by Джеффри Лорд
A few yards up from the beach, hidden in the trees, was a narrow road paved with a pebbled gray plastic. A large truck-like vehicle more than forty feet long stood in the shade, its slab sides coming so close to the ground that Blade could not make out whether it ran on wheels, tracks, or for all he knew, feet. The guards loaded the prisoners into the truck through the rear door, but none climbed inside after them.
Left alone for the first time after many hours of enforced silence, the prisoners burst out into a gabble of oaths, questions, lamentations, and complaints. Even Nilando cursed quietly. Only Blade was silent. When the others had run out of breath, he looked at Nilando and asked quietly, «Is this the usual Graduk method, or are we getting special treatment?»
«It is the first time I have ever heard of one of their slaving patrols raiding so far north. It must be very costly to send those great machines all that way to pick up a few prisoners.»
Blade nodded. «It would be. But I think they had more in mind than just a few prisoners for slavery. I think they were trying to frighten the people of Tengran. Have the Tengrans been doing anything the Graduki would consider particularly bad?»
Nilando frowned as he tried to think out an answer to this question. «Nothing that I know for certain. The Ice Dragons do not approach Tengran, so it has never asked for help. Nor have its people ever asked for refuge in the south. They are brave.»
«If the Ice Dragons cannot swim, the Tengrans are also quite safe,» Blade reminded him. «Do the Ice Dragons merely not attack Tengran, or do they avoid the whole area?» He had the feeling that something was beginning to take shape out of the fog of ignorance through which he had been groping for nearly a week, or might take shape if he kept prodding Nilando, trying to squeeze information out of the man.
«I have heard tales,» said Nilando slowly, «that the Ice Dragons do not come within a day’s fast walking of the shores of the lake. But they are only tales. If they were true, I do not see why many thousands of our people have not settled by the lake in search of safety.»
«Unless,» said Blade, also speaking slowly, also trying to define his own thoughts, «Tengran had some reason for not wanting too many people to see what they are doing?»
«By the High Hills!» exploded Nilando. «Are you trying to say that they may be the creators of the Ice Dragons? Then we must escape, so we can lead all the Treduki against these monstrous people and throw them all into their own lake. They-«
«No, damn you!» exploded Blade, losing his temper. «I didn’t mean that! I meant-«and there he stopped, because he was very far from sure he had a theory he could explain to Nilando. And he was very sure that if his theory was correct the worst thing he could do was explain it anywhere he might be overheard by Graduk soldiers. They might be silent and sadistic, but they probably were not stupid enough to entirely ignore what they overheard.
Fortunately, the van ended the exchange by starting up with a whine, a clatter, and a series of jolts that sent all the people inside bouncing about like corn in a popper. Nilando swore again.
The driver of the truck must have had frustrated ambitions to be the Graduk equivalent of a racing driver, because the truck swayed, jolted, and lurched wildly along. The prisoners inside kept bouncing about and picking up bruises and gouges from the bare metal interior for the better part of an hour. They were also getting hungry and thirsty. Blade managed to keep his mind off his present discomforts and his dubious prospects by turning his theory over and over in his mind, and also by trying to guess what sort of motor drove the truck. It gave off a continuous, unvarying, maddening whine, somewhat like an enormous mosquito trying to sing bass.
Without any warning or slowing, the brakes went on and the van slammed to a stop so sudden that all six prisoners flew like bowling balls the full length of the interior and crashed into the front wall. In the silence that followed the sudden cut-off of the motor, Blade heard a new sound coming from outside-the growl and murmur of an angry mob.
There was nothing for a moment that Blade could make out except a formless and incoherent roar. Then he began to make out single voices shouting specific words
«Kill the Treduki!»
«Treduki bring disease to our people!»
«The arena is for the rich. The money spent on slave raids is taken from the poor!»
«The Treduk animals feast while we starve!»
— and others more or less as ominous. It seemed the truck was surrounded by some group in opposition to the Graduk government. But it was a howling and perhaps armed mob, and its slogans seemed to have nothing to do with the Ice Dragons and much to do with murdering Treduki. Blade had seldom felt quite as helpless as he did now, sitting locked and bound in a truck surrounded by a mob that might be hostile to his guards but was likely to prove even more hostile to him.
A moment later the van began rocking back and forth, and the shouts from outside took on the rhythmic quality of a sailor’s heaving chanty. Blade grimaced. The mob had decided to try overturning the truck. No doubt it weighed a good many tons, but several hundred determined people can push hard. And after they got it over, then what? Set it on fire? Yes. Blade heard a new shout: «Burn the animals in their cage! Burn out the disease from our cities!»
Blade saw Rena turn white, and Nilando put an arm around her to comfort her, although the Irdnan’s own face was tight-drawn and pale itself. The rocking grew more violent; several times Blade felt one set of wheels rise completely clear of the ground and slam back. Once he heard a scream and a crunch as somebody didn’t jump back fast enough from the descending truck.
Then the scream of a siren cut through the uproar outside, just as the truck heaved up more mightily than before, reached its point of balance, and went over. Whether anybody was under it when it hit Blade didn’t notice; he was too busy bracing himself as well as he could to keep his brains from being bashed out against the walls. As it was he went head over heels and landed with a spine-jarring crash that momentarily made his head swim and added bruises to most of the places that hadn’t already been bruised in the course of the trip.
As he lay there, battered and coldly determined that the next person who touched him or tried to make him do anything was going to be killed, the truck door crashed open. He twisted himself around until he faced the light and then lurched to his feet, his bound hands raised clublike. Two of the soldiers squatted in the opening, their beamers leveled at him.
«Outside!» one of them snapped. Blade moved slowly forward, hearing the others behind him groaning and staggering to their feet, until he was squarely between the two soldiers. One of them prodded him in the hip with the butt of his beamer.
Blade spun on his left foot and his right foot shot out like a stone flying from an explosion, smashing into the soldier’s stomach and catapulting him through the open door. Before the other could bring his beamer up and aim it, Blade swung his bound hands against the man’s head in a hammer-blow that slammed him against the edge of the door. Blade heard the soldier’s skull crack. Then he leaped through the door into the sunlight, far too angry to be cautious but not too angry to notice what was around him.
The mob still surrounded the overturned truck at least a thousand strong, but they had backed away a little. From the overturned van to another similar one about thirty feet away a double line of men in blue uniforms made a clear alley. Blade at first thought these were more soldiers. Then he noticed the different cut of the uniforms, and that these men were armed with heavy barreled, green-painted pistol-like weapons with wide mouths, rather than the too-familiar black heatbeamers. He saw some of these turning toward him, staring and raising their weapons-then he suddenly had too much to do to look more.
Four soldiers came running around the end of the truck but made the fatal mistake of not blasting Blade on the spot. Like the men he had already taken out, they found him too close in before they could fire, and after that there was nothing they could do but flee or die. He butted the first one in the stomach, and the so
ldier screamed out all the breath in his body as he shot into the air and crashed against the man behind him. They went down together, and Blade leaped forward and crashed his bare foot down full force on the second man’s chest. He saw a third soldier raise his beamer to firing position, threw himself backward under it, and swept the man off his feet and hard up against the sharp edge of the open truck door. The man fell forward tonelessly, but before he hit the ground Blade found himself suddenly staring into the muzzle of the fourth soldier’s beamer.
There was no flashing of his life before his eyes, because the moment of staring at the beamer and knowing that it was about to chop him into charred pieces didn’t last long enough. Then the soldier suddenly dropped his beamer into the dust, threw up his hands, and fell backward with a thud.
In the sudden silence that followed the soldier’s collapse, Blade saw eyes in the mob turning from him to the double file of armed men, then on to the rest of the prisoners clustered behind him. Then one of the police-types snapped, «All right, you bastards! In the van! Now!» It was certainly a policeman’s type of voice, and Blade could no more swallow that than he had swallowed the soldier’s treatment. Not now. He lunged forward, and as he threw his arms to the left for a swinging blow at the nearest man’s head, two more beyond that one had time to whip up their weapons and aim them at Blade. He felt a sudden fierce itching all over his body, as if every inch of it were covered with a blazing rash, then his knees would no longer hold him up. He knew he was falling forward, vaguely wondered if there was yet a part of his skin unbruised, felt himself hit and the gravel drive into his skin, then slipped on down into blackness.
Chapter 7
This time, the first thing Blade became aware of was lying naked in a soft bed, his skin covered from head to toe with a soothing ointment, a faint hint of perfume in the air, and distant music in his ears. All together, it seemed so improbable that he decided he was not going to stay awake and try to orient himself, but would go back to sleep. He did so.
The second time he awoke the room was dark and both the perfume and the music were gone. So was the ointment. He looked at his skin where it had been smeared with the ointment, and saw that the bruises and scratches had faded as much as they would have normally in three or four days. However, he was still groggy-drugged? he asked himself-and so went back to sleep again.
The third time he awoke, he noticed that there was someone else in the room. At first glance this someone looked so much like Lord Leighton that for a moment Blade had the most disorienting sensation of all-that of having been snatched back to Home Dimension in his sleep. But a closer look showed him that the visitor was definitely not Lord Leighton. It was indeed possible he was not even human.
He was about five and a half feet tall, bandy-legged and squat as a chimpanzee, with appropriately long arms. His head was notably more cylindrical than the human norm, his eyes larger, and his ears far larger and more protruding. His hair was white and formed a fringe around a largely bald scalp. And that scalp, and every other inch of exposed skin, was a glowing sea blue.
«Well,» he said as he saw Blade stir and gape. «I see you are finally really awake. You need not be afraid. You are now among friends.»
Blade nodded slowly. Then, knowing it was an unoriginal and perhaps tactless thing to say:
«Who are you?»
«I? I am Stramod. I was one of the Ice Master’s early experiments in genetics. I did not please him, because I was still too complex and too human, which of course has been very satisfactory to me. I grant you, I am somewhat odd to look at, but-«He broke off and grinned at the blank look Blade realized must be spreading across his face. «But indeed I am lacking in manners. I forget that you have not been given our discourse so you would not know the Ice Master from the Seven Sorcerers of Septhran Mountain.» He rose. «I will go and speak to Doctor Leyndt and she will come and perhaps together we can explain.» He strode out, moving with grace and even some dignity in spite of his simian appearance.
He returned a few minutes later with a companion, from her white tunic presumably Doctor Leyndt. She was decidedly human, and strikingly beautiful. No, perhaps handsome would be a better word. There was no hint of delicacy or softness in her face, body, or stance-all were perfectly balanced. But definitely attractive. The hair, even done up as it was, shone with a rich auburn sheen, the lips were full, the wide mouth made Blade want to see it smile, and the body under that tunic was most definitely that of a woman, a mature woman with all the curves ripened.
Her voice was measured, low, almost emotionless. As with her physical qualities, her voice was a perfect balance between too much and too little expression. So was her choice of words. «You must have realized that you are no longer destined for Treniga Arena, and are no longer in the hands of the Conciliators’ soldiery. But I’m sure you want to know much more than that. Stramod and I will do our best to tell you.»
In fact, she explained, he had indeed been kept under sedation for more than four days, while the rest of the rescued Treduki were interrogated. Blade had appeared to be their leader, and a man of outstanding abilities, but they had to be sure he could be trusted before they tried to enlist him as an ally. So they had closely questioned all the others, to find out as much as possible of the way the others saw him, then gone to him directly. All the interrogation led to the conclusion that Blade was as able as he appeared, and trustworthy as far as this could be measured and judged for now. So they would answer any questions he might ask.
How had they known he had slain a Dragon Master? Oh, that was quite simple. Others had escaped from Irdna and reached Tengran even before Blade’s party, talking of the destruction of the town and of the death of a Dragon Master at the hands of a huge man who yet moved like a striking snake. And in Tengran there were agents who reported such news to the headquarters of the movement in Treniga, the Graduk capital.
Yes, there was indeed a movement of those among the Graduki who would form an alliance with the Treduki and use the combined skills of the two peoples to beat back the Ice Dragons and perhaps even the glaciers. It was the movement’s agents that secretly kept the area around Tengran’s lake free of Dragons, driving them off with sonic blasts from the nerve-pistols that Blade himself had met.
It was obvious, however, that the Conciliators, the ruling oligarchy among the Graduki, also had agents in Tengran, who had picked up the same information and told their masters. And the Conciliators had responded with the raid that had gathered in Blade and his companions and also killed as many Tengrans as possible to remind them of Graduk weaponry and perhaps make them afraid to cooperate further with the movement’s agents.
But it had been possible to foil the Conciliator’s scheme, exploiting for this purpose the very prejudice against Treduki that the Conciliators gave as one of their main reasons for rejecting any notion of joint resistance. The mass of the people regarded Treduki as disease-ridden animals and their kidnapping for slavery or for the grand arenas an expensive luxury of the upper classes. There was an organized movement afoot to force the Council to end such raids. That movement had grown so strong that it had bribed officials of the Supreme Council to reveal the route along which the latest batch of Treduki were being smuggled into Treniga after being landed at a remote bay where none would see them. And since her movement, the Union for Cooperation, had infiltrated the other one, what was known to its leaders was soon known to the Union’s.
After that it was a simple matter for those leaders of the anti-Treduk movement who were also leaders of the Union (she smiled as she said that, and Blade’s anticipation was rewarded ten times over-it gave her a radiance like a great rose in full bloom) to call out their followers and stage a riot at a convenient place on the road to Treniga. After that, fifteen Union people carefully disguised as Civil Guards and equally carefully placed nearby in advance had come charging to the rescue. They had intimidated the rioters (who might very well have actually killed Blade and his companions), dealt with those
soldiers not already dealt with more drastically by Blade, and made off with all the prisoners.
Blade himself, she went on severely, had very seriously complicated what had been planned as a comparatively neat and quiet affair by killing the soldiers. Not that she had any love for the Conciliators’ killer-squads, she added hastily, seeing Blade’s face flare with rage at the memory of how those soldiers had killed right and left and then humiliated the survivors. But the deaths of five soldiers would make the affair much more noteworthy than they had planned. And the Conciliators might well launch a dangerously thorough manhunt in pursuit of a man who, hands bound, could yet kill so many of their soldiers singlehanded.
By this time, no doubt, he was wanting to know more about the Union. For many Graduki, including perhaps herself, the desire to help the Treduki smash the Ice Dragons perhaps rose from guilt-guilt that the Ice Master himself was (or had been) Graduk. As for who the Ice Master was, there Stramod could tell a better story than she could. For he himself was an early creation of the Ice Master, and he and those like him could say much about the nature of the enemy. Blade, by now becoming slightly bored, said politely that nothing was more important than knowing the nature of the enemy, and nodded to the mutant to tell his story.
The Ice Master, it seemed, was actually the greatest scientist the Graduki had ever produced. His field had been biology and genetics, and with that knowledge plus great surgical skills he had been the first to design living creatures to specific requirements, as one would design a van or a warflier. He had succeeded in developing many such versions of the lower animals; then he had started on humans.
«I am one of his earlier creations, where he still knew such a thing as caution-not scruples, merely caution out of fear of failure. There were others like me, and because our minds were almost normal, we soon revolted against the Master. By this time he had gone on and created many less normal beings from human stock, using them for guards, slaves, gifts to his allies on the Supreme Council, and so on. We had to fight them, and in the fighting many of them and many of us were killed. But we made such an uproar that the secret of what he was doing could no longer be kept. His allies on the Council fell from office, and he himself was forced to flee. He went north into the glacier land, taking with him some of his creations and no doubt much of his equipment, for otherwise how could he have created the Ice Dragons? Their riders are no problem; they are merely prisoners from the villages, trained and conditioned. But the Ice Dragons show that he must have advanced his knowledge much beyond even what it was when he fled. In twenty years one can do much.»