The A. Merritt Megapack

by Abraham Merritt

  Still the woman leaned over him, smiling, tender, her eyes brooding upon his.

  “Let be!” giggled the king. She lifted the thing of torment from the soldier’s breast; bent to her veils and threw them over her. The slaves unbound the captain; dressed his shaking body. Sobbing, he staggered back, sank on knees at the black priest’s side.

  “I am displeased,” said the king, merrily. “Yet you did your duty. Therefore—live for a while, since that is your desire. I am just.”

  “Just is our lord,” echoed the chamber. “You—” he pointed to the archer who had slain cup maiden and a fellow bowman—”I am much pleased with you. You shall have your reward. Come to my right hand death!”

  Slowly at first the archer stepped forward. Faster he moved as the dull eyes of the dwarf met his and clung to them. Faster and faster—he raced up the steps, hurling the archers aside and leaped upon the slender sword!

  “I am generous,” said the king.

  “Our lord is generous,” intoned the Chinese.

  “Generous!” whispered the bowmen.

  “I am thirsty,” laughed the king. He drank deep from left hand and right. His head nodded; he swayed a bit; quite drunkenly.

  “My command!” he opened and closed one twinkling eye after the other. “Hear me, Klaneth! I am sleepy. I will sleep. When I was awaken—bring this man who knows Maldronah to me again. Let no harm come to him before then. It is my command. Also he shall have a guard of bowmen. Take him away. Keep him safe. It is my command!”

  He reached for his cup. It dropped from his lax hand.

  “By my Deaths!” he whimpered. “What shame that casks can hold so much and man so little!”

  He sank upon the divan.

  The Lord of the Two Deaths snored.

  “Our lord sleeps!” chanted the Chinese, softly.

  “He sleeps!” whispered the bowmen and cup maidens.

  The Chinese arose, bent over the king. He raised him on his shoulders like a child. The Two Deaths followed him. The two and ten archers upon the lowest step turned, marched up and circled the four. The four and twenty turned, marched and circled them. The bowmen beside the curved wall swung round and six abreast marched up the steps. The living frieze of scarlet and silver swung six by six out from their walls and followed them.

  The double ring stepped forward, passed through the curtains at the rear. After them strode the bowmen.

  Six fell out of the ranks, ranged themselves beside Kenton.

  The cup maidens picked up ewers and bowls. They tripped through the curtains.

  One of the six bowmen pointed to the lower floor. Kenton walked down the steps.

  Black priest on one side of him, white-faced captain on the other, three archers marching before them, three after them, he passed out of the judgment chamber of the king.

  CHAPTER 20

  Behind the Wall

  They led Kenton to a narrow room in whose high walls were slitted windows. Its heavy door was solid bronze. Around its sides ran stone benches. In its center was another bench. The bowmen sat him on it, tied his ankles with leathern thongs, threw cloaks on its top and pressed him down upon them. They seated themselves two by two on three sides of the room, eyes fixed on black priest and captain, now ready.

  The captain tapped the black priest on the shoulder.

  “My reward?” he asked. “When do I get it?”

  “When the slave is in my hands and not before,” answered Klaneth, savagely. “If you had been—wiser, you would have had it by now.”

  “Much good it would be doing me, with an arrow through my heart or—” he shuddered—“wailing even now at the feet of the king’s left hand death!”

  The black priest looked at Kenton evilly; bent over him. “Put no hope in the king’s favor,” he muttered. “It was his drunkenness that was speaking. When he awakens he will have forgotten. He will give you to me without question. No hope there!”

  “No?” sneered Kenton, meeting the malignant eyes steadily. “Yet twice have I beaten you—you black swine.”

  “But not a third time,” spat Klaneth. “And when the king awakens I will have not only you but that temple drab you love! Ho!” rumbled the black priest as Kenton winced, “that touches you, does it? Yes, I will have you both. And together you shall die—slowly, ah, so slowly, watching each other’s agonies. Side by side—side by side until slowly, slowly, my torturers have destroyed the last of your bodies. Nay, the last of your souls! Never before has man or woman died as you two shall!”

  “You cannot harm Sharane,” answered Kenton. “Carrion eater whose filthy mouth drips lies! She is Bel’s priestess and safe from you.”

  “Ho! You know that do you?” grunted Klaneth; then bent, whispering close to Kenton’s ear so softly that no one but him could hear. “Listen—here then is a sweet thought to carry you while I am away. Only while the priestess is faithful to the god is she beyond my reach. Now listen—listen—before the king awakes your Sharane shall have taken another lover! Yea! Your love shall lie in the arms of an earthly lover! And he will not be—you!”

  Kenton writhed, striving to break his bonds. “Sweet Sharane!” whispered Klaneth leering. “Holy Vase of Joy! And mine now to break as I will—while the King sleeps!”

  He stepped back to the soldier who had taken Kenton. “Come,” he said.

  “Not I,” answered the soldier, hastily. “By the gods, I prefer this company. Also if I lose sight of this man—I might forever lose sight of that reward you owe me for him.”

  “Give me his sword,” ordered Klaneth, reaching toward the blade of Nabu which the officer had retained.

  “The sword goes with the man,” answered the captain, setting it behind him; he looked at the archers.

  “That is true,” the bowmen nodded to each other. “Priest, you cannot have the sword.”

  Klaneth snarled; his hands flew out. Six bows bent, six arrows pointed at his heart. Without word, the black priest strode out of the cell. An archer arose, dropped into place a bar, sealing the door. A silence fell. The officer brooded; now and then he shivered as though cold, and Kenton knew he was thinking of that Death who with smiling, tender eyes had pressed teeth of torture in his breast. The six bowmen watched him unwinkingly.

  And at last Kenton closed his own eyes—fighting to keep back the terror of Klaneth’s last threat against his beloved; fighting against despair.

  What plot had the black priest set going against her, what trap had he laid, to make him so sure that so soon he would have her in his hands—to break! And where were Gigi and Sigurd and Zubran? Did they know how he had been taken? A great loneliness swept over him.

  How long his eyes were closed, or whether he had slept—he never could tell. But he heard as though from infinite distances away a still, passionless voice.

  “Arise!” it bade him.

  He opened his lids; lifted his head. A priest stood beside him, a priest whose long blue robes covered him from head to foot. Nothing could he see of the priest’s face.

  He knew that his arms and ankles were free. He sat up. Ropes and thongs lay on the floor. On the stone benches the bowmen leaned one against the other asleep. The officer was asleep.

  The priest pointed to his sword, the sword of Nabu lying across the sleeping soldier’s knees. Kenton took it. The priest pointed to the bar that held the door. Kenton lifted it and swung the door open. The blue priest glided through the doorway, Kenton close behind.

  The blue priest drifted along the corridor for a hundred paces or so and then pressed against what, to Kenton’s sight, was a blank wall. A panel opened. Now they stood in a long corridor, dimly lighted. Along it they went in a great curve. It came to Kenton that this hidden passage followed the huge arc of the temple, that it ran behind the temple’s outer wall.

  Now a massive bronze door closed the way. The blue priest seemed only to touch it. Yet it swung open; it closed behind them.

  Kenton stood in a crypt some ten feet square. At one end
was the massive door through which he had come; at the other was a similar one. At his left was a ten-foot slab of smooth, pallid stone.

  The blue priest spoke—if indeed it were he speaking, since the passionless, still voice Kenton heard seemed, like that which had bidden him arise, to come from infinite distance.

  “The mind of the woman you love—sleeps!” it said. “She is a woman walking in dream—moving among dreams that another mind has made for her. Evil creeps upon her. It is not well to let that evil conquer—Yet the issue rests on you—on your wisdom, your strength, your courage. When your wisdom tells you it is the time—open that farther door. Your way lies through it. And remember—her mind sleeps. You must awaken it—before the evil leaps upon her.”

  Something tinkled on the floor. At Kenton’s feet lay a little wedge-shaped key. He stooped to pick it up. As he raised his head he saw the blue priest beside the far door.

  The blue priest seemed but a wisp of wind-drawn smoke that, even as he looked, faded through the bronze and vanished!

  Kenton heard the murmur of many voices, muffled, vague. He slipped from door to door, listening. The voices were not within the passage. They seemed to seep through the slab of pallid smooth stone. He placed an ear against it. The sounds came to him more distinctly, but still he could distinguish no words. The stone must be exceedingly thin here, he thought, that he could hear at all. He saw at his right a little shining lever. He drew it down.

  A three-foot-wide, misty disc of light began to glow within the stone. It seemed to eat through the stone; it flashed out dazzlingly. Where the disc had been was a circular opening, a window. Silhouetted against it were the heads of a woman and two men. Their voices came now as clearly to his ears as though they stood beside him; over them came the wavelike murmur of a multitude. He drew back, fearing to be seen. The little lever snapped back into place. The window faded; with its fading the voices muted. He stared again at the smooth, pale wall.

  Slowly he drew down the lever; once more he watched the apparent burning out of the solid stone; saw the three heads reappear. He had his free hand over the visible wall to the edge of the circle; higher he lifted it, into the disc itself. And ever he touched cold stone. Even that which was to his eyes an opening was to the questing fingers—stone!

  He understood—this was some device of the sorcerers—the priests. A device to give them a peeping place, a listening post, within the crypt. Some knowledge of the properties of light not yet learned by the science of Kenton’s own world, control of a varying vibration that made the rock transparent from within but not from without. Whatever the secret, the stone was made as porous to the aerial waves of sound as to the etheric waves of light.

  Keeping his grip upon the handle, Kenton peered out between the heads and over the shoulders of those so close to and still so unconscious of him.

  CHAPTER 21

  Before the Altar of Bel

  The mists had lifted. They had become dense lurid clouds pressing down almost upon the top of the Zoned Temple. In front of him was a huge court paved with immense octagons of black and white marble. Trooping down upon this court like a forest of faery, halting in a wide semicircle around it, were hosts of slender pillars, elfin shafts all gleaming red and black whose tapering tops were crowned with carven, lace-tipped fronds glistening like gigantic ferns wet with dew of diamonds and sapphires. Upon the black and scarlet columns shone mysterious symbolings in gold and azure, in emerald and vermilion and silver. In halted myriads these pillars reached up toward the sullen, smouldering sky.

  Hardly a hundred feet away was a golden altar, guarded by crouching Kerubs, man-headed, eagle-winged, lion-bodied, carven from some midnight metal. They watched at each corner of the altar with cruel, bearded faces set between paws and as alert as though alive. From the tripod on the altar a single slender crimson flame lifted, lance tipped and motionless.

  In a vast crescent, a dozen yards in the van of the columns stood a double ring of bowmen and spearmen. They held back a multitude; men and women and children pouring out of the ordered grove of pillars and milling against the soldiers like wind-driven leaves against a well. Score upon score of men and women and children plucked from their own times and set down in this timeless world.

  “The new priestess—they say she is very beautiful?” One of the men in front of Kenton had spoken. He was thin, white-faced, a Phrygian cap over his lank hair. The woman was of a bold and blown comeliness, black tressed, black-eyed. The man at her right was an Assyrian, bearded, wolf visaged.

  “She was a princess, they say,” the woman spoke. “They say she was a princess in Babylon.”

  “Princess in Babylon!” echoed the Assyrian, wolf face softening, homesickness in his voice—“Oh, to be back in Babylon!”

  “The Priest of Bel loves her—so they say,” the woman broke the silence.

  “The priestess?” whispered the Phrygian; the woman nodded. “But that is forbidden,” he muttered. “It is—death!” The woman laughed again.

  “Hush!” it was the Assyrian, cautioning.

  “And Narada—the God’s Dancer—loves the Priest of Bel!” the woman went on, unheeding. “And so—as always one must speed to Nergal!”

  “Hush!” whispered the Assyrian.

  There was a rumbling ruffle of drums, the sweet piping of a flute. Kenton sought the sounds. His gaze rested on half a score of temple girls. Five crouched beside little tambours upon whose heads rested their rosy thumbs; two held to red lips pierced reeds; three bent over harps. Within their circle lay what at first seemed to him a mound of shimmering spider web spun all of threads of jet, in which swarms of golden butterflies were snared. The mound quivered, lifted.

  The sable silken strands had meshed a woman, a woman so lovely that for a heartbeat Kenton forgot Sharane. Dark she was, with the velvety darkness of the midsummer night; her eyes were pools of midnight skies in which shone no stars; her hair was mists of tempests snared in nets of silken gold. Sullen indeed was that gold, and in all of her something sullen that menaced the more because of its sweetness.

  “There is a woman!” the bold eyes turned to the Assyrian. “She’ll have what she wants—my bed on it!”

  There came a voice from beside her, wistful, dreamy, worshipping:

  “Ah, yes! But the new priestess—she is no woman! She is Ishtar!”

  Kenton craned his neck, looking for the speaker. He saw a youth, hardly more than nineteen, saffron-robed and slight. His eyes and face were those of a beautiful dreaming child.

  “He is half mad,” the dark woman whispered to the Assyrian. “Ever since the new priestess came, he haunts this place.”

  “We are going to have a storm. The sky is like a bowl of brass,” muttered the Phrygian. “The air is frightened.”

  The Assyrian answered:

  “They say Bel comes to his house in the storm. Perhaps the priestess will not be alone tonight.”

  The woman laughed, slyly. Kenton felt desire to take her throat in his hands. There came a low clashing of thunder.

  “Perhaps that is he, rising,” said the woman, demurely.

  There was a throbbing of the harp-strings, a complaining from the tambours. A dancing girl sang softly:

  “Born was Nala for delight, Never danced there feet so white; Every heart on which she trod. Dying owned her heel its god; Loose her girdle day or night— Born was Nala for delight!”

  The brooding eyes of Narada flashed angrily. “Be quiet!” Kenton heard her whisper. There was a ripple of laughter among the girls; the two with the pipes trilled them softly; the drums murmured. But she who had sung sat silent over her harp with downcast eyes.

  The Phrygian asked: “Is this priestess then really so beautiful?”

  The Assyrian said: “I do not know. No man has ever seen her unveiled.” The youth whispered:

  “When she walks I tremble! I tremble like the little blue lake of the temple when the breeze walks on it! Only my eyes live, and something grips my throat.” />
  “Peace!” a brown-eyed girl with kindly face and babe in arms spoke. “Not so loud—or it will be a bow string.”

  “She is no woman! She is Ishtar! Ishtar!” cried the youth.

  The soldiers nearby turned. Through them strode a grizzled officer, short sword in hand. Before his approach the others drew back; only the youth stood motionless. Right and left the sword carrier peered beneath bushy brows. Ere he could fix gaze on the youth a man in sailor’s cap and tunic of mail had walked between the two, gripped the youth’s wrist, held him hidden behind him. Kenton caught a glimpse of agate eyes, black beard—-It was Zubran!

  Zubran! But would he pass on? Could Kenton make him hear if he called? If his body could not be seen from without, could his voice penetrate the stone?

  The sword bearer scanned the silent group, uncertainly. The Persian saluted him gravely.

  “Silence here!” grunted the officer at last, and passed back among his men.

  The Persian grinned; pushed the youth from him; stared at the dark woman with eyes bolder than her own. He jostled the Phrygian from his place; laid a hand upon the woman’s arm.

  “I was listening,” he said. “Who is this priestess? I am newly come to this land and know nothing of its customs. Yet by Ormuzd!” he swore and dropped his arm around the woman’s shoulders. “It was worth the journey to meet you! Who is this priestess that you say is so beautiful?”

  “She is the keeper of Bel’s Bower,” the woman nestled close to him.

  “But what does she there?” asked Zubran. “Now if it were—you—I could understand without asking. And why does she come here?”

  “The priestess lives in Bel’s Bower upon the top of the temple,” the Assyrian spoke. “She comes here to worship at his altar. When her worship is done she returns.”

  “For such beauty as you say is hers,” remarked Zubran, “her world seems small indeed. Why, if she is so beautiful, is she content to dwell in so small a world?”