“Hear me, slave. I won’t ask you again. It’s the King’s Camel Race, isn’t it?” the demon rasped. The eunuch’s face collapsed into a fleshy red scowl, like a baby about to cry. The zar began to rotate his broken finger like a wheel.

“Yes, the race! Aiee Allah!” Nasir cried.

“How is it to be done?” the demon demanded.

“Please, no more …” Nasir pleaded.

“Answer! You needn’t betray any confidences. All you have to do is nod. Is it a bomb? Poison? A single rifle …” the demon asked in a soft, almost crooning, voice. He looked at Nasir’s mutilated finger and smiled.

Nasir nodded desperately.

So, the Scorpion thought. A single sniper with a high-powered rifle; the hardest hit to stop. His shoulders gathered as he made a sudden move. The eunuch’s scream was cut off by a strangulating grip, the Scorpion’s thumb jammed deep into his Adam’s apple.

“Who is it to be? A spectator? A guard?”

Sweat poured out of the eunuch like a sprinkler.

“A contestant. The one-eyed man they call Bandar. He’s the one,” Nasir blubbered.

The Scorpion blanched. Was it possible? he wondered. Bandar—his childhood enemy? And yet, ever since he had taken this mission, he had found himself rummaging in the past.

“This Bandar, the one-eyed. Is he Bandar ibn Faraj of the Mutayr?” the Scorpion demanded, in a voice he barely recognized as his own.

The eunuch nodded. “He’s a Mutayri, Master. A dangerous man,” Nasir confided, a desperate dog-like slavishness in his eyes.

The Scorpion’s mind reeled. It was as if the entire world was being drawn into the vortex of a single event. After all these years, his kismet and Bandar’s, drawn at last to a single killing-ground as he had somehow always known it would be.

“Will the prince bring the Yankee woman to the Camel Race?” the Scorpion demanded.

“I am forbidden …” Nasir gasped, unable to go on. The pain shot up his nose into the center of his brain as the demon probed with the khanjar’s point. Nasir felt his mind drowning in the pain.

“She will be in my master’s tent in the royal pavilion,” Nasir gasped.

“Is she unharmed?”

“She is my master’s new favorite,” the eunuch leered. Something about the way he said it bothered the Scorpion.

“What’s he done to her?” the Scorpion demanded.

“Nothing, truly. After she was ‘trained,’ she was willing,” Nasir babbled, alarmed at the icy storm cloud in the demon’s eyes.

“How was she trained?”

“I never touched her. By the Prophet, I swear. We simply kept her in the hut in the courtyard. When she got thirsty enough, she gave in,” he said with a sly grimace that turned to a groan as the Scorpion twisted his broken finger.

“What else?” the Scorpion said.