Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/120

120 broadening over the gross lushness like the great buds of two horribly fecund flowers. Something of the ugly attraction of death was in her. She exuded a passion of cruelty.

The great strong rounds of her shoulders were shining naked. This stark, gross parody of womanhood stood there, too vividly outlined by the mellow, age-old beauty of the Elder chamber, and the medusa coils of her black hair framed a face of heavy, almost masculine beauty. The sensuous, too-full lips, an aquiline nose—she looked the female pirate to perfection.

In Lane's mind her wide red mouth, those dark horrible depths of her eyes, the black magic of her cruel face was printed in bitter ink forever.

Her words were directed to a milder edition of herself, seated nearby and peering intently at something taking place in the distance which she was watching over the old ray screen.

"I married him, the tout, and he took me to the caves."

"I guess you soon turned the tables on him, eh, Deliar?"

"Precious right I did. I soon had the big-shot wound around my finger, and it wasn't long till he died and left me in charge. We have come a long way since then, haven't we, Miro?"

"We have managed to abolish these red dupes' ideas of freedom, and made a paying machine out of their labor, and their mines. We have overcome the best and oldest of the dreaded Eastern rays; the goody, goody things that they were! And now this rich western area lies open to us."

"When we get this area lined up to production, we will move southward. I have heard of some great stores of the Elder treasures under California."

TANDING behind Miro, the Da Sylva woman watched her, then said:

"Give that loafing workman a little 'sinus' through the soles of his feet; he has been laying down on the job."

Manipulating a pain ray through the screen before her, Miro laid the man upon the mine's floor with pain, he lay there writhing and shrieking with the sudden attack. As the pain ceased, he got up and seized his shovel, began to labor with a great show of industry. What else could he do?

"That's what these lazy b— need, a dose of pain to tell them they are not anything but dogs to us. They will learn to work!"

Lean-ribbed from poor food and pale from the underworld lack of sun, the workmen labored on, nor looked up at the screams and commotion of the one punished. They wore regular blue denim, ragged and soiled, in their miner's caps the regular miner's lamp hung. It was some ancient boring now being worked again, and by the looks it was gold, and very rich.

It was a white quartz vein, heavily shot with the yellow stuff. The vein was all of twelve feet wide. The men worked in a heavy silence. Fear rode them was apparent.

Behind Lane, Eemeeshee's preparatory tactical rearrangement seemed about finished. As his ray swept up to them, Saba pointed out Da Sylva's central chamber, where the power of this place seemed to have its home. Eemeeshee took a good look, and Lane could hear his "Hah!" of disgust and a kind of solemn glee in him at the set-up. Lane knew he was thinking, "This is going to be a cinch." Lane hoped he was right.

Suddenly from two miles overhead a cream-colored ray shot down through the blackness, and the "ulegra" (Elder word for electric) flowed over the ray, into the war-ray chambers where the rows of great-bodied, dull-faced fighting ro waited, animating them for the emergency that the watch ray far overhead had sensed, having observed the grey opacity with which Eemeeshee had surrounded his columns.

In seconds the grey cloud around them was shot through with the flaming dis-beams from the great war-ray mech. They weren't connecting, for Eemeeshee had caused a great area of the rock to become opaque, but they were searching out the area with a systematic thoroughness that left no room for doubt that they would score a hit soon or late.

Eemeeshee's great unturned caricature of a nose, lumpy and grotesque, flamed beet red with excitement. His vast, pillow-soft white body quivered like a grub on a fish-hook as he waved both hands at the watching rays of his columns of ray-spheres to fire and keep firing. His excited thought struck fear into Lane, for he was too much like some womanish officers he had seen,