Iceblood

by James Axler

  Balam rasped, "We go now"

  "We go later," Kane stated in harsh tone that brooked no debate. "After we apekin have attended to a few wake-up traditions. I do hope you'll be patient with our primitive customs."

  Balam ignored the words and sarcastic tone in which they had been delivered.

  Leng arrived with more bowls of porridge and cups of tea. He directed Kane and Brigid to a bathroom, which was more of a latrine. They took turns relieving themselves and splashing water on their faces from basins that were filmed with ice. If nothing else, the freezing water helped Kane come to full alertness.

  Leng took them outside to a shed where half a dozen sturdy, shaggy ponies were stabled. They all looked very tough, bred in the Tibetan wilderness and used to hardship.

  Knowing which horses were the best, Leng carefully selected three. Kane helped him saddle and bridle them. Balam stood apart, watching the process with what seemed like trepidation.

  Kane gestured for him to come near the smallest of the animals, and when he did, it squealed and snapped its teeth viciously at him. Kane couldn't help but grin. "He's a good judge of character, at least."

  Balam gazed at the pony impassively, and Kane received the distinct impression he had no idea of how to mount it. Putting his hands under Balam's armpits, he swung him up and planted him firmly in the saddle. He held the bridle, restraining the pony until it grew accustomed to the smell and feel of its rider. Kane stroked the animal's neck and crooned soothing words to it until it calmed down.

  Leng adjusted the stirrups, and Kane inserted Balam's tiny feet into them. He whispered, "Thank you."

  Kane looked at him in surprise, a bit startled by the acknowledgment of help. Biting back a sarcastic rejoinder, he said simply, "My pleasure."

  22

  They rode the trail with one leg dangling over the edge of a precipice and the other scraping against the cliff face. The rock-ribbed slant pitched downward at an ever steepening angle.

  Above them were snow-gilded peaks glimmering like powdered diamonds, but the trail beneath them was cast into cold, silent shadow. It wound around and down, ever down, skirting gorges and ravines littered with house-sized boulders.

  Since Brigid and Kane assumed Balam knew where he was going, they didn't question him as he took the point. The trail led in only two directions — back and up to the Byang-thang Plateau, and down, ever down.

  Around noon, they reached a windswept level place on the path, and Kane pointed out the remains of a cold camp and scatterings of horse dung. After the discovery, his pointman's sense was nervously alert, his eyes scanning crags and outcroppings for any sign of life.

  Less than an hour past the campsite, a wind sprang up and began blowing powdery snow in swirling, eye-stinging clouds. The ponies lowered their heads and trudged through it. Balam bowed his head likewise, wrapping the lower portion of his face in a woolen scarf.

  For what seemed like a chain of interlocking eternities, they marched through the thickening curtains of snow, which revealed only glimpses of fissures and chasms when the howling wind tore momentary rents in it.

  The billowing clouds of snow reduced their range of vision to only a few yards, and the moisture froze on their eyelids. Their faces, hands and legs grew numb, and ears and teeth ached fiercely.

  Over the keening wail of the wind, Kane thought he heard the frightened neighing of a pony and he cautiously squinted directly into the wind. He caught only a blurred fragment of Balam's pony disappearing over the edge of the trail.

  Reining his own mount in sharply, Kane slid from the saddle. He shouted to Brigid, "Stay there! Something's happened!"

  He could barely see her on her horse and he wasn't certain if she heard him, but she remained in the saddle.

  Kane made his way slowly to the point where he thought the pony had fallen, the wind setting his coattails to flapping like the wings of an ungainly bird. The snow burned his eyes, so he closed them, dropping to his knees and inching forward, calling for Balam.

  He reached the ledge rim and shouted over it, but he scarcely heard his own voice. He started to back away when fingers clutched desperately at his right hand and wrist. Groping down, Kane felt Balam's arm and he pulled him up from the rock knob where he had been dangling.

  Balam lay in Kane's arms like a child, trembling violently and once or twice he tried to speak. Cautiously, Kane worked his way backward until he felt the cliff pressing into his back, and then he sidled over to his horse. He knelt beneath the animal, using it as an unsatisfactory windbreak, and put Balam on his feet. "Are you all right?"

  Balam nodded, vein-laced eyelids squeezed shut. He still shivered, and Kane had no way of knowing if it was from fear or cold, but he didn't blame him either way. After spending three and a half years in a twenty-by-twenty cell, Balam was experiencing a very unpleasant reintroduction to the world.

  He hoisted him onto the saddle of his pony and led it by the bridle past the point where Balam's mount had plunged into the ravine. He climbed on behind Balam, heeling the pony forward.

  The trail entered a gash in the cliff face and descended through a tunnel that had been enlarged out of a natural cave. Sheltered from the merciless lash of the wind, they reined up and dismounted. Now at least they could speak without shouting.

  "What happened back there?" asked Brigid, her heavy, disheveled mane of hair glistening with snow, her face reddened by the scouring of wind-driven sleet.

  "Balam's horse missed his step," he answered. "Nearly took Balam with him."

  "Good thing you were paying attention." She made the comment between chattering teeth.

  Balam husked out, "Thank you."

  Kane tried to grin derisively, but his lips were too chapped. "My pleasure. How far now?"

  Balam made an odd gesture with one hand, languid and diffident. "Not long now."

  "You're not sure?" demanded Brigid.

  "Long time since I came this way. Landmarks change."

  "How long?" Kane inquired.

  Balam performed the hand gesture again, and Kane wondered if it was the equivalent of a shrug. "Not sure. Around time when we aborted Norse colonization of the North American continent."

  Brigid's eyes widened in astonishment. "That has to be eight or nine hundred years ago."

  "Long time," Balam whispered agreeably.

  After resting for half an hour, they continued on their way. The storm was gradually blowing itself out, and there were longer lulls between the freezing, gale-force gusts.

  The trail led for two miles along a fairly level parapet of basalt until it turned sharply and began to zigzag downward. Kane could see that it was largely hand-hewed and in some places it looked as if demolition charges had done the work. Regardless, the construction work was obviously ancient.

  The snow became little more than intermittent flurries the longer and deeper they rode. As sunset approached, the flurries ceased altogether and Kane saw more horse droppings on the path.

  The trail flowed seamlessly into relatively flat, stone-littered ground. Balam's slender frame stiffened in the saddle, as though he was excited or apprehensive.

  They followed a dry, boulder-filled streambed that wended its way through a sheer-walled ravine. Kane had visited some wild places before, but this piece of Tibet had to be one of the most inaccessible regions on the face of the Earth.

  The sky purpled with twilight when they marched out of the ravine into a box canyon. Bulwarks of granite stood like huge tombstones all around them. In the rock face fifty yards beyond the ravine, they saw a black cleft, partially hidden by clumps of tall, dry grass and slabs of limestone.

  Balam inclined his head toward it. "There."

  "That?" demanded Kane. "That hole in the wall is the door to your magic city of immortals?"

  Wriggling impatiently, Balam tried to dismount, so Kane reined the pony to a halt. He jumped to the ground and stood with his eyes fixed on the dark gap. His body swayed slightly, gracefully to and fro like a reed to
uched by a gentle wind.

  It occurred to Kane that Balam might be experiencing a deep emotion, so he said nothing. At the same time it had occurred to him that although he had seen horse manure on the trail, he saw no sign of horses anywhere in the vicinity The ground was far too hard and stony to take tracks, but he scanned it anyway.

  Then he heard the flat cracking snap of a rifle, followed a shaved slice of a second later by a little thump of displaced air next to his left ear.

  Kane lunged off the saddle, Sin Eater springing into his hand. Another shot split the heavy silence of the canyon, and the gravel gouted in front of Brigid's pony. It shrilled a frightened cry, rearing up on its hind legs. She managed to kick free of the stirrups and slid over the horse's rump, alighting on her feet. She fumbled to bring her mini-Uzi to bear.

  Grigori Zakat's disembodied voice floated on the air, the echoes distorting it as to the direction from which it emanated. "I did not kill you before when I had the chance, Kane. I prefer not to kill you now."

  Kane looked wildly around, assuming a combat stance, eyeing every boulder, declivity and decent-sized bush in the zone. "Then why are you shooting at us?"

  "To illustrate my preference that you stay alive. I hope you don't hold my actions in the museum against me."

  "You hope wrong," Kane replied, crouching down behind his pony, pulling Brigid to him.

  A note of laughter twisted through the canyon. It held an odd, high note. "You are the grudge-holding type. I'd hoped you were more emotionally mature than that. How did your friends, the black man and the white girl, fare?"

  "They had a whale of a time," answered Kane, ignoring the sour look Brigid cast in his direction. "What do you want?"

  "Obviously, the same as you. The Chintamani Stone, the shining trapezohedron. I have two of its facets in my possession, and they have led me here, to Agartha, to the Valley of the Eight Immortals, to claim the primary piece."

  "What makes you so sure this is Agartha?"

  "Call it intuition. Besides, I have the ancestral ambassador with me. He should know."

  "If that's true, what's keeping you from strolling in and taking it?"

  Balam behaved not only as if he were oblivious to the gunshots, but to the conversation. He continued to stare at the cleft, body still swaying.

  "I intend to wait until morning. Now, however, with you here — by the way, what is wrong with your small friend? — I propose another alliance of convenience. Safety in numbers and all that."

  "We've already had an example of your version of a truce, Zakat."

  The Russian laughed again. "I understand your point of view is different from mine, but what harm will it do to cooperate? I have you pinned down — you can't go anywhere. It won't cost you anything to go along with me. I know you think I handed you a raw deal in Newyork, but I'll make it up to you. Are you a religious man, Kane?"

  Out of all the threats and boasts he expected Zakat to taunt him with, that question took him aback. "I've never thought about it. Why?"

  "Because I am. In fact, I am an ordained priest. The deity of my religion is power, and the way one communes with such a god is to recognize and accept one's destiny. We are all agents of it. What is happening now is supposed to happen."

  "What are you going to do next?" Kane asked sneeringly "Read my fortune?"

  Zakat laughed again, as if he found the question truly funny. "Once I retrieve the prime piece of the trapezohedron, I can probably do far more than that. My point is, if you obey the law of power, you therefore shall gain more. It is a cumulative effect, known in my religion as causitry."

  While Zakat spoke, Kane scanned every inch of the area. Because of the deceptive echoes, Zakat and his people could be behind them. He felt ridiculously vulnerable, hunkering down behind a shaggy pony. He knew he had been in tighter spots in his life; he just couldn't recall them offhand.

  "Therefore," Zakat continued reasonably, "causitry is part of destiny and my actions caused your destiny to interact with mine."

  "Oh, shut up," Brigid muttered.

  Zakat continued to wax eloquent on subjects metaphysical. Kane listened to the man's blandishments and with a start he realized he was actually considering the man's proposition. He was a masterful persuader. He couldn't help but suspect that the fragments of the stone in his possession were augmenting Zakat's psionic abilities.

  Balam suddenly commanded Kane and Brigid's attention. He strode deliberately toward the opening in the cliff wall, unzipping his parka as he did so.

  "Tell the midget to stop, Kane," Zakat commanded sharply. "All of us enter together when the time is right."

  "Do as he says, Balam," Brigid called.

  Balam kept walking, shrugging out of his coat, dropping it on the ground behind him. The rifle cracked again, and a column of dirt spouted less than two feet in front of him. His measured, single-minded stride didn't falter.

  Kane watched, completely dumbfounded as Balam began peeling off his dark one-piece garment, stripping naked. He stopped only to step out of the leggings and then continued on, padding over sharp-edged pebbles on bare, six-toed feet.

  A voice burst out with a stream of agitated consonants, and black-turbaned Gyatso squeezed out between two boulders. He raced toward Balam, shrieking frenzied words, waving his arms over his head. Zakat bellowed something in Russian, and Kane figured it was an order to stop.

  Kane sprinted after Balam, firing a triburst in Gyatso's direction. The light was poor, the man's clothing was dark and he reacted with inhumanly swift reflexes. He bounded straight back, and the 9 mm rounds dug gouges in the dirt and ripped white scars on the rocks behind him.

  Two blasters opened up from behind the bulwark of stone, one obviously the Tokarev The canyon walls magnified the staccato reports. Brigid fired her autoblaster, spraying Zakat's basalt shelter with a hailstorm of lead, driving Gyatso back behind them.

  Kane didn't divert his attention from the rocks and so caught only brief glimpse of the darkness of the cleft swallowing Balam's pale body. He continued firing round after round until he reached the gap. It was just wide and high enough for an adult to slip through on all fours. He knew the gap was not a shallow depression but a tunnel. His flesh tingled at the prospect of crawling headfirst into a pitch-dark passageway, but it tingled even more at continuing a firefight with enemies who probably outgunned both Brigid and him and had good cover.

  As Brigid joined him, he snapped, "Get in there. I'll cover you."

  She looked at the opening fearfully, then flinched as a bullet struck the cliff over her head and sprinkled rock chips in her hair.

  Grabbing her by the collar, Kane forced her down in front of the opening. "Go, goddammit!"

  With a fatalistic shrug, Brigid wriggled into the cleft.

  23

  The rough-edged tunnel narrowed from a four-foot diameter to three within the first yard. The little light peeping in from outside vanished quickly, and Kane stared straight ahead into unfathomable darkness. If not for the sound of Brigid's scuffling on the stone, he wouldn't have known she was there. He resisted the urge to unpocket and turn on his microlight.

  The sound of voices from ahead of him was such a surprise he nearly stopped dead. A second later, he realized he had heard the echoes of Grigori Zakat's voice, but he wasn't comforted. He glanced behind him. Outlined against the hazy, irregular opening, he could just barely make out the Russian's head.

  He crawled faster and could only pray the tunnel would curve or drop before it occurred to Zakat to open fire into the cleft. He crawled as rapidly into the blackness as his hands and knees could move. His head bumped into knobs, and loose pebbles dug into his knees. His coat might turn a 7.62 mm bullet, but he didn't want to find out.

  At the sudden crack of the triggered AK, he dropped flat, hoping Brigid did the same. He heard a soft zing over his head. The whine of a ricochet instantly followed.

  He whispered, "Baptiste, are you all right?"

  "More or less," came the
pained reply. "I bumped my head."

  "Belly crawl or you'll have more than a knot up there."

  They wormed forward on their bellies. There came the crack of another shot, and rock chips sifted down on the back of his neck. Kane and Brigid slithered and scraped along. The tunnel narrowed even more, and the walls caught at Kane's shoulders, but he kept clawing and scrabbling onward, sweat stinging his eyes.

  The click of a firing-rate selector reverberated throughout the darkness. He knew Zakat had switched from single shot to full-auto.

  He heard a frightened cry from Brigid an instant before the tunnel floor vanished under his hands. He dived headlong into a sepia sea. Just as he fell, a stream of bullets tore through the tunnel and passed over his plunging body. They bounced off rock with a series of eerie screams.

  Kane wasn't listening. He was too busy clawing at empty air, groping for a handhold. He didn't grope for very long. A breath-robbing crash numbed his body, and he was only dimly aware of tumbling head over heels down a slope. By the time a rock stopped his thrashing descent, the burst of autofire had ceased.

  When his senses returned, he found he had fetched up against the base of a boulder in a half-sitting position. He heard a deep groan from Brigid, somewhere nearby.

  He thrust his hand into his coat pocket and removed the Nighthawk microlight, flicking it on and shining the amber beam around. Brigid was pushing herself up from the rocky ground, teeth clamped tight on groans of pain.

  "Don't ask me if I'm all right," she said lowly. "I'm liable to hit you."

  Kane cast the light upward, and it haloed a set of small, worn steps leading downward from the tunnel opening, nearly ten feet above them. Now he knew how Balam had kept from breaking his neck. He heard sounds from the tunnel, scramblings and murmurings.

  He forced himself erect, wincing at the flares of pain igniting all over his body "Can you walk, Baptiste?"

  She wobbled to her feet, gingerly dabbing at the blood flowing from a cut on her scalp, right at the hairline. "Guess I have no choice."