Page:Weird Tales Volume 27 Issue 01 (1936-01).djvu/66

64 face's sockets, and somehow she knew chokingly that she could not bear to gaze upon what was dawning there if she must throw herself backward off the cliff to escape it. In a voice that strangled with terror she cried,

"Wait!"

The pale-winged arms hesitated in their lifting; the light which was dawning behind the shadowed eye-sockets for a moment ceased to brighten through the veiling. Jirel plunged on desperately,

"There is no need to slay me. I would very gladly go if I knew the way out."

"No," the cold voice echoed from reverberant distances. "There would be the peril of you always, existing and waiting. No, you must die or my sovereignty is at an end."

"Is it sovereignty or Pav's love that I peril, then?" demanded Jirel, the words tumbling over one another in her breathless eagerness lest unknown magic silence her before she could finish.

The corpse-witch laughed a cold little echo of sheer scorn.

"There is no such thing as love," she said, "—for such as I."

"Then," said Jirel quickly, a feverish hope beginning to rise behind her terror, "then let me be the one to slay. Let me slay Pav as I set out to do, and leave this land kingless, for your rule alone."

For a dreadful moment the half-lifted arms of the figure that faced her so terribly hesitated in midair; the light behind the shadows of her eyes flickered. Then slowly the winged arms fell, the eyes dimmed into cloud-filled hollows again. Blind-faced, impersonal, the skull turned toward Jirel. And curiously, she had the idea that calculation and malice and a dawning idea that spelled danger for her were forming behind that expressionless mask of white-fleshed bone. She could feel tensity and peril in the air—a subtler danger than the frank threat of killing.

Yet when the white witch spoke there was nothing threatening in her words. The hollow voice sounded as coolly from its echoing caverns as if it had not a moment before been threatening death.

"There is only one way in which Pav can be destroyed," she said slowly. "It is a way I dare not attempt, nor would any not already under the shadow of death. I think not even Pav knows of it. If you" The hollow tones hesitated for the briefest instant, and Jirel felt, like the breath of a cold wind past her face, the certainty that there was a deeper danger here, in this unspoken offer, than even in the witch's scarcely stayed death-magic. The cool voice went on, with a tingle of malice in its echoing,

"If you dare risk this way of clearing my path to the throne of Romne, you may go free."

hesitated, so strong had been that breath of warning to the danger-accustomed keenness of her senses. It was not a genuine offer—not a true path of escape. She was sure of that, though she could not put her finger on the flaw she sensed so strongly. But she knew she had no choice.

"I accept, whatever it is," she said, "my only hope of winning back to my own land again. What is this thing you speak of?"

"The—the flame," said the witch half hesitantly, and again Jirel felt a sidelong scrutiny from the cobwebbed sockets, almost as if the woman scarcely expected to be believed. "The flame that crowns Pav's image. If it can be quenched, Pav—dies." And queerly she laughed as she said it, a cool little ripple of scornful amusement. It was somehow like a blow in the face, and Jirel felt the blood rising to her cheeks as if in answer to a tangible slap. For she knew that the scorn was