They saw the Premier reach out and break connection.
Kortha looked at the blank screen; he whirled on Ilse, and his big hands went out to catch her by the shoulders and bring her up close to him.
He said savagely, "Tell me! Tell me what I don't know. Why has Guantra turned against me? Why does he doubt my friendship? It can't be over you. He is not the man to endanger his power for a woman. What is his reason?"
Her blue eyes were unafraid. She said, "Guantra was never your friend. I dared not tell you before, but I can now because you have doubts of what your memory tells you. You saw how indecisive he was. He does not know whether his psychoanalyser in the Blue Grotto had time to change you. I got you out of there before he knew, before he had seen and spoken with you."
The giant released her; ran fingers that shook a little through the thick mop of his yellow hair, frowning.
"I don't understand. What psychoanalyser? What Blue Grotto? Wait—I remember the grotto, with the blue sea. But the rest is strange to me."
"And the room fitted with drapes? The couch with the ocemar pelts?"
"I slept there."
She told him then, hurriedly: of how the psychoanalyser was one of the machines Guantra had taken from the tower of Zut in Yassa and set it up in his hidden lair, and how he used it to turn key men into his friends by giving them new memories that were so closely linked with their old that rarely were they so much as hesitant about them. Only Kortha doubted, and that was because Ilse had come to him before Guantra. She picked up the thread of his life at the smithy in the desert and went on with it.