Kael McCanahan had fought in the port taverns of Marsopolis and Dunverick. He had traded fists with Deneban dockwallopers and Karrvan stevedores. He knew every trick in the creeds of a dozen fighting races. He used them all in the sea vaults below Akkalan. He used the club like a sword, driving it hard into a Senn's face. He hit backwards with it. He used an overhand, downward stroke, that drove the inches-long spikes that studded its knob, deep into a man's braincase. It is no easy matter for ten men to cage one man. Not in dimly lighted pits, with that one man an explosive cyclone of fists and bashing club. Ten men keep getting in the way of each other. And Kael McCanahan was there to make each mistake a costly one. He cut his opponents down to five in those first few minutes. Then he was at the wall, ripping loose the olisene-drenched torch, hurling it in their faces, to splatter in thick little globs of burning chemicals. With their screams of pain ringing in the sudden darkness, the McCanahan slid forward into the blacker shadows. Out of sight he ran. He found a tunnel that sliced at an angle into the main vault. He went along it, his bare feet making no sound. He discovered another converging corridor and raced along that. Inside ten minutes, he lost himself in the labyrinthine vaults. He came to a halt in the blackness, lungs gulping at cool air that was faintly spiced with seasalt. He listened, but heard no sound. When his heart ceased to thud so heavily against his ribs, he moved again. But now he went more cautiously, with the club before him like an overlong arm, probing the darkness. He felt the cool updraft of air, just as his feet went out from under him. VI He slid for thirty feet on a wet ramp that dropped him flat on his back on the floor of a huge chamber lighted by radio-active filaments set flush to the stone walls. At the far end of the vast room, two mighty metal doors were hung on great bronze hinges. On the floor of the room rested a hundred great daises. And on each dais lay a man or a woman. "A tomb," the McCanahan muttered. "I've found one of the Senn burial chambers." As he crawled to his feet and stared, he knew that this was no tomb. The bodies were flushed with life, and clad in the uniforms and trappings of a hundred different people. The McCanahan rubbed a bruised shoulder and went to walk among the daises. A shepherd boy with a ragged sheepskin across his loins and over one shoulder, lay beside a trimly garbed officer of the Palace Guard. Beyond them, a silk-swathed dancing girl lay beside a heavily muscled halgor-driver, with the brown of the desert sun still on his forehead. The McCanahan touched an arm. It was warm. It yielded beneath his fingers. He tried to rouse the man, without success.