The house master would not be budged from his decision. For a while it looked as if protocol would stand like an iron gate across Blade's path to the Emperor. This was not just embarrassing; with the whimsical and blood thirsty laws and customs of the Empire, it could become dangerous at any moment.

Eventually they had to borrow clothes for Blade. This took several more hours, but when Blade finally looked at himself in a mirror of polished bronze mounted in a silver frame, he had to admit the results were impressive. He wore black silk trousers bloused over the silver-embroidered tops of white kidskin boots. Above the waist he wore a white linen shirt, a short red tunic, a vest so stiff with gold lace that it could stand by itself, and a long blue coat that reached to his knees.

The sun was setting as Blade, Duke Boros, and Tulu left the outer wall to climb the hill to the House of Blood. The way up the hill lay up an immense flight of white marble steps with a gilded bronze railing on either side.

Blade noticed that the steps of the great staircase were too wide to climb in any sort of dignified fashion. A man had to climb them with a sort of scuttling movement that destroyed his dignity and also wasted his breath. As a man climbed, above him stood the terrible black castle, growing larger and more grim as it loomed higher and higher over him. Blade was quite sure that Kul-Nam had deliberately planned all this, to make sure that his visitors arrived in a properly intimidated frame of mind.

The black walls ahead were studded with glistening, elaborately carved cannon muzzles, and more cannons peered down from the tops of the towers. A deadly and continuous rain of stone and iron and lead would fall on the heads of any enemy trying to climb the hill. As long as the ammunition in the inner castle held out, any attacker would be lucky to get past the outer wall.