Toward evening he could see the sunset light flashing from dozens of ranked metal towers. The city was there. What surprised him was realizing its size. It must be a good ten of fifteen miles wide, and many of those towers had to be at least a mile high. Blade was tempted to push on through the darkness but decided against it. What lay around him was no longer any sort of garden, but rank wilderness that might hold all sorts of surprises.
This area might have been a garden once. Twice Blade saw heavily overgrown patches of tumbled stone, once the remains of a bridge. But here the neglect that was overtaking the land closer to the Wall had gone totally unchecked for many years. Even the robots seemed to shun this land. Blade hadn't seen one all afternoon.
They pushed on at dawn the next day. For the first few hours they faced a tangle of vegetation that would have done justice to a tropical jungle. Blade would gladly have traded one of their swords for a machete.
Then abruptly they came out into open country, rolling away toward the city that was now clearly visible from the ground for the first time. Somehow, in spite of its size and the hundred or more shimmering towers, the city looked sterile and asleep, even dead. It seemed to radiate a vast, overpowering silence that spread across the country and swallowed up even the sigh of the wind and the crunch of Blade's and Twana's footsteps through the brittle grass.
Blade wondered for a moment if he'd taken off on a wild-goose chase after a dead city. Still, there was no point in calling the city a corpse until he'd at least tried to take its pulse! He lengthened his stride.
They covered the last miles to the city in a couple of hours. As they drew closer, Blade saw the city had its own wall. It was the same height as the Wall outside, but this one was studded with featureless cylindrical towers about every hundred yards. Towers and wall both seemed to be made of something that looked like frosted, white glass. There was no shimmering in the air over his wall and no glint of metal from prowling Watchers. This wall looked as dead as the city behind it.
The wall stood unbroken as far as Blade could see, but once more the storm had been his friend. A good many trees grew along the wall, and one of them had fallen against it. Branches large enough to support a man jutted almost up to the top of the wall. Blade and Twana headed toward the tree.
Blade dropped his pack and other gear and scrambled up the tree. Some of the branches sagged under his weight, but all of them held. In a few minutes he crawled out onto the top of the city wall. On hands and knees he crept toward the inner side of the wall, half-expecting to stick his head into yet another weird energy field.
Instead, he found himself staring down at the ground. The city wall was barely ten feet thick. At the foot of the wall was a belt of what looked like faded green concrete. Beyond it was another stretch of ragged garden. Two miles away the buildings of the city began, mounting up like a mountain range, from five-story foothills to the crowning peaks of the mile-high towers. Nothing moved except the grass, where it was long enough to ripple in the wind.
Blade sighed. It looked as if he had come all this way to reach a dead city.
He crawled back across the wall, threw one end of the rope down, and saw Twana tie his gear and weapons to it. He pulled them up, put on his sword belt, then threw the rope down again. A moment later Twana was standing beside him.
In the moment after that, the city came horribly alive. The nearest tower, fifty yards away, sprouted lean, red-clad figures with gleaming blue rifles in their hands. «Get down!» Blade shouted, grabbing Twana's belt as he dropped flat.
He was seconds too slow. One of the figures raised his rifle, sighted, and fired. Air crackled and blurred, and a halo of white danced around Twana's head. She gave a choked cry and threw her arms out wildly to keep her balance. She took a drunken, reeling step; then one flailing foot came down on the empty air inside the wall. She vanished with a scream that ended in a crunch as she struck the ground fifty feet below.
Then there was silence-except for the sharp hiss of Blade's indrawn breath as he stood up and the softer hiss of steel as he drew his sword.
Chapter 11
Blade had enough self-control left not to charge or even shout. He stood where he was, staring at the cluster of red figures on the tower. He stared as if the intensity of his stare could draw them down from their perch and into range of his sword.
A part of his mind told him that he shouldn't do this, that he was endangering himself and his chances of peaceful relations with the people of this city. It was only a small part of his mind that said this, and the rage in Blade made him totally deaf to it. He didn't care about the danger to himself, not if he could take a few of those red-suited sharpshooters with him. As for peaceful relations-as far as he could see, these people couldn't have cared less about that. If they were going to be this trigger-happy ….
Or were they? There seemed to be confusion among the men on the tower. Two of them seemed to be arguing with the man who'd fired. The wind blurred the words past understanding, but they all seemed to be thoroughly excited about something. Their lean bodies were taut, and their arms waved about frantically. It looked as though something unexpected had happened. Could it be Twana's death-if she were dead? Blade risked stepping over to the edge of the wall and looking down. After a moment he looked away. Even from up here he could tell that he'd brought Twana to her death. She lay face down, her head twisted at an angle to her body that nothing living could ever take.
As Blade stepped back from the edge of the wall, the soldiers started disappearing from the top of the tower. A moment later a door opened onto the top of the wall, dilating like the lens of a camera. Five soldiers filed out and came toward Blade. All of them were carrying their rifles at the ready. The one who'd fired trailed a little behind the other four, and Blade saw the others looking uncertainly back at him. Blade relaxed slightly, but did not sheath his sword and went on willing the soldiers to come closer. If they kept on, they'd be so close that they could hardly use their rifles without hitting each other. He would have no such problem with his sword.
The soldiers came on. Their boots, coveralls, and helmets were all fire-engine red. Apparently they'd never heard of camouflage, or else had no need of it. Their rifles were streamlined, with silver barrels and stocks and butts of dark-blue plastic. They carried black truncheons and small cylindrical green boxes on their web belts. The faces under the helmets ….
The faces had human shape and human features, but all five sets of features were as identical as so many stamped coins. The skin of their faces and hands flexed and creased like living skin, but it had a waxy sheen that Blade had never seen, except in the skin of a dying man or a corpse.
More robots. No, not robots-androids. Artificial beings in human shape, perhaps organic, perhaps with all the parts and processes of a human being. Nonetheless, artificial creations of a biological science generations beyond that of Home Dimension. Were they programmed like the robots, or had they been given human intelligence to match their human forms? Certainly their greater physical versatility would make them more formidable opponents than the Watchers.
Blade decided to take the initiative and see what came of it. As the androids approached, he raised his sword and held in out in front of him, barring the androids' path.
«Halt! What is your business here?»
The five androids stopped as if they'd run into a stone wall, and the one who'd fired raised his rifle to his shoulder. One of his comrades grabbed it by the barrel and, with an angry growl, drew it down again. «He commands like a Master, (a meaningless gabble that might have been a name or a number),» the restraining android said sharply.