Cheeky!

Yeeep? It sounded both sleepy and irritable, but it was close at hand. Blade reached for a light switch and searched the room again. There it was, in a corner-a large cage of heavy wire mesh coated with plastic, and Cheeky inside it.

They must have known he shouldn't be separated from Blade, but they couldn't quite bring themselves to let something as unsanitary as a feather-monkey loose in a hospital room. So they'd caged him.

The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and their rules! Blade punched the call b.u.t.ton for the nurse and got out of bed, trailing wires. Cheeky was getting out of that cage now, and if the doctors fussed-well, he could always call up Lord Leighton. The scientist would be on his side, where Cheeky was concerned.

When the nurse arrived, Blade was sitting on the bed, scratching Cheeky behind the ears. He was smiling as he contemplated what Lord Leighton would say to the doctors if their stupidity got him dragged out of bed at night.

Blade stopped smiling when he contemplated what Leighton would say when he found out that people in Dimension X had learned about inter-Dimension travel. True, the technicians and scientists of Kaldak and Doimar were in no position at the moment to discover a method for traveling to other Dimensions, but in time- Leighton wasn't going to be pleased, either, that Blade and Cheeky had been separated upon arrival in Dimension X, and that Blade never found out anything about why he went to Kaldak and Cheeky went to Doimar. That might affect their plans for the next trip.

But at least Cheeky was here with him in Home Dimension. That and the fact that Blade had brought back with him the Kaldak uniform-made of a Oltec fabric and an Oltec kind of plastic-should certainly satisfy the scientist somewhat.

As for Blade, he was pleased enough that a balance of power now seemed to exist in the Dimension he had just visited. It had been necessary for the Doimari to lose some power and for the Tribes to gain some, but now, with Kaldak, they should all be able to live in a state of equilibrium and peace.

In a somewhat less well-equipped hospital in Doimar, the Seeker named Arsha propped herself up in bed. She was feeling much better today, and she knew it wouldn't be too much longer until she and her baby were discharged.

Arsha was the young scientist's a.s.sistant who had been experimenting on Cheeky at the research complex, before the feather-monkey had escaped and been reunited with Blade. She was also the one who had been punished by Detcharn but who had later seen to it that he fell to his death from the balcony railing. Arsha had also been one of the few Seekers to escape the cataclysm when the cliff had collapsed. During the chaos of the attack, she had managed to sneak down many flights of stairs, deep into the bowels of the earth, to the secret rooms where the baby Brant was kept. After the rocks and earth had settled, she had managed to carry the infant to safety through the long escape tunnel, which let out a mile away from the destroyed complex. Exhausted and badly shaken, she was spotted by a Doimari lifter and then taken to the City, where she claimed the baby was her own. Since all the other Seekers who knew about the baby had died in the cataclysm, Arsha alone knew the infant's true ident.i.ty: he was the son of Du-Shro Detcharn and his half-sister Moshra. He was thus the grandson of the Sky Master Blade.

She looked over to where the baby sat in his crib. He was watching her with his penetrating dark eyes, and he smiled and gurgled in delight when she turned to look at him. He certainly was a rugged-looking little boy, big for his age, with his st.u.r.dy body and black hair. He would grow up to be quite a man, perhaps even a G.o.d like the Sky Master himself.