"A little less than half a moon ago," Jaltor began, "an attempt was made to assassinate me. The reason it was not successful lay in the peculiar clumsiness of the assassin. He was captured immediately and put to torture in an effort to learn the names of others, if any, involved in the plot. He was an old man, strangely enough, and before he died he told me who had hired him." "I don't see," Jotan burst out, "what this has to do with any of us. Certainly we are not involved." "The name he gave," Jaltor went on, as though there had been no interruption, "was Garlud!" In the sudden, shocked silence that followed the measured tread of a guard in the corridor outside came clearly through the closed door. "I don't believe it!" Jotan shouted. He leaped from his chair to face the monarch. "Ever since I can remember you and my father were the closest of friends!" "And long before that Jotan," Jaltor said quietly. "Yet because some common killer gave his name, you believe such an impossible story? My father could have no reason for wanting you dead. What have you done to him?" * * * * * Jaltor ignored the last question. He said in the same quiet voice: "Not a common killer, Jotan. It was old Heglar who so named your father." The young Ammadian nobleman fell back a pace in complete amazement. "Old Heglar? Why, he wouldn't...." His voice trailed off. "Exactly. Heglar would not lie." Jotan lifted a shaking hand to rub his forehead in a kind of dazed helplessness that struck to the heart of every person in the room. "No," he said, his voice suddenly loud, "I do not believe it. Where is my father? Let me talk to him." "Where," Jaltor said coldly, "would apt to be any man who plotted the death of Ammad's king?" Slowly Jotan's hand fell from before his eyes as the meaning of those chill words came home to him. "You--you _killed_ him? Garlud? My father? Your friend?" Nothing altered in Jaltor's sober expression--and in that Jotan read his answer. With a strangely inarticulate snarl he launched himself at the king, seeking to lock his fingers in that deeply tanned neck. Curzad leaped from his place at the door, brushing past the paralyzed onlookers, and reached out to engulf the crazed young nobleman in his strong arms. Jotan, helpless in that iron grip was borne back, tears of rage and frustration streaming from his eyes. Jaltor raised a steady hand to his bruised throat, his expression unchanged. "Confine him in the pits, Curzad. Later I shall decide what is to be done with him." Tamar started up from his chair in angry protest. "What kind of justice is this?" he cried. "Will you send a man to his death because grief causes him to----" He stopped there, stricken into abrupt silence by what he saw in the ruler's eyes.