Chapter Seventeen
The Sacred Order
Bernard stepped quietly across the room and tried the door. It proved to be unlocked, and an instant later we were both outside in the passage.
Coincident with our arrival there, arose a sudden outcry from some place at the westward end. A high-pitched, grating voice, in which guttural notes alternated with a serpent-like hissing, was raised in anger.
“Chou Zhang!” whispered Bernard, grasping my arm.
Indeed, it was the unmistakable voice of the c******n, raised hysterically in one of those outbursts which in the past I had diagnosed as symptomatic of dangerous mania.
The voice rose to a scream, the scream of some angry animal rather than anything human. Then, chokingly, it ceased.
Another short sharp cry followed.
But not in the voice of Chou Zhan
