Barnevelt himself is given the alias of the famous general, Snyol of Plesht, from the Antarctic nation of Nichnyamadze (setting of the Krishnan short story "Calories"). Snyol's formidable reputation proves at various times both a boon and a hindrance to their mission. The two are dogged at every step by pirates from the Sunqar who believe their true goal is to disrupt the pirates' smuggling operation. Complications arise when the two become embroiled in the affairs of the native monarchy of Qirib, whose princess Zei is kidnapped by the pirates. Dirk is ordered by Queen Alvandi to recover the princess while George remains behind as a hostage. Dirk must therefore take the lead in rescuing Zei, putting down the pirates, recovering Shtain, and settling the affairs of Alvandi's topsy-turvy kingdom, in which the women bear arms and the men languish in perfumed idleness. To make matters worse, Dirk falls in love with Zei, an entanglement fraught with its own dangers and complications. Not only is she a princess, but as potential queen of Qirib she would have the responsibility of taking a new king-husband annually, ritually executing and feasting on each when his term as consort reaches its end. And even could that obstacle be overcome, as representatives of two different species Barnevelt and Zei supposedly could never be a true couple. Setting The planet Krishna is de Camp's premier creation in the Sword and Planet genre, representing both a tribute to the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and an attempt to "get it right", reconstructing the concept logically, without what he regarded as Burroughs' biological and technological absurdities. De Camp intended the stories as "pure entertainment in the form of light, humorous, swashbuckling, interplanetary adventure-romances - a sort of sophisticated Burroughs-type story, more carefully thought out than their prototypes." As dated in the 1959 version of de Camp's essay "The Krishna Stories" and James Cambias's GURPS Planet Krishna (a 1997 gaming guide to the Viagens series authorized by de Camp), the main Krishnan events of The Hand of Zei take place in the year 2143 AD, falling between the second part of "Finished" and The Hostage of Zir, and making it the sixth story set on Krishna in terms of chronology. The introductory section of the story is set much earlier, on Earth in about 2132 AD, and the final scene is set slightly later, on Krishna in