The King of Dreams

1

“That has to be what we’re looking for,” said the Skandar, Sudvik.

Gorn, standing at the edge of the cliff and pointing down the steep hillside with harsh jabbing motions of his lower left arm. They had reached the crest of the ridge. The underlying rock had crumbled badly here, so that the trail they had been following terminated in a rough patch covered with sharp greenish gravel, and just beyond lay a sudden drop into a thickly vegetated valley. “Vorthinar Keep, right there below us! What else could that building be, if not the rebel’s keep? And easy enough for us to set it ablaze, this time of year.”

“Let me see,” young Thastain said. “My eyes are better than yours.” Eagerly he reached for the spyglass that Sudvik Gorn held in his other lower arm.

It was a mistake. Sudvik Gorn enjoyed baiting the boy, and Thastain had given him yet another chance. The huge Skandar, better than two feet taller than he was, yanked the glass away, shifting it to an upper arm and waving it with ponderous playfulness high above Thastain’s head. He grinned a malicious snaggletoothed grin. “Jump for it, why don’t you?”

Thastain felt his face growing hot with rage. “Damn you! Just let me have the thing, you moronic four-armed bastard!”

“What was that? Bastard, am I? Bastard? Say it again?” The Skandar’s shaggy face turned dark. He brandished the spyglass now as though the tube were a weapon, swinging it threateningly from side to side. “Yes. Say it again, and then I’ll knock you from here to Ni-moya.”

Thastain glared at him. “Bastard! Bastard! Go ahead and knock me, if you can.” He was sixteen, a slender, fair-skinned boy who was swift enough afoot to outrace a bilantoon. This was his first important mission in the service of the Five Lords of Zimroel, and the Skandar had selected him, somehow, as his special enemy. Sudvik Gorn’s constant maddening ridicule was driving him to fury. For the past three days, almost from the beginning of their journey from the domain of the Five Lords, many miles to the southeast, up here into the rebel-held territory, Thastain had held it in, but now he could contain it no longer. “You have to catch me first, though, and I can run circles around you, and you know it. Eh, Sudvik Gorn, you great heap of flea-bitten fur!”

The Skandar growled and came rumbling forward. But instead of fleeing, Thastain leaped agilely back just a few yards and, whirling quickly, scooped up a fat handful of jagged pebbles. He drew back his arm as though he meant to hurl them in Sudvik Gorn’s face. Thastain gripped the stones so tightly that their sharp edges bit into the palm of his hand. You could blind a man with stones like that, he thought.

Sudvik Gorn evidently thought so too. He halted in mid-stride, looking baffled and angry, and the two stood facing each other. It was a stalemate.

“Come on,” Thastain said, beckoning to the Skandar and offering him a mocking look. “One more step. Just one more.” He swung his arm in experimental underhand circles, gathering momentum for the throw.

The Skandar’s red-tinged eyes flamed with ire. From his vast chest came a low throbbing sound like that of a volcano readying itself for eruption. His four mighty arms quivered with barely contained menace. But he did not advance.

By this time the other members of the scouting party had noticed what was happening. Out of the corner of his eye Thastain saw them coming together to his right and left, forming a loose circle along the ridge, watching, chuckling. None of them liked the Skandar, but Thastain doubted that many of the men cared for him very much either. He was too young, too raw, too green, too pretty. In all probability they thought that he needed to be knocked around a little—roughed up by life as they had been before him.

“Well, boy?” It was the hard-edged voice of Gambrund, the round-cheeked Piliplok man with the bright purple scar that cut a vivid track across the whole left side of his face. Some said that Count Mandralisca had done that to him for spoiling his aim during a gihorna hunt, others that it had been the Lord Gavinius in a drunken moment, as though the Lord Gavinius ever had any other kind. “Don’t just stand there! Throw them! Throw them in his hairy face!”

“Right, throw them,” someone else called. “Show the big ape a thing or two! Put his filthy eyes out!”

This was very stupid, Thastain thought. If he threw the stones he had better be sure to blind Sudvik Gorn with them on the first cast, or else the Skandar very likely would kill him. But if he blinded Sudvik Gorn the Count would punish him severely for it—quite possibly would have him blinded himself. And if he simply tossed the stones away he’d have to run for it, and run very well, for if Sudvik Gorn caught him he would hammer him with those great fists of his until he was smashed to pulp; but if he fled then everyone would call him a coward for fleeing. It was impossible any way whichever. How had he contrived to get himself into this? And how was he going to get himself out?

He wished most profoundly that someone would rescue him. Which was what happened a moment later.

“All right, stop it, you two,” said a new voice from a few feet behind Thastain. Criscantoi Vaz, it was. He was a wiry, broad-shouldered gray-bearded man, a Ni-moyan: the oldest of the group, a year or two past forty. He was one of the few here who had taken a liking of sorts to Thastain. It was Criscantoi Vaz who had chosen him to be a member of this party, back at Horvenar on the Zimr, where this expedition had begun. He stepped forward now, placing himself between Thastain and the Skandar. There was a sour look on his face, as of one who wades in a pool of filth. He gestured brusquely to Thastain. “Drop those stones, boy.” Instantly Thastain opened his fist and let them fall. “The Count Mandralisca would have you both nailed to a tree and flayed if he could see what’s going on. You’re wasting precious time. Have you forgotten that we’re here to do a job, you idiots?”

“I simply asked him for the spyglass,” said Thastain sullenly. “How does that make me an idiot?”

“Give it to him,” Criscantoi Vaz told Sudvik Gorn. “These games are foolishness, and dangerous foolishness at that. Don’t you think the Vor-thinar lord has sentries aplenty roving these hills? We stand at risk up here, every single moment.”

Grimacing, the gigantic Skandar handed the glass over. He glowered at Thastain in a way that unmistakably said that he meant to finish this some other time.

Thastain tried to pay no attention to that. Turning his back on Sudvik Gorn, he went to the very rim of the precipice, dug his boots into the gravel, and leaned out as far as he dared go. He put the glass to his eye. The hillside before him and the valley below sprang out in sudden rich detail.

It was autumn here, a day of strong, sultry heat. The lengthy dry season that was the summer of this part of central Zimroel had not yet ended, and the hill was covered with a dense coat of tall tawny grass, a sort of grass that had a bright glassy sheen as though it were artificial, as if some master craftsman had fashioned it for the sake of decorating the slope. The long gleaming blades were heavy with seed-crests, so that the force of the warm south wind bent them easily, causing them to ripple like a river of bright gold, running down and down and down the slope.

The hillside, which descended rapidly in a series of swooping declines, was nearly featureless except where it was broken, here and there, by great jagged black boulders that rose out of it like dragons’ teeth. Thastain could make out a sleek short-legged helgibor creeping purposefully through the grass a hundred yards below him, its furry green head lifted for the strike, its arching fangs already bared. A plump unsuspecting blue vrimmet, the helgibor’s prey, was grazing serenely not far away. The vrimmet would be in big trouble in another moment or two. But of the castle of the rebellious lordling, Thastain was able to see nothing at all at first, despite the keenness of his vision and the aid that the spyglass provided.

Then he nudged the glass just a little to the west, and there the keep was, snugly nestling in a deep fold of the valley: a long low gray curving thing, like a dark scar against the tawny grassland. It seemed to him that the bottommost part of the structure was fashioned of stone, perhaps to the height of a man’s thigh, but everything above that was of wood, rising to a sloping thatched roof.

“There’s the keep, no doubt of it,” Thastain said, without relinquishing the spyglass.

Sudvik Gorn was right. In this dry season, it would be no great challenge whatever to set the place on fire. Three or four firebrands hurled from above and the roof would go up, and sparks would leap to the parched unmown grass that came clear up to the foundations of the building, and the gnarled oily-looking shrubs nearby would catch. There would be a roaring holocaust all around. Within ten minutes the Vorthinar lord and all his men would be roasted alive.

“Do you see sentinels?” Criscantoi Vaz asked.

“No. Nobody. Everybody must be inside. No—wait—yes, someone’s there!”

A strange figure, very thin and unusually elongated, coming into view around the side of the building. The man paused a moment and looked upward—straight at Thastain, so it seemed. Thastain dropped hastily to his belly and signalled with a furious sweep of his left hand for the men behind him to move back from the ridge. Then he peered over the edge once more. Cautiously he extended the glass. The man was continuing on his path, now. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed anything after all.

There was something exceedingly odd about the way he was moving. That swinging gait, that curious flexibility of movement. That strange face, like no face Thastain had ever seen before. The man looked weirdly loose-jointed, somehow—rubbery, one might say. Almost as though he were—could it be—?

Thastain closed one eye and stared as intensely as he knew how with the other.

Yes. A chill ran down Thastain’s spine. A Metamorph, it was. Definitely a Metamorph. That was a new sight for him. He had spent his whole short lifetime up here in northern Zimroel, where Metamorphs were rarely if ever encountered—were, indeed, practically legendary creatures.

He took a good look now. Thastain fined the focus of the glass and was able to make out plainly the greenish tint of the man’s skin, the slit-ted lips, the prominent cheekbones, the tiny bump of a nose. And the longbow the creature wore slung across his back was surely one of Shapeshifter design, a flimsy, highly flexible-looking thing of light wick-erwork, the kind of weapon most suitable for a being whose skeletonic structure was pliant enough to bend easily, to undergo almost any sort of vast transformation.

Unthinkable. It was like seeing a demon walking patrol before the keep. But who, even someone who was in rebellion against his own liege lords, would dare ally himself with the Metamorphs? It was against the law to have any traffic with the mysterious aboriginal folk. But, thought Thastaine, it was more than illegal. It was monstrous.

“There’s a Shapeshifter down there,” Thastain said in a rough whisper over his shoulder. “I can see him walking right past the front of the house. So the story we heard must be true. The Vorthinar lord’s in league with them!”

“You think he saw you?” said Criscantoi Vaz.

“I doubt it.”

“All right. Get yourself back from the edge before he does.”

Thastain wriggled backward without rising and scrambled to his feet when he was far enough away from the brink. As he lifted his head he became aware of Sudvik Gorn’s glowering gaze still fixed on him in cold hatred, but Sudvik Gorn and his malevolence hardly mattered to him now. There was a task to be done.

2

Morning in the Castle. Bright golden-green sunlight entered the grand suite atop Lord Thraym’s Tower that was the official residence of the Coronal and his consort. It came flooding in a brilliant stream into the splendid great bedroom, walled with great blocks of smooth warm-hued granite hung with fine tapestries of cloth of gold, where the Lady Varaile was awakening.

The Castle.

Everyone in the world knew which castle was meant, when you said “the Castle”: it could only be Lord Prestimion’s Castle, as the people of Majipoor had called it these twenty years past. Before that it had been called Lord Confalume’s Castle, and before that Lord Prankipin’s, and so on and so on back into the vague mists of time—Lord Guadeloom’s Castle, Lord Pinitor’s Castle, Lord Kryphon’s Castle, Lord Thraym’s Castle, Lord Dizimaule’s Castle, Coronal after Coronal across the endlessly flowing centuries of Majipoor’s long history, the great ones and the mediocre ones and the ones whose names and achievements had become totally obscure, king after king all the way back to the semi-mythical builder himself, Lord Stiamot of seventy centuries before, each monarch giving his name to the building for the duration of the time of his reign. But now it was the Castle of the Coronal Lord Prestimion and his wife, the Lady Varaile.

Reigns end. One of these days, almost certainly, this place would be Lord Dekkeret’s Castle, Varaile knew.

But let that day not come soon, she prayed.

She loved the Castle. She had lived in that unfathomably complex array of thirty thousand rooms, perched here atop the astounding thirty-mile-high splendor of Castle Mount that jutted up like a colossal spike out of the immense curve of the planet, for half her life. It was her home. She had no desire to leave it, as leave it she knew she must on the day that Lord Prestimion ascended to the title of Pontifex and Dekkeret replaced him as Coronal.

This morning, with Prestimion off somewhere in one of the down-slope cities dedicating a dam or presiding over the installation of a new duke or performing one of the myriad other functions that were required of a Coronal—she was unable to remember what the pretext for this journey had been—the Lady Varaile awoke alone in the great bed of the royal suite, as she did all too often nowadays. She could not follow the Coronal about the world on his unending peregrinations. His boiling restlesness kept him always on the move.

He would have had her accompany him on his trips, if she could; but that, as both of them realized, was usually impossible. Long ago, when they were newly wed, she had gone everywhere at Prestimion’s side, but then had come the children and her own heavy royal responsibilities besides, the ceremonies and social functions and public audiences, to keep her close to the Castle. It was rare now for the Coronal and his lady to travel together.

However necessary these separations were, Varaile had never reconciled herself to their frequency. She loved Prestimion no less, after sixteen years as his wife, than she had at the beginning. Automatically, as the first dazzling shafts of daylight came through the great crystal window of the royal bedroom, she looked across to see that golden-green light strike the yellow hair of Prestimion on the pillow beside hers.

But she was alone in the bed. As always, it took her a moment to comprehend that, to remember that Prestimion had gone off, four or five days ago, to—where? Bombifale, was it? Hoikmar? Deepenhow Vale? She had forgotten that too. Somewhere, one of the Slope Cities, perhaps, or perhaps someplace in the Guardian ring. There were fifty cities along the flanks of the Mount. The Coronal was in ever-constant motion; Varaile no longer bothered to keep track of his itinerary, only of the date of his longed-for return.

“Fiorinda?” she called.

The warm contralto reply from the next room was immediate: “Coming, my lady!”

Varaile rose, stretched, saluted herself in the mirror on the far wall. She still slept naked, as though she were a girl; and, though she was past forty now and had borne the Coronal three sons and a daughter, she allowed herself the one petty vanity of taking pleasure in her ability to fend off the inroads of aging. No sorcerer’s spells did she employ for that: Prestimion had once expressed his loathing for such subterfuges, and in any case Varaile felt they were unnecessary, at least so far. She was a tall woman, long-thighed and lithe, and though she was strongly built, with full breasts and some considerable breadth at the waist, she had not grown at all fleshy with age. Her skin was smooth and taut; her hair remained jet-black and lustrous.

“Did milady rest well?” Fiorinda asked, entering.

“As well as could be expected, considering that I was sleeping alone.”

Fiorinda grinned. She was the wife of Teotas, Prestimion’s youngest brother, and each morning at dawn left her own marital bed so that she could be at the service of the Lady Varaile when Varaile awoke. But she seemed not to begrudge that, and Varaile was grateful for it. Fiorinda was like a sister to her, not a mere sister-in-law; and Varaile, who had had no sisters of her own nor brothers either, cherished their friendship.

They bathed together, as they did every morning in the great marble tub, big enough for six or eight people, that some past Coronal’s wife had found desirable to install in the royal chamber. Afterward Fiorinda, a small, trim woman with radiant auburn hair and an irreverent smile, threw a simple robe about herself so that she could help Varaile with her own costuming for the morning. “The pink sieronal, I think,” said Varaile, “and the golden difina from Alaisor.” Fiorinda fetched the trousers for her and the delicately embroidered blouse, and, without needing to be asked, brought also the vivid yellow sfifa that Varaile liked to drape down her bosom with that ensemble, and the wide red-and-tan belt of fine Makroposopos weave that was its companion. When Varaile was dressed Fiorinda resumed her own garments of the day, a turquoise vest and soft orange pantaloons.

“Is there news?” Varaile asked.

“Of the Coronal, milady?”

“Of anyone, anything!”

“Very little,” said Fiorinda. “The pack of sea-dragons that were seen last week off the Stoien coast are moving northward, toward Treymone.”

“Very odd, sea-dragons in those waters at that time of year. An omen, do you think?”

“I must tell you I am no believer in omens, milady.”

“Nor I, really. Nor is Prestimion. But what are the things doing there, Fiorinda?”

“Ah, how can we ever understand the minds of the sea-dragons, lady?—To continue: a delegation from Sisivondal arrived at the Castle late last night, to present some gifts for the Coronal’s museum.”

Varaile shuddered. “I was in Sisivondal once, long ago. A ghastly place, and I have ghastly memories of it. It was where the first Prince Ak-balik died of the poisoned swamp-crab bite he had had in the Stoienzar jungle. I’ll let someone else deal with the Sisivondal folk and their gifts.—Do you remember Prince Akbalik, Fiorinda? What a splendid man he was, calm, wise, very dear to Prestimion. I think he would have been Coronal someday, if he had lived. It was in the time of the campaign against the Procurator that he died.”

“I was only a child then, milady.”

“Yes. Of course. How foolish of me.” She shook her head. Time was flowing fiercely past them all. Here was Fiorinda, a grown woman, nearly thirty years old; and how little she knew of the troublesome commencement of Lord Prestimion’s reign, the rebellion of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail, and the plague of madness that had swept the world at the same time, and all the rest. Nor, of course, did she have any inkling of the tremendous civil war that had preceded those things, the struggle between Prestimion and the usurper Korsibar. No one knew of that tumultuous event except a chosen few members of the Coronal’s inner circle. All memory of it had been eradicated from everyone else by Prestimion’s master sorcerers, and just as well that it had. To Fiorinda, though, even the infamous Dantirya Sambail was simply someone out of the storybooks. He was a thing of fable to her, only.

As we all will be one day, thought Varaile with sudden gloom: mere things of fable.

“And other news?” she asked.

Fiorinda hesitated. It was only for an instant, but that was enough. Varaile saw through that little hesitation as if she were able to read Fiorinda’s mind.

There was other news, important news, and Fiorinda was concealing it.

“Yes?” Varaile urged. “Tell me.”

“Well—”

“Stop this, Fiorinda. Whatever it is, I want you to tell me right now.”

“Well—” Fiorinda moistened her lips. “A report has come from the Labyrinth—”

“Yes?”

“It signifies nothing in the slightest, I think.”

“Tell me!” Already the news was taking shape in Varaile’s own mind, and it was chilling. “The Pontifex?”

Fiorinda nodded forlornly. She could not meet Varaile’s steely gaze.

“Dead?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that, milady.”

“Then tell me!” cried Varaile, exasperated.

“A mild weakness of the leg and arm. The left leg, the left arm. He has summoned some mages.”

“A stroke, you mean? The Pontifex Confalume has had a stroke?”

Fiorinda closed her eyes a moment and drew several deep breaths. “It is not yet confirmed, milady. It is only a supposition.”

Varaile felt a burning sensation at her own temples, and a spasm of dizziness swept over her. She controlled herself with difficulty, forcing herself back to calmness.

It is not yet confirmed, she told herself.

It is only a supposition.

Coolly she said, “You tell me about sea-dragons off the far coast, and an insignificant delegation from an unimportant city in the middle of nowhere, and you suppress the news of Confalume’s stroke so that I need to pull it out of you? Do you think I’m a child, Fiorinda, who has to have bad news kept from her like that?”

Fiorinda seemed close to tears. “Milady, as I said a moment ago, it is not yet known as a certainty that it was a stroke.”

“The Pontifex is well past eighty. More likely past ninety, for all I know. Anything that has him summoning his mages is bad news. What if he dies? You know what will happen then.—Where did you hear this, anyway?”

More and more flustered, Fiorinda said, “My lord Teotas had it from the Pontifical delegate to the Castle late last night, and told me of it this morning as I was setting out to come to you. He will discuss it with you himself after you’ve breakfasted, just before your meeting with the royal ministers.—My lord Teotas urged me not to thrust all this on you too quickly, because he emphasizes that it is truly not as serious a matter as it sounds, that the Pontifex is generally in good health and is not deemed to be in any danger, that he—”

“And sea-dragons off the Stoien coast are more important, anyway,” Varaile said acidly. “Has a messenger been sent to the Coronal?”

“I don’t know, milady,” said Fiorinda in a helpless voice.

“What about Prince Dekkeret? I haven’t seen him around for several days. Do you have any idea where he is?”

“I think he’s gone to Normork, milady. His friend Dinitak Barjazid has accompanied him there.”

“Not the Lady Fulkari?”

“Not the Lady Fulkari, no. Things are not well between Prince Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari these days, I think. It was with Dinitak he went, on Twoday. To Normork.”

“Normork!” Varaile shuddered. “Another hideous place, though Dekkeret loves that city, the Divine only knows why. And I suppose you have no idea whether anyone’s tried to inform him yet, either? Prince Dekkeret might well find himself Coronal by nightfall and yet nobody has thought of letting him know that—”

Varaile realized that she was losing control again. She caught herself in mid-flight.

“Breakfast,” she said, in a quieter tone. “We should have something to eat, Fiorinda. Whether or not we’re in the middle of a crisis this morning, we shouldn’t try to face the day on an empty stomach, eh?”

3

The floater came around the last curve of craggy Normork Crest and the great stone wall of Normork city rose up suddenly before them, square athwart the highway that had brought them down from the Castle to this level on the lower reaches of the Mount’s flank. The wall was an immense overbearing barrier of rectangular black megaliths piled one upon another to an astonishing height. The city that it guarded lay utterly concealed from view behind it. “Here we are,” Dekkeret said. “Normork.”

“And that?” Dinitak Barjazid asked. He and Dekkeret traveled together often, but this was his first visit to Dekkeret’s native city. “Is that little thing the gate? And is our floater really going to be able to get through it?” He stared in amazement at the tiny blinking hole, laughably disproportionate, tucked away like an afterthought at the foot of the mighty rampart. It was barely wide enough, so it would seem, to admit a good-sized cart. Guardsmen in green leather stood stiffly at attention to either side of it. A tantalizing bit of the hidden city could be seen framed within the small opening: what appeared to be warehouses and a couple of many-angled gray towers.

Dekkeret smiled. “The Eye of Stiamot, the gate is called. A very grand name for such a piffling aperture. What you see is the one and only entryway to the famous city of Normork. Impressive, isn’t it? But it’s big enough for us, all right. Not by much, but we’ll squeak through.”

“Strange,” Dinitak said, as they passed beneath the pointed arch and entered the city. “Such a huge wall, and so wretched and paltry a gate. That doesn’t exactly make strangers feel that they’re wanted here, does it?”

“I have some plans for changing that, when the opportunity is at hand,” said Dekkeret. “You’ll see tomorrow.”

The occasion for his visit was the birth of a son to the current Count of Normork, Considat by name. Normork was not a particularly important city and Considat was not a significant figure in the hierarchies of Castle Mount, and ordinarily the only official cognizance the Coronal would be likely to take of the child’s birth would be a congratulatory note and a handsome gift. Certainly he would not make it the occasion for a state visit. But Dekkeret, who had not seen Normork for many a month, had requested permission to present the Coronal’s congratulations in person, and had brought Dinitak along with him for company. “Not Fulkari?” Prestimion had asked. For Dekkeret and Fulkari had been an inseparable pair these two or three years past. To which Dekkeret had replied that Count Considat was a man of conservative tastes; it did not seem proper for Dekkeret to visit him in the company of a woman who was not his wife. He would take Dinitak. Prestimion did not press the issue further. He had heard the stories—everyone at the court had, by now—that something had been going amiss lately between Prince Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari, though Dekkeret had said not a word about it to anyone.

They had been the closest of friends for years, Dekkeret and Dinitak, though their temperaments and styles were very different. Dekkeret was a big, deep-chested, heavy-shouldered man of boundless energy and unquenchable robust spirit, whose words tended to come booming out of him in a cheerful resounding bellow. The events of his life thus far had predisposed him to optimism and hope and limitless enthusiasm.

Dinitak Barjazid, a man a few years younger with a lean, narrow face and dark, glittering, skeptical eyes, was half a head shorter and constructed on an altogether less substantial scale, compact and trim, with an air of taut coiled muscularity about him. His skin was darker even than his eyes, the swarthy skin of one who has lived for years under the frightful sun of the southern continent. Dinitak spoke much more quietly than Dekkeret and took a generally darker view of the world. He was a shrewd, pragmatic man, raised in a harsh sun-baked land by a tough and wily scoundrel of a father who had been a very slippery sort indeed. Often there was a questioning edge on what Dinitak said that caused Dekkeret to think twice about things, and sometimes more than twice.

And he was governed always by a harsh, strict sense of propriety, a set of fierce moral imperatives, as though he had decided early in life to build his life around a philosophy of doing and believing the opposite of whatever his father might have done or thought.

They held each other in the highest estimation. Dekkeret had vowed that as he rose to prominence within the royal government of Majipoor, Dinitak would rise with him, although he did not immediately know how that would be accomplished, considering the clouded and notorious past of Dinitak’s father and kinsmen. But he would find a way.

“Our reception committee, I think,” said Dinitak, pointing inward with a jab of his upturned thumb.

Just within the wall lay a triangular cobblestoned plaza bordered along each side by drab wooden guardhouses. The emissary of the Count of Normork was waiting for them there, a small, flimsy-looking black-bearded man who seemed as though he could be blown away by any good gust of wind. He bowed them out of their floater, introduced himself as the Justiciar Corde, and in flowery phrases offered Prince Dekkeret and his traveling companion the warmest welcome to the city. The Justiciar indicated a dozen or so armed men in green leather uniforms standing a short distance away. “These men will protect you while you are here,” he declared.

“Why?” Dekkeret asked. “I have my own bodyguard with me.”

“It is Count Considat’s wish,” replied the Justiciar Corde in a tone that indicated that the issue was not really open to discussion. “Please—if you and your men will follow me, excellence—”

“What is that all about?” said Dinitak under his breath as they made their way on foot, escorted fore and aft by the black-clad guardsmen, through the narrow, winding alleys of the ancient city to their lodging-place. “I wouldn’t think that we’d be in any danger here.”

“We’re not. But when Prestimion was here on a state visit not long after he became Coronal, a madman tried to assassinate him right out in front of the Count’s palace. That was in the time of Count Meglis, Considat’s father. Madness was a very common thing in the world back then, you may recall. There was an epidemic of it in every land.”

Dinitak grunted in surprise. “Assassinate the Coronal? You can’t be serious. Who would ever do a wild thing like that?”

“Believe me, Dinitak, it happened, and it was a very close thing, too. I was still living in Normork then and I saw it with my own eyes. A lunatic swinging a sharpened sickle, he was. Came rushing out of the crowd in the plaza and ran straight for Prestimion. He was stopped just in time, or history would have been very different.”

“Incredible. What happened to the assassin?”

“Killed, right then and there.”

“As was right and proper,” Dinitak said.

Dekkeret smiled at that. Again and again Dinitak revealed himself as the ferocious moralist that he was. His judgments, driven by a powerful sense of right and wrong, were often severe and uncompromising, sometimes surprisingly so. Dekkeret had taken him to task for that, early in their friendship. Dinitak’s response was to ask Dekkeret whether he would prefer him to be more like his father in his ways, and Dekkeret did not pursue the issue after that. But often he thought that it must be painful for Dinitak, forever seeing sloth and error and corruption on all sides, even in those he loved.

“Prestimion was unharmed, of course. But the whole event was a tremendous embarrassment for Meglis, and he spent the rest of his days trying to live it down. Nobody outside Normork thinks about it at all, but here it’s been a blemish on the reputation of the entire city for almost twenty years. And even though it’s hardly likely that such a thing would happen again, I suppose that Considat wants to make absolutely certain that nobody waving a sharp object gets anywhere near the Coronal-designate while we’re here.”

“That’s imbecilic. Does he seriously think his city is a hotbed of crazed assassins? And what a damnable nuisance, having these troops marching around with us everywhere we go.”

“Agreed. But if he feels he has to bend over backwards in the name of caution, we’ll have to humor him. It would give needless offense if we objected.”

Dinitak shrugged and let the matter drop. Dekkeret was only too well aware of how little tolerance there was in his friend’s makeup for folly of any sort, and plainly this business of providing unneeded guards for the visitors from Castle Mount fell into that category. But Dinitak was able to see that having the guards around would be just a harmless annoyance. And he understood when to yield to Dekkeret in matters of official protocol.

They settled quickly into their hostelry, where Dekkeret was given the capacious set of rooms that was usually reserved for the Coronal, and Dinitak a lesser but comfortable apartment one floor below. In early afternoon they set out on their first call, a visit to Dekkeret’s mother, the

Lady Taliesme. Dekkeret had not seen her in many months. Although her son’s position as heir-designate to the throne entitled her to a suite of rooms at the Castle, she preferred to remain in Normork most of the time—still living, actually, in the same little dwelling in Old Town that their family had occupied when Dekkeret was a boy.

She lived there alone, now. Dekkeret’s father, a traveling merchant who had had indifferent success plodding to and fro with his satchels of goods amongst the Fifty Cities, had died a decade earlier, still fairly young but worn out, defeated, even, by the long laborious struggle that his life had been. He had never been able quite to make himself believe that his son Dekkeret had somehow attracted the attention of Lord Prestimion himself and had found his way into the circle of lordlings around the Coronal at the Castle. That Dekkeret had been made a knight-initiate was almost beyond his capacity to comprehend; and when the Coronal had raised him to the rank of prince, his father had taken the news merely as a bizarre joke.

Dekkeret often wondered what he would have done if he had come to him and announced, “I have been chosen to be the next Coronal, father.” Laughed in his son’s face, most likely. Or slapped him, even, for mocking his father with such nonsense. But he had not lived long enough for that.

Taliesme, though, had handled her son’s improbable ascent, and the stunning elevation of her own position that necessarily had accompanied it, with remarkable calmness. It was not that she had ever expected Dekkeret to become a knight of the Castle, let alone a prince. And undoubtedly not even in her dreams had she imagined him as Coronal. Nor was she the sort of doting mother who blandly accepted any success that came to her son as nothing more than his proper due, inevitable and well deserved.

But a simple and powerful faith in the Divine had been her guide throughout all her life. She did not quarrel with destiny. And so nothing ever surprised her; whatever came her way, be it pain and sorrow or glory beyond all measure, was something that had been preordained, something that one accepted without complaint on the one hand and without any show of astonishment on the other. Plainly it must have been intended from the beginning of time that Dekkeret would be Coronal someday—and therefore that she herself would finish her days as Lady of the Isle of Sleep, a Power of the Realm. The Coronal’s mother was always given that greatly auspicious post. Very well: so be it.

She had not anticipated any such things, of course; but if they happened anyway, well, their happening had to be viewed in retrospect as something as natural and unsurprising as the rising of the sun in the east each day.

What surprised Dinitak was the meanness of the Lady Taliesme’s house, a lopsided little place with sagging window-frames amidst a jumble of small buildings that might have been five thousand years old, on a dark, crooked street of uneven gray-green cobbled pavement close to the center of Old Town. What sort of home was this for the mother of the next Coronal?

“Yes, I know,” Dekkeret said, grinning. “But she likes it here. She’s lived in this house for forty years and it means more to her than ten Castles ever could. I’ve bought new furniture for her that’s costlier than what was here before, and nowadays she wears clothing of a sort that my father could never have afforded for her, but otherwise nothing in the least has changed. Which is exactly as she wants it to be.”

“And the people around her? Don’t they know they’re living next door to the future Lady of the Isle? Doesn’t she know that herself?”

“I have no idea what the neighbors know. I suspect that to them she’s just Taliesme, the widow of the merchant Orvan Pettir. And as for herself—”

The door opened.

“Dekkeret,” said the Lady Taliesme. “Dinitak. How good to see you both again.”

Dekkeret embraced his mother lovingly and with great care, as though she were dainty and fragile, and might break if hugged too enthusiastically. In fact he knew she was not half so fragile as he fancied her to be; but none the less she was a small-framed woman, light-boned and petite. Dekkeret’s father had not been large either. From boyhood onward Dekkeret had always felt like some kind of gross overgrown monster who had unaccountably been deposited by prankish fate in the home of those two diminutive people.

Taliesme was wearing a gown of unadorned ivory silk, and her glistening silver hair was bound by a simple, slender gold circlet. Dekkeret had brought gifts for her that were of the same austere taste, a glossy little dragonbone pendant, and a cobweb-light shimmering headscarf made in distant Gabilorn, and a smooth little ring of purple jade from Vyrongimond, and two or three other things of that sort. She received them all with evident pleasure and gratitude, but put them away as swiftly as politeness would permit. Taliesme had never coveted treasures of that sort in the days when they had been poor, and she gave no sign of having more than a casual interest in them now.

They talked easily, over tea and biscuits, of life at the Castle; she inquired after Lord Prestimion and Lady Varaile and their children and—briefly, very briefly—mentioned the Lady Fulkari also; she spoke of Septach Melayn and other Council members, and asked about Dekkeret’s current duties at the court, very much as though she were of that court herself in every fiber of her body rather than the mere widow of an unimportant provincial merchant. She referred knowingly, too, to recent events at the palace in Normork, the dismissal of a minister who was overfond of his wine and the birth of Count Considat’s heir and other matters of that sort; twenty years ago she would have had no more knowledge of such things than she did of the private conversations of the Shapeshifter wizards in their wickerwork capital in distant Piurifayne.

It gave Dekkeret great delight to see the way the Lady Taliesme was continuing to grow into the role that destiny was forcing upon her. He had spent almost half his life, now, among the princes of the Castle, and was no longer the provincial boy he had been, that long-ago day in Nor-mork, when he first had come to Prestimion’s notice. His mother had not had an opportunity for the same sort of education in the ways of the mighty. Yet she was learning, somehow. Essentially she remained as artless and unassuming as ever; but she was nonetheless going to be, at some time not very far in the future, a Power of the Realm, and he could see how capably she was making her accommodation to the strange and altogether unanticipated enhancement of her life that was heading her way.

A pleasant, civilized chat, then: a mother, her visiting son, the son’s friend. But gradually Dekkeret became aware of suppressed tensions in the room, as though a second conversation, unspoken and unacknowledged, was drifting surreptitiously in the air above them:

—Will the Pontifex live much longer, do you think?

—You know that that is something I don’t dare think about, mother.

—But you do, though. As do I. It can’t be helped.

He was certain that some such secret conversation was going on within her now, here amidst the clink of teacups and the polite passing of trays of biscuits. Calm and sane and stable as she was, and ever-tranquil in the face of destiny’s decrees, even so there was no way she could avoid casting her thoughts forward to the extraordinary transformation that fate would soon be bringing to the merchant’s son of Nor-mork and to his mother. The starburst crown was waiting for him, and the third terrace of the Isle of Sleep for her. She would be something other than human if thoughts of such things did not wander into her mind a dozen times a day.

And into his own.

4

Already, in his mind’s eye, Thastain could see the blackened timbers of the house of the Vorthinar lord crumbling in the red blaze of the fire they would set. As it deserved. He could not get his mind around the enormity of what he had seen. It was bad enough to have rebelled against the Five Lords; but to consort with Metamorphs as well—! Those were evils almost beyond Thastain’s comprehension.

Well, they had found what they had come here to find. Now, though, came disagreement over the nature of their next move.

Criscantoi Vaz insisted that they had to go back and report their discovery to Count Mandralisca, and let him work out strategy from there. But some of the men, most notably Agavir Toymin of Pidruid in western Zimroel, spoke out passionately in favor of an immediate attack. The rebel keep was supposed to be destroyed: very well, that was what they should set about doing, without delay. Why let someone else have the glory? Assuredly the Five Lords would richly reward the men who had rid them of this enemy. It was senseless to hang back at this point, with the headquarters of the foe right within their reach.

Thastain was of that faction. The proper thing to do now, he thought, was to make their way down that hillside, creeping as warily as that sharp-toothed helgibor, and get going on the job of starting the fire without further dithering.

“No,” Criscantoi Vaz said. “We’re only a scouting party. We’ve got no authority to attack. Thastain, run back to the camp and tell the Count what we’ve found.”

“Stay where you are, boy,” said Agavir Toymin, a burly man who was notorious for his blatant currying of favor with the Lord Gaviral and the Lord Gavinius. To Criscantoi Vaz he said, “Who put you in charge of this mission, anyway? I don’t remember that anybody named you our commander.” There was sudden sharpness in his tone, and no little heat.

“Nor you, so far as I know.—Run along, Thastain. The Count must be notified.”

“We’ll notify him that we’ve found the keep and destroyed it,” said Agavir Toymin. “What will he do, whip us for carrying out what we’ve all come here to do? It’s three miles from here to the Count’s camp. By the time the boy has gone all the way back there, the wind will have carried our scent to the Shapeshifters down below, and there’ll be a hillside of defenders between us and the keep, just waiting for us to descend. No: what we need to do is get the job over with and be done with it.”

“I tell you, we are in no way authorized—” Criscantoi Vaz began, and there was heat in his voice too, and a glint of sudden piercing anger in his eyes.

“And I tell you, Criscantoi Vaz—” Agavir Toymin said, putting his forefinger against Criscantoi Vaz’s breastbone and giving a sharp push.

Criscantoi Vaz’s eyes blazed. He slapped the finger aside.

That was all it took, one quick gesture and then another, to spark a wild conflagration of wrath between them. Thastain, watching in disbelief, saw their faces grow dark and distorted as all common sense deserted them both, and then they rushed forward, going at each other like madmen, snarling and shoving and heaving and throwing wild punches. Others quickly joined the fray. Within seconds a crazy melee was in progress, eight or nine men embroiled, swinging blindly, grunting and cursing and bellowing.

Amazing, Thastain thought. Amazing! It was ridiculous behavior for a scouting party. They might just as well have hoisted the banner of the Sambailid clan at the edge of the cliff, the five blood-red moons on the pale crimson background, and announced with a flourish of trumpets to those in the keep below that enemy troops were camped above them, intending a surprise attack.

And to think of the calm, judicious Criscantoi Vaz, a man of such wisdom and responsibility, allowing himself to get involved in a thing like this—!

Thastain wanted no part of this absurd quarrel himself, and quickly moved away. But as he came around the far side of the struggling knot of men he found himself suddenly face to face once again with Sudvik Gorn, who also had kept himself apart from the fray. The Skandar loomed up in front of him like a mountainous mass of coarse auburn fur. His eyes glowed vengefully. His four huge hands clenched and unclenched as if they already were closing about Thastain’s throat.

“And now, boy—”

Thastain looked frantically around. Behind him lay the sharp drop of the hillside, with a camp of armed enemies at its foot. Ahead of him was the infuriated and relentless Skandar, determined now to vent his choler. He was trapped.

Thastain’s hand went to the pommel of the hunting knife at his waist. “Keep back from me!”

But he wondered how much of a thrust would be required to penetrate the thick walls of muscle beneath the Skandar’s coarse pelt, and whether he had the strength for it, and what the Skandar would succeed in doing to him in the moments before he managed to strike. The little hunting knife, Thastain decided, would be of not the slightest use against the huge man’s great bulk.

It all seemed utterly hopeless. And Criscantoi Vaz, somewhere in the middle of that pack of frenzied lunatics, could do nothing to help him now.

Sudvik Vorn started for him, growling like a mollitor coming toward its prey. Thastain muttered a prayer to the Lady.

And then, for the second time in ten minutes, rescue came unexpectedly.

“What is this we have here?” said a quiet, terrifying voice, a controlled, inexorable voice that seemed to emerge out of nowhere like a metal spring uncoiling from some concealed machine. “Brawling, is that it? Among yourselves? You’ve lost your minds, have you?” It was a voice with edges of steel. It cut through everything like a razor.

“The Count!” came an anguished sighing cry from half a dozen throats at once, and all fighting ceased instantaneously.

Mandralisca had given no indication that he intended to follow them to this place. So far as anyone knew, he planned to remain behind in his tent while they went in search of the Vorthinar lord’s stronghold. But here he was, all the same, he and his bandy-legged little aide-decamp Jacomin Halefice and a bodyguard of half a dozen swordsmen. The men of the scouting party, caught like errant children with smudges of jam on their faces, stood frozen, staring in horror at the fearsome and sinister privy counsellor to the Five Lords.

The Count was a lean, rangy man, somewhat past middle years, whose every movement was astonishingly graceful, as though he were a dancer. But no dancer had ever had so frightening a face. His lips were hard and thin, his eyes had a cold glitter, his cheekbones jutted like whetted blades. A thin white vertical scar bisected one of them, the mark of some duel of long ago. As usual he wore a close-fitting full-body garment of supple, well-oiled black leather that gave him the shining, sinuous look of a serpent. Nothing broke its smoothness except the golden symbol of his high office dangling on his breast, the five-sided paraclet that signified the power of life and death that he wielded over the uncountable millions whom the Five Lords of Zimroel regarded, illicitly, as their subjects.

Shrouded in an awful silence now did Mandralisca move among them, going unhurriedly from man to man, peering long into each one’s eyes with that basilisk gaze from which you could not help but flinch. Thastain felt his guts churning as he awaited the moment when his turn would come.

He had never feared anyone or anything as much as he feared Count Mandralisca. There always seemed to be a cold crackling aura around the man, an icy blue shimmer. The mere sight of him far down some long hallway inspired awe and dread. Thastain’s knees had turned to water when Criscantoi Vaz had told him, after selecting him for this mission, that it would be headed by none other than the formidable privy counsellor himself.

It was unimaginable, of course, to decline such an assignment, not if he hoped to rise to a post of any distinction in the service of the Five Lords. But throughout the whole of the journey out of the Sambailid domain and up into this region of forests and grassland where the rebels held sway he had tried to shrink himself down into invisibility whenever the Count’s glance ventured in his direction. And now—now—to be compelled to look him straight in the eye—

It was agonizing, but it was over quickly. Count Mandralisca paused before Thastain, studied him the way one might study some little insect of no particular interest that was walking across a table in front of one, and moved on to the next man. Thastain sagged in relief.

“Well,” Mandralisca said, halting in front of Criscantoi Vaz. “A little bit of knockabout stuff, was it? Purely for fun? I would have thought better of you, Criscantoi Vaz.”

Criscantoi Vaz said nothing. He did not flinch from Mandralisca’s gaze in any way. He stood stiffly upright, a statue rather than a man.

A sudden gleam like the flicker of a lightning-bolt came into the Count’s eyes and the riding crop that was always in Mandralisca’s hand lashed out with blinding speed, a scornful backhand stroke. A burning red line sprang up on Criscantoi Vaz’s cheek.

Thastain, watching, recoiled from the blow as if he himself had been struck. Criscantoi Vaz was a sturdy-spirited man of much presence, of great sagacity, of considerable quiet strength. Thastain looked upon him almost as a father. And to see him whipped like this, in front of everyone—

But Criscantoi Vaz showed scarcely any reaction beyond a brief blinking of his eyes and a brief wince as the riding crop struck him. He held his upright stance without moving at all, not even putting his hand to the injured place. It was as if he had been utterly paralyzed by the shame of having been discovered by the Count in such a witless fracas.

Mandralisca moved on. He came to Agavir Toymin and struck him quickly with the crop also, almost without pausing to think about it, and, reaching the end of the row where Stravin of Til-omon stood, hit him also. He had put his mark on the three oldest men, the leaders, the ones who should have had enough sense not to fight. To the others it was a sufficient lesson; there was no need actually to strike them.

And then it was done. Punishment had been administered. Mandralisca stepped back and scrutinized them all with unconcealed disdain.

Thastain once more tried to shrink himself down into invisibility. The intensity of Mandralisca’s frosty glare was a frightful thing.

“Will someone tell me what was happening here, now?” The Count’s gaze came to rest once again on Thastain. Thastain shivered; but there was no recourse but to meet those appalling eyes. “You, boy. Speak!”

With extreme effort Thastain forced a husky half-whisper out of himself: “We have found the enemy keep, your grace. It lies in the valley just below us.”

“Go on. The fighting—”

“There was a dispute over whether to go down to it immediately and set it on fire, or to return to your camp for further orders.”

“Ah. A dispute. A dispute.” A look that might almost have been one of amusement came into Mandralisca’s stony eyes. “With fists.” Then his visage darkened again. He spat. “Well, then, here are the orders you crave. Get yourselves down there at once and put the place to the torch, even as we came here to do.”

“It is guarded by Shapeshifters, your grace,” Thastain said, astonishing himself by daring to speak out unbidden. But there it was: his words hung before him in the air like puffs of strange black smoke.

The Count gave him a long slow look. “Is it, now? Guarded by Shapeshifters. What a surprise.” Mandralisca did not sound surprised, though. There was no expression whatever in his tone. Turning toward Criscantoi Vaz, he said, “Well, they will burn along with everyone else. You: I place you in charge. Take three men with you. The enemies of the Five Lords must perish.”

Criscantoi Vaz saluted smartly. He seemed almost grateful. It was as though the blow across the face had never occurred.

He glanced around at the group of waiting men. “Agavir Toymin,” he said. Agavir Toymin, looking pleased, nodded and touched two fingers to his forehead. “Gambrund,” said Mandralisca next. And, after a brief pause: “Thastain.”

Thastain had not expected that. Chosen for the mission! Him! He felt a great surge of exhilaration. The thumping in his chest was almost painful, and he touched his hand to his breastbone to try to still it. But of course he would have been chosen, he realized, after a moment. He was the quickest, the most agile. He was to be the one who would run forward to hurl the firebrands.

The four men descended in a triangular formation, with Thastain at the apex. Gambrund, just behind him, carried the bundle of firebrands; flanking him were Criscantoi Vaz and Agavir Toymin, armed with bows in case the sentries saw them.

Thastain kept his head down and went forward with great care, mindful of the helgibor he had seen and such other low-slung predators of the grassland that might be lurking hidden in all this thick growth. The bright glassy sheen of the tawny grass, he realized now, was not just a trick of the eye; the blades did not simply look glassy, but actually felt like glass, stiff and and sharp-edged, unpleasant to move through, making a harsh whispering sound as he pushed them aside. They provided a slippery surface to walk on when they were crushed underfoot. Every step Thastain took was a tense one: it would be all too easy, sliding and slithering as he was, to lose his footing and go stumbling headlong down into the enemy camp.

But he negotiated the slope safely, halting when he reached a position that he judged was within throwing range. Moments later the other three came up behind him. Thastain pointed toward the keep. No sentinels were in sight.

Criscantoi Vaz indicated what he wanted done with quick urgent gestures. Gambrund held out a firebrand; Agavir Toymin produced a little energy-torch and ignited it with a quick burst of heat; Thastaine took it from him, ran forward half a dozen steps, and threw it toward the keep, turning himself in a nearly complete circle for greater velocity at the moment of release.

The blazing brand flew in a high, arching curve and landed in a bed of dry grass no more than five feet from the keep. There was the crackling sound of immediate ignition.

Burn! thought Thastain jubilantly. Burn! Burn! So perish all the enemies of the Five Lords!

Criscantoi Vaz followed Thastain’s brand a moment later with a second, throwing it with less elegance of form than Thastain but with greater force: it soared splendidly through the air and came down on the thatched roof itself. A pinkish spiral of flame began to rise. Thastain, flinging the next firebrand more emphatically, reached the group of black-trunked glossy-leaved shrubs closest to the building’s wall: they smoldered for a moment and burst into vivid tongues of fire.

The occupants of the keep, now, were aware that something was up. “Quickly,” Criscantoi Vaz cried. They still had two firebrands left. Thastain seized one with both hands as soon as Agavir Toymin had it lit, ran a few steps, whirled around, and flung it: he too reached the roof this time. Criscantoi Vaz placed the last one in a patch of dry grass outside the door, just as three or four men began emerging from it. Several of them set to work desperately trying to stamp out the blaze; the others, shouting in a kind of frenzy, started to make their way up the slope toward the attackers. But the climb from the valley floor was practically a vertical one and they had brought no weapons with them. After a dozen yards or so they gave up and turned back toward the keep, which with astonishing swiftness was being engulfed by fire. Like madmen they ran inside, though the whole entranceway was already ablaze. The front wall fell in after them. They would all roast like spitted blaves in there, the rebels and their tame Shapeshifters as well. Good. Good.

“We’ve done it!” Thastain cried, exulting at the sight. “They’re all burning!”

“Come, boy,” said Criscantoi Vaz. “Get yourself moving.”

He planted himself solidly and covered the retreat of the other three with drawn bow. But no one emerged now from the burning building. By the time Thastain had reached the safety of the crest, the rebel keep and much of the surrounding grassland were on fire, and a black spear of smoke was climbing into the sky. The blaze was spreading with awesome rapidity. The whole valley was sure to go up: there would be no survivors down there.

Well, that was what they had come here to accomplish. The Vorthinar lord, like so many of the little local princelings across the vast face of the continent of Zimroel, had defied the decrees of the five Sambailid brothers who claimed supreme authority in this land; and so the Vorthinar lord had had to perish. This continent was meant to be Sam-bailid territory, had been for generations until the overthrow of the Procurator by Lord Prestimion, now was Sambailid again. And this time must remain so for all eternity. Thastain, born under Sambailid rule, had no doubts of that. To permit anything else would be to open the door to chaos.

Count Mandralisca seemed mightily pleased with the work they had done down there. There was something almost benign about his quick frigid smile as he greeted them on the crest, his brief, fleeting handclasp of congratulation.

They stood together for a long while at the cliff’s edge, gleefully watching the rebel keep burn. The fire was spreading and spreading, engulfing the dry valley from end to end. Even when they were back at camp, miles away, they could still smell the acrid tang of smoke, and black drifting cinders occasionally wandered toward them on the southward-trending wind.

That night they opened many a flagon of wine, good coarse red stuff from the western lands. Later, in the darkness, feeling as tipsy as he had ever been though he had taken care to stop drinking before most of the others, Thastain went stumbling toward the ditch where they relieved themselves, and discovered the Count already there, with his aide-decamp, that stubby little man Jacomin Halefice. So even the Count Mandralisca needed to make water, just as ordinary mortals did! Thastain found something pleasantly incongruous about that.

He did not dare approach. As he hung back in the shadows he heard Mandralisca say in quiet satisfaction, “They will all die the way the Vorthinar lord died today, eh, Jacomin? And one day there will be no lords in this world other than the Five Lords.”

“Not even Lord Prestimion?” the aide-de-camp asked. “Or Lord Dekkeret, who is to come after him?”

Thastain saw Mandralisca swing about to face the smaller man. He was unable to see the expression on the Count’s face, but he could sense the bleak icy set of it from the tone of Mandralisca’s voice as he replied: “Your question provides its own answer, Jacomin.”

5

Asleep in his bed in the royal lodging-house in the Guardian City of Fa, Prestimion dreamed that he was back in the swarming, incomprehensibly vast collection of buildings atop Castle Mount that went by the name of Lord Prestimion’s Castle. He was wandering like a ghost through dusty corridors that he had never seen before. He was taking unfamiliar pathways that led him down into regions of the Castle that he had not even known existed.

A little phantom led him onward, a small floating figure drifting high up in the air before him, beckoning him ever deeper into the maze that was the Castle. “This way, my lord. This way! Follow me!”

The tiny phantom had the form of a Vroon, one of the many non-human peoples that had dwelled on Majipoor almost since the earliest days of the giant planet’s occupation by humans. They were doll-sized creatures, light as air, with a myriad of rubbery tentacular limbs and huge round golden eyes that stared forth on either side of sharply hooked yellow beaks. Vroons had the gift of second sight, and could peer easily into minds, or unerringly determine the right road to take in some district altogether unfamiliar to them. But they could not float ten feet off the ground, as this one was doing. The part of Prestimion’s slumbering mind that stood outside itself, watching the progress of his own dreams, knew from that one detail alone that he had to be dreaming.

And he knew also, taking no pleasure in the knowledge, that this was a dream he had dreamed many times before, in one variation and another.

He almost recognized the sectors of the Castle through which the Vroon was leading him. Those ruined pillars of crumbling red sandstone might belong to Balas Bastion, where there were pathways leading to the little-used northern wing. That narrow bridge could perhaps be Lady Thiin’s Overpass, in which case that spiraling rampart faced in greenish brick would lead toward the Tower of Trumpets and the Castle’s outer facade.

But what was this long rambling array of low black-tiled stone hovels? Prestimion could put no name to that. And that windowless, freestanding circular tower whose rough white walls were inset with row upon row of sharpened blue flints, sharp side outward? That diamond-shaped desert of gray slabs within a palisade of pink marble spikes? That endless vaulted hall, receding into the infinite distance, lit by a row of giant candelabra the size of tree-trunks? These places could not be real parts of the Castle. The Castle was so huge that it would take forever to see it all, and even Prestimion, who had lived there since he was a youth, knew that there must be many tracts of it that he had never had occasion to enter. But these places where his sleeping self was roaming now surely had no real-world existence. They had to be dream-inventions and nothing more.

He was going down and down and down a winding staircase made of planks of some gleaming scarlet wood that floated, like the Vroon, without visible means of support in the middle of the air. It was clear to him that he must be leaving the relatively familiar upper reaches of the Castle now and descending into the auxiliary zones lower on the Mount where the thousands of people whose services were essential to the life of the Castle dwelled: the guards and servitors, gardeners and cooks, archivists and clerks, road-menders and wall-builders and game-keepers, and so on and so on. Neither waking nor dreaming had he spent much time down there. But these levels were part of the Castle too. The Castle, big as it was, grew even greater from year to year. It was like a living creature in that regard. The royal sector of the great building nestled atop the uppermost crags of the Mount, but it had layer upon layer of subterranean vaults beneath, cutting deep into the stony heart of the giant mountain. And also there were the outer zones, sprawling downward for many miles along every face of the Mount’s summit like long trailing arms, extending themselves farther down the slope all the time.

“My lord?” the Vroon called, singing sweetly to him from overhead. “This way! This way!”

Puffy-faced Hjorts lined his path now, bowing officiously, and great thick-furred Skandars made the starburst salute with all the dizzying multiplicity their four arms afforded, and whistling greetings came to him from reptilian Ghayrogs, and flat-faced three-eyed little Liimen acknowledged him also, as did a phalanx of pale haughty Su-Suheris folk—representatives of all the alien races that shared vast Majipoor with its human masters. There were Metamorphs here as well, it seemed, long-legged slinking beings who slipped in and out of the shadows on every side. What, Prestimion wondered, were they doing on Castle Mount, where the aboriginal species had been forbidden since the long-ago days of Lord Stiamot?

“And now come this way,” said the Vroon, leading him into a building that was like a castle within the castle, a hotel of some sort with thousands of rooms arranged along a single infinitely receding hallway that uncoiled endlessly before him like a highway to the stars; but the Vroon was a Vroon no longer.

This was the version of the dream that Prestimion most dreaded.

There had been a transformation. His guide now was dark-haired Lady Thismet, daughter to the Coronal Lord Confalume and twin sister to Prince Korsibar, Thismet whom he had loved and lost so long ago. As buoyant as the Vroon and just as swift, she danced along before him with her bare toes a few inches above the ground, remaining always just out of his reach, turning now and then to urge him along with a luminous smile, a wink of her dark sparkling eyes, a quick encouraging flutter of her fingertips. Her matchless beauty speared through him like a blade. “Wait for me!” he called, and she answered that he must move more quickly. But, fast as he went, she was always faster, a slim lithe figure in a rippling white gown, her gleaming jet-black hair fanning out in back of her as she retreated from him down that unending hall. “This-met!” he cried. “Wait, Thismet! Wait! Wait! Wait!” He was running with desperate fervor now, pushing himself to the last extreme of his endurance. Ahead of him, doors were opening on either side of the endless corridor; faces peered out, grinned, winked, beckoned to him. They were Thismet too, every one of them, Thismet again and again, hundreds of Thismets, thousands, but as he came to each room in turn its door slammed shut, leaving him only the tinkling laughter of the Thismet behind it. And still the Thismet who was guiding him moved forward serenely, constantly turning to lure him onward, but never letting him catch up.

“Thismet! Thismet! Thismet!”

His voice became a tremendous clamoring roar of agony and rage and frustration.

“My lord?”

“Thismet! Thismet!”

“My lord, are you ill? Speak to me! Open your eyes, my lord! It’s me, me, Diandolo! Wake up, my lord. Please, my lord—”

“This—met—”

The lights were on now. Prestimion, blinking, dazed, saw the young page Diandolo bending over the bed, wide-eyed, gaping at him in shock. Other figures were visible behind him, four, five, six people: bodyguards, servitors, others whose faces were completely unfamiliar. He struggled to come fully up out of sleep.

The sturdy figure of Falco now appeared, nudging Diandolo aside, bending forward over Prestimion. He was Prestimion’s steward on all his official travels, twenty-five or so, a fine strapping fellow from Minimool with an enviable head of thick glossy black hair, a wonderfully melodious singing voice, and a bright-eyed look of invincible good cheer.

“It was only a dream you were having, my lord.”

Prestimion nodded. His chest and arms were drenched with sweat. His throat felt rough and raw from the force of his own outcries. There was a fiery band of pain across his forehead. “Yes,” he said hoarsely. “It was—only—a—dream—”

6

Three of Varaile’s four children were waiting for her in the morning-room when she entered it. They rose as she entered. It was the family custom for them to take the first meal of the day with her.

Prince Taradath, the eldest, was accompanying his father on his current journey, and therefore it was the second son, Prince Akbalik, who formally escorted Varaile to her seat. He was twelve, and already tall and sturdy: he had inherited his father’s yellow hair and powerful build, but he had his mother’s height. In two or three years he would be taller than either of his parents. His soft eyes and thoughtful manner, though, belied his stature and heft: he was destined to be a scholar, or perhaps a poet, most definitely not any sort of athlete or warrior.

Prince Simbilon, ten years old, still round-faced in a babyish way, terribly solemn of demeanor—priggish, even—elaborately offered Varaile the tray of fruits that was her usual first course. But the Lady Tuanelys, who was eight and had a conspicuous lack of interest in the routines of politeness, gave her mother nothing more than the quickest of nods and returned to her seat at the table, and to the plate piled high with cheese covered with honey that she had already provided for herself. It was folly to expect courtesy from Tuanelys. She was a pretty child, with a lovely cloud of golden hair that she wore in a beaded net, and finely sculpted features that foretold the feminine beauty that would be hers in six or seven more years; but her lean little body was as straight and long as a strap, just now. She was a runner, a climber, a fighter, a tomboy in every way.

“Did you sleep well, mother?” Prince Akbalik asked.

“As ever. And yourself?”

But it was Tuanelys who answered. “I dreamed of a place where all the trees grew upside down, mother. Their leaves were in the ground and their roots stuck up into the sky. And the birds—”

“Mother was speaking to Akbalik, child,” said Prince Simbilon loftily.

“Yes. But Akbalik never has anything interesting to say. And neither do you, Simbilon.” The Lady Tuanelys stuck her tongue out at him. Simbilon reddened, but would not respond. Fiorinda, watching the family scene from one side, began to giggle.

Akbalik now said, as though there had been no interruption, “I slept very well, mother.” And began to tell her of his schedule for the day, the classes in history and epic poetry in the morning and the archery lesson that afternoon, as though they were events of the greatest importance to the world. When he was done, Prince Simbilon spoke at length of his own busy day to come, punctuated twice by requests from the Lady Tuanelys to pass her serving-dishes of food. Tuanelys had nothing else to say at all. She rarely did. Her life just now seemed almost entirely focused on swimming; she spent hours each day, as much time as she could steal from her schooling, racing fiendishly back and forth in the pool in the east-wing gymnasium like a frenzied little cambeliot. There was something manic about the intensity with which she swam her laps. Her instructor said she had to be halted after a certain time lest she swim herself into exhaustion, because she would never stop of her own accord.

This morning her children’s self-absorption seemed less amusing to Varaile than it usually did. The disturbing report from the Labyrinth cast a somber shadow over everything. How would they react, she wondered, if they knew that their father might suddenly be much closer than ever before to becoming Pontifex, and that they could all find themselves uprooted from their good life at the Castle and forced to move along to the grim subterranean Labyrinth, the Pontifical seat far to the south, before long?

Varaile forced herself to sweep all such thoughts aside.

That Prestimion would one day be Pontifex had been inevitable from the hour that he had been anointed as Coronal and they had placed the starburst crown upon his head. Confalume was very old. He might die today, or next month, or next year; but sooner or later, and more likely sooner than later, his time had to come. Beyond question Akbalik and Simbilon must understand quite well what that would mean for them all. As for Tuanelys, if she did not know now, she would have to learn. And to accept. With high rank comes the obligation to conduct oneself in a royal fashion, even if one is only a child.

By the time she had finished eating Varaile felt fully in command of herself again. It was time now for her morning conference with Prestimion’s ministers: in his absence from the Castle, she served as regent in the Coronal’s stead.

Teotas was waiting for her outside the morning-room.

His face was even more grave than usual today, and its folds and furrows looked as though they had deepened overnight. Once he had resembled his older brother Prestimion so closely that one who did not know them well might almost have taken them for twins, though in truth there was a decade’s gap between them in age. But Teotas had a sharp, hot, brooding temper that Prestimion lacked, and here in his middle years it had carved gulleys in his face that made him seem much older than he was, whereas Prestimion’s skin was still unlined. There was no mistaking Teotas for the Coronal any longer; but it was not easy to believe that Teotas was the younger brother.

“Fiorinda gave you the message from the Labyrinth?”

“Eventually. I think she would rather have hidden it from me altogether.”

“We would all like to hide it from ourselves, I think,” Teotas said. “But from some things there’s no hiding, eh, Varaile?”

“Will he die?”

“No one knows. But this latest event, whatever it is, undoubtedly brings him closer to the day. I think, though, that we have a little more time left to us in this place.”

“Are you saying that because you know that it’s what I want to hear, Teotas? Or do you actually have some hard information? Did the Pontifex have a stroke or didn’t he?”

“If he did, it was a very light one. There was some difficulty in one leg and one arm—his mind went dark for an instant—”

“Fiorinda told me about the leg and the arm. Not about the darkness in his mind. Come on: what else?”

“That is all. He has his mages treating him now.”

“And also a physician or two, I hope?”

Teotas said, shrugging, “You know what Confalume is like. Maybe he has a doctor with him, and maybe not. But the incense is burning round the clock, of that I’m sure, and the spells are being cast thick and fast. May they only be efficacious ones.”

“So do I pray,” said Varaile, with a derisive snort.

They walked quickly down the winding corridors that led to the Stiamot throne-room, where the meeting would be held. The route took them past the royal robing-chamber and the splendid judgment-hall that Prestimion had caused to be constructed out of a warren of little rooms adjacent to the grandiose throne-room of Lord Confalume.

Every Coronal put his own mark on the Castle with new construction. The judgment-hall, that magnificent vaulted chamber with great arching frosted windows and gigantic glittering chandeliers, was Prestimion’s chief contribution to the innermost part of the Castle, though he had also brought about the building of the great Prestimion Archive, a museum in which a trove of historical treasure had been brought together, along the outside margin of the central sector that was known as the Inner Castle. And he had still other ambitious construction plans, Varaile knew, if only the Divine would grant him a longer stay on the Coronal’s throne.

Nevertheless, for all the stupefying grandeur of the glorious judgment-hall and Lord Confalume’s throne-room beside it, Prestimion had preferred since the beginning of his reign to spurn those imposing settings and to hold as many official functions as he could in the ancient Stiamot throne-room, a simple, even austere, little stone-floored chamber that supposedly had come down almost unchanged from the Castle’s earliest days.

As Varaile entered it now, she saw nearly all of the high peers of the realm arrayed within: the High Counsellor Septach Melayn and the Grand Admiral Gialaurys and the magus Maundigand-Klimd, and Navigorn of Hoikmar and Duke Dembitave of Tidias and three or four others, as well as the Pontifical delegate, Phraatakes Rem, and the Hierarch Bernimorn, the representative of the Lady of the Isle at the Castle. They rose as she came in, and Varaile signalled them back into their seats with a flick of her fingertips.

Of the potent figures of the kingdom only Prestimion’s other brother, Prince Abrigant, was missing. In the early years of Prestimion’s reign Abrigant had played an important role in government affairs—it was his discovery of the rich iron mines of Skakkenoir that had been the foundation of much of the great prosperity of the kingdom under Prestimion’s rule—but more recently he had withdrawn to the family estates down-slope at Muldemar, the responsibility for which had fallen to him by inheritance, and he spent most of his time there. But all of the others had gathered. The presence of so many great dignitaries here at the Council meeting today intensified the misgivings that Varaile already felt.

Quickly she crossed the room to the low white throne of roughly hewn marble that was the Coronal’s seat, and today, with the Coronal away, was hers as regent. She glanced to her left, where Septach Melayn sat, the elegant long-limbed swordsman who had been Prestimion’s dearest friend since his youth, and who was, next to Varaile herself, the adviser whose word he respected the most. Septach Melayn met Varaile’s gaze uneasily, almost sadly. Gialaurys—Navigorn—Dembitave—they appeared to be uncomfortable too. Only the towering Su-Suheris magus, Maundigand-Klimd, was inscrutable, as always.

“I am already aware,” she began, “that the Pontifex is ill. Can anyone tell me precisely how ill?” She turned her attention toward the Pontifical representative. “Phraatakes Rem, this news comes by way of you, am I correct?”

“Yes, milady.” He was a small, tidy, gray-haired man who for the past nine years had been the Pontifex’s official delegate at the Castle—essentially an ambassador from the senior monarch to the junior one. The intricate golden spiral that was the Labyrinth symbol was affixed to the breast of his soft, velvety-looking gray-green tunic. “The message arrived last night. There have been no later ones. We know nothing more than what you surely have already heard.”

“A stroke, is it?” said Varaile bluntly. She was never one for mincing words.

The Pontifical delegate squirmed a little in his seat. It was disconcerting to see that polished diplomat, always so unctuous and self-assured, show such a visible sign of distress. “His majesty experienced some degree of vertigo—a numbness in his hand, an uncertainty of support in his left leg. He has taken to his bed, and his mages attend him. We await further reports.”

“It sounds very much like a stroke to me,” said Varaile.

“I can offer no opinion concerning that, milady.”

Yegan of Low Morpin, a stolid, rather humorless prince whose presence on the Council had long mystified Varaile, said, “A stroke is not necessarily fatal, Lady Varaile. There are those who have lived for many years after suffering one.”

“Thank you for that observation, Prince Yegan.” And to Phraatakes Rem: “Has the Pontifex been generally in good health thus far this season, would you say?”

“Indeed he has, milady, active and energetic. Making proper allowance for his age, of course. But he has always been an extremely vigorous man.”

“How old is he, though?” Septach Melayn said. “Eighty-five? Ninety?” He left his seat and edgily began to pace the little room, his long legs taking him from side to side and back again in just a few quick strides.

“Perhaps even older than that,” said Yegan.

“He was Coronal for forty years and then some,” offered Navigorn of Hoikmar, speaking with a wheeze. He once had been a powerful figure of a man, a great military leader in his time, but lately was grown fat and slow. “And Pontifex, now, for twenty years after that, is that not so? And therefore—”

“Yes. Therefore he must be very old,” said Varaile sharply. She struggled to rein in her impatience. These men were all ten and twenty years her senior, and their days of real decisiveness were behind them; her quick-spirited nature grew irritable easily when they wandered into these circuitous ruminations.

To the Hierarch Bernimorn she said, “Has the Lady been informed?”

“We have already sent word to the Isle,” said the Hierarch, a slim, pale woman of some considerable age, who managed to seem at once both frail and commanding.

“Good.” And, to Dembitave: “What about Lord Prestimion? He’s in Deepenhow Vale, I think. Or Bombifale.”

“Lord Prestimion is at present in the city of Fa, milady. A messenger is preparing at this moment to set out for Fa to bring him the news.”

“Who are you going to send?” Navigorn asked. He said it in a thick, blunt, almost belligerent way.

Dembitave gave the old warrior a puzzled look. “Why—how would I know? One of the regular Castle couriers is going, I suppose.”

“News like this ought not to come from a stranger. I’ll bear the message myself.”

Color flared in Dembitave’s pale cheeks. He was Septach Melayn’s cousin, the Duke of Tidias, a proud and somewhat touchy man, sixty years of age. He and Navigorn had never cared much for each other.

Plainly he took Navigorn’s intervention now as some kind of rebuke. For a moment or two he proffered no response. Then he said stiffly, “As you wish, milord Navigorn.”

“What about Prince Dekkeret?” Varaile asked. “One would think he ought to know too.”

There was a second awkward silence in the room. Varaile stared from one abashed face to another. The answer was all too clear. No one had thought to tell the heir apparent that the Pontifex might be dying.

“I’m told he has gone off to Normork with his friend Dinitak to see his mother,” Varaile said crisply. “He too should be made aware of this. Teotas—”

He snapped to attention. “I’ll tend to it immediately,” he said, and went from the chamber.

And now? What was she supposed to do next?

Improvising swiftly, she said to the Pontifical delegate, “You will, of course, communicate our deep concern for his majesty’s health, our dismay at his illness, our overriding wish that this episode prove to be only a moment’s infirmity—” She searched for some further expression of sympathy, found nothing appropriate, let her voice break off in mid-statement.

But Phraatakes Rem, deftly taking his cue, smoothly replied, “I will do that, have no fear.—But I beg you, milady, let us not overreact. There was no real urgency in the phrasing of the message I received. If the High Spokesman had felt his majesty’s death to be imminent, he would have put matters in a very different way. I understand the distress that milady might feel over an impending change in the administration, and of course each of us here must feel the same distress, knowing that his role in the government may soon be coming to its end, but even so—”

The deep gravelly rumble that was the voice of the burly, ponderous Grand Admiral Gialaurys cut into the Pontifical delegate’s measured tones. “But what if Confalume really is in a bad way? I point out that we have a magus among us who clearly sees all that is to come. Should we not consult him?”

“Why not?” cried Septach Melayn heartily. “Why should we leave ourselves in the dark?” His distaste for sorcery of all sorts was as well known as the Grand Admiral’s credulous faith in the power of wizardry. But these two, who had been Prestimion’s great mainstays in the war against the usurper Korsibar, had long since come to a loving acceptance of the vast chasms of personality and belief that lay between them.

“By all means, let’s ask the high magus! What do you think, Maundigand-Klimd? Is old Confalume about to leave us or not?”

“Yes,” said Varaile. “Cast the Pontifex’s future for us, Maundigand-Klimd. His future and ours.”

All eyes turned toward the Su-Suheris, who, as usual, stood apart from the rest, silent, lost in alien ruminations beyond the fathoming of ordinary beings.

He was a forbidding-looking figure, well over seven feet tall, resplendent in the rich purple robes and jewel-encrusted collar that marked his rank as the preeminent magus of the court. His two pale hairless heads rode majestically at the summit of his long, columnar, forking neck like elongated globes of marble, and his four narrow emerald-green eyes were, as ever, shrouded in impenetrable mystery.

Of all the non-human races that had come to settle on Majipoor, the Su-Suheris were by far the most enigmatic. Most people, put off by their wintry manner and the eerie otherworldliness of their appearance, looked upon them as monsters and feared them. Even those Su-Suheris who, like Maundigand-Klimd, mingled readily with people of other species never entered into any sort of real intimacy with them. Yet their undeniable skills as mages and diviners gave them entry into the highest circles.

Maundigand-Klimd had explained to Prestimion, once, the technique by which he saw the future. Establishing a linkage of some type between his pair of minds, he was able to create a vortex of neural forces that thrust him briefly forward down the river of time, a journey from which he would return with glimpses, however cloudy and ambiguous they could sometimes be, of that which was to come. He entered that divining mode now.

Varaile watched him tensely. She was no great believer in the merit of sorcery herself, any more than Prestimion or Septach Melayn were, but she trusted Maundigand-Klimd and regarded his divinations as far more reliable than those of most others of his profession. If he were to announce now that the Pontifex lay on the brink of death—

But the Su-Suheris simply said, after a time, “There is no immediate reason for fear, milady.”

“Confalume will live?”

“He is not in present danger of dying.”

Varaile let out a deep sigh and leaned back in relief against the throne. “Very well, then,” she said, after a moment. “We have been given a reprieve, it seems. Shall we accept it without further question, and move on to other things? Yes. Let us do that.” She turned to Belditan the Younger of Gimkandale, the chancellor of the Council, who kept the agenda for Council meetings. “If you will be good enough to remind us, Count Belditan, of the matters awaiting attention today—”

The Pontifical delegate and the Hierarch Bernimorn, whose presence at the meeting was no longer appropriate, excused themselves and left. Varaile now plunged into the routine business of the realm with joyful vehemence.

A reprieve indeed is what it was. A respite from the inevitable. They would not have to leave the sun-washed magnificence of the Castle and its lofty Mount and take themselves down into the dark depths of the Labyrinth. Not now, at any rate. Not yet. Not quite yet.

But at the end of the meeting, when they had finished dealing with the host of trifling matters that had managed to make their way this morning to the attention of these great and powerful figures of the world, Septach Melayn lingered in the throne-room after the others had gone. He took Varaile gently by the hand and said in a soft tone, “This is our warning, I fear. Beyond any doubt the end is coming for Confalume. You must prepare yourself for great change, lady. So must we all.”

“Prepare myself I will, Septach Melayn. I know that I must.”

She looked upward at him. Tall as she was, he rose high above her, a great lanky spidery figure of a man, whose arms and legs were extraordinarily thin and whose slender body had, even now when age was beginning to come upon him, wondrous grace and ease of movement.

Here in his later years Septach Melayn had grown even more angular. There seemed to be scarcely an ounce of unneeded flesh anywhere on his spare, attenuated frame; but still he radiated a kind of beauty that was rare among men. Everything about him was elegant: his posture, his way of dress, his tumbling ringlets of artfully arrayed hair, still golden after all these years, his little pointed beard and tightly clipped mustache. He was a master of masters among swordsmen, who had never come close to being bested in a duel and had on only one occasion ever been wounded, while fighting four men at once in some horrendous battle of the Korsibar war. Prestimion long had loved him like a brother for his playful wit and devoted nature; and Varaile had come to feel the same sort of love for him herself.

“Do you think,” she asked him, “that Prestimion is ready in his heart to become Pontifex?”

“Would you not know that better than I, milady?”

“I never speak of it with him.”

“Then let me tell you,” said Septach Melayn, “that he is as ready for it as ever a man could be. All these many decades, living first as Coronal-designate and then as Coronal, he’s known that the Pontificate must lie at the end of his days. He has taken that into account. He fought to become Coronal, remember. It wasn’t simply handed to him. For two full years he battled against Korsibar, and broke him, and took the throne back from him that he had stolen. Would he have striven so fiercely for the starburst crown, if he had not already made his peace with the knowledge that the Labyrinth waited for him beyond his time in the Castle?”

“I hope you are right, Septach Melayn.”

“I know I am, good lady. And you know it too.”

“Perhaps I do.”

“Prestimion would never see becoming Pontifex as a tragedy. It is part of his duty—the duty that was laid upon him in the hour Lord Confalume chose him to be the next Coronal. And you know that he has never shirked duty in any way.”

“Yes, of course. But still—still—”

“I know, lady.”

“The Castle—we have been so happy here—”

“No Coronal likes to leave it. Nor the Coronal’s consort. But it has been this way for thousands of years, that one must be Pontifex after one is Coronal, and go down into the Labyrinth, and live there beneath the ground for the rest of one’s days, and—”

Septach Melayn faltered suddenly. Varaile, startled, saw a mist beginning to form in his keen pale-blue eyes.

He would leave the Castle too, of course, when Prestimion’s time to go arrived. He would follow Prestimion even to the Labyrinth like all the rest of them. There was pain in that realization for him as well; and for a moment, only a moment, it was evident that Septach Melayn had been unable to conceal that pain.

Then the dark moment passed. His bright dandyish smile returned, and he touched the tips of his fingers lightly to the golden curls at his forehead and said, “You must excuse me now, Lady Varaile. It is my hour for the swordsmanship class, and my pupils are expecting me.”

He started to take his leave.

“Wait,” she said. “One more thing. Your talk of your swordsmanship class puts me in mind of it.”

“Milady?”

“Do you have room in that class of yours for one more disciple? Because I have one for you: a certain Keltryn of Sipermit, by name, who is newly come to the Castle.”

Septach Melayn’s expression was one of bafflement. “Keltryn is not generally thought to be a man’s name, milady.”

“Indeed it isn’t. This is the Lady Keltryn of whom I speak, the younger sister of Dekkeret’s Fulkari. Who made application to me the day before yesterday on her sister’s behalf. She’s said to be quite capable at handling weapons, this Keltryn, and wants now to take advantage of the special training you alone can confer.”

“A woman?” Septach Melayn spluttered. “A girl?”

“I’m not asking you to take her as a lover, you know. Only to admit her to your classes.”

“But why would a woman want to learn swordsmanship?”

“I have no idea. Perhaps she thinks it’s a useful skill. I suggest you ask her that yourself.”

“And if she is injured by one of my young men? I have no tyros in my group. The weapons we use have blunted edges, but they can do considerable harm even so.”

“No worse than a bruise or two, I hope. She ought to be able to tolerate that. Surely you don’t mean to turn the girl away out of hand, Septach Melayn. Who knows? You may learn a thing or two about our sex from her that you had not known before. Take her, Septach Melayn. I make a direct request of it.”

“In that case, how can I refuse? Send this Lady Keltryn to me, and I’ll turn her into the most fearsome swordsman this world has ever seen. You have my pledge on that, milady. And now—if I have your leave to withdraw—”

Varaile nodded. He grinned down at her, and turned and bounded away like the long-legged boy he had been so many years ago, leaving her to herself in the now-deserted throne-room.

She stood there alone for a time, letting all thought drain from her mind.

Then, slowly, she went from the room, and down to her left, into the maze of passages that led out to the weird old five-peaked structure known as Lord Arioc’s Watchtower, from which one had such a wondrous view of the whole Inner Castle—the Pinitor Court and the reflecting pool of Lord Siminave with the rotunda of Lord Haspar beyond it, and the lacy, airy balconies that Lord Vildivar of that same impossibly ancient era had built, and everything else.

How beautiful it all was! How marvelously did that the hodgepodge of curious structures, assembled here across seven thousand years, fit together into this immense, unequalled masterpiece of architecture!

Very well, Varaile thought.

Prestimion is still Coronal, and I still reside here at the Castle, at least for the time being.

At last the hour had arrived when inexorable duty would pull them onward to the Labyrinth: that was the rule, and it had not varied since the time of the founding of the world. Every Coronal had had to go through this, and every Coronal’s wife.

May the Divine preserve the Pontifex Confalume, she prayed.

No question, though, that the Pontifex was approaching his end. But let us have a little more time here at the Castle, first. Just a little time more. Some few months. A year. Two, perhaps. Whatever we can have.

7

They were at the beginning of the Plain of Whips, now. Ahead, a red wall rising against the northern horizon, lay the narrow line of flat-topped sandstone bluffs on which the Five Lords had erected their five palaces, with the mighty eastward-flowing torrent of the River Zimr just beyond.

“Look, sir,” said Jacomin Halefice, and pointed toward the red hills. “We are almost home, I think.”

Almost home, thought Mandralisca, smiling wryly. Yes. For him there was only a somber irony in that phrase.

He was at home, more or less, anywhere and everywhere and nowhere in the world. In his overarching indifference, all places were the same in that regard for him. He had looked upon the perilous jungles of the Stoienzar as his home for a while, and before that a cell in the dungeons of Lord Prestimion’s Castle, and fine lodgings in the rich sprawling metropolis of Ni-moya before that, and he had lived many another place as well, on and on back to his bitter childhood in a forlorn town amidst the snowy peaks of the Gonghar Mountains, a childhood that he would much prefer to forget. For the past five years this arid and obscure district in central Zimroel was the one that he had chosen to define as “home”; and so, looking up at those sun-baked red bluffs now from the border of the sandy inhospitable plain that stretched before him, he was able with some justice to agree with Halefice that he was almost home, for whatever little value that word might hold.

“There are the lords’ palaces now, is that not so, your grace?” said Ja-comin Halefice, jabbing a finger toward the high ridge. The aide-decamp was riding just alongside the Count, astride a fat, placid, pale-lavender mount that was working hard to keep pace with Mandralisca’s more fiery steed.

The Count shaded his eyes and stared upward. “Three of them, anyway. I see Gavinius’s house, and Gavahaud’s, and Gavdat’s.” The sleek gray domes of ceramic tile gleamed with a reddish glint in the hard midday sunlight. “Too soon to make out the other two, I think. Or are you telling me that you’re able to see them already?”

“Actually, I don’t quite think I can manage it yet, sir.”

“Nor I,” said Mandralisca.

The Five Lords, when they had launched their strange and so far quite secretive break with the authority of the central government, had agreed not to make their headquarters in their uncle’s old capital of Ni-moya. That would have been wildly imprudent of them. They were, all five, imprudent men by nature; but sometimes they did listen to reason. At Mandralisca’s suggestion they had agreed to come all the way out here to the sparsely populated and long neglected province of Gornevon, midway between Ni-moya and Verf on the south bank of the Zimr.

The river, though it was readily navigable for its entire seven thousand miles of length, from the Dulorn Rift in the far west to the coastal city of Piliplok on the Inner Sea, was oddly contrary here. Everywhere else along its path fine anchorages abounded and great prosperous urban centers had sprung up in them, a host of rich inland ports—Khyntor, Mazadone, Verf, and any number more, of which group Ni-moya was the grandest, a sublime queen among the cities of the western continent.

But here in Gornevon a line of steep red sandstone bluffs sprang up vertically right at the shoreline of the river’s southern bank. That created an imposing—indeed, impassable—waterfront palisade that stood as an inexorable wall between the river and the lands to the south. Nor was there anything remotely like an anchorage to be found along that stretch of the river, not even a place where small boats could dock.

Which made the Zimr’s southern shore altogether inaccessible in this part of the country, and all commerce had forsaken it. On the other bank, directly opposite the site where the palaces of the Five Lords now stood, was the generous crescent harbor that had brought great wealth to the city of Horvenar; on this side, though, there was nothing but the flat-topped red cliffs, with something very much like a desert to the south of them, a parched useless land that no one had ever seen fit to settle, since there was no access from the river and the land approach from the south was extremely difficult. It was here that Mandralisca had persuaded the Five Lords to situate their capital.

It was a cheerless unwelcoming terrain. Gornevon was an arid province. All of it lay in the shadow of the western branch of the mid-continental Gonghar range, and that long and towering chain of snowy-crested precipices prevented the summer rains that blew from the southeast, out of the Shapeshifter lands, from getting here. On the other side of the province stood the mile-high wall that was the Velathys Scarp, which intercepted the winter rains that traveled with the west wind out of the Great Sea; and so Gornevon was a sort of pocket desert in the midst of fertile, prosperous Zimroel, one of the driest places in the entire immense continent.

“If only we were coming into Ni-moya now instead, eh?” said Halefice, with a chuckle.

Mandralisca’s response was a thin cool smile. “You love your comforts, don’t you, my friend?”

“Who but a madman—or the Five Lords—would prefer this place to Ni-moya, your grace?”

Mandralisca shrugged. “Who but a madman, indeed? But we go where we must go. Our destiny has sent us here: so be it.”

The five brothers would not have dared, of course, to use Ni-moya as the base for their insurrection, even though it was their family’s ancestral seat, from which their rapacious uncle the Procurator Dantirya Sambail had long ruled Zimroel as a king within the kingdom. Prestimion, having taken Dantirya Sambail prisoner on the battlefield of Thegomar Edge at the conclusion of the Korsibar war, had pardoned him, ultimately, for his perfidious role in the insurrection. The victorious Coronal had left him in possession of his lands and wealth. But he had stripped him of his title of Procurator, and had debarred him from wielding power beyond the boundaries of his own considerable estates. That had been some sixteen years ago. There had been no Procurators in Zimroel ever since.

Dantirya Sambail’s second rebellion had brought him to a bloody end at the hand of Septach Melayn in the marshy forests of the Stoien-zar. His lands had descended to his coarse, brutal brothers Gaviad and Gaviundar. Eventually, after their deaths, the properties had passed to

Gaviundar’s five sons, who yearned to regain the sway over all of Zimroel that their great and terrible uncle once had had; for the central government and its two monarchs, the Pontifex and the Coronal both, were far away on the other and older continent of Alhanroel, where both its capitals were situated.

On populous Zimroel most people felt only the most abstract sort of allegiance to that government. They gave lip service to the Coronal, yes; but it was the power of the Procurator, one of their own, that had always been far more real to them. They had grown accustomed to the reign of their ferocious Procurator. He had been a singularly unlovable man, but under his energetic rule Zimroel had attained much affluence and stability. And therefore it was very likely—so the five sons of Gaviundar told one another—that the people of Zimroel would even after a lapse of a decade and a half choose to accept the Procurator’s legitimate heirs, princes of the true Sambailid blood, as their masters.

Naturally it would not have done to begin any such drive toward power in Ni-moya itself. Ni-moya was the administrative center of the western continent, a hive of Pontifical bureaucrats. Let any member of the Sambailid tribe announce that he intended once more to exercise the old family authority over anything other than the family’s private lands, and immediately word of it would go forth from Ni-moya to the Labyrinth, and from there to the Castle, and in short order a royal army under the Coronal’s command would be setting out for Zimroel to restore matters to their proper order.

Out here in the hinterlands, though, one could do as one wished, even proclaim oneself sovereign over vast domains, and it might be years before word of it filtered back to the Coronal atop Castle Mount or to the Coronal’s own overlord, the Pontifex, in his underground lair. Majipoor was so huge that news often traveled slowly even when carried on swift wings.

And thus the five brothers had taken themselves out to this remote outpost and had given themselves resounding new titles: they named themselves the Lords of Zimroel, true successors by right of blood to the Procurators of old. And they had gradually let the word go forth, village by village throughout the adjacent regions of Zimroel on both sides of the river, that they held supremacy here now. They had left the river cities themselves alone, so far, because the river was the main highway across the continent, and any attempt to interfere with commerce on the Zimr would bring quick retribution from the central government.

But they had claimed and won allegiance in the farming communities north and south of the river for some hundreds of miles, reaching to the east as far as Immanala, to the west almost to Dulorn. That provided them with a domain from which they could eventually expand.

It was Mandralisca himself, long the second-in-command to Dantirya Sambail and now the chief adviser to his five nephews, who had suggested their new titles to them.

“You cannot call yourselves Procurators,” he said. “It would be like an instant declaration of war.”

“But ‘lords’—?” said Gaviral, who was the eldest one, and the quickest-witted of the lot. “Only the Coronal may call himself ‘lord’ on Majipoor, is that not so, Mandralisca?”

“Only the Coronal can take it as part of his name: Lord Prankipin, Lord Confalume, Lord Prestimion. But any count or prince or duke is a lord of sorts in his own territory, and one can quite properly say, in addressing him, ‘my lord.’ So we will make a little distinction here. You will be the Five Lords of Zimroel; but you will not try to speak of yourselves as Lord Gaviral, Lord Gavinius, Lord Gavdat, and so on. No: you will be ‘the Lord Gaviral,’ ‘the Lord Gavinius,’ ” et cetera, et cetera.”

“It seems to me a very fine distinction,” said Gaviral.

“I like it,” said Gavahaud, who of the five was the most vain. He grinned a broad toothy grin. “The Lord Gavahaud! All hail the Lord Gavahaud! It has a fine sound, would you not say, eh, Lord Gavilomarin?”

“Be careful,” said Mandralisca. “You have it wrong already. Not Lord Gavilomarin, but the Lord Gavilomarin. When one speaks to him directly one can call him ‘milord,’ and say, ‘Milord Gavilomarin,’ but never ‘Lord Gavilomarin’ alone. Is that clear?”

It took them a while to get it. He was not surprised. In Mandralisca’s estimation they were, after all, nothing more than a pack of buffoons.

But they embraced their new titles gladly. In the course of time they made themselves known in this district and several surrounding provinces as the Five Lords of Zimroel. Not everyone accepted the resurgence of Sambailid power gladly: the Vorthinar lord, for one, a petty princeling with lands to the north of the Zimr, had had ideas of his own about establishing authority independent of the Alhanroel regime, and had refused the Sambailid overtures so rudely and categorically that it had been necessary for the brothers to send Mandralisca to deal with him. But there were plenty of men who had loved Dantirya Sambail and resented his overthrow by the outlander Prestimion, and they came from many parts of the western continent to throw in their lot with the Five Lords. Very quietly a shadow Sambailid administration had emerged out here in rural Zimroel.

In their slowly expanding dominion the Five Lords appointed officials and decreed laws. They succeeded in diverting local taxes from the Pontifical tax-collectors to their own. They built five fine palaces for themselves opposite Horvenar atop the red bluffs of Gornevon. The dwellings of Gavdat and Gavinius and Gavahaud were side by side in a single group, with Gaviral’s somewhat to the west of the others on a little promontory with a better view of the river than his brothers had, and Gavilomarin’s off on the eastern side, separated from the rest by a low lateral ridge; and from those five palaces did they propose very gradually to extend their rule over the continent that their potent uncle once had ruled virtually as a king.

Up to this time the government of the Pontifex Confalume and the Coronal Lord Prestimion in far-off Alhanroel had paid no heed to what had begun to take shape in Zimroel. Perhaps they were still unaware of it.

The Five Lords knew what risks they were running. But Mandralisca had shown them how difficult it would be for the imperial government to take any kind of serious punitive action against them. An army would have to be raised in Alhanroel and transported somehow to the other continent across the great gulf that was the Inner Sea. Then the imperial troops would have to commandeer virtually the entire fleet of Zimr riverboats to carry them upriver to the rebel-held territory, or else march thousands of miles overland, through one probably hostile district after another.

And even if they succeeded in that, and brought the rebellious farmers of the region back under control, it would not be easy to dislodge the Five Lords themselves from their hilltop eyrie high above the Zimr. There was no possibility at all of scaling those red bluffs from the river side. That left only the desert approach from the south—the very district through which Mandralisca and his party were riding now. And that was a hellish road indeed.

8

In the evening the Justiciar Corde called for Dekkeret and Dinitak at their hostelry and escorted them to the palace of the Count for a formal banquet, the first of several such events planned for Dekkeret’s stay in Normork.

Dekkeret had seen the palace often enough when he was growing up: a blocky building of gray stone, squat and nearly windowless, that clung like some huge limpet to the city wall in a place where the wall made a wide outward curve to get past a jutting spur of Castle Mount. It was a dark, grim-looking place, fortresslike, uninviting. Even the six slim minarets that sprang from its roof, which the architect probably had meant to add a touch of lightness to the palace’s appearance, seemed like nothing so much as an array of barbed spears.

The interior was every bit as somber as the outside. The building seemed twice as big inside as without, and perhaps four times as ugly. Dekkeret and Dinitak were conducted down long stretches of shadowy bewildering corridors lit only by smoldering torches and inadequate glowlights, past radiating clusters of spokelike hallways of unadorned stone walls, through rooms with walls of black brick decorated with nothing more than the occasional preposterous statue of some unknown ancient figure or clumsily designed tapestries portraying forgotten lords and ladies of the city engaged in their lordly amusements; and eventually they arrived at the dark, drafty banqueting-hall of Count Considat, where an assortment of Normork’s notables awaited them.

It was a dreary evening. Considat spoke first, welcoming Normork’s most famous son back to his native city. The Count was young and had succeeded to his title only the year before, and was an amiable and almost diffident man rather more appealing in look and manner than his coarse, ill-bred father had been. But he was a dreadful speaker who droned on and on as though he had no idea of how to bring his speech to an end, unleashing a torrent of fatuous platitudes. At one point Dekkeret dozed off, and only a sharp rap under the table from Dinitak brought him back to the scene.

Then it was Dekkeret’s turn to speak, conveying Lord Prestimion’s greetings and—since that was the official pretext of his visit—congratulating the Count and Countess on the birth of their son. He extended Lord Prestimion’s regret at not being able to be present in person just now. The congratulatory gifts that had been sent by Lord Prestimion were carried in by Dekkeret’s men. Justiciar Corde spoke. Several other high officials of the court, obviously eager to make a powerful impression on the future Coronal, spoke also, effusively and to tiresome effect. Then Count Considat spoke again, no more ably than before, but at least with greater brevity. Dekkeret, caught a bit by surprise, improvised a reply. Then, only then, was food at last served, a sorry sequence of overcooked, feebly spiced meats and flaccid vegetables and prematurely opened wines. After-dinner speeches were to follow. Dekkeret made his way through the interminable ceremony by dint of a mighty summoning of patience and discipline.

He realized only too well that many more such evenings were in store for him in the years ahead. Once, when he was much younger, he had imagined that a Coronal’s life must be an endlessly glamorous affair of tournaments and feasting and revelry, interrupted now and then by the making of grand, dramatic decisions that would alter the fates of many millions of people. He knew better now.

The next day, with no official functions scheduled before nightfall, Dekkeret took Dinitak on a tour of the city, just the two of them—and a dozen or so bodyguards. It was a clear, warm morning, the air soft and fragrant in the eternal springtime of Castle Mount, the sunlight bright and strong. The soaring jagged crags of the Mount, rising beyond the city wall on all sides of Normork, glinted like ruddy bronze in that brilliant light.

Visitors to Normork often commented on the contrast between the glorious beauty of the city’s setting and the dark, hermetic look of the city itself, a tumbled multitude of close-packed gray buildings huddling in the shadow of that colossal black wall. Dekkeret, having been raised here, took the prevailing somberness of Normork for granted without finding anything unusual in it, indeed, without really noticing it at all; but now for the first time he began to see the city through the eyes of its critics. Perhaps, he thought, all the years he had spent dwelling in the airy higher reaches of Castle Mount were starting to alter his outlook toward this place.

The city wall was all but unscalable from without. Everywhere inside the city, though, stone staircases were set flush against its inner face that led to the top. They gave easy access to the broad road, wide enough for ten people to walk abreast on it, that ran along the wall’s rim. Dekkeret and Dinitak, accompanied by their inescapable gaggle of security men, ascended by way of the stairs just opposite their hotel.

In silence they set out westward around the city perimeter. After a time Dekkeret beckoned to his companion to follow him to the wall’s outer border. Leaning far out over it, he said, “Do you see that highway down there below us? The thing that looks like a white ribbon stretching a long way off into the east? That’s the one that comes up from Dundilmir and Stipool and the other cities over yonder on this level of the Mount. That road is the chief route of access to Normork for those cities and everything farther down. But you’ll notice that it doesn’t actually run into Normork anywhere. It can’t, because it comes in on the wrong side of town. You’ve already seen that the only entrance to the city is way around over there, on the side of Normork that faces upslope.”

Dinitak looked and nodded. “Yes. It comes straight up to the wall just below where we’re standing, but there’s no place to enter the city here. So it turns left instead and continues along the outside of the wall, following it all the way around, I suppose, until—until what? Until it reaches that stupid little gate?”

“Exactly. On the other side it joins up with the highway that we came down from the Castle on, and they become a single road that runs into Normork by way of the Eye of Stiamot.”

“And they make travelers from downslope go right around the city in order to enter from the upslope side? What an addlepated arrangement!”

“So it is. But changes are coming.”

“Oh?”

“I told you I had a plan for this city,” said Dekkeret grandly. “We’re standing right above the location where one day I intend to cut a second gateway through this wall.” He made a broad sweeping gesture, taking in a great swath of the titanic rampart of black stone. “Listen to this, Dinitak! The gate that I have in mind to build will be something truly majestic, nothing remotely like the puny little hole by which we entered yesterday. I’m going to make it fifty feet high and forty feet wide, or even more, so that even a Skandar will feel small when he stands under it. I’ll fashion it out of a kind of black wood that I know of from Zimroel, a rare and costly wood that takes a high polish and will shine like a mirror in the morning light, and I’ll bind it with big iron bands and the hinges will be of iron too; and by my most sacred decree it’s going to stand wide open at all times, except when the city is in peril, if ever it is. What do you say to that, eh?”

Dinitak was silent for a moment, frowning.

“I wonder,” he said finally.

“Go on.”

“It sounds very impressive, I agree. But do you think they’d genuinely want a gate like that here, Dekkeret? I’ve been here not even a day and a half, but my clear impression already is that what concerns these Normork folk above all else is safety. They lust for it beyond all reason. They are the most cautious people in the world. And this enormous impregnable black wall of theirs that they cherish so dearly is the symbol of that obsession. Doubtless that’s why the only opening in the wall is such a tiny one, and why they take care to shut that little opening and lock it up tight every evening at sunset. Do you think that the convenience of travelers coming from the downslope cities matters a damn to them, compared with the security of their own precious selves? If you come along and poke a great gaping breach in their wall for them, how likely is it that they’re going to love you for it?”

“I’ll be Coronal then. The first Coronal ever who was born in Normork.”

“Even so—”

“No. They’ll accept my gate, I’m sure of it. They’ll love my gate. Not at first, no, perhaps. I grant you they’ll need some time to get used to it. But it’ll be an utterly splendid gate, the new symbol of the city, something that people will travel from all over Castle Mount to stare at. And the citizens will point to it and say, ‘There it is, there’s the gate that Lord Dekkeret built for us, the most magnificent gate that can be found anywhere in the world.’ ”

“And the fact that it stands open all the time—?”

“Even that. A sign of municipal confidence. What enemies are there for them to fear, anyway? The world is at peace. No invading army is going to come marching up the side of Castle Mount. No, Dinitak—perhaps they’ll mutter and mumble at first, but in a very short while they’ll all agree that the new gate is the most wondrous thing that’s been built here since the wall itself.”

“No doubt you are correct,” said Dinitak, with just the lightest touch of irony in his tone.

Dekkeret heard it. But he would not let himself be checked. “I know that I am. The gate is going to be my monument. The Dekkeret Gate, is what people will call it in centuries to come. Everyone coming up the Mount from below will pass through it and gape at it in awe, and they’ll tell each other that this great gate, the most famous gate in the world, was built long ago by a Coronal Lord named Dekkeret, who was a man of this very city of Normork.”

He could not help smiling at his own absurdly pretentious words. His monument? Did a Coronal of Majipoor need seriously to worry about whether he would ever be forgotten? All that he had just said began to sound just a bit foolish to him even as the last words of it died away. Dinitak often had that effect on him. The tough little man’s hard-won realism frequently was a useful antidote to some of Dekkeret’s wilder flights of romanticism.

But not this time, he swore. Regardless of Dinitak’s misgivings, the Dekkeret Gate was going to be built. Probably not as his first project after he became Coronal, but he was determined to do it sooner or later. It had been his dream for many years. Nothing Dinitak could say was going to swerve him from it.

They walked onward along the top of the wall.

“That’s the Count’s palace, isn’t it?” Dinitak asked, pointing over the inner parapet. “It looks very different from this angle. But just as hideous.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.” Dekkeret felt his mood suddenly darkening. A throbbing began in his temples. He walked toward the parapet for a better view, and found two of Count Considat’s black-uniformed security men in his way. He gesticulated at them with such ferocity that they must have thought he meant to fling them over the side. Hastily they moved back.

Dekkeret stared down into the plaza in front of the palace. His face became bleak. His lips were tightly clamped. He pressed the tips of his fingers to the sides of his head and slowly rubbed the area just above his cheekbones.

“What’s wrong?” Dinitak asked, when some little while had gone by without a word from him.

“We would have a perfect view of the assassination attempt from up here,” said Dekkeret quietly. He sketched out the scene for Dinitak with quick movements of his hand. “Lord Prestimion has just arrived in the plaza. There’s his floater, sitting right down there. He steps out of it. Gialaurys walks at his left side. Akbalik is to the right of him. You never knew Akbalik, did you? He died just around the time you were joining us in Stoien city for the final attack on Dantirya Sambail. A wonderful man, Ak-balik was. He should be the one about to become Coronal, not me.—And there’s Count Meglis on the palace steps, three or four steps from the bottom. The stupid bastard is simply standing there, waiting for Prestimion to go to him, when it’s supposed to be the other way around. Prestimion isn’t expecting that. He waits for Meglis to finish coming down the steps, but he doesn’t, and for a couple of moments neither of them moves.”

Dekkeret fell silent.

“And where were you standing?” Dinitak asked. “You told me that you were there that day, that you saw the whole thing.”

“Yes. Yes. There was a huge crowd, over there on the left, where the plaza runs into that big boulevard. Thousands of people. Guards holding us back. I’m practically at the front, on that side. The second row.”

Dekkeret sighed. It was followed by another brooding silence.

Dinitak said, “Then what? The assassin bursts out of the crowd, swinging his sickle? Someone yells to warn the Coronal. The guards move in and cut the man down.”

“No. A girl comes out first—”

“A girl?”

“A beautiful girl, very tall, curling reddish-gold hair. Sixteen years old. Sithelle, her name was. My cousin. Standing just in front of me, right against the rope that’s holding the crowd back. She adored Lord Prestimion. We got up at dawn to get a good position up in front. She was carrying a bouquet that she had woven herself, hundreds of flowers. Was planning to throw it toward the Coronal, so I assumed. But no. No.” Dekkeret’s voice had become a dull low monotone. “She bends down and wriggles under the rope and slips past the guards so that she can hand the flowers to Prestimion. A very unwise thing to do. But he’s amused. He signals to the guards to let her approach. He takes the flowers from her. Asks her a question or two. And then—”

“The man with the sickle?”

“Yes. Skinny man with a beard. Crazy look in his eye. He comes charging out of nowhere, heading straight for Prestimion. Sithelle doesn’t see him coming, but she hears footsteps, I guess, and she turns, and he chops at her with the sickle to get her out of his way.” Dekkeret snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Blood everywhere—her throat—”

In a hushed voice Dinitak said, “He kills her, your cousin?”

“She must have died almost instantly.”

“And then the guards kill him.”

“No,” Dekkeret said. “I do.”

“You?”

“The assassin had been standing five or six places to my left. I came running out of the crowd right after him—I don’t know how I got past the restraining rope, don’t remember that part of it at all, only that I was out there, and I could see Sithelle with her hand across her throat trying to hold the cut together as she started to fall, and Prestimion standing there frozen with the man with the sickle raising his arm, and Gialaurys and Akbalik starting to move in from the sides but not fast enough. I grabbed the assassin’s arm and twisted it until it broke. Then I put my arm around his neck and broke that too. And picked up Sithelle—she was dead by then, that I knew—and walked off into the crowd with her, straight down Spurifon Boulevard into Old Town. No one stopped me. People moved away from me as I approached. Her blood was all over me. I took her to her house and told her parents what had happened. It was the most dreadful hour of my life. It has stayed with me ever since.”

“You loved her? You wanted to marry her, did you? You were promised to each other?”

“Oh, no. Nothing of the sort. I loved her, yes, of course, but not in that way. We were cousins, remember. Raised practically like brother and sister. Our families wanted us to marry, but I never had any serious thought of it.”

“And she?”

Dekkeret managed a thin smile. “She may have had some fantasy of marrying Lord Prestimion. I know she had pictures of him tacked up all over her room. But nothing could ever have come of that, and she probably realized it. Very possibly she may have been in love with me, I suppose. We were so young then—what did either of us know—?”

He looked down again into the plaza. Was that her blood still staining the cobbles of the plaza?

No. No, he told himself, stop being ridiculous!

Dinitak said, “In fact you were in love with her, I think.”

“No. I’m sure I wasn’t, not then. But—the Divine help me, Dinitak!—something has gradually come over me since that time. She won’t leave my mind. I look back across the years and I see her, her face, her eyes, her hair, the way she held herself, the way she would run up and down these stairs, the mischief in her glance—and I think, if only she had lived, if only we had had a chance to grow up a little—” Dekkeret shook his head fiercely. “Never mind. She’s been dead now longer than she ever was alive. She has no more reality now than someone who comes to you in a dream. Come: let’s get ourselves away from this place.”

“I’m sorry all this got stirred up for you again, Dekkeret.”

“No matter. It’s there inside me all the time. Seeing the actual site just made it a little worse for a moment.—That same afternoon, you know, Akbalik found me somehow and took me to see Prestimion, who offered to enroll me as a knight-initiate at the Castle as a reward for saving his life, and everything that’s happened to me since has been the direct outcome of what took place down there that terrible day. I remember Prestimion saying to Akbalik, ‘Who knows? We may have found the next Coronal here today.’ His very words. He was joking then, of course.”

“But he was right about that.”

“Yes. So it would seem. A direct line, connecting that boy who came running out of the crowd to save Lord Prestimion with the man who’ll sit someday where Prestimion sits now on the Confalume Throne.” Dekkeret laughed harshly. “Me: Lord Dekkeret! Isn’t that astounding, Dinitak?”

“Not to me. But I do sometimes think you have trouble believing you’re actually going to be Coronal.”

“Wouldn’t you, if you were the one?”

“But I’m not the one, and never will be, the Divine be thanked. I’m quite content being who I am.”

“As am I, Dinitak. I’m in no hurry to take over Prestimion’s job. If he went on being Coronal for the next twenty years, that would be perfectly all right with—”

Dinitak caught at Dekkeret’s sleeve. “Hold it a moment. Look—there’s something odd going on over there.”

He followed the line of Dinitak’s pointing arm. Yes: some sort of altercation seemed to be under way about fifty feet farther down the wall, just outside the protective circle of Considat’s security force. Half a dozen of the guardsmen were surrounding someone. Arms were waving. There was a lot of angry incoherent shouting.

“It’s too improbable that there would be another assassination attempt,” Dinitak said.

“Damned right it is. But those halfwits—” Dekkeret raised himself on tiptoe for a better view. A gasp of outrage burst from him. “By the Lady, it’s a messenger from the Castle that they’re making trouble for! Come on, Dinitak!”

They rushed over. An overwrought-looking guardsman thrust himself in Dekkeret’s face and said, “A suspicious stranger, my lord. We attempted to interrogate him, but—”

“Blockhead, don’t you recognize the badge of the Coronal’s couriers? Step aside!”

The courier was no one Dekkeret recognized, but the golden star-burst that was his badge of office was authentic enough. The man, though more than a little worse from wear after the security guards’ intervention, pulled himself together stalwartly and held forth to Dekkeret an envelope prominently sealed in scarlet wax with the sigil of the High Counsellor Septach Melayn. “My lord Dekkeret, I bear this message—by order of Prince Teotas, on behalf of the Council, I have ridden from the Castle day and night to give it to you—”

Dekkeret snatched it from him, gave the seal a cursory glance, ripped the envelope open. There was just a single scrawled page within, in Teotas’s bold, square, boyish lettering. Dekkeret’s eyes traveled quickly over the words, and then over them again, and again.

“Bad news?” Dinitak asked, after a while.

Dekkeret nodded. “Indeed. The Pontifex is ill. He may have had a stroke.”

“Dying, is he?”

“That word is not used here. But how can it fail to come to mind, when a man ninety years old is taken ill? I’m summoned immediately back to the Castle.” Dekkeret forced a chuckle. “Well, at least we won’t have to suffer through another of Count Considat’s dreadful banquets tonight: thanks be to the Divine for small mercies. But what might happen after that—” He looked away. He did not know what to think. A dizzying torrent of contradictory feelings rushed through him: sadness, excitement, dismay, euphoria, disbelief, fear.

Confalume ill. Possibly dying. Perhaps already dead.

Did Prestimion know? He was supposed to be off traveling also, just now. As usual. Dekkeret wondered what sort of scene was unfolding back at the Castle in the absence both of the Coronal and the Coronal-designate.

“It may be only nothing,” he said. His voice, usually so resonant, was hollow and hoarse. “Old men get ill from time to time. Not everything that seems to be a stroke is one. And one doesn’t necessarily die of a stroke.”

“All this is true,” said Dinitak. “But even so—”

Dekkeret held up his hand. “No. Don’t say it.”

Dinitak would not be halted. “You remarked just a moment ago that you hoped Prestimion went on being Coronal for the next twenty years. And I know you were sincere in hoping that. But you didn’t seriously believe that he would, did you?”

9

The first pungatans were coming into view, dotting the wasteland before them.

“These filthy plants!” Jacomin Halefice muttered. “How I loathe them! I would take a torch to the lot of them, if I were allowed!”

“Ah,” said Mandralisca. “They are our friends, those plants!”

“Your friends, perhaps, your grace. Not mine.”

“They guard our domain,” the Count said. “They keep us safe from our enemies, our lovely pungatans.”

So they did. This was a wild, cruel desert, and the only traversable road through it was a mere stony track. Venture off it even a dozen yards and you were at the pungatans’ mercy—those evil whip-leaved plants that were the only things that flourished here. It would be a major logistical task to guide an army of any size through this land of little water and nothing in the way of wood or edible crops, where what vegetation there was struck out savagely and lethally at all passersby.

But Mandralisca knew the way through this grim plain. “Beware the whips!” he called out, glancing back over his shoulder at his men. “Keep yourselves in line!”

He gave his mount the spurs and rode onward into the pungatan grove.

They were actually quite beautiful, the pungatans, or so it seemed to Mandralisca. Their thick gray stubby trunks, smooth and columnar, rose from the rust-red soil to a height of three or four feet. From the summit of each sprouted a pair of wavy ribbonlike fronds, extending in opposite directions for two yards or so with their tips trailing down prettily along the ground into an intricate coiling tangle of frayed ends. These fronds seemed delicate and soft; they were so nearly transparent that they were hard to see except at certain favorable angles. As they fluttered in the breeze, they might almost seem to be strands of clear seaweed, surging with the tides.

But one merely had to pass within fifteen or twenty feet of one of the plants and a deep wash of reddish-purple color came flooding into those fluttering fronds, and they grew turgid and began to tremble at their tips; and then—whack!—they would uncoil to their full startling length and strike, a whiplash blow of astonishing swiftness and horrific force. It was a savage lateral swing that sliced with the power of a sharp sword through any creature rash enough to have ventured within their range. That was how they nourished themselves, in this infertile soil: they killed, and then they fed on the nutrients that leached into the ground from the decomposing bodies of their victims. One could see fragmentary skeletons scattered all around, the ancient remains of incautious beasts and, evidently, a good many unwary travelers.

Someone had long ago laid out a safe track through this unappealing wilderness, a narrow zone that passed between the places where the plants tended to grow. It was marked only by a sparse border of rocks on either side, and the careless wayfarer could all too readily stray outside its limits. But Count Mandralisca was not one much given to carelessness. He guided his little convoy through the deadly plain without incident and thence up the narrow, interminably switchbacking trail that took one to the top of the riverfront bluffs and to the compound of palaces where his masters the Five Lords awaited his return.

What sort of foolishness, Mandralisca wondered, had they managed to get themselves into in his absence?

He was greeted, as he and his party came riding into the broad colonnaded plaza that fronted the three central buildings, by a sight so very much in accord with his expectations that he was hard put to choke back bitter laughter, and to conceal his loathing and disgust.

Gavinius, the brother for whom Mandralisca cared least of all, was wandering at large in the plaza, drunk—no surprise that!—and reeling around in a blundering rampage. Flushed and sweaty, clad only in a loosely flapping linen apron, he was roaming from one stone column to the next, blowing kisses to them as though they were pretty maidens, all the while bawling some raucous song. A leather flask of brandy dangled from one shoulder. A couple of his women—his “wives,” Gavinius liked to call them, but there was no evidence that that was so in any formal sense—followed along cautiously behind him as though they hoped somehow to steer him back inside the palace. But they were taking care not to get too close. Gavinius was dangerous when he was drunk.

He came to a lurching, staggering halt as the Count came into view.

“Mandralisca!” he bellowed. “At last! Where have you been, fellow? Been looking for you all day!”

The big man went stumbling forward. Mandralisca swung himself quickly to the ground. It would not be the part of wisdom to remain astride his mount in the presence of the Lord Gavinius.

Of the five brothers, Gavinius was the one who most closely resembled their late father Gaviundar: a huge big-bellied red-faced man with a wide, florid face, unpleasant little blue-green eyes, and great fleshy ears that sprang out at acute angles from the nearly bald dome of his head. Though Mandralisca was a tall man, the Lord Gavinius was even taller, and very much greater in bulk. He took up a stance that was almost nose to nose with Mandralisca and stood rocking alarmingly back and forth on the massive tree trunks that were his legs, squinting at him blearily. “You want a drink, Count? Here. Here. Look at you, you’re dusty all over! Where have you been?” Clumsily he unfastened the strap of his brandy flask, nearly dropping it in the process and catching it only by a desperate swipe of his huge paw, and pushed it toward Mandralisca.

“I thank you, milord Gavinius. But I have no thirst just now.”

“No thirst? Ah, but you never do. Damn you, why not? What a sorry stick of a man you are, Mandralisca! Have some anyway. You should want to drink. You should love to drink. How can I trust a man who hates to drink? Here. Here. Drink!”

Shrugging, Mandralisca took the flask from the bigger man, held it to his lips without quite touching it, pretended to take a swig, and handed it back.

Gavinius corked the flask and flipped it casually over his shoulder. Then, leaning close into Mandralisca’s face, he began thickly to say: “I had a dream last night—the most amazing—it was a sending, Mandralisca, a true sending, I tell you! I wanted you to speak it for me, but where were you? Damn you, where were you? It was such a dream—”

“He was away north of the Zimr, you booby, carrying out a punitive mission against the Vorthinar lord,” came a dry, hard voice suddenly from one side. “Isn’t that so, Mandralisca?”

Gaviral, it was. The only really clever one of the bunch: the future Pontifex of Zimroel, if Mandralisca had his way.

The interruption was a welcome one. Dealing with Gavinius, drunk or sober, was always an irritating business, and it could be perilous besides. Gaviral was capable of being dangerous in his own cunning way, but at any rate there was no risk of his grabbing you up in some bone-crushing demonstration of manly affection, or simply crashing down drunkenly upon you like a toppling tree.

“I have been in the north, yes, milord,” said Mandralisca, “and the mission has been accomplished. The Vorthinar lord and all his men went up in flames these five days past.”

Gaviral smiled. Alone in this brotherly herd of great uncouth oxen he was a wiry man, small and fidgety, with quick flickering eyes and a narrow, twitchy mouth. He was built on such a different scale from the others that quite possibly he was not his father’s son at all, Mandralisca sometimes suspected. But he did have the reddish hair of the whole Sambailid clan, and the distinctive coarseness of feature, and their irrepressible rapacity of spirit. “Dead, are they?” Gaviral said. “Splendid. Splendid! But I had no doubt. You are a good staunch faithful man, Mandralisca. What would we ever do without you? You are a jewel. You are our strong right arm. I commend you with all my heart.”

There was profound condescension in Gaviral’s effusive tone, an airy insincerity, a lurking disingenuousness, that blared forth in every syllable. He spoke as one might speak to a servant, to a lackey, to a minion—that is, one might speak that way if one were a fool and did not understand the proper ways of addressing those upon whom you are dependent, inferiors though they might be.

But Mandralisca betrayed no sign of taking offense. “Thank you, milord,” he said softly, with a grateful little smile and a nod of his head, as though he had been honored with a golden chain, or a knighthood, or the gift of six villages in the fertile north. “I will cherish these words of yours. Your praise means a great deal to me—more, perhaps, than you can realize.”

“It is not so much praise, Mandralisca, as a simple statement of the truth,” said Gaviral, seeming very pleased with himself.

He was the brightest of the five brothers, yes. But what Mandralisca knew, and Gaviral did not, was that Gaviral was not half so bright as he thought he was. That was his great flaw. He was easy enough to deceive: merely let him think you were in awe of his superb mind, and he was yours.

Gavinius now broke in abruptly. “I dreamed,” he said, returning to his theme as though Mandralisca and Gaviral had not been speaking with each other at all, “such a dream! The Procurator came to me, will you believe it? Walked up and down before me, looked me in the eye, said marvelous things to me. It was a sending, I know it was, but whose was it? Surely not the Lady’s. Why would the Lady send the Procurator’s spirit to me? Why would the Lady send me a dream in the first place?” Gavinius belched. “You have to explain it to me, Mandralisca. I’ve been hunting for you all day. Where have you been, anyway?” Then he turned away, scuffing about for his flask in the red sand of the plaza. “And where has my brandy gone? What have you done with my flask?”

“Go inside, Gavinius,” Gaviral said in a low but insistent tone. “Lie down. Close your eyes for a while. The Count will speak your dream later for you.” The little man gave his hulking brother a sharp thump on the breastbone. Gavinius looked down, blinking in astonishment, at the place where he had been struck. “Go. Go, Gavinius.” And Gaviral thumped him again, tapping a little harder this time. Gavinius, still blinking, went lumbering off toward his palace like a befuddled bidlak, with his women tagging along just behind.

The Lords Gavdat and Gavahaud had by this time appeared in the plaza, and Mandralisca saw Gavilomarin coming toward them over the ridge that separated his palace from the others. The brothers clustered around their privy counsellor.

Soft, jowly-faced Gavdat of the cavernous nostrils, as soon as he learned of the successful result of Mandralisca’s mission, let it be known that his casting of a thaumaturgic horoscope had made that outcome a certainty. He fancied himself a wizard of sorts, did Gavdat, and dabbled ineptly in magecraft and spells. Vain bull-necked Gavahaud, as ugly as his brothers but convinced to a marvelous degree of his own beauty, offered Mandralisca congratulations with a dainty foppish salute, doubly grotesque in so heavyset a man. Big flabby Gavilomarin, a pallid-souled negligible person who obligingly agreed with anything any of the others might say, clapped his hands in a simpleminded way and giggled happily at the news of the burning of the keep.

“So may they all perish, those who oppose us!” said Gavahaud sententiously.

“There will be many of those, I fear,” Mandralisca said.

“The Coronal, you mean?” asked the Lord Gaviral.

“That will be later. I mean others like the Vorthinar lord. Local princes, who see themselves as having a chance to break away from everyone’s authority. Once they behold lords like yourself openly defying the Coronal and the Pontifex and succeeding in that defiance, they see no reason to continue to pay taxes to other administrations. Including your own, my lords.”

“You will burn them for us, then, as you burned this one,” Gavahaud said.

“Yes. Yes. So he will!” cried Gavilomarin, and gleefully clapped his hands again.

Mandralisca threw him a quick baleful smile. Then, tapping his fingertips to the golden paraclet of his office that hung at his breast and glancing swiftly from one brother to the next, he said, “My lords, I have had a long journey this day, and I am very weary. I ask your permission to retire.”

As they made their way toward the village a little distance south of Gaviral’s palace where the highest-level retainers lived, Jacomin Halefice said hesitantly to Mandralisca, “Sir, may I offer a personal observation?”

“We are friends, are we not, Jacomin?” said Mandralisca.

The statement was so far from the truth that Halefice had difficulty hiding his astonishment. But he recovered after a moment and said, “It seemed to me, sir, that the brothers, when they were speaking with you just now—and I have noticed this before, in truth—you will forgive me for saying so, I hope, but—” There he hesitated. “What I mean to say—”

“Come out with it, will you?”

Halefice said, “Just that they are so very patronizing when they address you. They speak to you as though they are grand and mighty noblemen and you are insignificant, treated like nothing more than a vassal, a mere flunkey.”

“I am their vassal, Jacomin.”

“But not their servant.”

“Not precisely, no.”

“Why do you abide their insolence, then, sir? For that is what it is, and, forgive me, your grace, but it pains me to see a man of your abilities treated that way. Have they forgotten that you and only you have made them what they are?”

“Oh, no, not so. You give me too much credit, Jacomin. It was the Divine that made them what they are, and also, I suppose, their glorious father Prince Gaviundar, with some help from their lady mother, whoever that may have been.” Mandralisca flashed his quick frosty smile again. “All I did was show them how they could make themselves lords of these few unimportant provinces. And, if all goes well, lords of all Zimroel, perhaps, one day.”

“And it troubles you not in the least that they treat you with such contempt, sir?”

Mandralisca surveyed his bandy-legged little aide-de-camp with a long, slow, curious look.

He and Jacomin Halefice had been together for more than twenty years, now. They had fought side by side against the forces of Prestimion at Thegomar Edge, when Korsibar had perished at the hands of his own Su-Suheris magus, and the Procurator Dantirya Sambail had been defeated and made a prisoner by Prestimion, and Mandralisca himself, who had fought to the last stages of exhaustion, was wounded and taken prisoner also by Rufiel Kisimir of Muldemar. And the two of them had been near each other again at the time of the second great defeat, among the manganoza thickets of Stoienzar, that time when Dantirya Sambail was slain by Septach Melayn: Halefice had helped Mandralisca slip off into the underbrush and vanish, when Navigorn of Hoik-mar was pursuing him and would have put him to death. It was with Halefice’s assistance that Mandralisca had been able to make his escape from Alhanroel and find his way into the service of Dantirya Sambail’s two brothers.

Halefice’s loyalty and devotion were beyond question. He was Mandralisca’s right hand, as Mandralisca had been the right hand of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail. And yet, in all their time together, Halefice had never dared to speak so intimately with Mandralisca as he had just done. In its way that was, Mandralisca thought, somewhat moving.

He said carefully, “If they seem to treat me with contempt, Jacomin, it’s because their manner is ever a coarse one, as is the style of their whole clan. You remember their elegant father Gaviundar, and his beautiful brother Gaviad. Nor was their uncle Dantirya Sambail known for the gentleness of his tongue. Where you see contempt, my friend, I see only something of a lack of tact. I take no offense. It is in their nature. They are crude rough men. I forgive them for it, because we are all players in the same game, do you take my meaning?”

“Sir?” said Halefice blankly.

“Apparently you don’t. Let me put it this way: I serve the needs of the Sambailids, whether they know it or not, and I think they do not, but also they serve mine. It is the same between you and me, as well. Think on it, Jacomin. But keep your findings to yourself. Let us not discuss these things again, shall we?” Mandralisca turned away, toward his own simple cottage. “Here is the parting of our ways,” he said. “I wish you a good day.”

10

The lights remained on and the steward Falco stayed with Prestimion while he calmed himself. Diandolo brought him something cool and soothing to drink. The master of the lodge, virtually beside himself with chagrin that his royal guest had undergone so terrifying a dream under his own roof, produced such an outpouring of solicitousness and fuss that Falco had to order him from the room. Young Prince Taradath, who had accompanied Prestimion to Fa and had a suite of his own across the courtyard, now made a belated appearance, aroused at last from the deep sleep of adolescence by all the furore in the halls. Prestimion sent him away also. His father’s nightmares need not be any concern of his.

This was the third day of Prestimion’s state visit to Fa. Things had been going predictably thus far, the banquets, the speeches, the conferring of royal honors upon deserving citizens, and all the rest. But for the first two nights running he had had the lost-in-unknown-levels-of-the-Castle dream, although, the Divine be thanked, without the additional anguish of having Thismet entering into it. But this time the thing in all its full ghastliness had descended on him.

“You were shouting something like, ‘tizmit, tizmit, tizmit,’ my lord,” Falco said. The name of Thismet would mean nothing to him, of course. There were no more than six people in all the world who knew who she had been. “It was so loud I could hear you from two rooms away. ‘Tizmit! Tizmit!’ ”

“We are likely to say anything in dreams, Falco. It doesn’t have to make sense.”

“This must have been a very bad one, my lord. You still look pale.—Here, give me that,” he said, reaching behind him to take the flask that Diandolo had just brought into the room. “Can’t you hear how sore the Coronal’s voice is?—Another drink, my lord?”

Prestimion took the flask. It was brandy, this time. He gulped it down like so much water.

Falco said, “Shall I summon a speaker for your dream, lordship?”

“No one speaks the Coronal’s dreams except the Lady of the Isle, Falco. You know that. And the Lady is nowhere within reach.” Prestimion rose, a little unsteady on his feet, and went to the window. All was dark outside. It was still the middle of a moonless night here in lovely Fa, that gay and ever-charming city of tier upon tier of pink hillside villas with lacy stone balconies. He braced himself on the windowsill and leaned outward, seeking the cool sweet night air.

Twenty years, and Thismet still haunted him.

She and her brother both were long dead, dead and forgotten, so thoroughly forgotten that even their own father had no idea that they had ever lived. Prestimion’s team of mages had seen to that, on the battlefield at Thegomar Edge just after the great victory, when by a colossal act of sorcery they had blotted all knowledge of the Korsibar insurrection from the memory of the world.

But Prestimion had not forgotten. And, even after all these years with Varaile, Varaile whom he loved with a fervor that had never ebbed, This-met persisted in stealing back into his unguarded mind again and again as he slept. He knew he would never rid himself of the hold she had on him. She had been his dedicated enemy; then had come the astounding thunderbolt of their love; and then, when she had been his for scarcely any time at all, that shattering hour on the battlefield at Thegomar Edge in which he had won his crown and lost his bride almost in the same moment.

“I’ll leave you now, my lord,” Falco said. “You’ll want to get back to sleep. It’s still three hours to dawn.”

“Leave me, yes,” said Prestimion.

But he made no attempt to return to his bed. The dream would only be waiting for him there. He took from its bronze case the portfolio of official documents awaiting his signature that went with him everywhere, and set to work. There were always fifty or a hundred things stored up for him to sign, most of them generated by the ever-busy bureaucrats of the Pontificate, some the work of his own governmental departments.

Much of it was trivial stuff, routine proclamations and decrees, trade treaties between one province and another, revisions of the customs code, the sort of workaday business that other Coronals would have sloughed off on aides to read, so that they would merely need to scan a brief appended summary before signing. The papers from the Labyrinth, which had already been approved by the Pontifex or someone acting in his name, did not even require the Coronal’s attention, only his countersignature. In theory the Coronal had the right to reject a Pontifical decree and send it back to the Labyrinth for reconsideration, but no one could remember when any Coronal had last availed himself of the privilege. But Prestimion tried to read as much of this material as he could. In part that was due to an overriding sense of duty; but also he found it oddly comforting, on nights such as these, to immerse himself in such meaningless mind-numbing toil.

Dawn was still an hour or two away when he heard sounds from the courtyard: the gate being opened, the whirring hum of an arriving floater, a deep, commanding voice loudly calling for porters. That was strange, Prestimion thought, someone turning up at the royal lodge at an hour like this, and making so much noise about it at that.

He peered out.

The floater was from the Castle. It bore the royal starburst emblem. A big, heavyset man in a belted ankle-length red tunic had emerged from it. His great chest and shoulders led Prestimion to think at first that this might be Gialaurys; but this man was heftier even than the Grand Admiral, with a jutting gut on him that would make Gialaurys seem almost slender by comparison. And he spoke with the pure accent of Castle Mount, not Gialaurys’s broad, flat, almost comical Piliplok intonation. Prestimion realized after a moment that it must be Navigorn.

Here? Why? What had happened?

“Falco!” Prestimion called. The steward was at the door almost immediately. He looked as though he, too, had not gone back to sleep. “Falco, the Lord Navigorn has just arrived. He’s in the courtyard. See that he’s shown up here right away.”

The three flights of stairs left Navigorn winded and flushed. He swayed alarmingly in the doorway for a moment, a tall ungainly figure confronting the compactly built Prestimion. With difficulty he said, “Prestimion, I’ve—just—come—straight from the—Castle. I set out yesterday afternoon, traveled right on through the night.” Gingerly Navigorn lowered his bulky form into one of the chairs beside the window, a finely wrought thing of golden kamateros-wood that creaked and groaned beneath his weight, but held firm. “You don’t mind if I sit, do you, Prestimion? Sprinting up those stairs—” He grinned. “I’m not exactly in fighting trim these days.”

“Sit. Sit. You take up less space this way.” Navigorn elaborately settled himself into place. Patiently Prestimion said, “Why are you here, Navigorn? Do you come with bad news?”

The big man’s eyes rose to meet his. He seemed to search a moment for the proper way to begin. “The Pontifex may have had a stroke.”

“Ah,” Prestimion said, exhaling the word almost as though he had been punched in the chest. “A stroke. May have had a stroke, you say?”

“There’s no confirmation. I apologize, Prestimion, for awakening you with something like this, but—”

“I was awake, as a matter of fact.” Prestimion indicated the papers strewn about his desk. “Tell me about this stroke. This possible stroke.’’

“A message came from the Labyrinth. Numbness in his hand, stiffness in his leg. Mages have been called in.”

“Is he going to die?”

“Who can say? You know how tough the old man is, Prestimion. He’s made of iron.” A pained expression crossed Navigorn’s fleshy face. He turned and twisted so restively in his chair that it creaked a protest. He scowled and screwed up his face. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, this probably is the beginning of the end for him. Just my guess, you understand. Pure intuition. But the man’s ninety years old, he’s been Pontifex for twenty years and he was Coronal for forty-odd before that—even iron wears out, you know, sooner or later. I’m sorry, Prestimion.”

“Sorry?”

“No Coronal ever wants to go to the Labyrinth.”

“But every Coronal eventually does, Navigorn. Do you think this catches me unprepared?” And then, almost as if to contradict his own words, Prestimion went over to the sideboard, where a flask of Muldemar wine was sitting, and poured some into a bowl. “Do you want any?” he asked.

“At this hour of the morning? Yes, actually. Yes, I do.”

Prestimion handed him the bowl and poured another for himself. They drank in silence. A cascade of troublesome thoughts thundered through Prestimion’s brain.

Pacing about the room, he said, “What do you think I ought to do, Navigorn? Return to the Castle right away and await developments? Or set out for the Labyrinth to pay my respects while his majesty is still alive?”

“Phraatakes Rem doesn’t seem to think Confalume’s death is imminent. I’d go back to the Castle, if I were you. Meet with the Council, discuss things with the Lady Varaile. And then take yourself down to the Labyrinth.” Navigorn looked up. Suddenly there was a broad incongruous smile on his face. “This is good wine, Prestimion! From your family’s vineyards?”

“There’s none better, is there? Some more?”

“Please. Yes.”

Prestimion filled the bowls again and they sat thoughtfully sipping the rich purple wine for a time, neither of them speaking.

He found it strangely moving that it was Navigorn, rather than Septach Melayn or Gialaurys or his brother Teotas, who had brought him this unsettling news. He and Navigorn had been friends a long while, he supposed, but their friendship had never been the same sort of intimacy that he had with the others. Indeed, they had even been enemies, once, though Navigorn had no recollection of that. That had been in the time of the Korsibar usurpation, when Navigorn had unhesitatingly given his loyalty to the false Coronal, and had fought valiantly on Korsibar’s behalf in the civil war.

But of course Navigorn had not regarded Korsibar as a false Coronal. However unlawfully Confalume’s ill-advised son had placed himself upon the throne, however much his seizure of power had violated all custom and convention, he had been duly anointed and crowned, and, so far as the people of Majipoor were concerned, he was the proper Coronal. So of course when Prestimion had challenged Korsibar’s legitimacy as king and had gone to war to overthrow him, Navigorn had staunchly served the man he recognized as his king. It was only in the hour of Korsibar’s defeat, when the world was in chaos and Prestimion’s triumph was assured, that Navigorn had urged Korsibar to surrender and abdicate in order to keep the bloodshed from going on any longer.

But stubborn stupid Korsibar had refused to yield, and had died in the battle of Beldak marsh below Thegomar Edge; and Navigorn, kneeling before Prestimion, had admitted his error and begged forgiveness. Which Prestimion had freely given; and more than that besides. For in the great wiping of the world’s memory Navigorn had lost all recollection of the civil war and his role in it as Prestimion’s enemy, and so he could readily accept Prestimion’s invitation to join his Council, of which he had been a valued member all these years since. Time had turned Navigorn old and gouty and fat, but he had served Prestimion as staunchly as ever he had Korsibar. And here he was now, the one who had volunteered to take on the difficult job of carrying to Prestimion the news that his time as Coronal might nearly be over.

“Do you remember, Prestimion, when we all went to the Labyrinth to wait for Prankipin’s death, and the old man lingered on and on and on and we thought he’d never die? Ah, there was a time!”

“There was a time indeed,” Prestimion said. “How could I forget it?”

His mind leaped back across the decades to that great gathering, that shining array of young lords that had assembled in the underground city in the final days of the long reign of Prankipin Pontifex: the flower of Majipoor’s manhood, the princes of the realm, gathering about the dying old man. Among them, thought Prestimion, so many who were destined to die themselves, a year or three later, fighting on behalf of the usurping Korsibar in the needless, foolish war that he had brought upon the world.

Navigorn, lost now in memories, helped himself to more wine without asking. “You came down from the Castle with Serithorn of Sami-vole, I recall. Septach Melayn was with you, and Gialaurys, and that other friend of yours, that sneaky little man from Suvrael who called himself a duke—what was his name—?”

“Svor.”

“Svor, yes. And then there was good old Kanteverel of Bailemoona, and the Grand Admiral Gonivaul, who had never been to sea, and Duke Oljebbin, and Earl Kamba of Mazadone. Nor should I leave out our vile red-faced friend the Procurator Dantirya Sambail, eh, Prestimion?—and Mandrykarn of Stee—ah, there was a man, that Mandrykarn!—Venta of Haplior, also—” Navigorn shook his head. “And so many of them died young. Wasn’t that strange? Kamba, Mandrykarn, Iram of Normork, Sibellor of Banglecode, and plenty of others besides—dead, all dead, much too soon. More’s the pity, that. Who’d have known, when we were all together at the Labyrinth, that so many of us would be dead so soon afterward?”

It troubled Prestimion that that thought had occurred to Navigorn too. He waited tensely to see if the other man was going to extend the catalog of the dead: to Korsibar, say. Brawny, swaggering Korsibar had been the most conspicuous figure of all at that gathering of lords in the Labyrinth. But Navigorn did not speak Korsibar’s name.

And his reflective mood lifted as quickly as it had come. He smiled, sighed, lifted his wine-bowl in salute. “We had ourselves a time, though—didn’t we, Prestimion? We had ourselves a time!”

Navigorn began to talk now of the games they had held at the Labyrinth while waiting for Prankipin to die: the Pontifical Games, they had called them, the grandest tournament of modern times. “The wrestling between Gialaurys and that ape Farholt—I thought they’d kill each other, do you know? It seems like just yesterday. And the archery—you were in your prime, then, Prestimion, you did tricks with your bow that day that no one had seen before, or since, for that matter. Septach Melayn winning the fencing over Count Farquanor and making him look such a helpless fool in the bargain. And who was it in the saber? A big man, dark hair, very strong. His face is right at the edge of my mind, but his name is gone. Who was that? Do you remember, Prestimion?”

“I may have been elsewhere for the saber matches that day,” Prestimion said, turning away.

“I can still see the rest of the contests so clearly, though. It does seem just like yesterday. Twenty years and more, but just like yesterday!”

Just like yesterday, yes, Prestimion thought.

It had been Korsibar who won the saber contests. He was the big dark-haired man who lurked at the edge of Navigorn’s mind. But all recollection of Korsibar’s identity had long ago been edited from Navigorn’s memory, and that of Thismet, Korsibar’s sister, as well, and Prestimion was relieved to see that no recollection of them had crept back into Navigorn in the intervening years.

Nor did Navigorn seem to remember the final dramatic event of those famous Pontifical Games, the morning when the ninety contestants in the jousting had come together in full armor in the Court of Thrones, from which they were supposed to be transported to the Arena as a group. Prince Korsibar had burst into the room shouting the news that death had come at last to the aged Pontifex. The long wait was over. The time finally had come for the changing of the reign, and now the Coronal Lord Confalume would become Pontifex, and Confalume would name as the new Coronal young Prince Prestimion of Muldemar.

Or so everyone expected; but that was not what happened. For a dark cloud of sorcery fell upon the minds of the lords assembled in the Court of Thrones, and when it lifted an incredible scene was revealed. Prince

Korsibar, the Coronal’s son, had taken the starburst crown from the startled Hjort who held it and placed it on his own brow, and now was sitting in glory in the place where the Coronal was meant to sit, with his father Confalume, appearing bewildered and almost dazed, seated beside him on the Pontifical throne. And the lords who had conspired with Korsibar to do this thing cried out loudly, “All hail the Coronal Lord Korsibar! Korsibar! Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!”

“Thievery!” was the bellowed answer of Gialaurys. “Thievery! Thievery!” And would have rushed forward into the halberds of Korsibar’s guard, but that Prestimion reined him in, for he saw that it was certain death to offer any resistance to the takeover. And thus he and his friends withdrew from the room in astonishment and defeat, and the Coronal’s throne was Korsibar’s, though it had been the tradition on Majipoor since the earliest days that a Coronal’s son might never inherit his father’s office.

No, Navigorn had no recollection of any of that, or of the great war that had followed and had cost the lives of so many men great and small. Korsibar in time had been overthrown, and Prestimion’s sorcerers had sliced his usurpation out of the history of the world. But that day in the Labyrinth blazed as incandescently as ever in Prestimion’s mind, that time when the throne that had been promised to him had been snatched from his grasp by treachery, forcing him to launch that bloody war against his own former friends in order to restore the proper order of things.

Navigorn’s voice broke him from his reverie: “Will there be a new set of Pontifical Games, Prestimion, when we all go down to the Labyrinth to wait for Confalume to die?”

“We don’t know yet that Confalume is dying,” Prestimion said curtly. “But even if he is—more games? No. Not this time, I think.”

He looked toward the window. Dawn was breaking over Fa.

Navigorn was probably right, he thought: Confalume’s stroke was the herald of the old Pontifex’s end, and before very long Majipoor would see yet another change of reign. He would go to the Labyrinth to become Pontifex, and Dekkeret would take his seat atop Castle Mount as Coronal.

Was he ready for that? No, of course not. Navigorn had said it truly: no Coronal ever wants to go to the Labyrinth. But to it he would go, all the same, as was his duty.

Prestimion did wonder how so restless a nature as his was going to abide life in the underground capital. Even the Castle had proven too confining to him; throughout his reign he had roamed constantly about the world, seizing every excuse to visit distant cities. He had made no less than three grand processionals, something that few Coronals before him had done. But his whole reign had been like an unending grand processional for him: he had traveled as no Coronal had ever traveled before.

Of course he would not be required to hide himself away in the Labyrinth once he became Pontifex. It was merely the custom. The Pontifex, the senior monarch, was supposed to remain secluded; the young and glorious Coronal, it was, who went forth among the populace to see and be seen. He meant to abide by that rule, up to a point. But only up to a point.

How long is it going to be, he asked himself, before everything changes for me?

The Thismet dream, perhaps, had been an omen. The past was reaching out to reclaim him, and soon they would all replay the time of old Prankipin’s death once more. But this time he would have the role of the outgoing Coronal that had been Confalume’s then, and Dekkeret would be the new prince moving to the center of the stage.

At least there were no new Korsibars waiting in the wings. He had seen to that. Confalume, when he was Coronal, had let it be known that he had chosen Prestimion to succeed him, but had never formally named him as Coronal-designate, feeling that that was an unseemly thing to do while old Prankipin was still alive. Prestimion had not made that mistake. In the interests of an orderly succession he had already named Dekkeret as his heir, and had explained to his own sons why the sons of a Coronal could never hope to inherit their father’s throne.

So all was in order. There was no reason for any forebodings. What would be would be, and everything would go well.

Well, then, Prestimion thought, let the changes begin.

He was ready for them. As ready as he ever would be.

To Navigorn he said briskly, “I suppose you’re right that I’d do best to return to the Castle before heading down to the Labyrinth. I’ll want to have a long talk with Varaile first. And I should meet with the Council, of course—prepare them for the succession—”

The only response was a loud snore. Prestimion glanced back at Navigorn. Navigorn was asleep in his chair.

“Falco!” Prestimion called, opening the door. “Diandolo!”

The steward and the page came running.

“Get everything ready for our departure. We’ll leave for the Castle right after breakfast. Diandolo, wake up Prince Taradath and tell him that we’re leaving, and that it’s my intention to leave on time. Oh, and a message has to go to Duke Emelric of Fa, letting him know that my presence at the Castle has suddenly been required and that with great regret I must cancel the rest of my stay here. Before you do that, though, send a courier off to the Lady Varaile at the Castle with word that I’m on my way back, and—well, that should be enough for now.” Quietly, so as not to awaken Navigorn, Prestimion began to gather up the scattered papers of state that covered his desk.

11

A pale, tense face appeared in the doorway of Mandralisca’s work-chamber. A hesitant tenor voice said, in not much more than a throaty whisper, “Your grace?”

Mandralisca glanced up. A young man; a boy, more accurately. Green eyes, long straw-colored hair. Earnest, starry-eyed look on his face.

He pushed aside the maps that he had been studying. “I know you, I think. You were with me on the Vorthinar mission, weren’t you?”

“Yes, your grace.” The boy seemed to be trembling. Mandralisca could hardly hear him. “There is a visitor here who says that he has—”

A visitor? This was not a place where visitors came, this isolated ridgetop settlement above that barren, dry, remorseless valley.

“What did you say? A visitor?”

“A visitor, yes, sir.”

“Speak up, will you?—Are you afraid of me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And why is that?”

“Because—because—”

“Something about my face? The look in my eyes?”

“You simply are a frightening person, sir.” The words came out all in a burst. But the boy was gaining courage. His eyes met Mandralisca’s squarely.

“Yes. I am. The truth is that I work at it. I find it a helpful thing to be frightening.” Mandralisca indicated with an impatient gesture that he should enter the room instead of hovering at the door. The work-chamber, a circular room with an arched roof and burnt-orange mud-plastered walls, was a small one. The entire house was small: the Five Lords might live in palaces, but they had not bothered to provide one for their privy counsellor. “Where do you come from, boy?”

“Sennec, sir. A town not far downriver from Horvenar.”

“How old?”

“Sixteen.—Your visitor, sir, says—”

“Let my damned visitor wait. Let him eat manculain turds while he waits. It’s you I’m talking to just now. What’s your name?”

“Thastain, sir.”

“Thastain of Sennec. The rhythm’s a little brusque. Count Thastain of Sennec: does that sound better? Thastain, Count of Sennec. Count of Sennec and Horvenar. A certain grandeur, that, wouldn’t you say?”

The boy did not reply. His expression was a mixture of bewilderment, fear, and, perhaps, irritation or even anger.

Mandralisca smiled. “You think I’m playing some game with you?”

“Who would ever make me a Count, your grace?”

“Who would ever have made me one? But I am. Count Mandralisca of Zimroel: there’s real poetry for you! I was a country boy just like you, once, a country boy from the Gonghars. It was Dantirya Sambail who put the title on me, the day before he died. ‘You have served me well, Mandralisca, and it’s high time I gave you a proper reward.’ We were in the jungles of the Stoienzar then. We didn’t know they were about to catch up with us. I knelt down and he touched my shoulder with his dagger and proclaimed me a Count right there on the spot, Count of Zimroel, a title that no one had ever had before. The next day Prestimion’s men found our camp and the Procurator was killed. But I got away, and I took my Countship with me.—We’ll make you a Count too, one of these years, maybe. But first we have to turn the Lord Gaviral into a Pontifex. And the Lord Gavahaud, I suppose, into a Coronal.”

That brought only a blank-faced stare, and then a puzzled frown.

Perhaps he had said too much. It was time to send the boy away, Mandralisca realized. There was an odd pleasure in all of this, though: Thastain’s innocence was a charming novelty, and Mandralisca himself was in a strangely expansive mood this morning. But he had learned long ago to mistrust pleasure, even to fear it. And he was beginning to feel too relaxed with the boy. That was dangerous.

He said, “Do you happen to know the name of this visitor of mine?”

“Barz—Braj—Barjz—”

“Barjazid?”

“Barjazid, yes! That’s it, sir! Khaymak Barjazid, of Suvrael!”

Yes. Yes. Mandralisca remembered, now: the correspondence, the offer, the invitation to come. It had all slipped from his mind.

“He’s traveled a long way, then, this Khaymak Barjazid. Where is he now?”

“In the compound, sir, where everyone is kept who comes up the valley road from the pungatan desert. The guards at the first gatehouse found him and brought him in. He claims that you and he have business to discuss.”

Mandralisca felt a stab of excitement. The Barjazid at last! The new one, the brother, the unexpected survivor. He had taken his time about it. He had been dangling the promise of his arrival for most of the past year. And the promise of other things as well. I can be of great use to you, Barjazid had written. Allow me to visit you and show you what I have. “Thank you, Count Thastain. Tell him to come in.”

Thastain moved toward the door. “I’ll fetch him, your grace.”

“Yes. Do.” But—no, Barjazid should have been here months ago. Let the damned slippery bastard fry out there a little while longer. He was no stranger to desert heat, anyway. And it would not do to seem too eager, now that the man—and, Mandralisca assumed, his wares—finally were here. Overeagerness forfeits you the advantage every time.—“Wait, boy!”

“Sir?”

Mandralisca fashioned his long, tapering fingers into a steeple. “One more question, first, before I let you go. Tell me a little more about yourself. Why did you enroll in the service of the Five Lords? What were you hoping to gain by it?”

“To gain, sir? I don’t understand. I wasn’t looking to gain anything. It was a matter of my duty, your grace. The Five Lords are the rightful rulers of Zimroel, by descent from the Procurator Dantirya Sambail.”

“Very prettily spoken, Count Thastain. I admire your devotion to the cause.”

Again the boy headed for the door, as though he could not get himself away from Mandralisca’s presence too soon.

Mandralisca said, halting him once more, “Do you know, I wonder, what work I performed when I first entered the retinue of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail?”

“How could I know that, sir?”

“How could you, indeed. I was his poison-taster. A very old-fashioned position, that. Something out of the time of myth and fable. Dantirya Sambail felt that he needed one. Or perhaps he just wanted one, as a kind of ornamental decoration, a bit of medieval pageantry. Whatever was put before him to eat or drink, I tasted first. A snip of his meat, a sip of his wine. He never let anything enter his mouth without trying it on me first. I made quite an impression, do you know, standing at his shoulder during banquets at the Castle or the Labyrinth.” Mandralisca smiled a second time: close to the quota for the entire morning, he thought. “Go, now. Fetch me my Barjazid.”

12

“Shall I go with you?” Varaile asked. “I could, you know.”

“Are you that eager to see the Labyrinth again?”

“No more so than you are, Prestimion. But it’s been an age since we traveled together. You aren’t trying to avoid me, are you?”

He looked at her in genuine surprise. “Avoid you? You have to be joking. But I want this to be a brief, uncomplicated visit, quickly down, quickly back. He apparently isn’t as sick as we thought, after all. I’ll meet with him for a couple of days, discuss such important business as there happens to be, offer him my wishes for continued long life and good health, and come home. If I go with you, or Dekkeret, or Septach Melayn or Dembitave, or anybody but a Coronal’s minimal traveling retinue, the trip is bound to become a much more involved sort of thing, with all manner of formal events suddenly necessary. I don’t want to put him under any kind of strain. And I certainly don’t want to show up with so many members of the court that Confalume gets the idea that this is some kind of official farewell visit to a dying man.”

“I don’t remember suggesting that you take the whole court,” Varaile said. “I simply offered to accompany you myself.”

Prestimion took her hands in his and brought his face very close to hers. They were almost exactly of the same height. Smiling, he touched the tip of his nose to hers. “You know that I love you,” he said softly. “I feel that this is a trip I should make alone. If you want to come with me, I’m not going to stop you. But I’d rather just go down there myself and come back as fast as I can. It isn’t as though you and I won’t have plenty of time to be in the Labyrinth together in the years to come.”

“You will come right back, then?”

“This time, yes. The next time I go, it’ll be for a longer stay, I’m afraid.”

He had had much the same kind of conversation with Dekkeret a little while earlier, and not a very different one with Septach Melayn. They were all treating him as though he, and not Confalume, were the invalid. They viewed the probability of the Pontifex’s death as an enormous crisis for him, and wanted to gather around him, to protect and comfort him.

They were right to some degree, of course. It was a big thing he was facing—not this visit to the Labyrinth, but the inescapable transition that lay somewhere not far ahead in his life. Did they think, though, that he was likely to break down and burst into tears the moment he set foot in the subterranean capital? Did they believe he was so incapable of dealing with the prospect of becoming Pontifex that he must have his nearest and dearest beside him at all times? How could he explain to them that Coronals lived every day of their lives, day and night, in the awareness that they might become Pontifex at any moment? That possibility was inherent in the job; anyone who was unable to handle it was by that very fact unqualified to be Coronal.

In the end, the only member of his household who went with him was Prince Taradath. The boy had been disappointed by the abrupt termination of his long-promised trip to Fa, and had never seen the Labyrinth, besides. Meeting his majesty the Pontifex would be a memorable thing for him.

And it would be useful for Taradath to get a glimpse, however brief, of the administrative machinery of the Pontificate. Taradath, at fifteen, showed signs of ripening into a worthwhile young man, for whom some good role in the government no doubt would be found when Dekkeret was Coronal. The sons of Coronals, aware that they could never be Coronals themselves, often turned out to be frivolous idlers, or, what was much worse, vainglorious empty-headed boobies like Korsibar. Prestimion hoped for better things from his own boys.

They took the customary route to the Labyrinth, down the River Glayge aboard the royal barge through the fertile agricultural lowlands. At another time Prestimion might have made a little processional out of it, stopping at important river cities like Mitripond or Palaghat or Grevvin, but he had promised Varaile that this would be a quick trip. He entered the Labyrinth through the Mouth of Waters, the gate that Coronals used, and descended swiftly through the many levels of the underground city, past the warrens and burrows that were the offices of the bureaucrats and the grand architectural marvels below them—the Hall of Winds, the Court of Columns, the Place of Masks, and the others, those strangely beautiful places that would seem like places of wonder to anyone who loved the Labyrinth, as Prestimion doubted he ever could—and arrived at last at the deepest level, the imperial sector, where the Pontifex had his lair.

Protocol called for the High Spokesman to the Pontifex, the Labyrinth’s ranking official, to greet him. That post had been held for the past five years by the venerable Duke Haskelorn of Chorg, a member of a family that traced its descent from the Pontifex Stalvok of ten reigns earlier. Haskelorn was a man nearly as old as Confalume himself, plump and pink-faced, with long drooping cheeks and a thick roll of flesh below his chin. As was the custom here, he wore the tiny mask across his eyes and the bridge of his nose that was a kind of badge of office among the officials of the Pontificate.

“Confalume—” Prestimion began at once.

“—is in fine health, and looks forward to seeing you at once, Lord Prestimion.”

Fine health? What was the High Spokesman’s idea of fine health? Prestimion had no idea what to expect. But he was confounded, upon entering the vestibule of the maze of rooms, a labyrinth within the Labyrinth, that was the residence of the Pontifex of Majipoor. A smiling Confalume, formally clad in the ornate scarlet-and-black Pontifical robes, was standing—standing!—in the arched doorway at the vestibule’s inner end, holding his arms out toward Prestimion in a warm show of welcome.

Prestimion was so thoroughly taken aback that it was a moment before he could speak, and when he found his tongue the best he could do was stammer, “They told me—that you—you were—”

“Dying, Prestimion? Already well on my way back to the Source, eh? Whatever you may have heard, my son, here’s the truth: I am risen from my bed of affliction. As you see, the Pontifex stands on his own two legs. The Pontifex walks. A little stiffly, true, but he walks. He speaks, as well. Not yet dead, Prestimion, not even close to it.—You say nothing. Speechless with joy, are you? Yes, I suppose you are. You are reprieved from the Labyrinth for a little while longer.”

“They said you had had a stroke.”

“A little swoon, let’s say.” The Pontifex held up his left hand and clenched it into a fist. The second and fifth fingers would not close; he had to fold them into place with his other hand. “A minor bit of difficulty here, you see? But very minor. And the left leg—” Confalume took a few steps toward him. “A slight drag, you will notice. My dancing days are over. Well, it is not required of me at my age that I move very quickly.—You could call it a stroke, I suppose, but not a very serious one.” And then, noticing Taradath standing behind him: “Your son, is he, Prestimion? Grown almost out of all recognition since last I saw him. When was that, boy, five years ago, seven, when I was at the Castle?”

“Eight years ago, your majesty,” said Taradath, all too plainly fighting back his awe. “I was seven years old, then.”

“And now you’re as tall as your father, not that that’s such a difficult thing to achieve. And you’ve got your mother’s dark complexion, too. Well, come in, come in, both of you! Don’t just stand there!”

There was a quaver in Confalume’s voice, Prestimion observed, and he seemed to have acquired an old man’s garrulity as well. But he appeared to be in phenomenally fine shape. Confalume had always been a man of more than usual vigor and stamina, of course. Even now, his stocky frame was still muscular-looking and his sweeping thatch of hair, though it had long since turned white, was as thick as ever. Only the soft, papery texture of his cheeks betrayed the Pontifex’s great age in any meaningful way. And he did seem to have thrown off all but the most trifling signs of the stroke that had caused such excitement throughout both capitals of the realm.

He led Prestimion and Taradath within. Few visitors ever ventured into the private Pontifical chambers. Confalume’s famed collection of treasures decorated every sill and alcove and shelf: figurines of spun glass, carvings of dragon-ivory inlaid with porphyry and onyx, jeweled caskets, a whole forest of strange trees fashioned from strands of woven silver, ancient coins and mounted insects, leather-bound volumes of antique lore, and ever so much more, the hoard of a long acquisitive lifetime surrounding him on all sides. Nor had the Pontifex lost his fascination for the arts of wizardry, either: there were his cherished instruments of magic, still, his ammatepalas and veralistias and his armil-lary spheres, his rohillas and his protospathifars, his powders and potions and ointments. Perhaps, thought Prestimion, the old man had somehow been able to magic himself up out of his deathbed: certainly if faith in occult matters was sufficient to bring it about, Confalume would live forever.

The Pontifex poured wine for Prestimion and himself, and then for Taradath as well, and showed the boy through some of his rooms of fanciful objects, and engaged them in pleasant superficial conversation about their journey down the Glayge, and current construction projects at the Castle, and the activities of the Lady Varaile, and the like. It was all very charming and not in any way how Prestimion had expected the visit to unfold.

Taradath was no longer awed. He seemed to see the Pontifex as no more than a kindly old grandfather, now.

“Were these men all Pontifexes too?” he asked, pointing to the long row of painted medallions along the upper wall of the room.

“Indeed so,” Confalume replied. “This is Prankipin here—you do remember him, of course, don’t you, Prestimion?—and Gobryas who was just before him—Avinas—Kelimiphon—Amyntilir—” He could put a name to each portrait. “Dizimaule—Kanaba—Sirruth—Vildivar—”

Listening to Confalume go on and on, reciting the names of his predecessors for thousands of years, Prestimion felt a humbling sense of the immensity of history, that great soaring arch that disappeared at its farther end into the mists of myth, and in which could be found, at the end that was anchored in the present day, none other than his own self.

Most of these men were little more than names to Prestimion. The achievements of the Pontifexes Kanaba and Sirruth and Vildivar were known only to historians now. More recent ones, Gobryas, Avinas, Kelimiphon, yes, he knew something about them, though from all accounts they had been mediocre rulers. The world had come into hard times under the uninspired rule of such men as Gobryas and Avinas. But Prestimion, looking upward at that long array of faces, had a sudden awareness of himself as part of an extraordinary modern dynasty.

Prankipin, up there, Coronal for twenty years or so and Pontifex for forty-three, had inherited a weak and troubled world from his predecessor Gobryas and by wise measures and dynamic leadership had returned it to its former grandeur. If toward the end he had given way to the folly of sorcery and allowed the world to swarm with wizards, well, it was a forgivable flaw for a man who had accomplished so much. Then here was Confalume, not yet a portrait on the wall but an actual breathing man, Pontifex these twenty years past and Coronal forty-three more before that, who had built on Prankipin’s glorious foundation and seen to it that prosperity became even more general among Majipoor’s fifteen billion people. He, too, needed to be forgiven for his passion for magic, but that was easy enough, Prestimion thought.

And now it was the turn of Prestimion of Muldemar, Lord Prestimion now, Prestimion Pontifex one day to be. Would he be deemed a worthy successor to the great Prankipin and the splendid Confalume? Perhaps so. Majipoor was thriving under his guidance. He had made mistakes, yes, but so had Prankipin, so had Confalume. His own greatest achievement was that he had saved the world from misrule under Korsibar; but no one would ever know that. Had he achieved anything else worthwhile? Certainly he hoped that he had; but he of all people was in no position to know. He was still young, though. He would eventually, so he profoundly hoped and believed, be ranked with those other two as architects of a golden age.

“And is this Stiamot?” Taradath asked.

“He’s farther down the row, boy. Of course, the artist had to guess at what he really looked like, but there he is. Here—let me show you—”

Amazingly spry, the damaged left leg dragging only a little, Confalume went shuffling toward the far side of the room. Prestimion watched him going from portrait to portrait with Taradath, calling off the names of the early emperors.

The boy remained down there, peering up solemnly at the faces of Pontifexes who had ruled this world when Stiamot himself was a thousand years unborn. Confalume, returning to where Prestimion still sat, refilled their wine-bowls and said, in a low, confidential tone, “The true reason you came scurrying down here was that you thought I was dying, wasn’t it? You wanted to check my condition out with your own eyes.”

“I don’t know what I thought. But the news out of the Labyrinth about you was very worrisome. It seemed appropriate to pay you a visit. A man of your age, suffering a stroke—”

“I actually thought I was dying myself, as I felt it hit. But only while it was happening. I’m a long way from finished, Prestimion.”

“May it truly be so.”

“Are you saying that for my sake, or yours?” the Pontifex asked.

“Do you know how unkind that sounds?”

Confalume laughed. “But it’s realistic, yes? You don’t at all want to be Pontifex yet.”

Prestimion cast a wary glance toward Taradath, who was practically at the end of the hall, now, probably beyond earshot. There was a touch of testiness in his voice as he responded, “All of Majipoor wishes you continued good health and long life, your majesty. I am no exception to that. But I do assure you that if the Divine should choose to gather you in tomorrow, I am in every way ready to do what will be asked of me.”

“Are you? Well, yes, you say you are, and I must take that at face value, I suppose.” The Pontifex closed his eyes. He seemed to be staring into some infinite recess of time. Prestimion studied the tiny fluttering pulses in the old man’s veined eyelids, and waited, and continued to wait. Had he fallen asleep? But then, abruptly, Confalume was looking straight at him again, and the keen gray eyes were as penetrating as ever. “I do remember sitting down here with you a long while ago, your first visit here after becoming Coronal, and telling you that after you’d had the job for forty years or so you’d be quite willing to move on to the Labyrinth. Do you recall that?”

“Yes. I do.”

“You’re halfway to that forty years, now. So you must be at least half sincere when you tell me you’re ready to take over. But have no fear, Prestimion. There’s still twenty years more to go.” Confalume pointed toward the tabletop that bore his collection of astrological devices. “It happens that I cast my horoscope only last week. Unless there was some serious error in my calculations, I’m going to live to the age of a hundred and ten. I’m going to have the longest reign of any Pontifex in the history of Majipoor. What do you say to that, Prestimion? You are relieved, aren’t you? Confess it! You are! At least right now, you are.—But I can tell you, my young friend, you’ll be utterly sick of being Coronal by the time I make my trip back to the Source. You won’t mind leaving the Castle at all. A time will come when you’ll be eager to be Pontifex, believe me. You’ll be more than ready to retire to the Labyrinth, believe me—more than ready!”

On the way back up the Glayge Prestimion pondered Confalume’s words. He had to admit that he had been deceiving himself, if nobody else, in claiming that he was fully ready to let the Pontificate descend upon him. His relief at finding Confalume in this unexpected state of well-being was the unanswerable proof of that. It was a reprieve, unquestionably a reprieve; which meant that he still thought of becoming Pontifex as a grim and inexorable sentence, rather than simply a matter of duty. Though he very much doubted the worth of Confalume’s astrological calculations, the evidence seemed to indicate that it still would be a matter of some years before the world had its next change of rulers.

There was no getting around the fact that his mood was very much lighter now. That told him all he needed to know about his insistent professions of readiness for life in the Labyrinth.

Before departing for the Castle, he took Taradath on a brief tour of the city. The boy had seen wonders aplenty already in his short life, but the strangeness of the Labyrinth was like nothing else in the world, these vast echoing halls of curious design that lay so far underground. “The Pool of Dreams, this is called,” Prestimion said, gesturing toward the calm greenish water in whose depths mysterious images constantly came and went, some of supernal beauty, some of nightmare repulsive-ness, one moment’s scene altogether different from another. “No one knows how it works. Or even which Pontifex put it here.”

The Place of Masks, where huge bodiless blind-eyed faces rose on marble stalks. The Court of Pyramids, a zone of thousands of close-set white monoliths, purposeless, inexplicable. The Hall of Winds, where cold air emerged in great bursting gusts from stone grids, though they were deep beneath the surface of the world. The Court of Globes—the Cabinet of Floating Swords—the Chamber of Miracles—the Temple of Unknown Gods—

The next day Prestimion and his son took the swift shaft to the surface and returned to the Mouth of Waters, where the royal barge was waiting to carry them upriver to the Castle. But they had only reached Maurix, three days’ journey north of the Labyrinth, when they were overtaken by a fast-moving rivercraft that flew the Pontifical flag.

The messenger who came on board had but to speak two words and Prestimion knew what had happened.

“Your majesty—”

It was the phrase one used when addressing a Pontifex. The rest of the story followed only too quickly. Confalume was dead, most suddenly, of a second stroke. Prestimion would have to return to the Labyrinth to preside over his final rites and begin the process of taking over the Pontifical duties.

13

The resemblance was an astonishing one, Mandralisca thought.

Venghenar Barjazid, the dead one, he of the devilish mind-controlling machines, had been an evil-looking little man whose eyes were not quite of the same size or color nor even set on a straight line in his head, and whose lips slid away sideways toward the left side to give him a permanent smirk, and whose skin, dark and leathery and thick from a lifetime of exposure to the ferocious Suvrael sunlight, was as wrinkled and folded as a canavong’s hide.

Mandralisca found this new Barjazid just as charmingly repellent as his elder brother had been. A powerful intuition told him, from his very first glimpse of the man, that he had found a significant ally in the contest for world power that lay ahead.

This one was every bit as mean and scrawny of form and disagreeable of visage as his late brother. His eyes too were mismated and misaligned and had the same harsh brightness; his lips too were drawn off into a mocking grimace; he too had the folded, blackened skin of one who has lived too long in barren sun-blasted Suvrael. He looked a shade taller than Venghenar had been, perhaps, and just a touch less self-assured. Mandralisca supposed that he was around fifty: older, now, than Venghenar had been when he had brought his pack of devices to Dantirya Sambail.

And he, too, seemed to have come bearing merchandise. He had brought with him into the room a shapeless, bulging leather-trimmed cloth bag, frayed at the center, which he set down very carefully by his side when he took the seat that Mandralisca offered. Mandralisca gave the bag a quick sidelong glance. The things must be in there, he felt certain: the new collection of useful toys that the Barjazid had brought here to sell to him.

But Mandralisca was never in a hurry to enter into any sort of negotiation. It is essential, he believed, that one must first determine who is going to have the upper hand. And that one will be the one who has the greater willingness to delay getting down to the heart of the matter.

“Your grace,” said Barjazid, with a smarmy little bow. “What a pleasure to meet at last. My late brother spoke of you to me with the highest praise.”

“We worked well together, yes.”

“It’s my fervent hope that you’ll say the same of me.”

“Mine as well.—How did you know where to find me? And why did you think I’d have any reason to want to see you?”

“In truth I thought you had perished long ago, on that same day in the Stoienzar when my brother died. But then word reached me that you had escaped, and were alive and well and living somewhere in this region.”

“Word of my whereabouts reached as far as Suvrael?” Mandralisca asked. “I find that surprising.”

“Word travels, your grace. Also I have some knowledge of how to make inquiries. I learned that you were here; that you were in the employ of the five sons of one of the Procurator’s brothers, and that they perhaps had some thought of regaining the power in Zimroel that their famous uncle once had wielded; and I felt that I might be able to assist you in that enterprise. And so I sent you a message to that effect.”

“And took your sweet time getting here,” Mandralisca said. “Your letter indicated that you’d be here almost a year ago. What happened?”

“There were delays en route,” said Khaymak Barjazid. The quick reply seemed to Mandralisca to be a shade too glib. “You must understand, your grace, that it’s a long journey from Suvrael to here.”

“Not that long. I interpreted your letter to mean that you wanted to meet with me right away. Obviously that was incorrect.”

Barjazid looked at him appraisingly. The tip of his tongue slipped into view for an instant, flickering like a serpent’s. Softly he said, “I came here by way of Alhanroel, your grace. The shipping schedule favored that route. Besides, I have a nephew, my only living kinsman, in the service of the Coronal at Castle Mount. I wanted to see him again before I headed this way.”

“Castle Mount, as I recall it, lies some thousands of miles distant from the nearest seaport.”

“The Mount is somewhat out of the way, I admit. But it has been many years since I last had the pleasure of speaking with my brother’s son. If I am to give my allegiance to you here in Zimroel, as is my hope, I will probably never have another chance for that.”

“I know about that nephew,” Mandralisca said. He also had known about Khaymak Barjazid’s visit to Castle Mount; but it was a point in Barjazid’s favor that the man had volunteered to reveal it himself. Mandralisca steepled his fingers and peered contemplatively at Barjazid over their tips. “Your nephew turned traitor against his own father, is that not so? It was with your nephew’s invaluable assistance that Prestimion was able to weaken Dantirya Sambail and leave him vulnerable to the attack that cost the Procurator his life. One might even say that your brother’s death in the same battle was also your nephew’s direct responsibility. What sort of love can you feel for such a person, kinsman or no? Why would you want to visit him?”

Barjazid shifted about uneasily. “Dinitak was only a boy when he did those things. He came under Prince Dekkeret’s influence, and let himself be swept up in a flight of youthful enthusiasm for Lord Prestimion, and that led to consequences that I know he could not have foreseen. I wanted to find out whether over the years he had come to see the error of his ways: whether there could be any reconciliation between us.”

“And—?”

“It was asinine of me to think that such a thing was possible. He’s still Prestimion’s man through and through, and Dekkeret’s. They own him completely. I should have known better than to expect to find any trace of family feeling in him. He refused even to see me.”

“How sad.” Mandralisca did not even try to sound compassionate. “You went all the way to the Castle, and your visit was for nought!”

“Sir, I could get no closer to the Castle than the city of High Morpin. By my nephew’s explicit orders, I was denied permission to approach any nearer than that.”

A very touching story, Mandralisca thought. But not an entirely convincing one.

It was easy enough to find a more likely explanation for Khaymak Barjazid’s lengthy detour to Castle Mount. Quite likely the thought had occurred to him, after he had decided to sell his services to the

Five Lords, that there might be a better price available elsewhere. There was no question that this man was carrying valuable merchandise in that worn bag. Obviously, too, he was looking to peddle it to the highest bidder; and the world’s deepest pockets belonged to Lord Prestimion.

If Dinitak Barjazid had been willing to spend just five minutes listening to his uncle’s blandishments, this conversation would not now be happening, Mandralisca knew. A lucky thing for us, he told himself, that the younger Barjazid has the good taste to want to have nothing to do with his disreputable uncle.

“An unhappy adventure,” he said. “But at least you have it out of your system. And now—perhaps somewhat later than I expected you would—you do at last show up here.”

“No one regrets the delay more than I do, your grace. But indeed, I am here.” He smiled, revealing a set of nasty snags. “And I have brought with me those certain things to which I alluded in my letter.”

Mandralisca glanced once more at the bag. “Which are contained in that?”

“They are.”

He took that as his cue. “Very well, my friend. Has the point arrived, do you think, at which we can begin discussing our business?”

“We have already begun our business, your grace,” said Khaymak Barjazid calmly, making no movement toward the bag. Mandralisca gave him some points for that. Barjazid also knew the dangers of over eagerness, and was testing his ability to make Mandralisca wait. It was rare that he found himself outplayed like this.

Very well. He would allow Barjazid a small victory here. He waited, saying nothing now.

Again the tongue-tip briefly flickered forth. “You know, I think, that before my lamented brother came into the employ of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail, he operated a guide service in Suvrael, among other enterprises. Prior to that he spent some years at the Castle, serving as an aide to Duke Svor of Tolaghai, a close friend of Prestimion, who was merely Prince of Muldemar then. There was also at the Castle then a certain Vroon, Thalnap Zelifor by name, who—”

Mandralisca felt a burst of irritation. This was overdoing it. Having seized the advantage, Barjazid was all too evidently reveling in his control of the conversation. “Where is this story heading?” Mandralisca demanded. “Back to Lord Stiamot, is it?”

“If I might have your indulgence one moment more, sir.”

Again he allowed himself to subside. There had been a wondrously oily way about Barjazid’s saying that that Mandralisca was forced to admire. This man was a worthy adversary.

Barjazid continued unruffledly. “If you are aware of these matters already, forgive me. I want only to clarify my own role in my brother’s affairs, with which you may not be familiar.”

“Go on.”

“Permit me to remind you that this Thalnap Zelifor, a wizard by trade as people of his race tend to be, was a maker of devices capable of penetrating the secrets of a person’s mind. Prestimion, when he became Coronal, exiled this Vroon for some reason to Suvrael, and placed my brother in charge of escorting him there. Unfortunately the Vroon died en route; but he had been good enough, first, to give my brother some instruction in the art of using his devices, a number of which he had brought with him from the Castle.”

“None of this is new to me, so far.”

“But you will not have known that I, since I have a certain gift for mechanical matters, assisted my brother in experimenting with these things and gaining knowledge of their operation. Later, I even designed some improved models of them. All this was in Tolaghai city in Suvrael, many years ago. Then came the episode—perhaps you are aware of it, sir—when Prince Dekkeret, then a very young man and not yet a prince, visited Suvrael about that time, had a rather unfortunate encounter with my brother and his son, and took them both as prisoners to Castle Mount, along with much of the mind-reading equipment.”

“Your brother told me that, yes.”

“Likewise you know that my brother, escaping from the Castle, fled to western Alhanroel and made common cause with Dantirya Sambail.”

“Yes,” said Mandralisca. “I was there when he arrived. I was there, also, when Prestimion, using one of these devices that had been brought to him by your nephew Dinitak, made it possible for an army under Gialaurys and Septach Melayn to locate our camp and kill both the Procurator and your brother, and very nearly myself as well. The mind-reading devices all fell into Prestimion’s hands. I assume he has them locked safely away somewhere at the Castle.”

“Very likely he does.”

Mandralisca looked yet again, more pointedly this time, at Khaymak Barjazid’s battered, bulging bag. Enough of this recitation of ancient history: the sly little man was carrying the game too far. Mandralisca would not be toyed with any longer.

In a brusque, cool tone he said, “This is a sufficient prologue, I think. Many tasks await me today. Show me what you have for me, now.”

Barjazid smiled. He drew the bag up on his knees and pressed his fingers to its latch. From within he drew a sheaf of parchment sheets, which he unrolled and spread out over the open lid of the bag. “These are the original plans for Thalnap Zelifor’s various instruments of mind control. They have remained in my possession in Suvrael ever since the time when my brother was carried off to the Mount as Dekkeret’s prisoner.”

“May I see them?” Mandralisca reached forth a hand.

“Of course, your grace. Here are the sketches for three successive models of the device, each one of greater power than the one before. This is the first. This is the one that my nephew stole and delivered to Lord Prestimion for use against my brother. And this is the one that my brother himself was wearing in the climactic battle when Prestimion broke through his defenses.”

Mandralisca riffled through the parchment sheets. Barjazid was safe in showing them to him: they made no sense to him whatever.

“And those?” he said, nodding toward several other sheets still in Khaymak Barjazid’s hands.

“The designs for later models, still more powerful, of which I spoke a moment ago. In the intervening years I’ve continued to play with the Vroon’s basic concepts. I believe that I have made some important advances in the state of the art.”

“You only believe?”

“I have not yet had the opportunity to perform tests.”

“Out of fear that you’d be detected by Prestimion’s people?”

“In part, yes. But also—these are very expensive things to manufacture, sir—you must bear in mind that I am not a wealthy man—”

“I see.” They were being invited to finance the Barjazid’s research. “So the truth is you have no working models, then.”

“I have this,” Barjazid said, and drew a flimsy-looking metal helmet from the bag. It was a shimmering lacework of delicate red strands interwoven with gold ones, with a triple row of heavier bronze cords running over its crest. Its design was far simpler than that of the one Mandralisca remembered the other Barjazid wearing in the final struggle in the Stoienzar. That was probably due, to some degree, to a greater refinement of the concept. But the thing seemed too simple. It seemed incomplete, unfinished.

“What can it do?” Mandralisca asked.

“In its present form? Nothing. The necessary connections are not yet in place.”

“And if they were?”

“If they were, the wearer of the helmet could reach out to anyone in the world and place dreams in his mind. Very powerful dreams, your grace. Frightening dreams. Painful dreams, if that were desired. Dreams that could break a person’s will. That could beat him to the ground and make him beg for mercy.”

“Indeed,” Mandralisca said.

He ran his fingers slowly over the lacy meshes, exploring them, fondling them. He draped the helmet over his head, spreading it out, noting how light it was, scarcely noticeable. He took it off and folded it and folded it again, until it was small enough to fit within his closed hand. He weighed it on his outstretched palm. He nodded approvingly, but did not say anything. Perhaps a minute went by. Perhaps more.

Khaymak Barjazid watched the entire performance with what could only be interpreted as mounting anxiety and concern.

Finally he said, “Do you think you would have use for such a device, your grace?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, certainly. But will it work?”

“It can be made to. All of the instruments shown on these plans can be made to work. It merely requires money.”

“Yes. Of course.” Mandralisca stood up, went to the door, stood staring out into the brightness of the desert morning for a long while. He tossed the Barjazid helmet lightly from hand to hand. What would it be like, he wondered, to be able to send dreams into the mind of one’s enemy? Painful dreams, Barjazid had said. Nightmares. Worse than nightmares. A host of terrifying images. Things fluttering by, dangling on fine metal wires. An endless army of big black beetles marching across the floor, making ugly rustling sounds with their feet. Transparent fingers tickling the channels of the mind. Slow spirals of pure fear congealing and twisting in the tortured brain. And—gradually—a sobbing, a whimpering, a begging for mercy—

“Come outside with me,” he said to Barjazid over his shoulder, without looking back toward the other man.

They walked up the ridge to a point where several of the domed palaces of the Lords could be seen in the distance. “Do you know what those buildings are?” Mandralisca asked.

“They are the dwellings of the Five Lords. The boy who brought me to you told me that.”

“So you know that they call themselves the Five Lords, do you? What else do you know about them?”

“That they are the sons of one of Dantirya Sambail’s brothers. That they have lately laid claim to power in certain sectors of central Zimroel. That they have taken upon themselves the title of Lords of Zimroel.”

“You knew all those things when you wrote me that letter?”

“All but the part about their calling themselves the Lords of Zimroel.”

“Why would news of any of these matters have traveled all the way down to Suvrael?”

“I told you, your grace, I have some skill at making inquiries.”

“Apparently you do. The Coronal himself, so far as I know, is ignorant of what’s been going on in this part of Zimroel.”

“But when he finds out—?”

“Why, there’ll be war, I suppose,” Mandralisca said. He swung about to face the little man. “I propose to speak very directly, now. These five Lords of Zimroel are stupid and vicious men. I despise everything about them. As you get to know them, so will you. Nevertheless, there are millions of people here in Zimroel who regard them as the rightful heirs of Dantirya Sambail and will follow their banner, once it is openly raised, in a war of independence against the Alhanroel government. Which I believe we can win, with your aid.”

“That would please me greatly. It was Prestimion and his people who destroyed my brother.”

“You’ll have your revenge, then. Dantirya Sambail tried twice to overthrow Prestimion, but because he was already master of Zimroel he attempted both times to carry the insurrection into Alhanroel. That was a mistake. The Coronal and Pontifex can’t be beaten in their own territory by invaders from Zimroel. Alhanroel is too big to be conquered from outside, and lines of supply can’t be sustained across thousands of miles. But the opposite is also true. No army from the other continent could ever subjugate all of Zimroel.”

“You intend to establish Zimroel as a separate nation, then?”

“Why not? Why should we be subservient to Alhanroel? What advantage to us is there in being governed by a king and an emperor who live half a world away from us? I will proclaim one of the five brothers, the most intelligent one, as Pontifex of Zimroel. One of the others will be his Coronal. And we will be free of Alhanroel at last.”

“There is a third continent,” said Barjazid. “Do you have some plan in mind for Suvrael?”

“No,” said Mandralisca. The question took him by surprise. He realized that he had given Suvrael no thought at all. “But if it cares to make itself independent too, I suppose that could be managed easily enough. Prestimion’s not such a fool as to try to send an army down into your horrifying deserts, and if he did the heat would kill them all in six months, anyway.”

An avid glitter appeared in Barjazid’s mismatched eyes. “Suvrael would have its own king, then.”

“It could. It could indeed.” He saw suddenly what Barjazid was driving at, and a broad grin crossed his face. “Bravo, my friend! Bravo! You’ve named the price for your assistance, haven’t you? Khaymak the First of Suvrael! Well, let it be so. I congratulate you, your highness!”

“I thank you, your grace.” Barjazid gave him a warm smile of appreciation and fellowship. “A Pontifex of Zimroel… a king of Suvrael… And what role do you see for yourself, Count Mandralisca, once these brothers are established on their thrones?”

“I? I’ll be privy counsellor, as I am now. They’ll continue to need someone to tell them what to do. And I’ll be the one who tells them.”

“Ah. Yes, of course.”

“We understand each other, I think.”

“I think we do. What’s the next move, then?”

“Why, you have to build us your devilish machines. That’ll allow us to start making life difficult for Prestimion.”

“Very good. I propose to set up a workshop right away in Ni-moya, and—”

“No,” Mandralisca said. “Not Ni-moya. Here is where you’ll do your work, your highness.”

“Here? I’ll need special equipment—materials—skilled workmen, perhaps. In a remote desert outpost like this, I can’t possibly—”

“You can and will. A Suvraelinu like you shouldn’t have any problem dealing with desert conditions. We’ll bring in whatever you need from Ni-moya. But you have joined us now, my friend. This is your place, now. Here is where you’ll stay, and live and do your work, until the war is won.”

“You make it seem as though you don’t trust me, your grace.”

“I trust no one, my friend. Not even myself.”

14

Dekkeret returned to the Castle by the quickest route, taking the Grand Calintane Highway, which terminated in the broad open space paved with smooth green porcelain cobblestones that was the Dizimaule Plaza. His floater passed over the huge starburst in golden tilework that lay at its center and carried him through the great Dizimaule Arch, the main entrance to the Castle, the gateway to the southern wing. The guards stationed in the guardhouse on the arch’s left side waved to him as he passed through, and he acknowledged their salute with a brief, stiff one of his own.

There was an air of barely suppressed tension in the corridors of the Castle as he made his way inward. The faces of those who greeted him at each checkpoint were tightly drawn and solemn; lips were clamped, eyes were hooded.

“From the look of them all,” he said to Dinitak, “it would be easy enough to believe that the Pontifex has died in the time it took us to get back here from Normork.”

“You would know it already, I think,” said Dinitak.

“I suppose I would.”

Yes. They would be hailing him as Coronal, would they not, if Confalume had died? People kneeling, making the starburst salute, calling out the traditional cry: “Dekkeret! Lord Dekkeret! All hail Lord Dekkeret! Long life to Lord Dekkeret!” Even though he would not truly become Coronal until the Council had given its assent and Prestimion had formally proclaimed him. But everyone knew who the next Coronal was going to be.

Lord Dekkeret. How strange that sounded to him! How difficult for his mind to encompass!

“It’s simply a disquieting time for everyone,” Dinitak said. “It must always be this way, when a change of reign is in the air. The old masters leave the Castle; new ones arrive; nothing will be the same again for anyone who lives here.” They were at the threshold of the Inner Castle now. The Ninety-Nine Steps rose before them. There they paused. Dinitak’s rooms were on this level, far off to the left; Dekkeret lived above, in the suite in the Munnerak Tower that once had been occupied by Prestimion. “I should leave you here,” Dinitak said. “You’ll need to meet with the Council—with the Lady Varaile, too, I imagine—”

“Thank you for accompanying me to Normork,” Dekkeret said. “For sitting through those deadly banquets, and all the rest.”

“No need for thanks. I go where you ask me to go.”

They embraced quickly, and then Dinitak was gone.

Dekkeret mounted the ancient, well-worn steps two at a time. Lord Dekkeret, he thought. Lord Dekkeret. Lord Dekkeret. Lord Dekkeret. Astonishing. Unbelievable.

It had not yet happened, though. No new bulletins had come from the Labyrinth since he had received the message summoning him back from Normork. Septach Melayn, the first member of the Council Dekkeret encountered after entering the Inner Castle, was the one who provided him with that news.

The long-shanked swordsman was waiting for him in the little square outside the Prankipin Treasury, just at the top of the Ninety-Nine Steps. “You made a fast journey of it, Dekkeret! We didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”

“I left as soon as I got the message. Where’s Prestimion?”

“Halfway down the Glayge on his way to the Labyrinth, I expect. Came whistling back from Fa the moment we got the news, spent about three minutes with the Lady Varaile, and turned right around and headed south. Wants to pay his respects to old Confalume, you know, while there’s still the chance. I’m surprised you didn’t pass him on the way up.”

“Then Confalume is still—”

“Alive? So far as we know, he is,” said Septach Melayn. “Of course, it takes so damned long for us to find anything out up here of what’s going on down below. Phraatakes Rem says the stroke isn’t a serious one.”

“Can we trust him? It’s in his interest to maintain as long as he can that his master the Pontifex is still running the show. I know of cases where the death of a Pontifex has been covered up for weeks. Months.”

Septach Melayn said, with a shrug, “Of that, my lad, what can I say? For my own part, I’d prefer that Confalume go on being Pontifex for the next fifty years. I understand that you might very well hold a different position about that.”

“No,” Dekkeret said, catching hold of Septach Melayn’s wrist and putting his face very near to the older man’s. He was one of a very few Castle princes who came close to matching Septach Melayn in height. “No,” he said again, in a low, dark tone. “You are altogether mistaken in that, Septach Melayn. If the Divine means me to be Coronal someday, well, I’ll be ready for the task, whenever it comes to me. But I am in no way eager for it to come before its time. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in great error.”

Septach Melayn smiled. “Easy, Dekkeret! I meant no offense. None whatever. Come: I’ll see you to your rooms, so you can refresh yourself after your journey. The Council will be in session later this afternoon in the Stiamot throne-room. You should attend, if you will.”

“I’ll be there,” said Dekkeret.

But it was a pointless, useless meeting. What was there to say? The highest levels of the government were in a kind of paralysis. The Pontifex had suffered a stroke, perhaps was on the verge of dying, might even already have died. The Coronal had gone off to the Labyrinth, as was appropriate, to attend the bedside of the senior monarch. In both capitals the ordinary functions of the bureaucracy continued as usual, but the ministers who directed those functions found themselves caught in stasis, not knowing from one day to the next how long it would be before they would have to leave office.

Without any real information to work with, the members of the Council could only offer up high-minded statements of hope that the Pontifex would recover his faculties and continue his long and glorious reign. But the uncertainty left its mark on every face. When Confalume died, some of these men would be asked to join the administration of the new Pontifex at the Labyrinth, and others, passed over by the incoming Coronal, would be forced into retirement after many years close to the mainsprings of power. Either alternative carried with it its own problems; and no one could be certain of what would be offered him.

All eyes were on Dekkeret. But Dekkeret had his own destinies to consider. He said little during the meeting. It behooved him to remain quiet during this ambiguous period. A Coronal-designate is a very different thing from a Coronal.

When it was over, he retreated to his private apartments. He had a pleasant suite, by no means the grandest of its kind; but it had been good enough for Prestimion when he was the Coronal-designate, and Dekkeret found it more than satisfactory. The rooms were large and well arranged, and the view, through great curving multi-faceted windows, the work of cunning craftsmen from Stee, was a spectacular one into the abyss called the Morpin Plunge that bordered this wing of the Castle.

He met briefly with his personal staff: Dalip Amrit, the tactful onetime schoolmaster from Normork who was his private secretary, and bustling, hyperefficient Singobinda Mukund, the master of the household, a ruddy-faced Ni-moyan, and Countess Auranga of Bibiroon, who served as his official hostess in the absence of any consort. They brought him up to date on the events of his absence from the Castle. Then he sent them away, and slipped gratefully into the great bathing-tub of black Khyntor marble for a long quiet soak before dinner.

It was his thought to eat alone and get to sleep early. But he had scarcely donned his dressing gown after his bath when Dalip Amrit came to him with word that the Lady Varaile requested his presence at dinner that evening in the royal residence at Lord Thraym’s Tower, if he had no other plans.

One did not treat invitations from the Coronal’s consort casually. Dekkeret changed into formal costume, a long-waisted golden doublet and close-fitting violet hose trimmed with velvet stripes, and arrived punctually at the royal dining-hall.

He was, it seemed, the only guest. That surprised him just a little; he would have expected Septach Melayn, perhaps, or Prince Teotas and the Lady Fiorinda, or some other members of the inner court. But Varaile alone awaited him, so simply dressed in a long green tunic and a wide-sleeved yellow overblouse that he felt abashed by his own formality.

She presented her cheek for a kiss. They had always been close friends, he and the Lady Varaile. She was no more than a year or two older than he was, and, like him, had been snatched up suddenly out of a commoner’s life to make her home among the lords and ladies of the Castle. But she had been born to wealth and privilege, the daughter of the infinitely rich merchant banker Simbilon Khayf of the great city of Stee, whereas he was only the son of a hapless itinerant salesman; and so Dekkeret had always looked up to Varaile as someone who moved easily and comfortably among the aristocracy of the Mount, while he had had to master the knack of it slowly and with great difficulty, as one might learn some advanced kind of mathematics.

Over bowls of golden-brown Sippulgar dates and warm milk laced with the red brandy of Narabal she asked him pleasantly about his visit to Normork. She spoke fondly of his mother, whom she liked greatly; and she told him a few quick bits of Castle gossip that had reached her ears while he was away, lively if insignificant tales of tangled intrigues involving certain men and women of the court old enough to have known better. It was as if nothing in any way unusual had taken place in the world lately.

Then she said, as a course of pale-fleshed quaalfish simmered in sweet wine was set before them, “You know, of course, that Prestimion has gone to the Labyrinth?”

“Septach Melayn told me this afternoon. Will the Coronal be gone long?”

“As long as is necessary, I would think.” Varaile turned her huge, dark, glowing eyes on him with sudden unexpected intensity. “This time he’ll return to the Castle when he’s done. But the next time he goes there—”

“Yes. I know, lady.”

“You have no reason to look so stricken. For you it will mean the call to greatness, Dekkeret. But for me—for Lord Prestimion—for our children—”

She stared at him reproachfully. That struck him as unwarranted: did she think him so insensitive that he would not understand her predicament? But for love of her he kept his voice gentle. “Yet in truth, Varaile, the death of the Pontifex means the same thing for us all: change. Huge and incomprehensible change. You and yours go to the Labyrinth; I don a crown and take my seat on the Confalume Throne. Do you think I’m any less apprehensive than you are about what is to come?”

She softened a little. “We should not quarrel, Dekkeret.”

“Are we quarreling, lady?”

She left the question unanswered. “The strain of these anxieties has made us both edgy. I wanted only a friendly visit. We are friends, are we not?”

“You know that we are.”

He reached for the wine-flask to refresh their glasses. She reached for it at the same moment; their hands collided, the flask toppled. Dekkeret caught it just before it overturned. They both laughed at the clumsiness that this present unrest was creating in them, and their laughter broke, for the moment, the tensions that had sprung up between them.

She was right, Dekkeret knew. She was facing the tremendous sacrifice of giving up her familiar and beautiful surroundings in order to live in a distant and disagreeable place. He, though, would move on to the post that would bring him fame and glory, the one for which he had been preparing himself for ten years or more. What comparison was there, really, in their situations? He told himself to be more gentle with her.

“We should talk of other things,” she said. “Have you spoken with the Lady Fulkari since your return to the Castle?”

Dekkeret found it an unfortunate change of subject. Tautly he said, “Not yet. Is there some special reason why I should?”

Varaile seemed flustered. “Why, only that—she is very eager to see you. And I thought that you—having been gone more than a week—”

“Would be just as eager to see her,” Dekkeret finished, when it became apparent that Varaile either could not or would not. “Well, yes, I am. Of course I am. But not the first thing. I need a little time to collect myself. If you hadn’t summoned me tonight, I’d have spent the evening in solitude, resting from my trip, pondering the future, contemplating the responsibilies to come.”

“I beg your pardon for calling you away from your contemplations, then,” she said, and there was no mistaking the acidity in her tone. “I was very specific in saying that you were to come to me only if you had no other plans for tonight. I thought perhaps that you might prefer to be with Fulkari. But even an evening of quiet solitary meditation is a plan, Dekkeret. You certainly could have refused.”

“I certainly could not,” he said. “Not an invitation from you. And so here I am. Fulkari didn’t send for me, and you did. Not that I understand why, Varaile. For what purpose, exactly, did you ask me here this evening? Simply to lament the possibility that you’ll have to go to the Labyrinth?”

“I think that we’re quarreling again,” said Varaile lightly.

He would have taken her hand in his, if he dared such familiarities with the Coronal’s wife. Taking care to keep his tone temperate and mild, he said, “This is a difficult time for us both, and the stress is taking its toll. Let me ask you a second time: why am I here? Was it only because you wanted someone’s company tonight? You could have invited Teotas and Fiorinda, then, or Gialaurys, or Maundigand-Klimd, even. But you sent for me, even though you thought I might be spending the evening with Fulkari.”

She said, “I asked for you because I think of you as a friend, someone who understands the emotions I feel as the possibility of a change in the government begins to unfold, someone who—as you yourself pointed out—may be experiencing similar feelings himself. But also it was a way of finding out whether you were going to be with Fulkari tonight.”

“Ah. How devious, Varaile.”

“Do you think so? In that case, I suppose it was.”

“Why is that something you would want to know?”

“There are tales around the Castle that you have lost interest in her.”

“Untrue.”

“Well, then, do you love her, Dekkeret?”

He felt heat surging to his cheeks. This was unfair. “You know that I do.”

“And yet, your first night back, you preferred your own company to hers.”

Dekkeret toyed with his napkin, twisting it in his hands, crumpling it. “I told you, Varaile: I wanted to be alone. To think about—what is coming for us all. If Fulkari had wanted to see me, she would only have had to say so, and I would have gone to her, just as I’ve come to you. But no message came from her, only from you.”

“Perhaps she was waiting first to see what you would do.”

“And now she’ll think I’m your lover, is that it?”

Varaile smiled. “I doubt that very much. What she will think, though, is that she can’t be very important to you. Why else would you be avoiding her like this, on your first night back? That’s a mark of indifference, not of passion.”

“You heard me say that I love her. She knows that too.”

“Does she?”

Dekkeret’s eyebrows rose. “Have I left her in doubt of that, do you think?”

“Have you spoken with her of marriage, Dekkeret?”

“Not yet, no. Ah—now I see the true purpose of your calling me here!” Dekkeret glanced away. “She asked you to do this, eh?” he said coldly.

Anger flared a moment in Varaile’s eyes. “You come very close to the edge with a question like that. But no, no, Dekkeret: this is none of her doing. I am entirely to blame. Will you believe that?”

“I would never challenge your word, milady.”

“All right, then, Dekkeret: here is the crux. You will soon become Coronal: that is clear. The custom among us is for the Coronal to have a wife. The king’s consort has important functions of her own at the Castle, and if there is no consort who is to perform those functions?”

So that was it! Dekkeret did not reply. He cupped his wine bowl and held it without putting it to his lips, and waited for her to continue.

“You’re no longer a boy, Dekkeret. Unless I’ve lost count, and I doubt that I have, you’ll be forty soon. You’ve kept company with the Lady Fulkari for—what is it, three years now?—and not said a word to anyone about marriage. Including, apparently, to her. It’s a subject that ought to be on your mind now.”

“It is. Believe me, Varaile, it is.”

“And will Fulkari be your choice, do you think?”

“You press me too hard here, lady. I ask you to give over this inquisition. You are my queen, and also one of my dearest friends, but these are matters I propose to keep to myself, if I may.” Pushing back his chair, he looked at her in a way that set up a wall of silence between them.

Now it was her hand that reached out for his. Affectionately she said, “It was never my intention to cause you any discomfort, Dekkeret. I only wanted to speak my mind about something that causes me great concern.”

“I tell you once again: I do love Fulkari. I don’t know whether I want to marry her, nor am I sure if she wants me. There are problems between Fulkari and me, Varaile, that I will not discuss even with you. Especially with you.—May we once again change the subject, now? What can we talk about? Your children, shall it be? Prince Akbalik: he’s been writing an epic poem, isn’t that so? And the Princess Tuanelys—is it true that Septach Melayn has promised to begin training her in swordsmanship when she’s a year or two older—?”

When he awoke in the morning he found that a note had been slipped under his bedroom door during the night:

Can we go riding tomorrow? Into the southern meadows, perhaps?

-F.

His household people told him that some Vroon had brought it in the small hours. Dekkeret knew who that had to be: little Gurjara Yaso, Fulkari’s own magus, an inveterate caster of spells and brewer of potions who was her usual go-between in such matters. Dekkeret suspected the Vroon of having used sorcery even on him from time to time in an attempt to keep Fulkari in the prime place in his heart.

Not that any sorcery was needed: she was constantly in his thoughts. He was not in any way indifferent to Fulkari; and all through his sojourn in Normork he had needed only to let his mind drift briefly away from whatever was happening at the moment and there she was, burning like a beacon in his brain, smiling, beckoning to him, drawing him to her—

Certainly, after a week’s separation, the urge to rush to her side upon his return had been a powerful one. But Dekkeret had felt it was important to put some distance between himself and her for the moment, if only to give himself time to begin to comprehend what it was he really wanted from her, and she from him. That resolution shattered in an instant now. He felt a torrent of relief and delight and keen anticipation go through him as he read her note.

“Do I have any official functions this morning?” he asked Singobinda Mukund at breakfast.

“None, sir,” replied the master of the household.

“And no news has come from the Labyrinth, I take it?”

“Nothing, sir,” said Singobinda Mukund. He gave Dekkeret a horrified look, as though to indicate how astounded he was that Dekkeret should feel there was any need to ask.

“Send word to the Lady Fulkari, then, that I’ll meet her in two hours at the Dizimaule Arch.”

Fulkari was waiting for him when he arrived, a lovely, willowy sight in a riding habit of soft green leather that clung to her like a second skin. Dekkeret saw that she had already ordered up two high-spirited sporting-mounts from the Castle stables. That was Fulkari’s way: she seized the moment, she moved swiftly to do what needed to be done. Her waiting, last night, to see if he would make the first move had not been at all typical of her. And indeed when he had not done so she had made the move herself, by having that note slipped beneath the door.

They had been lovers almost three years now, almost since the first day of Fulkari’s residence at the Castle. She was a member of one of the old Pontifical families, a descendant of Makhario of Sipermit, who had ruled five hundred years before. The Castle was full of such nobility, hundreds, even thousands who carried the blood of bygone monarchs.

Though the monarchy could never be hereditary, the offspring of Pontifexes and Coronals were ennobled forever, and had the right to occupy rooms at the Castle for as long as they pleased, whether or not they had any official function in the current government. Some chose to take up permanent residence there and became fixtures at the court. Most, though, preferred to spend much of the year on their family estates, elsewhere on the Mount, visiting the Castle only in the high season.

Sipermit, where Fulkari had grown up, was one of the nine High Cities of Castle Mount that occupied the urban band just downslope from the Castle itself. But she had not actually set foot in the Castle until she was twenty-one, when she and her younger brother Fulkarno were sent by their parents, as young aristocrats usually were, to dwell for some years at court.

Dekkeret had noticed Fulkari almost instantly. How could he not? She looked enough like his long-lost cousin Sithelle, who had fallen before the assassin’s blade that terrible day some twenty years before in Normork, to be Sithelle’s own ghost walking among them in the halls of the Castle.

She was lean and athletic, as Sithelle had been, a tall girl with arms and legs that were long in proportion to her trunk. Her hair was the same sort of fiery red-gold cascade, her eyes were a similar rich gray-violet, her lips were full, her chin a strong one, also like Sithelle’s. Her face was broader than he remembered Sithelle’s to have been, and there was a curious tiny cleft in Fulkari’s chin that Sithelle’s had not had; but in the main the resemblance was extraordinary.

Dekkeret halted in his tracks and gasped when he first saw her. “Who is that?” he asked, and on being told that she was the newly arrived niece of the Count of Sipermit, he quickly wangled for her an invitation to a court levee being held the following week by Varaile; and arranged to be there himself, and had her brought up to him for an introduction, and stared at her in such intense fascination that he must have seemed a little mad to her.

“Did any of your ancestors happen to come from Normork?” he asked her, then.

She looked puzzled. “No, excellence. We are Sipermit people, going back thousands of years.”

“Strange. You remind me of someone I once knew there. I am of Normork myself, you know. And there was a certain person—the daughter of my father’s sister, in truth—”

No, no, there was no way to link her to Sithelle. The resemblance was a mere coincidence, uncanny though it was. But Dekkeret lost little time drawing her into his life. Fulkari was a dozen or so years younger than he, and had had no experience in the ways of the court, but she was quick-witted and lively and eager to learn, and fiercely passionate, and not the least bit shy. It was strange, though, holding her in his arms, and seeing that face, so much like Sithelle’s, so close to his own. He and Sithelle had never been lovers, had never even dreamed of such a thing; if anything, he had regarded her more as a sister than a cousin.

Now here he was embracing a woman who seemed almost to be Sithelle reincarnated. At times it felt oddly incestuous. And he wondered: Was he replicating with Fulkari the relationship that he had never had with Sithelle? Was it truly Fulkari that he loved, or was he in love, instead, with the fantasy of his lost Sithelle? That was a considerable problem for him. And it was not the only one she posed for him.

He drew her to him and held her close against him, cheeks touching first, then lips. It made no difference to him that the guardsmen who occupied the post just inside the Dizimaule Arch were watching. Let them watch, he thought.

After a time they stepped back from one another. Her eyes were shining; her breasts rose and fell rapidly beneath the soft, pliant leather.

“Come,” she said, nodding toward the mounts. “Let’s go down into the meadow.”

She vaulted easily into her beast’s natural saddle and took off without waiting for him.

Dekkeret’s mount was a fine slim-legged one of a deep purple color tinged with blue, of the sort specially bred for swiftness and strength. He settled himself easily in the broad saddle that was an integral part of the creature’s back, gripped the pommel that sprouted in the same way just in front of him, and sent the mount speeding forward after her with a quick urgent pressure of his thighs. Cool sweet air streamed past him, lifting and ruffling his unbound hair.

He wondered how many more opportunities he would have to slip away from the Castle like this, a private citizen bound on a journey of private amusement, unattended, unhindered. As Coronal he would rarely if ever be able to go anywhere by himself. His visit to Normork had shown him what was in store for him. There would always be bodyguards about, except when he managed somehow to give them the slip.

But now—the wind in his hair, the bright golden-green sun high overhead, the splendid mount thundering along beneath him, Fulkari racing on ahead—

Below the southern wing of the Castle lay a belt of great open meadows, through the midst of which ran the Grand Calintane Highway, the one traveled by all wayfarers bound for the Castle. There was no day of the year when these meadows were not in bloom, stunning bursts of blue flanked by bright yellow blossoms, masses of white and red, oceans of gold, crimson, orange, violet. The riding track Fulkari had chosen passed to the left of the highway, into the gently sloping countryside that lay above the nearby pleasure-city of High Morpin, ten miles away.

Dekkeret caught up with her after a time and they rode along side by side. They were far enough down the Mount now that the long shadow of the Castle could be seen reaching out before them, tapering to a slender point. Soon the meadowland gave way to a forest of hakkatinga trees, small and straight-trunked, with reddish-brown bark and dense crowns that grew tightly interlaced with their neighbors to form a thick canopy.

Here the mounts could not go as swiftly, and slowed to a canter without being told.

“I missed you so very much,” Fulkari said, as they rode along side by side. “It felt as if you were gone for a month.”

“For me also.”

“Did you have a lot of important meetings to attend as soon as you came back? You must have been terribly busy all day yesterday.”

He hesitated. “I had meetings, yes. I don’t know how important they were. But I had to be there.”

“About the Pontifex? He’s dying, isn’t he? That’s what everybody’s been saying.”

“No one knows,” Dekkeret said. “Until firm news comes from the High Spokesman, we’re all in the dark.”

They had reached a part of the forest now where he and she had been more than once before. The treetops were so closely woven together here that even in mid-morning a kind of twilight dusk prevailed. A small stream ran here, which a colony of dam-building granths had blocked with gnawed logs to form a pretty little pond. Along its margin was a thick, soft azure carpet of sturdy, resilient bubblemoss. It was a lovely little secret bower, sheltered, secluded.

Fulkari dismounted and tethered her reins to a low-hanging branch. He did the same. They faced each other uncertainly. Dekkeret knew that the wisest thing to do was to reach for her now, quickly fold her in his arms, draw her down onto that mossy carpet, before anything could be said that would break the magic of the moment. But he could see that she wanted to speak. She held herself apart from him, moistened her lips, paced restlessly about. Words were struggling to burst free within her. She had not brought him here merely for lovemaking.

“What is it, Fulkari?” he asked, finally.

She said, in a tone dark with tension, “The Pontifex is going to die soon, isn’t he, Dekkeret?”

“It’s as I just told you: I don’t know. No one at the Castle does.”

“But when he does—will you be made Coronal?”

“I don’t know that either,” he said, hating himself for the cowardly evasion.

She was unrelenting. “There can’t be any doubt of it, can there? You’ve already been named Coronal-designate. The Coronal doesn’t ever change his mind and pick someone else, once he does that.—Please, Dekkeret, I want you to be honest with me.”

“I expect to be made Coronal when Confalume dies, yes. If Lord Prestimion asks me, that is, and the Council ratifies.”

“If you’re asked, you’ll accept?”

“Yes.”

“And what will happen to us, then?” Her voice came to him as though from a great distance.

He had no choice now but to go forward with this. “A Coronal should have a consort. I was discussing that very thing with the Lady Varaile last evening.”

“You make it sound so impersonal, Dekkeret. ‘A Coronal should have a consort.’ ” She seemed frightened at speaking to him so bluntly, he who soon would be king, and yet there was an angry edge to her tone all the same. “Does it happen that there’s anyone in particular whom you might select to be your consort, perhaps?”

“You know there is, Fulkari. But—”

“But?”

He said, “You’ve made it clear in a thousand ways that you don’t want to be the consort of a Coronal.”

“Have I?”

“Haven’t you? A minute ago you asked me if I’d accept the throne if it was offered to me. As though it was a fairly common thing for people to refuse to become Coronal, Fulkari. It was last month, I think, that you wanted to know, out of the blue, whether any Coronal-designate had ever turned it down. And before that, that time when you and I were in Amblemorn—”

“All right. That’s enough. You don’t need to dredge up any more things of that sort.” She appeared close to tears, and yet her voice was still steady. “I asked you to be honest with me. Now I’ll be just as honest with you.” Fulkari paused a moment. Then she said, regarding him evenly, “Dekkeret, I don’t want to be the consort of a Coronal.”

He nodded. “I know that. But if you don’t, why have you let yourself become the lover of the Coronal-designate? For the sake of excitement? Amusement? You knew, when we met, what Prestimion had in mind for me.”

“You speak as though these things happen by design. Did I come to the Castle expecting to fall in love with Coronal-designate Dekkeret? Did I pursue you in any way after I arrived? You saw me. You sought me out. We talked. We went riding together. We fell in love. I could just as easily ask you, why did the Coronal-designate choose as his lover a woman who doesn’t happen to think it’s such a wonderful thing to be the wife of the Coronal?”

“I didn’t realize that I had done any such thing. That was something I discovered only gradually, as we got to know each other. It’s troubled me tremendously ever since I figured it out.”

Her face was flushed with anger. “Because our little emotional entanglement stands in the way of your great ambition?”

“You can’t call becoming Coronal my ambition, Fulkari. I never asked for it. I never even imagined that it could be possible. It came to me by default, when an earlier logical heir unexpectedly died.” How could he make her understand? Why was it such a struggle? “No Coronal ever sets out to win the throne. If it doesn’t descend on him out of inevitable logic, he doesn’t merit it. For years, now, the logic has pointed to me.”

“And must you go along with that logic?”

He looked at her helplessly. “It would be shameful to refuse.”

“Shameful! Shameful! That’s all you men are concerned with—pride, shame, how things will look! You say you love me. You know how frightened I am of your becoming Coronal. And yet—because your pride won’t let you say no to Prestimion—”

Now she was weeping. Awkwardly he took her in his arms. She did not resist, but her body was stiff, withdrawn.

Quietly he said, “Explain to me why it is that you don’t want to be my consort, Fulkari.”

“A Coronal spends all his time reading official documents, signing decrees, going to meetings. Or else he’s traveling to some far-off place to attend banquets and make speeches. He has very little time for his wife. How often do you see Prestimion and Varaile together? The Coronal’s wife has banquets and functions to go to and speeches to make, too. It seems like a hideous dreary exhausting job. It would devour me. I’m only twenty-four years old, Dekkeret. I don’t feel anywhere close to ready to taking on a life like that.”

“Hush,” he said, as though soothing a child. That was how she seemed to him now, anyway: if not a child, then still adolescent, far from any real maturity. He saw now why Varaile was so troubled over the present state of his relationship with Fulkari. Varaile hoped that Fulkari would be Majipoor’s next royal consort, and was afraid that Dekkeret was on the verge of discarding her. But Varaile had no real understanding of the way things really stood.

Did he, though? Fulkari’s beauty, her eerie resemblance to Sithelle, had mesmerized him also into thinking that she had in her the material of a royal consort. But evidently she did not. A royal mistress, yes. But not a queen. She had been telling him that, indirectly at first and now quite explicitly, for a long time now. “Hush,” he said again, as her sobbing deepened. “It’s all right, Fulkari. The Pontifex may not be dying at all. He may go on living for years—years—”

He was saying things now that he did not believe in the slightest. But it seemed more important to comfort her, just then, than to try to address the realities of the situation.

For the realities of the situation were that he would become Coronal and that he could not marry Fulkari, who plainly did not want to be a Coronal’s wife; and so he had no choice but to break with her forever, here and now. But that was something he did not think he could bring himself to do. Certainly not today; perhaps not ever. It was an impossible situation.

He held her close. He stroked her tenderly. Gradually the sobbing ceased. The stiffness of her stance began to ease.

Then, by an almost imperceptible transition, they found themselves with a single accord passing from anguish and confusion and unreconcilable conflict to the rhythms of desire and need. This was their special place, where they had often come to escape from the bustling intrusiveness of Castle life; and here beside the sweet dark pond the granths had built under the close-woven hakkatingas, a sudden familiar urgency once more overcame them and thrust all other considerations aside.

Fulkari, as ever, took the lead. She kissed him lightly and moved a short way back from him. Touched her hand to the metal clasps of her garment at breast, hip, and thigh. The soft leather gave way as though sliced by an invisible blade. She stepped quickly free of it and stood radiantly bare before him, pale, slender, smiling, irresistible, holding out her hands to him. Her eyes, those gray-violet Sithelle eyes of hers, were shining. They beckoned to him. For Dekkeret there was magic in that bright gleam. Sorcery.

At that moment the issue of who would or would not be the consort of the next Coronal of Majipoor seemed as far away to him, and as unimportant, as the sandy desert wastes of Suvrael. He could not think of such things now. He was helpless against the magic of her beauty. That smile, the sight of her slim naked form, the glow of those marvelous eyes, brought back to blazing life all that had caught him and gripped him again and again these three years past. He reached for her and pulled her lightly toward him, and they sank down together, intertwined, on the carpet of bubblemoss beside the pond.

15

“Today, I think, is our day for the singlestick baton,” said Septach Melayn a little doubtfully. “Or is it the basket-hilt saber we do today?”

“Rapier, excellence,” said young Polliex, the graceful dark-haired boy from Estotilaup, Earl Thanesar’s second son. “Tomorrow’s the day for singlesticks, sir.”

“Rapier. Ah. Yes, of course, rapier. No wonder you’re all wearing your masks.” Septach Melayn put the error behind him with a shrug and a smile.

There was a time when he had regarded little errors of memory as sins against the Divine, and did penance for them with extra hours of sword drills. But he had lately made a treaty with himself, and with the Divine as well, concerning such errors. So long as his eye remained keen and his hand was still unfaltering, he would forgive himself for these small slips of his mind. As a man ages he must inevitably resign himself to the sacrifice of one faculty or another; and Septach Melayn was willing to give up some fraction of the excellence of his memory if in return he might keep the unparalleled flawlessness of his coordination for another year or three, or five, or ten.

He selected a rapier from the case of weapons against the wall and turned to face the class. They had already formed themselves in a semicircle, with Polliex at his left and the new one, the girl Keltryn, at the opposite end of the row. Septach Melayn always began the day’s work with one end of the row or the other, and Polliex always managed to position himself in a favorable place to be among the first chosen. The girl had very quickly picked up the trick from him.

There were eleven in the class: ten young men and Keltryn. They met with Septach Melayn every morning for an hour in the gymnasium in the Castle’s eastern wing that had been his private drilling room since the earliest days of Prestimion’s reign. It was a bright, high-ceilinged room whose walls were pierced by eight lofty octagonal windows that admitted copious floods of light until shortly after midday. Some said that the place had been a stable in the days of Lord Guadeloom, but Lord Guadeloom’s days had been very long ago indeed, and the room had been used as a gymnasium since time out of mind.

“The rapier,” said Septach Melayn, “is an exceedingly versatile weapon, light enough to permit great artistry of handling, yet capable of inflicting significant injury when it is used as an instrument of defense.” He scanned the semicircle quickly, decided not to choose Polliex for today’s first demonstration, and automatically looked over toward the other side, where Keltryn was waiting. “You, milady. Step forward.” He raised his sword and beckoned to her with it.

“Your mask, sir!” came a voice from the middle of the group. Tora-man Kanna, it was, the prince’s son of Syrinx, he of the dark smooth skin and seductive almond eyes. He was ever one to point out things like that.

“My mask, yes,” Septach Melayn said, grinning sourly. He unhooked one from the wall. Septach Melayn always insisted that his pupils wear protective face-masks whenever the sharper weapons were used, for fear that some novice’s wild random poke would take out a princely eye and create an inconvenient hullaballoo and outcry among the injured boy’s kinsmen.

One day, though, the suggestion had been made to him in class that he too should wear a mask, by way of setting a proper example. It seemed wildly absurd to him that he of all people should be asked to take such a precaution—he whose guard had never been broken by another swordsman, not even once, except only that time at the Stymphi-nor engagement in the Korsibar war, when he had taken on four men at the same time on the battlefield and some coward had sliced at him from the side, beyond his field of peripheral vision. But for consistency’s sake he agreed. Still, it was often necessary for his students to remind him to don the ungainly thing at the outset of each class.

“If you please, milady,” he said, and Keltryn moved into the center of the group.

Septach Melayn still had not fully adapted to the concept of a female swordsman. He was, of course, much more comfortable in the company of young men than in that of women or girls: that was simply his nature. There had always been a circle of them in attendance on him. But the fact that his pupils had always been male was not so much a matter of his preference as theirs; Septach Melayn had never so much as heard of a woman’s wanting to wield weapons, until this one.

The odd thing was that this Keltryn seemed to have a natural gift for the sport. She was seventeen or so, nimble and swift, with a lean frame that might almost have been a boy’s, and the exceptionally long arms and legs that were a mark of advantage in swordsmanship. She had her older sister’s coloring and her older sister’s sparkling beauty, but Fulkari’s every motion was infused with a soft seductiveness that was apparent even to Septach Melayn, though he did not respond to it, whereas this one’s movements had an irrepressible coltish angularity that seemed delightfully unfeminine to him. And one could never imagine Fulkari picking up a sword. The weapon seemed not in any way out of place in Keltryn’s hand.

She faced him squarely, holding her rapier at rest by her side. The instant Septach Melayn raised his weapon she lifted hers and turned sideways into the fencing position, ready to meet his attack. The profile she presented was a very narrow one: from her first day in the class she had bound her breasts with some tight undergarment so that it appeared she had none at all beneath her white fencing jacket. Just as well, Septach Melayn thought. He was unaccustomed to fencing with someone who had breasts.

This was the first rapier lesson since she had joined the group. Keltryn was holding the weapon oddly, and Septach Melayn shook his head and lightly tapped her sword downward. “Let us begin by considering the placement of the hand, milady. We use the Zimroel style of handle here: the grip is a longer one than you may be familiar with, and we hold it farther back from the guard. You will find it gives greater freedom of action that way.”

She made the adjustment. The mask hid any sign of embarrassment or displeasure over the correction. When Septach Melayn lifted his sword again, she raised hers, waggling it as if to indicate that she was impatient to begin the lesson.

Impatience was something he would not tolerate. Deliberately, he made her wait.

“Let us consider certain fundamentals,” he said. “Our intention with this weapon, as I believe you know, is to lunge and thrust, and to parry our opponent’s counterthrust, and to make our own riposte. The point of the weapon is all we use. The entire body is the target. You should be familiar already with all of that. The special thing I teach you here is the division of the moment. Have you heard the term, milady?”

She shook her head.

“What we say is, a good fencer must seize control of time, rather than being controlled by it. In our daily lives we perceive time as a continuous flow, a river that moves without cease from source to mouth. But in fact a river is made up of tiny units of water, each distinct from every other one. Because they move in the same direction they give the illusion of unity. It is only an illusion, though.”

Did she understand? She gave no clue.

Septach Melayn continued, “It is the same with time. Each minute of an hour is a separate entity. The same with each second of a minute. Your task is to isolate the units within each second, and to view your opponent as moving from one unit to the next in a series of discontinuous leaps. It is a difficult discipline; but once you achieve it, it is a simple thing to interpose yourself between one of his leaps and the next. For example—”

He called her on guard, took the offensive immediately, lunged and let her parry, lunged again and this time countered her parry by beating her blade aside, so that he had a clear path to the tip of her left shoulder, which he touched; and withdrew and thrust once more, before she had had time to register that she had been struck, and touched the other shoulder. A third time he slipped within her guard and touched her carefully, very carefully, at the bony middle of her chest, just above the place where he imagined the dividing point between her flattened breasts to lie.

The entire demonstration had taken only a handful of seconds. His movements nowadays seemed slow, terribly slow, to him, but Septach Melayn was judging himself by the standards of twenty years ago. There still was no one who could match his speed.

“Now,” he said, shoving his mask back and relaxing his stance, “the purpose of what I’ve just done was not to show you that I am the superior fencer, which I think we all can take for granted, but to indicate the way the theory of the division of the moment operates. What you experienced just now, I suspect, was a perplexing blur of action in which a taller and more skillful opponent heartlessly came at you from all sides at once and pinked you again and again while you struggled to comprehend the pattern of his moves. Whereas what I experienced was a series of discrete intervals, frozen frames of action: you were here and then you were over there, and I entered the interval between those positions and touched your shoulder. I withdrew and returned and found an opening between the next two intervals and penetrated your guard once again. And so forth. Do you follow?”

“Not in any useful way, excellence.”

“No. I didn’t suppose you would. But let’s replay the sequence, now. I will do everything in precisely the same way. This time, though, try to see me not as a whirlwind of continuous activity, but as a series of still tableaus in which I hold this position and then this one and then the next. That is, you must see me faster, so that I appear to be moving more slowly. That may make no sense to you now, but I think that sooner or later it will.—On your guard, milady!”

He ran through it all a second time. This time she was, if anything, even more ineffectual, though she knew the direction his moves would be coming from. There was a desperation to her parrying, a frenzied hurry, that pulled her far off form and forced him to stretch to full extension to touch her as he had before. But she did seem also to be trying to comprehend his enigmatic talk about the division of the moment. She appeared to be attempting somehow to slow the flight of time by waiting until the last possible moment to react to his thrusts. Then, of course, she had to rush her parries. Against a swordsman like Septach Melayn that had to be a recipe for disaster; but at least she was trying to understand the method.

Again he touched shoulder, shoulder, breastbone.

Again he halted and pushed back the mask. She did the same. Her face was flushed, and she had a sullen, glowering look.

“Much better that time, milady.”

“How can you say that? I was horrible. Or are you simply trying to mock me… your grace?”

“Ah, no, milady. I’m here to teach, not to mock. You handle yourself well, better, perhaps, than you know. The potential is definitely there. But these skills are not mastered in a single day. I wanted to show you, only, the area within which you must work.” It was an appealing challenge, he thought, making a great swordsman out of a girl like this.

“Now watch while I run through the same maneuvers with someone to whom my theories are more familiar. Observe, if you will, how calm he remains in the midst of the attack, how he appears to be standing still when actually he is in motion.” Septach Melayn glanced toward the middle of the group. “Audhari?”

He was the best of Septach Melayn’s pupils, a Stoienzar boy with red freckles all over his face, the great-grandson of the former High Counsellor Duke Oljebbin of Lord Confalume’s reign and therefore in some way a distant kinsman of Prestimion’s. He was big and strong, with powerful forearms, and the quickest reflexes Septach Melayn had encountered in a long time.

“On your guard,” said Septach Melayn, and went at once to the attack. Audhari stood no more chance than anyone else of besting him, but he was able to make the pauses, anyway, to hold back the tumbling of the moments one upon another. And so he was able to anticipate, to parry, to find the opportunity between one instant and the next for a counterthrust or two, in general to hold his own commendably enough, all things considered, as Septach Melayn went methodically about the task of breaking through his guard again and again and again.

Even as he worked, Septach Melayn was able to steal a glance at the watching Keltryn. She was staring intently, in absolute concentration.

She will learn it, he decided. She could never be as strong as a man, she would probably not be as quick as one, but her eye was good, her will to succeed excellent, her stance quite satisfactory in form. He still could not understand why a young woman would want to take up swordsmanship, but he resolved to treat her with as much seriousness as he did any of his other pupils.

“You are not yet able to see,” he told the girl, “how Audhari goes about severing one moment from the next. It is done within the mind, a technique that requires long practice. But watch, this time, how he turns to meet each thrust. Pay no attention to me whatever. Watch only him.—Again, Audhari. On your guard!”

“Sir?” The voice was that of Polliex. “A messenger has come, your grace.” Septach Melayn became aware that someone had entered the room, one of the Castle pages, evidently. He stepped back from Audhari and cast his mask aside.

The boy was carrying a note, folded in thirds, unsealed. Septach Melayn scanned it hastily from both ends at once, as was his way, taking in the scrawled “V” of the Lady Varaile’s signature at the bottom even while he was reading the body of the text. Then he read it more carefully, as though that might somehow alter the content of the message, but it did not.

He looked up.

“The Pontifex Confalume has died,” Septach Melayn said. “Lord Prestimion, who was on his way back from the Labyrinth, has turned about and returned to it for his majesty’s funeral. As High Counsellor, I am summoned there as well. The class is adjourned. We will, I think, not meet again for some time.”

The class dissolved into a buzzing hubbub. Septach Melayn walked through their midst as though they were invisible and went from the room.

So it has happened at last, he thought, and now everything will change.

Confalume gone; Prestimion Pontifex; a new man on the throne at the Castle. A new High Counsellor would have to be named, also. True, Korsibar had kept Oljebbin on in that post after seizing the crown, but surely would soon have replaced him if his reign had lasted long enough for him to think about such things; and Prestimion, after the end of the usurpation, had lost no time putting his own man in the spot. Dekkeret, in all likelihood, would want to do the same. In any case Septach Melayn knew that he belonged with Prestimion in the Labyrinth. That was expected of him, and he would comply. But still—still—they had said that Confalume would recover, that he was in no imminent danger of dying—

All this was a great deal to have to wrap his mind around, so early in the day.

Turning the corridor that connected the east wing with the Inner Castle, Septach Melayn went past the vaulted gray building that was the new Prestimion Archive and the wildly swooping weirdness of Lord Arioc’s Watchtower. Entering the Pinitor Court, he caught sight of Dekkeret coming toward him from the other direction, with the Lady Fulkari at his side. They were wearing riding clothes, and had a rumpled, sweaty look about them, as though they had been outside the Castle for a ride in the meadows and were just returning.

Now it begins, Septach Melayn thought.

“My lord!” he called.

Dekkeret looked toward him, openmouthed with surprise. “What was that you said, Septach Melayn?”

“Dekkeret! Dekkeret! All hail Lord Dekkeret!” Septach Melayn cried, hands outstretched to make the starburst sign. “Long life to Lord Dekkeret!” And then, in a quieter tone: “I am the first to utter those words, I think.”

They were both staring, Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari, frozen, astounded. Then Septach Melayn saw them exchange stunned glances. Huskily Dekkeret said, “What is this, Septach Melayn? What are you doing?”

“Offering the proper salutation, my lord. News has come from the Labyrinth, it seems. Prestimion has become Pontifex, and we have a new Coronal to hail. Or will, as soon as the Council can meet. But the thing is as good as done, my lord. You are our king now; and so I salute you.—You seem displeased, my lord. What could I have said to offend you?”