It took the crystal, wavering and fading and imperfect, many hours to get this telecommunication through to Blade; when he realized what Lord L was up to he was badly upset and sought to send a message, by fierce concentration, that Lord L hold back. Blade wanted a full month to grow in. He had a plan. A plan that would be ruined if he suddenly regained his adult stature and strength. He was greatly relieved when the thought came, crystal inspired, that his Lordship understood and would do as Blade wished.

Meantime he learned much of this new dimension. He hid and listened as various women came, always women in pairs or sometimes threes or fours, and used the pavilion as a place of assignation for Lesbian love. The Izmir of Zir was an old man, mostly impotent and with bad breath, and there were five hundred women in his harem. Small wonder, Blade conceded as he lurked and watched, that they sought out the pavilion to writhe on the divans and use their bodies and artificial phalli to gain relief. There was, it seemed, a death penalty for such behavior.

There seemed to be a great many death penalties in Zir, and this was a paradox, for outwardly it was a land of milk and honey, with the air warm and fragrant and the sun golden. Blade did not dare venture beyond the pavilion, but he sometimes watched from an open window and was impressed by the beauty of the great park in which the harem stood. There were cunningly clipped trees and flowering shrubs and flitting birds and song and splashing water everywhere. Graveled paths led through mazes of high-growing hedges.

Only once did he see any of the guards, two large men with hard, brute faces who wore baggy pants and beaded vests and carried both sword and spear. They passed near the pavilion, hardly glancing in its direction, and Blade retired to his closet and hid for an hour. He could not stand up to such men yet. Not for a month.