by Джеффри Лорд
The sergeant, having sorted out the rest of the detail, confronted Blade and the man Nob. Arms akimbo, a sneer on his narrow features, he looked first at Blade and then concentrated on Nob. He pointed to the arm which Nob carried in a sling. «How came you by such an honorable wound, Nob? Sword stroke? Lance? Arrow, mayhap? How does it do, your wound? Maybe it fbsters, eh? We shall have to see to it, man.»
Nob, with a sideways glance at Blade, said, «‘Tis not so much, sergeant. An arrow scratch only. But it pained for a time and so I bound it up. I-«
The sergeant reached quickly for the sling and ripped it away. Nob had no time to draw back. There was a jangle of coins and jewelry as they spilled from the torn sling onto the cobbles and glinted around Nob’s feet.
The sergeant’s sneer was nasty. «Looting,» he snarled. «I thought so. Armus warned me to keep an eye on you. Come to that, where is Armus? I know he came — back to you malingerers, to whip you up, but I have not seen him this half hour. Where is he, Nob? And do not lie to me. Your life is already forfeit for looting. I have only to tell the captain and you are for the high hoist.»
Nob winked at Blade with his good eye. He stooped and began to gather up his treasure. He bore no wound that Blade could see.
«If you seek Axmus,» said Nob, «you will have to go back a way, sergeant.» The rogue frowned and looked puzzled and winked at Blade again. «I do not recollect that house number exactly. Do you recall it, friend?»
Blade concealed a smile and shook his head. «No. Now that I think of it I do not think it had a number, or a name.»
The sergeant put a hand on his sword. «What flummery is this, Nob? I have no time nor mood for stupid games. Where is Armus?»
Blade did not see from whence came the little dagger. He barely saw it flash before it was in the sergeant’s heart.
For a big man Nob was lightning fast. He plucked out the dagger, concealed it again and caught the falling man all in the same smooth movement. He frowned and made sympathetic sounds. «Poor fellow-he’s come down with something, I vow. All this excitement, I’ve no doubt. Very bad for the heart, sir.»
Blade did not know whether to laugh or be stem. It had been murder, but he was in no position to sit in judgment. This was Dimension X. And had he not, only a few minutes before, slain a man with one blow? He contented himself with saying, «Yes, Nob. There is certainly something the matter with his heart.»
As Nob eased the dead man to the cobbles, the trap sprang shut.
From beyond the gates came a high wail of trumpets. Blade had never heard this exact sound before, but he knew what it was.
«Charge!»
The gates crashed inward, torn away from the wall by frantic horses as the Samostan cavalry surged in. Banners fluttered and there was a continual call of trumpets. As the mounted horde jammed through the gate, too compressed and disorganized to be an immediate threat, Captain Mijax and Gongor set about assembling their men into squares of defense. There was a great deal of running and shouting and orders and counter-orders. Blade, after the first glance, knew that it was over for the Thyrnians if they stood and fought. Once the cavalry disentangled itself and was organized it would cut the foot soldiers down like weeds before a mower.
Nob was calm. He bent to pick up a last bauble that had eluded him and, eschewing the sling, stuffed his loot into various pockets. He tapped Blade’s arm. «This is not the place for us, master. Gongor and the captain will stand and fight because they must, and because they are fools. But no law says that we must be fools also. You come with old Nob and maybe I can save our skins. I know this district and I know something better-every sewer in it. That’s our way out, master. The sewers.»
Blade was more than ready. Horsemen kept pressing into the square and forming up in a half moon, the horns of which were designed to outflank the pitiful force of Thyme. By this time Gongor had succeeded in getting his men into a series of small squares which in turn formed one large square. Blade, fascinated and for the moment unmindful of his own peril, knew this to be a mistake. One large solid square would have been better. As it was, the squares were fragmented and afforded lanes by which the cavalry could infiltrate.
There was worse. A sudden hail of arrow fire came from the wall. Men in the squares screamed and fell. Blade saw Captain Mijax drop his sword and, still on his feet, use both hands to pluck an arrow from his eye. Another shower of arrows hissed in and the captain went down. The old white-headed man. Gongor, came to stand over the fallen captain and take his place. His snowy locks waved like a banner in the fading moonlight and he brandished his sword and shouted over the din.
«Rally to me, men of Thyme. To me, to Gongor. For Juna and our sacred city. To me. To Gongor. I invite you to die with mel»
Blade, who did not miss much, saw lance throwers join the archers on the wall. He noted that the lance throwing technique was one he had studied in old books back in Home Dimension. The lances themselves were little more than javelins, short and with heavy blades, razor sharp. They were fitted loosely into long sockets and when thrown the lancer retained the socket in his hand. Behind each lancer was a soldier with a supply of the deadly javelins-as the socket came back empty he fitted a new javelin into it.
By now Blade and Nob had taken shelter in one of the market stalls. Nob must have guided him there, for Blade had no recollection of the journey across the square. They crouched behind a counter and watched the dreadful havoc wrought by the javelin and arrow fire. The pitiful little squares were shrinking, half the remaining Thyrnians were down, dead or dying, and still the Samostan cavalry bided its time. The trumpets howled without halt and the cavalrymen cheered and brandished their shiny sabers, but they waited. When they did charge, Blade knew, it would be all over. The cavalry would be in among the shattered squares like wolves in the fold. Once the Thyrnians broke and ran, the horsemen could slaughter them at will.
Nob was on his hands and knees under one of the stalls. «Look you for a sewer top, master. Bound to be one about-I remember the market hags using them when I were only a younker. Look lively, sire, or by Juna’s tits we’ve no chance. They’ll ride us down like cur dogs.»
At that moment came a deeper braying of horns and Samostan foot soldiers began to march out of the streets and lanes leading onto the square. They had been lurking all this while, plugging every exit like corks in so many bottles. Now that the trap was sprung, and the Tbyrnians forced to stand and fight, the footmen wished to be in on the kill. They spilled into the square, six columns of them, advancing slowly with hoots and cries of derision. There were lancers and crossbowmen, slingers and swordsmen, all wearing the snake device on their armor and tunics. And the legend: A is Ister.
Nob was getting nervous. «Blast my balls,» he snarled, «there has got to be a sewer entrance hereabout. There must be! I remember. Many the pocky corpse I’ve seen tossed down-ahhhhhhh.»
Nob jammed his fingers into a crack in the cobbles and began to pry and pull, cursing all the time. A slab of stone began to move. It was a solid square into which half cobbles had been cunningly mortared for disguise.
«This is it right enough,» Nob gasped. Rivulets of sweat eroded the grime on his face, leaving white streaks. «As heavy as Juna’s conscience, I vow. Give us a hand, master.»
Blade was experiencing a weird, an irrational, ambivalence. He could not understand it and was both puzzled and worried. He could not deny it-half of him wanted to flee, to gain safety and get on with the mission. The other half wanted to stay and fight with the doomed Thyrnians. Madness! He looked a last time at old Gongor, his white head shining like a beacon in the battle haze, walking from group to group of his men, encouraging and soothing, laughing while he promised them nothing but death. Part of Blade wanted to stay and fight. Much of the veneer of civilized life as he knew it in Home Dimension had worn away. He was becoming a new man, the man he always became in X Dimension.
He went to give Nob a hand. The bearded man was cursing and sweating and one of his finge
rs was bleeding. «If we don’t shake our arses we’re going to be caught,» he rasped. «I’ll be a ball-less priest else. I don’t recall these cursed things being so heavy. Aha, now! Just so, master. Catch that edge and we’ll heave together-ar, now. Now-«
Blade put his great sinews into it and the sewer cover came up and away, out of its framing, so quickly. and with such impetus that Nob toppled over backward with a curse. His breeches split, and his pockets as well, and coins and jewels split and rolled around the stall enclosure. Nob began to scrabble about, frantically picking up his loot, swearing all the time by Juna’s tits that he did not deserve this fate.
Now it came. A great cry of trumpets from the cavalry was answered by the braying horns of the foot. The blood raced in Blade’s huge body, pounded in his temples, and he felt the hairs prickle on his neck. He sweated mightily and yet felt cold. He stood wide legged, shield adjusted, sword in his hand, and for a moment the battle madness took him. He would not run. He would stand and fight with the Thrynians.
The cavalry came on savagely, a long curving crescent of flashing sabers. On Gongor’s right flank-Blade and Nob were on the left-the horses were already in among the broken squares and the butchery had begun. Blade caught a last glimpse of Gongor. That venerable old man was wielding a scarlet sword astride a pile of dead, slashing at four mounted lancemen who surrounded him. One of the chargers, a massive black beast, reared and pawed at the lone man. For an instant Gongor appeared to be wearing a crimson helmet, then he disappeared and the tide of cavalry swept over him.
The crossbowmen sent a lethal hail of feathered bolts across the square, killing many of their own mounted soldiers. Blade laughed. There was a great outcry and immediately officers were in among the footmen, laying about with clubs and swords.
Nob gave Blade a push toward the sewer opening. Even, at that moment, in all the excitement and blood and battle craze, Blade had never smelled anything as repellent, as fearsome, as the stench from that black hole.
Nob was swearing by other parts of Juna’s anatomy. He gave Blade a great shove. «In, master. In! Down! Hasten. They’ve seen us now and they’ll do our business for certain. Jump, for Juna’s sake. Jump!»
They had indeed been seen. A squad of cavalry wheeled about and came charging at the stalls.. Blade, still poised on the brink of that mephitic pit, fearful but still defiant, felt the impingement of every detail: the sweat and foam of the horses, the pennon held aloft by the trumpeter, the beat and clang and spark of pounding iron on cobbles, the hard glare of the cavalrymen as they leaned toward him, their sabers extended straight ahead of them. Nearer they came. A surf of death crashing toward his fragile barrier. Closer. . closer….
He could make out individual faces. See the glint of bared teeth, twist of mouths, gaping of nostrils. On their shields and tunics the snake swallowed itself again and again, that hooplike serpent with the words limned under it-Ais Ister.
He heard Nob curse. The man gave him a shove. Blade tottered and fell and in falling glanced back and saw gold coins spilling a slow stream of gold, and Nob going after them as the first of the horses leaped the barrier and came crashing down in a shower of sparks as golden as the coins Nob died for.
Blade had only time, and thought, enough to close his mouth and eyes, and hold his nose, as he struck and disappeared into a slowly moving flow of filth.
CHAPTER 4
Blade could not touch bottom. He kept his head above the cesspool and paddled slowly, trying not to breathe any more than necessary. The darkness was total. Slimy things brushed him, clung to him, and now and again a corpse bobbed against him. Blade retched and vomited and was not ashamed. This sewer, this cloaca for a dying city, was as near hell as he wished to come. He pushed the bloated body of an enormous rat away from his face and once more sounded for bottom. His toes touched stone.
He could walk now, keeping his chin above the slime. The current, so sluggish at first, began to quicken and bear him along. He was now only shoulder deep. He brushed ahead of him with his sword as he half walked, half floated, through his quagmire of putridity. He rounded a bend and saw a shaft of light just ahead. Light only in a relative sense; a faint shaft of dawn seeping down an open sewer cover. Some few details of his fetid, tube-like dungeon were revealed. Blade paused well back from the gray bar of light and looked about him.
There was no way out. No ladder, no steps cut into the arching stone, no ropes. Nothing. From where he stood shoulder deep in a horrible porridge of feces and urine and rotted flesh to the tiny circle of light was a good thirty feet. He heard the thunder of cavalry up there, felt the reverberations, listened to the screams of men and women being cut down. Blade did not have to see to understand. It was all over. Thyrne had fallen and all organized resistance had ceased. The massacre of civilians had started. Blade moved on.
His sense of time was keen. He judged that an hour had passed before he came to the junction of two great sewers, larger than the one in which he suffered, and through which salt-smelling water rushed at a great pace. The moving water, deep and comparatively clean, caught at Blade and the suldge in which he moved and swept them both along. He had to swim now and just ahead he saw a torch guttering in a wall sconce. He made for it.
Beneath the torch was a platform of cobbles, and a narrow walkway led into a shadowy tunnel. Blade, somewhat cleansed by the moving water, hauled himself out of the stream and, with drawn sword, headed into the tunnel. Anything was better than that sewer. Anything.
The tunnel was narrow, so long that Blade must continually stoop, and convoluted as the bowels of some giant. At each bend or sharp turn there was a single torch, and for this Blade was grateful. He kept moving down passage after passage, the only sound that of his buskins on stone and, once, the accidental ring of his sword as it brushed a wall.
He rounded yet another bend and saw a narrow window, hardly more than a barred slot in the stone, high on the righthand wall. Faint light seeped slantwise through the bars. Blade judged the distance, poised, tensed and leaped. He seized a bar with one hand and pulled himself up until both elbows rested on the ledge. At first he hardly believed it. A toe? A big toe belonging to a mammoth foot?
So it was. He was within a colossus of some sort, a gigantic statue. His vantage was from the ankle, looking forward along the foot toward the toes. Gold. Solid goldl Blade whistled silently and made a few rapid calculations. Given the length of the foot-he estimated some twenty five feet-the image must be about two hundred feet tall. Solid gold. Here was loot enough to repay the cost of invasion a thousand times over, at least by HD standards. He put that thought away. It was far too early to think mission-he must only think survival.
Blade was sure enough, but to verify it he twisted and craned his neck to stare upward. He could see nothing but one enormous golden breast towering high over him, the nipple worked in silver. Juna again. The goddess of Thyme was, for the moment anyway, sheltering him.
Through the window he studied the cobbled square spread out beyond the foot of the goddess. He could make out only a pie-slice segment of it, but by extrapolation knew that the fighting here must have been deadly. Costly to both sides. It was probably here that the Samostans had struck first and had gained enough momentum to carry them to victory. Corpses of men and horses were stacked waist high in places, and pools of black blood still glittered on the cobbles. Dawn, seeping in fast, disclosed the mute and terrible evidence of charge and counter-charge, of heroic last stands and no quarter, of gutted horses and lanced men and banners fallen to make shrouds for their — bearers. Blade made a rapid and inaccurate count and took a vague pleasure in his findings-the Thyrnians had extracted a high price. The figures were very nearly two of Samosta to every dead man of Thyme. Blade smiled and wondered again at his involvement, as slight as it was. He had no business taking sides. He was a stranger, and certainly not in any paradise, and his job was to observe, evaluate, remember and stake out any claims that might be of potential value to England.
But first to survive.
Too late he heard them coming. Two or three of them, judging by the scuff of sandals on stone. They were coming from the same direction Blade had come-he had passed numerous side passages-and they would be around the bend of the corridor before he could drop from the window and scurry out of sight. There was nothing to do but cling to his perch ten feet above the floor and hope they would not glance up. Blade pushed his left arm through the narrow window, locked his elbow around a bar and waited with drawn sword. At least he would have surprise on his side.
There were only two of them and he need not have fretted. They were priests, ghoulish figures clad in black robes and wearing masks of beaten gold. They walked slowly, dragging their feet, and the golden masks must have been heavy to pull their heads down so. As they neared him Blade saw that the masks were actually helmets, fitting entirely over the head with thin slits for eye holes and a circular orifice for breathing and speaking.
Blade relaxed. Their vision would be very poor in those clumsy things.
The taller of the two black robes was questioning with both voice and gesture as they approached the dangling Blade.
«I understand, Ptol, why the living Juna must be given to the Samostans, to Hectoris himself, as tribute and propitiation. But why must we torture and disfigure the girl? This I do not understand. I am not opposed to cruelty, as you know, but in this case it is senseless. I-«
The priest thus addressed, a short and rotund figure who had obviously dined well all his life, stopped in his tracks. He put a hand on the taller man’s arm and began to harangue him in a soft, lisping voice. Blade cursed Ptol’s mushy guts and the growing pain in his own arm. They would pick this particular place to stop and natter. If they spotted him he was going to enjoy killing them, especially Ptol.