Warriors of Latan

Blade 37

By Jeffrey Lord

Chapter 1

«Halloooo, Richard!»

The ballroom of the old country house was large enough to raise echoes. Lord Leighton's voice, J thought, might be powerful enough to raise ghosts, if the old place had any left. The scientist was past eighty, hunchbacked; his legs were twisted by polio, and he walked with the aid of a cane. He still had a powerful voice, however-not to mention a sharp tongue, which J had felt more than a few times.

The two men heard thumpings and footsteps from somewhere above, then a shrill yeeep-yeeep-yeeep that grew rapidly louder. «He's home,» said Leighton.

The scientist appeared to be bracing himself, with his knob-knuckled hands gripping his cane tightly. Lately he had taken to using a cane outside his laboratories. Possibly he really needed it, but J suspected it also contained a few disagreeable surprises for any would-be kidnapper or assassin. Tear gas, poison darts, a miniature hand grenade? J wasn't going to ask merely to satisfy his curiosity; as long as he didn't know anything official about the cane, he wouldn't have to answer the questions of nervous civilian authorities.

A loaded cane made excellent sense if Leighton was going to be moving about very much in the world outside his laboratories. The mind inside that bald head had been one of the great scientific talents of modern England for half a century. Now it held the most vital secret of all-the secret of Dimension X. And it was the responsibility of J, as head of security and intelligence, to keep that secret safe, to keep the mission functioning smoothly, preventing the interference of Russians, Chinese, or anyone else who would want to explore the unknown.

Before J could follow that line of thought any further, something small shot out of a hole in the ceiling like a missile. It seemed to have homing properties as it shot across the ceiling toward J, then dropped down on his shoulder.

«Hello, Cheeky,» J said.

The missile was a monkeylike creature, about two feet from its head to the base of a long tail. In place of fur, however, Cheeky had glossy blue feathers. In the dusty and decayed grandeur of the old house, he was an exotic splash of color.

He started pulling J's hair with one paw while he ran the other through his feathers, combing out dust and bits of plaster. J knew the hair-pulling was a gesture of affection, but still didn't want to wind up as bald as a tomato because the feather-monkey liked him so much.

Footsteps sounded behind the two men, and they turned to see Richard Blade striding toward them. No matter how tired or work-stained or casually dressed he was, Richard always strode, never just walked, unless he was too badly hurt to be on his feet at all. Standing six feet one, he moved his two hundred and ten pounds of muscle and bone with the deceptively easy grace of a tiger on the prowl-a grace that hid more than a tiger's deadliness.

Of course, if Richard Blade hadn't been as lethal as he was, he almost certainly would have been dead a long time ago, far away. Richard Blade was the other half of the secret of Dimension X-the only man whose qualities of mind and body let him travel time after time into a series of deadly and bizarre parallel worlds, the only living human being who could travel into Dimension X and return alive and sane.

Dimension X was discovered quite by accident, like so much else in the history of science. Lord Leighton was experimenting with hooking up Richard Blade's brain to what was then his most advanced computer, hoping to create a superior combination of human and electronic intelligence. Leighton had, hoped Blade's superior mental and physical abilities would be enhanced by connecting him to a computer, and that Blade would, in turn, improve the computers capabilities. Direct interaction, it was called, but instead of learning all the information stored in the computer, Blade was hurled off into the unknown, from which he returned only by the use of his wits and strength, with a good deal of luck thrown in.

Obviously the ability to explore a parallel Dimension, with lands that mirrored Home Dimension, and use their resources would be enormously valuable to England. So Project Dimension X was born.

A few years and a few million pounds later, they'd actually made some progress-although not much in proportion to the time and money spent, not to mention the number of scars on various portions of Richard Blade's anatomy.

As he always did, seeing Blade again after an interval, J studied the younger man closely. He didn't expect to see any changes, and didn't. Blade was older, wiser, and more experienced than he'd been when they first met. J was head of the secret military intelligence agency MI6A then, and Blade was its newest field agent, straight out of Oxford. Today Blade still walked alone, a man born into the wrong century, better fit for the life of a professional adventurer than anyone else J had ever met.

As Blade appeared, Cheeky let out a wild yeeeep of delight and launched himself from J's shoulder toward his master and friend. He forgot to let go of J's hair as he did, and a large tuft of it went with the feather-monkey. J winced and rubbed the spot.

«Cheeky, that was bad of you,» said Blade sharply, lightly slapping the feather-monkey about the head and shoulders several times.

«Mreeeep?» said Cheeky. He sounded contrite, but it was hard to tell what he was thinking. The only person who could was Blade himself. He'd found Cheeky in Dimension X, among the warring lords of the Crimson River, and immediately established a telepathic link with the feather-monkey. The two could communicate by sending each other mental images or pictures. Their minds seemed to communicate without the use of their senses, and this strange bond tied them together in a close relationship that Blade had never known with any human.

That telepathic link, J now knew, might be one of the biggest advances the Project ever made. Or at least that was Leighton's best guess-not that he was ever willing to admit that he was «guessing,» of course. He regarded «guessing» as an obscene act. Nevertheless, the peculiar bond between Cheeky and Blade seemed to enable the feather-monkey to travel into other Dimensions, too. Maybe now the scientists were close to discovering how to send other human beings to Dimension X.

With a subdued Cheeky on his shoulder, Blade led the way to the part of the house that he had already cleaned and redecorated. He had bought the country house for himself a short time ago; it was to be his haven in Home Dimension, a place to house the growing menagerie of creatures he brought back with him from his strange travels. Built in the eighteenth century and neglected since before the Second World War, the house was going to need even more work before it was really comfortable. But at least you could move about through it now without falling through the floors or having portions of the ceiling fall on you.

Blade removed dustcovers from three chairs and pointed to a fine mahogany sideboard on top of which were glasses, bottles of liquor, and a dish of dried fruits and nuts. «If you gentlemen can make free with the contents of the sideboard, I'll go take a shower. Cheeky will play host.»

«Yeeeeekkkkkkhhhhh!»

J looked at Blade. «You almost said that with a straight face. «

«Who? Me or Cheeky?»

«You.»

«Too bad. I didn't mean it as a joke.» Blade set Cheeky on the floor and went out. The two men stared at Cheeky, then at each other.

«If I thought Richard was playing a practical joke-«began Leighton indignantly.

J waved a hand in dismissal of that idea. «He's about the last man in the world to do that. No, I think he really does expect us to treat Cheeky as our host.» J went over to the sideboard and poured out two glasses of scotch for himself and Leighton and handed the mixed fruits and nuts to Cheeky. The feather-monkey picked up the dish, yeeeeped something that might have been «Thank you,» and then jumped up on top of the sideboard without spilling a thing from the dish and started nibbling.

Leighton was silent as he took his glass, then shook his head again. «If Richard isn't joking, what does he think Cheeky is?»

«Or who. Remember, he always calls Cheeky 'he.' «

«I'm not likely to forget it.»

«Oh, confound it, Leighton! Why don't you stop beating around the bush and come out and say that you think Richard's gone bonkers! You're thinking it so loudly I can hear you, and I'm not telepathic.»

Leighton drained his glass and set it firmly on a closed container of plastering compound, then made a steeple of his long fingers. «I'm not worried about Blade's — sanity, J. I hope you realize that if I were, I would have said so.»

J nodded. Leighton wasn't as close to Richard as he was. J had known Richard longer and better, seeing him almost as the son he never had. Leighton, in contrast, had started off seeing Richard as hardly better than some exotic and expensive sort of laboratory animal. He'd mellowed over time, though-it was only a rumor that he had a computer where his heart should be.

«What bothers me is something else,» Leighton went on. «Suppose this bond between Richard and Cheeky gets so close that it's impossible for Richard to link telepathically with anyone else we might want to send to Dimension X?»

«If there is anyone else.»

«Now who's being skeptical about telepathy?» said Leighton, with a twinkle in his eye. «Oh, I admit I was one of those who dismissed it. So damned many charlatans running around, it was hardly worthwhile picking out the real phenomena. But I can face facts. Richard's not a superman, not a mutant, not some creature from outer space. He's as human as you and I. Where there's one like him, there have to be others.»