Blade wondered if they would be drugged beforehand, but they were given nothing, not even water. He licked his dry lips and listened to the remarks of the soldiers and the Consecrated. Apparently the writhings and the screams of the victims were part of the sacrifice. He hoped Arllona didn't realize that.
The cart was more than a hundred feet from the flames of the Mouth, but Blade could already feel its heat against his skin. The cart stood there, while Consecrated and soldiers dashed about like busy ants, doing a hundred and one last-minute things.
Mirdon rode up, sprang down from his horse, strode across the gleaming jade blocks of the pit to where Tyan stood waiting. They greeted each other with elaborately ceremonial courtesy, then, side by side, mounted the steps to the stand nearest the Mouth. Tyan was carrying his great staff; the reflections from the gold and the jewels made it look like a bar of solid fire. As Tyan and Mirdon took their places, all movement in the pit ceased.
A score of soldiers ran forward, carrying a T-shaped metal bar twenty feet long. They pushed the foot of the T into a socket in the rear of the cart, took positions along the crossbar, and began to shove. Blade noted with an almost detached interest this solution to the problem of pushing the cart into the Mouth without the pushers being burned up along with the sacrifice.
The cart moved forward slowly, jerkily, with many rattles and clanks. One wheel had a distinctive sound, a sort of brrraaaank! Blade counted carefully. Each time the wheel sounded meant ten feet closer to the Mouth.
Eighty feet to go. The heat was stronger now. It would be uncomfortable at seventy, painful at fifty, unendurable at forty. They would both probably be unconscious before any real flame touched them. That was a hopeful thought, now.
Seventy feet. It was getting uncomfortable. The bands and the bars of the grill were beginning to warm up as the heat came in waves from the Mouth. Blade looked at Arllona. She lay totally rigid, her lips showing drops of blood where she'd bitten them. Her eyes rolled toward him and met his.
Sixty feet. The light and the heat from the soaring column of flame that was the Mouth of the Gods poured over him, shutting out the world. He could no longer hear the wheels to measure their advance toward the Mouth. He could no longer hear anything except the steadily growing roar of the flames.
Fifty feet. There was pain now, pain over every inch of skin, more pain where the hot metal touched him. He could hear Arllona screaming now. He forced himself to go on taking shallow, regular breaths. In another moment the air would be hot enough to burn out his lungs. Then his own self-control might snap as thoroughly as Arllona's, and he would be screaming too, and-
Blade gasped, coughed as he inhaled scorching air, and sat up. There was a new pain now, an agonizing, stabbing pain in his head-a new pain, but also a familiar one. Somehow the computer had reached out for him, somehow it was gripping his brain now, to snatch him away from here, snatch him back to Home Dimension-
— and snatch Arllona too! It was worth a try, even if-! Blade didn't take time to complete the thought. Instead he twisted around as far as he could, laying one hand on Arllona's forehead and another over her wildly beating heart. She was alternately screaming and gibbering hysterically. He didn't try to speak to her. Instead he pressed both hands tightly on her skin, willing her to be calm, willing her to blank out her mind, willing her to somehow receive if she could the computer's pulses. In this moment Blade wasn't thinking of science or of new knowledge. All that was in his mind as the pain exploded again was sharing with Arllona this last, miraculous chance for safety-if he could.
The pain mounted higher. Blade held his breath again, knowing that if he breathed now he would scorch his lungs. In another second his eyeballs would melt and run like jelly down his blistering, blackening cheeks. In another second-
The pain in his head leaped upward like the flames of the Mouth itself. Blackness swallowed him up, blackness and a deadly cold wind that howled around him from nowhere. In one moment he knew only searing heat, in the next he knew only freezing cold. He did not know what had happened to Arllona; he could feel nothing under his hands where she had been.
Then he could feel nothing at all.
Chapter Eleven
Katerina Shumilova's first sensation was a totally agonizing headache. She remembered how she had felt before losing consciousness in the chair far below the Tower of London. A giant hand had been crushing her skull. Now she felt as if someone had tried to put her skull back together again and had done a miserably poor job of it.
Even that disagreeable memory was reassuring. If she could remember something like that, it proved she was still alive, with a more or less functioning brain. She would have felt much better without the headache. She felt that her head would drop off her shoulders, or at least start falling apart, if she moved an inch or even opened her eyes. She didn't know if she was sinking into bottomless quicksand, or if a man-eating tiger was about to leap on her. She did know that nothing could be worse than what would happen to her if she tried to move. She lay still, and soon she drifted off to sleep.
The next time she awoke her head still hurt, but now it was more like the morning after a liter of bad vodka than the total agony she'd felt before. She could also sense other things, outside herself-wet grass under her and all around her, cool against her bare skin, a warm, scented wind blowing over her, grass rippling, leaves rustling, the drone of insects, the soft pad-pad-pad of feet-
Realization of what this meant exploded in her head like a new stab of pain. What was she doing in a forest when she had been far below the Tower of London? This couldn't even be an English forest-it was much too warm for England in November. She was still naked-she could feel grass or warm air against every bit of bare skin. What had happened to her?
Fear fought with scientific curiosity for a moment. Then she opened her eyes. She gasped at the sudden blaze of light, as though someone had set off a flashbulb into her eyes, then buried her face in the grass again. The next time she opened her eyes, she did it slowly.
She continued to lie still until she thought she had the strength to get to her feet. Then she maneuvered elbows and knees into position, and lurched upward. Several small animals gave a startled yeeeep! and vanished in the long grass. Katerina staggered to her feet and stood upright. She realized that either she or the trees around her were swaying rather badly.
Her head was swimming, but it was her stomach that betrayed her. Sudden nausea welled up in her. She knelt down and was violently sick. She went on being sick, retching and heaving desperately, until there was absolutely nothing left in her stomach. She felt drained dry and her head was throbbing again, but otherwise she felt better than she had since arriving-wherever she was. She managed to get to her feet again and stagger away a few steps, to sit down in a patch of fresh grass with her back to a large tree.
After a while she still felt weak, but she could look around her and understand what she saw. She didn't like it.
She was sitting in a patch of long lush grass and trailing vines, with dense forest all around. Not just forest-tropical jungle. Some of the trees or the vines twining around them practically dripped brilliantly colored blossoms. A flock of strange birds with broad red wings and lean blue bodies flapped up from one tree as she watched. High above, clouds like puffed cotton ambled across a blue sky.