Ice Dragon

Chapter 13

Were the aliens humanoid? Blade asked himself for a moment. The figure stepping toward them as calmly as though it were a host greeting guests arriving at a party was nearly as tall as Blade, in its insulated clothing even wider, and carried-Blade had to look twice before he could believe it-a sword slung at its belt. The face that looked out of the parka hood seemed completely human as far as Blade could tell. A huge hooked nose jutted, wide-set brown eyes gleamed over a bushy pepper-and-salt beard.

Blade's staring at the man was interrupted by a cry of pain from Pnarr. He spun around to see the pilot fling his beamer away, smoke pouring from the charge housing. A moment later, Blade saw that his own beamer was smoking also, and both he and Leyndt did the same. And a moment after that, all three beamers exploded with sharp cracks and sprays of sparks, leaving small blackened half-melted patches on the ice.

The Ice Master stood looking at the spectacle, his eyes seeming to show amusement, while behind him eight more men filed out onto the ice and took up positions on either side of him. They were wearing orange parkas trimmed with black fur, black boots and wide black belts. Each of them carried a seven-foot spear, with a sword slung on one side of his belt and a long heavy club like a policeman's truncheon on the other. They did not look very intelligent, but they carried themselves like men who at least knew what to do with the weapons they carried. Then the Ice Master took another step forward, spread out his hands in a gesture doubtless meant to be welcoming, and spoke.

«You are Blade and Leyndt, are you not? I have been hoping you would come.» He turned to look at Pnarr. «Who is that?»

Blade did not like the man's tone, but answered him anyway. «The pilot of our flier, Captain Pn-«

«Never mind, he is not important,» said the Ice Master. He waved a hand at two of the guards. «Take him below and confine him for conditioning. He looks like a good physical specimen.» The two guards broke out of their formation and advanced on Pnarr, their spears held in one hand and truncheons in the other.

It happened so fast that Blade wasted crucial seconds in staring. But Pnarr, seeing the men coming at him, was faster. He sidestepped the first lunging truncheon blow at his head, reached into a boot top, whipped out a knife, and darted under the second lunge. The guard had barely time to spring back and away from the knife point as it swept up toward his heart and deflect it with a wild sweep of the truncheon. The guard took two steps backward, enough to bring him within reach of Blade, whose arms lunged out and clamped around the man's neck, jerking him backward off his feet so violently that Blade heard the neck snap. Pnarr turned to face the other guard, who had pulled out his sword. It was a single-handed weapon, with a slightly curved single-edged blade and a sharp point. Blade stepped forward, drawing his own knife from his belt, to give the guard two opponents, when a scream from Leyndt stopped him dead in his tracks.

Two of the other guards had leaped forward and grabbed her by the arms, dragging her to her knees. Another stood over her, sword drawn and its point at her throat. The Ice Master took another step forward and said quietly, «If this nonsense continues, she dies.» Blade froze, the knife still raised in his hand, and opened his mouth to shout to Pnarr. But Pnarr had heard also; he stepped back and dropped his knife. As it tinkled on the ice, the first guard, too blind with battle lust to hear or see anything but his immediate opponent, stepped forward and swung his sword. There was a whush as it sliced through the air, a chunk as it sliced through Pnarr's neck, and a thump as the severed head sailed through the air and fell to the ice. The body remained erect for a split second, blood spouting from the neck, then crumpled.

The guard who had swung stood staring down at the body, his eyes still glazed, and in that moment the Ice Master gestured sharply at two of the other guards. Swords drawn, they rushed at him; he made no effort to defend himself as their blades whistled through the air and sank into his body. Still without speaking, still glassy-eyed, he sank to the ice, kicked, and was still.

The Ice Master turned to Blade. «You will come with me.» It was an order, not a request. One of the guards plucked the knife out of Blade's hand; two others bound his arms behind his back and took up positions on either side of him. The remaining four guards picked up the two bodies and carried them in through the door. The Ice Master gestured sharply with a gloved thumb, and Blade's guards prodded him into movement. The Ice Master himself brought up the rear, one hand firmly clutching Leyndt's arm.

As the door slid shut behind them with a boom and a thump, lights flashed on in a blue-white glare that almost dazzled Blade. Before his eyes had recovered, he felt the floor under him starting to sink downward. In a moment the walls of a square shaft twenty feet on a side were flowing upward past him.

The walls of the shaft and the slab of flooring that had suddenly become a downward-bound elevator seemed to be made of the same homogeneous dead-black material, so dead and so black and so without variation that looking at it was like looking into a bottomless, lightless well. There was no sound of machinery as they sank, no variation in the speed of the elevator, only a silent and steady downward progress for what Blade estimated to be about three hundred feet.

The elevator stopped sinking, and a moment after that vertical walls sank into slots in the floor on all four sides, and they were in the middle of a large circular chamber through whose ceiling they had dropped. The chamber was about a hundred feet in diameter, floored and walled in pastel reds and yellows, and unfurnished, though not uninhabited. Decidedly not uninhabited.

More guards, for one thing, some of them walking beats around the square platform on which the slab had landed, others standing guard at four large arches that led off into corridors, winding off into the distance at the four compass points. The guards wore only close-fitting silver shorts like swimming trunks, black boots, and the same three weapons as the guards accompanying Blade and Leyndt.

There were others who were obviously slaves. Some of them were male, dressed only in the silver trunks, with heavy brass-colored metal rings clamped around their left ankles. Their heads, unlike those of the guards, were shaved, and their skulls apparently varnished or waxed with something that glistened a sullen orange under the yellowish lights of the chamber.

Others of the slaves were female, also dressed only in trunks, bare-footed, their hair uniformly worn in a ponytail that sometimes reached down to the small of their backs. The male slaves, Blade noted, shuffled about as though drugged, with careful plodding steps and a listless air, while the women moved more naturally, yet not without apprehension in the glances they continuously threw about the chamber.

He had no time for speculation on the reasons for this difference or on anything else, because the Ice Master sprang down from the platform and barked an order. Instantly the little group broke up, the four guards carrying the two bodies disappearing down one corridor, the two with Blade leading him off to a second, and four more guards springing up onto the slab, lifting Leyndt off her feet, and departing down still a third passage at a run. Leyndt was silent, either too numbed by the events of the last half-hour to resist, or consciously deciding that it would be futile to do so.

Blade himself, after seeing what Pnarr's resistance had produced, was very much determined to stay calm, stay alive, and carry out his mission of finding out as much as possible about the Ice Master and his allies. He took it for granted now that the aliens existed; even if so much of what he had seen had not been from a technology far beyond that of the Graduki, the sheer size of the base would have been far beyond any local ability to establish here in the polar wastes.

So he let his guards lead him down the corridor, into a smaller one that branched off to the right, and to the far end of that one. A door showed in a recess in the wall; one of the guards slapped a white disc on the wall beside the door, and it slid open. The two guards cut Blade's bonds and pushed him forward. He staggered forward into the room, almost falling to his knees, as the door whispered shut behind him.

If the room was a cell, the Ice Master obviously believed in treating at least some of his prisoners well. The room was nearly forty feet across and twice as high as Blade. Walls and ceiling were a checkerboard of pastel colors, blues and greens predominating, while underfoot spread a thick soft dark maroon rug. Rug? Blade reached down and felt the fibers curling around his toes. They felt more like the tendrils of some sort of plant. A living rug-more biological engineering? Possibly. He resumed his examination of the room.

One corner was fitted out as a living area-a platform for sleeping, covered with cushions and quilts, other cushions for sitting on, a row of shelves, a folding table. Another corner was fitted out as a bath, with a tall golden-mesh screen that presumably hid a toilet, a similarly gilded basin, and an enormous sunken tub not much smaller than a swimming pool. The rest of the room was empty. It would on the whole have made the most sybaritic London jetsetter run to his interior decorator, insisting that it be duplicated at all costs.

He went over to the wall and laid his hand against it. He felt a gentle warmth radiating from it, instead of the chill that he had unconsciously expected, since he knew he must be well down inside the ice or the chill rock below it, and more than the warmth-a gentle throbbing like the slow beating of an incredibly large and distant heart. He put his ear against the wall, trying to hear the sound more clearly and learn something about the nature of the source. He still had his ear against the wall when the door slid open and the Ice Master walked in.

He had taken off his surface clothing and wore a dark red coverall that was stretched tight over his broad chest and around his thick limbs. His feet and head were bare, and he wore on one side of his belt one of the curved swords and on the other side a small black box that looked like a pocket calculator or a radio. His head was almost entirely bald, except for a fringe of gray-flecked brown hair ending just above his ears, and all in all he looked almost more like the chief of a tribe of savages than Nilando did. Blade smiled at the thought.

The Ice Master returned the smile with a note of smugness that did nothing to put Blade at his ease. Then he took a few steps into the room and sat down on the floor. Blade noticed the Ice Master carefully kept between him and the door. Deciding that nothing was to be gained by remaining standing, he also sat down, but at a safe distance. He was not going to give the Ice Master the impression of any trust or friendliness-not now at any rate.

The Ice Master put both large hands on his knees and inclined his head in a ceremoniously slow nod. Then he spoke. His voice was higher-pitched than Blade would have naturally associated with such a large man, and his words came out slowly, calmly, and with the confidence of a man who knows he is in command of the situation and will remain that way.

«I was hoping you would make the flight north. You and Doctor Leyndt. The pilot was not so valuable, but it would have been interesting to see how he reacted to the conditioning. Although I have usually had to destroy violent ones like that in the past. I would not have destroyed the guard, except that he acted beyond his orders. That showed his conditioning was faulty. Even if I were willing to overlook it, the Menel would not be. They are very concerned about their own safety, the Menel are. But perhaps when one lives two thousand years, to be cut off at the age of, let us say, five hundred means a great loss. I do not know.»

Blade recognized the ploy. The Ice Master was hoping to establish his dominance by talking of things about which Blade knew nothing, but which were certain to arouse his interest. Having aroused that interest, he could increase the domination by throwing Blade bits of explanation, like throwing bones to a yelping dog. It was a comparatively basic interrogation technique, and for a moment Blade felt almost disappointed. Was this the best the fabled Ice Master, ruler of the snowy wastes, creator (or at least manager) of the Ice Dragons, and presumed ally of beings from beyond space (no doubt these were the Menel) could manage? Then he hastily reined in his complacency. The Ice Master was probably just exploring. It would be unwise to assume there was nothing more in his arsenal.

He was also going on. «-much impressed by the abilities you showed, both physical and mental. Of course I had no way of confirming the reports I received, but I hoped that if you were all they said you were, you would do what you have just done.» After this cryptic remark, he paused briefly, looking at Blade with a stare that seemed to want to strip him not only of all his clothing but of all his psychological barriers and expose the nakedness of his soul as well as of his body. Blade again noted the clumsiness, but again resisted any impulse to dismiss the man completely. Clumsy interrogation was often one of the most subtle techniques of a highly skilled interrogator, to get a subject feeling complacent, certain he had the measure of the man quizzing him.

«I am glad Doctor Leyndt came along. I had planned to make her one of the Girls (the way he said the word emphasized the capital letter) but now I see you care for her. At least enough to wish not to see her killed. Or thrown to the male slaves when they are given Pleasure Days. Or converted, as your pilot and the dead guard will be, into nutrient cultures for the Menel. This can be done while the subject is still alive-at least for a few hours. It appears to be quite painful.»

Blade made no attempt to control the disgust be was beginning to feel for this hulking, arrogant, and now sadistic brute. No, perhaps that was not quite right-there was nothing about the Ice Master yet revealed to suggest any sort of stupidity. In fact, there was too much heard and seen suggesting the reverse. Although he had yet to sort out what the Ice Master had done himself, what he had done with the help of the Menel, and what the Menel had done by themselves perhaps centuries before the Ice Master had even been born. He took a deep breath to calm himself and went on listening.

«Obviously I could condition you thoroughly enough to make someone of even your demonstrated strength and intelligence thoroughly docile. But that would destroy many of the same qualities that made me so-interested-in getting you into my hands.» Blade noted the barely concealed hesitation over the choice of words, suggesting a barely averted slip. So he possessed qualities of special interest to the Ice Master. That was indeed «interesting,» at least.

«You may have as many of the Girls as you wish, of course, and any extra furnishings you need can be brought in-«as the Ice Master gestured expansively around the apartment like a barkeeper welcoming a particularly good customer. «I would rather not have to even hurt Leyndt in order to influence you. She appears to be worth more than most women. You can easily see that the guards are numerous and well-armed, and you have already seen what the Pi-field that envelops my stronghold will do to more advanced weapons that might give one man a chance against superior numbers.» Blade nodded in what he hoped would come across as a gesture of boredom rather than of agreement. The Ice Master was leading up to something, although Blade found it hard to believe that anything much short of announcing the Day of Judgment justified this long a build-up.

He decided to speak. Trying to balance his voice between boredom, contempt, and stubbornness, concealing the curiosity and the disgust, he said shortly, «Well and good. So you're going to treat me like a prize laboratory specimen. Is that what you have in mind for me?»

The Ice Master managed to look shocked or at least give a fairly good imitation of it. «You are certainly not a specimen. You are an ally. You are my ally against the Menel.»