dragged her from the arena through a small doorway below the throne.
"Issus will dine well tonight," said a prisoner beside me.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"That was her dinner that old Thabis is taking to the kitchens. Didst not note how carefully he selected the plumpest and tenderest of the lot?"
I growled out my curses on the monster sitting opposite us on the gorgeous throne.
"Fume not," admonished my companion; "you will see far worse than that if you live even a month among the First Born."
I turned again in time to see the gate of a nearby cage thrown open and three monstrous white apes spring into the arena. The girls shrank in a frightened group in the center of the enclosure.
One was on her knees with imploring hands outstretched toward Issus; but the hideous deity only leaned further forward in keener anticipation of the entertainment to come. At length the apes spied the huddled knot of terror-stricken maidens and, with demoniacal shrieks of bestial frenzy, charged upon them.
A wave of mad fury surged over me. The cruel cowardliness of the power-drunk creature whose malignant mind conceived such frightful forms of torture stirred to their uttermost depths my resentment and my manhood. The blood-red haze
