As soon as her wrists were free she was once again every inch the royal Tatrix of Tharna.

I wondered if this could be the girl who had had the harrowing adventure, whose garments were tattered, whose body must still be wretched with pain from its sojourn in the claws of my tarn.

Imperiously, not deigning to speak to me, she gestured to the gloves of gold which I had placed in my belt. I returned them to her. She drew them on, slowly, deliberately, facing me all the while.

Something in her mien made me uneasy.

She turned and walked majestically to Dorna and the warriors.

When she had reached their side she turned and with a sudden swirl of those golden robes pointed an imperious finger at me. "Seize him," she said. Thorn and the warriors leaped forward, and I found myself ringed with their weapons.

"Traitress!" I cried.

The voice of the Tatrix was merry. "Fool!" she laughed, "do you not know by now that one does not make pacts with an animal, that one does not bargain with a beast?"

"You gave me your word!" I shouted.

The Tatrix drew her robes about her. "You are only a man," she said. "Let us kill him," said Thorn.

"No," said the Tatrix, imperiously, "that would not be enough." The mask glittered on me, reflecting the light of the descending sun. It seemed, more than ever before, to possess a ferocity, to be hideous, molten. "Shackle him," she said, "and send him to the mines of Tharna." Behind me the tarn suddenly screamed with rage and its wings smote the air. Thorn and the warriors were startled, and in this instant I leapt between their weapons, seized Thorn and a warrior, dashed them together, and threw them both, weapons clattering, to the marble flooring of the pillar. The Tatrix and Dorna the Proud screamed.

The other warrior lunged at me with his sword and I side- stepped the stroke and seized the wrist of his sword arm. I twisted it and thrust it up and high over my left arm, and with a sudden downward wrench snapped it at the elbow. He collapsed whimpering.

Thorn had regained his feet and leaped on me from behind, and the other warrior a moment later. I grappled with them, fiercely. Then, slowly, as they cursed helplessly, I drew them inch by inch over my shoulders, and threw them suddenly to the marble at my feet. In that moment both the Tatrix and Dorna the Proud plunged sharp instruments, pins of some sort, into my back and arm.

I laughed at the absurdity of this, and then, my vision blackening, the pillar whirling, I fell at their feet. My muscles no longer obeyed my will. "Shackle him," said the Tatrix.

As the world slowly turned under me I felt my legs and arms, limp, as weak as fog, thrown roughly together. I heard the rattle of a chain and felt my limbs clasped in shackles.

The merry victorious laugh of the Tatrix rang in my ears.

I heard Dorna the Proud say, "Kill the tarn."

"It" s gone," said the uninjured warrior.

Slowly, though no strength returned to my body, my vision cleared, first in the centre, and then gradually toward the edges, until I could once again see the pillar, the sky beyond and my foes.

In the distance I saw a flying speck, which would be the tarn. When it had seen me fall it had apparently taken flight. Now, I thought, it would be free, escaping at last to some rude habitat where it might, without saddle and harness, without a silver hobble, reign as the Ubar of the Skies that it was. Its departure saddened me, but I was glad that it had escaped. Better that than to die under the spear of one of the warriors. Thorn seized me by the wrist shackles and dragged me across the top of the pillar to one of the three tarns that waited. I was helpless. My legs and arms could not have been more useless if every nerve in them had been cut by a knife.

I was chained to the ankle ring of one of the tarns.

The Tatrix had apparently lost interest in me, for she turned to Dorna the Proud and Thorn, Captain of Tharna.

The warrior whose arm had been broken knelt on the marble flooring of the pillar, bent over, rocking back and forth, the injured arm held against his body. His fellow stood near me, among the tarns, perhaps to watch me, perhaps to steady and soothe the excitable giants.

Haughtily the Tatrix addressed Dorna and Thorn. "Why," she asked them, "are there so few of my soldiers here?"

"We are enough," said Thorn.

The Tatrix looked out over the plains, in the direction of the city. "By now," she said, "lines of rejoicing citizens will be setting out from the city."

Neither Dorna the Proud, nor Thorn, Captain of Tharna, answered her. The Tatrix walked across the pillar, regal in those tattered robes, and stood over me. She pointed across the plains, towards Tharna. "Warrior," said she, "if you were to remain long enough on this pillar you would see processions come to welcome me back to Tharna."

The voice of Dorna the Proud drifted across the pillar. "I think not, Beloved Tatrix," she said.

The Tatrix turned, puzzled. "Why not?" she asked.

"Because," said Dorna the Proud, and I could tell that behind that silver mask, she smiled, "you are not going back to Tharna."

The Tatrix stood as if stunned, not understanding.

The uninjured warrior had now climbed to the saddle of the tarn, to whose ankle ring I lay helplessly chained. He hauled on the one-strap and the monster took flight. Painfully I was wrenched into the air and, cruelly hanging by my shackled wrists, I saw the white column dropping away beneath me, and the figures upon it, two warriors, a woman in a sliver mask, and the golden Tatrix of Tharna.

Chapter Seventeen: THE MINES OF THARNA

The room was long, low, narrow, perhaps four feet by four feet, and a hundred feet long. A small, foul tharlarion lamp burned at each end. How many such rooms lay beneath the earth of Tharna, in her many mines, I did not know. The long line of slaves, shackled together, stooped and crawled the length of the room. When it was filled with its wretched occupants, an iron door, containing a sliding iron observation panel, closed. I heard four bolts being shoved into place.

It was a dank room. There were pools of water here and there on the floor; the walls were damp; water in certain places dripped from the ceiling. It was ventilated inadequately by a set of tiny circular apertures, about an inch in diameter, placed every twenty feet. One larger aperture, a circular hole perhaps two feet in diameter, was visible in the centre of the long room.

Andreas of Tor, who was shackled at my side, pointed to it. "That hole," he said, "floods the room."

I nodded, and leaned back against the damp, solid stone that formed the sides of the chamber. I wondered how many times, under the soil of Tharna, such a chamber had been flooded, how many chained wretches had been drowned in such dismal, sewerlike traps. I was no longer puzzled that the discipline in the mines of Tharna was as good as it was. I had learned that only a month before, in a mine not five hundred yards from this one, there had been a disturbance created by a single prisoner. "Drown them all," had been the decision of the Administrator of the Mines. I was not surprised then that the prisoners themselves looked with horror upon the very thought of resistance. They would strangle one of their fellows who though of rebellion, rather than risk the flooding of the chamber. Indeed, the entire mine itself could, in an emergency, be flooded. Once, I was told, it had happened, to quell an uprising. To pump out the water and clear the shafts of bodies had taken weeks.

Andreas said to me, "For those who are not fond of life, this place has many conveniences."

"To be sure," I agreed.

He thrust an onion and a crust of bread into my hands. "Take this," he said.