By now the twilight was turning purple. A chill in the air began to nibble at Blade's bare skin. He scrambled down the rocks again and gathered up several of the fallen robes. Then he climbed back up, wrapped himself in the robes as well as he could, and curled up. He didn't expect to be comfortable, but he did expect that anyone climbing up the outcropping to get at him would make enough noise to penetrate his sleep. In both Home Dimension and Dimension X, survival was a matter of a thousand small precautions that made a man a more difficult victim.

Satisfied that he'd done his best, Blade relaxed. Like any healthy animal at the end of a long day's hunting, he was asleep in moments.

Nothing bothered Blade that night. He woke in a land lit by a dying moon and the first pink traces of dawn, but as lifeless and empty as the night before. He climbed back down the rock to the bones.

In the dawn he was able to make a more thorough search. He found more robes and tore some of them into strips, then tied the strips around his feet. All the boots and shoes were too small for Blade, even if the passage of time hadn't made them unwearable. A few layers of cloth would be better than nothing, to keep the stones from wearing the skin off his feet as he climbed toward the mountains. When he'd finished binding up his feet, he began searching for a weapon.

It was a long search. The ambushers had not only wiped the party out of existence, theyd stripped the bodies of everything except the clothes on their backs and the harnesses on their riding animals. Blade had to search through the whole area, scattering bones and whole skeletons that might have lain here undisturbed for more years than he'd lived. At times he felt slightly like a grave robber.

At last he turned over an almost intact skeleton and found a long knife thrust up between its ribs. Apparently the dead man had been stabbed, then fallen on his face, concealing the death weapon under himself so that it was overlooked in the search after the battle. Blade drew the knife out from between the dry ribs and examined it carefully.