talons and an enormous froglike mouth splitting his head from ear to
ear, exposing three rows of long, white tusks. Then endow this creature
of your imagination with the agility and ferocity of a half-starved
Bengal tiger and the strength of a span of bulls, and you will have
some faint conception of Woola in action.
Before I could call him off he had crushed Lakor into a jelly with a
single blow of one mighty paw, and had literally torn the other thern
to ribbons; yet when I spoke to him sharply he cowed sheepishly as
though he had done a thing to deserve censure and chastisement.
Never had I had the heart to punish Woola during the long years that
had passed since that first day upon Mars when the green jed of the
Tharks had placed him on guard over me, and I had won his love and
loyalty from the cruel and loveless masters of his former life, yet I
believe he would have submitted to any cruelty that I might have
inflicted upon him, so wondrous was his affection for me.
The diadem in the center of the circlet of gold upon the brow of Lakor
proclaimed him a Holy Thern, while his companion, not thus adorned, was
a lesser thern, though from his harness I gleaned that he had reached
the Ninth Cycle, which is but one below that of the Holy Therns.
As I stood for a moment looking at the gruesome havoc Woola had
wrought, there recurred to me the memory of that other occasion upon
which I had masqueraded in the wig, diadem, and harness of Sator Throg,
the Holy Thern whom Thuvia of Ptarth had slain, and now it occurred to
me that it might prove of worth to utilize Lakor’s trappings for the
same purpose.
A moment later I had torn his yellow wig from his bald pate and
transferred it and the circlet, as well as all his harness, to my own
person.
Woola did not approve of the metamorphosis. He sniffed at me and
growled ominously, but when I spoke to him and patted his huge head he
at length became reconciled to the change, and at my command trotted
off along the corridor in the direction we had been going when our
progress had been interrupted by the therns.We moved cautiously now, warned by the fragment of conversation I had overheard. I kept abreast of Woola that we might have the benefit of all our eyes for what might appear suddenly ahead to menace us, and well it was that we were forewarned.

At the bottom of a flight of narrow steps the corridor turned sharply back upon itself, immediately making another turn in the original direction, so that at that point it formed a perfect letter S, the top leg of which 

 Prev. P 20/135 next