Ice Dragon

This man was much the best swordsman Blade had met all night, a maddening thing to encounter just when delay might be particularly fatal. He found himself taking risks he would never have thought of at other times, and once had the other's point whistle past his throat by a hairsbreadth, so close he could feel the whuff of disturbed air on his skin. The second Menel made no effort to intervene, concentrating instead on helping its comrade up. The two seemed to be conversing earnestly, the conversation sounding like a whole conclave of plumbers hard at work.

If the other man had not been functioning under a conditioning that slowed him just a fraction, he might have fatally delayed Blade. As it was, Blade got in a slash that beat the other's guard down and sank deep into his neck just as an uproar of shouting and pounding feet from above drowned out the pipe-banging sound of the Menel as a dozen more guards from the Heart detachment swarmed down the stairs.

Blade was sprinting down the corridor before his latest victim had hit the floor. A dozen guards, even a dozen slowed by their Menel conditioning, would be disastrously too many to fight. It was time to get away from the shaft head and try adding to the chaos by action somewhere else.

He did not stop ru

He reached the elevator shaft, punched the call button, waited for the indicator light to gleam on. It did so, the door opened-and two guards and a Girl tumbled out, falling rigidly to the floor and lying there motionless. Blade pulled the Girl gently aside before neatly slicing the throats of the two frozen men. Killing helpless victims was a stomach-turning business for him, but he found the guards sufficiently revolting for it to be just possible now.

The elevator shot upward and let him out on the floor of the Girls. He sprinted through the halls, heading for the Pleasure room, slapped its door-opener, and darted inside.

The room was as depressing as the rest of the living quarters of the Ice Master's underlings, with the stone-hard floor on which the Guards were conditioned to take their pleasure. There were two Girls on the floor, one of them Lora herself, and four Guards, three standing (one frozen in the act of unbuckling his trunks) and one lying flat on the floor, where the conditioning had dropped him just as he rolled off Lora. Blade stepped into the room, hauled the two Girls out into the corridor by their feet (no time to be chivalrous or elegant now), then went back into the room, sword ready. As he did so, the lights began flashing in the same pattern that had frozen the guards down below and the same undulating whine filled the air. Blade pulled himself to a stop, spun around, and plunged out the door, just as the main elevator opened its door to disgorge four of the Heart guards, with swords drawn.

The Girls were already staggering to their feet and tottering away down the corridor. Blade yelled at the top of his lungs, «In there!» and the Heart guards stopped in their tracks, looked at him, then at one another. and followed his pointing finger-straight into the Pleasure room. They charged the four newly un-frozen guards and hacked one of them to the floor before he could raise his weapons. Two others jumped back into a corner and drew sword and truncheon, while the one on the floor rolled aside from under the stamping feet of the newcomers, caught one of them by the belt, and slammed him down on the floor. The man was struggling to rise when Blade sprang back into the room and drove his sword point-first through both men at once. They jerked wildly, gurgled, and lay still.

Simultaneously one of the men in the corner and one of the attackers got blows home on each other, toppled to the floor, and reached out for each other with clawing hands. Blade stepped over them as they rolled in their blood on the floor, struggling to get a grip on each other's throat, thrashing and growling like animals. He reached the two surviving attackers just as one of them went down from a belly-slash by the remaining man in the corner, then thrust the remaining attacker through from behind. The corner survivor had just enough time to raise a bloodsmeared face to stare at Blade with the begi

Then Blade was on the move again, as fast as his now flagging muscles would push him along. He dashed to the secondary elevator, leaped in, pushed the button for his home level, and sagged to the floor to savor a moment's rest and relief. Now he had to get back to his chamber undetected, and wash the blood and sweat off himself before the Ice Master thought to check the chamber. If the Ice Master found it empty, he would find it hard not to draw the right conclusion. And if he drew that conclusion, Blade had no illusions that his value as an ally would make the Ice Master spare him. In fact, it would become absolutely vital for the Ice Master to get rid of Blade, to prove to the Menel his continued good faith and i

The door opened and Blade slipped out into the corridor, flattening himself against the wall at every sound. He had more than a hundred feet to go, the longest hundred feet he had ever traveled in his life. He had spent less time and effort on more than one occasion crossing a frontier strip sown with mines and guarded by barbed wire, searchlights, and machine gun nests. Halfway along he found a small waste chute, and took the chance to strip off the bloodsmeared trunks and boots and send them on their way down to destruction. But he held on to the sword-held on to it so tightly that his knuckles were paste-white by the time he finally slipped unseen and unmolested into his room. The sword went down the chute there in an instant, and in another instant he was squatting in the tub, not minding the coolness of the water this time as it flowed over him, washing away the blood, the sweat, and at least some of the strain.

He had done the first of the necessary things. He had given the Menel cause to distrust the Ice Master; he had given the guards occasion to distrust each other. Now he would have to wait and see if that distrust he had sown would lead the Ice Master to give him the opportunity to move to the next step.

Chapter 18

The Ice Master came to Blade the neat morning in such a state of nerves that before he said a word Blade knew that his plans were working. The other man could not sit, could not stand, could not do anything for more than a minute at a time except talk, and not always coherently. He presented the spectacle of a man watching twenty years' cherished dreams fall apart around him, as well as being in danger of his own life, a spectacle that in this case Blade was entirely happy to see.

The Ice Master's eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep and the lines of his face seemed to have been chiseled inches deeper into the flesh. His hair was unkempt; he kept plucking at his beard; Blade would not in fact have sworn that both beard and hair didn't show a good deal more white and gray than the last time he had seen the man. And all the confidence and arrogance was gone from his voice. In its place was an almost pleading note, so strong that Blade would have felt qualms about his plans if they had been laid against a person less unpleasant and dangerous than the Ice Master.