Champions Of The Gods

Chapter Two

It usually took a little while for Blade's senses to reorient themselves as Home Dimension faded out and Dimension X took shape. Usually he whirled through a nightmare of strange sounds and even stranger sights while this happened.

This time things were different. A hammering pain exploded in his head and a searing golden light swamped his vision, leaving him staring blindly into total darkness. Before he could even draw a breath he landed with a distinct and unmistakably real thud an a hard, lumpy surface.

The headache was much worse than usual. Even raining a hand sent pain stabbing sickeningly through his head. He felt nauseated, but he couldn't even gather the energy to retch. He lay still with his eyes closed until he felt the pain beginning to fade. A few minutes after that he was able to open his eyes, sit up, and then rise to his feet.

He was standing in the bottom of a shallow bowl formed by slopes of reddish-yellow sand and shiny jet-black gravel. The rim of the bowl was a series of undulating crests of wind-packed and wind-furrowed sand. Overhead a blazing sun made a cloudless blue sky seem almost luminous. Blade already felt the heat searing down on his naked skin. He licked his lips, which suddenly felt a great deal drier than they should have.

Down in the bowl there was not a breath of wind blowing. Occasional wisps of sand whirling past overhead told of a strong breeze higher up. Blade started up the side of the bowl. Remembering his survival training, he moved slowly, to avoid working up a sweat that would cost his body precious water.

The rim of the bowl gave him a better view of the landscape. He turned his face away from the wind, to keep the sand out of his eyes, and shaded his eyes against the sun with one hand as he scanned his surroundings. He could see a long way in the clear desert air. For many miles all he could make out were humps, ridges, and more pits and bowls, mile after mile of lifeless sun-scorched sand and gravel. The only thing moving anywhere was an occasional dust devil.

Blade could already feel the furnace-hot, sand-laden wind blowing over him, invisibly but inevitably sucking the moisture out of him. How many miles of desert lay between him and human life in this Dimension? More important, how many miles lay between him and the nearest water?

Blade firmly reined in his curiosity. The deep desert was no place to indulge a desire to see what lay beyond the next hill. It was a place for one rule, and one rule only, for anyone who wanted to live as long as he could. Make your water last as long as possible. One way to do that was to not move by day-not a mile to see over the next ridge, not a single foot if you could help it.

Blade moved a hundred feet or so, to a patch of soft sand in the lee of a small hump. He sat down and started digging himself in, working slowly to avoid getting sweaty or tired. A foot below the surface, the sand was thirty degrees cooler. Even a thin layer would keep the merciless sun from flaying the skin off his body.

In a few minutes Blade covered everything except his head and one arm. He worked the arm as deep into the sand as he could, closed his eyes, and did his best to go to sleep. He couldn't think of anything else to do.

The drop in temperature after the sun went down awoke Blade. He dug himself out from under the protecting sand, brushed himself off, and stood up. Taking refuge under the sand had helped. He felt thirsty, but well rested and not at all dehydrated.

Now he could walk without fear of the sun and the sand-laden wind trying to suck the moisture and the life from his body. The air was still and silent. Blade felt his skin puckering at the chill of the desert night. What seemed like a million bright and totally impersonal stars shone down from the sky. It was time to get moving.

He moved along swiftly, listening for any sound, looking for any light or movement. He saw nothing at all and heard nothing except the soft swish and crunch of his own bare feet on sand and gravel. This desert seemed as lifeless by night as it did by day. A good place to get out of as soon as possible.

An hour later he was climbing a ridgeline that marked the crest of a gigantic sand dune. He stood as close to the edge as he dared and watched the leeward face of the dune swoop down and away. The face plunged five hundred feet down, and long fingers of mounded sand stretched out half a mile or more into the desert. What lay beyond was swallowed in the darkness. No light shone, nothing moved. It was like looking into a bottomless pit lined with black velvet.

Blade's eyes scanned the visible face of the dune from left to right. Two-thirds of the way across he stopped and stood up, looking more carefully. Down in one of the little valleys between the sand mounds was a cluster of-things. Things that were unmistakably paler and sharper in outline than anything Blade had seen so far in this desert. Color and outline might be a trick played by shadows or overstrained eyes. They might also indicate something not of this desert.

Blade moved cautiously down the face of the dune, not wanting to risk starting a sandslide. He did not breathe easily until he felt under his feet the hardpacked level sand on top of one of the mounds. Then he turned and began scrambling along the fringes of the dune toward the valley where he had seen the shapes. Soon he stood at the head of the little valley, looking down onto the floor. The shadows here were deep, but they did not hide what lay below.

Bleached and frayed robes and the bones of men and animals lay scattered about on the sand. Some were half-buried, others lay as if they had just been dropped there by a casual wanderer. From one threadbare hood the empty eye sockets of a whitened skull stared up at Blade.

Blade stared back down at the skull. As silent as it was, it told him one welcome fact. This Dimension had human inhabitants.

This didn't surprise Blade. On all his trips into Dimension X he'd always found at least one people who were unmistakably human, whomever and whatever else he might find besides. Sooner or later he suspected he was going to wind up in a Dimension where the only intelligent race looked like birds or snakes or eight-foot turnips. He was perfectly happy to see that day postponed as long as possible.

There were a dozen or so complete human skeletons, the remains of several animals, plus assorted odd bones. The animal skeletons showed high arched backs, long necks, enormously long legs, and large splayed hooves for traveling across sand. Blade suspected the live animals would look remarkably like camels.

Blade knelt and examined the clothing of the dead men. It made him think of old pictures he had seen of Bedouin tribesmen. The basic garments were long flowing robes. Once they had been a dazzling white. Now they were faded and frayed, slashed and stained with their late wearers' blood.

Under the robes the riders had worn light tunics and trousers, and on their feet soft boots, now dried until they were cracked, hard as wood, and quite unwearable. Blade wrapped his feet in rags instead. But he was able to find a wearable tunic, trousers, and a robe. In these salvaged clothes he would look like something risen from the grave, but he would at least have a layer of cloth between his skin and the sun and sand.

Blade next spent a long time searching for possible weapons, without any luck. He shook out every garment, picked up every bone, and nearly looked under every grain of sand in the area. Whatever weapons the dead riders had carried were long gone.

From the way the bodies of the men and their mounts lay, it was not hard to figure out what had happened. They had been moving fast, probably fleeing, certainly not watching where they were going. They had ridden into the little valley and had found that their mounts could not climb the slopes all around them. Before they could turn and ride out again, their pursuers had arrived and turned the little valley into a death trap. There had been a brief savage flurry of swords cleaving skulls and arrows and bullets sinking into flesh; then the undisturbed silence of the desert had returned. The victors had stripped the bodies of weapons and had left their victims lying where they had fallen. The sun, the sand-laden wind, and scavenging birds had stripped the flesh from the bones in a few days or weeks. Nothing was left as a monument to the dead except their whitening bones and the clothes now worn by a man not even of their world, let alone of their people.

Blade bent and picked up a pebble from the ground. He put it in his mouth and began rolling it around between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. The flow of saliva this started broke up the caked dryness in his mouth and eased his breathing. With his robe flapping about him as he moved, he strode off down the valley.

With the chill desert night around him, Blade felt free to move even faster. At first the great ridge of sand loomed high behind him, silhouetted against the sky and cutting off a vast slice of the stars. Then it slowly faded away in the darkness, and Blade could no longer make out any features of the landscape around him. He felt as though he were walking across the desert under a great inverted bowl that had him trapped here alone, cut off from the rest of the world. It was an eerie sensation, and he wished again that he had a weapon of some sort. Even a dagger would have worked against the feeling that something might be lurking out there in the darkness, something against which all his skill and strength would be helpless.

Blade went on looking over his shoulder and listening for some sound other than his own footsteps all night. He also went on walking. The hours passed, and eventually the sky overhead began to turn gray, while the sky to the west began to show a faint tinge of pink. Blade began to breathe more easily as he started to get a clearer view of the land around him.

If any human beings had ever passed this way, they certainly hadn't left any trace of their passage. But at least this stretch of desert was not as lifeless as the one Blade had left behind. Here and there he saw small clumps of squat, gnarled bushes, with spiky black-green needles. Small mounds with dark holes in the tops suggested animal burrows, and once Blade saw the trail of a snake in a patch of fine sand. The sun had baked all the life out of this land.

It could still bake the life out of him if he was careless, though. It was definitely time for him to look for a halting place.

The land here was more rugged than it had been, and the horizon was closer. For all Blade could see there might be an oasis with cool water, date palms, and dancing girls just beyond that horizon. But if he couldn't see it, he wasn't going to risk walking by day on the chance of reaching it.

Instead he headed for a patch of bushes that spread out across the foot of a low ridge. When he reached the bushes he took off his robe and spread it out over several of the bushes. The spread-out robe made a patch of shade among the bushes. Blade lay down in the shade and began covering himself with sand again. Then he spat out the pebble that had kept his mouth from getting painfully dry.

Something about the way it glistened as it lay on the sand caught his eye. He reached out and picked it up, turning it over and over between thumb and forefinger. His eyes widened in surprise. Stripped of dust and grime, the pebble was unmistakably black jade! That was a stone Blade knew well-his father's collection had been one of the finest in England. Unless he'd forgotten most of what he knew, the pebble was not only black jade but black jade of the highest quality!

Blade sat bolt upright as he remembered all the patches of black gravel. Were they all pebbles of black jade too? Did this whole grim desert lie on a glistening black foundation?

Blade told himself firmly that the question would wait until night. He lay back down and covered himself with sand again. The question would not leave his mind at once, so it took him quite a while to get to sleep.