"It is enough," said Noork. "I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well."
"If you are captured," cried Rold nervously, "you will not tell them I talked with you?"
Noork laughed. "You never saw me," he told the slave.
The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at three distinct levels.
Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.
Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another of their number.
He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly worked metal—gold, silver and brass—vied with the faded garish colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the wolf-headed shape a female.
These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura worshipped—mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!
Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to the slaves and common citizens of the island.