A tremendous brazen clangor, reverberating like distant thunder against the cyclopean columns and the far-off walls and the sky of black stone that vaulted that incredible hall, drew my eyes back from the giddy, awesome mystery of the pit beneath us.
I saw that all the host of white robots were dropping swiftly out of the air. They fell upon the mirror, and upon the far-sweeping floor of ebon stone that rimmed it, and bowed their silver heads.
All the hall throbbed again to that mighty thunder.
"Malgarth!" A whisper of awe murmured among the robots. "The Master comes!"
Then I saw that vast doors of black metal had opened in the end of that hall, miles away. Through the portal came a clangoring throng of the old robots—many-formed machines of red-and-black, clumsy, grotesquely ugly, so queerly different from our silver captors.
"The Master!" rippled that murmur. "Malgarth comes!"
My strained eyes blinked. In that dusky light, I distinguished at last a monstrous stalking thing—a robot ten times taller than the rest. Its black, colossal body bore scores of fantastic, vari-formed appendages. The armored dome of its lofty head was crimson, and it gleamed blue with the myriad lenses of two immense multiple eyes.
This metal giant, I knew, was Malgarth.
The dark film beneath us spun and shimmered queerly to the impacts of his ponderous approaching tread. Was it to swallow the three of us, I wondered sickly, as it had Zerek Oom and Rogo Nug? And what could lie beneath it?
"Barihorn—"