The eyes of the prisoner now opened and he looked straight at me. There was a fierce brightness in his gaze, a demand which was cruel in its intensity, its force bent upon me. He tried in those few instants to beat down what was me, to take me over to do his will. And I knew that to him I represented a key to freedom, that he had brought me here for that purpose alone.
Perhaps if I yielded at once to his demand he might have achieved his purpose. But my response was almost automatic recoil. None of my breed yielded to force until we were overcome. Had he pleaded instead of tried to take—but the need in him was too great, and he could not plead when all life outside his crystal walls had become one with the enemy in his mind.
The silver strands tossed wildly, rippling as he fought to possess me as his slave thing. And I heard a startled cry. From before one of those ledges arose a man. He leaned forward and stared at the captive in the crystal. Then he swung around to look at me, astonishment speedily changing to excitement, and then satisfaction.
He was as different from the gray men as I was. But he was not of the Old Race. Nor had he any of the Power; I knew that when I looked upon him. But there was life and intelligence in his face and with that a detachment which said, though he looked human, he was not so within.
Standing a head taller than his servants, he was lean of body, though not reduced to such skeleton proportions as they. Nor did his face and hands have the gray pallor, though the rest of his body was covered by the same tight-fitting clothes as they wore, distinguished from theirs by an intricate blazon on the breast worked out in colors of yellow, red, and green.
His hair was almost as brightly yellow as that blazon, thick and long enough, though he wore it tucked behind his ears, to touch his shoulders. That was the hair of a Sulcarman. But when I studied his face I knew that here was no sea-rover trapped by the gate. For his features were very sharply angled about a large and forward thrusting nose, giving him almost the appearance of wearing one of the bird masks behind which the Falconers rose into battle.
“A—woman!”
He touched a button on his board and then he came around to face me, standing with his hands on his hips, eyeing me up and down with an insolence which made my anger rise.
“A woman,” he repeated and this time he did not speak in surprise but thoughtfully. And he glanced from me to the prisoner in the crystal and then back again.
“You are not,” he continued, “like the other—”
He gestured to the other side of the dais. I could not turn my head so I saw no more than the edge of a cloak. But I knew that to be Ayllia’s. She did not move and I thought perhaps she was caught in just the sort of web as now held me.
“So”—now he addressed the prisoner—“you thought to use her? But you did not try with the other. What makes this one different?”
The man in the crystal did not even turn his eyes to his questioner. But I felt that deep wave of hate spread from the box which held him, hate that froze instead of burned, a hate such as I had at times sensed in my brothers, but never in such a great tide.
His captor walked around me, though I could not turn my head to see him. I had learned this much, however, that he could not instantly recognize Power as his prisoner had done. Therefore he was devoid of any trace of that talent. And that thought gave me a spark of confidence, though looking upon the prisoner, I could not hope too much. . . .
For as he had known me as witch, so did I know him as more than warlock, as one of the adepts such as no longer existed in Escore and had never been known in Estcarp, where the Wise Women carefully controlled all learning lest just such a reckless seeker after forbidden learning rise.
“A woman,” the stranger repeated for the third time. “Yet you aimed a sending at her. It would seem she is far more than she looks, bedraggled and grimy as she is. And if there is any chance that she is even a little akin to you, my unfriend, then this is indeed a night when fortune has chosen to give me her full smile!”
“Now”—he nodded at my guard and they crowded in upon me, though there seemed to be some barrier so they could not really lay hand on me—“we shall put you in safekeeping, girl, until we have more time for the solving of your riddle.”
They continued to crowd me along the steps until I was on the opposite side of the room from the entrance, behind the prisoner in the crystal, so he could no longer see me, though I knew he was as aware of me as I was of him. The guards then stepped away and from the floor arose four bars of crystal like the pillar, but only as thick as my wrist. They slid up above my head and then they began to glow. As they did so the force which had held me rigid vanished, but when I put out my hand I found that there was an invisible wall between one bar and the next and I was boxed.
There was room within my square of unseen walls for me to sit down and I did, looking about me now with the need to learn all I could of this place—though I could not begin to guess the reason for it, what great project it was necessary to.
I could see Ayllia now. She sprawled as one unconscious or asleep on the second step of the dais, her head turned from me. But I could see the rise and fall of her breast and knew she still lived.
I needed sleep too. As I sat there all the strain and fatigue of my hours in this world closed about me as a smothering curtain and I had to have ease and relaxation of mind and body. Thus I concentrated on setting certain safeguards to alert me against any new attempt on the part of he who stood in the pillar to take command. With that done I rested my head on my knees.
But between my palms, hidden from sight, I held that wand I had brought out of Escore. Did it belong to the man in the pillar? If so, it might have been what he had noted instantly at my coming and wanted to get, though how he might reach it through his walls I could not see. That he was of value to my new captor was certain. And it might be that I would also end so. This thought I willed away, for sleep I must have if I would be quick of wit when such was needed.
XII
While I slept, I dreamed. But this was no second assault upon my will, no harsh order to obey. Rather a hand slipped into mine to lead me to a place of safety where one could speak mind to mind without chance of being overheard; it was the prisoner of the pillar whom I faced in that place which was not of our waking world. Somehow he seemed younger, more vulnerable, not filled with white hate and the need to burst bonds and rend the world about him to satisfy the revenge his spirit craved, all of which I had read in him before.
That he was an adept I already knew, one above the Wise Women of Estcarp as I was above Ayllia in the scale of Power control. Now I learned his name, or rather the name by which he went, since that old law that the naming of true names was forbidden lest it offer some enemy a straight course into mastery held. He was Hilarion, and once he had dwelt in the citadel of the gate.
He had created the gate because his seeking mind ever pushed on and on for new learning. And, having opened it, it followed that he was constrained to explore what lay beyond. So he came, arrogant and proud in his power—too arrogant, because of the past years of his supremacy in his own sphere, to take precautions.
Thus he had been caught in a web which was not spun from such learning, learning that would not have held him for an instant. But this danger was born of a machine, or a different path of Power, and one he did not understand. Only it was a strength which could incorporate him into it, even as I had seen the half-men in the city of towers, part flesh, part machine.