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“I hope it does,” growled Correy. “This underground business is getting on my nerves!”

It was a door I had seen, a huge slab of light yellow-green metal. I paused, my hand on the simple latch.

“Stand to one side,” I said softly. “Let’s see what happens.”

I lifted the latch, and the heavy door opened inward. Cautiously, I stared through the portal. Inside was blackness and silence; somewhere, in the far distance, I could see two or three tiny pin-pricks of green light.

“We’ll take a look around, anyway,” I said. “Follow me carefully and be ready for action. It seems all right, but somehow, I don’t like the looks of things.”

In single file, we passed beyond the massive door, the light from the large room outside streaming ahead of us, our shadows long and grotesque, moving on the rocky floor ahead of us.

Then, suddenly, I became aware that the path of light ahead of us was narrowing. I turned swiftly; the door must be closing!

As I turned, lights roared up all around us, intense light which struck at our eyes with almost tangible force. A great shout rose, echoing, to a vaulted ceiling. Before we could move or cry out, a score of men on either side had pinioned us.

“Damnation!” roared Correy. “If I only had the use of my fists–just for a second!”

* * * * *

We were in a great cavern, the largest I have ever beheld. A huge bubble, blown in the molten rock by powerful gases from the seething interior of the world.

The roof was invisible above our heads, and the floor sloped down gently in every direction, toward a central dais, so far away that its details were lost to us. From the center of the dais a mighty pillar of green flame mounted into the air nearly twenty times the height of a man. All around the dais, seated on the sloping floor of the cavern, were Lakonians.

There were hundreds of them, thousands of them, and they were as silent and motionless as death. They paid no heed to us; they crouched, each in his place, and stared at the column of greenish flame.

“It was a trap,” muttered Kincaide as our captors marched us rapidly toward the dais in the center of the huge amphitheater. “They were waiting for us; I imagine we have been watched all the time. And we walked into the trap exactly like a bunch of schoolboys.”

“True–but we’ve found, I believe, what we wished to find,” I told him. “This is the meeting place of the Worshipers of the Flame. There, I imagine is the Flame itself. And unless I’m badly mistaken, that’s Liane waiting up there in the center!”

It was Liane. She was seated on a massive, simple throne of the greenish-yellow metal, the column of fire rising directly behind her like an impossible plume. In a semicircle at her feet, in massive chairs made of the odd metal, were perhaps twenty old men, their heads crowned with great, unkempt manes of white hair.

And standing beside Liane’s throne, at her right hand, was–Hendricks!

* * * * *

His shoulders drooped, his chin rested upon his breast. He was wearing, not the blue-and-silver uniform of the Service, but a simple tunic of pale green, with buskins of dark green leather, laced with black. He did not look up as we were ushered before this impressive group, but Liane watched us with smiling interest.

Liane, seated there upon her throne, was not the Liane of those days in the Ertak. There, she had been scarcely more than a peculiarly fascinating young woman with a regal bearing and commanding eyes. Here, she was a goddess, terrifyingly beautiful, smiling with her lips, yet holding the power of death in the white hands which hung gracefully from the massive arms of the throne.