As I had trusted, there was a low door in the side of the dungeon where the slope abutted on the gully. It was solid iron, but secured only by bolts fastened on the outside. These bolts I ripped from their sockets with my dagger, and stepped into the pit.

It was freezing, already fetid, the dark relieved inadequately through the oval grating by cheerless pale brown flakes of light.

A man lay moaning against my feet. His legs were bound with chains to the legs of two neighbors. I had reckoned on their being bound, but not on chains. However, the metal was brittle and green as the grating, and they were tangled in it rather than fettered. I tried to roll him free, chopping meanwhile at the chain with my knife. He muttered and struggled.

“Are you a man?” I asked him in the tribal tongue. I had observed that his captors had not even bothered to take his knife away from him. He flinched and groveled on the soiled floor of the dungeon, and all about the warrior-heap was flailing and tossing like a fever-house. I felt contempt, black and deep as the hole in which they lay. Pride in myself had brought me here; now my pride urged me away. I was not one with this mortal wreckage, crawling like insects in their own filth.

But I had come a distance and would not retreat. If they had no brain or strength of their own, I must goad them with mine.

The rusty chain cracked under my blade. The three men, loosed from it, curled together like disturbed puppies. Their vacant eyes were enlarged and stupid, and it occurred to me they had been fed some medicine on their journey here. The last of the three was a Dagkta from Ettook’s krarl. I saw he knew me and was trying to collect himself. I gave him the bronze-mask’s knife, and put him to work on chains.

The slave-pit grew stealthily alive with staggering, bemused freedom. Some, less affected, were reviving in violent starts, snarling, searching out weapons, which in most cases had been left with them. Their eyes and knives glittered in the faint light. The tincture that had kept them docile was turning them vicious now that they had an avenue to escape and vengeance. Many were striped on the face or shoulders with the raw decoration of a whipping. Each had a score to settle.

None of this took very long, once we were started on it. Soon there were about twenty standing in the pit, and eight lying down permanently from the treatment they had got, poisoned with the drug or beaten out of the world.

In the ruin aloft, it seemed too steadily quiet; the fabric of peace was woven differently.

There was no need to speak to the red warriors. Most of them had recognized me, at last, and recognized themselves, and their blood was up. We stole out softly, two by two, into the gully, and scaled the slope.