"Because he is not dead," said Chiun, slipping back onto his pillow.
Chapter 3
Maddas Hinsein ran for his life from the baroque expanse of Arab Renaissance Square.
He was not alone. It seemed as if all of Abominadad were fleeing the square and the fury that had unleashed itself upon the world.
Twin furies, actually.
Maddas, tripping over the hem of his abayuh, craned his veiled face around to once again behold the terrible sight.
What his morose brown eyes saw filled him with a great dread.
The gallows that had been converted into a reviewing stand was now a shipwreck of splinters and rude boards. More frightening, one of the giant bronze forearms-cast from a mold of Maddas' own-had cracked asunder. The scimitar one huge fist clutched was balanced in the puny human-sized hands of the assassin who now wielded it as if it were a mere plastic swizzle stick instead of the ponderous product of the finest German swordsmiths.
It pointed straight upward, balanced, teetering. The blade began to descend. It swooshed like a jet taking off.
Under the blade stood Kimberly Baynes, nude, her broken neck tilted to one side, her eyes, once limpid pools of violet ink, now burning like balls of phosphorescent blood in an angry face that Maddas barely recognized.
They went wide as exploding suns as, hissing, the blade chopped down.
The ground shook. Sparks spit from the cracking concrete like a devil's anvil being worked. The blade rang like the mighty sword of Allah smiting the infidel.
And floating out from the vibration, a musical voice rang, mocking, insolent.
"Come, Shiva. This is no way to treat your bride!"
It was the voice of sweet Kimberly Baynes, and yet it was not.
She stood off to one side, her four arms lifting like a spider preparing to pounce upon its prey. Her small breasts shook.
The blade lifted again. It described a figure eight in the air, the flutter and swish of the fine blade impossibly loud as it cleaved the air.
This time it came in sideways, seeking her smooth neck.
Nimble and light-footed, Kimberly leapt to avoid it. The terrible edge whizzed under her. She alighted on all six limbs like a sinister sleek insect sheathed in human flesh.
"Lay down your sword, O Shiva," Kimberly proclaimed. "Kali claims you now. We will dance the Tandava and this land shall become the Caldron of Blood from which we shall both quaff mightily. "
The answer was an inhuman roar, loud, terrible, deafening.
It came from a man who wore a scarlet-and-purple costume that evoked images of genies, harems, and the Arabian Nights. His skin was a raw sunburned tone and his eyes burned like coals aflame. His thick-wristed hand balanced the other scimitar like a red ant carrying a twig.
The blade crashed down again. Kimberly dodged expertly.
This time it struck a prostrate figure in a green burnoose, chopping it in two. The separate parts of the body jumped into the sky.
The sight of his official spokesman, Selim Fanek-whom Maddas Hinsein had wisely arranged to take his place on the gallows-flying upward in two sections reminded the Scimitar of the Arabs of how this gold-haired vixen had betrayed him. Were it not for his own cunning, Maddas himself would now be flying skyward in pieces like so much cordwood. It was Fanek who had taken the traitorous fatal blow meant for Maddas himself.
He turned and resumed his run, a hulking figure in his feminine abayuh and black paratroop boots. He had to find sanctuary in this madness of betrayal. For soon the deadfall commands he had left with his trusted defense minister would be executed.
And he knew also that soon the American bombs would fall. Maddas Hinsein could live with the downfall of his people. But he, too, was on ground zero. And the Scimitar of the Arabs had a greater destiny to fulfill than becoming so much mulch. One that did not include ignominious death.
He had to find sanctuary.
A man stumbled across his path. He was an old one, with but a single yellow-brown tooth in his head.
"Allah forgive us!" the elder moaned. "For the sins of our wicked leader, we have been sent two demons to bedevil us."
"Curse you, old man!" snapped Maddas Hinsein, stomping out the pitiful man's lone tooth with the heel of a boot. "You are too weak to enjoy the triumph that lies before the Iraiti people."
Maddas plunged on, melting into the fleeing crowd.
Elsewhere in Abominadad, two frightened men were being carried along with the human wave escaping the carnage of Arab Renaissance Square.
"Can you see what's happening back there?" huffed Don Cooder, hostage anchor for the American television network BCN. His hair actually stood up on end-the result of a lifetime of hair-spray abuse.
"No," puffed Reverend Juniper Jackman, who had come to Abominadad to upstage and liberate Cooder, only to end up his cellmate. "Why should I care? Gettin' out alive's all that matters."
"We just witnessed a turning point in history," Cooder went on, his voice taking on a stentorian timbre. "Maddas, the Tyrant of Irait, has suffered the same overreaching fate as previous Iraiti despots. Someone has to inform the world."
"If I spot a phone booth," Reverend Jackman said distractedly, "I'll let you know."
"I'd give anything for a four-wire line at this crucial, pivotal, important moment in history I have been privileged to witness."
"And I'd give anything if someone would just beam me back to Washington. As a famous man said once, 'Fame is fleeting, but my ass is forever.' "
The crowd was scurrying like ragged lemmings for a cliff. Don Cooder and the Reverend Jackman were carried along by fear and the threat of trampling feet. If they tripped or stumbled, they would be instantly stomped into bloody rags. The thought of the closed-coffin funerals that would result made their blood run cold. Neither of them had come to Abominadad to be denied a last moment in the limelight-even if it was while lying amid black crepe and purple velvet.
As the stampede of men, women, and children flooded into the city proper, it was forced into a channel made by two lines of office buildings.
"Think they'll ever stop?" Cooder gasped.
"Up with hope," Jackman wheezed.
A cold, blocky building suddenly appeared in the path of the human flood. It almost blocked the other end of the street.
The crowd attempted to go around it. But the momentum of their flight was too great, the multitude pressed too closely, for most to manage.
"Oh, shoot," Reverned Jackman moaned.
Part of the leading edge of the crowd actually smashed into the squat building like starlings into a 747's intakes. They made quite an ugly sound as they began piling up.
The more nimble members of this surging clot of fleeing humanity thinned, and broke in two directions.
Suddenly the way before Don Cooder and Reverend Jackman parted like the Red Sea. They saw the slumping bodies.
And they saw the limestone facade, a bulwark of bodies crushed before it, seemingly coming at them.
"I'm gonna die in a heathen land!" Reverend Jackman yelped.
"I'm gonna die," Don Cooder moaned, "and there's no one to film my tragic yet ironic conclusion."
Jackman turned around, eyes sick, anxious, as if a camera might somehow materialize to preserve their last heroic moments on earth.
Then he noticed it.
"Hey, showboat, wait up!" he yelled.
"Are you crazy? I'll be trampled."
"No, you won't," said Reverend Jackman, his voice suddenly far away.
Cooder's head snapped back, thinking Jackman had fallen under the remorseless feet of the crowd.
But when he looked back, he saw Reverend Juniper Jackman bent over, chest working like a bellows, retching as he tried to get his wind back.
The stampede that had been hot on their heels had veered away in both directions to avoid the squat building.