Ice Dragon

Chapter 16

The next morning, and for three more mornings after that, he was awakened by the arrival of a Girl sent to bring him Pleasure. And with each one he followed the same pattern he had used with Lora, although with none of them did he have as much trouble establishing trust and confidence. Lora had been spreading the word. He hoped once more that she had not been spreading it too widely.

Before retiring that first night, he had made as thorough a search of the chamber as possible for any sort of bugging, and found nothing visible, let alone obvious. He was not yet particularly confident that the room was safe, of course, because any number of disguises were possible. He could not be sure of penetrating all of them, and could only penetrate a reasonable number by means of a search so thorough and obvious that it would tell the Ice Master exactly what he was looking for. He did not want to give the Ice Master the impression of too much distrust-just enough so that he would continue to keep Leyndt alive as a hoped-for hold over Blade.

And she was a hold over Blade. He was certainly unwilling to make any move that might endanger her-unless, he added as a mental reservation, the move stood a good chance of taking out the Ice Master and the Menel together. Even then, he knew that he might very easily balk at the thought of her being pounded to death beneath the lunging bodies of the guards or dissolved inch by inch by the solvents used in preparing the protein compounds for the Menel. He did not want her harmed, and had no objection to letting the Ice Master know it.

In fact, his concern for Leyndt brought him an unexpected dividend. In the course of entirely sincere inquiries about where she was and how she was, he was able to find out a tremendous amount about the workings of the Ice Master's stronghold. None of them had seen Leyndt, it turned out, but in the process of telling Blade so they told him so much else that was useful that he was almost consoled for the lack of information about the doctor.

The black building in the center of the ice grid was the top of the stronghold, which was about eight hundred feet from top to bottom and had a cross section, as he guessed, about five hundred by four hundred. His own chamber was on the same level as the Ice Master's, a little less than two-thirds of the way up. The Ice Master's chambers covered about half of the whole level, and were divided into at least seven large rooms, all luxuriously furnished. In front there was another large room where the guards who protected the Ice Master slept.

There were many other guards, of course-to guard the slaves, to guard the Girls (the ones who guarded the Girls were Cut-Off Ones-eunuchs), to guard the rooms where the Ice Master worked (his laboratories, no doubt). And to guard the Heart. The Heart? What was that?

The Girls all shuddered at the mention of it, but Blade was able to bring all of them around eventually, and build up a vague but tantalizing picture. Girls called it the Heart because it made a steady throbbing noise like a huge heart (and Blade nodded, with a flash of memory back to his first day in the chamber). They didn't know what it looked like, but they knew that it must be just above the level of the slave quarters, because the sound was loudest there. No Girl had dared to approach it since two who tried were caught by the guards-Blade had the impression that these guards were a particularly nasty lot even by the standards of the Ice Master-and forced to give Unlimited Pleasure until they died. It was a very terrible thing, and must be dangerous, because there were always many, many guards around it.

At this point Blade realized he had pulled something vitally important out of his questioning of the Girls. He would have laid long odds on the Heart being the main power source for the Ice Master's stronghold, or something equally important. To sabotage that… But he had no equipment. And besides, to destroy the Ice Master's stronghold alone would be valueless if he could do nothing against the Menel in their underground settlements. No, he would have to defer action at least until he had found out where the Menel were, where Leyndt was, and also how to return to the surface and escape to the south-unless the situation turned out to absolutely demand a suicide mission.

So he waited, asked the Girls questions, and on the fifth day was rescued by the Ice Master himself. At least that was the way Blade put it to himself. No doubt the Ice Master felt that he was merely giving his new ally necessary information and teaching him necessary skills to make him as useful as possible in the coming campaign against the Menel. Over the next ten days this teaching kept Blade very busy indeed.

The Ice Master took him from top to bottom of the stronghold, telling Blade in exhaustive detail about some things, hinting at others, and giving Blade important clues by leaving some things entirely unexplained or even unshown. Among the last was the Heart. They passed it on the way down to the slave quarters, and it was as the Girls said-a deep continuous throbbing coming from somewhere close beyond a chamber filled with the worst thugs Blade had seen in the whole stronghold. Stairs led from it down to a chamber at the level of the slave quarters.

The slave quarters were as sterile as an operating room, as silent as a morgue, and all the more terrifying for lacking the smells and sounds that would at least have suggested that the hundreds of vague-eyed figures that lay on pallets, stood in lines, or wandered about under the eyes of the guards were alive and human. And in one corner of the chamber into which the stairs from the Heart led, a corner which Blade explored for a few minutes while the Ice Master was off supervising some business of the slaves, was another item the Ice Master very carefully passed by.

It was a circular shaft, about thirty feet in diameter, plunging straight down and brightly lit all the way, until it vanished into what seemed like the bowels of the planet. Blade knew, however, that this must be the passage down to the underground dwellings of the Menel. He shoved a small piece of debris over the edge of the shaft and watched it float down as though it were a piece of dandelion fluff. Gravity in the shaft was controlled; if any enemy entered the shaft, no doubt those at the bottom simply cut off the gravity control and let the enemy plunge headlong down to the bottom, to smash himself to a pulp. Blade noticed as he turned back to rejoin the Ice Master a faint moldy odor clinging to the edge of the shaft, and scratch marks on some of the stones around the mouth many feet long.

That was as much as he was able to see and file away in his mind before the Ice Master called him back and they returned to the upper levels of the stronghold. The Ice Master showed him those with the same selective thoroughness as before, going on until by the time the tour was over Blade was almost too tired to appreciate and question the Girl who came to his chamber that night.

But there was even more to come, and Blade absorbed it all, keeping his eagerness veiled behind a mask of disinterest, watching the Ice Master working industriously to bring the day of his own destruction rapidly closer. The Ice Master explained the conditioning he used on the guards and slaves, the memory-erasure of the Girls, the training of the Dragon Masters (who were not allowed in the stronghold). He showed Blade the enormous culture vats where the Ice Dragons were cloned, the workshops where the Dragon Masters' suits and control wands and catcher-webs were made. He did not show Blade where any of the key systems of the stronghold-power, light, water, air circulation-were controlled, but Blade had not expected that, and in the course of the tours saw enough to permit him to draw his own conclusions. And also to be staggered by the technological treasure-trove here. If he had not been limited in what he could bring back to Home Dimension to what he could carry in his hands (or happened to be carrying in his hands) when the computer snatched him back, he could have brought back enough advanced knowledge to push England a century forward at a single leap.

But that was an opportunity unlikely to arise. He could at least bring back the knowledge that gravity control and the like were possible, which might encourage Home Dimension research enough to cut decades off the time of developing it. And the monumental knowledge that somewhere in some universe there existed another intelligent race! Meanwhile, he had plenty of problems to face here as he sought ways and means of dealing with the Ice Master and the Menel.

The Ice Master himself provided Blade with what might be a satisfactory solution to a problem that had been occupying a good part of Blade's attention ever since he began thinking out ways of destroying the stronghold. What was he to do about the slaves and Girls? They were innocent bystanders, at least five hundred strong, and to destroy or cripple the stronghold meant dooming them to a death perhaps swift, perhaps slow, but in any case certain. Blade knew he would not hold back even if the deaths of these people were the price for freeing this world of the Ice Master and meeting the threat of the Menel, but he did not like the prospect. But from the day the Ice Master took him up to the surface and showed him the huge fliers used to carry the Ice Dragons to their bases in the south and the prisoners north, Blade knew that these might be a solution to his problem. The machines were enormous, larger than any Home Dimension transport plane he had ever seen, easily capable of carrying five hundred or more people. He never came closer to letting his elation show as when the Ice Master showed him how to operate the huge machines. He found out that day that they could rise ten miles into the air and race along with a full load at twice or three times the speed of a Graduk Flier. One of them could easily carry away all the slaves and Girls-or bring in the force Blade knew he would need to take the stronghold.

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.