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“Well would I like to,” her face grew dreaming; “but the Silent Ones say — NO; they bid me let you go, Yolara —”
“The Silent Ones,” the priestess laughed. “YOU, Lakla! You fear, perhaps, to let me tarry here too close!”
Storm gathered again in the handmaiden’s eyes; she forced it back.
“No,” she answered, “the Silent Ones so command — and for their own purposes. Yet do I think, Yolara, that you will have little time to feed your wickedness — tell that to Lugur — and to your Shining One!” she added slowly.
Mockery and disbelief rode high in the priestess’s pose. “Am I to return alone — like this?” she asked.
“Nay, Yolara, nay; you shall be accompanied,” said Lakla; “and by those who will guard — and WATCH— you well. They are here even now.”
The hangings parted, and into the chamber came Olaf and Rador.
The priestess met the fierce hatred and contempt in the eyes of the Norseman — and for the first time lost her bravado.
“Let not HIM go with me,” she gasped — her eyes searched the floor frantically.
“He goes with you,” said Lakla, and threw about Yolara a swathing that covered the exquisite, alluring body. “And you shall pass through the Portal, not skulk along the path of the worm!”
She bent to Rador, whispered to him; he nodded; she had told him, I supposed, the secret of its opening.
“Come,” he said, and with the ice-eyed giant behind her, Yolara, head bent, passed out of those hangings through which, but a little before, unseen, triumph in her grasp, she had slipped.
Then Lakla came to the unhappy O’Keefe, rested her hands on his shoulders, looked deep into his eyes.
“DID you woo her, even as she said?” she asked.
The Irishman flushed miserably.
“I did not,” he said. “I was pleasant to her, of course, because I thought it would bring me quicker to you, darlin’.”
She looked at him doubtfully; then —
“I think you must have been VERY— pleasant!” was all she said — and leaning, kissed him forgivingly straight on the lips. An extremely direct maiden was Lakla, with a truly sovereign contempt for anything she might consider non-essentials; and at this moment I decided she was wiser even than I had thought her.
He stumbled, feet vanishing; reached down and picked up something that in the grasping turned his hand to air.
“One of the invisible cloaks,” he said to me. “There must be quite a lot of them about — I guess Yolara brought her full staff of murderers. They’re a bit shopworn, probably — but we’re considerably better off with ’em in our hands than in hers. And they may come in handy — who knows?”
There was a choking rattle at my feet; half the head of a dwarf raised out of vacancy; beat twice upon the floor in death throes; fell back. Lakla shivered; gave a command. The frog-men moved about; peering here and there; lifting unseen folds revealing in stark rigidity torn form after form of the priestess’s men.
Lakla had been right — her Akka were thorough fighters!
She called, and to her came the frog-woman who was her attendant. To her the handmaiden spoke, pointing to the batrachians who stood, paws and forearms melted beneath the robes they had gathered. She took them and passed out — more grotesque than ever, shattering into streaks of vacancies, reappearing with flickers of shining scale and yellow gems as the tattered pennants of invisibility fluttered about her.
The frog-men reached down, swung each a dead dwarf in his arms, and filed, booming triumphantly away.
And then I remembered the cone of the Keth which had slipped from Yolara’s hand; knew it had been that for which her wild eyes searched. But look as closely as we might, search in every nook and corner as we did, we could not find it. Had the dying hand of one of her men clutched it and had it been borne away with them? With the thought Larry and I raced after the scaled warriors, searched every body they carried. It was not there. Perhaps the priestess had found it, retrieved it swiftly without our seeing.
Whatever was true — the cone was gone. And what a weapon that one little holder of the shaking death would have been for us!
CHAPTER XXVIII
IN THE LAIR OF THE DWELLER
It is with marked hesitation that I begin this chapter, because in it I must deal with an experience so contrary to every known law of physics as to seem impossible. Until this time, barring, of course, the mystery of the Dweller, I had encountered nothing that was not susceptible of naturalistic explanation; nothing, in a word, outside the domain of science itself; nothing that I would have felt hesitancy in reciting to my colleagues of the International Association of Science. Amazing, unfamiliar — ADVANCED— as many of the phenomena were, still they lay well within the limits of what we have mapped as the possible; in regions, it is true, still virgin to the mind of man, but toward which that mind is steadily advancing.
But this — well, I confess that I have a theory that is naturalistic; but so abstruse, so difficult to make clear within the short confines of the space I have to give it, so dependent upon conceptions that even the highest-trained scientific brains find difficult to grasp, that I despair.
I can only say that the thing occurred; that it took place in precisely the manner I am about to narrate, and that I experienced it.
Yet, in justice to myself, I must open up some paths of preliminary approach toward the heart of the perplexity. And the first path is the realization that our world WHATEVER it is, is certainly NOT the world as we see it! Regarding this I shall refer to a discourse upon “Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity,” by the distinguished English physicist, Dr. A. S. Eddington, which I had the pleasure of hearing him deliver before the Royal Institution. 1
I realize, of course, that it is not true logic to argue —“The world is not as we think it is — therefore everything we think impossible is possible in it.” Even if it BE different, it is governed by LAW. The truly impossible is that which is outside law, and as nothing CAN be outside law, the impossible CANNOT exist.
The crux of the matter then becomes our determination whether what we think is impossible may or may not be possible under laws still beyond our knowledge.
I hope that you will pardon me for this somewhat academic digression, but I felt it was necessary, and it has, at least, put me more at ease. And now to resume.
We had watched, Larry and I, the frog-men throw the bodies of Yolara’s assassins into the crimson waters. As vultures swoop down upon the dying, there came sailing swiftly to where the dead men floated, dozens of the luminous globes. Their slender, varicoloured tentacles whipped out; the giant iridescent bubbles CLIMBED over the cadavers. And as they touched them there was the swift dissolution, the melting away into putrescence of flesh and bone that I had witnessed when the dart touched fruit that time I had saved Rador — and upon this the Medusae gorged; pulsing lambently; their wondrous colours shifting, changing, glowing stronger; elfin moons now indeed, but satellites whose glimmering beauty was fed by death; alembics of enchantment whose glorious hues were sucked from horror.
Sick, I turned away — O’Keefe as pale as I; passed back into the corridor that had opened on the ledge from which we had watched; met Lakla hurrying toward us. Before she could speak there throbbed faintly about us a vast sighing. It grew into a murmur, a whispering, shook us — then passing like a presence, died away in far distance.
“The Portal has opened,” said the handmaiden. A fainter sighing, like an echo of the other, mourned about us. “Yolara