I felt myself lifted, floated upward. Drake's hand shot out, clung to me as together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the latticed heart of the square-petaled rose our flight was checked. There for an instant we hung. Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds--

They were the nests of the Keeper's tentacles, and out from them the whiplike tendrils uncoiled, shot out and writhed toward us.

My skin flinched from their touch; my body, held in the unseen grip, was motionless. Yet when they touched their contact was not unpleasant. They were like flexible strands of gla.s.s; their smooth tips questioned us, pa.s.sing through our hair, searching our faces, writhing over our clothing.

There was a pulse in the great clipped rose, a rhythmic throbbing of vermilion fire that ran into it from the angled veins, beat through the latticed nucleus and throbbed back whence it had come. The huge, high square of scarlet and yellow was liquid flame; the diamond organs beneath it seemed to smoke, to send out swirls of orange red vapor.

Holding us so the Keeper studied us.

The rhythm of the square rose, became the rhythm of my own mind. But here was none of the vast, serene and elemental calm that Ruth had described as emanating from the Metal Emperor. Powerful it was, without doubt, but in it were undertones of rage, of impatience, overtones of revolt, something incomplete and struggling. Within the disharmonies I seemed to sense a fettered force striving for freedom; energy battling against itself.

Greater grew the swarms of the tentacles winding about us like slender strands of gla.s.s, covering our faces, making breathing more and more difficult. There was a coil of them around my throat and tightening--tightening.

I heard Drake gasping, laboring for breath. I could not turn my head toward him, could not speak. Was this then to be our end?

The strangling clutch relaxed, the ma.s.s of the tentacles lessened. I was conscious of a surge of anger through the cruciform Thing that held us.

Its sullen fires blazed. I was aware of another light beating past us--beating down the Keeper's. The hosts of tendrils drew back from me.

I felt myself picked from the unseen grasp, whirled in the air and drawn away.

Drake beside me, I hung now before the Shining Disk--the Metal Emperor!

He it was who had plucked us from the Keeper--and even as I swung I saw the Keeper's mult.i.tudinous, serpentine arms surge out toward us angrily and then sullenly, slowly, draw back into their nests.

And out of the Disk, clothing me, permeating me, came an immense tranquillity, a muting of all human thought, all human endeavor, an unthinkable, cosmic calm into which all that was human of me seemed to be sinking, drowning as in a fathomless abyss. I struggled against it, desperately, striving in study of the Disk to erect a barrier of preoccupation against the power pouring from it.

A dozen feet away from us the sapphire ovals centered upon us their regard. They were limpid, pellucid as gems whose giant replicas they seemed to be. The surface of the Disk ringed about by the aureate zodiac in which the nine ovals shone was a maze of geometric symbols traced in the lines of living gem fires; infinitely complex those patterns and infinitely beautiful; an infinite number of symmetric forms in which I seemed to trace all the ordered crystalline wonders of the snowflakes, the groupings of all crystalline patternings, the soul of ordered beauty that are the marvels of the Radiolaria, Nature's own miraculous book of the soul of mathematical beauty.

The flashing, petaled heart was woven of living rainbows of cold flame.

Silently we floated there while the Disk--LOOKED--at us.

And as though I had been not an actor but an observer, the weird picture of it all came to me--two men swinging like motes in mid air, on one side the flickering scarlet and orange Cruciform shape, on the other side the radiant Disk, behind the two manikins the pallid mount of the bristling cones; and high above the wan circle of the shields.

There was a ringing about us--an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline.

It came from the cones--and strangely was it their vocal synthesis, their voice. Into the vast circle of sky pierced a lance of green fire; swift in its wake uprose others.

We slid gently down, stood swaying at the Disk's base. The Keeper bent; angled. Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the tablet. The tendrils swept down, pushed here and there, playing upon the rods some unknown symphony of power.

Thicker pulsed the lances of the aurora; changed to vast billowing curtains. The faceted wheel at the top of the central spire of the cones swung upward; a light began to stream from the cones themselves--no pillar now, but a vast circle that shot whirling into the heavens like a noose.

And like a noose it caught the aurora, snared it!

Into it the coruscating mists of mysterious flame swirled; lost their colors, became a torrent of light flying down through the ring as though through a funnel top.

Down poured the radiant corpuscles, bathing the cones. They did not glow as they had beneath the flood from the shields, and if they grew it was too slowly for me to see; the shields were motionless. Now here, now there, I saw the other rings whirl up--smaller mouths of lesser cones hidden within the body of the Metal Monster, I knew, sucking down this magnetic flux, these countless ions gushing forth from the sun.

Then as when first we had seen the phenomenon in the valley of the blue poppies, the ring vanished, hidden by a fog of coruscations--as though the force streaming through the rings became diffused after it had been caught.

Crouching, forgetful of our juxtaposition to these two unhuman, anomalous Things, we watched the play of the tentacles upon the upthrust rods.

But if we forgot, we were not forgotten!

The Emperor slipped nearer; seemed to contemplate us--quizzically, AMUSED; as a man would look down upon some curious and interesting insect, a puppy, a kitten. I sensed this amus.e.m.e.nt in the Disk's regard even as I had sensed its soul of awful tranquillity; as we had sensed the playful malice in the eye stars of the living corridor, the curiosity in the column that had dropped us into the valley.

I felt a push--a push that was filled with a colossal, GLITTERING playfulness.

Under it I went spinning away for yards--Drake twirling close behind me.

The force, whatever it was, swept out from the Emperor, but in it was no slightest hint of anger or of malice, no slightest shadow of the sinister.

Rather it was as though one would blow away a feather; urge gently some little lesser thing away.

The Disk watched our whirlings--with a sparkling, jeweled LAUGHTER in its pulsing radiance.

Again came the push--farther yet we spun. Suddenly before us, across the pave, shone out a twinkling trail--the wakened eyes of the cubes that formed it, marking out a pathway for us to follow.

Immediately upon their gleaming forth I saw the Emperor turn--his immense, oval, metallic back now black against the radiance of the cones.

Up from the narrow gleaming path--a path opened I knew by some command--lifted the hosts of tiny unseen hands; the sentient currents of magnetic force that were the fingers and arms of the Metal Hordes. They held us, thrust us along, pa.s.sed us forward. Faster and faster we moved, speeding on the wake of the long-vanished metal monks.

I turned my head--the cones were already far away. Over the tablet of limpid violet phosph.o.r.escence still hovered the planes of the Keeper; and still was the oval of the Emperor black against the radiance.

But the twinkling, sparkling path between us and them was gone--was fading out close behind us as we swept onward.

Faster and faster grew our pace. The cylindrical wall loomed close. A high oblong portal showed within it. Into this we were carried. Before us stretched a corridor precisely similar to that which, closing upon us, had forced us completely out into the hall.

Unlike that pa.s.sage, its floor lifted steeply--a smooth and shining slide up which no man could climb. A shaft, indeed, which thrust upward straight as an arrow at an angle of at least thirty degrees and whose end or turning we could not see. Up and up it cleared its way through the City--through the Metal Monster--closed only by the inability of the eye to pierce the faint luminosity that thickened by distance became impenetrable.

For an instant we hovered upon its threshold. But the impulse, the command, that had carried us thus far was not to stop here. Into it and up it we were thrust, our feet barely touching the glimmering surface; lifted by the force that emanated from its floor, carried on by the force that pressed out from the sides.

Up and up we went--scores of feet--hundreds--

CHAPTER XXII. THE ENSORCELLED CHAMBER

"Goodwin!" Drake broke the silence; desperately he was striving to keep his fear out of his voice. "Goodwin--this isn't the way to get out.

We're going up--farther away all the time from the--the gates!"

"What can we do?" My anxiety was no less than his, but my realization of our helplessness was complete.

"If we only knew how to talk to these Things," he said. "If we could only have let the Disk know we wanted to get out--d.a.m.n it, Goodwin, it would have helped us."

Grotesque as the idea sounded, I felt that he spoke the truth. The Emperor meant no harm to us; in fact in speeding us away I was not at all sure that he had not deliberately wished us well--there was that about the Keeper--

Still up we sped along the shaft. I knew we must now be above the level of the valley.