Master Of The Hashomi rb-27 Read online

  Barely a mile farther on he came to water. A shallow stream flowed over a gravel bed and plunged down a steep ravine to end in a broad muddy pool. The pool had no outlet that Blade could see-either the water evaporated or seeped away underground. The banks were thickly overgrown with bushes, coarse grass, and even a few pale red flowers. Small mouse-like things darted for cover as Blade approached, and somewhere in the bushes a bird squawked in surprise.

  Two rocks stood out on either side of the stream where it flowed out of the ravine into the pool. Each showed the same sign that was on Blade’s knife-the poppy-like flower. Each carved image was nearly four feet high, and they were identical except for one point. The carving on the rock to the right of the stream was worn and beginning to lose detail. Many years of wind had scoured it, many years of hot days and chilly nights had flaked away the rock around it.

  The other carving was as clean and fresh as if the carver had set down his hammer and chisel only a few hours ago.

  The impression of something brand-new was so overpowering that Blade found himself examining the ground around the rock for footprints. The people whose sign was the poppy flower were not dead and gone. Some of them had passed this way, probably within months, certainly within years, leaving their sign for all to see. Was it a warning to their enemies, a welcome to their friends, a prayer to whatever gods they worshipped, or something else entirely different and quite incomprehensible?

  Blade wasted no time guessing. Nor did he change his plans. If the poppy people still existed, the mountains were as good a place as any to start looking for them. He had reason to assume they were formidable warriors, but no reason to assume he was in any danger from them-yet. He knelt by the stream, drank as much as he could, then rose and moved on.

  Now his eye searched the landscape a little more carefully, and his right hand was never far from the hilt of his knife. Otherwise, no one watching Blade could have told that he was now fully alert, ready to turn from explorer into deadly fighting machine between one breath and the next.

  The breeze blowing from the mountains began to carry a damp coolness. Blade turned south, to skirt the flank of the nearest peak in search of an easier path into the mountains. He was an expert climber, who’d made most of the important climbs in the Alps and Rockies. Dressed and equipped as he was, though, it made more sense to go around rather than over the looming peaks.

  Another hour, and a narrow, rugged pass opened before him, snaking off into the shadows among the peaks. It finally seemed to vanish close to the foot of the twenty-thousand-foot giant with its trailing plume of snow. Blade doubted he could find a better route into the mountains, and climbed straight toward the mouth of the pass.

  The shadows and the chill mountain air seemed to swallow Blade the moment he stepped into the pass. Before he’d gone a mile it was as if the barren, sun-baked slopes and the desert to the east had been a dream. Vast, rocky monoliths that seemed to brood were all around him. Blade had a sense of entering a world not made to human proportions, where he was an unwanted intruder.

  Still, he would push on as long as he could. If the mountain men were the people of the poppy flower, they might have a short way with strangers, but that was a risk he’d have to face. Meanwhile, he would take special care to memorize his route and mark his trail. He might want to get out of the mountains much faster than he came in.

  Blade strode on briskly, arms swinging to pump more air into his massive chest. The air around him was getting noticeably thinner. It would be cold tonight, but not dangerously so long as there was no wind.

  The air was still all that afternoon as Blade plunged deeper and deeper into the mountains. Where the sun lit up the slopes and blazed from the snowcaps of the peaks, the scenery had a magnificent Alpine beauty. Blade found himself almost regretting that he wasn’t going to be able to spend some time climbing a few of the mountains around him. For a while he amused himself with the fantasy of retiring here, when large-scale travel into Dimension X was perfected, and opening a resort. He was quite sure he could make this Dimension a popular tourist destination.

  Twilight overtook him on the edge of a mountain meadow of coarse grass dotted with tiny yellow flowers. A stream leaped from the top of a black cliff to his left, to make a waterfall as it plunged and a clear cold pool where it landed. Blade drank, stretched out on the ground, and fell asleep with the splashing of the waterfall in his ears.

  For three days Blade moved steadily deeper into the mountains. He would have turned back at the end of the second day if he hadn’t found food. His body might seem to have the strength and endurance of a machine, but it was flesh and blood. It would have been foolish to push on until he was too weak to retreat.

  But on the afternoon of the second day he found himself looking down on a flock of animals like large one-horned goats. A well-thrown stone stunned one and sent the rest of the flock dashing off in panic. Blade plunged down the slope, drew the knife, and slit the fallen animal’s throat. Then he butchered it and stuffed himself with the raw flesh. The meat was bloody, gamey, and still warm, but it was food-enough to keep him going for several more days. If he found more flocks of goats, he could keep going for weeks, even though raw goat meat wasn’t exactly a gourmet meal.

  After eating, Blade cut patches from the goat’s skin, scraped them clean, and tied them around his feet. When the condition of his feet might be a matter of life or death, any extra protection he could give them helped.

  Blade was still heading deeper into the mountains on the afternoon of the third day. His goal now was the twenty-thousand-foot peak. On one side the peak shot up in an almost vertical face nearly ten thousand feet high, flanked by two sharp spurs. On the other side a gentle slope ran almost up to the summit. Today the winds aloft must be light, for the snow plume was barely visible.

  Blade decided that he’d go as far as the mountain, then explore in a complete circle around its base. After that he’d climb as far up the easy slope as he could and from that high perch look for traces of human life. If he couldn’t find any, it would be time to turn back, to take his chances with the desert or at least look elsewhere for the human inhabitants of this Dimension.

  The hours passed; evening settled on the mountains, and darkness and the end of Blade’s daily march were not far off. Blade was making his way along a narrow ledge above a fast-flowing stream when he caught sight of a dim orange glow far ahead. It flickered and wavered, and he couldn’t tell what or how far away it might be-but it was there. He kept moving, but now he held the knife in his right hand and was thankful that the goatskin bindings made his footsteps almost noiseless.

  The darkness grew thicker, and in contrast the orange glow ahead grew slowly larger and brighter. Blade felt a moment’s relief as he stepped off the narrow ledge onto a broader shelf of rock. There he would have room to fight and no chance of a fifty-foot plunge into the boiling stream if he put a foot wrong.

  The rock shelf broadened and sprouted boulders, then grass, bushes, and even small trees stunted and twisted by altitude and years of wind. Blade used every bit of cover as he crept forward, his eyes never leaving the steadily growing spot of orange.

  A few more steps, and Blade was on the edge of a wide belt of cleared land, sloping down to the stream. On the far side of the stream another slope rose to the foot of a cliff. Halfway between the stream and the cliff a fire blazed inside a circle of large stones. Its flames shot up ten feet into the air, and sparks rose higher still. Around the stones about twenty men lay or sat on furs or skins, oiling or sharpening weapons, drinking from skin bags, or sound asleep. Blade’s eyes were drawn to the spectacle of what lay beyond them.

  The stream ran through a cutting at the bottom of the cleared slopes, between vertical walls of dressed stone twenty feet high. A wooden footbridge crossed it directly below the fire and the men. The stream ran on for another fifty yards, then suddenly it was no longer there. On either side of it the ground also ended, as if it had been cut off by a kn
ife or dissolved into the night air.

  Daylight now lingered only on the summit of the great peak. Everything else lay in shadow, sinking deeper by the minute. At first Blade could make out only a vast emptiness where the stream and the ground ended. Then his eyes adjusted to the darkness and told him of an immense valley, stretching away mile after mile; of mountain walls rising solid and nearly vertical on either side of the valley; of wooded hills and small lakes on its floor. It even told him of a dimly visible patch of light far off on the crest of one of the hills.

  That was all Blade learned of the valley before he learned something else. The men around the fire might seem to be off their guard; but they were not. Two of them jumped up with wild inhuman screeches, and the fire glowed on the curved swords they drew and pointed at Blade. Then their comrades were also jumping up, and their raw-throated cries tore at Blade’s ears and sent echoes leaping from the cliffs.

  Then all of them were rushing down the slope toward the bridge. Some ran so fast that they seemed to skim the ground, and none waited any longer than they needed to snatch up their weapons.

  None of them had time to cover more than a few steps before Blade leaped out of cover. None of the could drown out his yell, and none of them could match his speed as he also plunged down toward the bridge.

  Chapter 4

  Blade’s charge down the slope in the face of twenty-to-one odds wasn’t quite as suicidal as it seemed.

  To turn and flee would bring all the men after him, hunting him like a wild animal through the darkness and over ground they would certainly know better than he did. To stay where he was would invite them to climb up and come at him from all sides. To reach the bridge before they did gave him a chance to hold it against them. They would have to come at him no more than two at a time, since the bridge was narrow and there was no other crossing point on the stream. He would have a chance to hold them off long enough to discourage them. Then he could try a peaceful approach, and if that failed, he would still be holding the bridge. It looked light and rather poorly anchored at either end. A good heave and it would be in the stream, rushing toward the cliff and a plunge into the valley. That would keep the survivors on the other side long enough to give him a good head start on his retreat.

  The only danger was archery, which could pick him off from a distance. Blade hadn’t seen any bows among the men, and in the darkness he’d be a poor archery target anyway, particularly after the fight came to close quarters.

  All these thoughts tumbled furiously through Blade’s mind as his legs drove him toward the bridge. His speed, his size, his weird clothing, and his terrible war cry all combined to bring the enemy to a stop for a moment. Blade reached his end of the bridge a moment before the first of the enemy reached his.

  It took the enemy another moment to sort themselves out, with a great deal of angry shouting. Blade could make out no recognizable words in that shouting, so presumably there were none. As he had passed into Dimension X, the computer somehow twisted his brain so that he understood the local language as plain English and his own speech came out in the local language. It was a process no one fully understood, but it was a vast help in the exploration of Dimension X. No one, least of all Blade, was inclined to look such a gift horse in the mouth.

  Two men stepped onto the bridge, their swords raised in front of them, coming at Blade with the lithe grace of stalking cats. Blade considered for a moment lifting the bridge and dumping them into the stream, then decided against it. The others might regard it as treachery or brute strength, not skill and courage in a fair fight. Showing that skill and courage was his best chance of making peace with these warriors was therefore worth the risk.

  Those risks would not be small. Blade had only his knife, and the swords his opponents held were a foot and a half longer, curved like scimitars, and clearly heavy enough to chop a man in half. A gilded band ran along the back of each sword, so at least they weren’t doubled-edged.

  Blade stepped forward to force the two men to deliver their attack while they were still on the bridge. That way they would have to come straight at him, and they would have only the light planks rather than the solid ground under their feet.

  The two swordsmen stayed level with each other, their steps were measured and precise, and the gleaming swords they held in front of them never wavered. As the men closed, Blade saw that each man carried a knife like his in a heavily patterned leather sheath hanging from a sash at the waist. Otherwise they were dressed identically-soft boots, baggy trousers with a faint sheen to them, soft leather vests that left their arms and necks bare. They wore no armor that Blade could see, and every bit of hair except their eyebrows had been shaved off. Their heads were wrapped tightly in bands of leather, like an Indian’s turban but much more tightly fitting.

  Their clothing might be almost comic, but the steel they carried and the way they moved were not. They were clearly trained fighting men, sure and quick in their movements. Blade knew he could not safely take any chances against them-at least not until he had a sword to match theirs.

  The two swords rose higher still, ready to slash down at Blade’s head. He balanced himself on the balls of his feet, both hands out of sight behind his back. Then the swords came down, the one on Blade’s left a second ahead of the other. The steel muscles in Blade’s legs uncoiled, hurling him high and to one side. As he leaped, he shifted his knife from his right hand to his left.

  As Blade had expected, a full overhand slash with such a heavy sword drew both men forward, momentarily off balance. Blade closed with the man to his left before the other could raise his sword again. The knife flashed in a precise arc, slitting the flesh of the man’s neck and the windpipe under it. Blood sprayed, the man’s breathing became a horrible choking, and his hands quivered on the hilt of his sword. Yet he did not cry out, his eyes did not flicker, his face might have been a stone mask, and his arm muscles were actually twisting and jerking, trying to raise his sword back into striking position. He was dying on his feet, yet his mind was still on the fight rather than on the death that was only seconds away.

  Blade had no time to spend wondering what this might mean. As the man’s grip on his sword weakened, Blade lunged for it with his free right hand. Blade’s other opponent slashed sideways at him, bringing his sword around in a hissing arc with no thought for his dying comrade. The sharp edge whispered over Blade’s head as he ducked, then bit into the chest of the dying man. Flesh, ribs, the heart itself parted under the blow. It went in so deep that for a moment the dead man’s still-erect body held the sword of his living comrade. Then the second man joined the first in death, as Blade drove his knife up between the ribs, straight to the heart. He died as silently as the first, without a word, a cry, or even a change of expression.

  The swift death of the first two men made the next two hesitate briefly. Their eyes met Blade’s, though; and their faces were blank. Their hesitation did not come from fear, but from the desire of good fighting men to assess their opponent and the situation they faced. When they came, it was even faster than the first two. One sword was held high, the other wide to one side ready to slash in an arc.

  Blade suspected they might be trying to drive him away from the end of the bridge and open a passage for their comrades. He also suspected they would be quite willing to die in the process. He didn’t like the way the first two men had died, as silently as robots or zombies who couldn’t feel pain.

  The man with his sword held high was on the right, the one with the sword held wide on the left. Blade saw that the second man was moving out ahead of the other. He would be within striking range a few vital seconds before the other.

  Once more Blade’s legs hurled him to the left. This time he jumped wider. The sword was a blur as it slashed at him, the steel missing by inches from Blade’s skin. The man pulled the sword to a stop before it struck his partner but not before the other had to stop, well out of range of Blade.

  The sword was single-edged, so the man coul
d not take out Blade on the backswing. He had to turn the sword before he could strike again. He did it so quickly that no one slower than Blade could have taken advantage of the delay.

  Blade closed, feinting with the knife in his left hand, driving the man sideways to meet Blade’s right. The edge of Blade’s right hand caught the man across the throat. Blade felt the windpipe shatter, heard the man start choking, but saw no expression on his face. Blade dropped his knife, seized the dying man with both hands, and swung him around. The other man’s sword came down. Blade ducked, and it sank deep into the skull of the man held in front of Blade. Blood and brains sprayed and the man’s hands opened limply, letting his sword fall. Blade threw the corpse at the other swordsman hard enough to knock him off the bridge. Living and dead together plunged into the stream and were swept away toward the cliff. Blade stooped, gripped the fallen sword, and had it raised before the next two attackers started across the bridge. Now he had striking range equal to his opponents, not greater. Blade was six-foot-one and weighed more than two hundred pounds, all of it muscle and bone. His opponents all looked shorter and lighter. That gave Blade a longer reach and more striking power. It also meant that if necessary he could swing the heavy curved sword with one hand.

  The next two attackers charged across the bridge, and he decided it was necessary. Instead of rising to his feet, Blade waited for the enemy in a crouch. Then his sword slashed, ripping one man in the thigh and leaping up to take the other in the groin. The man with the wounded thigh staggered. His leg would no longer support his full weight, but he kept on coming. The man struck in the groin reeled backward from the sheer force of the blow, but did not fall. Neither man cried out.

  Blade found the silence in which his opponents took their punishment thoroughly unnatural and slightly unnverving. The man he’d struck in the groin must be in ghastly agony, his genitals mangled beyond healing. Yet he was not even moaning faintly. In fact, he was coming at Blade again, swinging his sword wildly but energetically.