Behind him Blade heard a voice bellow, «Break left, break right, pick them up!» and the semicircle of armed men disintegrated. Two men grabbed each of the victims on the ground and carried them off. It was not a rout, not a panic flight of broken and routed men, but an orderly retreat of trained men responding to orders. In minutes the fourteen surviving warriors and their victims had vanished as completely as if they had never existed. The only sign that anything unusual had disturbed the sleep of the empty city was the four dead bodies lying on the rubble. The woman was nowhere to be found; Blade hoped she had run away and had not been carried off by her attackers or been driven to follow her friend into the river.

Blade had no idea of where he could find a safe place in this city. There might not be any such thing if these marauders roamed freely all over it. Perhaps his wisest course was to leave the city entirely, abandoning it to the marauders for good. But his curiosity was aroused. Obviously, there were at least two kinds of people in the city, the marauders and their well-dressed opponents. The marauders seemed to be first-class well-disciplined fighters. Their victims had no more notion of how to fight than pigs have of computer programming. But if anybody represented a higher form of civilization around there, it was the victims. Possibly their civilization was no longer as advanced as it had been when the city was built, but it appeared to be more advanced than that of the marauders. And considerably more decadent, too, judging from their helplessness.

A sudden rumble of thunder reminded Blade that he was not doing himself any good by standing there in the open and the cold, exposed to chance spears and passing showers. He would have to get to shelter and then worry about finding answers to the mystery of the city.

But first, some clothing. Ignoring the blood, he began stripping the tunics and kilts from his victims and trying them on for size.