Part 6 (1/2)

”Mine, also.”

”Yes. A new time has come for Kaldak.”

And so on, until nearly everyone had sworn to obey Kareena and Blade. No doubt they were taking his victory over Hota as an omen. Blade felt more relieved than proud. Knowing which orders to give was always important, but being able to get them obeyed was even more so.

Chapter 12.

At dawn the next day Blade and Kareena stood side by side in an upper-floor window on the edge of Gilmarg. Far across the fields they saw the last munfans tramping toward the forest. Green light flickered three times from behind the munfans.

”That's Sidas signaling farewell,” said Blade. ”Now it's up to us.”

”Do you think they'll have enough fire-I mean, power cells?”

”They've got all we could hope to get out of Gilmarg without waiting for the Doimari to strike again,” said Blade. ”Thanks to Sidas, that's many more than I'd hoped.”

Sidas had made a suggestion so sensible that Blade was embarra.s.sed he hadn't thought of it himself. For a short distance a munfan could carry three or four times its normal load. So why not load the munfans until they could barely walk, lead them to the forest, unload them, bring them back, and repeat the whole process all night. It didn't matter if the power cells got all the way to Kaldak at once, as long as they were out of Gilmarg before any more Doimari came. The Doimari seldom came into the forests, and even if they did you could hide a whole city under the trees, never mind a pile of Oltec!

Sidas, Blade decided, was going to be an extremely useful man in the new Kaldak with its new Law. Once he was convinced it was possible to do something at all, he would think very clearly about how to do it. Blade had told Bairam, ”If Kareena and I don't come back, be sure Sidas gets the honor he deserves. Listen to him yourself, too. He thinks before he speaks.”

Bairam had flushed. ”And I still do not?”

Blade had clapped Bairam on the shoulder. ”You're getting better. But you still have a long way to go.”

”I know.” He had sighed. ”And you have made it even longer than it was before you came. I hope you stay a long time, Blade. Even my father could not do all which must be done to help Kaldak go where it must.”

”Blade,” Kareena now said insistently, breaking into his thoughts. ”Will they have enough power cells to fight a war against Doimar?”

”I don't think they'll have to fight the whole war with what they have now,” said Blade. ”There was a storeroom full of power cells under Gilmarg, in spite of all the years the Doimari have been coming to it. Why shouldn't there be some under Kaldak, when you've never even looked for them?”

Kareena smiled and turned away from the window. ”True. Who knows what lies in the darkness beyond the Law? Shall we go down and look?”

”-one hundred fifty-two. One hundred fifty-three. One hundred fifty-four. One hundred fifty-five.”

Blade listened to Kareena's voice counting the rungs of the ladder, then looked down. Twenty feet below, the lantern, dangling from a rope around his waist, made a flickering, unsteady ring of orange light on the walls of the shaft. He saw no sign of any opening or even a closed door.

How far down did this shaft go? With one hundred sixty rungs at a foot and a half each, they were already two hundred and forty feet below the level of the storeroom, and that was already a good fifty feet below ground level. They were already half again as deep as the Dimension X complex under the Tower of London, and with no elevator.

At least there was no elevator now. Once there must have been some sort of machinery for lifting equipment, if not people. Anything worth burying this far underground must have held items which couldn't be hauled up and down a ladder on people's backs. Perhaps this particular shaft was for ventilation and used by people only in an emergency. In that case the main shaft for whatever lay below must be elsewhere. Blade didn't like the idea of searching an underground maze for an elevator which probably no longer worked. On the other hand, he liked even less the thought of climbing back up this shaft rung by rung, with the Doimari quite possibly waiting at the top.

He stopped and flexed the kinks out of each arm and leg in turn. The lantern below swung through a wider arc, nearly striking the wall. As it steadied, Blade saw an unfamiliar pattern on the wall at the very edge of the light. He quickly descended four more rungs and looked again. The pattern was like bars or wire mesh over a large opening. Another five rungs downward, and Blade was sure.

It was an opening, large enough for a man, but it was also blocked by a door of metal bars as thick as Blade's thumb. Blade reeled in the lantern, hung it on a rung, then unslung his rifle and prepared to fire it.

”Won't that kill it?” Kareena asked.

”Remember the power cells. If it dies, we can make it live again.”

Kareena shook her head in irritation at her own mistake. ”I am sorry, Blade. I am not used to thinking of how life goes, when we are so far beyond the Law as I have known it.” She hesitated. ”Blade, do all the men of England think beyond the Law as easily as you do?”

”No,” said Blade shortly. That wasn't a line of questioning he wanted her to follow very far. He aimed the rifle at the nearest corner of the door and pulled the trigger. The shaft lit up with the familiar green laser glow. Even though the glow reached much farther than the lantern's light Blade saw no bottom to the shaft.

It took a complete power cell and part of another before the door was cut loose. The dark metal of the bars was nearly as tough as the silvery Englor alloy of Blade's loinguard. He waited until the bars cooled off a little, used the muzzle of his rifle to swing the gate open, and waited a little while longer. Even an emergency exit might have electronic sentinels if what lay beyond it was important enough. Some of these sentinels might even have survived the centuries since the fall of the Tower Builders.

The darkness beyond the doorway gave back nothing but silence. Finally Blade swung himself into the door, then helped Kareena down. They stood together on the edge of the unknown for a moment, Kareena's arm stealing around Blade's waist. Then Blade laughed loud enough to raise echoes and struck a dramatic pose, holding the lantern high.

”Forward! To the future of Kaldak!”

He'd hit the proper note. Kareena also laughed and stepped away from him. Side by side they walked into the darkness.

Directly ahead of them lay a single long corridor, with a metal floor and stone walls sprayed with some sort of plastic. The plastic was cream-colored and the floor a tarnished green. A translucent strip ran down the middle of the ceiling, probably the lighting system. At irregular intervals plain steel doors were set in the walls. The first three Blade tried were solidly locked.

”Why can't you burn a way through them?” asked Kareena, when they'd left the third door behind.

”Because they're too thick,” said Blade. ”I would use up too much of our power. Also, we don't know what's inside those doors. It might catch fire or explode.” To emphasize his words he thumped the fourth door with his fist. It resounded as dully as the others, but then swung open several inches. Kareena giggled. Blade put his shoulder to the door and pushed with unnecessary vigor. It flew open so violently it crashed against the stone wall inside.

The lantern showed rack after rack of crates, cans, boxes, and man-high cylinders all around the room. In the middle was a table, piled on one end with small cylindrical cans with spray b.u.t.tons on the tops. An overturned chair lay on the far side. Blade started walking around the room, holding the lantern up to each rack. Either the language of the Tower Builders was very different from that of their descendants, or the containers were marked in some sort of code. Blade couldn't understand more than one word or sign in ten on any of the labels. Finding out what was inside the containers was going to be a matter of trial and error. Not the best way, when one error could be fatal.

A clatter and an exclamation from Kareena made Blade turn around. She'd brushed against the table, knocking several of the metal cans off onto the floor. Blade sniffed. There was a faint smell in the air which hadn't been there before, rather like a cheap perfume.

”There's still something in the cans, Blade,” said Kareena. Before he could stop her she picked up one and pressed the b.u.t.ton down on one end. There was a faint hissing and the perfume smell grew stronger. ”It smells like a kind of soap,” she said merrily.

”Kareena-!”

She stretched out one bare arm, aimed the can at it, and pressed the spray b.u.t.ton again. A patch of skin turned wet and glistening. Then Blade grabbed the can and s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of her hand. ”Kareena, you don't know what that is! It could be a poison, even if it smells like perfume!”

But Kareena was too busy rubbing the sprayed patch of skin to listen. ”Blade it is a kind of soap,” she said finally. ”Look.” Blade had to admit that the patch of skin she'd sprayed was much cleaner than it had been, and showed no sign of damage. ”A liquid soap in a can! We've never found anything like that! What else do you suppose we're going to find?” She sounded like a child antic.i.p.ating a visit to the toy store.

Blade didn't want to quarrel with Kareena. He also didn't want her kittenish curiosity to kill them both. ”I do not know,” he said. ”The Oltec the Sky Masters left here in the Land is different from what they left in England. I do know that we must be very careful. So never, never play with anything you find the way you did now. You were very foolish and very lucky.”

Kareena's eyes went hard and for a moment Blade was sure a quarrel was about to start. Then she sighed. ”Blade, I suppose you are right. I did not think. I am not used to living so far beyond the Law that one must think about this sort of thing.”

”True, and so must everyone else in Kaldak. You're all going to have to learn.”

”Yes, but if we don't play with what we find, how are we going to learn anything about it?” She gestured around the room. ”There must be enough new Oltec here to keep fifty people busy learning about it.”

”Then we'll come back with fifty people, and they can go to work. That way if one man makes a mistake and gets killed, the other forty-nine can see what happened and learn from it. If we get killed, all we've learned dies with us. It may never get back to Kaldak at all and certainly won't get back in time to help against the Doimari.”

”You think there is really going to be a war?”

”You saw that machine, Kareena. If Kaldak had a hundred of them, wouldn't your father be tempted to try destroying Doimar. And he is a man who prefers peace and the Law. I have not heard that Feragga of Doimar is fond of either.” That was a considerable understatement. From what he'd heard of the woman who ruled Doimar, she was something to frighten naughty children with at bedtime!

Kareena nodded reluctantly. ”Very well, Blade. I will follow where you lead.” Blade noticed that this promise didn't keep her from scooping three cans of the spray soap into her pack.

Blade led on, trying to look more sure of where he was going than he actually was. His confidence grew as he found that about half the rooms were unlocked. After the third open room he was no longer leading quite so much in the dark. One rack there held several dozen portable lamps as powerful as miniature searchlights. They lit up the whole main corridor and showed a number of side ones as well. Blade refused to worry now about triggering alarms or defenses. He and Kareena were already far enough inside the complex to be helpless if any defenses did go into action. They were also far enough inside to have triggered them off a dozen times if they still worked.