Mushtaq's Knife/The Gangster Conspiracy

A while back, I mentioned a book and a knife; the latter by Mushtaq Ali al Ansari, the former by Chris Bunch, with help from my son and myself. I thought you might like a short preview of both, so hereunder a draft of one chapter:


THIRTEEN

Jasmine was unhappy with herself. She had practically tripped over the guard before she saw him -- the building was suppose to be empty, he wasn’t listed on the work roster! -- and at that point, he had seen her. She thought about running, but decided that a blaster bolt in the back wasn’t on her preferred menu, so she’d stood there. “You got me,” she said. “I surrender.”
At the moment, he had a grip on her left wrist, and his free hand was pulling back to slap her silly. They obviously hadn’t hired the fellow for his sensitivity and appreciation of art and flower-arranging abilities. He was a thug, looked it, off-the-books, and appeared as if he was going to really enjoy pounding her, to judge from his wicked grin.
And of a moment, time stalled, and it seems as if the thug was moving in extreme slow-motion, like a vid of a bullet piercing an apple, sooo slooowww ...
She had all the time in the universe:
Consider, say, weapons ...
Everybody had favorites. Riss had a boot snubbie she usually carried when working; Goodnight liked the military-issue stuff because that’s what he had been trained with; von Baldur favored an antique piezo-capacitor bolt-thrower that looked like it belonged in a Space Ranger vid and took forever to recharge. Grok had to have a large-frame blaster because his hands were so big. And those were just the shooters. For very close work, or when silence was necessary, there were other tools.
Jasmine favored the little knife the old Sufi Mushtaq Ali al Ansari had made for her, the Tiger’s Claw.
The tigre was a smallish thing, blade under nine centimeters long, with a fat, rounded handle about the same length, making the sheathed knife easy to hide on a belt under a jacket or even a loose blouse. Mushtaq made his knives using the lowest of low-tech methods in a traditional manner, hammering and forging the high-carbon tool steel by hand, using gas-fed firebrick ovens and open fires and anvils and suchlike that would have been at home back in the dawn of space flight, even before. He was more than passing adept as a knifefighter himself, so he knew how to build a knife that would hold up and do the job.
The tigre was slightly concave on the edge side, with a Turk’s knot guard at the base of the blade and a handle made of exotic wood -- walnut in the case of Jasmine’s knife -- permanently bonded to the full-tang. The knife was curved from tip to butt, with the point and end of the handle that could be joined by a straight line almost like a bowstring.
The blade had been clay-tempered -- so that the edge was hard and able to be made very sharp, while the main part of the blade was springier and not at all brittle. The edge had a visible temper line, where the clay left off, called a hamon. There were styles of ancient swords wherein these hamon lines had become quite complex, and whole texts had been devoted to the study of the patterns, which were often given fanciful names, like “clover-tree flower mushroom-shape,” or “Chrysanthemum and River.”
Not being stainless steel, the tigre’s blade had to be kept protected from rust. Some people favored lightweight machine oils for this, standard industrial lubes. Jasmine’s preference was a fragrant -- and very expensive -- sandalwood oil.
Jasmine wore the tigre in a cloned-leather sheath that carried the knife point down and edge forward. She had learned to draw the knife quickly from this style of carry, holding it in what knife-fighters called the ice-pick grip, point down, edge forward ...
All of this passed through Jasmine’s thoughts in a couple of heartbeats, driven by the fight-or-flight syndrome effect called tachypsychia -- the sense of crystal-sharp vision and hearing, the subjective distortion of time so that her thoughts sped past while the man next to her moved so slowly.
The thug who had her wrist gripped tightly in his left hand as he drew his right hand back preparing to slap her didn’t know any of this. His intent was to beat her senseless, and since he was a quarter meter taller and probably fifty kilos heavier and built like a high-gee weightlifter, likely didn’t anticipate that such a beating would be any problem.
Time shifted back to normal, and Jasmine said, “Your sister is a parakeet, isn’t she?”
The thug blinked. She could almost hear the gears grinding in his head. Say what? My sister ... ?
It was a nonsense phrase designed to give a listener pause for a second as he considered it. All she needed was half that.
Jasmine snaked her right hand under her blouse, found the rounded handle of her knife, and drew it, a move she had practiced a thousand times. The blade slid from the sheath smoothly, coming up in front of her just as the thug realized he might need to worry.
He changed the intended slap into a more efficient punch, making a fist and driving it at Jasmine’s face --
She raised the knife to block and angled it to the side slightly. The reverse-tanto clip-point lined up with the inside of the thug’s right wrist. Jasmine leaned her head slightly to her left, using the man’s grip on her to leverage herself a bit, but kept the knife angled, just so --
The thug’s arm hit the point of the knife and because the limb was bigger around all the way to his elbow, the force of his punch drove the razored tip deeper as the arm came in. By the time his now-open hand reached the spot where Jasmine’s head had just been, his arm was flayed from the wrist to the antecubital fossa, the inside of the elbow where the biceps tendon, the brachial artery, and the median nerve all resided. A bad place to be cut.
If he didn’t bleed out, it would take an ER medic quite a while to glue or staple that wound shut, but nobody was going to bother, because Jasmine stepped in, reversed the motion of her arm so that her palm faced up, and gave the stunned thug a gaping new mouth, right across his throat.
Nobody was going to be stitching that up in time to do him any good.
She stepped back. The thug, pale and going white, fell to his knees, then collapsed, face down.
What a great knife Mushtaq had made, she thought, as she bent to wipe the blood from the steel onto the dead man’s shirt.