Shih-ka'i did not tell the man that the dead were walking again. That none of the attackers had been alive. He gave the signal.

His men revealed themselves. The party below halted. They were badly outnumbered, and Hsu Shen was right behind them.

Shih-ka'i stared. Hsu Shen had been right. Three were legionnaires.

The group formed a turtle, ready to fight. Shih-ka'i's men closed in. The surrounded men dropped.

Shih-ka'i felt something electric stir the air. "Down!" he bellowed. "Everybody on the ground!" He whipped his mind into his bag of prepared tricks.

What looked like a great black boot sole blotted out the sky. Its heel descended swiftly. For an instant Shih-ka'i pictured himself as a bug about to be crushed.

He loosed a spell.

The air whined with the sound of a thousand giant whetstones scraping steel, then the cracking of a million tiny whips. He looked up. The boot had vanished.

"Get down there and carve those people up before they come alive again!" he thundered.

He did not wait to see if his orders were carried out. He closed his eyes and reentered the realm of spell. He seized one, pictured himself hurling a spear. He painted a big bull's-eye on the map from the fortress wall.

Thunder rolled across the cloudless wasteland. A flash extinguished the sun. Shih-ka'i opened his eyes. A thousand dust devils danced across the barrens like frenzied, drugged dancers, often colliding and collapsing. A few minutes later he heard a remote rumble. He smiled into his mask. "That'll make you keep your head down."

He waited for several minutes, his Tervola-senses extended. Nothing came. His enemy seemed cowed.

For the moment, he thought. Only for the moment.

He joined his men. "We'd do better to burn the bodies," he told Hsu Shen. "But there seems to be a shortage of wood."