The Broken Sword Read Free

sensations that had bombarded her from the moment she had picked up the rough metal cup, and the experience was at once magnificent and terrifying.
    She turned the cup over in her hands. It was the simplest of containers, a plain bowl small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. Its exterior was bumpy, like a rock whose sharp projections had been worn away by time, but the interior was perfectly scooped, without a single chip or flaw. Its color was a deep blackish green and was translucent when held to the light, as if it were actually made of glass.
    "Beatrice, are you sure..."
    "Yes, Grams. I'm not making it up."
    "Oh, I didn't mean—"
    "No, of course not." She smiled at the old woman's guilty expression, and understood it. Her condition had been diagnosed as retinopathy prematura—massive hemorrhage in the retinal capillaries at birth—and was incurable. There had never been any hope that Beatrice would see. The doctors had made that very clear to the family from the beginning, and they had accepted Beatrice's blindness as she herself had.
    But this was a miracle. As soon as the cup had warmed in her hands, it had become a part of her, as much a part of her as her arms or her organs. It was Beatrice's private miracle, and she would not let it go. Not ever.
    Someone knocked, and the sound sent a jolt of terror through her. She had experienced the feeling only once before, on the night her parents were killed on a rain-slicked road twenty miles from home. Beatrice had been in bed, but the terror had been enough to send her screaming into the hallway.
    She had been eight years old. Later, the psychiatrists who would become such a large and unwanted part of her life would say that she had imagined the premonition after the fact of her parents' death. They would explain away all of her special knowledge with the word "imagination."
    But the danger inherent in the knock at the hotel room door was not imaginary, any more than Beatrice's certainty of her parents' doom had been. "Don't answer it, Grams!" she shouted, but by the time she'd found her voice, her grandmother was already turning the knob.
    "No!" Beatrice ran toward her grandmother.
    The door slammed inward, hitting the old woman's head. A gray-bearded man in Arab robes caught her as she fell with one hand and turned her frail, small body away from him. Then, pulling a long knife from the sleeve of his robe, he slashed once, powerfully, against her throat.
    For a moment Grams hung suspended in the man's arms, her blood bubbling out of her, shooting across the room. A spray, ripe with the odor of her grandmother's warm blood, hit Beatrice's face.
    For a moment the girl stood frozen, too shocked to utter a sound. Then she saw Gram's body slide out of the man's hands toward the floor.
    Oh God, no, no, she thought as she backed away from the Arab.
    He approached her slowly, his face as expressionless and efficient as the manner in which he had killed Grams. He lifted his robes as he stepped over the pool of blood that had shot out of the old woman's neck. With an almost elegant gesture, he flicked the blood from the long blade away from him so that it would not stain his garments. His eyes narrowed slightly.
    He was trying to figure out how to kill her, Beatrice realized. She retreated further. Her back struck the open window; she could feel her buttocks trembling against the sill. Then the man's forehead cleared, and he took one step to the right. He had calculated the exact angle of his attack.
    His arm drew back slowly, a small, economical movement in which Beatrice felt the man's complete concentration focus to a pinpoint. With a gasp, she scrambled onto the sill. Then, as he reached for her, she fell with a shriek toward the pavement four stories below.
    She struck the stones of the courtyard with a thud and the sickening crack of broken bones. A smattering of people—a European nurse sitting on a bench beside a stroller, an old man reading, a young