“Sanang!” she cried again in her terrifying young voice—“Toad! Tortoise egg! Spittle of Erlik! May the Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake you! Sheik-el-Djebel!—cowardly Khan whom I laughed at from the temple when it rained yellow snakes on the marble steps when all the gongs in Yian sounded in your frightened ears!” She waited. “What! You won’t step out? _Tokhta!_” she exclaimed in a ringing tone, and made a swift motion with her left hand. Apparently out of her empty open palm, like a missile hurled, a thin, blinding beam of light struck the curtains, making them suddenly transparent. _A man stood there._ He came out, moving very slowly as though partly stupefied. He wore evening dress under his overcoat, and had a long knife in his right hand. Nobody spoke. “So—I really was to die then, if I came here,” said the girl in a wondering way. Sanang’s stealthy gaze rested on her, stole toward Cleves. He moistened his lips with his tongue. “You deliver me to this government agent?” he asked hoarsely. “I deliver nobody by treachery. You may go, Sanang.” He hesitated, a graceful, faultless, metropolitan figure in top-hat and evening attire. Then, as he started to move, Cleves covered him with his weapon. “I can’t let that man go free!” cried Cleves angrily. “Very well!” she retorted in a passionate voice—“then take him if you are able! _Tokhta!_ Look out for yourself!” Something swift as lightning struck the pistol from his grasp,—blinded him, half stunned him, set him reeling in a drenching blaze of light that blotted out all else. He heard the door slam; he stumbled, caught at the back of a chair while his senses and sight were clearing. “By heavens!” he whispered with ashen lips, “you—you _are_ a sorceress—or something. What—what, are you doing to me?” There was no answer. And when his vision cleared a little more he saw her crouched on the floor, her head against the locked door, listening, perhaps—or sobbing—he scarcely understood which until the quiver of her shoulders made it plainer. When at last Cleves went to her and bent over and touched her she looked up at him out of wet eyes, and her grief-drawn mouth quivered. “I—I don’t know,” she sobbed, “if he truly stole away my soul—there—there in the temple dusk of Yian. But he—he stole my heart—for all his wickedness—Sanang, Prince of the Yezidees—and I have been fighting him for it all these years—all these long years—fighting for what he stole in the temple dusk!... And now—now I have it back—my heart—all broken to pieces—here on the floor behind your—your bolted door.” CHAPTER V THE ASSASSINS On the wall hung a map of Mongolia, that indefinite region a million and a half square miles in area, vast sections of which have never been explored. Turkestan and China border it on the south, and Tibet almost touches it, not quite.