And so I uttered the war cry of Ko-ro-ba and leaped, sword ready, to face what might follow me.
A howl of bitter rage escaped my lips as I saw that the passageway was empty.
Maddened beyond understanding I began to race down the passageway, retracing my steps to confront what might be in the passage.I had run for perhaps half a pasang when I stopped, panting and furious with myself.
'Come out!' I cried.'Come out!'
The stillness of the passageway taunted me.
I remembered Vika's words, When the Priest-Kings wish you, they will come for you.
Angrily I stood alone in the passageway in the dimmed light of its energy bulbs, my unused sword grasped futilely in my hand.
Then I sensed something.
My nostrils flared slightly and then as carefully as one might examine an object by eye I smelled the air of the passageway.
I had never much relied on this sense.
Surely I had enjoyed the scent of flowers and women, of hot, fresh bread, roasted meat, Paga and wines, harness leather, the oil with which I protected the blade of my sword from rust, of green fields and storm winds, but seldom had I considered the sense of smell in the way one would consider that of vision or touch, and yet it too had its often neglected store of information ready for the man who was ready to make use of it.
And so I smelled the passageway and to my nostrils, vague but undeniable, there came an odour that I had never before encountered.It was, as far as I could tell at that time, a simple odour, though later I would learn that it was the complex product of odours yet more simple than itself.I find it impossible to describe this odour, much as one miught find it difficult to describe the taste of a citrus fruit to one who had never tasted it or anything much akin to it.It was however slightly acrid, irritating to my nostrils.It reminded me vaguely of the odour of an expended cartridge.
Although there was nothing now with me in the passage it had left its trace.
I knew now that I had not been alone.
I had caught the scent of a Priest-King.
I resheathed my sword and returned to Vika's chamber.I hummed a warrior's tune, for somehow I was happy.
Chapter Eight: VIKA LEAVES THE CHAMBER
'Wake up, wench!' I cried, striding into Vika's chamber, clapping my hands sharply twice.
The startled girl cried out and leaped to her feet.She had been lying on the straw mat at the foot of the stone couch. So suddenly had she arisen that she had struck her knee against the couch and this had not much pleased her.I had meant to scare her half to death and I was pleased to see that I had.
She looked at me angrily.'I was not asleep,' she said.
I strode to her and held her head in my hands, looking at her eyes.She had spoken the truth.
'You see!' she said.
I laughed.
She lowered her head, and then looked up shyly.'I am happy,' she said, 'that you have returned.'
I looked at her and sensed that she was.
'I suppose,' I said, 'that in my absence you have been in the pantry.'
'No,' she said, 'I have not,' adding as an acrimonious afterthought, '- Master.'
I had offended her pride.
'Vika,' I said, 'I think it is time that some changes were made around here.'
'Nothing ever changes here,' she said.
I looked around the room.The sensors in the room interested me.I examined them again.I was elated.Then, methodically, I began to search the room.Although the sensors and the mode of their application were fiendish and beyonf my immediate competence to fully understand, they suggested nothing ultimately mysterious, nothing which might not eventually be explained.There was nothing about them to encourage me to believe that the Priest-Kings, or King as it might be, were ultimately unfathomable or incomprehensible beings.
Moreover in the corridor beyond I had sensed the traces, tangible traces, of a Priest-King.I laughed.Yes, I had smelled a Priest-King, or its effects.The thought amused me.
More fully than ever I now understood how much the forces of superstition have depressed and injured men.No wonder the Priest-Kings hid behind their palisade in the Sardar and let the myths of the Initiates build a wall of human terror about them, no wonder they let their nature and ends be secret, no wonder they took such pains to conceal and obscure their plans and purposes, their devices, their instrumentation, their limitations!I laughed aloud.
Vika watched me, puzzled, surely convinced that I must have lost my mind.
I cracked my fist into my open palm.'Where is it?' I cried.
'What?' whispered Vika.
'The Priest-Kings see and the Priest-Kings hear!' I cried, 'But how?'
'By their power,' said Vika, moving back to the wall.
I had examined the entire room as well as I could.It might be possible, of course, to use some type of penetrating beam which if subtly enough adjusted might permit the reception of signals through walls and then relay these to a distant screen, but I doubted that such a device, though perhaps within the capacities of the Priest-Kings, would be used in the relatively trivial domestic surveillance of these chambers.
Then my eye saw, directly in the centre of the ceiling, another energy bulb, like those in the walls, only the bulb was not lit.That was a mistake on the Priest-Kings' part. But of course the device could be in any of the bulbs. Perhaps one of the almost inexhaustible energy bulbs, which can burn for years, had as a simple matter of fact at last burned out.
I leaped to the centre of the stone platform.I cried to the girl, 'Bring me the laver.'
She was convinced I was mad.
'Quickly!' I shouted, and she fairly leapt to fetch the bronze bowl.
I seized the bowl from her hand and hurled it underhanded up against the bulb which, though it had apparently burned out, shattered with a great flash and hiss of smoke and sparks. Vika screamed and crouched behind the stone platform.Down from the cavity where the energy bulb had been there hung, blasted and smoking, a tangle of wire, a ruptured metal diaphragm and a conical receptacle which might once have held a lens.
'Come here,' I said to Vika, but the poor girl cringed beside the platform.Impatient, I seized her by the arm and yanked her to the platform and held her there in my arms.'Look up!' I said.But she kept her face resolutely down.I thrust my fist in her hair and she cried out and looked up. 'See!' I cried.
'What is it?' she whimpered.
'It was an eye,' I said.
'An eye?' she whimpered.
'Yes,' I said, 'something like the "eye" in the door.'I wanted her to understand.
'Whose eye?' she asked.
'The eye of Priest-Kings,' I laughed.'But it is now shut.'
Vika trembled against me and in my joy with my fist still in her hair I bent my face to hers and kissed her full on those magnificent lips and she cried out helpless in my arms and wept but did not resist.