Unfortunately, once more his luck had been bad. The Baran himself had issued a new edict that the Desert Riders were to send their patrols to the very foot of the mountains of the Hashomi. They were also to arrest any man found wandering alone, or any party without proper identification. Such people were to be enslaved if they surrendered peacefully, killed on the spot if they resisted or attempted to escape after capture.

Apparently the Baran was not yet ready to make open war on the Hashomi. He was quite happy to set his soldiers to making it more difficult for the Hashomi to wage war against him.

The edict must have been very recent indeed, thought Blade, or the Hashomi would have heard of it and I would have been expecting something like this. Either that, or the network of spies the Hashomi claimed to have in Dahaura had let them down.

It was almost pleasant to think of the arrogant, fanatical Hashomi making such a mistake. Unfortunately it was Blade who was going to have to pay for that mistake. He would reach Dahaura as a bound slave, destined for sale in the market and perhaps worse. He didn't like the word «trimming» which he had heard mentioned by several of his captors. He suspected it referred to making a male slave into a eunuch. Slavery itself he could survive, but losing his manhood was another matter. They'd have to kill him first, and they wouldn't do it without a few casualties of their own!

Once Blade was sure he'd been captured by men of Dahaura, he tried to speak to them. He tried three times. The first two times he was slapped, hard enough to split his lip. The third time one of the men drew a knife and flourished it in a way that hinted Blade would lose an eye if he opened his mouth again.

«The Law of Silence for slaves is made of iron, and you would do well to remember that!»

Toward sunset they brought Blade water and food-raisins, flat bread, a small piece of dried meat. Then they lifted him onto the back of one of the pack camels, tying his hands to the reins and his feet to the stirrups. The others mounted up, and the whole patrol moved off into the desert night.

The patrol quartered the desert for three more days, from oasis to oasis. Apart from feeding him, the Baran's men ignored Blade completely. He had nothing to do but listen to the conversations around him and watch the desert scenery. The conversations told him little that was new and the scenery quickly lost its appeal.

At last the patrol reached an oasis that seemed to be a base for the Desert Riders. There was a whitewashed stone fort that would have looked at home in any of a dozen movies about the French Foreign Legion.

There was also a caravan heading eastward, out of the desert. The patrol captain turned Blade over to the caravan, with depressingly strict instructions to kill him if he tried escaping. That same evening the caravan rode out of the fort and turned east.

Five days later they were out of the desert, and six days after that they came to Dahaura.

The name Dahaura! meant «Jewel of the Da,» the mile-wide river on whose banks the city was built. The city covered all the land inside a wide bend of the Da. At the river end the ground rose into a gigantic rocky hill. Successive Barans had leveled and terraced the hill bit by bit, surrounding it with walls and building their palaces on top of it. With those walls defended by a loyal garrison, the Barans had a formidable citadel that could hold out even against an enemy who'd entered the city itself.

That would not be easy. The landward side of Dahaura was protected by a wall eight miles long and fifty feet high, with nine towered gates. On the river sides the city was defended by a strong fleet of galleys and the mile-wide river itself. A single floating bridge crossed the Da, entering the city directly below the walls of the Baran's citadel.

Dahaura could stand against almost any attack from the outside. That was the problem. The attack the Master of the Hashomi was readying would be one from within. How well could the city and the Baranate cope with that?

The caravan turned onto a brick road that approached the walls of Dahaura through several miles of cultivated land. Blade saw fruit orchards, vegetable patches, and vineyards with fat bunches of purple and green grapes. Small humped bridges carried the road over a network of irrigation canals.

Closer to the city the road grew wider and the traffic on it grew heavier. More caravans, with camels, horses, and mules all lurching or trotting along with a great clatter and clinking. Ox-carts piled high with barrels and sacks rumbled along, their drivers cracking long whips. Several times parties of soldiers passed, usually riding at a canter on graceful horses.

Still closer to the city, the side of the road began to be lined with white stone walls surmounted with gilded iron spikes. Beyond the walls Blade could make out treetops and the tiled roofs of sprawling houses. Once they passed a square white block of a building set in the middle of a neatly manicured lawn. Beside the building rose a five-sided tower, on each side a mosaic showing the red spiral that was the symbol of Junah, the One and Universal. A platform on top of the tower supported a circular brass gong as tall as a man.

Then at last they came up to the outer gate. Four guards came out, bare to the waist except for blue necklaces and their bows and quivers. They examined the caravan leader's pass, ran quickly along the line of men and animals, then signaled to their comrades on top of the wall. Ahead, double gates of iron-bound timber twenty feet on a side creaked open. The caravan trotted forward. A moment of darkness and coolness, then the sun was blazing down on the caravan again. Richard Blade had come to Dahaura.

A million people lived in Dahaura and it seemed to Blade that all of them were out in the streets at once. The caravan advanced one step, almost one inch at a time, down a wide street that was packed from curb to curb with other animals, men, women, and children, carts, wagons, and ornate carriages.

The air was thick enough to slice with the smells of animals, unwashed human beings, overripe fruit, herbs and spices, perfumes, and charcoal smoke from the braziers of the craftsmen in the little alleys opening off either side of the street.

Now traffic came to a complete halt as two wagons ahead locked wheels. One driver tried to jerk his vehicle free. The sacks piled high on the other wagon toppled into the first one. Several burst and showered the driver with yellow grain. The drivers cursed each other, everyone they were holding up cursed them, their oxen lowed angrily and tried to butt at each other. Eventually both drivers had the sense to back up, and the traffic untangled itself.

Blade saw similar scenes three more times before a massive gray-brown building loomed up at the end of the street. It had «prison» written all over it even without the armed guards at each gate and on the roof.

The caravan stopped briefly at the main gate of the prison and Blade was ordered to dismount. More of the barechested, blue-necklaced infantry of the Baran ran out to surround him.

«Dangerous?» one of them asked, pointing at Blade.

The caravan leader shrugged. «The Desert Riders took him alive, and he didn't give us much trouble either. Tries to talk out of turn, but that's about all.»

«Right,» said the soldier. He raised a spiked truncheon and prodded Blade in the buttocks with it hard enough to draw blood. «Come on, you. And remember the Law of Silence.»

By now Blade knew better than to do anything but obey. The guards hustled him off, and an iron-barred gate clanged shut behind them. A ramp paved with worn flagstones sloped down into the foundations of the prison. Blade's guards half-led, half-pushed him down it, and after another few steps the sunlight was gone.