And a curious thing happened.
Naraini cried out sharply—"Aho!"—as if unable to contain her excitement.
Somewhere in the palace behind them a great gong boomed like thunder.
A pause ensued, disturbed only by the fluttering of the woman's breath: for the space of thirty pulse-beats nothing happened. Then Naraini's fingers closed like bands of steel about Amber's left wrist.
"See!" she cried in a voice of awe, while the bracelets shivered and clashed upon her outstretched arm, "The Eye, my king, the Eye!"
Amber shut his teeth upon an exclamation of amaze. For just above the far, dark mountain ridge, uncannily brilliant in the void of the pale, moonlit firmament, a light had blazed out; a vivid emerald light, winking and stabbing the darkness with shafts of seemingly supernatural radiance.
"And thy ring, lord—look! The Token!"
The great emerald seemed to have caught and to be answering the light Naraini called the Eye; in the stone's depths an infernal fire leaped and died and leaped again, now luridly blazing, now fitfully a-quiver as though about to vanish, again strong and steady: even as the light of the strange emerald star above the mountains ebbed and flowed through the night.
Naraini shuddered and cried out guardedly for very fear. "By Indur, it is even as the Voice foretold! Nay, Heaven-born"—she caught his sleeve and forcibly pulled down his hand—"tempt not the Unseen further. And put away this Token, lest a more terrible thing befall us. There be mysteries that even we of the initiate may not comprehend, my lord. It is not well to meddle with the unknown."
The ring was off his finger now and the woman was cramming it into his coat-pocket with tremulous hands. And where the Eye had shone, the sky was blank. They stood in darkness, Amber mute with perplexity, Naraini clinging to his arm and shaking like a reed in the wind.