Destroyer - Master's Challenge Part 25

The two men circled the pit. The Dutchman's eyes were pale and lucid, the maniacal fire in them gone. Instead, they held a look of bewilderment as he searched Remo's face.

"Who are you?" the Dutchman asked. It was a plea. Strange music came to Remo on the wind. Faint but insistent, the dissonant melody was the same as the strains he had heard when he first came to the sh.o.r.es of Sinanju with Jilda and the others. It had filled him with terror then, but now the music carried no more fear than a pa.s.sing breeze. It was the Dutchman's music, but devoid of the Dutchman's power.

He feeds on fear, Remo thought. When he had stopped caring whether he lived or died, he had lost his fear of the Dutchman. And without the fear, he was no longer a victim.

The music swelled again, and suddenly Remo recognized it for what it was. It had sounded oddly familiar the first time he heard it, but didn't understand why. Now he knew. He had heard the same notes long ago, in a small boat setting off to carry him to the first stop in the Master's Trial. It was Chiun's music, note for note, only distorted, a perversion of the songs of Sinanju.

And as he watched the Dutchman standing in mirror image of himself, he understood the music's meaning. "I am you," he answered.

Yin and yang.

Light and shadow, good and evil, Remo and the Dutchman were opposite sides of the same being. They were born of the same traditions, both white men taken out of their societies and created anew in the ways of Sinanju. They both claimed Masters of the discipline as their fathers.

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Only fate had kept them apart for so long. Now, together, they formed a whole that could only end in destruction.

"If I kill you, I will die," the Dutchman said, sounding almost relieved. "It was you all along. I have been seeking the wrong man."

"You killed him."

"As I must kill you," the Dutchman said.

In one perfect spiral leap, he crossed the pit and delivered a blow to Remo's chest. His ribs broke under the impact. He tried to right himself, but the Dutchman was too fast. Remo felt a shattering pain in his kneecap that sent him flying toward a boulder. He landed on his shoulder.

The Dutchman kicked him off the rock. "It can't be done quickly," he said softly. "I've waited too long. The victory must be complete."

He stepped back. Remo stirred. The Dutchman crushed his elbow with his heel. The pain flooded over Remo like a wave. His vision receded to a wash of color: black, red, iridescent blue. . . .

"You will hear me now, and obey," the Dutchman commanded.

It was the fear. Stop the fear in yourself, and his power will vanish.

But he was afraid. No man had ever attacked him so fast. No man had ever beaten him so completely. The Dutchman was better than he was, better than anyone. In the Master's Trial, the Dutchman would have conquered the world.

"Feel the knives in your legs, Remo."

Remo screamed with the pain. Thousands of blades were suddenly embedded in his skin, cutting to the bone.

"They are in your hands now, your arms. ..."

He felt his palms flatten. The knives, slicing his flesh by inches, moved up his arms. Each thrust was an agony.

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Each knife brought him closer to the welcome numbness of death.

"Oh, Chiun," Remo whispered.

His eyes fluttered open. In the distance were three moving figures, barely visible. Remo tried to concentrate on them to lessen the pain. He was going to die, but Chiun had once told him that death did not have to be painful. "Take yourself out of the pain," Chiun had said. Chiun . . .

It was Chiun. The old man was alive, walking between Jilda and the boy. The three of them stopped beside H'si T'ang, seated on the ground. Chiun picked his teacher up and moved in a wooden gait toward the cave. As he walked, Chiun turned his head right and left, searching.

"I am here, Father," Remo said, too weak to be heard. "I, too, am still alive."

Then, from a place deep in his soul, another voice spoke: I am created s.h.i.+va, the Destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds; The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju.

Remo rose. He was covered with the wounds he had permitted in his fear, but the knives were gone.

The Dutchman regarded him, puzzled. When he spoke, his voice was full of false confidence. "You can't fight me now. Look at you."

Blood dripped off Remo's hands in pools. But the Dutchman's eyes were afraid. He prepared to strike.

Remo attacked before the Dutchman's hands could reach him. Through the pain, despite his broken bones and the blood that covered him, he struck three times, three perfect blows. The Dutchman fell, screaming, into the snake pit.

Remo watched the sinuous creatures slither over the stunned man who sat sprawled among the bones of the 225.

dead. The Dutchman made no attempt to move. Instead, a thin half-smile spread over his face. A drop of bright blood appeared at the corners of the Dutchman's lips and swelled to a stream.

"It is here at last," he said weakly. "The peace I have sought all my life. It is a great comfort."

Remo wanted to turn away, but he was unable. His eyes were locked into the Dutchman's. He felt himself weakening, warming with a flood of quiet resignation. Involuntarily, he dropped to his knees.

"Don't you see?" the Dutchman said. "We are the same being. Not men, but something else." He grimaced with a stab of pain. Remo felt it, too, at the same moment. "We grow closer now, in death. I am sorry to take you with me, but it is the only way. With you, 1 can finally find rest."

Remo nodded slowly. He understood the prophecy.

The Other will join with his own kind. Yin and yang will be one in the spring of the Year of the Tiger.

The Dutchman had to die, it was necessary. And when he died, Remo would have; to die with him. Yin and yang, light and darkness, life and death, together. It was the prophecy come to fruition.

He arranged himself in full lotus before the pit and waited, his spirit entwined with the Dutchman's, to enter the Void.

Chapter Twenty-Eight.

Someone slapped his face. The jolt pulled Remo out of his deep trance. Jilda, bruised and cut, was kneeling close to him.

"I've looked everywhere for you," she said, kissing him. "You'll be all right now. Put your arm around my shoulder." Gently she tried to lift him up.

Still stuporous, he picked up Jilda's rag-bandaged hand. "I'm sorry," he said.

"You had no choice. It is forgotten."

He pulled away from her. "Chiun. He's alive. I saw him."

"Yes. He lost consciousness, but he is well now."

"And H'si T'ang?"

"Chiun does not think the Venerable One will recover. It is his heart."

Remo fumbled to his knees. "Wait," he said. In the pit, the Dutchman was still sitting, motionless, his eyes frozen into a stare. The snakes were gone.

"But he couldn't have died without me." He made a move to enter the pit.

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Jilda pulled him back. "Come, Remo. You have lost so much blood. What did he do to you?"

"Don't . . . remember," Remo faltered. "But he shouldn't be ... shouldn't be . . ." Confused, he followed her back to the cave.

Chiun was pale, but his eyes sparkled when he saw Remo. H'si T'ang lay on his back in a s.p.a.ce cleared of the rubble from the Dutchman's lightning attack. The floor, stripped of its straw matting, was bare and cold, but Chiun had laid one of his brocade robes beneath his old teacher. Griffith knelt beside the old man, who smiled.

"Your return is welcome, son of my son."

"Thank you, Master," Remo said.

"There is no danger in the air. Has the Other gone to the Void?"

"Yes. 1 think so."

"You think?" Chiun asked.

Something was wrong. The knowledge that Remo and the Dutchman would die together was not a figment of anyone's imagination. They had both known it as surely as they knew the sun rose in the east. Yet Remo was still alive.

"He's dead," Remo said.

"Remo," H'si T'ang said, his ancient hands groping forward to touch him. "You are badly hurt."

"Not too badly. 1 can walk."

The old man frowned. "No power," he said. "I cannot heal you anymore."

"That's all right," Remo said, composing H'si T'ang's hands in front of him.

"But you are too weak ..."

"I'm all right. You're the one who needs to get better. You saved us both."

"Thank you," H'si T'ang said gently, "but only the young wish to live forever. I am but one step from the 228.

Void. It will be an easy step, one I am eager to take." He smiled. "Besides, it is our belief that a man's spirit does not enter the Void with him. It is pa.s.sed to another, and thus lives forever."

Remo remembered Kiree, who had fought so bravely in the hills of Africa. "I hope that's true," he said.

The old man coughed. His breath came in spasms, swelling the features of his face. "Chiun?" He raised his trembling hands. "Chiun, my son."

H'si T'ang struggled to speak, but no words came. In time, the withered hands stilled, and the ancient parchment-skinned face sank into blankness.

After several moments, Chiun spoke, in a quavering voice, the benediction for the death of his teacher: "And so it came to pa.s.s that in the spring of the Year of the Tiger did the Master of Sinanju die, as was foretold in the legends of ancient times. And thus did the Master become one with the spirit of all things."

Jilda led Griffith away. "What was H'si T'ang trying to say?" the boy whispered. Remo left, too, to leave Chiun alone with his grief.

"They walked slowly back toward the pit where Remo had left the Dutchman. "He's got to be dead," Remo said, hurrying.

"Of course he is," Jilda answered. "I saw him myself. There's no need to go back to that awful place."

Oh, yes there is, a nagging voice inside him said. He ran ahead, stopping at the edge of the pit.

"Well, we have to do something with ourselves, I suppose," Jilda said.

"I want to see the snakes," Griffith said.

"The snakes were gone. There was only . . . only ..." She walked around the open pit. There was nothing inside but some scattered bones.

"He is dead," Remo insisted, furious. He stared at the 229.

bones as if he believed he could make the Dutchman materialize out of them.

Jilda lowered herself into the hole and prodded the earth with her toes.

"This is another trick of his," Remo said. His voice was harsh and rasping. He clenched and unclenched his fists, opening the congealed wounds in his hands. "He's there. We just can't see him. He's-"

"He is gone, Remo," Jilda said. She uncovered a hole beneath a large, flat rock. The hole was big enough for a man to crawl through. "That's where he went."

"No!" Remo shouted, shaking with anger. He vaulted into the pit and worked his way through the freshly dug tunnel as fast as he could. "No!" he called from inside the earth. "No!" at the tunnel's mouth beside the ocean's rocky sh.o.r.e.

There was nothing ahead of him but a clear expanse of blue water.

It had been a waste, all of it-H'si T'ang's death, Jilda's suffering, Chiun's humiliation, his own efforts. He had failed them all. The Dutchman was still alive and would spread his poison around the world. He had lived because Remo had been too weak to die with him.

"Why didn't you take us both?" he screamed into the empty, indifferent sea.

There was no answer.

Chapter Twenty-Nine.