"Where are you going on this train?" the stranger asked.
"Dover City."
"Is that woman your mother?" He inclined his head in the direction of the passenger car.
"No. My parents are dead." He burst into tears. "I killed them."
The man's eyelids lowered and the corners of his mouth curved upward. "Good," he said softly. "Does anyone know what you can do?"
Jeremiah stammered, confused.
"The snow. The boy in the corridor. Things like that."
The boy shook his head.
"You know, if anyone finds out about you, they'll kill you."
Jeremiah's trembling worsened. "I won't do it anymore," he said weakly.
The man laughed. "You know as well as I that you can't control this— this ability of yours. You were asleep when you caused the snowstorm. Stop that sniffling at once." He shoved the boy's shoulder painfully. "It can only be directed. And used. Yes, this talent of yours could prove to be quite helpful."
"At the home in Dover City, they're going to put me in jail, aren't they?"
The man smiled a sly, oily smile. "But you're never going to reach Dover City," he said. "This encounter with me has changed your fate finally and inexorably. You will be rich. You will be free to take anything you want on the face of the earth. You will lead a life that is both unique and invincible. And you will be, with proper guidance and discipline, of invaluable assistance to me."
"Who are you?" the boy asked, ignorant of half the words the strange man had spoken.
"I am the Master," he said.
Then he shattered the glass in the cabin's window, gathered the boy up in his arms, and hurled them both outside into the cold to roll down the snowy, bramble-coated hillside as the train coughed on and out of sight.
* * *
Outside the castle's slit windows, the sea rumbled close to the palm trees. High tide. The Dutchman had been in the same position for hours. Waiting. A stranger from the outside would have thought he was resting, but the Dutchman never rested. He waited, and that was different.
The door opened with a soft knock and a squat, dark-haired man wearing a shabby seafarer's uniform entered carrying a red lacquer box.
"What's this for?" the Dutchman asked.
The mute stared at him intently, watching the shape of his lips. He handed the Dutchman the box with a slight bow, then gestured with practiced, fluttering hands a message that made the Dutchman shudder to the tips of his fingers. "It can't be true," he said as the mute drew a long beard in the air. Two men— a tall young white man and an aged Oriental. The mute bowed again, picked up a quill pen and a sheet of rice paper from a table in the room, and wrote with large, difficult strokes:
THEY HAVE COME.
He handed the Dutchman the paper, bowed again, and left the room, again sheathed in darkness except for the eerie light of the full tropical moon outside. The Dutchman looked at the lacquer box in his hands and willed his, fingers to stop trembling. When they steadied, he tossed the box into the air, thrust his right hand upward, and with a delicate dancing rhythm of his fingers, shattered the box in midair into a thousand pieces.
An envelope fluttered from its place in the box, where it had rested for many years, and drifted into the Dutchman's hands.
"At last," he said quietly, clutching the envelope to his chest. He rose, feeling the chains of a lifetime loosen and break. He walked to the door, handed the envelope to the mute waiting outside, and said, "Take this to the man called Chiun."
When his servant had disappeared into the night, the Dutchman walked through the castle into a room with a hidden panel that led to another room, a tiny, square black box occupied by a small ebony shrine. The Dutchman knelt before it.
He spoke softly. "O Master of Darkness," he whispered. "Thank you for delivering these men into my hands. Their arrival is premature, but I promise I will not fail you. Your will is mine. I go forth into death without fear. You will be avenged."
The waiting was over.
?Two
His name was Remo and he was bellysmacking. It smarted, diving forty feet from a cliff and landing on his stomach in the reef-shallowed waters of L'Embouchure Bay.
"No, no," Chiun shrieked from the shore, his thin arms waving wildly over a 1920s red and black striped, knee-length bathing costume. "Come back. Come back at once."
Remo sloshed back toward shore in the calf-high water, his abdomen glowing a bright crimson.
Chiun folded his arms across his chest and shook his head, making his beard and the wispy tuft of white hair on his crown dance in the breeze like a banner. "Disgraceful," he said, pointing with a long fingernail to Remo's red belly. "You are soaked. You enter the water like a rock."
"Tell that to my stomach. It feels like a ripe tomato that's just been fired out of a cannon. That water's only a foot deep."
"Nine inches more than you need," said the old Oriental, his hazel eyes narrowing into slits above his parchment cheekbones. "The Flying Wall must be performed lightly, like a seagull skimming the waters. The dive was developed in my village of Sinanju in Korea. Perhaps the teachings of Sinanju are too rigorous for soft white men," he said with a tight smile.
"Chiun, I live for Sinanju. But I can't help it. I'm not you. My stomach turns red when I hit a coral reef at a hundred miles an hour. Besides, this is supposed to be our vacation."
"If you are so in need of rest that you cannot perform your exercises, I suggest that you remain abed." He sniffed. "This island sun cannot be good for one's health. Too warm."
Remo's night-dark eyes pinched in sudden understanding. "That's it. You're just ticked 'cause Smitty sent us here for vacation when we could have been lolling on the rocky, frozen shores of Sinanju. Right? Right?"
Chiun shrugged. "What can be expected from a white man? Perhaps Emperor Smith felt you were not sufficiently excellent on our last assignment to merit a stay in Sinanju. Perhaps this desolate, sun-filled place is a fitting punishment for your laziness in performing the exercises recommended by the Master of Sinanju."
"Sint Maarten's one of the most beautiful islands in the world," Remo said stubbornly. "It sure beats the hell out of that back-stabbing rock quarry you call home."
Chiun bristled, the white cloud of hair on his head whipping back and forth. "How dare you insult the name of my village?" he sputtered.
"The last time we set foot in that godforsaken dump, the local clowns tried to murder me," Remo yelled.
"Perhaps they had seen you attempt the Flying Wall. Heh, heh." He pointed to the cliff from which Remo had been diving. "Heh, heh. Flying Wall. More like Flying-Pile-of-Garbage. Heh, heh." He rubbed his stomach in painful reminder.
"Well, they didn't exactly roll out the welcome mat for you, either. After all the gold you've sent them, they all sided with Nuihc, against you. He was calling himself the Master of Sinanju, and they believed him."
Chiun winced with the memory.
The Master of Sinanju was obliged by a thousand-year-old custom to support his village through his earnings as an assassin— the best assassin in history— for the House of Sinanju was the sun source of all the martial arts. Chiun had honored that custom for most of his eighty-odd years. But Nuihc, his nephew, would not. Despite his lofty speeches to the villagers of Sinanju, Nuihc was a greedy, evil man who had lived in dishonor all his life, and planned to sell out the village to the Communist North Koreans as soon as he usurped Chiun's position as Master. Death was too good for him, but death had claimed him anyway.
"That is all past now," Chiun said quietly. "Still, my village of Sinanju is lovely in the springtime. Come, Remo. I will show you the Flying Wall."
Remo walked him to the edge of the water and watched as the little man scaled the sheer face of the cliff like a gaily striped spider. He loved the old man who still, in his eighth decade, toiled at the work of death to keep his ungrateful village alive. To Remo, Chiun was Sinanju, and all of the greatness of the training of Sinanju was embodied in him. Remo watched. He wanted to learn the Flying Wall.
The tiny figure on top of the cliff shot off the edge without hesitation. He continued like a projectile almost straight out for some 50 feet before descending. He looked like a colorful bearded bird as he shifted his arms to catch the thermal air pockets in the wind. He descended in a curve toward shore, and landed in the shallowest water without a splash. The momentum of his flight kept him skimming over the corals until he was within inches of Remo. Then he stood up, revealing only a slender band of wetness down the front of his body. Even the backs of his legs were dry.