by Джеффри Лорд
The end result was that this time Blade would be hurled off into Dimension X with something that might help him stay alive there. That was good news, by any standard.
The routine in the changing room had been the same ever since the project began. Blade stripped naked, smeared himself all over with smelly black grease to prevent electrical burns, and pulled on a small loincloth.
Next Blade opened the attache case. The knife was already in its sheath. Blade drew it out and watched the play of light on the steel, then sheathed it again. He hooked the sheath to the belt, strapped the whole belt around his waist and drew it tight. Finally he stepped out into the main room again and headed toward the glass-walled booth in the center. Around him the lights on the consoles and control panels were already flickering and dancing in the familiar patterns of the main sequence.
Blade sat down in the metal-framed chair inside the booth. The black rubber of the back and seat were chill and clammy against his bare skin. After a little shifting about, he found that he could sit naturally, in almost his usual position, even wearing the belt and knife. Good. The fewer variations from the routine on any one trip, the better. He remembered his trip through two different dimensions, when everything seemed to be going wrong or at least becoming gruesomely unpredictable. He didn’t want that to happen again.
Lord Leighton took a final look at the main board and turned away with a satisfied expression. Even by his exacting standards, everything was going smoothly. He could leave his computer to its own devices for at least a few minutes and wire Blade up.
«Wiring up» was another routine that hadn’t changed in a long time. Lord Leighton worked with the speed and agility of a monkey, attaching cobra-headed metal electrodes to every part of Blade’s skin. From the electrodes colored wires ran off into the bowels of the computer consoles. When the job was done, Blade and the computer were a single unit, ready to be activated whenever Lord Leighton pulled the master switch.
Lord Leighton chose to wait a few moments, his eyes scanning the controls. J was perched in his usual place, on the small fold-out spectator seat on the wall by the main controls. On his face was the sober expression he usually wore as the time approached for Blade’s leap into the unknown. In those moments J could cease to be an urbane, poised gentleman. He could openly show the concern he felt as someone he cared about headed into danger.
Seconds ticked past, turning into minutes. If Blade hadn’t known better, he would have suspected Lord Leighton of prolonging the suspense for dramatic effect. Lord Leighton had been known to do that elsewhere. He’d never done it down here at this time and never would.
Suddenly Lord Leighton’s right arm shot out and the fingers of his right hand closed on the red master switch. Lord Leighton’s aged and misshapen body seemed to take on a grace that it never had at any other moment. The master switch slid down its slot and reached the bottom.
Between one heartbeat and the next, Blade’s senses twisted in the computer’s grip, and the world around him dissolved.
The floor gaped open, the walls split apart, the ceiling fell in. From some unimaginable outside a greenness swirled and boiled and roared into the room. It was not a liquid, a solid, or a gas. It was a color from some place where the laws governing nature were like nothing that Blade had ever met in Home Dimension or Dimension X.
The greenness poured down on Blade like a waterfall, rose up around him like lava bubbling up out of a volcano, roared past him like a river with a noise like an express train. The computer’s consoles and controls, Lord Leighton, J and his seat-all vanished.
There was nothing around Blade now except the greenness, the color that behaved like a liquid, a gas, a solid, and many things that were none of these and should not have existed in any sane or healthy universe. The more Blade saw, the less he liked it. The less he liked what he saw, the more a chilling thought battered at his mind. Had his luck finally run out? Had some malfunction of the computer, some error of judgment by Lord Leighton, even the effects of the knife and belt, brought him to the end of his road? Was he going to live out the rest of his life in some nightmarish nowhere between the dimensions?
It was possible. It always had been possible. His mind had never recoiled from that possibility into raw panic. It did not do so now. Grimly Blade fought his way back to a disciplined awareness of what seemed to be going on around him.
The greenness was now turning steadily into a liquid, a rushing torrent of liquid that was hot and cold at the same time. It chilled parts of Blade’s body, scalded others, filled his nostrils with fumes that had no odor and yet choked him, stabbed at his joints and groin with piercing daggers of icy cold, tormented him in a hundred ways. It carried him along as it did so, as if it wished to prolong the torment. It carried him on at a steadily increasing speed, until he felt that he was being whirled along like a log through rapids in flood.
Blade wondered when the rapids would sweep him over the falls to be smashed to pieces on the rocks at the bottom.
Chapter 3
Suddenly there was no more heat around Blade, only cold. What roared past him as loudly as ever was not liquid but air. He was still moving, but more slowly. As he rolled over and over, something solid struck him, now in the chest, now in the knee, now in the head.
Blade threw out his arms and legs to stop himself. They slammed against something solid and cold and rough as sandpaper. He could feel patches of skin vanishing from his fingers and toes. Then he rolled over the edge of something, fell with a thud, and stopped dead. He took several deep breaths and opened his eyes.
He realized then that his eyes had actually been open for some time. It was just that this time he’d landed in Dimension X on a pitch-black night. As his senses cleared further, he realized that the roaring coldness around him was a strong wind. It had blown him across the face of the land like a dry leaf, into the shallow depression where he now lay. He shifted position, ready to sit up. As he did, he felt the pressure of the belt around his waist and the sheathed knife against his thigh.
Blade let out a yell of triumph. He’d done it again! Once more something from Home Dimension had made the trip into Dimension X with him. Knowledge was growing, bit by bit.-His delight at this discovery drove out the last of his headache and he sat up.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Blade’s superb night vision began to pick out details. He was sitting in a shallow depression that ran up and down the side of a steep hill. The hillside was strewn with boulders and rose high above him, blocking off half the dark sky and making the world around Blade even darker.
Blade did not feel like standing, not yet and not in this wind. Instead he shifted position until he was on hands and knees, then crawled slowly up out of the depression.
That move saved his life. As he sat down again, there was a faint rattle, then a series of rumbling and crashing noises from the darkness above. A boulder twice the size of Blade himself came bouncing and rolling down the depression, straight across the spot where Blade had been lying. If he hadn’t moved, it would have crushed him to a bloody pulp.
Blade decided that it was time to get to his feet and get out of here, in spite of wind, cold, and darkness, before the hill rolled any more half-ton rocks down at him.
Blade moved downhill as fast as the steep slope and, the uncertain footing would let him. As always when he started moving, he felt his full strength return swiftly. Below him a spreading dark mass curled around the base of the hill, like the sea around a rock on the shore.
Several times more as Blade descended the hill the wind sent boulders crashing down close enough for him to hear them. Soon he could make out the dark mass at the foot of the hill. It was a vast expanse of pine forest, hundred-foot trees bending, bowing, and tossing their long branches in the wind. The forest seemed to stretch away, endless and lightless.
Blade practically ran down the last hundred yards of bare slope and plunged into the shelter of the trees. Up there on the hillside he was exposed to th
e full force of the wind. He might not die of exposure in one night, but he would become damned uncomfortable! When daylight came he would also be as visible as a bug on a tabletop, never the best situation in a new and unknown dimension. He preferred the forest.
Inside the forest Blade moved slowly to avoid bumping into trees or tripping painfully over fallen branches. He had covered about a hundred yards when he decided to stop before he became disoriented and lost his way. The darkness under the trees was so deep and complete that it almost deserved a stronger name. It was not just an absence of light, it was an almost tangible presence that seemed to passionately hate even the idea of light.
At least the trees broke most of the wind. Only an occasional gust swept down from above, sending its chill breath across Blade’s skin and kicking up the dead pine needles that lay inches deep underfoot. High above, the wind moaned and shrieked and roared continuously in the treetops, as if to remind Blade of its presence. Once or twice Blade heard the unmistakable long, tearing cracking and crash of a tree falling, giving up its struggle against the wind.
It was a forest in which a less disciplined man than Blade would have been expecting to meet vampires, ghouls, and witches. It was a forest in which even Blade was not sure he wasn’t going to meet bears, wolves, and hermits or woodcutters who might swing axes and ask questions afterward. It would be a good forest to get out of-tomorrow morning, when there was enough light for him to see where he was going. It was not a forest where Blade cared to run the slightest risk of wandering around in circles. He would settle in for the night and move on in the morning.
Blade found a clump of bushes in the lee of a pair of particularly massive trees. Under the bushes the needles lay thicker than elsewhere. He crawled in and began scooping them over himself. They would not be much protection against the cold, but they would be better than nothing. He would not be spending a very comfortable night, and he doubted that he would be getting much sleep. But he would be alive and reasonably healthy, come morning.
He stopped when there were six inches of needles over him. He relaxed, and after that sleep came with surprising speed and ease.
Blade was struggling up from a dream that seemed to be nothing but golden warmth. He shivered as the dream gave way to the cold and darkness around him. Then he opened his eyes, shook his head, and was instantly awake and alert, listening to the sounds of the forest.
They were all there, the same sounds he’d been hearing when he dozed off. But there were new sounds as well. As they registered on Blade’s awakened hearing, he sat up, plunged his hand under the pine needles, and drew the knife.
Far away, he heard the clang and thud of cymbals and drums, the occasional faint, thin wailing of a flute, and even more rarely the brassy voice of a trumpet.
The darkness was as solid and the wind as loud as before. Even Blade’s trained ears found it hard at first to judge the direction of the music. Gradually he got the impression that it was coming from somewhere off to his left.
Blade’s eyes searched the darkness. Was this lonely black forest beginning to make his imagination work too hard? Or did he really see a reddish glow flickering there off to the left, far away through the trees? After a moment, he was sure the glow was real.
It was hard to tell how far this forest stretched or how far beyond it lay the nearest human settlement. It certainly seemed endless and utterly lonely, no place for any sensible people to be lighting fires and playing music in the middle of the night.
So what was he seeing? Once more Blade could not forget that this forest was much too appropriate a setting for black masses, witches’ sabbaths, and other strange ceremonies. And people involved in that sort of affair were apt to resent intruders and deal with them drastically.
True enough. Yet if he didn’t seek out the musicians and their fire, it might be days before he got out of the forest, let alone found human beings. Blade slipped the knife back in the sheath but left it unstrapped for a quick draw. Then he set off again.
It took him longer than he’d expected to reach his goal. Several times the wind overhead drowned out the music. The fire seemed to flit ahead through the forest like a will-o’-the-wisp. He lost sight of it half a dozen times and once even managed to completely lose his sense of direction. He suspected that he was leaving a trail like a drunken snake’s. He knew that if anyone was watching him blundering about, they were probably laughing themselves sick.
The only consolation was that the music and the roar of the wind in the trees completely covered any noise he might be making. Between the wind and the music, the people around the fire probably couldn’t have heard him if he’d been approaching them in a tank!
Sheer determination carried Blade through. Eventually he reached a point where he could see the orange-red fire glow flickering clearly through the trees. He set the most direct course toward it he could manage, crouching low and moving by bounds from one tree to another. Whoever the people were, they had probably put out sentries.
The fire seemed close enough to touch when Blade came out on the edge of what was unmistakably a road. It ran in front of him, then curved around to the left toward the fire, which now showed through the trees on the other side. It was not a road that any people able to build anything better would have tolerated, even in this forest. It was barely one lane wide and totally unpaved. With his bare feet Blade could feel ruts and holes a foot deep and rocks the size of his head.
As he slipped across the road, the sound of the music grew louder than before. For the first time Blade heard human voices, cheering and shouting enthusiastically. The beat of the drums grew more rapid and the shouting grew more frenzied. Then suddenly all the instruments stopped as if the ground had opened up and swallowed the players. More cheering followed, along with applause; then that too died away and left the forest to the moan of the wind. Blade crept forward more cautiously than ever, until he could get a clear view of the camp. Beside the road was a clearing about a hundred feet square and on the far side, an enormous pile of roughly dressed tree trunks. In the lee of the pile half a dozen tents of various sizes were pitched in a rough semicircle. In the middle of the semicircle a campfire burned. Beside the tents a score of horses and pack mules were tethered to trees and bushes.
Blade’s attention shifted to the people. There were at least a dozen men seated cross-legged around the fire on furs spread on the ground. All wore variations of the same outfit-a short tunic with baggy sleeves and broad trousers bloused into soft leather boots equipped with spurs. Two of the men wore tunics and trousers of material with a high sheen and had jeweled daggers stuck in broad leather belts. The others wore duller clothes, some of them showing patches and ragged edges. Every man had a weapon, either on him or within easy reach. Five held musical instruments-two drums, a flute, a pair of cymbals, and a spiraling horn with what looked like a pearl mouthpiece.
Beside the fire knelt a girl. She was totally naked except for a broad copper bangle around one wrist and another around one ankle. Blade could see her shivering in the wind in spite of her closeness to the fire. Her skin was olive-hued and beaded with sweat, her short hair was a gleaming copper-gold, tangled and damp. It was obvious she’d just been dancing to the music.
There would never be a better time to catch these people relaxed and off their guard, ready to talk first and shoot afterward. Blade rose to his feet and pushed the sheath around the belt, toward the small of his back. He could still draw fast enough in an emergency, but he would not be flaunting his one and only weapon.
Then he spread out both hands in front of him and walked forward, out of the trees and into the firelit clearing.
Chapter 4
All of the men around the fire jumped up, grabbing their weapons. The girl screeched and threw herself flat on the ground. Before Blade could take three steps, he found four crossbows, three lances, and five swords aimed in his direction. A dozen pairs of eyes stared at him over the weapons, hostile but also curious.
The
older of the two well-dressed men frowned at Blade, then gave orders.
«Tzimon, Dzhai, climb up on the woodpile. Watch the forest, and call if anyone approaches.»
Two of the other men bowed jerkily and scurried toward the piled tree trunks. Blade looked at the well-dressed men and noticed a strong resemblance between them. Father and son?
The older man sheathed his sword and crossed his hands on his chest. «Well, man who comes forth so strangely from the night. Who are you, and what do you in the Empire of Saram?»
«What I do is seek aid. Food and fire and clothing, to begin with. Then whatever you may wish to offer me.»
«What the Empire of Saram offers those who stray into its borderlands is usually a quick death, if we are feeling merciful. If not, you go to the Emperor and a death that is anything but quick.»
«I have done nothing that honorable men would consider worthy of death, either quick or slow,» said Blade severely. They might take that as an insult, but these men seemed as likely to take the words as the sign of a man with a warrior’s pride.
«Who are you, then, that you should ask us to believe such a lie?» said the younger man with a harsh laugh. The older man frowned but turned unfriendly eyes on Blade. «My son speaks wisdom, although his words are not well chosen. This is the borderland where Saram meets the Steppes. You are not of the Empire, and few of the Steppemen have ever traveled here without wishing us harm.»
«What you have said merely proves that those of the Empire of Saram do not know everything,» said Blade. «And do not draw your sword and wave it at me for speaking this truth,» he added, with a pointed look at the son. The young man was glaring at Blade and had his hand firmly clamped on the silver-mounted hilt of his sword.