PART FIVE - MOUNT IDA
- 3 -
Gabe felt his knees go weak. He felt as if he was about to faint as Phobus, or possibly Deimus, the twin assassins remaining indistinguishable, raised his bloody dagger to strike. The Grand Prior of Villeneuve, Dr. Raymond Gerard, lay dead at their feet, and Gabe was about to join him.
As the assassin brought down the knife, Gabe flashed back to the events of the past week, witnessing the horrific murder at the National Gallery, meeting with the confrontational and aggressive Saphy, his dreams of fountains and goddesses, the help Jane Cavendish had given and her brutal death, fleeing the police to Paris and then following the clues to Turkey, capture and escape from the Hospitallers, and, more than anything else, the way that Saphy had gradually opened up to him, revealed her scarred and damaged heart and let him in.
He looked across at her, struggling defiantly in the face of death, and all he could think, as the knife slashed down, was about the feel of her soft lips on his, how right and good it had felt kissing her.
The knife, however, never reached its destination. Just as it swung towards Gabe, an arrow whistled through the air, passing smoothly straight through the assassin's hand and sticking squarely in the eye of the hooded guard holding Gabe. Another moment and another arrow struck the second assassin square in his shoulder blade just as he too was about to swing his dagger. And then everything was chaos.
As the arrow struck his hand, the assassin standing over Gabe dropped his dagger, while the guard holding Gabe slumped to the ground, clutching at his face where the arrow had embedded itself. The other assassin swung at Saphy as the arrow hit his shoulder, causing him to swing wide of his mark. The white feathered arrow still protruding from his shoulder, he swung around to see Atalanta at the head of around thirty naiads, all with arrows drawn on their bows.
As soon as they saw this, the group of hooded Hospitallers gathered around their fallen leaders and pulled guns from their robes. The air was filled with the sounds and flashes of gunfire. A naiad and then another dropped to the floor. More of them swung and spun agilely away from the Hospitallers' fire and unleashed a volley of their own arrows, sticking the hooded guards like pin cushions.
Meanwhile, the two bald assassins turned their attention from Gabe and Saphy to the rest of the crowd, obviously perceiving them as more of a threat. Even though one had an injured hand, the other a shoulder, and they were only armed with daggers where the others had guns and bows, they still managed to glide through the crowd, slicing and cutting with their daggers in just the right place to incapacitate both naiads and Hospitallers.
A naiad leapt toward Saphy, but the guard that had been holding her until a moment earlier hit the naiad square in the chest with a gunshot at point blank range, dropping her instantly to the floor. Saphy wasted no time in wriggling free of her captors and grabbing the bow and a handful of arrows from the naiad's quiver.
The guard was back on her in a moment, but in that time Saphy had put an arrow to her bowstring and drawn it back. As the guard made to grab her once more, Saphy released the arrow. She may have not known much of what she was doing, but at that close range there was nowhere the shaft could go but right into her attacker's chest.
The other guard made a lunge for Gabe but Saphy, growing in confidence, had another arrow on her string. This time, at a slightly greater range, the shot flew just off her target, but did enough to pierce the flesh of the warrior monk's arm, causing him to drop his handgun, which Gabe gingerly picked up.
Unable in that instant of panic to figure out how to take the safety catch from the gun, Gabe swung the weight of it into the guard's face, pistol whipping him until he fell into the grass.
Gabe and Saphy now stood back to back on the edge of the clearing, him with a gun, her with a bow with one final arrow drawn on the string, ready to take on anyone just like the rest of the people in that clearing, ready to defend themselves together, to fight for each other's lives not just their own.
Across the clearing, the Hospitallers' superior weaponry was making little difference against the naiad's speed and skill as more and more black robed monks found their bodies ripped open by the arrows of the women in white. While some naiads had fallen, in a few minutes the battle was over and there remained nothing but a heap of black robed fanatics, dead just like their leader, never to discover the secret they had fought for.
Phobus and Deimus now turned back to Gabe and Saphy. Bloodied and full of wounds from gunshots and arrows, they staggered forward, daggers dripping with the deaths of both sides. Gabe and Saphy were ready for them now, however, pointing both bow and gun right at them.
"You want us?" said Saphy.
"Then come and get us," Gabe finished her thought.
The two angry assassins looked around, seeing their victims' armed defiance did not stop them, but the fact that they were now surrounded by killers every bit as capable as them, the beautiful archers with arrows trained right at them, their determination wavered.
"This is not the last time you will feel fear," said one.
"Nor the last sense of dread," said the other.
"We will always be with you," hissed the first.
"You will never sleep easy while we watch," concluded the second as they staggered from the clearing.
The naiads did not follow them. Instead they turned their attention to removing the bodies from the clearing, both their own fallen and their enemies, covering their tracks so nobody could come this far after them.
Atalanta, tall, beautiful, elegant, the dark curls of her hair hardly dislodged by the frenetic battle in which Gabe had seen her personally skewer at least four Hospitallers with volleys of arrows, turned to the only two other survivors, Saphy and Gabe.
"You're not scared of them?" Gabe asked, referring to the assassins that the naiads had been happy to turn their backs on.
"Naiads are pure, we live by our own strict moral code, those two have no power over us," Atalanta explained.
"And that moral code is what brought you to kill Robert White in London," Gabe went on, "I get it now. And why you had to kill Gerard and his secret society now."
"Indeed," Atalanta concurred, "Keeping the secret of Salmacis' shame has always been more important to us than all else."
"So, then it follows that you haven't been rescuing us here, you've been building up to killing us too, just as you threatened in Paris," Gabe said, "Because you must know that we will not stop until we too find the Fountain and know its secret. I understand that now, and I'm ready for it."
He had never realised he could be so defiant and, as he looked over at Saphy for support, he almost thought he could see a look of pride on her face beneath the piercings and flame red hair.
"Perhaps," if possible, Atalanta had begun to look almost wistful, "And then again, perhaps not. We have never allowed anybody who came seeking the Fountain to find it or to return to the world with their knowledge. Never. And yet you two are different from all those who came before you. We have been watching you throughout your journey and your behaviour is not like the other seekers. You do not seek fame, fortune, death or power, you seek love and new life. You are compassionate. Your attempts to save our sister in Bodrum, while misguided, have taught us that you both have good hearts. Thus, we are prepared to make you a deal that we have never done before and may never again."
"Don't say that you'll spare us if we turn away and leave now," Saphy said, "We've come this far and we'll never leave without finding what we came for."
"No, I can see that you won't," Atalanta agreed, "Our offer is, in fact, just the opposite. We will allow you passage to the Fountain, indeed I myself will even lead you there, reveal the location to you, but there is a condition. You must never return home, never return to your old lives, never speak of what you have seen or done here. The rest of the world must assume you dead or disappeared or we have no agreement. The naiads will find a place for you and will watch and protect you, but if you ever leave do not think that we will hesitate to kill you."
