[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Slimy things brushed him, clung to him, and now and again a corpse bobbed
against him. Blade retched and vomited and was not ashamed. This sewer, this
cloaca for a dying city, was as near hell as he wished to come. He pushed the
bloated body of an enormous rat away from his face and once more sounded for
bottom. His toes touched stone.
He could walk now, keeping his chin above the slime. The current, so sluggish
at first, began to quicken and bear him along. He was now only shoulder deep.
He brushed ahead of him with his sword as he half walked, half floated,
through his quagmire of putridity. He rounded a bend and saw a shaft of light
just ahead. Light only in a relative sense; a faint shaft of dawn seeping down
an open sewer cover.
Some few details of his fetid, tube-like dungeon were revealed. Blade paused
well back from the gray bar of light and looked about him.
There was no way out. No ladder, no steps cut into the arching stone, no
ropes. Nothing. From where he stood shoulder deep in a horrible porridge of
feces and urine and rotted flesh to the tiny circle of light was a good thirty
feet. He heard the thunder of cavalry up there, felt the reverberations,
listened to the screams of men and women being cut down. Blade did not have to
see to understand. It was all over. Thyrne had fallen and all organized
resistance had ceased. The massacre of civilians had started.
Blade moved on.
His sense of time was keen. He judged that an hour had passed before he came
to the junction of two great sewers, larger than the one in which he suffered,
and through which salt-smelling water rushed at a great pace. The moving
water, deep and comparatively clean, caught at Blade and the sludge in which
he moved and swept them both along. He had to swim now and just ahead he saw a
torch guttering in a wall sconce. He made for it.
Beneath the torch was a platform of cobbles, and a narrow walkway led into a
shadowy tunnel.
Blade, somewhat cleansed by the moving water, hauled himself out of the stream
and, with drawn sword, headed into the tunnel. Anything was better than that
sewer. Anything.
The tunnel was narrow, so long that Blade must continually stoop, and
convoluted as the bowels of some giant. At each bend or sharp turn there was a
single torch, and for this Blade was grateful. He kept moving down passage
after passage, the only sound that of his buskins on stone and, once, the
accidental ring of his sword as it brushed a wall.
He rounded yet another bend and saw a narrow window, hardly more than a barred
slot in the stone, high on the right-hand wall. Faint light seeped slantwise
Page 30
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
through the bars. Blade judged the distance, poised, tensed and leaped. He
seized a bar with one hand and pulled himself up until both elbows rested on
the ledge. At first he hardly believed it. A toe? A big toe belonging to a
mammoth foot?
So it was. He was within a colossus of some sort, a gigantic statue. His
vantage was from the ankle, looking forward along the foot toward the toes.
Gold. Solid gold! Blade whistled silently and made a few rapid calculations.
Given the length of the foot he estimated some twenty five feet the image must
be about two hundred feet tall. Solid gold. Here was loot enough to repay the
cost of invasion a thousand times over, at least by HD standards. He put that
thought away. It was far too early to think mission he must only think
survival.
Blade was sure enough, but to verify it he twisted and craned his neck to
stare upward. He could see nothing but one enormous golden breast towering
high over him, the nipple worked in silver. Juna again.
The goddess of Thyrne was, for the moment anyway, sheltering him.
Through the window he studied the cobbled square spread out beyond the foot of
the goddess. He could make out only a pie-slice segment of it, but by
extrapolation knew that the fighting here must have been deadly. Costly to
both sides. It was probably here that the Samostans had struck first and had
gained enough momentum to carry them to victory. Corpses of men and horses
were stacked waist high in places, and pools of black blood still glittered on
the cobbles. Dawn, seeping in fast, disclosed the mute and terrible evidence
of charge and counter-charge, of heroic last stands and no quarter, of gutted
horses and lanced men and banners fallen to make shrouds for their bearers.
Blade made a rapid and inaccurate count and took a vague pleasure in his
findings the Thyrnians had extracted a high price. The
figures were very nearly two of Samosta to every dead man of Thyrne. Blade
smiled and wondered again at his involvement, as slight as it was. He had no
business taking sides. He was a stranger, and certainly not in any paradise,
and his job was to observe, evaluate, remember and stake out any claims that
might be of potential value to England.
But first to survive.
Too late he heard them coming. Two or three of them, judging by the scuff of
sandals on stone. They were coming from the same direction Blade had come he
had passed numerous side passages and they would be around the bend of the
corridor before he could drop from the window and scurry out of sight. There
was nothing to do but cling to his perch ten feet above the floor and hope
they would not glance up. Blade pushed his left arm through the narrow window,
locked his elbow around a bar and waited with drawn sword. At least he would
have surprise on his side.
There were only two of them and he need not have fretted. They were priests,
ghoulish figures clad in black robes and wearing masks of beaten gold. They
walked slowly, dragging their feet, and the golden masks must have been heavy
to pull their heads down so. As they neared him Blade saw that the masks were
actually helmets, fitting entirely over the head with thin slits for eye holes
and a circular orifice for breathing and speaking. Blade relaxed. Their vision
would be very poor in those clumsy things.
The taller of the two black robes was questioning with both voice and gesture
as they approached the dangling Blade.
"I understand, Ptol, why the living Juna must be given to the Samostans, to
Hectoris himself, as tribute and propitiation. But why must we torture and
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]