'We've met before, remember?' she jibed.
Raft grinned.
'Sorry. It was just—Do your people here know how beautiful you are?'
'Men of all races must be very much alike,' Janissa parried demurely. 'We must think about you just now, Brian Raft. You're in trouble.'
'Trouble you walked out on, I remember.' He did not mean to let her attractiveness blind him to that memory.
She shrugged lithely.
'What could I do then? Now I've walked in again, and you must forgive me.'
He glanced over the balcony rail and shuddered. 'You certainly did take a long chance. Lucky you weren't killed.'
'Not by a fall. Not my race! Though if you hadn't been here to spring the trap, I might have had some trouble. Let's go in. We may be seen from another balcony.'
She stepped through the window, stared around, and tossed the slashed cushion away. 'Now we can talk.'
Raft followed her, seeing how supple was the movement of her round, smooth limbs as they glided beneath velvety garments. She tilted him a sweetly wicked smile over one shoulder and shook the cloudy tiger-striped hair. There was a mound of silken cushions against the nearer wall. She laid a hand on Raft's arm and drew him down beside her to a cross-legged seat among them.
'We have much to tell each other,' she said. 'And perhaps not a very long time to do it in.'
'You'll have to start, then. Remember, I don't know anything at all.'
'I suppose not,' Janissa murmured. There was a soft roughness to her voice when she lowered it, a luxuriant roughness, like a purr. 'Not even Craddock knew, really, though he—created—our race. And now he does not remember certain things. So Parror will have to build a device that—'
'Suppose you start at the beginning,' Raft interrupted her. 'First, where is Paititi? On my own planet?'
'Yes. We know that, for some of us have gone through the unseen road to the jungle land outside. Not many, and only guardians, like Parror and myself. I went once and only once. It was horrible. Your world is frozen. Nothing moves.
'When we meet others outside, you know, we have to force ourselves to do everything as slowly as people in a nightmare. Otherwise we'd be only a blur when they looked at us. But we cannot live long outside Paititi, unless we carry something of the Flame with us.'
'The Flame?' Raft echoed. 'The Flame?'
'The Flame is the source of all life,' Janissa said soberly. 'In our whole land there are only two amulets that hold a little fiery seed of the Flame itself. We do not know how to make them. These two are very old, our heritage from the ancient race that lived here before us.' Her eyes narrowed. 'Parror has one. I should have the other. It's my right as Guardian. But the king claims it, and—well, never mind. I have my plans. The time is coming when —'
'Please,' Raft broke in. 'First tell me about this business of speed, and your people moving faster than ours. Why?'
'The Flame is sinking,' Janissa said in a somber voice. 'That is why Parror sought out Craddock. You see, Paititi was not always as it is now. In the old days, generations lived and died during the day, and other generations in a night. And before that, hundreds of generations in a day. The cycle slows now. Water moves faster than in the days of our fathers. Our memories go back a long way. We have written records, but certain things we had to guess. Before we were human, long, long ago, another race dwelt in Paititi.
'That race built these castles. Men and women not of our species but akin to yours, strong and wise and happy, dwelt in this land and lived beneath the Flame. Then the Flame sank and slept.'
Raft scowled.
'That race died?'
'It did not die.'
'What happened to it?'
She looked away.
'As you came through the unseen road, you must have seen a cavern there—a dark place where things crept and flew in shadow. You saw the monsters that dwelt in it. Those things—their ancestors—built this castle, and Parror's castle, and a hundred others. But as the Flame sank, they sank below the level of beasts. We know that now. But we did not always know.'
Raft tried to marshal the facts. 'The first race degenerated, eh? As your own evolved?'
'They degenerated long before we had the first glimmers of intelligence. I said that the Flame slept. Craddock wakened it, millions and millions of cycles ago. We know that, because our ancestors penetrated to the cave of the Flame, and found certain things there—a cloth sack, metal containers, a notebook with symbols we could not read.
'Not until da Fonseca came here, in his machine that flew, did we have any knowledge of the real truth, though we had often theorized. Parror and I took da Fonseca and through him learned the contents of that notebook.'
'Millions of cycles? Craddock isn't that old!'
'The tides of time are altered in Paititi,' Janissa said. 'Craddock awakened the Flame, and our race was given birth. Now the Flame sinks, and that means great evil.'
Dan Craddock! How much did he really know about the man, Raft wondered. For thirty years the Welshman had wandered the Amazon Basin. Why? Because of some secret he had stumbled on, long ago?
'What is this Flame?' he asked.
Janissa made a curious symbolic gesture. 'It is the giver of life and the taker-away of life. It is Curupuri.'
Raft stared at her. 'All right, leave that, then. What do you want?'
The eyes shaded to purple again. 'I am of royal blood. In the old days there were once three kings, enemies. They fought, and two were conquered. But the two vanquished kings were not shamed. They were given the hereditary honor of guardians of the Flame. They dwelt, after that, in the castle Parror holds now, while the conqueror dwelt in this place, by Doirada Gulf. It was so for generations. Until now!'
She seemed to bristle.
'Parror uses me—uses me! And I am of blood no less royal than his own. I held the secret of the lens, which he needed, but now that he has Craddock, he can waken the Flame, and I will be stripped of my birthright.' Her eyes glowed. 'Holding the castle of the Flame is a trust. We guard. Parror intends to break the trust, and act on his own, without waiting for the king's decision. That will be a shameful thing. It will bring shame on me, one of the guardians.'
'Yet you helped him murder da Fonseca,' Raft said. 'You helped him kidnap Craddock.'
'As for the murder, I did not know he intended that. The spell of the mirror can be broken, but it must be done slowly, carefully, or the victim will die. I had no love for da Fonseca, yet I did not want his death, and I would have stopped Parror could I have done so.
'Craddock—well, Parror lied to me. He told me he would do no more than bring Craddock here. I would not have trusted his word alone, but he gave me logic I could not deny. False logic, I know now. For he will get the knowledge he needs from Craddock's brain, and waken the Flame. That—that—' She hesitated. 'It may be a very great sin. I am no longer sure what is the right way, Brian.'
'Well, one way is for me to get out of here and see Craddock,' Raft said practically.
'I cannot get you out—yet,' she told him. 'But the rest is easy. I have the mirror. See?' She drew the little lens from her bosom and held it out. Raft, remembering da Fonseca, found himself instinctively glancing away.
Janissa laughed softly.
'There's no harm in it, unless the psychic cleavage is violent. Look into my mirror.'
'Not so fast,' Raft said. 'How does it work?'
'We know much of the mind,' Janissa said. 'The device is—is a mental bridge. Once it has caught the matrix of a man's mind, it can be put en rapport with that man. Each brain has a different basic vibration. You could not use the mirror alone, Brian, for it needs a trained mind to direct. But with my aid, you can. Look.'
He obeyed. In the tiny lens the gray storm-clouds misted and swirled. They were driven aside. Tiny and alive,
