Blade found himself looking around the darkening landscape with new alertness and a growing suspicion. These people might have been moving up from the desert in search of water, but he doubted they'd died from not finding it. They'd died from bows and sharp steel in the hands of human enemies.

Again Blade examined the litter of bones and gear, studying them in the light of this new certainty. The human enemies had been skilled enough to lay an ambush that struck down the whole party in almost the same moment. Perhaps a few had ridden entirely clear, but the rest lay too close together for there to be any other plausible explanation.

Blade backed away from the fallen bones, trying to look in all directions at once, and scrambled up the rock outcropping. The last few feet were nearly vertical. Blade pulled himself over the sharp crest and lay flat behind it, looking back the way he'd come.

Yes, here was where the ambushers had lain in wait. The rocks could conceal archers, holding their fire until the riders were within easy bowshot. Then a sudden rain of arrows, at a range where they could hardly miss the camels, and a mass of stunned and dismounted men to be finished off with swords.

All right, so he'd reconstructed the events of so many years ago. What did this mean for him now?

It didn't have to mean anything. The ambush could have been generations ago, the bones lying in the open because on this rocky slope the sand of the desert would not creep over them. The youngest of the ambush party could have long since died of old age.

Still, this land had once seen men killing each other, and it might do so again. Blade decided to strike out for the mountains as soon as dawn gave him traveling light. Out on the slope he lacked not only water but cover. He was as visible as a flea on a plate.