To get anywhere with hypnosis you've got to start fast. I looked Geipgos straight in the eye, passing my hand swiftly back and forth before his face, giving him no chance to realize that he was no longer asleep. The abrupt, almost intolerable glare was my greatest immediate asset.
"Yon Honi Erun," I whispered. "The Servants of the Mountain are very evil."
Geipgos blinked furiously, and his eyes widened in stark, incredulous terror.
I went on quickly: "You have always known them to be wicked—monstrously wicked and hateful. How repulsive they are in appearance alone, with their long scaly bodies so like the bodies of the shadow monsters which you feared would tear you piecemeal when as a child you disobeyed your parents.
"Do you not remember how you ran screaming from your father's wrath and hid in the dark, wishing that you might be a man grown, mighty in your contempt and defiance? You have always known the Servants of the Mountain to be hateful. But in your great fear you dared not say to yourself: 'They have brought me nothing but disaster!'"
Geipgos groaned and his eyes rolled.
"You dared not say," I went on relentlessly, "what you knew in your heart to be true. You dared not say: 'The Servants of the Mountain are false servants. They have brought my people nothing but disaster! When a man is hungry must he starve? Must the fruits of his labor, the harvest that he has sown not only for himself alone, but for the adored ones of his heart be snatched from him?'"
Geipgos' eyes took on a strange glaze and his lips began to tremble.
"Soon the sky will be red," I told him. "Soon the ground will shake. Soon the wrath of the mountain will be terrible against its false servants."
Geipgos tried to rise, but I gripped his arm and compelled him to keep his eyes riveted on the reflector. "They are not true servants, for they anger the mountain. The mountain would drive them forth, but without your help how can the mountain free itself? The mountain has no legs. It cannot walk about and seek out its false servants when they descend on the village."