Bagoas and the physician, helped by the wailing women of Ochus, lifted the body. They carried it from the platform, they bore it down the hall, they vanished with it into the darkness, and presently in the utter silence I heard the gates of the courts and the outer gates of the pylon clang behind them and the clashing of the bolts as they were shot by the guards of the gates.
Still for awhile the silence held, for all were like dead men with terror. Then a voice cried,
“The witch has killed the king with her kiss! Slay her. Tear her to pieces. Slay her and her company!”
The spell-bound mob began to stir; I heard swords rattling in their scabbards. They rose like waves on a quiet sea, and like a wave began to flow toward the platform on which I now stood alone. I stooped down, lifted the sistrum from the platform, and held it toward them.
“Be warned!” I cried. “Stay still lest the Curse of Isis fall on you also.”
“Witch! Witch! Witch!” they screamed, hesitating awhile, and again swayed forward.
I waved my arm, and as though in answer to it from the grating of stone beyond the platform suddenly arose dense smoke followed by bursts of flame. I waved it a second time, and from the gratings at the end of the hall arose smoke followed by bursts of flame. They looked, they saw, they understood.
“The Curse of Isis!” they screamed. “The Curse of Isis is upon us! Fire rises from hell.”
“Nay,” I answered, “fire falls from Heaven sent by the outraged gods!”
Now between me and them flared a fence of flame which the boldest dared not face. They paused, one hurled a sword at me which passed above my head. Then they turned, flying for the gateways of the hall, and there were met by another fence of flame. Some of the boldest leapt through it only to find that the gates were shut and that the terror-stricken guards had fled. They rushed back, burning, yea, their silken robes and their oil-anointed hair turned them, yet living, into torches. Now they took another counsel. They dragged the tables together, piling them each on each and striving thus to climb the walls of the hall. This, perhaps, they might have done, some of them, had not every man pulled down his neighbour, so that they fell in tumbled heaps upon the stone flooring where the life was trampled out of them.