Looters Of Tharn

Chapter 11

Blade had left the screens on when he fell asleep, and the first golden blaze of the sun creeping over the horizon woke him. A drink of water cleared his head, and he awoke the sleeping Krimon. The neuter awoke very slowly, with many mutterings and yelps of pain as aching muscles complained.

Blade was cheerfully unsympathetic. «Come on, my friend. We have another long day ahead of us. Breakfast first, and while we eat you will tell me of the Looters. Then we fly west until we come to the new homes of the people.»

Krimon looked uneasy at the last idea. «That-it will spread fear among the farms and villages, Mazda. They will not know that it is Mazda in the machine. They will see only the Looter war machine and fear it. Is that the way you wish to come again to Tharn?»

«I was planning to fly directly to my son's home if the machine will carry us that far. How far is that?»

«At least five days on a fast horse.»

That worked out to at least two hundred and fifty miles. «Krimon, that is much too far to walk if we want to get there soon. But I will listen to what you say of the Looters, and say nothing. If when you are through I am satisfied that I should indeed not come to Tharn in the Looter machine, we will get out and start walking. But I am very stubborn, as you have no doubt heard.»

«Indeed, it is always said of Mazda that he had a will harder than the hardest jewels. Very well, I will tell you what we know of the Looters.»

Urcit had been the last city of Tharn, the one where everyone had retreated by the time Blade arrived. But it was not always the only one. Scattered across the vast plain stretching half a year's ride toward the east were a score or more of other cities.

But even with the power, the magveils that controlled the weather and let the mani grow could not be spread over more than a tiny fraction of the great plain. Urcit was the fairest of all the cities of Tharn, and the soil around it the most fertile. There was plenty of room and plenty of mani there for the dwindling remnants of a once-proud people. So they retreated to Urcit and the other cities drifted off into the realms of legend. Even Sutha, the wise First Neuter who had been Blade's principal ally, had not considered them important enough to mention.

But the legends survived. Now they drew explorers eastward across the plain, seeking out the substance of the legends. Two years ago the first explorers of the people reached the distant cities. But at almost the same time, so did the Looters.

Who were the Looters, and where did they come from? They seemed to come from nowhere and to go back there when they had finished their deadly work. One woman said she had seen their war machines appear out of thin air, with a terrible sound and a blast of air that knocked her down. But she went mad afterwards. Did Mazda think she spoke the truth?

Blade couldn't say for certain. But he could wonder. Teleportation? Possibly. Or possibly-possibly even interdimensional travel. Had the Looters discovered it on their own?

There was no evidence at all that the Looters were even living creatures. No one in Tharn had ever seen anything except the terrible machines.

«Or at least nobody has seen a living Looter and lived to tell about it.»

«Have any tried?»

«Quite a few of our bravest young men and women have tried. None have succeeded, nor have any come back from the attempts.» Krimon's face was grim at the memory.

But the machines were there, and in terrible strength. There were the war machines, like the one Blade had captured. All of them had the fear-making sound, the mindnumbing light, and the deadly purple ray. There were also the tentacles, to tear captives limb from limb-or kill them in ways far slower and more agonizing.

«That means there must be living creatures inside the war machines at least some of the time,» said Blade. «Only living creatures take pleasure from the pain they can inflict on other living creatures. Machines do not have that bad habit.»

Krimon was able to describe for Blade the effects of the purple ray. Blade concluded that the ray somehow burst every blood vessel in a victim's body. The victim dropped on the spot, dead almost before he hit the ground.

Unfortunately Krimon's account didn't tell Blade anything about his own theory that the machines could distinguish living from nonliving matter. He decided against raising the question now. Why get the poor neuter's hopes up before giving the theory the thorough testing it would need anyway?

The Looter war machines were bad enough. But there were also the great boxlike machines that fired the rockets. The rockets were sometimes used as weapons, but not often. Mostly the big machines used a destructive red ray.

«Could it possibly be that the Looters do not have very many of the rockets?» asked Blade.

Krimon shrugged. «I do not know. I do not think anyone else does either.» It was obvious to Blade that the neuter had never considered the possibility of the Looters having any weaknesses at all. Morale in Tharn seemed to be down lower than a snake's belly. He was going to have some work to do there.

However, being a god was a real asset when it came to getting people to believe in you.

There were the big box machines. They seemed to be in command. There were other kinds of boxlike machines that carried cutting rays, or large metal claws that scooped things up. Finally there were machines that were nothing more than enormous platforms, the size of a village square, with a small cabin in one corner. They carried away the machinery, the stone, the metalwork that the Looters stripped from the cities they attacked.

The Looters had started far to the east of the city where Blade saw them at work. So far they had destroyed five Tharnian cities.

«When the Looters have finished taking from a city everything they can use, they destroy it the way the release of the power destroyed Urcit. A terrible ball of flame rises up, and then a great cloud of smoke soars into the sky, spreading out at the top.»

The mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion. It was hardly surprising that the Looters had the atomic bomb, considering everything else they had.

«And they are moving toward the settled lands of Tharn, Mazda. They know of our existence. Sooner or later they will fly all the way to the settled lands. Their rays will strike, people will die horribly in the metal arms, and then the ball of flame will sweep away what is left. We cannot prevent their coming, and we cannot survive it either.»

Definitely morale in Tharn was down. With good reason, Blade had to admit. To have the Looters come tramping along, murderous, destructive, and utterly mysterious, just when things had started to improve for the people-it would have been demoralizing to any people.

Most of the knowledge that would have helped fight the Looters had been gone for centuries even before Blade arrived. After the destruction of Urcit, the surviving neuters were too busy learning what they needed to save the survivors to have time for anything else.

It looked as if the job of organizing Tharn for battle against the Looters was going to be largely in the hands of Richard Blade.

His hands and his son's, he reminded himself. He was not only father to the people, but father to their King. He had found strange allies in stranger dimensions, but he had never dreamed that he would find one sprung from his own loins.

He shook his head and set his thoughts in order. «Well, Krimon, I have listened as I promised. You have made many things clear. I now say that we must fly to the house of King Rikard, as fast as the machine can take us. We must stop the Looters soon. Who knows what machines and what knowledge they are taking from you in the cities they loot? And those who fear that they will someday soon march upon the people are correct. Beings like the Looters will kill and destroy for the sheer love of killing and destroying, unless they are stopped. For all their science they are like the Pethcines of the Lesser War.»

«But this machine-«

«This machine is now a terrible weapon for us against its masters. We shall take it to King Rikard, and I and the wisest of the people shall study it. We shall find how it may be destroyed. And then we shall march out against the Looters, and destroy the machines one by one until there are no more of them and Tharn is saved.»

Krimon looked impressed. Blade realized he must have made the road ahead sound easy. He sighed.

He very much wished it were as easy as he had made it sound.