Lord Prestimion

1

More than thirty years had passed since there last had been a royal wedding at the Castle, that of Lord Confalume and the Lady Roxivail; and no one now attached to the Coronal’s staff was old enough to know the proper procedures and protocols for such an event. So a great scurrying about in the archives was initiated by the officials involved, until Prestimion found out about it and made an end to the search. “We’re capable of putting on a wedding here without having to turn to the oldsters to find out how we ought to do it, isn’t that so?” he asked Navigorn. “Besides, was the marriage of Confalume and Roxivail such a magnificent success that we want to take any aspect of it as a model for anything we do?”

“The Lady Varaile,” said Navigorn with diplomatic earnestness, “is nothing at all like the Lady Roxivail, my lord.”

No, Prestimion thought. Nothing at all.

Prestimion had seen the vain and willful estranged wife of Lord Confalume only once in his life—at the coronation games in honor of her son Korsibar, when that prince’s brief, illegitimate, and disastrous reign as Coronal was just getting under way. Roxivail, a small, dark, strikingly attractive woman, had maintained her looks well into middle age with the aid of wizardry, and Prestimion had been startled by her beauty. As well he might be; for she and her daughter Thismet resembled each other in an extraordinary way, to the degree that Roxivail seemed more like Thismet’s elder sister than her mother.

Her surprising appearance at the coronation games, her first visit to the Castle in some twenty years, had revived all the old gossip. Confalume, masterly and potent Coronal that he was, had not been able to govern his own wife; their marriage had been stormy throughout, and had culminated in Roxivail’s noisy departure from the Castle to take up life in a luxurious palace on an island in the Gulf of Stoien. She had remained there ever since, excepting only her journey to the Mount at the time of her son’s coronation. In her long absence Confalume had had to rule without a consort and to raise their twin children alone—twins whose very existence no one, not even their parents, now remembered at all. Those who had any recollection of the previous Coronal’s marriage would think of it, if ever they did, as being barren as well as unhappy. Prestimion had fonder expectations for his own.

In the end it was Prestimion himself, with some help from Navigorn and an immense amount of advice on matters of taste and style of decor from Septach Melayn, who worked out a formal program for the wedding. The usual high princes of Castle Mount would be in attendance, but not, Prestimion decided, anyone from the provinces. For that would mean extending an invitation to Dantirya Sambail along with all the other great provincial lords, and the absence of the Procurator of Ni-moya would be awkward to explain.

Invitations would go to the Lady Therissa, of course, and the Pontifex Confalume. But Prestimion assumed that their own current responsibilities and the great distances they would have to travel would keep them from coming to Castle Mount for a second time in little more than a year, and indeed they sent their apologies and regrets. They would be represented by their official surrogates at the Castle, the hierarch Marcatain for the Lady, and Vologaz Sar for the Pontifex. The Lady Therissa reiterated her hope that Prestimion would come to her at the Isle as soon as his present duties at the Castle permitted, and that he would bring his bride with him.

Some of Varaile’s own friends from Stee would be her ladies-in-waiting. Prestimion would be attended at the ceremony by Septach Melayn, Gialaurys, and Teotas. His other brother Abrigant should have been part of the event as well; but there was no telling whether he would return from his quest for the iron ore of Skakkenoir on time, and Prestimion did not propose to delay the wedding on his behalf.

He dealt quickly with the fact that Varaile was a commoner, and that nobody at the Castle could recall an occasion when a Coronal had chosen a commoner as his bride. Summoning Navigorn, he said, “We are creating a new duke today, and I have just drawn up the papers. See to it that the normal procedures are followed.”

Navigorn glanced at the document Prestimion handed him and his face turned scarlet with surprise and dismay. “My lord! A dukedom for that abominable, money-grubbing, utterly offensive—”

“Gently Navigorn. You’re talking about the father of the Coronal’s consort-to-be.”

Appalled at his own words, Navigorn made a little choking sound and mumbled an apology.

Prestimion laughed. “Not that anything you just said is untrue, of course. But we will ennoble Simbilon Khayf even so, because that will ennoble his daughter as well, and thus we sidestep a certain little problem of protocol. It seems the simplest way to handle it, Navigorn. And, best of all, he won’t ever know that it’s happened. His mind’s completely gone, you know. I could just as easily make him Coronal or Pontifex as give him a dukedom, for all he’d be able to understand.”

Which brought up another little difficulty involving the father of the bride, which was that Simbilon Khayf was altogether unfit to appear in public. He was a babbling, pathetic figure now, indifferent to cleanliness or decorum and muttering constantly of a need to atone for his sins. Even at his best, he would have been an embarrassment to Prestimion at the ceremony; but in his present condition there could be no question of it. “We will let it be known that he is too ill to attend,” Varaile declared, and so it was done.

Easily enough solved; but hardly a day went by without some new procedural problem arising.

One was the issue of how many mages would be at the wedding other than Maundigand-Klimd, and of which schools of practice, and what roles, if any, they would play. If Prestimion had had his own way, there would have been none. But Gialaurys was able to convince him of the rashness of that position. In the end a full array of wizards was in attendance at the rite, although at Prestimion’s insistence they were kept at a circumspect distance from the dais and allowed to utter their incantations only as part of a general preliminary invocation.

Then there was the matter of finding some function for Serithorn, as the senior peer of the realm, to perform, and the question of what to do about preventing another mountain of gifts from flowing toward the Castle when so many of the coronation presents still had not yet been unpacked, and of whether to hold another round of knightly games by way of celebrating the Coronal’s nuptials. Prestimion had not anticipated so many little details to deal with. But in a way he welcomed the distraction: for the time being, he was spared the need from fretting about the madness epidemic, or pondering the problem of finding the unfindable Dantirya Sambail, or dealing with any of the thousand routine questions that come before a Coronal in the course of an ordinary week. Everyone about him understood that the royal wedding took precedence, for the moment, over all of that.

And then, finally, he found himself on the high dais of Lord Apsimar’s Chapel, which someone had determined was the traditional place for such events, with the hierarch Marcatain standing to his right on behalf of the Lady of the Isle and the representative of the Pontifex Confalume at his left and Varaile facing him, and a host of grandees of the realm in magnificent garb looking on, and Septach Melayn beaming in smug self-satisfaction at the job of matchmaking that he had achieved; and the traditional words were being spoken and the rings were being exchanged and the familiar old wedding anthem that went back to Lord Stangard’s day was resounding in his ears.

It was done. Varaile was his wife.

Or would be, in a truer sense of the word, some hours later, when all the night’s feasting and celebration was over and they could at last be alone.

There was a lavish suite of rooms adjacent to Prestimion’s own that had belonged to the Lady Roxivail in the days of her marriage to Lord Confalume. In accordance with the wish of Lord Confalume it had not been used by anyone since Roxivail’s departure from the Castle. The court chamberlains, expecting that those rooms would be occupied now by Varaile and used by the royal couple on their wedding night, had gone to great effort to restore and refurbish them after their two decades of neglect.

But Prestimion regarded the Roxivail suite as an unlucky place for their first night together. He chose, instead, the apartments in Munnerak Tower, the white-brick building in the Castle’s eastern wing, where he had lived in his days as one of the many princes of the Castle. Those chambers lacked the majesty and splendor of the ones set apart for the use of the Coronal; but Prestimion felt no great need for the ultimate in majesty and splendor this night, and, he suspected, neither did Varaile. It was a handsome enough suite in its way, with spacious rooms that had a marvelous down-slope view through their curving many-faceted windows of the abyss known as the Morpin Plunge, and an oversized bathing-tub fashioned from huge blocks of black Khyntor marble that had been so cunningly set in place by the artisans that it was impossible to detect the joinings between one block and the next. To this suite Prestimion brought his bride; and here he waited, in the little room that had been his study and library, while she bathed away the fatigue of the long day of wedding rituals.

What seemed like ten years went by before she summoned him. But then came the call at last.

She was waiting for him in the room where the nuptial bed had been installed, a magnificent bed of imperial dimensions, carved from the darkest Rialmar ebony and canopied with the sheerest lace of Makroposopos. As he went down the corridor toward it Prestimion felt a sudden maddening burst of terror at the thought that the ghost of This-met would somehow interpose itself between him and his bride in this moment of moments; but then he opened the bedroom door, and saw Varaile standing beside the bed in the soft golden glow of three scarlet waxen tapers taller than herself, and Thismet at that instant became only a name, a cherished but distant memory, the mere ghost of a ghost.

Varaile was clad, after her bath, in a filmy gown of fine white silk, fastened at her left shoulder by a clasp of woven gold. Prestimion admired the reticence that had led her to cover herself for his arrival in the bedroom. But he noted also the lush and supple contours of her body glimmering through the gossamer fabric, and knew that modesty was not its only purpose. He caught his breath in delight and stepped toward her.

There was, for just an instant, a look of anxiety, even fear, in her eyes. It vanished, though, as quickly as it came. “The consort of the Coronal,” Varaile said, as though in wonder. “Can this be real?” And answered herself before he could speak. “Yes. Yes. It can. Come to me, Prestimion.”

She touched a drawstring at her shoulder.

The gown fell away like a cobweb.

2

A three-day honeymoon in the pleasure-city of High Morpin, an hour’s ride by floater below the Castle, was all that he could allow himself. He had been away from the seat of power too much of the time already since attaining the throne.

In his youth Prestimion had come often to that happy glittering playground of a place to go on dizzying juggernaut rides and let himself be catapulted through the power-tunnels and dance on the baffling, challenging mirror-slides. Such amusements were beyond his grasp now. A Coronal could not allow himself to put his body even to the slight risk that such games afforded, nor would the populace be pleased to see him cavorting like a boy in public. That he had become the prisoner of his own royal majesty was a fact beyond all denying.

But there were compensating delights in High Morpin for those whose high place in the realm denied them the freedom to move openly among the populace. Prestimion and Varaile stayed at the Castle Mount Lodge, a knifeblade-sharp slab of white stone set aside for the use of the nobility, and there they occupied the many-chambered penthouse known as the Coronal’s Suite, which was not so much a suite as a miniature palace that clung to the upper levels of the towering hotel much as the Castle itself wraps itself about the summit of the Mount.

The uppermost level of their suite was a transparent bubble of clearest quartz, which served as their bedchamber. From it they had a view of the entire sparkling city, all the way across to the immense fountain that Lord Confalume had had built at the city’s edge, which constantly hurled thick plumes of water, ever-changing in color, to an enormous height. One floor down was their robing-room, a hornlike excrescence of some shining white metal boldly cantilevered out from the other side of the building to provide a view of the lovely suburb of Low Morpin and the stupefying dark emptiness of the Morpin Plunge, where the face of the Mount fell away for a sheer drop of thousands of feet. Just below that was a room carved from a single gigantic green globe of jade, where soft musical tones emerged without apparent source from the air: the harmonic retreat, that room was called. Then a long white-vaulted passageway led at a steeply descending angle to the private dining-quarters, a small, elegantly appointed room where the Coronal and his consort could take their meals. A cascading series of balconies gave them access to the clear, pure air of the Mount and a third view, this one of the dark intricate bulk of the Castle rising high above them.

A second passageway in a different direction opened into an elaborate pleasure-gallery supported by pillars of golden marble. Here the residents of the suite could swim in a shimmering pool lined with garnet slabs, or suspend themselves in a column of warm air and permit streams of unquantified sensation to flood their senses, or put themselves in contact—through appropriate connectors and conduits—with the rhythms and sighing pulses of the cosmos. Here also were kept patterned rugs for focused meditation, banks of motile light-organisms for autohypnosis, a collection of stimulatory pistons and cartridges, and a host of other devices for the royal couple’s amusement.

From there the structure made an undulating swaybacked curve and sent two wings back up the building at differing levels. One contained an array of soul-paintings that had been collected by various Coronals of the the previous two centuries, and the other was a gallery for the housing of antiquities, bric-a-brac, and a miscellany of small sculptures and decorative vases. Centrally positioned between these two groups of rooms was the suite’s grand dining hall, a single sturdy octagonal block of polished agate thrusting far out into the abyss for the delight of such guests as the Coronal and his consort might care to entertain.

But the Coronal and his consort did not care to entertain anyone, just now, except each other. There would be time later to carouse with Septach Melayn, to listen to old Serithorn’s tales of the court gossip of long ago, to play host to great princes and dukes. This was a time purely for themselves. They had much still to learn about each other, and this was the finest opportunity they would ever have. Prestimion and Varaile spent their three days moving from room to room, from level to level, examining the curious artifacts with which the place was filled, taking in the glorious views of the gleaming airy city outside, paddling up and down the pool, and, much of the time, exchanging thoughts, memories, ideas, caresses. Meals were brought to them by silent servants whenever they remembered to request them.

On the third day, with the greatest regret, they came forth from their retreat. A royal floater waited outside the building to return them to the Castle; and thousands of people of every rank and station, those who had come to High Morpin on holiday and those whose role it was to serve their needs, sent up a great cry: “Prestimion! Varaile! Prestimion! Varaile! Long live Prestimion and Varaile!”

But then it was back to work. For Prestimion, the million minutiae of government; for Varaile, the weighty task of taking command of the royal household.

It was a busy time. Prestimion had had ample opportunity in recent years, sitting as he had at Lord Confalume’s right hand, to see how much work it was to be Coronal. But somehow the reality of it had never sunk in. Confalume, that robust and hearty man, had made it all look easy. To Confalume, the endless routine responsibilities of the throne had always been nothing but mere buzzing interruptions of the real work, which was to express the grandeur of the realm and its monarch by a glorious construction program: fountains, plazas, monuments, palaces, highways, parks, harbors. The lavishly conceived Confalume Throne and the awesome throne-room in which it was set would symbolize the reign of Lord Confalume for centuries to come. Even when he had been Coronal for forty years, and had largely withdrawn from active rule into a private world of mages and incantations, he still managed to keep up an outward show of gusto and vitality. Only those closest to him had any inkling of how weary he actually was toward the end, how relieved he was that the aged Pontifex Prankipin had died and allowed him at last to move on to the quieter life of the Labyrinth.

Prestimion was hardly lacking in vitality himself. But his was of a kind different from Confalume’s. Confalume expended his energy in a steady calm radiant outpouring, like the sun itself. Prestimion, a more volatile man, taut and tense within, functioned by bursts of impulsive action, tempered by long periods devoted to the accumulating of strength. That was how he had handled the insurrection of Korsibar: a lengthy period of waitful calculation and planning, and then the sudden launching of the counterstrike that had swept the usurper away.

But you could not reign as Coronal that way. You sat here atop the world, most literally, and the needs and hopes and fears and problems of the fifteen billion people of Majipoor found their way up the slopes of Castle Mount to you day after day after day. And although you delegated as much of the work as you could to others, the ultimate responsibility for every decision was always yours. Everything flowed through you. You were the world incarnate; you were Majipoor, in and of yourself.

Had Korsibar realized that, when he foolishly decided to make himself Coronal? Had he thought that being king was an unending round of tournaments and feasts, and nothing more? Very likely he had, that shallow man.

Prestimion could never have allowed himself to stand to one side and let Korsibar keep the throne: it was as much a matter of his sense of obligation to the world as it was his own desire to be Coronal himself.

And so, when he might have had peace with Korsibar and a place for himself on the Council for the price of a starburst gesture and an oath of allegiance, Prestimion had not been able to do it, and Korsibar had thrown him into the Sangamor tunnels as a traitor, and the war between them had begun. Now Korsibar was forgotten and Prestimion was Coronal Lord of Majipoor; and here he was, plodding through a daily stack of petitions and resolutions and memoranda and acts of the Council so thick it would choke a gabroon. It was enough to make him nostalgic, almost, for the days of the civil war, when he was far from all this paperwork, living a life of pure action.

Not that everything that crossed his desk was stultifyingly routine, of course.

There was the madness plague, for one. Gibbering vacant-eyed victims roamed the streets of a thousand cities, most of them harmless, some not. Hospitals everywhere were filling with screaming lunatics. There were accidents, collisions, fires, even murders. What was causing it? Prestimion feared that he knew, but it was not something he could speak of to anyone. Nor could he see a solution. The constant reports of chaos out there weighed heavily on his spirit. But there was nothing he could do.

Nothing he could do, either, about the dangers posed by his distant cousin Dantirya Sambail: the great adversary, the ever diabolical foe, malevolent and unpredictable, still at large. Where was he? What was he up to? All these months, and no one had seen or heard from him.

It was easy and tempting to think that he had perished, that he and his demonic man Mandralisca lay dead and rotting in some roadside ditch in southern Alhanroel. But that was too easy; and it strained Prestimion’s imagination to believe that fate could so conveniently have removed Dantirya Sambail from his list of problems without the slightest effort on his part. Still, a network of spies on two continents had produced no information.

The Procurator should surely have reached his headquarters in Ni-moya by now, but his throne there sat empty. Nor had he surfaced anywhere in southern or western Alhanroel. It was all very unsettling. Dantirya Sambail would reappear when least expected, Prestimion knew, and would cause maximum trouble when he did. But here, again, all that he could do was wait, and do his daily work, and wait. And wait.

Maundigand-Klimd came to him and said, “Look at these, my lord.” The Su-Suheris magus had a cloth sack with him, bulging as though he had brought three pounds of ripe calimbots straight from the marketplace.

It was Threeday morning, the day of the week when Prestimion customarily went down to the exercise-hall to engage in a little singlesticks contest with Septach Melayn. That was always an unequal match, for Septach Melayn had the reach on him by eight or ten inches, and had unparalleled mastery of any kind of hand-wielded weapon besides. But it was essential for the two men, bound now as they were to their desks so much of the time, to work at keeping their bodies in tune; and so on Threedays they dueled with batons, and on Fivedays they tested each other on the archery course, where the advantage lay with Prestimion.

“What do you have here, and is it necessary for me to see it at just this moment?” Prestimion asked, in some impatience. “I have an appointment with the High Counsellor.”

“It will take only a minute or two, my lord.”

Maundigand-Klimd up-ended his bag and what looked like three dozen tiny severed heads fell out onto Prestimion’s desk.

They were ceramic, he realized, after the first startled glance. But modeled in an extremely vivid and realistic manner, with terrifying grimacing faces—mouths gaping wide, eyes staring wildly, nostrils flaring—and a convincing swath of gore at the neck-stumps: cunning simulations of people who had died in the most frightful agony.

“Very pretty,” Prestimion said bleakly. “I’ve never seen anything like them. Is this the latest fashion of jewelry among the ladies of the court, Maundigand-Klimd?”

“I bought them last night at the sorcerers’ market in Bombifale. They are amulets, my lord, to guard one against the madness.”

“The sorcerers’ market, as I recall, is open only on Sea-days, and not even all of those. Yesterday was Twoday.”

“The sorcerers’ market at Bombifale is open every night of the week now, lordship,” said the Su-Suheris quietly. “These things are sold at many of the booths. Five crowns apiece, they are: stamped from molds in great quantity. But exceedingly well done.”

“So I see.” Prestimion poked at them with the tip of one finger. They were grisly things, all too convincingly real despite their miniature size. He saw the faces of men and women both, a few Ghayrogs, a couple of Hjorts, even a single Su-Suheris head that sent a particularly severe tremor of repulsion through him. Small metal fasteners were attached to them in back. “Magic against magic, is that it? One wears them, does one, for the sake of counteracting whatever witchcraft is causing the insanity plague?”

“Exactly. It is what we call in the trade a cloaking-magic. The little image sends a message indicating that the person who wears it is already afflicted with the madness—screaming, wild-eyed, mutilated of soul, altogether deranged—and so there is no need for the agent that brings the malady to act on them.”

“And do they work?”

“I doubt it, my lord. But people have faith in them. Nearly everyone I saw in the market was wearing one. There are other devices available, too, for the same purpose, at least seven or eight sorts, all of them guaranteed by their vendors to provide complete security. Most of them are crude, primitive things that make me embarrassed for my profession. They are what you might expect savages to use. But the fear is very widespread.—Do you remember, my lord, in the days when Prankipin was dying and dire omens were being read into every cloud and every bird that passed overhead, how all manner of strange new cults sprang up in the world?”

“I do remember, yes. I saw the Beholders dancing the Procession of their Mysteries in Sisivondal once.”

“Well, they dance it again. All the masks and idols and holy implements of an unholy kind are being brought forth. These little amulets here are but a sample of the whole. My lord, sorcery is my profession, and I do not doubt the existence of the powers of the invisible world, as I know that you often do. But to me these things are abominations. They bespeak an insanity of a sort themselves, as troublesome as the one they pretend to cure.”

Prestimion nodded somberly. He prodded the little heads again, turning over two or three of them that had landed upside-down, and was stunned to find himself looking at his own face.

“I wondered when you would notice that one, my lord,” said Maundigand-Klimd.

“Astonishing. Absolutely astonishing!” Prestimion picked it up and examined it closely. It gave him the shudders. A likeness of great fidelity, it was: a miniature screaming Lord Prestimion, hardly bigger than the ball of his thumb. “I suppose there’s a Septach Melayn somewhere in the batch, too, and a Gialaurys, and maybe a Lady Varaile, eh? And is this Su-Suheris here supposed to represent you, Maundigand-Klimd? What do they think: that our faces will be more powerful in warding off the madness than those of ordinary folk?”

“It is a reasonable expectation, lordship.”

“Ah. Maybe so.” Septach Melayn was here, yes. They had rendered him very well, down to the insouciant grin—even in the midst of a madman’s scream—and bold, flashing blue eyes. He saw no Varailes, though, and was very glad of that. He pushed the pile of amulets away from him. “How I hated all this credulous foolishess, Maundigand-Klimd! This pathetic faith in the worth of magic, in talismans and images, in spells and powders, exorcisms, abracadabras, the conjuring up of fiends and demons, the using of rohillas and ammatepilas and veralistias and all of that. What a waste of time, and money, and hope! I saw Lord Confalume utterly devoured by these follies, so befuddled by the whisperings of this magus and that that when a real crisis came upon him, he was completely unable to deal with—” He halted, unwilling even with Maundigand-Klimd to speak of the Korsibar revolt. “Well, I know as well as you do that some of it works, Maundigand-Klimd. But most of what passes for magic among us is nothing more than simple idiocy. I had hoped that the tide of superstition would begin to recede a little during my reign. And instead—instead—a new wave of this nonsense sweeping up over us, just when—” He paused again. “I’m sorry, Maundigand-Klimd. I know that you’re a believer. I’ve given you offense.”

“You’ve given none, my lord. I am no more of a ‘believer,’ as you put it, than you are yourself. I live not by faith but by empirical test. There are things that are self-evidently true, and other things that are false. What I practice is the true magic, which is a form of science. I have as much contempt for the other sort as you do, which is why I brought you these things today.”

“Thinking that I’ll issue an ordinance prohibiting them? I can’t do that, Maundigand-Klimd. It’s never wise to try to legislate against people’s irrational beliefs.”

“I understand that, lordship. I only wanted to call to your attention the fact that the madness is bringing forth a secondary level of insanity, which in itself will have harmful consequences for your reign.”

“If I knew what needed to be done, I’d be doing it.”

“Beyond doubt that is so.”

“But what—what? Is there anything you can suggest?”

“Not at this moment, my lord.”

Prestimion detected a curious inflection in Maundigand-Klimd’s voice, as though he might be leaving something of significance unspoken. Prestimion stared up at the two heads, at the four opaque green eyes. The Su-Suheris was an invaluable counsellor, and even, to a degree, a cherished friend. There were times, though, when Prestimion found Maundigand-Klimd unreadable, incomprehensible, and this was one of them. If there was some hidden subtext here, he was uncertain of what it was.

But then one possibility presented itself to him. It was a disagreeable one, but it needed to be pursued.

He said, “You and I have already discussed Septach Melayn’s notion that the madness has been caused by the world-wide obliteration of memory that I imposed, the day of the victory over Korsibar at Thegomar Edge. I think you know that I’m reluctant to accept that theory.”

“Yes, my lord. I do.”

“I can tell from the way you say it that you don’t agree with me. What are you holding back, Maundigand-Klimd? Do you have certain knowledge that I did bring the madness on that way?”

“Not certain knowledge, my lord.”

“But you think it’s very probable, do you?”

All this while it had been Maundigand-Klimd’s left head, usually the more loquacious of the pair, that had been speaking. But it was the other one that replied now:

“Yes, my lord. Very probable indeed.”

Prestimion closed his eyes a moment, drew in his breath sharply. The blunt statement came as no surprise. In recent weeks he had been veering more and more, in his own thoughts, toward the likelihood that he and he alone was responsible for the new darkness that had begun to descend upon the world. But it stung him deeply, all the same, to have the shrewd and capable Maundigand-Klimd lend his support to that idea.

“If the madness was caused by magic,” he said slowly, “then it can only be healed by magic, would you not say?”

“That could be so, my lord.”

“Is what you’re telling me, then, that one possible way to fix things is to call Heszmon Gorse and his father down out of Triggoin, and all the rest of the mages who took part in casting the spell that day, and have them cast a reverse spell that would restore everyone’s knowledge of the civil war?”

Maundigand-Klimd hesitated, something that Prestimion had rarely seen him do.

“I am not sure, my lord, that such a thing would be effective.”

“Good. Because it’s never going to happen. I’m not happy about the apparent consequences of what I did, but it’s a safe bet that I’m not going to try anything like it again. Among other things, I don’t have any desire to let everyone know that their new Coronal began his reign by hoodwinking the entire planet into thinking his accession had been peaceful. But also I see great risks in suddenly restoring the old sequence of events. People have spent the past couple of years living with the false history that I had my mages instill in their minds at the end of the civil war. For better or worse, they accept it as the truth. If I take all that away now, it might just cause an upheaval even worse than what’s going on now. What do you say about that, Maundigand-Klimd?”

“I agree completely.”

“Well, then: the problem remains. There’s a plague loose in the world, and a lot of bad magic is springing up as a result, a mess of chicanery and fraud which you and I both despise.” Prestimion, glowering at the little ceramic heads that Maundigand-Klimd had spilled all over his desk, began to scoop them back into their sack. “Since the plague was brought on by magic, it needs to be dealt with by a countermagic—good magic, true magic, as you say. Your kind of magic. Very well. Please work something out, my friend, and tell me what it is.”

“Oh, Lord Prestimion, if only it were that easy! But I will see what I can do.”

The Su-Suheris went out. Prestimion, when he was gone, fished about in the sack until he had found the Lord Prestimion head and the Septach Melayn, and dropped them in a pocket of his tunic.

Septach Melayn was waiting for him in the gymnasium, restlessly pacing up and down and flicking his baton through the air, bringing an ominous hum from the slender wand of nightflower wood at every motion of his supple wrist. “You’re late,” he said. He pulled a second baton from the rack and tossed it to Prestimion. “A lot of important decrees to sign this morning, was it?”

“A visit from Maundigand-Klimd,” said Prestimion, laying the baton aside and drawing the little heads from their pocket. “He brought me these. Charming, aren’t they?”

“Oh, indeed! Your portrait and mine, if I’m not mistaken. What are they meant for?”

“Amulets to conjure with. To keep the madness away, supposedly. Maundigand-Klimd tells me that the midnight market’s full of stuff like this, all of a sudden. They’re selling the way sausages would in the middle of the Valmambra. He bought a whole bag of them. Not just your face and mine, but all sorts, even a Ghayrog and a Hjort and a Su-Suheris. Something for everyone. All the old cults are starting up again, too, he says: big business all over again for the whole magus crowd.”

“A pity,” said Septach Melayn. He took the portrait of himself from Prestimion and balanced it in the palm of his hand. “A little on the grisly side, I’d say. But so cleverly done! Look, I’m grinning and shrieking at one and the same time. And I seem to be winking a little, too. I’d love to meet the artist who designed it. Perhaps I could get him to do a full-scale portrait, you know?”

“You are a madman,” said Prestimion.

“You may very well be right. May I keep this?”

“If it amuses you.”

“It certainly does. And now, please, my lord, pick up your baton. Our exercise hour is long overdue. On your guard, Prestimion! On your guard!”

3

At the beginning of the week following, word was brought to Prestimion as he breakfasted that his brother Abrigant had returned to the Castle from the south-country in the middle of the night, and was requesting immediate audience.

Prestimion had arisen at dawn. The hour was not much past that now. Varaile still slept; Abrigant must not have been to bed at all. Why such urgency?

“Tell him that I’ll meet with him in the Stiamot throne-room in thirty minutes,” Prestimion said.

Hardly had he settled into his seat there when Abrigant came bursting in, looking as though he had not taken the trouble even to change his clothing since his arrival. He was bronzed and weatherworn from his travels, and the brown cloak that he wore above threadbare green leggings was patched and soiled. Over his left cheekbone there was a bruise of considerable size, plainly not a recent one but still quite livid.

“Well, brother, welcome back to—” Prestimion began, but he got no further along than that with his greeting.

“Married, are you?” Abrigant blurted. His expression was fierce and challenging. “For that is what I hear, that you’ve taken a queen. Who is she, Prestimion? And why didn’t you wait until I could attend the ceremony?”

“These are very straightforward words when spoken to a king by his younger brother, Abrigant.”

“There was a time once when I made a grand starburst to you and a deep bow, and you told me that that was much too much obeisance between brother and brother. Whereas now—”

“Now you go too far in the other direction. We haven’t seen each other for many months; and here you are, charging in like a wild bidlak, not even a smile or a friendly embrace, immediately asking me to explain my actions to you as though you were Coronal and I a mere—”

Again Abrigant cut him off. “The groom who received me when I arrived told me that you have a consort now, and that her name is Varaile. Is this true? Who is this Varaile, brother?”

“She is the daughter of Simbilon Khayf.”

If Prestimion had struck him across the face, Abrigant would not have looked more astounded. He recoiled visibly. “The daughter of Simbilon Khayf? The daughter of Simbilon Khayf? That puffed-up arrogant fool is a member of our family now, Prestimion? Brother, brother, what have you done?”

“Fallen in love, is what I’ve done. What you’ve done is to behave like a belligerent boor. Calm yourself, Abrigant, and let’s begin this conversation again, if you will. The Coronal Lord welcomes the Prince of Muldemar to the Castle after his long journey, and bids him be seated. Sit there, Abrigant. There. Good. I don’t like to have people looming up over me, you know.” Abrigant seemed totally nonplussed, but Prestimion could not tell whether it was from the rebuke or from his bland admission of having married Simbilon Khayf’s daughter. “You look as though you’ve had an arduous trip. I hope it was a fruitful one.”

“Yes, it was. Very much so.” Abrigant’s words came as if through clenched teeth.

“Tell me about it, then.”

But Abrigant would not be turned from his course. “This marriage, brother—”

Summoning all the patience he could manage, Prestimion said, “She is a splendid queenly woman. You’ll not doubt the wisdom of my choice when you meet her. As for her father, I assure you that I’m no more enamored of him than you are, but there’s no cause for dismay. He’s caught the madness that’s running about the world, and has been locked away where he can’t offend anyone with his vulgar ways. In the matter of my not holding the wedding off until you got back here, I shouldn’t have to justify that to you; but I ask you to bear in mind that I had no assurance you’d keep your promise about giving up your quest for Skakkenoir within six months. For all I knew, you’d be gone two or three years—or forever.”

“You had my solemn pledge. Which I kept to the very letter of the word. It was six months exactly from the day we parted that I began my homeward trip:”

“Well, you have my gratitude for that, at least. The expedition was successful, you say?”

“Oh, yes, Prestimion. Quite successful. I have to tell you that it would have been a far greater success if you hadn’t sworn me to that six-month limit, but there’s much to report even so.—He’s really gone mad, has he? A raving imbecile, eh? What a perfect fate for him! I hope you’ve got him chained up among all those hideous beasts Gialaurys brought back from Kharax for you.”

“You said there was much to report,” Prestimion reminded him. “It would be kind of you to begin, brother.”

He had commenced the trip, Abrigant said—still obviously thunderstruck by the news of Prestimion’s marriage, but making a visible effort to put it out of mind—by heading eastward from Sippulgar along the Aruachosian coast of the Inner Sea. But that was such a vile sweltering place, where the air was so wet and thick that one could hardly breathe, and the wasps and ants were the size of mice and the very worms had wings and jaws, that they were driven inland soon after crossing over into the province of Vrist. The last glimpse of the sea that they had was at the dreary Vristian port of Glystrintai; after that, they found themselves in much less humid country, largely uninhabited—a hot, primordial-looking plateau of wrinkled crags and congealed lava, of pink lakes in which gigantic snakes lay coiled, of turbulent rivers inhabited by monstrous sluggish mud-colored fish, bigger than a man, that seemed to have wandered out of a much earlier era.

In this sun-baked prehistoric land of broad vistas and distant horizons a terrible silence prevailed day after day, broken only by the occasional skreeking cries of sinister-looking predatory birds, bigger even than the khestrabons or surastrenas they had seen in the east-country, that went soaring by high overhead. The travelers felt almost as though they were the first explorers of some virgin planet.

But then they spied smoke on the horizon—campfires—and they came the next day to a land of jet-black hills laced with dazzling outcrops of brilliant white quartz, where thousands of Liimen living in the middle of nowhere were mining gold. “True gold this time?” said Prestimion. “After golden bees and golden hills and walls of golden stone, a place where the actual metal itself is found?”

“The metal itself,” Abrigant said. “These are the mines of Sethem province, where naked Liimen work like slaves under the murderous sun. Here. See for yourself.” And he reached into a burlap knapsack that he had brought into the throne-room with him and pulled forth three square thin plates of gold, each about the size of the palm of his hand, on which geometric symbols had been marked with punches. “They gave me these,” said Abrigant. “I don’t know what they’re worth. The miners didn’t seem to care. They just do their work, as though they were machines.”

“The mines of Sethem,” Prestimion said. “Well, the stuff had to come from somewhere. I never gave it a thought.”

The image came to him of long lines of Liimen at work in that barren stony landscape: strange uncomplaining rough-skinned beings, with broad flat heads shaped like hammers and three fiery eyes glowing like smouldering coals in the craters of their deeply recessed eye-sockets. Who had assembled them and brought them there? What thoughts went through their minds as they plodded through their days of unthinkable toil?

The gold lay hidden in the quartz, the merest dusting of it scattered thinly through the rocky veins. The Liimen mined it, Abrigant said, by building fires on the black stony outcrops and hurling cold water and vinegar against the heated rock to fracture it so that the ore could be extracted from the fissures thus created. Some worked on the surface of the hills, others in deep tunnels that were too low-roofed for them to stand in, so that they had to writhe along the ground, seeing their way with lamps fastened to their foreheads. Eventually great mounds of ore-bearing rock were collected. Then a different group would set to work with stone sledgehammers to break that up into smaller pieces, which yet other workers took and ground down in mills operated by great handles, two or three Liimen to a handle, until it came to the consistency of flour.

The final phase was to spread the processed quartz out on slanting boards and pour water over it to flush away the dross, a task repeated again and again until only pure particles of gold remained. This then was smelted for days on end in a kiln, along with salt and tin and hoikka bran, and eventually pure gleaming nuggets came forth, which were beaten into the thin plates that Abrigant had been given.

“It is miserable work in a miserable place,” he said. “But they toil every hour of the day, handling an immense amount of rock to produce very little gold. And all that labor just for the sake of gold! If only there were more of the stuff, perhaps we could find some way to convert it into useful iron or copper. But as it is, we have just this, suited only for trifling decorative purposes.”

“And after Sethem,” Prestimion said, “where did you go then?”

“Eastward still,” replied Abrigant, “into the province of Kinorn, which was not quite a land of deserts but far from pleasant, having been folded again and again by ancient movements of the land so that crossing it was like crossing a giant griddle. We went on and on, ridge after ridge, and there was always the next steep ridge to climb, and we were tossed about in our floaters as though in a storm at sea. This bruise, Prestimion—I struck my head once when our car overturned and thought it would be my death. Some villages had been founded here, too, the Divine only knew why, where the people lived by farming and seemed to have very little knowledge of the great world beyond. They spoke a dialect that was difficult to understand. Zimroel was only a myth to them, and its demonic Procurator unknown; they claimed to know of such places as the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, and Alaisor and Stoien and Sintalmond and Sisivondal, but it was obvious that their information went no farther than those cities’ mere names. I asked of Skakkenoir, though, and they smiled at that, and said, yes, yes, Skakkenoir, and pointed east. They pronounced the name in a barbarous way that I could never get my tongue to imitate; but the soil there, they said, was bright red. The red of iron, Prestimion.”

“Of course, the six-month limit expired precisely at that point,” said Prestimion lightly, “and therefore you turned back without investigating any further.”

“You knew it, brother! That is what happened. But in fact we were actually a few days short of the six months, so we went on a little way. And look, Prestimion!” He put his hand into the knapsack again, taking from it three little glass vials of red sand, and a fourth that contained the dried and crumbling leaves of some plant. “Have this sand analyzed, and I think you’ll find them rich with iron, as much as one part in ten thousand. And the leaves: can these be from the metal-bearing plants of Skakkenoir? I think they are, Prestimion. It was only a small strand of red earth, twenty feet wide at most and soon petering out—one little accidental tongue jutting forth out of the land of Skakkenoir, I think. And half a dozen scraggly little plants growing on that red soil. The real wealth lay still to the east, of that I was sure. But of course I was sworn to turn back on the day the seventh month began, and that day had now arrived, and so I did. I came very close, I believe. But I was sworn to turn back.”

“All right, Abrigant. You’ve made your point.”

Prestimion opened the vial of leaves and lifted one out. It looked like nothing more than a dried leaf, such as one would use as a cooking herb. There was nothing metallic about it: one might do better, perhaps, trying to extract gold from the shining shrubs on the hills of Arvyanda that reflected the gold of the sunlight than to get iron from this little wrinkled brown scrap of vegetation. But he would have it analyzed, all the same.

“There you are,” said Abrigant. “The mines of Skakkenoir are yours for the taking. It is such ugly country, Prestimion , and so forbidding in its heat and its up-and-down landscape: I can see why other explorers gave up too soon. But perhaps they weren’t as eager as I was to find the land of iron. The great prosperity of the age of Prestimion, brother, is in those four vials.”

“May that truly be so. I’ll have them examined this very day. But even if they prove to bear iron, what then? A bit of red sand and a few leaves won’t take us very far. Skakkenoir itself remains undiscovered.”

“It lay just beyond the next hill, Prestimion! I swear it!”

“Ah, but did it, though?”

Abrigant gave him a stormy look. “I would go again and see. With bigger floaters and a great many more men. And no six-month deadlines, this time. It’s a ghastly land, but I would go, if only you’ll authorize a second expedition. And I’ll bring back all the iron you would ever want to possess.”

“First the chemical analysis of these little samples of yours, brother. And then we’ll discuss a new expedition.”

Abrigant seemed to be on the verge of some hot retort; but just then came a knock at the door, the little rat-tat-tat pattern that Prestimion recognized as Varaile’s. He held up his hand to silence his brother before he could speak and crossed the room to admit her.

She greeted him with a warm hug; and only after they stepped back from each other did she notice that there was someone else in the room.

“Forgive me, Prestimion. I didn’t know that you were—”

“This is my brother Abrigant, newly among us again after a difficult journey to the far south, questing after the land of iron. It took him very much by surprise, apparently, to discover that I had married in his absence. Abrigant: here is my consort Varaile.”

“Brother,” she said unhesitatingly. “How happy I am to know that you’ve returned safely!” And went instantly to him and enfolded him in an embrace nearly as warm as the one she had given Prestimion.

Abrigant seemed taken aback for a moment by the immediate openhearted fondness of her greeting, and returned it stiffly and awkwardly at first. But then he took her more wholeheartedly into his arms; and when he released her his eyes were shining in a new way and his fair-skinned face was reddened with confusion and pleasure. It was plain to see that Varaile had won him over in an instant, that he was overwhelmed by the beauty and poise and imposing presence of his brother’s new wife.

“I was just telling Lord Prestimion,” Abrigant said, “how greatly I regretted missing your wedding. I am the brother nearest to him in age; it would have been my great pleasure to stand beside him when he spoke his vows.”

“He too regretted it that you could not be there,” said Varaile. “But it was possible you’d be gone a very long while, and no one was sure how long. We both thought it best not to wait.”

“I quite understand,” Abrigant said, with a little bow. He could not have been more courtly, now. The angry man of a few moments before had utterly vanished. Looking toward Prestimion, he said, “I think we’ve finished our business for now, brother.—I’ll go to my rooms, if I may, and leave you with your lady.”

His eyes were glowing, and the meaning of that glow was as unmistakable to Prestimion as if it were possible for him to read his brother’s thoughts. You have done well for yourself, brother. This woman is truly a queen!

“No, no,” Varaile said, “I was just passing by. I wouldn’t want to interrupt your meeting. Surely you two still have much to tell each other.” She blew Prestimion a kiss and started toward the door. “Will we be lunching in the Pinitor Court as usual, my lord?”

“I think we will. And perhaps Abrigant will join us.”

“I would like that,” she said pleasantly, and made gestures of farewell to them both, and left the room.

“How altogether splendid she is,” Abrigant said, still aglow. “I comprehend everything now.—Does she call you ‘my lord’ all the time?”

“Only when she’s among people unfamiliar to her,” Prestimion said. “A little touch of formality, is all. She’s a very well-bred woman, you know. But we’re on more intimate terms when we’re alone.”

“I would hope so, brother.” Abrigant shook his head in amazement. “Simbilon Khayf’s daughter! Who would ever believe it? That squalid little man, bringing into the world a woman like that—”

4

And now it was summer in the Alhanroel midlands where Castle Mount rose to the heavens, though there was no sign of a change of seasons at the Castle itself, favored as always by its perpetual gentle springtime.

A deceptive calm had settled there. For the moment, at least, there were no crises to deal with. Prestimion, accustoming himself now to his role as Coronal, met with delegations from far-off lands, paid occasional visits to the neighboring cities of the Mount, presided over the deliberations of the Council, conferred with the representatives of the Pontifex and the Lady on such matters of government as required his cooperation. The plague of madness continued to claim new victims, but not quite so voraciously as before, and the populace at large seemed to have accepted it as a fact of life, like unduly heavy rainfall that flooded the fields at harvest time, or lusavender blight, or the sandstorms that sometimes ravaged southeastern Zimroel, or any of the other little flaws of existence that made Majipoor something other than a perfect paradise.

As for Dantirya Sambail, he seemed to have vanished from the face of the world. That he had lost his life somehow in the course of his wanderings through Alhanroel struck Prestimion as being much too good to be true; but he was coming reluctantly to accept the possibility that that might have been what had occurred. The mere thought of a world without Dantirya Sambail caused wondrous serenity and ease to steal over him. At moments of high stress or great fatigue during the course of his daily tasks Prestimion would sometimes pause and think, I am rid forever of Dantirya Sambail, simply for the sake of savoring the tranquility that the words brought to his spirit.

Varaile, too, had adapted well to the change in her circumstances that marrying Prestimion had brought. The Coronal’s wife had tasks of her own, a full daily round of them. One, though, was self-imposed: a visit to Simbilon Khayf in his comfortable captivity in the guest-house in the northern wing of the Castle near Lord Hendighail’s Hall, every morning before going on to that day’s regular chores.

The man who once had been the richest citizen of Stee, and whose grand mansion in that city had been the object of universal envy and admiration, now lived in just five modest rooms far from the center of Castle life. But he did not seem to care, or even to notice. Simbilon Khayf’s days of striving were over. He gave no indication even of remembering the power that had been his, or the fierce driving ambition that had led him to it, or the multitude of little vanities by which he had announced to the world that Simbilon Khayf was a force to be reckoned with.

Each day now he was born anew into the world. Yesterday’s experiences, such as they had been, had been washed from his mind as completely as the tracks that birds make at low tide along the sandy shore of the Inner Sea. His morning nurse awakened him and bathed him and dressed him in a simple white robe, and gave him his breakfast, and took him for a short walk along Lord Methirasp’s Parapet, the broad cobblestoned terrace behind his residence. Usually Varaile arrived just as he was returning from that.

This morning, as every morning, Simbilon Khayf seemed relaxed and happy. He greeted her, as ever, with a courteous if absent-minded kiss on the cheek and a brief, fleeting handclasp. Though he remembered little of his former life, he did, at least, generally recall that he had a daughter, and that her name was Varaile.

“You look well this morning, father. Did you have a good rest?”

“Oh, yes, very good. And you, Varaile?”

“It would have been nice to sleep a little longer, but of course I couldn’t do that. We were up very late last night: another banquet, it was, the Duke of Chorg here from Bibiroon, and he’s a great connoisseur of wines. And since Prestimion’s family is famous for its wine, naturally it was necessary to have a whole case of rarities shipped up from Muldemar for the banquet, and the duke, wouldn’t you know, wanted to have a sip from every single bottle—”

“Prestimion?” said Simbilon Khayf, smiling vaguely.

“My husband. Lord Prestimion, the Coronal. You know that I’m the Coronal’s wife, don’t you, father?”

Simbilon Khayf blinked. “You’ve married old Confalume, have you? Why would you have wanted to do that? Isn’t it strange, being married to a man older than your father?”

“But I’m not,” she said, laughing despite the gravity of the situation. “Father, Confalume isn’t Coronal any longer. He’s gone on to become Pontifex. There’s a new Coronal now.”

“Yes, of course: Lord Korsibar. How silly of me! How could I have forgotten that it was Korsibar who became Coronal after Confalume?—So you’ve married Korsibar, have you?”

She stared at him, puzzled and saddened. His damaged mind wandered in the strangest ways. “Korsibar? No, father. Wherever did you get that name from? There isn’t any Lord Korsibar. I’ve never heard of anyone by that name.”

“But I was sure that—”

“No, father.”

“Then who—”

“Prestimion, father. Prestimion. He’s the Coronal now, the successor to Lord Confalume. And I’m his wife.”

“Ah. Lord Prestimion. Very interesting. The new Coronal’s name is Prestimion, not Korsibar. What could I have been thinking of? You’re his wife, you say?”

“That’s right.”

“How many children do you and this Lord Prestimion have, then?”

Varaile said, reddening a little, “We haven’t really been married all that long, father. We don’t have any children yet.”

“Well, you will. Everybody has children. I had one myself, I think.”

“Yes. You did. You’re speaking with her right now.”

“Oh. Yes. Yes. The one who married the Coronal. What’s his name, this Coronal you married?”

“Prestimion, father.”

“Prestimion. Yes. I knew a Prestimion once. Smallish man, blond hair, very quick with a bow and arrow. A clever sort. I wonder what ever became of him.”

“He became Coronal, father,” said Varaile patiently. “I married him.”

“Married the Coronal? Is that what you said: you married the Coronal? How very unusual! And what a step upward in the world for us, my dear. No one in our family has ever married a Coronal before, isn’t that so?”

“I’m sure that I’m the first,” Varaile said. It was about this time, each visit, when her eyes would begin welling with tears and she would have to turn briefly away, for it was bewildering and upsetting to Simbilon Khayf to see her cry. That happened now. She flicked her fingers across her face and turned back to him, smiling valiantly.

In recent weeks it had become quite clear to her that she had never actually loved her father in the days when his mind was intact: had not, in fact, even liked him very much.

She had accepted the nature of their life together without ever questioning any aspect of it: his hunger for money and glory, his embarrassing social pretensions, his arrogance, his many foolishnesses of dress and speech, his enormous wealth. A prank of the Divine had made her his daughter; another, her mother’s early death, had made her the mistress of Simbilon Khayf’s household when she was still just a girl; and Varaile had accepted all that and had simply gone about the responsibilities that had fallen to her, repressing whatever rebellious thoughts might surface in her mind. Life as Simbilon Khayf’s daughter had often been a trying business for her, but it was her life, and she had seen no alternative to it.

Well, now the horrid little man who had happened to be her father was a shattered thing, an empty vessel. He too had been the victim of a prank of the Divine. It would be easy enough for her to turn her back on him and forget that he had ever existed; he would never know the difference. But no, no, she could not do that. All her life she had looked after the needs of Simbilon Khayf, not because she particularly wanted to, but because she had to. Now that he was in ruins and her own life had been immensely transformed for the better by yet another of the Divine’s little jokes, she looked after him still, not because it was in any way necessary, but because she wanted to.

He sat there smiling uncomprehendingly as she told him of yesterday’s Castle events: the meeting in the morning with Kazmai Noor, the Castle architect, to discuss the preliminary plans for the historical museum that Prestimion wanted to build, and then her lunch with the Duchess of Chorg and the Princess of Hektiroon, and in the afternoon a visit to a children’s hospital downslope at Halanx and the dedication of a playground in nearby Low Morpin. Simbilon Khayf listened, ever smiling, saying now and then, “Oh, that’s very nice. Nice indeed.”

Then she drew some papers forth and said, “I also had a few matters of private business to deal with yesterday. You know, father, that I’ve been signing all the family enterprises over to the employees, because someone has to run those companies and neither you nor I would be capable of doing that now, and in any case it would never do for the Coronal’s wife to engage in commerce. We transferred seven more of them yesterday.”

“Oh, very nice,” said Simbilon Khayf, smiling.

“I have their names here, if you’re interested, though I don’t think that you are. Migdal Velorn was at the Castle—you know who he is, father? The president of your bank in Amblemorn?—and I signed all the papers he brought me. They involved Velathyntu Mills, and the shipping company in Alaisor, and two banks, and—well, there were seven. We have just eleven companies left, now, and I hope to be rid of them in another few weeks.”

“Indeed. How good of you to take such care of things.”

His constant smile was unnerving. These visits were never easy. Was there anything else she needed to tell him today? Probably not. What difference did it make, anyway? She rose to leave. “I’ll be going now, father. Prestimion sends his love.”

“Prestimion?”

“My husband.”

“Oh, you’re married now, Varaile? How very nice. Do you have any children?”

On a fine golden morning toward the end of summer Prestimion went downslope to his family estates in Muldemar to attend the great annual festival of the new wine. Every year at that time, by ancient tradition, the newly made wines of the previous autumn’s vintage were brought out for their first tasting, and a lively day-long celebration was held in Muldemar city, capped by a grand banquet at Muldemar House, the residence of the Prince of Muldemar.

Prestimion had presided over a dozen or so of these events in his time as prince. Then, for two years running, there had been the distraction of the civil war to keep him from being present. Now he was Coronal and Abrigant had succeeded him at Muldemar. But last year there had been no banquet either, because he and Abrigant had been off in the east country chasing after Dantirya Sambail at the customary time of the festival. So this would be Abrigant’s first festival since becoming Prince of Muldemar; and he would regard it as a high honor if Prestimion were to attend. The Coronal did not ordinarily attend the Muldemar festival. But no member of Prestimion’s family had ever gone on to become Coronal before, either. Prestimion felt obligated to be there. It would mean an absence of three or four days from the Castle altogether.

Varaile, though, was a little unwell, and begged off attending. Even the short trip down to Muldemar seemed a little too much for her to deal with just now, she told him, and she certainly had no eagerness to take part in a lavish dinner where rich food and strong wines would be served far into the night. She asked Prestimion to bring Septach Melayn along as his companion instead. Prestimion was reluctant to go without her; but he was even more reluctant to disappoint Abrigant, who would be deeply hurt if he failed to appear. And so it happened that when the major-domo Nilgir Sumanand arrived at the Coronal’s residence with word that a young knight-initiate named Dekkeret had just returned to the Castle after a long absence overseas and was seeking an audience with Lord Prestimion on a matter of extremely great importance, it was to Varaile and not the Coronal to whom he delivered the message.

“Dekkeret?” Varaile said. “I don’t think I know that name.”

“No, milady. He has been away since before the time you came to live here.”

“It isn’t usual for knight-initiates to request audiences with the Coronal, is it? How extreme is the importance of this extremely important matter, anyway? Important enough for you to send him down to Prestimion at Muldemar, do you think?”

“I have no idea. He said it was quite urgent, but that he must deliver his report to the Coronal himself, or else to the High Counsellor, or, if neither of them is here, to Prince Akbalik. However, the Coronal is in Muldemar today, as you know, and the High Counsellor is down there with him, and Prince Akbalik has not yet returned from his own travels—he is in Stoienzar, I think. I hesitate to disturb Lord Prestimion’s holiday in Muldemar without your permission, milady.”

“No. Quite right, Nilgir Sumanand.” And then, somewhat to her own surprise, for she had been feeling queasy all morning: “Send him here to me. I’ll find out from him myself whether it’s something worth bothering the Coronal about.”

There was something generous and open-spirited about Dekkeret’s features and the straightforward gaze of his eyes that made Varaile take an immediate intuitive liking to him. He was obviously highly intelligent, but there did not seem to be anything sly or scheming or crafty about him. He was a big, ruggedly built young man, perhaps twenty years old or a year or two more, with wide, powerful shoulders and a general look of tremendous physical strength held under careful control. The skin of his face and hands had a tanned, almost leathery look, as though he had spent a great deal of time outdoors lately in some hot, harsh climate.

The Coronal, she told him, would be away from the Castle for several days more. She made it quite clear that she would not intrude on her husband’s visit to Muldemar except for very good cause. And asked him what it was, exactly, that Knight-Initiate Dekkeret wished to bring to the Coronal’s attention.

Dekkeret was hesitant at first in his reply. Perhaps he was disconcerted at finding himself in the company of Lord Prestimion’s consort instead of Lord Prestimion, or perhaps it was the fact that Lord Prestimion’s consort was so very close to his own age. Or else he was simply unwilling to reveal the information to someone he did not know: a woman, moreover, who was not even a member of the Council. He made no attempt, at any rate, to disguise his uncertainty about how to proceed.

But then he appeared to decide that it was safe to tell her the tale. After some awkward false starts he began to offer her a long, rambling prologue. Prince Akbalik, he said, had taken him with him some time back on a diplomatic mission to Zimroel. He had not been entrusted with any important responsibilities himself, but was brought along only to gain a little seasoning, since he had only a short while before joined the Coronal’s staff. After spending some time in Ni-moya he had arranged, for reasons that he did not seem to be able to make very clear, to be transferred temporarily to the service of the Pontifex, and had gone off to Suvrael to investigate a problem involving cattle exports.

“Suvrael?” Varaile said. “How awful to be sent there, of all places!”

“It was at my own request, milady. Yes, I know, it is an unpleasant land. But I felt a need to go someplace unpleasant for a time. It would be very complicated to explain.” It sounded to Varaile almost as though he had deliberately been looking to experience great physical discomfort: as a sort of purgation, perhaps, a penitential act. That was hard for her to comprehend. But she let the point pass without attempting to question him on it.

His task in Suvrael, Dekkeret said, had been to visit a place called Ghyzyn Kor, the capital of the cattle-ranch country, and make inquiries there about the reasons for the recent decline in beef production. Ghyzyn Kor lay at the heart of a mountain-sheltered zone of fertile grazing lands, six or seven hundred miles deep in the torrid continent’s interior, that was entirely surrounded by the bleakest of deserts. But upon his arrival at the port of Tolaghai on Suvrael’s northwest coast, he quickly learned that getting there was not going to be any easy matter.

There were, he was told, three main routes inland. But one of these was currently being ravaged by fierce sandstorms that made it impassable. A second was closed to travelers on account of marauding Shapeshifter bandits. And the third, an arduous desert road that ran across the mountains by way of a place called Khulag Pass, had fallen into disuse in recent years and was in a bad state of repair. No one went that way any more, his informant said, because the route was haunted.

“Haunted?”

“Yes, milady. By ghosts, so I was told, that would enter your mind at night as you slept and steal your dreams, and replace them with the most ghastly terrifying fantasies. Some travelers in that desert had died of their own nightmares, I heard. And by day the ghosts would sing in the distance, confusing you, leading you from the proper path with strange songs and eerie sounds, until you drifted off into some sandy wasteland and were lost forever.”

“Ghosts who steal your dreams,” said Varaile, marveling. Her innate skepticism bridled at the whole idea. “Surely you aren’t the sort to let yourself be frightened by nonsense like that.”

“Indeed I’m not. But setting off by myself into that miserable desert, ghosts or no ghosts, was a different matter. I began to think my mission was doomed to end in complete failure. But then I came across someone who claimed that he often went inland by way of Khulag Pass and had never had any problems with the ghosts. He didn’t say that the ghosts weren’t there, only that he had ways of withstanding their powers. I hired him to serve as my guide.”

His name, Dekkeret said, was Venghenar Barjazid: a sly, disreputable little man, very likely a smuggler of some sort, who extorted a formidable price from him for the job. The plan was to reverse the usual patterns of wakefulness, traveling by night and making camp during the burning heat of the day. They were accompanied by Barjazid’s son, an adolescent boy named Dinitak, along with a Skandar woman to serve as porter and a Vroon who was familiar with all the desert roads. A dilapidated old floater would be the vehicle in which they traveled.

The journey out of Tolaghai and up into the hills leading to Khulag Pass was uneventful. Dekkeret found the landscape startling in its ugliness—dry rocky washes, sandy pockmarked ground, spiky twisted plants—and it grew even more forbidding once they had gone through the pass and began their descent into the Desert of Stolen Dreams beyond. He had never imagined that the world held any such fearsome place, so stark and grim and inhospitable. But, he said, he simply took that cruel, barren wasteland as it came, without feeling a flicker of dismay. Perhaps he even liked it in some perverse way, Varaile supposed, considering that he had gone to Suvrael in the first place in search of whatever gratification there might be in hardship and suffering.

Then, though, the nightmares began. Daymares, rather. He dreamed that he was floating toward the benevolent embrace of the Lady of the Isle, at the center of a sphere of pure white light; it was a vision of peace and joy, but gradually the imagery of his dream changed and darkened, so that he found himself marooned on a bare gray mountainside, staring down at a dead and empty crater, and awakened trembling and weak with fear and shock.

“Did you dream well?” Barjazid had asked him, then. “My son says you moaned in your sleep, that you rolled over many times and clutched your knees. Did you feel the touch of the dream-stealers, Initiate Dekkeret?”

When Dekkeret admitted that he had, the little man pressed him for details. Dekkeret grew angry at that, and asked why he should allow Barjazid to probe and poke in his mind; but Barjazid persisted, and finally Dekkeret did provide a description of what he had dreamed. Yes, said Barjazid, he had felt the touch of the dream-stealers: an invasion of the mind, a disturbing overlay of images, a taking of energy.

“I asked him,” Dekkeret told Varaile, “if he had ever felt their touch himself. No, he said, never. He was apparently immune. His son Dinitak had been bothered by them only once or twice. He would not speculate on the nature of the creatures that caused such things. I said then, ‘Do the dreams get worse as one gets deeper into the desert?’ To which he replied, very coolly indeed, ‘So I am given to understand.’ ”

When they moved on at twilight, Dekkeret imagined he heard distant laughter, the tinkling of far-off bells, the booming of ghostly drums.

And the next day he dreamed again, a dream that began in a green and lovely garden of fountains and pools but quickly transformed itself into something terrible in which he lay naked and exposed to the desert sun, so that he felt his own skin charring and crackling. This time, when he awakened, he discovered that he had wandered away from camp in his sleep and was sprawled out in the midday heat amid a horde of stinging ants. Nor could he find his way back to the floater, and he thought he would die; but eventually the Vroon came for him, bearing a flask of water, and led him to safety. There had been suffering aplenty in that adventure, more, in truth, than he was looking for; but the worst of it, he told Varaile, had been neither the heat nor the thirst nor the ants, but the anguish of being denied the solace of normal dreaming, the terror of having that cheerful and soothing vision turn to something gruesome and frightful.

“So there really is some truth to these travelers’ tales, then?” asked Varaile. “This haunted desert actually does have deadly dream-stealing ghosts in it.”

“Of a sort, yes, milady. As I will shortly explain.”

They were almost out of the desert, now, following the bed of a long-extinct river through a violent terrain that had often been fractured by earthquakes. The land here rose gradually toward two tall peaks in the southwest, between which lay Munnerak Notch, the gateway to the cooler, greener lands of the cattle-country beyond. In another few days he would be at Ghyzyn Kor.

But the worst dream of all still lay ahead for him. He would not describe it in any specific way to Varaile, saying only that it brought him face to face with the one evil deed of his life, the sin that had sent him on his voyage of penance to Suvrael in the first place. Stage by stage he was forced to re-enact that sin as he slept, until the dream culminated in a scene of the most horrific intensity, one that made him shiver and blanch even to think of it now; and at its climax he experienced a sudden piercing pain, an intolerable sensation as of a needle of searing bright light slashing down into his skull. “I heard the tolling of a great gong far away,” said Dekkeret, “and the laughter of some demon close at hand. When I opened my eyes I was almost insane with dread and despair. Then I caught sight of Barjazid, across the way, half hidden behind the floater. He had just taken off some kind of mechanism that he was wearing around his forehead, and was trying to hide it in his baggage.”

Varaile gave a little start. “He was causing the dreams?”

“Oh, you are quick, milady, you are very quick! It was he, yes. With a machine that enabled him to enter minds and transform thoughts. A much more powerful machine than those used by the Lady of the Isle; for she can merely speak to minds, and this Barjazid’s device could actually take command of them. All this he admitted, not very willingly or gladly, when I demanded the truth from him. It was his own invention, he said, a thing that he had been working on for many years.”

“And carrying on experiments with it, is that it, using the minds of the travelers that he took into the desert?”

“Exactly, my lady.”

“You did well to come to the Coronal with this, Dekkeret. This device is a dangerous thing. Its use needs to be stopped.”

“It has been,” said Dekkeret. A broad smile of self-satisfaction spread across his face. “I succeeded in taking Barjazid and his son prisoner then and there, and seized the machine. They are here with me at the Castle. Lord Prestimion will be pleased, I think. Oh, lady, I surely hope that he is, for I tell you, lady, nothing is more important to me than pleasing Lord Prestimion!”

5

“His name is Dekkeret,” Varaile said. “A knight-initiate, very young and a little rough around the edges, but destined, I think, for great things.”

Prestimion laughed. They were in the Stiamot throne-room with Gialaurys. It was only an hour since his return to the Castle and Varaile had greeted him with this tale as though it were the most important thing in the world. “Oh, I know Dekkeret, all right! He saved my life in Normork long ago, when some lunatic with a sharp blade came charging out of a crowd at me.”

“Did he? He didn’t say anything to me about that.”

“No. I’d be very surprised if he had.”

“The story that he told me was absolutely astonishing, Prestimion.”

He had listened to it with no more than half an ear. “Let me see if I have it straight,” he said, when she was done. “He was with Akbalik on an assignment in Zimroel, that much I know, and then for some reason that was never made clear to me he went on by himself to Suvrael, and now, you tell me, he’s come back from there bringing what sort of thing?”

“A machine that seizes control of people’s minds. Which was invented by some shabby little smuggler, Barjazid by name, who offers to guide travelers through the desert, but who actually—”

“Barjazid?” Prestimion, frowning, glanced at Gialaurys. “It seems to me I’ve heard that name before. I know I have. But I don’t recall where.”

“A shady fellow who originally came from Suvrael, with squinty eyes and skin that looked like old leather,” Gialaurys said. “He was in the service of Duke Svor for a couple of years: a very slippery sort, this Barjazid, much like Svor himself. You always detested him.”

“Ah. It comes back to me now. It was right after that little trouble we had at Thegomar Edge, when we caught hold of that smarmy Vroon wizard, Thalnap Zelifor, who made all those mind-reading devices and had no hesitations about selling them both to us and to our opponents as well—”

Gialaurys nodded. “Exactly so. This Barjazid happened to be standing right there at the time, and you told him to pack up the Vroon and his whole workshop of diabolical machines and escort him into permanent exile in Suvrael. Where, no doubt, he got rid of the wizard at the first possible opportunity and appropriated the mind-control devices for his own use.” To Varaile he said, “Where did you say this man Barjazid is now, lady?”

“The Sangamor tunnels. He and his son, both.”

Hearty laughter came from Prestimion at that. “Oh, I like that! A nice closing of the circle! The tunnels were the very place where I first encountered Thalnap Zelifor, that time when he and I were prisoners chained side by side.” Which brought a puzzled glance from Varaile. Prestimion realized that all this discussion of episodes of the civil war had left her baffled. “I’ll tell you that story some other time,” he told her. “As for this gadget of his, I’ll give it a look when I have the chance. A machine that controls minds, eh? Well, I suppose we can find some use for it, sooner or later.”

“Better sooner than later, I think,” she said.

“Please. I’m not minimizing its importance, Varaile. There are many other things to deal with right now, though.” He smiled to soften the tone of his words, but he did not try to conceal his impatience. “I’ll get to it when I get to it.”

“And Prince Dekkeret?” Varaile said. “He should have some reward for bringing this thing to your attention, shouldn’t he?”

“Prince Dekkeret? Oh, no, no, not yet! He’s still a commoner, just a bright boy from Normork who’s making his way up the ladder here. But you’re quite right: we ought to acknowledge his good services.—What do you say, Gialaurys? Promote him two levels, shall we? Yes. If he’s second level now, which I think he is, let’s up him to fourth. Provided he’s recovered from whatever strange fit of conscience it was that sent him racing off to Suvrael.”

“If he hadn’t gone there, Prestimion, he’d never have captured the mind-control machine,” Varaile pointed out.

“True enough. But the thing may not turn out to have any value. And this whole Suvrael exploit of his bothers me a little. Dekkeret was supposed to be working for us in Ni-moya, not going off on mysterious private adventures, even ones that turned out to be worthwhile. I don’t want him doing that again.—Now,” Prestimion said, as Gialaurys, excusing himself, saluted and left the room, “let’s turn to another matter, shall we, Varaile?”

“And that is?”

“A new journey that has to be undertaken.”

A flicker of displeasure crossed Varaile’s face. “You’ll be traveling again so soon, Prestimion?”

“Not just me. Us. This time you’ll be accompanying me.”

She brightened at that. “Oh, much better! And where will we be going? Bombifale, perhaps? I’d love to see Bombifale. Or Amblemorn, maybe. They say that Amblemorn’s very strange and quaint, narrow winding roads and ancient cobblestoned streets—I’ve always wanted to see Amble-morn, Prestimion.”

“We’ll be going farther than that,” he told her. “A great deal farther: to the Isle of Sleep, in fact. I’ve not seen my mother since my coronation, and she’s never seen my wife at all. We’re long overdue for a visit. She wants to meet you. And she says she has important matters to discuss with me. We’ll go by riverboat down the Iyann to Alaisor and sail to the Isle from there. This time of year that’s the best route.”

Varaile nodded. “When do we leave?”

“A week? Ten days? Will that be all right?”

“Of course.” Then she smiled: a little ruefully, perhaps, Prestimion thought. “The Coronal never does get a chance to stay home at the Castle for long, does he, Prestimion?”

“There’ll be all the time in the world for staying home later on,” he replied, “when I am Pontifex, and my home is at the bottom of the Labyrinth.”

In the city of Stoien, at the tip of the Stoienzar Peninsula in far southwestern Alhanroel, Akbalik sat before a thick sheaf of bills of lading and cargo manifests and passenger lists and other maritime documents, wearily leafing through them in search of some clue to the location of Dantirya Sambail. He had done the same thing every day for the last three months. A copy of every scrap of paper that had anything to do with vessels traveling between Alhanroel and Zimroel found its way to the intelligence-gathering center that Akbalik, by order of Septach Melayn, had set up here in Stoien. By now he knew more about the price of a hundredweight of ghumba-root or the cost of insuring a shipment of thuyol berries against klegworms than he had ever imagined he would learn. But he was no closer to finding out anything about Dantirya Sambail than he had been the day he arrived.

The dispatches he was sending back to the Castle each week were becoming increasingly terse and cranky. Akbalik had been away in the provinces for months, passing what had begun to seem like an endless skein of pointless days among all these dreary strangers, first Ni-moya, now here. He was a famously even-tempered man, but even he had his limits. He was beginning to miss his life at the Castle tremendously. Nothing was being accomplished out here; it was time, he thought, and well past time, for him to be transferred back to the capital, and in the last couple of dispatches he had made explicit requests to that effect.

But no answers came. Septach Melayn was probably too busy keeping his dueling skills polished to bother reading his correspondence. Akbalik had written once to Gialaurys, but that was like writing to Lord Stiamot’s statue. As for the Coronal, Akbalik had heard that he had decided to make a pilgrimage to the Isle of Sleep to introduce his new wife to his mother, and was somewhere on the River Iyann, midway between the Mount and Alaisor, just now. So there was no hope at all of arranging a recall order, it seemed. Akbalik had no choice but to go on sitting here day after day, interminably sifting through his mountains of shipping documents.

At least Stoien city was a cheery enough place to be stranded, if you had no alternative but to be stranded in some provincial outpost. Its climate was perfect, summertime warmth throughout the year, sweet air and cloudless skies, pleasant sea breezes from mid-morning through mid-afternoon, mild evenings, a delicious cooling sprinkling of rain every night precisely at midnight. The city itself was a thin strand spilling out for more than a hundred miles along the sweeping curve of its great harbor, so that a population of better than nine million was accommodated without any sense of crowding. And the place was a joy to look at. Because the whole of the Stoienzar Peninsula was entirely flat, never rising more than twenty feet above sea level at any point, the people of the port of Stoien had introduced topographical variety into their city by requiring that every building had to be erected atop a brick platform faced with white stone, and by decreeing wide variation in the dimensions of the platforms. Some were no more than ten or fifteen feet high, but others, farther back from the shore, were impressive artificial hills that rose to heights of hundreds of feet.

Certain buildings of special importance stood in splendid isolation far above street level atop individual foundations; elsewhere, whole neighborhoods covering a square mile or more shared a single giant pedestal. The eye was kept in constant motion, faced as it was by pleasing alternations of high and low in every direction. And the effect of so much brick was softened by an abundance of bushes and vines and plants growing with tropical extravagance at the base of every platform, along the ramps that led to the higher levels, and clambering up the loftier walls. Those lush plantings afforded a brilliant show of color, not only the myriad different greens of their leaves, but the splendid indigo and topaz and scarlet and vermilion and violet of their innumerable flowers.

A pretty place, yes. And Akbalik’s own office high up in the customs house at the harbor afforded him a delightful view of the Gulf of Stoien, pale blue here, and smooth as glass. He was able to look northward for hundreds of miles, thousands, maybe, until the horizon intersected the planet’s great curve and turned everything to a thin gray line. But he longed for home all the same. He began to compose yet another missive to Septach Melayn in his head:

“Esteemed friend and revered High Counsellor. Four months have passed, now, since I came to Stoien city at your behest, and in that time I have loyally and diligently labored at the task of—”

“Prince Akbalik? Your pardon, prince, sir—”

It was Odrian Kestivaunt, the Vroon who served as his secretary here. The little creature stood by the door, fidgety as always, his multitude of dangling tentacles coiling and uncoiling nervously in a way that Akbalik had had to train himself to tolerate. He was carrying yet another stack of papers.

“More things for me to read, Kestivaunt?” said Akbalik, and made a sour face.

“I have already looked these over, Prince Akbalik. And have discovered something quite interesting in them. They were taken from freighters departing from various Stoienzar ports for Zimroel in the past two weeks. If you will allow me, prince, sir—”

Kestivaunt carried the papers to the desk and began to lay them out as though they were playing-cards in a game of solitaire. They were cargo manifests, Akbalik saw, long lists of commodities interspersed with some sea-captain’s comments on their condition as of the day they were taken on board, the quality of their packaging, and other such matters.

Akbalik glanced over the Vroon’s sloping shoulders as the small being dealt the sheets out. So many quintals of honey-lotus, so many sacks of madarate gum, so many pounds of orokhalk, so many adzes, awls, axe-handles, pack-saddles, sledgehammers—

“Is it really necessary for us to be doing this, Kestivaunt? ”

“One moment more, I entreat you, good prince. There. Now: I call your attention to the seventh line of the first manifest. Do you see what is entered there?”

“ ‘Anyvug ystyn ripliwich raditix,’ ” Akbalik read, mystified. “Yes. I see it. But I don’t make any sense out of it. What is it, something in Vroonish?”

“It’s more like Skandar than anything else, I would say. But not very much like Skandar. This is not, I think, any language spoken on Majipoor. But to continue, sir, if you will: line ten of this second manifest.”

“ ‘Emijiquk gybpij jassnin ys.’—What is this gibberish, man?”

“A coded message, perhaps? For look, look here, sir, line thirteen of the next paper: ‘Kesixm ricthip jumlee ayviy’ And line sixteen of the next: ‘Mursez ebumit yumus ghok.’ The nineteenth line of the next an orderly progression from sheet to sheet, is that not so?” The Vroon shuffled the papers excitedly, holding one and then another under Akbalik’s nose. “This nonsense is interpolated in otherwise ordinary texts at progressive intervals of three lines. We are missing, I think, the first two lines of the message, which would be on the first and fourth lines of documents we do not seem to have here. But it goes on and on: I have found forty lines of it so far. What could it be, if not a code?”

“Indeed. It sounds too absurd to be anyone’s language. But there are codes and codes,” Akbalik said. “This could all be nothing but some merchant’s way of hiding trade secrets from his competitors.” He glanced at another sheet. Zinucot takttamt ynifgogi nhogtua. What if that meant, Ten thousand troops setting out next week? He felt a sudden quiver of excitement. “Or, on the other hand, what we have here might well be some sort of communication between Dantirya Sambail and his allies.”

“Yes,” said the Vroon. “It might well be that. And codes are readily enough broken by those who are expert in that art.”

“Are you referring to yourself, perhaps?” Vroons, Akbalik knew, had many divinatory skills.

There came a writhing of tentacles in a gesture of negation. “Not I, sir. This is beyond me. But an associate of mine, a certain Givilan-Klostrin—”

“That’s a Su-Suheris name, isn’t it?”

“It is, yes. A man of unimpeachable honor, to whom such texts as these would be readily accessible.”

“He lives here in Stoien?”

“In Treymone, sir, the city of the tree-houses. That’s just a few days’ voyage up the coast from here, by way of—”

“I know where Treymone is, thank you.” Akbalik paused in thought a moment. In these months of working together he had developed a good deal of trust in this Odrian Kes-tivaunt, but involving some unknown Su-Suheris in such an explosive affair was another matter entirely. A little behind-the-scenes research would be in order first. The double-headed folk all seemed to know one another. He would ask Maundigand-Klimd for an opinion before bringing in Givilan-Klostrin.

Geenux taquidu eckibin oeciss. Emajiqk juqivu xhtkip ss.

Akbalik pressed the tips of his fingers to his aching temples. Did this mumbo jumbo, he wondered, conceal the secret plans of Dantirya Sambail? Or was it merely the private lingo of some shaggy Skandar merchant mariner?

Zudlikuk. Zygmir. Kasiski. Fustus.

Off to Castle Mount went a query to the magus Maundigand-Klimd. Back from the Castle, in due course, came Maundigand-Klimd’s reply. Givilan-Klostrin, he said, was well known to him: a person in whom prince Abrigant could have absolute faith. “I vouch for him,” said Maundigand-Klimd, “as though he were my brother.”

A sufficiently impressive recommendation, Akbalik decided. He sent for Odrian Kestivaunt. “Tell your Su-Suheris friend,” he said, “to get himself down to Stoien city right away.”

But the sight of the actual Givilan-Klostrin made Akbalik wonder about the merit of Maundigand-Klimd’s endorsement.

Maundigand-Klimd himself, for whom Akbalik had the highest respect, was a person of great dignity of bearing, indeed, of considerable personal grandeur, which was heightened by the monastic simplicity of his dress. Tastes in clothing at the Castle generally ran to the flamboyantly bright and bizarrely original, but Maundigand-Klimd mainly favored austere robes of black wool, or sometimes one of dark-green linen, with only a red sash to provide a bit of vivid color.

This Givilan-Klostrin, though, arrived at Akbalik’s office clad in a grotesque patchwork outfit of gold-embroidered brocade decked with squares of blazing silk in half a dozen clashing colors, and his two long-crowned heads were topped with a pair of towering five-pointed hats whose tips reached almost to the ceiling of the room. Half a dozen huge round staring eyes with great swirling brows were painted on each of the hats, three in front, three behind. Rigid up-jutting epaulets rose eight or ten inches from each of the oracle’s shoulders: they too were tipped with eyes, and narrow scarlet banners streamed downward from them.

The whole effect was probably intended to be awesome, but Akbalik found it absurdly comical. It was something that a mendicant fakir might wear, a wandering beggar who told fortunes in the marketplace for a couple of crowns. The Su-Suheris was horrifyingly cross-eyed, besides, the left eye of his right head peering over toward the right eye of the left head in a way that made Akbalik’s insides squirm.

I vouch for him as though he were my brother, Maundigand-Klimd had said. Akbalik shrugged. He would not have wanted a brother anything like Givilan-Klostrin; but, then, he was not a Su-Suheris.

“I am the house of Thungma,” Givilan-Klostrin declared portentously, and waited.

The Vroon had explained that part already. Thungma was the invisible spirit, the demon, the whatever-it-was, with whose consciousness Givilan-Klostrin made contact when he entered his divinatory trance. Givilan-Klostrin functioned as the “house” of the being during the time of his summoning.

The Su-Suheris, who stood with feet planted wide and arms folded across his chest, seemed to fill the room. He stared icily at Akbalik.

“The fee comes first,” Odrian Kestivaunt whispered. “This is extremely important.”

“Yes. I understand that. Tell me, Givilan-Klostrin: what will this consultation cost?” Akbalik asked, feeling almost seasick as he struggled to make eye contact somehow with the magus.

“Twenty royals,” the left head said immediately. His voice was deep and rumbling.

It was a preposterous amount. Most people worked all year for less. An hour’s visit with a dream-speaker would cost no more than a couple of crowns; this was a hundred times as much. Akbalik began to protest, but a quivering of tentacles from the Vroon, and a whispered, “Sir—sir—” caused him to subside. The magus’s fee, Odrian Kestivaunt had told him several times already, was an essential part of the process. Any attempt to bargain would ruin the entire enterprise.

Well, they weren’t his twenty royals. Akbalik took four gleaming five-royal pieces from his purse, the new ones showing Confalume in the Pontifex’s robes with Prestimion’s handsome profile on the reverse, and laid them on the desk. Givilan-Klostrin snatched them up smoothly and lifted them to his faces, pressing the coins against his outer cheekbones and holding them there a moment as though to satisfy himself that they were genuine.

“Where are the documents?” the magus asked.

Kestivaunt had prepared a page-long transcript of the coded lines he had found in the group of cargo manifests. Akbalik handed that to the Su-Suheris. He shook both of his heads at once, an effect that Akbalik found dizzying, and demanded the originals. Akbalik looked toward Kestivaunt, who went scurrying out, tentacles thrashing in agitation, and returned a few moments later with the papers. Givilan-Klostrin took them from him. Akbalik had to fight back laughter at the sight of the seven-foot-tall Su-Suheris solemnly reaching far down toward the tiny Vroon, who was barely eighteen inches high.

Givilan-Klostrin now opened a case he had brought with him and began to set his conjuring apparatus out on a bench. Akbalik felt some surprise at that, for he knew that Maundigand-Klimd performed his own divinations without the aid of a lot of gadgetry, and in fact had often expressed scorn for such devices. Perhaps this was all part of the show, he thought, a justification for that staggering twenty-royal fee. He watched as Givilan-Klostrin put out five cones of incense and lit them, instantly filling the room with clouds of cloyingly sweet smoke. Next the magus brought forth a little metal dome and tapped a projection at its tip, which caused it to emit a steady bell-like tone. A second such device placed beside the first produced the deep, low sound of far-off chanting; a third yielded an eerie, reverberant sound that might have been created by blowing into conical sea-shells.

Givilan-Klostrin handed a fourth such dome to Akbalik, and a fifth to the Vroon. “You will touch their triggers,” he said gravely, “at the appropriate moment. You will know when that moment has arrived.”

Akbalik was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. The sickening aroma of the incense, the hypnotic music of the bells and shells, the chanting—it was all rapidly getting to be too much for him.

But there was no turning back. The process, the very expensive process, was under way.

Givilan-Klostrin was holding Kestivaunt’s stack of cargo manifests clasped between the outspread fingers of his hands, one hand above, one below. All four of his eyes were closed. From both his throats came a strange, unsettling gargling sound, its doubled rhythms and eerie harmonies coordinated in a weird way with the distant chanting. He seemed almost to have fallen asleep. Then, gradually, his body began to sway and his legs started to quiver. He leaned a long way backward, inclining his heads so that they pointed toward the floor behind him, and stood straight again, and leaned once more, repeating the movement over and over.

Suddenly Odrian Kestivaunt, without having received any perceptible cue, tapped the jutting tip of the little metal dome he was holding. From it there came the sonorous blast of giant trumpets, a sound that expanded through the room with a force that seemed capable of bending the walls. To his own surprise Akbalik felt himself impelled then by some powerful inner force to touch the trigger of his own dome, and, when he did, it gave off a series of tremendous deafening cymbal-clashes. The hubbub all around them was astounding. He felt as though he had somehow been whisked off into the very midst of the thousand-instrument orchestra of the Ni-moya opera house.

Rivers of sweat flowed down Givilan-Klostrin’s faces. Akbalik had never seen a Su-Suheris perspire before: he hadn’t known they even were capable of it. The magus’s breath was coming in harsh huffing gasps. Blood had begun to ooze from his nose and mouth. He was clutching the documents, now, tightly against his chest.

As the sounds emanating from the five metal domes mounted in intensity, Givilan-Klostrin went reeling drunkenly around the room, flinging his heads back and lifting his knees almost to his chest with every lurching stride. Savage growling sounds came from him. He went crashing into tables and chairs without appearing to notice. When one sturdy chair in particular seemed to draw his anger—he had stumbled into it three times—he raised one foot and brought it crashing down with such astonishing force that the chair went flying into a host of splintered pieces. It was an extraordinary feat. Truly he was a man possessed, Akbalik thought.

The room now was utterly filled with the sounds of trumpets, bells, gongs. Givilan-Klostrin had come to a halt by the window, and stood there now, leaning forward, breathing heavily, his whole body shaking convulsively. He rocked from side to side, again and again lifting one foot and carefully putting it down, then lifting the other. His heads shot outward on their shared neck, moved rapidly inward until they seemed almost to strike each other, shot outward again. His cheeks were puffed; his tongues were outthrust; he made frightful blowing noises. Then he opened his eyes a moment. They were rolling wildly in their sockets.

One minute, two, three, five: it went on and on. The rhythm was building toward a tension that could only end in some awesome eruption. But would this terrifying seizure ever end?

Suddenly there was a startling silence in the room as all five metal spheres ceased their noisemaking at the same instant. Givilan-Klostrin seemed deep in trance.

His shaking and rocking and foot-lifting all had ceased. Now he stood statue-still, utterly frozen in place, the right head dangling limply as though its neck-stalk were broken and the left one staring unblinkingly forward at Akbalik. The stasis held for a minute or more. Then from the drooping right head there began to come a low moaning wordless sound, a kind of rumbling whine that wandered up and down over five or six octaves, gradually cohering into a series of unaccented syllabic phrases as unintelligible to Akbalik as the coded lines on the cargo manifest.

After a moment the upright left head began to speak as well: slowly declaiming a translation, apparently, of the oracular sounds coming from the other one, everything uttered clearly and precisely and understandably:

“The man whom you seek,” said the left head of Givilan-Klostrin, “is here in this very province. These are messages from his hidden camp in the southern part of the province of Stoien to his companions in another land. He has spent many months gathering an army in a far-off place; he will soon bring his forces together here; it is his desire to overthrow the king of the world.”

As he uttered the last of those words the Su-Suheris fell forward in exhaustion, collapsing with a tremendous crash almost at Akbalik’s feet. For a long moment he lay face down, trembling. Then he lifted each of his heads in turn and stared at Akbalik in a dazed, groggy way, as if uncertain of where he was or who the man might be that was standing before him.

“Is it over?” Akbalik asked.

The Su-Suheris nodded feebly.

“Good.” Akbalik made a brusque chopping gesture with one hand held sideways. “You will forget everything that was spoken here today.”

A look of bafflement appeared on both of Givilan-Klostrin’s icy-hued faces. In a weak voice the left head said, “Was anything spoken? By whom? I remember nothing, my lord. Nothing. The house of Thungma is empty.”

“This is true,” the Vroon murmured. “They carry no memories away from their trances. As I explained, they are vehicles, merely, for whatever the demon chooses to reveal.”

“I hope that’s really so,” Akbalik said. “Get him out of here as fast as you can.” He felt shaken and weak himself, as if it were he and not the Su-Suheris who had just been through the spasms and convulsions of that eerie seizure.

His head ached from the unrelenting sound of those gongs and trumpets. And the slow, precise, stunning words of the oracle reverberated ceaselessly in his mind: The man whom you seek is here. He has spent many months gathering an army in a far-off place. It is his desire to overthrow the king of the world.

The usual route from Castle Mount to the port of Alaisor on Alhanroel’s western coast was by river: downslope by floater by way of Khresm and Rennosk to Gimkandale, where the River Uivendak had its source, and then by riverboat down the Uivendak past the Slope Cities of Stipool and Furible and the foothills of the Mount via Estotilaup and Vilimong into the great central plain of the continent. The Uivendak, which after a thousand miles changed its name to the Clairn, and a thousand miles farther on became the Haksim, eventually was joined by the potent Iyann, which came flowing down out of the moist green country northwest of the Valmambra Desert and met the Haksim at a place known as Three Rivers, though no one knew why, since there were only two rivers there. From there to the coast the united rivers took the name of the Iyann.

That final stretch of the Iyann had once been famous for its sluggishness, and travelers heading westward on it had needed to resign themselves to an unhurried final leg of their journeys; but since the breaking of the Mavestoi Dam up-river from the joining with the Haksim the waters of the western Iyann were far more vigorous than they had been in previous centuries, and the riverboat that carried Prestimion and Varaile moved along toward Alaisor at a speed that Prestimion would have found more heartening if it did not constantly remind him of the infamous tragedy of the breaking of the dam.

Now they were just a few days’ journey from the coast, passing swiftly through warm, green, fertile agricultural lands whose inhabitants lined the shore, waving and cheering, shouting his name and sometimes Varaile’s also, as the Coronal’s ship went by. Prestimion and Varaile stood side by side at the rail, acknowledging the greeting with waves of their own.

Varaile seemed amazed by the strength and depth of the outpouring of affection that came from them. “Listen to it, Prestimion! Listen! You can practically feel their love for you!”

“For the office of the Coronal, you mean. It has nothing much to do with me in particular. They haven’t had time to learn anything more about me than that Lord Confalume picked me to succeed him, and therefore I must be all right.”

“There’s more to it than that, I think. It’s that there’s a new Coronal, after all those years of Confalume. Everybody loved and admired Lord Confalume, yes, but he’d been there so long that everyone had come to take him for granted, the way you would the sun or the moons. Now there’s a new man at the Castle, and they see him as the voice of youth, the hope of the future, someone fresh and full of vitality who’ll build on Lord Confalume’s achievements and lead Majipoor into a glorious new era.”

“Let’s hope they’re right,” said Prestimion.

They were silent for a time after that, looking out toward the west, where the golden-green sphere of the sun had begun to slip toward the horizon. The land was fiat, here, and the river very wide. Fewer people could be seen along the shore.

Then Varaile said, “Tell me something, Prestimion. Is it possible under the law for a Coronal’s son ever to become Coronal after him?”

The question astounded him. “What? What are you talking about, Varaile?” he said sharply, whirling about to face her with such a furious glare in his eyes that she backed away, looking a little frightened.

“Why, nothing! I was only wondering—”

“Well, don’t. It can never happen. Never has, never will! We have an appointive monarchy on Majipoor, not a hereditary one. I could show you historical records going back thousands of years to prove it.”

“You don’t need to do that. I believe you.” She still looked alarmed at the vehemence of his reaction. “But why do you seem so angry, Prestimion? I was simply asking a question.”

“A very strange one, I have to say.”

“Is it? I didn’t grow up at the Castle, you know. I’m not an expert on constitutional law. I do know that the new Coronal usually isn’t the son of the one before. But then I found myself wondering, well, what if—”

The question, Prestimion realized, had been entirely innocent. She had no way of knowing of Korsibar and his ill-fated revolt. He tried to calm himself. She had found him off his guard, that was all, seeming to probe into a sensitive, even a forbidden, area but in fact meaning nothing of the kind.

“Well,” she said, “if he can’t be Coronal—and not Prince of Muldemar either, I guess, because Abrigant’s bound to have children of his own some day and they’ll inherit that title—well, then, maybe he can be a prince of something else, I suppose.”

“He?” Prestimion was completely bewildered now.

“Oh, yes,” Varaile said, patting her stomach. “Definitely a he, Prestimion. I knew that weeks ago. But I had Maundigand-Klimd do a divination, all the same, and he confirmed it.”

He stared. Suddenly this all made sense.

“Varaile?”

“You look so amazed, Prestimion! As if it’s never happened before in the history of the world.”

“Not to me, it hasn’t. But that’s not the thing, Varaile. You told Maundigand-Klimd about it weeks ago, and not me? And told Septach Melayn too, I suppose, and Gialaurys, and Nilgir Sumanand, and your ladies-in-waiting, and the Skandar who sweeps the courtyard in front of—”

“Stop it, Prestimion! You mean you hadn’t figured it out?”

He shook his head. “It never occurred to me at all.”

“I think that you really ought to pay closer attention, then.”

“And you ought not to wait so long before telling me important news like this.”

“I waited until now,” she said, “because Maundigand-Klimd told me to. He cast my horoscope and said that it would be more auspicious for the child if I mentioned nothing about him to you until we were west of the ninetieth meridian. We are west of the ninetieth meridian, aren’t we, Prestimion? He said it was where the land flattened out and the river got very wide.”

“I’m not the captain of the ship, Varaile. I haven’t really been keeping track of the latitude.”

“I was speaking of longitude, I believe.”

“Latitude—longitude—what difference does it make?” Were they really past the ninetieth meridian yet? he wondered. Probably so. But either way what difference did it make, eightieth meridian, ninetieth, two hundredth? She should have told him long ago. But it seemed to be his destiny, he thought, to find himself entangled with some sort of wizardry at every turn. His head was throbbing with anger. “Sorcerers! Mages! They’re the ones who rule this world, not me! It’s outrageous, Varaile, completely outrageous, that this information has been circulating all over the Castle for weeks, and it’s been kept from me all this time simply because—because some magus happened to tell you—” He was practically sputtering with indignation. She was looking at him, wide-eyed with amazement. A smile crossed her face, and gave way to a giggle.

Then Prestimion began to laugh as well. He was being very foolish, he knew. “Oh, Varaile—Varaile—oh, I love you so much, Varaile!” He slipped his arms around her and drew her close against him. After a long while he released her, and smiled, and kissed the tip of her nose.—"And no, Varaile, no, he can’t possibly become Coronal after me, and don’t ever even think about such an idea. Is that understood?”

“I was just wondering, that’s all,” she said.

6

At any other time it would have been appropriate for Prestimion to spend at least a week at Alaisor. As Coronal, he certainly would have to be guest of honor at a banquet with Lord Mayor Hilgimuir in the famous Hall of Topaz and make the obligatory visit to the celebrated temple of the Lady on Alaisor Heights. And if he still had been only Prince of Muldemar, there would be a meeting with the great wine-shippers with whom his family had had commercial connections for so many generations; and so on.

But these were not ordinary times. He had to get quickly to the Isle. And so, although he would meet with the lord mayor, it would be only for an hour or two. He would skip the visit to the hilltop temple, since he would be seeing the Lady herself soon enough. As for the wine-merchants, they were irrelevant now that he was Coronal and no longer could be concerned with the family wine business. A single night in Alaisor was all that he could allow himself, and then they would be on their way.

The lord mayor had provided Prestimion and Varaile with the sumptuous four-level penthouse suite reserved exclusively for Powers of the Realm atop the thirty-story tower of the Alaisor Mercantile Exchange. All of Alaisor could be seen from its windows. Maundigand-Klimd and the rest of the Coronal’s entourage had been given lesser but still quite luxurious quarters nearby.

It was a city of high imperial grandeur, the greatest metropolitan center of the western coast. A line of massive towering cliffs of black granite ran parallel to the shore here. The Iyann had carved a deep canyon through that wall of black cliffs long ago in order to reach the sea; and Alaisor lay outspread like a giant fan at their base, spreading far along the shore to north and south, with the bay created by the Iyann’s mouth forming the city’s magnificent harbor. Grand boulevards ran on great diagonals through Alaisor city from its northern and southern extremities, converging in a circle at the waterfront. At that meeting-point stood six gigantic obelisks of black stone, marking the place where Stiamot, the conqueror of the Metamorphs, had been buried seven thousand years before. Prestimion pointed the monument out to Varaile from the balcony on the west side of the building, which gave them a view that overlooked the harbor.

The story was, he told her, that Stiamot, after becoming Pontifex, had decided in extreme old age to undertake a pilgrimage to Zimroel, to the Danipiur, the Metamorph high chieftain, for the sake of begging her forgiveness for the conquest. But his journey had ended here at Alaisor, where he fell ill and could not continue; and as he lay dying, looking outward toward the sea, he had asked to have his body laid to rest here instead of being carried thousands of miles eastward to the Labyrinth.

“And the temple of the Lady?” Varaile asked. “Where is that?”

They were on the uppermost floor of their suite. Prestimion led Varaile to the great curving eastern window, which faced the dark vertical wall of the cliffs. At this hour of the afternoon the westering sun bathed them in a bronzy-green sheen. “There,” he said. “Right below the rim—do you see?”

“Yes. Like a white eye staring at us out of the forehead of the hill. Have you ever been there, Prestimion?”

“Once. I visited Zimroel about a dozen years ago and spent a couple of weeks in Alaisor on the way, and Septach Melayn and I went up there. It’s a wonderful building, a slender curve of white marble one story high that seems to be hanging from the face of the cliff. You see the entire city laid out like its own map before you, and the sea beyond it, on and on halfway to the Isle.”

“It sounds marvelous. Couldn’t we go there just for a little while tomorrow?”

Prestimion smiled. “The Coronal can’t go anywhere ‘just for a little while.’ That building up there’s the second most sacred site on Majipoor. If I visited it at all, I’d have to stay overnight at the very least and meet with the Hierarch and her acolytes, and there’d be ceremonies and such, and all manner of other—well, you see how it is, Varaile. Whatever I do has heavy symbolic importance. And the ship to the Isle can’t wait: the winds are favorable to the west, and we need to leave tomorrow. Once the wind turns against you here, it can cause delays of many months, and I can’t risk that now. We can visit the temple the next time we’re in Alaisor.”

“And when will that be? The world is so big, Prestimion! Is there time for us ever to see the same place twice?”

“In four or five years,” he said, “when things are a little more settled in the world, it’ll be appropriate for me to make a grand processional, and we’ll go everywhere. I mean everywhere, Varaile. Even over to Zimroel: Piliplok, Ni-moya, Dulorn, Pidruid, Til-omon, Narabal. We’ll come through Alaisor again then, and we’ll stay longer. I promise you we will. Whatever we’ve missed on this trip we’ll see then.”

“ ‘We,’ you say. Does the Coronal’s wife go with him on the grand processional? Lord Confalume’s wife didn’t, when he came to Stee on his last processional.”

“Different Coronal. Different sort of wife. You’ll be at my side, Varaile, wherever I go.”

“That’s a firm promise?”

“A solemn vow. I swear it by Lord Stiamot’s whiskers. Here in the very shadow of his tomb.”

She leaned forward and kissed him lightly. “I guess it’s settled, then,” she said.

He had never been to the Isle of Sleep. Indeed in his days as a prince of the Castle it had never occurred to him to go there. One did not ordinarily go to the Isle unless one had some special need to undergo a rite of purification. It was not even customary for Coronals to visit it unless they were making a grand processional, and it was too soon in his reign for that.

But now the Isle was rising before him on the horizon like a wondrous white wall, and the sight of it set strange excitement churning within him.

“You will be surprised at how big it is,” everyone who had been there constantly said. And so, having been duly warned, Prestimion expected not to be surprised; but he was, all the same. An island, he had always thought, was a body of land that was completely surrounded by water, and islands were usually fairly small. The Isle of Sleep was a big island, everyone said, and he interpreted that to mean a very large body of land that was completely surrounded by water. But he still visualized it as something whose borders could be perceived as curving away on all sides to the ocean. In fact, though, the Isle was immense, so big that on any other world it would have been called a continent. Seen from out here in the sea, it certainly seemed to have a continent’s vast extent. It was only by comparison with Alhanroel, Zimroel, and Suvrael, the three officially designated continents of Majipoor, that anyone could have thought of giving the Isle any lesser designation.

One of the many wonderful stories that they told about the Isle was that in distant ancient times—millions of years ago, before there had been Shapeshifters, even, on Majipoor—it all had lain far below the surface of the sea, but had been thrust upward into the air in a single day and a single night by some awesome convulsion of the world’s interior. Which was why it was so sacred a place: the hand of the Divine had taken hold of it and brought it forth from the waters.

The undersea origin of the Isle could not be doubted. It was attested to by the fact that the entire place was a single enormous mass of chalk many hundreds of miles across and more than half a mile high, having the form of three giant circular tiers set one atop the next; and chalk is a substance made up of the shells of microscopic creatures of the sea.

Those great chalk ramparts gleamed now with overpowering whiteness in the bright blaze of the sun, filling all the sea before them like an impassable barrier. Varaile and Prestimion stood staring in wonder. “I think I can make out two of the three levels from here, and maybe just a hint of the third,” he said. “The big one that forms the base of the island is called First Cliff. There’s a forest along its rim, hundreds of feet above sea level. Do you see? And that must be Second Cliff that begins there, set back a goodly way from the one below. If you follow the white wall up and up, you’ll see a second line of green—that’s the boundary between Second Cliff and Third Cliff, I suppose. Third Cliff itself begins several hundred miles inland. You can’t really see it from below, except perhaps a suggestion of its summit. That’s where Inner Temple is: the place of the Lady.”

“It dazzles my eyes. I knew the Isle was made of white stone, but I never thought it would shine like that! Will we be going all the way to the top?”

“Probably. The Lady rarely descends to meet her son; it’s always the other way around. The custom is for her hierarchs to meet the Coronal at the harbor and take him first to the lodge they maintain for him there. He’s the representative of the world of action, you see, all noise and masculine bluster, and he needs to go through some transitional rituals before he can be admitted to his mother’s contemplative domain. Then they conduct him upward to her through the various terraces of the three cliffs. Eventually we’ll arrive at Inner Temple itself, up at the top, where my mother will receive us.”

So steeply did the Isle’s tremendous white rampart rise from the sea that there were only two harbors where ships could land, both of them difficult of access: Taleis on the Zimroel side, and Numinor here, facing Alhanroel. To these, at certain specified times of the year, came pilgrims from the mainland, some merely to retreat from the world for a year or two of meditation and ritual cleansing, others to join the Lady’s realm and spend the rest of their lives in her service.

The swift vessel that had carried Prestimion and Varaile across from Alaisor was too big to enter Numinor harbor. It had to anchor well out at sea, where its passengers were transferred to a waiting ferry whose pilot knew the secrets of the narrow channel, much beset by swift currents and treacherous reefs, through which the shore could be approached.

Three tall, slender elderly women of great dignity and gravity of bearing, clad identically in golden robes trimmed with red, were waiting at the pier when the ferry arrived. They were hierarchs of the Isle, lieutenants whom the Lady Therissa had sent to greet him. “We are instructed to conduct you first,” the senior one told them, “to the house called Seven Walls.”

Prestimion was expecting that. Seven Walls was the traditional guesthouse for newly arrived Coronals. It turned out to be a low, sturdy building of dark stone that stood atop the rampart of Numinor port, at the very edge of the sea. “But why is it called Seven Walls?” Varaile asked, as they were shown to their chambers within it. “It looks perfectly square to me.”

“No one knows,” Prestimion replied. “This place is as old as the Castle itself, and most of its history is lost in legend. They say that the Lady Thiin, Lord Stiamot’s mother, had it built for him when he came to the Isle to give thanks for his victory at the end of the Metamorph Wars. Supposedly seven Metamorph warriors were entombed in its foundations—warriors that Lady Thiin killed with her own hands while defending the Isle against an army of Shapeshifter invaders. But the building’s foundations have often been reconstructed and nobody’s ever found any Metamorph skeletons down there. Then there’s a notion that Lord Stiamot had a seven-sided chapel constructed in the courtyard while he was here, but there’s no trace of that, either. I’ve also heard it said that the name’s just our version of ancient Shapeshifter words meaning ‘the place where the fish scales are scraped off,’ because there was a Metamorph fishing village here in prehistoric times.”

“I like that one the best,” said Varaile.

“So do I.”

Certain rituals of purification were required of him before he could proceed higher on the Isle, and he spent several hours that evening performing them under the instruction of one of the hierarchs. He and Varaile slept that night in a splendid chamber overlooking the sea, amidst dark weavings of a style so antique that Prestimion found himself wondering whether Lord Stiamot himself had selected them. He imagined that the ghosts of all the kings of bygone years who had slept in this room would be crowding around him in the night, offering anecdotes of their reigns, or advice on how to deal with the problems of his own, but in fact he dropped almost instantly into the deepest of sleeps, and the dreams that came to him were peaceful ones. The Isle was a place of tranquility and harmony: all anxiety was banished here.

In the morning began the journey upward to the Lady. Varaile and Prestimion alone would go, not any of the others who had made the journey with them from the Castle. Permission to ascend to Third Cliff and the Inner Temple was not ordinarily granted to those who had not passed through the full rite of initiation.

The hierarchs led them to the terminal along the waterfront from which the floater-sleds in which they would make their ascent departed. Looking up at the glittering white wall of First Cliff, rising skyward virtually in a straight line, Prestimion was unable to see how it could be possible to traverse it. But the sled rose silently and easily, making the steep climb without effort, and nestled into its landing pad at the summit of the cliff like a great gihorna folding its wings. When they looked back, they could see Numinor port like a toy town below them, and the two curving arms of its stone breakwater jutting out into the sea like a pair of fragile sticks.

“We are at the Terrace of Assessment, where all novices come first. They are evaluated there, and their destinies are decided,” one of the hierarchs explained. “Beyond it, a short distance inland, is the Terrace of Inception, where those who will be allowed to continue to a higher level undergo their preliminary training. After a time—weeks, months, sometimes years—they go on to the Terrace of Mirrors, where they are brought into confrontation with their own selves, and make their preparations for what lies ahead.”

A floater-wagon was waiting to carry Prestimion and Varaile onward. Quickly they left the pink flagstone streets of the Terrace of Assessment behind and journeyed across a seemingly endless realm of cultivated fields to the Terrace of Inception, whose entrance was marked by pyramids of dark blue stone ten feet high. Here they saw some novices working at menial farming tasks, and others gathered in outdoor amphitheaters receiving holy instruction. There was no time to pause for a closer look, though, for the distances here were great, and Second Cliff’s formidable white bulk, standing large in the sky before them, still was very far away.

Indeed, the afternoon was beginning to wane before they reached the cliff’s base. They halted for the night at the third of First Cliff’s terraces, the Terrace of Mirrors, which lay right below the mighty facade of the new wall that reared up over them. At this terrace huge slabs of polished black stone were set edgewise into the ground all about, so that wherever you turned you saw your own image looking back at you, transformed and intensified by the mysterious light of this place. And in the early hours of morning it was upward for them once again, a second dizzying floater-sled climb to the rim of the next level.

There atop Second Cliff they could still see the sea, but it seemed very far away, and Numinor itself lay tucked out of sight, hidden from view just beyond the perimeter of the Isle. They could barely make out the pink rim of First Cliff’s outermost terrace. The Terrace of Mirrors, directly below them, seemed to be aglow with green flame wherever its monumental stone slabs were struck by the morning sun. “The outer terrace where we stand now,” a hierarch told them, “is known as the Terrace of Consecration. From here we will come to the Terrace of Flowers, the Terrace of Devotion, the Terrace of Surrender, and the Terrace of Ascent.” Prestimion felt a touch of awe as he contemplated the complexity and richness of the system by which the realm of the Lady was constructed. He had never suspected so elaborate a structure of preparation for the tasks that were carried out here.

But there was no time to linger and learn. The holiest sanctuary of all, Third Cliff, the abode of the Lady of the Isle, still had to be attained.

One more breathtaking vertical sled-ride and they were there. Prestimion was struck at once by the singular quality of the air up here, thousands of feet above the sea. It was cool and amazingly clear, so that every topographic detail of the Isle below them stood out as though magnified in a glass. The unfamiliar quality of everything—the light, the sky, the trees—so enthralled him that he paid no attention as the hierarchs called off the names of the terraces through which they were passing, until at last he heard one say, “And this is the Terrace of Adoration, the gateway to Inner Temple.”

It was a place of low, rambling buildings of whitewashed stone, set in gardens of surpassing beauty and serenity. The Lady, they were informed, awaited them; but first they must refresh themselves from their journey. Acolytes conducted them to a secluded lodge in a garden of venerable gnarled trees and arbors of serpentine vines laden with many-petaled blue flowers. A sunken tub lined with cunningly interwoven strips of smooth green and turquoise stone seemed irresistible. They bathed together, and Prestimion, smiling, ran his hand lightly over the swelling curve of Varaile’s abdomen. Afterward they dressed themselves in soft white robes that had been provided for them, and servitors brought them a meal of grilled fish and some delectable blue berries, which they washed down with chilled gray wine of a kind Prestimion was unable to identify; and then, only then, did one of the hierarchs who had accompanied them on their ascent tell them that they were summoned to the presence of the Lady. It was all very much like a dream. So solemn and majestic had the entire process been, and so beautiful, that Prestimion found it almost impossible to realize that what he was actually doing was paying a visit to his own mother.

But she was much more than just his mother, now. She was mother to all the world: mother-goddess, even.

They reached Inner Temple, where she was waiting for them, by crossing a slender arch of white stone that carried them over a pond of big-eyed golden fish into a green field where every blade of grass seemed to be of precisely the same height. At its far end was a low flat-roofed rotunda, its facade completely without ornamentation, that had been fashioned from the same translucent white stone as the bridge. Eight narrow wings, equidistantly placed, radiated from it like starbeams.

The hierarch gestured toward the rotunda. “Enter. Please.”

The simple room at the heart of the rotunda was octagonal in design, a white marble chamber without furnishings of any kind. In its center was a shallow pool, also eight-sided. The Lady Therissa stood beside it, smiling, holding out her hands in welcome.

“Prestimion. Varaile.”

She seemed, as ever, miraculously youthful, dark-haired and graceful and smooth of skin. Some said that all that was achieved through sorcery, but Prestimion knew that that was untrue. Not that the Lady Therissa had ever shown any disdain for the services of sorcerers: she had long had a magus or two in her employ at Muldemar House. But she kept them there to predict the fortunes of the grape harvest, not to cast spells that would guard her from the ravages of age. Even now she had a magical amulet about her wrist, a golden band inscribed in emerald shards with runes of some kind, but that too, Prestimion was certain, was there for some reason other than vanity’s sake. He was unshakably convinced that it was by her own inner radiance and not any kind of wizardry that his mother had preserved her beauty so far into her middle years.

But her ascent to the Ladyship had given her a new kind of lustre, an unfamiliar queenly aura that enhanced and deepened her great beauty. The silver circlet about her forehead that was the Lady of the Isle’s badge of office enshrined her in a wondrous glowing aura.

He had heard tales of that, how the silver circlet inevitably transformed its wearer, and thus it must have happened to the Lady Therissa. Plainly this was the role she had waited all her life to play. Her chief claim to distinction, once upon a time, had been that she was the wife of the Prince of Muldemar, and when that title passed to Prestimion she had been known for being the mother of the Prince of Muldemar; but now at last she had become someone of distinction in her own right, holder of the title of Lady of the Isle, one of the three Powers of the Realm. A position for which, Prestimion thought, she had quietly been preparing herself all the time that he had been heir-presumptive to Confalume’s throne, and which now provided her with the duties that she had been born to perform, for years not in any way knowing that she had been born for them, but born for them all the same.

She embraced Varaile first, a long warm enfolding of her in her arms, several times calling her “daughter,” and tenderly stroking her cheek. She had never had a daughter of her own, and Prestimion was the first of her sons to marry.

Varaile’s pregnancy seemed to be no surprise to her: she spoke of it at once, and referred to the child as “him,” as though there could be no doubt of that. Prestimion stood to one side a long while as the two women spoke.

Then at last she turned to him and embraced him also, but much more quickly, though at her touch he was able to feel the tingling power of her office, the force that marked her off from all other beings in the world. As she stepped back from him Prestimion saw that her demeanor was different now from what it had been with Varaile a moment before, her warm smile fading away, the expression of her eyes darkening. She was turning to the true business of the visit. “Prestimion, what has happened to the world? Do you know what I see, whenever I send my mind outward into it?”

He had been certain it was going to be this. “The madness, you mean?”

“The madness, yes. I find it everywhere. I encounter bewilderment and pain wherever I look. It is, of course, the task of the Lady and her acolytes to go up and down the world reaching out to those who are suffering and offering them the comfort of kind dreams, and we do what we can; but what’s going on now is beyond the scope of our abilities here. We work day and night to heal those who need us; but there are millions, Prestimion. Millions. And the number grows daily.”

“I know. I’ve seen it in one city after another as I travel. The chaos, the pain. Varaile’s own father has been taken by it. And—”

“But have you seen it, Prestimion? Have you? Not as I have, I think. Come with me.”

7

She turned and went from the room, beckoning him to follow her. Prestimion hesitated, frowning, and glanced at Varaile, not sure whether the invitation extended to her; but then he gestured to her to accompany him. The Lady Therissa could always send Varaile away if she was not meant to see whatever it was that the Lady Therissa meant to show him.

Already she was far down the hallway, moving past one and then a second of the spoke-like wings that spread outward from the core of the temple. Glancing in, Prestimion saw acolytes and perhaps hierarchs seated at long tables, heads bowed in what looked like meditation. Their eyes were closed. All wore silver circlets much like the Lady’s own around their foreheads. The mysteries of the Isle, he thought: they are casting their minds outward, searching for those in need, bringing dreams of healing to them. Was it sorcery or science by which their questing spirits roved the world? There was a difference between the two, he knew, although the means by which the Lady and her people went about their tasks here seemed every bit as magical to him as the spells and incantations of the mages.

She had gone into a small room brightly illuminated by natural light pouring through carved lacy tesselations in the marble ceiling. It appeared to be her private study. In it were a desk made of a single brilliantly polished slab of some colorful mottled stone, a low couch, a couple of small tables.

Three alabaster vases against the far wall held a lovely display of cut flowers, scarlet and purple and yellow and cobalt blue.

It did not seem to trouble her that Varaile had come to this room with him. But all her attention was turned toward Prestimion. From a shallow, elegantly inlaid wooden box on her desk she took a slender silver circlet similar to the one she wore and handed it to him.

“Put this on, Prestimion.”

He obeyed without questioning. He could barely feel that it was there, so finely made and slight was it.

“And now,” she said, setting two little wine-flasks on the table before him. She pushed one toward him. “This is no wine of our vineyard, but perhaps you’ll recognize the flavor. Drink it down all at once.”

Now he did question, at least with a puzzled glance. But she opened her own flask and drained it at a single draught, and after a moment he did the same with his. It was a dark wine, thick and pungent, and sweet with an aftertaste of spices. He had tasted something like it before, he knew, but where? And then Prestimion realized what it was: the wine that dream-speakers employed in consultations, so that the minds of those who came to them for help would be open to them. There was a drug in it that dissolved the barriers between one mind and another. It was years since he last had been for a speaking—he preferred to puzzle out his own dreams rather than have a stranger help him with their meaning—but he was sure that this was the wine.

“You know what this is?” she asked.

“Speaking-wine, yes. Shall we lie down now?”

“This is not a speaking, Prestimion. You will be awake for this, and you will see things you’ve never seen before. Frightening things, I’m afraid. Give me your hands.” He extended them toward her. “Ordinarily one must have months of training in the technique before one is permitted to do this,” she said. “The power of the vision is simply too great: it can burn out an unprepared mind in a moment. But you will not be traveling on your own. You’ll merely be accompanying me on my own voyage, the one I take every day across the world. You’ll see, through my eyes, the things I see on those voyages. And I will protect you from overflow effects.”

Gently she took his hands in hers. Then she laced her fingers between his and tightened her grasp with sudden and surprising force.

It was like being struck in the forehead by a hammer.

He could no longer focus his eyes. Everything was blurred. He lurched backward and thought he might fall, but she held him upright, seemingly without effort. The room churned and wheeled about him: Varaile, his mother, the desk, the flower vases, everything in motion, swinging dizzyingly in wild orbits around his head. His mind was swirling as it would have been if he had put away five flasks of wine in half an hour.

Then came calmness again, a blessed moment of balance and stability, and he felt himself rising wraithlike from the floor, passing easily through one of the carved lacework openings in the ceiling, drifting upward and upward into the sky like an untethered balloon. It reminded him of the drug-vision he had had long ago in the sorcerers’ city of Triggoin, when by the use of magical herbs and the uttering of powerful Names he had risen beyond the kingdom of the clouds and looked down on Majipoor from the edge of space.

But the effect was very different now.

That other time he had viewed the world from on high with the cool objectivity of a god. He had seen the whole giant planet as nothing more than a little ball turning slowly in the sky, a toy model of a world, with its three continents standing out as dark wedges no bigger than one of his fingernails, and he had carefully taken that little ball upon the palm of his hand and, gently, curiously, touched it with his finger, examining it with fascination and love, all the while standing outside it, at a distant remove from the lives of its people.

Now, though, he was at one and the same time far above the world and inextricably enmeshed in the inner reality of what lay below him. He looked down upon it from on high and yet was intimately linked to the broiling, turbulent energies of its billions of people.

He perceived himself soaring at infinite speed through some region of the upper air, and in the darkness below the myriad cities and towns and villages of Majipoor blazed like beacons, each distinct and easily identifiable: there was the immense Mount, with its Fifty Cities and its Six Rivers, there was the Castle clinging to the tip of that great rock and sprawling far down its sides, and there, limned in the same wondrous clarity, were Sisivondal and Sefarad and Sippulgar, Sintalmond, Kajith Kabulon, Pendiwane and Stoien and Alaisor, and all the rest of Alhanroel as well, and Zimroel’s cities just as clear, Ni-moya and Piliplok and Narabal and Dulorn and Khyntor and their many neighbors; and there was the Isle beneath him now, and Suvrael coming up to the south with cities he had not seen even in dreams, Tolaghai and Natu Gorvinu and Kheskh. He recognized each one now by sight, intuitively, as though they bore labels.

But also it seemed to him that he was traveling just above the rooftops of all these places, so close that he could touch the souls of their inhabitants the way he had touched the little turning ball of the world that time in Triggoin.

Potent psychic emanations were coming upward to him like heat out of a chimney, and what he felt was terrifying. No protective membrane separated him from the lives of the swarming billions of people who lived in those cities. Everything reached him in a mighty rush. He felt the outcries that told of pain and sorrow and utter despair; he felt the anguish of souls so isolated from their fellow beings that they might well have been encased in blocks of ice; he felt the bewildered throb of minds that moved in fifty directions at once and therefore could not move at all. He felt the stabbing agony of those who were struggling to make sense of their own thoughts and failed to comprehend. He felt the nightmare dread of those who looked into their minds to find their own pasts, and discovered only gaping canyons.

Over and over he experienced the terror that inner anarchy brings. He felt the desperate turbulence of the wounded spirit. He felt the horror of heart-blindness and the shame of heart-deadness. He felt the bleakness of irrevocable loss.

He felt chaos everywhere.

Chaos.

Chaos.

Chaos.

Madness.

Madness, yes, an irresistible river of it, spilling out across the land like some hideous tide of sewage set free. A great blight, an overwhelming unstoppable disaster, a juggernaut of calamitous pandemonium wheeling through the world, a scourge far greater in scope than anything he had imagined.

“Mother—” he gasped. “Mother!”

“Drink this,” Varaile said softly, and offered him a goblet. “Water, that’s all it is. Just water.”

His eyes fluttered open. He was, he saw, seated on the couch in his mother’s study, leaning back against the pillow. The white robe they had given him to wear was drenched with perspiration, and he was trembling. He gulped the water. It made him shiver. Varaile touched her hand lightly to his forehead: her fingers felt cold as ice against his feverish brow. He saw his mother across the room, standing with arms folded beside her desk, watching him calmly.

She said, “Don’t worry, Prestimion. The effects will pass in another moment or two.”

“I fainted, didn’t I?”

“You lost consciousness. You didn’t actually fall, though.”

“Here. Take this back,” he said, reaching for the silver circlet. But it was already gone from his forehead. He shuddered. “What a nightmare it was, mother!”

“Yes. A nightmare. I see these things every day. I have for months, now. So have the people of my staff. This is what the world has become, Prestimion.”

“All of it?”

She smiled. “Not all, no, not yet. Much is still healthy. What you felt was the pain of those who were most vulnerable to the plague, the first victims, the ones who had no way of defending themselves against the attack that came in the night. Their cries are the ones that rise to find me as I move through the night above them. What dreams can I send, do you think, that can heal such pain as that?”

He was silent. He had no answer to that. He had never, so it seemed to him then, felt such despair in his life: not even in the moment when Korsibar had seized the crown that he and everyone else had expected to go to him.

I have destroyed the world, he thought.

Looking toward Varaile, he said, “Do you have any idea of what I was experiencing when I was wearing that thing?”

“Some. It must have been very bad. The look on your face—that stunned, terrible expression—”

“Your father is one of the lucky ones,” he said. “He isn’t able to comprehend what’s happened to him. At least I hope he can’t.”

“You were looking right into people’s minds?”

“Not into individual ones, no. At least, it didn’t seem that way. It isn’t possible, I think, to see into individual minds. What you get is general impressions, broad waves of sensation, the aggregate of what must be hundreds of minds all at once.”

“Thousands,” the Lady said.

She was studying him very closely, he realized, from her place across the room. Her gaze was warm and compassionate and motherly, but it was a penetrating one, also, cutting deep into the interior of his soul.

After a while she said, very quietly, “Tell me what has occurred, Prestimion, that has brought this thing about.”

She knows, he thought.

There can be no doubt of that. She knows. Not the details, but the essence. That I am somehow responsible, that some action of mine is at the bottom of all this.

And she was waiting now to learn the rest of it. It was clear to him that he could hide it from her no longer. She wanted a confession from him; and he was willing, now—eager, even—to pour it all forth.

What about Varaile, though? He cast an uncertain glance toward her. Should he ask her to leave? Could he say what he had to say in front of her, and thus make her a party to his own immense crime? I am the one responsible, he would have to say, for what has happened to your father, Varaile. Did he dare tell her that?

Yes, he thought.

Yes, I do. She is my wife. I will have no secrets from her, king of the world though I be.

Slowly, carefully, Prestimion said, “It is all my doing, mother. I think you already know that, but I admit it all the same: I am the cause of the catastrophe, I alone. It was never my intention to make such a thing happen, but I did, and the guilt is entirely mine.”

He heard Varaile inhale sharply in astonishment and bewilderment. His mother, watching him as calmly and keenly as before, said nothing. She was waiting for the rest.

“I will explain it from the beginning,” he said.

The Lady, still silent, nodded.

Prestimion closed his eyes a moment, steadying himself. Begin at the beginning, yes. But where was the beginning?

The obliteration first, the reasons for it afterward, he thought. Yes.

He took a deep breath and plunged in. “The course of recent world events that you think you know is not the one that the world actually followed,” he said. “A vast deception has taken place. Great things have happened, things unprecedented in the history of the world, and no one knows of them. Thousands have died, and the reasons for their deaths have been concealed. The truth has been blotted out and we have all been living a lie, and only a handful of people are aware of the real story—Septach Melayn, Gialaurys, Abrigant, two or three others. None besides those. I offer it now to you; but you will see, I hope, that it must not go beyond you.”

He paused. Looked toward his mother, and then to Varaile. They still did not speak. Their expressions were unreadable, remote. They were waiting to hear what he had to say.

“You, mother: you had four sons, and one is dead, Taradath, who was so very clever, a poet, one who loved to play games with words. You think he died while swimming in one of the rivers of the north-country. Not so: he died by drowning, yes, but it was in the course of a terrible battle along the River Iyann, when the Mavestoi Dam broke. Does that startle you? It is the truth: that is how Taradath died. But you have believed a lie all this time, and I am responsible for that.”

Her only reaction was the merest flicker of the corner of her mouth. Her self-control astounded him. Varaile simply looked mystified.

“To continue: Lord Confalume had two children also. Twins, a son and a daughter. I see you look surprised at that. Yes, the children of Confalume are unknown today, and I am accountable also for that. The daughter’s name was Thismet: she was small, delicate, very beautiful, an extremely complex woman full of great ambition. She took after her mother Roxivail, I think. As for the son, he was strong and handsome, a tall, dark-haired man of lordly bearing, an athlete, a skilled hunter. Not particularly intelligent, I must say. A simple soul, but good-hearted, in his fashion. His name was Korsibar.”

From Varaile came a little cry of surprise as he spoke that name. Prestimion was puzzled by her reaction; but he chose not to interrupt the flow of his story to ask for an explanation. The Lady Therissa seemed far away, lost in thought.

“The Pontifex Prankipin grew ill,” Prestimion said. “Lord Confalume, contemplating the imminent change of Powers, fastened upon me as the one to follow him as Coronal. He said nothing publicly about that, of course, while Prankipin still lived. We gathered at the Labyrinth, all the lords and princes of the realm, to await the Pontifex’s death. And in that time of waiting certain villainous folk came to Prince Korsibar and whispered in his ear: ‘You are the Coronal’s son, and you are a great princely man. Why should little Prestimion be Coronal when your father becomes Pontifex? Take the throne for yourself, Korsibar! Take it! Take it!’ Two scoundrelly brothers, Farholt and Farquanor, were among those who urged him most strongly in that: they are forgotten now too, and good riddance. Another conspirator was a Su-Suheris magus, chilly and evil. And there was also the Lady Thismet, the most powerful influence of all. They pushed, and Korsibar was too weak and simple to resist. He had never imagined himself as Coronal. But now they made him think that the throne was his due. The old Pontifex died; and we gathered in the Court of Thrones for the passing of the crown, and Korsibar’s magus cast a spell to cloud our minds, and when we were ourselves again we saw Korsibar sitting beside his father on the double throne, and the star-burst crown was on Korsibar’s head and Confalume, who had had a spell of acquiescence placed upon him, took no steps to halt his son’s seizure of power.”

“This is not easy to believe,” said the Lady Therissa.

“Believe it, mother. Oh, I urge you, believe it. It happened.”

Speaking rapidly now, Prestimion sketched an account of the civil war for them. Korsibar’s proclamation of power and his own refusal to accept the takeover. The new Coronal’s naive invitation to Prestimion to take a seat on the Council, which was also refused, and with such anger and contempt that Korsibar had had him arrested and chained up in the Sangamor tunnels. His release from the tunnels through a compromise engineered by the tricky Dantirya Sambail, who hoped to play Korsibar and Prestimion off against each other to his own advantage; his raising of an army to challenge the illegal ascent of Korsibar to the throne; the first battle, outside the foothill city of Arkilon, which ended in a defeat for Prestimion’s rebel forces at the hands of Korsibar’s general Navigorn; the retreat into central Alhanroel, and a great victory for Prestimion over Navigorn at the Jhelum River; other battles, victories and defeats, his long march northwestward across Alhanroel with the armies of Korsibar in steady pursuit. And then the great disaster in the valley of the Iyann, when Dantirya Sam-bail, who now had allied himself with Korsibar, persuaded the usurper to blow up the Mavestoi Dam and bring the entire reservoir down on Prestimion’s forces.

“That was when Taradath died, mother, and many another loyal comrade with him, and all the valley was flooded. I was swept away by the waters myself, but managed somehow to swim to safety, and made my way northward into the Valmambra Desert, alone, and nearly died. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys found me there, and Duke Svor, whom you may remember; and the four of us went on to Triggoin, where we spent some months in hiding among the sorcerers, and I learned a few of their skills.” Prestimion smiled an oblique smile. “My tutor was Gominik Halvor. That was the beginning of my alliance with him and with his son Heszmon Gorse.”

Again Prestimion paused. His mother looked very pale. She was plainly much shaken by all this, and struggling hard to encompass it with her mind. Varaile did not even appear to be trying. Most of these names and places were unfamiliar to her; the tale was incomprehensible; she seemed utterly lost.

He moved on now to the climax of his story. He told of how in Triggoin he had come close to despair, but had undertaken a visionary quest in which he had seen that it was his destiny to overthrow Korsibar and heal the world. He described his coming-forth from Triggoin, his gathering of a new army at Gloyn in west-central Alhanroel, his march eastward toward Castle Mount, culminating in the great final battle against Korsibar and his forces at Thegomar Edge.

Prestimion said nothing of Thismet’s decision to change sides; nor of her coming before him in his camp at Gloyn and offering herself to him as his wife—and his consort, once he had attained the throne. He had sworn to have no secrets from Varaile; but here, now, as the episode of his love for Thismet and hers for him reached its proper place in the narrative, he could not bring himself to tell of it. What purpose would be served? It was something that had happened and then had been unhappened, and it had no bearing now on anything pertaining to the present condition of the world: a purely private interlude, buried now in unhistory. Let it remain there, Prestimion thought. The only thing that was important just now was to render an unvarnished account of the events at Thegomar Edge.

“They had the high position,” Prestimion said. “We were down below, in a marshy place called Beldak. At first the battle went against us; but as we retreated, Korsibar’s infantry foolishly came down the hill to give us chase, and once they broke their formation, we were able to bring reinforcements in from the side and catch them between two fronts. The tide turned in our favor. It was then that I deployed the mages who were my ultimate weapon.”

“Mages, Prestimion?” said the Lady Therissa. “You?”

“The fate of the world was at stake, mother. I was resolved to use any force I could to bring Korsibar’s reign to an end. Gominik Halvor and his son came forth, and a dozen more of the high wizards of Triggoin with them, and they cast a spell that turned bright noon into moonless night, and in the darkness we destroyed the usurper’s army. Korsibar was killed by his own magus, the Su-Suheris Sanibak-Thastimoon. The magus slew the Lady Thismet also, and then lost his life to Septach Melayn. Dantirya Sambail, who had fought against us that day, found me in the confusion and offered to fight me for the throne; but I defeated him and had him put under arrest. Then Navigorn came to me to surrender, and the war was over. The good Earl Kamba, who taught me the art of the bow, died that day, and Kanteverel of Bailemoona, and my dear little sly Duke Svor, and many another great lord, but the war was over, and I was Coronal at last.”

He looked toward his mother. The full impact of the story had reached her now. She was stunned into silence.

Then she said, gathering herself a little, “This truly happened, Prestimion? It seems more like some fantastic tale out of some ancient epic poem. The Book of Changes, it could be.”

“This truly happened,” he said. “All of it.”

“If that is so, then why is it that we know nothing of it?”

“Because,” he said, “I stole it from your minds.” And told them then the last of the story: how he stood amidst the dead at Thegomar Edge feeling no joy for his victory, but only grief at the sundering of the world, the irreparable division into two irreconcilable factions. For how could those who had fought for Korsibar, and seen their comrades die for him, accept the rule of Prestimion now? And how could he forgive those who had turned against him, often treacherously, as Prince Serithorn had, and Duke Oljebbin, and Admiral Gonivaul, and Dantirya Sambail, after pledging their support? What, also, of the surviving kin of those who had perished in those bloody battles? Would they not hold grudges against the victorious faction forever? “The war,” Prestimion said, “had left a scar upon the world. No, worse: a wound that could never heal. But suddenly I saw a way of repairing the irreparable, of healing the unhealable.”

And so the summoning one last time of Gominik Halvor and his fellow mages, and the giving of the order for the tremendous incantation that would wipe the war from the world’s history. Korsibar, and his sister also, would never have been; those who had died as a result of Korsibar’s usurpation would be shown to have died in some way other than on the field of battle; no one would remember that there ever had been a war, not even the sorcerers who had brought about its obliteration from memory—no one but Prestimion himself, and Gialaurys, and Septach Melayn. And Lord Prestimion would have succeeded to the starburst crown immediately upon the end of Prankipin’s reign, with no Lord Korsibar intervening.

“There you have it all,” Prestimion said. He was trembling again, and his brow was hot as if with fever. “I thought I was healing the world. Instead I was destroying it. I opened the gateway for this madness that consumes it now, the full dimensions of which have only become apparent to me today.”

Varaile said, speaking for the first time in a long while, “You? But—how, Prestimion? How?”

“Do you know how it is, Varaile, when the hot sun beats down and warms the air, so that it rises, as warm air will, and creates a vacant zone behind it? Turbulent cool winds come rushing in to fill that void. Well, I created such a void in the minds of billions of people. I lifted a great slice of reality from their recollection and gave them nothing to replace it. And, sooner or later, turbulent winds came rushing in. Not to everyone, no, but to many. And the process is not done working yet.”

“My father—” she said softly.

“Your father, yes. And all too many others. The guilt for all that is mine. I meant only to heal, but—but—”

He faltered and could not go on.

The Lady said, after a time, “Come here, Prestimion.” She held forth her hands.

He went to her and knelt, and laid his cheek against her thigh and closed his eyes, and she held him and stroked his forehead, as she had years ago when he was a small boy and some cherished pet of his had died, or he had done badly at his archery, or his father had spoken too harshly to him. She had always been able to soothe him then and she soothed him now, taking his anguish from him not only as a mother does, but also with the power invested in her as Lady of the Isle, the power to absolve, the power to forgive.

“Mother, I had no choice but to act as I did,” he said, his voice muffled and thick. “The war had left great resentments. They would have stained my reign forever and ever.”

“I know. I know.”

“And yet—look what I’ve done, mother—”

“Shh. Shh.” She held him closer. Stroked his brow. He felt the force of her love, the strength of her soul. He began to grow calm. She gently signaled him, after a little while more, to rise. She was smiling.

Varaile said, “You told us at the outset that this has to remain a secret. But do you still feel that way? I wonder if you should let the world know the truth, Prestimion.”

“No. Never. It would only make things worse.” He was steadier now, purged by his confession, the trembling and the feverishness gone from him now, his head beginning to clear, though the impact of the vision he had had while wearing the Lady’s circlet would not leave him. He doubted that he would ever be free of it. But what Varaile was suggesting seemed impossible to him. “Not because it would make me look bad,” he said, “although it certainly would. But pile one confusion atop another—take away what little sense anyone may still have of where reality really may lie—I can’t, Varaile! You see that, don’t you? Don’t you, mother?”

“Are you certain?” Varaile asked. “Perhaps, if you spoke out about it at last, your doing it would drive away the nightmares and the fantasies and would establish everyone on solid ground once more. Or else, calling the mages down again, getting them to cast a second spell—”

He shook his head and looked in appeal toward the Lady.

Who responded, “Prestimion’s right, Varaile. There’s no undoing it now, neither by any public action of the Coronal nor by more wizardry. We’ve already seen the kind of unintended consequences that an entirely benevolent act has had. We can’t risk having that happen again.”

“Even so, mother, now we have to deal with those consequences,” said Prestimion. “Only—how, I wonder? How?”

8

They remained for a time at the Isle, and Prestimion made no immediate plan for leaving. The winds were still westerly out of Alhanroel, so that the return voyage would be slow and difficult if he were to set out now.

But also he felt weary and drained by his steadily increasing comprehension of the catastrophe he had caused and the likelihood that there would be no way of repairing the damage. The stain of that, he feared, would darken his name for all time to come.

It had gradually dawned on him, years ago, that it might be possible for him to become Coronal, and that he would be capable of handling the job if he did; and he had then begun to yearn for it with all his heart. And—despite the small interruption created by Korsibar—he had indeed attained the starburst crown, even as Stiamot and Damlang and Pinitor and Vildivar and Guadeloom and all the rest of those whose names were inscribed on the great screen in front of the House of Records in the Labyrinth had done before him. They had ascended to the throne and reigned, more or less gloriously, and each had made his mark on the world’s history and had left visible evidence of his moment of power by adding something tangible to the Castle: the Stiamot throne-room, Vildivar Close, the Arioc watch-tower, whatever; and then they had gone on to be Pontifex for a while, and in the fullness of time they had grown old and died. But had any of them ever brought about a disaster such as he had achieved? His place in history would be unique. He had wanted the reign of Lord Prestimion to go down in history as a golden age; and yet he had contrived to lose his throne before he ever had had it, and had fought a war for it that caused the deaths of uncountable and unthinkable numbers of fine men, along with a few worthless ones—and then, then, when the crown was finally his, he had in a moment of folly done a thing to heal the world of its wound that had made matters infinitely worse than they already were. Oh, Stiamot! he thought. Oh, Pinitor! What a pitiful successor I am to your greatness!

Prestimion drew great comfort in these dark hours from the proximity of the Lady. And so he told her that he had decided to stay at the Isle a little while longer, and a suite of rooms was provided for him and Varaile at Inner Temple.

Ten days passed quietly. Then news reached Third Cliff of the arrival at Numinor of a pilgrim-ship from Stoien. There was nothing unusual in that, in this season of westerly winds. But soon after came a second message from the harbor. An important dispatch for the Coronal had been carried from Stoien aboard that ship, and a courier was hastening up to Inner Temple with it now.

“It’s from Akbalik,” Prestimion said, as he severed the thick waxen security-seal. “He’s been in Stoien all year, you know, running a data-gathering operation, trying to turn up some sort of definite information on the location of Dantirya Sambail. Why would he bother to write to me here, I wonder, unless he’s—oh, Varaile! For the love of the Divine, Varaile—”

“What is it, Prestimion? Tell me!”

He jabbed his finger against the page. “The Procurator’s alive, Akbalik says. And still in Alhanroel. He’s been hiding out all this time somewhere along the southern shore of Stoien province, skulking among the saw-palms and the swamp-crabs and the animal-plants. Making that his base, it seems, for a new civil war!”

Varaile was instantly aflutter with questions. Prestimion raised his hand for silence. “Let me finish reading,” he told her. “Mmm. Coded dispatches intercepted.... A Su-Suheris magus going into some sort of a trance to decipher them.... Full text attached herewith....” He rummaged through the sheaf of papers that Akbalik had sent.

He found it impossible, of course, to make any meaning out of the coded messages themselves, which apparently had been surreptitiously slipped into otherwise innocent cargo manifests. Emijiquk gybpij jassnin ys.? Kesixm ricthip jumlee ayviy? It would take a Su-Suheris with three heads, Prestimion thought, to find any sense in that. But Akbalik evidently had picked the right man for the job; for after his wizard had declared that the secret camp of Dantirya Sam-bail was located along the lower Stoien coast, Akbalik had sent agents to comb that entire region, and they had indeed come upon the Procurator’s camp in the very place where the decoded messages indicated it to be.

“But why do you think it’s gone unnoticed so long?” Varaile asked.

“Do you know what the southern Stoien coast is like? No, why should you? No one in his right mind goes there. No one ever thinks about it. Which is why he has chosen it for his hiding-place, I suppose. They say it’s hot as a steam-bath there. Your very bones will melt in that heat within an hour. There is a tree there, the manganoza, with sharp-bladed leaves—the saw-palm, they call it—that forms thickets so dense they’re impossible to enter. And then, giant insects wherever you walk, and enormous crabs that can snap an unwary man’s ankle in half with one bite. Was there ever a more appropriate place for Dantirya Sambail to take up lodgings?”

“You must hate that man very much,” Varaile said.

Prestimion was surprised by that. Hate? He didn’t think of himself as a hater. The word wasn’t an active part of his vocabulary.

Was there anyone, he wondered, whom he had ever hated? Korsibar, perhaps? No, certainly not him. He could make allowances for Korsibar. Korsibar’s astonishing grab for power had angered him greatly, yes, but nevertheless Prestimion had never seen him as anything but a big stupid good-natured blockhead of a prince who had been thrust into a situation far beyond his depth by a pack of sinister self-seeking companions.

And Farquanor and Farholt, then, Korsibar’s vile henchmen, whom the world was so much better off without? Had he hated them? he wondered.

Not really. Farquanor had been a nasty little schemer, and Farholt a great swaggering bully. Prestimion had disliked them very much. But hatred was not what he had felt for them. He doubted even that he had hated Sanibak-Thastimoon, whose dark conjurations had made so much trouble for the world, and who, in fact, was the one who had taken Thismet’s life. But there had been a sword in Thismet’s hand when she died. Would Sanibak-Thastimoon have killed her if she had not attacked him?

That hardly mattered now. But one did not hate people for being stupid, as Korsibar had been, or sly like Farquanor, or a blustering fool like Farholt. And Sanibak-Thastimoon had believed he was serving his master Korsibar’s best interests: should he have hated the Su-Suheris for that? One did not hate people at all, ideally: one simply disagreed with them, and prevented them from doing harm to you and yours, and went on about one’s business.

What about Dantirya Sambail, though, the real author of so many of the world’s misfortunes? Did the word apply to him?

“Yes,” Prestimion said. “That one I do hate. He’s evil through and through, that man. You can see it just by looking at him: those amazingly beautiful deceitful eyes, softly glowing at you out of that fat ugly face. He should never have been born. In a moment of idiotic foolishness I spared his life at Thegomar Edge, and in another I allowed his blotted-out memory of the war he waged against me to be restored; but I would gladly call both those decisions back, now, if only I could.”

He paced back and forth in mounting agitation. Merely thinking about the Procurator set him into a furious frenzy.

The treacheries of Dantirya Sambail had provided fresh support again and again for the Korsibar faction, when otherwise the usurper might have fallen through his own ineptitude. At every turn in the civil war, there Dantirya Sambail had been, devilishly engineering some new betrayal or defection. It was the Procurator who had sent his own two loathsome brothers, the drunken Gaviad and the great ugly Gaviundar, to lead armies on Prestimion’s side, covertly instructing them to transfer their allegiance at a critical moment. It was Dantirya Sambail who had incited Korsibar to the breaking of the Mavestoi Dam. It was he who—

“The man is a monster,” Prestimion said. “I might be able to understand it if he had rebelled out of simple greed, out of the crude and blatant hunger for power. But he already rules a whole continent; he has wealth beyond anyone’s comprehension. Nothing drives him except motiveless hatred, Varaile. He seethes without reason with an inner venom that poisons his every act. And he forces us to meet hatred with hatred. It’s hardly even two years since we’ve emerged from the civil war, and we still suffer the aftereffects of that; and here he is making ready for a second one! What else can one feel but hatred for such a man as that? I will destroy him, that I vow, Varaile, if ever I get the chance again.”

He was shaking with the force of his anger. Varaile poured wine for him, sweet golden wine of Dulorn, and pressed her fingertips against his temples until he grew more calm.

“You’ll be going to this Stoien place, then, won’t you, to make war on him?” she asked.

Prestimion nodded. “Akbalik’s sent a copy of these dispatches to Septach Melayn at the Castle by now. I don’t doubt that he and Gialaurys are already assembling an army to march down into the south-country. In any case I’ll have orders to that effect going off to them this very day.”

Already the strategy was taking form in his mind.

“One army coming in from the northwest by way of Stoien city, going down on a diagonal across the peninsula, and a second one south through Ketheron and Arvyanda and Kajith Kabulon to the Aruachosian coast, the route we took last year, and then westward from Sippulgar into Stoien province—yes. Yes. Hem him in from two sides at once. And then—”

There was a knock at the door. “Shall I answer?” Varaile said.

“Who would that be? Well, yes, answer it.—Meanwhile,” Prestimion continued, “I’ll sail for Stoien city as fast as I can and rendezvous with Akbalik there, and join the troops who’ll be setting out for—yes?” he said.

Varaile had gone to the door. An acolyte stood there, holding a message.

“What is it?”

Later word from Akbalik, perhaps? Prestimion broke the seal and scanned it quickly.

“Anything important?” Varaile asked.

“I’m not sure. Your young friend Dekkeret’s here. He’s made some kind of helter-skelter journey from the Castle to Alaisor and come racing across from Alaisor to the Isle aboard one of the express-mail ships. He’s asked special dispensation to come to you up here, and the Lady has granted it. Right now he’s on his way up Second Cliff. They expect him here later today.”

“Were you expecting him?”

“Not at all. I don’t have any idea at all why he’s come, Varaile. He says here that he has to meet with me immediately, but he doesn’t tell me why. Why is it that I doubt that the news he’s traveled halfway around the world at top speed to bring me is going to be anything cheerful?”

Dekkeret’s face, so earnest and boyish not so long ago, had hardened now. His whole demeanor was more reserved and poised. Since Prestimion’s first encounter with him at Normork, Dekkeret had traveled endlessly across the face of the world; and now, though he looked more than a little the worse for wear after the furious haste of his latest journey, he radiated an aura of strength and purpose as he entered into Prestimion’s presence and offered him the salute of allegiance.

“I bear greetings from the High Counsellor Septach Melayn and from the Grand Admiral Gialaurys, my lord,” was how he began. “They ask me to tell you that they have received certain information from Akbalik at Stoien city concerning Dantirya Sambail, and that they’ve begun to make preparations for military action while awaiting your explicit instructions.”

“Good. I’d have expected nothing less.”

“You yourself are aware, then, sir, of the Procurator’s location?”

“The news from Akbalik reached me only this morning. I’m preparing orders to send to the Castle.”

“There has been a new development, lordship. The Barjazids have escaped, and are on their way to the Stoienzar to offer their services to Dantirya Sambail. They have the mind-controlling device with them.”

“What? But they were prisoners in the tunnels! Is that place such a sieve, that anyone can walk out of it at the snap of a finger? Anyone but me, it would seem,” Prestimion added under his breath, remembering his own bitter time of captivity there.

“They had been released from the tunnels some time ago, sir. They were living as free men in the north wing of the Castle.”

“How could that have been possible?”

“Well, sir, apparently it happened like this—”

Prestimion listened in mounting disbelief and dismay as Dekkeret told him the tale.

That shifty-eyed little man Venghenar Barjazid, in the days before the civil war, had lived at the Castle in the retinue of Duke Svor. During his imprisonment in the Sangamor he had somehow made contact, so it seemed, with another former follower of the late duke, who had drawn up fraudulent papers ordering the release of Barjazid and his son from the tunnels and their transfer to modest accommodations in one of the residential sectors of the Castle.

No one, it seemed, had questioned the appropriateness of such a transfer. The Barjazids had walked out of the tunnels without any difficulty whatever. For a month or more they lived quietly in their new quarters, attracting no attention to themselves. Until, that is, it was discovered one morning that they had managed not only to arrange an escape for themselves—complete with a fine floater to take them wherever they wished—but also to take with them the entire set of mind-control devices and models that the elder Barjazid had acquired from the Vroonish wizard, Thalnap Zelifor, in the course of escorting the Vroon into exile in Suvrael.

Prestimion passed a hand across his face and muttered dark curses. “And they’ve gone to join Dantirya Sambail, have they? How does anyone know that? They left a little explanatory note behind in their room, did they?”

“No, sir. Of course not, sir.” Dekkeret forced a bleak little grin. “But an inquiry was held following their disappearance, and their confederate’s identity was uncovered, and his lordship Prince Navigorn placed the man under close interrogation. Very close, my lord. Prince Navigorn has been extremely distressed by this entire incident.”

“I can imagine he would be,” said Prestimion drily.

“What was learned from the interrogation, my lord, is that the confederate—Morteil Dikaan was his name, sir—”

“Was?”

“Unfortunately he did not survive the interrogation,” Dekkeret said.

“Ah.”

“The confederate, lordship, had obtained possession of one of the mind-control devices from the storeroom where they had been placed. He brought it to Barjazid in the Sangamor tunnels. And Barjazid used it to make everyone who examined his papers of release accept them as genuine. In the same way he was able to order one of the Castle floaters to be put at his disposal when he was ready to begin his journey south.”

“This device of his,” said Prestimion in a tone of funereal somberness, “has an absolutely irresistible force, then? It makes someone who wears it capable of compelling anyone in his path to do his bidding?”

“Not exactly, my lord. But it is extremely powerful. I’ve felt its power myself, sir—in Suvrael, in the place that is known as the Desert of Stolen Dreams. Which was given that name because Barjazid lurked there, entering the minds of wayfarers and altering their mental perceptions so that they were no longer able to tell true from false, illusion from reality: I explained all this to the lady Varaile, my lord. I told her of my own experience with the device’s effects while traveling with Barjazid down there, and explained the potential dangers of it.”

Varaile said, “Yes, he did, Prestimion. You may recall, I tried to tell you the story, the day you came back from the festival at Muldemar—but you were so busy, of course, with the plans for the trip to the Isle—”

Prestimion winced. It was true. He hadn’t even taken the trouble to question Dekkeret himself about what had befallen him in Suvrael. He had brushed the whole thing aside very quickly, filing Dekkeret’s tale for future reference and never giving it a moment’s thought again.

A machine that controls minds! And Barjazid on his way to turn it over to Dantirya Sambail.

It was another terrible blunder in a reign that was beginning to seem pockmarked with them. A Coronal, he thought, must never allow himself even to sleep, for fear that disaster will envelop the world if he closes his eyes for the merest moment. How, Prestimion wondered, had Confalume succeeded in keeping everything on an even keel for better than forty years? But of course Confalume hadn’t had a civil war and its aftermath to deal with, and Dantirya Sambail, may demons blast his soul, had elected to wait until the end of Confalume’s reign before beginning to make trouble.

He looked toward Dekkeret. The boy was staring at him with respect verging on adoration. Dekkeret had no clue, it seemed, that the Coronal’s mind was boiling with uneasiness and bitter self-accusation.

“Describe for me in detail,” Prestimion said, “the sort of things that Barjazid’s machine was able to do to your mind.”

Dekkeret gave Varaile an uncertain look. She responded with a firm nod.

To Prestimion he said, after a moment’s further hesitation, “At first it was just a nightmare. I thought I was being summoned to the Lady, and that was a glorious thing; but as I ran toward her she disappeared and I was left looking down into the crater of a burned-out volcano. It’s never possible for one person to feel the real force of someone else’s dream, is it, my lord? You must experience it from within. I can describe it to you as a bad nightmare, very bad, and you may think you understand, remembering certain bad dreams of your own. But no one else can ever understand how terrifying another person’s dream actually was. Still, I tell you, sir, this was the worst imaginable experience. I felt invaded—drained—violated. Barjazid knew what had happened. He tried to question me, afterward, to get details of my dream from me. He was carrying out experiments on people’s minds, you see: testing his equipment, sir.”

“That was it, then? He sent you a nasty dream?”

“If only that were all, my lord. But a nasty dream was only the beginning. I dreamed again the next time I slept. There was this woman I met in Tolaghai, someone in the Pontifical service. She came to me in my dream; we were both naked; she was leading me through a lovely garden. I should say that in Tolaghai this woman and I were lovers for a little while. So I followed her gladly enough; but once again everything changed, and the garden became a frightful desert with ghostly figures lurking in it, and I thought I would die there of the heat and the ants that had begun to sting me. So I woke up and found that Barjazid had caused me to walk in my sleep and I was lost in the desert at the worst time of the day, naked, far from camp, without any water, sunburned and swollen from the heat. A Vroon who was traveling with us found me and rescued me, or else I would have died. I am no sleepwalker, sir. Barjazid made it happen. He gave me the command to get up in my sleep and walk, and I got up. I walked.”

Prestimion, frowning deeply, nibbling at his lower lip, gestured without a word for Dekkeret to go on. There was more, he knew. He was certain of it.

Yes. “Then, my lord, the third dream. In the Khyntor Marches, that time when I was hunting steetmoy with Prince Akbalik, I committed an atrocious sin. We had guides with us, March-men, and my guide was struck down by the steetmoy I was hunting, but I was so obsessed with the hunt that I left her lying where she fell and ran off after the animal I was chasing. And when I came back to her much later I discovered that she had been killed and partly eaten by some scavenger-beast.”

“So that was it,” Prestimion said.

“That was what, sir?”

“The thing you did. The reason you went to Suvrael. Akbalik sent word that you had done something in Khyntor that you felt great shame about, and had gone off to Suvrael hoping that somehow you would suffer enough there to make atonement.”

Dekkeret’s face was bright red. “I would rather not have spoken of this. But you asked me to tell you what Barjazid’s machine did to my mind. With its help he went into it, my lord, and found the tale of the steetmoy hunt there, and made me live through it again; only it was ten times as painful as the real event had been, because this time I knew all along what was going to happen, and had no way of preventing it from happening again anyway. At the climax of the dream Barjazid was there with me in the snowy forest, questioning me about my having ignored the guide-woman for the sake of following after my steetmoy. He wanted to know every detail of it, what I felt about putting the pleasures of hunting ahead of a human life, was I ashamed, how was I going to cope with my guilt. And I said to him, still in the dream, ‘Are you my judge?’ And he said, ‘Of course I am. See my face?’ And pulled his own face apart, removing it the way you’d remove a mask; and under it there was another face, a mocking laughing face, and the face was my own, my lord. The face was my own.”

He hunched his shoulders high and looked away. He seemed appalled even now by the mere recollection.

Varaile said, “You didn’t go into these details the first time you told me the story. The hunt, the guide-woman, the removal of the mask.”

“No, milady. I thought it was all too horrible to speak of. But it was the Coronal’s request that I—that I tell—”

“Yes. It was,” Prestimion said. “What happened then?”

“I awoke. In great pain. Saw Barjazid with the machine still in his hands. Seized him, forced an explanation out of him, told him that I was taking him into custody and bringing him back to the Castle so that I could make all of this known to you.”

“But I was too busy with other things to listen,” said Prestimion. “And now Barjazid’s on the verge of handing this thing over to Dantirya Sambail.”

“I have explained everything to the lord Septach Melayn, sir. He has given orders for Barjazid and his son to be intercepted if at all possible.”

“If at all possible, yes. But he’s equipped with a machine that lets him fool around with realities, isn’t he? He’ll walk through the patrol lines the way he walked out of the tunnels, and then out of the Castle itself.”

Prestimion rose. “Come with me, both of you. It would be a good idea for me to discuss this business with my mother, I think.”

The Lady Therissa, sitting at her desk in her little private study, listened in sober silence as Prestimion sketched the outlines of Dekkeret’s story for her. She was quiet for a time even after he had finished.

Then she said, “There is real danger here, Prestimion.”

“Yes. I see that.”

“Has he joined forces with the Procurator yet?”

“That’s something I have no way of knowing. But I suspect that he hasn’t. Even with that diabolical gadget of his to help him, he’ll still have a difficult job getting down through Kajith Kabulon and locating Dantirya Sambail on the Stoien coast.”

Varaile said, “I think you’re right. He probably isn’t there yet. If he had reached Dantirya Sambail, they’d be using the mind-control machine to amplify the madness by now. We’d be hearing about whole cities going crazy, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure of it,” said Dekkeret, who had been standing to one side, visibly awed at finding himself in the innermost sanctuary of the Lady of the Isle. Even as he spoke, he seemed astonished by his own audacity at opening his mouth unbidden in the presence of two of the three Powers of the Realm, and he made a little gesture with his head and neck as if to pull himself back out of view. But the Lady Therissa smiled and beckoned him to continue, and he said, “I don’t know much about the Procurator, though nothing I’ve heard about him is anything but bad; but I know Barjazid only too well. I think he’s capable of using the machine in any way that Dantirya Sambail would want him to.”

The Lady said, “Can it really be as powerful as you make it seem, though? We have devices here at the Isle, you know, that can reach very deeply into minds. But nothing that can compel someone to rise up in his sleep and walk out into a lethal desert. Nothing that can take a dream of one kind and transform it into another.”

“The one you allowed me to try, mother—the silver circlet that I wore, when we had the dream-speaker wine—is that the most powerful instrument you have here?”

“No,” said the Lady Therissa. “There are stronger ones, ones which not only can make contact with minds but also are able to instill sendings in them. I didn’t dare allow you to experience their power, not without the months of training that their use requires. But even those things aren’t nearly as powerful as the device that this Barjazid evidently uses.”

“You’ve used the equipment of the Isle?” Dekkeret asked him. “Tell me what it was like, my lord!”

“What it was like,” Prestimion said, in a musing tone. He cast his mind back to that strange journey, feeling the potent memory of it returning to him. “What it was like. Oh, Dekkeret, that gets us into the same problem you raised when you said that no one can really feel the force of someone else’s dream. The only way you could really know that was to wear the circlet yourself.”

“But tell me, my lord, anyway. Please.”

Prestimion stared far into the distance, as though looking through the walls of Inner Temple, out across the three cliffs of the Isle, off to the sea beyond, glittering golden in the midday light. Very quietly he said, “It was like being a god, Dekkeret. It gave me the power of having mental communion with millions of people at once. It allowed me to be everywhere on Majipoor at the same time. The way the atmosphere is everywhere, the way weather is, the way gravity is.”

He narrowed his eyes to slits. The room, his mother, his wife, Dekkeret, all disappeared from his ken. It seemed to him that he heard the sound of a rushing wind. For a dizzying moment he imagined that he had the circlet on his forehead again and was soaring upward and outward, rising higher than the Mount itself, expanding into the vastness of the world by taking on an incomprehensible vastness of his own, touching minds everywhere, thousands of minds, hundreds of thousands, millions, billions, the healthy minds of the world and the poor sad sick disrupted ones also, reaching into them, offering a word here and a caress there, the comfort of the blessed Lady, the healing power of the Isle.

Everyone in the room was looking at him now. He realized that he had drifted off into some strange remote state of consciousness while standing here before them. Another moment passed before he felt that he had fully returned.

Then to Dekkeret he said, “What I learned, wearing that silver circlet, is that when the Lady is at her tasks she ceases to be an ordinary human being and becomes a force of nature—a Power, a true Power, in the way that neither the Coronal nor the Pontifex, mere elected monarchs that we are, could ever be. I haven’t said this to you, mother. But the day I wore the circlet I saw very clearly, and now can never forget, how important your function is to the world. And I understood how it must have transformed your life to become the Lady of the Isle.”

“But,” Dekkeret persevered, “as you traveled around the world using the power of the circlet, did you ever think there might be some way to implant dreams in people’s minds? Or to have such power over them that they would automatically have to obey your commands.”

“No. I don’t think so.” Prestimion turned toward the Lady. “Mother?” She shook her head. “It is as I said: the sending of dreams, yes. Commands, no. Not even with our most powerful devices can I do that.”

Dekkeret nodded grimly. “Then what Barjazid has, and is about to give to Dantirya Sambail, is the deadliest of weapons, my lord. And if those two are not stopped they will shatter the peace of the world. Which is why I brought my message in person, sir, instead of using the ordinary channels of communication. For no one who has not felt the force of the Barjazid device could possibly understand the threat that it holds. And I am the only one who has done that and lived to tell the tale.”

9

From his office high above the Stoien waterfront Akbalik watched the royal fleet arrive. Three swift ships, flying the Coronal’s banner and the banner of the Lady of the Isle.

“I should go down there and be waiting on the pier when they land,” he said. “I will go down there. I have to.”

“Your leg, sir—” said Odrian Kestivaunt.

“Damn the leg! The leg’s no excuse! The Coronal is coming, and the Lady with him. My place is down there on the pier.”

“At least let me change the poultice, sir,” said the little Vroon mildly. “There’s time enough for that.”

It was a reasonable request. Akbalik lowered himself to the stool next to the window and offered his injured calf to the Vroon’s ministration. Deftly, tentacles flying so swiftly that Akbalik could scarcely follow their busy motions, Kestivaunt stripped away yesterday’s bandage, laying bare the angry red wound. It looked worse than ever: puffy, swollen, the area of its jurisdiction over his leg expanding steadily despite the medication. Kestivaunt bathed it in some cool and faintly astringent pale-blue fluid, gently probed the raw place surrounding the wound with the tip of a tentacle, very carefully spread the lips of the cut and peered within. Akbalik hissed. “That hurts, fellow.”

“I ask your pardon, Prince Akbalik. I need to see—”

“Whether any baby swamp-crabs are hatching in there?”

“I told you, sir, there is very little likelihood that the one that bit you was old enough to—”

“Ow! For the love of the Divine, Kestivaunt! Just give it a new poultice and make an end to this poking around, will you? You’re torturing me.”

The Vroon apologized again and bent low over his toil. Akbalik could not see, now, what the small creature was doing; but it hurt less than what he had been doing a moment before, at any rate. Applying some mental emanation with those little wriggling tentacles, a Vroonish spell of healing? Perhaps. And a sprinkle of dried herbs, and more of that cooling blue fluid. The clean bandage, next. Better, yes. For the time being, anyway. Momentary surcease from the furious throbbing, the burning pain, the stomach-turning sense that slender tendrils of infection and corruption were gliding along the hidden pathways of his leg, reaching up toward his groin, his gut, ultimately his heart.

“All done,” Kestivaunt said. Akbalik rose. Gingerly he put his weight on the troubled leg, grimacing a little, catching his breath. He felt shafts of pain running up the entire left side of his body into his neck and onward to his cheek, his jawbone, his teeth. For the millionth time he saw the great purple swamp-crab, the hideous domed bulgy-eyed thing half as big as a floater, rising up menacingly out of the sandy muck before him. Saw himself adroitly turning away from the monster, smugly pleased with his swift response—stepping back from peril so quickly that he failed entirely to notice the other and much smaller crab, not much bigger across than the palm of his hand, slyly reaching one razor-sharp nipper toward his leg from its shelter in the crotch of a stinkflower bush—

“The cane,” he said. “Where’s my damned cane? They’re practically in port already!”

The Vroon indicated the cane, leaning against the wall by the door in its usual place. Akbalik limped across and took it and went out. As he reached the ground floor he paused, looking out into the bright sunlight, breathing deeply, composing himself. He didn’t want to seem like a cripple. The Coronal depended on him. Needed him.

It was no more than fifty yards across a broad cobbled plaza from the doorway of the customs-house where Akbalik maintained his office to the gateway of the piers. Akbalik moved slowly, carefully, holding the head of his cane with a tight grip. Today the distance felt like fifty miles.

Midway to his goal he became aware of the greasy tang of smoke in the air. He looked off to the north, saw the curling black strand climbing into the spotless sky, then the little red tongue higher up, licking out of a smallish building that stood atop a brick pedestal at least sixty feet high. Now he heard the sirens, too. So the crazies were at it again, Akbalik thought—first fire in three or four days, wasn’t it? And today of all days, with the Coronal’s ship landing at this very moment!

A line of Hjort customs-men stood across the entrance to the wharf, blocking access. Akbalik, not bothering to produce his identification, simply scowled at them and waved them out of his path with a sharp backhanded sweep of his hand. Moving past them without a glance, he went limping out toward Pier 44, the royal pier, draped for the occasion today in green and gold bunting.

Three ships, yes, the big cruiser Lord Hostirin and two escorts. The Coronal’s honor guard had come down the gangplank and was lining up along the pier. A little gaggle of Mayor Bannikap’s people was stationed just beyond them as a welcoming committee, with Bannikap himself visible in the midst of the crowd. “Prestimion!” they were crying.

“Prestimion! Lord Prestimion! Long life to Lord Prestimion!” The usual chant. How tired he must be of it!

And there he was, now, at the rail, with Varaile beside him and the Lady Therissa a short distance to their left, half hidden behind her son. To their rear, rising up out of the shadows, Akbalik saw the lofty figure of Prestimion’s two-headed magus Maundigand-Klimd. How ironic, Akbalik thought, that Prestimion, who once had no belief in sorcery at all, never seemed to go anywhere any more without that Su-Suheris magus at his side.

There in the group too—Akbalik was startled to see him—was young Dekkeret, hovering at the Lady Varaile’s elbow. That was a surprise. What was Dekkeret doing aboard a ship coming in from the Isle? Shouldn’t he still be off in Suvrael, seeking in the discomfort of the desert heat the Divine’s pardon for letting that guide-woman die—or else, what was more likely, have gone back to the Castle by this time?

But maybe Suvrael hadn’t supplied him with a sufficiently gratifying degree of the atonement, the penance, that he had so desperately seemed to want when Akbalik last saw him in Zimroel, and that strange spiritual hunger of his had led the boy to go from the bleak southern continent to the sanctuary of the gentle Lady for further repairs to his soul. Where Prestimion had encountered him during the course of his own visit to the Lady, and now was bringing him back. Yes, Akbalik thought. That must be it.

He hurried forward, wincing again and again as the stress of hurried movement brought him fresh pain. Shouldering his way into the midst of the scene, he took up a position right in front of the honor guard. This was Bannikap’s city, yes, but it was at Akbalik’s request that Lord Prestimion was here, and Akbalik wanted to cut through the official folderol as quickly as possible. He had hardly any patience at all left any more, not with that fiery pain gnawing at his left leg all the time.

“Lordship!” he called. “Lordship!”

The Coronal saw him and waved. Akbalik offered him a starburst. And then, as the Lady came into clearer view, he gave her her special sign of respect too. They began their descent to the pier. Mayor Bannikap came forward, his jaws already moving in the preamble to his speech of welcome, but Akbalik cut him off with a stinging glance and went to the Coronal’s side first.

Prestimion held out his arms for an embrace. Akbalik, not knowing what to do with his cane, tucked it under his arm and clasped it awkwardly to his side as he returned the Coronal’s greeting.

“What’s this thing?” Prestimion asked.

Akbalik tried to seem casual about it. “A minor leg injury, my lord. Annoying, but not particularly serious. There are many more important matters than this for us to discuss.”

“Yes,” Prestimion said. “As soon as I can get the stupid formalities out of the way.” He indicated Mayor Bannikap with a quick toss of his head and winked.

Akbalik turned from him and offered his homage to the Lady, and to the Lady Varaile. Dekkeret gave him a shy, uncomfortable grin. He was still keeping to the background.

At a quick glance it seemed to Akbalik that the Lady Varaile was with child. Her manner of dress indicated that. She had that radiant maternal look already as well. That was interesting, the thought of Prestimion as a father so soon after taking on the tasks of the crown. And in these troubled times, too. But he should have expected it. This was a new Prestimion, deepened by responsibility, plainly eager for greater stability in his life, continuity, the ripeness that was maturity.

The Lady Therissa looked magnificent: serene, graceful, steady of soul. All the things that Akbalik himself had been before his ill-fated expedition into the depths of the Stoienzar. He felt better simply from being this near to her.

“Is that smoke I smell?” Prestimion asked.

“A building’s on fire up the street a little way. There’s been a lot of that lately.” Akbalik lowered his voice. “Crazy people carrying bales of straw up to rooftops and setting fire to them. A very popular pastime, suddenly. The mayor will be able to give you more information.”

The mayor, a portly red-faced man related in some remote way to Duke Oljebbin and every bit as self-important, was already asserting his place anyway, coming forward to loom over Prestimion’s slight figure in a fashion that the Coronal was highly unlikely to enjoy. But protocol was protocol, and this was Bannikap’s moment. Akbalik deferred to him. He told Prestimion, who was staring pensively at that black curl of smoke spreading across the sky, that he would attend him later at his suite at the Crystal Pavilion, and made his limping exit.

A wall of continuous windows two hundred feet long gave the Crystal Pavilion its name. It was a relatively young building, put up by Duke Oljebbin during Prankipin’s time as Coronal, that stood in a magnificently solitary position in central Stoien atop a colossal pedestal of whitewashed brick. From Lord Prestimion’s splendid three-level suite atop the pavilion the view took in the entire city, which unfortunately made it all too easy today to see the pillars of smoke arising from the nine or ten fires that were burning in the downtown area.

“This happens every day, these fires?” Prestimion asked.

Akbalik and the Coronal sat before platters of small cubes of smoked sea-dragon meat. Lady Varaile, weary after the hasty and sometimes turbulent voyage, had retreated to her bedchamber. The Lady Therissa was in a suite four levels down from Prestimion’s, resting also. Akbalik had no idea where Dekkeret and the Su-Suheris had gone.

“More or less. It’s a little unusual to have this many going at once.”

“The madness, is it?”

“The madness, yes. This is the dry season: there’s a lot of fuel sitting around. Those pretty vines that flower all summer long turn to immense mounds of straw. As I told you, the crazies gather up bundles of it and go up on rooftops to set it afire. I don’t know why. I suppose there are more fires today than usual because they heard the Coronal and the Lady were coming, and that excited them.”

“Bannikap tried to tell me that the damage is generally pretty minimal.”

“Generally it is. Not always. There’s been a big effort, the past two weeks, to demolish and clear away the really seriously ruined buildings, so you won’t have to look at them while you’re here. Wherever you see a little park about big enough to have held a single building, with freshly planted flowering shrubs, you’re looking at a place where they had a bad fire.—May I have more wine, my lord?”

“Yes, of course.” Prestimion pushed the flask across. “Tell me what you did to your leg.”

“We should discuss Dantirya Sambail, sir.”

“We will. What about the leg?”

“I hurt it while I was out hunting for Dantirya Sambail. The Procurator’s been moving around very freely within that hell-hole where he’s been making camp, pulling up stakes every few days, going up and down through the jungle as it pleases him. He’s become very good, lately, at covering his tracks. We’re never quite sure where he is on any given day. Using a magus, I suppose, to cast a cloud of unknowingingness all around himself. Last month I took a few hundred men and went looking for him, just a reconnaissance mission, to make sure he wasn’t going to slip out of our reach altogether. I saw the place where he had been. But he had moved along, a day or two before.”

“He’s definitely aware that we’re on to him?”

“He must be, by now. How could he not? And if we lose him in there for more than a day or two at a time, finding him again will be the old needle in a haystack problem. He’s been amazingly tricky about staying beyond our reach. Anyway, about the leg—”

“The leg, yes.”

“The scouts said that they thought the Procurator’s current location was about two hundred miles inland from the town of Karasat, which is on the southern coast between Maximin and Gunduba, if those names mean anything to you. So I sailed over from Stoien to have a look. You know, my lord, people speak of the Suvrael desert as being the most unpleasant place in the world, with the Valmambra a distant second. But no, no, we’ve got the prize-winner right here in lower Alhanroel. I’ve never been to Suvrael, or the Valmambra either, but I tell you, sir, they can’t possibly be a patch on the southern Stoienzar for sheer nastiness. It’s full of creatures that must have migrated over from Suvrael looking for an even more horrible place to live. I know. I had an encounter with one.”

“Something bit you, you mean?”

“A swamp-crab, yes. Not one of the big ones—you should see the size of those monsters, my lord—” Akbalik spread his arms in a broad gesture. “No, it was a little one, a mere baby, lying in wait, clipped me with its nipper, snap, just like that. The worst pain I ever hope to feel. Some kind of acid venom, they say, in the bite. Leg swelled up five times normal size. It’s not so bad now, I think.”

Prestimion, frowning, leaned forward for a better look. “What are you doing for it?”

“I have a Vroon secretary, name of Kestivaunt, very capable. He’s looking after it. Puts medicine on it, does a little Vroonish hocus-pocus also—if the spells don’t cure it, the herbal ointment ought to.” A fresh spasm of blazing pain traveled up Akbalik’s side. He clenched his teeth and turned away, determined not to let Prestimion see how much anguish he was in. A change of subject seemed the best idea.—"My lord, tell me what Dekkeret was doing with you on the Isle, if you will. I would have assumed that he’d have finished up his business in Suvrael—you know, his expiation, his redemption, after that affair in the Khyntor Marches—and returned to the Castle a long time ago.”

“He did return,” said Prestimion. “Late last summer, it was. Bringing someone with him who he had had a little run-in with in Suvrael. Do you remember a certain Venghenar Barjazid, Akbalik?”

“Knavish-looking little fellow who used to do odd jobs for Duke Svor?”

“The very same. When I sent that troublesome Vroon Thalnap Zelifor into exile in Suvrael, I picked this Barjazid to go with him and make sure he got there. One of the infinite number of mistakes that I’ve made, Akbalik, since I took it into my head that I was qualified to be Coronal.”

Akbalik listened in growing concern as Prestimion sketched the tale for him: Barjazid doing away with the Vroon and appropriating his mind-controlling devices for his own purposes; the episodes of predatory experimentation on hapless travelers with those devices in Suvrael’s Desert of Stolen Dreams; then Dekkeret’s own encounter with Barjazid in that desert, his capture of Barjazid, his bringing of Barjazid and his machines to the Castle.

“He lost no time asking for an audience,” Prestimion said. “I didn’t happen to be at the Castle that day, so he met with Varaile, and very carefully explained the power of these devices, and the danger in them, to her. When I returned she tried to tell me the story, but I confess I paid very little attention. One more black mark on my record, Akbalik. Well, now Barjazid has slipped out of the Castle somehow and made his way down to the Stoienzar to put his machines to work on behalf of Dantirya Sambail. Which is what Dekkeret came running out to the Isle to tell me, and why I’ve come over to Stoien so quickly myself. If Barjazid and Dantirya Sambail manage to join forces—”

“I’m sure they already have, my lord.”

“How do you know that?”

“I said that the Procurator has become very good at eluding our scouts. A magus, I said, who’s casting a cloud of unknowingness around him. But what if it’s not a magus at all? What if it’s this Barjazid? If these devices of his are as powerful as Dekkeret says they are—” Once again Akbalik felt fire in his leg, and hid his shudder of pain from Prestimion . “A lucky thing for us all that the boy did go to Suvrael, eh? And I tried so hard to discourage him. What is your plan, my lord?”

“I’ve already told you, I think, that Septach Melayn and Gialaurys are leading a force of troops down to the Stoienzar from Castle Mount. They’ll go after Dantirya Sambail from the western end of the peninsula. I mean to assemble a second army here in Stoien city that will enter the Stoienzar from the other side. My mother will guide our movements: she thinks she knows a way of employing the arts of the Isle to search him out. Meanwhile, to keep him from escaping from the area as we go toward him, we blockade the ports everywhere along the peninsula, north and south—”

“May I ask you, my lord, who will command the army out of Stoien city?”

Prestimion seemed surprised at that. “Why, I will.”

“I beg you, sir, no.”

“No?”

“You must not go into the Stoienzar jungle. You have no idea how awful a place it is. I don’t just mean the heat and the humidity, or the insects half as long as your arm that buzz in your face all day long. I mean the dangers, my lord, the terrible perils that lie everywhere around. Do you wonder why there are no settlements there? It is one vast sticky marsh, where your boots sink ankle-deep at every step. Beneath you lurk hidden venomous monsters, the swamp-crabs, whose bite is death, unless you’re lucky enough to be bitten by a very small one, as I was. The trees themselves are your enemies: there is one whose seed-pods explode as they ripen, sending long fragments in every direction that strike deep into a man’s flesh like flying daggers. There is another tree, the manganoza palm, it is, whose leaves are as sharp as—”

“I know all this, Akbalik. Nevertheless, the task of leading the troops falls to me, and what of it? Do you think I’m afraid of a little discomfort?”

“Many men will die while marching through those swamps. I’ve seen it happen. I came close to dying there myself. I say that you have no right to risk your life there, my lord.”

Anger flared in Prestimion’s eyes. “No right? No right? You overreach yourself, Akbalik. Not even Prince Seri-thorn’s nephew should venture to instruct the Coronal in what he ought or ought not to do.”

Prestimion’s rebuke struck Akbalik with almost physical force. His face went red; he muttered an apology and offered a hasty starburst. To steady himself he took a long draught of the wine. Some different sort of approach was required. After a moment he said in a low voice, “Can your mother really use her arts to help you in this war, my lord?”

“She believes that she can. She may even be able to counteract the mental powers that Barjazid wields.”

“And so—forgive me again, Lord Prestimion—you mean to take her with you, do you, into the Stoienzar jungles? The Lady of the Isle is to ride at your side as you make your way through those deadly swamps? Do you really intend to place her in that sort of jeopardy?”

He saw at once that he had scored a point. Prestimion looked stunned. Plainly had not been expecting a thrust from that direction. “I need her close beside me as matters unfold. She will have a clearer view than anyone of the Procurator’s movements.”

Akbalik said, “The Lady’s powers work at any distance, do they not? There’s no need to bring her so close. She can stay safe in Stoien while the jungle campaign is mounted. And so can you. You and she can devise strategy together and your wishes can be relayed easily enough to the battle-front.” And quickly added, as Prestimion began to reply: “My lord, I plead with you to listen to me. Perhaps Lord Stiamot may have led his army into battle seven thousand years ago, but such risks on the part of a Coronal are unacceptable today. Remain here in Stoien city and supervise the conflict from a distance with the Lady’s help. Let me lead the imperial troops against the Procurator. You are not expendable. I am. And I’ve already had some experience in dealing with the conditions that the Stoienzar presents. Let me be the one to go.”

“You? No. Never, Akbalik.”

“But my lord—”

“You think you’ve been fooling me, with that leg of yours? I can see how you’re suffering. You’re barely able to walk, let alone go back into that jungle on a new mission. And how can you tell that the infection won’t get worse than it is right now before you start to heal? No, Akbalik. You may be right that it isn’t wise for me to go in there, but you certainly aren’t going to.”

There was a steely note in the Coronal’s voice that told Akbalik it was useless to object. He sat in silence, massaging his throbbing leg just above the wound.

Prestimion went on: “I’ll attempt to direct operations from here, as you suggest, and we’ll see how that works out. But as for you, I relieve you right now from active service. The Lady Varaile is going to leave for the Castle in a few days—she’s pregnant, do you know that, Akbalik?—and I’m assigning you the job of escorting her back to the Mount.”

“My congratulations, sir. But with all respect, my lord, let Dekkeret take her. I should stay here in Stoien city with you and assist you in the campaign. My understanding of the nature of that jungle—”

“Might be useful, yes. But if you lose that leg, what then? It’s idiotic for you to remain in Stoien. This is a provincial backwater. We have the best doctors in the world at the Castle, and they’ll repair you in short order. As for Dekkeret, I need him here with me. He’s the only one who understands anything about how this Barjazid device actually works.”

“I implore you, my lord—”

“I implore you, Akbalik: save your breath. My mind’s made up. I thank you for all you’ve accomplished here in Stoien. Now get yourself to the Castle with my lady Varaile, and have that leg properly taken care of.”

Prestimion stood. Akbalik rose also, with an effort he was unable to conceal. His injured leg did not want to support him. The Coronal seized him around the shoulders, steadying him as he struggled to find his balance.

From outside, far below, came the sudden sound of sirens. People were yelling in the streets. Akbalik glanced toward the window. A new pillar of black smoke was rising in the city’s southern quarter.

“It gets worse and worse,” Prestimion muttered. He turned to go. “Some day, Akbalik, we’ll look back at these times and chuckle, won’t we? But I wish we could do a little more chuckling right now.”

It was late the next afternoon before Akbalik had any opportunity to speak with Dekkeret. The last time he had seen the young man was in a simple mountain tavern in Khyntor, on a night two years before in early spring, as they sat together over flasks of hot golden wine. That was the night Dekkeret had announced his intention to go to Suvrael. “You judge yourself too harshly,” Akbalik had said then. “There’s no sin so foul that it merits a jaunt in Suvrael.” And he had urged Dekkeret to make a pilgrimage to the Isle instead, if he truly felt a need to cleanse his soul of its stain. “Let the blessed Lady heal your spirit,” Akbalik had told him then. It is foolish to interrupt your career at the Castle, he said, for the long absence that the trip to Suvrael would require.

But Dekkeret had gone to Suvrael anyway; and to the Isle as well, it seemed, if only for the briefest of visits. And his travels did not appear to have done any harm to his burgeoning career after all.

“Do you remember what we agreed,” Dekkeret said, “when we were sitting together in that Khyntor tavern? That you and I would have a happy reunion on the Mount two years hence, is what we said, when I was back from Suvrael. We would go to the games in High Morpin together, is what we promised each other. The two years have come and gone, Akbalik, but we never managed to get to High Morpin.”

“Other matters interfered. I found myself here in Stoien instead at the time we were supposed to be holding our reunion. And you—”

“And I went to the Isle of Sleep, but not as a pilgrim.” Dekkeret laughed. “Can you imagine, Akbalik, how strange my own life seems to me these days? I, who had simply hoped to be a knight of the Castle, and maybe hold some modest ministerial post when I was old—I find myself keeping company with the Coronal and his wife, and with the Lady herself, and drawn into the midst of the most complex and delicate affairs of state—”

“Yes. Rising fast, you are. You’ll be Coronal some day, Dekkeret, mark my words.”

“Me? Don’t be foolish, Akbalik! When all this is over, I’ll be just another knight-initiate again. You’re the one who might be Coronal! Everyone says so, you know. Confalume might have another ten or twelve years to live, and then Lord Prestimion will become Pontifex, and the next Coronal might well be—”

“Stop this nonsense, Dekkeret. Not another word.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. I happen to think that you’d be an entirely plausible person to succeed—”

“Stop it! I’ve never spent a moment thinking about my becoming Coronal and I don’t expect to become Coronal and I don’t want to become Coronal. It’s not going to happen. Just for one thing, I’m the same age as Prestimion exactly. His successor is going to come from your generation, not from mine. But for another—” Akbalik shook his head. “Why are we wasting this much time on anything as idiotic as this? The next Coronal? Let’s do what we can to serve this one!—I’m going to be escorting the Lady Varaile back to the Castle in another few days. You’ll be staying here, advising Lord Prestimion on ways to deal with Barjazid and his mind-gadget, do you know that? I want you to promise me something, Dekkeret.”

“Name it. Anything.”

“That if the Coronal takes it into his head to go off into those jungles looking for Dantirya Sambail despite all I’ve said to him about that, you’ll stand up before him and tell him that that’s an insane thing to be doing, that he absolutely must not do it, that for sake of his wife and his mother and his unborn child, and for the whole world’s sake, for that matter, he has to keep himself far away from the reach of the things that live in that ghastly hothouse of a place. Will you do that, Dekkeret? No matter how angry you make him, no matter what risks to your own career you may run, tell him that. Over and over.”

“Of course. I promise.”

“Thank you.”

For a moment neither one spoke. It had been an awkward conversation through and through, and it seemed now to have hit a wall.

Then Dekkeret said, “May I ask you a personal question, Akbalik?”

“I suppose.”

“It worries me to see you limping around like that. Something really bad must have happened to that leg. You’re in a lot of pain, aren’t you?”

“You sound just like Prestimion. My leg, my leg, my leg! Look, Dekkeret, my leg’s going to be all right. It isn’t going to drop off, or anything. While I was sloshing around in the Stoienzar I got a nasty nip from a miserable little crab, and it got infected, and, yes, it hurts, so I’ve been walking with a cane for a few days. But it’s healing. Another few days and I’ll be fine. All right? Is that enough about my leg? Let’s talk about something cheerful, instead. Your little holiday in Suvrael, for example—”

It was still early in the morning and already the bitter scent of smoke marred the sweet fresh air: the first fire of the day, Prestimion thought. This was the day of Varaile’s departure for the Castle. A seven-floater caravan was lined up in front of the Crystal Pavilion, a regally grand one for Varaile and Akbalik to ride in, four lesser ones for their security escort, and two for their baggage. The sooner Varaile was back in the safe environment of the Castle, high up above the turmoil that appeared to be engulfing so many of the lowland cities, the better. Prestimion hoped he would be back there himself before the new prince—Taradath, they were going to call him, in honor of the lost uncle that the boy would never know—was born.

“I wish you would come with me, Prestimion,” Varaile said, as they emerged from the Pavilion and walked toward the waiting floaters.

“I wish I could. Let me deal with the Procurator, first, and then I will.”

“Are you planning to go into those jungles after him?”

“Akbalik insists that I mustn’t. And who am I to disobey Akbalik’s command?—No, Varaile, I won’t be going in there myself. I want my mother beside me as we reach out to crush Dantirya Sambail, and the Stoienzar is no place for her. So I’ve given in. I tell you, though, it galls me to remain comfortably ensconced here in Stoien while Gialaurys and Septach Melayn and Navigorn are sweating their way through the saw-palm forests looking for—”

She cut him off with a laugh. “Oh, Prestimion, don’t be such a boy! Maybe the Coronals we once read about in The Book of Changes went into the forests and fought terrible battles against the monsters that used to live in them, but that isn’t done any more. Would Lord Confalume have gone thrashing around in a jungle, if he had had a war to fight? Would Lord Prankipin?” She looked at him closely, then. “You won’t go, will you?”

“I’ve just explained to you why I can’t.”

“Can’t doesn’t necessarily mean won’t. You might decide that you don’t really need to have the Lady Therissa at your elbow while the war’s going on. In that case, will you leave her in Stoien city and go into the jungle anyway, once Akbalik and I are far away?”

This was making him uncomfortable. He had no more desire to enter that abomination of a jungle than anyone else. And he understood that a Coronal’s life should not be placed lightly at stake. This was not the civil war, when he had been only a private citizen seeking to overthrow the usurper: he was the anointed and sacred king, now. But to fight a war by proxy at a distance of two thousand miles, while his friends were risking their lives among the swamp-crabs and saw-grass—?

“If somehow it becomes essential for me to go there, absolutely unavoidable, then I will,” Prestimion said finally. “Otherwise, no.” He touched his hand lightly to the front of her body. “Believe me, Varaile, I want to be back at the Castle myself, all in one piece, before Taradath is born. I won’t take any risks except those that I have no choice about taking.” Then, taking her hand in his, he kissed her fingertips and led her toward the floater. “You should be on your way. But where’s Akbalik? He ought to be here by now.”

“That’s him, isn’t it, Prestimion? All the way over there?”

She pointed far across the plaza. A man with a cane, yes. Walking very slowly, pausing now and again to rest and take the weight off his left leg. Prestimion stared balefully toward him. This was a troublesome thing, this infected leg of Akbalik’s. Vroonish wizardry could go only so far; the man needed to be in the hands of the Castle’s best surgeons for this. Akbalik was important to him. Prestimion wondered just how serious this wound of his really was.

“It’s going to take him forever to get here,” Prestimion said. “Why don’t you go into the floater and sit down, Varaile? All this standing around can’t be good for you.” She smiled and entered the car.

Just then something that had been bobbing in and out of Prestimion’s mind for many weeks drifted back into it, something that he had been meaning to ask again and again, without ever quite getting around to it. He peered in after her. “Oh: and one question before you leave, Varaile.—Do you recall, when we were at Inner Temple and I was telling the story of the memory obliteration to my mother and you, I mentioned that the name of the son of Lord Confalume who seized the throne was Korsibar? You seemed very surprised when I said that. Why was that?”

“I had heard the name before. From my father, in his ravings one day. He seemed to think that Confalume was still Coronal, and I told him no, there was a new Coronal now, and he said, ‘Oh, yes, Lord Korsibar.’ ‘No, father,’ I said, ‘the new Coronal is Lord Prestimion, there isn’t any such person as Lord Korsibar.’ I thought it was the madness speaking in him. But then, when you told us that the usurper whose name had been wiped from history by your mages was Korsibar—”

“Yes. I see,” said Prestimion. He felt a sudden shiver of apprehension. “He knew the name. He remembered Korsibar. Can it be, I wonder, that the obliteration is wearing off, that the true past is breaking through?”

That was all he needed right now, he thought. But perhaps only those in the deepest extremity of madness were experiencing such flashbacks; and no one was likely to take what they said very seriously. “My father in his ravings,” as Varaile had just put it. Even so, it was something that he would have to bear in mind. Consult one of his mages about it, he thought: Maundigand-Klimd, or perhaps Heszmon Gorse.

It was a problem for some other time. Akbalik had arrived at last.

He flashed a broad, unconvincing grin. “All ready, are we?” he cried, with a cheeriness that was all too obviously forced.

“Ready and waiting. How’s the leg?” Prestimion asked. He thought it seemed more swollen than it had been the night before. Or was that just an illusion?

“The leg? The leg is fine, my lord. Just a tiny little twinge here and there. Another few days—”

“Yes,” Prestimion said. “Just a tiny little twinge. I think I observed you getting a couple of those tiny little twinges as you were crossing the plaza. Don’t waste any time getting that leg looked at once you’re back at the Castle, eh?” He looked away in an attempt to avoid seeing the enormous difficulty with which Akbalik was entering the floater. “Safe journey!” he called. Varaile and Akbalik waved to him. The vehicle’s rotors began to hum. The other floaters in the caravan were coming now to life also. Prestimion stood in the plaza looking eastward for a long while after the five vehicles had disappeared from sight.

10

“Tell me honestly,” Septach Melayn said, “did you ever expect to see this part of the world again in your life?”

“Why not?” Gialaurys said. They were entering the Kajith Kabulon rain-forest once more, having made the journey southward through Bailemoona and Ketheron and Arvyanda following the same track they had taken two years before. That time, though, they had been Prestimion’s companions on a small exploratory expedition; now they were coming at the head of a great military force. “We serve the Coronal. Prestimion tells us to go here, we go here. He wants us to go there, we go there. If that involves making ten trips to Ketheron the same year, or fifteen to the Valmambra, what should that matter to us?”

Septach Melayn laughed. “A heavy answer to a light question, my friend. I meant only that the world is so big that one never expects to visit the same place twice. Except, of course, going back and forth among the cities of the Mount. But here we are, plodding through the muck of soggy Kajith Kabulon for the second time in three years.”

“I repeat my reply,” said Gialaurys grumpily. “We are here because it is the pleasure of the Coronal Lord Prestimion that we get ourselves down to the Stoienzar, and the shortest way from Castle Mount to the Stoienzar runs through Kajith Kabulon. I fail to see any point to your question. But this wouldn’t be the first time you’ve opened your mouth just to let some noise come out, is it, Septach Melayn?”

“Do you think,” Navigorn said, as much to break the rising tension as for any other reason, “that anyone’s ever lived long enough to see the whole world? I don’t mean just getting from here to the far side of Zimroel: the Coronals all do that when they make their grand processionals. I mean going everywhere, every province, every city, the eastern coast of Alhanroel to the western coast of Zimroel, and from the land around the North Pole down to the bottom end of Suvrael.”

“That would take five hundred years, I think,” said Septach Melayn. “Longer, I suspect, than any of us is likely to live. But see: Prestimion has been Coronal just a short while, and already Gialaurys and I have been deep into the east-country of Alhanroel, and then down south as far as Sippulgar, and now we are to have the great pleasure of visiting the beautiful Stoienzar—”

“You are very irritating today, Septach Melayn,” Gialaurys said. “I will ride in a different floater, I think.”

But he made no move to halt the vehicle and leave it, and they continued onward. The forest canopy grew deeper. This was a green world in here, but for the occasional contrast that the brilliant fungi of the treetrunks provided, mainly scarlet in this part of the forest, occasionally a vivid yellow brighter even than the sulfury yellow of Ketheron. Although it was still only early afternoon, the sun was no longer visible through the tightly interwoven vines that linked the tops of the tall, slender trees flanking the road. The unending downpour’s persistent drumbeat sound was making everyone edgy: a light rain, unvarying in its intensity, but continuing hour after hour without a break.

A long line of floaters stretched behind them. Each one was emblazoned with the Labyrinth symbol of the Pontifex, since officially this was not an army, merely a peacekeeping force engaged in a police action, and—officially speaking, at least—it was under the command of the Pontificate. The whole system of enforcing the law was a matter for the Pontificate. There were no armies on Majipoor, just Pontifical troops charged with keeping the peace. The Coronal had no troops of his own beyond those who served as the Castle guard. The army that Korsibar had sent against Prestimion during the civil war had been a greatly expanded and probably unconstitutional version of the Coronal’s bodyguard; the army that Prestimion had assembled in his successful campaign against the usurper was a volunteer militia.

A constitutional expert, one whose nose was buried all the time in the Synods and Balances and Decretals, would probably have raised some objections to the legality of this brigade, too. Septach Melayn had requisitioned these troops from Vologaz Sar, the Pontifex’s man at the Castle, by presenting him with a decree already signed by himself as High Counsellor and Gialaurys as Grand Admiral, acting in the name of the absent Lord Prestimion, and, for good measure, by Navigorn and Prince Serithorn as well.

“I will have to send this to the Labyrinth for countersigning, of course,” Vologaz Sar had said.

“Yes. By all means please do. But we need to leave for the Stoienzar immediately, and we’ll be collecting troops from the various Pontifical encampments along the way. So if you’ll add your own signature here, giving us authorization to levy troops on a strictly provisional basis pending formal approval by the Pontifex—”

Whereupon Septach Melayn produced a second copy of the decree, identical to the first.

“This is extremely irregular, Septach Melayn!”

“Yes. I rather suppose it is.—You need to sign over here, I think, just above the Pontifical seal, which we have already had engrossed on the document to save you the trouble.”

In return for Vologaz Sar’s cooperation, Septach Melayn had spared him the necessity of providing Pontifical officers to take part in the action against Dantirya Sambail. It would be simpler, he said, if command responsibilities remained concentrated in the hands of the Coronal’s own trusted men. The enormity of the request was too much for the outmaneuvered Vologaz Sar. “Whatever you wish,” he muttered, abandoning all resistance, and scrawled his signature on the sheet.

Now it was the fourth day of their passage through rainy Kajith Kabulon. They had turned off the main highway, which would have taken them to the provincial capital and Prince Thaszthasz’s wickerwork palace once again, and were making their way sluggishly along a spongy-bedded secondary road that ran somewhat to the west. Everything in this part of the rain-forest grew with crazy tropical excessiveness. Thick tangles of spiky purplish moss festooned the trees so heavily that it was hard to understand why they were not choked by it. Angry blotches of crimson lichen clung to every rock; long ropy strands of a swollen blue fungus coiled along the sides of the road like sleeping serpents. The rain was omnipresent.

“Does it ever stop?” Navigorn asked. He alone, of the three, had not been to Kajith Kabulon before. “By the Lady, this weather can drive a man berserk!”

Septach Melayn gave him a thoughtful glance. The strange convulsive seizures that had plagued Navigorn intermittently almost since the beginning of the madness epidemic still troubled him from time to time, particularly when he was under stress. Would the steady pounding of the rain send him into another one now? That would be awkward, here in the cramped confines of the floater that they shared.

Probably it would have been wiser, Septach Melayn thought, for Navigorn to have remained behind at the Castle, serving once more as regent, instead of subjecting himself to this expedition. But he had insisted. He still felt that his reputation had been badly compromised by the Procurator’s escape from the Sangamor tunnels. The very similar escape of Venghenar Barjazid and his son from that same prison, although Navigorn could not in any way be blamed for it, had reawakened those feelings of shame and guilt in him. Dantirya Sambail would be causing no trouble today if Navigorn had been able to keep him safely locked up in the tunnels. And so, evidently by way of achieving a redemption of some sort, he had insisted on coming along. Poor frivolous Serithorn, finally, had been stuck with the job of running the government in their absence, aided in that to some extent by Prestimion’s brother Teotas. But the strain of the rain-forest climate was telling on Navigorn. Septach Melayn peered anxiously ahead, hoping for a glimpse of sunlight soon.

He turned to Gialaurys. “What do you say we sing, good admiral? A lively ballad to while away the time!” And launched in lustily on a tune ten thousand years old:

Gialaurys, whose singing voice would have done discredit to the great toad of Kunamolgoi Mountain, folded his arms, glowering, and looked at Septach Melayn as though he had succumbed to the madness himself. Navigorn, though, grinned and joined in immediately:

“If you will stop that bellowing for a moment,” said Gialaurys, “we can consider which highway we need to take here. For there seems to be a fork in the road. Or does that not matter, if only we sing loudly enough?”

Septach Melayn looked over his shoulder. They had the Vroon guide Galielber Dorn with them, but the small being was huddled up in the back of the vehicle, shivering with some Vroonish malady. The damp climate of Kajith Kabulon seemed not at all to his liking. “Dorn?” Septach Melayn cried. “Which way?”

“Left,” came the unhesitating reply, a sickly moan.

“But we need to go toward the west. A left turn will take us the other way”

“If you know the answer, why do you ask the question?” said the Vroon. “Do whatever pleases you. A left turn will bring us to the Stoienzar, however.” He groaned and slid down under a pile of blankets.

“We go left, I suppose,” said Septach Melayn, shrugging. He shifted the floater’s course. It would be just splendid, he thought, if this whole procession of vehicles were to set out down the wrong fork. But one did not argue with a Vroonish guide. And indeed the left-hand branch of the highway, after a few hundred yards, began gradually to loop around on itself, doubling on its own course. Septach Melayn saw now that it was curving to avoid a round muddy-looking lake, heavily congested with drifting vegetation, that blocked further progress in the other direction.

The lake’s great mass of floating plants looked sinister, almost predatory: humped tangled masses, leaves like horns of plenty, cup-shaped spore-bodies, snarled ropy stems, everything dark blue against the lighter blue-green of the water. Huge aquatic mammals moved slowly through it, feeding. Septach Melayn had no idea what they were. Their tubular pinkish bodies were almost totally submerged. Only the rounded bulges of their backs and the jutting periscopes of their stalked eyes were in view, and now and then a pair of cavernous snorting nostrils. They were cutting immense swaths through the water-plants, which writhed angrily as the animals gobbled it, but did not otherwise react. At the far side of the lake new growth was already hastening to fill the gaps that the grazing beasts had opened.

“Do you smell something odd?” Navigorn asked.

The windows of the floater were sealed. Even so, a whiff of the lake’s fragrance was coming through. The aroma was unmistakable. It was like breathing the fumes of a distillery vat. The lake was in ferment. Evidently one by-product of the respiration of these water-plants was alcohol, and, having no outlet, the lake had turned into a great tub of wine.

Septach Melayn said amiably, “Shall we sample it? Or will it delay our journey too much to stop here, do you think?”

“Would you go among those pink beasts for a sip of wine?” Gialaurys asked. “Yes. Yes, I think you would. Well, here, then: get down on your knees and swill to your heart’s content!” He yanked at the rotor control and the floater began to halt.

“Your constant hostility starts to bore me, Admiral Gialaurys,” Septach Melayn said.

“Your brand of humor long ago began to bore me, High Counsellor,” Gialaurys retorted.

Navigorn started the floater up again. “Gentlemen—please, gentlemen—”

They went on.

The rain was ceasing, now. They were emerging at last from the forest of Kajith Kabulon. It was possible to see the sun again, blazing with tropical force straight ahead of them in what was undoubtedly the west. Golden Sippulgar and the Aruachosian coast lay off to the south with the waters of the Inner Sea beyond. Before them lay the Stoienzar Peninsula and Dantirya Sambail.

An end came to the bickering. This was new territory to all of them, and with every passing mile the landscape was turning stranger and more menacing. The roadway had diminished until it was hardly more than an unpaved track, barely wide enough to let the floaters go through. In places it was completely overgrown, and they had to halt and cut a path for themselves with their energy-throwers. And then, after a time, there seemed to be no road at all, and it was necessary to have the floaters bull their way onward by main force, with frequent interruptions while they hacked at vines or even trees that blocked all forward access.

There was no rain here, but this country was more humid, even, than Kajith Kabulon had been. A perpetual steamy fog prevailed everywhere. The ground itself exuded moist vapor, belching steam upward at the merest touch of the sun’s rays. Shrouds of furry parasitic plants dangled from every branch of every tree. And the trees themselves were nightmarish things. One, that seemed to create forests all by itself, sent up thousands of slim vertical shoots from a single thick horizontal stem that ran like a black cable along the ground for close to a mile. Another grew with its roots facing upward, rising ten or fifteen feet out of the ground and waving about as though trolling for passing birds. There was a third kind that seemed to have melted and run at the base, for its trunk emerged from a swollen woody mass, a kind of botanical tumor, at least fifty feet across and taller than the tallest man.

These were mere oddities, though, curious and strange, that posed no dangers for the travelers. And there were others that were actually charming in their peculiarities, like the tree whose multitudes of brilliant yellow flowers dangled at the ends of long ropes, like so many lanterns, or the one of somewhat similar structure whose suspended blue-gray seed-pods clanged in the breeze to make a pleasant tinkling sound. A little way onward they came to a huge grove of trees that entered into bloom all at the same moment, at sunrise. It was Septach Melayn, rising early, who saw it happen. “Look at this!” he cried, awakening the others, as giant crimson blossoms began opening everywhere at once around them, creating a symphony of color, a single great chord. All day long they passed through this wondrous forest of flowering trees; but at twilight the petals began to drop with the same singleness of timing as had marked their unfolding, and by dawn they all were fallen and the ground had become a carpet of pink.

But as the expedition proceeded westward such moments of beauty came further and further apart, and what they encountered now seemed increasingly threatening.

First came a few manculains, creeping about sullenly in the underbrush: solitary long-nosed many-legged creatures, sluggish and timid, with narrow red ears. They were covered all over by long yellow spines sharp as stilettos whose black tips, breaking off easily at the lightest touch, or, seemingly, only at a glance, could burrow deep into your flesh as though they had minds and volition of their own.

Then some round hairy insects with double rows of malevolent eyes were seen feeding on a small mikkinong that had injured one of its fragile legs: they reduced it to picked bones in mere moments. And then, in an open place in the forest, the travelers met a hovering swarm of energy-creatures, each one a brilliant white flash no bigger than one’s thumb. When they realized that they had been seen, they quickly elongated into horizontal forms two yards long that danced about in the air in unattainable groups a hundred yards away. One unwary officer drew too close to them and they fell on him with a wild buzzing sound of glee, surrounding him in such numbers that he could not be seen at all within that cloud of zigging streaks of light, and when they withdrew from him nothing remained but blackened cinders.

The energy-creatures did not reappear. But the heat and humidity, which had been overwhelming from the moment of the expedition’s entry into the peninsula, increased with every mile. They were not far from the coast, now. The breeze here blew straight from Suvrael, so that the southern continent’s searing blowtorch heat mingled with the vapors rising from the warm sea that separated the continents and turned the air of the Stoienzar’s maritime lowlands into a salty soup.

Bugs of all sorts grew huge and mighty here: meaty things with bristly legs and clacking jaws, crawling about everywhere over the moist sandy muck that passed for soil in this place. The first swamp-crabs came into view, also, baleful purple-domed crustaceans of tremendous size resting half-submerged in the marshy ground. Here, too, were groves of the celebrated animal-plants of Stoienzar, things that were rooted permanently in place and manufactured their food by photosynthesis, but which had fleshy arms that slowly moved about, and rows of shining eyes about the upper section of their tubular bodies, and slit-like mouths below. They came in all sizes, and swung about in an unsettling way to stare at the travelers as their floaters passed by. They would, said Galielber Dorn, seize and devour any small animal that came within reach of their grasping hands.

“We should torch them all,” Gialaurys muttered, shuddering.

But they knew they would need their energy-throwers for more immediate purposes. This was the land, now, of the manganoza palms, ungainly slouching trees that grew one up against the next with so little space between that they formed a well-nigh impenetrable wall. These trees had clusters of long, arching feather-like leaves, lined along every edge with astonishingly sharp-edged crystalline cells. The slightest breeze was enough to make these leaves stir and flutter about. It took no more than a glancing touch to draw blood; a harder gust of wind and the trees were capable of lopping off hands, arms, even heads.

Now the journey became truly appalling. There no longer was any road at all, and the only way to penetrate the saw-palm forest was to get out of the floaters and blow a pathway through it with energy-weapons. But every such blast expended here was one less that could be used against the forces of Dantirya Sambail.

Eventually, thought Septach Melayn, it would come down to the necessity of having to advance through this stuff on foot, prepared for ambush and hand-to-hand combat with the Procurator’s men at any moment. And, he reflected, they must know this country well by now, whereas we are strangers in it. In every way the advantage lay with them.

But he kept his misgivings to himself. All that he said aloud was, “This is the perfect place for Dantirya Sambail to have chosen as his camp. His kind of place exactly: everything here is as stubborn and vile and dangerous as he is himself.”

11

In Stoien City it was still at least an hour before dawn. Prestimion had scarcely slept at all. He stood now at the great curving window of his bedroom atop the Crystal Pavilion, staring intently eastward as though by the force of his gaze alone he could somehow hurry the rising of the sun.

Out there in the east, hidden from him now by the darkness that lay like a shroud across western Alhanroel, the future of Majipoor was being shaped. The history of the reign of the Coronal Lord Prestimion was being written. The entire course of the period that would bear his name was going to be determined in the next few weeks. And somehow he was here in Stoien, thousands of miles from the scene of action, passively allowing others to act in his name. He was a marginal player in his own destiny. How had he contrived to allow that to happen?

There was Dantirya Sambail, huddling like a malign spider at the center of the web he had spun for himself in the ferocious jungles of the Stoienzar Peninsula, preparing to launch whatever campaign of subversion and disruption he had been hatching since his escape from the Sangamor tunnels. And there were Septach Melayn and Gialaurys and Navigorn hacking their way toward him through those jungles from the west at the head of one armed force, while a second band of soldiers was moving eastward across the same peninsula to the same destination—an army that the Coronal himself should be leading, or, at the worst, Akbalik or Abrigant, but which was instead commanded by some Pontifical captain whose name Prestimion could not seem to remember more than two days running.

It infuriated Prestimion that he had trapped himself here in Stoien city, unable to take his precious anointed self, or his mother’s, any closer to the zone of peril. Abrigant was back at Muldemar now, exercising the princely responsibilities that had fallen to him when his elder brother became Coronal. And Akbalik, on whom Prestimion had come to rely to the extent that he had begun to think of him as his own successor, surely was somewhere in central Alhanroel by this time, heading for the Castle, weary and perhaps mortally ill from the wound he had suffered in the jungle.

Prestimion had tried to pretend that he needed Akbalik to escort the Lady Varaile back to the Castle to await the birth of her child, just as Akbalik had attempted to persuade Prestimion that his wound was not as serious as it was. But neither of them had been fooled. There were plenty of captains other than Akbalik who could have accompanied Varaile on her journey across Alhanroel. The reason why Akbalik was traveling with her, instead of playing a key role in the attack on Dantirya Sambail’s camp, was that the venom of the swamp-crab was seeping deeper within his body day by day, and the only physicians who could save him were half a world away on Castle Mount.

If Akbalik dies—

Prestimion shook the thought away. He had enough to contend with just now without speculating on contingencies like that. Other beloved friends of his were at risk in the Stoienzar at this moment, while he himself remained cooped up here, wild with the frustration of knowing that he must remain safe behind the lines, where his sacred person would be shielded from the risks of battle. And Dantirya Sambail, surely aware that the moment of reckoning was drawing near, was very likely making ready to burst forth from hiding in all his diabolical fury.

Then, above all, there was the plague of madness steadily spreading through the world, the pernicious disruption that threatened to unhinge everyone’s sanity before it was done, and for which Prestimion alone, however blameless his motives had been, stood responsible. What kind of world had he created, that terrible day at Thegomar Edge, for the son who would soon be born to Varaile and him? What would be the legacy of the Coronal Lord Prestimion to the world, other than a time of the most horrific chaos? The pitiful struttings of the Procurator of Ni-moya were trivial by comparison. It was easy enough to envisage the defeat and overthrow of Dantirya Sambail at the hands of the armies now converging on his camp. But the madness—the madness—he was at his wit’s end for a solution to that!

He heard a knocking at his bedroom door.

Prestimion turned from the window. Someone coming to him at this early hour? What else could it be, but news of some new catastrophe?

“Yes?” he called hoarsely. “What is it?”

From the hallway came the voice of Nilgir Sumanand. “My lord, I beg your pardon for disturbing you, but Prince Dekkeret is here to see you, and he will not wait. It is a very urgent matter, so the prince tells me,” said the aide-decamp, with a certain note of dubiety in his tone. And then another voice, Dekkeret’s, saying impatiently, “No, no, not Prince Dekkeret. Just Dekkeret, that’s all.”

Prestimion frowned. He was rumpled and bleary-faced, stale from the long night’s unrest. “Tell him to wait a moment, will you, while I put myself together a little.”

“I could let him know, if you wish, that it would be better for him to return later in the day.”

Dekkeret seemed to be speaking again out there, explaining something to Nilgir Sumanand in low, emphatically stressed phrases. Prestimion choked back his annoyance. This could go on all morning if he didn’t intervene. He strode to the door and pulled it open. Nilgir Sumanand, looking half-asleep, blinked up apologetically at him. Dekkeret stood just behind the older man, looming up like a wall.

“You see, sir,” Nilgir Sumanand said, “he rousted me up and very insistently declared—”

“Yes. I quite understand. It’s not a problem. You can go, Nilgir Sumanand.”

Prestimion beckoned Dekkeret into his suite.

“I very much regret the earliness of the hour, my lord,” Dekkeret began. “But in view of the gravity of the situation and the importance of this new development, I felt that it would be wrong to wait until—”

“Never mind all that, Dekkeret, and get to the point. If I hear one more groveling apology I’ll explode. Just tell me what all this is about.”

“Someone has come to us in the night from the Procurator’s camp. I think you’ll be very interested in what he’s brought us. Very interested indeed, lordship!”

“Ah, will I be, now?” said Prestimion, ashen-voiced. Already he regretted having allowed himself to be burst in upon this way. Dantirya Sambail had sent a message, evidently. An ultimatum, perhaps. Well, whatever it was, it probably could have kept a little longer.

But Dekkeret was throbbing with barely contained excitement; and that, too, made things worse. Suddenly Prestimion felt an almost paralyzing sense of tremendous fatigue. The sleepless night, the strain of the recent weeks, the onslaught of self-doubt and self-accusation that he had lately launched against himself, all were taking their toll. And there was something about Dekkeret’s youthful bubbling exuberance, his awkward coltish eagerness to please, that intensified Prestimion’s own sense of exhaustion. He was still a relatively young man himself; but right now he felt at least as old as Confalume. It was as if Dekkeret, bounding in here full of energy and vigor and hope, had in just these few moments drained him of whatever vitality he still had left.

It would be cruel and foolish, he knew, to dismiss Dekkeret out of hand. And this ostensible message from the Procurator, though it probably was just some mocking screed, was at least worth hearing about. Wearily Prestimion signaled Dekkeret to proceed.

“When we were at Inner Temple, my lord, you told me that you had donned the silver circlet of your mother the Lady, and had looked out into the mind of the world as she does every night. It was like being a god, you said. The circlet permits the Lady to be everywhere on Majipoor in a single moment, is what you told me. And yet, you said, there are limitations to the godhood of the wearer of the circlet. The Lady can enter the mind of a dreamer and take part in his dream, and interpolate certain thoughts of her own, offer guidance, even a degree of solace. But to shape the dream herself, or to create a dream and implant it in a sleeping mind—no. To give commands to the sleeper that must be obeyed—no. Do I have it correctly, my lord?”

Prestimion nodded. He was maintaining his patience through a supreme effort of self-control.

“And what I told you then, sir, is that the device that Venghenar Barjazid used on me in Suvrael is far more powerful than anything that is available to the Lady, and that if he allies himself with Dantirya Sambail, together they will shake the world to pieces. And as we have recently discovered, lordship, Barjazid has reached the Procurator’s camp, and has begun to use his devilish device on Dantirya Sam-bail’s behalf.”

Prestimion offered a second curt nod. “You tell me a great many things I already know, Dekkeret. Where are you going with all this? There’s been a message, you said, from Dantirya Sambail?”

“Oh, no, lordship, I never said that. What has come is not from Dantirya Sambail but from his camp, and it is not a message but a messenger. May I ask him to come in here, my lord? He’s waiting just outside.”

More and more mystifying. Prestimion assented with a perfunctory wave of his hand.

Dekkeret went to the door and called someone in from the hall.

A boy, it was, fifteen or perhaps sixteen years old, slender and hard-eyed and self-possessed. There was something oddly familiar about his features—those thin lips, that narrow jaw. He looked like a street-beggar of some sort, deeply tanned, dressed in little more than tattered rags, his cheeks and forehead marked by the scars of newly healing scratches as though he had been scrambling through brambles not very long before. Dangling from his left hand was a bulging burlap sack.

“My lord,” said Dekkeret, “this is Dinitak Barjazid. Venghenar Barjazid’s son.”

Prestimion made a spluttering sound of astonishment. “If this is some sort of joke, Dekkeret—”

“Not at all, lordship.”

Prestimion stared at the boy, who was looking back at him with a curious expression that seemed to be compounded equally of awe and defiance. And—yes, by the Divine—he was plainly his father’s son! These were the elder Barjazid’s features that Prestimion saw before him. All of Venghenar Barjazid’s savage determination and fiery drive were mirrored in the taut lines of the boy’s face. But that face lacked some key aspects of his father’s. It was insufficiently crafty, Prestimion thought; it did not project the disingenuous subtlety of Venghenar Barjazid; there was no glint of treachery in the boy’s eyes. Time, no doubt, would put those things there. Or perhaps old Barjazid had created an improved model of himself in this boy, one that knew better how to conceal the darkness within.

“Will you explain?” Prestimion said, after a time. “Or shall we just go on standing here like this?”

But there was no rushing Dekkeret, it seemed. He was evidently determined to do this at his own rhythm. “I know this boy well, my lord. I met him for the first time in Suvrael, on that journey I took through the desert, the time when his father amused himself by playing with my mind. And when I seized the dream-stealing machine from the father and said I would bring it—and him—to Castle Mount to show to the Coronal and the Council, it was this boy who urged old Barjazid to cooperate. ‘We should go,’ he said. ‘It is our great moment of opportunity.’ ”

“An opportunity to carry their mischief right into the Castle, eh?”

“No, lordship. Not at all. The old man, my lord, is a rascal. He has nothing but evil on his mind. The boy you see here is something quite different.”

“Is he, now?”

“Let him tell you himself,” said Dekkeret.

Prestimion felt his eyes beginning to sag shut. What he really wanted more than anything was to have these two go away and permit him to get some sleep. But no: no, he must get to the heart of this mystery. He indicated to young Barjazid that he should speak.

“My lord—” the boy began.

He looked toward Prestimion, then to Dekkeret, then to Prestimion again. It was curious, Prestimion thought, how his face changed as he turned from one to the other. For Prestimion he donned a look of deep respect, almost subservience. But it was a desultory and mechanical expression, a subject’s automatic acknowledgment that he was in the presence of the Coronal Lord of Majipoor and nothing more; and Prestimion thought he saw a subtext even of resentment there, a hidden unwillingness to concede full acceptance of the power that the Coronal indeed wielded over him.

When Dinitak Barjazid looked at Dekkeret, though, a glow came into the boy’s eyes that spoke of sheer worship. He seemed mesmerized by Dekkeret’s personal force, his charisma, his vibrant strength. Perhaps it is because they are closer in age, Prestimion thought. He sees me as a member of some senior generation. But it was a distressing demonstration of the erosion of his own youthful vigor that just these few years at the summit of power had brought about.

“My lord,” the young Barjazid was saying, “when my father and I came to the Castle, it was my hope that we could offer the dream-machine to you, that we could enroll ourselves in your service and make ourselves of value. But through some error we were imprisoned instead. This left my father greatly embittered, though I said again and again that it was a mistake.”

Yes, Prestimion thought. And I could tell you whose mistake it was, too.

“Then we escaped. It was through the help of an old friend of my father’s that we did. But the Procurator of Ni-moya’s people were also involved. He has his influence among the Castle guards, you know.” Prestimion exchanged a glance with Dekkeret at that, but said nothing. “And so it was to the Procurator, who seemed to be our only ally, to whom we fled,” the boy continued. “To his camp in the Stoienzar Peninsula. And there we learned that it is the Procurator’s plan to wage war against your lordship and against his majesty the Pontifex, and make himself the master of the world.”

That phrase had a fine resonant sound, Prestimion thought: master of the world. He speaks very well, Prestimion told himself. No doubt the boy’s been rehearsing this little speech for weeks.

But it was a struggle to pay attention. Another wave of weariness had come over him. He realized that he had begun rocking rhythmically back and forth on his feet in an effort to keep himself awake.

—"My lord?” the boy said. “Are you not well, my lord?”

“Just a little tired, is all,” he said. Mustering all his self-control, he brought himself up toward something close to wakefulness again. It was very shrewd of the boy to have noticed, in the midst of his own narrative, that I was flagging, Prestimion thought. He poured a drink of water for himself. “How old did you say you were, boy?”

“Sixteen next month, sir.”

“Sixteen next month. Interesting. All right, go on. Dantirya Sambail wants to be master of the world, you were saying.”

“I said to my father when we heard that, ‘There is no future for us in this place. We will only find trouble here.’ And also I said to him, ‘We should not be part of this rebellion. The Coronal will destroy this man Dantirya Sam-bail, and we will be destroyed along with him.’ But my father is full of anger and bitterness. It is not that he is an evil man so much as he is an angry one. His soul is full of hatred. I could not tell you why that is. When I said that we should leave the camp of Dantirya Sambail, he struck me.”

“Struck you?”

Prestimion could see the fury in the boy’s eyes, even now.

“Indeed, my lord. Lashed out at me the way you might lash out at a beast that had nipped at your foot. Told me I was a fool and a child; told me I was incapable of seeing where our true advantage lay; told me—well, no matter what he told me, my lord. It was nothing very pretty. That night I left the Procurator’s camp and slipped away through the jungle.” Again the boy glanced at Dekkeret, that same worshipful glance. “I had heard, my lord, that Prince Dekkeret was in Stoien city. I decided that I would go to Prince Dekkeret and enroll in his service.”

“In his service,” Prestimion said. “Not mine, but his, eh? How flattering that must sound to you, Dekkeret. Prince Dekkeret, I should say. Since everyone seems to think you’re a prince, I suppose I’ll have to make you one when we get back to the Castle, won’t I?”

A look of shock appeared on Dekkeret’s usually stolid face. “My lord, I have never aspired—”

“No. No. Forgive my sarcasm, Dekkeret.” I must be very tired indeed, Prestimion thought, to be saying such things as that. Once more he glanced toward Dinitak Barjazid. “And so. To continue. You made your way through the jungle—”

“Yes, my lord. It is not a pleasant journey, my lord. But it was one that I had to make.—Shall I show it to him now, Prince Dekkeret?” he asked, looking aside.

“Show it, yes.”

The boy reached down and scooped up the burlap sack, which had been lying at his feet all this while. He drew from it an intricate circular object fashioned of rods and wires of several different metals delicately woven together, gold and silver and copper and perhaps one or two more, with a series of glittering inlaid stones and crystals, sapphire and serpentine and emerald and what looked like hematite, affixed along its inner surface within an ivory frame. It had something of the look of a royal crown, or perhaps some talismanic instrument of magery, on the order of a rohilla, though much larger. But what it actually was, Prestimion saw, was a mechanism of some sort.

“This,” the boy said proudly, holding the thing forth for Prestimion’s inspection, “is one of the three working models of the dream-machine. I took it from my father’s tent in the jungle and brought it safely here. And I am willing to show you how to use it in your war against the rebels.”

The coolly delivered statement struck Prestimion like a bolt from on high.

“May I see it?” he asked, when he had regained a little of his steadiness.

“Of course, my lord.”

He placed it in Prestimion’s hands. It was a beautiful gleaming thing of complex and elegant design, scarcely heavier than a feather, that seemed almost to be throbbing with the force of the power locked up within it.

Prestimion realized that this was not the first time he had seen something like this. During the civil war, when they were camped in the Marraitis meadowlands west of the Jhelum River on the eve of the great battle that soon would be fought there, he had gone into the tent of the Vroon Thalnap Zelifor and observed him working over an object of somewhat similar design. It was, the Vroon had explained, a device that would enable him when it was perfected to amplify the waves coming from the minds of others, and read their inmost thoughts, and place thoughts of his own into their heads. In time he had indeed perfected it, and eventually it had fallen into the hands of Venghenar Barjazid, and now—now—

Abruptly Prestimion lifted the instrument toward his own forehead.

“My lord, no!” the young Barjazid cried.

“No? Why is that?”

“You must have the training, first. There is tremendous strength in the instrument that you hold. You’ll injure yourself, my lord, if you simply put it to your head like that.”

“Ah. Perhaps so.” He handed the thing back to the boy as though it were about to explode.

Could it be, he wondered, that this youngster had actually brought him the one weapon that might give him hope of countering the uprising that confronted him?

To Dekkeret he said, “What do we have here, do you think? Is this boy to be trusted? Or is it all some new plot of Dantirya Sambail’s to send him here among us?”

“Trust him, my lord,” Dekkeret said. “Oh, I beg you, Lord Prestimion: trust him!”

12

Travelers returning to Castle Mount from Stoien began their eastward journey by going up along the coast to Treymone, where they could take a boat up the River Trey as far as it was navigable. Then it was necessary to swing to the north to avoid the grim desert that surrounded the ruins of the ancient Metamorph capital of Velalisier. The route led up into the broad, fertile valley of the River Iyann, which they would traverse as far as Three Rivers, where the Iyann took off on its northward journey. There one turned slightly to the south again, entering the grassy plain known as the Vale of Gloyn, and crossed west-central Alhanroel to the midlands mercantile center of Sisivondal, where the main highway to the Mount could be found. From there it was a straight path across the heart of the continent to the foothills of the mighty peak.

Prestimion had provided Varaile and Akbalik with a floater of the most capacious sort for their homeward journey to the capital. They rode in cushioned comfort while platoons of tireless Skandar drivers guided the big swift vehicles as they hovered just above the bed of the highway. An armed escort of Skandar troops occupying half a dozen armor-shelled military floaters accompanied them, three vehicles preceding theirs and three traveling aft, as safeguards against any disturbances that the convoy might encounter. Not that any sane man would dare to lift his hand against the Coronal’s consort, but sanity was beginning to be a commodity in short supply in these districts, and Prestimion intended to take no chances. Again and again, as the floaters halted briefly for supplies in some town or village along the way, Varaile saw wild, distorted faces peering at her from the roadside, and heard the harsh cackling cries of the demented. The Skandars, though, kept all these troubled folk at a safe distance.

They were beyond Gloyn now, moving along through a series of unfamiliar places with such names as Drone, Hun-zimar, Gannamunda. So far Varaile had had a fairly easy time of the journey. She had expected much more discomfort, especially as the passing days brought her ever closer to the hour when the new Prince Taradath would enter the world. But aside from the growing heaviness of her body, the sagging weight of her swelling belly, the occasional throbbings in her legs, the pregnancy had little effect on her well-being. Varaile had never given much thought to motherhood—she had not even had any lovers, before Prestimion had come like a whirlwind into her life and swept her away—but she was tall and strong and young, and she could see now that she was going to withstand whatever stresses were involved in childbirth without serious challenge.

Akbalik, though—it was clear to Varaile that he was finding the trip east very much of an ordeal.

His infected leg seemed to be getting worse. He said nothing about it to her, of course, not a word of complaint. But his forehead glistened with sweat much of the time, now, and his face was flushed as though he suffered from a constant fever. Now and again she would catch him biting his lower lip to hold back pain, or he would turn away from her and let a stifled groan escape his lips while she pretended not to notice. It was important to Akbalik, Varaile saw, to maintain a pose of good health, or at least of steady recovery. But it was easy enough to tell that all that was a mere facade.

How sick was he, really? Could his life be in danger, perhaps?

Varaile knew what high regard Prestimion had for Akbalik. He was a bulwark of the throne. It was possible, even, that Prestimion saw Akbalik as a likely choice for Coronal in case anything should happen to old Confalume and it became necessary for Prestimion to move along to the senior throne. “A Coronal has to keep the succession in mind all the time,” Prestimion had said to her more than once. “At any moment he can find himself transformed into a Pontifex—and it’ll go badly for the world if there’s no one ready to take over for him at the Castle.”

If Prestimion had already selected the man he would call upon in such an eventuality, he had never said a thing about it to her. Coronals did not like to talk about such matters, apparently—not even with their wives. But she saw already that Septach Melayn, though Prestimion loved him more than any other man in the world, was too whimsical a person to entrust with the throne, and Gialaurys, Prestimion’s other dear great friend, was too credulous and slow.

Who, then? Navigorn? A strong man, but troubled greatly by what looked very much like the onset of the madness. There was Dekkeret, of course: full of promise and ability and fervor. But he was ten years too young for a Coronal’s high responsibilities. Very likely he would be horrified if Prestimion were to turn to him tomorrow and offer him the starburst crown.

Which left only Akbalik, really. To lose Akbalik to the stupid bite of a vicious little Stoienzar crab, then, would be a terrible blow to all of Prestimion’s plans. Especially in a challenging time like this, when troubles seemed to sprout like mushrooms on every side.

We will be in Sisivondal before long, Varaile thought. That was an important city: her father had owned warehouses there, she remembered, and a bank, and a meat packaging company. Surely there would be competent doctors in a city like that. Would it be possible to persuade Akbalik to go to one of them for treatment? It would have to be handled very delicately. “Akbalik was so wonderfully sensible that we all used to go to him for advice about our problems,” Prestimion had told her. “But the wound has changed him. He’s turned touchy and strange. You have to be very careful not to offend him, now.” But certainly she had legitimate reasons of her own now for wanting to stop in Sisivondal for a medical checkup; and would it greatly upset him, she wondered, if she were to suggest in a mild sort of way that he might just as well get that leg of his looked at too, while they were there?

She would try it. She had to.

Sisivondal, though, was still many hundreds of miles away. It was too soon to bring the subject up.

They sat side by side in silence, watching for hour after hour as the flat monotonous landscape of west central Alhanroel’s dusty drylands flowed past their windows.

“Can you tell me if any battles were fought here in the civil war?” Varaile asked him, finally, purely for the sake of having some sort of conversation at all.

Akbalik looked at her strangely. “How would I know, milady?”

“I thought—well—”

“That I fought in it? I suppose I did, milady. Many of us did. But no memory of it remains to me. You understand why that is, do you not?”

Fresh perspiration had broken out on his brow and cheeks. His deep-set gray eyes, nearly always bloodshot now, took on a haunted look. Varaile regretted having said anything at all.

“I know what the mages did at Thegomar Edge, yes,” she said. “But—listen, Akbalik, if talking about the war is something painful for you—”

He seemed scarcely to have heard her. “As I understand it, there were no engagements close by here,” he said, looking not at her but at the scene outside, a parched brown landscape punctuated by occasional sparse clumps of gray-green trees that grew in strange spiral coils. “There was a battle northwest of here, at the reservoir on the Iyann. And something by the Jhelum, off to the south, and one in Arkilon plain, I think Prestimion said. And of course the one at Thegomar Edge, which is far off to the southeast. But the war bypassed this region, so I do believe.” Akbalik turned suddenly in his seat to stare at her with wild-eyed intensity.

“You know, do you not, milady, that I fought against Lord Prestimion in the war? ”

Varaile would not have been more startled if he had revealed himself just then to be a Shapeshifter. “No,” she said, with as much control as she could muster. “No, I had no idea! You were on Korsibar’s side? But how can that be, Akbalik? Prestimion thinks the world of you, you know!”

“And I of him, milady. But even so, I believe I was on the other side during the rebellion.”

“You only believe that you were? You aren’t sure?”

Something that could have been a spasm of pain passed across his face. He tried to turn it into a wry smile. “I told you, no memory of the war remains to me, or to any of us, except for Prestimion and Septach Melayn and Gialaurys. But I was at the Castle when the war broke out, that much I know. Even though the manner of Korsibar’s coming to the throne would have to have been unusual and irregular, I still would have regarded him, I think, as the true Coronal, simply because he had been anointed and crowned. So if I had been asked to fight on his behalf—and certainly Korsibar would have asked me—I would have done so. Korsibar was at the Castle, and Prestimion was off in the provinces, raising armies from the local people. Most of the Castle princes would necessarily have served as officers in what would have been regarded as the legitimate royal army. I know that Navigorn did. And I, being Prince Serithorn’s nephew, would surely not have defied my powerful uncle by going off to join Prestimion.”

Varaile’s head was swimming. “Serithorn was on Korsibar’s side too?”

“You ask me about things I no longer remember, lady. But yes, I think he was, at least some of the time. It was a very complicated period. It was not easy to know who was on which side, much of the time.”

He half-rose, suddenly, wincing.

“Akbalik, are you all right?”

“It’s nothing, milady. Nothing. The healing process—a little painful, sometimes—” Akbalik managed another unconvincing smile. “Let us finish with the war, shall we?—Do you see, now, why Lord Prestimion wiped it all from our minds? It was the wisest thing. I would rather be his friend unto death than his former enemy; and now I have no recollection of ever having been his enemy, if indeed I ever was. Nor has Navigorn. Septach Melayn has told me that Navigorn was Korsibar’s most important general; but all that is forgotten, and Prestimion trusts him implicitly in all things. The war is gone from us. Therefore the war can never be a factor in our dealings with one another. And therefore—”

Another groan came from him now, one that he was altogether unable to conceal. Akbalik’s eyes rolled wildly in his head, and sweat seemed to burst from his every pore, coating his face with a bright sheen. He started to rise, spun about, fell back against the cushion of his seat, shivering convulsively.

“Akbalik—Akbalik!”

“Milady,” he murmured. But he seemed lost in delirium, suddenly. “The leg—I don’t know—it—it—”

She seized a pitcher of water, poured some for him, forced the glass between his lips. He gulped it and nodded faintly for more. Then he closed his eyes. For a moment Varaile thought he had died; but no, no, he still was breathing. A very sick man, though. Very sick. She dipped a cloth in the water and mopped his burning forehead with it.

Then, hastening to the fore cabin, she rapped on the frame of the door to get the driver’s attention. The driver, a brown-furred Skandar named Varthan Gutarz, who wore amulets of some Skandar cult around the meaty biceps of three of his four arms, was hunched over the floater’s controls, but he looked up quickly.

“Milady?”

“How long before we’re in Sisivondal?”

The Skandar glanced at the instruments. “Six hours, maybe, milady.”

“Get us there in four. And when you do, head straight for the biggest hospital in town. Prince Akbalik is seriously ill.”

Sisivondal appeared to be a thousand miles of outskirts. The flat dry central plain went on and on, practically treeless, now, the emptiness broken only by little clusters of tin-roofed shacks, then more emptiness, then another small group of shacks, perhaps twice as many as before, and then emptiness, emptiness, emptiness, with some scattered warehouses and repair shops after that. And gradually the outskirts coalesced into suburbs, and then into a city, a city of great size.

And great ugliness. Varaile had seen few ugly places in her recent travels about the world, but Sisivondal was somber indeed, a commercial city with no beauty of any sort. Many major roads met here. Much of the merchandise being shipped from Alaisor port to Castle Mount or to the cities of northern Alhanroel had to pass through Sisivondal. It was a starkly functional city, mile after mile of gigantic warehouses fronting broad plain boulevards. Even the plants of Sisivondal were dull and utilitarian: stubby purple-leaved camaganda palms that could stand up easily to the interminable months of Sisivondal’s long rainless season, which lasted most of the year, and massive lumma-lummas, which could be mistaken for big gray rocks by the casual eye, and the tough prickly rosettes of garavedas, which took a whole century to produce the tall black spike that bore their flowers.

It looked as though the boulevard that had brought them in from the west would take them straight to the center of town. Varaile saw now that the incoming roads were like the spokes of a great wheel, linked by circular avenues that diminished in sweep as they moved inward. The public buildings would be at the center. There had to be a major hospital among them.

Akbalik was dying. She was certain of that now.

He was only intermittently conscious. Very little of what he said made sense. He had one lucid moment in which he opened his eyes and said to her that the swamp-crab’s poison must finally have reached his heart; but the rest of the time he babbled of things that she could not comprehend, jumbled accounts of tournaments and duels, hunting trips, even fist-fights—boyhood memories, perhaps. Sometimes she heard the name of Prestimion, or that of Septach Melayn, or even Korsibar’s. That was odd, that he would be speaking of Korsibar. But her father had done the same in the throes of his madness, she reminded herself.

The hospital, at last. To her dismay Varaile found that the chief doctor was a Ghayrog, a terribly alien thing to encounter at such a time. He was dour-faced and aloof, remarkably unimpressed at finding the wife of the Coronal standing before him and urging him to drop everything he might be doing so that he could look after the nephew of Prince Serithorn.

The forked reptilian tongue moved in and out with disconcerting rapidity. The gray-green reptilian eyes displayed little compassion. The calm and measured voice might have been that of a machine. “You come at a very difficult moment, milady. The operating rooms are all in use now. We have been overwhelmed with all manner of unusual problems here, which—”

Varaile cut him off. “I’m sure that that’s so. But have you heard of Prince Serithorn of Samivole, doctor? By the divine, have you heard the name of Lord Prestimion? This man is Serithorn’s nephew. He is a member of the Coronal’s inner circle. He needs immediate treatment.”

“The Messenger of the Mysteries is among us today, milady. I will ask him to intercede with the gods of the city on behalf of this man.” And the Ghayrog beckoned to a mysterious, sinister figure in the hallway, a man who wore a strange wooden mask, that of a yellow-eyed hound with long pointed ears.

She felt a surge of fury. The gods of the city? By the Divine, what was the creature talking about? “A magus, you mean? No, doctor, not a magus. Medical help is what we came here for.”

“The Messenger of the Mysteries—”

“Can bring his message to someone else. You will place Prince Akbalik in your care this moment, doctor, or I tell you, and I swear it by whatever god you may happen to believe in, that I will have Lord Prestimion shut this hospital and transfer every member of its staff to the back end of Suvrael. Is that clear enough?” She snapped her fingers at one of her Skandar escorts. “Mikzin Hrosz, I want you to go through this place and get the name of every doctor in it, and everyone else’s name, too, down to the Liimen who swab down the operating tables. And then—”

But the recalcitrant Ghayrog had had enough. He was giving orders of his own, now; and suddenly there was a gurney to place Akbalik on, suddenly there were earnest-faced young interns, Ghayrogs and humans both, gathered around it. They wheeled Akbalik away. The Messenger of the Mysteries marched along beside the gurney as though it was the plan to give him the benefit not only of conventional medical treatment but also of the fantastic religious cult that seemed to have taken hold of this city.

Varaile herself was offered a comfortable room in which to wait. But she did not have to wait long. The Ghayrog doctor returned soon. His mien was as frosty as ever; but when he spoke there was a gentleness in his tone that had not been there before. “What I was trying to tell you, milady, was simply that no useful purpose would be served in interrupting the care of some other seriously ill patient to look after Prince Akbalik, because I could see immediately that the prince’s condition was already so critical that—that—”

“That he’s dead?” she cried. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

But she could read the answer in his face even before he managed to speak the words.

13

Not even in the most unfettered dreams of his boyhood had Dekkeret ever imagined himself in the midst of a scene such as this. A palatial royal suite atop a towering building in Stoien city, halfway across the world from his native city of Normork on Castle Mount. Standing just to his right: the Coronal Lord of Majipoor, Prestimion of Muldemar, with a dark and brooding expression on his face. Behind the Coronal his Su-Suheris sorcerer, Maundigand-Klimd, on whom he seemed to rely for advice in all things. On his other side, the sublime Lady of the Isle of Sleep, the Princess Therissa, with the silver circlet of her office around her brow. Across the room, the boy Dinitak Barjazid of Suvrael, holding in his hands the sinister thought-controlling helmet that he had stolen from his treacherous father in the rebel camp.

The fate of the world was in the hands of these people. And somehow Dekkeret of Normork found himself in their midst as everything unfolded. No, not even in a dream would he have indulged in such a fantasy. Nevertheless, here he was. Here he was.

“Let me see that thing again, boy,” the Princess Therissa said to Dinitak Barjazid.

He brought the helmet to her. His hands trembled as he put it in hers. He too, Dekkeret thought, is astonished to find himself in the thick of events such as these.

She had already examined it extensively, its metallic wires and its crystal and ivory attachments. And she and the boy had had a long discussion, utterly incomprehensible to Dekkeret and evidently to the Coronal as well, of its technical aspects.

The device was beautiful, in its sinister way. It reminded Dekkeret of some of the implements of sorcery that that deranged magus had destroyed, just before jumping overboard himself, during the riverboat journey that he and Akbalik had made from Piliplok to Ni-moya.

But this helmet was a scientific instrument, not any kind of magical apparatus at all. Perhaps that made it all the more frightening. Dekkeret did not have much faith in the workings of magic, though he was well aware that some mages—not all—had genuine powers. Most of what the sorcerers did, he was convinced, was fraud and charlatanry designed to awe the credulous. Maundigand-Klimd himself had said as much more than once. But this helmet was something other than a charlatan’s gimcrack. Dekkeret had heard the Lady and Dinitak Barjazid speaking of the instrument not in terms of the demons one could invoke through it by uttering certain spells, but in terms of its ability to amplify and transmit brain-waves by electrical means. That did not sound like sorcery to him. And he knew that the Barjazid helmet worked. He had felt its terrible power himself.

The Lady put her own circlet aside and held the helmet above her head.

Prestimion said, “Mother, do you think you should?”

She smiled. “I’ve had more than a little experience with devices of this sort, Prestimion. And Dinitak has explained the basic principles of this one to me:”

She donned it. Touched the controls, made small adjustments.

Dekkeret could hardly bear to watch as she allowed the power of the device to enter her. She was, he thought, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, ageless, glorious, altogether superb. Her regal grace of bearing, her serene features, her splendid lustrous black hair, her elegantly simple robe with that astonishing purple-red jewel gleaming in its golden hoop on her bosom—oh, truly she was the queen of the world! What if this monstrous machine of the Bar-jazids were to damage her mind as it lay upon her brow? What if she were to cry out and turn pale before them, and crumple and fall?

She did not cry out. She did not fall. She stood as erect as ever, utterly motionless, transfixed by whatever she was experiencing: transported, it would seem, to some far-off realm.

There was no indication that the helmet was harming her. But a frown appeared on her smooth white forehead as the moments went on, and her lips tightened and turned downward in a grim expression that Dekkeret had never seen on her face before, and when, after what had seemed to him like an eternity, she finally raised the helmet from her brow and handed it back to Dinitak, there was the barest hint of a tremor in her fingers.

“Extraordinary,” she said. Her voice sounded deeper than usual, almost hoarse. She pointed to her circlet, lying before her on a table. “It makes this seem like a toy.”

“What was it like, mother? Can you describe it?” Prestimion asked.

“You would have to put it on yourself to understand. And you are far from ready for that.” Her gaze came to rest on young Barjazid. “I felt your father’s presence. I touched his mind with mine.” That was all she seemed to want to say about her contact with the elder Barjazid; but Dinitak’s face grew stern and dark as though he could understand precisely what she must have felt. Turning again to Prestimion, she added, “I encountered the Procurator’s mind too. He is a demon, that man.”

“You can actually identify individual minds, your worship?” Dekkeret asked.

“Those two stood out like beacons,” the Lady replied. “But yes, yes, I think I could find others, with some practice. I sensed the emanations of Septach Melayn farther to the east—I do think it was he I touched—and perhaps Gialaurys, or it might have been Navigorn. They are moving toward him through the most terrible of jungles.”

“What of my wife? And Akbalik?”

The Lady Therissa shook her head. “I made no attempt to rove as far from here as they must be by now.” And, to Dinitak: “I found your father so easily because he was wearing the helmet too. When I cast my mind forth to see what I could find, the first thing I felt was the mental broadcast coming from him. The one he has is more powerful than this, isn’t it, boy?”

“It is, ma’am, yes. A later model. I didn’t dare try to take it: it never leaves his side.”

“He’s employing it to spread the madness, just as we feared. I saw how easily that can be done. The spell of forgetfulness that you had the mages cast at the end of the war, Prestimion: just as you said, it created places of impairment in many minds, structural weaknesses, easily breached. Not much stress is needed to break through them. And if this man, using his helmet, simply touches such people—”

A sound that seemed almost to be one of pain came from Prestimion. “Mother, this has to be stopped!”

His anguish was profound. Dekkeret stared at him in horror.

“That may not be so simple,” said Maundigand-Klimd somberly. “He is using the helmet to defend himself and his master against attack, is he not, Lady Therissa?”

“Yes. You sensed that, didn’t you? He’s setting up some kind of shield that made it difficult for me to make contact with him. Even when I did at last penetrate it, I met with great murkiness. And could not tell you, within five hundred miles, where his camp is located.”

“Of course you couldn’t,” Prestimion said. “There’s every likelihood that Barjazid’s using the helmet to keep Dantirya Sambail’s camp concealed from attackers. Akbalik spoke of that. ‘A cloud of unknowingness,’ he called it. He thought the Procurator might be using a magus to create it for him with some sort of incantation. But then, when I told him Dekkeret’s tale of his encounter with Barjazid and his helmet in Suvrael, Akbalik suggested that Dantirya Sam-bail’s constant disappearances were probably Barjazid’s work.”

“You may be certain of it, my lord,” said Dinitak. “It is no difficult thing to use the helmet to cast this cloud of unknowingness, as you term it, over someone’s mind. I could do it myself. I could stand right here and you would think I had vanished before your eyes.”

Prestimion turned toward the boy. “Do you think,” he said, “that one of these helmets could be used to counteract the power of another?”

“That should be possible, my lord. It would not be an easy thing—my father is highly adept with these devices, and he is always a dangerous opponent—but yes, I think it can be done.”

“Well, then. The answer to our problem’s obvious. We use the helmet we have here for a counterstrike. If all goes well for us, we remove Barjazid and his device from the equation, and the spreading of the madness is ended, and Septach Melayn and Gialaurys will be able to find and attack Dantirya Sambail. What do you say, mother? Is that something you think you could do?”

The Lady Therissa met her son’s gaze levelly. And said in a flat calm tone without any warmth in it at all, “I’m accustomed to using my powers for healing, Prestimion. Not for making war. Not for launching attacks on people—even someone like this man Barjazid. Or Dantirya Sambail.”

Her unexpected response obviously jarred Prestimion badly. His eyes flashed amazement and color flared in his cheeks. He regained his poise quickly, though, and said, “Oh, mother, you mustn’t think of it as an attack! Or at least try to see it simply as a counterattack. They are the aggressors. What would you be doing, if not defending innocent people against their attacks?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.” But the Lady sounded unconvinced. A certain darkening of her brow revealed the depths of the conflict within her. “You also need to bear in mind, Prestimion , that I barely know how to use this thing. Before we can even think of using it as you suggest, I’d need to gain more skill with it—to master its subtleties, to get a deeper understanding of its power and range. All that will take time. Assuming that I agree to do such a thing at all. And I am by no means sure that I will.”

The look of exasperation on Prestimion’s face intensified. “Time? We have no time! There are two armies of ours in that horrible jungle at this very moment. How long do you think I can keep them sitting there, mother? And the madness, spreading hour by hour at that man’s hands—no. No. We need to strike right away. You have to do it, mother!”

The Lady did not reply. She enfolded herself in her regal grandeur and calmly regarded her son in silence—a silence that was itself an answer, Dekkeret thought. The temperature in the room seemed to approach the freezing point. A quarrel between the Coronal and the Lady of the Isle: what an extraordinary thing that was to find oneself witnessing!

Then the high, clear voice of Dinitak Barjazid broke through the frosty stillness: “I could do it, my lord, if the Lady won’t. I could. I know I could.”

“You would strike out against your own father?” Dekkeret cried at once, amazed.

The boy looked at him scornfully, as though Dekkeret had said something impossibly naive. “Oh, Prince Dekkeret, why not? If he chooses to make himself the enemy of all the world, surely he’s my enemy as well. Why did I bring this helmet here, if not to offer it for use against him? Why did I flee from him at all?” His eyes were shining. His whole face was aflame with youthful zeal. “I am here to serve, Prince Dekkeret. In any way that I can.”

Prestimion was staring at him too, Dekkeret realized.

He understood suddenly that young Barjazid had put him in a precarious position. He was the one who had brought the boy to Prestimion, after all. He was the one who had urged the Coronal to have faith in him. From the moment Dekkeret had wrested the dream-stealing helmet out of the elder Barjazid’s grasp in Suvrael, Dinitak had taken the position with his father that it would be wise for them to go with Dekkeret to Castle Mount and demonstrate the power of their device to Lord Prestimion.

But suppose what was happening now was—as Prestimion had proposed at the time of Dinitak’s startling defection to his side in Stoien city—simply part of some intricately treacherous scheme of Dantirya Sambail’s? What if the boy, wearing the helmet that he claimed to have brought here for the sake of putting it at the Coronal’s service, were to join forces across these thousands of miles with his father in Stoienzar, who was wearing one of the others? Together they would create an invulnerable force.

It was a rash gamble, Dekkeret thought. They were staking everything on a ragged youngster in whose veins ran the blood of a man for whom betrayal and deceit were as natural as breathing. Could they risk it?

And yet—even so—

“What do you say, Dekkeret?” the Coronal asked. “Shall we accept the boy’s offer?”

Dekkeret looked past Prestimion toward the aloof and enigmatic figure of Maundigand-Klimd, who had remained on the periphery of the discussion throughout.

Help me, he begged the Su-Suheris, speaking only with his eyes. I am beyond my depth here. Help me. Help me.

Did Maundigand-Klimd understand?

Yes. Yes. The four green eyes of the magus were looking directly into his own. From the left head came the slightest of nods. Then a second one, from the right. And then again, unmistakably, both heads nodding at once.

I thank you, Maundigand-Klimd. With all my heart.

In a bold voice Dekkeret said, “I told you when he first came here that we should trust him, my lord. I still believe that we should.”

“So be it, then,” Prestimion said immediately. Plainly he had already made the same choice. He glanced toward young Barjazid. “We’ll meet again later today,” he told the boy, “to discuss how to go about making our counterstrike.” Then, to the Princess Therissa: “Mother, you are excused from attending. I won’t ask you to take part in this task, since you find it so disagreeable, though I still have other work for you.” And finally, speaking this time to Dekkeret and Dinitak and Maundigand-Klimd together: “You may go, now, all of you. I want to have a few minutes alone with my mother.”

From a cabinet below the window Prestimion took a flask of the wine of Muldemar, a rare vintage that he had brought with him to Stoien from the Castle, and poured it liberally for them. They saluted each other solemnly.

“I ask your pardon, mother,” he said, when they had had a few sips and put their bowls down. “It pained me very much to put you into such a difficult position in front of the others.”

“I took no offense. You are the Coronal Lord, Prestimion: you are responsible for the welfare of the world. These men threaten us all, and you need to take action against them. I’m willing to do all that I can to help you in that. But you asked something of me that I’m not capable of giving.”

“For which I’m sorry. I should have seen that before I spoke. For you to employ your training and powers in order to commit an act of aggression—”

“You understand it now,” she said, and smiled, and reached across to take his hand. She kissed it lightly, the merest brush of her lips against his skin. “But the attempt must be made, with or without me. Will the boy succeed in besting his father, I wonder? Just from my own brief contact with his mind, I can see how formidable he is. And how evil.”

“If at the very least Dinitak can hamper his father somewhat, that will help. An unexpected jab that weakens his guard—a distraction—a diversion—” Prestimion shrugged. “Well, we’ll see soon enough.” He picked up the Lady’s silver circlet, lying where she had left it on the table. The tingling sensation that heralded its power immediately manifested itself to him. “You need to give me further training in this,” he said. “And I’ll want to learn how to use the Barjazid helmet also. If I’m required to sit here far behind the battle lines, as everyone seems to insist, I want to be able to take whatever part in the struggle I possibly can, even at this distance.”

“I can help you with that.”

“Will you? The Barjazid device too?”

“Mastering it won’t be easy for you. To use it is to ride the lightning. But yes, Prestimion—yes—I’ll give you all the assistance I can. Which means I must learn to master the thing myself, I suppose. What wine is this? It’s splendid stuff.”

He laughed. “You don’t recognize it? It comes from our own cellars, mother!”

She drank again, savoring the wine more closely this time, and asked him to fill her bowl once more.

“Gladly,” he said. And then, after a little while: “Take up your circlet once again, if you will, mother. Cast your mind far afield for me. There are things I need to know. Tell me how my army fares in the Stoienzar jungles, and find Varaile for me as she travels eastward, and my poor suffering Akbalik.”

“Yes. Of course.” She donned the slender silver band and closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them again Prestimion saw that she had slipped into the trance-state through which the wearer of the circlet was able to rove freely through the world. She seemed unaware of his presence entirely. He scarcely dared breathe. She was gone a long time; and then that far look, that look of absence, went from her eyes and she was herself again.

But she was silent. “Well?” Prestimion said, when he could wait no longer. “What did you see, mother?”

“It was Septach Melayn I encountered first. What a dear man he is, ever charming, ever elegant and graceful! And so deeply devoted to you.”

“How does he fare, then?”

“I found him restless and troubled. He moves on and on through the jungle. But the enemy is nowhere to be found. His scouts come back again and again with reports of the Procurator’s camp, but when the full army goes to the place, there is no one there. And apparently never was.”

“The cloud of unknowingness,” Prestimion said. “With young Barjazid’s aid we’ll help him overcome that.—And Varaile, and Akbalik?”

“They are far from here by now, are they not, well beyond the midpoint of the continent?”

“I certainly hope so. But crossing such a distance is no great task for you, is it?”

“No,” she said, and returned to her trance. This time, when she emerged from it, her jaw was tightly set and her eyes looked alarmingly grim. Again she was maddeningly slow to speak. Evidently it took her some time to collect herself after these voyages.

“Is something the matter?” he burst out finally. “With Varaile? The baby?”

“No,” she said. “All is well with your wife and the child she carries.—Your friend Akbalik, though—”

“His condition’s grown worse, has it?”

She paused just a moment. “His suffering is over, Prestimion .”

The quiet words hit with savage impact. For an instant Prestimion was almost stunned by them. Then, gradually recovering, he said quietly, “I sent him to his death when I let him go into that jungle. Not the first good man whose life was shortened on my account. Not the last, I fear.—I thought he might be Coronal after me, mother. That was how much regard I had for him.”

“I know you loved him. I regret bringing you such tidings.”

“I asked for them, mother.”

She nodded. “There is more trouble, I think, in another quarter. I had only the barest suggestion of it as I cast my mind outward. Let me look again.”

A third time she entered trance. Prestimion drained his wine-bowl and waited. This time when she came forth he threw no impatient questions at her.

“Yes,” she said. “So I thought. There is a great fleet gathered on the coast of Zimroel, Prestimion. An armada, in truth. Scores of ships, perhaps more than a hundred, waiting at sea off Piliplok for Dantirya Sambail to give them the order to sail.”

“So that’s it! He’s quietly been assembling an invasion force all this time, and now it’s on the way! But how strange, mother, that it was able to come together unobserved, unreported—”

“I had the greatest difficulty in detecting it. It moves as though under cover of perpetual night, even in daytime.”

“Of course. The cloud of unknowingness again! Which has hidden not just the Procurator from us, but an entire navy!” Prestimion rose. To his great surprise he felt a curious kind of tranquility stealing over him. The news was bad, most of it, but at least he had heard the worst of it now. “So be it,” he said. “We know what kind of enemy we face, at any rate. We’d better get down to the job of dealing with him, eh, mother?”

“Darkness is coming on,” Navigorn said. “Shall we make camp here, do you think?”

“Why not?” said Septach Melayn. “It’s as bad a place as any, isn’t it?”

And worse than some, he thought. It was a pity that young Dekkeret was not along on this expedition: if he still had the taste for penitence and punishment that had driven him to undertake his journey to Suvrael, he would find these jungles ideal for additional self-flagellation purposes. There could be few regions in the world less hospitable than the southern Stoienzar.

They had seen an endless procession of hideosities in their westward journey through the peninsula. Trees that sprouted and grew and died all in one day—springing out of the ground at dawn, rising to a height of thirty feet by noon, unfolding ugly black flowers then that gave off pungent noxious fumes, within another hour producing swollen ripe fruit of the most intensely lethal sort, and finally perishing of their own miserable poisonous nature by sunset. Purple crabs as big as houses that came rumbling up out their hiding-places in the sandy ground right under your nose, clacking murderous claws sharp as scimitars. Black snails that spit red acid at your ankles. And the damnable vile sawpalms everywhere, the foul manganozas, gleefully waving their savage fronds at you as though daring you to come near their impenetrable and impassable thickets.

This campsite of Navigorn’s, now: a broad, dusty gray beach of sharp-edged gravel along the banks of a dry gravelly river. That was perfect, thought Septach Melayn. A river that seemed to be altogether without water, that offered the eye nothing but a long barren expanse of small broken stones. There had to be water somewhere beneath its rocky bed, though, for if one stood and watched for a time one could see that the pebbles were in steady slow movement, as though they were being dragged sluggishly along the river’s course by the force of an underground stream flowing deep down below. To while away the time, he thought, you could stand beside it and fish for precious stones, trying to spy the occasional emerald or ruby or whatever, borne along like a brightly glittering fish through all the dreary slow-moving debris. But he suspected you could wait here for fifty thousand years before you found anything worth finding. Or forever, perhaps.

Gialaurys stepped from his floater and came toward them. “Are we going to make our camp in this place?”

“Have you seen any better site?”

“There’s no water here.”

“But also no manganozas and no swamp-crabs,” Navigorn said. “I could do with a night’s respite from those. And in the morning we can go straight on toward the Procurator’s camp.”

Gialaurys laughed harshly and spat.

“No,” said Navigorn. “This time we’re actually going to find it. I have a feeling that we will.”

“Yes,” Septach Melayn said. “Of course we will.”

He sauntered away from them and found a seat on a saddle-shaped boulder by the river’s edge. Scaly many-legged things the size of his hand were rummaging for provender through the topmost level of the gravel, burrowing down to seize smaller creatures lurking below, then coming up to feed at the surface: bugs of some sort, he thought, or crustaceans, or maybe they were the air-breathing fishes of this dry river. Fishes with legs would fit well with a river that had no water. One of them clambered up atop the gravel and peered at him out of half a dozen bright, beady eyes as though it might be contemplating making a run at his ankle to sample his flavor. Everything wanted to bite you in the Stoienzar, even the plants. Septach Melayn shied a rock at the thing, not making any serious attempt to hit it, and it scrabbled out of sight.

For all the buoyancy of his resilient nature, this place was a severe test even for him. As for the others, they must be suffering intensely. The unremittingly hostile nature of the peninsula was so excessive that it was almost funny; but one could find amusement only so long in the challenges of a district where every moment brought some new discomfort or danger. And they were swiftly growing weary of the entire adventure. It was beginning to seem to everyone that they had been chasing after Dantirya Sambail all their lives: first in the east-country, then in Ketheron and Arvyanda and Sippulgar, and now on this interminable trek through the Stoienzar.

How long had they been in here, actually? Weeks? Months? One day flowed unaccountably into the next. It seemed like centuries since they had entered this monstrous place.

Three times, now, scouts had gone forward and returned with reports of having found the Procurator’s camp. A lively, bustling place, hundreds of men, tents, floaters and mounts, stockpiles of provisions—but everything vanished like a phantom in the night when they brought the army forward and made ready for an attack. Was what the scouts had found merely an illusion? Or was it the absence of the camp, when they went back for a second look, that was the illusion?

Whatever it was, Septach Melayn was sure, sorcery had to be at work. The abracadabra of the mages operating on their minds, some devilish conjuration. Dantirya Sambail was playing with them. And doubtless getting things ready, all the while, for the long-planned stroke of violence by which he meant to take his revenge on Prestimion for having thwarted his hunger for power in so many ways.

Another of the scaly little creatures of the river was staring at him, perhaps a dozen feet away. It stood half erect, weaving a busy pattern in the air with its multitude of little legs.

“Are you one of the Procurator’s spies?” Septach Melayn asked it. “Well, tell him Septach Melayn sends him this gift!”

Once again he tossed a rock, aiming this time to hit. But somehow the little thing succeeded in dodging the missile, deftly moving just a few inches to one side. It continued to peer at him as though defying him to try again.

“Nicely done,” he said. “There aren’t many who sidestep the thrusts of Septach Melayn!”

He let the small creature be. Sudden drowsiness was coming over him, though it was only the twilight hour. For a moment or two he fought it, fearing that the creatures of the river would swarm up over him as he slept; and then he recognized the telltale signs of a sending from the Lady, and let the spell take possession of him.

The dream-state came over him within instants, there by the shore of the gravelly river. No longer was he in vile Stoienzar, but rather in some green and leafy glade of Lord Havilbove’s wonderful park on the slopes of Castle Mount, and the Lady of the Isle was with him, Prestimion’s mother, the beautiful Princess Therissa, telling him to fear nothing, to move ahead and strike boldly.

To which he replied, “Fear is not the issue, milady. But how can I strike at something I can’t see?”

“We will help you to see,” she told him. “We will show you the face of the enemy. And then, Septach Melayn, it will be your time to act.”

That was all. The moment passed. The Lady was gone. Septach Melayn opened his eyes, blinked, realized that he had been dreaming.

Before him stood half a dozen of the little scaly things of the river. They had clambered up out of the gravel and were arrayed in a semicircle before him, no more than ten inches from the tips of his boots, standing in that odd semi-erect posture of theirs. He watched them weaving their forelegs about, in much the same way as the first one had. It was almost as though they were entangling him in some spell. Do we have a conclave of tiny sorcerers here? he wondered. Were they planning a concerted assault? Did they mean to rush forward in another moment and sink their little nippers into his flesh?

Apparently not. They were just sitting there, watching him. Fascinated, perhaps, by the sight of a long-legged human being dozing on a boulder. He did not feel himself in any danger. The sight of them, arranged as they were in an earnest little congregation, seemed amusing and nothing more.

So far as he could recall, these were the first inhabitants of the Stoienzar he had encountered who did not seem inherently pernicious.

A good omen, he thought. Perhaps things will be changing for the better, now.

Perhaps.

14

“Now,” Prestimion said. “IF you’re ready, let it begin!”

They were gathered about him, the four of them, in the room that he had made his battle headquarters at the royal suite of Stoien city’s Crystal Pavilion: Dinitak, Dekkeret, Maundigand-Klimd, and the Lady of the Isle. It was just before dawn. They had been preparing for this moment with the most single-minded concentration for the past ten days.

Dinitak wore the dream-helmet. He would spearhead the attack. The Lady, using the silver circlet of her power, would monitor all aspects of the struggle as it developed and report on them to Prestimion.

“Yes, my lord, I’m ready,” young Barjazid said, giving Prestimion an impudent wink.

The boy closed his eyes. Adjusted something on the rim of the helmet. Hurled his mind upward and outward toward the camp of Dantirya Sambail.

An eternally long moment crawled by. Then Dinitak’s left cheek quivered and he drew the side of his mouth back sharply in an ugly grimace; he lifted his left hand and spread its fingers wide, and they began to tremble like leaves fluttering in a hard wind.

“He is focusing the energy of the helmet against his father,” Princess Therissa murmured. “Locating him. Making contact.”

The boy was trembling. Trembling. Trembling. Trembling.

Dekkeret turned to Maundigand-Klimd. “Are we right to do this?” he asked in a low voice. “I know what the father is like. He’ll kill the boy if he can.”

“Be calm. The Lady will protect him,” the Su-Suheris replied.

“Do you really think she—”

Angrily Prestimion waved them both to silence. To his mother he said, “Are you in contact with Septach Melayn also?”

She answered with a nod.

“Where is he? How far from Dantirya Sambail?”

“Very, very close. But he’s unaware that he is. The cloud of unknowingness still screens the Procurator’s camp.”

From Dinitak Barjazid came now a sharp grunting sound, almost a yelp. He did not appear to be aware that he had uttered it. His eyes were still shut; both his hands were fiercely clenched into tight fists; convulsive tremors now ran up and down both sides of his face, so that his features were twisted and distorted into constantly changing patterns of disarray.

“He has made contact with his father,” the Princess Therissa said. “Their minds are touching.”

“And? And?”

But the Lady’s eyes were closed now, too.

Prestimion waited. It was maddening to be fighting a battle by proxy like this, across a distance of—what?—two thousand miles, was it? He chafed at his own inactivity. Somewhere out there was Dantirya Sambail, with the hel-meted Venghenar Barjazid at his side. Somewhere not far to the east of the Procurator’s camp were Septach Melayn, Gialaurys, Navigorn, and the army that had followed them through the Stoienzar. A second army, a regiment of Pontifical forces led by an officer named Guyan Daood, was closing in from the other side. Meanwhile the Coronal Lord of Majipoor stood idly by in this luxurious room far from the scene of battle, a mere observer, depending on an untried and virtually unknown boy from Suvrael to open the way for his armies and on his own mother to tell him what was going on.

“The father knows he is under attack,” the Lady said, speaking as though in trance. “But he has not yet discovered its source. When he does—ah—ah—”

She pointed a stabbing finger across the room. Prestimion saw Dinitak go jerking backward as though a hot blade had touched his flesh. He staggered, lurched, nearly fell. Dekkeret, moving swiftly toward him, caught him and steadied him. But the boy did not want to be steadied. Brushing Dekkeret aside as though he were a mere buzzing fly, he planted his feet far apart, threw his head and shoulders back, let his arms dangle at his sides. His whole body was trembling. His hands coiled and uncoiled, now forming fists, now spreading wide with the fingers rigid.

A new sound came from Dinitak’s lips, stranger than before. It was harsh and low, a bestial throbbing sound, not quite a growl, not quite a whine. It seemed to Prestimion that he had heard a sound like that before, but where? When? Then he remembered: it was the krokkotas, the caged man-killing beast of the midnight market of Bombifale, all jaws and teeth and claws, that had uttered the same hideous droning noise. And later it had come from Dantirya Sambail as well, that day in the Sangamor tunnels, the krokkotas growl again, a frightful cry of throttled rage and hatred and threat.

And now it was coming from Dinitak. “The father speaks through the boy’s throat,” whispered the Lady. “Crying out his rage at this betrayal.”

Prestimion saw Dekkeret’s face go pale with fear. He knew at once what the young man must be thinking: that Venghenar Barjazid must surely have the upper hand in this encounter, that his superior skill with the thought device, his wily unscrupulous nature, his savage determination to prevail, would inevitably prove to be too much for Dinitak. They might well see the boy destroyed before their eyes.

But Dinitak had told them over and over that he was confident of success; and in any case they had no choice but to go forward now. This was the path they had chosen; no other was available to them.

And Dinitak Barjazid appeared to be withstanding his father’s counterthrusts.

That terrifying growling had ceased. So had much of the trembling. Dinitak stood firmly braced as before, deep in his trance, nostrils flaring, eyes open now but unseeing, his teeth bared and his jaws agape. His whole aspect was a strange one, but strangely calm as well. It was as though he had passed through a zone of terrible storms into some unknown tranquil realm beyond.

Prestimion leaned forward eagerly. “Tell me what’s happening, mother!”

“Yes. Yes.” She seemed very far away herself. Her words came with great difficulty. “They are—contending for power. Neither one—is able to budge—the other. It is—a stalemate—a stalemate, Prestimion—”

“If only I could help, somehow—”

“No. No need. He is holding his father at bay—preventing him—preventing him from—”

“From what, mother?”

“From sustaining—sustaining—” Prestimion waited.

“Yes?” he said, when he could wait no longer. “From sustaining the cloud of unknowingness,” said the Princess Therissa. For a moment she returned from her trance and her eyes focused squarely on Prestimion’s. “The father is unable to do both things at the same time, to fend off his son’s attack and also to keep the cloud of unknowingness in place around the Procurator’s camp. And so the cloud is lifting. The way is clear for Septach Melayn.”

This part of the jungle seemed just like all the rest, a habitation for monsters. Heat. Humidity. Sandy, moist, marshy soil. Thickets of manganoza palms everywhere. Strange plants, strange birds overhead, strange little animals peering hungrily at them from the underbrush, clouds of sinister little buzzing things in the air, the great unrelenting eye of the sun above them, seemingly filling half the sky. The ocean close at hand on their left and a solid wall of green on their right. The populous northern shore of the peninsula was somewhere off beyond those trees, a pleasant land of thriving harbors, bountiful farms, sumptuous resorts, bayfront villas; but one had no sense here that any of that existed. The north shore might as well have been on some other world.

In this place plants and animals both were indefatigable foes. Nightmare things with teeth and claws lurked everywhere. And again and again it was necessary to leave the safety of the floaters, come forth with energy throwers, blast away at the stubborn tangles of inimical sharp-edged greenery that blocked their path. And for what? For what? The pursuit of an invisible enemy who vanished before their advance with will-o’-the-wisp stealth?

Today, though—today was going to be different. They had the Lady’s promise of that.

“Can you feel her with you?” Gialaurys asked. He and Septach Melayn were riding in the lead floater today. Navigorn was just behind them.

“I feel her, yes.”

The sendings had been coming to him, waking and sleeping, for the past day and a half. It was an experience such as Septach Melayn had never before had in his life, or even imagined was possible: the constant presence of the Lady in some corner of his mind, speaking softly to him, often without the use of words, simply touching him, steadying him, comforting him, lending him her strength.

She was with him now.

Rise before dawn. Go forward unhesitatingly. You are within striking distance of your enemy.

“What is she saying?” Gialaurys demanded. “Tell me, Septach Melayn! Tell me! I want to know!” He was like some big, eager, overfriendly tame beast, clambering all over him. “Are we really near him? Why can’t we see anything? The smoke of their campfires, for instance—”

“Peace, Gialaurys,” Septach Melayn replied. One had to be patient with the great burly fellow: he meant well, his heart was good. “The cloud of unknowingness still hangs over everything in front of us.”

“But if the Lady says it’s going to lift—”

“Peace, Gialaurys. Please.”

“I find you very strange today, Septach Melayn.”

“I find myself very strange. I am not my own self at all. But let me be: let me hear the messages of the Lady undistracted by your chatter, eh?”

“She speaks to you even now, while you’re awake?”

“Please,” said Septach Melayn in a tone compounded of irritation and weariness and anger, and this time Gialaurys withdrew sulkily to his side of the cabin and said no more.

It had been just after dawn when they set out, and now, an hour later, the sun was rapidly climbing in the sky. They seemed to be following a vaguely northwest course through the jungle, although always remaining within a few miles of the sea. It was the Lady, speaking through Septach Melayn from her place beside Prestimion at the western tip of the peninsula, who was directing their route.

Some mysterious enterprise, Septach Melayn knew, was unfolding back there in Stoien city under Prestimion’s command and with the aid of the Lady. He had no idea what it was, only that they had found some way of striking at Dantirya Sambail from afar, and that very shortly they would lift the shroud of darkness which for weeks had kept him and his forces from striking at the foe they had come into this ghastly jungle to find.

Was it so? Or was this all some sorry hallucination, born in his tired mind out of the long travail of their journey? How could he tell?

What could he do but obey the guiding impulses that arose in his mind, and hope they were real ones? And struggle on and on until this business had reached its conclusion, if such a thing was ever to be granted them.

This was not how he had expected things to be, this life of constant toil and frustration, when Prestimion first had been named as heir to the throne.

How strange it all had been since then, Septach Melayn thought, looking back over the short and troubled years of the reign of the Coronal Lord Prestimion. “Lord Confalume has told me that I am to be the next Coronal,” Prestimion had said one day when they all were much younger than they were now, thousands of years younger; and they had rejoiced, he and Gialaurys and little Duke Svor, they had caroused far into the night, and Akbalik had come in eventually to help them finish the last of the wine, and Navigorn, and Mandrykarn, who would die in the war, and Abrigant and perhaps one of Prestimion’s other brothers, and even Korsibar—yes, Korsibar had been there, joyously embracing Prestimion with all the rest, for the crazy idea of seizing the throne for himself had not yet entered his mind. And the future had looked bright indeed for them that night. But then—the usurpation, and the civil war, and the memory obliteration, and this new business with Dantirya Sambail—why, the whole reign thus far had been nothing but sorrow and toil. What had it gained any of them that Prestimion was Coronal Lord, except a life of hardship and pain and weariness and sorrow for the loss of good friends?

And now—now—this awful unending trek through the Stoienzar, pursuing a phantom that would not allow itself to be found—

Septach Melayn shrugged. Like everything else, this was part of the plan of the Divine. Who someday would summon them all to return to the Source, as was the destiny of everyone who had ever lived, great and small, and what difference would it make then that they had had to endure these little moments of discomfort in this jungle when they would much rather have been carousing at the Castle?

Therefore, he thought, utter no complaints. Go on and on, wherever you must. Do your task, whatever it may be.

He stared forward through the windscreen of the floater.

“Gialaurys?” he said suddenly.

“You told me that you wanted no conversation.”

“That was before. Look you, Gialaurys! Look there!” Hastily bringing the floater to a halt, Septach Melayn pointed toward the north with a frantic jabbing finger.

Gialaurys looked, rubbed his eyes, looked again. “A clearing? Tents?” he said, amazed.

“A clearing, yes. Tents.”

“Is Dantirya Sambail in there somewhere, do you think?”

Septach Melayn nodded. They had stumbled onto the verge of an actual road, two floater-widths wide, that cut straight across the rough track that they had been following westward. It began to their north, amidst the manganoza thickets, and appeared to run down toward the sea. Through the opening that it made in the saw-palm grove they could see the tawny tents of a good-sized encampment in the midst of the jungle, the sort of hastily improvised bivouac that their scouts had come upon more than once, but which no one had ever been able to find again the next day.

And there was the Lady’s sweet voice in his mind, letting him know that they had reached their goal and should make ready for attack.

Leaving the floater, he trotted back to the one just behind theirs, Navigorn’s, which had halted also. Navigorn was peering out, looking puzzled.

“Do you see it?” Septach Melayn asked.

“Do I see what? Where?”

“Why, the Procurator’s camp! Open your eyes, man! It’s right over there—”

But as he turned to point it out for Navigorn, Septach Melayn blinked uncomprehendingly, clapped his hand to his mouth, grunted in astonishment.

It was all gone. Or, perhaps, never had been at all. There was no road crossing their path. No clearing; no encampment; nothing but the familiar solid green wall of manganoza palms.

“What are you talking about, Septach Melayn? What do you see?”

“I see nothing at all, Navigorn. That’s the problem. I saw it—Gialaurys did too, just a moment ago—and now—now—”

Within his soul Septach Melayn cried out to the Lady for an explanation. At first no answer came. She did not seem to be with him at all.

Then he felt her with him again. But when she came to him, her presence felt distant and unclear, as if she had suffered some great diminution of her strength. It was with the greatest difficulty that he derived any meaning from the uncertain pulse of the wordless contact that ran between them.

Slowly, though, he came to understand.

What he had experienced just before, the sight of the roadway in the jungle and the tent camp beyond it, had been no illusion. The enemy they had sought so long was indeed hidden right behind those nearby trees. And for one brief tantalizing moment it had become possible for his eyes to penetrate the cloud of unknowingness that had concealed the Procurator from them for so long.

But the means by which that cloud had been stripped away had lost its force. The effort had proven too great. The cloud had descended once more.

They could, of course, attempt an attack against the nearby position where they now knew Dantirya Sambail to be hiding. But it would be like fighting a battle blindfolded. The Procurator and all his men would be invisible to them. And they themselves would be in plain view as they launched a charge against a foe they could not see.

It was plain to Prestimion that Dinitak was faltering, now. His face was strangely pallid despite the darkness of his Suvrael-tanned skin, his eyes were bleary, his thin cheeks were sagging with monstrous fatigue. He seemed to be shivering. Now and again he pressed his fingertips against his temples. His helmet was slightly askew, but he did not seem to notice.

The operation was hardly two hours old, and already they were on the verge of losing the key player.

“Will he hold out, mother?” Prestimion asked quietly.

“He’s weakening very quickly, I think. He has been able to disrupt his father’s power of illusion but not to overcome it. And now his strength is beginning to flag.”

The Lady, too, was showing signs of the strain. Since well before sunrise she had maintained contact through her circlet with Septach Melayn deep in the Stoienzar jungles, had observed at a careful distance the camp of Dantirya Sambail, and had linked herself to Dinitak Barjazid also, while the boy endeavored to use his helmet against his father. The effort of keeping three bridges of perception open at once had to be draining her strength.

Is our attack on Dantirya Sambail going to fail, Prestimion wondered, before we have even struck our first blow?

He looked toward Dinitak again. No question of it: the boy was on the edge of collapse. His face was gleaming with sweat and his eyes seemed not to be in focus. They were rolling wildly around, so that now and again only the whites were showing. He had started to sway erratically back and forth, rocking eerily on the balls of his feet. A low droning sound came from him.

There was no way that Dinitak could be acting effectively against his father any longer. More likely he was taking a frightful buffeting from Venghenar Barjazid through that helmet. And at any moment—

Yes. Dinitak swung about to the side, froze for a moment in a kind of huddled crouch, quivered wildly from head to toe, and began to topple.

Dekkeret, at Prestimion’s side, cried out and moved toward the boy with the same swiftness of reaction that he had shown long ago when that madman with the sickle had erupted from the crowd in Normork. Dinitak, pivoting as he fell, was already crumpling to the ground. With a quick lunge Dekkeret caught him about the shoulders and eased him the rest of the way toward the floor.

Dinitak had knocked the helmet from his forehead in that last convulsive movement before falling: for one dismaying moment the fragile thing seemed almost to be floating across the room. Prestimion, snatching at it almost unthinkingly as it flew past, plucked it from the air with two hooked fingers. He stood staring at it in awe for an instant as it lay in his hands.

Then he realized what must be done in this moment of crisis.

“It is my turn with it now,” he said. Without waiting for a reaction from any of the others, he raised the helmet high over his head, looked upward at it for the merest moment, and pulled it down into place.

This was not the first time he had worn it. At Prestimion’s stubborn insistence, Dinitak Barjazid had given him three sessions of training with the device over the last two weeks: the most minimal kind of exploration, mere brief tastes of what the helmet was capable of doing. He had learned how to operate the controls in a rudimentary sort of way and he had made short hopping excursions to the outer reaches of Dinitak’s own mind and Dekkeret’s. But there had been no opportunity for any real experience at long-range use.

There would be now.

“Help me, if you can,” he said to Dinitak, who lay sprawled in a heap on the floor, propped up against Dekkeret. “How do I find the Stoienzar?”

“The vertical ascent dial first,” the boy said. His voice, faint and reedy with exhaustion, was next to impossible to hear. “Go up. Up and out. Then choose your path from above.”

Up and out? Easy enough to say. But what—how—

Well, there was nothing for it but to begin. Prestimion touched the vertical ascent dial, giving it just the lightest of twists, and was caught up instantly and carried on high. Like riding the lightning, yes. Or a climbing rocket. His mind went soaring upward at infinite velocity through the steel-blue band that was the atmosphere and out into the blackness beyond, heading toward the sun.

Its great blazing golden-green bulk hung before him in the pure emptiness of space, terrifyingly close, sending bursts of flame outward in every direction. By its stunning light Prestimion saw Majipoor far below him, the merest tiny globe, slowly revolving. The single jagged peak of Castle Mount that came thrusting out from one side of it looked from here like nothing more than a slender needle; but Prestimion knew that it was the most colossal of needles, pushing high up through the envelope of air that surrounded the world, extending deep into the dark night-realm outside it.

The planet turned and Castle Mount moved beyond his view. That shining blue-green expanse below him now was the Great Sea, whose shores so few explorers had seen. He saw the coast of Zimroel, then; there was the Isle of Sleep, and the Rodamaunt Archipelago, and now, as Prestimion hovered for a timeless time suspended between the stars and the world, he perceived Alhanroel coming back into view once more, the side that faced Zimroel, this time. From a position somewhere over the midpoint of the Inner Sea he saw it clearly, up ahead. There was the long southward-tending sweep of its western coast, and there, the slender jutting thumb that was the peninsula.

I am much too high, he told himself. I must descend. Already I have stayed far too long. Years have been going by, centuries, while I soar out here. The battle is over; the world has moved along; the history of my reign has been told.

I have stayed too long; I must descend.

He let himself drift downward. With surprising ease he moved himself toward the coast of Alhanroel.

Steady, now. There is Stoien city. We are in it at this moment, somewhere, even though I am out here as well. And now let us go eastward along the southern shore. Yes. Yes. The peninsula. The jungle.

From a million miles away came a voice that might have been Dinitak Barjazid’s, saying, “Search for the point of flame, my lord. That is where you will find them.”

The point of flame? What was that supposed to mean?

All was chaos before him. The closer Prestimion came to the surface of the world, the more incomprehensible everything became. But he found the helmet’s lateral control and forced himself forward through the thick shroud of haze and murk that confronted him, cutting into it like a living sword, and gradually the confusion gave way to some degree of clarity. The effort was enormous. His brain was ablaze. He was entering the zone of Venghenar Barjazid’s defensive screen, now. Great rocking waves of explosive force went shuddering through the firmament all about him, so that he had to fight to keep from tumbling like a spent meteor into the sea, which leaped and foamed like new milk below him.

He regained his balance. Held himself in perfect equipoise. Pushed himself deep into the dark barrier and struggled on toward its farther side.

He could see blazing light beyond.

A point of flame, yes, just as young Barjazid had said, a searing zone of brightness shining through the incomprehensible cloud that still was wrapped about him.

“There they are!” he cried. “Yes! Yes! I see them. But how do I reach—”

Suddenly Prestimion felt support: a friendly hand at his elbow, holding him upright. He sensed that his mother was reaching out to him through her circlet, touching his mind, lending her own strength and wisdom. And she in turn must be drawing on whatever instructions Dinitak Barjazid was able to gasp out to her.

Now was his way clear.

With one of the fine dials on the helmet he centered his mind on that point of flame and the fiery glow thinned and dimmed, and he clearly saw the jungle camp as though he were down there on the ground in the middle of it. The tents, the heaped-up weapons, the bonfires, the floaters and mounts.

Through whose eyes was he seeing all this? he wondered. The answer came immediately. He probed his host’s mind and quickly discerned a bright core of malevolence, burning with terrible intensity; and shuddered at the feel of it, for he recognized within instants that he was touching the soul of the Procurator’s second-in-command, the odious Mandralisca.

To be within that mind was like swimming in a sea of molten lava. It was impossible for Mandralisca to harm him, he supposed, not without one of these helmets. But any sort of contact with the man at all was a foul experience that ought not to be prolonged.

Prestimion shoved. Mandralisca went reeling away and was gone.

It is Venghenar Barjazid that I want. And then Dantirya Sambail.

“Mother? Help me to find the man with the helmet.”

No need. Venghenar Barjazid had already found him, and was fighting back against the intruder in the camp.

The opening defensive move came quickly and stunningly. Prestimion felt a sensation as of a powerful blow on the back of his head, and another at the base of his stomach. He gasped and reeled, tottering under the onslaught. Desperately he fought for breath. But Barjazid was unrelenting.

He had the more powerful helmet. And he was a master of his device and Prestimion was a novice.

Prestimion, his consciousness divided, part of him in a room in Stoien city with his mother and Dekkeret and Din-itak and Maundigand-Klimd, and part of him in a clearing in the jungles of Stoienzar, began to doubt, in the first fury of the struggle, that there was any means at all by which he could fend off this ferocious assault. It looked certain that he must inevitably be destroyed.

But then he pushed, as he had pushed against Mandralisca, and Barjazid seemed to yield to the pressure, and Prestimion pushed again, harder; and this time the force of Barjazid’s fury seemed to diminish, either because Prestimion had succeeded in shoving him back or, perhaps, because he had simply drawn aside to gather his strength for a more conclusive blow. Whichever it was, the lull gave Prestimion a much-needed respite.

But he knew it would not last long. He could see the little man as though he were actually standing before him: thin-lipped, sly-eyed, an old necklace of poorly matched sea-dragon bones around his neck and the dream-helmet on his brow. Barjazid looked supremely confident. His eyes were gleaming with malign pleasure. Prestimion had no doubt that he was readying himself to deliver a second and perhaps final thrust.

He braced himself for it.

Are you still with me, mother? I need you now.

Yes. Yes. She was still there. Prestimion felt her unquestionable presence at his side.

And now, abruptly, he became aware of a second potent power joining the effort also, a new bulwark for him in his battle. A strange force came from this ally, nothing at all like the gentle and loving radiance that emanated from the Lady. Through the eyes of the newcomer he seemed to be seeing in some other dimension of perception altogether. After an instant Prestimion recognized the source of that odd alteration of his field of view, that strange doubleness of vision that had come over him just now. It had to be Maundigand-Klimd who had linked himself somehow to the chain of attack. What other explanation could there be, if not the entry of the Su-Suheris magus into the conflict?

Now, Prestimion. Strike!

Yes. He struck. Even as Barjazid was gathering his strength for the blow that would finish the struggle, Prestimion rushed at him with all the might at his command.

Barjazid’s skill with these devices was far greater than Prestimion’s; but the spirit that had propelled Prestimion to the throne of Majipoor was a stronger one than the dark soul that sizzled and flared within Venghenar Barjazid. And Prestimion had the Lady and Maundigand-Klimd standing at his side, adding their power to his. He lashed out at Barjazid with a tremendous thrust of force and knew at once that he had broken through the other man’s defenses with it. Barjazid went reeling backward, thrown off balance by that single great rush of strength coming from his opponent. He swayed and spun about, striving frantically to remain upright.

Again. Again, Prestimion!

Again, yes. And again and again and again.

Barjazid crumbled. Fell. Lay with his face against the marshy soil, making soft moaning sounds.

Nothing now guarded the path to Dantirya Sambail.

15

“Can you see it now?” Septach Melayn cried. “The tents? The floaters? Is that not Dantirya Sambail himself? Come on, before it vanishes a second time!”

He had no real understanding of what had happened, or why, for the Lady no longer rode within his conscious mind. All that was certain was that the Procurator’s camp, which only a little while before had been cloaked once again in renewed invisibility, had burst into view before their astounded eyes and lay open and undefended before them. Now the world was churning with a mighty strangeness, the web of destiny crossing and recrossing upon itself, and Septach Melayn knew that this was the moment to bring matters to a conclusion. There might not be another opportunity.

It seemed strange, to have the barriers drop away so easily like this. But Septach Melayn greatly suspected that making such a thing happen had been no simple matter, that some tremendous unseen battle had cleared the way.

“There—yes,” Navigorn said, looking baffled. “I see the camp. But how—”

“This is Prestimion’s doing,” said Septach Melayn. “I feel him at work here. He stands close beside us now. Come, brothers! Quickly!”

He ran forward into the clearing, sword already in his hand. Gialaurys was at his right shoulder, Navigorn to his left, and the troops they had brought with them from the north came rushing up behind them from their floaters to join the fray. This was not to be a carefully structured battle but simply a wild raid, headlong and fierce.

“Find the Procurator!” Gialaurys cried in a voice like a great crack of thunder. “Get him first!”

“And Mandralisca also,” Septach Melayn called. “Those two must not escape!”

But where were they? All was in confusion in here. The camp was full of bewildered soldiers milling in such hectic tumult and disarray that there was no telling who was where.

As they advanced into the camp a thin, parched old man who had been sprawled on the ground rose uncertainly to his feet and shambled aimlessly up toward them, his eyes dull and almost blank, his face distorted, one side of his face drawn downward as though he had lately suffered a stroke. Some sort of metallic instrument was on his head—a magical device, perhaps. The man was making thick unintelligible sounds, mere incoherent gabblings. He reached out with trembling hands toward Navigorn, who was the closest to him. Navigorn flung him contemptuously to one side and sent him sprawling out on the ground like a heap of discarded clothing.

“Ah, but don’t you know him?” Gialaurys said. “The Barjazid, it is! The damnable maker of all this mischief! Or what’s left of him.” And he turned to run the man through.

But Septach Melayn, ever quicker, had already dispatched him with the quickest flick of his sword.

“That is Mandralisca there, now, I think,” said Navigorn, pointing to the far side of the clearing.

And indeed the Procurator’s poison-taster could be seen lurking there, creeping along the wall of manganoza palms, searching for some opening through which he could escape. “He is mine,” Navigorn said, and ran off toward him.

“The Procurator, there,” cried Septach Melayn. “I claim him for my own!”

Yes. Dantirya Sambail stood fifty yards away, smiling at him across the tumultuous uproar of the battlefield that his camp had become. He did not appear to be prepared for combat: all he wore was a simple linen tunic, belted at the waist, and soft leather shoes with peaked tips jutting far out in front. But he had obtained a sturdy saber from somewhere and also a long narrow dagger. He held one weapon in each hand as he looked toward Septach Melayn and beckoned him on toward single combat. The Procurator’s strange purple eyes were gazing almost lovingly at him out of that fleshy and florid face.

“Yes,” Septach Melayn said. “Let us try our skills, shall we, Dantirya Sambail?”

They moved slowly toward each other, each man’s gaze fixed rigidly on his opponent as though there were no one else anywhere around them in the clearing. The Procurator had his stiletto in his right hand, the saber in his left. Which was odd, Septach Melayn thought, for as far as he knew Dantirya Sambail was right-handed, and a massive saber was always his weapon of choice. What was he planning to do? Try to knock Septach Melayn’s own sword aside with a swinging side-stroke of the saber, and strike for his undefended heart with the dagger?

No matter. It would not happen. Septach Melayn was certain that this was the moment for him to send that great monster from the world at last.

“On the field at Thegomar Edge you came at Prestimion with two weapons also, did you not, Dantirya Sambail?” Septach Melayn asked him cordially. “And struck at him with an axe, I think, and then went for him with a saber as well. But still he bested you, I’m told.” They were circling each other as they spoke, maneuvering for advantage. Septach Melayn was the younger and taller and quicker man, the Procurator the heavier and stronger one. “He bested you, yes, and spared your life. But I am not Prestimion, Dantirya Sambail. When I best you, it will be the end for you. And none too soon, I’d say.”

“You talk much too much, you man of flowers and ringlets. You trifling fop! You overgrown boy!”

“Fop, am I? Well, perhaps it is so. But a boy? A boy, Dantirya Sambail?”

“A boy is all you are, yes. Come, Septach Melayn, let’s see that famous swordsmanship of yours at last!”

“I offer you a demonstration with all my soul.”

Septach Melayn stepped forward, deliberately opening his guard as an encouragement to the Procurator to reveal what it was he had in mind to do with those two weapons of his. But Dantirya Sambail only moved in a crabwise scuttle, brandishing dagger and saber as if uncertain himself of which to use. Septach Melayn flicked a quick elegant thrust at him, only for the sake of letting the Procurator see the flash of sunlight against his swiftly moving blade. Dantirya Sambail smiled and nodded in approval. “Ah, well done, boy, very well done. But you drew no blood.”

“Not when I choose to slice the air, no,” said Septach Melayn. “But try this, though. Boy, you say?”

Now was the time for summoning all his mastery of the weapon and making a quick end of the combat. He had no yearning for playing games with Dantirya Sambail. This man had escaped destruction too many times already. Prestimion somehow had opened the way for this moment and it was up to Septach Melayn to complete the act; now it was time to bring Dantirya Sambail quickly to his finish, Septach Melayn thought, without fighting any drawn-out elaborate duel, or giving the Procurator a chance to work some new kind of treachery.

Coming in quickly on the attack, Septach Melayn feinted idly to the left, chuckling to see how easily Dantirya Sam-bail mistook that for his real thrust. As the Procurator parried the feint with his saber, Septach Melayn whipped his light sword around the other way and slid its point through the meaty part of the arm that held the dagger. The drawing of first blood brought a sudden flaring of fury and, perhaps, fear, in Dantirya Sambail’s remarkable eyes. With an angry howl he struck at Septach Melayn, a downward blow with the saber that would have cut another man in half. Dancing easily aside, Septach Melayn offered the Procurator a pleasant smile and went straight in on the left, arcing his wrist neatly and putting his blade between Dantirya Sambail’s ribs, tickling it forward until he was certain he had reached the heart.

There, Septach Melayn thought. It is done. And this tower of evil is gone from our midst.

They stood close together a moment, the Procurator leaning against him, breathing heavily, and then not seeming to breathe at all. A tremor shook the Procurator’s body the way a volcano’s eruption shakes the ground, and a gush of bright blood spewed from his lips. Then all was still, and Dantirya Sambail was a dead weight against him. Septach Melayn reached out and flicked the saber from Dantirya Sambail’s nerveless grasp. It went clattering to the side. With a single light shove he sent the lifeless Procurator after it.

“An overgrown boy, yes,” Septach Melayn said. “A trifling fop. No doubt you were right. That is surely what I am.—Goodbye, Dantirya Sambail. You’ll not be greatly missed, I think.”

But he felt no great sense of triumph, not yet, only a quiet feeling of satisfaction within, of release from a burden. He looked around to see how the others were faring.

Gialaurys was dealing with three or four of the Procurator’s men at once. He seemed not to be in need of help. In the midst of the struggle he glanced across, saw Septach Melayn standing beside the fallen form of Dantirya Sambail, and gave him a wildly gleeful grin of congratulation.

But it appeared as though Navigorn had had poorer luck. He was returning now from the manganoza thicket, looking disconsolate. A trail of bloody scratches ran down one side of his face. “Mandralisca got away, damn him! He walked through those miserable palms as though they weren’t there and disappeared.—I would have followed but for the trees. You can see they’ve cut me half to pieces as it is.”

In this moment of glory Septach Melayn would accept no disappointment, not even this. He clapped Navigorn heartily on the shoulder. “Well, it’s a pity, that. But come, man, don’t be so hard on yourself, Navigorn. The fellow’s a demon, and chasing demons is no easy game. But he’s not likely to get far on his own, is he? May he be devoured by crabs as he wanders around in the jungle!” Septach Melayn pointed then to the bodies strewn all around. “Look! Look you! There lies the Procurator! And the Barjazid over there! The work is done, Navigorn. We’ve nothing left to do here but a little mopping-up!”

To Prestimion, two thousand miles away, the snapping of the tension came to him like the breaking of some giant cable. He staggered under the impact of it, reeling backward in a sudden access of dizziness.

Instantly Dekkeret was at his side, steadying his arm. “My lord—”

“I don’t need any help, thanks,” said Prestimion, disengaging himself from Dekkeret’s grasp. He must not have sounded very convincing, though, for Dekkeret continued to hover watchfully by his side.

Prestimion thought he knew what had happened just now in the Procurator’s camp, but he was not certain. And in any event his voyage with the helmet and the battle with Venghenar Barjazid had brought him by now to the brink of exhaustion. He felt chilled, as though he had been swimming in icy waters, and his head was whirling. He closed his eyes, drew two or three deep breaths, struggled to find his equilibrium.

Then he looked toward the Lady. In the hollow, thin voice of a very tired man he asked her, “Is he really dead, then?”

She nodded solemnly. She looked pale and drawn. Surely she was weary as he was himself. “Gone, and no question of it. It was Septach Melayn who slew him, was it not?” And Maundigand-Klimd, to whom she had addressed the question, nodded, both heads at once, full confirmation.

“Then there will be no second civil war,” said Prestimion, and the first warm flickers of joy began to cut through the shroud of fatigue that had engulfed him. “We can give thanks to the Divine for that. But there’s still much for us to do before the world is whole again.”

Dekkeret said, “My lord, you should put the helmet down, now. Simply the wearing of it must draw energy from you. And after what you have done—”

“But I’ve just told you that I’m not finished. Stand back, Dekkeret! Stand back!”

And put his hand to the ascent control of the helmet once again before anyone could protest, and sent himself soaring upward a second time.

Was this wise? he wondered.

Yes. Yes. Yes. While he still had strength left in him after the voyage to the Stoienzar, this was something he must do.

He drifted in silence like a great bird of the night above the mighty cities of Majipoor. They sparkled below him in all their glittering majesty, Ni-moya and Stee, Pidruid and Dulorn, Khyntor and Tolaghai and Alaisor and Bailemoona.

And he felt the weight of the madness in them. He sensed above all else the anguish of the myriad sprung and riven souls who had suffered such harm in the moment when he had ripped the tale of the war against Korsibar from the collective memory of the world. His own heart was drawn downward by sorrow as he perceived, far more clearly even than when he had traveled the world with the Lady’s circlet on his brow, how much damage he had done.

But what he had done then, he hoped to undo now.

The helmet of the Barjazids had enormously more power than the circlet of the Lady. Where she could reassure and comfort, the wearer of the helmet was able to transform.

And heal, perhaps. Could it be done? He would find out. Now.

He touched a shattered mind with his own. Touched two, three, a thousand, ten thousand. Drew all the tumbled pieces together. Made the rough places smooth.

Yes! Yes!

It was a fearful effort. He could feel his own vital force flowing outward like a river, even as he healed those with whom he came in contact. But it was working. He was certain of it. He went on and on, making a secret and silent grand processional around the world, swooping down here in Sippulgar, here in Sisivondal, here in Treymone, here in his own Muldemar, touching, mending, healing.

The task was immense. He knew he could not hope to achieve it all in this one journey. But he was determined to make a beginning here and now. To bring back this day from that bleak realm in which he had forced them to wander for so long as many as he could of those whom he had condemned to madness.

He moved randomly about the world. The madness was everywhere.

He halted here.

Here.

Here.

Again, again, again, Prestimion descended, touched, repaired. He had no idea, any longer, whether he was moving from north to south or from east to west, whether this was Narabal he was passing over or Velathys or some city of Castle Mount itself. He went on and on, heedless of the expense of spirit that he was undertaking. “I am Prestimion the Coronal Lord, the Divine’s own anointed king,” he said to them, a hundred times, a thousand, “and I embrace you, I bring you the deepest of love, I offer you the gift of your own self returned. I am Prestimion—I am Prestimion—I am Prestimion—the Coronal Lord—”

But what was this? The contact was breaking. The sky itself seemed to be shaking apart. He was falling—falling—

Plunging toward the sea. Whirling, plummeting, descending headlong into darkness—“My lord, can you hear me?”

Dekkeret’s voice, that was. Prestimion opened his eyes, no easy thing to accomplish in his dazed, numbed state, and saw the burly broad-shouldered form of Dekkeret kneeling beside him as he lay stretched full length on the floor of the room. The helmet of the Barjazids was in the younger man’s hands.

“What are you doing with that?” Prestimion demanded.

Dekkeret, reddening, laid the thing beside him, putting it down beyond Prestimion’s reach. “Forgive me, my lord. I had to take it from you.”

“You—took—it—from—me?”

“You would have died if you wore it any longer. We could see you going from us, right here. Dinitak said, ‘Get it off his head,’ and I told him it was forbidden to touch a Coronal in that way, that it was sacrilege, but he said to take it off anyway, or Majipoor would need a new Coronal within the hour. So I removed it. I had no choice, my lord. Send me to the tunnels, if you wish. But I could not stand here and watch you die.”

“And if I ordered you to give it back to me now, Dekkeret?”

“I would not give it to you, my lord,” said Dekkeret calmly.

Prestimion nodded. He forced a faint smile and sat up a little way. “You are a good man, Dekkeret, and a very brave one. But for you nothing that we have achieved this day would have happened. You, and this boy Dinitak—”

“You are not offended, my lord, that I took the helmet from you?”

“It was a bold thing to do. Overbold, one might almost say. But no: no, Dekkeret, I’m not offended. You did the right thing, I suppose.—Help me get up, will you?”

Dekkeret lifted him as though he weighed nothing at all, and set him on his feet, and waited a moment as though fearing he would fall. Prestimion glanced around the room: at his mother, at Dinitak, at Maundigand-Klimd. The Su-Suheris was as inscrutable as ever, a remote figure displaying no emotion. The other two still showed evidence of the fatigue of the battle, but they seemed now to be making a recovery. As was he.

The Lady said, “What were you doing, Prestimion?”

“Healing the madness. Yes, mother, healing it. With the aid of the helmet it can be done, though it’s hard work, and won’t be finished overnight.” He looked down at the helmet, close by Dekkeret’s foot, and shook his head. “What appalling power there is in that thing! I find myself tempted to destroy it, and any more like it that may be found in Dantirya Sambail’s camp. But what has been invented once can come into the world a second time. Better that we keep it for ourselves, and find some good way to put its great force to use—beginning with the task I commenced just now, of going among the poor mad ones and bringing them back among us.”

Turning then to Dekkeret, he said, “Dantirya Sambail has assembled a fleet off Piliplok. Its captains are waiting for an order from their master to sail toward Alhanroel. Let them know, Dekkeret, that the order they await will never come. See to it that they disperse peacefully.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then we will disperse them by force,” said Prestimion. “But I pray it won’t come to that. Tell them, in my name, that there are to be no more Procurators in Zimroel. That title is now extinct. We will divide the powers of the one who held it among other princes who are more loyal to our crown.”

And then, to the Lady: “Mother, I thank you for your great help, and I release you now to return to your Isle. Dinitak, you will come with me to the Castle; we’ll find work for you there. And you, Dekkeret—Prince Dekkeret, you are thenceforth—and you, Maundigand-Klimd—come, we’ll prepare for our return to the Mount. This sorry business has kept us away from home long enough.”

16

“And this is Prince Taradath,” Varaile said, bringing forth a small fur-wrapped bundle. A wrinkled red face was visible at its upper end.

Prestimion laughed. “This? This, a prince?”

“He will be,” said Abrigant, who had come quickly up from Muldemar that morning when news of Prestimion’s return to the Castle from the west country had reached him. They were gathered in the great sitting-room of the royal apartments of Lord Thraym’s Tower, Prestimion’s official residence. “He’ll be as tall as our brother Taradath was, and just as quick with his wit. And as good an archer as his father, and Septach Melayn’s equal with the sword.”

“I will begin his instruction as soon as he can walk,” said Septach Melayn gravely, “and by the time he is ten there will be none who can stand against him.”

“You are all very optimistic,” Prestimion said, peering in astonishment at the small wrinkled visage of his newborn son. Every baby looks like every other one, he thought. But yes, yes, this one is a Coronal’s son and the descendant of princes, and we will make something special of him indeed.

He looked toward Abrigant. “Since you see such aptitude in store for him, brother, what skills do you propose to offer him yourself? Will you take him down to Muldemar and teach him the secrets of the winery, do you think?”

“Make a vintner of him, Prestimion? Oh, no: it’s metallurgy I’ll guide him toward!”

“Metallurgy, eh?”

“I’ll put him in charge of the great iron-mines of Skakkenoir, on which the foundations of the prosperity of your reign are to stand.—You do remember, Prestimion, that you promised me that I would be given a second chance to go in search of the metals of Skakkenoir, once this little matter of Dantirya Sambail was dealt with? And I have politely sat on my haunches at Muldemar ever since, waiting for my moment. Which is now at hand, I think, brother.”

“Ah,” Prestimion said. “Skakkenoir, yes. Well, then, take five hundred men, or a thousand, and go to look for Skakkenoir, Abrigant. And come back from there with ten thousand pounds of iron for us, will you?”

“Ten thousand tons,” said Abrigant. “And that will be only the beginning.”

Yes, Prestimion thought.

Only the beginning.

He had been Coronal how long now? Three years? Four? That was hard to say, because of Korsibar, and the thing that had been done at Thegomar Edge to make it seem that no civil war had ever happened. He had no clear idea of the date of his own reign’s starting-point. In the public chronicles of the realm it would be set at the hour of Prankipin’s death and Confalume’s ascension to the Pontificate; but Prestimion himself knew that there had been the two years of strife, his wanderings in the provinces and the battles far and wide, before he had truly come to the possession of the throne. And even then, hardly had he been formally crowned but there had been Dantirya Sambail to deal with all over again, and everything else—

Well, there would be a new beginning now, once and for all.

He took the baby from Varaile and held him very gingerly, not at all certain of the best way of doing it, and he and Varaile walked off a little way to stand by themselves, leaving the others—Septach Melayn and Gialaurys and Navigorn and Abrigant and Maundigand-Klimd, those who had been the pillars of his reign thus far—to gather by the table where an array of the wines of Muldemar had been laid out to celebrate the Coronal’s return. Out of the corner of his eye Prestimion saw Dekkeret somewhat shyly standing at the edge of the group, Dekkeret who would surely be a figure of great importance in the land in the years ahead, and he smiled as Septach Melayn beckoned him to the table and affectionately put an arm around the young man’s shoulders.

To Varaile, Prestimion said, “And your father? He’s made an extraordinary recovery, I hear.”

“A miracle, Prestimion. But he’s not really his old self, you know. Hasn’t said a word about all the properties I signed away while he was sick. Hasn’t spent so much as a moment meeting with the moneymen who used to take up all his time. He’s lost all interest in making money, it would seem. The baby, that’s what appears to matter to him the most. Though he said to me yesterday that he hopes he can be some use to you as an economic adviser, now that you’re back at the Castle.”

That was an odd notion, taking Simbilon Khayf into the Council. But these were new times, and Simbilon Khayf, it seemed, was a new man. Well, we will see, Prestimion thought.

“His help will be very valuable, I’m sure,” he said.

“And he’s eager to give it. He has the greatest respect for you, Prestimion.”

“You must bring him to me in a day or two, Varaile.”

Then he turned away and stood for a time by the window, peering into the courtyard below. There was a good view from here of much of the Inner Castle, the heart and nucleus of the entire great structure, the high domain of power. This Castle in which he dwelled was called Lord Prestimion’s Castle now, and would be until the end of his reign. The world had been given into his hand to rule; and though he had made an uncertain beginning of things, he was certain now that his mistakes were behind him, that an age of miracles and wonders was about to commence. And for the first time since they had come to him to tell him that the Pontifex Prankipin was dying and he would very likely be selected to take Lord Confalume’s place as Coronal, he felt a sensation of something very much like peace stealing over his heart.

He let his mind go roaming outward, beyond the Inner Castle and beyond the uncountable multitude of rooms that surrounded the Castle’s core, and on past the Mount at whose summit it stood, and the wondrous multifarious sprawl of the Majipoor lowlands farther on. In a moment’s flicker of his mind he undertook a journey that no man could hope to complete in a lifetime, from one end of the world to the other, and returned just as swiftly to the Mount, to the Castle, to this tower that was his home.

“Prestimion?” Varaile said, as if from a great distance away.

He looked around, startled by the intrusion on his reverie. “Yes?”

“You’re holding the baby upside down.”

“Ah. Ah, so I am.” He grinned. “Perhaps you’d better take him back, eh?”

Well, perhaps not all the mistakes were behind him yet.

He handed the baby to Varaile and leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the tip of her nose. And went back across the room to see if Septach Melayn and Gialaurys and the rest had left any of the best wines for him.