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.