taken him, stolen all of his precious possessions, and thought to sell him into a short life of slavery and death for a few bits of silver. Revenge and recovery of what was his were the only thoughts in Gord's mind as he acted.
With a lightninglike flick of his wrist, Gord brought the heavy dagger down. His arm shot outward as he did so, and the weapon flew from his hand, point first. The sharp point of the blade hit where he had aimed, imbedding itself in the bicep of the veiled man's sword arm just as he was bringing forward his weapon for a sweeping cut targeted at Gord's neck.
'Aargh…' the nomad cried, a half-stifled sound of pain as the dagger pierced his flesh. The stroke could not be held, and neither could the warrior's grip on his sword hilt. Gord ducked, but need not have done so. The long blade went flying on an incline into the darkness, sailing well over and past the young adventurer's head with a whirring sound. The Arroden tried to continue the fight, standing his ground and reaching for his dagger with his sound left arm, but with two sword slashes and a final dagger thrust, Gord cut him down.
It took only a little time for Gord to locate the Arroden shaik's hidden wealth. It was buried, of course, and kept safe in a locked chest. Gord had it out from under the carpet and the dirt quickly. He used the long sword to hack the container open, for he feared that poisoned needles protected its lock and he had no time or desire to try to use his skill as a thief to defeat any protections that might have been built into the nomad chiefs strongbox. Inside were all of his treasures except for his shirt of magical elfin mall.
'So, Yahoud, you like my armor, do you?' he said aloud as he buckled on his shortsword and tucked his enchanted dagger back into its sheath. 'Let us see how much good it does when my long-fanged poniard here kisses your lousy body!' His ring, his armband, his sling, and all of his other possessions were here as well, and he savored each thing as he reclaimed and donned it. Adding a largish leather pouch full of coins to what he had recovered of his own, Gord ran out of the tent and headed back for where the animals were kept. He was curious about what was happening in the battle to the north, and besides that he was not yet done with revenge. With luck, it might be possible to find Yahoud in a position where he had only a few of his warriors around him. If that happened, Gord vowed he would risk the odds to even the score with the Arroden shaik.
Windeater recognized him as soon as he came near the stallion. It was a simple matter to untether him, then find and put on his saddle. Just before Gord broke camp, so to speak, he cut the rope that held the camels and other horses together. Then he galloped Windeater along their length, hooting and waving his arms as he went. Frightened dromedaries and equines ran off in all directions, and horse and rider pounded off toward the sounds that still came faintly from the north.
After about twenty minutes of hard riding, Gord brought Windeater to a halt atop a low rise. A few hundred yards in the distance he could see the Yoli encampment. Spread out in an arc along the flat ground were clusters of Arroden; from this vantage point, Gord could see that the camp was about two-thirds surrounded. Inside the camp, several unwinking lights glowed brightly. They looked like magical globes of illumination, evidently cast by the Yoli sometime during the combat. There had probably been more, but Gord supposed that the Arroden had priests and shamans of their own to counter such light with magically wrought darkness. A few burning tents added a flickering glow to the steady brightness of the enspelled light spheres. Even though his night-sight did not operate at such long distances, Gord could discern what was going on in the camp, and some of what had transpired, thanks to this strange combination of illumination.
It appeared that at one point the attacking force must have been right among the defenders. There were bodies dressed in the pale ochre robes of the Arroden strewn throughout the camp. Many Yollites had died there, too. Because of what he was now witnessing, the young adventurer assumed that the defenders had managed to push back the first onslaught of the veiled warriors. He saw no combat activity within the camp, but with every passing minute the Arroden were expanding the ends of their arc and clearly intended to encircle the Yollite encampment. The beleaguered Yollites were lying low, for the attackers were sending buzzing bolts from their crossbows toward the camp. Any figure that showed itself in or against a light source was a target. Before, the Yollites had needed the light to use their bows, just as the Arroden had suspected they would prefer to do, but now the illumination was a liability, and the lit areas were being generally shunned. Gord could make out burned and smoking patches of ground here and there around the camp. If any spell-workers still lived among the defenders, no sign of this was evident. Either their magic was exhausted, or these men had died after casting their spells. Gord wondered how many Yoli warriors remained. It was hard to tell from this distance.
Gord tied Windeater to a scrubby bit of brush a hundred paces away, in a place where an upthrust fold of ground would conceal the stallion's presence unless someone came within ten or so yards. Moving quietly down the slope and then working to his left, the young thief began moving toward the veiled warriors who were besieging the camp. The Arroden strategy was a logical and unsurprising one; by encircling their enemy, they could contain them and also gain maximum sniping advantage, just so long as the attackers were careful not to hit the allies on the other side of the circle with their crossbow fire. The Arroden camels were ground-reined in small groups along the outside edge of the circle, but the animals' senses had already been assaulted by so much commotion that they paid no heed to another man in their vicinity. And, as Gord soon found out, the attackers themselves did not even consider that someone might be coming up behind them…
It was so easy as to be almost laughable. Each of the Arroden warriors was stationed roughly one hundred fifty feet from the fringe of the Yoli encampment, and more importantly each one was at least seventy-five feet, sometimes as much as a hundred, away from his nearest neighbor — not enough space for the Yoli to attempt an escape as a group, but plenty of room for Gord to work undisturbed.
He picked a spot in the loosely spaced circle to begin, and then moved relentlessly along the Arroden rank. He killed as silently as the whisper of an owl's wings, as swiftly as that nocturnal predator does when its great talons strike an unsuspecting rat. From one of the first men he felled, Gord appropriated an attractive-looking necklace. Then, as he went on, he amused and revenged himself by stripping many of his victims of the silver bracelets they wore, stringing them on the necklace as he went along. Old habits die hard, Gord thought to himself as he did this — but the Arroden were certainly dying a lot more easily.
One of the men he did in was Yahoud himself, and he was careful to take this man with a dagger thrust in the neck so that he could reclaim his mail shirt in whole and unharmed condition. Gord's only regret was that he had had to strike the shaik from behind to kill him quickly, and thus the Arroden leader never knew by whose hand he died. He lost exact count after a time, but Gord thought that he had managed to slay no fewer than a score of the veiled men, and had worked his way around about a quarter of the circle. Then his presence was noticed — but not by those whom he was killing.
It was his own success that proved his undoing. The lack of missile fire from the segment where Gord had been wreaking his revenge must have become apparent to the besieged Yoli. A brief, tentative movement in that direction by a group of Yollites failed to bring any reaction from the attackers, and, unbeknownst to those along the circle, some intelligent leader among the defenders' ranks managed to spread the word of this development.
As for the attackers, they were so widely spaced, and one side of the circle was so far from its opposite section, that they remained oblivious to the fact that their ranks had been thinned. The closest Gord came to discovery was when an occasional warrior remarked to himself that the comrade on his right must have used up his crossbow bolts — just before that man himself fell to Gord's blades.
There was a sudden burst of activity in the center of the beleaguered encampment, but much of what went on was shielded from the view of outsiders by tents and large canvas shields. Some of the Arroden continued to fire indiscriminately into the mass, but most of them held their fire and did what they could to prepare for what was sure to be a last, desperate rush. Then the rush began — but it went in two directions at once. While expendable animals were driven out toward the side opposite Gord, a rush of men and animals headed toward the unguarded portion of the circle. The ploy was detected by the veiled nomads within a couple of minutes, when those on the still-intact side of the circle realized what they were being 'attacked' by. Shouts and cries traveled along the arc, and an Arroden shaman stationed close to the gap in the circle brought forth a globe of light to show his brethren what was happening.
The brilliant sphere sprang into being not far from where Gord was crouching. An Arroden warrior who would have been Gord's next victim got to his feet nearby, shifting his attention from the on-rushing Yoli to the strange sight the globe revealed. 'It is the prisoner!' the veiled nomad shouted, pointing his small crossbow at Gord and jerking the trigger to release a hasty shot at the young adventurer. 'He has escaped the camp and slain Thotir!'
The shaft plucked at the baggy robe that covered Gord, but did him no harm. Gord shouted a curse at the fellow, ran forward, and attacked without thinking. By this time he was mad with fighting lust and blood madness.
