Champions Of The Gods rb-21

by Джеффри Лорд

«Hold!» Tyan's voice thundered out again. «One more order I shall give. Let Commander Mirdon be summoned from wherever he is, with such soldiers of Kano as he chooses to accompany him.»

  Jormin turned to stare at his superior. His eyes were wide, and his mouth was working with anger that seemed about ready to explode into total defiance. With an obvious effort he kept his voice level.

  «Commander Mirdon is doubtless at his post upon the walls. Do you wish him summoned even from there?»

  «Yes,» said Tyan coolly. «It will educate you, Jormin, to have Mirdon be the Guard for this sacrifice at the Mouth of the Gods.»

  Jormin's eyes blazed, then once more he controlled himself and turned away, shoulders slumping. Obviously it enraged Jormin to have his enemy Mirdon given what was presumably a high honor.

  It was hard to see that it mattered very much, though. Mirdon would be honored, Jormin humiliated. He, Richard Blade, would almost certainly be dead within two hours.

  The slaves, the soldiers, and the Consecrated-obviously had carried out dozens of sacrifices. They knew what to do and did it rapidly, efficiently, and without giving Blade any chance for a single move of his own.

  Unfortunately Arllona had time to wake up. She screamed when she did, writhing and twisting against her bonds. She went on screaming and writhing until two of the Consecrated jammed a gag into her mouth and wrapped her wrists and ankles so they wouldn't chafe or scrape. Then she could only lie, panting, quivering, her eyes staring wildly like a trapped animal's.

  More than the soldiers and the Consecrated, it was Arllona who kept Blade from making a move on his own. Several times he could have struck out or even made a run for it. He would undoubtedly have died a quicker death than he was going to in the Mouth of the Gods. But he would have left Arllona to face the Mouth by herself. Blade was willing to endure the slower death of the Mouth so that Arllona did not have to die alone.

  They were carried swiftly on their grates to the huge metal cart and raised to the broad grill on top. They were placed side by side there, held in place by heavy metal bands around their waists and ankles. It did not make any difference that their hands were free-it would have taken a blowtorch to cut through any of the bands.

  Blade wondered if they would be drugged beforehand, but they were given nothing, not even water. He licked his dry lips and listened to the remarks of the soldiers and the Consecrated. Apparently the writhings and the screams of the victims were part of the sacrifice. He hoped Arllona didn't realize that.

  The cart was more than a hundred feet from the flames of the Mouth, but Blade could already feel its heat against his skin. The cart stood there, while Consecrated and soldiers dashed about like busy ants, doing a hundred and one last-minute things.

  Mirdon rode up, sprang down from his horse, strode across the gleaming jade blocks of the pit to where Tyan stood waiting. They greeted each other with elaborately ceremonial courtesy, then, side by side, mounted the steps to the stand nearest the Mouth. Tyan was carrying his great staff; the reflections from the gold and the jewels made it look like a bar of solid fire. As Tyan and Mirdon took their places, all movement in the pit ceased.

  A score of soldiers ran forward, carrying a T-shaped metal bar twenty feet long. They pushed the foot of the T into a socket in the rear of the cart, took positions along the crossbar, and began to shove. Blade noted with an almost detached interest this solution to the problem of pushing the cart into the Mouth without the pushers being burned up along with the sacrifice.

  The cart moved forward slowly, jerkily, with many rattles and clanks. One wheel had a distinctive sound, a sort of brrraaaank! Blade counted carefully. Each time the wheel sounded meant ten feet closer to the Mouth.

  Eighty feet to go. The heat was stronger now. It would be uncomfortable at seventy, painful at fifty, unendurable at forty. They would both probably be unconscious before any real flame touched them. That was a hopeful thought, now.

  Seventy feet. It was getting uncomfortable. The bands and the bars of the grill were beginning to warm up as the heat came in waves from the Mouth. Blade looked at Arllona. She lay totally rigid, her lips showing drops of blood where she'd bitten them. Her eyes rolled toward him and met his.

  Sixty feet. The light and the heat from the soaring column of flame that was the Mouth of the Gods poured over him, shutting out the world. He could no longer hear the wheels to measure their advance toward the Mouth. He could no longer hear anything except the steadily growing roar of the flames.

  Fifty feet. There was pain now, pain over every inch of skin, more pain where the hot metal touched him. He could hear Arllona screaming now. He forced himself to go on taking shallow, regular breaths. In another moment the air would be hot enough to burn out his lungs. Then his own self-control might snap as thoroughly as Arllona's, and he would be screaming too, and-

  Blade gasped, coughed as he inhaled scorching air, and sat up. There was a new pain now, an agonizing, stabbing pain in his head-a new pain, but also a familiar one. Somehow the computer had reached out for him, somehow it was gripping his brain now, to snatch him away from here, snatch him back to Home Dimension-

  — and snatch Arllona too! It was worth a try, even if-! Blade didn't take time to complete the thought. Instead he twisted around as far as he could, laying one hand on Arllona's forehead and another over her wildly beating heart. She was alternately screaming and gibbering hysterically. He didn't try to speak to her. Instead he pressed both hands tightly on her skin, willing her to be calm, willing her to blank out her mind, willing her to somehow receive if she could the computer's pulses. In this moment Blade wasn't thinking of science or of new knowledge. All that was in his mind as the pain exploded again was sharing with Arllona this last, miraculous chance for safety-if he could.

  The pain mounted higher. Blade held his breath again, knowing that if he breathed now he would scorch his lungs. In another second his eyeballs would melt and run like jelly down his blistering, blackening cheeks. In another second-

  The pain in his head leaped upward like the flames of the Mouth itself. Blackness swallowed him up, blackness and a deadly cold wind that howled around him from nowhere. In one moment he knew only searing heat, in the next he knew only freezing cold. He did not know what had happened to Arllona; he could feel nothing under his hands where she had been.

  Then he could feel nothing at all.

  Chapter Eleven

  Katerina Shumilova's first sensation was a totally agonizing headache. She remembered how she had felt before losing consciousness in the chair far below the Tower of London. A giant hand had been crushing her skull. Now she felt as if someone had tried to put her skull back together again and had done a miserably poor job of it.

  Even that disagreeable memory was reassuring. If she could remember something like that, it proved she was still alive, with a more or less functioning brain. She would have felt much better without the headache. She felt that her head would drop off her shoulders, or at least start falling apart, if she moved an inch or even opened her eyes. She didn't know if she was sinking into bottomless quicksand, or if a man-eating tiger was about to leap on her. She did know that nothing could be worse than what would happen to her if she tried to move. She lay still, and soon she drifted off to sleep.

  The next time she awoke her head still hurt, but now it was more like the morning after a liter of bad vodka than the total agony she'd felt before. She could also sense other things, outside herself-wet grass under her and all around her, cool against her bare skin, a warm, scented wind blowing over her, grass rippling, leaves rustling, the drone of insects, the soft pad-pad-pad of feet-

  Realization of what this meant exploded in her head like a new stab of pain. What was she doing in a forest when she had been far below the Tower of London? This couldn't even be an English forest-it was much too warm for England in November. She was still naked-she could feel grass or warm air against every bit of bare skin. What had happened to her?

  Fear fou
ght with scientific curiosity for a moment. Then she opened her eyes. She gasped at the sudden blaze of light, as though someone had set off a flashbulb into her eyes, then buried her face in the grass again. The next time she opened her eyes, she did it slowly.

  She continued to lie still until she thought she had the strength to get to her feet. Then she maneuvered elbows and knees into position, and lurched upward. Several small animals gave a startled yeeeep! and vanished in the long grass. Katerina staggered to her feet and stood upright. She realized that either she or the trees around her were swaying rather badly.

  Her head was swimming, but it was her stomach that betrayed her. Sudden nausea welled up in her. She knelt down and was violently sick. She went on being sick, retching and heaving desperately, until there was absolutely nothing left in her stomach. She felt drained dry and her head was throbbing again, but otherwise she felt better than she had since arriving-wherever she was. She managed to get to her feet again and stagger away a few steps, to sit down in a patch of fresh grass with her back to a large tree.

  After a while she still felt weak, but she could look around her and understand what she saw. She didn't like it.

  She was sitting in a patch of long lush grass and trailing vines, with dense forest all around. Not just forest-tropical jungle. Some of the trees or the vines twining around them practically dripped brilliantly colored blossoms. A flock of strange birds with broad red wings and lean blue bodies flapped up from one tree as she watched. High above, clouds like puffed cotton ambled across a blue sky.

  The damned British had certainly gone to a lot of trouble to dispose of her after the experiment! They had gone on drugging her, loaded her aboard a plane, then flown her down to South America or perhaps Africa somewhere a long way from London, and probably a long way from civilization. Well, she would just have to head back as fast as she could.

  She wished that they'd given her some clothes, though. Modesty didn't concern her. What did concern her were insects, thorns, and night chills, in that order. Katerina muttered a few heartfelt curses at the British in general and at J and Lord Leighton in particular. Then she pulled herself to her feet and started forward, across the clearing and into the forest.

  Deep under the trees there was so little light that practically nothing grew on the forest floor. If she hadn't had her field training in the endless forests of Siberia, she would have been lost within minutes. As it was, it wasn't until the ground started sloping downward that she could be sure of not going around in circles.

  She promptly set out to follow the downslope. In any land water flows downhill, and water would sooner or later lead her to what passed for civilization around here. She would have to make up some very solid cover story to explain how she came to be here, stark naked and alone. She had learned to lie with a straight face, however. If she hadn't she would never have survived even one mission, let alone years of them.

  Before she'd gone very far she was streaming with sweat in the hot airlessness of the forest. Her hair hung damp, limp, and tangled with bits of bark and leaves. Rough tree trunks and razor-edged leaves scraped and sliced her skin, and the scrapes and cuts stung as sweat poured down over them. Insects swarmed around her, forming a cloud in front of her eyes, whining maddeningly in her ears, biting and stinging. At first she tried to wave them off. Then she found that that took too much of the strength she was going to need just to stay on her feet.

  Somehow she managed to keep going long enough. Toward the end her head was swimming, her eyes were dimmed with tears and fatigue and swollen half-shut with insect bites, her legs seemed to be made of lead, and her head started throbbing again. But the end of the forest did come. At last she stumbled out of the dimness onto the brushgrown bank of a river.

  Katerina collapsed on the grass in the shade of a bush overgrown with pale red berries and stared out across the water. It flowed sluggishly past her, brownish-green, and at least a hundred meters from shore to shore. On the opposite bank rose more forest, a green mass as solid as the one behind her.

  After a while she felt her strength returning. She walked over to the bank, bent down, and scooped water out of the river with her cupped hands. At this point she felt she would rather die from anything that might be in the water than die of thirst.

  Drinking the water cleared her head still further. She took a firm grip on a projecting root and lowered herself into the river. The current was too gentle to break her grip, and the cool water flowing over her skin washed away sweat, fatigue, the stinging of her cuts and the smarting of insect bites.

  While she was bathing, three of the red-winged birds flew down and began eating the berries off the bush. Katerina recalled another point of her survival training-anything the local birds and animals eat can probably be eaten by human beings too. She climbed out of the river and stretched luxuriantly to finish uncramping and unkinking her muscles. Then she walked to the bush and began picking berries.

  The berries were hard and fleshy, but pleasantly sweet. She ate slowly at first, then faster, as nothing seemed to be going badly wrong inside. Even the first few mouthfuls of berries fought off the gnawing emptiness in her belly.

  As she ate, she looked up and down the river. Downriver was nothing but forest and greenish-brown water flowing away into a seemingly endless distance. Upstream, the forest ended only a few miles away. Then the land rose, as green hills gave way to a solid wall of gray rock across the horizon. The direction of the sun told Katerina that she was looking north at the mountains.

  In the center, the gray rocks leaped still higher, into an enormous cone-shaped mountain mass rising at least fifteen thousand feet above the forest. After a second look, Katerina realized that the cone shape was that of a volcano. A third look told her that the white plume from the broad summit was not wind-whipped snow, but steam. Apparently there was still life in the huge volcano.

  That in turn made her suspect she was in South America. That continent had a good many live volcanoes, while as far as she remembered Africa had none. Absently she reached for another cluster of berries, while trying to guess which volcano this one might be.

  Then a loud splash sounded in the water, fifty meters off to Katerina's right. She turned to look, and froze on the spot. Something large and scaly was climbing out of the river, water sluicing off a broad back set with twin rows of spines running from neck to tail. A red-eyed head with a two-foot parrot's beak rose, then the beak clamped down on a bush. The bush was ripped out by the roots. The creature heaved itself the rest of the way out of the water, stood for a moment on four splay-clawed feet, then lumbered off into the forest, the bush still clutched in its beak. From nose to tail it was at least ten meters long.

  Katerina stayed frozen where she was long after even the sound of the beast's departure had died away. She was no longer afraid of the animal. What froze her now was a sense of facing the unknown, an unknown many times worse than anything she'd ever imagined.

  There was no animal like that monster in South America. There was none in Africa. There was none any place on earth, and there hadn't been any for more than thirty million years. That thing was a creature of another world or another time, or both.

  It seemed impossible and incredible. But could it possibly be so? Had the British mastered the secret of time travel? To dispose of her, had they hurled her back to the age of the dinosaurs? Perhaps she was alone in this forest, alone on this day millions of years before even Man's remotest ancestors would appear.

  If she was that alone, she would be alone for the rest of her life. She did not cry, or faint, or even shiver at the thought. But for a long time, she sat completely frozen.

  Chapter Twelve

  Blade awoke with a headache that pounded and throbbed and seemed to shoot pulses of pain off to every part of his body. It was the worst headache he could ever remember feeling after a return to Home Dimension. He lay there, letting the headache shut out the rest of the world. He remembered Arllona and his desperate effort to
snatch her away from the flames of the Mouth of the Gods in Kano. He also knew he ought to be up and asking about what had happened to her. For the moment he knew it would be pointless to try moving as much as his little finger, even to save himself.

  Gradually the pain started fading from his limbs and body. Strange sensations replaced them. He did not feel the cool sheets of a hospital bed under him. Instead he felt damp moss, matted grass, dead leaves. He did not smell antiseptic hospital odors, but fresh growing flowers and rotting wood. He did not hear the whir of electronic diagnostic machines and the brisk click of nurses' heels on tile floors. He heard the sound of birds, the wind in tall trees, something large and alive crunching through bushes a good distance off. As the pain started to fade from his head, Blade opened his eyes and looked straight up.

  Golden sunlight struck into his eyes, sunlight filtering down through a maze of leafy branches a hundred feet above him. All around were thick tree trunks, overgrown with preposterous tangles of flowering vines. The air was thick with odors, damp and warm.

  Blade sat up, then felt both head and stomach settle down. His skin was reddened and smarted like a bad case of sunburn, but nothing worse. He stood up, brushed himself off, and looked around him again. The second look showed him nothing he hadn't seen the first time. This started him thinking.

  Something hadn't gone the way Lord Leighton had planned it. He was not in London, or even in Britain. The forest around him looked like virgin jungle. If he was in Home Dimension, the computer had dropped him into the middle of Africa or perhaps South America.

  That was a fair-sized «if.» He could have also landed in some other part of the Dimension where Kano and the Raufi were now fighting it out. Dimensions were often complete worlds, as complex and varied as the Earth of Home Dimension.

  He might also have gone sailing off into another Dimension entirely! That did not frighten Blade: He was about as incapable of being frightened as any sane man could be. But the idea of being bounced randomly about among different Dimensions was slightly unsettling.