Gerard detached himself from the knot of councilors and came to Zulkeh’s side.
“Your Majesty is ill-served by lending credence to such rumors,” he soothed. “I dally with the Ecclesiarchs to obtain information, not to give it out. Naturally I must accept their bribes, lest they suspect my motives. As for the War Minister’s pool, its purpose is solely to draw forth would-be assassins that they might be the more promptly dispatched by your efficient executioners.
“But let us now to the business at hand,” he continued, spreading his arms in a calming gesture. “The wizard Zulkeh is here at your express request, to dispel the fears roused by—”
“Dispel the fears!” shrilled King Roy. “What good can a wizard do? I was mad to even think of it!” Here he glared most ferociously at Zulkeh.
“Ha! You—wizard! Can you conjure up a battalion of troops who won’t flee from their own shadows? Can you cast a stupefying spell over the entire populace, so that these ministers of mine could deal with them as equals? Can you? Can you? Ha! Wizard—ha! Fraud! Impostor!”
Then, even as the thundercloud enfolds its roiling fury round the granite crown of the awesome peak, so did the mage’s brow o’erboil with rage.
“Silence!” he spoke. “I perceive that civilization has decayed even further than I feared, since respect for Knowledge has fled not only the brute masses upon whom its hold was always faint, but the puissant as well.”
The King of Goimr gibbered in outrage, but the wizard paid no heed. Indeed, he spoke further.
“Yet in these paltrous times do I live, and living so must need support the temporal power, no matter its feeble merit, lest chaos reign supreme. This truth, however, renders it imperative for the secular representatives of Order to grasp at least the rudiments of science. For know, Your Majesty, that truth reveals not itself as itself. Nay, fie upon such witless notions! Rather does Reason insinuate itself through the obscure—to most, the opaque. It moves through the angularities of logic, the vectors of analysis, the immanence of the unfolding speculation. Surely you grasp my point?”
Zulkeh paused to observe the King’s response. As the latter was still gabbling in mindless fury, the wizard cut impatiently to the core.
“What, then,” he demanded, “was the nature and content of this dream?”
And at that, at the very mention of the word, King Roy’s distemper fled like a ghost. His eyes rolled wildly. “My dream!” he shrieked, and collapsed to the floor.
CHAPTER III.
A Portentous Dream—Its Contents Revealed. The Mage Is Troubled in His Mind. King Roy’s Wrath. The Mage Elucidates. King Roy’s Anxiety. The Wizard Is Commanded!
“The hair—the hair!—everywhere I turned—pulling me down, binding my limbs—then! My tongue—caught! Caught, I say, caught!—grasped by a great beard sprung suddenly up before me, coiling about like a thousand serpents, writhing and twisting—but worse—it spoke! Yes, it spoke, I say! The beard spoke! Oh God, did it speak—on and on and on and on, babbling in some heathen tongue.
“But I couldn’t speak—it was horrible! I couldn’t give orders—not a one!—and me, a King! And who ever heard of a beard speaking, anyway? Certainly not to a King! I mean, what’s happened here to the basic rules?
“Then it was worse still—for suddenly it wasn’t just the one great beard, oh no! Thousands of beards, millions of them, millions I tell you! Little ones mostly—but so many! Everywhere—growing over the whole palace, sprouting up everywhere—right on my dinner plate, I tell you!
“I couldn’t move, couldn’t lift a finger—every finger was held down by beards! And worst of all—I couldn’t give orders, not a one—and me, a King! The great beard still had me by the tongue!
“But it got worse! For then—all the beards started to speak! Oh God and what a fearful racket they made—millions and millions of little beards, all of them gabbling away in hundreds of barbarous tongues, not one of which made any proper sense.
“Then—suddenly—the beards let me go! I jumped up—ran away—they all hissed at me but they let me go—I thought—but I was wrong! For just when I thought I was getting away I saw this figure before me. Not much—something small. But it was hideous! Hairy and frightful!—and then! It started to grow! It wasn’t small at all! No! It tricked me! And me—a King! It was huge! It was gigantic! And it kept growing and growing, higher and higher—o horrible! Horrible! Horrible!