Equebus smiled pure venom. Kreed, lingering in the background, chuckled and wrung his hands in glee. Blade spat into the sand at the Captain's feet.
The slave named Chephron was a hideous hunchback clad only in a long leather kirtle. He wore an iron collar and his pocked face was badly malformed. He was bald and his legs were twisted and spindly and covered with open sores. Blade looked at him with distaste. The man had executioner, torturer, written all over him. Most obscene of all was the voice, a high shrill bleat.
He touched Blade's arm. The filthy crooked fingers were cold as death on the big man's smooth warm flesh.
"Come, master," said Chephron. "I will see to everything. I will instruct you, master, never fear. But come. Hurry. Tarsu already awaits you."
Blade followed the grotesque form down the stair. Down and down as the murk grew deeper. Somewhere below them a torch gleamed yellow. Still they kept going down.
The guttering torch revealed a small narrow room. Three walls of stone, the fourth of wood. Chephron, smirking and bowing, muttering all the time, rapped on the wooden wall. "Tarsu? You are ready?"
A voice came back deep and gruff. "I am ready."
"Your hand is on the wall so you will know when it is lifted?"
"It is. Have done with chatter and begin. My sword is thirsty."
The executioner turned to Blade, grimacing horribly. He pointed to the wooden wall, then to the single torch in the ring bolt. "You understand, my master? Simple - quite sun-pie. I will take the only torch with me. When I am out and the trap door is closed you will be in darkness." His bleating laugh was shrill and high. "As dark as Tor's bowels! Not a single ray comes down."
Blade nodded at the wooden wall. "That rises, then?"
"Ah, yes, master. It rises. On the far side there is another room such as this. You will be alone with Tarsu, master. In the dark. As Tarsu has always been in the dark. Heh-heh - I do not envy you, master, and I do not think I will see you again."
There came an impatient rapping from the far side of the wooden wall.
Chephron extended fingers to Blade in a twiddling motion. "It is the custom, master, to give something."
Blade's skin was crawling. This creature was like a slimy thing that had lived in darkness forever.
"I have nothing," Blade said harshly. "But this!" He moved the executioner toward the stairs with a sound kick. "Get out!"
Chephron rubbed his behind and drooled. Slaver ran from the corners of his toothless mouth. "I thank you, master. It will be a great pleasure to drag your body away."
"Out!"
Chephron scuttled up the steep stairs with the torch. He vanished around a bend and Blade was in near total darkness. He waited and listened. He ran to the end of the room and threw himself flat, belly down, on the floor. He rested his fingertips lightly against the wooden wall. From far overhead came a sullen clang of stone on stone as the heavy trap door was dropped into place.
Blade was in darkness. The wall began to rise.
Chapter Thirteen
The wooden wall slid away from Blade's touch, upward into darkness. There was a faint click. Then silence absolute. Pit dark. Stygian. Blade held his breath.
Silence. Blade caught an odor, a whiff of human sweat. Near. Very near. Too near!
SWISH - the sword cut the air just over Blade's head. Tarsu had been at the same end of the room, touching the wall, directly opposite Blade.
Blade rolled frantically to his left. Sparks flew as the sword beat on the stone floor. Could the man smell him, Blade?
He got on his hands and knees and scuttled, for all the world like one of the giant crabs, to the rear wall of the room. There he went to his belly again. He took a deep breath and held it until his ears popped. He made a mental picture of the room. The stairs were behind him and about ten feet distant. They were narrow and there was no room to swing a sword. If he could entice Tarsu to fight him on the stairs -
Later he would try that. For now, if he could only come to grips with his enemy before the sword could inflict a mortal wound - if he could get the sword, or make Tarsu lose it.
Something rattled on the stone floor just in front of Blade. He lay unmoving. breathing softly through his mouth. An old trick. Tarsu had tossed a pebble, a fragment of the wall. Blade smiled grimly. His opponent would have to do better than that.
There was the smell again. This time of sweat mingled with something else. Grease? Oil of some sort -
Blade moved just in time. The sword glanced off the wall just over him and sparks showed like tiny golden stars in a miniature eternity, a macrocosm of space. Tarsu grunted, a foiled animal sound, and Blade launched himself in air, feet first, at an unseen point three feet behind the sparks.
His bare feet rammed into solid flesh. The man went down, the sword chiming "wildly on stone, with Blade half on him, half off. Now!
Both men were mute. Blade tried to use his weight and his great strength. Tarsu, the smaller man but wiry and with lightning reflexes, writhed and fought back with a fury Blade had not expected. The man's body was heavily greased and Blade could not hold him. It took both his hands just to keep the eager sword away from his throat and when he tried to pin Tarsu with his weight the man kept slipping from under.
Tarsu tried to get his teeth into Blade's throat. Blade butted him cruelly in the face and heard the nose crack. Tarsu got his hand into Blade's beard and began pulling it out by the roots. He slammed a knee into Blade's crotch and the big man went sick. He held on to the sword arm, trying to break the wrist, unable to get the right leverage. They rolled over and over across the cold stone floor, nailing and biting and scratching. Blade's face contorted as he put his last strength into breaking the wrist, the arm, anything.
Tarsu saved his arm by letting go of the sword. It fell with a clang, slid and stopped. Blade let go of Tarsu and dove in the direction of the sound. But Tarsu clung to him like a leech, biting and clawing at his flesh, and it was Tarsu who found the sword again. He kicked it far across the room. Blade cursed and seized Tarsu by the beard and smashed a terrible right hand. The blow only partially found its mark. Tarsu went falling backward, away from Blade. Blade groped. Nothing. He fought to control his breathing, to cut off the gasps that could betray him. There was no sound from Tarsu.
A slithering sound. A scraping and brushing sound. Tarsu was feeling about for the sword. Blade, on his hands and knees once again, began to crawl in the direction of the sounds. He would have to play bulldog now - get a grip on the man's throat and hang on, no matter what. Hang on until Tarsu was dead.
"Hah!"
A grunt of triumph from the darkness. A slither of metal on stone. Tarsu had found the sword. Blade stopped and began to inch backward.
He had his breathing under control. Very slowly, inch by patient inch, he began to work his way toward the stone stairs in a corner of the room. He reached the wall, brushed it with his hands, began to feel for loose mortar. If he could tug one of the crude undressed stones free -
Blade was nearly to the stair before he found it. A stone twice the size of his fist and loosely set. Within a few seconds he had tugged it free. A weapon of sorts. But how to use It?
Tarsu heard the trickle of mortar or a tiny scrape of stone on stone, something. And spoke for the first time since he had found the sword. His voice came from the far end of the room.
"So, Blade, you take to the stair! Others have done that before you. They thought I could not use my sword in close quarters. They were wrong. You are wrong, Blade."
Tarsu was moving in, his feet light on the stone, stalking, knowing where Blade must be. Blade retreated up the first step and raised the stone high. Yet he dared not hurl it. He could hear Tarsu stalking, coming at him out of the gloom, but he had no target. If he hurled the stone at random into the darkness he was certain to miss. The chances were a 100 to 1 that he would. Keep the stone.