Страница 19 из 40
Chapter Ten
Blade was becoming increasingly aware of several unpleasant sensations-he was regaining consciousness. His head ached abominably, his shoulders were bruised and swollen, the thongs bound tightly around wrists and ankles were cutting into the flesh, and his mouth was dry and sour. His nose was assaulted by a stench compounded of unwashed humanity, smoke, spoiled food, and the tantalizing scent of roasting meat. That made his mouth water. It also made him start with surprise. Did the Wakers roam into the countryside beyond Pura to hunt for their food? He stopped the questioning; his head was aching too badly to cope with the effort of thinking.
His vision was clearing now; he made out a too-familiar figure looming over him and looking grimly down at him. It was the leader of the Waker force that had tracked him down, as tall and lean as ever. He wore a rough bandage around the spear gouge in his upper arm and a thoroughly hostile expression on his bearded face.
«'You wake. Good.» The tone was curt and clipped. He sounded more like a man who regards speech as a waste of time than a man who uses short and simple words because he knows no other kind. Then he barked, «Water!» and from behind him a hunched figure in filthy rags shambled out and cringingly offered a bowl of water to Blade's lips. Blade looked at the slave, keeping his face expressionless with considerable effort. If this was the way the Wakers treated their slaves, it was no wonder that the Dreamers feared Waker slavery almost more than death itself.
Blade drank the water, which was not much cleaner than the slave who brought it. In spite of its sour taste it refreshed him and helped clear his head. Now he was able to look beyond the man standing above him and take note of his surroundings. For the moment he was not thinking of escape, but every bit of information about where he was might come in handy when the time came.
It was twilight again; evening must have come. Ahead on either side of him, were dozens of Wakers busily carrying out the affairs of a tribal encampment preparing for night. The carcass of some animal turned on a spit over a wood fire that burned in a soot-blackened hearth built up with slabs of stone and metal roughly mortared together. Beside it a large pot of water simmered on another fire, and two slave women supervised by a Waker crone were dropping handfuls of leaves and bits of what looked like dried fruit into it. A whiff of the odors rising from the pot reached Blade's nose; spicy and sweetish at the same time.
Beyond the fires rose a vine-covered wall, still intact except for a few stones missing from the crest. Along the wall ran a wooden walkway raised ten feet above the ground on stout poles. In the shelter of the walkway were a dozen roughly made tents. There was a continuous coming and going around the tents-mostly men and women in the rags and filth of slaves. Armed men occasionally wandered out from the largest of the tents and over to one of the slave tents. Blade could hear snatches of song float from inside this tent; the words were indistinct but no doubt bawdy. Metallic bangings and scrapings of metal being worked came from another.
Twisting himself around slowly and painfully, the grit and pebbles on the ground clawing at his bare skin, Blade saw that the whole encampment lay within a square courtyard roughly a hundred feet on each side. Three sides were formed by walls with walkways ru
That was as far as Blade got with his observations before the tall man was back again, looming over him more closely and grimly than before. He drew a long, sharp knife from his belt. Blade tensed. He was ready to make a fight, but how much of a fight could he manage with both wrists and ankles bound?
Instead of driving the knife in, the man bent down, keeping well clear of Blade's reach as he did so, and slashed the thongs around Blade's ankles. A quick barked order and two men came over from the guard tent. They hauled Blade to his feet and held him upright while he stamped his swollen, numbed feet and felt the fiery prickles of returning feeling in them. Then one of the guards lifted his spear and prodded Blade gently in the small of the back with the point, gesturing toward the tower with the other hand. Blade nodded and stumbled forward.
Inside the darkness was almost tangible-and certainly pungent. There was only an occasional wavering spot of smoky yellow light, where torches burned in metal holders driven into the wall or standing on the floor. Under Blade's feet the floor seemed to be free of the ancient accumulation of dust he had noticed in nearly every other building in Puri.
They came to a staircase and started up it, the tall man leading and the two guards following behind Blade with their spears still pointed at his back. Up they went through the darkness for three flights, passing doorways hung with patchwork curtains roughly splashed with incomprehensible badges of white paint. Finally they came to the fourth door, which was covered by a curtain of solid blue, with a single gigantic eye painted on it in white. Two guards stood in front of it.
«I bring the prisoner Blade before Krog,» said the tall man. The guards nodded; one of them reached up and lifted the curtain aside. Blade's guards prodded him onward again as the tall man led the way through the arched doorway into the room beyond.
Blade had half-expected something the size of the interior of St. Patrick's Cathedral, a ceiling soaring out of sight into the gloom above and a floor the size of a football field. Instead the chamber was almost cozy, barely forty feet on a side, and lit almost as well as a Dreamer's vault. It was a moment before Blade recognized the color of the light and where it was coming from. Then he stared in frank amazement at the marconite capsule in the base of the heavy iron lamp that hung on a chain from the ceiling. He stared at the capsule and the bulbs wired to it, his mind working furiously to find some plausible explanation for this Waker gang using marconite. Then a sharp cough came from the end of the room. Blade immediately forgot about the marconite and turned his entire attention to the two people sitting on a bench there. Both were contemplating him as though he were a specimen under a microscope.
The girl-woman-drew his eye first. Which was she? It was hard to tell her age. From the slim, hard lines of her body and the proud jut of her small, firm breasts, he would have guessed her to be nineteen, perhaps twenty at most. She wore only a kilt and a dazzling array of knives that sparkled and glinted at her waist, wrists, and ankles. What seemed like fair skin was darkened by grease and dirt, as were the foamy curls of blonde hair covering her neat little head. Blade could see from even across the room an intentness and a calculating quality in the wide blue eyes-and a streak of savage cruelty that struck Blade with almost physical force and made him instantly alert. Here was a possible enemy, and a deadly dangerous one. Woman, definitely, not a girl. To call her a girl would be to risk making himself just a little bit less alert. He could not afford that with this woman.
A beautiful woman, also. And obviously interested in him, the way her eyes were roaming over his body. Nine times out of ten he had found a way to put that interest to some sort of use, but he had a feeling that this might be the tenth time. He jerked his attention away from the woman and turned to the man.