“If any brother shall break this, let him die beneath ten thousand knives.”

“—­Who violates this, shall be hurled down into the great sky.”

“—­Let thunder from the Five Regions annihilate him.”

Silence followed, broken suddenly by the frenzied squawking of a fowl, as suddenly cut short.  Near the chink, Heywood heard a quick struggling and beating.  Next instant he lay flattened against the wall.

The shutter grated open, a flood of light poured out.

Within reach, in that radiance, a pair of sinewy yellow hands gripped the neck of a white cock.  The wretched bird squawked once more, feebly, flapped its wings, and clawed the air, just as a second pair of arms reached out and sliced with a knife.  The cock’s head flew off upon the tiles.  Hot blood spattered on Heywood’s cheek.  Half blinded, but not daring to move, he saw the knife withdrawn, and a huge goblet held out to catch the flow.  Then arms, goblet, and convulsive wings jerked out of sight, and the shutter slid home.

“Twice they’ve not seen me,” thought Heywood.  It was darker, here, than he had hoped.  He rose more boldly to the peep-hole.

Under the arch of swords, the new recruits, now standing upright, stretched one by one their wrists over the goblet.  The Incense Master pricked each yellow arm, to mingle human blood with the blood of the white cock; then, from a brazen vessel, filled the goblet to the brim.  It passed from hand to hand, like a loving-cup.  Each novice raised it, chanted some formula, and drank.  Then all dispersed.  There fell a silence.

Suddenly, in the pale face of the black image seated before the shrine, the eyes turned, scanning the company with a cold contempt.  The lips moved.  The voice, level and ironic, was that of Fang, the Sword-Pen:—­

“O Fragrant Ones, when shall the foreign monsters perish like this cock?”

A man in black, with a red wand, bowed and answered harshly:—­

“The time, Great Elder Brother, draws at hand.”

“How shall we know the hour?”

“The hour,” replied the Red Wand, “shall be when the Black Dog barks.”

“And the day?”

Heywood pressed his ear against the chink, and listened, his five senses fused into one.

No answer came, but presently a rapid, steady clicking, strangely familiar and commonplace.  He peered in again.  The Red Wand stood by the abacus, rattling the brown beads with flying fingers, like a shroff.  Plainly, it was no real calculation, but a ceremony before the answer.  The listener clapped his ear to the crevice.  Would that answer, he wondered, be a month, a week, to-morrow?

The shutter banged, the light streamed, down went Heywood against the plaster.  Thick dregs from the goblet splashed on the tiles.  A head, the flattened profile of the brisk man in yellow, leaned far out from the little port-hole.  Grunting, he shook the inverted cup, let it dangle from his hands, stared up aimlessly at the stars, and then—­to Heywood’s consternation—­dropped his head to meditate, looking straight down.