"My darling!" cried Mian Ith, her arms going about the slight body of the thinker. "It is so long since we were together!"
"I feared," answered the seeker, his soft high-pitched voice more feminine than Mian Ith's, "that Ho Dyak would persuade your father that you should be his mate. He, like you, wore the red robes of the priestly rulers."
Mian Ith laughed. "The great muscled fool," she sneered. "He thought that I loved him. He told me of his studies in the forbidden books of the Ancients. Iiiy! but did he reveal his twisted unbelieving soul to me! It was a little matter to lay a trap for him—to rid myself of him forever."
Ho Dyak felt his lips curl back from his teeth with scorn and hatred. This, this—woman! Say, rather, this female sliran. She had betrayed him to the priests of Lalal that she might be free to continue her forbidden trysts with this puny seeker! It was true. He could read the woman's unshielded mind now. He had never attempted to do so heretofore.
Two slashes of his keen-edged bronze sword and he would be avenged. And yet Ho Dyak shook his head even as the thought came to him. He was well rid of the false-tongued Mian Ith and the dreamy-eyed seeker he despised. Better had Mian Ith chosen a stalwart black-robed warrior or yellow-robed toiler for her lover.
The man and the woman moved into the other room, their four arms interlocked and their soft head tendrils mingled in that half-embrace. And Ho Dyak slipped from the outer door into the corridor beyond. A half-ruined ramp within the walls, a ramp sealed off ages past and revealed to the boy, Ho Dyak, by a dislodged block of masonry, opened off the ramp a level above. In this way had Ho Dyak climbed in the bygone years to the Upper Shrine of Lalal and taken from the thousands of inscribed metal scrolls those he wished to study.
He would go to the Upper Shrine, fill his pouch with other slim metal skin records of the past, and take as well certain small mysterious objects sealed in crystalline spheres. The Earthman might know their purpose.
And so Ho Dyak ascended the ramp and squeezed through the shadowed opening so familiar to him.
Later, Ho Dyak turned for a last look about the Upper Shrine. He saw crystal-walled cases and unrusting metal devices of the Ancients. Here was static knowledge and machinery that might make Arba the mightiest nation upon the shores of the Sea of Thol. He touched lightly the pouch where nine more of the precious metal scrolls nested. Perhaps after all these centuries the wisdom of the forgotten ages would come to life beneath his four hands' clumsy touch.
It was then that the javelins came from the grayness of the Shrine's further corners.