Warren Murphy: The Arms of Kali

"Ivory," Remo whispered, and their eyes locked. "I know who you are and I know who I am now too. I don't care what happens to the statue. I love you. I have for two thousand years."

She looked at him, then dropped the gun silently into the thick carpet and took a step toward him. "I feel it, but I don't understand it," she said.

"Two thousand years ago," Remo said, "we were lovers. I was a Master of Sinanju and you were a priestess of Kali and we loved. Until Kali separated us."

The name forced Ivory to glance again at the statue, and she said, "But I serve Kali." Her face bore a bewildered expression.

"Don't serve Her," Remo said. "Don't leave me again." He stepped forward and kissed her, and again he felt the peace of a quiet valley in a distant time. Once again he was with her, just as he had lain with her in a bed of flowers.

"Destroy it," she hissed. "Do it quickly, while there is time. Do it for us. I love-"

She stiffened.

"Ivory," Remo said. He shook her. Her hands clawed at her neck, tore at her clothing. Her eyes, round with fear, pleaded silently with him. From her lips came a choking gasp. She grasped Remo's arms, but a convulsion shook her and her hands fell limply as she sank into Remo's arms.

"Ivory!" Remo screamed. He lifted her in his arms and turned toward the statue.

The statue sprouted a small bud of an arm.

"Kali is a jealous goddess, my son," Chiun said. He took Ivory's body from Remo's arms and floated to the carpet in lotus position, gently setting the body down. The only sign of tension in the old man was in his hands as he placed them together, like a child in prayer.

He began to moan, and Remo dropped to his side. "Chiun. Are you all right?"

"There ... is no air to breathe," Chiun said softly. He bowed his head, his white hair trembled. Then his whole head shook in a violent spasm and lurched backward as if some invisible hand had yanked it.

Remo touched the old man briefly in panic, then rose and turned toward the statue.

"You've done this," he shouted, and threw a lethal kick at the head of the stone carving. His foot never reached it. His legs buckled and he sprawled on the floor. He rose again and tried to smash the statue with his hands, but his arms hung uselessly, refusing to serve him.

He turned toward Chiun and his mouth hung open in horror. A small blue spot had appeared on Chiun's forehead and it was growing.

The ring, Remo thought. He fumbled in his pocket. What would he do with it? He couldn't wear it. Would its mere presence be enough? He wrapped his fingers around it and pulled it out. Then, holding it in front of him as if he were confronting a vampire with a cross, he approached the statue.

His legs could barely move. Inside him was a heaviness that seemed to drag his heart into the depths of hell. He had no strength and it took all the concentration of his mind and muscles to lift his palm with the silver ring in it and move it toward the impassively malicious face of the idol.

The ring glowed for a moment, and for that instant Remo thought that the ring-Lu's ring, given to him by the woman he loved-could save him. But the glow faded and scores of small pits appeared in the silver as it melted and the molten metal, burned through his skin and his flesh with a terrible searing pain.

He screamed and fell thrashing to the floor. The pain pounded through his body and the tender flesh on his palm sizzled. The bud of an arm on Kali's torso grew before his eyes, and the goddess's sickly-sweet smell overpowered the room. Remo knew that the power of the ring was as nothing compared with the foul energy that emanated from the hideous stone sculpture.

As he lay there, he looked toward Chiun. There was no pleading in the old man's eyes, as there had been in Ivory's. There was no fear, no shame, no accusation. Remo, numb in his own pain, ached for the old teacher. Chiun's eyes looked ancient and hollowed, and the blue mark on his forehead was growing, darkening. Chiun was dying, more slowly than most because he could control the responses of his own body, but dying. And there was nothing in the dying old eyes except peace.

"Chiun," Remo whispered. He tried to drag himself across the floor. If he must die, let it be with the man who had given him life. But nothing inside him worked anymore. Remo could not even lift his head from the floor.

He closed his eyes. He could not bear the sight of Chiun's proud face as it succumbed to death.

Then a voice spoke.

Its origin was not outside Remo, but somewhere in the recesses of his mind. It was more a feeling than a voice, but it carried the acrid scent of the goddess, acrid and cloying. It might have been the stink of his own burning flesh, he thought, but the pain was so great and the certainty of Chiun's death was so hard that he was forced to accept the truth: that Kali was now inside him, controlling and mocking him. Then She spoke to him in Her own tongue just as She had spoken to Master Lu two millennia before.

"This is only the beginning of your punishment," the voice said. Then it laughed, high and tinkling as a chorus of tiny bells.

"I brought her back for you, child of Lu," the voice told Remo. "A different body, but the same woman. Born to bring you a moment's joy, as Lu's woman served him. And taken by me just as quickly."

The bells were gone from the voice now, and it was rock-hard ice.

"You could have loved me as Lu could have loved me. You could have served me. But you chose to die instead. And you shall: As your woman has died. As the old man now is dying. Except their deaths will be quick. Yours will be the best that I can provide."

Remo forced his eyes open. The voice disappeared. Chiun lay on his side, unmoving. He had given up. He had waited for Remo to save him, and Remo once again had chosen to hide behind his own closed eyelids.

"You will not kill him," Remo said, pulling himself with a desperate effort to his knees. A wave of unseen energy slapped him hard across the chest. Bile rose in his throat, and he wavered, but he pulled himself up still further. "Maybe I deserve your punishment," he whispered. "Maybe Lu did. Maybe even Ivory. But you will not have Chiun."

He brought himself to his full height. His hand still burned. His head still spun. His insides were water. His legs were immobile, but he was standing and he knew in that moment that he would never kneel before Kali again.

"False hero," the voice said again. "You are weak. Your teacher was weak. All are weak before me." But I will not bow before you, another voice inside him said. It was a small voice, from a place very far removed from his mind, but it spoke, and Kali listened. "No."

A sharp stab of pain clutched at his stomach. Blood spurted from his nose and mouth.

Remo stood.

The glob of molton silver in his hand sizzled into liquid again, burning down the length of his fingers. Remo stood.

His ears were pierced by something that felt like two hot wires jabbed into his eardrums. They filled his ears with a sound like the wail of a thousand screams.

And yet he stood, and quieted them with his will. He could feel his strength returning. He raised his head and stared directly into the evil eyes of the stone goddess.

"You are not Lu," the voice said.

"No," Remo answered coldly, speaking aloud in the silent room.

"But you have his spirit."

"And another's," Remo said.

"Who are you?" The demand was a shriek, silent in the physical room he occupied, but reverberating inside him like the keening of a banshee.

And then he answered, from the place inside himself, the place that did not make itself known even to Remo, and the voice from the place spoke its own words, the words of the old prophecy of Sinanju:

I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds. The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju."