Undying World

CHAPTER 5

What Blade did next was not typical of him. Perhaps it was the loneliness, the terrible silence, that caused him to forego his usual caution. Ordinarily, from a position of weakness, he would have laid a snare, made the enemy come to him. At least he would have scouted ca

He searched in the shadowed street until he found a shop. He entered, ignoring the sleepers frozen in the attitudes of buying and selling, and searched until he found what he wanted-a simple crowbar. It lay on a half-opened crate in the back room of the shop. Blade cursed himself as a fool. He had been thinking of weapons in terms of bladed instruments, of swords and daggers and the like. There were plenty of weapons about. The crowbar was a weapon. So was the heavy sledge hammer he picked up and took with him.

Blade crouched in the shop entrance for five minutes, not moving, listening. Only silence. No sign of anything moving. They, it, whoever, must have returned to their sewer burrow. Making just one mistake-dropping that sewer lid half an inch.

As he waited, he detached the knife from the curtain-rod shaft and stuck it in his belt. When he was sure he was not watched, he darted back to the kiosk. Another reason for going into the sewers was to get away from that spying moon with its searchlights and, another thought occurred, from the possibility of being watched through powerful telescopes.

He pried the edge of the sewer lid up with the crowbar. It slipped away several times; he cursed softly. At last he got the bar far enough in for leverage and heaved, putting all his great strength into it. The lid moved several inches out of its bed, enough for Blade to get his fingers under the edge. He tried to lift it, to move it just enough and without sound. It was useless, too much even for him. The damn thing must weigh over a thousand pounds.

Again he resorted to the crowbar, a pitifully inadequate tool, to move the lid an inch at a time. When he had enough space for a full hand-hold he lost his patience, gripped it, straightened with a curse and put every bit of effort into it. His arm muscles bulged and the great sinews of his back and legs popped as he heaved upward.

It was a mistake. He moved the mammoth lid but could not hold it, could not lower it gently. It got away from him and spun and fell with a resounding clang. For a moment his ears rang as if he were inside a bell. Blade cursed. Nothing like a

The dark hole gaped beneath him. Blade picked up the sledge hammer and knelt by the hole. There was no ladder. No sound came from below. What light slanted into the kiosk showed him part of a bricked arch, nothing more. He listened for ru

Blade pondered. Another mistake. He should have searched about for some means of making light, but he had not and now time was against him. He could not assume that whoever was down there was deaf.

He dropped the crowbar into the pit and listened. Hardly a second elapsed before he heard it strike, a soft sound. Between twenty and thirty feet and soft bottom; mud or sand or, just possibly, more of the artificial turf. He must make up his mind.

Blade clutched the sledge hammer near the head, gripped the edge of the lid ring with one powerful hand, and let himself dangle down into the pit. His swinging legs made gallows shadows on the illuminated are of brick. He let go, thinking as he fell that at least he was getting away from that accursed ever-glowing moon.

He fell easily, bending his knees and rolling in what must be sand or earth. He scooped up a handful of the stuff and sniffed it. There was a faint, hardly discernible odor of old sewage. This sewer had not been used for a long time.

Blade wasted precious moments in groping for the crowbar. It might come in handy again. Just as his fingers closed over it, he looked up to see lights approaching from his left. A score of torches held high and burning straight with no flickering. Blade grimaced and turned to his right.

Another dazzle of torches approached from the right. He was trapped between them. Blade made a rapid calculation. There was more room to the right than to the left. He ran that way. The sewer was narrow here and, now that he could see a bit, he did not want to be trapped in a thirty-foot alley when there might be a better site farther on. He had the feeling now. Battle lay ahead.

His hunch was right-not altogether a hunch because the torches to his right were strung out, those to his left cramped-and as the sewer began to widen he saw someone watching him from a niche in the wall. Nothing more than a shadow, but Blade was sure it moved. When he sprang toward it and tried to grasp it, the shadow became flesh and blood and spat at him, hissed and clawed like a cat, then vanished. Blade wiped a trickle of blood from his face and gri

Blade kept moving to his right. The sewer widened, and kept widening until he reckoned it at some ninety feet across. Beyond this point it began to narrow again. Here he must make his stand.

Both groups of torches were converging on him. They were held high and thrust ahead; Blade could see little of the bearers or the figures behind them. As the light grew he could make out more detail about him: the wide area in which he was trapped must be some sort of living quarters, for he saw crude tables and chairs. There were shelves and ledges in the walls containing what looked like bedrolls and blankets. A dripping water-jar hung from the ceiling and he knew a sudden and terrible thirst for real water.

Hastily he stripped off the jacket and trousers he had taken from the sleepers. He did not know the relationship between these sewer people and the beautiful people above, but it might be just as well to come as a stranger, naked and prepared to do battle or make friends and, as always he must, to establish his supremacy by guile or strength. Long experience had taught him that to survive in Dimension X he must rule or, at the very least, share the power.

They were crowding him now. The torches flared and sparked. Blade hefted the sledge hammer and swung it in an arc. It was well balanced with a long shaft and a sixteen-pound head. A good enough mace. In his left hand he gripped the small crowbar for use as a fending weapon.

As the torch bearers approached from both sides, the light increased until Blade could make them out. They were human, right enough, as he understood human-men, women and children-all staring at him, pointing and whispering among themselves. The women were bare-breasted, the children naked, and the men wore baggy trousers of a material resembling denim. The men were hirsute of chest, arms and back-everywhere but on their heads. They were all bald.

None spoke to Blade. No one raised his voice. They whispered and kept their distance. Beyond the first fringe, some twenty feet from him, Blade saw several of the bald men in conference, whispering and gesturing among themselves. It was time to take the first step.

Richard Blade could be quite a ham when he chose to be, when it suited his purpose and might save his life. Now he twirled the sledge hammer over his head. It made a humming sound and the torchlight was reflected from the burnished metal.