Mind Wizards of Callisto
Lin Carter
Book One
THE QUEST FOR KUUR
Chapter 1
The Mystery of the Mind Wizards
When you have an enemy, you cannot rest in peace until you have destroyed him.
This is one of the great laws of life, and it holds as true for individual men as for nations.
As a warrior by inclination, a fighting-man by profession, I have made this dictum a part of my personal philosophy. And nothing that has ever chanced to occur in my long career of wandering and adventure has ever proved this belief an error.
And now we had indeed an enemy! An enemy secretive and furtive, shadowy and hidden, unscrupulous and insidious. There was no course open to men of courage and honor but to seek out the hidden lairs of that enemy and destroy him before he brought his cunning schemes to fruition and destroyed us.
In the years since I first found myself miraculously transported across the gulf of millions of miles of space by some mysterious agency to this strange and marvelous world, I have allied myself with a people called the Ku Thad. They are a brave and stalwart and freedom-loving nation of heroic and noble-hearted warriors, and the seat of their power is the great city of Shondakor the Golden, which arises amidst the Plains of Haratha on the River Ajand.
To their princess, the fair Darloona, I have given my allegiance and my heart.
And―by a miracle even more wondrous and inexplicable than that which so strangely transported me to this unknown and beautiful planet―I succeeded in winning her heart as well.
It is a miracle I will never completely manage to understand. That I, a wandering young adventurer from a far-off world, should have won the love of the most beautiful princess of two planets, remains and shall ever remain a mystery beyond the scope of my comprehension. It seems to me that I am a very ordinary young man, no braver or more handsome or more exceptional in any way than any other of a thousand young men. But my beloved saw in me some rare and precious quality that remains invisible to my own scrutiny, and chose me for her mate from all others.
It is no mere false modesty on my part to say that this marvel remains inexplicable to me, for I am no more humble or self-effacing than most men. It is simply, I think, that few men really deserve the wonderful gift of the heart of a lovely and noble woman. Once that gift has been bestowed upon us, we thereafter must spend the rest of our lives earning and deserving that gift.
However, against all odds, I had won through a world of perils to a place beside the Princess of the Golden City and had made her mine. Her kingdom, which now I shared as Prince Jandar of Shondakor, I have held firm against a host of enemies. Mere months before, the city of Tharkol, ruled by the mad queen Zamara, had launched an insidious assault against our realm. Armed with a secret weapon of immense power, the self-styled “Empress of Callisto” had sought to subjugate the Golden City of the Ku Thad as the first step on her ambitious program of planetary conquest. She had caught us by surprise, taking as her prisoners my princess and myself, as well as our staunch ally and comrade, the burly Perushtarian warrior, Ergon.
In a bewildering sequence of remarkable events, we had been able to turn the tables on Zamara, carrying her off into the wilderness of the Great Plains, safely eluding recapture by the Tharkolians until narrowly managing to rejoin our own comrades.
And then had come a sequence of revelations so unexpected and surprising, that the entire history of this jungle-girdled world would forever after be changed because of them.
For Zamara was not truly mad, it proved, but had been seduced into her gaudy dreams of world conquest by an insidious band of telepaths who dwelt in a secret citadel in a far-off land, from which hidden fortress they worked to the destruction of the free cities of Thanator.
Once the full truth became known, Zamara was overcome by contrition and labored mightily to undo the damage she had done. From our most powerful enemy she became our staunchest ally, adding the armed might of her own warlike realm to the fighting legions of the Ku Thad in a mighty effort to throw down the power of our true enemy, the Mind Wizards of Kuur.
In this great crusade upon which we were shortly to embark, a second ally lent us his strength. This was the redoubtable and cunning Seraan of Soraba, a merchant city to the north on the shores of Corund Laj the Greater Sea, Kaamurath by name. His city-state had been next on Zamara’s agenda of world dominance; apprised of this, the clever Prince Kaamurath had insinuated his master-spy, Glypto, into the city of Tharkol. It had been Glypto who was instrumental in freeing us from Zamara’s captivity, after we had been taken prisoner in a daring Tharkolian raid.
Soraba is a part of the wealthy Perushtarian empire to the north. They are not a warlike people, the Perushtarians, but a nation of tradesmen and merchants. In the past, when internecine strife broke out between the several cities of their empire, the Perushtarians had been wont to hire the services of an immense mercenary army called the Chac Yuul, the Black Legion. But those days were over and gone, and in recapturing the kingdom of my beloved princess from the clutches of her enemies, I had taken a part in the overthrow of the Chac Yuul. Broken and dispersed, the warrior host had since vanished from the great stage of world events and no longer played any major role in the history of the Jungle Moon.
Hence the wily Kaamurath had been forced to rely upon his own resources in defending his realm from the ambitions of Zamara of Tharkol. Disguising himself as the merchant Shaphur, he had led a caravan of warriors, also disguised, to reconnoiter the situation, and we had fallen in with him after effecting our escape from Tharkol.
In time all of these matters had come to their resolution. And when at length it became known that a secret agent of the hidden fortress of telepaths―the “Mind Wizards,” they styled themselves―had in fact been the power behind Zamara’s throne, a fact cleverly concealed from everyone, including Zamara, it became grimly obvious to the sovereigns of Shondakor, Tharkol and Soraba that we should never be permitted to enjoy peace until we had rooted out and destroyed this secret nest of telepathic magicians who worked, and had worked behind the scenes for many years, to overthrow the kingdoms of Thanator.
It was some months after our return from these hazardous adventures that we prepared to embark on our crusade against the Mind Wizards of Thanator.
For that time we had labored mightily in preparation for this expedition. In our attack against the Mind Wizards, we had determined that speed was the essential factor.
Only one hemisphere of this planet is known to us. Thanator, or Callisto, is one of the moons of Jupiter. The astronomers of my native Earth will doubtless argue that Callisto is too small a world to sustain a breathable atmosphere, and too distant from the Sun for its surface to be warm and fertile, much less tropic. With these learned teachings I cannot argue: all I can say is that I, Jon Dark, have dwelt upon this world for months, and that I still live and breathe and feel the warmth of a tropic daylight upon my flesh.
I expect no one to believe the amazing narrative of my adventures, for I can offer no tangible proof of their veracity to offset the calculations of astronomers. I suspect, merely, that the sages and scientists of my native Earth have yet to unriddle most of the secret mysteries of the Universe … and that the inexplicable existence of intelligent life upon the surface of the Jungle Moon is but one of those mysteries.
How I traveled here I can neither explain nor even understand. And why I continue to set down with a reed pen on papyrus this continuing narrative of marvels remains a puzzle even to myself. At periods a volume of these memoirs is transported through the jungles of the Grand Kumala by a picked war-party of fighting-men in my retinue to a mysterious jade disc which is the site of the Callistan terminus of a peculiar subspatial link between our two worlds. Who built this marker I cannot conjecture―what unseen and superior intelligence maintains this Gateway between the worlds is still a mystery even to myself. And whether these memoirs do indeed retrace the route I traveled years before, to materialize at the bottom of a jade-lined well in the central plaza of the Lost City of Arangkor in the trackless and unexplored jungles of southern Cambodia I dare not even guess.