Max Allan Collins

around—only it wasn't Fydor after all.

The Akkadian intruder had abandoned his Yeti cape for the furs of the sentry he'd killed—the late Fydor—and right now he was facing another of those guards, and rather rudely sending a stream of steaming urine at the man's legs.

The put-upon, peed-upon guard reflexively looked down at his breeches, giving Mathayus just the moment he needed to head-butt the bastard into unconsciousness. The crack of it echoed off the sur­rounding mountains like small thunder.

The guard dropped into the snow like the dead weight he was, and Mathayus returned to his current mission— that is, finishing the piss he was taking. A man could not go into battle, after all, with any dis­tractions.

Within the log fortress, the captain was removing from the flames of the fireplace his scimitar, which he had heated up until the steel glowed a pulsing red. Grasping the scimitar's hilt, the captain fought his growing discomfort with some braggadocio, slic­ing the air all around Jesup, tauntingly.

'Which limb do I take first?' the captain said, not so much to the Akkadian as to the crowd, like a musician soliciting requests.

'The right leg!' one drunken warrior cried.

'The left!' yelled another.

Others seemed to prefer the arms, with prefer­ences running (not surprisingly) to the right or the left.

Throughout all of this, the prisoner remained un­moved. The captain, for all his boasting before his men, was wondering: What does the Akkadian know that we don't?

Outside, another guard wore a pensive expres­sion, as if he too were pondering that question; this was, however, an illusion, as—despite his wide-open eyes—the man was quite dead, propped up to appear to still be on guard, despite the spear of an icicle stuck into the side of his turban, a little blood around the entry, frozen and black now.

The man who had accomplished this, of course, was Mathayus, in a hooded cloak, who at the moment was climbing an exterior wall of the timber citadel, two ropes dragging behind him tied to a huge boulder that the Akkadian towed behind him. The weight of the boulder made the warrior's feat all the more difficult, as—two floors up now —he grasped for purchase between logs.

At that moment, the spread-eagled Jesup was watching the captain approach him with that red-hot scimitar. Soon its sizzling blade was just under the prisoner's chin. The captain flashed rotten teeth in a sadistic smile, as if to say, 'I don't fear you or your big talk.'

Jesup merely returned the smile.

And said, 'Maybe the gods will have pity on you ... because my brother will not.'

The captain tried to laugh at that, through his fetid smile; but the laugh caught in his throat—there was something deadly serious in the Akkadian's words that told the warrior this was no boast. And it was not.

For on the roof, at that very moment, Mathayus sat on the lip of the black-billowing chimney; in his hands, the boulder was held high over his head, as if he were trying to impress small children with a strongman stunt.

But it was not children he sought to impress— however childish the minds of these enemy warriors might be.

Taking a deep breath, Mathayus scooted forward and dropped down into the chimney, still holding that massive stone over his head, so that as he disappeared down, the boulder stayed behind, and plugged up the chimney, blocking it until only the tiniest wips of smoke found escape.

Almost immediately within the chamber below, thick black smoke began to plume outward from the fireplace. The captain forgot his prisoner, for the moment, and with everyone else in the room turned his attention to the massive stone fireplace and the gathering fumes.