«Yes. They will make good slaves. And their women will make good Girls for Pleasure.»
«Except Leyndt.»
«You wish her for yourself?»
«Yes. Not as a Girl. As she is-or as close to it as you think safe.»
«Well,» said the Ice Master slowly, «if you do this thing for me that you promise, I will certainly give you Leyndt. You will be responsible for seeing that she does not endanger us, and I will not condition her at all. But I will keep her close by me until you return from the south with your fighters.»
«Of course. Will you be sure to keep her safe from the guards, if they go on fighting?»
«I will do my best. I will keep her in my own quarters, with a room to herself. All the guards are conditioned to stay out of my private chambers, Menel and regular alike.»
«Good.» It was even better than he dared let the Ice Master know. For the first time he had a reasonably good notion of where to find Leyndt. And find her he would! One of the first things to do when he returned was to get Leyndt beyond the reach of Menel, Ice Master, or guards. He did not imagine that Stramod or Nilando would argue that point.
He debated for a moment whether he should ask for a map of the stronghold to help in training his raiding force. It might seem like asking too much, so much that the Ice Master's suspicions would be aroused. On the other hand, the Ice Master would certainly want the raiders to be ready to go into action the moment they arrived. Blade decided to risk it.
«It might save time if my men knew their way around your stronghold when they arrived. Otherwise the guards would have an advantage in any fighting. And we don't know that my men won't have to go straight into action when they arrive.» Blade knew perfectly well they would.
The Ice Master frowned. «I hope I can make some sort of arrangement with the Menel to calm things somewhat before then. But you may be right. Very well. I will give you a map before you leave. How soon will you be ready to leave?»
«As soon as you want me to be.»
The Ice Master rose and clasped both of Blade's hands. For a moment Blade was closer than he had ever been to feeling sorry for the Ice Master, but the moment passed quickly. Blade knew this man's motives, saw them for what they were, and could despise them and him. He could not do the same with the Menel, and so he had spared one and would spare the rest if there were any way to do this without betraying the human population of this world.
With that in his mind, he followed the Ice Master out into the corridor and down it to the Ice Master's own chambers. There the Ice Master gave him the clothing and survival gear he would need on the surface, the charts and navigational instructions for the flier, the diagram of the stronghold, and finally one of the electronic master keys that unlocked the controls of the great fliers. Those keys, like the Dragon wands, were prodigies of electronic science. Then they rode up on the secondary elevator to the hangar, and Blade went to his flier.
The Ice Master would not step inside with him-no doubt, Blade thought, afraid of my betraying him by taking off with him and turning him over to the Graduki. The man's trust did have its limits. Blade closed and sealed the door behind him and walked forward through the vast echoing cargo hold that stretched two hundred feet fore and aft and rose thirty feet above his head, to the control room in the nose.
As he went through the five simple steps that brought the huge flier from a slumbering mass of inert metal to a machine ready to hurl itself into the skies, he again felt frustrated to the point of almost physical pain at the impossibility of bringing one of these machines back to Home Dimension. With its electronics, its power plant, and above all the array of tubes and circuits that somehow neutralized and manipulated gravity, it would hurl England and the whole human race two centuries into the future at once. Or perhaps such a leap might be more than human wisdom could handle? It had taken nearly the whole of Blade's adult life to hammer out some sort of precarious control over the atomic and hydrogen bombs.
Perhaps the larger pieces of the Menel's wisdom were best left here?
A moment later he saw the huge hangar's darkness broken by light pouring down from above, as the Ice Master opened the great sliding doors to the surface. He twisted the power dial and simultaneously pulled back on the main control lever. There was a mighty lurch that sent vibrations and metallic clangings surging through the whole structure of the flier as it came up off the floor, wobbling in the air currents now flowing through the hangar. He eased it forward, waiting until the open door above showed a broad rectangle of blue sky and searing golden sun, with wisps of snow darting past to suggest a strong wind. He twisted the power dial further and pulled back yet farther on the main control. The flier reared up on its broad-finned tail, pushing Blade deep into the cushions of the control chair, then leaped into the sky.
Blade rather doubted that the Menel would be likely to try to stop his flight. But he preferred to be on the safe side, so kept the flier as low as possible, so low that radar would find it hard to pick him up and even seeing the flier, silver-gray against the blaze of the snow-covered ice cap, would be chancy. This meant flying slowly, because neither the automatic pilot nor his own skills were up to hedgehopping the flier at its normal cruising speed of twice the speed of sound. The fact that he had been able to learn to handle the big flier at all was more a tribute to its simplicity and foolproof design than to his own piloting abilities.
So he crept along at barely half the speed of a Home Dimension jet airliner for better than two hours. He skimmed less than a hundred feet above fangs of intricately sculptured ice, watching streamers of snow blow out like the plumes of a cavalry helmet from blue-green shimmering ice domes, feeling the updrafts as the wind struck vertical cliffs of chiseled whiteness and hurled itself upward, to strike the flier and toss it about. The sky was a flawless blue that might have been enameled and then polished to a glowing sheen tinged with gold and silver, and neither storm nor whiteout threatened him.
At the end of the two hours, neither his own eyes nor the far-reaching radars of the flier showed any signs of pursuit. He checked the charts again for the precise course south to Tengran, then set the auto-pilot and lifted the flier up to cruising speed and altitude. At more than twice the speed of sound he raced south, the flier locked on course, the ice now ten miles below and reduced to a featureless plain of blazing white, only the faintest blue lines etched across it to mark where crevices plunged down into cold blue darkness.
Less than two hours at cruising speed took the flier clear of the glacier land and out over the narrow belt of tundra, green now at the height of summer. The river whose banks he had reached the first night in this dimension began there, a silver thread creeping south across the tundra, losing itself for a while in the tumbled gray masses of the mountains down which he had climbed, and then appearing again in flashes of light under the trees of the forest that spread to the horizon on either side. Blade dropped the flier down to treetop height again to avoid giving premature alarm to the Tengrans.