A sudden reckless excitement burned through me like fire. "Good enough!" I cried. The Roman broke in on us. "Down the stair, then, at once! We'll meet them at the very bottom, if possible, and then when they do force us back up, it will give us a long enough delay for the aid you speak of to get here." We ran toward the steps cut in the shaft, but Denham halted us by an exclamation. "Look!" he cried, pointing some distance along the wall of the temple. "There are suits of the guards' armor, hanging up. We'll need them, before we are through today!" We saw the wisdom of his suggestion, and hastily acted on it, donning suits of the brazen armor and helmets to match. The Roman alone, who was already attired very similarly, did not join us. And now we rushed toward the steps in the shaft's side, and down them to the beginning of the spiral stair. Down the stair we ran, recklessly throwing ourselves around the curves of that airy, high-flung pathway. Looking down, I saw that the light in the pit was growing, as the dawn began to flame in the world above, and I glimpsed vaguely through the rising mists a great horde that eddied and swirled about the bottom of the stairway. Up to our ears, stronger and stronger, came the clanging of heavy metal objects striking the barred gate, while there rose at the same time a savage roar from the pit's blood-thirsty hordes. We raced on, down and down until I was near to dropping with exhaustion. And still the Roman sternly spurred us forward, with the cheering assurance that the farther down we went, the farther up the hordes would need to press us back. Finally we reached the fourth curve of the spiral stair above the ground, a height of perhaps two thousand feet above the pit's floor. And there the Roman halted us. "We'll make our stand here," he said. The clangor and the roaring below were deafening, now, and for a few minutes we lay upon the steps exhausted, then rose to our feet, one by one. Fabrius stood a step below the rest of us, his heavy shortsword in his hand, calmly looking down toward the pit. I drew my own rapier, my heart thumping wildly, but I strove to appear as calm as the Roman. Denham, with elaborate unmindfulness of the roaring mobs below, drew forth a snuff-box containing a few grains of the brown powder, and offered us each in turn a pinch, which we refused, then daintily took some himself. "Ha, Ixtil," cried D'Alord, slapping the Aztec on the back gleefully, "this should be a better fight even than those in the pit, eh?" The chieftain smiled darkly, shifting his saw-toothed sword from hand to hand, but made no other answer, and the Frenchman turned to me. "What of him?" he demanded, pointing to Lantin. "He has no sword." I turned in dismay, for I had forgotten my friend, almost. "You'd best go back up to the temple's top," I told him. "Wait for the coming of Kethra, and guide him down to us. You can be no good here, you know, so don't risk yourself."