He showed it to Sohmsei. “Can you get there?'
The Arraki laughed in his curious soft way. “Count three tens, Lord, before you break the door. Keesh!'
The two Arraki, dark spider-shapes in the gloom, slipped over the wide sill. Banning could hear the dry pattering click of their clawed feet on the stone outside. He began to count. Rolf and Horek, with Jommor between them and six or seven men behind, came running up. Banning stood in front of the door.
'We have Jommor with us,” he shouted. “You in there, hold your fire unless you want him dead!'
'No,” yelled Jommor. “Fire!'
Rolf hit him across the mouth. Banning leaned closer to the door.
'Do you hear? It's his life, as well as ours.'
He thought he heard Tharanya's voice inside, giving them an order.
Thirty. Now.
He kicked the door in, crashing his boot-heel hard against the lock. His flesh shrank, expecting the impact of explosive pellets. None came. A woman shrieked suddenly, and another. A half-dozen palace guards stood ranked in front of a group of servants and waiting women, armed but with their guns dropped. And now Keesh and Sohmsei had scuttled in through the window at their rear, and the guards were overwhelmed by an out-bursting wave of screaming women and yelling men who wanted to avoid the Arraki.
Tharanya was not among them.
There was a door to an inner chamber beyond the milling clump of guards and servants. Banning fought his way toward it, but the Arraki were closer and they got there first, throwing the tall white panels wide. There was a room beyond with a broad white bed curtained in yellow silk, and thick rugs on the floor and a woman's cushioned furniture. The walls were white with great inset panels done in a yellow brocade to match the hangings of the bed. One of the panels was still moving. It had been open, and now was almost shut.
No man could have reached that narrowing crack before it closed, but the Arraki were not men. By the time Banning had floundered into the room they had torn the panel open and vanished into the space that lay behind it. Banning heard them running, and then there was a scream of pure terror, compressed and made hollow by narrow walls.
Sohmsei came back, carrying Tharanya's limp body in his arms. He looked regretful. “I am sorry, Lord,” he said. “We did not harm her. But this is a thing that happens often with your human women.'
Banning smiled. “She'll come to,” he said, and reached out his own arms. “Good work, Sohmsei. Where's Keesh?'
'Gone on to spy out the secret passage,” said Sobmsei, laying Tharanya carefully in Banning's arms. “He will sense if any danger threatens.'
Banning nodded. Tharanya lay against him. He could feel the warmth of her, the motion of her breathing. Her throat was white and strong and her red hair hung in a heavy mass below his arm, and her lashes were thick and dark on her cheeks. He didn't want to go anywhere. He just wanted to stand and hold her.
Rolf said grimly from behind him, “Come on, Kyle, we've still got work to do.'
Keesh came back, his leathery flanks heaving. “Nothing,” he said. “All is quiet there, Lord.'
Rolf said, “We'll need the Arraki, Kyle.'
Banning started, and a chill shiver ran down his spine. This was the time now, the time he had dreaded.
CHAPTER VIII
The laboratory they were in was not such a one as Banning had ever seen before. The machines and instruments here were so masked and shielded that their purposes were unguessable, their complexities only to be imagined. This long, high, wide room had the quiet cleanness of a great hall of dynamos.
He could understand why only a man who had mastered the sciences of the stars could attain to high place in this far-reaching star empire.
Rolf was speaking to that man, harshly, rapidly. Jommor listened, his face set like stone. Horek was out checking the men as they rounded up stragglers, but the two Arraki were here, bunched and tense, their eyes roving alertly.
Tharanya had recovered. She sat in a chair, her face perfectly white and her eyes like hot sapphires as she looked at Banning. She looked at no one else.
Rolf finished, and Jommor said slowly, “So that's it. I might have known.'
'No,” said Tharanya, and then on a rising scale, “Oh, no! We'll not give your Valkar his memory back, so he can rend the Empire!'
'You haven't,” Rolf pointed out grimly, “much choice.'
Tharanya's flaring gaze never left Banning's face. She said to him bitterly, “You almost succeeded once, didn't you? You came here with whatever clues your father had left you, and you tricked me into letting you search the old archives, and you found the way to the Hammer and went away laughing — at us, at me.'
Banning said, “Did I?'
She said, “You did, and with the oldest trick a man can use with a woman, and the cheapest.'
Jommor said, “Tharanya—'
She did not look at him as she said, to Banning, “You were just a little too slow. The little that saved the Empire! We caught you, and Jommor erased your memory. We should have erased you.'
'But you didn't,” Banning said.
'No, we didn't. We hate killing — something a son of the Old Empire wouldn't understand. We were foolish enough to give you false memories and set you down on that fringe planet Earth and think you safety out of the way, I was foolish enough.'
Rolf said sourly, “He was out of the way enough that it took me long years of secret search on Earth to find Him.'
Tharanya looked slowly at the big dark man. “And now you have him, you want his memory too, and you'll have the Hammer in your grasp.'
'Yes,” said Rolf, and the word was like the snap of a wolf. “Listen Jommor. You can restore his memory. And you'll do it. You'll do it because you don't want to see Tharanya die.'
Jommor said, “I thought that would be it.'
'Well?'
Jommor looked at Tharanya. Presently the line of his shoulders seemed to sag, and his head bent forward. “As you say — I haven't much choice.'
Banning's heart pounded, and his flesh was cold. He said hoarsely, “How long will it take?” Seconds, hours, centuries — how long does it take to change a man, to make him not? Suppose this whole incredible dream was true and Neil Banning was only a name, a fiction, a walking lie? Would he remember, afterward? Would he mind, that he had not really ever been?
Jommor got up slowly. Without any expression of face or voice he answered, “An hour, perhaps less.'
Tharanya stared at him. It seemed that she could not believe what she heard. Then she cried out furiously, “No! I forbid you, Jommor — do you hear? I forbid you! No matter what they—'
Sohmsei laid one taloned hand gently on her shoulder, and she caught her breath, breaking off short with a gasp of loathing. And the Arraki said, “Lord, her mouth cries anger while her mind speaks hope. There is deception here, between these two.'
Rolf made a short harsh sound between his teeth. “I thought Jommor had given in too easily.” He looked from one to the other. “All right, out with it. Its no use to lie to an Arraki.'
Tharanya moved away from Sohmsei, but she did not speak. Jommor shrugged, his face still showing nothing. Banning admired his control.
'The Arraki,” said Jommor, “is doubtless a good servant, but he is overzealous.” He looked at Banning. “You want your memory returned. I have agreed. I can't do more.'
'An hour,” Banning said. “Or perhaps less.” He walked over to Tharanya. ‘What do you expect to happen in the next hour?'
Her eyes blazed at him, direct and unevasive. “I don't know what you're talking about. And please ask your
