/ am the Dutchman.
Maker of nonexistent worlds, manipulators of minds. Heir to the secrets of Sinanju. Possessor of a power greater than any man should have to bear. The Dutchman, specter of death, fated to live without peace, without rest, until his mission was fulfilled.
He moved on silent feet toward the goat cart. As usual, the animals reared and panicked when they caught his scent, knocking the heavy metal containers on their sides. Animals had always feared him. They understood the disguises of death better than humans did.
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But here, among the primitive mountain dwellers of Cappadocia, even the humans knew him. They had seen him kill. They had some idea of the terrible extent of his madness. The farmer fled, screaming. His goats pulled in all directions, their eyes bulging as the Dutchman drew nearer.
He set them free and lifted one of the containers to his lips. The milk was warm but good. He drank greedily.
Something moved. There was a sound like a wail, quickly muffled. With a start, he set down the container and shifted the dried grass inside the cart. At the back, hidden behind the tall containers and half covered with grass, was a thin young woman holding an infant in her arms. Her shoulders shook. With jerky movements, she tried to put the baby behind her. Its fat brown legs kicked out at the air.
He felt something stirring within him. Colors, a strange music, a heightened awareness. The little brown legs seemed to glow, blocking out everything around them.
No, he told himself. He would not let it happen. He had felt the same wild longing nearly all his life. It heralded the unleashing of the inhuman beast he carried inside him. He had watched a pig explode when he was ten years old, and had realized even then that somehow he had made it happen. He was born with the gift of death. He had set his own parents on fire just by imagining it. He had transformed a beautiful girl into a mass of boils with the hideous power of his mind. And now he saw the baby's fat brown legs charred black to the bone, disappearing into ash . . .
The baby cried, jarring his thoughts. It was too late to stop the power, but he could divert it if he . . . tried. . . .
"Go," he shouted in Turkish. "Take the baby. Now."
Feeling as if every muscle and nerve in his body were being ripped apart, he forced his gaze away from the baby
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and onto one of the uninhabited stone mountains. It had been so difficult, just the slight turning of his head, that he thought he would die from the effort. He knew it would not be long before he would be unable to control the power even that much.
Relaxing, allowing his eyes to rest on the great peak of gray rock, he exhaled slowly. The mountain changed before his eyes to a glowing, jagged mass of electric blue. Dissonant music, sounding like a choir of tormented souls, rose up around him. The mountain glowed green, then orange, outlined with an aura of bright white. The air smelled acrid and oppressive. The power had engulfed the mountain.
"Nuihc, why have you done this to me?" he cried. If he had been left alone, he might have died in childhood, as other mutants did. He should not have been permitted to develop to his capabilities. He should never have been privy to the teachings of Sinanju, which strengthened a mind that was already too strong to live among men. But his teacher, Nuihc, the man who had saved him from the world of men, had not allowed him to die. For Nuihc had seen in young Jeremiah Purcell a being who could help him to conquer the earth. In Jeremiah, Nuihc had created the Dutchman, homeless, mad, doomed. And now Nuihc was dead.
"You may serve me in only one way," Nuihc had said a thousand times before his death.
The Dutchman still remembered the first time he heard the conditions of his life under the strange Oriental teacher.
"How may I serve you, Master?" he had asked.
"Kill him who rules the destiny of Sinanju. Should 1 die, bring to death by your own hands the Master Chiun. Only then will you find rest."
Kill Chiun. Find the Master of Sinanju and kill him, or live forever in torment.
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The distant peak quivered and trembled like a piece of crumpled paper. Then, its sides heaving apart, the mountain exploded in a crash of flying rock that blackened the sky.
When it was over, he fell on the ground and sobbed.
Chapter Seven
Even before Remo got to Peru, he knew that he never wanted to see that country again. It had been the worst trip of his life. The small boat he had set sail in broke apart during a storm in the Sea of Okhotsk. He was picked up near dawn by a Russian freighter, whose captain was going to turn him over to Soviet authorities until Remo uncovered several crates filled with eight-millimeter porno films. The Russian captain didn't understand much English, but "contraband" was a word he understood. So was "Siberia."
Thus was Remo dumped overboard somewhere in the vicinity of the Aleutian Islands, where he was rescued by an American seaplane and carted as far as Juneau, Alaska. Slogging on foot to a U.S. military base some fifty miles away, he stowed away on an experimental supersonic fighter on a test run to Houston. At the Gulf of Mexico, he hitched a ride on a Mexican fishing boat in exchange for labor.
Several thousand mackerel later, he arrived in Merida, Mexico, stinking but richer by twelve dollars-enough to
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get him on a series of second-class buses crammed to bursting with chickens and pigs, through the middle American countries. It was touch and go at the borders of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Equador. By the time he arrived in the vast, unpopulated Peruvian highlands, he knew he'd been right. The Master's Trial was an exercise in lunacy. No one would ever find him in this place. He sat beneath a yew tree and slept.
He awoke in the middle of a sea of painted faces. Nearly a hundred men surrounded him, all of them decked out in feathers and tunics of bright cloth. They carried spears. The spears were pointed straight at him.
"Wait a second," Remo said, staggering to his feet. "Whoever you think I am, you're wrong. Donde est-" His high school Spanish deserted him. Not that it mattered. He didn't know where he was going, anyway.
He searched his mind for the name of the man he had come to see. Jildo? No, Jildo was the Viking. There was someone named Kirby, or Kibbee, and then the guy in Wales, Emory or something. Why didn't these people have ordinary names?
"Me Remo," he said, pulling out his jade stone.
The leader of the group took it out of his hand and examined it. He nodded to the others, then gave it back, motioning Remo forward.
"Ancion," Remo said, remembering. "That's the name of the guy I'm supposed to meet."
At the mention of the name, the warriors all laid down their spears and knelt. "Ancion," they chanted, bowing low.
"Ancion must be a big cheese."
"Ancion," they intoned.
They walked for half a day through the hills, over a rope bridge spanning a large river, and finally up a narrow footpath winding in a spiral around a high mountain. At
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the apex was a bank of stone steps leading to a massive building painted brightly and adorned with carved friezes. In the floor outside the main entrance was a smooth, domed rock bearing the same three characters as Remo's rock. The warrior leader took Remo inside, into a large stone chamber. In addition to the warriors, more than a hundred others were present, kowtowing toward a gold throne placed atop a pyramid of steps twenty feet high. On it sat a young man with refined, chiseled features. He was dressed in a checkered tunic weighted heavily with gold and silver, and a cape of what Remo recognized as bat fur. He wore a wide band of colored cloth around his head, and two large gold discs five inches wide over his ears. In his hand was a feathered scepter.