Elza stared with the fascination of horror, for now tiny tongues of flame were licking about. Blue tongues, licking the air, vanishing into wisps of black smoke.
Tarrano snapped off his ray. But the tongues of flame stayed alive. Spreading slowly, soundlessly, their heat now melting the ground.
A breath of the smoke touched Elza's face. Pungent, acrid. It stopped her breathing. She choked, coughed heavily to expel it.
"Come away, Lady Elza. Let us watch from a safer distance."
He led her from the hillock, up the wind to where at the edge of the forest they stood gazing.
The blue fire had spread over a distance of several feet. A sluggish, boiling, bubbling area of flame. Tongues now the height of a man. And from them, rolling upward, a heavy black cloud--deadly fumes thick, blacker than the night, spreading out, welling forward over the forest toward the Great City slumbering in its falsely peaceful security.
At last Elza knew. Stood there, cold, shuddering, thinking with all the power of her mind and being:
_"Death, Jac! Death to all the City! The black cloud of death!"_
Oblivious to Tarrano she stood until at last the rocky eminence was one great mass of the surging blue fire. And the black cloud, compact as a thunder-head, rolled onward.
_"You can see it coming! Death Jac! Death to all the City!"_
A sudden madness descended upon Elza. She felt abruptly that her warning was futile, felt an overpowering desire to run. Run somewhere--anywhere, away from the lurid sight she was facing. Or run perhaps, to the Great City; to race with that black cloud of death; to run fast and far, and burst into our palace to warn us.
Tarrano himself lost in triumphant contemplation of what he had done, for the moment was heedless of Elza's presence. With white face upon which the blue glare had settled like a mask of death, Elza turned silently from him. Forgetful of that horrible thing they had encountered--others of its kind which might be lurking about--she turned silently and plunged into the black depths of the forest.
We stood there at the casement of the palace, gazing with a growing terror at the visible evidence of the tragedy which threatened. A black cloud off there in the distance, spreading out, rolling inexorably toward us. And then came the wind, and with it a breath of the black monster--a choking, horrible suggestion of the death rolling already over the city.