Blade raised on an elbow and feigned interest while kissing one of her firm breasts. "Who does rule in Alb, then?"
"Cunobar the Gray. He has deposed Lycanto and even now marches north to Voth, with all the Albian army behind him. They will be at our gates in less than a week."
Blade, his lips brushing a rosy nipple, could find no vast excitement in this intelligence. "So what of this? Is not this Cunobar a friend to your father, and you?"
"That is true enough. But there is a difference now, my Lord. And it is all of my doing. Or most of it, for Cunobar the Gray has long wanted me for his wife. He spoke for me when I was still a child, as is the custom. I have liked him, but have not loved him, and I never gave him promise. Until "
Blade left off kissing her breast. "Until?"
"Until recent days, when I was greatly angered with you. Because you treated me as child and would not see my love. I sent a message to Cunobar the Gray. I "
It explained so much. Blade held up a hand and said, with a weary laugh, "You asked Cunobar to march up here and win your hand in fair and honorable combat by killing me!"
She would not meet his eye. "I did. I was regretful in the instant, but the messenger had gone. But it is no matter, Lord."
He followed her glance. She was looking at the great bronze axe, newly burnished by Sylvo, gleaming in the rays of the moon.
"You will slay Cunobar easily enough," said Taleen. "He is not as old as his hair tells of him, and he is a fine warrior, but none can stand up to you. I am not worried."
"Nor am I," answered Blade. "Because I am not going to fight Cunobar, in fair combat or foul. I am weary of blood and sick of killing."
Taleen drew back to stare at him in amazement. "This cannot be Lord Blade that speaks! You must fight Cunobar else he can take me for his own. And name you coward to the world."
A little star of pain exploded in Blade's head. He grimaced and fell into a flurry of temper.
"Let Cunobar take you, then. And the devil too, for that matter!"
The word lingered in the chamber. Devil? The Blade that Taleen knew would have said: Thunor!
Taleen's horror changed to concern. She eyed Blade with a new tenderness. "You are not well? Frigga help me, I know something is wrong. You do not look the same, my Lord Blade, nor do you speak the same. What is it?"
Blade reached for her, not to be denied this time. She resisted, still babbling on, but he bore her down and silenced her with his lunging entry. In a moment she began to move and moan beneath him.
Blade, on the verge of convulsion, felt the pain slamming at his head. Someone screamed and he knew it to be his voice. Then the pain vanished, to be replaced by utter silence and tranquility as he fell into the body of Taleen. She was enormous woman now, world woman, and she opened her chasm to him as he clung like an ant to her smooth female flesh-smelling mountains and shot the scarlet rapids of her veins down into the burning moist heat of her. Falling and falling and sliding no hand or foothold on these pink slopes and the wet glissade ever increasing and at the end, waiting for him, the edge of eternity drenched in a waterfall of frothing virgin's blood.
For one frantic half breath Blade clung to the precipice of the only reality he knew, fearful of returning to a reality he had lost. In a great brilliant flash of light and knowledge he saw Taleen's face, the room about him, and Aesculp brooding in the corner. This creature threshing about was himself. His hand, flailing, sought beneath a pillow by accident and his fingers closed about a round and smooth object that was of marble size. What?
Words roared at him in tiny balloons, miniscule from an inverted bull horn, and a chorus was crying aloud that it was the black pearl he held. The pearl given him back by Jarl, who had taken it by threat from a reluctant sea robber.
"Such loot is too rich for the likes of them," Jarl explained. "It will only give them ideas ideas idea "
Blade rode the black pearl now, clinging to that smooth convexity, and shot out of a red tunnel into Craghead's mists. Surf cried a dirge for Queen Beata groaning in her cage. Heads were piled high, each picked up and borne away by monster flies, and blood caked on an axe and the mist grew cold cold colder.
Aesculp came alive and leaped at Blade from the corner, a terrible creature with a bloodstain for a face. Bronze sparked and the chamber was filled with a dreadful sound of leathern wings.
Blade made a final silent sound in his throat. Not Thunor, not Blade himself, could have explained what it meant.
Chapter Sixteen
"Some of the greatest inventions," said Lord Leighton, "have been discovered quite by accident. I think, J, that this may be one of them."
For a moment J did not answer. He was looking at the big man in the small white bed. Richard Blade slept peacefully, his curling beard and longish hair a dark stain on the pristine pillow. Small electrodes attached here and there led to a large electroencephalograph in one corner of the aseptic room, part of a hospital complex lying far beneath the Tower of London. Here there was silence, broken only by their voices and the occasional hum of a machine, with no encroachment by the insane traffic high over them.
J's benign, aging Establishment face bore traces of harrowing nights and days. As head of Britain's super agency, MI6A, he was accustomed to bearing a heavy load; the past few weeks had been nearly intolerable.
"I thought we had lost him," J said. "I will admit to it now, Lord Leighton. I had given up hope and I was blaming you and your damned blundering. That infernal computer of yours "
Lord Leighton's yellow eyes were red streaked and his expensive suit hung on his polio-ruined frame like so many rags. Now and then he twitched and raised an arm, as if trying to ease himself of the hump he must wear forever. He was peering at the encephalograph.
"His brain waves are very nearly back to normal," he told J quietly. "Another few hours and the molecular structure will be restored to what it was. I have sedated him to sleep another twelve hours. When you talk to him again, J, he will be exactly the man you have always known."
J nodded without speaking, He went to the bedside and bent over the sleeping Blade, then lightly touched the bearded face with his fingers. "Wherever he's been, Lord L, he has been in wind and weather. And sun. He is burnt nearly black. That wound in his back and the healed burns my God, Lord L! He is going to have a story to tell!"
Lord Leighton paced a few steps sometimes movement eased the eternal pain in his back and watched J with a mixture of affection and impatience. J was a spymaster, no scientist, and it was inevitable that he should get the cart before the horse.
"I hope Blade can tell us his story," Lord Leighton began, "but I shouldn't count on it too heavily, J. He simply may not remember very much. I have foreseen that. I am already working on a memory expanding drug which, in conjunction with a sort of booster computer I call it a chronos computer should enable Blade to remember everything about his next venture. And without any conscious effort on his part."
Lord Leighton beamed at J, remarkably like a crippled old cat that has found a way to attract mice without effort on its own part.
J was not ashamed to let his jaw droop as he stared at the little cripple.
"His next venture? What in hell are you talking about, man?"
Lord Leighton looked long-suffering, patient, and waved a placating hand toward a small table on which lay a thick file bound in green leather.
"It's all in there, J. Everything. Read it in the taxi, on your way to the Prime Minister. It's the highest priority and top top secret, or however you chaps label these things."