“Ring, ring, Buddha bells,Gilded gods are listening.Swing, swing, lily bells,In my garden glistening.Now I hear the Shaman drum;Now the scarlet horsemen come;Ding-dong!Ding-dong!Through the chanting of the throngThunders now the temple gong.Boom-boom!Ding-dong!“Let the gold gods listen!In my garden; what care IWhere my lily bells hang mute!Snowy-sweet they glistenWhere I’m singing to my lute.In my garden; what care IWho is dead and who shall die?Let the gold gods save or slayScented lilies bloom in May.Boom, boom, temple gong!Ding-dong!Ding-dong!”
“Ring, ring, Buddha bells,Gilded gods are listening.Swing, swing, lily bells,In my garden glistening.Now I hear the Shaman drum;Now the scarlet horsemen come;Ding-dong!Ding-dong!Through the chanting of the throngThunders now the temple gong.Boom-boom!Ding-dong!
“Let the gold gods listen!In my garden; what care IWhere my lily bells hang mute!Snowy-sweet they glistenWhere I’m singing to my lute.In my garden; what care IWho is dead and who shall die?Let the gold gods save or slayScented lilies bloom in May.Boom, boom, temple gong!Ding-dong!Ding-dong!”
“What are you singing?” whispered Cleves.
“‘The Bells of Yian.’”
“Is it old?”
“Of the 13th century. There were few Buddhist bells in Yian then. It is Lamaism that has destroyed the Mongols and that has permitted the creed of the Assassins to spread—the devil worship of Erlik.”
He looked at her, not understanding. And she, pale, slim prophetess, in the moonlight, gazed at him out of lost eyes—eyes which saw, perhaps, the bloody age of men when mankind took the devil by the throat and all Mount Alamout went up in smoking ruin; and the Eight Towers were dark as death and as silent before the blast of the silver clarions of Ghenghis Khan.
“Something is stirring in the forest,” whispered Tressa, her fingers on her lips.
“Damnation,” muttered Recklow, “it’s the wind!”
They listened. Far in the forest they heard the clatter of palm-fronds. They waited. The ominous warning grew faint, then rose again,—a long, low rattle of palm-fronds which became a steady monotone.
“We hunt,” said Recklow bluntly. “Come on!”
But the girl sprang from the hammock and caught her husband’s arm and drew Recklow back from the hibiscus hedge.
“Use me,” she said. “You could never find the Yezidee. Let me do the hunting; and then shoot very, very fast.”
“We’ve got to take her,” said Recklow. “We dare not leave her.”
“I can’t let her lead the way into those black woods,” muttered Cleves.
“The wind is blowing in my face,” insisted Recklow. “We’d better hurry.”
Tressa laid one hand on her husband’s arm.
“I can find the Yezidee, I think. You never could find him before he finds you! Victor, let me use my ownknowledge! Let me find the way. Please let me lead! Please, Victor. Because, if you don’t, I’m afraid we’ll all die here in the garden where we stand.”
Cleves cast a haggard glance at Recklow, then looked at his wife.
“All right,” he said.
The girl opened the hedge gate. Both men followed with pistols lifted.
The moon silvered the forest. There was no mist, but a night-wind blew mournfully through palm and cypress, carrying with it the strange, disturbing pungency of the jungle—wild, unfamiliar perfumes,—the acrid aroma of swamp and rotting mould.
“What about snakes?” muttered Recklow, knee deep in wild phlox.
But there was a deadlier snake to find and destroy, somewhere in the blotched shadows of the forest.
The first sentinel trees were very near, now; and Tressa was running across a ghostly tangle, where once had been an orange grove, and where aged and dying citrus stumps rose stark amid the riot of encroaching jungle.
“She’s circling to get the wind at our backs,” breathed Recklow, running forward beside Cleves. “That’s our only chance to kill the dirty rat—catch him with the wind at our backs!”
Once, traversing a dry hammock where streaks of moonlight alternated with velvet-black shadow a rattlesnake sprang his goblin alarm.
They could not locate the reptile. They shrank together and moved warily, chilled with fear.
Once, too, clear in the moonlight, the Grey Death reared up from bloated folds and stood swaying rhythmically in a horrible shadow dance before them. And Cleves threw one arm around his wife and crept past, giving death a wide berth there in the checkered moonlight.
Now, under foot, the dry hammock lay everywhere and the night wind blew on their backs.
Then Tressa turned and halted the two men with a gesture. And went to her husband where he stood in the palm forest, and laid her hands on his shoulders, looking him very wistfully in the eyes.
Under her searching gaze he seemed oddly to comprehend her appeal.
“You are going to use—to use yourknowledge,” he said mechanically. “You are going to find the man in white.”
“Yes.”
“You are going to find him in a way we don’t understand,” he continued, dully.
“Yes.... You will not hold me in—in horror—will you?”
Recklow came up, making no sound on the spongy palm litter underfoot.
“Can you find this devil?” he whispered.
“I—think so.”
“Does your super-instinct—finer sense—knowledge—whatever it is—give you any inkling as to his whereabouts, Mrs. Cleves?”
“I think he is here in this hammock. Only——” she turned again, with swift impulse, to her husband, “—only if you—ifyoudo not hold me in—in horror—because of what I do——”
There was a silence; then:
“What are you about to do?” he asked hoarsely.
“Slay this man.”
“We’ll do that,” said Cleves with a shudder. “Only show him to us and we’ll shoot the dirty reptile to slivers——”
“Suppose we hit the jar of gas,” said Recklow.
After a silence, Tressa said:
“I have got to give him back to Satan. There is no other way. I understood that from the first. He can not die by your pistols, though you shoot very fast and straight. No!”
After another silence, Recklow said:
“You had better find him before the wind changes. We hunt down wind or—we die here together.”
She looked at her husband.
“Show him to us in your own way,” he said, “and deal with him as he must be dealt with.”
A gleam passed across her pale face and she tried to smile at her husband.
Then, turning down the hammock to the east, she walked noiselessly forward over the fibrous litter, the men on either side of her, their pistols poised.
They had halted on the edge of an open glade, ringed with young pines in fullest plumage.
Tressa was standing very straight and still in a strange, supple, agonised attitude, her left forearm across her eyes, her right hand clenched, her slender body slightly twisted to the left.
The men gazed pallidly at her with tense, set faces, knowing that the girl was in terrible mental conflict against another mind—a powerful, sinister mind which was seeking to grasp her thoughts and control them.
Minute after minute sped: the girl never moved, locked in her psychic duel with this other brutal mind,—beating back its terrible thought-waves which were attacking her, fighting for mental supremacy, struggling in silence with an unseen adversary whose mental dominance meant death.
Suddenly her cry rang out sharply in the moonlight, and then, all at once, a man in white stood there in the lustre of the moon—a young, graceful man dressed in white flannels and carrying on his right arm what seemed to be a long white cloak.
Instantly the girl was transformed from a living statue into a lithe, supple, lightly moving thing that passed swiftly to the west of the glade, keeping the young man in white facing the wind, which was blowing and tossing the plumy young pines.
“So it isyou, young man, with whom I have been wrestling here under the moon of the only God!” she said in a strange little voice, all vibrant and metallic with menacing laughter.
“It is I, Keuke Mongol,” replied the young man in white, tranquilly; yet his words came as though he were tired and out of breath, and the hand he raised to touch his small black moustache trembled as if from physical exhaustion.
“Yarghouz!” she exclaimed. “Why did I not know you there on the golf links, Assassin of the Seventh Tower? And why do you come here with your shroud over your arm and hidden under it, in your right hand, a flask full of death?”
He said, smiling:
“I come because you are to die, Heavenly-Azure Eyes. I bring you your shroud.” And he moved warily westward around the open circle of young pines.
Instantly the girl flung her right arm straight upward.
“Yarghouz!”
“I hear thee, Heavenly Azure.”
“Another step to the west and I shatter thy flask of gas.”
“With what?” he demanded; but stood discreetly motionless.
“With what I grasp in an empty palm. Thou knowest, Yarghouz.”
“I have heard,” he said with smiling uncertainty, “but to hear of force that can be hurled out of an empty palm is one thing, and to see it and feel it is another. I think you lie, Heavenly Azure.”
“So thought Gutchlug. And died of a yellow snake.”
The young man seemed to reflect. Then he looked up at her in his frank, smiling way.
“Wilt thou listen, Heavenly Eyes?”
“I hear thee, Yarghouz.”
“Listen then, Keuke Mongol. Take life from us as we offer it. Life is sweet. Erlik, like a spider, waits in darkness for lost souls that flutter to his net.”
“You think my soul was lost there in the temple, Yarghouz?”
“Unutterably lost, little temple girl of Yian. Therefore, live. Take life as a gift!”
“Whose gift?”
“Sanang’s.”
“It is written,” she said gravely, “that we belong to God and we return to him. Now then, Yezidee, do your duty as I do mine! Kai!”
At the sound of the formula always uttered by the sect of Assassins when about to do murder, the young man started and shrank back. The west wind blew fresh in his startled eyes.
“Sorceress,” he said less firmly, “you leave your Yiort to come all alone into this forest and seek me. Why then have you come, if not to submit!—if not to take the gift of life—if not to turn away from your seducers who are hunting me, and who have corrupted you?”
“Yarghouz, I come to slay you,” she said quietly.
Suddenly the man snarled at her, flung the shroud at her feet, and crept deliberately to the left.
“Be careful!” she cried sharply; “look what you’re about! Stand still, son of a dog! May your mother bewail your death!”
Yarghouz edged toward the west, clasping in his right hand the flask of gas.
“Sorceress,” he laughed, “a witch of Thibet prophesied with a drum that the three purities, the nine perfections, and the nine times nine felicities shall be lodged in him who slays the treacherous temple girl, Keuke Mongol! There is more magic in this bottle which I grasp than in thy mind and body. Heavenly Eyes! I pray God to be merciful to this soul I send to Erlik!”
All the time he was advancing, edging cautiously around the circle of little plumy pines; and already the wind struck his left cheek.
“Yarghouz Khan!” cried the girl in her clear voice. “Take up your shroud and repeat the fatha!”
“Backward!” laughed the young man, “—as do you, Keuke Mongol!”
“Heretic!” she retorted. “Do you also refuse to name the ten Imaums in your prayers? Dog! Toad! Spittle of Erlik! May all your cattle die and all your horses take the glanders and all your dogs the mange!”
“Silence, sorceress!” he shouted, pale with fear and fury. “Witch! Mud worm! May Erlik seize you! May your skin be covered with putrefying sores! May all the demons torment you! May God remember you in hell!”
“Yarghouz! Stand still!”
“Is your word then the Rampart of Gog and Magog, you young witch of Yian, that a Khan of the Seventh Tower need fear you!” he sneered, stealing stealthily westward through the feathery pines.
“I give thee thy last chance, Yarghouz Khan,” she said in an excited voice that trembled. “Recite thy prayer naming the ten, because with their holy names upon thy lips thou mayest escape damnation. For I am here to slay thee, Yarghouz! Take up thy shroud and pray!”
The young man felt the west wind at the back of his left ear. Then he began to laugh.
“Heavenly Eyes,” he said, “thy end is come—together with the two police who hide in the pines yonder behind thee! Behold the bottle magic of Yarghouz Khan!”
And he lifted the glass flask in the moonlight as though he were about to smash it at her feet.
Then a terrible thing occurred. The entire flask glowed red hot in his grasp; and the man screamed and strove convulsively to fling the bottle; but it stuck to his hand, melted into the smoking flesh.
Then he screamed again—or tried to—but his entire lower jaw came off and he stood there with the awful orifice gaping in the moonlight—stood, reeled a moment—and then—andthen—his whole face slid off, leaving nothing but a bony mask out of which burst shriek after shriek——
Keuke Mongol had fainted dead away. Cleves took her into his arms.
Recklow, trembling and deathly white, went over to the thing that lay among the young pines and forced himself to bend over it.
The glass flask still stuck to one charred hand, but it was no longer hot. And Recklow rolled the unspeakable thing into the white shroud and pushed it into the swamp.
An evil ooze took it, slowly sucked it under and engulfed it. A few stinking bubbles broke.
Recklow went back to the little glade among the pines.
A young girl lay sobbing convulsively in her husband’s arms, asking God’s pardon and his for the justice she had done upon an enemy of all mankind.
When Victor Cleves telegraphed from St. Augustine to Washington that he and his wife were on their way North, and that they desired to see John Recklow as soon as they arrived, John Recklow remarked that he knew of no place as private as a public one. And he came on to New York and established himself at the Ritz, rather regally.
To dine with him that evening were two volunteer agents of the United States Secret Service,ZB-303, otherwise James Benton, a fashionable architect; andXYL-371, Alexander Selden, sometime junior partner in the house of Milwin, Selden & Co.
A single lamp was burning in the white-and-rose rococo room. Under its veiled glow these three men sat conversing in guarded voices over coffee and cigars, awaiting the advent of53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves, recently Professor of Ornithology at Cambridge; and his young wife, Tressa, known officially asV-69.
“Did the trip South do Mrs. Cleves any good?” inquired Benton.
“Some,” said Recklow. “When Selden and I saw her she was getting better.”
“I suppose that affair of Yarghouz upset her pretty thoroughly.”
“Yes.” Recklow tossed his cigar into the fireplace and produced a pipe. “Victor Cleves upsets her more,” he remarked.
“Why?” asked Benton, astonished.
“She’s beginning to fall in love with him and doesn’t know what’s the matter with her,” replied the elder man drily. “Selden noticed it, too.”
Benton looked immensely surprised. “I supposed,” he said, “that she and Cleves considered the marriage to be merely a temporary necessity. I didn’t imagine that they cared for each other.”
“I don’t suppose they did at first,” said Selden. “But I think she’s interested in Victor. And I don’t see how he can help falling in love with her, because she’s a very beautiful thing to gaze on, and a most engaging one to talk to.”
“She’s about the prettiest girl I ever saw,” admitted Benton, “and about the cleverest. All the same——”
“All the same—what?”
“Well, Mrs. Cleves has her drawbacks, you know—as a real wife, I mean.”
Recklow said: “There is a fixed idea in Cleves’s head that Tressa Norne married him as a last resort, which is true. But he’ll never believe she’s changed her ideas in regard to him unless she herself enlightens him. And the girl is too shy to do that. Besides, she believes the same thing of him. There’s a mess for you!”
Recklow filled his pipe carefully.
“In addition,” he went on, “Mrs. Cleves has another and very terrible fixed idea in her charming head, and that is that she really did lose her soul among those damned Yezidees. She believes that Cleves, though kind to her, considers her merely as something uncanny—something to endure until this Yezidee campaign is ended and she is safe from assassination.”
Benton said: “After all, and in spite of all her loveliness, I myself should not feel entirely comfortable with such a girl for a real wife.”
“Why?” demanded Recklow.
“Well—good heavens, John!—those uncanny things she does—her rather terrifying psychic knowledge and ability—make a man more or less uneasy.” He laughed without mirth.
“For example,” he added, “I never was nervous in any physical crisis; but since I’ve met Tressa Norne—to be frank—I’m not any too comfortable in my mind when I remember Gutchlug and Sanang and Albert Feke and that dirty reptile Yarghouz—and when I recollecthow that girl dealt with them! Good God, John, I’m not a coward, I hope, but that sort of thing worries me!”
Recklow lighted his pipe. He said: “In the Government’s campaign against these eight foreigners who have begun a psychic campaign against the unsuspicious people of this decent Republic, with the purpose of surprising, overpowering and enslaving the minds of mankind by a misuse of psychic power, we agents of the Secret Service are slowly gaining the upper hand.
“In this battle of minds we are gaining a victory. But we are winning solely and alone through the psychic ability and the loyalty and courage of a young girl who, through tragedy of circumstances, spent the years of her girlhood in the infamous Yezidee temple at Yian, and who learned from the devil-worshipers themselves not only this so-called magic of the Mongol sorcerers, but also how to meet its psychic menace and defeat it.”
He looked at Benton, shrugged:
“If you and if Cleves really feel the slightest repugnance toward the strange psychic ability of this brave and generous girl, I for one do not share it.”
Benton reddened: “It isn’t exactly repugnance——” But Recklow interrupted sharply:
“Do you realise, Benton, what she’s already accomplished for us in our secret battle against Bolshevism?—against the very powers of hell itself, led by these Mongol sorcerers?
“Of the Eight Assassins—or Sheiks-el-Djebel—who came to the United States to wield the dreadful weapon of psychic power against the minds of our people, and to pervert them and destroy all civilisation,—of the Eight Chief Assassins of the Eight Towers, this girl already has discovered and identified four,—Sanang, Gutchlug, Albert Feke, and Yarghouz; and she has destroyed the last three.”
He sat calmly enjoying his pipe for a few moments’ silence, then:
“Five of this sect of Assassins remain—five sly, murderous, psychic adepts who call themselves sorcerers. Except for Prince Sanang, I do not know who these other four men may be. I haven’t a notion. Nor have you. Nor do I believe that with all the resources of the United States Secret Service we ever should be able to discover these four Sheiks-el-Djebel except for the astounding spiritual courage and psychic experience of the young wife of Victor Cleves.”
After a moment Selden nodded. “That is quite true,” he said simply. “We are utterly helpless against unknown psychic forces. And I, for one, feel no repugnance toward what Mrs. Cleves has done for all mankind and in the name of God.”
“She’s a brave girl,” muttered Benton, “but it’s terrible to possess such knowledge and horrible to use it.”
Recklow said: “The horror of it nearly killed the girl herself. Have you any idea how she must suffer by being forced to employ such terrific knowledge? by being driven to use it to combat this menace of hell? Can you imagine what this charming, sensitive, tragic young creature must feel when, with powers natural to her but unfamiliar to us, she destroys with her own mind and will-power demons in human shape who are about to destroy her?
“Talk of nerve! Talk of abnegation! Talk of perfect loyalty and courage! There is more than these in Tressa Cleves. There is that dauntless bravery which faces worse than physical death. Because the child still believes that her soul is damned for whatever happened to her in the Yezidee temple; and that when these Yezidees succeed in killing her body, Erlik will surely seize the soul that leaves it.”
There was a knocking at the door. Benton got up and opened it. Victor Cleves came in with his young wife.
Tressa Cleves seemed to have grown since she had been away. Taller, a trifle paler, yet without even the subtlest hint of that charming maturity which the young and happily married woman invariably wears, her virginal allure now verged vaguely on the delicate edges of austerity.
Cleves, sunburnt and vigorous, looked older, somehow—far less boyish—and he seemed more silent than when, nearly seven months before, he had been assigned to the case of Tressa Norne.
Recklow, Selden and Benton greeted them warmly; to each in turn Tressa gave her narrow, sun-tanned hand. Recklow led her to a seat. A servant came with iced fruit juice and little cakes and cigarettes.
Conversation, aimless and general, fulfilling formalities, gradually ceased.
A full June moon stared through the open windows—searching for the traditional bride, perhaps—and its light silvered a pale and lovely figure that might possibly have passed for the pretty ghost of a bride, but not for any girl who had married because she was loved.
Recklow broke the momentary silence, bluntly:
“Have you anything to report, Cleves?”
The young fellow hesitated:
“My wife has, I believe.”
The others turned to her. She seemed, for a moment, to shrink back in her chair, and, as her eyes involuntarily sought her husband, there was in them a vague and troubled appeal.
Cleves said in a sombre voice: “I need scarcely remind you how deeply distasteful this entire and accursed business is to my wife. But she is going to see it through, whatever the cost. And we four men understand something of what it has cost her—is costing her—in violence to her every instinct.”
“We honour her the more,” said Recklow quietly.
“We couldn’t honour her too much,” said Cleves.
A slight colour came into Tressa’s face; she bent her head, but Recklow saw her eyes steal sideways toward her husband.
Still bowed a little in her chair, she seemed to reflect for a while concerning what she had to say; then, looking up at John Recklow:
“I saw Sanang.”
“Good heavens! Where?” he demanded.
“I—don’t—know.”
Cleves, flushing with embarrassment, explained: “She saw him clairvoyantly. She was lying in the hammock. You remember I had a trained nurse for her after—what happened in Orchid Lodge.”
Tressa looked miserably at Recklow,—dumbly, for a moment. Then her lips unclosed.
“I saw Prince Sanang,” she repeated. “He was near the sea. There were rocks—cottages on cliffs—and very brilliant flowers in tiny, pocket-like gardens.
“Sanang was walking on the cliffs with another man. There were forests, inland.”
“Do you know who the other man was?” asked Recklow gently.
“Yes. He was one of the Eight. I recognised him. When I was a girl he came once to the Temple of Yian, all alone, and spread his shroud on the pink marble steps. And we temple girls mocked him and threw stemless roses on the shroud, telling him they were human heads with which to grease his toug.”
She became excited and sat up straighter in her chair, and her strange little laughter rippled like a rill among pebbles.
“I threw a big rose without a stem upon the shroud,” she exclaimed, “and I cried out, ‘Niaz!’ which means, ‘Courage,’ and I mocked him, saying, ‘Djamouk Khagan,’ when he was only a Khan, of course; and I laughed and rubbed one finger against the other, crying out, ‘Toug ia glachakho!’ which means, ‘The toug is anointed.’ And which was very impudent of me, because Djamouk was a Sheik-el-Djebel and Khan of the Fifth Tower, and entitled to a toug and to eight men and a Toughtchi. And it is a grave offence to mock at the anointing of a toug.”
She paused, breathless, her splendid azure eyes sparkling with the memory of that girlish mischief. Then their brilliancy faded; she bit her lip and stole an uncertain glance at her husband.
And after a pause she explained in a very subdued voice that the “Iagla michi,” or action of “greasing the toug,” or standard, was done when a severed human head taken in battle was cast at the foot of the lance shaft stuck upright in the ground.
“You see,” she said sadly, “we temple girls, being already damned, cared little what we said, even to such a terrible man as Djamouk Khan. And even had the ghost of old Tchinguiz Khagan himself come to the temple and looked at us out of his tawny eyes, I think we might have done something saucy.”
Tressa’s pretty face was spiritless, now; she leaned back in her armchair and they heard an unconscious sigh escape her.
“Ai-ya! Ai-ya!” she murmured to herself, “what crazy things we did on the rose-marble steps, Yulun and I, so long—so long ago.”
Cleves got up and went over to stand beside his wife’s chair.
“What happened is this,” he said heavily. “During my wife’s convalescence after that Yarghouz affair, she found herself, at a certain moment, clairvoyant. And she thought she saw—shedidsee—Sanang, and an Asiatic she recognised as being one of the chiefs of the Assassins sect, whose name is Djamouk.
“But, except that it was somewhere near the sea—some summer colony probably on the Atlantic coast—she does not know where this pair of jailbirds roost. And this is what we have come here to report.”
Benton, politely appalled, tried not to look incredulous. But it was evident that Selden and Recklow had no doubts.
“Of course,” said Recklow calmly, “the thing to do is for you and your wife to try to find this place she saw.”
“Make a tour of all such ocean-side resorts until Mrs. Cleves recognises the place she saw,” added Selden. And to Recklow he added: “I believe there are several perfectly genuine cases on record where clairvoyants have aided the police.”
“Several authentic cases,” said Recklow quietly. But Benton’s face was a study.
Tressa looked up at her husband. He dropped his hand reassuringly on her shoulder and nodded with a slight smile.
“There—there was something else,” she said with considerable hesitation—“something not quite in line of duty—perhaps——”
“It seems to concern Benton,” added Cleves, smiling.
“What is it?” inquired Selden, smiling also as Benton’s features froze to a mask.
“Let me tell you, first,” interrupted Cleves, “that my wife’s psychic ability and skill can make me visualise and actually see scenes and people which, God knows, I never before laid eyes upon, but which she has both seen and known.
“And one morning, in Florida, I asked her to do something strange—something of that sort to amuse me—and we were sitting on the steps of our cottage—you know, the old club-house at Orchid!—and the first I knew I saw, in the mist on the St. Johns, a Chinese bridge humped up over that very commonplace stream, and thousands of people passing over it,—and a city beyond—the town of Yian, Tressa tells me,—and I heard the Buddhist bells and the big temple gong and the noises in streets and on the water——”
He was becoming considerably excited at the memory, and his lean face reddened and he gesticulated as he spoke:
“It was astounding, Recklow! There was that bridge, and all those people moving over it; and the city beyond, and the boats and shipping, and the vast murmur of multitudes.... And then, there on the bridge crossing toward Yian, I saw a young girl, who turned and looked back at my wife and laughed.”
“And I told him it was Yulun,” said Tressa, simply.
“A playfellow of my wife’s in Yian,” explained Cleves. “But if she were really Chinese she didn’t look like what are my own notions of a Chinese girl.”
“Yulun came from Black China,” said Mrs. Cleves. “I taught her English. I loved her dearly. I was her most intimate friend in Yian.”
There ensued a silence, broken presently by Benton; and:
“Where do I appear in this?” he asked stiffly.
Tressa’s smile was odd; she looked at Selden and said:
“When I was convalescent I was lonely.... I madethe effortone evening. And I found Yulun. And again she was on a bridge. But she was dressed as I am. And the bridge was one of those great, horrible steel monsters that sprawl across the East River. And I was astonished, and I said, ‘Yulun, darling, are you really here in America and in New York, or has a demon tangled the threads of thought to mock my mind in illness?’
“Then Yulun looked very sorrowfully at me and wrote in Arabic characters, in the air, the name of our enemy who once came to the Lake of Ghosts for love of her—Yaddin-ed-Din, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox.... And who went his way again amid our scornful laughter.... He is a demon. And he was tangling my thread of thought!”
Tressa became exceedingly animated once more. She rose and came swiftly to where Benton was standing.
“And what do you think!” she said eagerly. “I said to her, ‘Yulun! Yulun! Will youmake the effortand come to me if Imake the effort? Will you come to me, beloved?’ And Yulun made ‘Yes,’ with her lips.”
After a silence: “But—where do I come in?” inquired Benton, stiffly fearful of such matters.
“Youcamein.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You came in the door while Yulun and I were talking.”
“When?”
“When you came to see me after I was better, and you and Mr. Selden were going North with Mr. Recklow. Don’t you remember; I was lying in the hammock in the moonlight, and Victor told you I was asleep?”
“Yes, of course——”
“I was not asleep. I hadmade the effortand I was with Yulun.... I did not know you were standing beside my hammock in the moonlight until Yulun told me.... Andthatis what I am to tell you; Yulun saw you.... And Yulun has written it in Chinese, in Eighur characters and in Arabic,—tracing them with her forefinger in the air—that Yulun, loveliest in Yian, flame-slender and very white, has seen her heart, like a pink pearl afire, burning between your august hands.”
“My hands!” exclaimed Benton, very red.
There fell an odd silence. Nobody laughed.
Tressa came nearer to Benton, wistful, uncertain, shy.
“Would you care to see Yulun?” she asked.
“Well—no,” he said, startled. “I—I shall not deny that such things worry me a lot, Mrs. Cleves. I’m a—an Episcopalian.”
The tension released, Selden was the first to laugh.
“There’s no use blinking the truth,” he said; “we’re up against something absolutely new. Of course, it isn’t magic. It can, of course, be explained by natural laws about which we happen to know nothing at present.”
Recklow nodded. “What do we know about the human mind? It has been proven that no thought can originate within that mass of convoluted physical matter called the brain. It has been proven thatsomething outsidethe brain originates thought and uses the brain as a vehicle to incubate it. What do we know about thought?”
Selden, much interested, sat cogitating and looking at Mrs. Cleves. But Benton, still flushed and evidently nervous, sat staring out of the window at the full moon, and twisting an unlighted cigarette to shreds.
“Why didn’t you tell Benton when the thing occurred down there at Orchid Lodge, the night we called to say good-bye?” asked Selden, curiously.
Tressa gave him a distressed smile: “I was afraid he wouldn’t believe me. And I was afraid that you and Mr. Recklow, even if you believed it, might not like—like me any the better for—for being clairvoyant.”
Recklow came over, bent his handsome grey head, and kissed her hand.
“I never liked any woman better, nor respected any woman as deeply,” he said. And, lifting his head, he saw tears sparkling in her eyes.
“My dear,” he said in a low voice, and his firm hand closed over the slim fingers he had kissed.
Benton got up from his chair, went to the window, turned shortly and came over to Tressa.
“You’re braver than I ever could learn to be,” he said shortly. “I ask your pardon if I seem sceptical. I’m more worried than incredulous. There’s something born in me—part of me—that shrinks from anything that upsets my orthodox belief in the future life. But—if you wish me to see this—this girl—Yulun—it’s quite all right.”
She said softly, and with gentle wonder: “I know of nothing that could upset your belief, Mr. Benton. There is only one God. And if Mahomet be His prophet, or if he be Lord Buddha, or if your Lord Christ be vice-regent to the Most High, I do not know. All I know is that God is God, and that He prevailed over Satan who was stoned. And that in Paradise is eternal life, and in hell demons hide where dwells Erlik, Prince of Darkness.”
Benton, silent and secretly aghast at her theology, said nothing. Recklow pleasantly but seriously denied that Satan and his demons were actual and concrete creatures.
Again Cleves’s hand fell lightly on his wife’s shoulder, in a careless gesture of reassurance. And, to Benton, “No soul is ever lost,” he said, calmly. “I don’t exactly know how that agrees with your orthodoxy, Benton. But it is surely so.”
“I don’t know myself,” said Benton. “I hope it’s so.” He looked at Tressa a moment and then blurted out: “Anyway, if ever there was a soul in God’s keeping and guarded by His angels, it’s your wife’s!”
“That also is true,” said Cleves quietly.
“By the way,” remarked Recklow carelessly, “I’ve arranged to have you stop at the Ritz while you’re in town, Mrs. Cleves. You and your husband are to occupy the apartment adjoining this. Where is your luggage, Victor?”
“In our apartment.”
“That won’t do,” said Recklow decisively. “Telephone for it.”
Cleves went to the telephone, but Recklow took the instrument out of his hand and called the number. The voice of one of his own agents answered.
Cleves was standing alone by the open window when Recklow hung up the telephone. Tressa, on the sofa, had been whispering with Benton. Selden, looking over the evening paper by the rose-shaded lamp, glanced up as Recklow went over to Cleves.
“Victor,” he said, “your man has been murdered. His throat was cut; his head was severed completely. Your luggage has been ransacked and so has your apartment. Three of my men are in possession, and the local police seem to comprehend the necessity of keeping the matter out of the newspapers. What was in your baggage?”
“Nothing,” said Cleves, ghastly pale.
“All right. We’ll have your effects packed up again and brought over here. Are you going to tell your wife?”
Cleves, still deathly pale, cast a swift glance toward her. She sat on the sofa in animated conversation with Benton. She laughed once, and Benton smiled at what she was saying.
“Is there any need to tell her, Recklow?”
“Not for a while, anyway.”
“All right. I suppose the Yezidees are responsible for this horrible business.”
“Certainly. Your poor servant’s head lay at the foot of a curtain-pole which had been placed upright between two chairs. On the pole were tied three tufts of hair from the dead man’s head. The pole had been rubbed with blood.”
“That’s Mongol custom,” muttered Cleves. “They made a toug and ‘greased’ it!—the murderous devils!”
“They did more. They left at the foot of your bed and at the foot of your wife’s bed two white sheets. And a knife lay in the centre of each sheet. That, of course, is the symbol of the Sect of Assassins.”
Cleves nodded. His body, as he leaned there on the window sill in the moonlight, trembled. But his face had grown dark with rage.
“If I could—could only get my hands on one of them,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Be careful. Don’t wear a face like that. Your wife is looking at us,” murmured Recklow.
With an effort Cleves raised his head and smiled across the room at his wife.
“Our luggage will be sent over shortly,” he said. “If you’re tired, we’ll say good-night.”
So she rose and the three men came to make their adieux and pay their compliments and devoirs. Then, with a smile that seemed almost happy, she went into her own apartment on her husband’s arm.
Cleves and his wife had connecting bedrooms and a sitting-room between. Here they paused for a moment before the always formal ceremony of leave-taking at night. There were roses on the centre table. Tressa dropped one hand on the table and bent over the flowers.
“They seem so friendly,” she said under her breath.
He thought she meant that she found even in flowers a refuge from the solitude of a loveless marriage.
He said quietly: “I think you will find the world very friendly, if you wish.” But she shook her head, looking at the roses.
Finally he said good-night and she extended her hand, and he took it formally.
Then their hands fell away. Tressa turned and went toward her bedroom. At the door she stopped, turned slowly.
“What shall I do about Yulun?” she asked.
“What is there to do? Yulun is in China.”
“Yes, her body is.”
“Do you mean that the rest of her—whatever it is—could come here?”
“Why, of course.”
“So that Benton could see her?”
“Yes.”
“Could he see her just as she is? Her face and figure—clothes and everything?”
“Yes.”
“Would she seem real or like a ghost—spirit—whatever you choose to call such things?”
Tressa smiled. “She’d be exactly as real as you or I, Victor. She’d seem like anybody else.”
“That’s astonishing,” he muttered. “Could Benton hear her speak?”
“Certainly.”
“Talk to her?”
Tressa laughed: “Of course. If Yulun shouldmake the effortshe could leave her body as easily as she undresses herself. It is no more difficult to divest one’s self of one’s body than it is to put off one garment and put on another.... And, somehow, I think Yulun will do it to-night.”
“Comehere?”
“It would be like her.” Tressa laughed. “Isn’t it odd that she should have become so enamoured of Mr. Benton—just seeing him there in the moonlight that night at Orchid Lodge?”
For a moment the smile curved her lips, then the shadow fell again across her eyes, veiling them in that strange and lovely way which Cleves knew so well; and he looked into her impenetrable eyes in troubled silence.
“Victor,” she said in a low voice, “were you afraid to tell me that your man had been murdered?”
After a moment: “You always know everything,” he said unsteadily. “When did you learn it?”
“Just before Mr. Recklow told you.”
“How did you learn it, Tressa?”
“I looked into our apartment.”
“When?”
“While you were telephoning.”
“You mean you looked into our rooms fromhere?”
“Yes, clairvoyantly.”
“What did you see?”
“The Iaglamichi!” she said with a shudder. “Kai! The Toug of Djamouk is anointed at last!”
“Is that the beast of a Mongol who did this murder?”
“Djamouk and Prince Sanang planned it,” she said, trembling a little. “But that butchery was Yaddin’s work, I think. Kai! The work of Yaddined-Din, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox!”
They stood confronting each other, the length of the sitting-room between them. And after the silence had lasted a full minute Cleves reddened and said: “I am going to sleep on the couch at the foot of your bed, Tressa.”
His young wife reddened too.
He said: “This affair has thoroughly scared me. I can’t let you sleep out of my sight.”
“I am quite safe. And you would have an uncomfortable night,” she murmured.
“Do you mind if I sleep on the couch, Tressa?”
“No.”
“Will you call me when you are ready?”
“Yes.”
She went into her bedroom and closed the door.
When he was ready he slipped a pistol into the pocket of his dressing-gown, belted it over his pyjamas, and walked into the sitting-room. His wife called him presently, and he went in. Her night-lamp was burning and she extended her hand to extinguish it.
“Could you sleep if it burns?” he asked bluntly.
“Yes.”
“Then let it burn. This business has got on my nerves,” he muttered.
They looked at each other in an expressionless way. Both really understood how useless was this symbol of protection—this man the girl called husband;—how utterly useless his physical strength, and the pistol sagging in the pocket of his dressing-gown. Both understood that the only real protection to be looked for must come from her—from the gifted and guardian mind of this young girl who lay there looking at him from the pillows.
“Good-night,” he said, flushing; “I’ll do my best. But only one of God’s envoys, like you, knows how to do battle with things that come out of hell.”
After a moment’s silence she said in a colourless voice: “I wish you’d lie down on the bed.”
“Had you rather I did?”
“Yes.”
So he went slowly to the bed, placed his pistol under the pillow, drew his dressing-gown around him, and lay down.
After he had lain unstirring for half an hour: “Try to sleep, Tressa,” he said, without turning his head.
“Can’t you seem to sleep, Victor?” she asked. And he heard her turn her head.
“No.”
“Shall I help you?”
“Do you mean use hypnosis—the power of suggestion—on me?”
“No. I can help you to sleep very gently. I can make you very drowsy.... You are drowsy now.... You are very close to the edge of sleep.... Sleep, dear.... Sleep, easily, naturally, confidently as a tired boy.... You are sleeping, ... deeply ... sweetly ... my dear ... my dear, dear husband.”
Cleves opened his eyes. He was lying on his left side. In the pink glow of the night-lamp he saw his wife in her night-dress, seated sideways on the farther edge of the bed, talking to a young girl.
The strange girl wore what appeared to be a chamber-robe of frail gold tissue that clung to her body and glittered as she moved. He had never before seen such a dress; but he had seen the girl; he recognised her instantly as the girl he had seen turn to look back at Tressa as she crossed the phantom bridge over that misty Florida river. And Cleves comprehended that he was looking at Yulun.
But this charming young thing was no ghost, no astral projection. This girl was warm, living, breathing flesh. The delicate scent of her strange garments and of her hair, her very breath, was in the air of the room. Her half-hushed but laughing voice was deliciously human; her delicate little hands, caressing Tressa’s, were too eagerly real to doubt.
Both talked at the same time, their animated voices mingling in the breathless delight of the reunion. Their exclamations, enchanting laughter, bubbling chatter, filled his ears. But not one word of what they were saying to each other could he understand.
Suddenly Tressa looked over her shoulder and met his astonished eyes.
“Tokhta!” she exclaimed. “Yulun! My lord is awake!”
Yulun swung around swiftly on the edge of the bed and looked laughingly at Cleves. But when her red lips unclosed she spoke to Tressa: and, “Darling,” she said in English, “I think your dear lord remembers that he saw me on the Bridge of Dreams. And heard the bells of Yian across the mist.”
Tressa said, laughing at her husband: “This is Yulun, flame-slender, very white, loveliest in Yian. On the rose-marble steps of the Yezidee Temple she flung a stemless rose upon Djamouk’s shroud, where he had spread it like a patch of snow in the sun.
“And at the Lake of the Ghosts, where there is freedom to love, for those who desire love, came Yaddin, Tougtchi to Djamouk the Fox, in search of love—and Yulun, flame-slim, and flower-white.... Tell my dear lord, Yulun!”
Yulun laughed at Cleves out of her dark eyes that slanted charmingly at the corners.
“Kai!” she cried softly, clapping her palms. “I took his roses and tore them with my hands till their petals rained on him and their golden hearts were a powdery cloud floating across the water.
“I said: ‘Even the damned do not mate with demons, my Tougtchi! So go to the devil, my Banneret, and may Erlik seize you!’”
Cleves, his ears ringing with the sweet confusion of their girlish laughter, rose from his pillow, supporting himself on one arm.
“You are Yulun. You are alive and real——” He looked at Tressa: “She is real, isn’t she?” And, to Yulun: “Where do you come from?”
The girl replied seriously: “I come from Yian.” She turned to Tressa with a dazzling smile: “Thou knowest, my heart’s gold, how it was I came. Tell thy dear lord in thine own way, so that it shall be simple for his understanding.... And now—because my visit is ending—I think thy dear lord should sleep. Bid him sleep, my heart’s gold!”
At that calm suggestion Cleves sat upright on the bed,—or attempted to. But sank back gently on his pillow and met there a dark, delicious rush of drowsiness.
He made an effort—or tried to: the smooth, sweet tide of sleep swept over him to the eyelids, leaving him still and breathing evenly on his pillow.
The two girls leaned over and looked down at him.
“Thy dear lord,” murmured Yulun. “Does he love thee, rose-bud of Yian?”
“No,” said Tressa, under her breath.
“Does he know thou art damned, heart of gold?”
“He says no soul is ever really harmed,” whispered Tressa.
“Kai! Has he never heard of the Slayer of Souls?” exclaimed Yulun incredulously.
“My lord maintains that neither the Assassin of Khorassan nor the Sheiks-el-Djebel of the Eight Towers, nor their dark prince Erlik, can have power over God to slay the human soul.”
“Tokhta, Rose of Yian! Our souls were slain there in the Yezidee temple.”
Tressa looked down at Cleves:
“My dear lord says no,” she said under her breath.
“And—Sanang?”
Tressa paled: “His mind and mine did battle. I tore my heart from his grasp. I have laid it, bleeding, at my dear lord’s feet. Let God judge between us, Yulun.”
“There was a day,” whispered Yulun, “when Prince Sanang went to the Lake of the Ghosts.”
Tressa, very pallid, looked down at her sleeping husband. She said:
“Prince Sanang came to the Lake of the Ghosts. The snow of the cherry-trees covered the young world.
“The water was clear as sunlight; and the lake was afire with scarlet carp.... Yulun—beloved—the nightingale sang all night long—all night long.... Then I saw Sanang shining, all gold, in the moonlight.... May God remember him in hell!”
“May God remember him.”
“Sanang Noïane. May he be accursed in the Namaz Ga!”
“May he be tormented in Jehaunum!—Sanang, Slayer of Souls.”
Tressa leaned forward on the bed, stretched herself out, and laid her face gently across her husband’s feet, touching them with her lips.
Then she straightened herself and sat up, supported by one hand, and looking silently down at the sleeping man.
“No soul shall die,” she said. “Niaz!”
“Is it written?” asked Yulun, surprised.
“My lord has said it.”
“Allahou Ekber,” murmured Yulun; “thy lord is only a man.”
Tressa said: “Neither the Tekbir nor the fatha, nor the warning of Khidr, nor the Yacaz of the Khagan, nor even the prayers of the Ten Imaums are of any value to me unless my dear lord confirms the truth of them with his own lips.”
“And Erlik? Is he nothing, then?”
“Erlik!” repeated Tressa insolently. “Who is Erlik but the servant of Satan who was stoned?”
Her beautiful, angry lips were suddenly distorted; her blue eyes blazed. Then she spat, her mouth still tremulous with hatred. She said in a voice shaking with rage:
“Yulun, beloved! Listen attentively. I have slain two of the Slayers of the Eight Towers. With God’s help I shall slay them all—all!—Djamouk, Yaddin, Arrak Sou-Sou—all!—every one!—Tiyang Khan, Togrul,—all shall I slay, even to the last one among them!”
“Sanang, also?”
“I leave him to God. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”
Yulun calmly paraphrased the cant phrase of the Assassins: “For it is written that we belong to God and we return to Him. Heart of gold, I shall execute my duty!”
Then Yulun slipped from the edge of the bed to the floor, and stood there looking oddly at Tressa, her eyes rain-bright as though choking back tears—or laughter.
“Heart of a rose,” she said in a suppressed voice, “my time is nearly ended.... So.... I go to the chamber of this strange young man who holds my soul like a pearl afire between his hands.... I think it it written that I shall love him.”
Tressa rose also and placed her lips close to Yulun’s ear: “His name, beloved, is Benton. His room is on this floor. Shall wemake the efforttogether?”
“Yes,” said Yulun. “Lay your body down upon the bed beside your lord who sleeps so deeply.... And now stretch out.... And fold both hands.... And now put off thy body like a silken garment.... So! And leave it there beside thy lord, asleep.”
They stood together for a moment, shining like dewy shapes of tall flowers, whispering and laughing together in the soft glow of the night lamp.
Cleves slept on, unstirring. There was the white and sleeping figure of his wife lying on the bed beside him.
But Tressa and Yulun were already melting away between the wall and the confused rosy radiance of the lamp.
Benton, in night attire and chamber-robe belted in, fresh from his bath and still drying his curly hair on a rough towel, wandered back into his bedroom.
When his short, bright hair was dry, he lighted a cigarette, took the automatic from his dresser, examined the clip, and shoved it under his pillow.
Then he picked up the little leather-bound Testament, seated himself, and opened it. And read tranquilly while his cigarette burned.
When he was ready he turned out the ceiling light, leaving only the night lamp lighted. Then he knelt beside his bed,—a custom surviving the nursery period,—and rested his forehead against his folded hands.
Then, as he prayed, something snapped the thread of prayer as though somebody had spoken aloud in the still room; and, like one who has been suddenly interrupted, he opened his eyes and looked around and upward.
The silent shock of her presence passed presently. He got up from his knees, looking at her all the while.
“You are Yulun,” he said very calmly.
The girl flushed brightly and rested one hand on the foot of the bed.
“Do you remember in the moonlight where you walked along the hedge of white hibiscus and oleander—that night you said good-bye to Tressa in the South?”
“Yes.”
“Twice,” she said, laughing, “you stopped to peer at the blossoms in the moonlight.”
“I thought I saw a face among them.”
“You were not sure whether it was flowers or a girl’s face looking at you from the blossoming hedge of white hibiscus,” said Yulun.
“I know now,” he said in an odd, still voice, unlike his own.
“Yes, it was I,” she murmured. And of a sudden the girl dropped to her knees without a sound and laid her head on the velvet carpet at his feet.
So swiftly, noiselessly was it done that he had not comprehended—had not moved—when she sat upright, resting on her knees, and grasped the collar of her tunic with both gemmed hands.
“Have pity on me, lord of my lost soul!” she cried softly.
Benton stooped in a dazed way to lift the girl; but found himself knee deep in a snowy drift of white hibiscus blossoms—touched nothing but silken petals—waded in them as he stepped forward. And saw her standing before him still grasping the collar of her golden tunic.
A great white drift of bloom lay almost waist deep between them; the fragrance of oleander, too, was heavy in the room.
“There are years of life before the flaming gates of Jehaunum open. And I am very young,” said Yulun wistfully.
Somebody else laughed in the room. Turning his head, he saw Tressa standing by the empty fireplace.
“What you see and hear need not disturb you,” she said, looking at Benton out of brilliant eyes. “There is no god but God; and His prophet has been called by many names.” And to Yulun: “Have I not told you that nothing can harm our souls?”
Yulun’s expression altered and she turned to Benton: “Say it to me!” she pleaded.
As in a dream he heard his own words: “Nothing can ever really harm the soul.”
Yulun’s hands fell from her tunic collar. Very slowly she lifted her head, looking at him out of lovely, proud young eyes.
She said, evenly, her still gaze on him: “I am Yulun of the Temple. My heart is like a blazing pearl which you hold between your hands. May the four Blessed Companions witness the truth of what I say.”
Then a delicate veil of colour wrapped her white skin from throat to temple; she looked at Benton with sudden and exquisite distress, frightened and ashamed at his silence.
In the intense stillness Benton moved toward her. Into his outstretched hands her two hands fell; but, bending above them, his lips touched only two white hibiscus flowers that lay fresh and dewy in his palms.
Bewildered, he straightened up; and saw the girl standing by the mantel beside Tressa, who had caught her by the left hand.
“Tokhta! Look out!” she said distinctly.
Suddenly he saw two men in the room, close to him—their broad faces, slanting eyes, and sparse beards thrust almost against his shoulder.
“Djamouk! Yaddin-ed-Din!” cried Tressa in a terrible voice. But quick as a flash Yulun tore a white sheet from the bed, flung it on the floor, and, whipping a tiny, jewelled knife from her sleeve, threw it glittering upon the sheet at the feet of the two men.
“One shroud for two souls!” she said breathlessly, “—and a knife like that to sever them from their bodies!”
The two men sprang backward as the sheet touched their feet, and now they stood there as though confounded.
“Djamouk, Kahn of the Fifth Tower!” cried Tressa in a clear voice, “you have put off your body like a threadbare cloak, and your form that stands there is only your mind! And it is only the evil will of Yaddin in the shape of his body that confronts us in this room of a man you have doomed!”
Yulun, intent as a young leopardess on her prey, moved soundlessly toward Yaddin.
“Tougtchi!” she said coldly, “you did murder this day, my Banneret, and the Toug of Djamouk has been greased. Now look out for yourself!”
“Don’t stir!” came Tressa’s warning voice, as Benton snatched his pistol from the pillow. “Don’t fire! Those men have no real substance! For God’s sake don’t fire! I tell you they have no bodies!”
Suddenly something—some force—flung Benton on the bed. The two men did not seem to touch him at all, but he lay there struggling, crushed, held by something that was strangling him.
Through his swimming eyes he saw Yaddin trying to drive a long nail into his skull with a hammer,—felt the piercing agony of the first crashing blow,—struggled upright, drenched in blood, his ears ringing with the screaming of Yaddin.
Then, there in the little rococo bedroom of the Ritz-Carlton, began a strange and horrible struggle—the more dreadful because the struggle was not physical and the combatants never touched each other—scarcely moved at all.
Yaddin, still screaming, confronted Yulun. The girl’s eyes were ablaze, her lips parted with the violence of her breathing. And Yaddin writhed and screamed under the terrible concentration of her gaze, his inferior but ferocious mind locked with her mind in deadly battle.
The girl said slowly, showing a glimmer of white teeth: “Your will to do evil to my young lord is breaking, Yaddin-ed-Din.... I am breaking it. The nail and hammer were but symbols. It was your brain that brooded murder—that willed he should die as though shattered by lightning when that blood-vessel burst in his brain!”
“Sorceress!” shrieked Yaddin, “what are you doing to my heart, where my body lies asleep in a berth on the Montreal Express!”
“Your heart is weak, Yaddin. Soon the valves shall fail. A negro porter shall discover you dead in your berth, my Banneret!”
The man’s swarthy face became livid with the terrific mental battle.
“Let me go back to my body!” he panted. “What are you doing to me that I can not go back? I will go back! I wish it!—I——”
“Let us go back and rejoin our bodies!” cried Djamouk in an agonised voice. “There are teeth in my throat, deep in my throat, biting and tearing out the cords.”
“Cancer,” said Tressa calmly. “Your body shall die of it while your soul stumbles on through darkness.”
“My Tougtchi!” shouted Djamouk, “I hear my soul bidding my body farewell! I must go before my mind expires in the terrible gaze of this young sorceress!”
He turned, drifted like something misty to the solid wall.
“My soul be ransom for yours!” cried Yulun to Tressa. “Bar that man’s path to life!”
Tressa flung out her right hand and, with her forefinger, drew a barrier through space, bar above bar.
And Benton, half swooning on his bed, saw a cage of terrible and living light penning in Djamouk, who beat upon the incandescent bars and grasped them and clawed his way about, squealing like a tortured rat in a red-hot cage.
Through the deafening tumult Yulun’s voice cut like a sword:
“Their bodies are dying, Heart of a Rose!... Listen! I hear their souls bidding their minds farewell!”
And, after a dreadful silence: “The train speeding north carries two dead men! God is God. Niaz!”
The bars of living fire faded. Two cinder-like and shapeless shadows floated and eddied like whitened ashes stirred by a wind on the hearth; then drifted through the lamp-light, fading, dissolving, lost gradually in thin air.
Tressa, leaning back against the mantel, covered her face with both hands.
Yulun crept to the bed where Benton lay, breathing evenly in deepest sleep.
With the sheer sleeve of her tunic she wiped the blood from his face. And, at her touch, the wound in the temple closed and the short, bright hair dried and curled over a forehead as clean and fresh as a boy’s.
Then Yulun laid her lips against his, rested so a moment.
“Seek me, dear lord,” she whispered. “Or send me a sign and I shall come.”
And, after a pause, she said, her lips scarcely stirring: “Love me. My heart is a flaming pearl burning between your hands.”
Then she lifted her head.
But Tressa had rejoined her body, where it lay asleep beside her deeply sleeping husband.
So Yulun stood a moment, her eyes remote. Then, after a while, the little rococo bedroom in the Ritz-Carlton was empty save for a young man asleep on the bed, holding in his clenched hand a white hibiscus blossom.