was completely familiar with, their voices
sounded a chant of fear and awe. "The white god has come! The white
god has come! The white god has come!"

Bram Forest scarcely considered them. He was advancing upon the dark
warrior with the clean, stalking movements of a tiger, his great
shoulders low, his magnificent legs tense for the death spring.

The dark one was frozen from surprise. From whence had this naked
white creature erupted? He stood stiff from sudden fear and
uncertainty a moment too long and the hands of the avenger were upon
him. The fingers of those hands were like steel talons driving deep
into his throat and in his panicked mind he looked upon the face of
death and found it horrible. He was being driven down to the ground,
lower and lower in abject submission by this strange and terrible
manifestation the brown-skinned ones had called a white god.

The dark warrior's mind raced and in his terrorized desperation a
native cunning sprang to his aid. Using every ounce of his remaining
strength, he forced words up from his tortured throat. "Would you kill
an unarmed man?"

The words touched a responsive chord in Bram Forest's mind. The craven
spoke aptly. By killing him thus, was not Bram Forest doing the same
thing for which he had condemned the other?

Bram Forest straightened and hurled the cringing figure from him.
"Then defend yourself, swine!" he cried and seized up the dead
warrior's shining whip sword.

The dark one sought means of escape but he feared turning from this
avenger as much as facing him. He could only play for time.

Rising, he retrieved his own sword and faced the other with his
expression of fear not one whit abated. The man of the steel hands
whipped the sword experimentally and the dark one was struck by a ray
of hope. The other's actions with the blade were as clumsy as had been
those of Jlomec the Nadian. Perhaps all was not lost.

* * * * *

The dark one gripped his blade and moved forward in the customary
crouch of the Tarthan fighting man. Then elation welled up within him
as the answering posture of the other revealed him as knowing nothing
whatever of the whip-sword's use. The dark one's smile returned. God
or not, the skill of this one with the ancient weapon of Tarth was
even less than that of the pathetic Jlomec.

The dark warrior parried a clumsy thrust with ease and whipped his
blade around to harass the other's exposed back. "Yo