by Джеффри Лорд
«So, you're finally going to let Blade bed you?» said Hota. He spoke loudly enough to be overheard but not so loud that anyone who wanted to ignore him couldn't do so. Blade saw Kareena silently grit her teeth and hoped Bairam would have the sense to do the same.
Instead Bairam drew his sword so violently that he nearly dropped it, then stepped toward Hota. Kareena tried to hold him back, but he shook off her hand fiercely.
«Hota, you will eat those-words.»
Hota's own sword rasped out of its scabbard. «You will eat my sword long before that, Bairam. You may be of Peython's blood, but I begin to wonder. Would Peython have a son ready to sell his sister to someone outside the Law?»
At this point Blade would cheerfully have strangled Bairam with his bare hands. From the look on Kareena's face she would probably have helped him. However, there was Hota to deal with first. Everyone else was hovering around the two swordsmen, not knowing whether they should back off and give them room to fight or try to break up the duel. Custom and the Law said the duel should be fought. Common sense said it should be stopped. Then Blade pushed his way through the circle and stepped up to Hota.
«Hota, I say that you are a coward, to fight Bairam who has not your strength. I say that you will prove anything only by fighting me to the death.»
Hota spat at Blade's feet. «You are outside the Law, Blade. Now stand out of the way.»
«So are you, Hota. The Law is made for men. You are much less of a man than Kareena. You are only an animal who talks too much and foolishly. I say this, and I will go on saying it while I live. So kill me or hear it from me every day while I am in Kaldak.»
Hota's scream really was more like an animal's cry than anything human. Blade jumped back as Hota's sword flashed past his chest three times, in three savage thrusts. Then several men gripped Hota's arms and shoulders, pulling him back. He screamed and cursed until Blade was afraid the men holding him would have to knock him out. Blade very much wanted the fight to go to a conclusion.
«Hota, will you prove Blade's words the truth?» said Sidas angrily. «Does a brave man fight with a sword against bare hands?»
Blade laughed. «Do not take his sword from him, Sidas. In England we have ways of fighting with our bare hands which you do not have in the Land. So Hota with his sword and me with my hands is a fair fight, as long as neither of us is wearing armor. Hota, I will fight as I stand if you will meet me-«
«I will, by the Law! Now let me go, you-!»
Reluctantly, Sidas and the others let Hota go. He shook himself to loosen his muscles, then raised his sword and sprang forward. Blade dropped into unarmed-combat stance and hoped this gamble would pay off. Facing Hota with his bare hands would give him a perfect excuse for killing the man, and Hota had to die. With his loud mouth, his bigotry about the Law, and his many friends among the warriors, he'd simply become too dangerous to be left alive. Blade was going to have to terminate him, as cold-bloodedly as he'd ever terminated a KGB agent. In fact there'd been KGB agents he'd killed with more regrets than he would feel in Hota's case. On the other hand, bare hands against bare steel was a gamble. Blade was confident of his skill in unarmed combat, but he was also aware of Hota's speed and strength. If the man was able to slow Blade down at all, this fight might have a very ugly ending.
Blade quickly discovered that Hota's combination of speed and a short sword gave the man a nearly perfect defense. If he'd been using a longer sword which he had to raise before striking, Blade might have been able to get in under it. As it was, he found the sword's point darting at his ribs every time he tried to close. If it got to be a life-or-death matter, he could always take the sword in his shoulder, immobilizing Hota's weapon. Then he could strike with his free hand. He didn't want to do that yet, though. Gilmarg had to be explored, and he'd be damned if he was going to try exploring it with one arm out of action!
So Blade kept his distance as much as he could without looking too cautious. Several times he managed to get in a kick at Hota's hip from the man's left. This slowed Hota down a little but not much. After the fourth kick he started guarding with his left arm held low. The next time Blade kicked, Hota's hand clamped down on Blade's ankle like the claw of the waldo. Blade had to kick, twist, and roll all in one motion to get free without being run through. Even then Hota's sword gashed the back of his leg.
As he got up, Blade heard Kareena gasp with relief and close her eyes. He wished she'd keep herself more under control. Knowing that Kareena was on Blade's side. could drive Hota into a berserk attack, caring nothing about his survival as long as he could take Blade with him.
Fortunately the cut was shallow. In Home Dimension a light bandage would have been enough for it. He wasn't even going to lose any speed. Just as well, since Hota seemed to be a more intelligent fighter than he'd expected.
Suddenly Blade realized that the way Hota reacted to Blade's kicks opened a possible line of attack. Blade feinted twice with his kicks and saw Hota make the same response each time. Not so intelligent after all, Blade thought. Putting both arms in predictable positions isn't a good idea in a fight. Blade decided to make his move the next time. Otherwise Hota might get suspicious, and he himself was going to be losing speed from sheer fatigue before much longer. Hota hadn't been chased all over Gilmarg by a runaway waldo!
Blade closed, then stood with one leg loose, the other stiffened. Hota gave his war cry and thrust fiercely at Blade's exposed and immobile stomach. Blade wheeled on his stiffened leg and brought the edge of his left hand across the side of Hota's neck. At the same time he folded to the right and gripped Hota's wrist. The sword point darted past Blade, inches away from castrating him. All of Hota's forward motion was now a free gift to Blade.
With that help, Blade's strength and his grip on Hota's shoulder and arm easily did the rest. In a single smooth motion Blade dropped and Hota rose. The Kaldakan let out a scream as he found himself in midair, then hit the ground headfirst with a gruesome crunch. Blade stepped back, noting that Hota's skull was flattened on top and his whole head was at an impossible angle to his shoulders.
Then Kareena was in Blade's arms, and this time he didn't even want to push her away. He wasn't feeling quite so cold-blooded now that Hota was dead, and it helped not to have to look at the man's body for a while.
Finally Kareena stepped away from Blade and turned to the others. «You see that Hota is dead, from the bare hands of a man he fought with a sword. A man he said was outside the Law! I say that if Blade is outside the Law, then the Law itself is not as it should be.» Several people flinched at those words, but nobody dared say anything. Blade himself wouldn't have argued with Kareena, not when she had her sword drawn and looked ready to kill anyone who argued.
«I will stay here in Gilmarg with Blade, and we shall study the secrets of the Tower Builders. Whatever we do or leave undone will be for the good of Kaldak, in the war which is coming. The rest of you, start loading the munfans!»
Bairam stepped forward. «My sister, our chief's daughter, speaks well. My sword will go where she or Blade of England tells it to go.»
«Mine likewise,» said Sidas.
«And mine.»
«Mine, also.»
«Yes. A new time has come for Kaldak.»
And so on, until nearly everyone had sworn to obey Kareena and Blade. No doubt they were taking his victory over Hota as an omen. Blade felt more relieved than proud. Knowing which orders to give was always important, but being able to get them obeyed was even more so.
Chapter 12
At dawn the next day Blade and Kareena stood side by side in an upper-floor window on the edge of Gilmarg. Far across the fields they saw the last munfans tramping toward the forest. Green light flickered three times from behind the munfans.
«That's Sidas signaling farewell,» said Blade. «Now it's up to us.»
«Do you think they'll have enough fire-I mean, power cells?»
«They've got all we could hope to get out of Gilmarg without wai
ting for the Doimari to strike again,» said Blade. «Thanks to Sidas, that's many more than I'd hoped.»
Sidas had made a suggestion so sensible that Blade was embarrassed he hadn't thought of it himself. For a short distance a munfan could carry three or four times its normal load. So why not load the munfans until they could barely walk, lead them to the forest, unload them, bring them back, and repeat the whole process all night. It didn't matter if the power cells got all the way to Kaldak at once, as long as they were out of Gilmarg before any more Doimari came. The Doimari seldom came into the forests, and even if they did you could hide a whole city under the trees, never mind a pile of Oltec!
Sidas, Blade decided, was going to be an extremely useful man in the new Kaldak with its new Law. Once he was convinced it was possible to do something at all, he would think very clearly about how to do it. Blade had told Bairam, «If Kareena and I don't come back, be sure Sidas gets the honor he deserves. Listen to him yourself, too. He thinks before he speaks.»
Bairam had flushed. «And I still do not?»
Blade had clapped Bairam on the shoulder. «You're getting better. But you still have a long way to go.»
«I know.» He had sighed. «And you have made it even longer than it was before you came. I hope you stay a long time, Blade. Even my father could not do all which must be done to help Kaldak go where it must.»
«Blade,» Kareena now said insistently, breaking into his thoughts. «Will they have enough power cells to fight a war against Doimar?»
«I don't think they'll have to fight the whole war with what they have now,» said Blade. «There was a storeroom full of power cells under Gilmarg, in spite of all the years the Doimari have been coming to it. Why shouldn't there be some under Kaldak, when you've never even looked for them?»
Kareena smiled and turned away from the window. «True. Who knows what lies in the darkness beyond the Law? Shall we go down and look?»
«-one hundred fifty-two. One hundred fifty-three. One hundred fifty-four. One hundred fifty-five.»
Blade listened to Kareena's voice counting the rungs of the ladder, then looked down. Twenty feet below, the lantern, dangling from a rope around his waist, made a flickering, unsteady ring of orange light on the walls of the shaft. He saw no sign of any opening or even a closed door.
How far down did this shaft go? With one hundred sixty rungs at a foot and a half each, they were already two hundred and forty feet below the level of the storeroom, and that was already a good fifty feet below ground level. They were already half again as deep as the Dimension X complex under the Tower of London, and with no elevator.
At least there was no elevator now. Once there must have been some sort of machinery for lifting equipment, if not people. Anything worth burying this far underground must have held items which couldn't be hauled up and down a ladder on people's backs. Perhaps this particular shaft was for ventilation and used by people only in an emergency. In that case the main shaft for whatever lay below must be elsewhere. Blade didn't like the idea of searching an underground maze for an elevator which probably no longer worked. On the other hand, he liked even less the thought of climbing back up this shaft rung by rung, with the Doimari quite possibly waiting at the top.
He stopped and flexed the kinks out of each arm and leg in turn. The lantern below swung through a wider arc, nearly striking the wall. As it steadied, Blade saw an unfamiliar pattern on the wall at the very edge of the light. He quickly descended four more rungs and looked again. The pattern was like bars or wire mesh over a large opening. Another five rungs downward, and Blade was sure.
It was an opening, large enough for a man, but it was also blocked by a door of metal bars as thick as Blade's thumb. Blade reeled in the lantern, hung it on a rung, then unslung his rifle and prepared to fire it.
«Won't that kill it?» Kareena asked.
«Remember the power cells. If it dies, we can make it live again.»
Kareena shook her head in irritation at her own mistake. «I am sorry, Blade. I am not used to thinking of how life goes, when we are so far beyond the Law as I have known it.» She hesitated. «Blade, do all the men of England think beyond the Law as easily as you do?»
«No,» said Blade shortly. That wasn't a line of questioning he wanted her to follow very far. He aimed the rifle at the nearest corner of the door and pulled the trigger. The shaft lit up with the familiar green laser glow. Even though the glow reached much farther than the lantern's light Blade saw no bottom to the shaft.
It took a complete power cell and part of another before the door was cut loose. The dark metal of the bars was nearly as tough as the silvery Englor alloy of Blade's loinguard. He waited until the bars cooled off a little, used the muzzle of his rifle to swing the gate open, and waited a little while longer. Even an emergency exit might have electronic sentinels if what lay beyond it was important enough. Some of these sentinels might even have survived the centuries since the fall of the Tower Builders.
The darkness beyond the doorway gave back nothing but silence. Finally Blade swung himself into the door, then helped Kareena down. They stood together on the edge of the unknown for a moment, Kareena's arm stealing around Blade's waist. Then Blade laughed loud enough to raise echoes and struck a dramatic pose, holding the lantern high.
«Forward! To the future of Kaldak!»
He'd hit the proper note. Kareena also laughed and stepped away from him. Side by side they walked into the darkness.
Directly ahead of them lay a single long corridor, with a metal floor and stone walls sprayed with some sort of plastic. The plastic was cream-colored and the floor a tarnished green. A translucent strip ran down the middle of the ceiling, probably the lighting system. At irregular intervals plain steel doors were set in the walls. The first three Blade tried were solidly locked.
«Why can't you burn a way through them?» asked Kareena, when they'd left the third door behind.
«Because they're too thick,» said Blade. «I would use up too much of our power. Also, we don't know what's inside those doors. It might catch fire or explode.» To emphasize his words he thumped the fourth door with his fist. It resounded as dully as the others, but then swung open several inches. Kareena giggled. Blade put his shoulder to the door and pushed with unnecessary vigor. It flew open so violently it crashed against the stone wall inside.
The lantern showed rack after rack of crates, cans, boxes, and man-high cylinders all around the room. In the middle was a table, piled on one end with small cylindrical cans with spray buttons on the tops. An overturned chair lay on the far side. Blade started walking around the room, holding the lantern up to each rack. Either the language of the Tower Builders was very different from that of their descendants, or the containers were marked in some sort of code. Blade couldn't understand more than one word or sign in ten on any of the labels. Finding out what was inside the containers was going to be a matter of trial and error. Not the best way, when one error could be fatal.
A clatter and an exclamation from Kareena made Blade turn around. She'd brushed against the table, knocking several of the metal cans off onto the floor. Blade sniffed. There was a faint smell in the air which hadn't been there before, rather like a cheap perfume.
«There's still something in the cans, Blade,» said Kareena. Before he could stop her she picked up one and pressed the button down on one end. There was a faint hissing and the perfume smell grew stronger. «It smells like a kind of soap,» she said merrily.
«Kareena-!»
She stretched out one bare arm, aimed the can at it, and pressed the spray button again. A patch of skin turned wet and glistening. Then Blade grabbed the can and snatched it out of her hand. «Kareena, you don't know what that is! It could be a poison, even if it smells like perfume!»
But Kareena was too busy rubbing the sprayed patch of skin to listen. «Blade it is a kind of soap,» she said finally. «Look.» Blade had to admit that the patch of skin she'd sprayed was much cleaner than it had been, and show
ed no sign of damage. «A liquid soap in a can! We've never found anything like that! What else do you suppose we're going to find?» She sounded like a child anticipating a visit to the toy store.
Blade didn't want to quarrel with Kareena. He also didn't want her kittenish curiosity to kill them both. «I do not know,» he said. «The Oltec the Sky Masters left here in the Land is different from what they left in England. I do know that we must be very careful. So never, never play with anything you find the way you did now. You were very foolish and very lucky.»
Kareena's eyes went hard and for a moment Blade was sure a quarrel was about to start. Then she sighed. «Blade, I suppose you are right. I did not think. I am not used to living so far beyond the Law that one must think about this sort of thing.»
«True, and so must everyone else in Kaldak. You're all going to have to learn.»
«Yes, but if we don't play with what we find, how are we going to learn anything about it?» She gestured around the room. «There must be enough new Oltec here to keep fifty people busy learning about it.»
«Then we'll come back with fifty people, and they can go to work. That way if one man makes a mistake and gets killed, the other forty-nine can see what happened and learn from it. If we get killed, all we've learned dies with us. It may never get back to Kaldak at all and certainly won't get back in time to help against the Doimari.»
«You think there is really going to be a war?»
«You saw that machine, Kareena. If Kaldak had a hundred of them, wouldn't your father be tempted to try destroying Doimar. And he is a man who prefers peace and the Law. I have not heard that Feragga of Doimar is fond of either.» That was a considerable understatement. From what he'd heard of the woman who ruled Doimar, she was something to frighten naughty children with at bedtime!
Kareena nodded reluctantly. «Very well, Blade. I will follow where you lead.» Blade noticed that this promise didn't keep her from scooping three cans of the spray soap into her pack.