They passed in silence among the cubes, which made slithering sounds that were muted by the thick stainless-steel walls. The Cottingsharm army was lined up along one wall. Some were breathing; some were not.
The quiet was strange and foul. Chiun’s skin felt like it was tingling. He was too alert, too aware. He kept thinking he felt the prickling of those tiny little eyes on him.
“This place makes my flesh crawl,” Remo declared.
“I hope you are joking. I have long ago instructed you in the mastery of crawling flesh,” Chiun said.
“It’s this place. It’s this stuff. These things. I don’t even know how to talk about them. I just know they’re wrong. And did you notice the brand name?” Remo jabbed a finger at the etching in the stainless steeclass="underline" Property Of The United States Of America. “Makes me feel ill.”
“I assume this is another feeble joke.” Chiun observed Remo halt at an emergency containment booth. Behind the glass was a bodysuit of shiny material and an airtight helmet like those donned by the space shuttlers.
The sign read In Case Of Emergency, Break Glass. The neatly piled hose inside was of a different makeup than the water hoses Chiun was used to seeing.
“Look. A spark igniter. That’s a welding torch. The hose has welder’s gas. Probably high-temperature stuff to patch up a box in an emergency breech. Still, not enough gas to blow this place up.”
Chiun regarded his pupil reproachfully. “My method of creating heat with a hammer would be faster than that tiny flame. Let the Emperor care for disposal of the nanomachinoids.”
“Trust Smitty to do the right thing? I don’t think so. But you knew that, didn’t you? You want me to shoulder all the responsibility.”
“You are Reigning Master and contract negotiator. Not I,” Chiun sniffed.
“Whatever. You can blame it all on me. Maybe we could feed a garden hose from the gas main in the house.”
More ridiculous words pouring from the mouth of Remo, the Obviously White Master of Sinanju.
Chiun started to respond, but instead he suddenly ran. He ran in fire.
Remo heard the clicks of a hundred tiny valves, flush-mounted in the stainless steel all around them and opening all at once. The sound of a hissing snake strike filled the vast chamber—it was the release of gas at an immensely high pressure. Remo was already running. Chiun was at his side. The vast chamber seemed longer than when they came through the first time.
Floor slots opened to suck the old air out and make room for the flammable mixture. More tiny flickers in a dozen places produced sparks. In under a second the room was filled with hydrogen and billowing with flame.
Remo and Chiun were out of the chamber, but the gas clouds were in pursuit, reaching out for them and the hallway had its own incendiary system that was now sparking to life. Flames embraced the Masters of Sinanju.
Only their speed saved them from the flames. They literally outran the conflagration and emerged into the space behind the hidden panel in Loch Tweed Castle. They slipped out of the dining hall and through the finely decorated old chambers, then emerged onto the front steps.
“Hallo? Who’re you?” demanded an SAS colonel, leader of the counterassault.
“Fire inspector?” Remo could feel the pressure waves thundering through the house behind him, and he stepped off the old flagstone porch just as the front door exploded open behind him. The double doors flipped through the air like a thrown magazine, and the SAS commandos craned their necks to watch them land in a decorative pond and crush the last existing mating pair of Tweed-Beige swans.
The SAS colonel couldn’t believe he was alive. He’d been physically removed from the front of the building. He swore he saw the bloody doors flying at him for a fraction of a second.
“Where’d he go?” the commando demanded. “Where’s the old man, too?”
The SAS agents were tearing their eyes away from the horror in the brick pond. None of them had witnessed the escape of the two men on the porch, but they were gone.
“Didn’t any of you see anything?”
“Oh, God!” One of the commandos had discarded his weapon and was half running to the pond, where a crippled, gasping swan came staggering from the water and collapsed. The colonel had always suspected Butch Butler was a closet sentimentalist. “Butler, retrieve your weapon!”
“Brighton” Butch cuddled the swan and sobbed as it went limp in his arms.
“Damn it all to hell!” the colonel exploded as more of his elite squadron broke down in tears. “Buck up, you pansies! Come on!”
Heckler & Koch submachine guns rattled on the flagstone steps as the weeping commandos huddled around the dead bird. The noncriers were trying to keep from chuckling.
“What is so goddamn funny?” he demanded, then the flames caught his attention again. Loch Tweed Castle was a bonfire. “Has anybody called the fire department?”
Chapter 15
Okyek Meh Thih was a strange man from an ancient time, and he didn’t know many of the Elder stories—stranger stories, from a far more ancient time.
He didn’t know their meaning, didn’t understand the words, but he knew they were important. But were they so important that he should turn his back on his People when they needed him most? This was truly the most terrible crisis the People had ever faced in his lifetime, and as far back as the legends told since the People first came together in the jungle.
“These are the most vital of all the legends I would tell you,” said his teacher, his grandfather, Chak Meh Neh, to the inquisitive boy that Okyek Meh Thih had been. That was almost three hundred months ago.
“But how can they have importance when they are not about the true gods?” Okyek Meh Thih had asked the old man. “We pray to Curupira to lead our hunts and we ask Little Black Shepherd to help us find those who become lost in the forest. Saci causes us little troubles, but at least our prayers to him have a purpose—to beg him to take his mischief elsewhere. These are the spirits who deserve our attentions.”
“And who taught you of all these holy beings?” the old man demanded of the boy.
“You taught me this, so I know it is true,” the boy replied.
“Then you will hearken to what I say now. This is the greatest truth you will ever learn from me.”
The boy who was Okyek Meh Thih agreed that he would put his trust in the old man’s words. “But, Grandfather, help me to understand. This story you told does not fit with all the other knowledge that you have given me.”
The old man nodded in agreement. “I felt the same way when I heard these special stories. I asked the same questions. I will give you the same answer, which is this—the ways of the gods are variegated. They act differently to different Peoples. For this reason, some Peoples shun Curupira, where we honor him. Likewise, some gods seldom meddle in the affairs of men and some gods are concerned with mankind not at all. Thus, there is little to tell of these gods.”
The boy considered this. “Such a god is Chuh Mboi Aku?”
“Yes. He cares only for the human beings who know the way to speak to him, or so I have heard. There has not been a People to my knowledge who can speak to Chuh Mboi Aku—not in ten thousand months. His importance lies not in what he has done, for he has done nothing but sleep the eons away. His importance lies not in what he might do, for he ignores all prayers and all blasphemes directed to him. His importance lies only in what he will do, someday.”
With that, the old man took his protégé to the cave in the mountain where the old inscription was. There was a central illustration and some decorative symbols. Okyek Meh Thih could make nothing of it. “Is this Chuh Mboi Aku?”