the slash of steel, and my
throat closed in spasmodic dread. This was breaking the compact, bound
as they were not to inflict physical damage. I opened my lips to protest
this breaking of the bond of honor and met her dark blazing stare, and
suddenly the sweat broke out on my forehead. I had placed myself wholly
in their hands, and as Kyral had said, they were in no way bound by
honor to respect a pledge to a Terran!

Then, as my hands clenched into fists, I forced myself to relax. This
was a bluff, a mental trick to needle me into breaking the pact and
pleading for mercy. I set my lips, spread my palms wide against the wall
and waited impassively.

She said in her lilting voice, "Take care not to sever the tendons, or
his hands would be paralyzed and he may claim we have broken our
compact."

The points of the steel, razor-sharp, touched my palms, and I felt blood
run down my hand before the pain. With an effort that turned my face
white, I did not pull away from the point. The knives drove deeper.

Dallisa gestured to the _chak_. The knives dropped. Two pinpricks, a
quarter of an inch deep, stung in my palm. I had outbluffed her. Had I?

If I had expected her to betray disappointment--and I had--I was
disappointed. Abruptly, as if the game had wearied her already, she
gestured, and I could not hold back a gasp as my arms were hauled up
over my head, twisted violently around one another and trussed with thin
cords that bit deep into the flesh. Then the rough upward pull almost
jerked my shoulders from their sockets and I heard the giant _chak_
grunt with effort as I was hauled upward until my feet barely, on
tiptoe, touched the floor.

"Blindfold him," said Dallisa languidly, "so that he cannot watch the
ascent of the sun or its descent or know what is to come."

A dark softness muffled my eyes. After a little I heard her steps
retreating. My arms, wrenched overhead and numbed with the bite of the
cords, were beginning to hurt badly now. But it wasn't too bad. Surely
she did not mean that this should be all....

Sternly I controlled my imagination, taking a tight rein on my thoughts.
There was only one way to meet this--hanging blind and racked in space,
my toes barely scrabbling at the floor--and that was to take each thing
as it came and not look ahead for an instant. First of all I tried to
get my feet under me, and discovered that by arching upwards to my
fullest height I could bear my weight on tiptoe an