"His signet? Hai!" Croft found himself suddenly shaken. "Now may Zitemku seize that woman, and Adita turn her favor from her!"
"Thou meanest—Kalamita?" And now Naia clung against him, not in womanly yearning, but with the quick fear of a mother. "Jason—"
"Aye," he said tensely, "have you forgotten how she forced thy own ring from thee—or the foul thing she planned, save Helmor had overruled her? Now Zitu be thanked you have spoken of this in time since, in my own way, those things she plans may be learned, and Helmor warned."
For now it seemed to him, that lost in the press of work in Himyra, supported by the sense of security derived from the dreams he had inspired in the brain of Zollaria's monarch he had indeed been blind, and that while he had labored without ceasing, the woman who hated him as only a woman of her type could hate, and Ptah, priest of Bel, and possibly Bandhor also, had been busy with their schemes. Wherefore, it was best that he learn quickly what those schemes embraced, what new danger to Naia and Jason, Son of Jason, might be involved.
"Fear not, beloved. Zitu means not these spawn of Zitemku to prevail against us—wherefore we are warned. Ga, thou art, priestess of the Eternal Fire, to me—messenger of Azil have I been to thee, and shall be again—but messenger of Zilla will I be to these plotters—making all their plotting vain. Farewell, thou mate of Jason. He goes to learn what they plan."
In a final caress, he sunk his mouth again to hers, seeming as always when he kissed her in such fashion to draw the very essence of her being to him. And then he left her, making his way swiftly out of the palace and pausing where the fire urns flared before it, across a mighty space.
Once more, then, it behooved him to bring himself into contact with the woman Kalamita. He willed himself toward her, passed swiftly to Bandhor's palace and failed to find any sign; paused, baffled for a time before he recalled the scene he had witnessed between her and Ptah, Bel's priest, in the latter's quarters in the temple. Then, where better if she were plotting against Helmor, he asked himself, than in that ebon-walled room.
Swiftly he sought it, and there he found her—and not only her, but Bandhor, Ptah, and another, a heretofore unknown man.
The four were seated around Ptah's table, where flaring oil-lamps partly dispelled the gloom, pricking out the intent masks of the several faces, causing iridescent flashes of light from the jeweled bands that circled Kalamita's arms, and broidered her garment's hem. In a way that half light struck Croft as wholly fitting to the scene wherein these four sat together and plotted against Helmor's reign.