The Torian Pearls

«Turn around, Blade, and look in the mirror.»

Blade turned around. He saw Kayarna standing beside him in a long red skirt and jeweled sandals, her hair piled high and caught up with a gold circlet, the nipples of her bare breasts lightly rouged. Then he saw himself in the bronze mirror that hung on the wall.

On his head rose a conical crown a foot high, the frame white gold but with the gold almost completely invisible under layer after layer of black pearls. There were hundreds of them, perhaps more than a thousand, all perfect, all carefully graded and carefully placed. The large ones at the base of the crown were the size of grapes, the ones at the very top were hardly larger than grains of sand. Blade moved his head slightly, and the light played across the black surface of pearls.

It was like wearing a crown of luminous darkness.

«You are already the king of my lovers,» said Kayarna with a smile, ru

«You flatter me,» said Blade. «I can hardly refuse. Yet what becomes of the Kargoi now?»

«You yourself have said that the man Paor is worthy to be High Baudz. Indeed he seems wise and brave. So let him be chosen to rule the Kargoi, and they will have no further need of you.»

It struck Blade that he might have just been given the perfect opportunity to raise the question of the Hauri and of Loyas safety and position. Before he could say a word, Kayarna smiled again.

«To the King-By-Marriage, all but the queen must kneel. Even she may kneel if she chooses.»

In a single flowing motion Kayarna knelt on the floor before Blade. With one hand she raised his kilt, with the other she drew aside the loinguard under it. Her mouth with its warm, superbly skilled, mobile lips closed on Blade's manhood.

He stood like a rock as she stroked and licked and sucked, trying to keep his back straight and his breathing even. It was a game they played sometimes, seeing how long and how silently each could endure the other's best and most skilled efforts to arouse. It was a delightful game, one in which there was never a loser-only wi

Blade's silence drove Kayarna to put her hands to work along with her lips. Blade clenched both his teeth and his fists and kept quiet. But his back was begi

Blade groaned out loud. As if the groan was a signal, pain roared in his head like the winds of a hurricane sweeping in off the sea. His ears were filled with thunder and before his eyes the world vanished in a red fog of pain. Lord Leighton's computer was gripping his brain, and he was on his way back to Home Dimension.

Wild thoughts of Loya, of the Menel diary, of a dozen other things left undone or unfinished flashed through his mind. He groaned again, as much in frustration as in pain or pleasure. Kayarna heard that groan and was certain that Blade's resistance was about to crumble. Her lips closed on him again.

Then there was nothing for Blade but the pain in his head and the other pain in his groin that was also flaming ecstasy. The world faded around him, but before it did, Kayarna's lips had done their work. As the sensation of those lips on him faded, Blade's body jerked and twisted in a shuddering climax. It jerked and twisted again as the pain spread from his head downward into every nerve fiber. Then it seemed to lie still and quiet, as darkness swallowed him up and he fell down into it, away from Kayarna, away from Tor, away into infinity.

Chapter 27

«So, Richard,» said J. «How do you feel about this last trip?»

Soon after he'd started sending out agents instead of going out himself, J had discovered the need for something more than the formal debriefing. Of course that was still necessary and always would be. But if after that debriefing you sat down with the man over some good whiskey and talked things over less formally-well, it was sometimes surprising what came out.

Blade sighed. «Frankly, it was somewhat like the first time I ran into the Menel. I have the feeling I was snatched back just about the time the real work was about to begin. Not only in dealing with the Menel, but in so much else. There's Loya and our child, there's Paor, there's ….» He broke off and shrugged. «I could go on for half an hour, but I think you get the idea.»

«I do,» said J. «But if we always gave you time to finish everything you've started, you'd be spending ten years in each Dimension.»

Blade laughed. «That's perfectly true. I never was one for leaving business unfinished, even as a boy.» He sipped his whiskey in silence for a moment. «I suppose I did get through everything that absolutely had to be done. I also left practically everybody alive and healthy when I came home. That's a pleasant change.»

«Everybody, except the Vodi,» put in J.

«True. But I don't think the Vodi are going to be on my conscience. Nor the Menel, either.»

«Lord Leighton is having fits over the Menel, you realize. If he had a soul, I think he'd sell it to have the Menel diary in his hands. He's been saying that we might learn the true relationship of Dimension and space if we could only translate that diary.»

«I know,» said Blade. «I was wondering myself what the Menel being in that Dimension meant. Did they have interdimensional travel? Or were the Torians and the Kargoi somehow in-something-that was physically the same as the Dimension of the Ice Dragons. I stopped wondering about it, after a while. I had too many other things on my mind, and I knew Lord Leighton could do a better job of puzzling it all out anyway.

«One point where I have done more thinking is on what the Menel were really after. I wondered if they could seriously hope to conquer the Dimension with their implanted animals. I couldn't see how that was possible, so I wondered if the Menel were a pack of fools.

«I don't think they are. I now think that what they probably hoped to do was flood a particular area with implanted animals. That could make the area uninhabitable, by killing or frightening away all the 'primitive' inhabitants. The humans might even come to call the area accursed. Then the Menel could move from their island to the mainland and settle in. They would be nearly as safe from premature human interference as they'd been on the island. But they would have more room and more resources of metal and everything else. In a generation or two, they would have the strength and the weapons for a full scale war of conquest.

«They didn't reckon on ru

«Perhaps,» said J. «But I don't think having you to lead them-ah, hindered them in any way.»

Blade flushed. «I suppose not. In any case, the Menel were beaten off, and now their secret is out. Also, they will face a united human race in at least part of the world. That's something I'm sure they won't be expecting from a 'primitive' race. Who knows? In a generation or two they may be ready to give up the struggle. I'd give a good deal to be on hand when that happens.» There was a distant look in Blade's eyes, one that J would have called dreamy in any man less practical and tough-minded. «If some human could approach the Menel as an equal, who knows…? I wondered about that, too.»

«You'd have Lord Leighton's support in going back, that's for certain,» said J. «But we still haven't got a controlled-return process reliable enough to risk you. Even if we did, you might land back in the same Dimension, but twenty-five years in its past or three hundred years in its future.»