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to get to the point.
"The communications people told me, sir, that the signal from this helmet was
interfering with a similar signal put out by the helmet Matt's wearing.
Whickever one he'd taken, he'd be walking around back there broadcasting a
built-in noise, very easy for the berserker to identify as a chronotransmitter
and home in on. The berserker must have thought it an obvious trap, sir,
since, it hasn't homed in and killed him yet." Derron's voice was very well
controlled, but he could feel his anger in the tightness of his throat.
"So, you're shocked at what we're doing, Odegard. Is that it?" Time Ops grew
angry too, but not guiltily or defensively. He was only annoyed, it seemed, at
Derron's obtuseness.
He flicked on his desk screen and spun a selector. "Take a look at this. Our
present view of Ay's lifeline."
During his hitch of sentry duty, Derron had gotten pretty good at reading the
screens.
This was the first look he had today at what was happening to Ay's lifeline.
He studied the picture carefully, but what he saw only confirmed his fears of
yesterday. "It looks bad. He's getting way off the track."
"Matt's buying a little more present-time for us here, and so far that's all
he's doing. Is it clear now why we're trying to get the dragon to kill him?
Millions, many millions, have died in this war for nothing, Major."
"I see." His anger was growing more choking by the moment, because there was
nowhere it could justly be vented. In hands that he could not keep from
shaking, Derron held the helmet out in front of him for a moment, looking at
it as if it were an archeological find he had just unearthed. "I see. You'll
never win unless you find that dragon's keyhole. Matt never was anything but a
fancy piece of live bait, was he?"
"No, I wouldn't say that, Major." Time Ops' voice was less sharp. "When you
first suggested that he be used, we weren't sure but that he could come out
alive. But the first full-scale computer simulation showed us the way things
pretty well had to go. No doubt you're right when you say bugging the helmet
made the trap a little too obvious."
Time Ops shrugged, a slight, tired motion. "The way things stand at this
moment, Matt may be safer from berserkers than we are."
Matt came painfully awake, trying to cough around a gag of dirty cloth that
had been stuffed into his mouth. His head ached, throbbing hideously, as if he
had been drugged.
He was being carried with a sickening jogging motion; when his head had
cleared a little more, he understood that he was riding slung across a
load-beast's humped back, his head hanging down on one side of the animal and
his feet on the other. His helmet had fallen off somewhere; and there was no
bouncing tug at his waist from the weight of sword and scabbard.
Six or eight men had him prisoner. They were walking near the load-beast in
the darkness, guiding and leading it along a narrow winding path by moonlight.
The men looked behind them frequently, and now and then they exchanged a few
low-voiced words.
"... I think two of them are following, or they were. ..."
Matt heard that much. He tried the cords holding his wrists and ankles and
found them strong and tight. Turning his head, he could see that the trail
ahead wound among jagged pillars and out-croppings of rock; from what he knew
of the country near Blanium he judged that they were right along the coast.
When the man who was leading the way turned and paused a moment to let the
others close up, Matt saw without surprise that he was tall and thin and robed
in black, and had
belted around his lean waist a sword and scabbard that looked like Matt's.
Nomis had taken for himself one of the power symbols of a king.
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The way grew steadily rougher. Shortly the little procession came to a thin
ridge, with deep clefts in the rock on either side of it; here the load-beast
must be left behind. At
Nomis's order, some of the men lifted Matt from its back. He tried to feign
unconsciousness, but Nomis came to lift his eyelids and then regard him with a
knowing grin.
"He's awake. Untie his feet, but see to it that his arms are doubly secure."
The men did so. The farther they progressed on this hike, the more often they
stopped to look uneasily about them, starting at every sound of the night.
They seemed to fear
Nomis and whatever lay ahead almost as much as they feared the pursuit that
must be coming after them from the castle.
With his arms still bound behind his back, men ahead and behind holding on to
him, Matt was led across the single-file ridge, then made to scramble up
through a long twisting chute, almost a tunnel between high walls of rock that
shaded out the moon.
Only Nomis, leading through the darkness, seemed to know the way. The sound of
surf became audible, drifting from somewhere below.
A cloud was over the moon when the party straggled at last onto a tiny
tableland of rock.
Only Nomis immediately saw the figure that had been waiting, motionless as
stone, for their arrival. When he saw it, he quickly drew Matt's sword; and
when Matt was pushed up out of the chute to within his reach, he gripped
Matt's hair with one hand and with the other laid the bare blade against
Matt's throat.
The moon came out then, and the other men saw the thing that stood watching
them.
Like odd chicks of some gaunt black bird, they squawked and scrambled to get
behind
Nomis, all making sure they stood within the old chalked diagram. For a few
seconds, then, everything was still, save for the faint wind and the surf and
one man's muttering in fear.
Keeping the sword against Matt's neck, Nomis pulled the gag from his face and
displayed him to the berserker. "What say you, mud thing, is this man indeed
your enemy? Shall I slay him, then?"
The metal puppet might have been sent charging forward, far faster than any
man could move, to pull Matt away to captivity. But there was the keen edge
right against the jugular. The berserker would not risk a thread of
responsibility for Matt's death.
"Wizard, I will give you power," said the demon. "And wealth, and the
pleasures of the flesh, and then life everlasting. But first you must give me
that man alive." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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