Plainly, then, we had come aboard the craft of someone of more than ordinary station, I thought, and gave my attention to a man standing on guard beside a door in the facing of the space between the level of the after-deck and the waist, where, as I judged, whatever private cabins there might be on the vessel would be placed.
Huge he was and florid, muscled like an ox, his mighty thorax banded with metal, fitting him so closely that the bellies of the shoulder muscles bulged above their upper edge. Head, shoulders, and arms were naked, as were his legs save for a short cloth skirt below his armor, falling half-way down his thighs, and the metal casings on his heavy calves. Thick-lipped, flat-nosed, bulging of forehead, he was a veritable giant, his appearance little short of ferocious as he leaned on the haft of a spear and watched, straightening to attention only when the captain in charge of the raiding party advanced with his captives toward him. But only for a moment. Then as the captain paused, without speaking, he shifted his spear, put out a hand, and opened the door.
It gave into a passage, with curtained doorways on either hand and a lighted apartment at the farther end, toward which Naia, her maid, and Bathos, with the Zollarians who led them, passed.
They reached it, and then, in so far as sensation went at least, I gasped. The room was ablaze with lights that struck back on every hand from woodwork carved and tooled in most magnificent fashion, hung with woven fabrics of green shot through with threads of gold. But if the apartment was amazing in its appearance, its occupant was in no way overcast. Rather, she seemed the center of all its blended richness of furnishing and color. I say she because it was a woman who lay stretched on a couch of what seemed molded-silver. And such a woman! For a single instant, as I saw her, she seemed more gorgeous in her voluptuous physical perfection than anything in all that gorgeous place.
Tawny she was as a lioness, of hair and eyes, as she lay there on that splendid couch, draped with the mottled hide of some tawny beast; lithe as a tigress she appeared in all her supple, wonderfully rounded length, save for a jeweled girdle supporting a drapery of almost transparent tissue. And as she lifted her fine torso, raising herself to a sitting position before the captain, who sank with uplifted hand to a knee before her, one sensed there were tiny bells on the jeweled bands about her tapering ankles that tinkled as she moved.
Suspicion, swift as a lance-thrust, came upon me as I saw her, even before the captain spoke. "Hail to thee, Kalamita, Priestess of Adita, goddess of beauty; thy servant returns from that mission on which it was thy pleasure to send him, bringing with him those thou named."
Kalamita! Kalamita, the Zollarian, magnet of the flesh, by whose shameless charms and yet more shameless favors Kyphallos, Prince of Cathur, had been seduced. Well I thought was she named magnet—and one could fancy how she might draw men to her as irresistibly as the moth is drawn by the flame, and with equally fatal results. I glanced at Croft.
His face was a blended thing of conjecture and consternation on thus once more beholding Zollaria's lovely magnet of the flesh. But he said no word, though his hand crept out and touched me as we stood side by side to watch.
Kalamita smiled. "'Tis well, Ptoth," she made answer. "Arise. You have proven faithful, and you shall have your reward. Found you any obstacle worth naming on your mission?"
"Nay, Sister of Bandhor," said Ptoth, rising. "None but the house slaves lay there to oppose us—one we brought with us, since so it was ordered—the rest were slain."