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He thrust for Annja’s flat belly with his remaining machete. The speed and fury of this strike would have impaled her had she not leaped back and left like a cat.
Unfortunately the motion slammed her hip into another counter laden with Mafalda’s exotic merchandise. A choking cloud of dust and bits of ground herb and tiny wisps of feather floated up to surround Annja’s head as jars jostled her arm. She sneezed, eyes filling with tears.
He rushed her, raising the machete to chop her down. In dodging, she had turned half away from him clockwise. She gripped the long hilt of her sword with both hands and thrust almost blindly toward the onrushing figure.
She felt a momentary resistance as he ran onto the blade.
His eyes blazing with determination, he drove himself onward. The sword’s point came out his back with a sickening sound. He fought to bring his raised weapon down in a self-avenging death stroke.
Fading strength betrayed his will. The machete fell from fingers that could no longer grip. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. A look of infinite sadness, almost apology, came into the blazing black eyes.
Then all light went out of them. They became dull as stones. He slumped in death.
Annja grimaced. She had killed many times. And almost every time before she had killed someone who richly deserved it—at the least a violent aggressor, and sometimes a serial predator upon human prey.
She knew somehow this man was none of those. He was a good man fighting with all his strength and will for something he truly believed was right. Deluded he may have been—must have been—but fighting for the right nonetheless.
Her head spun with confusion. Doesn’t that make him innocent? Her mission in life—as much as she could understand it—was to protect the innocent, to preserve innocence, at all costs. Even the cost of her life. Yet she had just killed a man acting for reasons she could not reproach.
He attacked you, a voice inside her head reminded her. And that fact seems to establish pretty definitively that he either killed Mafalda or had guilty knowledge of the deed. Virtuous he might have been. Innocent, no.
All this passed through her mind in a flash, a wheel of spiritual and stomach sickness, as she released her grip on the sword. It returned to its otherwhere, infinitely far yet no farther than the palm of her hand. The dead Amazonian warrior slumped to the plank floor.
Loud crashes snapped Annja back to the moment. She spun in time to see Dan flying upside down into a tall bookcase against one wall, having evidently crashed through a long table and a crowded set of shelves. The broken remnants of these and their contents were still falling toward and clattering off the floor in an immense swirl of dust and magic powders.
Standing at the apparent launch point of his flight was a tall, wiry, African-looking woman in a headdress like a flare-topped white can. She seemed to be in the follow-through stages of having executed some kind of throw. But Annja had never seen any woman throw a grown man like that. Nor any man.
The woman straightened. For a moment she stood facing Annja. Annja felt her gaze slide past, take in the dead man sprawled on his face on the floor right behind her. The woman’s handsome features twisted in a grimace of grief that tore at Annja’s heart.
The woman’s right hand whipped up with striking-viper speed. The very nature of the movement triggered Annja’s reflexes, already set on hair trigger. She was in motion, diving over the counter she had slammed against mere seconds before, before the woman’s hand came level with her dark eyes.
Annja had learned that she could dodge gunshots. Not because she could move faster than bullets, but because she’d found herself adept at reading the body motions of an opponent. She could see the motion of muscle and tendons in a gun hand, the paling of a trigger-finger knuckle as pressure was applied. When she had such warning she simply got out from in front of the muzzle before the shot was fired. It was a foolproof way of being missed.
And now it was fortunate that she acted before the shot was fired.
A green flash suddenly filled the shop. It filled Annja’s head with what seemed like emerald needles, stabbing and ricocheting inside her skull. The backs of her eyes hurt. A crack like thunder seemed almost incidental.
Impossible as it seemed, she knew what had happened. In college a careless classmate had flashed a laser pointer in her eyes from across the quadrangle. Although it was a low-power device and rated safe, the headache and vision disruption had persisted for hours. The aftereffects hadn’t completely gone away for two days.
This was no mere pointer. She had gotten only side-scatters of coherent light and it had severe effects. Dazzled, she hit the far side of the counter. She smelled smoke and heard the crackling of flames.
She came up onto all fours, moved cautiously forward. Another green flare lit the shop with an accompanying crack of ionized air. The counter’s bulk had absorbed a shot meant for her.
She called back the sword. Her mind raced. She realized the energy weapon had some limitations, probably including a recharge time. Otherwise the woman would simply hold down the trigger and slash through Annja’s concealing counter until she found flesh.
The thought chilled Annja with a dread that threatened to sap her strength. She remembered the oft-spoken words of her teachers—it was not the weapon but the wielder!
Crouching with one hand on the floor, gritty with spilled powders, she stuck her head around the counter’s end. A green flash blew a corner from the counter and set the wood to smoldering. But Annja had plotted her moves in her mind. She had withdrawn her head before the other woman could fire. Now Annja launched herself in a low dive, turning it into a forward roll that carried her past the foot of the main counter, where Mafalda lay. Fortunately her blood had pooled at the other end.
A second shot shattered the middle of that counter into flaming splinters, so close that spinning fragments seared Annja’s bare leg. She gathered her limbs under her and, with all the strength that fear and fury could lend her, leaped over the counter and Mafalda’s body.
The energy hand weapon apparently cycled quicker than Annja had estimated. She was met by a dazzling flash that sent more emerald needles stabbing through her brain to the back of her skull.
9
Dazzling though it was, the beam itself missed Annja. Screaming, she slashed blindly with the sword. She felt it bite and pass through the scarcely yielding solidity of wood, not flesh. Blinking wildly at tears of agony, she pressed forward.
When she could see again, it was to glimpse her opponent’s sandaled heel vanishing into an oblong of brilliance that must have been a back door.
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