Dimension Of Dreams

Chapter Three

The pain in his head told Blade that consciousness was coming back to him. Then an equally sharp pain in his naked bottom made him yelp and leap to his feet in spite of his throbbing head. Looking down, he saw that he had landed on his rear in the middle of a large patch of thistlelike plants with springy, woody stems, thin purple leaves, and spectacularly long and pointed stickers. Under his feet was moss-grown stone; he lay down on it until the headache had vanished and his exploring fingers had removed all the prickers. Then he rose to his feet again and cautiously looked around him.

He realized that the moss-grown stone he had been lying on showed a pattern of cracks too regular to be natural, with great clumps of purple thistles growing out of them. Blade saw the stone stretching off in an unnaturally straight line on either side. It was flanked by trees set at roughly thirty-foot intervals and rising so high that Blade had to crane his neck up toward the graying sky to see their bushy tops. Their trunks were massive and at first glance appeared to be covered with green scales. Closer examination revealed a choking tangle of vines and weeds clinging to the bark. A chill breeze blew past, making Bade shiver and the glossy green leaves of the vines and the dull purple ones of the thistles dance.

Obviously, he had landed in the middle of a road. Or of what had been a road. Some of the thistles sprouting from the cracks between the blocks in the road were three feet high. More than one entire block had been heaved completely out of position by winter frosts, spring thaws, and the slow, steady work of the plants. No one had used this road or cared whether it was usable for many years.

But all roads tend to lead somewhere. From the way the light was rapidly fading from the sky, Blade guessed it was almost sundown. The chill already in the air suggested that the coming night would be uncomfortably cold for a naked man to spend in the open. Blade looked along the road and noticed that to the right it sloped down and to the left it rose. In both cases it rapidly vanished into the twilight, but it seemed to Blade that going up made more sense than going down. At the very least, the higher he got the more he could see when morning came. He turned off to the left and set off up the road, eyes moving ceaselessly from side to side, looking for possible dangers and for anything that might be converted into a weapon to meet those dangers.

The climb up into the gathering darkness lasted so long that Blade was beginning to wonder if he was climbing a mountain. Then abruptly the row of trees on either side vanished, and the road divided and swung out on either side to form a circular drive. Directly ahead a flight of stairs-overgrown and crumbling like the road-led up to a vast sprawling house that seemed to cover the whole top of the hill. For a moment Blade's anticipation rose. Then it fell back again as he examined the house. He noted dead and living vines encrusting the once white walls, windows gaping like the eye sockets of a skull, and leaf-clogged gutters oozing dirty water. No one had come along the road for a long time, and no one had lived in this house or cared whether it was even livable for an equally long time. Whoever had raised the mansion there was long gone.

Behind the house the slope continued to rise. Blade walked around it along the circular drive, noting the fallen trees that were rotting amid the grass of what had once been a neatly kept lawn. Now it grew rank and dense, reaching Blade's knees.

Blade's mood grew sober as he surveyed the estate. He did not like this house, intact but as lifeless as the Great Pyramid, sitting there brooding on this dark hill. The mental association of abandoned houses filled with things dark and sinister was too deep for even Blade's trained mind to shake off. He had never seen a better haunted house.

He would not have liked it particularly even if he had never heard of haunted houses. Country mansions could easily be abandoned for legitimate reasons. But they could also be abandoned for more sinister ones-plagues, wars, the long, slow dying of a civilization that could no longer sustain them. The mansion was intact except for the damage inflicted by the years. That seemed to rule out war. Or did it? Chemicals, bacteria, hard radiation, or radioactive dust could leave a house intact and its inhabitants dying in agony. The house seemed to have been abandoned long enough for any CBR warfare agents to have lost their deadliness. But Blade would have been happier with a Geiger counter.

There was no point in standing in the darkness, staring at the house. It only suggested the state of the world he had fallen into, and it might be leading him completely astray. At the top of the hill he might see anything from a farm to an entire city. He stepped away from the house, took a final look at the empty windows, shivered at more than the rising wind, and strode off up the hill.

He pushed up the steadily steepening grade for more than a hundred yards, the grass now wet with dew swishing past his calves and the occasional thistle plant adding scars to his ankles to match the ones on his rear end. As the house slowly vanished in the darkness behind him, he made a mental note of his course. If all else failed, he could go back to the mansion and try to find as much shelter from the night wind as its dark and depressing interior might offer. He felt the ground beneath his feet leveling out, saw another row of trees looming up, and passed between two of them.

Now the ground sloped downward. He had a vague sense of a vast, empty space in front of high, from which the wind now moaned unbroken and uninterrupted. He was staring into the darkness, trying to make out something recognizable, when the clouds passing overhead suddenly flared silver at their rear edges. A full moon glowed in a sky full of stars, pouring an almost incandescent silver light over the land.

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.