«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.