Nur An shook his head. "We still live," he said dismally, "but that is about the best that one may say."
"We are in the palace of a maniac, Nur An," I said. "There is no doubt in my mind as to that. Everyone here lives in constant terror of Ghron and from what I have seen today they are warranted in feeling terror."
"Yet I believe we saw little or nothing at that," said Nur An.
"I saw enough," I replied.
"Those girls were so beautiful," he said after a moment's silence. "I could not believe that such beauty and such duplicity could exist together."
"Perhaps they were the unwilling tools of a cruel master," I suggested.
"I shall always like to think so," he said.
The day waned and night fell; no one came near us, but in the meantime I discovered something. Accidentally leaning against the wall at the narrow end of our room I found that it was very warm, in fact quite hot, and from this I inferred that the flue of the chimney from which we had seen the smoke issuing rose through the center of the tower and the wall of the chimney formed the rear wall of our apartment. It was a discovery, but at the moment it meant nothing to us.
There were no lights in our apartment, and, as only Cluros was in the heavens and he upon the opposite side of the tower, our prison was in almost total darkness. We were sitting in gloomy contemplation of our predicament, each wrapped in his own unhappy thoughts, when I heard footsteps apparently approaching from below. They came nearer and nearer until finally they ceased in an adjoining apartment, seemingly the one next to ours. A moment later there was a scraping sound and a line of light appeared at the bottom of one of the side walls. It kept growing in width until I finally realized that the entire partition wall was rising. In the opening we saw at first the sandaled feet of warriors, and finally, little by little, their entire bodies were revealed—two stalwart, brawny men, heavily armed. They carried manacles and with them they fastened our wrists behind our backs. They did not speak, but with a gesture one of them directed us to follow him, and, as we filed out of the room, the second warrior fell in behind us. In silence we entered a steep, spiral ramp, which we descended to the main body of the palace, but yet our escorts conducted us still lower until I knew that we must be in the pits beneath the palace.
The pits! Inwardly I shuddered. I much preferred the tower for I have always possessed an inherent horror of the pits. Perhaps these would be utterly dark and doubtless over-run by rats and lizards.