“Unless you will serve our ends. Are you bent on destruction?”
“I am in Ahura’s hands. It is His, not yours, to give life or death.”
Avil incautiously advanced a few steps into the darkness.
“The ‘suicide-demon’ possesses you, Persian,” he was asserting, when with a clatter of chains the prince bounded from his corner and dashed the priest to the bricked floor.
“At last, adder!” snorted he, uplifting his manacled hands, and smiting once and again.
“Rescue! Help! Murder!” bawled Avil, helpless on his back.
Well that the jailers ran swiftly, or Bel would have lacked a pontiff. They plucked the prince from his victim by sheer force, and dragged Avil away, covered with bruises. He stood, invoking upper and nether powers to blast the Persian race forever. They put a shorter chain on the prisoner, but he still challenged out of his gloom.
“Closer, friend! Closer! I dearly love a fair wrestle!”
But the priest turned away, quaking, and bade the others open the door of the adjacent cell, for he desired speech with that second prisoner of state, the Hebrew Daniel.
Darius was left in his dungeon; the bolts clanked into place, the footsteps died away. At first he heard only the swash of the current against the oozing bricks, and the shouts of bargemen forcing their craft up-river. But the prince did not rage in his fetters, as a month earlier, when first they cast him into this “death-in-life.” Laying his ear against the partition, he could hear voices uplifted—Avil-Marduk in angry colloquy with Daniel, who, contrary to Belshazzar’s pledge in the proclamation, had not been kept in light captivity, but in heaviest durance. Darius caught no word, but he guessed that the priest was ill satisfied with his errand when Daniel’s door clashed to suddenly, and Avil’s voice sounded in the gallery:—