Dimension Of Dreams

Chapter Thirteen

Halda seemed to find Blade more exciting with the blood and sweat from the duel still on his body than she would have otherwise. She was almost insatiable in her demands. But before Blade had exhausted his carefully rationed energies, she had had enough. She was still snuggled close against Blade when she fell asleep.

He looked down at her, and found her more vulnerable and defenseless than ever before. For a moment he could not help feeling a little sorry for her. She was obviously from a different mold than her father, and there must be regrettably little sympathy between them. Krog would be left to bear the burden of his dreams alone. Halda had to seek out what consolation and companionship she could manage in the company of robust barbarians such as the late, unlamented Drebin. If she was warped, it was not surprising.

Blade did not go on feeling sorry for Halda for more than a few brief minutes. He reminded himself that Halda wanted Narlena dead. Halda hated the Dreamer girl already and would hate her even more if she thought her to be a threat to the total possession of Blade. Blade doubted that Krog was much inclined to kill Narlena. He might be too humane, and certainly he would be too aware of Narlena's value as a hostage for Blade's good behavior to indulge his daughter's jealousy this way. Nor did Blade think Halda would go against her father's wishes and kill Narlena or have her killed on her own initiative.

But there was always the danger of Halda's convincing her father that Blade was plotting against him and that Narlena should be killed or at least tortured to punish Blade. Halda was quite capable of conjuring up such a story out of thin air. More important, Krog was almost certainly capable of believing it. The man had not lived and ruled as long as he had among the Wakers without developing a sharp nose for disloyalty and a strong and ruthless hand to crush it when it appeared. No, if Narlena was to be saved, Blade would not only have to go on satisfying Halda but to go on giving every sign of loyalty to Krog in his new position as war master to the People of the Blue Eye.

Fortunately the job was basically one of leading and training their fighting men. That was a job he knew by heart and could do well and even somewhat enjoy, no matter how peculiar the circumstances. It was certainly easy to work with the Waker fighters; under Krog and Debrin they were already fairly well trained in handling their personal weapons and in small-unit tactics. At least they were as well trained as could be expected under the circumstances-Roman legionnaires they decidedly were not. But did this matter here in Pura, there was nothing to fight but other Wakers, for the most part more inept than they? Obviously not. And Blade was relieved that he did not have to teach any of the Waker fighters their military ABCs. He had not been that lucky with the Dreamers.

As he watched the Waker fighters going through their tactics or practicing long-range spear throwing, he wondered how Yekran and Erlik were doing with the Dreamers during his absence. He had no idea, because the People of the Blue Eye had virtually abandoned raiding since his capture. Instead, their fighters concentrated on the forthcoming war against the other Wakers. The skirmishing between the people and their rivals was becoming more and more intense. Krog was even preparing plans for defending the tower in case some of the other gangs should get together and try attacking first. But only a very few Dreamer prisoners had come in recently, and Blade had no opportunity to talk to them. Nor did he dare ask too strongly for the right to do so, for fear of giving Halda a pretext for denouncing him to her father and getting Narlena punished.

The ignorance was maddening. Had Erlik and Yekran been able to take advantage of this lull to recruit more freely among the wandering Dreamers and step up the training of those they had already enlisted? Or had they and their followers grown complacent, taking the lull to mean that the Wakers were already on the run? If they had assumed the latter, they had doomed the Dreamers as surely as if they had flooded each vault with poisoned gas. When Krog was ready, the People of the Blue Eye would march out, and they would win. After their victory Krog would certainly welcome all the defeated fighters who wished to join him. In a short time he would be able to hurl a force of many hundreds of fighting men against the Dreamers and sweep them away like dust in the wind if they had readied no more than the comparative handful of half-trained fighters Blade had given them.

And the possible consequences of such a Waker victory made Blade shudder. Every day, he watched fighters knock slaves out of their path with backhand blows; every night he lay in bed with Halda and listened to her bloody tales of battles, vengeances, and tortures. There were times when it seemed to him that both Narlena's death and his own would be preferable to continuing to aid these people. Then he reminded himself that the forthcoming war was certain to kill a great many Wakers-far more than the Dreamers could ever have put down in the same time and without any risk to the Dreamers either. And a victory for the People of the Blue Eye would at least be a victory for the one man among the Dreamers who seemed to have some notion of building rather than simply fighting and destroying. Krog's rule in Pura might just possibly be tolerable even to the Dreamers.

Blade did not realize the full depth of Krog's vision for the future until the night the leader invited him up to his private chamber for dinner. It was a frugal meal; Krog was the type of leader unwilling to live better than his followers. Blade's stomach was still muttering hungrily as he sat on the cushions that covered the floor and listened to Krog talk.

Krog rambled back and forth over his life and achievements and to what he hoped to do in the future. He told of his grandfather who had raised him. As Blade had suspected, the grandfather had been one of the Dreamers who threw in their lot with the Wakers when the time of Pura's fall came about. But he had not been a scholar. He had been something even more remarkable-an officer in the security troops. He had been very lucky to survive, considering that the security men were usually killed on sight. But he had survived and taught the grandson he raised his own realism, his own visions of a revived Pura, and the skills needed to survive in the hard, brutal world of the Waker gangs. By the time his grandfather died, Krog had learned much of what he later taught, including his unarmed combat skills and the value of training for the fighters.

The story of Krog's adult years Blade had already heard from at least two dozen different people among the gang. But it was fascinating to hear it told by Krog himself in the way he had seen it over a period of nearly thirty years, the fights and raids, the duels and deadly grapplings with rivals; the friends who had become disloyal or too powerful and so had also been eliminated; the suppression of the Council of Masters in favor of a single leader aided by the war masters, and finally the ten years as leader, not unchallenged, not undisputed, but certainly undeposed.

Gradually he had given the People of the Blue Eye reason to be loyal to him. Drebin had been the last man with enough ambition and enough of a following to be a danger to Krog's leadership. That was why he had arranged the duel. He had expected Blade to win, and if Blade won, Drebin would be dead with none of his followers able to point accusing fingers at Krog. There was a cheerfully cynical note in Krog's voice as he told this story. Now that Drebin was safely dead and the People of the Blue Eye had a new war master, Krog could move on to his great plans.

Some of these plans Blade had also heard more than twenty times in talking with the people. Obviously, Krog did not care in the least whether they were kept secret or not. But once again it made a difference to hear the story from the lips of the man who had conceived the whole notion of the war and what he would do with his victory.

The other Wakers could never stand against the alliance of the Blue Eyes and the Green Towers, even if by some miracle they all united to fight for their lives. Together the two gangs of the alliance numbered well over three hundred fighters. And they were the best three hundred out of all the Wakers, able to fight and certain to win against odds of three or four to one. Krog took victory for granted.

And then? Krog would indeed provide a warm welcome for any Waker who wished to abandon his defeated gang and bring himself, his skills, and weapons over to the alliance. Krog would bind these people loyally to him by generous rewards, to him personally, not to the alliance. And when the right time came, he would use these followers to wipe out the People of the Green Tower. He could not keep the alliance with them stable for long and still carry out his plans. Too many of the Green Towers were the barbaric sort of Wakers, interested in nothing but fighting, killing Dreamers, and looting vaults.

Not that Krog was necessarily against killing Dreamers and looting vaults, especially for food, clothing, gold and jewels, and the marconite crystals. With hundreds of trained fighters behind him, he could in fact do both on a vaster scale than had ever been done in Pura. But he did not want to and hoped he would not have to. Rather, he would threaten to break into thousands of vaults, looting them and killing their occupants. The Dreamers he captured would be frightened into going to where their fellows lay asleep and bringing them into Waking. Then they could be captured without chasing them all over the city or going to the trouble of actually breaking into the vaults.

«What will you do with all these slaves?» Blade asked at this point.

«I will not make them slaves,» Krog replied, «unless they force me to do so. I would rather have them be loyal subjects like my fighters. The fighters will protect the Dreamers and teach them to defend themselves. The Dreamers will use the wealth and the machines in their vaults to help the people to a better life. They will teach the fighters how to use the machines themselves. And they will learn how to make more machines. Fighters will marry Dreamer women; Dreamer men will marry Waker women. I will even think of freeing all the Dreamer slaves we already have. In a generation we will be like one people. Each will have learned from the other, and there will be many machines. Then we can start rebuilding Pura.» And when Krog said «rebuilding Pura,» there was a distant, dreaming expression in his eyes. That expression told Blade more than any ten thousand words that Krog was sincere in what he said. If the future of Pura had depended entirely on Krog's desire to see it rise again, Blade would have had no doubts at all about that future.

But Krog was only one man, and there were only a handful among the Wakers who understood and approved his plans. He stood like a rock in the middle of the sea. All around him that sea roared and hissed, a sea of simpleminded, blood-thirsty men and women with nothing behind them but generations of bloodshed, privation, and hatred for the Dreamers. They had almost found a leader in Drebin. They might easily find another one in Krog's own daughter. After weeks of sharing her bed, Blade knew that the young woman was a pure, bloody barbarian, even if an intelligent one. In the hour of their greatest victory could Krog control these people and keep them from slaughtering and looting far and wide? That would smash not only Krog's plans for rebuilding Pura but any possibility that the Dreamers could ever do so. Blade didn't think Krog could manage it. Moved as he was by the man's dreams, he came away from the chamber as determined as ever to derail the Wakers' plans.

He walked for a while in the cooler air of the courtyard to clear his head. The interior of any Waker-held building always reeked of soot, smoke, spoiled food, and masses of unwashed humanity. Even Krog's efforts and example had done little for the Blue Eyes. And what good were those efforts anyway, thought Blade sourly, when even his own daughter rejects them? That made him think of Halda, of how she was always waiting for him at this time of night, and how he must go in to her soon if she were not to become suspicious and resentful. He sighed and turned back into the building.

Halda was waiting for him in their private chamber as he came in. She lay sprawled in the pose she usually adopted. It was meant to tell him that her needs were urgent. There was no romance in her and seldom any sense of fun or play, only the rutting urge. But no woman as beautiful as she was-savagely beautiful-could hurl herself at him as she did without arousing a response.

He stripped off his tunic and kilt and lay down beside her on the sleeping cushions. She was still wearing her kilt and two of her knives, one on the right wrist and one on the left ankle. These she never took off, not even at the height of their lovemaking. Blade had often felt the fiat coldness of the knives pressed against his skin as Halda's arms and legs locked around him as tightly as the jaws of a trap.

Her eyes flickered toward him as he lay down, but she made no movement. This would be one of the nights when it was up to him to do all the work. He rose on one elbow and bent his head down over her face, brushing his lips gently against hers. Then he pressed harder until he felt her mouth open under his and the hot little puffs of breath that told him she was responding. As he continued to kiss her, his free hand reached across her body and took her right nipple between thumb and forefinger, massaging it gently in a slow circular pattern that drew it up out of the firm breast into a firmer bud and drew out of Halda a soft hissing moan. Her breasts were exquisite, and exquisitely sensitive.

He prolonged the breast play until he could feel her body begin to writhe slowly back and forth of its own accord. He moved his mouth down into the fine-muscled hollow of her slim throat and nibbled and licked the firm flesh there. Now her own hands seemed to drift lightly over onto his body. They toyed with the hair on his chest, then crept downward to his genitals, teasing them upward and outward into a stiff, swollen rod. She was playing the same game she often did: trying to make him come prematurely. So far she had never succeeded, although she had pushed him terribly close more than once. She had skilled fingers and yet more skilled lips.

He replied by moving his own hands downward across her body to her navel, playing with that for a moment, and then leaping his fingers clear over her groin down to her knees. Slowly he brought his hands back up along the inside of her thighs, plucking, caressing, and stroking to the mat of stiffly curled dark blonde hair over her mound, already damp from her arousal. It became damper still as Blade's fingers played around it, his palm cupped and pressed down with a slow pulse that quickened bit by bit as he felt her responding. The twistings of her body became wilder, her motions coming almost continuously.

At times she insisted on riding him. But tonight she was too far gone to rise away from his hands and swing herself into position. Her muscles bunched, and her thighs almost exploded apart as he levered himself over her and plunged down and in. She was as wet inside as outside; he slid in without the slightest resistance, plunging far deeper than he had intended for the first stroke. Then he raised himself so high that he almost withdrew. Halda's hips jerked as she tried to heave herself upward to keep Blade deep inside her. Blade dropped down again, plunging once more deep inside and settled into a steady stroke. He was moving fast, but he knew that his iron endurance would enable him to keep up for a long time, more than long enough to meet Halda's needs.

It was a hot and sticky night. The sweat soon ran down from Blade's body to mingle with Halda's. She was beyond awareness of what went on around her, almost beyond control of her body. It was heaving and jerking almost continuously as Blade drove himself in and out of her. Her arms and legs came up to curl tightly around his back and buttocks as she sought to pull him deeper and deeper into herself, sought to pull herself higher and higher on the thrusting phallus.

Her breath came in a continuous hiss, a low moaning from deep in her throat occasionally breaking through. Her head thrashed back and forth tossing the blonde curls about. Blade could feel more quickening in her movements. She climaxed with a great wrenching of her entire body, a convulsion that seemed to be as agonizing as it was joyful. Then his own spasm came, triggered by hers. He surged into her in a wild fierce spewing that seemed to drain every cell of his body down through his genitals into her.

Then, before he could make a further move, even to roll off her, a wild cry tore in through the window from the courtyard below.

«Attack! Attack! The Green Towers are attacking! Turn out, turn out!»