Blade hoped he'd convinced the Wizard. Otherwise his last moments might be at hand, because he was absolutely certain that death would be preferable to letting the Wizard control his mind. He also hoped that he wouldn't have to argue like this every time he and the Wizard didn't see eye to eye.

The silence continued, until at last the Wizard's shoulders sagged slightly. He forced a smile on to his face, but there was no pleasure in his voice when he spoke.

«Very well, I see that I can expect nothing better from you. Your skill in arraying your arguments is as great as the skill of Sir John Hawkwood in arraying his men.»

Blade remembered that Sir John Hawkwood had been an English soldier of fortune, the first of the great condottieri and the chief general of the city of Florence against the Visconti. He was being praised very highly indeed.

«Thank you, my lord count,» said Blade, with a slight nod.

The sour mood seemed to leave the Wizard and his smile broadened. «Come, come. I think we need not waste more time in courtly exchanges. This is not the Palazzo Ducale in Milan.» He drew his dagger, holding it by the point, and threw it to the far corner of the room. Then he lay down on the floor on his back. Blade knelt beside him.

«Are you ready, Blade?»

«I am.»

The Wizard frowned in concentration, then raised his hand-and pressed it against Blade's forehead. Blade held the dagger in both hands, the point an inch from his chest, ready to drive it in by pure reflex the moment he felt the Wizard seeking control of his mind. Their eyes met once again, briefly-then the room around them vanished in the sequence of images the Wizard was pouring into Blade's mind.

— A young knight, clearly the Wizard at nineteen or twenty, riding up and down the tilting yard, practicing with lance, sword, and shield.

— The same man, riding across green fields of waving grass, picking off birds with a small crossbow, his servants riding behind to pick them up.

— Grimmer scenes, many of them in rapid succession, of the wars in which the Visconti of Milan sought to weld northern Italy into a single kingdom under their rule. Pitched battles in the open field, ambushes by night, a tent where wounded men lay moaning in fever or screaming with pain as the surgeon set smashed bones and probed for arrowheads, the walls of Florence with their flaunted banners looming above the battlements. Finally the deathbed of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, and the collapse of all the Visconti hopes to be kings in Italy.

— A small but strong castle, perched on a rocky spur, with vineyards, olive orchards, and fields of grain spreading around it.

— A chamber, high in the tower of the castle, where the Wizard, now a man with his face lined and gray showing at his temples, read scrolls, mixed fuming chemicals, sat in meditation or trances, slowly grew thin and hollow-eyed with the strain of his explorations of the unknown.

— A nightmare of swirling, dancing colors and images, as the Wizard's mind twisted itself, creating a whole new set of senses, so that Home Dimension slipped away.

— The Wizard awakening in a field in Rentoro, within sight of a hill Blade recognized as the one where the castle now stood. The Wizard was unarmed, but he was fully clothed.

The people drifting out from the nearest town to start work on the great castle. Some came with smiling or at least curious faces. Others came with the slow tread and the blank faces of zombies.

On and on, image after image, each image confirming both the Wizard's own tales and everything Blade had heard from Lorya. Blade saw the training of the Wolves, the burning of rebellious towns, the hanging of rebels, the last great battle outside the walls of Morina. He saw a courtyard and a line of Wolves galloping across it, to pass between two glowing objects lying on the ground and vanish into thin air.

He saw a room in the castle, with row after row of great glass bowls on carved wooden shelves. He saw the Wizard take down one of the glass bowls, place it on the floor in front of him, then contemplate it. An image sprang into life inside the bowl-and Blade recognized the walls of Dodini.

He saw another room, where the Wizard sprawled on a silk-draped couch, wearing only red silk trousers and a dagger, waited on hand and foot by lovely young women who wore nothing at all.

He saw what seemed to be the shaft of a mine, where gaunt men with tangled hair and beards slaved to move great chunks of some crystalline substance onto hoists or into carts. Other men with wolf badges watched over the miners, urging them on with long iron-tipped whips.

At last the Wizard stopped sending images, and Blade saw no more. He stood up and stepped back on legs that shook slightly. He was breathing hard and sweating, as if he'd just run several miles with man-eating tigers at his heels.

Bernardo Sembruzo, Conde di Pietroverde, the Wizard of Rentoro, was everything his own words and the legends of Rentoro said he was. He was a telepath who could reach, read, and control other minds. He was a scientist who'd discovered some form of matter transmission. He was the discoverer of a method of traveling into Dimension X by the unaided power of the human mind.

He was, in short, the single most important human being alive in any Dimension Blade knew.

He was also an Italian Renaissance nobleman, who was using all these vast gifts to rule Rentoro like an Italian Renaissance tyrant. This did not diminish his gifts. It did greatly increase the danger of dealing with him.

Blade shook his head furiously, like a man surrounded by a swarm of buzzing, whining insects. Here in the Wizard's castle he'd discovered mysteries not only far beyond what he'd expected, but far beyond what he would have believed possible. Hunger, fatigue, and astonishment slowed his thoughts, but he forced them into motion. What next? Find out exactly what the Wizard must know from you, came the answer.

Blade licked dry lips. «I believe you now, I have learned enough from you. What do you want to know from me?»

The Wizard shrugged. «The same as I have been asking. Where do you come from, when did you leave it for Rentoro, and how did you get here?»

«You will not need to enter my mind for any of this?»

«Not if you tell me freely.»

That was reasonable enough, so Blade told the Wizard of his own Home Dimension, of Lord Leighton and J, of the computer and his journey to Rentoro. As he spoke, he thought he saw the Wizard's face set into a hard mask and his shoulders sag again.

When Blade was finished, the Wizard sighed. «So I thought it was with you,» he said. «I entered your mind briefly, while you lay asleep with the woman. I saw pictures of much of what you have just described, but they were confused, as is often the case in the mind of a sleeping man. I could not understand, but I would not risk waking you and warning you. I learned your name, I learned that you had come to Rentoro from some other world, and that you would seek me out. That was enough, for the moment.»

«I see,» said Blade. That explained the strange dreams, the night after he'd rescued Lorya and fled with her from Dodini.

«Now I learn that you have come to me from England, but an England more than five hundred years in the future of my Milan. You have come not by the powers of your own mind, although those powers are great, but by a vast mechanical device I do not understand. What I do understand, though, is that you seem to offer me no way home. You could perhaps help me cross the Dimensions to your time and home, but not to cross time to my castle and my own people.» The Wizard's voice was level and expressionless. Only the hands, clenched until the knuckles stood out white, revealed his anguish.

Blade knew that he had to say something encouraging, that would convince the Wizard of his value. He also knew that he had to choose his words very carefully. In disappointment or in anger, the Wizard could have him killed with no more trouble than swatting a fly.