The Face in the Abyss, Abraham Merritt [important of reading books .txt] 📗

Mother. If indeed you saw into my mind you know

whose face it wore.” ‘I saw,” she nodded. “Yet still I cannot believe. How can

I believe when I do not know—” She stopped; she seemed to be listening. She raised her

self upon her coils until her head was a full foot above tall Regor. Her eyes were intent, as though she looked beyond the walls of that great chamber. She dropped back upon her coils, the rosy pearl of her body slowly deepening.

“To me, Huon!” she called. “Your men with you. Kon—” she clicked some command, pointed to the opposite side of the alcove.

Again she listened.

“Suarra,” she pointed toward the girl, “Suarra, go you to your rooms.”

Then, as Suarra faltered, “Nay, stand behind me, daughter. If he has dared this—best for you to be near me!”

Once more the Serpentwoman was quiet; gaze withdrawn. Huon and his men climbed the steps; ranked themselves where she had bade: Suarra stepped by Graydon.

“She is angry! She is very angry!” she whispered. She passed behind the Serpentwoman’s coils.

And now Graydon heard a faint, a far-away clamor;

shouts and ring of metal on metal. The tumult drew close. At a distant end of the columned place was a broad entrance over which the webbed curtains fell. Abruptly, these were torn apart, ripped away, and through the opening poured blue-kirtled Emer soldiers, fighting to check some inexorable pressure slowly forcing them back.

Then over them he saw the head of Lantlu, and behind and around him a hundred or more of his nobles.

They made their way through the portal. The Emer fought desperately, but gave way, step by step, before the push of long javelins in the hands of those who drove them. None fell, and Graydon realized that their assailants were deliberately holding back from killing, striving only to break through.

“Stop!” the cry of the Snake Mother had in it something of the elfin buglings of her winged Messengers, the flying, feathered serpents. It halted the struggling ranks.

“Dura!” an officer of the blue-kirtled Emer faced her, saluting. “Let them through! Escort them to me!”

The guards drew aside, formed into two lines; between them Lantlu and his followers marched to the foot of the

steps. He smiled as he beheld Graydon, his eyes glinted as they roved from Regor to Huon and his band.

“All here, Bural!” he spoke to a noble beside him whose face was as beautiful and cruel as his. “I had not hoped for such luck!”

He made an ironic obeisance to the Serpentwoman.

“Hail, Mother!” Rank insolence steeped the greeting. “We ask your pardon for our rough entrance, but your guards have evidently forgotten the right of the Old Race to do you homage. We knew that you would punish them for their forgetfulness, so we did them no harm. And it seems we have come barely in time to save you, Mother, since we find you beset by dangerous men. Outlaws whom we have been seeking. Also an outlander whose life was forfeit when he entered YuAtlanchi. Evil men. Mother! We will lift their menace from you!”

He whispered to Bural, and took a swaggering step up the stairway. Up came the javelins of the nobles, ready to hurl, as they followed him. Graydon threw his rifle to his shoulder, finger itching on the trigger. Under stress, he reverted unconsciously to his English.

“Stop! Or I’ll blow your rotten heart out of you! Tell them to drop those javelins!”

“Silence!” the Mother touched his arm with the sistrum, a numbing shock ran through it; the gun fell at his feet.

“He said you would be safer where you are, Lantlu. Safer still with javelins lowered. He is right, Lantlu—I, Adana, tell you so!” lisped the Snake Mother.

She raised the sistrum high. Lantlu stared at the quivering globe, a shade of doubt on his face. He halted, spoke softly to Bural; and the javelins were lowered.

The Serpentwoman swayed slightly, rhythmically, to and fro, upon the upper pillar of her coils.

“By what right do you demand these men, Lantlu?”

“By what right! By what right?” he looked at her with malicious, assumed incredulity. “Mother Adana! Do you grow old—or forgetful like your guards? We demand them

because they have broken the law of YuAtlanchi, because they are outlaws, wolf-heads, to be taken where and how it

may be. By right of the old law, Mother, with which, by virtue of a certain pact between your ancestors and mine, you may not interfere. Or if you do—then. Mother, we must save your honor for you, and take them nevertheless. Bural

—if the outlander stoops to pick up his weapon, skewer him. If one of those outlaws moves toward his, let the javelins loose. Are you answered. Mother?”

“You shall not have them,” said the Serpentwoman, serenely. But the pillar of her body swayed in slowly widening arcs, her neck began to arch, thrusting her head forward

—like a serpent poising to strike.

Suarra slipped from behind her, thrust her arm through Graydon’s. Lantlu’s face darkened.

“So!” he said, “Suarra! With your lover! Your people howl

for you, you wench of the Urd! Well—soon they shall have you—”

Red light flashed before Graydon’s eyes, there was a singing in his ears. Hot hatred, dammed up since Lantlu had taunted him in the shrine of the Shadow, swept him. Before the Serpentwoman could stay him, he leaped down the steps, and shot a hard fist squarely into the sneering face. He felt the nose crunch under the blow. Lantlu tottered, staggered back. He recovered his poise with cat-like quickness; he rushed at Graydon, arms flexed to grip him.

Graydon ducked under his clutching arms, drove two blows upward into his face, the second squarely upon his snarling mouth. And again he felt bone give. Lantlu reeled back into the arms of Bural.

“Graydon! Come to me!” the Snake Mother’s cry was peremptory, not to be disobeyed.

He walked slowly back up the steps, head turned on the watching nobles. They made no move to stop him. Halfway up, he saw Lantlu open his eyes, break away from Bural’s hold, and glare uncomprehendingly about him. Graydon halted, fierce elation filling him, and again, unknowing, he spoke in his own language.

“That’ll spoil some of your beauty!”

Lantlu glared up at him, vacantly; he wiped a hand over his mouth, stared at its scarlet wetness stupidly.

“He says your women will find it difficult to admire you hereafter,” trilled the Serpentwoman. “Again he is right!”

Graydon looked at her. The little hand holding the sistrum was clenched so tightly that the knuckles shone white, her red forked tongue flickered upon her lips, her eyes were very bright … The Mother, he thought, might be angry with him, but she appeared to be uncommonly enjoying the sight of Lantlu’s battered countenance … he had seen women at the prize ring watch with exactly that expression the successful mauling progress of their favorite. He drew up beside her, nursing his bruised knuckles.

And now Lantlu was trying to break from the hands of his men who were holding him… Graydon rather admired him at that moment… certainly the brute had courage… quite a hog for punishment….

“Lantlu!” the Snake Mother raised herself until her head swayed a man’s full height over them, her eyes were cold purple gems, her face like stone—“Lantlu—look at me!”’

She lifted the sistrum. The globe stopped its quicksilver quivering, and out of it sprang a ray of silvery light that flashed on Lantlu’s forehead. Instantly he ceased his struggling, grew rigid, raised his face to her. The silvery ray flashed across the faces of his followers, and they too stiffened into men of wood, silent.

“Lantlu! Carrion carrier for Nimir! Listen to me! You have defiled the Temple, the only one of all the Old Race to do that. By violence you have forced your way to me, Adana, of the Older Race who fed your forefathers with the fruit of our wisdom. Who made you into men. You have mocked me! You have dared to raise armed hands against me! Now do I declare the ancient pact between my people and yours broken—broken by you, Lantlu. Now do I, Adana, declare you outlaw, and outlaws all those with you. And outlaw shall be all who hereafter throw their lot with yours. I cast you out! Go to your whispering Shadow, tell it what has befallen you. Go to your Dark Master, Lantlu, and beg him to make you whole again, restore your beauty. He cannot—not he, whose craft has grown so weak that he cannot find himself a body. Let this comfort you. Tempted as he

may have been, he will not now try to hide-behind that face of yours. Tell him that I, who worsted him long time ago, I, Adana, who prisoned him in the stone, am awake, and on guard, and will meet him once again when the hour has struck—aye, and worst him again. Aye, utterly destroy him! Go, you beast lower than the Urd—Go!”

She pointed with the sistrum to the tattered curtains. And Lantlu, head swaying in weird mimicry of hers, turned stiffly, and paced away. Behind him, heads swaying, went his nobles. The blue-kirtled soldiers herding them, they passed from sight.

The Serpentwoman’s body ceased its movement, her pillared coil dropped, she rested her little pointed chin on Suarra’s shoulder. Her purple eyes, no longer cold or glittering, weighed Graydon quizzically.

“As the brutes fight!” she mused. “I think there must be something human in me after all—so to enjoy those blows and the sight of Lantlu’s face. Graydon, for the first time in ages, you have lifted all boredom from me.”

She paused, smiling at him.

“I should have slain him,” she said. “It would have saved much trouble. And many lives—maybe. But then he would have had no time to mourn his vanished beauty—nor to eat his vain heart out over it. No, oh no—I could not relinquish that, not even for many lives. Augh-h!—” she yawned, “and for the first time in ages, I am sleepy.”

Suarra leaned against the side of the alcove. A golden bell sounded. A door opened and through it came four comely Indian women, carrying a cushioned litter. They set it beside the Serpentwoman, stood waiting, arms crossed on brown breasts, heads bowed. She swayed toward it, stopped—

“Suarra,” she said, “see that Regor and Huon and the others are shown to their quarters, and that they are properly cared for. Graydon, wait here with me.”

They knelt to her once more, then followed Suarra through the opened portal.

Graydon stood with the Mother. She did not speak, was deep in thought. At last she looked at him.

“That was a boasting message I sent to Nimir,” she said.

“I am not so sure of the outcome, my Graydon, as I seemed to be. You have given me several new things to think about Still—it will also give that creeping Evil something to think on besides his deviltries—perhaps.”

She was silent until Suarra returned. Then she slipped out of her nest, thrust her body into the litter and slowly drew her shimmering coils after her. She lay for a moment, chin cupped in her tiny hands, looking at them.

“Kiss him good-night, daughter,” she said. “He shall rest well, and safely.”

Suarra raised her lips to his.

“Come, Graydon,” laughed the Serpentwoman, and when he was close, she put her hands on each side of his face, and kissed him, too.

“What abysses between us!” She shook her head, “and bridged by three blows to a man I hate—yes, daughter, I am woman, after all!”

The women picked up the litter, Suarra beside her, they moved away. From the entrance came two blue-kilted Emers, who with low bows, invited him to follow