The Broken Sword Read Free Page A

couple holding hands—leapt up at the intrusion. The young woman screamed. Beatrice sighed once, aware of the pain streaking through her body. When she opened her eyes, she saw the flap of a white robe from inside her hotel room. The man was coming after her.
    Got to get up, she thought, dazed. The people in the courtyard were moving toward her, their movements slowed as if she were experiencing a dream. And while they were moving, their expressions stunned, their hands trembling, Beatrice felt her bones knitting, the warmth of the cup spreading through her injuries, healing the broken blood vessels, pulling her cells back together.
    The cup. She was still holding it, clutching it so hard that her fingers were white. It throbbed hotly in her hands, singing to her as it did its work. The cup was what the man wanted. He had killed Grams just to get to Beatrice, to this.
    Get up, she screamed at herself. Get up now.
    Groaning, she pulled herself to her feet. The onlookers in the courtyard halted in their slow-motion pilgrimage toward her. The young woman fell to her knees, either in prayer or simple astonishment; the old man blinked owlishly. Around Beatrice were scattered droplets of her own blood, from wounds now entirely healed. She stared at them for a moment, struggling to believe her eyes, then lit out from the garden into the streets of the city.
    Beatrice tore through the cluttered street, stumbling as she crashed into a stall where gaily colored scarves danced lazily in the hot desert air.
    The stall owner shrieked at her in Arabic. Across the serpentine market street, two veiled women turned to one another, giggling. Beside them, squatting before a blanket strewn with trinkets and glass beads, an old crone in a filthy burnoose directed a gesture toward Beatrice, hands brushing together as protection against whatever spirit had driven the European girl with the long golden hair crazy.
    This might be a dream, she thought hopefully. It certainly seemed like a dream, from the shooting in the bazaar onward. Maybe she hadn't seen her grandmother murdered in front of her. Maybe she hadn't fallen four stories to a stone pavement and broken nearly every bone in her body. Maybe there was no cold-eyed Arab who moved with the grace of a dancer chasing her.
    Let this be a dream, she prayed. Oh God, yes. She would wake up in the small squishy bed next to Grams', and daylight would be streaming through the window, and...
    And I'd still be blind.
    She pumped her legs faster, gulping for air. No, she had never dreamed like this. She had had running dreams before, but the landscape had been entirely different. It had been the amorphous nightmare world of the blind, in which menace exuded from hidden sounds and smells and shapes that bumped her as she passed. This was different. Color screamed at her from every inch of the universe. Shapes were not something you felt when you drew near to them, but real objects that assaulted and intruded into you from a far distance. The buildings she saw were not the perfect monolithic structures she had imagined, but crumbling towers of stone and wood. And people in this new world were all strangers.
    Behind her a shot rang out. Someone screamed.
    Beatrice cast a glance backward and saw a woman fall. The people on the street looked wildly around to see where the shot had come from. Voices rose in a frenzied crescendo as the mob of terrified pedestrians trapped in the tight bottleneck of the ancient street sought to get clear. They ducked into doorways and flattened themselves against the sides of the narrow buildings, trying to make themselves invisible to the invisible gunman.
    That was for me , Beatrice thought as she watched the woman's still body sprawled on the garbage-strewn street. The man in the white robes knew exactly where she was, and would kill whomever he needed to get to her. Her only hope was to manage somehow to melt into the panicked crowd.
    "Thanatos," a woman shrilled as she