The Mouthpiece of Zitu

by J. U. Giesy

They passed from the room and along a corridor in which the oil sconces had now been extinguished, faintly illuminated by the light of the new day. Before a massive door Zud paused and set his hand to a slender cord. His action was followed by the muffled clanging of a brazen gong. He slid the door open and revealed the shadow-wrapped throat of a shaft, up which a platform presently trembled into view. It was a primitive form of elevator operated, as Croft knew, by a Mazzerian crew in the foundations of the pyramid itself, lifting and lowering it on signal, by winding its cable on and off a revolving drum.

With Zud, he stepped aboard. The platform mounted slowly up the shaft. The high priest, with a hand on an inner cord, observed its progress, and presently once more the gong far below clanged out. The platform stopped.

They stepped into a very short corridor between masonry walls of a cut and polished stone not unlike marble, save that it held a strange, translucent quality in its substance and was wholly white. The main staircase of the pyramid mounted before them and ran on toward the top, with its crowning Temple of Zitu, and just beyond it, at the far end of the corridor, was a door. Silver it was, the most precious of Palosian metals, tooled and carved into the design of a full-sized woman's figure, in whose hand was the looped cross of immortal life.

Croft thrilled as they paused before it. This was the entrance to the quarters of the Gayana. Here it was that Naia had waited for him when he plunged into the venture of the Zollarian war. Then briefly he had held her in his arms, and she had told him that none should claim her ever save himself, or, failing that, she would remain forever virgin in the sanctuary of Ga beyond this door outside which now he stood so very, very differently from what he had once thought that he should.

And suddenly the knowledge of what Zud had told her—of the shock of revelation that must have come upon her, the torment to her every finer sensibility and feeling—caused an actual sensation of constriction in Croft's chest. He stood with tight-set lips and flaring nostrils as Zud put up a hand and pressed against the left breast of the woman on the door.

There was a tiny click, and the door slid to one side, disappearing into a socket in the wall and flooding the corridor with light. No gloomy abode was that in which the vestals dwelt. High up on the pyramid, but one flight beneath the crowning temple on the truncated apex, it caught the first of Sirius's rays, and the last, through deep embrasures set with slanting glass in the structure's walls. As the door slipped aside a scene was presented to Croft's eyes, brilliant with light and life.

"Hold!" he said as Zud would have entered and stepped past him on one side.

"Wait me below in your own apartments, man of Zitu. Consider meanwhile those words we have spoken before you brought me here. Peace be with you, priest of Zitu. Go!"

Then, as Zud turned to do his bidding and regained the platform in the shaft, he stepped through the aperture of the door to the other side and paused, a trifle abashed.

He had come at a stride to a region of youth and beauty. It surrounded him on every side. Feminine forms in diaphanous fabrics were grouped about the room. The chatter of their voices filled the place. Directly before him a group of maidens already at work about an immense basket of flowers, forming the garlands and sprays which at the noontide hour of prayer they would fling at the feet of the statue of Tamarizia's god, paused and stood staring as Croft appeared.