Alex Archer - Provenance

“And we wish you’d give some nice man a chance to.”

Annja sighed. She’d given some a chance. But they had a tendency to not stick around.

Or to die.

But she couldn’t tell her friends that. Even though their well-intentioned teasing was like sticking a knife in an open wound.

“What you need,” Mindy said, swirling a plastic sword with a piece of lime impaled on it in her tumbler of mineral water, “is a nice, rich oil sultan. But not one of the religious fanatic ones. Or a fat one with oily skin and too many rings. A handsome, dashing young sultan!”

“Right,” Annja said. “And they exist where?”

Clarice cocked an eyebrow at Mindy. “You been playing Prince of Persia on your PlayStation Two again?”

“All right, how about just a billionaire? I mean, a nice young billionaire. I’m not talking Donald Trump orange comb-over here.”

“If you just believed in yourself you could catch one,” Clarice told Annja. “Get him to take you for a nice cruise—What?”

Annja shuddered.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Clarice said.

“That’s one way to look at it.”

Clarice set her generous mouth. “All right. Be that way.”

“She will,” Mindy said, spearing a bit of lettuce. “She always is.”

BACK IN HER LOFT Annja stood gazing at her couch by the light of a lamp with a black metal shade. She had changed to russet sweats, a green T-shirt and running shoes. “Do I really spend too much time here with my papers and artifacts?” she wondered aloud.

Of course not, she assured herself. She trotted the globe almost incessantly, both for Chasing History’s Monsters and on adventures of her own that were far less publicized.

But the evenings she spent on her sofa reading papers and arcane journals—not to mention alt. archaeo and alt.archaeo.esoterica—struck her now as sadly symptomatic of a major hole in her life. She couldn’t escape it even by racing around the world.

Get off this track in a hurry, she told herself sternly.

Her eyes strayed to the end of the couch. The emerald pendant Garin had lent to her that night on the Ocean Venture was strung over the heavy wood frame like a cheap Mardi Gras trinket from New Orleans. He had insisted she keep it. When she tried to demur, saying it made her feel uncomfortable, he only laughed.

“Our destinies are intertwined anyway,” he told her. “A bauble more or less makes no difference either way, don’t you see?”

He had a point, she had to admit. She had hung it there, in plain sight, almost defiantly. She figured in the event anyone burgled her loft they’d leave it alone, figuring it had to be paste and gold paint.

She sat down on the couch, clicked on the television. Tuning it to a station that was showing a documentary on sea turtles—innocuous enough—and turning the volume just low enough to provide a reassuring murmur of background noise, she opened her notebook computer and went to download her e-mail.

She had just gotten engrossed in the current flame war regarding the true origins and purpose of the famous giant stone Olmec heads when her skylight exploded in a tinkling cascade of gleaming glass shards, and men dressed all in black came sliding on ropes into her living room.

Annja pushed the computer off onto the couch and leapt to her feet. Her rational mind was gridlocked. This is totally impossible, this can’t be happening, things like this don’t happen, it doesn’t make any sense—

Fortunately her body had long since learned how to react to immediate danger without relying on her brain. The sword appeared in her hand almost as if by its own accord.

The men descending from the shattered skylight in a downward roil of humid air were dressed in black, from boots to masks. Unlike the balaclavas worn by the Ocean Venture hijackers these lacked mouth holes. The intruders carried what looked like submachine guns of a design unfamiliar to Annja.

Two landed in the middle of her hardwood floor. They turned to her. With her left hand Annja scooped up a heavy fossil of a large chambered nautilus that a paleontologist friend had given her. She threw it at the one on her left. He raised a black-clad arm to protect his face.

The heavy stone crunched when it hit his arm. Whether it broke the bone or not he reeled back, off balance. His partner seemed nonplussed by the fury of her counterattack—and by the sight of her suddenly swinging a broadsword with a three-foot blade in her right hand.

Belatedly he started to lift his weapon. She slashed him diagonally across the neck. He fell back clutching at his blood-spurting throat.

Taking the sword’s hilt in both hands Annja screamed her fury at the violation of her sanctum and swung with all her might at the man who had deflected the fossil with his arm. That arm dangled. He tried to aim at her one-handed. Her blade caught him at the juncture of neck and shoulder and bit deep into his torso. He dropped to his knees.

He was wearing body armor. It didn’t surprise her. It also gave little protection against her sword, which struck at the edge of his shell and found flesh. Hard-shell armor would bind her blade worse. She put her hips into yanking the weapon free.

The man fell onto his masked face. His blood soaked into her throw rug.

It occurred to her that if this was some SWAT team she was in big trouble. In her anger she didn’t care. She respected the police, but she also respected a document some people seemed to think irrelevant—the Bill of Rights. She couldn’t square masked paramilitaries kicking down people’s doors and invading their homes without presentation of warrant with the protections supposed to be guaranteed to Americans—which no act of Congress nor stroke of presidential pen was supposed to be able to contravene. No matter what kind of “official” sanction these men could have, to her mind their actions made them nothing but violent criminals.

And if she had to flee the country, live on the run—well, Garin and her mentor Roux had been living outside the law for centuries. She would learn from them, or learn on her own.

Two more men rushed at her. Beyond the light cast by her lamp she saw more figures descending from the skylight’s jagged blackness. Her heart sank. How many of them are there? she wondered desperately.

She parried an overhand sword cut from the nearer man, on her left. The sound of steel on steel was ringing in her ears before the realization struck her—there was no SWAT team anywhere in the United States whose members carried short-swords slung in scabbards over their backs. Belatedly she realized she had seen the hilts protruding above the shoulders of the first two men she had cut down. Her mind had refused to assimilate them at first, so unexpected were they.

Reflexively she had thrown her right hand up any which way in response to the stimulus of seeing the two-foot straight blade flashing toward her eyes, and stopped it with the flat of her own weapon. Shouting again in anger she spun right, dropping her weight as she did so. Her sword sang a rising, skirling song as it slid across the other’s edge and whipped free. The second man, trying to close on her right, danced back to avoid its downward-slashing tip.

She went low, scything out with her right leg in a spinning sweep. The first attacker did not expect the move. It took him in the side of the right calf and knocked both legs right out from under him.

She completed her spin, driving with her left leg, coming up from the floor, slashing up and right with her sword. The second man hacked at her. Metal rang like a bell, a high pure note. Then the intruder was staring in stunned amazement at the stump of his sword blade, cut off clean from his cross hilt.