Max Allan Collins

the wooden platform. 'That one's mine.'

Jesup nodded back, reminding the younger man, 'Wait for the signal.'

'Yes.'

'Live free,' Jesup said, initiating the traditional Akkadian farewell.

Then the two men gripped forearms, the leather wristguards snapping against each other.

'Die well,' Mathayus replied, completing the rit­ual.

As Jesup slipped away, vanishing into the dark­ness, Mathayus quickly unslung his magnificent bow and notched an arrow ... not just any arrow. This one bore an iron tip with no feathered tail—an eye-bolt through which was tied a catgut tether line.

Powerful as he was, Mathayus always felt the strain drawing back the taut bowstring—though the weapon was all but a part of him, its use remained a challenge. And when he finally released the bow­string, the arrow seemed to burn through the night, with an impossible power and swiftness ... trailing its catgut tether.

A good quarter mile away, the arrow struck deep, embedding itself firmly in the thickness of a wooden lodge pole. Mathayus's smile was tight as he gazed across the encampment, the tether now bisecting the tent city from this dune to that distant pole. It cut past the sentry platform, just above and to one side of it... but the bored guard had not noticed, at least not yet.

Soon the Akkadian was tying his end of the tether line onto the pommel of his saddle. Slipping the bola over the tied tether—making a decent handgrip of its two iron balls—he nudged the camel to attention. No argument this time, as Hanna pushed to her feet.

Mathayus tested the line, to see if the tether ... and the camel. .. could take his weight. Hanna groaned in protest, but he gave her a hard look— now and then, he had to remind the beast who was boss.

'Stay,' he said, firmly, and the animal and the man locked eyes.

And the beast nodded, or seemed to ... and that was good enough for the Akkadian.

He backed up, and began to run and grabbed onto the iron bola balls and went gliding down the tether line, off the dune and over the sands and toward the encampment. Hanna was staying put, and this was easy ... almost fun ... and the Akkadian risked holding on with one hand, to remove from his waist­band his hatchetlike kama.

When he swooped past that sentry platform, Ma­thayus wielded the nonlethal side of the kama, using it like a war club, whacking the guard across the shoulders, knocking the man off his post, sending him spinning head over heels into the darkness, to either unconsciousness or death.

A few minutes prior, elsewhere in the encamp­ment, two of Memnon's most lovingly sadistic tor­turers—a pair of fat, greasy, bearded, sweaty brutes as interchangeable as a right and left sandal—were heating up a poker in the coals of a campfire. Look­ing on with considerable interest was a skinny little weasel of a man, his leathers shabby, his face wis-pily bearded; his name was Arpid, and at the mo­ment his world was turned upside down.

Literally.

For Arpid—a thief by trade, a horse thief by spe­cialty—was suspended over the fire, his head so near the flames his scraggly hair was getting singed. Tied by the ankles and hanging from a post like an overripe fruit, Arpid watched from his upended per­spective as one of the fat torturers withdrew the poker and displayed its glowing orange tip to his colleague.

Both of the fat brutes gazed lovingly at the fiery tip of the poker. To some men, work is but a job; to these two, imparting affliction was a calling.

They seemed a bit surprised, when a deep, im­perial