Then silence.
Shuddering, I looked.

Where the mounted men had been was--nothing.
Nothing?
There were two great circular spaces whose floors were glistening, wetly red.

Fragments of man or horse--there was none.
They had been crushed into--what was it Norhala had promised--had been stamped into the rock beneath the feet of her--servants.
Sick, I looked away and stared at a Thing that writhed and undulated over the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and spheres linked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramid.

Through the fields, over the plain its coils flashed.
Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them, tossing them aside broken, gliding over them.

Some there were who hurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it, praying.