Prismatic fire blazed roof-high as he flung back the cover of one, jetting iridescently from a tumbled mass of primitive goldwork encrusted with the unbelievable gems of Orion. He lifted a heavy golden torque, studded with blazing gouts of crimson flame and slung on an inch-thick rope of giant Venusian pearls worth each the lives of twenty men. A yellow diamond Chalcidite rolled across the scarred steel of the open door and came to rest, winking like an evil eye in the dim light sifting down the corridor behind Kurland.
His voice was soft, terrible in its hatred as he looked at her, blanket clutched frozen across her bosom. His eyes blazed as balefully as the huge jewel winking before him.
"Will you lie now, Recorder? These are the Jewels of Orion!"
She did not answer, less for the contemptuous accusation in his voice than the more dreadful thought her trained mind thrust at her as insistently. If the Plutonian had been sabotaged and wrecked for such world-loot, as his sure knowledge, his very presence indicated, then his first assumption must inevitably be true. The survivor he considered her must indeed be the hellish wrecker. And she was not the only survivor.
Her eyes were enormous. A mound of living fire grew upon the dusty steel as he piled up the blazing rings and brooches of the long-dead Orion kings. He tossed down a circlet of hammered gold, wreathed for the brows of some ancient queen, and the thirty pendant gems tinkled musically in the silence. Each could have bought the souls of an army, round, glinting stars of purest emerald green deep-sunk with tiny suns of icy diamond lustre. Kurland paused in his magical task, looking across at her.
"Are they worth the blood we walked upon to reach them, Recorder?" he asked, quietly.
"I ... I didn't know," she faltered, meeting his gaze with growing firmness.
"Men have died before over these bright toys," he shrugged, opening another box and pouring it in a blazing cascade over the first heap of white fire. "Men will die again. And among them, Gion."
"The Marward of Jupiter?" she whispered. "He knows? He sent you here, knowing this?"
"Your message reached him. The Marward is swift to serve his servants. Particularly those ... bearing gifts."