When the blood was mixed
with dragonfeathers and frogsdown and melded with a genuine
philosopher's stone, they had used it to ink in the right path of the
planets of a diagram. It had failed. The sky had cracked and a piece had
fallen into the vessel of blood, killing a Sather who was less than two
thousand years old.
"Two thousand?" Dave asked. "How old is Sather Karf?"
"None remembers truly. He has always been the Sather Karf--at least ten
thousand years or more. To attain the art of a Sather is the work of a
score of centuries, usually."
That Sather had been in sad shape, it seemed. No one had been able to
revive him, though bringing the dead back to life when the body was
reasonably intact was routine magic that even a sersa could perform. It
was after that they'd begun conjuring back to Dave's world for all the
other experts.
"All whose true names they could find, that is," Garm amended. "The
Egyptian pyramid builder, the man who discovered your greatest science,
dianetics, the great Cagliostro--and what a time we had finding his true
name! I was assigned to the helping of one who had discovered the
secrets of gravity and some strange magic which he termed
relativity--though indeed it had little to do with kinship, but was a
private mystery. But when he was persuaded by divers means to help us,
he gave up after one week, declaring it beyond his powers.
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