"At least you are a man," said Cossa the Mong. "You give up your advantage and fight me on foot. No true Cath would have done that." Blade moved closer.

"You do not look like a Cath," said the Mong. "You are dark and you have a beard. What are you doing with those overcivilized fools? You should be with us, stranger.

With the Mongs! You even have the look of a Mong about you, though I have never seen one so huge."

The bow movement was so rapid that Blade could not follow it. There was a streak in the air, a keening tw.a.n.g. The arrow took Blade in the fleshy part of his left leg just above the knee. It was painful. Blade did not so much as glance down.

"One arrow, Cossa."

The Mong spat again and laughed wildly. "Who knows, Sir Blade? One may be enough - or it may be my time to follow the black sand to my destiny."

Ten feet separated them now. Cossa ran at Blade, at the same time releasing his last arrow straight at Blade's groin where the armor joined. Blade got his shield down just in time.

Cossa came in screaming. Blade dropped the shield, leaped sideways to avoid the first rush, and drew his sword. He held it in his left hand, the mace in the right, and moved in on the man.

The Mong rushed to meet him, his curved sword flaming in the brilliant sunlight. Blade fended the first blow with his own sword and swung the mace. Cossa ducked under the deadly iron ball and danced away.

Blade waited. He had seen how the captured Mongs died beneath the executioner's sword and he knew that Cossa would not run. The man had to die or win, as did Blade himself.

The Mong came in again, slashing furiously, so furiously that Blade had to fall back a few steps. He had no chance to swing the mace as he fended off the clanging blows. Sparks whirled and hissed and sweat ran into his eyes. For a moment it was cut and slash and parry and hack. Blade was on the defensive. Their swords locked and their faces were so close Blade could smell the Mong's sour breath.

Blade put a foot in the man's chest and kicked him away. Cossa nearly went sprawling, and Blade spun the mace and sprang forward for the kill. But the Mong kept his feet and, ducking under the blow, aimed a blow at Blade's head which he barely parried in time.

Cossa was gasping for breath now and Blade himself was tiring. The mace was beginning to feel twice its weight. Blade let it drop to his side and made a long lunge with his sword. The Mong danced away.

Blade recovered and stood his ground. He twirled the mace again. Cossa could hardly breathe now, yet he found wind to laugh and taunt.

"You are a giant, Sir Blade, but I have slain bigger men in the high lands where the snow apes live. Now!"

Cossa came in to the attack again, silent now. The curved sword hummed in the air. The Mong's flat, bearded face gleamed with sweat. Blade sensed that it was the man's last effort, that the Mong would gladly die if he could take Blade with him. As Cossa charged he plucked a short dagger from his belt with his left hand. If he could get close enough he could dagger Blade even as the bigger man was killing him.

Blade hurled the mace with all his force. It struck the Mong at the knees, a bone crushing blow, and the chain whipped around the shattered knees. Cossa went down with a strangled cry of pain and rage. Blade leaped forward.

Cossa, on his back, both legs broken, still tried to defend himself. He slashed up at Blade with his sword. Blade brushed it aside and put his own steel through the man's throat, just at the collarbone, a terrible downward thrust that carried through flesh and bone and arteries and embedded the point six inches in the earth.

The Mong screamed once, a sound drowned in the burble of gushing blood. He arched and clutched at the sword transfixing him and looked up at Blade with a baleful dying stare. He tried to speak but only blood came from his gaping mouth.

Blare whistled at the gray, which was cropping gra.s.s nearby. He was mindful of Queko's advice that, should he win, he must take every advantage of his triumph. As he swung into the saddle he glanced at the Mong lines. Closer than he had thought. He was less than a hundred yards from the throne where Khad Tambur sat, surrounded by his banners and his guard, glowering over the plain at his dead champion.

Blade coaxed the gray around. He had recovered his mace and sheathed his sword. There was no sign of overt hostility from the Mongs, only silence and dark looks. Perhaps Queko was right. The Mongs worshiped courage and prowess in battle. Force was the only thing they understood. There was a chance, if he displayed enough contempt, enough confidence and courage, that he could browbeat the Khad into keeping his bargain. Blade put the gray into an arrogant canter and headed straight for the Mong lines and the waiting Khad. As he went, he swung the mace around his head so the cruel jade spikes made a sparkling blur.

He prepared his speech. It had best be short, and he away in a hurry. No sense in pressing things too far. The words formed in his mind.

"Now, Khad Tambur, O Shaker of the Universe! I am victor. I demand my rightful spoils. I will have your sister, Sadda, as my captive. And you, and all your Mongs, had best be gone before another day or..."

In that moment, flushed with battle and victory, Richard Blade was an arrogant man. Too late, just a minisecond too late, he saw the trap. The big gray never saw it.

The rawhide cords had been cunningly laid in trenches and covered over. Tensioned sticks of bow wood awaited a releasing trigger. Somewhere in the crowd of sullen Mongs a man pulled a cord. The web of trip lines sprung into view.

The gray was caught at the knees and went down in a long plunging fall. It whinnied high in distress. Blade went over the gray's head, headlong and helpless, and even as he saw the rock and knew he would strike it, he saw again the grinning dwarf and heard the words: "Beware the ground, Sir Blade."

He had discarded his helmet. He sought to shield his head with his arm but the heavy mace enc.u.mbered him. His head struck the rock, and the plain and the silent Mongs vanished in a scarlet flash.

Chapter Seven.

Blade awoke in darkness. He was naked except for breeches. His wrists and ankles were weighted with heavy chains and manacles. His head pained him and above his right eye was a great ma.s.s of spongy congealed blood. There was a dull ache in his left leg where Cossa's arrow had taken him.

He lay staring at a ceiling he could not see. He was in a tent, for he could hear the slither of wind and sense the rippling of the thick feltlike material. A black tent. A Mong tent.

Richard Blade was not a man for self-recrimination. So he had played the fool and walked, or cantered, into the trap. Now to get himself out of it - if that were possible. If not - but he would face that when it came. He was still alive.

He tested his chains and knew he was not going to break them. He lay quiet again and stared into the darkness and listened to the sounds of the camp around him. He began to adjust and react, all his senses attuned now, and he realized that he was deep in the Mong encampment. He heard song and the complaint of harsh voices: yells, screams, children in uproar as they played at some savage game. Hors.e.m.e.n went thundering past not far away.

He was lying on something soft - soft but scratchy. Blade put his face to it. Woven horsehair.

There was movement near him and for a moment moonlight shafted into the tent. Then darkness again. Someone had entered the tent. Someone who stood there in the dark and breathed softly and watched him.

Blade sat up, his chains jangling. "Who is it?"

There was a scratching in the gloom, and a light flared. A twist of wick burning in oil in a handled bowl. The shadow behind the flame was grotesquely small. The dwarf.

Blade managed to summon a wry grin. "h.e.l.lo, little man. You see I did not heed your warning. Next time do not speak in riddles, I..."

A mistake. The dwarf moved close to him, one finger to his grinning mouth, a look of panic in the dark eyes. Blade hushed. He was a fool.

The dwarf put the lamp down and scuttled away into the shadows again. Blade heard the tent opening rustle. The dwarf came back and squatted a discreet distance from Blade. He spoke in a harsh whisper.

"No harm this time, Sir Blade, but guard your tongue. No more mention of that or I will share your fate and I would not like that. I come from Sadda, who trusts me as much as she trusts anyone, and I would keep it that way. I cannot help you, Sir Blade, even if I would. But you can help me, who did give you warning, by forgetting I ever gave it."

Blade nodded. "It is forgotten."

For a long minute the dwarf was silent as he studied Blade from head to toe. Blade returned the scrutiny.

Here was no warrior. The dwarf wore a little pointed cap with a bell on the peak. Around his neck was a small iron collar. Below that he wore a jerkin of leather, with yellow stripes, and tight-fitting leather breeches. On his tiny feet were shoes of some sort of skin, with the fur inward and the toes very long and curled up and held in place by stiffeners.

Blade got it then. A fool. The Khad's fool! But he had sounded like Sadda's man- He badly needed a friend. Blade whispered, "Does the Khad know you're here? Or his sister, the one called Sadda?"

The dwarf, without apparent effort, turned a backward flip and landed in exactly the same position. From the darkness behind Blade a mocking voice spoke. "No to the first, yes to the last. And who are you, Sir Blade, to question me? I am sent to question you.

For a moment Blade was startled. He had forgotten the dwarf was a ventriloquist. And better at it than Blade had known. The grinning mouth had not twitched a muscle.

"To question me? Who sent you to do that? What is your name, little man?"

The grin was fixed. "They call me Morpho. That is enough for you. And it was Sadda who sent me to look at you, to question you, and to report back to her."

Blade stretched his huge body and the chains jingled. He smiled at the dwarf. There was much here he did not understand. He sensed that beyond all this mystery there might be a chance for his life.

"Then look," said Blade, "and question. And take back a report that will keep me alive. I will reward you for it one day."

Morpho put a finger to his mouth and shook his head. Behind Blade the voice spoke again. "Not all fools dress like fools."

Blade accepted the rebuke. He waited.

The dwarf walked on his hands around the tent, always careful to stay out of Blade's reach. Even upside down the grin was there. The silence got on Blade's nerves.

"Must you always grin, little man? Always? This is not a time for grinning."

Morpho dropped to his feet and came back to squat. "I must always grin, Sir Blade. I am a fool, from a family of fools. When I was a baby the doctors cut my mouth - look near and you can see the scars - so that I must wear a fool's grin from birth to death."

The dwarf leaned closer in the smoking lamplight. Blade saw the faint scars at the corners of the grinning lips. He kept silent. The man would get on with it when he was ready.

Morpho put a finger alongside his nose in thought, frowned, then began to whisper.

"I am honest with you, Sir Blade. What else with a man who is so near to torture and death? You are not a Cath and you are not a Mong. Just what you are I do not know. Our spies behind the wall could not find out, other than you pleasured the Empress Mei greatly. It is said that you are an envoy from Pukka, come with great powers. This may be. It is strange all the same that the Emperor Mei Saka has disappeared and the Empress, instead of putting on the yellow cloth of mourning, welcomes you. You would speak, Sir Blade?"

He might as well carry the lie through, for what it was worth. Blade was thinking fast now, and he had heard that the Khad was a greedy man. He was grateful for all he had learned in his three weeks behind the wall.

"The Emperor Mei Saka is dead, eaten by carrion apes and his bones forgotten. It is true that I come from Pukka, sent as special envoy by the High Emperor of all the Caths, to replace the Low Emperor, Mei Saka, and find out why you Mongs cannot be defeated. They are very impatient in Pukka and do not understand why this fighting must go on year after year."

Morpho grinned and watched Blade with alert dark eyes in which there was no belief. But he nodded and said, "As you say it, Sir Blade. I will tell" Sadda all these things."

The dwarf's eyes roamed up and down Blade's powerful frame. "I will also tell her what she most wants to know - that you will make a magnificent slave in more ways than one. It may be that she will save you from the Khad yet."

Blade was getting out of his depth again. "How can Sadda save me, little man? Our spies reported that she was a prisoner and was to be bound and turned over to me if I won. How can Sadda do anything for me? Or for herself? There must be much hate between the Khad and she."

"Hate?" Morpho's head nodded vigorously. "There is. There was. There will be. Yet they are still brother and sister and, until one of them is dead, they must rule the Mongs together. Each has his faction and the spies are thicker than flies on pony dung. They quarrel constantly and makeup constantly. Each always on guard against the other. And now that you have lost, after having won and thrown the victory away, the Khad has released Sadda from her tent and they are friends again and tonight that will be celebrated. You will be judged and disposed of, Sir Blade. That is why I am here on Sadda's errand - to see if you are worth saving as a slave.

"She is subtle, is Sadda, and knows that for just now she has the. advantage over the Khad. He would have handed her over to the Caths, I think, if things had gone otherwise today. So he would have been rid of her and no real blame to him. But things did not go otherwise, because you are something of a arrogant fool, Sir Blade, if a brave one, and now the Khad must put a good face on it. Sadda knows this. She knows that if she asks him for something soon, before his temper changes, that she is likely to get it."

Blade nodded. "And she will ask him for me? As a slave?"

Morpho turned one of his amazing flips and stared at Blade, his mouth grotesque in the wavering light of the lamp.

"If you are fortunate she will, Sir Blade. If not you will die at dawn on the plain before the wall. Plans are made. All the Caths to be summoned to watch. A parley in which the Khad will ask once again for the giant cannon. Which, of course, the Caths will not part with. Not even for you."

Blade had to agree. They would not part with the great cannon. Lali would be distressed, but Lali would have to let him die on the plain.

"The Khad," said Morpho, watching Blade's face closely, "has planned a special death for you. Would you know of it?"

Blade shrugged. "Why not? Words do not hurt me." He was suddenly aware that this was some sort of test and had nothing to do with Sadda or the dwarf's errand. Morpho was trying to find out something for himself.

"You will be tied to a stake and your guts cut out," said Morpho. "Then you will be strangled. You see what a genius the Khad is?"

No mistaking the hate and scorn in those last words. Blade knew that if he had not found a friend he had at least found an enemy of the Khad. It was not much, yet more than he had had a few minutes before.

A vast shiny black face poked itself into the tent. Blade stared in surprise. He had not known there was anyone on guard outside.

The black wore a tall peaked turban and a colored sash wound about his loins. He waved a heavy sword at the dwarf in a peculiar motion. Morpho signed back and the black disappeared. Blade blinked and watched the tent entrance. Had he really seen it? Or had a genie swirled like dark smoke in and out of the tent?

Morpho saw his expression and chuckled. "Eunuchs. Sadda's men. The Khad gave leave that they might guard you, instead of his own men, which is a reason to believe that you may live a time yet, Sir Blade. But that will be as the black sands write it. And my time is up."

He turned a double back flip back toward the entrance. "I will do my best for you, Sir Blade. I promise nothing. But I will extol your virtues as a slave. You understand me, Sir Blade?"

Blade nodded sourly. "If what I have heard of Sadda is true I understand you. You mean bed slave?"

The mouth moved in the bad light. "That is what I mean. Now I go, after one last warning. Do not show fear. Be bold, but not too bold. I would have you live, Sir Blade."

The dwarf was gone.

Soon afterward they came for him. The blacks first, three of them with flaring torches, and he saw why Morpho had not feared their eavesdropping. They made throaty animal sounds. Their tongues had been torn out and he guessed they had also been deafened by the way they stared and motioned with the thick-bladed swords.

The larger of the blacks hauled Blade to his feet and examined his chains. They threw a twist of cloth at him and signed that he wrap it around him. His chains were enormously heavy and c.u.mbersome, and Blade had barely completed the task when the tent entrance parted and a warrior came in. He approached Blade and gave him a fierce stare.

"I am Rahstum," he announced proudly. "Chief Captain of all the Mongs and high servant to Khad Tambur, Scourge of the World and Shaker of the Universe. You are wanted in audience, stranger, by the Khad and his sister, the Most Magnificent Sadda. Are you ready, stranger?"

Blade did not doubt that he was of high rank. His leather armor was new and burnished to a high l.u.s.ter and there was a silver chain about his neck. From each of his shoulders dangled a horsetail. His high peaked cap was worked with silver. He was taller than any Mong Blade had seen before, and his eyes were a piercing light gray instead of the usual dark brown and did not have the Mong slant about them. They stared at Blade now, above a thick sprouting beard, with a mingle of curiosity and contempt.

It was time, Blade thought, to a.s.sert himself a bit. It could do no harm. He glared back at the splendid Captain.

"You will not call me stranger," he said coldly. "I am Sir Blade, come from Pukka, great city of all the Caths, and there will be a great ransom paid for me."

Blade plunged on. "You will treat me with respect, Captain..." He let more ice creep into his voice - "with the respect due my rank, or you will be sorry for it."

The gray eyes widened and for a moment there was doubt in them. Then white teeth flashed through the beard in a derisive smile. The man made a mocking little bow.

"I am sorry, Sir Blade. But I am also curious. I have roamed the world much and I have never before heard a t.i.tle such as this Sir. You would enlighten me, perhaps?" His tone was that of an intelligent and educated man, and Blade did not think he was a Mong.

With great dignity, considering that he was in chains and loin cloth, Blade explained: "Sir is a high rank in a great secret society in the south of Cath. Few have heard of it, but I am next to the High Emperor in rank. I am not a Cath, as you can see, and it is part of the society's mystery that I cannot tell any man who and what I am - except that I come from a far-off place beyond the edge of the world. Where the waters of life fall away in a great stream to the place of death. Thence I come. Thence I will return when the black sands have written it."

His voice was deep and bell toned. Blade was rather proud of himself. It was a nice bit of mumbo-jumbo.

It had no effect on the Captain, but the file of Mong soldiers behind him muttered and looked uneasy. The man called Rahstum laughed curtly and said, "Tell that to the Khad, Sir Blade. He may believe you."

He gestured to his men. "Bring him along, you stupid animals. And do not talk to him, nor let him talk to you.

He might cast a spell on you." He spun on his heel and stalked from the tent.

As he was conducted through the tent village, Blade kept his eyes and ears open. He was flanked on either side by the Mong guards and there was no hope of escape, though the great wall lay less than a mile away to the south. It was as tight a spot as he had ever been in, in any dimension, and what he saw was not encouraging.

They crossed an open s.p.a.ce where a long gallows stood. A dozen naked Mongs dangled from it, some by the heels, some by the neck;. All were dead. Nearby another Mong had been impaled on a sharpened pole.

Rahstum glanced back at Blade with a cold smile. "The Khad's justice. Thieves, deserters, murderers, and some who spoke against the Khad. How great a ransom will your friends pay for you, Sir Blade?" And the man Rahstum laughed.