 CHAPTER VI. DEED AND DREAM When Olga went to her room that night in St. Petersburg, instead of going to bed, she unpacked from her valice a series of articles which seemed strange possessions for a young girl of not quite seventeen to travel with on her wedding journey. First came a tiny spirit furnace from which, by the aid of an arrangement something like the modern blow-pipe, an intense heat could be obtained. Then a delicate pair of scales, a glass pestle and mortar, and a couple of glass-liquid measures, and lastly half a dozen little vials filled with variously coloured liquids and as many little packets of powders that looked like herbs ground very finely. When she had placed these out on the table, after having carefully locked the door of her room and seen that the windows were completely shuttered and curtained, she drew from the bosom of her dress a gold chain, at the end of which was fastened, together with the key of the secret recess in the wall of the turret chamber of the house at Hampstead, a small bag of silk, out of which she took a little roll of parchment. The slip which she had abstracted from Paul Romanov's secret will after she had persuaded Sergei with her false kisses to leave her alone for a while. She seated herself at the table, drew the electric reading lamp which stood on it close to her, laid the slip down in front of her, keeping it unrolled by means of a couple of little weights, and studied it intently for several minutes. Then she made a series of calculations on another sheet of paper and compared the result carefully with the same figures on the slip. She made them three times over before she was satisfied that they were absolutely correct and then, with all the care and deliberation of a chemical analysis performing a delicate and important experiment, she proceeded to weigh out tiny quantities of the powder and to mix them very carefully in the little glass mortar. This done, she emptied the mixture into a little platinum crucible which she placed on the furnace at the same time applying a gentle heat. Then she turned her attention to the vials measuring off quantities of their contents with the most scrupless exactitude, mixing them two and two and adding this mixture to a third and so on in a certain order, which was evidently pre-arranged as she constantly referred to the slip of parchment and their own calculations as she was mixing them. By the time she finished this part of her work she had obtained from the various coloured liquids one perfectly colourless and odourless of a specific gravity apparently considerably in excess of that of water, although at the same time it was extremely mobile and refractive. She held it up to the light looking at it with her eyelids somewhat screwed up and with a cruel smile on her pretty lips. So far so good, she said in a voice a little higher than a whisper, the lies of fifty strong men in that couple of ounces of harmless looking fluid, if anyone could see me just now I fancy they would take me rather for a witch or a prisoner of the fifteenth century than for a girl of the twenty first. Well, my friend Alan, your mysterious power may kill more quickly but not more surely than this and this too would take a man out of the world so easily that not even he himself will know that he is going, not even when he sinks into the sleep from which he will awake on the other side of the shadows. So much for the bodies of our enemies and now for their souls I don't want to kill the whole sail, at least not just yet. And as for you, my Alan, you are far too splendid to glorious a man to be killed, to say nothing of your being so much more useful alive. No, I have a very much pleasant fate in store for you. Just then a little cloud of incense smoke began to rise from the crucible in which were the mixed powders and a faint pleasant perfume began to diffuse itself. She stopped her soliloquy, measured off exactly half of the liquid and patiently poured it drop by drop into the crucible, at the same time gradually increasing the heat. The vapour gradually disappeared and the perfume died away. When she had poured in the last drop she began slowly stirring the mixture with a glass rod. It gradually assumed the consistency of thick syrup, and after stirring it for three minutes by her watch, which lay on the table beside her, she extinguished the electric lamp and waited. In a few seconds a pale orange-coloured flame appeared hovering over the crucible. As its ghostly light fell upon her anxious features she caught sight of herself in a mirror let into the wall on the opposite side of the table. She started back in her chair with an irrepressible shudder. For the first time in her life she saw herself as she really was. The weird unearthly light of the flame changed the clear pale olive of her skin into a shallow red, and cast what looked like a mist of vapour tinged with blood across the dark luster of her dusky eyes. It seemed as though the light that she had called forth from the darkness had melted the beautiful mask which hid her inner self from the eyes of men, and revealed her naked soul incarnate in the evil shape that should have belonged to it. Suddenly the flame vanished. She turned on the switch of the lamp, placed a platinum cover over the crucible with a pair of light-curved tongs and, with a quick half turn, screwed it hermetically down. Then she turned the heat of the furnace onto the full, rose from her chair and stretched herself with her linked hands above her head till her light-girlish form was drawn up to its full height in front of the mirror. She looked dreamily from under her half-closed lids at the perfect picture presented by the reflection, and then her tightly closed lips melted into a smile, and she said softly to herself, Ah, that is a different sort of picture. I wonder what Alan would have thought if he could have seen that one. I don't think I should have taken my trip in the airship tomorrow if he had done. Well, I have seen myself as I am, but four generations of inherited hate and longing for revenge have made me. In the light of that horrible flame I might have sat for the portrait of the lost soul of Lucretia Borgia. Ah, well, if mine is lost it shall be lost for something worth the exchange. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, as old Milton said, and after all, who knows? Bah, that is enough of dreaming. Then the time for doing is so near I must get some sleep tonight, or my eyes will have lost some of their brightness by tomorrow. So saying, she busied herself putting away her vials and powders and apparatus. The half of the colourless liquid she had left she carefully decanted into a tiny flask over the stopper of which she screwed a silver cap that had a little ring on the top, and this she hung on the chain around her neck. She replaced the slip of parchment in its silken bag and carefully burned the paper on which she had made her calculations. By this time the bottom of the crucible was glowing red-hot. She noted the time that had elapsed since she had screwed the cap down, waited five minutes longer, and then extinguished the furnace, undressed, and got into bed. And in half an hour was sleeping as quietly as a little child. She had set the chime of her repeating watch to sound at six, and hung the watch close above her head. Calm as her sleep was at first it was by no means dreamless, and her dreams were well fitted to be those of a guilty soul slumbering after a work of death. She saw herself standing with Alan on the glass dome-deck of the airship, beneath the light of a clear, white moon sailing high in the heavens and a host of brilliant stars glittering out of the deep blue depths beyond it. Far below them lay an unbroken cloud-sea of dazzling whiteness which stretched away into the infinite distance on all sides until it seemed to blend with the moonlight and melt into the sky. Then the scene changed, and the airship swept downward in a wide spiral curve and plunged through the noiseless billows of the shadowy sea. As she did so a fearful chorus of sounds rose up from the earth below. The moonlight and starlight were gone, and in their place the lurid glare of burning cities and blazing forests cast a fearful radiance up through the great eddy-in-waves of smoke, and reflected itself on the under surface of the clouds. Now the airship swept hither and thither with bewildering rapidity, like the incarnation of some fearful spirit of destruction. The moon had vanished, and she was giving orders rapidly and men were working the long, slender guns in a grim silence that contrasted weirdly with the horrible din that rose from the earth. She saw neither smoke nor flame from the guns nor heard any sound as they were discharged, but every time she raised her hand the motion was followed within a few seconds by a shaking of the atmosphere, a dull roar from the earth and the outburst of vast dazzling masses of flame, before which the blaze of the conflagration paled. She looked down with fierce exaltation upon the scene of carnage and destruction, and as she gazed upon it the fires died away. The roar of the explosions began to sound like echoes in the distance, and when the landscape of her dreamland took definite shape again the airship was hovering over a vast oval valley, walled in by mighty mountain masses, surmounted by towering peaks, on some of which crests of everlasting snow and ice shone, undissolved in the rays of the tropical sun. The valley itself was of such incomparable and fairy-like beauty that it seemed to belong rather to the realm of imagination than to the world of reality. A great lake lay in the centre its emerald shores lined with groves of palms and orange trees, and fringed with verdant islets spangled with many coloured flowers. On the northern shore of the lake lay a splendid city of marble palaces, surrounded by shady gardens and divided from each other by broad straight streets, smooth as ivory and spotless as snow, and lined with double rows of wide-spreading trees which cast a pleasant shade along their sides. In the midst of a vast square, in the centre of the city rose an immense building of marble of perfect whiteness, surmounted by a great golden dome which in turn was crowned by the silver shape of a woman with great spreading wings, which blazed and scintillated in the sunlight as though they had been fashioned of sheets of crystal pure and translucent as diamonds. All over the valley, villas and palaces of marble were scattered in cool ravines and on shaded wooden slopes, and as far as her eye could reach vast expanses of garden land, emerald pasture and golden cornfields stretched away over hill and vale, until the most remote were met by the cool, dark forests which clothed the middle slopes of the all encircling mountains, and themselves gave place higher up to dark, frowning precipices, vast walls of living rock rising thousands of feet sheer upwards and ending in the mighty peaks which stood like eternal sentinels guarding this enchanted realm. If she had had her will, she would have gazed forever upon this delightful scene, but the spirit of the dream was not to be controlled, and it faded from her sight just as the picture of death and desolation had done. As it faded away, Allen, who had now come back to her side, laid his hand upon her shoulder, and looking at her with mournful eyes said wearily, That was your first and last glimpse of heaven. Now comes the judgment. As he spoke, the airship soared upward again and was instantly enveloped in a cloud of impenetrable darkness. She sped on and on in utter silence through the gloom, which was so dense that it seemed to cast the rays of the ship's electric lights back upon her as she floated amidst it. Presently the death-like silence was broken by a low, weird sound that seemed like a wail of universal agony rising up from the earth beneath. Then, far ahead and high up in the sky, appeared a faint light, which grew and brightened until the darkness melted away before it, and Olga saw the airship floating near enough to the earth for her to see that all its vegetation was withered and yellow, and the beds of its streams almost dry, with only little thin rivulets trickling sluggishly along them. Millions of people seemed wandering listlessly and aimlessly about the streets of the cities and the parched fields of the open country, even and anon stretching their hands as though in appeal to the dark, moonless sky in which the fearful shape of light and fury mist was growing every moment brighter and vaster. It grew and grew until it arched half the horizon with this tremendous curve, and then out of the midst of it came a huge dazzling globe of fire, from the rim of which shot forth great flames of every colour, some of which seemed to descend to the surface of the earth like long fiery tongues that licked up the seething lakes in wreathing clouds of steam, which hissed and roared as they rose like ascending cataracts. She looked down between them at the earth. The myriads of figures were there still, but now they lay prone and lifeless on the ground, as though the last agony of mankind were past. The light of the blazing globe grew more and more dazzling and the heat more and more intense. The speed of the airship slackened visibly, although the wings and propellers were working at their utmost speed, and it was falling rapidly, as though there was no longer any air to support it. She gasped for breath in the choking burning atmosphere of the deck chamber, and then a swift vivid wave of light seemed to sweep through her brain, and she woke with a choking gasp of terror, with the chimes of her watch ringing sweetly in her ears, telling her that the vision had been but a dream of a night that had passed. Wide awake in an instant, she got out of bed and turned on the electric lamp. As the room had been perfectly warmed all night by the electric conduction stows, which were then in almost universal use, she only stopped to throw a fur-lined cloak around her shoulders before she went to remove the cap of the crucible. She peered anxiously into the vessel, and saw about two fluid ounces of a dark, glittering liquid, from the surface of which the light of the lamp was reflected as though from a mirror, with hands that trembled slightly in spite of the great effort she made to keep her nerves in check. She poured the precious fluid into one of the glass measures that she had used the night before. Seen through the glass, its colour was a deep, brilliant blue, and, like the white liquid first prepared, shone as though with an inherent, light-giving power of its own. She held it up admiringly to the light, and said to herself, with the same cruel smile that had curved her lips when she had contemplated the other fluid. How beautiful it is! It might be made of sapphire as dissolved in some potent essence. In reality, it is an elixir capable of dissolving the souls of men. Ah, my proud masters of the world, which will soon see how much your boasted powers avail you against this, and a woman's wit, and hates it. And you, my splendid Alan, before tomorrow night, you should be at my feet. Two drops of this, and that proud, strong soul of yours, shall melt away like a snowflake under warm rain. And you shall be my slave, and do my bidding, and never know that you are not as free as you are now. The days have gone by, then men sought the elixir of life. But Paul Romanoff sought and found the elixir of death, death of the body or of the soul, as the possessor of it shall veil. And he has gone, and I alone, of all the children of men, possess it. She set the measure down on the table, and took out of her valence a similar little flask to the one which held the white liquid. In this she carefully poured the contents of the measure, screwed the cap on as before, and hung it with the other on the chain around her neck. Then, womanlike, she turned to the mirror, threw back her cloak a little, and gazed at the reflection of the two flasks which shone like two great gems upon her white skin. There is such a necklace as a woman never wore before, since woman first delighted in gems. A necklace that all the jewels in the world could not buy. How pretty they look! So saying, she turned away from the mirror, and carefully put away all traces of the work she had been engaged in. Then she threw off her cloak, and turned the lamp out, and got into bed again, to wait until the attendant called her at eight o'clock as she had directed. She did not go to sleep again, but lay with wide open eyes looking at the darkness, and conjuring out of it visions of love and war, and the world-wide empire which she believed to be now almost within her grasp. In all these visions two figures stood out prominently, those of Sergei and Alan, her lover that had been, and a lover that was to be. If only the elixir did its work as its discoverer had said it would. As such thoughts as these passed through her brain, a new, and perhaps a nobler conception of her mission of revenge took possession of her. In the past Natasha had won the love of the men whose genius had made possible, nay irresistible, the triumph of that revolution which had subverted the throne of her ancestors, and sent the last of the Tsars of Russia to die like a felon in chains amid the snows of Siberia. What more magnificent vengeance could she, the last surviving daughter of the Romanovs win than the enslavement of the men descended not only from Natasha and Richard Arnold, but also from that Alan Tremaine whose name he bore, and who, as first president of the Anglo-Saxon Federation, had ensured the victory of the Western races over the Eastern. The empire of freedom and peace which Richard Arnold had won for Natasha's sake, this son of the line of Natasha should convert at her bidding into an empire such as she longed to rule over, an empire in which men should be her slaves and women her handmaidens. For her sake the wave of destiny should flow back again, she would be the Semiramis of a new despotism. What was the freedom or the happiness of the mass of mankind to her? If she could raise herself above them and put her foot upon their necks, why should she not do so? By force the leaders of the terror had overthrown the despotisms of the old world, why should not she employ the self-same force to seat herself, with the man she loved in spite of all her hereditary hatred upon the throne of the world, and reign with him in that glorious land whose beauties had been revealed to her in the vision which surely had been something more than a dream. Thus thinking and dreaming and illuminating the darkness with her own visions of glories to come she lay in a kind of ecstasy until a knock at the door warned her that the time for dreaming had passed and the hour for action had arrived. A brief half-hour suffice for her toilet, and she entered the room of the hotel in which Sergei was awaiting her, dressed to perfection in her plain, clinging robe of royal purple and self-composed as though she had passed the night in the most innocent and dreamless of slumbers. She submitted to his greeting kiss with as good a grace as possible and yet with an inward shrinking which almost amounted to loathing, born of the visions which were still floating in her mind. She shuddered almost invisibly as he released her from his embrace and then the bright blood rose to her cheeks and a sudden light shone in her eyes as the thoughts possessed her, that not many hours would pass before a far nobler lover would take her in his arms and would press sweeter kisses upon her lips, the lips which had sworn fealty and devotion to the enemies of his race. Sergei with the true egotism of the lover took the blush to himself and said with a laugh of boyish frankness, travelling and Russian air seem to agree with your majesty. Evidently you have slept well your first night on Russian soil, I was half afraid that what happened yesterday, and your conversation with that golden-winged braggart from area would have sufficiently disturbed you to give you a more or less sleepless night, but you look as fresh and as lovely as though you had slept in the most perfect peace at home. The anger that these unthinking words awoke in her soul brought back the bright flush to Olga's cheeks and the lights into her eyes, and again Sergei mistook the sign as indeed he might well have done, and so he entirely mistook the meaning of her words when she replied with a laugh of the true significance of which he had not the remotest conception. On the contrary, how was it possible that I could have anything but the sweetest sleep and the most pleasant dreams after such a delightful journey and the making of such pleasant acquaintances? Do you not think that the fates have favoured us beyond our wildest expectations in thus bringing our enemies so unconsciously across our path at the very outset of our campaign against them? But really, these Aryans are delightful fellows. No, don't frown at me like that, because you know as well as I do that in that chivalrous good nature of theirs lies our best hope of success. As she spoke she went up to him and laid her two hands upon his shoulder, and went on looking up into his eyes with a seductive softness in hers. I am afraid I made you terribly jealous yesterday, but really, Sergei, you must remember that in diplomacy and diplomacy alone lies our only chance of advantage in the circumstances which the kindly fates appear to have specially created for our benefit. The time for you to act will come later on, and when it comes, I know you will acquit yourself like the true Roman of that you are, but for the present, well, you know these Aryans are men, and their diplomacy alone is in the question. It is better that a woman should deal with them. You will trust me for the present, won't you, Sergei? For all answer, he took a face between his hands, put her head back and kissed her, saying as he released her, Yes darling, I will trust you, not only now, but forever. You are wiser than I am in these things. Do as you please, I will obey. As he spoke, the door opened, and a attendant came in with two little cups of coffee on a silver salver. He placed it on the table, told them that breakfast would be ready for them in the morning room in ten minutes, and retired. As they sipped their coffees, Olga said to Sergei, Now, we shall meet on enemy's breakfast, and I want you to be a great deal more courteous and friendly than you were yesterday. Our own feelings concern ourselves alone, but in our outward conduct, we owe something to the sacred cause which we both have at heart. You can imagine how great the sacrifice I am making my relations with those whom I have been taught to hate for my cradle. I can see as well as you do, perhaps better, that this future ruler of area admires me in his own boyish way. If I can bring myself to appear complacent, surely it is not too much to ask you to look upon it with indifference or even with interest, a brotherly interest, you know, for you must remember that he knows me only as your sister. Now, I want you to ask them to come and have breakfast, visits at our table, and to exert yourself to appear agreeable to them, even as I show, and above all things promise me that you will fall in with any suggestions that I may make as regards our trip in this wonderful airship which we are to make tomorrow. There is no time now to explain to you what I mean, but I swear to you by the blood that flows in both our veins, that if I can only carry through without any let or hindrance, the plans that I have already formed, that before 48 hours have passed that airship shall no longer be under Alan Arnoldson's command. He looked at her for a moment with almost incredulous admiration. She returned his acquiring glance with a steady unwavering gaze which made suspicion impossible. All his life he had grown up to look upon her as sharing with him the one hope that was left of restoring the ancient fortunes of their family. More than this they had been lovers ever since either of them knew the meaning of love. How then could he have dreamt that behind so fair an appearance lay as dark and treacherous a design as the brain of an ambitious woman had ever conceived? Intoxicated by her beauty and the memory of his lifelong love, he took a couple of steps towards her, took her unresisting into his arms again and said passionately, Give me another kiss, darling, and on your lips I will swear to trust you always and do your bidding even to the death. She returned his kiss with a passion so admirably simulated that his resolve was thrice strengthened by it, and then she released herself gently from his embrace saying, Even so unto the death it needs be, as I shall serve our sacred cause to the end cause what it may. Come, it is time that we vent down to breakfast. Breakfast passed off very pleasantly, and by the time it was over, Sergei was upon much better terms with the two Aryans than he had been on the previous day. He had taken Olga's warning and appealed to heart, and he had done so all the more easily for the reason that he felt somewhat ashamed of himself for the ill temper and bad manners of which he had been guilty, and which their two new acquaintances had repaid with such dignified courtesy and good humour. His frankly expressed apology was accepted with such perfect good nature, unmixed with even a suspicion of condescension that he felt at ease with them at once, and even began to regret that his destiny made it impossible for him to be their friend instead of their enemy. The discussion of their plans for the day occupied the rest of the meal. They had a whole twenty-four hours before them, for the ethereal would not be back from San Francisco where she was going when she passed the train until ten o'clock on the following morning. So it was arranged that they would begin the day with a sleigh-drive, a luxury which not even area could afford. Then the two Aryans were to see the sights of the city under the guidance of Olga and Sergei, and performed the chief of the duties that brought them to St. Petersburg. After luncheon they were to have a couple of hours on the ice in the park, into which the Yusofov gardens of the nineteenth century had been expanded. After which they would see the ice palaces illuminated at dusk, then dine, and finish the day at the opera. When the airship arrived a rapid flight was to be taken across Europe over the Alps and back to Moscow, across Italy, Greece, and the Black Sea, which would enable Alan and Alexis to deposit their guests with their Moscow friends soon after nightfall. The sleigh-drive took the form of a race on the plain stretching towards Lake Ladoga, between the two troikas driven by Sergei and Olga, who had so managed matters that she had Alan for a companion, and who, not a little to Sergei's disgust, won it after a desperate struggle by a head. The race was a revelation to the two Aryans, and when Alan handed Olga out of the sleigh after they had trotted quietly back to the city, the interest which she had excited in him during the railway journey had already begun to deepen into a sentiment much more pleasing and dangerous. The rest of the morning was devoted to driving about the city, and to paying a visit to the ancient fortress of Peter and Paul, which alone of all the fortress prisons of Russia had been preserved intact as a fitting monument of a fallen despotism and a warning to all future generations. Once at least in his life every man in area visited this fortress, as good Muslims visit Mecca, and this was the duty which Alan and Alexis were now performing. In one of the horrible dungeons deep in the foundations of the fortress, under the waters of the Neva, they were shown a massive gold plate riveted onto the rough damp stone wall. Its surface was kept brightly polished, and it looked strangely incongruous with the gloom and squalor of the cell. On it stood an inscription in platinum letters let into the gold. In this cell, Israel, Damasca, afterwards known as Natas, the master of the terror, was imprisoned in the year 1881, previous to his exile to Siberia by order of Alexander Romanov, the last of the tyrants of Russia. With feelings wide asunder as love and hate or gratitude and revenge, the descendants of Natas and the daughter of Romanov stood in front of this memorial plate and read the simple and yet pregnant words. Alan and Alexis both bent their heads as if in reverence for a moment, but Olga and Sergei gazed at it with heads erect and eyes glowing with the fires of anger in a silence that was broken by Alan saying, Liberty surely never had a stranger temple than this, and yet this dungeon is to us what the tomb of the prophet is to the Muslims. I wonder what the last of the czars would have thought if he could have foreseen even a little part of all that sprang from the tragedy that was begun in this dismal cell. He would have killed him, said Olga, carried away for the moment by an irrepressible burst of passion, and then there would have been no Natas, no terror and no terrorist air fleet, and Alexander Romanov would have died master of the world instead of a chained felon in Siberia. Your ancestor, Richard Arnold, would have starved in his garret, or killed himself in despair as many other geniuses did before him and the world would have remained the slave market of tyrants and the shambles of murderous men. Let us thank God that Natas lived to do his work, said Alan in a tone of solemn reverence, wondering not a little at Olga's strange outburst and yet not having the remotest idea of its true cause. Neither Olga nor Sergei could reply to this speech. They would have bitten their tongue through rather than say amen to it, and anything else they dare not have said. After a moment more of somewhat constrained silence, Olga turned towards the door and said, Come, let us go, the air of this place poisons me. When they got on the ice after lunch, Olga was not a little astonished to find that, perfect as she and Sergei were in skating, the two Aryans were little inferior to them, despite the fact they had just left their tropical home for the first time. How is this? said Olga to Alan, as hand in hand they went sweeping over the ice in long, easy curves. I suppose you manufacture your ice for skating purposes in area. No, he said. Some of our mountains rise above the snow line, and in their upper valleys they have little lakes, so when we want a skating surface, we just pump the water up and flood them and let it freeze. Besides this, I don't think there is any harm in me telling you that we have a sort of wheel skate, which runs quite as easily as steeled as an ice. Ah! said Olga, possessed by a sudden thought. Then I suppose that is why the streets of your splendid city are so broad and white and smooth. Quietly as the words were spoken, Alan's hand tightened upon hers, as he heard them with a grip that almost made her cry out with pain. It was some moments before he recovered from his astonishment, sufficiently to ask her the meaning of her unexpected and amazing question. She greeted his question with a saucy smile and a mocking upward glance and said quietly, simply because I have seen them. It was a bow drawn at a venture. She had suddenly determined to test the truth of her vision and hazard a description from it of the unknown land. You have seen them, cried Alan, now more amazed than ever. But pardon me, even at the risk of contradicting you, I must tell you that that is impossible. No one, not a born Aryan, has set eyes on Arya for more than a hundred years. So you think perhaps? Said she in the same quiet, half mocking tone. Well, now listen and tell me whether this description is entirely incorrect. If it is correct, you need say nothing. If it is not, you can tell me so. And then she began, while he listened in a silence of utter stupification and described the valley and the city of Arya as she had seen them in her dream vision. When she had finished, he was silent for several moments and then said in a voice that told her that she had really seen it as though with the eyes of flesh. What are you, a sorceress, or? No, you cannot be an Aryan girl in disguise, for none ever leaves the country till she is married. Then, as I cannot be the latter, said Olga, you must, I suppose, consider me the former. Now I shall take my revenge for your reticence in the train yesterday and tell you no more via quits to that extent at least, and now we will go back to my brother if you please. With this, Aryan was forced to be content. Indeed, he could not have pursued the subject without breaking his oath and so a few minutes later it came about that Olga and Sergei were skating together in an unfrequented part of the lake, and here Olga took an opportunity that she might not have again of telling him as much as she thought fit to him to know of her plans for capturing the airship on the following day. I needn't tell you, said she, that this airship is worth everything to us and that therefore they must be ready to go to any extremities to get position of it. It is the first step to the command of the world. For you heard Alan say today that she is the swiftest vessel in the whole Aryan fleet. But to do that we must first overcome the crew, said Sergei, looking anxiously about to see if there was anyone within year short. How are we going to do that? Two of us against ten or a dozen armed with powers we know nothing about. We must find means to drug them, to poison them if necessary during tomorrow's voyage, came the reply in a whisper that made his heart stand still for the moment with utter horror. Good God, is that really necessary? It seems a horrible thing to do when they are trusting us and taking us as their guests. He said in a low trembling voice. Yes, she replied with a well simulated shudder. It is horrible, I know, but it is necessary. Remember that we have solemnly sworn war to the knife against this people and that armed as they are all open as self is impossible. Therefore they must be struck in secret or not at all. Now listen, I have brought with me a flask which my grandfather gave me a day or two before he died. It contains enough of a tasteless powerful narcotic to send twenty people to sleep so that nothing will wake them for several hours. I will give you half of this tonight and keep half myself and one of us must find an opportunity to get the crew to take it in their vine or whatever they may drink. For they are sure to have one or two meals Valvier on board. Tonight I will send instructions in cipher to the Lossenskis in Vorobyevo to tell them that as many as possible of the friends must be ready for action by eight tomorrow night and must wait if necessary night after night till we come. If all goes well we shall select the new crew of the ethereal from them before we see two more sunrises. In fact by the time they return from our voyage they must have absolute control of the vessel. Such an opportunity as this will never offer itself again an eye for my part and determine to risk anything not accepting life itself to take the best advantage of it. It would be madness to allow any scruples to stand in our way. Then the empire of the air is almost within our grasp. And none shall so far as I am concerned replied Sergei in a low steady voice that showed that his horror of the deed they contemplated had succumbed at least for the moment to the tremendous temptation offered by the prospect of success. Spoken like a true Romanov said Olga looking up at him with a sweet smile of approval. As the deed is so shall the reward be. Now we must get back to our friends. We will find a means to get an hour together before tonight to arrange the matter further and we will have Alan and Alexis to suppervise us. After the opera and then I will begin my share of the work. Once the airship is ours we can hide her in one of the ravines of the Caucasus hold the council of war in the villa of Orobievo and set about the work of the revolution in the regular fashion. The rest of the day was spent in accordance with the plans already agreed on. Olga and Sergei had teed together in their private rooms before going to the theatre and put the finishing touches to their plans for the momentous venture of the following day. And Alan and Alexis all unsuspecting accepted their invitation to supper after their return from the opera house. The seemingly innocent and pleasant little supper which passed off so merrily in the private sitting room occupied by Olga and Sergei had but one incidental which calls for description here and even that was unnoticed not only by the two guests but by Sergei himself. Just before midnight Olga proposed that in accordance with the ancient customer of Russia they should drink a glass of punch, brewed in the Russian style and that she volunteered to brew it herself it is needless to say that the invitation was at once accepted. The apparatus stood upon a little table in one corner of the room. For a single minute her back was turned to the three sitting at the table in the centre. Her share in the conversation was not interrupted for an instant and no one saw a couple of drops of sparkling blue liquid fall into each of the three of the glasses from the little flask that she had concealed in the palm of her hand. And when she turned around with the little silver tray on which the glasses stood the flask was resting at the bottom of her dress pocket. She handed a glass to each of them and then took her own up from the side table where she had left it. She went to her place and holding her glass up said simply here's to that which each of us has nearest at heart and drank. All followed suit and as the clock chimed 12 a few minutes later the two Aryans took their leave and left Olga and Sergei alone. You said you would begin your share of the work tonight? said he as soon as they were alone. Have you done sir? If you do your work tomorrow as successfully as I have done mine tonight replied Olga looking steadily into his eyes as she spoke the empire of the air will no longer be theirs. Sergei returned her glance in silence. He wanted to speak but some superior power seemed to have laid a spell upon his will and as long as Olga's burning eyes were fixed on his his tongue was paralyzed. Nay more than this his mind even refused to shape the sentences that he would have liked to speak. Olga held him mute before her for several minutes and then she said quietly still keeping her eyes fixed on his. Now speak and tell me what you would do if I told you that I preferred Alan as a lover to you and that I would rather a thousand times be his slave and placing than your wife. I should say that you are the mistress of my destiny that I have no law but your will and that it is for you to give me joy or pain as seems good to you. Sergei spoke the unnatural words in a calm, passionless tone rather as though he was speaking in a sort of hypnotic trance than in full command of his senses. A strange, subtle influence had been stealing through his veins and over his nerves ever since he had drunk the liquor which Olga had prepared. He seemed perfectly incapable of resisting any suggestion that might have been made to him. His will was paralyzed but even the consciousness of this fact was fading from his mind. All his passions were absolutely in abeyance. Even his love for Olga failed to inspire him with any jealous resentment of words which half an hour before would have goaded him to frenzy. He heard them as though they concerned someone else. The ruin of his life's hopes which they implied so distinctly had no meaning for him. So far as his volition was concerned he was an automaton ready to obey without question the dictates of her imperious will. Said Vildu, said Olga, in the tone of a mistress addressing a servant, now go to bed and sleep there and remember the work said lies before you to-morrow. I will, said Sergei, and without another word, without attempting to take his customary good-night kiss, he walked out of the room leaving her to the enjoyment of her victory and the contemplation of triumphs that now seemed almost certain to her. Punctual to its appointed time, the airship appeared in mid-air over the city a few minutes before ten the next morning. It sank slowly and gracefully to within a hundred feet of the ground over the garden of the hotel in which the two Aryans and their new friends were staying. Signals were rapidly exchanged as before between Alan and one of the crew standing on the after-part of the deck. Then it sank down onto one of the snow-covered lawns of the garden, a door opened in the glass-covering of the deck, a short, light, folding ladder, with handrails dropped out of it to the ground, and Alan, springing up three or four of the steps, held out his hand to Olga, saying, How long? We shall have a crowd around us in another minute. This was true. For the appearance of the airship had already attracted hundreds of people in the streets and many of them had already made their way into the gardens of the hotel in order to get a closer view of her. Olga, feeling not a little, like a queen ascending a throne, ran lightly up the steps followed by Sergei and Alexis. The moment they got onto the deck the ladder was drawn up, the glass door slid noiselessly to, and Alan at once presented them to his friends on deck. While the introductions were taking place the wings of the airship began to vibrate and undulate with a wavy motion from forward aft, at first slowly and then more and more swiftly. Her propeller whirled around and the wonderful craft rose without a jar or a tremor from the earth. Then the propellers began to revolve faster and faster and she shot forward and upward over the trees amid the admiring murmurs of the crowd in the streets about the hotel. But little did those light-hearted citesiers dream any more than did the captain and the crew of the ethereal that this aerial pleasure-cruise was destined to mark the beginning of a tragedy that would involve the whole of civilized humanity in a catastrophe so colossal that the like of it had never been seen or even dreamt of on earth before. From the wits of a woman and the weakness of a man were now to be evolved the elements of destruction that ear-long should lay the world in ruins. End of chapter 7 Chapter 8 of Olga Romanoff by George Griffith This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Read for LibriVox.org by Craig Franklin The New Terror Five years had passed since the ethereal had vanished like a cloud from the sky leaving so far as the airship itself was concerned no more trace than if she had soared into space beyond the sphere of the earth's attraction and departed to another planet. All the rest of the winter of 2031 tidings had been sought most anxiously but in vain by the kindred and friends of those who had formed her crew during the ill-fated voyage on which she had disappeared into the unknown. The earth had been ransacked east and west north and south by the aerial fleet in search of the missing ethereal but without result. She had been traced to St. Petersburg and Vorobyevo but there, like the phantom craft of the flying Dutchman she had melted into thin air so far as any result of the search could show. But when the snows thawed on the mountains of Norway and the bodies of eight Aryans who had formed her crew on her last fatal voyage were discovered by a couple of foresters on a melted snowdrift on the very spot on which Vladimir Romanov had been killed with his companions by the order of the Supreme Council a thrill both of horror and excitement ran through the whole civilized world. That their death was intimately connected with the disappearance of the airship was instantly plain to everyone and the only inference which could be drawn from such a conclusion was that at last some power, silent, mysterious and intangible had come into existence prepared to dispute the empire of the world with the Aryans and, more than this, had already struck them a deadly blow which it was utterly beyond their power to return. The effects of this discovery were exactly what Olga had anticipated from the first time since their ancestors had conquered the earth and made war impossible the supreme authority of the Aryans was called into question. It was quite beyond their power to conceal the fact that their flagship had either deserted or been captured incredible as either alternative seemed. The Central Council therefore wisely accepted the situation and immediately after the discovery of the bodies the president published a full account of her last voyage as far as was known in the columns of the European Review the leading newspaper of the day in the old world. The only clue to the fate of the airship seemed to lie in the fact that at St. Petersburg a youth and a young girl with whom Alan and Alexis had made friends on their journey from London had gone on board the ethereal for a trip to the clouds but this led to nothing. Who was to recognise the daughter of the Tsar and the last male Zion of the house of Romanov in Olga and Sergei Ivanovich who had never been known as anything but the orphaned grandchildren of Paul Ivanovich the sculptor. More than this, even to entertain for a moment the supposition that this boy and girl who were known to be little more could by any possible means have overcome the ten Aryans armed as they were with their terrible death-power and then have vanished into space with the airship would have been to shatter the supremacy of the Aryans at a blow. Even as it was the wildest and most dangerous rumours began to fly from lip to lip a nation to nation all round the world and for the first time since the days of the terror the earthfolk began to think of the Aryans rather as men like themselves than as the superior race which they had hitherto regarded them. The president of Arya at once issued a proclamation asking in the interest of peace and public security for the assistance of all the civilised peoples of the earth in his efforts to discover the lost airship and also conditionally declaring a war of extermination on any power or nation which either concealed the whereabouts of the ethereal or gave any assistance to those who might be in possession of her. This proclamation was published simultaneously in all the newspapers of the world and produced a most profound sensation wherever it was read. The terrible magic of the ominous word war roused at once the deathless spirit of combativeness that had lain dormant for all these years. It was impossible not to recognise the fact that this mysterious power which had come unseen into existence and had snatched the finest vessel in the Aryan navy from the possession of the council with such daring and skill that not a trace of her was to be found could have but one object in view and that was to dispute the empire of the air and the descendants of the terrorists. This could mean nothing else than the outbreak sooner or later of a strife that would be a veritable battle of the gods, a struggle which would shake the world and convulse human society throughout its whole extent. The general sense of peace and security in which men had lived for four generations was shattered at a stroke by the universal apprehension of the blow that all men felt to be inevitable but which would be struck. No man knew when or how. A year passed and nothing happened. The world went on its way in peace. The Aryan patrol circled the earth with a moving girdle of aerial cruisers ready to give instantaneous warning of the first reappearance of the lost ethereal but nothing was discovered. If she still existed, she was so skillfully concealed as to be practically beyond the reach of human search. Then, without the slightest warning, while Anglo-Saxondon was in the midst of the 130th celebration of the Festival of Deliverance, the civilized world was started out of the sense of security into which it had once more begun to fall by the publication in the European review of an annoying piece of intelligence. A mystery of the sea, disappearance of three transports. It is our duty to chronicle the astounding and disquieting fact that the three transports, Marsilia, Ceres and Astrea belonging respectively to the eastern, southern and western services have disappeared. The first left New York for Southampton four days ago and should have arrived yesterday. The Central Atlantic Signalling Station reported her all well at midday on Tuesday and this is the last news that has been heard of her. The second was reported from Cape Verde Station on her voyage from Cape Town to Marseille and there all trace of her is lost as she never reached the Canary station. The third was last heard of from station number two in the Indian Ocean which is situated at the intersection of the 80th Meridian of East Longitude with the 20th parallel of South Letitude. She was on her way from Melbourne to Alexandria and should have touched at Aden two days ago. The disappearance of these three magnificent vessels filled as they were with passengers and loaded with cargoes of enormous value both in money and material can only be described as a calamity of worldwide importance and happily too the mystery which surrounds their fate invested with a sinister aspect which is impossible to ignore. That they lost is the result of accident or shipwreck it is almost impossible to believe. They represent the latest triumphs of modern shipbuilding. All were over 40,000 tonnes in measurement and had engines capable of driving them at a speed of 50 nautical miles an hour through the water. For 50 years no ocean transporter suffered shipwreck or even serious injury so completely has modern engineering skill triumph over the now conquered elements. Added to this no storms of even ordinary violence have occurred along their routes. After passing the stations of which they were last reported they vanished and that is all that is known about them. The president of area has desired us to state that he has ordered his submarine squadron stations at Zanzibar, Ascension and Fael to explore the ocean beds along the routes pursued by the transports. Until we receive news of the results of their investigation it will be well to refrain from further comment on this mysterious misfortune which has suddenly and unexpectedly fallen upon the world and in doing so we shall only express the fervent desire of all civilised men and women when we express the hope that this calamity grievous as it is may not be the precursor of even greater misfortunes to come. It would be almost impossible for us of the present day to form any adequate estimate of the thrill of horror and consternation which this brief and temporally worded narration of the mysterious loss of the three transports sent through the world of the twenty-first century. Not only was it the first event of the kind that had occurred within the memory of living men but saving the loss of the ethereal was the first dark cloud that had appeared in the clear heaven of peace and prosperity for more than a hundred and twenty-five years. But terrible as was the state of excitement and anxiety into which it threw the nations of the world it gave place to a still deeper horror and bewilderment when day after day passed and no tidings were received of the three submarine squadrons consisting of three vessels each which had been sent to inquire into the fate of the transports. They dived beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic and that was the last that was ever seen of them. Month after month went by every week bringing news of some fresh calamity at sea of the disappearance of transport after transport along the great routes of ocean travel of squadron after squadron of submarine cruisers which plunged into the abyss of the sea to discover and attack the mysterious enemy of mankind that lay hidden in the depths and which never reappeared on the surface. Whether they were captured or destroyed it was impossible to say because no member of their crews ever returned to tell the tale. Whatever doubt there had been as to the existence or hostile nature of this ocean terror that was paralyzing the trade of the world was speedily set at rest by a discovery made in the spring of the year 2032 by a party of divers who descended to repair a fault in one of the Atlantic cables about 200 miles west of Ireland. There lying in the Atlantic ooze they found a shattered fragments of the Sirius a transport which had disappeared about a month before. The great hull of the splendid vessel had been torn asunder by some explosive of tremendous power and more than this her hold had been rifled of all its treasure and the most valuable portions of its cargo. After this they no longer remained any doubt that the depths of the ocean were the hunting ground for some foe of society one at least of whose objects was plunder. The president and council of area found themselves at last confronted and baffled by an enemy who could neither be seen nor reached in his hiding place wherever it might be beneath the surface of the waters. Thousands of lives had been sacrificed and treasure in millions had been lost by the end of the first year of what men had now come to call the New Terror. New fleets of submarine cruisers were built and held in readiness in all the great ports of the world and these scoured the ocean depths in all directions with no further result than the swift and silent annihilation of vessel after vessel by some power which struck irresistibly out of the darkness and then vanished the moment that the blow had been delivered. As yet however no enemy appeared on land or in the air nor were any tidings heard of the lost ethereal or her captain and lieutenant. The Aryans had replaced her with ten almost identical vessels and had raised the strength of their navy to two hundred and fifty vessels one hundred of which were kept in readiness in area while the other hundred and fifty were distributed in small squadrons at twenty four stations half of which were in the western hemisphere and half in the eastern. The submarine warfare had now practically ceased. Nearly two hundred vessels belonging to area, Britain and America had been captured or destroyed by an enemy which at the period at which this portion of the narrative opens was a supreme throughout the realm of the waters as the Aryans were in the air. To the menace of the airships this hidden foe replied by severing all the oceanic cables and paralyzing the communication of the world save over land and through the air. Thus at the end of six years after the capture of the ethereal by Olga Romanov more than half the work of those who had brought peace on earth after the Armageddon of nineteen oh four had been undone. All over the world not even accepting an area men lived in a state of constant anxiety and apprehension not knowing whether or how their invisible enemy would strike them next. The masters of the world were supreme no longer for a new power had arisen which within the limits of the seas had proved itself stronger than they were. Communication between continent and continent had almost ceased save where the Aryan airships were employed. In six short years the peace of the world had been destroyed and the stability of society shaken. Among the nations of Anglo-Saxondom the change had manifested itself by a swift decadence into the worst forms of unbridled democracy. Men's minds were unhinged and the most extravagant options found acceptance. Parliaments had already been made annual and were fast sinking into machines for registering the ever-changing opinions of rival factions and their leaders. Sovereigns and presidents were little better than popular puppets existing on sufferance. In short, all that Paul Romanoff had prophesised was coming to pass more rapidly than even he had expected so far as the area of the Anglo-Saxon Federation was concerned. In the Muslim Empire affairs were different but no less threatening. The Sultan Khalid, the magnificent as he was justly styled by his admirers saw clearly that the time must come when this mysterious enemy would emerge from the waters and attempt the conquest of the land. And for three years past he had been manufacturing weapons and forming armies against the day of battle which he considered inevitable and which he longed for rather than dreaded. Thus, while Anglo-Saxondom was lapsing into the anarchy of unrestrained democracy the Muslim monarch was preparing to take advantage of the issue of events which skillfully turned to account might one day make him master of the world. Such was the condition of affairs throughout the world on the first of May 2036 and then the long expected came in strange and terrible shape. At midnight a blaze of light was seen far up in the sky of the city of Aria. A moment later something that must have been a small block of metal fell from a tremendous height in the square in the centre of the city and was shivered to fragments by the force of its fall. On the splintered pavement where it fell was found a little roll of parchment addressed to the president. It was taken to him and he opened it and read these words. To Alan Arnold President of Aria If you want your son Alan and his friend Alexis look for them on an island which you will find near the intersection of the 40th parallel of South Latitude and the 120th Meridian of West Longitude in the South Pacific. They have served my turn and I have done with them. Perhaps they will be able to tell you how I have conquered the empire of the sea. Before long I shall have rested the empire of the air from you as well. Olga Romanov End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of Olga Romanov by George Griffith This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Flight of the Revenge Astounding, almost stupefying as were the tidings conveyed by this letter which had dropped like a veritable bolt from the blue. The challenge contained in the last sentence and the ominous name with which it was signed were matters of infinitely greater and more instant importance. Alan Arnold was the responsible president of Aria first and a father afterwards. He lost not a moment in speculating upon the strange fate of his son and first-born. The safety, not only of Aria but of the world, demanded his first attention and he gave it. Crushing, the missive in his hand, he took two swift strides to a telephone in the wall of the room in which he had received the message from the skies and delivered several rapid orders through it. If they had been the words of a demigod instead of those of a man their effects could scarcely have been more instantaneous or marvellous. On a hundred mountain peaks all around the great valley of Aria enormous lights blazed out simultaneously flinging long streams of radiance dazzling and intense for miles into the sky towards all points of the compass and at the same moment fifty airships soared up from their stations all around the mountains flashing their searchlights ahead and a stern in all directions. It was a scene of unearthly wonder and magnificence a scene such as could only have been made possible by the triumphant genius of a race of men heirs of all the best that Earth could give them who had turned the favour of circumstance to the utmost advantage. Three minutes for the aerial cruisers to clear the mountains and as they did so the wide sweeping rays of fifty searchlights assisted by the blazing orbs which crowned every mountain peak illuminated the darkness for many miles outside the valley. In the midst of the sea of light thus projected through the semi-darkness of the starlit heavens the flying shape of an airship was detected speeding away to the south eastward instantly the prowls of the whole squadron would turn towards her and the first aerial race in the history of the world began. The pursuing airships spread themselves out in a huge semi-circle at the extremities of which two swiftest vessels in the fleet almost exact counterparts of the lost ethereal one of these bore the same name as the stolen flagship and the other had been named the aerial after the first vessel built by Richard Arnold the conqueror of the air 132 years before these two vessels carried ten guns each and were capable of a maximum speed of 500 miles an hour the highest velocity that it had so far been found possible to attain the others were somewhat smaller craft mounting eight guns each and capable of a speed of about 400 miles an hour the chase, either because she could not travel faster or for some hidden reason allowed the pursuing squadron to gain upon her until she was only some five miles ahead of its two foremost vessels which were travelling at the highest speed attainable by the whole fratilla she showed no lights and so in order to keep her in view it was necessary for her pursuers to keep their searchlights constantly sweeping the skies ahead of them lest they should lose sight of her in the semi-darkness this placed the Aryan fleet at a serious disadvantage which very soon became apparent for before the pursuit had lasted an hour the chase opened fire and so the Aryans had to learn guns and shell after shell charged with some terrific explosive began bursting along the line of the pursuing squadron producing fearful concussions in the atmosphere and causing the pursuers to rock and toss in the shaken air like ships on a stormy sea the aetherial and the aerial at the two extremities of the semi-circle replied with a rapid converging fire from their bow guns reaching the now invisible chase all the projectiles were of course time-shells but the speed at which the vessels were travelling not only made the aim hopeless but caused such an inrush of air into the muzzles of the guns that the projectiles checked in their course through the barrels flew wild and exploded at random often in dangerous proximity to the vessels themselves hence after about a dozen shots had been fired the commanders of the two vessels found themselves compelled to cease firing and to trust the speed alone to overtake the enemy on the other hand this disadvantage to them was all in favour of the chase which was able to work her two stern guns without the slightest impediment before long she got the range of her pursuers and at last a shell burst fairly under one of the smaller vessels a brilliant flash of light blue as the lightning bolt illuminated her for an instant and in that instant her companions saw her stop and shiver like a stricken bird in mid-air and then plunge downwards like a stone to the earth Olga Romanov standing on the deck of what had once been the ethereal flagship of the Arian fleet and now renamed the Revenge saw this catastrophe as it had done through her nightglasses she lowered them from her eyes and said to a dark-eyed black-haired young fellow who was commanding the gun that had done the execution bravo Boris Lasensky did you sight that gun Boris drew himself up and saluted saying yes majesty I did then for that you shall be a prince henceforth and if you can bring another down you shall command an iship of your own then this fight is over Boris saluted again and ordered the gun to be reloaded before it could be discharged a shell from the port gun which had been fired as Olga spoke struck another of the Arian vessels square on the four-quarter the flash of the exploding projectile was almost instantaneously followed by the outburst of a vast dazzling mass of flame which illuminated for the instant the whole scene of the aerial battle the airship with all its cargo of explosives blew up like one huge shell and the frightful concussion of the atmosphere induced by the explosion hurled the two vessels that were close on either side of her like feathers into space turning them completely over and flinging them to the earth 6000 feet below a few moments later instantaneously two great spouts of flames shot up from the spots where they struck and when the darkness closed over them again four of the pursuing squadron had been annihilated better still live in Ostrov cried Olga as she saw the awful effects of this last shot for that you too shall be a prince of the empire and command an iship on our next expedition now Boris let us see beat that yes much is due said Boris again knitting his brows and clenching his teeth in anger at his rival's superior success he glanced along the line of the pursuers and saw four of the Aryan squadrons flying close together he brought the gun to bear upon the two inner ones took careful aim and dispatched the projectile on its errand of destruction the moment he had released it he said to the other two men who were working under him load again quickly the command was instantly obeyed and scarcely had the explosion of the first blazed out than a second shell was sent after it the very firmament seemed splits in twain by the frightful results of the two well-aimed shots each of which had found its mark on the two inner vessels with fatal accuracy great sheets of flame leapt out in all directions from the focus of the explosion and in the midst of the dazzling radiance those on board the revenge saw the two outside airships of the four roll over and dive head foremost into the dark abyss below them they struck the earth as the others had done and vanished into annihilation in the midst of the momentary mist of fire this last catastrophe made it plain to the commanders of the aerial and the aerial that to continue the chase under such conditions meant the destruction in detail of all the smaller ships of the squadron those on board the revenge saw signals rapidly flash from one end of the line and instantaneously answered from the other end ah said Olga my lords of the air seem to have had enough of it for the present look the small fry are falling to the rear our reception has been a little too hot for them I wonder what they are going to do now cease-fighting let us watch them you two gunners have done gloriously and earned quite enough laurels for your first battle it soon became evident that the Aryans had decided to send their smaller craft back from the speed of the revenge and the terrible accuracy and destructiveness of her guns the commanders of the squadron were now convinced that she was either the lost ethereal or some vessel even superior to her built upon the same plan this being so to have continued the pursuit under such conditions with the smaller craft would simply have been to court destruction for them in detail it was impossible for them to use their guns effectively at the speed at which they were travelling while as had been so terribly proved the chase could use hers with perfect ease the flying fight could thus only result under present conditions in the ignominious defeat of the squadron by the single vessel as long as she was able to keep ahead the only hope of success lay therefore in a trial of speed and manoeuvring skill between her and the ethereal and aerial so orders were flashed to the smaller vessel to return to area with the mournful tidings of the destruction of eight of their number as they vanished into the darkness behind Olga devined instantly the tactics that were to be adopted she saw the converging searchlights of the two remaining airships begin to glow brighter and brighter in the rear of the revenge proving that they had increased their speed so it's going to be a race is it she said half to herself there we will see if we can lead them into the trap how fast are we going Boris he went to the engine room and returned saying for how did it miles an hour Majesty make it five replied Olga he saluted and transmitted the order to the engineer the lights of the pursuers immediately began to recede again then they seemed to stop that will do said Olga they have reached the limit of their speed keep to the south foot and see that they come no nearer the three airships were in fact now traveling at their utmost speed if anything the advantage was slightly in favor of the revenge thanks to the high efficiency of the motive power which had been applied to her in accordance with the directions left by Olga's father and transmitted in the will of Paul Romanov so all the rest of the night and on into the next day pursuers and pursuits sped on with fearful velocity through the air they passed over Africa and out above the ocean and still on and on they swept until the sudden sea was crossed and the mighty ice barriers that fences in the south pole gleamed out white upon the horizon this was passed and still they rushed on over the dreary wastes of Antarctica the pole was crossed along the fortieth meridian and then they swept northward until the smoke cloud that crowned the crest of Mount Erebus rose above the snow clouds that hid the earth the revenge headed straight towards this and swept over it followed at a distance of about ten miles by her pursuers then with a mighty upward sweep she leapt two hundred feet higher still came to equilibrium and discharged a shell downwards onto the ice the explosion was answered by the rising of a flotilla of airships which seemed to have sprung out of the bowels of the earth thirty vessels as large as herself rose simultaneously through the clouds and spread themselves out in a wide circle around the two arian vessels which thus found themselves surrounded by an overwhelming force and dominated by the revenge floating far above them with her ten guns pointing down upon them to an observer so placed as to be able to command a view of the situation it would have seemed that nothing short of the surrender or annihilation of the aetherial and the aerial could have been the outcome of it so evidently thought Olga and those in command of the Russian aerial fleet for although for one brief instant the two arian vessels lay at their mercy they fail to take advantage of it and in losing this one precious moment they reckon without the superior skill and perfect control of their airships possessed by those of whom they thought to make an easy prey what really happened took place with such stupefying suddenness that they were taken completely off their guard the aetherial and the aerial they end on to each other in the midst of the circle of their enemies each mounted ten guns and of these everyone was available the crews of both vessels trained by constant practice to the highest point of efficiency knew exactly what to do without so much as an order being given automatically the twenty guns were trained in the twinkling of an eye each on a Russian vessel and discharged simultaneously a moment later the two vessel sank like stones through the thick clouds below them and while the heavens above were shaken with the combined explosions of the twenty projectiles each of which had found its mark with an earing accuracy they had regained their equilibrium a thousand feet from the surface of the ice and darted away full speed northward to such a fearful pitch of efficiency had their guns and projectiles been brought that while the aim was unerring if once a fair shot was obtained nothing shaped by human hands could withstand the impact of their shells without destruction twenty one of the thirty vessels of the Russian fleet collapsed and as it were shriveled up under the frightful energy of the aerial projectiles twenty masses of flame blazed out over the grey surface of the cloud sea and in another moment the fragments of the vessel it had taken so many months of labour and such wondrous skill to construct were lying scattered far and wide over the snow and ice of the Antarctic desert the awful suddenness with which this destruction had been accomplished deprived Olga and her subordinates of all powers of thought for the moment they heard the roar of the explosion and saw a mist of flame burst out around them as though all the fires of Mount Erebus had broken loose at once and then came the silence of speechless horror and stupidification it was more like the work of omnipotent fiends than of men the bolts of heaven themselves could have done nothing like it then the moment of shock passed and those who survived remembered what they ought never to have forgotten that, armed as they were with weapons which under favourable circumstances were absolutely irresistible the first shot meant victory for those who fired it and destruction for their enemies odds of mere numbers went for nothing for each airship was equal to ten others provided she could send her ten projectiles home first and this is just what had happened all this had passed in a twentieth of the time that it has taken to describe it and by the time Olga and her subordinates grasped the extent of the calamity that had overtaken them the two arian vessels darting through the air at five hundred miles an hour had swept far out of range at their guns and were moreover so hidden by the cloud sea that they had no idea which course they had taken and in a paroxysm of unrestrained passion literally screened with rage as she ordered the revenge to sink below the clouds less than two minutes sufficed for the remains of the fleet that had been thirty one strong five minutes before and now only numbered eleven vessels to sink through the clouds a rapid glance round showed them the ethereal and the aerial tiny specks far out over the waist of snow and ice speeding away to the northward to give chase was out of the question for scarcely had they sighted them then they vanished as completely as though they had melted into the atmosphere and so Olga signalled for her remaining vessels to proceed to their secret haven in the snowy solitudes of the south while the ethereal and her consort sped onward on their homeward voyage to carry the news of the terrible vengeance that they had taken for the destruction of the eight airships which had been annihilated by the guns of the revenge twenty hours sufficed for the two arian vessels to pass over a quarter of the earth's circumference and carry their tidings of vengeance and victory to area and shortly after noon on the day but one after Olga had dropped her challenge from the skies a meeting of the ruling council was held at the president's house in order to consider the startling and pregnant events which had taken place and to determine the plan of the war which after a hundred and thirty years of unquestioned supremacy they were now called upon to wage not only for the mastery of the world but for the very lives and liberties of the citizens of area it had of course been impossible to conceal from the inhabitants of the valley the gravity of the startling events which had taken place in such a rapid succession nor did the president and council consider any such concealment desirable there were no demagogues and no politics in area and therefore there was no need for any state secrets save those which contained the essentials of aerial navigation there was also no fear of panic in a community which contained no ignorant or criminal classes and so when the council was sitting the strange tidings were promulgated through the length and breadth of the valley marvellous and disquieting as they were they yet gave rise to very few external signs of excitement they were gravely earnestly and even anxiously discussed for they brought with them a prophecy of calamities to come the probability of whose realisation was too plain to be ignored but ever since the days of the terror each generation of Aryans had been carefully trained to recognise the fact that the progress of science and the restlessness of human invention in the world outside their borders must sooner or later produce some challenge to their supremacy and some attempt to dispute with them the empire of the air now after four generations in spite of all the elaborate precautions that had been taken the stringent laws that had been enacted and more than once mercilessly enforced the crisis had come it was now impossible to doubt that by some means which so far seemed almost superhuman the flagship of their fleet had been stolen and the son of the president kidnapped with his greatest friend more than this the news brought back by the ethereal and the aerial proved beyond all doubt that means had been found to build a large fleet of aerial warships without even rousing the suspicion of the council and worse and most sinister sign of all there was also the fact proved by Olga's letter to the president that the moving spirit of this defiant revolt against the supremacy of Arya was one who bore Ilya Omand and still hated name of Romanov as has been said there was no panic through the night in area but still many a man and woman anxiously asked either aloud or in his or her own soul whether in the mysterious revolutions of human affairs it might not be about to come to pass that she who had wrought this apparent miracle might not yet able to avenge the terrible fate of her ancestor the last of the czars then with this thought came a universal revulsion of horror at the prospect of such a crime against humanity and a deep resolve to exact the penalty for it to the utmost if war was to be brought once more upon the earth those who brought it would find Arya worthy of its splendid traditions and ready if necessary to reconquer the earth as the founders of its empire had done in the Armageddon of 1904 fierce as that mighty struggle had been its horrors would pale before those of a conflict in which conquest would mean extermination for if Arya was forced once more to draw the sword it would not be sheath until it was peace again on earth even if that peace were to be but the silence of universal desolation end of chapter 9 chapter 10 of Olga Romanov by George Griffith this Librivox recording is in the public domain chapter 10 strange tidings to Arya the sitting of the council lasted until nightfall and just as the western mountains were throwing the huge shadows over the lovely valley two more airships passed between two of the southward peaks and a lighted in the great square in the centre of the city they were the two vessels which had been sent to the island indicated in Olga's letter to bring back the long lost Alan and Alexis it would be vain to attempt to describe the feelings with which the president and the father of Alexis went as they thought to receive their sons but the airships had returned without them and in their stead they brought a written message which conveyed tidings no less strange and startling than those brought from Antarctica by the ethereal and her consort it was a letter from Alan to his father and as soon as he received it from the captain of one of the airships who had found it nailed to a tree on the island he took his friend into his library and there the two fathers read it together after briefly but circumstantially recounting the capture of the flagship by Olga by means of her subtle drugs and showing how by using the power they gave her she had kept them in mental slavery for years forcing them to employ their skill and knowledge in aiding her to build her aerial and submarine fleets out of the spoils of the destroyed ocean transports from which the letter had taken an incalculable amount of treasure Alan's letter concluded thus I will now tell you the reason why Alexis and myself have not waited for the airship which we knew you would send for us as soon as you received the message which Olga Romanov told us she would dispatch to you we consider that by our weakness and folly or in truth I should rather say mine for it was I who invited these treacherous guests on board the ethereal we have not only brought identities upon the world but we have also forfeited our right to the citizenship of area what the judgment of the council would be upon us I don't know but we are resolved that whatever it might have been you and Alexis father should be spared the sorrow of pronouncing sentence upon your own sons some day perhaps we may win at least the right to plead our cause before you a present we have none and until we have won it you shall not see us again unless you capture us by force we were sent here in the Nile the swiftest and most powerful vessel of the Russian submarine fleet only a few days ago an accident revealed to Alexis for the first time during our long mental slavery the means which this woman who is as beautiful as an angel and as merciless as a fiend had used to keep us in subjection we took the utmost care to give her no suspicion of his discovery and although we drank no more of her poison we acted exactly as though we were still under its influence in what could only have been mockery she gave us back our belts and coronets bidding us wear them when we return to our kingdom as she put it we shall never wear the wing circlet again till we have regained the right to do so but the belts and a couple of brace of magazine pistols which we took before we left her stronghold in Antarctica stood us in good stead we have killed the crew of the Nile and taken possession of her she is far swifter and more powerful than any vessel in our submarine navy for she can be driven at 150 miles an hour through the water and can destroy anything that floats in or on the sea with a blow of her ram and more than this she carries a torpedo battery which has an effective range of two miles and can strike and destroy anything within that distance without giving the slightest warning of her presence there are 50 vessels of this type in the Russian fleet but the Nile is at least 30 miles an hour faster than any of them an attack will probably be made by the Russians on our station at Kugil and Ireland within a week by submarine vessels and a small squadron of airships and there we should begin our operations against the enemy if you have any reply to make to this letter we will wait for it at sea off Kugilin and then begin the campaign we have planned we shall never rest until we have either destroyed the Russian fleet in detail or have died in the attempt to do so if we ever return it will be to restore to you the supremacy of the sea and then and not till then we will ask you to pardon our fault and will willingly submit to such further conditions as you may see fit to impose upon us before you give us back if you ever do the rights which we have lost with all love and duty to yourself and loving remembrance to the dear ones in area your son, Alan at the foot of the letter was a post script signed by Alexis endorsing all that Alan had said save with regard to his sole responsibility for the calamity that had ensued by Olga and Sergei on board the ethereal the two fathers discussed the strange and to them most effecting communications for nearly an hour in private and then another meeting of the council was called to consider it and pronounce authoritatively upon it the president read the letter aloud in a voice which betrayed no trace of the deep emotion that moved his inmost being and then left the council chamber of so that their presence might not embarrass their colleagues the simple, mainly straight forwardness of Alan's letter appealed far more eloquently to the council than excuses or prayers for forgiveness would have done it was plain too that after the first indiscretion of taking the strangers on board the airship no moral responsibility or blame could be laid on Alan and Alexis for what they had done under the influence for drug which had paralysed the council therefore not only accepted the conditions of the letter but without a dissentient voice agreed to confer the first and second commands of the area submarine fleets and stations for the time being upon Alan and Alexis with permission to call in the aid of the nearest aerial squadrons when necessary this decision was dispatched forthwith by an airship to Kerigoulin and within an hour all area was talking of nothing else than the strange fate of the two youths who for five years had been mourned as dead later on that evening when the twin snow-clad peaks which towered above the high city of area had lost the pink afterglow of the departed sunlight and were beginning to gleam with a whiter radiance in the level beams of the newly risen moon a girl was standing on the spacious terrace of a marble villa which stood on the summit of a rounded eminence a couple of miles from the western verge of the city she had crossed the threshold of womanhood the next sun that would rise would be that of her 20th birthday yet for two years she had worn the silver circle and crystal wings for an area a girl became of legal age at 18 though she took no share in the civil life of the community until she was married the event which as a rule took place not long after she was invested with the symbol of citizenship it was an exceedingly rare event for an area girl to reach the eve of her 20th year unmarried for the sexes in the Central African Paradise were very evenly balanced and as was natural in a very high state of civilization where families seldom exceeded three or four children celibacy in either sex was looked upon as a public fortune and a private reproach but Alma Tremaine the girl who was standing on the terrace of her father's house on this most eventful evening had become an exception to the rule through circumstances so sad and strange that her loneliness was an honor rather than a reproach there were many of the wearers of the golden wings who had sought long and ardently to win her from the allegiance and the favoring eyes upon any of them she was beautiful in a land where all women were fair a land where under the most favorable conditions that could be conceived a race of almost more than human strength and beauty had been evolved and she came of a family scarcely second in honor even to that of the president for she was the direct descendant in the fifth generation of Alma Tremaine first president of the Anglo-Saxon Federation through his son Cyril born two years after the daughter who had married the first born son of Natasha and Richard Arnold more than five years before she and Alan had plighted their boy and girl troth on the eve of his departure on the fateful voyage from which she had never returned and of which no tidings had reached area until a few hours before a simple vow which her girlish lips had then spoken she had remained steadfast even when as the years went by and still no tidings came of her lost lover she in common with her own kindred had begun to mourn him as did it is true that she was in love rather with a memory than with a man yet with some nature such a love as this is stronger than any other more ideal and more lasting and exempt from the danger of growing cold infruition so strong was the hold that this love had taken upon her being that the idea of even accepting the love and homage of any other man appeared as sacrilegious to her as the embrace of an earthly lover would have seemed to a none of the middle ages and so with a single companion in her solitary state she stood aside and watched with patient unregretful eyes the wedded happiness of her more fortunate friends this companion was Isma Arnold, Alan's sister who had a double reason for doing as Alma had done not only had she resolved never to marry while her brother's fate remained uncertain but she too had also made her choice among the youths of Aria and in such matters an Aryan girl seldom chose twice so she waited for Alexis as Alma did for Alan hoping even against her convictions and keeping his memory undefiled in the sacred shrine of her maiden soul no artist could have dreamt of a fairer picture than Alma standing there on the terrace overlooking the stately city and the dark shining lake at her feet she was clad in soft clinging garments of whitest linen and finest silk of shimmering pearly grey edged with a dainty embroidery of gold and silver thread her dress confined at the waist with a girdle of interlinked Azirion and gold clothed without concealing the beauties of her perfect form and her hair crowned by her crystal winged coronet flowed unrestrained after the custom of the maidens of Aria over her shoulders in long and lustrous waves of dusky brown shadow in the great deep grey eyes which looked up as though in mute appeal to the starlight the shadow of a sorrow which can never come to a woman more than once all these years she had loved in cheerful patience and perfect faith for the man whose memory she had lived in maiden widowhood and now who could measure the depths of the darkness darker than the shadow of death itself that had fallen across her life severing the past from the present with a chasm that seemed impassable and leaving the future but a barren, loveless waste to be trodden by her in weariness and loneliness until the end all these years she had loved an ideal man one of her own splendid race the very chosen of the earth as pure in his unblemished manhood as she was in the stainless maidenhood that she had held so sacred for his sake even while she thought him dead and lo the years had passed and he had come back to life but how? hers was not the false innocence of ignorance she knew the evil and the good and because she knew both shrank from contamination with the horror born of knowledge she had seen both Olga's letter and Alan's and those two terrible sentences they have served my turn and I have done for them she is as beautiful as an angel and as merciless as a fiend kept ringing their fatal changes through her brain in pitiless succession forcing all the revolting possibilities of their meaning into her tortured soul till her reason seemed to reel under their insupportable stress mocking voices spoke to her out of the night and told her of the unholy love that such a woman would in the plentitude of her unnatural power have for such a man how she would subdue him and make him not only her lover but her slave how she would humble his splendid manhood and play with him until her evil fancy was sated and then cast him aside as she had done like a toy of which she had tired better a thousand times that he had died as his murdered comrades had died in the northern snowdrift into which one of the skies had cast them to sleep the sleep that knew neither dreams nor waking better for him and her that he had gone before her into the shadows and had remained her ideal love until hand in hand they could begin their lives anew upon a higher plane of existence as these thoughts passed and reparsed through her mind with pitiless persistence her lovely face grew rigid and white under the starlight and but for the nervous twining and untwining of her fingers as her hands clasped and unclasped behind her her motionless form might have been carved out of stone for the first time since peace had been proclaimed on earth 132 years ago the flames of war had burst forth again and for the first time in the story of her race the snake had entered the now no longer enchanted of area it was hers to suffer the first real agony of soul that any woman of her people had passed through since Natasha in the palm grove down yonder by the lake had told Richard Arnold of her love on the night that he had received the master's command to take her to another man to be his wife there were no tears in the fixed wide open eyes that stared almost sightlessly up to the skies in which the stars were now pailing in the growing light of the moon the torment of her torturing thoughts was too great for that she was growing blind and dizzy under the merciless stress of them when it might have been just in time to save her from the madness that seemed the only outcome of her misery the sweet silvery tones of a girl's voice floated through the still scented air uttering her name Elmer the sound mercifully recalled her wandering sense in an instant it was the voice of her friend of the sister of her now doubly lost lover and it reproved the selfishness of her great sorrow by reminding her that she was not suffering alone as the sound of her name reached her ear the rigidity of her form relaxed the light came back to her eyes and turning her head she looked in the direction whence it came there was a soft whirring of wings in the still air of the tropic night and out of the half-darkness floated a shape that looked like a realisation of one of the old world fairy tales it was a vessel some twenty-five feet long by five wide built of white polished metal and shaped something like an old Norse galley with its high arching prow fashioned like the breast and neck of a swan from the sides projected a pair of wide rapidly undulating wings and in the open space between these stood on the floor of the boat the figure of a girl whose loose golden hair floated out behind her with the rapid motion of her fairy craft there was no need for words of greeting between the two girlfriends Alma knew the kindly errand on which Isma had come and as she stepped out she went towards her with hands outstretched in silent welcome as their hands met the two girls stood face to face motionless for a moment they made an exquisite contrast of opposite types of womanly beauty Alma, tall and stately with a proudly carried head clear pale skin grey eyes and perfectly regular features and Isma a year younger and a good in shorter slender reform yet strong and light of limb with golden silky hair and sunny blue eyes fresh, rosy skin and mobile features which scarcely ever seemed to wear the same expression for a couple of minutes together a sweeter daughter of delight as ever man could look upon with eyes of love and longing but she was grave enough now for her friend's sorrow was hers too and its shadow lay with equal darkness upon her the reddy tears welled up under her dark lashes as she looked upon Alma's white drawn face and dry burning eyes and her low sweet voice was broken by a sob as passing her arm around her waist she drew her towards the boat and said come dear this sorrow belongs to me as well as you and we must help each other to bear it I have brought my new boat so that we can take a flight around the valley and talk about it quietly if the two heads are better than one so are two hearts Alma's only reply to the invitation was a sad sweet smile and a gentle caress but the welcome, loving sympathy had come when it was most sorely needed and so she got into the aerial boat with Isma and a few moments later the beautiful craft was bearing them at an easy speed southward down the valley End of Chapter 10