Warlock. Part 10

No, the specter replied. If I sound morose, it is not because I am tortured. Indeed, it was a h.e.l.l at first, a madness of confusion and anguish. Never to know the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a woman, the taste of wine or food! Well, you could see how the mind would rebel at such a future. But with time, wisdom came. A man cannot be eternal, living across all of time, without gaining wisdom. And with that came acceptance, for a wise man knows never to battle that which is ultimately immovable. And with the acceptance, there was a joy of a sort, though it is a joy far different from any human joy If I sound morose, it is not because I am tortured. Indeed, it was a h.e.l.l at first, a madness of confusion and anguish. Never to know the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a woman, the taste of wine or food! Well, you could see how the mind would rebel at such a future. But with time, wisdom came. A man cannot be eternal, living across all of time, without gaining wisdom. And with that came acceptance, for a wise man knows never to battle that which is ultimately immovable. And with the acceptance, there was a joy of a sort, though it is a joy far different from any human joy-quite indescribable, I am afraid, good Shaker.

'I imagine so,' Sandow said. 'Yet I seek knowledge more than all else. I know the joy of which you speak. It springs from a hunger for understanding, for information, for knowledge. Perhaps I feel it to a much smaller degree than you, but it is there nonetheless.'

And may your hunger be satisfied.

'And may your hunger never be satisfied,' the Shaker said, exhibiting, in that strange well-wis.h.i.+ng, his complete understanding of at least one angle of what immortality must be like.

'Forming up here, Shaker Sandow,' the commander called from the front line of the men.

He went to take his place before his a.s.sistant, Mace.

They left that forest of glowing, polished trees, of crystal men and crystal tigers. And they walked forth toward the other wonders of this forgotten land!

18.

The following three days presented them with a great many strange sights and new fears. The only one of them who seemed not to be frightened of the eerie spectacles they discovered was the Shaker. Indeed, he exhibited the same almost childlike fascination with every new wonder they came upon, without regard to life or limb. After a while, many of the others began to think the old magician had the right att.i.tude, for-though the rest of them feared the land-none of them had died or been wounded. Perhaps their bad luck was behind them and only good fortune waited in the ways ahead.

Though a few of them came close to death and injury, the narrow escapes seemed things to laugh upon, good jokes-especially when they thought of what had happened to less fortunate members of their party on the slopes of the Cloud Range.

They pa.s.sed out of the jungle and found themselves in fields of stunted gra.s.ses where gnarled, rugged trees found footholds in the shallow soil and in the thick strata of rock just beneath. All the copses of trees leaned toward the mountains, in the direction of the wind, and afforded the only shelter from possible aircraft surveys of the land.

Twice, glittering silver circles pa.s.sed above them, humming slightly like a flight of bees. Both times, they were fortunate enough to be near concealment when the sound first came to them, and they escaped detection.

In time, the fields gave way to a stretch of cold desert, flat sands the color of ashes, gray and barren of life. They skirted this area for a while, striking east some eighty miles along its southern reaches until it became obvious that there was no soon end to the wastes. Here, though, they seemed to be free of the air patrols which searched for them nearer the mountains, and when they finally stepped onto the soft gray sands and began the trek north, it was with a degree of a.s.surance they would not have had closer to the Cloud Range.

Although there was no life upon the desert, it was here that they met the next great hazard of their journey. Suddenly, without warning and-it seemed-without reason, towering geysers of sand would spout upward from the flat surface, a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred feet into the air. The earth would shake with some unknown movement beneath it, and the sun would be obscured by a haze of powdery soil that choked the lungs and made the skin dark and greasy. Several times, the booming e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of earth nearly erupted under their feet, and they were sent in scattering panic to avoid being tossed into the sky and abraided to the bones by the steaming columns of sand. But always they were lucky, missed by miles or inches, and they progressed.

And on the morning of the fourth day, they left the lifeless flats and gained ground where scrubby brush struggled for existence. Here, there were scorpion creatures as large as a man's arm, but the rattle of their claws upon the ground always gave warning of their approach, and no one was bitten, save Crowler, and his bite damaged nothing but his boot.

Here, in the land of scorpions and mutated, scraggly brush that only barely sustained its existence, the first signs of civilization began to appear. At first, there was nothing more than an occasional thrust of refined metal from the bosom of the earth, like a broken blade stabbing the ground. It was always rusted or otherwise pitted with age, as the beams had been which the Shaker had seen in the forest, but it was something, at least, to indicate that they might be on the right track, moving toward areas where pieces of the Blank survived.

Later, they saw the sh.e.l.l of a smashed aircraft, a mammoth thing, circular as the small patrol planes were, but a hundred times as large. There were holes torn in the hull, and the light glinted off strange things concealed in the shadows inside. At the Shaker's insistence, he was permitted to light a torch and enter. Mace went with him, as did Gregor, though no one else felt up to it. Within the damaged structure, they found a great deal of fungus clinging to the walls and to the shapes of what had once been seats. By counting the metal frames of the seats in an un.o.bscured row, they estimated that the plane had carried some nine hundred pa.s.sengers. They were staggered by such a discovery, but the proof was indisputable.

There were two skeletons in the pa.s.senger's cabin, one of them intertwined with ugly, cancerous fungus that s.h.i.+vered whenever one of the three came close to it. The other skeleton's skull was bashed in, the cause of death obvious. Most of the other pa.s.sengers had apparently escaped.

In the control room, which was every bit as large as the entire downstairs of the Shaker's house in Perdune, they found the skeletons of fourteen men. None of the crew, it seemed, had lasted through the grinding impact of the crash. Here, the walls had been stoved in, punctured by rock formations. The nose had been crumbled backward, and the floor had been driven up perilously close to the ceiling near the left-hand wall. Some of the crew had been crushed, others had been decapitated by exploding sheets of pressed hull metal. Some were flung about the chamber in an almost gay disarray, while others remained seated, strapped to the pilot chairs before their instrument cl.u.s.ters, the flesh gone but the spirit apparently still willing.

They left the craft no wiser than they had entered it, though their respect for the civilizations of the past was immense. There had been relics in their home lands, beyond the mountains, of course, though nothing so fantastic as this. Some said the Darklands and Oragonia had been swept clean of most of what had been there, swept clean by mammoth tidal waves that towered hundreds of feet into the air and crashed across the land with the power of the G.o.ds, obliterating history. Since the fossils of sea creatures could often be found a hundred miles inland and even further, such theories were highly regarded.

Farther on, they found the wrecked tangle of what might have been several ground vehicles, though rust and corrosion had destroyed the ma.s.s too much for any guess to be accurate.

For a time, the struggling ma.s.ses of metal and shattered stone-and unidentifiable plastic casings-grew larger and more distinct, until the party walked between walls of litter, down streets of rubble and debris which seemed to sprout of the earth like weeds.

Abruptly, all of this terminated in a crater more than a mile across. The floor of the depression was a smooth, black gla.s.s which was drifted over in most parts with windblown dirt and clumps of dried gra.s.s and weeds. Some tremendous heat seemed to have fused the very soil into a hard, glittering, bubbled surface which rang hollowly under their booted feet.

By evening of that fourth day, they had crossed the crater, walked through more rubble and senseless ruin, and had reached open fields again. This place seemed to have once been cultivated, for there were remnants of stone-bottomed irrigation ditches, and the rusted tubes of what might have been irrigating equipment of some complex design. All that grew here was a tall, bamboo-like reed which soared twelve feet into the air. The stuff grew as thickly as normal gra.s.s, and it presented an almost impenetrable wall. The ground beneath it, as the Shaker attested, was warmed like the ground beneath the jungle had been, though this did not seem much like an amus.e.m.e.nt park so much as a crop.

'But what would they want with such stuff to go to this expense?' Richter asked.

'Who knows. But it must have been precious. To a man who has never seen gold, it might seem valueless too.'

'Well, if it lies in our path,' Richter said, 'I'll welcome it. We must be nearing our goal, and I want to be certain we have cover for the last leg of the journey.'

'Shall I send the Squealers aloft?' Fremlin asked, having set his cages off his shoulders.

'Perhaps it is time for that again,' Richter said.

Two of the black creatures were released, a different two this time. They took to the air with a display of pure joy, dipping and swaying, zooming across the heads of the men before rising over the stalks of bamboo and disappearing to the northeast.

Daborot made a warmer supper than they had been used to since the mountains, and a sort of feast was held in celebration of having gotten this far. Some of the levity of the feast was gone when, inside of an hour, the Squealers had not returned.

Half an hour before dark, almost two hours after the ascension of the Squealers, Richter suggested that the bird master dispatch another of his charges to scout the way and to determine what had happened to the earlier pair.

Fremlin worked with set lips, his face grim, lips bloodless. He spoke to the bird he was about to send aloft, holding it in his hands, cooing to it in a manner that was altogether loving and altogether sober. The bird listened intently, without any of the normal chortlings of good humor which accompanied a chance to fly.

Then Fremlin threw it into the air; it took wing and was gone without acrobatics.

Darkness came too swiftly.

The stars rose.

And the Squealer fell. It dropped from the darkening sky and flapped desperately as it tumbled along the ground. It gained its feet and skittered about somewhat dizzily, making screeching noises that were painful speech.

Fremlin ran to it, calling softly in that inhuman tongue, scooped the bird into his hands and held it to the light.

'What has happened to it?' Richter asked. His own face was tense in the flickering orange of the campfire.

'An arrow in its wing. Through its wing, and grazed its back,' Fremlin said.

'Will it live?'

'It may, it may,' the bird master said, though he did not seem to be the one to administer the proper medicine, for he shook so violently he appeared to be a man fighting a fever.

'Ask it of the others,' Richter said.

And Fremlin and the bird fell to conversation. Everyone was silent as the master elicited information from his charge, and sat forward expectantly as Fremlin turned to deliver the news.

'It says the ramparts of a walled city, partially in ruin, lie to the northeast no more than three miles. The walls are guarded by men in the liverie of Jerry Matabain, so this is the place which we seek.' His voice was hurried, the words stumbling over one another. If he stopped long enough to think, his mind would be swept with emotions, and he knew it.

'The other Squealers?' Richter asked.

'Dead,' Fremlin said.

'How can the bird know for certain?'

'He has seen the men, and he has been shot by them. He surmises that the others were killed, and I reached that same conclusion myself before he spoke his fears.' He pressed the bird to his chest, warming it. It shuddered pathetically, pecked at its bedraggled wing. 'But that is not the worst,' he added.

'And what is the worst?' Richter asked.

'The bird thinks the men may have kept him in sight with the idea of dispatching a plane in this direction. He would have taken evasive action to mislead them, but he required all the energy that remained in him to reach us and warn us.'

In the night above them, to the northeast, the curious drone of an aircraft rode the currents of the cool breeze, drawing nearer!

19.

'The fire!' Richter called, snapping the mesmerized men into action as the hypnotic hum of the approaching aircraft grew steadily louder.

Mace leaped forward, cursing beneath his breath, and tipped a pot of soup onto the flames, stepped back as the hot coals sputtered, as pungent steam rose into the darkness before their faces. A second man, a red-haired youth called Tuk, kicked at the glowing embers, stomped them to death with quick bootheels.

Overhead, the plane broke across the reeds, a blacker circle against the velveteen darkness of the sky, blotting out stars as it swept by. Its almost imperceptible noise set the nerves on edge, though the ears barely heard it.

'Perhaps they didn't see,' Crowler whispered. His voice seemed to carry abnormally far.

'They did,' Mace said.

Five hundred feet away, the oval craft rose, circled, and started back toward them. Suddenly, the night was split open by the thundering sound of a mallet striking a wooden block, again and again, over and over in such close succession that the noise was almost like a drummer's music-except it was ugly and unrhythmic.

'Gunshots!' Shaker Sandow said. He had never heard a gun fired in his life. But having seen a few of the instruments which had survived the Blank, he felt certain that this was just what one of them would sound like.

In front of them, the earth geysered upward under the impact of the slugs. The whine of ricochets which bounced off the flat stones was like the swarming of angry insects on all sides of them. The men farthest from the bamboo turned to make for that scanty cover, and they were struck down so swiftly that only a few of them even had time to manage a scream before embracing death. Blood showered up from them like a fine mist of water, spattered across the faces of men nearby.

The others, moving almost instinctually, without conscious thought, fell to the ground and rolled into the concealing stand of bamboo. They came quickly to their knees and skittered forward, taking the brunt of the reeds on their faces. Blood sprang up on their cheeks, ran from their foreheads into their eyes, blinding them. When it was impossible to move any farther without collapsing with fatigue, they rolled into the gulleyed earth and clung to the stones there, praying to whatever G.o.ds they had renounced on the mountains only days earlier.

Bullets cut through the reedy growths, but the bamboo was hardy enough and deflected the sh.e.l.ls sufficiently to rule out any accuracy on the part of the gunner. Canes were severed by slugs, rattled down between their fellows with hollow, musical sounds and were still.

There was only the hum of the aircraft.

And the smell of earth.

And fear.

The pilot of the ancient craft was not finished, however, and he came back a second time, moving low, snapping forty rounds into the edge of the bamboo field, making the reeds sway in his backwash of air. Then he climbed upward and hovered. The sound of his engines was low, but audible as he waited for survivors to stumble stupidly into the open land beyond the woody gra.s.s.

Shaker Sandow looked around him and there was not another man anywhere nearby. Visibility was no more than six feet about him, but at least no one else seemed sheltered in that radius. Just as well, too. The closer they were, the more deadly a single burst of fire might prove to be.

The night seemed unnaturally quiet, as if all the world were dead, even the wind. The only sound was the ever-present background drone of the silver aircraft.

But as he waited for the attack to be renewed, he realized that the silence was a false picture. It only seemed silent here, because he had been concentrating all of his attention on the enemy vehicle, listening intently for its approach. There were other sounds: dying sounds, wounded sounds. To his left, someone was choking on his own blood. The twisted way his words worked up his shattered throat was evidence that the pilot was soon to have taken another victim. To his right, the sounds of two men talking quietly came to him. One of them was wounded; he could tell that much by the anguished tone of voice, just below the level of a squeal of pain. The other seemed to be trying to help his damaged friend. He could not make out the words, though. Ahead, someone was whimpering in pain and terror.

Suddenly, he wondered about Gregor and Mace. Were they dead? Or dying? He was fairly certain that they were not among those who had been killed before reaching the perimeter of the bamboo field. But once they had reached concealment, had they been struck down?

'Mace!' he called out, his voice sounding older and more useless than ever. What a fool he had been! What a fool to risk everything to charge blindly into an alien land where the rules by which he was used to playing did not exist! He had risked both their lives as well as his own, and he saw now that the old have no rights whatsoever to ask the young to fight their wars for them.

'Shaker? Where are you?' It was Mace's voice. He was certain of that, and with that certainty, he felt as if twenty years of life had been lifted from his shoulders.

'Stay where you are!' Shaker Sandow shouted. 'If you move, the reeds above will move, and they'll have something to shoot at.'

'I've already seen that,' Mace said.

Of course, he would have, Sandow thought. 'Where is Gregor, Mace? Have you seen him?'

'Beside me,' Mace said. 'He was beside me out there, and I fair carried him in here.'

'Fair killed me in the process, too!' Gregor called.

The Shaker realized he was crying, and he wiped the tears from his cheeks and pretended he was too old for such behavior. The best thing was not that Mace and Gregor were alive and unharmed-though that was a G.o.dly gift indeed. The best thing was that, even now, they were jousting with words in the same good humor they always had.

When the flesh dies before the spirit, Sandow thought, it is only a sorrow. But when the spirit dies before the flesh and apathy and cowardice set in, then it is a tragedy.

The pilot dived, firing.

Bullets snapped through the bamboo.

Directly before the Shaker, someone screamed, and the reeds parted, admitted a pale, gangling youth with blood smeared all over his face and chest. He looked at Sandow who reached a hand for him. He took the Shaker's slim fingers, made a few inches on his knees, then fell over, his face shoved into the soft earth, and was done.

The silence returned, then the screams and the moans of agony from the wounded and the dying. But one sound did not return: the hum of the aircraft. It had left them, at least for the moment.

'This is the commander!' Richter shouted from somewhere closer the edge of the field. 'We may not have much time, so listen carefully. We'll group at the edge of the bamboo, where we entered. If you see a wounded man as you come out, see if you can bring him with you. If you see dead men, note their names until you can tell me who they were. Now, hurry! The devil may be coming back with reinforcements!'

The Shaker pushed to his feet, separated the reeds before himself and struggled through to the open where Richter waited ten feet along the wall of gra.s.s. He had not seen any wounded men himself, but others had. In five minutes, a list of dead had been prepared. There were sixteen men who would not continue the journey. Of the twenty-six who remained, five were wounded. Crowler had a shoulder wound that had already begun to clot; the bullet had torn clear through. Three enlisted men suffered varying degrees of injury: Daborot had a creased skull, from which blood poured freely, though it did not appear to be a serious condition; a boy named Halbersly had lost a thumb, but a tourniquet and bandages had already stopped the bleeding; Barrister, the soldier who had monitored the first climbing party that had met with disaster, was in the worst shape of all, for he had three bullets inside him-one in his right hip, one in his right side which had sliced through a good bit of meat, and the last in the biceps of his right arm. All the wounds bled, and all of them looked ugly. Fortunately, he was unconscious. And the last of the five injured was Gregor. There was a bullet through his left foot, and he could not stand on that leg at all.

Mace seemed in worse condition than the apprentice 'There was nothing I could do, Shaker!' he said, almost pitifully, his great, broad face deeply lined, etched with fear and anger.

'I know that Mace.'

'Perhaps I should have stretched upon him-'