Blade's head struck the ground so hard that for a moment the world spun crazily about him in a gray fog. He lay still for another moment, until his head started clearing and he could distinguish the roaring in his ears from the roaring of the crowd. Faintly, in the middle of the roaring, he heard someone scream, screaming three times in prolonged and terrible agony.

Then warriors and Hunters, with Kordu in the lead, were running out from the crowd, grabbing Geddo's body by the ankles and unceremoniously dragging it off Blade. Others bent over Blade and helped him to his feet. He lurched and staggered, but he managed to stand.

Another warrior ran out of the crowd, carrying something bloody in one hand. He threw it at Blade's feet. Blade saw it was Stul's severed head. Somehow he managed to thank the man, although it hurt him to speak. His throat felt as if it were filled with red-hot pebbles.

Then Catherine broke away from the warriors guarding her and ran toward Blade. Blade held out both arms to her and she ran straight up to him, flowing up against his chest. He felt her shivering and trembling, heard her incoherent murmurs in his ear, and held her tightly. Gradually he felt her grow calm and quiet.

Kordu stepped up to Blade and knelt as he had by the river after Blade had killed the giant three-horns.

«Blade, what is your will?»

«My will?» The words came out in a croak the first time. Then the thought burst in Blade's mind.

By his victory, for better or worse, he was now the High Chief of all the Ganthi.

Chapter Eighteen

The first thing the new High Chief of the Ganthi nearly did was fall flat on his face in front of more than a thousand of his new subjects. Blade was hot, horribly thirsty, and dizzy from pain and loss of blood.

Catherine chose that moment to faint in his arms, from sheer relief. He lowered her gently to the ground. Then for a while he was much too busy seeing that she was properly treated to worry about his own wounds.

He was also much too busy listening to what she babbled as she tossed and turned on her sleeping mat in the grip of fever and nightmares. He listened very carefully, and he did not like what he heard.

She babbled in Russian, to start with. Blade knew the language well enough to understand most of what she said. She was disoriented, and she thought she was in a hospital deep inside Russia, being cared for after returning from a mission in the West! Then she cried out and clutched at her head and stomach, moaning something about Lord Leighton, J, and a terrible gray monster of a computer.

She moaned and murmured and babbled a good deal more, and by the time she fell into a quiet, healthy sleep Blade knew most of what he had to know about Katerina, who she was, and how she had been sent into Dimension X.

Katerina was a Russian undercover agent. She had successfully penetrated the Project by getting her job as a computer technician. That in itself was going to mean a monumental uproar in Project Security. Probably the uproar was already underway, if Lord Leighton and J were moving as fast as they usually did when the Dimension X secret seemed to be in danger.

Somehow she had been detected and caught. Blade could easily see the logic of what had happened next. The best way of keeping the secret of the Project was for Katerina to quietly disappear. The best way to do that was to send her off to Dimension X. Whatever happened to her, she would never come back to Home Dimension with what she'd learned.

So far so good. But none of this explained how in the name of Whoever ruled Dimension X Katerina had managed to arrive here, alive, sane, and entirely functional! How had it happened? How had half a dozen picked Englishmen died or gone mad on trips to Dimension X, while Katerina hadn't? How had years of searching for someone else who could survive the trip been totally unsuccessful, if Katerina had done it so easily? What had gone wrong?

Blade realized that this trip into Dimension X was sprouting unanswerable questions like an untended garden sprouting weeds. Certainly they were unanswerable by anyone except Lord Leighton and his team of scientists, far away in Home Dimension. There wasn't too much Blade could do beyond observing what happened and staying alive to return to Home Dimension and report on it. It was maddening to have to play such a passive role, but unfortunately he didn't have much choice.

One thing he could do on the spot was do his best to get from Katerina the story of who she was, what she had done, and how she had managed to survive her trip. That raised a knotty question. Should he frankly tell her that he knew who she was, and that she shouldn't waste time with cover stories? Would he learn more, or less, if he did that? Would he be in more or less danger?

He turned the question over and over in his mind for several hours, and decided in favor of telling the truth, as far as he would tell Katerina anything. If she was as good an agent as she probably was, he had to assume that she knew who he was, and that she would be on the alert in any case. She would not really expect him to believe her cover story, which would certainly be lame and full of holes. There was no really convincing way for her to explain how she had gotten here! She would also be less likely to try extracting information from him, if he let her know that he was aware and alert. She would know then that probing him would be a waste of time.

Of course, there was the danger of setting up a total stand-off, in which neither could hope to learn very much about the other. As long as they were both in this situation, however, there wouldn't be too much danger to the Dimension X secret. Blade knew he had to start by protecting that as best he could and letting anything else come second.

There were other methods for extracting information from Katerina without giving any himself. Blade had used those methods before, even on women. He never enjoyed using them on anyone, but he never hesitated when the need arose.

But here in Dimension X, it was hardly safe to proceed to drastic methods. He and Katerina were alone here among the Ganthi, and for the moment they would do better as temporary allies, guarding each other's backs. Threatening Katerina would certainly make her an open enemy, determined to destroy him at any reasonable risk to herself. She would be a formidable enemy, Blade knew. The Russians chose their top agents well and trained them better.

Even if Katerina did not kill him, an open fight between them would leave the Ganthi confused and wondering what was going on. The Ganthi might well decide to end their new High Chief's life. Blade could not afford to risk his own life that way in order to extract Katerina's secrets. Anything he might learn would be wasted if it died with him.

There were also two more considerations. First, Katerina might very well not make it back to Home Dimension, even with his help. She'd made the trip one way, but that didn't guarantee she could make it both ways. If she didn't return to Home Dimension alive and sane, it didn't matter how much she learned.

Second, she was somebody from Home Dimension, even if she was from the opposition. Without some good reason, Blade could not bring himself to simply kill, torture, or even deceive somebody able to survive the trip, somebody who was, by virtue of that quality alone, set apart from the rest of the human race, who was in a way his equal and his comrade. It would be like wantonly destroying a great work of art, to «terminate» or even endanger Katerina unless he had to.

It took Blade several hours of complicated analysis to reach his conclusions, and he was more relieved after reaching them than he had been after some major battles he'd fought. He sincerely hoped that Russian agents weren't going to start popping out of the woodwork on every trip into Dimension X!