Glory Road

Chapter 14

Rufo was shaking my shoulder. "Breakfast, Boss!" He shoved a sandwich into my hand and a pot of beer into the other. "That's enough to fight on and lunch is packed. I've laid out fresh clothes and your weapons and I'll dress you as soon as you finish. But snap it up. We're on in a few minutes." He was already dressed and belted.

I yawned and took a bite of sandwich (anchovies, ham and mayonnaise, with something that wasn't quite tomato and lettuce) -- and looked around. The place beside me was empty but Star seemed to have just gotten up; she was not dressed. She was on her knees in the center of the room, drawing some large design on the floor.

"Morning, chatterbox," I said. "Pentacle?"

"Mmm—" she answered, not looking up.

I went over and watched her work. Whatever it was, it was not based on a five-cornered star. It had three major centers, was very intricate, had notations here and there—I recognized neither language nor script—and the only sense I could abstract from it was what appeared to be a hypercube seen face on. "Had breakfast, hon?"

"I fast this morning."

"You're skinny now. Is that a tesseract?"

"Stop it!"

Then she pushed back her hair, looked up, and smiled ruefully. "I'm sorry, darling. The witch is a bitch, that's certain. But please don't look over my shoulder. I'm having to do this by memory; I lost my books in the marsh—and it's difficult. And no questions now, please, please. You might shake my confidence—and I must be utterly confident."

I made a leg. "Your pardon, milady."

"Don't be formal with me, darling. Love me anyhow and give me a quick kiss—then let me be."

So I leaned over and gave her a high-caloric kiss, with mayonnaise, and let her be. I dressed while I finished the sandwich and beer, then sought out a natural alcove just short of the wards in the passage, one which had been designated the men's room. When I came back Rufo was waiting with my sword belt "Boss, you'd be late for your own hanging."

"I hope so."

A few minutes later we were standing on that diagram, Star on pitcher's mound with Rufo and myself at first and third bases. He and I were much hung about, myself with two canteens and Star's sword belt (on its last notch) as well as my own, Rufo with Star's bow slung and with two quivers, plus her medic's kit and lunch. We each had longbow strung and tucked under left arm; we each had drawn sword. Star's tights were under my belt behind in an untidy tail, her jacket was crumpled under Rufo's belt, while her buskins and hat were crammed into pockets—etc. We looked like a rummage sale.

But this did leave Rufo's left hand and mine free. We faced outward with swords at ready, reached behind us and Star clasped us each firmly by hand. She stood in the exact center, feet apart and planted solidly and was wearing that required professionally of witches when engaged in heavy work, i.e., not even a bobby pin. She looked magnificent, hair shaggy, eyes shining, and face flushed, and I was sorry to turn my back.

"Ready, my gallants?" she demanded, excitement in her voice.

"Ready," I confirmed.

"Ave, Imperatrix, nos morituri te—"

"Stop that, Rufo! Silence!" She began to chant in a language unknown to me. The back of my neck prickled.

She stopped, squeezed our hands much harder, and shouted, "Now!"

Sudden as a slammed door, I find I'm a Booth Tarkington hero in a Mickey Spillane situation.

I don't have time to moan. Here is this thing in front of me, about to chop me down, so I run my blade through his guts and yank it free while he makes up his mind which way to fall; then I dose his buddy the same way. Another one is squatting and trying to get a shot at my legs past the legs of his squad mates. I'm as busy as a one-armed beaver with paperhangers and hardly notice a yank at my belt as Star recovers her sword.

Then I do notice as she kills the hostile who wants to shoot me. Star is everywhere at once, naked as a frog and twice as lively. There was a dropped-elevator sensation at transition, and suddenly reduced gravitation could have been bothersome had we time to indulge it.

Star makes use of it. After stabbing the laddie who tries to shoot me, she sails over my head and the head of a new nuisance, poking him in the neck as she passes and he isn't a nuisance any longer.

I think she helps Rufo, but I can't stop to look. I hear his grunts behind me and that tells me that he is still handing out more than he's catching.

Suddenly he yells, "Down!" and something hits the back of my knees and I go down—land properly limp and am about to roll to my feet when I realize Rufo is the cause. He is belly down by me and shooting what has to be a gun at a moving target out across the plain, himself behind the dead body of one of our playmates.

Star is down, too, but not fighting. Something has poked a hole through her right arm between elbow and shoulder.

Nothing else seemed to be alive around me, but there were targets four to five hundred feet away and opening rapidly. I saw one fall, heard Zzzzt, smelled burning flesh near me. One of those guns was lying across a body to my left; I grabbed it and tried to figure it out. There was a shoulder brace and a tube which should be a barrel; nothing else looked familiar.

"Like this, my Hero." Star squirmed to me, dragging her wounded arm and leaving a trail of blood. "Race it like a rifle and sight it so. There is a stud under your left thumb. Press it. That's all—no windage, no elevation."

And no recoil, as I found when I tracked one of the running figures with the sights and pressed the stud. There was a spurt of smoke and down he went. "Death ray," or Laser beam, or whatever—line it up, press the stud, and anyone on the far end quit the party with a hole burned in him.

I got a couple more, working right to left, and by then Rufo had done me out of targets. Nothing moved, so far as I could see, anywhere.

Rufo looked around. "Better stay down, Boss." He rolled to Star, opened her medic's kit at his own belt, and put a rough and hasty compress on her arm.

Then he turned to me. "How bad are you hurt, Boss?"

"Me? Not a scratch."

"What's that on your tunic? Ketchup? Someday somebody is going to offer you a pinch of snuff. Let's see it."

I let him open my jacket. Somebody, using a saw-tooth edge, had opened a hole in me on my left side below the ribs. I had not noticed it and hadn't felt it—until I saw it and then it hurt and I felt queasy. I strongly disapprove of violence done to me. While Rufo dressed it, I looked around to avoid looking at it.

We had killed about a dozen of them right around us, plus maybe half that many who had fled—and had shot all who fled, I think. How? How can a 60-lb. dog armed only with teeth take on, knock down, and hold prisoner an armed man? Ans: By all-out attack.

I think we arrived as they were changing the guard at that spot known to be a Gate—and had we arrived even with swords sheathed we would have been cut down. As it was, we killed a slew before most of them knew a fight was on. They were routed, demoralized, and we slaughtered the rest, including those who tried to bug out. Karate and many serious forms of combat (boxing isn't serious, nor anything with rules) -- all these work that same way: go-for-broke, all-out attack with no wind up. These are not so much skills as an attitude.

I had time to examine our late foes; one was faced toward me with his belly open. "Iglis" I would call them, but of the economy model. No beauty and no belly buttons and not much brain—presumably constructed to do one thing: fight, and try to stay alive. Which describes us, too—but we did it faster.

Looking at them upset my stomach, so I looked at the sky. No improvement—it wasn't decent sky and wouldn't come into focus. It crawled and the colors were wrong, as jarring as some abstract paintings. I looked back at our victims, who seemed almost wholesome compared with that "sky."

While Rufo was doctoring me, Star squirmed into her tights and put on her buskins. "Is it all right for me to sit up to get into my jacket?" she asked.

"No," I said. "Maybe they'll think we're dead." Rufo and I helped her finish dressing without any of us rising up above the barricade of flesh. I'm sure we hurt her arm but all she said was, "Sling my sword left-handed. What now, Oscar?"

"Where are the garters?"

"Got em. But I'm not sure they will work. This is a very odd place."

"Confidence," I told her. "That's what you told me a few minutes ago. Put your little mind to work believing you can do it." We ranged ourselves and our plunder, now enhanced by three "rifles" plus side arms of the same sort, then laid out the oaken arrow for the top of the Mile-High Tower. It dominated one whole side of the scene, more a mountain than a building, black and monstrous.

"Ready?" asked Star. "Now you two believe, tool" She scrawled with her finger in the sand. "Go!"

We went. Once in the air, I realized what a naked target we were—but we were a target on the ground, too, for anyone up on that tower, and worse if we had hoofed it. "Faster!" I yelled in Stars ear. "Make us go faster!"

We did. Air shrilled past our ears and we bucked and dipped and side-slipped as we passed over those gravitational changes Star had warned me about—and perhaps that saved us; we made an evasive target. However, if we got all of that guard party, it was possible that no one in the Tower knew we had arrived.

The ground below was gray-black desert surrounded by a mountain ringwall like a lunar crater and the Tower filled the place of a central peak. I risked another look at the sky and tried to figure it out. No sun. No stars. No black sky nor blue—light came from all over and the "sky" was ribbons and boiling shapes and shadow holes of all colors.

"What in God's name land of planet is this?" I demanded.

"It's not a planet," she yelled back. "It's a place, in a different sort of universe. It's not fit to live in."

"Somebody lives here." I indicated the Tower.

"No, no, nobody lives here. That was built just to guard the Egg."

The monstrousness of that idea didn't soak in right then. I suddenly recalled that we didn't dare eat or drink here—and started wondering how we could breathe the air if the chemistry was that poisonous. My chest felt tight and started to burn. So I asked Star and Rufo moaned. (He rated a moan or two; he hadn't thrown up. I don't think he had.)

"Oh, at least twelve hours," she said. "Forget it. No importance."

Whereupon my chest really hurt and I moaned, too.

We were dumped on top of the Tower right after that; Star barely got out "Amech!" in time to keep us from zooming past.

The top was flat, seemed to be black glass, was about two hundred yards square—and there wasn't a fiddlewinking thing to fasten a line to. I had counted on at least a ventilator stack.

The Egg of the Phoenix was about a hundred yards straight down. I had had two plans in mind if we ever reached the Tower. There were three openings (out of hundreds) which led to true paths to the Egg—and to the Never-Born, the Eater of Souls, the M.P. guarding it. One was at ground level and I never considered it. A second was a couple of hundred feet off the ground and I had given that serious thought: loose an arrow with a messenger line so that the line passed over any projection above that hole; use that to get the strong line up, then go up the line—no trick for any crack Alpinist, which I wasn't but Rufo was.

But the great Tower turned out to have no projections, real modern simplicity of design—carried too far.

The third plan was, if we could reach the top, to let ourselves down by a line to the third non-fake entrance, almost on level with the Egg. So here we were, all set—and no place to hitch.

Second thoughts are wonderful thoughts—why hadn't I had Star drive us straight into that hole in the wall?

Well, it would take very fine sighting of that silly arrow; we might hit the wrong pigeonhole. But the important reason was that I hadn't thought of it.

Star was sitting and nursing her wounded arm. I said, "Honey, can you fly us, slow and easy, down a couple of setbacks and into that hole we want?"

She looked up with drawn face. "No."

"Well. Too bad."

"I hate to tell you—but I burned out the garters on that speed run. They won't be any good until I can recharge them. Not things I can get here. Green mug-wort, blood of a hare—things like that."

"Boss," said Rufo, "how about using the whole top of the Tower as a hitching post?"

"How do you mean?"

"We've got lots of line."

It was a workable notion—walk the line around the top while somebody else held the bitter end, then tie it and go down what hung over. We did it—and finished up with only a hundred feet too little of line out of a thousand yards.

Star watched us. When I was forced to admit that a hundred feet short was as bad as no line at all, she said thoughtfully, "I wonder if Aaron's Rod would help?"

"Sure, if it was stuck in the top of this overgrown ping-pong table. What's Aaron's Rod?"

"It makes stiff things limp and limp things stiff. No, no, not that. Well, that, too, but what I mean is to lay this line across the roof with about ten feet hanging over the far side. Then make that end and the crossing part of the line steel hard—sort of a hook."

"Can you do it?"

"I don't know. It's from The Key of Solomon and it's an incantation. It depends on whether I can remember it—and on whether such things work in this universe."

"Confidence, confidence! Of course you can."

"I can't even think how it starts. Darling, can you hypnotize? Rufo can't—or at least not me."

"I don't know a thing about it."

"Do just the way I do with you for a language lesson. Look me in the eye, talk softly, and tell me to remember the words. Perhaps you had better lay out the line first."

We did so and I used a hundred feet instead of ten for the bill of the hook, on the more-is-better principle. Star lay back and I started talking to her, softly (and without conviction) but over and over again.

Star closed her eyes and appeared to sleep. Suddenly she started to mumble in tongues.

"Hey, Boss! Damn thing is hard as rock and stiff as a life sentence!"

I told Star to wake up and we slid down to the setback below as fast as we could, praying that it wouldn't go limp on us. We didn't shift the line; I simply had Star cause more of it to starch up, then I went on down, made certain that I had the right opening, three rows down and fourteen over, then Star slid down and I caught her in my arms; Rufo lowered the baggage, weapons mostly, and followed. We were in the Tower and had been on the planet—correction: the "place"—we had been in the place called Karth-Hokesh not more than forty minutes.

I stopped, got the building matched in my mind with the sketch block map, fixed the direction and location of the Egg, and the "red line" route to it, the true path.

Okay, go on in a few hundred yards, snag the Egg of the Phoenix and go! My chest stopped hurting.