“What plots, Zikali, and how can my taking a distant journey tell you anything about them?”

“You know them well enough, Macumazahn; they have to do with the overthrow of a Royal House that has worked me bitter wrong.  As to how your journey can help me, why, thus.  You shall promise to me to ask of this Queen whether Zikali, Opener-of-Roads, shall triumph or be overthrown in that on which he has set his heart.”

“As you seem to know this witch so well, why do you not ask her yourself, Zikali?”

“To ask is one thing, Macumazahn.  To get an answer is another.  I have asked in the watches of the night, and the reply was, ’Come hither and perchance I will tell you.’  ‘Queen,’ I said, ’how can I come save in the spirit, who am an ancient and a crippled dwarf scarcely able to stand upon my feet?’

“’Then send a messenger, Wizard, and be sure that he is white, for of black savages I have seen more than enough.  Let him bear a token also that he comes from you and tell me of it in your sleep.  Moreover let that token be something of power which will protect him on the journey.’

“Such is the answer that comes to me in my dreams, Macumazahn.”

“Well, what token will you give me, Zikali?”

He groped about in his robe and produced a piece of ivory of the size of a large chessman, that had a hole in it, through which ran a plaited cord of the stiff hairs from an elephant’s tail.  On this article, which was of a rusty brown colour, he breathed, then having whispered to it for a while, handed it to me.

I took the talisman, for such I guessed it to be, idly enough, held it to the light to examine it, and started back so violently that almost I let it fall.  I do not quite know why I started, but I think it was because some influence seemed to leap from it to me.  Zikali started also and cried out,

“Have a care, Macumazahn.  Am I young that I can bear bring dashed to the ground?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, still staring at the thing which I perceived to be a most wonderfully fashioned likeness of the old dwarf himself as he appeared before me crouched upon the ground.  There were the deepset eyes, the great head, the toad-like shape, the long hair, all.

“It is a clever carving, is it not, Macumazahn?  I am skilled in that art, you know, and therefore can judge of carving.”

“Yes, I know,” I answered, bethinking me of another statuette of his which he had given to me on the morrow of the death of her from whom it was modelled.  “But what of the thing?”

“Macumazahn, it has come down to me through the ages.  As you may have heard, all great doctors when they die pass on their wisdom and something of their knowledge to another doctor of spirits who is still living on the earth, that nothing may be lost, or as little as possible.  Also I have learned that to such likenesses as these may be given the strength of him or her from whom they were shaped.”