Blade #16 - The Crystal Seas by Jeffrey Lord

Author:Jeffrey Lord [Lord, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pulp Adventure
ISBN: 9780523227801
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Published: 1975-11-30T13:00:00+00:00

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

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