Simultaneously one of the men in the corner and one of the attackers got blows home on each other, toppled to the floor, and reached out for each other with clawing hands. Blade stepped over them as they rolled in their blood on the floor, struggling to get a grip on each other's throat, thrashing and growling like animals. He reached the two surviving attackers just as one of them went down from a belly-slash by the remaining man in the corner, then thrust the remaining attacker through from behind. The corner survivor had just enough time to raise a bloodsmeared face to stare at Blade with the beginning of gratitude in his eyes when Blade's sword whistled down and sheared off his head.
Then Blade was on the move again, as fast as his now flagging muscles would push him along. He dashed to the secondary elevator, leaped in, pushed the button for his home level, and sagged to the floor to savor a moment's rest and relief. Now he had to get back to his chamber undetected, and wash the blood and sweat off himself before the Ice Master thought to check the chamber. If the Ice Master found it empty, he would find it hard not to draw the right conclusion. And if he drew that conclusion, Blade had no illusions that his value as an ally would make the Ice Master spare him. In fact, it would become absolutely vital for the Ice Master to get rid of Blade, to prove to the Menel his continued good faith and innocence.
The door opened and Blade slipped out into the corridor, flattening himself against the wall at every sound. He had more than a hundred feet to go, the longest hundred feet he had ever traveled in his life. He had spent less time and effort on more than one occasion crossing a frontier strip sown with mines and guarded by barbed wire, searchlights, and machine gun nests. Halfway along he found a small waste chute, and took the chance to strip off the bloodsmeared trunks and boots and send them on their way down to destruction. But he held on to the sword-held on to it so tightly that his knuckles were paste-white by the time he finally slipped unseen and unmolested into his room. The sword went down the chute there in an instant, and in another instant he was squatting in the tub, not minding the coolness of the water this time as it flowed over him, washing away the blood, the sweat, and at least some of the strain.
He had done the first of the necessary things. He had given the Menel cause to distrust the Ice Master; he had given the guards occasion to distrust each other. Now he would have to wait and see if that distrust he had sown would lead the Ice Master to give him the opportunity to move to the next step.
Chapter 18
The Ice Master came to Blade the neat morning in such a state of nerves that before he said a word Blade knew that his plans were working. The other man could not sit, could not stand, could not do anything for more than a minute at a time except talk, and not always coherently. He presented the spectacle of a man watching twenty years' cherished dreams fall apart around him, as well as being in danger of his own life, a spectacle that in this case Blade was entirely happy to see.
The Ice Master's eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep and the lines of his face seemed to have been chiseled inches deeper into the flesh. His hair was unkempt; he kept plucking at his beard; Blade would not in fact have sworn that both beard and hair didn't show a good deal more white and gray than the last time he had seen the man. And all the confidence and arrogance was gone from his voice. In its place was an almost pleading note, so strong that Blade would have felt qualms about his plans if they had been laid against a person less unpleasant and dangerous than the Ice Master.
The broken sentences tumbled out of the Ice Master's mouth for better than an hour, and Blade picked them up one by one, made ideas out of them, assembled the ideas into a picture of the situation-and could barely keep from grinning broadly. The Menel-conditioned guards were firmly convinced that somewhere among the regular guards was a conspiracy dedicated to killing them-or even the Menel. The regular guards were equally convinced that the Menel-conditioned guards had all at once gone off their nut and decided to kill them. The two factions had been fighting in the corridors of the stronghold all night. Blade gathered that at least twenty more bodies had joined the fifteen or so he had seen before returning to his chamber. At this rate the guards might well kill off half of their own number before he could return with his own force!
The Girls and slaves cowered panic-stricken in their quarters; no Pleasure was given, no food was prepared, the bodies and the debris of battle lay about the stronghold with none to pick them up. And the Menel!
For the first time in twenty years the Menel were taking an active and direct interest in the inner workings of the stronghold that they had so casually created and presented to their human ally. It was this more than anything else that was paralyzing the Ice Master with fear. He was trying to persuade them to stay out of the stronghold, because if they came up, the lights and sirens would freeze the regular guards and leave them to the mercy of the Menel-conditioned ones, who would slaughter them without mercy and leave the Ice Mister without a single guard who would not in a crisis dance to the Menel's tune. The reply of the Menel to this was that obviously the regular guards were no longer trustworthy; their conditioning had been faulty-perhaps deliberately so? (The Ice Master broke into a cold sweat in recalling the moment of the Menel's veiled accusation of treachery.) Therefore why should they care what happened to the Ice Master's own guards? If these unreliable guards were to seize the Main Core (which Blade recognized as the place called the Heart by the Girls), a dangerous situation would be created for all concerned The Ice Master could hardly blame the Menel if under the circumstances they took concern for their own survival before his convenience, could he?
Mentally, Blade noted the confirmation of his previous guess that the Heart (or Main Core) was something important and even potentially dangerous to both Ice Master and Menel. Aloud, he went to great lengths to assure the Ice Master that he was being ill-treated by his ungrateful patrons. He spared no effort to build up the Ice Master's selfrighteousness and thus increase his stubborn resistance to the Menel. The Ice Master nodded at each phrase Blade threw him, like an eager dog begging for a bone-a dog that Blade, after a little while, would cheerfully have kicked across the room. But finally he felt the Ice Master was primed and ready, and launched his own proposal.
«I know where I can get at least a hundred fighting men loyal to me personally, who could stand against the Menel's guards all by themselves.»
The Ice Master's head jerked up as though somebody had tightened a noose around his neck, and stared at Blade with hope dawning in his greedy, panic-stricken eyes. «Where?» he croaked.
«In the south,» said Blade. «They would certainly fight against the Menel if I told them to. Many of them are Treduki, trained in weaponscraft from their childhood and better fighters than any of these hot-house plants you call guards. Others are Graduki, and among them are most of the leaders of the resistance to the Conciliators.» He saw a light begin to dawn on the Ice Master's strained face, nodded, and before the man could say anything, filled in for what he guessed must be the man's thoughts.
«Exactly. Once they've killed off the Menel-conditioned guards and given you the whip hand, you can have them killed, or conditioned, or turned into slaves and Girls, or anything else you want. And you'll be wiping out the last bit of resistance to the Conciliators. There won't be anybody left to teach the Treduki how to fight the Ice Dragons, and you can accumulate even more slaves without any problem.» At that point the Ice Master's face became so wrought-up that Blade for a moment was afraid he had overplayed his hand. Then he realized that the Ice Master was simply stunned at the unexpected prospect of having still more of his enemies delivered into his hand, and was struggling to grasp the idea. It took him a while, like a child confronted with an unlimited stack of Christmas presents. Finally his astonishment faded enough for him to smile and nod slowly.