"You know her not!" exclaimed Ninyas, much disturbed. "Where is the prison-house in Babylon that could hold her for a single day? Where is the son of Ashur who would not leap to the saddle with bow and spear at the first wave of the Great Queen's hand?"
The eunuch's answer came in firm and measured accents, though his face was distorted as with a hidden agony of pain.
"There is a prison-house from which not Ashtaroth herself could break out—from which old Nimrod might not be delivered by all the horsemen of Assyria. When my lord's servants shall surround and hew her in pieces, then may every son of Ashur bind on his headpiece a shred of the Great Queen's garments, whom he loved so well."
Ninyas laughed aloud, and, seizing his discarded goblet, drained it to the dregs.
"Enough!" he exclaimed. "She sinned against Nisroch and Baal, when she took the sceptre of Nimrod from the hand of his descendant. What am I, that I should interfere to avert her doom? And yet, I would it might be done without shedding of blood. Can we not lead her forth from the city into some desert place, and so dispose of her in safety, where she shall disturb the king no more?"
"Will my lord trust his servant?" asked the eunuch.
"I will remain here at the banquet in my palace until it is over," answered Ninyas brutally. "Let Baal be his own avenger, and let Assarac see to vindicating the honour of his god. I have spoken." Then, clapping his hands, Ninyas summoned back the women who usually surrounded him at his revels, to dismiss the whole matter from his mind in a deep and stupefying carouse.
Leaving the royal presence, Beladon felt his arm seized once more in the eunuch's painful gripe, while Assarac muttered, half-unconsciously, such broken sentences as served to disclose the plot he had constructed, and the means by which it was to be carried out. Presently, in a few simple directions, he imparted to his subordinate the outline of his purpose, commanding him to muster all the priests and prophets in the city at the great northern gate by which the queen should enter, with knife and lotus-flower in hand; to surround these with so strong a force of spearmen as it would be impossible for the populace to break through; and then, at a given signal, to fall on Semiramis with his followers, bind her in fetters of iron, and so bring her a helpless captive into the temple of Baal. It would be a fine revenge, thought Assarac, to keep her there till the arrival of Sarchedon from the desert, and then to slay them, in each other's sight, before the altar of his god. Better still, perhaps, and worthier of his fierce mad love, to strike his own knife into her heart at the first halt of her chariot within the gate.
"I can trust you," said he, when they parted, and Beladon proposed to attest his fidelity in a great oath by the everlasting wings, "because the queen's first act, when she reënters the city, will be to take vengeance on him who kept the door of her son's prison-house, and suffered the captive to escape."
But the wariest of mankind may leave one weak point undefended—the keenest judges of human nature will omit from their calculation some vice, prejudice, or folly, such as dominates the very self-interest of their tools. That Beladon should have disclosed a plot, on the success of which his own personal safety, his very life depended, would have been unaccountable, but for the joyous, pleasure-loving disposition which, priest of Baal though he was, could not keep his secret from a woman.