Джеффри Лорд: Warlords Of Gaikon

Eventually there were no more. J raised his hand in a final salute to Blade, then withdrew to the small folding chair that had been installed on the wall for him. Lord Leighton stepped up to the main control panel, lifting his hand over the red master switch.

Blade suddenly felt an impish and almost uncontrollable desire to say something memorably scandalous, something that would have turned Lord Leighton's remaining hair white if it hadn't been white already. Then he fought down the desire. They didn't know much about Dimension X. But they had begun to suspect that what Blade was thinking about at the moment of transition might be connected with where he wound up. So it might not be wise to go sailing off into Dimension X with a bawdy joke on his mind.

Then Lord Leighton drew the master switch downward in its slot. The chamber vanished.

For a moment the after-image lingered in Blade's vision. It lingered so vividly that for another moment he doubted whether he had even started the transition. Something had gone wrong; he was still in the chamber below the Tower, and Lord Leighton-

Then he realized that he was standing alone and naked in the middle of an immense, dark red plain. As far as his eyes could reach it was the color of old blood and as featureless as a tabletop. Above it arched a totally black sky, without a single star. There was no wind, no feeling of, either heat or cold, and a silence that could not have been more complete if Blade had been marooned in outer space.

The silent red plain and the silent black sky were beginning to become oppressive when Blade noticed something high in the sky, directly above his head. A pulsating spot of raw, rich gold appeared in the sky. Then the spot began to rotate. It whirled faster and faster, throwing out long streamers down toward the horizon.

The golden streamers reached the horizon. As they did so, the plain under Blade's feet began to rotate in turn, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until it was matching the speed of the golden spot high above.

The golden streamers began to waver and dance wildly, shimmering and hurling sparks and bits of fire down out of the sky like meteors. The plain under Blade's feet whirled faster and faster. Now it began to quiver like a driven piece of machinery and give out a high-pitched hum.

Still faster. Blade began to feel a weight pressing on his chest, making it hard to breathe. He tried to raise one hand to shade his eyes against the fire from the golden streamers. His arm seemed to weigh a ton.

He looked down and saw that his feet were beginning to flow, melting into the plain like hot wax under the weight pressing down on him. His feet went, then his ankles, then he was standing on fast-dissolving knees. He melted up as far as the waist, stayed there for a moment, then continued to vanish. In seconds he could no longer see how far his body had spread, for the horizon was getting closer and closer as he shrank down and melted into the plain. In a few more seconds all that was left was his head, his chin resting on the plain itself. Somehow he managed to raise his eyes for a final look at the nightmarish dance of the golden streamers against the black sky.

Then his head dissolved, and there was only blackness.

Blade's first sensation was the usual pounding headache that followed a transition into Dimension X. It proved that he was alive, and it always went away after a few minutes. Meanwhile the best plan was to lie quietly. Blade cautiously opened his eyes and looked around him.

A chilly wind was blowing over him and whistling in the tops of nearby trees, and mist swirled above him. Under his naked body he could feel a thick layer of dead needles and leaves on rocky soil. He was lying with his feet higher than his aching head, which lay between the half-exposed roots of a tree that soared up into the gray mist. A branch heavy with long green needles hung down almost to Blade's nose, arching and curving as the brisk wind tossed it. There was no sight or sound or smell of anything dangerous, human or animal. Blade decided to go on lying still until his head cleared.

The fresh air helped, and soon Blade could stand up. He stepped around the tree to get its thick trunk between himself and the wind and took a more thorough look around.

The dense forest and the swirling gray mist cut off his vision close at hand-sometimes to only a few yards. But he could see enough to gather that he was in rugged, heavily forested country. It looked like uninhabited, almost virgin wilderness.

It was pointless to try to tell the time of day as long as the mist cut off the view. But if it was this raw and cold by day, Blade had no intention of staying out here to face the night in the forest, naked and alone. He was tough enough to do it if he had to, but exhaustion from exposure could leave him less able to fight or run. Much better to find whoever lived in this dimension, get fed, get warm, and start learning his way around. If anybody lived in this dimension. So far he had never landed in a totally uninhabited dimension, but there was always a first time for-

This dimension would not be it. Before Blade could complete the thought, an unmistakably artificial sound came floating down to his ears. Somewhere, apparently close upwind, someone was beating a large gong. Blade listened more carefully. A very large gong. Its notes had a deep, booming quality, and went on and on and on, fading away only gradually. Each note had barely time to die away before another followed on its heels.

The gong seemed to be somewhere farther up the hill. Blade peered as intently as he could at the forest above, but the trees grew so thickly that it was like trying to peer through a brick wall. Blade gave up the effort and struck off uphill, letting the sound of the gong guide him over the rough ground.

The gong fell silent before Blade had covered more than two hundred yards. But barely fifty yards farther on, he saw a double line of white stones gleaming ahead in the twilight. He froze until he was reasonably sure there was no one within sight or earshot. Then he slipped forward to stand by the nearer line of stones.

As he had suspected, the stones marked out a path of bare earth, beaten almost rock-hard by the passage of many feet over many years. The path ran up and down the hill, rapidly losing itself in the mist and shadows under the trees in either direction. Blade looked toward the top of the hill and thought he could see a dark mass looming through the trees, a dark mass too regular in shape to be a natural feature.

So he headed uphill, following the line of the path but far enough from it so that the white stones were barely visible. He didn't want to unexpectedly meet whoever used the path.

The slope soon became noticeably steeper and the undergrowth not only more tangled, but thorny. By the time Blade reached the top, he was sweating heavily in spite of the chill. Blood from dozens of places where the thorns had jabbed him ran down his legs, arms, and chest. He stripped a handful of wet leaves off a nearby bush and used them to wipe off his body while he looked at the building on top of the hill.

It rose a good sixty feet above the wall that surrounded it on three sides and had a distinctly Oriental flavor. It looked like a mass of heavily tiled overhanging roofs, heavy beams carved in elaborate floral designs, gilded dragons' heads, and small windows with even more elaborately carved shutters. The protecting wall was eight feet high, overgrown with thorny vines and creepers, and surmounted with a double row of foot-long iron spikes. On one side of the building a rather rickety-looking mass of scaffolding rose halfway to the top floor, but there was nobody on it.

In fact, there was nobody in sight around the entire building. The fourth side of the enclosure was wide open except for a solid wooden hut about twenty feet square blocking off part of it. Blade could see almost the entire space within the walls. Most of it was laid out with delicately pruned shrubs between white gravel paths and small pools, but there was nobody in it. The building-a temple, probably-seemed deserted.