The Golden Steed

Blade threw back his head and laughed, wildly and triumphantly. «The Pendari are in your rear, Ornilan! How will you get your army clear now? How, I ask you?» He caught himself as he realized there was an almost hysterical note in his voice. Strain and fatigue were catching up with him.

Ornilan made no reply. Hands still over his wound but blood seeping between them, he dug his spurs into his horse. It cantered away and was lost in the cloud of dust spreading across the field as the main army of Pendar went into the attack.

Whether the Lanyri ever learned that their general was dying Blade himself never knew. Certainly they showed no loss of spirit or lack of courage as they stood and fought off one Pendari charge after another. But soon their spears were almost gone, and their arms too weary to throw those that remained-or to hold their shields up, for that matter. Pendari arrows began to find targets, and the Lanyri ranks began to thin. All through the long afternoon of heat and dust they thi

In the gray light of that dawn Blade rode back to Vilesh with Princess Harima. He had his second wind now, or perhaps his third. He talked as they rode along side by side.

«It was odd. The whole point of my being out there was to bait the trap for the Rojags. But they rode straight into it anyway, simply because we had charged them. I'm not sure if more than a handful of them even recognized me. And as for General Ornilan…» He shrugged.

«Well, it doesn't matter whether or not it was necessary this time. You certainly won't have to do it again,» said Harima. She went on, with a note of mock severity in her voice. «Do you think I'd let you, in any case? I don't want to be the Pendarnoth's widow, not for a good many years at least.»

«Widow?»

«Didn't Nefus tell you? Oh, there are times when I want to slap that brother of mine, even if he is a king! I went to him the night before the battle and asked him if I could have you to husband. He consented. He will a

Blade was about to ask, «What banquet?» But then pain stabbed into his head, pulsing savagely for a moment, then fading. The computer was tugging at his brain, seeking him out to snatch him back to Home Dimension. Its grip hadn't tightened on this first lunge, but it would be back. The grip would tighten, and Harima and the battlefield and all of Pendar would sink away into his memories.

As the pain faded and his vision cleared, he saw a familiar face staring up at him from the ground almost at the feet of the Golden Steed, a face white and drained of blood by a gaping wound in the neck. General Ornilan. He was naked-the scavengers had already been at work. Blade beckoned to one of the guardsmen riding with them and pointed down at the body.

«This man is to be taken to Vilesh and buried with honor. He was a brave opponent.» The guardsmen looked for a moment as though he wanted to argue, but the hardening of Blade's face kept the man's mouth shut. He nodded and dropped back to pass the word on to his comrades. Blade urged the Golden Steed forward again.

As he did so, the pain struck a second time. After the first terrible pulsing, he knew that this time the computer's grip was going to tighten. The outside world faded swiftly into darkness, with none of the effects he was used to. Oddly, though, he still had the sensation of gripping the Golden Steed tightly between his legs and holding the reins tightly in his hands.

The darkness-formless, empty, chill-swirled about him until all sense of time and space left him. Then it began to fade. Slowly at first, then suddenly it was torn apart by a glaring burst of light. The light dazzled Blade. He closed his eyes, but he could still feel the Golden Steed under him.

Then a voice was sounding in his ear. It was unmistakably Lord Leighton's voice, loud and almost shrill with surprise and indignation. And just as unmistakably Lord Leighton was shouting, «Get that horse out of here!»

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Once again Richard Blade was riding the Golden Steed. But instead of the yellow-brown plains of Pendar, the rolling green hills of Surrey stretched out around him. And instead of the white walls and gilded roofs of Vilesh, red brick cottages lurked among the trees, sending curls of blue smoke up from their chimneys into the dawn sky. It was a clear bright crisp dawn, too, something rare for the English winter. The Golden Steed's hoofs left a distinct trail across the white frost on the brownish grass underfoot.

Blade felt very much at peace with the world, for it had been a good trip into the Dimension of the Pendari. Its incredible wealth of gold had made the prime minister sit up and take notice with a vengeance. Blade hoped, however, that if large-scale teleportation was ever perfected to the point where Pendari gold could be brought to England by the ton, it would be traded for. Otherwise England would be acting as badly as the Lanyri, and that was a possibility Blade did not like.

Certainly Lord Leighton felt that teleportation was a good deal closer than it had ever been before. The return of the Golden Steed had been proof of that. Of course, there had been rather a lively time getting the horse out of the underground complex. It had nearly panicked on first emerging, and only Blade's best efforts had kept it from ru

Of course all the electronically guarded doorways had never been intended to let horses through, so the only way they could get the Golden Steed to the elevator was to disco

Finally they had managed to get the Golden Steed to the elevator. But «you can lead a horse to an elevator, but you can't make him get in.» Once more the Golden Steed had nearly panicked, and to calm it down, they had to shoot it full of tranquilizers. They called it a carefully regulated dose, but someone was evidently not careful enough. For two hours they had faced the problem of concealing a full-sized, semi-conscious horse on the grounds of the Tower of London. Finally a horse trailer from Scotland Yard's Mounted Section arrived, with a security-cleared veterinarian, and hauled the Golden Steed off to J's country estate. It was being stabled there now, rapidly eating its way through J's budget, and making J wonder if he could get some of the money back in stud fees, if nothing else. Blade wondered how Lord Leighton had managed to put the whole story of the Golden Steed into suitably detached scientific language. That would be an achievement sufficient to tax even Leighton's intellect, to say nothing of his command of scientific language.

Oh well, that wasn't his problem. What bothered Blade when he thought about it were those quixotic impulses that had continually struck him during the last battle in Pendar. Words like «honor» and «chivalry» had popped into his head repeatedly, unasked and unexpected. Admittedly the ideas weren't completely alien or ridiculous to him-public school and university had made that impossible. But if he were going to suddenly start thinking like a fifteenth-century French knight-one of the kind that had been slaughtered by the thousands at the Battle of Agincourt-he was courting trouble. He could easily wind up just as dead as those French knights if he overindulged in grand gestures.