Norhala's hand that had gone from my wrist dropped down again; the other
fell upon Drake's.
Kulun loosed his hood, let it fall about his shoulders.
He stepped forward, held out his arms to Norhala.
“A strong man!” she cried approvingly. “Hail--my bridegroom! But
stay--stand back a moment. Stand beside that man for whom I came to
Ruszark. I would see you together!”
Kulun's face darkened. But Cherkis smiled with evil understanding,
shrugged his shoulders and whispered to him. Sullenly Kulun stepped
back. The ring of the archers lowered their bows; they leaped to their
feet and stood aside to let him pass.
Quick as a serpent's tongue a pyramid tipped tentacle flicked out
beneath us. It darted through the broken circle of the bowmen.
It LICKED up Ruth and Ventnor and--Kulun!
Swiftly as it had swept forth it returned, coiled and dropped those two
I loved at Norhala's feet.
It flashed back on high with the scarlet length of Cherkis's son
sprawled along its angled end.
The great body of Cherkis seemed to wither.
Up from all the wall went a tempestuous sigh of horror.
Out rang the merciless chimes of Norhala's laughter.
“Tchai!” she cried. “Tchai! Fat fool there. Tchai--you Cherkis! Toad
whose wits have sickened with your years!
“Did you think to catch me, Norhala, in your filthy web? Princess!
Queen! Empress of Earth! Ho--old fox I have outplayed and beaten, what
now have you to trade with Norhala?”
Mouth sagging open, eyes glaring, the tyrant slowly raised his arms--a
suppliant.
“You would have back the bridegroom you gave me?” she laughed. “Take
him, then.”
Down swept the metal arm that held Kulun. The arm dropped Cherkis's son
at Cherkis's feet; and as though Kulun had been a grape--it crushed him!
Before those who had seen could stir from their stupor the tentacle
hovered over Cherkis, glaring down at the horror that had been his son.
It did not strike him--it drew him up to it as a magnet draws a pin.
And as the pin swings from the magnet when held suspended by the head,
so swung the great body of Cherkis from the under side of the pyramid
that held him. Hanging so he was carried toward us, came to a stop not
ten feet from us--
Weird, weird beyond all telling was that scene--and would I had the
power to make you who read see it as we did.
The animate, living Shape of metal on which we stood, with its forest of
hammer-handed arms raised menacingly along its mile of spindled length;
the great walls glistening with the armored hosts; the terraces of that
fair and ancient city, their gardens and green groves and clustering
red and yellow-roofed houses and temples and palaces; the swinging gross
body of Cherkis in the clutch of the unseen grip of the tentacle, his
grizzled hair touching the side of the pyramid that held him, his arms
half outstretched, the gemmed cloak flapping like the wings of a jeweled
bat, his white, malignant face in which the evil eyes were burning slits
flaming hell's own blackest hatred; and beyond the city, from which
pulsed almost visibly a vast and hopeless horror, the watching
column--and over all this the palely radiant white sky under whose light
the encircling cliffs were tremendous stony palettes splashed with a
hundred pigments.
Norhala's laughter had ceased. Somberly she looked upon Cherkis, into
the devil fires of his eyes.
“Cherkis!” she half whispered. “Now comes the end for you--and for all
that is yours! But until the end's end you shall see.”
The hanging body was thrust forward; was thrust up; was brought down
upon its feet on the upper plane of the prostrate pyramid tipping the
metal arm that held him. For an instant he struggled to escape; I
think he meant to hurl himself down upon Norhala, to kill her before he
himself was slain.
If so, after one frenzied effort he realized the futility, for with
a certain dignity he drew himself upright, turned his eyes toward the
city.
Over that city a dreadful silence hung. It was as though it cowered, hid
its face, was afraid to breathe.
“The end!” murmured Norhala.
There was a quick trembling through the Metal Thing. Down swung its
forest of sledges. Beneath the blow down fell the smitten walls,
shattered, crumbling, and with it glittering like shining flies in a
dust storm fell the armored men.
Through that mile-wide breach and up to the inner barrier I glimpsed
confusion chaotic. And again I say it--they were no cowards, those men
of Cherkis. From the inner battlements flew clouds of arrows, of huge
stones--as uselessly as before.
Then out from the opened gates poured regiments of horsemen, brandishing
javelins and great maces, and shouting fiercely as they drove down upon
each end of the Metal Shape. Under cover of their attack I saw cloaked
riders spurring their ponies across the plain to shelter of the cliff
walls, to the chance of hiding places within them. Women and men of
the rich, the powerful, flying for safety; after them ran and scattered
through the fields of grain a multitude on foot.
The ends of the spindle drew back before the horsemen's charge,
broadening as they went--like the heads of monstrous cobras withdrawing
into their hoods. Abruptly, with a lightning velocity, these broadenings
expanded into immense lunettes, two tremendous curving and crablike
claws. Their tips flung themselves past the racing troops; then like
gigantic pincers began to contract.
Of no avail now was it for the horsemen to halt dragging their mounts on
their haunches, or to turn to fly. The ends of the lunettes had met,
the pincer tips had closed. The mounted men were trapped within
half-mile-wide circles. And in upon man and horse their living
walls marched. Within those enclosures of the doomed began a frantic
milling--I shut my eyes--
There was a dreadful screaming of horses, a shrieking of men. Then
silence.
Shuddering, I looked. Where the mounted men had been was--nothing.
Nothing? There were two great circular spaces whose floors were
glistening, wetly red. Fragments of man or horse--there was none.
They had been crushed into--what was it Norhala had promised--had been
stamped into the rock beneath the feet of her--servants.
Sick, I looked away and stared at a Thing that writhed and undulated
over the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and spheres
linked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramid. Through the
fields, over the plain its coils flashed.
Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them,
tossing them aside broken, gliding over them. Some there were who
hurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it,
praying. On rolled the metal convolutions, inexorable.
Within my vision's range there were no more fugitives. Around a corner
of the broken battlements raced the serpent Shape. Where it had writhed
was now no waving grain, no trees, no green thing. There was only smooth
rock upon which here and there red smears glistened wetly.
Afar there was a crying, in its wake a rumbling. It was the column, it
came to me, at work upon the further battlements. As though the sound
had been a signal the spindle trembled; up we were thrust another
hundred feet or more. Back dropped the host of brandished arms, threaded
themselves into the parent bulk.
Right and left of us the spindle split into scores of fissures. Between
these fissures the Metal Things that made up each now dissociate and
shapeless mass geysered; block and sphere and tetrahedron spike spun and
swirled. There was an instant of formlessness.
Then right and left of us stood scores of giant, grotesque warriors.
Their crests were fully fifty feet below our living platform. They
stood upon six immense, columnar stilts. These sextuple legs supported
a hundred feet above their bases a huge and globular body formed of
clusters of the spheres. Out from each of these bodies that were at one
and the same time trunks and heads, sprang half a score of colossal arms
shaped like flails; like spike-studded girders, Titanic battle maces,
Cyclopean sledges.
From legs and trunks and arms the tiny eyes of the Metal Hordes flashed,
exulting.
There came from them, from the Thing we rode as well, a chorus of thin
and eager wailings and pulsed through all that battle-line, a jubilant
throbbing.
Then with a rhythmic, JOCUND stride they leaped upon the city.
Under the mallets of the smiting arms the inner battlements fell as
under the hammers of a thousand metal Thors. Over their fragments and
the armored men who fell with them strode the Things, grinding stone and
man together as we passed.
All of the terraced city except the side hidden by the mount lay open to
my gaze. In that brief moment of pause I saw crazed crowds battling
in narrow streets, trampling over mounds of the fallen, surging over
barricades of bodies, clawing and tearing at each other in their flight.
There was a wide, stepped street of gleaming white stone that climbed
like an immense stairway straight up the slope to that broad plaza at
the top where clustered the great temples and palaces--the Acropolis of
the city. Into it the streets of the terraces flowed, each pouring out
upon it a living torrent, tumultuous with tuliped, sparkling little
waves, the gay coverings and the arms and armor of Ruszark's desperate
thousands seeking safety at the shrines of their gods.
Here great carven arches arose; there slender, exquisite towers capped
with red gold--there was a street of colossal statues, another over
which dozens of graceful, fretted bridges threw their spans from
feathery billows of flowering trees; there were gardens gay with
blossoms in which fountains sparkled, green groves; thousands upon
thousands of bright multicolored pennants, banners, fluttered.
A fair, a lovely city was Cherkis's stronghold of Ruszark.
Its beauty filled the eyes; out from it streamed the fragrance of its
gardens--the voice of its agony was that of the souls in Dis.
The row of destroying shapes lengthened, each huge warrior of metal
drawing far apart from its mates. They flexed their manifold arms,
shadow boxed--grotesquely, dreadfully.
Down struck the flails, the sledges. Beneath the blows the buildings
burst like eggshells, their fragments burying the throngs fighting for
escape in the thoroughfares that threaded them. Over their ruins we
moved.
Down and ever down crashed the awful sledges. And ever under them the
city crumbled.
There was a spider Shape that crawled up the wide stairway hammering
into the stone those who tried to flee before it.
Stride by stride the Destroying Things ate up the city.
I felt neither wrath nor pity. Through me beat a jubilant roaring
pulse--as though I were a shouting corpuscle of the rushing hurricane,
as though I were one of the hosts of smiting spirits of the bellowing
typhoon.
Through this stole another thought--vague, unfamiliar, yet seemingly
of truth's own essence. Why, I wondered, had I never recognized this
before? Why had I never known that these green forms called trees were
but ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences? That these high projections of
towers, these buildings were deformities?
That these four-pronged, moving little shapes that screamed and ran
were--hideous?
They must be wiped out! All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmonious
ugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth unbroken
planes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness--harmonies of arc and line and
angle!
Something deep within me fought to speak--fought to tell me that this
thought was not human thought, not my thought--that it was the reflected
thought of the Metal Things!
It told me--and fiercely it struggled to make me realize what it was
that it told. Its insistence was borne upon little despairing, rhythmic
beatings--throbbings that were like the muffled sobbings of the drums of
grief. Louder, closer came the throbbing; clearer with it my perception
of the inhumanness of my thought.
The drum beat tapped at my humanity, became a dolorous knocking at my
heart.
It was the sobbing of Cherkis!
The gross face was shrunken, the cheeks sagging in folds of woe; cruelty
and wickedness were wiped from it; the evil in the eyes had been washed
out by tears. Eyes streaming, bull throat and barrel chest racked by his
sobbing, he watched the passing of his people and his city.
And relentlessly, coldly, Norhala watched him--as though loath to lose
the faintest shadow of his agony.
Now I saw we were close to the top of the mount. Packed between us
and the immense white structures that crowned it were thousands of the
people. They fell on their knees before us, prayed to us. They tore at
each other, striving to hide themselves from us in the mass that was
themselves. They beat against the barred doors of the sanctuaries; they
climbed the pillars; they swarmed over the golden roofs.
There was a moment of chaos--a chaos of which we were the heart.
Then temple and palace cracked, burst; were shattered; fell. I caught
glimpses of gleaming sculptures, glitterings of gold and of silver,
flashing of gems, shimmering of gorgeous draperies--under them a
weltering of men and women.
We closed down upon them--over them!
The dreadful sobbing ceased. I saw the head of Cherkis swing heavily
upon a shoulder; the eyes closed.
The Destroying Things touched. Their flailing arms coiled back, withdrew
into their bodies. They joined, forming for an instant a tremendous
hollow pillar far down in whose center we stood. They parted; shifted
in shape? rolled down the mount over the ruins like a widening
wave--crushing into the stone all over which they passed.
Afar away I saw the gleaming serpent still at play--still writhing
along, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that some
way, somehow, had slipped by the Destroying Things.
We halted. For one long moment Norhala looked upon the drooping body of
him upon whom she had let fall this mighty vengeance.
Then the metal arm that held Cherkis whirled. Thrown from it, the
cloaked form flew like a great blue bat. It fell upon the flattened
mound that had once been the proud crown of his city. A blue blot upon
desolation the broken body of Cherkis lay.
A black speck appeared high in the sky; grew fast--the lammergeier.
“I have left carrion for you--after all!” cried Norhala.
With an ebon swirling of wings the vulture dropped beside the blue
heap--thrust in it its beak.