Thirsty blades — Reading Companion

Someone had worked fast and skilfully as Rankin reclined in the _souk_ that afternoon, smoking a _narghileh_, sipping bitter Abyssinian coffee, and pondering on how to extricate the lady Azizah from the peril that was descending from the mountains of Kurdistan.

Shoulder to shoulder the assailants advanced. Their steps were deliberate, now that they were certain rather than hopeful that the .45 had not been reloaded. Six lean swordsmen from the desert, grim phantoms whose curved blades gleamed frostily in the moonlight; curved scimitars whose drawing cut shears from shoulder to hip with one swift stroke.

Rankin drew his scimitar, cursed the disguise that had forbidden his favorite saber, and came on guard. The six paused a moment in their advance. _One_ of them, they knew, must close with their prey, while the other five hacked him to pieces. And the sentence of that _one_ was written; for their victim's frenzy would not be tempered with any hope of escape. _One_ of them was even now a dead man....

One ... two ... three paces....

Rankin dropped his point and laughed.

The line wavered. It takes courage to assault a madman.

A long, fierce lunge, and a deadly swift flicker of steel; and Rankin withdrew from the mêlée, on guard again. That sudden assault from beyond probable striking-distance had caught them off balance; _one_ of them was even now a dead man, shorn half asunder.

Then they closed in. Rankin's footwork saved him, and during that instant of grace, his blade again hit deep as he evaded the charge.

_"Mashallah!"_ gasped the red-bearded chief as he spurred his horse a pace forward.

There were only four to continue the attack, but their assault would be a reckless whirlwind of steel. No more sidestepping or retreating for Rankin.

"----hacked to pieces in some side street of Tekrit----" flashed through his mind. Ismeddin the Darvish was right.

And then he saw the chief draw his blade.

"Horse and foot! Christ, if I could only get _him_!" prayed Rankin.

Time had ceased. He remembered how very slowly a swift blade approaches when one is in the last extremity. He could parry, cut, retreat, parry again, cut--and then the chief on horse would cut him down. But there was plenty of time....

Then something on the wall behind Rankin cast its shadow over him: attack from the rear.

"They are thorough in Tekrit!" flashed through his mind as the very end of that interminable instant came in an irresistibly flailing mill of blades.

Clack-clack-click! And a silent stroke that bit flesh. Clack-clack----

"Halt!" roared the chief from his Barbary horse.

His upraised blade swept down. In response to his signal, something soft and clinging dropped from the wall and enveloped Rankin. Snared in a net!

The three surviving footmen sheathed their blades, seized Rankin, now firmly enmeshed in the silken net, shouldered him, and followed their chief.

"Well," reflected Rankin, as he resigned himself to captivity, "if I'm hacked to pieces at all, it probably won't be in a side street.... I wonder if Ismeddin foresaw _this_?

"And this only the 11th of Nisan ... two more like this, and I'll be in good training for that black swordsman in the vault....

"They expected me--just staring at that girl had nothing to do with it," Rankin assured himself by way of minimizing the folly of having stared too intently into the eyes of the veiled woman who had that afternoon appraised him from the height of her glittering litter.

But Rankin knew that there was a direct connection between the sanguinary combat of a few moments ago, and the exchange of glances between him and the veiled girl whose gorgeously adorned litter had followed the red-bearded dignitary through the _souk_. There was but one conclusion: the girl had called the redbeard's attention to Rankin.

Well, and so be it then! For those were the eyes of Azizah who so often had accompanied Suleiman Baalshem in that haunting, recurring dream that for twenty years had driven Rankin the length and breadth of Asia, and across all the lands of Islam. He was attaining his goal, even if only to meet the thirsty blades whereof Ismeddin had spoken.

The chief of his assailants, then, must be the Shareef, Sayyid Yussuf, the girl's uncle and guardian. In which case, all the better: at least Rankin was not in the hands of the devil-worshipers who had been filtering out of Kurdistan to celebrate their dreadful _sabbat_ in that ravine two days' ride from Tekrit ... and thus and thus Rankin speculated ... with never a passer-by to intrude on the unreality of it all.