Джеффри Лорд: Dimension Of Dreams

But the rising wind was whipping at Blade's body and making him shiver, tough as he was. He started down the slope. This time he was alert not only for possible enemies and weapons, but for another road that might lead him to the city and save him an exhausting scramble across country.

He reached the bottom of the hill and scrambled over a pile of stones several feet high, which had no doubt once been a much higher wall. Now it was only a tumbled mass, overgrown with weeds, moss, and thistles. Again the spines pricked and jabbed at Blade, and insecurely settled stones shifted under his feet, throwing him sprawling several times. He was still more scarred, grazed, bruised, dusty, and bad-tempered by the time he pushed his way through a line of bushes on to another long-unused road.

As he felt moss-slick stones beneath his feet, the moon vanished behind another wall of cloud. But he knew that another left turn would take him toward the city, if not straight to it. He turned and strode along the road, pushing himself faster and faster as his eyes once again became adjusted to the darkness along the road. The chill wind made him hurry simply to keep warm.

For about two miles the road ran between a double row of the same huge trees he had seen on the estate. It curved gently to the left as it did so, and about halfway along, it became noticeably wider. At that point two side roads ran into it, and Blade thought he saw the dim bulks of other unlighted mansions sprawling across hilltops at the ends of both roads. Unlighted. Were they also untenanted, like the first one? Had they also been abandoned for years or even generations to the weather and the vegetation? It was a bad sign if they were. He must be within a mile of the river, practically in the suburbs of the city. What kind of people would let land within easy walking distance of their city slip untidily back into wilderness? A people who shut themselves in might make for an unpleasant encounter.

He toyed with the idea of turning aside into one of the mansions. If he found it deserted, he could spend the night there and approach the city in the morning. People anywhere were less likely to have a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policy in broad daylight. But as he toyed with the idea, the road made a sharp bend, and he found himself turning onto a section that ran straight and level and nearly a hundred feet wide toward the river and the city.

It was as overgrown as all the previous stretches of road he had followed, and the bushes and grass on either side were wild and rank. Blade's heart sank. For the first time a gnawing suspicion about the city and its people crept into his mind. In a fleeting moment of moonlight he saw something gleaming amid the tangled thistles and rotting leaves that covered the roadway some fifty feet ahead. He ran forward and bent to look at it.

A human skeleton lay in the weeds, almost bare of flesh but still clothed in a kiltlike garment of green cloth and plastic sandals. Although faded and stained by weather and mold, the garments showed no signs of decay. Blade tried to rip off a sample of the kilt, but found it like trying to tear heavy canvas.

He looked down at the corpse again, then down the road toward the river and the city. He could see the towers looming in the darkness, even without the help of the moon. How long had the body been here? The clothing was undecayed; was it just incredibly tough, or had the body come here only recently? And if so, how? Blade wished once again that he had a weapon of some sort. Then it occurred to him that if his growing suspicions were correct, he probably would not need one. But it was with a slower and more cautious step that he moved forward into the darkness, looking about in all directions and also down at the road, searching for more skeletons. He was so intent on being alert against possible dangers that he was at the near end of the bridge that crossed the river almost before he realized it. He stopped and looked up across the river and toward the city.

As he did so, the moon once again came to his rescue. A ragged hole opened in the overcast and silver light flowed down, again breaking the darkness. Blade took a good look at the city in the moonlight and heaved a sigh of relief. His suspicions had been correct.

There would be no danger to fear from the inhabitants of the city. It had none. The cold light of the moon was pouring down on a city as lifeless and abandoned as the mansion on the hill.

There was no doubt about it-the city was dead. Blade surveyed it carefully, noting details. Broken windows stared emptily. One of the high walkways connecting two towers sagged in the middle. The bridge ahead of him was littered with debris-metal panels peeling off the high towers from bad weather, chunks of unidentifiable material resembling plastic, wheels, rods, and odd boxes that had perhaps once been part of vehicles. The inevitable purple thistles sprouted from the cracked pavement and sidewalks. Beyond the bridge the whole rank of buildings along the riverbank, nearly two miles of buildings that must have once risen ten and fifteen stories, lay in piles of rubble. Only an occasional hollow-eyed wall rose free.

Blade shook his head and frowned. Had the computer finally sent him into a dimension completely empty of human life? No, there was that skeleton on the road. And unless he was mistaken, there were other skeletons gleaming whitely amid the dark thistle leaves on the bridge. There were other people in this dimension-human, as far as he could tell from the skeletons. And he strongly suspected that the first skeleton had come to its final resting place long after the city had been abandoned. Was there some life still lurking in the ruins, or were the skeletons wanderers drifting hi from somewhere else and dying by accident, starvation, or disease? Had the city been depopulated by a plague, a plague that perhaps still lingered in the ruins?

Blade strode out onto the bridge. At least out here on the broad roadway nothing could come at him unexpectedly. Halfway across, the moon vanished again, but not before he had spotted a long metal bar lying on the road. He picked it up and hefted it, testing its weight and balance. It weighed more than five pounds, and it was thicker at one end than at the other. He found after a few trial swings that he could handle it as an improvised mace. Not that improvised medieval weapons would help him very much if any people he ran into had weapons as advanced as their city. But if their civilization had collapsed and the survivors had descended into barbarism, he would be far from helpless. Feeling a little less like a mouse, though not yet like a lion-perhaps a fox now he stalked forward again, using the mace to probe ahead in the darkness and test the footing. He had no desire to step through an unseen hole in the roadway and drop a hundred feet to the liver below.

He passed two more skeletons. Both were completely fleshless, but again their garments and footgear showed no signs of decay. In addition to the sandals and kilt, one of them wore a sleeveless tunic with a V neck and a large embroidered patch on the right side of the chest. Blade bent down to try to make out the patch, and as he did so, he caught sight of a fourth body, lying half-hidden in a particularly rank growth of thistles a few yards farther on.

This was a body, not a skeleton. In the darkness Blade could not tell for sure how long it had been there, but a quick sniff indicated no decay. He doubted it could be more than twenty-four hours old. This body was also clad in sandals, tunic, and kilt, but the tunic was encrusted with soot, sweat, and grease, as well as blood from the gaping wound in the man's side.

Blade sprang to his feet, hand gripping the mace and eyes probing along the bridge in both directions. Somebody did indeed live in the city-or at least prowled it and killed in it. He bent again to examine the body more closely.