As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two short swords rose to bar his way.
"None are to pass save the priests," spoke a voice from nowhere gruffly. "The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the sacrifice is chosen."
Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.
In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his left.
His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.
The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully. For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to blood-slippery step.
The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more. He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.
In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.
So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.
He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes. Noork grinned.