HOW TWO, IN THE LABYRINTH OF MIRRORS, WATCHED DISTANT HAPPENINGS
An oppression such as he had never known fell upon Kendric. Nor was
the depressing emotion an emanation alone of his growing dread on
Betty's account; the atmosphere of the place through which he moved
began to weigh him down, to crush the spirit within him. They left the
treasure chamber which was six times doubly locked after them. They
went through the ancient empty rooms and out into the gardens.
Kendric, looking up, saw the small ragged patch of sky and felt as
though upon his own soul, stifling him, rested the weight of the hollow
mountain. To him who loved the fresh, wind-swept world, the open sea
with its smell of clean salt air, the wide deserts where the sunshine
lay everywhere, this pleasure grove of a long dead royalty was become
musty, foul, permeated with an aura of a great gilded tomb. His
sensation was almost that of a drowning person or of one awaking from a
trance to find himself shut in the narrow confines of a buried coffin.
The air seemed heavy and impure; he fancied it still fetid with all the
blood of sacrificial offerings which the ravening soil had drunk.
But he knew that now was no time for sick fancies and he shook them off
and bent his mind to the present crisis. Zoraida was retracing the
steps which had led them here; she had spoken of Betty. It was likely
then that they were returning through the long passageways to the
house. Dark hallways to thread, the dark mind of his guide to seek to
read. Now, while darkness outdoors was well enough, the black gloom of
a maze at any corner of which Zoraida might have placed one or a dozen
of her hirelings, had little lure for him. She did not mean to let him
go free; she had kept him all day immured in his own room; she would no
doubt seek to lock him up again.
"It's tonight or never to make a break for it," he decided as he
followed her.
They were passing the block of jasper, the ancient stone of sacrifice.
Zoraida went by first; Kendric was passing when an impulse prompted him
to put out a sudden hand for the keen edged knife of obsidian. He
slipped it into his belt and hid the haft with his coat. If it came to
an ambush, to an attack in the dark, a revolver bullet might fly wild
while the wide sweep of a knife blade would somehow find a sheath in
something more palpable than thin air.
They went on, returning along the way they had come. When the gardens
of the golden Tezcucan were behind them and a door barred Kendric
experienced a sense of relief, even though the tunnels were ahead of
him. He kept close to Zoraida, prepared for any sort of trickery and
with no desire to have her whisk suddenly through a door somewhere and
slam it in his face. His one urgent prayer was for a breath of the
open; just then the consummation of human happiness seemed to him to be
freedom on horseback somewhere out in the mountains with the whole of
the wide starry sky generously roofing the world. He thought of
Betty--and he thought, too, of the six little boys doomed to count
themselves happy back yonder where at most the sun shone down upon them
a few minutes of the day.
Never once did Zoraida turn, not once did she speak as they hastened
on. What little he saw of her face where there was lamplight showed
him hard set muscles. At last they were again in the house which was
hushed as though untenanted or as though its occupants were asleep or
dead. He could fancy Bruce in some remote room, tricked by some false
message of Zoraida's, eagerly expecting her, hungering for her lying
explanations; he could picture Barlow, glowering, but awaiting her,
too. Well, the time had passed when he could largely concern himself
with them and what they did and thought. Tonight he must serve
himself, and Betty. If she would listen to him.
Presently he saw where it was that Zoraida was conducting him. He
remembered the dim ante-room in which they paused a moment while
Zoraida fastened the door behind them; then, the curtain thrown aside,
they were again in that barbaric, tapestry-hung chamber in which, the
first night here, he had been brought before her. As before the ruby
upon the thin crystal stem shone like a burning red eye.
Now, for the first time since they had turned away from the golden
Tezcucan's treasure chamber, was Kendric given a full, clear view of
Zoraida's face. During their progress many thoughts had come and gone
swiftly through his mind; now as they two stood looking steadily at
each other, he realized clearly that one matter and one alone had
occupied her. No abatement of cruelty had come into her long eyes; no
flush of color had swept away the cold whiteness of her cheek. She was
set in a merciless determination, relentlessly hard; the colorless face
resulted from a frozen heart. Before now Kendric had seen murder
staring out of a man's widened eyes; now he saw it in a woman's.
For the instant only she had looked at him as though she were probing
into his secret thought and there swept over him the old, disquieting
sensation that each thought in his mind lay as clear to her look as a
white pebble in a sunlit pool. Then her eyes passed on, beyond him.
He turned and saw the hangings parted at that spot where Zoraida had
appeared to him that other time; one of the brutish, squat forms which
Kendric remembered, stood in the opening.
Zoraida spoke with the man swiftly, her voice hard and sharp. A quick
change came into the heavy, thick-lipped face; the stupid eyes
brightened; the face was distorted as by some hideous anticipation.
Zoraida ended what she had to say; the man spoke gutturally, nodding
his head. Then he dropped the curtain and was gone.
Zoraida went to her black chair with the crystal balls for feet and sat
stiffly, her ringed fingers tapping restlessly upon the wide arms.
Presently the man returned, carrying a wide flat box. Thereafter,
while Zoraida watched him impatiently, he occupied himself after a
fashion which Kendric found inexplicable. From the box the man took a
number of rectangular mirrors, fine clear glass framed with thin bands
of ebony. Deftly, into a groove made in the back of each mirror, he
slipped the end of a tall ebony rod. Then he rolled back the heavy rug
from two thirds of the floor. The floor was of stone, laid fancifully
in colored mozaic; here and there, seemingly placed utterly at random,
were smooth round holes in the stone blocks. Into each hole the haft
of one of the rods was thrust so that when the man stepped back to
survey his handiwork there was a little forest of mirrors on glistening
stems grown up in apparent lack of design, like young pines on a
tableland.
Then Zoraida rose and went from one of the glasses to another, turning
them a little to right or left, adjusting painstakingly, seeming to
read the meaning of some fine lines scratched in the stone floor. Her
eyes were like a mad woman's. She herself moved her chair, shoving it
from the rug to the bare floor, careful that each supporting crystal
sphere rested exactly upon a chosen spot. Her retainer handed her a
small stool; she placed it and, since it was near the spot where he
stood, Kendric made out the four crosses where the four legs were to
go. Then Zoraida went swiftly back to her chair.
As she sat down she called again sharply to the squat brute who served
her. His broad ugly teeth showed white in his animal grin; he ran
across the room and swept back the curtains draping the wall. They
were laced to rings along the upper edge and the rings ran on a long
rod. As they were whipped back they disclosed no ordinary wall but a
great expanse of mirror extending from floor to ceiling, from corner to
corner. When two other walls were exposed they too resolved themselves
into clearly reflecting surfaces.
"Clap-trap again," muttered Kendric, beginning to feel a strange dread
in his heart and growing angry with it and determined that Zoraida
should not guess.
"Be seated," commanded Zoraida sternly. "If you would see what
amusement is being offered a friend of yours!"
One by one the lamps were being put out by the hasty hand of the fellow
whom Kendric began to long to strangle; he could hear a low guttural
gurgling sort of noise rising from the thick throat, issuing from the
monstrous mouth. Zoraida did not appear to hear but sat rigid,
waiting. At last, when all but one opaque shaded lamp were
extinguished and the room was cast into shadowy gloom, Kendric,
impelled by environment, a curious dread and perhaps the will of
Zoraida, sat down on the stool.
"Clap-trap, you say!" scoffed Zoraida. "Watch the first mirror!"
At first the mirror reflected nothing save the shadowy room and a
vague, half-seen line of other mirrors. But while Kendric watched
there came a swift change. Somewhere a lamp had been lighted--several
lamps, for there was a brilliant light. He saw reflected what appeared
to be a small room with a door in one wall. He saw the door open and a
man come in; it was either the man who just now had obeyed Zoraida's
commands or his twin-fellow. The man began hooking together what
appeared to be several frames of steel bars. Working swiftly he shaped
them into a steel cage hardly larger than to accommodate a man
standing. Kendric's heart leaped and then stood still. He remembered
words which Juanita, terrified by idle threat from him, had spoken.
He sat like a man in a trance. The dim mirrors seemed unreal. What he
saw elsewhere--was it a reflected reality or was his mind under the
spell of Zoraida's? Was she through hypnosis projecting a lying image
into his groping consciousness? Absolutely, he did not know. He drew
his eyes away from the vision of that room and turned them
questioningly upon Zoraida. Stern she was and rigid and white, a dim
figure in that dim light save alone for her eyes; they burned
ominously, glowing like a cat's.
A quick shifting of the image in the glass jerked back his straying
attention. The man had completed his brief labors with the steel
frames which now made a strong cage; he shook the bars with his hand as
though trying them, and they were firm in their places. He opened a
section which turned on hinges so that a narrow door swung back. Then
he drew away and across the room. And now the remarkable thing was
that though he moved several paces, still he remained in full view at
the center of the mirror.
Plainly in a complicated series of reflectors there were mirrors which
were being turned as the man moved, cunningly and skilfully adjusted to
his slow progress; otherwise would he have passed out of the scope of
Kendric's vision. As it was, the cage slid away out of view, an
uncanny sort of thing since it had the appearance of gliding under a
will of its own.
Presently, however, the man opened a door in the wall and was gone.
For an instant the mirror darkened; then the light flashed back and
Kendric was treated to a broken procession of images which set him
marveling. First he saw straight into the heart of the gardens of the
golden Tezcucan; he saw the sacrificial stone; he saw one of the old
men approach it and pass by; he saw the treasure chamber. Again he
stared at Zoraida, again the fear was upon him that she had mastered
his mind with hers, that what he fancied he saw was but what she willed
him to imagine. For he could not ignore the long tunneled distance
they had traversed, the dark passageways, the heavy doors with their
massive locks. And yet his reason told him that to a mind like
Zoraida's as he began to believe it, a brain filled with ancient craft
and perhaps a strain of madness, actuated by such dark impulses as
certainly must abide there, the actual physical accomplishment of this
sort of parlor magic was a thing in keeping. There would be small
tube-like holes through walls, angled with reference to other mirrors;
there would be scientific arrangement; there would be, somewhere in the
great house, a sort of operating room, a room of mirrors with a trained
hand to manipulate them. Perhaps, with modern reflectors, she but
improved on some fancy of an ancient king who sought to guard himself
against treachery or his hoardings against the hand of his treasurers.
Again and again, as Kendric sat watching, the mirrors darkened and grew
bright again, with always a new image. He saw the room in which he had
spent a long day immured and knew then that had Zoraida been of the
mind she could have sat here in her private room and have observed
every move he made. He saw still another room and in it Bruce pacing
up and down, up and down, swinging suddenly to look eagerly at his
door; he saw Barlow's back as Barlow stared out of a window--somewhere.
"Thus Zoraida knows what goes forward in her own house," said Zoraida,
speaking for the first time. Kendric, struck with a new thought,
looked about the room everywhere, seeking to locate the necessary
opening in the wall through which came the reflections from mirrors in
other places. But the great glasses covering three of the walls
presented what appeared to be smooth, unbroken surfaces; where the
fourth wall was tapestry-draped there was no sign of an opening;
neither floor nor ceiling, places offering no detail but blurred with
vague shadows, showed him what he sought.
"Watch closely!" said Zoraida.
Again it was the small room of the steel cage. The savage-looking man
in the short tunic was there again. He looked watchful, tense, not
altogether at his ease. In one hand was a heavy whip; in the other a
pistol. Kendric thought of the animal trainers he had seen at
circuses. The man's eyes were on the door through which he had come.
So vivid were old images bred now of associations of ideas that Kendric
had no doubt of what small head with fierce eyes would appear next; he
could prevision the lithe puma, in its quick nervous movements, the
lashing of the heavy tail and the glint of the teeth. And so when he
saw what it was that entered, he sat back for a moment limp and the
next sprang to his feet. It was Betty.
Betty clothed strangely and with a face dead white, with eyes to haunt
a man. She wore a loose red robe, sleeveless, falling no lower than
her ankles; her bare feet were in sandals. Her hair was down; about
her brows was a black band that might have been ebony or velvet; into
it was thrust a large white flower.
Betty was speaking. Kendric had dropped back into his chair, having
lost sight of her when he stood. He saw that she was speaking swiftly,
supplicatingly; her hands were clasped; all this he could see but no
slightest sound came to him. He could not tell if she were near or
far. He began to realize the exquisite torture which Zoraida might
offer a man through her mirrors.
He saw the squat brute's wide grin that was as hideous as the puma's
could be; all of the teeth he saw and they were glistening and sharp,
unusually sharp for a human being. And then he saw Betty pushed
forward though she shrank back at first with dragging feet and though
then, suddenly galvanized, she fought wildly. But two big hands locked
tight on her arms and as powerless as a child of six she was thrust
into the steel cage, the door snapped after her. She stood looking
wildly about her; her lips opened as she must have screamed; she
dropped her face into her hands. Kendric saw the white flower fall.
Again the man looked to the door through which he and then Betty had
entered. And now came the puma. It ran in, snarling; it was looking
back over its shoulder as though someone had whipped it into the room.
It saw another enemy armed with whip and pistol and sidled off with
still greater show of dripping fangs. All this in dead silence so far
as Kendric was concerned; never the faintest sound coming to him. The
whip was flung out and snapped, and there was no sound; the puma's
teeth clicked together on empty air, and no sound; Betty, looking up,
shrieked, and no sound. They looked to be so close to Kendric that he
felt as if with one stride he could hurl himself among them; and yet he
knew that they might be shut off from him by innumerable walls and
locked and barred doors. He saw Betty so plainly that until he
reasoned with himself he felt that she must see him.
"A puma will not attack a human being." Kendric sought to speak as
though merely contemptuous of Zoraida's entertainment. "They are
cowardly brutes."
"The puma," said Zoraida, "is starving. Further, he has been driven
mad by men who whipped and then appeared to run, frightened of him.
Watch."
The man threatening the puma slipped out through the door behind him.
The door closed. Betty and the animal were alone. The great cat lay
down and looked at her with its hard, unwinking eyes, only its slow
tail moving back and forth like a bit of mechanism clock-regulated.
Presently the puma lifted its head and began a horrible sniffing; it
lifted itself gradually from the floor; it drew a step nearer Betty's
cage and sniffed again. Kendric could see Betty draw back the few
inches made possible by the narrow confines of the cage, could see that
again she screamed.
"A little fresh blood has been sprinkled on the floor of the cage,"
said Zoraida. "A little of it is on the gown she wears. It will not
be overlong to watch. Are you growing impatient?"
"Are you mad?" he burst out. "Good God, do you mean to let this go on?"
"Am I mad?" Her eyes, slowly turned to his, looked it. "Perhaps. Who
that is mad knows he is mad? And who, my friend, is sane? Do I mean
to let this go on?" She laughed at him, and the sound was as hard as
the tinkle of bits of jangling glass. "You have but to be patient to
know."
The puma sniffed again, again drew closer. Betty was tight pressed
against the far bars shutting her in, and even so had the great cat
thrust a claw forward she could not withdraw beyond the reach of the
ripping talons. The cat circled her. Always Betty turned with it, her
eyes upon its eyes, her eyes that were large and fixed with terror.
"A puma is patient, more patient than a man," said Zoraida. "It may be
an hour; it may be all night before it strikes. It may be a night and
a day, and still another night and day. Its hunger does not diminish
as time passes! Or," and she shrugged with a great showing of her
indifference, "it may strike now, at any moment. That is one of the
things that makes the moment tense for that white-faced little fool in
there. Imagine when she is worn out, if it lasts that long; when sleep
will no longer flee because of terror; and when I command that the
light shall be extinguished where she is! You see, she must be
thinking all those things."
The sweat broke out on Kendric's forehead, he felt as though ice ran in
his veins. If he only knew where all this was going on! Was it above
him or below, to right or left? Ten steps or a hundred yards away?
"By God----" he shouted. But only Zoraida's merciless laughter
answered him.
"I had to choose between this and the ancient stone of sacrifice," she
told him. "Have I not chosen well?"
The puma had been still. Now again it moved and its feet had
quickened, it glided with ever-increasing swiftness, it came close to
the steel bars, it showed more of its sharp, tearing, dripping teeth.
"Betty!" shouted Kendric. "I----"
He knew that Betty could not hear, that he could do nothing. Nothing?
As the thought framed he leaped to his feet and in the grip of such a
rage as even he had never known, hurled himself across the few paces
between him and Zoraida.
"You have the way to stop this damned thing!" His hands, like claws,
were thrust before her face. "You will stop it."
Even in his headlong rage there were cool cells in his brain. He saw
the quick significant look Zoraida shot over his shoulder and turned;
there behind him stood one of the squat brutes who did her bidding.
Kendric saw something in the man's hand but did not reck whether it was
gun or knife or club or something else. He whipped about and struck.
As the man staggered under the unexpected blow, Kendric snatched up the
heavy stool on which he had been sitting and struck again, so swift
that the blow landed while the figure was yet staggering backward. The
man fell, stunned, and then, as quick as light, before Zoraida could
lift a hand, Kendric was upon her again.
"Call off your cat!" he shouted at her.
She lifted her head defiantly.
"Never has man dictated to me!" she cried angrily. "Here I dictate.
If you dared put a hand on me----"
He saw her own hand creeping out toward the table. What it sought he
did not know; a hidden bell, perhaps. Or a dagger. He remembered her
swift attack upon Ortega. He seized her wrist, his fingers locked hard
about it; she struggled and he held her back in her chair. Suddenly
she relaxed and shrugged and laughed at him.
"You add to the entertainment!" she mocked him. "For, mind you, while
you make large commands, the puma draws nearer and nearer. If you
will, between your great commands, but glance into the mirror----"
"I say you can put a stop to that infernal torture," he said fiercely.
"And you will!"
"Yes?" she sneered at him. "And you will make me, perhaps? You, a
common adventurer will dictate to Zoraida!"
For the moment he felt powerless in face of her cold taunting. But
there was too much at stake for him to yield now to a feeling of
powerlessness. One hand was on her wrist; the gripping fingers of the
other shut about the haft of the ancient obsidian knife. The old knife
of sacrifice. His face was white and stern, his eyes no whit less
deadly than Zoraida's.
"You threaten my life?" she gasped. "_You_?"
He made no answer. He was beyond speech. Slowly he lifted the great
knife, slowly as in a dream he set the thin point against the soft
flesh of Zoraida's throat. As a tremor shook his hand Zoraida whipped
back.
"You would not dare! You would not dare!"
His hand was steady again. He held her still, and the point of the
knife crept a hair's breadth closer to the life within her. A little
more and it would have slipped into the skin it was pricking.
"You could not do it," she whispered.
Then he spoke.
"I can do it." His lips were dry, his voice very harsh. "You have
said that you know me for a man of my word. Well, then, I swear to you
that little by little I'll drive that knife in unless you set that girl
free."
Still she sought to brave it out, sought to defy him; her eyes, on his,
told him that his will was less than hers, and that this could never
be. But Kendric knew otherwise. It was given him to know that if
Betty died, he did not care to live. Like men of his stamp it was
unthinkable to him that he should lift his hand against a woman. But
woman for the moment Zoraida was not. Fiend, rather; reincarnated
savage; a thing to stamp into the earth. What he had said he meant.
He was giving her time because on her rested Betty's fate. He pressed
the knife a little deeper. So steady was his hand, so stiff Zoraida's
body, so gradual the increased pressure, that the knife point made in
the white flesh a tiny, shadow-filled dimple.
Now came into Zoraida's eyes a swift change, a look which in all of her
life had never been there until now. A look of terror, of realization
of death, of frantic fear. She sought to speak, and words failed her.
The knife pressed steadily. A piercing scream broke from her.