Free The Golden Sword by Janet Morris

was raised to parry Hael’s blow. The quarters were too close for the short sword to have helped me, though I still held it in my bleeding right, along with the threx’s reins. The gol-knife was gone now, somewhere below in the dust, in a dead man’s neck.
    Hael, free to engage properly his opponent, skewered him with dispatch. He brought Quiris head to tail with my dun threx. I looked around me. I saw only Nemarsi still mounted. I searched for Chayin, seeing Saer was among the riderless, and felt a great relief when I spied him standing upon the ground over a lifeless form. He was speaking, it seemed, to a threx. I could hear his coaxing tone but not his words. The dust slowly settled. Everywhere the jiasks were catching up the riderless animals. I did not see Marshon, the jiask who had taken me to wash in the jer, among them. Hael’s eyes were fastened upon the threx I rode.
    “A Menetpher!” Chayin called out, holding high a blooded blade.
    A sardonic smile appeared upon Hael’s full lips. His cloak and beard were white with dust. I looked away from him, at the corpses. I counted fifteen. There was much blood upon the moving jiasks, but no telling whether it be theirs or their victims’. One limped slowly among the dead. Another, holding a useless arm, stood staring at the body of the jiask Marshon. The sun’s rising was ruby mist upon the land. Hael still stared around him, smiling. Chayin snatched up the dragging reins of the steel-blue threx he was stalking and led her toward us. The men’s voices were growl and hiss in their throats, and many shook their heads to and fro as they collected threx, weapons, and chalds from among the fallen. If a Parset dies in battle with an enemy of his peer group, his chald is returned to the Day-Keepers by the enemy, that his death may be entered upon the Day-Keeper’s Roll. Those possessions upon him at the time of his demise are retained by his killer. There would be a formal rebuke and presentation of these Menetpher chalds to the Menetpher Day-Keepers, for the traditional truce surrounding threx meets had been broken. The Nemarsi who had died victorious in battle fared better. Their effects would be shared between those in the tribe with whom they had sipped blood. If, however, the Menetphers had triumphed and left no clue as to the identity of the assassins, all the worldly goods of the fallen would have been thrown out upon the sand. In mysterious death among the Parset tribes, there is no beneficiary. Thus do they keep murder from their backs. Only if a man is willing to take up the chaldra, the responsibilities and family of another, does he raise arms against him other than in war. It the death is unseemly, such as death at the hand of a chaldless, or while pursuing some immoral end, then also are all worldy possessions of one so slain cast away, serving no one, that all trace of his ignoble memory be lost forever and ever, and even his, name be scoured away by the desert. Such are the Day-Keepers’ laws upon the Parset Lands.
    Hael still smiled, like a proud father at his son’s first chalding.
    “Does death so amuse you, dharener?” I asked him. He grunted.
    Chayin, mounted once again upon Saer and leading the steel-blue threx, joined us.
    My arms were shaking uncontrollably. I pressed them against me.
    “She sits upon Guanden, proudest possession of the tiask Besha, and fastest among Nemarsi threx, and she wonders why I find the situation amusing. I would have been far from amused had we returned home and found thirteen of our best stolen from under our very noses.” Hael chuckled aloud.
    For a moment, I was with the helsar. The battle had excited it, even wrapped away within Hael’s pack. It had made use of some of the life energy lost in battle. It was warmer, closer. Then it was gone. But I marked it stronger.
    “And Besha this way comes,” said Chayin in a distant tone. I searched his face. Now the veil was surely upon him. His eyes stared, enraptured