Most of the people were dressed in dark leather boots, trousers, and baggy shirts. Some also wore heavy jackets studded with bits of metal, as a crude sort of armor. Blade saw one with both a jacket and a rifle run up the hill toward him, then stop suddenly and turn without noticing the Englishman. A moment later Blade himself had to stop. At his feet was a steep-sided ditch at least ten feet deep and half again as wide, the bottom overgrown with bushes and grass. The angle of the slope had hidden the ditch from Blade.
Now Blade could see that the rifleman was a boy no more than seventeen years old, with long blue-tinged hair caught up in a pigtail and a red sash around his waist. He was kneeling and firing at the oncoming rats with more enthusiasm than accuracy. Blade winced as he saw one laser beam crisp grass at the feet of one of the boy's comrades.
Then suddenly the grass and bushes at the bottom of the ditch churned, and four of the rats scrambled up the side toward the boy. «Behind you!» Blade shouted. The boy whirled, finger closing on the trigger of his rifle. Blade dove for the ground as a laser beam singed his hair. Then the first of the rats reached the boy. He drew his sword, but not before the rat was too close for him to hold it off. Its jaws closed on his leg, and Blade knew from his yell that the leather wasn't tough enough to keep out those yellow-white teeth. The boy hacked down with the sword, splitting the rat's skull but dropping his rifle. It hit the lip of the ditch, teetered, then rolled down a few feet to fetch up against a bush.
Before the rifle stopped rolling, Blade was gathering himself for a leap. As it stopped, he jumped. He landed on hands and knees close to the rifle but closer to one of the rats. It lunged at him. Blade crouched and met it with knife in one hand and the other hand outstretched to guard. He saw that these giant rats moved more slowly in proportion to their size than normal rats.
As the rat closed, Blade's free hand shot forward, closing on the rat's ears. He jerked its head back and his knife slashed, laying the rat's throat open. Then he picked it up one-handed, threw it at its two remaining comrades, and bent down to scoop up the laser rifle.
It looked so simple that Blade couldn't believe anyone could miss with it. Then he missed two shots himself, and one rat got so close that he had to reverse the rifle and crush the rat's skull with the butt. After that he realized he'd been using the laser like a normal bullet-firing weapon, leading his target and allowing for the wind. Laser beams moved at the speed of light, unaffected by wind.
Blade killed the last of the four rats in the ditch with a long blast which nearly tore it in two. It rolled down the slope, its charred guts trailing, to land almost on top of five more rats coming out of the same burrow. They milled around long enough for Blade to drop two of them with shots to the head. He killed a third as it scrambled upward, and burned the tail off a fourth. That slowed it down enough for the boy to kill it with a sword thrust between the eyes. The fifth rat reared up on its hind legs to attack the boy's throat. The boy thrust it through the stomach, its jaws closed on empty air inches short of his throat, and then Blade burned halfway through its neck with his laser.
More rats were scurrying out of their burrow in the ditch as the last corpse rolled down. Blade scrambled up to join the boy on the edge before any of the new rats could start climbing up. The boy took one long look at Blade, examining him from head to foot. Then he shrugged and after that seemed to find nothing unusual about fighting side by side with a nearly naked man half again his size and much lighter-skinned.
Blade picked off rats at long range, and the boy used his sword on any which got close. His wounded leg was bleeding freely, but the wounds didn't seem deep enough to slow him down. They were both too busy killing rats in the ditch to pay attention to the battle behind them. Blade's world shrank down to the matted, blood-smeared grass in the ditch, the blood-spattered boy beside him, the hot rifle in his hands, and the steadily more overpowering smell of burned rat flesh.
Eventually Blade's laser ran out of power in the middle of a burst. The rat was still alive, and the boy jumped down to kill it with his sword. He slipped on the grass and tumbled head over heels to the bottom of the ditch. Blade threw down his useless rifle and got ready to finish off the rat with his knife.
Then a laser beam sizzled past Blade's ankles, and the rat's head exploded gruesomely. He turned around, raising his knife. The man standing there was nearly his own size, with bare arms corded with muscles and covered with scars. His head was shaved bald, and he wore a mustache with small silver beads tied to each end. Wide golden eyes met Blade's for a moment, then shifted their gaze down into the ditch.
«Ho, Bairam!» the man shouted. «Your thoughts are still faster than your eye or your hand. Does nothing change?»
Young Bairam glared at the man in silence for a moment, then pointed at Blade. «Yes it does, Hota. It was this one who saved me, not you. Also he, unlike you, did not use Oltec when the battle was over and death-danger past.»
«The death-danger was not past. There were still living rats close.»
«I saw none.»
«You had your eyes turned the wrong way, as usual.»
«I had my eyes on these,» he said, pointing at the dead or dying rats littering the bottom of the ditch. «And he-«pointing at Blade «-and I kept them from biting you in the ass, until they were all dead. It was then that you used the Oltec. The Law says-«
«You are so sure that you know what the Law says, because you are Peython's son! I have better reason to know what the Law says. I have obeyed it in more battles than you have years.»
«Oh? I didn't know you'd fought that many women.»
The big man began reciting a list of his battles which Blade found almost impossible to understand. It wasn't the language itself which confused him. The transition into Dimension X had altered the structure of his brain so that he could both speak and understand the local language as if it were English. Why this happened was still a mystery, but Blade didn't mind the alteration going unexplained as long as it didn't stop happening!
The problem with this conversation was that Blade didn't know what two-thirds of the words used meant. «Oltec,» for example. Blade thought he remembered a tribe of Central American Indians by that name but seriously doubted he'd landed in Central America! Then «Kaldak,» «munfan,» and dozens of others. For all the sense he could make of it, the conversation might as well have been taking place in a language he didn't understand.
The quarrel between Bairam and Hota came to an abrupt end when a high-pitched, very cold voice spoke from behind Blade.
«Be quiet, both of you.»
Blade helped the boy out of the ditch, then turned to face the speaker. He saw a blue-haired young woman with a laser rifle slung across her chest and a short sword in one hand. Her face was dirty and too thin for real beauty, but her eyes were a glorious deep green with flecks of silver. An armored jacket concealed her above the waist, but one leg of her trousers was ripped open to above the knee. The leg exposed had a magnificent tan which didn't come from a bottle and lovely curves which came from firm muscles instead of support hose.
Right now she sounded too angry to encourage Blade to think how she might look undressed. «I am going to speak to my father about both of you if there is another quarrel like this. Each of you is both right and wrong. Bairam, there were live rats up here, which you could not see. So Hota did not break the Law of Oltec. Hota, you should have let either Bairam or this one have the kill. You were greedy, then you kept the quarrel going after my brother spoke wrongly. You also showed bad sense, in keeping the quarrel alive with this one standing close.» She turned to Blade, brushing hair out of her eyes and looking hard at him. «Who are you, pale man?»