Then we made our way back into the palace now thronged with our men, seeking high and low for the Shaman chief. We passed through a honeycomb of narrow passages, and a warren of chambers hewn into the rock. The dark winding stairs and gloomy tunnels had carried us down perhaps three hundred feet, when we came to another maze of rooms--a crowd of tawdry-clothed women huddled in the corners--the archers’ quarters above the gate. Through these we passed into a small pillared hall lighted with torches set in iron wall-brackets, with a single arrow-slit overlooking the gate of death. There in his black robes, upon a carven chair supported by writhing figures in stone, sat the chief Shaman looking at us with dead eyes--his hands resting upon the carven arms of his chair--and sprawling at his feet, face down on the bloodstained floor with a knife hilt protruding from his back, the black-robed figure of his head councillor--slain, we guessed, by his master lest his knowledge might aid us. We could get no details from our prisoners: doubtless none saw that last scene. But from the crystal phial still clutched in the dead hand one could reconstruct some of it. The sudden blow that struck down the other unsuspecting figure, the deliberate assuming of the seat in the chair of judgment, the smoothing out of the folds of the rich sombre robe, the last thought of hate as the poison was swallowed that left us with only the mask of what had been. The cruel, narrow eyes looked out at us from the hairless, parchment-like face that was strangely devoid of wrinkles, smooth as wax under the close-fitting, black, fur-trimmed cap; the thin-lipped mouth still bore traces of the last sardonic smile at cheating us to the end. Kyrlos could feed only a dead man to the vultures, naught but the empty shell of the lamp remained. Seated there the dead figure was imposing, but when we moved it, I realized what Aryenis had meant with her taunt about a “misshapen vulture”: the scraggy neck in the fur collar, the distorted rounded back, the talon-like hands, had all something of kinship with the loathsome birds without.