Nard Rost's chuckle reached him. "Nothing so bloody as that. We're to be slaves, cultivating their patches of vegetables and goorn."

"Relsa too?"

"Unless Detch—he's the sub-chief who captured us—wants her."

Besan stumbled and the huge warrior ahead of him, the leader apparently, swung his spear again. It caught Besan across the ear and cheek. He staggered and his hatred for this grinning pulpy-nosed brute grew. Once he got his hands on a spear, or a club, or a knife—then let this gargoyle giant watch for his life!

He who had never killed an animal, or struck a blow in anger, was praying to all the unknown powers of space that he might strike the life from Detch's hulking body!

The trail wound between a series of ragged gigantic boulders; black, gray, and red-mottled and layered white. A guard in a thatched shelter high above welcomed them and shouted the word along ahead.

The guard cranked at a rude windlass, the rope disappearing lumpily into the rocks ahead, and when they rounded another black barrier of stone they saw a stout barrier of logs lifting to shoulder-height even as they reached it.

They stooped and passed beneath (apparently the gate lifted no higher) and were in a long, narrow valley.

Cultivated fields and groves of tall slender trees checkered the valley floor. In the low cliffs on either hand black openings gaped, cave entrances, and before these scantily clad children and women moved or sprawled lazily in the sun.

Overhead a rude network of interlaced vines, poles and twisted grasses sheltered the cultivated patches of ground. Besan saw now the purpose of the regular groves of trees—they were to support the guarding nets sagging overhead. It was only thus that the nocturnal raids of the bat-winged wadts could be checked.

Detch strutted proudly as he called out to the cave dwellers.

"I have taken slaves," he bragged. "Two strong men fit for the fields. Them I will sell."

A sleek-bodied girl, her central stripe almost pure white, pushed out from among the admiring group before the caves. Her small rounded hands perched atop her generously wide hips and her head tilted.

"The female," she said harshly, "is for sale too?"

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