Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 2 (1925-08).djvu/33

for state occasions, sar, an' they are made out of glass."

Through the stunned horror of the white man there came a curious sound. It was the raja, laughing. He was laughing at the jest of a man trying to buy his own life and the death of a woman with bits of colored glass which were paste and not precious stones at all. He was particularly amused at the white man's trying to buy the death of a woman who had offered a very great price for her life. She had offered him a son, concerning whom she had wished to make prayers to the god Khayandra. It diverted the raja of Barowak to think of a man trying to exchange trumpery bits of trash for so priceless a gift, and he was minded to carry out the jest to its only fitting conclusion, with the aid of the Arthurian Legends and the History of the Spanish Inquisition. He gave orders, laughing uncontrollably . . .

The man with the disheveled hair was staring, now, as if he saw terrifying things. He drank of his green drink and shuddered. Gresham was listening very intently, and perhaps for the first time in his life did not notice that we were becoming a bit conspicuous. The voice of the man with the disheveled hair had grown louder, toward the last.

The raja of Barowak gave orders, laughing, and men departed swiftly north and south and east and west to scour the whole world for red things. They brought red cloths and red woods and red stones and red dyes. And they took whole rivers and made them red with the dyes that they had brought. And then they took the white man and sat him in a red chair, binding him very securely, and so that he could not move, nor even open his jaws to scream. And then for a hundred years they left him.

They did not touch him. They did not beat him. They did not harm him in any smallest way, but from some spot far overhead a tiny drop of red-tinted water fell down upon his head. Once every second it fell, deliberately, inexorably, never late, never early, never varying by the thousandth fraction of an inch from the one spot where it fell.

From taps the blows rose to hammer-blows and then to mighty, horrible collisions that jarred his brain to its very foundations. The inevitable monotony of it grew terrible, horrifying, of a sort to drive away sanity. The white man began to make noises in his throat by the end of the first year. By the hundredth year he was screaming through forcibly closed lips.

Then they took him away, and he slept for a day. And then they took him back for another hundred years, but he was forgotten, and they left him for a thousand generations, while he screamed and screamed and the water fell remorselessly, drop by drop, drop by drop, upon the one same spot upon his skull.

And then he was released for a single day, while he knew that the raja and all his descendants must have died and been forgotten, and hoped that they had forgotten the cause of his doom, or the length of it. But they put him back again and again, and yet again, until he knew that he must wait patiently until all the armies of the world could find no more red dye with which to tint the rivers, and the rivers had run dry, and there was no more water in the earth. He sat on his reddened throne and screamed endlessly because a tiny drop of water fell drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . upon a single tiny spot upon his skull.

And he stayed there for a hundred thousand years.