sunrise litters will come to bear you
and those with you if they will, to join them, which you should do by
midday. In the afternoon marshall them as you think wise, for the battle
will take place in the small hours of the following morning, since the
People of Lulala only fight at night. I have said."

"Do you not come with us?" I asked, dismayed.

"Nay, not in a war against Rezu, why it matters not. Yet my Spirit will
go with you, for I shall watch all that passes, how it matters not
and perchance you may see it there--I know not. On the third day from
to-morrow we shall meet again in the flesh or beyond it, but as I think
in the flesh, and you can claim the reward which you journeyed here to
seek. A place shall be prepared for the white lady whom Rezu would have
set up as a rival queen to me. Farewell, and farewell also to yonder
Bearer of the Axe that shall drink the blood of Rezu, also to the little
yellow man who is rightly named Light-in-Darkness, as you shall learn
ere all is done."

Then before I could speak she turned and glided away, swiftly surrounded
by her guards, leaving me astonished and very uncomfortable.

CHAPTER XVI

ALLAN'S VISION

The old chamberlain, Billali, conducted us back to our camp. As we went
he discoursed to me of these Amahagger, of whom it seemed he was himself
a developed specimen, one who threw back, perhaps tens of generations,
to some superior ancestor who lived before they became debased. In
substance he told me that they were a wild and lawless lot who lived
amongst ruins or in caves, or some of them in swamp dwellings, in
small separate communities, each governed by its petty headman who was
generally a priest of their goddess Lulala.

Originally they and the people of Rezu were the same, in times when they
worshipped the sun and the moon jointly, but "thousands of years" ago,
as he expressed it, they had separated, the Rezuites having gone to
dwell to the north of the Great Mountain, whence they continually
threatened the Lulalaites whom, had it not been for She-who-commands,
they would have destroyed long before. The Rezuites, it seemed, were
habitual cannibals, whereas the Lulalaite branch of the Amahagger only
practised cannibalism occasionally when by a lucky chance they got hold
of strangers. "Such as yourself, Watcher-by-Night, and your companions,"
he added with meaning. If their crime were discovered, however, Hiya,
She-who-commands, punished it by death.