With creaking, napping wingstrokes the skulls launched themselves at the Persian, their jaws clicking stonily. Kazam and the detective were in the middle of a cloud of flying jaws that were going for their throats.
Insanely Fitzgerald beat at the things, his eyes shut. When he looked they were lying on the floor. He was surprised to see that there were just four of them. He would have sworn
to a dozen at least. And they all four bore the same skillfully delivered slash mark of Kazam’s knife.
There was a low, choking noise from the monster on the divan. As the detective stared Kazam stepped up the first of the three shallow steps leading to it.
What followed detective Fitzgerald could never disentangle. The lights went out, yet he could plainly see. He saw that the monstrous Runi Sarif had turned into a creature such as he had seen on the tapestry, and he saw that so had Kazam, save that the thing which was the Persian carried in one paw a blade.
They were no longer in the tower room, it seemed, nor were they on the white desert below. They were hovering in a roaring squalling tumult, in a confusion of spheres which gently collided and caromed off each other without noise.
As the detective watched, the Runi monster changed into one of the spheres and so, promptly, did Kazam. On the side of the Kazam sphere was the image of the knife. Tearing at a furious rate through’the jostling confusion and blackness Fitzgerald followed, and he never knew how.
The Kazam sphere caught the other and spun dizzily around it, with a screaming noise which rose higher and higher. As it passed the top threshold of hearing, both spheres softened and spread into black, crawling clouds. Suspended in the middle of one was the knife.
The other cloud knotted itself into a furious, tight lump and charged the one which carried the blade. It hurtled into and through it, impaling itself.
Fitzgerald shook his head dizzily. They were in the tower room, and Runi Sarif lay on the divan with a cut throat. The Persian had dropped the knife, and was staring with grim satisfaction at the bleeding figure.
“Where were we?” stuttered the detective. “Where—T At the look in Kazam’s eyes he broke off and did not ask again.
The Persian said: “He stole my rights. It is fitting that I should recover them, even thus. In one plane—there is no room for two in contest.”
Jovially he clapped the detective on the shoulder. “I’ll send you back now. From this moment I shall be a card in your Bureau of Missing Persons. Tell whatever you wish—it won’t be believed.”
“It was supposed to be a paradise,” said the detective.
“It is,” said Kazam. “Look.”
They were no longer in the tower, but on a mossy bank above a river whose water ran a gamut of pastels, changing hues without end. It tinkled out something like a Mozart sonata and was fragrant with a score of scents.
The detective looked at one of the flowers on the bank. It was swaying of itself and talking quietly in a very small voice, like a child.
“They aren’t clever,” said Kazam, “but they’re lovely.”
Fitzgerald drew in his breath sharply as a flight of butterfly things passed above. “Send me away,” he gasped. “Send me away now or I’ll never be able to go. I’d kill you to stay here in another minute.*1
Kazam laughed. “Folly,” he said. “Just as the dreary world of sand and a tower that—a certain unhappy person— created was his and him so this paradise is me and mine. My bones are its rock, my flesh is its earth, my blood is its waters, my mind is its living things.”
As an unimaginably glowing drift of crystalline, chiming creatures loped across the whispering grass of the bank Kazam waved one hand in a gesture of farewell.
Fitzgerald felt himself receding with incredible velocity, and for a brief moment saw an entire panorama of the world that was Kazam. Three suns were rising from three points of the horizon, and their slanting rays lit a paradise whose only inglorious speck was a stringy, brown man on a riverbank. Then the man vanished as though he had been absorbed into the ground.