Mind Wizards of Callisto - Lin ...

Mind Wizards of Callisto - Lin Carter, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 1

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Mind Wizards of Callisto -
Jandar 05
Lin Carter
Book One
THE QUEST FOR KUUR
Chapter 1
Page 1
 The Mystery of the Mind Wizards
When you have an enemy, you cannot rest in peace until you have destroyed him.
This is one of the great laws of life, and it holds as true for individual men as for nations.
As a warrior by inclination, a fighting-man by profession, I have made this dictum a part of my personal
philosophy. And nothing that has ever chanced to occur in my long career of wandering and adventure
has ever proved this belief an error.
And now we had indeed an enemy! An enemy secretive and furtive, shadowy and hidden, unscrupulous
and insidious. There was no course open to men of courage and honor but to seek out the hidden lairs of
that enemy and destroy him before he brought his cunning schemes to fruition and destroyed us.
In the years since I first found myself miraculously transported across the gulf of millions of miles of
space by some mysterious agency to this strange and marvelous world, I have allied myself with a people
called the Ku Thad. They are a brave and stalwart and freedom-loving nation of heroic and
noble-hearted warriors, and the seat of their power is the great city of Shondakor the Golden, which
arises amidst the Plains of Haratha on the River Ajand.
To their princess, the fair Darloona, I have given my allegiance and my heart.
And-by a miracle even more wondrous and inexplicable than that which so strangely transported me to
this unknown and beautiful planet-I succeeded in winning her heart as well.
It is a miracle I will never completely manage to understand. That I, a wandering young adventurer from
a far-off world, should have won the love of the most beautiful princess of two planets, remains and shall
ever remain a mystery beyond the scope of my comprehension. It seems to me that I am a very ordinary
young man, no braver or more handsome or more exceptional in any way than any other of a thousand
young men. But my beloved saw in me some rare and precious quality that remains invisible to my own
scrutiny, and chose me for her mate from all others.
It is no mere false modesty on my part to say that this marvel remains inexplicable to me, for I am no
more humble or self-effacing than most men. It is simply, I think, that few men really deserve the
wonderful gift of the heart of a lovely and noble woman. Once that gift has been bestowed upon us, we
thereafter must spend the rest of our lives earning and deserving that gift.
However, against all odds, I had won through a world of perils to a place beside the Princess of
theGoldenCity and had made her mine. Her kingdom, which now I shared as Prince Jandar of
Shondakor, I have held firm against a host of enemies. Mere months before, the city ofTharkol , ruled by
the mad queen Zamara, had launched an insidious assault against our realm. Armed with a secret weapon
of immense power, the self-styled “Empress of Callisto” had sought to subjugate theGoldenCity of the
Ku Thad as the first step on her ambitious program of planetary conquest. She had caught us by surprise,
taking as her prisoners my princess and myself, as well as our staunch ally and comrade, the burly
Perushtarian warrior, Ergon.
In a bewildering sequence of remarkable events, we had been able to turn the tables on Zamara,
carrying her off into the wilderness of theGreat Plains , safely eluding recapture by the Tharkolians until
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 narrowly managing to rejoin our own comrades.
And then had come a sequence of revelations so unexpected and surprising, that the entire history of this
jungle-girdled world would forever after be changed because of them.
For Zamara was not truly mad, it proved, but had been seduced into her gaudy dreams of world
conquest by an insidious band of telepaths who dwelt in a secret citadel in a far-off land, from which
hidden fortress they worked to the destruction of the free cities of Thanator.
Once the full truth became known, Zamara was overcome by contrition and labored mightily to undo the
damage she had done. From our most powerful enemy she became our staunchest ally, adding the armed
might of her own warlike realm to the fighting legions of the Ku Thad in a mighty effort to throw down the
power of our true enemy, the Mind Wizards of Kuur.
In this great crusade upon which we were shortly to embark, a second ally lent us his strength. This was
the redoubtable and cunning Seraan of Soraba, a merchant city to the north on the shores of Corund Laj
the Greater Sea, Kaamurath by name. His city-state had been next on Zamara’s agenda of world
dominance; apprised of this, the clever Prince Kaamurath had insinuated his master-spy, Glypto, into the
city ofTharkol . It had been Glypto who was instrumental in freeing us from Zamara’s captivity, after we
had been taken prisoner in a daring Tharkolian raid.
Soraba is a part of the wealthy Perushtarian empire to the north. They are not a warlike people, the
Perushtarians, but a nation of tradesmen and merchants. In the past, when internecine strife broke out
between the several cities of their empire, the Perushtarians had been wont to hire the services of an
immense mercenary army called the Chac Yuul, the Black Legion. But those days were over and gone,
and in recapturing the kingdom of my beloved princess from the clutches of her enemies, I had taken a
part in the overthrow of the Chac Yuul. Broken and dispersed, the warrior host had since vanished from
the great stage of world events and no longer played any major role in the history of the Jungle Moon.
Hence the wily Kaamurath had been forced to rely upon his own resources in defending his realm from
the ambitions of Zamara of Tharkol. Disguising himself as the merchant Shaphur, he had led a caravan of
warriors, also disguised, to reconnoiter the situation, and we had fallen in with him after effecting our
escape from Tharkol.
In time all of these matters had come to their resolution. And when at length it became known that a
secret agent of the hidden fortress of telepaths-the “Mind Wizards,” they styled themselves-had in fact
been the power behind Zamara’s throne, a fact cleverly concealed from everyone, including Zamara, it
became grimly obvious to the sovereigns of Shondakor, Tharkol and Soraba that we should never be
permitted to enjoy peace until we had rooted out and destroyed this secret nest of telepathic magicians
who worked, and had worked behind the scenes for many years, to overthrow the kingdoms of
Thanator.
It was some months after our return from these hazardous adventures that we prepared to embark on
our crusade against the Mind Wizards of Thanator.
For that time we had labored mightily in preparation for this expedition. In our attack against the Mind
Wizards, we had determined that speed was the essential factor.
Only one hemisphere of this planet is known to us. Thanator, or Callisto, is one of the moons of Jupiter.
The astronomers of my native Earth will doubtless argue that Callisto is too small a world to sustain a
breathable atmosphere, and too distant from the Sun for its surface to be warm and fertile, much less
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 tropic. With these learned teachings I cannot argue: all I can say is that I, Jon Dark, have dwelt upon this
world for months, and that I still live and breathe and feel the warmth of a tropic daylight upon my flesh.
I expect no one to believe the amazing narrative of my adventures, for I can offer no tangible proof of
their veracity to offset the calculations of astronomers. I suspect, merely, that the sages and scientists of
my native Earth have yet to unriddle most of the secret mysteries of the Universe . . . and that the
inexplicable existence of intelligent life upon the surface of the Jungle Moon is but one of those mysteries.
How I traveled here I can neither explain nor even understand. And why I continue to set down with a
reed pen on papyrus this continuing narrative of marvels remains a puzzle even to myself. At periods a
volume of these memoirs is transported through the jungles of the Grand Kumala by a picked war-party
of fighting-men in my retinue to a mysterious jade disc which is the site of the Callistan terminus of a
peculiar subspatial link between our two worlds. Who built this marker I cannot conjecture-what unseen
and superior intelligence maintains this Gateway between the worlds is still a mystery even to myself. And
whether these memoirs do indeed retrace the route I traveled years before, to materialize at the bottom
of a jade-lined well in the central plaza of the Lost City of Arangkor in the trackless and unexplored
jungles of southernCambodia I dare not even guess.
The fact that human beings no different from my fellow Earthlings dwell upon a distant planet seems to
me a fact of astounding importance to the future of mankind. It behooves me to pass along to my fellow
Americans some record of the marvels and mysteries I have encountered here. If any eye but my own
shall ever peruse these pages I cannot ever hope to know. Perhaps these memoirs go astray when they
vanish up that pulsing beam of golden light that forms at random intervals within the jade Gateway . . .
perhaps they wander forever in the far places of the Universe, a Universe whose vastness and many
mysteries and inexplicable secrets I am only beginning to comprehend.
Or, perchance they molder into decay in a forgotten city of crumbling stone that has been lost for
unknown ages in the midst of the Cambodian jungles.
I do not know; probably, I shall never know.
But write them I shall, hoping that across the vastness of some three hundred and eighty-seven million,
nine hundred and thirty thousand miles they will somehow come into hands of men able to read them and
to appreciate the transcendent significance of the information they contain.
To those readers, then-if any-I now speak. Doubtless to you my narrative of marvels and adventures
upon a distant world will seem no more than an extravagant fiction. Sobeit. Read and ponder well; the
decision of my veracity is yours to make. And stop to think: if this is nothing but mere fiction, then I must
surely be the most gifted romancer in all the annals of fantastic literature since Edgar Rice Burroughs. For
only an author of his great imaginative genius could concoct so weird and marvelous a world as Thanator,
and make it real and living on the page.
Then pause to consider: would any author, able to invent such a stirring and vivid narrative, thronged
with wonders, leave so many questions unanswered, so many mysteries unsolved?
Somewhere on the further hemisphere of Callisto, yet unknown to us, the secret citadel of the Mind
Wizards lay hidden.
But-where?
Callisto is not a small world. It measures nearly three thousand miles in diameter, which makes it, with
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 Ganymede and Titan, one of the largest satellites in the Solar System-so large, in fact, that at the very
dawn of the science of astronomy, the great Galileo was able to discover it by means of the small, crude
lenses available to him. We are talking, therefore, of something in the neighborhood of twenty-four million
square miles.*
And-where in all this twenty-four million square miles might the lair of the Mind Wizards be found?
Only the one hemisphere of Callisto is known to us and has been mapped by the cartographers of
Thanator: the hemisphere which contains the Corund Laj, the Grand Kumala, the White Mountains, the
Great Plains of Haratha, and the Sanmur Laj, or Lesser Sea, as well as the cities of Shondakor, Tharkol,
Soraba, Farz, Narouk, Ganatol and Perushtar, and, formerly, Zanadar.
The opposite hemisphere is completely unknown. And we had good reasons to suspect that the hidden
lair of the Mind Wizards lay in the trackless wilderness of this second hemisphere.
But again-where?
Luckily, we possessed two slender clues to the whereabouts of the secret citadel.
During the desperate attempt of the Ku Thad to recapture their city from the clutches of the Black
Legion two years ago, I had been forced to fight to the death against the cunning devil-priest, Ool the
Uncanny, in the Pits below Shondakor, in order to rescue my comrades Koja of the Yathoon Horde and
Lukor, the gallant and peppery little master-swordsman from Ganatol, who had been taken prisoner by
the Chac Yuul.
At that time, and before our duel ended in his death, the clever little warlock who had been the
mastermind behind the Black Legion, the power behind the throne of its leader, Arkola, had boastfully
revealed to me some hint of the hiding place of his fellow Mind Wizards.
His words are burnt indelibly into my memory. Well do I recall that harrowing hour in which for the first
time I matched swords against an adversary who could read my mind like an open book, and knew a
split second in advance where my next stroke would fall.
Only by sheer chance had Ool been overcome and slain. But in his overconfidence, sure of his victory
over me, he gloatingly let slip some small clue as to the location of the mysterious Mind Wizards.
Smirking in oily anticipation of his triumph over me in the deadly game of blade against blade, he had
boasted to me, there in dank and gloomy dungeons, and his words remain in my memory to this hour-
1 am one of the Mind Wizards of Kuur, dark shadowy Kuur that lies beyond theDragonRiver amid the
Peaks of Harangzar, on the other side of Thanator. My people share a curious science, a mental
discipline that permits us to read the thoughts and minds of other beings . . . We are a small, a dying race;
but we have a mighty power over the minds of other men, a power which, if used adroitly, can lay an
empire within our reach.
Because of these words which Ool had incautiously let slip in the moment before he inadvertently tripped
over the corpse of Bluto which lay sprawled out behind him, and fell, shattering his skull against the pave,
gave us our first precious clue to the whereabouts of thelandofKuur . It was in the second hemisphere,
near a river amidst the mountains: that much, at least, we knew.
Our second clue had lain in our hands for months, but had somehow or other gone unrecognized all that
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