact is, if you did want to take it from me I might just say, go ahead. But you don't want that, do you?”

“Not at all,” Patrizinho said.

“Forgive me, please,” she said. “I'm tired, all of a sudden.”

“We said ‘we' healed you,” Xia said, “but it would be more accurate to say we helped your body—and mind—to heal yourself. And that took a great deal of work on their parts. Get some rest.”

“But what—what about Publico? Is he gone?”

Patrizinho's laugh was sad. “Him? No. He smells the prey now. The sickness of power is upon him. He'll never give up, short of success or death.”

“He's got reinforcements,” Xia said. “Specifically, he's mobilizing some members of the Brazilian army and air force against us, under the pretext that our
quilombo
is a terrorist stronghold.”