The whip-crack of a rifle-shot still crackled in their ears.
Tiyang had leaped to his feet in the dusk, a Ginseng root, half-alive, hanging from one hand and beginning to squirm.
Suddenly the first moonbeam fell across the wall. And in its lustre Tressa rose to her knees and flung up her right hand.
Then it was as though her palm caught and reflected the moon’s ray, and hurled it in one blinding shaft straight into the dark visage of Tiyang-Khan.
The Yezidee fell as though he had been pierced by a shaft of steel, and lay sprawling there on the grass in the ghastly glare.
And where his features had been there gaped only a hole into the head.
Then a dreadful thing occurred; for everywhere the grass swarmed with the little naked creatures he had made, running, scrambling, scuttling, darting into the black hole which had been the face of Tiyang-Khan.
They poured into the awful orifice, crowding, jostling one another so violently that the head jerked from side to side on the grass, a wabbling, inert, soggy mass in the moonlight.
And presently the body of Tiyang-Khan, Warden of the Rampart of Gog and Magog, and Lord of the Seventh Tower, began to burn with white fire—a low, glimmering combustion that seemed to clothe the limbs like an incandescent mist.
On the wall knelt Tressa, the glare from her lifted hand streaming over the burning form below.