Blade refused to believe this was sheer carelessness. These men looked like experienced soldiers who wouldn't leave a camp unguarded without some good reason. Either they knew there was nothing prowling the valley by night that could do them any harm, or there was something against which there was no possible defense. That was not a pleasant thought, and Blade found himself looking cautiously around him and taking extra care to move silently.
Then he laughed softly to himself. If the soldiers who knew this land had decided there was no point in losing sleep, he would take his cue from them. He retreated to a safe distance and found level ground behind a large boulder that would conceal him when dawn came. Then he settled down for another night of trying to find soft spots in the rocks.
Chapter 3
The camp woke at dawn with a burst of human and animal voices, drums and trumpets, and the clatter of equipment and weapons. Blade listened, trying to make out what was being said.
He knew that if he made out any words he'd be able to understand them. As he passed into each new Dimension, the computer somehow altered his brain so that the language of that Dimension came to him as plain English-and his own speech came out in the new language. He'd experienced this miracle every time he went into Dimension X, but even Lord Leighton and the Project's best neurologists didn't understand exactly how the miracle took place.
Unfortunately, he was too far off to make out any words. He started crawling closer, but before he'd covered half the distance, the soldiers were marching off again. All he could make out was, «Hud, na, na, ni! Hud, na, na, ni!»-which was probably nothing more than a marching cadence and certainly didn't tell him very much. He settled down to another day on the trail of the soldiers.