The Ruins Of Kaldac

Chapter 3

Blade covered at least two miles at a trot, then saw the path was sloping downhill. At the same time the trees began to thin out. Soon Blade could make out the tumbled, overgrown stone blocks of a wall ahead. He climbed over the wall and picked his way across another stream on the half-submerged ruins of a bridge. After a few hundred yards more through young trees, Blade found himself on an open hillside. The sun was still well above the horizon. At the foot of the hill the city of towers loomed against a pale sky. In the clear air Blade felt he could reach out and touch it. Even from this distance it showed remarkably little damage. Most of the windows and doors were black and gaping, and here and there stone had crumbled or metal paneling had corroded through. Bushes sprouted from cracks in the streets, and the wreckage of one of the aerial bridges completely blocked an intersection. Otherwise the city might have been sleeping rather than dead. It was easy to tell that its builders had loved beauty and put that love into their city, without a thought for the war which their love of beauty hadn't been able to prevent.

On the hillside sloping down to the city, Blade saw clusters of ruined buildings. Some of the clusters were practically small towns in themselves, others were isolated and overgrown. The «suburbs» hadn't been so robustly built as the towers of the city itself.

In a way, Blade found the city of towers a more depressing sight than the ruins to the west. He was glad it was late enough in the day to give him an excuse to stay out of the city until morning. He didn't care for the thought of prowling dark streets where the least superstitious man might find himself watching and listening for ghosts.

Blade stiffened as he realized the morbid and dangerous turn his thoughts were taking. He'd been letting his attention wander, at a time when he had to be even more alert than he'd been in the forest. He took cover behind a bush and found that when he could no longer see those dead towers looming over him, the gloomy thoughts went away.

He also realized that if he hadn't been alone he wouldn't have felt this way. He wouldn't be too particular about the company, either. He remembered some of his old comrades from MI6A, dour men who seldom talked about anything except their profession and the price of whisky. Even one of them would have been a relief.

Blade was as much a loner as any sane man can be. He wouldn't have joined MI6A in the first place if he wasn't. But even a man as naturally solitary as a cat can occasionally want someone to talk to or at least to guard his back. But Blade didn't even have someone else who'd faced the dangers of Dimension X and could swap stories with him over a bottle of Scotch! According to Leighton, they were one step closer to sending someone else to Dimension X, once an alloy-weapon or suit could he manufactured to increase the survival chances. Still, even if such a protective device were made, they'd still have to find someone who could travel into Dimension X and return alive and sane, and the search for such a person was as far from success as ever.

Blade decided that if he had a choice between a happy marriage in Home Dimension and a comrade-in-arms for travel into Dimension X, he'd choose the second. It was hard to imagine a woman worth marrying who would accept being shut out of most of her husband's working life. She would be shut out-the Official Secrets Act would see to that. Even worse, she'd have a good chance of ending up a widow without ever being allowed to know how!

Blade rose, stepped out into the open, then stopped in midstride. Smoke and dust were rising from one of the clusters of ruins, less than half a mile away. Then he saw running figures burst out of the ruins onto the open hillside. They seemed to be human, with dark skins or wearing dark clothing. Some ran singly, others in pairs. Darker shapes, low to the ground, seemed to be running after the people and among them. As Blade watched he saw the reddish flicker of sunset light on metal, then a longer, greenish glow which looked artificial. Lasers?

Blade drew his knife and started down the hill, using every bit of cover he could. About halfway down the hill he saw what the low dark shapes were. He saw the short legs, the smooth brown coats, the pointed heads with ugly red eyes, the obscenely hairless tails.

Rats.

Rats the size of German Shepherds!

Blade charged out from behind a stretch of broken wall and plunged down the hill like an Olympic sprinter.

Blade loathed rats. He'd loathed them ever since a night on one of his first missions for MI6A. He'd spent that night in a hut on the outskirts of Calcutta, along with the rat-gnawed corpse of a baby no more than three months old. Ever since that night he'd killed rats any time he had a chance, coolly, efficiently, and as thoroughly as possible.

Blade went down the hill with all thoughts of having no one to guard his back quite forgotten. He didn't quite forget that he had a back to guard. He never went that far, one of the reasons he was still alive after so many years of enough dangers to kill a dozen men. Instead of staying under cover of the ruins, Blade now stayed in the open, as far from any cover as possible. Crumbling walls and fallen roofs could hide the rats. With his knife and club, Blade could fight them safely only if he saw them coming a long way off. It would also help if he didn't suddenly burst out of nowhere at the people fighting the rats. They might be just a little bit trigger-happy right now!

Blade counted about a dozen people and at least twice that many rats. Four of the people seemed to be armed with rifles firing lasers or some other type of energy beam. The others carried bows or spears. All of them carried short swords strapped to their hips. So far none of the rats were close enough to make the people draw their swords.

The battle was moving uphill toward Blade, and the people were leaving a trail of dead or dying rats behind them as they climbed. Every time one rat went down, two or three more seemed to pop out of the ruins, and they were tough. Blade saw one lose a leg to a laser beam but keep coming on three legs until someone else put an arrow through its brain.

Most of the people were dressed in dark leather boots, trousers, and baggy shirts. Some also wore heavy jackets studded with bits of metal, as a crude sort of armor. Blade saw one with both a jacket and a rifle run up the hill toward him, then stop suddenly and turn without noticing the Englishman. A moment later Blade himself had to stop. At his feet was a steep-sided ditch at least ten feet deep and half again as wide, the bottom overgrown with bushes and grass. The angle of the slope had hidden the ditch from Blade.

Now Blade could see that the rifleman was a boy no more than seventeen years old, with long blue-tinged hair caught up in a pigtail and a red sash around his waist. He was kneeling and firing at the oncoming rats with more enthusiasm than accuracy. Blade winced as he saw one laser beam crisp grass at the feet of one of the boy's comrades.

Then suddenly the grass and bushes at the bottom of the ditch churned, and four of the rats scrambled up the side toward the boy. «Behind you!» Blade shouted. The boy whirled, finger closing on the trigger of his rifle. Blade dove for the ground as a laser beam singed his hair. Then the first of the rats reached the boy. He drew his sword, but not before the rat was too close for him to hold it off. Its jaws closed on his leg, and Blade knew from his yell that the leather wasn't tough enough to keep out those yellow-white teeth. The boy hacked down with the sword, splitting the rat's skull but dropping his rifle. It hit the lip of the ditch, teetered, then rolled down a few feet to fetch up against a bush.

Before the rifle stopped rolling, Blade was gathering himself for a leap. As it stopped, he jumped. He landed on hands and knees close to the rifle but closer to one of the rats. It lunged at him. Blade crouched and met it with knife in one hand and the other hand outstretched to guard. He saw that these giant rats moved more slowly in proportion to their size than normal rats.

As the rat closed, Blade's free hand shot forward, closing on the rat's ears. He jerked its head back and his knife slashed, laying the rat's throat open. Then he picked it up one-handed, threw it at its two remaining comrades, and bent down to scoop up the laser rifle.

It looked so simple that Blade couldn't believe anyone could miss with it. Then he missed two shots himself, and one rat got so close that he had to reverse the rifle and crush the rat's skull with the butt. After that he realized he'd been using the laser like a normal bullet-firing weapon, leading his target and allowing for the wind. Laser beams moved at the speed of light, unaffected by wind.

Blade killed the last of the four rats in the ditch with a long blast which nearly tore it in two. It rolled down the slope, its charred guts trailing, to land almost on top of five more rats coming out of the same burrow. They milled around long enough for Blade to drop two of them with shots to the head. He killed a third as it scrambled upward, and burned the tail off a fourth. That slowed it down enough for the boy to kill it with a sword thrust between the eyes. The fifth rat reared up on its hind legs to attack the boy's throat. The boy thrust it through the stomach, its jaws closed on empty air inches short of his throat, and then Blade burned halfway through its neck with his laser.

More rats were scurrying out of their burrow in the ditch as the last corpse rolled down. Blade scrambled up to join the boy on the edge before any of the new rats could start climbing up. The boy took one long look at Blade, examining him from head to foot. Then he shrugged and after that seemed to find nothing unusual about fighting side by side with a nearly naked man half again his size and much lighter-skinned.

Blade picked off rats at long range, and the boy used his sword on any which got close. His wounded leg was bleeding freely, but the wounds didn't seem deep enough to slow him down. They were both too busy killing rats in the ditch to pay attention to the battle behind them. Blade's world shrank down to the matted, blood-smeared grass in the ditch, the blood-spattered boy beside him, the hot rifle in his hands, and the steadily more overpowering smell of burned rat flesh.

Eventually Blade's laser ran out of power in the middle of a burst. The rat was still alive, and the boy jumped down to kill it with his sword. He slipped on the grass and tumbled head over heels to the bottom of the ditch. Blade threw down his useless rifle and got ready to finish off the rat with his knife.

Then a laser beam sizzled past Blade's ankles, and the rat's head exploded gruesomely. He turned around, raising his knife. The man standing there was nearly his own size, with bare arms corded with muscles and covered with scars. His head was shaved bald, and he wore a mustache with small silver beads tied to each end. Wide golden eyes met Blade's for a moment, then shifted their gaze down into the ditch.

«Ho, Bairam!» the man shouted. «Your thoughts are still faster than your eye or your hand. Does nothing change?»

Young Bairam glared at the man in silence for a moment, then pointed at Blade. «Yes it does, Hota. It was this one who saved me, not you. Also he, unlike you, did not use Oltec when the battle was over and death-danger past.»

«The death-danger was not past. There were still living rats close.»

«I saw none.»

«You had your eyes turned the wrong way, as usual.»

«I had my eyes on these,» he said, pointing at the dead or dying rats littering the bottom of the ditch. «And he-«pointing at Blade «-and I kept them from biting you in the ass, until they were all dead. It was then that you used the Oltec. The Law says-«

«You are so sure that you know what the Law says, because you are Peython's son! I have better reason to know what the Law says. I have obeyed it in more battles than you have years.»

«Oh? I didn't know you'd fought that many women.»

The big man began reciting a list of his battles which Blade found almost impossible to understand. It wasn't the language itself which confused him. The transition into Dimension X had altered the structure of his brain so that he could both speak and understand the local language as if it were English. Why this happened was still a mystery, but Blade didn't mind the alteration going unexplained as long as it didn't stop happening!

The problem with this conversation was that Blade didn't know what two-thirds of the words used meant. «Oltec,» for example. Blade thought he remembered a tribe of Central American Indians by that name but seriously doubted he'd landed in Central America! Then «Kaldak,» «munfan,» and dozens of others. For all the sense he could make of it, the conversation might as well have been taking place in a language he didn't understand.

The quarrel between Bairam and Hota came to an abrupt end when a high-pitched, very cold voice spoke from behind Blade.

«Be quiet, both of you.»

Blade helped the boy out of the ditch, then turned to face the speaker. He saw a blue-haired young woman with a laser rifle slung across her chest and a short sword in one hand. Her face was dirty and too thin for real beauty, but her eyes were a glorious deep green with flecks of silver. An armored jacket concealed her above the waist, but one leg of her trousers was ripped open to above the knee. The leg exposed had a magnificent tan which didn't come from a bottle and lovely curves which came from firm muscles instead of support hose.

Right now she sounded too angry to encourage Blade to think how she might look undressed. «I am going to speak to my father about both of you if there is another quarrel like this. Each of you is both right and wrong. Bairam, there were live rats up here, which you could not see. So Hota did not break the Law of Oltec. Hota, you should have let either Bairam or this one have the kill. You were greedy, then you kept the quarrel going after my brother spoke wrongly. You also showed bad sense, in keeping the quarrel alive with this one standing close.» She turned to Blade, brushing hair out of her eyes and looking hard at him. «Who are you, pale man?»

«He saved my life, Kareena,» said Bairam. «Why do you speak to him that way?»

Kareena glared at her brother again. «I know who you are.» Then she smiled, making her thin face almost beautiful for a moment, and punched her brother lightly in the shoulder. «I know who you are and what you are. I do not know anything about this man.»

«I am Richard Blade of England, a land beyond the ocean.»

«What ocean?» said Kareena abruptly. The point of her sword hovered within inches of Blade's bare stomach.

«You have not heard of the Gray Ocean?» said Blade, trying to look surprised as he improvised his story. «Then I have come even farther than I imagined. When I fled after killing seven men to avenge my sister's honor, I knew I would have to go far. I did not know I would come to a land where they did not know of the Ocean.»

«Your sister must have been a poor creature, if she could not avenge her own honor,» said Kareena. But the sword point wavered.

«Against seven men?» said Bairam. «Kareena, be serious. Even you would find those odds too much!»

«You're an odd one to tell me about-«Kareena began sharply, then caught herself as she realized she was about to start another quarrel in front of the stranger. She shrugged, then smiled politely at Blade. «Certainly you are not from Kaldak. From your pale skin I would say you are from no city in all the Land. The Sky Masters were said to have skins like yours, but they are all dead. So your story will be interesting, even if it is not as you have told it. Also, you did save Bairam. That puts me in your debt under the Law, and also our father Peython.

«However, you are not yet within the Law and cannot be until we return to Kaldak. Therefore you cannot bear an Oltec weapon. Will a sword or a spear satisfy your honor as a warrior of England?»

From that, Blade concluded that «Oltec weapon» must mean one of the laser rifles. He really would have preferred to carry one of them, but the rifles were probably rare. Certainly one of them wouldn't save him if these people turned violently hostile. He could help keep them friendly by following their customs.

Ceremoniously Blade picked up his empty laser rifle and handed it to Kareena. «A sword or a spear is enough. I have seen many lands, lived with many peoples, and obeyed the Law of each one. That is honor and also wisdom.»

Bairam smiled. «Kareena, how can you doubt a man who speaks such words?»

«Because they are no more than words,» said Hota bluntly. «When we know if they are more-«He would have probably started another quarrel, but Kareena was looking ready to strangle both Hota and her brother with her bare hands. She laid the rifle down and turned.

«Sidas! Bring a spear for the pale man Blade. Then everybody be ready to move. There will be no camping here tonight!»

That got a murmur of agreement from the rest of the band, who'd finished off the wounded rats and gathered along the edge of the ditch. Blade counted fourteen, five of them women. Under the dirt their skins were all various shades of reddish brown, but only a few of them had the green eyes and bluish hair of Kareena and her brother. Some of them were sorting through bulging leather packs, while others squatted by heavy bags slung below long poles.

Bairam wanted to march as he was, but Kareena insisted that he sit down and let her bandage his wounds. Blade noticed that she poured some liquid from a leather bottle onto the bandage, then avoided touching the wound with her bare hands. It was always a relief to find a Dimension where the people had some notion about the causes of infection. Otherwise, if you let the local doctors treat you, you risked dying of blood poisoning. If you tried to treat yourself, you risked being burned for sorcery. Either way was an unpleasant and undignified end.

No one made a move to offer Blade any clothes, so he adjusted his loinguard and sat cross-legged with the spear across his knees until Kareena finished with her brother. Then she pulled out a bone whistle and blew hard. The people with packs strapped them on, those with poles lifted them, and the party moved out. Blade kept toward the front, looking back occasionally for any more signs of the rats. He saw nothing moving, and the hillside soon faded out of sight in the gathering twilight.