If Alec had been here, now…
He wondered in that fleeting moment as the armored cars raced on, the wicked snouts of their guns aimed and poised, if, in the turmoil of fear, he could Porteur himself out of this world and back to his own.
He had not done it in those previous times of trouble so he doubted that he would now. The enormous unfairness of it struck him. The Montevarchi took jewels from this world (and other treasures besides, no doubt) and in return she would Porteur through weapons to enable her Valcini bully-boys and their Honshi cohorts to get slaves to work for her. As a system it would look marvelous on paper.
A flash spurted from the lead car. The Galumpher four over staggered sideways like a schooner hit by a cyclone. Great gobbets of red meat flew. Red blood rained. The Galumpher emitted a squeal like the siren of the Queen Elizabeth. Again the gun fired—a ninety mm job, Prestin judged—and again a shell smashed into a Galumpher. Women screamed. Children cried. A machine gun opened up, sweeping along the line of Galumphers.
Dalreay, his face ghastly, started to run out toward the armored cars. Other men followed him.
Prestin found himself running with Dalreay, expecting every moment a bullet to finish him. The noise shocked ears accustomed to normal city sounds. His glasses steamed up. But he kept on running, waving the two silly swords.
What price now the long-argued gun versus sword controversy?
Red bedlam battered at his brain. He could see the armored cars as they raced nearer, see the sand spurting disdainfully from their tires, see the evil wink of gunfire from their turrets. He thought they were Hispano-Suiza jobs but could not be sure. A spouting line of bullet pocks swathed down the string of running men. Swords and javelins flew into the air as relaxing fingers lost their grip. Prestin felt something excruciatingly hard hit him in the chest. Shouting, he dropped both swords, feeling ill, feeling the earth reeling up to smash into his face and mouth. Then, before he felt nothing at all, he felt the ice freezing from the center of pain in his chest.
Then—then came the nothing.
When he opened his eyes the first thing he felt was the numbness in his chest. It felt as though he had sent it to be dry-cleaned and it was late coming back. He could not feel his hands or feet, either. He didn’t think he had been sick but his mouth tasted like Hogmanay aftermath. He groaned.
Someone else, breathing heavily near him, groaned back.
“Where the blue-blazes are we?” asked the fierce, petulant voice of Todor Dalreay.
“Judging by what those guns did to us,” croaked Prestin, “we’re dead, buried and in hell!”
“No—” Dalreay made movements, then he relaxed, his back shoving into Prestin. “I’ve just checked. The Honshi haven’t pubicked me. So they won’t have you, I suppose.”
“Pubicked?” Then Prestin remembered and in a panic-stricken series of vigorous movements wriggled around and checked himself. He relaxed, shakily. “Nor me—thank Amra!”
“Thank Amra,” said Dalreay. “May Amra be praised.”
Now he could see the white-painted room in which they lay on the floor. There were two barred windows high up. The floor was made from a matted compost, judging by its smell, sketchily covered by a scrap of canvas. The door, made from laminated wood and bound in bronze, showed a small spy-hole, at the moment blocked by a bronze flap.
“Bronze,” said Dalreay. “Honshi.”
“But—”
“They use iron for weapons, bronze and copper for armor. The Valcini keep them geared to their own technology. There must be a reason.”
“Yes,” said Prestin, understanding only too well that reason and the Contessa’s reasoning behind it. “Oh, yes.”
The bronze flap lifted and a Honshi turned his head sideways so he could look in with one round eye, blank and horribly emotionless.
“Get lost,” growled Dalreay.
The guard hissed. Prestin didn’t know if the things could understand English, or if they could speak. Dalreay pushed himself up on his hands, his body lank on the floor. His clothes had been torn away from his chest, as had Prestin’s. Prestin looked quickly down at his own body. A sticking plaster covered the point where the numbness still persisted, and then he understood what had happened.
“We’ve been knocked out by a needle-bullet carrying an injection of sleeping sand-man drops, Todor! They weren’t shooting to kill—only to take us captive, as though we were wild animals!”
Dalreay laughed unpleasantly. “We are—to them!”
Prestin felt the shame of it, the reduction, of his own stature as a man. These Valcini held the pride, a dark lonely pride that would stand against Dalreay’s impatient honor as the smoke against the flame.
A fear of meeting the Valcini took Prestin then, threatening to unman him before the eyes of his comrade.
The door grated open and Honshi guards with pointed swords stalked in, the shriveled wisps of hair fleering from each helmet point. They moved warily.
Dalreay laughed theatrically and the Honshi stiffened. The swords quivered and they backed off. Prestin stared and took a deep joy from the impact of Dalreay’s power, futile though the gesture might be.
“We are special prisoners, friend Bob,” he said in his quick eager voice. “Just we two in this cell. Oh, yes, the Valcini intend to have sport with us before we die.”
“I thought,” said Prestin, appalled and suddenly much more frightened, “I thought they wanted us as slaves!”
“The Contessa gives the Valcini a number of slaves to play with from time to time. So we of Dargai hear.”
The Honshi guards moved forward and started to poke their swords at Prestin and Dalreay. The men staggered up, the stiffness not fully worn off, and stumbled out into the corridor. Each time the Honshi stuck their swords forward they said, “Hoshoo! Hoshoo!” The sound echoed with a terrible menace.
Slipping and stumbling, the two men somehow labored along the corridor, passing door after door of the cell block. The guards were quite evidently terrified of them.
Panting, Dalreay said, “Don’t let the guards fool you, Bob. They’re scared, but you have rats on Earth—King Clinton used the analogy”—exhausted though he was, when Dalreay spoke of King Clinton he made that small secret sign—”he said the Honshi always fought like cornered rats. They’re deadly dangerous.”
“What—what about the Trugs?”
“Just pray you never have to stand up to one in a hand-to-hand fight. Even I am not sure of that outcome.”
Prestin saw the first outside window as the corridor turned and the cell block finished. A green light shone through it. The Honshi pushed forward with their swords—each one red at the tip now—and a loud “Hoshoo!” The cuts and fang-wounds from the Ulloa still itched Prestin from time to time, but they had not been deep or serious; now he felt a vicious hatred for these mindless Honshi and their biting, stabbing swords.
“Don’t try to grab ‘em!” warned Dalreay.
Prestin saw the wisdom of that. Endurance had come to mean a great deal in this world of Irunium. With men and women of his own time riding in automobiles and mechanisms at their beck and call, endurance was being bred out. Irunium unmercifully exposed the chinks in the self-esteem of other-worlders. All the morale and strength-sapping artifacts of life back home added together to make a man unfit for life almost anywhere, let alone Irunium. Irunium demanded more than the home world, more than mere physical toughness, and Prestin had to face up to the next ordeal. He must endure.
All Prestin could see past the window was a green wall going up out of view. Dalreay, also looking out as they went by, looked sick.