by Talbot Mundy
Compared to the man whom Jeff fought in the yard of the minaret he was as two to one. Even his physical strength seemed twice that of the former. In poise, calm, majesty of brow, and magnetism he more resembled one of those temple images that sit in the gloom and stare through eyes of amethyst, than any ordinary being. He looked aloof from human standards; yet — the hunger for human power burned in him, and could be felt.
His coppery skin shone, well groomed, although hardly clothed at all, and his muscles were like bronze castings. His smile was thick-lipped, but as static as the rest of him, as if it had been cast in place. On his forehead, under an orange-yellow turban, was the crimson caste-mark of the cruel goddess whom he chose to serve, but he wore no other ornament, nor any clothes except the yellow cloth twisted scantly on his loins. His feet were bare, and he sat with their soles turned upward in the attitude impossible, or at best a torture, to the western races.
“Bong!”
The word, if it was one, sounded like a hammer on bell-metal, producing overtones that hummed away into infinity. The eight who were with him hurried like supers betrayed by a rising curtain to straighten themselves into rigid attitudes on either hand — all except one, the woman. Jeremy knew her again, although the snakes and skulls were missing. Alone of all of them she sat irregular — apart from the exact arc of a circle that the others kept — like a picture of Herodias, lacking John Baptist’s head just yet a while. Lovely, if you love that kind of thing. Rich, ripe, full-lipped, with eyes of a challenging candor that had looked with curiosity and some amusement — but no pity — into more and worse evil than the rest of the world suspects there is. Sex-insolence robed in a leopard-skin.
She had jewels on most of her fingers, and on one toe what looked like a wedding-ring set with diamonds; but her nostril had not been pierced for the jeweled stud so much affected by Hindu women, and her earrings were not the usual drooping things but emeralds cut table-shape and set so that even the claws of the setting were invisible.
The others were seven men in yellow smocks, not remarkably different from those who had conducted the offensive hitherto, but possibly a mite more sure of themselves and a shade less anxious, consequently, to create impressions. Seven men so much alike in motive and self-discipline that a kind of graceless unity had settled on them, making of men of varying height and weight one pattern molded by unanimous desire.
“Who are these people? Where am I?” Cyprian demanded, sitting up.
Instead of answering, the bronze man in the midst pointed a finger at Jeremy and spoke in English: “You and he, pick up that bed and set it down between you!”
By “he” he meant Ramsden. By giving a command that would probably not be disobeyed he intended to impose his will. The most imperial control must have beginning, and the hypnotist does not live — nor ever did — who can exert authority without by some means gaining first the victim’s own consent.
Jeremy was done with being hypnotized.
“You go to hell!” he answered civilly in English.
“Ditto!”
Ramsden reenforced him with a gruff voice and a gesture like a gladiator’s. He feared poison-gas much more than any mental trickery.
“Come over here, Pop!” Jeremy said to Cyprian. “Try to walk.”
Cyprian made the attempt, getting his feet to the floor and then thrusting himself up with both hands. He did not do badly. Jeff caught him before he tripped and fell, and set him down like a child between himself and Jeremy, where the old man, leaning against Jeff’s shoulder, shut his eyes after one hard look at the nine who faced him. He was conscious, for his lips were moving. He might have been memorizing a formula.
“Can you do this?” said Jeremy, smiling impudently into the face of the enemy’s spokesman.
He avoided the woman’s eyes. She had a long silk handkerchief that she plied between her fingers restlessly. He snatched it without looking at her, and went through the motions of the Thug-assassin, tossing the handkerchief at last into the lap of the immense man in the midst. It was the essence of disrespect — irreverence.
“Beat that if you can!”
The woman giggled. He who should have been respected spoke in an unknown language.
“Bong! “ or so it sounded, and about eight other syllables. It was as startling as the gong that checks ten thousand horsepower in mid- turn.
Four of the nine got up and passed behind the pillars to their rear, returning in a minute with a wooden stretcher and a great weight on it. The woman giggled again.
“Look!” said the man in the midst, again in English.
But Jeremy had looked. His cue was disobedience. It did not interest him to con again the features of the man whom Jeff had fought and killed — whom he had made to sit up and seem to speak in the ox- cart.
“I get you!” he answered, laughing. “Who killed Cock-Robin? That it? Want to bet? I’ll bet the man who took his number down can do the same to you! Come! Put your money up!”
Disobedience increasing into disrespect, was rising to Jeremy’s head like wine. His voice and the little curt laugh betrayed it. Cyprian’s old, lashless eyes opened a trifle — hardly wider than walnuts at a winter’s end — and his lips ceased moving. When he spoke at last he had pulled himself together and there was the strength in his voice that is the accumulation of half a century’s conceded deference. He spoke as one having authority:
“Peace in the presence of death!”
“I’m not joking, Pop,” said Jeremy; but the fumes were no longer rising. “Rammy can lick that blighter!”
“Peace!” commanded Cyprian.
He was still leaning against Ramsden’s shoulder. Jeff’s right arm was around his waist as if it had been a girl’s. Depending on Jeff’s grip the old man leaned forward — raised one finger — pointed at the bronze face opposite — opened his eyes wide at last. He seemed to be drawing deep on his reserves of strength.
“Peace! Do you hear me!” He was speaking English just as Jeremy had done. “As long as we are unaccounted for—”
It was the bronze man’s turn to laugh. He and the woman rang a carillon like bells in tune. The other seven smiled, as if the abyss in which their thoughts dwelt swallowed any sound they might have made.
“My brother!” said the bronze man simply, making a gesture toward the bier. The two words explained the whole of his attitude, although the word did not necessarily imply blood-relationship.
“Watch out you don’t join him in Hell!” sneered Jeremy, bridling, repeating his curt, dry laugh — the danger signal.
So Cyprian reentered the lists, raising his head off Ramsden’s shoulder.
“You do not dare!” he said, pointing a lean forefinger. And again he spoke English. “You have no occult power! You can harm no men who are awake. You are a weak thing — a poor thing — helpless — human flesh and blood! You are as helpless in the face of honesty as that!”
He pointed at the corpse. Wise, wise old Cyprian! Nine out of any ten religionists would have voiced some tenet of their creed, and so have given the enemy an opening into which to thrust the barbed darts of religious rivalry.
“You will never get my library,” he went on. “Trustees have orders what to do with it. And if you harm me, can you pick the knowledge from my old dead brains?”
The woman laughed aloud. The man in bronze smiled triumphantly. Jeff Ramsden’s arm closed around Cyprian, and Jeremy leaned forward, as if to interpose his own body between the old man and the shock that was trembling on cruel lips to be launched. News of the burning of his books was likelier than not to unhinge Cyprian. It was a bomb reserved to batter his defenses. Jeff forestalled it — drew the fuse.
“Your books are up in smoke,” he said. “Rather than let them carry even one away we—”
No need to finish the friendly lie. Cyprian understood that friends had been forehanded with the torch.
“All?” he demanded.
“Every last one,” said Jeff.
&nbs
p; “You know that?”
“Yes.”
Cyprian stiffened himself, almost as if ten years were taken off his age.
“I am content. I have deserved it. It was pride that prevented me from burning them long ago. You are certain they are all gone?”
Then the old man bowed his head, and the enemy understood there was no more chance in that direction. There is little you can do in that way with a man who owns nothing and asks no more favors of the world. But you may threaten. He tried that next: “At your age death without water—”
“Is easier than for you!” said Cyprian.
“At the mercy of ants—”
“God’s creatures!” answered Cyprian. “I am old. I can face my end.”
Or you may tempt — perhaps.
“We know much. You know a little. Add yours to ours, and we can track the Nine down.”
Cyprian bent his head again, this time to hide a smile; but the woman saw it. She made some kind of signal to the man. Cyprian was elated. The double confession couched in ten words, that these, too, were hunting the Nine and did not even know their whereabouts, was like a breath of incense.
The man with the bronze smile read the woman’s signal and appeared to be digesting it. He said nothing for about a minute. Then:
“We have a man who knows a member of the Nine by sight.”
Jeff and Jeremy looked up, and down again, not daring to complete the exchange of glances. Even so, it was enough. The nine who watched all recognized the movement and interpreted it. The woman held her hands palm- downward about midway from her bosom to the floor and moved them outward in a motion that suggested leveling the earth for new erections.
“Your friends hold him prisoner!”
“You deduce that?” Cyprian asked, looking up with a swift bird-movement of the head.
Ignorant himself of whether it was trite or not, he was afraid that Jeff or Jeremy might blurt out an admission. He knew better than to give away one scrap of information. Tell the enemy nothing. Concede nothing. Yield nothing. That was next to being his religion. That was why he bought up books on occultism and the secret sciences. It was part and parcel of him.
Jeff detected Cyprian’s call for discretion sooner than Jeremy did. His slower wit was working at full power, plugging as it were against obscurity; whereas Jeremy, knowing himself the quicker, was leaping from one possibility to another. Jeremy, if left to it, would have tried to strike a bargain, leaving mother-wit to solve it when the time for double-crossing came. Jeff would have used force. What his mind was pondering, deliberately rather than obtusely, was: Why had he not been searched? The comfortable weights disposed beneath the ragged costume he was wearing were enough proof of the fact. Did these men, knowing not a shot had been fired in the long night’s hurly-burly, simply deduce from that a lack of firearms? Were they so careless?
Jeff doubted it. There was another reason. Figuring the probabilities he guessed that only two or three had captured him and Jeremy with the aid of gas, and had been glad enough to get them under lock and key until the others came. But they would hardly dare use gas again with their own unprotected persons in the crypt. Not very swiftly, but as surely as he sets his feet when walking, Jeff reviewed the argument, and then, as if the wound beneath a bandage hurt him, shifted his position.
Jeremy was on another track. He wanted to know what they knew, unlike Jeff, who did not care and only wanted to be out of it. A jest died still-born on Jeremy’s lips. It would have suited his sense of fitness to make that dead man speak again, and Cyprian, aware of indiscretion in the air, shook nervously.
But he with the bronze smile realized that nothing he had said or done had brought the prisoners nearer to the right subjective state in which he could impose his will on them. And he lost patience. Time seemed to be an element in his immediate affairs, and the woman kept making signals that impressed the others, if not him. Suddenly he moved — about six inches — leaning forward and thrusting his hands in front of him as if they were serpents’ heads.
“You — three — may — not — live — longer — than — you — can — endure — Her — agonies. Unless — you — choose — to — be — of — use!” he said.
Each word was separate — almost as if etched — spoken in English with an accent learned at one or other of the universities. And at the word “Her” his eyes met the woman’s, as if she were the expert in applied torment.
“The younger shall be hurt first. The older shall look on,” he said as if it were an afterthought.
“How be of use?” asked Jeremy.
“Like this!” said Jeff; and he was on his feet before the words had shaped themselves.
He could be quick when thought’s slow processes had ground out a conclusion. Loosing bold of Cyprian he leaped at the woman and had thrown her into Jeremy’s lap before Cyprian’s shoulders hit the floor.
“Hang on to her!” he yelled.
And then, with every sinew aching from the former fight, he launched himself straight at the man in the middle, landing on his neck before a man could move to his assistance. One tenth of a second then would have been plenty for the whole of Jeff’s plan to go up in smoke like Cyprian’s library, but he was squandering no tenths. With a hand on the back of the neck of his enemy he hurled him forehead-forward to the stone floor — stunned him. And as the seven sprang to assist their chief Jeff dragged him out from under them, cuffing two into unconsciousness and knocking another into the discard somewhere behind the pillars. Then at last he drew his automatic pistol, and throwing his back against a pillar stood at bay, with a foot on the bronze man’s stomach and the pistol muzzle threatening him.
“Are you heeled?” he called to Jeremy.
But Jeremy had his hands too full for any such issue as a gun. He had the daughter of the Ohms to wrestle with. A trapped leopard with the smell of the forest in her lungs would have been a toy compared to her. No python ever wrapped and unwrapped coiling energy so fast, nor struck so swiftly. She was strength and hate and savagery all compressed into the heart of charged springs, and a knife in each hand made her no whit easier to overcome. What was worse, Jeff had only knocked out three of the seven. Four were on their feet and fancy-free — it might be they were doubly dangerous for lack of the control the man in their midst had exercised before Jeff laid him out.
Jeremy with his knee in the woman’s stomach twisted one wrist until she dropped that knife with a scream of anger. But her right wrist was stronger than his left, and her stomach muscles could resist his knee. She slipped out from under him and kicked the fallen knife. One of the seven pounced on it, and Jeff shot him dead before he could raise his hand to drive the blade into Jeremy.
But that was not Jeff’s plan. Noise, that might bring help was likelier to bring more enemies. Gas was what he feared. As long as there were living followers of Kali in the crypt it was hardly likely their friends would turn the gas on. He wished the giant under his foot would show signs of life. If Jeremy should kill the woman and he should shoot all the others there would probably be a greater risk of gas than ever.
But Destiny was overturning. They were down inside the works. Like a pair of interwoven springs released Jeremy and the woman fought in spasms, she using teeth and he his fists at last — for how else should a man release his biceps from unyielding jaws? The underlings in, yellow lurked behind pillars for their opportunity, as likely as not possessed of firearms and afraid to use them yet lest Jeff should finish off their chief. The woman, for a second mastering Jeremy, writhed close to a pillar. Jeff decided he must shoot her — just as two men moved — the man under his foot and Cyprian. Both moved at once — spoke — used the same word —
“Cease!”
Then: “Don’t shoot again. Put up your weapon,” ordered Cyprian.
He under Jeff’s foot shouted something at the woman in a tongue that not even Cyprian understood, and she, with a last dynamic dig with her knife at Jeremy’s right eye, laughed and relaxed, so
that Jeremy scattered his strength and she slipped away from him before he could recover. She had the knife poised for throwing, with the haft against the heel of her hand and her elbow well back, when Jeff coughed and her eye looked down the barrel of his automatic. Jeremy laughed and took the knife and thanked her for it, in return for which she spat so nearly straight into his mouth that he could neither eat nor drink for days without remembering it.
And all that while the light — the pale, cool, unexplained light that had started in a dozen places and appeared to join itself together into one — had continued steadily, casting no shadow in their midst but leaving all the outer portions of the crypt in darkness.
It began to grow dim; not at once, but gradually, as it once came, resolving into separate mysteries, each withdrawing, and each growing less. Jeremy went for the woman again, but she laughed, escaping his clutches easily, mocking him and as the light waned focussing her thought on Cyprian. It was as obvious as the increasing dimness that when darkness came Cyprian was due for her attentions.
So Jeff Ramsden, feeling that his plan was no good after all — but game until the gods should hoist his number — bent his knee rather than his shoulders and seized the man beneath him by the wrist.
“Come close, you two! Quick!”