Someone sent distress signals to outer space from the planet Tschai. It was Adam Reith's misfortune to be sent from Earth to investigate. Because when his ship came close to Tschai, it was torpedoed... and Adam escaped to the surface with his life and nothing else. Tschai was a vast planet and previously unexplored. Adam, taken as slave by humans, learned that there were four other intelligent but non-human races dominant on that strange world. And to find the mystery of the distress call and the vicious attack, he would have first to gain his freedom and then find a safe way to pass the city and the alien Chasch and their treacherous cousins, the Blue Chasch. Jack Vance's Tschai novels are considered his masterwork, a constantly changing epic canvas of weird peoples, exotic lands, and surprising extra-terrestrial adventures.

Marooned on the strange planet Tschai, Adam Reith agreed to lead an expedition to return the princess Ylin Ylan, the Flower of Cath, to her homeland halfway around the globe. Monsters of land and sea lay before them, and beings both human and alien who might rob, kill or enslave them. Tschai was a large planet, an ancient planet, where four powerful alien races struggled for mastery while humans were treated as pawns; nothing would be easy for Reith on this journey. But the girl's father was enormously wealthy and her homeland technologically sophisticated. If Reith was ever to obtain human aid in returning to Earth, where better than Cath? If he could get there... SERVANTS OF THE WANKH, complete in itself, is the second volume of Jack Vance's masterwork interplanetary saga.

Getting back to Earth from the planet Tschai involved only stealing a spaceship or having one built to order—for Tschai was the abode of several intelligent star-born races and, as such, had spaceyards. But Adam Reith's problem was not so simple. He'd already been lucky to escape the Chasch and the Wankh and a dozen different types of humans, and now his course led directyly to the Great Sivishe Spaceyards in the domains of the Dirdir. But the Dirdir were quite different from the other aliens who competed for this world. They were quicker, more sinister, and had an unrelenting thirst for hunting victims like Adam Reith. The closer he came to his objective, the keener their hunting instincts would become!

The Pnume are native to Tschai, living underground in a vast network of caverns with their human slave-species, the Pnumekin. Historians of Tschai, the Pnume collect its past with scholarly disinterest; they hear rumors of Adam Reith - a man who claims to come from another planet, named Earth - and they want him for permanent display in Foreverness, museum of Tschai life! Reith must survive the Pnume tunnels, if he is ever to return to Earth. Tschai The Pnume is part 4 of 4 of Tschai Tschai is a planet orbiting the star Carina 4269, 212 light-years from Earth. It is populated by three alien, mutually hostile species; the displaced, native Pnume; and various human races, some of whom live as slaves or clients of the aliens. Each of the four novels relates Reith's adventures with one of the species, and is named after that species.