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night they were, as all such are, as one with the darkness and silhouetted dunes.
    Tarra lay still, his head down, eyes slitted and peering; and in a little while a booted foot appeared silently before his face, and he heard a hoarse voice calling: “Ho! He’s finished—feathered, too! ’Twas my arrow nailed him! Come on, you two!”
    Your arrow, hey, dog? Tarra silently snarled, coming from huddle to crouch, straightening and striking all in the same movement. The stump of his not-so-useless sword was a silver blur where it arced under a bearded jackal’s chin, tearing out his taut throat even as he screamed: “He’s al—
ach-ach-ach!”
    Close behind the Hrossak, someone cursed and gripped the arrow in his back, twisting it sharply. He cried out his agony—cut off as a mountain crashed down on the back of his skull—and without further protest crumpled to the earth.
    Tarra was not dead, not even unconscious, though very nearly so. Stunned he lay there, aware only of motion about him in the night, and of voices gruff as grit, coming it seemed from far, far away:
    “Gumbat Chud was ever a great fool. ‘My arrow!’ he yells, ‘my arrow!’ And this fellow meanwhile slitting his throat nice as that!”
    And a different voice: “Is he dead?”
    “Gumbat? Aye. See, he now has two mouths—and one of ’em scarlet!”
    “Not him, no—the stranger.”
    “Him too, I fancy, I gave him such a clout. I think it almost a shame, since he’s done us such a favour. Why, with Gumbat gone there’s just the two of us now to share the spoils! So waste no time on this one. If arrow and clout both haven’t done for him, the badlands surely will. Come on, let’s get after his beasts and see what goods he hauled.”
    The other voice was harder, colder: “Best finish him, Hylar. Why spoil a good night’s work by leaving this one, perchance to tell the tale?”
    “To whom? But…I suppose you’re right, Thull. We have had a good night, haven’t we? First that girl, alone in the desert, wandering under the stars. Can you believe it?”
    A coarse chuckle. “Oh, I believe it, all right. I was first with her, remember?”
    “You were last with her, too—pig!” spat the first voice. “Well, get on with it, then. If you want this fellow dead, get it done. We’ve beasts to chase and miles to cover back to Chlangi. Pull out the arrow, that’ll do for him. His life—if any’s left—will leak out red as wine!”
    Thull did as Hylar suggested, and shuddering as fresh waves of agony dragged him under, the Hrossak’s mind shrank down into pits of the very blackest jet….
    • • •
    Tarra Khash, the Hrossak, inveterate wanderer and adventurer, had a lust for life which drove him ever on where other men would fail. And it was that bright spark, that tenacious insistence upon life, which now roused him up before he could bleed to death. That and the wet, frothy ministrations of his camel, kneeling beside him in starlit ruins, where it washed his face and grunted its camel queries. This was the animal Tarra had used as mount, which, over the two hundred miles now lying in their wake, had grown inordinately fond of him. Eluding its pursuers, it had returned to its master much as a dog might do, and for the past half-hour had licked his face, kneed him in the ribs, and generally done whatever a camel might for a man.
    Finally coming awake, Tarra gave its nose an admonitory slap and propped himself up into a seated position. He was cold but his back felt warm, stiff and sticky; aye, and he could feel a trickle of fresh blood where his movements had cracked open a half-formed scab. In the dirt close at hand lay the man he’d killed, Gumbat Chud, and between them a bloody arrow where it had been wrenched from his back and thrown down. Tarra’s scab bard lay within reach, empty of its broken sword. They’d taken it for its jewels, of course.
    Staring at the arrow, his blood dry on its point, Tarra remembered the conversation