The Sea Peoples(90)

There was a bestial howling from behind them, from many throats. Toa’s weapon chattered, shatteringly loud, and Thora shouted:

“Now would be a good time, Johnnie!”

Squeezed beside him Pip twisted and looked back through the open space and into the body of the truck, and presumably at whatever was behind it. She blanched, which made John want to gibber in panic; Philippa Balwyn-Abercrombie wasn’t the sort who blanched on small provocation.

A deep breath, and he stepped on the clutch and pushed the lever forward, then transferred his foot to the accelerator. Yells followed as the vehicle lurched forward with a grinding, clanging clash of machinery from under the hood, seeming to stagger as it built up speed. Some force pushed him back against the hard rest behind him, like going over the crest of a rise in a fairground roller-coaster. The wheels lurched and banged over bits of rubble in the roadway, tossing everyone from side to side—the cramped quarters in the front were an advantage now, though Deor cursed in Old English as he was nearly thrown out.

John eased off on the accelerator and wrenched at the wheel to avoid a head-high pile of bricks, then back again to dodge a smoldering tree-trunk, then up onto the sidewalk and a clanging contact with some cast-iron something.

“Left! Left here!” Deor shouted.

Crack.

Pip fired her rifle at something he hadn’t seen as he dragged at the wheel to turn them left down a broader road and then frantically right to avoid another cone of slumped wreckage. The left wheels of the truck rode high, and John yelped as he felt the vehicle beginning to tip. Behind him Toa bellowed and leapt to the left side, a thud he could feel through the steel fabric beneath him, and the truck slammed down on all four wheels again as it came to a—relatively—uncluttered stretch of roadway.

Then a figure crashed into the bumper of the truck and vaulted over it, lying full-length along it and beginning to crawl towards him. The face was mostly red eyes and gray teeth, the skin around them scorched black and weeping red from a network of cracks. The knife clenched between the broken teeth was long and crusted brown.

“Bugger!” Pip said crisply, as John gave a wordless yell.

Pip and Deor fired simultaneously, she bracing her rifle on the top of the dashboard and Deor extending his pistol. John couldn’t tell if one hit or both, but the man grinning around the stained steel of the knife jerked upright as half his head splashed away, then fell over backward. The wheels thumped over him, and John concentrated on driving—that and coughing up black phlegm, stained from the rain of ash all around them.

“I wonder what’s in this damned ash,” Pip said.

“I don’t,” Deor said bluntly. “And we would die of it if we had to stay here long.”

John kept his attention on the half-buried street, and was thankful of it as Pip made disgusted noises and Deor grew more and more silent; Toa was swearing in half a dozen languages, and Thora the same, though in different ones.

This city died of more than a blow from the sky, John thought. That may have been a cleansing.

The sky grew darker, and tendrils of mist rose. Before long it was a clinging mist that hid everything, growing closer and closer to his face. At last he braked the truck and stuck the lever back into the middle position.

“I can’t drive this thing any farther,” he said.

“You are right,” Deor said. “More than you know. We must pass through this. To . . . another place.”

Pip grimaced in the dimness. “Back to where we went into the fog?” she said.

“Yes,” Deor said.

Oh. She told me that, John thought. I thought she must be exaggerating. Now I’m horribly afraid she wasn’t.

They piled out of the truck and began walking behind Deor into the mist. John couldn’t see anything beyond six paces away, which was just enough to make all of them visible. He coughed again, and noticed that the snow-like fall of black ash had stopped, and that less of it was crusted over the pavement under his feet. Then it wasn’t pavement anymore. . . .

John opened his mouth to ask Deor what was happening, hesitating to interrupt the chanting he could hear the scop murmuring under his breath. Then something went through him like a flash of white fire. And there were voices screaming . . .

He stumbled to a halt, bracing himself instinctively on the point of his kite shield. . . .

Wait a minute. I’m in full plate! he thought.

It was so infinitely familiar that he hadn’t noticed. And his lungs felt free of the poison he’d been breathing for hours. He took a deep breath, noting that the visor of his sallet was up, and looked at the others. Pip was back in her white shorts and singlet and round black hat, twirling her double-headed cane in relief, and Toa had his huge spear and fiber loincloth-belt. Deor was in his own folk’s dress, with the mail and round shield, and Thora in a Bearkiller Alister’s cataphract armor. The man he’d been imprisoned with was in the full fig of a Boisean light cavalryman, with captain’s bars on the collar of his mail shirt.

“I think I just had a vision of . . . Hell,” John said.

“Close enough, as you Christians conceive of it,” Deor said grimly, glancing around himself.

John looked at the Boisean: “You’re probably wearing an ID tag, if that uniform’s any guide, friend. Take a look.”

The man did, pulling out a leather thong from beneath the mail and the quilted gambeson beneath it.