The bridge ahead of him was littered with debris-metal panels peeling off the high towers from bad weather, chunks of unidentifiable material resembling plastic, wheels, rods, and odd boxes that had perhaps once been part of vehicles. The inevitable purple thistles sprouted from the cracked pavement and sidewalks. Beyond the bridge the whole rank of buildings along the riverbank, nearly two miles of buildings that must have once risen ten and fifteen stories, lay in piles of rubble. Only an occasional hollow-eyed wall rose free.

Blade shook his head and frowned. Had the computer finally sent him into a dimension completely empty of human life? No, there was that skeleton on the road. And unless he was mistaken, there were other skeletons gleaming whitely amid the dark thistle leaves on the bridge. There were other people in this dimension-human, as far as he could tell from the skeletons. And he strongly suspected that the first skeleton had come to its final resting place long after the city had been abandoned. Was there some life still lurking in the ruins, or were the skeletons wanderers drifting hi from somewhere else and dying by accident, starvation, or disease? Had the city been depopulated by a plague, a plague that perhaps still lingered in the ruins?

Blade strode out onto the bridge. At least out here on the broad roadway nothing could come at him unexpectedly. Halfway across, the moon vanished again, but not before he had spotted a long metal bar lying on the road. He picked it up and hefted it, testing its weight and balance. It weighed more than five pounds, and it was thicker at one end than at the other. He found after a few trial swings that he could handle it as an improvised mace. Not that improvised medieval weapons would help him very much if any people he ran into had weapons as advanced as their city. But if their civilization had collapsed and the survivors had descended into barbarism, he would be far from helpless. Feeling a little less like a mouse, though not yet like a lion-perhaps a fox now he stalked forward again, using the mace to probe ahead in the darkness and test the footing. He had no desire to step through an unseen hole in the roadway and drop a hundred feet to the liver below.