The Towers Of Melnon

Chapter THREE

Blade first became aware of the sound of insects. They were in the long grass that rose up around his aching head, whining softly to themselves. Hearing them was an agreeable surprise. After the nightmare sounds of his transition from home dimension, he would not have been surprised to wind up deaf. Perhaps the sound had never had any physical reality? It might have been merely a hallucination produced by his brain as it writhed in the grip of Lord Leighton's computer.

The grass was not only long, it was stiff and sharp. Blade felt it prickling and jabbing against his bare skin. Slowly, painfully aware of his throbbing head, he sat up and looked around him. The movement startled the insects around him into silence or frantic efforts to escape. Some of them flew across his field of vision, bright darting splotches of red, black, and purple. The whine and hum from the grass died away as he became more aware of his surroundings.

It was just after dawn, with a morning mist hanging low over the ground. A yellow glow higher up told of the rising sun, and patches of blue sky promised a clear day. But in the swirling grayness of the mist, six gigantic dark shapes loomed up tall and grim. They soared up to incredible heights-a mile or more, if Blade was judging their distance correctly in the mist. But even through the mist their outlines were too regular to be natural.

As the mist began to lift, Blade realized that he was standing almost at the base of the seventh of the gigantic towers. The seven formed a huge circle, a good three miles in diameter. In the middle of the circle Blade could make out a sunken, cleared space about half a mile across. The sunken circle seemed as bare, flat, and featureless as a military parade ground. It was paved-with a yellowish coating that reflected more and more brightly the rising sun.

Blade turned his eyes upward, to examine the tower looming over him. He had to crane his neck until it ached, to see the top. In fact, looking up at it gave him a sickening moment of vertigo. It rose so high from such a slender base that Blade almost expected it to stagger suddenly, to topple over on him and crush him into the rocks and vegetation around its base.

All seven seemed to be as identical as seven automobiles of the same make and model turned out on the same assembly line, except for their colors. The one towering above Blade was a glossy dark green that reminded him of a ripe avocado. From left to right around the circle, the other six gleamed orange, dark blue, golden yellow, flaming red, somber flat black, and glossy white. Except for the black one, all seven were so highly polished that the sun blazing off their towering sides struck painfully into Blade's eyes.

Each of the seven rose well over a mile from a base not more than five hundred feet square. Blade did not know very much about architecture, but he could recognize a building technology decades or centuries beyond anything known in home dimension. How had these seven towers come to be where they were, apparently all by themselves? The mist had almost entirely lifted now. He could see no signs of any other buildings beyond the circle of towers, or any signs that the towers themselves were inhabited.

Blade looked up at the green tower above him again. As he did, his doubts about whether these monsters were inhabited were suddenly answered. Around each of the seven towers, two hundred feet or so above the ground, ran a two-story balcony, jutting out some fifty feet or so on all four sides of the towers. Dark figures were appearing on the balcony above Blade, dwarfed by the distance. Blade could not at first even tell whether he was seeing human beings or some more fanciful and perhaps much less agreeable creatures.

Then one of the figures stepped to the edge of the balcony. Without stopping or hesitating, he stepped out into space. Blade suppressed a gasp and watched. He expected to see the figure plunge downward, to smash itself among the rocks and shrubs at the foot of the tower.

Instead, the figure seemed to float slowly, as if it had no more weight than a soap bubble. As it descended, Blade realized that it was in fact human. The man was dressed from head to foot in the same glossy dark green as the finish of his tower. Blade thought he could also see a sword blade on the man's belt, flashing in the sun.

For a moment he wondered if he should take cover and wait to see what happened. Certainly there was room to hide around the base of the tower. A belt of tumbled boulders, shrubs and small trees, long grass, and little gullies and hills extended for nearly a mile around the base of the green tower. The other six also seemed to be surrounded by such a fringe of semi-wilderness. Did these people preserve those tracts for recreational purposes-as parks-or was it that they simply didn't care? Blade remembered the Sleepers of the Dimension of Dreams, and how they had let an entire city crumble to ruins while they sank into their Dreams.

Blade decided that he was trying to analyze not only ahead of the facts, but at the wrong time. The man in green was less than a hundred feet above Blade's head now, and descending steadily. He was definitely wearing a sword-no, two swords-at his belt. On his head was a cylindrical helmet with cheek pieces and a crest from which a green plume waved. A warrior, obviously.

Now Blade understood how the man was descending so effortlessly through the air. He was riding down on a kind of flying trapeze. Three stout bars of glossy green metal formed an equilateral triangle. The warrior stood on one of these and clung to straps fastened to the two side-pieces. Blade could see no rope or wire attached to the trapeze. Had these people conquered gravity, like the alien Menel in the world of the Ice Dragons? That was an intriguing thought, but Blade reminded himself sharply that this was not the time for analysis or speculation.

Should he duck for cover or go forward to meet the warrior? It was almost too late to hide. Besides, he had to make his first encounter with the inhabitants of this Dimension sooner or later. The odds were good on their having something worth taking back to home dimension. Advanced civilizations usually did, and these people seemed to be quite highly advanced.

As Blade reached this decision, the warrior in green reached the ground. He did not ride his trapeze down the last few feet, but instead jumped while it was still eight feet above the ground. He landed and rolled like a trained tumbler or paratrooper. Blade mentally noted this as suggesting a high level of training among this Dimension's warriors. The man was up again almost instantly, and as the trapeze settled to the ground beside him, he snatched it up and held the upper end of the triangle, against his face. There was apparently a microphone in the trapeze, but the warrior's voice boomed out loud enough to have been heard on the balcony two hundred feet above without any electronic help. Certainly Blade heard it clearly enough, as he crouched behind a bush a good one hundred feet away.

«I, Kir-Noz, Warrior of the First Rank of the Tower of the Serpent, declare that I am First on the Ground this day of war against the Tower of the Eagle. Let those who have the keeping of the Book of Honor record this day.» The warrior dropped the trapeze and spread his arms wide, drawing his two swords as he did so. They flashed in the sun, a long sword and a shorter one, both curved, both with green-enameled hilts. Then he thrust the swords back in their scabbards and began to walk slowly away from the base of the tower, his eyes on the ground.

He had covered perhaps fifty feet when Blade rose from behind his concealing bush. The warrior's eyes opened in amazement, staring at this unexpected apparition. His jaw sagged so that his mouth gaped open like that of an idiot or a dying fish. Blade took two steps forward and held out both hands, palms outward in a gesture of peace.

«Greetings, warrior,» said Blade. He could be certain that the warrior would understand his language as well as he understood the warrior's. During the transition into Dimension X the parts of Blade's brain that controlled his language skills changed. As a result of these changes, Blade reached each new dimension with an instinctive command of the local language. It no longer surprised him as it had the first few times, although he didn't fully understand the reasons. (Neither did Lord Leighton, in fact.) But it was no less welcome now for the fifteenth time than it had been the first. Sign language was more useful in adventure novels than in survival situations where your life might depend on getting your message across fast and accurately.

Seeing that the warrior was too astonished to reply for the moment, Blade continued. «My name is Blade. I come in peace to the people of the Tower of the Serpent, from a distant land called England. I would speak with the rulers of the Tower of the Serpent.»

These words seemed to push the warrior beyond simply standing and goggling at Blade. His jaw closed with a snap and his hands dropped to his sword hilts and closed around them. «You are not of Melnon?»

«What is Melnon?» asked Blade.

The warrior looked as though Blade had just asked, «What is the sun?» or, «What is rain?»

«Melnon is the world,» he said sharply. «Are you of the world or are you not?»

«I have come to the world that is Melnon, from England. I have come in peace.»

«You say that you come from the Beyond?» The warrior gestured with one hand, outward beyond the circle of towers.

«If all outside the towers of Melnon is the Beyond, then yes, I do come from the Beyond.» Blade wasn't sure whether being from the «Beyond» would get him treated as a monster or as a god. So he was careful to qualify his statements.

Apparently such subtleties were useless, with this warrior at least. «You cannot be from the Beyond. For it is not of the world, and there are no people except in the world. You are of the Low People of one of the other towers. Or perhaps» — the warrior hesitated as if he were about to use obscene language-«one of the other towers has foresworn the War Wisdom of Melnon. They are sending men among the Waste Land at the foot of the Tower of the Serpent, to catch and kill the First on the Ground.» Kir-Noz drew both swords and flourished them so that they whistled in the air. «The tower that forgot the War Wisdom of Melnon will pay in time. But you shall pay at once!» Without any further words the man sprang toward Blade.

Blade was not caught by surprise. The moment the swords flashed clear, he had stepped back two paces and dropped into a fighting stance. While Kir-Noz was hurling his threat, Blade was surveying the ground around his own feet, looking for any handy-sized loose stones. There didn't seem to be any. So as Kir-Noz charged him, Blade's leg muscles knotted, and he sailed five feet to the right in a single leap. Kir-Noz was moving too fast to stop. He charged straight through the spot where Blade had been standing. His swords carved the empty air with a fury that would have been frightening if it hadn't been so useless. He pulled himself to a stop, turned, and saw Blade standing off to one side.

Kir-Noz charged again. Blade leaped aside again. Kir-Noz kept on going again. By the time they had gone through the sequence a third time, Blade was beginning to wonder what kind of warrior he was dealing with. He wasn't sure whether Kir-Noz was feeble-minded, half-blind, or simply so badly trained that he had never learned to keep an eye on his opponent. Blade's opinion of the competence of the warriors in this Dimension took a sharp downturn.

Kir-Noz's ineptness would be helpful to Blade. He definitely did not want to kill the warrior. But if Kir-Noz had been at all competent, it would have been difficult for an unarmed man to get inside those two sharp and fast-moving swords. As it was, Blade had plenty of time to consider various tricks. In the meantime, he kept leaping aside from Kir-Noz's bull-like rushes. Many years of unarmed combat training had polished his reflexes and left his leg muscles like steel springs, so he had no worries about being able to go on avoiding Kir-Noz. But he didn't want to simply go on avoiding the warrior, any more than he wanted to kill him.

Little by little, Blade led Kir-Noz through the grass, over the rocks, away from the base of the Tower of the Serpent. He wanted the other men on the balcony high above to see what happened to their picked warrior. When Kir-Noz charged for the ninth time they were a good one hundred yards out from the base, in a small field littered with numerous clods of earth and grass. As Blade sprang aside he dropped into a crouch. His hands darted down and snatched up two clods of dirt. He leaped to his feet again and watched as Kir-Noz pulled himself to a stop once more, then he stood and faced the warrior.

«Ho, Kir-Noz,» he shouted. «Here I am, wise warrior of the Tower of the Serpent. Why am I so hard to find?»

The taunt stunned Kir-Noz into an explosion of rage. «When I have killed you, Blade, I will have Queen Mir-Kasa send a message to your home tower. They have done a great wrongness against the War Wisdom of Melnon, to send to watch us a man who carries no swords but only leaps about and waves his arms like a little child of the Low People playing in the dirt!»

«Oh, to be sure,» said Blade sarcastically. «My masters no doubt understand nothing of the War Wisdom of Melnon. And when you have killed me you can say anything you want to them. But first you have to kill me. Come on, Kir-Noz! Show me what a warrior of the Tower of the Serpent is good for, besides waving his swords about as though he were chasing flies away from a garbage heap.»

That last taunt drove Kir-Noz beyond the limits of speech. He screamed wordlessly, like a wild animal on the hunt, then dashed at Blade. As Kir-Noz charged, Blade's arms snapped up, and the two clods of earth he had been carrying sailed through the air at Kir-Noz's face.

They never reached their target, though. Kir-Noz's eyes flicked toward them as they came at him. Then, between one breath and the next, both his swords whistled up and struck with blinding speed in two crisscrossing slashes. The two clods disintegrated into a spray of dust and chopped bits of grass.

Kir-Noz's speed with his swords had been far faster than Blade had expected. But Blade's own training was better and his reflexes just as lightning-swift. Before the dust from the clods had started hitting the ground, Blade was lunging at Kir-Noz. Pivoting on his left leg, he shot his right leg out at a speed that even Kir-Noz could not match or guard against. Blade's leg outreached the warrior's sword. His foot crashed into Kir-Noz's stomach as the swords arced down. The warrior folded up like a pocketknife and reeled backward several steps, but he held on to his weapons. Blade closed, chopped Kir-Noz across the left wrist to break his grip on the short sword, and snatched it up as it fell.

The sight of one of his swords in Blade's hands seemed to revive Kir-Noz, oddly enough. His breath came more normally, and he straightened up and stared at Blade. Blade returned the stare, with considerable respect. Kir-Noz's training might have its limitations, but he was certainly fast, and he could certainly take punishment.

«Ho, Kir-Noz,» Blade said. «Will it violate the War Wisdom of Melnon if I come against you with this sword against the one I have left to you?»

Kir-Noz looked dubious. «It were better for me to consult the Council of Wisdom,» he said slowly. «They-«

«Are not here,» Blade interrupted him quietly. «Come, Kir-Noz. You call yourself a warrior of the First Rank. Surely that should make you fit and able to decide how to kill an enemy.» His voice took on a mocking tone again. «What are the warriors of the First Rank in the Tower of the Serpent? Little children tugging at their mothers' skirts? Perhaps even little children of the Low People?»

Kir-Noz screamed like a maniac, and launched himself at Blade. If he hadn't still been slowed by Blade's kick, Blade might have died in that next instant. As it was, Kir-Noz's long sword whistled down past his ear only inches away. It took a frantic parry with the short sword to keep the return stroke away from his groin. Blade decided to open the distance again.

But now that he had Blade at close quarters, Kir-Noz was the last man in Melnon to let him get clear. He came in again, his sword flashing in a dazzling series of strokes that took all of Blade's strength and skill to parry. Blade found his breath beginning to come more quickly, and his legs protested. As the sun rose higher, sweat began to pour down off him, stinging his eyes and making his hand so slick he began to find it hard to keep a grip on his sword.

He was also becoming aware of two things about his opponent, as the deadly exchange went on. Kir-Noz was wearing completely flexible but obviously tough body armor-glossy green, of course-that covered him from neck to groin. Several times thrusts which should have gone deep into his flesh merely dimpled the armor. And there were few enough chances for those thrusts. In theory a man with a short sword could close in, under the reach of a man with a longer weapon. But if the man with the long sword was as fast as Kir-Noz obviously was, matters weren't so easy. Blade hoped that Kir-Noz would lose some of that speed before long, but nothing of the kind happened. In spite of the punishment he had taken, the Tower warrior seemed to have recovered every bit of his speed and strength. And it began to seem to Blade that Kir-Noz's endurance might just possibly be greater than his own. That was an unpleasant thought. It meant he would have to make his own move before he became more tired and lost too much of his speed.

More important, he wanted to make the move with his sword. It was obvious by now that fighting in Melnon was highly stylized, according to the «War Wisdom.» If he wanted to ensure his own reputation and good reception here, he would have to beat Kir-Noz with Melnon's weapons. And he still didn't want to kill the man. He was strong and fast and deadly and, if he were defeated in such a way that he could respect Blade, he would make a valuable ally.

By the time he had worked this all out, Blade knew that he would have to make his move very soon indeed. Twice the tip of Kir-Noz's sword had nicked his flesh leaving thin, gently oozing gashes. Its edge must be razor-sharp. With the heavy blade behind it, the edge would sheer through flesh and bone as though it were cutting paper. Blade realized that he could hardly risk even the lightest wound from Kir-Noz's sword.

Kir-Noz was wearing calf-length green boots, with heavy soles. And Blade began to notice that Kir-Noz always looked quickly at the ground underfoot before closing. Of course! The man was used to doing all his fighting on level ground. Perhaps that table-flat drill field in the center of the circle was a fighting arena for the warriors of all seven Towers of Melnon? Blade, on the other hand, was barefoot. And he was as agile as a mountain goat at any time, in any place. Step by step, he began to back toward a patch of gravel and small boulders, leading Kir-Noz after him. He ignored the warrior's taunts about «cowards who can fight only against the War Wisdom,» and kept on backing. Kir-Noz was by now too intent on finishing this infuriating opponent to be fully aware of where he was going. He kept following Blade as though he were on a leash.

Blade stepped back into the patch of rough ground. He saw Kir-Noz look at the gravel and stones. The warrior recognized the treacherous footing-but he kept coming. He advanced furiously, obviously determined not to waste any more time. He closed so fast that Blade could hardly back away quickly enough.

Then Kir-Noz's left foot came down on an insecure rock. He did not quite stagger, but for a moment it was all he could do to keep on his feet. As his foot slipped off the rock he stepped into a soft patch, sinking so deeply that the gravel was almost halfway up his boot. He lurched to one side, trying desperately to jerk his foot out of the soft spot. As he lurched he was off balance for a moment.

In that moment Blade closed. He lunged at Kir-Noz with the short sword, stabbing straight at the warrior's armored belly with all the speed and strength left in his own body. Simultaneously he chopped with the edge of a flattened hand at Kir-Nozs right arm, the one holding the long sword. Both blows connected. The jolt in his belly toppled Kir-Noz off balance. He went down on his back in the gravel. He lashed upward with his sword, but Blade's down-chopping hand smashed into his sword arm again. Blade felt the bone crack under the blow and heard Kir-Noz gasp as he bit back a scream. Then Blade dropped on his knees beside the fallen warrior and twisted the long sword out of Kir-Noz's hand. Finally he raised the sword and held the point an inch from Kir-Noz's face.

«Well, Kir-Noz. I have fought with your weapons. In fact, I have fought you with a short sword against a long one. What does your War Wisdom say to that?»

Kir-Noz was silent for a moment, biting his lip from the pain of his broken arm. Sweat was pouring off him. Blade undid the straps of the warrior's heavy cylindrical helmet and took it off. That seemed to revive Kir-Noz somewhat.

«I do not know what the War Wisdom says to what you have done, Blade. Perhaps that is because no one in all of Melnon would believe that what you have just done could be done at all. I have been a warrior of the First Rank of the Tower of the Serpent for ten years, in more than fifty wars fought according to the War Wisdom, without ever seeing a warrior such as you. Do you truly claim to be from the Beyond?»

«England is nowhere here in Melnon, that is certain,» said Blade with a grin.

Kir-Noz managed a feeble smile in return. «No, it is not. Perhaps you had best say that you are indeed from the Beyond. Otherwise you could only be a warrior of one of the other towers. Perhaps they might even think you one of the Low People fleeing from your station in another tower. And in either case they would kill you. But if you say that you are something which has no place in our law and custom… Well, at least they will not kill you before the Council of Wisdom makes laws to cover such cases as yours. And perhaps they will not kill you at all. Perhaps they-«

Kir-Noz never finished the sentence. In that moment Blade sprang to his feet, both swords flashing. He swore. Kir-Noz painfully raised himself on one elbow and looked around him.

As though they had sprung from the grass and rocks under their feet, some forty green-clad warriors were standing in a wide circle around Blade and Kir-Noz. The expressions on the faces under the helmets were not at all friendly.