Warriors Of Latan

Blade would have been happier if he'd known exactly what they were looking for. Knowing where the Idol was hadn't answered the question of exactly what it was.

No living man among the Uchendi had seen the Idol. The Rutari carried it off something like eighty years ago. Cheeky had seen it, but only from a distance, in poor light, and while he was desperately trying to hide the fact that he was looking at it from the Wise One, Ellspa, and Moyla.

Somehow Blade pieced together enough information to keep his job from being completely hopeless. The Idol was made of metal harder than any the tribes knew and worked in ways they could not understand. It was small enough that one person could carry it-Cheeky had seen Ellspa do so.

That was all he knew. In a way it made the mystery of the Idol greater and more tantalizing than ever. Now at last Blade was at the mouth of the Idol's cave, with no one to stop him from going in. According to Cheeky's memories, the Idol lay about three hundred feet inside the darkness.

Blade's feet were itching to carry him into the cave, but he controlled them. While he covered her with the bow, Crystal retrieved their packs. She returned wearing trousers and sandals again, with some of her light-headedness gone. Taking vengeance for her father with her own hands must have been a tonic to her, but Blade was glad it was wearing off. It was a long way home.

In the packs were four torches made of reeds dipped in animal fat, then bound tightly around wooden sticks. Blade took out two torches and blew up the sentries' abandoned fire until some embers were glowing again. It was smoking like the devil, but with the mist swirling around so thickly Blade wasn't worried, about anyone noticing the smoke. Thrust into the embers, the torches began to smoke, then burn, then shed a flickering, sickly yellow light.

Just enough to keep us from falling down holes, thought Blade, and to Cheeky, («All right, little friend. Lead on.») Aloud, he told Crystal, «Stay behind me and keep a lookout toward the mouth of the cave. «There was no point in leaving her alone on guard at the entrance; she'd be in more danger and Blade would be in no less.

Slowly Cheeky walked along the damp rock to the mouth of the cave, then waited for Blade and Crystal to come up behind him. He moved on, to the limits of the torchlight, then yeeped plaintively. His unhappiness at being so close to the darkness was obvious. Blade took three steps forward while Crystal stayed where she was, extending the light of his torch that much farther into the cave. Cheeky yeeeped again, this time happily, and hopped forward…

Chapter 23

Blade quickly lost track of time as they moved in this leapfrog fashion deeper into the darkness of the Idol's cave. As they moved, Crystal laid out a fine leather thong dyed white, marking their path back to the outside world. She carried only three hundred feet of it. If Cheeky's estimate of the distance to the Idol was badly off, they'd face an interesting choice: abandon the search or risk going on into the darkness beyond the end of the thong.

They groped their way through the cave, their hands feeling what their eyes couldn't see in the flickering light of the torches. It seemed to Blade that the walls and ceiling of the cave had been untouched by anything but dripping water and stagnant air since before man existed. The slimy dark rock around them seemed to be closing in on them, narrowing down until it was only a little higher than Blade and barely wide enough for him and Crystal to stand side by side. Blade noticed that the thong was about half gone.

(«Is this-the way you remember?»)

(«Oh, yes,» said Cheeky blithely. «We do not have far to go. «)

Now the tu

«If we are attacked,» he said over his shoulder, «grab Cheeky and run! No point in both of us getting killed. «

There was no sound from Crystal except a small defiant snort. She obviously had her own opinion about abandoning Blade, but there was no time to argue. Twenty feet more and the tu

«Raise those torches high,» Blade said, and stepped forward.

In the center of the chamber was a pile of black stones and ashes, the remains of a fire. Behind that was an altar of mountain stone roughly mortared together. On the altar lay the Idol. It gleamed metallically, and there was something oddly familiar about the shape…

Blade's feet carried him halfway across the cave before he realized what the Idol was. The moment of recognition brought him to a stop so sharply that he swayed, and both Cheeky and Crystal cried out in alarm and reached for him. He waved them to silence and stared intently at the Idol, trying to convince his brain that his eyes were telling the truth.

On the altar lay an UZI submachine gun, a perfectly ordinary piece of Home Dimension weaponry. There was one forty-round magazine in the gun, and three more magazines of 9mm rounds arranged in a little tripod to one side.

Somebody in Home Dimension must have traveled into this land of Latin-who? and how long ago? No one could recall precisely how long the Idol had been in Uchendi hands before the Rutari stole it eighty years ago, but it had to be at least a century. So this UZI had been in Latan for nearly two hundred years.

Or at least two hundred years as this Dimension measured time. Blade knew that didn't necessarily mean much-the Project had discovered some time ago that time in one Dimension wasn't always related to time in any other. On his second trip to Kaldak, Blade found that his daughter, who hadn't been born when he left the first time, was now about thirty years old! Also, he'd once left a Dimension where he was about to be burned at the stake and then returned only second later, after weeks in another Dimension. Project Dimension X might tell them some very important things about the nature of time. The only problem was, once again, knowing what questions to ask.

A more immediate problem was examining this UZI: UZIs were found all over the world, and this one might well have been stripped of any markings telling where it originated. But if he could just get it back Home and have J's weapons experts go over it-and he'd better keep that thought to himself…

He stepped up to the altar and picked up the Idol. The UZI hadn't been stripped of its markings; it had a serial number and some ordnance department's markings on it in the usual places. Blade raised the UZI to get a closer look-and this time it seemed as if the chamber and even reality itself were swaying around him.

The UZI bore the markings of the Ordnance Corps of the Imperial and Royal Army of Englor.

Englor. The alternate England fighting against the Red Flames of Russland. Their army used UZIs-one of the many bizarre parallels between Englor's Dimension and Home Dimension. This was a UZI that had somehow made its way from Englor's Dimension to the Dimension of the tribal warriors of Latan.

At least Blade found that explanation more agreeable than the idea that he'd gone completely mad and the UZI, the cave of the Idol, and God knows what else was an elaborate hallucination. He did not want to wake up strapped to a bed in the mental ward of a secret hospital. He'd been through that before with the Ngaa, and once was too often.

Some of the other men from Home Dimension who'd tried traveling into Dimension X were still in such wards. They'd be there for life, too, their hold on any reality snapped forever by exposure to an alternate one.