He flexed his left leg, wincing at the deep muscle pain from her kick, twisted his torso and asked it if she had truly broken those ribs in their intimate tango of interrogation or had only bruised them. But he couldn't waste time on healing. He had to walk the labyrinth before Merlin's magic counted down its heartbeats and blocked him from the passage. Before someone broke that door open and found Dierdre lying battered and unconscious at the altar.
Maybe she felt she had a duty to Mulvaney and his betrayed honor? More likely this was Machiavellian office politics, a way to tie Brian and Duncan together and destroy an enemy blocking her path. Duncan she didn't even respect, and the hate she'd shown in flashes down the years had nothing cordial to it.
Dim shouting echoed down from above. They were in.
He shook his head and cleared it. He couldn't waste time on thinking, either. He wiped the sweat from his hands and focused on the stone pattern set into the floor, remembering the Way he'd walked that other hidden pattern, dropping his mind into the Zen archer. He placed his right foot squarely on the line, and walked. As he walked, he drew the kukri from his belt and carried the bare steel balanced in his hand. Its calm weight was a comfort. Steel was always calm.
Again the room fell away from his concentration, from his meditation, as he became the stepping of his feet and then the clockwise inward spiral of the line they were stepping on. He visualized the arrow touching the tip of his nose and turned his head aside and closed his eyes, letting the target grow in his mind, draw nearer, swell until it filled the world.
He was the archer and the bow and the arrow and the target all in one, and the target loosed him to fly free. Power warmed him and drew him and he sank into the heart of it. He felt it flooding to a peak, this time, and beyond where the other Way was blocked. He couldn't miss.
"Halt! Who goes there?"
The words echoed in a hollow space, even though they had been spoken into dead silence rather than shouted, and they carried the feel of boredom. Brian had spent his time on sentry-go and knew the flavor well.
"Brian Albion."
"Huh?" And the man shook his head from the shadows. "Anzac."
Sign and countersign. Reflex answered "Gallipoli."
"Advance and be recognized."
Brian stepped across the lines of the labyrinth, shielding his knife in the gloom. Have to talk to the head of security about predictable passwords, traditions be damned. But that would be Dierdre, of course. At least she's told you that today is April 25, somewhere under Glastonbury.
If she wasn't lying about where the pattern took you.
The sentry stood in shadow, peering at a list and clutching a submachine gun in his other hand, pointed at the ceiling. Brian gritted his teeth and then forced himself to relax. He concentrated on walking casually, the pace of a man who belonged. Body language could lie as persuasively as words . . .
Or broadcast the truth. The guard's fingers tightened on his SMG, and the kukri flew before Brian realized his hand had moved. Time did its battlefield trick where he swore he could see bullets in flight, and the muzzle of the 9mm swung down toward him and the kukri spun glinting through the air and orange sparks lit the bore and both he and the guard grunted surprise and impact and pain.
Spent shell casings tinkled across stone. Brian sank to his knees, swaying gently. The guard collapsed with a faint gurgle, one hand clutching the hilt of the kukri where it protruded above his left clavicle. Strange target, but Brian hadn't chosen it. The knife and his eyes and arm and fifty years of combat had made the decision for him, judging the bulk of the uniform as body armor and changing his aim in mid-swing.
He waited a moment, wondering why he could hear such things as the shell casings and the rustle of cloth as the man fell. He should be damn near deaf, with a 9mm fired in a tight space walled with stone. Suppressor. What the Yanks would call a silencer. So maybe the other guard wouldn't be here in seconds, or wasn't already taking aim from distant shadows.
He explored his left arm, finding blood hot and oily on the sleeve. The guard hadn't quite traversed far enough before he'd fired. Maybe had his weapon set for a three-shot burst rather than full auto, so he didn't keep firing as he fell and his fingers jerked in dying reflex. Forearm wound, a glancing furrow, Brian's fingers told him that the bone remained whole and major blood vessels intact. He'd had far worse before.
But his left side was another matter.
Brian sighed, gently, gently, his breath limited by stabs of pain. That one felt nasty. Descending colon, his body told him, perforation and leakage. Classic gut wound. Prognosis -- massive infection, ugly lingering death without immediate surgery and antibiotics.
For a human.
His abdominal muscles writhed, he curled around the fire blazing through his gut, and a hard lump slithered down inside his shirt. Just one slug. He gritted his teeth as the flames spread out from his side, his body ripping pathogens into shreds and knitting tissue across the ravages of the wound. He reached out for Power, felt it slipping away from him, couldn't grasp it. Merlin again, blocking, controlling, even after centuries. The old bastard wouldn't allow competing magic in this space.
He blinked swirling dots from his eyes and staggered to his feet, mopping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. His ears buzzed. Cumulative effect, the wounds and Dierdre's multiple gifts and the shock
