The sun glinted on spired helmets and whetted spearheads.  Spurs jingled and bright silks flashed as three armored riders breasted the long slope of a great sand dune in the wide desert that formed the southwestern marches of Turan.  Red turbans were wound about their helmets; sashes of the same color girdled their waists.  White silken shirts, baggy trousers thrust into short black boots, and sleeveless, silvered mail shirts completed their apparel.  Curved swords hung at their hips.  Upright from the holders that hung from the saddles of two of them rose the ten-foot Turanian lances.  The remaning one bore, slung from his saddle, a thick, double-curved bow in a bow case and a score and a half of arrows in a lacquered leathern quiver.

Accompanying them was a fourth figure, bound by both wrists to a rope held by the bowman.  Deep gashes in the sand told of this prisoner's inability to keep up with his mounted captors.  He wore the white khalat of the desert Zuagir, though the garment was dirty and torn to shreds.  His lean, dark visage was hollow-cheeked, but implacable hatred lurked in his red-rimmed eyes.  He stumbled panting up the slope without a sound of pain or protest.

The Turanian soldiers, separated from the rest of their troop by a two-day sandstorm, were seeking their way back to Fort Wakla, a Turanian outpost deep in the Zuagir desert country.  Yesterday they had met the Zuagir.  His horse had tumbled under him with an arrow through its heart, and he had been led senseless on the sand by a blow from a spear butt.  The commander of Fort Wakla had lately begun an intense campaign against the desert tribes, who had harried Kuranian caravans overly much of late.  Having taken the Zuagir prisoner, the horsemen were bringing him back to the fort to be bled of knowledge before being hanged.

At the top of the dune, the little troop paused to rest.  Waterskins were lifted to parched mouths, while the ragged prisoner crawled up on all fours, almost done in.  Sand dunes stretched as far as the eye could see.  As practiced warriors, the Turanians used the pause to let their hawklike eyes sweep the horizon and the surface of the sands.  Nothing could be seen save endless, rolling yellow plain.

The tallest of the three, the man with the bow and the prisoner's rope, suddenly stiffened.  Shading his dark eyes, he bent forward to get a better view.  On the top of a dune a mile away, he had sighted a lone horseman riding at a gallop.  The dune had hidden him as they came to their point of vantage, but now the stranger was flying down the near side in a flurry of sand.  The leader turned to his fellows.

"By the alabaster hips of Yenagra!" he said, "we have caught another desert rat!  Be ready; we will kill this one and take his head on a lance tip back to the fort."