crack

to him that anyone might be following them.
Thus, the first warning they had was the clinking of a horse’s harness. It was midmorning, three days’ ride out of Port Tinarana and they had come into the edges of Marou’s old range. Around them the ochre hills already throbbed with heat. Sound carries a long way in the desert stillness . . . but they were close, too close. Keilin had made no attempt to hide their tracks up to this point, but now he led the camels across bare rock and over to a narrow gorge, hardly more than a crack in the red cliffs. Then, ghosting among the broken boulders on the high slopes he slipped back.
Down in the riverbed, following their tracks, were twenty-two horsemen. They’d stopped so that the tracker could examine the trail. Dust hung about them, and the figures shimmered in the heat. Keilin snaked closer. He could hear the voices. “Not more than a few minutes ahead, master. The dung is still moist,” said the man who was squatting and examining the trail. He wore the red-and-yellow-striped tarboosh of a goatherd from the Thunder Gorge area of the Tinarana River. All the other men wore the sweat-stained uniforms of the Palace Guard.
“Damn good thing too. If we don’t catch them