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.