With his knife Mathayus cut through the hides and created an opening, through which he droppeddown, landing like a big cat, almost silently, on the hide-covered floor.
It was if he had entered another world, a strange, shadowy, yet golden tent-chamber where elaborate drapes and tapestries hung, ornate benches and furnishings lending a palatial feel, while a central fire created a smoky ground-level fog that added to an undeniable occult atmosphere.
Rising to a crouch, Mathayus unslung his formidable bow and notched an arrow. Clearing a hanging tapestry, he realized he was not alone. A figure with its back to him, in a long flowing cape with a high ornate stiff collar, decorated with moon signs and other enigmatic symbols, began to swivel around to him, with an unnatural fluidity, as if floating.
The sorcerer.
Closing one eye, the master archer took aim, as the figure turned fully to him...
... and the sorcerer, it seemed, was a sorceress.
As fully concealed as this figure had been with its cloaked back to him, now was it fully revealed. Barely clad, much of her golden-hued skin exposed, her form was slender yet shapely, high firm breasts half-concealed by a glittering halter, loins also girded in gilt. An oval face of such breathtaking beauty he had never seen—wide-set almond eyes as large as they were dark, delicate nose, small perfect lips, all framed by shoulder-length obsidian hair topped by a golden headdress.
Her eyes held his, hypnotically—was she a dream?
Entranced, thunderstruck by such rare beauty, Mathayus allowed his grip on the bowstring to loosen, slightly; then he squeezed his eyes shut, trying to regain, and maintain, his concentration.
This was sorcery ... and he had, after all, come to kill a sorcerer. Who was to say this was not a man, an evil magician, casting a spell of feminine illusion?
"I am Cassandra," she said. Her voice was musical, and as she stepped forward, tiny toe-ring cymbals kept time, chiming as she moved. On her hands were gloves of gold . .. with silver claws.
He had come here to kill. Once again he aimed his arrow at her heart....
"You have been betrayed, Mathayus," she said.
But her lips were not moving!
The voice, the lovely, musical voice, was in his mind! He squeezed shut his eyes, opened them, and sighted down the drawn arrow as he spoke.
"You know my name?" he asked her.
She nodded. In his head, her voice said, "And I know why you're here... but I'm afraid you will not find me so easily slain."
As he stared at his beautiful target, Mathayus felt a strange, perhaps sorcery-induced sensation ... time seemed to slow, even while his mind raced.
"So kill me," she said, aloud this time. "If you can.
Her eyes seemed to delve deep within him, to his very soul; he felt weak, the strain on his arm, however massively muscular, was enormous.
He let the arrow fly ... but his target was not the sorceress.
A red-turbaned guard had stepped inside the tent, just behind Cassandra, and the arrow took him off his feet and out of this life.
As Mathayus—alert, himself again—notched another arrow, the sorceress viewed him with ineffable sadness.
"I am sorry, Akkadian," she said aloud, as if she meant the words. As if she had wanted to die. "You lost your chance."
Another guard in helmet and leathers came charging at him, sword swinging. Mathayus threw down the bow, and whipped his scimitar from its sheath, with his right hand, and with his left withdrew the kama. When the guard was upon him, Mathayus deflected the sword blow with the scimitar, and swung the kama into the man's midsection, dropping him to the smoky floor to bleed and die.
The next one came up from behind, and the Akkadian swiveled and traded blows of blades with the man, then slashing him across the chest and elbowing him to the ground. Two more were on him then, their swords flashing, and the assassin swung his blade around, killing one instantly, wounding the other, but dropping both men. He finished the surviving one—the sorceress was chilled by the ice-cold expression of the assassin hard at work—with a downward stabbing blow, and was catching his wind, when suddenly they were everywhere, red turbans streaming into the tent.
Like a machine designed for killing, he fought them with a skill and ferocity that astounded the sorceress, much as her beauty had taken his breath away.
But their numbers overwhelmed Mathayus, until they swarmed over him within the confined space, and he did not see Memnon himself enter, in the company of his second-in-command, the scarred human demon called Thorak, who—trident in hand— advanced toward the one-man army.
Surrounded by red-turbaned guards, who had fought him to a standstill, Mathayus was preparing for one last glorious assault, to carve a bloody breech through them on his way to dying well, when the trident thrust forward, and its three prongs pinned him to the central tent post.
And in his mind he heard the voice of the sorceress again, genuinely sorrowfuclass="underline" / am sorry, Akkadian. I am sorry.
Desert Death
T
he sea of soldiers parted around Mathayus, who remained pinned by Thorak's trident to the tent post, allowing him to see his host approaching. No introduction was needed: the man in golden chain mail, whose regal bearing did not diminish the austere cruelty of his handsome features, could be no one but Memnon himself.
The Teacher of Men paused, appraising his brawny guest, saying, "A living, breathing Akkadian ... What a rarity ... what an uncommon pleasure."
And Memnon strode forward to Mathayus and planted himself before the warrior with a fearlessness that had nothing to do with the assassin's captive state.
"I have heard," Lord Memnon said, "that your kind trains itself to bear great pain." With a smile as small as it was nasty, Memnon nodded to his massive second-on-command, Thorak, gesturing for him to remove the trident. "Well, we'll put your capacity to withstand pain to the test. . .."
Mathayus spat in the warlord's face.
A tiny sneer preceded Memnon's response— which was to backhand the Akkadian, a blow of such power that blood spattered the tent wall nearby.
"You bleed like any other man," Memnon pointed out.
Mathayus sneered, too—not a tiny one, though ... a bloody snarl of defiance.
That look vanished, however, as the Akkadian heard a familiar voice: "What? No more cold, daring words from the heartless assassin?"
The sarcasm had come from a young, lightly bearded man in noble leathers, just entering the room, with a cowhide sack—large enough for a good-size water jug—gripped by its draw ties.
Takmet! The son of King Pheron of Ur ...
And Mathayus now understood why the sorceress had spoken of treachery.
"You, Takmet," Mathayus said, his eyes wide. "You are our betrayer?"
This seemed to amuse the king's son, who answered by way of a sarcastic half bow.
In the brutal world in which Mathayus had lived his life, a man's word, his honor, was all that separated him from the animals, even the human ones. "You would betray your own father?"