"Months?" rumbled Ommodurad. "Indeed, I believe the tales of the Greymen are true and that an evil spirit has returned to haunt me. You speak of months?" He threw back his head, laughed a choked throaty laugh that was half sob.
"Know, demon, or madman, or ancient prince of evil: for thirty centuries have I brooded alone, sealed from an empire by a single key!"
I felt the shock rack through and through the invader mind. This was the opportunity I had hoped for. Quick as thought I moved, slashed at the wavering shield, and was past it——
I grappled onto the foul mind-matrix, scanned its symbolisms: a miasma of twisted concepts like great webs, asquirm with bristling nodes like crouching spiders—and through it all a yammering torrent of deformed thought-shapes.
In my eagerness I was careless. The invader mind, recovering, struck back. Too late I felt it slip into my awareness, flick over the stored information. I leaped to protect one fact ... and lost my gains. With only a single tenuous line of rapport with the alien mind still open, I clung, shaken—but hugging precious patterns of stolen data. My raid had been no more than an irritation to the other mind ... but I had fetched away a mass of information. I interpreted it, integrated it, matched it to known patterns. A complex structure of relationships evolved, growing into a new awareness.
Upon the mind-picture of Foster's face was now super-imposed another: that of Qulqlan, Rthr of all Vallon, ruler of the Two Worlds!
And other pictures, snatched from the intruder mind, were present now in the earth-consciousness of me, Legion.
The Vaults, deep in the rock under the fabled city of Okk-Hamiloth, where the mind-trace of every citizen was stored, sealed by the Rthr and keyed to his mind alone.
Ammaerln, urging the king to embark on a Far-Voyage, stressing the burden of government, tempting him to bring with him the royal mind-trace; Qulqlan's acquiescence and Ammaerln's secret joy at the advancement of his scheme; the coming of the Change for the Rthr, aboard ship, far out in space—and the vizier's bold stroke; and then the fools who found him at the lifeboat ... and the loss of all, all....
There my own memories took up the tale: the awakening of Foster, unsuspecting, and his recording of the mind of the dying Ammaerlin; the flight from the Hunters; the memory-trace of the king that lay for three millenia among neolithic bones until I, a primitive, plucked it from its place; and the pocket of a coarse fibre garment where the cylinder lay now—on the hip of the body I inhabited but as inaccessible to me as if it had been a million miles away.