Page:Weird Tales Volume 26 Number 01 (1935-07).djvu/23

"Guards! Guards!" yelled Karnath, but again I only laughed.

"You sent them away yourself, so that they might not hear you kill me. Now they will not hear me kill you."

Etain darted to the door but I was ahead of her and flung her back and locked the door swiftly. Then I turned.

Karnath came out from behind his desk, raising a heavy lamp wildly to dash down upon my head.

I caught his wrist and forced him to drop it. We struggled there, and though he was the younger by many years, he was a child in my grasp. I was no longer a trembling old man. The strength of every arm in doomed Atlantis seemed in my arm.

My thin hands held his throat with a steely grip he could not break. The woman watched in frozen, paralyzed horror as I stalked steadily, remorselessly, with struggling Karnath to the windows. I forced his head back down over the ledge of the open window, his protruding eyes staring wildly up at me.

"Gods of Atlantis, look down on a sacrifice and an atonement!" I thundered, and flung Karnath clear of the window.

I saw his body go whirling downward through the darkness, and then I turned. Etain was flattened against the wall, her eyes dilated with awful fear, her beauty all lost in horror. But she came forward, glided fearfully closer to me, her eyes pleading.

"Do not slay me, Ulios!" she begged in frantic fear. "You loved me once!"

She came closer, breathlessly wheedling and insinuating.

"Only you and I are left now, Ulios—but we two can still live on immortally. We can still transfer each other's brains to new bodies at need. I will love you, as no woman has loved before. You will do it, Ulios? You will spare me and live on with me?"

I looked at her, and smiled. I took from my pocket a tiny black tablet which I put into my mouth and swallowed.

"What are you doing?" cried Etain.

I told her, "I have just swallowed a subtle poison. In an hour I will be dead, for my vengeance and atonement are finished. You are part of that atonement, Etain. You are not going to die, you are going to live on by yourself in that body, and grow old in it. Yes, you shall experience that thing you feared most of all in the world, that to prevent which you betrayed Atlantis. You shall grow old!"

I walked to the door and unlocked it. "I go now to complete the record of my sin and my atonement which I have written, and then to die. Farewell, Etain."

"Ulios!" she cried, and as I went out of the door and closed it behind me I heard her hoarse scream again.

"Ulios!"