[Illustration]
THE SLAYER OF SOULS
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
AUTHOR OF “IN SECRET,” “THE COMMON LAW,” “THE RECKONING,” “LORRAINE,”
ETC.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
_Copyright, 1920,
By Robert W. Chambers_
_Copyright, 1919, 1920, by International Magazine Company_
_Printed in the United States of America_
TO
MY FRIEND
GEORGE ARMSBY
I
Mirror of Fashion,
Admiral of Finance,
Don’t, in a passion,
Denounce this poor Romance;
For, while I dare not hope it might
Enthuse you,
Perhaps it will, some rainy night,
Amuse you.
II
So, your attention,
In poetry polite,
To my invention
I bashfully invite.
Don’t hurl the book at Eddie’s head
Deep laden,
Or Messmore’s; you might hit instead
Will Braden.
III
Kahn among Canners,
And Grand Vizier of style,
Emir of Manners,
Accept—and place on file—
This tribute, which I proffer while
I grovel,
And honor with thy matchless Smile
My novel.
R. W. C.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. THE YEZIDEE
CHAPTER II. THE YELLOW SNAKE
CHAPTER III. GREY MAGIC
CHAPTER IV. BODY AND SOUL
CHAPTER V. THE ASSASSINS
CHAPTER VI. IN BATTLE
CHAPTER VII. THE BRIDAL
CHAPTER VIII. THE MAN IN WHITE
CHAPTER IX. THE WEST WIND
CHAPTER X. AT THE RITZ
CHAPTER XI. YULUN THE BELOVED
CHAPTER XII. HIS EXCELLENCY
CHAPTER XIII. SA-N’SA
CHAPTER XIV. A DEATH-TRAIL
CHAPTER XV. IN THE FIRELIGHT
CHAPTER XVI. THE PLACE OF PRAYER
CHAPTER XVII. THE SLAYER OF SOULS
THE SLAYER OF SOULS
CHAPTER I
THE YEZIDEE
Only when the _Nan-yang Maru_ sailed from Yuen-San did her terrible
sense of foreboding begin to subside.
For four years, waking or sleeping, the awful subconsciousness of
supreme evil had never left her.
But now, as the Korean shore, receding into darkness, grew dimmer and
dimmer, fear subsided and grew vague as the half-forgotten memory of
horror in a dream.
She stood near the steamer’s stern apart from other passengers, a
slender, lonely figure in her silver-fox furs, her ulster and smart
little hat, watching the lights of Yuen-San grow paler and smaller
along the horizon until they looked like a level row of stars.
Under her haunted eyes Asia was slowly dissolving to a streak of vapour
in the misty lustre of the moon.
Suddenly the ancient continent disappeared, washed out by a wave
against the sky; and with it vanished the last shreds of that accursed
nightmare which had possessed her for four endless years. But whether
during those unreal years her soul had only been held in bondage, or
whether, as she had been taught, it had been irrevocably destroyed, she
still remained uncertain, knowing nothing about the death of souls or
how it was accomplished.
As she stood there, her sad eyes fixed on the misty East, a passenger
passing—an Englishwoman—paused to say something kind to the young
American; and added, “if there is anything my husband and I can do it
would give us much pleasure.” The girl had turned her head as though
not comprehending. The other woman hesitated.
“This is Doctor Norne’s daughter, is it not?” she inquired in a
pleasant voice.
“Yes, I am Tressa Norne.... I ask your pardon.... Thank you, madam:—I
am—I seem to be—a trifle dazed——”
“What wonder, you poor child! Come to us if you feel need of
companionship.”
“You are very kind.... I seem to wish to be alone, somehow.”
“I understand.... Good-night, my dear.”
Late the next morning Tressa Norne awoke, conscious for the first time
in four years that it was at last her own familiar self stretched out
there on the pillows where sunshine streamed through the porthole. All
that day she lay in her bamboo steamer chair on deck. Sun and wind
conspired to dry every tear that wet her closed lashes. Her dark,
glossy hair blew about her face; scarlet tinted her full lips again;
the tense hands relaxed. Peace came at sundown.
That evening she took her Yu-kin from her cabin and found a chair on
the deserted hurricane deck.
And here, in the brilliant moonlight of the China Sea, she curled up
cross-legged on the deck, all alone, and sounded the four futile
strings of her moon-lute, and hummed to herself, in a still voice, old
songs she had sung in Yian before the tragedy. She sang the tent-song
called _Tchinguiz_. She sang _Camel Bells_ and _The Blue
Bazaar_,—children’s songs of the Yiort. She sang the ancient Khiounnou
song called “The Saghalien”:
_I_
_In the month of Saffar_
_Among the river-reeds_
_I saw two horsemen_
_Sitting on their steeds._
_Tulugum!_
_Heitulum!_
_By the river-reeds_
_II_
_In the month of Saffar_
_A demon guards the ford._
_Tokhta, my Lover!_
_Draw your shining sword!_
_Tulugum!_
_Heitulum!_
_Slay him with your sword!_
_III_
_In the month of Saffar_
_Among the water-weeds_
_I saw two horsemen_
_Fighting on their steeds._
_Tulugum!_
_Heitulum!_
_How my lover bleeds!_
_IV_
_In the month of Saffar,_
_The Year I should have wed—_
_The Year of The Panther—_
_My lover lay dead,—_
_Tulugum!_
_Heitulum!_
_Dead without a head._
And songs like these—the one called “Keuke Mongol,” and an ancient air
of the Tchortchas called “The Thirty Thousand Calamities,” and some
Chinese boatmen’s songs which she had heard in Yian before the tragedy;
these she hummed to herself there in the moonlight playing on her
round-faced, short-necked lute of four strings.
Terror indeed seemed ended for her, and in her heart a great
overwhelming joy was welling up which seemed to overflow across the
entire moonlit world.
She had no longer any fear; no premonition of further evil. Among the
few Americans and English aboard, something of her story was already
known. People were kind; and they were also considerate enough to
subdue their sympathetic curiosity when they discovered that this young
American girl shrank from any mention of what had happened to her
during the last four years of the Great World War.
It was evident, also, that she preferred to remain aloof; and this
inclination, when finally understood, was respected by her fellow
passengers. The clever, efficient and polite Japanese officers and crew
of the _Nan-yang Maru_ were invariably considerate and courteous to
her, and they remained nicely reticent, although they also knew the
main outline of her story and very much desired to know more. And so,
surrounded now by the friendly security of civilised humanity, Tressa
Norne, reborn to light out of hell’s own shadows, awoke from four years
of nightmare which, after all, perhaps, never had seemed entirely
actual.
And now God’s real sun warmed her by day; His real moon bathed her in
creamy coolness by night; sky and wind and wave thrilled her with their
blessed assurance that this was once more the real world which
stretched illimitably on every side from horizon to horizon; and the
fair faces and pleasant voices of her own countrymen made the past seem
only a ghastly dream that never again could enmesh her soul with its
web of sorcery.
And now the days at sea fled very swiftly; and when at last the Golden
Gate was not far away she had finally managed to persuade herself that
nothing really can harm the human soul; that the monstrous devil-years
were ended, never again to return; that in this vast, clean Western
Continent there could be no occult threat to dread, no gigantic menace
to destroy her body, no secret power that could consign her soul to the
dreadful abysm of spiritual annihilation.
Very early that morning she came on deck. The November day was
delightfully warm, the air clear save for a belt of mist low on the
water to the southward.
She had been told that land would not be sighted for twenty-four hours,
but she went forward and stood beside the starboard rail, searching the
horizon with the enchanted eyes of hope.
As she stood there a Japanese ship’s officer crossing the deck,
forward, halted abruptly and stood staring at something to the
southward.
At the same moment, above the belt of mist on the water, and perfectly
clear against the blue sky above, the girl saw a fountain of gold fire
rise from the fog, drift upward in the daylight, slowly assume the
incandescent outline of a serpentine creature which leisurely uncoiled
and hung there floating, its lizard-tail undulating, its feet with
their five stumpy claws closing, relaxing, like those of a living
reptile. For a full minute this amazing shape of fire floated there in
the sky, brilliant in the morning light, then the reptilian form faded,
died out, and the last spark vanished in the sunshine.
When the Japanese officer at last turned to resume his promenade, he
noticed a white-faced girl gripping a stanchion behind him as though
she were on the point of swooning. He crossed the deck quickly. Tressa
Norne’s eyes opened.
“Are you ill, Miss Norne?” he asked.
“The—the Dragon,” she whispered.
The officer laughed. “Why, that was nothing but Chinese day-fireworks,”
he explained. “The crew of some fishing boat yonder in the fog is
amusing itself.” He looked at her narrowly, then with a nice little bow
and smile he offered his arm: “If you are indisposed, perhaps you might
wish to go below to your stateroom, Miss Norne?”
She thanked him, managed to pull herself together and force a ghost of
a smile.
He lingered a moment, said something cheerful about being nearly home,
then made her a punctilious salute and went his way.
Tressa Norne leaned back against the stanchion and closed her eyes. Her
pallor became deathly. She bent over and laid her white face in her
folded arms.
After a while she lifted her head, and, turning very slowly, stared at
the fog-belt out of frightened eyes.
And saw, rising out of the fog, a pearl-tinted sphere which gradually
mounted into the clear daylight above like the full moon’s phantom in
the sky.
Higher, higher rose the spectral moon until at last it swam in the very
zenith. Then it slowly evaporated in the blue vault above.
A great wave of despair swept her; she clung to the stanchion, staring
with half-blinded eyes at the flat fog-bank in the south.
But no more “Chinese day-fireworks” rose out of it. And at length she
summoned sufficient strength to go below to her cabin and lie there,
half senseless, huddled on her bed.
When land was sighted, the following morning, Tressa Norne had lived a
century in twenty-four hours. And in that space of time her agonised
soul had touched all depths.
But now as the Golden Gate loomed up in the morning light, rage,
terror, despair had burned themselves out. From their ashes within her
mind arose the cool wrath of desperation armed for anything, wary,
alert, passionately determined to survive at whatever cost, recklessly
ready to fight for bodily existence.
That was her sole instinct now, to go on living, to survive, no matter
at what price. And if it were indeed true that her soul had been slain,
she defied its murderers to slay her body also.
That night, at her hotel in San Francisco, she double-locked her door
and lay down without undressing, leaving all lights burning and an
automatic pistol underneath her pillow.
Toward morning she fell asleep, slept for an hour, started up in awful
fear. And saw the double-locked door opposite the foot of her bed
slowly opening of its own accord.
Into the brightly illuminated room stepped a graceful young man in full
evening dress carrying over his left arm an overcoat, and in his other
hand a top hat and silver tipped walking-stick.
With one bound the girl swung herself from the bed to the carpet and
clutched at the pistol under her pillow.
“Sanang!” she cried in a terrible voice.
“Keuke Mongol!” he said, smilingly.
For a moment they confronted each other in the brightly lighted
bedroom, then, partly turning, he cast a calm glance at the open door
behind him; and, as though moved by a wind, the door slowly closed. And
she heard the key turn of itself in the lock, and saw the bolt slide
smoothly into place again.
Her power of speech came back to her presently—only a broken whisper at
first: “Do you think I am afraid of your accursed magic?” she managed
to gasp. “Do you think I am afraid of you, Sanang?”
“You are afraid,” he said serenely.
“You lie!”
“No, I do not lie. To one another the Yezidees never lie.”
“You lie again, assassin! I am no Yezidee!”
He smiled gently. His features were pleasing, smooth, and regular; his
cheek-bones high, his skin fine and of a pale and delicate ivory
colour. Once his black, beautifully shaped eyes wandered to the
levelled pistol which she now held clutched desperately close to her
right hip, and a slightly ironical expression veiled his gaze for an
instant.
“Bullets?” he murmured. “But you and I are of the Hassanis.”
“The third lie, Sanang!” Her voice had regained its strength. Tense,
alert, blue eyes ablaze, every faculty concentrated on the terrible
business before her, the girl now seemed like some supple leopardess
poised on the swift verge of murder.
“Tokhta!”[1] She spat the word. “Any movement toward a hidden weapon,
any gesture suggesting recourse to magic—and I kill you, Sanang,
exactly where you stand!”
“With a pistol?” He laughed. Then his smooth features altered subtly.
He said: “Keuke Mongol, who call yourself Tressa Norne,—Keuke—heavenly
azure-blue,—named so in the temple because of the colour of your
eyes—listen attentively, for this is the Yarlig which I bring to you by
word of mouth from Yian, as from Yezidee to Yezidee:
“Here, in this land called the United States of America, the Temple
girl, Keuke Mongol, who has witnessed the mysteries of Erlik and who
understands the magic of the Sheiks-el-Djebel, and who has seen Mount
Alamout and the eight castles and the fifty thousand Hassanis in white
turbans and in robes of white;—_you_—Azure-blue eyes—heed the
Yarlig!—or may thirty thousand calamities overtake you!”
There was a dead silence; then he went on seriously: “It is decreed:
You shall cease to remember that you are a Yezidee, that you are of the
Hassanis, that you ever have laid eyes on Yian the Beautiful, that you
ever set naked foot upon Mount Alamout. It is decreed that you remember
nothing of what you have seen and heard, of what has been told and
taught during the last four years reckoned as the Christians reckon
from our Year of the Bull. Otherwise—my Master sends you this for
your—_convenience_.”
Leisurely, from under his folded overcoat, the young man produced a
roll of white cloth and dropped it at her feet and the girl shrank
aside, shuddering, knowing that the roll of white cloth was meant for
her winding-sheet.
Then the colour came back to lip and cheek; and, glancing up from the
soft white shroud, she smiled at the young man: “Have you ended your
Oriental mummery?” she asked calmly. “Listen very seriously in your
turn, Sanang, Sheik-el-Djebel, Prince of the Hassanis who, God knows
when and how, have come out into the sunshine of this clean and decent
country, out of a filthy darkness where devils and sorcerers make earth
a hell.
“If you, or yours, threaten me, annoy me, interfere with me, I shall go
to our civilised police and tell all I know concerning the Yezidees. I
mean to live. Do you understand? You know what you have done to me and
mine. I come back to my own country alone, without any living kin,
poor, homeless, friendless,—and, perhaps, damned. I intend,
nevertheless, to survive. I shall not relax my clutch on bodily
existence whatever the Yezidees may pretend to have done to my soul. I
am determined to live in the body, anyway.”
He nodded gravely.
She said: “Out at sea, over the fog, I saw the sign of Yu-lao in fire
floating in the day-sky. I saw his spectral moon rise and vanish in
mid-heaven. I understood. But——” And here she suddenly showed an edge
of teeth under the full scarlet upper lip: “Keep your signs and your
shrouds to yourself, dog of a Yezidee!—toad!—tortoise-egg!—he-goat with
three legs! Keep your threats and your messages to yourself! Keep your
accursed magic to yourself! Do you think to frighten me with your
sorcery by showing me the Moons of Yu-lao?—by opening a bolted door? I
know more of such magic than do you, Sanang—Death Adder of Alamout!”
Suddenly she laughed aloud at him—laughed insultingly in his
expressionless face:
“I saw you and Gutchlug Khan and your cowardly Tchortchas in
red-lacquered jackets slink out of the Temple of Erlik where the bronze
gong thundered and a cloud settled down raining little yellow snakes
all over the marble steps—all over you, Prince Sanang! You were
_afraid_, my Tougtchi!—you and Gutchlug and your red Tchortchas with
their halberds all dripping with human entrails! And I saw you mount
and gallop off into the woods while in the depths of the magic cloud
which rained little yellow snakes all around you, we temple girls
laughed and mocked at you—at you and your cowardly Tchortcha horsemen.”
A slight tinge of pink came into the young man’s pale face. Tressa
Norne stepped nearer, her levelled pistol resting on her hip.
“Why did you not complain of us to your Master, the Old Man of the
Mountain?” she asked jeeringly. “And where, also, was your Yezidee
magic when it rained little snakes?—What frightened you away—who had
boldly come to seize a temple girl—you who had screwed up your courage
sufficiently to defy Erlik in his very shrine and snatch from his
temple a young thing whose naked body wrapped in gold was worth the
chance of death to you?”
The young man’s top-hat dropped to the floor. He bent over to pick it
up. His face was quite expressionless, quite colourless, now.
“I went on no such errand,” he said with an effort. “I went with a
thousand prayers on scarlet paper made in——”
“A lie, Yezidee! You came to seize _me_!”
He turned still paler. “By Abu, Omar, Otman, and Ali, it is not true!”
“You lie!—by the Lion of God, Hassini!”
She stepped closer. “And I’ll tell you another thing you fear—you
Yezidee of Alamout—you robber of Yian—you sorcerer of Sabbah Khan, and
chief of his sect of Assassins! You fear this native land of mine,
America; and its laws and customs, and its clear, clean sunshine; and
its cities and people; and its police! Take that message back. We
Americans fear nobody save the true God!—nobody—neither Yezidee nor
Hassani nor Russ nor German nor that sexless monster born of hell and
called the Bolshevik!”
“Tokhta!” he cried sharply.
“Damn you!” retorted the girl; “get out of my room! Get out of my
sight! Get out of my path! Get out of my life! Take that to your Master
of Mount Alamout! I do what I please; I go where I please; I live as I
please. And if I please, _I turn against him_!”
“In that event,” he said hoarsely, “there lies your winding-sheet on
the floor at your feet! Take up your shroud; and make Erlik seize you!”
“Sanang,” she said very seriously.
“I hear you, Keuke-Mongol.”
“Listen attentively. I wish to live. I have had enough of death in
life. I desire to remain a living, breathing thing—even if it be
true—as you Yezidees tell me, that you have caught my soul in a net and
that your sorcerers really control its destiny.
“But damned or not, I passionately desire to live. And I am coward
enough to hold my peace for the sake of living. So—I remain silent. I
have no stomach to defy the Yezidees; because, if I do, sooner or later
I shall be killed. I know it. I have no desire to die for others—to
perish for the sake of the common good. I am young. I have suffered too
much; I am determined to live—and let my soul take its chances between
God and Erlik.”
She came close to him, looked curiously into his pale face.
“I laughed at you out of the temple cloud,” she said. “I know how to
open bolted doors as well as you do. And I know _other things_. And if
you ever again come to me in this life I shall first torture you, then
slay you. Then I shall tell all!... and unroll my shroud.”
“I keep your word of promise until you break it,” he interrupted
hastily. “Yarlig! It is decreed!” And then he slowly turned as though
to glance over his shoulder at the locked and bolted door.
“Permit me to open it for you, Prince Sanang,” said the girl
scornfully. And she gazed steadily at the door.
Presently, all by itself, the key turned in the lock, the bolt slid
back, the door gently opened.
Toward it, white as a corpse, his overcoat on his left arm, his stick
and top-hat in the other hand, crept the young man in his faultless
evening garb.
Then, as he reached the threshold, he suddenly sprang aside. A small
yellow snake lay coiled there on the door sill. For a full throbbing
minute the young man stared at the yellow reptile in unfeigned horror.
Then, very cautiously, he moved his fascinated eyes sideways and gazed
in silence at Tressa Norne.
The girl laughed.
“Sorceress!” he burst out hoarsely. “Take that accursed thing from my
path!”
“What thing, Sanang?” At that his dark, frightened eyes stole toward
the threshold again, seeking the little snake. But there was no snake
there. And when he was certain of this he went, twitching and trembling
all over.
Behind him the door closed softly, locking and bolting itself.
And behind the bolted door in the brightly lighted bedroom Tressa Norne
fell on both knees, her pistol still clutched in her right hand,
calling passionately upon Christ to forgive her for the dreadful
ability she had dared to use, and begging Him to save her body from
death and her soul from the snare of the Yezidee.