The startled girl cried out and leaped to her feet.She had been lying on the straw mat at the foot of the stone couch. So suddenly had she arisen that she had struck her knee against the couch and this had not much pleased her.I had meant to scare her half to death and I was pleased to see that I had.
She looked at me angrily.'I was not asleep,' she said.
I strode to her and held her head in my hands, looking at her eyes.She had spoken the truth.
'You see!' she said.
I laughed.
She lowered her head, and then looked up shyly.'I am happy,' she said, 'that you have returned.'
I looked at her and sensed that she was.
'I suppose,' I said, 'that in my absence you have been in the pantry.'
'No,' she said, 'I have not,' adding as an acrimonious afterthought, '- Master.'
I had offended her pride.
'Vika,' I said, 'I think it is time that some changes were made around here.'
'Nothing ever changes here,' she said.
I looked around the room.The sensors in the room interested me.I examined them again.I was elated.Then, methodically, I began to search the room.Although the sensors and the mode of their application were fiendish and beyonf my immediate competence to fully understand, they suggested nothing ultimately mysterious, nothing which might not eventually be explained.There was nothing about them to encourage me to believe that the Priest-Kings, or King as it might be, were ultimately unfathomable or incomprehensible beings.
Moreover in the corridor beyond I had sensed the traces, tangible traces, of a Priest-King.I laughed.Yes, I had smelled a Priest-King, or its effects.The thought amused me.
More fully than ever I now understood how much the forces of superstition have depressed and injured men.No wonder the Priest-Kings hid behind their palisade in the Sardar and let the myths of the Initiates build a wall of human terror about them, no wonder they let their nature and ends be secret, no wonder they took such pains to conceal and obscure their plans and purposes, their devices, their instrumentation, their limitations!I laughed aloud.
Vika watched me, puzzled, surely convinced that I must have lost my mind.
I cracked my fist into my open palm.'Where is it?' I cried.
'What?' whispered Vika.
'The Priest-Kings see and the Priest-Kings hear!' I cried, 'But how?'
'By their power,' said Vika, moving back to the wall.
I had examined the entire room as well as I could.It might be possible, of course, to use some type of penetrating beam which if subtly enough adjusted might permit the reception of signals through walls and then relay these to a distant screen, but I doubted that such a device, though perhaps within the capacities of the Priest- Kings, would be used in the relatively trivial domestic surveillance of these chambers.
Then my eye saw, directly in the centre of the ceiling, another energy bulb, like those in the walls, only the bulb was not lit.That was a mistake on the Priest-Kings' part. But of course the device could be in any of the bulbs. Perhaps one of the almost inexhaustible energy bulbs, which can burn for years, had as a simple matter of fact at last burned out.
I leaped to the centre of the stone platform.I cried to the girl, 'Bring me the laver.'
She was convinced I was mad.
'Quickly!' I shouted, and she fairly leapt to fetch the bronze bowl.
I seized the bowl from her hand and hurled it underhanded up against the bulb which, though it had apparently burned out, shattered with a great flash and hiss of smoke and sparks. Vika screamed and crouched behind the stone platform.Down from the cavity where the energy bulb had been there hung, blasted and smoking, a tangle of wire, a ruptured metal diaphragm and a conical receptacle which might once have held a lens.
'Come here,' I said to Vika, but the poor girl cringed beside the platform.Impatient, I seized her by the arm and yanked her to the platform and held her there in my arms.'Look up!' I said.But she kept her face resolutely down.I thrust my fist in her hair and she cried out and looked up. 'See!' I cried.
'What is it?' she whimpered.
'It was an eye,' I said.
'An eye?' she whimpered.
'Yes,' I said, 'something like the 'eye' in the door.'I wanted her to understand.
'Whose eye?' she asked.
'The eye of Priest-Kings,' I laughed.'But it is now shut.'
Vika trembled against me and in my joy with my fist still in her hair I bent my face to hers and kissed her full on those magnificent lips and she cried out helpless in my arms and wept but did not resist.
It was the first kiss I had taken from the lips of my slave girl, and it had been a kiss of mad joy, one that astonished her, that she could not understand.
I leaped from the couch and went to the portal.
She remained standing on the stone platform, bewildered, her fingers at her lips.
Her eyes regarded me strangely.
'Vika,' I cried, 'would you like to leave this room?'
'Of course,' she said.Her voice trembled.
'Very well,' I said, 'you shall do so.'
She shrank back.
I laughed and went to the portal.Once again I examined the six red, domed sensors, three on a side, which were fixed there.It would be, in a way, a shame to destroy them, for they were rather beautiful.
I drew my sword.
'Stop!' cried Vika, in terror.
She leaped from the stone couch and ran to me, seizing my sword arm but with my left hand I flung her back and she fell stumbling back against the side of the stone couch.
'Don't!' she cried, kneeling there, her hands outstretched.
Six times the hilt of my sword struck against the sensors and six times there was a hissing pop like the explosion of hot glass and a bright shower of scarlet sparks.The sensors had been shattered, their lenses broken and the wired apertures behind them a tangle of black, fused wire.
I resheathed my sword and wiped my face with the back of my forearm.I could taste a little blood and knew that some of the fragments from the sensors had cut my face.
Vika knelt beside the couch numbly.
I smiled at her.'You may now leave the room,' I said, 'should you wish to do so.'
Slowly she rose to her feet.Her eyes looked to the portal and its shattered sensors.Then she looked at me, something of wonder and fear in her eyes.
She shook herself.
'My master is hurt,' she said.
'I am Tarl Cabot of Ko-ro-ba,' I said to her, telling her my name and city for the first time.
'My city is Treve,' she said, for the first time telling me the name of her city.
I smiled as I watched her go to fetch a towel from one of the chests against the wall.
So Vika was from Treve.
That explained much. Treve was a warlike city somewhere in the trackless magnificence of the Voltai Range.I had never been there but I knew her reputation.Her warriors were said to be fierce and brave, her women proud and beautiful.Her tarnsmen were ranked with those of Thentis, famed for its tarn flocks, and Ko-ro-ba, even great Ar itself.
Vika returned with the towel and began dabbing at my face.
It was seldom a girl from Treve ascended the auction block. I suppose Vika would have been costly had I purchased her in Ar or Ko-ro-ba.Even when not beautiful, because of their rarity, they are prized by collectors.
Treve was alleged to lie above Ar, some seven hundred pasangs distant, and toward the Sardar.I had never seen the city located on a map but I had seen the territory she claimed so marked.The precise location of Treve was not known to me and was perhaps known to few save its citizens.Trade routes did not lead to the city and those who entered its territory did not often return.
There was said to be no access to Treve save on tarnback and this would suggest that it must be as much a mountain stronghold as a city.
She was said to have no agriculture, and this may be true. Each year in the fall legions of tarnsmen from Treve were said to emerge from the Voltai like locusts and fall on the fields of one city or another, different cities in different years, harvesting what they needed and burning the rest in order that a long, relatiatory winter campaign could not be launched against them.A century ago the tarnsmen of Treve had even managed to stand off the tarnsmen of Ar in a fierce battle fought in the stormy sky over the crags of the Voltai. I had heard poets sing of it.Since that time her depredations had gone unchecked, although perhaps it should be added that never again did the men of Treve despoil the fields of Ar.
'Does it hurt?' asked Vika.
'No,' I said.
'Of course it hurts,' she sniffed.
I wondered if many of Treve's women were as beautiful as Vika.If they were it was surprising that tarnsmen from all the cities of Gor would not have descended on the place, as the saying goes, to try chain luck.
'Are all the women of Treve as beautiful as you?' I asked.
'Of course not,' she said irritably.
