Light gleamed dully from down the corridor. With great care she widened the distance between the door's edge and its frame. When the space was large enough, she put her head out cautiously and looked along the corridor. Standing there, watching her with wide eyes, was one of the palace guards! Shock held both Dylara and the guard momentarily paralyzed--then Dylara, the first to recover, was into the corridor and running swiftly in the opposite direction. Behind her she heard the guard shout a command. But before he could do more, she was around a bend in the corridor and racing toward the stairs she knew were further along.... ... Vokal, not yet completely asleep, leaped from his bed at the sound of a sudden hoarse cry from outside his apartment. When he arrived at the open door--a door he had only moments before barred from inside--he found a knot of palace guards already assembled there. "What has happened?" he demanded sharply. The man regularly stationed outside his door explained in a few words. Vokal's cheeks paled at the full implication of what had occurred came to him. Whoever this mystery woman was, she had overheard--_must_ have overheard--his conversations with both Rhoa and Sitab. Were she a spy--someone who would go to Jaltor with what she had heard--Vokal was a dead man! "Find her!" he screamed. "A hundred tals to the man who brings her alive, to me. Death to all of you unless she is found! Go!" They went. They went as though the hounds of hell were at their heels. Within seconds every floor of the palace was alight with torches, every hall crowded with warriors, every room being searched. Guards at the palace gates were alerted, patrols were set to scouring the grounds between palace and outer wall. There was no sign of the missing girl. * * * * * Tharn, sleeping soundly as a man does whose conscience is clear and whose bed is no more uncomfortable than a hundred others he has occupied, awakened suddenly. For a brief moment he lay without moving, his ears searching for some indication of what had awakened him. There! The barest whisper of leather against stone from down the corridor that ran past his cell door. A sandaled foot had made that sound. Other ears--even the ears of a man already awake--would have missed what his sleeping brain had caught. Soundlessly he left his stone bench and moved to the door. But the darkness was such that even his unbelievably sharp eyes were helpless to penetrate it. But if his eyes were useless, his ears were not. Fifty feet further down the corridor a man was standing; he could hear his breathing and the rustle of garments. A few seconds later Tharn's eyes caught a tiny glow of light--a glow that soon swelled to a flickering light strong enough for him to see the opposite row of barred cell doors.