The Broken Sword (7 page)

Aubrey's eyes rolled back in his head. "Thanatos!" he shouted, and he felt the power surge through him like molten metal.

"Yes," Saladin answered softly. "You understand." With the cat's blood he traced a pentacle on Aubrey's forehead, and the young man fell to his knees in ecstasy.

W
hen the ritual was
ended, the monks parted again. A slab of rock covering a hole in the far wall was removed, and Aubrey walked out into an alley in the back of the building. He was alone in the night, and reborn. He found a woman among the lowest ranks of beggars, and had her for twenty dirham in the darkened doorway of a tumbledown building.

She was young, perhaps fifteen, although her teeth were already sparse. Her hair had been uncombed for days, and her arms were crusted with dirt. When Aubrey finished with her, she pulled herself up off the ground, clutching the coins in one hand, and loped down the alleyway, looking back once at the handsome young man who obviously had enough money for the high-priced bordellos.

She should not have looked back. For in that single glance Aubrey saw the girl's true heart, her longing for a better life, her hope. The hope sparked a fire in him that caused him to gasp aloud. In the instant of that glance, Aubrey was transported back to the stone chamber thick with the smell of the dead cat's blood. He heard the animal's wails as it struggled to hold onto the precious life that was leaving it with each beat of its heart. The girl's eyes held hope, and Thanatos had the power to take every last shred of it away.

With a spurt of energy he had not known he possessed, Aubrey sprang away from the stone wall and with two strides caught the girl by the arm. She turned toward him, smiling nervously at him through her mottled teeth while she hid the coins she'd earned behind her back. Aubrey grasped her by her hair. Then, hearing the chant of the black magicians drumming in his ears, he coiled the long black strands of hair into his fist and, as the girl began to scream, yanked her toward him with a violent tug that snapped the girl's neck.

At the moment of her death, Aubrey felt a satisfaction he had never imagined. He was Thanatos. He was death incarnate.

At dawn he walked back to the villa and began to paint.

T
he effect of the
power on his work was immediate and startling. For the first time, his paintings were no longer a talented imitation of Saladin's, but branched into a direction that was his alone. Aubrey's lines were harder than Saladin's, his colors more vivid; and in the trapped, enclosed spaces between the tortured lines was the essence of the fear he had embraced with such love and awe on the night of his initiation into the dark world.

He painted all day and into the night without food or rest. In the evening, Saladin came into his studio wearing his customary robe and holding a glass of wine. "You smell like a woman," he said, sniffing with distaste. He flicked a finger at the oils Aubrey had finished. "These are better."

Aubrey put down his brush. His hands were shaking. "Saladin, I . . ." He swallowed. "Last night I killed someone."

Saladin looked up from the painting for a moment, then down again, smiling. "Have you developed a taste for murder, after all?" he asked.

Aubrey sat on the floor against a wall. "Is that all you can say?"

Saladin raised his eyebrows. "Should I say something else? You were the one who did the killing."

"Yes, you're right," Aubrey said numbly.

"Do you feel remorseful? Is that the problem?"

"Well, naturally..." He slumped forward, resting his chin on his arms. "Actually I don't. That's just it. I don't feel anything at all. I barely remember anything, except perhaps..." He swallowed. "... how enjoyable it was."

Saladin grinned. "Indeed. An uncommon pleasure." He lowered himself into a chair and sipped his wine.

"Even when I broke her neck, all I could think of was the chanting from last night, that strange music."

"Lovely, wasn't it? Egyptian, Nineteenth Dynasty."

"What did you
do
to me?" Aubrey wailed miserably.

"I? My dear boy—"

"I feel as if, between one day and the next, my life has changed completely. As if I've suddenly become this monstrous, amoral creature."

"And so you have," Saladin said, picking up a magazine and leafing through it. "You've given up your soul."

Aubrey sat in stunned silence. "You were serious."

"Of course I was. And so were you. Otherwise, you wouldn't be painting now."

"Then my wish—"

"You'll become a great artist, Aubrey," he said reassuringly. "And a famous one."

Aubrey stared ahead sullenly. "I might have done that anyway."

"It's rather late to have second thoughts about that, isn't it?" He laid the magazine on his lap. "Put some yellow in the upper right quadrant," he said, gesturing impatiently toward the abstract oil on the easel. "The balance is off."

Aubrey tapped his fingers to his lips, thinking. "Exactly what does it mean to lose one's soul?"

"Not much," Saladin answered. "Until you die."

"What happens then?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"According to the magicians with whom I studied, one forfeits any life after this one, and therefore the opportunity to perfect oneself." He shrugged.

"That doesn't seem like a very high price to pay," Aubrey said, feeling better.

"My sentiments exactly. No choirs of angels with harps, no fellows with pitchforks, no coming back as a snake or a tree or a one-armed beggar. Just one jolly, self-indulgent life, and then..." He held out his empty hands. "Nothing."

Aubrey stood up and walked to his easel. "A little more yellow, you said?"

"Cadmium. Mix some burnt sienna into it."

Aubrey added a splash to the painting. "Saladin," he asked brightly, "what did you wish for?"

The tall man stretched in his chair. "Haven't you guessed?"

Aubrey turned around, the brush poised in mid-air. Saladin's face was as unlined as the day he had first met him, his hair as black, his knowledge as profound. "You said the chant last night came from Nineteenth Dynasty Egypt."

Saladin nodded. "The reign of Ramses the Second."

"Now, how would you know that?" Aubrey demanded. "No written music from Pharaonic Egypt exists. No one's ever heard it."

"Perhaps someone."

Aubrey closed his eyes with dawning understanding. "Good God, you were there," he whispered. "Your wish was to live forever."

Saladin rose and walked across the room.

"But that's brilliant! What do you care about losing your soul? You'll never know what it's like to die."

"I might."

"How? What can harm you?"

"Only magic stronger than my own. If there is such a thing."

"I doubt that."

"Hmm." He leaned against the doorway. "It might be nice if there were."

"Nice? To die?"

The tall man shrugged. "A life that goes on too long ceases to seem precious. It becomes a burden, like an overdue pregnancy."

Aubrey snorted. "Give it to me, then. I'll take it."

"Yes," Saladin said slowly, his ancient eyes shining with malevolent humor. "I imagine you would."

T
wo months later Saladin
was arrested in England for the murder of the washerwoman in the sculpture and eighteen others whose bodies had been similarly preserved. Aubrey never saw him again.

The paintings which had begun to take shape on the night of Aubrey's initiation into the coven in Tangier sold almost immediately. The name Katsuleris circulated quickly, first through esoteric European art circles, then on a broader scale. Within six months, a prominent gallery in Milan offered Aubrey a month-long exhibit for which people waited hours in line.
Time
magazine ran an article about the phenomenal resurgence of interest in the field of abstract art.

Through it all, Aubrey continued to participate in the rites of the coven. The rituals filled the places in his psyche that his work did not. They suffused him with energy and purpose; they focused his mind. They led him to a series of teachers around the world, all of them soulless as he was, all masters of the dark ways.

He excelled as a student. When he returned to the coven in Tangier, he took over as its leader, wearing the inverted silver pentagram that Saladin had once worn.

He became comfortable with the two lives he led, painting by day, then celebrating in the thick of night the magic rituals that brought him into deep communion with the powers of the demon gods.

And afterward, after each rite, he killed.

The killings were the great exultation of his new life. At first he murdered only women, and only for the pleasure it brought him. But women, he soon learned, were too easy to kill, and too easy to get away with killing. Aubrey longed to explore new frontiers in murder, to develop his skill to the level of an art form and to be recognized for his artistry.

And so, through contacts made in the coven, he added a third component to his life: He became an assassin known as Thanatos, and not even the people who sought his services ever connected him with the dapper young artist named Aubrey Katsuleris.

I
t came as a shock
, then, when a young Arab appeared in the doorway of an apartment in New York City where Aubrey was staying.

"What do you want?" he hissed, maneuvering the man so that he would fall silently into the apartment when Aubrey killed him.

The Arab immediately prostrated himself on the floor, offering up a battered leather case.

Aubrey ignored it. "Who sent you?"

"My uncle, Hamid Lagouat, who follows the instructions of our patriarch, the High Lord Saladin."

For a moment, Aubrey could only stare at the man. Then, flinging himself onto a sofa, he burst out laughing. This was no terrorist seeking Thanatos. It was only one of Saladin's pesky relatives.

"I should have known. Well, get up, get up. What does Saladin have in mind now? Where the devil is he, anyway?"

The Arab raised his face from the carpet. "He is dead, Sire."

Aubrey blinked. "Dead? Did you say he was dead?"

"He was killed by an American FBI agent."

"But..." Aubrey fell dizzy. Saladin wasn't supposed to die, not ever. It was his wish, a wish granted in exchange for eternity. "How was it done?"

"He was beheaded, Sire."

"Beheaded?
By the FBI?"

"My uncle saw it with his own eyes." He approached Aubrey once again with the leather case. "As Saladin's heir, the document in here is for you, Sire."

Slowly Aubrey took it. "That's right, he made me his heir, didn't he?" he mused.

"Yes, Sire. As such, my entire family—and there are many of us—stands ready to assist you in any way."

"Yes, yes." From the case Aubrey extracted a small notebook. It was a diary of some sort, its pages handwritten with a quill pen and interspersed with Saladin's breathtakingly realistic drawings. Among them were portraits of a man, a woman, and a preadolescent boy, as well as many pages—over twenty, rendered in colored pencil—of an oddly shaped container of some kind.

Aubrey flipped through the entire book first, then went back to the beginning. On the first pages was a letter to him.

My dear Aubrey,

I am writing to you because it is possible that I may at last have the good fortune to die. After you accept the gift implicit in my story—and you will, no doubt, accept it—you may also, one day millennia hence, come to long for death as I do.

My story is about a cup. A quite ordinary artifact, from its appearance, a small bowl of greenish metal; yet countless men have died for it. Wars have been fought, legends grown, kingdoms fallen over its existence.

At one time it was known as the Holy Grail, and in this connection was it stolen from me by a sorcerer named Merlin, who understood well the ways of magic. It was not for himself that Merlin took the cup, but for a king who, perhaps alone of all the multitudes who have ever lived upon this earth, did not desire to possess it and its wonderful gift. He feared that eternal life would corrupt him, as it had me. He never did embrace the darkness, which you and I have come to love so well. Rather than succumb to the temptation of the cup, he threw it away, and died young for his pains.

I wonder now if that king were not wiser than the rest of us.

His name was Arthur of Britain. You no doubt have heard the legend about the once and future king—the great ruler who would one day return to finish out his reign. For sixteen hundred years, the legend has been told and retold until it has become little more than a fairy story. Even among those who accept the possibility of reincarnation, no one believes that an individual can be reborn as himself, to continue a life begun in the distant past.

And yet that is what has happened. Arthur has come back.

He is a boy again these days, far from royal, and far from the land where he once ruled. What the gods have planned for him I do not know, but they have seen to it that the cup which I have possessed for five thousand years is now in his keeping.

The gods. The ancient gods, Aubrey. Are you familiar with them? Or are there no records of them left at all? The ancient gods, long vanquished and forgotten … I smell their presence in the air. Their magic.

If I die, it will be their doing.

And the cup will be yours—if you can find it and keep it. So you must find it, Aubrey. Find it and kill the boy. Discover, if you can, the instrument of my death and destroy it, for whatever the object is, the most terrible gods of all have placed their power in it.

And now, dear chap, farewell. If you are reading this, then I have already gone to the void, the nothing I was taught to expect. That is my only fear about dying—that there might be something other than a void waiting for me.

I do not wish to meet the ancient gods.

Aubrey closed the book. He tried to speak, but found that his lips and tongue were dry. He nodded curtly to the young man in dismissal.

"There is one more article I have been instructed to leave with you, Sire," the messenger said, producing an envelope. After handing it to Aubrey, he bowed. "Should you desire the assistance of my family, I will be nearby."

"Nearby where?"

"Wherever you are, Lord." The messenger performed a graceful salaam, then left.

The envelope contained a map. A map of a rural area in England, near the ruins of a fifth-century castle where Hamid Lagouat, who had ridden with Saladin on his last day of life, had seen a sword in a stone.

A
ubrey left immediately for
England, but he did not find the boy whom Saladin had described so well in his diary, nor the American FBI agent who apparently had cut himself loose from all ties to his past in order to protect him.

He did spot the woman in the drawings, however. She had remained for some time near the place where Arthur Blessing and Hal Woczniak had disappeared, although it quickly became clear from her actions that she knew nothing of their whereabouts.

He also saw the messenger who had visited him in New York to bring news of Saladin's death.

They may prove to be useful one day
, Saladin had said of his relatives. He had been right. When the woman left the country in her own search for her nephew, Aubrey called upon Saladin's—now Aubrey's own—private army to track Emily Blessing in her wanderings.

She placed personal ads to Arthur in the newspapers of every place she visited. These the Arabs collected and sent to Aubrey. He instructed them to deliver copies of those newspapers to every village and community within a fifty-mile radius of those cities. It was a long shot, he knew, but worth the small effort. The woman was the key. Sooner or later, the boy would come to her. Aubrey would keep her in abeyance until then.

Meanwhile, there was the sword.

Find the cup... Kill the boy..
.
Destroy the instrument of my death.

Of the three directives with which Saladin had charged his heir, only the third had been possible so far, and that had taken three years.

The weapon had not even been visible at first. Without the map, Aubrey would never have thought to look for it in the woods surrounding a field of ancient ruins. He would never have noticed one boulder among many, hidden in an overgrown thicket.