“She is Ahriman’s slave!—What lie did she make to Meranes?”
“Powers moving about this place have used her. There is a great plot.”
“What lie?”
Sadyattes drew from his girdle a written-over paper. “This is for Nitetis, from Meranes. It was to have been taken by the hand of the magus Artaxias—my enemy, as well you know, Pearl of the Deep! I, having many ways, received the paper first. Read Aryenis.... Meranes’s hand and seal.”
Aryenis thought that it was so, for indeed the letter was finely forged. Sadyattes and that foster-brother and a ring of principal men, with many a subtle helper that was not seen to be principal, had wrought well toward making a fine, envenomed instrument for their purposes, and the letter was great aid thereto. “Read,” said Sadyattes, and Aryenis read Nitetis’s name and love terms around it, and lines that followed, and Meranes’s name, and all in the hand, so she thought, of Meranes. She read in a voice that was a gathered sheaf of myriads of voices—old and old voices.
“The pearl that is false, I will bray in a mortar. The rose that is true, I will set at the height of the garden....”
“They call her the rose.—Meranes! Meranes!”
“Read—read!” said Sadyattes.
“The rose that is true, I will set at the height of the garden. The bud that is mine and the rose’s, I will cherish, but the false son will I blind and turn into the desert!...”
“The palace is falling, there are waves that are rising.”