Before they could turn and ride out again, their pursuers had arrived and turned the little valley into a death trap. There had been a brief savage flurry of swords cleaving skulls and arrows and bullets sinking into flesh; then the undisturbed silence of the desert had returned. The victors had stripped the bodies of weapons and had left their victims lying where they had fallen. The sun, the sand-laden wind, and scavenging birds had stripped the flesh from the bones in a few days or weeks. Nothing was left as a monument to the dead except their whitening bones and the clothes now worn by a man not even of their world, let alone of their people.

Blade bent and picked up a pebble from the ground. He put it in his mouth and began rolling it around between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. The flow of saliva this started broke up the caked dryness in his mouth and eased his breathing. With his robe flapping about him as he moved, he strode off down the valley.

With the chill desert night around him, Blade felt free to move even faster. At first the great ridge of sand loomed high behind him, silhouetted against the sky and cutting off a vast slice of the stars. Then it slowly faded away in the darkness, and Blade could no longer make out any features of the landscape around him. He felt as though he were walking across the desert under a great inverted bowl that had him trapped here alone, cut off from the rest of the world. It was an eerie sensation, and he wished again that he had a weapon of some sort. Even a dagger would have worked against the feeling that something might be lurking out there in the darkness, something against which all his skill and strength would be helpless.

Blade went on looking over his shoulder and listening for some sound other than his own footsteps all night. He also went on walking. The hours passed, and eventually the sky overhead began to turn gray, while the sky to the west began to show a faint tinge of pink. Blade began to breathe more easily as he started to get a clearer view of the land around him.