The rawhide cords had been cunningly laid in trenches and covered over. Tensioned sticks of bow wood awaited a releasing trigger. Somewhere in the crowd of sullen Mongs a man pulled a cord. The web of trip lines sprung into view.
The gray was caught at the knees and went down in a long plunging fall. It whinnied high in distress. Blade went over the gray's head, headlong and helpless, and even as he saw the rock and knew he would strike it, he saw again the grinning dwarf and heard the words:
"Beware the ground, Sir Blade."
He had discarded his helmet. He sought to shield his head with his arm but the heavy mace encumbered him. His head struck the rock, and the plain and the silent Mongs vanished in a scarlet flash.
Chapter Seven
Blade awoke in darkness. He was naked except for breeches. His wrists and ankles were weighted with heavy chains and manacles. His head pained him and above his right eye was a great mass of spongy congealed blood. There was a dull ache in his left leg where Cossa's arrow had taken him.
He lay staring at a ceiling he could not see. He was in a tent, for he could hear the slither of wind and sense the rippling of the thick feltlike material. A black tent. A Mong tent.
Richard Blade was not a man for self-recrimination. So he had played the fool and walked, or cantered, into the trap. Now to get himself out of it - if that were possible. If not - but he would face that when it came. He was still alive.
He tested his chains and knew he was not going to break them. He lay quiet again and stared into the darkness and listened to the sounds of the camp around him. He began to adjust and react, all his senses attuned now, and he realized that he was deep in the Mong encampment. He heard song and the complaint of harsh voices: yells, screams, children in uproar as they played at some savage game. Horsemen went thundering past not far away.
He was lying on something soft - soft but scratchy. Blade put his face to it. Woven horsehair.
There was movement near him and for a moment moonlight shafted into the tent. Then darkness again. Someone had entered the tent. Someone who stood there in the dark and breathed softly and watched him.
Blade sat up, his chains jangling. "Who is it?"
There was a scratching in the gloom, and a light flared. A twist of wick burning in oil in a handled bowl. The shadow behind the flame was grotesquely small. The dwarf.
Blade managed to summon a wry grin. "Hello, little man. You see I did not heed your warning. Next time do not speak in riddles, I..."
A mistake. The dwarf moved close to him, one finger to his grinning mouth, a look of panic in the dark eyes. Blade hushed. He was a fool.
The dwarf put the lamp down and scuttled away into the shadows again. Blade heard the tent opening rustle. The dwarf came back and squatted a discreet distance from Blade. He spoke in a harsh whisper.
"No harm this time, Sir Blade, but guard your tongue. No more mention of that or I will share your fate and I would not like that. I come from Sadda, who trusts me as much as she trusts anyone, and I would keep it that way. I cannot help you, Sir Blade, even if I would. But you can help me, who did give you warning, by forgetting I ever gave it."
Blade nodded. "It is forgotten."
For a long minute the dwarf was silent as he studied Blade from head to toe. Blade returned the scrutiny.
Here was no warrior. The dwarf wore a little pointed cap with a bell on the peak. Around his neck was a small iron collar. Below that he wore a jerkin of leather, with yellow stripes, and tight-fitting leather breeches. On his tiny feet were shoes of some sort of skin, with the fur inward and the toes very long and curled up and held in place by stiffeners.
Blade got it then. A fool. The Khad's fool! But he had sounded like Sadda's man—
He badly needed a friend. Blade whispered, "Does the Khad know you're here? Or his sister, the one called Sadda?"
The dwarf, without apparent effort, turned a backward flip and landed in exactly the same position. From the darkness behind Blade a mocking voice spoke. "No to the first, yes to the last. And who are you, Sir Blade, to question me? I am sent to question you.
For a moment Blade was startled. He had forgotten the dwarf was a ventriloquist. And better at it than Blade had known. The grinning mouth had not twitched a muscle.
"To question me? Who sent you to do that? What is your name, little man?"
The grin was fixed. "They call me Morpho. That is enough for you. And it was Sadda who sent me to look at you, to question you, and to report back to her."
Blade stretched his huge body and the chains jingled. He smiled at the dwarf. There was much here he did not understand. He sensed that beyond all this mystery there might be a chance for his life.
"Then look," said Blade, "and question. And take back a report that will keep me alive. I will reward you for it one day."
Morpho put a finger to his mouth and shook his head. Behind Blade the voice spoke again. "Not all fools dress like fools."
Blade accepted the rebuke. He waited.
The dwarf walked on his hands around the tent, always careful to stay out of Blade's reach. Even upside down the grin was there. The silence got on Blade's nerves.
"Must you always grin, little man? Always? This is not a time for grinning."
Morpho dropped to his feet and came back to squat. "I must always grin, Sir Blade. I am a fool, from a family of fools. When I was a baby the doctors cut my mouth - look near and you can see the scars - so that I must wear a fool's grin from birth to death."
The dwarf leaned closer in the smoking lamplight. Blade saw the faint scars at the corners of the grinning lips. He kept silent. The man would get on with it when he was ready.
Morpho put a finger alongside his nose in thought, frowned, then began to whisper.
"I am honest with you, Sir Blade. What else with a man who is so near to torture and death? You are not a Cath and you are not a Mong. Just what you are I do not know. Our spies behind the wall could not find out, other than you pleasured the Empress Mei greatly. It is said that you are an envoy from Pukka, come with great powers. This may be. It is strange all the same that the Emperor Mei Saka has disappeared and the Empress, instead of putting on the yellow cloth of mourning, welcomes you. You would speak, Sir Blade?"
He might as well carry the lie through, for what it was worth. Blade was thinking fast now, and he had heard that the Khad was a greedy man. He was grateful for all he had learned in his three weeks behind the wall.
"The Emperor Mei Saka is dead, eaten by carrion apes and his bones forgotten. It is true that I come from Pukka, sent as special envoy by the High Emperor of all the Caths, to replace the Low Emperor, Mei Saka, and find out why you Mongs cannot be defeated. They are very impatient in Pukka and do not understand why this fighting must go on year after year."
Morpho grinned and watched Blade with alert dark eyes in which there was no belief. But he nodded and said, "As you say it, Sir Blade. I will tell" Sadda all these things."
The dwarf's eyes roamed up and down Blade's powerful frame. "I will also tell her what she most wants to know - that you will make a magnificent slave in more ways than one. It may be that she will save you from the Khad yet."
Blade was getting out of his depth again. "How can Sadda save me, little man? Our spies reported that she was a prisoner and was to be bound and turned over to me if I won. How can Sadda do anything for me? Or for herself? There must be much hate between the Khad and she."
"Hate?" Morpho's head nodded vigorously. "There is. There was. There will be. Yet they are still brother and sister and, until one of them is dead, they must rule the Mongs together. Each has his faction and the spies are thicker than flies on pony dung. They quarrel constantly and makeup constantly. Each always on guard against the other. And now that you have lost, after having won and thrown the victory away, the Khad has released Sadda from her tent and they are friends again and tonight that will be celebrated. You will be judged and disposed of, Sir Blade. That is why I am here on Sadda's errand - to see if you are worth saving as a slave.