"So the Kanlars had settled here and had built the city of cylinders, which lies above us. But still they planned to sweep back on Kom, and annihilate all there. But this they could not do, being too few in number. So the Raider, who is their god and their king, spoke to them and said that he would bring them men from every age of earth's past to be their servants, to fight for them at will. The Raider could travel at will through time--ask me not how!--and he swept back through the centuries and brought men by the thousands to the Kanlars, young warriors to fight their battles for them. "There was a great cavern far beneath the city of the Kanlars, a great hollow space formed by inside shiftings of the young earth, and in this the Kanlars prisoned the men brought by the Raider, piercing a shaft down to it from their temple above, and placing in that shaft the stairway down which you came, under the direction of the Raider. They chose from among their prisoners some to be guards of the others, and those killed in battle here they brought back to seeming life by their arts of hell, and used as slaves. "So, steadily, the hordes here in the pit have grown in number, until scarcely more could be contained here. Soon there will be enough to suit the purpose of the Raider and then they will be loosed and hurled south to carry fire and death to the cities beyond the ice, to Kom and the people of Kom, who can have no knowledge whatever of the peril that hangs over them. Up on the great roof of the temple, which is the home of the Raider, there are scores of great flying-platforms which the Kanlars have been constructing. They have made strange weapons, too, and so when their hour strikes, they will open the gates here and allow the hordes to pour up the stair, up to the roof of the temple, where they will crowd into the flying-platforms, under the leadership of the Kanlars, and race south over the ice to rain down death and destruction on Kom. And thus will the Raider and the Kanlars be revenged upon the people who cast them out." * * * * * Fabrius stopped, and I looked at Lantin, then back toward the Roman. Was this the true secret of the Raider's activity? "But will the hordes here do this?" I asked. "Will they follow the Kanlars, and obey them?" Fabrius laughed shortly, and D'Alord replied for him. "Ha, friend," he said to me, "you are new here, and do not know these men. They are evil, I tell you. They boast always of what they will do when they are loosed on Kom, for they know that soon they are to be thus loosed. Some subtle poison from the Raider's self has entered into them, I think. They are like tigers waiting to be freed upon a helpless prey." "It is so," said Lantin, "for short a time as I have been here, I have found that this is so. There is no hope from the hordes here in the pit, for they will follow the Raider to a man."