The Slayer Of souls Part 46

The thing scrambled between the fingers of the Sorcerer, leaped into the gra.s.s, ran a little way and hid, crouched down, panting, almost hidden by the long gra.s.s. The shocked watchers on the wall could still see the creature. Tressa felt Cleves' body trembling beside her. She rested a cool, steady hand on his.

"It is the Tchor-Dagh," she breathed close to his face. "The Mongol Sorcerer is becoming formidable."

"Oh, G.o.d!" murmured Cleves, "that thing he made is _alive_! I saw it. I can see it hiding there in the gra.s.s. It's frightened--breathing! It's alive!"

His pistol, clutched in his right hand, quivered. His wife laid her hand on it and cautiously shook her head.

"No," she said, "that is of no use."

"But what that Yezidee is doing is--is blasphemous----"

"Watch him! His mind is stealthily feeling its way among the laws and secrets of the Tchor-Dagh. He has found a thread. He is following it through the maze into h.e.l.l's own labyrinth! He has created a tiny thing in the image of the Creator. He will try to create a larger being now.

Watch him with his Ginseng roots!"

Tiyang, looming ape-like on his haunches in the deepening dusk, moulded and ma.s.saged the Ginseng roots, one after another. And one after another, tiny naked creatures wriggled out of his palms between his fingers and scuttled away into the herbage.

Already the dim lawn was alive with them, crawling, scurrying through the gra.s.s, creeping in among the flower-beds, little, ghostly-white things that glimmered from shade into shadow like moonbeams.

Tressa's mouth touched her husband's ear:

"It is for the secret of Destruction that the Yezidee seeks. But first he must learn the secret of creation. He is learning.... And he must learn no more than he has already learned."

"That Yezidee is a living man. Shall I fire?"

"No."

"I can kill him with the first shot."

"Hark!" she whispered excitedly, her hand closing convulsively on her husband's arm.

The whip-crack of a rifle-shot still crackled in their ears.

Tiyang had leaped to his feet in the dusk, a Ginseng root, half-alive, hanging from one hand and beginning to squirm.

Suddenly the first moonbeam fell across the wall. And in its l.u.s.tre Tressa rose to her knees and flung up her right hand.

Then it was as though her palm caught and reflected the moon's ray, and hurled it in one blinding shaft straight into the dark visage of Tiyang-Khan.

The Yezidee fell as though he had been pierced by a shaft of steel, and lay sprawling there on the gra.s.s in the ghastly glare.

And where his features had been there gaped only a hole into the head.

Then a dreadful thing occurred; for everywhere the gra.s.s swarmed with the little naked creatures he had made, running, scrambling, scuttling, darting into the black hole which had been the face of Tiyang-Khan.

They poured into the awful orifice, crowding, jostling one another so violently that the head jerked from side to side on the gra.s.s, a wabbling, inert, soggy ma.s.s in the moonlight.

And presently the body of Tiyang-Khan, Warden of the Rampart of Gog and Magog, and Lord of the Seventh Tower, began to burn with white fire--a low, glimmering combustion that seemed to clothe the limbs like an incandescent mist.

On the wall knelt Tressa, the glare from her lifted hand streaming over the burning form below.

Cleves stood tall and shadowy beside his wife, the useless pistol hanging in his grasp.

Then, in the silence of the woods, and very near, they heard Sansa laughing. And Selden's anxious voice:

"Arrak is dead. The Sou-Sou hangs across a rock, head down, like a shot squirrel. Is all well with you?"

"Tiyang is on his way to his star," said Tressa calmly. "Somewhere in the world his body has bid its mind farewell.... And so his body may live for a little, blind, in mental darkness, fed by others, and locked in all day, all night, until the end."

Sansa, at the base of the wall, turned to Selden.

"Shall I bring my body with me, one day, my lord?" she asked demurely.

"Oh, Sansa----" he whispered, but she placed a fragrant hand across his lips and laughed at him in the moonlight.

CHAPTER XV

IN THE FIRELIGHT

In 1920 the whole spiritual world was trembling under the thundering shock of the Red Surf pounding the frontiers of civilisation from pole to pole.

Up out of the h.e.l.l-pit of Asia had boiled the molten flood, submerging Russia, das.h.i.+ng in giant waves over Germany and Austria, drenching Italy, France, England with its b.l.o.o.d.y spindrift.

And now the Red Rain was sprinkling the United States from coast to coast, and the mindless administration, scared out of its stupidity at last, began a frantic attempt to drain the country of the filthy flood and throw up barriers against the threatened deluge.

In every state and city Federal agents made wholesale arrests--too late!

A million minds had already been perverted and dominated by the terrible Sect of the a.s.sa.s.sins. A million more were sickening under the awful psychic power of the Yezidee.

Thousands of the disciples of the Yezidee devil-wors.h.i.+pers had already been arrested and held for deportation,--poor, wretched creatures whose minds were no longer their own, but had been stealthily surprised, seized and mastered by Mongol adepts and filled with ferocious hatred against their fellow men.

Yet, of the Eight Yezidee a.s.sa.s.sins only two now remained alive in America,--Togrul, and Sanang, the Slayer of Souls.

Yarghouz was dead; Djamouk the Fox, Kahn of the Fifth Tower was dead; Yaddin-ed-Din, Arrak the Sou-Sou, Gutchlug, Tiyang Khan, all were dead.

Six Towers had become dark and silent. From them the last evil thought, the last evil shape had sped; the last wicked prayer had been said to Erlik, Khagan of all Darkness.

But his emissary on earth, Prince Sanang, still lived. And at Sanang's heels stole Togrul, Tougtchi to Sanang Noane, the Slayer of Souls.

In the United States there had been a cessation of the active campaign of violence toward those in authority. Such unhappy dupes of the Yezidees as the I. W. W. and other radicals were, for the time, physically quiescent. Crude terrorism with its more brutal outrages against life and law ceased. But two million sullen eyes, in which all independent human thought had been extinguished, watched unblinking the wholesale arrests by the government--watched panic-stricken officials rus.h.i.+ng hither and thither to execute the mandate of a miserable administration--watched and waited in dreadful silence.

In that period of ominous quiet which possessed the land, the little group of Secret Service men that surrounded the young girl who alone stood between a trembling civilisation and the threat of h.e.l.l's own chaos, became convinced that Sanang was preparing a final and terrible effort to utterly overwhelm the last vestige of civilisation in the United States.

What shape that plan would develop they could not guess.