The sky seemed to be one vast aurora with shifting and wavering bands of violet, green, blue, yellow, and gray. The plain was covered with tall yellow grasses except for groves of trees here and there. Far away, a large herd of huge black animals was grazing. Behind him was a house-sized and roughly pyramid-shaped boulder of some smooth, greasy, and greenish stone.
He had fifty seconds to get to the other side of the boulder. The Great Mother had arranged this detour to mystify any enemy who might be traveling through the gateways. He ran around the stone and saw a shimmering on its side. But he stopped for several seconds. Here was something not even the Great Mother could have anticipated. Two tiger-sized beasts with long snouts and predators’ teeth were standing in front of the gate. They roared but did not charge.
Kickaha, yelling, ran at them, his beamer again in his hand. One beast bounded away; the other held its ground and crouched down to spring at him. His beamer ray drilled through its head. It slumped and was silent. He leaped over the carcass, which stank of burned flesh, and through the gate. A roar filled his ears. The other beast had turned and was, he supposed, charging him. He envisioned the gate disappearing and the animal bouncing off the suddenly hard side of the boulder. But he was rammed forward by its flying body and slammed into a wall. The force of the impact stunned him.
When, after an underterminable time, he regained his senses, his groping hand felt a sticky liquid. An odor like a weasel’s filled his nostrils. But he also smelled blood. He felt the device on his wrist and pressed a button. Light sprang from it, momentarily dazzling him. It lit up a small chamber cut out of stone like the first one. But he doubted that he was in the same boulder, if it was a boulder. He got to his feet and noted as he stepped over the big predator that only its front part had gotten through the gate.
He walked toward the wall through which he had just entered. There were shimmerings on each of the other walls. The Great Mother had told him that two were false gates containing devices that would spray poison on the intruder. He jumped through the safe gate while hoping that he had not been delayed too long by the animal. As he emerged on the other side and yelled out the code word, he landed on top of a six-foot square and six-inch-deep metal box. It was poised a thousand feet in the air above a land of bare stone. The sky was blue, and the wind whistling past him was cold. Below were row on row of Brobdingnagian busts carved out of monoliths. They extended to the horizons. Manathu Vorcyon had told him that this was the world of Arathmeem the Strutter. That Lord, long since slain by Red Orc, had made a planet of which a fourth consisted of billions of rock or jewel busts of himself.
He was glad that he had not arrived when an electrical storm was in full rage. Thunder and lightning and a strong wind might have drowned out the code word. In which situation, the metal box would have automatically turned over and dumped him.
On the bottom of the box, near the edge, was a slightly raised metal plate. He got down on his belly, reached over the edge, felt the plate, and pressed it. Then he was, as the Great Mother had said he would be, in darkness and enclosed by a very thick fluid. It pressed on him and flowed up his nostrils and into his ears. He had not been given an oxygen mask because he would not be in this gate-trap very long. But an enemy of Manathu Vorcyon would be unless he knew what Kickaha knew.
He reached out with his right hand and felt up and down the wall until his fingers came to a rounded protuberance. He pushed with the flat of his hand on it, and he was free of the strangest trap he had ever been in. It was inside a massive rock on Wooth’s World, a stone that was a living-nonliving thing, analogous to a virus. The slow-moving fluid eventually emerged from fissures in the rock and dripped onto the ground outside the gigantic boulder. From this lava were born—if that word could be used for the bizarre process—small balls flat on the bottom.
The natives on this planet worshiped the “mother,” and they would take the “babies” and set them in the center of their villages. These minor gods grew into stones as large as the mother. Moreover, there was a thriving trade in “babies.” Those villages that had a monopoly on the supply sold them to those who lacked them. Many wars had been fought to protect or to seize a source of the most precious commodity on this planet.
Dripping with the heavy gray fluid, Kickaha stood motionless until it had oozed away from him and spread in a puddle around him. Then he jumped to the ground beyond the puddle. He began walking toward the east. Manathu Vorcyon, during millennia of the use of spies and eavesdropping via gates she had tapped into, had a rough idea of where the gate to Zazel’s World was located on this planet. It was up to Kickaha to find the exact location, but he knew the direction he should go from her gate.
Getting there was not easy. He was on the Unwanted World, a planet so crowded with dangerous beasts, birds, plants, and other forms of life that it was a wonder they had not killed each other off long ago. After some days of avoiding or shooting these, Kickaha had great respect for the survival abilities of Red Orc. After ten days, four of them spent in hiding from a five-foot-high and city-block-wide creature that oozed across the ground and emitted a deadly gas, Kickaha topped a high ridge. Below him was a plain and a river. Near the river were the remains of the gigantic square nest built by some kind of creatures. Manathu Vorcyon did not know what they were. The structure was built with a concrete-like substance made in the creatures’ bellies and spat out to dry.
Los had set up a gate there, the only entrance, as far as anyone knew, to Zazel’s World. When Red Orc had finally returned to this place, he had slain all of the creatures living in it. Unable to find the gate, he had destroyed the construction. Believing that the creatures had broken the gate off at its foundation and buried it somewhere, he searched the land for a hundred-square-mile area. He had very sensitive metal detectors that could determine the size and shape of any metal mass a hundred feet down in the ground. The first time he looked for the gate, he did not find it, and he did not succeed during his many other searches.
“The truth,” the Great Mother had said, “is that we can’t be sure that those creatures removed and hid the gate. Perhaps a Lord did it, though that does not seem likely.”
Kickaha had refrained from saying that he had already thought of that. She might, as on previous occasions, be irritated enough to chew him out and thus put him in his place. Sometimes, the Great Mother was a Big Mother.
After crossing the plain, spooking a herd of bisonlike animals on the way, he got to the ruins. There were no pieces left from Red Orc’s beam-blasting. He must have disintegrated these and burned out a huge hole in the ground. The hole was brim-full of water.
Kickaha took the backpack off and placed it on the ground. After opening it, he took out a device shaped like a big cigar, but twice the size of the largest cigar he had ever seen. Attached halfway along its upper part was a monocular cylinder. He pointed it toward where the building had been. He could see crosshairs and the sky through it. He slowly moved it back and forth, working upward. Then he saw a brightness like a short lightning streak.
He murmured, “I’ll be damned! There it is!”
Manathu Vorcyon had told him that the instrument was a gate or crack-in-the-wall detector. Kickaha had not known that such a thing existed until she had handed it to him. It was many thousands of years old, and, as far as she knew, the only one.
“Shambarimen is supposed to have made that, too,” she had said.
“You must have a hell of a lot of confidence in me,” he had said. “What if I lose it or have it taken away from me?”
She had shrugged and had said, “I’ve been saving it for a truly important time, a serious crisis. This is it.”
So, here was the gate or, since the metal hexagram had been removed, the weak spot made by the gate. Red Orc had not known where it was since he did not have the detector.
Kickaha put the detector down. Up there, perhaps fifty feet above the ground, was the crack in the wall between two universes, visible only to his instrument.
To reach it, he would have to build a series of platforms and ladders. There was plenty of wood around, and he had the tools he needed.
“Might as well get to work,” he muttered.
“Thank you,” a voice said loudly behind him.
He whirled, his hand darting at the same time for the holstered beamer.
Red Orc stood forty feet from him. He was smiling, and his beamer was pointing at Kickaha. On the ground behind him was an airboat, its white needle shape gleaming, its canopy open.
“No!” the Thoan said.
Kickaha stopped his hand. At a gesture from Red Orc, he raised both hands above his head. His heart was beating so hard that it seemed to be close to exploding.
“How …?” Kickaha said, then closed his mouth. The Thoan would certainly explain how clever he had been.
“Now you may move your hand slowly, use two fingers to remove your beamer, and toss it far from you,” Red Orc said. “Then throw the finder to me.”
Kickaha obeyed, looking at the same time for Thoan backups. The nearest cover for them was a grove of woods a hundred yards away.
“I knew Manathu Vorcyon had gated you away,” the Lord said. “I detected her trap long ago, and I deliberately sent you through my gate so that she would bring you to her world. I knew that she would probably give you some device to find the crack—I admit I didn’t know why the hexagram was no longer there—and that you would use her gates to get here.”
Kickaha had many questions. One was how Red Orc knew that Manathu Vorcyon had been the one to whisk him away to her world. But he would not ask them. What mattered was that he was in as bad a situation as he had ever been.
“I don’t intend to kill you just now,” Red Orc said. “Rest awhile while I use her device.”
Keeping his eyes on Kickaha, he bent down and picked up the finder. Then he pointed the beamer at Kickaha. He must have set it only for stun power, but the ray hit Kickaha in the chest and knocked him backward and down. The effect was as if Kickaha had just opened a door and a team of men running with a big rammer had slammed its end into his chest. The world grew dim around him; his breath was knocked loose from him. He could not get up though he strove to do so.
By the time that he could draw in enough air and raise himself on one elbow, he saw Red Orc looking through the device. A second later, he took it from his eye. He turned with a grin of delight and triumph toward Kickaha.
A bright flash blinded Kickaha, and a roar deafened him.
Pieces of bloody flesh struck his face and chest. Then the smoke surrounding Red Orc was blown away by the wind. His left hand and much of his lower arm gone, his head and torso a red ruin, the Lord lay on the ground.
Kickaha fell back onto the grass and stared at the bright and blue sky. He just could not grasp what had happened. The man of many wiles, the man never at a loss, was bewildered. Not until his heart had slowed down to near a normal rate and his chest pain had eased was he able to think straight.
Anger replaced the pain. Manathu Vorcyon had betrayed him. She had used him as a pawn, not caring that he might be mutilated or killed. Her “detector” was a fake designed to lure Red Orc. The light, the supposed crack in the wall, automatically came on a few minutes after he had turned the instrument on. And something, he did not know what, triggered the explosives when the Thoan came within a certain range. That her decoy also could be killed had not stopped her.
The Great Mother was a great bitch.
“She could at least have warned me,” he muttered.
Her reasoning for not doing so would have been that he might act differently if he knew the true intent of the finder. And she would have explained that Red Orc was such a danger to everybody in the universes, to the existence of the universes themselves, that any means to kill him was justified.
Not to me, he thought. Now, I have to kill Manathu Vorcyon. I won’t go after her, but if I should ever happen to run across her, I’ll deal her the dead man’s hand.
Then he groaned. A thought had inserted itself in the flow of his images of revenge against the Great Mother. Only Red Orc knew whether or not Anana had drowned in the flash flood, and he was dead.
Groaning again, he rolled over on his side to get ready to stand up. He said, “God!” Shock had come after shock. Standing not ten feet from him was Red Orc. He held a beamer pointed at his enemy and was smiling as the slain man had been smiling. Behind him was another airboat, the exact duplicate of the first one.
Kickaha looked at where Red Orc had been—where he still was. He was a corpse. Yet the living man was here. It was too much to understand. But if his mind could not handle the inrush of events, his body was able to struggle to its feet. Weaving back and forth slightly, he spoke hoarsely.
“You have nine lives!”
“Not quite as many as a cat,” Red Orc said.
Kickaha waved at the dead man but did not speak.
“Clones, flesh of my flesh, genes of my genes,” the Lord said. “I raised them from babies and educated them. Being, in a sense, I, they have my inborn drive toward power, so I have seen to it that they don’t have a chance to usurp me. I wouldn’t turn my back to any of them. Since they’re as intelligent as I am, though not nearly as well educated or experienced, they were reared to be staked-out goats, decoys with highly expendable lives. Four of them have been sacrificed so far, including that man there, but I did avenge the first three.”
He paused, smiled, then said, “Of course, you could be talking to one of them now, not the real Red Orc.”
“But how did you get here? How did you know when I got here?”
“Manathu Vorcyon is not the only one who has secrets. Tell me what happened here. I assume that the device was not able to detect a crack and that it was a trick to blow my head off. You must also have thought of the high probability that your head could have gone the way of my clone’s. However, I take nothing for granted. There wasn’t a gate or a crack, was there?”
“No.”
Red Orc smiled. “I know there isn’t. I tried the Horn here, and nothing happened. If I’d known that when I sent you out, I would’ve told you not to waste your time or mine.”
He gestured with the beamer and said, “Walk ahead of me to the boat.”
Kickaha obeyed. He wondered where the Horn was now. Probably it was in the Lord’s boat. Then the same thing that had happened when Red Orc caught him at the cliff top occurred again. He felt a slight prick in his back, and he awoke in an unfamiliar room, a twenty-foot cube. He was not bound, and he was naked. There was in the cube no furniture, rugs, door, or window. In one corner was a hole in the floor, apparently for excretion, but it looked and smelled clean. Cool air moved slightly over him, piped in through a nozzle on a wall near the ceiling.
His chest still hurt. When he looked down, he could see the five-inch-wide black and blue bruise across his breast. But his head was clear, and he no longer felt emotional shock. What he did feel was frustration and rage.
To work off the stiffness in his muscles and his emotions, he exercised as vigorously as the chest pain would allow him. Then he began pacing back and forth while waiting for Red Orc to make his next move. Hours must have gone by before a cough behind him startled him. Red Orc or one of his clones stood there, holding a beamer. Kickaha was beginning to think that the weapon had been grafted to the Lord’s hand. And the Lord had popped out of a gate or had opened a section of the wall while his captive’s back was turned to him.
“Turn around,” the Thoan said.
Kickaha did so, and the upper and lower sections of the wall before him parted. The top section slid into the ceiling; the lower, into the floor. At the Lord’s command, Kickaha marched down a very wide and high hallway, doorless and windowless, then went around a corner and down a similar corridor. Two men armed with spears stood by the sides of a door twelve feet high. Their square steel helmets and bulging cuirasses were arabesqued in gold, and their short kilts were crimson and embroidered with small green female s
phinxes. Kickaha had never seen such armor or dress before. The guards stepped aside, their spears ready to plunge into Kickaha. The door slid to one side into the wall.
The two, followed by the guards, entered an enormous room furnished with laboratory equipment, most of it strange to Kickaha. They walked down a half-mile-long aisle past many tables and big machines. When a wall barred farther progress, Red Orc told Kickaha to stop. The Thoan spoke a code word swiftly, but not too fast for Kickaha to understand it and to store it in his memory.
A huge square area of the wall became transparent. Kickaha could not help crying out. Anana, unclothed, was in the room beyond the wall. She was bound into a chair, her head held in a brace. Her eyes were closed. Above her head was what at first seemed to be a giant hair dryer.
He whirled around and snarled. “What are you doing to her?”
“I would think you’d be overjoyed because she is alive. If I had left her on that ledge just above the floodwaters, she would have died. She had a broken leg and arm, three broken ribs, and a slight concussion. Now she’s in excellent physical shape because of my medical skills. You’re a hard man to please, Trickster.”
“What are you doing to her?”
The Lord waved his free hand. “What you see, leblabbiy, is a process I conceived and built and experimented with during those many times I worked to relieve myself of the inevitable boredom that comes to all immortals. The machine there is not an ancient device I inherited. I invented it.”
He paused, but Kickaha said nothing. If Red Orc was waiting for another outburst, he was not going to get it.
The Lord spoke sharply. “Look at her, Kickaha! And say goodbye to the Anana you knew!”
Reluctantly, Kickaha turned to the window.
The World of Tiers, Volume 2 Page 82