Then the leader pointed to the bridge, and the two men laid their weapons on the ground and walked slowly off to join their comrades at the bridge. A moment later the two men who'd run to the camp came running back across the bridge. They carried flasks and strips of white cloth in their hands, and they ran toward Blade.
Blade felt pain and tension and the anticipation of death flow out of him in a great wave. For some reason they were going to take him prisoner, instead of killing him, and even try to heal his wounds. They might even succeed. Then he would be alive, and that was a situation with many more possibilities than being dead.
Blade's eyes slid shut and his mind drifted off to somewhere far away. None of his senses registered the two men kneeling beside him, bathing and bandaging his wounds, or the leader standing over them, looking down at Blade with profound curiosity.
Chapter 5
Blade was pleasantly surprised to wake up at all. He knew that people could die from losing the amount of blood he'd lost, even with Home Dimension's medical science to help them. Under the more primitive conditions of Dimension X, it would not have been at all difficult for him to slip away in spite of the best efforts of the men tending him.
He was still more pleasantly surprised to wake up in a bed, with the smell of clean linen and flowers around him, and in the background the crackling of a fire and the splash of flowing water. Mere comfort could not pull him through, if the doctors of the poppy-flower warriors didn't know their business. It would help him regain his strength more quickly once he was out of danger. That was all to the good. Being weak and helpless was never safe in Dimension X. It was even less safe when you were in the hands of people whose intentions toward you had once been murderous; and might easily become so again.