Beyond the arch lay the open country, green, rankly overgrown where it had once been tamed. The only signs that men had once lived there were the road running west and the occasional villas which dotted the hills and valleys. Stairs ran up to the top of the vine-sheathed arch. This time Blade climbed up it to take a long and careful look back toward the city. He did not expect to see any pursuers. He and Narlena would have a considerable head start on any force the People of the Blue Eye could send out. And the other Waker gangs still had little desire to move about in the daytime.
He saw nothing moving, nothing anywhere in all that wilderness of stone, although he strained his eyes to the limit. But from the top of a tower visible far to the east streamed a long coiling plume of dark blue smoke-the general alarm signal of the People of the Blue Eye. If the pursuit was not yet in sight, it was certainly being organized. Time to move on again.
Blade and Narlena scrambled down the dusty stairs of the arch and headed west along the main road for another half mile. Then they turned south, toward the river. Their path led along a private road leading up to one of the villas and beyond them across the wooded hills. They slipped through the shadows under the trees for half an hour, then reached a sunlit patch of long grass, completely concealed on all sides by tall trees. Best of all, a small, clear stream flowed out from under the roots of one of the trees. Blade climbed another tree and once more checked their rear. Once more he was relieved to neither see nor hear any signs of pursuit.
Here they were well out of sight, and except for the woodcutters and hunters, there were few among the Wakers with much tracking skill in open country. Before Krog could bring his hunters down from the north, Blade and Narlena could easily be safely back in Dreamer territory.
They drank. Blade felt the water pouring down his throat, sluicing away the caked dust from the long run, and restoring life to his aching limbs. Then with Narlena curled beside him, he lay down and slept.
When they awoke, twilight had drenched the forest. They drank deeply again, stretched their cramped, chilled limbs, and moved on again. After half an hour they came out of the forest into open rolling countryside, within a mile of the river.
Toward the east Pura was sinking quietly into shadow — silent, dark, and apparently lifeless. Above the towers the first stars were coming out in the purple sky. Blade handed Narlena one of his knives, drew his sword, and led the way to the river.
Although the country south to the river was almost treeless, their pace was far from easygoing. The hedges that the villa owners had cultivated and kept carefully pruned in the days of Pura's glory had run wild and grown almost to the height of the trees. Vines wound their way in all directions, heavy with overripe berries that poured a sickly sweet odor into the evening air and squashed to slippery, sticky pulp underfoot. Everywhere the purple thistle grew, rank and tangled, clawing at their bare legs with its multitude of thorns. Blade tried to avoid the thistle patches as much as possible, but sometimes there was no way around them, nothing to do but to hack a way through with his sword. By the time they were halfway to the river, both his legs and Narlena's looked and felt as if they had been lashed with barbed wire.
Their goal was a bridge that had once carried a high road running from north to south, a few miles west of the city. If the Wakers had blocked it off, however, Blade planned to swing still farther west until the walls of the gorge dropped down into level country. Then they could easily swim or ford the river. But he hoped they could use the bridge. The faster he got back to the Dreamers and warned them of Krog's plans, the, happier Blade would be.
They slipped down the last few hundred yards toward the riverbank as cautiously as if they had been stalking a Waker gang amid the ruins of Pura. In the gathering darkness Blade could see Narlena only as a shadowy form. But the sureness of her step as she moved along beside him was a vivid contrast to the cringing and trembling girl he had led out into the open country for the first time so many weeks ago.
A hundred yards from the entrance to the bridge Blade stopped and motioned Narlena down flat on the ground. Then, sword held ready, he stalked forward. He groped for a firm and silent footing at each step, senses on hair-trigger alert, suspicious of any sign of a hostile presence. If Krog's men were lying in ambush, he could at least give Narlena a chance to make her way into the safety of the darkness and then west and across the river. Step by step now, with longer and longer intervals between steps, the bridge twenty yards away. .
A sudden eye-searing glare of light as a dozen blue-white beams leaped out of the darkness and pinned him to the spot. Blade's sword leaped high in an instant, and he whirled around, his dazzled eyes trying to make out behind the glare what sort of enemy he faced. Who in Pura could turn night into day like this?
All but one of the lights died, and out of the suddenly returning darkness came a familiar voice. Unbelievable, perhaps, here and now, but unmistakable.
«Blade! Welcome back!»
«Yekran! Is that really you?»
The brawny figure of the Dreamer fighter loomed out of the darkness. Two thick solid arms reached up and clapped Blade on the back.
«Of course it's me, you idiot. Is Narlena-?»
«Still alive and well, and with me.»
Blade turned his head toward the darkness behind him and shouted, «Narlena, it's Yekran and some other Dreamer fighters. Come on!»
He turned back to Yekran on legs shaky with the release of tension and shook his head. «All right, Yekran, I believe you. But what the devil are you people doing out here?»
«That's a long story. Let's be on our way home, and I'll tell you on the way. We don't wait around out here even now.»
Chapter Seventeen
As the Dreamer patrol swung along the south bank of the river at a pace that would have done credit to Waker fighters, Yekran told Blade of what had been going on among the Dreamers. Part of the story Blade had already guessed. The simple fact that a Dreamer patrol was operating many miles from home and several miles out in the open country beyond Pura made it clear that the Dreamers had gained much skill and selfconfidence since he had been captured. They were no longer afraid of the open countryside but could move about it with confidence and pride.
But there was a great deal more that Blade did not understand-starting with the glaring lights that had sprung at him out of the darkness. Yekran was surprised at Blade's lack of understanding.
«Surely in your home world where you are all Wakers, you must often need to travel about after dark? Do you not use such things? We took a glow-bulb and put it on the end of a long stick. On the other end of the stick we put a cylinder of marconite. Then we connected the marconite to the bulb with wires. Now we can carry daylight with us wherever we go. I do not think the Wakers will like that.»
«You haven't used the lights on them before?» asked Blade.
«No. This night was the first time we tried them out. We wanted to wait until we had many of them. That way they would he a surprise to the Wakers when we first used them in battle.»
Blade nodded and grinned. Yekran had accidentally hit on one of the basic rules for using secret weapons: don't spring them on the enemy in penny packets. Hit him hard with a lot of them at once.
But there was more. The vaults were opening by the score each night now, and more than a hundred Dreamers were coming in each week. There were now more than a thousand of them in the enclave that Yekran's fighting bands had made safe from the Wakers. Nearly five hundred of them were old enough to be trained as fighters, and nearly two hundred had already been trained. The rest could at least throw spears and stones down from the walls that had been built around the enclave. The walls were made of rubble, dragged into place and piled up by the muscles and bare hands of men and women who realized that their city might rise again. It covered a square two blocks on a side near Narlena's vault.