CHAPTER XIIIThe King Is Dead
Briefly he thought that the walls were hung with arabesque curtains. Then he saw them more clearly. Bas-relief carvings had been laid with a lavish hand on these walls. It was a design of roots, or branches—or, perhaps, serpents—intertwined in a jungle tangle that the eyes could not follow. The stone was varicolored, marked with brighter striations, glittering with mica and gem-chips. The passage seemed to be walled and roofed with a twining barrier of twisting roots.
A faint bluish light filtered through the tiny interstices between the carvings, as though they had been overlaid on a surface that held a light of its own.
Some instinct made Boyce move his hand to his hip, but the sword was gone, taken from him, no doubt, during his captivity to Irathe. But h
