Walkers (31 page)

But Samena said, ‘There’s still
something evil here, I can feel it. It’s close now. Much closer. Maybe it’s not
in this dream... but it’s very near.’

Kasyx said, ‘My vote is that we
leave it for now. Come on, we don’t have any real experience yet. If Yaomauitl
turns up in this dream, then what the hell are any of us going to do?’

Samena touched her fingers to her
forehead and closed her eyes. She could sense the evil almost as distinctly as
the heartbeat which pounded through the building. It was like an intense black
coldness inside the front of her brain; the blackness of diseased skin, the coldness
of death. She could almost see grotesque faces, somewhere just out of focus;
faces that whispered and conferred with each other, speaking of blasphemies and
tortures and cruelties beyond human imagination.

Yet – there was some curiously
alluring
quality about all this
darkness, all this evil. It promised sensations of intense pleasure, of
delirious self-indulgence, of nakedness and passion and danger. The voices
whispered of the ‘little death’; and of moments of humiliation so extreme that
the pleasure-centres of the brain craved for extinction, to make the
humiliation complete.

Kasyx reached out for Samena, and
drew her towards him. ‘What is it?’ he asked her. ‘Is it really strong?’

She nodded. ‘I don’t know whether
it’s good or whether it’s bad. It seemed like it was evil at first... but now
I’m not so sure.’

‘Maybe we should check it out,’
Tebulot suggested.

Kasyx shook his head. ‘Enough for
one night, okay? Let’s get back to Springer. I want to know why he hasn’t been
keeping in touch.’

They turned back towards the tunnel;
but as they did so, the two hooded figures stepped out of it, and barred their
way – although how they had managed to get behind the Night Warriors without
their noticing, none of the three could even begin to work out. But this was a
dream, after all – and anything could happen in a dream.

The Night Warriors cautiously
approached the hooded figures, and then stopped. It was clear that they were
not going to move out of the way.

‘Do you want to stand aside?’ Kasyx
asked them.

One of the hooded figures raised its
arm and pointed across to the opposite side of the gallery. There was another
tunnel entrance there, slightly narrower, but just as dark.

You will go that way,
the hooded figure commanded.

‘Sorry, pal,’ Kasyx replied. ‘We’re
going back the way we came in.’

You will go where you have been told,
the figure insisted.

‘And if we refuse?’ asked Tebulot.

The two hooded figures, already
tall, began to stretch taller and taller, and the shadowy mouths of their hoods
widened, until they were leaning over the Night Warriors like blind man-eating
worms. They swayed as they came nearer, and Kasyx again glimpsed those writhing
black tentacles where their faces should have been.

Tebulot didn’t wait for any orders.
He wrenched back the T-bar on his heavy machine, lifted it up to his shoulder,
and fired it at the nearer of the two figures.

There was a soft, sharp
zzaffff.
and a bright white bolt of pure
energy was swallowed up by the darkness inside the figure’s hood.

For one moment, Tebulot thought that
the figure had absorbed his shot without injury; but then suddenly the tall
hooded cloak began to tumble and collapse. It fell to the ground as if it had
been completely empty, a magical trick; but at the very last second there was a
nauseating wriggling from under the robes, and something emerged, something
gristly and black and tangled. Tebulot tugged back the weapon’s T-bar and fired
again, and another bolt of white energy scored a direct hit.

There was a crackle, and a sickening
odour of burned fat, and a shriek that penetrated the Night Warriors’ ears like
the scraping of metal on glass.

The second figure had hesitated when
its companion was attacked, but now it swayed ominously over Samena, and score
after score of greasy tentacles began to unroll out of the front of its hood,
as if it were vomiting snakes. Samena screamed out loud, but lifted her arms,
and stiffly crossed her wrists, aiming her right index finger directly at the
heart of the tentacles.

She let fly with almost all the energy
that Kasyx had given her – far more than she needed – but then she was
inexperienced and terrified, and the creature was almost on top of her. There
was an explosion of power from the tip of her finger, and the arrowhead which
she had fitted earlier lanced into the creature’s body, followed by a six-foot
shaft of pure dazzling light.

The arrowhead tore into the
creature’s flesh, opening up a path for the concentrated energy to follow. The
energy zapped out of sight, burying itself beneath the surface of the
creature’s skin, then instantly detonated. With an ear-splitting crack, pieces
of unravelled tentacle were spattered in all directions. Some of them struck
Kasyx’s helmet, making a slapping sound like fragments of wet wash-leather.

‘Come on now!’ shouted Tebulot, and
the three of them ran into the tunnel.

It was very dark inside the tunnel,
and it seemed narrower and moister than before.

Their feet slipped on the ribbed,
muscular floor, and several times they had to put their hands out sideways to
prevent themselves from overbalancing. All that Kasyx could see was a jumble of
light and shadows, and the back of Tebulot’s helmet as he struggled along in
front of him.

At last they reached the end of the
tunnel, and were back at the cobbled courtyard. It was still raining, a
torrential downpour that filled the courtyard with a rising mist of spray.
Kasyx reached out and held Tebulot’s shoulder to caution him not to go any
further, and then he clasped his hand over the brow of his helmet. In this way,
his vision switched to infra-red, for detecting enemies by heat rather than
light.

Kasyx scanned the brightly-coloured
green-and-yellow courtyard that the infra-red facility displayed in front of
his eyes. There was nothing anywhere near that gave off calorific energy
although Kasyx was aware that because they were nothing more than monsters in a
dream the hooded figures might radiate no body heat at all. In which case they
could be waiting outside in the rain, ready to devour them.

‘I can’t detect any of those tentacle
creatures out there,’ he told Tebulot and Samena.

‘But we ought to come out of the
tunnel ready for anything. Remember those figures up on the balconies? They
might try firing down at us, or stretching down and trying to grab us. So we’ve
got to sprint across that courtyard like goddamned ostriches, you understand,
and set up as much attacking fire as we can.’

Tebulot cocked his weapon, and
frowned in concentration as he set it for rapid side-to-side fire. There were
no instructions on any of the switches or levers, but Tebulot seemed to know
intuitively how to operate it. The weapon was partly mechanical and partly
imaginary; it was capable of doing whatever its carrier could think up. If
Tebulot had wanted his energy bolts to fire out forwards and then U-turn and
hit a target somewhere behind him, it was quite capable of carrying out his
command.

Samena, who had been alertly
protecting their backs as they made their way through the tunnel, fitted her
finger with a multiple arrowhead which would burst apart in mid-flight and send
a dozen wicked barbs hurtling in a deadly hemispherical spray.

‘All right,’ said Kasyx, tensely.
‘Now,
go!’

They threw themselves out into the
driving rain, and they were instantly met by a flying forest of thick black
arrows, fired from the balconies above their heads. The arrows zipped through
the rain with such velocity that they were invisible until they struck their
targets; each one set up a hair-raising screech as it flew towards them.

Thirty or forty of them flying together
sounded like all the banshees of hell let loose at once. And they were so
powerful that they penetrated the cobbles of the courtyard floor, up to three
feet in depth.

Tebulot’s machine was defensive as
well as offensive. ; Dropping on to one knee, he lifted it up and fired a spray
of energy bolts which intercepted almost all of the next shower of arrows, so
that they came clattering down harmlessly. For the first time, Samena showed
her speed and skill in movement, dodging and ducking between hurtling arrows to
reach the middle of the courtyard, lift her stiffened arms, and let loose a
multiple burst of arrowheads up at the overhanging balconies.

There were cries and screams from
above them, and four empty robes came floating down through the rain, to settle
wetly on the cobbles. Tebulot adjusted his weapon and fired a short but
punishing burst of energy at each of them. There were searing sizzles, and
eternally echoing shrieks. Only one of the tentacled creatures managed to
escape him, dragging itself like a deformed, tortured octopus across the
courtyard and into the shadows.

Kasyx deflected two or three arrows
by raising his arm in front of his face and discharging power. With a violent
snapping of static electricity, the arrows lost their atomic integrity and
vanished. But the drain on Kasyx’s charges was too high for him to defend
himself very much longer, and he took advantage of Samena’s next flurry of
arrowheads to run for the tunnel which would take them out of the building.

Once in the shelter of the tunnel,
he looked back. Tebulot had almost reached shelter, pausing now and again to
fire off a tremendous fusillade of dazzling white energy at the hooded figures
who clustered on the balconies. Samena was further away, but she was so light
and agile that Kasyx felt sure she could reach the tunnel without any
difficulty.

The courtyard flashed and crackled
and flickered with blinding lights. The pouring raindrops were caught by the
flashes in mid-air, as if they were being picked out by strobes, so that
Tebulot and Samena appeared to be fighting in a cage of silver needles. There
was a strong smell of burning linen, and some indescribable odour which the
tentacled creatures gave off when Tebulot hit them, like scorched snail.

More arrows screeched down into the
courtyard. More robes tumbled and billowed down from the balconies. But Tebulot
checked his charge-scale now and saw that it was glowing only faintly, which
meant that he had used up practically all the energy which Kasyx had given him
before they had entered the dream. He loosed off one final flash of energy, and
then came running towards Kasyx with his head down and his arm held up to
protect himself from random arrows. One arrow hurtled close and crunched deep
into the cobbles next to his running foot, but he managed to make a final
football-tackle leap into the tunnel, his weapon clattering down next to him.

‘Power!’ he said, breathlessly. ‘I’m
right out of power!’

Kasyx said, ‘Hold on. I don’t have
very much left. I’m going to need quite a dose of it to get out of this dream;
I don’t want to use that.’

They both anxiously watched Samena,
who was almost halfway across the courtyard now, skipping and weaving and
dodging every one of the swarms of arrows that the hooded figures were firing
at her. She made her defensive movements look like a complicated dance, her
perfectly co-ordinated muscles acting with speed and power and always with
grace. She was unable to see the arrows that were aimed at her, but her
sensitivity was such that she could pick up the tiny surges of emotion that
came from the hooded figures just as they released their crossbows – they were
like tiny pellets of ice, dropped down from the balconies – and she could also
sense the hustling of the air molecules in front of the speeding arrows, as
they were pushed out of the way by the arrow’s 300 mph flight.

Kasyx and Tebulot were mesmerised
for a moment by Samena’s stunning ballet; but then Kasyx realised that she was
not firing her arrowheads any more. Like Tebulot, she must be out of charge.

‘Samena!’ he shouted. ‘Samena! You
have to run for it!’ Samena glanced at him quickly, and her face was tight with
tension. He could see her judging in that same flick of the eye the distance
from where she was standing to the tunnel, trying to decide which was the best
way to make her escape.

‘Now, Samena!’ Kasyx bellowed at
her.
‘Now!’
Then, however, the
courtyard began to change – and change dramatically. The balconies withdrew
into the walls, like closing eyelids, and the hooded figures vanished with
them. The tops of the walls high above their heads began to lean towards each
other and close in, until at last they joined up together to form a vaulted
roof. Beneath their feet, the heartbeat-drumming grew louder, and more
insistent, and all the time the courtyard grew darker and darker, until Kasyx
and Tebulot could only make out the whiteness of Samena’s arms and legs, as she
came struggling slowly towards them.

Kasyx called, ‘Samena! One last
effort!’ But now the floor of the courtyard began to drop, and curve, so that
Samena was having to climb her way uphill to reach the entrance to the tunnel.
The cobbles rumpled up into soft, fleshy folds, slippery with mucus; after only
two or three steps upward, Samena lost her grip and slid back down again. Kasyx
leaned forward, and looked down into the deep curved reaches of the courtyard,
but Samena seemed to have dropped right out of sight.