Bloodstone (25 page)

"Your face feels hot and drawn, your heart beats quickly. Damn! I had hoped this recurrent fever had broken for good, though I've noted a decline in your usual vigorous spirits of late. Wait, I'll get something." He padded across the stones to the chest where his possessions were kept.

"I don't want any more of your weird drugs," Teres Complained. "I'm sick of being imprisoned in this foul city, where the very air is poisoned by the fetid vapors of Kranor-Rill! Kane, can you take me along with you through Bloodstone?"

There was faint suspicion in his face as he looked up from the cabinet. "I've carried other objects close to my person through Bloodstone. It's power has now increased to the level where I could draw another person through the crystal with me, assuming we clung together like parting lovers." His eyes questioned her.

"Take me with you, then!" Teres pleaded. "Or do you consider me only your chattel? The atmosphere of this unwholesome place smothers my every breath, sucks like a feasting leech upon my vitality. Take me into the forest with you, Kane. Let me breathe fresh air, feel warm sunlight... spend an afternoon where the tainted aura of this elder-world horror does not lie. Please, Kane, I've lain too long in the shadow!"

Kane seemed to regret the suspicion he had nurtured. "Of course, Teres," he acceded. "The atmosphere of Arellarti is oppressive. I've been thoughtless not to give you relief from this noisome morass earlier. Small wonder your health is uncertain, when I've held you captive here these many days. There is a focus of cosmic stress that opens into the forest just north of here. Bloodstone's power should be sufficient to transport the two of us there."

There was a moment of terror when they entered the shadowy dome, where emerald light played about them, tinting their skin like ghastly corpse flesh. Teres swallowed her loathing fear and clutched Kane's arm as he strode confidently forward to the malignant crystal.

His hands adjusted the crystal knobs of' the control dais in a manner she could not follow. Smiling encouragement--an iniquitous grin in the serpentine light--he led her to the glowing crystal. "Still game for this?" he asked.

Teres took umbrage at his bantering tone. "I can take anything you can!" she gritted.

"Stand close to me, then," he advised. "We have to share the force field of the ring."

Willingly Teres pressed her body against his massive frame, threw her arms about him as if in last embrace. From Bloodstone thrummed a high drone of power--felt in her head, though not audible to her ears. An electric tingling coursed through her then, and in dread she glimpsed a dancing web of green fire engulfing both their forms. Teres tightened her embrace in a final spasm, clinging to Kane as the vortex of energy burst over them, sucked them down... down...

Hideous vertigo. Blackness. Falling for eternity. Falling through eternity.

Blaze of white light. Teres staggered as firmness pressed her boots. Then she did fall, overbalancing Kane; they struggled in a wriggling heap onto leaf-strewn stone. Bloodstone, Arellarti, Kranor-Rill... all had vanished. About them now rose the yellow and gold forest of autumn, where sunlight warm and familiar sifted through the richly hued trees.

A tortuous outcropping of gray stone-whose leaning and queerly eroded columns hinted that more than nature had been at work here--marked this focus of interdimensional flux. As Teres grappled for support against him, Kane's boot tripped on a broken pedestal, and the frightened girl fell atop him to the stone. In her panic, she pinned his arms that sought to catch their fall and with driving shoulder threw him back against a splintered column. Rock smashed into his skull, obliterating his consciousness in a haze of black pain.

Teres examined him anxiously. A deeper red matted his thick hair where the stone had struck, but his chest heaved regularly. It had almost been accidental, Teres reflected, though her actions had not been the work of a panic-stricken girl.

She had persuaded Kane to take her from Arellarti with no formulated plan or intention--except flight, escape from the evil luminance of Bloodstone, and from Kane as well, since he refused to break away from this unhallowed bond. Teres thought only to reach the world beyond the fog-shrouded tare, the world of men, of honest sunlight and firm ground. Where a lifetime ago a wild girl had striven to master the arts of war, as sung in minstrel's ballads, and never dreamed that she would be plunged into the black realm of elder Earth, whose legends were remembered in darker verse. Let Kane take her to the world she had left, then there would be hope to flee this cancerous terror. There was no other chance of escaping from Arellarti with its bestial guardians, and Kranor-Rill surrounding it like a poisonous moat. But how might she elude Kane? A hundred wild possibilities gibbered in her mind, but beyond the all-consuming need to escape, Teres had resolved nothing.

In the vertigo that claimed them as they passed between the planes of time and space--spewed forth upon this jagged knoll, to stagger and blink from the wrenching shock--Teres had seized her chance. Her need to escape made her movements almost instinctive. She tripped Kane as they swayed together and drove his head against the skewed rock. And now?

Her hand shook as she drew forth Kane's dirk. The haft was cold in her hands, its blade a white-hot sliver of light. She could kill him now, while he lay senseless. A cowardly way to slay so powerful a warrior, but she could never hope to match him in equal combat. And certainly he should be slain. Whatever her feelings toward this man--for he was a man, although his thoughts and motives might seem inhuman--there could be no denial of the treachery of his acts, nor of the alien evil he schemed to call back from the stars of Earth's dawn. He must die, if this horror were to be averted. True, he had saved her life on several counts; true, she believed she loved him, believed he returned her love. Balanced against the measureless suffering his mad dreams would hurl upon mankind... He must die, and her hand could strike the blow. The heroes whose legends she sought to emulate would not hesitate. Bright Ommem knew what crimes this man had perpetrated, should there be truth to his allusions to immortality. Kinder that a loving hand should wield the knife, strike here at the heart, a quick clean death before he awoke.

A stormwind of conflicting thoughts and emotions. Though its intolerable weight pained her arm as if she had held it forever, only seconds passed before she lowered the dagger. Almost despising her own weakness, Teres knew she could not kill Kane like this.

The bloodstone ring blazed on his hand, its luster sullen and unnatural in the sunlight. It seemed to watch her. Perhaps it did. With a bark of mirthless laughter, Teres saw the answer to her dilemma. Kane could do nothing without the ring. If she destroyed it, his power would vanish, his dark schemes crumble like sand. Probably he would never forgive her, but it was better to live with the curse of his hatred than with the stain of his blood.

She touched the ring with shrinking fingers, yet gripping firmly, as if she held a viper by its neck. Her discovery of last night had not been nightmarish illusion; in the daylight she could see that the metal of the ring merged with the flesh of his middle finger. She tugged experimentally, but without dislodging it any fraction.

No matter. If the ring would not come away from finger, finger could come away from hand. Gruesome work, but a finger was a petty sacrifice under these dread circumstances. Quick, before he was aroused.

Steeling herself, Teres pinned Kane's left hand with her knee and stretched forth his middle finger. The gem shone like some unthinkable fire, imprisoned beneath depths of green sea. She set the razor-honed blade against the base of the digit and started to press down.

Teres screamed. The knife flung smoking from her nerveless hand, its edge blackened and fused where it had cut into Kane's skin. At the instant of incision a bolt of insurmountable agony had contacted the blade, coursed like unseen lightning along her arm. She fell back, stunned and sickened from the lancing pain.

"What the hell!" rumbled Kane, jolted abruptly from his stupor. He glared about in confusion, saw the shallow cut on his hand, the seared blade, the stricken girl. With grim suddenness his thoughts reconstructed what had transpired.

There was deadly fury ablaze in his killer's eyes as he struggled to his feet.

Teres recovered faster. The war of anger and pain across Kane's face was not good to look upon. Flight was all that remained for her.

She scrambled clear of the contorted cluster of rock, broke into the open forest, and thus gained a fair lead before Kane could clear his throbbing head and give pursuit. His heavy tread made a dull pounding upon the forest floor as he plunged after her. Once he called to her, but neither wasted breath on further sound.

Teres had the fleetness of a vixen. There was stamina in her long limbs, and with her lead she believed she could rapidly outdistance Kane. The other's brawny frame seemed far too bulky for a foot race, even though she had observed the sudden quickness of his movements. Still Teres knew she was faster of foot than most men, and she hoped to lose her pursuer in the thick timber before they had run far.

A short distance proved her hope to be misdirected. Like a charging bull, Kane leapt from the rocks and rushed after her. His initial burst of speed closed her lead, then, seeing that he could not overtake her at once, he paced himself to follow her at short interval. There was driving strength in his thick legs and enduring wind in his barrel chest. He hung onto her trail like a great, silent bearhound.

Teres set as fast a pace as she dared, then concentrated on maintaining it. Huge trunks flashed by her in blurs of gray, sometimes looming before her as if sprung up through sorcery. Roots and dead branches clawed at her ankles, but somehow she avoided them as well. The forest gloom kept the ground barren of undergrowth, the tall trunks shorn of low branches, or their race would be of different character. Teres could not have plowed through underbrush as easily as her relentless pursuer. Like children playing tag through some fantastic temple of infinite pillars, they dashed through the deep forest, their footfalls muffled by leaf mold, so that louder sounded their panting breath, drumming hearts.

Bleakly Teres realized she could not shake Kane like this. With unfading strength he pounded along behind her, at times gaining a little, at others dropping somewhat back. But never did he lose sight of his quarry, and as the chase stretched on, it became apparent that he was slowly closing the distance between them. Fever and weeks of inaction had leeched Teres's stamina. She gasped for breath now; her second wind was gone. Aching fatigue cramped her muscles, made ragged the grace of herdeer-like strides.

One of them must soon drop to the forest loam, she knew, and odds told her that person would be Teres, unless some miracle intervened, and quickly. She wasted brief effort trying to dodge through the maze of trunks, seeking to escape his sight, perhaps lose him in the forest. But Kane was too near to her now for this stratagem, nor had she the breath or agility to run an evasive course.

The forest abruptly opened upon a road. Her heart pounding too painfully for thought, Teres turned onto the road and used its firmer surface to gain a few strides on Kane. Fear alone gave strength to her agonized limbs now, and her chest ached too horribly to draw breath. On faltering legs she followed the roadway. With pitiless patience, Kane bore along in her steps like a wrathful nemesis, and it almost seemed she could feel his hoarse breath on her back. Though there was no hope of losing him here, the open road made running a fraction less difficult--maybe would give her another hundred yards of flight, before she collapsed to the earth to await Kane's anger. And if the gods of fortune could but grant it, perhaps there might lie a village hidden beneath the trees.

Trees whose canopied branches overarched the road made dazzling, dizzy mosaic of light and shadow to blanket the road, soft ground. Swaying ground.

A horse whinnied and reared. Men yelled startled curses. Blindly she had rounded a curve and burst upon a detachment of armed men. Soldiers! Her vision wavered too vertiginously to discern whose men they were, nor did she greatly care in her deathly exhaustion.

She dropped to her knees before the prancing mount, drew great sobbing mouthfuls of air into her flailing chest.

"What the hell's happening here!" demanded a familiar voice. Lord Dribeck calmed his pawing stallion and glared down at the gasping figure who had blocked his march. "Shenan's tits! It's Teres! Hers is a face that I won't forget! Scared out of her skin from the looks of things! And Kane! Another face that hangs in the mind! What are you doing here, Kane? What's going on!"

Kane gave no indication of being disconcerted. "I've caught a fugitive for you, milord," he explained, speaking slowly to draw breath. He wished now he had ended the chase in the forest, but he had been savoring Teres's hopeless fear, even though for the past mile or more he could have overtaken her. He might have ended her flight in another manner, but he had not meant to kill her, despite his anger.

"I thought you were scouting along the border," Dribeck was saying.

"So I was--until I intercepted some information which revealed Teres to be hiding along the fringes of

Kranor-Rill. Didn't want to give her a chance to grow suspicious and slip away again, so I immediately rode south. By killing my horse I got to the abandoned homestead where she laired before she had time to be wary. She sought to elude me through the forest, and the rest is obvious. I see you also learned of her hideout, since you were leading a company of soldiers to capture her." Kane uneasily wondered how much inquiry his glib story would bear up under.

"No, I'm leading my men toward Kranor-Rill to investigate--and I hope to quell--this growing alarm along the southern frontier. We're getting persistent rumors of weird glowing lights that emanate through the swamp mists at night, that the Rillyti are building some sort of road across the quicksands... Well, you've heard them all yourself." Dribeck looked searchingly at Kane, his face thoughtful. To be sure, appearances substantiated Kane's bewildering tale.