Lord Prestimion

1

“How can I remain at the Castle after this?” Navigorn demanded. His strong-featured face was a study in the most intense anguish. “I am in disgrace, my lord. I can’t bear to look anyone in the eye. You gave me a task, and see how hideously I have bungled it! What else can I do now but withdraw from this place and go into retirement? I beseech you, my lord, permit me to—”

Prestimion held up his hand. “Peace, Navigorn. I don’t doubt that all this has been upsetting for you, but I still need you here beside me. Your request to retire is refused. Calm down and tell me how the escape came about.”

“If only I could be sure, my lord—”

“Well, what do you think happened, then.”

“Yes. As best I can, lordship.”

Navigorn rose from his seat on the bench to Prestimion’s left and began to pace about like some caged beast that has but little space in which to roam.

The meeting was being held not in Prestimion’s official quarters but in the modest and austere throne-room of Lord Stiamot, a curious survival from ancient times situated just at the edge of the zone of majestic and splendid chambers that was the modern Castle’s core. It was a small, stark room, furnished with a simple marble seat in antique style for the Coronal, low benches for his ministers, and a Makroprosopos carpet in subdued colors that supposedly was a reproduction of the one from Lord Stiamot’s time.

But Lord Stiamot’s time was seven thousand years in the past. The throne-chamber he had used had long since been supplanted by a grand throne-room built by Lord Makhario, and that in turn had given way after many centuries to the even more magnificent royal chamber of Lord Confalume, which Prestimion’s predecessor had furnished with a throne of such supreme grandeur that it might seem better befitted for a god than a mere worldly king. Prestimion, though, since his return to the Castle from his travels on the Mount, had taken to using the unostentatious little Stiamot throne-room as his working headquarters, preferring its simplicity to the splendor of his formal office or the impossibly opulent surroundings of Lord Confalume’s throne-chamber. He had been amused to learn that Korsibar had shown the same preference after the first few weeks of his short reign.

Only the innermost members of Prestimion’s circle were at the meeting: Septach Melayn, Gialaurys, Maundigand-Klimd, and Prestimion’s brothers Abrigant and Teotas. Prestimion was aware that it might have been appropriate to invite Vologaz Sar, whom the Pontifex Confalume had lately designated to be the official representative of the Pontificate at the Castle, and also the hierarch Marcatain, as representative for that arm of the government which was headed by the Lady of the Isle. But he was not yet certain how to go about admitting the great deception that he had practiced on the world to his mother the Lady, or to the Pontifex. Especially to the Pontifex. And so, thus far, he had been governing as though he were the sole Power of the Realm, sharing nothing with the two high officials who were in fact senior to him by constitutional rank.

That could not continue much longer. Already, this new crisis over Dantirya Sambail had compelled him to reveal to his astonished brothers the fact of the memory-obliteration. He could trust them to remain silent as long as that was his wish. But he knew that he had no authority to compel silence from his mother, or from Confalume.

Navigorn, without ceasing his pacing, said, “There was bribery involved. Of that I’m certain. Mandralisca, it was—”

“That demon!” Gialaurys exclaimed.

“That demon, yes. The Procurator’s poison-taster, and poisonous is he himself. We had him locked safely away, so we thought, but somehow he began to suborn his guards, promising them—it isn’t clear—vast estates in Zimroel, or something of the kind. Four of them have disappeared, at any rate. Set him free, they did, and slipped away to points unknown.”

“You have their names?” Septach Melayn asked.

“Of course.”

“They’ll be found, no matter where they’ve fled. Duly punished to the limits of the law.” Septach Melayn made quick whicking gestures with his wrist as though flourishing an invisible sword in the air. “Has there ever been such a fountain of iniquity in our world as this vile Mandralisca, I wonder? The very first time I set eyes on him I knew—”

“Yes, I remember,” Prestimion said, with a bleak smile. “It was at the funeral games for the old Pontifex, when you and I had the wager on the baton-dueling, and you bet against Mandralisca just out of sheer loathing for him, though he was the better baton-man. And lost five crowns to me.” The Coronal looked toward Navigorn again. “All right. We return to your story. Mandralisca has succeeded in getting free. How does he manage to make his way to Dantirya Sambail in a different part of the tunnels entirely?”

“Unclear, lordship. More bribery, no doubt.”

“How badly do you pay your men, Navigorn, that they so readily sell their honor to prisoners?” asked Teotas fiercely.

Navigorn whirled on Prestimion’s younger brother as though he had been slapped. Hot fury crackled in his eyes. But Teotas, a slender golden-haired youth who bore a startling resemblance to his royal brother but had a far more fiery temper, met Navigorn’s glare with anger of his own. For a moment it seemed as though they might fight. Then, just as Prestimion was on the verge of signaling Gialaurys to intervene, Navigorn turned away with a look of weariness and defeat on his face and said in a low voice, “Your question does not deserve an answer, boy. But I tell you all the same, I could have given them a hundred royals a week, and it would have made no difference. He took possession of their souls:”

“This is so,” said Septach Melayn, lightly touching his fingertips to Teotas’s chest before the young prince could reply. “Mandralisca deals in demons’ coinage. On the right day he could suborn anyone he chooses. Anyone.”

“Me? You? Prestimion?” snapped Teotas, angrily pushing the hand aside. “Demon or no, he can’t buy everyone. You speak only for yourself here, Septach Melayn!”

“Enough of this,” Prestimion said impatiently. “We’re losing our way.—What do you say, Navigorn? How could Mandralisca have been able to get to his master’s cell?”

“I can’t tell you that. One of the four bribed ones must have helped him, I suppose. I can say to you only that he did get to him, got him loose, led him from the tunnels without anyone trying to stop them. Quite likely he cast some spell that allowed him to cloud the minds of those on duty at the gates, and walked by them as though they were asleep.”

“I never knew this Mandralisca to be versed in sorcery!” said Prestimion, startled.

“Anyone can master a simple spell or two,” Maundigand-Klimd said. “And that one would be simple.”

“For you, perhaps. But he’d have used it the day he first was imprisoned, if he’d known the art of it from the beginning,” Prestimion said. “It must have been brought to him covertly just the other day.”

“By whom?” Gialaurys asked.

“By some other member of the Procurator’s retinue, smuggling it into the tunnels,” cried Septach Melayn. “Getting it in, perhaps, the same way Mandralisca got himself and his master out. A conspiracy! The Ni-moya folk found out where Dantirya Sambail was, and contrived by magical arts to get him free!”

“This is shameful,” Teotas said, glowering again at Navigorn. “If prisoners can be freed so casually from the tunnels by wizardry, why was no sort of counterspell put on the place to protect against that very thing?”

“Spells—counterspells—there would be no end of that,” Prestimion said irritably. “We couldn’t have guarded against every eventuality, Teotas.” He looked toward the Su-Suheris. “I asked you to strip the Procurator’s mind of certain special memories, Maundigand-Klimd. And I instructed you, also, to remove from it every possibility of acting on evil impulses. Were those things done?”

“Only the initial and very preliminary phase, the removal of those certain memories. The greater work, the suppression of the evil that’s so deeply rooted in his character, must be executed with care, my lord, if the man’s not to be reduced to a babbling idiot.”

“Small loss that would have been,” said Gialaurys.—"Well, then: a pretty mess, Dantirya Sambail loose with most or all of his foulness still intact within him, and on his way to Zimroel to raise an army. But we’ll handle it. We’ll get messengers out, top speed, west and south. I’ll slap a surveillance order on all ports along both those coasts. Stoien, Treymone, Alaisor—we’ll cut him off from home, and track him down, and bring him back here in chains. It’s not as though the Procurator’s a difficult man to recognize.”

“That he is not,” said Abrigant, speaking for the first time. “But he may not have gone west or south, though.”

“What?” said Gialaurys and Septach Melayn in the same instant.

Abrigant unfolded a despatch. “Akbalik brought this to me five minutes before I entered this meeting,” he said. “According to what I see here, someone looking very much like the Procurator of Ni-moya was sighted these two days past in Vrambikat province. I point out that Vrambikat lies due east of Castle Mount.”

“East,” said Gialaurys in a baffled tone. “What good’s his going east? This must be wrong. You can’t get to Zimroel from here by traveling east!”

“You can if you get yourself to the shore of the Great Sea and sail clear across to the other side,” said Septach Melayn with a sly smile.

Gialaurys grunted in annoyance. “Nobody in all of history has ever sailed across the Great Sea. What makes you think Dantirya Sambail would attempt such an impossible project now?”

“Let’s hope he has,” said Abrigant, grinning. “He’ll never be seen again!”

A bright cascade of laughter came from Septach Melayn. “Or if by some miracle he does get all the way over to Zimroel after a year or two at sea,” he said, “it’ll take him half a year more just to make the trip from Pidruid or Narabal, or wherever he comes ashore, to his home in Ni-moya. Where we’ll have troops waiting to arrest him.”

Prestimion alone failed to register amusement. “The thought of the Procurator’s making such a voyage at all is completely imbecilic,” he said. “It can’t be done.”

“There is an old tale,” said Maundigand-Klimd, “that the thing was attempted in the time of Lord Arioc, a vessel setting out from the port of Til-omon and sailing westward in the Great Sea, but it became tangled in floating dragon-grass, and then miscarried its direction altogether, and wandered at sea for five years, or, some say, eleven, before finally finding its way back to the port from which it had—”

“All well and good,” said Prestimion sharply, “but I refuse to believe that Dantirya Sambail has any such enterprise in mind. If he really has set out eastward, it’s no doubt some sort of trick. Eastern Alhanroel’s a remote, isolated place. He can disappear into it and easily avoid capture, and eventually he could change course entirely and head up north to Bandar Delem or Vythiskiorn and find a Zimroel-bound ship there. Or swing around abruptly to the south, and go out by way of the tropics. The one idea I don’t give any credit to at all is that he’s actually planning to make his way home by way of a sea that nobody has ever been able to navigate.”

“What are you going to do, then?” asked Septach Melayn.

“Send a military force toward Vrambikat and try to track him down before he vanishes altogether.” Prestimion pointed toward Gialaurys. “Under your command, Gialaurys,” he said. “Yours and Abrigant’s, jointly. I want you on the road to Vrambikat within fifty hours.” He hesitated a moment and added, gesturing to the Su-Suheris, “You’ll go with them, Maundigand-Klimd. And I want a Vroon, also. Vroons are wondrous good at magicking up the right direction for travel. Have you a Vroon among your wizardly acquaintances, Maundigand-Klimd, who could accompany you?”

“There is one I know, named Galielber Dorn. He has the skills we would need.”

“And where’s he to be found?”

“High Morpin, my lord. He has a mind-reading concession there, at the park of the mirror-slides.”

“That’s not far. Get word to him right away that he’s to present himself at the Castle by tomorrow afternoon. Offer him whatever fee he thinks he needs for serving as our guide.”

The thought came to Prestimion then of what it would be like to go into the east-country, where he had never been, where hardly anyone ever went. The excitement of venturing into territory so little known as this region of Alhanroel throbbed suddenly within him; and he felt himself overcome once more by that powerful wanderlust, that irresistible desire to leave the Castle’s multitude of echoing rooms behind him and set forth into the infinite wonder that was Majipoor, that had come to be for him the one consolation for the absence of his true consort.

He would not let them go into those strange lands yonder without him.

Could not.

And if he needed to provide a plausible pretext for allowing himself once more to be drawn from the Castle, why, this search for Dantirya Sambail would serve the purpose well enough, he told himself.

And so he said, flashing a sudden smile at them after another pause: “Do you know, Septach Melayn, I think I’ll want you to serve as regent again. Because I mean to be part of this expedition also.”

2

He knew almost at once that he had made the right choice. This was uncommonly beautiful country, out here east of the Mount. Prestimion was not the only member of the party to whom this was a new land. None of them had ever gone into the east-country, except perhaps the little Vroon, Galielber Dorn, who was their guide. It was not clear whether the Vroon had actually traveled in these parts before, but certainly he behaved as if he had, calling out the landmarks to them one after another with the confident air of one who has been here many times. But that was a special skill of Vroons, Prestimion knew: their near-infallible sense of direction, their all-knowing awareness of the relationship of places. It was as though they came into the world with detailed maps of every region of the universe already in place behind their great golden eyes. Yet in fact Galielber Dorn might be just as much a stranger to the east-country as they were themselves.

The mighty pedestal of Castle Mount filled the sky behind them. Just ahead lay the misty valley of Vrambikat; and beyond that was the unknown. Already they were able to spy strangenesses and wonders in the distance, for the land was still sloping away from the Mount, and their view extended for many miles to north and south and east.

“That patch of red, Galielber Dorn,” said Abrigant, pointing off to the southeast, where there was a startling dot of bright color against the horizon. “What’s that? A place that’s rich in iron ore, is it? For iron has that reddish hue.”

Prestimion chuckled. “He looks for metals everywhere,” he said quietly to Gialaurys. “It is his obsession now.”

“Only sand, that is,” the Vroon replied. “Those are the blood-red dunes of Minnegara that you see, which border on the scarlet sea of Barbirike. The sand is made up of the myriad shells of the tiny creatures that give the sea its ruddy tint.”

“A scarlet sea,” Prestimion murmured, shaking his head. “Blood-red dunes.”

Which came into clearer view three days later: parallel rows of crescent dunes as sharp along their crests as scimitars, and so vivid in color that the air shimmered red above them; and, farther on, stretching beyond sight, a long narrow body of water that seemed like nothing so much as a great pool of blood. It was a handsome and startling sight, but ominous as well. Abrigant, ever eager for sources of metals, was all for a side journey to explore it; but the Vroon maintained that no iron would be found there, and Prestimion peremptorily told his brother to put the project from his mind. They were on a different quest just now.

In Vrambikat city they interviewed the three citizens who had reported seeing Dantirya Sambail. Commoners, they were, two women and a man, all of them so tongue-tied at finding themselves summoned before people of such obvious high rank that it was almost impossible for them to get their story out. Had they known that they were facing the Coronal and his brother, and the Grand Admiral of the Realm, they very likely would have fallen down fainting. As it was, the best they could do was fumble and stammer.

But again Galielber Dorn proved himself useful. “Allow me,” the Vroon said, and stepped forward, extending his ropy, twining tentacles toward the jabbering trio.

He was a tiny creature, no more than knee-high to the shorter of the women, yet they backed away uncertainly as the Vroon approached them. Three clipped clicking sounds came from his curving golden beak and they halted, shifting their weight uncertainly from leg to leg. Galielber Dorn went from one to the next, reaching out with two delicate, intricately branched tentacles and wrapping them about their wrists, and with each one he maintained his grip for some moments while staring upward into their eyes.

By the time he was done with the last of them, all three were as calm as though they had been given some soothing potion. And when, under further prompting from Prestimion, they began finally to speak, the story came from them in a copious flow.

They had indeed encountered a pair of brusque, disagreeable men who answered well to the descriptions of Dantirya Sambail and his minion Mandralisca. The one man was long-limbed and slim, with an athlete’s wiry grace about him and a dour, hard face, cheekbones like knifeblades, eyes like polished stones. The other, a shorter and sturdier-looking man, had worn a kerchief over his face as though to protect himself from wind and sun, but they had seen his eyes, and they were even more remarkable in their way than those of the other man: lovely violet-hued eyes, as gentle and tender and warm as the taller man’s dark ones had been cold and hostile.

“There can be no doubt, can there?” said Gialaurys. “There are no other eyes in the world like the Procurator’s.”

The fugitives had come riding into Vrambikat city on two plump mounts that looked as if they had been driven to the last extremes of exhaustion. They needed to sell these creatures, they explained, and to purchase new ones with which to continue their journey, and they had no time to waste. “I laughed,” said the man, “and told them that no stableman would pay fifty weights for two half-dead beasts like that, The tall one struck me and knocked me to the ground, and I think would have put an end to me right then, if the other hadn’t stopped him. Then Astakapra here"—he indicated the older of the women—"told him where he could find a stable nearby, and off they went, and good riddance, say I.”

“Where is this stable?” Prestimion asked, “Is it easy to reach from here?”

“Nothing easier, sir,” the man said. “This wide street here, that’s Eremoil Way. Two blocks, corner of Amyntilir, turn right, second building in from the corner on your left, with the bales of hay out front. Can’t miss it.”

“Pay them something,” said Prestimion to Abrigant, and they moved along.

The ostlers at the stable remembered their visitors only too well. It had not been difficult for them to identify the mounts on which Mandralisca and Dantirya Sambail had been traveling as stolen ones, for they bore the markings of a well-known mount-breeder of the foothill city of Megen-thorp on their haunches, and the Megenthorp man had sent word out into the hinterlands not long before that two strangers had broken into his compound and taken a pair of valuable mares. Which were these two beasts before them now, sadly reduced by days of harsh usage; and the two men who had come to the stable, the fierce-looking gaunt one and the other, shorter one with the strange purple eyes, had proceeded at once to draw weapons on the ostlers and relieve them of two fresh animals, leaving the winded ones from Megenthorp in their place.

“So they have swords now too,” said Abrigant. “Supplied by the accomplices in their escape, I wonder, or acquired along the way?”

“Along the way, it would seem,” Prestimion said. “As with the mounts.” To the ostlers he said, “Do you have any idea which direction they were heading in as they went out of town?”

“Oh, yes, my lord, yes. East. They asked us where the main eastward highway could be found; and we told them, oh, yes, we told them truly, as who would not, with a sword’s tip at his throat?”

East.

How far east? As far as the Great Sea? That was untold thousands of miles away. Surely, surely, they weren’t insane enough to be thinking of getting back to Zimroel that way. Where, Prestimion wondered, were they really heading?

“Come,” he said. “Time’s wasting.”

“We’re riding in floaters and they on mounts,” said Gialaurys. “We’re bound to overtake them sooner or later.”

“They can find floaters for themselves the same way they found mounts,” Prestimion said. “Let’s get moving.”

Beyond Vrambikat the countryside grew emptier, only widely scattered little towns now and the occasional camp of imperial troops on maneuvers, and lonely watchtowers along the rim of hills flanking the road. No one had seen two strangers on mounts come riding this way lately, although it would have been easy enough for Dantirya Sam-bail and Mandralisca to slip by these places unnoticed under cover of darkness. And in dreams the next two nights both Prestimion and Gialaurys had a sense of their quarry moving swiftly and steadily through the territory ahead of them. “Dreams must be trusted,” said Gialaurys, and Prestimion did not dispute him.

Eastward, then. What else could be done?

Scenes of extraordinary beauty unfolded before their eyes as they journeyed on. The long scarlet sea became a mere slit in the landscape that lay off to their right, and then it vanished altogether; but now, in the same direction, they saw pale green mountains soft as velvet that ran through the rising spine of the land, and, when they looked down over the other way, into the low country of the north, the travelers beheld a chain of small, perfectly round lakes, black as the darkest onyx and just as glistening, that stretched on and on in a triple row to the limits of their vision. It was as if the hand of a master artist had distributed them in the landscape with the greatest of care.

A lovely sight, but an inhospitable place. “The Thousand Eyes, they are called,” Galielber Dorn told them. “Where those lakes are, that is entirely a barren zone. There are no settlements in the district before us down there. Nor wild animals either, for no living thing can abide that black water. It burns one’s skin like fire, and to drink of it means death.”

Four days later they came to the mouth of a great serpentine chasm that angled off to the northeast, toward the place where earth and sky met. Its steep walls, forbiddingly vertical, were shining like gold in the midday sun. “The Viper Rift,” said the Vroon. “It runs three thousand miles, or somewhat more, and its depth is immeasurable. There’s a river of green water at its bottom, but I think no explorer has ever been able to climb down those mountain walls to reach it.”

And then a place of trees with long, many-angled red needles that sang like harps in the breeze, and one where boiling-hot streams came pouring down out of a cliff a thousand feet high, and a district of vermilion hills and purple gullies bridged by glistening spider-threads strong as powerful cables, and one where the scarlet energy of a tireless volcano rushed with a great roaring whoosh far up into the sky from a triangular rupture in the ground.

All very fascinating, yes. But this territory was vast and empty. In much of it a terrifying silence ruled. Dantirya Sambail could be anywhere in it, or nowhere. Did it make sense to continue his seemingly hopeless pursuit? Prestimion began to give some consideration to turning back. It was irresponsible of him to go on and on for mere curiosity’s sake, when vital tasks awaited him at the Castle and this quest seemed ever more unlikely to meet with success.

But then, at last, unexpectedly, came some word of the fugitives:

“Two men on mounts?” a phlegmatic flat-faced villager said, in a shoddy little town that sat square in a crossroads between two highways that bore no traffic at all. Maundigand-Klimd had found him. He seemed to take the fact that a Su-Suheris had suddenly manifested himself in his remote town utterly for granted; but evidently he took everything utterly for granted. “Oh, yes, yes. They came this way. A tall lean man and one who was older and heavier. Ten, twelve, fourteen days ago.” He pointed toward the horizon. “Heading east, they were.”

East. East. Always east.

But the east seemed to go on forever.

They rode on. It was, at any rate, a lovely district to be traveling in. The air was clear and pure, the weather mild, the winds gentle. The soil looked fertile. Every day’s sunrise was a golden-green delight. But there were only the tiniest, most forlorn towns out here, each one dozens of miles from its neighbor; and the inhabitants stared in amazement at the sight of well-born travelers venturing among them in a procession of glossy floaters bearing the starburst crest.

It was almost unthinkable, Prestimion told himself, that after all the thousands of years of human existence on Majipoor there should be such near-emptiness out here, not very many weeks’ journey east of Castle Mount. He knew that great tracts of central Zimroel were still unoccupied; but to see this silent realm of immense open spaces virtually in the shadow of the Mount—that was unexpected, and strange. And humbling, too. It taught one, once again, the meaning of size. Even after all these thousands of years of human settlement, the vastness of Majipoor was such that ample room for expansion still remained.

Surely this region was one that could be usefully developed. A project for the future, Prestimion thought. As though he did not have enough before him already.

The road they were following, a broad, straight highway, veered slightly to the south now, though it still ran predominantly eastward. The few villages were even farther apart, here, tiny collections of strawroofed huts with scruffy kitchen-gardens around them. Green meadows and forest gave way to the dark blur of wilderness to the north and a line of rocky blue hills in the south. Straight ahead, still, lay a grassy land of streams and small lakes, quiet, peaceful, inviting.

But there was evidence that this place was not altogether a bucolic paradise. Flights of big dusky-winged raptorial birds often passed by high overhead—khestrabons, they were, or perhaps the even larger and fiercer surastrenas—with their long yellow necks at full extension and their beady eyes hungrily taking in all that lay below them. Now and again, far in the distance, they could be seen swooping down by twos and threes as though to snatch up some hapless migratory creatures of the ground. There were some fearsome insects here, too, beetles twice the size of thuvna eggs, with six horns an inch long on their heads and black armor spotted with sinister blotches of red covering their wings. An army of them, half a mile in length, came marching five abreast along the edge of the road one morning, making a terrifying clacking sound with their huge beaks as they advanced.

“What are these things called?” Gialaurys wanted to know, and the Vroon replied: “Calderoules, they are. Which in the dialect of eastern Alhanroel means ‘poison-spitters’—for they’ll throw fiery acid at you out of spouts under their wings from ten feet away, and woe betide you if any of it touches your lips or nostrils.”

“I think this pretty place is less charming than it looks,” observed Abrigant, with a hiss of displeasure, and Prestimion had word sent to the floaters behind theirs in the convoy that no one was to set foot outside of his vehicle until they had left these insects well behind them.

As for the plants in this region, they were like no plants Prestimion and his companions had ever seen. Confalume, when he was Coronal, had been deeply interested in botany as in so many other things, and Prestimion had often strolled with him through one or another of the glass-roofed garden-houses that the older man had caused to be built at the Castle, admiring the strange and wonderful plants that had been collected for him in every part of the world; and in time something of Lord Confalume’s passion for horticultural curiosities had passed to him. At Prestimion’s request, Galiel-ber Dorn put names to as many of the plants they were seeing now as he could: these are moonvines, this is gray carrionfurze, that low stubby weed is mikkusfleur, that is barugaza, this with the white trunk and fruit like globes of green jade is the kammoni tree. Perhaps the Vroon was inventing the names as he went, perhaps they were the true ones; but after a time even he could name them no more, and replied with a shrug of his many tentacles whenever he was asked to identify some curious specimen spied by the roadside.

Yet he still knew the names of the natural features they were passing. There was a surprising place that he called the Fountain of Wine, where, he said, creatures too small to see carried out natural fermentation in a subterranean basin, and a geyser sprayed the product of their labors into the air five times a day. “You would not want to taste it, though,” the Vroon warned, when Gialaurys expressed an interest.

And then, the Dancing Hills—the Wall of Flame—the Great Sickle—the Web of Jewels—

The miles fled behind them. Days went by. Weeks. Ever eastward ran their course, the Mount now beginning to drop from sight to the rear of them, no villages at all along the way any more, nothing at all to be seen except broad fiat fields of grass, each of a different color: a great swath of topaz grass, then one where the jutting blades were deep cobalt, and then claret, indigo, creamy primrose, saffron, chartreuse. “We must be coming to the Great Sea,” Abrigant said. “Look how low the land lies here. And only grass will grow, as though the ground is a sandy swamp. The sea can’t be very far off.”

“I doubt this very much,” Gialaurys said gruffly. He had long since lost all appetite for continuing this expedition, which had come by now to strike him as a foolhardy if not downright impossible endeavor. Gialaurys looked questioningly toward the Vroon. “The sea’s a year’s journey from us yet, if it’s a day. What do you say, little one?”

“Ah, the sea, the sea.” Galielber Dorn made a small percussive sound with his beak, the Vroonish equivalent of a smile, and gestured vaguely toward the east. “Far, yet,” he said. “Very, very far.” And soon the last of the grassy savannahs was behind them and they were in a district of purplish granite hills, not in any way resembling a coastal landscape, which gave way to a dense forest of rich black soil where big bright globular fruits of some unknown kind clung to every bough of the thick-leaved trees like golden lamps in a green night.

Prestimion, for all Gialaurys’s grumbling, was not yet ready to abandon the quest for the Procurator. They began, now, all of them, to search purposefully for Dantirya Sambail in dreams. That was often a useful way to gain access to information that could not be had by other means.

And indeed the method produced an immediate rich harvest of results. Too rich, in fact: for Abrigant, after commending himself to sleep and the mercy of his mother the Lady of the Isle, had a clear vision of the Procurator and his henchman encamped at a village of low, round, blue-tiled dwellings beside a swift stream, and awakened convinced that that place was no more than sixty miles north of their present position. But dreaming Gialaurys had seen the fugitives too, camped in that sweet meadowland to their rear where those flights of yellow-necked raptorial birds had passed overhead. The voice that spoke to Gialaurys in his dream told him quite explicitly that the expedition had gone unknowingly past its quarry in the night, weeks ago, and was already a thousand miles too far to the east. One of Prestimion’s captains, though, a man from the northwestern part of Alhanroel named Yeben Kattikawn, was just as positive that he had had a true vision of the Procurator moving rapidly ahead of them, traveling in a stolen floater; according to the dream of Yeben Kattikawn, Dantirya Sambail was almost to the shore of Lake Embolain of the silken-smooth water, which was the one place in eastern Alhanroel that everyone had heard of, though hardly anyone could tell you precisely where it was. And Prestimion himself, wrestling with the problem throughout an entire night of uneasy sleep, emerged with the conviction that Dantirya Sambail had bypassed them in the Dancing Hills, which Prestimion saw in the most vivid detail, quivering and swaying as the ground beneath them trembled, and the Procurator and his sinister companion riding steadily over their unstable crest, heading northward with the intent of turning at some point and making a great westerly loop back beyond Castle Mount to the other coast of the continent.

This welter of contradictions gave no guidance at all. At midday, while they were camped beside a grove of tall gray-leaved tree-ferns whose trunks were hairy with scarlet fur, Prestimion drew Maundigand-Klimd aside and asked him for a clarifying opinion, telling him that their night’s dreaming had produced only confusion; and the Su-Suheris, who had not taken part in the dream-quest, for his people did not seek information in that way, replied that he suspected sorcery at work. “These are false trails that your enemy has planted in all your minds, I think. There are certain spells of dispersion that a fleeing man can cast, to deflect those who seek him from his proper route. And these dreams give every evidence that the Procurator has cast just such spells, or had them cast for him.”

“And you? Where do you think he is?”

Maundigand-Klimd disappeared at once into a trance, one head communing with the other, and for a long while stood swaying before Prestimion without speaking. Seemingly he was in some other realm. A soft sweet wind blew from the south, but it barely stirred the fronds of the gray ferns. The world was still and silent for an endless long time. Then the four eyes of the magus opened all in the same instant and he said, looking more somber even than he ordinarily did, “He is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”

“And the meaning of that,” Prestimion prompted patiently, when no better explanation was forthcoming, “is—?”

“That we have let ourselves be badly deceived by him, my lord. That—just as I suspected—he, or some sorcerer in his pay, has spread confusion all over these empty provinces, so that the people we meet imagine him traveling this way or that, in a floater or upon mounts. The information they’ve given us is worthless. The same is true of what Abrigant has discovered in his dream, and Kattikawn also, I fear.”

“Did your trance show you where he is, then?”

“Alas, only where he is not,” said Maundigand-Klimd. “But I suspect the truth will prove to be closer to your dream and that of Gialaurys: Dantirya Sambail may never have come out this far at all. He may have only pretended to be heading east, allowing us to think he was going toward the Great Sea while actually traveling some other way entirely.”

Prestimion kicked angrily at the spongy golden turf. “Exactly as I thought he might from the beginning. Simply feinting a journey into these unknown eastern lands but actually doubling back after a short while toward the Mount, and then on to some western seaport and the voyage to Zimroel.”

“It appears that that is what he has done, my lord.”

“We’ll find him, then, wherever he is. We have a hundred sorcerers to his one.—You’re sure he’s not somewhere out there ahead of us?”

“I’m sure of nothing, my lord. But the probabilities are against it. The eastward route holds no benefit for him. My own intuitions, which I trust, tell me that he’s behind us, and getting further from us every day.”

“Yes. While we head the wrong way. This has all been nothing but a wild gihorna chase, I see.” And no justification whatever remained now for proceeding on the journey, other than his hunger to explore new lands. That was not sufficient. He clapped his hands together.—"Gialaurys! Abrigant!”

They came running at Prestimion’s call. Quickly he set forth for them all that Maundigand-Klimd had just told him.

“Good,” said Gialaurys immediately, with a fierce grin of satisfaction. “I’ll send word down the line that we’re starting back to the Mount.”

Abrigant still argued valiantly for his village of blue-tiled cottages sixty miles away. But Prestimion knew that it would be foolish to go searching after what was surely yet another phantom; and—not without some sadness at the thought of giving up the venture here—he gave permission for Gialaurys to sound the order for retreat.

That night they camped in a wooded place where purple mists seeped from the moist ground, so that the gray clouds that moved in at sunset quickly turned deep violet and the sun, as it dropped toward the west, lit the shining leaves of the forest trees to a magical translucent red. Prestimion stood for a long while looking westward into this strange light, until at last the sun disappeared behind the far-off bulk of Castle Mount and darkness came gliding over him out of the east, out of that remote land by the shores of the Great Sea whose immensity, he knew, he would never in this life behold.

Behold it he did, though, just a few hours later, in a dream of exquisite vividness that came to him almost as soon as he had closed his eyes in sleep. In that dream they had not given up the eastward trek, but somehow had ventured on, and on and on and on, past the last outpost of explored territory, the place called Kekkinork, where the blue seaspar with which Lord Pinitor of ancient times had bedecked the walls of Bombifale city was mined. Just beyond Kekkinork lay the Great Sea itself, shielded behind great cliffs that stretched off parallel to the shore as far to north and south as anyone could see, a formidable and seemingly endless barrier of gleaming black stone shot through with dazzling veins of white quartz. But there was a single opening in that unending cliff, a narrow sliver through which the glint of the new day’s sunlight came, and in his dream Prestimion went running toward that opening and through it, and onward, down to the waiting sea, and waded out into the gentle pink surf of the ocean that occupied close to half of the planet.

Dreaming, he stood at the brink of the world.

The western coast of Zimroel lay somewhere out there before him, inconceivably far away, lost from view beyond the curve of the horizon. As he stared outward he tried without success to fathom the immensity of the span that lay between him and the other shore. But no mind could encompass it. He saw only water, a soft pink here at the sandy shore, then a pale green, then turquoise and rich deep blue farther on, and beyond that only a realm of unchanging azure gray that blended imperceptibly with the sky.

It was impossible for him to believe that there could be any end to that tremendous ocean, although he knew in some rational corner of his mind that there had to be—far away, so far that the ship had never been built that could survive the journey. The continent of Zimroel was out there somewhere in front of him, and beyond that lay the Inner Sea, which had seemed so huge to him when he had journeyed from Alaisor to Piliplok long ago, but which was only a puddle compared with this one; and far off in the east on the opposite shore of the Inner Sea was Alhanroel, with its thousand cities and its Labyrinth and its Castle; and here he stood at Alhanroel’s other edge, looking off toward Zimroel and unable to comprehend the distance between here and there.

“Prestimion?” a soft voice called.

Thismet, it was.

He turned and saw her coming out of that narrow gateway in the black cliff, running toward him across the sand, smiling, extending her arms to him. She was dressed as she had been that day in his tent in the quiet Vale of Gloyn, just before the final battle of the civil war, when she had come to him to confess her error in pushing her brother toward his taking of the crown, and to offer herself to him as his bride: a sheer white gown, was all, and nothing beneath it but her sleek and beautiful self. A dazzling sun-halo glistened about her. “We could swim to Zimroel, Prestimion,” she said. “Would you like to? Come. Come.” And the gown was gone, and in the bright light of morning her slender dusky-skinned body gleamed in its miraculous nakedness like burnished bronze. He stared at her taut, trim form in a transport of delight, his gaze sweeping downward in wonder to take in the slim shoulders and the high, rounded little breasts and the flat belly that flared outward so startlingly at her hips and the lean, sinewy legs below; and then, with trembling hands, he reached for her.

She folded his hand into hers. But instead of coming to him she pulled him toward her, pulled with a strength that he could not have resisted had he wanted to, and led him onward into the sea. The water, enveloping him easily, was warm and soothing. Surely the womb itself could not have been more comforting than this. With swift, strong strokes they swam eastward, Thismet just a little way ahead of him, her black lustrous hair glinting in the new day’s light; and for hours they went on that way, heading ever toward the continent on the far shore, she turning now and then to smile and wave and beckon him on.

He felt no fatigue whatever. He knew he could swim for days like this. For weeks. Months.

But then, after a while, he looked toward Thismet and became aware that he could not see her anywhere, and indeed realized that it was some time since he had, that he could not actually remember when she had last been there ahead of him. “Thismet?” he called. “Thismet, where are you?” But there was no answer, only the gentle lapping of the waves, and after a time he knew himself to be entirely alone in the vastness of that great ocean.

In the morning Prestimion said nothing to anyone, simply washed his face by a limpid little stream that ran alongside their campsite and dressed and found some cold meat from last night’s meal for his breakfast; and a little while afterward they broke camp and began their long trek back to the Castle, no one speaking of the dreams that had come in the night, or of the failure of the quest for Dantirya Sambail.

3

It was only mid-morning, but already at least ten assassins with drawn swords had come bursting into the Coronal’s official suite so far that day, and Septach Melayn had dispatched them all with his usual efficiency. Usually they arrived in groups of two or three, but the most recent bunch had been a foursome. That had been half an hour ago. He had given them a very fine lesson in swordsmanship indeed.

Now, slumped in a gloomy slouch behind Prestimion’s desk with the latest thick stack of governmental documents in front of him awaiting his signature, he felt a most powerful urge to get up and wipe out a few more. It was not just a matter of keeping his reflexes sharp, though that was important enough, but of preserving his sanity. Septach Melayn had sworn long ago that he would serve Prestimion in all tasks that were required of him, yes. But he hadn’t bargained on being cooped up here in Prestimion’s office at the Castle for weeks on end, handling all the dreary tasks that a Coronal was required to deal with, while the real Coronal was off roaming about in the mysterious east country, not merely hunting for Dantirya Sambail but also encountering excitements of all kinds along the way, a whole great host of strange monsters and marvels.

Let someone else be regent the next time Prestimion feels like going on a trip, Septach Melayn thought. Gialaurys, or Navigorn, or Duke Miaule of Hither Miaule, or anyone else at all—Akbalik, Maundigand-Klimd, even that new boy Dekkeret. Anyone. Just not me, he thought. I have had more than a sufficiency of this. I am a man for action, not desks and papers. You have been unfair to me, Prestimion.

He turned to the top document on the stack.

Yes. Be it resolved. Whatever they were resolving, let it herewith be resolved: the dumping of both cities’ sewage into the central plaza of Sipermit, for all Septach Melayn cared at this point. What business was it of his? Why should it even be the Coronal’s affair, for that matter? His eyes were beginning to glaze with boredom and fatigue. Quickly he scrawled his signature on the resolution without reading the rest of it and shoved it aside.

Next: Resolution No. 1279, Year 1 Pont. Confalume—

He could bear it no longer. Half an hour of this at a time was all he could take. His soul rebelled.

“What?” he bellowed, looking up. “More murderers? Ha! Is there no respect for high office in the world any more?”

There were five of them this time, lean sharp-nosed men with the sun-darkened skin of southerners. Septach Melayn leaped to his feet. His rapier, which remained just beside him at the desk at all times, was in his hand and already in motion. “Look at you,” he said, with a disdainful edge to his voice. “Those dirty boots! Those ragged leather jerkins! Spots of grease all over them! Don’t you know how to dress when you come calling at the Castle?” They had arrayed themselves in a semicircle from one side of the big room to the other. I will start at the end closest to the window, thought Septach Melayn, and work my way across.

And then he stopped thinking and became pure motion, a mere machine of death, dancing on the tips of his toes in perfect balance, his long right arm extending, thrusting, withdrawing, extending again, parrying, thrusting, withdrawing. His blade moved with the speed of light.

Let them keep pace with him if they could. They would be the first who had ever managed it.

“Ha!” he cried. “Yes!” So, so, so: with a little grunting sound of delight he skewered the scar-faced one by the window through the throat, then whirled neatly and put the tip of his blade deep into the belly of the one next to him with the red bandanna, who was kind enough to topple heavily athwart the third, the stunningly ugly one, thus forcing him to turn his back on Septach Melayn just sufficiently long for Septach Melayn to take him in the heart from the side. “Ah! There! So!” One, two, three. This was mere dancing; this was good simple play. The two surviving killers now attempted to charge Septach Melayn at the same time, but he was much too fast for them: a hard lunge to the right carried his blade all the way through the midsection of the first, and by lowering his left shoulder and flexing his left knee he was able to dodge under the thrust that came from the other attacker while simultaneously pulling his sword from the body of the first, and then with a triumphant cry of “Ha! Ha!” he pivoted sharply and—

A knock at the door. A voice from the hallway. “My lord Septach Melayn! My lord, is everything all right with you in there?”

Damn. It was doddering old Nilgir Sumanand, Prestimion’s aide-de-camp and major-domo. “Of course everything’s all right!” Septach Melayn told him. “What do you think?” Hastily he returned to the desk and tucked his sword out of sight by his feet. He brushed a vagrant lock of his hair back into place. Reaching for Resolution No. 1279, he made a devout pretense at studying it intently.

Nilgir Sumanand peered in. “I thought I heard you speaking to someone, though I knew no one was there,” he said. “And there were some outcries, or so it seemed to me; and other sounds. Footsteps, as if someone was moving quickly about the room. A scuffle, perhaps?—But there’s no one here except yourself, I see. The grace of the Divine be on you, my lord Septach Melayn! I must have been imagining things.”

No: I was, thought Septach Melayn wryly, glancing about the empty room. He could still see the bloody heaps of dead assailants, although he knew the other man could not.

“What you heard,” he said, “was the regent of the realm at his exercise. I’m not used to such a sedentary kind of life. I get up from this desk every hour or so and indulge in some calisthenics, do you follow? To keep myself from rusting away. A quick bit of feint and slash, a little tuning-up of wrist and arm and eye.—What is it you want, Nilgir Sumanand?”

“Your noontime appointment is at hand.”

“And what appointment is that?”

Nilgir Sumanand looked a little taken aback. “Why, the transmuter of metals, my lord. You sent word three days past that you would meet with him here today at noon.”

“Ah. So I did. I do recall it now.”

Damn. Damn damn damn.

It was the alchemist, the man who claimed to be able to manufacture iron from charcoal. Another bit of infernal bother, Septach Melayn thought, scowling. This was Abrigant’s project, not Prestimion’s. It wasn’t sufficient to be doing the Coronal’s job; they wanted him to handle Abrigant’s business as well. Abrigant too was off in the east with Prestimion, though. Since no one knew when they were going to return, all manner of strange things were falling to Septach Melayn in their absence. And this one seemed the wildest fantasy, this conjuring of valuable metal out of useless charcoal. But he had promised to give the man a little of his time.

“Let him come in, Nilgir Sumanand.”

The major-domo stepped aside to allow someone to enter. “I hail the great lord Septach Melayn,” his visitor said obsequiously, and executed a profound, if clumsy, bow.

Septach Melayn felt a wince of distaste. The man who stood before him was a Hjort! That was something he hadn’t anticipated: a big-bellied stubby-legged Hjort with gleaming bulgy eyes like those of some unpleasant fish and dull gray skin that was erupting everywhere with smooth rounded protrusions as big as good-sized pebbles. Septach Melayn did not care for Hjorts. He knew that was wrong of him, that Hjorts were citizens too, and usually decent ones, and could not help it that they looked so hideous. There had to be a whole world full of Hjorts somewhere in the universe and its people would surely think he was hideous. But he was uncomfortable in their company, all the same. They irritated him. This one, who was dressed with particular resplendence in tight red trousers, a dark-green doublet with scarlet trim, and a short cloak of purple velveteen, seemed to glory in his own ugliness. He showed no special awe at finding himself in the private office of the Coronal Lord, or in the presence of the High Counsellor Septach Melayn.

As a private citizen of aristocratic background, Septach Melayn could feel any way about outworlders that he pleased. But as regent for the Coronal of Majipoor he knew he must show respect for citizens of every sort, be they Hjorts or Skandars or Vroons or Liimen, Su-Suheris or Ghayrogs or anything else. He bade the Hjort welcome—Taihjorklin was his name—and asked him to fill him in on the details of his researches, since the absent Abrigant had not provided him with much to go on.

The Hjort clapped his pudgy hands and two assistants appeared, both of them Hjorts as well, rolling a large four-wheeled tray on which was stacked a great assemblage of implements, charts, scrolls, and other impedimenta. He seemed prepared for an extensive demonstration.

“You must understand, my lord, that all things are interwoven and become separate again, and that if one can fathom the rhythm of the separation, one may replicate the interweaving. For the sky gives and the land receives; the stars give and the flowers receive; the ocean gives and the flesh receives. The mingling and combining are aspects of the great chain of existence; the harmony of the stars and the harmony of—”

“Yes,” Septach Melayn cut in. “Prince Abrigant has explained all these philosophical matters to me already. Be kind enough to show me how you go about making metal out of charcoal.”

The Hjort seemed only slightly disconcerted by Septach Melayn’s brusqueness. “We have, my lord, approached our task through the use of various scientific techniques, to wit, calcinations, sublimations, dissolutions, combustions, and the joining of elixirs. I am prepared to elaborate upon the specific efficacy of each of these techniques, if it should please you, my lord.” Hearing no such request, he went on, choosing relevant exhibits from his tray as he spoke: “All substances, you must realize, are made up of metal and non-metal in varying proportions. Our task is to increase the proportion of the one by reducing the proportion of the other. In our processes we employ both waters corrosive and waters ardent as our catalysts. Our chief reagents are green vitriol, sulfur, orpiment, and a large group of active salts, primary among them sal hepatica and sal ammoniac, though there are many others. The first step, my lord, is calcination, the reduction of the matters used to a basic condition, This is followed by solution, the action of the liquor distilled from our reactive substances upon the dry substances, after which we induce separation and then conjunction, by which I mean—”

“Show me the metal that your process produces, if you will,” said Septach Melayn, not in an unkindly way.

“Ah.” Taihjorklin’s balloon-like throat membranes expanded in an unsettling fashion. “Of course. The metal, my lord.”

The Hjort turned and took from the tray a delicate strand of bright wire, no thicker than a hair and no longer than a finger, which he presented to Septach Melayn with a grand flourish.

Septach Melayn scrutinized it coolly. “I would have expected an ingot, at the least.”

“There will be ingots aplenty in good time, my lord.”

“But at present, this is what you have?”

“What you see represents no small achievement, your lordship. But the process is only rudimentary at this point. We have established general principles; now we are ready to move on. Much equipment remains to be purchased before we can proceed to the stage of large-scale production. We require, for instance, proper furnaces, stills, sublimatories, scorifying pans, crucibles, beakers, lamps, refluxatory extractors—”

“All of which will cost a large amount of money, I take it?”

“Some considerable funding will be required, yes. But there can be no doubt of success. Ultimately we will draw any required quantity of metal from base substances, in the same way as plants draw nourishment from air and water and soil. For one is all, and all is one, and if you have not the one, then all is nothing, but with proper guidance the highest descends to the lowest and the lowest will rise to the highest, and then the total achievement is within our grasp. We are in command, let me assure you, my lord, of the element that enables all. Which element, I tell you, my lord, is none other than dry water, which has been sought by so many for so long, but which we alone have succeeded in—”

“Dry water?”

“The very same. Repeated distillation of common water, six, seven hundred distillations, removes its moist quality, provided certain substances of great dryness are added to the substratum at particular phases of the process. Permit me to show you, my lord.” Taihjorklin reached behind him and took a beaker from the tray. “Here, your lordship, is dry water itself: do you see it? This brilliant white substance, as solid as salt.”

“That scaly crust, you mean, along the side of the beaker?”

“None other. It is a pure element: the quality of dryness residing in first matter. From such elements as this can be rendered the elixir of transmutation, which is a transparent body, lustrous red in its emanation, by which—”

“Yes. Thank you,” said Septach Melayn, settling back in his chair.

“My lord?”

“I will report the details of today’s meeting to the Coronal immediately upon his return. One is all, I will tell him. All is one. You are the master of calcination and combustion, and the mystery of dry water is a mere elementary riddle to you, and with proper governmental funding of a certain considerable scope you assert that you can bring forth from the sands of Majipoor an infinite supply of valuable metals. Do I have it correctly, Ser Taihjorklin? Very well. I will make my report, and the Coronal will deal with it as he sees fit.”

“My lord—I have only begun to explain—”

“Thank you, Ser Taihjorklin. We will be in touch.”

He rang for Nilgir Sumanand. The Hjort and his assistants were ushered from the room.

Pfaugh, thought Septach Melayn, when they were gone. One is all! All is one!

The whole bizarre swarm of sorcerers and exorcists and geomancers and haruspicators and thaumaturges and warlocks and superstition-mongering seers of all the other kinds that had been spreading across the world since he was a boy had seemed bad enough to him. But one transmuter of metals, it seemed, could generate more nonsense than any seven wizards!

All that was Prestimion’s problem, though—when and if Prestimion deigned to come back from the east country. He and Abrigant could hire a thousand transmuters a week, if that was what they cared to do. That would not be an issue for Septach Melayn.

His own problem was that the regency was driving him crazy. Perhaps slaying a few more assassins would help to calm his nerves. He reached for his sword. Glared at the new horde of enemies that had come bursting into the room.

“What, six of you at once! Your audacity knows no limits, vermin! But let me teach you some fine points of the art of swordsmanship, eh? See, this is known as calcination! This is the combustion of sublimation! Ha! My rapier is dipped in dry water! Its merciless tip turns the one into all, and the all into one. So! Thus I transmute you! So! So! So!—”

His afternoon schedule was a busy one. Vologaz Sar was the first caller, his majesty the Pontifex’s official delegate at the Castle: a cheerful, airy-spirited man of late middle years, fair-skinned and with a look of fleshy good health about him, who seemed delighted to have escaped the gloomy depths of the Labyrinth after a lifetime in Pontifical service. He came originally from Sippulgar, that sunny city of golden buildings on Alhanroel’s distant Aruachosian coast, and like many southerners he had an easy, genial manner that Septach Melayn found pleasing. But today Vologaz Sar seemed troubled to some extent by Lord Prestimion’s continued absence from the Castle. He expressed puzzlement over the fact that a newly seated Coronal would spend so much time traveling about, and so little at his own capital.

“I understand Lord Prestimion has gone east this time,” he said. “That seems quite unusual. A Coronal would want to show himself to his people, yes, but who is there to show himself to in the east-country?”

They were drinking the smooth blue wine of the southland, which its makers rarely exported to other provinces. It had been very kind of Vologaz Sar to bring such a delightful gift, thought Septach Melayn. The Pontifical delegate was a man of taste and distinction in every respect. His manner of dress showed as much. Vologaz Sar had chosen impeccable garb, a long cotton robe of brilliant white, elegantly embroidered with abstract patterns in the amusing Stoienzar style, over a rich undertunic of dark purple silk, and hose of a paler purple hue. A black velvet mantle lay across his shoulders. The golden Labyrinth emblem on his breast that marked him as a member of the Pontifical staff was decorated with three tiny emeralds of great depth of color. Septach Melayn found the total effect greatly satisfactory. Such attention to detail of dress always drew his admiration.

He refreshed their bowls and said, choosing his words with care, “His journey east is not exactly a formal processional. He has special business of a delicate kind to handle there.”

The Pontifical delegate nodded gravely. “Ah. I see.” But did he? How could he? Vologaz Sar was much too polished, of course, to pursue the inquiry in that direction. He simply said, after just the slightest pause: “And when he returns, what then? Does other special business await him that will take him elsewhere again?”

“None that I’ve been told of. Is it a source of great concern to the Pontifex that Lord Prestimion’s been away so much?”

“Great concern?” said Vologaz Sar lightly. “Oh, no, great concern is not quite the right phrase.”

“Well, then—?”

For a moment or two there was silence. Septach Melayn sat back, smiling, and waited impassively for his majesty’s representative to come to his point.

After a time Vologaz Sar said, with a minute but perceptible intensifying of tone, “Has the notion of Lord Prestimion’s making a trip to the Labyrinth to offer his respects to his imperial majesty been discussed yet?”

“We have it on our agenda, yes.”

“With any specific date in mind, may I ask?”

“None as yet,” said Septach Melayn.

“Ah. I see.” Vologaz Sar took a reflective sip of his wine. “It’s custom of long standing, of course, for the new Coronal to pay a call on the Pontifex fairly early in his reign. To receive his formal blessing, and to set forth whatever legislative plans he may have in mind. Perhaps this has been overlooked, it being so many years since the last change among the Powers of the Realm.” Yet again his tone deepened and darkened ever so slightly, though it remained cordial and light. “The Pontifex is the senior monarch, after all, and, of course, is in a technical sense the father of the Coronal as well.—I understand from Duke Oljebbin that Confalume has been heard lately to remark on the fact that he’s had rather little contact of any sort with Lord Prestimion thus far.”

Septach Melayn began to comprehend.

“Is his majesty displeased, would you say?”

“That might be too strong a term. But he is certainly perplexed. He has the greatest affection for Lord Prestimion, you understand. I scarcely need point out that when he was Coronal he looked upon Prestimion virtually as a son. And now, to be so completely ignored—the constitutional issues aside, you understand, it’s a matter of simple courtesy, is it not?”

All very pleasantly put. But they were verging into regions of high diplomacy, Septach Melayn saw. He refreshed the wine-bowls once again.

“No discourtesies are intended, I assure you. The Coronal’s had certain unusually difficult matters to deal with here at the outset of his reign. He felt that it was necessary to address them immediately, before allowing himself the pleasure of the ceremonial visit to his imperial father the Pontifex.”

“Matters so difficult that he chooses not even to bring them to the Pontifex’s attention? They are supposed to be ruling jointly, as of course you are aware.” It was beyond question a rebuke, but uttered very blandly.

“I’m not in a position to offer illumination here,” said Septach Melayn, studiedly matching blandness with bland-ness, though he understood that combat on the highest level was under way. “This is a matter between Lord Prestimion and the Pontifex.—His majesty is well, I take it?”

“Quite well, yes. He’s remarkably vigorous for a man of his years. I think Lord Prestimion can expect a lengthy reign as Coronal before his own time of succession to the Labyrinth arrives.”

“The Coronal will be overjoyed to hear that. He feels the greatest fondness for his majesty.”

Vologaz Sar’s posture shifted in a way that signaled that they were entering the crux of the matter, though there was no further alteration in the honeyed tone of his voice. “I will tell you in all confidence, Septach Melayn, that the Pontifex has been in something of a grim mood these days. I could not tell you why: he seems unable to explain it himself. But he prowls the imperial sector of the Labyrinth in apparent confusion, as though he’s never seen the place before. He sleeps badly. I’m told that he brightens greatly when told that he has visitors, but then shows obvious disappointment when the visitors are brought to him, as though he’s perpetually expecting someone who never arrives. I’m not necessarily implying that that person is Lord Prestimion. The whole hypothesis is pure guesswork. Obviously it wouldn’t be reasonable for him to expect the Coronal to arrive without prior notice. It may simply be that the move from the Castle to the Labyrinth has depressed the Pontifex. After forty years as Coronal, living up here in the bright splendor of the Castle amid crowds of high lords and courtiers, suddenly to find oneself forced into the Labyrinth’s dark depths—well, he’d not be the first Pontifex to feel the strain of that. And Confalume such a hearty, outgoing man, as well. He’s changed enormously in just these few months.”

“A visit from Lord Prestimion might cheer him, then, do you think?”

“No question of it,” said Vologaz Sar.

Septach Melayn proffered the last of the blue wine, and he and his guest toasted one another graciously.

The visit was plainly ending, and it had been altogether amiable throughout. But no ambiguities lurked behind Vologaz Sar’s suave politeness. Prestimion had been avoiding Confalume—had since the day of his accession been running the government, in fact, as though he were sole monarch of the world—and Confalume was aware of it, and was annoyed. And now commanded—that was the only word, commanded—Prestimion to get himself down to the Labyrinth post-haste and bend his knee to the senior monarch as the law required.

Prestimion was not going to be pleased about that. Confalume, Septach Melayn knew, was the one person in all the world whom Prestimion did not want to face.

Septach Melayn well understood—and Prestimion, when he returned, would also, though Confalume himself did not—what process must be going on in Confalume’s mind these days. Prestimion’s deliberate shirking of his ceremonial duties at the Labyrinth was only a secondary issue. The visitors for whom Confalume unconsciously longed, and whose perpetual non-arrival brought him such incomprehensible distress, were Thismet and Korsibar, the children of his blood, the children of whose very existence he no longer had any knowledge. Their absence somehow throbbed in him like the pulsations of an amputated limb.

It was a strange kind of misery, and one that would wring Prestimion’s heart. Prestimion had scarcely been the cause of the deaths of Korsibar and Thismet in the civil war—their dooms were something that they had brought upon themselves—but beyond any doubt it was Prestimion who had stolen Confalume’s memories of his lost son and daughter from him, a theft that Prestimion must surely look upon as a deed of a fairly monstrous sort, and it was that guilty awareness that led Prestimion now to keep his distance from the sad old man that the once-great Confalume had become.

Well, there was no help for it, Septach Melayn thought. All acts have consequences that can never be indefinitely avoided; and Prestimion must live with the thing he had brought about. It was impossible for him to stay away from the Labyrinth forever. Confalume was Pontifex and Prestimion was Coronal and it was high time that the rituals of their relationship were properly observed.

“I’ll convey all that you’ve said today to Lord Prestimion as soon as he returns,” said Septach Melayn, as he showed the Pontifical delegate to the door.

“You have his majesty’s gratitude for that.”

“And you’ll have mine,” said Septach Melayn, “if you’ll share one bit of information with me in return.”

Vologaz Sar looked uncertain and just a trifle alarmed. “And that is—?”

Septach Melayn smiled. One could focus on matters of high politics only so long. He was determined to put the tensions of this meeting behind him as quickly as he could. “The name of the merchant,” he said, “who provided you with the fabric for that delightful robe.”

Two more appointments remained on his afternoon calendar, and then he was free.

The first was with Akbalik, whom Prestimion, just before his departure for the east-country, had named as a special emissary to far Zimroel, with the thought of posting a reliable man in Ni-moya to look out for signs of unrest among the followers of Dantirya Sambail. Akbalik was ready now to begin his journey. He had come to the Coronal’s office today so that Septach Melayn, as regent, could sign his official papers of rank.

Somewhat to Septach Melayn’s surprise, Akbalik had the new knight-initiate Dekkeret with him, the big, husky protégé whom Prestimion had discovered during his trip to Normork. Evidently this was Dekkeret’s first visit to this suite of royal power, for he looked about in undisguised wonder at the magnificent central room, the great palisander desk, the huge window looking out into the infinite sky, the marvelous inlaid patterns of rare woods that formed a huge star-burst pattern in the floor.

Septach Melayn threw Akbalik an interrogatory frown.

No one had told him that Akbalik would be bringing Dekkeret here. Akbalik said, with a gesture toward the young man, “I’d like to take him with me to Zimroel. Do you think the Coronal would mind?”

Wickedly Septach Melayn said, “Ah, have you two become such good friends so soon?”

Akbalik did not seem amused. “It’s nothing like that, and you know it, Septach Melayn.”

“What is it, then? Is the boy in need of a holiday already? He’s only begun his training here.”

“This would be part of his training,” said Akbalik. “He’s asked if he could accompany me, and I think it might be a good thing for him. It’s healthy for a young initiate to acquire some understanding of what it’s really like out there beyond Castle Mount, you know. To experience an ocean voyage, to get a feel for the true size of the world. To see such a spectacular place as Ni-moya, also. And to observe how the machinery of the government actually works across such immense distances as we have to deal with.”

Turning toward Dekkeret, Septach Melayn said, “Immense distances, yes. Do you realize, boy, that you’ll be away nine months, maybe a year? Can you spare that much time from your studies, do you think?”

“Lord Prestimion said in Normork that I was to have accelerated training. A trip like this would surely accelerate it, sir.”

“Yes. I suppose it would.” Septach Melayn shrugged. Would Prestimion mind, he wondered, if the boy were to vanish into Zimroel for a year? How was he supposed to know? For the thousandth time he cursed Prestimion for having loaded all this decision-making on him. Well, it had been Prestimion’s idea to make him regent: so be it, he must act as he saw fit. Why not let the boy go? It would be on Akbalik’s head, not his. And Akbalik was right: it was always useful for a young man to learn something of the real world.

Dekkeret was staring at him in earnest supplication. Septach Melayn found something charmingly innocent and sweet about that eager imploring look. He could remember a time when he had been eager and earnest himself, long ago, before he had chosen instead to mask himself in an air of lazy debonair frivolity that by now was no mask, but the very essence of his character. As he looked at the boy it was easy enough to see those qualities of seriousness and strength that had attracted Prestimion’s interest.

So be it, he thought. Let him go to Zimroel.

“Very well. Your papers are ready, Akbalik. I’m adding the name of the knight-initiate Dekkeret here—so—and initialing the page.”

Already he found himself envying the boy. To get away from the Castle—to go roving off into the far regions of the realm—to escape all this politicking for a while and get the good fresh air of some other place into your lungs—!

He glanced toward Dekkeret and said, “And allow me, if you will, to offer a small suggestion. If you’re not kept too busy in Ni-moya all the time, you and Akbalik should allow yourself a little excursion up north into the Khyntor Marches while you’re over there, and do a bit of steetmoy-hunting.—You know about steetmoy, don’t you, boy?”

“I’ve seen garments made from their fur, yes.”

“Wearing a stole made of steetmoy fur’s not quite the same thing as looking a living steetmoy in the eye. Most dangerous wild animal in the world, so far as I know, the steetmoy. Beautiful thing: that thick fur, those blazing eyes. Went hunting them myself, once, the time Prestimion and I went to Zimroel. You hire yourself some professional hunters in Ni-moya and you head far up north, into the Marches—cold, snowy place, like nothing you’ve ever seen, all misty forests and wild lakes and a sky like an iron plate, and you track down a pack of steetmoy, not an easy thing, white animals against the white ground, and go for them at close range, a poniard in one hand and a machete in the other—”

The boy’s eyes were aglow with excitement. But Akbalik seemed less delighted.

“You were worried, I thought, that he would be skimping on his training by going with me to Zimroel. Now, suddenly, you’ve got him running up to Khyntor and chasing after steetmoy in the snow. Oh, my friend, you never can manage to be serious very long, can you?”

Septach Melayn reddened. He had, he realized, allowed himself to be carried away. “That will be part of his training too,” he said huffily, and stamped his seal onto Akbalik’s papers. “Here. A good journey to you both. And let him go to Khyntor for a week, Akbalik,” he added, as they went out. “What harm could it do?”

Prince Serithorn of Samivole was the only one left for him to see, now, and then he could go to the gymnasium over in the east wing for his daily late-afternoon fencing-match with one of the officers of the guard. Septach Melayn practiced a different weapon each day—rapier, two-handed sword, basket-hilt saber, Narabal small-sword, singlestick baton, Ketheron pike—and each with a different partner, for he learned a man’s basic moves so quickly that it was a dull business for him to fence with anyone more than two or three times. His opponent today was a new young guardsman from Tumbrax, Mardileek by name, said to be a good man with the saber, who came with a recommendation from Duke Spalirises himself. But there was Serithorn to deal with first.

The prince had added himself to Septach Melayn’s appointments list only that morning. Ordinarily one could not get to see the regent on such short notice; but Serithorn, as the senior peer of the realm at the Castle, was an exception to that rule as to all others. Besides, Septach Melayn, like everyone else, found Serithorn a congenial and appealing character, and never mind that after much to-ing and fro-ing he had eventually thrown his support to Korsibar in the civil war. It was hard to hold a grudge against Serithorn for anything for long. And the war was not even ancient history, now: it was no history at all.

Usually Serithorn was late for appointments. But today, for some reason, he was precisely on time. Septach Melayn wondered why. As usual, Serithorn was simply and unostentatiously dressed, a plain russet cloak of many folds over a somber purple tunic, and simple leather boots lined with red fur. The wealthiest private citizen of Majipoor did not need to trumpet his wealth. Where another man might have chosen as his headgear some showy wide-brimmed deep-felted hat trimmed with metal braid and scarlet tiruvyn feathers, Prince Serithorn was content to wear an odd stiff-sided yellow cap, high and square, that a Liiman sausage-peddler would have spurned. He took it off now and tossed it on the desk—the Coronal’s desk—as casually as if he were in his own sitting-room.

“I understand that my nephew’s just been here. A splendid fellow, Akbalik. A credit to the family. Prestimion’s shipping him off to Zimroel, I hear. Whatever for, I wonder?”

“Simply to get some notion of how the Zimroelu feel about their new Coronal, I’d imagine. It’s a good idea, wouldn’t you say, for Prestimion to keep himself up to date on the general run of sentiment over there?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.” Then, indicating the tall stack of documents piled by the edge of the desk, Serithorn said, “You’ve been working hard, haven’t you, for such a light-hearted fellow? Laboring away mightily at all this dreary paper! I commend you for your newfound industriousness, Septach Melayn.”

“The compliment’s undeserved, Prince Serithorn. These documents are all still in need of attention from me.”

“But nevertheless you’ll give it, I’m sure you will! Only a matter of time.—How very admirable you are, Septach Melayn! I have, you know, a light spirit very much like yours; but here you are toiling heroically at your regency day after day, whereas I’ve never been able to force myself to deviate into seriousness for any span of time longer than three minutes running. My congratulations are sincere:”

Septach Melayn shook his head. “You overestimate me, I think. And much underestimate yourself. Some men are secretly foolish, and conceal their flaws behind an air of great gravity, or much bluster. But you are secretly deep, affecting frivolity. And have had vast influence in the realm. I happen to know that it was you who induced Lord Confalume to pick Prestimion as his successor.”

“I? Ah, you’re deceived in that, my friend. Confalume spotted Prestimion’s ability all on his own. I merely added my approval when he asked.” Serithorn lifted an eyebrow. A blithe smile crossed his smooth face.—"Secretly deep, you think? Flattering of you to say so, very flattering. But entirely untrue. You may have secret depths, dear friend: quite likely you do. But I’m frivolous through and through. Always have been, always will be.” Serithorn’s wide, clear eyes contemplated Septach Melayn in a mordant way that seemed to negate everything that he had just said. There were layers upon unfathomable layers of wiliness here, thought Septach Melayn.

But he refused to offer any challenge. With an ingratiating little laugh he replied, “The fact is, I think, that each of us overestimates the other. You’re frivolous through and through, you say? Very well: I consent to accept your opinion of yourself. As for me, I propose to stipulate that I’m a mere idle-spirited mocker, lazy and gay of heart, overly fond of silks and pearls and fine wines, whose only worthwhile qualities are a certain skill at swordplay and a deep loyalty to his friends. Can we agree with that evaluation also? Do we have a treaty on this, Serithorn?”

“We do. You and I are of one sort, Septach Melayn. Piffling frothy triflers, both of us. And so you have my deepest sympathy for having been forced by Prestimion to cope with all this bureaucratic nonsense. Your soul’s far too sprightly and buoyant for this sort of work.”

“This is true. Next time the Coronal goes traveling, I’ll go with him and you can be regent.”

“Me? But I invoke our treaty! I’m no more qualified for sitting behind that desk than you are. No, no, no, let some more solid citizen of the realm have the post. If I had wanted to do the sweaty work of a Coronal, I’d have seen to it long ago that I had the glory and homage that goes with it. But never for a moment did I crave the crown, Septach Melayn, and that mountain of papers on this desk is exactly the reason why.”

He was, Septach Melayn knew, being completely serious now. Serithorn was by no means the lightweight he claimed to be; but he had ever been content to exercise his will at one remove, standing close to the throne but never seated upon it. The blood of many kings ran in his veins: no one in the world had loftier lineage, not that that in itself could have made him Coronal. Intelligence and shrewdness were different matters, though, and Serithorn had those in abundance. He was of kingly quality in all respects but one, which was his utter and wholehearted desire not to bear the burden of power.

According to Prestimion, who had heard the story from his mother, Lord Prankipin decades ago had actually asked Serithorn to be his successor as Coronal when he became Pontifex, but Serithorn had said, “No, no, give the job to Prince Confalume.” The tale had the ring of truth to it. There could be no other reason why Serithorn had not had the throne. And here they all were, so many years later, and Confalume was Pontifex himself after a long and splendid run as Coronal and Serithorn had never been anything more than a private citizen, welcome in all the halls of power but wielding none himself, a cheerful, easy-hearted man whose unlined features and easy stance made him appear twenty or thirty years younger than he really was.

“Well,” said Septach Melayn, after a time. “Now that that’s settled, will you tell me whether there’s some special reason for this visit? Or is it purely social?”

“Oh, your company’s pleasant enough, Septach Melayn. But this, I think, is a matter of business.” A quick lowering of his brows furrowed Serithorn’s forehead, and a slight darkening was evident in his tone.—"Could you be kind enough to supply me, do you think, with some sort of summary of whatever it is that has been taking place in recent months between Prestimion and the Procurator of Ni-moya?”

Septach Melayn felt a band of muscles go tight across his midsection. A blunt question like that was very far indeed from Serithorn’s customary brand of frivolity. Caution seemed appropriate.

“I think,” he said, “that you had better take that matter up with Prestimion himself.”

“I would do just that, if only Prestimion happened to be here. But he’s chosen to go wandering around interminably in the east-country, hasn’t he? And you sit here in his place.—I’ve got no desire to be troublesome, Septach Melayn. In fact, I’m trying to be helpful. But I lack so much basic information that I can’t properly evaluate the nature of the crisis, if ‘crisis’ is the proper term for what we have. For instance, during the coronation week a story was going around that Dantirya Sambail was, for some reason, being held prisoner in the Sangamor tunnels.”

“I could provide you with an official denial of that, I suppose.”

“You could, but don’t put yourself to the bother. I had the story direct from Navigorn, who said Prestimion had made him the Procurator’s special custodian. Navigorn was pretty puzzled about that assignment, I can tell you. As were we all.—Shall we agree to accept it as a legitimate fact that Prestimion was in fact keeping Dantirya Sambail in the tunnels during the coronation and shortly afterward as well, presumably for some good and proper reason about which I am not at present making inquiries?”

“Be it so stipulated, Serithorn.”

“Good. Note that I used the past tense. Was keeping. The Procurator’s free now, isn’t he?”

“I do wish you’d address all these questions to Prestimion,” said Septach Melayn uncomfortably.

“Yes, I’m sure that you do.—Please, Septach Melayn. Stop trying to parry me at every step: this isn’t a duel. The fact is that Dantirya Sambail has escaped. And Prestimion’s somewhere between here and the Great Sea, yes, he and Gialaurys and Abrigant and a whole troop of soldiers, wandering around in the hope of recapturing him. Yes. Yes. I know that that’s so, Septach Melayn. No need to deny it. Now: forget that I ever asked you for details of the quarrel between Prestimion and the Procurator. Only confirm for me that there is a quarrel. They are in fact bitter enemies, is that not so?”

“Yes,” Septach Melayn said, with a nod and a slow sigh of resignation. “They are.”

“Thank you.” Serithorn took a folded paper from his robe. “If Prestimion hasn’t learned it already, I think it would be helpful to him for you to get word to him that he’s almost certainly looking in the wrong place.”

“Is he, now?” said Septach Melayn, eyes widening, though only for a moment.

Serithorn smiled. “I am, you know, a landowner of some considerable extent. I constantly receive reports from my estate managers in various parts of the world. This one comes from a certain Haigin Hartha, in Bailemoona city in the province of Balimoleronda. A very odd business, actually. A party of strange men—Haigin Hartha doesn’t say how many—was discovered poaching the gambilak herds on my lands outside Bailemoona. When my gamekeeper objected, one of the poachers told him that the meat was wanted on behalf of Dantirya Sambail, the Procurator of Ni-moya, who was making a grand processional in this region. Another of the poachers—am I boring you, Septach Melayn?”

“Hardly.”

“You seemed inattentive.”

“Thoughtful, rather,” said Septach Melayn.

“Ah. To continue, then: another of the poachers then struck the first one in the face, and said to my gamekeeper that the first man’s story was completely untrue, a sheer fantasy that the gamekeeper should wipe from his mind immediately, and that they were simply taking the meat on their own account. He offered my man fifty crowns in payment, and, since the alternative appeared to be to be murdered on the spot, the gamekeeper accepted the offer. The poachers went off with their catch. Later in the day, Haigin Hartha—he is my estate manager in Bailemoona, you will recall—heard from a friend that someone with the highly distinctive features of Dantirya Sambail had been seen that morning traveling with a group of men on the outskirts of Bailemoona city. My manager’s friend wondered whether Haigin Hartha might be expecting a formal visit from the Procurator at our estate, which, as you might expect, Haigin Hartha found a very unsettling idea. And then, no more than ten minutes later, the gamekeeper came in with his account of the poachers and the bribe. What do you make of all this, Septach Melayn?”

“It all seems clear enough. I wonder about the poacher who struck the other one, though. Whether he might have been tall and lean, with a death’s-head sort of face, all angles and planes and mean murderous dark eyes.”

“The Procurator’s poison-taster, is that the man you’re speaking of? A disagreeable piece of work, that one.”

“Mandralisca, yes. He’d be traveling with Dantirya Sambail.—Is there more to the story?”

“Nothing else. Haigan Hartha concludes his message by saying that he never heard from the Procurator one way or the other about a visit, and inquires as to whether he is supposed to expect one. Naturally, he is not. Why, I wonder, would a Procurator of Ni-moya be making a grand processional through Balimoleronda province, or any other place in Alhanroel?”

“Grand processional’s the wrong term, of course. He’s simply traveling privately through Balimoleronda on his way back from the Castle to Zimroel, I suppose.”

“From his imprisonment at the Castle?” asked Serithorn mildly. “He is, am I to understand, a fugitive on the run?”

“Terms like ‘imprisonment’ and ‘fugitive’ are ones that I wish you’d reserve for your conversations with Prestimion. But I can tell you, at least, that the Coronal is indeed trying to locate Dantirya Sambail. And, since Bailemoona is, as I recall, south of Castle Mount, Prestimion’s evidently not going to find him by going due east. I thank you on his behalf. Your report has been very useful.”

“I do try to be of help.”

“You have been. I’ll see to it that the Coronal is told of all this as quickly as possible.” Rising to his full considerable height, Septach Melayn stretched first his arms and then his legs, and said to Serithorn, “You’ll forgive me, I hope, for seeming restless. This has been a taxing day for me. Are there any other matters for us to discuss?”

“I think not.”

“I’m to the gymnasium, then, to work off the day’s stresses by belaboring some hapless new guardsman from Tumbrax with my saber.”

“A good idea. I’m going in that direction myself: shall I accompany you?”

They went out together. Serithorn, ever the soul of affability, provided Septach Melayn with a series of diverting gossipy tidbits as they made their way through the maze of the Inner Castle, past such ancient structures as the Vildivar Balconies and Lord Arioc’s Watchtower and Stiamot Keep, toward the Ninety-Nine Steps that led downward into the surrounding regions of the great amorphous conglomeration that was the Castle.

Their route brought them after a while near the awesomely unsightly pile of black stone that Prankipin, early in his days as Coronal, had inflicted on the Castle to serve as the office of the Ministers of the Treasury. As they approached it Septach Melayn caught sight of a curiously ill-matched pair coming toward the building from the opposite direction: a tall, strikingly handsome dark-haired woman, accompanied by a much shorter and stockier man who was elaborately overdressed in what seemed like a glittering parody of appropriate court costume, all sequins and flash and grotesquely intricate brocaded fabric. He, too, was of striking appearance, but in a very different way—inordinately ugly, with his most notable feature being the carefully coif-fed mountain of silver hair rising upright from his wide forehead.

It was no great task for Septach Melayn to recognize these two instantly: they were the financier Simbilon Khayf, no doubt on his way toward some maneuver of chicanery involving the Treasury, and his daughter Varaile. The last time he had seen them, some months back, it had been in Simbilon Khayf’s grand mansion in Stee, that time when he had been decked out in the coarse linen robes of a merchant, and had worn a brown wig and a false beard over his own golden hair, and had played the role of a country bumpkin to help Prestimion penetrate the mystery of that other and insane Lord Prestimion who was harassing the shipping of Stee. Septach Melayn was more grandly dressed today, in his true capacity of High Counsellor of the Realm. But after all the other complicated transactions of this day, he had no wish now to deal with the coarse and vulgar Simbilon Khayf. “Shall we turn to the left here?” he said quietly to Serithorn.

Too late. They were still fifty feet from Simbilon Khayf and his daughter, but the banker had spied them already and was shouting his greetings.

“Prince Serithorn! By all that’s holiest, Prince Serithorn, how splendid it is to see you again! And look! Look, Varaile, this is the great Septach Melayn, the High Counsellor himself! Gentlemen! Gentlemen! What a pleasure!” Simbilon Khayf came rushing toward them so hastily that he nearly tripped over his own brocaded robe. “You surely must meet my daughter, gentlemen! It’s her first visit to the Castle, and I promised her the sight of greatness, but I never imagined that we would so swiftly encounter this evening a pair of lords of the magnitude and significance of Serithorn of Samivole and the High Counsellor Septach Melayn!”

He thrust Varaile forward. Her eyes rose, up and up, toward those of Septach Melayn, and a little gasp of surprise escaped her lips. Softly she said, “Ah, but I believe we have already met.”

An awkward moment. “It is not the case, my lady. There must be some mistake!”

Her eyes did not leave his. And now she smiled. “I think not,” she said. “No. No. I know you, my lord.”

4

“And there we were,” Septach Melayn said, “right out in front of Lord Prankipin’s Treasury, her and me and Serithorn and that impossible simpering father of hers. Of course I denied any possibility that she and I could have had a previous meeting. It seemed the only thing to do.”

“And how did she react to that?” asked Prestimion.

They were in Prestimion’s private apartments in Lord Thraym’s Tower. It was Prestimion’s first day back from the east country. The long and fruitless journey had left him very weary; and he had barely had time to bathe and change his garments before Septach Melayn had come rushing in with his report on all that had taken place here in his absence. What a lot of stuff it was, too! This Hjort wizard of Abrigant’s who claimed to be able to turn trash into precious metal, for one, and then the alleged sighting of Dantirya Sambail down by Bailemoona, and Confalume apparently complaining that his Coronal was snubbing him, and new tales of widespread unrest and cases of greatly disturbed minds in this city and that.

Prestimion was hungry for more details on all of those things right away. And yet Septach Melayn seemed to be obsessed with this trivial episode involving the daughter of Simbilon Khayf.

“She knew I was lying,” he said. “That was easy enough to see. She kept staring at my eyes, and measuring my height against her own, and it was obvious that she was thinking, Where have I seen eyes like that before, and a man as tall and thin as this one is? Her mind could easily supply the wig and the false beard, and she’d have her answer. I thought for a moment she was going to hold her ground and insist that she knew me from somewhere. But her father, who may be coarse and vulgar but who’s very far from stupid, realized what was about to happen and obviously didn’t want his daughter to get involved in contradicting the High Counsellor to his face, and so he called her off. She was wise enough to take the hint.”

“For the moment, yes. But she suspects the truth, and that’s bound to lead to further complications.”

“Oh, she doesn’t just suspect the truth,” said Septach Melayn lightly. He smiled and made a graceful little two-handed flourish of his wrists. Prestimion knew that gesture of Septach Melayn’s very well. It meant that he had taken some unilateral action for which he was asking to be excused, but which he did not regret in any way. “I sent for her the next day and told her the tale of the whole masquerade straight out.”

Prestimion’s jaw gaped. “You did?”

“I had to. One simply can’t lie to a woman of that quality, Prestimion. And in any case she definitely hadn’t been fooled at all by my denials.”

“You told her who your two companions were also, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well done, Septach Melayn! Well done! What did she say, then, when she found out that she had entertained the Coronal of Majipoor, and the High Counsellor and the Grand Admiral too, in her father’s sitting-room?”

“Say? A little murmur of surprise. Turned very red. Looked quite flustered. And, I think, also amused and rather pleased about it all.”

“Was she, now? Amused! Pleased!” Prestimion rose and paced about, pausing by the window overlooking the airy bridge of shining pink agate, reserved for the Coronal’s use alone, that led across the Pinitor Court to the royal offices and the adjacent ceremonial rooms of Inner Castle. “I wish I could say the same. But I tell you, Septach Melayn, I find nothing very agreeable about the thought that Simbilon Khayf has been made aware that I was secretly sniffing around in Stee wearing some kind of comic-opera disguise and pretending to be a thick-headed peddler of business machines. What sort of use, I wonder, is he going to put that bit of information to?”

“None, Prestimion. He doesn’t know a thing about it, and he’s not going to find out.”

“No?”

“No. I made her promise not to tell her father a word.”

“And she’ll keep that promise, of course.”

“I think she will. I gave her a good price for her silence. She and Simbilon Khayf are going to be invited to the next court levee and formally presented to you. At which time he’ll be decorated with the Order of Lord Havilbove, or some such meaningless honor.”

A croaking sound of disbelief escaped from Prestimion.

“Are you serious? You’re actually asking me to permit that loathsome clown to set foot in the royal chambers? To let him come before the Confalume Throne?”

“I am always serious, Prestimion, in my way. Her lips now are sealed. The Coronal and his friends were having a little adventure in Stee, and no one needs to know about it, and she will abide by her part of the agreement if you abide by yours. As you sit upon the throne they’ll approach you reverently and make starbursts to you, and you’ll smile and graciously acknowledge their homage, and that will be that. For the rest of his life Simbilon Khayf will glow with rapture over having been received at court.”

“But how can I—”

“Listen to me, Prestimion. It’s a shrewd arrangement on three counts. The first is that you want our prank in Stee covered up, and this will accomplish that. The second is that Simbilon Khayf has been lending money to half the princes of the Castle, and sooner or later one of them looking for easier terms or an extension of a loan is going to feel impelled to wangle a court invitation on his behalf, which you will grant, even though you think Simbilon Khayf’s a despicable boor, because the request will come from somebody influential and useful like Fisiolo or Belditan or my cousin Dembitave. This way, at least, you give Simbilon Khayf the access to court that he’s bound to get anyway, eventually, under terms that are advantageous to yourself.”

Prestimion threw Septach Melayn a black look. But Septach Melayn’s argument had some logic to it, he conceded grudgingly, repugnant though it all was to him.—"And the third count? You said there were three.”

“Well, you want to see Varaile again, don’t you? Here’s your chance. She might as well be a million miles away, living down there in Stee. You may never visit Stee again in your life. But if she’s right here in residence at the Castle as one of the royal ladies-in-waiting, a position which you could readily offer her while chatting with her after the throne-room reception—”

“Wait a moment,” said Prestimion. “You move along a little too quickly, my friend. What makes you think I’m so eager to see her again?”

“But you do, isn’t that so? You found her very attractive while we were in Stee.”

“How would you know that?”

Septach Melayn laughed. “I’m not blind to such things, Prestimion. Or deaf, either. You couldn’t stop staring at her. The sound of your pupils dilating could be heard halfway across the room.”

“This is exceedingly impertinent, Septach Melayn. She’s a good-looking woman, yes. That’s obvious to anyone, even you. But for you to leap from there to the assumption that—that I’m—”

His voice trailed off into an incoherent sputter.

“Ah, Prestimion,” said Septach Melayn, smiling warmly at him from across the room. “Prestimion, Prestimion, Prestimion!” The look in his eyes was sly and knowing, and his tone was certainly not that of subject to monarch, nor even that of a High Counsellor to the Coronal he served, but the gentle, intimate one used between two friends who had seen in many a midnight together.

Prestimion felt the light-hearted rebuke. There was no way he could refute it. For he had stared at Varaile, that time in Stee, with intense fascination. Had responded to her beauty with an undeniable quiver of approbation. Of desire, even.

Had dreamed of her, and more than once.

“We are getting into a region,” said Prestimion after a considerable while, “where I’m uncertain of the meaning of my own feelings. I pray you, Septach Melayn, put this subject aside for now. What we need to discuss is this tale of Serithorn’s that has to do with the whereabouts of Dantirya Sambail.”

“Navigorn will give you the latest news of that. He’s on his way over right now.—You’ll permit Simbilon Khayf and his daughter to be received from the throne? I gave my word you would, you know.”

“Yes, Septach Melayn! Yes. Yes. So be it. Where’s Navigorn, now?”

“This is the district where he’s most likely to be,” said Navigorn. He had brought a map with him to the meeting, a hemiglobe of fine white porcelain overpainted in blue, yellow, pink, violet, dull green, and brown to indicate major geographical features. It was the sort of map that was equipped to display special information in bright patterns of light, and Navigorn brought that function to life now with a touch of his hand.

Points of red fire, connected by lines of brilliant green, sprang up on its face along the lower quadrant of the continent of Alhanroel. “Here’s Bailemoona, south of the Labyrinth and very slightly to the east,” he said, indicating the brightest of the red dots. “The sighting there was incontrovertible. Not only was someone who looks just like Dantirya Sambail seen in the vicinity of Serithorn’s estate around the time of the game-poaching, but one of the Procurator’s men told Serithorn’s gamekeeper that the meat he was stealing was being taken for the benefit of Dantirya Sambail.”

“There were plenty of incontrovertible sightings of him in the east country, too,” Abrigant pointed out. “All over the place, as a matter of fact. They were all planted by the Procurator’s sorcerers to fool us. What makes you think that this isn’t the same wizardy sort of stuff?”

Navigorn merely scowled. Prestimion looked in appeal toward Maundigand-Klimd, who said, “There’s no question the Procurator was in the east country for a time. I believe that he actually was seen by villagers in the Vrambikat district. But most of the reports that drew us onward were illusions born of enchantments and dreams, not genuine eyewitness sightings. While we ran hither and thither after them, he was doubling back into central Alhanroel, leaving us to chase fantasies of his making all over the wilderness area. The Bailemoona report, I think, is different: authentic.”

Abrigant looked unconvinced. “This is assertion without demonstration. You simply tell us that one set of reports was illusion and this other one is real. But you offer no proof.”

It was the left head of the Su-Suheris that had spoken before. Now the other head said calmly, “I have a certain gift of second sight. The Bailemoona reports have the ring of truth to me, and so I choose to give them credence. You are not obligated to agree.”

Abrigant began to make some grumbling reply; but Navigorn said, with a sharp note of testiness in his voice, “May I continue?” He traced a line with his hand over the illuminated places on the map. “There have been additional sightings, some of them more trustworthy than others—here, here, here, and here. You’ll note that the general direction is southerly. That’s the only sensible direction for him to go in anyway, because he’s got nothing to his north or west except the desert that surrounds the Labyrinth, not a useful choice, and he wouldn’t have anything to gain by going back into the east-country. But there’s a clear line of march here that’s taking him toward the southern coast.”

“What cities are those?” Abrigant asked, indicating the red dots strung like glowing beads along the lines of green that stretched southward across the land.

“Ketheron up here,” said Navigorn. “Then Arvyanda. This is Kajith Kabulon, where the rain never ceases falling. Once he makes his way through its jungles, he emerges on the southern coast, where he can get a ship heading toward Zimroel in any one of a hundred ports.”

“Which are the main ones?” Gialaurys asked.

“Due south of the rain-forest country,” Navigorn said, “we have Sippulgar, first. Continuing on westward along the coast from there, he would come to Maximin, Karasat, Gun-duba, Slail, and Porto Gambieris—this, this, this, this, and this.” He spoke in a brusque, commanding tone. He had prepared himself well for this meeting: a way of atoning, perhaps, for his negligence in allowing Dantirya Sambail to slip free in the first place. “Aside from Sippulgar, none of these has direct shipping connections with Zimroel, but in any of them, or their neighbors farther along the north shore of the Stoienzar peninsula, he could book a passage on a coasting vessel that would carry him up to Stoien city, to Treymone, even to Alaisor. In any of those he’d be able to arrange for the voyage across to Piliplok, and from there upriver to Ni-moya.”

“No, not so easily,” said Gialaurys. “You may recall that I’ve placed all ports from Stoien to Alaisor under close surveillance. There’s no way that anyone as unusual-looking as he is could slip past even the dullest-witted customs official. We’ll extend the blockade eastward now as far as Sippulgar. Farther, even, if you want me to, Prestimion.”

Prestimion, studying the map with care, made no immediate reply. “Yes,” he said, after a good deal of time had gone by. “I also think that we’d do well to set up military patrols along a line beginning just north of Bailemoona and running westward as far as Stoien city.”

“That is to say, along the route of the klorbigan fence,” said Septach Melayn, and began to laugh. “How very appropriate. For that’s what he is, isn’t he? Ugly as a klorbi-gan, and five times as dangerous!”

Prestimion and Abrigant began to laugh also. Gialaurys, looking vexed, said, “I pray you, what are you talking about here?”

“Klorbigans,” said Prestimion, still chuckling, “are fat, lazy, clumsy burrowing animals of south-central Alhanroel with great pink noses and enormous hairy feet. They live on bark and tree roots, and in their native district they eat only certain wild species that are of no use to anyone but themselves. About a thousand years ago, though, they began migrating north into the areas where the farmers grow stajja and glein, and they discovered that they liked the taste of stajja tubers every bit as much as we do. Suddenly there were half a million klorbigans digging up the stajja crop all over the middle of Alhanroel. The farmers couldn’t kill the beasts fast enough. Whoever was Coronal at that time finally hit on the idea of a special kind of fence that runs right along the middle of the continent. It’s just a couple of feet high, so any animal that’s even slightly less sluggish than a klorbigan can step right over it, but it goes down six or seven feet underground, which apparently keeps them from burrowing beneath it.”

“Lord Kybris, it was, who built it,” Septach Melayn said.

“Kybris, yes,” said Prestimion. “Well, we’ll build a klorbigan fence of our own, a patrol line without any breaks in it, so that if Dantirya Sambail decides to swing around once again and go north, he’ll be picked up in—” He paused in mid-sentence. “Navigorn? Navigorn, what’s the matter?”

Everyone stared. Big black-bearded Navigorn had turned away suddenly from his map and was doubled into a crouch, head bowed and arms clutching his middle, as if in some terrible racking spasm of pain. After a moment he raised his head, and Prestimion saw that Navigorn’s features were contorted into a horrifying grimace. Appalled, Prestimion signaled for Gialaurys and Septach Melayn, who were closest to him, to go to his aid. But Maundigand-Klimd acted first: the Su-Suheris lifted one hand and inclined his two heads toward each other, and something invisible passed between him and Navigorn, and within a moment the entire strange episode appeared to have ended. Navigorn was standing upright as though nothing at all had occurred, blinking the way one might after having dropped into an unexpected doze. His face was calm.—"Did you say something, Prestimion?”

“A very singular expression came over you, and I asked you what the matter was. It seemed you were having a seizure of some sort.”

“I was? A seizure?” Navigorn looked bewildered. “But I have no recollection of any such thing.” Then he brightened. “Ah! Then it must have happened again, without my knowing it!”

“Then this is something frequent with you?” asked Septach Melayn.

“It has occurred more than once,” said Navigorn, looking a little sheepish now. Plainly he was abashed to be making this admission of weakness. But he plunged forward even so. “Along with great headaches, yes, that come and go suddenly, so that I think my skull will split open. And terrible dreams, very often. I have never had dreams of such a sort before.”

“Will you tell us of them?” asked Prestimion gently.

It was a delicate thing, asking someone—a nobleman, a warrior at that—to reveal his dreams in such a group. But Navigorn said unhesitatingly, “I am on a battlefield, again and again, a great muddy field where men are dying on all sides and streams of blood run underfoot. Who among us has ever fought a pitched battle, my lord? Who ever will, on this peaceful world? But I am there, armed and armored, laying about me with my sword, killing with every stroke. I kill strangers and I kill friends too, my lord.”

“You kill me, perhaps? Septach Melayn?”

“No, not you. I don’t know who they are who fall to my sword. They are not people whose faces I can identify when I awaken and think back upon my dream. But as I lie dreaming I know that I am killing dear friends, and it sickens me, my lord. It sickens me.” Navigorn shivered, though the room was very warm. “I tell you, lordship, this dream comes to me over and over, sometimes three nights running, so that by now I fear closing my eyes at all.”

“How long has this been going on?” Prestimion asked.

Navigorn said, shrugging, “Days? Weeks? It’s not something I can easily reckon up.—May I be excused for a few minutes?”

Prestimion nodded. Flushed now and glossy with sweat, Navigorn went from the room. Prestimion said quietly to Septach Melayn, “Did you hear? A battle in which he kills his friends. This is one more thing for which I bear the guilt.”

“My lord, what guilt there is in this is Korsibar’s,” said Septach Melayn.

But Prestimion merely shook his head. Grim thoughts assailed him. Yes, the battle itself where so many had died had been of Korsibar’s making. Navigorn’s baffling dreams, though, his spasms of agony, his inner confusion long after the event, all of that was part of the new madness, and who was responsible for that if not Prestimion himself? This madness was something that his sorcerers had conjured upon the world at his behest, though he had not known it would happen.

Abrigant broke suddenly into Prestimion’s meditation while they waited for Navigorn to return. “Brother, will you be going down yourself into the south-country to look for the Procurator, as you went east?”

Prestimion was startled at that, because the thought had only just been forming in his own mind. But they were of one flesh, he and Abrigant, and often of the same mind as well. He said with a grin, “I might very well do that. It will need discussion before the full Council, of course. But his majesty the Pontifex has requested my presence at the Labyrinth, and he is right to so request; and as long as I’ve gone that far south, I’ll probably continue on toward Stoien in the hope of finding—”

“You speak of the full Council,” said Septach Melayn. “While Navigorn is out of the room, let me ask this, Prestimion : suppose some member of the Council—Serithorn, say, or my cousin Dembitave—demands from you outright to know why it is that Dantirya Sambail happens to be a fugitive whom you’re hunting from one end of Alhanroel to another? What would you say to him, then?”

“Simply that he has given grave offense against the law and against the person of the Coronal.”

“And you will offer no explanatory details of any sort?”

“I remind you, Septach Melayn, he is Coronal,” said Gialaurys irascibly. “He can do as he pleases.”

“Ah, no, good friend,” said Septach Melayn. “He is king, yes, but not a tyrant absolute. He’s subject to the decrees of the Pontifex as are we all, and he is accountable in some degree to the Council as well. Decreeing a great potentate like Dantirya Sambail to be a criminal, and giving no reason for it to his own Council—not even a Coronal can do that.”

“You know why he must,” Gialaurys said.

“Yes. Because there is one great fact that has been withheld from all the world, excepting only the five of us who are here, and Teotas who is not.” And Septach Melayn nodded toward Maundigand-Klimd and Abrigant, the two latecomers to the truth of what had happened that day at Thegomar Edge. “But we get deeper and deeper into equivocation and evasion and downright lying the longer we clutch that secret to our bosoms.”

“Let it be, Septach Melayn,” Prestimion said. “I have no answers for these questions of yours, except to say that if the Council presses me too far on the subject of Dantirya Sambail’s unspecified crimes, I will equivocate and evade. And, if necessary, lie. But I like none of this any better than you do.—And now Navigorn’s coming back, so put an end to it.”

Abrigant said, just as Navigorn was entering, “One further thing, brother: if you are going south into Aruachosia, I ask permission to accompany you part of the way.”

“Only part?”

“There is the place called Skakkenoir, which we discussed not long ago, where one can recover useful metals from the stems and leaves of the plants that grow there. It’s in the south, somewhere east of Aruachosia, perhaps even east of Vrist. While you hunt for Dantirya Sambail down there, I would go in search of Skakkenoir.”

In some amusement Prestimion said, “I see that nothing will turn you from this quest. But the metal-bearing plants of Skakkenoir are a wild fantasy, Abrigant.”

“Do we know that, brother? Allow me but to go and look.”

Again Prestimion smiled. Abrigant was a relentless force. “Let’s speak of this later, shall we, Abrigant? This is not the time.—Well, Navigorn, are you recovered? Here, have a bit of this wine. It’ll soothe your soul. Now, as I was just about to say at the moment when Navigorn became ill: the Pontifex Confalume has reminded me that I am long overdue to call upon him in his new residence, and therefore—”

That evening, just the two of them dining alone in the Coronal’s apartments, Septach Melayn said to Prestimion, “I see you wrestling with the matter of the great secret we keep, and I know how much anguish it gives you. How are we going to deal with this thing, Prestimion?”

They sat face-to-face in Prestimion’s private dining-alcove, a seven-sided elevated room separated from its surroundings by an ascent of seven steps made of solid beams of black fire-oak, and bedecked by embroidered hangings a thousand years old, silks of many colors interwoven with gold and silver threads, that depicted the sports of hunting and hawking.

“If I had an answer for that,” said Prestimion, “I would have given it to you this afternoon.”

Septach Melayn stared for a time at the grilled kaspok in his plate, a rare delicacy—a white fish of the northern rivers, with meat as sweet as fresh berries—that he had scarcely tasted. He took a sip of his wine, and then drank again, not a sip this time. “You wanted to heal the world’s pain, you told me, by wiping clean its memory of the war. To allow everyone a chance at a fresh start. Yes, all well and good. But this general madness that seems to have followed upon it—”

“I never anticipated that. I would never have called for the obliteration, if I could have seen that that would happen. You know that, Septach Melayn.”

“Of course I do. Do you think I’m holding you at fault?”

“You seem to be.”

“Not at all. Quite the opposite. The thing has happened, and I see you taking personal responsibility for it, and I see the effect that it’s having on you. Well, I say once again: what’s done is done. Leave off expending energy in guilt, and deal only with the challenges that we now face. You’ll harm yourself otherwise. When Navigorn had that fit today—”

“Listen to me,” Prestimion said. “I am responsible for the madness. And for everything else that has befallen the world since I took the throne, and everything that will happen throughout my life. I am Coronal, and that means, above all else, the burden of responsibility for the world’s destiny. Which I am prepared to bear.”

Septach Melayn attempted to speak, but Prestimion would not have it. “No. Hear me out.—Did you think I imagined that wearing the crown meant nothing more than grand processionals and splendid banquets and sitting here in the Castle’s opulent rooms amidst ancient draperies and statuary? When I made the decision at Thegomar Edge to cleanse the world of all awareness of the war, it was a hasty thing, and I see now that it may have been a poor choice. But it was my own decision for which I had valid reasons at the time and which still seems to me not altogether a misguided idea. Does that sound like a statement of a man tormented by guilt?”

“You used the word yourself only today. Do you remember? ‘This is one more thing for which I bear the guilt.’ ”

“A passing fancy, nothing more.”

“Not so passing. And not such a fancy, Prestimion. I see into your soul as readily as any magus. Each new report of the madness racks you with pain.”

“And if it does, is it worth ruining this fine dinner to tell me so? Pain fades with time. This kaspok was brought by swift couriers from the shores of Sintalmond Bay for your delectation and mine, and you allow that dainty piece offish to turn to old leather in your plate while you belabor me with all this. Eat, Septach Melayn. Drink. I assure you, I’m ready to live with whatever discomfort the consequences of my decision at Thegomar Edge will bring me.”

“All right,” said Septach Melayn. “Permit me to come to my true point, then. If you must live in pain, why do you condemn yourself to bearing that pain alone?”

Prestimion looked at him without comprehension. “What are you talking about? How am I alone? I have you. I have Gialaurys. I have Maundigand-Klimd to offer me wisdom and consolation, both heads of him. I have my two sturdy brothers. I have—”

“Thismet will not come back to life, Prestimion.”

Septach Melayn’s bold words struck Prestimion like a slap across the face.

“What?” he asked, after a stunned moment. “Does the madness have hold of you, now, that you talk such idiocy? Yes, Thismet is dead, and always will be. But—”

“Are you going to spend the rest of your life in mourning for her?”

“No one but you, Septach Melayn, would dare speak so close.”

“You know me well. And speak close I do.” There was no way to deflect the singleminded force of Septach Melayn’s intensely focused blue gaze. “You live in terrible solitude, Prestimion. There was a time, in those few weeks before Thegomar Edge, when you seemed full of new life and joy, as though some piece of you that long was missing had at last been put into place. That piece was Thismet. It was plain to us all at Thegomar Edge that we were destined to smash Korsibar’s revolt that day, because you were our leader, and you had taken on an aura of invincibility. And so it befell; but in the hour of victory Thismet was slain, and nothing has been the same for you ever since.”

“You tell me nothing that I do not already—”

Coronal or no, Septach Melayn coolly overspoke him. “Let me finish, Prestimion. Thismet died, and it was the end of the world for you. You wandered the battlefield as though you were the one that had lost the war, not as though you had fought your way through to the throne. You called for the memory-obliteration, as if you needed to hide the dark circumstances surrounding your ascent from all the universe, and who could speak against you in that moment? On the very day of your coronation I came upon you in despair in the Hendighail Hall, and you said things to me that no one would have believed if I had repeated them beyond us two: the kingship meant nothing to you, you said, except years and years of hard joyless work, and then some time in the grimness of the Labyrinth while waiting for your death. All this despair I credit to the loss of Thismet.”

“And if that’s so, what then?”

“Why, you have to put Thismet from your mind, Prestimion! By the Divine, man, don’t you see that you must give her up? You’ll always love her, yes, but loving a ghost brings chilly comfort. You need a living consort, one who will share the glories of your reign when all is going as it should, and hold you in her arms in the darkness of the other times.”

Septach Melayn’s fair skin was flushed now with the excitement of his own oratory. Prestimion stared at him in astonishment. This was presumption indeed. Septach Melayn was a uniquely privileged friend; only he in all the world could speak to him like this. But what he was saying now came near a breach of that privilege.

Containing himself with no little effort, Prestimion asked, “And you have a candidate in mind for the post, I suppose?”

“It happens that I do. The woman Varaile, of Stee.”

“Varaile?”

“You love her, Prestimion.—Oh, don’t start fulminating at me with protests! I saw it plain as day.”

“I’ve met her just once, for no more than an hour, while going under an assumed name and wearing false whiskers.”

“It took five seconds, no more, for the thing to happen between you. She struck as deep into your soul as a woodsman’s axe, and struck such sparks from you that it lit the entire room.”

“You think I’m made of metal within, then, that an axe will strike sparks against me? Or stone, perhaps.”

“There could be no mistaking it: she for you, and you for her.”

Prestimion found nothing here that he could deny. And yet it was outrageous to be invaded so intimately, even by Septach Melayn. He reached for the flask of wine that sat between them and held it contemplatively a long while with both his hands before refilling their bowls. At last he said, “What you propose is impossible. Varaile is a commoner, Septach Melayn, and her father is a gross and boorish beast.”

“You wouldn’t be marrying her father.—As for her, Coronals have married commoners many a time. I will get the history books and quote you examples, if you like. In any case, all aristocrats spring from common families, if only you go back far enough. I mean no offense, Prestimion, but is it not true that the princely family of Muldemar itself sprang from a line of farmers and vinters?”

“Ages ago, long before Lord Stiamot’s day, Septach Melayn. By the time he began to build this Castle we were already ennobled.”

“And you will hold your nose and make Simbilon Khayf a count or an earl—not the first grubby vulgar moneylender to be granted such a dignity, I think—and by so doing, you’ll be able to make his daughter a queen.”

It was a struggle now not to order Septach Melayn from the room. Prestimion fought for inner calmness, and found some, and his tone was a level one as he replied, “You amaze me, my friend. I concede the point that grieving forever over Thismet would be folly, and a Coronal does well to provide himself with a consort. But would you really marry me to a woman I’ve known less than an hour? The question of her common birth completely aside: I remind you again, Septach Melayn, that she and I are complete strangers to each other.”

“Which can readily be repaired. She’s in the Castle this very hour. Next week she comes before you at the royal reception. As has already been pointed out, if you ask her to join the ladies-in-waiting of the Castle, she’ll have no way to refuse. And then there’ll be ample opportunity for you and her to—”

The anger that had been not very far from the surface in Prestimion a moment before dissolved now in laughter. “Ah, I see it all! You’ve contrived the whole thing very carefully, haven’t you, by dangling that offer of a royal reception before them?”

“It was necessary to buy her silence, or Simbilon Khayf would have known who those three merchants were who came to him for a loan that day in Stee.”

“So you’ve said. I wonder if there might not have been some simpler way to manage all that.—In any case, Septach Melayn, let us make an end of this. I want you to understand that at the present time the idea of marriage is extremely distant from my mind. Is that clear?”

“All I ask is that you take the opportunity to get to know her a little better. Will you do that much?”

“It’s important to you that I do, I see.”

“It is.”

’Well, then. For your sake, Septach Melayn, I will. But don’t arouse any false hopes in her, my good friend. However much you may want me to, I’m not about to take a wife. If you yearn so much for there to be marriage festivities at the Castle, you can marry her.”

“If you choose not to,” said Septach Melayn airily, “then I will.”

5

It had been Lord Confalume’s custom, and Lord Prankipin’s before him, to hold invitational royal receptions on the second Starday of each month. Various prominent citizens of the realm were brought before the Coronal and honored with a moment or two of his attention. Prestimion, though he found the custom fatuous and even distasteful, was aware of its usefulness in forging the ties through which governance was achieved. A moment spent in the presence of a Coronal was something that would remain with a citizen for a lifetime; that person would always think of himself as affiliated in some way with the grandeur and power of that Coronal, and would feel enhanced by that, and profoundly grateful, and eternally loyal.

This was only the third such reception that Prestimion had been able to find time to hold since his accession. Since it was primarily an act of political theater, the royal levee needed careful staging and thorough rehearsal. Among other things, he had to spend an hour or two, the night before, going over the list of events with Zeldor Luudwid, the chamberlain in charge of such events, memorizing some flattering fact about each honoree. Then, on the day of the ceremony, at least an hour more was required for proper robing. He must look overwhelmingly regal. That meant not merely some costume in the traditional green and gold, the colors that symbolized to any viewer the office and the power of the Coronal. It meant elaborate over embellishment: varying combinations of fur mantles, silken scarves, stiff flaring epaulets, diadems and gems, all manner of frills and furbelows, this bit of trimming and that one being put on him and removed and put on him again until just the right mix of grandiosity was attained.

Today the basic costume was a high-waisted loose-fitting golden velvet doublet, paned at the chest in front and back to reveal the green silk shirt beneath. The doublet’s wide winged sleeves, similarly paned to the elbow, then close-fitting to the wrists, ended in turned-back lace cuffs partly concealed by handsome gauntlet gloves of crimson leather. His boots, of the same leather, were turned down to reveal green silk stockings.

The boots caused trouble, because they were padded in the sole to add two inches to his height. Prestimion had long ago come to terms with the fact that he was not as tall as many other men, and that mattered not at all to him. Indeed, he rarely gave it a thought. The artificial boosting that these boots provided was offensive to him, and he asked for them to be taken away and replaced by a normal pair. Only after a fifteen-minute delay was it determined that no unpadded boots of a color appropriate to the rest of his costume existed in his closet, and therefore he would have to begin the robing all over again with a doublet of a different shade of gold. Which brought a hot burst of anger from him, because it was too late to start doing that; and in the end he wore the padded boots, although it made him suddenly self-conscious to find himself looking at the world from a height two inches greater than usual.

On his brow, of course, was the grand starburst crown of Lord Confalume, that preposterous intricate confection of emeralds and rubies and purple diniabas and dazzling metal chasings, a thing that announced in a voice of thunder that its wearer was the properly anointed incarnation of the majesty of the realm. And on his chest rested the golden medallion that Confalume had given him at his coronation, with the signet seal of Lord Stiamot in its center. It was, ostensibly, a modern reproduction of the medallion that the Coronals of antiquity had worn. But in fact it was no such thing. Prestimion himself, in conspiracy with Serithorn and the late and no longer remembered Prince Korsibar, had invented the tale of the medallion out of thin air and designed a plausible-looking “reproduction” of the supposedly long-lost original as a gift for Lord Confalume to celebrate his fortieth year as Coronal. Now it had been passed onward to Prestimion himself, and would, he supposed, go marching on down through the centuries from Coronal to Coronal, revered and cherished. After a couple of hundred years it would probably be an unquestioned article of faith that the half-legendary Stiamot himself had worn this very one, an eon and a quarter ago. In such ways, he thought, are potent traditions born.

Lord Confalume also had bedecked the throne-room with the tripods and censers and astrological computing-machines of his court wizards, not because these devices played any part in the official ceremonies of the court, but simply because in his later years he had come to like having such things about him. But Prestimion was a less credulous man than Confalume. He was well enough aware, in a calculating way, of the value and uses of sorcery in modern-day Majipoor, but he had never managed to arrive at a completely comfortable acceptance of the way the public had embraced so much that was mere superstition and chicanery.

Therefore he had banned all of Confalume’s implements of magic from the room. But he did permit a magus or two to be on hand for his receptions, if only to gratify public taste. If they needed to believe that he ruled not just by the grace of the Divine but also with the aid of whichever demons, spirits, or other supernal powers the people of Majipoor currently held in high esteem, he would not deny that to them.

Maundigand-Klimd was the magus on duty today—a Su-Suheris was always valuable for instilling awe—and, at Septach Melayn’s special request, so also were two geomancers from Tidias, complete with their tall brass helmets and shining metallic robes. Lord Confalume had brought them to the Castle in his time, along with a great host of others of their profession, and they all still seemed to be here and on the public payroll, although they had no official function in the administration of the new Coronal. Apparently these two had complained of their idleness to Septach Melayn, a man of Tidias himself; and so they were here, standing sternly on either side of Maundigand-Klimd, impressive brass-helmeted symbols of the realm of supernatural forces that existed side by side with the visible world that was everyday Majipoor. They were not, though, permitted to utter invocations or draw their invisible lines of power on the floor or burn their colored powders of mystic virtue. They were mere decorations, like the clustered masses of moonstones and tourmalines and amethysts and sapphires that Lord Confalume, when he had this room built, had caused at enormous expense to be inserted into the gigantic gilded beams of the ceiling.

“Your lordship,” said the major-domo Nilgir Sumanand. “It’s time for the reception.”

So it was. Prestimion left his robing-chamber and made his way, awkward in his thick-soled boots, through the hallways of the ancient myriad-roomed Castle that he had inherited from his multitude of royal predecessors. He would, he knew—eventually, in the fullness of his years—place his own imprint on the Castle of the Coronal. It was the tradition, after all, for each ruler to make his own additions and modifications.

The series of minor rooms that lay between the robing-chamber and the Confalume throne-room, for instance, seemed like a poor employment of the space they occupied. He had it in mind to clear them all away and construct a great judgment-hall next to the throne-room itself, something huge and grand, with crystal chandeliers and windows of frosted glass. An austere but imposing chapel nearby for the private reflections of the Coronal might be worthwhile, too. The present one was an awkward little afterthought of a room with no architectural merit whatever. And outside the central core, perhaps over by the watchtower of lunatic design that Lord Arioc of long ago had built, Prestimion wanted to erect a museum of Majipoori history, an archive containing memorabilia of the world’s long past, where future Coronals could study the achievements of their predecessors and contemplate their own high intentions. But all that was for the future. His reign had only just begun.

Unsmiling, looking neither to left nor right, walking stiffly in an attempt to avoid tripping over his own troublesome boots, he entered the throne-room, solemnly inclined his head as his subjects greeted him with starbursts, and ascended the many steps of the mahogany pedestal atop which the throne itself was set.

Solemnly. That was the key. He knew better than anyone what empty mummery such a spectacle as this really was. Its prime and perhaps only purpose was to awe the credulous. Yet for all his intelligence and sophistication and that touch of irreverence that he hoped he would never lose, Prestimion was more than somewhat awed by it too. A Coronal must believe his own mummery, he knew, or the people never would.

And that faith in the grandeur and might of the Coronal Lord, rooted in this very pageantry, this showy business of robes and thrones and crowns, had had much to do, he was certain, with the general tranquility and prosperity of this great world over the thirteen thousand years since humans first had come to settle on it. The Coronal was the embodiment of the whole world’s hopes and fears and desires. All of that had now been entrusted to the care of Prestimion of Muldemar, who understood only too well that he was human and mortal, but must nevertheless conduct himself as though he were much more than that. If for the sake of the public good he must don ornately fanciful green-and-gold robes and sit with solemn face upon a gigantic gleaming block of black opal shot through with veins of blood-scarlet ruby, so be it: he would play his part as he was expected to do.

To his left, as he took the throne, stood the chamberlain Zeldor Luudwid, with a table beside him on which the decorations to be handed out today were piled. A little farther on was Maundigand-Klimd, who was flanked to right and left, as though they were bookends, by the two Tidias geomancers. On the other side of the throne were a couple of secondary chamberlains—two massive Skandars who were huge even as Skandars went—carrying great staffs of office. Prestimion caught sight of Septach Melayn in the shadows just beyond, studying him thoughtfully. For the High Counsellor to attend a levee was a bit unusual; but Prestimion had a good idea of why Septach Melayn had showed up here today.

For there was Simbilon Khayf out there, plainly visible among the multitude of citizens who would be presented to the Coronal this day—that rigid pile of glittering silver hair was unmistakable—and there was the lady Varaile, tall and stately and beautiful, at her father’s side. And Septach Melayn—damn him!—was here, Prestimion realized, to supervise her meeting with the Coronal.

“His lordship the Coronal Prestimion welcomes you to the Castle,” Zeldor Luudwid intoned grandly, “and bids you know that he has studied your attainments and achievements with care and regards each of you as an ornament of the realm.”

It was the standard greeting. Prestimion, only half listening, nevertheless adopted a pose of seeming attentiveness, sitting staunchly upright and looking serenely outward at the waiting crowd. He took care, though, not to let his eyes fasten on anyone in particular. He aimed his gaze well above their heads, so that it rested on the glowing tapestry on the far wall, the one depicting Lord Stiamot receiving the homage of the conquered Metamorphs.

Idly he wondered, not for the first time, how many thousands of royals Confalume had expended while he was Coronal in the course of creating the fabulous throne-room that bore his name. Prestimion made a mental note to search the archives some day for the exact amount. Probably it was more than Stiamot had spent to build the original Castle in the first place. It had taken years to construct this high-vaulted room, with its gem-encrusted beams covered with hammered sheets of pale-red gold, its spectacular tapestries, its floor of costly yellow gurnawood. The throne alone must surely have cost a fortune—not just for that colossal block of black opal of which it was fashioned, but for the stout silver pillars beside it and the great canopy of gold, inlaid with blue mother-of-pearl, that those pillars supported, and for the starburst symbol above all the rest, made of white platinum tipped by spheres of purple onyx.

But of course the money had been there for Confalume to spend. Majipoor had never known such a time of affluence and general well-being as it had in his reign.

Much of that was due to good luck: a general absence, for many decades now, of droughts, floods, great storms, and other natural disasters. But also the former Coronal—building on the work of his predecessor, Lord Prankipin—had promulgated a sharp cut in taxation, with immediate benefits, and had gone to great lengths to seek out and extirpate ancient and foolish trade restrictions that were holding back the free flow of goods from one province to another. He had acted in many other ways to eliminate all manner of unneeded regulatory impediments, also. In this he had had the valuable support of Dantirya Sambail, who as Procurator of Ni-moya had come over the years to rule the lesser continent of Zimroel virtually as a king in his own right. Many of those ancient trade regulations had originally been enacted to protect the interests of Zimroel against the older and more fully developed continent of Alhanroel. But Dantirya Sambail understood that all those obsolete restrictions were by now doing more harm than good and had raised no objection to striking them from the books. As a result there had been an enormous worldwide increase in productivity and in the general welfare of all.

From Prestimion’s point of view that was both good and bad. He had been given the throne of a wondrously thriving realm, and though it was necessary now to cope with the damage that the civil war had done and the fact that Dantirya Sambail had ceased to be an agent for the general good and had become an obstacle to its continuation, Prestimion was confident that both of those problems could be dealt with quickly enough. They had better be. His name would be cursed forever if during the years ahead he failed to sustain the level of prosperity that had been reached in the time of Lord Confalume.

One by one the day’s chosen ornaments of the realm, whose attainments and achievements the Coronal had studied with such care, were summoned to the throne to be acknowledged for all that they had done.

No members of the titled nobility were here today. The aristocracy received its rewards in other ways. The group now gathered before the Coronal was made up of humbler folk: elected officials of cities or provinces, and an assortment of businesspeople, and farmers who had in one noteworthy fashion or another advanced the state of agriculture; and also artists and writers, stage performers, athletes, even a scholar or two.

Usually Prestimion was able to call from his memory the reason why each of them was being honored in this day’s ceremony, or to guess it from some phrase of the introductions that Zeldor Luudwid provided. Where he could not come up with anything specific, he was always able, at least, to make some general remark that passed as appropriate. Thus, when the mayor of Khyntor in Zimroel came forward to be acclaimed for some undoubtedly significant municipal accomplishment, Prestimion had no recollection at all of what it was the good woman had done, but it was not a difficult matter for him to hold forth with great vigor on the famous bridges of Khyntor, those remarkable engineering feats, miraculously spanning the stupendous width of the River Zimr, that any child on Majipoor would have known something about. When a soul-painter from Sefarad who had done a celebrated series of canvasses depicting the tide-pools of Varfanir approached the throne, Prestimion realized that he had confused the man with another soul-painter famous for his portraits of ballerinas, and was not sure which was the tide-pool man and which the connoisseur of the dance. He offered, instead, a brief discourse on the marvels of soul-painting itself, speaking of the fascination he had for that medium, in which artists imprinted their visions on cunningly prepared psychosensitive fabric, and expressed his hope to do a little soul-painting himself one day when the cares of government permitted him the leisure to master the art. And so forth: one deft little speech after another, graceful, well turned, kingly, after which Zeldor Luudwid presented the honoree with the appropriate insignia of distinction, a bright riband or sparkling medallion or something of the like, and gently sent him back to his seat, pleasantly dazed by his encounter with greatness.

Simbilon Khayf was one of the last to be presented. For him, of course, Prestimion had no problems of memory. He spoke first of the importance of such private banks as Simbilon Khayf’s in stimulating the growth of entrepreneurial industry on Majipoor, and then turned easily to a synopsis of Simbilon Khayf’s own great achievement in rising from the humble ranks of the factory-workers of Stee to his present eminence in the world of finance. Simbilon Khayf’s eyes did not leave Prestimion’s as the Coronal delivered his encomium; and once again Prestimion wondered whether this shrewd, unpleasant man might somehow have succeeded in linking the crowned king high atop the throne before him with the bewhiskered merchant who had come to him at his mansion in Stee seeking a loan.

But Simbilon Khayf betrayed no such awareness. Throughout the entire time of his audience with the Coronal his face wore an unvarying expression of frozen humility and awe; and when he accepted from Zeldor Luudwid the golden wreath of the Order of Lord Havilbove and muttered his thanks, his voice was thick and husky with emotion and his hands were trembling, as though he was barely able to withstand the immense importance of the honor that had been bestowed upon him.

After the ceremony the Coronal always held a more casual reception in one of the adjacent rooms for the recipients of the more important decorations. Here, now, Prestimion knew, would come the triumphal moment of Septach Melayn’s stage-managing. For those who had been awarded the Order of Lord Havilbove were entitled to attend the second reception. Inevitably Prestimion would find himself confronting Simbilon Khayf and his daughter once again, in circumstances where conversations of an extended sort would be hard to avoid. Impossible, actually.

Which must have been precisely what Septach Melayn had had in mind.

Smoothly and swiftly Prestimion moved through the crowded room, exchanging a brief word with each of his guests. The unnaturally thick soles of his boots hampered him only a little, though it was odd to feel so tall. After a time he could see the uncouth spire of Simbilon Khayf’s hair just ahead of him in his direct path. Varaile, oddly, did not seem to be anywhere near her father; but then Prestimion caught sight of her on the other side of the room, speaking with Septach Melayn.

The merchant banker still seemed overwhelmed by it all: He barely managed to make sense as he blurted out a little stammering speech of gratitude for the Coronal’s kindness in inviting him here today, which turned, after a moment or two, into a rambling and disjointed speech, accompanied by much heavy breathing and floridity of face, in praise of his own accomplishments. All perfectly in character, a flustered combination of high self-approbation and extreme insecurity. The banker’s wayward performance bolstered Prestimion’s feeling that the likelihood of Simbilon Khayf’s having guessed the connection between his bearded visitor in Khayf and the Coronal before whom he now stood was not very great. And plainly Varaile had not violated her promise to Septach Melayn to keep the truth about that to herself.

Simbilon Khayf’s huffing and puffing went on and on and on. Prestimion detached himself finally and moved along through the throng; but it was ten minutes more before he came to Varaile.

Their eyes met and for him it was just as it had been before, that other time in her father’s house in Stee: that disquieting tingle of electric connection, that quiver of excitement, of uncertainty, of confusion. And for her, too, of that he was certain: he saw the quick flaring of her nostrils, the brief quirking of the corners of her mouth, the sudden darting of her eyes from side to side, the flush slowly spreading over her flawless features.

This is no illusion, he thought. This is something very real.

But it passed quickly. In a flash, she was cool and calm and self-possessed again, the very model of a well-bred young woman who has no doubt of how to conduct herself in the presence of her king. As poised and proper as her father had been gauche and jumpy, she hailed him with the appropriate deference, making the starburst gesture to him and thanking him simply but warmly, in that deep, wondrously musical voice of hers that he remembered so well from Stee, for the great honor he had conferred upon her father. By the nature of the occasion nothing further was called for in this situation. It would have been easy enough now for Prestimion to acknowledge her gratitude with a quick impersonal word or two and move along to the next guest.

But he saw Septach Melayn standing to one side with folded arms, watching keenly, smiling slyly, and knew that his friend occupied the position of power in this. The master duelist had backed him into a corner. Septach Melayn did not intend to permit him any sort of facile and cowardly escape.

Varaile was waiting, though. Prestimion searched his mind for the right words—something that would bridge the immense gap between Coronal and subject that separated him from her now and transform this into a normal conversation between a man and a woman. Nothing came. He wondered if such a conversation would even be possible. He had no idea of what to say. He had been trained since boyhood to conduct himself effectively in any kind of diplomatic situation; but his training had not prepared him for anything like this. He stood before her mute and incapable.

And in the end it was Varaile who rescued him. In the midst of his frozen silence her cool and formal pose of reverent deference began to give way, ever so subtly, to something warmer and less stiff: a hint of amusement in her eyes, the merest trace of a playful smile on her lips, a tacit affirmation that she saw the comic nature of their present predicament. That was all it took. Immediately there was that unquestionable current of connection running between them again, sudden, startling, intense.

Prestimion felt a flood of relief and delight.

It was difficult for him to maintain his own sternly regal posture while all of that was passing through him. He allowed a certain softening of his stance, a relaxation of his official face, and she took her cue from it. Quietly she said, looking straight into his eyes as she had not dared to do a moment before, and speaking in the most casual, informal tone, “You’re taller now than you were in Stee. Your eyes were on a level with mine, then.”

It was a gigantic leap across the boundaries that separated them. And instantly, as though recoiling in consternation at her own boldness, she drew back with a little gasp, pressing her fingertips to her mouth. They were monarch and subject once again.

Was that what he wanted? No. No. Absolutely not. So now it was Prestimion’s turn to put her at her ease, or the moment would be lost. “It’s these idiotic boots,” he said, smiling. “They’re supposed to make me look more imposing. You won’t ever see me in them again, I assure you.”

At once the mischief was back in her eyes. “The boots, no. But will I ever see you again?”

Septach Melayn, against the wall a dozen feet behind her, was nodding and beaming in delight.

“Do you want to?” Prestimion asked.

“Oh—my lord—oh, yes, my lord—”

“There’s a place for you at court if you want it,” said Prestimion. “Septach Melayn will arrange for it. I’ll have to pay a visit to the Labyrinth soon, but perhaps we can dine together after I return to the Castle. I’d like to get to know you much better.”

“That would give me great pleasure, my lord.” The tone this time was a mixture of formality and eagerness. A slight tremor in it betrayed her confusion. For all her innate poise, she had no real idea of how to handle what was unfolding now. But neither did he. Prestimion wondered what it was, exactly, that Septach Melayn had said to her about his intentions. He wondered, too, just what those intentions were.

And this present conversation had gone on much too long. Septach Melayn was not the only one watching them now.

“My lord?” she said, as he bade her a formal farewell and began to move away.

“Yes, Varaile?”

“My lord, was that really you, that time at our house in Stee?”

“Do you have any doubt of that?”

“And just why was it, may I ask, that you came?”

“To meet you,” he said, and knew there would be no turning back from there.

6

The Labyrinth of Majipoor was a joyless place at best: a huge underground city, level upon level descending into the depths of the planet, with the hidden lair of the Pontifex at its deepest point, at the level farthest from the warming rays of the sun.

Prestimion had experienced some of the blackest moments of his life here.

It was in the great hall of the Labyrinth known as the Court of Thrones that Korsibar, in the moment of the announcement of the death of the Pontifex Prankipin, had carried out his astounding seizure of the starburst crown that was to have been Prestimion’s, right before Prestimion’s eyes and those of the highest figures of the realm.

And it was in the suite of rooms set aside for the Coronal’s use at the Labyrinth that Prestimion had come before Korsibar’s father, Lord Confalume, who had now become the Pontifex Confalume, to demand of him the throne that Confalume had promised to him; and had heard from the bewildered and broken Confalume that nothing could be done, that the usurpation was an irrevocable act, that Korsibar was Coronal now and Prestimion must slink away to make whatever he could out of his life without further hope of attaining the throne. Confalume had wept, then, when Prestimion had pressed him to take action against this out-rage—Confalume, weeping! But the Pontifex was paralyzed by fear. He dreaded a bloody civil war, which would certainly be the outcome of any challenge to Korsibar, too greatly to want to set himself in opposition to his son’s amazing and unlawful act. The thing is done, Confalume had said. Korsibar holds the power now.

Well, the thing that had been done had now been undone, and Korsibar had been blotted from existence as though he had never been, and Prestimion was Lord Prestimion now, returning in glory to this place from which he had crept away in shame and defeat. No one but he and Gialaurys and Septach Melayn knew anything of the dark events that had taken place in the subterranean metropolis in the days immediately after the death of the Pontifex Prankipin. But the Labyrinth was full of painful memories for him. If he could have avoided this journey, he would have. He had no wish to see the Labyrinth again until the day—let it be far in the future, he hoped!—when Confalume at last was dead and he himself must take up the title of Pontifex.

Staying away from the Labyrinth entirely, though, was impossible. The new Coronal must present himself, early in the reign, to the Pontifex from whom he had received his throne.

Here he was, then.

Confalume awaited him.

“Your journey was a pleasant one, I hope?”

“Fair weather all the way, your majesty,” Prestimion said. “A good breeze carrying us southward down the Glayge.”

They had had the introductory formalities, the embraces and the feasting, and now it was just the two of them together in quiet conversation, Pontifex and Coronal, emperor and king, nominal father and adoptive son.

The river route was what Prestimion had taken to get here: the usual one for a lord of the Castle who was making a visit to the Labyrinth. He had traveled aboard the royal barge down the swift, wide Glayge, which rose in the foothills of the Mount and made its way south through some of the most fertile provinces of Alhanroel to the imperial capital. All along the river’s banks the populace had been assembled to cheer him on his way: at Storp and Mitripond, at Nirnivan and Stangard Falls, Makroposopos and Pendiwane and the innumerable towns along the shores of Lake Roghoiz, and the cities of the Lower Glayge beyond the lake, Palaghat and Terabessa and Grevvin and all the rest. Prestimion had made this journey in reverse not many years before, returning from the Labyrinth to the Castle after the usurpation, and a far more somber trip it had been, too, with banners portraying the newly proclaimed Lord Korsibar fluttering in his face at every port. But that was then, and this was now, and as he went past each city the cry of “Prestimion! Prestimion! All hail Lord Prestimion!” echoed in his ears.

There were seven entrances to the Labyrinth; but the one that Coronals used was the Mouth of Waters, where the Glayge flowed past the huge brown earthen mound that was the only part of the Labyrinth visible aboveground. Here, a line so sharp that a man could step across it in a single stride marked the division between the green and fertile Glayge Valley and the lifeless dusty desert in which the Labyrinth lay. Here Prestimion knew he must put behind him the sweet breezes and soft golden-green sunlight of the upper world and enter into the mysterious eternal night of the underground city, the sinister descending coils of its densely populated levels, the hermetic and airless-seeming realm far below that was the home of the Pontifex.

Masked officials of the Pontificate were on hand to greet him at the entrance, with the Pontifex’s pompous white-haired cousin, Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, at the head of the group in his new capacity as High Spokesman to the Pontifex. The swift shaft reserved only for Powers of the Realm took Prestimion downward, past the circular levels where the Labyrinth’s teeming millions of population dwelled, those who served the Pontifical bureaucracy and those who simply performed the humble tasks of any great city, and onward to the deeper zones where the Labyrinth’s famed architectural wonders lay—the Pool of Dreams, the mysterious Hall of Winds, the bizarre Court of Pyramids, the Place of Masks, the inexplicable gigantic empty space that was the Arena, and all the rest—and with breathtaking swiftness delivered him to the imperial sector, and to the Pontifex. Who immediately dismissed his entire entourage from the room, even Oljebbin. Prestimion’s meeting would be with Confalume alone.

Nor was the Confalume who faced him now the Confalume that Prestimion was expecting to see.

He had feared that he would find the feeble ruined hulk of a man, the sorry and dismal remnant of the great Confalume of yore. The beginning of that collapse had already been in evidence at their last meeting. The Confalume with whom he had that fruitless, despondent meeting in the grim aftermath of the thunderbolt force of Korsibar’s power-grab, the man who had wept and trembled and begged most piteously to be left in peace, had been only a shadow of the Confalume whose forty-year reign as Coronal had been marked by triumph after triumph.

Although the later obliteration of specific knowledge of the usurpation and the civil war that had ensued would have spared Confalume from the grief he felt over his son’s actions, there was no reason to think he would ever recover from the damage that had been inflicted on his spirit. Even at Prestimion’s coronation, with the whole Korsibar event now relegated to oblivion, Confalume had seemed little more than an empty shell, still physically strong but befuddled of mind, haunted by phantoms whose identity he could not begin to understand. And, according to Septach Melayn, who had met with the legate Vologaz Sar during Prestimion’s absence in the east-country, the Pontifex now was still a greatly troubled man, confused and depressed, plagued by sleeplessness and nebulous free-floating distress.

And so Prestimion had thought that that charismatic Confalume of old surely would be gone, that he would meet a frail trembling man who stood at the edge of the grave. It was frightening to think that Confalume might not have much longer to live, for Prestimion himself had hardly commenced his own reign. He was far from ready to be pulled away from the Castle prematurely in order to immure himself in the dark pit that was the Labyrinth, although that was a risk that any Coronal faced when he succeeded one who had held his Castle throne as long as Confalume had.

But it was a Confalume reborn and revivified to whom Prestimion presented himself now in the Court of Thrones, that hall of black stone walls rising to pointed arches where Pontifex and Coronal were meant to sit side by side on lofty seats—the very place in which Korsibar had staged his coup-d’état. Here before him was Confalume, and he seemed to be the robust and forceful man Prestimion remembered from former days: jaunty and erect in the scarlet-and-black Pontifical robes, with a miniature replica of the ornate Pontifical tiara glittering bravely on one lapel and the little golden rohilla, the astrological amulet that he was so fond of wearing, mounted on the other. Nothing about him had the aspect of imminent death. When they embraced, it was impossible not to be impressed by the strength of the man.

Confalume was himself again, rejuvenated, thriving. He had always been a man of tremendous physical vigor, not tall but powerfully built, with keen gray eyes and a full thick sweep of hair that had maintained its chestnut hue far into his later years. In any gathering at the Castle, the former Lord Confalume had automatically been the center of attention, not solely because he was Coronal, but because there emanated from him such personal magnetism, such a potent pull of inherent force, that you could not help but turn toward him. And clearly more than a vestige of that Confalume still remained. That innate vigor of his had pulled him through the crisis. Good, Prestimion thought. He felt a tide of immense relief go flooding through him. But at the same time he realized that he would be dealing now not with a shattered, weary old man to whom he could say whatever he thought most useful, but rather with one who had spent better than forty years on the Coronal’s throne, and who understood the wielding of high power better than anyone else in the world.

“You look well, majesty. Remarkably well!”

“You seem surprised, Prestimion.”

“I had heard rumors of a troubled mood—restlessness, difficulty sleeping—”

“Pah! Rumors, nothing more. Fables. I had a few hard moments at the beginning, perhaps. There’s a necessary period of adjustment, coming down from the Castle to live in this place, and I won’t pretend that that part’s easy. But it passes; and then you feel quite at home here.”

“Do you, then?”

“I do. And you should take comfort from it. There’s never been a Coronal yet who hasn’t been appalled by the necessity of moving along eventually to the Labyrinth. And why not? To wake each morning in the Castle, and look out at that great airy expanse all around, and to be able to descend from the Mount whenever you please to go wherever you like, Alaisor or Embolain or Ketheron if the whim takes you, or Pidruid or Narabal, for that matter—all the while knowing that one of these days the old emperor’s going to wake up dead, and when that happens they’re going to come for you and ship you down the Glayge to this place and point nine miles straight down and say, Here’s your new home, Lord So-and-So—” The Pontifex smiled. “Well, it’s not all that terrible to be here, let me assure you. It’s different. Restful.”

“Restful?” That hardly seemed the word for this sunless cheerless place.

“Oh, yes. There’s definitely something to say for the seclusion, for the peace and quiet of it. No one can even speak to you directly, you know, no one but your Spokesman and your Coronal. No pestilent petitioners plucking at your sleeve, no crowds of ambitious lordlings flocking around hoping for favors, no backbreaking journeys to undertake across thousands and thousands of miles because your Council has decided that it’s time to show your face in some distant province. No, Prestimion, you sit down here in your cozy underground palace, and they bring you legislation to read and you glance at it and say yes or no or maybe, and they take it away and you no longer have to give it a thought. You’re young and full of vitality, and you can’t begin to comprehend the merits of being sequestered in the Labyrinth. I admit that I felt the same way, thirty years ago. But you’ll see. Have yourself forty-odd years as Coronal, as I did, and I promise you you’ll be more than ready for the Labyrinth, and no anguish about it at all.”

A forty-year reign as Coronal? Well, there was no probability of that, Prestimion knew. Confalume was past seventy already. A decade or so at the Castle was about the best the new Coronal could hope for, and then he would find himself Pontifex. But the older man seemed sincere in what he was saying, and there was great comfort in that.

“No doubt all you tell me about life in the Labyrinth is true,” Prestimion said, smiling. “I’m quite willing to wait forty years to find out, though.”

Confalume looked pleased. His return to something approaching his old strength was neither a pretense nor an illusion, Prestimion realized. Confalume seemed rejuvenated, brimming with life, settling in for a long stay in his strange new home.

He filled their wine-bowls with his own hand—for once, no oversolicitous servants were lurking about—and swung around in his seat to face Prestimion. “And you?” he said. “Not overwhelmed, are you, by all your new tasks?”

“So far I hold my own, your majesty. Although it’s been a busy time.”

“It must have been, yes. I hear so little from you. You leave me in the dark, you know, about all the affairs of the realm, and that’s not so good.”

It was said very pleasantly, but there was no mistaking the implicit sting of the words.

Prestimion’s reply was a cautious one. “I realize, sir, that I’ve been remiss in reporting to you. But there’s been a great many problems to take care of all at once, and I wanted to be able to come to you with some evidence of real progress to show.”

“Problems such as what?” the Pontifex asked.

“Dantirya Sambail, for one.”

“The bloody Procurator, yes. But he’s all noise and no push, is that not so? What’s he been up to?”

“Contemplating setting up a separate kingdom for himself in Zimroel, apparently.”

Confalume’s hand leaped as if of its own accord to the rohilla in his lapel and rubbed it in a counterclockwise way. He gave Prestimion an incredulous stare. “Are you serious? And is he? Where is he now? Why haven’t I been told of any of this?”

Prestimion stirred uneasily in his seat. They were entering into perilous territory here. “I was waiting, sir, until I could interrogate the Procurator myself about his intentions. He was at the Castle for a time"—that was true enough—“but then he left, supposedly on a journey into the east country.”

“Why would he go there?”

“Who can know any reason for anything Dantirya Sambail does? At any rate, I gathered a small force and went out there after him.”

“Yes,” said the Pontifex tartly. “So I understand. You might have informed me of that, too.”

“Forgive me, sir. I’ve been remiss in many ways, I see. But I assumed your own officials would notify you of my departure from the Castle.”

“As they did, yes.—Dantirya Sambail eluded you in the east-country, apparently.”

“He’s in southern Alhanroel now, and intends, I assume, to take ship shortly for his homeland. When I leave here, I’ll be going down toward Aruachosia to try to seek him out.” Prestimion hesitated a moment. “The Grand Admiral has blockaded the ports.”

Confalume’s eyes flashed surprise. “What you’re telling me, then, is that you regard the most powerful man in the world, other than yourself and me, as a dangerous threat to the integrity of the realm. Am I correct? That he has eluded your attempts to take him into custody. That he is currently a fugitive running hither and thither around Alhanroel as he seeks to get back overseas. What is it we have here, Prestimion, a civil war in the making? Over what? Why should the Procurator suddenly be talking about setting up an independent government? He’s been content with the present power-sharing arrangements all these years. Is it that he looks upon the new regime as weak, and feels safe in making his move? By the Divine, he won’t succeed at it!—You’re his kinsman, Prestimion. How can he dare think of launching an uprising against his own kin?”

He already has launched one, Prestimion thought, which has been fought and settled at a terrible cost, and the world will never be the same for it. But it was impossible for him to speak of that in any way. And Confalume’s face had grown troublesomely red with rage.

This topic had to be put quickly to rest.

Calmly Prestimion said, “These rumors may all be overblown, sir. I need to find Dantirya Sambail and discover from him myself whether he feels that his present high position is insufficiently eminent. And if he does, I’ll convince him, I assure you, that he’s mistaken. But there’ll be no civil war.”

The Pontifex appeared to be satisfied by that reply. He busied himself with his wine for a time; and then he began to question Prestimion quickly about other matters of state, moving with great efficiency from one subject to another, the rebuilding of the dam on the Iyann, the problem of inadequate harvests in places like Stymphinor and the valley of the Jhelum, the puzzling reports of outbreaks of insanity in many cities across the land. It was obvious that this man was no feeble and ill-informed recluse huddled away here in the dark recesses of the Labyrinth to wait out the final years of his life: plainly Confalume intended to be an active and dynamic Pontifex, very much the strong emperor to whom the Coronal would be the subordinate king, and even in the absence of detailed reports from Prestimion he had managed to keep abreast of much of what was taking place in the world. More, probably, Prestimion suspected, than he was bringing up for discussion now. It was common knowledge when Confalume was in his prime that underestimating him was a dangerous game to play; Prestimion knew that it would be rash to underestimate him even now.

The meeting, which Prestimion had hoped would be brief and even perfunctory, proved to be a lengthy one. Prestimion replied to everything in great detail, but always choosing his words with extreme care. It was a tricky thing to tell Confalume how he proposed to go about solving the current spate of problems, when he could not allow himself even to reveal to Confalume any knowledge of why these problems happened to exist in their happy and harmonious world at all.

The shattering of the Mavestoi Dam, for example. That had been the doing of Confalume’s own son Korsibar, at Dantirya Sambail’s suggestion: one of the most frightful calamities of the civil war. But how could he ever explain that to Confalume, who no longer knew even of Korsibar, let alone of the war? There was famine in places like the Jhe-lum Valley and Stymphinor because great battles had been fought there, thousands of soldiers quartered on the land, granaries emptied to feed them, whole plantations trampled underfoot. The battles were forgotten; the consequences remained. And the madness? Why, there was every likelihood that that was the result of the vast witchery called down upon the world by Heszmon Gorse and his crew of sorcerers at Prestimion’s own order! But any attempt to explain that would also entail speaking of the war, and of its bloody conclusion, and then of his decision—which now looked so reckless even to him—to blot the whole thing from the minds of billions of people.

A deep longing arose in him to reveal the truth to Confalume here and now: to share the terrible burden, to throw himself on the older man’s mercy and wisdom. But that was a temptation he dared not yield to.

He did have to give the Pontifex some sort of answers to his questions, or he would risk seeming incompetent in the eyes of the one who had nominated him for the throne. But there was so much that simply could not be spoken. All too often it seemed that he could respond to Confalume either by telling outright lies, which he most profoundly hoped to avoid doing, or else by revealing the unrevealable.

Somehow though, by dint of half-truth and subterfuge, he succeeded in threading his way through the maze of the Pontifex’s queries without speaking of that which could not be told, and yet without resorting to any truly shameful deception. And Confalume appeared to accept what he had been told at face value.

Prestimion hoped so, anyway. But he was much relieved when the meeting reached its apparent end and he could take his leave of the older man without further cause for uneasiness.

“You won’t be so long in coming the next time, will you?” Confalume asked, rising, letting his hands rest on Prestimion’s shoulders, looking squarely into Prestimion’s eyes. “You know what pleasure it gives me to see you, my son.”

Prestimion smiled at that phrase, and at the warmth of the Pontifex’s tone, though he felt a sharp pang also.

Confalume went on, “Yes, ‘my son,’ is what I said. I always wanted a son, but the Divine would never send me one. But now I have one—after a manner of speaking. For by law the Coronal is deemed the son-by-adoption, of course, of the Pontifex. And so you are my son, Prestimion. You are my son!”

It was an uncomfortable, even painful moment. The Divine had sent Confalume a son, a fine noble-looking one at that. But he was Korsibar, who now had never been.

Worse was to come.

For then, even as Prestimion was edging uneasily toward the door, Confalume said, “You should marry, Prestimion. A Coronal needs a partner for his labors. Not that I did all that well myself with my Roxivail, but how was I to know how vain and shallow she was? You can manage it better. Surely there’s a woman somewhere who’d be a fitting consort for you.” And once again Thismet’s image blazed in Prestimion’s mind, and brought him the unfailing stab of agony that came with any thought of her.

Thismet, yes. Confalume had never known of the late-blooming romance that had sprung up between Thismet and him on the battlefields of western Alhanroel.

But what did that matter now? It would have been lawful for Prestimion to marry Confalume’s daughter, yes, despite the technicalities of the adoptive relationship. Only Confalume had no daughter. Her name itself had been canceled from the pages of history. Prestimion’s brief and swiftly extinguished alliance with Thismet was simply one thing more of which he could say nothing. Now there was Varaile; but she and he were still strangers. Prestimion had no way of knowing whether the promise of their early meetings would ever be fulfilled. He was oddly unwilling, besides, to mention Varaile at all to Confalume for another reason: out of some perverse and, he realized, wholly ridiculous fidelity to the memory of the murdered daughter of whose existence Confalume had no clue.

So he smiled and said, “Surely there is, and may it be that I find her, some day. And if and when I do, I’ll marry her quickly, you can be sure of that. But let us say no more on that subject now, shall we, father?” And saluted and hastily took his leave.

7

Dekkeret had learned about Ni-moya when he was a boy at school, of course. But no geography lesson could possibly have prepared him for the reality of Zimroel’s greatest city.

Who could believe, after all, that the other continent could have any city so grand? As far as Dekkeret knew, Zimroel was mainly an undeveloped land of forests and jungles and enormous rivers, with much of its central region given over to the impenetrable wilderness to which the aboriginal Metamorphs had been banished by Stiamot, and where they still had their largest concentration of population. Oh, there were some cities out there, too—Narabal and Pi-druid and Piliplok and such—but Dekkeret imagined them to be muddy backwaters inhabited by hordes of coarse, ignorant yokels. As for Ni-moya, the continental capital, one heard impressive population figures, yes—fifteen million people were said to be living there, twenty million, whatever the number was. But many cities of Alhanroel had reached such proportions hundreds of years ago, so why get excited over the size of Ni-moya when Alaisor and Stee and half a dozen other cities of the older continent were at least as big, or bigger? In any event, population size itself was no guarantee of distinction. You could readily cram twenty million people into one area, or fifty million, if you cared to, and create nothing better than an enormous squalid urban mess, noisy and dirty and chaotic and close to intolerable for any civilized person who had to spend more than half a day in it. And that was what Dekkeret was expecting to find at his journey’s end.

He and Akbalik had sailed from Alaisor, the usual port of embarkation for travelers bound to the western continent from central Alhanroel. After an uneventful but interminable-seeming sea journey they made their landfall at Piliplok on Zimroel’s eastern coast.

Which proved to be a city that lived up in every way to Dekkeret’s expectations of it: he had heard that Piliplok was an ugly place, and ugly it was, brutal and rigid of design. People often said of his own native city of Normork that it was dreadfully dark and somber, a city that only someone born there could love. Dekkeret, who found Normork’s appearance quite pleasing, had never understood that criticism before. But he understood it now: for who could possibly love Piliplok except someone native to the place, to whom Piliplok’s brutal and rigid look was the norm of beauty?

One thing that it wasn’t, though, was a muddy backwater. A backwater, maybe, but not at all muddy; Piliplok was paved, every last inch of it, a hideous metropolis of stone and concrete with barely a tree or a shrub to be seen. It was laid out with mathematical and indeed almost maniacal precision in eleven perfectly straight spokes radiating outward from its superb natural harbor on the Inner Sea, with curving bands of streets crossing the axis of the spokes in disagreeably exact rows. Each district—the mercantile quarter close to the waterfront, the industrial zone just beyond it, the various residential and recreational areas—was uniform throughout itself in architectural style, as though fixed by law, and the buildings themselves, clumsy and heavy, were not much to Dekkeret’s taste. Normork was an airy paradise by comparison.

But their stay there was blessedly brief. Piliplok was not just the main harbor for the ships that sailed between Alhanroel and Zimroel, and for the fleet of sea-dragon hunters that plied the waters of the Inner Sea in quest of the gigantic marine mammals that were so widely prized for their meat. It was also the place where the River Zimr, the greatest of all Majipoor’s rivers, reached the sea after its seven-thousand-mile journey across Zimroel; and so, by virtue of its position at the huge river’s mouth, Piliplok was the gateway to the whole interior of the continent.

Akbalik bought passage for them aboard one of the big riverboats that plied the Zimr between Piliplok and the river’s source at the Dulorn Rift in northwestern Zimroel. The riverboat was enormous, far larger than the ship that had carried them across the Inner Sea; and whereas the oceangoing vessel had been simple and sturdy of design, intended as it was to bear up under the stresses involved in crossing thousands of miles of open sea, the riverboat was an ungainly and complicated affair, more like a floating village than a ship.

What it was, actually, was a broad, squat, practically rectangular platform with cargo holds, steerage quarters, and dining halls belowdecks, a square central courtyard bordered by pavilions and shops and gaming pavilions at deck level, and, at the stern, an elaborate many-leveled superstructure where the passengers were housed. It was decorated in an ornate and fanciful way, a jagged scarlet arch over the bridge, grotesque green figureheads with painted yellow horns jutting out like battering-rams at the bow, and a bewildering abundance of eccentric ornamental woodwork, a whimsical host of interlacing joists and scrolls and struts sprouting on every surface.

Dekkeret stared in wonder at his fellow passengers. The largest single group of them were humans, of course, but also there were great numbers of Hjorts and Skandars and Vroons, and a handful of Su-Suheris in diaphanous robes, and some scaly-skinned Ghayrogs, who were reptilian in general appearance although in fact they were mammals. He wondered if he would see Metamorphs too, and asked Akbalik about that; but no, Akbalik said, the Shapeshifter folk rarely left their inland reservation, even though the ancient prohibition against their traveling freely through the world had long since ceased to be firmly observed. And if there were any on board, he added, they would probably be wearing some form other than their own, to avoid the hostility that Metamorphs aroused whenever they mingled with other folk.

The Zimr, at Piliplok, was dark with the silt it had scoured from its bed in the course of its long journey east, and where it met the sea the river was some seventy miles across, so that it hardly looked like a river at all, but rather like a gigantic lake beneath which a vast stretch of the coast lay drowned. Piliplok itself occupied a high promontory on the river’s southern bank; as they set out on their journey Dekkeret could just barely make out the uninhabited northern bank, plainly visible even across that great distance because it was a massive white cliff of pure chalk, a mile high and many miles long, brilliant in the morning light. But soon, as the riverboat left Piliplok behind and began to make its way upriver, the Zimr narrowed somewhat and took on more a riverlike appearance, though it never became truly narrow.

For Dekkeret this was like a journey to another world. He spent all his time on deck, staring out at the round-topped tawny hills and busy towns that flanked the river, places whose names he had never heard before—Port Saikforge, Stenwamp, Campilthorn, Vem. The density of population along this stretch of the river astonished him. The riverboat rarely traveled more than two or three hours before pulling into some new port to discharge passengers, pick up new ones, unload cargo crates, take new cargo on. For a time he jotted the names of them in a little notebook he carried—Dambemuir, Orgeliuse, Impemond, Haunfort Major, Salvamot, Obliorn Vale—until he realized that if he kept on writing down all these towns, there would be no room left in the book for anything else long before he reached Ni-moya. So he was content simply to stand by the rail and stare, drinking in the constantly changing sights. After a time they all blurred pleasantly together, the unfamiliar landscape started to look very familiar indeed, and he no longer felt such a sense of overwhelming strangeness. When dreams came to him in the night, though, they very often were dreams in which he was flying through the endless midnight of space, moving in utter ease from star to star.

There were two disturbing events during the voyage, both of them occurring within a few days after the departure from Piliplok, one comic, the other tragic.

The first involved a red-haired man just a few years older than Dekkeret, who seemed to spend much of his time wandering the decks muttering to himself, or chuckling unaccountably, or pointing at some spot in the empty air as if it held mysterious significance. A harmless lunatic, Dekkeret thought; and, remembering that other madman, not at all harmless, who had killed his beloved cousin Sithelle in the course of a crazed attempt to assassinate the Coronal, he made a point of keeping his distance from the man. But then, on the third day, as Dekkeret stood near the starboard rail looking out at the passing towns, he suddenly heard maniacal laughter coming from his left—or perhaps they were frantic shrieks; there was no way of telling—and looked about to see the red-haired man run wildly across the riverboat’s central concourse, arms flailing, and mount the steps that led to the upper decks, and stand for a moment at the edge of the observation portico up there, and then, uttering a cascade of grotesque giggles and cackles, hurl himself over the side and into the river, where he began to thrash about in a frantic, frenzied way.

Immediately a loud cry of “Man overboard!” went up, and the riverboat halted and swung around in its path. Two burly crewmen went out in a dinghy and without much difficulty hauled the hapless lunatic from the water. They brought him back on board, dripping and spuming, and took him down belowdecks. That was the last Dekkeret saw of him until the riverboat pulled in, a day later, at a town called Kraibledene, where the fellow was put ashore and, so it appeared, turned over to the local authorities.

A day later came an even stranger thing. In early afternoon of a clear, warm day, as the riverboat was traversing a stretch of the river without settlements, a gaunt stern-faced man of about forty in a stiff, thickly brocaded robe descended from the passenger deck carrying a large and obviously heavy suitcase. He set the suitcase down in an unoccupied section of the main deck, opened it, and drew from it a series of odd-looking instruments and implements, which he proceeded to arrange with meticulous care in a perfect semicircle in front of him.

Dekkeret nudged Akbalik. “Look at all that weird stuff! It’s sorcerer’s equipment, isn’t it?”

“It certainly looks like it. I wonder if he’s going to cast some sort of spell right here in front of us all.”

Dekkeret knew little about sorcery and had even less liking for it. Manifestations of the supernatural and irrational made him uncomfortable. “Is that anything we need to worry about, do you think?”

“Depends on what kind of spell it is, I suppose,” Akbalik said, with a shrug. “But maybe he’s just planning to hold a bargain sale for amateur wizards. Nobody would ever use all those different things in a single spell.” And he began to point out and identify the different implements for Dekkeret. That triangular stone vessel was called a veralistia: it was used as a crucible in which powders were burned that permitted a view into things to come. The complex device with metal coils and posts was an armillary sphere, which showed the positions of the planets and stars so that horoscopes might be cast. The thing made of brightly colored feathers and animal hair woven closely together—Akbalik could not recall its name—was employed to facilitate conversations with the spirits of the dead. The one next to it, an arrangement of crystal lenses and fine golden wires, was called a podromis: wizards used it in restoring sexual virility.

“You seem to be quite the expert,” said Dekkeret. “You’ve had personal acquaintance with all of this, I take it?”

“Hardly. I don’t often have occasion to converse with the spirits of the dead, and I haven’t had much need of podromises, either. But you hear about these things wherever you turn, nowadays.—Look, he’s still got more! I wonder what that one is supposed to do. And that, with all the wheels and pistons!”

The suitcase was finally empty. A good-sized crowd had gathered by now. Word must be getting around the ship, Dekkeret thought, that some kind of demonstration of magic was about to get under way. You could always draw a big crowd for that.

The gaunt magus—for that was surely what he was, a magus—took no notice of his audience. He was seated crosslegged now before his neat semicircular row of strange glittering apparatus and appeared to be off in some other realm of consciousness, eyes half closed, head rocking rhythmically from side to side.

Then, abruptly, he rose. Raised his foot and brought it down with savage force on the fragile instrument that Akbalik had called a podromis. Mashed it flat, and went on to trample the armillary sphere, and the device of wheels and pistons, and the small, delicate machine of interlocking metallic triangles just beyond it. The onlookers gasped in amazement and shock. Dekkeret wondered if it might be blasphemous to destroy such things as these, whether doing so would bring down the vengeance of the supernatural spirits. If indeed such spirits existed at all, he added.

The magus now had systematically destroyed almost his entire collection of magical equipment. Those that he could not smash, like the veralistia, he hurled overboard. Then, calmly, purposefully, he walked to the rail and in a single smooth movement surmounted it and leaped into the river.

This time there was to be no rescue. The man had gone straight under, vanishing instantly from sight as though the pockets of his robe were filled with stones. Once again the riverboat came to a halt and crewmen went out in a dinghy, but they found no trace of the jumper, and returned after a time, grim-faced, to report their failure.

“Madness is everywhere,” Akbalik said, and shivered. “The world is turning very strange, boy.”

After that, members of the crew patrolled the deck two by two at all hours to guard against further such incidents. But there were no others.

The two bizarre events left Dekkeret in a somber, brooding mood. Madness was everywhere, yes. He could not now keep the memory of Sithelle’s incomprehensible terrible death, which for months he had worked hard to repress, from flooding back into his mind in all its full horror. That wild-eyed lunatic—those clotted, unintelligible cries of rage—Sithelle stepping forward—the flashing blade—the sudden startling spurt of blood—

And now a giggling clownish fellow jumps overboard in mid-river, and then a magus who has evidently reached the end of his tether. Could it happen to anyone at any time, the onset of irresistible madness, the utter unstoppable flight of all reason from the mind? Could it happen even to him? Worriedly Dekkeret searched his soul for the seeds of insanity. But they did not seem to be present within him, or, at any rate, he could not find them; and after a time his normal high spirits reasserted themselves, and he went back to his pastime of peering at the passing cities of the river-bank without fear that he would without warning be seized with the unconquerable urge to hurl himself over the rail.

When the splendor of Ni-moya burst abruptly upon him he was utterly unprepared.

For several days, now, the river had been growing wider. Dekkeret knew that a second great river joined the Zimr just south of the city—the Steiche, it was, coming up out of the wild Metamorph country—and where the two rivers flowed together, their union would of necessity form one much larger than either of its components. But he had not expected the joining of the rivers to create such a vast body of water. It made the mouth of the Zimr at Piliplok look like a trickling stream. Crossing that great confluence was much like being on the ocean again. Dekkeret was aware that Ni-moya was somewhere to the north; there were other great cities over on the other shore; but it was hard for his stunned mind to take in the immensity of the scene, and all he could see was the dark breast of the water stretching to the horizon, dotted everywhere by the bright pennants of the hundreds of local ferries that crossed it constantly in all directions.

He stared for what seemed like hours. Then, as he stood gaping, Akbalik took him by the elbow and turned him to one side.

“There,” he said. “You’re looking in the wrong direction. That’s Ni-moya up yonder. Some of it, anyway.”

Dekkeret was astounded. It was a magical sight: an endless backdrop of thickly forested hills, with an enormous city of shining white towers in the foreground, each one seeming taller than its neighbor, row upon row of titanic structures descending right to the shore of the river.

Was this a city? It was a world in itself. It went on forever, following the river’s course as far as he could see, and continuing onward, obviously, for a long distance beyond—hundreds of miles, maybe. Dekkeret caught his breath. So much! So beautiful! He felt like dropping to his knees. Akbalik began to speak like a tour guide of Ni-moya’s most famous sights: the Gossamer Galleria, a mercantile arcade a mile long that hovered high above the ground on nearly invisible cables; and the Museum of Worlds, where treasures from all over the universe were on display, even, so it was said, things from Old Earth; and the Crystal Boulevard, where revolving reflectors created the brilliance of a thousand suns; and the Park of Fabulous Beasts, full of wonders from remote and practically unknown districts—

There was no end to the recitation. “That’s the Opera House, there on the hill,” said Akbalik, indicating a many-faceted building gleaming so brightly that it made Dekkeret’s eyes ache to look at it. “With a thousand-instrument orchestra, creating a sound you can’t begin to imagine. That big glass dome over there with the ten towers sprouting from it, that’s the municipal library, which holds every book that’s ever been published. Over there, that row of low buildings right at the water’s edge, with tiled roofs and turquoise and gold mosaics on their fronts, the ones you might think are the palaces of princes, those are the customs buildings. And then, just above and to the left of them—”

“What’s that one?” Dekkeret broke in, pointing toward a structure of great size and transcendent beauty, a good way down the shore, that rose above everything else in supreme majesty, imperiously summoning the attention of every eye even amidst this phenomenal concatenation of architectural wonders.

“Oh, that,” said Akbalik. “That’s the palace of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail.”

It was a white-walled building of unthinkable splendor and grace: not of such prodigious size as Dekkeret knew Lord Prestimion’s Castle to be, but quite large enough to meet almost any prince’s requirements, and of such wondrous elegance that it dominated the waterfront by its sheer perfection.

The Procurator’s palace appeared to hover in mid-air, floating above the city, although in actuality, Dekkeret saw, it was situated atop a smooth white pedestal of stupendous height—a more modest version, in its way, of Castle Mount itself. But instead of sprawling off in all directions, as the Castle did, this building was a relatively compact series of pavilions and colonnaded porticos that made ingenious use of suspension devices and cantilevered supports to give the appearance of complete defiance of gravity. The uppermost floor was a series of transparent bubbles of clearest quartz, with a row of many-balconied chambers below it, and a wider series of galleries in the next level down, reached by a cascading series of enclosed staircases that bowed outward like knees and swung sharply back inward again in a manner that seemed to defy all geometry. Squinting into the glare of Ni-moya’s radiantly white towers, Dekkeret could make out hints of other wings flanking the building on both sides below. At its gleaming base a single sturdy octagonal block of polished agate, at least as big as an ordinary person’s house, jutted from the facade like an emblazoned medallion.

“How can any one person, even the Procurator, be allowed to live in anything so grand?”

Akbalik laughed. “Dantirya Sambail is a law unto himself. He was only twelve, you know, when he inherited the procuratorial fief of Ni-moya. Which had always been an important fief, you understand, the most important one in Zimroel, but that was before Dantirya Sambail took control of it. Everyone assumed there would have to be a regency, but no, not at all, he disposed of his cousin the regent in about two minutes and took power in his own right, and then, thanks to at least three marriages and half a dozen informal alliances and a lot of very desirable inheritances from an assortment of powerful kinsmen, he put together what amounts to a private empire. By the time he was thirty he held direct rule over a third of the continent of Zimroel and indirect influence over just about all the rest of it except the Metamorph reservation. If he could have figured out some way of taking that over too, he probably would have done it. As it is, he rules Zimroel pretty much as its king. A king needs a decent palace: Dantirya Sambail has spent the last forty years improving the one he inherited into what you see before you now.”

“What about the Pontifex and the Coronal? Didn’t they have any objections to all this?”

“Old Prankipin’s main concern, at least before he fell in with the sorcerers, was always commerce: constant economic expansion and the free flow of goods from one region to another, with everybody making a nice profit and the money going around and around. I think he saw the rise of Dantirya Sambail as a favorable contributing factor. Zimroel was a pretty fragmented place, you know, so far from the centers of government across the sea that the local lords mostly did whatever they pleased, and when the interests of the Duke of Narabal clashed with the interests of the Prince of Pidruid, it wasn’t always healthy for the regional economy. Having someone like Dantirya Sambail in charge, capable of telling all the local boys what they should do and making it stick, played right into Prankipin’s plan. As for Lord Confalume, he was even more enthusiastic about the unification of Zimroel under Dantirya Sambail than the Pontifex. Neither of them liked Dantirya Sambail, you under-stand—who could?—but they saw him as useful. Indispensable, even. So they tolerated his power grab and in some ways even encouraged it. And he was smart enough not to tread on their toes. Traveled often to the Labyrinth and the Castle, he did, paid his respects, loyal subject of his majesty and his lordship, et cetera, et cetera.”

“And Lord Prestimion? Is he going to go along with the arrangement also?”

“Ah. Prestimion.” A cloud appeared to cross Akbalik’s face. “No, things are different now. There’s some trouble between Lord Prestimion and the Procurator. Fairly serious trouble, in fact.”

“Of what sort?”

Akbalik looked away. “Not of any sort that I’m able to discuss with you right now, boy. Serious, is all. Extremely serious. Perhaps we’ll have an opportunity to go into the details some other time.—Ah: we’re landing in Ni-moya, it seems.”

The section of the city where the riverboat came to shore was called Strelain, which Akbalik told him was the name of Ni-moya’s central district. A government floater was waiting for them; it took them up and up through the hilly streets of the great city, and deposited them at last at the tall building that was to be their home for the next few months.

Dekkeret’s little apartment was on the fifteenth floor. That a building could have so many floors was something that had never occurred to him. Standing by the wide window, peering out at the tops of the buildings below, and at the river farther on, and the dark line of the Zimr’s southern shore so far off that he could barely make it out, he had the giddy feeling that the building might at any moment pitch forward purely of its own unsustainable height and tumble down the hill, scattering its component bricks far and wide as it fell. He turned away from the window, shuddering. But the building stood firm.

The next day he began work at the Office of Documentary Appeal. That was a subdivision of the Bureau of the Treasury, housed in a back wing of the rambling thousand-year-old governmental complex of blue granite known as the Cascanar Building, in south-central Strelain.

It was meaningless work. Dekkeret had no illusions about that. He was supposed to interview people who had had important documents—important to them, anyway—garbled somehow by the bureaucracy, and help them straighten out the confusion. From his first day he found himself attempting to unravel disputes about erroneous listings of birth-dates, improper delineation of property boundaries, muddied self-contradictory statements inserted into legal depositions by careless stenographers, and a host of other such things. There was no reason in the world why it had been necessary to ship him thousands of miles to handle such drab and trifling matters, which any career civil servant already working here could be dealing with.

But the point, he knew, was that everyone in the government, from the Pontifex and Coronal on down, was a career civil servant. And every prince of Castle Mount who had any ambition toward high office was required to put in time doing routine work of just this sort. Even Prestimion, who had been born to the rank of Prince of Muldemar and might have spent a life of pleasant idleness puttering in his vineyards, had had to go through a round of chores like this by way of gathering the practical experience that had carried him to the throne.

Dekkeret, a salesman’s son, had never had such grandiose ambitions. The starburst crown was no part of his plan; to be a knight of the Castle seemed as bold an aspiration as he could allow himself. Well, he was that, now, thanks to the happenstance of his having been standing close by the Coronal at the time of the assassination attempt: a knight-initiate, anyway. And therefore he found himself behind this desk at the Office of Documentary Appeal in Ni-moya, plodding through day after day of foolish dreary work and hoping eventually to move on to grander things, closer to the summit of power. But this had to be done first.

Akbalik, whom he never saw during his working hours and only occasionally in the evenings, was someone who already had gone on to grander things, though Dekkeret was not sure just what they were. Plainly Akbalik was a model worth patterning oneself after. He was very close to the Coronal’s inner circle, apparently, if not actually a member of it himself just yet. He was quite friendly with the High Counsellor Septach Melayn; he had the respect of the gruff and businesslike Admiral Gialaurys; he seemed to have easy access to Lord Prestimion. Surely he was destined to have a swift ascent to the highest reaches of the government.

Of course, Akbalik was the nephew of the wealthy and powerful Prince Serithorn, and that surely helped. But although high birth could get you fairly easily to high places in the Castle hierarchy, Dekkeret knew that ultimately it was merit, intelligence, character, perseverance, that brought you to the top. Fools and sluggards didn’t become Coronals, although they might, by good luck and the accident of family connection, attain illustrious lesser posts despite their blatant deficiencies. Count Meglis of Normork was a good example of that.

Nor did great riches or noble birth suffice to get one to the throne, or else Serithorn, descended from half the great Coronals of antiquity, would have had it. Prince Serithorn, though, was not the kind of man who was suited for the job. He lacked the necessary seriousness. Septach Melayn, the High Counsellor, would never be Coronal either, it seemed, for the same reason.

But Lord Prestimion, obviously, had proven himself fit for the post. So had Lord Confalume before him. And Akbalik, too, that calm, steady-minded, quick-witted, hardworking, reliable man, might have the stuff of Coronals in him. Dekkeret admired him inordinately. It was much too early even to speculate about who might succeed Prestimion as Coronal when he became Pontifex; but, Dekkeret thought, how splendid if it turned out to be Akbalik! And how good that would be for Dekkeret of Normork, too, for he could plainly see that Akbalik looked upon him favorably and regarded him as a highly promising young man. For a moment, just a moment, Dekkeret allowed himself the wild fantasy of picturing himself as High Counsellor to the Coronal Lord Akbalik. And then it was back to correcting misspelled names on deeds of trust, and sorting out conflicts in land titles that went back to Lord Keppimon’s day, and authorizing refunds for taxes that had been levied in triplicate by overenthusiastic revenue inspectors.

Two months went by in this fashion. Dekkeret grew enormously restless at his job, but he plodded gamely onward and allowed no hint of discontent to pass his lips. In his free time he roamed the city, bowled over again and again by the splendors he found everywhere. He made a few friends at the office; he met a couple of pleasant young women; once or twice a week Akbalik joined him at a local tavern for an evening’s amiable exploration of the excellent Zimroel wines. Dekkeret had no idea what sort of assignment it was that had brought Akbalik to Ni-moya, and he did not ask. He was grateful for the older man’s company, and wary of seeming to probe matters that obviously did not concern him.

One night Akbalik said, “Do you remember that time when we were in the Coronal’s office and Septach Melayn spoke about our going on a steetmoy-hunting expedition while we were here?”

“Of course I do.”

“You’re bored silly with the work you’ve been doing, aren’t you, Dekkeret?”

Dekkeret reddened. “Well—”

“Don’t try to be diplomatic. You’re supposed to be bored silly with it. It was designed to bore you. But you weren’t sent here to be tortured. I’m about ready for a break in my own work: what say we take ten days up north, and see how the steetmoy are running this time of year?”

“Would I be able to arrange a leave of absence?” Dekkeret asked.

Akbalik grinned. “I think I could manage to get one for you,” he said.

8

The countryside changed very quickly once they were north of Ni-moya. The climate of most of Majipoor was subtropical or tropical, except along such high mountain ridges as the Gonghar mountains of central Zimroel and atop Mount Zygnor in far-northern Alhanroel. Castle Mount itself, where the weather-machines devised by the ancients eternally fended off the bitter night of the stratospheric altitude, enjoyed an endless springtime.

But one sector of northeastern Zimroel reached far up toward the pole and therefore had a cooler climate. In the high, mountain-bordered plateau known as the Khyntor Marches, snow was not at all uncommon during the winter months; and beyond that, walled off behind the tremendous peaks known as the Nine Sisters, there was an unknown polar land of perpetual storm and frost where no one ever went. In that grim and virtually inaccessible region, so legend had it, a race of fierce fur-clad barbarians had dwelled for thousands of years in complete isolation, as unaware of the comfort and warmth and prosperity enjoyed by Majipoor’s other inhabitants as the rest of Majipoor was of them.

Akbalik and Dekkeret had no intention of going anywhere near that myth-shrouded land of constant winter and unyielding ice. But even just a short distance back of Ni-moya, its stark influence on the territories bordering on it was quickly apparent. Lush green subtropical forests yielded to vegetation more typical of a temperate climate, dominated by curious angular deciduous trees with bright yellow trunks, set very far apart from one another in stony meadows of scruffy pallid grass. And then, as they entered the foothills of the Khyntor Marches, a further increment of bleakness became evident. The trees and grass were far sparser, now. The landscape here was a gradually rising terrain of flat gray granite shields with swift cold streams slicing down out of the north. In the hazy distance the first of the Nine Sisters of Khyntor was visible: Threilikor, the Weeping Sister, whose dark facade was glossy with a multitude of rivulets and streams.

Akbalik had hired a team of five hunters, March-men, lean leathery-skinned mountaineers of the northlands who dressed in rough, crudely stitched robes of black haigus-hide, to guide them into the Marches. Three of them seemed to be male, two female, although it was not easy to tell, so thoroughly were they engulfed in their bulky robes. They said very little. When they talked to each other, it was in a harsh mountain dialect that Dekkeret found practically impossible to understand. In addressing their two Castle lord-lings they took care to use conventional speech, but he had trouble with that too, because the thick-tongued mountaineers spoke with heavy accents tinged with the rhythms of their own tongue, and also Dekkeret was often unfamiliar with the Ni-moyan idioms that peppered their speech. He let Akbalik do most of the talking.

The mountain folk appeared to regard their city-bred charges with amusement verging on scorn. They definitely had no great respect for Dekkeret, who had never been in wilderness country before, and who was obviously uncertain of himself despite his size and strength. They looked upon him, he was sure, as an inept and useless boy. But they seemed not to have much esteem even for Akbalik, whose aura of competence and capability usually won quick recognition anywhere. Whenever he asked them something they would reply in curt monosyllables, and sometimes could be seen to turn away with sardonic smiles, as though barely able to suppress their contempt for any city man who needed to ask about something so self-evident that any child would know it.

“The steetmoy are forest creatures,” Akbalik told him. “They don’t like it much out here on the open tundra. That’s their home territory down there, that dark place in the shadow of the mountain. The hunters will scare up a pack of them for us in the deep woods and drive them into a stampede. We select the ones we want to go after and chase them through the forest until we have them cornered.” Akbalik glanced at Dekkeret’s oddly short legs, heavily knotted with muscle. “You’re a good runner, aren’t you?”

“I’m no sprinter. But I can manage.”

“Steetmoy aren’t especially fast either. They don’t need to be. But they have plenty of stamina and they’re better than we are at barreling through thick underbrush. It’s easy for one to make his way into dense cover and get away from you. The problem then is that they sometimes come slipping around behind you and attack from the rear. They live primarily on berries and nuts and bark, but they don’t mind eating meat, you know, especially in winter, and they’re very adequately equipped for killing.”

Turning to his pack, he began to draw weapons from it and lay them out in front of Dekkeret.

“These are what we’ll take with us. The hooked machete is for cutting your way through the brush. The poniard is what you use for killing your steetmoy.”

“This?” Dekkeret asked. He picked it up and stared at it. Its blade was impressively sharp but no more than six inches in length. “Isn’t it a little short?”

“Did you expect to be using an energy-thrower?”

Dekkeret felt his face going hot. He remembered, now, that Septach Melayn had talked about how steetmoy are hunted with poniard and machete. Dekkeret hadn’t given it much thought at the time. “Well, of course not. But with this thing I’d have to be right on top of the steetmoy for the kill.”

“Yes. You would, wouldn’t you? That’s the whole point of the sport: hunting at close range, great risk for high reward. And also, doing as little damage to the valuable fur as possible. If it comes down to a matter of your life or the steetmoy’s, you can use your machete, but that’s not considered very sporting. Imagine Septach Melayn, for instance, hacking away at a steetmoy with his machete!”

“Septach Melayn has the quickest reflexes of any man who ever lived. He could kill a steetmoy with an ivory toothpick. But I’m not Septach Melayn.”

Akbalik seemed unworried. Dekkeret was big and strong; Dekkeret was determined; Dekkeret would look after himself quite satisfactorily down there in the steetmoy forest.

Dekkeret himself was less confident. He had never asked for this adventure. It had all been Septach Melayn’s idea originally. He had been eager enough to undertake it, yes, back there in the Castle, but that was without any real awareness of what hunting steetmoy in their native territory might involve. And, though he had heard plenty of exuberant hunting tales from other young knight-initiates during his first few months at the Castle, and had envied them greatly, he realized now that it was one thing to roam the walled hunting preserves of Halanx or Amblemorn in search of zaur or onathils or bilantoons, but it was something else entirely to be roaming around in a cold northern forest looking for a ferocious steetmoy that you planned to kill with a tiny dagger.

Cowardice, though, was no part of Dekkeret’s makeup. What lay ahead sounded like a tough assignment, but perhaps the hunt wouldn’t turn out to be as risky as it seemed just now, with his imagination leading him to anticipate the worst. So he picked up his poniard and his machete and hefted them and took a few fierce swipes through the air for practice, and told Akbalik cheerfully that on second thought the poniard seemed more than adequate for the job and he was ready for the steetmoy hunt whenever the steetmoy were ready for him.

Akbalik had a new surprise in store for him as they followed the five March-men down a long boulder-strewn slope into the dark glade where the steetmoy lived. Reaching into his pack, he drew forth two blunt-nosed metal tubes, stuck one into his belt next to his poniard, and handed the other one to Dekkeret.

“Energy-throwers? But you said—”

“Lord Prestimion’s orders. We want to behave like proper sportsmen, yes, but I’m also supposed to bring you back from here alive. The poniard is the prime weapon, and if you get into difficulties you use the machete, and if you get into real difficulties you blast the damned animal with the energy-thrower. It’s not the elegant way, but it’s a sensible last resort. An angry steetmoy can rip a man’s guts out with three slashes of his claws.”

Feeling more ashamed than relieved, Dekkeret tucked the energy-thrower into one of the loops of his belt, wishing there were some way of pushing it down out of sight to keep the March-men guides from noticing it. But that hardly mattered. They had already made it quite clear that they looked upon Dekkeret and Akbalik as a pair of shallow self-indulgent fops so doltish that they could find nothing better to do with their time than take themselves off into the forests of the north and hunt dangerous animals for no motive more worthy than their own amusement. It could scarcely lessen them in the March-men’s eyes if one of them suddenly happened to pull out an energy-thrower and blaze away at an inconveniently rambunctious steetmoy. All the same, Dekkeret quietly vowed that he would not use the weapon even as a last resort. The poniard and—if necessary—the machete would have to do the job.

It had snowed during the night. Though the temperature was a little above freezing now, the ground was white everywhere. A few solitary flakes still were coming down. One of them struck Dekkeret’s cheek, causing a little burning sensation. A strange feeling, that. The whole concept of snow was new to him, and very curious.

The trees in this glade had yellow trunks like those farther to the south, but they carried heavy growths of blackish-brown needle-like leaves rather than showing bare deciduous branches, and instead of having their trunks and branches contorted into odd angles these trees stood tall and straight, with their thick crowns meeting far overhead. Underneath, a dense darkness prevailed. A stream dotted by big boulders flowed past on one side, and on the other, the one closest to the mountain, the land dropped sharply away into a swooping valley.

The five hired hunters led the way, with Dekkeret and Akbalik close behind, following in the tracks that the March-men left in the snow. Gradually the pace picked up until they were trotting through the forest, moving in easy loping bounds along the bank of the stream. Hardly ever did the hunters look back toward them. When one of them did—it was one of the women, a flat-faced, wide-mouthed one with big gaps between her teeth—it was to give Dekkeret a mocking grin that seemed to say, In five minutes you will be frightened entirely out of whatever wits you may have. Perhaps he was wrong about that. Perhaps she was just trying to look encouraging. But it was not a pretty grin.

“Steetmoy,” Akbalik said suddenly. “Three of them, I think.” He pointed off to the left, into a dark grove where the yellow-trunked trees stood particularly close together and the snow lay thick on the ground. At first Dekkeret noticed nothing unusual. Then he glimpsed a zone of whiteness in there that was different from the whiteness of the snow: softer, brighter, with a lustrous gleam instead of a hard glitter. Large furry white animals, moving about. The sound of their low muttering growls came toward him on the wind.

The hunters had paused by the edge of the grove. A few unintelligible muttered words passed among them; and then they began to move toward the trees, fanning out in a wide arc as they did so.

Quickly Dekkeret came to understand what was happening. The steetmoy—three of them, yes—had picked up the scent. They were moving slowly about amidst the trees, as if working out their strategy. Dekkeret could see them clearly now, thick-bodied beasts built low to the ground, with long jutting black snouts and flat triangular heads out of which golden eyes, rimmed with red, were staring intently. They were about the size of very large dogs, but heavier and sturdier. They looked graceless but powerful: their thighs and haunches were massive, their forearms plainly held great strength. Long curving claws, black and shiny, jutted from their paws. Dekkeret could not believe that he would be expected to kill one of these creatures with a mere handheld dagger. But that was what was done, supposedly. It seemed improbable. He hadn’t forgotten Septach Melayn’s words: “Beautiful thing: that thick fur, those blazing eyes. Most dangerous wild animal in the world, so far as I know, the steetmoy ”

The gap-toothed mountain woman was gesturing at him.

“First one’s yours,” Akbalik said.

“What?”

Dekkeret had expected the older, more experienced Akbalik to go first. But the meaning of those gestures was not at all ambiguous. The woman was beckoning to him.

“They’ve decided it,” Akbalik said. “They usually know the best match of hunter and prey. You’d better go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.”

Dekkeret nodded. He stepped forward, still apprehensive and uneasy. But with his first step toward the dark glade an astonishing thing happened. All uncertainty dropped away. A strange cool calmness settled over him. Fear and doubt were utterly absent from his mind. He found himself entirely ready, primed for the kill, utterly focused on his objective.

And an instant later the hunt was on.

The March-men now had positioned themselves across a lengthy curving front that spanned the place where the three steetmoy were moving about and extended well beyond it on both sides. The woman who seemed to be Dekkeret’s guide was at the center of the line. She led the way forward, with Dekkeret close behind her. The two hunters at farthest left and right were moving inward at a sharp angle, pulling the line in toward the animals. They started now to set up a terrible din with brass hunting-horns that they had drawn from their packs, while the other two March-men began to clap their hands and shout.

The idea, Dekkeret saw, was to separate the animals, driving two of them away to give him a clear path to the third. And the noise was having its intended effect. The steetmoy, puzzled and bothered by the strident blaring sounds, were up on their hind legs, raking trees with their claws in what seemed to be a reflexive expression of irritation, and their growls no longer were low rumbling mutters but reverberating bellows of anger.

The March-men continued to close in. The steetmoy, showing no apparent fear, but only annoyance and perhaps disgust at being harassed in this fashion in their own domain, turned slowly and began to lope away in different directions—each heading, perhaps, for its own den. The five hunters ignored the two biggest ones, allowing them to slip away undisturbed into the deeper woods. They gave their attention to the remaining one, a female, perhaps, smaller than the other two but still a formidable beast. They were advancing on it in high-kicking strides as though on parade, and making noise for all they were worth.

The animal seemed befuddled by the uproar for a moment or two. Then, blinking and grumbling, the steetmoy swung around and headed at a slow but steadily accelerating pace toward the cover of a clump of shrubbery a few hundred yards away.

The gap-toothed woman stepped aside. Dekkeret knew that this was his moment.

He went rushing forward, machete in one hand, poniard in the other.

At the fringe of the glade the trees were fairly far apart, but they quickly became more dense, with saplings and brush occupying the spaces between them and semi-woody vines dangling from their lower branches. Before long Dekkeret was moving through one difficult thicket after another, chopping away furiously with the machete as he scrambled through. He drove himself onward in a kind of frenzy, heedless of obstacles. And yet for all his frenetic exertions he was losing ground. He could still see the retreating steetmoy up ahead. But the beast, slow-moving though it was, seemed easily able to clear a path for itself with its powerful forearms, leaving a tangled trail of shattered underbrush and torn vines behind it that only made Dekkeret’s task harder. Very gradually it was widening the distance between itself and its pursuer.

And then it disappeared entirely. He was all alone.

Where had it gone? Into a hidden burrow? Had it wriggled under some impenetrable pile of brush? Or, Dekkeret wondered, maybe it had simply stepped behind some thick-trunked tree up ahead, and was at this very moment wending its way back toward him, slinking from one clump of brush to the next, moving into position for the lethal counterattack that Akbalik had said they sometimes made.

Dekkeret looked around for the mountain woman. No sign of her. Somehow in his pell-mell race through the woods he had left her behind.

Clutching his two weapons tightly, he turned in a full circle without moving from the spot, staring warily into the dimness, listening desperately for the sound of ripping underbrush, of falling saplings. Nothing. Nothing. And now thick mist had begun to rise from the snowy ground to veil everything in white. Should he call out for the woman? No. Possibly her disappearance was deliberate; perhaps it was always the custom to leave the huntsman alone with his prey in the final moments of the chase.

After a few moments he began to move cautiously off to his left, where the mist seemed a little thinner. His plan was to traverse a circular arc back to his starting point, searching for the steetmoy’s hiding-place as he went.

In the forest, all was still. It was as if he had gone into it on his own.

Then, as he came around past a copse of straight-trunked young trees that had sprouted just inches apart from one another so that they formed a tight palisade, everything changed in a hurry. On the far side of the copse he found himself looking into a little clearing. The woman stood at the center of it, peering around in all directions as though searching for the steetmoy, or, perhaps, for him. Dekkeret called out to her; and in the same instant the steetmoy came bounding out of the woods on the other side.

The gap-toothed woman, already turning toward Dekkeret, swung around swiftly to face the angry animal. The steetmoy, rising on its hind legs, swatted her aside with one swipe of its forearm. She went sprawling to the ground. Without a pause the steetmoy went pounding on past the astonished Dekkeret toward the nearest group of trees.

It took him a moment to break from his stasis. Then he too was in motion, running after the steetmoy once more, knowing only that this was his final chance, that if he let the beast get away from him a second time he would never see it again.

Knots were forming in his thighs and calves. He could feel the muscles writhing. As he made a sharp turn he stepped on a slick snow-covered slab of rock, and slipped, twisting his ankle and sending a jolt of fire running up his left leg. But he kept on going. The steetmoy no longer seemed to be trying to take evasive action; it was simply trotting ahead of him, moving now through a sector of the forest that was open enough for both of them to move readily through it. That gave an advantage to Dekkeret, who, slow runner that he was, should have been able in open terrain to move a bit faster than the steetmoy.

But he was unable to close the space between him and his prey. He had plenty of stamina left, but there appeared to be no way that he could compel the rebellious muscles of his legs to drive him onward any more quickly. It began to become clear to him that the steetmoy would elude him once more.

Not so. The beast fetched up against a thickly snarled mass of brush and vines and came to a halt there, unaccountably choosing to swing about and stand its ground instead of ripping its way through. Had it decided to halt for a showdown with its bothersome foe? Or was it simply tired of running? Those were questions that Dekkeret would never be able to answer. He had no time to pause for thought at all. Before he even realized fully what had happened, his own momentum brought him virtually up against the animal, which was standing erect with its back to the tightly woven underbrush. He heard the creature’s angry growling. A massive paw swung toward him. Instinctively Dekkeret ducked around it and brought the poniard upward and inward. The steetmoy roared in pain. Dekkeret stepped back, thrust forward again, found his target a second time. Brilliant crimson blood spurted over the soft white fur of the steetmoy’s breast.

He stepped back, breathing hard. Would a third blow be necessary? Did he need to use the machete?

No and no. The steetmoy, looking confused, remained upright for a moment, rocking slowly from side to side, as its bright red-rimmed eyes slowly began to glaze. Then it toppled. Dekkeret stood over it, hardly believing what had happened. The animal did not move.

Turning, then, he cupped his hands and yelled. “Hoy! Akbalik, where are you? I got it, Akbalik! I got it!”

A muffled reply came to him through the mist from far away. He was unable to make it out.

He tried again. “Akbalik?”

This time, no call came in return. There was no response from any of the hunters either. Where was everyone? If he left the steetmoy lying here, would scavenging beasts tear it apart before he could return to it? For that matter, would he even be able to locate it again in this mysterious misty forest?

Some minutes passed. Swirls of new snow descended. Dekkeret realized that he could not continue to remain where he was. Slowly he began to make his way back in the direction from which he thought he had come, searching for his own tracks in the snow as he went. After a time he saw the tight-grown copse again; and on the far side of it he came upon a scene that would remain in his mind to the end of his days.

Akbalik and four of the March-men hunters were standing in the middle of the clearing back of the copse. A bloody machete dangled from Akbalik’s hand and there was more blood all over the snow. The March-men, farther to the rear, stared stonily at Dekkeret as he came into view. The gap-toothed woman lay on her back, motionless, her entire mid-section torn apart, a terrible wound. Five or six feet away from her was the dead body of some squat thick-snouted beast that had been cut practically in half by Akbalik’s machete. It had bloodstains on its muzzle as well.

“Akbalik?” Dekkeret asked, bewildered. “What’s happened here? Is she—?”

“Dead? What do you think?”

“Is this the animal that killed her? What is it, anyway?”

“A tumilat, they said. A scavenger, a carrion-feeder. They live in underground burrows around here. It’ll kill, sometimes, if it finds a dying or unconscious animal. But what I can’t understand is why a scavenging animal would attack someone who isn’t—”

“Oh,” said Dekkeret, in a very small voice, and put his hand over his mouth. “Oh. Oh. Oh.”

“What is it, Dekkeret? What are you trying to say?”

“Not the tumilat,” Dekkeret murmured. “The steetmoy. It came out of nowhere and ran right into her and knocked her down with its paw. And kept on going. So did I. I went right after it and caught up with it and killed it, Akbalik. I killed it. But I didn’t stop to think about the hunter woman. She was lying here—wounded, maybe, unconscious—oh, Akbalik! I never even gave her a thought. And then, while she was lying here all alone, the scavenging animal came up to her, and—oh—” He stared into the gathering whiteness all about him, appalled at what he had done. “Oh, Akbalik,” he said again, feeling numb. “Oh!”

9

When Prestimion and his companions emerged from the Labyrinth’s southernmost mouth they saw the broad reaches of Alhanroel stretching before them like an endless ocean. The land was flat here, and the horizon was a gray hazy line that seemed to be a million miles off. Every day brought new landscapes, new kinds of vegetation, new cities. And somewhere ahead of them in that unending vastness was Dantirya Sambail, slipping steadily away.

The royal party halted first in Bailemoona, that lovely city of the fertile plain southeast of the Labyrinth where the Procurator’s man Mandralisca had had his encounter with Prince Serithorn’s gamekeeper. Kaitinimon, Bailemoona’s new young duke, Kanteverel’s son, met them outside the city’s bright claret-hued walls and gave them a royal welcome.

He had his late father’s round-faced easy-going look, and, like Kanteverel, preferred simple loose-flowing tunics to more glittery formal garb. But Kanteverel had rarely been anything other than cheerful and jovial, and there was a barely hidden tension about this man, a poorly concealed rigor of spirit, that showed him to be of a different sort entirely. Still, it was a long while since a Coronal had visited Bailemoona, and Kaitinimon displayed nothing but delight at Prestimion’s arrival, staging an appropriately splashy festivity for him, a host of musicians and jugglers and cunning conjurers and a grand display of the famed cuisine of the region, with local wines to match each dish. And, of course, he provided a visit to Bailemoona’s legendary golden bees.

Nearly every city of the realm had its special item of distinction. The golden bees were Bailemoona’s. Once, long ago, in the days when only sparse bands of Shapeshifters had lived in this part of Alhanroel, such bees had been far from uncommon throughout the entire province and the adjacent territories. But the spread of human civilization had sent them into a long decline that brought them eventually to the brink of extinction, and now the only ones that remained were those that the Dukes of Bailemoona kept sacrosanct in the celebrated apiary on the grounds of the ducal palace.

“We open the apiary to the general public just three times a year,” Duke Kaitinimon said, as he led Prestimion through the palace garden to the bee-house. “On Winterday, on Summerday, and on the duke’s birthday. Admission is by lottery, a dozen visitors an hour for ten hours, and tickets change hands at high prices. At other times no one is permitted to visit them except their regular keepers and members of the ducal family. But, of course, when the Coronal comes to Bailemoona—”

The apiary was a building of startling beauty: a huge lacy structure of radiant metallic mesh, held upright by smooth tubular struts of some gleaming white wood that crossed and crossed again in an intricate way baffling to the eye, the entire thing seemingly so insubstantial that a puff of wind would hurl it into ruin. Within it Prestimion was able to make out a myriad bright bursts of light winking on and off with a rapidity that made the mind reel, like semaphore signals so swift that no one could possibly decipher their message. “What you’re seeing,” said the duke, “is sunlight glancing off the bodies of the bees as they move about. But come: come inside, if you will, my lord.”

A long entryway leading to a series of small chambers, each with a door at both ends, admitted Prestimion and his party to the apiary proper. Which was a gigantic dome four or five times the size of the Confalume throne-room, and so artfully woven that the mesh of which it was made was only faintly visible when beheld from within, a mere faint film against the open sky.

A high-pitched droning sound enveloped the visitors like a thick veil. There were bees everywhere overhead. Hundreds of them. Thousands.

They were in ceaseless motion, endlessly crossing and recrossing the upper reaches of their home in a bewildering airborne ballet. Prestimion was amazed by their numbers, and by the speed at which they moved, and the brilliance of the light that rebounded from their glossy sides and wings as they flitted quickly about. He stood for a long moment at the entrance, staring upward in wonder, marveling at the rapidity of the bees’ movements and the dizzying beauty of the patterns that they created.

Gradually he began to focus on individual bees instead of simply following the movements of the group, and it started to dawn on him that the bees seemed very large, as insects went. But Septach Melayn voiced the question first. Turning to the duke, he said, “Are these really bees, your grace? For as I track them about this cage with my eyes they appear as big as birds to me.”

“Your eyes are not deceiving you,” replied the duke. “As if ever they could. But bees are truly what they are. Here: let me show you.”

He walked out into the middle of the floor and took up a pose with outstretched arms and upturned hands. Within moments half a dozen of the apiary’s inhabitants had swooped down to settle on him as though they were his pets flocking to their master, and a dozen more, just after, descended and took up orbit around his head.

The duke remained motionless. Only with his eyes did he signal to his guests. “Come close, now. Look at them. Slowly—slowly—take care not to frighten them—” Prestimion carefully advanced, and Septach Melayn, and then big Gialaurys, who was most careful of all, walking as though on a carpet of eggshells.

But Maundigand-Klimd, for whom the bees seemed to hold no interest, remained by the entrance. Abrigant, likewise, stayed at the apiary’s edge, his face darkened by a perpetual scowl. Since their arrival in Bailemoona he had scarcely bothered to veil his impatience to be on his way, off to Skakkenoir somewhere to the south and east, where the metal-bearing plants supposedly were to be found. The quest for Dantirya Sambail was only an irritating distraction to him; an hour spent among flittering bees, however beautiful they might be, an unutterable waste of time.

When he was close enough to Duke Kaitinimon to have a clear view of the gleaming little entities that were crawling over his palms, Prestimion emitted a low whistle of surprise. The golden bees of Bailemoona were creatures several inches in length, with plump little bodies, very birdlike indeed.

What actually were they, he wondered, small birds or very large insects?

Insects, Prestimion decided, when he had moved another few steps nearer. Now he was able clearly to make out their three pairs of furry legs. Their bodies were segmented, head and thorax and abdomen. They were covered everywhere, wings and body both, with a sleek reflective armor that could easily be mistaken for a fine coating of gold, and which accounted for the dazzling light-effects that their movements caused.

“Even closer,” said the duke. “Close enough to see their eyes.”

Prestimion obeyed. And gasped. Their eyes!—those strange eyes!—he had never seen such eyes.

Not the cold faceted eyes of insects, no, not at all. Nor the beady glittering ones of birds, for that matter. Their eyes were disproportionately large and had an oddly mammalian look to them, the warm, soft, liquid eyes of some little creature of the forest. But there was a burning intelligence in them, also, that set these creatures apart from the chattering droles and mintuns of the woods. It was almost frightening to look into those knowing eyes.

“Stand as I’m standing,” the duke said. “Stay very still, and they’ll come to you also.”

Neither Septach Melayn nor Gialaurys cared to make the experiment. But Prestimion thrust his arms outward with his palms facing up. A moment or two went by. Then a pair of the bees came out of the air and flew inquisitive circles around his head; and, after another minute or so, one of them cautiously lit on Prestimion’s left hand.

He felt an odd tickling sensation as it moved about on him. Very slowly he turned his head toward the left for a better view, and found himself staring into the insect’s huge solemn eyes. It was watching him closely.

There was intelligence there, beyond any doubt.

A tiny mind, but keen, penetrating. To what end, though? What kind of thoughts circulated in the brains of these little creatures, the last of their kind, as they flew their endless sparkling loops around the great apiary that was their only refuge in the world?

“Our ancestors kept them in little cages as pets,” Kaitinimon said, after a time. “They’d fly around for a month or two at most, and then would sicken and die. They could not abide the cages, you see. But no one who had ever had bees even a few days could resist their beauty: when your bees died, you felt you must immediately replace them, although those would die also, just as quickly. Once there were millions of them in this province. They turned the whole sky golden when they flew overhead in great masses. Now I alone have the privilege of keeping bees in Bailemoona; and this cage, as you see, is quite large. They would never survive in anything smaller.—If you carefully turn your hands over, like this, my lord, the bees will leave you. Unless, of course, you wish to extend the experience a little longer.”

“Just a few minutes more, I think,” Prestimion said. Two more bees arrived on his left hand, and then a third, landing on the other one. He stood transfixed, unable to take his eyes from theirs, lost in contemplation of the small intelligences that now quite placidly were traversing his hands. There were five of them on him, now. Six. Seven. He must seem safe. He wondered if they were looking somehow into his mind.

Abruptly he found himself wishing most intensely that Varaile had been here to see the bees with him today.

The thought startled him: that Varaile had taken Thismet’s place in his mind already, that he should be longing for this new woman whom he barely knew, and wishing that he had her by his side as he rode on and on through the world. And he did. It amazed him that he should feel her absence so strongly. But Thismet was gone forever, and Varaile awaited him at Castle Mount. By virtue of his power and his responsibilities, he was destined to spend his life traversing the world, and suddenly, with a degree of passion that astonished him, he yearned to share it all with Varaile, to show her everything that he would be privileged to see himself, the golden bees of Bailemoona, the vanishing lake of Simbilfant, the midnight market of Bombifale, the surging colors of Gulikap Fountain, the gardens of Tolingar—everything. Everything.

“You find our bees interesting, my lord?”

Caught off guard, Prestimion gave the duke a hasty glance. “Oh, yes,” he said quickly. “Yes! How extraordinary they are! How remarkable!”

“I could send a few to you at the Castle,” Kaitinimon said. “But they would only die, like all the rest.”

That night, as they dined on delicacies of the region in the ducal palace, Prestimion’s thoughts still were fixed on the golden bees, and on the longing for Varaile that they had so unexpectedly kindled in him. The bright glow of their enigmatic eyes would not release him, nor the pretty dazzle of the myriad flitting fliers swiftly moving through the upper reaches of their immense apiary. Those knowing eyes—that look of inexplicable intelligence—that beautiful golden gleam winking on and off—

This wondrous world, he thought, this place of miracles, that held enough surprises to last one for ten lifetimes—

But to see the famous golden bees had not been the primary purpose of the Coronal’s visit here, and it was Gialaurys, finally, who brought matters around to the essential topic.

“There was a report,” he said to the duke, “that the Procurator Dantirya Sambail and one or two of his men had passed this way not long ago. The Coronal has reason to speak with him and wishes to locate him. We wonder if you’ve had any contact with him.”

The duke showed no sign of surprise. Very likely word had reached him and no doubt many others, by this time, that Lord Prestimion was trying to locate the Procurator of Ni-moya and that a continent-wide manhunt was under way.

Which was, of course, news of the most sensational kind. But Duke Kaitinimon knew better than to raise whys and wherefores with Prestimion in such an affair. He asked no questions and offered only the most straightforward kind of response, telling the Coronal that he too had heard of the Procurator’s presence in the area, but had not been visited by him. That had puzzled him, that the Procurator would pass this way and not trouble to pay a call. He was certain, though, that Dantirya Sambail was no longer to be found anywhere in Balimoleronda province. More than that he could not say. And when Septach Melayn asked him whether he thought it more likely that the fugitive Procurator would have gone south or west from Bailemoona, Duke Kaitinimon could only shrug. “Plainly he’s trying to get home. What he seeks, I suppose, is the sea. He could reach it either way. Who am I to try to comprehend the mind of Dantirya Sambail?”

Prestimion decided on the southward route out of Bailemoona. There was never any such thing as a short journey on Majipoor, but the Procurator would have a shorter time of it reaching the sea by going to the south than toward the west; and, though the ports were supposed to be blockaded, Prestimion knew only too well how easy it would be for someone as wily as Dantirya Sambail to bribe his way through any blockade. He had, after all, bought his way out of the Sangamor tunnels. What challenge could it be for him to find some lazy and venal customs official in a southern port who would look the other way while he and Mandral-isca put themselves aboard a freighter heading toward Zim-roel?

Southward, then, for Prestimion. Toward Ketheron and its Sulfur Desert.

It was a logical choice, and an alluring one. The Sulfur Desert was neither a desert nor a place where sulfur was to be found; but from all reports it was one of the most striking sights in the world. Prestimion was grateful to Dantirya Sambail for having given him a pretext to visit it.

One more place that he would go without Varaile. He could not get her out of his mind.

Two days’ journey out of Bailemoona they began seeing the first outcroppings of yellow sand. At first there were only stray streaks and tailings of the stuff, mixed with ordinary dark soil that diluted the brilliance of its hue. But gradually the prevalence of it intensified until all the hillsides and valleys seemed stained with it; and then, when the travelers came to the Sulfur River itself, yellowness was all about them as though it were the only color in the universe.

It was easy to see why the first explorers of this district had believed they had stumbled upon a vast trove of sulfur. Surely there could be no other substance that had that same bright warm hue. But indeed there was; for the “sulfur” of the Sulfur Desert was nothing but powdery yellow sand, a fine calcareous sand given its striking pigmentation by grains of quartz and minute fragments of feldspar and hornblende. It had been formed, apparently, in some incalculably ancient era when much of central Majipoor had been a desert of the most arid kind, and great yellow mountains occupied the territory west of the Labyrinth. The potent action of hard winds over many millennia had scoured those mountains down into powder and carried it thousands of miles, depositing it finally in the region over the Gaibilan Hills behind Ketheron, where the Sulfur River had its source; and the river had done the rest, sweeping enormous quantities of the sand down out of the hills and distributing it across the entire broad valley where the travelers from Castle Mount now stood, a valley that had been known since time immemorial as the Sulfur Desert.

In most parts of it these unique yellow sands formed a superficial layer that rarely exceeded twenty or thirty feet in thickness. But there were some places where it had a depth of half a mile or more and had solidified under the pressure of the eons into a soft, porous rock that readily formed lofty vertical cliffs. It was in that zone of flat-faced yellow cliffs that the towns and cities of the Ketheron district had been built.

There were those who thought that Ketheron had a fairyland loveliness about it; but to others, the region was a grotesque and bizarre place, something one might imagine in a nightmare. Erosion had cut a network of sharp-sided gullies deep into the cliffs’ topmost strata, and weathering had created gnarled tapering spires of a hundred fanciful shapes in the exposed areas. By hollowing those spires out and punching tiny slit-windows through the soft rock of their walls, the Ketheron folk had transformed them into dwelling-places, dreamlike and odd, whole towns made up of tall narrow yellow buildings that looked like the pointed caps of witches.

The strangeness of Ketheron made it a favorite site for soul-painters, who had flocked here for centuries, unfurling their psychosensitive canvases and letting impressions of what they saw filter onto them through their trance-enhanced minds. Hauntingly atmospheric soul-paintings showing Ketheron’s twisted yellow towers were standard items in the houses of the newly rich who had not yet learned to shun the commonplace. Even in the Castle Prestimion had seen five or six Ketherons hanging in odd places about the premises, and they had so thoroughly accustomed him to the look of this place that he was afraid he might take the actuality of it for granted when he finally beheld it.

But the soul-paintings, he quickly came to see, had not prepared him in any way for Ketheron itself. That yellow landscape, with the muddy yellow river flowing serenely through its heart, and the skewed and contorted ogre-houses of Ketheron city rising spikily from the tops of the cliffs—how mysterious it all looked, how much like a piece of some alien world that had been set down here on Majipoor between Bailemoona and the Aruachosian coast!

Of course, Prestimion thought, any place you did not know had to be regarded as a place of mystery. And how much knowledge did you ever have, really, even of the places you thought you knew?

What he saw here, though, was truly strange. Ketheron city, which extended for some miles along the northern bank of the river in the heart of the valley, was the capital of the Ketheron district. It was small as the cities of Majipoor went, half a million people at best. Prestimion stared in wonder at the oddly shaped houses, at the unfamiliar faces of the townspeople who came out to peer at their Coronal as he rode past. Yes, Ketheron was unusual-looking to an extreme. The people themselves had a yellow cast to their features, or so he imagined, and they favored billowing baggy clothing and long floppy caps that gave them a gnomish look perfectly in keeping with the weirdness of their district.

But even if Ketheron had been as familiar to him in its contours and textures as Muldemar or Halanx or Tidias, Prestimion realized that he would be deceiving himself if he believed that he knew it. Every city was a world in itself, a world in miniature, with thousands of years of history locked up in its walls—more secrets than you could ever learn if you spent the rest of your life there. And Ketheron was just one city of all the multitudinous cities of this vast world that had been given into his care, a place that he would pass through this day, and never see again, and its essence would be as much of a riddle to him tomorrow as it had been the day before yesterday.

This was farming territory—the soft yellow ground was phenomenally fertile—and the people seemed like simple folk, by and large, unaccustomed not only to visiting Coronals but to aristocrats of any sort. The mayor of Ketheron city appeared almost to be trembling as he came out of the town hall, a spindly, warped three-story tower at the very edge of the cliff, to greet Prestimion and lead him within. He was protected by a formidable armamentarium of superstition: his purple-and-yellow cloak of office was bedecked with so many talismans and amulets that it was a wonder the poor man could stand upright beneath their weight, and he had brought two mages with him for moral support, a plump little oily-skinned man and a tall gaunt scarecrow of a woman, who carried the holy implements of what was apparently a purely local cult, since not even Maundigand-Klimd had ever seen their like before. The Su-Suheris seemed amused by the earnest clodhopping conjurations by which the pair drove lurking dark spirits from the cavernous, musty-smelling room where the meeting was taking place, rendering it safe for the Coronal and his party. Or was it for the mayor’s own benefit that these rites were being performed?

Gialaurys conducted the inquiry, while Prestimion and the rest stood to one side. Clearly the mayor was too thoroughly intimidated by the mere proximity of Prestimion to be able to carry on a conversation with him, and Septach Melayn’s airy insouciance did not seem likely to put the poor man any more at ease. But Gialaurys, massive and fearsome though he looked, had the art of speaking with plain folk, for he came of plain stock himself.

Had the mayor or any of the townsfolk seen or heard aught of Dantirya Sambail in these parts? he asked. No, they had not. The mayor did seem aware, at least, of who Dantirya Sambail was. But he could not imagine why the awesome Procurator of Ni-moya would have been traveling hereabouts. That so mighty and terrifying a personage could have had any reason whatever for entering this picturesque but unimportant region was a concept that left the poor man looking baffled and dismayed.

“We have chosen the wrong route, I think,” Prestimion murmured to Septach Melayn. “If he’d been heading straight for the Aruachosian coast, he’d have had no choice but to pass through here, wouldn’t he? We should have gone west from Bailemoona instead of south.”

“Unless the mayor’s somehow been magicked into forgetting that Dantirya Sambail ever came by,” said Septach Melayn. “The Procurator knows how that game’s played, now.”

But nothing so devious had been necessary. When Gialaurys produced a sketch of Mandralisca that they were carrying with them, the mayor recognized the poison-taster’s bleak face instantly. “Oh, yes, yes,” he said. “He was here. Traveling in a rusty old floater, he was, and stopped in town to buy provisions—three weeks ago, five, six, somewhere back then. Who could ever forget a face like that?”

“Traveling alone, was he?” Gialaurys asked.

The mayor had no idea. No one had taken the trouble to investigate the floater, which had been parked by the bank of the river. The hatchet-faced man had bought what he needed and returned to his floater and continued onward. Nor could the mayor say which way he had gone.

Here, at least, his mages were of some use. “We could see that this stranger would bring no luck to our city,” the gaunt woman volunteered. “And so we followed along his floater’s trail for half a mile or so, and planted dragon-wax candles every hundred yards to ensure that he’d not return.”

“And the direction he was going—?”

“South,” the little oily-faced man said immediately. “Toward Arvyanda.”

10

“They were glad to get rid of us,” Prestimion said, chuckling. The royal caravan was crossing something called Spurifon Bridge, a weatherbeaten, disturbingly creaky wooden span that could well have been five thousand years old. It was just barely possible to see the silt-choked Sulfur River far below them, moving at the sluggish pace of a sleepy serpent, a tawny yellow line against the brighter yellow of the valley through which it flowed. “How terrifying we must have seemed! I hope they didn’t just make up the first story that came into their minds for the sake of moving us on out of town.”

“It takes courage to lie to a Coronal,” Abrigant said. “Was there so much as one atom of courage in that whole town?”

“They told the truth,” said Maundigand-Klimd. “I detect the trail of their incantation-candles along our path. Look: there, and there. Burned to stumps, but there are the stumps. We go the right way.”

“These Ketherons are harmless timid people caught up in matters too deep for them, and we have badly frightened them,” Prestimion said. “We should do something for them.” He looked toward Septach Melayn. “Make a note of it. We’ll build them a new bridge, at least. This one belongs in a museum.”

“It’s the responsibility of the Pontifex to build bridges,” grumbled Septach Melayn. “That’s what the title means: builder of bridges. An ancient word, millions of years old.”

“Nothing’s millions of years old,” said Abrigant. “Not even the stars.”

“Well, thousands, then.”

“Peace, both of you,” Prestimion snapped. “Let the appropriate department be notified, a new bridge for Ketheron, and so be it, with no further quibbling.” What was the use of being Coronal, he wondered, if he had to utter a decree twice, even among his closest associates, in order to make it effective?

South of the river the prevailing yellowness of the countryside soon began to thin out, reversing the pattern of the north, streaks of darker soil becoming more and more common until everything was normal again. It was something of a relief to be leaving it behind. The brilliant color, strange as it was, numbed and deadened the mind after a time by its very intensity, and the monotony of the sulfureous landscape had begun to become oppressive.

They camped that night in the foothills of a mountain range of moderate size that lay just ahead of them. A sending of the Lady of the Isle came to Prestimion as he slept.

It was uncommon for Coronals to receive sendings, and not only because the Lady customarily was his own mother. Sendings were meant as guidance for the soul; and one Power of the Realm ordinarily did not presume to advise another. But sometimes when a Coronal stood at a point of decision and crisis the Lady would take it upon herself to intervene with her wisdom. This night, sleep overcame Prestimion almost as soon as he had closed his eyes. He felt himself going down into the trance state that betokened a sending. Then he heard the soft music of the Lady’s domain, and glided easily into a low pavilion of pure white marble set all about with pots of flowering shrubs, fragrant alabandinas and tanigales and the like. And there before him was the Princess Therissa, Lady of the Isle, his mother and mother to all the world, smiling and holding out her hands to him.

She looked as young as ever, for she was one of those women whom age seemingly could not touch. Her thick dark hair had lost none of its gleam since she had taken up her new duties. The silver headband of her office lay lightly on her brow. On the bosom of her robe, as always, rested the Muldemar Ruby, that wondrous jewel that had been in the family four thousand years, a deep red stone with a purple flush, set in a golden hoop.

Thismet was standing beside her.

Or so it seemed at first to Prestimion. That small, delicately formed woman of the mischievous sparkling eyes could only be Thismet; but even as his spirit reverberated with surprise and unease—for why would Thismet be here with the Lady in this sending, when he thought he had begun to make his final peace with the tragedy of her death, and was moving onward in his life?—everything shifted in the smooth way that things often shift in dreams, and he was plainly able to see that the woman next to his mother was not Thismet at all, had never been Thismet, could not have been Thismet. She was Varaile. How strange, he thought, that he had mistaken her for Thismet. For each was beautiful and compelling in her own way, but tall robust full-bodied Varaile looked nothing at all like the tiny fragile-seeming woman whom Prestimion had loved and lost so long ago.

He became aware that his mother was speaking. But there seemed to be some barrier between her and him that kept him from comprehending her words. It was as if the air was too dense in this pavilion, or the fragrance of the flowers too strong. And still she spoke, smiling throughout, gesturing gently toward him, toward Varaile, toward herself. He strained to hear. And at last he understood. “Do you know this woman, Prestimion?” the Lady was saying. “Her name is Varaile, and she lives in Stee.”

“I know her, yes, mother. Yes.”

“She has the bearing of a queen.”

“A queen is what she will be,” said Prestimion. “My queen, who will live beside me at the Castle.”

“Do you mean that, Prestimion? Tell me that you do.”

“Oh, yes, mother. Yes, I do. Yes!”

When he woke in the morning the dream was still burning in his mind, as true sendings always do. Septach Melayn, who was the first to come upon him, looked at him strangely and laughed, and said, “You appear to be in another world today, my friend.”

“Perhaps I am,” said Prestimion.

It was necessary, though, for him to return to this one. They were still many days’ journey from the southern coast, and there was no time to waste if he hoped to overtake Dantirya Sambail.

The last of the yellow sand now lay behind them. So was the desert aridity of Ketheron. The air was soft and moist here, warm and velvet smooth, the hills thick with greenery that had a waxy sheen, the sky often darkened by rain-clouds, though the showers were always brief. They were moving now toward the tropical regions.

Three singular landmarks marked the point of transition.

The first, in a place where the road veered upward suddenly out of the flat plain and delivered them into a country of craggy hills, was what seemed initially to be a solitary mountain that loomed to their left, but which quickly revealed itself to be an entire mountain range, a long gray wall that rose with surprising abruptness from the terrain surrounding it. Atop the great base rose a host of smaller rounded peaks, each one the exact image of its neighbor, that swarmed along its elongated summit in chaotic and bewildering profusion.

“It is the Mountain of the Thirteen Doubts,” said Maundigand-Klimd, who had made himself the custodian of their maps during this journey. “Its many peaks look just like each other, and one pass leads only into another, so that a traveler attempting to cross the mountain must invariably get lost.”

“And will that happen to us?” asked Prestimion, wondering if the Procurator might at this moment be wandering around amidst those identical stone humps.

The Su-Suheris shook both his heads in that unnerving way of his. “Ah, no, lordship: we go past these mountains, not over them. But their presence to the east of us tells us that we have taken the correct road. We must look now for the Cliff of Eyes, which will be coming upon us very soon.”

“The Cliff of Eyes,” said Septach Melayn. “What in the name of the Divine can that be?”

“Wait and see,” said Maundigand-Klimd.

When they found it—and sharp-eyed Septach Melayn was the first to spy it—there could be no doubt of its identity. It was a stately mountain of some whitish stone that stood by itself, rising conspicuously above the highway just to their right; and its entire face was bespeckled with a multitude of large, deeply inset oval-shaped boulders of some dark shining mineral, scattered across it like raisins in a pudding. The effect was of a thousand stern black eyes peering down at passers-by from the mountain’s white face. Gialaurys made a flurry of holy signs at the sight of it, and even Prestimion felt a shiver of something like awe, or even fear.

“How did this happen?” he wanted to know. But no one offered an answer, and he knew better than to expect one. Who could say what force had shaped the world, or for what reason? One did not inquire into the nature and motives of the Divine. The world was the world: it was as it was, a place of eternal delight and mystery.

The Cliff of Eyes seemed to watch them for hours as they rode past its eerie flank.

“And soon,” said Maundigand-Klimd, bending over his map, “we will be at the Pillars of Dvorn, which mark the boundary between the central sector of Alhanroel and the south.”

It was just before dusk when they reached them: two great blue-gray rocks, ten times the height of a man and tapering upward to sharply pointed tips. They stood facing each other with the road running straight as an arrow’s flight between them, so that they formed a kind of ceremonial gateway to the lands beyond. The rocks were rough and convoluted on their outer faces but smooth and flat on the inner ones, which made it seem as if they were the two severed halves of a single great structure.

“There is magic here,” Gialaurys muttered restively, and offered another swarm of holy signs.

“Ah, yes,” said Septach Melayn, with a playful lilt to his voice. “There’s a curse on the place. Every twenty thousand years the rocks come crashing together, and woe betide the wayfarers who happen to be passing through the gateway just then.”

“So you know the old legend, do you?” asked Maundigand-Klimd.

Septach Melayn swung around to face him. “Legend? What legend? I was only having a little sport with Gialaurys.”

“Then you reinvent what already was,” said the Su-Suheris. “For indeed there was an ancient Shapeshifter tale that said just that, that these were clashing rocks, which had moved before and someday would move again. And, what is worse, that the next time they did, it would be a great king of the human folk that perished here between them.”

“It would, would it?” said Prestimion, smiling jauntily and letting his gaze travel quickly from one great rock face to another. “Well, then, I suppose I’m safe, because, although I’m certainly a king, no one yet would call me a great one.” And added, with a wink at Septach Melayn, “But perhaps we should look for some other route south anyway, eh? Just to be absolutely safe.”

“The Pontifex Dvorn, my lord, caused magical plates of brass to be installed on each side of the road, inscribed with runes to protect against just such a thing,” Maundigand-Klimd said. “Of course, that was thirteen thousand years ago and the plates have long since vanished. You see those shallow square indentations high up on the walls? That was where they were, or so it’s said. But I think our chances of passing through safely are excellent.”

And indeed the Pillars of Dvorn remained in place as the royal caravan went past them. There was a distinct change in the look of the land on the far side, a greater density of foliage in response to the increase in warmth and humidity, and the hills there were smooth, rounded humps instead of hard jagged crags.

Maundigand-Klimd’s maps showed no settlements within fifty miles of the Pillars. But the travelers had gone no more than ten minutes’ journey when they came upon the ghost of a road leading off the main highway toward a cluster of low hills to the west, and Septach Melayn, fastening his keen vision on those hills, announced that he could make out a row of stone walls midway up, half buried beneath thickets of strangling vines. Prestimion, his curiosity piqued, sent Abrigant off with a couple of men to investigate. They returned fifteen minutes later with the report that a ruined city lay hidden in there, deserted except for a family of Ghayrog farmers who made their home amidst the ancient buildings. It was, so one of the Ghayrogs had told them, all that remained of a great metropolis of Lord Stiamot’s time, whose people were massacred by Shapeshifters during the Metamorph Wars.

“This cannot be,” said Maundigand-Klimd, shaking both his heads at once. “Lord Stiamot lived seventy centuries ago. In this climate the jungle would long since have swallowed up any such abandoned city.”

“Let’s have a look at it,” said Prestimion, and they made a side jaunt down the western road, which after a few hundred yards became nothing more than a dirt track that climbed steadily into the hills at a gentle grade. Soon the wall of the ruined city came into view. It was a substantial stone structure, at least fifteen feet high in most places, but nearly overwhelmed by shrubs and vines. Just to the left of the entrance to the city proper stood an immense many-buttressed tree with pale-gray bark, whose myriad arms, flattening as they embraced the stone of the wall, seemed to be melting into it so that it was difficult to tell where tree left off and ruin began.

Two sturdy young Ghayrogs came forth to greet them. They were both naked, but it was impossible to tell whether they were male or female, because the sexual organs of male Ghayrogs emerged only when they were aroused, and the breasts of the females were similarly hidden except when they were nursing young. Nor, mammals though they were, was it easy to think that they were other than reptilian. These two had brightly gleaming scales and strong tubular arms and legs; their cold green eyes were unblinking and their forked scarlet tongues flicked constantly in and out between their hard fleshless lips; and masses of fleshy black coils writhed like serpents on their heads in lieu of hair.

They greeted their visitors with a kind of indifferent courtesy and asked them to wait while they summoned their grandfather. He appeared shortly, a venerable Ghayrog indeed, limping slowly up to them. “I am Bekrimiin,” he said, with a creaky but effusive gesture of welcome. Prestimion did not offer his own name in return. “We are very poor here, but you are welcome to such hospitality as we can provide,” Bekrimiin said, and signaled to his grandchildren, who quickly produced platters that were nothing more than the giant heart-shaped leaves of some nearby tree, on which they had placed some sort of mashed starchy vegetable, evidently fermented, that had a fiercely spicy flavor. Prestimion took some and ate with a determined show of pleasure, and several of the others followed suit, though neither Gialaurys nor the fastidious Septach Melayn made even a pretense of eating. A sweet, mildly bubbly liquid—either wine or beer; Prestimion was unable to tell which—accompanied it.

Afterward the Ghayrog led them into the heart of the ruins. Only the merest outlines of the city were visible, mainly the foundations of buildings, here and there a charred tower, or a couple of standing walls, propped up by the trees that stood beside them, of what might once have been a warehouse or a temple or a palace. Most of the structures had long since been engulfed by the giant buttressed trees, whose flattening arms tended to grow together until they completely encircled and concealed whatever it was that they had drawn their support from when young. The name of the city, the old man said, was Diarwis, a name that meant nothing to Prestimion or his companions.

“It dates from Lord Stiamot’s time, does it?” Prestimion asked.

The Ghayrog laughed harshly. “Oh, no, nothing like that. These foolish children told you that? They are ignorant. Whatever I try to teach them of history goes from their minds before I finish my words.—But no, the city is much more recent. It was abandoned only nine hundred years ago.”

“Then there was no Metamorph attack here, either?”

“They told you that too, did they? No, no, that is just a myth. The Metamorphs were long gone from Alhanroel by then. This city destroyed itself.” And the old Ghayrog told a tale of a cruel and haughty duke, and of an uprising of the serfs who tilled his fields: the murder of three members of the duke’s family, and the duke’s savage reprisal, and then a further uprising, leading to an even more brutal reprisal, followed by the assassination of the duke himself and the abandonment of the city by serfs and masters alike, for by that time not enough people remained alive here to sustain any sort of urban life.

Prestimion listened in brooding silence, stunned by this bit of unknown history.

Like any prince of the Castle who had been marked for a high role in the government, he had made an extensive study of the annals of Majipoor’s history; and, by and large, it was a strikingly peaceful tale, with no significant bloodshed between the time of Stiamot’s campaigns against the Metamorphs and Prestimion’s own struggle with Korsibar. Certainly he had never come upon any accounts of rebellious serfs and assassinated dukes. The story went against all that he wanted to believe about the basically benign ways of the people of Majipoor, who had learned long ago to settle their quarrels by less violent means. He would rather have been told that the Shapeshifters had been the ones who worked this ruination; at least there already was a well-established history of fierce conflict between humans and Metamorphs, though it had come to an end thousands of years before this city’s destruction.

Bekrimiin informed his guests now that they were welcome to stay with him overnight, or for as long as they wished; but Prestimion had already had more than enough of this place, which had begun to weigh heavily on his spirits. To Gialaurys he said, “Thank him and give him some money, and tell him that it is the Coronal who he has entertained this afternoon. And then let’s be on our way.” To Abrigant he added, “When we are back at the Castle, find me whatever documents you can that exist concerning this place. I’d like to study its history more deeply.”

“There may very well be nothing to find in the archives about it,” said Septach Melayn. “The suppression of unpleasant facts was perhaps not any invention of ours, my lord.”

“Perhaps so,” Prestimion said somberly, and went out through the city’s gateway, and stood for a time staring at the great tree that held the city wall in its devouring embrace; and he said little to anyone all the rest of the afternoon.

They entered now into the district known as Arvyanda. Whenever anyone spoke of that region, it was always in the phrase, “Arvyanda of the golden hills,” which brought to Prestimion’s mind the image of the parched tawny hills of some area that had long dry summers, as was common farther to the north. He wondered why hills would be golden in this perpetually green and lush tropical region of frequent rainfall. Or was it that the yellow metal itself was mined in this place?

But the answer came quickly enough, and it was neither of those. A thick-boled tree with wide boat shaped leaves grew in copious quantity on the hillsides of Arvyanda, to the exclusion of nearly everything else; and in the bright tropical sunlight those innumerable leaves, which were stiff and outspread and of a texture that seemed almost metallic, gave back a brilliant golden reflection, as though the entire region had been gilded.

In Arvyanda city they made inquiries concerning Dantirya Sambail, with inconclusive results. Nobody was prepared to claim that they had actually seen the Procurator pass that way, although there were some scattered reports of unpleasant strangers moving swiftly through the outskirts of town some weeks before. Were they being deliberately vague, or were the Arvyanda folk merely stupid and unobservant? There was no easy way to tell; but in any case there was nothing to learn from them.

“Shall we continue?” Septach Melayn asked Prestimion.

“As far as the coast, yes.”

On the other side of Arvyanda were the celebrated topaz mines of Zeberged. It was the transparent form of the precious mineral that was found here, clear as the finest glass and, when polished, of an unparalleled brilliance. But so bright was the sun against the rocky terrain of Zeberged that the topaz outcroppings were invisible by day because of the glare; and therefore the miners came out only at twilight, when the topaz could be seen gleaming lustrously by the last rays of the light, and clapped bowls over the shining stones to serve as markers. Early the next morning they would return and cut away the marked pieces of rock, and turn them over to the craftsmen who polished them.

Prestimion watched all this with interest. But the miners of Zeberged, though they presented him with wondrous slabs of purest topaz, could give him no information about Dantirya Sambail.

Beyond Zeberged the sky grew dark with clouds, hanging heavy in the sky like thick, opalescent gauze. They were entering rainy Kajith Kabulon, where a wedge-shaped mountain formation perpetually caught the fogs that came off the southern seas and transformed them into rain. Indeed it was not long before they reached the zone of precipitation, and once they did they saw no more sunlight for days. The rain came in a steady drumbeat. It was essentially continuous, interrupted only by occasional scant hours of surcease.

The jungles of Kajith Kabulon were green, green, green. Trees and shrubs in exuberant prodigality rose everywhere toward the sky, their trunks striped brilliantly with strands of red and yellow fungi that provided the only splashes of vivid color to be seen and their crowns tied together by an impenetrable tangle of lianas and epiphytes that formed a virtually solid canopy, against which the rain constantly splashed, dripping through to the ground below. The spongy soil was covered by a dense carpet of furry green moss, broken here and there by narrow streamlets and numerous small pools, all of which reflected and refracted the dim greenish light in such complex ways that it often was impossible to tell whether that light came from overhead or rose in spontaneous generation from the forest floor.

There was animal life everywhere here too, bewildering in its abundance. Voracious long-legged bugs; clouds of fleas; droning white wasps with black-striped wings. Blue spiders that hung groundward in lengthy chains from towering trees. Flies with immense ruby eyes. Yellow-spotted scarlet lizards. Flat-headed booming toads. Mysterious small things that lurked in the crannies of rocks without revealing any more of themselves than hairy probing talons. And, now and again, some heavy shaggy beast that never came anywhere near the travelers, but could be seen at a great distance, snorting and snuffling through the jungle as it overturned clods of moss with its fork-like trunk to seek whatever might dwell beneath. In the green darkness, things took on strange borrowed forms: slender chameleons looked like gray twigs, twigs like chameleons, snakes pretended to be vines, certain vines had the unmistakable look of serpents. Rotting logs lying in the streams were easily enough taken for lurking predatory gurnibongs; but once, as Gialaurys knelt by the water’s edge to splash his face in the morning, he saw what he was sure was only a log that was lying in the stream a few feet from him rise, grunting, on four stubby legs and move slowly away, snapping its long toothy snout in displeasure at having been disturbed.

Prince Thaszthasz, a supple, olive-skinned man of unknowable age who had governed in Kajith Kabulon as far back as Prestimion could remember, took the unheralded arrival of the Coronal in his province as calmly as he seemed to take everything else. He provided a lavish feast for Prestimion at his wickerwork palace at the heart of the jungle, an open and airy structure that he said was patterned after a style favored by the Metamorphs of Ilirivoyne, far off on the other continent. “I build a new one every year,” Thaszthasz explained. “It saves on housekeeping costs.” They dined on the sweet fruits and smoked meats of the rainforest, a procession of flavors wholly unfamiliar to the men from Castle Mount, but the wine, at least, was of the north, a touch of home at last. There were musicians; there were jugglers; three sinuous girls wearing next to nothing performed an intricate, provocative dance. Prestimion and the prince discussed the pleasures of the Coronation festivals, the vigorous health of the Pontifex as Prestimion had lately observed it, and the fascinations of the jungle about them, which Thaszthasz unsurprisingly thought the most beautiful district in all of Majipoor.

Gradually, as the night wore on, the talk came around to more serious matters. Prestimion began gradually to move toward the topic of Dantirya Sambail; but before he had quite managed to be specific about his reasons for coming south, Prince Thaszthasz deftly interjected that he had a grave problem on his hands himself, which was the growing incidence of inexplicable insanity among the people of his province.

“We are in general very well balanced folk here, you know, my lord. The unvarying mildness and warmth of our climate, the beauty and tranquility of our surroundings, the steady music of the rain—you have no idea, your lordship, how beneficial all of that is for the soul.”

“This is true. I have no idea of it indeed,” said Prestimion.

“But now—in the past six months, or eight, perhaps—quite suddenly, there has been a change. We see the most solid citizens suddenly rising up and going off by themselves, entirely unprepared, into the forest. Leaving the main roads, you understand, which is a perilous thing, for the forest is huge—you would call it a jungle, I suppose—and it can be unkind to those who flout its requirements. There have been eleven hundred such disappearances so far. Only a handful of those who have gone have returned. Why did they go? What were they seeking? They are unable to tell us.”

“How strange,” said Prestimion uncomfortably.

“Then, too, we’ve had a great many unusual episodes of irrational behavior, even violence, in the city itself—actual fatalities, even—” Thaszthasz shook his head. A look of pain appeared on his smooth, normally serene face. “It goes beyond my understanding, my lord. There have been no changes here that might have brought about such upheavals. I confess I find it distasteful and disturbing.—Tell me, lordship, have you heard similar reports from other districts?”

“From some, yes,” said Prestimion, who, distracted by the strange new scenery all about him, had managed to put this entire issue out of mind since leaving the Labyrinth. It was unpleasant to have to confront it once again. “I agree: the situation is troublesome. We are conducting investigations.”

“Ah. And no doubt will have important conclusions to share with us shortly.—Can it be some kind of sorcery, do you think, that has caused all this, my lord? That is my theory, and a sound one, I think. What else could have robbed so many people of their reason all at once, if not a great witchcraft that some dark force has cast across the land?”

“We are giving it our closest attention,” said Prestimion, this time putting enough sharpness into his tone so that Thaszthasz, long experienced in the ways of power, could see that the Coronal wished to end the discussion. “Let me turn to another matter, now, Prince Thaszthasz, which is in fact the purpose for which I have ventured into your lovely forest—”

11

“He certainly was quite cool about it,” said Septach Melayn in some dudgeon, as they were making their way out the southern end of the rain-forest country. “Oh, yes, of course, the celebrated Procurator,” he said, in devastating high-pitched mimicry of Prince Thaszthasz’s bland, unperturbable style of speech. “ ‘What a remarkable person he is! And what a season this has been for unexpected visits by the greatest citizens of the realm!’ Hadn’t he heard a thing about the coastal blockade? Or the interdiction line that we’ve run from Bailemoona to Stoien?”

“He knew,” said Abrigant harshly. “Of course he knew! He just didn’t want to get himself into a quarrel with Dantirya Sambail. Who would? But it was his responsibility to detain the Procurator until—”

“No,” Prestimion said. “We were too dainty in our announcements. We sent word to port officials to detain him if they saw him, but we never said any such thing to people like Thaszthasz who hold authority inland across Dantirya Sambail’s most probable route to the sea. And now we see the result of our delicacy. By failing to name Dantirya Sambail openly as a fugitive from the law, we’ve made it possible not only for him to slip through to the coast, but for him to enjoy the hospitality of princes along the route.”

But Abrigant persisted. “Thaszthasz should have known that we wanted him. He should be punished for his negligence in—”

“In what?” Gialaurys demanded. “In inviting the ruler of the entire western continent to sit down and have a meal in his palace? If we don’t come out and say that Dantirya Sambail’s a criminal who needs to be brought to trial, why should we expect anybody to assume that he is?” Gialaurys shook his head heavily. “Even if he knew, why would he meddle? Dantirya Sambail’s big trouble for anyone, and Thasthasz obviously has no stomach for trouble. He may not even have had an inkling of the whole affair. He lives out here in his jungle listening to the lovely rain come down, and nothing else matters to him at all.”

“There is still the hope,” said Maundigand-Klimd, “that someone has been bold enough to seize Dantirya Sambail at one of the coastal ports.” And, since no one cared to deny that possibility, they put the subject aside.

They were entering the territory of Aruachosia, now, along the southern coast of Alhanroel. The sea was only a few hundred miles away, and every breeze brought them its salty tang and sultry warmth. This was a humid, steamy land; great stretches of it, swampy and insect-plagued and covered by tangled thickets of saw-edged manganoza palms, were virtually uninhabitable. But in the western part of the province there was a cone-shaped domain of relatively temperate country leading down to Sippulgar, the main seaport of the southern coast, which lay athwart the boundary between Aruachosia and its neighbor to the west, the province of Stoien.

Golden Sippulgar, it was always called. This has been a golden journey indeed, thought Prestimion: the golden bees of Bailemoona, the yellow sands of Ketheron, the golden hills of Arvyanda, and now golden Sippulgar as well. All very picturesque; but thus far they had little to show for their efforts other than fool’s gold. Dantirya Sambail had hopped blithely on and on ahead of them, unhindered in any way, and by now very likely had slipped through the port blockade as well and was on the high seas, heading home for his own private kingdom in Zimroel, where he would be virtually impregnable.

Did this continued pursuit make any sense? Prestimion wondered. Or should he halt at this point and hasten back to the Castle? The duties of kingship awaited him there. Dantirya Sambail’s defiance was not the only problem confronting him; there was a real crisis in the land, evidently, a plague, an epidemic. But the Coronal and his closest advisers were off once again in outlying districts engaged in a fruitless search that might better be carried on by other means.

And then—Varaile—the great unanswered question of his life—

For a moment, then and there, Prestimion resolved to turn at once from his quest for the Procurator. But no sooner had the thought come to him than he thrust it from him. He had followed Dantirya Sambail’s track this far, through desert and jungle, through one golden land after another: he would keep going, he decided, at least until he reached the coast, where he might obtain some reliable account of the Procurator’s movements. Golden Sippulgar would be the last point on his journey. To Sippulgar it was, then; and then homeward, homeward to the Castle, homeward to his throne and his tasks, homeward to Varaile.

Sippulgar was called “golden” because the facades of its multitude of sturdy two- and three-story buildings were fashioned without exception from the golden sandstone that was quarried in the hills just to its north. Just as the metallic leaves of the trees of Arvyanda, gleaming under the potent tropical sun, turned that region into a realm of brilliant gold, so too did the warm mellow stone of Sippulgar, glinting with bits of micaceous matter, yield a dazzling golden glow in the full brightness of the day.

It was in every way a city of the far south. The air was moist and heavy; the plantings that lined the streets and clustered about the houses were superabundantly lush, and offered up a riot of bewilderingly colorful blooms in a hundred different shades of red, blue, yellow, violet, orange, even dark maroon and a pulsating, shimmering black so intense that it seemed the quintessence of color rather than the total absence of it. The people were black, too, or, at least, dark, their faces and limbs all showing evidence of the sun’s hot touch. Sippulgar was beautifully situated, in a curving bay along the blue-green shore of the Inner Sea, crowded with ships from every part of the world. This stretch of southern Alhanroel was known as the Incense Coast, for everything that grew here was fragrant in one way or another: the low plants right along the shore that produced khazzil and the balsam known as himmam, and the forests not far inland of cinnamon trees and myrrh, thani-bong trees, scarlet fthiis. All of these exuded such a plenitude of aromatic oils and gums that the air itself about Sippulgar seemed perfumed.

Prestimion’s arrival in Sippulgar was not unexpected. He had known from the beginning of this southern journey that no matter which route he took from the Labyrinth, he would eventually have to reach the coast here, unless information were to reach him along the way that led him to follow Dantirya Sambail in some other direction. And so the city’s highest official, who bore the title of Royal Prefect, had a majestic suite ready for him in the governmental palace, a substantial building of the local sandstone with a sweeping view of the bay.

“We are, my lord, prepared to meet your every need, both material and spiritual,” the Prefect said at once.

Kameni Poteva was his name: a tall, hawk-faced man with not an ounce of fat on him, whose white robe of office was decorated with a pair of jade amulets of the kind known as rohillas and a sewn band of holy symbols. Sippulgar was a superstitious city, Prestimion knew. They worshipped a god who represented Time here, in the form of a winged serpent with the ferocious toothy snout and blazing eyes of the little omnivorous beast called a jakkabole: Prestimion had seen representations of it in several great plazas on his way into the city. There were exotic cults here, too, for Sippulgar was home to a colony of various expatriate beings from the stars, folk whose entire populations on Majipoor were no more than a few hundred all told. One entire street of the Sippulgar waterfront, he had heard, was given over to a row of temples to the gods of these alien people. Prestimion made a mental note to have a look at them before he moved along.

Septach Melayn came to him that evening as he was making ready for the formal dinner that the Prefect was giving in his honor. “A message from Akbalik, in Ni-moya,” he said, holding out an already-opened envelope. “Very strange news. Young Dekkeret has signed on with the Pontifical bureaucracy and taken himself off to Suvrael.”

Prestimion stared in bewilderment at the paper in Septach Melayn’s hand without reaching for it. “What did you say? I don’t think I understand.”

“You remember, don’t you, that we sent Akbalik out to Zimroel to check on whether Dantirya Sambail was fomenting trouble over there? And that at the last moment I suggested that Dekkeret go with him to pick up a little diplomatic experience?”

“Yes, yes, of course I remember. But what’s this about his taking a job with the Pontifical people? And why Suvrael, of all places?”

“He’s doing it as a penance, apparently.”

“A penance?”

Septach Melayn nodded. He gave Akbalik’s letter a quick glance. “They went hunting steetmoy up in the Khyntor Marches, apparently—that was my idea too, I have to admit—and there was some sort of accident, a local guide-woman killed during the course of the hunt, through some negligence of Dekkeret’s, I gather. Or at least that’s what Dekkeret believes is what happened. Anyhow, Dekkeret felt so bad about it that he decided to go off to the most unpleasant place he knew of in the entire world and carry out some difficult task under conditions of extreme physical discomfort, by way of atoning for whatever it was he felt responsible for causing while he was hunting in the northlands. So he bought himself a ticket to Suvrael. Akbalik tried to talk him out of it, of course. But it happened that the Pontifical people in Ni-moya were looking for some young official willing to undertake a ridiculous mission to Suvrael to find out why the Suvraelinu hadn’t been meeting their quota of beef exports lately, and when one of Dekkeret’s friends who worked for the Pontificate found out that Dekkeret was going to Suvrael anyway, he arranged to get him a temporary commission on the Pontifical staff, and off he went. He’s probably landed in Tolaghai by now. The Divine only knows when he’ll be back.”

“Suvrael,” Prestimion said, shaking his head. Fury was mounting in him. “An act of penance, he says. The young idiot! By all the demons of Triggoin, what’s wrong with him? He belongs at the Castle, not running around in that blasted desert wasteland! If he felt some need to atone, the Isle of Sleep’s the usual place for such things, isn’t it? And a much shorter trip, too.”

“I suppose the Isle seemed like too tame a place for him. Or maybe going there never occurred to him.”

“Then Akbalik should have suggested it. Suvrael! How could he have done that? I had plans for that boy! I’ll hold Akbalik responsible for this!”

“My lord, Dekkeret is very headstrong. You know that. If he had his mind made up to go to Suvrael, you could not have dissuaded him yourself.”

“Perhaps so,” said Prestimion, trying now without much success to get his irritation under control. “Perhaps.” Scowling, he swung about and stared out the window. “All right. I’ll deal with young Dekkeret when and if he gets back from this mission of penance of his. I’ll give him something to be penitent about! Reporting on Suvraelu beef exports for the Pontifex! There’s been a drought in Suvrael for years, and the pastures have burned out, and they’ve butchered all their cattle because they can’t feed them, that’s why the beef exports have fallen off! What need does the Pontificate have of sending a man all the way down there just to find out about the obvious? The drought is over, anyway, so I understand. Give them two or three years to rebuild their herds, and they’ll be shipping as much beef as they ever—”

“The point, Prestimion, isn’t what sort of information the Pontificate thought it needed to gather. The point is that Dekkeret has an exaggerated sense of personal honor and felt obliged to expiate what he believed to be a terrible sin by undergoing prolonged personal suffering. There are worse failings for a young man to have, you know. You’re being really unfair to him.”

“Am I? I suppose you may be right,” said Prestimion reluctantly, after a little while. “What about Akbalik? What else does he have to report, and where is he now?”

“He’s heading back from Ni-moya by way of Alaisor at the moment, and says he’ll rejoin us at any place you care to name. As for the Procurator, there’s been no sign of him in Ni-moya, and from what Akbalik’s been able to find out he doesn’t seem to be anywhere in Zimroel yet.”

“I suppose he’s somewhere on the high seas, then, between here and there. Well, so be it. We’ll deal with him when the time comes. Anything else?”

“No, my lord.”

Septach Melayn handed the despatch to Prestimion, who took it without looking at it and tossed it to a nearby table. Turning his back on Septach Melayn once again, he glared toward the water as if he could see all the way to Suvrael from here.

Suvrael! Dekkeret has gone to Suvrael!

Such foolishness, Prestimion thought. He had thought so highly of the boy, too, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Normork assassination attempt, when Dekkeret had seemed so stalwart, so quick, so fundamentally capable. And now this! Well, perhaps it could be chalked off to youthful romanticism. Prestimion almost felt sorry for the young man, off there in the sun-baked southern continent, which from all reports was a miserable arid place of sand dunes and stinging insects and scorching winds.

The memory awoke in Prestimion of his own disagreeable wanderings in the Valmambra Desert of the north after the great defeat at Mavestoi Dam, the darkest hour of the Korsibar war. He had suffered grievously in the Valmambra: had dropped finally into a delirium of fatigue and starvation, and would surely have perished if another two or three days had gone by before he was found. That journey through the Valmambra had been the most arduous event of Prestimion’s life.

And yet they said that Suvrael, any part of it, was ten times worse than the Valmambra. If so, then Dekkeret would certainly find there the ordeal that he craved for the sake of purifying his soul. But what if it took him the next five years to get himself out of Suvrael and back to the Castle? What would become of all his youthful promise, then? For that matter, what if he were to die down there? Prestimion had heard tales—everyone had—of inexperienced wayfarers who had strayed from some desert path and, lost without drinking water in Suvrael’s blast-furnace heat, met their deaths within just a few hours.

Well, Dekkeret was probably able to look after himself. And Septach Melayn was right: it was a pardonable exploit, at least in one so young. The Suvrael adventure might be the making of him, if he survived it. It would toughen him; it would give him a deeper perspective on life and death, on responsibility and obligation. The best hope Prestimion had was that the boy came quickly to forgiving himself, down there, for his northlands mishap, and returned to the Castle in a reasonable period of time ready to take on the duties that were waiting for him.

The main issue for Prestimion, here in golden Sippulgar, was Dantirya Sambail. And the Prefect Kameni Poteva lost no time sharing such news as he had of the Procurator’s whereabouts, although it was, alas, no news at all.

“At your request, my lord, we have raised an embargo against him at every port along the coast. Since we received word from you concerning the emergency, no ship has left Sippulgar bound for Zimroel without a complete check of the entire passenger manifest being undertaken by my port officials. Dantirya Sambail was not seen. We have also run checks on any ship leaving here for other ports along the Alhanroel coast that serve the Zimroel trade. The result was the same.”

“What ports are those?” Prestimion asked. The Prefect spread a map of southern Alhanroel before them. “They all lie west of here. We can eliminate the other direction. As you see, my lord, here is Sippulgar near the provincial border separating us from Stoien, and this, here, is eastern Aru-achosia. Running onward still farther to the east lie the provinces of Vrist, Sethem, Kinorn, and Lorgan. The only port of any significance along that entire coastal stretch is Glystrintai, in Vrist, and the only ships that sail out of Glystrintai come here. So if the Procurator had been foolish enough to go eastward when he reached the coast, he would only have come back here anyway, and we would have taken him into custody.”

“And to the west?”

“To the west, my lord, is the province of Stoien, developing into the Stoienzar Peninsula. We find just a few widely spaced ports along the southern Stoien coast, because the great heat, the insects, the impenetrable saw-palm jungles, have discouraged settlement. In a span of close to three thousand miles we have only the towns of Maximin, Karasat, Gunduba, Slail, and Porto Gambieris, none of them of any consequence. If the Procurator had emerged from Kajith Kabulon at any of those and attempted to buy passage to some port farther west, we would certainly have had word of it; but no one resembling Dantirya Sambail has been seen in any of them.”

“What if he didn’t come as far overland as the southern coast, though?” Septach Melayn wanted to know. “What if he simply turned in a westerly direction farther up, and headed for one of the ports on the northern side of the peninsula? Would that have been possible?”

“Possible, yes. Difficult, but possible.” The Prefect traced a line across the map with the tip of one long, bony finger. “Here is Kajith Kabulon. The only good road that comes out of the rain-forest is the one going due south, which brought you here. But there are some country roads, badly maintained and not easy to use, that might have more appeal for a man trying to escape justice. This one, for instance, which leaves Kajith Kabulon at its southwest corner and passes through north-central Aruachosia heading west toward the peninsula. If he managed things successfully, the Procurator would have been able to reach any one of a dozen ports on the peninsula’s Gulf side. And from there things would be much easier for him.”

“I see,” said Prestimion, with a sinking feeling within. He stared at the map. The Stoienzar peninsula, Duke Oljebbin’s domain, came thrusting westward out of the lower part of Alhanroel like a gigantic thumb, reaching far out into the ocean. South of the peninsula was the main body of the Inner Sea, leading to Suvrael. On the north side of the peninsula lay the calm, tropical waters of the Gulf of Stoien; and Stoienzar’s Gulf coast was one of Majipoor’s most heavily populated regions, with a major city every hundred miles and a string of resort towns and agricultural centers and fishing villages occupying nearly all the open territory between them. If Dantirya Sambail had succeeded in reaching any part of the Gulf coast, he might well have been able to find some rogue mariner who would transport him to Stoien city, the most important port along that coast, from which ships traveled constantly back and forth between Zimroel and Alhanroel.

They had, of course, placed an interdiction on Stoien, and on all the other ports of that part of the continent that engaged in intercontinental shipping. But how reliable would that interdiction be? These easygoing tropical cities had always been notorious hotbeds of official corruption. Prestimion, in his years of training at the Castle, had studied the lively case histories. The governor Gan Othiang, who had flourished in the peninsula port of Khuif in the reign before Prankipin’s, had been in the habit of imposing a personal levy as well as the regular harbor taxes on all merchants whose ships called there; at his death, his private coffers, laden with ivory, pearls, and shells, held more wealth than the municipal treasury. Up the way at Yarnik, the mayor, one Plusiper Pailiap, had been in the habit of confiscating the property of deceased merchants whose heirs did not file a claim within three weeks. Duke Saturis, Oljebbin’s grandfather, had several times been accused of draining off a percentage of all customs revenues for his own benefit, though the governmental inquiries that followed had always been quashed for reasons that no longer were clear. A prefect of Sippulgar about a thousand years ago had covertly maintained his own fleet of pirate ships to raid local shipping. And so on. It was as if there was something in the sultry air down here that eroded rectitude and piety.

Prestimion shoved the map aside. To Kameni Poteva he said, “How long, do you think, would it have taken Dantirya Sambail, traveling by floater, to reach the port of Stoien from—”

The Prefect’s demeanor, though, had suddenly become exceedingly peculiar. Kameni Poteva was a tightly wound man at his best—that had been obvious from the start but the inner tension that must perpetually have gripped him appeared now to have heightened to a degree that was very close to the breaking point. His lean, sharp-featured face, from which the tropic sun seemed to have burned away all superfluous flesh, was drawn so tight that the skin looked to be in danger of cracking. A muscle was leaping about in his left cheek and his thin lips were twitching, and his eyes stood out fiercely, a pair of huge, bulging white orbs, below his dark forehead. Kameni Poteva’s hands were clenched into taut fists; he held them pressed together, knuckle tight against knuckle, over the two rohillas on the breast of his robe.

“Kameni Poteva?” Prestimion said, in alarm.

From the Prefect came a hoarse gasp: “Forgive me, my lord—forgive me—”

“What is it?”

Kameni Poteva’s only reply was a shake of his head, more like a shudder than anything else. His whole body was trembling. He seemed to be fighting desperately for control over it.

’Tell me, man! Do you want some wine?”

“My lord—oh, my lord—your head, my lord—?”

“What about my head?”

“Oh—I’m sorry—so sorry—”

Prestimion glanced about at Septach Melayn and Gialaurys. Was this the madness, striking right at the Coronal’s own elbow? Yes. Yes. Surely it was.

In this moment of mounting strangeness Maundigand-Klimd stepped forward quickly and extended his hands so that they rested on the Prefect’s shoulders; inclining both his heads until they were no more than inches from Kameni Poteva’s forehead, the Su-Suheris uttered a few quiet words, unintelligible to Prestimion. A spell, no doubt. Prestimion imagined that he saw a white mist appear in the air between the two men.

A few seconds passed without apparent change in Kameni Poteva’s state. Then a low hissing sound came from the Prefect’s lips, as though he were a balloon that had been inflated almost to the breaking point, and there was a perceptible easing of his posture. The crisis seemed to be ending. Kameni Poteva looked up for an instant at Prestimion, eyes wild, face livid with shame and shock, and then looked away again.

After a moment he said, in a hollow, barely audible voice, “My lord, this is unbearably humiliating—I humbly ask your pardon, my lord—”

“But what was it? What happened?—Something about my head, you said.”

A long anguished pause. “I was hallucinating.” The Prefect groped for the wine-flask. Quickly Septach Melayn refilled his bowl for him. Kameni Poteva drank greedily. “These things come, two, three times a week, now. There is no escaping them. I prayed that there would be none while I was with you, but it happened anyway. Your head, sire—it was monstrous, swollen, about to explode, I thought. And the High Counsellor—” He looked at Septach Melayn and shuddered. “His arms, his legs, they were like those of some giant spider!” He closed his eyes. “I must be dismissed from office. I am no longer qualified to serve.”

“Nonsense,” said Prestimion. “You need a little rest, that’s all. By all reports you’ve been doing a fine job. Are they something new, these hallucinations?”

“A month and a half. Two months.” The man was in misery. He was unable now to look directly at Prestimion at all, but sat with his head bowed and shoulders hunched, staring at his feet. “It is like a fit that comes over me. I see the most dreadful things. Nightmare visions, monstrosities, one after another for five, ten, sometimes fifteen minutes. Then they go away, and each time I pray that it will be the last. But there is always another time.”

“Look at me,” said Prestimion.

“My lord—”

“No. Look at me. Tell me this, Kameni Poteva. You aren’t the only one in Sippulgar who’s been suffering these disturbances, have you?”

“No. I am not.” A very small voice.

“I thought so. Has there been very much of it recently? Normally stable people breaking down, behaving oddly?”

“Some of that, yes. A great deal, I would have to say.”

“Deaths?”

“Some, yes. And destruction of property. My lord, I must have sinned very grievously, to have brought this thing upon—”

“Listen to me, Kameni Poteva. Whatever’s going on, it isn’t your fault, do you understand me? You mustn’t take it personally, and you mustn’t regard it as a disgrace that the attack happened to hit you in my presence. Just as you’re not the only one in town experiencing hallucinations, Sip-pulgar is not the only city where it’s happening. It’s everywhere, Kameni Poteva. Bit by bit, it seems, the whole world is going crazy. I want you to know that.”

The Prefect, calmer now, actually managed a smile.

“If you mean to comfort me with such a statement, my lord, I must tell you that you are not succeeding.”

“No. I suppose not. But I felt you should know. It’s an epidemic, a universal phenomenon. At the moment we aren’t sure what’s causing it. But we are very much aware of the problem and we’re working on it, and we intend to solve it.”

Prestimion heard a faint forced cough from Septach Melayn. He glared sharply at him to let Septach Melayn know that this was no moment for his usual brand of mockery.

At least some of what he had just said was true, after all. Some. They were aware of the problem. They did intend to solve it. But how, or when, or by what means—well, Prestimion thought, one thing at a time. Lord Stiamot himself could do no more than that.

There seemed no purpose any longer in continuing the hunt for the escaped Procurator. Prestimion knew that he could run and run, on and on, farther and farther, but he was unlikely to find Dantirya Sambail, nor would he ever escape the demons that were writhing within his own soul by wandering this way and that across the world. It was time to get back to the Castle.

Kameni Poteva, the next day, turned over to Prestimion the file of all the information about the fugitive that he had been able to glean from his fellow administrators in the provinces of Aruachosia and Stoien. The whole thing amounted to nothing whatever: sketchy guesses, untrustworthy rumors, and a good many firm denials that Dantirya Sambail had been anywhere in the vicinity of the domain of the official in question.

No definite sightings of the Procurator had been reported since the one that had come by way of Prince Serithorn from his estate manager Haigan Hartha, many long months ago, just outside Bailemoona; and that had been a second-hand report, at that. Aside from that, very little: just Haigan Har-tha’s own encounter with someone who very likely was Mandralisca, about the same time, and that second sighting of Mandralisca some months later, far to the south, in Keth-eron. After that the trail gave out.

“There are just two possibilities,” said Septach Melayn. “The first is that they slipped through Arvyanda and Kajith Kabulon without being noticed at all, found a western road to Stoienzar as the Prefect suggested, got themselves aboard a ship heading for Zimroel, and are somewhere on the high seas between Stoien city and Piliplok at this very minute. The other, since they obviously didn’t come by way of Sippulgar and aren’t likely to have taken any route that goes east of Sippulgar, is that they wandered into some quicksand bog in the rainforest, were swallowed up, and will never be seen in this world again.”

“The Divine would not be so kind to us,” Prestimion said.

“You overlook a third alternative,” said Gialaurys, giving Septach Melayn a look of glowering irritation. “Which is that they emerged safely from the Kajith Kabulon jungles, entered Stoienzar, discovered the embargo in the ports, and went into hiding in some pleasant little town on the peninsula, patiently awaiting the arrival of a rescue armada that they have summoned by swift courier from Zimroel.”

“There’s some sense to that notion, I think,” said Abrigant.

“It would be like him, yes,” Prestimion said. “He’s capable of great patience indeed in pursuing his ends. But we can hardly conduct a village-to-village search from here to Stoien city.”

“We could have the Pontifex’s officials do it for us, though,” suggested Septach Melayn.

“We could, yes. And will. My own feelings, I should add, lean toward the first theory: that he’s slipped through our net and is already on the way to Zimroel. In which case, we should hear sooner or later that he’s arrived there. Dantirya Sambail’s not one to remain silent for long on his own turf. Either way, we should return without further delay to the Castle, where there’s much for us to do, I suspect.”

Abrigant said, “By your leave, brother, if I may speak to another subject, I wish to raise the question of Skakkenoir once again. You told me that when we were finished in Sippulgar, I could go in search of it.”

“Skakkenoir?” Gialaurys said.

“A place said to be somewhere in Vrist, or even farther east,” said Septach Melayn with a faint but unmistakable note of scorn in his voice, “where the soil is full of iron and copper that the plants themselves pull up from the ground, atom by atom, so that it can be recovered by burning their branches and leaves. The only problem is that nobody’s ever succeeded in finding it, because it doesn’t exist.”

“It does!” cried Abrigant hotly. “It does! Lord Guade-loom himself sent an expedition to look for it!”

“And failed to find it, I believe, nor has anyone else even bothered to look in the last few thousands of years. You’d do as well trying to fetch iron ore back from your dreams, Abrigant.”

“By the Divine, I’ll—”

Prestimion raised his hand. “Silence! You two will be coming to blows next!” To Abrigant he said, “Your soul will have no rest until you make this journey, is that not so, brother?”

“So I do feel.”

“Well, if you must, then, take two floaters and a dozen men and go in search of the iron of Skakkenoir. Perhaps the Prefect Kameni Poteva has some useful maps for you.”

“You jeer at me too, do you, Prestimion?”

“Peace, brother, I meant nothing by it. It was a serious suggestion. For all we know there’s information about this place buried in the Sippulgar archives. Ask him, at any rate. And then go. But I put one commandment on you, Abrigant.”

“And that is?”

“That if you haven’t found Skakkenoir and its metal sands within six months, you turn about and return to the Castle.”

“Even if I’m within two days’ journey of my goal?”

“How will you know that? Six months, Abrigant. Not an hour more. Swear me that.”

“If I have definite information that Skakkenoir lies a day or two before me, definite information, and—”

“Six months exactly. Swear.”

“Prestimion—”

“Six months.”

Prestimion held out his right hand, the hand on which he wore the ring of kingship. Abrigant looked at it in amazement for a moment or two. Even now he appeared to be of a rebellious mind. But then, as if remembering that he and Prestimion were no longer just brother and brother but also subject and king, he nodded and lowered his head and touched his lips to the ring.

“Six months,” he said. “Not an hour more, Prestimion. I’ll bring you two floaters full of iron ore when I return.”

12

Homeward the royal party sped, taking only the straightest and swiftest routes, pausing not at all. Couriers preceding them cleared the roads for their passage north. There were no conferences this time with local dukes or mayors, no official banquets, no tours of scenic wonders: just day after day of hard travel through the southern provinces of Alhanroel, past the Labyrinth, up the Glayge valley toward Castle Mount. But to Prestimion the journey seemed to take an eternity and a half. His mind raced with thoughts of all that awaited him once he was at the Castle again.

And then, at last: the Mount filling the sky before him, and the commencement of the familiar ascent by way of Amblemorn of the Slope Cities. The quick eastern road up the mountain by way of Morvole and Dekkeret’s Normork, past Bibiroon Sweep and Tolingar Barrier and the wonderful self-maintaining garden that Lord Havilbove had laid out three thousand years ago, past the Free Cities ring to Ertsud Grand, where the upward slope steepened and the Mount became a gray granite shield pointing toward the clouds that lay just below the summit; Minimool; Hoikmar; the cloud zone, cool and moist, of the Inner Cities. Passing the sparkling burnt orange spires of Bombifale, then, and moving on into the realm of eternal sunlight above, with the High Cities just beyond. They were two dozen miles up into the sky by that time, with the thousands of miles of sprawling lowlands of Alhanroel spread out behind them like a map on which the most gigantic cities became mere dots. Here, now, was the summit road, paved with bright red flagstones, to carry them from Bombifale to High Morpin, with the Castle itself in view above them, finally; and round and round the vast mountain’s diminishing tip they went, the ten miles of the Grand Calintane Highway, brightened by the splendor of the myriads of flowers that bloomed every day of the year amidst the gnarled and fantastic spearlike peaks of the summit.

A great crowd was waiting for him at the Dizimaule Plaza, an immense reception party gathered on the green porcelain cobblestones, with the Castle in all its bewildering bulk of thirty thousand rooms as the backdrop. Navigorn, who had served as regent in Prestimion’s absence, was the first to embrace him. Prestimion’s brother Teotas was waiting also, and Serithorn, and the counsellors Belditan and Dembitave and Yegan and the rest of his inner circle of government, and such members of Lord Confalume’s regime as still remained at the Castle. But one person was not there.

Prestimion said quietly to Navigorn, as they proceeded through the Dizimaule Arch toward Vildivar Close and the Inner Castle buildings that lay beyond it, “And the lady Varaile, Navigorn? How has she fared in my absence? And why was she not at the gate to greet me now?”

“She is quite well, my lord. As for her not being at the gate today, let her give you her reasons herself. I can only tell you that she was invited, and chose not to come.”

“Chose not to come? What does that mean, Navigorn?”

But Navigorn would only say again that the lady Varaile would have to explain that herself.

Which could not be done immediately, much to Prestimion’s displeasure. There were rites that had to be performed to mark a Coronal’s return to the Castle after a long absence, and then it behooved him to go to his office to receive the most urgent of the accumulated memoranda of state, and after that he had his own report to make to the Council. Only then, then, would he be free to pursue private inquiries.

He hastened through the ritual of return in so casual and cursory a way that even Serithorn looked a little shocked. The memoranda of state—abstracts of the host of piled-up reports from every region of the world—were not so easy to dismiss, but Prestimion cut corners by devoting most of his immediate attention to the summaries that had been prepared by the office of the Pontifex, abstracts of the abstracts: presumably those had been filtered for their significance before being forwarded to the Castle. What he saw there was dismaying, tales of mounting insanity in any number of provinces, bands of addled saints drifting about the land and plenty of addled sinners too, riots and other kinds of civil disturbance, fires, crime, a nightmare of ever-expanding chaos. It was precisely as he had said, in an unguarded moment, to the Prefect Kameni Poteva. Bit by bit, it seems, the whole world is going crazy.

Of Dantirya Sambail there seemed to be no news. Akbalik had returned from Ni-moya and was in the western port of Alaisor, awaiting a new assignment. Dekkeret evidently was still in Suvrael. No report had come from Abrigant thus far concerning his expedition to Skakkenoir. From the Isle of Sleep there was a message from the Princess Therissa, suggesting that he find occasion to pay her a visit as soon as his other duties permitted. That would certainly be an appropriate thing to do, Prestimion agreed. He had not seen her for many months. But for the time being that trip would have to wait.

The Council meeting, which lasted about an hour, came next. Navigorn’s report covered much the same material Prestimion had already seen in the papers on his desk. When he was done, the other Council members expressed their concern over the rising incidence of madness across the world, and Gialaurys offered a motion that the high wizards of Triggoin be summoned to the Castle for a consultation that might lead to a remedy. It passed by a powerful margin, despite a protest of sorts from Prestimion. “It was my hope to reduce the influence of superstition in the world, not to hand the government over to the sorcerers,” he said. But even he recognized the value of properly harnessed wizardry; and also he knew only too well how effective the incantations of such men as Gominik Halvor and his son Heszmon Gorse could be. After voicing his objections, then, he quickly withdrew them, and gave his assent to Gialaurys’s measure.

At that point, pleading the fatigue of travel, he ordered the meeting adjourned, and went to his private chambers.

“Ask the lady Varaile,” he said to the major-domo Nilgir Sumanand, “if she will have dinner with the Coronal this evening.”

She was as beautiful as he remembered her to be: more beautiful, even. But she had changed. Something was different about the expression of her eyes and the set of her jaw, and she held her lips now in a tightly compressed way that Prestimion did not recall from before.

Of course she had really been not much more than a girl when he had first met her at the time of his little masquerade in Stee. Now she was moving into her twenties; perhaps all that had happened was that the last vestiges of adolescence were going from her face as she made the transition into full adulthood. But no—no—there seemed to be something else at work—

Perhaps only nervousness, Prestimion decided. She was a commoner, he was the Coronal; and she was a woman, and he a man; they were alone with each other in the Coronal’s private chambers. They barely knew each other, and yet, in their last meeting long months ago, they had reached some sort of understanding that neither of them had been willing to voice explicitly, but which clearly had held implications of a future alliance. In all these months they both had had plenty of time to consider and reconsider those few words that had passed between them in the reception hall after the royal levee at which her father had been honored.

To put her at her ease he opened with what he hoped would be a light-hearted approach: “I told you, the last time we met, that we’d have dinner together as soon as I got back from my trip to the Labyrinth. I neglected to add, I suppose, that I would be going on as far south as Sippulgar before I returned to the Castle.”

“I did begin to wonder, as the weeks mounted up, my lord. But then my lord Navigorn told me that you would be making a further journey and might not be back for many months. He said it was a mission of the highest importance, one that would take you into a distant part of the continent.”

“Did Navigorn tell you just how far I was going, or why?”

She looked startled at that. “Oh, no! Nor did I ask. It’s not my place to be privy to the business of the realm. I’m a mere citizen, my lord.”

“Yes. So you are. But a lady of the court, also, now. Ladies of the court somehow come to learn of many things that mere citizens never hear of even in their dreams.”

It was meant as a joke, if only a feeble one; but it was not received as one. Something was definitely wrong, he thought. A certain degree of tension was only to be expected at such a meeting as this; he felt it himself. But what had impressed him about her whenever he had seen her previously was her remarkable poise, her utter command of self, far beyond her years. She made it seem as if there was no situation, however ticklish, that she would be unable to handle. The unsmiling woman who stood before him now was stiff and uneasy, guarded in her movements, seemingly weighing every word before she spoke.

She said, “Nevertheless, I felt it was inappropriate to inquire after the reason for your journey. Would it be proper to inquire of you whether your trip was a successful one, my lord?”

“It was and it wasn’t. My meeting with the Pontifex went well. After that, I visited strange and interesting places, and met the people who govern them. That part of it was fine also. But I had another purpose, which was to locate a certain troublesome lord whose actions threaten the stability of the realm. Do you know who I mean, Varaile? No. Well, you will, eventually. In any case, I wasn’t able to find him. He seems to have slipped through my net.”

“Oh, my lord, I’m sorry!”

“So am I.”

Prestimion noticed now, for the first time, how plainly and soberly she was dressed: a formal robe, yes, suitable for calling upon a Coronal, but of a drab beige tone that seemed inappropriate for her high-colored complexion, and her only ornament was a slender silver bracelet. And she had pulled her splendid hair back in an unflattering way.

This long-awaited reunion was going most unpromisingly. Some wine and food, he thought: perhaps that would relax things. He summoned Nilgir Sumanand.

Who had everything ready in the antechamber, a feast of truly royal quality. But Varaile only picked at her food, sipped desultorily at her wine.

Prestimion said, finally, when the conversation had sputtered out for the third or fourth time, “There’s some problem here, Varaile. What is it? You seem six million miles away.”

“My lord, do I? Certainly it was most kind of you to ask me to dine with you, and I don’t mean to seem—”

“Call me Prestimion.”

“Oh, my lord, how can I do that?”

“Easily. It’s my name. A long one, perhaps, but not hard to pronounce. Pres-tim-i-on. Try it.”

She looked close to tears. “This is not right, my lord. You are the Coronal and I am no one; and in any event we barely know each other. To call you by your name like that—”

“Never mind, then.” He began to feel some annoyance, but whether it was with her for her moodiness and distance, or for himself for his clumsiness in leading this conversation, he was not sure. Somewhat brusquely he said, “I asked you a minute ago to tell me what the problem was. You evaded the issue. Are you afraid of me? Or do you think it’s wrong, perhaps, for you to be here alone with me?—By the Divine, Varaile, you haven’t fallen in love with someone while I was away, have you?” But he could see by her face that that was not it either. “Tell me. You’ve changed, somehow, in my absence. What’s happened?”

She hesitated a moment.

“My father,” she said, in a voice so faint he could barely make out her words.

“Your father? What about your father?”

Varaile looked away; and a dozen wild suppositions ran through Prestimion’s mind at once. Was Simbilon Khayf seriously ill? Had he died? Gone bankrupt overnight through the catastrophic failure of one of his loathsome speculative schemes? Warned Varaile sternly to ward off any romantic overtures the seductive young Coronal Lord might make?

“He’s lost his mind, my lord. The plague—the madness that is sweeping the world—”

“No! Not him too!”

“It was very quick. He was at Stee when it happened, and I was at the Castle, of course. One day he was fine, I was told, working on deals, meeting with his agents and factors, arranging the takeover of some company, all his usual projects. The next day everything was changed. You know his hair, how proud he is of it? Well, his chief clerk, Prokel Ikabarin, is always the first person to arrive at his office every morning. This time, when Prokel Ikabarin came in, he found my father kneeling in front of his desk, cutting off his hair. ‘Help me, Prokel Ikabarin,’ he said, and handed him the scissors to reach the places he couldn’t get to. He had hacked most of it off by then.”

A surge of amusement welled up in Prestimion at that. He turned aside to conceal his grin from Varaile. Simbilon Khayf’s extravagantly foolish sweep of silver hair, cut down to mere stubble? Why, what more delicious kind of insanity could have stricken him than that?

But there was more. And worse.

Varaile said, “When he was done with his hair, he announced that his life had been a sinful waste, that he repented all his greed, that he must at once distribute his wealth to the poor and take up a life of meditation and prayer. Whereupon he asked Prokel Ikabarin to send for his half-dozen closest advisers, and began signing away his property to whatever charitable organizations happened to come to his mind. He gave away at least half his fortune in ten minutes. Then he put on beggar’s robes and went out into Stee to ask for alms.”

“This isn’t easy for me to believe, Varaile.”

“Do you think it was for me, my lord? I know what sort of man my father was. I never had any illusions about him at all; but it wasn’t for me to lecture him on his ways, nor was I the sort to turn my back on his wealth myself, I suppose, no matter how I felt about his business practices. But when they came to me here at the Castle—I have been in residence here all the time of your absence, you understand, my lord—when they came to me and said my father was roaming through Stee in a torn and dirty robe, begging for a few copper weights for his next meal—well, I thought it was some black jest at first, of course. And then—then, when other reports came in, and I went down to Stee to see for myself—”

“He’s given away everything? The house, too?”

“He didn’t remember about the house. Just as well, too, for what would have become of all our servants, turned out into the streets overnight? Did he expect them to become beggars too? No, he didn’t manage to give it all away. His mind was too murky to manage that. Thousands of royals went, yes—millions, maybe—but there’s plenty left. He still controls dozens of companies, banks all over the world, great estates in seven or eight provinces. But he’s completely incompetent now. I had to have a receiver appointed to manage his holdings—it’s not something I could do myself, you realize. And he’s completely insane. Oh, Prestimion, Prestimion, I was aware of all my father’s faults, his vanity, his hunger for money, his coldblooded treatment of anyone who stood between him and what he wanted, but still—still—he’s my father, Prestimion. I love him. And what has happened to him is so utterly terrible.”

It did not escape Prestimion’s notice that she had begun calling him by his name. “Where is he now?”

“At the Castle. I asked my lord Navigorn to bring him here, because if he stayed in Stee, someone was bound to harm him on the streets. They have him under guard in one of the back wings. I visit him every day, but he hardly recognizes me now. I don’t think he quite knows who he is, any more. Or what he once was.”

“Take me to visit him tomorrow.”

“Do you really think that you ought to see—”

“Yes,” he said. “I do. He is your father. And you are—” There was no need to finish the sentence. The barriers that she had put up between them earlier were gone. She was staring at him now with an entirely new expression in her eyes.

This was the moment, Prestimion thought, to make everything completely clear between them.

“When I invited you here tonight,” he said, “it was with the notion of making some sort of speech about how important it was for us to spend more time together, to get to know one another, and so on and so forth. I won’t make that speech. I’ve had plenty of time, all these months roaming around in places like Ketheron and Arvyanda and Sippulgar, to get to know you already.”

She seemed apprehensive. “Prestimion—?”

His words came tumbling out helter-skelter. “I’ve lived alone long enough. A Coronal needs a consort. I love you, Varaile. Marry me. Be my queen. I warn you, it won’t be easy, being wife to the Coronal. But you are the one I choose. Marry me, Varaile.”

“My lord—?” she said, with astonishment in her voice.

“You were calling me Prestimion a moment ago.”

“Prestimion, yes. Oh, yes! Yes! Yes!”