Blade began to meet with some of those merchants by night, slipping gold into their hands. They said to him things they would not have dared to say in daylight. It did not take long for Blade to finish his picture of what was going on in Nurn and send the last detail of it off to the people waiting aboard Fox at Clintrod.

The last message he sent from the Inn of the Seven Cats read:

I am going tonight to a dealer reputedly in the service of the Duke himself. This is dangerous, but I must visit at least one such before I finish my work here.

There may be a trap laid for me. In case there is, I am having the four sailors move in disguise tonight to another inn. They will wait for me there. If I do not rejoin them or send word that I am safe within a day, they will head north and go aboard Fox. You will not wait for me after they appear, but set sail at once for Talgar. My disappearance will be the final proof that Duke Tymgur is behind the plot to embroil Talgar and the Sea Masters with each other, to his advantage.

The Goddess be with you. Blade

Blade did not particularly enjoy the prospect of sticking himself up like a lightning rod and seeing what Duke Tymgur would throw at him. But he couldn't see that he had much choice.

Richard Blade was prowling the streets of Mestron, at an hour when they were normally deserted by all honest people. No, that was not true. The Sisters of the Night, the high-class courtesans, were honest in that they gave value for money received. But none of their elegant carriages were within sight or hearing now.

Tonight Blade was not moving through the waterfront warehouses and taverns. He slipped along paths and alleys in a residential quarter, high on a wooded hill a good three miles from the harbor. It was also where Duke Tymgur's agent had promised a meeting.

Blade didn't know the quarter nearly as well as he knew the waterfront. The wooded villas and estates around him could easily hide an ambush. But he had no choice. If Duke Tymgur's agent seriously wanted to do business, that was fine. If he was setting a trap-well, no one could ask better proof of the Duke's treachery than an effort to murder the agent probing into his affairs. Blade hoped that if there was a trap, he could spring it and make his escape. He remembered what he had told Alanyra about getting the word out.

He had taken and was taking all the precautions he could think of. For the last mile he had followed a wandering, unpredictable course toward the rendezvous, to throw off anyone trying to follow him. He avoided patches of light as though they were quicksand and watched from the shadows each time he rounded a corner. His eyes flickered endlessly from side to side, his footsteps were light, and his hand was never far from his sword hilt.

He wore a short-sword and a broadsword on his belt, and all of his garments from hood to boots were dark gray or black. Under his tunic he wore a shirt of fine mail that would keep out all daggers and most swords. In sheaths at wrists and ankles, Blade carried four knives equally well-suited for stabbing or throwing. If there was a better concealed weapon than a good knife for silent killing in any dimension, Blade hadn't met it.

He also carried three signal pots in a pouch on his belt. Thrown down hard, they broke, ignited, and poured out vast clouds of thick greenish-white smoke. They made a signal clearly visible by day. By night they could also make a fleeing man invisible in a moment. Blade wasn't sure whether he was going to be cat or mouse in this game. But he knew that he might change from one to the other in a matter of seconds.

He checked behind him, looking down the street and then searching the wall tops to the left and right of him. No movement, not even a prowling cat or a waving branch. Blade took advantage of the pool of shadow to do a few limbering-up exercises. Then he stalked on.

He came to the street that led to the agent's villa. He flattened himself against the base of a vine-grown wall. The street stretched out of sight, the gate of the villa clearly visible in the moonlight. There was no other light in the street and none visible through the trees rising above the villa wall. But there was plenty of light for an archer to aim by, and the street was open and bare of cover.

He wasn't going to walk down that street, an easy target for any archer lying in wait. If the agent was honest, and Blade's cautious approach made him uneasy, that was too bad. He could always say that he suspected the villa was being watched by the Emperor's agents. (Probably it was. And suppose they chose this moment to move in? That would solve the problem of Duke Tymgur, to be sure. But it wouldn't be much help to Blade if the Emperor's men stabbed first and asked questions afterward.)

Blade waited until a patch of cloud drifted across the moon. Then he flitted catfooted by the crossroads and dove into a ditch. Now he was at the foot of the villa's wall, around the corner from the gate.

Blade looked up, to the top of the wall. It was no more than eight feet high, overgrown with vines and jostled by small trees. He could see no spikes on top. He waited for another moment of dimmed moonlight. Then he was up the wall with a rush.

He flattened himself on the loose, crumbling bricks on top just long enough to listen for any signs of alarm and look down inside the wall. Vines, bushes, and weedy patches of grass crowded up against the wall. He swung himself down inside the wall, and flattened himself on the damp earth behind one of the bushes.

Still no signs that anyone in the villa was awake, alert, or even alive. If this was a trap, they were obviously waiting until he was well inside to spring it. There it might be hard to fight and impossible to run.

Once more Blade was doing something he had done a score of times before in as many different places. Not always for stakes as high as tonight, though. Tonight was not a matter of scoring points against the Russians or the Chinese or the Albanians. Tonight could make or break the future of two, brave peoples.

In the garden Blade did not need to look for pools of shadow. It was practically all shadow under the trees. He had to look instead for enough light to see where he was going, and also where he had been. He wanted to have an escape route firmly in mind, so that he could make a fast retreat if any of a dozen things went wrong.

Blade moved on. He would dart across thirty feet of open grass and go to earth under a bush. Then he would look in all directions and listen to all the sounds coming in from all sides. There were night-birds giving off gurgling coos, insects whining, and somewhere the sound of water running over stones. No human sounds-no footfalls, no clink of weapons, no voices. If he hadn't known this was a garden, Blade would have said he was alone in a forest miles outside the city.

Then he would creep forward on his hands and knees under the bushes. The slick, close-woven fabric of his clothes shrugged off thorns and branch stubs, but there were always stones and roots to leave bruises. Sweat ran down his face. It would not damage his dark camouflage grease, but it did attract swarms of insects. They whined and darted around his face and into his eyes.

Blade's caution paid off just when he had nearly decided that it wouldn't. As he flattened himself against a vast, gnarled tree nearly eight feet thick, he saw a high hedge about fifty feet ahead. Light shone through it, revealing a stone-flagged walk on the other side. The light also silhouetted a number of human heads on the nearer side of the hedge.

Blade practically stopped breathing while he counted the men lying in wait. There were at least ten. Two had crossbows; the others seemed to carry swords or battle axes. As one of them half rose, the light revealed his face more clearly. Blade sucked in his breath. It was Stipors' henchman, the officer who had helped conduct the interrogation of the prisoners returning from the Sea Masters.