The first swordsman came at him, sword held low for a thrust. Blade smashed down the man's feeble guard with the mace, then sliced the man's numbed hand from its arm with the sword. A spearman followed, holding his spear sideways, like a quarterstaff, ready to block or strike. But he was not fast enough to deal with Blade, who thrust with his sword to bring the spear down, then struck overhand with the mace to shatter the man's collarbone.
Behind him Blade heard a voice bellow, «Break left, break right, pick them up!» and the semicircle of armed men disintegrated. Two men grabbed each of the victims on the ground and carried them off. It was not a rout, not a panic flight of broken and routed men, but an orderly retreat of trained men responding to orders. In minutes the fourteen surviving warriors and their victims had vanished as completely as if they had never existed. The only sign that anything unusual had disturbed the sleep of the empty city was the four dead bodies lying on the rubble. The woman was nowhere to be found; Blade hoped she had run away and had not been carried off by her attackers or been driven to follow her friend into the river.
Blade had no idea of where he could find a safe place in this city. There might not be any such thing if these marauders roamed freely all over it. Perhaps his wisest course was to leave the city entirely, abandoning it to the marauders for good. But his curiosity was aroused. Obviously, there were at least two kinds of people in the city, the marauders and their well-dressed opponents. The marauders seemed to be first-class well-disciplined fighters. Their victims had no more notion of how to fight than pigs have of computer programming. But if anybody represented a higher form of civilization around there, it was the victims. Possibly their civilization was no longer as advanced as it had been when the city was built, but it appeared to be more advanced than that of the marauders. And considerably more decadent, too, judging from their helplessness.
A sudden rumble of thunder reminded Blade that he was not doing himself any good by standing there in the open and the cold, exposed to chance spears and passing showers. He would have to get to shelter and then worry about finding answers to the mystery of the city.
But first, some clothing. Ignoring the blood, he began stripping the tunics and kilts from his victims and trying them on for size. He couldn't even get into the first two sets, but the third was a tolerable fit. Sandals on his feet completed the outfit, and a spear completed his weaponry. Then he scrambled up the rubble and began looking for a building that was reasonably intact. The darkness already seemed thicker than before, and it was becoming more difficult to make things out. Another rumble of thunder, louder than the first, indicated that the storm was moving in.
About three Home Dimension blocks away a relatively undamaged building rose a desolate twenty stories above the piled rubble at its base. It looked like the best prospect within easy reach, and time and weather were pressing. Blade began a lurching, scrambling advance toward the building, over the treacherous heaps of debris.
It was a long and bruising struggle across the wide expanse of wreckage along the riverbank, but finally Blade scrambled down the last slope into comparatively open street. The main door of the building was half-blocked by the spilled and heaped fragments of its former neighbors. But Blade scrambled in over the twisted metal and chunks of stone and plastic into what must have once been a lobby. A sudden flash of lightning sent light glaring in through the high windows fifty feet above ground level, lighting up an even higher vaulted ceiling, which was grimed with generations of dust. The glare also revealed the entrance to a flight of stairs leading downward. Blade was about to step past them and look for a flight upward; he had no desire to be trapped in a cellar by a band of the marauders. But as he passed the head of the stairs, he felt an unmistakable current of warm air flowing up out of the stairwell. In the dank lifeless chill of the building it was as unmistakable and as startling as a slap in the face.
Blade sniffed the air. No sign of smoke. Probably not the marauders, then. A fire large enough to produce that much heat would have been pouring out clouds of smoke. But he headed down the stairs, ready with sword and spear in his hands and mace in his belt.
The stairs went down three full flights, each of twenty broad stone steps. The steps were padded with accumulated dust that puffed up in clouds from under Blade's sandals and made him sneeze and cough in spite of his desperate efforts to keep quiet. The noise reverberated in the stairwell, filling the gaps between the thunderclaps that were now coming more and more frequently. As he descended farther, he became aware that the darkness was giving way to a faint but unmistakable pinkish light and that the air was definitely getting warmer. A moment later the spear he had been gently scraping along the right-hand wall thrust out into empty air. With both weapons ready and all senses keyed up to the limit, he slipped around the corner.
He was at one end of a vaulted corridor stretching into the pink-tinged gloom. The ceiling, covered with red tile, rose to three times Blade's height. Along the walls at intervals of forty-odd feet were circular recesses. As Blade stepped cautiously out into the corridor, he saw that in each recess was a featureless circular metal door about six feet in diameter.
The floor of the corridor was deeply coated with dust, but the air was so warm that Blade knew there must be a major heat source somewhere. An artificial heat source, almost certainly, and that meant civilized people. Did they all lurk underground and leave the surface to the marauding barbarians? Did these vaultlike metal doors lead to their living quarters? At any rate, there did not seem to be any immediate danger, so Blade felt safe enough to strip off his clothes and let the warmth bake the night's chill out of his naked body.
Suddenly a faint click floated down the corridor to Blade's ears, sounding as loud as an explosion in the dusty stillness of the corridor. Blade started and looked down the corridor-then hefted his weapons. With a faint whispering of long-unused machinery, the door of one of the vaults was slowly swinging open.
Chapter Five
Short of ducking back up the stairs, there was only one hiding place that Blade could see in the long corridor. Behind the opening door itself. He plunged down the corridor and dove behind the foot-thick disk of metal just as it swung fully open. Peering out from behind it, Blade saw a girl step out into the corridor.
She wore the customary sandals and kilt, in a green so dark that it looked almost black in the dim light. Her hair was unbound and flowed down her back, like a black waterfall. She was carrying her tunic over her arm and wore nothing above the waist except a silver-glinting chain around her slim throat. As she turned to survey the corridor, Blade could not help admiring the high, firm, youthful breasts and the trim, flat stomach. But she was a living representative of the people who presumably had built the city. He had to talk to her. Carefully laying his weapons down on the floor, he stepped out into the open, hands spread wide in a conciliatory gesture.
She started and her eyes went wide as she saw him, but she made no sound or any move to run. In fact, as her eyes went over him, there was a probing, even admiring look in them.