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 with a rhythmic, JOCUND stride they leaped upon the city.
Under the mallets of the smiting arms the inner battlements fell as under the hammers of a thousand metal Thors.Over their fragments and the armored men who fell with them strode the Things, grinding stone and man together as we passed.
All of the terraced city except the side hidden by the mount lay open to my gaze.In that brief moment of pause I saw crazed crowds battling in narrow streets, trampling over mounds of the fallen, surging over barricades of bodies, clawing and tearing at each other in their flight.
There was a wide, stepped street of gleaming white stone that climbed like an immense stairway straight up the slope to that broad plaza at the top where clustered the great temples and palaces--the Acropolis of the city.Into it the streets of the terraces flowed, each pouring out upon it a living torrent, tumultuous with tuliped, sparkling little waves, the gay coverings and the arms and armor of Ruszark's desperate thousands seeking safety at the shrines of their gods.
Here great carven arches arose; there slender, exquisite towers capped with red gold--there was a street of colossal statues, another over which dozens of graceful, fretted bridges threw their spans from feathery billows of flowering trees; there were gardens gay with blossoms in which fountains sparkled, green groves; thousands upon thousands of bright multicolored pennants, banners, fluttered.
A fair, a lovely city was Cherkis's stronghold of Ruszark.
Its beauty filled the eyes; out from it streamed the fragrance of its gardens--the voice of its agony was that of the souls in Dis.
The row of destroying shapes lengthened, each huge warrior of metal drawing far apart from its mates.They flexed their manifold arms, shadow boxed--grotesquely, dreadfully.
