With the long sword Blade pointed to the dead Honcho. "How did this come about?"
"When he saw the explosion he took something. A very little pellet. Of a golden color."
"What did he say?"
Her smooth, tawny shoulders moved in a shrug of negation. Muscles rippled beneath the golden flesh.
"He said: 'Blade has won. My Thara and my Urcit are dead. Perhaps Blade is a God after all.'"
"That is all he said?"
"All, my Lord. Then he smiled and looked at me with those green eyes of his and died. We are well rid of him, my Lord. He would have made trouble for us still."
Blade moved the sword in an arc. "Not for long. But it is as well. Zulekia..."
"Yes, Lord?"
"You will not call me Lord in future. You will call me Richard."
"Richard?" The name came hesitantly from her ripe mouth. A hint of a smile as she said it again. "Richard - what does it mean?"
He went to her and put an arm about her smooth shoulders and smiled down into violet eyes that were full of glints and shadows. She nestled close to him.
"It means kiss, perhaps? I like kiss."
He kissed her for a long time. She clung to him.
Blade, still with his arm around her, turned to stare at the smoke hanging like a grim canopy over Urcit.
After a moment the girl said: "Urcit has been destroyed forever?"
"Not forever, Zulekia. We will build it again. A better Urcit."
She watched him with puzzlement. "But who will rule Tharn now?"
Blade held up the sword. At that moment a ray of sun struck through the black pall and glinted along the steel.
"I will rule Tharn," said Richard Blade.
Zulekia nodded. It was complete acceptance. A natural thing. Blade, aware of his own doubts and fears, felt his spirits lifting. It could be done! It must be done.
"There will be much toil," he said. "Sweat and work such as you have not known. Fear, terror, failures...but we will do it, Zulekia. As I came a stranger into your world - now you will be, at first, a stranger in the world I shall make here in Tharn."
Her expression told him that she did not really comprehend. He sighed and patted her smooth shoulder. She would understand. In time. Time, he thought, was about the only thing he could be sure of now. And how much of that? Blade shrugged his massive shoulders. It would be as it would be...
"Richard?"
"Yes?"
"There is something I must say. There has been a strangeness in me - in my body - since that time we had coi in the Gorge Tower. I have read of such things. Of course it is illegal that I bear..."
Blade stared at her. Harshly he said, "The laws of Tharn have been changed!" Then, with a smile, he kissed her gently. "I am ruler now, and I declare it legal that you bear my child. In fact, I demand it!"
It had been, from the very beginning, from the time of his first adventure in Alb, and then in the Land of Cath, a hazard. Lord Leighton had pointed it out. His Lordship had toiled to invent the little chronos computer, a device to "stretch" Blade's memory capacity so the big man could store data without conscious effort on his part. This aided greatly in the debriefing.
when Blade was brought back through the computer Part of his mind became a tape recorder, a memory tank, which was easily tapped.
There was still the hazard. Blade tended to forget his real persona, in his real dimension; in the heat of action, and danger, battling for survival or in the throes of love, Richard Blade forgot who Richard Blade really was! And so it was now, when the pain began in his head, that Blade was startled and genuinely surprised.
Zulekia's lovely face began to blur. Blade must have made some sound of anguish as the pain grew more intense, for the girl clung to him, alarmed and stared into his face.
"Richard! What is it? You are so strange. You... you..."
The plains of Tharn shimmered and tilted. A dozen suns hued red hot lances through his head. He clutched at the girl and felt that solid tawny flesh turn to vapor. Blade himself was fast becoming bodiless, his limbs dissolving and floating away. He tried to look at Zulekia a last time, for now he understood it, knew that Lord Leighton was calling him back, but the girl was a bird that fluttered away from him.
He was shrinking fast to dwarfdom. He was a fluid running from positive to negative and soon he would be nothing at all.
Blade was conscious, barely conscious, that he still clutched the great sword of the Pethcines. From a great distance, an echo in a labyrinthine shell, he heard a voice say: "Zul... I lo..."
He was gone.
Chapter Seventeen
Richard Blade, as always after his jaunts through the dimensional rift, was in a state of semi-coma and mild shock. Judging from past experience it would be at least twelve hours before he adjusted to life in London in 1970. Before he was once more the Richard Blade who was a top agent for MI6A, and who had for a boss a querulous, tweedy old man called J.
Lord Leighton, with J in anxious attendance, was peering into the glass cubicle set in the innards of the monstrous computer. His Lordship's little yellow eyes gleamed with delight as Blade's big body began to materialize in the chair on the rubberized pad.
J let out a sigh of relief. "I say, old fellow. We did it again. But I don't mind telling you I was getting a little worried. I know that you know what you're doing, Leighton, but I still fret Must we always use Blade? Couldn't we..."
Lord Leighton did not look at him. "You know the answer to that, J. No. The PM's orders. So long as Blade continues to volunteer, then Blade it is. There! He's very nearly back. We can go in in a moment. What's that he's got with him?"
J peered through the glass where Blade now sat, naked, in the chair that so greatly resembled an electric chair. His brawny body was festooned with electrodes which led away through portholes into the giant computer. Blade sat unmoving, staring straight ahead of him.
J frowned. "Looks like a sword, of course. What else? A great bloody broadsword. I'm damned. Wonder where the dear boy has been this time?"
The little hunchback scowled at him. At these times it was all that Lord Leighton could do to maintain a scientific calm. He had - quite by accident - wrought the scientific miracle of all time, and he wondered if his nerves would, in the end, prove equal to the strain.
He tapped J on the arm. "We'll know soon enough. , Come. It's all right now. You know the procedure."
"I should," said J grumpily. "It's my third time through it."
He stood aside to let Lord Leighton precede him into the glass chamber. His hand inadvertently brushed against Leighton's hump, grotesque under the white smock, and J felt an odd moment of revulsion. For the first time he really understood just how out of place he was in this scientific jungle. Lord Leighton belonged here. J did not Lord Leighton was a modern Merlin, a space age wizard, and this monster computer was to him no more than an erector toy. J was a rather old-fashioned, middle-class, spy master. He shrugged and followed his Lordship into the glass cubicle. Things were as they were.
Richard Blade did not appear to recognize them, or even see them. He sat quietly and stared straight before him. Lord Leighton began detaching the electrodes. When Blade's body was free of the wires Leighton tried to take the sword from him.
Blade's big hands tightened on the hilt of the sword. He would not let it go.
Lord Leighton stepped back, not at all disconcerted. "It's all right He'll let it go later on. Now I'll just get on with the hypnosis and we can get him down to quarters."
Leighton began to move a scrawny, prehensile hand back and forth before Blade's eyes. It was a technique he had evolved, after much experimentation, since Blade's return from Alb. Blade, who normally could not be hypnotized at all, was responsive at these moments, and the mild hypnosis helped smooth the transition between dimensions.