Part 11 (2/2)

'Very well,' Shaker Sandow said. 'Ill see to it in just a few moments, when I've taken a bite of food and have had a chance to clear my mind of cobwebs.'

Since the Shaker was not attempting to read the minds of men, the silver reading plate was not necessary, though the chants were. He worked through the words in all the strange tongues of the sorcerers, and at last he was prepared to strike upward with his mind, to sail above the stalks of bamboo and seek out the nature of the landscape to all sides of them.

His eyes remained open.

They saw nothing.

His mouth went slack.

His hands hung uselessly at his sides.

A bead of drool appeared on his lips.

It was as if he had vacated his body. And he had.

And then he was back, blinking his eyes, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his s.h.i.+rt. He drew a very deep breath and settled his strained nerves with a last relaxative chant that took his voice down through all the registers of the musical range until he was singing a low base that made the words almost unintelligible.

When he was finished, Commander Richter leaned forward and said, 'What have you seen?'

The city is but a mile ahead,' Sandow affirmed. 'We are very close indeed. There are great black ramparts, walls easily eighty foot high. I could see no stone marks, no seams in all that encircling masonry, and odd substance indeed. Upon the walls are stationed soldiers in the colors of the Oragonian Empire, and they are armed with devices which they have mined from the storehouse of the dead city. I did not see any way in which we could breach those walls in our small numbers and with the meager bows and arrows we possess. To complicate matters, I found that they have chosen a much more dangerous method of dealing with us than sending searchers in our path.'

'That is?' Richter asked.

They have encircled the bamboo field with torch-bearers, and they have lighted the dry reeds at the perimeter. Even now, the fires burn in toward us, leaving black ash and little else in their wake. We should soon smell the smoke-and feel the heat.'

'But this stuff will go up like well-cured kindling!' Richter gasped. 'When it has finished and the smoke has cleared, they would find nothing but our bones!'

'I doubt they desire to find anything more than that,' Shaker Sandow said, smiling grimly.

Commander Richter was about to speak when his face changed from fury and confusion, slipped on an expression of graveyard humor. 'Aye, and you wouldn't be sitting there so smugly if you expected all of us to die,' the old officer said. 'Out with it now, friend. What else did you discover?'

'An escape,' Sandow said. He smiled the same smile that Richter used. 'And perhaps a way into the city. Not far from here, but twenty feet ahead, there is the foundation of an ancient house which is now filled with dirt Part of the earth filling the ruins has caved in, and there is a pathway into rooms beneath the ground, into what seem to be tunnels. The tunnels, in turn, stretch long dark fingers toward the walls of the city, as if-perhaps and the G.o.ds be willing-they go under the mighty black walls which the Oragonians guard.'

Richter grinned with sheer delight now. 'I knew that luck must come our way sometime, friend. And now it has!'

'Perhaps, but please speak softly. Luck is a s.a.d.i.s.tic woman, and she likes nothing more than to see a man brought to ruin after climbing the walls of false hopes.'

The men were summoned quickly to their feet, and the situation was quickly outlined to them. Not worried now about the size and the clarity of the trail left behind them, they hacked their way into the growth, desperately seeking the broken mold of the old house, the cellars that would protect them.

Barrister was almost entirely black and blue, and as they jostled his body through the torturous path, his flesh seemed to grow even darker, his limbs to swell, the veins on his head standing out fiercely as if they would burst in the instant.

Mace had slung Gregor over a shoulder and was moving with the ease he always exhibited. The boy's leg thumped against Mace's b.u.t.tocks, and the lad gurgled thickly, painfully in his sick sleep.

Don't let him die, the Shaker thought. Don't let him die, whatever you do, Mace.

He did not know why he should be exhorting Mace to maintain Gregor's well-being. Perhaps it was that, after watching the extremely capable giant, he had ceased to think of him merely as a man, but as some kind of demi-G.o.d.

Smoke drifted through the stalks now, though the heat had not reached them and would not for several minutes.

'Here it is!' the red-haired Tuk shouted from his position in the lead. He raised the curved blade of his machete and pointed directly ahead and at the ground.

In another moment, they were standing before a jumbled ma.s.s of stones through which the bamboo stalks grew, though not as thickly as elsewhere. Along the northern wall, the earth had parted and dropped down, giving view of darkness beyond.

'In there,' Shaker Sandow said.

Richter directed the men through, down a drop of seven or eight feet to a set of stairs. The stairs wound for twelve paces around a stone column and into a chamber where the air was cool and fresh, and where a breeze stirred their hair. The torches showed dark gray walls, some panels of what appeared to be wood-but was not -which still clung to the basic stone beneath. There was no furniture and no ornamentation. No one particularly cared about the crudeness of their haven.

By the time all were safe beneath the blazing land, the heat had become oppressive above, and even reached wispy fingers down to them, though the draft down there tended to carry both heat and smoke out of these rude chambers. They could hear the roar of the fire not far away, and by the time they had located the mouth of the tunnel which led toward the city, the popping, crackling, exploding fury was directly over them, consuming anything that its acidic tongues could possibly devour.

'Single file,' Richter said. 'Two torches to the front, two to the rear, and one in the middle of the procession, Move quietly, lest there be Oragonians at the other end, The moment you spot light, Tuk, outen your two torches, and everyone else will follow suit.'

Holding a dagger ready in his one good hand, the burly Sergeant Growler licked his salt-encrusted lips and said, 'The city will be ours, and we will find ourselves returning home by air. I feel it in my bones 1'

'And feeling it in your bones is no certain fortune-telling,' Richter said.

Again, they had taken the roles of the cheery optimist and the balancing pessimist. The men reacted with a general lifting of spirits, but also with a bit more caution-just as the two officers had wanted them to react Maybe there is a chance for success, the Shaker thought. Maybe Lady Luck's sadism will be directed toward those who wait so smugly on the ramparts above. Perhaps she has led them to build false hopes. G.o.ds knew, this bunch had never had much hope at all!

He felt a gnawing eagerness to be in the city, to discover the books and the machines that would await them there. Surely, there would be things even more fascinating than war machines. He wondered what the Oragonians might have pa.s.sed over as useless-and which he might find to be the most priceless artifacts of all.

He dared to allow himself to think that there might be enough in the city to explain to him why his mother had had to die. Even Gregor, whose mother had left a diary, might still feel the guilt of his birth enough to want that answer.

And, too, there might be some way of saving the youth's life in the city. And again, maybe not. They walked down the dark tunnel!

BOOK THREE.

The City and the Dragon!

21.

Down the center of the tunnel, there were two rails which were pitted with age, set almost flush with the moss-spattered stones of the floor. It looked very much as if a train had traveled here in centuries past, though the purpose of putting such a vehicle underground was one that none of them could fathom Twice, they found places where stairs lead upward from platforms that jutted out from the tunnel wall. Both of these were blocked by rubble and led nowhere. Since they could not yet have covered the mile to the city, they did not spend much time with these clogged exits but continued on their way.

In time, they found the train. It was on its side, wheels crushed against the left-hand wall, dug into the stone there. The top of the cab was pinned against the right-hand wall, and through the shattered gla.s.s of that operator's booth, the white bones of a man looked out at them The hollow eye sockets of the skull seemed to stare with inordinate interest. They came up to the front of it and set down the stretcher with Barrister slung in it. Mace propped the unconscious neophyte-Shaker, Gregor, against the gutter curb and stretched to get his cramped muscles in order, as if he expected to lift this mammoth obstacle himself.

'Half a mile yet, I'd say,' Richter said quietly, turning to Shaker Sandow.

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