Robert Adams - Bili the Axe

“But, at one and the same time, my lord prince, I know full well that I have nothing of that nature to fear from you or any of your liegemen, not so long as you have need of the Kleesahks, who one and all hail me as their Champion of the Last Battle—whatever that really means. You and I both know that your killing of me—whether done or ordered, whether forthright and open or made to appear a ‘regrettable accident’—would be the one certain way to alienate the Kleesahks from you, your house, your kingdom and your schemes.

“So let us two cease to tensely stalk about one another, hackles erect, snarling through our bared fangs like a brace of strange hounds. I’ll unbar the door and have one of your gentlemen fetch down your sword when you speak the word. You can then swear your oath upon your Sacred Steel. That done, we two can proceed down to witness that farce at the tower keep, then you and Count Steev together with me and my officers can get down to the serious business of planning this next campaign against these Skohshuns.”

For long minutes, Prince Byruhn spoke no word. He simply sat, glaring at Bili from beneath his white-flecked red eyebrow. One at a time, he cracked the scarred knuckles of his big hands. Next, he brought up his goblet and drained it, his throat working rapidly.

At last, he rasped out, “By my steel, your impertinences are hard to swallow passively, young cousin! But you’re correct, of course, in your assumption that I’d fear to kill you even did I feel it necessary for New Kuhmbuhluhn. And I suppose that if I refuse to swear your wretched Sword Oath, you’ll hotfoot it down to the tower keep and set about the partial wrecking of the Kleesahks’ night’s work on your men and women. Am I right?”

Bili just nodded.

“To stop you, for sure, I would have to kill you or have others do it, and that takes us back to the sorry fact that I dare not bring about your death… yet.”

The prince gusted a long, exasperated sigh, stood up with a crackling of joints, leaned to reach across the table and secure the ewer, the dregs of which he emptied into his goblet.

“Allright, sir duke, you may have my sword fetched back to me, here; I’ll swear your oath on it. But whilst you’re about that matter out there, find yoi* one of the Sandee servants and tell the oaf to refill that ewer and bring it to me… and tell him that it damned well better be full , this time round!”

A voracious flea biting hard into a very sensitive portion of her body awakened Dr. Erica Arenstein. Grumbling curses and wishing for the umpteenth time that the nearby brook would thaw so that she might have herself a thorough wash and chide Merle Bowley and the other surviving Ganik bullies into doing likewise, she clawed at her crotch. Finally managing to dislodge the pesky parasite, she drew her legs up tight once more, snuggled against Bowley’s warm back and sought the sleep from which the pain of the fleabite had torn her.

As the wind howled around the rocks of the mountain, she reflected that she and the small party of survivors of the once-huge main bunch of Ganiks had been lucky as sin to chance across this smallish, low-ceilinged cave; although even the shortest of them could only enter and proceed about it at a crouch, while most of them were required to do so on all fours, those same circumstances made it—the fore part of it, anyway—possible to heat to somewhere barely above freezing with a trench fire and slate reflectors. With a higher roof and - consequently more space to absorb the heat, they all would likely have long since frozen to death of a frigid night, despite huddling together like a litter of puppies under the blankets and the ill-cured, smelly bearskins.

Their escape itself had been a very close thing, with the vanguard of the Kuhmbuhluhn force to be heard entering the outer section of the caverns even as she and the twenty-odd men clambered up the makeshift ladder in the narrow airshaft which those ancients who had enlarged and improved upon the natural caverns had bored through the living rock. They had emerged from their climb upon the north face of the mountain, well enough armed and supplied, but all afoot in a country that was now the undisputed domain of their enemies.

But the resourceful woods- and mountain-wise Ganiks had not stayed long afoot. By the time Erica had slyly guided them to the westernmost edge of the ruin of shattered rocks, splintered trees and shifted earth that once had been a plateau called the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn—a period of some four days and nights—all were mounted bareback on small mountain ponies.

Although the body that Erica inhabited was that of an Ahrmehnee woman in the mid-twenties—shapely, vibrant and rather toothsome—it was not the body in which her consciousness had been first born. Erica had often had to think very hard to recall just what that first husk that had contained her had looked like, for it had been dust for almost a millennium now.

She was one of a group of scientists which had, a bare two years before the man-made catastrophe which almost exterminated mankind and plunged most of the survivors back into barbarism and savagery, developed and perfected a device for the transference of minds between bodies. While radiation and plagues extirpated whole populations and races of mankind, while roving mobs of maddened, starving people scoured the face of the earth, Erica and the others had sealed themselves within the main complex of the J&R Kennedy Memorial Research Center—a large proportion of which had been built underground anyway—situated between Gainesville and Tallahassee, Florida, and carried on their various projects.

Via powerful transceivers, the group had kept abreast of the rampant insanities afoot across the rest of the continent and world as long as anyone continued to transmit. Blindly, the men and women listened to the destruction and death of city after city, country after country, as hunger and violence and disease brought civilization first to its knees, then to its death. After a short while, the steadily dwindling number of broadcasters were widely scattered and were located mostly in out-of-the-way places.

The majority of the residents of the Center were multilingual, and this fact was of great help in communication, for signals sometimes came, toward the last, in obscure 4an-guages and dialects.

For a few weeks, they were in daily contact with the captain of a Russian trawler in the North Atlantic, until lack of fuel and supplies and a near mutiny of his crew forced him to seek his home port; then they never heard from him again. Another Russian station, this one somewhere in the Caucasus region, stayed on the air sporadically for almost a year, broadcasting in Russ, Armenian, Farsi, Turkish and Georgian; from the natures of the final transmissions, the Center personnel assumed that one or more of the plagues had finally wiped out the distant facility.

This was what assuredly happened at their last U.S. contact—a military installation of so hush-hush a nature that they never knew its exact location. The last North American contact was with a field biologist in far-northern Canada; that one ceased suddenly in the midst of a sentence and could never again be raised.

Another such contact—a Japanese whaler and its factory ship, cruising in Antarctic waters—announced its intention of essaying a passage of the Straits of Magellan and never again broadcasted or acknowledged a transmission.

At the end of the second year, only three stations were still broadcasting on any sort of regular schedule—one in Uppington, Union of South Africa, one in southeastern Siberia and one in Queensland, Australia. By the end of the third year after the Center had been sealed, even these few were becoming unrelievedly silent.