Gathering Storm
B
y midmorning the next day, Thorak and those dozen red-turbaned warriors had all but caught up with their quarry; as they trudged up the slope of a large dune—a wind shifting the sands ominously, sun beating down without mercy—they were not aware of their seeming imminent success. Their prey, however, was aware of them: from a nearby dune, Mathayus—astride Hanna, the sorceress sharing his saddle, riding behind him now, her arms wrapped around his midsection, her standof-fishness a memory—picked up on sounds, carried by wind. His keen senses were more finely honed than those of the thief, trudging along trying to ignore the blistering heat, while the woman seemed lost in her mystical musings. He wheeled the albino beast around and saw a cloud of dust—distant, but not so distant as to pose no threat.
Still, the Akkadian only smiled; in fact, he grinned. "Thorak ..."
The horse thief turned, saw the gathering cloud of dust, and shook his head, with the weary resignation of the put-upon. "What a surprise . .. however could he have found us? ... Oh, yes, you left him that marker. ..."
"Yes, and the fool is walking right into danger."
Arpid looked up at Mathayus as if questioning his fellow traveler's sanity. "Oh, he is, is he?"
"Certainly."
"How many men does he have, would you say?"
The assassin frowned at the distant dust cloud. "Only a dozen, I'd say."
"Ah. Only a dozen of the finest warriors of Memnon's Red Guard. And there are three of us, including one woman and a sniveling coward...."
Mathayus shook his head. "The fool is riding right into a storm."
The sorceress was studying him with childlike curiosity. "A storm?"
"Pardon me for saying," the thief said, "but, formidable as you are, partner... you're no storm. You're just one man. A man among many, I grant you .. . but one man."
The Akkadian grinned down at his scruffy companion, then he lifted his eyes away from the dust cloud Thorak and his men were raising, toward the opposite horizon.
Sighing, shaking his head, the thief muttered, "This is, without a doubt, the worst fix you've gotten me into yet!"
And now Arpid looked up, his attention drawn to the direction in which the Akkadian was gazing, and grinning; what was that fool so happy about, anyway?
The thief's eyes took in that horizon, where he saw a dark brown shimmering fine, like a living thing, moving inexorably toward them.
"Perhaps I spoke to soon," Arpid said, agape. "I believe you have managed to outdo yourself, Akkadian—this is without a doubt the worst fix I've ever been in!"
"The day is young, thief," Mathayus said, reining Hanna.
"Gods save us," Cassandra said, eyes huge as she took in the ominous, gathering darkness, as if an impatient night had decided to rush in, hours early. "It's a sandstorm!"
"And right on time," the assassin said.
The sound was growing, a hollow, eerie roaring, like a hoarse scream.
"Ah, yes!" the thief said, throwing his hands in the air. "Just what we needed! Who wouldn't want this? I was just thinking, if only we could have a sandstorm along about now...."
Mathayus looked pointedly at his partner. "Fend for yourself, thief." He glanced back at the sorceress, sharply. "I must leave you here."
The sorceress seemed struck by that thought. "Leave me . . . ?"
The Akkadian hopped down off Hanna, and helped the woman down, and from a saddlebag withdrew a blanket, which he handed her. His eyes held hers, speaking volumes; but the only words he gave her were: "Cover up."
Then he swung back up into the saddle and spurred Hanna down off the dune.
As he rode, the Akkadian reached down into another saddlebag and plucked out a narrow strip of leather, greased, odd looking—a slitted cut across it, making an eyehole. Though the sand guard's prime function was protection, it also served as a bizarre battle mask, providing the assassin a fearsome visage. He tied it on with one hand as he spurred Hanna, even harder, her hooves pounding the sand, stirring tiny storms of their own.
On a flat stretch of desert, the red-turbaned company of twelve had paused, when their leader held up a hand—he'd heard something ... someone'... fast approaching. Thorak knew it couldn't be the Akkadian—a man alone would not dare attack thirteen; it must be a courier from one of the armies, sent by Memnon.
A red-turbaned warrior pointed. 'There!"
And coming down over a slope was one man— a leather-masked brute on a white camel... the Akkadian! Was he mad, charging them like a one-man army?
"He's attacking ... alone?" one warrior said to another.
"The sun has baked his brain," the other said, the tracker among them. "He's been seized by desert madness...."
And from their midst came Thorak's booming voice: "A thousand duranas to the man who brings me his head!"
Thorak's men were loyal, that was unquestioned; but the smell of money sparked these warriors to seek new heights of valor. Swords whipped from belts and the bare-chested, red-turbaned warriors spurred their horses and galloped toward the lunatic, soldiers bellowing war cries that would have chilled the blood of any normal man.
Mathayus, of course, was no normal man: he was the last of the Akkadians, on a blood mission, galloping at full speed. But he was not, as his foes surmised, a man alone—he rode at the head of an army of his own ... an army of sand.
As he came down over the rise, the sandstorm— the length of the horizon, a brown swirl of destruction—came up behind him, miles wide, as tall as Memnon's palace, a churning, burning wall of flying particles.
A thousand duranas or not, the riders panicked— the sight of the madman—featureless in the ghostly leather mask with the narrow eye slit, hunkered over, waving a scimitar, and racing toward them, with a sandstorm at his back—was a living nightmare, and they reined in their horses.
Then the sandstorm overtook the Akkadian, racing on ahead of him, and even as the brown swirl enveloped camel and rider, the two did not break stride.
Staggered by the man's audacity, realizing at once the assassin's bold plan, Thorak watched in helpless shock as the charging warrior disappeared into the storm, while Thorak's fabled Red Guard broke their own charge, their horses rearing, their ranks scattering as the whirlwind hit full force, swallowing them, the world a harsh vortex of sand, biting the flesh, blinding the eyes, the wind knocking men from saddles, onto the desert floor, and when they tried to stand, knocked them down again.
But Thorak did not succumb—he remained astride his fine steed, a battle-ax in one hand, reins in the other—and he screamed, "Akkadian bastard," and rode into the storm, searching in naught visibility for the object of his rage.
The world was a terrifying, blinding blur of falling bodies, whipping sand, and frightened, rearing horses. The supreme fighting men who were Thorak's red-turbaned warriors had been reduced to whimpering fools, wheeling about in isolation though the screams of others were all around them, only a few still on horseback.
And Mathayus—prepared for this hellish wind, relishing it—popped in and out of the pockets of isolation, looming over his disoriented adversaries like the personification of grim death itself. His blade flashed, splashing the brown world with red. He leaped from his saddle and tackled two of the soldiers, taking them down, scimitar slashing, flashing, the dagger in his other hand doing the same.
Then he disappeared, only to emerge here, and there, blades in both hands flashing, three warriors going down at once under the onslaught of steel, bodies dropping away into a wall of swallowing sand that offered the fresh corpses instant burial. The screams of slaughter were otherworldly as Mathayus and the storm became one, delivering their brutal sentences of death with simultaneous dearth of mercy.