I turned to answer him, then halted. From above, from the sun-flooded air of early morning, had sounded a long, rising shriek of wind, a piercing whistle of a rising gale. A fierce burst of wind struck us, and cold, ice-cold, flooded through my heart. There was a thundering of wind-sounds above, another buffeting gust of cold air, and then appeared abruptly, a hundred feet above us, the Raider! "God!" muttered Lantin, behind me. The blades of our enemies and ourselves had ceased to clash, and with a common impulse we gazed up. The Raider's swirling mists contracted suddenly, his three orbs of green changed to purple, and he drifted gently, tauntingly, down toward us. * * * * * A howl of triumph went up from the hordes on the stair. Away down and around the spiraling stairway it went, down all their packed masses, down into the shaft to the pit itself, all taking up and passing on that savage, exultant shout. For we had lost. Kethra had lost. The Raider had somehow eluded him, in time, and had come back to destroy us and to loose his hordes on the flying-platforms, to send them down to Kom in a rain of death, while Kethra vainly searched time for the Raider. We had lost. Slowly, slowly, the Raider came down toward us, while the hordes below us watched with delighted expectancy. Spinning, twisting, it sank down until it hung a scant twenty feet above us, and we waited, helpless, for the destroying flashes from the central orbs. Suddenly D'Alord stepped forward, and uttering a yell of defiance, he picked a sword from the floor, whirled it around his head and sent it hurtling spear-wise up toward the Raider. It fell back, missed by yards. And now the gray, shapeless mass of the Raider spun and laced with inconceivable rapidity, while down upon us darted flash on flash of purple, destroying fire, from the central orbs. The flashes fell short! Between us and the Raider was hanging a veil of transparent black, a tenuous black net that was suspended in midair above us, and against which the purple flashes splashed and stopped. I turned swiftly, and a little behind and above me was hovering the air-boat of Kethra. It moved toward us, and we stepped on it. And in that same instant, there appeared in the air all around us, above and around the temple and the Raider, score on score of the air-boats, crowded with the men of Kom. From them darted a hundred black nets like the one that hung before us. The black veils closed upon the Raider, contracted, and while he spun and changed and twisted with mad speed, the veils contracted still until they were a black ball five feet across, in which he was prisoned. Then, from Kethra's air-boat and from all around us, there darted flash on flash of orange flame, which struck the black ball, burned fiercely for a moment, and then vanished. In the air there drifted only a shining mist, and then that too was swept away!