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  Master's Challenge

  ( The Destroyer - 55 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Buying Time...

  An ancient legend comes to life when assassins from three great tribes of warriors set up shop in the village of Sinanju, with the wholesale destruction of Remo Williams on their minds. For a guy like Remo, a little mortal combat's no big deal, but this time, a day's work only buys him trouble. A powerful old enemy is back in business, determined to close out Remo's account, and even with all the skills of Sinanju, Remo keeps coming up short.

  To make matters worse, Harold W. Smith, director of CURE, is sitting on the deadliest threat to U.S. security he's ever encountered, and no one's minding the store. If Remo and Chiun don't turn up soon, the free enterprise system will be out of business, and Smith will have hell to pay - with his life and the future of his country.

  DESTROYER #55: MASTER'S CHALLENGE Copyright (c) 1984 by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Prologue

  The Legend

  It came to pass that the great assassin Wang, first Master of the glorious house of Sinanju, came to be known and admired the world over for his feats of strength and agility and discipline of mind. But there were those, far away among the wild peoples of the earth, who questioned the Master's power and challenged him to test his strength against their own.

  The Master, in his wisdom, knew that these peoples, whose diverse civilizations were as ancient as his own, were not his enemies, but his equals. For amid all the timid hordes of men who lived lives of sloth and insignificance, only these few remained from the ancient days of glory and kept the traditions and secrets of their ancestors. Thus deeming them to be worthy opponents, the Master accepted their challenge.

  He traveled to each of their lands in succession, carrying neither arms nor food, and met with the best among them in mortal combat. Although his opponents fought with honor and courage, the Master vanquished them all, bowing after each death and commending to the gods the departed spirits of his fallen adversaries.

  When he had slain the last of his opponents, the family and friends of the dead man fell upon Wang in anger. But the Master spoke, saying, "Do not seek to make war on me, for we are not among those people who annihilate without thought. We are few in the world, we of valor and faith in the ancient ways. Let us leave one another in peace."

  "My son will be avenged," spoke the father of the slain warrior.

  The Master of Sinanju answered him, saying, "Then prepare your son's son to do battle with my successor. And for each generation after, let our best meet together in blood for the ultimate test of their powers. We shall be enemies but once in a lifetime. For all the rest of our days, may we leave one another in privacy and peace."

  Thus was the beginning of the secret ritual known as the Master's Trial.

  MASTER'S CHALLENGE

  Chapter One

  Ancion paused at the end of Kwasha Challa, the sacred rope bridge that separated his domain from the rest of Peru. Kwasha Challa had been built just for him, specifically for this crossing, as an identical bridge had been built a generation ago for his father.

  Twelve hundred feet below, the Apurimac river boiled with white rapids. Beyond it lay the green Peruvian highlands dotted with the ancient burial towers of Ancion's ancestors. It would be, he knew, some time before he saw them again.

  The oracle had predicted a safe journey for him. Still, it was one he did not look forward to making. He would have to cross most of the known world, alone and penniless as tradition decreed, to reach the place his people called the Land at the End of the World. From the accounts given by his father and grandfather, it was a desolate place, cold and inhospitable, with rocks in place of the lush and startling contrasts of his native land.

  He mounted the white llama that had been left for him. His father had done the same. And his grandfather, dressed

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  in the same kind of garments that Ancion now wore, the woven wincha wound around his head for warmth, the silver pin holding his cloak together, and the large gold discs pierced into his ears that communicated to those who understood that Ancion was an Inca, the Inca, reigning king of a people believed by the world to be long extinguished.

  For when Pizarro looted the Inca Empire in 1532 and murdered Atahualpa, the "last" Inca, his band of bloodthirsty Spaniards missed an enclave in the mountains where Ancion's ancestors ruled. Since then, Ancion's people had lived, hidden and secret, away from the ways of other men. Only one Inca in each generation, the Inca, was permitted to leave, and then only on two occasions. The first was a stay in the outside world to leam its ways in order to better protect his people from them. The second time was to make the journey Ancion was embarking on now, the journey to meet the most powerful being on earth. It was a tradition not to be questioned.

  In his pockets were some dried potatoes, the precious papa that had sustained his people for 5,000 years, and his weapon. It was a bola, a cord weighted by a rock encrusted with sharp stones. Used properly, it was deadly enough to kill a cougar in flight. The bola and a small sharp knife at his waist were Ancion's only defenses against the white and black and yellow men who stood between him and his destiny. They would be enough.

  Unwinding the cord carefully, he whirled the bola over his head until it sang. Then he lowered it, still vibrating in his hands, and snapped the two thick ropes that bound the bridge to the land. Kwasha Challa fell, destroying the only entrance into his country until his return. It was done. His journey had begun.

  The journey to Sinanju. The Land at the End of the World.

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  Emrys ap Llewellyn fastened his knapsack around his huge, square shoulders. "Griffith!" he called.

  "Up here, Da," a small voice rang from the top of a tall pine. It echoed through the green hills surrounding the valley. The boy laughed as the big man made a show of stalking the tree like a bear. With both hands gripping the pine's trunk, Emrys shook it. The boy fell out of the branches into his arms, shrieking with delight.

  "Got you now," Emrys said, hugging his son. The boy's hair smelled of pine and deep woods.

  "Do it again, Da."

  "That I cannot." Emrys hitched up his knapsack again. "It's time I'll be going, son."

  Griffith's face fell. His large, soft eyes welled with tears.

  "Now, none of your caterwauling. It's time, and that's that. Go on to home, you shameful baby."

  "But Da, your eyes-"

  "Don't you be talking back to me, scamp!" He swatted the boy across the bottom.

  "Don't go, Da," Griffith wailed. "You'll not see well enough to fight the Chinee. He'll kill you sure."

  Emrys turned on him fiercely. "I'll not have you speaking so to your old father."

  His eyes were different from his son's. For all their understanding, they were warrior's eyes, and Griffith's words stopped at the sight of them. But he couldn't stop the tears. "It ain't right, so it's not," the boy said miserably.

  "You've just got to understand. This is something I've got to do. It's the way of our kin. One day you'll be going, too."

  "I don't want to fight the damned Chinee," the boy protested.

  "Watch your mouth!"

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  "I want to stay here, in these woods, with the Old Ones, the spirits. And I want you to stay with me. Now that Ma's gone, we're all we have, you and me."

  Emrys cleared his throat. Sometimes Griffith sounded as if he were a hundred years old. "Well, what a man wants and what he's got to do are two different things," he said gruffly. "Besides, your Ma made you promise on the day she died to mind me. Did you not promise her?"

  The bo
y stared at the ground.

  "Did you na?"

  "Yes. I promised."

  "Then go home. And not another word.''

  Emrys stomped off toward the hills, following the winding stream that bisected the valley. It had been a raging river once, in the days when all of Wales was as wild and unknown as the valley and its surrounding woods.

  There were no roads here, no electricity, no running water. No taxes, no trolleys, no army. Instead, there were the hills, still dotted with the ancient shrines of gods who had been worshiped before the Romans came. Mryddin, oldest among the dieties, still ruled in the valley. There was the forest, still populated with the wild, savvy people who had dwelled there since the beginning of time, where the great magician Merlin himself had hidden while he waited for young King Arthur to come of age.

  There were spirits and music and timeless enchantment in the valley; outside was the contamination of the new world. And beyond that, far off in lands so distant and strange that Emrys could not even imagine them from the stories his father, Llewellyn, had told him, were other knots of civilization that still clung to the old, true ways.

  The place where he was going was one of those. The people there were fighters, like Emrys's own kind. The Masters of Sinanju were rarely bested in battle. Llewellyn himself had fallen at the hands of the great Chinee. It had

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  been a terrible shock to Emrys, who was already fully grown by the time his father took on the Master of Sinanju. The Chinee was a small, weak-looking man well past middle age. But Llewellyn had explained after his return from Sinanju, while he waited for the Master to come do battle with him, that the people of that land lived so far away that even their appearance was different. Their size had little to do with their strength, and their peculiar slanted eyes could see the legs on a caterpillar at twenty paces.

  As his father lay dead, Emrys had been tempted to attack the frail-looking Oriental himself. But the Chinee who had killed Llewellyn did an odd thing in his moment of victory. He found Emrys in the crowd of onlookers and bowed to him. The look in the Master's hazel eyes had not been one of triumph, but of respect for Emrys's dead father. Llewellyn had fought well, and the Master of Sinanju had acknowledged his valor. It was during that moment that Emrys came to understand the Master's Trial, and why his people had honored the contest since the days when the river ran wide as an ocean through the valley. The outcome of the Trial was final. Until now.

  It was Emrys's turn, at last, to challenge the protegee of the Master of Sinanju and avenge Llewellyn's death. Once in each generation. It was his only opportunity.

  He squeezed his eyes shut hard, as if the movement would disperse the cloudiness of his vision. Of course, it didn't work. It never did. He only hoped his sight would hold out long enough for him to do the things he had to do: go to Sinanju to meet with the great Chinee in peace. Return to the valley to prepare for battle. Encounter the Master's son when he arrived in Wales. And kill him.

  There was another thing he had to do as well, and the thought filled Emrys with worry. He had to prepare Griffith to fight in his own generation's Master's Trial. For

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  regardless of the outcome of this contest, Griffith would have to go forth to the next.

  What had happened to Griffith? Emrys's people sprang from fighting stock that went back for thousands of years. Now here was his own son, Griffith ap Emrys, who could not even bring himself to kill a squirrel. Emrys Had come to blows more than once in defense of the boy whom the others labeled weak and girlish, but there was no denying it: Griffith was a sad excuse for a warrior. While the other boys of the valley practiced their falls and developed their fists on one another, Griffith spent all his time exploring the old altars of the dead gods, so long vanished that even the forest people did not remember their names. He raised lost birds and sang made-up songs into the air. He slept, frequently, in caves thick with bats and did not fear even the wildest horse. But he would not fight.

  Perhaps it was the lack of a mother. Emrys's wife Brawnwyn had died so young.

  He turned for a last look at his home. The valley, stretching below him, looked like a miasma of diffused light. Just let my eyes hold out, he said to himself. In the center of the dim, velvet-toned valley stood Griffith where Emrys had left him.

  "What will become of my strange little child?" he asked the wind. He waved slowly to the small figure and then turned away, before he could think of an answer.

  Jilda guided the slender wooden boat expertly over the freezing swells of the Bering Strait. On either side of her rose the continents of Asia and America, vast lands filled with decaying, soft men and uselessly ornamental women.

  She was hungry. Keeping one oar in motion, she pulled a long iron-tipped spear from the bottom of the boat. The water was rough. Jilda stood up in the tossing boat, watching. She saw a flash of silver, poised her spear, then

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  lowered it, cursing. A halibut, but too big. Its weight would capsize the boat. She waited, immobile, perfectly balanced on the choppy waves.

  Her ancestors had watched and waited in exactly the same way, standing in the narrow-hulled boats that carried the first of the Vikings to glory in the weak lands that stood like ripe fruit ready for picking. The Norsemen who had carried the lightning of Thor from Norway throughout Europe and Russia a thousand years ago had waited with their spears in the air and hunger gnawing at their bellies just as Jilda did now.

  She felt their blood in her. She was proud, because her forefathers were the purest of the magnificent warriors who had ruled the sea. When the Viking conquest drew to a close, most of her people changed and adapted. They learned to live at peace with the world. They accepted lives of comfort and idleness. But her own people, the small knot of sea-toughened men and women who had refused to lose their wildness and their instinct for survival, chose to leave their homeland instead.

  Many Vikings settled in the remote Faeroes Islands deep in the Norwegian Sea, and her ancestors were among these. But her people, sensing the pervading onslaught of modern ways even to this distant archipelago, chose to separate themselves from the rest of their kind. They selected for their new home the smallest, coldest land mass in the Faeroes chain, an uninhabited island that they named Lakluun. And on Lakluun they fished and hunted, built their turf-covered stone croft houses, brewed mead from fermented honey, praised their gods, revered their legends, burned their dead at sea, raised their young, and survived with the old ways.

  A flutter on the surface of the water. The fish was a young one, its two flat eyes flashing in the sunlight on its right side. Halibut. Effortlessly, Jilda tossed in her spear

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  and rowed to catch it before it sank. She cut the still-moving flesh with the dagger she carried in her belt and ate it raw.

  Where was this place she was going? The elders had told her nothing, except that she was to meet a great warrior and challenge his son in battle. The contest was called the Master's Trial. Why it was necessary to determine a master among races of people who had no earthly contact with one another had puzzled her, but the, elders did not speak of it.

  It was the way things were done. As the best fighter on Lakluun, it was Jilda's duty to comply, just as it had been her duty to kill the first of the beasts offered during the Sacrifice of Nine. The animals were not used for food but for ceremony, and the ceremony sickened her. Once every nine years the people of Lakluun offered the sacrifice to Thor, Odin, and Freya, the three gods of thunder, war, and pleasure, killing nine of every male creature in existence and displaying them in the Sacred Wood for the deities to see. For weeks, the gentle woods stank with the corpses of horses hanging by their necks next to the maggot-covered bodies of dogs and reindeer. But nothing was so terrible as the sight of the nine hanged men, stolen from wayward fishing boats, their eyes rotting and blistered beneath the trees.

  Tradition. How she despised the elders' senseless traditions! It was horrifying to kill nine innocent men for the
delight of the gods, but that was what tradition decreed. And it was contemptible to journey halfway around the world to meet a warrior for the purpose of killing not the warrior himself, but his son, whom she had never even seen. Tradition? Bah. It was stupidity, insanity, waste!

  But then, without tradition, where would her people be? Living the lives of slugs hiding in shells, crawling for their every need? What would Jilda herself be without the strength

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  and spirit of her ancestors? A fat, dimpled wife, perhaps, screaming at infants and driving a padded automobile with rubber tires? A cooperative worker, running in her rat's maze each day without a mouthful of clear air, devoid of freedom or dignity?

  No, she would choose death rather than submit to the life of the world outside Lakluun. But was there no way to avoid the disgusting practice of the Master's Trial?

  Jilda finished her meal and threw the bones overboard. She wiped her hands on the leather cape she wore over her long grown. Her pale eyes changed color, as they did when she was deep in thought. She had a plan.

  She would meet with the Master of Sinanju as tradition demanded. She was the chosen warrior of Lakluun, and it was her right to speak with the Master and the other contestants. When she did speak, she would tell them all to abandon the Trial. Surely none of them wished to kill a perfect stranger in the name of some foolish contest. This was one tradition that had to be stopped. And if she could stop it, she could return to Lakluun and end forever the Sacrifice of Nine.

  She picked up her oars again, satisfied.

  Kiree was cold, colder than he had ever been in his life. The occasional soldiers he spotted along the rocky shores of the place called Sinanju posed no problem; he was dark and small and accustomed to hiding and moving quickly. He had not been confronted by a single human during his entire journey.

  But the weather, even in May, would surely kill him. In the Dogon region of central Mali, where his people, the Tellem, lived, temperatures of 115 degrees were not unusual. The heat could be withstood, but the cold . . . Who could live in such a frozen wasteland? During his long trip, Kiree had at times considered wearing protective clothing,