Джеффри Лорд: The Torian Pearls

The chair now held his head down so that he could no longer look upward, but he knew he had no more than a few seconds. He heaved himself desperately forward, fingers and toes clawing at the sand.

He'd covered perhaps ten feet when the light above him was suddenly blotted out. He had a tiny part of a second to realize that this was some sort of end, if not the end of everything. Then a slab of stone the size of a small office building landed on him.

In that moment he knew pain that swept away all other sensations, all thoughts, all awareness even of his own body. Then the pain faded, and he knew that he was not dead-at least not except in this strange world he'd just left. He was aware of every separate molecule of his body, hurtling away on its own path into an immense chill dark emptiness. This awareness lasted long enough for relief to fill his mind, relief that he'd survived one more monstrous twisting of the laws of nature in the nightmare world between the Dimensions.

Then both relief and awareness vanished, and everything was blackness and the terrible cold void where his molecules darted about like meteors.

Slowly Blade realized that his molecules no longer darted about in the great dark void. He felt them slowly assembling themselves into the body and mind he knew so well. Then slowly that mind and body began to be aware of more than the void.

His head throbbed as if it really had been crushed and then roughly put back together. Every throb seemed to send a wave of pain through the rest of his body, so that all his bones seemed to shake in rhythm with the pounding in his head.

He lay still and let other sensations join the headache. Wetness was under him and all around him, except for his face. Some of it was a sticky, clinging wetness, like thick mud. Some of it felt more like warm muddy water.

All of the wetness smelled strongly of decaying vegetation. The warm air that blew over Blade's face smelled even more strongly and far more unpleasantly of dead animals, the foul scum on stagnant ponds, methane oozing from the black depths of swamps, a faint hint of sulphur.

Blade cautiously opened his eyes and sat up, ignoring the pain in his head. He sat motionless, bracing himself with his arms, until the pain in his head faded. Then he surveyed what lay around him.

He sat near the top of a half-submerged slope of black mud and dead, yellowing grass. His legs were submerged. The mud under him sucked and squelched unpleasantly every time he moved. Slowly he got his legs under him and started to rise. For a moment he had the unpleasant feeling that the mud would grip him and hold him here, as he'd been held in the chair under the falling cliff. Then the grip of the mud broke and he stood up.

All around him was a broad expanse of water, broken here and there by hillocks like the one he was on or by dead and dying trees. The surface of the water shimmered as if it had been polished. A closer look showed Blade that the water was dark with mud and spotted with floating bits and pieces. Blade saw dead animals, patches of dead leaves, floating bits of wood too straight to be natural, but nothing alive. He began to feel that he was looking out over a land just emerging from the waters of a universal flood-or perhaps slowly vanishing under those waters. Everywhere he looked, Blade could see no land rising more than a foot or two above the gently lapping water.

The western horizon was beginning to swallow the glowing ball of the setting sun. Blade noticed for the first time the incredible colors spreading across the sky. The sun itself was a raw red-orange with a faint tinge of gold and a stronger tinge of purple. Long streaks of crimson, purple, and salmon stretched along the horizon, layer on layer of color rising steadily upward. Everywhere Blade saw hints of other, less common colors-a rich mahogany tinged with red, an unmistakable shimmering green. The few clouds that hung in the western sky were tinged blue and pink-not a delicate blushing pink, but a raw, almost bloody color. Behind everything swirled a dozen shades and mixtures of gold and orange. The sky was so beautiful that it was almost frightening.

Blade stared at the western sky until he found the display of colors growing hypnotic. With a painful effort he lowered his gaze to the line of the horizon itself. That line showed humps and waverings, black against the flaming sky. It did not look like much-perhaps only a line of hilltops not drowned quite so deeply as the rest of the land around here. But it was certainly more than Blade could see in any other direction. If dry land lay anywhere within sight, it lay off toward that impossible and monstrously beautiful sunset.

Blade wasted no time in setting off. He had no idea how far he might have to go and he suspected that darkness would come fast when the sun vanished. He walked up over the crest and down the other side of his own hill. Before he'd gone a hundred yards the water was up to his knees. He picked up a floating branch and used it to feel his way along. Another two hundred yards and the water was up to his waist. A few yards more and the bottom became so oozy that he found it easier to start swimming.

Blade set an easy stroke, one he knew he could keep up all night and most of the next day if he had to. Every few minutes he stopped briefly, treading water as he looked around him to take his bearings. The last thing he wanted to do was end up swimming in circles as darkness swallowed up the swamp. Each time he looked, the wavering line of dark humps was still there. At least it wasn't an optical illusion.

Once when Blade stopped he raised his eyes to look again at the display of colors in the sky. They were slowly fading, some lingering longer than others. The whole display was still something to take a man's breath away, and Blade found himself wondering what might be the cause. He remembered that volcanic dust in the atmosphere often led to such unnaturally colorful sunsets.

As he watched, he suddenly saw five lean winged shapes glide across the sky, black silhouettes against the blazing colors. They soared lightly and easily, sweeping upward from the horizon and losing themselves in the twilight that was spreading from the east. Blade watched them until they faded from sight, and did not much care for their looks. He had an impression of twenty-foot wings, long beaks, and spiked tails. Birds, bats, or giant reptiles of some sort? Certainly they looked like meat-eaters. Blade hoped they weren't hungry.

He swam on. He'd covered about a mile when he felt his feet strike into sticky mud. A few more strokes and he was able to walk again. He strode forward, water and mud and trailing weeds dripping from him, until the water was no more than knee deep. He passed a clump of trees with wilted green leaves still hanging from their branches. A few birds twittered cheerfully to themselves in the branches as they settled down for the night. Their sound made Blade feel better. They were the first healthy living things he'd seen or heard in a Dimension that otherwise seemed to be almost nothing but water and mud and weirdly glowing sky.

Blade walked through the knee-deep water across what once must have been level ground for nearly a mile, past several more clumps of trees. Far off to the left he saw what looked like the ruins of farm buildings. In the gathering twilight he could not be sure, and he had no time to spare for side trips.

Another three hundred yards, and the water began to deepen again as the ground sloped away under him. Blade could clearly see his goal to the west now. It was unmistakably a hilly, wooded shoreline. It seemed no more than three or four miles away, although it was hard to judge distances in this land. A long swim in the darkness, but worth it-Blade wanted dry land under him before he stopped for the night.