"My brother, your doom is sealed, indeed," he said. "This is one of the sacred bulls from the temple of Shamar, the great sun, that you have slain. When one of these goes mad, as did this one, no man in the land does aught to stay it. That is the law. From its horns to its hoofs, every hair of it is sacred. Bel-Ar may forgive me the loss of a fademe, though it will be a great vexation to him; but the death of one of these sacred bulls of Shamar he will not forgive any man. Sooner might you expect mercy if you declared yourself a follower of the Goddess Glorian of Ruthar. In this matter I cannot hope to persuade him. By the bones of the ten thousand kings, I am sorry that this thing has happened!" But later, as they rode on toward the city of Adlaz, the red captain seemed to be far from rueful. He rode behind the car, and, when he thought none was observing him, he smiled to himself, as though the course events were taking pleased him very well indeed. CHAPTER III THE KING JUDGES Like the shape of a mighty wheel with four spokes was the plan of the city of Adlaz--or more like a circle drawn around the angles of a cross, the curved line of the outer boundary passing through the far-flung arms. Built in a long-ago time of perils and wars, Adlaz was a walled city, and its wall was both stout and high, and set with many castellated towers. It was also a very ancient wall, to which its moss-grown, weather-worn gray stones bore witness. In all of the sweeping circumference of the outer wall, which enclosed some ten square miles of street and square, there were four breaks only, and those were protected by ponderous gates of bronze and guarded well by soldiers of the king. Those breaks were where the rim of the wheel met its four spokes. The wall was the rim. The spokes were four wide roadways, which ran east, west, north and south from the city's center. The hub of the wheel was a park or esplanade, fronted on all sides by magnificent buildings in which the colored rocks hewn from the Maeronican quarries were blended splendidly. In the very center towered the massive structure of the Temple of the Sun, built all of white marble, the tips of its hundred spires capped with solid gold. Other and many streets were laid out in all directions within the angles of the four great avenues; but none was so wide as they by many feet. Within the wall dwelt nearly half a million souls, Maeronicans, if one named them from their country, but loving to call themselves the Children of Ad, after their city, which in turn drew its name from a certain mighty king, the time of whose rule was so lost in the mists of dim antiquity that he was little more than a tradition in the mouths of the people.