The Warrior Within Read online

  Mera shrugged. “I’ll climb faster if I climb lighter.” She bounced lightly on the balls of her feet, making the equipment clipped to her harness jingle. If the prospect of the climb made her nervous, she gave no sign of it. She walked back along the bridge and stood for a moment, examining the wall. Finally she nodded, apparently satisfied.

  “I’ll need a boost,” she told Karsman as she attached the rope to her harness. “Just for the first part.” She showed him how to stand, making him into a living ladder. “Ready?” she asked.

  “Ready,” he said.

  He felt her feet on his hip and back for an instant, and then she was standing on his shoulders, leaning into the wall. She hardly weighed anything at all.

  “Hands under my feet,” she called down. “Lift me up.”

  He managed to get first one hand and then the other under the soles of her feet. He pushed up with all his strength, carrying her weight on his hands. Slowly, he lifted her upward.

  The next moment the weight on his hands was gone. When he looked up he saw that she was at full stretch on the wall, one foot resting on the lintel above the door, her fingers reaching for a handhold above her head. She found the grip and pulled herself smoothly upward. A moment after that, she was three meters above his head and still climbing, scrambling upward almost as easily as if she were climbing a ladder.

  Steck passed him the other end of the rope. “Wrap that around your waist.”

  Karsman did as he was told. He spread his feet, trying to brace himself as much as possible. He prayed that if Mera fell she wouldn’t drag them both off the walkway and into the water below.

  She was fifteen meters up now, climbing unsupported, her fingers and toes finding tiny fissures in the metal. Whatever handholds she was finding were invisible from below. From where Karsman stood, it looked as if she were clinging to the wall by magnetism.

  Thirty meters above them a piece of the structure jutted outward, blocking any upward progress. Karsman watched, heart in his mouth, as Mera slowly traversed the wall crabwise, feeling her way from handhold to handhold, edging out over open water. If she slipped, there was no way he could belay her. She would drop like a stone, straight down into the liquid below. He gnawed at his thumbnail, hardly daring to breathe. At last, she crept out from below the obstruction and started to ascend again.

  “I knew there was a reason I liked her,” Steck said approvingly.

  Ten meters higher up she stopped climbing, balancing on a chunk of steel that protruded from the cliff face, steadying herself one-handed. She reached down for something at her belt, and Karsman saw the gleam of metal.

  “—slot here,” she called down, her words almost lost in the roar of the water below. “—setting my first cam.”

  Karsman could just make out a thin scratch in the metal wall, a seam almost too narrow to be seen from below. He watched as Mera slid the device into it and pulled the trigger to activate the locking mechanism. She tugged on the protruding end.

  “Solid,” she shouted down. “—should even take your weight, Karsman.”

  She clung there for a few minutes, busy with her rope, then started climbing again. If she was tiring, Karsman could see no sign of it. A few meters farther up, she pulled herself up onto another projecting block, twisted around, and sat there, legs dangling.

  “You can come up now, Steck,” she called down.

  Steck turned to Karsman. “You’re not going to be able to climb up there like she did. And we’re not going to be able to haul you up.”

  Karsman swallowed. “I know,” he said. “I want you to stay with her. Find somewhere safe. Get down the Road to the next town and keep going.”

  “I didn’t say we were leaving you behind, idiot. Here.” Steck held out his gear bag, now mostly empty. “I’ll go up, help her fix the ropes. Then you climb using the ascenders. You can do that, right?”

  Karsman looked in the bag. “I think so,” he said. “You think they’ll hold?”

  “They should do. These ones are pretty sturdy. Some guy named Karsman made them for me.”

  “Oh. Right.” It was odd to think that his life depended on equipment he had made himself, carefully fashioned out of salvaged metal in the strip-town’s machine shop. He hoped that he and Artificer had done a good job.

  Up on the wall, Mera detached herself from the rope and tossed the loose end down to Steck. Karsman set his feet again, ready to belay him.

  Watching Steck inch his way up was less nerve-racking than seeing Mera make the same ascent. With a stable anchor on the wall, Karsman could belay Steck effectively. Unless the cam pulled out of the crack Mera had found for it, a fall shouldn’t be fatal. Karsman had never had Steck’s gifts for climbing, neither his head for heights nor his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of technique, but he knew enough that he could tell the difference between an impossible problem and one that was merely very difficult. Mera had done the impossible, finding handholds in an all but featureless metal cliff. What remained was more in the nature of an abstract technical problem, a soluble equation whose elements were ropes and geometry.

  He was in the middle of telling himself that it was all going to be easy from now on when Steck fell. He was negotiating the same awkward overhang that Mera had encountered, stretching out for a hold that lay just beyond his reach, when he lost his footing. One moment he was there on the wall. The next instant, he lost his grip and dropped.

  The rope Karsman had tied around his waist snapped taut, the sudden shock almost pulling him off the walkway. His boots slid on the smooth metal. In the end he was only able to save them both by dropping to his knees. He leaned back, fighting to take the strain, while Steck swung back and forth overhead, cursing, fingers scrabbling at the wall.

  “Hold him,” Mera shouted. She left her perch and spidered her way downward to check on the cam she had set. “It’s good,” she called down at last. “Just don’t do that again, Steck.”

  The slow climb resumed. At last, Steck was level with Mera, holding onto the wall, his toes dug into the same crack that held the cam. Karsman saw them lean in toward each other, conferring.

  When Karsman looked down again, he saw that the water was higher than before. In the time it had taken Steck to ascend the wall, it had risen to barely two meters below the walkway. The spray thrown off when the waves hit the wall spattered the legs of his overalls.

  He waited. Above him, Mera and Steck were doll-like figures on the gray steel wall. He watched them fuss over the ropes and the anchors that they had placed. Finally the harness, the only one they had, came sliding down the rope to him.

  He let out the straps and pulled the harness on. Above him, the wall rose, smooth and sheer, the sunlight glinting orange on the gray metal. Below him, the rising water in the reservoir boiled with renewed fury.

  He reached inside himself, looking for Warrior. Now would be a good time for some help, he told the persona.

  There was no answer.

  * * *

  Without Warrior to help, the climb was a long agony.

  Karsman had enough experience of climbing with ascenders for the process to be largely automatic. While waiting, he had already attached the aiders—canvas straps to support his feet and allow him to climb the rope almost like a ladder—to the ascenders. All that remained for him to do was to attach the ascenders to his harness and start climbing.

  He took a deep breath and stepped up to the rope, clipped the ascenders onto it one after the other. He thought about saying a prayer to one of the gods, but decided the time for prayers was past. In any case, his mind was blank: for all the hours he had spent turning prayer wheels in the Temple, he was unable to remember even the smallest fragment of any of the prayers he had recited.

  He took hold of the first ascender, gripped the handle, and slid it upward, feeling the rope flow smoothly through the device’s jaws. When he pulled downward, it locked tight on the rope. He leaned backward, putting all his weight on it to satisfy himself that it would
not slip. Finally ready, he started to climb.

  Climbing with ascenders was an exercise in repetition, simple motions executed one after the other. Raise one foot in its loop of webbing and slide the ascender up. Pull down and feel it lock. Tread down on the foot loop. Repeat on the opposite side. Step, slide, lock, and switch. Step, slide, lock. Each upward movement, however small, was a step toward the final goal. He climbed without thinking, falling into the familiar rhythm, ignoring his aches and pains, focused only on moving himself upward one step at a time.

  The rope trembled and swayed as he climbed. It hung so close to the wall that he found himself almost pressed against the metal, his field of view reduced to the square meter of polished steel directly in front of him. The gleaming surface was very slightly rough to the touch. When he exhaled, it fogged for an instant, then cleared again almost as quickly.

  He looked down only once, and immediately regretted it. Below him, the walkway was a narrow blade of steel suspended over the turbulent waters filling the basin. If he fell from the rope, he might or might not strike it on his way down, but in any case he would finish up in the water and that would be the end of him. It would be ironic, he thought, to drown in the middle of a desert.

  The overhanging section that had slowed Mera and almost defeated Steck was in front of him now. He climbed as high as he could, then pushed outward from the wall with his feet, dangling backward in his harness. As he hung there, with the straps of the harness digging into his bruised sides and shoulders, he glimpsed the sky above and felt a momentary fear that he was about to fall upward into it. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt for the wall with his hands. The cool metal was reassuringly solid to the touch. Clumsily, he heaved himself past the obstruction and kept climbing.

  Mera and Steck were waiting for him a little distance above. The ledge where they crouched was barely wide enough to stand on, but he welcomed it as a refuge, muttering a silent prayer of thanks to whatever engineering necessity had created a projection just here. His back and legs ached. He doubted that he could have climbed much farther.

  He let them help him up onto the ledge and sank back against the wall, legs trembling. Below, the first waves were starting to break over the walkway they had left behind.

  “The next bit looks easier,” said Mera. To Karsman, twisting his neck to look upward, it didn’t look easy at all. He kept his back pressed to the wall, doing his best not to look down as Mera prepared for the next phase of the climb.

  Steck passed him the end of the rope again. “Better you than me,” he said. “If she falls, she’ll take me straight off the ledge. You might stand a chance.”

  Karsman wrapped the rope around his waist. “Thanks,” he said.

  Mera did not come off the wall. She climbed with the same assurance as before, finding handholds where Karsman would have sworn there were none. Toward the end, her pace slowed a little and Karsman could tell she was tiring, but by then less than five meters separated her from the line of red dirt marking the top of the wall. She braced herself, balancing on two protruding studs, then launched herself upward. She gained the top in one last desperate scramble that brought Karsman’s heart into his mouth. A sudden explosion of red dirt as she reached the rim of the pit and then she was gone, pulling herself over the edge and out of sight. Fine red sand drifted down on Steck and Karsman from above.

  “She did it,” Steck whispered. Karsman closed his eyes and waited for his heart rate to return to normal.

  Mera did not reappear, but the harness came sliding back down the rope. Steck detached it, fastened it on. “Last leg,” he said. “We’re nearly home now.” He tested the rope, then reached up for the first hold.

  Steck climbed more slowly than Mera, taking his time. Every so often he rested, letting the rope take his weight while he studied the options available to him. At last, however, he too reached the top and hauled himself over. Karsman saw his legs kicking in the air for a moment, and then he was gone.

  Karsman waited. Neither Mera nor Steck reappeared. Only the twitching of the rope showed that they had not abandoned him. He guessed that they must be trying to find a better way to anchor the rope. Then, finally, he saw movement at the lip of the pit and the harness came sliding back down to him.

  For him, the second part of the climb was no easier than the first. The distance he needed to climb was smaller, but the rope now lay almost flush against the surface, so that his knees and hands bumped against the wall continuously. As he came closer to the top, downdrafts tugged at him, setting the rope swaying and whipping fine sand into his eyes every time he looked up. He squeezed his eyes closed and kept climbing.

  At last, his reaching hand touched something gritty. He let go of one ascender and reached up. Instead of metal, his fingers touched rock and sand. He climbed a little higher until his face was level with a shallow bank of soil that rose above the pit, then dug his fingers into the dirt and heaved himself upward. The metal rim of the pit banged against his thighs, and then he was up and out, collapsing onto the dry earth, still tangled in his harness. He lay on his stomach, fighting for breath.

  Something black moved in the periphery of his vision, and a booted foot scuffed the dirt close to his head. He looked up slowly.

  A little distance from the edge of the pit, a loose circle of black-uniformed Temple guards stood watching him, their weapons at the ready. Beyond them were two flatbed trucks in Temple livery. Mera and Steck were sitting in the dirt beside them, hands on their heads. More guards stood over them with guns in their hands.

  “Hello, Karsman,” said Magnan. “Glad that you could join us.”

  Karsman stared up at him, not understanding.

  Magnan smiled. He tapped one of the pouches on his belt. “The wallkeys all have locators built into them,” he said. “We’ve been tracking you for hours.”

  “I didn’t kill Curinn,” Karsman said. “He was dead already when I took it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We have bigger problems now.”

  “I’m working for the Muljaddy,” Karsman tried. “They said for you to help me. You can check with them yourself.”

  Magnan pursed his lips. “Now, here’s the thing,” he said. “The soldiers have taken the Muljaddy hostage. Said they’d trade them for you.” He straightened up, brushing dirt from the palms of his hands. “So I think you’d better come with us.”

  With an effort, Karsman stumbled to his feet. His gaze swept over the line of guards. He saw the truck beyond them and wanted it. With a truck they could drive fast through the desert to the Road. With a truck they could go anywhere.

  There were twelve Temple guards in all, including the two watching Steck and Mera. Karsman measured distances and angles.

  I need you now, Warrior, he thought, but the persona stayed obstinately silent.

  The Temple guards closed in fast, surrounding him before he could make a move for the pistol in his pocket. This time they used their shocksticks.

  CHAPTER TEN

  He was still shaking when the guards unloaded him from the truck, every nerve in his body on fire. His mouth was full of the metallic taste of blood and his legs would not hold him up. It took three men to drag him up the ramp to the inner room where the soldiers had set up their command post.

  “Ah, here he is,” said Flet. His expression was neutral, showing little more than a mild interest as he studied Karsman. “You’ve caused us a lot of trouble, you know.” He nodded to the guards. “Put him there.”

  The guards lowered him into a chair and left him there. He slumped against the backrest, fighting to control the trembling in his arms and legs and wishing that the room would stop spinning around him.

  “And this is who you’ve been hiding from us,” Flet continued, turning his attention to Mera.

  “Leave her alone,” said Karsman. The words came out awkwardly through his broken lips. “She has nothing to do with this.”

  The mercenary ignored him. “Come here,” he said. Mera took a few steps
toward him, her head held high.

  Flet glanced back at Karsman. “I’d prefer not to kill you,” he said. “Not unless I have to. But if you try to interfere, Taran’s going to put a bullet in each of your knees.”

  The other soldier looked up from behind a desk piled with equipment. He tapped the pistol that lay beside him and nodded.

  With two guards standing over him, Karsman could only watch as Flet approached Mera.

  “Who are you?” Flet asked. “Gad-Ayulia? Or just one of her foot soldiers?”

  “Ship just showed up again,” interrupted Taran before Mera could say anything.

  “For real this time?” Flet said, not looking around.

  “Can’t tell. It . . . no, it’s gone again.”

  In the corner, the Muljaddy twitched. Karsman had not even noticed the post-human sitting there, white vestments covered by a heavy black robe. They lifted their head and looked at Karsman with something like sadness in their deep brown eyes.

  “So is there a ship, or isn’t there?” Flet said.

  “I don’t know.” The other soldier sounded frustrated. “The Muljaddy planetary defense network’s a piece of shit. So much noise in the system I can’t tell what’s real anymore. Either we’re getting major crosstalk from the array processor, or someone’s pushing ghosts across the data stream to fuck with us. Maybe both.”

  “Forget the ship. It doesn’t matter anyway,” Flet said. “We know she has to come here. Go back to watching the loader and let me know the second you see anything.”

  He turned back to Mera, reaching into one of the pouches on his belt. He took out the flat tablet that Karsman had seen him use with the women in the Temple. “Put your hand here,” he told Mera.

  Magnan’s hand was on Karsman’s shoulder. The guard captain stood directly behind him, close enough that Karsman could hear the faint hum of the shockstick he held, powered up and ready to use. “Just stay down,” Magnan advised him. “Not worth it.”

  Slowly, Mera reached out. She touched her fingers to the tablet that Flet held out to her.