With that help, Blade's strength and his grip on Hota's shoulder and arm easily did the rest. In a single smooth motion Blade dropped and Hota rose. The Kaldakan let out a scream as he found himself in midair, then hit the ground headfirst with a gruesome crunch. Blade stepped back, noting that Hota's skull was flattened on top and his whole head was at an impossible angle to his shoulders.
Then Kareena was in Blade's arms, and this time he didn't even want to push her away. He wasn't feeling quite so cold-blooded now that Hota was dead, and it helped not to have to look at the man's body for a while.
Finally Kareena stepped away from Blade and turned to the others. «You see that Hota is dead, from the bare hands of a man he fought with a sword. A man he said was outside the Law! I say that if Blade is outside the Law, then the Law itself is not as it should be.» Several people flinched at those words, but nobody dared say anything. Blade himself wouldn't have argued with Kareena, not when she had her sword drawn and looked ready to kill anyone who argued.
«I will stay here in Gilmarg with Blade, and we shall study the secrets of the Tower Builders. Whatever we do or leave undone will be for the good of Kaldak, in the war which is coming. The rest of you, start loading the munfans!»
Bairam stepped forward. «My sister, our chief's daughter, speaks well. My sword will go where she or Blade of England tells it to go.»
«Mine likewise,» said Sidas.
«And mine.»
«Mine, also.»
«Yes. A new time has come for Kaldak.»
And so on, until nearly everyone had sworn to obey Kareena and Blade. No doubt they were taking his victory over Hota as an omen. Blade felt more relieved than proud. Knowing which orders to give was always important, but being able to get them obeyed was even more so.
Chapter 12
At dawn the next day Blade and Kareena stood side by side in an upper-floor window on the edge of Gilmarg. Far across the fields they saw the last munfans tramping toward the forest. Green light flickered three times from behind the munfans.
«That's Sidas signaling farewell,» said Blade. «Now it's up to us.»
«Do you think they'll have enough fire-I mean, power cells?»
«They've got all we could hope to get out of Gilmarg without waiting for the Doimari to strike again,» said Blade. «Thanks to Sidas, that's many more than I'd hoped.»
Sidas had made a suggestion so sensible that Blade was embarrassed he hadn't thought of it himself. For a short distance a munfan could carry three or four times its normal load. So why not load the munfans until they could barely walk, lead them to the forest, unload them, bring them back, and repeat the whole process all night. It didn't matter if the power cells got all the way to Kaldak at once, as long as they were out of Gilmarg before any more Doimari came. The Doimari seldom came into the forests, and even if they did you could hide a whole city under the trees, never mind a pile of Oltec!
Sidas, Blade decided, was going to be an extremely useful man in the new Kaldak with its new Law. Once he was convinced it was possible to do something at all, he would think very clearly about how to do it. Blade had told Bairam, «If Kareena and I don't come back, be sure Sidas gets the honor he deserves. Listen to him yourself, too. He thinks before he speaks.»
Bairam had flushed. «And I still do not?»
Blade had clapped Bairam on the shoulder. «You're getting better. But you still have a long way to go.»
«I know.» He had sighed. «And you have made it even longer than it was before you came. I hope you stay a long time, Blade. Even my father could not do all which must be done to help Kaldak go where it must.»
«Blade,» Kareena now said insistently, breaking into his thoughts. «Will they have enough power cells to fight a war against Doimar?»
«I don't think they'll have to fight the whole war with what they have now,» said Blade. «There was a storeroom full of power cells under Gilmarg, in spite of all the years the Doimari have been coming to it. Why shouldn't there be some under Kaldak, when you've never even looked for them?»
Kareena smiled and turned away from the window. «True. Who knows what lies in the darkness beyond the Law? Shall we go down and look?»
«-one hundred fifty-two. One hundred fifty-three. One hundred fifty-four. One hundred fifty-five.»
Blade listened to Kareena's voice counting the rungs of the ladder, then looked down. Twenty feet below, the lantern, dangling from a rope around his waist, made a flickering, unsteady ring of orange light on the walls of the shaft. He saw no sign of any opening or even a closed door.
How far down did this shaft go? With one hundred sixty rungs at a foot and a half each, they were already two hundred and forty feet below the level of the storeroom, and that was already a good fifty feet below ground level. They were already half again as deep as the Dimension X complex under the Tower of London, and with no elevator.
At least there was no elevator now. Once there must have been some sort of machinery for lifting equipment, if not people. Anything worth burying this far underground must have held items which couldn't be hauled up and down a ladder on people's backs. Perhaps this particular shaft was for ventilation and used by people only in an emergency. In that case the main shaft for whatever lay below must be elsewhere. Blade didn't like the idea of searching an underground maze for an elevator which probably no longer worked. On the other hand, he liked even less the thought of climbing back up this shaft rung by rung, with the Doimari quite possibly waiting at the top.
He stopped and flexed the kinks out of each arm and leg in turn. The lantern below swung through a wider arc, nearly striking the wall. As it steadied, Blade saw an unfamiliar pattern on the wall at the very edge of the light. He quickly descended four more rungs and looked again. The pattern was like bars or wire mesh over a large opening. Another five rungs downward, and Blade was sure.
It was an opening, large enough for a man, but it was also blocked by a door of metal bars as thick as Blade's thumb. Blade reeled in the lantern, hung it on a rung, then unslung his rifle and prepared to fire it.
«Won't that kill it?» Kareena asked.
«Remember the power cells. If it dies, we can make it live again.»
Kareena shook her head in irritation at her own mistake. «I am sorry, Blade. I am not used to thinking of how life goes, when we are so far beyond the Law as I have known it.» She hesitated. «Blade, do all the men of England think beyond the Law as easily as you do?»
«No,» said Blade shortly. That wasn't a line of questioning he wanted her to follow very far. He aimed the rifle at the nearest corner of the door and pulled the trigger. The shaft lit up with the familiar green laser glow. Even though the glow reached much farther than the lantern's light Blade saw no bottom to the shaft.
It took a complete power cell and part of another before the door was cut loose. The dark metal of the bars was nearly as tough as the silvery Englor alloy of Blade's loinguard. He waited until the bars cooled off a little, used the muzzle of his rifle to swing the gate open, and waited a little while longer. Even an emergency exit might have electronic sentinels if what lay beyond it was important enough. Some of these sentinels might even have survived the centuries since the fall of the Tower Builders.
The darkness beyond the doorway gave back nothing but silence. Finally Blade swung himself into the door, then helped Kareena down. They stood together on the edge of the unknown for a moment, Kareena's arm stealing around Blade's waist. Then Blade laughed loud enough to raise echoes and struck a dramatic pose, holding the lantern high.