Kenneth Bulmer - Keys to the Dimensions 03, page 11
Val shuddered deeply. Her slight form, travel-stained and weary, trembled.
Tony shouted, “By Arlan!” He fumbled at his waist.
Nyllee—Nyllee screamed out an exact reference to a frog’s more unpleasant habits and snatched out her green-beam projector. The pale green fire washed over the white-gowned woman.
She stood, tall and commanding, indifferent to the ray. The green beam recoiled, washing like a splashing hosepipe, died baffled.
“Run!” choked Val, sobbing. She snatched at Redfern’s arm. “Run!”
Turmoil broke out in the hall. Men and creatures from other dimensions broke and fled. The rebounding green beam had sliced into a column and now a section of the flat roof caved in in a smother of dust and tiles.
The smashing noise of the fall deafened them. Redfern saw the woman jerk at the chain. From the shadows beneath the intact room to her rear he saw a movement; he saw a large floppy hat, a long stained raincoat. He saw a shape move purposefully forward and where the face should be he could see only twin pits of feral fire.
“A Trug!”
Now he knew.
People scattered in all directions. Narumble the Fourth staggered back, his hard face broken and working with fear. Nyllee fired again. Then Redfern saw she had angled the beam, was bringing down more of the roof. Val’s tuggings at last brought Redfern into action. He pushed Tony.
“Let’s get out of here, Tony! Bring Nyllee! Hurry!”
But Tony shouted in triumph. He swung up the Paneco, aimed the innocent-looking nozzle into the dust and turmoil.
“The Paneco will settle the Montevarchi! This is the moment we have waited for! All the dead slaves of the mines of Irunium join me now in this moment of revenge and triumph!”
“No! No!” screamed Narumble. “You will destroy everything! Don’t fire the Paneco, you fool!”
The bureaucrat, his crimson robes swirling, leaped for Tony. The gun muzzle jerked up. Momentarily, Redfern thought he glimpsed a slender line of vibration stemming from the muzzle, like air dancing above a hot plate; but whether the line of tremblation originated at the gun muzzle or collapsed back onto it from the side of the building, he could not be sure. What he did see was the sudden coalescing of that insubstantial line, a thickening and a solidifying into a solid ebony blackness. Where that black pencil touched, the building ceased to exist. Air crashed in to replace the sudden vacuity, dust puffed and dissipated. The molecules of the stone and brick and tile had been completely shattered.
Cursing, Tony flung Narumble off.
He aimed the Paneco deliberately for the woman in the sheer white gown and her dancing gibbering manikin. The black pencil of complete annihilation swept down the roof, a cornice, a column, disrupting them all, centered on the woman’s breast.
And then Redfern gasped anew.
That ravening force of utter destruction, which drew its power from the very objects it annihilated, blossomed and spread; like the head of a cobra it puffed out to form a globular shell about the woman and her dwarf.
Her shriek of maniacal laughter gushed out.
Then Nyllee had grabbed Tony’s arm. Mentioning a frog’s bowels, she shouted: “She’s got some sort of defense against it, Tony! Come on! Now’s our chance to get away!”.
Val began to run, dragging Redfern. “We won’t get another chance!” she screamed.
Cursing with all the bitter hatred of thwarted vengeance, Tony followed. Together the four dimensional-travelers scampered out of the building beneath the gilded crossbow and fled along the Street of Cutlers.
The last thing they heard as they sped from the confusion was Narumble the Fourth, as he heaved himself up, shaking, crying: “A Paneco has never failed before! I don’t believe it!”
“You can’t have everything, Tony,” Redfern snapped, leading on at a dead run. “That was the Contessa, wasn’t it? Well, from all I know of her, she’ll have an answer to everything!”
“The cat!” Val panted. “And we didn’t get the fake teeth!”
Redfern hurt himself laughing as he pounded for the house with the cellar that contained a gateway to another world.
Instead of the crone waiting in vain for her new choppers they confronted a couple of guards in the cellar, chunky men wearing goggles and leather-covered metal helmets. The four travelers cowed them with their new weapons, clustered, and, on the word of command from Val, jumped into the air. Eighteen inches from the floor Redfern felt that tiny jerk of disorientation and the next moment he was staggering on a soft undulating ground and choking in the billowing battering of ribbons and scarves of spidersilk.
“This way!” Val set off, pushing doggedly through the spiderstrands. Swinging his sword, Redfern helped clear the way. The opus number had changed. Instead of the Number Five in E flat major of Opus 73, he could have sworn as he struggled on that he could hear the Symphony Number Six in F major, Opus 68. The conceit amused him. Perhaps those two works were all this world boasted, the Emperor Concerto and the Pastoral Symphony. If so, they were good choices.
Val screamed suddenly and stopped and Tony bumped into her.
The scent of jasmine drenched them.
A shape moved. A vast whiteness, rounded and furred, pranced and danced and cavorted through the unending stream of blowing ribbons. At first, what with all these strands of spidersilk billowing about, Redfern thought it had to be a spider: an enormous spider with treetrunk legs and giant mandibles clicking and hungering for their juices.
Nyllee, with her habitual reference, did not hesitate. Her green-beam weapon gouted. The thing, whatever it was, gibbered and mewed and, half its body blown off, tumbled backward into the blizzard of shreds and ribbons. It wasn’t a spider; just what it really was Redfern never knew. He pushed Val on and shouted, hard and urgently.
“Good on you, Nyllee. Now let’s reach that other Gate—fast!”
They cut and hacked their way through, and Redfern’s back itched all the time in dire apprehension that another corpse-white vampiric monster would drop suction-cup-like upon him.
“We’re here,” Val gasped. Spidersilk clung about her and diademed her hair. They were all panting and fearful and anxious to get out of this maniacal dimension.
Through the swirling storm of blowing strands Redfern clearly saw above them another white vast softness squashing down. He yelled. His mouth was wide open as he plunged bodily into foaming water.
Thrashing and gasping they clawed their way to the surface. Brown gushing water, foaming over tangled half-submerged trees, broke over them. He caught Val in a grip he swore death would not break. A log rolled nearby and he flung his other arm over it. After a struggle that left him winded and limp, he got Val and himself half-astride, half-lying on the log as it surged in the current.
She screamed in his ear: “The river’s flooded more! Where we took off from the bank’s under water—that means the other Gate into the caverns is in the river now, too!”
He nodded savagely, flinging water from his hair and eyes.
“We’re being carried downstream. Toward the nodal point. When we hit it, if we hit it, transmit us then, Val!”
“I can sense it,” she gasped back. “Coming up!”
Tony and Nyllee, struggling together, swept past on a rolling log, farther out into midstream. Redfern caught a flashing glimpse of Nyllee’s superb figure with the white robe cut and plastered to it. Tony was gasping for air. They rushed helter-skelter on, caught firmly in the dashing current, being swept faster and faster downstream.
“They’re going too fast—they’re floating away!” Val shouted.
“Where’s the Gate, Val, the Gate!” shrieked Redfern.
Water foamed and broke over them. His ears rang. Water stung his eyes. He spat mouthfuls and more mouthfuls sloshed in as he gasped for air.
“It’s almost here, almost here! But Tony! And Nyllee!”
“They’re gone, Val! Think of Gait and the Wizards. We’ll try to get back for Tony and Nyllee—”
And then, with only the faintest of jolts to tell him he had transited, he swallowed more water and sat up in the middle of a plashing underground stream in total darkness.
The flashlights showed them the cavern of the serpents.
They moved on, not talking, shrunken by the experience. Without their two companions they seemed naked, defenseless.
Yet, what else had there been to do?
When the glow of phosphorescent moss ahead indicated they were nearing the spot where they had encountered the giant serpent, Redfern hesitated. He took Val’s arm again. She responded; but her smile was wan.
“We’ll get them back, Val,” he promised her.
Since becoming mixed up with these crazy dimensions his path had been pocked by losses. First he’d mislaid David Macklin and Alec and Sarah, not to mention the brachiating dice-fiend Moke. Then the shufflers from Thothtoreth had gone off—wait. In between that he’d seen poor old Obo shot down. He hadn’t liked that at all and didn’t like to recall it. Gait had gone missing in a different way, and Mother Haapan had rejuvenated herself into a pulse-pounding piece of pulchritude. And now Tony and Nyllee were gone. Well.
That left Val.
He refused to let the thought roll on.
About the only worthwhile object left him was to get Val safely back to Montrado. He’d have to do what he could to help the Wizards of Senchuria first; but he promised himself, not without a sense of the pitiful grotesqueness of the promise, that he’d cut everything if Val ran into more danger. She’d about had her fill of that. This time he’d make her think of her own skin first.
And to hell with Arlan.
Val was the key—the key to Montrado—and the key to Earth. The serpent’s mate slithered icily from the darkness.
Looking at that sinuous length, that colossal wedge-shaped head, those curved shining fangs as the head swayed above them, Redfern wondered if they’d have time for Val to be the first and most important key—the key to Senchuria.
He aimed the green-beam weapon in shaking fingers. He pressed the firing stud. Nothing happened. The two yellow eyes blazed down hypnotically on him.
“The river! It fouled up the gun!” he gasped.
Val cowered back, trembling. Resolutely, he pulled out the Paneco. For all he knew it might bring the whole roof of this world in on top of him. But there was nothing else he could do. The head swayed and looped and darted—
Redfern pulled the trigger.
That insubstantial line of gossamer tremblation lashed out, thickened, coalesced into midnight blackness. The head of the serpent puffed into dust and the dank air of the cavern rolled in to fill the sudden vacuum. Their ears rang with the concussion.
The thick trunk writhed and leaped. Its scales gleamed and scintillated, reminding Redfern of the scales of the Trugs he had seen. Then the body flopped over and lay still. He let out his breath in a gust of relief.
“I still didn’t like it.” He breathed unsteadily. “But…”
“I think even Arlan would condone the act,” Val said in a small voice.
The roof groaned and dust and chips of rock fell; but the vaulted groinings held, fast pinioned to the unknown world above.
They went on. At every noise they made, every stone clink, every foot-scrape, Redfern shuddered, frantically aware that there could easily be other great serpents. He sweated and turned every which way with his eyes striving to pierce the darkness. The journey seemed never-ending. Then, blessedly, Val was saying: “We’re here, Scobie. The Portal.”
He felt he had aged years as he put his arms around Val and waited for the transit.
For a man who didn’t like being pushed around, Scobie Redfern had recently been pushed further and harder than any man he could imagine had been pushed.
The next instant they stood on the cool stones of the vaults beneath the castle of the Wizards of Senchuria.
A weirdly incongruous feeling of coming home hit Redfern.
The feeling of the Narangonese Paneco strapped to his waist bolstered him and gave him a deceptive suggestion of strength and competence which the memory of that giant serpent’s gross death bolstered even as it shamed. He felt a lightening of spirit. The blood thrummed through his body and while not looking forward to the coming strife he could at least face it in the rationalizing out of the lack of alternatives that confronted him. If he had to fight then at least he fought with good weapons. He was dimly aware of dark depths he had never suspected within himself.
Val called. Together they ran for the gemmed escalator. He burst out onto the courtyard and started for the battlements, the Paneco was in his hand as he ran. This time he was the hunter. It made a pleasant change.
Just what he had expected he couldn’t have said: the city exactly as he had left it with the people clustering on the battlements; smoke and flame and destruction; a city of dead men; the Gara’hec resurrected into a second blasphemous life; deserted and abandoned walls and buildings.
Instead Vivasjan hurried forward, his face sagging with despair. No great sound came from the walls. The sun, declining now, shone burnished arms into crevices and alleys between the buildings and walls sparkling the jeweled surfaces into blinding splendor.
“You have returned—but too late, too late! We must hurry. All is lost—”
“Too late!” gasped Val. She looked outraged.
“Hurry, hurry!” moaned Vivasjan. He went to brush past them, scurrying for castle walls to their rear. Other people followed him, old men and women, youngsters, Gara’hec and Suslincs intermingled with them. It was a rout.
“Wait! Wait!” shouted Redfern. “We have the weapons!”
“Too late!” and Vivasjan, supported by his close bodyguard of Wizards, hurried away.
“Well…” began Val. Then she saw Gait.
His dark bearded face revealed all too clearly now the hollowness of the man. Mina at his side was more supporting him than being helped. Then Mother Haapan, radiant still in the beauty of her youth yet with a strained and frightened expression on her face, pushed past with the man who had come for her in the hall of rejuvenation.
Redfern grabbed Gait and swung him to a halt.
The philosopher stared at him in uncomprehending panic.
Redfern shook him. “What’s going on, Gait?”
He babbled. Mina whispered, frightened: “Val! You have come back—that is good. You can help the other Porteur. We are evacuating the city of Senchuria—”
“Evacuating? Another Porteur?”
“Yes, yes. Didn’t you hear me? Hurry with us, now. They came for us, they will help us, they are taking us through to another dimension. But we must hurry. The war machines of the Infalgon are almost at the walls!”
Val glared at Redfern. Mother Haapan, passing, called across. “Val! You’re just in time to be saved. Hurry!”
“This other Porteur,” Redfem said, harshly. “Where is she?”
“By the Ruby Gate, the other side of the Chrysoberyl Wing. They came through, and now they are taking us to safety.”
At a dead run Redfern headed for the Chrysoberyl Wing and the gardens of chrysanthemums and the Ruby Gate beyond. Val panted along beside him. They burst through the scurrying people, trampling over flowerbeds. As they reached the gate, an imposing structure faced with solid rows of rubies, he heard the first ominous cracks of sound from the walls. A quick glance showed him rivulets opening in the stones. The Infalgon war machines were breaking through. He hesitated; the Paneco could stop them; but he knew as well as he knew anything in this life he had to get to this other Porteur.
The Ruby Gate swayed. A whole rank of rubies chipped away and a fortune rolled in the dust.
People screamed and scattered. A short and wide man with enormous energy and vigor leaped toward Redfern. He swung a long sword and he wore a strange glinting armor. At his waist was belted a hand weapon of a pattern unfamiliar to Redfern. He looked the incarnation of the devil, a man who could cut an ox in two with one stroke of sword.
He yelled at Redfern through the dust and Redfern was conscious of the words through the translator band he still wore in his hair.
“Get back in line! Women and children first!”
Out of the dust a giant of a man lumbered up with an ax so big no mortal could lift it, let alone wield it. His seamed and gigantic face showed all the fierce savagery of the barbarian. A straggle of fugitives eddied out of his path and bolted frenziedly for the Ruby Gate.
“Hold them back, Fezius!” rumbled the giant. “Sarah is getting swamped!”
“You great buffoon, Offa, what in Amra’s name do you think I’m doing!”
“You don’t have to namby-pamby them! By Mac the Black I’ll lay a few low before—”
“Sarah!” yelled Redfern. “Do you mean… Sarah?”
The squat man looked at him as though he’d crawled out of some unnameable sink. “This oaf has ears he doesn’t know how to use.” Then, like quicksilver: “What do you know of my Sarah?”
“Is David Macklin here? And Alec—?”
“Hai! This one does know!”
“This girl—this is Val—she is a Porteur, too!” yelled Redfern through the din. “She can help Sarah—I’m going to deal with the Infalgon war machines…”
“Another girl with the power! By Amra, that is good!” Then Fezius absorbed what Redfern had said. He frowned and his face looked like a gargoyle over a water spout. “Fight them! They have weapons—fearful forces—”
“And I have this!” shouted Redfern, brandishing the Paneco. He remembered Macklin talking to Sarah, back on that tree platform on Myrcinus, about Fezius and Offa. So Macklin had sent his friends after him! He hadn’t forgotten! The realization warmed Redfern afresh. He turned and started back against the flow of fugitives.
Before he reached the walls Fezius and Offa rolled along at his sides. He felt vastly comforted.
Fezius grunted: “We came looking for you, Scobie Redfern. David kept blaming himself that you had fallen into the Montevarchi’s hands. They only just escaped with their lives; but you had vanished. They could guess where. We’ve been following your trail… and then this pleasant little dust-up with the Infalgon interrupted.”
Tony shouted, “By Arlan!” He fumbled at his waist.
Nyllee—Nyllee screamed out an exact reference to a frog’s more unpleasant habits and snatched out her green-beam projector. The pale green fire washed over the white-gowned woman.
She stood, tall and commanding, indifferent to the ray. The green beam recoiled, washing like a splashing hosepipe, died baffled.
“Run!” choked Val, sobbing. She snatched at Redfern’s arm. “Run!”
Turmoil broke out in the hall. Men and creatures from other dimensions broke and fled. The rebounding green beam had sliced into a column and now a section of the flat roof caved in in a smother of dust and tiles.
The smashing noise of the fall deafened them. Redfern saw the woman jerk at the chain. From the shadows beneath the intact room to her rear he saw a movement; he saw a large floppy hat, a long stained raincoat. He saw a shape move purposefully forward and where the face should be he could see only twin pits of feral fire.
“A Trug!”
Now he knew.
People scattered in all directions. Narumble the Fourth staggered back, his hard face broken and working with fear. Nyllee fired again. Then Redfern saw she had angled the beam, was bringing down more of the roof. Val’s tuggings at last brought Redfern into action. He pushed Tony.
“Let’s get out of here, Tony! Bring Nyllee! Hurry!”
But Tony shouted in triumph. He swung up the Paneco, aimed the innocent-looking nozzle into the dust and turmoil.
“The Paneco will settle the Montevarchi! This is the moment we have waited for! All the dead slaves of the mines of Irunium join me now in this moment of revenge and triumph!”
“No! No!” screamed Narumble. “You will destroy everything! Don’t fire the Paneco, you fool!”
The bureaucrat, his crimson robes swirling, leaped for Tony. The gun muzzle jerked up. Momentarily, Redfern thought he glimpsed a slender line of vibration stemming from the muzzle, like air dancing above a hot plate; but whether the line of tremblation originated at the gun muzzle or collapsed back onto it from the side of the building, he could not be sure. What he did see was the sudden coalescing of that insubstantial line, a thickening and a solidifying into a solid ebony blackness. Where that black pencil touched, the building ceased to exist. Air crashed in to replace the sudden vacuity, dust puffed and dissipated. The molecules of the stone and brick and tile had been completely shattered.
Cursing, Tony flung Narumble off.
He aimed the Paneco deliberately for the woman in the sheer white gown and her dancing gibbering manikin. The black pencil of complete annihilation swept down the roof, a cornice, a column, disrupting them all, centered on the woman’s breast.
And then Redfern gasped anew.
That ravening force of utter destruction, which drew its power from the very objects it annihilated, blossomed and spread; like the head of a cobra it puffed out to form a globular shell about the woman and her dwarf.
Her shriek of maniacal laughter gushed out.
Then Nyllee had grabbed Tony’s arm. Mentioning a frog’s bowels, she shouted: “She’s got some sort of defense against it, Tony! Come on! Now’s our chance to get away!”.
Val began to run, dragging Redfern. “We won’t get another chance!” she screamed.
Cursing with all the bitter hatred of thwarted vengeance, Tony followed. Together the four dimensional-travelers scampered out of the building beneath the gilded crossbow and fled along the Street of Cutlers.
The last thing they heard as they sped from the confusion was Narumble the Fourth, as he heaved himself up, shaking, crying: “A Paneco has never failed before! I don’t believe it!”
“You can’t have everything, Tony,” Redfern snapped, leading on at a dead run. “That was the Contessa, wasn’t it? Well, from all I know of her, she’ll have an answer to everything!”
“The cat!” Val panted. “And we didn’t get the fake teeth!”
Redfern hurt himself laughing as he pounded for the house with the cellar that contained a gateway to another world.
Instead of the crone waiting in vain for her new choppers they confronted a couple of guards in the cellar, chunky men wearing goggles and leather-covered metal helmets. The four travelers cowed them with their new weapons, clustered, and, on the word of command from Val, jumped into the air. Eighteen inches from the floor Redfern felt that tiny jerk of disorientation and the next moment he was staggering on a soft undulating ground and choking in the billowing battering of ribbons and scarves of spidersilk.
“This way!” Val set off, pushing doggedly through the spiderstrands. Swinging his sword, Redfern helped clear the way. The opus number had changed. Instead of the Number Five in E flat major of Opus 73, he could have sworn as he struggled on that he could hear the Symphony Number Six in F major, Opus 68. The conceit amused him. Perhaps those two works were all this world boasted, the Emperor Concerto and the Pastoral Symphony. If so, they were good choices.
Val screamed suddenly and stopped and Tony bumped into her.
The scent of jasmine drenched them.
A shape moved. A vast whiteness, rounded and furred, pranced and danced and cavorted through the unending stream of blowing ribbons. At first, what with all these strands of spidersilk billowing about, Redfern thought it had to be a spider: an enormous spider with treetrunk legs and giant mandibles clicking and hungering for their juices.
Nyllee, with her habitual reference, did not hesitate. Her green-beam weapon gouted. The thing, whatever it was, gibbered and mewed and, half its body blown off, tumbled backward into the blizzard of shreds and ribbons. It wasn’t a spider; just what it really was Redfern never knew. He pushed Val on and shouted, hard and urgently.
“Good on you, Nyllee. Now let’s reach that other Gate—fast!”
They cut and hacked their way through, and Redfern’s back itched all the time in dire apprehension that another corpse-white vampiric monster would drop suction-cup-like upon him.
“We’re here,” Val gasped. Spidersilk clung about her and diademed her hair. They were all panting and fearful and anxious to get out of this maniacal dimension.
Through the swirling storm of blowing strands Redfern clearly saw above them another white vast softness squashing down. He yelled. His mouth was wide open as he plunged bodily into foaming water.
Thrashing and gasping they clawed their way to the surface. Brown gushing water, foaming over tangled half-submerged trees, broke over them. He caught Val in a grip he swore death would not break. A log rolled nearby and he flung his other arm over it. After a struggle that left him winded and limp, he got Val and himself half-astride, half-lying on the log as it surged in the current.
She screamed in his ear: “The river’s flooded more! Where we took off from the bank’s under water—that means the other Gate into the caverns is in the river now, too!”
He nodded savagely, flinging water from his hair and eyes.
“We’re being carried downstream. Toward the nodal point. When we hit it, if we hit it, transmit us then, Val!”
“I can sense it,” she gasped back. “Coming up!”
Tony and Nyllee, struggling together, swept past on a rolling log, farther out into midstream. Redfern caught a flashing glimpse of Nyllee’s superb figure with the white robe cut and plastered to it. Tony was gasping for air. They rushed helter-skelter on, caught firmly in the dashing current, being swept faster and faster downstream.
“They’re going too fast—they’re floating away!” Val shouted.
“Where’s the Gate, Val, the Gate!” shrieked Redfern.
Water foamed and broke over them. His ears rang. Water stung his eyes. He spat mouthfuls and more mouthfuls sloshed in as he gasped for air.
“It’s almost here, almost here! But Tony! And Nyllee!”
“They’re gone, Val! Think of Gait and the Wizards. We’ll try to get back for Tony and Nyllee—”
And then, with only the faintest of jolts to tell him he had transited, he swallowed more water and sat up in the middle of a plashing underground stream in total darkness.
The flashlights showed them the cavern of the serpents.
They moved on, not talking, shrunken by the experience. Without their two companions they seemed naked, defenseless.
Yet, what else had there been to do?
When the glow of phosphorescent moss ahead indicated they were nearing the spot where they had encountered the giant serpent, Redfern hesitated. He took Val’s arm again. She responded; but her smile was wan.
“We’ll get them back, Val,” he promised her.
Since becoming mixed up with these crazy dimensions his path had been pocked by losses. First he’d mislaid David Macklin and Alec and Sarah, not to mention the brachiating dice-fiend Moke. Then the shufflers from Thothtoreth had gone off—wait. In between that he’d seen poor old Obo shot down. He hadn’t liked that at all and didn’t like to recall it. Gait had gone missing in a different way, and Mother Haapan had rejuvenated herself into a pulse-pounding piece of pulchritude. And now Tony and Nyllee were gone. Well.
That left Val.
He refused to let the thought roll on.
About the only worthwhile object left him was to get Val safely back to Montrado. He’d have to do what he could to help the Wizards of Senchuria first; but he promised himself, not without a sense of the pitiful grotesqueness of the promise, that he’d cut everything if Val ran into more danger. She’d about had her fill of that. This time he’d make her think of her own skin first.
And to hell with Arlan.
Val was the key—the key to Montrado—and the key to Earth. The serpent’s mate slithered icily from the darkness.
Looking at that sinuous length, that colossal wedge-shaped head, those curved shining fangs as the head swayed above them, Redfern wondered if they’d have time for Val to be the first and most important key—the key to Senchuria.
He aimed the green-beam weapon in shaking fingers. He pressed the firing stud. Nothing happened. The two yellow eyes blazed down hypnotically on him.
“The river! It fouled up the gun!” he gasped.
Val cowered back, trembling. Resolutely, he pulled out the Paneco. For all he knew it might bring the whole roof of this world in on top of him. But there was nothing else he could do. The head swayed and looped and darted—
Redfern pulled the trigger.
That insubstantial line of gossamer tremblation lashed out, thickened, coalesced into midnight blackness. The head of the serpent puffed into dust and the dank air of the cavern rolled in to fill the sudden vacuum. Their ears rang with the concussion.
The thick trunk writhed and leaped. Its scales gleamed and scintillated, reminding Redfern of the scales of the Trugs he had seen. Then the body flopped over and lay still. He let out his breath in a gust of relief.
“I still didn’t like it.” He breathed unsteadily. “But…”
“I think even Arlan would condone the act,” Val said in a small voice.
The roof groaned and dust and chips of rock fell; but the vaulted groinings held, fast pinioned to the unknown world above.
They went on. At every noise they made, every stone clink, every foot-scrape, Redfern shuddered, frantically aware that there could easily be other great serpents. He sweated and turned every which way with his eyes striving to pierce the darkness. The journey seemed never-ending. Then, blessedly, Val was saying: “We’re here, Scobie. The Portal.”
He felt he had aged years as he put his arms around Val and waited for the transit.
For a man who didn’t like being pushed around, Scobie Redfern had recently been pushed further and harder than any man he could imagine had been pushed.
The next instant they stood on the cool stones of the vaults beneath the castle of the Wizards of Senchuria.
A weirdly incongruous feeling of coming home hit Redfern.
The feeling of the Narangonese Paneco strapped to his waist bolstered him and gave him a deceptive suggestion of strength and competence which the memory of that giant serpent’s gross death bolstered even as it shamed. He felt a lightening of spirit. The blood thrummed through his body and while not looking forward to the coming strife he could at least face it in the rationalizing out of the lack of alternatives that confronted him. If he had to fight then at least he fought with good weapons. He was dimly aware of dark depths he had never suspected within himself.
Val called. Together they ran for the gemmed escalator. He burst out onto the courtyard and started for the battlements, the Paneco was in his hand as he ran. This time he was the hunter. It made a pleasant change.
Just what he had expected he couldn’t have said: the city exactly as he had left it with the people clustering on the battlements; smoke and flame and destruction; a city of dead men; the Gara’hec resurrected into a second blasphemous life; deserted and abandoned walls and buildings.
Instead Vivasjan hurried forward, his face sagging with despair. No great sound came from the walls. The sun, declining now, shone burnished arms into crevices and alleys between the buildings and walls sparkling the jeweled surfaces into blinding splendor.
“You have returned—but too late, too late! We must hurry. All is lost—”
“Too late!” gasped Val. She looked outraged.
“Hurry, hurry!” moaned Vivasjan. He went to brush past them, scurrying for castle walls to their rear. Other people followed him, old men and women, youngsters, Gara’hec and Suslincs intermingled with them. It was a rout.
“Wait! Wait!” shouted Redfern. “We have the weapons!”
“Too late!” and Vivasjan, supported by his close bodyguard of Wizards, hurried away.
“Well…” began Val. Then she saw Gait.
His dark bearded face revealed all too clearly now the hollowness of the man. Mina at his side was more supporting him than being helped. Then Mother Haapan, radiant still in the beauty of her youth yet with a strained and frightened expression on her face, pushed past with the man who had come for her in the hall of rejuvenation.
Redfern grabbed Gait and swung him to a halt.
The philosopher stared at him in uncomprehending panic.
Redfern shook him. “What’s going on, Gait?”
He babbled. Mina whispered, frightened: “Val! You have come back—that is good. You can help the other Porteur. We are evacuating the city of Senchuria—”
“Evacuating? Another Porteur?”
“Yes, yes. Didn’t you hear me? Hurry with us, now. They came for us, they will help us, they are taking us through to another dimension. But we must hurry. The war machines of the Infalgon are almost at the walls!”
Val glared at Redfern. Mother Haapan, passing, called across. “Val! You’re just in time to be saved. Hurry!”
“This other Porteur,” Redfem said, harshly. “Where is she?”
“By the Ruby Gate, the other side of the Chrysoberyl Wing. They came through, and now they are taking us to safety.”
At a dead run Redfern headed for the Chrysoberyl Wing and the gardens of chrysanthemums and the Ruby Gate beyond. Val panted along beside him. They burst through the scurrying people, trampling over flowerbeds. As they reached the gate, an imposing structure faced with solid rows of rubies, he heard the first ominous cracks of sound from the walls. A quick glance showed him rivulets opening in the stones. The Infalgon war machines were breaking through. He hesitated; the Paneco could stop them; but he knew as well as he knew anything in this life he had to get to this other Porteur.
The Ruby Gate swayed. A whole rank of rubies chipped away and a fortune rolled in the dust.
People screamed and scattered. A short and wide man with enormous energy and vigor leaped toward Redfern. He swung a long sword and he wore a strange glinting armor. At his waist was belted a hand weapon of a pattern unfamiliar to Redfern. He looked the incarnation of the devil, a man who could cut an ox in two with one stroke of sword.
He yelled at Redfern through the dust and Redfern was conscious of the words through the translator band he still wore in his hair.
“Get back in line! Women and children first!”
Out of the dust a giant of a man lumbered up with an ax so big no mortal could lift it, let alone wield it. His seamed and gigantic face showed all the fierce savagery of the barbarian. A straggle of fugitives eddied out of his path and bolted frenziedly for the Ruby Gate.
“Hold them back, Fezius!” rumbled the giant. “Sarah is getting swamped!”
“You great buffoon, Offa, what in Amra’s name do you think I’m doing!”
“You don’t have to namby-pamby them! By Mac the Black I’ll lay a few low before—”
“Sarah!” yelled Redfern. “Do you mean… Sarah?”
The squat man looked at him as though he’d crawled out of some unnameable sink. “This oaf has ears he doesn’t know how to use.” Then, like quicksilver: “What do you know of my Sarah?”
“Is David Macklin here? And Alec—?”
“Hai! This one does know!”
“This girl—this is Val—she is a Porteur, too!” yelled Redfern through the din. “She can help Sarah—I’m going to deal with the Infalgon war machines…”
“Another girl with the power! By Amra, that is good!” Then Fezius absorbed what Redfern had said. He frowned and his face looked like a gargoyle over a water spout. “Fight them! They have weapons—fearful forces—”
“And I have this!” shouted Redfern, brandishing the Paneco. He remembered Macklin talking to Sarah, back on that tree platform on Myrcinus, about Fezius and Offa. So Macklin had sent his friends after him! He hadn’t forgotten! The realization warmed Redfern afresh. He turned and started back against the flow of fugitives.
Before he reached the walls Fezius and Offa rolled along at his sides. He felt vastly comforted.
Fezius grunted: “We came looking for you, Scobie Redfern. David kept blaming himself that you had fallen into the Montevarchi’s hands. They only just escaped with their lives; but you had vanished. They could guess where. We’ve been following your trail… and then this pleasant little dust-up with the Infalgon interrupted.”
