«You may speak,» Blade said. They were both obviously dying of curiosity.

«Is-do you have-your power in that?» said the plump girl. «Do you-keep it on?»

Blade laughed. «No. My power is where it is in any other man.» He unhooked the loinguard, took it off, and held it up in front of the girls so they could see it more clearly. «You see. It is only a thing of Oltec, to protect me in battle, so that I will not lose the place where my power stays.»

«Ah,» they said almost in unison. Then also in unison they reached out and started stroking Blade's thighs and penis. This led to the inevitable conclusion, although Blade could never use the term «making love» when he spoke of what he did in the bed with the two slave girls. He'd had much more pleasant erotic experiences with women he'd seduced as part of an assignment. At least the two girls seemed happy enough, probably at knowing they would not be punished for failing to please him.

When he'd finished with the girls, Blade walked over to the boy still cowering in the corner. «If you wish either of the girls, and she consents, I will let you have her. I will even go into one of the other rooms and leave you alone.»

The boy stared at Blade as if he'd grown a second head, then burst into tears and curled up almost in the fetal position. In the process his loincloth slipped. Blade had a strong stomach, and he'd seen more ghastly sights than any other six men he knew put together. He still had to swallow and close his eyes for a moment at the sight of the boy's groin. It was nothing but a mass of scar tissue. He'd been castrated, so crudely and brutally that it was a miracle he was still alive.

Blade sighed. There was nothing to say to the boy and nothing to say even to himself except what he'd already said a number of times: Doimar had to be stopped.

He helped the boy to his feet, then called the guards. The two girls were supporting the boy between them as the guards led all three of them out. Blade stood with his face firmly turned to the window until he heard the door close behind him. He did not want anyone who might inform Feragga or Nungor to see the look on his face.

The sun was close to the horizon now. Most of Doimar's towers still had part of their metal facing, and these reflected the reddish sunset over the rest of the city. It looked almost as if the entire city had been dipped in blood. Blade thought this was a highly appropriate color for Doimar.

Chapter 15

Blade soon learned there were two factions in Doimar's army. One was led by the Seekers. These rule-of-thumb scientists and engineers had rediscovered most of the military Oltec. Their faction included the men and women trained to operate the waldoes, and certain others with rare technical skills.

The second faction was led by the older officers, who'd learned warfare before Feragga became ruler of Doimar.

They had the support of the infantry, who would fight with nothing but rifles, grenades, and some mortars.

The infantry faction should have won by sheer weight of numbers. Doimar's infantry counted at least seven thousand men and women, while the Seekers could call on the support of no more than five or six hundred. However, even the infantrymen usually admitted that the waldoes would be nearly indispensable in the war against the other cities of the Land. They resented this fact, but they didn't deny it. By the time Blade reached Doimar, the two factions had signed an uneasy truce. This didn't keep either one from seeking to gain whatever advantage it could over the other, by fair means or foul.

It helped keep the peace that Feragga and Nungor both tried to be impartial, at least in public. Both learned swordsmanship, became experts with rifles, and could handle grenades and mortars. Both also knew how to operate the waldoes and put them through their paces. But it was still no secret that Feragga's sympathies lay with the Seekers, and Nungor's lay with the infantry.

None of this surprised Blade at all. In any army, those who do their fighting with machinery seldom get along with those who expose their own bodies to the enemy's weapons. The machine operators think the infantrymen are stupid. The infantrymen think the machine operators are cowards. In Doimar matters were even worse than usual. Blade had learned that the waldoes were operated by some sort of remote control, and thus the waldo operators would be many miles from the battlefield, doing their work with all the comforts of home around them. The infantry would be out in front, hungry, cold, thirsty, stinking, and dying in the mud like the infantry of every army in every Dimension throughout history. Blade was quite sure that each side in the feud would try to win him over. When this happened, he was almost as sure he could get some advantage from it.

The training room was two hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, with an arched roof eighty feet high. At the far end one of the waldoes stood to the right of a tall steel door. At the near end stood Blade, a female Seeker, one of the control chairs for the waldoes, and several electronic consoles. The chair and the consoles stood on a rubber-tired cart.

Blade contemplated the control chair. It reminded him of the equipment once used to send him into Dimension X, before the invention of the KALI capsule. There was the same chair with a polished steel frame and black leather seat and back. There was the same tangle of multicolored wires crawling all over it like demented snakes. It looked like something you'd expect to find in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition.

There were also a few differences. The chair and its wiring stood in the middle of a steel frame eight feet high. From the frame hung long metallic mesh gloves and a helmet which covered the whole head and bulged with electronic and optical gear. Knee-high mesh boots stood on the base of the frame.

«Now listen carefully, Blade of England,» said the Seeker sharply. «To work the Fighting Machines is not as simple as it looks. Many have thought so. Their mistakes have damaged many machines. We do not often let fighters of Doimar near a Voice Chair until we have tested them in many ways. But it is Feragga's order that you are to be taught everything you want to learn. We obey her orders.» She shook her fist in his face. «But if you wreck a Machine, nothing Feragga says will save you from me.»

The Seeker had to reach up to shake her fist in Blade's face. She was hardly more than five feet tall, with a trim figure showing through a sort of uniform of green leather trousers and shirt. Her dark eyes were enormous.

«I will listen and not wreck a Machine,» said Blade. «In England the best warriors are trained to use both the weapons of their bodies and the weapons of Oltec. Only those who know both can command in war.»

«If that is truly the case in England, you are wiser than we,» said the woman. «As it is, we who know the Machines must often give way to those who know nothing but a child's weapons. If Feragga was not wise, we would be as badly off as the people of Kaldak, chained by the Law.»

She started explaining the operation of the waldoes. It was very much as Blade had expected, a masterpiece of simplicity. The waldo operator put his hands into the gloves and his feet into the boots. Then every motion of his arms and legs was transmitted by radio to the waldo, which matched those movements. The helmet contained video and sound pickups so the operator could see and hear what the waldo saw and heard. Still other controls fired the laser-or Fire Beam, as the Doimari called it.

«Don't the Fighting Machines have any other weapons than the Fire Beam?» asked Blade.

«No, curse it,» said the woman. «We know they have throwers for fire bombs, like the ones the foot soldiers carry. But the throwers need a special kind of bomb, and we have found no such bombs in any city of the Land.»