We turned to go. The rosy, azure-shot globe at her side suddenly dulled. From it came a faint bell sound as of chimes far away. She bent over it. It vibrated, and then its surface ran with little waves of dull colour; from it came a whispering so low that I could not distinguish the words--if words they were.
She spoke to the red dwarf.
"They have brought the three who blasphemed the Shining One," she said slowly. "Now it is in my mind to show these strangers the justice of Lora. What say you, Lugur?"
The red dwarf nodded, his eyes sparkling with a malicious antic.i.p.ation.
The woman spoke again to the globe. "Bring them here!"
And again it ran swiftly with its film of colours, darkened, and shone rosy once more. From without there came a rustle of many feet upon the rugs. Yolara pressed a slender hand upon the base of the pedestal of the globe beside her. Abruptly the light faded from all, and on the same instant the four walls of blackness vanished, revealing on two sides the lovely, unfamiliar garden through the guarding rows of pillars; at our backs soft draperies hid what lay beyond; before us, flanked by flowered screens, was the corridor through which we had entered, crowded now by the green dwarfs of the great hall.
The dwarfs advanced. Each, I now noted, had the same cl.u.s.tering black hair of Rador. They separated, and from them stepped three figures--a youth of not more than twenty, short, but with the great shoulders of all the males we had seen of this race; a girl of seventeen, I judged, white-faced, a head taller than the boy, her long, black hair dishevelled; and behind these two a stunted, gnarled shape whose head was sunk deep between the enormous shoulders, whose white beard fell like that of some ancient gnome down to his waist, and whose eyes were a white flame of hate. The girl cast herself weeping at the feet of the priestess; the youth regarded her curiously.
"You are Songar of the Lower Waters?" murmured Yolara almost caressingly. "And this is your daughter and her lover?"
The gnome nodded, the flame in his eyes leaping higher.
"It has come to me that you three have dared blaspheme the Shining One, its priestess, and its Voice," went on Yolara smoothly. "Also that you have called out to the three Silent Ones. Is it true?"
"Your spies have spoken--and have you not already judged us?" The voice of the old dwarf was bitter.
A flicker shot through the eyes of Yolara, again cold grey. The girl reached a trembling hand out to the hem of the priestess"s veils.
"Tell us why you did these things, Songar," she said. "Why you did them, knowing full well what your--reward--would be."
The dwarf stiffened; he raised his withered arms, and his eyes blazed.
"Because evil are your thoughts and evil are your deeds," he cried.
"Yours and your lover"s, there"--he levelled a finger at Lugur.
"Because of the Shining One you have made evil, too, and the greater wickedness you contemplate--you and he with the Shining One. But I tell you that your measure of iniquity is full; the tale of your sin near ended! Yea--the Silent Ones have been patient, but soon they will speak." He pointed at us. "A sign are _they_--a warning--harlot!" He spat the word.
In Yolara"s eyes, grown black, the devils leaped unrestrained.
"Is it even so, Songar?" her voice caressed. "Now ask the Silent Ones to help you! They sit afar--but surely they will hear you." The sweet voice was mocking. "As for these two, they shall pray to the Shining One for forgiveness--and surely the Shining One will take them to its bosom! As for you--you have lived long enough, Songar! Pray to the Silent Ones, Songar, and pa.s.s out into the nothingness--you!"
She dipped down into her bosom and drew forth something that resembled a small cone of tarnished silver. She levelled it, a covering clicked from its base, and out of it darted a slender ray of intense green light.
It struck the old dwarf squarely over the heart, and spread swift as light itself, covering him with a gleaming, pale film. She clenched her hand upon the cone, and the ray disappeared. She thrust the cone back into her breast and leaned forward expectantly; so Lugur and so the other dwarfs. From the girl came a low wail of anguish; the boy dropped upon his knees, covering his face.
For the moment the white beard stood rigid; then the robe that had covered him seemed to melt away, revealing all the knotted, monstrous body. And in that body a vibration began, increasing to incredible rapidity. It wavered before us like a reflection in a still pond stirred by a sudden wind. It grew and grew--to a rhythm whose rapidity was intolerable to watch and that still chained the eyes.
The figure grew indistinct, misty. Tiny sparks in infinite numbers leaped from it--like, I thought, the radiant shower of particles hurled out by radium when seen under the microscope. Mistier still it grew--there trembled before us for a moment a faintly luminous shadow which held, here and there, tiny sparkling atoms like those that pulsed in the light about us! The glowing shadow vanished, the sparkling atoms were still for a moment--and shot away, joining those dancing others.
Where the gnomelike form had been but a few seconds before--there was nothing!
O"Keefe drew a long breath, and I was sensible of a p.r.i.c.kling along my scalp.
Yolara leaned toward us.
"You have seen," she said. Her eyes lingered tigerishly upon Olaf"s pallid face. "Heed!" she whispered. She turned to the men in green, who were laughing softly among themselves.
"Take these two, and go!" she commanded.
"The justice of Lora," said the red dwarf. "The justice of Lora and the Shining One under Thanaroa!"
Upon the utterance of the last word I saw Marakinoff start violently.
The hand at his side made a swift, surrept.i.tious gesture, so fleeting that I hardly caught it. The red dwarf stared at the Russian, and there was amazement upon his face.
Swiftly as Marakinoff, he returned it.
"Yolara," the red dwarf spoke, "it would please me to take this man of wisdom to my own place for a time. The giant I would have, too."
The woman awoke from her brooding; nodded.
"As you will, Lugur," she said.
And as, shaken to the core, we pa.s.sed out into the garden into the full throbbing of the light, I wondered if all the tiny sparkling diamond points that shook about us had once been men like Songar of the Lower Waters--and felt my very soul grow sick!
[1] Later I was to find that Murian reckoning rested upon the extraordinary increased luminosity of the cliffs at the time of full moon on earth--this action, to my mind, being linked either with the effect of the light streaming globes upon the Moon Pool, whose source was in the shining cliffs, or else upon some mysterious affinity of their radiant element with the flood of moonlight on earth--the latter, most probably, because even when the moon must have been clouded above, it made no difference in the phenomenon. Thirteen of these shinings forth const.i.tuted a laya, one of them a lat. Ten was sa; ten times ten times ten a said, or thousand; ten times a thousand was a sais. A sais of laya was then literally ten thousand years. What we would call an hour was by them called a va. The whole time system was, of course, a mingling of time as it had been known to their remote, surface-dwelling ancestors, and the peculiar determining factors in the vast cavern.
CHAPTER XV
The Angry, Whispering Globe
Our way led along a winding path between banked ma.s.ses of softly radiant blooms, groups of feathery ferns whose plumes were starred with fragrant white and blue flowerets, slender creepers swinging from the branches of the strangely trunked trees, bearing along their threads orchid-like blossoms both delicately frail and gorgeously flamboyant.
The path we trod was an exquisite mosaic--pastel greens and pinks upon a soft grey base, garlands of nimbused forms like the flaming rose of the Rosicrucians held in the mouths of the flying serpents. A smaller pavilion arose before us, single-storied, front wide open.
Upon its threshold Rador paused, bowed deeply, and motioned us within.
The chamber we entered was large, closed on two sides by screens of grey; at the back gay, concealing curtains. The low table of blue stone, dressed with fine white cloths, stretched at one side flanked by the cushioned divans.
At the left was a high tripod bearing one of the rosy globes we had seen in the house of Yolara; at the head of the table a smaller globe similar to the whispering one. Rador pressed upon its base, and two other screens slid into place across the entrance, shutting in the room.
He clapped his hands; the curtains parted, and two girls came through them. Tall and willow lithe, their bluish-black hair falling in ringlets just below their white shoulders, their clear eyes of forget-me-not blue, and skins of extraordinary fineness and purity--they were singularly attractive. Each was clad in an extremely scanty bodice of silken blue, girdled above a kirtle that came barely to their very pretty knees.
"Food and drink," ordered Rador.
They dropped back through the curtains.
"Do you like them?" he asked us.
"Some chickens!" said Larry. "They delight the heart," he translated for Rador.
The green dwarf"s next remark made me gasp.
"They are yours," he said.