The fact that human beings no different from my fellow Earthlings dwell upon a distant planet seems to me a fact of astounding importance to the future of mankind. It behooves me to pass along to my fellow Americans some record of the marvels and mysteries I have encountered here. If any eye but my own shall ever peruse these pages I cannot ever hope to know. Perhaps these memoirs go astray when they vanish up that pulsing beam of golden light that forms at random intervals within the jade Gateway … perhaps they wander forever in the far places of the Universe, a Universe whose vastness and many mysteries and inexplicable secrets I am only beginning to comprehend.
Or, perchance they molder into decay in a forgotten city of crumbling stone that has been lost for unknown ages in the midst of the Cambodian jungles.
I do not know; probably, I shall never know.
But write them I shall, hoping that across the vastness of some three hundred and eighty-seven million, nine hundred and thirty thousand miles they will somehow come into hands of men able to read them and to appreciate the transcendent significance of the information they contain.
To those readers, then―if any―I now speak. Doubtless to you my narrative of marvels and adventures upon a distant world will seem no more than an extravagant fiction. Sobeit. Read and ponder well; the decision of my veracity is yours to make. And stop to think: if this is nothing but mere fiction, then I must surely be the most gifted romancer in all the annals of fantastic literature since Edgar Rice Burroughs. For only an author of his great imaginative genius could concoct so weird and marvelous a world as Thanator, and make it real and living on the page.
Then pause to consider: would any author, able to invent such a stirring and vivid narrative, thronged with wonders, leave so many questions unanswered, so many mysteries unsolved?
Somewhere on the further hemisphere of Callisto, yet unknown to us, the secret citadel of the Mind Wizards lay hidden.
But―where?
Callisto is not a small world. It measures nearly three thousand miles in diameter, which makes it, with Ganymede and Titan, one of the largest satellites in the Solar System―so large, in fact, that at the very dawn of the science of astronomy, the great Galileo was able to discover it by means of the small, crude lenses available to him. We are talking, therefore, of something in the neighborhood of twenty-four million square miles.*
And―where in all this twenty-four million square miles might the lair of the Mind Wizards be found?
Only the one hemisphere of Callisto is known to us and has been mapped by the cartographers of Thanator: the hemisphere which contains the Corund Laj, the Grand Kumala, the White Mountains, the Great Plains of Haratha, and the Sanmur Laj, or Lesser Sea, as well as the cities of Shondakor, Tharkol, Soraba, Farz, Narouk, Ganatol and Perushtar, and, formerly, Zanadar.
The opposite hemisphere is completely unknown. And we had good reasons to suspect that the hidden lair of the Mind Wizards lay in the trackless wilderness of this second hemisphere.
But again―where?
Luckily, we possessed two slender clues to the whereabouts of the secret citadel.
During the desperate attempt of the Ku Thad to recapture their city from the clutches of the Black Legion two years ago, I had been forced to fight to the death against the cunning devil-priest, Ool the Uncanny, in the Pits below Shondakor, in order to rescue my comrades Koja of the Yathoon Horde and Lukor, the gallant and peppery little master-swordsman from Ganatol, who had been taken prisoner by the Chac Yuul.
At that time, and before our duel ended in his death, the clever little warlock who had been the mastermind behind the Black Legion, the power behind the throne of its leader, Arkola, had boastfully revealed to me some hint of the hiding place of his fellow Mind Wizards.
His words are burnt indelibly into my memory. Well do I recall that harrowing hour in which for the first time I matched swords against an adversary who could read my mind like an open book, and knew a split second in advance where my next stroke would fall.
Only by sheer chance had Ool been overcome and slain. But in his overconfidence, sure of his victory over me, he gloatingly let slip some small clue as to the location of the mysterious Mind Wizards.
Smirking in oily anticipation of his triumph over me in the deadly game of blade against blade, he had boasted to me, there in dank and gloomy dungeons, and his words remain in my memory to this hour―
1 am one of the Mind Wizards of Kuur, dark shadowy Kuur that lies beyond the Dragon River amid the Peaks of Harangzar, on the other side of Thanator. My people share a curious science, a mental discipline that permits us to read the thoughts and minds of other beings … We are a small, a dying race; but we have a mighty power over the minds of other men, a power which, if used adroitly, can lay an empire within our reach.
Because of these words which Ool had incautiously let slip in the moment before he inadvertently tripped over the corpse of Bluto which lay sprawled out behind him, and fell, shattering his skull against the pave, gave us our first precious clue to the whereabouts of the land of Kuur. It was in the second hemisphere, near a river amidst the mountains: that much, at least, we knew.
Our second clue had lain in our hands for months, but had somehow or other gone unrecognized all that time until the sharp eyes and keen wits of old Zastro, the wise sage of the Ku Thad and one of our most trusted councillors, discerned its hidden meaning.
It was in the form of a small circular medallion of precious metal which Ergon had found about the neck of Ang Chan, another Kuurian, a second Mind Wizard, who had been the power behind Zamara’s throne and the mastermind behind her mad scheme of world conquest, even as Ool had skulked and whispered in the shadows of the mighty warlord, Arkola.
There aboard Zamara’s great warship, as a flying vessel of Shondakor closed in battle with it, Ang Chan had fallen to a chance-flung dagger wielded by Zamara herself, hurled at the wily mastermind by the outraged princess in the terrible moment in which she had at last discovered how the yellow dwarf had manipulated her thoughts to obey the bidding of the far-off Mind Wizards.
The medallion bore a seemingly meaningless inscription, curved and ragged lines gathering about a triangular symbol. The disc contained no message that was legible to me at the time, so I thrust it within my garments for later examination and promptly forgot all about it.
Chapter 2
Secret in Silver
In the great Hall of the royal palace of Shondakor were we assembled for the council of war.
Once the grinning idol of Hoom, devil god of the Chac Yuul, had leered down upon the splendid hall, squatting like a huge, obscene toad atop the dais of many steps.
Now the Twin Thrones stood upon that high place beneath a billowing canopy of cloth of gold, the thrones wherefrom Darloona and I were wont to preside over state functions.
At the foot of those stairs a great table of carven stone was set and many gilt chairs were drawn about this table, whose top was littered with books and documents, scrolls and charts.