by Джеффри Лорд
For more long minutes the fight went on. Blade's sword was beginning to lose its edge and show so many nicks it looked more like a saw than a sword. And there was blood on his left leg just below the knee, where Ornilan's sword had gashed it. So far the wound had not stiffened or cost him much blood, but it meant that his guard was no longer impenetrable.
It was the Golden Steed that found the strength to neigh, and rear, and lash out with both fore-hoofs. It caught Ornilan's horse on the side of the neck, and the horse stumbled and lurched sideways as its rider launched another stroke at Blade. The stroke missed. Half off-balance, Ornilan was slow to bring his guard back up. Blade's sword flashed out in a thrust, at the full length of Blade's long arm. Its point drove into Ornilan's neck, tearing through skin and flesh. Blood spurted out, and down on the general's armor.
Although he must have known that the wound was mortal, Ornilan dropped his sword and clamped both hands over the wound. For a moment the blood slowed to a trickle. His face pale, he stared at Blade.
«Why, Pendarnoth? Why, when you were offered so much?»
«It wasn't enough, Ornilan.»
«But you are still going to…»
«Lose?» He shook his head. «I think not, Ornilan.»
The words were barely out of Blade's mouth when he heard Pendari horns sounding beyond the Lanyri squares. There were more of them than Blade had ever heard. They sounded in an arc miles wide, from far around on the Lanyri left to equally far around on the right. And behind the harsh music of the horns was the earth-shaking thud of hoofs-not merely thousands, but tens of thousands.
Blade threw back his head and laughed, wildly and triumphantly. «The Pendari are in your rear, Ornilan! How will you get your army clear now? How, I ask you?» He caught himself as he realized there was an almost hysterical note in his voice. Strain and fatigue were catching up with him.
Ornilan made no reply. Hands still over his wound but blood seeping between them, he dug his spurs into his horse. It cantered away and was lost in the cloud of dust spreading across the field as the main army of Pendar went into the attack.
Whether the Lanyri ever learned that their general was dying Blade himself never knew. Certainly they showed no loss of spirit or lack of courage as they stood and fought off one Pendari charge after another. But soon their spears were almost gone, and their arms too weary to throw those that remained-or to hold their shields up, for that matter. Pendari arrows began to find targets, and the Lanyri ranks began to thin. All through the long afternoon of heat and dust they thinned, still standing. It was not until the sun was dipping close to the horizon that the Pendari broke the first square. It was not until well after dark that the last one gave way. And it was not until dawn broke over the battlefield that the killing ended, for the Pendari took no prisoners. Sixty thousand Lanyri soldiers had come onto the field the morning before. Sixty thousand remained there the morning after.
In the gray light of that dawn Blade rode back to Vilesh with Princess Harima. He had his second wind now, or perhaps his third. He talked as they rode along side by side.
«It was odd. The whole point of my being out there was to bait the trap for the Rojags. But they rode straight into it anyway, simply because we had charged them. I'm not sure if more than a handful of them even recognized me. And as for General Ornilan…» He shrugged.
«Well, it doesn't matter whether or not it was necessary this time. You certainly won't have to do it again,» said Harima. She went on, with a note of mock severity in her voice. «Do you think I'd let you, in any case? I don't want to be the Pendarnoth's widow, not for a good many years at least.»
«Widow?»
«Didn't Nefus tell you? Oh, there are times when I want to slap that brother of mine, even if he is a king! I went to him the night before the battle and asked him if I could have you to husband. He consented. He will announce it tonight at the banquet.»
Blade was about to ask, «What banquet?» But then pain stabbed into his head, pulsing savagely for a moment, then fading. The computer was tugging at his brain, seeking him out to snatch him back to Home Dimension. Its grip hadn't tightened on this first lunge, but it would be back. The grip would tighten, and Harima and the battlefield and all of Pendar would sink away into his memories.
As the pain faded and his vision cleared, he saw a familiar face staring up at him from the ground almost at the feet of the Golden Steed, a face white and drained of blood by a gaping wound in the neck. General Ornilan. He was naked-the scavengers had already been at work. Blade beckoned to one of the guardsmen riding with them and pointed down at the body.
«This man is to be taken to Vilesh and buried with honor. He was a brave opponent.» The guardsmen looked for a moment as though he wanted to argue, but the hardening of Blade's face kept the man's mouth shut. He nodded and dropped back to pass the word on to his comrades. Blade urged the Golden Steed forward again.
As he did so, the pain struck a second time. After the first terrible pulsing, he knew that this time the computer's grip was going to tighten. The outside world faded swiftly into darkness, with none of the effects he was used to. Oddly, though, he still had the sensation of gripping the Golden Steed tightly between his legs and holding the reins tightly in his hands.
The darkness-formless, empty, chill-swirled about him until all sense of time and space left him. Then it began to fade. Slowly at first, then suddenly it was torn apart by a glaring burst of light. The light dazzled Blade. He closed his eyes, but he could still feel the Golden Steed under him.
Then a voice was sounding in his ear. It was unmistakably Lord Leighton's voice, loud and almost shrill with surprise and indignation. And just as unmistakably Lord Leighton was shouting, «Get that horse out of here!»
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Once again Richard Blade was riding the Golden Steed. But instead of the yellow-brown plains of Pendar, the rolling green hills of Surrey stretched out around him. And instead of the white walls and gilded roofs of Vilesh, red brick cottages lurked among the trees, sending curls of blue smoke up from their chimneys into the dawn sky. It was a clear bright crisp dawn, too, something rare for the English winter. The Golden Steed's hoofs left a distinct trail across the white frost on the brownish grass underfoot.
Blade felt very much at peace with the world, for it had been a good trip into the Dimension of the Pendari. Its incredible wealth of gold had made the prime minister sit up and take notice with a vengeance. Blade hoped, however, that if large-scale teleportation was ever perfected to the point where Pendari gold could be brought to England by the ton, it would be traded for. Otherwise England would be acting as badly as the Lanyri, and that was a possibility Blade did not like.
Certainly Lord Leighton felt that teleportation was a good deal closer than it had ever been before. The return of the Golden Steed had been proof of that. Of course, there had been rather a lively time getting the horse out of the underground complex. It had nearly panicked on first emerging, and only Blade's best efforts had kept it from running wild and smashing up many hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment. Then there had been the problem of cleaning up the chamber-a disagreeable surprise for some of the technicians. They had not expected to find themselves drafted as stable hands when they signed on with Lord Leighton.
Of course all the electronically guarded doorways had never been intended to let horses through, so the only way they could get the Golden Steed to the elevator was to disconnect all the electronic surveillance equipment. That was another lively time-somebody pulled one switch too many, and the entire complex was plunged into darkness for the better part of half an hour. It turned out that the emergency system had been accidentally cross-connected to the main one, so the two systems went out together, and the technicians had to grope around with flashlights and even matches to get things back on the line.
Finally they had managed to get the Golden Steed to the elevator. But «you can lead a horse to an elevator, but you can't make him get in.
» Once more the Golden Steed had nearly panicked, and to calm it down, they had to shoot it full of tranquilizers. They called it a carefully regulated dose, but someone was evidently not careful enough. For two hours they had faced the problem of concealing a full-sized, semi-conscious horse on the grounds of the Tower of London. Finally a horse trailer from Scotland Yard's Mounted Section arrived, with a security-cleared veterinarian, and hauled the Golden Steed off to J's country estate. It was being stabled there now, rapidly eating its way through J's budget, and making J wonder if he could get some of the money back in stud fees, if nothing else. Blade wondered how Lord Leighton had managed to put the whole story of the Golden Steed into suitably detached scientific language. That would be an achievement sufficient to tax even Leighton's intellect, to say nothing of his command of scientific language.
Oh well, that wasn't his problem. What bothered Blade when he thought about it were those quixotic impulses that had continually struck him during the last battle in Pendar. Words like «honor» and «chivalry» had popped into his head repeatedly, unasked and unexpected. Admittedly the ideas weren't completely alien or ridiculous to him-public school and university had made that impossible. But if he were going to suddenly start thinking like a fifteenth-century French knight-one of the kind that had been slaughtered by the thousands at the Battle of Agincourt-he was courting trouble. He could easily wind up just as dead as those French knights if he overindulged in grand gestures.
That was a new kind of overindulgence for him. As a secret agent there were professional standards to follow, but the key one had nothing to do with traditional notions of honor. It was: stay alive. It had been impressed on him very early in his career that it didn't matter how an agent played the game, but rather that he won it and came out on his feet. And if necessary, that the opponent did not come out on his feet. But now, Blade found himself unable to keep his mind set in that mold.
Was it the computer affecting his brain again? Possibly. It had already given him problems with sex and with alcohol. Perhaps it was now giving him more subtle psychological problems?
Or was it simply too much exposure to worlds where fighting and violence had not been mechanized, where one could be «honorable» without winding up a corpse? Where in fact it was even sometimes to one's advantage to play the game a certain way? He didn't know. Nor did he know how far these new attitudes might lead him. He would have to keep it under control though. If it led him too far, he would wind up very dead, far from home, and perhaps for no good reason.
Or was honor perhaps a good reason for accepting death? There I go again, he told himself sharply. A year ago he would have given a professional's answer to the question. A large resounding no. Today… He would have to speak to both J and Lord Leighton about it, that was certain. It was something that might endanger his fitness for further trips into Dimension X.
But there was one consolation. Neither J nor Lord Leighton would laugh at him for admitting this problem. J was of the old school, and he tried to preserve its standards in his personal life if he could not do so in his profession. He would appreciate Blade's situation. And the scientist? Well, a sense of personal honor was not scientifically measurable, so Leighton would never admit its existence. At least not aloud to Blade. But there was a particular expression on Leighton's face when he was forced to recognize something that went beyond the limits of the measurable. It would be on his face when he listened to Blade explaining this new problem.
His mind was really wandering down strange paths today, Blade told himself. Time to get moving, get a little fresh air blowing in his face. He dug his heels into the flanks of the Golden Steed and felt it surge forward.
FB2 document info
Document ID: e2d7c006-bcdd-4081-b0c3-bce1def6dd5b
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 12 August 2010
Created using: FictionBook Editor Release 2.5 software
Document authors :
golma1
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/