He'd come perhaps seven hours and twenty miles from his starting point when he saw something breaking the monotony of rocky ground, upended boulders, and scrubby bushes. At first it seemed only an irregular smudge on the ground, pale and uncertain in the fading light. Then Blade's eyes caught a last flash of sunlight on something metallic. He increased his pace, until he was almost running across the last three hundred yards.

Half in the shadow of a high outcropping of gray rock, a litter of bones stretched for fifty yards along the ground. There were human remains, and also skeletons that looked very much like camels. The bones were bleached and scoured white as flour by the sun and wind of-how many years? Blade could only guess.

Certainly a long time. There were cotton robes and leather belts, pouches, and boots among the remains. The robes were pale and worn as fine as cobweb, the leather was cracked and flaking, baked hard as wood. The dead had been lying here a long time since they came out of the desert to die here of thirst before they could reach the mountains.

Or had they died of thirst? Blade found himself noticing other flashes of light on metal, cracks in some of the skulls, peculiar stains on the robes. He began to move among the remains, examining them more carefully.

Most of the robes were faded to a dingy white, but most also showed large patches of spots that had once been stained dark. Bloodstains? Certainly nothing else was as likely.

Blade picked up a skull. It had been split from the crown to the bridge of the nose, and after that hacked free of the neck that once held it up. Wind and sun had not done that.

Something sharper than a stone pricked Blade's foot. He stepped back, knelt, and felt in the gravel and bones around him. He came up with a long, leaf-shaped arrowhead, still attached to a few inches of shaft baked so dry that the wood crumbled to powder between Blade's fingers.