It was Shizu who drew first blood, cutting in beneath Annja’s guard and slashing the tip of her sword across Annja’s shoulder. Blood flowed, staining her jersey, and Shizu grinned in triumph.
“The beginning of the end,” she mocked.
Annja ignored her and the wound, as well. She could tell it wasn’t too deep and she wasn’t in any real danger from it at the moment, though eventually the blood loss would take its toll, she was sure.
She’d just have to redouble her efforts and put an end to this before that happened.
Shizu came at her again and they traded another series of blows, the sound of their swords colliding ringing out across the field. This time, when the Dragon stepped in close, Annja took advantage of the situation and lashed out with her leg, striking the Dragon straight in the chest and causing her to stumble backward.
Annja kept up her forward momentum, driving the Dragon back across the field with a combination of sword fighting and martial-arts moves, throwing out strikes and kicks between sword blows.
Finally the Dragon began to tire and came in with a new overhand blow, trying to end it all.
Seeing it coming out of the corner of her eye, Annja shifted her hold on her weapon and struck out at the hilt of her enemy’s.
Their swords slammed together and the Muramasa blade rang like a crystal bell in the second before it flew out of Shizu’s grasp, tumbling through the air.
Annja hadn’t expected the maneuver to work. The Dragon was shocked. She turned her head to watch the blade go flying from her.
Afraid that Shizu would simply call her weapon back again, just as Annja regularly did with her own sword, she didn’t hesitate but drove home a short, sharp thrust.
Looking the other way, the Dragon never even saw it coming.
The broadsword entered Shizu’s body between the third and fourth ribs and exited out the back just to the right of her spine.
Annja released her sword and stepped back.
The Dragon tottered for a moment and then sank slowly to her knees, her bloody hands searching for and finding the hilt of Annja’s weapon but without the strength to pull it free.
“How did you take the sword from me?”
Her eyes glazed over and she crumpled to the ground.
The Dragon was dead.
And with her death Annja’s sword, which just a moment before had been shoved horizontally through the Dragon’s body, vanished back into the otherwhere, ready for the next time Annja would need it.
Annja knew she should have felt satisfaction at the end result, but all she could think about was that final question.
She didn’t understand. She knew instinctively that the Dragon had not been talking about her own weapon, but about how Annja’s sword had vanished right out of the Dragon’s very hands. And that didn’t make any sense.
How could the Dragon not know about the sword’s ability to vanish and reappear at will? Surely the weapon the Dragon carried had been able to do the same?
Annja looked across the field, expecting the Dragon’s weapon to have vanished the minute its wielder died, only to find it right where it had fallen, jammed point first into the earth about ten feet away.
For a long moment, Annja couldn’t look away.
The sword was still there.
Her thoughts churning at the implications, Annja climbed to her feet and cautiously approached it.
The sword was as she remembered it, right down to the etching of the dragon on the surface of the blade just below the hilt. Even now the etching seemed to be snarling in defiance.
Reaching out, afraid of what might happen should she touch it but needing to know nonetheless, she wrapped her hand around the hilt.
Nothing happened.
Where she expected to feel something from the blade, some sense of its bloody history and evil reputation, she felt nothing.
It was just a sword.
An inert piece of metal.
While it might have historical value, there was nothing otherwise special about the weapon.
Garin and Roux had been wrong.
Priceless historical artifact it might be, but that was all. The only mystical sword Annja knew of was the one she carried.
Epilogue
From the shadows beyond the rows of cherry trees at the edge of the esplanade, Garin Braden watched the woman he had selected and trained specifically for this day, for this very battle, fall beneath the point of Annja’s sword.
This was not the way things were supposed to end.
No longer content to leave the sword, and hence his future, in the hands of anyone other than himself, Garin had carefully planned and orchestrated events for years to arrive at this point in time. Originally created to eliminate Roux, the training of his beautiful assassin had been redirected when Annja had reunited the pieces of Joan’s shattered sword, irrevocably changing the status quo. Garin had adapted, however, and modified his goals. His intent to steal the sword for himself and eliminate both his former mentor and his mentor’s new protégé had seemed flawless, but apparently he’d done something that he kept telling himself, and even the Dragon, not to do.
He’d underestimated Annja Creed.
Both she and Roux still lived, while the blood of Garin’s carefully groomed champion pooled upon the ground at Annja’s feet beneath the beauty of the cherry blossoms.
How poetic, he thought in disgust.
To add insult to injury, he’d even let that bastard Henshaw live. His two shots had been true, but when he’d checked the body he’d discovered that Henshaw had been wearing a protective vest; he was unconscious rather than dead. All Garin had to do to eliminate a future threat was put one more bullet through the man’s skull, but the previous shot had ruined his silencer and he hadn’t wanted to alert Annja that her partner was in trouble.
He’d let the man live and might someday regret it.
No matter, he thought.
There will be another time, another opportunity.
He was sure of it.
Just as he was sure that he and Annja Creed would one day face each other over that sword.
And on that day, Garin Braden intended to come out on top.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6626-5
THE DRAGON’S MARK
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Joe Nassise for his contribution to this work.
Copyright © 2010 by Worldwide Library.
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