by Джеффри Лорд
Nor did Nilando show concern that Blade seemed far more familiar with advanced learning than he himself. He was no Graduk, that was for certain-who had ever heard of one such treating Treduki as equals, or even as human beings, and risking his life for them as Blade had done? They were all arrogant cowards. Although, Nilando admitted, there were rumors that some among the Graduki favored aiding the Treduki to resist the Dragons and the glaciers. But these were rumors only. The Graduki sat in their luxurious towns, enslaved or killed the odd Treduk, flew their patrols over Treduk territory, and did nothing else.
They saw such patrols flying over twice during the voyage downstream, but both times the patrolling craft was too high for Blade to make out any details of the silent racing silver shape. That was yet another thing that would have to wait until he had moved into Graduk territories.
The morning of the fourth day arrived. The campfires were doused with leather buckets of water from the river and the wet ashes dug under, the blankets rolled and tied, the cooking pots scoured with sand and stacked. The whole party chattered and even laughed as they climbed aboard the boats. At last they were nearing Tengran, a town that, short of the very laws of nature being suspended, would be yet safe from the Dragons. The town lived from river traffic and fishing, and stood on an island several miles out in the middle of a vast lake formed where the river was backed up by a mountain range. Unable to break through, the river had turned its course west for many days’ travel before finding a weak spot in the mountains and pouring through them in a series of rapids that only light boats with expert crews could navigate. These rapids divided the Treduki into two groups by dividing the river that was their main link. Nilando emphasized, however, that in spite of their relative immunity to the attacks of the Ice Dragons, who seldom made their way through the mountain passes, the southern Treduki were generous with aid to their more afflicted and exposed northern brothers. They themselves had suffered far more from Graduk slave raids and attacks when those were at their height.
The mountains were barely visible pushing up over the horizon as the boats moved into midstream and set sail to a following breeze. But over the next hours Blade saw the peaks rise steadily higher and higher until they made a wall against the southern sky, a wall of blue-gray separated from the blue sky by a line of white-sparkling snow caps, with their craggy sides seamed by the silver threads of streams fed by the melting snows. The mountains loomed tall at the southern end of the vast lake when finally the boats reached it shortly after noon, rearing up almost straight from the placid waters. The breeze had died away to a feeble whisper, and the people were breaking out the oars and preparing to row the last miles to Tengran, now clearly visible in the center of the lake, when Nilando suddenly caught Blade by the arm and pointed toward the sky above the mountain peaks.
«Graduk patrol fliers! Three of them! And low, too!»
Blade followed the pointing finger and saw that the man was right. In a V-formation three swept-winged silver shapes were racing over the mountains and beginning an unmistakable descent toward the lake. The people in the boats were turning now to stare, and beginning to mutter nervously, finger their muskets and other weapons, and swear aloud they had never seen Graduk patrollers do anything like this.
The three machines were approaching too fast for there to be any hope of the boats scuttling back to shore in time to avoid them, if indeed the boats were their intended prey. They passed over the island barely a thousand feet up. Blade saw puffs of gray smoke rising above the rooftops of Tengran as alarm fires were ignited-or perhaps futile guns fired. Then, still in perfect formation, the three machines extended long ski-like undercarriages from beneath their fuselages and touched down as delicately as birds, in spite of their massive size and weight. They skated across the water like skimmed stones in feather clouds of spray, slowly losing speed and sinking deeper as they did so.
Even in the tension of the moment, Blade felt a brief surge of disappointment. From their shape, the whistle and roar as they came down, and the smell of the fumes blowing across the water from the exhaust nozzles, the Graduk machines seemed hardly more than jet-powered seaplanes. If this was typical of the «advanced science» of the Graduki, he found it hard to believe that they could be responsible for the electronics of the wands. But if not the Graduki or at least some among them, then who? He had thought he might be approaching the end of the mystery, but now it seemed to have suddenly whipped away out of sight. He felt like a man staggering along an endless tunnel.
The three fliers had now turned completely around and were slowly approaching the boats. As they approached, Blade noticed turrets on top of each one turning slowly and training long black tubes on the boats. Then hatches opened in the gleaming metal flanks and helmeted men in blue uniforms, carrying smaller black tubes, climbed out on the wings. One of these men spoke through an amplifier, his harsh voice booming across the water.
«All right, we’ve got you surrounded. Throw your weapons over the side and row toward us.» Blade was reminded of Home Dimension policemen coping with an unruly mob, and the bellowing Graduki seemed to be producing much the same reaction among the people in the boats as policemen often did. These were now cursing openly, shaking their fists, hurling obscenities (but as yet nothing more solid) across the water at the blue figures. Far from throwing their weapons overboard, Blade saw some, Rena among them, fumbling for arrows or powder-horns.
Suddenly all the people in the five boats shouted together. From behind the flier that lay between them and the island, three more boats appeared, broad-beamed, many-oared craft in which the glint of weapons was clearly visible above the thrashing oars. But it was a shout that quickly turned into gasps and screams of horror, as the plane swung its turret sharply around and the black tube depressed and fired.
There was nothing visible in the air, but the patch of water toward which the tube was pointing leaped into the air like an erupting geyser in a spout of spray and steam. Seconds later the hiss of boiling water and the crackle of superheated air chased each other across the distance to Blade’s ears. Their flying machines might be no better than Home Dimension’s, but Graduk weaponry was clearly well beyond human practice, if not theory.
The boats slowed but did not stop. They continued to advance on the fliers, and now Blade saw men scurrying forward in each one and clustering around small cannon mounted in the bows. Perhaps they hoped that however hostile the Graduki seemed, on this occasion at least they would not push that hostility to the point of open violence.
The men in the approaching boats and the people watching them hopefully had about thirty seconds to indulge those hopes. During those thirty seconds half a dozen of the blue-clad soldiers scrambled over the top of the nearest flier to the other wing, lined up, and aimed their tubes toward the boats. Blade swallowed, hoping he was wrong about what he saw coming.
He was not. With an ear-torturing crackle, both turret and soldiers opened fire together on the center boat. It was as if it had suddenly been dropped into the whirling blades of a buzz-saw. Amid the boil of steam and spray, Blade saw the hull part in the middle, the timbers on either side of the cut turning black in an instant. Men hurled themselves over the side, writhed in the boiling water, or whiffed out of existence in puffs of smoke as the invisible beam flicked across the decks of the two sinking portions. It touched the cannon; powder flared up in a cloud of smoke, charred bodies flew into the air, the cannon itself was suddenly a darkened blob of melted metal.
The turret swung its heavy weapon to the next boat, while smaller flecks of steam and foam in the disturbed water around the sinking halves of the first one showed where the soldiers were picking off the survivors one by one with their lighter weapons. The turret beam chopped into the second boat, this time sweeping along its deck from fore to aft before swinging down to punch the hull open. As the screams of the burning men came across the water, something snapped in the watchers around Blade.
He heard Nilando scream, «No, you
fools!» and then a dozen muskets went off around him and as many bowstrings twanged. One huge woodsman rose to his full height, whipped his axe up and over his head, and hurled it across the water at the soldiers on the nearest flier. It struck the wing with a sharp clang, bounced high, slid down the smooth metal, and vanished into the water of the lake. The woodsman clawed at his beard and swore.
Now more blue-clad soldiers were pouring out of all three fliers, and two of the three were turning their turret weapons toward the Tengran boats. Blade saw the third one caught in the middle of its frantic retreat, its oars sliced off one by one, as though a cruel schoolboy were pulling the legs and wings off a fly. Then he heard Nilando shouting again, his voice as close to panic as Blade had ever heard it, shouting at his people to stop. More muskets went off and Blade saw two of the soldiers drop to the wings and lie still, another one stagger and drop his weapon. Then Nilando swore a futile, incoherent oath, grabbed Rena by the arm, and jerked her over the side.
They had barely vanished when the crackle of the heatbeamers tore at Blade’s ears again, louder than ever this time, and a hideous scream and the sudden smell of charred flesh made him swing around. The woodsman was falling, falling in two pieces; a beam had chopped through his body at one stroke. His torso toppled over the side with another scream and vanished in a churning blast of steam as another beam picked it off; his legs fell to the bottom of the boat and lay there, looking like something left after a fire in a butcher shop.
Then Blade realized that the beams were crackling all around him and other men and women were dying hideous deaths as the Graduk beammen picked them off one by one. The Irdnans were being used for target practice! Blade was filled with a fury as searing as the beams playing around him; at that moment he could have torn one of the beammen limb from limb without a second thought.
Instead he too snarled an oath and plunged over the side, on the side of the boat away from the fliers. The water bit ice-cold at his heated skin as he dove under, stroking himself far down until the bubbling and splashing as the beams tore into the surface of the water was far above him. He turned, even his capacious lungs beginning to scream and ache, and pushed upward, still trying to put distance between himself and the killers aboard the fliers.
His head broke through the silver roof that was the surface and his lungs of their own volition swelled with a mighty gulp of fresh air. Then the crackle and hiss of a striking beam slammed down around him like a wall cutting off the whole world, and he felt a blast-furnace-hot whip crack across his temple: He drifted down again into a blackness that seemed the only thing offering a cool refuge from the torturing heat.
Chapter 6
The first conclusion Blade’s foggy mind reached after he again became aware of his surroundings was that if he was aware of his surroundings he was presumably not dead. The second was that since he appeared to be sitting or lying on a vibrating metal floor he was presumably no longer in the water. That was as much as his mind was up to recognizing for a considerable time, until the ache in his head and the pain in his scalp faded somewhat.
He was propped up in a sitting position with his back against the blue-painted metal wall of a semi-cylindrical chamber about six feet high and twenty feet long. The metal behind and under him was vibrating continuously, and from this and the unmistakable distant roar of jet engines he realized he was aboard one of the Graduk fliers. Presumably a prisoner, as he was chained to the wall by two long chains hooked to a leather belt around his waist, and his hands and feet were bound painfully tightly together by black tape. Otherwise he was naked.
Looking around the compartment, he saw Nilando, Rena, two other men and another woman from among the Irdnans, all of them likewise stripped, bound, and chained, several of them also roughly bandaged. Lifting his own bound hands to the sore area of his own scalp, he discovered that his entire head had been shaved and a large bandage covered the entire side of his scalp where the heatbeam blast had struck. His opinion of the Graduki went up about two-tenths of a percent in response to this indication of some mild concern for the health of those Treduki not used for target practice in the water. But he would still have cheerfully dismembered any or all of the four blue-uniformed figures that sat clutching their beamers in seats facing the prisoners. Beyond those four, others sat facing forward. Blade forced himself to full alertness and began a careful study of his surroundings for a clue as to how to escape.
Escape was definitely the first thing to think of, if all his fellow prisoners were able to travel, and if the plane did not land so far inside Graduk territory that there would be no hope of reaching friendly territory on foot. It had to be a high priority, because so far the Graduki-or at least those he had met-did not look of much use for any of the projects he might want to undertake in this dimension. Nilando had said they would do nothing against the Ice Dragons, either in cooperation with the Treduki or on their own. This rather ruled out getting their help in finding out more about what was going on up in the glacier-covered portions of the world. Nor would they be likely to set him and Nilando and the others free, so that they might return to the Treduk towns and teach their people what had been learned about Dragon Masters and their vulnerable points. Blade realized they would not even be likely to release him alone, assuming he wished to abandon his companions-he had been captured in the company of the barbarous Treduki and therefore would be one in the eyes of his captors.
In fact, he could not even be sure that the Graduki were planning to leave him and the others alive for very long. There was a delight in slaughter that seemed fairly well-rooted in Graduk nature, judging from the way the soldiers had picked off the people in the boats. But whatever the prospects, there was the fact that no escape would be possible until the flier landed.
Another two hours went by before the floor tilted downward and the landing gear went down with a loud clanking. As the floor continued to tilt, Blade watched his companions closely. They were all conscious now, but the guards had growled ominously at his attempts to speak to them, so he and Nilando had watched each other in silence. As far as he could tell, none were seriously hurt. But two hours’ flying plus however long they had been in the air while he was unconscious added up to an enormous distance. They would most likely be many, many hundreds of miles inside Graduk territory. It would be a long walk home.
Unless perhaps that rumored faction of pro-Treduk Graduki actually existed, and he could somehow make contact with them? But how? Such a faction would most likely be operating underground, hard to find, suspicious of strangers, and hardly likely to accept him or his companions at the drop of a hat. It was something to watch for, certainly, but not expect to find.
The engines were now definitely being throttled back, and the floor tilted even more steeply. Moments later he felt a shuddering and a roar as the hydro-skis slid down onto a watery surface and spray shot up to drum like hail on the belly of the flier. The flier skimmed along until it had lost enough speed for the hydro-skis to cease bearing it. Then there was an abrupt slowing, a series of jolts, a dying whistle as the engines were cut off, and the sound of waves sloshing against the outside of the fuselage as it settled down into the water.
Seconds later there was a whine from aft as an auxiliary propulsion system cut in. The flier began moving again, gently rocking and heaving-and sometimes not so gently-under the impact of the waves. It moved forward slowly, across water that, whatever it was, clearly was not as calm as the lake.
During the minutes of the rocking and heaving, the guards unbuckled their seat belts, checked their uniforms and gear in the manner of soldiers everywhere and in every age, then moved aft to deal with the prisoners. They unchained them, cut the tapes binding their feet with knives, then jerked them roughly to their feet. Nilando glared at the man who pulled Rena up by her hair, fondling her with his other hand as he did so-and was rewarded by a jackbooted foot slamming into his stomach. He crashed back against the wall, gasping, with a look of fury in his eyes hotter than t
he heatbeams. The guard backed off hastily, fingering his beamer.
A hatch clanged open, and the guards motioned to the prisoners. Blade took the lead and balancing as well as he could without the use of his bound hands, stepped out through the hatch onto the wing. A noticeable breeze was kicking up waves high enough to send water washing well over the wing. The water did not seem as cold to Blade’s feet as the water of the river or the lake-here they seemed to be farther from the chilling influence of the glaciers.
The fliers appeared to have landed in a bay a good two miles wide, formed by two long wooded points jutting out at either end to largely shelter it from the open sea. The shore appeared largely composed of sheer cliffs; with forest cover extending from the edge of the cliffs back to the line of hills that formed the landward horizon. The only break in the rocks was a small beach barely a hundred yards long. From the beach a large powerboat was making its way toward the flier; half a dozen of the familiar blue-uniformed figures crouched in it.
Blade was surprised that the flier had landed in this apparently wild and remote bay, but before he could speculate further the boat had reached the flier. One of the men in it threw out a line which the guards aboard the flier hauled in. Under the muzzles of beamers aboard both flier and boat, the prisoners scrambled into the boat, several of them having to be fished out of the water in the process. Then the engine purred and the boat swung in a sharp turn away from the flier. Even before the prisoners had reached the beach, the flier had fired up its engines, raced across the bay, and leaped into the air, to vanish toward the south.
