The Slayer of Souls
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"Look upon me, my lord!"
There was a golden light in his eyes which seemed to stiffen the muscles and confuse his vision. He heard her voice again as though very far away:
"It is written that we shall love, my lord – thou and I – this night – this night. Listen attentively. I am thy slave. My lips shall touch thy feet. Look upon me, my lord!"
There was a dazzling blindness in his eyes and in his brain. He swayed a little still striving to fix her with his failing gaze. His pistol hand slipped sideways from his knee, fell limply, and the weapon dropped to the thick carpet. He could still see the glimmering golden shape of her, still hear her distant voice:
"It is written that we belong to God… Tokhta!.."
Over his knees was settling a snow-white sheet; on it, in his lap, lay a naked knife. There was not a sound in the room save the rushing and splashing of the scarlet fish in its crystal bowl.
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 Baroulass! I am mistress to the Slayer of Souls! I am a golden plaything to Sanang Noïane, 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 Baroulass 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 Baroulass 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. Pronounce 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 Baroulass 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 Baroulass. 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 God," 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:
"God 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 Noïane; 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 God, 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.
So, – their honeymoon scarce begun, Benton and Yulun came from Boston in answer to Recklow's emergency call.
And all the way across from San Francisco came volunteer agent XLY-371, otherwise Alek Selden, bringing with him a girl named Sansa whom he had gone to the coast to meet, and whom he had immediately married after she had landed from the Japanese steamer Nan-yang Maru. Which, also, was remarkable, because, although they recognised each other instantly, and their hands and lips clung as they met, neither had ever before beheld the living body of the other.
The third man who came to New York at Recklow's summons was volunteer agent 53-6-26, otherwise Victor Cleves.
His young wife, suffering from nervous shock after the deaths of Togrul Khan and of the Baroulass girl, Aoula, had been convalescing in a private sanitarium in Westchester.
Until the summons came to her husband from Recklow, she had seen him only for a few moments every day. But the call to duty seemed to have effected a miraculous cure in the slender, blue-eyed girl who had lain all day long, day after day, in her still, sunny room scarcely unclosing her eyes at all save only when her husband was permitted to enter for the few minutes allowed them every day.
The physician had just left, after admitting that Mrs. Cleves seemed to be well enough to travel if she insisted; and she and her maid had already begun to pack when her husband came into her room.
She looked around over her shoulder, then rose from her knees, flung an armful of clothing into the trunk before which she had been kneeling, and came across the room to him. Then she dismissed her maid from the room. And when the girl had gone:
"I am well, Victor," she said in a low voice. "Why are you troubled?"
"I can't bear to have you drawn into this horrible affair once more."
"Who else is there to discover and overcome Sanang?" she asked calmly.
He remained silent.
So, for a few moments they stood confronting each other there in the still, sunny chamber – husband and wife who had never even exchanged the first kiss – two young creatures more vitally and intimately bound together than any two on earth – yet utterly separated body and soul from each other – two solitary spirits which had never merged; two bodies virginal and inviolate.
Tressa spoke first: "I must go. That was our bargain."
The word made him wince as though it had been a sudden blow. Then his face flushed red.
"Bargain or no bargain," he said, "I don't want you to go because I'm afraid you can not endure another shock like the last one… And every time you have thrown your own mind and body between this Nation and destruction you have nearly died of it."
"And if I die?" she said in a low voice.
What answer she awaited – perhaps hoped for – was not the one he made. He said: "If you die in what you believe to be your line of duty, then it will be I who have killed you."
"That would not be true. It is you who have saved me."
"I have not. I have done nothing except to lead you into danger of death since I first met you. If you mean spiritually, that also is untrue. You have saved yourself – if that indeed were necessary. You have redeemed yourself – if it is true you needed redemption – which I never believed – "
"Oh," she sighed swiftly, "Sanang surprised my soul when it was free of my body – followed my soul into the Wood of the White Moth – caught it there all alone – and – slew it!"
His lips and throat had gone dry as he watched the pallid terror grow in her face.
Presently he recovered his voice: "You call that Yezidee the Slayer of Souls," he said, "but I tell you there is no such creature, no such power!
"I suppose I – I know what you mean – having seen what we call souls dissociated from their physical bodies – but that this Yezidee could do you any spiritual damage I do not for one instant believe. The idea is monstrous, I tell you – "
"I – I fought him – soul battling against soul – " she stammered, breathing faster and irregularly. "I struggled with Sanang there in the Wood of the White Moth. I called on God! I called on my two great dogs, Bars and Alaga! I recited the Fatha with all my strength – fighting convulsively whenever his soul seized mine; I cried out the name of Khidr, begging for wisdom! I called on the Ten Imaums, on Ali the Lion, on the Blessed Companions. Then I tore my spirit out of the grasp of his soul – but there was no escape! – no escape," she wailed. "For on every side I saw the cloud-topped rampart of Gog and Magog, and the woods rang with Erlik's laughter – the dissonant mirth of hell – "
She began to shudder and sway a little, then with an effort she controlled herself in a measure.
"There never has been," she began again with lips that quivered in spite of her – "there never has been one moment in our married lives when my soul dared forget the Wood of the White Moth – dared seek yours… God lives. But so does Erlik. There are angels; but there are as many demons… My soul is ashamed… And very lonely … very lonely … but no fit companion – for yours – "
Her hands dropped listlessly beside her and her chin sank.
"So you believe that Yezidee devil caught your soul when it was wandering somewhere out of your body, and destroyed it," he said.
She did not answer, did not even lift her eyes until he had stepped close to her – closer than he had ever come. Then she looked up at him, but closed her eyes as he swept her into his arms and crushed her face and body against his own.
Now her red lips were on his; now her face and heart and limbs and breast melted into his – her breath, her pulse, her strength flowed into his and became part of their single being and single pulse and breath. And she felt their two souls flame and fuse together, and burn together in one heavenly blaze – felt the swift conflagration mount, overwhelm, and sweep her clean of the last lingering taint; felt her soul, unafraid, clasp her husband's spirit in its white embrace – clung to him, uplifted out of hell, rising into the blinding light of Paradise.
Far – far away she heard her own voice in singing whispers – heard her lips pronounce The Name– "Ata – Ata! Allahou – "
Her blue eyes unclosed; through a mist, in which she saw her husband's face, grew a vast metallic clamour in her ears.
Her husband kissed her, long, silently; then, retaining her hand, he turned and lifted the receiver from the clamouring telephone.
"Yes! Yes, this is 53-6-26. Yes, V-69 is with me… When?.. To-day?.. Very well… Yes, we'll come at once… Yes, we can get a train in a few minutes… All right. Good-bye."
He took his wife into his arms again.
"Dearest of all in the world," he said, "Sanang is cornered in a row of houses near the East River, and Recklow has flung a cordon around the entire block. Good God! I can't take you there!"
Then Tressa smiled, drew his head down, looked into his face till the clear blue splendour of her gaze stilled the tumult in his brain.
"I alone know how to deal with Prince Sanang," she said quietly. "And if John Recklow, or you, or Mr. Benton or Mr. Selden should kill him with your pistols, it would be only his body you slay, not the evil thing that would escape you and return to Erlik."
"Must you do this thing, Tressa?"
"Yes, I must do it."
"But – if our pistols cannot kill this sorcerer, how are you going to deal with him?"
"I know how."
"Have you the strength?"
"Yes – the bodily and the spiritual. Don't you know that I am already part of you?"
"We shall be nearer still," he murmured.
She flushed but met his gaze.
"Yes… We shall be but one being… Utterly… For already our hearts and souls are one. And we shall become of one mind and one body.
"I am no longer afraid of Sanang Noïane!"
"No longer afraid to slay him?" he asked quietly.
A blue light flashed in her eyes and her face grew still and white and terrible.
"Death to the body? That is nothing, my lord!" she said, in a hard, sweet voice. "It is written that we belong to God and that we return to Him. All living things must die, Heart of the World! It is only the death of souls that matters. And it has arrived at a time in the history of mankind, I think, when the Slayer of Souls shall slay no more."
She looked at him, flushed, withdrew her hand and went slowly across the room to the big bay window where potted flowers were in bloom.
From a window-box she took a pinch of dry soil and dropped it into the bosom of her gown.
Then, facing the East, with lowered arms and palms turned outward:
"There is no god but God," she whispered – "the merciful, the long-suffering, the compassionate, the just.
"For it is written that when the heavens are rolled together like a scroll, every soul shall know what it hath wrought.
"And those souls that are dead in Jehannum shall arise from the dead, and shall have their day in court. Nor shall Erlik stay them till all has been said.
"And on that day the soul of a girl that hath been put to death shall ask for what reason it was slain.
"Thus it has been written."
Then Tressa dropped to her knees, touched the carpet with her forehead, straightened her lithe body and, looking over her shoulder, clapped her hands together sharply.
Her maid opened the door. "Hasten with my lord's luggage!" she cried happily; and, still kneeling, lifted her head to her husband and laughed up into his eyes.
"You should call the porter for we are nearly ready. Shall we go to the station in a sleigh? Oh, wonderful!"
She leaped to her feet, extended her hand and caught his.
"Horses for the lord of the Yiort!" she cried, laughingly. "Kosh! Take me out into this new white world that has been born to-day of the ten purities and the ten thousand felicities! It has been made anew for you and me who also have been born this day!"
He scarcely knew this sparkling, laughing girl with her quick grace and her thousand swift little moods and gaieties.
Porters came to take his luggage from his own room; and then her trunk and bags were ready, and were taken away.
The baggage sleigh drove off. Their own jingling sleigh followed; and Tressa, buried in furs, looked out upon a dazzling, unblemished world, lying silvery white under a sky as azure as her eyes.
"Keuke Mongol – Heavenly Azure," he whispered close to her crimsoned cheek, "do you know how I have loved you – always – always?"
"No, I did not know that," she said.
"Nor I, in the beginning. Yet it happened, also, from the beginning when I first saw you."
"That is a delicious thing to be told. Within me a most heavenly glow is spreading… Unglove your hand."
She slipped the glove from her own white fingers and felt for his under the furs.
"Aie," she sighed, "you are more beautiful than Ali; more wonderful than the Flaming Pearl. Out of ice and fire a new world has been made for us."
"Heavenly Azure – my darling!"
"Oh-h," she sighed, "your words are sweeter than the breeze in Yian! I shall be a bride to you such as there never has been since the days of the Blessed Companions – may their names be perfumed and sweet-scented!.. Shall I truly be one with you, my lord?"
"Mind, soul, and body, one being, you and I, little Heavenly Azure."
"Between your two hands you hold me like a burning rose, my lord."
"Your sweetness and fire penetrate my soul."
"We shall burn together then till the sky-carpet be rolled up. Kosh! We shall be one, and on that day I shall not be afraid."
The sleigh came to a clashing, jingling halt; the train plowed into the depot buried in vast clouds of snowy steam.
But when they had taken the places reserved for them, and the train was moving swifter and more swiftly toward New York, fear suddenly overwhelmed Victor Cleves, and his face grew grey with the menacing tumult of his thoughts.
The girl seemed to comprehend him, too, and her own features became still and serious as she leaned forward in her chair.
"It is in God's hands, Heart of the World," she said in a low voice. "We are one, thou and I, – or nearly so. Nothing can harm my soul."
"No… But the danger – to your life – "
"I fear no Yezidee."
"The beast will surely try to kill you. And what can I do? You say my pistol is useless."
"Yes… But I want you near me."
"Do you imagine I'd leave you for a second? Good God," he added in a strangled voice, "isn't there any way I can kill this wild beast? With my naked hands – ?"
"You must leave him to me, Victor."
"And you believe you can slay him? Do you?"
She remained silent for a long while, bent forward in her armchair, and her hands clasped tightly on her knees.
"My husband," she said at last, "what your astronomers have but just begun to suspect is true, and has long, long been known to the Sheiks-el-Djebel.
"For, near to this world we live in, are other worlds – planets that do not reflect light. And there is a dark world called Yrimid, close to the earth – a planet wrapped in darkness – a black star… And upon it Erlik dwells… And it is peopled by demons… And from it comes sickness and evil – "
She moistened her lips; sat for a while gazing vaguely straight before her.
"From this black planet comes all evil upon earth," she resumed in a hushed voice. "For it is very near to the earth. It is not a hundred miles away. All strange phenomena for which our scientists can not account are due to this invisible planet, – all new and sudden pestilences; all convulsions of nature; the newly noticed radio disturbances; the new, so-called inter-planetary signals – all – all have their hidden causes within that black and demon-haunted planet long known to the Yezidees, and by them called Yrimid, or Erlik's World. And – it is to this black planet that I shall send Sanang, Slayer of Souls. I shall tear him from this earth, though he cling to it with every claw; and I shall fling his soul into darkness – out across the gulf – drive his soul forth – hurl it toward Erlik like a swift rocket charred and falling from the sky into endless night.
"So shall I strive to deal with Prince Sanang, Sorcerer of Mount Alamout, the last of the Assassins, Sheik-el-Djebel, and Slayer of Souls… May God remember him in hell."
Already their train was rolling into the great terminal.