"Aye and will," said the Zollarian monarch. "If it comes again, I shall safeguard the child, placing a double watch upon it, and also upon this woman, whose beauty is too great to fail to sway men's minds."
Gazar appeared to consider.
"'Twere well to do so," he agreed at length. "The past sun it came to my ears that since her return she has visited the house of Ptah."
"Ptah?" Helmor stiffened. "Now, by Bel himself, he appeared in my dream—those together."
"Aye," the soothsayer made answer. Gazar did not miss the point. It was as but the naming of something already known.
As in his sleep Helmor contracted the fingers of a hand. His lips set. His expression became one of determination.
"Now, by Bel," he declared, "shall I indeed have this insolent beauty watched. May Adita withdraw her favor from her for first having induced me to harken to her plans. Gazar, I am half-minded that he himself has shown me his pleasure, since, even though I myself have vowed him the child did Tamarizia refuse our demands or seek to win him from us, yet should she attack with her present weapons, not even Bel might save our armies from them, had we not the infant itself to place in her hands. Go. I shall ponder these things deeply. More lies within this vision than the fancies of a sleep-dulled brain."
Croft quitted the chamber as Gazar turned to leave it. He was wholly satisfied with his success and through it that Helmor, though superstitious, held, even as Ptah had declared on the day before, none too great a respect for his gods. Wherefore, he was determined that the succeeding night would see the dream repeated with far less effort since now the pictures of its sequence were printed on the surfaces of Helmor's mind, and the man would go to his couch, considering the likelihood of his dreaming again.
And being repeated, Helmor would take those precautions to safeguard the price of his own and his nation's safety. This would leave Croft himself free to continue his work on the means by which the eventual rescue of his loved ones was to be brought about. A vast elation, a reborn confidence thrilled him as he sought another room in the palace—no sumptuous apartment this time where sleepless attendants watched above a master's slumbers, but a deep-set room, soured by the lack of sunlight, where Naia of Aphur lay on the soiled padding of a battered couch, cradling Jason, Son of Jason, in her arms.
He told her of his progress, now he should take Koryphu to Zitra, how there he should let him tell his story before Jadgor, how a message would be sent north through Mazhur, bearing Tamarizia's demands for a meeting between representatives of both nations, whereat Zollaria's demands and Tamarizia's attitude toward them might be discussed.