The last resistance died away as we swept into the low-pillared halls and out again to the back of the palace, where in front of us--hidden by yet one more wall of rock--lay the cleft of the gate and the vultures. But no trace found we of that fiend from the nether pit--the chief Shaman--as we hunted out the fleeing foe from hole and corner, from dark-shadowed room and ghostly hall, with red torch and redder steel. Spear-point and sword and reeking pickhead checked and sank as there was no more living flesh to stay their relentless way, and our grim-faced swordsmen halted to tie up wounds and get breath. But while we stayed uncertain on the farther exit of the palace, Henga gave a loud cry and leaped forward as a man slipped from cover at a corner to bolt down a flight of stairs beyond into a gloomy passage. Just one word, “Atros,” but that was enough for me, and game leg and all I followed the flying figures, Philos, Stephnos, Payindah, and a dozen men at my heels. We raced down the stairs past screaming women, past darkened rock-cut rooms, and came out at the end upon a little platform giving upon the gorge over the gate of death. And there we stayed, for on the very verge of the open space above the sheer void, guarded only by a ledge a few inches high, two mail-clad figures, locked together, struggled and fought above the cavernous depths below. They reeled and fell, but as we closed Henga shrieked to us to stand back. The locked figures rose again, neither willing to loose grip, and then crashed to the ground once more; but this time Henga was on top, and his fingers writhed about the Shaman’s throat. Then, just as he had dealt with Atana, so dealt he with Atros, speaking to him slowly the while, as the man’s face worked and the sweat stood out upon his brow. And there on the sheer cliff, hundreds of feet above the vultures below, Henga exacted the last farthing of his debt. Then rising to his feet, he swung up the limp body and hurled it out into the dim gulf, leaning over to watch it spinning down, arms and legs whirling through the air. Then he turned to us grimly. “I think such carrion would poison even the vultures. Note you he was not in the fight, but lurking in the palace while better men than he went forth to death. Atana had, at least, courage.” I leaned out over the giddy drop, and saw opening before me the great cleft up which we had first come to Sakaeland. At the foot--veiled already by the gathering shadows--was the open place of death, the circling vultures wheeling upward, disturbed by the fall of Atros’s body. Kyrlos’s words came back to me, “Ere the spring buds show, I will feed your master and his friends to the vultures in the gate.” The little twisted trees above us were still void of leaf, bare of the least little bud.