Alone, unnoticed, they had departed from the City of Ice on a small flying platform similar to the one they had used before. The night had pa.s.sed; day, with a new warmth to the sun, came again. Flying low, with Tarrano in a grim, moody silence, and Elza staring downward.

The aural lights were overhead when at the last Tarrano brought the platform to rest. A thick, luxuriant forest. Huge trees with rope-like roots and heavy vines. Others with leaves like the ears of an elephant.

And the ground hidden by almost impenetrable underbrush.

They had landed in a tiny glade beside a dank marsh of water, where ferns shoulder high were embanked. It was dark, the stars and the tints of the auroral lights were barely distinguishable through the ma.s.s of foliage overhead. Elza gazed around her fearsomely. The air was heavy, oppressive. Redolent with the perfume of wild flowers and the smell of mouldering, steaming soil.

"All in good time. Lady Elza," Tarrano repeated. "You will know where we are presently; we are closer to human habitation than you would think."

Elza's heart pounded. As they were descending she had noticed a glow of light in the sky ahead. As though by intuition now, she seemed to realize that they were not far from the Great City. Her thoughts leaped to me--Jac Hallen--there in Maida's palace. Tarrano's grim, sinister purpose was as yet unknown to her. But she guessed that in it, danger impended for me--for all of us in the Great City.

_"Jac! Danger! Jac! Danger!"_

Her thoughts instinctively reiterated the two words uppermost in her mind. And I think that it was just about then when they awakened me.

Leaving the vehicle, Tarrano commanded Elza to follow him; and he began picking his way through the jungle. A light was in his hand; it penetrated but a short distance. A quivering beam of yellow light; then Elza saw that upon occasion, as Tarrano's finger slid a lever, the beam narrowed, intensified to a bright lavender. And now where it struck, the vegetation withered. Blackened, sometimes burst into tiny flame, and parted thus before them as they advanced.

The jungle was silent; yet, as Elza listened, beneath the crackle of the burning twigs she could hear the tiny myriad voices of insect life.

Startled voices as the heat of Tarrano's beam struck them. Rustling leaves; breaking twigs; things scurrying and sliding away, unseen in the darkness.

Once or twice a crashing--some monster disturbed in his rest plunging away. Again, a slithering bulk of something, undulating its path through the thickets. All unseen. Save once. Looking upward, Elza caught a gleam of green eyes overhead. A triangle of three baleful spots of phosph.o.r.escent green. Her murmur of fright caused Tarrano to glance upward. His lavender, beam, grown suddenly larger, swung there with a hiss. Falling from above came a pink body. A bloated body, square, with squat, twisted legs; a thing larger than a man. A grotesque naked monstrosity almost in human form. A travesty--gruesome mockery of mankind. A face, three-eyed...

The thing lay writhing in the underbrush, mouthing, mumbling and then screaming--the shrill scream of death agony. And the horrible smell of burning flesh as Tarrano's light played upon it...

"Come away, Lady Elza. I'm sorry. I had hoped to avoid an affair such as this."

Sickened, shuddering, Elza clung close to Tarrano as he led her onward.

An hour or more; and now Elza could see in the distance the lights of the Great City.

_"Jac! Danger! Jac! Danger!"_

The idea of thought-transference had come to her. With all the power of her mind she was thinking her warning to me, praying that it might reach me.

"Single-handed, Lady Elza. You shall see now how, single-handed, I make impossible any attack upon Tarrano."

In her abstraction Elza had almost forgotten herself and Tarrano; his voice reached her--his voice grim and with a gloating, sinister triumph in it. He was bending to the ground. Elza saw that they had come to an open s.p.a.ce--an eminence rising above the forest. Underfoot was a stony soil; in places, bare black rock with an outcropping of red, like the cinnabar from which on Earth we melt the _Heavy-metal_.[23]

[Footnote 23: Quicksilver.]

Tarrano faced her. "Nature, my Lady Elza, is fair to my purpose. I knew I would find some such deposit as this." He turned his face to one side attentively, and darted his light--harmlessly yellow now--to where a lone tree showed its great leaves beginning to waver in a night breeze.

"Nature is with us! See there, my Elza! A wind is coming--a wind from us to--them!"

The breeze grew--a breeze blowing directly over the forest to where in the distance the lights of the Great City showed plainly. Tarrano added:

"I had thought to create the wind." He tapped his belt. "Create the wind to carry our onslaught. But you see, it is unnecessary. Nature is kind, and far more efficacious than our man-made devices."

_"Jac! Danger!"_ She stood there in the breeze, watching Tarrano--his purpose as yet no more than guessed--praying that I might receive her warning.

Tarrano selected his spot--a tiny little cone of rock no bigger than his thumb. He beckoned Elza.

"Stand close, and watch. You shall see how from the merest spark, a conflagration may ensue."

The cylinder in his hand darted forth a needle-like shaft--a light of intense purple. It touched the tiny cone of rock, and he held it there.

"A moment. Be patient, my Elza."

The point of rock seemed presently to melt. Like a tiny volcano, at their feet, lava from it was flowing down. A little stream of melted rock, viscous, bubbling a trifle; red at the edges, white within, and with wisps of smoke curling up from it.

Elza stared with the fascination of horror, for now tiny tongues of flame were licking about. Blue tongues, licking the air, vanishing into wisps of black smoke.

Tarrano snapped off his ray. But the tongues of flame stayed alive.

Spreading slowly, soundlessly, their heat now melting the ground.

A breath of the smoke touched Elza's face. Pungent, acrid. It stopped her breathing. She choked, coughed heavily to expel it.

"Come away, Lady Elza. Let us watch from a safer distance."

He led her from the hillock, up the wind to where at the edge of the forest they stood gazing.

The blue fire had spread over a distance of several feet. A sluggish, boiling, bubbling area of flame. Tongues now the height of a man. And from them, rolling upward, a heavy black cloud--deadly fumes thick, blacker than the night, spreading out, welling forward over the forest toward the Great City slumbering in its falsely peaceful security.

At last Elza knew. Stood there, cold, shuddering, thinking with all the power of her mind and being:

_"Death, Jac! Death to all the City! The black cloud of death!"_

Oblivious to Tarrano she stood until at last the rocky eminence was one great ma.s.s of the surging blue fire. And the black cloud, compact as a thunder-head, rolled onward.

_"You can see it coming! Death Jac! Death to all the City!"_

A sudden madness descended upon Elza. She felt abruptly that her warning was futile, felt an overpowering desire to run. Run somewhere--anywhere, away from the lurid sight she was facing. Or run perhaps, to the Great City; to race with that black cloud of death; to run fast and far, and burst into our palace to warn us.

Tarrano himself lost in triumphant contemplation of what he had done, for the moment was heedless of Elza's presence. With white face upon which the blue glare had settled like a mask of death, Elza turned silently from him. Forgetful of that horrible thing they had encountered--others of its kind which might be lurking about--she turned silently and plunged into the black depths of the forest.

CHAPTER XXIX

_A Woman's Scream_

"The black Cloud of Death!"

We stood there at the cas.e.m.e.nt of the palace, gazing with a growing terror at the visible evidence of the tragedy which threatened. A black cloud off there in the distance, spreading out, rolling inexorably toward us. And then came the wind, and with it a breath of the black monster--a choking, horrible suggestion of the death rolling already over the city.

We must have been fascinated at the cas.e.m.e.nt for some considerable time.

Elza's thought messages had ceased. Abruptly I came to myself.