Master's Challenge (Destroyer 55)

Chapter One

Ancion paused at the end of Kwasha Challa, the sacred rope bridge that separated his domain from the rest of Peru. Kwasha Challa had been built just for him, specifically for this crossing, as an identical bridge had been built a generation ago for his father.

Twelve hundred feet below, the Apurimac river boiled with white rapids. Beyond it lay the green Peruvian highlands dotted with the ancient burial towers of Ancion's ancestors. It would be, he knew, some time before he saw them again.

The oracle had predicted a safe journey for him. Still, it was one he did not look forward to making. He would have to cross most of the known world, alone and penniless as tradition decreed, to reach the place his people called the Land at the End of the World. From the accounts given by his father and grandfather, it was a desolate place, cold and inhospitable, with rocks in place of the lush and startling contrasts of his native land.

He mounted the white llama that had been left for him. His father had done the same. And his grandfather, dressed in the same kind of garments that Ancion now wore, the woven wincha wound around his head for warmth, the silver pin holding his cloak together, and the large gold discs pierced into his ears that communicated to those who understood that Ancion was an Inca, the Inca, reigning king of a people believed by the world to be long extinguished.

For when Pizarro looted the Inca Empire in 1532 and murdered Atahualpa, the "last" Inca, his band of bloodthirsty Spaniards missed an enclave in the mountains where Ancion's ancestors ruled. Since then, Ancion's people had lived, hidden and secret, away from the ways of other men. Only one Inca in each generation, the Inca, was permitted to leave, and then only on two occasions. The first was a stay in the outside world to learn its ways in order to better protect his people from them. The second time was to make the journey Ancion was embarking on now, the journey to meet the most powerful being on earth. It was a tradition not to be questioned.

In his pockets were some dried potatoes, the precious papa that had sustained his people for 5,000 years, and his weapon. It was a bola, a cord weighted by a rock encrusted with sharp stones. Used properly, it was deadly enough to kill a cougar in flight. The bola and a small sharp knife at his waist were Ancion's only defenses against the white and black and yellow men who stood between him and his destiny. They would be enough.

Unwinding the cord carefully, he whirled the bola over his head until it sang. Then he lowered it, still vibrating in his hands, and snapped the two thick ropes that bound the bridge to the land. Kwasha Challa fell, destroying the only entrance into his country until his return. It was done. His journey had begun.

The journey to Sinanju. The Land at the End of the World.

Emrys ap Llewellyn fastened his knapsack around his huge, square shoulders. "Griffith!" he called.

"Up here, Da," a small voice rang from the top of a tall pine. It echoed through the green hills surrounding the valley. The boy laughed as the big man made a show of stalking the tree like a bear. With both hands gripping the pine's trunk, Emrys shook it. The boy fell out of the branches into his arms, shrieking with delight.

"Got you now," Emrys said, hugging his son. The boy's hair smelled of pine and deep woods.

"Do it again, Da."

"That I cannot." Emrys hitched up his knapsack again. "It's time I'll be going, son."

Griffith's face fell. His large, soft eyes welled with tears.

"Now, none of your caterwauling. It's time, and that's that. Go on to home, you shameful baby."

"But Da, your eyes--"

"Don't you be talking back to me, scamp!" He swatted the boy across the bottom.

"Don't go, Da," Griffith wailed. "You'll not see well enough to fight the Chinee. He'll kill you sure."

Emrys turned on him fiercely. "I'll not have you speaking so to your old father."

His eyes were different from his son's. For all their understanding, they were warrior's eyes, and Griffith's words stopped at the sight of them. But he couldn't stop the tears. "It ain't right, so it's not," the boy said miserably.

"You've just got to understand. This is something I've got to do. It's the way of our kin. One day you'll be going, too."

"I don't want to fight the damned Chinee," the boy protested.

"Watch your mouth!"

"I want to stay here, in these woods, with the Old Ones, the spirits. And I want you to stay with me. Now that Ma's gone, we're all we have, you and me."

Emrys cleared his throat. Sometimes Griffith sounded as if he were a hundred years old. "Well, what a man wants and what he's got to do are two different things," he said gruffly. "Besides, your Ma made you promise on the day she died to mind me. Did you not promise her?"

The boy stared at the ground.

"Did you na?"

"Yes. I promised."

"Then go home. And not another word."

Emrys stomped off toward the hills, following the winding stream that bisected the valley. It had been a raging river once, in the days when all of Wales was as wild and unknown as the valley and its surrounding woods.

There were no roads here, no electricity, no running water. No taxes, no trolleys, no army. Instead, there were the hills, still dotted with the ancient shrines of gods who had been worshiped before the Romans came. Mryddin, oldest among the dieties, still ruled in the valley. There was the forest, still populated with the wild, savvy people who had dwelled there since the beginning of time, where the great magician Merlin himself had hidden while he waited for young King Arthur to come of age.

There were spirits and music and timeless enchantment in the valley; outside was the contamination of the new world. And beyond that, far off in lands so distant and strange that Emrys could not even imagine them from the stories his father, Llewellyn, had told him, were other knots of civilization that still clung to the old, true ways.

The place where he was going was one of those. The people there were fighters, like Emrys's own kind. The Masters of Sinanju were rarely bested in battle. Llewellyn himself had fallen at the hands of the great Chinee. It had been a terrible shock to Emrys, who was already fully grown by the time his father took on the Master of Sinanju. The Chinee was a small, weak-looking man well past middle age. But Llewellyn had explained after his return from Sinanju, while he waited for the Master to come do battle with him, that the people of that land lived so far away that even their appearance was different. Their size had little to do with their strength, and their peculiar slanted eyes could see the legs on a caterpillar at twenty paces.

As his father lay dead, Emrys had been tempted to attack the frail-looking Oriental himself. But the Chinee who had killed Llewellyn did an odd thing in his moment of victory. He found Emrys in the crowd of onlookers and bowed to him. The look in the Master's hazel eyes had not been one of triumph, but of respect for Emrys's dead father. Llewellyn had fought well, and the Master of Sinanju had acknowledged his valor. It was during that moment that Emrys came to understand the Master's Trial, and why his people had honored the contest since the days when the river ran wide as an ocean through the valley. The outcome of the Trial was final. Until now.

It was Emrys's turn, at last, to challenge the protegee of the Master of Sinanju and avenge Llewellyn's death. Once in each generation. It was his only opportunity.

He squeezed his eyes shut hard, as if the movement would disperse the cloudiness of his vision. Of course, it didn't work. It never did. He only hoped his sight would hold out long enough for him to do the things he had to do: go to Sinanju to meet with the great Chinee in peace. Return to the valley to prepare for battle. Encounter the Master's son when he arrived in Wales. And kill him.

There was another thing he had to do as well, and the thought filled Emrys with worry. He had to prepare Griffith to fight in his own generation's Master's Trial. For regardless of the outcome of this contest, Griffith would have to go forth to the next.

What had happened to Griffith? Emrys's people sprang from fighting stock that went back for thousands of years. Now here was his own son, Griffith ap Emrys, who could not even bring himself to kill a squirrel. Emrys had come to blows more than once in defense of the boy whom the others labeled weak and girlish, but there was no denying it: Griffith was a sad excuse for a warrior. While the other boys of the valley practiced their falls and developed their fists on one another, Griffith spent all his time exploring the old altars of the dead gods, so long vanished that even the forest people did not remember their names. He raised lost birds and sang made-up songs into the air. He slept, frequently, in caves thick with bats and did not fear even the wildest horse. But he would not fight.

Perhaps it was the lack of a mother. Emrys's wife Brawnwyn had died so young.

He turned for a last look at his home. The valley, stretching below him, looked like a miasma of diffused light. Just let my eyes hold out, he said to himself. In the center of the dim, velvet-toned valley stood Griffith where Emrys had left him.

"What will become of my strange little child?" he asked the wind. He waved slowly to the small figure and then turned away, before he could think of an answer.

Jilda guided the slender wooden boat expertly over the freezing swells of the Bering Strait. On either side of her rose the continents of Asia and America, vast lands filled with decaying, soft men and uselessly ornamental women.

She was hungry. Keeping one oar in motion, she pulled a long iron-tipped spear from the bottom of the boat. The water was rough. Jilda stood up in the tossing boat, watching. She saw a flash of silver, poised her spear, then lowered it, cursing. A halibut, but too big. Its weight would capsize the boat. She waited, immobile, perfectly balanced on the choppy waves.

Her ancestors had watched and waited in exactly the same way, standing in the narrow-hulled boats that carried the first of the Vikings to glory in the weak lands that stood like ripe fruit ready for picking. The Norsemen who had carried the lightning of Thor from Norway throughout Europe and Russia a thousand years ago had waited with their spears in the air and hunger gnawing at their bellies just as Jilda did now.

She felt their blood in her. She was proud, because her forefathers were the purest of the magnificent warriors who had ruled the sea. When the Viking conquest drew to a close, most of her people changed and adapted. They learned to live at peace with the world. They accepted lives of comfort and idleness. But her own people, the small knot of sea-toughened men and women who had refused to lose their wildness and their instinct for survival, chose to leave their homeland instead.

Many Vikings settled in the remote Faeroes Islands deep in the Norwegian Sea, and her ancestors were among these. But her people, sensing the pervading onslaught of modern ways even to this distant archipelago, chose to separate themselves from the rest of their kind. They selected for their new home the smallest, coldest land mass in the Faeroes chain, an uninhabited island that they named Lakluun. And on Lakluun they fished and hunted, built their turf-covered stone croft houses, brewed mead from fermented honey, praised their gods, revered their legends, burned their dead at sea, raised their young, and survived with the old ways.

A flutter on the surface of the water. The fish was a young one, its two flat eyes flashing in the sunlight on its right side. Halibut. Effortlessly, Jilda tossed in her spear and rowed to catch it before it sank. She cut the still-moving flesh with the dagger she carried in her belt and ate it raw.

Where was this place she was going? The elders had told her nothing, except that she was to meet a great warrior and challenge his son in battle. The contest was called the Master's Trial. Why it was necessary to determine a master among races of people who had no earthly contact with one another had puzzled her, but the elders did not speak of it.

It was the way things were done. As the best fighter on Lakluun, it was Jilda's duty to comply, just as it had been her duty to kill the first of the beasts offered during the Sacrifice of Nine. The animals were not used for food but for ceremony, and the ceremony sickened her. Once every nine years the people of Lakluun offered the sacrifice to Thor, Odin, and Freya, the three gods of thunder, war, and pleasure, killing nine of every male creature in existence and displaying them in the Sacred Wood for the deities to see. For weeks, the gentle woods stank with the corpses of horses hanging by their necks next to the maggot-covered bodies of dogs and reindeer. But nothing was so terrible as the sight of the nine hanged men, stolen from wayward fishing boats, their eyes rotting and blistered beneath the trees.

Tradition. How she despised the elders' senseless, traditions! It was horrifying to kill nine innocent men for the delight of the gods, but that was what tradition decreed. And it was contemptible to journey halfway around the world to meet a warrior for the purpose of killing not the warrior himself, but his son, whom she had never even seen. Tradition? Bah. It was stupidity, insanity, waste!

But then, without tradition, where would her people be? Living the lives of slugs hiding in shells, crawling for their every need? What would Jilda herself be without the strength and spirit of her ancestors? A fat, dimpled wife, perhaps, screaming at infants and driving a padded automobile with rubber tires? A cooperative worker, running in her rat's maze each day without a mouthful of clear air, devoid of freedom or dignity?

No, she would choose death rather than submit to the life of the world outside Lakluun. But was there no way to avoid the disgusting practice of the Master's Trial?

Jilda finished her meal and threw the bones overboard. She wiped her hands on the leather cape she wore over her long grown. Her pale eyes changed color, as they did when she was deep in thought. She had a plan.

She would meet with the Master of Sinanju as tradition demanded. She was the chosen warrior of Lakluun, and it was her right to speak with the Master and the other contestants. When she did speak, she would tell them all to abandon the Trial. Surely none of them wished to kill a perfect stranger in the name of some foolish contest. This was one tradition that had to be stopped. And if she could stop it, she could return to Lakluun and end forever the Sacrifice of Nine.

She picked up her oars again, satisfied.

Kiree was cold, colder than he had ever been in his life. The occasional soldiers he spotted along the rocky shores of the place called Sinanju posed no problem; he was dark and small and accustomed to hiding and moving quickly. He had not been confronted by a single human during his entire journey.

But the weather, even in May, would surely kill him. In the Dogon region of central Mali, where his people, the Tellem, lived, temperatures of 115 degrees were not unusual. The heat could be withstood, but the cold... Who could live in such a frozen wasteland? During his long trip, Kiree had at times considered wearing protective clothing, as others native to the frigid area did, but he had discarded the idea. He was a Tellem. He would wear the loose black cotton leg wrappers of his people, the white cotton cap, the string of antelope teeth around his neck, the ceremonial red sash around his waist, and nothing more. If he could not stand the cold, then he deserved to die ignominiously before his turn at battle.

He made his way carefully toward the cave, moving quickly in the night shadows. Before his death at the hands of the yellow man, the great warrior Balpa Dolo had described the cave to Kiree.

"It is the home of the ancients of the Yellow Land," Balpa Dolo had said. "Outside the entrance are plants that have not been seen in all of Africa. Three plants, a pine, a bamboo, and a plum blossom. But you will not need this sign. The cave is a holy place, and you will feel its holiness. Open your senses, and your instinct will take you there."

Kiree had closed his eyes at the shore of Sinanju, and felt and listened for the thrum of life. He felt it only weakly from ordinary humans, but among the Tellem, the vibration was strong. And here, too, the unheard music of concentrated, instinctual life pulled him toward the cave and nowhere else. He did not see the flowers until he was almost at the mouth of the hill.

A thin old man with strange features and golden skin emerged from the cave on footsteps so silent and controlled that even the dust beneath his feet did not move. He wore a robe of dazzling red, embroidered with threads that shimmered like water in sunlight. He was small, nearly as small as Kiree, and looked as insubstantial as a feather. To Kiree's eyes, the yellow man resembled nothing as much as a series of high clouds, from the wispy white hair on his head and chin to the slender, inch-long fingernails on his hands. And yet there was power about him. Near him, the thrum of life was deafening to Kiree's sensitive instincts. And there was peace, too, the unmistakable serenity of the born warrior.

"You are the Master of Sinanju," Kiree said in English.

The frail-looking old Korean bowed formally. "I am Chiun," he said. "I welcome you to this place of peace."

Inside the cave, the vibrant life force washed over Kiree like warm waves. The other contestants sat on a fragrant grass mat that covered the floor, their faces bright in the light from a smokeless fire. There was an enormous white man, a thin, aristocratic brown man with a high-bridged nose and jewels in his ears, and a woman with golden hair. The level of energy that emanated from them was almost tangible. The cave was alive with pure life. Balpa Dolo had been right. It was a holy place.

"There is safety here," he said softly.

The splendidly robed Oriental smiled. "There is always safety among persons of honor."

Chiun brought food and drink, and treated each of the guests with impeccable courtesy. "Now that you have all assembled here, I wish you to meet another of my people," he said.

"Your son?" Emrys asked.

"No. According to the rules of the Master's Trial, the protegee of the victor does not meet with the challengers before the hour of combat. At the appointed time, my son will travel to your lands, just as you have come to Sinanju, alone. This is a meeting of peace among those of us who have kept the old ways in the face of the new."

"The old ways are not always the best ways," Jilda said. Her voice was respectful, but her chin was thrust out defiantly.

Ancion's dark eyes flashed. "Do you mean to lead your people away from their traditions?" He looked at Jilda with contempt.

"I speak only of the Master's Trial. It is a tradition that is unworthy of us."

Ancion set down his bowl with distaste and rose quickly. As he did, he stepped on the hem of his cloak, momentarily losing his balance. He broke his fall with his hands, digging into the red-hot peat of the fire. Ancion yelped with the pain, righting himself. "You do not belong here!" he spat.

"And you are only angry because you have shamed yourself by tripping over your clothes like a child," Jilda taunted.

"Hold. Hold." The voice, thin and quavering, came from deep within the recesses of the cave. The contestants fell silent as they watched an old, old man emerge from the shadows. He was heavyset and bald, and his face was so worn and wrinkled that it looked like a crumpled sheet of translucent parchment, but he held his back perfectly straight. His eyes were like those of a statue, their pupils pale and unseeing.

Emrys rose. "The old Master," he said. The others murmured. "My father spoke of you. The most powerful of all the Masters of Sinanju."

"The Venerable One," Jilda said. "I remember, too. It is he of the Sight."

"H'si T'ang," Kiree whispered. "The warrior who can see the future."

"I would much rather see the present," the old man said, smiling. "But these eyes have long since abandoned this old body." He turned his sightless gaze toward the fire.

Chiun took his hand. "H'si T'ang was my teacher," he said, helping the old man to a place at the fire beside Ancion. The Inca regarded him coldly.

"And who are you, my children?" H'si T'ang asked.

"If you have the Sight, you should know who we are," Ancion said.

Jilda slapped the floor with her open palm. "How dare you speak to the Venerable One in this way!"

"Venerable One," Ancion mocked. "A useless blind man who lives in a cave."

The others protested, but H'si T'ang quieted them. "Ancion may speak as he likes here." He turned to the Inca. "You are quite right, my son. It is to a shamefully inadequate dwelling that Chiun has brought you, but it was for a reason. You see, the Master of Sinanju occupies, by tradition, a house in the village, but Chiun believed that you would prefer to meet in secrecy. That is why he chose my home for this gathering. He did not intend to insult you by bringing you here."

"It is a holy place," Kiree said. "The cave where our fathers met."

"You remember well," H'si T'ang said.

"It's good enough for me," Emrys added belligerently.

"It is still a cave," Ancion said flatly. "And I would like to know why the so-called Master of Sinanju allows his teacher to live in such a rough place. In my homeland, when the old king passes on his powers to the new, he continues to live in splendor. It is his due. You seem to me a man worthy of little respect among your own people."

H'si T'ang smiled. "At my age, respect from one's peers is not so important as understanding of one's own heart. This 'rough place,' as you call it, is of my own choosing. For it is here, away from the traffic of daily life, that I may contemplate all the things that I was too busy to notice during my youth." He reached for the Inca's long, tapering fingers. "For example, twenty years ago, I would not have been able to know that your hands were burned without seeing or touching you."

Ancion snatched his hands away. "Don't touch me."

"I am more than one hundred and thirty years old," H'si T'ang said. "I would not harm you, but I can help you." With an impossibly swift motion, he clapped Ancion's hands between his own and held them. When he released them, the Inca stared at his palms in amazement. The burns had healed completely in the instant that H'si T'ang had touched them.

"Sorcery," Ancion whispered, making a sign against witchcraft. "One such as you should never have been permitted to fight in the Master's Trial. You killed my grandfather with trickery."

"I felled your grandfather, the great warrior Huaton, in combat."

"You bewitched him!" Ancion shrieked.

"I cannot bewitch. I can only heal. I would have healed Huaton if I could, but he was dead even before he fell."

Ancion shouted him down. "There is no Master's Trial, only the work of sorcerers!"

"Stop it!" Jilda commanded. "The Master's Trial is an evil thing. It is causing us to turn against one another already. "

"This is not your affair, woman," Ancion said coldly.

"I am one of the contestants in this misbegotten game, and it is my affair," Jilda said. "We must stop the Trial before it begins. There are so few of us left, we people of honor and strength. Why should we seek to destroy one another when the whole world pushes to destroy us?"

"Sorcery," Ancion muttered.

Jilda rose. "Inca ruler, I witnessed the death of my predecessor at the hands of the Master Chiun. He used no sorcery. But if that is what you fear, then help me to stop this wicked contest."

"I fear no one! It is you who fear, because you are a woman, and by nature a coward."

Jilda's jaw clenched. She stared at the Inca for a long moment, as if fighting with herself. Then, exhaling suddenly, she pulled the dagger from her belt and leaped like a deer toward Ancion. He moved out of her way swiftly, pulling out his own knife.

It happened in a matter of seconds. Then, in another moment, a third pair of moving hands entered between then, snatched both daggers away, and thrust them upward, where they quivered embedded in the stone ceiling of the cave.

"This is why we have the tradition of the Master's Trial," Chiun said wearily, his hands still on their wrists. "This way, only four from each generation among us are destroyed."

Ancion jumped up and extricated his knife from the rock. He held it, hesitating as he watched the blank eyes of H'si T'ang. Then he slid the blade back into its sheath. "I will fight your apprentice. But if there is any trickery, my people will stand ready to tear his limbs and scatter his blood on the wind." He threw his cloak over his shoulder and left.

Chiun poured more tea into the remaining cups and cleared the Inca's things away. "Not the peaceful meeting I planned."

"It was my fault," Jilda said. "I attacked him." She hung her head. "I, who wished to abolish the bloodshed."

"Violence is a difficult habit to break among our kind," H'si T'ang said kindly. "It is the way of all our peoples. It is how we have survived."

"But we don't have to kill each other."

"That is for each of you to decide in your own heart." He turned to Emrys. "Tell me, will you resign from the contest?"

Emrys grunted. "I'll not be called a coward."

H'si T'ang nodded. "And you, Jilda. You would not permit yourself to be called a coward, either?"

"It is different for me. I'm a woman. I cannot be the only one to retreat. The elders of Lakluun would be shamed. "

"I see. And you, Kiree? Would your elders be shamed?"

The little black man smiled. "Very much," he said. "You see, the Tellem do not believe in death. It is our belief that when we die, our spirits are transferred to others. That way, we continue to live. To fear shedding one life when there is promise of another at hand is most unworthy."

"We believe much the same thing here in Sinanju," H'si T'ang said.

Jilda sighed. "So the Master's Trial goes on. Because we are afraid to be afraid."

"That is so," H'si T'ang said.

They slept. The next morning, as the three warriors prepared to take their leave, Chiun gave each of them a polished piece of jade inscribed with Korean characters. "It is the symbl of the Master's Trial," Chiun said. "When my pupil comes to your lands for the contest, he will be carrying one of these so that you may recognize one another."

"What about Ancion?" Jilda asked.

Kiree laughed. "I think Ancion will have everyone in his country looking for the protegee of the Master of Sinanju."

Emrys strapped his knapsack onto his back. H'si T'ang moved toward him in the shadows. "Forgive me, but there is something about you, my son. Your aura. Something is wrong."

Emrys looked back quickly to Jilda and Kiree, standing in the doorway of the cave. "There's nothing wrong with me," he said loudly.

"It is your eyes--"

"My eyes are as good as anybody's. Good enough to fight your boy, at least," he bristled. Then he straightened up and smiled. "No offense, H'si T'ang. Whatever you did to Ancion's hands last night made a good show, but I don't cleave much to magic and hocus pocus myself. Besides, I can see just fine. Your aura locator made a mistake this time." He chuckled and joined the others at the door.

When they had left, Chiun turned to the old man and said, "The big one is becoming blind."

"I know. But he is too proud to admit it."

They settled near the fire. "And where is your successor now?" the old man asked.

"In America. But he will arrive here soon. I wish for you to meet him."

"Then his visit must be very soon, because my days are coming to an end," H'si T'ang said softly. "He is a good pupil?"

"Good enough," Chiun said, not wishing to boast about his protegee. "He is white."

"Oh?"

"But worthy," Chiun hastened to add. "That is, reasonably worthy. For a white."

H'si T'ang laughed. "I am making you uncomfortable," he said. "I do it out of amusement, because you are so painfully prejudiced."

"I did not wish to train a white boy. It just happened."

"It was meant to happen. Perhaps you do not know the legend. You are still so young."

Chiun was disconcerted. "I have lived more than eighty years, my teacher. No one would call me young."

H'si T'ang snorted. "Wait until you are my age. Even the mountains will appear young. You do know the legend, then?"

"Which legend? We have so many."

"The legend of Shiva." The old man spoke softly, remembering. "The ancient god of destruction will come to earth as a tiger wearing the skin of a man. He will be called the white night tiger, and he will die, to be created anew by the Master of Sinanju."

"I know the legend," Chiun said. "It has sustained me."

"And he is the one? The white night tiger?"

"I believe so. I have seen signs in him."

"And the boy? Does he know himself to be Shiva?"

Chiun shook his head. "He tries not to believe. Even when the signs exhibit themselves, he strives to forget. He is white, after all. What can one expect from a white thing?" He spat on the cave floor.

"He is only young. Too young, perhaps, to undertake the Master's Trial. He has not encountered opponents such as these contestants before, no doubt."

"No. Not like these."

"Take care of your godling, my son. This rite of passage is measured in blood."

Chiun stared at the fire for some time. "He is ready," he said at last.

H'si T'ang nodded. "Good," he said. "The scroll you took from my collection. Did you send it to him?"

"Yes, Little Father," Chiun said.

"Then you know the prophecy?"

"I do not understand it fully."

The old man smiled. His mouth was broad and toothless, and he grinned like a baby. "If the prophecies were perfectly understood, they would be history, not prophecy," he said, clapping Chiun on the back. "So. Tell me, son. What do you call your young, white, misplaced, nonbelieving pupil who bends his elbow during combat?"

Chiun looked up at him, startled. Then he smiled, because through the long years he had forgotten that his old teacher could still surprise him. "If you know he bends his elbow, then you know his name."