The Torian Pearls

Chapter 13

With all the other men who'd worked beside him, Blade went down to the sea to scrub off the blood and filth. Then Blade rode up to where the smashed wagons lay. He began picking up boards and tying them on the back of his drend.

Paor followed him. «What are you doing, Blade?»

«I'm going to build a raft. Do you want to help me?»

«I suppose I can. Why do you want to build it?»

«I want to go out on the water farther than I can swim and see how these beasts live there.»

Paor's mouth opened and he stood speechless for a moment. «Blade, they will come and smash the raft. Then they will gulp you down in a mouthful!»

«Perhaps. But I do not know that. I do not know many things about these creatures, and I need to know them. The Kargoi need to know them too.»

«You cannot do this any other way?»

«Not without sending someone else into danger that I will not face myself. Would you have me do that?»

Paor was silent again. He could recognize a man who'd made up his mind to the point where there was no arguing with him.

With the help of half a dozen warriors, the raft quickly took shape. It was about ten feet by six feet, just able to keep Blade afloat and dry. It would never support a sail, so Blade carved one of the reptile ribs into a combination pole and paddle.

The warriors watched grim-faced from the shore as he set out, and Naula was weeping openly. No doubt his voyage seemed as mad to them as that of Columbus had to his Spanish friends. Blade was not going nearly as far-in fact, he was barely going out of their sight. But he was in just as much danger, if not more.

Blade had to push and pull the raft some distance before it would float with his weight on it. Then he scrambled aboard and began paddling steadily. Behind him the figures of the watchers on shore grew slowly but surely smaller.

Blade headed straight away from land. Every few minutes he took soundings with an improvised lead line, a rock tied to a length of rope. He was pleased to find the water getting steadily deeper.

Out in deep water he would be no more vulnerable to the reptiles then he would be in the shallows. They could come at him in either place. He would have a better chance of catching a glimpse of the beasts' masters. Those masters would probably keep their distance from shore, even if they swam in the water along with their pets. If they used something like a submarine to control the reptiles' attacks, they would probably have to stay in deep water.

What they would do to somebody who came out seeking them in deep water was another matter, one not at all pleasant to think about. Again Blade had a painful sensation of going up against outrageously long odds. He would have felt a little better with a rocket launcher, or even a single hand grenade!

Blade kept paddling until the lead showed eighty feet of water under the raft and a bottom that might have once been a forest. He untangled the half-decayed, weed-grown branch the line brought up and threw it over the side. Then he put up his paddle and squatted in the middle of the raft, waiting and trying to look in all directions at once across the water.

Slowly the sunset colors blazed in the sky, then faded into darkness. Somewhere beyond the horizon a storm was raging across water and land and the endlessly changing frontier between the two. Blade saw dim, noiseless flashes low down in the dark sky and felt the raft rise and fall on a gentle swell, all that was left of the distant waves. It was a warm night, and so quiet that when Blade dipped a hand over the side of the raft and held it up, the falling drops sounded almost loud.

Clouds came and went across the face of the moon at irregular intervals. When the moon shone clear there was enough light to see clearly. On Blade's left an isolated hill rose clear of the water. An almost intact stone building was perched halfway up the side facing him. To his right lay a wide stretch of swamp where a large flat hilltop lay just below the surface of the water. Between the two was a wide stretch of empty water, suggesting a valley that was now a deep channel. Certainly that would be a logical route for the sea reptiles and their masters, if the masters were logical-if the masters existed at all.

Alone on the water, Blade found it hard to know exactly what to believe. It seemed possible that he was on a wildgoose chase. It seemed just as possible that some malignant intelligence was even now watching him from under the water, getting ready to strike.

On the shore orange glows told Blade that the watchers had lit fires. If those fires helped keep the watchers happy, so much the better. Blade began a slow, regular scan of a complete circle around him.

He didn't know how long it took him to scan that circle twelve times. He did know that on the thirteenth time, he spotted a faint light just above the water's edge on the hill with the stone building. It was so faint that he would never have seen it from the shore, or even from three hundred yards farther away. The light did not flicker, and it was a pale blue-white that Blade had never seen in any campfire in any Dimension. Perhaps a pocket of volcanic gas had ignited and was venting itself into the air?

Then the light began to come and go, not wavering but going on and off in what Blade quickly saw was a regular pattern. Two long-one short-two long. Then five longs in rapid succession, then a repetition of the first five. Over and over again, eight times. The blue-white light was artificial, and someone was signaling with it. Who would answer?

Blade began paddling the raft slowly toward the hill. Whoever built the microcircuitry he'd found in the reptile's head could undoubtedly build underwater detection devices able to pick up two shrimps mating five miles away, and radar able to pick up a mouse two miles off. They might not have either one on the hill. In that case he might be able to sneak up on the hill where the light shone and go hunting for the answers to a good many of his questions.

The hill was only a mile away, but it seemed to take hours before it started growing visibly larger. Not a breath of air moved to either slow Blade's progress or conceal the small sounds he could not help making as he paddled the raft steadily toward his goal.

He'd covered about half the distance when the light began signaling again. This time it went through the complete sequence four times. Now Blade could see that the light shone from among low, spreading trees that straggled along the water's edge. The remnants of an orchard, perhaps. Blade started bearing to the left. He wanted to come in on the opposite side of the hill from the light and sneak across the slope under cover of the trees.

The hill grew steadily larger in the darkness, and so did the light on it. On the shore the fires burned higher and higher, undisturbed. Whatever the signal light was doing, it hadn't yet called an attack by the sea reptiles on the watchers along the shore.

At last Blade could see that he was no more than a hundred yards from dry land. He was tempted to slip off the raft and swim the rest of the way in, to make a smaller target. But he couldn't be sure of safely anchoring the raft, or of finding it again in the darkness. He paddled in until the raft gently scraped over the top of a submerged tree and bumped solid ground. Blade leaped ashore, agile as a cat and even quieter, and tied the lead line around a stump.

If the signal light was manned, whoever was manning it hadn't detected him, didn't care about him, or was waiting for the right time to strike. There was no point in trying to guess which. Blade made sure that his bowstring was dry and that both swords moved freely in their scabbards. Then he began his slow stalk through the trees toward the blue-white light.

Around him the night was silent and dark except for the signal light ahead, the orange fire glow on the distant land, and the moon when the clouds let it shine. From time to time the trees cut off Blade's view of the signal fight, but they never entirely cut off his view of the water.

Suddenly the clouds opened wider than ever, as though a veil had been jerked away. The moon blazed down until it laid a silver trail across the water.

As if the moonlight had called it out of the depths, something black and glistening rose from the water into the silver path. For a moment Blade thought it was one of the great reptiles coming to the surface. Then he recognized the conning tower of a small submarine, and the foamy wake it left behind as it ran in toward the island. Half a dozen cylindrical objects seemed to be tied to the submarine's hull, giving it a hump-backed appearance.

Blade had to watch the submarine for only a minute to know that it was heading straight toward the signal light. He moved on again, more slowly and carefully than before. He didn't know what to expect-armed sentries, detectors, booby traps, land mines, or what. He was sure that whoever had set up the signal station and was now coming to inspect it must have provided it with some defenses.

If there were any, Blade passed through them as if he'd been an insect or a ghost. He came out on a ledge of rock uphill from the signal light, just as the submarine stopped about fifty feet offshore. In the glow from the light he could clearly make out who was operating it and who was swimming ashore from the submarine. He watched them and froze, barely breathing.

The signalers and the swimmers were not human. They stood eight or nine feet tall, and they looked like nothing so much as giant stalks of asparagus with four double-jointed arms ending in lobster-like claws. Instead of feet, they moved on a massive rippling suction disk at the base of the «stalk.» The ones swimming in from the submarine were encased from head to foot in flexible, transparent cylinders that left the arms and claws free for swimming. Blade could see air tanks and sacks of gear slung from a belt around each cylinder.

These beings were not human, but Blade had seen them before. Many trips to Dimension X in the past, he'd met them in a Dimension where they helped send out Ice Dragons to prey on the human inhabitants of a glacier-stricken world. The Ice Dragons had a human Ice Master, but ultimately they were the creation and the weapon of the advanced science of the Menel.

Yet the Menel were not creatures of any Earth or any Dimension. They came from deep space, across the great gulfs between the stars. From their distant, unknown home they had come to this world, in this Dimension. They had come and now they were settling down to do what?

Blade didn't know. All he had was a magnificent opportunity to find out and perhaps prevent it, if it was dangerous and he lived long enough. If he hadn't been so close to the Menel and still half stunned with surprise, Blade would have laughed out loud.

Now he probably had the answer to his first question-who was controlling the sea creatures? In finding the answer to that question, though, he'd raised at least fifty more!