But Balkis wasn’t to be deterred from the point. “What did they say, these priests?”
Matt took a deep breath, then gave it to her straight. “That you’re a threat to the horde’s plans for world conquest.”
“I?” Balkis stared at him, shocked and, finally; frightened.
She saw the implications quickly, Matt realized, and he was impressed by her intelligence. “Do you have any idea why you might be the key to stopping the horde?”
“None at all!” But cynicism rose behind the fright in her eyes. “If you can discover that, you will use me as a weapon, will you not?”
“Not a weapon, no,” Matt said slowly, “but as an ally. Can you honestly say the Caliph is using Queen Alisande as a weapon?”
“There would be some truth to it,” Balkis said slowly, “but you might as easily say she uses him. I take your point.”
Amazingly quickly, Matt thought, and with no explanation. “What I had in mind goes beyond that, though. It’s a matter of common interests. If stopping the horde helped you regain your homeland and your heritage, wouldn’t you want to foil their plans?”
“Yes!” Balkis’ eyes burned with sudden fervor.
Matt nodded. “Not a weapon, then, but someone who shares a common goal with me.”
“I see why you seek to learn more about this enemy,” Balkis said slowly, “but was that he, the man in midnight-blue robes who appeared in front of you?”
“And held my attention long enough for the Thuggee to sneak up behind me and knock me out, yes,” Matt said sardonically, looking away. “I really should have been more aware of my surroundings.”
“With a surprise like his appearance, it would be a wonder if you had been,” Balkis said dryly.
Matt looked back at her with surprised gratitude—but Balkis seemed unaware that she had made an excuse for him, only that she was dealing in facts. “Why did he not smite you with magic himself?”
“Good question,” Matt said, “and the obvious answer is that he couldn’t.”
“He is no magician, then?”
“Oh, he definitely is, if he could appear out of nowhere that way,” Matt said, “but I suspect he’s cautious, too. He seems to have some idea who I am, so he would have been wary of my magic.”
“That was why he bade the Thuggee strike you unconscious!”
“Good point,” Matt said. “How did they catch you?”
“As one struck your head, another pounced on me where I lay behind a basket and held some foul-smelling rag over my nose.”
“A drug,” Matt frowned. “So Arjasp knows how to make ether or chloroform or some such, and knew where you were. Difficult to do, if he wasn’t there.”
“But he was!”
“No, his image was,” Matt explained. “If he’d been there himself, he could have hit us with major magic, and would have. But if he were a thousand miles away, just projecting a sort of picture-in-the-round of himself, he couldn’t do much here—not too many spells work over long distances, and the ones that do take a lot of energy and concentration. He was probably using up half his resources just sending his image.”
“Why not come himself, if such a sending were so tiring?” Balkis asked, frowning.
“Because he would have arrived already tired, and being considerably older than me, he’d tire more easily,” Matt explained, “whereas I would have been full of energy.”
“And you might have struck him low with your magic!”
“Yes.” Matt nodded. “Definitely safer to stay home and send instructions to the Thuggee. Of course, there’s the little question of why they obeyed him, but what I said about common goals might have something to do with that.”
“At the very least,” Balkis said, ”they would have had assistance in finding two victims for sacrifice.”
“Good point.” Matt wondered how long it would take her to learn everything he knew. “And it should have worked. I shouldn’t have woken up quickly enough to get us out of that temple, and he probably didn’t suspect that I knew who Kali was, or could understand Hindi and Sanskrit.”
“How did you know that goddess?” Balkis eyed him askance.
“It’s called a good liberal arts education,” Matt told her. “That’s also how I’d know Arjasp was a magician even if he hadn’t appeared out of nowhere.”
“By these ‘liberal arts’ of yours?” Balkis frowned.
“By history, anyway,” Matt said. “He was talking about Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian god of light, and Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian god of darkness—from which I would guess he’s a Zoroastrian.”
“There is sense in that.” Balkis nodded. “What is a Zoroastrian?”
“A person who believes the religion preached by a prophet named Zoroaster,” Matt said, “though it had been around a long time before him; he just gave it its final form. The priests were called ‘magi,’ and they had so great a reputation for spells and supernatural power that people based the word ‘magic’ on them.”
Balkis shivered. “Powerful wizards indeed! But who was this Ahriman that Arjasp spoke of?”
“Just a more modem name for Angra Mainyu,” Matt said, “just as the more recent name for Ahura Mazda is Ormuzd. Before Zoroaster, the Mazdaeans believed that the world is a battleground between Ahura Mazda, the god of goodness, and Ahrirnan, the god of evil. They were equal in power, so humanity had to decide the issue by rallying to support Ahura Mazda and giving him more power by living good lives and doing good to one another.”
“Then Ahriman must tempt people to hurt one another and live evil lives,” Balkis said slowly.
“You understand quickly,” Matt told her.
“But if Arjasp is a … what is one of the magi?”
“A magus,” Matt said, “at least, in Latin.”
“What is Latin?”
“The language of an empire that has seen its day and fallen apart,” Matt sighed. “But the magi in the pictures I’ve seen wore white robes and hats. I think Arjasp is a magus who has decided to turn his coat and become a priest of Ahriman.”
“For heaven’s sake, why?” Balkis cried.
“You heard him,” Matt said. “He’s dreamed up the idea that Ahriman has to win the fight and conquer the whole world before Ahura Mazda can begin to win it back. Then, presumably, the god of light will win more and more battles until he conquers the world and Right and Goodness prevail. Of course, the Zoroastrians never believed any such thing.”
Balkis frowned, beginning to understand. “So if this Arjasp is devoted to Ahura Mazda, he must do all he can to see that Ahriman wins the whole world as quickly as possible?”
Matt nodded. “That’s how I figure him.”
“Then his mind is crazed!” Balkis cried. “It is split into fragments as surely as the glaze of a pot that has baked too long in the kiln!”
“Crazy he is,” Matt confirmed.
“What could have thrown him so far from good sense?”
“Who knows?” Matt shrugged. “I’m not a psychiatrist—a doctor of the mind. Maybe he came into contact with a Chinese merchant and learned about the Taoists—they believe that the world goes through cycles from bad to better to good, then to worse and to bad again. Or he could have heard about it from the Germans, with their belief in an endless winter followed by a war of gods that engulfs the whole world and destroys it so that a whole new world can . be born. Or maybe something just went wrong with hisbiochemistry or something broke inside his brain, and he brooded about his own sufferings and the unfairness of life, and decided the only way to cure it was to hurry up and get the battle between Angra Mainyu and Ahura Mazda over with, so that Ahura Mazda could start winning again and punish Angra Mainyu for him.” He spread his hands, at a loss. “No way we can really know, Balkis. All we can be sure of is that he was one of the magi, but went wrong somehow and turned against his own kind and Ahura Mazda.”