Page:Weird Tales Volume 2 Number 2 (1923-09).djvu/52
The girl danced no more. She continued to play her piping melody, but the great, mournful eyes beneath the star-crown grew brilliant with slowly forming tears.
CHAPTER ELEVEN THE SACRIFICE
"WHAT the devil good is her weeping, Sig? She deliberately pointed. And that horror knocked poor old TNT into the pit! He's there now. Can't get out. We're locked in here. Thirty minutes at most till noon. And that little Jezebel you're infatuated with comes to weep over him! Who cares how she feels? Actions speak!"
It was morning of the next day. That four of the party, even in the face of that yellow Death, had consented to return to their cells after the abrupt end of last night's grotesque ceremony, had been due to Tellifer's own appeal.
Beyond a few bruises, the latter had not been injured. When the girl, as Waring accused, had deliberately showed her terrible familiar that Tellifer was the evening's appointed victim, the unlucky esthete had been a little apart from his companions, close to the eight-sided pit. The great cephalite or head-shield of the monster had struck Tellifer between the shoulders with battering-ram force.
Knocked off his feet, he had rolled upon one of the treacherous pentagonal slabs that surrounded the sooty pit. He had gone down head first, but, sliding down the steep slope of the bowl, had arrived at the bottom without being stunned.
He had presently replied to the anxious hails of his friends. When it became clear that the latter were required to return to their cells, leaving him in the pit, he had urged them to do so. For them to be slain on the spot could do him no good. And in the hours before Sunfire should again justify its name he might escape from the pit.
Waring had made a gallant effort to join his friend. But he had been blocked by the alert yellow death's-head, and finally allowed himself to be driven back with the others. As the correspondent had been required to release his fellow-slaves, so the girl saw to it that he duly re-shackled and boxed them up. Under the gentle glance of those pitying eyes, Waring had finished the task by adjusting his own fetters and tossing the key out to her. The thing was maddening beyond words, but there had seemed no alternative ave death.
The monster had then been led back to its lair, and the girl had bolted down the bronze cover that debarred its return and departed.
It had seemed that the captive of the pit, left thus unguarded, must surely find some way to climb out and release his companions. Yet dawn had returned, bringing Tellifer's strange executioner to march slowly up the sky, and that means still remained undiscovered. Though the pit was deadly through only a part of the daym alone in it Telllifer was helpless as a beetle at the bottom of a bowl.
As the morning wore on and the temperature of the court slowly rose, Tellifer ceased his efforts to climb out. The time soon came when shouted advice or questions from the cell-rank drew no response. That the victim might be already dead, or in heavy stupor, appeared the best hope left for him.
Small wonder, then, that when a slender form drifted on light feet across the central court, poised beside one of the eight columns, and at last sank down there, a figure of desolate mourning, Waring had cursed her and her grief together. Chivalry was all very well, and Waring was not deficient therein. But a weeping she-fiend who chained him in a stone cell, prepared the agonizing murder of the closest friend, and then came to mourn over her work while watching its progress, seemed to him outside the pale of toleration.
In young Sigsbee, grief for the victim was still strangely united with concern for their betrayer But his view met scant sympathy in any quarter. Otway expressed his own attitude with decision.
"That woman," said he, grimly just, "is acting under compulsion of some sort. Probably, superstitious religious training. But were she what she appears, the revulsion of her nature against all this vile, cold-blooded treachery and cruelty, would not stop at mere weeping. She is of white blood, but she disgraces it. Any Indian woman, feeling as she pretends to feel, would dare the wrath of her people on earth and the gods beyond and be true to the humane instinct. It's no use, Sigsbee! A man is dying in that infernal hole, and she isn't doing a thing to help him-is she?"
"She goes there and cries!" snarled Waring. "Cries over him! And not the bare decency to give him a drink of water. Not a drop of water in nearly eighteen hours! My God, Otway-"
'"Steady, old man. You can be pretty sure he isn't suffering now. The chances are that he won't revive enough to realize what is happening to him. I know that sun. Under that great lens above the pit, and with no water-why, the poor fellow probably went out soon after he stopped answering our hails, two hours ago. Is the girl still hanging about there? I wonder she can endure the heat."
"She's such a kind of queer creature," offered John B. gloomily, "that I don't reckon it's possible to guess what she could or couldn't stand, sir. I've met lots of queer kinds, different places, but I didn't suppose there could be one just like her. She seems to me a lot more horrible than that big centipede, sir."
"She isn't!" cried the youthful Sigsbee despairingly. "She's-Oh, I don't know what she is, but I tell you that girl is not wicked! It's all some abominable mistake!"
"Mistake that poor old TNT is dead or dying there? Mistake that she's hovering over him like-like a weeping vulture?"
"No, she isn't, Waring. She's gone away or at least, I think she has. There's such a glare that a fellow can't see much."
"The focus," Otway observed, "must have been complete for some minutes past. My friends, poor Tellifer is-"
He paused. Indeed, to finish the sentence was needless. The sun, centered now in a brazen sky, had too obviously reached the full altitude of its murderous mission.
Waring was worst hit, but the others felt badly enough. The esthete had been eccentric, fanciful, sometimes more than a little trying; but with all his moods and nerves, he had carried a reckless bravery; there had been a certain odd, innocent loveableness about him.
Dim against the blinding glory beyond, a slender form flitted past the sullenly silent cell rank. To the left, where rose the bronze lever that controlled the great stone bowl, a slight, metallic, grating sound was heard.
Sigsbee and Otway, whose cells were nearest the center, vaguely beheld the phantomlike rising of a huge rounded mass beneath Sunfire.
A few seconds later the faint but unmistakable splash of a solid mass striking water far below reached their ears.
CHAPTER TWELVE REVENGE!
"CUT it, Sig! I'm past caring. That little Jezebel murdered Tellifer! The Woman? Murderess-torturer-she-