The same problem of risk to the Girls applied even more strongly to anything more than simple Pleasure sessions. He did not even know if they were familiar enough with the layout of the stronghold to tell him very much about it; he would have laid two years' salary that their movements were too restricted: And no doubt any Girl found outside a restricted area was appropriately punished, so he could not with a clear conscience encourage them to do any spying.
But he was forgetting some rather basic points in his concern for the Girls! If he could lead the conversation around to their Pleasure sessions with the Whole Ones particularly the guards-he might find out where the guards were quartered, get some idea of how many there were, what routes they used to come and go, and so forth. Similarly, if any of them had ever been taken to the Ice Master's quarters for giving him Pleasure (and Blade doubted that the Ice Master was so self-controlled as to keep the Girls entirely for the slaves and guards), they might well remember where those quarters were, how well guarded, and so on. He might build up quite a body of useful information without asking the Girls to take any risks, if he went about it right.
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.