But as he dove for the hole, the block of coral shivered under a heavy impact. It lurched upward in a cloud of sand and debris, then rolled down, squarely blocking the hole. Blade pulled up short, then backed water furiously as the fanged head of a yulon thrust forward past where the boulder had been. Damn! The last thought he could find in his mind was fury that he was going to die snapped in two like a fish, instead of like a fighting man.

But those fanged jaws never closed on him. Instead a pale blue-white body darted down between him and the gaping red mouth. One long slim arm reached out, thrusting with a pole. The yulon's head churned up a cloud of sand and silt as it jerked back, away from Blade, away from the Fishman. The Fishman turned to face Blade. He recognized the woman. For some reason she had decided to save him from the yulon. For a moment he hesitated.

That moment's hesitation was a moment too long. Suddenly he felt something bristly on his shoulder, looked up, and saw the net drifting down over him. He pushed himself away from the bottom, surging upward. But the three men holding the net jerked down hard. Blade found himself yanked to a stop before he had risen a yard. He hung there just off the bottom, slashing at the fibers of the net with his sword. Tough as they were, he could feel the steel going through them.

But once again he wasn't fast enough. He saw a hole large enough to let him through open up in the mesh of the net. And he saw the woman swim down in front of the hole, and reach out toward him with the same long pole she had used on the yulon. He slashed at it with his sword, but she was too quick for him. A swift twisting of those long graceful arms, and the pole drove in through his guard, its blunt end slapping hard into his chest.

For a moment Blade wondered what the woman could hope to do by tapping him with the blunt end of a pole. Then he felt a numbing chill spreading through him, starting from his chest. He could still breathe, still hear, still see. But his arms and legs would not listen to the frantic signals from his brain.

The chill spread up through his neck. His mouth drifted open as far as the air mask would let it. He tried to lift a hand to hold the mask in place. He was still trying to do that when the chill spread into his head, and all sensation faded out.

Alanyra took her eyes off the unconscious Stranger for the first time when Oknyr swam up. Ten years seemed to have dropped from his bones as he pulled to a stop in front of her, and his one eye was shining with triumph.

«They are all dead, captured, or fleeing, Noble Lady.»

«All?»

«At least all we came against,» Oknyr said with a grin. «I won't say that the other Clans have done as well.»

«None could have,» said Alanyra, pointing at the motionless form inside the net.

Oknyr's eyes fell on the Stranger, and he shrugged. «Perhaps.»

Alanyra was very tired, too tired to be angry with the old warrior. She merely said quietly, «Did you doubt my word?»

Oknyr's skin turned almost purple with embarrassment. «Not your word, Lady. Only your-enthusiasm.» Then, more briskly, «So you have him. Now let us set about getting him home to our Reefs, before the trinzans or the loose yulons decide to make a meal of him.»

Chapter ELEVEN

Several things surprised Blade when he crept back to consciousness. The first thing was that he was awake at all. That was a pleasant surprise. Then he realized that meant he was in Fishman hands. That was neither a surprise nor pleasant.

But apparently they meant to keep him alive and in good shape at least for the moment. The chamber in which he was lying was not only not underwater, it was even dry and lit by sunlight pouring down through a hole in the roof. The walls of the circular chamber sloped up toward the hole, forming a cone some thirty feet high. A brief touch told Blade that the walls were as smooth and slick as glass.

The floor of the chamber was about twenty feet across. Most of it was covered deeply with clean, dry, blue-gray sand. Blade himself was lying on a foot-thick bed of dried seaweed. In a yard-high niche in the wall, a stream of water trickled down from above and vanished down a white-painted drain. Blade stuck a finger into the water, then cautiously tasted it. Somehow the Fishmen had managed to contrive fresh running water out here in the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles from the nearest land.

Blade found that his mind was beginning to work clearly again. That meant he found it hard to sit still. He rose and began to walk around the chamber, keeping close to the walls but searching the sand-for what? He wasn't sure. Something to use as a weapon, to start with. Then a way out, if possible.

There was a way out. He found it almost at once. In fact, he nearly fell into it. In a pit in the sand in the very center of the chamber was a pool of water. Again Blade dipped a finger and tasted. Salt water. He looked down and saw a vertical rock-walled shaft plunging away and down into blackness.

Fine. Except that this was a way out for a Fishman or a man with an air mask, and right now Blade was neither. Diving down that tunnel blindly might simply lead to his running out of air and dying miserably, to make a grisly find for some Fishman sentry a few hours or days later. He wasn't desperate enough to throw his life away like that. The Fishmen could come and kill him, if they wanted him dead.

But did they? Blade suspected that if they had wanted him dead, they would never have brought him here. For some reason he was more valuable to at least one Fishman alive than dead. Most probably the woman, he realized. That opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities.

Now that he was out of danger for the moment, he could sit down and think about the war between Talgar and the Fishmen. And he could not keep his thoughts from returning to the notion he had considered as the fleet sailed toward battle. Was somebody-probably in Nurn-playing a deadly game with the two peoples of the sea? Admittedly the notion of a game of that kind lasting three hundred years was rather improbable. But in Dimension X, the improbable usually turned out to be what was actually happening.

And if some game player in Nurn had decided to suddenly raise the stakes? That would explain the sudden increase in the savagery of the war, as both sides poured out money and goods for arsenals of new weapons from the Empire's workshops. Could somebody in Nurn have decided that it was time to make a clean sweep of both Talgar and the Fishmen, so that Nurn could rule the seas itself?

Blade didn't know. All the pieces he had seemed to fit. But he also realized he didn't have enough of the pieces to be able to make a complete and accurate picture even for himself. However, he was certainly in the best place to pick up some more of those pieces. If he could manage it, that woman was going to answer a few questions.

Blade swept his eyes around the chamber and noticed that something was now floating on the surface of the pool. It was a small, circular, close-woven basket, made of some sort of reed and covered with oil or grease to waterproof it. Blade reached out over the pool and caught hold of the basket by the handle. As he lifted it, he felt a slight resistance. Too late he noticed a thin cord trailing from the bottom of the basket, a yellow cord that plunged away into the depths of the shaft. Damn! He had probably just given a signal to some watcher down below.

Well, if the damage was done, he might as well at least find out what was in the basket. It took a good deal of time and some raw fingers before he could get the lid off. Inside the basket he found a circular loaf of bread and a half a dozen dried salt fish.

Blade stared at the bread and fish for a moment. His stomach set up a rumbling like an exploding gasworks to remind him of how hungry he was. Fine. It looked like they wanted to provide him with a meal. And for prison food, it didn't look too bad.