Shadow Puppets (The Shadow 3)

May he find peace.

It was a small group gathered there in the cemetery in Ribeirao Preto. Bean and Petra, the Wiggins, Peter. Graff had gone back to space. Suriyawong had led his little army back to Thailand, to help their homeland drive out the conquerors and restore itself.

No one had anything much to say over Achilles's grave. They could not pretend that they weren't all glad that he was dead. Bean read the inscription he had written, and everyone agreed that it wasn't just fair to Achilles, it was generous.

In the end it was only Peter who had something he could say from the heart.

"Am I the only one here who sees something of himself in the man who's lying in this box?"

No one had an answer for him, either yes or no.

Three bloody weeks later, the war ended. If the Chinese had accepted the terms the Caliph had offered in the first place, they would have lost only their new conquests, plus Xinjiang and Tibet. Instead, they waited until Canton had fallen, Shanghai was besieged, and the Turkic troops were surrounding Beijing.

So when the Caliph drew the new map, the province of Inner Mongolia was given to the nation of Mongolia, and Manchuria and Taiwan were given their independence. And China had to guarantee the safety of teachers of religion. The door had been opened to Muslim proselytizing.

The Chinese government promptly fell. The new government repudiated the ceasefire terms, and the Caliph declared martial law until new elections could be held.

And somewhere in the rugged terrain of easternmost India, the goddess of the bridge lived among her worshipers, biding her time, watching to see whether India was going to be free or had merely changed one tyranny for another.

In the aftermath of war, while Indians, Thais, Burmese, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians searched their onetime conquerors' land for family members who had been carried off, Bean and Petra also searched as best they could by computer, hoping to find some record of what Volescu and Achilles had done with their lost children.