lives in constant terror of Ghron and from what I have seen today they are warranted in feeling terror.'
'Yet I believe we saw little or nothing at that,' said Nur An.
'I saw enough,' I replied.
'Those girls were so beautiful,' he said after a moment's silence. 'I could not believe that such beauty and such duplicity could exist together.'
'Perhaps they were the unwilling tools of a cruel master,' I suggested.
'I shall always like to think so,' he said.
The day waned and night fell; no one came near us, but in the meantime I discovered something. Accidentally leaning against the wall at the narrow end of our room I found that it was very warm, in fact quite hot, and from this I inferred that the flue of the chimney from which we had seen the smoke issuing rose through the center of the tower and the wall of the chimney formed the rear wall of our apartment. It was a discovery, but at the moment it meant nothing to us.
There were no lights in our apartment, and, as only Cluros was in the heavens and upon the opposite side of the tower, our prison was in almost total darkness. We were sitting in gloomy contemplation of our predicament, each wrapped in his own unhappy thoughts, when I heard footsteps apparently approaching from below. They came nearer and nearer until finally they ceased in an adjoining apartment, seemingly the one next to ours. A moment later there was a scraping sound and a line of light appeared at the bottom of one of the side walls. It kept growing in width until I finally realized that the entire partition wall was rising. In the opening we saw at first the sandaled feet of warriors, and finally, little by little, their entire bodies were revealed-two stalwart, brawny men, heavily armed.
They carried manacles and with them they fastened our wrists behind our backs. They did not speak, but with a gesture one of them directed us to follow him, and, as we filed out of the room, the second warrior fell in behind us. In silence we entered a steep, spiral ramp, which we descended to the main body of the palace, but yet our escorts conducted us still lower until I knew that we must be in the pits beneath the palace.
The pits! Inwardly I shuddered. I much preferred the tower for I have always possessed an inherent horror of the pits. Perhaps these would be utterly dark and doubtless overrun by rats and lizards.
The ramp ended in a gorgeously decorated apartment in which was assembled about the same company of men and women that had partaken of the banquet with us earlier in the day. Here, too, was Ghron upon a throne. This time he did not smile as we entered the room. He did not seem to realize our presence. He was sitting, leaning forward, his eyes fixed upon something at the far end of the room over which hung a deadly silence that was suddenly shattered by a piercing scream of anguish. The scream was but a prelude to a series of similar cries of agony.
I looked quickly in the direction from which the screams came, the direction in which Ghron's gaze was fastened. I saw a naked woman chained to a grill before a hot fire. Evidently they had just placed her there as I had entered the room and it was her first shrill scream of agony that had attracted my attention.
The grill was mounted upon wheels so that it could be removed to any distance from the fire that the torturer chose, or completely turned about presenting the other side of the victim to the blaze.
As my eyes wandered back to the audience I saw that most of the girls sat there glaring straight ahead, their eyes fixed with horror upon the horrid scene. I do not believe that they enjoyed it; I know that they did not. They were equally the unwilling victims of the cruel vagaries of Ghron's diseased mind, but like the poor creature upon the grill they were helpless.
Next to the torture itself, the most diabolical conceit of the mind that had directed it was the utter silence enjoined upon all spectators against the background of which the shrieks and moans of the tortured victim evidently achieved their highest effectiveness upon the crazed mind of the jed.
The spectacle was sickening. I turned my eyes away. Presently one of the warriors who had fetched us touched me on the arm and motioned me to follow him.
He led us from this apartment to another and there we witnessed a scene infinitely more terrible than the grilling of the human victim. I cannot describe it; it tortures my memory even to think of it. Long before we reached that hideous apartment we heard the screams and curses of its inmates. In utter silence, our guard ushered us within. It was the chamber of horrors in which the Jed of Ghasta was creating abnormal deformities for his cruel dance of the cripples.
Still in silence, we were led from this horrid place and now our guide conducted us upward to a luxuriously furnished apartment. Upon divans lay two of the beautiful girls who had welcomed us to Ghasta.
For the first time since we had left our room in the tower one of our escort broke the silence. 'They will explain,' he said, pointing to the girls. 'Do not try to escape. There is only one exit from this room. We will be waiting outside.' He then removed our manacles and with his companion left the apartment, closing the door after them.
One of the occupants of the room was the same girl who had sat at my right during the banquet. I had found her most gracious and intelligent and to her I now turned.
'What is the meaning of this?' I demanded. 'Why are we made prisoners? Why have we been brought here?'
She beckoned me to come to the divan on which she reclined and as I approached she motioned to me to sit down beside her.
'What you have seen tonight,' she said, 'represents the three fates that lie in store for you. Ghron has taken a fancy to you and he is giving you your choice.'
'I do not yet quite understand,' I said.
'You saw the victim before the grill?' she asked.
'Yes,' I replied.
'Would you care to suffer that fate?'
'Scarcely.'
'You saw the unhappy ones being bent and broken for the dance of the cripples,' she pursued.
'I did,' I answered.
'And now you see this luxurious room-and me. Which would you choose?'
'I cannot believe,' I replied, 'that the final alternative is without conditions, which might make it appear less attractive than it now seems, for otherwise there could be no possible question as to which I would chose.'
'You are right,' she said. 'There are conditions.'
'What are they?' I asked.
'You will become an officer in the palace of the jed and as such you will conduct tortures similar to those you have witnessed in the pits of the palace. You will be guided by whatever whim may possess your master.'
I drew myself to my full height. 'I choose the fire,' I said.
'I knew that you would,' she said sadly, 'and yet I hoped that you might not.'
'It is not because of you,' I said quickly. 'It is the other conditions which no man of honor could accept.'
'I know,' she said, 'and had you accepted them I must eventually have despised you as I despise the others.'
'You are unhappy here?' I asked.
'Of course,' she said. 'Who but a maniac could be happy in this horrid place? There are, perhaps, six hundred people in the city and there is not one who knows happiness. A hundred of us form the court of the jed; the others are slaves. As a matter of fact, we are all slaves, subject to every mad whim or caprice of the maniac who is our master.'
'And there is no escape?' I asked.
'None.'
'I shall escape,' I said.
'How?'
'The fire,' I replied.
She shuddered. 'I do not know why I should care so much,' she said, 'unless it is that I liked you from the first. Even while I was helping to lure you into the city for the human spider of Ghasta, I wished that I might warn you not to enter, but I was afraid, just as I am afraid to die. I wish that I had your courage to escape through the fire.'
I turned to Nur An, who had been listening to our conversation. 'You have reached your decision?' I
