Pearl Of Patmos

The crossbowmen sent a lethal hail of feathered bolts across the square, killing many of their own mounted soldiers. Blade laughed. There was a great outcry and imme-

diately officers were in among the footmen, laying about with clubs and swords.

Nob gave Blade a push toward the sewer opening. Even, at that moment, in all the excitement and blood and battle craze, Blade had never smelled anything as repellent, as fearsome, as the stench from that black hole.

Nob was swearing by other parts of Juna's anatomy. He gave Blade a great shove. «In, master. In! Down! Hasten. They've seen us now and they'll do our business for certain. Jump, for Juna's sake. Jump!»

They had indeed been seen. A squad of cavalry wheeled about and came charging at the stalls.. Blade, still poised on the brink of that mephitic pit, fearful but still defiant, felt the impingement of every detail: the sweat and foam of the horses, the pe

He could make out individual faces. See the glint of bared teeth, twist of mouths, gaping of nostrils. On their shields and tunics the snake swallowed itself again and again, that hooplike serpent with the words limned under it-Ais Ister.

He heard Nob curse. The man gave him a shove. Blade tottered and fell and in falling glanced back and saw gold coins spilling a slow stream of gold, and Nob going after them as the first of the horses leaped the barrier and came crashing down in a shower of sparks as golden as the coins Nob died for.

Blade had only time, and thought, enough to close his mouth and eyes, and hold his nose, as he struck and disappeared into a slowly moving flow of filth.

CHAPTER 4

Blade could not touch bottom. He kept his head above the cesspool and paddled slowly, trying not to breathe any more than necessary. The darkness was total. 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 suldge 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 tu

The tu

He rounded yet another bend and saw a narrow window, hardly more than a barred slot in the stone, high on the righthand wall. Faint light seeped slantwise 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 goldl 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 Thyme 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 ba

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.