By then she was washing her face in the last of the water from the canteen. She looked up at Blade, the glazed look gone but her face still showing doubt and confusion. Blade didn't blame her. She was as much at his mercy as she'd been at the soldiers', and he looked far more like them than like her.
Blade smiled. «Don't worry. I'm a friend, or at least no friend to those-!» He jerked a thumb at the corpses of the soldiers. «My name is Blade. Who are you and where-?»
He broke off as he noticed the woman was staring at him blank-faced, as if she didn't understand a word he was saying. The moment he stopped she began speaking a stream of quick, high-pitched one and two-syllable words. At least they sounded like words-Blade couldn't be sure. He suspected from the woman's tone that she was nervous, frightened, and trying to get an urgent message across to him. He might have guessed most of that if she'd never opened her mouth!
Again Blade asked, «Who are you?» and again the woman might as well have replied in Mandarin Chinese for all Blade could understand her. They went through this exchange twice more, as an unpleasant fact slowly dawned on Blade.
The strange twisting of his brain which made him understand and speak the language in each new Dimension wasn't working here. He could understand the soldiers, and no doubt they'd understand him if he ever had to talk to them. It was different with the woman. His own words were coming out in English, and the woman's in her own language, whatever that was.