The computer did not fail. Blade lived and prospered and, when the thirty days had elapsed, he was his own brute and masculine self again, with the civilized trappings of Home Dimension fallen away as they always did when he was in X Dimension. His thews were mighty again, his legs like pillars of oak and his chest deep and his shoulders massive. He had his hair clipped to a decent length but let his beard grow long and black and curly. Now that his body again matched his head in proportion he was as handsome as ever, but he was not the Blade of HD. Beneath that flowing dark mane was a brain both subtle and shrewd, but with an animal cunning the normal Blade did not possess. By the time he had attained his growth again he was more a creature of Zir than of Home Dimension. He had adapted.

The Izmir kept his word. He had said that he could muster a dozen loyal guards and he did. They were led by a captain named Ogier, a stalwart, barrel-shaped man who clanked about in armor and whose only loyalty was to the old Izmir and, later, to Blade. It was this Ogier who, when the situation was explained to him, schemed how the child Blade could be kept alive.

«'Tis simple enough,» Ogier said, «given loyal men such as I have. There are twelve of us. Six of us will remain always awake and on guard. We will keep the boy here, Izmir, in your own chambers and six of us will be with him come night or come day. Six will guard and six will sleep, and so it will be until the need is past.» And he glanced down at Blade, who by this time had the size and heft of a ten-year-old.