The Ruins Of Kaldac

Chapter 2

Blade had found the room after a short search. When he first arrived in Dimension X he had discovered that he was sitting halfway up a steep hill covered with long grass. He felt no trace of a headache. He stood up, stretched his arms and legs, then unhooked his loinguard and examined it. Both the loinguard and what it was intended to protect seemed to be intact. As he put the loinguard back on, a stronger gust of wind made the grass around him dance wildly. Then thunder rumbled across the hillside and the gray skies overhead let loose with a downpour of cold rain.

Blade had looked hastily around for shelter. Visibility was shrinking rapidly, so it was hard to make out details.

As far as he could tell, there were ruins at the bottom of the hill. He saw what looked like walls with gaping windows, a tower reduced to a jagged fang, a rubble-choked street lined with trees tossing their branches in the storm, but nothing which promised protection from the weather. He turned and looked uphill.

On the crest of the hill stood a grayish block which looked like an unruined building. He watched for a moment, looking for any signs of life, saw none, then started cautiously up the hill. He would have liked to run up to the nearest door and get out of the rain, but the building was the most conspicuous object and probably the best shelter for miles around. Others in the area might also have their eyes on it, and he didn't plan to walk into an ambush, so he proceeded slowly.

Blade stopped every few yards, noticing new details about the building each time. He saw that one side of it was dark except for some blurred white shapes on the wall near the ground. He saw that one wing had nearly collapsed. Moss grew on some of the leaning slabs, while creepers grew up the cracked walls and over the tiles of the roof.

At last he reached the hilltop and walked completely around the building. He suddenly realized that the blurred white shapes on the darkened wall were the silhouettes of human beings, distorted by many years of weathering. Blade had seen something similar-in photographs taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the atomic bomb had exploded there, the flash darkened the walls of buildings everywhere except where people had been standing close by. The victims' bodies left white shadows on the walls, just like these shadows Blade saw now. So there had been an atomic bomb explosion in this Dimension, Blade realized.

For a moment Blade considered moving on, to avoid any possible danger from lingering radiation. Then he realized that the darkened wall still showed traces of the bomb only because it was on the side of the building away from the prevailing winds. On the other side the walls were undarkened, and grass and plants were growing. Certainly enough time had passed for the building to be free of any dangerous radioactivity. Blade tore a branch from a bush growing by the door and made an improvised club, then strode into the building.

It was as deserted inside as it was outside, except for a few small skittering shapes which immediately vanished into the walls. They were about the size of mice but didn't move like them. Blade thought of radiation-induced mutations.

In one room he had found blurred footprints, but they were in ankle-deep dust. Whoever made the footprints had come and gone years ago. Blade found he had the choice of four rooms which were reasonably dry except for the rain blowing in through the windows. He'd picked the one with the least dust, and now he finally stopped pacing and thinking about all the incidents leading up to his arrival in Dimension X. He decided he needed to get some sleep, and he curled up in the corner farthest from the door but closest to the window. After a moment he sat up, unhooked his loinguard, and wrapped it around his left hand. The club and the loinguard were the best weapons he could hope for tonight, and the metal wire was getting cold against his bare skin.

Blade curled up again and started willing himself to go to sleep, in spite of the damp chill. He hoped Lord Leighton's plans to provide him with more survival equipment succeeded, and quickly. Right now he would have given a good deal for a down sleeping bag or even a blanket and thick pile of dry leaves!

By morning the wind had died and the rain was only a drizzle, although the sky was still a depressing gray. A few minutes of vigorous exercises got Blade's blood flowing again. By the time he'd finished exercising, the clouds were beginning to break up. Visibility rapidly increased to several miles. That was enough to tell Blade that there were probably no friends or enemies anywhere close enough to matter.

At the foot of the hill Blade saw a ruined city, hundreds of crumbling buildings along rubble-choked streets radiating out from a central tower. Beyond the city lay a solid wall of dark green forest. Beyond that Blade saw a line of what could have been either oddly-shaped hills or truly gigantic buildings. At this distance and with clouds still lying low on the horizon, he couldn't be sure.

Everything seemed weirdly lifeless. The city was half-overgrown with bushes and trees, and the forest beyond looked as dense as a jungle. Blade saw no tracks on the ground, no birds in the air. He couldn't hear any birds or insects even when he held his breath to listen, nothing but the sigh and moan of the wind. After a while this eerie silence drove him into action. He hurried around to the other side of the building and looked west.

On this side the hill sloped away more gently, leveling out in an immense grassy plain. The plain began less than half a mile away and continued all the way to the horizon, as flat and featureless as a billiard table. Far off to the north Blade saw what looked like one end of an enormous bridge, with more ruined buildings clustered around it. He couldn't see what the bridge crossed, or any more signs of life than he'd seen elsewhere.

Blade tore off another branch and started tying it with lengths of vine to the first branch, to make a heavier club. By the time he'd finished, his hands were red and sore from the acid sap of the creepers. He'd also decided to go east, exploring the ruined city at the foot of the hill, then cutting through the forest. What lay on the far side of the forest certainly looked more interesting than the plain to the west. The forest would also give him better shelter from the weather and probably more food. He took a last look around the ruined building, then started down the hill.

It didn't take Blade long to see all of the ruined city he needed to see. One rubble-clogged street or one house with its windows and doors gaping like the eye sockets of a skull looked very much like another. Like the building on the hill, the city had been abandoned for generations, possibly centuries. Unlike the building, it had been visited a number of times after its people abandoned it. Blade saw ragged holes in a dozen walls, where fixtures had been pulled or chopped free. He saw rooms swept almost clean of dust. Under an overhanging piece of roof he found the remains of a campfire and a pile of animal droppings no more than a few weeks old. Blade looked briefly for the animals' tracks, then realized the night's rain would have completely wiped them out.

The visitors seldom went above the third floor and apparently never went into the cellars. Blade struggled down some of the crumbling, treacherous flights of stairs and found whole untouched piles of metal waiting for him. Much of it was so rusted or corroded he couldn't tell what it had been, but he found a piece with a sharp point just the right size to be used one-handed. He also found strips of a plasticlike material which he wrapped around one end of the piece of metal to give him a better grip on this improvised knife. A longer strip of the plastic tied around his waist made a belt.

Blade came up from the last cellar faster than he'd gone down. It was definitely inhabited-by ordinary-looking mice and by something considerably larger which never left the shadows in a corner. Blade could only hear its chittering and the scrabbling of claws, on stone, and smell an unbelievably rank odor.

By the time Blade left the city the clouds were almost gone, and it was a bright, if somewhat chilly, day. He could now see clearly that the tall shapes beyond the forest to the east were colossal buildings. They stood so close together that some of them were linked by aerial bridges, and most of them looked nearly intact. Blade was sure that their appearance was deceptive, but the towers would provide better shelter than the ruins. They should also tell him more about the fate of this Dimension and its people.

The moment Blade plunged into the forest, he was back in twilight. The trees grew in such regular order that it was clear they'd been planted that way. No doubt the spaces between the trees were wide enough when the park was laid out. Now, after long years of neglect, the ground between the trees was overgrown with bushes, ferns, and vines. Blade lost a good deal of skin pushing through some particularly thick patches. He kept going, since he didn't want to spend the night in the forest or reach the city after dark if he could help it.

Around mid-afternoon he came out onto the bank of a sluggish, weed-choked stream, with an unmistakable path on the far bank. He probed the stream with a fallen branch and learned he'd be swimming rather than wading across it. He was about to slip into the water when a patch of the weeds started swirling back and forth. Then a long row of black bony spines broke the surface briefly, heading toward Blade. He pulled his foot out of the water just as the creature swam close enough to give him a good look at it.

It looked like a cross between a giant catfish, a piranha, and a stingray. It had spines on either side of its jaws as well as along its back, a large mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, and a long thin tail with a barb on the end. It was at least nine feet long and coal-black except for sickly green eyes.

Blade decided that swimming across the stream might not be such a good idea after all. He started working his way upstream, looking for bridges or fallen trees. He found neither, but eventually he came to the ruins of a small dam. Beyond the dam the stream spread out in a small lake, but over the top of the dam the water was no more than ankle-deep. Blade crossed the top of the dam as fast as he dared go on the crumbling, slimy stones, keeping a watchful eye on the lake. Two sets of black spines rose near the dam only moments after he reached dry land and the path.

Once on the path he moved more easily but also more cautiously. The existence of a path implied the existence of someone to make it, and Blade didn't want to surprise or be surprised by that someone.

So he moved from one patch of cover to the next, looking and listening around him before each move. The path was obviously in fairly regular use, but there'd been too much rain last night even here under the trees to leave any footprints.

Roughly a mile down the path from the stream, Blade stopped abruptly. On either side of the path, ferns, vines, bushes, and even small trees were crushed into the ground. A trail of more of the same damage led off into the woods to the left. A large tree at the head of the trail showed a black scar. Blade looked more closely at the tree. Something had gouged out bark and wood to a depth of at least six inches, and also burned the edges of the wound to charcoal.

Blade followed the trail. It came to an end within fifty yards, and the smell stopped Blade even sooner. Decay and insects hadn't left enough of the animal to make it worth going closer. It must have been about the size of a large bear, and its skull and ribs showed the same sort of blackening as the tree.

Blade began to wonder just how primitive the people of this Dimension were. They'd obviously wrecked much of their civilization. Just as obviously, they had enough technology left to produce a weapon very much like a laser. That didn't make them any less dangerous, of course. Civilized people can be as unfriendly to strangers as primitive ones. With machine guns, lasers, and artillery they can also be unfriendly at a much greater range and in a much more destructive way.

It was also more important than before to get out of the woods before nightfall. Blade was sure he could outtalk, outfight, or if necessary outrun most human opponents. He wasn't nearly so confident he could do the same with a creature ten times his weight and probably carnivorous.

Blade returned to the path and started off again, moving a good deal more briskly than before.