The executioners were now supporting rather than holding fast the prisoner. And they themselves, hardened as they were to applying fire and steel, shifted uneasily, and licked their dry lips as they regarded the sultan. And when he turned, they dropped their eyes to avoid his eyes.
Still the sultan did not speak.
His presence was a smoldering doom.
Then a poison sweetness crept up from the mouth of the pit.
From its blacknesses emerged the figure of a bearded king, who solemnly advanced with measured steps, as to the cadence of a slowly beaten drum.
The tongueless executioners dropped their implements, and made horrible, choking grasps at speech.
But as if alone in a desert waste, the presence strode through the group. His robe brushed Maksoud as he passed toward the other side of the court, bearing in his left hand a strangely carved scepter, and with his right hand stroking his long, curled beard.
Straight across the moon-bathed tiles, and to the twelfth pedestal; and then with infinite care and deliberation, he seated himself cross-legged after the fashion of those eleven all too life-like images.
Very faintly came the sound of a distant gong: not resonant as bronze, but rather as the hissing of a serpent or the rustling of silk.
The sultan started. Then he looked Maksoud full in the eye, and smiled that terrific smile of his father, the Old Tiger.