The Man of Bronze

by James Alan Gardner

  He laughed again, pleased with himself. Urdmann knew I’d never abandon Ilya . . . and with Ilya’s wounded leg, we couldn’t possibly move as fast as Urdmann and his men. They’d reach the surface far ahead of us; they’d race to their copter and get away long before we could pursue. “Farewell, Lara, dear,” Urdmann called. “Rule Britannia, and God save the queen.”

  I could hear the sounds of people on the move: our enemies scrambling up the escape tunnel. It occurred to me Urdmann may have deliberately shot Ilya in the leg rather than trying for a kill—if Ilya was dead, there’d be nothing to slow me down. And, of course, Urdmann wouldn’t just shoot me; he wanted to humiliate me first, to pay me back for previous indignities I’d heaped on him. Besides, if I was dead, Urdmann wouldn’t have the fun of gloating to my face.

  One more score to settle, I thought. One more debt to repay, you arrogant toad.

  “How are you doing?” I asked Ilya. All this while he’d been packing his wound with bandages. I still didn’t know how badly he’d been hit, and he was doing his best to hide it from me. He’d turned away to treat himself; I couldn’t tell if his secretiveness came from modesty, male pride, or damage so severe he didn’t want it to distract me. Under other circumstances, I’d have smacked him and taken a look for myself . . . but the bacon-crackle sound was so close, I decided I better deal with it before I checked Ilya’s injury. I took a few steps toward the noise . . .

  A piece of the floor rose up: featureless, black, and floppy, like a silhouette cut from tar paper. Its cloth-thin shape was humanoid but embellished grotesquely with reindeer antlers and a tail that reminded me of the saber-toothed tiger’s. Bacon-fat sounds sizzled within its dark folds. With a jolt, I realized the noise was the creature’s voice, so degraded it no longer sounded like words. The hiss-spit-crackle was all that remained of a language older than fire. Without doubt, I was facing the last of the shamans—one that somehow had survived the Tunguska blast, though now so withered it had literally become a walking shadow.

  “Stay back,” I said, raising my guns. If the murals we’d seen had told the truth, this shaman must have committed many murderous atrocities; but there was no point shooting him in cold blood if he kept his distance. Besides, would bullets faze a flapping shadow who’d lived through a fifteen-megaton blast? Better to try intimidation first, rather than resort to violence.

  But I’d wasted my breath. The shadow shaman stretched out his fluttering hand . . . and I knew if that blackness touched me, I’d regret it. I fired both guns point-blank into the thing’s body. Simultaneously, I used the recoil as impetus for a back flip, up, over, and down feetfirst several paces away.

  In the dim cavern glow, the dark figure wavered like water. Then it released a flurry of crackles, like a bonfire when dry twigs are tossed in. I feared the sound was laughter: my bullets had passed through the shaman harmlessly. How can you shoot a shadow?

  “Silver bullets,” I said. You can never be sure if silver bullets will work against a particular type of creepy crawly, but they’re always worth a try. The VADS instantly delivered the ammo I asked for. Too bad when I fired, the silver rounds had no more effect on the shadow than normal lead.

  “Larochka,” said Ilya, not far away. “Take the katana.”

  I spun my guns back into their holsters and Ilya tossed me the sword. “Please tell me,” I said, “that a hundred Japanese priests blessed this blade when it was forged and gave it the name Shadow Slayer.”

  “Don’t know,” Ilya replied. “Great-grandfather looted it off some dead guy’s corpse.”

  “Then we can’t say it isn’t named Shadow Slayer.” I turned to the shaman. “You hear that?”

  The darkness crackled. I charged.

  One good thing about shamans who’ve lived in a hole for millennia: they know bugger all about swordplay. The last time my opponent had tangled with outsiders, pointy sticks were the peak of military technology. The shaman surely realized my katana was a weapon—I held it like a weapon as I sped to the attack—but this throwback to primitive hunters had no experience facing sharp, swinging steel. He raised his shadowy hands in an attempted defensive posture, but his guard wouldn’t have stopped a mosquito. With a feint and a twist and a back cut, I evaded his block and delivered a perfect killing stroke. My blade slashed through his neck with a whisper like silk on silk.

  It didn’t decapitate him. I saw no effect at all; the flapping darkness remained unbroken, as black as a mine at midnight. But perhaps Japanese priests had blessed the sword against evil, or those old tales were true about cold iron harming supernatural beings. The shaman shrieked as the steel sliced through. He staggered back, then shrieked again. This time the cry came from anger, not pain. Howling in outrage he came at me, his hands clawing the air with murderous fury.

  I dodged and swung the katana again—another killing swipe, this time to the body. Any other foe would have been disemboweled; the shaman screamed but kept coming, driving his flimsy frame forward onto the blade like paper impaling itself on a spike. A split second later, his outstretched hand raked my left shoulder . . . and although he was nothing but shadow, his fingers gouged my parka, tossing up goose down in surprised white clouds before stabbing my flesh.

  Unlike my howling enemy, I didn’t scream in pain. Never let the other fellow know you’re hurt. Blood gushed down my arm from finger-sized holes pierced deep into my deltoid; but I backed off fast and took time to smile before weaving my sword in a sweeping S through the shadow man’s torso. He screeched and retreated, no longer giving his bacon-fat laugh.

  For another few seconds, we sparred with each other. I could rely on practiced technique: good footwork, trained reflexes, and a wealth of sneaky tricks acquired in the kendo schools of Kyoto. Maybe I couldn’t compete with top Japanese sword masters—maybe—but I could outfight, outthink, and outmaneuver a bronze-wraith bumpkin who hadn’t mixed it up dirty since the Stone Age.

  On the other hand, expertise only went so far. Each strike with the katana made the shaman wail in agony, but I never caused tangible damage. When my opponent chose to grit his invisible teeth and plow forward despite the pain, all I could do was back off. I could merely hurt the shaman; he could gut me.

  Okay. New strategy.

  I scrambled back to put a few yards between me and the bad guy, then panted loudly to give the impression I was running out of breath. I also flexed my wounded shoulder with many groans and winces, doing my best to portray a woman stiffening with pain—too bad that wasn’t completely an act. In short, I put on a show to suggest I was weakening. The shaman barreled forward to take advantage of my failing strength. I hesitated, then fled: aiming my feet for the nearest ramp up the side of the cavern.

  The shaman pursued, snuffling like a pig after truffles. Inwardly, I rejoiced. Ilya was virtually defenseless on the cavern floor: unable to run and armed only with bullets. If the shaman had headed for my friend, there was little I could do to intervene. Fortunately, the shadow man only had eyes for me. I had hurt him; I had assaulted his dignity; I had defied him. After centuries of ruling the subterranean roost—butchering unmutated humans for pleasure, always having his own way—the shaman saw me as a rebellious peon who must be made to suffer.

  So he chased me. I ran. To the garden terrace above us—which happened to be a large level patch, almost a small field rather than a mere garden. What had once grown here? Wheat? Rye? Barley? Likely some kind of grain . . . but whatever had thrived here in ages past was long gone now. No light meant no plants.

  At the rear of the terrace, another patchwork of animal skins had been staked to the wall. I ran across the bare earth, fast but not too fast. I wanted the shaman close on my heels. If I got too far ahead, and if he saw what I intended to do, he might retreat. Then again, if my new strategy didn’t work . . . did I really want the shaman within spitting distance behind me?

  No time for doubt. The shaman traveled almost as quickly as I did. He didn’t run—he glided over the ground like a
legless ghost. Without looking back, I could tell how close he was behind me; he’d started the bacon-fat crackle again, laughing at my efforts to escape.

  You’d think an ancient spellcaster sadist would have more brains. How had this shadow thing lasted so long if he couldn’t tell when he was being played? Then again, maybe I was the fool. Maybe the shaman wasn’t afraid because he knew he was in no danger.

  Only one way to find out.

  As I reached the wall I swung my sword, slashing at the skins that hung there. The sharp katana cut a gash across the pelts. Sunlight flooded forth, gathered by the lens on the other side and focused all around us.

  The shaman shrieked. This time the sound wasn’t pain, it was fear.

  I swept the katana again, slicing off more of the animal hides that held back the light. More sun poured in. The shaman reversed course and fled, making a squirrellike chitter as it fled the brightness. “Too late,” I said. One more swing of the sword and the lens was completely uncovered. I shifted the lens in its frame to bathe the shaman with channeled sunbeams.

  You know what happens to shadows at daybreak: they’re dispelled by rosy-fingered dawn. Most shadows don’t give earsplitting screams as they vanish, but apart from that, it was the same old, same old.

  I jogged back to Ilya. He was still in one piece and had bandaged his bullet wound. “I heard the screams,” he said. “Glad to see they came from shadow man rather than you. What did you do?”

  “I enlightened him,” I said . . . then regretted it. As a peer of the realm, I should hold myself to a higher standard than bad movie gag lines.

  Ilya put his arm around my neck, and I propped him up as we crossed the cavern. A few times his bad leg gave out and he lost his balance, clutching at me for support. When he grabbed my injured shoulder, it hurt. A lot. The cave’s weak light wouldn’t allow a good look at my wounds, but I could see feathers from the ripped parka sticking to the dark grit of my blood. Feathers had likely been driven into the punctures, too—a fine way to bring on infection. But something told me we didn’t have time to deal with my injuries. The sooner we got back to the surface, the happier I’d be.

  The cavern ended in a crude stage area—an expanse of stone several feet higher than the rest of the cave’s floor. This would be the tabernacle: the shamans’ unholy of unholies, where they kept the bronze thigh and committed their greatest atrocities. In the middle of the space stood a plain stone pedestal the height and shape of a birdbath. It must have been the bronze thigh’s resting place.

  Not anymore. The pedestal was empty.

  A tunnel opened at the rear of the tabernacle: the escape route Urdmann had mentioned. He must have been standing in the tunnel’s mouth as he spoke to us—probably with his sniper rifle propped against the surrounding stone. But the opening was empty now; Urdmann and his men had scarpered.

  From the cavern’s main floor, Ilya and I approached the raised area with caution. I couldn’t believe our enemies had simply fled without leaving a nasty surprise: a booby trap on the ramp to the tabernacle or something in the escape tunnel. Lancaster Urdmann was not the type to make a peaceful exit. I kept a keen watch for trip wires and electric-eye triggers as we climbed to the shamans’ sacred dais.

  Nothing. But as I placed my foot on the stage, something went woomph in the escape tunnel. I pushed Ilya down and threw myself on top of him . . . but nothing further happened. Nothing but Ilya’s profane protests that (a) he wasn’t some frail old granny who needed me shielding his body, and (b) would I please get off him because I was hurting his %*$#&! leg.

  I rolled off my friend and stood up. The escape tunnel’s mouth was now blocked with tumbled ice and snow: a thick barricade of it, freshly fallen from above.

  “Oh, very nice,” I growled. “He’s shut us in with an avalanche.” The woomph must have been an explosion set off by Urdmann as he left the tunnel: an explosion that dropped a load of Siberian winter to seal off the shaft.

  “Don’t fret, Larochka,” Ilya said. “We can make it back the long way. I can’t move fast, and we may meet more monsters, but . . . oh.”

  His last word caught my attention. I turned and saw where he’d been looking. At the far corner of the tabernacle, in the shadows against the rock wall, an electric device had begun to blink atop a stack of what looked like gray bricks.

  “That’s a bomb, isn’t it?” Ilya whispered.

  I nodded. The bricks were plastic explosive: maybe C-4, maybe one of the new military-grade plastiques circulating on the black market. Whatever it was, I was sure the stack contained enough firepower to bring the cavern down around our heads.

  “Ilyosha,” I said, “how good are you at disarming bombs?”

  “Never tried it,” he replied. “So who knows? I might be brilliant. How about you?”

  “My preferred technique is running like mad to get out of the blast radius. But since that would involve abandoning you . . .”

  Ilya didn’t bother arguing. He knew I wouldn’t leave him . . . even if there was enough time to do so, which I doubted. Urdmann would have set the bomb’s timer for only a few minutes—long enough to let us agonize over our predicament but not long enough to defuse the bomb or get ourselves clear.

  Still, maybe I could defuse the bomb. If I was lucky. In movies, you just had to cut the red wire . . . or was it the green? I walked carefully forward, hoping the great mound of explosives didn’t have a motion sensor to set it off if I got too near.

  A piece of paper lay folded on the stack. I debated touching it—a demolitions expert might have rigged a trigger that went off when the paper was moved—but if Urdmann had left me a note, he wouldn’t want to kill me before I’d read it. Urdmann liked to gloat . . . and this note was his chance to say Ha-ha, Lara, I beat you.

  Nothing went boom as I opened the message:

  Lara dear,

  As soon as you drew near, the warmth of your lovely body triggered this bomb’s detonation sequence. You now have ten minutes to live. What a pity I’ll never know how you chose to pass the time.

  All my best wishes,

  Lancaster Urdmann, O.B.E.

  P.S. If you get out of this alive, let’s meet for a return engagement in the Sargasso Sea.

  “O.B.E.?” I squawked. Who on Earth had Urdmann blackmailed to get an Order of the British Empire? He must have held a gun on the queen’s favorite corgi. Or maybe he was just lying about the O.B.E. so I’d spend my final minutes in anguish. “That does it,” I said. “We’re getting out of here now.”

  I glanced at the guts of the bomb, but it was a snarl of electronics with nothing that cried out I’m the deactivation switch. Urdmann would surely have put in false circuits, touch-sensitive triggers, and all kinds of other tricks to discourage tampering. The moment might come when I’d be desperate enough to yank out wires at random on the off chance I’d get the right one. But not yet.

  Instead, I looked around the cavern, searching for means of escape. We’d passed all those side tunnels as we walked along the cavern’s edge; who knew where they led? Possibly into private living quarters for the shamans: dead-end crawl spaces whose only way out was back the way we’d come. If we went down a tunnel and the bomb went off, the cavern would collapse, trapping Ilya and me in a lightless hole until we ran out of air, water, food, or all three. Not good. Or perhaps the cavern would turn out to be the lair of more monsters, in which case the end result would be the same, only quicker. But what else was there? As I gazed upon the cavern, all I could see was dark unforgiving stone . . . and of course, light from the two terrace lenses we’d uncovered . . .

  Hmm.

  “Ilyosha,” I said, “drag yourself to the escape tunnel. Watch for traps but get ready to leave.”

  “What about the avalanche blocking the passage?” Ilya asked. “You think the warmth of your smile will melt the snow away?”

  “Close.” Without waiting to explain, I ran for the nearest terrace.

  At the back of the terrace, another lens h
ad been covered with hides to shut out the light. My katana blade went snicker-snack, and sunshine flooded in . . . or as much of a flood as one gets from the near-arctic sun in December. I grabbed the lens’s frame and aimed the light straight at the escape tunnel. Two more seconds to focus—three cheers for arcane devices that defy the laws of physics—then I stepped back to judge my handiwork.

  A beam of sun illuminated the mouth of the escape tunnel like a theater spotlight. Ilya, lying near the opening, blinked at me through the glare.

  “Does it feel warm?” I yelled.

  “A little,” he replied. I couldn’t tell if he was just humoring me or if the lens really was focusing the sun like a magnifying glass, heating up the blockage of snow between us and the outside world. Only one way to find out: more light, more sun, and—I hoped—more heat.

  I ran from terrace to terrace, uncovering lenses and aiming them at the barrier of snow. When I’d done a dozen terraces on the lowest level, I pulled myself up to the next highest tier and repeated my rounds. One by one, beams of light converged on the frozen wall that sealed off our escape; one by one, the heat sources accumulated, combining their thermal strength. Ilya was forced to crawl back from the tunnel mouth: first, to remove himself from the increasingly toasty brilliance of the lenses, then to avoid the meltwater and toppling chunks of ice that fell from the hole once the weight began to loosen.

  Meanwhile, I kept an eye on my watch. Urdmann’s note said the bomb would go off in ten minutes. Under other circumstances, that might be a lie—Urdmann would cheat for cheating’s sake, promising ten minutes but setting the detonator for nine. Or two. In this situation, however, I believed he’d allow the full time. He wanted to prolong our suffering; he wanted to savor the thought of us wallowing in despair till the very last moment. If anything, he’d let the clock run a little longer . . . maybe ten minutes and ten seconds, so we’d have a brief moment of false hope that the bomb had fizzled. Then boom and the end of all things.