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those six men has budged. They sure sleep soundly!”
    The Children of the Snow Leopard (one of the clans of the northern part of the Empire) were crouched on a low rocky ledge. Below them a small fire was burning, around which lay their adversaries, bundled up in tattered blankets. The cautious highlanders usually set a watch, but this time they hadn’t. And this fact did not sit well with the squad’s tracker. One might have thought that Ga-Nor had overlooked an ambush, but the captain of the redheaded soldiers would sooner chop off his own hand than believe that his blood brother could have missed a warning sign.
    The uncertainty was throwing him off balance. Da-Tur thought yet again that their reconnaissance mission was cursed. The northerners who served at the Gates of the Six Towers knew the gorges and trails of the Boxwood Mountains like the backs of their own hands. They were the best scouts in the Empire. No enemy patrol could possibly slip through the mountain passes unobserved while the Children of the Snow Leopard watched over them.
    When Da-Tur’s ten had left the Gates of Six Towers, they hadn’t thought they would encounter any trouble. Everything had been quiet as the squad descended into the valley beyond the primary ridge. But every settlement, every square inch of land had been swarming with Nabatorian soldiers. And then Ta-Ana had noticed the white robe of a Sdisian in their midst. The scouts returned back the way they had come without hesitation. They had to report what they had seen to the commander of the Gates as soon as possible.
    On the return trip, in one of the gloomy ravines, they had been attacked by a mountain gove. They had acted foolishly. They should have bypassed the old watchtower that had been abandoned by the Empire’s soldiers back during the War of the Necromancers (fought over five hundred years before the events described here, after the Dark Revolt of the Damned. After the war the Empire gave up the lands that lay beyond the Gates of Six Towers and, having retreated across the mountain range, began a war with the Highborn for the forests of Uloron and Sandon) . But the northerners were in a hurry, so they decided to cut their journey short and they did not take the detour. And so it was that they chanced upon the ravenous creature, which had just emerged from its summer hibernation. Only three of them survived: Da-Tur, Ga-Nor, and Ta-Ana. Seven Children of the Snow Leopard remained forever in that narrow gorge.
    Ga-Nor, a tall, tanned man with red mustaches, raised himself up on his elbows and looked below. He contracted his bushy eyebrows. It really was strange that the highlanders hadn’t bothered to set up a watch.
    Nothing. No movement at all. There was no sound except for a distant measured droning—a mountain river thundering through the shallows. There was no cause for alarm. If this was an ambush, it was very skillfully done. But skillful ambushes were beneath the dignity of the impatient highlanders. In any case, the Chus, as they called themselves, could not lie still for so long unless they were dead.
    Suddenly Da-Tur understood.
    “I swear by the hide of an ice demon! They’re dead!” he said, stunned.
    “Let’s get out of here,” whispered Ta-Ana, marveling at herself. She had never been afraid of corpses, but everything that was happening right now seemed strange. “We shouldn’t disturb their souls.”
    Ga-Nor nodded grimly and backed up the archer. “Dawn is still a long ways off. We can cover a lot of ground.”
    Da-Tur stood up quietly, walked along the rocky ledge for about ten yards, getting as far away from the fire as possible, and then jumped down below. His comrades followed him. Glancing backward, they tried to hurry away.
    A green glow suddenly flared up on the western side of the twin-peaked mountain. It turned into a ball of fire, which soared up into the sky in a steep arc, paused for a moment at its highest point, and then fell toward the