Wildcards

II.

The air was flat and unmoving and clogged Brennan's nostrils with the miasma of seven million people crammed too closely together. After three years in the mountains he was unused to the city, but he was still able to take advantage of it. One man among thousands, he was seen but not noticed, heard but not remembered, as he walked to Minh's restaurant on Elizabeth, carrying his flat leather case.

It was early evening and the street was still crowded with potential customers, but the restaurant was closed. That was strange.

The vestibule, the only part of the restaurant's interior visible from the street, was dark. The sign hanging on the inside of the outer glass door said "Closed. Please call again." in English and Vietnamese. Three men, city punks, lounged on the street in front of the building, joking among themselves.

Brennan walked to the corner, trying to drape his sudden apprehension with a cloak of calmness. He ran through a series of breathing exercises that had been Ishida's first lesson to him when he had decided to give direction to his life by studying the Way. Apprehension, fear, nervousness, hatred-these would do him no good. He needed the ineffable calmness of an unbroken, unclouded mountain pool.

Kien was still alive. Of that he never had a doubt. Kien was a cunning and ruthless survivor to whom the fall of Saigon was merely an inconvenience. It would have taken him some time, but Brennan knew that he must have built a network of agents as potent and relentless as his network in Vietnam. These agents, given the few days that it took the letter to be written, delivered, and acted upon, could have tracked Minh down.

He turned the corner and, unnoticed by the other pedestrians on the street, slipped into a side alley bordering Minh's restaurant. It was dark there, and as quiet and rank as death. He crouched next to a pile of uncollected garbage, listening and watching. He saw nothing, as his eyes adjusted to the deeper gloom of the alley, besides scavenging cats. He heard nothing but the rustling sounds they made as they searched through the garbage.

He set his case down and flicked open its latches. He could barely see in the gloom, but he needed no light at all to assemble what lay inside. He snapped on and dogged down the limbs, upper and lower, to the central grip, and with sure, practiced strength slipped the string over the lower tip, stepped through, set the tip of the lower limb against his foot, bent the upper limb against the back of his thigh, and slipped the string over its tip. He brushed the taut string with his fingers and smiled at the low thrumming sound it produced.

He held a recurved bow, forty-two inches long, made of layers of fiberglass laminated around a yew core. Brennan knew it was a good bow. He had made it himself. It pulled at sixty pounds, powerful enough to bring down a deer, bear, or man.

The case also held a three-fingered leather glove which Brennan slipped on his right hand and a small quiver of arrows which he attached to his belt by Velcro tabs. He pulled one free. It was tipped by a hunting broadhead with four razorsharp vanes. He nocked it loosely to the taut string and, more silent than the cats scrabbling through the uncollected garbage, crept to the restaurant's back door.

He listened, but could hear nothing. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and cracked it open half an inch. An arc of light spilled out and he found himself looking into a swatch of the kitchen. It, too, was empty and quiet.

He slid inside, a silent blot of darkness in the stainless steel and white porcelain room. Keeping low, moving fast, he went to the double swinging doors that led out into the dining area and cautiously peeked through the oval window set into the door. He saw what he had been afraid he would see. The waiters, cooks, and customers were huddled together in one corner of the room under the watchful eyes of a man armed with an automatic pistol. Two others held Minh spreadeagled against a wall while a third worked him over. Minh's face was bruised and bloody, his eyes were swollen shut. The man who was beating him methodically with a leather sap was also questioning him.

Brennan slipped down below the window, his teeth clenched, rage swelling the veins in his neck and reddening his face.

Kien had recognized Minh and ordered him hunted down. Minh was one of the few people in America who could identify Kien, who knew that he had methodically and ruthlessly used his position as an ARVN general to betray his country, his men, and his American allies. Brennan, of course, also knew Kien for what he was. He also knew that whatever place Kien had made for himself in America, those in authority would respect, listen to, and probably even fear him. Brennan, on the other hand, since he had walked away from the Army in disgust during the debacle of the Fall of Saigon, was an outlaw. No one in authority knew that he was back in the States, and he wanted to keep it that way.

He reached into his back pocket, withdrew a hood, and slipped it on, covering his features from his upper lip to the top of his head.

He took a moment to breathe deep, to drown his emotions in a void of nothingness, to forget his rage, his fear, his friend, his need for revenge, to forget even himself. He became nothing so that he would be all. He was not angry, not calm. He rose silently to his feet and stepped through the door, sank down on one knee behind a table and drew his first shaft.

The quiet, assured words of Ishida, his roshi, filled his mind like the somnolent tolling of a great bell.

"Be simultaneously the aimer and the aimed, the hitter and hit. Be a full vessel waiting to be emptied. Loose your burden when the moment is right, without thinking or direction, and in that manner know the Way."

He stared without seeing, forgetting whether his targets were men or bales of hay, loosed his first shaft, dropped his hand to the quiver at his belt, took out his next arrow, nocked, lifted the bow, and drew the string while the first shaft was still on its way.

The first arrow hit while he was shifting his aim to take in the third target. They realized they were being attacked by the time the second arrow had struck and the fourth was released. By then it was too late.

He had chosen the order of his targets before becoming submerged in the void. The first was the man guarding the hostages with the drawn gun. The shaft struck him in the back, high on the left side. It skewered his heart, sliced through one lung, and burst out half a foot from his chest. The impact hurled him forward, astonished, into the arms of a waiter.

They both stared at the bloody aluminum shaft protruding from his chest. The gunman opened his mouth to swear or pray, but blood gushed forth, drowning his words. He slumped forward, his legs gone rubbery, and the waiter dropped him.

The two who held Minh released him. He slumped to the floor as they reached for the weapons at their belts. One had his hand pinned to his stomach before he could draw; the other was nailed to the wall. He dropped his pistol and clutched at the shaft pinning him like an insect staked to a drying-board. The last, the one who had been questioning Minh, whirled around and was struck in the side. The arrow angled upward, slipped between his ribs, pierced his heart, and punched upward through his right shoulder.

Nine seconds had elapsed. The sudden silence was broken only by the pained weeping of the man nailed to the wall.

Brennan crossed the room in a dozen strides. The hostages were still too stunned to move. Two of the thugs were dead. Brennan took no pleasure in their deaths, as he took no pleasure in killing deer to provide meat for his table. It was just something that had to be done. Neither did he waste his pity on them.

The one who was gutshot was curled up on the floor, unconscious and in shock. The other, pinned to the wall by the shaft that had pierced his chest, was still alert. Fear twisted his face and when he looked into Brennan's eyes his sobbing grew to a wail.

Brennan stared at him without remorse. He drew a shaft from his quiver. The man started to babble. Brennan slashed out. The broadhead cut the man's throat as easily as if it were a razor. Brennan dispassionately stepped aside from the sudden spurt of blood, slipped the arrow back into the quiver, and knelt down by Minh.

He was badly hurt. All his limbs were broken-it must have been agonizing to have been held up the way he wasand internal damage must have been massive. His breathing was shallow and shuddering. His eyes were swollen shut. They probably wouldn't have focused even if he could have opened them.

"Ong Id ai?" he breathed at Brennan's gentle, probing touch. Who are you?

"Brennan."

Minh smiled a ghastly smile. Blood bubbled on his lips and gleamed on his teeth.

"I knew you would come, Captain."

"Don't speak. We have to get help-"

Minh shook his head. The effort cost him. He coughed and grimaced in pain.

"No. I am dying. I must tell you. It is Kien. This proves it. They wanted to know if I told anyone, but I would say nothing. They don't know of you."

"They will," Brennan promised. Minh coughed again.

"I had hoped to help. Like the old days. Like the old days." His mind wandered for a moment and Brennan looked up.

"Call an ambulance," he ordered. "And the police. Tell them there's three more on the street in front. Move." One of the waiters leaped to follow his orders while the others watched in mute incomprehension.

"Help you," Minh repeated, "help you." He fell silent for a moment and then seemed to make a supreme effort to speak rationally and clearly. "You must listen. Scar has kidnapped Mai. I was following him, trying to get a lead to where he had taken Mai, when I saw him and Kien together in the back of a limousine. Go to Chrysalis, Crystal Palace. She might know where he's taken her. I couldn't… find… out." His last sentence was interrupted by bloody fits of coughing.

"Why did they take her?" Brennan asked gently. "For her hands. Her bloody hands."

Brennan wiped the beads of sweat from Minh's forehead. "Rest easy now," he said.

But Minh didn't listen. He rose up, clutching Brennan's arm.

"Find Mai. Help. Her."

He settled back, sighed. Blood bubbled on his lips. "Toi met," he said. I am tired.

Brennan clenched his jaw against the ache and answered softly in. Vietnamese.

"Rest, then."

Minh nodded and died.

Brennan let him down gently and sat back on his heels, blinking rapidly. Not another one, he said to himself. Not another death. It was another thing Kien had to answer for. He stood, looked around, and saw nothing but fear on the faces of the people he had rescued. There was no sense in waiting. The police would only ask awkward questions. Like his name. There were plenty of people who would like to know that Daniel Brennan was still alive and back in the United States, Kien only one among them.

He had to leave before the police arrived. He had to follow the slim lead that Minh had left him. Chrysalis. Crystal Palace.

But he stopped, turned to the freed hostages. "… eed a pen," he said.

One of the waiters had a felt-tip marker that he wordlessly handed to Brennan. He paused for a moment. He wanted Kien to wake up at night in a cold sweat, thinking, wondering.

It wouldn't get to him right away, but, with enough messages, enough dead agents, it eventually would.

He scrawled a message next to the man nailed to the wall by his arrow. It said: "I'm coming for you, Kien."He stopped before signing it. His name wouldn't do. It would take the fear of the unknown from his attacks and give Kien, his agents, and his government contacts too concrete a clue to follow. He smiled as sudden inspiration struck him.

The code name of his last mission in Vietnam, when Kien had betrayed him and his unit into the hands of the North Vietnamese, had been Operation Yeoman. That name would make Kien think. He might suspect that it was Brennan who stood behind the name, but he wouldn't know for sure. It would gnaw at him in the night and salt his dreams with memories of deeds he'd thought long buried. It was also an appropriate name in a grimly ironic way. It suited him well.

He signed the short message Yeoman and then, in a burst of final inspiration, drew a small ace of spades, the Vietnamese symbol of death and ill-fortune, and colored it in. The Vietnamese waiters and kitchen help muttered to themselves at the sight of the mark, and the waiter from whom Brennan had borrowed the pen refused to take it back with quick, birdlike shakes of his head.

"Suit yourself," Brennan said. "How do I get to the Crystal Palace?"

One of them stammered directions and Brennan went back out through the kitchen, into the dark alley. He disassembled his bow, slipped it back into its case, and was gone before the police arrived. Still wearing his mask, he kept to the alleys and dark streets, passing other phantom figures in the darkness. Some watched him, some were absorbed in their own doings. None tried to stop him.

The Crystal Palace, on Henry, was part of a block-long three-story rowhouse. About half the row had been destroyed in the Great Jokertown Riot of 1976 and had never been rebuilt. Some of the debris had been cleared away, some remained in great piles sitting next to tottering walls. As Brennan passed he saw eyes, whether human or animal he couldn't tell, gleaming out from cracks and crevices within the piles of wreckage. He wasn't tempted to investigate. He went farther down the street to where the rowhouse was still intact, up the short stone staircase under a canopied entrance, through a small antechamber, and found himself in the main taproom of the Crystal Palace.

It was dark, crowded, and smoky. There was an occasional obvious joker, like the short, blubbery, tusked fellow peddling newspapers by the door and the bicephalic singer on the small stage managing some nice harmony on a Cole Porter tune. Some were normal enough until one looked close. Brennan noticed one man, normal, handsome even, except that he lacked a nose and mouth and had instead a long, curled proboscis that he extended like a straw into his drink as Brennan watched. Some wore costumes that called attention to their strangeness, as if to proclaim their infection in a defiant manner. Some wore masks to hide their deformities, although some who wore masks were naturals, or nats, in joker slang. "You a salesman?"

It took Brennan a moment to realize that the question was directed at him. He looked over to the end of the long wooden bar where a man sat on a high stool, swinging his short, stubby legs well clear of the floor. He was a dwarf, about four feet tall and four feet wide. His neck was as tall as a can of tuna fish and as thick as a man's thigh. He looked as solid and expressionless as a slab of marble.

"Those your samples?" he asked, gesturing at Brennans case with a hand that was twice the size of Brennan's. "Just the tools of my trade."

"Sascha."

One of the bartenders, a tall, thin man with a pencil mustache and an oily curl of hair falling limply over his forehead, turned toward the dwarf. Brennan had noticed him out of the corner of his eye, mixing and dispensing drinks with incredible speed and surety. When he turned at the dwarf's call Brennan saw that he had no eyes, only a blank, unbroken expanse of skin covering his sockets. The bartender looked in his direction and nodded rapidly.

"He's okay, Elmo, he's okay." The dwarf nodded and took his eyes off Brennan for the first time since he had spoken. Brennan frowned, was about to speak, but the bartender beat him to it. He pointed down to the other end of the bar and said, "She's over there."

Brennan pursed his lips. The eyeless man smiled briefly and turned away to mix another drink. Brennan looked in the direction the bartender had indicated and caught his breath.

A woman sat at a corner table with a slim, light-skinned black man who was wearing a red kimono splashed with yellow dragons and embroidered with what Brennan took to be mystical formulae. He was handsome, but for the bulging forehead that marred his profile. The chair he sat in was ordinary. The woman's chair was throne-sized, with a black walnut frame and red velvet cushions. She set down the thimble-sized crystal glass from which she was sipping a honey-colored liqueur, looked directly at Brennan, and smiled.

She wore pants that clung to her lithe figure and a sheathlike wrap that gathered over her right shoulder, leaving half her chest naked. Her skin was completely invisible, exposing vague, shadowy muscles and the organs that labored underneath them. Brennan could see blood pulsing in the network of veins and arteries that ran through her flesh, could see her ghostly, semitransparent muscles shift and glide at her slightest movement, could even see, faintly, the beating of her heart within the cage of her ribs and the fluttering of her lungs as they labored evenly and unceasingly.

She smiled at him. Brennan knew that he stared, but he couldn't help himself. She looked too bizarre to be beautiful, but she was fascinating. Her exposed breasts was totally invisible, save for its fine network of interlacing blood vessels and its large, dark nipple. Her face-well, who could tell? Her eyes were blue; her cheekbones, under the sheath of jaw muscle, high; her nose a cavity in her skull. Her lips, like the nipple of her breast, were visible. They were full and inviting and curved in a sardonic smile. She had no hair to hide her white skull. He threaded his way through the crowd toward her table and she watched him with what seemed to be, if he could read her bizarre expression, detached amusement. He watched the mechanism of her throat work as she sipped her drink.

"Forgive me," he began, and ran down to silence. She laughed. It was good-humored, with no bitterness, reproach, or anger. "Forgiveness granted, masked man," she said. "I'm a sight to behold. No one seeing me for the first time can act casual about it. I'm Chrysalis, owner and proprietress of the Crystal Palace, as I guess you know. This is Fortunato." The black looked at Brennan and he could see the man's eastern blood in the shape of his eyes. They nodded at each other wordlessly. There was, Brennan realized, an aura of power about this man. He was an ace, of that Brennan was suddenly sure.

"What's your name?" Chrysalis asked him.

She spoke in a cultured British accent, which would have surprised Brennan if he hadn't already exceeded his surprise quotient for the evening. Her voice had grown thoughtful, her expression seemed calculating.

"Yeoman," Brennan said, wondering how open he could afford to be.

"Interesting. Its not your real name, of course." Brennan looked at her silently.

"Would you like to know it?" her companion asked. Fortunato smiled lazily and she shrugged and smiled back noncommittally.

Fortunato looked at Brennan. 'His eyes grew deeper, darker. Brennan sensed a swirling vortex of power growing in them, power he suddenly realized was directed toward him.

He flashed with anger, his fists clenching, and he knew that he couldn't keep the spore-given ability of Fortunato from penetrating into the core of his brain. There was only one thing he could do.

He took a deep breath, held it, and let all thought drain from his mind. He was back in Japan again, facing Ishida, trying to answer the riddle the roshi has posed him when he had first sought entry to the monastery.

"A sound is heard when both hands are clapped. What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

Wordlessly Brennan had thrust forth one hand, clasped into a fist. Ishida had nodded, and Brennan's training began in earnest. He called upon that training now. He entered deeply into zazen, the state of meditation where he emptied himself of all thought, feeling, emotion, and expression. A timeless time passed and, as if from a long distance away, he heard Fortunato mutter, "Extraordinary" and he brought himself back.

Fortunato looked at him with a modicum of respect in his eyes. Chrysalis watched them both carefully.

"You're into Zen?" Fortunato asked.

"A humble student," Brennan murmured, his voice sounding even to him as if coming from a distant mountain peak.

"Maybe I'd better speak to Yeoman alone," Chrysalis said. "If you want." Fortunato stood.

"A moment." Brennan shook himself like a dog shedding water and returned entirely to the room. He looked at Fortunato. "Don't do that again."

Fortunato pursed his lips, nodded. "I'm sure we'll meet again."

He left the table, threading his way through the crowded room.

Brennan took his chair as Chrysalis gazed at him with what seemed to be a calculating expression.

"Strange that I haven't heard of you before," she said. "I've just come to town."

Her gaze had become penetrating, captivating. It was with some effort that Brennan pulled his gaze away from her eyes floating naked in their hollow sockets.

"On business?" she asked. Brennan nodded and she sipped her drink, sighed, put her glass down. "I can see that you're not in the mood for small talk. What do you want of me?"

"Your bartender," he began. "How does he get along so well without eyes?"

"That's an easy one," Chrysalis said with a smile. "I'll give it to you for free. Sascha's a telepath, among other things. Don't worry. Whatever secrets you're hiding behind your mask are safe. He's a skimmer. He can only read surface thoughts. Makes his job easier, makes the Crystal Palace safer. He tells Elmo who the dangerous, the sick, the twisted, are. And Elmo gets rid of them."

Brennan nodded, feeling a little safer. He was glad to learn that the bartender's ability was limited. He didn't like the thought of anyone poking about in his brain.

"What else?" Chrysalis asked.

"I need to know about two men. A man named Scar and his boss, Kien."

Chrysalis looked at him and frowned. At least, the muscles of her face bunched up. Like her bodily musculature, they looked wispy, insubstantial, as if that which made her flesh and skin totally invisible affected them to the point of translucency.

"You know that they're connected? That's something maybe only three people outside their own circle know. Are they friends of yours?" Sudden anger blazed across Brennan's face and she flinched. "No. I guess not."

Her words brought to life memories of treachery and violence. Sascha turned his blind gaze to their corner. Elmo stood on tiptoes, craning his thick neck. Around the room half a dozen people fell silent. One man clutched his temples and fainted dead away. He whimpered like a whipped dog as the others at his table tried to bring him out of his trance. Chrysalis broke her gaze from Brennan's, waved Elmo off, and the tension began, slowly, to dissipate.

"They're dangerous, both of them," she said calmly. "Kien's Vietnamese, an ex-general. He showed up about, oh, eight years ago. He quickly insinuated himself into the drug trade and now owns a large share of it. In fact, he has his fingers in most other illegal activities in the city, while maintaining a facade of solid respectibility. Owns a string of dry-cleaning establishments and restaurants. Donates to the proper charities and political parties. Gets invited to all the big social events. Scar's one of his lieutenants. He doesn't report directly to Kien. The general keeps himself well insulated."

"Tell me more about Scar."

"Local boy. I don't know his real name. He's called Scar because of the strange tattoos he's had smeared all over his face. They're supposed to be Maori tribal markings."

Brennan must have looked incredulous because Chrysalis shrugged. He watched muscles shift and bones rotate in their sockets. The nipple of her exposed breast bobbed up and down on its pad of invisible flesh.

"He supposedly got the idea from an anthropologist from NYU. who was studying his street gang. Something about urban tribalism. Anyway, he's one mean dude. He's Kien's chief muscle. Unbeatable in a fight." She gazed at him shrewdly. "You're going up against him."

It was a statement, not a question.

"What makes him unbeatable?"

"He's an instantaneous teleport. He can vanish quicker than anyone can move and reappear anywhere he wants to. Usually behind his opponent. He's also mean as hell. He could be big stuff, but he likes to kill too much. He's content with being one of Kien's lieutenants. Not that he does badly for himself." She toyed with her glass for a moment, then looked directly at Brennan. "Are you an ace?"

Brennan said nothing. Their eyes locked for a long moment and then Chrysalis sighed.

"You have nothing. You're just a man. A nat. What makes you think you can take Scar?" she repeated.

"As you said, I'm a man. He's kidnapped the daughter of a friend of mine. I'm the only one left to go after her."

"The police?" Chrysalis began reflexively, then laughed at her own suggestion. "No. Scar, through Kien, has enough police protection. I take it you have no solid evidence that Scar has the girl? No. What about one of the other aces? Black Shadow, Fortunato perhaps…"

"There's no time. I don't know what he's doing to her. Besides"-he stopped for a moment and looked back ten years, "this is personal."

"So I suspected."

Brennan drew his gaze back into the room. He stared hard at Chrysalis.

"Where can I find Scar?"

"I'm in the business of selling information and I've already given you plenty for free. That tidbit will cost you."

"I have no money."

"I don't need money from you. I do you a favor, you do me one."

Brennan scowled. "I don't like being in anyone's debt."

"Then find your information elsewhere."

The need to be doing something was burning in Brennan. "Very well."

She took a sip of her liqueur and regarded the crystal goblet, held in a hand whose flesh was as clear as the goblet itself.

"He has a big place on Castleton Avenue, Staten Island. It's isolated and fenced in and sits on extensive grounds. He likes to hunt. Men."

"He does?" Brennan asked, his gaze thoughtful, considering.

"Why did Scar kidnap this girl? Is she special in any way?"

"I don't know," Brennan said, shaking his head. "I thought it was to keep her father quiet because he had seen Scar and Kien together, but the sequence of events is all wrong. Minh saw them together when he was following Scar, trying to pick up clues about the kidnapping. He told me that they took her for her `bloody hands.' That mean anything to you?"

Chrysalis shook her head.

"Can't you get him to be less cryptic?"

"He's dead."

She reached out, put one of her hands on his and something passed between them. "You probably won't heed my warnings, but I'll give them anyway. Be careful." Brennan nodded. Her hand, invisible on his, was warm and soft. He watched blood pulse rhythmically through it. "Possibly," she continued, "you'd like to discharge some of your debt?"

"How?" Brennan asked, meeting the subtle challenge of her tone and expression.

"If you survive your encounter with Scar, come back to the Palace, tonight. Don't worry about the time. I'll be waiting for you."

There was no mistaking her meaning. She offered entanglements that he had avoided for a long time, relationships that he had wanted no part of for years.

"Or do you find me repulsive?" she asked matter-of-factly in the lengthy silence that stretched between them.

"No," he said more curtly than he had intended. "Its not that, not that at all."

His voice sounded harsh in his own ears. He had isolated himself so long from human contact that the thought of entering into any kind of intimate relationship was frightening.

"Your secrets will be safe from me, Yeoman," Chrysalis said.

He took a deep breath, nodded.

"Good." Her smile returned. "I'll expect you."

He turned without a word, and her smile slipped from her face. "If," she said so softly that only she heard the words, "you can do the impossible. If you can beat Scar."

There were, Brennan thought, two ways to go about this. He could be surreptitious. He could sneak into Scar's mansion, not knowing what security system he might have, and flit from room to room, not knowing what was in each room, not even knowing if Mai was in the building. Or he could just walk in, putting his trust in luck, nerve, and his ability to think on his feet.

He unmasked after he left the Crystal Palace and found a cab. The cabbie was reluctant to take him out to Staten Island, but he flashed a couple of twenties and the hack became all smiles. It was a long ride, by cab and ferry, and Brennan spent it in unhappy reminiscence. Ishida would have disapproved, but then, Brennan knew, he had never been the best of the roshi's students.

He had the cabbie drop him off a block or so from the Castleton address that Chrysalis had given him, paid the fare, and gave the hack a tip that wiped out most of his cash reserves. As the cab pulled away he moved quietly in the shadows until he stood across the street from Scar's place. It was as Chrysalis had described.

The house itself was a hulking stone mansion set a couple hundred yards off the street. A few lights shone through scattered windows on each of the three floors, but there was no illumination on the outside. The wall that encircled the grounds was stone, about seven feet high, surmounted by strands of electrical wire. The small glass-sided guardbox that stood by the wrought-iron gate held a single sentinel. It didn't look as if the security would be very difficult to breach, but the mansion was definitely too big to search room by room.

It would have to be boldness, nerve, and luck. A lot of luck, Brennan thought as he walked briskly from the shadows. The man in the guardbooth was watching a small television set, a talk show hosted by a beautiful woman with wings. Brennan, who hadn't watched television since his return to the States, nevertheless recognized her as Peregrine, one of the most visible aces, the hostess of Peregrine's Perch. She was watching an immense bearded man in a chef's hat doing something culinary. They chatted amiably as his large hands moved with surprising grace and Brennan realized that he was Hiram Worchester, alias Fatman, another of the more-public aces.

The guard was engrossed in Peregrine, who wore an undeniably attractive costume that was slit down nearly to her navel. Brennan had to rap on the glass door of the booth to get his attention, though he had made no effort to conceal his approach.

The guard opened the door. "Where did you come from?"

"A cab." Brennan gestured vaguely over his shoulder. "I sent it away."

"Oh, oh sure," the guard said. "I heard it. What do you want?"

Brennan was about to say that Kien sent him about the girl, but he bit the words back at the last instant. Chrysalis had told him that only very few people knew that Kien and Scar were connected. This flunky certainly wasn't one of them.

"The boss sent me. About the girl," he said, keeping as vague as possible while making his voice assured and knowing. "The boss?"

"Call Scar. He knows."

The guard turned, picked up a phone. He hung up after a few seconds of muffled conversation and touched a panel in front of him. The wrought-iron gate swung open silently.

"Go on in," he said, turning back to the television, where Hiram and Peregrine were eating sugar-coated chocolate crepes with delighted looks on their faces. Brennan hesitated briefly.

"One more thing," he said.

The guard sighed, turned slowly, more than half-watching the television set.

Brennan rammed his palm, hard, in an upward motion against the guard's nose. He felt bone buckle and shatter at the force of his blow. The man convulsed once as splinters of bone knifed through his brain, and then went utterly slack. Brennan snapped off the television as Fatman and Peregrine were finishing the crepes, and dragged the body into the yard and dumped it behind some concealing shrubbery. Regretfully, he left his bowcase stashed there as well, but, so as not to go totally unarmed, extracted a spare bowstring and looped it loosely around his hips, under the waistband of his jeans. He walked briskly up the drive to the mansion.

Scar needed a gardener. The yard had turned feral. The grass hadn't been cut all summer; the shrubberies had gone crazy. Untended, they had spilled over their original boundaries and provided a fairly dense undergrowth beneath the thick, untrimmed trees. It was more of an acre or two of forest than a front yard and for a moment it made Brennan long for the quiet peacefulness of the Catskills. Then he was at the front door and he remembered what had brought him here. He rang the bell.

The man who answered the front door had the insolence of a city punk and the gun that he carried under his armpit in a shoulder rig looked big enough to bring down an elephant.

"Come on in. Scar's got a client. They're with the girl." Brennan frowned at the man's back as he led him into the mansion. What was going on? Prostitution? Weird sex? He wanted to question the man who was leading him to the rear of the mansion, but knew that it was best to keep his mouth shut. He'd find answers soon enough.

Scar kept a little better care of the interior of his mansion than he did of the yard, but not much. The marble parquet floor was filthy, and there were stale odors clogging the air that made Brennan sick. He was afraid to breathe too deeply, lest he find himself able to identify some of the odors. A stairway swept upward into the upper stories of the mansion, but they stayed on the first floor, heading toward the rear of the building.

His guide turned to the left, passed through a metal detector which beeped once, and looked back at Brennan. Brennan followed him. The detector was silent. The thug nodded and led Brennan into a well-lit room that had four other people in it. One was a tough, identical for all practical purposes to the one who had met Brennan at the door. Another was a woman with long blond hair. She wore a mask that covered her entire face.

Another was Mai. She looked up at him dully as he entered the room and quick stifled the look of recognition that came to her face when she saw him. It had been three years since he had seen her. She had grown into a beautiful young woman, small, delicate, fine-featured, with thick, glossy hair and dark, dark eyes. She looked unharmed, if terribly tired.

There were circles under her eyes and Brennan could read the weariness in her every muscle by the way she held herself. The last was Scar. He was tall and lean, dressed in tee shirt and black chinos. His face was a nightmare. The patterns tattooed on it in black and scarlet turned it into the leering, bestial face of a demon. His eyes were sunk in black pits, his teeth inset in a scarlet cave. Brennan was surprised to see, when Scar smiled at him, that his teeth weren't filed.

"What's your name, man?" he asked in the thick argot of the inner city. "I ain't never seen you before."

"Archer," Brennan lied automatically. "What's going on here?"

Scar flashed his smile again. It twisted his face into odd contortions that showed nothing of humor.

"You just in time, man. The sister here is going to demonstrate her power, aren't you?"

Everyone looked at Mai, who bowed her head in silent, wearied resignation.

"She can do it?" the masked woman asked, her voice oddly eager and sibilant.

Scar only nodded and gestured at Mai. The two thugs watched with disinterest. Scar kept shifting his gaze back and forth to Brennan, Mai, and the woman.

"Tell the man," he said, watching Brennan closely as Mai approached the woman, "that I was going to tell him all about her. I was just checking things out."

Brennan nodded impatiently, aloof and hard-eyed outside, indecisive inside. Mai walked to the woman without glancing in his direction. Whatever was going to happen, he thought, couldn't be too bad. She seemed to be taking things calmly enough. He decided to wait.

"You have to take the mask off," Mai told the woman quietly. She drew back a little and glanced at the men watching her, but obeyed. Brennan watched impassively as she unmasked, Scar watched with a slight, sly smile. She was obviously ashamed of her face. Brennan had seen worse, but it was enough to evoke leering whispers from Scar's men. She had no chin and only a slight lower jaw. Her nose consisted of flat nostrils set above her lipless mouth. Her forehead was tiny. Her whole face was thrust forward in a reptilian manner that was enhanced by the colorfully beaded texture of her skin. She looked all the world like a Gila monster with long blond hair.

"I used to be beautiful," she said, looking down.

Scar's men snickered aloud, but Mai took her roughskinned cheeks between her palms and said quietly, "You will be again."

The woman looked up at her, a world of pain in her eyes. Mai gazed calmly at her, her face blank with the serenity of a madonna. For a moment nothing happened. Brennan glanced from her to Scar, who was watching him carefully, then back again. Then, where her palms touched the leathery skin of the woman's cheeks, blood began to run in little trickles. It seemed to be welling from the woman's cheeks, Mai's palms, or both. Tiny rivulets ran from between Mai's fingers, down the backs of her hands to her wrists. Mai moaned and Brennan stared at her as her face changed. Her chin receded, her jaw shrank. Her forehead narrowed and her skin became thick and pebbly and banded in orange and black and scarlet. It took some minutes. Brennan watched with pursed lips. Scar watched him watch. He smiled malevolently, his tattooed face a demonic mask.

Two lizard-women faced each other, one blond, one darkhaired. The woman looked at Mai wide-eyed, Mai looked back reassuringly. She sighed, longly, like a lover after release, and she began to change. Her skin lost its roughness, its bright color. The bone beneath it shifted back to normal configurations. Her lips twitched slightly, perhaps at the pain of the metamorphosis, but she said nothing. It took a moment longer, but the blond woman, too, began to change. Skin softened, bleached itself. Bone flowed like soft wax. Tears ran down her high, fine cheeks, whether from pain or joy, Brennan couldn't tell. The transformation took some minutes. When the tiny rivulets of blood ceased to flow, Mai took her hands from the woman's face. The woman was right. She had been beautiful, and was again. Weeping silently, she took Mai's hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. Mai smiled at her and swayed tiredly. Brennan could see that willpower alone kept her on her feet. Every line and muscle of her body cried out in weariness.

The woman reached down to a purse on a small table near where she stood and took out a thick envelope. Scar gestured. One of his smirking thugs took it, put it in his back pants pocket, and escorted the woman from the room.

"Well, man, what you think?"

"Fantastic," Brennan said, still looking at Mai. "What is it, genetic manipulation of some sort?"

"I don't know about that shit," Scar said. "I just heard that she was healing jokers in the neighborhood, and I figured why should she fix up those poor jokers when she can fix up jokers who'll pay plenty. So I snatched her."

Brennan turned away from Mai and met Scar's eyes. "She's worth a lot. You should have told Kien about her. I'll have to take her to him."

Scar puckered his tattooed lips in mock consternation. "You will? You seem to know a lot, man. How come you don't know that I told the man about her when that gook saw us together in the back of the man's limo?" He turned, looked at Mai, and added maliciously, "And then the man had the old gook hit so he wouldn't tell no one about it."

"My father?" Mai asked.

Scar nodded, grinning like a devil. Mai gasped, swayed, and would have fallen if Scar's man hadn't grabbed her roughly by the arm. Brennan moved.

He launched himself across the room, ripped the gun from the man's shoulder rig, jammed the barrel against his chest, and pulled the trigger. There was an immense roar as the blast lifted the man ofu his feet and threw him against the wall. He left a red smear as he slumped to the floor, his eyes open and unbelieving.

Brennan whirled, but Scar was gone. He saw a flicker at the edge of his vision and felt sharp pain as Scar chopped down on his wrist, knocking the gun from his grasp. Scar ducked Brennan's sweeping arm, kicked the gun across the room, and vanished silently and utterly.

He reappeared between Brennan and the gun, smiling crazily.

"You need a gun to go up against Scar? You some kind of crazy nat," he said. "What name you want on your tombstone?" He reached into the pocket of his chinos and with a practiced flick of his wrist opened a six-inch-long straight razor. He vanished again and Brennan felt a sudden biting pain in his side. He heard Mai's cry, threw himself away, rolled, and stood. Blood ran down his side where Scar had slashed a long, shallow cut across his ribs. He barely had time to stand before Scar appeared again, slashed his cheek open, and popped away. It was as Chrysalis had said. He was fast and precise in his teleporting. And he did enjoy his work.

"I cut you slowly, man," he said, appearing with killing lust in his eyes, "I cut you till you beg me to finish you." He twitched his wrist, flicking Brennan's blood off the edge of his blade. It was bright in the room, bright and closed in. Brennan was trapped, confined, and he knew he didn't have a chance in hell. Scar would cut him to ribbons, laughing, as he tried to reach the gun. He breathed deeply, calming his racing mind, drawing, as Ishida had taught him, into a state of serene tranquility, and he knew what he had to do. Scar slashed his back as he turned, ran, and hurled himself through the French windows in the rear of the room. He burst out of the light onto a dark patio.

Scar smiled a genuinely happy smile and stepped out onto the patio after him. He whistled tunelessly and watched Brennan run into the yard and blunder into a thick patch of trees.

"Hey, nat!" he called out. "Where are you, man? I tell you what. You give me a good hunt, I'll cut you a few times then finish you fast. You disappoint me, I'll cut your balls off. Even the gook chick won't be able to grow you a new pair."

Scar laughed at his joke, then followed Brennan into the dark. He stopped after a moment and listened. He heard nothing but the sounds of the wind in the trees and, distantly, occasional cars moving in the far streets. His prey was gone, vanished into the night. Scar frowned. Something was wrong. He walked deeper into the trees.

And from nowhere, a ghost silent among shadows, Brennan rose from his hiding place, his waxed nylon bowstring wrapped around his fists. He looped the string around Scars throat from behind, yanked, and twisted. Flesh and gristle crumpled and Scar vanished. He reappeared a few feet away, clutching at his crushed windpipe. He tried to suck in air, but nothing reached his laboring lungs. He opened his mouth to say something at Brennan, to curse him or plead with him, but no words came. He vanished again, but reappeared a microsecond later in the same place, his tattooed face screwed up in pain and fear, his concentration shattered, his control gone. Brennan watched him flicker crazily among the trees, desperation on his face, teleporting madly, nonsensically. Finally he appeared spewing blood from his mouth, staggered against a tree, dropped his razor, and fell face up. Brennan approached cautiously, but he was dead. He hunkered over him, and took out the felt-tip pen that the waiter had given him in Minh's restaurant. He drew an ace of spades on the back of Scar's right hand, and, to be sure that Kien wouldn't miss it, placed the hand over Scar's marked face.

He made his way back through the trees silently, like the ghost of a forest animal. Mai was waiting for him on the patio. She didn't seem surprised when it was he who emerged from the trees. She knew him, and what he could do.

"Captain Brennan, is Father really dead?"

He nodded, unable to say the words. She seemed to shrink, to look frailer, more tired, if that were possible. She closed her eyes and tears welled silently from beneath their lids.

"Let's go home."

He led her into the welcome darkness of the night.

He left after she bandaged his wounds, promising to drop by when he could, sadness for her welling inside him, merging with the grief he himself felt at Minh's death. Another comrade, another friend, gone.

Kien had to be brought down. It was up to him, one man, alone, with nothing but the strength of his hands and the cunning of his mind. It would take a long time. He needed a base to operate from, and equipment. Special bows, special arrows. He needed money.

He drew back into the shadows of the Jokertown night, waiting for a certain type of man to come by, a street merchant who exchanged packets of white powder for green bills crumpled in sweaty desperation.

He breathed deeply. The night stank with the countless scents of seven million people and their myriad hopes, fears, and desperations. He was one of them now. He had left the mountains and returned to humanity and he knew that this return would bring with it disappointment and grief and lost hopes. And comfort, some part of him said, wondering at the warm touch of invisible flesh and the sight of a visible heart beating faster and faster with growing passion.

A sudden noise, a softly scraping step, caught his attention. A man passed him. He was dressed richly for a poor neighborhood, and he walked with jaunty arrogance. This was the one for whom he waited.

Brennan slipped quietly among the shadows, following him. The hunter had come to the city.