The Slayer of Souls

Recklow said: "The horror of it nearly killed the girl herself. Have you any idea how she must suffer by being forced to employ such terrific knowledge? by being driven to use it to combat this menace of hell? Can you imagine what this charming, sensitive, tragic young creature must feel when, with powers natural to her but unfamiliar to us, she destroys with her own mind and will-power demons in human shape who are about to destroy her?

"Talk of nerve! Talk of abnegation! Talk of perfect loyalty and courage! There is more than these in Tressa Cleves. There is that dauntless bravery which faces worse than physical death. Because the child still believes that her soul is damned for whatever happened to her in the Yezidee temple; and that when these Yezidees succeed in killing her body, Erlik will surely seize the soul that leaves it."

There was a knocking at the door. Benton got up and opened it. Victor Cleves came in with his young wife.

Tressa Cleves seemed to have grown since she had been away. Taller, a trifle paler, yet without even the subtlest hint of that charming maturity which the young and happily married woman invariably wears, her virginal allure now verged vaguely on the delicate edges of austerity.

Cleves, sunburnt and vigorous, looked older, somehow – far less boyish – and he seemed more silent than when, nearly seven months before, he had been assigned to the case of Tressa Norne.

Recklow, Selden and Benton greeted them warmly; to each in turn Tressa gave her narrow, sun-tanned hand. Recklow led her to a seat. A servant came with iced fruit juice and little cakes and cigarettes.

Conversation, aimless and general, fulfilling formalities, gradually ceased.

A full June moon stared through the open windows – searching for the traditional bride, perhaps – and its light silvered a pale and lovely figure that might possibly have passed for the pretty ghost of a bride, but not for any girl who had married because she was loved.

Recklow broke the momentary silence, bluntly:

"Have you anything to report, Cleves?"

The young fellow hesitated:

"My wife has, I believe."

The others turned to her. She seemed, for a moment, to shrink back in her chair, and, as her eyes involuntarily sought her husband, there was in them a vague and troubled appeal.

Cleves said in a sombre voice: "I need scarcely remind you how deeply distasteful this entire and accursed business is to my wife. But she is going to see it through, whatever the cost. And we four men understand something of what it has cost her – is costing her – in violence to her every instinct."

"We honour her the more," said Recklow quietly.

"We couldn't honour her too much," said Cleves.

A slight colour came into Tressa's face; she bent her head, but Recklow saw her eyes steal sideways toward her husband.

Still bowed a little in her chair, she seemed to reflect for a while concerning what she had to say; then, looking up at John Recklow:

"I saw Sanang."

"Good heavens! Where?" he demanded.

"I – don't – know."

Cleves, flushing with embarrassment, explained: "She saw him clairvoyantly. She was lying in the hammock. You remember I had a trained nurse for her after – what happened in Orchid Lodge."

Tressa looked miserably at Recklow, – dumbly, for a moment. Then her lips unclosed.

"I saw Prince Sanang," she repeated. "He was near the sea. There were rocks – cottages on cliffs – and very brilliant flowers in tiny, pocket-like gardens.

"Sanang was walking on the cliffs with another man. There were forests, inland."

"Do you know who the other man was?" asked Recklow gently.

"Yes. He was one of the Eight. I recognised him. When I was a girl he came once to the Temple of Yian, all alone, and spread his shroud on the pink marble steps. And we temple girls mocked him and threw stemless roses on the shroud, telling him they were human heads with which to grease his toug."

She became excited and sat up straighter in her chair, and her strange little laughter rippled like a rill among pebbles.

"I threw a big rose without a stem upon the shroud," she exclaimed, "and I cried out, 'Niaz!' which means, 'Courage,' and I mocked him, saying, 'Djamouk Khagan,' when he was only a Khan, of course; and I laughed and rubbed one finger against the other, crying out, 'Toug ia glachakho!' which means, 'The toug is anointed.' And which was very impudent of me, because Djamouk was a Sheik-el-Djebel and Khan of the Fifth Tower, and entitled to a toug and to eight men and a Toughtchi. And it is a grave offence to mock at the anointing of a toug."

She paused, breathless, her splendid azure eyes sparkling with the memory of that girlish mischief. Then their brilliancy faded; she bit her lip and stole an uncertain glance at her husband.

And after a pause she explained in a very subdued voice that the "Iagla michi," or action of "greasing the toug," or standard, was done when a severed human head taken in battle was cast at the foot of the lance shaft stuck upright in the ground.

"You see," she said sadly, "we temple girls, being already damned, cared little what we said, even to such a terrible man as Djamouk Khan. And even had the ghost of old Tchinguiz Khagan himself come to the temple and looked at us out of his tawny eyes, I think we might have done something saucy."

Tressa's pretty face was spiritless, now; she leaned back in her armchair and they heard an unconscious sigh escape her.

"Ai-ya! Ai-ya!" she murmured to herself, "what crazy things we did on the rose-marble steps, Yulun and I, so long – so long ago."

Cleves got up and went over to stand beside his wife's chair.

"What happened is this," he said heavily. "During my wife's convalescence after that Yarghouz affair, she found herself, at a certain moment, clairvoyant. And she thought she saw – she did see – Sanang, and an Asiatic she recognised as being one of the chiefs of the Assassins sect, whose name is Djamouk.

"But, except that it was somewhere near the sea – some summer colony probably on the Atlantic coast – she does not know where this pair of jailbirds roost. And this is what we have come here to report."

Benton, politely appalled, tried not to look incredulous. But it was evident that Selden and Recklow had no doubts.

"Of course," said Recklow calmly, "the thing to do is for you and your wife to try to find this place she saw."

"Make a tour of all such ocean-side resorts until Mrs. Cleves recognises the place she saw," added Selden. And to Recklow he added: "I believe there are several perfectly genuine cases on record where clairvoyants have aided the police."

"Several authentic cases," said Recklow quietly. But Benton's face was a study.

Tressa looked up at her husband. He dropped his hand reassuringly on her shoulder and nodded with a slight smile.

"There – there was something else," she said with considerable hesitation – "something not quite in line of duty – perhaps – "

"It seems to concern Benton," added Cleves, smiling.

"What is it?" inquired Selden, smiling also as Benton's features froze to a mask.

"Let me tell you, first," interrupted Cleves, "that my wife's psychic ability and skill can make me visualise and actually see scenes and people which, God knows, I never before laid eyes upon, but which she has both seen and known.

"And one morning, in Florida, I asked her to do something strange – something of that sort to amuse me – and we were sitting on the steps of our cottage – you know, the old club-house at Orchid! – and the first I knew I saw, in the mist on the St. Johns, a Chinese bridge humped up over that very commonplace stream, and thousands of people passing over it, – and a city beyond – the town of Yian, Tressa tells me, – and I heard the Buddhist bells and the big temple gong and the noises in streets and on the water – "

He was becoming considerably excited at the memory, and his lean face reddened and he gesticulated as he spoke:

"It was astounding, Recklow! There was that bridge, and all those people moving over it; and the city beyond, and the boats and shipping, and the vast murmur of multitudes… And then, there on the bridge crossing toward Yian, I saw a young girl, who turned and looked back at my wife and laughed."

"And I told him it was Yulun," said Tressa, simply.