"This Sinanju, why have I never heard of it?"
"Perhaps," said the old man, "because you are ignorant and unread."
Maddas Hinsein knew an insult when he heard one. The pistol came out like a viper's head, muzzle zeroing in on the Oriental's sunken chest.
"You would not shoot me, an old man," the Master of Sinanju said simply.
"Why not? I have shot so many." And Maddas laughed.
"Because I have seen fit to present you with one of the treasures of the House of Sinanju, the finest house of assassins ever to walk this ancient land."
A yellow claw of a hand emerged from the joined white kimono sleeves to gesture to the seven-foot-long sword lying swathed in burlap on the desktop.
"You! You sent this fine blade to me?"
"Yes," said the Master of Sinanju, padding up to the weapon. "I trust you have treated it with respect, for it has been in my family for over two thousand years."
"You say you are an assassin," Maddas asked, interest silvering his suspicious tone.
The one called Chiun drew himself up proudly. "No, I am the assassin. The last of my line."
"I have need of an assassin," Maddas said thoughtfully. "The American President has caused me much trouble. I would like him killed. Could you do this?"
"Easily," said the Master of Sinanju, carefully laying the burlap folds aside to expose the gleaming blade. He examined the rubies and emeralds on the hilt with a critical eye.
Maddas Hinsein absorbed this answer with interest. "Could you assassinate the American President with that very sword and return it to me with the President's blood upon the blade?"
"With the President's head impaled upon the tip of the blade, were it my wish to please you so."
Maddas Hinsein's brown eyes glowed with pleasure. "It would please me greatly. I think we can do business, Master of . . . what was that name?"
"How quickly they forget," said the Master of Sinanju. "Bong must be doubly shamed that his service has made no impression on you Mesopotamians."
"Names do not matter," Maddas said impatiently. "Only deeds. Will you cut off the President's head with that sword for me, or not?"
"No." The old Oriental's voice was distant. He did not look up from his examination.
Maddas Hinsein was not used to the word "no." It startled him so much that instead of shooting the old man then and there, he sputtered a question: "Why not?"
"Because this sword is reserved for the execution of common criminals, not dispatching emperors," said the Master of Sinanju, who laid careful hands upon the hilt. He seemed only to touch it, and the blade lifted into the air as if weightless.
But Maddas Hinsein knew full well that it was not weightless. He had worked up a sweat carrying it, and the Scimitar of the Arabs was built like the Bull of Bashan.
"Then how would you kill the President?" he asked.
"With the only proper instrument-my hands," replied Chiun.
"I would accept this," said Maddas Hinsein, thinking the old Oriental meant slow strangulation.
"But I would not," said the Master of Sinanju, turning to face the Scimitar of the Arabs, the weapon held balanced before him, the flared tip less than a foot from Maddas' still-sweaty face. He could not believe the little man possessed such strength.
"There is not enough gold on the face of the earth to entice me to work for one such as you," the old man went on in a tone whose coldness matched that of the blade. "I may be the last of my line, a childless old man, but I still have my pride."
Maddas Hinsein blinked stupidly. That was a second no. Did this unbeliever not comprehend with whom he was treating?
"I demand that you work for me!" he roared, cocking his pistol.
"And I refuse."
"I do not understand. If you do not wish to sell your services to the Scimitar of the Arabs, why did you send me such a magnificent sword?"
"Because," said the Master of Sinanju, drawing the blade back over his shoulder with a sharp whisk of steel cutting air, "it was too heavy to carry."
Maddas Hinsein registered the abrupt drawing back of the blade. His first thought was to pull the trigger at once. No conscious thought was involved in this snap decision. It was pure reflex.
But it came too late.
For as his brain processed the first danger signal, the old Master of Sinanju swept the blade around. His sandaled feet left the floor. And the old man became a floating flower of spinning skirts, with the sword becoming a long pistil of flashing silver beneath the overhead lights.
Maddas Hinsein realized the stroke had completed itself when the Master of Sinanju alighted on his feet, his back to him, the sword momentarily lost to his sight.
He felt the soft breeze of the blade's passing. But he knew that it had accomplished nothing. He had felt nothing, save for that gentle breeze. His eyes still saw. His feet still stood firmly, supporting his strong body.
"You missed," Maddas Hinsein's brain commanded his tongue to taunt. But what came out of his throat instead was a bubbling sound oddly unlike human speech.
And as the Master of Sinanju turned to face him once more, the long blade came up before his unreadable Oriental face. The tip was scarlet with gore, and as it lifted ceilingward, blood ran down it like cough syrup.
Out of the corner of his eyes, the Scimitar of the Arabs caught sight of his own throat in the long wall mirror. A thin red line was visible there. It seemed to go around to the back of his neck. As his eyes grew startled, the line exuded blood like more thick cough syrup dripping from a glass jar rim.
"My son has been avenged," said the Master of Sinanju coldly.
They were the last words Maddas Hinsein ever heard in life.
His legs finally got the message that no more commands would ever come from his disconnected brain. They buckled at the knees. And as he fell, his head, severed so expertly that no vertebra was injured by the razorlike blade, so swiftly that the stump to his neck kept it balanced in place, simply fell off like a shaggy hat.
The Scimitar of the Arabs felt nothing. But before the light went out in his moist eyes, his tumbling head caught sight of his falling body and the ugly red orifice that was his exposed neck.
A single tear escaped his right eye.
It was the only tear ever shed over the passing of Maddas Hinsein, self-styled Scimitar of the Arabs. And it was red.
The Master of Sinanju took his time wiping the tainted blood from the blade of his ancestors. Then he left the bunker like a ghost from the storied past of doomed Abominadad.
Chapter 43
On the roof of the Palace of Sorrows, Kali danced.
Clasping her mate, her lover, and her dancing partner all in one to her corpse-black bosom, she turned and spun. Her naked feet made dry rustling sounds on the limestone roof, like the dead leaves of autumn skittering along pavement.
She led, because her dancing partner hung limp in her four-limbed embrace. His slipper-clad feet dragged uselessly. His head hung low, bobbing on a boneless neck like that of a strangled chicken.
"Dance! Why do you not dance, lover?" Kali whispered. "I need for you to dance. For without your mighty feet moving in concert with mine, dancing the Tandava, this world of woe will toil on as before. Dance, O Red One. The Red Abyss awaits us both."
Though no reply came from her mate's blackened lips, she danced on, her limbs shaking and quivering in death throes that would never end.
Tears flowed from Kali's blood-red eyes. The tears were a poisonous whitish-yellow, like pus. She was thinking of all the hot fluids she would drink from the Caldron of Blood, if only Shiva would lead.
Chapter 44
Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, ascended to the roof of the Palace of Sorrows to watch the fall of Abominadad by starlight.
He found instead a macabre dance, and the body of his dead pupil clasped in the scorpion's grip of the demoness that, as much as the Arab tyrant Maddas, had brought him to the end of all happiness.