“Tooth,” she said, holding onto his arm, keeping him erect with her own tense little body. “If I understood my grandfather correctly, the entrance to the fortress is not far.”
He nodded, sorry she had broken the trance into which he had settled so comfortably, for the pain was a great deal worse while he was fully aware of his surroundings.
“Come on,” she said, pulling his arm.
His leg was very warm and an odd tingling sensation pierced it from foot to hip. When he looked down at it, he wished that he had not, for the sight was unsettling. The wound had been torn wider, and the shrapnel had worked its way partially back out. In the process, the severed blood vessel had been permitted more freedom to spurt, and it was jetting regular pulses of warm blood down over his trousers. With an effort, he looked around and saw, behind, that he had been leaving a fairly rich red trail for the last half a dozen steps. In the moonlight, though, the red looked black.
“Hurry!” Leah said.
“Bleeding . . . too fast,” he said.
“A tourniquet,” she suggested, trying to make him sit down on the snow.
“No time. Only a. … medkit. Bleeding too fast. Wound’s . . . too big. I’m sort of sleepy.”
“Don’t sleep,” she said. “Fight it!”
Blackness rose out of his guts and surged through his entire body, velvety and smooth and pleasant to behold. He felt his blood pressure dropping as a leaden dizziness clutched him and spun him heavily about.
He screamed silently. . .
Silently . . .
Tooth Mountain stood so close—yet so far.
He shambled a few steps forward before he fell and struck the ground hard. The cold snow felt wonderful on the spurting wound, and he suddenly felt sure he would be fine, just fine, with just a little snow in the wound where the blood was . . . He laid there, feeling good, drowsy, appreciating the cold snow as he slipped quietly, peacefully into death . . .
XI
NOT JUST silence: quieter than that.
Not just total blackness: darker.
Not just odorless, antiseptic, clean: much purer than any words.
It was an aching, senseless void, a pit without matter, a pit without nonmatter, without walls or ceiling or floor, without air or wind, without anything the senses could distinguish, a limitless eternal stretch of absolute nothingness . . .
. . . and then there was light.
At first, there was an almost intangible brightening of the nothingness. Then the indescribable blackness became pitch. Then just black. Then just dark. The light came by degrees, and in a millennium it was as bright as a moonlit night, though there were no features about him.
He became aware of sounds next.
Clickings . . .
Whirrings . . .
The sound of tapes spooling and unspooling . . .
All the noises of a complex and busy machine doing whatever it was its makers had created it to do. As he thought of the word “machines,” the first concrete concept which had occurred to him in this slow awakening, other solid thoughts and questions arose in his mind.
Where was he? His mind danced over that question, aware that a man who had no idea where he was was either intoxicated or insane or had been abducted by someone, perhaps under drugs. Yes, yes, all the clichés of the historical novel rushed back to him in bulk. But as he considered each of them and rejected them, he found there was no comfort in clichés. Where in the devil was he?
He could feel a chair beneath him. No, not exactly a chair, either. It was more like a plushly padded automatic couch which had now folded – and changed position-elevation to get him into a sitting posture. The thing was so well padded, in fact, that it bordered on the uncomfortable at first, though he found himself rapidly adapting to it
Why couldn’t he open his eyes?
Not yet, a smooth voice-tape whispered into the auditory nerves of his head. The words were not heard so much as experienced, and he knew there was a tap directly to his brain.