It was just as well that things had fallen out that way, Jim thought later. Because his first reaction after transforming himself into a flea was to discover at least one of the unfortunate side effects of the transformation. He had forgotten entirely what the viewpoint of a flea would be, out of sight in the hair on a dog’s back.

Basically, the view was of hair. Hairs like tree trunks, all around them and leaning over them. There was, of course, the skin of Kelb underneath him. He felt a momentary instinctive urge to try to get at some of the blood beneath that skin, but overruled it. However, meanwhile, as in a dense growth of something like bamboo, he was still completely fenced in by hair-hair not only enclosing him but reaching up to shut out any sight of what might be above its tips.

This would not do. What he needed was a viewpoint outside his flea body. He visualized the prospect as seen through Kelb’s eyes.

However, what he found himself seeing, though recognizable, was-as in the vision of all dogs-in black and white; and so different that it took a moment for him to make out even the stone walls and stone roof overhead. This would not do.

What he wanted was human vision; but human vision that would be completely disembodied.

Well, there was no reason why that should not be achievable by a very small amount of magic. What came immediately to mind was a pair of invisible human eyes floating in the air just above Kelb’s head. A concept that fitted into words easily enough, but was a little hard to picture in the mind. To begin with, how did you picture eyes if they were invisible?

He had wrestled with that for a moment until the obvious answer came to him.

Of course, the invisible eyes didn’t have to be like a pair of human eyeballs, only invisible. It could be as if his flea-eyes were magic glasses connected to an invisible television camera hookup, which could be swiveled around, up or down, to let him hear and see things in perfectly normal human fashion, in any direction from Kelb’s head.

He had visualized such a camera arrangement, then made it invisible, then turned it on; and suddenly he had achieved a good view of the corridor down which Kelb was trotting. It was a corridor perfectly bare of any kind of decoration, no carpet on the stone floor-that accounted for the sound he now heard of Kelb’s claws clicking as he moved. The only thing that broke the corridor walls on either side were occasional entrances, either to rooms or other corridors; but Kelb was proceeding with apparent confidence, giving every indication of knowing where he was going.

“Where are we?” Jim started to ask the Djinni-dog. But even before the words were formed, he realized he had nothing to form them with. Not only was he so tiny that his voice would probably not be heard by Kelb; but he had no vocal apparatus as a flea.

It was true, he remembered, that the watch-beetle that Carolinus had summoned up on Jim’s first acquaintance with the magician had spoken in a high tinny voice, but that might simply have been made possible by Carolinus’s magic. Jim also remembered that Rrrnlf the giant sea devil, reduced to beetle size, had apparently had no voice at all. Though Carolinus had appeared to hear him saying things then, and talked with him in a conversation of which only Carolinus’s side was audible.

What he wanted now, Jim decided, was to be able to speak inside Kelb’s mind.

He tried to visualize what a Djinni’s mind might look like. A sort of place of shadows? He had discovered sometime since that his visualizations did not have to be correct to work. It was the concept behind the visualization that made the structure on which his creative ability could act.

That’s all right. It’s me, thought Jim. Where are we?

“I am concerned, master,” said Kelb. “We’re now in the quarters of the ordinary Assassins; and I would have thought we’d run into some of them before now. I do not understand this, unless a number of them are now out on some raid or other.”

Jim realized that Kelb was speaking his words out loud.

You don’t have to actually say what you tell me, Jim said. Just think it. I’ll hear it. Think the words.

Indeed, you are a great magician, said Kelb, thinking the words. Do you hear me now?

I hear you loud and clear, said Jim. You were just saying a number of the Assassins might have been sent off on a raid-against the caravan again ?

Oh, no, said Kelb. But there has been talk for some time of the fact that the Golden Horde Mongols were planning a foray down here into what is actually Il-Khanate Mongol territory; and during the last two hundred years Mongols have taken many Assassin castles. Hasan ad-Dimri could have sent out many of his men in a strong group to see if any such Mongol force is coming this way; so he can take measures for defense. That’s the only thing I can think of-

He broke off suddenly, as two men barely in their twenties stepped out of one of the entrances ahead and turned to stare directly at him.

Kelb went invisible, and began to try to sneak up along the wall at his left, which was farthest from where they were standing. He moved with surprising softness, his nails no longer clicking on the floor. Jim suddenly thought of Brian and Hob. He turned his mental camera view back on himself and his fellow fleas, and discovered they were being carried along in mid-air, quite visible themselves-but only as specks.

It suddenly occurred to him that the amount of magical energy required to make three fleas invisible would be hardly any amount at all. Accordingly, he did so. He spoke mentally to Brian and Hob-meanwhile making sure that when they tried to speak back it would be a mind-to-mind contact-though where a mind could hide in the body of a flea, he had no idea. He did not know much about a flea’s anatomy; but he was fairly sure that like most insects it did not have a brain.

Brian? he asked. Hob?

M’lord- Hob began on a note of alarm; but Brian interrupted him.

James? he said. Where are you? I don’t know whether I was seeing you or just feeling you close here; but I can’t do that now.

I’m right here, said Jim. I made us all invisible and inaudible, so that those two Assassins up ahead won’t hear or see us. Kelb’s already made himself invisible.

I noticed, thought Brian, a little sourly. James, this is not my favorite way of traveling.

It’s the best I can do at the moment, Brian, said Jim.

Oh, I’m not blaming you, James, said Brian. It’s just that fleas are foul creatures. I don’t like being one-craving your pardon, James, he added hurriedly, since you yourself are also a flea at the moment.

No offense taken whatsoever, Brian, said Jim. I quite understand how being a flea could bother a knight. I’m not too bothered myself, possibly because of being a magician, and being more used to this than you.

Of course, said Brian, naturally. Pray forgive my bad manners.

They aren’t bad manners, Brian- Jim broke off. They were now almost level with the two men, who were talking to each other in low voices. To Jim’s surprise their faces were a pasty white.

“But I was sure-“ began the Assassin who had been first to speak, uncertainly.

“Allah curse thee for the donkey wits thou wast born with!” snapped the other. “O, fool! Were there ever any dogs in the White Palace?”

“No...” said the other.

“Could a dog get in here without passing the guards at the gate?”

The jaw of the smaller Assassin dropped.

“So,” went on the taller Assassin, “I say it again. There is no dog, no voice! Do you see a dog now? Do you hear a voice now?”

“Neither was I,” he said, and ducked back into the entrance out of which they had come, colliding with the taller Assassin, who was already on his way out of sight.

What now? asked Brian, as they passed the entrance into which the two men had vanished, and got a glimpse of a short hallway with a green door at the end, tightly closed.

Paradise? said Jim thoughtfully. Why do you call an indoctrination center for recruits ‘Paradise’?

Forgive me, master, said Kelb, my understanding does not extend to knowing what ‘indoctrination’ means. But it is the place where they take those newly committed to being Hashasheens, after filling them with hashish first, and then telling them they are going to paradise; and to them, under the drug, it is as if they went.

“Forgive me, master,” he said timidly, “but I can pass through this door without opening it. Is it so with you, master?”

“Thanks for telling me,” said Jim. He hastily visualized himself and the two other fleas passing through the door as if it was no more than a projected illusion; quickly adding the magic stipulation that he, Brian and Hob should do this while still in connection with the skin of Kelb.

Around the edges of this pool, sitting with their backs propped up against imitation palm tree trunks, were a number of young men, most of them seemingly lost in thought, or with their eyes shut-whether asleep or not he did not know. There were also a number of women around, most of them middle-aged and rather businesslike in expression, who seemed mostly concerned with gathering in groups, talking and eating. Nearly all the male figures lying around had trays of food near them, but very few were paying any attention to them. They looked dazed.

The women, however, were busy with their conversation and food. Occasionally one of them would break off to go over to one of the recumbent figures and stroke some fingers under his chin, possibly murmur to him or pay various sorts of little attentions, then carefully evade the slow grasp which might respond to these attentions-but by no means always did- and then return to the group; or go on to give the same sort of momentary touching and talking to another of the recumbent figures. The women were dressed in what seemed to be layers of filmy, semitransparent silk garments that covered them from neck to wrists and ankles, and were of various hues.

The clothes, in fact, were lovely. The women, Jim decided, on the whole were not; nor did they seem to be making any effort to be so.

Sheep’s entrails, said Kelb, stuffed of course with rice and sugar and cinnamon and other good things.

Hah! Like a Scot’s haggis, eh? said Brian. There were certainly Scotsmen with the first crusade. They must have gotten in among these infidels-“ He broke off.

They are not particularly dainty about how they reach into the communal pot of food, however, he went on. It is true they wipe their hands, but only so often; and I have seen more than one hand go in to the wrist. Also they feed each other, and those beneath the trees.

This last was true, Jim noticed. One of the things done by these women, who must be playing the part of the Houris, the women with which the Blessed were solaced in Paradise, would be to occasionally make a small ball of food from some of the foods on the tray beside a recumbent figure and put it into his mouth. But not always. Very often she just gave the dazed man a pat, or a stroke-and went on to the next one.

They skirted the pool and went on through the fake palm trees, with the figures against them becoming fewer and fewer until they saw a wall ahead of them. Low down, the wall was unpainted; and as far as Jim could see, there was no door in it. But Kelb carried them right to the wall, regardless.

Arriving at the point where the sand of the floor met the wall, he sniffed doglike along the line where wall met sand until he reached a spot where he began to dig industriously with his front paws. Sand spurted backward until he finally exposed what appeared to be part of a tiled floor, blue and white squares of glazed tiles alternating in a checkerboard pattern.

He pressed one of the blue tiles with a paw, and in front of him the apparently seamless wall slipped downward, revealing a rectangular opening.

He went in. In the dimness of the narrow, walled passage, he hesitated.

“Are you still with me, master?” he asked.

Jim remembered the fact that the Djinni could probably no more feel them than see them.

“We’re here, Kelb,” he said, also allowing his words this time to come out as spoken sound.

As it did, an utter blackness descended on them. Kelb’s voice came out of it.

“Master, there is no more need for you and those with you to ride as fleas upon me. If you will return to your ordinary bodies, you will find to your right, on the wall, a rack of torches, and at the end of the rack, a flint and steel wherewith to light them. There is a powder on the thick end of the torch that will make them light easily if you get a spark to them.”

Jim made the necessary magic adjustment. Still in darkness, but now feeling the slight weight of Hob at the back of his neck, and also feeling rather than seeing Brian’s presence beside him, he reached out. He rammed his fingers rather painfully against a hard wall surface. Then he ran his hand over it, up and down, moving along as if he was using a brush to paint it. Finally he touched what felt like a curved wooden stand.

In the stand, he felt a row of upright bundles of something that felt more like tightly rolled paper than anything else.

He lifted one from its hole, groped again, and found, dangling on a cord, the flint and steel that Kelb had mentioned. Holding the torch in his left armpit, he struck the flint and steel together with both hands until a spark jumped in the right direction to touch the upper, thicker end of the torch. A flame burst into view, spreading and brightening until it illuminated the end of a long tunnel in the rock.

It also revealed Brian, still looking somewhat battered, but cheerful, and Kelb in his dog form looking expectantly up at him.

“Hob, are you all right?” asked Jim.

“Yes, m’lord,” came the small voice just above his left shoulder; and he remembered suddenly that, like Brian, he had been sleeping in his travel clothes for warmth, when the Assassins had captured them. But he had not felt Hob climbing back into the knapsack.

“Should I come out?” Hob asked.

“There’s not much to see,” said Jim. “We’re just in a dark tunnel. Perhaps you’d better just stay where you are.”

“Yes, m’lord.”

They went forward, Kelb trotting confidently a little ahead, but still within the circle of torch-light. The tunnel was longer than Jim had expected, considering that it clearly had been hewn out of solid rock. In the end, he judged they must have walked close to a quarter of a mile before Kelb stopped and waited for them to join him. They were facing a similar wall that seemed to bar off the tunnel at this point.

“I have pressed what needs to be pressed to cause this end of the tunnel to open,” said Kelb in an apologetic voice, “but, my masters, it is evidently stuck. Would you mind very much jumping up and down on the floor? I think that will jar it loose and it will go up.”

Not surprising, thought Jim. Mechanical contrivances here in the fourteenth century could hardly be expected to work better than those in the twentieth century.

“In that case,” he said, “we’d better jump together, you and I, Brian. I’ll say one, two, three and then we jump-that way we should come down together.”

“Hah!” said Brian. “Infidel magic! Of course it doesn’t work right!”

Jim was not exactly sure what he meant; but there was no point in going into the matter now. He counted off and they jumped. They came down hard on the stone floor; but evidently that was just what was needed, for slowly the stone slab before them began to move upward-but jerkily, as if it needed oiling.

“It is not used much, you see, my masters,” said Kelb, “and anyone who is brought here, except the Grandmaster, must of course die after he has seen this tunnel. Therefore it is necessary that he be slain and his body be taken out to be left at some little distance on the mountainside, that he shall not be connected with the entrance, here, once it is closed again. But for us, we need but step outside now.”

He had timed his words excellently. As he finished, the stone stopped jerking upward, and there was room to duck under it out into the star-lit night of the mountainside. There were a few bushes around them, and the rocks all but closed them in. Kelb did something behind them, and they heard the door scraping downward and finally ceasing to make any noise.

“It is closed now,” Kelb said in a satisfied voice.

“That’s good,” said a voice out of the darkness. “And the place of its opening is now known. That will be useful. Abu al-Qusayr spoke truth to me, though I am not of his faith. So, now I find you all again, Franks.”

It was the voice of Baiju, the Mongol from the caravan.