She moaned and clutched at his arm, but came with him as he descended slowly toward the light. The stairway opened into a long corridor whose ceiling was faintly luminous. White-faced and frightened, they paused on the bottom step and looked down the corridor. Mara gasped and covered her eyes.
"Big Joe!" she whispered in awe.
He stared through the stairwell door and down the corridor through another door into a large room. Big Joe sat in the center of the room, sleeping his sleep of ages amid a heap of broken and whitening bones. A creature of metal, twice the height of Asir, he had obviously been designed to kill. Tri-fingered hands with gleaming talons, and a monstrous head shaped like a Marswolf, with long silver fangs. Why should a metal-creature have fangs, unless he had been built to kill?
The behemoth slept in a crouch, waiting for the intruders.
He tugged the girl through the stairwell door. A voice droned out of nowhere: "If you have come to plunder, go back!"
He stiffened, looking around. The girl whimpered.
"Stay here by the stairs," he told her, and pushed her firmly back through the door.
Asir started slowly toward the room where Big Joe waited. Beyond the room he could see another door, and the monster's job was apparently to keep intruders back from the inner vaults where, according to the ritual chants, the Blaze of the Winds could be kindled.
Halfway along the corridor, the voice called out again, beginning a kind of sing-song chant: "Big Joe will kill you, Big Joe will kill you, Big Joe will kill you——"
He turned slowly, searching for the speaker. But the voice seemed to come from a black disk on the wall. The talking-machines perhaps, as mentioned somewhere in the ritual.