Bending nearer, the girl fixed her yellow eyes on the man who looked back at her with dying gaze, sitting upright and knee deep in his shroud.
Then, noiselessly she uncoiled her supple golden body, extending her right arm toward the knife.
"Throw back thy head, my lord, and stretch thy throat to the knife"s sweet edge," she whispered caressingly. "No!--do not close your eyes.
Look upon me. Look into my eyes. I am Aoula, temple girl of the Baroula.s.s! I am mistress to the Slayer of Souls! I am a golden plaything to Sanang Noane, Prince of the Yezidees. Look upon me attentively, my lord!"
Her smooth little hand closed on the hilt; the scarlet fish splashed furiously in the bowl, dislodging a blossom or two which fell to the carpet and slowly faded into mist.
Now she grasped the knife, and she slipped from the bed to the floor and stood before the dazed man.
"This is the Namaz-Ga," she said in her silky voice. "Behold, this is the appointed Place of Prayer. Gaze around you, my lord. These are the shadows of mighty men who come here to see you die in the Place of Prayer."
Cleves"s head had fallen back, but his eyes were open. The Baroula.s.s girl took his head in both hands and turned it hither and thither. And his glazing eyes seemed to sweep a throng of shadowy white-robed men crowding the room. And he saw the bloodless, symmetrical visage of Sanang among them, and the great red beard of Togrul; and his stiffening lips parted in an uttered cry, and sagged open, flaccid and soundless.
The Baroula.s.s sorceress lifted the shroud from his knees and spread it on the carpet, moving with leisurely grace about her business and softly intoning the Prayers for the Dead.
Then, having made her arrangements, she took her knife into her right hand again and came back to the half-conscious man, and stood close in front of him, bending near and looking curiously into his dimmed eyes.
"Ayah!" she said smilingly. "This is the Place of Prayer. And you shall add your prayer to ours before I use my knife. So! I give you back your power of speech. p.r.o.nounce the name of Erlik!"
Very slowly his dry lips moved and his dry tongue trembled. The word they formed was,
"Tressa!"
Instantly the girl"s yellow eyes grew incandescent and her lovely mouth became distorted. With her left hand she caught his chin, forced his head back, exposing his throat, and using all her strength drew the knife"s edge across it.
But it was only her clenched fingers that swept the taut throat--clenched and empty fingers in which the knife had vanished.
And when the Baroula.s.s girl saw that her clenched hand was empty, felt her own pointed nails cutting into the tender flesh of her own palm, she stared at her blood-stained fingers in sudden terror--stared, spread them, shrieked where she stood, and writhed there trembling and screaming as though gripped in an invisible trap.
But she fell silent when the door of the room opened noiselessly behind her;--and it was as though she dared not turn her head to face the end of all things which had entered the room and was drawing nearer in utter silence.
Suddenly she saw its shadow on the wall; and her voice burst from her lips in a last shuddering scream.
Then the end came slowly, without a sound, and she sank at the knees, gently, to a kneeling posture, then backward, extending her supple golden shape across the shroud; and lay there limp as a dead snake.
Tressa went to the bowl of water and drew from it every blossom. The scarlet fish was now thrashing the water to an iridescent spume; and Tressa plunged in her hands and seized it and flung it out--squirming and wheezing crimson foam--on the shroud beside the golden girl of the Baroula.s.s. Then, very slowly, she drew the shroud over the dying things; stepped back to the chair where her husband lay unconscious; knelt down beside him and took his head on her shoulder, gazing, all the while, at the outline of the dead girl under the snowy shroud.
After a long while Cleves stirred and opened his eyes. Presently he turned his head sideways on her shoulder.
"Tressa," he whispered.
"Hush," she whispered, "all is well now." But she did not move her eyes from the shroud, which now outlined the still shapes of _two_ human figures.
"John Recklow!" she called in a low voice.
Recklow entered noiselessly with drawn pistol. She motioned to him; he bent and lifted the edge of the shroud, cautiously. A bushy red beard protruded.
"Togrul!" he exclaimed.... "But who is this young creature lying dead beside him?"
Then Tressa caught the collar of her tunic in her left hand and flung back her lovely face looking upward out of eyes like sapphires wet with rain:
"In the name of the one and only G.o.d," she sobbed--"if there be no resurrection for dead souls, then I have slain this night in vain!
"For what does it profit a girl if her soul be lost to a lover and her body be saved for her husband?"
She rose from her knees, the tears still falling, and went and looked down at the outlined shapes beneath the shroud.
Recklow had gone to the telephone to summon his own men and an ambulance. Now, turning toward Tressa from his chair:
"G.o.d knows what we"d do without you, Mrs. Cleves. I believe this accounts for all the Yezidees except Sanang."
"Excepting Prince Sanang," she said drearily. Then she went slowly to where her husband lay in his armchair, and sank down on the floor, and laid her cheek across his feet.
CHAPTER XVII
THE SLAYER OF SOULS
In that great blizzard which, on the 4th of February, struck the eastern coast of the United States from Georgia to Maine, John Recklow and his men hunted Sanang, the last of the Yezidees.
And Sanang clung like a demon to the country which he had doomed to destruction, imbedding each claw again as it was torn loose, battling for the supremacy of evil with all his dreadful psychic power, striving still to seize, cripple, and slay the bodies and souls of a hundred million Americans.
Again he scattered the uncounted myriads of germs of the Black Plague which he and his Yezidees had brought out of Mongolia a year before; and once more the plague swept over the country, and thousands on thousands died.
But now the National, State and City governments were fighting, with physicians, nurses, and police, this gruesome epidemic which had come into the world from they knew not where. And National, State and City governments, aroused at last, were fighting the more terrible plague of anarchy.
Nation-wide raids were made from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf to the Lakes. Thousands of terrorists of all shades and stripes whose minds had been seized and poisoned by the Yezidees were being arrested. Deportations had begun; government agents were everywhere swarming to clean out the foulness that had struck deeper into the body of the Republic than any one had supposed.
And it seemed, at last, as though the Red Plague, too, was about to be stamped out along with the Black Death called Influenza.
But only a small group of Secret Service men knew that a resurgence of these horrors was inevitable unless Sanang, the Slayer of Souls, was destroyed. And they knew, too, that only one person in America could hope to destroy Sanang, the last of the Yezidees, and that was Tressa Cleves.
Only by the sudden onset of the plague in various cities of the land had Recklow any clew concerning the whereabouts of Sanang.
In Boston, then Washington, then Kansas City, and then New York the epidemic suddenly blazed up. And in these places of death the Secret Service men always found a clew, and there they hunted Sanang, the Yezidee, to kill him without mercy where they might find him.
But they never found Sanang Noane; only the ghastly marks of his poisoned claws on the body of the sickened nation--only minds diseased by the Red Plague and bodies dying of the Black Death--civil and social centres disorganized, disrupted, depraved, dying.
When the blizzard burst upon New York, struggling in the throes of the plague, and paralysed the metropolis for a week, John Recklow sent out a special alarm, and New York swarmed with Secret Service men searching the snow-buried city for a graceful, slender, dark young man whose eyes slanted a trifle in his amber-tinted face; who dressed fashionably, lived fastidiously, and spoke English perfectly in a delightfully modulated voice.
And to New York, thrice stricken by anarchy, by plague, and now by G.o.d, hurried, from all parts of the nation, thousands of secret agents who had been hunting Sanang in distant cities or who had been raiding the traitorous and secret gatherings of his mental dupes.
Agent ZB-303, who was volunteer agent James Benton, came from Boston with his new bride who had just arrived by way of England--a young girl named Yulun who landed swathed in sables, and stretched out both lovely little hands to Benton the instant she caught sight of him on the pier.
Whereupon he took the slim figure in furs into his arms, which was interesting because they had never before met in the flesh.