The Ruins Of Kaldac Part 6

"Mine, also."

"Yes. A new time has come for Kaldak."

And so on, until nearly everyone had sworn to obey Kareena and Blade. No doubt they were taking his victory over Hota as an omen. Blade felt more relieved than proud. Knowing which orders to give was always important, but being able to get them obeyed was even more so.

Chapter 12.

At dawn the next day Blade and Kareena stood side by side in an upper-floor window on the edge of Gilmarg. Far across the fields they saw the last munfans tramping toward the forest. Green light flickered three times from behind the munfans.

"That's Sidas signaling farewell," said Blade. "Now it's up to us."

"Do you think they'll have enough fire-I mean, power cells?"

"They've got all we could hope to get out of Gilmarg without waiting for the Doimari to strike again," said Blade. "Thanks to Sidas, that's many more than I'd hoped."

Sidas had made a suggestion so sensible that Blade was embarra.s.sed he hadn't thought of it himself. For a short distance a munfan could carry three or four times its normal load. So why not load the munfans until they could barely walk, lead them to the forest, unload them, bring them back, and repeat the whole process all night. It didn't matter if the power cells got all the way to Kaldak at once, as long as they were out of Gilmarg before any more Doimari came. The Doimari seldom came into the forests, and even if they did you could hide a whole city under the trees, never mind a pile of Oltec!

Sidas, Blade decided, was going to be an extremely useful man in the new Kaldak with its new Law. Once he was convinced it was possible to do something at all, he would think very clearly about how to do it. Blade had told Bairam, "If Kareena and I don't come back, be sure Sidas gets the honor he deserves. Listen to him yourself, too. He thinks before he speaks."

Bairam had flushed. "And I still do not?"

Blade had clapped Bairam on the shoulder. "You're getting better. But you still have a long way to go."

"I know." He had sighed. "And you have made it even longer than it was before you came. I hope you stay a long time, Blade. Even my father could not do all which must be done to help Kaldak go where it must."

"Blade," Kareena now said insistently, breaking into his thoughts. "Will they have enough power cells to fight a war against Doimar?"

"I don't think they'll have to fight the whole war with what they have now," said Blade. "There was a storeroom full of power cells under Gilmarg, in spite of all the years the Doimari have been coming to it. Why shouldn't there be some under Kaldak, when you've never even looked for them?"

Kareena smiled and turned away from the window. "True. Who knows what lies in the darkness beyond the Law? Shall we go down and look?"

"-one hundred fifty-two. One hundred fifty-three. One hundred fifty-four. One hundred fifty-five."

Blade listened to Kareena's voice counting the rungs of the ladder, then looked down. Twenty feet below, the lantern, dangling from a rope around his waist, made a flickering, unsteady ring of orange light on the walls of the shaft. He saw no sign of any opening or even a closed door.

How far down did this shaft go? With one hundred sixty rungs at a foot and a half each, they were already two hundred and forty feet below the level of the storeroom, and that was already a good fifty feet below ground level. They were already half again as deep as the Dimension X complex under the Tower of London, and with no elevator.

At least there was no elevator now. Once there must have been some sort of machinery for lifting equipment, if not people. Anything worth burying this far underground must have held items which couldn't be hauled up and down a ladder on people's backs. Perhaps this particular shaft was for ventilation and used by people only in an emergency. In that case the main shaft for whatever lay below must be elsewhere. Blade didn't like the idea of searching an underground maze for an elevator which probably no longer worked. On the other hand, he liked even less the thought of climbing back up this shaft rung by rung, with the Doimari quite possibly waiting at the top.

He stopped and flexed the kinks out of each arm and leg in turn. The lantern below swung through a wider arc, nearly striking the wall. As it steadied, Blade saw an unfamiliar pattern on the wall at the very edge of the light. He quickly descended four more rungs and looked again. The pattern was like bars or wire mesh over a large opening. Another five rungs downward, and Blade was sure.

It was an opening, large enough for a man, but it was also blocked by a door of metal bars as thick as Blade's thumb. Blade reeled in the lantern, hung it on a rung, then unslung his rifle and prepared to fire it.

"Won't that kill it?" Kareena asked.

"Remember the power cells. If it dies, we can make it live again."

Kareena shook her head in irritation at her own mistake. "I am sorry, Blade. I am not used to thinking of how life goes, when we are so far beyond the Law as I have known it." She hesitated. "Blade, do all the men of England think beyond the Law as easily as you do?"

"No," said Blade shortly. That wasn't a line of questioning he wanted her to follow very far. He aimed the rifle at the nearest corner of the door and pulled the trigger. The shaft lit up with the familiar green laser glow. Even though the glow reached much farther than the lantern's light Blade saw no bottom to the shaft.

It took a complete power cell and part of another before the door was cut loose. The dark metal of the bars was nearly as tough as the silvery Englor alloy of Blade's loinguard. He waited until the bars cooled off a little, used the muzzle of his rifle to swing the gate open, and waited a little while longer. Even an emergency exit might have electronic sentinels if what lay beyond it was important enough. Some of these sentinels might even have survived the centuries since the fall of the Tower Builders.

The darkness beyond the doorway gave back nothing but silence. Finally Blade swung himself into the door, then helped Kareena down. They stood together on the edge of the unknown for a moment, Kareena's arm stealing around Blade's waist. Then Blade laughed loud enough to raise echoes and struck a dramatic pose, holding the lantern high.

"Forward! To the future of Kaldak!"

He'd hit the proper note. Kareena also laughed and stepped away from him. Side by side they walked into the darkness.

Directly ahead of them lay a single long corridor, with a metal floor and stone walls sprayed with some sort of plastic. The plastic was cream-colored and the floor a tarnished green. A translucent strip ran down the middle of the ceiling, probably the lighting system. At irregular intervals plain steel doors were set in the walls. The first three Blade tried were solidly locked.

"Why can't you burn a way through them?" asked Kareena, when they'd left the third door behind.

"Because they're too thick," said Blade. "I would use up too much of our power. Also, we don't know what's inside those doors. It might catch fire or explode." To emphasize his words he thumped the fourth door with his fist. It resounded as dully as the others, but then swung open several inches. Kareena giggled. Blade put his shoulder to the door and pushed with unnecessary vigor. It flew open so violently it crashed against the stone wall inside.

The lantern showed rack after rack of crates, cans, boxes, and man-high cylinders all around the room. In the middle was a table, piled on one end with small cylindrical cans with spray b.u.t.tons on the tops. An overturned chair lay on the far side. Blade started walking around the room, holding the lantern up to each rack. Either the language of the Tower Builders was very different from that of their descendants, or the containers were marked in some sort of code. Blade couldn't understand more than one word or sign in ten on any of the labels. Finding out what was inside the containers was going to be a matter of trial and error. Not the best way, when one error could be fatal.

A clatter and an exclamation from Kareena made Blade turn around. She'd brushed against the table, knocking several of the metal cans off onto the floor. Blade sniffed. There was a faint smell in the air which hadn't been there before, rather like a cheap perfume.

"There's still something in the cans, Blade," said Kareena. Before he could stop her she picked up one and pressed the b.u.t.ton down on one end. There was a faint hissing and the perfume smell grew stronger. "It smells like a kind of soap," she said merrily.

"Kareena-!"

She stretched out one bare arm, aimed the can at it, and pressed the spray b.u.t.ton again. A patch of skin turned wet and glistening. Then Blade grabbed the can and s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of her hand. "Kareena, you don't know what that is! It could be a poison, even if it smells like perfume!"

But Kareena was too busy rubbing the sprayed patch of skin to listen. "Blade it is a kind of soap," she said finally. "Look." Blade had to admit that the patch of skin she'd sprayed was much cleaner than it had been, and showed no sign of damage. "A liquid soap in a can! We've never found anything like that! What else do you suppose we're going to find?" She sounded like a child antic.i.p.ating a visit to the toy store.

Blade didn't want to quarrel with Kareena. He also didn't want her kittenish curiosity to kill them both. "I do not know," he said. "The Oltec the Sky Masters left here in the Land is different from what they left in England. I do know that we must be very careful. So never, never play with anything you find the way you did now. You were very foolish and very lucky."

Kareena's eyes went hard and for a moment Blade was sure a quarrel was about to start. Then she sighed. "Blade, I suppose you are right. I did not think. I am not used to living so far beyond the Law that one must think about this sort of thing."

"True, and so must everyone else in Kaldak. You're all going to have to learn."

"Yes, but if we don't play with what we find, how are we going to learn anything about it?" She gestured around the room. "There must be enough new Oltec here to keep fifty people busy learning about it."

"Then we'll come back with fifty people, and they can go to work. That way if one man makes a mistake and gets killed, the other forty-nine can see what happened and learn from it. If we get killed, all we've learned dies with us. It may never get back to Kaldak at all and certainly won't get back in time to help against the Doimari."

"You think there is really going to be a war?"

"You saw that machine, Kareena. If Kaldak had a hundred of them, wouldn't your father be tempted to try destroying Doimar. And he is a man who prefers peace and the Law. I have not heard that Feragga of Doimar is fond of either." That was a considerable understatement. From what he'd heard of the woman who ruled Doimar, she was something to frighten naughty children with at bedtime!

Kareena nodded reluctantly. "Very well, Blade. I will follow where you lead." Blade noticed that this promise didn't keep her from scooping three cans of the spray soap into her pack.

Blade led on, trying to look more sure of where he was going than he actually was. His confidence grew as he found that about half the rooms were unlocked. After the third open room he was no longer leading quite so much in the dark. One rack there held several dozen portable lamps as powerful as miniature searchlights. They lit up the whole main corridor and showed a number of side ones as well. Blade refused to worry now about triggering alarms or defenses. He and Kareena were already far enough inside the complex to be helpless if any defenses did go into action. They were also far enough inside to have triggered them off a dozen times if they still worked.

Blade counted about forty rooms in the complex. Some of the open ones were empty or used only for what had to be junk. In many of the filled ones everything was so tightly packaged or sealed that Blade was reluctant to disturb it. He still found enough on display to impress him.

There were hundreds of sets of infantry equipment, including uniforms, boots, gas masks, body armor, and weapons. There were other garments which looked like radiation or chemical protection for rescue workers. There were portable radios and miniature computers. There was enough medical equipment for a small army, including what seemed to be a complete portable operating room. There were tons of rations, some still edible after all the years lying in the darkness. There were no waldoes or any vehicles except a few small freight trucks, but there was everything else needed to help the people of a bombed city defend its ruins.

Kareena was too amazed at the richness of the Oltec to say anything more for quite a while. When she could finally speak, the first thing she asked was, "Do you suppose there's something like this under Kaldak?"

Blade nodded. "It would make sense to have supplies stored under each city. It might be hard to carry them from one city to another in the middle of a war."

"Then-all we had to do, to be as strong as Doimar-was to go a little farther down in Kaldak than the Law said we could? Then-it is because we have obeyed the Law that Kaldak has been put in danger?"

She looked and sounded so confused that Blade wished he could soften his answer, but knew he could not. "Yes. That is so. And the first thing we do when we return to Kaldak is explore every bas.e.m.e.nt and every hole, in every bas.e.m.e.nt in the city."

They moved on, collecting samples of the smaller items as they went. Although they tried to restrain themselves, by the time they reached the center of the complex their packs were bulging and so heavy they were glad to unsling them for a while.

The center of the complex was unmistakably a command center of some sort. There was a central room with consoles, displays, and screens on all four sides. There were six reclining couches, and four unidentifiable contraptions with seats, helmets, gloves, and boots all wired to ma.s.sive metal frames. Blade wondered if they were communications devices, or perhaps equipment for interrogating (and torturing) prisoners.

The rest of the command center included two bunkrooms, a storeroom full of rations and uniforms, and a bathroom. Kareena peered into the bathroom, grinned, then flexed cramped shoulder muscles. "Blade, I think I'm going to take the first bath anyone's taken here since the fall of the Sky Masters."

"I doubt if the water's running," said Blade, smiling.

Kareena sat down on the floor and started pulling off her boots. "Remember that soap-water in the cans? There should be some more in the storeroom."

There was. Blade brought four cans of it, and found barrels of distilled water in the back of the storeroom. By the time he'd rolled one of them into the bathroom, Kareena was naked. She ran over and kissed him. With considerable self-control, Blade managed not to put his arms around her. He thought she looked disappointed. Then she frowned.

"Blade, do you suppose there are any ghosts here?"

Blade felt a moment's irritation at this superst.i.tion, then remembered his own feeling when he had stared at Mossev's dead towers in the evening light. He shook his head. "I don't think any of the Tower Builders died here. Even if they did, in England we think that to bring life back to a place where there are ghosts drives away the evil ones and gives peace to the good ones." Cautiously he reached out and laid a hand on the smooth skin of her left shoulder. She did not flinch, and her eyes continued to meet his. "We're alive, aren't we?"

"Yes," said Kareena. She raised a hand and covered his. "We're alive." She lifted his hand, held it for a moment, then moved it down onto her right breast. She squeezed her eyes shut, and they stood like that for a moment. Then she raised a hand and began caressing Blade's neck and throat.

"Kareena," he said. "Do you know what you're doing?" He thought he had his answer in the way her nipple was turning hard under his hand, but he wanted to be certain.

She took another step closer to him. "Yes, Blade. I know. Now both hands went to work, unb.u.t.toning Blade's jacket. He shrugged himself free of it, then ran his hands up and down Kareena's back. He knelt as she struggled to pull the s.h.i.+rt over his head. When she'd succeeded, he gripped her neat, solid b.u.t.tocks firmly and began kissing her smooth stomach. He ran his lips up over her ribcage and she sighed louder. So did Blade. He'd never expected to find a woman's ribcage a beautiful sight, but there was a first time for everything. When Blade's lips encircled a nipple, Kareena gave a little choking cry. When he ran one hand lightly up between her thighs to the damp hair where they joined, he could feel her trembling so hard he was afraid she would fall.

"Blade." His name came out barely recognizable. "Blade. The beds."

He stood up and kissed her lips, pulling her close until he could feel her swollen nipples and she groaned at the feeling of his erection against her thighs. Her mouth flared open and her tongue leaped out to seek him.

"Kareena...."

They managed to get out of the bathroom, but they never got to the bedrooms. Their desire was too strong and one of the reclining couches was too close at hand. Kareena bent down and swiftly unfastened Blade's trousers. It took her a little longer to find the catch on the silver loinguard. Then she would have kissed his erection if he hadn't pulled her away just in time. Blade knew that Kareena's lips on top of everything else would cause him to have a climax then and there. If she was a virgin he was going to have enough trouble controlling himself to give her what she desperately wanted and certainly deserved.

Blade was right about Kareena's being a virgin, but he'd underestimated how eager she was. She practically pushed him down onto the couch, without even giving him time to finish taking off his trousers. She needed no guiding to straddle him, and he needed no guiding to slide smoothly into her warm, damp readiness. The moment of resistance came and went so swiftly that Blade could hardly be sure it happened at all, and Kareena's eyes were already squeezed tightly shut. Her mouth opened, and it gaped wider as she threw her head back. Her body swayed like a tree in a high wind.

Blade hoped he could last. Then Kareena started squirming from side to side as her own control slipped, and Blade knew that his was going to vanish entirely in another moment. So he gripped her by the shoulders and pulled her hard toward him, until his lips could work all over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She bent over even farther and bit him in the neck so hard he yelled, and thoughts of vampires ran weirdly through his mind.

Then she cried out, too, even louder. Blade felt her writhing and twisting inside as well as outside for one fleeting moment. Then he felt nothing except his own explosive release, as he drained himself into Kareena.

For a short time the ceiling could have fallen in without either of the people sprawled on the couch noticing it. Then Kareena slowly curled herself onto Blade's sweat-speckled chest. He noticed she was very careful to keep him inside her, and he was happy to stay there.

"You said we would do nothing which was not for the good of Kaldak," he murmured in her ear. "Was this for the good of Kaldak?"

"I don't know what it did for Kaldak," said Kareena. "But it was certainly good for me."

Chapter 13.

After a while Blade and Kareena felt like moving again. They took a bath, using up most of the spray soap and making a happy mess on the floor. At the finish Kareena was kneeling in front of Blade, sponging off his thighs and groin. At last she threw the sponge away, ran her hands up between Blade's thighs, and followed with her mouth. They quickly wound up on the couch for a second time. Kareena seemed willing to make up for what she lacked in experience, with her enthusiasm and willingness to try anything.

Both of them would have enjoyed a third time, but Blade couldn't forget the long shaft leading to the surface. He was sure the Doimari knew of the defeat of their waldo, and would react to it sooner or later. He didn't want to find them waiting at the mouth of the tunnel, a dozen laser rifles or another waldo ready to fry anyone who came out.

He kissed Kareena, then swung his legs off the couch, and patted her gently on the rump. "It's time we were on our way out of here," he said. "If we stay much longer, we'll be sacrificing the good of Kaldak to our own pleasure." He walked over to the packs and started rummaging through them. "Now if I can just find something to use for a b.o.o.by trap-"

Kareena sat up. "A what?"

"A b.o.o.by trap." Although he knew that every minute might count, Blade took the time to explain what he meant. He might be killed, and if he wasn't he would sooner or later be returning to Home Dimension. The more of his knowledge of the fine points of handling Oltec he pa.s.sed along to Kareena, the better for Kaldak and the Land.

"Watch what I do very carefully," he finished. "That way you can teach the Kaldakans to do it, if I am not around. You can also warn the Kaldakans who come to this place, so they will not fall into the traps I set for the Doimari. If I can set any traps, that is," he added. So far he hadn't found anything he could use in the packs. They couldn't afford the time for another complete search of the whole complex, but he hated leaving this wealth of Oltec for the Doimari.

Toward the bottom of Kareena's pack Blade found a ridged metal ball with a ring on top. It looked remarkably like an old-fas.h.i.+oned hand grenade. It exploded like one, too, when Blade tested it by pulling the pin and dropping it down the shaft. The Tower Builders hadn't abandoned reliable older weapons while developing new ones. Blade pointed this out as an example of their wisdom.

"So we should not give up bows even when rifles are as common as bows are now?" asked Kareena.

"No. The bows will still be good for hunting. Every animal you kill with an arrow saves power cells for killing Doimari."

Kareena remembered where she'd found the grenade and led Blade to the room. He picked up all the grenades he could carry. Then he b.o.o.by trapped the entrance to the shaft with four grenades wired to the door. Any unsuspecting visitor opening the door would stretch an almost invisible wire, pulling the pin out of one grenade and setting off the rest. Then Blade and Kareena slung their packs and started climbing.

Halfway up the shaft Blade burned off ten rungs of the ladder, leaving a fifteen-foot gap. At intervals from there to the top he cut halfway through a rung. Each rung still looked sound, but under a man's weight it would break and drop an incautious climber several hundred feet to the bottom of the shaft. Kareena watched carefully, asking questions whenever she didn't understand what Blade was doing. Sometimes he laughed grimly at the thought of the fate awaiting unsuspecting Doimari.

They saw no sign of any unwanted visitors in the store room. Blade and Kareena left some of the items they'd collected below, then filled up the s.p.a.ce in their packs with power cells. As far as Blade was concerned, they couldn't have too much power for their rifles. Then they started up the tunnel. Halfway up, Blade used all but two of the remaining hand grenades to set another b.o.o.by trap.

"Won't that bring down the whole tunnel?" asked Kareena.

"I hope it will," said Blade. "It's better that no one have the Oltec here than that the Doimari use it in the war."

Kareena looked stunned for a moment, then nodded slowly. "Yes, I suppose it is so. With ten thousand men armed with that Oltec, the Doimari would not even need the war machines."

Blade would have liked to kiss her for such clear thinking, but the tunnel was too narrow. Instead he simply squeezed her hand, then started climbing again. As they approached the mouth of the tunnel, Blade found himself stopping every few yards and holding his breath. He heard nothing except his own heartbeat and a faint distant sighing which might have been the wind in the street.

They'd stayed underground longer than he thought. When they finally crawled out of the tunnel, it was so dark outside that Blade could barely find the hole in the wall made by the waldo. "Oh, good," whispered Kareena. "It will be easier to escape in the darkness."

"Perhaps," said Blade. "But there is Oltec which lets a man see in the dark almost as well as in the light." He explained infrared searchlights and gunsights in language he hoped Kareena could understand. Relying on his own excellent night vision, Blade studied the room. He saw no signs anyone had entered it since the Kaldakans left. There didn't seem to be anything to be gained by waiting longer.