He nodded.
"All right. But just remember to take things slowly. Slowly!" She raised the hypogun and aimed the blunt snout at his throat. "Good luck."
She pressed the trigger.
He felt nothing, not even the air-blast carrying the drug into his bloodstream but, with shocking abruptness, the universe slowed down. It hadn't, of course. It was just that his own metabolism, reflexes and sensory apparatus had suddenly begun operating at almost forty times the normal rate. The danger lay in accepting the illusion of a slowed universe as reality.
He moved from where the physician stood poised on the balls of her feet, the hypogun still in her hand, her finger hard against the trigger. The light seemed dull, tinged with a pronounced reddish cast and the tiny figures depicted on the mirror-screen had frozen into rigid immobility.
He stepped to the door and pulled aside the barrier. The thin material moved reluctantly as if made of lead. He stepped through, passed an immobile, vacant-eyed guard, reached the outer door. The material was thicker, heavier; he strained for minutes before it would move. Ducking through the opening he walked from the tents to the plain.
Steadily he began to walk toward the nightside. A wind rose about him as he walked, roaring past his ears, building up into an almost solid wall of air against which he stooped, fighting the hampering restriction. The ground felt soft beneath his feet, the stars reddish points in the sky.
Suddenly he tripped and fell, drifting down like a feather but hitting the ground with savage force, jarring his bones and ripping a patch of skin from the side of his face. He lay gasping from the shock, cold with the fear of injury. Climbing to his feet he examined the ground, noting the deep indentation made by his foot, the equally deep but much longer gouge torn by his falling body. The wind had stopped and gave him the answer. He had hit the ground with the impact velocity of about fifty miles an hour. Only fantastic luck had saved him from serious injury.
Cautiously he continued his journey. He ate as he walked, sucking at the tablets of glucose which were strangely hard and slow to release their energy. He had plenty of time to think. He was living at about forty times the normal rate but could not walk at a normal speed. A normal speed, for him, was over a hundred miles an hour but at that speed wind resistance made progress impossible. His clothes too presented a problem. His speed had increased but not his strength and he felt as if he were clothed in lead. The inertia of his garments aided the wind in slowing him down to a steady thirty miles an hour.
It was fast enough. It was ten times the traveling speed of a party moving over rough and unfamiliar ground and he would catch up with the prince even allowing for time wasted in search and following barren trails.
Ten times as fast—but he needed more than ten times the energy to do it.
In slow-time a man would starve to death before he had a chance of growing old.
Chapter Fifteen
THE ROOM was very quiet, the lights soft, the air tainted with the odor of antiseptics beneath the comforting scent of spice. On a pneumatic mattress the Matriarch rested, almost mummy-like in her immobility, the withered pattern of her face. Bandages swathed her side and drugs coursed their slow way through her blood. She felt no pain, no trepidation, only a peculiar detachment as if her mind were divorced from her body so that she could ponder events with an objective viewpoint.
She was thinking of Dumarest and what he had said.
He had known nothing of the mirror and its secret so why should he have been so interested in discovering how she had learned of what had transpired between himself and her ward? He had meant something unconnected with the mirror. He had seemed to be trying to give her a message. He—
She opened her eyes and stared at Dyne.
"My Lady." His voice was smooth, his face, his very clothes. He stood at the foot of the bed, tall in his scarlet, his cowl throwing shadow across his face. A machine of flesh and blood uncontaminated by emotion. And then she remembered.
"You!" Her voice was a whisper. "You knew what had taken place between them. You could have told the girl."
"My Lady?"
"You were with me watching in the mirror. Just before the phygria attacked. You—" She broke off, seeing the pattern as it fell into place, each piece fitting to make an incredible whole. "It had to be you. No one else could have arranged for the exchange. No one else could have told her all she needed to know. You!"
He said nothing, waiting.
"You killed her," she whispered. "After she attacked me you killed her. You had to keep her silent for your own sake. Alive she could have told too much." Her hand scrabbled on the coverlet. "But why? Why should you, a cyber, engage in such intrigue?"
His eyes were cold, relentless, his face as if carved from marble.
"Power? Wealth? Personal ambition?" She whispered the motives which drove normal men into such actions and knew that none of them could apply. The cyber was not a normal man. "But you failed!" she said triumphantly. "You failed!"
"Because of Dumarest," he admitted. "Because of an unknown factor. I told you once, My Lady, that I was not infallible. Always there is the unknown element to take into consideration. But, if it had not been for the traveler, your ward would be dead and her substitute your successor to the throne of Kund."
"Is that why you tried to kill him? You must have primed the phygria—or told your agents to do it. They must have tried to burn him on the journey and stab him during the storm." She paused, chest heaving, cold with the knowledge of how close he had been to success.
"The mirror," she whispered. "You would have changed the setting but I gave you no opportunity. You had no time. Dumarest exposed the plot before you could do the one thing which would have proved him to be a liar." Her mind spun with the unanswered question. "But why? Why?"
He had no intention of giving her the answer. The plans of the Cyclan encompassed the universe and rulers were merely pawns to be moved according to the great design. The Lady Thoth was independent and had no love for any cyber. Her substitute, prepared years ago, was amenable and, better, utterly predictable. More he neither knew nor guessed.
"I shall ruin you!" Anger stiffened the thin voice. "I shall expose you and your Cyclan for what you are. Never again will you be trusted." Her hand lifted, trembled as she pointed. "Go!"
"No, My Lady."
"You dare—?"
"If you shout your guards will not hear you." He touched the bracelet around his wrist. "A cone of silence surrounds us. But you will say nothing, do nothing. If you do then I will be impelled to divulge certain facts about you and your ward. The fact that you and she are blood relations, for example."
"You lie!"
"No, My Lady. The girl is the daughter of your grandchild—the one you placed in a position of safety when you accepted the throne of Kund. She should have been killed. No Matriarch of Kund is permitted to have natural issue and you know the law. Instead you took the throne and kept both your romance and its issue a secret. Now you intend to make her your successor. If the truth became known that would not be permitted. And it is the truth—I can prove it."
He paused, looking down at her.
"Your silence for mine, My Lady. It seems a fair enough exchange."
She was helpless to do other than agree.
The Prince of Emmened was hopelessly lost. He stood in a circle of his guards and cursed them, the fates, the lack of guidance and everything but himself. They were too cold to argue, too afraid to do other than huddle together for mutual protection. Around them the cold gripped the soil, threw streamers of frost over icy boulders, made even the dancing shadows things of menace.
"Move!" screamed the prince. "Move! Move!"