Ice Dragon

The black building in the center of the ice grid was the top of the stronghold, which was about eight hundred feet from top to bottom and had a cross section, as he guessed, about five hundred by four hundred. His own chamber was on the same level as the Ice Master's, a little less than two-thirds of the way up. The Ice Master's chambers covered about half of the whole level, and were divided into at least seven large rooms, all luxuriously furnished. In front there was another large room where the guards who protected the Ice Master slept.

There were many other guards, of course-to guard the slaves, to guard the Girls (the ones who guarded the Girls were Cut-Off Ones-eunuchs), to guard the rooms where the Ice Master worked (his laboratories, no doubt). And to guard the Heart. The Heart? What was that?

The Girls all shuddered at the mention of it, but Blade was able to bring all of them around eventually, and build up a vague but tantalizing picture. Girls called it the Heart because it made a steady throbbing noise like a huge heart (and Blade nodded, with a flash of memory back to his first day in the chamber). They didn't know what it looked like, but they knew that it must be just above the level of the slave quarters, because the sound was loudest there. No Girl had dared to approach it since two who tried were caught by the guards-Blade had the impression that these guards were a particularly nasty lot even by the standards of the Ice Master-and forced to give Unlimited Pleasure until they died. It was a very terrible thing, and must be dangerous, because there were always many, many guards around it.

At this point Blade realized he had pulled something vitally important out of his questioning of the Girls. He would have laid long odds on the Heart being the main power source for the Ice Master's stronghold, or something equally important. To sabotage that… But he had no equipment. And besides, to destroy the Ice Master's stronghold alone would be valueless if he could do nothing against the Menel in their underground settlements. No, he would have to defer action at least until he had found out where the Menel were, where Leyndt was, and also how to return to the surface and escape to the south-unless the situation turned out to absolutely demand a suicide mission.

So he waited, asked the Girls questions, and on the fifth day was rescued by the Ice Master himself. At least that was the way Blade put it to himself. No doubt the Ice Master felt that he was merely giving his new ally necessary information and teaching him necessary skills to make him as useful as possible in the coming campaign against the Menel. Over the next ten days this teaching kept Blade very busy indeed.

The Ice Master took him from top to bottom of the stronghold, telling Blade in exhaustive detail about some things, hinting at others, and giving Blade important clues by leaving some things entirely unexplained or even unshown. Among the last was the Heart. They passed it on the way down to the slave quarters, and it was as the Girls said-a deep continuous throbbing coming from somewhere close beyond a chamber filled with the worst thugs Blade had seen in the whole stronghold. Stairs led from it down to a chamber at the level of the slave quarters.

The slave quarters were as sterile as an operating room, as silent as a morgue, and all the more terrifying for lacking the smells and sounds that would at least have suggested that the hundreds of vague-eyed figures that lay on pallets, stood in lines, or wandered about under the eyes of the guards were alive and human. And in one corner of the chamber into which the stairs from the Heart led, a corner which Blade explored for a few minutes while the Ice Master was off supervising some business of the slaves, was another item the Ice Master very carefully passed by.

It was a circular shaft, about thirty feet in diameter, plunging straight down and brightly lit all the way, until it vanished into what seemed like the bowels of the planet. Blade knew, however, that this must be the passage down to the underground dwellings of the Menel. He shoved a small piece of debris over the edge of the shaft and watched it float down as though it were a piece of dandelion fluff. Gravity in the shaft was controlled; if any enemy entered the shaft, no doubt those at the bottom simply cut off the gravity control and let the enemy plunge headlong down to the bottom, to smash himself to a pulp. Blade noticed as he turned back to rejoin the Ice Master a faint moldy odor clinging to the edge of the shaft, and scratch marks on some of the stones around the mouth many feet long.

That was as much as he was able to see and file away in his mind before the Ice Master called him back and they returned to the upper levels of the stronghold. The Ice Master showed him those with the same selective thoroughness as before, going on until by the time the tour was over Blade was almost too tired to appreciate and question the Girl who came to his chamber that night.

But there was even more to come, and Blade absorbed it all, keeping his eagerness veiled behind a mask of disinterest, watching the Ice Master working industriously to bring the day of his own destruction rapidly closer. The Ice Master explained the conditioning he used on the guards and slaves, the memory-erasure of the Girls, the training of the Dragon Masters (who were not allowed in the stronghold). He showed Blade the enormous culture vats where the Ice Dragons were cloned, the workshops where the Dragon Masters' suits and control wands and catcher-webs were made. He did not show Blade where any of the key systems of the stronghold-power, light, water, air circulation-were controlled, but Blade had not expected that, and in the course of the tours saw enough to permit him to draw his own conclusions. And also to be staggered by the technological treasure-trove here. If he had not been limited in what he could bring back to Home Dimension to what he could carry in his hands (or happened to be carrying in his hands) when the computer snatched him back, he could have brought back enough advanced knowledge to push England a century forward at a single leap.

But that was an opportunity unlikely to arise. He could at least bring back the knowledge that gravity control and the like were possible, which might encourage Home Dimension research enough to cut decades off the time of developing it. And the monumental knowledge that somewhere in some universe there existed another intelligent race! Meanwhile, he had plenty of problems to face here as he sought ways and means of dealing with the Ice Master and the Menel.

The Ice Master himself provided Blade with what might be a satisfactory solution to a problem that had been occupying a good part of Blade's attention ever since he began thinking out ways of destroying the stronghold. What was he to do about the slaves and Girls? They were i