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feet long, charging toward me, swiftly, noiselessly, its ears straight against its pointed head, its fur slick with rain, its fangs bared, its wide nocturnal eyes bright with the lust of the kill.
    A strange noise escaped me, an incredible laugh. It was a thing I could see, could feel, could fight!
    With an eagerness and a lust that matched that of the beast itself, I rushed forward in the darkness and when I judged its leap I lunged forward with the broad-headed spear of Gor. My arm felt wet and trapped, and was raked with fangs and I was spun as the animal squealed with rage and pain and rolled on the road. I withdrew my arm from the weak, aimlessly snapping jaws.
    Another flash of lightning and I saw the sleen on its belly chewing on the shaft of the spear, its wide nocturnal eyes unfocused and glazed. My arm was bloody, but the blood was mostly that of the sleen. My arm had almost rammed itself down the throat of the animal following the spear I had flung into its mouth. I moved my arm and fingers. I was unhurt.
    In the next flash of lightning I saw the sleen was dead.
    A shudder involuntarily shook me, though I do not know if this was due to the cold and the rain or the sight of the long, furred, lizardlike body that lay at my feet. I tried to extract the spear but it was wedged between the ribs of the animal.
    Coldly I took out my sword and hacked away the head of the beast and jerked the weapon free. Then, as sleen hunters do, for luck, and because I was hungry, I took my sword and cut through the fur of the animal and ate the heart.
    It is said that only the heart of the mountain larl brings more luck than that of the vicious and cunning sleen. The raw meat, hot with the blood of the animal, nourished me, and I crouched beside my kill on the road to Ko-ro-ba, another predator among predators.
    I laughed. “Did you, Oh Dark Brother of the Night, think to keep me from Ko-ro-ba?”
    How absurd it seemed to me that a mere sleen should have stood between me and my city. Irrationally I laughed, thinking how foolish the animal had been. But how could it have known? How could it have known that I was Tarl of Ko-ro-ba, and that I was returning to my city? There is a Gorean proverb that a man who is returning to his city is not to be detained. Was the sleen not familiar with that saying?
    I shook my head, to clear it of the wild thoughts. I sensed that I was irrational, perhaps a bit drunk after the kill and the first food I had had in several hours.
    Then, soberly, though I acknowledged it as a superstition, I performed the Gorean ritual of looking into the blood. With my cupped hands I drank a mouthful of blood, and then, holding another in my hands, I waited for the next flash of lightning.
    One looks into the blood in one's cupped hands. It is said that if one sees one's visage black and wasted one will die of disease, if one sees oneself torn and scarlet one will die in battle, if one sees oneself old and white haired, one will die in peace and leave children.
    The lightning flashed again, and I stared into the blood. In that brief moment, in the tiny pool of blood I held, I saw not myself but a strange face, like a globe of gold with disklike eyes, a face like none I had ever seen, a face that struck an errie terror into my heart.
    The darkness returned, and in the next flash of lightning I examined the blood again, but it was only blood, the blood of a sleen I had killed on the road to Ko-ro-ba. I could not even see myself reflected in the surface. I drank the blood, completing the ritual.
    I stood up, and wiped the spear as well as I could on the fur of the sleen. Its heart had given me strength.
    “Thank you, Dark Brother of the Night,” I said to the animal.
    I saw that water had gathered in the concave side of the shield. Gratefully, I lifted it and drank from it.

Chapter Five:
THE VALLEY OF KO-RO-BA
    I began to climb now.
    The road was familiar, the long, relatively steep ascent to the crest of that series of