The Ruins Of Kaldac rb-34

by Джеффри Лорд

  Blade wasn't seriously worried. He'd faced and beaten more formidable opponents than Nungor. At the same time, he felt that the gift he would like most in all the world or any Dimension was not having to tell anyone a single lie for a whole month!

  In Feragga's own tower at least, the Doimari had the elevators working again. Blade was given a suite of three rooms on a high floor, with a guard at the door but no bars on the window. They weren't needed. Outside the window was a three-hundred-foot drop straight down to the courtyard of the tower.

  Blade saw there was more metal in the furniture than he'd seen in Peython's tower. Otherwise there was hardly anything in his rooms which could teach him much about Doimar. He tested the lock on the outer door, discovered that it worked, and set it. Then he walked back to the window and looked down into the courtyard.

  It was late afternoon, and the towers of Doimar were stretching long shadows across the lower buildings. The towers to the west were silhouetted against a reddening sky. In the courtyard a company of soldiers was drilling. Blade counted about two hundred men. They were going through the sort of close-order drill loved by sergeants in every Dimension, whether it makes any sense on the battlefield or not.

  Blade also noted that every one of the men had a laser rifle and that many seemed to be carrying grenades. At one end of the courtyard a small group of men was standing around what looked like mortars or light artillery. There were no waldoes in sight, but Blade hadn't expected that any of Doimar's secret weapons would be on public display. Peython must have taken as much trouble to send spies into Doimar as Feragga had to send them into Kaldak, although he hadn't learned as much.

  Blade thought of Kaldak, with at most one laser rifle for every four men or women of fighting age and no other Oltec weapons at all. It didn't really matter that Doimar's soldiers were wasting their time in close-order drill. Even without the robots, the weapons they already carried would give them an enormous advantage in firepower. They could probably win if they were trained to walk backward on their hands and fire their rifles with their toes! The idea of an army marching into battle like that made Blade laugh, but there was nothing funny about what would happen to Kaldak and the other cities of the Land when Feragga's army advanced.

  To be sure, she would destroy the iron grip of the Law and its restrictions on the use of Oltec. She would also be destroying many lives and much wealth, and reducing to slavery the surviving inhabitants of any city she conquered. Doimar could only end up ruling an empire of ruins, inhabited by slaves or by outlaws determined to die rather than yield to their conquerors. In the process most of the civilization built up since the fall of the Sky Masters would be destroyed. The Land would sink back into barbarism, and this time the darkness would last not for hundreds but for thousands of years.

  On the other hand, the defeat of Doimar would not mean the victory of the Law and its fear of Oltec. Kaldak was already well started on the road to exploring beyond the Law and making positive improvements in the Land. But it would have to go even farther in order to beat Doimar. Where one city went, others would sooner or later have to follow, out of fear or simply out of pride.

  Blade knew where he stood. Doimar had to be stopped. The only question was how, and there was no point in even asking himself that until he knew more.

  Sharp knocking on the door interrupted Blade's thoughts. He took his sword from the windowsill and faced the door. «Who is there, and what do you want?»

  «Nungor, Blade. I have brought a woman for you.»

  «I-«Blade was about to say, «I did not ask for a woman,» then stopped himself. If Nungor was bringing him a woman, it was probably to make Feragga jealous. Making relations between Feragga and her War Captain as bad as possible could do more good than harm, as long as it didn't put Kareena in more danger.

  Also, this would be Blade's first chance to talk to a Doimari slave. From experience in many Dimensions he knew that slaves could be good sources of information on their masters' strengths and weaknesses. It was not only what they said, it was also what they didn't say.

  «Send her in, Nungor. I thank you.»

  There were two girls, neither more than seventeen, both dressed only in dirty gray shifts. One was thin, almost gaunt, while the other was positively plump. There was also a boy who couldn't have been more than fifteen, wearing only a loincloth and clearly frightened half out of his wits. The moment Nungor closed the door, the boy scurried across the room to the corner farthest from Blade and cowered there, baring his teeth like a cornered rat.

  Blade tried to soothe him. «Do not worry. I am not a lover of men. Even if I was, you are too young for me, by the Law of England.»

  «England is a city with-?» began the slim girl. The other one struck her sharply across the mouth.

  «You talk only when the man says you can, little fool! Didn't your Initiation teach you anything?»

  The slim girl knelt at Blade's feet, eyes on the floor. «You may beat me before you take your pleasure with me, Master.»

  «No doubt I may,» said Blade dryly. «But I do not choose to. I will always forgive one mistake.» He pulled off his shirt. «Now-into the bed with you.» He felt no real desire for these two poor creatures, but if he didn't take them Nungor might get suspicious, and the girls would surely be punished. He could hardly let them suffer for his scruples. The slim girl pulled her shift over her head and started toward the bed. As she did, Blade saw her back.

  «Good God!»

  She stopped as if he'd struck her, quivering all over. He stared at her. In spite of her thinness, she was quite lovely, with the taut, spare curves of a girl who's just turned into a woman-except for her back. From just below her shoulder blades to the base of her spine, her back was a ridged mess of criss-crossing scars. She must have been flogged half to death and would certainly carry scars like that to the end of her life.

  «That was your Initiation-the flogging?» asked Blade gently. In spite of his tone the girl seemed too frightened to speak, so her companion spoke for her.

  «Yes. She and the boy there were made slaves when their parents refused to pay their taxes. She was unruly and disobedient, so she was Initiated by the whip. The boy was even worse, so he was Initiated with the knife.»

  Blade decided not to ask what «Initiation with the knife» meant. He didn't really need to know. He did know that he would have to be more careful than ever, if «Initiation» for Kareena meant being flogged like this. He doubted if either her mind or her body could survive the experience.

  «You have not been Initiated?» he asked the second girl. «I?» She looked insulted. «Only a fool sells herself into slavery, then says what she should not. I found an easier life in Feragga's house than I could ever have outside.» She pulled her shift over her head and raised her arms over her head. «Have I not done well?»

  She certainly looked well-fed, almost complacent, although the other girl would have been much more attractive without the scars and her fear. Blade sat down on the windowsill, pulled off his boots, and began undoing his trousers.

  As his silver loinguard came into sight, both girls stared. The scarred girl was the bolder of the two. She reached out a finger and touched the metal, then jerked her hand back as if the loinguard was red-hot.

  «You may speak,» Blade said. They were both obviously dying of curiosity.

  «Is-do you have-your power in that?» said the plump girl. «Do you-keep it on?»

  Blade laughed. «No. My power is where it is in any other man.» He unhooked the loinguard, took it off, and held it up in front of the girls so they could see it more clearly. «You see. It is only a thing of Oltec, to protect me in battle, so that I will not lose the place where my power stays.»

  «Ah,» they said almost in unison. Then also in unison they reached out and started stroking Blade's thighs and penis. This led to the inevitable conclusion, although Blade could never use the term «making love» when he spoke of what he did in the bed with the two slave girls. He'd had much more plea
sant erotic experiences with women he'd seduced as part of an assignment. At least the two girls seemed happy enough, probably at knowing they would not be punished for failing to please him.

  When he'd finished with the girls, Blade walked over to the boy still cowering in the corner. «If you wish either of the girls, and she consents, I will let you have her. I will even go into one of the other rooms and leave you alone.»

  The boy stared at Blade as if he'd grown a second head, then burst into tears and curled up almost in the fetal position. In the process his loincloth slipped. Blade had a strong stomach, and he'd seen more ghastly sights than any other six men he knew put together. He still had to swallow and close his eyes for a moment at the sight of the boy's groin. It was nothing but a mass of scar tissue. He'd been castrated, so crudely and brutally that it was a miracle he was still alive.

  Blade sighed. There was nothing to say to the boy and nothing to say even to himself except what he'd already said a number of times: Doimar had to be stopped.

  He helped the boy to his feet, then called the guards. The two girls were supporting the boy between them as the guards led all three of them out. Blade stood with his face firmly turned to the window until he heard the door close behind him. He did not want anyone who might inform Feragga or Nungor to see the look on his face.

  The sun was close to the horizon now. Most of Doimar's towers still had part of their metal facing, and these reflected the reddish sunset over the rest of the city. It looked almost as if the entire city had been dipped in blood. Blade thought this was a highly appropriate color for Doimar.

  Chapter 15

  Blade soon learned there were two factions in Doimar's army. One was led by the Seekers. These rule-of-thumb scientists and engineers had rediscovered most of the military Oltec. Their faction included the men and women trained to operate the waldoes, and certain others with rare technical skills.

  The second faction was led by the older officers, who'd learned warfare before Feragga became ruler of Doimar.

  They had the support of the infantry, who would fight with nothing but rifles, grenades, and some mortars.

  The infantry faction should have won by sheer weight of numbers. Doimar's infantry counted at least seven thousand men and women, while the Seekers could call on the support of no more than five or six hundred. However, even the infantrymen usually admitted that the waldoes would be nearly indispensable in the war against the other cities of the Land. They resented this fact, but they didn't deny it. By the time Blade reached Doimar, the two factions had signed an uneasy truce. This didn't keep either one from seeking to gain whatever advantage it could over the other, by fair means or foul.

  It helped keep the peace that Feragga and Nungor both tried to be impartial, at least in public. Both learned swordsmanship, became experts with rifles, and could handle grenades and mortars. Both also knew how to operate the waldoes and put them through their paces. But it was still no secret that Feragga's sympathies lay with the Seekers, and Nungor's lay with the infantry.

  None of this surprised Blade at all. In any army, those who do their fighting with machinery seldom get along with those who expose their own bodies to the enemy's weapons. The machine operators think the infantrymen are stupid. The infantrymen think the machine operators are cowards. In Doimar matters were even worse than usual. Blade had learned that the waldoes were operated by some sort of remote control, and thus the waldo operators would be many miles from the battlefield, doing their work with all the comforts of home around them. The infantry would be out in front, hungry, cold, thirsty, stinking, and dying in the mud like the infantry of every army in every Dimension throughout history. Blade was quite sure that each side in the feud would try to win him over. When this happened, he was almost as sure he could get some advantage from it.

  The training room was two hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, with an arched roof eighty feet high. At the far end one of the waldoes stood to the right of a tall steel door. At the near end stood Blade, a female Seeker, one of the control chairs for the waldoes, and several electronic consoles. The chair and the consoles stood on a rubber-tired cart.

  Blade contemplated the control chair. It reminded him of the equipment once used to send him into Dimension X, before the invention of the KALI capsule. There was the same chair with a polished steel frame and black leather seat and back. There was the same tangle of multicolored wires crawling all over it like demented snakes. It looked like something you'd expect to find in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition.

  There were also a few differences. The chair and its wiring stood in the middle of a steel frame eight feet high. From the frame hung long metallic mesh gloves and a helmet which covered the whole head and bulged with electronic and optical gear. Knee-high mesh boots stood on the base of the frame.

  «Now listen carefully, Blade of England,» said the Seeker sharply. «To work the Fighting Machines is not as simple as it looks. Many have thought so. Their mistakes have damaged many machines. We do not often let fighters of Doimar near a Voice Chair until we have tested them in many ways. But it is Feragga's order that you are to be taught everything you want to learn. We obey her orders.» She shook her fist in his face. «But if you wreck a Machine, nothing Feragga says will save you from me.»

  The Seeker had to reach up to shake her fist in Blade's face. She was hardly more than five feet tall, with a trim figure showing through a sort of uniform of green leather trousers and shirt. Her dark eyes were enormous.

  «I will listen and not wreck a Machine,» said Blade. «In England the best warriors are trained to use both the weapons of their bodies and the weapons of Oltec. Only those who know both can command in war.»

  «If that is truly the case in England, you are wiser than we,» said the woman. «As it is, we who know the Machines must often give way to those who know nothing but a child's weapons. If Feragga was not wise, we would be as badly off as the people of Kaldak, chained by the Law.»

  She started explaining the operation of the waldoes. It was very much as Blade had expected, a masterpiece of simplicity. The waldo operator put his hands into the gloves and his feet into the boots. Then every motion of his arms and legs was transmitted by radio to the waldo, which matched those movements. The helmet contained video and sound pickups so the operator could see and hear what the waldo saw and heard. Still other controls fired the laser-or Fire Beam, as the Doimari called it.

  «Don't the Fighting Machines have any other weapons than the Fire Beam?» asked Blade.

  «No, curse it,» said the woman. «We know they have throwers for fire bombs, like the ones the foot soldiers carry. But the throwers need a special kind of bomb, and we have found no such bombs in any city of the Land.»

  «That is unfortunate for the Seekers,» said Blade. «If the Fighting Machines could throw their own bombs, they might not need the help of the men on foot. They could win the war by themselves.»

  The Seeker's eyes became still larger. «You think so?» Blade nodded. «Then perhaps we could ask that the war be put off, until we learned how to make the special bombs….» Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head. «No. Feragga is too eager to begin the conquest of the Land. She would not allow it, and Nungor's friends would see it as weakness.»

  «Perhaps,» said Blade and left the matter there. He hoped he'd sown a little more disagreement in Doimar, without giving the Doimari an idea they could use against Kaldak. He was going to have the same delicate problem time after time as long as he was in Doimar. He had to appear to be helpful without actually giving any help. He couldn't be sure of still being in this Dimension to help Kaldak defeat any schemes he'd suggested to the Doimari. Advising both sides in a war was fun in theory, but in practice it was more often than not a bloody headache!

  Blade had to strip naked to use the control chair. As he did he was very aware of the woman's eyes roaming up and down his body. But she was still as thoroughly businesslike as Lord Leighton when it came time to get
him hooked up.

  The gloves and boots opened down the back, so they would fit almost any size of hand and foot, or at least almost any size of hand and foot in Doimar. Blade found them uncomfortably snug, although he could still move all his essential joints and muscles.

  When the girl was sure of this, she pressed a green button on the frame. Blade heard a faint hum from the consoles, saw lights glowing on several of the consoles, and stood up. A second button made the chair swing back out of Blade's way. «All right, Blade. The Machine lives. Now start walking in place slowly, as if you'd just got up from being sick-no, no, not that slowly, you're not a baby!» and she clutched at her thick brown hair with both hands.

  At the far end of the training room the waldo gave off a metallic squealing noise which set Blade's teeth on edge. Then slowly it started walking, with little shuffling steps very unlike the six-foot strides Blade knew the waldoes could take. He stopped, and it stopped, swaying so that for a moment Blade was afraid it would fall over. The Seeker winced. Then Blade cautiously turned his body to the left and started walking in place again. The waldo started off, this time heading for a point along the right wall of the room. Another stop, another turn, and it was heading to the left. Blade zig-zagged the waldo all the way down the training room until he could practically reach out and touch it, then sent it back to the far end and started all over again.

  Within half an hour Blade felt confident he could make the robot do anything its mechanism could stand. After another half-hour, even the Seeker was convinced Blade knew how to handle the Fighting Machine safely. She cut off the power and showed Blade how the helmet worked.

  «This mouthpiece is the basic control for the head and the laser. Bite down on the left end, and it turns the head. Bite down on the right, and it fires the laser. Don't get the two confused, or you might wind up killing yourself!»