Warren Murphy - Last Rites

There Remo hesitated. And in that moment he sensed a presence behind him.

Remo whirled. And there stood Chiun, his face stiff in the moonlight, his hands tucked into the joined sleeves of his kimono.

"What are you doing up here?" Remo asked harshly.

"I have come this far, but I will go no farther. This is your quest. You must see it to its end, no matter how bitter it is for both of us."

"You want me to go in here or not?"

"I offer no opinion," Chiun said, voice and eyes thin.

"Okay," Remo said thickly. And he stepped in.

The moonlight showed red sandstone for several yards. When he passed into the dark portion, he stopped, letting the visual purple in his eyes adjust to the blackness. His heart thumped, but he felt a strange calmness come over his mind.

As his eyes adjusted, Remo began to see low shapes on both sides of the cave and his mouth went dry.

THE MASTER OF SINANJI stood in the moonlight looking into the cave. He watched the back of his pupil recede beyond the wash of pure moonlight and in his heart bid a silent farewell to him. After this night nothing would ever be the same again, he knew.

Then out of the cave came Remo's excited voice. "Chiun, get in here!"

"I will not," Chiun called back.

"You gotta. I need your help."

"For me to enter that cave is to die. Your own mother told you this."

"That's not what she said, and if you don't come in here right now, I'm coming out there to drag you in!"

His face warping with a succession of conflicting emotions, Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, passed grimly into the forbidding cave.

He saw the first sack of bones to his right. It was a mummy. There was another on the opposite side, facing it. Two sad bundles of bones wrapped in faded Indian blankets. Farther along sat two more mummies. They reclined in niches carved out of the porous red sandstone.

At the end of the tunnel of sandstone, whose sides were repositories for the dead, Remo Williams knelt beside a living man, cradiing his head on his lap.

"It's Sunny Joe," Remo whispered, pain in his voice. "I think he's dying, Chiun."

But the eyes of the Master of Sinanju were not on his pupil or the dying man, but on the thing in the great arched niche beyond. The niche at the very end of the cave.

It was a mummy like the others. It wasn't dressed in Indian blankets, but in a silken robe whose cut and color and fineness marked it unmistakably as a kimono woven in the village of Sinanju long ago during the Silla period.

Looking up, Remo saw Chiun looking beyond him, transfixed.

"That's the mummy I saw in my vision. It looks just like you."

"It is Kojong," whispered Chiun. "It is the lost -Master."

"Never mind him. Help me."

Tearing his eyes from the mummy in faded yellow silk, Chiun knelt beside the dying man.

He was well over six feet tall with a strong, weathered face and deep-set brown eyes. Dust caked his face, and his lips were parchment dry and cracked.

Placing a palm to his mouth and nose, Chiun tested the breathing. Long fingers felt along the spine and throat.

"His ki is failing," Chiun said.

Remo looked stricken. "He can't die now. I just found him."

A low cough came from deep within the unconscious man.

Resting an ear against his chest, Chiun listened patiently until a second cough racked the body. Chiun lifted his head. "It is the mouse disease," he said gravely.

"What's that?"

"A malady carried by mice when they are abounding. It fills the lungs with death. If he can be revived, he might be saved." And Chiun began to manipulate the man's spine.

Sunny Joe Roam stirred. His eyes blinked open. "I know you," he said.

"I know you, too," Remo said.

"You're dead. Does that mean I'm dead now?"

"None of us are dead, brother," Chiun said softly. "If you have any strength in your body, draw upon it that you might be saved."

"Water. There's water in Sanshin's canteen."

"Sanshin?" Remo and Chiun said in one voice. "My horse. Appreciate a swig."

Remo ran down to get it, but when he came back to administer it, Sunny Joe took one tentative sip, then his head lolled to one side in Remo's supporting hand.

"No," Remo moaned.

"He is not dead," Chiun said, stern voiced. "But we must make haste."

Tears streaming from his eyes, Remo said, "You told me he was dead."

"And he that you were dead. But if you would have him live, you must do as I say."

"How do I know you won't let him die just to save your village?"

"Because you know just as I know that this man is of my village. I am pledged to preserve his life. As are you. If you are not a good son to him, then you at least will do this for Sinanju."

Chiun accepted the man's head in his lap. Remo stood up. "What do you need?"

"Viper wine has always been very efficacious against the mouse disease."

"Any viper do?"

Chiun nodded. "So long as it is poisonous."

Remo went out into the night and down into the desert, his heart a stone. Closing his eyes, he swept the desert with his entire sensitive body. It was night. Snakes would be in their holes.

Remo walked purposefully toward the first tiny heartbeat he heard.

It was a mouse. In his anger, he kicked sand toward it. A second mouse led him on a frantic chase through brambles before he saw it was a rodent.

Remo soon learned to tune out the warm-blooded mice and seek the slower heartbeats of cold-blooded creatures.

He found a red-and-black banded coral snake not long after.

When Remo stuck his hand into the burrow, the coral snake struck. Its fangs snapped on empty air, and Remo grabbed its entire head in his hand, dragging it out into the moonlight. With it coiled around his arms, he resumed his hunt.

A sidewinder undulating along the sand saw Remo approach and tried to slither away. Remo enveloped its head in his free hand and, bearing two twisting, squirming, writhing serpents, he ran back to Red Ghost Butte, scared and hopeful at the same time.

But in his heart there was a cold feeling that he had come this far only to watch his father die.

SUNNY JOE ROAM flickered in and out of consciousness as the Master of Sinanju examined the two snakes. Selecting the coral snake, he milked it by holding the head so the jaws gaped. He held the exposed fangs over a rude cup he had fashioned from sandstone, hooking them to the edge. The clear yellow venom dripped for nearly a minute-an agonizingly slow time for Remo.

Chiun added water and, taking some brambles between his hands, set them alight by the friction of his hands.

The venom was soon bubbling.

"Will it work?" Remo asked anxiously.

"We need ginseng root," Chiun said without emotion.

"Where are we going to get ginseng in a desert?" Remo said bitterly.

Chiun looked up. "You must prepare yourself for whatever may come."

"That's easy for you to say. He's not your father."

Sunny Joe's sun-squint eyes fluttered open. He saw Chiun. "Hey, chief. How's it going?"

"I am well, brother. And you?"

"My time's about up, I reckon."

"Do not say that."

Sunny Joe's eyes found Remo's. "I thought I'd dreamed I saw you. The old chief told me you'd bought it during that parachute drop."

"He told me the same about you," Remo said.

"What about it, chief?"

"I did what I must," Chiun said, not looking up from the boiling venom.

Remo swallowed three times before saying his next words, "I'm not who you think I am."

"No. Who are you?"

From his wallet, Remo took the folded drawing. Unfolding it, he held it before Sunny Joe's pain-wracked eyes.

"Do you recognize her?"

Sunny Joe's eyes seemed to pass over the drawing without recognition. Then they grew sharp. "Where'd you get that?"

"It's a police drawing."