Outlanders 32 Evil Abyss, page 1
Prologue
Northern Cambodia
Flat palm leaves, the rich color of emerald, drooped over Zhou Tzu's face. He gazed up at the ruby-red droplets glistening on the tips, appreciating the contrast of color. Then a fat drop of blood fell from a frond and splattered warmly against his forehead. Except to narrow his eyes, he didn't move.
His skull throbbed, as if hammers pounded away at the bone. A vibration, like that of a musical note refusing to fade hummed against his eardrums. Absently he wondered whose blood daubed the foliage, whether it was his own or that of his men.
In his nostrils burned the chemical stink of high explosive. A heavy umbrella of smoke hovered over the crater punched in the center of the jungle clearing. It slowly drifted away, pushed by a humid breeze, but he followed its path with only his eyes. He didn't turn his head. Dazed as he was, he instinctively remained motionless. Zhou Tzu’s face and khaki clothing were the hue of the mudflat in which he lay. He didn't stir for fear of breaking the illusion he was only a slime covered log half-submerged in the muck. Over the hum echoing in his head, he heard the moist sucking sound of feet slogging through the mire and the murmur of male voices speaking in the Khmer dialect. One announced loudly, his tone suggesting more outrage than surprise, "This one is alive!"
A bubbling moan at the very edges of audibility reached him. It was drowned out by a voice, as sharp as a whip crack, demanding, "Where is your general? Where is Thou Tzu?"
He heard no response, but he did hear the meaty smack of a hand striking flesh. "Can you hear me, pig? Where is General Zhou Tzu?"
The response, when it came, was so low Zhou Tzu's ears barely registered A but he recognized the voice as that of Chaksi, his second lieutenant Chaksi had celebrated his fourteenth birthday only two days earlier. The sound of another slap was followed by a gasped-out obscenity from the youth. An instant later came a door- slamming bang. A guttural voice snarled, "Little bastard, Find a suitable tree. Make an example of this one." Zhou Tzu knew Colonel Puyang's voice just as he knew it was the colonel who had administered the head shot to Chaksi with his beloved Tokarev pistol. Stomach muscles knotting with adrenalin, Zhou struggled against the almost insane urge to burst up from the bog and attack the patrol but he had only a piha-kaetta dagger as weapon. His subgun had been damaged by the explosion. He had been walking point when the world blew up in a blaze of flame, heat and mud barely ten feet ahead of him. He couldn't be sure if the explosion had been due to a warhead fired from an airborne vimana, or from a buried mine, but at the moment he cared very little one way or the other.
Through the haze of his fogged perceptions and stunned eardrums, Zhou barely understood that Colonel Puyang's patrol had violated the border between his territory and that of the Devi-Naga. Blinking up at the little beads of crimson dangling on the tips of the palm fronds over his head, he wondered again how much of the blood had been splashed there by the four men comprising his escort. As the patrol moved on, checking the other bodies, Zhou Tzu continued to remain motionless in the marsh surrounding the vast lake of Tonle Sap. His right leg and rib cage throbbed fiercely but he dared not move. Dark shapes shifted against the blaze of the afternoon sun. Zhou watched through stilted lids as six men stepped into his range of vision.
Colonel Puyang caught and held his attention. He was a large man with the beginnings of a paunch swelling against the green-gray uniform tunic. Worked in gold thread, both sleeves bore the overlapping-scale design of an officer in the elite Cobra Guard. Perched on his skull was a gold hued helmet fashioned to resemble the hooded head of a king cobra, one of the great Naga who had, according to legend, created the land of Kambujadesa and the city of Angkor Thom.
Beneath the helmet's overhang, meant to suggest the upper jaw and snout of a serpent, Puyang's face was that of Vetala, the two-vizaged demon of legend. The left half of the face was normal, but the other half was no face at all--rather it was a raw red cicatrix. The maimed tissue was knitted into a network of scar tissue that reached down beneath his chin and around to the right ear. The colonel's eye was still there, and although it glared with a milky blue-white hatred, it did not see.
Colonel Puyang's disfigurement was a silent testimony of why he hunted Zhou Tzu so relentlessly, regardless of borders or pacts. Some years before, Zhou had given the man two faces to symbolize his treachery. A scarlet plume, a symbol of his rank, fluttered from the crest of Puyang's helmet. His men were similarly uniformed, although their helmets were unadorned and then tunics didn't carry the scale design. All of them carried spindly KM-50 subguns, a carryover from the long-ago reign of the Khmer Rouge.
A Cobra guard used the barrel of his weapon to push aside a clump of foliage. He exclaimed, "Colonel! There is another one of the general's men alive!"
Zhou Tzu recognized the man they dragged from the underbrush as Mongpa, a young man who had served him for three years. A wet, dark red stain spread across the front of his olive-drab tunic, and the crimson froth flecking his lips indicated a punctured lung. Two of the Cobra guards held the man up before the colonel, who demanded harshly, "Is there any point in asking you about General Zhou Tzu"
The young man shook his head dazedly as if he didn't understand the question. Poyang spat out an obscenity and slammed the frame of the Tokarev flat against the left side of Mongpa's jaw. A little spurt of blood burst from his slack lips.
"You are not worth a bullet" Poyang growled, drawing a two-foot-long poignard from a canvas hip scabbard. The highly polished blade flashed in the afternoon sunlight as the point crunched through Mongpa's chest. The two troopers pushed the young man forward to meet Puyang's thrust, and the triangular point slid out of his back very near his spine. Even at that distance, Zhou Tzu heard the grate of steel against bone. Colonel Puyang whipped the blade free with an angry flourish, a fiat ribbon of liquid crimson trailing after it As Mongpa sagged in the grips of the troopers, his head bowing, Puyang raised the knife and brought it down edge first, in a swift, practiced stroke.
The razor-keen steel of the blade sheared through Mongpa's neck, severing tissue, muscle, blood vessels and bone. His head dropped to the marshy ground with a moist thud and rolled like an awkward ball.
The Cobra guards laughed in their appreciation and admiration of the decapitation performed by their commanding officer. They allowed Mongpa's body to fall to the muddy ground, where it twitched in postmortem spasms for a few moments.
Reaching down, Colonel Puyang picked up the head by a handful of hair and stated loudly, “It's not Zhou Tzu's head, but it will suffice to provide an object lesson to those who defy her holiness, the Devi Kumudvati, the Naga princess."
The colonel swaggered into the jungle, swinging Mongpa's head as if he were carrying a basket by its handle. "Let at keep searching."
Zhou Tzu didn't move, not even when the laughing voices and slogging sounds of the Cobra guards' progress faded away completely. He knew that Puyang had spoken strictly for his benefit, in the chance he might be hiding within earshot and creep out when the patrol seemed to be gone. The colonel would probably leave a trooper in vicinity to make sure. Zhou Tzu would practice the same tactic were the situation reversed.
A heavy, deafening silence fell over the jungle. Somewhere close by a tree frog chirped inquisitively. Squinting up between the sheltering fronds, he glimpsed three white egrets soaring overhead, their curve-beaked heads at the ends of elongated necks peering down at the scene of the ambush. Zhou Tzu knew that carrion feeders would soon be winging their way toward the feast.
The hot yellow disk of the Asian sun slowly darkened at the edges as heavy clouds scudded across the sky, heralding the approach of one of the season's frequent storms. By degrees, the sun was swallowed by huge black thunderheads. Cloud mountains massed in the west, and a crooked finger of lightning arced across them. Almost automatically, Zhou Tzu counted the seconds. When the thick humid air shivered to a clap of thunder, he estimated the storm front was less than two miles away and moving very fast.
He continued to lie still, listening but hearing nothing but the chittering of monkeys and the clacking screech of tropical birds. The buzz of flies winging over and settling on the bodies of his men to drink the blood oozing into the mud reached his ears. He knew it was already turning gummy and dark brown, especially in such intense heat. The equally high humidity would prevent the blood from drying for some hours, and the odor was sure to draw scavengers larger than flies. He hoped the rain arrived before that.
Zhou Tzu drifted in and out of wakefulness or consciousness—he wasn't sure which during his brief periods of lucidity. He couldn't understand what would have driven the Devi-Naga to break the truce. It was possible Colonel Puyrog had acted on his own, without the approval or knowledge of Kumudvati.
He and the princess were enemies true enough, the last members of rival dynasties continuing a thousand year-old struggle to claim lordship over Phnom Kuleh and Angkor Thom. However, they had always observed the rules of warfare as laid down by the Seven Serpent Princes and honoring a truce was paramount. He had only met her face-to-face on one occasion, and that had been at least fifteen years ago.
Since both of their opposing positions were due to birthrights, they were obligated to participate in an exchange-of-essences Ceremony, a ritual that extended back to the first meeting of Ye-liu, the dragon princess and the great hero Kaundinya. He remembered very little of it and he assumed she didn't, either, since both of them were aswim in a sea of opiates. He couldn't even recall what she looked lik e, since her face had been veiled.
Regardless of what either one them remembered, the ceremony was a symbolic replay of the first truce struck between Naga and man. Without it, Cambodia and the Khmer empire could not have been built. For Kumudvati to violate the substance of the flee was the same as spitting upon the spirit of the ancient ritual. A stiff wind rattled the leaves of the underbrush and the fronds of the banyan trees. The sky rolled with thunderclaps and flashed with bolts of lightning. The storm front swept in even more swiftly and fiercely than Zhou Tzu had calculated.
Wind-driven sheets of refreshingly cold rain fell, first in scattered showers then in a torrential downpour. Gust of wind tore at the tree line and the palm fronds hanging over Zhou Tzu were beaten down by the deluge. Streams of water spouted over his upturned face, washing away the mixture of crusted mud and dried blood. When he inhaled some of it, he was forced to raise his head from the mire to keep from choking to death. Zhou decided the time had come to return to life. Setting his teeth on a groan, he heaved himself out of the sucking grip of the bog. He staggered to his feet and nearly fell. His bead swam with vertigo and his stomach lurched. Only the cool kiss of rainwater kept him conscious, rinsing his uniform and hair of clotted mud. When he was fairly certain he would not faint, General Zhou Tzu straightened to his full height, tugging the hem of his uniform tunic to straighten it. He winced at the flare of pain in his rib cage. Raising his right hand he briefly eyed the long flat blade of his dagger. The downpour swiftly cleansed it of sludge and slime.
Moving slowly and carefully, alert for any signs of movement in the undergrowth, Zhou Tzu crept away from the site of the massacre, favoring his stiff right knee. Squinting through the shifting veil of water, he looked for the path Colonel Puyang had followed. Despite the dim light he found it—a narrow animal trail eating between two tangled walls of vegetation. He gained strength with every step as his mind cleared. His lips compressed in the determination to track down Puyang and execute him for the barbaric manner in which he had put Mongpa and Chaksi to death.
Zhou Tau wasn't horrified by the deaths of his men— in his years as hereditary warlord of Phnom Kuleh, he had witnessed many people, soldiers and civilians alike, die in every conceivable way. But during the period of the truce he had observed with the Devi-Naga, deaths had been few. There had been no massacres.
Despite the pain in his right side and leg, Zhou Tau walked with his spine straight, his carriage erect. He was a soldier, not a criminal, and he wouldn't skulk through the jungle, especially in his own ancestral territory, like a fugitive.
Zhou Tzu was tall for a Cambodian, nearly six feet, slender of build and long limbed. He attributed his height and build to his Chinese heritage. He were his sleek blue-black hair long in the tradition of the ancient Khmer kings, knotted at his nape and held in place by a clasp made of a tiger's claw.
Using one hand to shield his eyes from the downpour, Zhou Tzu walked warily through the undergrowth. When lightning lit up the sky, he glimpsed a helmeted figure huddled miserably under the leafy canopy of a prana tree. As Zhou had suspected, the colonel had posted a sentry in the vicinity of the ambush, but the soldier was more concerned with staying dry.
Zhou Tzu took a breath, held it for a moment then sidled forward, making sure he stayed on the outer edge of the Cobra guard's peripheral vision. The racket of rain and wind-whipped foliage covered any sound he made as he crept up behind the soldier. Zhou struck quickly, his left hand slapping around the man's mouth and at the same moment he drove the point of his dagger up under the protective fan of the helmet. He slid the blade into the base of the trooper's skull, severing the nerves and stabbing deep into the brain proper.
The Cobra guard died quickly and painlessly and very nearly bloodlessly. Mongpa's death had been far more agonizing. Twisting the handle of the dagger to free it from the man's skull, Zhou Tzu lowered his body to the ground. He wasn't a sadist. He always preferred to give an enemy an easy death, if possible.
Quickly he stripped the soldier of his weapon and ammo. He checked the chamber of the KM-50 to make sure a round filled the spout. The harness with the extra magazines went over his shoulder and, subgun held at hip level, he moved on.
The rain abated for a few seconds then poured down hard again. Water dripped from the limbs of trees and down the back of his neck. After a few minutes the wind died down to no more than an intermittent breeze. The rain slacked off to a steady drizzle. Lightning still arced across the sky, but the heart of the storm had moved away. The humidity rising in as wake was oppressive. Little streamers of mist curled up from the ground. The setting sun peeked out from behind the thick fleece of cloud cover, casting a sullen scarlet glow against the distant thunderheads. Zhou Tzu eyed the position of the sun apprehensively. Within half an hour, full dark would settle over the jungle and the Magickers would be abroad in the night—or so the old village shamans claimed. Despite his anger and desire for vengeance, Zhou permitted himself a very small but very sour smile.
Still, as he followed the animal trail, he grew more alert for glimpses of shadowy, hooded figures. The Magickers were reputed to be a dark brotherhood of sorcerers who sought to claim and channel the eldritch energies hidden within the walls of Angkor Wat. They wished to subvert natural law to serve their own black purposes, or so the village shamans claimed. Zhou Tzu was not quite sure what the shamans meant by that, but he knew the towers of Angkor often shimmered with a luminosity that seemed something more than a trick of the light.
The Magickers themselves viewed both Zhou Tzu and the Devi-Naga as an impediment to that quest. To them, it made little difference who controlled the territory or what ideology they espoused. As far as the Magickers were concerned both factions were the same and were hated with equal ferocity.
Lifting his gaze up to the tree line, he could barely discern the outline of the pinnacled towers of Angkor War. The distance was deceptive—many miles of fields, paddies and canals lay between him and the sprawling complex of temples and tombs claimed by Kumudvati. Sweat rivered down Zhou Tzu's face as he walked through the dense mass of dark green, the somber verdant hue relieved by brilliant blossoms of flowering plants. Brightly feathered birds sang and screeched from the trees. Twice snakes and lizards slithered out of his path. Once he heard the hoarse cough of a tiger but the great cat was not close by. If it had scented the patrol, the tiger had probably decided the party was too strong to attack.
The sinking sun left bands of molten yellow and seething orange along the horizon, providing just enough illumination for Zhou to see the green-hued walls of the ancient Ta Som temple. Time and the merciless hands of the elements had etched deep scars and grooves in the low sandstone walls surrounding the temple grounds. A giant fig tree, with roots thicker than his thighs, spread out over the smiling, lichen-encrusted face of a massive likeness of a kneeling Buddha that arose from the courtyard. Paving slabs were cracked and upended. Between them roots, grass, weeds and saplings had forced than way.
The architecture of the temple was ornate, the facade swarming with sculptures and carvings depicting dancers, many-armed gods and multi-headed demons. Giant stone faces of slumbering Buddha’s smiled down from the sides of the building.
Zhou Tzu paused, hidden by the flowering foliage, his eyes sweeping the temple's grounds for any sign of Puyang's patrol. A sudden shifting of shadow, of a paler shade of dark than the gathering blackness, made his shoulders stiffen. A chill finger seemed to stroke the base of his spine and he repressed a shudder.
A gray-robed figure slunk across the courtyard of Ta Som, moving stealthily and silently. Although the figure was too far away for him to see a face, there was no mistaking the robe or the glimpse of the smooth, hairless head. It was a Magicker, apparently intent on performing some arcane ritual within the temple itself. But as far as Zhou knew, all the galleries inside the main structure were empty, containing nothing but shadows and the accumulated detritus of many centuries of neglect. Zhou Tzu had just started to step toward the temple grounds when he heard a faint crunch, as of a foot treading upon a twig. Instantly he sank to his knees, silently enduring the flare of pain from his rib cage and knee joint. He waited breathlessly for another sound, realizing either a tiger or even one of the ravenous dragons that terrorized the region could be tracking the Magicker. His many years as a guerrilla fighter and hunter had honed his senses to such an uncanny degree of sharpness he sometimes fancied he could hear sounds before they were made.
