it being evident that it had stood here, ready for immediate departure,
but the unquestionable fact may serve to emphasize again the suddenness
of the final catastrophe. People had simply dropped and forgotten
everything. In the extremity of terror civilized man had become a
savage, reverting to primeval instincts in preferring his legs to any
other means of escape. There was but one thing left for him--to run
away.
It was a depressing experience to be standing solitary and alone under
these vast arches that had echoed to the tramp of feet innumerable. A
sense of his loneliness pressed heavily upon Constans; then, suddenly,
he became aware of the presence of a man, who stood leaning against a
pillar a short distance away and watched him from under close-knit
brows.
The fair hair and frank, kindly face seemed dimly familiar to Constans;
and what thighs and breadth of shoulder! The stranger stood little short
of gianthood, and Constans would have run small chance against him as
man to man. Bitterly he regretted having left his bow behind; even his
double-edged hunting-knife was missing from his belt.
The man walked deliberately forward to meet him. Certainly his dress and
equipment proclaimed him a Doomsman, and by the same token he must have
recognized that Constans was an alien. Yet he smiled and held out his
hand as he came up.
"It is Constans, of course; for who else among the House People would
dare to cross the Gray Wolf's threshold. Do you not remember Ulick?"
The two young men shook hands heartily, albeit a certain constraint was
immediately to fall upon them. For Constans could not be unmindful of
his purpose, and Ulick was a true Doomsman, and hatred of the
House-dweller was the first article in his hereditary creed. The
inheritance of a naked sword lay between them. Was it not inevitable
that one or the other of them should be moved to take it up?
It was Constans who realized that only frankness could save the
situation, and as they walked along he told Ulick the full story of the
enmity between him and Quinton Edge, then of the years of his
apprenticeship to his Uncle Hugolin, and of the message in the bottle
that had served to crystallize desire into action. The purport of the
letter was still fresh in his mind, and he repeated it as nearly as he
could word for word.
"Esmay, did you say?" interrupted Ulick. "It was Esmay who helped me
trap you. Don't you remember her eyes, brown and with a flame in them
like to the carbuncles in the bracelet that I gave her? Elena was her
mother."
Constans assented, indifferently. In truth, he had entirely forgotten
about the girl.
"Ten days ago she disappeared," said Ulick, gloomily, "and not a trace
of her have I been able to discover. Yet I believe that your friend
Quinton Edge could tell me if he would."
"I don't understand."
"Nor does anybody else. For all that, I am sure that he does not want
her for himself; no woman has ever been able to boast that Master
Quinton Edge looked at her twice. Were it otherwise I think I should go
mad."
Constans shrugged his shoulders impatiently; then he looked up and saw
the pain in the big fellow's face. It touched him, although he could not
comprehend the weakness (for such it seemed to him), that had given it
birth.
"If you could see her, you would understand," continued Ulick, as though
divining his thought. Again they walked along in silence. Constans broke
it abruptly:
"And your grandsire, is he still living? I can see him yet, that
terrible old man who wanted to cut out my eyes and tongue so that you
could have a new toy."
Ulick smiled, and the current of his darker mood was diverted.
"Lucky for you that he fell asleep again before he could give the order
for the irons to be heated. And so we ran away trembling, and I brought
you to the vault underneath the sidewalk--do you remember?"
"I remember," said Constans, briefly.
"He is living still; think how old he must be! Nowadays he sleeps nearly
all the time; sometimes for a week on end he will not leave his couch in
the darkened room. Then again he will have himself apparelled and his
great sword girded upon him, and he will come down into the court-yard
and walk in the sun for hours. You should see those lazy rascals of
guardsmen scatter at the first sight of him--like mice running to their
holes when puss begins to yawn and stretch herself."
"You are still the heir?"
"Yes, unless the council sees fit to set my rights aside in favor of my
cousin Boris. To tell the truth, neither of us is fit to be chief in
Doom while Quinton Edge lives."
"Tell me."
"Why, you see, Boris is a brute whose brains, such as he has, are always
fuddled with ale. And I----" Ulick stopped and laughed a little
sheepishly.
"Well?"
"Frankly, then, I don't want to carry the weight of the wolf-skin; I
should feel like a man buried up to his neck in sand. I dreamed of that
the other night, and how a raven that had Quinton Edge's face came and
pecked at my eyes."
"Then you really don't care," commented Constans, shrewdly.
"No; except to have my fair share of the fighting and feasting--and, of
course, Esmay."
Constans laughed. "You always come back to the girl."
"How could it be otherwise, since I love her?" said Ulick, simply.
Constans grew sober again. "Strange that it should be the same man,
Quinton Edge, for whom we are both seeking. I can see, however, that my
arrow must not leave the string until first you have had speech with
him."
"But that is just what I cannot do," returned Ulick, with a frown. "It
is a week now that any one has seen him, and yet neither galley nor
troop has left the city since the new moon."
"He must show himself in time; we have only to wait."
"Waiting! it is the one thing----"
"Yet you must; the chance is certain to come. Only, if I help you in
this, then afterwards when you have learned what you want----"
Ulick nodded. "Do what you will, but until then it is Esmay who stands
first, and he lives under her shadow."
The young men had been walking in the direction of the Citadel Square,
and the time had come for Constans to decide whether or not he should
give Ulick his full confidence. Yesterday he had moved all his
belongings to a large building on the south side of the square
overlooking the fortress, and he was minded to establish himself there
permanently. It might seem foolhardy for him to take up his abode, not
under, indeed, but just above the noses of his enemies; in reality, he
was as safe in one place as in another. Here was an immense building,
containing literally hundreds of apartments; it was like being in a
rabbit-warren, a labyrinth of passages and rooms that it would take a
regiment to explore. He had only to observe reasonable prudence in
entering and leaving his lair to be assured against the ordinary risks
of discovery, and he depended, too, upon the obvious negligence of the
sentinels. It was a simple application of the principle that what is
nearest to the eye is oftenest overlooked.
For where he stood he could see the huge bulk of the sky-scraper
towering into the blue. The building had been constructed upon a narrow,
triangular plot of land, and its ground-plan bore a fanciful resemblance
to the shape of a flat-iron. Its acute angle was pointed towards them;
one compared it instinctively to the prow of some gigantic ship of stone
ploughing its way through billows of brick and mortar.
"Come," said Constans, and Ulick, understanding the confidence about to
be reposed in him, followed silently.
It was a small front-room on the third floor that Constans had fitted up
as his abode, and after Ulick had passed approving judgment upon his
friend's domestic arrangement they walked over to the window and stood
there looking down into the thoroughfare upon which the building faced.
Formerly this open space had been paved with small oblong blocks of
stone, but these had long since been incorporated with the walls of the
fortress, and in their stead was a stretch of thick, short turf. Pacing
slowly along, there came in sight the figure of a man, his head bent
down and his hands clasped behind his back. Constans recognized him
instantly, even before Ulick's eager whisper had reached his ear. It was
Quinton Edge.
Constans knew that he was doing a foolish thing, but the humor of the
moment gripped him, and he yielded to it. To make sport of this
insolent, and so wipe out, in some measure, the memory of his own
humiliation--the temptation was too great to be resisted, and the next
instant the bowstring twanged and an arrow plunged into the ground, a
scant yard in front of Quinton Edge, and stuck there quivering.
Involuntarily, the Doomsman stepped back and another arrow grazed his
heel; a half turn to the right and a third shaft sheared the curling
ostrich-plume from his hat. A fourth arrow to the left of him, and then
Quinton Edge understood. He drew himself up and stood still while a
dozen more skilfully directed bolts winged their way to complete the
barbed circle that hemmed him in. And each missile bore its individual
message to his memory--a tiny tuft of scarlet inserted in the
feathering.
Quinton Edge waited an instant or so, as though out of pure politeness,
then turned and faced the great building that towered mountainously
above his head. There were hundreds of window openings in the tremendous
facade of the "Flat-iron," and he had no means of guessing the precise
one in whose deep embrasure his enemy stood concealed; at any moment he
might expect the final shaft striking home to his heart and staining its
feathering all crimson in his life blood. Yet there was no hint of
perturbation in the affected languor of his voice; he bowed slightly and
spoke:
"What a sorry marksman! See! I will give you a final chance to hit the
gold. Make the most of it, for here in Doom no man's hair grows long
enough to hide a nicked ear."
He threw back his cloak of crimson cloth and unbuttoned the white,
ruffled shirt that he wore underneath, exposing his naked throat and
breast. And not an eyelash quivered, while he stood there for the space
in which one might count a score slowly.
"As you please, then," he continued, readjusting his garments with
punctilious care. "I must warn you, however, that standing so long in
this chilly air may mean the influenza for me. By the Shining One! if we
keep on like this the interest due on our little account is likely to
exceed in amount the original principal. That would be a pity as
happening between gentlemen, who know naturally nothing of what they
call business and have no desire to cheat each other."
[Illustration: "AN INSTANT LATER THE BOWSTRING TWANGED"]
Then he laughed heartily, unaffectedly. "What a comedy! and you and I
cast for the fools in it. Which is the bigger one neither of us should
be willing to say. And for the best of reasons, we don't know. My
compliments, brother imbecile, and so good-day."
Quinton Edge doffed his hat as though to intimate that the interview was
at an end, then stepped lightly across the hedge of arrows and proceeded
at an even pace to the eastern angle of the fortress, around which he
disappeared.
Ulick's eyes were sparkling as he turned to Constans.
"He is at least a man," he said, half proudly, half enviously.
But Constans only set his teeth the harder. "I could have gone out, met
him face to face and killed him," he said, sombrely, "only for you and
your Esmay."
XIII
GODS IN EXILE
February, and a full three months since Constans had come to Doom. And
yet he was virtually at his starting-point, so little had he been able
to accomplish along the line of his purpose. A dozen times indeed he
might have planted an arrow between the delicately shrugged shoulders of
Master Quinton Edge as he strolled, of a sunshiny morning, along the
Palace Road, surrounded by his little body-guard of flatterers and
political courtiers. But such an act would have stained his honor
without fully satisfying his vengeance; he did not want to strike until
he should know where it would hurt the most.
It had been Ulick always who had stood in the road; Ulick with his
eternal lamentations over the maid Esmay. Together they had searched for
her in every possible quarter. But where was one to look first in this
wilderness of stone? It would have been an obvious procedure to have
kept close watch upon the movements of Quinton Edge, whose complicity
was a matter of reasonable suspicion. But the first attempts at
shadowing him had resulted in nothing, and early in December the _Black
Swan_, with Quinton Edge himself in command, had left her moorings in
the Greater river, bound doubtless on some piratical expedition.
It was an added aggravation of Constans's impatience that Ulick himself
was ordered away at the end of January. He had been drafted to take part
in a raid, and since the route of the proposed foray led far to the
southward he would probably be absent for a considerable time. It would
take a fortnight's hard riding for the band to reach the distant colony
against which the attack had been planned, and fully six weeks would be
required in which to drive the cattle home. Two full months, then, and
as yet only one had passed; the returning raiders would not cross the
High Bridge much before the first day in April.
As the weeks went heavily on, Constans, in spite of his philosophy,
began to fret and chafe. He could put in a part of each day in the
library poring over his books and digging out the ancient wisdom from
the printed page by sheer force of will. But there always came a time
when only physical exertion would have any effect in dispelling the
mental disquietude that possessed him, and then he would throw aside his
books and walk the empty streets for hours.
The weather continued bad, bitter cold alternating with storms of rain
and sleet. Towards the end of January the snow came in earnest: it lay a
foot deep on the level, and the Doomsmen, after their custom, kept
closely within doors. Constans would occasionally note a few fresh
tracks along the Palace Road, and the smoke that curled steadily from
scattered chimney-pots and the bivouac fires on the Citadel Square might
be taken as evidence that the suspension of social activities was only
temporary. But for the present, at least, Constans had the city to
himself, and he wandered about as he chose without a thought of
possible danger.
An anxiously longed-for discovery was the reward of one of these lonely
excursions. In a shop that had once been devoted to the sale of
fire-arms, Constans found a quantity of ammunition of a caliber that
would fit the chambers of his revolver. The cartridges had been packed
in hermetically sealed cases, presumably for export-shipment or upon a
special order. However that might be, the precaution had prevented the
deterioration of the powder, and the ammunition was consequently, in
condition for use. Constans nerved himself to make the experiment, but
although his studies had made him well acquainted with the theory of the
explosive projectile, he had to summon all his resolution for the actual
pulling of the trigger.
The detonation that followed startled him out of his self-possession. He
dropped the pistol, and was out of the shop and half way across the
street before he could recover himself. Then, ashamed of his cowardice,
he forced himself to pick up the weapon and went forward to examine the
two-inch plank at which he had taken aim. To his astonishment and
delight he saw that a hole had been drilled clean through the solid oak
and the bullet itself was lying on the ground, flattened from its impact
with the masonry behind the planking. All this, let it be said again,
was perfectly familiar to Constans in theory, but its realization in
fact gave him a strange thrill. A score of men armed with these large
caliber pistols, or, better still, rifles, might easily enough compel
the surrender or bring about the destruction of the entire fighting
force of the Doomsmen.
Inspired by this new thought, Constans made a thorough examination of
the stock of arms in the shop. To his disappointment he found most of
the rifles in unserviceable condition, covered with rust and verdigris.
Finally, however, he came across a dozen carbines carefully wrapped and
packed for a prospective shipment across the ocean. Protected by their
heavy coverings the weapons had suffered comparatively little damage,
and Constans spent the best part of a week in cleaning them and getting
the mechanism of their working parts into tolerable order.
Later on, Constans removed the serviceable ammunition, amounting to
several hundred rounds, to a convenient hiding-place in the cellar of a
building fronting on the Lesser or Eastern river, and he also
transported thither the carbines, the latter carefully wrapped in
greased rags to preserve them from dampness. Some day the opportunity
would come to put these things to use. And now, February had passed, and
March was well into its third quarter; in a few more days the returning
sun would cross the line, and spring, the time for action, would be at
hand. How he longed for its advent.
This was the third occasion upon which Constans had noticed that
peculiar noise, a continuous, deep, humming note, such as might have
been made by swarming-bees multiplied a hundredfold. On the day that he
first heard it he happened to be walking three blocks to the westward of
the Citadel Square, and it seemed then that the seat of the mystery lay
almost due south. A week later he happened to be in the same locality.
Once more, those deep-toned vibrations smote upon his ears; now the
sound-waves were all about him and the sense of direction was lost;
again, and they plainly proceeded from somewhere to the eastward. It was
perplexing, but the varying quarter and strength of the wind might be
sufficient to account for the difference, and in one curious particular
the two observations corresponded. The day of the week in each case had
been Friday, and the humming noise had commenced at precisely the same
time--the passing of the sun over the meridian.
To-day was the third successive Friday, and Constans had made
preparations for the careful noting of the phenomenon should it reoccur.
He waited with a lively sense of expectation, and he was not
disappointed. At high noon the humming began again, and it seemed to be
louder than when he had listened to it on the two former occasions--the
air was full of the vibrant droning. There was a sinister quality, too,
in its monotone, and Constans for the moment felt himself swayed by a
gust of superstitious terror. He recalled the traditions current among
the House-dwellers, the belief that Doom was inhabited not only by the
outlaws but by demons of many a grewsome sort and kind. There were
strange tales of lights that lured the wanderer onward, only to vanish
as the victim sank into some frightful abyss; of invisible hands that
plucked at the rash intruder's skirts; of monstrous shapes that leered
and gabbled behind the traveller's back and were only blocks of stone
when he turned to face them; of bloodless creatures that one might meet
in the full flood of day, and whose unearthly character was only to be
proved by observing that they cast no shadow in even the brightest
sunlight; of vampires and ghouls and fair women with enchanting voices,
who enticed their victims into blind passageways and then changed
suddenly to foul, harpy-like monsters. But in this latter case the
foolish one had only himself to blame, for if he kept on the lookout he
could always detect the masquerade by observing the creature's hands.
The harpies could transform themselves in every other way, but their
claws remained unchanged, and they were, consequently, obliged to cover
them with gloves. "Beware the gloved hand," was a familiar aphorism
among the wise women of the West Inch, and Constans, shaken in spite of
himself by the remembrance of these old fables, felt the sweat break out
upon his forehead, for all that the wind blew shrewdly cold.
Yet as he waited and listened and still nothing happened his natural
good-sense reasserted itself. Overhead a glorious winter sun was
shining; as everybody knew, the sirens never sang until after dark, and
assuredly they were accustomed to give a much more artistic performance.
His courage re-established, curiosity asserted her rights; he must
discover the source and nature of this mystery, and so he proceeded
cautiously in the direction from whence it now appeared to come, a
course that led him south by east for perhaps ten of the city blocks.
Constans found himself a short distance below the Citadel Square and in
a quarter of the city that he had never yet explored. Suddenly he came
upon a large building of brick covering a full square in area but only
two stories in height. As he approached the humming noise grew louder
and louder; the secret, whatever it was, lay concealed behind those
common-place-looking walls. Constans held his breath and went forward
slowly.
The street, upon which the main elevation of the building faced was an
unusually wide one, and directly in front of the entrance to the
structure the snow had been cleared away from a circular space whose
diameter was about forty feet. In this enclosure were three women whose
costume, a dark gray cloak and scarlet hood, proclaimed them to be of
the Doomsmen. They were kneeling on the hard pavement, and kept
alternately bowing their foreheads to the ground and then bringing the
upper body to a vertical position, the arms extended and the palms
turned outward. The movements were done in time to the rhythmic throb of
the mysterious humming, and undoubtedly the ceremony possessed some
religious significance.
For perhaps ten minutes Constans stood motionless, watching the scene.
Then, together, the women rose to their feet and approached a rude,
block-shaped structure of stone that apparently served as an altar. Upon
it each in turn laid her gift, some article of food, and immediately
departed. In his eagerness to see what would follow, Constans stepped
boldly around the corner, and so came within the view of a man who had
just made his exit from the building.
It was too late to retreat, and Constans stood his ground, noting that
the stranger seemed equally astonished with himself at the encounter. An
elderly man, to judge by the whitening beard, but his eye was bright and
searching, and there was no hint at superannuation in either port or
movement. He was dressed in a long skirtlike garment of black
cloth--true priest garb--and for a girdle he wore a length of hempen
rope tied in the peculiar and sinister fashion known as the "hangman's
knot." Around his neck, suspended like a priest's stole, hung a steel
chain with pendent manacles or handcuffs that jangled unmusically as he
moved. A grotesque, almost ridiculous figure this priest of the
Doomsmen, but with the first look into the man's face one forgot about
the fantastic garb. A singular contradiction it presented, for the
large, square jaw was indicative of a mind keenly rationalistic, while
the high, narrow forehead assuredly proclaimed the partisan and the
bigot.
It was the elder man who broke the silence.
"The time is long since a man of the Doomsmen has appeared to pay his
vows to the Shining One. You are welcome, my son."
Constans wondered if he had heard aright. Then he remembered that he was
wearing a suit of Ulick's clothes and that his hair was cut after the
Doomsmen fashion. It was a comfortable assurance of the merit of his
disguise that it had passed muster so easily; he had only to guard
against talking too much, and detection was practically impossible. So
he contented himself with what might pass for an obeisance and some
vague words of apology. The priest, however, paid no attention to his
excuses, but continued in a tone of sarcastic bitterness:
"Strange that you should think it worth while to seek a god who is
served only by women. Yet the Shining One seems neither to know nor to
care that the sons of the Doomsmen come no longer into his presence
chamber and bring no gifts to his altar. A god forsaken by his people, a
neglected shrine, a worn-out creed--why, indeed, should any one do
reverence to such things as these? Yet you have come."
"I--my father----" stammered Constans. "There are reasons; I will
explain----"