Master Of The Hashomi

Chapter 8

The women of the valley were eager to get Blade's services, but didn't forget caution or common sense. It was several days before Blade heard from Mirna again, and more than a week before she led him to his first rendezvous.

Even then Blade was not quite as well-off as he'd hoped to be. It was entertaining to dream of satisfying hundreds of sex-starved women while learning all the secrets of the Hashomi from what the women babbled or moaned. Things didn't work out that way.

Mirna had said there were more eager and lusty women than there were eager and lusty men. Blade met less than a hundred. Doubtless there might be more, but Mirna seemed to be a cautious soul. Blade suspected she was bringing to him only those women she could trust to be totally discreet and possibly only those who were her personal friends-and allies. Mirna quite obviously had some plans beyond giving a few dozen of her friends a few happy hours in bed with Richard Blade.

Blade was careful not to inquire about those plans. If Mirna was deep in some dangerous game, she would be quite ready to denounce him to the Master if he did anything but keep his mouth shut and his loins busy. She couldn't afford to be less than ruthless where her own survival was concerned.

Blade did learn a good deal from the women in spite of all this. Unfortunately, most of it was kitchen gossip, domestic scandals, or which Hashomi were usually impotent, drunk, or more than normally sadistic. A vast amount of petty detail, which would no doubt be useful if he ever decided it was worth trying to blackmail some of the Hashomi.

Somehow, Blade could not see much sense in that.

He realized after a few days that he should have expected this. The place of women among the Hashomi was so low that even in his most unguarded moments a sworn adept would hardly reveal very many secrets to one. Most of the leaders high enough to be in the confidence of the Master were celibate or so old they'd lost interest in women.

Not that Blade's passing among the women was a complete waste of his time and energy. From what he saw and from what they told him, he was able to work up a map of the whole valley, with all the important towns and camps and many of the guard posts clearly marked. He was also able to find out where much of the gear he badly needed could be obtained, without the Master's consent or knowledge.

So night after night Blade made his rounds to the places where the women waited. Night after night he slipped into unguarded storehouses, arsenals, and shops, to come out with what he wanted. Night after night, a hidden cache grew in a forest near the northern wall of the valley. Before long he had everything he needed to make his way safely out of the valley and through the mountains that hid it from the world.

Apart from all this, there was a great deal of lusty pleasure to give the women, and to take from them. That was quite all right with Blade-there was nothing of the ascetic in him!

The Master and the senior Treases were more informative. They told Blade very little, but they showed him a lot. From what he saw, Blade was able to draw a good many conclusions on his own.

There were at least nine separate drugs involved in the cult of the Hashomi, ranging from the healing to the lethal. The basic drug was a mildly addictive one that was given to the Hashomi from the moment they entered the ranks of the order. Its main effect was to make them more sensitive to the other eight drugs.

Three of these were more important than the others. There was the huma, the poison the Master had injected into the two men defeated by Blade. A full dose of it could kill a strong man in a few seconds. Even a grain or two finding its way through a cut or scratch could kill a man within a few agonizing hours.

There was the ken, the drug the leader had injected into the two disobedient Hashomi after the fight by the bridge. It made a man passive, almost without a will of his own, incapable of acting without orders and equally incapable of disobeying any order given him. While a man had the ken in him, he was little more than a puppet.

The final member of the deadly trio was the nad. This was not made from the handr flower, but compounded according to a highly secret formula from certain mineral salts and vegetable juices. Its effects reminded Blade of what he'd seen among victims of massive doses of LSD. The nad reacted in any warm-blooded creature to produce madness paranoia, uncontrollable rage, catatonic withdrawal, furious convulsions that ended in death from the rupturing of muscles and internal organs.

Any warm-blooded creature-animals as well as men. Seared into Blade's memory was a demonstration, of the nad he watched one day. He stood beside the Master on the edge of a steep-walled pit dug in the earth almost at the foot of the White Mountain. Together they watched three armed Hashomi lead a man and a woman into the pit. Their hands were bound behind their backs, and both were naked. The man was gray-haired and pot-bellied, while the woman was hardly more than a girl.

They were led to the center of the pit, then chained by the ankle to a thick wooden stake sunk in the earth. The Hashomi scuttled toward the entrance to the pit and slammed the gate behind them. As they did, another gate on the opposite side of the pit opened. The two chained victims turned fear-widened eyes toward the second gate.

«They are a farmer and his daughter caught stealing ripe handr from the fields of the Hashomi,» the Master said. «This is contrary to our ways, which were given to the First Master by Junah himself.»

In other words, stealing handr was blasphemy. Junah was the god of the religion that seemed to dominate this Dimension. It ruled in Dahaura as well as in the valley, although Blade had heard that in Dahaura it was divided into several sects.

Blade nodded politely. «I understand. Certainly the handr must be protected.»

The Master smiled. «Indeed it must be, and today you shall see how we protect it.» His last words were nearly drowned out by a high-pitched neigh that turned into a shrill scream and ended in a long rasping intake of breath. Blade recognized a horse, in terrible pain, fear, or anger.

Hooves thudded, and the horse burst out into the pit. It was a small gray stallion, thick-necked, short-legged, obviously a breed formed for strength and endurance rather than speed or show. It plunged out into the pit, alternately rearing and kicking out, long teeth snapping at the air. Its eyes were wide and bloodshot and rolled furiously.

«The nad is working in it,» said the Master. «Soon it will be blind as well as mad. But before its eyes grow dark, it will see the man and the woman.»

As the horse dashed around and around the pit, one of its lashing hooves struck the girl on the hip. The girl bit back a scream and clutched at the post to hold herself up. Blood now trickled down her bare thigh, and her father let out a sharp cry that mingled horror, fear, and rage.

The horse heard him and turned. Its drug-hazed eyes focused on him, and it reared up, its iron-shod hooves striking out. Its aim was good enough. One hoof flailed the air by the man's ear, the other crashed into his forehead. Skin parted, bone cracked and shattered, blood oozed. The man jerked convulsively, then collapsed to the ground without a cry. He was not dead-Blade could see him twitching feebly. But the damage would have defeated Home Dimension's best brain surgeon.

Then the horse turned on the girl, using both hooves and teeth. The girl was not as lucky as her father, for it took her a long time to die. At first she tried to be silent, then she screamed, and finally she was silent again because her torn lungs could no longer take in enough air for a scream.

Blade also had to exercise a good deal of self-control before the girl died. He wasn't going to cry out and he wasn't going to be sick. He'd seen far too many ugly sights. He did have to grip the railing in front of him, to keep his hands from closing on the lean throat of the Master of the Hashomi and squeezing until life was gone. He was quite certain that he could do that before the other Hashomi could kill him.

At last the only movement around the girl was the flies settling on her wounds. The Master signaled to one of the Hashomi and the man stepped forward, holding a bow with an arrow already nocked to it. The arrow whistled down into the pit, driving through the horse's skull. It reared with a gasp and dropped beside its two victims. The bodies were still lying there as the Master led Blade away.

«Thus the nad is an instrument of the justice of the Hashomi,» said the Master. Blade nodded. He did not trust himself to speak, not when it took a real effort to keep his hands at his sides.

Finally he was able to ask, «You say that any warm-blooded animal will do this under the influence of the nad?»

«Yes. We have tried it with horses, dogs, oxen, goats, and sheep-even the hunting falcons that the nobles of Dahaura love so greatly. All will run mad, smashing and killing as best they can, until they fall dead or are slain.»

«I see,» said Blade. Perhaps he saw even more clearly than the Master intended. What would happen to a city-say, Dahaura-if a few dozen animals maddened with the nad were let loose in its streets? Or a few hundred, or a few thousand? With the nad, not only men but animals could be turned into mindless, maddened weapons of the Hashomi.

Then a question occurred to him. Perhaps the Master would answer it, having already shown him so much. «What about animals whose blood runs cold-snakes and fish, for example?»

The Master's smile was unpleasantly smug. «We have little use for fish. But as for snakes-well, we do something with the fathers of snakes.»

The next day the Master led Blade to another pit, at the mouth of a large cave on the other side of the valley. This pit was more than a hundred yards across and twenty yards deep. Iron spikes six feet long and six inches thick were planted firmly in the rock all around the edge. They sloped inward, to impale anything trying to climb out of the pit.

This time four of the Hashomi with Blade and the Master carried crossbows, and two carried large brass trumpets that coiled around the men's shoulders. The trumpeters walked to the edge of the pit and started blowing. They blew until echoes were bouncing around the pit and from the pit to the slopes above. They blew until half the mountainside above the pit could have crumbled and crashed down in a landslide without being heard. The trumpeters began to gasp and their faces turned the color of ripe tomatoes, but they went on blowing.

Finally the blare of the trumpets died, because the trumpeters had no more breath to blow. They reeled back from the edge of the pit, and only sheer will power and the Master's watchful eyes kept them from collapsing. As the echoes died away, the crossbowmen stepped forward, raising their weapons.

Then the earth seemed to respond to the call of the trumpets. Out of the dark mouth of the cave floated a distant rumbling and hissing, followed by the sound of heavy squelching footsteps, and an unbelievably foul odor. It was like every imaginable form of decay and corruption mixed together and multiplied. Blade found himself wanting to hold his nose, and saw that even the Master was wrinkling up his face in uncontrollable distaste.

Then the darkness in the mouth of the cave seemed to come alive, take form, and crawl out of the pit. It was thirty feet long, coal black, and moved on four clawed legs as thick as a man's body. The head was as large as a horse's body, equipped with glaring yellow eyes and a mouth full of crusted teeth a foot long. From the head a double line of sharp spines ran down the creature's back to the tip of its stubby tail. From nose to tail it was covered with scales the size of dinner plates, glossy where they weren't dulled by mud or filth.

Just as Blade was getting used to the presence of the first creature, a second pushed its black snout out of the cave. Then a third, a fourth, a fifth until the pit seemed to be packed solid with black-scaled flesh. The smell was past description, past belief, and nearly past endurance. Even the Master was now holding his nose with one hand as he motioned the archers forward with the other.

They cocked their bows, raised them, and let fly. Four heavy bolts drove through the scales of the nearest monster, deep into its flesh. It quivered so violently that Blade expected it to fall over and be trampled flat by its mates. Instead it went on quivering like a jelly for nearly a minute. Then suddenly it whirled around, more quickly than Blade would have believed possible, and its jaws clamped down on the flank of its nearest neighbor.

The second monster let out a hissing roar like a boiler venting steam and twisted free of the first one's jaws. A ragged tear showed in its hide, and white flesh laced with pale red blood showed at the bottom of the tear. The wound didn't seem to slow the creature at all. With another roar it turned on its attacker, bowling it over and trying to get a grip on its throat. The long teeth scraped across the scales without penetrating, and the two creatures drew apart for a moment. Then they hurled themselves at each other again.

The fight was long, bloody, and noisy. At last the creature with the arrows in its hide lost the sight of one eye. Its opponent lunged in from the blind side, got its teeth into the throat, and chewed and twisted until at last the flesh tore and blood vessels split to pour a red pool on to the ground. The dying creature toppled on to its side, the tail still thrashing back and forth. Its opponent drew back slowly, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, its muzzle coated up to the eyes with dried blood.

By this time several of the other monsters had paired off to fight, and many more seemed ready to leap at each other's throats. The Master signaled to the trumpeters again, and the blare of their instruments rose until it drowned out even the roar of the monsters below. Somehow it reached their slow wits as a message, and one by one they turned and crept back into the cave. Within a few minutes they were gone, leaving behind nothing but their odor. A trail of blood and fallen scales showed where they'd dragged the dead body into the cave with them.

Blade stepped away from the pit until he felt it was safe to take a deep breath. By the time he could speak again, the Master had joined him. The man's face was paler than usual, and the hands gripping the great staff were white-knuckled and quivering slightly. It seemed there were powers in this valley strong enough to make even the Master of the Hashomi uncomfortable.

Blade decided to take advantage of that discomfort.

«What are they?» he said softly. He could see why the Master had referred to them as «the fathers of snakes.» They were obviously reptiles of some sort, left over from a distant age of this Dimension. But what business did the Hashomi have with them?

The Master's eyes seemed to be fixed on something far off and barely visible. His voice was dreamy, as though he himself had taken an overdose of one of the Hashomi's drugs.

«When the First Master came to this valley, it was theirs.» He went on to describe a sort of lost world, where monsters out of distant ages of the world had swarmed over the cliffs and among the forests.

«We had no use for most of them, but these have done well. In the time that is coming, they will do even better for us. They are ours, like the drugs, like the swords and knives of our sworn fighters. They are the assarani.»

In other words, weapons. Who would be the assarani's victims, in «the time that is coming»? Blade did not dare ask that aloud. Instead he asked, in a carefully business-like voice, «What was in those bolts the archers fired into the first assaran? I am surprised that any of your drugs could take effect so quickly in such a large, slow-moving creature.»

Blade's tone brought the Master back to reality. He smiled. «We owe much to the wisdom of the First Master. What works upon the assarani is not in the arrows. It is in them.»

Blade looked a question at the Master. He continued. «The water they drink is from a stream that flows down into their cave. We drop into the stream what will make them more sensitive to any other drug. The water carries it to them, they drink, and thus all the other drugs work upon them in a moment.»

Blade nodded. The account left out a good many details he would have been glad to know, but it gave him one vital piece of information. He'd guessed at it before-now he could be sure. The drugs of the Hashomi were enormously powerful. Like LSD, a few pounds dropped into a city's water supply would probably be enough to affect a whole population. He'd never liked the idea of something that powerful available to dangerous or irresponsible men or groups.

He liked even less the idea of such drugs in the hands of the Hashomi.

The Master went on, too proud of his people's skills to be silent or to notice the chill remoteness on Blade's face.

«We also dispose of the bodies of our dead by feeding them to the assarani. In each body we place the proper drugs, so that in eating the flesh of the dead the beasts also eat the drugs.»

Blade wondered what the farmers and craftsmen of the Valley of the Hashomi thought of having their dead carted off as dinosaur fodder. He would have to ask someone beside the Master, though. In silence he followed the Master away from the pit.