Dimension Of Dreams

Chapter Ten

Blade was becoming increasingly aware of several unpleasant sensations-he was regaining consciousness. His head ached abominably, his shoulders were bruised and swollen, the thongs bound tightly around wrists and ankles were cutting into the flesh, and his mouth was dry and sour. His nose was assaulted by a stench compounded of unwashed humanity, smoke, spoiled food, and the tantalizing scent of roasting meat. That made his mouth water. It also made him start with surprise. Did the Wakers roam into the countryside beyond Pura to hunt for their food? He stopped the questioning; his head was aching too badly to cope with the effort of thinking.

His vision was clearing now; he made out a too-familiar figure looming over him and looking grimly down at him. It was the leader of the Waker force that had tracked him down, as tall and lean as ever. He wore a rough bandage around the spear gouge in his upper arm and a thoroughly hostile expression on his bearded face.

«'You wake. Good.» The tone was curt and clipped. He sounded more like a man who regards speech as a waste of time than a man who uses short and simple words because he knows no other kind. Then he barked, «Water!» and from behind him a hunched figure in filthy rags shambled out and cringingly offered a bowl of water to Blade's lips. Blade looked at the slave, keeping his face expressionless with considerable effort. If this was the way the Wakers treated their slaves, it was no wonder that the Dreamers feared Waker slavery almost more than death itself.

Blade drank the water, which was not much cleaner than the slave who brought it. In spite of its sour taste it refreshed him and helped clear his head. Now he was able to look beyond the man standing above him and take note of his surroundings. For the moment he was not thinking of escape, but every bit of information about where he was might come in handy when the time came.

It was twilight again; evening must have come. Ahead on either side of him, were dozens of Wakers busily carrying out the affairs of a tribal encampment preparing for night. The carcass of some animal turned on a spit over a wood fire that burned in a soot-blackened hearth built up with slabs of stone and metal roughly mortared together. Beside it a large pot of water simmered on another fire, and two slave women supervised by a Waker crone were dropping handfuls of leaves and bits of what looked like dried fruit into it. A whiff of the odors rising from the pot reached Blade's nose; spicy and sweetish at the same time.

Beyond the fires rose a vine-covered wall, still intact except for a few stones missing from the crest. Along the wall ran a wooden walkway raised ten feet above the ground on stout poles. In the shelter of the walkway were a dozen roughly made tents. There was a continuous coming and going around the tents-mostly men and women in the rags and filth of slaves. Armed men occasionally wandered out from the largest of the tents and over to one of the slave tents. Blade could hear snatches of song float from inside this tent; the words were indistinct but no doubt bawdy. Metallic bangings and scrapings of metal being worked came from another.

Twisting himself around slowly and painfully, the grit and pebbles on the ground clawing at his bare skin, Blade saw that the whole encampment lay within a square courtyard roughly a hundred feet on each side. Three sides were formed by walls with walkways running along them and broken only in one place by a massive wooden gate. The fourth side of the courtyard was the wall of one of the great towers. It reared up so high into the fading light that Blade could barely make out its blue-paneled top. Lights showed at some of the windows, flickering pale yellow lamps that suggested torches or oil lamps. Apparently the slaves lived in the open, along with the men who guarded them and the entrance to the camp. The rest of the gang lived in the greater comfort and shelter of the tower itself.

That was as far as Blade got with his observations before the tall man was back again, looming over him more closely and grimly than before. He drew a long, sharp knife from his belt. Blade tensed. He was ready to make a fight, but how much of a fight could he manage with both wrists and ankles bound?

Instead of driving the knife in, the man bent down, keeping well clear of Blade's reach as he did so, and slashed the thongs around Blade's ankles. A quick barked order and two men came over from the guard tent. They hauled Blade to his feet and held him upright while he stamped his swollen, numbed feet and felt the fiery prickles of returning feeling in them. Then one of the guards lifted his spear and prodded Blade gently in the small of the back with the point, gesturing toward the tower with the other hand. Blade nodded and stumbled forward.

Inside the darkness was almost tangible-and certainly pungent. There was only an occasional wavering spot of smoky yellow light, where torches burned in metal holders driven into the wall or standing on the floor. Under Blade's feet the floor seemed to be free of the ancient accumulation of dust he had noticed in nearly every other building in Puri.

They came to a staircase and started up it, the tall man leading and the two guards following behind Blade with their spears still pointed at his back. Up they went through the darkness for three flights, passing doorways hung with patchwork curtains roughly splashed with incomprehensible badges of white paint. Finally they came to the fourth door, which was covered by a curtain of solid blue, with a single gigantic eye painted on it in white. Two guards stood in front of it.

«I bring the prisoner Blade before Krog,» said the tall man. The guards nodded; one of them reached up and lifted the curtain aside. Blade's guards prodded him onward again as the tall man led the way through the arched doorway into the room beyond.

Blade had half-expected something the size of the interior of St. Patrick's Cathedral, a ceiling soaring out of sight into the gloom above and a floor the size of a football field. Instead the chamber was almost cozy, barely forty feet on a side, and lit almost as well as a Dreamer's vault. It was a moment before Blade recognized the color of the light and where it was coming from. Then he stared in frank amazement at the marconite capsule in the base of the heavy iron lamp that hung on a chain from the ceiling. He stared at the capsule and the bulbs wired to it, his mind working furiously to find some plausible explanation for this Waker gang using marconite. Then a sharp cough came from the end of the room. Blade immediately forgot about the marconite and turned his entire attention to the two people sitting on a bench there. Both were contemplating him as though he were a specimen under a microscope.

The girl-woman-drew his eye first. Which was she? It was hard to tell her age. From the slim, hard lines of her body and the proud jut of her small, firm breasts, he would have guessed her to be nineteen, perhaps twenty at most. She wore only a kilt and a dazzling array of knives that sparkled and glinted at her waist, wrists, and ankles. What seemed like fair skin was darkened by grease and dirt, as were the foamy curls of blonde hair covering her neat little head. Blade could see from even across the room an intentness and a calculating quality in the wide blue eyes-and a streak of savage cruelty that struck Blade with almost physical force and made him instantly alert. Here was a possible enemy, and a deadly dangerous one. Woman, definitely, not a girl. To call her a girl would be to risk making himself just a little bit less alert. He could not afford that with this woman.

A beautiful woman, also. And obviously interested in him, the way her eyes were roaming over his body. Nine times out of ten he had found a way to put that interest to some sort of use, but he had a feeling that this might be the tenth time. He jerked his attention away from the woman and turned to the man.

Here was a very different type. The young woman was obviously a barbarian; this man was just as obviously civilized or at least trying hard to look that way. The woman's father, Blade realized, noting the unmistakable facial resemblance. Like his daughter he was slender-the slenderness of a man who carries nothing but muscle and sinew on his bones-and blond. His hair was close-cropped and clean enough for Blade to make out the numerous strands of gray in it.

He wore a blue kilt and a dark red tunic. Both his garments and as much of his skin as Blade could see appeared to be a good deal cleaner than the average among the Wakers. He was clean-shaven which also set him apart from the generally hairy Wakers. He appeared to be unarmed, but why not, considering the arsenal his daughter was carrying? He was, however, wearing the first piece of jewelry that Blade had seen among the Wakers-a silvery medallion with a blue jewel in the center, carved in the form of an eye. It hung around his neck on a gold chain.

The old man raised his hand and beckoned the four men facing him forward to within ten feet of his throne. Then he waved the tall man aside so that he and Blade could see each other still more clearly.

Blade was already moving warily toward a favorable impression of this man. A closer look at him reinforced this impression. The man's face was scraped and red, suggesting that the fight to keep himself clean-shaven had been won at the cost of considerable pain. The man seemed to have created for himself a small center of civilization among a mass of barbarians. Had he had much success in passing his notions on to his people? Blade didn't think so-except in training the fighting men. But in Dimension X, as in Home Dimension, new and better ways of fighting and killing were willingly learned by almost anybody.

The man crossed his arms on his chest and spoke. «You are Blade, the man from another world who has been helping the Dreamers and training them to fight.» It was a statement, not a question, delivered in a quiet, calm voice with no hint of challenge in- it. «I am Krog, the leader of the People of the Blue Eye. I have been looking for you for a long time, ever since one of my war patrols met you on the East Bridge. I have heard that you had just arrived in our world that night, only hours before. Is that so?»

Blade nodded.

«Then you learn very quickly and keep your head as well as being a strong and wise fighting man. The People of the Blue Eye need one like you. And my daughter Halda-«with a look in which Blade thought he saw a flash of weary distaste «-finds you pleasing. Will you join the People of the Blue Eye and become a war master equal to Drebin, here?» He raised a hand to indicate the tall man.

Before Krog could complete the gesture, Drebin jumped forward shaking both his fists almost in Krog's face. «If you make him my equal, Krog, I will kill first him and then you! The people will have a new leader. Your daughter Halda would not mind that much, I think.» There was no mistaking the look he shot at Halda. And there was no mistaking the fact that she did not return it. This startled Drebin. He drew back a step, staring at the woman.

Krog's voice cut into the silence like a butcher's cleaver slicing meat. «Drebin. I wondered many times if you were a fool. Did you speak so seldom because you knew that if you talked a great deal, people would know you for a fool? I do now.» Krog rose from his bench and made a quick flicking gesture of his right hand at Halda. She also rose, moving slowly off to the left, both hands held close to her body. Blade recognized the pattern. Two people who had trained together were taking position in case a third party attacked. Would Drebin-the fool-recognize this also?

He did not. A bull's roar erupted from him, followed by a bull's rush forward, straight at Krog. Then without stopping, Drebin sprang to the right in a single quick motion, apparently hoping to get onto Krog's flank before the leader could turn. Krog spun on one heel and met Drebin's flanking move with a quick one-two right foot into the side of Drebin's left knee, then both fists into the tall man's solar plexus. Drebin folded up like a pocketknife, let out a strangled choking gasp, and sat down on the floor. Krog stood over him, both fists poised and ready to strike, contempt in his eyes.

«As I said, Drebin, you are a fool. It would have saved me this whole unpleasant scene if I had been wise enough to realize that fact some time ago and dealt with you then. But you are popular with at least some of the fighters. And my daughter did once find you appealing. Why, I don't know,» with a sour look at Halda.

Krog sat down again and continued to look at Drebin. «And you have served me well, carrying out my orders until now and being always quick to learn and teach what I wanted the people to know, at least about fighting. You are a good fighter. So I think that if you want to keep your place as the one war master of the people, you can fight for it.»

Drebin looked at him, pain, anger, and bewilderment chasing each other across his dark bearded face.

«Yes,» said Krog. «You can fight this man Blade. To the death. If you win and kill him, then you will still be War Master, whether or not Halda likes you. If he wins and kills you, then he will follow where you have been. Everywhere.» The innuendo was not lost on Drebin. He managed to glare at Krog with even more fury than he had done before. Halda, on the other hand, grinned openly at Blade.

«Hold it!» roared Blade in a voice so loud that he almost startled himself and sent echoes reverberating around the chamber. Krog jumped back a yard at a single bound and stared at Blade, hands raised. Halda drew a knife and held it ready to throw. Seeing that he had their attention, Blade continued.

«Why the devil should I help any of you damned bandits?» he snapped. «I threw in with the Dreamers because all I saw your people doing was killing and enslaving the Dreamers and looting the city. I haven't seen much of anything different since. Certainly not now. I want to help rebuild Pura, not go on destroying it the way you're doing.»

At a sign from Krog, Halda vanished through the inner door of the chamber. The leader himself turned back to stare at Blade more intently than before. He seemed to be searching for something in Blade's face or words. For a moment Blade wondered what he could have done or said to draw such a reaction from Krog. But the Waker leader was obviously too complicated a man to make it possible to answer that question now. He would have to stay alive and wait for Krog to reveal himself bit by bit. But in order to stay alive, would he-?

From behind the curtain across the inner door came the sound of fists on flesh and a short shrill scream. Then the curtain burst open and Narlena tumbled through it to land with bruising force on the stone floor. She was nude, her hands were bound, and there was a small trickle of blood flowing across her ribs just below her left breast. Behind her came Halda, flourishing a dagger whose needle-sharp point was bright with fresh blood. Blade swallowed and looked at Narlena, who was half-unconscious with fright and pain. Then he looked back at Krog, who nodded.

«Of course,» the Waker leader said. «You can always refuse to help up. But then you will see her-«with a jerk of his thumb at Narlena «-die before we kill you. I assure you that Halda will make her die very slowly. Well, Blade?»

Blade swallowed again. He had been in this kind of situation before, forced to bend before someone who held hostages. And because he had bent, both he and the hostages had survived, and the hostage-takers had not. He would try to do it again. As he looked at Krog, however, it occurred to him that it might be a little harder to manage things this time.

«All right, Krog,» he said finally. «I will fight Drebin as you wish.»