Publisher's Synopsis
He drew the dagger from the waist shawl. He cut across the blue mark which the steel chain had graved on the boy's windpipe, obliterating it with torn flesh and a rush of blood. He left the dagger sticking in the wound. His name was cut in the ebony hilt. The Red Chief would find, and read, and yes! thus the score would be even! The hadji never knew how he reached safety. He had a vague memory of a sentinel challenging him, of a bullet whistling above his head, of how he went down the path scudding on his belly like a jackal to the reek of carrion. He remembered how, as he reached the valley, the western tower of the Raven's Station seemed like a spire away on the world's rim: a spire of hope and lost hope. He remembered the sudden gusts of snow coming down like hissing spears, with the moon reeling above him through the clouds like a great, blinding ball of light and with a lonely southern peak pointing at the mute stars like a gigantic icicle, frozen, austere, desolate. He remembered vaguely how he traveled day and night, day and night, and it was only gradually, slowly, as his mind jerked free from fleshly thrall and buffeted its road back through the mists of passion to God's Peace, that there came to him knowledge of why he was fleeing from that thing in the glitter of the hills as from a thing accursed.
