Джеффри Лорд - Return To Kaldak

Blade, Feragga, and Baliza left the party by midnight, while they were all still sober enough to fly. They were going south, to meet the one man Blade wanted to see who hadn't been at the party. It would have caused too much talk, to recall Bairam from his exile in the south.

Feragga was going south with them, to wait out the crisis in Doimar. «I'm going back as soon as I'm sure I'll be heard instead of shot at,» she said bluntly. «And if that doesn't happen-if I have to stay in Kaldak-I'm not going to ask anyone to come. Anybody who wants to come to me from Doimar, that's up to them.»

«We risked-«Baliza began, but her father put a hand on her shoulder.

«I know what you risked, and I know what you did. That destruction of the cliff-it wasn't your fault, but the Seekers died. My Seekers, more than Detcharn's.

«I'm grateful to be alive. I'm still not grateful enough to be a traitor, and there's nothing you can do to change my mind on that. Nor you either, Blade,» she said with a grin. «I've still got a soft heart for you, but not a soft head.»

Blade had the feeling that before long the Kaldakans were going to wish they'd left Feragga in Doimar! He couldn't completely share the feeling-he was too glad she was alive. But he wasn't at all surprised at her refusal to be a traitor. That was one more thing he could have told the Kaldakans in advance, if he hadn't been so carefully hiding his identity.

He made a mental note to talk with Feragga about the use of rockets for space flight. If the Doimari got turned in that direction, it might keep them peaceful and would certainly help the whole Dimension recover. If only his son Detcharn had thought of that himself! His name might be honored in the history of this world, instead of cursed.

To their surprise, Geyrna met them at the lifter field. «Do you mind if I come along?» she said.

«Not if you don't mind telling me why,» said Baliza.

«I want to talk to Feragga,» Geyrna said. «The Koldak Council of Nine is going to ask why she won't jump through hoops for them. I'd like to have an answer for them. It may not save my seat, but it will save my conscience.»

«How did you guess what I've just been telling these people?» demanded Feragga. «You aren't a mind-speaker, are you?»

Geyrna grinned sourly. «Just natural shrewdness-no, if I had that, I might still have a husband. And that's the other reason I'm going south. I want to try putting things back together with Bairam. He shouldn't have gone drinking the way he did, but-well, I did give him some reasons. Maybe they would have been reasons for any man, not just Bairam. I don't know. I want-«She squeezed her eyes shut as Baliza embraced her.

They would need two pilots for the flight south. Blade and Baliza tossed a coin for it, and Baliza won the first watch. As the lights of Kaldak faded behind them, Blade crawled aft and curled up on a pile of old parachutes. Cheeky curled up on his chest, one paw twined in Blade's beard. Blade couldn't remember when he'd last had a good night's sleep. While he was as tough as a diesel locomotive, he also knew the need to sleep when he could.

The worst might be over, but he refused to assume it was until he woke up back in Home Dimension.

Something was wrong.

There was a blanket over Blade, and there hadn't been one in the lifter. Instead of the stiff parachutes, there was a cool sheet under him, smooth and with a smell that practically shouted, «Hospital!» Had the lifter crashed.

Perhaps. But Kaldak didn't have hospitals like that.

Blade opened his eyes, then sat up. He was in the familiar room in the Complex's private hospital where he spent a couple of days for observation after each trip. That was the rule, whether he came back wounded or not. The doctors wanted their piece out of him, and that was all there was to it!

He looked around the room. Hanging on the wall was the Kaldakan soldier's uniform he had worn on the flight to see Bairam in his place of exile in the south. Why the Complex's scientists hadn't yet absconded with it to conduct their experiments was a mystery, but then it was as hard now to believe what he was seeing as it had been to believe he was back in Kaldak. However, there was just as little point in ignoring what his senses were shouting to him.

He'd fallen asleep in Kaldak and awakened in Home Dimension. As simple as that-the simplest and easiest transition from one Dimension to another in the whole history of the Project!

And if that wasn't enough, this simple homecoming was the end of the most complicated, nerve-wracking mission in the history of the Project. Well, no. The fight against the Ngaa had been worse. But this return to Kaldak was certainly a bloody good second!

Blade laughed. Somewhere up above was a Higher Power with a taste for practical jokes. Whether you called him God, Buddha, Allah, or the Lord of the Laws, he had to exist. There was no other way to explain this sort of thing.

Then a thought made Blade's heart race so that the nurse on duty monitoring his vital signs nearly punched the emergency button.

Cheeky!

Yeeep? It sounded both sleepy and irritable, but it was close at hand. Blade reached for a light switch and searched the room again. There it was, in a corner-a large cage of heavy wire mesh coated with plastic, and Cheeky inside it.

They must have known he shouldn't be separated from Blade, but they couldn't quite bring themselves to let something as unsanitary as a feather-monkey loose in a hospital room. So they'd caged him.

The bastards and their rules! Blade punched the call button for the nurse and got out of bed, trailing wires. Cheeky was getting out of that cage now, and if the doctors fussed-well, he could always call up Lord Leighton. The scientist would be on his side, where Cheeky was concerned.

When the nurse arrived, Blade was sitting on the bed, scratching Cheeky behind the ears. He was smiling as he contemplated what Lord Leighton would say to the doctors if their stupidity got him dragged out of bed at night.

Blade stopped smiling when he contemplated what Leighton would say when he found out that people in Dimension X had learned about inter-Dimension travel. True, the technicians and scientists of Kaldak and Doimar were in no position at the moment to discover a method for traveling to other Dimensions, but in time-

Leighton wasn't going to be pleased, either, that Blade and Cheeky had been separated upon arrival in Dimension X, and that Blade never found out anything about why he went to Kaldak and Cheeky went to Doimar. That might affect their plans for the next trip.

But at least Cheeky was here with him in Home Dimension. That and the fact that Blade had brought back with him the Kaldak uniform-made of a Oltec fabric and an Oltec kind of plastic-should certainly satisfy the scientist somewhat.

As for Blade, he was pleased enough that a balance of power now seemed to exist in the Dimension he had just visited. It had been necessary for the Doimari to lose some power and for the Tribes to gain some, but now, with Kaldak, they should all be able to live in a state of equilibrium and peace.

In a somewhat less well-equipped hospital in Doimar, the Seeker named Arsha propped herself up in bed. She was feeling much better today, and she knew it wouldn't be too much longer until she and her baby were discharged.

Arsha was the young scientist's assistant who had been experimenting on Cheeky at the research complex, before the feather-monkey had escaped and been reunited with Blade. She was also the one who had been punished by Detcharn but who had later seen to it that he fell to his death from the balcony railing. Arsha had also been one of the few Seekers to escape the cataclysm when the cliff had collapsed. During the chaos of the attack, she had managed to sneak down many flights of stairs, deep into the bowels of the earth, to the secret rooms where the baby Brant was kept. After the rocks and earth had settled, she had managed to carry the infant to safety through the long escape tunnel, which let out a mile away from the destroyed complex. Exhausted and badly shaken, she was spotted by a Doimari lifter and then taken to the City, where she claimed the baby was her own. Since all the other Seekers who knew about the baby had died in the cataclysm, Arsha alone knew the infant's true identity: he was the son of Du-Shro Detcharn and his half-sister Moshra. He was thus the grandson of the Sky Master Blade.