by Джеффри Лорд
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.»
Chapter Eleven
Krog was determined to be as even-handed in setting up the death duel between Drebin and Blade as possible. So he announced that it would take place in ten days. By that time Blade should have fully recovered from the assorted minor wounds he had collected since being captured. And Drebin would have largely recovered from the spear wound in his arm. Both would be at their best. Krog cheerfully informed them that no matter who won, he was looking forward to a magnificent spectacle. The People of the Blue Eye would talk about it for years afterward. Blade grimaced at this. He had fought in arenas before but had never learned to enjoy the process of risking his life for somebody else’s bloodthirsty amusement.
And he would be risking his life in the fight with Drebin, no doubt about that. If it had been a matter of a straight fight with swords and spears, he could have relied on springing his own knowledge of unarmed combat on Drebin as a surprise-possibly a fatal one for the war master. But Drebin had shown in his attack on Krog that from somewhere he had picked up a respectable knowledge of unarmed combat himself. Not equal to Krog’s, of course. The Waker leader had impressed Blade with the speed and skill of his hands and feet yet another thing about this complex man Blade wanted to explore. But Drebin looked good enough so that nothing Blade could do would be a complete surprise to him.
So there was no possibility of springing any surprises on Drebin. In that case what were his chances in the fight? Drebin was as tall as Blade, half a bead
taller than most of the other Wakers, but slimmer. It was a slimness like Krog’s, though, of a frame layered with sinew and whipcord muscle. Blade knew he probably outweighed the man by a good twenty pounds, but that would be helpful only in a close grapple. If Drebin was as fast as he looked, getting him into such a grapple might be impossible, or if possible, too dangerous. Did Drebin’s fighting style have any peculiarities? Blade wished he had had more of an opportunity to see the man in action. As it was, he could only hope that the ten days before the duel would give him that opportunity.
In the meantime, he had the freedom of the people’s camp. He knew perfectly well that Narlena would pay in blood and agony for any attempt to escape or any hostile act, so he kept well clear of the wall and kept a close rein on his tongue and temper. But his eyes and ears were active every waking minute.
What he learned about the Wakers-or at least about the People of the Blue Eye-included much that he had only guessed at before and probably even a good many things that Krog would rather he had not learned. But tongues wagged freely in the camp. A fair number of the Waker fighters seemed to think anyone going up against War Master Drebin was a dead man. So why should they take the trouble of guarding their tongues with a man who would not live long enough to make any ill use of what he learned? To be considered a walking dead man is a good way to pick up information, although Blade had to admit that it was also more than a little hard on the nerves.
The People of the Blue Eye numbered five or six hundred, perhaps one tenth the total number of Wakers. Blade was agreeably surprised to learn that the Wakers were so few in number. He had not dared hope that they had killed each other off until the Dreamers might outnumber them as much as ten to one. And of the six hundred who could be called truly of the people-some three hundred slaves also served them-barely a third were trained and able to fight and raid.
It occurred to Blade that if the same ratio of fighters to total strength held among the other Waker gangs, there might be fewer than two thousand Waker fighting men in the whole of Pura. If one tenth of the fifty thousand surviving Dreamers in the vaults could be found awake and one tenth of these trained as fighters, it would mean a united striking force of four or five hundred men. That might be enough to strike such a blow at the disunited, mutually hostile, and largely untrained Waker gangs that their rule in Pura would be swept away and the city free to rise again.
The chances of the Dreamers might be even better than that, because there were usually several hundred able-bodied Wakers outside the city. These were the food-gatherers who hunted in the spreading forests to the north of Pura, fished in the forest streams, or gathered fruits and nuts. That was all the Wakers had to eat, except when they found a Dreamer vault open and were able to gorge themselves from the food machines.
So much for what the Wakers lived on. What they appeared to live for was carrying on the old quarrel with the Dreamers, killing or enslaving all those they found wandering about during their Waking periods. Occasionally they found vaults open and looted them. Very occasionally they would find a defective vault and were able to break into it and murder the Dreamer in his gas-protected and Dream-soothed sleep. And frequently, almost continuously, they fought among themselves.
That was a tradition as long as fighting the Dreamers. In fact Blade soon realized that it was all that had kept the Wakers from rooting out the Dreamers to the last man, woman, and child. There was another side to the coin, of course; if the Wakers were not in the habit of killing off so many of their own people in gang wars, they might have had less need for slaves. Not likely, though; for some reason the majority of Waker babies were males, which meant a great surplus of free men over free women and a great need by the free men to seek other kinds of partners. A child born of a free Waker man and a slave Dreamer woman was therefore free from birth.
For territory, food, slaves, or only because it might be spring and the young men of a gang eager to try out their new swords, the Wakers fought. Dozens of them died in such fighting every month. That explained the majority of the bodies Blade had found in the streets. Sometimes two gangs, very rarely three or even four, would make a temporary alliance to squash a common opponent who had made himself intolerable by taking too many slaves or too much of the best forest hunting territory. But once the common enemy had given up-or as often happened, persuaded one of the allies to switch sides-the fighting went back to the usual petty squabbling.
Under Krog the People of the Blue Eyes were the first to even partly break out of that pattern. This was almost entirely due to his leadership. Although not everybody liked him-a good many fighters showed a naked preference for Drebin to be leader-nobody could or would deny his ability.
Krog was one of the free «mixtures»-father a Waker, mother a Dreamer slave. And there were hints of something out of the ordinary about his father or at least his father’s ancestry. Hints that Blade put together with the stories of the Puran scholars who had joined the Wakers in the days when the city was dying. He suspected that Krog might be of Dreamer blood on both sides.
Krog had distinguished himself at a very young age as the swiftest and deadliest fighter of the People of the Blue Eye. By the time he was thirty he wore the title of war master. In those days the war master had not been the chief assistant to a single leader of the people. Instead he had been one of several equal members of the Council of Masters-war master, hunt master, slave master, camp master, and others.
Everybody of both sexes and all ages delighted in telling Blade the story of how Krog had changed that system and risen to supreme power. In fact, he heard ten times more about it than he could ever need to know or indeed could understand. It had been mostly Krog’s nimble wits and nimble hands that had transformed all the other masters into allies or corpses and himself into supreme ruler of the People of the Blue Eye.
That had been ten years ago. Once in power, Krog had set out to make the People of the Blue Eye as strong among the Wakers as he himself was strong among the people. Half a dozen small wars and as many defeated and swallowed small gangs later, he had very nearly done this. Then he won over the People of the Green Tower into a close alliance. First he had defeated their war master in barehanded single combat; then he persuaded the other masters that two strong gangs combined could loot and kill the Dreamers more effectively. The two gangs had been allies now for three years, and the Green Towers had even begun to pick up and use some of Krog’s military ideas.
The alliance was a frightening menace to all the other gangs, who had not failed to notice what Krog was doing or to hear of what he was planning to do in the future. They had tried upsetting his plans by warfare. But singly or even in pairs the other gangs were no match for the People of the Blue Eye. Krog had trained his people to a level of skill and discipline that had not been seen in Pura since the collapse of the old security forces a century ago.
Now for the first time in the history of the Wakers no less than nine gangs were talking of an alliance to smash the Blue Eyes and the Green Towers and put an end to the menace that was Krog. Or at least so the rumors ran. The people were confident that there was no real danger, otherwise why would Krog risk a duel that might leave his old war master dead, with the new one of uncertain skill and loyalty? The people’s faith in Krog’s judgment was great. Only the hot-blooded fighters of Drebin’s faction were likely to mutter sourly about all the occasions when Krog had passed up a good, bloody finish fight with a rival gang in favor of sitting down and running rings around them with that quick tongue of his.
All this, Blade realized, left him in an awkward position. He had to stay alive, and that meant killing Drebin and succeeding him as Krog’s war master. But as war master of the People of the Blue Eye he would have to help Krog lead them in a general war against most of the other Waker gangs, a war in which the people would certainly be outnumbered. If they were defeated, Blade knew that he would most probably die and that Narlena would either be killed or enslaved again by the victors.
&nbs
p; But if the people won, Krog would be much closer to realizing his plan of uniting the Wakers and ending the Dreamers once and for all. Blade would then have to lead the Wakers against the Dreamers as energetically as he led the Dreamers against the Wakers before his capture. He might think of sabotaging the Waker war effort, but that would do the Dreamers no good if they lacked the strength to take advantage of any Waker mistakes or delays. And if he was detected, he would most certainly die. Narlena would die with him, and both of them would most probably die very slowly.
It was a nasty position to be in. Blade could not see a way out of it. He still could not see a way out of it when the tenth day arrived, and with it his death-duel with War Master Drebin.
Chapter Twelve
The day of the duel dawned half overcast, hot, and stifling. In the tower, where the few wandering breezes could not find their way through the narrow windows, it was like a Turkish bath. Blade was dripping with sweat before he had even risen from the leaf-filled cloth pallet that formed his bed. So were the two guards who brought him his breakfast-a mixture of ground nuts, bits of dubious meat, and a bowl of water.
He drank only some of the water and then asked one of the guards for his knife. The man looked at him with sullen suspicion. «You think I’m crazy?»
«No, I’m not planning to do anything to you or myself. I just want to shave.»
«Shave?»
«Yes.» Blade fingered his beard. «Cut my beard off, like Krog does. Understand me?»
If the guard did, he gave no sign of it. But after a moment he drew his knife from its sheath, placed it on the floor between him and Blade, and backed off several feet, hefting his spear as he did so. With the guards staring intently and warily at him, their spears aimed and ready, Blade scraped his cheeks and chin as well as the lack of soap and the dullness of the knife permitted. When he was finished, his face felt as if it had been sandpapered, but he felt he had made an important gesture, one that both Krog and the People of the Blue Eve in general would recognize. Krog set himself apart from all the other Wakers Blade had met by shaving. So by shaving, Blade would be openly allying himself with Krog and whatever plans the leader might have. Blade called to the two guards and told them he was ready.