the hail of radiant lances poured from the spinning wheels, falling upon Towered Shapes and City’s wall alike. There arose a prodigious wailing, an unearthly thin screaming. About the bases of the defenders flashed blinding bursts of incandescence — like those which had heralded the flight of the Flying Thing dropping before Norhala’s house.
Unlike them they held no dazzling sapphire brilliancies; they were ochreous, suffused with raging vermilion. Nevertheless they were factors of that same inexplicable action — for from thousands of gushing lights leaped thousands of gigantic square pillars; unimaginable projectiles hurled from the flaming mouths of earth-hidden, titanic mortars.
They soared high, swerved and swooped upon the lance-throwers. Beneath their onslaught those chimerae tottered, I saw living projectiles and living target fuse where they met — melt and weld in jets of lightnings.
But not all. There were those that tore great gaps in the horned giants — wounds that instantly were healed with globes and pyramids seething out from the Cyclopean trunk. Ever the incredible projectiles flashed and flew as though from some inexhaustible store; ever uprose that prodigious barrage against the smiting rays.
Now to check them soared from the ranks of the besiegers clouds of countless horned dragons, immense cylinders of clustered cubes studded with the clinging tetrahedrons. They struck the cubed projectiles head on; aimed themselves to meet them.
Bristling dragon and hurtling pillar stuck and fused or burst with intolerable blazing. They fell — cube and sphere and pyramid — some half opened, some fully, in a rain of disks, of stars, huge flaming crosses; a storm of unimaginable pyrotechnics.
Now I became conscious that within the City — within the body of the Metal Monster — there raged a strife colossal as this without. From it came a vast volcanic roaring. Up from its top shot tortured flames, cascades and fountains of frenzied Things that looped and struggled, writhed over its edge, hurled themselves back; battling chimerae which against the glittering heavens traced luminous symbols of agony.
Shrilled a stronger wailing. Up from behind the ray hurling Towers shot hosts of globes. Thousands of palely azure, metal moons they soared; warrior moons charging in meteor rush and streaming with fluttering battle pennons of violet flame. High they flew; they curved over the mile high back of the Monster; they dropped upon it.
Arose to meet them immense columns of the cubes; battered against the spheres; swept them over and down into the depths. Hundreds fell, broken — but thousands held their place. I saw them twine about the pillars — writhing columns of interlaced cubes and globes straining like monstrous serpents while all along their coils the open disks and crosses smote with the scimitars of their lightnings.
In the wall of the City appeared a shining crack; from top to bottom it ran; it widened into a rift from which a flood of radiance gushed. Out of this rift poured a thousand-foot-high torrent of horned globes.
Only for an instant they flowed. The rift closed upon them, catching those still emerging in a colossal vise. It CRUNCHED them. Plain through the turmoil came a dreadful — bursting roar.
Down from the closing jaws of the vise dripped a stream of fragments that flashed and flickered — and died. And now in the wall was no trace of the breach.
A hurricane of radiant lances swept it. Under them a mile wide section of the living scarp split away; dropped like an avalanche. Its fall revealed great spaces, huge vaults and chambers filled with warring lightnings — out from them came roaring, bellowing thunders. Swiftly from each side of the gap a metal curtaining of the cubes joined. Again the wall was whole.
I turned my stunned gaze from the City — swept over the valley. Everywhere, in towers, in writhing coils, in whipping flails, in waves that smote and crashed, in countless forms and combinations the Metal Hordes battled. Here were pillars against which metal billows rushed and were broken; there were metal comets that crashed high above the mad turmoil.
From streaming silent veil to veil — north and south, east and west the Monster slew itself beneath its racing, flaming banners, the tempests of its lightnings.
The tortured hulk of the City lurched; it swept toward us. Before it blotted out from our eyes the Pit I saw that the crystal spans upon the river of jade were gone; that the wondrous jeweled ribbons of its banks were broken.
Closer came the reeling City.
I fumbled for my lenses, focussed them upon it. Now I saw that where the radiant lances struck they — killed the blocks blackened under them, became lustreless; the sparkling of the tiny eyes — went out; the metal carapaces crumbled.
Closer to the City — came the Monster; shuddering I lowered the glasses that it might not seem so near.
Down dropped the bristling Shapes that wrestled with the squared Towers. They rose again in a single monstrous wave that rushed to overwhelm them. Before they could strike the City swept closer; had hidden them from me.
Again I raised the glasses. They brought the metal scarp not fifty feet away — within it the hosts of tiny eyes glittered, no longer mocking nor malicious, but insane.
Nearer drew the Monster — nearer.
A thousand feet away it checked its movement, seemed to draw itself together. Then like the roar of a falling world that whole side facing us slid down to the valley’s floor.
Chapter XXIX.
The Passing of Norhala
Hundreds of feet through must have been the fallen mass — within it who knows what chambers filled with mysteries? Yes, thousands of feet thick it must have been, for the debris of it splintered and lashed to the very edge of the ledge on which we crouched; heaped it with the dimming fragments of the bodies that had formed it.
We looked into a thousand vaults, a thousand spaces. There came another avalanche roaring — before us opened the crater of the cones.
Through the torn gap I saw them, clustering undisturbed about the base of that one slender, coroneted and star pointing spire, rising serene and unshaken from a hell of lightnings. But the shields that had rimmed the crater were gone.
Ventnor snatched the glasses from my hand, leveled and held them long to his eyes.
He thrust them back to me. “Look!”
Through the lenses the great hall leaped into full view apparently only a few yards away. It was a cauldron of chameleon flame. It seethed with the Hordes battling over the remaining walls and floor. But around the crystal base of the cones was an open zone into which none broke.
In that wide ring, girdling the shimmering fantasy like a circled sanctuary, were but three forms. One was the wondrous Disk of jeweled fires I have called the Metal Emperor; the second was the sullen fired cruciform of the Keeper.
The third was Norhala!
She stood at the side of that weird master of hers — or was it after all the servant? Between them and the Keeper’s planes gleamed the gigantic T-shaped tablet of countless rods which controlled the activities of the cones; that had controlled the shifting of the vanished shields; that manipulated too, perhaps, the energies
