heard no one. He
tried the only two doors opening out of the hall, but they were secured
on the other side. Then he came to a bend in the corridor, and stopped
short, hearing a murmur of low voices.

If he had used a hunter's tricks of silent tread and vigilant wariness
before, Ross was doubly on guard now as he wriggled to a point from
which he could see beyond that turn. Mere luck prevented him from giving
himself away a moment later.

Assha! Assha, alive, well, apparently under no restraint, was just
turning away from the same quiet man who had had a part in Ross's
interrogation. That was surely Assha's brown hair, his slender wiry body
draped with a Beaker's kilt. A familiar tilt of the head convinced Ross,
though he could not see the man's face. The quiet man went down the
hall, leaving Assha before a door. As he passed through it Ross sped
forward and followed him inside.

Assha had crossed the bare room and was standing on a glowing plate in
the floor. Ross, aroused to desperate action by some fear he did not
understand, leaped after him. His left hand fell upon Assha's shoulder,
turning the man half around as Ross, too, stepped upon the patch of
luminescence.

Murdock had only an instant to realize that he was staring into the face
of an astonished stranger. His hand flashed up in an edgewise blow which
caught the other on the side of the throat, and then the world came
apart about them. There was a churning, whirling sickness which griped
and bent Ross almost double across the crumpled body of his victim. He
held his head lest it be torn from his shoulders by the spinning thing
which seemed based behind his eyes.

The sickness endured only for a moment, and some buried part of Ross's
mind accepted it as a phenomenon he had experienced before. He came out
of it gasping, to focus his attention once more on the man at his feet.

The stranger was still breathing. Ross stooped to drag him from the
plate and began binding and gagging him with lengths torn from his kilt.
Only when his captive was secure did he begin looking about him
curiously.

The room was bare of any furnishings and now, as he glanced at the
floor, Ross saw that the plate had lost its glow. The Beaker trader
Rossa rubbed sweating palms on his kilt and thought fleetingly of forest
ghosts and other mysteries. Not that the traders bowed to those ghosts
which were the plague of lesser men and tribes, but anything which
suddenly appeared and th