“We must not act until Karn is about to use his own power,” the voice continued. “We do not know if he can learn in any way from his own methods what we would do. Therefore, do not use mind-touch, kinswoman, until we come to you.”
The voice was gone. Elossa shivered at its vanishing. While it had been with her she had felt warm, at peace. Now that it had gone she could worry once more, foresee only too many ways in which failure lay. She closed her eyes again and drew upon her will, upon those techniques for conserving and strengthening inner power which she had been so carefully schooled to use.
But she was not given long to so arm herself, for the door opened and the grate of its opening aroused her, though it was not the Yurth she expected to see, those guards who would come to make her submit to Karn’s unholy slave making. Rather it was Stans.
He slipped inside and closed the door behind him, standing then with his shoulders against it as if he would use his body to reinforce a barrier. None of the other women looked up, their faces remained blank. But he was staring straight at her, and she saw his lips move with exaggerated shaping as if he would send her some message which he must not say aloud. She tried to read as twice he went through that, and the third time. . . .
“Come in.”
The same message as that other. But was he Karn’s instrument? If she obeyed the Raski’s order would it mean enslavement? This was not what the multi-mind had warned her of, but that did not mean that this was not as great a peril as what her kin had here faced and lost to.
That a Raski should summon mind-touch was so against all the customs of his race that she could not believe in this. But for the fourth time he was shaping the words, and his expression was one of strain. He had turned his head a fraction so one ear rested against the door as if he must listen for some danger without.
It was trust he demanded. Elossa weighed her present feeling for Raski against the facts of their journey together. They had saved each other’s lives, yes. How much did that count against his words to Karn? Her inbred caution warred with another emotion she was not prepared to understand, which she wished to press out of her mind altogether but could not.
At last she did as he wished. She sent a mental probe. Just as she had reeled and tried to withdraw from the multi-mind’s meeting so did she know instantly that strange revulsion moved in him at her invasion. Yet as quickly he steadied himself, even as a man facing impossible odds for some point of honor which was even greater to him than life. She could read. . . .
And. . . .
Her strange instinct was right. What he had said to Karn-that had been a weapon of sorts, all he could seize upon at that moment. She read and learned.
Karn the impossible, the man who in the destruction of his city ages ago had, as she had earlier been told, continued to live, because he had already been deep in strange practices of the mind, disciplines of the body learned by chance by an obscure priesthood. They had wrought such changes, not by their own inner striving, but by the use of drugs and strange practices of control which could force hallucinations until the unreal became permanently real.
Fleeing the destruction of Kal-Hath-Tan a handful of priests, and Karn, had reached this other sanctuary-one they knew of old-to which even then they had retired at intervals with victims for their researching into unhealthy paths. Karn had lived-or was it a hallucination of life? At any rate here he ruled.
The Yurth from the ship-some had been captured, brought here, subjected to Karn’s processes of domination. They too, lived. But they were indeed the hollow shells of what they had been. For they had not been subjected to that change which Yurth brought upon themselves when they assumed the burden of what they considered their irreparable sin.
When the new generations made the Pilgrimage some had been drawn into Karn’s net by the same method he had used with Elossa-the call for help uttered in Yurth mind-touch. Thus the hidden master of the over-mountain land had built up his forces.
He had had no failures-outwardly. So he became in his own eyes, undying, all powerful, Atturn himself-that entity which had been the core of the research. One by one the priests had died, or Karn had brought death to them. But Karn remained ever in power. Now, now he had thought to gather his forces, to extend his rulership. He had been questioning Stans- striving to learn what lay open to his taking in the plains lands to the east.
“He read your mind?” Elossa demanded. For if Stans had lain as open to Karn as he was now to her then what hope had either of them for rebellion?
“He could not,” Stans returned. “He was angry, and-I hope-troubled. But I am not one with him in Atturn. However, the fact that we are kin may not keep him from striving to break me. He has all which worked for him long ago-the drugs-the other things. But that takes time-he had not had me long enough in his hands.”
Elossa made her decision. “Do even as you have done-play his liege man.”
“But he will take you soon. You will become as these.” Stans made a slight gesture to indicate the women about her, none of whom had seemed even yet to note his presence.
She might trust him from what she had read in his open mind, but it would be better not to provide him with any other information, unless she could hint that within herself lay some defense she had not yet tried.
“It may be that I can stand to him. If he holds in thrall all these Yurth then that must be exhausting to whatever power he summons. I am fresh come-and. . . .”
Stans stiffened. He turned to face her fully, his hands now balled into fists.
“They are coming!”
“They must not find you here.” She was quick to recognize the additional peril in that. “Behind there.” She pointed to one of the low couches on which the women sat. There was a small space between it and the wall-a very poor hiding place. But if they took her quickly- and she distracted their attention-it might serve.
He shook his head but she crossed swiftly and seized upon his sleeve.
“If Karn’s men find you here then what good will you do either of us?” she demanded fiercely. “Hide, and later do what you can. Be Karn’s man-perhaps he will bring you to see how he can enslave me. Then we can well have a chance there to act together.”
Stans did not look convinced, but he did push toward the divan. The unmoving women still did not lift their eyes as he flattened himself into hiding there as best he could. Elossa, chin up, summoning her best appearance of confidence, stood not too far from the door as if she had been pacing up and down as might a new taken prisoner.
It was not the Yurth who came for her, rather two towering, shambling creatures, distorted, demonic-headed Raski plainly of the same breed as those who had first captured them, the tainted city stock.
They had to stoop to enter for their heavily muscled bodies were those of giants among their kind. And they slobbered from half-open mouths. Their near naked bodies gave off the stench of unwashed, even diseased flesh as they closed in upon her, each gripping an arm and dragging her toward the door. Nor did they glance around. Stans, she thought, was safe.
Once again she passed, firmly held by her two monster guards, through a number of passages, until they came into a room near as large as the presence chamber in which Karn had first greeted them. Here his throne was to one side, less impressive. The middle of the room was occupied by a huge representation of Atturn. From the open mouth of that puffed, irregularly, trails of smoke, thin trails which did not rise to the ceiling, but rather wreathed around the mask-face as if it willed their clinging touch.
Elossa smelled the strange odors of the place. Was the smoke one of the mind-bending drugs Stans had mentioned? If so there was no way for her to escape at least some of Karn’s infective devices.
The master of this maze had directly before him a brazier of gleaming metal, along the edge of which played those lines of light as had been on the walls of the corridor behind the first of the Mouths. In this, also, burned something which gave off smoke, and he leaned forward, was inhaling that, like a man gulping down some life-renewing fluid, his mouth open.