Yezidee, Hassani, Boche, Bolshevik – all are the same – all are secretly swarming in the hidden places for the same purpose!"
The girl's blue eyes were aflame, now, and the pistol was lifting slowly in her hand to a deadly level.
"Sanang!" she cried in a terrible voice.
"Sanang!" she cried again in her terrifying young voice – "Toad! Tortoise egg! Spittle of Erlik! May the Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake you! Sheik-el-Djebel! – cowardly Khan whom I laughed at from the temple when it rained yellow snakes on the marble steps when all the gongs in Yian sounded in your frightened ears!"
She waited.
"What! You won't step out? Tokhta!" she exclaimed in a ringing tone, and made a swift motion with her left hand. Apparently out of her empty open palm, like a missile hurled, a thin, blinding beam of light struck the curtains, making them suddenly transparent.
A man stood there.
He came out, moving very slowly as though partly stupefied. He wore evening dress under his overcoat, and had a long knife in his right hand.
Nobody spoke.
"So – I really was to die then, if I came here," said the girl in a wondering way.
Sanang's stealthy gaze rested on her, stole toward Cleves. He moistened his lips with his tongue. "You deliver me to this government agent?" he asked hoarsely.
"I deliver nobody by treachery. You may go, Sanang."
He hesitated, a graceful, faultless, metropolitan figure in top-hat and evening attire. Then, as he started to move, Cleves covered him with his weapon.
"I can't let that man go free!" cried Cleves angrily.
"Very well!" she retorted in a passionate voice – "then take him if you are able! Tokhta! Look out for yourself!"
Something swift as lightning struck the pistol from his grasp, – blinded him, half stunned him, set him reeling in a drenching blaze of light that blotted out all else.
He heard the door slam; he stumbled, caught at the back of a chair while his senses and sight were clearing.
"By heavens!" he whispered with ashen lips, "you – you are a sorceress – or something. What – what, are you doing to me?"
There was no answer. And when his vision cleared a little more he saw her crouched on the floor, her head against the locked door, listening, perhaps – or sobbing – he scarcely understood which until the quiver of her shoulders made it plainer.
When at last Cleves went to her and bent over and touched her she looked up at him out of wet eyes, and her grief-drawn mouth quivered.
"I – I don't know," she sobbed, "if he truly stole away my soul – there – there in the temple dusk of Yian. But he – he stole my heart – for all his wickedness – Sanang, Prince of the Yezidees – and I have been fighting him for it all these years – all these long years – fighting for what he stole in the temple dusk!.. And now – now I have it back – my heart – all broken to pieces – here on the floor behind your – your bolted door."
CHAPTER V
THE ASSASSINS
On the wall hung a map of Mongolia, that indefinite region a million and a half square miles in area, vast sections of which have never been explored.
Turkestan and China border it on the south, and Tibet almost touches it, not quite.
Even in the twelfth century, when the wild Mongols broke loose and nearly overran the world, the Tibet infantry under Genghis, the Tchortcha horsemen drafted out of Black China, and a great cloud of Mongol cavalry under the Prince of the Vanguard commanding half a hundred Hezars, never penetrated that grisly and unknown waste. The "Eight Towers of the Assassins" guarded it – still guard it, possibly.
The vice-regent of Erlik, Prince of Darkness, dwelt within this unknown land. And dwells there still, perhaps.
In front of this wall-map stood Tressa Norne.
Behind her, facing the map, four men were seated – three of them under thirty.
These three were volunteers in the service of the United States Government – men of independent means, of position, who had volunteered for military duty at the outbreak of the great war. However, they had been assigned by the Government to a very different sort of duty no less exciting than service on the fighting line, but far less conspicuous, for they had been drafted into the United States Department of Justice.
The names of these three were Victor Cleves, a professor of ornithology at Harvard University before the war; Alexander Selden, junior partner in the banking firm of Milwyn, Selden, and Co., and James Benton, a New York architect.
The fourth man's name was John Recklow. He might have been over fifty, or under. He was well-built, in a square, athletic way, clear-skinned and ruddy, grey-eyed, quiet in voice and manner. His hair and moustache had turned silvery. He had been employed by the Government for many years. He seemed to be enormously interested in what Miss Norne was saying.
Also he was the only man who interrupted her narrative to ask questions. And his questions revealed a knowledge which was making the girl more sensitive and uneasy every moment.
Finally, when she spoke of the Scarlet Desert, he asked if the Scarlet Lake were there and if the Xin was still supposed to inhabit its vermilion depths. And at that she turned and looked at him, her forefinger still resting on the map.
"Where have you ever heard of the Scarlet Lake and the Xin?" she asked as though frightened.
Recklow said quietly that as a boy he had served under Gordon and Sir Robert.
"If, as a boy, you served under Chinese Gordon, you already know much of what I have told you, Mr. Recklow. Is it not true?" she demanded nervously.
"That makes no difference," he replied with a smile. "It is all very new to these three young gentlemen. And as for myself, I am checking up what you say and comparing it with what I heard many, many years ago when my comrade Barres and I were in Yian."
"Did you really know Sir Robert Hart?"
"Yes."
"Then why do you not explain to these gentlemen?"
"Dear child," he interrupted gently, "what did Chinese Gordon or Sir Robert Hart, or even my comrade Barres, or I myself know about occult Asia in comparison to what you know? – a girl who has actually served the mysteries of Erlik for four amazing years!"
She paled a trifle, came slowly across the room to where Recklow was seated, laid a timid hand on his sleeve.
"Do you believe there are sorcerers in Asia?" she asked with that child-like directness which her wonderful blue eyes corroborated.
Recklow remained silent.
"Because," she went on, "if, in your heart, you do not believe this to be an accursed fact, then what I have to say will mean nothing to any of you."
Recklow touched his short, silvery moustache, hesitating. Then:
"The worship of Erlik is devil worship," he said. "Also I am entirely prepared to believe that there are, among the Yezidees, adepts who employ scientific weapons against civilisation – who have probably obtained a rather terrifying knowledge of psychic laws which they use scientifically, and which to ordinary, God-fearing folk appear to be the black magic of sorcerers."
Cleves said: "The employment by the huns of poison gases and long-range cannon is a parallel case. Before the war we could not believe in the possibility of a cannon that threw shells a distance of seventy miles."
The girl still addressed herself to Recklow: "Then you do not believe there are real sorcerers in Asia, Mr. Recklow?"
"Not sorcerers with supernatural powers for evil. Only degenerate human beings who, somehow, have managed to tap invisible psychic currents, and have learned how to use terrific forces about which, so far, we know practically nothing."
She spoke again in the same uneasy