each other, Blade, and are using you. Do not go tonight.'
The light in Mokanna's hut went out. Barracid lay in total darkness but for the bloody moonlight. Blade, straining his eyes and ears, thought he saw shadows move across the drill grounds, thought he heard a faint clang of steel on steel. He could not be sure.
Mokanna's light came on again.
Mokanna had agreed not to send the torch signal to the waiting Equebus until he was sure Blade had failed and was dead. Then, to protect himself, he was to send a belated signal and swear that Blade had escaped beforehand, deserting the uprising he had inspired, and had come on Equebus in the ravine by accident.
There was no signal. The solitary light glowed in Mokanna's quarters. Barracid waited for Blade to return, brooding in the dark night under a red moon, and Blade was now convinced that it was another trap. Something had gone badly wrong.
Blade left the shadows, sword in hand, and began to walk back toward the encampment. There was nothing else to do, nowhere for him to go. If he struck out alone, on his own, he would be classed as a deserter, a runaway, and so forfeit the protection of Zeena and, through Zeena, the Queen Mother Pphira. Blade needed all the protection he could get.
And he could not leave Pelops to the not so tender mercies of Mokanna. With Blade labeled a runaway and deserter the little man would have no protection at all. It was only Blade, and through Blade, Zeena, who kept the teacher alive and with some degree of freedom as Blade's servant.
Blade entered the first ring of stone huts. He heard men snoring, men crying out in their sleep, men awake and cursing and whispering. The battlemen, at least some of them, knew that something strange and dangerous was afoot tonight.
He went wide of the hut corners, his sword ready. Nothing moved on the broad drill fields. Blade stopped with his back against a stone wall and peered at the big hut of Mokanna. The light still glowed through an open window.
Something lay in the dirt near the door of Mokanna's hut. A body. A headless body.
He took a few steps toward the thing. Not headless. The head was there. Neatly perched atop the leather clad buttocks. Mokanna's head.
Blade stopped. Nothing moved. No sound. Yet the hut of Mokanna waited for him, waited as though it were a living, breathing thing. A chill traced down Blade's spine. He did not like this.
He stopped a foot short of the body and stared down at it. It was Mokanna right enough. The big hairy shoulders, the powerful bowed legs. Moonlight glinted on the head. The mouth was open, the teeth showing, the eyes staring. Something shiny sparkled and Blade saw that it was the chain of office. Someone had draped it over the head and around what had been a neck.
A shadow at the window. A voice said, 'You who are called Richard Blade! Come into the hut. You will not be harmed. But drop your sword first. At once. Drop it!'
Blade hesitated. The window was empty again, the shadow gone. The hut waited.
'Obey, Blade! I, Equebus, give the order in the name of Queen Pphira. You will not be harmed. You are under the Queen's protection now.'
Relief surged through Blade. Zeena! She had worked fast in Sarmacid, had seen her mother and told her of Blade and the marriage. The Queen, then, had not been so difficult as Pelops had warned. Blade nearly laughed. Pelops was an old woman in the guise of a man. It was all right. He tossed his sword down near the body and stalked toward the hut Mokanna's dead eyes seemed to follow him.
A dozen torches flared as Blade kicked open the hut door. A little arrogance now, he thought. A time for showing absolute confidence.
Blade went down before the rush of a dozen men. He let out a bellow of rage and struggled to his knees, smashing heads together in his fury. He caught a glimpse of Pelops lying in chains in a corner.
Blade fought like a demon gone mad. He broke an arm, cracked a neck, drove awesome punches into guts and faces. He went down time and again and kept getting up. More men rushed at him. Lance butts shattered over his head and broad back. Blade winced and bled and planted his legs like stone columns and fought back.
Equebus, scarlet cloaked in a far corner of the big room, looked on with a sneer.
'Are you children?' he asked his men scathingly, 'that one man can defeat you all? Take him. Now! At once. Use your lances on his head - but do not kill him. The man who kills him dies!'
Blade used a judo hold and flung a man at Equebus. The Captain of the Slave Patrol skipped nimbly to one side, his mouth a thin line of contempt beneath the feral hooked nose. 'Beat him,' screamed Equebus. 'Beat him down! Beat him bloody! Only keep him alive and break no bones.'
More men leaped into the fight. They were Sarmaians and small men compared to Blade, but well muscled and wiry. They were slave catchers and they knew their trade. Blade at last went down and could not rise again. Lance butts smashed him into oblivion.
Blade was not out long. When he regained consciousness he was face down on the dirt floor and he was in chains. Massive iron manacles on his wrists and ankles were linked with chains and fastened to another great chain around his waist. The mere weight of the chains told Blade that he was well caught. He could not break these bonds.
The hut was silent. Where was everybody? Blade groaned, his bones ached and he bled from a dozen minor wounds, and rolled over and tried to get to his feet. A foot caught him from behind and kicked him off balance. Blade went sprawling into the dirt again. Pain lanced his beknobbed skull. He cursed and rolled over again to stare upward.
The tall man who stood wide legged, his thumbs hooked into a sword belt, was the same man Blade had seen on the beach that day with Zeena. Equebus. Captain of the Slave Patrol. Thickset, sturdy and as tall nearly as Blade himself, he was a giant among the Sarmaians. What had Pelops called this man - Equebus the Cruel? Blade could believe it.
The swarthy face was axe-like, the nose a hooking scimitar over a thin bloodless mouth. The beard was black, bushy and tinged with gray here and there. The narrow eyes were a Sarmaian dark. But Blade knew that this was
