More figures were appearing on the balcony. Still no sign of any change from the usual routine, or of any awareness of danger. One man was visibly standing a little apart from his fellows. Then Blade saw the gleam of a lifter dropping down, to swing just in front of the man. The First on the Ground launched himself downward. In a few minutes he was indeed on the ground. Blade heard the familiar words of the formal declaration faintly across the hundred yards to the base of the tower.

Then men started swinging themselves out into space on lifters and plunging downward. Blade felt his own breath quicken, and felt a tension almost radiating from the forty-odd men scattered across the Waste Land around him. They were primarily a diversionary force, to fight only if there was no other way to keep the war party busy. Their main goal was the balcony, and a rendezvous with the main attack.

It would not be long now. More than half the war party was already on the ground, and Blade could count a dozen warriors descending on lifters at any one moment. Sixty, seventy, eighty-the number of men on the ground swelled continuously.

And then there was a sudden soundless flurry of motion among the figures remaining on the balcony, and the glint of dancing swords catching the sun. One of the figures was forced against the railing, and then over it. The dark shape plunged down through two hundred feet of air, his limbs flailing desperately. A small puff of dust rose where he struck the earth. A moment later another came sailing down after it, and a moment later two more. One of the last seemed to be wearing the work clothes of one of the Low People, but even Blade's eagle-sharp eyes could not be certain.

But he could be certain that something had gone badly wrong with the attack inside the tower. It was supposed to strike upward from the lowest Levels to the balcony, clear it, then lower the lifters for the men on the ground outside. That way the whole attack would not have to fight its way up the narrow stairs, where the defending warriors would have all the advantages. But the attack was not supposed to start until after the war party was well on its way to the Plain of War. Someone had blundered, and the alarm was up. Blade cursed under his breath.

A moment later someone else blundered. This time it was one of Blade's own men. Forgetting to wait for Blade's signal, he rose from his hiding place and hurled his smoke bomb. This time Blade swore out loud, in a bellowing roar that rolled away across the Waste Land. Plumes of green smoke suddenly spurted up on either side of him in response to the first bomb, as the scouts relayed the message. Blade's straining ears could pick out war cries on the other side of the tower as the main attacking party rose from its cover and moved into action.

He wasted no more breath swearing. The damage was done. Now all he could do was to try to salvage as much as possible-perhaps even a victory. Blade himself rose from cover, snatched a smoke bomb from the sack at his waist, and hurled it as far as he could toward the war party. Thick, oily green smoke gushed up, spreading fast across his field of vision, mixing with the mist to form an impenetrable curtain.

Seeing Blade in action, his other forty warriors joined in. The war party vanished behind a solid wall of rolling, greasy green smoke. The wall spread to either side, and forward and backward as well. Within moments of the first bomb, gentle swirling greenness was all around Blade. With luck, both his own men and the war party would be completely invisible from the balcony. The men up there would have no idea of what was happening on the ground.

He dipped into the bag again, pulled out a white armband, and tied it about his left arm. With everybody on both sides wearing green, some sort of identification was needed to distinguish attackers from defenders. Blade hoped that all his men would remember this precaution. If they didn't, on their own heads be it. He wasn't going to stop to ask questions.

Then he pulled out a whistle, put it to his lips, and blew hard. The mist and the smoke and his own taut nerves did weird things to the whistle blast. It seemed to go on and on, echoing from the walls of all seven towers like some terrible death-shriek. But from behind Blade and on either side of him came the sound of running feet. Dim figures pounded past in the smoke, heading for the tower and the war party. The warriors of Melnon were accustomed to fighting duels, not pitched battles. So the warriors of the Serpent would have no training to help them stand off a massed attack. Nor did the warriors of the Leopard have much training to help them deliver one. Blade hoped surprise and speed and the smokescreen would let them get away with it, however. He drew his own two swords and broke into a run.

Blade wore light sandals, like the rest of his men, and he skimmed lightly over the broken ground. But others ran even faster. Before Blade had covered half the distance to the base of the tower, war-cries and death-cries and the clang of weapons sounded from ahead.

Blade charged through a thick patch of smoke and came out in the middle of the fight. A small wiry figure darted at him, with his long sword reaching out. There was no flash of white on the man's arm. Blade parried by reflex and struck by calculation. His short sword drove into the man so hard that it penetrated through the armor and into the flesh. Blood spurted down the glossy green, and the man howled in agony and reeled back.

He reeled into the path of one of Blade's men, forcing him to halt for a moment. A long sword swished out of the smoke and took the exile's head clean off. But that in turn slowed the man with the long sword long enough for Blade to close under his guard and kick him in the groin. The man doubled up, and as he did so, Blade's long sword came down. A second head flew into the air, to bounce and roll to a stop not far from the first.

That was the first and last exchange of blows that Blade remembered at all clearly. From the moment the second head struck the ground, the battle dissolved and flowed around him in an endless confusion of rushing bodies, flashing swords, and screaming men. He remembered losing his short sword to a down-cut from an oversized warrior, closing with the man, and chopping him across the throat with a knife-hand karate blow. He remembered tripping over a body that suddenly rolled under his feet, and rolling in his turn to escape the down-slash of along sword. Then he sprang to his feet behind the attacker, closed, locked both hands around the man's head, and jerked back hard to snap his neck like a carrot.

He even remembered shouting, «Hold! Warriors of the Tower of the Serpent, hold! We come only to destroy Nris-Pol, a danger to us all! We are not your enemies!» But nobody in the war party believed him. He didn't really expect them to.

Eventually both the smoke and the fighting began to break up. Some of the survivors of the war party ran blindly off into the Waste Land, pursued by some of Blade's survivors. Others, less panic-stricken, ran to their lifters and began to rise into the air.

But Blade had planned for this also. Several of his men ran forward, swinging weighted lines. They whirled the lines about their heads, then sent them whipping upward. The weights looped around the lifter cords, tangling them. Before the men on the lifters could react, the men on the ground had fastened their cords to stout pegs. A few hefty blows with a mallet drove each peg into the ground. And then it was just a tug of war between the reel above and the peg below.

Usually it was the reel that lost. They were not designed to cope with the extra strain. One by one they burnt out, and let their lifters fall. Some of the men on the lifters survived the falls long enough for Blade's men to have to fight them. But Blade saw one warrior come straight down from forty feet up. He writhed about like a half-severed worm, his back obviously broken. Blade went over to him and put him out of his misery with the short sword.