Free Secret of the Slaves by Alex Archer

else unusual she held her right hand as if gripping something, focused her will, reached…
    The sword appeared in her hand.
    The man’s eyes widened to see the broadsword materialize from thin air. But the two big single-edged blades never faltered in their complex dance of death. Annja was pretty sure his moves were intended to hypnotize or intimidate her, as well as pose a daunting problem in attack or defense. She didn’t doubt he could trap a longer blade between his and twitch the sword right out of her hands if she got careless.
    Annja opted for the direct approach. She simply whacked at one of those dervish-whirling blades with her sword.
    There was a jar of impact up her arm, a strangely musical clang. More than a foot of dark steel blade shot away to embed itself in the wall, between tattered posters for local samba clubs. The man stopped to stare in amazement at the surface where his machete had been chopped off at an angle as neatly as a bamboo stalk.
    Annja’s strike to sever the blade had been forehand. She flowed forward and whipped the sword around in a horizontal backhand stroke that should have separated the long-haired head from wide copper shoulders. Instead the man bent his upper body to his left, away from the stroke. The blade whizzed just over his head, slashing free a lock of hair that floated downward in the heavy air like a feather.
    He thrust for Annja’s flat belly with his remaining machete. The speed and fury of this strike would have impaled her had she not leaped back and left like a cat.
    Unfortunately the motion slammed her hip into another counter laden with Mafalda’s exotic merchandise. A choking cloud of dust and bits of ground herb and tiny wisps of feather floated up to surround Annja’s head as jars jostled her arm. She sneezed, eyes filling with tears.
    He rushed her, raising the machete to chop her down. In dodging, she had turned half away from him clockwise. She gripped the long hilt of her sword with both hands and thrust almost blindly toward the onrushing figure.
    She felt a momentary resistance as he ran onto the blade.
    His eyes blazing with determination, he drove himself onward. The sword’s point came out his back with a sickening sound. He fought to bring his raised weapon down in a self-avenging death stroke.
    Fading strength betrayed his will. The machete fell from fingers that could no longer grip. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. A look of infinite sadness, almost apology, came into the blazing black eyes.
    Then all light went out of them. They became dull as stones. He slumped in death.
    Annja grimaced. She had killed many times. And almost every time before she had killed someone who richly deserved it—at the least a violent aggressor, and sometimes a serial predator upon human prey.
    She knew somehow this man was none of those. He was a good man fighting with all his strength and will for something he truly believed was right. Deluded he may have been—must have been—but fighting for the right nonetheless.
    Her head spun with confusion. Doesn’t that make him innocent? Her mission in life—as much as she could understand it—was to protect the innocent, to preserve innocence, at all costs. Even the cost of her life. Yet she had just killed a man acting for reasons she could not reproach.
    He attacked you, a voice inside her head reminded her. And that fact seems to establish pretty definitively that he either killed Mafalda or had guilty knowledge of the deed. Virtuous he might have been. Innocent, no.
    All this passed through her mind in a flash, a wheel of spiritual and stomach sickness, as she released her grip on the sword. It returned to its otherwhere, infinitely far yet no farther than the palm of her hand. The dead Amazonian warrior slumped to the plank floor.
    Loud crashes snapped Annja back to the moment. She spun in time to see Dan flying upside down into a tall bookcase against one wall,