Max Allan Collins

of them, came boiling up out of the cones.

'All the sooner,' the thief said, 'to feast on our naked heads.'

Mathayus had barely been listening to this, more intent on trying to free himself, though his strug­gling seemed in vain. 'You find this funny, do you?'

'You're Akkadian, aren't you?'

'Yes.'

'I heard the guards talking. I thought your kind was all dead.'

'Not yet.'

'Not till those ants get you, you mean?'

'Your humor eludes me.'

'Name's Arpid. Honest man accused of theft. You are?'

'Mathayus ... Laugh at me, please. The anger may help me escape.'

'I don't think so. You see, that's what I find funny. A pitiful specimen like me, and a brawny brute like you ... and yet I am about to escape ...

while you are about to die a horrible death, no doubt brought about by a dire destiny earned by you for leaving me to die last night!'

'You? You're about to escape.'

'That's right. Men like you... all muscle, no brains ... poor man, you only see the surface, don't you?' The wispily bearded thief managed to nod toward the two guards seated on their rocks around the gully's edge. 'They're just like you . .. While they were burying us, I was pretending to be a-sleep.. . only I was actually sucking air into my lungs, till they were the size of a camel's bladder.'

The guard who'd been distributing the fiery rags to the anthills was now returning to his rock at the gully's edge. Mathayus watched as the man lifted a wineskin and drank. The other guard was examining the haul they'd made: a cache of weapons that had been Mathayus's ... including the massive bow, which the guard quickly discovered he couldn't be­gin to draw back.

A tiny smile etched itself on the Akkadian's lips, but it didn't last long: now, striding into the buried assassin's view, came rows of fire ants, an army marching from the surrounding cones with a single objective: Mathaysus's head.

'If you're going to escape,' Mathayus said to his fellow prisoner, as the ants moved toward him, 'what are you waiting for?'

'You see that one?' Arpid asked, referring not to one of the oncoming ants, but to the nearer of the two guards, the fellow drinking wine from a skin.

'What about him?'

'Nothing. Just, he's been drinking that yak piss for about an hour now, and very soon nature's going to run its course and . .. ah! What did I tell you.'

The guard was rising from his rock, heading over to another pile of boulders; soon, he was relieving himself, his back to the prisoners down in the sandy gully.

'Damned if you weren't right...' Mathayus be­gan, turning toward his fellow prisoner ...

... but he was talking to an empty hole in the ground! Arpid was gone, slithered up and out of that hole that would seem only large enough for a man's head. But if that slender fellow had truly filled him­self with air...

And now Mathayus was alone down in the gully—or almost alone: he still had his friends, the fire ants, less than twenty feet away.

The Akkadian was as brave as any man in his world, but nonetheless, panic consumed him, in ad­vance of the ants doing the same, and he struggled madly within his prison of sand, to no success.

'Hey!' someone yelled.

It was the guard, on his way