Through his swimming eyes he saw Yaddin trying to drive a long nail into his skull with a hammer,—felt the piercing agony of the first crashing blow,—struggled upright, drenched in blood, his ears ringing with the screaming of Yaddin.
Then, there in the little rococo bedroom of the Ritz-Carlton, began a strange and horrible struggle—the more dreadful because the struggle was not physical and the combatants never touched each other—scarcely moved at all.
Yaddin, still screaming, confronted Yulun. The girl’s eyes were ablaze, her lips parted with the violence of her breathing. And Yaddin writhed and screamed under the terrible concentration of her gaze, his inferior but ferocious mind locked with her mind in deadly battle.
The girl said slowly, showing a glimmer of white teeth: “Your will to do evil to my young lord is breaking, Yaddin-ed-Din.... I am breaking it. The nail and hammer were but symbols. It was your brain that brooded murder—that willed he should die as though shattered by lightning when that blood-vessel burst in his brain!”
“Sorceress!” shrieked Yaddin, “what are you doing to my heart, where my body lies asleep in a berth on the Montreal Express!”
“Your heart is weak, Yaddin. Soon the valves shall fail. A negro porter shall discover you dead in your berth, my Banneret!”
The man’s swarthy face became livid with the terrific mental battle.
“Let me go back to my body!” he panted. “What are you doing to me that I can not go back? I will go back! I wish it!—I——”
“Let us go back and rejoin our bodies!” cried Djamouk in an agonised voice. “There are teeth in my throat, deep in my throat, biting and tearing out the cords.”
“Cancer,” said Tressa calmly. “Your body shall die of it while your soul stumbles on through darkness.”