She laughed. It had a frost-brittle sound in her ears. "If you kill me, how do you plan to find the sword? Using a Ouija board?"
"You frame a most astute objection," he said, and shot her in the leg.
Or tried to. As he dropped his arm, time seemed to slow for her. She'd anticipated his move and noticed the black-gloved finger as it tightened on the curving trigger with its longitudinal grooves.
She was moving, diving sideways to put a six-inch post of splintery gray-green pressure-treated wood between herself and her opponent. The handgun flashed. The bullet kicked up bits of porous white gravel behind the heel of her boot.
She put down a shoulder, rolled, came up crouching behind another upright. Godin stood placidly, regarding her with an odd smile on his face.
"Very good," he said, and snapped a shot for her face.
Again she read the intention in the ripple of the fine calfskin of the glove echoing the movement of muscle and bone in the finger beneath. Before he had completed triggering the shot, she had ducked back. The bullet sailed past her head and struck the grassy slope behind her with an audible thud even as the aftereffects of the painfully loud report rang in her ears.
As the ringing subsided she heard the crunch of his crepe-soled shoes on the pumice. He was walking clockwise, trying to flank her.
She sprinted right, straight out in front of him. She kept her eyes at soft focus so as to perceive the widest possible vision field. She saw his arm once again tense to fire.
She stiffened her left leg as she swung it out for the next step, dug her heel deep through the gravel to the soil below. She pivoted around her heel, away from him, as another shot cracked out – horribly loud, the noise like knitting needles driven into her eardrums. Wheeling through 270 degrees, she ran straight at him, trailing her right arm.
The sword appeared in her hand.
He was trying to shift aim to shoot her in the face. She ran fast. The sword sang through the air in a rising backhand cut.
Somehow the Jesuit managed to twitch his heavy revolver far enough that the mystic blade did not shear it in half. Instead it knocked the dull silver weapon from his grasp. It spun end over end, glittering in the light of the single streetlamp that illuminated the little depression beneath the hill with its curious gleaming statue.
It took her a moment to halt her disarming cut, which had passed over Godin's head as he recoiled. In that immobile instant he grasped her sword wrist with his own right hand and, using legs and hips, turned his body hard clockwise. His strength and mass were sufficient to complete the locking out of her already straightened elbow. He put his left palm on that elbow and applied pressure as his right hand yanked the trapped arm across his body and twisted the captive wrist cruelly counterclockwise. Annja was forced to bend double at the waist as pain shot up her arm.
"Ah, splendid," he said, puffing slightly. "I knew the sword would put in an appearance if I put your life properly in danger. Now, release it, please. I really don't want to hurt you."
"Is that why you shot at me?" she asked.
"I believed you would dodge. As indeed you did. I observed during your running fight with those young hooligans that you possess quite extraordinary physical abilities. But I'm afraid I have you at a decisive disadvantage."
"I guess so," she said. She relaxed her muscles in defeat. Her fingers opened. The sword fell from them.
It vanished halfway to the ground.
Not even the too clever Jesuit had anticipated that. In his astonishment he relaxed his own grip a fraction.
Annja threw her body forward and down, no longer resisting the pressure on her arm but literally rolling with it. She kicked her right leg out straight behind her, brought it up. Her long hair dragged across the pumice. Then she completed her walkover, freeing her arm from the terrible torsion.
Before she finished her rotation, Godin released her and danced back. He respected her strength and agility even if he didn't quite grasp the extent of them.
She planted her left leg as it descended, fired a right side-kick at him. He stepped back with his left foot, pivoting backward out of the way. She continued her spin, putting her right leg down and whipping her left foot in a blinding spinning roundhouse kick for his face. He leaned aside. Her corrugated sole just grazed his ear.
"Ow," he said mildly.
She threw a furious punch at his face. He got the back of his hand up against her inner arm, deflecting the piledriver blow just enough that it missed his face as he ducked into her. She threw a left. He fouled it with his elbow. She launched a furious flurry of punches, faster than he could possibly move.
Yet he fouled or deflected and slipped them all. His muscles could not match up to her youthful power. But he never opposed his strength to hers. He applied deflecting force at ninety degrees to her angle of attack, or simply closed inside the blows so they lacked force when they did make contact.
After an interval of wild but fruitless activity she stepped back, breathing hard. Her cheeks felt hot as a forge. Incongruously she wondered what her body temperature was, given her unnatural exertion.
"How can you dodge me?" she shouted. "I'm faster than you could possibly be."
"The same way you dodged my bullets," he said. "By reading your intent from your eyes, your breathing, the play of your muscles. Most of all, your balance. I salute you, by the way. It has taken me years of practice and brutal experience to become so proficient."
With a cry of frustration she charged him.
She had some vague intention of grappling him and taking him to the ground.
It was a poor choice. Rather than trying to dance away, Godin stepped up to meet her and jabbed her in the face with his right hand. The blow did not break her nose but it stung and filled her eyes with a rush of hot tears. It did break her momentum. He followed with a left cross to her ribs that sent a white-hot stab of pain through her chest and clenched her lungs like a fist.
She gasped and staggered past him at a diverging angle. Momentum carried her out of range of any intended third shot to his combination.
But not out of range of her long legs. She halted herself, did a little stutter step and pistoned a side-thrust kick into his ribs just beneath his right arm. The impact jolted her teeth together and sent fresh spikes of pain through her torso.
It lifted him into the air and knocked him over. He rolled over twice and lay on his face.
Annja almost collapsed. She just caught herself, bent over, bracing hands on knees, gasping and moaning as she tried to suck in breaths. She knew it was the worst thing she could do. The posture created both physical and mental stress that actually restricted her ability to draw in air. But she was momentarily overcome by a drowner's desperation.
After three heaving breaths she quit feeling as if she were about to die and began to force herself to breathe from her diaphragm, compressing her abdominal organs to create room to allow her lungs to fill all the way to the bottom. As she winched herself fully upright, she saw the Jesuit stir, then begin with obvious pain to pick himself up. As he did he was hit by a coughing spasm so violent that it sounded as if things were tearing within him.
He's an old man!she thought with a pang of self-reproach. She had to remind herself sternly that old or not he had given her as tough a hand-to-hand fight as she had experienced since coming into her destiny. He was a skilled, tough bastard.
Yet he didn't seem so tough as he spit something dark into the gravel from all fours then raised the back of one gloved hand to his mouth to wipe it. She wondered if she had broken his ribs.