«All right,» Blade said to Yekran. «You take the northern side. I'm going down to the south.»
They shook hands, and he followed Narlena off along the street, first walking, then loping, then tearing through the darkness at a run. Ahead of them loomed the wall at the south end of the street, its top and rear face crowded with Dreamer fighters. They ran past the catapult standing in the street, waved to its crew, ran through the aid squads standing ready behind the fighters, and reached the wall. The fighters manning it turned to greet Blade. As they did so, an ear-splitting chorus of war yells and screams shot up from the street beyond. Blade heard the swelling sound of running feet and clashing weapons moving rapidly toward the wall.
The men with the fireballs in the upper windows didn't wait for orders. Neither did the catapult crew. Two windows lit up with a searing blue-white glare. The two centers of the glare arched out into mid-air, dropping toward the street, trailing twenty-foot streamers of flame, and spitting out sparks like a Roman candle. At the same time the catapult hurled a hundred pound bag of jagged stone and metal fragments clean over the heads of the men on the wall, straight into the oncoming enemy. A very different kind of screaming and yelling now rose from beyond the wall. Blade dashed forward and scrambled up the wall just as the catapult let fly again. He and Narlena flattened themselves on the stones as another bag sailed overhead and crashed into the street.
Looking over the top of the wall, they could see the street beyond lit up by the fireballs. Both of them lay in the street, still sputtering, hissing savagely, and flaring up every few seconds. Men lay writhing and screaming on the pavement or ran howling away, hair and beard trailing smoke and flame. Some of them stumbled and fell over the mangled dead or the dying who had been struck down by the flying debris. As Blade watched, a third bag of fragments smashed down into the street, spewing pieces in all directions, cutting down more of the running men. The entire head of the attack column seemed to have vanished in less than a minute. But farther down the street Blade could see hundreds more fighters, still brandishing their weapons, still howling threats and war cries. They would attack again.
They did. This time there were three times as many as there had been the first time-moving even faster. Blade could hear their commanders yelling at them to spread out. But trying to get untrained Wakers to change their normal fighting habits in the middle of a battle was hopeless. They came on in the same dense mass as before. More fireballs plunged down into it; more men screamed and shrieked as the flames seared and blinded them. More shots crashed down in the street, solid stones as well as bags of fragments smashing men to the ground, reducing them to pulp before they could even scream. The charge lost half its men as it came down the street.
But the other half was driven by a thirst for revenge and by dreams of loot and prisoners. They kept on coming, charging through the flames, through the flying stones, through the arrows that whistled by their ears and sank into their bodies, over the corpses of their comrades, up to the wall like a wave.
The Dreamers on top of the wall flinched and gave way. For a terrifying moment Blade was alone on top of the wall, Wakers boiling around him so thickly that neither he nor they could lift a weapon. He grabbed the nearest Waker with his bare hands and jerked the man's neck back until he heard it snap. Then he lifted the body and threw it down into the men still climbing up the wall. His sword swung out in a lethal curve, carving chests, stomachs, and faces in a single sweep.
«Come on back up here, you bastards!» he roared at the top of his lungs. «We've got to hold the wall.»
The sight and sound of Blade jerked the retreating Dreamers to a stop and turned them into a solid mass. As the Wakers poured down the inside of the wall, stumbling, falling, and yelling like fiends, they ran into the Dreamers coming back. The crash as the two forces ran head-on into each other at full speed echoed in the street and nearly deafened Blade. But he was too busy slashing his way through the enemy close at hand to pay much attention to what was going on behind him.
Stones began to crash down from windows high above as the people up there joined in the fight. They were falling wildly onto both sides alike.
Blade opened his mouth to bellow, «Stop it!» to the fools at the windows. As he did so, a stone plummeted down and bounced off the back of his skull. It was like being hit with a hammer. He staggered as sparks and flame exploded in his head. He nearly went down. A Waker saw him reel and sprang forward, sword raised. But the man kept on going forward, down onto his knees, down onto the top of the wall as a Dreamer leaped up behind him and ran a spear through him. Half-stunned, Blade suddenly realized that he was surrounded by Dreamers, Narlena among them, all around him. Not Wakers! The Wakers were either leaping down the outside of the wall and taking to their heels or kneeling and begging for mercy.
Not all of them received it. The Dreamers' blood was boiling, and more than a few of them went charging straight off into the darkness in pursuit of the fleeing Wakers before Blade could stop them. He cursed them half-incoherently as they dashed past him; they might be running into a trap. Then somebody stuck the spout of a water jug into his mouth. The water poured down his dry throat, and his head began to clear.
As he looked around him, he began to wonder whether there could be enough Wakers left from the attacking column to provide the trap he had feared. He didn't even want to guess at the number of Waker bodies lying in the street on either side of the wall or on the slopes of the wall itself. Not much under two hundred, certainly. And he could only see about a dozen Dreamer bodies. There must be more, but even if there were two or three times as many, it was still a solid victory. The riverbank column wasn't going to be in shape for another attack for a long time.
He looked down the street to the south and saw the sharp, jagged movements of a battle there. The Dreamer pursuers and the freeing Wakers were fighting it out. The catapult fired again. This time a fireball soared all the way down the street into the middle of the fight. The fight broke apart amid screams and shouts. A moment later there was nothing alive in the street except a dozen or so Dreamers drifting back to the wall, herding as many Waker prisoners ahead of them.
Blade would have liked to stay and greet them. But he had heard nothing of how the Dreamers were doing against the other two Waker attacks, and he had to know. The battle for Pura could still very easily be lost. Calling to Narlena, he strode away up the street, holding his throbbing head as still as he could.
Chapter Nineteen
Blade and Narlena turned into the street leading back to the center of the enclave and increased their pace to a trot. Suddenly Blade heard running feet approaching, and another messenger dashed up to him.
The man was panting so hard that at first he could not speak. Finally he gasped, «Captain Blade, the other two columns are both in sight but neither is attacking. Captain Yekran wants to know if he should lead the reserves out to attack them»
«No, damn it, tell that id-«Before he could get any further, the dull pain in his head suddenly flared into something savage and pounding. He winced and staggered and would have fallen if Narlena and the messenger had not grabbed him and held him upright.
After a moment the pain faded back to a dull ache, but he could feel the veins in his temples pulsing unnaturally. Lord Leighton was trying to bring him home. The computer had reached out across dimensions for him, for his brain. For the first time in several trips it had missed its first thrust. But it would be trying again, and sooner rather than later it would drag him back to Home Dimension. And damn it, he didn't want to go now! All his work in Pura had been leading up to this battle, and now he might be snatched away in the middle of it and have to leave the overconfident Yekran in command.