Master Of The Hashomi

Chapter 2

For now, Blade was alive, safely in Dimension X, unhurt except for the usual headache, and in no danger of anything except sunburn. The sun and the hot wind blowing across his skin made him suspect he'd landed in a desert.

He opened his eyes and sat up. Sunlight flamed and his head started throbbing again. He saw gray mountains to his left, red-brown desert to his right. With the dazzling sunlight and his throbbing head, he had a moment's sensation that both the mountains and the desert were alive and watching him.

Slowly his eyes adjusted to the glare and his head calmed down. He found he could stand, look around him, and see the landscape for what it was.

He stood on a rocky slope that rose from the edge of the desert toward the mountains. A monstrous, incandescent sun poured light and heat out of a sterile blue sky. The mountains lay to the west, the desert to the east.

The desert began about five miles to the east and nearly a mile below Blade. It stretched away toward a distant flat horizon, patches of gravel alternating with patches of sand. Blade saw gulleys that must have been carved by water, but no vegetation, let alone birds or animals. In the clear air the horizon was a good thirty miles away-two days travel, for a man taking it easy and saving moisture. Every one of those thirty miles looked dead, dry, and sterile. It would be too much of a gamble heading out across the desert, Blade decided. He'd have to reach water within three days. That was as long as he could hope to last in this sun-baked land. Then he would die. In a few more days after that his body would be a withered husk. In a few months the sand would have buried him, or perhaps stripped the flesh from his bones so that only a bleaching skeleton would remain to greet travelers.

There seemed to be nothing out there worth risking such a fate. If the ground at his feet had been sprouting man-eating tigers and poisonous snakes, perhaps Blade would have thought differently. But it was only bare rock, sullen gray streaked with black and brown, cracked and flaked by thousands of years of sun, and at the moment almost too hot to stand on. To the west rose the mountains, and Blade turned to study them more closely.

The nearest peaks leaped up to at least ten thousand feet. Farther away Blade could see more peaks rising to twelve and fifteen thousand feet, with white snowcaps blazing from their summits. Still farther off he could make out the white wall of a magnificent triangular peak soaring up to at least twenty thousand feet. A plume of snow trailing from its summit hinted at strong winds high aloft.

Where there was snow, there would be water. Where there was water, there would be life, and where there was life Blade could find something to eat. If there were no people, Blade knew he might be in for an uncomfortable time. He'd be eating berries and roots and raw fish, drinking from mountain streams, and generally living more like an animal than a human being. But he would be living, which was more than the desert would let him do.

It was time to move out. Blade decided he'd go north at his present altitude, between mountain and desert. There wasn't much to choose between north and south-the view was equally dismal in either direction. But at his present altitude the nights should be endurable, and any streams flowing down from the mountains might not have entirely dried up.

Blade licked lips that already felt dry from the sun and gritty with rock dust, then struck north, moving with steady, unhurried strides.

The mountains to the west seemed unchanging, always turning the same face toward him. The nearer peaks seemed close enough for him to throw a rock over their summits, but in fact had to be at least twenty miles away. He'd be crossing those miles sooner or later, but not today.

He'd arrived in this Dimension about mid-morning. At noon he stopped for a short rest, then moved on. At this pace he could keep moving for two days without food or water, covering a good fifty miles in that time.

Slowly the boulders began to cast lengthening shadows.

The sun's light took a reddish tinge as it sank toward the peaks. In another hour the darkness and chill of the desert night would come swiftly. Blade began looking for something better than bare rocky ground to give him a resting place for the night. As his eyes searched, his legs kept moving.

He'd come perhaps seven hours and twenty miles from his starting point when he saw something breaking the monotony of rocky ground, upended boulders, and scrubby bushes. At first it seemed only an irregular smudge on the ground, pale and uncertain in the fading light. Then Blade's eyes caught a last flash of sunlight on something metallic. He increased his pace, until he was almost running across the last three hundred yards.

Half in the shadow of a high outcropping of gray rock, a litter of bones stretched for fifty yards along the ground. There were human remains, and also skeletons that looked very much like camels. The bones were bleached and scoured white as flour by the sun and wind of-how many years? Blade could only guess.

Certainly a long time. There were cotton robes and leather belts, pouches, and boots among the remains. The robes were pale and worn as fine as cobweb, the leather was cracked and flaking, baked hard as wood. The dead had been lying here a long time since they came out of the desert to die here of thirst before they could reach the mountains.

Or had they died of thirst? Blade found himself noticing other flashes of light on metal, cracks in some of the skulls, peculiar stains on the robes. He began to move among the remains, examining them more carefully.

Most of the robes were faded to a dingy white, but most also showed large patches of spots that had once been stained dark. Bloodstains? Certainly nothing else was as likely.

Blade picked up a skull. It had been split from the crown to the bridge of the nose, and after that hacked free of the neck that once held it up. Wind and sun had not done that.

Something sharper than a stone pricked Blade's foot. He stepped back, knelt, and felt in the gravel and bones around him. He came up with a long, leaf-shaped arrowhead, still attached to a few inches of shaft baked so dry that the wood crumbled to powder between Blade's fingers.

Blade found himself looking around the darkening landscape with new alertness and a growing suspicion. These people might have been moving up from the desert in search of water, but he doubted they'd died from not finding it. They'd died from bows and sharp steel in the hands of human enemies.

Again Blade examined the litter of bones and gear, studying them in the light of this new certainty. The human enemies had been skilled enough to lay an ambush that struck down the whole party in almost the same moment. Perhaps a few had ridden entirely clear, but the rest lay too close together for there to be any other plausible explanation.

Blade backed away from the fallen bones, trying to look in all directions at once, and scrambled up the rock outcropping. The last few feet were nearly vertical. Blade pulled himself over the sharp crest and lay flat behind it, looking back the way he'd come.

Yes, here was where the ambushers had lain in wait. The rocks could conceal archers, holding their fire until the riders were within easy bowshot. Then a sudden rain of arrows, at a range where they could hardly miss the camels, and a mass of stunned and dismounted men to be finished off with swords.

All right, so he'd reconstructed the events of so many years ago. What did this mean for him now?

It didn't have to mean anything. The ambush could have been generations ago, the bones lying in the open because on this rocky slope the sand of the desert would not creep over them. The youngest of the ambush party could have long since died of old age.

Still, this land had once seen men killing each other, and it might do so again. Blade decided to strike out for the mountains as soon as dawn gave him traveling light. Out on the slope he lacked not only water but cover. He was as visible as a flea on a plate.

By now the twilight was turning purple. A chill in the air began to nibble at Blade's bare skin. He scrambled down the rocks again and gathered up several of the fallen robes. Then he climbed back up, wrapped himself in the robes as well as he could, and curled up. He didn't expect to be comfortable, but he did expect that anyone climbing up the outcropping to get at him would make enough noise to penetrate his sleep. In both Home Dimension and Dimension X, survival was a matter of a thousand small precautions that made a man a more difficult victim.

Satisfied that he'd done his best, Blade relaxed. Like any healthy animal at the end of a long day's hunting, he was asleep in moments.

Nothing bothered Blade that night. He woke in a land lit by a dying moon and the first pink traces of dawn, but as lifeless and empty as the night before. He climbed back down the rock to the bones.

In the dawn he was able to make a more thorough search. He found more robes and tore some of them into strips, then tied the strips around his feet. All the boots and shoes were too small for Blade, even if the passage of time hadn't made them unwearable. A few layers of cloth would be better than nothing, to keep the stones from wearing the skin off his feet as he climbed toward the mountains. When he'd finished binding up his feet, he began searching for a weapon.

It was a long search. The ambushers had not only wiped the party out of existence, theyd stripped the bodies of everything except the clothes on their backs and the harnesses on their riding animals. Blade had to search through the whole area, scattering bones and whole skeletons that might have lain here undisturbed for more years than he'd lived. At times he felt slightly like a grave robber.

At last he turned over an almost intact skeleton and found a long knife thrust up between its ribs. Apparently the dead man had been stabbed, then fallen on his face, concealing the death weapon under himself so that it was overlooked in the search after the battle. Blade drew the knife out from between the dry ribs and examined it carefully.

It was nearly two feet long, with a heavy hilt of silver and black lacquer. The blade was slightly curved, heavily weighted toward the point, and razor-sharp on both edges. Blade tried a few experimental slashes. The knife was beautifully balanced, for both forehand and backhand strokes. It looked and felt capable of lopping off hands, arms, and even heads with lethal efficiency.

Blade made a belt from a strip of fabric and a sling for the knife from another, then tied the sling to the belt. It now rode easily on his right thigh, ready for a quick draw. It was a far better weapon than he'd expected to find, and apparently in perfect condition, completely unrusted. Perhaps that shouldn't be so surprising. This seemed to be the kind of land where a child could grow to middle age without ever seeing rain.

As Blade started to sling the knife, he noticed a design worked in silver on the pommel and engraved near the point. It was an elaborate design, showing a five-petaled flower that reminded Blade vaguely of a poppy.

Presumably the original owner of the knife had been one of the ambushers, since his knife had been in the body of one of the victims. Presumably he had also not survived the victory, otherwise he'd have retrieved his weapon. The flower doubtless meant something to him. It meant nothing to Richard Blade, who'd come across an unimaginable distance to stumble on this forgotten battlefield and play scavenger among its bones. All that mattered to him was that the knife still held its edge and temper.

He bent to tighten his foot bindings, then straightened up and drew a patch of cloth over his head and shoulders for extra protection from the sun. Now he could leave the dead to the sleep he'd interrupted and go on about his search for the living people of this Dimension.

Blade turned his face toward the distant mountains, then started walking.