Blade looked behind him and waved one arm cautiously. Two men suddenly appeared where there'd seemed to be only bare rock, crawling forward to lie beside Blade and look where he pointed. One of them was Giraz.
«From the ledge where the hospital sits, it's a four-hundred-foot drop to the valley,» Blade said. «Only a bird could get up or down it. The only way in or out for men is through the tunnel to the bridge, past the guards at the bridge, and then down the path to the valley floor. Men in the hospital and holding the bridge can hardly be attacked from below. They cannot easily be attacked from above, either, as long as they are alert.»
«But we can attack from above, eh, Blade?» said Giraz, with a thin smile.
«Yes. The Hashomi don't seem to have garrisoned the hospital. I'll take thirty of the best climbers down with me tonight. The last five hundred feet are all that really need mountain climbing. Thirty should be enough to take the bridge or at least block the tunnel. Then we can fix ropes and bring the rest of the men and gear down by daylight.»
«And then?» That was a question Giraz had asked several times, and Blade gave him the same answer as before.
«Then we wait and see. The Hashomi can't heavily attack us without splitting their forces and weakening their hold on the valley entrance.»
«What if they decide to ignore us, Blade?»
Blade grinned. «We'll make sure they can't afford to do that.»
Blade scrambled down the last few feet of the cliff, dropping to his hands and knees the moment he felt level ground under his feet. He peered into the darkness that held the ledge and the hospital buildings on it. The buildings were no more than formless lumps in the night. In one window Blade saw a faint yellow spark of light. That building, he remembered, held the doctors' quarters. He'd given it a wide berth, since the doctors would certainly raise the alarm.
Crawling on his belly like a snake, Blade crept across the twenty yards of open ground to the nearest building. Its shadow covered him, and he knew he was now almost invisible to any human eye. The silence and the darkness remained unbroken.
He turned and watched the rest of the men with him drop down the cliff. They moved as fast as they dared, with only the faintest scraping of booted feet and gloved hands on the rock. One by one they reached level ground, crept under cover, and without a word melted into the darkness.
Now Blade heard faint rustlings from the darkness. The men were pulling off their boots and putting on soft-soled, noiseless sandals and checking their weapons. So far so good. If the Hashomi had put a garrison in the hospital, it didn't seem to be at all alert.
Blade was rising to his feet, ready to signal to his men, when three robed figures slipped out from between two of the buildings. Instantly Blade's men sprang up and surrounded them. Blade drew his sword and dashed across to where the three were now flat on the ground. All three were women, and all three were still writhing and trying to kick and scream.
Blade was relieved to see that the men had obeyed his orders: «Kill no one in the hospital unless I say so.» Blade didn't want any casualties among the women.
Blade drew back the hoods from all three women. He recognized two of them, and one of them he'd bedded. He spoke to that one in an urgent whisper.
«I am Richard Blade, the man from Britain who came to the Valley of the Hashomi and then escaped from it. I have come with many armed men, to end the rule of the Hashomi. What do you say of that?»
The woman Blade spoke to seemed too stunned to understand his words, but one of the others gave a sigh of relief. «You-you are not an enemy to the women?»
«Not unless they make themselves enemies to me. Mirna should have told you that.»
«Mirna no longer serves at the hospital, Blade»
Blade felt a chill of suspicion. «Has she been harmed?»
«I do not know. She was sent to serve at a hospital in the valley, that I know.»
That was as much as the woman could be expected to know, Blade realized. It was too bad that Mirna was not up here, ready to take charge of the women and out of reach of the Hashomi, but it could not be helped.
«We will let you go, if you promise to return to your quarters and tell your sisters that Richard Blade has come again, to help the women of the valley.» He didn't mention that he came in the service of the Baran of Dahaura, since that might confuse or frighten them.
All three women now had recovered enough to nod, and two of them kissed Blade's hands. He signaled to his men to let the women up. The women darted away, and Blade led his men off through the darkness.
The invaders advanced in spurts, half of the men keeping watch from under cover while the other half moved. It was slow but safe progress. They took half an hour to cover the three hundred yards to the mouth of the tunnel, but they reached it without raising the alarm.
Blade crawled to the mouth of the tunnel and lay on his belly, looking down it. The torches flickered in their brackets. The damp air with the faint reek from behind the doors was the same. At the far end of the tunnel Blade saw vague hints of movement as the Hashomi on guard walked their posts.
Blade motioned his men forward. The first eight came up holding nine-foot pikes, brought down the cliff in sections and now screwed back together. The pikemen stepped around Blade and formed a double line, holding their pikes level. Eight bristling steel points now confronted any Hashom in the tunnel, ready to impale him before he could get within reach of his opponents.
Now it was time for speed. Blade pointed down the tunnel with his drawn sword, and the eight pikemen broke into a run. Blade ran behind them, and behind him ran all the rest of his men, except five left to guard the hospital end of the tunnel.
They were half way down the tunnel before Blade noticed any reaction from the far end. «Faster!» he snarled. They had to get out of the tunnel before the Hashomi realized what was going on and pulled the bridge back.
One Hashom plunged forward, filled with panic or desperate courage. The pikes spitted him like a chicken and carried him along for twenty feet before he fell off and was trampled underfoot. Blade's men charged on. An arrow whistled overhead, string sparks from the ceiling. Another arched down and struck a man behind Blade in the chest. Without a cry he staggered out of the path of the men behind him. Then he slumped to the floor, blood spraying from his mouth as he coughed.
The charging men burst out of the tunnel. Their sheer momentum swept two Hashomi on the near end of the bridge into the gap. A Hashom ran around the flank of the pikemen and struck at one of them. His sword clanged on the man's steel cap. Before he could strike again, Blade closed with him and cut off both his arms, then pushed him over the edge.
The bridge was narrow enough to force the pikemen to stop and regroup. That gave the Hashomi on the other side of the gap time to rush out of their cave and form a ragged battle line. Some of them wore only loincloths, others nothing at all. They had no time to move the bridge before Blade's men were advancing again.
Afterward Blade could never forget the battle there on the ledge three hundred feet above the valley floor, but he could never remember any of the details. It was all vague and undefined, like a battle fought in a nightmare.
Blade remembered that men fought with their bare hands when they'd lost their weapons, and with their teeth and feet when their arms were hacked off. He remembered a Treas striking down one of his men with a staff, and the man in his final agony gripping the staff and jerking furiously, so that he and the Treas plunged into the gap together. He remembered that both sides fought in total silence, the Hashomi because it was part of their training, his own men because they didn't want to raise the alarm.