Champions Of The Gods

She promptly set out to follow the downslope. In any land water flows downhill, and water would sooner or later lead her to what passed for civilization around here. She would have to make up some very solid cover story to explain how she came to be here, stark naked and alone. She had learned to lie with a straight face, however. If she hadn't she would never have survived even one mission, let alone years of them.

Before she'd gone very far she was streaming with sweat in the hot airlessness of the forest. Her hair hung damp, limp, and tangled with bits of bark and leaves. Rough tree trunks and razor-edged leaves scraped and sliced her skin, and the scrapes and cuts stung as sweat poured down over them. Insects swarmed around her, forming a cloud in front of her eyes, whining maddeningly in her ears, biting and stinging. At first she tried to wave them off. Then she found that that took too much of the strength she was going to need just to stay on her feet.

Somehow she managed to keep going long enough. Toward the end her head was swimming, her eyes were dimmed with tears and fatigue and swollen half-shut with insect bites, her legs seemed to be made of lead, and her head started throbbing again. But the end of the forest did come. At last she stumbled out of the dimness onto the brushgrown bank of a river.

Katerina collapsed on the grass in the shade of a bush overgrown with pale red berries and stared out across the water. It flowed sluggishly past her, brownish-green, and at least a hundred meters from shore to shore. On the opposite bank rose more forest, a green mass as solid as the one behind her.

After a while she felt her strength returning. She walked over to the bank, bent down, and scooped water out of the river with her cupped hands. At this point she felt she would rather die from anything that might be in the water than die of thirst.

Drinking the water cleared her head still further. She took a firm grip on a projecting root and lowered herself into the river. The current was too gentle to break her grip, and the cool water flowing over her skin washed away sweat, fatigue, the stinging of her cuts and the smarting of insect bites.

While she was bathing, three of the red-winged birds flew down and began eating the berries off the bush. Katerina recalled another point of her survival training-anything the local birds and animals eat can probably be eaten by human beings too. She climbed out of the river and stretched luxuriantly to finish uncramping and unkinking her muscles. Then she walked to the bush and began picking berries.

The berries were hard and fleshy, but pleasantly sweet. She ate slowly at first, then faster, as nothing seemed to be going badly wrong inside. Even the first few mouthfuls of berries fought off the gnawing emptiness in her belly.

As she ate, she looked up and down the river. Downriver was nothing but forest and greenish-brown water flowing away into a seemingly endless distance. Upstream, the forest ended only a few miles away. Then the land rose, as green hills gave way to a solid wall of gray rock across the horizon. The direction of the sun told Katerina that she was looking north at the mountains.

In the center, the gray rocks leaped still higher, into an enormous cone-shaped mountain mass rising at least fifteen thousand feet above the forest. After a second look, Katerina realized that the cone shape was that of a volcano. A third look told her that the white plume from the broad summit was not wind-whipped snow, but steam. Apparently there was still life in the huge volcano.

That in turn made her suspect she was in South America. That continent had a good many live volcanoes, while as far as she remembered Africa had none. Absently she reached for another cluster of berries, while trying to guess which volcano this one might be.

Then a loud splash sounded in the water, fifty meters off to Katerina's right. She turned to look, and froze on the spot. Something large and scaly was climbing out of the river, water sluicing off a broad back set with twin rows of spines ru

Katerina stayed frozen where she was long after even the sound of the beast's departure had died away. She was no longer afraid of the animal. What froze her now was a sense of facing the unknown, an unknown many times worse than anything she'd ever imagined.

There was no animal like that monster in South America. There was none in Africa. There was none any place on earth, and there hadn't been any for more than thirty million years. That thing was a creature of another world or another time, or both.

It seemed impossible and incredible. But could it possibly be so? Had the British mastered the secret of time travel? To dispose of her, had they hurled her back to the age of the dinosaurs? Perhaps she was alone in this forest, alone on this day millions of years before even Man's remotest ancestors would appear.

If she was that alone, she would be alone for the rest of her life. She did not cry, or faint, or even shiver at the thought. But for a long time, she sat completely frozen.

Chapter Twelve

Blade awoke with a headache that pounded and throbbed and seemed to shoot pulses of pain off to every part of his body. It was the worst headache he could ever remember feeling after a return to Home Dimension. He lay there, letting the headache shut out the rest of the world. He remembered Arllona and his desperate effort to snatch her away from the flames of the Mouth of the Gods in Kano. He also knew he ought to be up and asking about what had happened to her. For the moment he knew it would be pointless to try moving as much as his little finger, even to save himself.

Gradually the pain started fading from his limbs and body. Strange sensations replaced them. He did not feel the cool sheets of a hospital bed under him. Instead he felt damp moss, matted grass, dead leaves. He did not smell antiseptic hospital odors, but fresh growing flowers and rotting wood. He did not hear the whir of electronic diagnostic machines and the brisk click of nurses' heels on tile floors. He heard the sound of birds, the wind in tall trees, something large and alive crunching through bushes a good distance off. As the pain started to fade from his head, Blade opened his eyes and looked straight up.

Golden sunlight struck into his eyes, sunlight filtering down through a maze of leafy branches a hundred feet above him. All around were thick tree trunks, overgrown with preposterous tangles of flowering vines. The air was thick with odors, damp and warm.

Blade sat up, then felt both head and stomach settle down. His skin was reddened and smarted like a bad case of sunburn, but nothing worse. He stood up, brushed himself off, and looked around him again. The second look showed him nothing he hadn't seen the first time. This started him thinking.

Something hadn't gone the way Lord Leighton had pla

That was a fair-sized «if.» He could have also landed in some other part of the Dimension where Kano and the Raufi were now fighting it out. Dimensions were often complete worlds, as complex and varied as the Earth of Home Dimension.

He might also have gone sailing off into another Dimension entirely! That did not frighten Blade: He was about as incapable of being frightened as any sane man could be. But the idea of being bounced randomly about among different Dimensions was slightly unsettling.