Fors met those dark burning eyes squarely. “It is agreed. And what I can do, that I shall. But—where men once flew they must fly again! That also we must swear to!”
9. INTO THE BLOW-UP LAND
Fors hunched over the table, leaning on his elbows, hardly daring to breathe lest the precious cloth-backed squares he was studying crumble into powdery dust. Maps—such a wealth of maps he had never dreamed of. He could put finger tip to the point of blue which was the edge of the great lake—and from that he could travel across—straight to the A-T-L-A-N-T-I-C Ocean. Why, that was the fabulous seat He looked up impatiently as Arskane came into this treasure room.
“We are here—right here!”
“And here we are like to stay forever if we do not bestir ourselves—”
Fors straightened up. “What—?”
“I have but come from the tower at the end of this building. Something alive moves at the far end of the field of machines. It is a shadow but it slides with too much purpose to be overlooked by a cautious—”
“A deer,” began Fors, knowing that it was not.
Arskane gave a short bark of humor-lacking laughter. “Does a deer creep upon its belly and spy around corners, brother? No, I think that our friends from the city have found us out at last. And I do not like being caught in this place—no, I do not like that at all!”
Fors left the maps regretfully. How Jarl would have delighted in them. But to attempt to move them would be to destroy them and they would have to remain—as they had through the countless years. He picked up his quiver and checked the remaining arrows. Only ten left. And when they were gone he would have only short sword and hunting knife—
Arskane must have picked that thought right out of his companion’s mind for now he was nodding. “Come.” He went back to the flight of stairs which led them in a spiral up and up until they stood in a place that had once been completely walled with glass. “See there—and what do you make of that?”
The southerner stabbed a finger southeast. Fors picked out a queer scar in the vegetation there, a wide wedge -of land where nothing grew. Under the sun the soil had a strange metallic gleam. He had seen the raw rocks of mountain gorges and the cleared land where the Old Ones had once had concrete surfaces, but this was differ-ent. In a land where trees and grass had reclaimed their own nothing green encroached upon the wedge.
“Desert—” was all he could suggest doubtfully. But there should be no deserts in this section of the country.
“That it is not! Remember, I am desert born and that is no natural wasteland such as I have ever known. It is something the like of which I have not stumbled upon in all my journeying!”
“Hush!” Fors’ head snapped around. He was sure of that sound, the distant scrape of metal against metal. His eyes ran along the lines of the silent machines. And there was a flicker of movement halfway down the second line!
He screened his eyes against the sun, crowding up to the frame of the vanished glass. Under the shadow of the spreading wing of a plane squatted a gray-black blot. And it was sniffing the ground!
His whisper hardly rose above the rasp of Arskane’s quick breathing. “Only one—”
“No. Look within the curve of that bush—to the right—”
Yes, the southerner was right. Against the green, one could see the bestial head. The Beast Things almost always hunted as a pack. It was too much to hope that this time they did not. Fors’ hand dropped to his sword hilt.
“We must go!”
Arskane’s sandals already thudded on the stairs. But before he left the tower Fors saw that gray thing dart forward from under the plane. And two more such lumps detached themselves from the covering of trees along the ruined runway, taking cover among the machines. The pack was closing in.
“We must keep to the open,” Arskane warned. “If we can stay ahead and not allow them to corner us we shall have a fair chance.”
There was another door out of the building, one which gave upon the other half of the field. Here was a maze of tangled wreckage. Shell holes pocked the runways; machines and defense guns had been blasted too. They swung around the sky-pointing muzzle of an anti-aircraft gun. And in the same instant the air was rent with a horrible screech, answered by Lura’s snarl of rage. A thrashing tangle of fighting cat and her prey rolled out almost under their feet.
Arskane swung his club with a sort of detached science. He struck down, hard. Thin, bone-gray arms went wide and limp and Lura was clawing a dead body. A missile from the wreckage grazed Fors’ head sending him spinning against the gun. He stumbled over the body from which came a filthy stench. Then Arskane jerked him to his feet and pulled him under the up-ended nose of a plane.
Still shaking his ringing head Fors allowed his companion to guide him as they turned and dodged. Once he heard the ring of metal as Beast Thing dart struck. Arskane pushed him to the left, the momentum of the southerner’s shove carrying both of them into cover.
“Driving us—” Arskane panted. “They herd us like deer—”
Fors tried to struggle free of the other’s prisoning hand.
“Lura—ahead—” In spite of the blow which had rocked him he caught the cat’s message. “There the way lies clear—”
Arskane did not seem disposed to leave cover but Fors tore free and wriggled through an opening in the churned earth and broken machines. It seemed to last hours, that crawling, twisting race with death. But in the end they came out on the edge of that queer scar in the earth which they had sighted from the tower. And there Lura crouched, her lips lifted in a snarl, her tail sweeping steadily to signify her rage.
“Down that gully—quick—” Arskane was into the notch before he had finished speaking.
The strange earth crunched under Fors’ boots. He took the only way left to freedom. And Lura, still giving low voice to her dismay, swept by him.
Here there was not even moss and the rocky outcrops had a glassy glaze. Fors shrank from touching anything with his bare flesh. The sounds of pursuit were gone though. It was too quiet here. He realized suddenly that what his ears missed was the ever-present sound of insects which had been with them in the vegetation of the healthy world.
This country they had entered blindly was alien, with no familiar green and brown to meet the eye, no homely sounds for the reassurance of the ear. Arskane had paused and as Fors caught up he asked the question which was on his tongue tip.
“What is this place?”
But the southerner countered with a question of his own. “What have you been told of the Blow-Up Lands?”
“Blow-Up Lands?” Fors tried to remember the few scanty references to such in the records of the Eyrie. Blow-Up Lands—where atom bombs had struck to bite into the earth’s crust, where death had entered so deeply that generations must pass before man could go that way again—
His mouth opened and then shut quickly. He did not have to ask his question again. He knew—and the chill horror of that knowing was worse than a Beast Thing dart striking into his flesh. No wonder there had been no pursuit. Even the mutant Beast Things knew better than to venture here!
“We must go back—” he half whispered, already knowing that they could not.
“Go back to certain death? No, brother, and already it is too late. If the old tales be true we are even now walking dead men with the seeds of the burning sickness in us. Instead—if we go on—there is a chance of getting through—”
“Perhaps more than a chance.” Fors’ first horror faded as he recalled an old argument long ago worn to rags by the men of the Eyrie. “Tell me, Arskane, in the early years after the Blow-Up did the people of your tribe suffer from the radiation sickness?”