Paradox (21 page)

* * *

A FAINT RED GLOW THROUGH her
eyelids roused her. She forced gummy eyes open. Off over Azerbaijan, somewhere beyond the vastness of Ararat, the sun was rising. Bands of red light
stretched far west over the tormented terrain of eastern Turkey to either side of them. If little light made it around the mountain's bulk to where
Annja and the rabbi huddled, even less warmth did. Still, she imagined she felt
warmer.
The sun did a surprising amount for her energy and morale. Meaning she felt as
if she'd been dead for less than a week now.
She had a vague sense of movements large and menacing on the dawnlit ground
beneath them, like Sam and Frodo surrounded by orc armies on the slopes of Mount Doom. Another volcano, she recalled, if a much more vigorous one. Also much warmer.
She shrugged the sensation off. It was only hyperactive imagination. They hung
still well around ten thousand feet. There was no way she could see anything
down there anyway, if something actually was happening. Still an added sense of
unease continued to smolder within.
Great. That's totally what I need. More to worry about.
She looked to Levi and found herself gazing into his wide eyes. They watched
her steadily through goggles and glasses. The young rabbi seemed perfectly calm
and at peace.
On sudden impulse she kissed him on the tip of his cold nose. He blinked.
"What was that for?" he asked. His voice had a rusty-hinge creak to
it. If he was like her it was raw from breathing the thin, icy air.
"For trusting me." She hoped that hadn't been cruel. She felt no
romantic or physical attraction to him and she wasn't going to. But she felt a
great surge of something like love for him. As if he were a younger brother.
He's ten years older than you, she reminded herself. But in real-world
experience, she knew, she was far his senior.
Feels like centuries, she thought, as she began to disentangle them.
She checked their anchors and replaced a couple she didn't trust. Then she
expanded the length of safety rope tethering them to one another to twenty
feet. It should give her some room to explore for a route down. Although last
night, anyway, the only route she'd been able to detect dead-ended pretty decisively
against that wide icy crack in the mountain rock.
"What a difference a day makes," she muttered. "Or a little
daylight." Being able to see where she was going struck her as an almost
decadent luxury.
But shortly she began to frown in dismay. The ugly realization slowly suffused
her mind that the only possible paths were back up over the overhang, whose
underside she now saw was slick with ice, or across the yawning gap, too far to
leap with any degree of safety, to a surface that looked as hard and slippery
as glass. Have I trapped us here? she wondered.
Instantly her mind rebelled. There's always a way, she told herself fiercely.
And I always find it.
Yet was that mere childish bravado? Her resourcefulness had always served her
in tight situations. Otherwise she'd never have lived to be doing her fly
imitation up here on a sheer cliff with several thousand feet to anything
resembling a decent-sized nonvertical surface below the thick soles of her
boots.
Everything has limits, she thought glumly. Had her resourcefulness at last done
a fatal face-plant against its own boundaries?
From not far enough above her a shout pealed out like a morning bell.
"There she is! There's the filthy apostate who killed my brother!"

Annja Creed looked up. Fifty
feet above their precarious perch she saw three figures peering over another
black rock shelf. Despite their hoods and goggles she recognized Leif Baron,
Josh Fairlie and Jeb Higgins. Jeb was clearly the one who had alerted the
others by screaming at them. Each wore a distinctive colored jacket, but by
this time Annja could have distinguished the Young Wolves from each other
anyway, by little more than the way they moved and carried themselves.
"So they did keep searching throughout the night," she said.
"Levi, we have to go."
"Where?" The question was neither a challenge nor a cry of
desperation. It was simply a good question.
She shook her head and sighed. She wanted to cry in desperation. There was only
one way.
Thunder cracked. It reverberated between the walls of the ice chasm before them
and made the whole great mountain seem to tremble. Amid the colossal racket the
lesser
crack
of something passing them by faster than the speed of sound
was scarcely perceptible. But Annja, who knew the sound too well, didn't miss
it.
"What's that?" Levi shouted, grimacing at the sharp noise hurting his
ears.
"They're shooting at us!" Annja said.
Another pistol shot crashed. She never heard that bullet pass. As the echoes
died she heard Baron shouting, "Accursed fool, you'll bring the whole
mountain down on our heads!"
She risked another look up. Jeb was leaning way out from his perch, clutching a
safety rope with one gloved hand while firing his pistol at her with the other.
His face was red with rage.
"Oh, no," Annja said.
"What do we do?" Levi asked.
"Hold on," she said. She launched herself into space.
Thunder roared a third time as she flew, feeling weightless. She tried to relax
so that she wouldn't break any bones as she hit. She couldn't keep her shoulder
blades from pinching toward each other with anticipation of a bullet biting
between them.
But Jeb's aim, already wild from passion, was thrown off even farther by the
utter unexpectedness of her flying-squirrel jump.
To a wall of sheer, slick ice.
In her brief mad flight Annja dropped several feet. Screaming, she visualized
and summoned her sword. She gave herself just enough time to reverse it and
grasp it with both hands. Then she thrust, forward and down.
Through thick ice the blade bit. So great was Annja's momentum that all but a
foot of the steel vanished into the translucent sheet of ice and snow.
She heard shouting. No words penetrated her consciousness; she had no awareness
to spare as, clinging like a drowning woman with her right hand to the sword,
she let go with the other to pull her ice ax from its loop in her belt and slam
the spiked side of its head into the ice. Her forward-faced crampons bit home
then, and she was almost secured.
She held her breath and let the sword go. She sagged alarmingly but with three
points of contact kept her grip like a fly on the slippery wall. Groping at her
harness, she fumbled an ice picket free and rammed it home. Then she snapped
one carabiner off a quickdraw from her harness onto the picket. She was safe.
As safe as she could be dangling over a thousand-foot drop. With a group of
murderous religious fanatics hanging over her head. One of whom was shooting at
her.
She turned her head. "Levi," she said, trying not to scream.
"Jump!"
"Jump where?"
"Across! Just unsnap and push off as hard as you can. Brake yourself with
arms and legs when you hit. I've got you. I won't let you fall!"
I hope.
Shots roared again. Their head-bursting noise echoed across the whole face of
Ararat. This time bullets pitted the sheer face in minieruptions of powdered
ice and stone not ten feet from her.
Goaded by the fresh fusillade of gunfire, Levi unhooked from the piton that
secured him to the ledge and flung himself across the abyss.
Unfortunately in his excitement the rabbi forgot to put out his hands and feet
to arrest his momentum. Instead he did a face-plant six feet to Annja's right
with a pronounced
splat
. Limply he slid down to the end of his
twenty-foot slack.
Already wincing in sympathy and dread, Annja barely remembered to brace for the
shock.
Fortunately it didn't peel her.
She heard a scream like an angry eagle. She looked up. Eluding Baron's hand,
outstretched to drag him back, Jeb Higgins jumped outward from the outcrop to
fall with his auto-pistol extended toward Annja. Yellow fire flashed from the
muzzle as he triggered more shots.
It did not make for a stable firing platform. Jeb wasn't aiming well. Or at
all. Still, Annja plastered herself to the wall and thought flat thoughts.
Jeb reached his tether's end. Annja winced as she heard ribs crack.
Nonetheless, he did remember to hit the wall feet-first. His legs flexed and he
pushed himself away to close the range. His rage-contorted face was barely a
dozen feet from hers as he raised the gun to point at her.
She got ready to die.
Suddenly a sheet of ice, ten feet by twelve and probably weighing upward of a
ton, broken loose by vibration somewhere overhead from the gunshots, fell like
a guillotine blade on the small of Jeb Higgins's back.
Its leading edge was like a shard of broken glass—sharper than any razor.
Just missing his safety rope, the ice mass sliced his body clean in half. Jeb's
eyes went wide as his hips and legs went pinwheeling away below him. Their
greater air resistance made them fall at a slower rate than the ice-blade,
separating from it. A vast final gush of red hit the cliff behind him like a
thrown bucket of blood as his heart made one last spastic pulse.
The light went out of his furious blue eyes. He slumped to hang by his harness
from the safety line. The weapon dropped from limp fingers to vanish down the
mountainside.
Annja bit down on the sour vomit, stinging with acid, that tried to burst from
her lips. She swallowed the vileness, spat to clear her mouth. Even as she did
so she was planting an anchor and hastily changing her hookup. Clamping a
descender onto the secured line she fast-roped down.
As she approached the rabbi, who hung limply and spun slowly at the end of his
rope, she risked an upward glance. She saw Baron and Fairlie still on hands and
knees on the overhang. They seemed to be holding a furious debate, but she
couldn't hear them, though their mouths moved animatedly. They seemed to be
communicating as much with frenetic gestures as words anyway.
She understood. They dare not speak aloud, much less fire any more shots at
their quarry. Where one lethal chunk of ice had been loosened enough to break
free, another might be on the verge of following. Hanging, literally, by a
whisper.
Levi stirred even as Annja reached him. He had blood streaming from his nose,
turning his beard to a red mess. His goggles were askew on his face.
"Anything broken?" she asked quietly.
"Gee," he said, "I was supposed to stop myself, wasn't I?"
"Next time. Did you break any bones?"
"Only my nose I think. But it doesn't hurt now as much as it did. I think
I blacked out momentarily from the pain."
Annja hoped that was true, and that he hadn't blacked out from concussion. That
could be bad. Especially if he'd hit hard enough to make his brain bleed. The
slow buildup of hydraulic pressure from a subdural hematoma would inexorably
crush his brain inside the skull. Well, she thought as detachedly as she could,
we'll know soon enough.
"As long as your legs and hands work, we're good," she reassured him.
"Oh. I'm fine, Annja."
"I doubt that. But we have to move," she replied.
She secured him to the wall of ice. Then as the red dawn light turned tawny and
the land around them brightened she began to work her way north around the
mountainside, out of sight of Baron and Fairlie.

* * *

SOME BREATHLESS INTERVAL LATER
they rested together on a shelf of black rock with their legs dangling in
space.
"So, you've got some kind of sword, then, I take it?" Levi said. He
took a mouthful of water from a plastic bottle. He was showing no signs of slow
brain implosion, so that was one less worry.
Annja looked away from him. She shrugged. "I guess so. No point trying to
hide it now, is there?"
His face split in a big happy grin. "Cool!"
She looked at him seriously. "If we make it out of here, Levi, please keep
it a deep dark secret. For me. For my sake."
"Well, of course, Annja. Whatever you say." He seemed hurt she'd even
suggest he'd blab. But he brightened quickly.
"Anyway, who am I going to tell? I'm already regarded as a total fringie
in Biblical scholarship and ancient archaeology circles. So if I said I'd hung
out with a woman who possessed a magic sword, it'd be a total feeding frenzy.
Right?"
"I guess so."
"What about them, though?" He bobbed his head and wagged his eyebrows
up and left, in the general direction of their pursuers. "They had to see
you pull that sword out of nowhere."
"Either they catch us and kill us. Or we get down off the mountain alive.
Which almost by definition means we've by some totally unlikely means managed
to kill all of them. Either way, we're not in much danger from them telling
people about the sword, are we?"
"Oh. That's true."
"Better take it easy on that water," she said, rousting herself to
her feet. "I'm going to have to ask you to take some risks if we're going
to have any chance of staying clear of our friends up there. Can you do that
for me?"
"Sure, Annja. How could I help but trust someone the Creator has chosen to
carry one of his gifts?"
He grinned as if to show he was half joking. With a sinking feeling she
suspected it was no more than half.
"Would it make any difference to you if I told you the last possessor of
the sword was Joan of Arc?" Annja asked.
"I'd say maybe this time the Creator has decided to trust it to more
sophisticated hands."
Annja shook her head. "You're incorrigible, Levi."
From somewhere above once more they heard voices. Annja could make out no words
but the sounds came sharp and angry. Jeb's death had slowed the pursuit. But
only for a while.
"Time to go," she said.
"Annja?"
"Yes?"
"Do we have any chance? I mean, seriously?" Levi asked.
She frowned. Then she shrugged and laughed.
"We're not dead yet," she said.
"You're right," he said.

* * *

ANNJA WAS AS GOOD AS HER WORD.
When she could she had them rappel down long casts, a hundred feet at a time.
Even if it did eat up her dwindling necklace of anchors. They were coming at
last down to less precipitous terrain where they wouldn't need anchors much
anyway. And if Bostitch's bad boys caught them they'd have no more need for
them at all.
Levi proved as good as his word, too. When Annja leapt from perch to doubtful
perch he followed her unhesitatingly, flinging himself through space with
abandon. She wanted to warn him not to take the notion that some god or gods
were looking out for him too literally. On the other hand she didn't want him
to start doubting, either.
The day was mercifully clear. It was afternoon; the sun shone brightly on the
west face, where Annja and Levi made their tortuous way down. It was at best a
mixed blessing for Annja. Sunshine did lift the spirits—at least alleviate the
sense of leaden doom that had been pressing down on her, acknowledged or not,
since she'd first heard the muffled sound of gunshots inside the Anomaly.
But the sun's arrival over the top of the peak made it harder to exert herself
without overheating, muffled as she was against the high-altitude cold. And it
brought increased risk that ice melting or rock expanding in its heat would
make the purchase treacherous, even for pitons or camming devices.
They made rapid progress down. Reaching slopes that were anything other than
sheer walls would make descent enormously less stressful, if not so quick as
fast-roping. It was the same for their opponents, too, of course. But Annja and
the rabbi still seemed to maintain a substantial lead over the pursuers.
Then as Annja waited at the top of what looked like the last sheer face they
had to negotiate before the slope grew gentler, belaying for Levi as he climbed
down to her, shots started cracking out from above. If the bullets came
anywhere close Annja saw no evidence.
But the sudden terrifying noise startled the young scholar and made him lose
his grip. He fell fifteen feet to the sloping, iced-over ledge like a sack of
meal.
The sound of his ankle breaking was like a handgun going off.