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 of whatever similar but smaller
cornute ganglia were scattered throughout the City and one of which we
had beheld when the Emperor's guards had blasted Ventnor.

Close was Norhala in the lenses--so close that almost, it seemed, I
could reach out and touch her. The flaming hair streamed and billowed
above her glorious head like a banner of molten floss of coppery gold;
her face was a mask of wrath and despair; her great eyes blazed upon the
Keeper; her exquisite body was bare, stripped of every shred of silken
covering.

From streaming tresses to white feet an oval of pulsing, golden light
nimbused her. Maiden Isis, virgin Astarte she stood there, held in the
grip of the Disk--like a goddess betrayed and hopeless yet thirsting for
vengeance.

For all their stillness, their immobility, it came to me that Emperor
and Keeper were at grapple, locked in death grip; the realization was as
definite as though, like Ruth, I thought with Norhala's mind, saw with
her eyes.

Clearly too it came to me that in this contest between the two was
epitomized all the vast conflict that raged around them; that in it was
fast ripening that fruit of destiny of which Ventnor had spoken, and
that here in the Hall of the Cones would be settled--and soon--the fate
not only of Disk and Cross, but it might be of humanity.

But with what unknown powers was that duel being fought? They cast no
lightnings, they battled with no visible weapons. Only the great planes
of the inverted cruciform Shape smoked and smoldered with their sullen
flares of ochres and of scarlets; while over all the face of the
Disk its cold and irised fires raced and shone, beating with a rhythm
incredibly rapid; its core of incandescent ruby blazed, its sapphire
ovals were cabochoned pools of living, lucent radiance.

There was a splitting roar that arose above all the clamor, deafening
us even in the shelter of the silent veils. On each side of the crater
whole masses of the City dropped away. Fleetingly I was aware of scores
of smaller pits in which uprose lesser replicas of the Cone