by Джеффри Лорд
She gave him the same reasons he'd already considered, then added, «There may be more back in the cave. But if we move fast, we will be able to kill the two outside before the others can help them. Then we can wait for them to come out and be killed.»
«Perhaps,» said Blade. «It would be better if we killed the two outside so fast that they give no warning. Others inside might hide the Idol, or even take it out another way, Are you sure there is only one mouth to this cave?»
Crystal looked annoyed with herself, then shook her head. Blade patted her shoulder. «Never mind. You thought like a warrior, and I will swear this before all the Uchendi. Some things that you must know, you will learn only with experience. Winter Owl did not know everything either when he was your age. «
There was still one problem. Blade wouldn't have a good shot with his bow unless the sentries could be lured out into the open. With better arrows or the crossbow, he would have risked picking them off in their shelter of boulders, but with the weapons he had it was necessary to make other plans.
He explained those plans to Crystal while he strung the bow and checked the feathers on his arrows for damage from the wet weather. He had a dozen of the best wooden arrows the Uchendi could make; that should be enough against two surprised men who would never have heard of archery.
Crystal listened wide eyed, trying to stifle giggles. Then she crept behind the nearest boulder and stripped naked. She went on giggling as she did so, and Blade hoped she didn't think this whole thing was a game. There wasn't much he could do or say if she did, though-not with her whims of steel!
With Cheeky on her back and clinging to her hair, Crystal crept off down the slope on hands and knees. Blade did the same, moving off at a sharp angle. By the time he reached the floor of the valley, Crystal was already in place. She sent him a brief mental picture of what she could see from where she was, and Blade had to admit she'd chosen the place well.
(«Good thinking. But don't go into your act until I tell you.»)
Blade lay still for another minute, to make sure the telepathic communication hadn't alerted the sentries. Then he crept forward to the boulder he'd picked. It was big enough to hide him while he stood and drew his bow, and around it was clear ground to give him good footing while he shot. Blade picked his best arrow, nocked it to the bow, and sent his message to Crystal.
(«Now!»)
Fifty yards up the slope from the mouth of the cave, a dark-haired figure rose into sight. The sentries looked up and saw a naked woman standing there watching them. Perched on her shoulder was an animal. They looked again, and Blade could almost read their thoughts without telepathy, from the looks on their faces. Then:
«Wise One! You didn't die!» one of them shouted. «Blessings for that!»
«No blessings for lazy swine like you!» shouted Crystal, pitching her voice as low as possible. The two guards looked at each other. «Is this her or-?» one of them said, afraid to follow his own thoughts to their conclusion.
The other threw up his hands in despair. «Spirit or flesh, she summons us. I will go, if you are afraid.»
«If she allows, I will have your blood for those words,» the second man growled. Then they both did exactly what Blade wanted them to do, stepping out onto the open slope away from the boulders.
«No, l will have your blood,» said Blade, only half to himself. He took two steps to the left and shot his first arrow. It flew wide, but the two Rutari had no ears or eyes for anything except the apparition of the Wise One. Blade had plenty of time to shoot again. The second arrow hit the first sentry in the thigh.
He let out a scream that echoed around the valley. Crystal shuddered visibly, but the second man didn't notice. He looked wildly around and apparently decided the scream was from the Wise One. Now that he was satisfied that she had returned as an evil Spirit to curse him, no amount of respect for her memory could keep him at his post. Without a backward glance at spear or comrade, he took to his heels.
Blade nocked a third arrow with flying fingers. Not far beyond the running man was more rough ground. If he got into that he'd be so hard to hit that he would have a good chance of getting away. His tale of what happened might not be accurate, but it would damned sure bring more Rutari warriors up here in a hurry! Blade thought he and Crystal could do better without this.
Blade could also have done without Crystal's idea of help. As he aimed for the running man, she ran down the slope, her knife in her hand and Cheeky clinging desperately to her hair. Screaming like a real Spirit, she leaped on the staggering wounded man and slammed him to the rocky ground. Blade didn't dare shoot for fear of hitting her, and by the time he was able to let fly, the running man was no easy shot.
The arrow drew another scream. Blade dropped his bow, snatched up his spear, then dashed forward. He hoped he hadn't hit Crystal and was determined to teach her a lesson if he hadn't.
Crystal was covered with blood when Blade reached her, but she was grinning with such savage delight that he knew it must be her victim's. He dashed on past her until the second sentry appeared out of the mist. He was stumbling along, the arrow in his back, one hand groping behind him for the source of this mysterious pain. Hearing Blade coming up behind him, he turned just in time to take Blade's spear in his chest.
When he was sure the second man was dead, Blade returned to Crystal. She was wiping her knife off on the dead man's hair, and wiping herself off with a bunch of dead grass. As Blade approached she jumped up and threw her arms around him. It was a much more enthusiastic embrace than Blade enjoyed receiving from a naked young woman when he couldn't do anything about it.
«That's two for my father's Spirit. Two, and they won't be the last!» she crowed.
«It might have been only one, and us in danger,» growled Blade. «You must understand the way of weapons like my bow. Never, never, never get in their path when I am using them. An arrow flying a long way cannot always tell a friend from an enemy. You might have had an arrow here-«he patted her flat stomach «-instead of the two sentries.»
Instead of being apologetic, Crystal wriggled with pleasure under his touch. Danger and vengeance for her father seemed to be working on her like a love potion.
Blade sighed. «Crystal, if you try to draw me into making love to you now, I shall turn you over my knee and spank you. There is much to be done before we can safely do that. Have you forgotten why we came?»
She pressed her face into his chest. «Am I no longer desirable to you?»
He put his arms around her. «You are even more desirable than ever.» This was the simple truth. She'd lost weight on their trek north, without losing her magnificent figure. «Left to myself, I would have you down on the ground-«
«Not on the ground, please, Blade. The stones would be hard. On our cloaks, at least.»
Blade laughed. «On our cloaks. But as I said, we are not our own masters. There is the Idol close by, ready for us. Who knows? It might make me impotent, if we tried to make love before we rescued it from the unlawful hands of the Rutari!»
Eye of Crystal looked horror-struck, whether at the idea of the Idol's wrath or Blade's impotence was hard to tell. Then she looked up toward the mouth of the cave and nodded.
«Let us go and seek the Idol, then. Once we have it, perhaps its magic will make you stronger.»
«Woman, you've got a one-track mind,» said Blade, patting her rump as she started up the slope ahead of him.
Blade would have been happier if he'd known exactly what they were looking for. Knowing where the Idol was hadn't answered the question of exactly what it was.
No living man among the Uchendi had seen the Idol. The Rutari carried it off something like eighty years ago. Cheeky had seen it, but only from a distance, in poor light, and while he was desperately trying to hide the fact that he was looking at it from the Wise One, Ellspa, and Moyla.
Somehow Blade pieced together enough information to keep his job from being completely hopeless. The Idol was made of metal harder th
an any the tribes knew and worked in ways they could not understand. It was small enough that one person could carry it-Cheeky had seen Ellspa do so.
That was all he knew. In a way it made the mystery of the Idol greater and more tantalizing than ever. Now at last Blade was at the mouth of the Idol's cave, with no one to stop him from going in. According to Cheeky's memories, the Idol lay about three hundred feet inside the darkness.
Blade's feet were itching to carry him into the cave, but he controlled them. While he covered her with the bow, Crystal retrieved their packs. She returned wearing trousers and sandals again, with some of her light-headedness gone. Taking vengeance for her father with her own hands must have been a tonic to her, but Blade was glad it was wearing off. It was a long way home.
In the packs were four torches made of reeds dipped in animal fat, then bound tightly around wooden sticks. Blade took out two torches and blew up the sentries' abandoned fire until some embers were glowing again. It was smoking like the devil, but with the mist swirling around so thickly Blade wasn't worried, about anyone noticing the smoke. Thrust into the embers, the torches began to smoke, then burn, then shed a flickering, sickly yellow light.
Just enough to keep us from falling down holes, thought Blade, and to Cheeky, («All right, little friend. Lead on.») Aloud, he told Crystal, «Stay behind me and keep a lookout toward the mouth of the cave. «There was no point in leaving her alone on guard at the entrance; she'd be in more danger and Blade would be in no less.
Slowly Cheeky walked along the damp rock to the mouth of the cave, then waited for Blade and Crystal to come up behind him. He moved on, to the limits of the torchlight, then yeeped plaintively. His unhappiness at being so close to the darkness was obvious. Blade took three steps forward while Crystal stayed where she was, extending the light of his torch that much farther into the cave. Cheeky yeeeped again, this time happily, and hopped forward…
Chapter 23
Blade quickly lost track of time as they moved in this leapfrog fashion deeper into the darkness of the Idol's cave. As they moved, Crystal laid out a fine leather thong dyed white, marking their path back to the outside world. She carried only three hundred feet of it. If Cheeky's estimate of the distance to the Idol was badly off, they'd face an interesting choice: abandon the search or risk going on into the darkness beyond the end of the thong.
They groped their way through the cave, their hands feeling what their eyes couldn't see in the flickering light of the torches. It seemed to Blade that the walls and ceiling of the cave had been untouched by anything but dripping water and stagnant air since before man existed. The slimy dark rock around them seemed to be closing in on them, narrowing down until it was only a little higher than Blade and barely wide enough for him and Crystal to stand side by side. Blade noticed that the thong was about half gone.
(«Is this-the way you remember?»)
(«Oh, yes,» said Cheeky blithely. «We do not have far to go. «)
Now the tunnel was sloping downhill and beginning to curve slightly to the left. Cheeky started yeeping excitedly. Blade signaled to Crystal to come up close behind him, handed her the other torch, and drew his knife. It would be a more useful weapon at close quarters than either spear or bow.
«If we are attacked,» he said over his shoulder, «grab Cheeky and run! No point in both of us getting killed. «
There was no sound from Crystal except a small defiant snort. She obviously had her own opinion about abandoning Blade, but there was no time to argue. Twenty feet more and the tunnel opened up to a larger cave.
«Raise those torches high,» Blade said, and stepped forward.
In the center of the chamber was a pile of black stones and ashes, the remains of a fire. Behind that was an altar of mountain stone roughly mortared together. On the altar lay the Idol. It gleamed metallically, and there was something oddly familiar about the shape…
Blade's feet carried him halfway across the cave before he realized what the Idol was. The moment of recognition brought him to a stop so sharply that he swayed, and both Cheeky and Crystal cried out in alarm and reached for him. He waved them to silence and stared intently at the Idol, trying to convince his brain that his eyes were telling the truth.
On the altar lay an UZI submachine gun, a perfectly ordinary piece of Home Dimension weaponry. There was one forty-round magazine in the gun, and three more magazines of 9mm rounds arranged in a little tripod to one side.
Somebody in Home Dimension must have traveled into this land of Latin-who? and how long ago? No one could recall precisely how long the Idol had been in Uchendi hands before the Rutari stole it eighty years ago, but it had to be at least a century. So this UZI had been in Latan for nearly two hundred years.
Or at least two hundred years as this Dimension measured time. Blade knew that didn't necessarily mean much-the Project had discovered some time ago that time in one Dimension wasn't always related to time in any other. On his second trip to Kaldak, Blade found that his daughter, who hadn't been born when he left the first time, was now about thirty years old! Also, he'd once left a Dimension where he was about to be burned at the stake and then returned only second later, after weeks in another Dimension. Project Dimension X might tell them some very important things about the nature of time. The only problem was, once again, knowing what questions to ask.
A more immediate problem was examining this UZI: UZIs were found all over the world, and this one might well have been stripped of any markings telling where it originated. But if he could just get it back Home and have J's weapons experts go over it-and he'd better keep that thought to himself…
He stepped up to the altar and picked up the Idol. The UZI hadn't been stripped of its markings; it had a serial number and some ordnance department's markings on it in the usual places. Blade raised the UZI to get a closer look-and this time it seemed as if the chamber and even reality itself were swaying around him.
The UZI bore the markings of the Ordnance Corps of the Imperial and Royal Army of Englor.
Englor. The alternate England fighting against the Red Flames of Russland. Their army used UZIs-one of the many bizarre parallels between Englor's Dimension and Home Dimension. This was a UZI that had somehow made its way from Englor's Dimension to the Dimension of the tribal warriors of Latan.
At least Blade found that explanation more agreeable than the idea that he'd gone completely mad and the UZI, the cave of the Idol, and God knows what else was an elaborate hallucination. He did not want to wake up strapped to a bed in the mental ward of a secret hospital. He'd been through that before with the Ngaa, and once was too often.
Some of the other men from Home Dimension who'd tried traveling into Dimension X were still in such wards. They'd be there for life, too, their hold on any reality snapped forever by exposure to an alternate one.
No, he would act on the assumption that he was really holding an Englor army-issue UZI submachine gun, and consider how it could have got here. It seemed to Blade that there were three ways.
Latan could be on the same alternate Earth as Englor, Russland, Gallia, and so on.
Latan could be on another planet in the same Dimension as Englor, which had developed spaceflight and reached it.
Englor had discovered the Dimension X secret on its own and had left the gun in Latan. This last possibility — that Englor had discovered inter-Dimension travel-was the most unpleasant. It also seemed to Blade the most likely.
If the Englorians were on the same planet, it was possible that they should not have come to Latan again some time in the last two hundred years. Or it was impossible unless there'd been a war large enough to destroy civilization and leave remote parts of the planet isolated. That didn't seem likely. Such a war would certainly have affected the whole planet violently enough for there to be legends about it. Blade hadn't heard anything of the kind.
An interplanetary expedition also seemed unlikely. There were no legends of the Idol Makers coming out of the sky. One day they h
adn't been there, the next day they had. After a while another day came when they were simply gone, leaving the Idol behind.
No, Englor had discovered Dimension X and sent at least one full-scale expedition into it. (Never mind whether there was more than one Englor. That way lay madness.) The Englorians had left the gun here, the inhabitants of Latan had found it, and they had made it into an Idol. That seemed the best explanation for everything Blade had seen here. He remembered with uneasy clarity Lord Leighton's words about the Dimension X secret probably not really being much of a secret anymore.
And if Englor discovered inter-Dimensional travel at least two centuries ago, what had they done with it since then? Except that it might not be two centuries to Englor's Dimension; it might be only a few years.
There were too bloody many questions running around loose for Blade's peace of mind. He decided to start reducing them as fast as he could. Step one was to pick up the Idol and the magazines and stow them away in his pack. Step two was to get back outside.
Step three was to get out of Rutari territory as fast as possible. Blade knew he just might find a few answers by exploring these caves, but it was likely that somebody would notice the missing sentries, draw the appropriate conclusions, and make more trouble than he and Crystal and Cheeky could handle.
Blade scooped the magazines into his pack and picked up the gun. The UZI's plastic sling was cracked and yellow with age and spotted with mold. Blade unhooked it and left it on the altar, making a mental note to make a new sling out of some of the leather thong once they were out of the cave. A sling would leave both hands free for a useable weapon like his bow and arrow. He couldn't imagine that the UZI was still useable, and even if it wasn't a piece of junk, the ammunition would have deteriorated hopelessly.
Blade grabbed Crystal and said, «We have the Idol. Let us take it to its lawful home among your people before the Rutari come.»
Crystal nodded and found the leather thong. They followed the thong back to the entrance of the cave. Outside they delayed their leaving just long enough for Blade to find a deep crevice in the side of the valley. He dropped the two dead sentries and all their gear down the crevice. It was now getting toward the rainy season in this part of the mountains; one good storm would wash away any bloodstains. If it looked as if the sentries had vanished by magic, it might sow fear among the Rutari and delay their pursuit, giving the Uchendi more time to prepare for the attack.
