by Джеффри Лорд
The land ahead did indeed slope down. It moved on past another row of trees, past two more abandoned houses. Then it flowed out across miles of almost treeless plain to a broad river set deep in a high-walled gorge. On the far side of that river stood a city.
For a moment Blade wondered if the previous thought that he might see a city out there in the darkness was still working on his mind and making him see things. He focused all his attention on the city; it did not vanish. In fact, the neat rows of buildings stood out more clearly than before. Some rose only ten or twenty stories, others a quarter of a mile. Metal gleamed in the moonlight. One complex of thousand-foot towers, set in a close square, reflected the moonlight from walls of different vividly gleaming colors-red, gold, orange, silver. Other buildings were domeshaped, rising up five hundred feet or more and showing their frames, gilded frames that seemed to drip liquid moonlight, through transparent outer shells.
All thought of returning to the decaying, empty mansion to spend the night vanished from Blade’s mind as he stood absorbing the image of the city and what it meant. The city rising on the riverbank could only be the creation of an advanced society. Was this good? Not necessarily, he reminded himself. He thought of decadent Tharn, the strangely immortal Morphi, and the nonhuman Menel, with their superscience, which was exceeded only by their laziness. He could not even assume that this city would offer him safety. Bureaucrats could be as deadly foes as barbarian chiefs, and for a man who did not understand the rules they were enforcing, ten times as dangerous. You could not simply whip out a sword-assuming you had one-and decapitate each officious clerk. And the deserted mansion so close to the city suggested that the people were a cautious breed, preferring to huddle within their high walls and pursue their lives in safety. Such a people might well be inhospitable to strangers wandering naked out of the darkness.
But the rising wind was whipping at Blade’s body and making him shiver, tough as he was. He started down the slope. This time he was alert not only for possible enemies and weapons, but for another road that might lead him to the city and save him an exhausting scramble across country.
He reached the bottom of the hill and scrambled over a pile of stones several feet high, which had no doubt once been a much higher wall. Now it was only a tumbled mass, overgrown with weeds, moss, and thistles. Again the spines pricked and jabbed at Blade, and insecurely settled stones shifted under his feet, throwing him sprawling several times. He was still more scarred, grazed, bruised, dusty, and bad-tempered by the time he pushed his way through a line of bushes on to another long-unused road.
As he felt moss-slick stones beneath his feet, the moon vanished behind another wall of cloud. But he knew that another left turn would take him toward the city, if not straight to it. He turned and strode along the road, pushing himself faster and faster as his eyes once again became adjusted to the darkness along the road. The chill wind made him hurry simply to keep warm.
For about two miles the road ran between a double row of the same huge trees he had seen on the estate. It curved gently to the left as it did so, and about halfway along, it became noticeably wider. At that point two side roads ran into it, and Blade thought he saw the dim bulks of other unlighted mansions sprawling across hilltops at the ends of both roads. Unlighted. Were they also untenanted, like the first one? Had they also been abandoned for years or even generations to the weather and the vegetation? It was a bad sign if they were. He must be within a mile of the river, practically in the suburbs of the city. What kind of people would let land within easy walking distance of their city slip untidily back into wilderness? A people who shut themselves in might make for an unpleasant encounter.
He toyed with the idea of turning aside into one of the mansions. If he found it deserted, he could spend the night there and approach the city in the morning. People anywhere were less likely to have a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policy in broad daylight. But as he toyed with the idea, the road made a sharp bend, and he found himself turning onto a section that ran straight and level and nearly a hundred feet wide toward the river and the city.
It was as overgrown as all the previous stretches of road he had followed, and the bushes and grass on either side were wild and rank. Blade’s heart sank. For the first time a gnawing suspicion about the city and its people crept into his mind. In a fleeting moment of moonlight he saw something gleaming amid the tangled thistles and rotting leaves that covered the roadway some fifty feet ahead. He ran forward and bent to look at it.
A human skeleton lay in the weeds, almost bare of flesh but still clothed in a kiltlike garment of green cloth and plastic sandals. Although faded and stained by weather and mold, the garments showed no signs of decay. Blade tried to rip off a sample of the kilt, but found it like trying to tear heavy canvas.
He looked down at the corpse again, then down the road toward the river and the city. He could see the towers looming in the darkness, even without the help of the moon. How long had the body been here? The clothing was undecayed; was it just incredibly tough, or had the body come here only recently? And if so, how? Blade wished once again that he had a weapon of some sort. Then it occurred to him that if his growing suspicions were correct, he probably would not need one. But it was with a slower and more cautious step that he moved forward into the darkness, looking about in all directions and also down at the road, searching for more skeletons. He was so intent on being alert against possible dangers that he was at the near end of the bridge that crossed the river almost before he realized it. He stopped and looked up across the river and toward the city.
As he did so, the moon once again came to his rescue. A ragged hole opened in the overcast and silver light flowed down, again breaking the darkness. Blade took a good look at the city in the moonlight and heaved a sigh of relief. His suspicions had been correct.
There would be no danger to fear from the inhabitants of the city. It had none. The cold light of the moon was pouring down on a city as lifeless and abandoned as the mansion on the hill.
Chapter Four
There was no doubt about it-the city was dead. Blade surveyed it carefully, noting details. Broken windows stared emptily. One of the high walkways connecting two towers sagged in the middle. The bridge ahead of him was littered with debris-metal panels peeling off the high towers from bad weather, chunks of unidentifiable material resembling plastic, wheels, rods, and odd boxes that had perhaps once been part of vehicles. The inevitable purple thistles sprouted from the cracked pavement and sidewalks. Beyond the bridge the whole rank of buildings along the riverbank, nearly two miles of buildings that must have once risen ten and fifteen stories, lay in piles of rubble. Only an occasional hollow-eyed wall rose free.
Blade shook his head and frowned. Had the computer finally sent him into a dimension completely empty of human life? No, there was that skeleton on the road. And unless he was mistaken, there were other skeletons gleaming whitely amid the dark thistle leaves on the bridge. There were other people in this dimension-human, as far as he could tell from the skeletons. And he strongly suspected that the first skeleton had come to its final resting place long after the city had been abandoned. Was there some life still lurking in the ruins, or were the skeletons wanderers drifting hi from somewhere else and dying by accident, starvation, or disease? Had the city been depopulated by a plague, a plague that perhaps still lingered in the ruins?
Blade strode out onto the bridge. At least out here on the broad roadway nothing could come at him unexpectedly. Halfway across, the moon vanished again, but not before he had spotted a long metal bar lying on the road. He picked it up and hefted it, testing its weight and balance. It weighed more than five pounds, and it was thicker at one end than at the other. He found after a few trial swings that he could handle it as an improvised mace. Not that improvised medieval weapons would help him very much if any people he ran into had weapons as advanced as their city. But if their civilization had collapsed and the survivors had descended into bar
barism, he would be far from helpless. Feeling a little less like a mouse, though not yet like a lion-perhaps a fox now he stalked forward again, using the mace to probe ahead in the darkness and test the footing. He had no desire to step through an unseen hole in the roadway and drop a hundred feet to the liver below.
He passed two more skeletons. Both were completely fleshless, but again their garments and footgear showed no signs of decay. In addition to the sandals and kilt, one of them wore a sleeveless tunic with a V neck and a large embroidered patch on the right side of the chest. Blade bent down to try to make out the patch, and as he did so, he caught sight of a fourth body, lying half-hidden in a particularly rank growth of thistles a few yards farther on.
This was a body, not a skeleton. In the darkness Blade could not tell for sure how long it had been there, but a quick sniff indicated no decay. He doubted it could be more than twenty-four hours old. This body was also clad in sandals, tunic, and kilt, but the tunic was encrusted with soot, sweat, and grease, as well as blood from the gaping wound in the man’s side.
Blade sprang to his feet, hand gripping the mace and eyes probing along the bridge in both directions. Somebody did indeed live in the city-or at least prowled it and killed in it. He bent again to examine the body more closely.
It was the body of a man in his thirties, at a rough guess, but Blade knew that in the darkness all his guesses would be very rough indeed. The dead man wore a full beard, and his hair reached his shoulders. Both beard and hair were ragged and greasy. The man’s skin was so coated with soot and grease that it was impossible to tell its color. He looked lean, like a track runner, but not emaciated. There was no sign of weapons or gear on or near him.
Now Blade realized that he would have no need to fear advanced weapons. Whoever the people living in the city or at least roaming about in it might be, they had sunk far into barbarism. Which did not make them less dangerous. Far from it. Primitive peoples were even more likely than civilized ones to believe that stranger equals enemy and react accordingly. He would have to approach even more cautiously. And finding anything worth bringing home in this dimension would be a matter of luck. He stood up and as he did so; he saw lights moving amid the ruins along the riverbank.
He counted five of them moving toward him in an irregularly spaced line across the ruins. They bobbed up and down as though their bearers were stumbling and lurching across the mounds of rubble. All shone with a flickering, yellowish glow that to Blade suggested hand-carried torches. He could not yet make out what or who carried them. But he did not wish to be detected prematurely. He lay flat on the roadway behind a thick clump of the thistles, gripped his mace, and waited.
In a minute four more torches joined the original five, two at either end of the line. The new arrivals appeared to be moving inward so that all nine would form a semicircle opening toward the river and the bridge. A moment later Blade saw movement among the piles of debris that spilled onto the far end of the bridge. Two more torches flared in the darkness, and then shrill screams rose in the wind, followed by savage howls of triumph.
What was happening up ahead might be perfectly right and proper, but Blade doubted it. In any case, he wasn’t going to assume anything without taking a closer look. He rose from cover and sidled forward in a half-crouch, keeping low and hopefully invisible in the darkness until he was within fifty feet of the end of the bridge. In the area of yellow light thrown out on the rubble-strewn ground by the torches, he could see clearly what was happening.
There were eighteen men in the semicircle facing the river, nine of them holding torches and the other nine holding long pointed metal rods, spear-fashion. All eighteen had the dirty, shaggy look of the last body Blade had found. Some wore the full tunic-kilt outfit, some only the kilt, and a couple were barefoot and wore only ragged loincloths. All eighteen had their eyes turned inward, riveted on the five people in the middle of the semicircle, who seemed to be held there by fear-paralyzed limbs and the threat of the uplifted spears around them.
The five wore full tunics with embroidered patches, kilts with large pouches hanging from black metal link belts, and sandals. Two of them seemed to be women, judging by their long hair, and they also wore broad-rimmed hats. The three men were clean-shaven and short-haired. The clothes of all five were spotless except for dust they had picked up in their frantic scramble over the rubble in the flight from their pursuers. There was no sign of weapons on any of them. The hands they raised to their enemies, clasping and unclasping in agonies of fright, were empty and clean.
Before Blade could see more, the armed men in the semicircle made their move. The ones carrying torches jabbed them into crevices in the piles of rubble to keep them upright and burning. Then they drew efficient if clumsy-looking swords from cloth scabbards on their belts and advanced toward the cowering captives. The then with the spears hefted their weapons in both hands, holding them high with points slightly down, ready to either stab or throw. Blade began to wonder just how barbaric the bearded men were. They seemed to have developed fairly sophisticated tactics and weapon techniques.
One of the swordsmen was almost within striking distance of the five. The captives were looking at him like birds charmed by a snake. Blade wondered if they were drugged, feeble-minded, or just too frightened to defend themselves. Five people, even in such a situation, should have had some way of at least taking a few of their enemies with them. But these five were apparently going to sit there and let themselves be butchered like the proverbial stalled ox. Blade wondered if there was any point in trying to help people so obviously incapable of helping themselves.
Then the lead swordsman took the extra step needed to bring him within striking distance and swung his sword at the nearest of the five. Not with the edge but with the flat of the blade. The man tried to duck at the last split second, but he was too late. The flashing metal smashed into his head with a whunk clearly audible to Blade, and the man sprawled on the ground.
As if the first blow had been a signal, other swords men now leaped forward, their swords glinting in the torchlight. The other two men crumpled. Then the first swordsman reached down, grabbed one of the women by her hair, and jerked her to her feet. One of the others reached for her belt, hands fumbling at the clasp, and jerked it and her kilt off in one motion. There was suddenly a sour taste in Blade’s mouth and stomach. He knew he wasn’t going to crouch in the shadows and the thistles and watch mass rape no matter who the «good guys» might be. He began a stealthy creep forward as the men stripped the remaining garments from the woman and threw her to the ground. Blade knew he would not be able to do much beyond creating a diversion to enable the woman to get away. But that should be possible with surprise on his side.
But suddenly his chances of taking them by surprise vanished as the second woman broke from her trance, leaped to her feet, and dashed straight toward him. As she plunged out onto the bridge, she caught sight of Blade flattening himself in the thistles. In an instant she stopped dead, let out a wild scream of terror, and before Blade could shout or move to stop her, she dashed to the edge of the bridge and threw herself off. The warriors, turning at the sound of the scream and staring at the woman, also caught sight of Blade. He saw two of them raise their spears as the leader, who had been about to fall on the first woman, sprang to his feet and turned toward the bridge.
Blade knew that his only chance now was to get to close quarters before the spearmen could turn him into a porcupine, then rely on his superior strength and skill. He sprang to his feet and charged straight at the leader, whirling his mace around his head so that it was a gilded blur in the torchlight, screaming at the top of his lungs. The leader took one tremendous leap backward, putting himself beyond the range of Blade’s savage swing. One of the other men standing over the woman wasn’t so lucky. Blade’s mace smashed into his temple, and he flew through the air and landed six feet from where he took off. His companion swung his sword up in a flashing arc, but Blade knocked it out of his hand wi
th one swing of the mace and smashed in his forehead on the return swing.
For a moment the other swordsmen backed off from Blade, and the spearmen had a clear shot at him. But the spearmen were unnerved by his size and ferocity and the speed with which he had killed two of the swordsmen. And his leaping, whirling figure made a poor target in the flickering torchlight. He felt spears dart past his body and legs and heard them bang metallically on the road. Then he bellowed, «Run, you fool!» to the nude woman on the ground. Without waiting to see whether she obeyed or even heard him, he charged the spearmen, mace still whirling in one hand, a sword snatched up from one of his victims now flashing in the other.
The first swordsman came at him, sword held low for a thrust. Blade smashed down the man’s feeble guard with the mace, then sliced the man’s numbed hand from its arm with the sword. A spearman followed, holding his spear sideways, like a quarterstaff, ready to block or strike. But he was not fast enough to deal with Blade, who thrust with his sword to bring the spear down, then struck overhand with the mace to shatter the man’s collarbone.
Behind him Blade heard a voice bellow, «Break left, break right, pick them up!» and the semicircle of armed men disintegrated. Two men grabbed each of the victims on the ground and carried them off. It was not a rout, not a panic flight of broken and routed men, but an orderly retreat of trained men responding to orders. In minutes the fourteen surviving warriors and their victims had vanished as completely as if they had never existed. The only sign that anything unusual had disturbed the sleep of the empty city was the four dead bodies lying on the rubble. The woman was nowhere to be found; Blade hoped she had run away and had not been carried off by her attackers or been driven to follow her friend into the river.
Blade had no idea of where he could find a safe place in this city. There might not be any such thing if these marauders roamed freely all over it. Perhaps his wisest course was to leave the city entirely, abandoning it to the marauders for good. But his curiosity was aroused. Obviously, there were at least two kinds of people in the city, the marauders and their well-dressed opponents. The marauders seemed to be first-class well-disciplined fighters. Their victims had no more notion of how to fight than pigs have of computer programming. But if anybody represented a higher form of civilization around there, it was the victims. Possibly their civilization was no longer as advanced as it had been when the city was built, but it appeared to be more advanced than that of the marauders. And considerably more decadent, too, judging from their helplessness.