It was certainly worth trying. In any land good slaves weren't usually mistreated on a moment's impulse. They were too valuable.

Blade set out to make himself look valuable.

At the end of the first day's march the slaves were watered, fed more porridge, and allowed to sleep in their chains in an open, grassy meadow. The next morning they started off again, with a new set of guards and four new slaves added to the chain.

So it went for ten days. The column moved steadily north, covering about twenty miles a day. That was hardly an easy day's stroll, even for Blade. Every day one or two people dropped out and had their throats cut by the roadside. But Blade had marched half again as far, on half as much food and water. He was never in any danger of dropping out.

The column avoided all except the smallest villages and towns, but they saw plenty of traffic on the road-farm carts, trains of pack animals, carriages of nobles with whole squadrons of outriders, and more columns of slaves, some of them up to three hundred strong. In spite of the threat from the Steppemen and the Emperor's taste for his subjects' blood, the affairs of Saram seemed to be in good order, even to be rather prosperous.

This too did not particularly surprise Blade. The Emperor's whims were savage, but they were probably like lightning, striking at random. For every man or woman enslaved or tortured, a hundred might go about their business quietly, living, prospering, and dying of old age.

Kul-Nam might very well be a madman and a bloodthirsty despot. Yet it was hard for Blade to believe that most of the man's subjects would gladly exchange his rule for chaos, civil war, or conquest by the Steppemen.

On the eleventh day the column of slaves, now more than sixty strong, marched through a valley in the coastal bills onto a road running north beside the sea. That night they had chunks of salt fish thrown into their porridge and were marched into the surf to bathe. Two men drowned. Blade found an enormous relief in getting nearly two weeks' filth off his body.