Ice Dragon

That was the key to the problem now. As long as the Pi-field was on, the guards dominated the situation. There were nearly three hundred of them at Blade's most conservative estimate, too many for him to cope with singlehanded. Even if he penetrated to the Heart, he had nothing available with which to damage it. So he had to bring in a fighting force, preferably with some of those small bombs he had used on the fliers. With surprise on their side, reasonable luck, very fast action, and his guidance as to the vital spots of the stronghold, he guessed that a hundred or so good fighting men could clean the place out. That would chop off the Ice Master's threat at the roots; without the support from the stronghold the Dragon lair would wither on the vine.

Obviously this would not take care of the Menel entirely, but certainly it would create enough of an uproar that they would notice something was going on. Some of them would undoubtedly come up that shaft from their nearest settlement to find out what. From the Ice Master's vague descriptions they apparently were not so physically formidable that it was impossible to kill or capture them-preferably capture. And then? It was going to be difficult to communicate with them without the Ice Master, but on the other hand it was going to be next to impossible to destroy all their settlements, even if that were the right thing to do. Certainly the immediate threat to the Treduki would be gone when the Ice Master was defeated; possibly after that some way could be found for human and Menel to share this world.

Meanwhile, how to bring in the fighting force to deal with the Ice Master? Granted, the man was so eager for an ally against the Menel that he was giving Blade an amount of help and freedom that would have been preposterous under other circumstances. But he was still holding Leyndt somewhere in the stronghold, and would certainly kill or torture her if Blade simply went up to the surface and dashed off in one of the fliers. Scratch that idea. And Blade could hardly imagine the Ice Master letting him take one of the fliers and head south. That would be the act of a fool, and the Ice Master, mad, egotistical, and cruel though he was, showed no signs of being that kind of fool.

Very well. The Ice Master would not let Blade go unless the situation was desperate. So-how to create a desperate situation for the Ice Master? His strength and his prospects depended on the good will of the Menel. The thing he would most fear would be losing the support of the Menel, and having them turn against him would be several times worse.

So-how to turn the Menel against the Ice Master? Many of the guards definitely received additional conditioning at the hands of the Menel themselves. The Menel were not such fools as to put so much of their knowledge and power into the hands of a human without taking some care to watch, control, and limit him. (One way in which they had limited him was prohibiting him from cloning human guards in the same way he cloned the Ice Dragons. Such guards would have been entirely under the Ice Master's control and entirely immune from that of the Menel. Obviously this was intolerable-and just as obviously the prohibition was one of the Ice Master's main grievances against the Menel.)

But all the guards would not be so conditioned. Suppose some of them turned against the Menel-or seemed to be turning against the Menel, which would be just as effective? The Menel would unleash their conditioned guards against the other ones, and the Ice Master's forces would be divided. The stronghold would be a shambles of fighting men, clambering up and down its scores of levels and slaughtering one another. The Ice Master would be tearing his beard out by the bloody roots!

And then, if Blade came to him in the middle of the shambles and promised that if allowed to fly to the south he would bring back a hundred or more fighting men, loyal to him, that could be thrown into the battle against the Menel's guards? At that point Blade would become not merely a useful ally but an indispensable one for survival, and he could head south with reasonable certainty that Leyndt would be safe. Unless she was killed in the fighting, of course, but he could reasonably expect the Ice Master to see to her safety.

And after he returned? Simply getting a hundred fighters would not solve the problem. For one thing, most of them would have to be Treduki, for the Graduki were largely untrained in handling the primitive weapons that would be needed. But the Treduki themselves were also primitive, and faced with the wonders of the stronghold, would they be too terrified to fight? Not many of them could be expected to be as level-headed as Nilando. Stramod might be able to help there.

And he would certainly be able to help with training the men. To take the stronghold from its own people, the attackers would have to commit to memory every scrap of information Blade had learned about it. How long would that take? Would it take so long that the Ice Master would become suspicious? However long it would take, it would have to be done. Otherwise Blade knew he would be leading a hundred or more men who trusted him like sheep to the slaughterhouse.

But those were problems to be considered later. Now he had to find a way to sow distrust between the Menel and their human ally. The Menel, it appeared, came up from their settlement from time to time. Did they have a regular route and schedule? The Girls would hardly know that, since they did not even know of the existence of the Menel, but here as elsewhere they might know things from which he could deduce much. After that-how to give the appearance of an attack on the Menel by the regular guards?

That brought him to a dead stop for an unpleasant moment. What did the Menel look like? He had only the vaguest clues about this, apart from the Ice Master's hints that they were small enough to fit inside an ordinary human dwelling without too much trouble. So-an upper limit on their size. But otherwise? Blade remembered the scratches-clawmarks? — and the moldy odor at the head of the shaft, and grimaced. Then he put the matter aside and moved on to the next question.

He was still moving from question to question when fatigue finally drove him to the sleeping platform. But he had answered a good many of the questions, and he could see the rest falling into place before much longer. He was on the move again-now with his mind, in a few more days with his body.

Chapter 17

Blade waited until his mental clock told him enough time had passed for the Girl he had just been with to have returned safely to her quarters. He didn't want her or any of the eight other Girls he had taken Pleasure with, talked to, and given names to, involved in what was about to happen. The ordinary guards were kill-happy enough; what the Menel-conditioned guards might be like, their minds worked over by non-humans with probably a very imperfect knowledge of human psychology, he didn't know. He didn't want to find out at the expense of any of the Girls, either.

When he was reasonably certain the Girl was safe, he rose from the platform, went over to the door, and began hammering on it, calling loudly and incoherently at the same time. He kept on until he heard the booted feet of guards in the corridor outside, and a harsh voice demanding, «What's the trouble?»

«I–I'm sick. I-«and he gave what he hoped would be a convincing imitation of a man being violently sick to his stomach, then fell to the floor and began thrashing about and groaning audibly. The guards were normally under strict orders not to enter his chamber, but he was wagering that in such an emergency situation their fear of the Ice Master's wrath at losing Blade would make them willing to risk a small violation of the rules.