Daughter of the Sun Part 27

"It's tonight or never to make a break for it," he decided as he followed her.

They were pa.s.sing the block of jasper, the ancient stone of sacrifice.

Zoraida went by first; Kendric was pa.s.sing when an impulse prompted him to put out a sudden hand for the keen edged knife of obsidian. He slipped it into his belt and hid the haft with his coat. If it came to an ambush, to an attack in the dark, a revolver bullet might fly wild while the wide sweep of a knife blade would somehow find a sheath in something more palpable than thin air.

They went on, returning along the way they had come. When the gardens of the golden Tezcucan were behind them and a door barred Kendric experienced a sense of relief, even though the tunnels were ahead of him. He kept close to Zoraida, prepared for any sort of trickery and with no desire to have her whisk suddenly through a door somewhere and slam it in his face. His one urgent prayer was for a breath of the open; just then the consummation of human happiness seemed to him to be freedom on horseback somewhere out in the mountains with the whole of the wide starry sky generously roofing the world. He thought of Betty--and he thought, too, of the six little boys doomed to count themselves happy back yonder where at most the sun shone down upon them a few minutes of the day.

Never once did Zoraida turn, not once did she speak as they hastened on. What little he saw of her face where there was lamplight showed him hard set muscles. At last they were again in the house which was hushed as though untenanted or as though its occupants were asleep or dead. He could fancy Bruce in some remote room, tricked by some false message of Zoraida's, eagerly expecting her, hungering for her lying explanations; he could picture Barlow, glowering, but awaiting her, too. Well, the time had pa.s.sed when he could largely concern himself with them and what they did and thought. Tonight he must serve himself, and Betty. If she would listen to him.

Presently he saw where it was that Zoraida was conducting him. He remembered the dim ante-room in which they paused a moment while Zoraida fastened the door behind them; then, the curtain thrown aside, they were again in that barbaric, tapestry-hung chamber in which, the first night here, he had been brought before her. As before the ruby upon the thin crystal stem shone like a burning red eye.

Now, for the first time since they had turned away from the golden Tezcucan's treasure chamber, was Kendric given a full, clear view of Zoraida's face. During their progress many thoughts had come and gone swiftly through his mind; now as they two stood looking steadily at each other, he realized clearly that one matter and one alone had occupied her. No abatement of cruelty had come into her long eyes; no flush of color had swept away the cold whiteness of her cheek. She was set in a merciless determination, relentlessly hard; the colorless face resulted from a frozen heart. Before now Kendric had seen murder staring out of a man's widened eyes; now he saw it in a woman's.

For the instant only she had looked at him as though she were probing into his secret thought and there swept over him the old, disquieting sensation that each thought in his mind lay as clear to her look as a white pebble in a sunlit pool. Then her eyes pa.s.sed on, beyond him.

He turned and saw the hangings parted at that spot where Zoraida had appeared to him that other time; one of the brutish, squat forms which Kendric remembered, stood in the opening.

Zoraida spoke with the man swiftly, her voice hard and sharp. A quick change came into the heavy, thick-lipped face; the stupid eyes brightened; the face was distorted as by some hideous antic.i.p.ation.

Zoraida ended what she had to say; the man spoke gutturally, nodding his head. Then he dropped the curtain and was gone.

Zoraida went to her black chair with the crystal b.a.l.l.s for feet and sat stiffly, her ringed fingers tapping restlessly upon the wide arms.

Presently the man returned, carrying a wide flat box. Thereafter, while Zoraida watched him impatiently, he occupied himself after a fashion which Kendric found inexplicable. From the box the man took a number of rectangular mirrors, fine clear gla.s.s framed with thin bands of ebony. Deftly, into a groove made in the back of each mirror, he slipped the end of a tall ebony rod. Then he rolled back the heavy rug from two thirds of the floor. The floor was of stone, laid fancifully in colored mozaic; here and there, seemingly placed utterly at random, were smooth round holes in the stone blocks. Into each hole the haft of one of the rods was thrust so that when the man stepped back to survey his handiwork there was a little forest of mirrors on glistening stems grown up in apparent lack of design, like young pines on a tableland.

Then Zoraida rose and went from one of the gla.s.ses to another, turning them a little to right or left, adjusting painstakingly, seeming to read the meaning of some fine lines scratched in the stone floor. Her eyes were like a mad woman's. She herself moved her chair, shoving it from the rug to the bare floor, careful that each supporting crystal sphere rested exactly upon a chosen spot. Her retainer handed her a small stool; she placed it and, since it was near the spot where he stood, Kendric made out the four crosses where the four legs were to go. Then Zoraida went swiftly back to her chair.

As she sat down she called again sharply to the squat brute who served her. His broad ugly teeth showed white in his animal grin; he ran across the room and swept back the curtains draping the wall. They were laced to rings along the upper edge and the rings ran on a long rod. As they were whipped back they disclosed no ordinary wall but a great expanse of mirror extending from floor to ceiling, from corner to corner. When two other walls were exposed they too resolved themselves into clearly reflecting surfaces.

"Clap-trap again," muttered Kendric, beginning to feel a strange dread in his heart and growing angry with it and determined that Zoraida should not guess.

"Be seated," commanded Zoraida sternly. "If you would see what amus.e.m.e.nt is being offered a friend of yours!"

One by one the lamps were being put out by the hasty hand of the fellow whom Kendric began to long to strangle; he could hear a low guttural gurgling sort of noise rising from the thick throat, issuing from the monstrous mouth. Zoraida did not appear to hear but sat rigid, waiting. At last, when all but one opaque shaded lamp were extinguished and the room was cast into shadowy gloom, Kendric, impelled by environment, a curious dread and perhaps the will of Zoraida, sat down on the stool.

"Clap-trap, you say!" scoffed Zoraida. "Watch the first mirror!"

At first the mirror reflected nothing save the shadowy room and a vague, half-seen line of other mirrors. But while Kendric watched there came a swift change. Somewhere a lamp had been lighted--several lamps, for there was a brilliant light. He saw reflected what appeared to be a small room with a door in one wall. He saw the door open and a man come in; it was either the man who just now had obeyed Zoraida's commands or his twin-fellow. The man began hooking together what appeared to be several frames of steel bars. Working swiftly he shaped them into a steel cage hardly larger than to accommodate a man standing. Kendric's heart leaped and then stood still. He remembered words which Juanita, terrified by idle threat from him, had spoken.

He sat like a man in a trance. The dim mirrors seemed unreal. What he saw elsewhere--was it a reflected reality or was his mind under the spell of Zoraida's? Was she through hypnosis projecting a lying image into his groping consciousness? Absolutely, he did not know. He drew his eyes away from the vision of that room and turned them questioningly upon Zoraida. Stern she was and rigid and white, a dim figure in that dim light save alone for her eyes; they burned ominously, glowing like a cat's.

A quick shifting of the image in the gla.s.s jerked back his straying attention. The man had completed his brief labors with the steel frames which now made a strong cage; he shook the bars with his hand as though trying them, and they were firm in their places. He opened a section which turned on hinges so that a narrow door swung back. Then he drew away and across the room. And now the remarkable thing was that though he moved several paces, still he remained in full view at the center of the mirror.

Plainly in a complicated series of reflectors there were mirrors which were being turned as the man moved, cunningly and skilfully adjusted to his slow progress; otherwise would he have pa.s.sed out of the scope of Kendric's vision. As it was, the cage slid away out of view, an uncanny sort of thing since it had the appearance of gliding under a will of its own.

Presently, however, the man opened a door in the wall and was gone.

For an instant the mirror darkened; then the light flashed back and Kendric was treated to a broken procession of images which set him marveling. First he saw straight into the heart of the gardens of the golden Tezcucan; he saw the sacrificial stone; he saw one of the old men approach it and pa.s.s by; he saw the treasure chamber. Again he stared at Zoraida, again the fear was upon him that she had mastered his mind with hers, that what he fancied he saw was but what she willed him to imagine. For he could not ignore the long tunneled distance they had traversed, the dark pa.s.sageways, the heavy doors with their ma.s.sive locks. And yet his reason told him that to a mind like Zoraida's as he began to believe it, a brain filled with ancient craft and perhaps a strain of madness, actuated by such dark impulses as certainly must abide there, the actual physical accomplishment of this sort of parlor magic was a thing in keeping. There would be small tube-like holes through walls, angled with reference to other mirrors; there would be scientific arrangement; there would be, somewhere in the great house, a sort of operating room, a room of mirrors with a trained hand to manipulate them. Perhaps, with modern reflectors, she but improved on some fancy of an ancient king who sought to guard himself against treachery or his h.o.a.rdings against the hand of his treasurers.

Again and again, as Kendric sat watching, the mirrors darkened and grew bright again, with always a new image. He saw the room in which he had spent a long day immured and knew then that had Zoraida been of the mind she could have sat here in her private room and have observed every move he made. He saw still another room and in it Bruce pacing up and down, up and down, swinging suddenly to look eagerly at his door; he saw Barlow's back as Barlow stared out of a window--somewhere.

"Thus Zoraida knows what goes forward in her own house," said Zoraida, speaking for the first time. Kendric, struck with a new thought, looked about the room everywhere, seeking to locate the necessary opening in the wall through which came the reflections from mirrors in other places. But the great gla.s.ses covering three of the walls presented what appeared to be smooth, unbroken surfaces; where the fourth wall was tapestry-draped there was no sign of an opening; neither floor nor ceiling, places offering no detail but blurred with vague shadows, showed him what he sought.

"Watch closely!" said Zoraida.

Again it was the small room of the steel cage. The savage-looking man in the short tunic was there again. He looked watchful, tense, not altogether at his ease. In one hand was a heavy whip; in the other a pistol. Kendric thought of the animal trainers he had seen at circuses. The man's eyes were on the door through which he had come.

So vivid were old images bred now of a.s.sociations of ideas that Kendric had no doubt of what small head with fierce eyes would appear next; he could prevision the lithe puma, in its quick nervous movements, the lashing of the heavy tail and the glint of the teeth. And so when he saw what it was that entered, he sat back for a moment limp and the next sprang to his feet. It was Betty.

Betty clothed strangely and with a face dead white, with eyes to haunt a man. She wore a loose red robe, sleeveless, falling no lower than her ankles; her bare feet were in sandals. Her hair was down; about her brows was a black band that might have been ebony or velvet; into it was thrust a large white flower.

Betty was speaking. Kendric had dropped back into his chair, having lost sight of her when he stood. He saw that she was speaking swiftly, supplicatingly; her hands were clasped; all this he could see but no slightest sound came to him. He could not tell if she were near or far. He began to realize the exquisite torture which Zoraida might offer a man through her mirrors.

He saw the squat brute's wide grin that was as hideous as the puma's could be; all of the teeth he saw and they were glistening and sharp, unusually sharp for a human being. And then he saw Betty pushed forward though she shrank back at first with dragging feet and though then, suddenly galvanized, she fought wildly. But two big hands locked tight on her arms and as powerless as a child of six she was thrust into the steel cage, the door snapped after her. She stood looking wildly about her; her lips opened as she must have screamed; she dropped her face into her hands. Kendric saw the white flower fall.

Again the man looked to the door through which he and then Betty had entered. And now came the puma. It ran in, snarling; it was looking back over its shoulder as though someone had whipped it into the room.

It saw another enemy armed with whip and pistol and sidled off with still greater show of dripping fangs. All this in dead silence so far as Kendric was concerned; never the faintest sound coming to him. The whip was flung out and snapped, and there was no sound; the puma's teeth clicked together on empty air, and no sound; Betty, looking up, shrieked, and no sound. They looked to be so close to Kendric that he felt as if with one stride he could hurl himself among them; and yet he knew that they might be shut off from him by innumerable walls and locked and barred doors. He saw Betty so plainly that until he reasoned with himself he felt that she must see him.

"A puma will not attack a human being." Kendric sought to speak as though merely contemptuous of Zoraida's entertainment. "They are cowardly brutes."

"The puma," said Zoraida, "is starving. Further, he has been driven mad by men who whipped and then appeared to run, frightened of him.

Watch."

The man threatening the puma slipped out through the door behind him.

The door closed. Betty and the animal were alone. The great cat lay down and looked at her with its hard, unwinking eyes, only its slow tail moving back and forth like a bit of mechanism clock-regulated.

Presently the puma lifted its head and began a horrible sniffing; it lifted itself gradually from the floor; it drew a step nearer Betty's cage and sniffed again. Kendric could see Betty draw back the few inches made possible by the narrow confines of the cage, could see that again she screamed.

"A little fresh blood has been sprinkled on the floor of the cage,"

said Zoraida. "A little of it is on the gown she wears. It will not be overlong to watch. Are you growing impatient?"

"Are you mad?" he burst out. "Good G.o.d, do you mean to let this go on?"

"Am I mad?" Her eyes, slowly turned to his, looked it. "Perhaps. Who that is mad knows he is mad? And who, my friend, is sane? Do I mean to let this go on?" She laughed at him, and the sound was as hard as the tinkle of bits of jangling gla.s.s. "You have but to be patient to know."

The puma sniffed again, again drew closer. Betty was tight pressed against the far bars shutting her in, and even so had the great cat thrust a claw forward she could not withdraw beyond the reach of the ripping talons. The cat circled her. Always Betty turned with it, her eyes upon its eyes, her eyes that were large and fixed with terror.

"A puma is patient, more patient than a man," said Zoraida. "It may be an hour; it may be all night before it strikes. It may be a night and a day, and still another night and day. Its hunger does not diminish as time pa.s.ses! Or," and she shrugged with a great showing of her indifference, "it may strike now, at any moment. That is one of the things that makes the moment tense for that white-faced little fool in there. Imagine when she is worn out, if it lasts that long; when sleep will no longer flee because of terror; and when I command that the light shall be extinguished where she is! You see, she must be thinking all those things."

The sweat broke out on Kendric's forehead, he felt as though ice ran in his veins. If he only knew where all this was going on! Was it above him or below, to right or left? Ten steps or a hundred yards away?

"By G.o.d----" he shouted. But only Zoraida's merciless laughter answered him.

"I had to choose between this and the ancient stone of sacrifice," she told him. "Have I not chosen well?"

The puma had been still. Now again it moved and its feet had quickened, it glided with ever-increasing swiftness, it came close to the steel bars, it showed more of its sharp, tearing, dripping teeth.

"Betty!" shouted Kendric. "I----"

He knew that Betty could not hear, that he could do nothing. Nothing?

As the thought framed he leaped to his feet and in the grip of such a rage as even he had never known, hurled himself across the few paces between him and Zoraida.

"You have the way to stop this d.a.m.ned thing!" His hands, like claws, were thrust before her face. "You will stop it."

Even in his headlong rage there were cool cells in his brain. He saw the quick significant look Zoraida shot over his shoulder and turned; there behind him stood one of the squat brutes who did her bidding.

Kendric saw something in the man's hand but did not reck whether it was gun or knife or club or something else. He whipped about and struck.