“It was ten years ago,” I told her.
“Ten years! Impossible.”
I pointed to the corpses around us. “You have lain like this for ten years,” I explained. “There are subjects here who have lain thus for fifty, Ras Thavas tells me.”
“Ten years! Ten years! What may not have happened in ten years! It is better thus. I should fear to go back now. I should not want to know that my father, my mother too, perhaps, were gone. It is better thus. Perhaps you will let me sleep again? May I not?”
“That remains with Ras Thavas,” I replied; “but for a while I am to observe you.”
“Observe me?”
“Study you—your reactions.”
“Ah! and what good will that do?”
“It may do some good in the world.”
“It may give this horrid Ras Thavas some new ideas for his torture chamber—some new scheme for coining money from the suffering of his victims,” she said, her harsh voice saddened.