"I'll probably get hydrophobia," grunted Lark ... but obeyed.
The whistle brought immediate results. Footsteps clattered through the tunneled corridor, and shortly questions were being hurled at the false guard officer by an excited handful of Magogean soldiery.
"I was taking these two slaves to their quarters," explained Lark. "That one is a trouble maker. He turned against me. I was forced to strike him down. Cart him away. Throw him in the dungeon. You—" He picked out a likely looking prospect Gary's size—"come with me while I take this other where he must go."
So, as the band of soldiers lugged their unconscious kraedar into durance vile, Lark and a soldier escorted Gary to the first conveniently dark passageway. From this came shortly a thud, as of some blunt instrument striking a heavy object ... and a few moments later two warriors clad in the habiliment of the Magogean armed forces were speeding upward through the labyrinthine corridors of the Palace Royal toward those chambers to which the girls had been taken.
They had ascended three levels and reached the point in the Palace Royal where the corridors were beginning to look less like passageways of a fortress and more like the aisles and avenues of a residential area when there burst about their ears a cascade of sounds at once bewildering and startling. It was the clamor of a myriad of ringing bells, sharp warning tocsins sounding an alarum of some sort. Whence it came, at first they could not tell. Searching for an explanation, their eyes discovered a series of grilled openings periodically spaced about the wainscoting of the chambers through which they hurried.
Gary guessed, "A general communicating system of some sort, Lark. But what does it mean? Do you think Borisu has seen the girls, discovered—"
"He's hardly had time," demurred Lark. "But something's up—no doubt about that. Ah! Here comes someone. Perhaps now—" He lifted his voice in a shout as a soldier clad like Gary raced into the corridor. "Hello there, you!"
The Magogean warrior identified the rank of his accoster and halted, saluting. "Yes, kraedar? Foot soldier Norad, preparing to take post, sir, in accordance with emergency alarm instructions."
"Very good," approved Lark. "What is the nature of the emergency? Have you any idea?"