ce.

Shuddering, I looked. Where the mounted men had been was--nothing.

Nothing? There were two great circular spaces whose floors were
glistening, wetly red. Fragments of man or horse--there was none.
They had been crushed into--what was it Norhala had promised--had been
stamped into the rock beneath the feet of her--servants.

Sick, I looked away and stared at a Thing that writhed and undulated
over the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and spheres
linked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramid. Through the
fields, over the plain its coils flashed.

Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them,
tossing them aside broken, gliding over them. Some there were who
hurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it,
praying. On rolled the metal convolutions, inexorable.

Within my vision's range there were no more fugitives. Around a corner
of the broken battlements raced the serpent Shape. Where it had writhed
was now no waving grain, no trees, no green thing. There was only smooth
rock upon which here and there red smears glistened wetly.

Afar there was a crying, in its wake a rumbling. It was the column, it
came to me, at work upon the further battlements. As though the sound
had been a signal the spindle trembled; up we were thrust another
hundred feet or more. Back dropped the host of brandished arms, threaded
themselves into the parent bulk.

Right and left of us the spindle split into scores of fissures. Between
these fissures the Metal Things that made up each now dissociate and
shapeless mass geysered; block and sphere and tetrahedron spike spun and
swirled. There was an instant of formlessness.

Then right and left of us stood scores of giant, grotesque warriors.
Their crests were fully fifty feet below our living platform. They
stood upon six immense, columnar stilts. These sextuple legs supported
a hundred feet above their bases a huge and globular body formed of
clusters of the spheres. Out from each of these bodies that were at one
and the same time trunks and heads, sprang half a score of colossal arms
shaped like flails; like spike-studded girders, Titanic battle maces,
Cyclopean sledges.

From legs and trunks and arms the tiny eyes of the Metal Hordes flashed,
exulting.

There came from them, from the Thing we rode as well, a chorus of thin
and eager wailings and pulsed through all that battle-line, a jubilant
throbbing.

Then wit