It was over. Remo clasped his own hands together tightly. "Why?" he called out in anguish, looking at the small body at his feet. "I didn't want to kill him. He didn't deserve to die."
It echoed through the empty hills. He was afraid to move.
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Maybe he should never have learned the teachings of Sinanju, he thought. He wasn't worthy of it. A true Master would have found a way to stop the fight. But then, neither Ancion nor Kiree had permitted the fight to stop.
Nothing made sense. Nothing. He had spent a lifetime fighting fools and mindless killers and human vermin, and within a week he had discovered two men who could match him in every respect. And he had killed them both.
Who was the mindless killer now?
I'm supposed to kill bad guys, he thought. Not Kiree, who accepted me as his friend. Not Ancion, so fair that he allowed me to live when he could easily have finished me in a stroke.
"Father, this test is too difficult for me," he whispered. But Chiun's voice did not come. Whatever he had to learn from the Master's Trial, he had to learn alone.
He carried Kiree's body to a far cliff and buried it beneath a small bala -tree. He chose the spot because there was a spider in one of the branches, spinning a net as fine as gossamer. He spoke to the spider,
"May your spirit return quickly, my friend," he said.
The spider threw out a strand of silk and added^it to her net.
Chapter Eleven
Tired. So tired.
The Dutchman staggered between the two wooden posts that signaled the division between Chinese Manchuria and North Korea along the rutted road where he walked. It was dawn again, and from the dawn when he left the Russian girl in the forest to the present one, he had known nothing. The beast inside him had run wild, feasting its desires at its every whim, not sleeping, not eating. The long path he had walked was strewn with death and calamity.
Perhaps his own death was coming soon. He hoped for it, longed for it. With death would come the peace he had never known. He trudged ahead, exhausted and burning from the spent incandescence of his power. The power was a volatile thing. With each exertion, it seared his brain and body like a firebomb. Without rest, the power would surely destroy what little sanity still remained somewhere inside him. Like a burning star, the Dutchman would consume himself in his own flames.
But without death. The beast would see that he lived, tortured and agonized, until he was an old man.
Ill
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By mid-afternoon, he could smell the sea. The voices of fishermen drifted toward him, their snatches of conversation complaining about the weather and the catch. The Dutchman followed the voices.
On a gravel path walked three men passing a bottle among them. One of them stumbled, hanging on to the others for support. "Look, a white," he said in provincial Korean.
"Probably a spy. There was another not long ago. I saw him on the beach."
"In the shape you're in, you'd see mermaids. With three tits." The men snorted and doubled over with laughter.
"Can you direct me to the village of Sinanju?" the Dutchman asked them in perfect Korean. The men looked surprised.
"I think it's over that way," the most coherent of them said, pointing vaguely inland.
"Thank you." The Dutchman did not turn away, but stared instead into the man's eyes: He was growing comfortable with the beast within him. It wanted to play. "That's a nasty burn on your arm."
"Hm? What?" The fisherman glanced down at his arm. "There's nothing wrong with-" He sucked in his breath. Before his eyes, the man's forearm bubbled into red, seeping blisters. "What's happened?"
The others came around to examine the arm. It was swelling to twice its size. The hair on it frizzled and disappeared. The outer skin dried, then blackened.
The man screamed. The others drew back, watching the Dutchman with alarm.
"Take out your eyes," he commanded the man holding the bottle.
With a shudder, the man squatted on the ground and broke the bottle on a rock.
"Yi Sun!" the third man said. But the eyes of the man
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with the broken bottleneck in his hands never left the Dutchman. Viciously he struck his own face with the jagged glass, digging deep into his eye sockets until streams of clear liquid poured out of them and two pulpy masses hung down his cheeks.
The third man emitted a wail that was half-whisper, half-sob, and skittered backward.
"You!" the Dutchman called.
The man covered his face and ran. Within ten paces he dropped, the ground red with scattered blood and intestines for a hundred feet in all directions. His belly had exploded.
The Dutchman threw his head back and laughed. The power, coursing through him, filled him with ecstasy. Then, as quickly as the sensation had come, it vanished, leaving him groggy and weak.
He vomited. There was blood in the thin liquid that came out of him. Not long . . . not long now. His body was skeletal, his vision blurry.
Find Chiun. And then, his promise fulfilled, he could seek death in peace. If he accomplished his mission, Nuihc's spirit would allow him some comfort at the end. He had promised him rest.
Chiun was nearby. The caves. There was a force coming from one of them, a power, a music. He had reached his quarry.
"Thank you, Nuihc," he whispered, stumbling forward blindly.
Rest. After a lifetime of torment, he would find rest at last.
The tiny porcelain cup in H'si T'ang's hands dropped to the floor.
"Master?" Chiun asked, moving to the old man's side. "Are you not well?"
"He is here." He gestured with a trembling hand to-
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ward the opening of the cave. "The Other ... the Other has come."
Chiun sprang to his feet and waited in the shadows of the cave entrance.
"But something is wrong. His aura is broken, almost disappeared. . . . Now, my son. Now."