Six lean, brown men, nude save for loin-cloths that glowed like golden flames in the spectral bluish light, emerged from an entrance concealed by the silver-embroidered arras, and filed across the hall toward the dais. Following them came four others, likewise arrayed, but blacker than any negroes Farrell had ever seen. They bore a litter on which lay a form whose gracious feminine curves were not entirely concealed by the silken, metallically glistening shroud. "Good Lord!" muttered Farrell. "A woman!" The brown-skinned sextet ascended the dais. The blacks followed with their burden. As they halted, two others emerged from the back-drapes of the dais, bringing with them wrought bronze trestles on which the litter was placed. * * * * * Shirkuh took his post behind the litter as the sextet of adepts from High Asia seated themselves cross-legged in front of it. "Fellow thaumaturges," he began, "I, the least of your servants, beg leave to present a feat that has never been accomplished save in far-off Lhasa." He paused, smiled, and stroked his mustache. Then he gestured toward the shrouded form on the litter. An attendant gathered the silken folds and drew them aside. Farrell barely suppressed a gasp of horrified amazement. The woman on the bier was La Dorada. Her copper-golden hair flamed like living fire in the bluish-purple, pulsing light of the room. The hands, folded across her breast, sparkled with jewels. She had no other adornment or dress. La Dorada, the Golden, dead not over ten hours, and stripped of all but her exquisite beauty, lay exposed to the gaze of that assemblage of devil-mongers. For one terrible instant Farrell had thought that Antoinette lay on that bier; then he remembered her resemblance to the dead actress, and assured himself that Antoinette was and must be in her apartment on rue Lachepaillet, awaiting another night of fantastic dreams of an assassin's paradise, and the lashing of an invisible scourge. "_Monsieur le Marquis_," continued Shirkuh with a smile that flashed satanic mockery, "is unable to be with us. But I trust that that which I offer will be worthy of your presence." "Lord!" muttered Farrell. "I don't know the Marquis, but exhibiting her dead body here in his house--I've half a notion to start the show right here!" D'Artois' fingers closed about Farrell's right wrist. "_Imbécile!_ This infamy is none of your business. Tend to your own sheep." Shirkuh nodded and made a gesture. The faint, whimpering music became louder. Among the plucked strings of _sitar_ and _oudh_ Farrell could distinguish the notes of a wind instrument that was a mockery of a woman's voice. The drums muttered and purred in complex rhythm.