Fire exploded in Blade's head, as something heavy smashed down on his skull. The fire spread and swelled, blinding him as he fell, then swamping all his other senses so that he barely felt the sand grains against his skin.

At last the fire turned into blackness, and the blackness swallowed Blade.

Waking up a chained prisoner with a splitting headache is never pleasant. When you haven't expected to wake up at all and aren't quite sure that you're alive, the experience is also confusing. Blade hadn't been so disoriented and uncertain since his first few arrivals in Dimension X.

He was chained by the ankles and wrists to damp wood gritty with sand. Around him he could see grayish darkness, and overhead still more darkness with a blurred rectangular patch of blue in the middle. He smelled musty decay, human filth, and spoiled fish, and heard a distant background murmuring.

Blade decided he had to try forcing his mind to work and his senses to focus on the world around him. If they worked, well and good. If they didn't, he was either seriously injured and in deep trouble, or dead and in another world.

Blade wasn't sure which of the last two conclusions would be more unpleasant. On the whole, he suspected he would be better off; dead. If he was alive but helpless, he would still be within reach of a man planning to kill him as painfully as possible, without being able to defend himself very well. If he were dead, on the other hand-

Then he realized that he was analyzing the situation with his usual care, if not with his usual speed. So his mind was working-perhaps not well, but working nonetheless. He was definitely not dead.

However, the world around him remained as confusing and hard to define as before. Blade wondered if he had a mild concussion. He closed his eyes, leaned back, and winced as his throbbing head struck something solid a little too hard. He kept his eyes closed while he breathed slowly and deeply and used certain Yoga techniques he'd been studying over the last year. Originally he'd studied them with an eye to reducing the stress load of the transition into Dimension X. The apparent success of the KALI capsule made that unnecessary, but Blade kept up the exercises all the same.

Under the influence of the Yoga and the fresh oxygen pumped into his system, the pain in his head began to fade. So did other pains he hadn't noticed before. His ears began to sort out the background murmuring into the creak of wood, the clatter of metal on metal, and the sighing of wind. When he opened his eyes again, his vision was clear enough to tell him where he was.

He was in the hold of a small merchant ship at sea, with a light breeze blowing. On deck the cook was signaling that a meal was ready by banging his spoon against the pot. Blade's chains ran through iron shackles on wrists and ankles, and were hooked to massive iron rings set into the planks. Blade tested his freedom of movement. He'd be able to stand up or lie down, feed himself, probably even bathe. He wasn't a gorilla, and nothing less could break free.

The clinking of Blade's chains as he tested them brought a face peering over the edge of the hatch. It was broad, bearded, and remarkably uncurious.

«Unh, you're awake.»

«Where am I?»

The sailor laughed and started to turn away, then stopped, turned back, and spat down into the hold, just missing Blade. «Doesn't matter where you are, diver. You won't be with us long. Shell Island's the place for you.» He looked at Blade for a moment, as if waiting for the prisoner to start screaming or begging for mercy. Then he spat again, missed Blade again, and vanished.

Blade leaned back and ran what he'd learned about Shell Island through his memory. It was a nearly desert island about five days' sailing from Gohar. It was far enough from the western shore of the Sea so that escape to land was impossible without a boat. It was also in shallow water, surrounded by reefs with only one navigable ship channel through them to the open water.

The same shallows supported rich beds of tissue-shells and pearl oysters, and schools of the small mollusks that produced most of Gohar's valuable dyes. No single place in the Empire produced so much wealth, or was so feared by those who didn't share that wealth.

Like Devil's Island or Australia, Shell Island was a place for dangerous criminals the Goharans didn't execute. At any given time, several thousand men and women lived there.

Some lived longer than others, but few survived more than five years and still fewer lived out their sentences and returned sane and healthy to Gohar.

The convicts of Shell Island lived by diving for shells, netting dye-mollusks, extracting the tissues, dyes, and pearls, and sending them back to Gohar. All the work demanded either strength and endurance or skill and care. If you were neither strong nor careful, you didn't last very long. If the guards didn't kill you for sport, your fellow prisoners often did. If no human being killed you, the sun, poisonous sea snakes, sharks, starvation, drowning, and fevers had their turn. If you lasted long enough in spite of all the dangers, you would probably go insane and stumble off a cliff some night as you wandered around raving.

Blade had to admit that Shell Island wasn't his idea of an agreeable destination, but he also remembered what he'd said to Khraishamo. Shell Island wasn't escape-proof. He wouldn't let it be.

He soon learned that he couldn't do much toward escaping while he was aboard this ship. The crew clearly had strict orders to ignore everything a prisoner on his way to Shell Island might say or do. None of them had even heard that any such being as a «Man from the Future» was in Gohar. Blade tried to explain himself, but only convinced most of the crew that he'd already gone insane.

«Won't last two weeks on the island,» said the captain, shaking his head. «Waste o' food to take him there at all.» But orders were orders, and the captain was going to deliver Blade to Shell Island or sink to the bottom of the sea trying.

At the same time, the crew knew how to handle dangerous prisoners. They fed Blade fish and porridge and gave him water twice a day. Once a day they threw buckets of saltwater over him, and rubbed oil on his skin where the shackles chafed it. Otherwise they left him strictly alone. No one with keys or a weapon ever came within Blade's reach. Two men with spears held ready to throw stood by every time he was fed or cleaned. After the first three days Blade decided he wasn't going to get anywhere until he reached Shell Island. It might be no better, but it certainly couldn't be any worse than this ship.

He did learn one useful fact by listening to the crew talk. Kloret hadn't lied. Thrayket IV of Gohar was dead, and before the ship returned from Shell Island he would be buried in the Imperial Tomb along with three hundred years of his ancestors. From the captain on down, the crew were quite irritated at having to miss the funeral. They were partly consoled by not having to miss the coronation of His Radiance Harkrat II, with all the feasts and gifts and dancing in the streets while the public fountains ran with wine.

If Harkrat lives to be crowned, thought Blade, then decided that was being too pessimistic. Kloret might be ready to plunge Gohar into civil war if he thought it would give him advantages he could gain no other way. As long as he thought he could control the prince by blackmail, he would use other and safer methods of accumulating the power he wanted.

One thought of Kloret led to another. For the first time Blade began to wonder why he was alive and on his way to Shell Island, rather than dead and dropped into the sea with stones tied to his body. He knew he'd be guessing, but he also knew he had to think through what Kloret might have in mind for him. Against a man like the Prime Minister, it wasn't safe to sit and wait for facts to drop on you out of the sky.