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at a time and place of their own choosing. With the advantage of surprise the
Dreamers might break the back of their most dangerous opponent.
But who were these people, and who under the heavens of every conceivable and
inconceivable dimension was their leader? Yekran had no idea. Several of the
recruits recognized Blade's description of the Waker gang that fought in
well-coordinated pairs, but none of them could give him the faintest clue
about where it came from or who led it. One thing stood out; the other Waker
gangs seemed to have limited territories, but the trained one roamed freely
all over the city.
Blade was not surprised. Such a gang would be able to march through the
territories of other gangs and raid where it wanted to as easily as a fox
prowling through a nest of field mice. And things would be just as one-sided
if the gang came up against his Dreamers before he, Yekran, and Erlik had the
chance to put several more months into recruiting and training. When he
thought of that possibility, a cold sweat broke out all over him. He would
pace up and down the vault like a caged animal, face working in frustration at
the small amount of time he had to do so much. Then Narlena would come to him
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and caress him until he was calmer outside if not inside.
More weeks passed; the Dreamers now had over two hundred people and nearly
fifty fighters, and the Waker gangs were becoming fewer and farther between.
Blade doubted that the losses he and his followers had inflicted were enough
to account for this. The word was out among the Wakers, no doubt.
The darkness, for generations the time when they moved about and raided with
impunity, had suddenly become deadly. Now it was infested with gangs of
Dreamers that did not cower or flee but fought back and, turning the tables
completely, hunted down the Wakers! Blade wondered if the Wakers were
concerned about a mysterious new leader that the Dreamers had found! The
Wakers at least had the advantage of knowing what Blade looked like. Would any
of them be able to put two and two together?
As the activity of the Waker gangs declined, more and more of the Dream
patrols drew a blank.
They continued to bring in Dreamer recruits in ones, twos and half-dozens
until there were enough to fill more than forty vaults. But there were nights
when not even a single wandering and bewildered Dreamer appeared. When that
happened, Blade would inevitably lead his patrol into one of the regular
hiding places and wait for daylight to spread across Pura and give them a safe
return home.
The night had become unexpectedly chill and rainy toward the end of one of
those useless patrols.
The first gray light of a tentative dawn found Blade, Erlik, Narlena, and four
other Dreamer fighters huddled on the tenth floor of a tower in the western
section of Pura. The small windows had kept out much of the wind and rain. But
the chill seeped through nevertheless. And the dampness in the air turned the
dust on the floor to a thin layer of slimy mud that covered the tiles and
smeared the clothing of the people squatting there and shivering.
Blade wondered, not for the first time, why he was here, doing what
he was doing. For the marconite, of course that might be worth more
than everything else he had brought back from
Dimension X put together. But that wasn't enough to explain why he was
training and leading the
Dreamers, risking his neck every day and night for them.
It wasn't that he had forgotten Home Dimension. On his early trips into
Dimension X, he had. Then there had been a new Richard Blade who came out of
the computer, a Richard Blade who barely remembered that there was a Home
Dimension. Alterations in the computer had taken care of that. Now
Blade not only remembered Home Dimension as he struggled to survive in
Dimension X but had total recall of everything that happened to him there and
took it back with him to Home Dimension.
Remembering Home Dimension didn't help. He still tended to get involved
with the people he encountered, tended to hope that the computer would not
snatch him back until he had finished whatever work he had set himself to do.
Was that foolish sentimentality, something he would have to root out of
himself? Maybe it was, but he clearly saw he couldn't do things any other way.
He would just have to struggle along, getting sucked into every local problem
that came along and hoping he was fast and smart enough to get out again.
All this deep thinking wasn't going to make him any warmer, drier, or less
muscle-cramped, he reminded himself. He stood up and looked out the window. A
watery dawn light was gradually washing away the darkness. Blade hoped that
the sun would be out shortly, drying the streets and banishing the rest of the
gloom from the city. In this shadowy morning light a few bold Wakers might
continue their prowling beyond the normal time. Both he and his companions
were chilled and weary after a long night of tramping through the pitch-black
streets, slipping on wet rubble with clatters and crashes that made them
clutch their weapons and would certainly have attracted any Wakers within
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earshot. He did not want to face a fight now on the way home.
He decided that if another week went by and the night patrols continued to
draw a blank, it would be time to seek out and raid a Waker stronghold. He
hoped this would not be throwing away the lives of his followers and their
hard-won self-confidence. Right now they saw him as an almost super-human
being and in spite of their occasional losses they were developing an almost
arrogant belief in their own prowess. Yekran was the only one not so
naive. He shook his head when he heard boastful talk of rooting the Wakers out
of their lairs like the vermin they were.
The sullen gloom of the morning bothered Blade. It gave him the feeling that
such an unusual light might hide more than it revealed. And what it hid might
be unwelcome. The feeling was too vague for him to make anybody else believe
it, almost too vague to be put into words, but it was there. And he would not
ignore it. Those same vague forebodings had put him on the alert and saved his
life three or four times during his career as an agent. Perhaps it had
taken his brain this long to create these feelings of adjustment to
Dimension X certainly he had never felt this way during any of his previous
trips.
It was time to move. His six companions were experienced soldiers by Dreamer
standards. By now they all had swords and spears. They also had heavy sandals,
and most had leggings to protect their shins and calves from grazes and
scrapes on the rubble. They had gear pouches and water-bottles but no food, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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