On the issue of the Battle of Aeria, Olga and, under her unnaturally acquired influence, the Sultan, had staked the empire of the world and lost it. Before the fight had been raging many hours even she was forced to admit that Aeria was impregnable to any assault that she could deliver. But when the Aerians began to practise the desperate tactics of the second day it became manifest that nothing but annihilation awaited the invading fleet, out-matched as it was in speed and gun-power by the new Aerian warships and the land batteries.
With eyes burning with rage and envy she had watched through her glasses the incomparable Alma floating serenely at her unattainable altitude far above the battle-storm, and she had pictured Alan, her former slave, standing upon her deck perhaps—bitterest thought of all—with his wedded love beside him, and like a very arbiter of war hurling his destroying lightnings far and wide upon her ships until the[360] supreme moment came in which he would descend like a very god from the upper air, and, hand in hand with Alma, strike the last terrible blow which would end the last conflict of man with man and leave neither friend nor foe alive to tell what the issue had been.
It would be a glorious end, worthy of him and the splendid traditions of his race, and she loathed herself for the craven fear that had seized upon her in the fateful hour of battle, and made her incapable of challenging the same fate at his hands. Khalid himself would have done so without hesitation, but she had robbed him of his manhood and debased him, as she had debased every other human being that had fallen under her influence.
She had spent nearly the whole of the night of the 22nd on deck, and when the awful radiance of the Fire-Cloud was for the last time succeeded by the light of day, even her haughty spirit had at last bowed before the supernatural terrors that were multiplying about her. For the first time since she had brought bloodshed back into the world a thrill of panic shuddered through her soul, and, for the first time, she learnt the meaning of fear.
Then, too, came a longing which for the time being overmastered all other considerations. The elementary animal instinct of self-preservation rose up within her with irresistible force and conquered the hate and the ambition whose objects would have vanished when another sun had risen.
Her thoughts went back to her old stronghold in the snowy solitudes of Antarctica, to the deep dark caverns of Mount Terror. Surely those mighty walls of living rock, shrouded in eternal ice and snow, would give her an asylum in which she could defy the fate that was about to overwhelm humanity—and what then? For a moment an awful vision of the unspeakable loneliness of such a survival amidst the ruins of the world struck such terror to her heart that she almost resolved to head the Revenge into the thick of the fight that was still raging round Aeria, and die rather than[361] face it. Then the vision passed, and the terrors of the present blotted out the fear of the future.
The last sun that the human race would ever see was just rising when she sent for Boris Lossenski, who was still commanding the Revenge under her, and said abruptly, and without even consulting Khalid, who was standing by her side—
“There is nothing but death to be found here. We will escape if we can. Head the ship for Mount Terror and make her fly as she has never flown before. Don’t spare either the engines or the power. We must be there before nightfall if possible.”
Boris saluted and obeyed in silence, and Olga turned to Khalid and said in a tone of weariness and almost of despair—
“It is no use fighting any longer. The Fates themselves are against us, and I—yes, I have been frightened into belief at last. A shameful confession is it not?”
“Not shameful but only reasonable,” he replied. “All I regret is that you did not believe sooner, and save this last slaughter of these gallant people.”
“What is done, is done!” she said with a half-regretful glance at the mountains of Aeria, which were now rapidly fading away into the blue distance; “it is only a question of sooner instead of later. Indeed, it seems hardly worth while even for us to attempt to live when, even if we survive, only the ruins of the world can be ours. And yet”—
“Yet sweeter would be life with you even in a wilderness of death than destruction that might be eternal parting,” replied Khalid in low tones that thrilled with passion. “Nay, what dearer destiny could man desire than to be the Adam of a new world of which you were the Eve?”
The words of her husband—for Khalid was her husband now as well as her slave—brought a sudden flush to Olga’s face, and this was succeeded by an almost deathly pallor. She put up her hand to the broadened circlet of gold which concealed the terrible scar of the wound made by Alan’s bullet, and said almost in a whisper—
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“You and I—yes, you and I may live. We will! But if we do we must save ourselves alone.”
And with that she left him abruptly and went to her own room with the plan of her last crime already shaped in her mind.
She was the only woman on board the Revenge. Her maid Anna had been left behind at Alexandria, a maniac driven mad by the universal terror. What of Boris and the twenty-five men who formed the air-ship’s crew? If they were permitted to survive to the time when there would be no law but might, she would be the one woman in the world—one woman, beautiful and almost defenceless, among those who, though now her servants, would then be ready to slay each other in the dispute as to which of them should be her master.
Such a thought in such a mind as hers could have but one outcome. When the hour for the midday meal arrived, she bade Boris invite the whole crew into the main saloon, saying that, as this might be the last meal that any of them would eat, they would take it together. Then, as though moved by some sudden gracious fancy, she filled for every man with her own hands a glass of the best and oldest wine that had been reserved for her own use.
Khalid, rigid Moslem as he was, refused it, and she only touched it with her lips, but the others drained their glasses and drank death at her hands, even as the Aerians had drunk it in the same fashion and at the same table seven years before.
But this time it was fated that her sin should find her out more quickly. Later on in the afternoon Boris, to his amazement and alarm, found every man of his crew succumbing to an irresistible drowsiness, and soon this began to affect himself. A terrible thought at once flashed into his ever-suspicious mind. Fighting against the stupor that was stealing over his senses, he took a deep draught of strong spirit.
This conquered the poison for a time and cleared his intellect sufficiently for him to see what his pitiless mistress had done, and then there rose up in his mind a desperate longing for[363] vengeance on the murderess who had used him and his companions as long as they were useful and then poisoned them like so many rats.
He took out his pistol and examined it to see if it was charged, and then, with the poison and the spirit fighting in his brain for mastery, he made his way from the engine-room to the quarter-deck, where Olga and Khalid were standing, watching with strained, fascinated eyes and faces that looked livid and corpse-like in the unnatural light of the Fire-Cloud, the long tongues of many-coloured flame that were shooting like so many gigantic serpents down from the zenith, as though they would lick the life-blood out of the world that now lay panting for breath and paralysed with fear beneath them.
Just as he reached the top of the companion-way a mist swam before Boris’s eyes, his brain reeled, and he stumbled forward on to the deck, discharging his pistol aimlessly as he did so. The bullet struck and broke to fragments against the bulwarks. Khalid and Olga turned round to see him lying on his side with savagely-gleaming eyes, livid face, and foam-flecked lips, trying to raise himself on one hand and take aim at them with the other.
As Khalid sprang forward Olga’s ever-ready pistol came out of her belt. She cried to Khalid to get out of the line of fire, but just as she spoke Boris made his last effort, and, taking what aim he could, pulled the trigger. Khalid stopped short and clasped his hand to his right side. Then Olga, with a low cry of fury breaking from her white lips through her clenched teeth, sent a bullet through Boris’s brain just as he was struggling to bring his pistol up again.
“Are you hurt, Khalid?” she asked with a deadly fear at her heart as she crossed the deck to where he was standing with his hand still pressed to his side.
“Yes,” he gasped. “He has shot me through the lung.”
Then he coughed, and Olga saw drops of blood on his black beard and moustache. Without wasting any time in useless words she helped him down into the saloon and set herself at[364] once to examine and dress his wound. The bullet had entered between the fourth and fifth ribs on the right side, drilled a clean hole through the lower lobe of the right lung, and passed out at the back without touching any bone.
With perfect rest and quiet there was nothing to prevent recovery from such a wound, but Olga shuddered as she thought of its consequences in their present situation. If Khalid succumbed, as he well might do under the unknown terrors and dangers of the night that was now so near, she would have to choose between killing herself beside him, or, if the rock-chambers of Mount Terror proved a safe asylum, living mateless and alone until she starved to death on the wilderness that the world would be when it had passed through its baptism of fire.
She satisfied Khalid’s whispered request for an explanation of Boris’s attempt on their lives by saying that he had probably made himself drunk in an attempt to fortify himself against the terrors that were multiplying around him. Then she went through the ship and in a few minutes came back and said—
“I shall have to take the ship to Mount Terror myself. It was not only Boris, for every man of the crew is dead drunk. Think of them making such brutes of themselves at such a time!
“No,” she continued, putting her hand on his shoulder as she saw him make an attempt to rise. “You must not move yet; you will want all your strength when we get there, for you will have to regulate the engines while I am in the conning-tower. As for these animals, we will leave them to their fate.”
A couple of hours later she went on deck to see whether Mount Terror, or at anyrate the smoke-crest of Mount Erebus, was in sight, for the Revenge had now been flying almost long enough to have reached the confines of Antarctica. The speed was, however, so great that nothing was distinctly visible. There was only the flaming heaven above and a grey blur beneath, so she went to the engine-room and slowed down to a hundred miles an hour.
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Then she helped Khalid to the engineer’s seat in front of the controlling levers and took her place in the conning-tower. She had scarcely been at her post half an hour before she saw the huge white cones of the twin mountains of Antarctica shining against the dull grey sky beyond, one of them crowned as she had last seen it by a long stream of smoke that rose almost vertically in the windless air.
She signalled to Khalid to reduce the speed, first to fifty and then to thirty miles an hour, allowing the Revenge at the same time to sink gently down towards the ice-covered continent. She crossed the well-remembered bay in which the Narwhal had performed her terrible exploit, swept over the ice-wall at an elevation of a hundred feet, swung the ship round and stopped her in front of the great cleft in the side of Mount Terror.
No human foot seemed to have trodden the Antarctic solitude from the day she left it to crown herself Tsarina of the Russias to this one on which she brought her flagship back with its crew of murdered men to seek her last chance of life amidst the general doom which she could now almost bring herself to believe she had directly brought upon the world.
She ran the Revenge slowly into the vast portal that yawned black and deep before her between the snow slopes of the mountain, and then, turning on the search-light, took her along the great gallery which led to the shore of the subterranean lake, and there lowered her for the last time to the earth. Then she and Khalid disembarked, he moving slowly and painfully, and she supporting him as well as she was able, and watching him with the intense anxiety of a supreme selfishness which had now centred itself upon him as the one possibility of making her life endurable.
Thus did Tsarina Olga and Khalid the Magnificent, conquerors of the earth and sharers of the world-throne, come back, one wounded almost to death, and the other half distraught with fear and perplexity, to take refuge at the uttermost ends of the earth from the assault of the foe that had confounded all their schemes of conquest.
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Leaving the Revenge in the great gallery, she led him to the council chamber and laid him on the cushions of the luxurious divan on which she had been wont to hold her audiences. There she examined and redressed his wound, and then for the next three hours she busied herself bringing supplies of food and drink from the ship and preparing for the final siege which their last stronghold would so soon have to endure.
Then the fancy took her to go once more into the air to take one more look at the world and the splendours of the fate that was menacing it. Nineteen hours had passed since she gave the order to head the Revenge for Mount Terror. Sixteen of these had been consumed in the most rapid flight that the air-ship had ever accomplished. So fast had the Revenge flown westward and southward that the sun had almost seemed to stand still waiting for her journey to be accomplished, but still it had slowly sunk farther and farther down into the luminous mist that now seemed to fill the whole sky.
The difference between the longitude of Aeria and Mount Terror had lengthened the last fateful day by nearly five hours, but now the end was very near at hand, and here even, on the very confines of the world, life had little more than four hours to live. To the north the whole sky was flaming out into indescribable splendours, and the long fire-streams radiating from the nucleus now seemed to be literally holding the planet in their clasp. Enormous meteors were bursting out from the heart of the flaming cloud and exploding without a sound in the ever-silent abysses of space.
She stood rooted to the spot by the weird and awful glories of the spectacle, and for the time being seemed to forget even Khalid and the indescribable dangers that were threatening them both. Instead of being daunted, her spirit rose as though in response to the splendours before her. She felt that she was standing upon Nature’s funeral pyre watching the conflagration of the world she had ruined. Saving only Khalid there was not another human being within thousands of miles of her, and in her loneliness her soul seemed to expand and rise to a nobility that it had never known before.
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She saw the utter insignificance and contemptibility of the human strife which had been superseded and silenced by this majestic assault of the primal forces of Nature, and for the first time in her life she thought of herself and her sins with a disgust and shame that humbled her in her own eyes to the dust.
So she stood and watched, oblivious of everything but the celestial glories above and around her, until a rapid series of frightful explosions seemed to run roaring round the whole horizon. She looked up with shaded eyes towards the zenith. The central mass had suddenly become convulsed and expanded until it looked as though the whole sky had been transformed into an ocean of fire torn by incessant storms.
Huge masses of many-coloured flame were falling from it in all directions on the devoted earth, and as each of these entered the atmosphere it burst into myriads of fragments which fell in swarms until the blazing sky was literally raining fire over sea and land.
The blazing Sky was literally raining Fire over Sea and Land. Page 367.
The Fire-Cloud had at last invaded the outer confines of the earth’s atmosphere.
All this while there had been no change in the Antarctic cold of the air, but soon after the first storm of explosions roared out Olga felt a puff of warm tainted air blow across her face. Then came another and another, and then she heard what had never been heard before on the slopes of Mount Terror—the sound of running water. The snows were melting, and soon there would come avalanche and deluge.
She hurried back into the council chamber, convinced that it was no longer safe to remain in the open air. She made the great bronze doors fast and covered them with layer after layer of thick heavy curtains. Every other opening into the chamber she closed up as tightly as possible. In the nature of the case they were compelled to trust to the supply of air already in it to last them through the ordeal.
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