Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen Page A

that what it represented was gigantic. In its monstrous gripping nose the creature in the painting brandished a sharp-pointed spear, jagged all along its length. Under its feet it trod the symbols:
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    426TH ARMORED DIVISION
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    â€”whose meaning, and even language, were strange to Rolf. Now, holding his breath, he ventured to put out a hand and touch a part of one of the endless belts, a plate of armor too heavy for a man to carry or for a riding-beast to wear into a fight. Nothing seemed to happen from the touch. Rolf dared to lay his hand flat on the featureless surface of the Elephant’s metal flank.
    Then he stepped back and looked around the rest of the cave. There was not much to see. A few openings in the curving walls, holes too small for men to enter. Maybe they were chimneys of a sort; the air in the cave was good. And there were the huge doors set in the wall just ahead of Elephant—if “ahead” was the direction in which the projections on the topmost hump were pointing.
    These doors were flat expanses of metal, seemingly covering an opening of just the right size to permit Elephant’s passage. The vertical cracks of imperfect closure at the doors’ edges were noticeably wider at the bottom than at the top, as if the great panels had been slightly warped. Through each widened crack a small heap of pebbly dirt had sometime trickled to the floor below.
    Rolf knelt thoughtfully to finger some of this debris. As nearly as he could calculate, the floor here was at approximately the same vertical level as that of the canyon outside. The same landslide that had made the rock-jumble out there might easily have buried these doors.
    He closed his eyes for a moment to better visualize the various distances and directions of his movements in coming into the cave. Yes, it seemed so. Let these doors be opened, and some of the house-sized rocks outside them cleared away, and Elephant would be free.
    His rush-light had burned down to a finger-searing shortness and he lighted another from it. The air in the cave seemed as fresh as ever, and what little smoke his torch gave off was rising steadily. It would be far too much dispersed and faint for anyone to notice at the outer entrance of the cave.
    Rolf walked again around Elephant, running his hand along its surface. On this circuit he paid much closer attention to details. This was like handling Thomas’s eyeglasses; there was no feeling of magic here, but a sense of other powers that somehow seemed to suit Rolf better than wizardry.
    High on one vast armored flank, just above the covered upper level of the endless tread, was a barely perceptible circular line, like the crack of a very close-fitting door. Recessed in the surface of this circle was a handle that might tug it open, if it was indeed a door. And now Rolf saw there were four small steps, set into the solid metal, ascending from floor level to the circle.
    He took a deep breath, gripped his torch precariously between his teeth, and climbed. The handgrip on the door accepted his fingers easily. Deep in his throat he muttered a protective spell, half-forgotten since his childhood—and then he pulled. His first tug was resisted, and his second. Then, when he dared lean all his weight outward from the handle, ancient stiffness yielded with a sudden crack of sound. The door, incredibly thick, swung open on a hinge. In that moment a sharp, straining click sounded somewhere in Elephant’s inside, and there was light, striking out of the door like the golden beams of the sun.
    Already off balance, Rolf half-leaped, half-fell from Elephant’s side, his torch landing on the stone floor beside him. He did not need the torch, with the flood of true illumination washing out of Elephant’s opened side. That golden glow was not as bright as sunlight, he saw now, but it was as steady as the sun, without smoke or flames or flickering
    Now Ardneh will appear, Rolf thought, and made