Tiyang had leaped to his feet in the dusk, a Ginseng root, half-alive, hanging from one hand and beginning to squirm. Suddenly the first moonbeam fell across the wall. And in its lustre Tressa rose to her knees and flung up her right hand. Then it was as though her palm caught and reflected the moon’s ray, and hurled it in one blinding shaft straight into the dark visage of Tiyang-Khan. The Yezidee fell as though he had been pierced by a shaft of steel, and lay sprawling there on the grass in the ghastly glare. And where his features had been there gaped only a hole into the head. Then a dreadful thing occurred; for everywhere the grass swarmed with the little naked creatures he had made, running, scrambling, scuttling, darting into the black hole which had been the face of Tiyang-Khan. They poured into the awful orifice, crowding, jostling one another so violently that the head jerked from side to side on the grass, a wabbling, inert, soggy mass in the moonlight. And presently the body of Tiyang-Khan, Warden of the Rampart of Gog and Magog, and Lord of the Seventh Tower, began to burn with white fire—a low, glimmering combustion that seemed to clothe the limbs like an incandescent mist. On the wall knelt Tressa, the glare from her lifted hand streaming over the burning form below. Cleves stood tall and shadowy beside his wife, the useless pistol hanging in his grasp. Then, in the silence of the woods, and very near, they heard Sansa laughing. And Selden’s anxious voice: “Arrak is dead. The Sou-Sou hangs across a rock, head down, like a shot squirrel. Is all well with you?” “Tiyang is on his way to his star,” said Tressa calmly. “Somewhere in the world his body has bid its mind farewell.... And so his body may live for a little, blind, in mental darkness, fed by others, and locked in all day, all night, until the end.” Sansa, at the base of the wall, turned to Selden. “Shall I bring my body with me, one day, my lord?” she asked demurely. “Oh, Sansa——” he whispered, but she placed a fragrant hand across his lips and laughed at him in the moonlight. CHAPTER XV IN THE FIRELIGHT In 1920 the whole spiritual world was trembling under the thundering shock of the Red Surf pounding the frontiers of civilisation from pole to pole. Up out of the hell-pit of Asia had boiled the molten flood, submerging Russia, dashing in giant waves over Germany and Austria, drenching Italy, France, England with its bloody spindrift. And now the Red Rain was sprinkling the United States from coast to coast, and the mindless administration, scared out of its stupidity at last, began a frantic attempt to drain the country of the filthy flood and throw up barriers against the threatened deluge. In every state and city Federal agents made wholesale arrests—too late! A million minds had already been perverted and dominated by the terrible Sect of the Assassins. A million more were sickening under the awful psychic power of the Yezidee.