Unseen, unnoted any more than the trailing smoke of one of the low-burning lamps he drifted to Helmor's luxurious bed and began hurling his thought force upon him, seeking thereby to awaken a sympathetic vibration inside his heavy head.
Over and over he drew the mental pictures he had formed, concentrating all his power on them—Helmor defeated in every purpose—Kalamita and Ptah as co-plotters—Helmor about to be dethroned—the child sacrificed to Bel—and Tamarizia resorting for vengeance to the sword—the Zollarian armies once more beaten into a bleeding rabble—fleeing—leaving their own defenseless monarch to face the future alone—Kalamita haughty and sneering—her mask of meekness cast aside—showing at last as the one by whom these things had been brought to pass.
And suddenly the lips of Zollaria's monarch moved. He muttered in his slumber, "Lost—all is lost—defeat—dishonor." For a moment while the slave girls eyed one another without stilling the sweep of their fans there was silence, and then Helmor groaned.
He stirred, he knotted the fingers of a heavy hand. "Thou—thou treacherous one," he muttered. "Through thee Helmor stands undone."
Croft thrilled. The thing was succeeding. In his mind Kalamita answered. "Aye, Helmor, through me, these things have transpired to my ends. Defeat have I brought upon you. Tamarizia would have held back the sword, had you possessed the child to place safely in her hands."
And then suddenly, as though to point the moral, appeared Naia, clasping the form of the infant the tawny siren had announced as slain, lifting it toward Helmor in suppliant fashion, even as in the flesh she had held it to him once. And she spoke sinking upon her knees. "Take him and give him back to his father, O Helmor, and all will be well with thee again." And Helmor, seizing the infant, lifted it toward the skies and—Kalamita screamed, covering her face, and turned to stagger out of his presence, while a multitude of voices sounded, crying; "Hail to Helmor, saviour of his nation! Hail to Helmor the Wise!"
Whereat Helmor surged suddenly up in his bed, and sat blinking in the half dusk of his chamber, from one to another of his attendant slaves.
So for a moment he sat, and then, throwing off his coverings, he rose.
"Go," he directed in a voice that quivered with the emotion of his vision. "Rouse Gazar and say to him that I have dreamed, and require his presence."