GAME

The desert night is cold and dry. The screams have stopped. You settle down wishing you had packed blankets.

Dawn comes with soothing warmth as the red light of the sun spills over you. The ruined temple is pretty in daylight, the walls are built of white and pale blue stones set in a non-repeating pattern.

Looking basically westward, your shadows stretch across the desert toward a smudge of smoke at the horizon. A long horse-ride and a longer walk away, the city of Zul-Bazzir.

Golden Ahm-Rami easily finds the scuffs where a man's feet hit the dirt and then ran away, as well as the prints of a leopard going the same direction.

Something about being near the temple now makes him feel very uneasy and he gestures to Tobias to hurry away in the direction of Osan and the leopard went. Back toward Zul-Bazzir? Seems like it.

It gets warmer, then hot, as the sun climbs.

Before you've gotten more than half way toward Zul-Bazzir, the footprints come to an area of harder ground where they become untrackable. However, the trend is apparent: Osan headed straight toward the city, as if it was a place of refuge for him. The leopard accompanied him.

You continue toward Zul-Bazzir.

It's about the middle of the morning, another hot day shaping. The streets are moderately busy with porters carrying stuff, shoppers looking for stuff, and vendors vying to sell stuff from their open storefronts.

You've lost track of Jewel, Sabiha, Osan, and the leopard. Somewhere is an invaluable gem, and elsewhere are precious letters of credit.

It's late morning when Tobias starts asking around. It's an hour after sunset, in a comfortable wine shop eating tapas, when a man walks over to your table and sits in one of the two empty chairs. He looks old (with the pointy white goatee and leathery face) but he moves young. His name is Ras-Niss. He comes from Akhet, near the Tomb Hills, two hundred miles south from Zul-Bazzir.

"Osan," he says ...