Chapter Three
The pain in his head told Blade that consciousness was coming back to him. Then an equally sharp pain in his naked bottom made him yelp and leap to his feet in spite of his throbbing head. Looking down, he saw that he had landed on his rear in the middle of a large patch of thistlelike plants with springy, woody stems, thin purple leaves, and spectacularly long and pointed stickers. Under his feet was moss-grown stone; he lay down on it until the headache had vanished and his exploring fingers had removed all the prickers. Then he rose to his feet again and cautiously looked around him.
He realized that the moss-grown stone he had been lying on showed a pattern of cracks too regular to be natural, with great clumps of purple thistles growing out of them. Blade saw the stone stretching off in an unnaturally straight line on either side. It was flanked by trees set at roughly thirty-foot intervals and rising so high that Blade had to crane his neck up toward the graying sky to see their bushy tops. Their trunks were massive and at first glance appeared to be covered with green scales. Closer examination revealed a choking tangle of vines and weeds clinging to the bark. A chill breeze blew past, making Bade shiver and the glossy green leaves of the vines and the dull purple ones of the thistles dance.
Obviously, he had landed in the middle of a road. Or of what had been a road. Some of the thistles sprouting from the cracks between the blocks in the road were three feet high. More than one entire block had been heaved completely out of position by winter frosts, spring thaws, and the slow, steady work of the plants. No one had used this road or cared whether it was usable for many years.
But all roads tend to lead somewhere. From the way the light was rapidly fading from the sky, Blade guessed it was almost sundown. The chill already in the air suggested that the coming night would be uncomfortably cold for a naked man to spend in the open. Blade looked along the road and noticed that to the right it sloped down and to the left it rose. In both cases it rapidly vanished into the twilight, but it seemed to Blade that going up made more sense than going down. At the very least, the higher he got the more he could see when morning came. He turned off to the left and set off up the road, eyes moving ceaselessly from side to side, looking for possible dangers and for anything that might be converted into a weapon to meet those dangers.
The climb up into the gathering darkness lasted so long that Blade was beginning to wonder if he was climbing a mountain. Then abruptly the row of trees on either side vanished, and the road divided and swung out on either side to form a circular drive. Directly ahead a flight of stairs-overgrown and crumbling like the road-led up to a vast sprawling house that seemed to cover the whole top of the hill. For a moment Blade's anticipation rose. Then it fell back again as he examined the house. He noted dead and living vines encrusting the once white walls, windows gaping like the eye sockets of a skull, and leaf-clogged gutters oozing dirty water. No one had come along the road for a long time, and no one had lived in this house or cared whether it was even livable for an equally long time. Whoever had raised the mansion there was long gone.
Behind the house the slope continued to rise. Blade walked around it along the circular drive, noting the fallen trees that were rotting amid the grass of what had once been a neatly kept lawn. Now it grew rank and dense, reaching Blade's knees.
Blade's mood grew sober as he surveyed the estate. He did not like this house, intact but as lifeless as the Great Pyramid, sitting there brooding on this dark hill. The mental association of abandoned houses filled with things dark and sinister was too deep for even Blade's trained mind to shake off. He had never seen a better haunted house.
He would not have liked it particularly even if he had never heard of haunted houses. Country mansions could easily be abandoned for legitimate reasons. But they could also be abandoned for more sinister ones-plagues, wars, the long, slow dying of a civilization that could no longer sustain them. The mansion was intact except for the damage inflicted by the years. That seemed to rule out war. Or did it? Chemicals, bacteria, hard radiation, or radioactive dust could leave a house intact and its inhabitants dying in agony. The house seemed to have been abandoned long enough for any CBR warfare agents to have lost their deadliness. But Blade would have been happier with a Geiger counter.
There was no point in standing in the darkness, staring at the house. It only suggested the state of the world he had fallen into, and it might be leading him completely astray. At the top of the hill he might see anything from a farm to an entire city. He stepped away from the house, took a final look at the empty windows, shivered at more than the rising wind, and strode off up the hill.
He pushed up the steadily steepening grade for more than a hundred yards, the grass now wet with dew swishing past his calves and the occasional thistle plant adding scars to his ankles to match the ones on his rear end. As the house slowly vanished in the darkness behind him, he made a mental note of his course. If all else failed, he could go back to the mansion and try to find as much shelter from the night wind as its dark and depressing interior might offer. He felt the ground beneath his feet leveling out, saw another row of trees looming up, and passed between two of them.
Now the ground sloped downward. He had a vague sense of a vast, empty space in front of high, from which the wind now moaned unbroken and uninterrupted. He was staring into the darkness, trying to make out something recognizable, when the clouds passing overhead suddenly flared silver at their rear edges. A full moon glowed in a sky full of stars, pouring an almost incandescent silver light over the land.
The land ahead did indeed slope down. It moved on past another row of trees, past two more abandoned houses. Then it flowed out across miles of almost treeless plain to a broad river set deep in a high-walled gorge. On the far side of that river stood a city.
For a moment Blade wondered if the previous thought that he might see a city out there in the darkness was still working on his mind and making him see things. He focused all his attention on the city; it did not vanish. In fact, the neat rows of buildings stood out more clearly than before. Some rose only ten or twenty stories, others a quarter of a mile. Metal gleamed in the moonlight. One complex of thousand-foot towers, set in a close square, reflected the moonlight from walls of different vividly gleaming colors-red, gold, orange, silver. Other buildings were domeshaped, rising up five hundred feet or more and showing their frames, gilded frames that seemed to drip liquid moonlight, through transparent outer shells.
All thought of returning to the decaying, empty mansion to spend the night vanished from Blade's mind as he stood absorbing the image of the city and what it meant. The city rising on the riverbank could only be the creation of an advanced society. Was this good? Not necessarily, he reminded himself. He thought of decadent Tharn, the strangely immortal Morphi, and the nonhuman Menel, with their superscience, which was exceeded only by their laziness. He could not even assume that this city would offer him safety. Bureaucrats could be as deadly foes as barbarian chiefs, and for a man who did not understand the rules they were enforcing, ten times as dangerous. You could not simply whip out a sword-assuming you had one-and decapitate each officious clerk. And the deserted mansion so close to the city suggested that the people were a cautious breed, preferring to huddle within their high walls and pursue their lives in safety. Such a people might well be inhospitable to strangers wandering naked out of the darkness.