Glypto cringed from the half-hearted blow, showing pointed, ratlike, yellowish teeth in a frightened snarl. But Darloona put out one hand to halt Ergon; her womanly heart was touched by the pathetic and yet amusing little man.
“Ergon, don’t strike him; he will help us to escape, and we should be grateful,” she said softly.
Ergon growled and spat.
“As you will, my lady. But trust the scrawny little horeb no further than an arm’s reach away. Such as he would sell us to the guards for a copper coin!”
Glypto made an elaborate, courtly bow to my Princess, stuck out his tongue at the surly Ergon, then pranced across the room to where the secret trapdoor gaped in the ceiling.
“This way! This way, my masters! Permit your servant to show you the secret of the House of Glypto!” he chortled gaily.
Darloona quickly donned her hunting garb while Ergon and I pulled on our leathern tunics, girdles, and buskins. Two moons were aloft in the night skies of Thanator, and the vast amber-and-ocher-banded bulk of mighty Gordrimator (as the Callistans term their primary, Jupiter) heaved up its mighty orb above the horizon by the time we were ready to depart.
A knotted cord dangled down from the panel in the ceiling, and by this we one by one ascended, with Glypto in our rear. We found ourselves crouched in a narrow crawl-space between the floors. It was dark and cramped, airless and stifling, but Glypto produced a stub of candle to which he struck a light. By the thin, wavering illumination of this bit of greasy wax we perceived that the narrow space between the floors consisted of heavy beams between which thin flimsy laths, coated with plaster, formed the ceiling. Glypto showed us how to crawl along the beams and cautioned us against putting any weight on the laths between these beams, warning us that they were not strong enough to bear our weight.
So we progressed on hands and knees, Glypto taking the forward position after carefully drawing up the knotted line, which he untied and stowed away beneath his rags. He also drew up and pegged shut the trapdoor: when shut, the hairline crack in the plaster was invisible from the room below, or so he assured us.
The crawl-space ended in a vertical wall wherein Glypto or his ancestors had cut a hole. Once through this we were able to stand erect, and found ourselves in a black and stifling passageway hollowed through the wall of the palace. We could stand erect, but could only go back or forward by inching along sideways, so narrow was the passage between the wall of our room and that of the next apartment.
Glypto sent a chill of dread into the very marrow of my bones when he carelessly announced that the apartment next to ours housed none other than the gray-robed, slant-eyed yellow dwarf who had so cleverly assisted in our capture. This personage he called the Queen’s priest and councillor, and gave us to understand that his name was Ang Chan.
I knew―although my companions did not―that the yellow dwarf was one of the Mind Wizards of Kuur. This I had guessed from the start, because he was obviously of the same race as Ool the Uncanny, who by an odd and thought―provoking coincidence had also served Arkola the Usurper, the chief of the Black Legion, as his priest and councillor.
And, as I had excellent cause to know, Ool had been a natural telepath!
I had already guessed that Zamara’s cunning accomplice was also a member of this mysterious race whose emissaries appear from time to time on the great stage of Thanatorian affairs, always in a position of enormous influence, to manipulate the flow of events for some purpose unknown and unguessable except to themselves. Assuming the Mind Wizards to be a race of telepaths, I suddenly understood many things which had baffled me before. So swift had been the succession of events, so dire the perils into which chance had thrust us, that the struggle to think of a solution to our predicament had occupied my mind to the exclusion of other thoughts.
But now, quite suddenly, it came to me how Darloona and Ergon and I had been lured into outstripping our hunting party, and had been drawn into the clump of woods where Zamara and her band had been hidden, prepared to seize us.
We had pursued a snow-white vanth.
A vanth that Ergon had not been able to see!
A vanth that had miraculously vanished into thin air before our very eyes, the moment we were beneath the hidden nets!
These thoughts went tumbling through my mind as I inched along the narrow passage between the walls.
Suddenly my whirling brain made sense of the chaos of mysteries into which we had been thrust.
Suddenly, one by one, the scattered pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
Suddenly, l knew the answer to the secret!
Chapter 6
The Captor Made Captive
For I suddenly knew that the shadowy and elusive Mind Wizards could do more than just read the minds of others. They could subtly and secretly influence those minds, as well!
For the human mind is much more than just a center of the cognitive faculty and a storehouse of memory. It is the switchboard of the senses: therein the ears and the eyes and the other sensory organs feed the results of their surveillance to be interpreted to the brain in the great nerve centers.
The vision center, for instance, digests and arranges into pictures the information gathered by the eyesight and fed into the brain in the form of electrical impulses passed along the nerve fibers.
It suddenly occurred to me that a trained and gifted telepath might well be able to tamper with the vision center of the brain, inducing the illusion of pictures directly to the brain-pictures the eyes themselves had not really seen at all!
Such as the elusive white vanth we had followed.
The vanth that had led us straightway into a cunningly laid trap.
The vanth that had somehow been invisible to Ergon.
The vanth that had disappeared, the moment we were beneath the nets. The vanth that had been invisible to Ergon for the very good reason that it had not really been there at all.
Concealed within the copse, Ang Chan had telepathically transmitted the cleverly sustained illusion of a fleeing vanth into the unsuspecting minds of Darloona and me. Because it was we two he wished to capture.
Ergon had not been induced to see the vanth because Ang Chan had no reason to wish to capture him.
It was mere chance that Ergon, alone of our companions, had been at the fore of the party with my Princess and myself when we saw―or thought we saw―the rare white vanth. Not knowing why we so suddenly broke into a charge, he unthinkingly spurred his thaptor in order to keep up with us, and thus had been captured as well. Had not the kidnapping been timed to a split-second schedule, in order for us to be bundled off in the balloon mere instants before the remainder of the hunting party entered the copse on our heels, Ergon would doubtless have been murdered on the spot. But that would have taken a few moments―and Zamara’s scheme was not timed to include those few extra moments. So it had proved best to merely take him along.
Cold perspiration burst out on my bare forearms. Ugly, faithful, loyal devoted old Ergon! He owed his very life to the fact that Zamara’s scheme had not included a few seconds leeway!
Once this simple fact entered my comprehension, other pieces of the puzzle coalesced neatly. We had been housed in such curious comfort, simply because Ang Chan’s quarters lay next to our own.
Obviously, our capture was the initial phase in Zamara’s megalomaniac scheme of world conquest. Seizing us left Shondakor leaderless. In our absence, the Shondakorian host would weary its strength and scatter its forces hither and thither about the Great Plains, searching for the lost Prince and Princess. In this interval of disorder and confusion and dispersal of strength, the legions of Tharkol would strike in an invasion that was doubtless the second phase in Zamara’s plan of conquest.