Part 3

Shirkuh nodded and made a gesture. The faint, whimpering music became louder. Among the plucked strings of _sitar_ and _oudh_ Farrell could distinguish the notes of a wind instrument that was a mockery of a woman's voice. The drums muttered and purred in complex rhythm.

The adepts were swaying from their hips, and making statuesque passes and gestures that resembled an animation of the figures of Egyptian sculpture. Their glassily staring eyes shifted in regular cadence to follow their darting finger tips. They were as revivified corpses that had not yet gained full control of their bodies.

Then they lifted their voices in a chant like the wailing of ghouls imprisoned in a looted tomb; dead brazen faces chanting to the dead. And Shirkuh, arms extended, made antiphonal responses in a voice that surged and thundered like a distant surf.

The notes of that diabolical wind instrument behind the arras became more and more like the voice of a woman: a mellow sweetness against a background of sepulchral wailing and the solemn intonation of Shirkuh.

"Good Lord, Pierre, that's awful!" muttered Farrell.

"Wait until it fairly starts," countered d'Artois in a whisper. "This is primitive magic. Very primitive, but deadly. They are imitating that which they design to accomplish.

"_Pardieu_, hear that damnable pipe--_her_ very voice, now. They imitate in music and symbolize in their chant the triumph of the dead as they return from Beyond."

That satanically sweet voice was now almost articulate. Farrell strained his ears as he leaned forward, clutching the arms of his chair. He sought to distinguish the words that it spoke. And then another instrument came into play: a hoarse, reverberant roaring like the lustful bellowing of pre-Adamite monsters. The hall trembled with that terrific bestial blast.

The fumes of the censers were swirling and twining like fantasmal serpents in the ghastly blueness, weaving arabesques, spiralling in vortices, gathering about that hellish sextet and its leader like shapes from beyond the border clamoring at the periphery of a necromancer's pentacle.

A luminous haze was gathering and drawing to itself the censer fumes. The nebulous iridescence pulsed and quivered like a sentient thing. It throbbed with the slow, persistent beat of a turtle's heart after it has been removed from the body. It elongated; then as it slowly settled, that amorphous luminescence took shape: the graceful form of La Dorada.

The pipe that mimicked a woman's voice was articulating now in unison, joining the necromancer's antiphonal answer to the chanting adepts and the minotaurean bellowing of that monstrous horn.

The master had called her, and she was there.

The phantom presence slowly merged with the nacreous body of La Dorada. The dead woman shivered for a moment, extended her shapely arms, sat erect on the bier. Her cry was a mingling of exultation and bewilderment; then she accepted the hand that Shirkuh offered her, and splendid in her unclad beauty, sprang gracefully to the dais.

[Illustration: "_The dead woman shivered for a moment, then sat erect on the bier._"]

The music and the chanting and the bestial roaring of that terrific horn had ceased. The assembled thaumaturges sat fixed and staring as though their life and their spiritual essence had been torn from them and given to the dead who saluted them with a gesture and a bow.

Shirkuh smiled triumphantly.

"You have seen, Brethren. I called her and she came. And I am but Shirkuh, the least of the slaves. See, she is alive, with the warmth and beauty that at noon of this very day was a coldness, and a sister of the dust."

The red-gold head inclined in affirmation, and her smile was a slow, curved sorcery.

"Good God, that's the awfulest blasphemy!" muttered Farrell. "Or is it an illusion?"

"It is all too real," whispered d'Artois.

* * * * *

And then she spoke: "I have come back from the shadows and from the blackness of death. I have come to greet you and to say that there is a Garden to which I must soon return. And those who meet me there need not ever think of farewell.

"I came from across the narrow bridge, and back across it I must go. Yet not this time to any blackness, but to the Garden, to be the Bride and the reward and the welcome of those who believe. Oh, _Fedawi_ ... Devoted Ones...."

La Dorada, lovely in death, and more alluring than ever in life: yet a cold horror clutched Farrell as he heard that dead woman's caressing voice entrance the thaumaturges with promises that no human woman could fulfill or even imagine. Her voice was a poison sweetness, a full-throated richness that pronounced the beguilements of Lilith chanting to the Morning Star.

"Death so loved me that he has allowed me to leave," she said in that wondrous voice that had made her the darling of Paris. And then her exultant tones became a poignant sorrow as she continued, "But the beloved of death must return...."

"_Cordieu!_ That is a foulness beyond mention!" growled d'Artois. Then:

"Let's go! Before we go utterly mad----"

He leaped to his feet and thrust back his chair. And as Farrell followed, he expected at any instant a fanatical outburst, the flash of blades, the crackle of pistols. But the thaumaturges sat like the ancient dead awaiting the newly died.

La Dorada was ascending the bier. Her motions were graceful, but very slow, as though the animation was being drained from her body. She was dying a second time.

This as they paused at the threshold for a backward glance; then, advancing, Farrell and d'Artois sighed deeply, and strode to the Renault. The hideous life-like unreality had dazed them.

"_Dieu de Dieu!_" muttered d'Artois as he glanced at Farrell's lean, drawn features, and shoulders drooping as though from the weight of the Persian mail they had so needlessly worn. "What did that blasphemous monster want with us? Did he hope to drive us to madness?"

"No," said Farrell wearily. "He was mocking us. Certainly he didn't withhold his cutthroats because he was afraid to try."

* * * * *

The long beam of the headlights swept the château, then picked up the winding road as the car headed back toward the city. D'Artois sat hunched behind the wheel. Farrell shivered at the memory of that ghastly loveliness that had greeted them from the grave.

"I know she was dead," reiterated Farrell. "She couldn't have been alive. Not with that dagger I saw jammed into her breast this afternoon. But why did he invite you? What everlastingly damned mummery--there's something behind all this--she's going to greet them in the Garden and there will be no farewell--was that all illusion, or----"

Farrell slumped back against the cushions and made a gesture of bewilderment and futility.

They left the river road, passed through the Mousserole Gate, and threaded their way through the unsavory quarters between there and the Nive. As they crossed the first of the seven bridges that span the river, d'Artois suddenly jerked back from his crouch behind the wheel.

"_Nom de Dieu!_" he exclaimed.

Farrell, aroused by the note of alarm, glanced at his companion and saw that the horror on his face was in keeping with the consternation in his voice.

The car leaped forward as d'Artois stepped on the accelerator.

"Death and damnation!" he shouted above the full-throated roar of the motor. "We sat there like dummies. _That_ is what he wanted!"

"What?" demanded Farrell, tense, and alarmed by d'Artois' contagious excitement. A sudden fear seized him.

"A trap. Not for your worthless head nor mine, but for her! Thaumaturgy! If there is but one greater damn fool than Glenn Farrell, it is Pierre d'Artois!"

They passed the plaza, and with a screech of brakes slowed down enough to make the turn at rue Port Neuf. Then up rue d'Espagne, around the hairpin turn, and thence down the street along the city wall. Again the brake linings smoked their wrath and squealed their protest. Fuming and cursing in a high rage, d'Artois leaped to the curbing, dashed up the steps, and pounded Antoinette Delatour's door with the butt of his pistol.

"_Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?_" cried the terrified, bewildered maid.

"Flames and damnation! Open, quick!" demanded d'Artois. "_C'est moi!_"

"But she is sleeping," protested the maid, still half asleep.

"Hasten, then. If she sleeps, wake her--is she indeed----"

And as the door yielded, d'Artois, pistol in hand, charged up the stairs, taking them three at a time. Farrell was but a jump behind him.

They pounded on Antoinette's door. No response.

"The key----" began d'Artois.

But Farrell stepped back, gathered himself, and charged the door. It resisted the shock; but a second assault burst it open, tearing the lock from its socket.

The floor of Antoinette's room was covered with fallen plaster. Her bed was empty. A hole two feet square yawned in the ceiling. The turquoise and silver slippers mocked them.

"Gone!" muttered Farrell.

"While we sat there ready for an ambush that didn't materialize," added d'Artois.

Farrell turned to the door. D'Artois seized him by the arm.

"_Tenez!_ If you are going to tear the château to pieces," he said, "spare yourself the trouble. They have taken her elsewhere. No effort was made to detain us when we left because none was necessary. And they will not be at the château, not any of them."

Farrell's eyes were cold as sword-points as they flashed back again to the empty, canopied bed. Then the slaying rage left him.

"Right, Pierre," he admitted. "It's your move. With some head-work."

"Head-work, indeed!" retorted d'Artois with a bitter, mordant laugh. "It was my head-work that led to this. We should have watched her."

_5. Ibrahim Khan_

"Now, where do we start?" demanded Farrell the following morning, as he tasted the strong coffee that was to banish the remains of the nightmarish sleep from which sunrise had awakened them. "You've got the _Sûreté_--that's what you call your detective bureau, isn't it?--on the trail. But there's a lot of this that no honest policeman could swallow."

"It is indeed a madhouse," admitted d'Artois. "But let us sum up for a moment: Antoinette is evidently _en rapport_ with some one in that Garden; some one with whom she identifies herself, and whose savage beatings in some way leave marks on Antoinette's body.

"By means of clairvoyance or other unusual perception, she recognized the Marquis in her dream garden, her description of which tallies closely with the traditional paradise devised by the higher Ismailians for the deluding of their fanatical assassins.

"Assassins operating very much like the _fedawi_ of five centuries ago murdered La Dorada, the sweetheart of the Marquis. La Dorada bears a marked resemblance to Antoinette, though far from enough to make her a double, except under the most favorable conditions.

"The terribly resurrected La Dorada last night spoke of a Garden. And the dying La Dorada pronounced the name Hassan just before she expired in the plaza. Through the whole chain of horror and deviltry, we see a continuous linkage of the Ismailians and the _hasheeshin_ of accursed memory.

"Antoinette," continued d'Artois, "must in some way be involved in a mesh of necromancy and murder that hinges on her resemblance to La Dorada. It is not impossible that she was kidnapped to double for La Dorada in that accursed Garden.

"And finally," concluded d'Artois, "this society of thaumaturges, which has made such overgrown fools of us, is obviously allied to or even an integral part of the society of Ismailians and its higher orders, adepts, occultists, necromancers, and devil-mongers of all degrees."

"Now that you've summed it up, what are we going to do?" reiterated Farrell.

"You will take the trail at once," replied d'Artois.

Farrell brightened perceptibly at the hint of direct action.

"Shoot," he said bruskly.

"_Mais non_," countered d'Artois, "it is you who will shoot if my plan is right. You are deft at disguise, and you speak several Oriental languages like a native."

D'Artois paused, intently studied the lean, bronzed features of his friend, and his cold gray eyes.

"An Arab," he muttered. "Possible, but not so good. A Kurd ... yes, that would be better."

"Wrong!" contradicted Farrell. "There were some Kurds at the château last night, notably that hell-hound of a Shirkuh. And the first of the assassins I shot down in the plaza was a Kurd. Too many of them in the picture. I might be tripped on their dialect."

"An Afghan, then," compromised d'Artois. "They are Aryans, and our blood brothers, those Afghans. You will loiter around the waterfront. I will warn the _Sûreté_ to arrest you at times, but to release you for lack of evidence; so be careful not to be too brazen in building up a local background of feuds and slayings to substantiate your supposed reason for having left your native hills.

"It is a slim chance; but it is possible that you will stumble across some Ismailian who will favorably mark your possibilities. In the meanwhile, I will keep in touch with you as much as possible.

"But remember, one false move will betray your mission. And the first warning you will receive will be a dagger jammed very deeply into your back. You are flirting with sudden death the moment you leave this house."

* * * * *

That afternoon Farrell lurched from a doorway that the most vivid imagination could not have associated with the house of Pierre d'Artois. The shape of his eyebrows had been changed by judicious plucking. His hair had been dyed, and the cut of his mustaches altered. Tenacious, finely powdered pigments had been rubbed into his eyelids and about his eyes so as to change their expression: all trifles, yet the total effect, aided by the drunken swagger, the gestures, the reek of _'araki_ and foreign tobacco, was that Glenn Farrell had disappeared, and that a hard, haggard, quarrelsome Afghan sobering up from a spree strode muttering down rue Saint Augustin, and thence toward the _quai_ along the Adour.

He found fishing-vessels, tramps from Algiers, and a _zaroug_ that had sailed all the way from the Red Sea with its crew of stout Danakils. Husayn, its _nakhoda_, was a lean, grizzled Arab whose manner suggested pearl-poaching, smuggling, or slave-running from the Somali Coast to Arabia, with piracy thrown in for good measure.... Husayn spoke of his health, which forbade further traffic on the Red Sea....

There was a Levantin, oily and cringing, who peddled narcotics....

There were brawls along the waterfront. No true Afghan would or could abstain. A fight was a fight.

Very soon the waterfront boasted a new character, a quarrelsome Afghan, drunken, bawdy, stranded, swearing loudly by the honor of the Durani clan, and ready for any skulduggery. Ibrahim Khan, they called him.

Once in a while some whining cadger of drinks would mutter as Ibrahim Khan reviled him and tossed him a franc. That was a member of the _Sûreté_ giving, and receiving, the lack of news that is falsely said to be good news. Sometimes it was warning, but never encouragement.

The quarter of the city that lies between the Nive and the Mousserole Wall is so disreputable that during the war it was out of bounds for soldiers. It is a district of narrow, dingy streets, dirty cafés, bawdy-houses of the lowest order; it abounds in cheap wine, cheaper women, and all the scum and riffraff of a polyglot border-and-seaport town.

While the upper stratum of the enemy was doubtless of high degree, the foundation layer would be in the mire. The underworld of France would furnish its quota for the lower order of assassins. The master mind needed dirty tools for dirty work; and here, among the thieves, pimps, cutthroats of beyond the river, the trail might be picked up.

Ibrahim Khan sat in one of the dingiest of those unsavory resorts, muttering in Pushtu and Arabic and broken French, alternately gross and poetic as he courted the attention of Marcelle, the barmaid whose coarse, buxom loveliness drew trade for all departments of the house.

"Tie your husband to a rope, Bimbar, Tie the rope to a tree; Throw the tree in the river, Bimbar, And come to your lover."

Thus he chanted in amorous, wine-muddled accents, the whole stanza in one breath, and, in the Afghan fashion, ending in a high-pitched, gasping cry, a full octave higher.

The girl did not understand the words; but there was one sitting in the corner who did.

"Oh, my brother," he murmured, and spat contemptuously, "are such as that sister of pigs fit for the pride of the Durani clan?"

Ibrahim Khan's hand flashed to the hilt of one of the knives that bristled in his belt. But before he could draw, the thin-faced man smiled.

"Put that knife away, brother," he said. "I have news for you."

"Well?" interrogated Ibrahim Khan a little less belligerently. "Out with it."

"Softly, softly," murmured the stranger. Ibrahim Khan had never seen him along the waterfront, or in the Mousserole quarter. "I am Nureddin. I have been interested in your handiness in certain matters ... and Husayn, the _nakhoda_, speaks well of you----"

"He should, Allah blacken him!" admitted Ibrahim Khan, who under his layer of grime was Glenn Farrell, trembling with eagerness to follow up what he sensed was the first open move to take the bait he had so patiently and thus far vainly offered the enemy.

"There are women," continued Nureddin, "lovelier than the brides of paradise."

Farrell laughed contemptuously, and made an insulting remark that left little doubt as to his opinion of Nureddin's profession: but that was to play his part as a truculent Afghan.

"Nay, by Allah!" protested Nureddin with a good-humored laugh. "It is not what you think. Follow me, if you have courage."

Farrell scrutinized Nureddin for an instant. Whatever game Nureddin might be playing, it would certainly not be for small counters. Then Farrell, still feigning skepticism, drew from the pocket of his grimy, ill-fitting suit a small pouch, hefted it so that the gold it contained clinked softly. He tossed the money to Marcelle.

"_Ya_ Nureddin, I will fight as eagerly for my naked hide as for a pouch of gold. Now if you still want me to meet your friends, I will entertain them royally, _inshallah_!"

Nureddin smiled and stroked his chin.

"By Allah, O Afghan, you are suspicious. Follow me."

"Lead on," agreed Farrell.

* * * * *

He followed Nureddin to the street and thence to an alley so narrow that with his outstretched arms he could at the same time touch the buildings on both sides: and the narrowness was exceeded only by the stench. Nureddin halted at the end of the alley. A heavy, iron-bound door barred further progress.

"From here you must go blindfolded," said Nureddin.

"By your beard!" mocked Farrell as his hand flashed into view with a pistol whose cavernous muzzle gaped ominously. "Perhaps you would like to bind my hands also? Now, forward! Or I will blow thy teeth right and left ... if it so please Allah," he concluded piously.

"Fire!" retorted Nureddin. "The Master would give me a less pleasant death for disobeying his orders."

In the moonlight Farrell could see the perspiration that glittered on Nureddin's forehead; but he did not flinch.

"_La, billahi!_" ejaculated Farrell after a moment. "Were there a blood feud between us, I would. But as it is----" He shrugged, holstered his pistol, and turned, to stalk down the narrow alley.

Farrell was certain, now, that he was on the right trail. But since spies are notoriously eager to agree to anything and everything to gain admittance to forbidden doors, Farrell had to play the blustering, alternately suspicious and fool-hardy Afghan. He swaggered away in his lordly fashion, presenting his back as a fair target for hurled knife, or pistol fire.

"_Ya_ Ibrahim!" protested Nureddin. "Be reasonable. _He_ ordered. It is on my head----"

"_He_, whoever he is," retorted Farrell, "may then seek me himself and I will induce him to change his rules. _Wallah!_ And your head, that is no more than a ball to play with!"

"Oh, well, have it your own way," agreed Nureddin resignedly as Farrell again turned. Then he clapped his hands sharply.

Farrell sensed his danger; but before he could whirl and draw, something soft and clinging enveloped him. It was a net whose fine, stout silken cords bound his limbs and entangled him.

"God, by the Very God, by the One True God!" he swore, struggling with the soft, relentless thing that enmeshed him like a monstrous spider-web, and seeking to draw a knife. "Pig and father of pigs!"

Something emerged from the shadow of the pilaster that buttressed the wall. Farrell dropped flat, still striving to extricate himself and tackle his enemy. He secured a footing and leaped up, butting his shoulder with a terrific jolt into his enemy's stomach.

A grunt and a gasped curse. A warning cry from Nureddin. The knife in Farrell's hand slashed a dozen meshes in the net. Then, before he could follow up and extricate himself, a form dropped from a window directly above, driving him flat against the paving. His knife dug vainly between the cobblestones. He recovered, thrust upward....

Smack! Something hard and heavy and swiftly moving swept his senses away as he felt his blade bite home.

_6. Satan's Garden_

The slow, steady drip-drip-drip of water dropping against stones crept into Farrell's consciousness and finally became an impression distinct from the trip-hammer throbbing of his battered head. He stirred, and found that he was not bound. The holster under his left arm was empty. One of his knives, however, remained.

"If they wanted my hide, they could have taken it in the alley," he reflected as he pieced together his recollections of the encounter. "So far, it looks as if I've got 'em fooled."

Then, in Arabic, "_Aie_ ... my head! O dogs and sons of dogs, come out and fight! _Ya_ Nureddin, thou son of a strumpet, thou uncle of camels! Thou eater of unclean food!"

The cell echoed with his bellowing. As he paused for breath, he reeled, clutched at the wall from whose base he had arisen, and supported himself. A torch flared smokily in the distance, from its sconce in the wall of the passage that opened into his cell.

"Father of many pigs!" he stormed as he kicked the iron grillework that barred his advance, and rattled the chain and lock that secured the door.

The clattering and jangling finally drew a protest from beyond Farrell's field of vision. Then a fat, white-bearded fellow with bleary eyes and a bloated, sottish face emerged from a cross passage.

"Silence a moment!" he croaked as he took the torch from its sconce and advanced toward the grille.

"Bring me that dog of a Nureddin!" raged Farrell.

"One thing at a time," replied the warden. "Calm down and I'll promise you action."

"Oh, very well, then," agreed Farrell. "Lead on, Uncle."

Uncle drew a pistol and, keeping Farrell covered, unlocked the door.

"Now, wild man, forward!" he ordered. "And no false moves."

The slimy, glistening sides of the passage indicated that they were far beneath the surface of the city; perhaps in that labyrinth of vaults and connecting tunnels of which local tradition has murmured darkly and vaguely. Although his head ached from contact with material weapons wielded by physical enemies, Farrell shuddered at the evil that brooded about that archaic masonry and muttered of that which had emerged to defile the dead with obscene necromancies, and torment the living with monstrous hallucinations that came in the guise of dreams. The aura of age-old menace overpowered the terror of the Ismailian assassins.

"To your left," commanded the warden.