The fight was long, bloody, and noisy. At last the creature with the arrows in its hide lost the sight of one eye. Its opponent lunged in from the blind side, got its teeth into the throat, and chewed and twisted until at last the flesh tore and blood vessels split to pour a red pool on to the ground. The dying creature toppled on to its side, the tail still thrashing back and forth. Its opponent drew back slowly, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, its muzzle coated up to the eyes with dried blood.
By this time several of the other monsters had paired off to fight, and many more seemed ready to leap at each other's throats. The Master signaled to the trumpeters again, and the blare of their instruments rose until it drowned out even the roar of the monsters below. Somehow it reached their slow wits as a message, and one by one they turned and crept back into the cave. Within a few minutes they were gone, leaving behind nothing but their odor. A trail of blood and fallen scales showed where they'd dragged the dead body into the cave with them.
Blade stepped away from the pit until he felt it was safe to take a deep breath. By the time he could speak again, the Master had joined him. The man's face was paler than usual, and the hands gripping the great staff were white-knuckled and quivering slightly. It seemed there were powers in this valley strong enough to make even the Master of the Hashomi uncomfortable.
Blade decided to take advantage of that discomfort.
«What are they?» he said softly. He could see why the Master had referred to them as «the fathers of snakes.» They were obviously reptiles of some sort, left over from a distant age of this Dimension. But what business did the Hashomi have with them?
The Master's eyes seemed to be fixed on something far off and barely visible. His voice was dreamy, as though he himself had taken an overdose of one of the Hashomi's drugs.
«When the First Master came to this valley, it was theirs.» He went on to describe a sort of lost world, where monsters out of distant ages of the world had swarmed over the cliffs and among the forests.
«We had no use for most of them, but these have done well. In the time that is coming, they will do even better for us. They are ours, like the drugs, like the swords and knives of our sworn fighters. They are the assarani.»
In other words, weapons. Who would be the assarani's victims, in «the time that is coming»? Blade did not dare ask that aloud. Instead he asked, in a carefully business-like voice, «What was in those bolts the archers fired into the first assaran? I am surprised that any of your drugs could take effect so quickly in such a large, slow-moving creature.»
Blade's tone brought the Master back to reality. He smiled. «We owe much to the wisdom of the First Master. What works upon the assarani is not in the arrows. It is in them.»
Blade looked a question at the Master. He continued. «The water they drink is from a stream that flows down into their cave. We drop into the stream what will make them more sensitive to any other drug. The water carries it to them, they drink, and thus all the other drugs work upon them in a moment.»
Blade nodded. The account left out a good many details he would have been glad to know, but it gave him one vital piece of information. He'd guessed at it before-now he could be sure. The drugs of the Hashomi were enormously powerful. Like LSD, a few pounds dropped into a city's water supply would probably be enough to affect a whole population. He'd never liked the idea of something that powerful available to dangerous or irresponsible men or groups.
He liked even less the idea of such drugs in the hands of the Hashomi.
The Master went on, too proud of his people's skills to be silent or to notice the chill remoteness on Blade's face.
«We also dispose of the bodies of our dead by feeding them to the assarani. In each body we place the proper drugs, so that in eating the flesh of the dead the beasts also eat the drugs.»
Blade wondered what the farmers and craftsmen of the Valley of the Hashomi thought of having their dead carted off as dinosaur fodder. He would have to ask someone beside the Master, though. In silence he followed the Master away from the pit.
Chapter 9
Not everything the Master showed Blade was as exotic or sinister as the nad-crazed horse or the pit of the assarani. Much of it was simply the training sessions of the Hashomi, with sword and knife, spear, longbow and crossbow, dagger, strangling cords, and other weapons for both open battle and silent murder.
There was very little Blade could teach them about the use of the weapons they already had. Hour after hour of training, week after week, had done about all that could be done.
The Hashomi needed even less advice and instruction on physical conditioning. From the newly entered teenage boys up to the graying men in their late fifties, they were all quick, tough, hard as nails, trimmed down to nothing but skin and muscle stretched tautly over their light bones. In a straight barehanded brawl, somebody the size and strength of Blade could pull any of them apart, but only if he could catch them and hold on.
Still, a time was coming when the Hashomi might need every technique of unarmed combat that Blade could or would teach them. The Master made that clear. The Master also made it clear that Blade had better teach, and teach well-or he might find his freedom and even his life ending abruptly.
The Master also wanted Blade to pass on his skills with the quarterstaff. Like bare hands, a simple staff of wood was not a weapon that would arouse the suspicions of the Hashomi's enemies.
Blade went to work, eight and ten hours a day, doing his best and concealing his distaste for teaching the Hashomi anything that might make them more dangerous. The men learned fast, as he expected. Within a few days he was able to appoint some of the more promising students as instructors.
While Blade taught, he also learned. At times he saw Hashomi training with throwing spears and lighter scimitars. These, he was told, were weapons of the soldiers of Dahaura.
At other times he saw Hashomi using their assassination weapon, but wearing green robes with golden sashes and green shoes of heavy canvas. This was the ceremonial costume of the Hemo-Junah-the Fighters of Junah. They were the strongest of the dissenting sects among the worshippers of Junah, bitterly opposed to the orthodox Tezo-Junahthe Children of Junah.
The rulers of Dahaura, the Barans, had belonged to the Children of Junah for nearly four hundred years. During that time they had persecuted the other sects, until only the Fighters of Junah were left with any strength. As their name implied, they were a militant sect, whose members swore blood oaths and sought to perfect themselves in arms. Often they paid for their oaths and their training with their lives, strangled or beheaded or impaled by order of the Barans. The persecution reduced their numbers, but increased the fanaticism of the survivors.
It was an old and familiar story to Blade, one he'd seen or heard of in a dozen Dimensions. Obviously the Hashomi were planning to take advantage of the religious conflict. They'd be fools not to. But what did they hope to gain by this? The Hashomi were skilled and fanatical, but they had only five thousand fighting men. Dahaura was an empire spreading several weeks ride from border to border, with millions of people: It would be a tough nut for even the Hashomi to crack.