The small, heavy lock on a girl's slave collar, incidentally, may be of several varieties, but almost all are cylinder locks, either of the pin or disk variety.

In a girl's collar lock there would be either six pins or six disks, one each, it is said, for each letter in the Gorean word for female slave, Kajira; the male slave, or Kajirus, seldom had a locked collar; normally a band of iron is simply hammered about his neck; often he works in chains, usually with other male slaves; in some cities, including Ar, an unchained male slave is almost never seen; there are, incidentally, far fewer male slaves than female slaves; a captured female is almost invariably collared; a captured male is almost invariably put to the sword; further, the object of slave raids, carefully scouted, organized and conducted expeditions, is almost always the acquisition of females; commonly one cylinder is struck, its bridges sealed off, its compartments broken into and ransacked for gold and beauty; the men of the compartment are slain and the women stripped; those women who do not please the slavers are slain; those that do have the goods of the compartment tied about their necks and are herded to the roof, with whip and slave goad, either to be bound across tarn saddles or thrust bound into wicker slave baskets, covered and tied shut, carried beneath the great birds in flight; sometimes, after only a quarter of an Ahn, before adequate reinforcements can be summoned, the slavers depart with their booty, leaving behind a flaming cylinder; slavers can strike any city but they are particularly a scourge to those cities which have not trained the tarn, but depend on the ponderous tharlarion.

On Gor, though most locks are of metal, wooden locks are not altogether unknown. In the most common variety there are two sets of matching pins, one fixed on a wooden spatula like key and the other set, movable, falls into the bolt, securing it. With the key placed under the bolt, and pressed upward, the movable pins are lifted over the bolt, permitting its movement. This form of lock, however, as one might suspect, provides a poor sort of security, for the pins may be lifted individually by tiny sticks wedged in the holes until the bolt is free.

Another form of lock, providing perhaps even less security, is the notched beam lock which may be opened by a heavy sickle-like key which is inserted through a hole in the door, fitted into the notch, and then rotated to the left or right, depending on whether the door is being locked or opened. These keys are quite heavy and are carried over the shoulder, and can, if necessary, even function as weapons.

Padlocks, it might be mentioned, are common on Gor. Also, combination locks are not unknown, but they are infrequently found. The most common combination lock consists of a set of lettered rings which conceal a bolt. When the letters are properly aligned the bolt may be withdrawn.

Some locks, on the compartments of rich persons, or on the storehouses of merchants, the treasuries of cities, and so on, are knife locks or poison locks; the knife lock, when tampered with, releases a blade, or several of them, with great force, sometimes from behind the individual at the lock. On the other hand, knife locks are seldom effective against an individual who knows what to look for. Much more dangerous is the poison lock, because the opening through which the tiny pins, usually coated with a paste formed from kanda root, can emerge can be extremely small, almost invisible to the eye, easy to overlook in the crevices and grillwork of the commonly heavy, ornate Gorean lock. Another form of lock difficult to guard against is the pit lock, because of the natural crevices in Gorean tiling commonly found in corridors of cylinders; when tampered with a trap falls away beneath the individual, dropping him to a pit below, usually containing knives fixed in stone, but upon occasion osts, or half-starved sleen, or water tharlarion; sometimes, however, the pit may be simply a smooth-sided capture pit, so that the individual may later be interrogated and tortured at length.

Lastly it might be mentioned that it is a capital offense for a locksmith, normally a member of the Metal Workers, to make an unauthorized copy of a key, either to keep for himself or for another.

The door to my compartment, however, in the House of Cernus, did not have a lock. The two beams, of course, could effectively secure it, but they could only be used when someone was inside. The fact my compartment did not have a lock was, I assumed, no accident.

I decided it would not be wise to insist that a lock be placed on the door. Such a demand might seem importunate or to evince a concern for secrecy, not in place in a house where I, supposedly, had taken gold for the use of my steel. Such a demand might have incited suspicion that I was not what I seemed. Further I was confident that the lock would be placed, for Cernus would insist, by one of his own smiths, and thus that the nature of the lock would be known to him and that a duplicate of its key, in spite of the injunction against such, would doubtless be his.

I was not altogether without an expedient, however, as, upon examination, I discovered that the door had, as well as the latch string hole, another small hole bored below the latch bar, doubtless put there by someone who had used the room before myself.

"This permits," I said to Elizabeth, indicating the small hole below the latch bar, "the complex knot."

"What is that?" she asked.

"Observe," I said to her.

I sprang to my feet and looked about the room. There were several chests in the room, including the iron-banded one with its heavy lock. There were also some cabinets against one wall, filled with plate and cups, some bottles of paga and Ka-la-na.

"What are you looking for?" she asked.

"String," I said, "or cord, anything."

We began to rummage through some of the chests and, almost immediately, Elizabeth discovered some five pairs of sandal thongs.

"Will these do?" she asked.

"Excellent," I said, taking a pair from her.

She knelt and watched me as I took one of the thongs and sat cross-legged by the door, and split it carefully over the edge of my sword. I now had, in effect, a piece of boskhide cord. I then looped the cord over the latch bar and then put both ends of the cord through the small hole, so they dangled on the outside of the door. I then swung the door inward.

"Suppose," I said, "I now tied a relatively fair-sized knot with these two ends of the cord."

Elizabeth looked at the cords for a moment. "Then," she said, "you would have tied the latch bar down, so it could not be lifted with the latch string."

I smiled, Elizabeth was quick, always quick. In tying such a knot, with the cord looped on the inside about the latch bar, and the knot too large to slip through the hole, I would have fastened the bar down.

"But someone could untie the knot," she pointed out, "and enter."

"Of course," I said, looking at her.

She looked at me for a moment, puzzled. Then suddenly her face broke into a smile and she clapped her hands. "Yes," she laughed. "Marvelous!" Elizabeth was one of the quickest girls I had ever known. She, of Earth, had never heard of this trick, and yet, from the barest of hints, she had understood what could be done.

"Observe," I said. I then took the two dangling cords and began to tie what must have seemed to her an incredible knot. "Actually," I informed her, as I continued to weave the cords together in an ever larger and more complex fashion, "this is only a fifty-seven turn knot. It is, however, my own invention, though I never thought I'd need it. This trick was taught to me by Andreas of Tor, years ago, of the Caste of Singers, for doors in the city of Tor are commonly of this variety. His own knot was a sixty-two turn knot, his father's was seventy-one; one of his brothers used a hundred-and-four turn knot, which, as I recall, Andreas thought a bit pretentious."