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After eating, Blade cut patches from the goat's skin, scraped them clean, and tied them around his feet. When the condition of his feet might be a matter of life or death, any extra protection he could give them helped.
Blade was still heading deeper into the mountains on the afternoon of the third day. His goal now was the twenty-thousand-foot peak. On one side the peak shot up in an almost vertical face nearly ten thousand feet high, flanked by two sharp spurs. On the other side a gentle slope ran almost up to the summit. Today the winds aloft must be light, for the snow plume was barely visible.
Blade decided that he'd go as far as the mountain, then explore in a complete circle around its base. After that he'd climb as far up the easy slope as he could and from that high perch look for traces of human life. If he couldn't find any, it would be time to turn back, to take his chances with the desert or at least look elsewhere for the human inhabitants of this Dimension.
The hours passed; evening settled on the mountains, and darkness and the end of Blade's daily march were not far off. Blade was making his way along a narrow ledge above a fast-flowing stream when he caught sight of a dim orange glow far ahead. It flickered and wavered, and he couldn't tell what or how far away it might be-but it was there. He kept moving, but now he held the knife in his right hand and was thankful that the goatskin bindings made his footsteps almost noiseless.
The darkness grew thicker, and in contrast the orange glow ahead grew slowly larger and brighter. Blade felt a moment's relief as he stepped off the narrow ledge onto a broader shelf of rock. There he would have room to fight and no chance of a fifty-foot plunge into the boiling stream if he put a foot wrong.
The rock shelf broadened and sprouted boulders, then grass, bushes, and even small trees stunted and twisted by altitude and years of wind. Blade used every bit of cover as he crept forward, his eyes never leaving the steadily growing spot of orange.
A few more steps, and Blade was on the edge of a wide belt of cleared land, sloping down to the stream. On the far side of the stream another slope rose to the foot of a cliff. Halfway between the stream and the cliff a fire blazed inside a circle of large stones. Its flames shot up ten feet into the air, and sparks rose higher still. Around the stones about twenty men lay or sat on furs or skins, oiling or sharpening weapons, drinking from skin bags, or sound asleep. Blade's eyes were drawn to the spectacle of what lay beyond them.
The stream ran through a cutting at the bottom of the cleared slopes, between vertical walls of dressed stone twenty feet high. A wooden footbridge crossed it directly below the fire and the men. The stream ran on for another fifty yards, then suddenly it was no longer there. On either side of it the ground also ended, as if it had been cut off by a knife or dissolved into the night air.
Daylight now lingered only on the summit of the great peak. Everything else lay in shadow, sinking deeper by the minute. At first Blade could make out only a vast emptiness where the stream and the ground ended. Then his eyes adjusted to the darkness and told him of an immense valley, stretching away mile after mile; of mountain walls rising solid and nearly vertical on either side of the valley; of wooded hills and small lakes on its floor. It even told him of a dimly visible patch of light far off on the crest of one of the hills.
That was all Blade learned of the valley before he learned something else. The men around the fire might seem to be off their guard; but they were not. Two of them jumped up with wild inhuman screeches, and the fire glowed on the curved swords they drew and pointed at Blade. Then their comrades were also jumping up, and their raw-throated cries tore at Blade's ears and sent echoes leaping from the cliffs.
Then all of them were rushing down the slope toward the bridge. Some ran so fast that they seemed to skim the ground, and none waited any longer than they needed to snatch up their weapons.
None of them had time to cover more than a few steps before Blade leaped out of cover. None of the could drown out his yell, and none of them could match his speed as he also plunged down toward the bridge.
Chapter 4
Blade's charge down the slope in the face of twenty-to-one odds wasn't quite as suicidal as it seemed.
To turn and flee would bring all the men after him, hunting him like a wild animal through the darkness and over ground they would certainly know better than he did. To stay where he was would invite them to climb up and come at him from all sides. To reach the bridge before they did gave him a chance to hold it against them. They would have to come at him no more than two at a time, since the bridge was narrow and there was no other crossing point on the stream. He would have a chance to hold them off long enough to discourage them. Then he could try a peaceful approach, and if that failed, he would still be holding the bridge. It looked light and rather poorly anchored at either end. A good heave and it would be in the stream, rushing toward the cliff and a plunge into the valley. That would keep the survivors on the other side long enough to give him a good head start on his retreat.
The only danger was archery, which could pick him off from a distance. Blade hadn't seen any bows among the men, and in the darkness he'd be a poor archery target anyway, particularly after the fight came to close quarters.
All these thoughts tumbled furiously through Blade's mind as his legs drove him toward the bridge. His speed, his size, his weird clothing, and his terrible war cry all combined to bring the enemy to a stop for a moment. Blade reached his end of the bridge a moment before the first of the enemy reached his.
It took the enemy another moment to sort themselves out, with a great deal of angry shouting. Blade could make out no recognizable words in that shouting, so presumably there were none. As he had passed into Dimension X, the computer somehow twisted his brain so that he understood the local language as plain English and his own speech came out in the local language. It was a process no one fully understood, but it was a vast help in the exploration of Dimension X. No one, least of all Blade, was inclined to look such a gift horse in the mouth.
Two men stepped onto the bridge, their swords raised in front of them, coming at Blade with the lithe grace of stalking cats. Blade considered for a moment lifting the bridge and dumping them into the stream, then decided against it. The others might regard it as treachery or brute strength, not skill and courage in a fair fight. Showing that skill and courage was his best chance of making peace with these warriors was therefore worth the risk.
Those risks would not be small. Blade had only his knife, and the swords his opponents held were a foot and a half longer, curved like scimitars, and clearly heavy enough to chop a man in half. A gilded band ran along the back of each sword, so at least they weren't doubled-edged.
Blade stepped forward to force the two men to deliver their attack while they were still on the bridge. That way they would have to come straight at him, and they would have only the light planks rather than the solid ground under their feet.
The two swordsmen stayed level with each other, their steps were measured and precise, and the gleaming swords they held in front of them never wavered. As the men closed, Blade saw that each man carried a knife like his in a heavily patterned leather sheath hanging from a sash at the waist. Otherwise they were dressed identically-soft boots, baggy trousers with a faint sheen to them, soft leather vests that left their arms and necks bare. They wore no armor that Blade could see, and every bit of hair except their eyebrows had been shaved off. Their heads were wrapped tightly in bands of leather, like an Indian's turban but much more tightly fitting.