City Of The Living Dead

Chapter 2

Blade awoke with a more than usually violent pain in his head and the feeling of something hard under it. He ignored the hardness and lay still. His head always hurt after he'd passed into Dimension X, and there was never anything to do about it, but wait until it stopped hurting.

Blade kept his eyes closed, breathed regularly, and gradually felt the pain fade from a pounding agony to a dull, distant ache. At that point he opened his eyes and sat up.

All around him was a dull, gray twilight. He was resting in the lee of a house-sized boulder, dark blue with layers of red in it. Around him were strewn a number of other rocks that looked like quartz.

Straight ahead the ground rolled gently away into the distance, covered with waist-high bushes that bore only a few tufts of brown, spikey leaves. Far away a sharp ridge cut off the horizon. Blade rose and headed toward the ridge. It was the only break in the whole dreary landscape around him.

It turned into a race between Blade's march toward the ridge and the coming of darkness. There was barely enough light to see by when he finally reached the top. Below him the ground plunged away into a tortured, rugged slope of bare rock dotted here and there with stunted shrubs. The slope dropped nearly a thousand feet to a level floor of more bare rock. Far off in the gathering darkness rose the other wall of the valley.

A patch of silver-white among the rocks halfway down the slope at his feet caught Blade's eye. He looked more carefully and saw a thin line of silver winding down the slope below the patch. He scrambled down the slope toward it as fast as he dared.

In spite of his care, he twice fell hard enough to get bruised. Several times rocks came loose under his feet and rolled off down the side of the valley, crashing and banging like small cannon. Blade ignored everything, until at last he slide down a near-vertical pitch eight feet high and landed on hands and knees beside the spring.

It gushed from the rock as if it were coming from a fire hose, forced up and out by the pressure underground. It made a twenty-foot arc in the air and splashed down hard enough to throw up the cloud of spray that Blade had seen first. Over the centuries the spring had worn a pool for itself in the rock where it fell. Blade crawled over to the pool and began scooping the water into his mouth. It was lukewarm and tasted faintly of minerals, but it was drinkable.

By now it was completely dark. Blade realized he might be wise to find some place where he'd be invisible both from the ridge and from the floor of the valley. On the other hand, that would mean roaming about among the tangled and treacherous rocks of the valley wall in the darkness. He'd probably be safer staying where he was.

Blade found a flat spot only a few yards from the pool and lay down. The rock was not a particularly soft bed, and he suspected that he'd have a whole crop of fresh bruises in the morning. That hardly mattered. He'd found water, and the weather seemed tolerable.

For the moment that was quite enough-much more than he'd started with in some Dimensions, in fact. He could seek out what else this Dimension held when there was light to see it.

Blade awoke in a chilly dawn to feel a breeze on his bare skin. He stood up and went through a series of brisk exercises to restore his circulation and get any cramps or kinks out of his muscles. When he'd finished, he felt about as ready to face a day's traveling as he could, considering that he still had no clothes, footgear, food, or weapons.

He was bending down to drink when he heard a distant noise that was neither the wind, the water, nor rocks rolling down the valley wall. He straightened up and listened. With tantalizing slowness, the sound grew louder and took on recognizable forms. Blade heard the blare of trumpets and the thud of slowly beaten drums echoing among the rocks. Then he heard the sound of many feet moving steadily.

Blade scrambled down the slope toward the valley floor, keeping low and looking for a place where he could see without being seen. He found it-a shallow depression in the ground, screened from the side by two large boulders. He dropped flat and stared downslope just as the approaching men emerged out of the mist eddying across the valley floor.

It was quite a procession-three hundred men at least, with two hundred animals and more than thirty wagons, carts, and litters. As he got a better look at the party, Blade realized he'd better be particularly on the alert. If this weren't a military expedition, he'd like to know what else to call it.

Ahead, behind, and on either flank rode forty men mounted on almost comically misshapen beasts. They looked as though someone had started to draw a horse but got so drunk while doing it that the rear end came out very different from the front.

The head could have belonged to a horse, except for the enormous protruding ears. The forelegs were double-jointed and ended in three sharp-clawed toes, and the body was thinner than any horse could ever be without starving to death. The hind legs looked as if they might have been borrowed from a kangaroo, long, heavy-boned, and immensely muscular, with sharp, jutting spurs. The creature trailed off into six feet of flattened tail, ending in a mass of bone. Blade noticed that the tails were strapped tightly in place. Doubtless they were unstrapped in battle, so the beasts could use them as weapons.

The creatures were dark green with irregular patterns of grayish-brown stripes, except for white tails and ears. They might look ludicrous, but Blade suspected they would be unpleasantly formidable opponents in battle.

The riders wore chain mail shirts over broad-skirted leather coats and plate leg armor over blue leather trousers. They wore high-crested helmets with jointed cheek-pieces, and all were bearded. All of them had a shield and a light ten-foot lance, and either two swords or a sword and a vicious-looking double-bladed axe with a four-foot handle. The weapons and armor looked well worn, and the men themselves were tanned, scarred, and relaxed in their saddles. They had the stamp of veterans all over them.

So did the men marching on foot. There were about a hundred of them, in two lines. They were dressed like the cavalry, except for the leg armor. All of them carried sword and shield. About half carried bows and quivers, while the other half carried long matchlock muskets and powder horns.

Between the two lines of infantry was a mixed column of men, beasts, and vehicles. There were five small cannon on crude mountings, no more than blocks of wood with wheels attached. There were a score of ox-carts, some piled high with canvas-covered sacks and chests, others rattling along empty. There was a pair of four-wheeled wagons covered with embroidered red curtains. Blade heard female voices and laughter coming from behind the curtains. There were two more low-slung wagons, each carrying four barred wooden cages. Blade heard a hissing sound as the two wagonloads of cages rattled past and thought he smelled a faint animal musk.

In the middle of everything was a palanquin curtained with gilded leather and decorated with floral designs in silver picked out with jewels. In front a pole supported a long banner, pale green, showing a black claw holding a burning torch. Eight heavily muscles bearers carried the palanquin. Except for shoulder pads, loincloths, boots, and ankle chains, they were naked. Two more eight-man bearer teams marched behind the palanquin, under the guard of a dozen soldiers wearing blue-lacquered helmets and silvered mail.

A punitive expedition, a royal progress, a general's tour of inspection, a tax-gatherer's visit, or what?

There were enough men and animals and gear for the party to be any of these things, or several of them at once. He decided to follow them for a while, although he'd keep his distance at first. He didn't want to find out the hard way that these people killed or enslaved strangers on sight.

Whatever the men were and wherever they were going, they were going there fast. The drums thudded, the trumpets blared, wheels banged and rumbled over rock, ungreased axles squealed, hooves and feet clattered and thumped. In a few minutes the whole party was past, and the last rider was disappearing in the mist. Blade waited until the noise started to fade away, then scrambled down to the valley floor and set out in pursuit.

The trail showed poorly on the hard rock, but the soldiers made so much noise that only a deaf man could have had any trouble following them. Blade kept a good mile behind them, out of sight in the mist, stopping whenever silence from ahead told him the soldiers had stopped. Twice he dropped back even farther as the mist lifted briefly. Otherwise he was on the move all day, his long legs easily keeping pace with the soldiers ahead.

The soldiers kept on through the thickening mist of evening until the light was gone. Then they made camp. From the splashing sounds, Blade guessed they'd made camp around a stream or spring. Wearily, he resigned himself to a chill and thirsty night. He decided he'd scout out the camp, though, just to see what more he could learn about these people.

He made his approach two hours after dark and promptly learned one thing. The soldiers had made a circle of their wagons and crept inside that circle like mice into their holes. They hadn't even bothered to post a guard over the spring. Blade took advantage of that, drinking the ice-cold water until his thirst was gone. Then he made a complete circle around the camp, coming so close that he felt he could almost reach out through the mist and touch the wagons. Except for the occasional lowing of the draft animals or the choking snore of a restless soldier, the camp was as silent as the rest of the dark valley.

Blade refused to believe this was sheer carelessness. These men looked like experienced soldiers who wouldn't leave a camp unguarded without some good reason. Either they knew there was nothing prowling the valley by night that could do them any harm, or there was something against which there was no possible defense. That was not a pleasant thought, and Blade found himself looking cautiously around him and taking extra care to move silently.

Then he laughed softly to himself. If the soldiers who knew this land had decided there was no point in losing sleep, he would take his cue from them. He retreated to a safe distance and found level ground behind a large boulder that would conceal him when dawn came. Then he settled down for another night of trying to find soft spots in the rocks.