The Slayer of Souls

"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 is you, 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!"