Looters Of Tharn

Chapter 3

Blade came back to consciousness several feet up in the air. He landed with a thud and rolled down a grassy slope, arms and legs flailing wildly. At the bottom he crashed against a small tree, picking up a few more bruises, then lay quietly.

Gradually the splitting pain in his head and the ringing in his ears faded away. Now he heard the thin moan of wind sweeping past from vast distances, the creak of strained trees, the whispering ripple of wind-blown grass, the chirrrrr of a bird or an insect.

Off to his right a mighty range of hills sprawled across the horizon, towering against a pale blue sky where white wisps of clouds raced before the wind. Blade sat up, and perspective returned to his vision in a moment.

The hills were not a mile high and many miles away. They were only a low undulating ridge, perhaps two hundred feet high at most. A few stunted trees, no more than saplings, poked out above the bushes and long grass along the crest. Between Blade and the ridge lay a grassy depression no more than a mile wide.

Blade rose to his feet and brushed grass and dirt off his bare skin. He reached down and broke off one of the saplings, then stripped it of leaves and branches. It was hardly thicker or heavier than a walking stick and wouldn't be much of a weapon against any human or large animal. But he could at least jab it into the ground ahead of him, testing his way. It also made him feel better, which was even more important. The right frame of mind was always a good part of the job of survival.

Blade looked toward the ridge again. It certainly looked like the highest point anywhere close at hand. In the other three directions gently rolling grassland stretched away endlessly to a distant horizon. The grass grew thickly, in tangled masses. It was dark green, with pale yellowish brown stripes and spots on it that made it look diseased. Blade turned back toward the ridge and strode down toward the valley, the sapling over his shoulder like a rifle.

He moved forward with long, steady strides, occasionally prodding at the ground ahead of him with the sapling. Tangles of grass jerked at his ankles and an occasional thistlelike plant jabbed thorns into his calves. But these slowed him only slightly. The hope of seeing something more than miles and miles of grass from the top of the ridge pushed him on.

Beyond the ridge, the ground dropped away again, then swept out across more miles of grassland. But the horizon was no longer a featureless line where green plain met washed-out blue sky.

On it rose a city. It sprawled across nearly half the horizon, a mass of graceful white towers mixed with lower buildings, bridges, walls, amphitheaters-every sort of architectural shape. Everything had been conceived and built on a soaring, monumental scale. But even from many miles away everything showed the telltale signs of long abandonment. Windows gaped darkly, bridges sagged, here and there a wall had collapsed and grass had already overgrown the spilled rubble. It was a beautiful city, so beautiful that Blade involuntarily stopped to admire it. But it was also a dead city.

Blade swore and sat down. Had the computer finally hurled him into a dimension without human life? Men-or something intelligent-had built that city, no doubt about that. But he had equally little doubt that the builders of the city no longer lived and ruled in it.

Who did?

Perhaps no one did. Perhaps nothing moved in that city except grass waving in the wind. In any case, Blade knew that he was not going to find out anything standing there on top of the ridge.

Blade was striding down the far slope of the ridge toward the city when he heard the sound. Like the thunder of a distant storm, it rolled across the plains from the direction of the city. First a single sharp clap, then a long, slowly fading rumble. Blade felt bits of grit drive into his eyes and sting his skin. The bushes, trees, and grass danced for a long moment in something that wasn't the wind.

Somewhere not too far away, something had produced a violent shock wave. Blade doubted that it was natural. This land seemed to be as flat as a billiard table, and just about as unlikely to produce anything noisy and geological.

So whatever had made the shock wave was probably artificial. Blade crouched low behind a bush. Anything or anybody able to make an explosion this powerful might also be able to detect a man miles away.

Blade started to shift his position to where he could see out in all directions and no one could easily see him. Another crack-boom-rumble sounded from the direction of the city. Blade scanned the horizon and the buildings for some possible sign of where the blasts came from. No flash of flame, not even a rising and spreading cloud of smoke. What was making the explosions, and where?

For the third time the sounds blasted their way across the plain. Watching closely, Blade saw the blast wave kick up dust and debris in the streets of the city. There was a lot of power behind those blasts, whatever they were. No doubt his view of the blast site itself was cut off by the mass of thousand-foot buildings. But why no smoke clouds rising even higher into the sky? There was something increasingly odd about those explosions, if that was what they were.

Three more explosions came in rapid succession, then five minutes of silence and after that three more. Blade waited in concealment as the silence following the last three explosions grew longer and longer. Five minutes, ten, twenty. After half an hour, Blade crawled out from under the bush, stood up, and scanned the city again. It stood as before silent and grim. Nothing moved in its rubble-strewn streets or buildings with windows staring like the eye-sockets of bleached skulls.

Blade headed down the ridge toward the city. He couldn't help wishing he had something more than the sapling as a weapon. The explosions had been too powerful to think about with an easy mind. He would have felt a damned sight more comfortable walking toward the city with a couple of light antitank rockets or something like that slung on his back.

Oh well, they couldn't send through the computer everything he might need in a new dimension. Even if they could, they'd need to send six porters or a Land Rover to carry the whole lot! Blade smiled for a moment at the idea of seven stark-naked men tramping across some other-dimensional landscape, himself in the lead and six others following with heavy packs.

The grass rose a yard high as Blade descended the ridge. Once again he had to plow through it like a ship through pack ice, his massively muscled legs moving up and down tirelessly. His eyes continuously scanned the city, and from time to time looked to either side and behind him. He couldn't imagine what danger might come at him from the miles of empty, open plain. But a man in a new world seldom died from the dangers he expected.

Blade had covered about half the distance to the city when something in the grass ahead made him stop and look more closely. Something gleamed whitely there, reflecting the sun from among the greens and yellow-browns of the waving grass. Blade took two more steps forward and saw the unmistakable glint of sunlight off metal.

White, bleached bones lay scattered in the grass, the bones of human beings and horses all mixed together. The sunlight glinted from the unrusted portions of swords, spear heads, iron-studded belts, round helmets, the metalwork of harnesses.

Blade picked up the most intact of the belts and tied it around his waist. Then he thrust the least-rusted of the swords into it and stood up. That made him feel better. Now he might stay alive if he ran into more of the people whose bones littered the ground around him.

Blade crouched down again and examined the remains more closely. At once he noticed a few odd things about them. For one thing; there were clearly three different types of people among the dead. One type was short, almost bandy-legged, broad-framed and squat, with round skulls and wide faces. A second was taller, some of them six feet or over, thinner, long-limbed and graceful. A third-the most numerous-looked like the results of cross-breeding between the first two. What was even odder was that most of the tall skeletons seemed to be those of women! The lighter bones and the pelvic girdle were hard to mistake.

There was also something odd about the armor and weapons. There was quite a lot of metal there-good but crudely finished wrought iron, most of it. Efficient but primitive. Yet some of the helmets, many of the breastplates, and nearly all of the belts were made of some pale, tough, plastic-like material.

Blade picked up one of the belts and tried to snap it in his hands. He pulled at it until the muscles of his thick arms stood out like rocks and the sweat popped out on his forehead. But he might as well have been trying to snap a length of steel cable. He braced one of the breastplates-designed for a woman, he noticed-against a horse's ribcage and tried to drive the sword through it. He put all his strength into the thrust, but the armor only dimpled and sprang back into shape. It took several jabs before he was able to drive his sword through it.

Tough stuff, this, thought Blade. He looked more closely at the belt in his hands. He'd be damned if this stuff wasn't almost identical to teksin, the ubiquitous material that the people of Tharn had made from the mani plant. Almost? He couldn't see any difference at all!

Could he be in Tharn?

The thought made his pulse race and his breath come more quickly. He couldn't help it. The idea that after all the failures he had finally returned to a particular dimension was too exciting.

Then the excitement faded. So far he had nothing to prove that he was in Tharn except a few pieces of something that looked very much like teksin and a few skeletons of warrior women. That wasn't enough. There was no reason why the people of some other dimension couldn't have come up with something identical to teksin. Nor were fighting women unique to Tharn. Until he had more to go on, he would assume that this was a new world, with a whole set of new dangers.

He turned back to examining the skeletons. They lay scattered every which way, and wind and time had broken some of them apart. But all the bones were intact, none of them broken or gouged. Some of the skeletons looked as though the people had simply lain down to sleep or fallen off their horses and never got up again. To Blade, those bones didn't look like those of people and horses who had died in battle. What had killed them, then?

Blade knew he could only guess for the moment. Meanwhile he would watch his step and his back even more carefully. He rummaged through the remains until he found a helmet and a breastplate that more or less fitted him. Then he tied two or three of the belts together at his waist as an improvised loinguard.

He looked toward the city again. He was armed and armored now. If any of the three peoples still lurked in the city, he felt he could give a good account of himself. But what then? None of these people could be the ones who had built the city. That was the relic of an advanced civilization. None of these people seemed much beyond early Iron Age.

But there was still that damned teksinlike stuff they used!

How did an Iron-Age people get that? Tharn had been a land of advanced if decadent science. These people-

Blade shrugged. Speculating in advance of facts was never a very good idea. It seemed even less a good idea in this dimension, which seemed to be throwing four or five mysteries at him all at once.

However, multiple mysteries didn't bother Blade. They just made him more curious and more determined to satisfy his curiosity. Hitching his sword into position for a quick draw, he strode on toward the city.

Closer to the city the grass seemed shorter and the ground firmer. Blade plunged along with long, powerful strides. In another twenty minutes he was more than a mile closer to the city, and stopped again.

Now there was more than that teksinlike material to make him wonder if he was back in Tharn. Seen closer up, a good many of the city's buildings were beginning to remind him of Urcit, the capital of Tharn. Urcit was gone now, destroyed by the final explosion of its Power. But parts of this city might have been Urcit's ghost-if a city could have a ghost.

Again, this could be coincidence. But two coincidences between this dimension and Tharn? Blade couldn't help wondering. He also couldn't help moving forward even faster than before, until be was almost trotting. He covered the next mile at that pace, then stopped again.

No, the resemblance to Urcit was just a coincidence, startling as it was. Blade couldn't see a single case of the phallic theme that had dominated art and architectural decoration in decadent Urcit, with its people of beautiful, sex-starved women. Several of the buildings bore large, complex designs in red. They looked to Blade more like three or four large snakes having an orgy than anything else. Definitely they weren't the magnificently explicit phallic themes of the people's art.

He felt almost disappointed. He remembered Zulekia's face hovering before him as the computer worked on his brain, thrusting him into this dimension. He would have liked to see the changes made in the time since he left Tharn. He had broken the mold in which both the people and their barbaric enemies, the Pethcines, had been trapped. He had given them-call it their freedom, for want of a better word. What had they done with it?

He doubted that he or anybody else from Home Dimension would ever find out.

He rose to his feet again and started forward. Then in the next moment he stopped, stared, and threw himself flat on the ground.

Out from behind a building on the edge of the city slid a gleaming metal machine. It rode some thirty feet off the ground, and the air blurred under it. With one glance Blade could see that it was a machine built for one purpose, and one purpose only.

War.