The Temples Of Ayocan

Chapter 2

Being able to breathe again told Blade that he had made the shift into the new dimension. For a time he did not try to move, except for the muscles in his chest. He lay where he had landed, savoring the luxury of cool air flowing in and out of his body. He did not even bother to open his eyes.

When he did, bright sunlight stabbed into them, which did not make his throbbing head feel any better. He closed his eyes again and turned his head to one side and kept it in that position until the headache had faded. Then he opened his eyes, lifted his head, and looked around him.

He first saw mountains-high mountains, snowcapped, rearing jaggedly against a blue sky. For a moment the mountains seemed so close that he thought he could reach out and touch them-or they could rise up and topple over on him.

Then his vision cleared, and perspective returned. It was the crystal clear air and the flat land between him and the mountains that made them look so close. In fact they must be forty or fifty or even more miles away. It was hard to tell how high their summits rose into the flawless blue sky, but some of them must be close to twenty-five thousand feet. From one jagged peak a long white plume of snow whipped out in the wind, like a feather in a lady's hat.

Slowly, flexing each limb to see if it still worked, Blade rose to his feet. He was as naked as ever, but apparently uninjured. He went through a quick series of exercises to make absolutely sure, and to work some of the tension out of his mind. Physical activity had always helped him relieve mental strain.

Even a short spurt of physical exercise made his breath come short, quick, and hard. This was something he hadn't anticipated while he lay resting. Even the place where he stood must be at a fairly high altitude, ten or twelve thousand feet above sea level at least. Air this thin would not hold heat very well.

For the moment it seemed to be near noon, for the sun blazed hotly almost straight down from the clear sky. But it would be cold at night-colder than Blade wanted to face naked and unequipped.

Now he made a more careful survey of his surroundings. All around him was a level blue-gray plain-hard, dusty earth with patches of gravel and boulders. There was not a tree in sight, and precious little vegetation of any sort.

Far to the south a glimmer of darker blue broke the monotony of the plain. Blade narrowed his eyes against the glare of the sun from the miles of bare rock and examined the south still more carefully. The blueness might be just a miles-wide outcropping of another kind of rock, darker that that of the plain. But the way it gleamed? Everything in Blade's survival training and field experience shouted (or whispered) «Water!» Certainly there was nothing else within sight that looked as much like water. Even more certainly, there was nothing here offering a better chance of survival than a large body of fresh water. Probably there would be fish and vegetation, perhaps human settlements along its shores. Certainly any human settlements he was likely to find within easy walking distance would be along the lake.

Unless the water was brackish? He swore mentally at his ingrained habit of considering all the possibilities, even the worst ones. Then he firmly pushed the thought down. Where else in all this endless plain did he have any chance of finding what he needed to survive? When his conditioned pessimism was finally silent, he headed south.

He moved along briskly, trying not to exert himself enough to work up a sweat. There was no point in wasting any moisture if he could avoid it. Distances were deceptive on this high plain, as he already knew. That glimmer of water might have come from twenty miles away.

He loped onward, his shadow black against the lighter blue-gray of the earth at his feet. Sun and wind had powdered a thin layer of that earth, and as he moved along he left footprints and kicked up dust. Under that thin layer the earth was nearly as solid as the rocks that lay in large patches everywhere.

It was a drab land. The only color nearer than the mountains was occasional patches of white gravel and even rarer patches of scrubby black-green bushes and vines. These were mostly huddled in the lee of the larger rocks. Not surprising, in this land where a wind from those mountains could sweep fifty miles unchecked, stripping the land bare, grinding down even boulders with clouds of wind-driven dust. This was a land that had been here long before men-if indeed there were any in this dimension. And it would be here long after they had gone, if they ever came, and it would show no signs of either their coming or their going.

The blue on the horizon spread wider and wider as Blade moved south, and the sun began to creep down from overhead, toward the mountains. By the time it was halfway down in the sky, Blade knew that the blueness must indeed be water. By the time the sun hovered just above the highest peaks, Blade was within a mile of the shore of the lake. And by the time darkness was falling, he was standing by the water's edge.

Seen close up, the water was an incredibly rich blue. It was impossible for Blade to judge how far it stretched-neither to the south nor to the east could he see any shore. At this altitude it had to be a lake, but a lake the size of an inland sea. And it was fresh water. One taste reassured Blade on that point. Whatever he might die from in this new dimension, it would not be thirst.

For many hundreds of yards back from the water's edge, the shore of the lake was heavily overgrown with low-slung black-green bushes. These bore large yellow flowers that looked somewhat like sunflowers except that the mass of seeds in the middle of the blossom was bright red instead of brownish. Blade wondered if the red seeds were as edible as sunflower seeds. If they were, he was in no danger of starving either.

But he was in danger of getting very cold very quickly. The thin air of the high plain was rapidly losing its heat now that the sun was gone. A chill breeze crept down from the distant mountains, blowing across his bare skin and bit by bit robbing his body of its heat. He bent down and took hold of one of the bushes, trying to break it off or pull it up out of the ground. A layer of leafy branches under him and another over him might not make the most comfortable bed for a good night's sleep, but they would at least be something between his bare skin and the cold.

The bushes were tough and their bark scraped at his fingers, which were red and sore by the time he had broken off half a dozen branches. The broken ends dripped a sticky lemon-yellow sap. Blade bent down and sniffed at it. A strong vegetable smell, but underneath it something else, tantalizingly faint, so faint he couldn't define or describe it. But definitely appealing. He sniffed at the sap more vigorously, then suddenly pulled himself to a stop and threw the branch down on the ground.

That faint, underlying element in the smell of the sap was something-Blade didn't know what-insidiously attractive. He had been within seconds of smearing the sap over his nostrils, to absorb more and still more of the odor. And then what? What would a massive dose of whatever lurked in the sap have done to him? He didn't know and he didn't want to find out, at least not here and now. All he needed now was an overdose of narcotics while he was fighting to survive and keep warm on the lonely shores of this lake. He continued breaking off branches, but he was very careful now to keep them away from his face. He even tried to keep the sap from getting on his skin. He had no way of knowing whether or not it could be absorbed into his body through the skin.

By the time Blade had piled on the ground what he hoped would be enough branches, it was almost completely dark. Only the faintest orange glimmer beyond the mountains gave him any sense of direction. The lake stretched out endlessly away into the darkness, featureless and now black instead of blue. The wind had died, and even the faint splashing of little waves on the gravel of the beach had died away with it. For the moment, this was a dimension of total loneliness, almost total darkness, and silence except for the sound of his own breathing and footsteps.

Blade was getting ready to burrow down into his bed of branches when he suddenly realized that there was no longer total darkness out on the lake. Lights had suddenly appeared, faint, distant, and wavering, but unmistakable. Blade counted nine of them, stretched out in a long line across the lake. They shone a pale yellow-orange, and slowly but steadily they were coming closer. Their approach was too steady, too purposeful, for anything natural.

The line spread out wider and wider, until it seemed to stretch halfway across the lake horizon. Blade realized that if the line kept on all the way to the shore, he would end up almost in the middle of it. Slowly and cautiously, he rose to a crouching position, and moved away from his piled branches. He would have liked to scatter them so that they gave no sign of his presence, but there was no time for that. The lights were coming on faster now. Blade could hear a distant but fast-swelling chant as they did so.

He slipped up the slope from the beach, taking care to avoid softer patches of ground where he might leave footprints. Fifty yards up the slope, he came to a particularly thick patch of the bushes, some of them eight feet high. The close-grown rough branches were hard to push apart and painful to slip through. But when he had done so, he could crouch almost invisible to anyone on the beach.

The chant coming out of the darkness was definitely getting louder now. With relief Blade recognized human voices-at least forty or fifty of them, all chanting together to a beat set by two deep-toned drums. He had encountered a fair number of nonhuman or semihuman beings in his Dimension X travels, but he always preferred to at least start by dealing with human beings. Not that human beings were necessarily that much more predictable than nonhumans, or less likely to shoot first and ask questions afterward. It was more a question of what contributed most to his own peace of mind.

The lights kept growing brighter, the chant kept growing louder. Now Blade could make out words, and understand them. Once again Lord Leighton's computer had done its incomprehensible work on his brain, altering it so that he understood and responded in the language of the new dimension, however strange it might be.

The chant was a repetition of a single set of sentences, in a complex and varying pattern. Blade could pick out at least three different parts, and every fourth repetition they seemed to shift key entirely.

Over and over again the words came:

«Hail, flower of life! Hail, flower of death! We come to you in the service of Ayocan. We come to you in the judgment of Ayocan.»

Ayocan? thought Blade. King, priest, saint, devil, god, spirit? And the flower of life/death? Blade had a sudden chilling thought. Could the «flower» be the one growing on the bushes where he was lurking, the bushes with the narcotic sap? There didn't seem to be anything else living here that might match the description. And what were the people approaching across the lake planning to do with the bushes?

He had no time to answer these questions, or ask himself any more. Suddenly even more yellow-orange light was shining from the lake. Narrowing his eyes against the new glare, Blade saw that behind each of the nine original lights a second one was now burning, brighter than the first. Then the original lights all went out, suddenly, simultaneously, with almost military precision. Now Blade could see what was approaching him across the lake-and who.