Out rang the merciless chimes of Norhala"s laughter.
"Tchai!" she cried. "Tchai! Fat fool there. Tchai--you Cherkis! Toad whose wits have sickened with your years!
"Did you think to catch me, Norhala, in your filthy web? Princess!
Queen! Empress of Earth! Ho--old fox I have outplayed and beaten, what now have you to trade with Norhala?"
Mouth sagging open, eyes glaring, the tyrant slowly raised his arms--a suppliant.
"You would have back the bridegroom you gave me?" she laughed. "Take him, then."
Down swept the metal arm that held Kulun. The arm dropped Cherkis"s son at Cherkis"s feet; and as though Kulun had been a grape--it crushed him!
Before those who had seen could stir from their stupor the tentacle hovered over Cherkis, glaring down at the horror that had been his son.
It did not strike him--it drew him up to it as a magnet draws a pin.
And as the pin swings from the magnet when held suspended by the head, so swung the great body of Cherkis from the under side of the pyramid that held him. Hanging so he was carried toward us, came to a stop not ten feet from us--
Weird, weird beyond all telling was that scene--and would I had the power to make you who read see it as we did.
The animate, living Shape of metal on which we stood, with its forest of hammer-handed arms raised menacingly along its mile of spindled length; the great walls glistening with the armored hosts; the terraces of that fair and ancient city, their gardens and green groves and cl.u.s.tering red and yellow-roofed houses and temples and palaces; the swinging gross body of Cherkis in the clutch of the unseen grip of the tentacle, his grizzled hair touching the side of the pyramid that held him, his arms half outstretched, the gemmed cloak flapping like the wings of a jeweled bat, his white, malignant face in which the evil eyes were burning slits flaming h.e.l.l"s own blackest hatred; and beyond the city, from which pulsed almost visibly a vast and hopeless horror, the watching column--and over all this the palely radiant white sky under whose light the encircling cliffs were tremendous stony palettes splashed with a hundred pigments.
Norhala"s laughter had ceased. Somberly she looked upon Cherkis, into the devil fires of his eyes.
"Cherkis!" she half whispered. "Now comes the end for you--and for all that is yours! But until the end"s end you shall see."
The hanging body was thrust forward; was thrust up; was brought down upon its feet on the upper plane of the prostrate pyramid tipping the metal arm that held him. For an instant he struggled to escape; I think he meant to hurl himself down upon Norhala, to kill her before he himself was slain.
If so, after one frenzied effort he realized the futility, for with a certain dignity he drew himself upright, turned his eyes toward the city.
Over that city a dreadful silence hung. It was as though it cowered, hid its face, was afraid to breathe.
"The end!" murmured Norhala.
There was a quick trembling through the Metal Thing. Down swung its forest of sledges. Beneath the blow down fell the smitten walls, shattered, crumbling, and with it glittering like shining flies in a dust storm fell the armored men.
Through that mile-wide breach and up to the inner barrier I glimpsed confusion chaotic. And again I say it--they were no cowards, those men of Cherkis. From the inner battlements flew clouds of arrows, of huge stones--as uselessly as before.
Then out from the opened gates poured regiments of hors.e.m.e.n, brandishing javelins and great maces, and shouting fiercely as they drove down upon each end of the Metal Shape. Under cover of their attack I saw cloaked riders spurring their ponies across the plain to shelter of the cliff walls, to the chance of hiding places within them. Women and men of the rich, the powerful, flying for safety; after them ran and scattered through the fields of grain a mult.i.tude on foot.
The ends of the spindle drew back before the hors.e.m.e.n"s charge, broadening as they went--like the heads of monstrous cobras withdrawing into their hoods. Abruptly, with a lightning velocity, these broadenings expanded into immense lunettes, two tremendous curving and crablike claws. Their tips flung themselves past the racing troops; then like gigantic pincers began to contract.
Of no avail now was it for the hors.e.m.e.n to halt dragging their mounts on their haunches, or to turn to fly. The ends of the lunettes had met, the pincer tips had closed. The mounted men were trapped within half-mile-wide circles. And in upon man and horse their living walls marched. Within those enclosures of the doomed began a frantic milling--I shut my eyes--
There was a dreadful screaming of horses, a shrieking of men. Then silence.
Shuddering, I looked. Where the mounted men had been was--nothing.
Nothing? There were two great circular s.p.a.ces whose floors were glistening, wetly red. Fragments of man or horse--there was none.
They had been crushed into--what was it Norhala had promised--had been stamped into the rock beneath the feet of her--servants.
Sick, I looked away and stared at a Thing that writhed and undulated over the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and spheres linked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramid. Through the fields, over the plain its coils flashed.
Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them, tossing them aside broken, gliding over them. Some there were who hurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it, praying. On rolled the metal convolutions, inexorable.
Within my vision"s range there were no more fugitives. Around a corner of the broken battlements raced the serpent Shape. Where it had writhed was now no waving grain, no trees, no green thing. There was only smooth rock upon which here and there red smears glistened wetly.
Afar there was a crying, in its wake a rumbling. It was the column, it came to me, at work upon the further battlements. As though the sound had been a signal the spindle trembled; up we were thrust another hundred feet or more. Back dropped the host of brandished arms, threaded themselves into the parent bulk.
Right and left of us the spindle split into scores of fissures. Between these fissures the Metal Things that made up each now dissociate and shapeless ma.s.s geysered; block and sphere and tetrahedron spike spun and swirled. There was an instant of formlessness.
Then right and left of us stood scores of giant, grotesque warriors.
Their crests were fully fifty feet below our living platform. They stood upon six immense, columnar stilts. These s.e.xtuple legs supported a hundred feet above their bases a huge and globular body formed of cl.u.s.ters of the spheres. Out from each of these bodies that were at one and the same time trunks and heads, sprang half a score of colossal arms shaped like flails; like spike-studded girders, t.i.tanic battle maces, Cyclopean sledges.
From legs and trunks and arms the tiny eyes of the Metal Hordes flashed, exulting.
There came from them, from the Thing we rode as well, a chorus of thin and eager wailings and pulsed through all that battle-line, a jubilant throbbing.
Then with a rhythmic, JOCUND stride they leaped upon the city.
Under the mallets of the smiting arms the inner battlements fell as under the hammers of a thousand metal Thors. Over their fragments and the armored men who fell with them strode the Things, grinding stone and man together as we pa.s.sed.
All of the terraced city except the side hidden by the mount lay open to my gaze. In that brief moment of pause I saw crazed crowds battling in narrow streets, trampling over mounds of the fallen, surging over barricades of bodies, clawing and tearing at each other in their flight.
There was a wide, stepped street of gleaming white stone that climbed like an immense stairway straight up the slope to that broad plaza at the top where cl.u.s.tered the great temples and palaces--the Acropolis of the city. Into it the streets of the terraces flowed, each pouring out upon it a living torrent, tumultuous with tuliped, sparkling little waves, the gay coverings and the arms and armor of Ruszark"s desperate thousands seeking safety at the shrines of their G.o.ds.
Here great carven arches arose; there slender, exquisite towers capped with red gold--there was a street of colossal statues, another over which dozens of graceful, fretted bridges threw their spans from feathery billows of flowering trees; there were gardens gay with blossoms in which fountains sparkled, green groves; thousands upon thousands of bright multicolored pennants, banners, fluttered.
A fair, a lovely city was Cherkis"s stronghold of Ruszark.
Its beauty filled the eyes; out from it streamed the fragrance of its gardens--the voice of its agony was that of the souls in Dis.
The row of destroying shapes lengthened, each huge warrior of metal drawing far apart from its mates. They flexed their manifold arms, shadow boxed--grotesquely, dreadfully.
Down struck the flails, the sledges. Beneath the blows the buildings burst like eggsh.e.l.ls, their fragments burying the throngs fighting for escape in the thoroughfares that threaded them. Over their ruins we moved.
Down and ever down crashed the awful sledges. And ever under them the city crumbled.
There was a spider Shape that crawled up the wide stairway hammering into the stone those who tried to flee before it.
Stride by stride the Destroying Things ate up the city.
I felt neither wrath nor pity. Through me beat a jubilant roaring pulse--as though I were a shouting corpuscle of the rushing hurricane, as though I were one of the hosts of smiting spirits of the bellowing typhoon.
Through this stole another thought--vague, unfamiliar, yet seemingly of truth"s own essence. Why, I wondered, had I never recognized this before? Why had I never known that these green forms called trees were but ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences? That these high projections of towers, these buildings were deformities?
That these four-p.r.o.nged, moving little shapes that screamed and ran were--hideous?