27

Like the bedroom, Annja found the Sultan’s adjoining bathroom large and luxuriously appointed. But not hopelessly gaudy or decadent, as she expected a South China Sea potentate’s bathroom to be.

She showered for a long time. It took time for the multiple jets of water, which she had turned to stinging heat and strength, to flush away the sensation of having her skin covered in blood.

When she emerged from the shower stall she found a fluffy white robe and fresh towels had been placed on the green marble counter by soft-footed servants. Wrapped in a sense of floating unreality, she toweled herself mostly dry, put on the robe and wrapped her hair in another towel.

Then she emerged. The room had been completely cleaned. Sprays of fresh flowers, including lilacs, had been placed in niches on the wall, in planters on the floor and on most horizontal surfaces. They did a startlingly effective job of masking the harsh scents of disinfectants—which in turn did a pretty fair job of masking other, even less congenial smells.

The stained rugs were gone. The tile beneath cleaned up readily. The bedclothes were so fresh she could smell them. She suspected the very mattress beneath, huge as it was, had been replaced. With a little bit of express-elevator sensation in her stomach it occurred to her to suspect that somewhere in the great gleaming onion-domed pile of the palace, or the vaults beneath, was a storeroom stacked with replacement mattresses wrapped neatly in plastic, for just such eventualities as this. Cleanup after failed assassination attempts.

And, she supposed, those that succeeded as well. That was one thing that decisively linked the mightiest monarch to the most miserable beggar—when they fell, life went on. The major difference was the amount of energy other people put into pretending otherwise before getting on with it.

At the big bed’s foot sat Wira. He wore new pajama bottoms, these of pale orange silk. His hair, still unbound, hung to either side of his face like heavy dark curtains.

As she came into the bedroom he raised his head and smiled at her. His smile had a haunted quality to it, as did his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?” she asked, approaching. She got within six feet of him and stopped. She was unsure how to proceed. She felt cleansed but extremely drained.

He laughed softly. “Saving my life. It was a very professional attack. The intruders were inside the grounds in force before anyone discovered them. They left teams to delay my bodyguards getting to me. Almost long enough.”

She came and sat next to him on the bed. That seemed harmless enough. He certainly didn’t draw away.

“Why did they use swords?” she asked. She didn’t bother asking how the assassins had gotten in undetected—it was an inside job. That was so apparent there seemed little point in bringing it up. Rooting out the traitor or traitors, and dealing with them—that was his problem, his and Purnoma’s. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to know the details, anyway.

“The langgai tinggang,” he said. “That translates as, ‘the longest tail feather of the hornbill.’ Very poetic, really. It’s a type of Dayak parang. You’re familiar with the Dayak?”

She nodded. “Borneo tribesfolk,” she said. “Some of them tend to be pretty resistant to the modern world.”

She could feel his warmth. She smelled soap on clean masculine skin, realized he’d showered as well. She felt honored he had let her use his personal facility while he went elsewhere, even if it was one door down the hall, as was likely. The odd, courtly courtesy seemed so typical of him.

“You’re very knowledgeable. Although I suppose it is your line of work. And ‘resistant to the modern world’ is a nice way of putting it.”

“Being quick with a euphemism about native peoples is one of the skills we learn in anthropology if we don’t want to be ostracized. Most times it’s justified. Sometimes it goes too far. Were these men Dayaks, then?”

He shook his head. His hair brushed his shoulders. They were wide shoulders, she noticed, with well-defined musculature beneath bronze skin.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Sword of the Faith. For some reason that’s the weapon they’ve adopted as their literal sword of the faith. They fight with swords as a point of honor. As do my own forces, as you’ve seen.”

He smiled a lopsided smile. “In a strange way, I believe the assassins were honoring me. Despite my embrace of Western ways, measured though it is, I am apparently worthy of a most traditional death.”

“I’m a little surprised your guards didn’t try to take any prisoners,” Annja said.

“They did,” he said. “The guards in your room. Neither in particularly good shape. The Sons of the Sword, as they call themselves, do not surrender. Nor do they talk. As I’m sure you realize, torture’s no use for getting actual information. The mere threat works fine on the weak-willed—but Sword of the Faith weeds those out in ways you probably could imagine, but shouldn’t care to, I think. For the others—” He shrugged. “Torture can serve for punishment, to terrorize others, or to generate false testimony.”

“I know,” she said. She didn’t meet his eyes. For some reason she thought of Cyrus St. Clair, his narrow balding head, his pale indeterminate eyes, his white Panama hat.

“Also,” the Sultan said, “I suspect my guards felt chagrined that they were so late to the scene—especially since they found their work being done for them by a foreign woman. A very beautiful one. With a Crusader-style broadsword.”

He looked at her curiously. “Where did you get that, Annja?”

“What do you mean? I managed to wrestle one of the swords off the assassins who came to my room. I’ve practiced sword-fighting a lot. It’s one of the reasons I decided to become an archaeologist. Even if my specialty did wind up being documents. And really—”

He smiled gently. “I know what I saw,” he said softly.

Annja shook her head and tried to make her eyes go ingénue-wide. “Maybe I grabbed it off a wall. Events are a bit of a blur.”

“Annja, dear,” he said, “there are no straight-bladed, cross-hilted swords in this palace. I may be a modernist and a moderate, but I am a Muslim. To us, the cross-hilted broadsword is the dominant symbol of Crusader aggression. And all this begs the question, where did the mysterious thing go?”

She looked him in the eye. She noticed they had long lashes. Beautiful eyes. She felt her cheeks grow warm and her breath grow short. Her skin took on a tingling sensation.

“Does it really matter?” she asked, more breathlessly than she intended.

“No,” he said. His own voice had dropped half an octave. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

He reached for her. Drew her to him with a hand on her shoulder. She turned to meet him.

Their mouths joined in a kiss. It went on and on.

When they broke away she stood before him.

He took her hand, kissed her palm. “I have to go,” he said. “A helicopter waits to take me to my flotilla, which is already under way. I won’t see you until I get back. You may stay here as long as you wish. You’ve the run of the palace, my dear.”

“Be careful,” she said, before rushing out of the room feeling a flood of emotions.

Because she had learned the value of rest the hard way, Annja actually went back to sleep as Wira went off to dress and then head out as the first rosy light stretched its fingers over the city and the harbor overlooked by the bedroom window. She slept no more than an hour. When she opened her eyes, not exactly refreshed but at least more rested, Wira was gone.

She had her own arrangements to make.

Twelve hours later, she was slipping over the gunwales of the power junk she had chartered, into a black Zodiac boat bobbing in the chop as a swollen red sun plopped into the dark Celebes Sea.