The air glowed and sparked between his fingers and the sword. Golden fire burst out into tiny balls that sailed away on the wind, then swelled upward. It swelled up until the flames reached out toward Blade and blotted out his view of Katerina. Fire went on swelling until there was nothing around him except the swirling golden fire.
Then the fire was gone, and in its place a great blackness that swallowed him up between one heartbeat and the next.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Several people were not particularly happy after Blade returned to Home Dimension.
Lord Leighton and J sat in the living room of J's London flat. J found himself extremely tempted to just go on sitting there, until cobwebs formed over him or at least until the maid came around in the morning to clean up the room. He suspected that Lord Leighton felt exactly the same way. He'd never seen the scientist look so red-eyed, haggard, and generally wretched after the conclusion of one of Blade's trips into Dimension X.
Well, it was hard to blame the man. He himself didn't feel much better. It was absolutely maddening to consider what had happened-and it was also slightly chilling to consider what might have happened. They'd found a method of passing two people at once from one Dimension to another. They'd found another person fully equal to Blade in her ability to enter Dimension X and survive. They'd lost her, too, but however maddening that was, it was the luck of battle. It would have been almost as awkward to have her back as it had been to lose her with much of the information she could have provided. Katerina had lived, she had survived in Dimension X, and in doing so she'd proved conclusively that Blade was not unique. Somewhere in the world there were other people who could survive the trip into Dimension X. The problem, though, was finding them. There nothing was new, nothing was changed. The long search would become longer still, and there was no helping it.
The «might have beens» were even more unsettling, even if none of them had happened. There were so many of them that it was impossible to describe them, or even to count them all. But the total added up to one conclusion-this time they had come closer to losing Blade than ever before. They hadn't lost him, but that was because their luck-and Blade's-hadn't run out. A dozen unknown factors had been thrown into the whole affair, and that none of them had killed Blade or trapped him forever in Dimension X was as big a miracle as Kano's defeat of the Raufi!
Leighton, of course, was feeling particularly bad because he was responsible for some of these unknowns, without being able to say a word to explain any of them! He felt he was failing in his duties to the Project, to Richard Blade, and to his own reputation as a scientist. Which of the three failures preyed on his mind the most was impossible to tell. But J was quite sure that they added up to a grisly burden. For once he felt totally sympathetic toward the scientist, and he made a mental promise to do everything he could to help Leighton. The man was past eighty, close to the end of his life and career, and here his greatest achievement, the Project, had turned around and bitten him!
At least, J added mentally, he would do everything to help Leighton that wouldn't endanger Richard Blade.
Meanwhile, there was a decision to be made. Push on with the next mission, or defer it until-until what? That was the question. Blade was in fine shape physically and mentally, although he was certainly angry, and he seemed somewhat depressed about something he hadn't mentioned. The two women, Arllona and Katerina, were both dead. There was nothing more to find out from or about either of them. There really wasn't any reason for delaying, except perhaps objections from Richard, and their own nerves. But there wouldn't be any objections from Richard-there never were. And as for their own nerves-well, if they'd given in to those at all, the Project would have come to a halt years ago. This was no time to start.
J rose, went to the sideboard, and brought back the whiskey decanter, the soda water, and two glasses. He prepared two very large whiskies-and-soda and handed one to Leighton.
Leighton did not pick his up. But he did raise his fatigue-reddened eyes and look at J.
«Well, what do you think we ought to do?»
«In what sense?»
«Should we defer the next mission, or proceed on schedule?»
J couldn't help laughing. Leighton's mind had been working along the same lines as his.
«Well, what have you concluded?»
«We might as well push on.»
J laughed again. For this moment at least, they were two minds with a single thought.
«I quite agree,» he said. They raised their glasses and drank.
Richard Blade sat in a West End bar and contemplated ordering another in what was already a long series of whiskies. He finally decided against it. He did not feel particularly good, and from here on drinking would make things worse rather than better.
He'd left something out of his report on the mission, and he was wondering if he'd been wise to do so. Not what he felt about «being buggered about from Dimension to Dimension like a bloody table-tennis ball»-he'd let them know his feelings on that at great length. He was angry about that, although not really angry at anyone, since Leighton himself seemed to be almost completely at sea over what had happened.
What he'd left out was everything about what he and Katerina had felt for each other. For all that J and Lord Leighton knew, the two of them had been an effective partnership of two professionals, allies by necessity. They didn't and they wouldn't know about partnership of two lovers, or about what Blade had felt as he knelt beside the dying Katerina.
He'd loved Katerina, but he'd fought off saying it even to himself until it was too late. He was not proud of that. He couldn't be. So he would never mention that.
He wasn't bothered about having fallen in love with a KGB agent, at least not one who'd been in love with him too. He saw clearly that the very strengths and gifts that had let Katerina travel into Dimension X and survive made her the kind of woman he could love. It hadn't been inevitable that they would fall in love-but there had always been a good chance of it.
Yet could he expect even J to see things that way? J would bend over backwards not to pass any judgments. But, for the first time in his life, Richard Blade had let his professional behavior be affected by a woman. It probably would be the last time, too, but in his profession once could be too often.
No, J should not learn of it, and he would not. It would be a strain never to mention it, but it would not be as much of a strain as any of the alternatives.
Blade decided that he would order another drink after all, to celebrate the decision.
On the outer wall of Kano, Tyan sat and looked out over the land beyond. Smoke rose from the fires where the bodies of the Raufi were being burned, hazing the landscape, but Tyan would not have seen it clearly in any case. His vision, like his thoughts, was on things much farther away.
He had played a trick. True, it was a trick to save Kano. But he had played it with one who was indeed the Champion of the Gods, sent by them for the salvation of Kano. The gods had not punished Kano for his trick, and for this he thanked them.
As for himself-well, he was old, Kano was safe, and his son was dead. If the gods chose to exact a price from him for his blasphemy with their champion, then so be it. He would not even pray to avert it.
He would pray, however, that they would do what they wished to do soon. Even as a child, he had never liked waiting. Now he liked it even less.
Tyan sighed, lifted his eyes to the sky, and began to pray.