The King of Dreams

1

The Pontifex Prestimion had not been expecting to return to Castle Mount so soon, nor had he anticipated any such sad occasion as the funeral of a brother. Yet here he was once more hastening upriver from the Labyrinth, choking with grief, for Teotas’s burial rites. The ceremony would not be held at the Castle itself, but rather at Muldemar House, the family estate, the place where Teotas had been born and where he would rest now forever beside a long line of his princely ancestors.

It was years since Prestimion had been to Muldemar. There was no real reason for him to visit it. He had often gone there during his days as a prince of the Castle to visit his mother the Lady Therissa, but his accession to the Coronal’s throne had automatically brought her the title and duties of Lady of the Isle of Sleep, and she had been a resident of that island ever since. And likewise Prestimion’s coming to the throne had made Muldemar House his brother Abrigant’s domain, and Prestimion was not eager to overshadow his brother’s authority in his own house.

But then had come the bewildering, agonizing news of Teotas’s death; and Prestimion had come hurrying back to the ancestral home. Abrigant himself, an imposing figure in a dark blue doublet and a cloak striped with black and white, with a yellow mourning badge pinned to his shoulder, greeted him when the Pontifical party arrived at the gateway to Muldemar city. His eyes looked red and raw from sorrow. He was a tall man, the tallest by a head and shoulders of the four brothers who had grown up here together decades ago, and when he wrapped the Pontifex in a close and long embrace it was a well-nigh smothering one.

He released Prestimion and stepped back. “I bid you welcome to Muldemar, brother. Think of this place as being as much your home now as ever it was.”

“You know how grateful I am for those words, Abrigant.”

“And now that you’ve come, we can proceed with our burying.”

Prestimion nodded grimly. “Has there been word from our mother?”

“She sends a warm message of love, and tells us that she joins with us in our grief. But she will not be with us here.”

That news came as no surprise. There had never been any likelihood that the Lady Therissa would attend the ceremony. She was too old now for the arduous journey by sea and land from the Isle of Sleep to Castle Mount, and in any case the distance was so great that she could not have arrived here quickly enough. Abrigant had delayed the rite considerably as it was, in order to make it possible for Prestimion to be there. The Lady Therissa would mourn her youngest son from afar.

Prestimion was startled at how much older Abrigant seemed than when they last had met. That had been at the crowning of Dekkeret, not very long ago. Just as Teotas had, Abrigant had begun very quickly to show his years. He stood a little stoopingly, now. The luster of Abrigant’s glistening golden hair appeared to have dimmed greatly in just the past few months, and the vertical lines of age that had just been beginning to emerge on either side of his nose now seemed very deeply etched. Obviously the death of Teotas had fallen heavily upon him. Abrigant and Teotas, the third son and the fourth, had been extremely close, especially in these recent years when Prestimion’s royal responsibilities had kept him apart from the others.

“We are the only two left now,” Abrigant said, with a kind of wonder in his words, as though he could not believe his own statements. The tone of his voice was dark and sepulchral, like the gusting of a distant wind. “And so strange, so wrong, that our brothers should be dead this young! How old was Taradath when he fell in the Korsibar war? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? And now Teotas, who was younger even than myself, and is gone so much before his time—!”

The haunted look in Abrigant’s eyes was an awful thing to behold.

“Do you have any idea what could have driven him to it?” Prestimion asked. He had barely begun to come to terms with the whole thing himself.

In a guarded voice Abrigant replied, “It was a fit of madness, of a kind that had been coming upon him more and more often. That is all I would care to say, brother. Dekkeret will speak with you about it in more detail later. But come: here are the floaters that will take us to Muldemar House.” He gestured toward Varaile and Fiorinda, who had taken up a place just to Prestimion’s left throughout the conversation, and were standing silently while Prestimion and Abrigant spoke. “Here, my sisters—”

The two women had rarely left each other’s side during the journey from the Labyrinth. Both of them were swathed in the yellow robes of mourning, and both seemed so grief-stricken still that there was no way a stranger could have told which one was the widow of the late prince, and which merely the sister-in-law. Fiorinda’s three small children, two girls and a boy of five, huddled behind their mother, peeping out shyly, showing little comprehension of the tragedy that had overtaken their family. “This floater is yours,” Abrigant told them. He ushered them toward it. The Lady Tuanelys and young Prince Simbilon would travel with their mother and aunt and cousins also. “And I will ride with the Pontifex in this one,” he said, indicating his own floater. Prestimion entered it, and his two older sons climbed in beside him, and Abrigant gave the vehicle the command to proceed.

Abrigant seemed to unwind and expand during the course of the journey from Muldemar city to the estate itself. Perhaps he was relieved, at this dark time, to have his elder brother arrive to assume some of his burdens.

He complimented Prestimion on how much his children had grown and how well they looked. Young Taradath was indeed beginning to look quite princely, and Prince Akbalik also, though Simbilon still seemed far from getting his growth. And it did not seem to Prestimion that the Lady Tuanelys, who had been suffering lately from nightmares that had a troublesome resemblance to the dreams of the sort Teotas had supposedly been having, looked at all well. Disturbing dreams had begun to afflict Varaile also, lately. But Prestimion said nothing about that to Abrigant.

“And this year’s wines!” Abrigant was saying. He sounded almost exuberant now. “Wait until you sample them, Prestimion! A year of years, a year for the ages! The red in particular, as I was saying to Teotas only—last—month—”

His voice slowed and then halted in mid-sentence. All exuberance vanished and the haunted look abruptly returned to his eyes.

Prestimion said quickly, “Ah, look there, Abrigant: Muldemar House! How beautiful it is! How much I’ve missed being here!” It was as though he felt it was his task, not only as Pontifex but as the eldest of the family, to keep Abrigant from sinking into despondency.

To his two sons he said: “I was born here, you know. This evening I’ll show you the rooms where I used to live.” As if they had never seen the place before; but his concern now was merely to distract Abrigant from his sorrow.

Prestimion himself, laboring under his own sharp sense of great loss, felt lifted from his dark mood by the sight of his boyhood home.

Who could fail to respond to the extraordinary beauty of the vale of Muldemar? Amidst all the varied splendors of Castle Mount it stood out as a place of grace and calm. It was bordered on one side by the broad face of the Mount itself, and on the other by Kudarmar Ridge, a secondary peak of the Mount that would, anywhere else in the world, have been regarded as a mountain of majesty and grandeur in its own right. Lying as it did in the sheltered pocket between those two lofty peaks, Muldemar vale was favored all the year round by soft breezes and gentle mists, and its soil ran rich and deep.

Prestimion’s ancestors had settled here even before the Castle itself existed. They were farmers, then, who had come up from the lowlands with cuttings of the grapevines they grew down there. Over the centuries their wines had established a reputation for themselves as the foremost ones of Majipoor, and grateful Coronals, over the centuries, had ennobled the vintners of Muldemar, bringing them upward eventually to be dukes and then princes. Prestimion was the first of his line who had gone on to hold the Coronal’s throne, and after it the Pontifical seat.

The family lands ran for many miles through the choicest zone of the vale, a broad green realm stretching from the Zemulikkaz River to the Kudarmar Ridge. Deep within the estate lay the white walls and soaring black towers of Muldemar House itself, a domain of two hundred rooms laid out in three sprawling wings.

Abrigant had been thoughtful enough to provide Prestimion with the rooms that once had been his, a second-level apartment that looked out through gleaming windows of faceted quartz to the great vista of Sambattinola Hill. Little had changed here since he last had occupied it, more than twenty years before: the walls still bore the same subtle murals in quiet shades of amethyst and azure and topaz pink, and the window seat in which the young Prestimion had spent so many pleasant hours was furnished with some of the same books that he had read there long ago.

Household servants whom Prestimion did not recognize, no doubt the sons and daughters of the ones he had known, were on hand to help the Pontifex and his family settle in. This caused a minor clash with Prestimion’s own staff, for custom required that the Pontifex bring his own servants with him wherever he traveled, and they guarded that prerogative jealously. “You may not enter,” said sturdy strapping Falco, who had the title of First Imperial Steward now, and took his promotion very seriously. “These rooms belong to the Pontifex, and you may not look upon him.” It saddened Prestimion to see these good people of Muldemar staring timidly at him over Falco’s shoulder in awe and wonder, as though he were not a man of Muldemar himself but had descended into their midst from some other planet; and he instructed Falco that it was his intention, in this house, to waive the usual Pontifical prerogatives and allow ordinary common citizens to have access to his presence. Falco did not like that at all.

Varaile and Prestimion would share the master bedroom; Varaile put Tuanelys, who awakened often now crying in the night, in the room just adjacent. Taradath, Akbalik, and Simbilon were left to shift for themselves beyond. It was a suite of many rooms.

“I wish I could have Fiorinda nearby me as well,” Varaile said.

Prestimion smiled. “I know you’re accustomed to her presence close at hand. But this apartment was not designed to provide space for a lady-in-waiting when I lived in it. Would that it had been, but that was not how things were done.”

“It’s not for myself that I want Fiorinda near,” said Varaile, with a bit of snap in her voice. “She’s the one in need of comfort, and I wish that I could give it.”

“They’ll have put her in the rooms she and Teotas usually had when they were here. No doubt she’ll have a maid of her own to look after her there.”

But Varaile could not put Fiorinda from her mind. “How she suffers, Prestimion. And I as well. Teotas would never have undertaken that walk in the night if she had been beside him. But Fiorinda and Teotas were apart all those weeks before he—died, and the fault was mine. I should never have taken her with me from the Castle.”

“The separation was meant to be only temporary. And who could guess that Teotas had it in him to destroy himself?”

Varaile threw a strange look his way. “Is that what he did?”

“Why would a man climb out onto a dangerous and almost inaccessible tower in the middle of the night, if not to destroy himself?”

“The Teotas I knew was not a suicidal man, Prestimion.”

“I agree. But what was he doing out there, then? Sleepwalking? No one sleepwalks like that. Drunk? Teotas was never known as a heavy drinker. Under a spell, perhaps?”

“Perhaps,” Varaile said.

His eyes widened. “You sound almost serious.”

“Why not? Is it such an impossible idea?”

“Let’s assume that it isn’t, then. I’ll grant you that there are some magics that actually work. But who would lay a spell of self-destruction on the Pontifex’s brother, Varaile?”

“Who, indeed?” she replied sharply. “Isn’t that what you need to find out?”

Prestimion nodded absently. The mystery had to be unraveled, yes. But how? How? Who could look into dead Teotas’s mind and produce the needed answers? They were roaming into very mysterious territory now. “I need to discuss all this with Dekkeret,” he said. “Dekkeret was the last person to see Teotas alive, only a few hours before his death. Abrigant says he knows something about what happened.”

“You should speak to him, then. By all means, Prestimion.”

From Abrigant, Prestimion learned that Dekkeret was still at the Castle, but would be traveling down to Muldemar House later that day, now that he knew Prestimion had arrived. And in mid-afternoon came hubbub and hullaballoo from without, as a procession of royal floaters bearing the starburst emblem drew up outside. Prestimion looked out to see the towering figure of the Coronal, in full formal robes, entering the building. He noted with more than a little interest that the Lady Fulkari walked at his side.

Dekkeret seemed grim and determined, and very much in charge of things. It was evident that he had begun already to take on the intangible qualities of kingliness, here in the early months of his reign. Prestimion was pleased by that. He had never had any doubt of the wisdom of his choice of Dekkeret to succeed him, but that look of grandeur that Dekkeret wore now was a welcome confirmation all the same.

There was no chance before dinner for a conference with him, nor during the meal either. Coronals had not been uncommon visitors at Muldemar House over the centuries, and the princes of Muldemar maintained guest quarters for them in the east wing, as far from Prestimion’s present suite as was possible to be. Their first opportunity for a meeting was at the dinner table, but dinner was a somber, formal event at which private conversations were impossible. Prestimion and Dekkeret embraced, as it behooved the Pontifex and Coronal to do whenever they were present at the same event, and then they took their seats at opposite ends of the long table. Fulkari sat beside Dekkeret, Varaile adjacent to Prestimion, with Fiorinda next to her.

The rest of the gathering that was assembled in the great banquet hall was few in number. Abrigant and his wife Cirophan were accompanied by their two adolescent boys. Prestimion’s two older sons were there also. The only other guests were Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, who had come with the Pontifex to Muldemar. Abrigant spoke briefly of the solemn occasion that had brought them together this night, and they lifted their glasses in Teotas’s memory. Then dinner was served, a fine one; but it was an oddly assorted group, the prevailing mood was a subdued one, and there was little conversation.

Afterward Dekkeret came to Prestimion and said, “You and I should talk after dinner, your majesty.”

“We should, yes. Shall I bring Septach Melayn?”

“I think it should just be the two of us,” said Dekkeret. “You can share what I have to say with the High Spokesman later, if you wish. But Abrigant feels that you and I ought to discuss these things just between ourselves at first.”

“Abrigant knows what you’re going to tell me?” Prestimion asked.

“Some. Not all.”

Prestimion chose for the site of their meeting the tasting-room of Muldemar House, a place that had always exerted a strange charm over him, though there were those who said that they found the place gloomy. It lay at the mouth of a deep cool cavern of green basalt on the lowest level of the building, extending far underground into the bedrock of the Mount itself. Along both sides the entire passage was lined from floor to ceiling with a royal ransom in Muldemar wines, vintages stretching over hundreds of years, back through the mists of time. An ancient iron door sealed the room off from the rest of the building. There was no part of Muldemar House where he and Dekkeret could find greater seclusion.

He had requested that Abrigant’s cellarmaster leave a bottle of brandy for them on the tasting-room table. It was amusing to see that the bottle that the man had chosen, a big-bellied hand-blown globelet, was an outrageously precious one with what was surely more than a century of dust on it and a faded label dating it to the reign of Lord Gobryas, predecessor of Prankipin as Coronal. Prestimion poured two generous bowlfuls and they sipped for a time in silence, savoring the brandy reflectively.

At length Dekkeret said, “I feel great sadness at your loss, Prestimion. I loved Teotas greatly. How sorry I am that this wondrous liquor, if I’m ever fortunate enough to taste it again, will always summon the memory of his death for me.”

Prestimion nodded gravely. “I never thought that I’d outlive him. Even though he was aging quickly, and looked so much older than he was, there were many years between us. And then to have something like this happen—this—”

“Yes,” said Dekkeret. “But perhaps he was never meant to live a long life. As you say, he was aging quickly. There was always a fire burning within him. As though he had a furnace inside his breast, and was consuming himself for fuel. That temper of his—his impatience—”

“I have some of those qualities myself, you know,” Prestimion said. “But only a tincture. He had the full dose.” He applied himself thoughtfully to his brandy for a time. Its texture was marvelously smooth, but its long-pent-up flavor erupted within one’s mouth like an exploding galaxy. Then he said, when he judged the silence to have gone on long enough, “He killed himself, didn’t he, Dekkeret? What else could it have been, but suicide? But why? Why? He was under great stress, yes, but what kind of stress is there that could possibly drive a man like Teotas to take his own life?”

Quietly Dekkeret said, “I think he was murdered, Prestimion.”

“Murdered?”

Prestimion could not have been more astounded if Dekkeret had slapped him in the face.

“Or, let us say, he was forced by something outside himself into a frame of mind in which dying seemed more attractive to him than living; and then he was maneuvered into a place where death was a very easy thing to find.”

Prestimion hunched forward, staring intently. Dekkeret’s words went through him like a whirlwind. This was not anything that he wanted to believe. But the world does not let one believe only the things one chooses to believe.

“Go on,” he said. “Let me hear it all.”

“He came to me in my office,” said Dekkeret, “on the last afternoon of his life. As you know, I had invited him to serve as my High Counsellor—that was how much regard I had for him, Prestimion—but he would neither say me yea or nay about taking the post, and finally I sent for him to press him on it.”

“Why was he so hesitant? Was it on Fiorinda’s account?”

“That was the reason he gave, yes. That the Lady Varaile had requested the Lady Fiorinda to be her companion at the Labyrinth, and Teotas would not let his own ambitions stand in the way of that. But also there were the dreams he was having. Every night, apparently, a siege of nightmares beyond all describing.”

“Yes. Varaile heard about that from Fiorinda.—There are a lot of bad dreams going around these days, you know. My own daughter Tuanelys has been troubled by them. And Varaile as well, lately.”

“Even she?” Dekkeret said. He seemed to register the news with the deepest interest. “Nothing so savage as the ones that afflicted Teotas, I do sincerely hope. The man was in ruinous condition when I met with him. Pale, bloodshot, trembling. He told me straight out that he dreaded going to sleep each night, for fear of the dreams. Whatever resolution of the Fiorinda problem we might have tried to work out became impossible to discuss, because those dreams of his had wrecked him so. He said that he had become convinced, through his dreams, that he was unworthy of being High Counsellor. He begged me to release him from the appointment. Which I suppose I simply should have done, considering the shape he was in. But I wanted him, Prestimion, I wanted him badly. I asked him finally to put the whole matter aside for one more week, and it seemed to me as he was leaving that he had agreed to that.”

“But instead, feeling terrible shame and guilt over having told you he wanted to decline the appointment, and not wanting to go through the whole thing again with you the following week, he headed straight from your office to some remote spire of the Castle, clambered out to the edge, and jumped off.”

“No.”

“That was what I was told that he did.”

“He jumped, yes. But not right after his meeting with me. It was in the afternoon that I saw him. It was in the middle of the night when he fell to his death.”

“Yes. I did know that, actually. There was talk that he’d been sleepwalking. Which would make it an accident, rather than suicide.”

“It was neither, Prestimion.”

“You really believe that he was murdered?”

“There is a device—a little metal helmet: do you remember it?—that allows one to reach across great distances and interfere with the workings of someone else’s mind. With my own eyes I beheld you using such a helmet fifteen years ago.”

“Of course. The one that your friend Dinitak stole from his father and brought to us to use against Dantirya Sambail.”

“Which was a copy of an earlier one, you recall, that Dinitak’s father Venghenar had stolen from the Vroon who invented it, and which he employed in the Procurator’s service.”

“All these deadly helmets have been kept under seal in the Treasury ever since those days. Is it your notion that someone’s made off with one of them and was using it against Teotas?”

“The Barjazid helmets are still at the Castle, where they belong, and all of them remain under our control,” Dekkeret replied. “But there are other Barjazids beside Dinitak in this world, Prestimion. And other helmets.”

“You know this to be a fact?”

“Dinitak is my source. His father’s younger brother, Khaymak Bar-jazid by name, still lives, and still understands the making of the helmets. It was this Khaymak who used to construct the things for Venghenar when they all lived in Suvrael long ago. He continues to possess the plans and sketches he used. While you were still Coronal, he came to the Castle to offer some new and improved model to you, but Dinitak found out about it first and turned him away, not wanting anyone of his sort sniffing around at court. So Khaymak took himself off to Zimroel and sold the helmet plans to a certain Mandralisca, whose name you will, I think, remember.”

Dekkeret’s words fell upon Prestimion with devastating impact. “The poison-taster? He’s still alive?”

“Evidently so. And in the service of five extraordinarily loathsome brothers who happen to be the the nephews of our old friend Dantirya Sambail. And they, as I have only just begun to discover, have launched some sort of local insurrection against our rule in a desert district of central Zimroel.”

“This is beginning to move too quickly for me,” Prestimion said. He poured fresh bowls of brandy for them both, and took a long, slow sip. “—Let us go back a little. This Khaymak Barjazid has put a mind-controlling helmet in the hands of Mandralisca the poison-taster?”

“Yes.”

“And—surely this is where you have been heading with all of this—Mandralisca has used the helmet to reach into Teotas’s mind and drive him to the edge of insanity. Over the edge, indeed, to the point where he would take his own life.”

“Yes, Prestimion. Precisely so.”

“What’s your proof of this?”

“I authorized Dinitak to withdraw one of the old helmets from the Treasury and conduct a little investigation with it. He reports that mental broadcasts are emanating from somewhere in the vicinity of Ni-moya. He believes the operator is none other than Mandralisca, who appears to have been striking randomly all over the world. And not always randomly, since one of his broadcasts was aimed at Teotas, with the results that we all have seen.”

“You believe that what Dinitak says is true?”

“I do.”

“And how long have you known all this?”

“About three days.”

Once again Prestimion felt the whirlwinds of chaos roaring through his mind. “You heard me say that my little daughter Tuanelys has been having bad dreams. Varaile, occasionally, too. My brother, my daughter, my wife: can it be that this Mandralisca has found a way of making the Pontifex’s own family his target?”

“That could be so.”

“And the Pontifex next? Or the Coronal?”

“No one is safe, Prestimion. No one.”

My brother. My daughter. My wife.

Prestimion closed his eyes and pressed the tips of his fingers to the lids. A tumultuous welter of emotions surged through him: fury, foremost, but sadness, also, and a bleak sense of exhaustion of the spirit, and even fear. Had the Divine, he wondered, placed some curse on his entire reign? First the Korsibar usurpation, and then the plague of madness that had been the consequence of his high-handed act in wiping out the entire world’s memories of the civil war, and then the attempt by Dantirya Sambail to unseat him. Now these new vermin, these five brothers, spurred to yet another rebellion by this devilish Mandralisca, who seemed to have a dozen lives—and, worst of all, an invisible threat reaching even into his family itself—

When he looked at Dekkeret again he saw that the younger man was regarding him worriedly, even tenderly. In haste Prestimion strove to restore his mantle of regal poise.

“I am reminded,” he said, slowly, calmly, “of Maundigand-Klimd’s prophecy that a Barjazid would somehow make himself a Power of the Realm. I told you of that, did I not? Yes. You thought he might have been speaking of Dinitak, and scoffed at that, and I warned you not to take the prophecy too literally. Well, we will have no Barjazids as literal Powers of the Realm, I think, but here is one who is certainly wielding power, in the abstract sense. We will locate him before he does further harm, and take his helmets from him, and see to it that he is able to build no more of them. And we’ll deal at last with that serpent Mandralisca, too, and pull his fangs.”

“That we will.”

“You will report to me daily, Dekkeret, concerning any further discoveries Dinitak may make.”

“Absolutely.” Dekkeret finished the last of his brandy. “The uprising, or whatever it is, in Zimroel needs handling also. I may go there in person to deal with it.”

Prestimion lifted an eyebrow. “Under the pretext of a grand processional, you think? So early in your reign? And so far?”

“I should do whatever seems appropriate, Prestimion. I’ve only just begun to consider what that will be. Let’s discuss this further, shall we, after the funeral.—Do you plan to remain here at Muldemar for any length of time?”

“A few days, only. At most a week.”

“And then back to the Labyrinth, is it?”

“No. To the Isle of Sleep,” Prestimion replied. “My mother remains in residence there. For the second time she has lost a son. It’ll do her good to have a visit from me in such a dark hour.” Rising, he said, “We should rejoin the company above, I think. Send for your Dinitak, and let’s meet with him here somewhere in the next few days.”

“I will, Prestimion.”

As they ascended the stairs Prestimion said, “I note that you come here with the Lady Fulkari. I found that somewhat surprising, after the conversation that you and I had had about her.”

“We are betrothed,” said Dekkeret, with a tiny smile.

“Even more of a surprise. It was my impression that Fulkari had rejected the idea of becoming the consort of the Coronal, and you were searching for some way to break with her. Am I wrong about that?”

“Not at all. But we held further discussions. We explained ourselves more clearly to each other.—Of course, there’ll be no announcement of any plans for a royal marriage until the pain of this business with Teotas has had a chance to fade.”

“Naturally not. But I hope you’ll give me proper notice when the time comes. I would have liked Confalume to officiate at my wedding, if events had permitted.” Prestimion paused and caught Dekkeret for a moment by the hand. “It would give me great pleasure to officiate at yours.”

“Let it be the Divine’s will that you do,” said Dekkeret. “It would be a good thing, anyway, that the next time the Pontifex travels to Castle Mount from the Labyrinth it’s for a happier occasion than the present one.”

2

“My lord, may I come in?” Abrigant said to Dekkeret, who had gone to the door to answer his knock.

Teotas’s funeral was three days in the past, now. Dinitak had come down from the Castle at Prestimion’s request. He and Prestimion and Dekkeret had been meeting for more than an hour. Things had not gone entirely smoothly. Something was amiss, though Dekkeret had no idea what it was. Prestimion seemed to be in a dark, cold, brooding mood, saying little, sometimes putting a curious bit of overemphasis on some otherwise innocuous statement. It was as if some change had come over him the other day, once Dekkeret had raised the likelihood that it was the Barjazid helmet that was to blame for what had befallen Teotas.

Abrigant’s knock offered a welcome break in the tension. Dekkeret went quickly to the door of Prestimion’s suite to see who it was, leaving Prestimion and Dinitak huddled over the helmet that Dinitak had brought down to Muldemar House with him. Prestimion was examining the helmet closely, poking at it with a fingertip and muttering under his breath, staring at it with open hatred as though it were some malevolent living thing that gave off poisonous exhalations. The Pontifex was radiating such an intensity of feeling that Dekkeret was glad to have an excuse to get away from him for a moment.

“It’s your brother you’re looking for, I suppose,” said Dekkeret. He gestured rearward with his thumb. “Prestimion’s back there.”

Abrigant seemed surprised and perhaps dismayed to discover

Dekkeret answering at Prestimion’s door. “Am I interrupting official business, my lord?”

“There’s a fairly important meeting going on, yes. But I think we can take a break for a little while.” Dekkeret heard footsteps behind him. Prestimion, frowning, emerged from within. “The Pontifex evidently feels the same way.”

Abrigant looked toward his brother and said, with some chagrin, “I had no idea, Prestimion, that you and the Coronal were having a conference, or I certainly would never have presumed—”

“A little intermission in the proceedings was in order, anyway,” Prestimion said. His tone was affable enough. But the tight set of his mouth and jaws showed exactly how displeased he was by the interruption. “Is there some urgent news that I need to know about, Abrigant?”

“News? No news, no. Only a little bit of family business. A matter of a minute or two.” Abrigant seemed off-balance. He shot a swift glance at Dekkeret, and then one at Dinitak, who now had come out from within also. “This really can wait, you know. It was hardly my intention to—”

Prestimion cut him off. “No matter. If we can take care of it as quickly as you say—”

“Shall Dinitak and I go back inside, and leave this sitting-room to the two of you?” asked Dekkeret.

“No, stay,” said Abrigant. “This isn’t really anything that requires privacy, I suppose. With your permission, my lords: I will need only a moment.” To Prestimion he said, “Brother, I’ve just been speaking with Varaile. She tells me that you and she will be leaving here in a day or two: not for the Labyrinth, though, but for the Isle of Sleep. Is this so?”

“It is.”

“It was my thought to go to the Isle myself, actually, as soon as I’ve dealt with all current business here. Our mother should not be alone at a time like this.”

Prestimion appeared irritated and confused. “Are you saying that you’d like to accompany me there, Abrigant?”

Abrigant’s face now mirrored Prestimion’s puzzlement. “That isn’t exactly what I had in mind. One of us must surely go to her; and I simply assumed that the responsibility for undertaking the trip would fall to me. The Pontifex, I felt, is likely to have important official duties at the Labyrinth that would prevent him from making such a long journey.” And, with increasing discomfort: “It’s certainly not customary for Pontifexes to visit the Isle, as I understand it. Or Coronals either, for that matter.”

“A great many things that aren’t customary have been happening in recent years,” Prestimion returned smoothly. “And I can do my Pontifexing wherever I happen to be.” His face darkened. “I am the eldest of her sons, Abrigant. I think this task is one for me to handle.”

“On the contrary, Prestimion—”

Dekkeret was beginning to find it more than a little embarrassing to be listening to this conversation between the brothers. He had been an unwilling witness to it in the first place; but now that it had turned into a tense dispute, it was something that he very much did not want to be overhearing. Something was going on here that only a member of the family could fully understand, and that no outsider should see.

If Abrigant, who had relinquished all public duties upon Dekkeret’s ascent to the throne and had more leisure for family matters these days than his royal brother, believed that he should be the one to comfort their mother in this difficult hour—well, Dekkeret conceded, he did have good reason for thinking that. But Prestimion was the older brother. Should he not be the one who decided which one of them was to go to the Isle?

And Prestimion was Pontifex as well. No one, Dekkeret thought, not even the Pontifex’s brother, should say something like “On the contrary” to a Pontifex.

In the end that was the conclusive point. Prestimion listened for a few moments more, confronting Abrigant with folded arms and containing himself with an only too apparent show of elaborate patience as Abrigant argued his case; and then he said simply, “I understand your feelings, brother. But I have other reasons, reasons of state, for needing to be abroad at this present moment. The Isle will be merely the first stop on my journey.” He was staring unwaveringly at Abrigant now. “What I must deal with,” Prestimion said, “is the matter that was under discussion here when you knocked at the door just now. Since it would be convenient as well as desirable for me to go to the Isle, there’s no need for you to make the trip as well.”

Abrigant greeted that with an instant or two of silence and a baffled stare. It seemed to be gradually sinking in upon him that Prestimion’s words amounted to a command.

Dekkeret had no doubt that the Pontifex’s brother was still displeased. But there could be no pursuing the issue beyond this point. Abrigant forced a smile that showed only a wintry warmth. “Well, then, Prestimion, in that case I have to yield to you, don’t I? Very well, I yield. Carry my love to our mother, if you will, and tell her that my thoughts have been with her from the first moment of this tragedy.”

“That I will do. And your task now will be to comfort the Lady Fiorinda. I leave her in your care.”

Abrigant did not seem to be prepared for that either. He was already upset by his capitulation to Prestimion on the journey to the Isle, and further bewilderment appeared on his face at this latest statement of Prestimion’s. “What? Fiorinda’s going to stay here, then? She won’t be accompanying Varaile on these travels of yours?”

“That would not be a good idea, I think. Varaile will send for her when we have returned to the Labyrinth. Until that time, I prefer to let her remain at Muldemar.” Then—in a gesture that seemed to Dekkeret to be rather more of a display of imperial strength than of fraternal affection—Prestimion held out his arms stiffly toward Abrigant and said, “Come, brother, give me an embrace, and then I must get on with this meeting.”

When Abrigant had gone from the room and they had gone back within, Dekkeret turned to Prestimion and said, by way of breaking the vacuum of uneasy silence that lingered in Abrigant’s wake, “What exactly are these travels of which you were speaking a moment ago, majesty? If I may know.”

“I’ve made no final decision yet.” The sharpness remained in Prestimion’s voice. “But there’s no question but that you and I will be in motion in the months ahead.” He gathered up the helmet, which he had left lying on the table, and poured the soft metal meshes from his right hand to the left one like a hoard of golden coins. “Foh! I never thought I’d be handling this filthy thing again. It was almost the killing of me, once. You remember that, do you?”

“We can never forget it, your majesty,” Dinitak said. “We saw you brought to your knees from the effort of using it, that time when you were sending your spirit all through the world to heal people of the madness.”

Prestimion smiled a pale smile. “So I was. And you said to Dekkeret, ‘Get it off his head,’ as I recall it, and Dekkeret answered that it was forbidden to handle a Coronal in such fashion, and you told him to remove it anyway, or the world would need a new Coronal in a very short while. And so Dekkeret removed it from my head.—I wonder, Dinitak, would you have taken it from me yourself if Dekkeret hadn’t finally been willing to do it?”

Quickly Dekkeret said, not bothering to conceal the annoyance in his voice, “The question’s unfair, Prestimion. Why ask him such a thing? I did take the helmet off you when I saw what it was doing to you.”

But Dinitak turned to Dekkeret and said coolly, “I have no objection to replying to the Pontifex’s question.” And, to Prestimion: “I would have removed it, yes, your majesty. One holds the person of a Coronal sacred, up to a point. But one doesn’t stand idly by while the Coronal’s life is in danger. I understood the power of that helmet better than either of you. You were pouring all your strength into it, majesty, and you had used it long enough. It was placing you in great peril.” Dinitak’s dark face had grown very flushed. “I would not have hesitated to pull it from your brow if Dekkeret found himself unable to do so. And if Dekkeret had tried to prevent me, I would have pushed him aside.”

“Well spoken,” Prestimion said, with a little gesture of applause. “I like the way you said that: ‘I would have pushed him aside.’ You’ve never gone in very much for diplomacy or tact, have you, Dinitak? But you’re certainly an honest man.”

“The only one his family has managed to produce in ten thousand years,” said Dekkeret, and laughed. Dinitak, after a moment, broke into laughter also, with unfeigned heartiness.

Only Prestimion maintained a sober mien. The strange tension that had been settling about him since the first moments of this afternoon’s meeting had heightened after Abrigant’s departure. Now there was a powerful undercurrent of edginess about him, as though he were contending with some explosive inner force that he could barely hold in check.

But his voice was calm enough as he threw the helmet back down on the table and said, “Well, may the Divine preserve me from ever having to don that thing again! I remember its powers only too vividly. A man my age has no business going near it. When we need it again, it’ll be you, Dinitak, who’ll do the work, eh? Not me.” He looked then toward his Coronal.—“And not you either, Dekkeret!”

“The thought had not occurred to me, I assure you,” Dekkeret replied. He wanted very much to return to the theme that Prestimion had so casually brushed aside.—“You said a minute ago, Prestimion, that the two of us would be in motion. Where will you be going, do you think?”

“What I intend to do is something Pontifexes rarely have done. Which is to travel hither and yon about the land, according to no fixed plan. This for the sake of guarding my family against the reach of our friend Mandralisca’s malice.”

Dekkeret nodded. “That seems wise.”

“I’ll go to the Isle first, of course, probably by way of the northern route out of Alaisor: they tell me that the prevailing winds will be better this time of year, going that way. Once I’ve seen to my mother I’ll return to the mainland by way of the southern path, via Stoien or Treymone. Stoien, I think: that would be best. If I choose to go back then to the Labyrinth, that’ll provide the most direct route. But where I go once I reach Alhanroel will depend on the doings of Mandralisca and his five brutish masters, how much trouble they intend to create, how much jeopardy I find myself in.”

“You will find yourself in none, I pray,” said Dekkeret fervently. He studied Prestimion with care. The Pontifex still had that strange look about him. Something was ticking within Prestimion, ticking, ticking.—“And what journeys do you have in mind for me, may I ask?”

“You said yourself, just before the funeral, that you were thinking of going to Zimroel and investigating the situation there yourself,” said Prestimion. “Only time will tell whether a step like that will be necessary. I hope that it won’t: a new Coronal has too much to do at the Castle to be going jaunting off to the other continent. But under the present circumstances you surely should put yourself into a position that will allow you to get yourself out there as swiftly as possible, if need be.”

“The western coast, you mean.”

“Exactly. While I’m sailing to the Isle, you should be following in my tracks, zigzagging across the western lands to Alaisor also.”

“You want me to take the land route, then?”

“Yes. Go by land. Show yourself to the people. It always stirs up good feelings when the Coronal comes to town. Your overt pretext will be that you’re making a kind of processional—not the full thing with all the banqueting and circuses, but only a preliminary sort, the new Coronal making a quick tour of the most important cities of central and western Alhanroel. Take Dinitak with you, I think. You’ll want to monitor events on the other continent very closely, and that helmet of his will allow you to do that. Once you’ve reached Alaisor, start down the coast, finishing up at Stoien, say, where you’ll wait for me to return from visiting my mother. When I’m done at the Isle, I’ll meet you at Stoien or thereabouts, and we’ll confer and evaluate the situation as we see it then. It may be necessary for you to go to Zimroel and bring matters under control there. Or perhaps not. How does this sound to you?”

“In perfect conformity with my own ideas.”

“Good. Good.” Prestimion seized Dekkeret’s hand and wrung it with startling force.

Then, at last, his icy self-control broke. He turned quickly away and went striding briskly around the room in quick furious steps, fists clenched, shoulders rigid. Dekkeret suddenly understood the aura of tension that had surrounded Prestimion this day: the man had been overflowing all this while with barely contained rage. That was only too plain now. That his own family should be under attack—his wife and his daughter, and of course Teotas—that was something he could not and would not abide. The Pontifex’s face looked gray with fatigue, but there was a bright spark of anger in his eyes.

A hot stream of words that had been withheld too long came boiling out of him now.

“By the Divine, Dekkeret, can you imagine anything more intolerable! Yet another rebellion? Are we never to be spared such things? But this time we’ll put a finish to the rebels and their rebellion both. We’ll hunt down this Mandralisca and make an end to him once and for all, and these five brothers as well, and all who swear allegiance to them.”

Prestimion was moving agitatedly about the room all the while, barely pausing to look in Dekkeret’s direction. “I tell you, Dekkeret, whatever was left of my patience is worn away. I’ve spent the twenty years of my reign, Coronal and Pontifex both, struggling with enemies such as no ruler of Majipoor since Stiamot’s time has had to cope with. Drive my brother to madness, will they? Enter the dreams of my little girl, even? No. No! I’ve had enough and more than enough. We’ll cut them down. We’ll abolish them root and branch. Root and branch, Dekkeret!”

Dekkeret had never seen Prestimion in such rage. But then the Pontifex seemed to regain some measure of poise. He halted his frenzied pacing and took up a stance in the middle of the room, letting his arms dangle, breathing slowly in and out. Then he waved Dekkeret and Dinitak unceremoniously to the door. His voice was calmer, now, but it was chilly, even harsh. “Go, now, the two of you. Go! I need to speak with Varaile, to let her know what’s ahead for us.”

Dekkeret was more than happy to be excused from the Pontifex’s presence. This was a new Prestimion, and a frightening one. He was aware that Prestimion had ever been an impulsive and passionate man, his intrinsic shrewdness and caution constantly at war with surging temper and impatience. But there had always been a leavening quality of good humor and playful wit about him that gave him the ability to find sources of fresh strength even in times of the most arduous crisis.

Moderation in the face of adversity had been Prestimion’s defining characteristic throughout his long and challenging reign. Dekkeret had already noticed that in his middle years he seemed to have grown crusty and conservative, as men will often do, and had lost a good deal of that resilience. Prestimion appeared to be taking this Mandralisca business as a personal affront, rather than as the attack on the sanctity of the commonwealth that it actually was.

Perhaps it is for this reason, Dekkeret thought, that we have a system of double monarchy here. As the Coronal grows older and more rigid, he moves on to the higher throne and is replaced at the Castle by a younger man, and thereby the wisdom and experience of age is yoked to the flexibility and vigor of buoyant youth.

Fulkari greeted Dekkeret with a warm embrace when he returned to their quarters after parting from Dinitak. She had just been bathing, it seemed, and wore only a thick furry robe and a bright golden strand at her throat. A sweet aroma of bathing-spices rose from her breasts and shoulders. He felt some of the stress of his meeting with Prestimion beginning to ebb from him.

But clearly she was able to tell, just at a single glance, that things were not right. “You look very strange,” she said. “Did things go badly between you and Prestimion?”

“Our meeting covered a lot of difficult ground.” Dekkeret flung himself down carelessly on a velvet-covered divan. It creaked in protest as his big form landed on it. “Prestimion himself is becoming rather difficult.”

“In what way?” said Fulkari, seating herself at the divan’s foot.

“In a dozen ways. The long weariness of holding high office has had its effect on him. He laughs much less than he did when he was younger. Things that once might have seemed funny to him no longer amuse him. He gets angry very easily. He and Abrigant had a peculiar little argument that never should have taken place in front of me. Or at all, for that matter.” Dekkeret shook his head. “I don’t mean to speak harshly of him. He’s still an extraordinary man. And we mustn’t forget that his youngest brother has just met a horrifying death.”

“Small wonder that he’s behaving like this, then.”

“But it’s painful to see. I feel for him, Fulkari.”

She grinned mischievously. Taking one of his feet in her hands, she began to knead and massage it. “And will you also grow cranky and ill-tempered when you’re Pontifex, Dekkeret?”

He winked at her. “Of course. I’d think something was wrong with me if I didn’t.”

For an instant she appeared, despite the wink, to have taken him seriously. But then she laughed and said, “Good. I find cranky, ill-tempered men very attractive. Almost irresistible, as a matter of fact. Just the thought of it excites me.”

She slithered up the divan toward him until she was nestling in the crook of his arm. Dekkeret pressed his face against her copper-bright hair, inhaled its fragrance, kissed her lightly on the nape of her neck. Slipping his one hand into the front of her robe, he lightly traced the line of her collarbone with his fingers, then let the hand slide lower to cup one of her breasts. They remained like that for a time, neither of them in a hurry to move onward to the next stage.

He said, after a while, “We’ll be returning tomorrow to the Castle.”

“Will we, now?” said Fulkari dreamily. “That’s nice. Although it’s very nice here too. I wouldn’t mind staying another week or two.” She wriggled against him, fitting her body more snugly into place against his.

“There’s plenty of work waiting for me at home,” Dekkeret persisted, wondering why he was so perversely bound on shattering the developing mood. “And once I’ve caught up with that there’ll be a little traveling for us to do.”

“A trip? Ooh, that’s nice too.” She sounded almost on the edge of sleep. She was coiled against him in a state of utter relaxation, warm and soft, like a drowsy kitten. “Where will we be going, Dekkeret? Stee? High Morpin.”

“Farther. Much farther.—Alaisor, in fact.”

That woke her up quickly. She drew back her head and stared at him in amazement. “Alaisor?” she said, blinking at him. “But that’s thousands of miles away! I’ve never been that far from the Mount in my life! Why Alaisor, Dekkeret?”

“Because,” he said, wishing most profoundly that he had saved all this for later.

“Just because? Clear to the other side of Alhanroel, just because?”

“It’s at the Pontifex’s request, actually. Official business.”

“The matter that you and he were just discussing, you mean?”

“More or less.”

“And what matter exactly was that?” Fulkari had extricated herself from his embrace, now, and had swung around to face him, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the divan.

Dekkeret realized that caution was in order here. He was hardly in a position to share much of the real story with her—the rebellion that was supposedly starting up in Zimroel, the reappearance of Mandralisca, the possibility that the Barjazid helmet had been used to drive Teotas to his death. Those were not affairs that he was able to speak of with her. Fulkari was still a private citizen. A Coronal might share such things with his wife, but Fulkari was not his wife.

Picking his words judiciously, Dekkeret said, “A few odd things have been going on lately across the sea. What sort of things isn’t particularly important right now. But Prestimion wants me to head west and station myself somewhere along the coast, so that if it turns out to be necessary for me to go to Zimroel in the near future, I’ll already be well on the way there.”

“Zimroel!” She said it as though he were talking about a voyage to the Great Moon.

“To Zimroel, yes. Perhaps. None of this may ever come to pass, you realize. But the Pontifex feels that we need to look into it even so. Therefore he’s asked Dinitak and me to head out to Alaisor and—”

“Dinitak also?” Fulkari said, her eyebrows shooting upward.

“Dinitak will be traveling with us, yes. Doing special government research, using certain detecting equipment that—” No, he could hardly speak of that either. “Using certain special equipment,” he finished lamely. “He’ll be reporting to me on a daily basis. You do like Dinitak, don’t you? You won’t have any problem about his accompanying us.”

“Of course not.—And Keltryn?” she asked. “What about her?”

“I don’t understand,” Dekkeret said. “What in particular do you mean?”

“Is she going to be coming with us too?”

He felt lost. “I’m not following you, Fulkari. Are you saying that whenever we take a trip anywhere, you’ll want Keltryn to come along with us?”

“Hardly. But we’ll be gone several months at the very least, won’t we, Dekkeret?”

“At the very least, yes.”

“Don’t you think they’ll miss each other, having to be apart as long as that?”

This was utterly incomprehensible. “Dinitak and Keltryn, you mean? Miss each other? I don’t at all understand what you’re talking about. Do they even know each other, except in passing?”

“You mean you don’t know?” Fulkari said, and laughed. “He hasn’t said anything about it to you? And you honestly haven’t noticed? Dinitak and Keltryn? Really, Dekkeret! Really!”

3

Keltryn was in the little bedroom of her apartment at the Setiphon Arcade, laying out the cards for what she thought must be her three thousandth game of solitaire since the Pontifex had summoned Dinitak to Muldemar House for Teotas’s funeral.

Four of Comets. Six of Starbursts. Ten of Moons.

Why was it necessary for Dinitak to be at Teotas’s funeral? Dinitak had no official place in the government nor was he a member of the Castle Mount aristocracy. His only role at the Castle was as Dekkeret’s friend and occasional traveling companion. And, so far as Keltryn was aware, Teotas and Dinitak had been only nodding acquaintances, nothing more, until very recently. There wasn’t any reason for him to be at the funeral. No one had said anything at all about Dinitak’s going down to Muldemar House when the funeral arrangements were first being set up.

And then, right on the eve of the funeral itself, a courier in Pontifical uniform suddenly arriving to say that Prestimion requested the presence of Dinitak Barjazid immediately at Muldemar? Why? On such short notice, Keltryn thought, it was unlikely that Dinitak would have been able to get down there in time for the ceremony. So it must have had to do with something else. And why had the message summoning Dinitak come from the Pontifex, rather than from his own good friend Lord Dekkeret? Dekkeret was down there too, after all. The whole thing was very mysterious. And she wished that Dinitak would hurry back, now that the funeral was done with, she assumed, and Teotas safely deposited in his tomb.

Petulantly she dealt out the cards.

Pontifex of Nebulas. Damn! She had the Coronal of Nebulas on the table already. Couldn’t the Pontifex have turned up five minutes ago? Nine of Moons. Knave of Nebulas. She slipped the Knave below the Coronal of Nebulas. Three of Comets. Keltryn scowled. Even when the cards turned up in the right order she took no pleasure from it. She was sick of solitaire. She wanted Dinitak. Five of Moons. Queen of Star-bursts. Seven of—

A knock!

“Keltryn? Keltryn, are you in there!”

She swept the cards to the floor. “Dinitak! You’re back at last!” She ran toward the door, remembered at the last moment that she was wearing nothing but her loinclout, and hastily snatched up a robe. Dinitak was so terribly fastidious about such things, so very moral. Despite everything that had passed between them since they had become lovers, he would be shocked if she were to come to the door virtually naked. The robe had to be on her before it came off: that was how he was. Besides, Dekkeret might be with him. Or the Pontifex Prestimion, for all she knew.

She opened the door. There he was: alone. She caught his wrist and tugged him inside, and then she was in his arms, at last, at last, at last. She covered him with kisses. It felt to her as though he had been gone at least six months.

“Well!” she said, releasing him, finally. “Are you glad to see me?”

“You know I am.” His eyes gleamed fiercely, shining like beacons in his narrow, angular face. He moistened his lower lip with a quick movement of his tongue. Straitlaced and high-minded as he might sometimes be, he seemed quite thoroughly ready right now to pull the robe from her.

A roguish mood seized her. She decided to make him wait a little while. It would be a test of her own fortitude as much as his. “Did you and your friend the Pontifex have a lot of interesting things to talk about?” she asked, taking a couple of steps back from him.

Dinitak looked very uneasy. His eyelids flickered three or four times very rapidly in what seemed almost like a tic, and a muscle twitched in one of his lean, sun-darkened cheeks. “It’s—not something I can really discuss,” he said. “Not now, anyway.” His voice sounded strained and hoarse. “We had meetings—the Pontifex and the Coronal and I—there are some problems, political problems, they want me to provide some technical assistance—” He was still staring at her hungrily all the while. Keltryn loved that, the fierce way he looked at her. Those dark gleaming eyes, that powerful gaze, that tremendous intensity of his, the powerful magnetic force that emanated from him, that coiled-spring tension: those aspects of him had fascinated her from the first moment.

“And the funeral?” she said, deliberately continuing to hold him at bay. “What was that like?”

“I got there too late for it. But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t for the funeral that they asked me down, you know. It was for the other thing, the technical assignment.”

“The thing you won’t tell me about.”

“The thing I can’t tell you about.”

“All right, don’t tell me. I don’t care. It’s probably enormously boring, anyway. Fulkari’s told me about the official things that Lord Dekkeret does all day long, now that he’s Coronal. They’re colossally boring. I wouldn’t be Coronal for anything in the world. They could wave the starburst crown in front of me and the Vildivar necklace and Lord Moazlimon’s ring and all the rest of the crown jewels and I still wouldn’t—” Abruptly she had had enough of this game. “Oh, Dinitak, Dinitak, I missed you so horribly all the time you were at Muldemar! And don’t say that it was only a few days. It felt like centuries to me.”

“And to me,” he said. “Keltryn—Keltryn—”

He reached for her, and she went willingly to him. The robe fell away. His hands ran eagerly up and down her body as she tugged him to the carpeted floor.

They were still new enough as a couple so that the physical part of their intimacy had a ferocious, almost compulsive urgency about it. Keltryn, to whom all of this was entirely unfamiliar, felt not only the excitement that came with the release of pent-up desires but also a powerful sense of wanting to make up for lost time, now that she had at last allowed herself to experience this aspect of adult life.

There would be sufficient opportunity later on, she knew, for deep, searching conversations, long hand-in-hand strolls through quiet corridors of the Castle, dinners by candelight, and such. Enough of the old tomboyish Keltryn still remained alive in her, the virginal student of swordsmanship who was so adept at holding boys at bay, that she would tell herself from time to time that they ought not to allow their relationship to be entirely one of sweaty grappling and hot, wild copulation; but yet, now that she had had her first taste of sweaty grappling and hot, wild copulation, she found herself quite willing to postpone those deep, searching conversations and long hand-in-hand strolls for some future phase of the affair.

Dinitak, for all the asceticism that seemed to be an inherent part of his makeup, appeared to feel the same way. His own appetite for love-making, unleashed now after who knew how long a period of restraint, was at the very least as strong as hers. Gladly they pushed each other again and again to the edge of exhaustion, and beyond the edge.

But establishing that kind of relationship had not been at all simple to achieve. For the first two weeks after their initial accidental meeting outside Lord Haspar’s Rotunda they had seen each other practically every day, but he never even came near to offering anything like a physical approach, and Keltryn had no idea how to elicit one. She had become only too well accustomed to the unwanted attentions of classmates like Polliex and Toraman Kanna; but how did one go about inviting wanted attentions? She began to wonder whether Dinitak might be the same sort of man as Septach Melayn, and whether it would be her peculiar destiny to fall in love only with men who were by innate nature unavailable to her.

She had no doubt that she was in love with him. Dinitak was unlike anyone else she had ever known, both in her girlhood in Sipermit and at the Castle. His dark, brooding good looks, that lean, taut Suvraelinu look that came from having grown up under the harsh, unforgiving sun of the desert continent, held a powerful, almost irresistible, appeal for her. That he was slender, almost flimsy, of build and hardly an inch taller than she was herself made no difference to her. When she looked at him she felt—in her knees, in her breast, in her loins—a sense of overpowering attraction of a sort she had never experienced before.

He was unusual in other ways, too. There was a bluntness, even a roughness, about his way of dealing with people that must have come, Keltryn thought, from his upbringing in Suvrael. He was a commoner, for one thing: that made him different right there from the boys she had grown up with. But there was something else. She knew very little about his background, but there were rumors that his father had been a criminal of some sort, that the father had tried to play some sort of ugly trick on Dekkeret when Dekkeret was a young man traveling in Suvrael, and that Dinitak, appalled at his father’s schemings, had turned against him and helped Dekkeret take him prisoner.

Whether that was true or not, Keltryn had no idea, but it felt true. From various things Dinitak had said, to her and to other people around the Castle, she knew that he held a hard, austere view of things, that he had no patience with any sort of irregular behavior along a range that ran from mere laziness and sloppiness at one end of the scale to criminality at the other. He seemed driven by a powerful moral imperative: a reaction, someone said, against the lawlessness of his father. He was an idealist, honest to the point sometimes of brutality. He was quick to denounce lapses of virtue in others, and, to his great credit, he did not seem to commit any such lapses himself.

Such a person, Keltryn knew, could all too easily seem prudish and preachy and self-righteous. Yet, strangely, Dinitak did not strike her that way. He was good company, lively, entertaining, graceful in his manner, capable of a certain sharp-edged wit. No wonder that Lord Dekkeret was so fond of him. As for Dinitak’s powerful sense of right and wrong, one had to admit that he lived by his own strictures: he was as hard on himself as he was on anyone else, and asked for no praise for that. He seemed naturally upright and incorruptible. It was simply the way he was. One had to take a person like that as he came.

But was a person like that, she wondered, too high-minded to indulge in the bodily passions? Because she herself had finally decided it was time to indulge in those passions herself, and she finally had found someone with whom she would like to indulge, and he seemed utterly unaware that she felt that way.

In her desperation it occurred to her, at length, that she had an expert in such matters right within her own family. And so she consulted her sister Fulkari.

“You might try putting him in a situation where he really has very little choice, and see what he does,” Fulkari suggested.

Of course Fulkari would know how to go about it! And so one afternoon Keltryn invited Dinitak to join her for a swim in the Setiphon Arcade’s pool that evening. Hardly anyone seemed to be using the pool these days, and no one at all—Keltryn had checked—went there in the evening. Just to be certain, though, she took the trouble to lock the door to the pool from within once she and Dinitak arrived.

He had brought a swimsuit with him, naturally.

Now or never, Keltryn thought. As he started off to one of the dressing rooms she said, “Oh, we don’t really need to wear suits here, do we? I never bring one. I haven’t brought one tonight.” And she slipped quickly out of the few garments she was wearing, trotted blithely past him with her heart thundering so violently that she thought it would crack her ribs, and executed a perfect dive into the pink porphyry tank. Dinitak hesitated only a moment. Then he stripped also—she looked up from the pool, staring in wonder and awe at the beauty of his trim, narrow-waisted body—and leaped in after her.

They splashed around for a while in the warm, cinnamon-scented water. She challenged him to a race, and they streaked side by side from one end of the pool to the other, ending in what they could only call a tie. Then she hauled herself up out of the pool, found some towels to spread out on the tiled margin, and beckoned to him to join her.

“What if someone comes?” he asked.

She made no attempt to conceal the mischievous mirth she felt. “Nobody will. I locked the door.”

She could not have made it more plain, lying there naked on this pile of soft towels in this warm, humid room that they had entirely to themselves, that she had brought him here to give herself to him. If he disdained her now, it would be the clearest possible message that he had no interest in being her lover—that he found her physically unattractive, or that he was not a man who responded to women, or else that his own hyperdeveloped moral sensibility would not permit him to enjoy the pleasures of the body in any free and easy way.

None of those things were true. Dinitak lay down alongside her, and easily and capably gathered her into his arms and put his lips to hers and sent one of his hands roving over her firm little breasts and downward then to the juncture of her thighs, and Keltryn knew that it was going to happen to her at last, that she was about to cross the great boundary that separated girls from women, that Dinitak would initiate her this evening into the mysteries that she had never dared to experience before.

She wondered if it would hurt. She wondered if she would do things the right way.

But it turned out that there was no need to think about right ways and wrong ways. Dinitak obviously knew what he was doing, and she followed his lead easily and after a time she was able just to let her own instincts take charge. As for pain, there was only a moment of it, nothing like what she had feared, though it was a bit startling for an instant and she did let a little gasp escape her lips. After that there were no problems. What had happened felt strange, yes. But very fine. Fantastic. Unforgettable. It seemed to her that she had stepped just now through a doorway which had admitted her to some altogether unfamiliar new world where everything glowed with bright auras of delight.

That one little gasp led to difficulties afterward, though. When it was over, Keltryn lay back in a dazed haze of pleasure and astonishment, and only gradually did she realize that Dinitak was staring at her with a stunned look on his face that could almost have been one of horror.

“Is something wrong?” she whispered, close to tears. “Was I displeasing to you?”

“Oh, no, no, no! You were wonderful!” he said. “More than wonderful. But why didn’t you tell me it was your first time?” His forehead was knotted with anguish.

So that was it! His damned morals again!

“It never would have occurred to me. If you were wondering about it, I suppose you always could have asked.”

“One doesn’t ask about things like that,” he said sternly. It was as if she had done something dreadfully improper, she thought. How had this become her fault? “Anyway,” he went on, “I had no reason to suspect it. Not when you inveigled me down to this pool like this, and flung your clothes aside so shamelessly—and—” He struggled for words, did not seem to be able to find the right ones, and finally blurted, “You should have said something, Keltryn! You should have told me!”

This was bewildering. She began to feel anger rising. “Why? What possible difference could knowing it have made?”

“Because I feel so guilty for what’s happened, now. Unknowingly or not, I’ve done something that I can’t forgive myself for. To take a young woman’s virginity, Keltryn—it’s a kind of theft, in a way—”

This was getting farther and farther from anything that made sense to her. “You didn’t take anything. I gave.”

“Even so—one simply doesn’t do such things.”

“One doesn’t? You mean, you don’t. You sound positively prehistoric, Dinitak. Do you think the Castle is some sacred sanctuary of purity? I’ve spent months in the midst of a pack of silly boys who were absolutely slavering to do the very thing with me that you and I just did, and I said no to them all, and the first time I decide to say yes I get blamed for not having informed you in advance that I—that—”

Tears were surging up again, but this time they were tears of rage, not of fear. The idiot! How could he dare feel guilty in such a wonderful moment? What right did he have to expect her to give him details of her past sexual history?

But she knew that she had to put her anger aside and do something to repair this, and fast, or their friendship would never survive it.

In the gentlest tone she could find Keltryn said, “I don’t want you to think you did anything wrong, Dinitak. So far as I’m concerned what you did was one hundred percent right. Yes, I was a virgin—and I can’t tell you how tired I was of continuing to be one, and I think I would have gone right out of my mind if I had gone on being one an hour longer.”

But that only made things worse. Now he was the angry one. “I see. You wanted to get rid of that tiresome innocence of yours, and therefore you found a convenient implement to help you dispose of it. Well, I’m glad to have been of use.”

“Implement? No! No! What an awful thing to say. You don’t understand anything, do you?”

“Don’t I?”

“Please. You’re spoiling everything. All this pious outrage of yours. This blustering righteous indignation. I know that you can’t help it, that you take all these issues of morality tremendously seriously. But look at the mess you’re making between us! It’s all so terribly stupid and unnecessary.”

He started to reply, but she put her hand over his mouth.

“Don’t you realize I love you, Dinitak? That that’s the reason why you’re here with me tonight, and not Polliex, or Toraman Kanna, or some other boy from Septach Melayn’s fencing class? All these weeks we were together, and you never once made a move, and I sat there praying desperately that you would, but you were either too shy or too pure or too something else to do it, and so, finally—finally—tonight, the two of us at the swimming pool, I thought—I’ll put him in a position where he can’t resist me, and see what happens—”

At last he understood.

“I love you, Keltryn. That’s the only reason I was waiting. What I thought was that the time for that part of things hasn’t come yet. I didn’t want to cheapen our friendship by behaving like all those others. And I’m very sorry now that I miscalculated everything so badly.”

Keltryn grinned. “Don’t be. All that’s over and done with. And now—”

“Now—”

He reached for her. She eluded his grasp, rolled past him to the side of the pool, threw herself in with a resounding splash. He came splashing after her. She swam down the middle of the pool with all the speed at her command, a pink streak cutting a line through the pink water, and Dinitak came barreling after her. At the far end she pulled herself up to the tiles again, laughing, and held out her arms to him.

That was the beginning. It was all much less complicated for them after that. Keltryn began to comprehend that that odd puritanical side of him had its own set of boundaries, that the harsh code of values by which he lived was not something that could be delineated in simple tones of black and white. Dinitak was no ascetic. Far from it; passion and lust were certainly no strangers to his makeup. But things had to happen in accordance with his unique sense of what was proper, and Keltryn realized that she would not always be able to anticipate what that was.

In the weeks that followed, they spent night after night in each other’s arms, until it actually began to seem desirable to have some time off to get some sleep. Dinitak’s trip to Muldemar provided that. Provided rather too much of it, Keltryn thought, by the second day of his absence. She could not get enough of him—nor, it seemed, he of her.

She continued her twice-weekly fencing sessions with Audhari of Stoienzar. After Septach Melayn’s departure for the Labyrinth the fencing class had dissolved, but she and Audhari went on meeting, even so. Fulkari, for a while, had been convinced that a romance was budding there; but Fulkari had been wrong about that. Keltryn had never regarded big, good-natured Audhari as anything but a friend.

He guessed right away that something had changed in her life. Perhaps it was the dark semicircles under her eyes, or perhaps a certain slowing of her reflexes that had set in, now that she was getting so little sleep. Or, Keltryn thought, maybe there’s some kind of emanation given off by girls who have begun going to bed with men, a visible aura of un-chastity, that every man is easily able to detect.

And finally he mentioned it. “There’s something different about you these days,” Audhari observed, as they went at each other with their foils.

“Is there? And what would that be, then?”

He laughed. “I couldn’t really say.”

They dropped the subject there. He appeared to regret having brought it up, and she certainly was not eager to pursue the conversation.

She wondered, though, about his ambiguous words. Why couldn’t he say? Was it because he genuinely didn’t know what it was that had changed about her? Or did he feel uncomfortable about talking to her about it? Though he made no further references to it, it seemed to her, though, that a more personal tone had begun to steal into his remarks to her: a flirtatious one, even. He noted that she seemed not to be getting as much sleep as she needed. He observed that there was a new sexiness in the way she walked. He had never said things like that to her before.

She asked Fulkari about it. Fulkari replied that men often changed their way of speaking to a woman once they decided that she had become more available than she had been before.

“But I’m not available!” she said, indignant. “Not to him, anyway.”

“Even so. Your whole manner’s different, now. He may be picking that up.”

Keltryn didn’t much like the idea that all the men of the Castle might be able to figure out at a glance that she was sleeping with somebody. She was still too new to the world of mature men and women to feel entirely at home in it; she wanted to clutch her affair with Dinitak close to herself, sharing the knowledge of her transition into adulthood with no one except, perhaps, her sister. The idea that Audhari, or just about anyone else, could look at her and know right away that she had been Doing It with someone, and therefore she might somehow be interested in doing it with him as well, was offensive and disturbing to her.

Possibly, Keltryn thought, she was misunderstanding things. She hoped that she was. The last thing she wanted, now, was for her kind, earnest friend Audhari to begin making romantic overtures to her.

At a suggestion from her serving-maid, though, she went down one Starday into the lower reaches of the Castle, the market area, and bought from a purveyor of wizard-goods a tiny amulet of fine knitted wire known as a focalo, that had the property of warding off the unwanted attentions of men. She pinned it to the collar of her fencing jacket the next time she met with Audhari.

He noticed it at once, and laughed. “What’s that thing for, Keltryn?”

She flushed a flaming scarlet. “It’s just something I’ve started wearing, that’s all.”

“Has somebody been bothering you? That’s why girls usually wear focalos, isn’t it? To send a keep-away message.”

“Well—”

“Come on. It can’t be me you’re worried about, Keltryn!”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, feeling unutterably embarrassed now, but realizing that she had no choice but to tell him, “I’ve been starting to think that things have been getting a little peculiar between us lately. Or so it seems to me. Your telling me that I walk in a sexier way now, and things like that. Maybe I’m completely wrong, but—oh, Audhari, I don’t know what I’m trying to say—”

He was more amused than annoyed. “I don’t think I do either, actually. But one thing I’m sure of: you don’t need that focalo around me. I could tell right from the start that you weren’t interested in me.”

“As a friend, I am. And as a fencing partner.”

“Yes. But not anything beyond that. That was very easy to tell.—Anyway, you’ve got a lover now, don’t you? So why would you want to get involved with me?”

“You can tell that too?”

“It’s written all over your face, Keltryn. A ten-year-old could see it. Well, good for you, is what I say! He’s a very lucky fellow, whoever he is.” Audhari slipped his fencing mask into place. “But we really ought to get down to work now, I think. On your guard, Keltryn! One! Two! Three!”

Dekkeret said, “I don’t mean to intrude on your personal life, Dinitak. But Fulkari tells me that you’ve been seeing a great deal of her sister in recent weeks.”

“This is true. Keltryn and I have been spending a great deal of time together lately. A very great deal of time.”

“She’s a lovely girl, Keltryn is.”

“Yes. Yes. I confess that I find her extremely fascinating.”

They were dining together at Dekkeret’s invitation, just the two of them, in the Coronal’s private chambers. Dekkeret’s steward had laid a magnificent meal before them, bowls of spiced fish, and the sweet pastel-hued fungi of Kajith Kabulon, and roast leg of bilantoon cooked in thokka-berries from far-off Narabal, accompanied by a rich, earthy wine of the Sandaraina region. Dekkeret ate robustly; Dinitak, restless and edgy, scarcely seemed hungry at all. He did little more than pick at his food and did not taste his wine at all.

Dekkeret studied him closely. From time to time over the years, he knew, Dinitak had struck up some casual relationship with this woman or that one, but they had never come to anything. He had the feeling that Dinitak did not want them to, that he was a man who had little need of ongoing feminine companionship. But from what Fulkari had told him, something quite different appeared to be going on now.

“As a matter of fact,” said Dinitak, “I expect to be seeing her this very evening, after I leave you. So if you have business to discuss with me, Dekkeret—”

“I do. But I promise not to keep you here very late. I wouldn’t want business matters to get in the way of true love.”

“Such sarcasm isn’t worthy of you, my lord.”

“Was I being sarcastic? I thought I was speaking the simple truth. But let’s get on to our business, at any rate. Which involves Keltryn, in fact.”

Dinitak responded with a puzzled frown. “It does? In what way?”

Dekkeret said, “The plan now, as I understand it, is for us to depart for the western provinces on Threeday next. Since we’ll be away for a few months or even more, maybe a good deal more, what I asked you here tonight to discuss was whether you’d like to invite Keltryn to accompany us on the trip.”

Dinitak looked astounded. He rose halfway out of his seat and his face turned a blazing crimson beneath his dark Suvraelinu tan. “I can’t do that, Dekkeret!”

“I don’t think I understand you. What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I mean it’s completely out of the question. The idea’s outrageous!”

“Outrageous?” Dekkeret repeated, narrowing his eyes to a mystified squint. After more than twenty years of their friendship, he still was unable to tell when he was likely to strike some odd vein of moral fastidiousness in Dinitak. “Why is that? What am I failing to see here? According to Fulkari, you and Keltryn are absolutely mesmerized by each other. But when I offer you a way of avoiding a long and undoubtedly painful separation from her, you flare up at me as though I’ve suggested something hideously obscene.”

Dinitak seemed to grow calmer, but he was still visibly upset. “Consider what you’re saying, Dekkeret. How can I possibly bring Keltryn along with me on this trip? It would say to everyone that I look upon her as nothing more than a concubine.”

Dekkeret had never seen him as obtuse as this. He wanted to reach across the table and shake him. “As a companion, Dinitak. Not a concubine. I’m going to be bringing Fulkari with me, you know. Do you think I regard her as a concubine too?”

“Everyone understands that you will marry Fulkari after the mourning period for Teotas is over. For all intents and purposes she is already your consort. But Keltryn and I—nothing is established between us. I’m twice her age, Dekkeret. I’m not even sure that it’s proper for us to have been doing what we’re doing now. There’s no way I could countenance taking an extended trip across the continent in the company of a young single girl.”

Dekkeret shook his head. “You astound me, Dinitak.”

“Do I? Well, then, I astound you. So be it. She can’t come with us. I won’t allow it.”

This was not in any way what Dekkeret had expected. Indeed at the outset of the meal he had been wondering whether Dinitak, in some hesitant, awkward way, would eventually bring the conversation around to a request for permission to have Keltryn join them on the journey. Having her come with them made perfectly good sense to him. The girl was very young, yes, but by all accounts she was levelheaded beyond her years and growing up fast. Besides, she and Fulkari were not only sisters but the closest of friends, and it would be useful to have Keltryn keeping Fulkari company while he and Dinitak were occupied in the real tasks of the mission. And one would assume that Dinitak would relish the prospect of having her close at hand while they traveled. But he could not have been more wrong about that.

Beyond all doubt Dinitak was serious about this concubine business, crazy as it sounded. Dekkeret knew better than to try to argue with him in the area of moral niceties. Where matters of that sort were concerned, Dinitak inhabited a world of his own.

Dekkeret sighed.

“As you wish,” he said. “The girl stays home.”

The job of breaking the news to Keltryn became Fulkari’s responsibility. She and Dekkeret agreed that if they left the matter to Dinitak, his clumsy explanations would infuriate Keltryn to the point where the relationship could not survive.

But she became infuriated anyway. “The fool!” she cried. “The preposterous little prig! So holy that I can’t travel with him, is that it? Well, then. I’ll spare him the shame of it. I never want to see him again!”

“You will,” Fulkari said.

4

This would be Prestimion’s fifth visit to the Isle of Sleep. That was unusual in itself, and more so because he was Pontifex now. But Prestimion had been an unusual monarch since the earliest days of his reign.

A Coronal might visit the Isle once or twice during his reign, generally in the course of making a grand processional: the post of Lady of the Isle, after all, was normally held by the mother of the Coronal, and it was reasonable for the Coronal to want to visit his mother now and then.

But for him to go to the Isle once he had become Pontifex was a very different matter. The Pontifex normally would have no official reason for going there. Pontifexes did relatively little traveling in general, and such as they did do was usually confined to the continent of Alhanroel.

If the Pontifex’s prior reign as Coronal had been a lengthy one, his mother might well not have survived to the end of it: that had been the case with Lord Confalume, whose elder sister Kunigarda had served as Lady of the Isle during the latter half of his incumbency at the Castle. Any Lady who did live long enough to see her son’s ascent to the senior throne customarily would remain on the Isle even after she had retired from her duties to make room for the new Coronal’s mother. Former Ladies of the Isle dwelled at the capacious estate that was provided for them in the Terrace of Shadows on the Isle’s Third Cliff.

Perhaps her son the Pontifex might choose to pay a call on her there once he had settled fully into the responsibilities of his new post. But more often than not he would neglect to make the journey until it was too late: his mother died before he could find an opportunity to go, or he himself grew too old to want to travel. Whole centuries had gone by without a visit by a Pontifex to the Isle.

Prestimion, who had always had the closest and warmest of relationships with his mother the Lady Therissa, had journeyed to the Isle of Sleep in his early years as Coronal Lord in order to introduce his bride Varaile to her, and to enlist his mother’s aid in the struggle against the rebellious Dantirya Sambail. He had gone there again in the fifth year of his reign, having decided then to make his first grand processional for the sake of presenting himself to the world in the aftermath of the chaos that had been engendered by the Procurator Dantirya Sambail’s two insurrections. That time he had crossed Alhanroel by land, just as he had done now, and had taken ship at Alaisor for the Isle, and gone on from there to Zimroel, making stops at Piliplok on the eastern coast and at Ni-moya inland.

In his eleventh year Prestimion had chosen to make a second processional, this one following a similar route, but carrying him onward beyond Ni-moya, clear across Zimroel to the crystalline city of Dulorn and beyond it to the remote western cities of Pidruid and Narabal and Til-omon, where visits from a Coronal were few and far between. Prestimion had found occasion on that trip for still another visit to his mother. And in the sixteenth year of his reign as Coronal he had undertaken the third and last of his grand processionals, this one a truly extraordinary one that had taken him across the bottom of Alhanroel to Stoien, thence to the Isle yet again, and from there, to the astonishment of all the world, southward to the forbidding desert continent of Suvrael, that had not seen a Coronal’s face in three hundred years.

Now here he was arriving at the Isle once again. There before him in the sea reared the familiar colossal bulk of the place, that phenomenal wall of glittering white chalk rising high above the water, its three great tiers going up and up in diminishing circles to the holy sanctuary at the top, Inner Temple, where the Lady and her millions of acolytes dwelled. The sun, at this time of day, lay nearly overhead, and the smooth face of the Isle gleamed with an almost unbearable reflected brilliance in its intense light.

Large as the Isle was—and on any planet but Majipoor it would have been deemed a continent, not an island—it was accessible to shipping only at two harbors, Taleis on the western side facing Zimroel, and Nu-minor, in the Isle’s northeastern corner, looking toward Alhanroel. Prestimion had always come to the Isle by the Numinor entrance. Taleis port was a place he had never seen. He realized now, standing on the deck of the swift vessel that had brought him here this time and peering out yet again at the brilliant white rampart that surrounded the harbor at Numinor, that he probably never would.

This, so Prestimion expected, would be the last visit he would ever make to the Isle of Sleep. Nor would he go on to Zimroel when he was finished here, which might have justified a brief stop at Taleis to satisfy his curiosity. The world was Dekkeret’s now; Pontifexes did not undertake grand processionals; in years to come, as he aged, he would settle ever more deeply into his life at the Labyrinth.

A warm, sweet breeze blew toward them as their ship glided toward Numinor. Eternal summer was the rule in these latitudes. The Isle was forever in bloom: even from this distance Prestimion fancied that he could make out the bright colors of the groves of eldirons and tanigales and purple-blooming thwales that grew so profusely on its multitude of chalky terraces.

As they neared the Isle Varaile stood at Prestimion’s side, with Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, who had accompanied the Pontifex on this voyage, nearby. The princes Taradath and Akbalik and Simbilon flanked their father and mother on the deck. The young Lady Tuanelys, who had no liking for ocean travel, had remained below in her cabin, as she had for most of the journey.

The ship’s captain, a massive Skandar with grayish-purple fur, called out for the anchor to be lowered.

“Why are we dropping anchor all the way out here?” Prince Simbilon asked.

Prestimion began to reply; but Taradath, who had made the journey to the Isle with his father on Prestimion’s last processional, spoke first: “Because any ship that’s fast enough to get us across from Alaisor to here in any decent time is going to be too big to fit into the harbor,” he said, a bit too patronizingly for Prestimion’s taste. “Numinor port’s a tiny little place, and they’ll have to take us in by ferry. You’ll see.”

The protocol for a visiting Coronal upon landing at Numinor was for him to stop first at the royal guesthouse known as Seven Walls, a single-story building of gray-black stone situated right on the seawall at the rampart of the port. There he was required to perform various rituals of purification before beginning the ascent to the uppermost of the three terraces, where the Lady would be waiting for him. It was generally the custom for the Coronal to go upward to the Lady, rarely for the Lady to come down to the shore to meet him.

But Prestimion was Pontifex now, not Coronal, and he had no idea what kind of arrangements would be made. Nor had he asked. Perhaps Seven Walls was reserved only for Coronals, and Pontifexes were taken elsewhere. It made no difference. Let it come as a surprise, he thought.

Everything seemed to be going as usual, at first. The transfer to the ferry was carried out smoothly; the ferry pilot steered them efficiently through the reefs and shallows of the channel to their landing at Numinor port; a little group of the Lady’s hierarchs, solemn in their golden robes with red trim, was waiting as always to greet him. They made the spiraling Labyrinth sign of reverence to him, formally greeted the Lady Varaile and the High Spokesman Septach Melayn and the Grand Admiral Gialaurys, and led them ashore, conducting Prestimion and his family in the customary fashion to Seven Walls, and the others to a hostelry off in the opposite direction.

Then things began to vary from the old routine. “The Lady herself awaits you in the guesthouse, your majesty,” one of the hierarchs told him, as they drew near the building.

Prestimion’s first response was surprise that his mother, who on his last visit had seemed at last to be beginning to succumb to the inevitabilities of age, would have subjected herself to the effort of descending from her sanctuary high up atop this mountainous island when it would be so much easier on her for him to go upward to her. Then he reminded himself that his mother was no longer Lady of the Isle. The person who was waiting for him at Seven Walls would be the new incumbent, Dekkeret’s mother, the Lady Taliesme.

Why, he wondered, had Taliesme come here to him? Perhaps she did not yet feel firmly established in the grandeur that now was hers, and found herself, when confronted here with the arrival of a visiting Pontifex, impelled by the awe his office inspired to go down the mountain to him rather than require him to go up to her. But then another possibility, a much more troublesome one, leaped into Prestimion’s mind as he saw Taliesme coming toward him through the courtyard of Seven Walls.

His mother Therissa had always been a woman of unconquerable strength of spirit. But the years were doubtless taking their toll. She must surely have found Teotas’s death a mighty blow. Perhaps her health had given way beneath it. Perhaps, hard as it was to believe, she had undergone some kind of emotional collapse, or even a physical one. She might be seriously ill—dying, maybe. Or possibly already dead. And Taliesme had not wanted him to make the ascent to Inner Temple unaware of the Lady Therissa’s condition. So she had come to him here for the sake of breaking the news to him.

Yet Prestimion did not sense any atmosphere of stark calamity about Taliesme as she came forward to greet him. She moved with quick birdlike steps: a small, energetic woman robed in white, with the silver circlet of her office about her forehead. Her eyes were bright and sparkling, her hands readily outstretched.

“Your majesty,” she said. “I offer you and your family the warmest welcome to our island.”

“For that we thank you, your ladyship.”

“And you have, of course, my deepest sympathies on your great loss.”

He could not wait any longer. “My mother, I hope, has borne it well?”

“As well as could be expected, I should say. She looks forward eagerly to seeing you.”

“I’ll find her in good health, then?” Prestimion asked tensely.

There was just the tiniest moment of hesitation. “You’ll find her not as strong as you remember her, your majesty. The death of Prince Teotas has been hard on her. I will not pretend otherwise. And there have been other troublesome little difficulties, of which we should speak before you ascend to Inner Temple. But first, I think, perhaps some refreshment is in order.—Will you come within, your majesty?”

A light meal had been laid out for them in Seven Walls: flasks of golden wine, trays of oysters and smoked fish, bowls of fruit. It seemed to Prestimion that Taliesme was as comfortable playing hostess to the Pontifex as she might have been entertaining some longtime neighbors in her old home in Normork, which Dinitak had told him once was a very humble little place indeed.

He was fascinated by the way she had been transformed, and yet not transformed at all, in the course of her elevation to the Ladyship.

She could not have been more different in her manner from her predecessor at the Isle. There was a world of contrast between Taliesme’s simplicity and unassuming modesty and the aristocratic stateliness of the Lady Therissa. Yet an undeniable nobility had settled over her since she had assumed her duties here.

From the moment of her first visits to the Castle in the days when Dekkeret was merely Coronal-designate, Prestimion had been impressed by Taliesme’s confidence, her poise, her serenity. Now that she was Lady of the Isle, a certain aura of grace and assurance of the sort that almost invariably came to typify every woman who held the post of Lady had been added to those qualities. But her essential self seemed fundamentally unchanged, not in any way overwhelmed by the greatness that had come to her with Dekkeret’s ascent to the throne.

Prestimion felt his judgment of her son confirmed anew in her. Once again, as so often in the past, it had proved to be the case that the mother of the man who was deemed worthy of the title of Coronal Lord of Majipoor was herself a fitting candidate for the role of Lady of the Isle.

The conversation, which Prestimion allowed her to lead, traveled easily through a wide range of topics. They spoke first of all of the tragic death of Teotas: how startling, how mystifying, that a man of his abilities and character should undergo such a breakdown. “All the world mourns your brother, your majesty, and feels great sadness on your behalf and on your family’s,” Taliesme assured him. “I sense their grief and sorrow constantly.” She touched the circlet that kept her in contact with the dreaming minds of Majipoor’s billions, night after night.

Then, when it was appropriate to change the subject, she turned it deftly to her son Dekkeret, asking for news of him in his new role as Coronal. “He will be one of the greatest of our kings,” Prestimion told her, and offered a sketchy summary of the plans Dekkeret had made, as much of them as he had revealed thus far, for his reign. He touched also—lightly, very lightly—on the matter of Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari, indicating only that their often complex and sometimes stormy relationship appeared to be entering a new and sunnier period.

Finally, after Taliesme had taken the opportunity to praise the handsomeness of Prestimion’s three sons and the blossoming beauty of his pretty young daughter, Prestimion judged it was time to return to the topic that was of the greatest interest to him.

A quick sidelong glance at Taradath was sufficient to convey to the boy that this would be a good moment for him and his brothers and sister to go outside for a stroll along the Numinor seawall. When they were gone he said, “You mentioned, when we arrived, certain troublesome little difficulties that my mother has been having. I would like to speak of those now, if we may.”

“Indeed I think we should, your majesty.” Taliesme drew herself up in her seat as though fortifying herself for what was to be said.—“I regret to tell you that your mother has been afflicted, for some months now, by dreams. Very bad dreams: dreams that I can only describe as nightmares. Which have had a fairly serious effect on her general well-being.”

Prestimion caught his breath in shock and amazement. His mother too? There was no limit to Mandralisca’s audacity. He had already shown himself willing to strike almost anywhere in the royal family.

But now his mother also? His mother? She who for twenty years had been the world’s beloved Lady, and now wanted to live only in peaceful retirement? This was intolerable.

Before he could reply, though, Varaile said, breaking a long silence, “My daughter Tuanelys has had troubled dreams recently as well, your ladyship.” Though she had addressed the Lady Taliesme, she was looking at no one in particular. She was hollow-eyed and haggard, having had yet another bleak dream herself in the night just past. “She cries out, she shivers in fright, she bursts into sweat. It was dreams of this sort, night after night, that drove Prince Teotas to take his life. And even I—I, too—”

Varaile was trembling. Taliesme looked toward her in shock and surprise. “Oh—my dear woman—my dear—”

Prestimion went to his wife and rested his hands gently on her shoulders to soothe her. But he maintained a calm tone of voice as he said, as though musing over the irony of it, “The Lady of the Isle receiving dreams instead of sending them? The former Lady, I mean. But even so: it seems so strange.—Has my mother described these dreams to you?”

“Not very clearly, majesty. Either she is unable to be specific, or unwilling. All I get from her is vague talk of demons, monsters, dark images—and something else, something deeper and more subtle and powerfully distressing, which she absolutely will not describe at all.” Taliesme touched the tips of her fingers to her silver circlet. “I’ve offered to enter her mind and probe for the source, or to have one of the more experienced hierarchs of the Isle do it. But she will not allow it. She says that one who was once the Lady of the Isle must not open herself to the circlet of the Lady. Is that true, majesty? Is there some prohibition against doing that?”

“Not that I know of,” said Prestimion. “But the Isle has its own customs, and few outside it know anything about them. I’ll speak of this with her when I get to see her.”

“You should,” Taliesme said. “I’ll mince no words, majesty. She suffers terribly. She should avail herself of whatever aid can be had, and she of all people should know that we stand ready here to help her.”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“And another thing, majesty. These dreams, which have entered your family so freely—they are widespread throughout the world. Again and again I’m told by my acolytes that as they monitor the minds of sleeping people they detect pain, shock, torment. I tell you, your majesty, we spend nearly all of our time now with such people, seeking them out, trying through sendings to heal their suffering—”

So it was even worse than he had expected. Prestimion let his eyelids drift shut, and sat in silence for a time.

When he spoke again, it was in the quietest of voices. “It is almost like an epidemic of madness, would you not say, your ladyship?”

“An epidemic indeed,” said Taliesme.

“We’ve had such a thing on Majipoor before. In the early years of my reign as Coronal, it was. I found out what was causing it, and I took steps to bring an end to it. This is, I think, a plague of a somewhat different sort, but I think I know what is causing this one too, and I tell you in the most solemn way that I’ll bring an end to this one as well. An old enemy of mine is loose in the land. He will be dealt with.—When will I be able to see my mother, your ladyship?”

“It is too late in the day now to make the ascent to Third Cliff,” Taliesme answered. Her face was set and somber and there was no sparkle in her eyes now. She and he had passed far beyond the pleasant courtesies of an hour before. Each now understood that a serious challenge lay ahead for them all. The note of fierce determination in Prestimion’s tone seemed to have had a powerful effect on her. With just a few words he had conveyed a sense of present crisis, of impending large events that would require her participation at a time when she had only begun to take command of the great powers of the Isle. “I will escort you to her in the morning.”

5

Prestimion had dreams himself, that night.

Not nightmares, not him, for he was certain that the scheming poison-taster in Zimroel would not dare to approach the mind of Prestimion Pontifex. These were dreams of his own mind’s devising. But they were wearisome dreams all the same, for in them he went up and up the white cliffs of the Isle of Sleep over and over again, forever ascending, never reaching the summit, an endless frustrating daylong journey past terrace after terrace that invariably culminated in his finding himself, at the end, at the very place from which he had set out. By morning Prestimion felt as though he had been climbing the wall of this island all his life. But he concealed his night of uneasy sleep from Varaile. She was preoccupied with Tuanelys: had gone to the little girl’s bedroom more than once during the night, although it had turned out, each time, that Varaile had been imagining Tuanelys’s cries, and the child had been sleeping soundly.

And now it was time for them to begin the upward journey in earnest. May the Divine grant us an easier trip, Prestimion prayed, than the ones I have been making all night.

He held the Lady Tuanelys on his lap aboard the floater-sled that would take them up the vertical wall that was the face of First Cliff. Varaile sat to one side of him, the Lady Taliesme to the other, and the boys in back. When the sled began its giddy climb, Tuanelys, frightened, wriggled about so that her face was buried in her father’s chest; but Prestimion heard a whistle of appreciation from Prince Akbalik as they shot silently and swiftly upward against gravity’s pull. He smiled at that: Akbalik was usually so restrained and serious. But perhaps the boy was beginning to change as he entered adolescence.

At the landing pad at the summit, Prestimion pointed out Numinor port far below, and the jutting arms of the breakwater where the ferry had delivered them to land. Tuanelys did not want to look. The two younger boys were wonderstruck, though, at the height of the ascent they had made. “That’s nothing,” Taradath said scornfully. “We’ve only begun to go up.”

Prestimion found that the children were a welcome distraction during the long journey. It worried him that Taliesme might have held back some of the most disquieting details of the Lady Therissa’s health, and he did not want to think too deeply about what waited for him above. So he derived great pleasure from watching Taradath, who had seen all this before, don the role of tour guide to his brothers and sister, loftily telling them, whether they wanted to know or not, that this was the Terrace of Assessment, where all pilgrims to the Isle were brought first, and this was the Terrace of Inception, and this the Terrace of Mirrors, and so on and so on throughout the day. It was amusing, too, to observe how little the other three cared to be instructed by their know-it-all oldest brother.

“We always stop for the night here at the Terrace of Mirrors,” said Taradath grandly, as if this were a trip he made every six months or so. “First thing in the morning we go up to Second Cliff. It makes you dizzy, you do it so fast. But the view from up there is fantastic. Just you wait.”

Out of the corner of his eye Prestimion caught sight of Prince Simbilon making a face at Taradath behind Taradath’s back, and smiled.

Taradath would be seventeen soon, Prestimion thought. He made a mental note to talk with Varaile about sending him back to the Castle next year, enrolled as a knight-initiate. There was no reason why the grown son of a Pontifex had to remain with his family at the Labyrinth; and it would probably do Taradath some good to have the other young men of the Castle take him down a peg or two. Prestimion had done his best to teach Taradath that once he had entered adult life he would enjoy no special privileges or deferences simply because he was the Pontifex’s son, but perhaps that was a lesson better learned at the hands of one’s own peers.

Floaters were waiting to transport them from the Second Cliff landing stage to the final sled station at the base of Third Cliff. Quickly they traversed the Second Cliff terraces, where the pilgrims completed their training so that they could move on as acolytes to the highest level of the Isle and aid the Lady in her task. Up there on Third Cliff the Lady’s vast staff of acolytes nightly donned the silver circlets that permitted one mind to touch another across any distance, and sent their spirits forth to heal through benign dreams those whose souls were in pain: to guide, to counsel, to console. On previous visits Prestimion, wonderstruck, had watched the Lady’s legions at their work. But there would be no time for such diversions now.

The travelers reached the last of the floater-sled depots by mid-morning. Now came the final upward leap, to the flat summit of the Isle, thousands of feet above their starting point down at sea level.

The younger boys were excited by the astonishing clarity of the air of Third Cliff and the brilliance of the sunlight, which made everything take on a strange unworldly glow. As soon as the sled had landed they came rushing out and began to chase each other around the sled depot, while Taradath called out to them, “Hey, careful, you two! The air is really thin, up this high!” They paid no attention. The summit of Castle Mount was ever so much higher than this, after all. But the air of Castle Mount was artificial; what they were breathing here was the real thing, depleted of oxygen by the altitude, and before long Simbilon and Akbalik were feeling the effect of it, slowing down, panting hard now, staggering dizzily about.

Prestimion, who was standing beside Taradath, leaned close and whispered, “Don’t say it.”

Taradath did not seem to understand at all. “Don’t say what, father?”

“ ‘I told you so.’ Just don’t say it.” Prestimion put a little crackle into his voice. “All right? They know now that the air is different up here. No need for you to rub it in.”

Taradath blinked a couple of times. “Oh,” he said, and his cheeks reddened as he began to grasp Prestimion’s meaning. “Of course I won’t, father.”

“Good.”

Prestimion turned away, covering his mouth with his hand to hide his grin. Another small step in the boy’s education, he thought. But there was still a long way to go.

The Terrace of Shadows, where the Lady Therissa had made her home since giving up the powers that had been hers, lay within the wall that separated the sheltered sanctuary that was Inner Temple from the rest of Third Cliff. Varaile and the children remained behind at the Third Cliff guesthouse. “Your mother’s house is on the far side of Inner Temple,” Taliesme told Prestimion. She led him through the immaculate garden that surrounded the lovely eight-sided marble building that was now her home, across a close-cut grassy lawn, and into a forested zone beyond that Prestimion had never entered before.

No buildings were visible here: only a curving row of smallish trees of a sort he did not recognize, rising directly in front of him. They had thick, smooth, reddish-brown trunks that bulged oddly in the middle, and bushy crowns of shining blue-green leaves that were lobed so that they looked almost like upturned hands. The trees had been planted so closely, one fat swelling trunk nuzzling up against the next, that they constituted what amounted to a wall. Only in a single place had a narrow space been left, marked by white marble flagstones, by means of which one could enter the very private sector that lay behind the grove.

“Come, majesty,” Taliesme said, and beckoned Prestimion to follow her through.

It was dark and mysterious within. Prestimion found himself in another garden, less regular in form and not as carefully manicured as the one surrounding Inner Temple. It was planted mainly with what looked like palm trees—they had slender, ribbed trunks that rose to a phenomenal height without branching—that exploded far overhead into tremendous clusters of fan-shaped leaves so huge that it seemed they would prevent any sunlight from breaking through the shield that they formed. Yet these gigantic leaves were attached to wiry, tremulous stems that moved about freely in the slightest breeze, so that openings constantly were made in the leafy roof overhead, and bright shimmering shafts of light did penetrate in quickly darting bursts, creating a shifting pattern of shadows beneath.

“There is your mother’s home,” Taliesme said, pointing to a low, sprawling villa directly ahead. It was a handsome flat-roofed structure that had been fashioned of the same smooth white stone as had been used in the making of Inner Temple. Secondary buildings, similar in design, flanked it: servants’ homes, Prestimion supposed. Other houses were dimly visible farther in. Those were the homes of senior hierarchs, Taliesme told him. “The Lady Therissa is expecting you. The hierarch Zenianthe, who is her companion, will take you to her.”

Zenianthe, a slim, dignified white-haired woman who seemed to be of about his mother’s age, was waiting for him on a portico lined with potted ferns. She made the Labyrinth symbol to Prestimion and gracefully signalled for him to enter.

The house was smaller within than it appeared from outside, and modestly furnished: the home of someone who has put aside the outer glories of life. The hierarch took Prestimion down a starkly simple corridor, past several little rooms that appeared at a quick glance to be virtually empty, and into a kind of conservatory at the heart of the house, glass-roofed, with a small round pool at its center and pots of greenery arranged along its margin. Prestimion’s mother stood quietly to one side of the pool.

His eyes met hers. The jolt he got at his first sight of her was a far greater shock than he was expecting.

He had done as much as he could to prepare himself for this meeting. The Lady Therissa was five years older now than she had been at their last meeting; she had suffered a crushing loss in the death of her youngest son; and she had been assailed besides by whatever sort of diabolical torments Mandralisca had been sending against her by night. Prestimion knew that the effects of all that would surely be a doleful thing to behold.

He thought, though, that he had succeeded in fortifying himself against the worst of surprises; but now that he was in her presence at last, struggling with the impact of what he was seeing, he realized that no degree of preparation, perhaps, could have been sufficient.

The curious thing was that her great beauty appeared to have survived despite everything. She had always seemed much younger than her years: a slender, regal woman of superb grace and elegance, famous for her pale smooth skin, her dark gleaming hair, her calm unshakable spirit.

Those things, Prestimion knew, were the outward manifestations of the perfection of her soul. Other women might maintain eternal youthfulness with the aid of sorcerers’ incantations and potions, but never the Lady Therissa. She looked the way she looked, over the years, because she was who she was. Neither her early widowhood nor the civil war that had nearly denied her eldest son Prestimion the crown that was rightfully his, nor the death of her second son Taradath in that same war, nor the great responsibilities that had devolved upon her when she had become Lady of the Isle, nor the later convulsion that had come over the world during the time of the plague of madness, had been able in any way to leave any sort of external mark on her.

Now, wondrous to behold, her hair was nearly as dark as ever—and naturally so, Prestimion was certain. Her face, though the lines of age had begun to enter it years ago, was still unwithered: the face of the most beautiful of women, rendered even more lovely, if that was possible, by the work of time. And as he moved around the side of the pool and went forward to greet her, her posture as she awaited him was as erect as ever, her entire bearing as queenly. In all ways the Lady Therissa seemed to be a woman twenty or thirty years younger than she actually was.

Then, looking close into her eyes, he saw where the real change had occurred.

Her eyes. That was the only place: nowhere else but her eyes. Another person, not ever having looked into those eyes before, might not have noticed anything amiss at all. But to Prestimion the transformation of his mother’s eyes was a thing of such stunning, overwhelming magnitude that he was scarcely able to believe what he saw.

In that still-beautiful face her eyes had taken on a blazing, frightful strangeness that contradicted the very beauty in which they were set. They were the eyes of a woman who had lived a hundred years, or a thousand. Deeply sunken now, rimmed by an intricate webwork of fine lines, those transformed eyes stared out at him in a cold, rigid, unblinking way, unnaturally bright, weirdly intense, the eyes of someone who had seen the walls of the world peel back to reveal some realm of unimaginable horrors that lay behind them.

Gone now was that incredible look of serenity, the marvelous radiance that was the outer display of the inner perfection that had been, for him, her most significant characteristic. Prestimion saw the most terrible anguish in his mother’s eyes now. He saw enormous pain in them: pain that was unbearable, but which was being borne nonetheless. It took all the force of will he could muster to keep himself from flinching away from the dreadful gleaming stare of those appalling eyes.

He took her hands in his. There was a tremor in her fingers that had never been there before. Her hands were cold to the touch. He realized fully now how old she was, how worn.

This weakness of hers stunned him. He had always looked to her to be his ultimate reservoir of strength. It had been that way in the time of the war against Korsibar; it had been that way when he had crushed the rebellion of Dantirya Sambail. Now he understood that that strength was exhausted.

I will have vengeance for this, Prestimion told himself.

“Mother—” His voice was hoarse, muffled, indistinct.

“Do I frighten you, Prestimion?”

Determined to give her no sign of the consternation he felt, he forced an unnaturally hearty tone, and a sort of grin. “Of course you don’t, mother.” Leaning forward, he kissed her lightly. “How could you ever frighten me?”

She was not deceived. “I could see it in your face as soon as you came near enough to get a good look at me. A quick little movement at the side of your mouth, it was: it told me everything.”

“Perhaps I was a bit surprised,” he conceded. “But frightened? No. No. You look a little older, I suppose. Well, so do I. So does everyone. It happens. It’s not an important thing.”

She smiled, and the icy harshness of her gaze softened just a little. “Oh, Prestimion, Prestimion, Prestimion, is this any time of your life or mine for you to begin lying to your mother? Don’t you think there are mirrors in this house? I frighten myself, sometimes, when I look into them.”

“Mother—oh, mother—” He gave up all pretense, and drew her close against him, folded her in his arms, held her in a gentle embrace, sending to her whatever he could of comfort.

She had become very thin, Prestimion realized. Almost brittle, as though she were all bones: he was afraid of holding her too tightly for fear that he would injure her in some way. But she pressed herself gladly against him. He heard something that almost might have been a sob, a sound that he had not heard from her before in all the years of his life; but perhaps it had only been an intake of breath, he thought.

When he released her and stepped back he was pleased to see that the fixed hard stare had relaxed a little further, and something of the old warm glow had come back into her eyes.

She nodded to him to follow her, and led him into a simple antechamber nearby, where a flask of wine and two bowls were waiting on a small stone table with an inlaid border of bright mother-of-pearl. Prestimion noticed that her hand quivered just a little as she poured the wine for them.

They took their first sips in silence. He looked straight at her and made no attempt now to avert his eyes, painful as that was for him.

“Was it losing Teotas that did this to you, mother?”

The tone of her reply was a steady, unwavering one. “I’ve lost a son before, Prestimion. There’s nothing worse for a mother than to outlive her child; but I know how to handle grief.” She shook her head. “No, Prestimion. No. It wasn’t Teotas alone that aged me like this.”

“I know something about the dreams you’ve been having. Taliesme told me.”

“You know nothing about those dreams, Prestimion. Nothing.” Her face had darkened, and her voice seemed an octave deeper now. “Until you’ve directly experienced one yourself, you can’t possibly know. And I pray that the Divine will spare you from anything of the kind.—You’ve not had one, have you?”

“I don’t think so. I dream of Thismet, sometimes. Or that I’m wandering around lost in some strange part of the Castle. A couple of nights ago I dreamed that I was traveling up and up and up to Third Cliff in a floater-sled, without ever getting there. But everybody has dreams of that sort, mother. Just ordinary irritating dreams that you’d rather not be having, but you know you’ll forget them five minutes after you awake.”

“My dreams are of a different kind. They cut deep; and they linger. Let me tell you about my dreams, Prestimion. And then perhaps you’ll understand.”

She took a slow sip of her wine and stared down into the bowl, swirling it slowly. Prestimion waited, saying nothing. He knew a little of what Teotas’s deadly dreams must have been like, and Varaile’s, and even, to some degree, Tuanelys’s. But he wanted to hear what his mother had to say of her own dreams, first, before he spoke to her of those other ones.

She was silent for a time. Then at last the Lady Therissa looked across at him again. Her eyes had taken on once more the cold, hard, ferocious glare they had had when he had first stared into them. But that he knew better, he might have thought those eyes were the eyes of a madwoman.

“Here is how it happens, Prestimion. I lie down, I close my eyes, I let myself slide off into sleep as I have done every night for more years than I care to think about.” She spoke quietly, calmly, impersonally, as though she were telling a mere story, some fable about a person who had lived five thousand years before. “And—it happens once a week, perhaps, or twice, sometimes three—not long after sleep comes, I feel an odd warmth behind my forehead, a warmth that grows and grows and grows until I think my brain must be on fire. There is a throbbing in my head, here, here—” She touched her temples and the roof of her skull. “A sensation, also, as of a bright, hot beam of light cutting into my forehead and going deep within. Going into my soul, Prestimion.”

“Oh—mother—how dreadful, mother—”

“What I’ve told you so far is the easy part. After the heat, the pain, comes the dream itself.—I am in court. I am on trial before a shouting mob. I stand accused of the most loathsome betrayals of trust, of the filthiest of lies, of treachery against those I was chosen to serve. It is an impeachment, Prestimion. I am being removed from my post as Lady of the Isle for having been negligent in my tasks.”

She paused, then, and took some more wine, and sipped it unhurriedly. The effort of telling him these things was obviously a drain on her energies.

Prestimion was all but certain, now, that what was afflicting her had to be sendings from Mandralisca. But some part of him wanted not to believe that: wanted to cling to the wan hope that the poison-taster had not succeeded in making contact with his mother’s mind.

Grasping at shadows, he said, “Forgive me for this, mother, but I see little difference here between this dream and any of mine in which I chase Thismet down a corridor of a thousand slamming doors. Our sleeping minds generate ridiculous absurdities to torture us. But when I awaken from the Thismet dream I know that she’s long dead, and the dream evaporates like the empty thing it was; and when you awaken from your dream of being placed on trial you should know that you were never—”

“No.” The single syllable cut through his words like a knife. “Your dream, I agree, is nothing more than the floating upward of the crumbling debris of the past, like something drifting on the tide. You awaken and it’s gone, leaving only a troubling residue that remains just a little while. Mine is something quite other, Prestimion. It carries the force of reality. I awaken convinced of my own guilt and shame, utterly and unshakably convinced. And that feeling lingers on and on. It penetrates me like the venom of a serpent. I lie there sweating, shivering, knowing that I have failed the people of Majipoor, that in my term as Lady of the Isle I did nothing that was good, but only incalculable harm, to millions of people.”

“You are convinced of this.”

“Beyond all possibility of argument. It becomes more than a dream. It becomes a fact of my existence, as real to me as your father’s name and face. A basic part of me that nothing could eradicate.”

Prestimion’s last doubts of the nature and source of his mother’s dark dreams fell away from him. How could he resist the truth any longer? He had heard things much like this before, from Dekkeret, speaking of Teotas’s dreams. Guilt—shame—an overriding sense of unworthiness, of failure, of having betrayed those whom one had sworn to serve—

She was watching him. Those eyes—those eyes—!

“You aren’t saying anything, Prestimion. Do you understand in any way what I’m telling you?”

He nodded wearily. “Yes. Yes, I do. I understand very well. These are sendings that you’re receiving, mother. A malevolent force is reaching into your mind from without and implanting things, more or less the way the Lady of the Isle implants dreams in those she serves. But the Lady brings only benevolent dreams that have no more than the force of suggestion. These dreams of yours carry far greater power. They have the force of reality. They are something that you have no choice but to believe is true.”

The Lady Therissa seemed a little surprised. “So you know these things already, then!”

Again he nodded. “And I know who’s sending them, too.”

“As do I.” She touched her fingertips to her forehead. “I still have the circlet I wore when I was Lady of the Isle. I used it to reach out toward the source of my dreams and identify it. It is Mandralisca, back at his evil work again.”

“I know.”

“He has killed Teotas, I think, by sending him dreams that were beyond his power to endure.”

“I know that too,” Prestimion said. “Dekkeret has worked it out, bit by bit, with the help of his friend Dinitak Barjazid. There is another Barjazid loose in the land, the brother of the one I killed at Stoienzar. He has allied himself with the poison-taster, who himself is in league with the kinsmen of Dantirya Sambail, and these hellish thought-control helmets are being made again. They have been used against Teotas, and against you, and also, I think, Varaile, and even, it may be, against my little daughter Tuanelys.”

“But not, so far, against you.”

“No. Nor do I expect that. I think he may be afraid to challenge me outright. To attack the Pontifex is to attack Majipoor itself: the people will not follow him there. No, mother, what he wants is to intimidate me by striking at those who are closest to me, I think, hoping that he can force me into making a deal of some kind with him and the people he serves. To grant them political control in Zimroel, perhaps. To restore to them the authority that I took away from the Procurator Dantirya Sambail.”

“He will kill you, if he can,” the Lady Therissa said.

Prestimion rejected that idea with a sweeping gesture of his hand. “That’s something that I don’t fear at all. I doubt that he would attempt it; I know that if he tried, he would not succeed.” He left his seat and crouched at her side, resting one hand lightly over her forearm and staring up into her ravaged eyes. Tautly he said, “The one who will die, mother, is Mandralisca. You can be certain of that. I would slay him for what he did to Teotas, alone. But now that I know what he has done to you—”

“It’s your plan to make war against him, then,” she said, stating it, not asking.

“Yes.”

“And raise an army and invade Zimroel and destroy this man with your own hand? I hear it in your voice. Is that what you mean to do, Prestimion?”

“Not I myself,” Prestimion said quickly, for he could see where she was heading with this. The patterns of conflict crossing her features were obvious, her fierce loathing for Mandralisca and all he represented playing against her fears for her eldest son’s life. “Oh, what I would give to be the one who cuts him down! I won’t attempt to deceive you about that. But my days on the battlefield, I’m afraid, have been over for a very long time, mother. Dekkeret is my sword now.”

6

It was the sixteenth day of Dekkeret’s journey across the broad central plain of Alhanroel to the great city of the northwestern coast, Alaisor. He had arrived now at the city of Shabikant on the River Haggito, a muddy southward-flowing stream that came down from the Iyann. The one and only thing Dekkeret knew about Shabikant was that it was the place where the famous Trees of the Sun and the Moon grew.

“We should visit them while we have the chance,” he told Fulkari. “We may never pass this way again.”

As Prestimion had suggested, the Coronal and his party had taken the land route to Alaisor. It would have been far quicker to go by river-boat down Castle Mount via the Uivendak and its tributaries to the swift River Iyann, which would carry them onward to the shores of the Inner Sea. But there was no need for haste, since Prestimion would be making the long trip to the Isle before returning to Alhanroel, and he and Dekkeret were both agreed that there were advantages to be gained in having the new Coronal present himself formally at various major cities while on his way west, rather than hurrying by them by riverboat, with no more than a wave and a smile for the millions of people whom he would pass.

Therefore he had gone by way of the Great Western Highway to the grim mercantile center of Sisivondal in the midst of the dusty Camaganda drylands, a journey that was exceedingly ugly but spared them the troublesome crossing of the rugged Trikkala Mountains, and from Sisivondal across the great curving bosom of Majipoor through Skeil and

Kessilroge and Gannamunda and Hunzimar into the grassy Vale of Gloyn, where enormous herds of bizarre animals grazed placidly in huge savannas of copper-colored gattaga-grass, and onward beyond Gloyn, the halfway point between Castle Mount and Alaisor, in a gently north-northwesterly direction, stopping here and there to confer the honor of the new Coronal’s presence on this provincial duke and that rural mayor. With not a word said to anyone along the way, of course, of the growing disturbance in Zimroel. That was no one’s business except the Coronal’s, thus far. Certainly these good people of west-central Alhanroel had no need to know about the minor unrest on the other continent.

Dinitak, by donning his helmet daily, was keeping Dekkeret apprised of what was going on over there. The five nephews of Dantirya Sambail had returned from their wanderings in the desert and set up a headquarters in the city of Ni-moya, something that they were not exactly forbidden to do, but provocative all the same. And it appeared that they had taken control of Ni-moya and the region immediately surrounding it, which, if the reports that Dinitak’s mind-trollings had brought back were correct, was definitely a violation of Prestimion’s twenty-year-old decree stripping Dantirya Sambail and his heirs forever of any and all political power in Zimroel.

Dekkeret did not feel that any of this required an immediate governmental response. He expected that he soon would have confirmation of Dinitak’s reports arriving by way of more orthodox channels, along with greater detail of what actually was taking place, and he would wait until those reports had come. Then he and Prestimion together, when they met as planned a month or two from now at the coastal city of Stoien, could work out a fitting strategy for dealing with these troublesome Ni-moyans.

The royal party reached Shabikant a short while past noon, when the city, spreading before them for many miles to the north and south on the broad sandy plain that bordered the eastern bank of the Haggito, lay basking in the warmth of the bright mid-country sunlight.

Shabikant was a city of four or five million people, evidently something of a metropolis as the cities of this region went—a pretty place of graceful buildings of pink or blue stucco topped with ornate roofs of green tile. The mayor and a party of municipal officials came riding out to greet Dekkeret and his companions, and much bowing and starburst-making and speechifying took place before they finally were escorted into town.

The mayor—his title was hereditary and largely ceremonial, one of Dekkeret’s aides whispered to him—was a rotund, red-faced, green-eyed little man named Kriskinnin Durch, who appeared generally overwhelmed at finding himself playing host to the Coronal Lord of Majipoor. Apparently Lord Dekkeret was the first Coronal to have visited Shabikant in several centuries. Kriskinnin Durch seemed unable to get over the fact that this great event was taking place during his own administration.

But he nevertheless wasted no opportunity in letting Dekkeret know that he himself was descended on his mother’s side from one of the younger brothers of the Pontifex Ammirato—a not very significant monarch of four hundred years before, as Dekkeret recalled. “Then you are of far more distinguished lineage than I am,” Dekkeret told him amiably, amused rather than annoyed by the man’s bare-faced pretentiousness. “For I am descended from no one in particular at all.”

Kriskinnin Durch seemed not to have the slightest idea of how to respond to such a bland statement of humble origins coming from the Coronal Lord of Majipoor. He chose, therefore, to pretend that Dekkeret had not uttered it.

“You will, of course, pay a call on the Trees of the Sun and the Moon while you are among us?” the mayor went on.

“That was my very intention,” said Dekkeret.

Fulkari, speaking so that only he could hear, said, “They all seem to be descended from the brothers of Pontifexes on their mother’s side, these backwoods mayors. And from beggars and thieves and counterfeiters on their father’s; but it all averages out, doesn’t it?”

“Hush,” said Dekkeret, with a quick wink and a light squeeze of her hand.

By way of a royal hostelry he and Fulkari were provided with a pleasant pink-walled lodge right at the river’s edge, which probably was usually employed to house the mayors of nearby cities and other such regional functionaries when they came calling on Kriskinnin Durch. Dinitak and the rest of Dekkeret’s staff were taken off to lesser lodgings nearby.

“I most sincerely hope you will find everything here to your liking, my lord,” said the mayor obsequiously, and, backing away, bowed himself out of their presence.

His chambers, Dekkeret saw, were large but lacking in grace of design. They were furnished in the overstuffed style that had been popular nearly a century ago in the early years of Lord Prankipin’s reign—everything covered with heavy brocaded upholstery and resting on squat, ungainly legs. A scattering of drab crude paintings that surely had to be the work of local artists decorated the walls, most of them hanging slightly askew. The whole place was almost exactly as he would have expected. Quaint, Dekkeret thought: very quaint.

The mayor had tactfully given Lord Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari separate suites, since no reports of any royal marriage had reached the city of Shabikant and people tended to be quite fastidious about such matters out in these agricultural provinces. But the two suites were, at least, adjacent, and there was a connecting door, bolted closed, that was not at all difficult to open. Dekkeret began to think the mayor might not be quite as stupid as he had seemed on first encounter.

“What are these Trees of the Sun and the Moon?” Fulkari asked him, when they were finished installing themselves in their rooms and their various chamberlains and ladies-in-waiting had gone off to their own quarters. Dekkeret had thrown the bolt and come into her suite, where he found Fulkari lolling in a great tub of blue stone, lazily scrubbing her back with a huge brush whose long handle was of such a strange zigzag design that it might just as easily have been some kind of implement of witchcraft.

“As I understand it,” he said, “they’re a pair of fantastically ancient trees that are supposed to have the power of oracular speech. Not that anyone’s heard them say anything for the past three thousand years or so, I hasten to add. But a Coronal named Kolkalli came here somewhere back then while making a grand processional and went to see the trees, and precisely at sunset the male tree spoke, and said—”

“These trees have sexes?”

“The Tree of the Sun is male and the Tree of the Moon is female. I don’t know how they can tell. Anyway, the Coronal came to the trees at sunset and demanded that they predict his future, and at the moment the sun sank below the horizon the male tree said thirteen words in a language that the Coronal couldn’t understand. Kolkalli became very excited and asked the priests of the trees if they would translate it for him, but they claimed that nobody in Shabikant was able to speak the language of the trees any more. In fact they did understand it, but they were afraid to say anything, because what the tree had uttered was a prophecy of the Coronal’s imminent death. Which happened three days later, when he was stung on the finger by a poisonous gijimong and died in about five minutes, which is essentially the only thing that is remembered about the Coronal Lord Kolkalli.”

“You believe this?” Fulkari asked.

“That the Coronal was stung on the finger by a gijimong and died? It’s in the history books. One of the shortest reigns in Majipoor’s history.”

“That the tree actually spoke, and it was a prophecy of his death.”

“Verkausi tells the story in one of his poems. I remember studying it in school. I confess I don’t quite see how a tree would be capable of speech, but who are we to quarrel about plausibility with the peerless Verkausi? I take a neutral position on the subject, myself.”

“Well, if the trees do say anything tonight, Dekkeret, you mustn’t let the locals slither out of translating the message.” Fulkari brandished her fists in a pose of mock ferocity. “ ‘Translate or else,’ you’ll tell them! ‘Translate or die! Your Coronal commands it!’ ”

“And if they tell me that the tree has just said that I’ve got three days to live? What do I do then?”

“I’d keep away from gijimongs, just for a starter,” Fulkari replied. She extended one long, slender arm toward him. “Help me out of the tub, will you? It’s got such a slippery bottom.”

He took her hand and she leaped lithely over the rim of the tub and into the huge towel that he held open for her. Gently, lovingly, he rubbed her dry as she nestled against him. Then he tossed the towel aside.

For the fiftieth time that day Dekkeret was struck by the luminous beauty of her, the radiance of her hair, the sparkle of her eyes, the strength and vigor of her features, the elegant compromise that her body had made between athletic trimness and feminine voluptuousness. And she was such a splendid companion, besides: clever, alert, perceptive, lively.

It amazed him constantly how close they had been to a parting of the ways. He still could hear, all too often, echoes of words that had once been spoken: Dekkeret, I don’t want to be the consort of a Coronal, she had said to him in that forest grove on Castle Mount. And he to Prestimion, in the Court of Thrones of the Labyrinth: It’s very clear that she’s the wrong woman for me. It was hard now to believe that they had ever said such things. But they had. They had. No matter, Dekkeret thought: time had passed and things were different now. They would marry as soon as this annoying business of Mandralisca was behind them.

His eyes encountered hers, and he saw the mischief glinting in them.

“But there’s no time now,” he said plaintively. “We have to get dressed. His excellence the mayor is awaiting us for lunch, and the tour of the city, and at sunset we go to see the celebrated talking trees.”

“You see? You see? It’s business all the time, for the Coronal and his consort!”

“Not all the time,” Dekkeret said, speaking very softly, burying his face in the hollow of her shoulder. She was warm and fragrant from the bath. He ran his hands lightly down her long lean back, across her smooth rump, along her flanks. She trembled against him. But she was holding herself in check just as he was. “When today’s speechifying is over,” he said, “there’ll be just the two of us here, and we’ll have all night to ourselves. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes. Oh, yes, Dekkeret, I know! But first—duty calls!” She brushed her lips lightly against his to tell him that she had made her peace with that, that she understood that a king’s pleasure must wait until a king’s work was done.

Then she slipped from his grasp and held the door between their suites open for him, grinning, making little shooing gestures to send him off to his own place while she went about the task of dressing for the public events that lay ahead. He blew her a kiss and went through to get dressed himself: the royal robes in the green and gold colors emblematic of his high status, the ring, the pendant, all the little outward signs and symbols that marked him as king of the world.

She has changed, he thought. She has grown into her role. We will be very happy together.

But first, as Fulkari had said, duty called.

It was late in the afternoon before all the public formalities of the royal visit to Shabikant were behind them—the mayor’s lunch at the town hall had turned out to be, of course, an interminable banquet attended by all the city’s notables, with speech after speech of welcome and expressions of hope for a long and glorious reign—and Dekkeret and Fulkari at last, accompanied by Dinitak and several of Dekkeret’s aides, were being conducted back down to the river to view Shabikant’s greatest attraction, the Trees of the Sun and the Moon.

Mayor Kriskinnin Durch, almost beside himself with excitement, trotted along beside them. With him came half a dozen of the dignitaries who had been at the banquet, now wearing broad purple ribbons across their breasts that marked them, so the mayor explained, as officials of the priesthood of the trees. It was strictly an honorary distinction nowadays, he added: since the trees had been silent for thousands of years and the cult of their worship had fallen into disuse, the “priesthood” had in fact become a social society for the leading men of Shambikant.

Fulkari, letting a little flash of wickedness go flickering across her face, claimed now to be having second thoughts about the visit. “Do you think this is so wise, Dekkeret? What if they decide to speak again, after all this time, and they tell you something you’d just as soon not have heard?”

“I think the language of the trees has probably been forgotten by now, don’t you? But we can always opt not to hear the translation, if it hasn’t been. And if it’s a really bad prophecy the priests will surely pretend they can’t understand what the tree is saying, just as they did for Kolkalli.”

Twilight was not far off now. The sun, bronzy green at this hour, hung low over the Haggito, and in these latitudes gave the illusion of being oddly broadened and flattened in the final moment of its nightly descent through the western sky.

The trees were contained in a small oblong park at the river’s edge. A palisade of black metal posts terminating in sharp spikes protected them. They stood side by side, two solitary figures outlined against the darkening sky in an otherwise empty field.

The mayor made a great show of unlocking the gate and ushering the guests from Castle Mount inside.

“The Tree of the Sun is on the left,” he declared, in a tone throbbing with pride. “The Tree of the Moon is the one on the right.”

The trees were myrobolans, Dekkeret realized, but they were by far the biggest ones he had ever seen, titans of their kind, and must surely be very ancient indeed. Very likely they had been strikingly impressive, too, back in Lord Kolkalli’s time.

But it was easy to see that the two great trees were finally coming to the end of their days.

The vivid, distinctive patterns of alternating green-and-white stripes that marked the trunks of healthy myrobolans had faded and collapsed on these two into blurry formless blotches, and the tall thick trunks themselves had developed alarming curvatures, the Tree of the Sun leaning distressingly off to the south, the Tree of the Moon going the other way. Their many-branched crowns were nearly bare, with only a scattering of crescent-shaped gray leaves to cover them. Soil erosion at the two trees’ bases had exposed their gnarled brown roots, though an attempt had been made to hide that by strewing the region around each tree with little banners and ribbons and heaps of talismans. The entire look of the place seemed sad, even pathetic, to Dekkeret.

He and Fulkari had been provided with talismans of their own to contribute to the pile. Precisely at the moment of sunset they were supposed to go forward and offer them to the trees, which might then respond—here the mayor winked broadly—with oracular statements. Or, he said, they might not.

The sun’s lower rim was just touching the river, now. It began to sink slowly into it. Dekkeret waited, picturing in his mind the immense mass of the world as it rolled ponderously onward along its axis, carrying this district inexorably into darkness. Now the sun was half-gone. And now nothing but the copper glint of its upper curve remained. Dekkeret held his breath. All conversation among the townsmen had ceased. The air suddenly seemed strangely still. There was a certain drama about all this, he had to admit.

The mayor indicated with a nod that they should get ready to go forward in another moment.

Dekkeret glanced at Fulkari and they advanced solemnly to the trees, he to the female tree, she to the male one, and knelt and added their talismans to the mounds just as the last glimmer of the sun vanished in the west. Dekkeret bowed his head. The mayor had instructed him to speak to the trees in the privacy of his heart and ask them for guidance.

An intense silence ensued as the last light of day disappeared from the sky. No one in the group of townspeople standing behind them seemed even to be breathing.

And in that silence Dekkeret, in astonishment, thought that he did indeed hear something—a rusty, grinding sound, so faint that it scarcely crossed the threshold of his hearing, a sound that might have been rising from the ground out of the roots of the tree before which he knelt. Was it the huge old tree swaying in the first breeze of evening? Or had the oracle—how could it be possible?—actually spoken, offering the new Coronal a couple of groaning syllables of unintelligible wisdom?

He glanced again toward Fulkari. There was a strange look in her eyes, as if she had heard something too.

But then Kriskinnin Durch broke the spell with a cheerful, robust clapping of his hands. “Well done, my lord, well done! The trees have welcomed your gifts, and have, I hope, imparted their wisdom to you! What an honor for us this is, after all these years, a Coronal paying homage to our marvelous trees! What a wonderful honor!”

“You didn’t really hear anything, did you?” asked Fulkari in a low voice, as she and Dekkeret moved away.

Had he? No. No. Of course not, he decided.

“The murmuring of the wind is what I heard,” he said. “And maybe some shifting of the roots. But it’s all very dramatic, isn’t it? And spooky, even.”

“Yes,” said Fulkari. “Spooky.”

7

“Sabers today?” Audhari asked, surprised, as he entered the gymnasium room where he and Keltryn held their twice-weekly fencing session. “You and I haven’t ever dueled with sabers before.”

“We will today,” said Keltryn, in a voice tight and hard with anger.

She had arrived at the fencing-hall five minutes early to select her weapon and make herself familiar with its greater length and heft. Septach Melayn had thought she was too light-framed to work with the saber. Probably he was right about that. She had tried it a couple of times without much show of aptitude, and he had excused her from saber drills thereafter.

But she had no desire today for the elegant posing and prinking of rapier-work. Today she wanted the big weapon. She wanted to slash and bash and crash, to inflict damage and if necessary to be damaged herself. None of this had anything to do with Audhari. It was her boiling fury over Dinitak, mounting up and mounting up and mounting up until it overflowed within her, that drove her actions today.

Keltryn had lost track by now of how many weeks it was since Dinitak had gone off into the west-country with the Coronal and Fulkari. Four weeks, was it? Five? She could not say. It seemed like an eternity and a half. However long it was, it felt like a far longer span of time than her entire little romance with Dinitak had covered.

It all seemed like nothing more than a dream, now, those few strange weeks with Dinitak. Before he came along she had guarded her body as though it were a temple and she were its high priestess. Then—she was not even sure why; had it been real physical attraction, or the impatience of her own maturing body, or even something as trivial as wanting to step forward finally into the kind of existence that her sister had had so long?—she had opened herself to Dinitak, and permitted him to penetrate in more senses than one the sanctuary of her self, and he had led her into realms of pleasure and excitement far beyond anything she had imagined in her virginal fantasies.

But there had been more to it than sex, or so she had thought. For those few weeks she had ceased at last to think of herself as I and had begun to be a we.

And then—as casually as though she were a worn-out garment—he had discarded her. Discarded. No other word applied, so far as she was concerned. To go jaunting off into the west-country like that with Dekkeret and Fulkari, and to leave her behind because it was—what had Fulkari told her?—because it was “politically inappropriate” for him to be accompanied by an unmarried woman while he was traveling in the Coronal’s entourage—

It was hard to believe that any man in the early throes of a passionate love affair would take such a position. Dinitak was famous for his bluntness, for his rugged honesty: he was surely capable of speaking up even to Lord Dekkeret, telling him, “I’m sorry, your lordship, but if Keltryn doesn’t go, I don’t go either.”

But he hadn’t said any such thing. She doubted that the Coronal would have been troubled in the slightest by her presence on the journey. It had been Dinitak’s idea to leave her behind, Dinitak’s, Dinitak’s, Dinitak’s. How could he do such a thing? Keltryn asked herself. And the ugly answer came too fast: Because he’s grown tired of me already. I must be too eager, too demanding, too—young. And this is his way of dumping me.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Fulkari had said. “He’s crazy about you, Keltryn. I assure you, he hates leaving you at the Castle like this. But he’s just too prim to bring a young woman like you along with him on an official journey. He said it would be degrading to you, that it would make you seem like a concubine.”

“A concubine!”

“You know he has some extremely old-fashioned ideas.”

“Not so old-fashioned that he wouldn’t sleep with me, Fulkari.”

“You told me yourself that he seemed pretty hesitant even about that.”

“Well—”

Keltryn had to admit that Fulkari was right on that score. She had practically had to throw herself at Dinitak, that day at the pool, before he was willing at last to accept what she was offering. And even then there had been that odd reaction of dismay and chagrin, afterward, when he realized that she had given him her virginity. He is just too complicated for me, Keltryn had decided. But that did not help her get over her fury at being excluded from the west-country trip, or at being separated for so many weeks from the man she loved while their romance was still in its full early heat.

In the days that followed her anger with him came and went. Sometimes she thought that she had ceased to care, that Dinitak had merely been a phase in her late adolescence that she would look back toward eventually with amusement and nostalgia. At such times she would feel entirely calm for hours at a stretch. But then she grew furious with him for having wrecked her life. She had given him more than her innocence, she told herself: she had given him her love. And he had thrown it mockingly back in her face.

This was one of the angry days, today. Keltryn had dreamed a vivid dream of him, of the two of them together; she had imagined that he was in her bed beside her; she had reached hungrily for him, only to find herself alone. And had awakened in a red haze of frustration and rage.

She would be fencing with Audhari this day. Sabers, she thought. Yes. Slash and bash and crash. Work the anger out of her system with some heavyweight swordplay.

The tall freckle-faced young man from Stoienzar seemed baffled and bemused by her desire to use the big weapon. Not only was she inexperienced with it, but his advantage of height and strength would be enormously more significant with sabers than it was with rapiers or batons, where technique and quick reaction time mattered as much as simple force. But she would not be gainsaid.

“On your guard!” she cried.

“Remember, Keltryn, the saber uses the cutting edge as well as the point. And you have to protect your arm against—”

She lowered her mask and let her eyes blaze at him. “Don’t condescend to me, Audhari. On your guard, I said!”

It was an impossible match, though. The saber was a little too heavy for her slender arm. And she had only the sketchiest idea of the correct technique. She knew that the fencers had to keep farther apart than they did when using rapiers, but that meant it was impossible for her to reach him with a simple lunge. She had to resort to crude inelegant back-alley lateral swings that would surely have brought yelps of outrage from Septach Melayn had he been there to witness her performance.

It was satisfying, in its way. It did allow her to vent some of her wrath. But what she was doing was not fencing at all. It had no style, no manner, no form. She would have accomplished just as much by grabbing up a hatchet and hacking up some firewood. Audhari, perplexed by her frantic assaults, had to abandon his own well-developed technique and parry whatever way he could. Whenever he intercepted the attack of her blade with his own, the collision sent an agonizing shiver of pain through Keltryn’s hand and arm. And finally he blocked one onslaught of hers so ringingly that her saber flew clattering to the floor.

She knelt to pick her saber up and remained kneeling for a moment more, struggling to catch her breath.

“What’s going on here today?” Audhari asked. He tossed his fencing mask aside and went closer to her. “You seem all worked up over something. Is it anything I’ve done?”

“You? No—no, Audhari—”

“Then what is it? You’ve chosen a weapon that’s obviously too heavy for you, and you’re swinging it around like a battle-axe instead of trying to fence properly with me. The best saber men deploy it almost like a rapier, you know. They go for lightness and speed, not for brute power.”

“I suppose I’ll never be a good saber man, then,” she said sullenly, accenting the man. She was maskless now too.

“That’s hardly anything to be ashamed of, though. Look, Keltryn, let’s forget this saber business and start over with something lighter, and—”

“No. Wait.” She shut him up with an impatient wave of her hand. A new and strange thought was coming into her mind.

It’s time to move on beyond Dinitak.

Dinitak had served his purpose in her life. Whatever had existed between them was over and done with, as he was going to find out whenever he returned from his trip to the west-country. She didn’t need him any more. She would be a fool to go on pining as she had for a man who could abandon her so lightheartedly.

To Audhari she said, “Maybe we should just forget about fencing this morning. There are other things we could be doing.”

Her tone was sly but not ambiguous. Audhari looked at her uncomprehendingly, blinking as though she had spoken in the tongue of some other world. Keltryn stared straight into his eyes and gave him a hot, intense smile that she was certain he could interpret in only one way. Now it seemed that understanding was dawning in him.

Her own boldness amazed her. But it was very pleasing to be doing this, and doing it all on her own initiative, without relying for once on Fulkari’s advice. She was glad now that Fulkari was away from the Castle. The time had come, she knew, for her to learn to make her own way through the whirlpools of life.

“Come on, Audhari!” she cried. “Let’s go upstairs!”

“Keltryn—”

Audhari appeared totally astounded. He was bright red from the collar of his fencing jacket to the roots of his hair. His lips moved, but no reply emerged.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, finally. “You don’t want to, is that it?”

He shook his head. “How weird you are this morning, Keltryn!”

“I’m not attractive, is that it? Do you think I’m ugly? Do you, Audhari? I wouldn’t want to impose myself on a man who thinks I’m unattractive, you know.”

All too obviously Audhari felt as though he would rather be in the depths of the Labyrinth right now than having this conversation. “You’re one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen, Keltryn.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that that’s not enough. Whatever we did upstairs would be completely meaningless. You’ve never shown the slightest interest in me, that way, and I’ve known it and I’ve respected it. Now you change your mind just like that? That isn’t right. It doesn’t make sense. It feels like you just want to use me.”

“And if I do, what of it? You can use me too. Would that be so terrible?”

“I’m not like that, Keltryn. And it wouldn’t be any good. Any more than your trying to fence with a saber was.”

Now it was her turn to look astounded. After all that she had heard while she was growing up about how men were nothing but mere monsters of lust, why was it her bad luck to keep running into ones who worried so much about morality and respectability and propriety? Why was it so difficult to find simple uncomplicated debauchery when she wanted some?

Audhari, still red-faced, went on: “Please, can we just drop this talk, all right? Please. If you want to fence, let’s fence, and if not, not. But we’ve been such good friends for so long, and now—what you’re doing now is so damned confusing, Keltryn! I beg you, stop it. Just stop it.”

She glowered at him. This was the last thing she would have expected. “Oh, I’m confusing you, am I? Well, then. I humbly beg you to forgive me for that,” she said frostily. “I’d never want to feel that I was guilty of having confused my dear sweet friend Audhari.”

Putting her saber back in the weapons rack, she went from the room without another word.

She knew that she was being cruel, and that she was the confused one. It didn’t matter. She hated him for having refused her in a moment of—

Need? Spite? She didn’t know what it was. What she knew was that she understood a great deal less about men than she had thought a few months ago.

She was still simmering with rage half an hour later when she was crossing the Pinitor Court and caught sight of Polliex of Estotilaup, her former fencing-class partner, coming from the opposite direction. As he drew near he smiled at her in a mechanical, impersonal way, but showed no sign of wanting to stop to talk. Since her last and most emphatic refusal of his invitations to her to join him for a weekend of fun and frolic at the pleasure-city of High Morpin, he had maintained an attitude of the most rigorous properness in such sporadic contact as they had had. He was, after all, a duke’s son, and knew how to behave once he had been turned down.

But Polliex also knew how to behave when an attractive young woman, even one that had treated him earlier with disdain, indicated at some later time that his attentions would not be unwelcome. Keltryn greeted him with a warmth that she doubted he would misinterpret, and he very smoothly responded without revealing the faintest trace of surprise when she began to speak of High Morpin, its power-tunnels and mirror-slides and juggernauts, and expressed regret that she had never found time to go there even once since coming to Castle Mount.

Polliex was remarkably good-looking and his courtly, polished manners were extremely pleasing in comparison with Audhari’s awkward boyishness and Dinitak’s stern rigorous virtue. Her three days and nights with him at High Morpin were filled with delight. But why, she wondered, was she holding herself back, as she found herself again and again doing, from full enjoyment of all that Polliex offered? And why did thoughts of Dinitak keep stealing into her mind, even now, even here, even when she was with someone else? She was finished with Dinitak. And yet—Oh, damn him! she thought. Damn him!

8

In Thilambaluc, a medium-sized city four hundred miles farther along the road to Alaisor, Dekkeret, remembering something that Prestimion had told him he had done in the first months of his own reign, went out at midday into the marketplace in the gray clothes of an ordinary wayfaring man to hear what might be heard. It is useful, Prestimion had said, for the Coronal sometimes to learn at first hand what people were saying in the marketplace. The Castle atop its Mount was too far up in the sky to provide a clear enough view of the real world.

Dinitak was the only one who went with him. They slipped away in a quiet moment of the morning, Dekkeret saying nothing about what he had in mind to anyone on his staff. As for Fulkari, she had been feeling slightly ill that day, and had retired to her room at their hostelry. He did not mention his journey to her either.

Although Prestimion had told him that he had gone in disguise on these excursions, even to the extent of wigs and false mustaches, Dekkeret saw no need for any such intricate subterfuges. Prestimion, because he was such a distinctive-looking man, easily identifiable by the curious contrast between his surprisingly unprepossessing stature and his overwhelmingly kingly, commanding presence, would have run some risk of being recognized even among people who had not yet had a chance to see his portrait. The look in his eyes alone marked him for what he was.

But Dekkeret believed he was less likely to be discovered out here so far from the Castle. The new coinage showing his features had not yet been released, and in any case who would be able to identify a Coronal from his stylized face on a coin? Nor were the portraits of the new Coronal that hung in every shop-window particularly realistic; Dekkeret barely recognized his own image in them himself. Wearing rough casual garb that he had borrowed from one of the grooms traveling with the royal party, and with a shapeless cloth cap slouching across his head, he would seem like nothing more than just another brawny itinerant laborer, a big simple man who had come to town looking for work as a road-mender or a logger or something else equally fit for a man of his size and strength. He’d not get a second glance. And no one would have any reason to recognize Dinitak Barjazid at all.

The marketplace in Thilambaluc was a double-lobed oval with a cobbled roadway running up the middle between the two sectors. Everything within was crowded together higgledy-piggledy, each booth jammed up against its neighbor. In the eastern half of the market were dozens of stalls devoted to vegetables and fruits, and the butchers’ tables, fresh red meat piled everywhere and streams of blood running off. A zone given over to the sale of little sweet cakes and mild frothy beverages led to one where the tables were heaped with mounds of cheap clothing, and that was fronted by a row of rickety little cooking-stoves tended by the ubiquitous Liiman sausage-sellers.

Across the way, on the far side of the center roadway, the merchandise was of an even more varied sort: barrels and sacks of spices and dried meats; tanks of live fish; booths hung with simple glittery necklaces and bracelets; stacks of secondhand books and pamphlets, worn and frayed; mounds of wickerwork chairs and flimsy lacquered tables of the same sort, piled ten or twelve feet high; pots and pans and other kitchen implements of every kind; a corner where jugglers and other entertainers were performing; another where public scribes had their tables set out; another advertising the wares of sorcerers and wizards. Both the marketfolk and buyers were of a wide mixture of races other than human—a good many scaly Ghayrogs here, a sprinkling of ashen-hued Hjorts, the occasional towering Skandar or Su-Suheris moving through the throng.

Dekkeret could not remember the last time he had been in a public marketplace. The richly cluttered texture of this place fascinated him. It was so full, so busy. He vaguely remembered the one in Normork from his childhood as having been more spacious, the merchandise generally finer, the customers better dressed, but of course Normork was a city of

Castle Mount and this was a nondescript provincial town in the middle of nowhere.

“Well, shall we go in?” he said to Dinitak.

As he expected, nobody showed any sign of knowing who he was. He moved casually through the place, pausing at this stand to examine a cunningly arranged pyramid of smooth-skinned blue melons, at this one to sniff at some unfamiliar custardy-looking yellow fruit, at this to accept a sample pinch of savory smoked meat from its vendor. Where the crowds were particularly dense, they opened for him as crowds ordinarily will when a man of Dekkeret’s height and mass is coming through, but without any sort of deference except to his superior bulk.

He listened wherever he went, hoping to pick up someone’s opinions of the new Coronal, or some reference to having had unusually unpleasant dreams lately, or complaints about high taxation, or anything else at all that might guide him to a better understanding of daily life in the world over which he now ruled. But these people had not gone to the market for the sake of holding conversations. Aside from the constant interchanges between buyer and seller having to do with the price and quality of the merchandise, they said very little.

On the far side from where he and Dinitak had entered, where the various entertainers were performing, they saw fifteen or twenty people gathered around a gaunt, gray-bearded man in red-and-green robes who seemed to be a professional storyteller, judging by his clear, firm voice and the conspicuously placed begging-plate full of coins sitting on the ground beside him. “This man’s servants,” he was saying as Dekkeret and Dinitak approached, “would set out fine golden bowls filled to the brim with good wine, and at a signal from the great wizard the bowls would fly through the air, and offer themselves to all the passersby, and anyone who chose could drink of them at will. I saw also that the wizard was able to make statues walk, and could leap into the fire without being burned, and assume two faces at once, and sit in the air many minutes at a time with his legs folded beneath him without falling, and do many another thing that defied my understanding.”

A stocky red-haired man with a tanned, seamed face stood just to Dekkeret’s left, listening in slack-jawed awe. Dekkeret turned to him and asked, “Who is he speaking of, friend?”

“The master magus Gominik Halvor of the city of Triggoin, master. Has just come back from Triggoin himself, that one has, and is telling tales of the wondrous things he saw there.”

“Ah,” said Dekkeret. He knew that name, Gominik Halvor: from Triggoin indeed, he was, an adept of adepts among sorcerers, who had served as a magus at Prestimion’s court at the Castle long ago, before Dekkeret’s own time there. But to the best of Dekkeret’s knowledge Gominik Halvor had been dead ten years or more. Well, Dekkeret thought, a good storyteller does not have to worry about such petty factual details, so long as he pleases his audience. And the steady clink of copper coins into the man’s plate, even the occasional flashing glint of a silver piece, testified that he was doing just that.

“One day I stood in the marketplace of Triggoin, just as you are standing here with me,” the storyteller went on, “and a sorcerer appeared, a blue-furred Skandar half the size of a mountain, and took a wooden ball with several holes in it, and long ropes of sturdy twine passing through the holes, and threw it up so high that it went out of sight altogether, while he stood holding the end of the rope. Then he beckoned to a boy of twelve years who was his assistant, and ordered him to climb the rope; and up the boy went, higher and higher until he too was gone from view.

“The Skandar then called out three times to the boy to return, but the boy did not reappear. So the Skandar took from his waistband a keen-edged knife of a size like this”—and the storyteller indicated with his hands a blade that was more like a sword—“and slashed fiercely through the air with it, once, twice, three times, four, five. On the fifth slash one of the boy’s severed arms fell to the ground in front of him, and a moment later a leg, and then the other arm, and the other leg, and then, as we all gasped in amazement and horror, the head of the boy. The Skandar put the knife aside then and clapped his hands, and the boy’s torso came plummeting down out of the sky: and as we watched, the severed limbs and head at once reattached themselves to the trunk, and the boy stood up and bowed! And we were so astounded by this that we rushed forward to press whatever coins we had upon this sorcerer, not just weights or crowns, but some of us contributed five-royal pieces, even, which was the least we could offer for such a remarkable performance.”

“I think he may be giving us a subtle hint,” said Dinitak. “But five royals would be too ostentatious, perhaps. Let’s see if I have something smaller.” He scooped a handful of coins from his purse, selected a bright one-royal coin, and tossed it into the bowl. There was a little round of applause from the other onlookers. Here in the provinces, even a single royal had substantial purchasing power.

“On another day,” the storyteller continued, with a grateful look toward Dinitak, “I saw a demonstration of a related kind performed by the great magus Wiszmon Klemt, who produced a thick bronze chain of fifty yards in length and hurled it into the air as easily as you would toss your hat aloft. It remained standingly rigidly upright, as though fastened to something invisible overhead. Then animals were brought forward: a jakkabole, a morven, a kempile, a gleft, even a haigus. One by one they scrambled up the chain until they came to the very top, and there they immediately disappeared. When the last of the beasts had vanished, the magus snapped his fingers and the chain came tumbling down to land neatly coiled at his feet; but of the animals that had disappeared, nothing was seen again.”

“This is very entertaining,” said Dekkeret, “but not, I think, particularly useful. Shall we move on?”

“I suppose we should,” Dinitak agreed.

As they started up the pathway that ran past the aisle of entertainers a plump, oily-skinned man in a soiled crimson robe detached himself from the crowd and stepped in front of them. Dekkeret saw that he had a little astrological amulet of the kind called a rohilla pinned to his breast, strands of blue gold wound around a lump of pink jade. Confalume, that superstitious man, had worn one of those constantly. Around this man’s throat was an amulet of some other sort that Dekkeret could not name. A flat triangular ivory pendant inscribed with mysterious runes dangled below it. That he was a professional magus was a reasonable guess.

Which was swiftly confirmed. “Tell you your future, my master?” the man said, looking up at Dekkeret.

“Nay, I think not,” Dekkeret replied, affecting a coarse east-country inflection. The last thing he wanted in this place was a magus, even one who, like this one, was most likely a charlatan, peering into his soul. “I have me no more than a few coppers to my name, and you’d want more than that of me, eh, master?”

“Perhaps your rich friend, then. I saw him throw that big coin in the pot.”

“Nay, he is na’ interested neither,” said Dekkeret. And, to Dinitak: “Come along now, will ye?”

But the magus was not so easily put off. “The two of you for fifty weights! A mere half a crown, a third my usual price, because the fees have been so slow today. What do you say, my masters? Fifty weights, the two of you? A trifle. A pittance. And I will sketch for you a map of the road that lies ahead.”

Again Dekkeret shook his head.

Dinitak, though, laughed and said, “Why not? Let’s see what’s in our stars, Dekkeret!” And before Dekkeret could protest further Dinitak pulled out his purse again, plucked five square copper coins, ten-weight pieces, from it, and pressed them into the sorcerer’s hand. The magus, grinning triumphantly, clamped his hand around Dinitak’s wrist, peered close into Dinitak’s eyes, and began to murmur something intended to pass for a formula of divination.

Despite his misgivings Dekkeret found himself wondering what the man was going to tell them. Given his own skepticism toward all things magical and the general look of disreputability about this marketplace magus, he had no expectation at all of anything of value coming forth. But the degree of inaccuracy in the man’s predictions might be amusing. If he saw Dinitak opening a shop in Alaisor and becoming a successful merchant, say. Or undertaking a journey to some fabulous place that he had always dreamed of seeing, like Castle Mount.

The baffling thing that happened next was not amusing in the slightest, though. Halfway through the mumbled recitation of the formula the grin disappeared, and the magus abruptly halted his chant and clapped a hand over his mouth as though he were about to be sick. His bulging eyes stared out at Dinitak in an expression of absolute shock and horror and fear. It was the way one might look at someone who has just revealed himself to be the carrier of a deadly plague.

“Here,” the astrologer said. His voice was thick with dread. “Keep your fifty weights, my master! I am unable to perceive your horoscope. I have no choice but to return your money.” From a pocket of his robe he drew Dinitak’s five coins. Then, seizing Dinitak’s wrist, the magus dumped the coins back into his palm and went scuttling hastily away, glancing back a couple of times in that same horrified way before losing himself in the crowd.

Dinitak’s swarthy face was weirdly pale, and he was biting down hard on his lower lip. His eyes were wide with amazement. Dekkeret had never seen him as rattled as this. Dinitak looked stunned by the consultation’s abrupt end. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Am I so frightening? What did he see?”

9

“Thastain, with someone who’s here to meet with Count Mandralisca,” Thastain announced to the cold-eyed Ghayrog guard who stood in front of the building that once had been the procuratorial palace.

The Ghayrog gave him only the most perfunctory of flickering glances. “Enter,” he said automatically, and stepped aside.

After all this time Thastain still could not fully accept the fact that all he needed to do was speak his name and he would be admitted to the fabulous palace that once had been the home of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail. It was hard enough for him to believe that he was actually living in the city of Ni-moya at all. For a boy who had grown up in an unimportant little provincial town like Sennec, merely to visit Ni-moya was the ambition of a lifetime. “See Ni-moya and die,” the proverb went, in the part of the country that he came from. To find himself right in the heart of that greatest of all cities, living just a few hundred yards from the palace and able to walk in and out of that extraordinary building unchallenged, was a stunning thing.

“Have you ever been in Ni-moya before?” he asked the stranger that he was escorting to the Count.

“This is my first time,” the man said. He had an odd thick-tongued accent that Thastain was unable to place: Zies eesz may vfeerst tiyme. His documents listed his place of residence as Uulisaan. Thastain had no idea where that might be. Perhaps it was in some remote district on the southern coast, far down below Piliplok. Thastain knew that people from Piliplok spoke with a strange accent, and maybe those who lived even farther down the coast spoke even more strangely.

But there was very little about this visitor that Thastain did not find strange. In recent months a whole procession of curious characters had come here on business with Mandralisca. It was Thastain’s responsibility to meet them at the hostelry where most such visitors were put, conduct them to the official headquarters of the Movement on Gambineran Way, check out their appointment documents there, and lead them into the palace for their meetings with the Count. He had grown accustomed to seeing all sorts of marginal types pass through, an odd assortment of individuals who all too plainly moved along the weirder, more dimly lit edges of society. Mandralisca seemed to have a great appetite for people of that sort. This one, though, was perhaps the most curious of them all.

He was very tall and thin, almost flimsy-looking, and dressed in a peculiar way, a coarse and heavy black overjacket thickly padded with down above a light tunic of faded green silk. The look in his eyes, somehow both arrogant and uneasy at the same time, was peculiar. The eyes themselves were peculiar too, almost yellowish where they ought to have been white, and an eerie purple at their centers. Peculiar also was his face, broad and pale with small features all jammed together in the middle. The way he held his shoulders, hunched up against his ears. The way he walked, as if he suspected that his head might be in imminent danger of coming loose at the neck. Even his name: Vi-itheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp. What kind of name was that? Everything about this man was mystifying. But it was not Thastain’s job to pass judgment on Mandralisca’s visitors, only to show them to the Count’s office.

“Is an excellent city, Ni-moya,” Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp remarked, as Thastain led him down the inland side of the palace. They were passing through a gallery linking one wing and the next that had one long window of clear quartz, affording a stunning view of the metropolitan core that rose in level upon level up into the hills. “Much have I heard concerning it. Is one of best cities in world, I think.”

Thastain nodded. “The best, they say. Nothing to rival it even on Castle Mount.” He slipped easily into his tour-guide mode. Somehow that eased the tensions that this unsettling stranger had evoked in him. “—Have you had much of a chance to see the place yet? That’s the Museum of Worlds, over on that hill up there. And the Gossamer Galleria, down there to the left. You can just barely make out the dome of the Grand Bazaar from here, with the beginning of the Crystal Boulevard beyond it.”

He felt almost like a native, casually pointing out the great attractions like that to this visitor from afar. In truth Thastain was as much in awe of Ni-moya and its wonders now as when the Five Lords had moved their capital here from the Gornevon desert many months before. But in his heart he liked to pretend that he was a genuine child of the great city, quick-witted and worldly-wise and sophisticated.

When they came to the end of the quartz gallery Thastain turned left and headed out onto the covered walkway that would bring them to the riverfront side of the palace, which was Mandralisca’s sector of the building. “We go this way,” Thastain said, as the visitor started to stray off into the private quarters of the Lord Gaviral. Officially the procura-torial palace now was Gaviral’s residence, but Mandralisca had taken half the southern wing, with the best river views, for his own uses. There had been a time when the Five Lords had treated Mandralisca more or less as they treated their servants, but that time was over now. It seemed to Thastain that these days Mandralisca gave the orders and the Five Lords did pretty much as he said.

Another guard waited at the end of the walkway: a Skandar, he was, none other than Thastain’s old nemesis Sudvik Gorn, who had made such a nuisance out of himself long ago when they had gone up north to burn the keep of the Vorthinar lord. Thastain gave him the merest glance, now. The course of time had raised Thastain up to become a member of Count Mandralisca’s inner circle of aides, and Sudvik Gorn was nothing but a hallway guard.

“Visitor for the Count,” Thastain told the Skandar. And, to Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp, once again: “We go this way.” He indicated a spiral ramp leading toward a dizzying series of elbow-bend staircases that went up and up and up.

At the beginning Thastain had feared he would never learn his way around inside the procuratorial palace. But, huge though it was, he had taken the measure of it by this time.

The first time he saw it from the river it had seemed as immense as he imagined the Coronal’s castle to be, but he knew now that much of the palace’s height came from the shining white pedestal that lifted it far above the riverfront level. The host of external galleries and staircases that one viewed from below gave the place the appearance of a formidable maze, but that was misleading. The building itself, a complex series of interlocking pavilions and balconies and porches, was certainly a vast one, but its interior plan was strikingly logical and Thastain had quickly mastered the routes that traversed its interior.

Mandralisca had taken for his office the magnificent chamber in which the Procurator Dantirya Sambail had lorded it in the days when he ruled with almost regal splendor over the continent of Zimroel. Dantirya Sambail had been dead more than twenty years now—longer than Thastain had been alive—but the presence of that larger-than-life man still seemed to linger in the enormous room. The splendor of its gleaming floor, a burnished slab of pink marble inlaid with crisscrossing swirling slashes of some dazzling jet-black stone, and the shining crescent arc of the great curving desk of crimson jade, and the brilliant white wall-hangings of thick rich steetmoy fur, all spoke eloquently of the Procurator’s fabled taste for luxury.

The entire wall of the chamber on its riverfront side was a single great bubble of quartz of the finest quality, as clear as air itself. Through it one had a view of the great sweeping curve of the River Zimr, which at this point was so wide that one was just barely able to see all the way across to the green suburbs on the farther bank. A string of huge brightly painted riverboats laden with passengers and freight coursed serenely along the river’s main channel. Directly below the window, a long row of low buildings with brilliantly tiled roofs and ornate mosaic ornaments on their walls lined the river quay for a considerable distance, glittering in the midday sun: humble customs-houses, they were, which Dantirya Sambail had had redecorated at a cost of many thousands of royals so that they would be more pleasing to his eye as he looked out on them from high overhead.

The Count Mandralisca was behind his desk when Thastain entered. The little helmet of bright metal mesh that he always kept close by him was at the Count’s elbow. His other two constant companions were beside him: to his left, sorting through a pile of documents, the little bandy-legged aide-de-camp Jacomin Halefice, and to his right that shifty-eyed Suvraelinu, Khaymak Barjazid, he who designed and built Mandralisca’s thought-helmets for him.

We three, Thastain told himself, are the only people in the world that Count Mandralisca trusts—as much as he trusts anyone at all.

“Well,” Mandralisca said, with the false joviality that he often liked to affect. “It is Duke Thastain. And who have you brought me this time, my good duke?”

Back in the earliest weeks of Thastain’s time in the service of Count Mandralisca, when he was nothing more than a green boy up from the provinces, the Count, in that darkly playful way of his that could sometimes seem so threatening, had arbitrarily bestowed an honorary title of nobility on him: Count of Sennec and Horvenar. And thereafter he would often address Thastain as “Count Thastain.” It was a meaningless thing, just another example of Mandralisca’s mocking, sardonic sense of humor. Thastain knew better than to be offended by it. That was simply Mandralisca’s style, cold and often cruel, and always capricious. Thastain had quickly come to see that for the Count, coldness and cruelty and capriciousness were simply useful ways of sustaining his power and authority. There was no way he could make people love him, but engendering fear through unpredictability could be just about as effective.

Lately, though, Mandralisca had taken to calling Thastain “duke” instead. More of his capriciousness, Thastain wondered, or was it something else? Perhaps it could be a sign that he was advancing in Mandralisca’s favor. Or maybe it was simply an indication that Mandralisca remembered only that once upon a time he had amused himself by giving the boy from Sennec a make-believe title, but had forgotten which title it was.

More likely the latter, Thastain decided: though he had reason to regard himself as one of Mandralisca’s special favorites, he knew it was foolish to believe that he had any more real significance for the Count than his leather boots or the cutlery he used at dinner. Thastain understood quite well by now that he was here simply as something for Mandralisca to use. The only person whose existence held any sustained importance in Mandralisca’s mind was Mandralisca himself.

“This is Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp,” declared Thastain, stumbling over the difficult name, though he tried his best to prolong and roll the double letters as the visitor had done. “Of Uulisaan.”

“Ah. From Uulisaan,” Mandralisca repeated, savoring the word with real delight. He seemed to disappear into a mood of meditative contemplation for a moment or two. Then, to Thastain:—“Do you know where Uulisaan happens to be, dear duke?”

Thastain kept his face expressionless. This duke thing was beginning to annoy him now.

“Not at all, your excellence.”

Mandralisca glanced toward Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp, who had remained just within the arching doorway, standing hunched up against the wall in that weird awkward stiff-bodied way of his. “It is in Piurifayne, is it not, my friend? The southwestern part of the province, over on the Gonghar side?”

“That is correct, milord Mandralisca,” said Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp.

Piurifayne?

The word ran through Thastain’s mind like a fiery sword. Piurifayne was the province of the Metamorphs, the Shapeshifters, the race that had ruled the planet before the first human settlers arrived. Piurifayne, yes. Nobody ever went there; but everyone knew about it, that wild primordial rain forest in central Zimroel, lying between the mountains of the interior and the swift River Steiche, where the Shapeshifters had been compelled to live for the past seven thousand years. Lord Stiamot had ordered them to be penned up in there after completing his conquest of them in the Shapeshifter War; and there they remained, mysterious and aloof, dwelling completely apart from the other races that had come to colonize the planet that once had been theirs, and generally feared by them.

How could this man be from Piurifayne? No one but Shapeshifters lived in Piurifayne. And Shapeshifters were forbidden by ancient law to leave it, although it was common knowledge that from time to time they did, disguised as humans or sometimes as Ghayrogs, to move surreptitiously on shadowy errands through the cities of the settled world.

So that could only mean—

“Now do you understand, my good duke?” said Mandralisca, giving Thastain his most icy smile. And, to Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp: “Perhaps it would be more comfortable for you to take another form, my friend—”

“If it would be safe to do so here—” said the Metamorph, with quick glances toward Thastain, toward Jacomin Halefice, toward Khaymak Barjazid.

“They are my colleagues,” said Mandralisca grandly. “Have no fear.” And with that assurance Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp at once began to undertake the shift out of human guise.

It was something that Thastain had never seen before. He had never even dreamed that he would. Like nearly everyone he knew, he looked upon the Shapeshifters with horror and a kind of dread: terrifying, archaic creatures, unfathomable, unknowable, lurking out there in their jungles full of poisonous resentment of the people who had displaced them from their world, plotting who knew what ultimate revenge for that displacement. The thought of actually being in the same room with one made his flesh creep.

But he watched in astonishment, unable to turn his eyes away, as the Metamorph writhed and shivered within his odd, ill-fitting clothing like a creature preparing to molt its skin, and the features of his curious face seemed to grow soft and blurry and indistinct—they were actually flowing—and his hunched-up shoulders commenced a weird dance of their own, jerking and twisting about as though trying to turn at right angles to his spine—

A few moments more and the transformation was finished. The man whom Thastain had brought to this room was gone, and in his place was a different being, frail-looking, elongated and angular, with sallow, faintly greenish skin and inward-sloping eyes that had no pupils and knife-sharp cheekbones and slitlike lips and a tiny, almost invisible nose.

A Metamorph. A Shapeshifter.

Thastain still had trouble believing it: a creature out of forbidden Piurifayne, standing no more than a dozen feet away from him. Here in the office of Count Mandralisca, by express invitation of the Count himself.

The Vorthinar lord, up there in the north, had been in league with Shapeshifters—Thastain had seen one up there himself, walking patrol in front of the keep, the first and only time before this that he had. But that was one of the reasons, so he thought, that the Five Lords had deemed it desirable to break the Vorthinar lord’s power. One did not consort with Metamorphs. It was like allying oneself with demons. But now—Mandralisca himself—a Shapeshifter right here in the procuratorial palace—

Thastain looked toward Jacomin Halefice, and then toward Khaymak Barjazid. But they betrayed no signs of surprise or dismay. Either they had mastered the art of concealing such feelings in the presence of the Count, or they had already been aware of the identity of the mysterious visitor.

Mandralisca gathered the Barjazid helmet into his two cupped hands, the way one might gather up a little pile of treasured coins, and held it out in front of him. “This is our little weapon,” he said to the Metamorph, “the device with which we will free our continent from the grip of our Alhanroel masters. Our experiments with it have been quite fruitful so far.” He nodded across at Khaymak Barjazid. “We are indebted to this man for making it available to us.”

“And with this small device,” said Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp, “it is possible to reach into any mind in the world, you say?” The thick, contorted accent was gone, now that the Metamorph had resumed his own form. His voice had become silken-smooth. “And to wield power over that mind?”

“So it would appear.”

“The Coronal’s mind? The Pontifex’s?” The Metamorph paused. “Or the Danipiur’s, say?”

“It seemed to me altogether too dangerous, too provocative, to meddle with the minds of the Coronal or the Pontifex,” Mandralisca replied smoothly. “I assure you that I could do it if I chose; but I have not so chosen. I will tell you, though, that I’ve successfully reached the minds of certain members of the Pontifex’s family: his brother, his mother, his wife, his child. By way of letting him know our capabilities, so to speak.—You understand that this is in the strictest confidence, to be shared with no one other than the Danipiur herself. And as for the Danipiur—no, no, of course, I would never attempt to tamper with the mind of the great queen whose ambassador you are.”

“But you could, if you wanted to?”

“Very likely I could. But to what purpose? It would only offend and repel. The Piurivars are our friends. As you know, we regard you as allies in our great struggle.”

Thastain was as thunderstruck by that calm statement as he had been by the first revelation of the Shapeshifter’s identity. Allies? Was that what Mandralisca had in mind? Human and Metamorph, fighting side by side against the forces of the Pontifex and the Coronal?

He must, Thastain thought. Why else was this creature here? And why else would Mandralisca be speaking so respectfully of the Shapeshifter queen, or so politely calling the Shapeshifters by their own name for themselves?

“Would you like to see a little demonstration of our helmet?” Mandralisca asked pleasantly. He dangled the device in Thastain’s direction. “Here, Duke Thastain. Suppose you slip this over your head and show our friend how it functions.”

“Me?”

“Why not? You’re a quick-witted lad. You’ll pick up the trick of it in no time whatever. Here. Here.”

Thastain was aghast. He had never so much as touched the helmet. So far as he knew, no one but Mandralisca himself, and, he supposed, Khaymak Barjazid, was allowed to go near it. Using it required special training, and was said to be difficult and exhausting besides, and very risky for anyone inexperienced in its handling. He held up both his hands, palms facing outward, and said numbly, “I beg that you excuse me from this, your grace. I have no skill for such things.”

But Mandralisca was insistent. Once more he extended the hand holding the helmet toward Thastain. There was a chilly determination in his eyes that Thastain had seen all too many times before, but never aimed at him. “Here, my little duke,” Mandralisca said again. “Here.”

It would be suicide for him to put the helmet on. Was that what the Count was trying to achieve? Or was this merely one more of those little capricious games that he so very much enjoyed playing?

Thastain was still debating how to handle the situation when Khaymak Barjazid leaned toward Mandralisca and said, in a quiet, almost murmuring tone, “If I may interject something here, your grace, allow me to point out that it could be possible for a user unfamiliar with the helmet’s functions to damage it if he uses it improperly.”

That seemed to come as news to the Count. “Indeed, is that so? Well, then: we wouldn’t want to do any harm to our helmet, would we?” He caressed the little device in that fondling, loving way he had with it. “Perhaps we’ll skip the demonstration. I’m not in the mood for working with the helmet just now myself. Unless you, Barjazid—no, never mind. No demonstration.” To the Metamorph he said, “I’ll gratify your curiosity about our helmet another time. What I’ve asked you here to discuss today is the precise nature of the alliance I’ve proposed to the Danipiur.”

“She is eager to hear your offer,” said Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp.

Thastain listened in amazement verging on disbelief as Mandralisca swiftly set forth his plan for establishing the independence of the continent of Zimroel. He meant very shortly to issue a proclamation in the name of the Lord Gaviral, he said, dissolving the ancient bonds that linked Zimroel to the dominant eastern continent. At the same time a new constitution would be promulgated under which Zimroel would become a separate entity with Ni-moya as its capital and the heirs of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail as its monarchs. The Lord Gaviral would take the title of Pontifex of Zimroel, and one of his brothers, yet to be chosen, would be designated as Zimroel’s Coronal. The continent of

Suvrael, Mandralisca added, would proclaim its own independence at the same time, and would institute a separate government for itself with Khaymak Barjazid as its first king.

It was, said Mandralisca, the Lord Gaviral’s great hope that the new governments of Zimroel and Suvrael would be swiftly recognized by the leaders of Alhanroel, and that peaceful relationships among the three continents would continue as they had since time immemorial. But the Lord Gaviral was not so naive as to think that men like Prestimion and Lord Dekkeret would greet the secession with any such benign response. On the contrary, Mandralisca continued: it was much more probable that the Alhanroel government would launch a military invasion of Zimroel and attempt to restore its supremacy by force.

“That could never succeed,” Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp said unhesitatingly. “The supply-line distances are too great. It would take every crown in the imperial treasury to cover the cost of sending an army here big enough to do the job.”

“Precisely,” said Mandralisca. “And even if they tried it anyway, that army would find itself confronting the angry opposition of the billions of patriotic citizens of Zimroel. Who are loyal to the family of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail and unalterably hostile to the exploitative rule of the Pontifex. The armies of Prestimion would have to battle every step of the way, from the moment of their landing on our coast onward.”

“Ah,” said the Metamorph reflectively. “So the traditional allegiance of the people of Zimroel to the Pontifical government will melt away overnight, then. You are certain of that, Count Mandralisca?”

“Completely.”

“Perhaps you are correct.” The Metamorph indicated by his tone that such things as the loyalties of the people of Zimroel were a matter of complete indifference to him. “But in what way, I must ask, does all this concern the Danipiur and her subjects?”

“In this way,” replied Mandralisca. He leaned forward intently and pressed the tips of his fingers together. “What is the most likely place for an invading force from Alhanroel to land here? Piliplok, of course: the main port on our eastern coast. It’s the gateway to all of Zimroel, as everyone is well aware. Therefore Prestimion and Dekkeret will expect us to fortify it against an attack. And for the same reason, they’ll not choose to make their landfall at Piliplok at all.”

“There is no other place for an army to come ashore,” said the Meta-morph.

“There is Gihorna.”

An inflection that Thastain interpreted as surprise entered Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp’s voice. “Gihorna? There are no first-class ports anywhere along the whole Gihorna coast.”

“But there are some third-class ones,” said Mandralisca. “Prestimion has never been known for doing things the easy way, or the expected way. I think they’ll land at five or six places in Gihorna at once, and begin marching toward Ni-moya. They will have two possible routes. One lies straight up the coast, via Piliplok, and up the Zimr from there to the capital. But that will bring them into confrontation with the armies that they must know will be waiting there to defend against just such a Piliplok landing. The only other route, as you surely already see, is by way of the River Steiche and its surrounding valley. Which would bring them up against the borders of the province of Piurifayne.”

Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp received that statement with the same show of indifference as before. The slitted eyes displayed a look of what could almost have been boredom.

“I ask you again, what is that to us?” said the Shapeshifter. “Not even Prestimion would dare cross into Piurifayne for the sake of making war against Ni-moya.”

“Who knows what Prestimion would or would not do? But this I do know: that any incursion into the jungles of Piurifayne, a difficult proposition at best for any army no matter how well equipped, would be made fifty times harder if the Piurivars were to engage in a campaign of guerilla warfare to keep the imperial forces away from their villages. Indeed a line of Piurivar warriors positioned up and down the Steiche itself would quite probably be able to succeed in preventing the imperial army from entering Piurifayne at all. Eh, my friend? What do you think.”

Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp responded with a silence so long and intense that Thastain, listening to the colloquy in mounting disbelief, felt his ears ringing with it. Was Mandralisca serious? Was the Count actually telling an ambassador from the Danipiur that he wanted Metamorphs to go into battle in the service of the Five Lords against the Alhanroel government? Thastain’s mind was reeling. This was all like some very strange dream.

Then at last the Shapeshifter said calmly, “If Prestimion or Dekkeret were to send an army marching through our province, that would, of course, concern us greatly. But I tell you once more, I think that they would not do that. And for us to fortify our Steiche boundary for the sake of preventing them from coming across it would be an act of war against the imperial government that would have serious consequences for my people. Why should we risk it? What interest do we have in taking sides in a struggle between the Pontifex of Alhanroel and the Pontifex of Zimroel? They are equally detestable to us. Let them fight it out to their hearts’ content. We will go on living our own lives in Piurifayne, which your Lord Stiamot kindly granted to us long ago as our little sanctuary.”

“Piurifayne is in Zimroel, my friend. An independent government of Zimroel, grateful for Piurivar assistance in the war of liberation, might show its gratitude in interesting ways.”

“Such as?”

“Full citizenship for your people? The right to move freely wherever you please, to hold property outside Piurifayne, to engage in any form of commerce?—An end to all forms of discrimination against your race, is what I’m offering. Complete equality throughout the continent. Does that interest you, Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp? Would it be worth putting troops along the Steiche for?”

“It would be if we could trust your promise, Count Mandralisca. But can we? Ah, can we, Count Mandralisca?”

“You will have my oath on it,” said Mandralisca piously. “And as my good friends here will testify, my oath is my sacred bond. Is that not so, Jacomin? Khaymak? Duke Thastain, I call upon you to speak on my behalf. I am a man of honor. Is that not so, my friends?”

10

At Kesmakuran, a neat little city of perhaps half a million souls five hundred miles deeper into the west-country, with row upon row of low square-roofed houses built mainly of a handsome pinkish-gold stone, Dekkeret halted to perform an act of homage at the tomb of Dvorn, the first Pontifex. Visiting the tomb was Zeldor Luudwid’s idea. “Dvorn is greatly venerated in these parts,” the chamberlain said. “It might well be taken as sacrilege, or at the very least a serious insult, if the Coronal were to come this way and not lay a wreath on his tomb.”

“The tomb of Dvorn,” Dekkeret repeated in wonder. “Can it really be? I’ve always thought of Dvorn as a purely mythical character.”

“Someone had to be the first Pontifex,” Fulkari pointed out.

“I grant you that. He may even have been named Dvorn, I suppose. That still doesn’t mean that anything we think we know about him has any foundation in reality, though. Not after thirteen thousand years. We’re talking about someone who lived almost as long before Lord Stiamot’s time as Stiamot is before ours.”

But Zeldor Luudwid was a persuasive person in his quiet, self-effacing way, and Dekkeret knew better than to ignore his advice. As the prime carryover from Lord Prestimion’s administration, he was better versed in the minutiae of the realm than anyone else in the new Coronal’s entourage.

And, according to Zeldor Luudwid, the Pontifex Dvorn was worshipped practically as a god in this region, the alleged place of his birth. The cult of Dvorn had adherents for a thousand miles in all directions.

It was right here in Kesmakuran, so it was claimed, that Dvorn had launched his uprising against whatever chaotic pre-Pontifical government had existed in the earliest days of the occupation of Majipoor by human settlers; and here he had been buried after a distinguished reign of nearly a hundred years. Pilgrims came constantly to his tomb, said Zeldor Luudwid, and knelt before the sacred vessels in which some of his hair and even one of his teeth were preserved, and begged the great Pontifex to intercede with the Divine for the continued welfare and security of the citizens of Majipoor.

Dekkeret had heard nothing about any of that before. But it was impossible for any Coronal to make himself familiar with all the multitudinous cults that had sprung up in the world since Prankipin had first begun his policy of encouraging superstitions of every variety.

What Dekkeret did know were the legendary tales: how in a troubled time, five or six hundred years after the first human colonists had arrived on Majipoor, a provincial leader named Dvorn had assembled an army somewhere in the west-country and marched across province after province, preaching a gospel of world unity and stability and gaining the allegiance of all those who had wearied of the strife between one district and another, until he was the master of the entire continent of Alhanroel. He had given himself the title of Pontifex, using a word that had meant “bridge-builder” in one of the languages of Old Earth, and had chosen Barhold, a young army officer, to govern the world in association with him, with the title of Coronal Lord. It was Dvorn who had decreed that upon the death of each Pontifex the Coronal Lord would succeed to that title and would select a new Coronal to take his own place. Thus he saw to it that the monarchy would never become hereditary: each Pontifex would pick the best qualified member of his staff as his successor, ensuring that the world would remain in capable hands from generation to generation.

All of that was told in the third canto of the vast epic poem that was every schoolchild’s bane, Aithin Furvain’s The Book of Changes. But it was significant that Dvorn was merely a name even to Furvain. Nowhere in the third canto or anywhere else did the poet make the slightest attempt to depict him as a person. He provided no hint of what Dvorn might have looked like; he told no anecdotes that gave insight into Dvorn’s character; Dvorn existed in the poem only in his function as founder of the government and primordial giver of laws.

So far as Dekkeret was concerned, Dvorn was entirely mythical, a traditional culture-hero, a symbolic figure that someone had invented to explain the origins of the Pontifical system. Dekkeret suspected that the medieval historians, feeling a need to attach a name to that otherwise unknown warrior who had helped to bring that system into being, and whose life and deeds and even identity had long since been lost in the mists of early history, had chosen to call him Dvorn.

As Fulkari had suggested, someone had to be the first Pontifex. Let him, then, be called Dvorn. It would never have occurred to Dekkeret that an actual tomb of Dvorn might exist in some remote part of west-central Alhanroel, complete with actual physical relics of the first Pontifex (several of his teeth, they said, a knucklebone or two, and also—after thirteen thousand years!—some of his hair), or that he was worshipped in a quasi-godlike fashion by the people of the area.

Yet here was the Coronal Lord Dekkeret in Kesmakuran, standing just outside the veritable tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn, making ready to present himself before the statue of the ancient monarch and humbly ask for Dvorn’s blessing on his reign.

He felt incredibly foolish. Prestimion had never warned him that being Coronal might involve his traveling around the land kneeling before provincial idols and sacred oracular trees and all manner of other fantastic idiocies, begging for the mercy of inanimate things. He was annoyed with Zeldor Luudwid for having pushed him into this thing. But there was no backing out of it now: it was his duty as Coronal, he supposed, to participate in the beliefs and observances of his people whenever he chose to leave the tranquility of Castle Mount and come out here among them; and it did not matter how inane those beliefs and observances might be.

The tomb was a deep artificial cave that had been carved, no one seemed to know how long ago, into the side of a good-sized mountain of black basalt just outside town. A pair of odd wooden structures that looked very much like cages were affixed to the cave wall on either side of the entrance to the tomb, high off the ground and reachable only by a narrow ladder of wooden struts connected by ropes. Each cage contained a vertically mounted wooden wheel, much like the water-wheel that a miller might use.

Two young women wearing only loincloths were marching constantly upward on the paddles of these wheels, causing them to revolve without cease. Their slender naked bodies gleamed with perspiration, but they moved tirelessly, keeping a steady rhythmic pace, as though they were mere parts of the machinery about them. Their faces showed the fixed expressions of sleepwalkers; their eyes stared far off into other worlds.

Two other women dressed just as skimpily stood below, near the rope-ladders, looking up vigilantly at the pair toiling on the wheels. Dekkeret had been told earlier that a corps of consecrated women, numbering eight all told, labored here day and night to keep these wheels eternally in motion. Each of the operators of the wheel walked a shift that was many hours in length, never pausing for meals or even a sip of water. The two at the ladders were the women of the next team, waiting here ready to jump into service ahead of time in case one of the women in the cages should tire and falter even for a moment.

Dekkeret understood that it was a matter of the highest honor in Kesmakuran to serve on the wheel. Every young woman of the city aspired to be one of those chosen for a one-year term inside the wooden cages. The rite was, so he had learned, an ongoing prayer to the Pontifex Dvorn, imploring him to maintain the continuing tranquility of the commonwealth that he had created. Even the smallest interruption in their unending climb, the most trivial alteration in the rhythm of their steps, might jeopardize the survival of the world.

Dekkeret could not linger long to observe this remarkable performance, though. The time had come for him to enter the tomb. The six Guardians of the Tomb—they did not call themselves priests—stood flanking him, three to his right, three to his left. The Guardians were big men, nearly as big as Dekkeret himself, who wore black robes with scarlet trim, the Pontifical colors. They were brothers, apparently, ranging from fifty to sixty years in age, resembling one another so closely that Dekkeret had trouble remembering which one was which. He was able to tell the Chief Guardian from the others only because he was the one holding the ornately woven wreath that Dekkeret was going to place before the statue of Dvorn.

He himself had donned his robes of office for the occasion, and he was wearing the little golden circlet that was serving him in lieu of the full version of the starburst crown on this journey. Fulkari and Dinitak would not be accompanying him into the tomb; he gave them each a glance as he made ready to enter, and was grateful to them both for keeping their faces frozen in expressions of the highest seriousness. One sly little wink from Fulkari, or a quick grimace of skepticism from Dinitak, would instantly destroy the high solemnity of bearing that Dekkeret was working so hard to sustain.

He entered the tomb by way of an imposing rectangular entrance-way some twenty feet high and at least thirty feet wide. A thick carpet of sweet-smelling red petals had been laid down underfoot. Dozens of glowfloats drifting overhead provided a gentle greenish light that illuminated the elaborate pictorial reliefs that had been cut into the walls from floor to ceiling. Scenes from Dvorn’s life, Dekkeret guessed: depictions of the great monarch’s military triumphs, of his coronation as Pontifex, of his raising of Barhold to the rank of Coronal. They seemed quite well done and Dekkeret wished he could get a closer look at them. But the six Guardians were marching in a steady lockstep alongside him, faces turned rigidly forward, and it seemed best to him to do the same, so that all he saw of the reliefs was what he could glimpse out of the corners of his eyes.

And then Dvorn himself in all his grandeur and royal magnificence rose before him, a colossal figure of mellow cream-colored marble set in a great niche at the back of the cave.

The seated image of the Pontifex was ten feet high, or even more, a noble statue with its left hand resting on its knee and the right hand raised and extended toward the mouth of the cave. The expression on Dvorn’s carved face was one of great placidity and benevolence: not merely a regal face but a downright godlike one, the serene smiling features perfectly composed, calm, reassuring, all-consoling.

It was, thought Dekkeret, an utterly magnificent piece of sculpture. He was surprised that such a masterpiece was so little known beyond its own district.

This was the way one might portray the face of the Divine, he told himself—provided some artist had decided to regard the Divine as a human being rather than as the abstract and forever unknowable spirit of creation. But no one ever attempted to depict the Divine in such a literal guise. Was something like that what the unknown maker of this great work had had in mind—to show Dvorn as an actual deity? Certainly there was something almost sacrilegious about the godlike serenity with which the sculptor had endowed the face of the Pontifex Dvorn.

To the right and left of the immense statue were two smaller niches, set high on the wall of the cave, that contained large round mirror-bright bowls of polished agate. These, Dekkeret suspected, were the vessels in which the relics of the Pontifex Dvorn were kept, the hair and the teeth and the knucklebones and the rest. He did not propose to inquire about those things, though.

The Chief Guardian handed Dekkeret the wreath. It was fashioned of dried reeds of several colors and textures, braided together in a bewilderingly complex pattern that must have taken the weaver many hours to achieve, and bound every four inches or so by thin metal bands inscribed with lettering of an antique kind that was unintelligible to Dekkeret. He was supposed to place the wreath in a shallow pit that had been carved in the cave floor directly in front of the statue and set fire to it with a torch that the Chief Guardian would hand him. Then, while it smoldered, he was instructed to kneel, enter a state of contemplation, and place his soul in the care of the great founding Pontifex.

That would be an odd thing for him to do, a man who put no faith in supernatural things. But Prestimion’s words of months ago, as the two of them stood together in the vastness of the Pontifical throne-chamber in the depths of the Labyrinth, came drifting back to him now:

To the fifteen billion people over whom we rule we are the embodiment of all that is sacred here. And so they put us up on these thrones and bow down to us, and who are we to say no to that, if it makes our job of running this immense planet any easier? Think of them, Dekkeret, whenever you find yourself performing some absurd ritual or clambering up onto some over decorated seat. We are not provincial justices of the peace, you know. We are the essential mainsprings of the world.

So be it, Dekkeret thought. This was the task that faced the Coronal Lord of Majipoor today. He would not question it.

He laid the wreath in its pit, accepted the torch from the Chief Guardian, and touched the tip of the flame to the edge of the reeds.

Knelt, then. Bowed his head before the statue.

The Guardians stepped back, disappearing into the shadows behind him. Quickly Dekkeret lost all awareness of their presence. Even the endless click-clack of the turning prayer-wheels outside the cave, which he still had been noticing only moments before, faded from the screen of his perceptions.

He was alone with the Pontifex Dvorn.

Now what, though? Pray to Dvorn? How could he do that? Dvorn was a myth, a creature of fable, a vague figure out of the early cantos of The Book of Changes. Even in the privacy of his own thoughts Dekkeret was unable to bring himself to pray to a myth. He was not really accustomed to prayer at all.

He had faith in the Divine, yes. How could he not? He was his mother’s son. But it was not a faith that ran very deep. Like everyone else—even Mandralisca, perhaps—he would make small requests of the Divine in casual conversation, and give thanks to the Divine for this or that favor granted. But all of that was just in the ordinary manner of speaking. To Dekkeret the Divine was the great creative force of the universe, a distant and incomprehensible power, hardly likely to pay attention to the trifling individual requests of any one creature of that universe. Neither the urgent prayers of the Coronal Lord of Majipoor nor the panicky cries of a frightened bilantoon pursued by a ravening haigus in the forests would stir the special mercy of the Divine, who had brought all creatures into being for purposes beyond the knowing of mortal beings, and had left them to make their own way throughout their lives, until the hour had come for them to be recalled to the Source.

But still—he felt that something was happening here—something strange—

The wreath was burning now, sending up flickering bluish-purple flames and twisting coils of dark smoke. A sweet fragrance that reminded Dekkeret of the aroma of the pale golden wine of Stoienzar filled his nostrils. He breathed deeply of it. It seemed the proper thing to do. And as it flooded down into his lungs a potent dizziness came over him.

He stared for an endless timeless time at the serene stone face that loomed there before him. Stared at that wondrous face, stared, stared, stared. And suddenly it seemed necessary for him to close his eyes.

And now it seemed to him that he heard a voice within his head, one that spoke not with words but with abstract patterns of sensation. Dekkeret could not have translated any of it into specific phrases; but he was certain that there was some sort of conceptual meaning there even so, and a definite sense of oracular power. Whoever, whatever, was speaking to his mind had recognized him as Dekkeret of Normork, Coronal Lord of Majipoor, who one day would be Pontifex in the direct line of succession from Dvorn.

And it was telling him that great labors lay before him, and at the end of those labors he was destined to bring about a transformation of the commonwealth, a change in the world nearly as great as the one that Dvorn himself had worked when he brought into being the system of Pontifical government. The nature of that change was not made clear. But it would be he himself, the voice seemed to indicate, he, Dekkeret of Normork, who would work that great transformation.

What was streaming into his mind had the force of true revelation. Its force was overwhelming. Dekkeret remained motionless for what might have been weeks or months or years, bowed down before the statue, letting it fill his soul.

After a time the power of it began to ebb. He no longer sensed any substance to what he felt. He was still in contact, somehow, with the statue, but what was emanating from it now had become nothing more than a far-off inchoate reverberation that went echoing off into the recesses of his mind, boum, boum, boum, a sound that was emphatic and powerful and somehow significant, but which carried with it no meaning that he could understand. It came less and less frequently and then not at all.

He opened his eyes.

The wreath was nearly burned, now. The slim metal rings that once had bound it lay scattered amidst a thin, acrid-smelling sprinkling of ash.

Boum, once again. And after a time, again, boum. And then no more. But Dekkeret remained where he was, kneeling before the statue of Dvorn, unable or perhaps just unwilling to rise just yet.

It was all very strange, he thought: coming in here feeling like an idiot for taking part in such mummery, and then, as the event unfolded, finding himself overcome by something very close to religious awe.

As his mind began to clear he found himself reflecting on what a weird journey this trip across the continent had been. The oracle trees of Shabikant that had spoken to him, perhaps, at the moment of sunset. The astrologer in the marketplace of Thilambaluc who had taken that single look into Dinitak’s eyes and fled in horror. And now this. Mystery upon mystery upon mystery, a procession of puzzling omens and forebodings. He was out of his depth here. Suddenly Dekkeret longed to leave this place, to move onward to the coast and join up with Prestimion, good sturdy skeptical Prestimion, who would explain all this to him in rational terms. But still—still—he was held spellbound by what he had just experienced, that feeling of overwhelming awe, that eerie silent wordless voice tolling in his brain.

When he emerged from the cave it was obvious that Fulkari and Dinitak were able to tell at a glance that something unusual had happened to him in there. They came quickly to his side the way one goes to a man who seems to be about to topple to the ground. Dekkeret shook them away, insisting that he was all right. Fulkari, looking worried, asked him what had happened in the cave, but his only response was a shrug. It was not anything he wanted to talk about so soon, not with her, not with anyone. What was there to say? How could he explain something that he barely understood himself? And even that, he thought, was inaccurate. It had been, in fact, something that he had not understood at all.

11

“This very room,” said Prestimion bleakly, looking out over the sea, “was our battle headquarters in the campaign against Dantirya Sambail. Dekkeret, Dinitak, Maundigand-Klimd and my mother and I right here, with the Barjazid helmet, while you two were out in the jungle, closing in on his camp. But we were still young then, eh? Now we are these many years older, and we must fight that war all over again, it seems. How my soul rebels against the thought! How I boil with anger at those mischievous monstrous men who refuse to let the world dwell in peace!”

From behind him came the flat, broad, Piliplok-accented voice of Gialaurys: “We destroyed the master, my lord, and we will destroy the lackeys as well.”

“Yes. Yes. Of course we will. But what a filthy waste, fighting yet another war! How wearisome! How needless!” Then Prestimion managed a thin smile.—“And you really must stop calling me ‘my lord,’ Gialaurys. I know it’s an old habit, but I remind you I am Coronal no longer. The title is ‘your majesty,’ if you must. Everyone else seems to have learned that by now. Or simply ‘Prestimion’ will do, between you and me.”

“It is very hard for me to remember these courtly niceties,” Gialaurys said in a sour growling tone. His wide meaty-jowled face, ever innocent of deception of any kind, showed his annoyance plainly. “My mind is not as keen as it once was, you know, Prestimion.” And from another corner of the room came the sly chuckle of Septach Melayn.

It was a week, now, since the Pontifical party had made the ocean crossing from the Isle of Sleep to the Alhanroel mainland for Prestimion’s intended rendezvous with Lord Dekkeret. The Coronal himself was still well up the coast, according to the latest word—somewhere a little way south of Alaisor, in the vicinity of Kikil or Kimoise—but was heading toward Stoien city as quickly as possible. Another day or two, perhaps, and he would be here.

The three of them had gathered this afternoon in one of the lesser chambers of the royal suite atop the Crystal Pavilion, which was the tallest building in Stoien city, rising high up above the heart of that lovely tropical port. A two-hundred-foot-long wall of continuous windows afforded spectacular views from every room, the city and all its startling multitude of pedestals and towers on one side, the immense glass-blue breast of the Gulf of Stoien on the other.

This was one of the gulfside rooms. For the past ten minutes Prestimion had stood by that great window, staring fiercely out to sea as though he could reach all the way to Zimroel and strike Mandralisca and his Five Lords dead with his glaring eyes alone. But of course Zimroel, unthinkably far off in the west, was beyond the range of even the most terrible of glances. He wondered how high this building would have to be in order to let him actually see that far. As high as Castle Mount, he suspected. Higher.

All he could see from here was water and more water, curving away into infinity. That distant point of brightness on the horizon—could it be, Prestimion wondered, the Isle of the Lady, from which he had so recently come? Probably not. Probably even the Isle was too far to glimpse from here.

Once again he found it a burden to contemplate the vast size of Majipoor. The mere thought of it was a weight on his spirit. What madness it was to pretend that a planet so huge could be governed by just a couple of men in fancy robes sitting on splendid thrones! The thing that held the world together was the consent of the governed, who by voluntary choice yielded themselves up to the authority of the Pontifex and the Coronal. And that consent seemed to be breaking down now, at least in Zimroel. It would, apparently, need to be restored by military force. And, Prestimion asked himself, just what sort of consent was that?

Prestimion’s mood had been prevailingly dark for days, a darkness that rarely left him more than moments at a time. He could not tell how much of that he owed to the strain of so much recent travel, he who was finally being forced to admit that he was no longer young, and how much to the despair that he felt over the inevitability of a new war.

For there would be a war.

So he had told his mother weeks ago at the Isle of Sleep, and so he believed with every atom of his being. Mandralisca and his faction had to be eliminated, or the world would split asunder. The great final battle against the villainy that those people represented would be fought, if he had to lead the march on Ni-moya himself. But Prestimion hoped it would not come to that. Dekkeret is my sword now, is what he had told the Lady Therissa, and that was true enough. He himself longed for the peace of the Labyrinth. That thought astonished him even as it formed in his mind. But it was the truth, the Divine’s own truth.

A hand touched his shoulder from behind, the lightest and quickest of touches. “Prestimion—?”

“What is it, Septach Melayn?”

“Is time, I would like to suggest, for you to stop staring at the sea and come away from that window. Is time for a little wine, perhaps. A game of dice, even?”

Prestimion grinned. So many times, over the years, had Septach Melayn’s well-timed frivolity pulled him back from the brink of despondency!

“Dice! How fine that would be,” he said: “The Pontifex of Majipoor and his High Spokesman down on their knees on the floor of the royal suite like boys, rolling for the triple eyes, or the hand and the forks! Would anyone believe it?”

“I remember a time,” said Gialaurys, speaking as though to the empty air, “when Septach Melayn and I were playing tavern dice on the deck of the riverboat that was taking us up the Glayge from the Labyrinth after Korsibar had stolen the throne, and just as he rolled the double ten I looked up and there was the new star blazing in the sky, the blue-white one, so very bright, that for a time people called it Lord Korsibar’s Star. And Duke Svor came out on deck—ah, he was a slippery one, that little Svor!—and saw the star, and said, ‘That star is our salvation. It means the death of Korsibar and the rising of Prestimion.’ Which was the Divine’s own truth. That star is still shining brightly to this very time. I saw it just last night, high above, between Thorius and Xavial. Prestimion’s star! The star of your ascendance, it is, and it still shines! Look you for it tonight, your majesty, and it will speak to you and lift your heart.” Now he was facing directly toward the Pontifex. “I pray you, put all this gloom of yours aside, Prestimion. Your star is still there.”

“You are very kind,” said Prestimion gently.

He was more deeply touched than he could say. In the thirty years of his friendship with the massive, slow-moving, inarticulate Gialaurys he had never heard anything like such eloquence out of him.

But of course Septach Melayn had to puncture the moment. “Only a moment ago, Gialaurys, you told us your fine mind was losing its keen edge,” the swordsman said. “And yet here you are recalling a game of dice we played half a lifetime ago, and accurately quoting to us the exact words Duke Svor spoke that evening. Is this not most inconsistent of you, dear Gialaurys?”

“I remember what is important to me, Septach Melayn,” Gialaurys replied. “And so I recall things of half a lifetime ago more clearly than I do what I was served last night at dinner, or the color of the robe I wore.” And he glared at Septach Melayn as though, after all these decades of having been on the receiving end of the quicker man’s banter, he would gladly catch Septach Melayn up in his huge hands and snap his slender body in half. But it had ever been thus with those two.

Prestimion said, laughing now for the first time in much too long, “The wine is a good idea, Septach Melayn. But not, I think, the game of dice.” He crossed the room to the sideboard, where a few wine-flasks sat, and after a moment’s inner deliberation chose the creamy young golden wine of Stoien, that grew so old so fast it was never exported beyond the city of its manufacture. He poured out three bowls’ full, and they sat quietly for a while, slowly drinking that thick, rich, strong wine.

“If there is to be a war,” said Septach Melayn after a time, and there was an odd tension in his voice, “then I have a favor to ask of you, Prestimion.”

“There will be a war. We have no alternative but to eradicate those creatures.”

“Well, then, when the war begins,” Septach Melayn went on, “I trust you will permit me to play a part in it.”

“And me as well,” said Gialaurys quickly.

Prestimion did not find these requests at all surprising.

Of course he had no intention of granting them; but it pleased him that the fires of valor still burned so strongly in these two. Did they not understand, he wondered, that their fighting days were over?

Gialaurys, like so many big-bodied men of enormous physical strength, had never been famous for his suppleness or agility, though that had not mattered in his years as a warrior. But, as also tends to happen to many men of his build, he had thickened greatly with age, and he moved now in a terribly slow and careful way.

Septach Melayn, whip-thin and eternally limber, seemed as quick and lithe as he had been long ago, essentially unchanged by the years. But the network of fine lines around his penetrating blue eyes told a different story, and Prestimion suspected that that famous cascade of tumbling ringlets had more than a little white hair mixed now with the gold. It was hardly possible that he still could have the lightning-swift reflexes that had made him invincible in hand-to-hand combat.

Prestimion knew that the battlefield was no place for either of them these days, any more than it was for him.

Delicately he said, “The war, as I know you understand, will be Dekkeret’s to fight, not mine or yours. But he’ll be apprised of your offers. I know that he’ll want to draw on your skill and experience.”

Gialaurys chuckled heavily. “I can see us entering into Ni-moya now, sweeping all opposition aside. What a day that will be, when we go marching six abreast up Rodamaunt Promenade! And it will have been my great pleasure personally to lead the troops north from Piliplok. The invasion army will land in Piliplok, of course.—And you know, Prestimion, what we rough men from Piliplok think of those soft Ni-moyans and their eternal pursuit of pleasure. What joy it will be for us to knock down their flimsy gates and march into their pretty city!” He rose and walked about the room, making such effeminate mincing gestures that a roar of delighted laughter came from Septach Melayn. “ ‘Shall we go to the Gossamer Galleria today to buy a fine robe, my dear?’ ” said Gialaurys in a high-pitched strangled voice. “ ‘And then, I think, dinner at the Narabal Island. The breast of gammigammil with thognis sauce, how I adore it! The Pidruid oysters! Oh, my dear—!’ ”

Prestimion too was holding his sides. This sort of performance was nothing that he would ever have expected from the gruff Gialaurys.

Septach Melayn said in a more serious way, when the merriment had subsided a little, “What do you think, Prestimion? Will Dekkeret really choose to land in Piliplok, as Gialaurys says? I think there are some difficulties in that.”

“There are difficulties in anything we do,” said Prestimion, and his mood grew grim again as he contemplated the realities of the war he was so passionately determined to launch.

It was a fine brave thing to cry out for an end, at long last, to the iniquities of the Sambailids and their venomous chief minister. But he had no idea of the true depth of the Five Lords’ support in Zimroel. Suppose it was already possible for Mandralisca to assemble an army of a million soldiers to defend the western continent against an attack by the Coronal? Or five million? How would Dekkeret raise an army big enough to meet such a force? How would the troops be transported to Zimroel? Would transporting that many men even be possible? And, if so, at what a cost? The armaments needed, the ships, the provisions—

And then, the invasion itself—the glint in Gialaurys’s eyes as he spoke of rough men of Piliplok knocking down the flimsy gates of Ni-moya brought no corresponding thrills of delight to Prestimion. Ni-moya was one of the wonders of the world. Was it worth putting that incomparable city to the torch merely for the sake of maintaining the world’s present system of laws and rulers?

He would not let himself waver from his belief that it was necessary and inevitable to go to war. Mandralisca was a blight upon the world, a blight that could only spread and spread and spread if it were left unchecked. He could not be tolerated; he could not be appeased; he must be destroyed.

But, Prestimion thought gloomily, would the people of future times ever forgive him for it? He had wanted his reign to be known as a golden age. He had bent every effort toward that goal. And yet, somehow, the years of his ascendance had been marked by catastrophe upon catastrophe—the Korsibar war, the plague of insanity that followed it, the rebellion of Dantirya Sambail—and now it seemed certain that the final achievement of his reign would be either the destruction of Ni-moya or else the partition of what had been a peaceful world into a pair of mutually hostile independent kingdoms.

Both choices seemed equally hateful. But then Prestimion reminded himself of his brother Teotas, terror-stricken to the point of suicidal madness and scrambling about in a panicky haze atop some precarious parapet of the Castle. His little daughter Tuanelys, writhing in fear in her own bed. And how many other innocent people across the world, random victims of Mandralisca’s malevolence?

No. The thing had to be done, no matter the cost. He forced himself to harden his soul around that thought.

As for Gialaurys and Septach Melayn, they were already caught up in the anticipation of the glorious military campaign that they hoped would cap their years. And were, as usual, disagreeing: Prestimion heard Septach Melayn, his eyes agleam, saying, “Is utterly idiotic, my dear friend, the whole idea of landing at Piliplok. Don’t you think Mandralisca can figure out that that’s where we’d have to come ashore? Piliplok’s the easiest port in the world to defend. He’ll have half a million armed men waiting for us at the harbor, and the river behind them blockaded by a thousand ships. No, sweet Gialaurys, we’ll have to put our troops ashore well south of there. Gihorna’s the place, say I. Gihorna!”

Gialaurys screwed his face into a mask of contempt. “Gihorna’s a wasteland, a dismal swamp, uninhabitable, altogether abominable. The Shapeshifters themselves won’t go near the place. Mandralisca won’t even need to fortify it. Our men will sink into the mud and vanish as soon as they step out of their landing-craft.”

“On the contrary, my dear Gialaurys. It’s precisely because the Gi-horna coast is so unappealing that Mandralisca is unlikely to think we’ll land there. But we can, and will. And then—”

“—And then we march north for thousands of miles up the side of the continent to Piliplok, which according to you we should avoid doing because it is the easiest port in the world to defend and Mandralisca’s army will be waiting for us there, or else we have to turn west right into the dark jungles of the Shapeshifter reservation and head for Ni-moya that way. Do you really want that, Septach Melayn? To send the whole army into the perils of unknown Piurifayne on its way north? What kind of insanity is that? I’d rather take my chances on a straightforward Piliplok landing and fight whatever battle we have to fight there. If we follow the jungle route the filthy Metamorphs will pounce on us and—”

“Stop it, both of you!” Prestimion said, in a tone of such vehement insistence that Septach Melayn and Gialaurys both turned toward him wide-eyed. “All this arguing is completely pointless. Dekkeret is the commanding general who will fight this war. Not you. Not me. These matters of strategy are for him to decide.”

They continued to stare at him. They both looked shaken; and not only, Prestimion thought, on account of the harshness with which he had just spoken to them. It was his abdication of command, he suspected, that amazed them so. That was not at all like the Prestimion they had known all these years, to cut off this kind of debate by saying that such a matter of high policy was outside his jurisdiction. He was amazed at it himself.

But Dekkeret was Coronal now, not Prestimion; Dekkeret was the one who would have to prosecute this war; it was up to Dekkeret to devise the best way to go about it. Prestimion, as the senior monarch, could offer advice, and would. But it was Dekkeret to whom the ultimate responsibility for the war’s success must fall, and the final word on strategy had to be his.

Prestimion told himself that he was content with that. The system of government to which he was dedicated, the age-old system that had worked so well since Dvorn the Pontifex had devised it, required it of him. So long as Dekkeret, his chosen successor as Coronal, conducted the war bravely and effectively, it was right and proper for Prestimion himself, as Pontifex, to retire to a secondary role in the conflict. And Prestimion had no doubt that Dekkeret would.

In a quieter tone he said, “A little more wine, gentlemen?”

Someone was knocking at the door, though. Septach Melayn went to open it.

It was the Lady Varaile, who had gone off for a time to be with the children. Tuanelys was still troubled by dreams; and Varaile herself looked careworn and weary, suddenly older than her years. Merely to see her in this condition was enough to inflame Prestimion’s wrath all over again: he would kill Mandralisca with his own hands, if ever he had the chance.

She was holding a slip of paper. “There’s been a message from Dekkeret,” she said. “He’s in Klai, less than a day’s journey away. And hopes to be here tomorrow.”

“Good,” Prestimion said. “Excellent. Did he have anything else to say?”

“Only that he sends the Pontifex his love and respect, and looks forward to his reunion with him.”

“As do I,” said Prestimion warmly.

He realized, suddenly, how very tired he was of the responsibilities of great power, and how much he had come to depend on Dekkeret’s youthful vigor and strength. It would be good to see him, yes. And especially good to discover how he, Dekkeret, planned to cope with this crisis. For that is not my task but his, thought Prestimion, and how glad I am of that!

A time will come when you’ll be eager to be Pontifex, Confalume had told him once, in the old Pontifex’s rooms in the Labyrinth just a few days before his death. Yes. And now it had. For the first time Prestimion understood to the depths of his spirit what the old man had been talking about that day.

12

The last time Dekkeret had been in Stoien city had been in the second or third year of Prestimion’s reign as Coronal, a time when he was merely an earnest young newcomer to the inner circles of Castle Mount without the faintest expectation of becoming Coronal himself. Stoien awakened old memories for him, and not all of them were fond ones.

The eerie, unforgettable beauty of the city, matchlessly situated along a hundred miles of lovely white beaches here on the rim of the Stoienzar Peninsula: that had remained fresh in his mind all these years. Nor had Stoien changed in any way. Its skies were still cloudless. Its curious buildings, rising from the peninsula’s flat terrain on artificial platforms anywhere from ten feet in height to hundreds, still dazzled the eye as they had before; its lush vegetation, the omnipresent denseness of bushes with leaves brilliant with irregular bursts of indigo and topaz and sapphire, of cobalt and claret and vermilion, still set the soul ablaze with delight. Such damage as had been done by the fires that madmen had set during the chaos of the insanity plague had long since been repaired.

But it was in Stoien that Dekkeret had taken leave for the last time of his dear friend and mentor Akbalik of Samivole, Akbalik who had been his guide in his earliest years in Prestimion’s service at the Castle. Akbalik whom Dekkeret had loved more than any other man, even Prestimion—Akbalik who in all probability would be Coronal now, if he had lived—it was here to Stoien that Akbalik had come, limping and in pain from the swamp-crab bite that he had suffered while hunting for the fugitive Dantirya Sambail in the steaming jungles east of the city, and which would kill him not long afterward. “The wound is nothing,” Akbalik told Dekkeret when Dekkeret arrived in Stoien after a voyage to the Isle, to which he had gone bearing urgent messages for Lord Prestimion. “The wound will heal.”

But perhaps Akbalik had already known that it would not, for he had also exacted from Dekkeret an oath promising that he would speak out against anything that Lord Prestimion might want to do that would put his life at risk, such as chasing after Dantirya Sambail into the same jungles where Akbalik had been bitten: “No matter how angry you make him, no matter what risks to your own career you run, you must keep him from doing anything so rash.” Which Dekkeret had sworn, though inwardly he felt it should be Akbalik’s task, not his, to say such things to the Coronal; and then Akbalik had set out eastward from Stoien across Alhanroel, escorting the Lady Varaile—pregnant then with the future Prince Taradath—back to Castle Mount. But he made it no farther than Sisivondal on the inland plateau before the poison in his wound killed him.

All that was long ago. Now the winds of fortune had made Dekkeret Coronal. Prince Akbalik of Samivole was remembered only by middle-aged folk. The only Prince Akbalik of whom most people were aware was Prestimion’s second son, named in the other Akbalik’s honor. But the sight of Stoien’s strange and wondrous myriad of towers brought that first Akbalik, that calm, wise, gray-eyed man who had meant so much to Dekkeret, vividly back to life in his memory, and a great sadness came over him at the recollection.

To make it even worse, Prestimion and his family were settled in the very same lodgings they had had on that earlier occasion, the royal suite of the Crystal Pavilion, and they had put Dekkeret and his companions up there also. Nothing could have been better designed to force him to relive the final exhausting moments of the war against Dantirya Sam-bail, when Prestimion, making use of the Barjazid helmet, had struck against the Procurator from this very building, aided wherever possible by Dinitak and Maundigand-Klimd and the Lady Therissa and Dekkeret himself.

But there was no other choice, really. The Crystal Pavilion was Stoien’s premier building, the only place in the city suitable to house a visiting monarch.—Or, in this case, a pair of monarchs: for here were Coronal and Pontifex both in Stoien at the same time, a thing that never had happened before, and that had, so Dekkeret learned before he had been in Stoien more than ten minutes, thrown the city administration into such a state of panicky confusion that they would need the rest of their lives to recover from it.

It was fairly late in the evening when Dekkeret and his party arrived. He was caught a little off balance by the discovery that Prestimion wanted to meet with him at once. Dekkeret had had a hectic journey down the coast from Alaisor—he had not anticipated that Prestimion would come so quickly from the Isle to the mainland—and he begged an hour’s respite, or two, to rest and cleanse himself from the dust of the road before seeing the Pontifex.

Fulkari wondered why it was necessary to have such an immediate conference. “Is it really so urgent? Can’t we be allowed some time for dinner first, and a night’s sleep?”

“Perhaps there have been developments in Zimroel that I don’t know about,” Dekkeret said. “But I think not. This is simply his nature, love. Everything is urgent to Prestimion. He is the most impatient man alive.”

She accepted that grudgingly, and when he had bathed he went upstairs to Prestimion’s rooms. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys were there with him, which Dekkeret had not expected.

Nor did he expect the swiftness with which the Pontifex swept him toward the point of the meeting. Prestimion embraced him warmly, as a father might embrace a long-lost son, but almost at once they were deep into a discussion of the matter of Zimroel. Prestimion cared hardly at all to hear about Dekkeret’s journey across the continent, his odd adventures in Shabikant and Thilambaluc and the other obscure stops along his westward route. Two or three brusque questions, followed by quick interruptions of Dekkeret’s replies, and then they were talking of Mandralisca and the Five Lords, and how Prestimion believed the crisis in Zimroel must be resolved.

Which was, Dekkeret rapidly learned, by sending a great army across the sea—an army led in person by the Coronal Lord Dekkeret—to set things to rights there by force, if need be.

“At long last we must break this Mandralisca, and break him so that he can never recover from it,” said Prestimion. As he uttered those words his features underwent an extraordinary transformation, his intense sea-green eyes now strangely aflame with a cold fury that Dekkeret had never seen in them before, his thin lips tightening into a taut grimace, his nostrils flaring with an astonishing vindictive rage. “Let there be no mistake about it: we have to destroy him, regardless of the cost, and all those who follow his banner as well. There is no hope of peace in the world so long as that man continues to breathe.”

Prestimion’s tone was an extraordinarily belligerent one, uncompromising, fierce. Dekkeret was taken aback by that, though he did his best to hide his surprise and dismay from the Pontifex. Surely Prestimion knew, better than any man alive, what it meant for there to be civil war on Majipoor. Yet here he was, trembling with barely contained wrath, instructing his Coronal to set all of Zimroel ablaze, if necessary, for the sake of ending the Sambailid rebellion!

Perhaps I am misunderstanding him, Dekkeret thought, hoping against all probability.

Perhaps he is not advocating actual warfare at all, but only a grand show of imperial pomp and force, under cover of which Mandralisca can be peacefully encircled and removed.

It was Dekkeret himself who had first suggested, some months earlier, that it might be necessary for him to go to Zimroel and make an end to such unrest as was brewing there. And Prestimion had agreed that that might be a good idea. But it was Dekkeret’s impression that they had both been thinking of something along the lines of a grand processional: the Coronal making a formal state visit to the western continent, with all the pageantry that a visit of that sort entailed, and thereby reminding the people of Zimroel of the ancient covenant under which all regions of the world lived together in peace. During that visit Dekkeret would be able to determine the strength of Mandralisca’s insurrection and, through the power and authority of his mere presence, take steps—political steps, diplomatic steps—to bring it to a halt.

But Prestimion had spoken just now of sending an army—a great army—to Zimroel to deal with Mandralisca.

There had never been any talk, so far as Dekkeret recalled, of his undertaking the Zimroel journey at the head of any sort of military force. When had Prestimion’s thinking shifted from the use of peaceful means against the rebels to one of all-out war? Dekkeret wondered what had turned the Pontifex so suddenly into such a fire-breather. No one had greater reason to hate war than Prestimion, and yet—yet—that look in his eyes—the angry crackle of his voice—could there be any doubt of his meaning? There must be war, was the essence of what Prestimion was saying. And you are the one who will wage it for us. It sounded very much like an order: a direct command from the senior monarch.

Dekkeret wondered how he was going to cope with that.

Certainly Mandralisca had to be removed: no question of that. But was war really the only way? Suddenly Dekkeret found his mind aswirl with a torrent of roiling conflicts. War was as repugnant a concept to him as it was to any sensible being. It had never occurred to him that his reign might begin, as Prestimion’s had, on the battlefield.

He glanced quickly about for guidance toward Septach Melayn, toward Gialaurys. But Gialaurys’s jowly face was rigidly set, a bleak, stony mask of icy determination, and even the flippant and sportive Septach Melayn had a strange look of seriousness about him just now. They were both of them resolved on war, Dekkeret realized. Perhaps these two, Prestimion’s oldest friends, were the very ones who had turned the Pontifex onto that course.

Cautiously Dekkeret said, hoping Prestimion would not notice the ambiguity of his phrasing, “I give you my pledge, your majesty, that I will do whatever must be done to restore the rule of law in Zimroel.”

Prestimion nodded. He looked calmer now, his face less flushed than it had been a moment before, some of the tension gone from it. “I’m confident that you will, Dekkeret. And so far as a specific plan of action goes—?”

“As soon as possible, majesty.” More ambiguity, but Prestimion did not appear to find that troublesome. “It would be unwise for me to rush toward decisions just now. Your brother’s death deprived me of my High Counsellor, and I’ve had no opportunity to choose another. And therefore, your majesty—”

“You are being very formal with me today, Dekkeret.”

“If I am, it is because we are discussing great matters of war and peace. You have been my friend for many years; but you are also my Pontifex, Prestimion. And”—he gestured toward Septach Melayn—“we are in the presence of your High Spokesman as well.”

“Yes. Yes, of course. This is serious business, and calls for a serious tone.—By all means, Dekkeret, take a few days to think things over.” Prestimion smiled for the first time in the course of the meeting. “Just so long as the path that you choose is one that will rid me of Mandralisca.”

Fulkari must have seen at once, when Dekkeret returned to their rooms on the floor just below Prestimion’s, what an effect his meeting with the Pontifex had had on him. Quickly she drew a bowl of wine for him and waited without speaking while he drank it down.

Then she said, “There’s trouble, isn’t there?”

“Apparently so.”

He could barely bring himself to speak. He felt a little dizzy from weariness, from hunger, from the strain of the strange, tense encounter.

“In Zimroel?”

“In Zimroel, yes.”

Fulkari was staring at him oddly. He had never seen such a look of profound concern in those lovely gray eyes of hers. Dekkeret knew that he must be a terrible sight. His whole body felt clenched. A throbbing had begun behind his eyes. His jaw muscles were aching: too much insincere smiling, he supposed. He accepted a second bowl of wine from her and drank it nearly as swiftly as he had the first.

“Do you want to talk about it at all?” she asked gently, when some time had gone by in silence.

“No. I can’t. I can’t, Fulkari. These are high matters of state.”

Dekkeret had moved to the window now, and stood with his back to her, looking out into the night. All the mysterious beauty of Stoien city lay spread out before him, the slender buildings on their lofty brick pedestals, the variations of high and low, the artificial hills rising in the distance, the dazzling abundance of tropical vegetation. Fulkari, somewhere on the other side of the room, said nothing. He knew that he had wounded her with the sharpness of his words. She was his life’s companion, after all. She was not yet his wife, but she would be, whenever the pressures of this unexpected crisis relented long enough for a royal wedding to take place. And yet he had spoken to her as though she were some casual amusement of the evening, with whom it would be unthinkable to share the slightest detail of what had passed between the Pontifex and the Coronal. He realized that he was asking her to bear all the burdens of being the royal consort without making her privy to any of the daily challenges of his task.

He let a couple of moments go by.

Then he said, “All right. There’s really no sense in hiding it from you. Prestimion is so upset about this Mandralisca affair—this rebellion—that he intends to put it down by force. He’s talking about sending an army into Zimroel to crush it. Not even an ultimatum first, if I understood him correctly: just invade and attack.”

“And you disagree, is that it?”

Dekkeret swung around to face her. “Of course I disagree! Who would lead that army, do you think? Who’d be in charge of putting troops down in Piliplok and heading up the river to Ni-moya? It isn’t Prestimion who’ll be doing that, Fulkari. It isn’t Prestimion who’ll stand in front of the gates of Ni-moya and demand that they be thrown open, and who will have to smash them down if they’re not.”

She was regarding him now in a steady, level way. Her voice was calm as she said, “Of course. Such things would be the Coronal’s responsibility. I understand that.”

“And do you think the people of Zimroel are going to greet an invading army with open arms, and love and kisses?”

“It would be an ugly business, I agree, Dekkeret. But what choice is there? I know a little of what Dinitak’s been telling you—the helmet that this man Mandralisca uses, the things he does with it, the way he’s stirred up those five ghastly brothers to proclaim the independence of Zimroel. What else can the Pontifex do, in the face of open rebellion, but send an army in to straighten things out? And if there are casualties—well, how can that be helped? The commonwealth must be preserved.”

Now it was his turn to stare.

What he saw was a Fulkari that he had never fully seen before, the Lady Fulkari of Sipermit, a woman of high aristocratic pedigree, who traced her ancestry back through the generations to Lord Makhario. Of course she would see nothing wrong with putting down the Sambailid rebellion by the use of armed might. It came to him with the sudden force of revelation that after all these years of life at the Castle, even after having become Coronal himself, he was seeing for the first time, really seeing, the essential difference between the aristocrats of the Mount and a commoner like himself.

But he said nothing of that. He replied simply, “I don’t want to make war on Zimroel. I don’t want to kill innocent people, I don’t want to burn towns and villages, I don’t want to knock down the gates of Ni-moya.”

“And Mandralisca?”

“Must be stopped. Destroyed, to use Prestimion’s word. I have no quarrel with that. But I want to find some other way to bring it about, something short of waging total war against the people of Zimroel.” Dekkeret looked toward the sideboard and the remaining wine, but decided against taking a third bowl. “I’m going to send for Dinitak. I need to talk with him.”

“Now?” Fulkari asked, giving him a look of mock horror.

“He’ll have valuable things to say. He’s as close to a High Counsellor as anyone I have right now, Fulkari.”

“You also have me. And I give you this bit of high counsel: it’s two and a half hours now since we arrived in this place, or a little more, and we haven’t managed to find time to have anything to eat yet. Food is a good thing when one is hungry. Food is important. Food is a pleasing concept.”

“We’ll invite him in to join us, then.”

“No, Dekkeret! No.”

“What’s this? Do we have open defiance here?” he said, more amused by her audacity than annoyed.

Fulkari’s eyes also were flickering with a gleam of amusement. “That might be the word for it. Outside this room you are my Coronal Lord, yes, but in here—here—oh, Dekkeret, don’t be so foolish! You can’t be Coronal your every waking moment. Even a Coronal needs some rest, and we’ve been traveling all day. You’re too tired to think usefully about these things now, or to discuss them with Dinitak. I say let’s have dinner sent in, at long last. And then let’s go to bed.” A different sort of gleam entered her eye now. “Sleep on all this. Pray for a useful dream. You can talk to Dinitak in the morning.”

“But Prestimion is expecting—”

“Shush.” Her hand covered his mouth. She pressed herself close against him, and despite himself he slipped his arms around her and let himself melt into her embrace. Her lips rose to meet his. His hands traveled down the length of her smooth, slender back.

Fulkari is right, he thought. Nothing requires me to be Coronal my every waking moment.

Dinitak can wait. Prestimion can wait. And Mandralisca can wait as well.

In the night, as Dekkeret slept, fragments of memory came floating up out of the deep well of his spirit and went dancing about in his mind, stray bits and pieces out of the recent past that seemed to be trying to assemble themselves into some coherent whole.

***

—He is in Shabikant, kneeling before the two oracular trees, the ancient Trees of the Sun and the Moon. And from those trees comes the faintest of sounds, a far-off rusty grinding sound, as though the trees after the silence of ages are trying to muster their powers once more and speak out to the newly crowned king and tell him something he must know.

—He is in Kesmakuran, at the tomb of Dvorn the first Pontifex, this time kneeling before the ancient monarch’s great smiling statue, and the sweet hazy smoke of the herbs burning in the pit before him fills his lungs and invades his mind, and he closes his eyes and hears a voice within his head speaking in some strange wordless way, telling him, until it all dissolves into a meaningless boum, boum, boum, that he is destined to bring about great change, that he will work a transformation in the world nearly as great as that which was worked by Dvorn himself when he created the Pontificate.

—He is in the marketplace at Thilambaluc, he and Dinitak, and a tawdry marketplace astrologer is telling Dinitak’s fortune for a price of fifty weights, but the fortune-telling has hardly begun when the man’s eyes bulge with shock and alarm and he thrusts Dinitak’s coins back into his hands, claiming that he is unable to offer a prediction of his future and will not take his money, and runs swiftly away. “I don’t understand,” Dinitak says. “Am I so frightening? What did he see?”

—He has been wandering the Castle alone in the first days of his reign, and he is standing outside the judgment-hall that Lord Prestimion built, and the Su-Suheris magus Maundigand-Klimd comes upon him and asks for a private audience, and tells him that he has had a mysterious revelation in which he saw the Powers of the Realm gathered before the Confalume Throne to perform some ritual of high importance, but a mysterious fourth Power was present in the Su-Suheris’s vision along with the Pontifex and the Coronal and the Lady of the Isle. Dekkeret is perplexed by that, for how can there be a fourth Power of the Realm? And Maundigand-Klimd says, “I have one other detail to add, my lord.” The aura of that unknown fourth, the Su-Suheris declares, carries the imprint of a member of the Barjazid family.

In Dekkeret’s dreaming mind these fragments of memory drifted round and round and round again, until suddenly they were united into a single strand and the pattern came clear—the mysterious distant sound coming from the shifting roots of the oracular trees, the wordless words of the statue of the first Pontifex, the fear in the eyes of the marketplace astrologer, the revelation that had been visited upon Maundigand-Klimd—

Yes.

He sat upright, wide awake, as awake as he had ever been, heart pounding, sweat streaming from every pore.

“A fourth Power!” he cried. “A King of Dreams! Yes! Yes!”

Fulkari, lying beside him, stirred and opened her eyes. “Dekkeret?” she asked foggily. “What is it, Dekkeret? Is something wrong?”

“Up! Bathe yourself, dress, Fulkari! I need to speak with Dinitak immediately.”

“But it’s the middle of the night. You promised, Dekkeret—”

“I promised to sleep on it, and to pray for a useful dream. And so I have, and the dream has come. And brought me something that can’t wait until morning.” He was out of bed and searching for his robe. Fulkari was sitting up, now, blinking, rubbing her eyes, muttering to herself. He kissed her lightly on the tip of the nose and went out into the hall to find the steward of the night.

“Get me Dinitak Barjazid,” Dekkeret called. “I want him right away!”

It seemed to take no time at all for Dinitak to arrive. He was fully dressed and entirely awake. Dekkeret wondered whether he had been to sleep at all. Dinitak was such an ascetic in so many ways: sleep must seem a waste of time to him.

“I would have summoned you right after I met with Prestimion,” Dekkeret began, “but Fulkari was able to talk me into waiting until I had had a chance to rest a little while. It was just as well I did.”

Quickly he sketched for Dinitak a summary of his conference with

Prestimion the night before. Dinitak seemed surprised at none of it, neither Prestimion’s unconcealed hatred for Mandralisca nor the Pontifex’s fierce desire to destroy the Sambailid rebellion by force of arms. It was, he said, exactly what one would expect of a man who had been tried by the Sambailid clan as the Pontifex Prestimion had been tried.

“I tell you bluntly, I detest the idea of going to war against Zimroel,” Dekkeret said. “The Lady Taliesme surely will be opposed to it also. I think Prestimion secretly feels the same way.”

“I suspect you may be right there. He has no love for war.”

“But he’s so troubled by the attacks on his own family that obliterating Mandralisca is his highest priority and he doesn’t care how the job gets done. Go to Zimroel, Dekkeret, he said to me. Take the biggest army you can. Set things to rights there. And destroy Mandralisca. War is what he means, Dinitak. It’s my hope that I can get him to soften his mind on this.”

“You will have a struggle there, I think.”

“I think so too. The Pontifex is not famous for his patience. He feels that his reign as Coronal was stained by the scheming of his enemies, and he believes, probably rightly, that this man Mandralisca has been behind most or perhaps all of the trouble. Now that trouble has burst out again, he wants to be rid of Mandralisca, once and for all. Well, who doesn’t? But war, to me, is a last resort. And I’d be the one who would have to command the troops, after all, not Prestimion.”

“That would not matter to him. You are the Coronal. The Pontifex decrees policy, and the Coronal carries out the decrees. It has always been thus.”

Dekkeret shrugged. “Nevertheless, if I can avoid this war, I will, Dinitak. I’ll go into Zimroel, yes. And I’ll see to it that Mandralisca’s days of troublemaking are brought to an end, just as Prestimion wants. It’s what happens after Mandralisca’s out of the picture that I want to discuss with you now.”

The bedroom door opened and Fulkari emerged, dressed in a handsome green morning robe. She gave Dinitak an amiable smile, as if to say that she saw nothing wrong with Dekkeret’s holding a policy conference at this hour of the night. Dekkeret threw her a grateful wink. Quietly she took a seat by the window. The first faint purplish streaks of dawn were visible in the east.

“Peacefully or otherwise,” Dekkeret said, “the Mandralisca problem has been solved, let us assume. The uprising of the five Sambailids has been curbed, and they’ve been made to see that they had better not get such ideas again. Without Mandralisca to do their thinking for them, they probably won’t. All right. The question that will remain, Dinitak, is this: what can we do to prevent future Mandraliscas from arising? He and his master Dantirya Sambail have given the world an entire generation of trouble. We can’t let anything like that happen again. And so—an idea, a very strange idea, in the middle of the night—”

13

“You are a duke?” the Shapeshifter asked, as Thastain led him from Mandralisca’s office. “Truly, a duke? You are so young to be a duke.”

Thastain grinned. “It amuses him to call me that. Or count, sometimes: he calls me that too. I’m not a duke or a count of anything, though. My father was a farmer in a place called Sennec, west of here. He died and we couldn’t pay the debts and we lost the farm, and I went into the service of the Five Lords.”

“But he calls you a duke,” said Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp. “You are a farmer’s son, and he calls you a duke. It is only a joke, you say. A strange joke, is what I think. It seems almost to be a kind of mockery. I do not understand human jokes. But, then, why should I? Am I in any way human?”

“Only in your appearance right now,” Thastain replied. “But of course that can change.—Come this way, sir. Down these steps, if you will.”

I am having a polite conversation with a Metamorph, he thought, astounded. I just called him ‘sir’. Life held no end of amazements, it seemed.

As his meeting with Mandralisca ended, the ambassador from the Danipiur—for that was what he was, Thastain realized, the ambassador from the Shapeshifter queen—had reverted to his assumed human form for the journey back to his lodgings. So now he was a peculiar-looking long-legged man once again, who walked as though he had learned how to walk only last week and spoke with a thick buzzing accent that was a struggle for Thastain to penetrate. It seemed to him that Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavistheyp was almost as strange in pseudo-human guise as when he was wearing his own form.

Like any farm boy of northern Zimroel, Thastain had been raised to fear and loathe the Shapeshifters. They were the dread alien beings of the Piurifayne jungles to the southeast, who seethed with hatred over the loss of their world to human invaders thirteen thousand years before, and would never rest until they had somehow recaptured control of it. Though Lord Stiamot had confined them to their rain-forest reservation, everyone knew that their form-changing abilities made it possible for them to slip out of Piurifayne at will and go secretly among humans, working every manner of mischief: poisoning wells, stealing mounts and blaves, kidnapping babies to be raised as slaves in their jungle villages. Or so Thastain had grown up believing.

He had never spoken to a Metamorph before, not knowingly. He had never so much as seen one at close range. And now—Come this way, sir. Down these steps, if you will. Wonder of wonders. Come this way, sir.

They emerged from the procuratorial palace into the clear, bright light of another perfect Ni-moyan day. The hostelry where Mandralisca kept his out-of-town visitors was a ten-minute walk away from the river—up the hill past the Movement headquarters and the apartment building where Thastain himself lived, turn left, enter an underground passageway that quickly turned into a broad stone staircase going up to the next level inland. And there was the hostelry, a great white tower, as most of the buildings of this sector of Ni-moya were, standing in a row of similar towers that formed a solid phalanx along the street known as Nissimorn Boulevard. Four of the Five Lords had mansions farther down Nissimorn Boulevard, where the apartment towers gave way to the private dwellings of the very wealthy. Everyone knew Nissimorn Boulevard. It was such a famous street that when he first saw it Thastain wondered if his feet would begin tingling as they came in contact with its pavement.

“The Count Mandralisca makes jokes of you,” the Metamorph went on as they ascended the stone staircase, “but even so you are one of his most important people. Is that not so, that you are a close aide?”

“One of the closest. You saw the other two just now. Jacomin Halefice, Khaymak Barjazid, and I: we are his inner circle, the people he most trusts.” It was the truth, more or less, Thastain thought. The Count was more at ease with Halefice and Barjazid and him than with anyone else. He had told them things that he had kept secret from everyone all his life, about his childhood, his father, his service with Dantirya Sambail. That had to signify a certain closeness.

But Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp said, startling Thastain with the accuracy of his perception, “You are the people he most trusts, yes, but how much does he trust you? Or anyone? And how much do you trust him?”

“I can’t speak to any of that, sir.”

“He is a difficult man, I think, your Count Mandralisca. Proud, suspicious, dangerous. He offers us an alliance. He makes us promises.”

Thastain saw what was going on now. He maintained an uneasy silence.

The Shapeshifter said, “We have not done well by the promises of your people in the past. There were Pontifexes and Coronals who swore to make our lives better, to grant us this privilege and that one that had been taken from us by Lord Stiamot, to permit us to come forth freely from our lands. You see how we live now.”

“Count Mandralisca is neither a Pontifex nor a Coronal. The thing that he seeks is to free the people of this continent from the rule of such kings as those. He means all the people of this continent, your people included.”

“Perhaps so,” the Shapeshifter said. “And he is an honorable man, would you say, your Count Mandralisca?”

Honorable?

That word was not, thought Thastain, the first one that would come to mind in describing Mandralisca. Cold-hearted, yes. Cruel, maybe. Frightening. Fierce. Determined. Ruthless. But honorable? Honorable? Thastain had known a few unquestionably honorable men in his Sennec days, good, strong, uncomplicated men, whose word was their bond. Liaprand Strume, for one, the storekeeper, who would always allow more credit to someone in trouble. Safiar Syamilak, his father’s bailiff, the devoted guardian of their lands. And the big red-bearded man with the farm just upriver from theirs, the one who had cracked his back lifting the wagon that had fallen on that little boy—Gheivir Maglisk, that was his name. Three honorable men, no doubt of that. It was hard to see what Count Mandralisca had in common with those three.

On the other hand it was not his business to be speaking harshly of Count Mandralisca to this Metamorph, or to anyone else. It was Mandralisca whom he served, not the Metamorphs. If this creature wanted to find out how trustworthy Mandralisca might or might not be, he would have to do it on his own.

“The Count is an extraordinary man,” Thastain replied finally. No lie, that. “When this land of ours is freed at last from the oppression of the Pontifexes, you’ll see how well Count Mandralisca keeps his promises.” Which was also the truth, for what it was worth.—“Look there, sir,” Thastain said, desperately searching for some distraction. “How the early-afternoon light strikes the Crystal Boulevard.”

“Is so very beautiful, yes,” said Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp thickly, shading his strange eyes against the brilliant stream of radiance that batteries of revolving reflectors summoned from the Crystal Boulevard’s shining paving-stones. “Is the greatest of cities, your Ni-moya. I am thankful to your Count for permitting me to come here. Is my hope someday to bring my clansfolk here to see it as well, when your Count has won his war against the Pontifex and the Coronal. For such his promise is, that we will be allowed to come.”

“Such his promise is, yes,” Thastain agreed.

Jacomin Halefice was in the Movement headquarters building when Thastain returned to it after delivering the Shapeshifter to his hostelry. Thastain was glad to see him. Lately a friendship of sorts had come into being between Thastain and the aide-de-camp, based, apparently, on Halefice’s fears that Khaymak Barjazid was supplanting him in Mandralisca’s affections. Halefice, Thastain knew, went a long way back with Mandralisca—back to the days when the two of them had been in the service of Dantirya Sambail. They had fought together against the army of Prestimion in the Procurator’s rebellion.

But it was Barjazid, whom Mandralisca had known only a short while, who controlled the all-important helmets. Often, nowadays, the Count seemed to favor the little man from Suvrael over Halefice; and so, evidently, Halefice had decided to cultivate the friendship of the young and swiftly rising Thastain, forming an unstated alliance against a further increase in Khaymak Barjazid’s influence with Mandralisca.

Thastain, young as he was, was clever enough to know that Halefice was being foolish. There was no need for anyone to worry about the place he held in Mandralisca’s “affections.” Mandralisca had no affections, only schemes, desires, goals; he kept people about him who would help him in the fulfillment of those things, saw them entirely as instruments toward his intended purposes, discarded them if they were no longer useful. You were deluding yourself if you imagined that you were any kind of friend to Mandralisca, or he to you.

Even so, Thastain welcomed Halefice’s overtures. It was a nerve-wracking business, working for Count Mandralisca. You never knew when you would make some critical mistake, or even a minor one, and he would turn on you with all his terrible ferocity. Thastain had not really anticipated being thrust into such proximity with the terrifying Count when he had chosen to enter the service of the Five Lords. Jacomin Halefice softened that proximity for him. The aide-de-camp was a genial, easy-natured man, whose company was a pleasant relief after an hour or two with the Count. And perhaps Jacomin Halefice might even be able to protect him against Mandralisca’s wrath should he someday become its target. Sooner or later, after all, everyone did.

“Took the Shapeshifter home, did you?” Halefice asked. “That was a surprise, eh, seeing the Count invite one of those in for a conference! But he’ll ally himself with anyone and anything, will our Count, if he thinks it’ll serve his needs.”

“And will it serve his needs, do you think, to bring in the Shapeshifters in the struggle against Alhanroel? How can you trust such creatures?”

“They are a bunch of slippery serpents, yes,” Halefice said, with a grin and a nod. “I love them no more than you do, boy. But I see why Mandralisca would attempt to make common cause with them, just the same. They have much more reason to hate the Pontificate than he does, you know. And the enemy of your enemy, remember, is your friend. Mandralisca believes that when the time comes, the Piurifayne folk will do everything they can to make life difficult for Prestimion and Dekkeret.”

“So we have Metamorphs as our friends, now!” Thastain shuddered. “Stranger and stranger every day.—The Metamorph doesn’t trust the Count very much, by the way. Doesn’t entirely think he’s going to keep his promises about granting them equality once the war is won.”

“He told you that, did he? Very confiding of him. I wouldn’t pass that word along to Mandralisca, though, if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“What good will it do? If Mandralisca’s planning to doublecross the Shapeshifters when he no longer has any use for them, he’ll do it regardless of what they might suspect. He doesn’t expect anyone to trust him anyway, does Mandralisca. And if you tell him that the Shapeshifter’s been pouring things such as you’ve just told me into your ears, the Count’ll start worrying about how chummy you’re getting with his new Metamorph friends. Keep it to yourself, is what I say. Don’t even tell me. You haven’t told me. Understood?”

“Understood,” Thastain said.

“What about going out on the Promenade for some sausages and beer, now?” Halefice suggested.

Thastain welcomed the return to the bright warm sunlight. His head was spinning. He had not been expecting any sort of conversational intimacy with that Shapeshifter, and the fact that Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp had appeared to want to use him as a confidant was disturbing and unsettling. If the Metamorphs mistrusted Mandralisca’s promises, let them take that up with Mandralisca himself, he thought, not whisper it in the ear of his youngest and least surefooted aide.

And, though he had not found his brief moments of contact with the Shapeshifter as horrifying and repugnant as he had expected—had, indeed, begun in that brief conversation to look upon the Shapeshifters as actual people with actual grievances, rather than dread monsters—he still resented the fact that Mandralisca had thrust him so blithely into that contact. It had not been right to ask that of him. His old conditioning was still powerful. He did not crave the companionship of Metamorphs. He was not at all sure that he cared to be in the service of a man who thought it would be desirable to form an alliance with them.

Thastain was, in fact, getting weary of Mandralisca and his icy-souled ways. Mandralisca treated him reasonably well, even seemed to find his company somewhat amusing, but he knew how little that really meant. Even the Metamorph had been able to see the contempt behind the Count’s use of the mock title of “duke” for him.

“Do you notice,” Jacomin Halefice said, as they stood by the riverfront walk eating their sausages, “how tense the Count has become these days? Not that he was ever a man of easy spirit. But the slightest provocation now is enough to set him twanging like a tightly strung harp-string.”

“Indeed,” said Thastain noncommittally. He had learned long ago the great value of listening and nodding and saying very little of his own when Count Mandralisca was the subject of the discussion.

“Khaymak thinks he is overusing the helmet,” Halefice went on. “Night after night he roves the world with it, entering people’s minds and doing what he does to them. Barjazid says that the helmet is a wearying thing to use, when one uses it as much as that. And who would know better?”

“Who, indeed,” said Thastain.

“But I think more than the helmet is involved. This is no trifling thing, proposing to make war against the Coronal. I think the Count sometimes fears he may have overreached himself. He must do all the planning himself, you know. The Five Lords are worthless creatures. And now, this business of enlisting the Metamorphs in our cause—it is always dangerous, dealing with them, of course. You must watch your back at every moment. The Count knows that. And, I think, the Danip-iur’s ambassador knows he must look to the Count in the same fashion. A wondrous pair, they are!—Another round of sausages, eh, Thastain?”

“What a good idea,” Thastain said.

“Of course,” said Halefice, “the important question is not whether the Count intends to doublecross the Shapeshifters, but whether they will doublecross us. If the Count has not convinced the Shapeshifter that his promises are sincere, how likely are they to help our cause, when the day of action comes? Suppose they decide that his talk of civil equality is no more to be believed than anything else the Unchanging Ones have said over the years, and abandon us to fight our own battles among ourselves.”

“Unchanging Ones?”

“Their term for us. The Count may be making a grievous error if he places overmuch reliance on the goodwill of his new Metamorph friends.—But of course we are not having this discussion, Thastain. We are simply standing here enjoying our sausages.”

“Indeed,” said Thastain.

And thought: So Halefice also thinks they mistrust each other, do Mandralisca and Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp? Surely he is right about that. They are of the same kind, in a sense: slippery treacherous serpents, just as Halefice says. Well, they deserve each other.

But do I really deserve either one of them?

14

“A breakfast meeting is what he wants,” Prestimion said. “A discussion of the highest priority, he says, just the two of us, Pontifex and Coronal together. Not Septach Melayn, not Gialaurys, not even you, Varaile. And only last evening he was asking for more time to prepare his invasion plan, because he’s operating without a High Counsellor. What could have come over him in the night, do you think?”

Varaile smiled. “He knows you very well, Prestimion. How little you enjoy any sort of delay.”

“I don’t think that’s it. I may be an impatient, impulsive man, but Dekkeret certainly isn’t. And this time I wasn’t rushing him, for once. I agreed yesterday that it would be all right for him to take three or four days to think things over. Instead he’s coming back at me the very next morning. There has to be a reason for that. And I’m not sure I’m going to like it when I discover what it is.”

The meeting took place in a private dining room adjacent to the Pontifex’s quarters, on the eastern side of the building facing into glorious golden-green morning sunlight. At Prestimion’s orders the meal was served all at once, plates of fruit, steamed fish, a stack of sweet brown stajja-cakes, some light breakfast wine. Neither of them touched much of it. Dekkeret seemed to be in a very strange mood, tense, wound up very tight, and yet with a glowing, oddly exalted look in his eyes, as though he had had some rapturous vision in the night.

“Let me tell you my plan,” he said, when the brief social pleasantries were done with. “With the alterations that I’ve made in it as a result of a night’s thinking.”

There was something almost theatrical about the way Dekkeret had said that. Prestimion was mystified by it.

“Go on,” he said.

“What I intend,” Dekkeret said, “is at once to undertake the first grand processional of my reign. That will give me a convenient and un-controversial pretext for visiting Zimroel. Since I’m already here on the west coast, I’ll announce that that will be my first stop. I’ll set out as soon as possible. Sail right across to Piliplok, journey up the Zimr to Ni-moya, continue on into the far western lands, stopping at Dulorn, Pidruid, Narabal, Til-omon, all those cities of the west where ‘Lord Dekkeret’ is nothing more than a name.’

He paused then, as though to give Prestimion a chance to express his approval.

Prestimion, growing more and more bewildered by his Coronal’s words and manner, said, “I remind you, Dekkeret, there’s an insurrection going on over there. What we spoke of yesterday was your invading Zimroel with a major army, in order that the uprising can be put down. A campaign of war against the rebels who defy our authority. War. That’s something quite different from a grand processional.”

Serenely Dekkeret said, “Prestimion, you were the one who spoke of an invasion. I never did. Invading Zimroel, raising my hand in war against its people, who are my own people: these are not policies with which I can agree.”

“So you oppose the idea of dealing with the rebellion by force?”

“Most emphatically, majesty.”

Prestimion felt the blood beginning to leap in his veins. He was astounded as much by Dekkeret’s air of bland calm assurance as by the outright insubordination embodied in his words.

He controlled himself with some effort. “I think you have no choice in this, my lord. How can you even think of a grand processional of the usual sort at a time like this? For all you know, you’ll arrive in Piliplok and find that they’ve sworn allegiance to one of these Sambailid brothers, hailing him as their Procurator or even, maybe, as their Pontifex, and won’t even let you land. Imagine that: the Coronal of Majipoor turned away at the harbor! What will you do then, Dekkeret? Or you’ll get to Ni-moya and the river will be blockaded by a hostile fleet, and you’ll be told that this is Sambailid territory and you’re not welcome in it. What then? Won’t you regard that as a cause of war?”

“Not necessarily. I’ll remind them of the covenant that binds them in loyalty.”

Prestimion stared. “And if they laugh at you, what course of action will you take?”

“I promised you, Prestimion, that I would do whatever needs to be done to restore the rule of law in Zimroel. I intend to keep that promise.”

“By measures that nevertheless fall short of outright war.”

“I’ve never said that. I’ll have troops with me. I’d use them if I had to. But I don’t think a war will be necessary.”

“If I tell you that I see it as the only solution, that will put us in direct conflict, you and me, won’t it?” Prestimion still spoke in a measured tone, but his anger was rising from moment to moment. This was a development he had never envisioned. In all the years since Dekkeret had first emerged as the obvious choice to become the next Coronal, Prestimion not once had imagined that he and Dekkeret would ever find themselves differing on any great matter of state. This seemed the final betrayal, to have his own protégé rise up against him in a time of such crisis. “I urge you, Dekkeret, rethink what you’ve just said.”

“You are Pontifex, majesty. I obey you in all things and always will. But I tell you, Prestimion, I oppose this war of yours with all my soul.”

“Ah,” said Prestimion. “With all your soul.”

Prestimion had not felt so baffled since the moment long ago when he had watched Confalume’s son Korsibar placing the starburst crown on his own head with his own hands and proclaiming himself king. What is the Pontifex to do, he asked himself, when his Coronal throws his orders back in his face? Confalume had never prepared him for something like this. Prestimion saw the relationship between himself as Pontifex and Dekkeret as Coronal, suddenly, much as the aging and increasingly ineffectual Confalume, grudgingly yielding power to the young firebrand Coronal Lord Prestimion, must once have seen it in his own day.

He fought to contain his surging temper. In another moment he would be shouting and snarling. That must not be allowed to happen. To win time for himself he broke a stajja-cake in half, nibbled at it without interest, washed it down with cool golden wine.

“Very well,” Prestimion said at last. “You think you can avoid war. No doubt you can, if you’re resolved not to start one. But that still leaves the problem of Mandralisca and his uprising. You’ve pledged to bring both of them under control. Just how do you plan to do that if not by military force?”

“The same way we did in the campaign against the Procurator. Mandralisca has a helmet. We have helmets also. He has a Barjazid: I have a Barjazid. My Barjazid will outmaneuver his Barjazid and take him out of the picture; and that will leave Mandralisca at my mercy.”

“I think this is naive of you, Dekkeret.”

Now anger flared for an instant in the younger man’s eyes. “And I think your thirst for war against your own citizens is an unbecoming thing for one who fancies himself a great monarch, Prestimion. Especially when it’s a war you’ll be waging by proxy, many thousands of miles from the battlefield.”

It was difficult for Prestimion to believe that Dekkeret had actually said such a thing. “No!” he roared, slamming his open hand against the table so that the cutlery jumped high and the wine-flask went flying over the edge. “Unfair! Unfair! Wrongheaded and unfair!”

“Prestimion—”

“Let me speak, Dekkeret. This must be answered.” Prestimion realized that his hands were clenched into fists. He put them out of sight. “I have no thirst for war,” he said, as calmly as he could manage it. “You know that. But in this case I think war is unavoidable. And I will wage it myself, Dekkeret, if you have no stomach for it. Do you think I’ve forgotten how to fight? Oh, no, no: you get yourself back to the Castle, my lord, and I will take the troops to Zimroel, and I’ll take my place proudly in the front lines with Gialaurys and Septach Melayn, as we did in the old days.” His voice was rising again. “Who was it who broke Korsibar’s armies that day at Thegomar Edge, when you were not much more than a boy? Who was it who put the thought-helmet on his own head in this very building and reached out to smash Venghenar Barjazid with it in the Stoienzar jungles? Who was it who—”

Dekkeret raised both his hands in appeal. “Gently, your majesty. Gently. If there is to be another war, and may the Divine spare us from that, you know I will lead it, and I will win it. But let this rest a moment, I pray you. There’s more to tell you, and it has implications that reach far beyond the problems of the moment.”

“Speak, then,” Prestimion said in a hollow voice. His furious outburst had left him numb. He wished he had not knocked the wine over, now.

Dekkeret said, “Do you remember, Prestimion, when we spoke in the tasting-room at Muldemar House, just the two of us as we are this morning, and you reminded me of that strange prophecy of Maundigand-Klimd’s that a Barjazid would become the fourth Power of the Realm? Neither of us could make any sense of that then, and we put it aside as an impossibility. But in this night just past I understood its meaning. A fourth Power is needed. And with your consent I will create Dinitak Barjazid as that Power, once the matter of Mandralisca and the five Sambailids is behind us.”

“I see that you have gone mad,” said Prestimion, all rancor gone, only sadness in his tone now.

“Hear me out, I pray. Judge my madness for yourself when I’ve spoken.”

Prestimion’s only response was a resigned shrug.

“We have never known such prosperity on Majipoor as we have in the modern era,” said Dekkeret. “The era of Prankipin and Lord Confalume—of Confalume and Lord Prestimion—of Prestimion and Lord Dekkeret, if you will. But we have never known such turbulence, either. The coming of the mages and sorcerers, the rise of the strange new cults, the troublemaking of Dantirya Sambail and Mandralisca—all these things are new to us. Perhaps the one thing goes with the other, prosperity and turbulence, the uncertainties of new wealth and the mysteries of magic. Or perhaps we have simply grown too populous, now—with fifteen billion people on one world, huge though it is, perhaps there must inevitably be some discord, even strife.”

Prestimion sat quietly, waiting to see where this was going. It was evident that Dekkeret had rehearsed this speech over and over in his mind for half the night: it behooved him, especially after his angry outburst of a few moments before, to give it some show of attention before rejecting whatever demented irrational idea it was that his chosen Coronal had managed to spawn.

Dekkeret went on: “In the earlier time of troubles that we speak of as the time of Dvorn, the first two Powers were created, with joint command: the Pontifex the older, wiser monarch to whom the responsibility for devising policy was given, and the Coronal the younger, more vigorous man who had the task of executing those policies. Later, when a wonderful new invention made it possible, came the third Power, the Lady of the Isle, who with her multitude of associates enters the minds of great numbers of people each night and offers them solace and guidance and healing. But the equipment the Lady uses has its limitations. She can speak with minds, but she is unable to direct or control them. Whereas these helmets that the Bar-jazids have invented—”

“Have stolen, rather. A sniveling treacherous little Vroon named Thalnap Zelifor invented the things. One of the many errors for which I will be someday called to account is that I put that Vroon and his helmets into the hands of Venghenar Barjazid, to our great injury ever since.”

“The Barjazids, especially Khaymak Barjazid, have built upon that Vroon’s designs and greatly increased their abilities. I was one of the first, you will recall, to feel the force of the helmet, long ago when I was traveling in Suvrael. But what I felt then, strong as it was, was nothing like the power available in the later version of the helmet you used to strike down Venghenar Barjazid in the Stoienzar those many years ago. And the helmet that drove your brother into insanity, and has harmed so many others lately up and down the land, is far stronger yet. It is a formidable weapon indeed.”

Dekkeret leaned forward, his gaze intently focused on Prestimion.

“The world,” he said, “needs more stringent government than it had in years gone by, or else we will have new Mandraliscas all the time. What I propose is this: that we take the helmets into the government, giving them over to Dinitak Barjazid and making it his responsibility to search out malefactors, and to control and punish them by using his helmet to transmit powerful mental sendings. He will monitor the minds of the world, and keep the wicked in check. For this he will require the status and authority of a Power of the Realm. We will call him, let us say, the King of Dreams. His rank will be equal to our own. Dinitak will be the first of that title; and it will descend through the generations to his descendants thereafter.—There you have it, your majesty.”

Astonishing, Prestimion thought. Unbelievable.

“Dinitak, as I understand it, has no descendants at present,” he replied at once. “But that’s the least of the things I see wrong with this scheme of yours.”

“And the others?”

“It’s tyranny, Dekkeret. We rule now by the consent of the people, who freely make us their kings. But if we have a weapon that permits us to control their minds—”

“To guide their minds. Only the wicked need fear it. And the weapon is already loose in the land. Better that we make it exclusively ours, forbidden to anyone else, than to leave it out there for future Mandraliscas. We, at least, can be trusted. Or so I prefer to think.”

“And your Dinitak? Can he? He’s a Barjazid, I remind you.”

“Of the same blood,” said Dekkeret, “but not of the same nature. I saw that in Suvrael, when he urged his father Venghenar to go with me to the Castle and show you the first helmet. Later we saw that again when he came to us at Stoien, bringing a helmet we could use against his father in the rebellion. You were suspicious of him then, do you remember? You said, ‘How can we trust him?’ when he showed up bearing the helmet. You thought it might be all some intricate new scheme of Dantirya Sambail’s. ‘Trust him, my lord,’ is what I said to you then. ‘Trust him!’ And you did. Were we wrong?”

“Not then,” Prestimion said.

“Nor will we be now. He is my closest friend, Prestimion. I know him as I’ve never known anyone else. He’s driven by a set of moral beliefs that make the rest of us seem like pickpockets. You said it yourself at Muldemar, remember, that time when he gave you an answer that was truthful, but a little too blunt? ‘You are no diplomat, Dinitak, but you are an honest man,’ or words to that effect.—Did you notice that although he came with me on this trip, Keltryn didn’t?”

“Keltryn?”

“Fulkari’s younger sister. She and Dinitak have had a little romance—but why would you know that, Prestimion? You were off at the Labyrinth when it started. Anyway, he wouldn’t take Keltryn with him. Said it was improper to be traveling with an unmarried woman. Improper! When did you last hear a word like that?”

“A very holy young man, I agree. Too holy, perhaps.”

“Better that than otherwise. We’ll marry him off to Keltryn sooner or later—if she’ll have him, that is; Fulkari tells me she’s furious with him for leaving her behind—and they’ll begin a tribe of holy young Barjazids who can succeed their great ancestor as Kings of Dreams in the centuries ahead. And fear of the harsh dreams that the King of Dreams can send will maintain peace in the land forever after.”

“A nice fantasy, isn’t it? But it makes me very uneasy, Dekkeret. I once took it upon myself to meddle with the minds of everyone on Majipoor in one great swoop, at Thegomar Edge, when I had my mages wipe out all memory of the Korsibar uprising. I thought then it was a good thing to do, but I was wrong, and I paid a bitter price for it. Now you propose a new kind of mind-meddling, a constant ongoing monitoring.—I won’t allow it, Dekkeret, and that ends it. You would need to have the approval of the Pontifex to establish any such system, and that approval is herewith withheld. Now, if we can return to the problem of Mandralisca—”

“You doom us all to chaos, Prestimion.”

“Do I, now?”

“The world has become too complicated to be governed from the Labyrinth and the Castle any longer. Zimroel has grown wealthy and restless under Prankipin and Confalume and you. And they know how long it takes to ship troops from Alhanroel to deal with any sort of trouble there. The rise of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail as a sort of quasi-king in Zimroel was the beginning of a secessionist movement there. Now it’s gone another step. There’ll be the constant threat of divisiveness and insurrection across the sea unless we have some direct and immediate way of intervening. The whole structure will come apart.”

“And you actually think that using the Barjazid helmet is the only way we have of holding the world government together?”

“I do. The only way short of turning Zimroel into an armed camp with imperial garrisons stationed in every city, that is. Do you think that would be better? Do you, Prestimion?”

Abruptly Prestimion rose and went to the window. He yearned for nothing more than to bring this maddening discussion to an end. Why would Dekkeret not yield, even in the face of a Pontifical refusal? Why would he not see the impossibility of his great idea?

Or am I, Prestimion wondered, the one who refuses to see?

For a long time he stared out silently into the streets of Stoien city. He remembered a time when he had stared out another window of this very building at pillars of smoke rising from the fires set by lunatics at the time of the plague of madness, a plague that he had, however indirectly he had done it, brought upon the world himself.

Did he, he asked himself, want to see fires such as those in the cities of Majipoor again? In Zimroel: in wondrous Ni-moya, and magical crystalline Dulorn, and tropic Narabal of the sweet sea breezes? You doom us all to chaos, Prestimion—A fourth Power of the Realm. A King of Dreams.

Young Barjazid wearing the helmet, roving the night to seek out those who threatened to break the peace, and warning them sternly of the consequences, and punishing them if they disobeyed. Of the same blood but not of the same nature—It would be a mighty transformation. Did he dare? How much less risky it would be simply to apply the Pontifical veto to this wild scheme and put it away, and send Dekkeret off to Zimroel to crush this new uprising and hurl Mandralisca finally into his grave. While he himself returned to the Labyrinth and lived out the rest of his days pleasantly there amid imperial pomp and ceremony, as Confalume had done for so long, never needing to grapple with the hard questions of governance, for he had a Coronal who could grapple with such things for him.

A constant threat of divisiveness and insurrection across the sea. The whole structure will come apart—

From somewhere behind him Dekkeret said, “I want to point out, your majesty, that we have that vision of Maundigand-Klimd’s to take into account here. And also, on my journey here across Alhanroel, there were several occasions when I had visionary experiences of my own, to my great surprise, that seemed to indicate—”

“Hush,” Prestimion said softly, without turning. “You know what I think of visions and oracles and thaumaturgy and all the rest of that. Be quiet and let me think, Dekkeret. I pray you, man, just let me think.” A King of Dreams. A King of Dreams. A King of Dreams. And finally he said, “The first step, I think, is to speak with Dinitak. Send him to me, Dekkeret. The powers you want to entrust to him are greater even than our own, do you realize that? You say we can trust him, and very likely you’re right, but I can’t act just on your say-so. I suspect that I need to find out just how holy he is. What if he’s too holy, eh? What if he thinks that even you and I are miserable sinners who need to be brought in check? What would we be loosing on the world, in that case? Send him to me for a little chat.”

“Now, you mean?” Dekkeret asked.

“Now.”

15

“The plan is this,” Dekkeret told Fulkari, two hours later. “We are to call it simply a grand processional. It won’t be labeled in any way as a military expedition. But it’ll be a grand processional that looks a lot like a military expedition. The Coronal will be accompanied not only by his own guardsmen, but by a contingent of Pontifical troops—a substantial number of Pontifical troops. Which gives the whole enterprise something of the aspect of a peacekeeping mission, since a grand processional would normally involve Castle personnel only, and the forces of the Pontifex would have no role in it. The message we’ll be sending, then, is this: ‘Here is your new Coronal, and hail him as your king. But if anyone among you has treasonous thoughts of insurrection, you are warned that there is an army standing here behind him that will bring you to your senses.’ ”

“Was this Prestimion’s idea, or yours?”

“Mine. Based on his suggestion long ago that one good way I could investigate the situation in Zimroel at first hand was to go there under the guise of making a grand processional. I managed to convince him just now that we’d do best by holding back the option of actual warfare to be our last resort, one that we can always call upon if I get the wrong sort of reception when I’m over there.”

“Zimroel!” Fulkari said, shaking her head in wonder. “That’s a place I never dreamed I’d see.” There was no mistaking the sheen of excitement in her eyes. It was as though she had not heard him mention the prospect of becoming embroiled in warfare at all. “We’ll go to Ni-moya, of course. And Dulorn? They say that Dulorn looks like something out of a fairy tale, an entire city built out of white crystal. What about Pidruid? Til-omon?—Oh, Dekkeret, when do we sail?”

“Not for some while, I’m afraid.”

“But if it’s such an urgent situation—”

“Even so. Alaisor’s where the ships bound for Zimroel embark, so we’ll need to go back up there first. The fleet will have to be assembled, the imperial troops mustered. That’ll take time, all the rest of the summer, perhaps. Meanwhile the official proclamations of a processional have to be drawn up and shipped to every city of Zimroel that I’ll be visiting, so that they’ll be on notice to receive me with the splendor that Coronals are customarily received when they come to town.” He smiled. “Oh, one more thing: you and I have to get married, also. Toward the end of this week, is probably the best time. Prestimion himself has agreed to perform—”

“Married? Oh, Dekkeret—!” There was mingled delight and perplexity in her tone. But it was the perplexity that predominated. Her lower lip trembled a little. “Here, in Stoien? We aren’t going to have a Castle wedding? You know I’ll do it wherever you want. But why such short notice, though?”

He took her hands between his. “They tend to be very conventional people over in Zimroel, I understand. It simply won’t look right to them if the Coronal shows up on his first grand processional accompanied by—by a—”

“A concubine? Is that the word you want?” Fulkari stepped back and laughed. “Dekkeret, you sound exactly like Dinitak now! Improper! Unseemly! Shameful!”

“Let’s say ‘awkward,’ then. The situation in Zimroel’s so delicate that I can’t risk any sort of political embarrassment when I’m over there. But if the answer’s no, Fulkari, you’d better tell me now.”

“The answer’s yes, Dekkeret,” she replied unhesitatingly. “Yes, yes, yes! You knew that.” Then the jubilant gleam went from her eyes and she looked away from him, and in quite a different tone she went on, “But still—I always thought—the way these things are done, you know, at the Castle, in Lord Apsimar’s Chapel, where Coronals are supposed to get married, and then the reception afterward in the courtyard by Vildivar Close—”

Dekkeret understood. This was Lord Makhario’s many-times-great-granddaughter speaking, Lady Fulkari of Sipermit, to whom the ways of the Castle aristocracy were second nature. Fearing now that she would be inexplicably cheated of the grand and glorious wedding ceremony that she had assumed would be hers ever since the moment of their betrothal.

Gently he said, “We can get married again at the Castle later on. The full business, I promise you, Fulkari, the total grand event, with your sister as your bridesmaid and Dinitak my best man, and the whole court watching, and a second honeymoon in High Morpin at the lodge the Coronal keeps there for his private holidays. But we’ll have our first honeymoon in Ni-moya. And a wedding performed by the Pontifex himself, right here and now, before he sets off back to the Labyrinth.—What do you say?”

“Well, of course, we can’t have the Coronal Lord of Majipoor making the grand processional in the company of some little tart, can we? By all means, let’s make it official, then. I’ll marry you wherever, whenever you want, whatever you think is best.” There was that lovely sparkle of delight and mischief in her eyes again. “But afterward, my lord, when we are home at the Castle again—satin and velvet, and Lord Apsimar’s Chapel, and the courtyard by Vildivar Close—”

It was a simple ceremony, almost perfunctory, absurdly so for so solemn a rite of state as a Coronal’s wedding: held in Prestimion’s suite, the Pontifex presiding, Varaile and Dinitak as witnesses, Septach Melayn and Gialaurys looking on.

The whole thing took no more than five minutes. Prestimion did wear his scarlet-and-black robes of office, and the starburst crown was on Dekkeret’s brow, but otherwise it could just as well have been the wedding of a shopkeeper and his pretty young clerk at the office of the municipal Justiciar. All those who were present understood the reasons for this haste. A proper royal wedding would follow in the fullness of time, yes—once the challenge of the Five Lords of Zimroel had been met. But for now the basic proprieties would be satisfied. Lord Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari would go off to Zimroel with wedding bands on their fingers, and let no one in the western continent breathe a word about the wickedness of Castle morality.

The wedding feast, at any rate, was a properly luxurious affair, with wines of five colors, and plate upon plate of Stoienzar oysters and smoked meats and the pungent pickled fruits that they doted on here in the tropical lands. Septach Melayn sang the ancient wedding anthem in a creditable if reedy tenor, and Fulkari, a little tipsy, gave Prestimion so unexpectedly passionate a kiss that the Pontifex’s eyes went wide and the Lady Varaile clapped her hands in mock admiration; and at the appropriate moment Dekkeret gathered up his bride and carried her off to their suite on the floor below, making such a lively show of boyish eagerness that one might readily think this would be the first night that she and he had ever spent together.

A few days later the Pontifical party set out on the return journey to the Labyrinth: by ship along the north shore of the Stoienzar Peninsula to Treymone of the famous tree-houses, and overland from there through the Velalisier Valley and the Desert of the Labyrinth to the imperial capital. Dekkeret stood with Prestimion at the royal quay on the Stoien waterfront for a brief farewell as Varaile and the Pontifex’s children boarded their vessel. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys remained tactfully to one side. At Dekkeret’s request, they would be accompanying him into Zimroel on the grand processional.

Dekkeret spoke briefly of his regrets over the harsh words that had passed between them not long before; but Prestimion brushed that aside, saying that he regretted his own anger at that breakfast meeting at least as much, and that the whole episode was best put out of mind. Out of it, he pointed out, had come a general agreement between them on some of the greatest matters of state that any Coronal and Pontifex had ever had to contemplate.

Prestimion did not need to add that the specific set of tactics to use in handling the Zimroel problem was something he was leaving in Dekkeret’s hands. They both knew that: this was a Coronal’s task, not a Pontifex’s.

As for the advent of the fourth Power of the Realm and Dinitak’s designation as King of Dreams, they left any recapitulation of that unsaid also. Dekkeret knew that Prestimion was still uncomfortable with the concept, but that he would not stand in the way of implementing it—eventually. Prestimion had had his conference with Dinitak, although neither man chose to discuss with Dekkeret what had taken place. Evidently all had gone well, Dekkeret concluded. The campaign against Mandralisca came first, though.

At the end they embraced, and it was a warm one, though it was, as always, an awkward business on account of the difference in their heights. Prestimion bade Dekkeret farewell, and congratulated him once more on his marriage, and wished him well in his grand processional, and told him they would meet again at the Castle once the work at hand had been consummated. Then he turned and walked in all imperial dignity aboard the vessel that would carry him to Treymone, without looking back.

Dekkeret himself, his bride, his companions Dinitak Barjazid and Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, and the rest of the royal entourage were on their way five days later. They too began their journey by ship, sailing northward from Stoien across the Gulf to the quiet little port of Kimoise on the western coast. Fast floaters were waiting there that took them up the coast to Alaisor via Klai and Kikil and Steenorp, a retracement in reverse of the route they had followed down to Stoien for Dekkeret’s rendezvous with the Pontifex. But there would be a long wait in Alaisor while the fleet was assembled and the troops mobilized.

For it was a mobilization. Dekkeret had no illusions about that. He knew he had to go across to Zimroel prepared to fight a war. But the great test of his reign would lie in whether he could succeed in sidestepping that war. Would that be possible? He profoundly hoped so. He was the Coronal Lord of Zimroel as well as that of Alhanroel, but he did not want to win the loyalty of the citizens of the western continent by the sword.

This was Dekkeret’s fourth visit to Alaisor, the major metropolitan center of the western coast. But he had never had time on the other three journeys to see the great city properly.

On his first visit, traveling to Zimroel with Akbalik of Samivole years ago when he was still just a young knight-initiate, he had stopped there only long enough to catch the ship that would take them across the Inner Sea. He had passed through Alaisor again a couple of years later, this time an even shorter visit, for that was the frenzied time when he was racing across the world to the Isle of Sleep to bring word to Lord Prestimion that Venghenar Barjazid had escaped from prison at the Castle and intended to turn his thought-control helmets over to the rebel Dantirya Sambail. And on this most recent visit, just a few months before, Dekkeret had been there only a couple of days before receiving word that Prestimion had arrived in Stoien and requested his immediate presence. He had barely had an opportunity to place a wreath on the tomb of Lord Stiamot before it was necessary to move onward.

Now, though, there was more than ample time to experience the marvels of Alaisor. Dekkeret would gladly have been on his way to Zimroel without delay. But there were ships to call in from other ports, new ones to construct, soldiers to levy from the surrounding provinces. Like it or not, his stay in Alaisor was going to be an extended one this time.

It was a superbly located city, an ideal seaport. The River Iyann, running westward through upper Alhanroel, reached the sea here. By carving a deep track through the lofty palisade of black granite cliffs that ran parallel to the shore, the river had created a link between the districts of the interior and the great crescent bay at the base of the mountains. That bay at the mouth of the Iyann had become the harbor of Alaisor. The city itself had sprung up primarily along the coastal strip, with tendrils of urban settlement reaching behind it into the hills to form the spectacularly situated suburb of Alaisor Heights.

Dekkeret and Fulkari were housed in the four-level penthouse suite atop the thirty-story Alaisor Mercantile Exchange where visiting royalty usually stayed. From their windows they could see the dark spokes of the grand boulevards that ran toward the waterfront from all corners of the city, converging just below them in the circle marked by six colossal black stone obelisks that was the site of Lord Stiamot’s tomb. Stiamot had been en route to Zimroel in his old age, the story went, to ask the pardon of the Danipiur of the Metamorphs for the war he had waged against her people, when he fell mortally ill in Alaisor. He had asked to be buried facing the sea. Or so the story went.

“I wonder if he’s really buried there,” Dekkeret said, as they looked down on the ancient tomb. Some people of Alaisor were moving among the obelisks, strewing handfuls of bright flowers. The tomb was freshly bedecked with blossoms every day. “For that matter, did he ever exist at all?”

“So you doubt him too, the way you doubted Dvorn, when we were at his tomb.”

“It’s the same thing. I agreed that someone whose name was Dvorn probably was Pontifex at some time or other long ago. But was he the one who founded the Pontificate? Who knows? It was thirteen thousand years ago, and at that distance in time do we have any good way of distinguishing history from myth? Likewise with Lord Stiamot: so ancient that we can’t be sure of a thing.”

“How can you say that? He lived only seven thousand years ago. Seven’s very different from thirteen. Compared with Dvorn, he’s practically our contemporary!”

“Is he? Seven thousand years—thirteen thousand—these are incredible numbers, Fulkari.”

“So there never was a Lord Stiamot at all?”

Dekkeret smiled. “Oh, there was a Lord Stiamot, all right. And either he or somebody else of the same name probably was the one who conquered the Metamorphs and sent them off to live in Piurifayne, I suppose. But is he the man who’s buried under those black obelisks? Or did they just bury someone there, five or six thousand years ago, someone important at that time, and gradually the idea took hold that the person in that tomb is Lord Stiamot?”

“You’re terrible, Dekkeret!”

“Simply realistic. Do you believe that the real Stiamot was anything like the man the poets tell us about? That superhuman hero, striding from one end of the world to the other the way you or I would walk across the street? My guess is that the Lord Stiamot of The Book of Changes is ninety-five percent fable.”

“And will the same thing happen to you, do you think? Will the Lord Dekkeret of the poems that will be written five thousand years from now be ninety-five percent fable too?”

“Of course. Lord Dekkeret and Lady Fulkari both. Somewhere right in The Book of Changes Aithin Furvain himself tells us that Stiamot once heard someone singing a ballad about one of his victories over the Metamorphs, and wept because everything they were saying about him in that song was wrong. And even that is probably a fable too. Varaile once told me that they were singing songs in the marketplace about Prestimion’s struggle with Dantirya Sambail, and the Prestimion they sang about was nothing like the Prestimion she knew. It’ll be the same with us someday, Fulkari. Trust me on that.”

Fulkari’s eyes were glistening. “Imagine it: poems about us, Dekkeret, five thousand years from now! The heroic saga of your great campaign against Mandralisca and the Five Lords! I’d love to read one of those—wouldn’t you?”

“I’d love to know what the poet tells us about how things turned out for Lord Dekkeret, anyway,” said Dekkeret, staring down somberly at the ancient tomb in the plaza below. “Does the saga finish with a happy ending for the gallant Coronal, I wonder? Or is it a tragedy?” He shrugged. “Well, at least we won’t have to wait five thousand years to find out.”

There was no escaping a second ceremony at the tomb this time, and a visit to the temple of the Lady atop Alaisor Heights, the second holiest shrine to the Lady in the world, and a formal dinner at the celebrated Hall of Topaz in the palace of the Lord Mayor of Alaisor, Manganan Esheriz. And as the weeks went by there were other official events as well, a numbing succession of them, as Alaisor took full advantage of the unusual fact of a Coronal’s extended presence in the city.

But Dekkeret spent as much of his time as possible planning his tour of Zimroel: the landing at Piliplok, the journey up the Zimr, the entry into Ni-moya. He learned the names of local officials, he studied maps, he sought to identify potential trouble spots along the way. The trick would be to arrive at the head of a huge army while still managing to carry off the pretense that this was only a peaceful grand processional undertaken for the purpose of introducing the new Coronal to his western subjects. Of course, if he should find a rebel army waiting for him when he landed at Piliplok, or if Mandralisca had gone so far as to blockade the sea against him, he would have no choice but to meet force with force. But that remained to be seen.

The summer ticked along. The time soon would come, Dekkeret knew, when the season changed and the winds turned contrary, blowing so vigorously out of the west that departure would have to be postponed for many months. He wondered if he had misjudged the timing, had spent so much time assembling his fleet that the invasion must be delayed until spring, and his enemies given that much more time to dig themselves in.

But at last everything seemed propitious for departure, and the winds still were favorable.

His flagship was called the Lord Stiamot. Of course: the local hero, the Coronal whose name was a synonym for triumph. Dekkeret suspected the ship had formerly borne some less resounding name and had hastily been renamed on his behalf, but he saw no harm in that. “Let that name be an omen of our coming success,” Gialaurys said with gruff exuberance, pointing to the golden lettering on the hull as they went aboard. “The conqueror! The greatest of warriors!”

“Indeed,” said Dekkeret.

Gialaurys was exuberant also—indeed, he was the only one—when Piliplok harbor finally came into view, many weeks later, after a slow and windy crossing of the Inner Sea made notable by the presence of a great band of sea-dragons that stayed close at hand much of the way. The huge aquatic beasts frisked and frolicked about Dekkeret’s fleet with alarming playfulness day after day, lashing the choppy blue-green sea with their immense fluked tails and sometimes rising from the water, tail first, to display nearly their entire awesome bodies. The sight of them was exhilarating and frightening at the same time. But at last the dragons vanished to starboard, disappearing into the next phase of whatever mysterious journeys the sea-dragons were wont to make in the course of their endless circlings of the world.

Then the sea changed color, darkening to a muddy gray, for the voyagers had reached the point off shore where the first traces of the silt and debris carried into the ocean by the Zimr could be detected. The huge river, in its seven-thousand-mile journey across Zimroel, transported untold tons of such stuff eastward. At its gigantic mouth, sixty miles across and wider, all that tremendous load was swept into the sea, staining it for hundreds of miles out from shore. The sight of that stain meant that Piliplok city could not be far away.

And then, finally, the shore of Zimroel came into view. The chalky mile-high headland just north of Piliplok that marked the place where the great mouth of the Zimr met the sea stood out brightly against the horizon.

Gialaurys was the first to spy the actual city. “Piliplok ho!” he bellowed. “Piliplok! Piliplok!”

Piliplok, yes. Was a hostile fleet waiting there for him, Dekkeret wondered?

It did not appear that way. The only vessels in view were mercantile ones, moving about their business as though nothing at all were amiss. Evidently Mandralisca—unless he had some surprise up his sleeve—did not intend to deny the Coronal of Majipoor the right to land on Zimroel’s soil. To defend the continent’s entire perimeter against invasion was, after all, an enormous task, possibly beyond the rebels’ resources.

Mandralisca must be drawing a line somewhere closer to Ni-moya, Dekkeret decided.

Gialaurys could barely contain his delight as his birthplace came into view. Joyfully he clapped his hands. “Ah, there’s a city for you, Dekkeret! Take a good look, my lord! Is that a city, or isn’t it, eh, my lord?”

Well, he had every reason to smile at the sight of his native city. But Dekkeret, who had been to Piliplok before on his trip with Akbalik, knew what to expect of it, and he greeted the place with none of the old Grand Admiral’s glee. Piliplok was not his idea of urban beauty. It was a city that only its natives could love.

And Fulkari gasped in outright shock at her first glimpse of it as they entered the harbor. “I knew it wasn’t supposed to be beautiful, but even so, Dekkeret—even so—could it have been some lunatic who laid this place out? Some crazed mathematician in love with his own insane plan?”

That had been Dekkeret’s reaction too, that other time, and the city had grown no lovelier in the twenty-odd years of his absence. From the central point of its splendid harbor its eleven great highways fanned out in rigidly straight spokes, crossed with unerring precision by curving bands of streets. Each band delimited a district of different function—the marine warehouses, the commercial quarter, the zone of light industry, the residential areas, and so forth—and within each district every building was of an architectural style unique to that district, every structure looking precisely like its neighbor. Each district’s prevailing style had only one thing in common with the styles of its neighbors, which was that they all were characterized by a singular heaviness and brutality of design that oppressed the eye and burdened the heart.

“In Suvrael, where hardly any trees or shrubs of the northern continents can survive our heat and powerful sunlight,” said Dinitak, “we plant what we can, palms, tough succulents, even the poor scrawny things of the desert, for the sake of giving our cities some beauty. But here in this benevolent coastal climate, where anything at all will grow, the good folk of Piliplok seem to choose to grow nothing at all!” Shaking his head, he pointed toward shore. “Do you see a stem anywhere, Dekkeret, a branch, a leaf, a flower? Nothing. Nothing!”

“It is all like that,” said Dekkeret. “Pavement, pavement, pavement. Buildings, buildings, buildings. Concrete, concrete, concrete. I remember seeing a shrub or two, last time. No doubt they’ve had those removed by now.”

“Well, we aren’t coming here as settlers, are we?” said Septach Melayn lightly. “So let us pretend that we adore the place, if they should ask us, and then let us get ourselves far from it as soon as we can.”

“I second the motion,” Fulkari said.

“Look,” said Dekkeret. “Here comes our reception committee.”

Half a dozen vessels had put out from the harbor. Dekkeret, still uneasy, was relieved to see that they did not have the look of military ships—he recognized them as the strange-looking fishing vessels of Piliplok that were known as dragon-ships, lavishly ornamented with bizarre fanged figureheads and sinister spiky tails, with garish painted rows of white teeth and scarlet-and-yellow eyes along their sides, and intricate many-pronged masts carrying their black-and-crimson sails—and that they flew ensigns of welcome that showed the green-and-gold colors symbolic of the power and authority of the Coronal.

It could, of course, all be some deceptive maneuver of Mandralisca’s, Dekkeret supposed. But he doubted that. And he felt further reassurance when a huge voice came booming across the waters to him through a speaking-tube, crying out the traditional salute: “Dekkeret! Dekkeret! All hail Lord Dekkeret!” It was the unmistakable deep rumble of a Skandar’s voice. There was a greater concentration of the giant four-armed beings in Piliplok than anywhere else in the world. The Lord Mayor of Piliplok himself, Kelmag Volvol by name, was a Skandar, Dekkeret knew.

And that was unquestionably Kelmag Volvol now, an immense shaggy figure nearly nine feet high in the red robes of mayoralty, standing in the bow of the lead dragon-ship making clusters of starburst signs, four at a time, and then signalling that he wished to come aboard the Lord Stiamot for a parley. If this were a trap, Dekkeret thought, would the mayor of the city have been willing to bait it with his own person?

The two flagships lined up broadside. Kelmag Volvol clambered into a wickerwork transport basket. A thick rope that culminated in a massive curved blubber-hook, normally used in the butchering of sea-dragons, was lowered from the rigging and the hook was fastened to the basket. The rope then was hoisted by pulleys so that the basket containing Lord

Mayor Kelmag Volvol was lifted aloft and swung outward over the rail of the ship. Slowly and steadily it traveled through the gap separating the vessels, Kelmag Volvol standing solemnly upright all the while, and neatly deposited him beside the capstan head on the deck of the Lord Stiamot.

Dekkeret lifted both his hands in greeting. The towering Skandar, nearly half again as tall as the Coronal, knelt before him and saluted once more.

“My lord, you are welcome to Piliplok. Our city rejoices at your presence.”

Protocol now called for an exchange of small gifts. The Skandar had brought a surprisingly delicate necklace fashioned from finely interwoven sea-dragon bones, which Dekkeret placed around Fulkari’s neck, and Dekkeret offered him a rich brocaded mantle of Makroposopos manufacture, purple and green with the royal starburst and monogram at its center.

The ceremonial sharing of food in the Coronal’s cabin was the next order of ritual. This posed certain technical difficulties, since the Lord Stiamot had not been designed with Skandars in mind, and Kelmag Volvol could barely manage to negotiate the companionway that led belowdecks. And he had to stoop and crane his neck to fit within the royal cabin itself, which was roomy enough for Dekkeret and Fulkari but which the Lord Mayor Kelmag Volvol filled practically to overflowing. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, who had accompanied them below, were forced to stand in the passage outside.

“I must begin this meeting with troublesome news, my lord,” the Skandar said as soon as the formalities were over.

“Concerning Ni-moya, is it?”

“Concerning Ni-moya, yes,” said Kelmag Volvol. He threw an uneasy glance toward the two men outside.—“It is a highly sensitive matter, my lord.”

“Nothing that needs to be hidden from the Grand Admiral Gialaurys and the High Spokesman Septach Melayn, I think,” Dekkeret replied.

“Well, then.” Kelmag Volvol looked acutely uncomfortable. “It is this, and I regret to be the bearer of such tidings. Your journey onward to Ni-moya: I must advise you against it. A cordon has been placed around the city and the territory immediately surrounding it, to a distance of some three hundred miles in all directions.”

Dekkeret nodded. It was as he had guessed: Mandralisca had reined in his original grandiose plans to claim all of Zimroel at the outset, and was limiting the sphere of his rebellion to an area he was easily capable of defending. But a rebellion was still a rebellion, even so.

“A cordon,” Dekkeret repeated thoughtfully, as though it were a mere nonsensical sound that conveyed nothing to him. “And what, I pray, does that mean, a cordon around Ni-moya?”

The pain in Kelmag Volvol’s great red-rimmed eyes was unmistakable. His four shoulders shifted about in keen embarrassment. “A zone, my lord, protected by military force, which officials of the imperial government are forbidden to enter, because it is now under the administration of the Lord Gaviral, Pontifex of Zimroel.”

A snort of astonishment came from Septach Melayn. “Pontifex, is he! Of Zimroel!”

And from Gialaurys: “We will flay him and nail his hide to the door of his own palace, my lord! We will—”

Dekkeret motioned to them both to be still.

“Pontifex,” he said, in the same wondering tone. “Not merely Procurator, the title his uncle Dantirya Sambail was content to hold, but Pon-tifex? Pontifex! Ah, very fine! Very bold!—He makes no claim to Prestimion’s own throne, does he? He is content only to rule over the western continent, our new Pontifex, beginning with the territory around Ni-moya? Why, then, I applaud his restraint!”

Skandars, Dekkeret remembered a moment too late, had virtually no capacity for irony. Kelmag Volvol reacted to Dekkeret’s lighthearted words with such a sputtering display of astonishment and distress that it was immediately necessary to assure him that the Coronal did indeed regard the developments in Ni-moya with the greatest concern.

“Which brother is this, this Gaviral?” Dekkeret said to Septach Melayn, who had lately been gathering information concerning these nephews of Dantirya Sambail.

“The eldest one. A small scheming man, with a certain rudimentary intelligence. The other four are little more than drunken beasts.”

“Yes,” said Dekkeret. “Like their father Gaviundar, the Procurator’s brother. I met him once, when he came to the Castle in Prestimion’s time as Coronal, sniveling after some favor having to do with land. An animal, he was. A great huge coarse vile-smelling hideous animal.”

“Who betrayed us at the battle of Stymphinor in the Korsibar war,” said Gialaurys darkly, “when Navigorn nearly cut our army to pieces and Gaviundar and his other brother Gaviad, our allies then, shamefully held back their troops. And his seed comes back to haunt us now!”

Dekkeret turned again to the Skandar, who looked baffled by all this talk of unknown battles, but was struggling to hide his confusion. “Tell me the rest of it. What territorial claims is this Gaviral actually making? Just Ni-moya, or is that only the beginning?”

“As we understand it down here,” Kelmag Volvol went on, “the Lord Gaviral—that is the title he uses, the Lord Gaviral—has decreed this entire continent independent of the imperial government. Ni-moya is apparently already under his control. Now he has sent ambassadors to the surrounding districts, explaining his purposes and asking for oaths of allegiance. A new constitution will shortly be announced. The Lord Gaviral soon will select the first Coronal of Zimroel. It is believed that he will name one of his brothers to the post.”

“Has the name of a certain Mandralisca been mentioned?” Dekkeret asked. “Does he figure in this in any way?”

“His signature was on the proclamation we received,” said Kelmag Volvol. “Count Mandralisca of Zimroel, yes, as privy counsellor to his majesty the Lord Gaviral.”

“Count, no less,” muttered Septach Melayn. “Count Mandralisca! Privy counsellor to his majesty the Pontifex Lord Gaviral! Has come a long way from the days when he was tasting the Procurator’s wine to see if it’d been poisoned, that one has!”

16

“You asked for me, your grace?” Thastain said.

Mandralisca nodded curtly. “Bring me the Shapeshifter, if you will, my good duke.”

“But he is gone, sir.”

“Gone? Gone?”

Mandralisca felt a momentary surge of fury and dismay so wildly intense that it astounded him with its force. Only for a moment; but in that moment it had seemed to him that he was being swept through the air in the teeth of a hurricane. It was a frightening overreaction, and not the first of its kind in recent days.

He hated these spells of soul-vertigo that had begun coming over him lately. He hated himself for succumbing to them. They were a mark of weakness.

The boy must see it, too. He was staring.

Mandralisca forced himself to say more calmly, “Gone where, Thastain?”

“Back to Piurifayne, I think, sir. Summoned home by the Danipiur to deliver his report, I believe.”

Stunning news. Mandralisca felt another whirlwind go roaring through his mind.

He groped for the riding crop that always lay on his desk, gripped its handle until his knuckles were white, shoved it aside. To quiet himself he went to the window and stared out. But that only made things worse, for he found himself looking into the rain. For the past three days Ni-moya had been pelted by surprising rains, a deluge beyond all expectation this late in the summer, when the long dry season of autumn and winter should be coming on. Everything beyond the window was a blank gray wall. The river, though it lay just below, could not be seen at all. Nothing there but gray, gray, gray. And the unending drumming of the rainfall against the great quartz window of his office had already begun to be maddening. Another day and it would have him screaming.

Calm. Stay calm.

But how? Dekkeret—the word had just come in—had landed safely in Piliplok, with many troops. And Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp had taken himself back to Piurifayne for a chat with his queen.

“He left,” Mandralisca said, “and I wasn’t told? Why not? We had an important meeting scheduled for today, he and I.” The red tide of anger was mounting again. “The Metamorph ambassador unexpectedly sets out for home without troubling to stop in at my office to take his leave of the privy counsellor, and no one says anything to me!”

“I had—no idea, sir—I never thought—”

“You never thought! You never thought! Exactly, Thastain: you never thought.”

He had wanted the words to sound icy-cold, but they came out as a kind of throttled screech. Mandralisca thought his head was going to explode. Khaymak Barjazid had told him just the other day that it was risky to be using the helmet as much as he was. Perhaps that might be so; perhaps it could be making him just a little unstable, he thought. Or maybe it was simply the tension he felt now that the hour of the long-dreamed-of war of independence was at hand. But he had never had so much difficulty maintaining his self-control. And this was no moment to be losing control.

Not with Dekkeret in Piliplok. And the Metamorph ambassador gone.

For the second time in a minute and a half Mandralisca fought back his own overloaded emotions and struggled to think things through.

The plan to fortify the entire coast against the Coronal had long since been scrapped. In the end Mandralisca had abandoned the idea on the grounds that it was one thing to invite the people of Zimroel to join the rulers of Ni-moya in a general declaration of independence, and something else again to ask them, this early in the uprising, actually to lift their hands against an anointed Coronal. Better to let the vengeance-hungry Shapeshifters handle Dekkeret, Mandralisca had decided, finally, after weeks of inner debate. But suddenly that decision was beginning to look like a significant strategic error, a gamble that had gone wrong. The force of Shapeshifter guerillas that Mandralisca had been negotiating to place in the forests along Dekkeret’s likely route north did not yet exist. And now the Shapeshifter ambassador himself had vanished. His essential ally. His secret weapon against the Alhanroel government.

The Danipiur had already been told the essence of Mandralisca’s proposal, civil freedom for her people in return for their military aid against Dekkeret. Perhaps Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp had simply gone home to discuss with the Danipiur the final details involved in deploying the troops Mandralisca had requested.

Perhaps.

Why, though, had the Shapeshifter not said anything about that to him first? Possibly something much more disquieting was going on: something more like a Shapeshifter change of heart about the entire enterprise. What had seemed so simple earlier was now beginning to present unexpected challenges.

But anger was the wrong response, he knew. Fear, despair, anxiety—all useless. It was much too early in the campaign to give panic a foothold. There were always going to be surprises, setbacks, miscalculations.

In the softest tone he could manage Mandralisca said, “I should have been informed right away, Thastain. I regret that I wasn’t. But there’s nothing that can be done about that now, is there?—Is there, Thastain?”

“No, your grace.” The merest whisper.

The boy was white-faced and trembling. It seemed to be all he could do to meet Mandralisca’s gaze. Was he expecting to be beaten for his negligence? The riding crop, maybe? Mandralisca had not seen Thastain so fear-stricken since the early days at the desert headquarters out by the Plain of Whips.

But terrorizing the underlings would serve no useful purpose now. The sudden departure of Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp might or might not be a serious development, though at the very least it raised the possibility of major complications and confusions. But, no matter what the Shapeshifter might be up to, Mandralisca told himself, it was far from sensible just now to be alienating valuable members of his own staff. And Thastain was valuable. The boy was loyal; the boy was helpful; the boy was intelligent.

Mandralisca said, “What I want you to do now, Thastain, is to get yourself out into the Grand Bazaar, talk to one of the shopkeepers, tell him that I want him to put you in contact with some senior member of the Guild of Thieves.—You know about the guild of official thieves of Ni-moya, Thastain? How they operate in the bazaar in cooperation with the merchants, taking a certain regulated percentage of goods for themselves in return for guarding the place against greedy free-lance thieves who don’t understand when enough is enough?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Talk to the thieves, then. They have connections with the local Shapeshifter community. This city’s swarming with Shapeshifters, you know. There are more of them here than you’d ever believe, lurking all around the place. Get in touch with them. Use my name. If you have to throw money around, then throw it freely. Tell them that I have urgent need to send a message via one of them to the Danipiur—urgent need, Thastain—and when you find someone who’s willing to carry that message, bring him here to me. Is that clear, Thastain?”

Thastain nodded. But there was an odd look on the boy’s face.

Mandralisca said, “You don’t much care for Shapeshifters, do you, Thastain? Well, who does? But we need them. We need them, you understand? Their cooperation is necessary to the cause. So hold your nose and get yourself off to the bazaar, and don’t waste any time about it.” He smiled. The inner storm seemed to be passing; he felt almost like himself again. “—Oh, and on your way out tell Khaymak Barjazid that I want to see him in here, right away.”

Barjazid looked at the bunched-up mass of metal mesh in Mandralisca’s hand that was the thought-control helmet, then at Mandralisca, then at the helmet again. He had not replied at all to the request Mandralisca had just made.

“Well, Khaymak? You aren’t saying anything, and I’m waiting. Here: take the helmet. Get to work.”

“A direct attack on the mind of Lord Dekkeret? Do you think this is wise, excellence?”

“Would I have asked you to do it if I didn’t?”

“This is a considerable change of plan. We had agreed, I thought, that there would be no attempts undertaken against the Powers themselves.”

“There’ve been several considerable changes of plan lately,” Mandralisca said. “Certain concessions to financial and political realities have had to be made. We didn’t blockade the sea to keep the Coronal’s fleet from landing, though at one time we were talking about that. We didn’t set up military outposts up and down the coast, either. And we assumed we would be getting valuable help from Shapeshifter troops, but suddenly that seems to be in doubt also. And so Dekkeret is now in Piliplok and very soon will be heading this way. He’s brought an army with him.”

“May I remind you, your grace, we have an army too.”

“Ah, and will it fight? That’s the question, Khaymak: will it fight? What if Dekkeret comes marching up to our borders and says, ‘Here I am, your Coronal Lord,’ and our men fall down and start making star-bursts to him? That’s a risk I don’t feel comfortable taking. Not while we have this” He opened his clenched hand and held the helmet forth. “By the use of this I drove Prestimion’s brother over the edge of madness, and many another also. It’s time to go to work on Dekkeret. Take it, Khaymak. Put it on. Send your mind down to Piliplok and latch it onto Dekkeret’s, and begin taking him apart. It may be our only hope.”

Once more Khaymak Barjazid looked at the helmet in Mandralisca’s hand, but he made no move to reach out for it. Mildly he said, “It has been very clear for a long time, excellence, that your own powers of operating the helmet are superior to mine. Your greater intensity of spirit—your stronger force of character—”

“Are you telling me that you won’t do it, Khaymak?”

“Against such a powerful center of energy as the mind of Lord Dekkeret surely must be, it would perhaps be desirable that you be the one who—”

Mandralisca felt the whirlwinds starting up again within him. I must not allow that, he thought, clamping down. Stay calm. Calm. Calm.

Coldly, cuttingly, he said, “You told me only a few days ago that I may be using the helmet too much. And I do see certain signs of strain in myself that may very well be the result of just that.” His hand strayed toward the riding crop. “Don’t waste any more of my energy in discussing this, Khaymak. Take the helmet. Now. And go to work on Dekkeret with it.”

“Yes, your grace,” Barjazid said, looking very unhappy indeed.

Carefully he affixed the helmet, closed his eyes, seemed to enter the trancelike state with which one operated the device. Mandralisca watched, fascinated. Even now the Barjazid helmet still seemed like a miraculous thing to him: such a flimsy little webwork of golden wires, and yet one could use it to reach out over thousands of miles, enter other minds, any minds, even those of a Pontifex or a Coronal, and impress one’s will—take control—

Several minutes had passed, now. Barjazid was perspiring. His face had grown flushed beneath its heavy Suvrael tan. His head was bowed, his shoulders hunched together in a sign of obvious stress. Had he reached Dekkeret? Was he sending beams of red fury into the Coronal’s helpless mind?

Another minute—another—

Barjazid looked up. With trembling hands he lifted the helmet from his brow.

“Well?” Mandralisca demanded.

“Very strange, your grace. Very.” His voice was hoarse and ragged. “I did reach Dekkeret. I’m sure I did. A Coronal’s mind—surely it’s like no other. But it was—defended. That’s the only term I can use. It was as if he was shielding himself in some way against my entry.”

“Is this possible, technically speaking?”

“Yes, of course—if he’s wearing a helmet too, and knows how to use it. And he does, of course, have access to helmets, the ones confiscated from my brother long ago, that have been locked away at the Castle. It’s certainly possible that Dekkeret has brought one of those with him. But that he could use it with such mastery—that he would so much as know how to use it at all—”

“And that he would happen to be wearing it at the exact moment when you tried to attack him,” Mandralisca said. “Yes. A coincidence like that is the most unlikely thing of all. Maybe you were right, just now, that you simply don’t have enough inner force, mental strength, whatever it is, to break through Dekkeret’s defenses. Let me try, I suppose.”

Barjazid surrendered the helmet only too gladly.

Mandralisca held it cupped in both his hands for a moment, wondering whether this was really a good idea. It had been obvious all day that the pressures of this campaign had begun significantly to deplete his vitality. Using the helmet involved a great drain on one’s energies. A further expenditure of spirit at this time could well be damaging.

But it could be even more damaging to let Barjazid see how weary he was. And if he could manage, in one great stroke of mental force, to shatter the mind of the enemy who would otherwise soon be coming toward him out of Piliplok—

He put the helmet on. Closed his eyes. Entered the trance.

Sent his mind roving, southward, eastward, Piliplokward.

Dekkeret.

Surely that was he. A fiery red globe of power, like a second sun, out there by the coast.

Dekkeret. Dekkeret. Dekkeret.

And now—to strike—

Mandralisca summoned every bit of strength within him. This was the act from which he had held back so long, the direct attack on his primary foe, the outright onslaught against the single man who held the royal forces together. For reasons that had never been clear even to him—caution, strategy, perhaps even fear?—he had not struck at Prestimion when he was Coronal, and he had not struck at Dekkeret, either. He had sought to win his goals by more indirect means, gradually, rather than through one outrageous coup. It was, he supposed, his nature: silence, patience, cunning. But all those hesitations dropped away now. This was the moment to reach Dekkeret and destroy him—

The moment—

To—strike—

The moment—the moment—

He was striking, but nothing was happening. That fiery red globe was impossible to hit. It was not a matter of insufficient force, of that he was sure. But his angry lightning-bolts were glancing aside like feeble darts striking stone. Again, again, again he thrust; and each time he was rebuffed.

And then his last reservoir of energy was empty. He swept the helmet from his forehead and leaned forward against his desk, taut, quivering, resting his head on his arms.

After a moment he glanced up. The look on Khaymak Barjazid’s face was frightful. The little man was staring at him with eyes bulging with shock and horror.

“Your grace—are you all right, your grace?”

Mandralisca nodded. He was numb with exhaustion.

“What happened, your grace?”

“Shielded—just as you said. Impossible to get near him. Completely defended.” He pressed his fingertips to his aching eyes. “Can he be some kind of superman, do you think? I know this Dekkeret, this Coronal, only by repute—we have never met—but nothing I’ve ever heard about him would lead me to think he has any special powers of mind. And yet—the way he deflected me—the ease of it—”

Khaymak Barjazid shook his head. “I know of no power of the human mind that would let it fend off the thrust of the helmet. More likely they have come up with some new form of the device. My nephew Dinitak, you know, is with the Coronal’s party. He understands the helmets. And may have modified one in such a way that he can use it to protect his master.”

“Of course,” said Mandralisca. It was all completely clear now. “Dinitak, who sold his own father out to Prestimion by bringing him the helmets, and who has done it again these twenty years afterward. He has ever been a thorn in my side, that nephew of yours. Great is the mischief he’s done: and great will be his suffering, Khaymak, when I finally begin to pay him back for it!”

Thastain returned toward nightfall, rumpled and soiled from his day in the maze of tunnels and galleries and narrow arcades that was the Grand Bazaar of Ni-moya, and soaked through and through by the inexorable rain. Mandralisca could see at once that the boy must have failed in his mission, for he looked both glum and fearful, and he had returned alone, instead of bringing some Shapeshifter with him as Mandralisca had ordered. But he listened with a sort of weary patience to Thastain’s long recitation: his tour of the vast labyrinthine market, his conversations with this merchant and that one until finally he had won the cooperation of a certain Gaziri Venemm, a dealer in cheeses and oils, who after much hesitation and circumlocution agreed, upon payment of a purse full of royals, to arrange for Thastain to be conducted to one of his fellow merchants who was believed—believed—to be a Shapeshifter masquerading as a man of the city of Narabal.

And indeed, Thastain reported, the supposed man of Narabal did appear, from his shifty ways and uncertain accent, to be a Metamorph in disguise. But he would not, not for any price, agree to undertake a mission to the Danipiur.

“I mentioned your name, your grace. He was indifferent. I mentioned the name of Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp. He tried to pretend that he had never heard that name before. I showed him a purse of royals. It was all no use.”

“And is he the only Shapeshifter in the bazaar?” asked Mandralisca.

“I spoke with four more of them all told,” said Thastain, and from the look of distaste on his face Mandralisca knew that it was true, and that it had not been a pleasant task. “They will not do it. Two denied, very indignant, that they were Metamorphs at all; and I could see that they were lying, and that they knew I knew they were lying, and that they did not care. A third pleaded poor health. A fourth simply refused, before I had spoken six words. I can go back to the bazaar tomorrow, excellence, and perhaps then I can find—”

“No,” Mandralisca said. “There’s no point in that. Something has happened. The Danipiur’s ambassador has decided not to help us, and has returned to Piurifayne to tell her that. I’m certain of it.” He was surprised at his own composure. Perhaps he had passed beyond the whirlwind zone, now. “Get me Halefice,” he said.

When the aide-de-camp arrived Mandralisca said at once, “There are some new difficulties, Jacomin.”

“Other than the arrival of Dekkeret and the disappearance of the Metamorph, excellence?”

“Other than those, yes.” Mandralisca provided a crisp summary of his own thwarted attempts against Dekkeret with the helmet and Thastain’s fruitless search in the bazaar for a cooperative Metamorph. “Very soon, I suppose, the Coronal will be marching this way. The Shapeshifter aid I had counted on will evidently not materialize. As for the military forces we’ve been able to raise ourselves, they are sufficient to defend Ni-moya, I suppose, but not to permit us to go beyond the perimeter of the lands we already hold.”

There was a stricken look on Halefice’s face. “Then what will we do, your grace?”

“I have a new plan.” Mandralisca looked from Halefice to Barjazid, from Barjazid to Thastain, letting his gaze linger on each of them, assaying them carefully, seeking to measure their trustworthiness. “You three are the first to hear it, and you will also be the last. The scheme is this: the Lord Gaviral will invite Dekkeret to a parley at a place midway between Piliplok and Ni-moya, telling him that we want to arrive at a peaceful solution to our disputes, a compromise that will treat the grievances of Zimroel without damaging the structure of the imperial government. I know that that will appeal to him. We’ll sit down at a table together and try to work things out. We’ll offer our terms. We’ll listen to his.”

“And then?” Halefice asked.

“And then,” said Mandralisca, “just when the talks are going as smoothly as can be, Jacomin, we’ll kill him.”

17

“A parley,” Dekkeret said, fascinated by the strangeness of the idea. “We are asked to a parley!”

“First he tries to strike at you with his helmet, and then he asks you to a parley?” Septach Melayn said, laughing. “I see that the man will try anything. You will refuse, of course.”

“I think not,” said Dekkeret. “He has been testing us. And now that we’ve shown him that Dinitak can beat back his attacks, I think he’s found out what we are made of, and wants to change his tune for a new and sweeter one. We should listen to it, and see what it sounds like, eh?”

“But a parley? A parley? My lord, the Coronal does not negotiate peace terms with those who deny his sacred authority,” said Gialaurys in his deepest, most sternly ponderous tone. “He simply destroys them. He sweeps them aside like gnats. He does not enter into discussions with them concerning the concessions he is being asked to make, the territory he is expected to yield, or anything else. A Coronal can concede nothing at all, ever, to any such creatures as these.”

“Nor will I,” said Dekkeret, smiling a little at the old Grand Admiral’s staunch and earnest rigor. “But to refuse outright to hear the virtuous Count Mandralisca’s proposals—or, rather, those of the great and mighty Pontifex Gaviral, since I see that it’s Gaviral who invites us to this meeting—no, I think it would be wrong to take that position. We should listen, at least. This parley will draw them out of Ni-moya, which will spare us the need to lay siege to that city, and perhaps to do harm to it. We will talk with them; and then, if we must, we will fight; but all the advantage lies on our side.”

“Does it?” Dinitak asked. “We have an army, yes. But I remind you, Dekkeret, we are on enemy soil, very far from home. If Mandralisca has been able to collect forces anywhere near the size of our own—”

“Enemy soil?” Gialaurys cried. “No! No! What are you saying? We are in Zimroel, where his majesty the Pontifex’s coinage still is legal tender, and I mean the Pontifex Prestimion, not this foolish puppet of Mandralisca’s. The imperial writ is law here still, Dinitak. Lord Dekkeret here is king of this land. And also I was born here, no more than fifty miles from this spot that you call enemy soil. How can you even speak such words? How—”

“Peace, good Gialaurys,” said Dekkeret, close to laughter now. “There’s a certain truth to what Dinitak says. This may not be enemy soil right here, but we don’t know how far upriver we can go before that changes. Ni-moya has proclaimed its independence: by the Lady, has named its own Pontifex! Has begun striking its own coins with Gaviral’s silly face on them, for all we know. Until we have put things to rights, we need to think of Ni-moya as an enemy city, and the lands surrounding it as hostile territory.”

They were camped on the northern bank of the Zimr, not far inland from Piliplok, in a pleasant, unspectacular countryside of rolling hills and well-tended farms. The air was warm here, a dry wind blowing from the south, and from the tawny look of the vegetation it was clear that in this district the rains of spring and early summer had long since ended. A host of small thriving cities lined both sides of the river in this district, and in each of them, so far, Dekkeret had been greeted with pleasure and excitement by the populace. Of whatever strange thing was going on in Ni-moya, the local officials seemed to have only the faintest idea, and they spoke of it to Dekkeret with obvious embarrassment and uneasiness. Ni-moya was thousands of miles away, in another province; Ni-moya, to these country people, was sophisticated to the point of decadence; if Ni-moya had decided to involve itself in some sort of peculiar political upheaval, that was a matter between Ni-moya and the Coronal, and no doubt the Coronal would very quickly take steps to restore the natural order of things there.

Septach Melayn said, “Read me the Sambailid lord’s demands again, will you, my lord?”

Dekkeret riffled through the elegantly lettered parchment sheets. “Mmmm… here it is. Not demands, exactly. Proposals. The Lord Gaviral—an interesting title; who ever made him lord of anything?—deplores the possibility that armed conflict might break out between the forces of the people of Zimroel and those of the Coronal Lord Dekkeret of Alhanroel—notice, I am Coronal of Alhanroel, here, not of Majipoor—and calls for peaceful negotiations to resolve the conflict between the legitimate aspirations of the people of Zimroel and the equally legitimate authority of the imperial government of Alhanroel.”

“At least he concedes that it’s a legitimate government,” said Septach Melayn. “Even if he does keep talking about it as Alhanroel’s government, and not Majipoor’s.”

“Be that as it may,” Dekkeret said, with a shrug. “He’s taking the approach that this is to be a discussion between powers of equal standing, and that, of course, we can’t allow. But let me go on: he wants—ah—here, yes—the primary thing that he wants to discuss at our meeting is the restoration of the title of Procurator of Zimroel, hereditary to his family. Hopes we can come to a peaceful agreement concerning the powers of said Procurator. Implies that his current title of Pontifex of Zimroel is merely provisional, and that he would be willing to abandon all claim to a separate Pontificate, in return for a constitutional compromise granting greater autonomy to Zimroel in general and the province of Ni-moya in particular, all of this under a Sambailid procuratorship.”

“Well, then,” Septach Melayn said, “is somewhat less fuss here than at first report. Sounds to me as though he’d be willing simply to settle for the name of Procurator and political control over Ni-moya and its surroundings. Which is more or less what Dantirya Sambail had.”

“A title which Prestimion stripped him of,” said Gialaurys. “And vowed there would never be Procurators in Zimroel again.” The Grand Admiral’s jowly face reddened, and growling sounds came from somewhere deep within him. He had the look, Dekkeret thought, of some great volcano preparing to erupt. “Are we to hand to the worthless nephew that which Prestimion took from the uncle, just on the nephew’s say-so? Dantirya Sambail, at least, was a great man in his way. This one’s a stupid pig and nothing more.”

“Dantirya Sambail a great man?” Dinitak said, startled. “From all I heard, he was a monster of monsters!”

“That too,” said Dekkeret. “But a shrewd and brilliant leader. He was no small instrument in the bringing of Zimroel into the modern world, in the days when Prankipin and Confalume ruled, and this continent was a patchwork of little principalities. He worked well with Castle and Labyrinth for forty years, until the time came when he took it into his head to be the one who named the new Coronal, and after that nothing was ever the same.” And, to Gialaurys: “You know better than to think that we’d actually be handing power to this Gaviral anyway, my lord Admiral. This letter’s Mandralisca’s work. Is Mandralisca who’d be the real Procurator, if ever we let the title come back into being.”

“And neverthless you intend to parley, my lord, knowing you are in fact parleying with the serpent Mandralisca, who has tried once already to take your life?” Gialaurys asked.

Septach Melayn stroked his little curling beard and laughed. “Do you remember, Gialaurys, when we were all of us drawn up at Thegomar Edge just before the final battle of the Korsibar war, and a herald under a white flag came out from Prince Gonivaul, who was Grand Admiral then, saying that Lord Korsibar still had hope of a peaceful resolution of all disputes and was calling for a parley?”

“Yes, and suggested that Duke Svor should be the one we send out to discuss terms with him?” said Gialaurys, grinning at the memory.

To Dinitak Septach Melayn said, “Svor was the least warlike of us all, and the trickiest. And had been a good friend of Korsibar’s before the factions divided. We saw no purpose in the parley, but Prestimion said, ‘It does no harm to listen,’ just as Dekkeret has said here today. And so Svor rode forth and met with Gonivaul in the middle of the open field, and Gonivaul made his proposal, which was that Svor wait until the battle had begun and at that time go among Prestimion’s captains to say that Lord Korsibar would make them all dukes and princes if they would abandon Prestimion in mid-struggle and defect to the usurper. And also he offered little Svor Korsibar’s own sister, the beautiful This-met, to be his wife, as the fee for his treason. That was Korsibar’s idea of a parley.”

“And what did Svor do?” Dekkeret asked.

“Rode back to our camp and told us what had been offered, and we all had a good laugh, and then the battle began. In which Svor died bravely, as it happened, fighting well on Prestimion’s behalf, though the sly little man had never been much known for his valor before that day.”

“And will we all have a good laugh also,” said Dinitak, “when we find out what Mandralisca’s idea of a parley is?”

“That do I hope,” said Dekkeret.

“So you are resolved to go through with this thing?” Gialaurys asked.

“Indeed I am,” Dekkeret said. “Where’s the herald from the Lord Gaviral? Tell him I accept the invitation. We will set out at once for the appointed place.”

The appointed place was three thousand miles up the Zimr near a town called Salvamot, where in the old days the Procurator Dantirya Sambail had maintained a country retreat, Mereminene Hall by name. The domain had remained in the family after the Procurator’s downfall, and was now, apparently, the property of the Sambailid who called himself the Lord Gavahaud.

“Which one is that?” Dekkeret asked Septach Melayn. “Their names all sound alike to me. Is he the big drunken one?”

“That is Gavinius, my lord. Gavahaud is the popinjay, the pompous paragon of style and taste, a veritable Castle Mount of vanity and foolish arrogance. I look forward to taking instruction from him in the niceties of fashion.”

Dekkeret chuckled. “We all have much to learn from these people, I think.”

“And they will learn a little from us, my lord,” said Gialaurys.

It was not a usual thing for seagoing vessels to engage in river travel, but there would not have been riverboats enough to carry all of Dekkeret’s force, and the Zimr was so deep and wide it could handle the larger ships of the Coronal’s maritime fleet without difficulty. The only problem had to do with the regular commercial shipping on the Zimr, which was unprepared to find such a host of huge ocean-craft taking up the preponderance of the channel. They scattered this way and that as the great phalanx of Lord Dekkeret’s armada moved northward.

It was virtually a changeless landscape here, a broad riparian plain, low rolling hills beyond, and a succession of little bustling agricultural towns strung along both banks, with day after day of bright skies and warm sunlight. There were reports of heavy rains in Ni-moya, unseasonal downpours, but Ni-moya was far away, and here in the Zimr’s lower valley there was only dry weather and unending warmth.

This was, in theory, Dekkeret’s inaugural grand processional, but he paid no visits to any of the river towns, merely stood in the bow of the Lord Stiamot and waved to the assembled populace as he went sailing by. Even on a grand processional it was impossible for the Coronal to call at any but the most major cities, or else he would spend all the rest of his days going from place to place, growing fat on mayors’ banquets, and never see the Castle again. And the business of Mandralisca and the Five Lords was too pressing to permit any such stops now, even at such relatively important places as Port Saikforge, Stenwamp, or Gablemorn.

On and on they went, town after town, through the placid Zimr valley: Dambmuir, Orgeliuse, Impemond, Haunfort Major; Cerinor and Semirod and Molagat; Thibbildorn, Coranderk, Maccathar. Septach Melayn, who had appointed himself the keeper of the maps, called off each name as the towns came into view. But they all looked alike, anyway—the waterfront promenade, the pier where throngs of riverboat passengers waited for the next vessel, the warehouses and bazaars, the dense plantings of palms and alabandinas and tanigales. As one place after another flowed by him in a pleasant blur, Dekkeret found himself reflecting yet again on the sheer immensity of the great world that was Majipoor: the multitude of its provinces, its myriad cities, its billions of people, spread out over three great continents so huge that it would be a lifetime’s task, and then some, to traverse them all. Here in this densely populated valley, what did Ni-moya matter, or the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount? To these people, the lower Zimr valley was a world unto itself, a little universe, even, swarming with life and activity. And yet there were dozens, scores, hundreds of such little universes everywhere in the world.

It was a miracle, he thought, that a planet so vast and populous had managed so well to live at peace with itself, at least until these troublesome recent times. And would live peacefully again, he swore, once the poisonous irruption of evil into the world that Mandralisca and his ilk represented had been contained and cauterized away.

“This is Gourkaine,” said Septach Melayn one bright cloudless morning, as yet another river town came into view.

“And of what significance is Gourkaine, then?” Dekkeret asked, for Septach Melayn had uttered the name with a certain emphasis and flourish.

“Of none at all, my lord, except that it is the town just downriver from Salvamot, and Salvamot is where our friends the Five Lords of Zimroel await us. So we are almost at our goal.”

Salvamot was a town just like all the others, except that no throngs of eager citizens had gathered at the piers to hail the Coronal when his armada was nearing their city, as had been the case everywhere else thus far, even at nearby Gourkaine. Nor were there any banners flying that bore Lord Dekkeret’s portrait on them and the royal colors. Only a small group of municipal officials could be seen, collected in a tight and uneasy-looking knot by the main quay.

“It is as though we have crossed some sort of border,” said Dekkeret. “But we are still thousands of miles from Ni-moya. Does the power of the Five Lords reach all the way down to here, I wonder?”

“Bear in mind, my lord, that Dantirya Sambail was a frequent visitor to his lands here,” Septach Melayn said, “and his kinsmen also, I’d wager. These people here must feel a special loyalty to that tribe now. And also, look you there—”

He indicated a quay just upriver from the town. A dozen or more big riverboats were docked there, and from their masts fluttered the long crimson banners of the Sambailid clan, with their blood-red crescent-moon emblem emblazoned upon them. It appeared that other such ships lay just to the north, around a slight bend that the Zimr made here. So the Five Lords, or some of them, at any rate, were already on the scene here in Salvamot, and with an armada of their own. Small wonder that the local citizenry would greet the arriving Coronal with some degree of restraint.

A detachment of the Coronal’s guard preceded Lord Dekkeret ashore. Soon the guard-captain returned accompanied by a short, thick-necked man in black robes and a golden chain of office, who announced himself to be Veroalk Timaran, the Chief Justiciar of the Municipality of Salvamot—“I would hold the title of mayor, in another place, my lord,” he informed Dekkeret gravely—and expressed his great delight and satisfaction that his city had been chosen as the site of this historic meeting. He bowed so extravagantly to the Lady Fulkari that veins bulged out on the broad column of his neck and his face turned red. He would, he said, escort the Coronal and his companions to the estate of the Lord Gavahaud in person. The Lord Gavahaud had provided floaters for the royal party, said the Justiciar Veroalk Timaran, and they were waiting a little way beyond.

There were just three small vehicles, with a capacity of perhaps fifteen occupants, and scarcely any room for the Coronal’s bodyguard.

Dekkeret said amiably, “We have brought our own floaters, your honor. We prefer to travel in those. I would be pleased to have you ride beside me in my own.”

The Chief Justiciar had not been prepared for this, and he seemed flustered, perhaps not so much at the distinction of being asked to ride in the Coronal’s personal floater as at the realization that the day was already departing from the script that had been provided him. But he was in no position to place himself in opposition to the Coronal’s wishes, and he watched in what seemed to be mounting consternation as Dekkeret’s men proceeded to unload a score of floaters from the flagship, and as many more from the second vessel, and went on to unload still more from the third: enough vehicles to transport the Coronal’s entire corps of guardsmen, and a good many of the imperial troops as well.

“If you will, your honor,” said Dekkeret, beckoning the Chief Justiciar Veroalk Timaran toward a floater bearing the starburst crest.

Salvamot—city, town, whatever it was—thinned out swiftly once they were away from the river, and very shortly Dekkeret found himself riding through flat open country studded with sparse stands of slender trees that had russet trunks and purple leaves, and then making a winding ascent in more heavily forested terrain toward a low plateau to the east. The domain of the Lord Gavahaud, said the Justiciar, lay up there.

Fulkari rode at Dekkeret’s side, and Dinitak also. Dekkeret would gladly have left her behind to wait for him at Piliplok, for he had no idea what danger awaited him at this conference, or whether it would end in some sort of armed conflict. But she would not hear of it. The Five Lords, she said, would not dare touch an anointed Coronal. And even if they attempted any violence, she said—and it was clear that she saw the peril too—what sort of royal consort would she be, to shrink back into safety while her lord was at risk? She would rather die bravely with him, she said, than carry a cowardly widowhood back with her to the Castle.

“There will be no widowhoods for you just yet,” Dekkeret told her. “These are men who lack all courage, and we will quickly have them kneeling to us.”

Privately he was not so certain of that. But that made no difference. Fulkari would not be denied, and, come what may, she would be with him to the end of this.

Septach Melayn was in the second floater, and Gialaurys in the third, and the others followed close behind. It was a considerable force, hundreds of armed men, and others ready at the pier should any signal of distress go up. If we are riding into ambush, Dekkeret thought, we will make them pay a good price for their treachery.

But all seemed peaceful enough as the floaters entered the great arched gateway of Mereminene Hall. There were crescent-moon banners galore here, and a host of men in the green Sambailid livery, some of them armed, but only in the ordinary way of men-at-arms who guard a great estate. Dekkeret saw no lurking battalions, no cache of waiting weaponry.

A tall thickset red-haired man, strikingly ugly, a preening strutting figure in sweeping maroon cloak and foppish yellow tights that were much too tight, came forward with a clanking of golden spurs. He made a grand excessive bow to Dekkeret and Fulkari, culminating in exaggerated starburst salutes as he straightened up. “My lord—my lady—you do us great honor. I am the Lord Gavahaud, whose pleasure it is to show you to the accommodations that will be yours during this your stay. My lordly brother will be pleased to greet you afterward, when you are installed.”

“What kind of accent is that?” Fulkari asked, under her breath. “He utters everything through his nose. Is that the Ni-moyan way of speech? I’ve never heard the like.”

“False grandeur is what they speak here,” said Dekkeret. “We must be careful not to snicker, whatever the provocation.”

The guest-lodge of Mereminene Hall was a place of shining adamantine floors and vermilion-tiled walls and faceted windows intricately set in lead, easily worthy of housing a visiting Coronal. The main house must surely be even grander, Dekkeret thought. And this was a mere country estate. Old Dantirya Sambail had not been one to stint, it seemed. But why would he? In his time he had been king of Zimroel, effectively, and no doubt had wanted to equal in a single generation all that the Coronals of Castle Mount had built for themselves over thousands of years.

Nor was there any stinting of hospitality by this Gavahaud, either. The lodge swarmed with platoons of bowing servants; rare wines and exotic fruits aplenty were supplied for the delectation of the guests if they cared to refresh themselves upon arrival; their bed-linens were of the finest manufacture, glowing warm-hued silks and satins.

A chamberlain came within an hour with word that there would be a formal dinner that evening, adding that it was the wish of the Lord Gaviral that no discussions of serious matters should be expected until the following day.

The Lord Gaviral—he who styled himself Pontifex of Zimroel—came to the guest-lodge an hour after that, alone, simply dressed, unarmed, and on foot. Dekkeret was surprised at how small a man this Gaviral was, no taller than Prestimion and much less solidly built: flimsy-framed, in fact, with the constantly moving eyes and twitching lips of a man who is uneasy in his spirit. He had heard that these Sambailids were massive hulking ugly men as the old Procurator and his brothers had been, and certainly Gavahaud fit that description, but not this one, who had some of the ugliness but none of the size. Only by his rank plume of orange-red hair and his broad, wide-nostriled nose was his kinship with the tribe of Dantirya Sambail confirmed.

But he was courtly enough, speaking well and making every show of respect for his royal visitor, and behaving not in any way like one who has proclaimed himself to be a lord and even a Pontifex in defiance of all the natural order of things. He inquired merely whether the Coronal found his lodgings suitable, and hoped that his lordship’s appetite would be equal to the feast that awaited him. “I regret that two of my brothers have been unable to join us for this meeting,” said Gaviral. “The Lord Gavinius is unwell, and could not leave Ni-moya. The Lord Gavdat, who practices the study of magery, has remained behind as well, because he is in the midst of important prognosticatory calculations that he feels must not be interrupted even for so important a gathering as this.”

“I regret their absence,” said Dekkeret courteously, although Septach Melayn had already told him that Gavinius was a revolting drunken fool, and the other one, Gavdat, evidently was a fool of a different kind, forever lost in the claptrap of geomantic studies. But courtesy would cost him nothing; and he was only too well aware that it made no difference whether he met with one Sambailid brother, or five, or five hundred. Mandralisca was the force to reckon with. And of Mandralisca nothing at all so far had been said.

It was evening, now. Banquet time.

As Dekkeret had suspected, the late Procurator had indeed lived here on a truly regal scale. The main house was a massive stone pile with some seven or ten great-windowed halls radiating from its core, and the banquet hall was the greatest of all, a tremendous gallery of rugged antique design, with bare red beams of bright thembar-wood, and rough heavy walls of mortared boulders piled to an astounding height. And this at the country estate of a provincial lordling; what was the procuratorial palace at Ni-moya like, Dekkeret wondered, if Dantirya Sambail’s mere country retreat had been a place of this sort?

The big room was full: the entire court of the Five Lords must be here, Dekkeret thought. Protocol was somewhat strained at the high-table seating. Dekkeret, as Coronal, was entitled to the center position, with Fulkari at his side. But the Lord Gaviral claimed at least for the time being to be the Pontifex of this continent, whatever that meant, and the Lord Gavahaud his brother, as the actual owner of Mereminene Hall, was the putative host of the meeting. Which one of them would sit at the Coronal’s right hand? There was much murmuring, and in the end Gavahaud deferred to Gaviral, and let him take the seat of honor beside Dekkeret, but not before some further confusion involving the third brother, the Lord Gavilomarin, who had appeared now also, a blinking, watery-eyed lump of a man with a blithering smile and a general air of witlessness about him. He took the central seat without asking, apparently choosing it at random, and had to be moved along toward the end of the dais, down by Septach Melayn and Gialaurys. Dinitak was seated at the opposite end.

Where, Dekkeret asked himself, was the infamous Mandralisca?

His name had not so much as been mentioned thus far. That seemed very odd. In the awkward first moments after taking his seat Dekkeret said to Gaviral, by way of having anything to say at all, “And your privy counsellor, of whom I’ve heard so much? Surely he is here tonight, but where?”

“He dislikes the prominence of the dais,” said Gaviral. “You will find him over there on the left, against the wall.”

Dekkeret glanced in the direction Gaviral indicated, far across the room to an ordinary table set amidst many others. Though he had never seen Mandralisca, he recognized him at once. He stood out from all those around him like death at a wedding feast: a pallid, somber, harsh-faced, thin-lipped man garbed in a tight-fitting suit of shining black leather that was altogether without ornament except for some large, bright pendant of gold, no doubt an emblem of office, on a chain around his neck. His hard, glittering eyes were trained directly on Dekkeret, nor did he flinch away as the Coronal’s gaze came to rest on him.

So that is Mandralisca, Dekkeret thought. After all this time, he and I are no more than a hundred feet apart.

He found himself fascinated by the man’s chilly, repellent face and sinister aura. There was an unquestionable magnetism about him, a diabolical force. Tremendous demonic power of will was evident in his features. Dekkeret understood now how this man, the embodiment of all that had bedeviled Prestimion throughout the years of his otherwise glorious reign, could have caused so much trouble in the world for so many years. Here was a truly dark soul; here was one whose very existence made one wonder about the Divine’s purpose in creating him.

After a long moment the contact between Majipoor’s Coronal and the Lord of Zimroel’s privy counsellor broke, and it was Mandralisca who was the first to look away, in order to make some remark to his table-companions. There were three of those: a round-faced common-looking man of middle years or a little more, a handsome, open-faced lad with golden-white hair who could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, and a small, swarthy-skinned, squinch-eyed fellow who beyond any question had to be Dinitak’s despised helmet-making uncle, Khaymak Barjazid of Suvrael.

Servitors brought wine around, and filled all their bowls. Dekkeret wondered idly whether Dantirya Sambail’s old custom of taking a poison-taster with him wherever he went might not have been appropriate here. Though it seemed absurd, he put his hand over Fulkari’s when she reached in an automatic way for her wine-bowl, and held her back.

She gave him a questioning look.

“We must wait for the toast,” he whispered, not knowing what else to say.

“Oh. Of course,” she said, looking a little abashed.

The Lord Gaviral was on his feet, now, wine-bowl in his hand. The hall grew silent. “To amity,” he said. “To harmony. To concord. To the eternal friendship of the continents.”

He looked toward Dekkeret and drank. Dekkeret, realizing now that his wine had been poured from the same flask as Gaviral’s, rose and returned the toast with equally empty generalities, and drank also. It was superb wine. Whatever else would happen here at Mereminene Hall, they were not going to be poisoned this evening, he decided.

All around the room, the Sambailid folk were on their feet—all of them men, Dekkeret noted—holding high their bowls and calling out, “To amity! To harmony! To concord!” Even Mandralisca had joined the toast, although what he held in his hand was a water-glass, not a winebowl.

“Your privy counsellor doesn’t care for wine, eh?” Dekkeret said to Gaviral.

“Abhors it, in fact. Will not touch the stuff. Had to drink too much of it, I suppose, when he was taster to my uncle the Procurator.”

“I take your point. If I thought there might be poison in every winebowl that was handed me, I might lose my taste for drink myself, after a year or two,” said Dekkeret, and laughed, and took another sip of his own.

It still seemed very odd to him that Mandralisca had not come up to be introduced. The merest provincial mayor was ever eager to force his name and pedigree on a visiting Coronal; and here was a man who held the rank of privy counsellor to someone who gave himself the title of lord, and claimed authority over all of Zimroel, and he chose instead to nest among his own companions at a far table. But that was Mandralisca’s style, apparently: to lurk in the background and allow someone else the visible glory. That was how he had operated in Dantira Sambail’s time, and that seemed to be how he operated now.

Dekkeret did remark again on Mandralisca’s evident shyness to Gaviral at one point in the evening, saying that it was strange that he was not at the high table.

“He is a man of very humble birth, you know,” Gaviral said piously. “He feels it is not his place to be up here with those of us whose ancestry is so splendid. But you will meet him tomorrow, my lord, when we all gather in the meadow to explore the details of the treaty we wish to propose.”

18

It was midday, bright and warm, when the summons came to gather in the meadow for the conference that had brought the Coronal to this place. When Dekkeret reached the site, a broad grassy plain far from the main houses that was bordered on three sides by a dark, dense forest and on the fourth by a pleasant stream, he saw that a meeting-table made of broad planks of polished black wood, mounted on a foundation of thick yellowish beams that tapered to a point, had been erected parallel to the stream. A neat array of paper and parchment was set out on it, weighed down by crystal globes to keep them from blowing away in the gentle breeze, and also inkpots, milufta-feather pens, and various other writing gear. Dekkeret saw also an assortment of wine-flasks, wine of half a dozen different colors, and a row of bowls waiting to be filled. Once the treaty had been presented and—as Gaviral so plainly hoped—agreed upon, the signatory parties would no doubt be expected to celebrate the event right here upon the spot.

The Lord Gaviral, resplendent in a metallic jerkin that seemed almost like a suit of armor and richly tooled scarlet leggings piped with golden thread, was already at the site, standing beside the table. His brothers Gavahaud and Gavilomarin, splendidly dressed also, flanked him.

As for Mandralisca, he stood just at his master’s elbow, clad now not in last night’s skin-tight black leathers but in a far gaudier costume: a knee-length red-and-green jacket with a wide, flat collar decked with white steetmoy fur and hanging sleeves that were slashed to allow his arms to come through, over dark gray hose of the finest weave, and a broad meshwork belt at his waist supporting a fancy tasseled pouch. It was the sort of dandyish costume that Septach Melayn might have chosen, though the sight of Mandralisca’s pale, hard, sinister face rising above that flaring collar muted the outfit’s flamboyance more than somewhat. Mandralisca’s own threesome of companions, the pudgy little bandy-legged aide-de-camp and the tall fair-haired youth and the scrawny, evil-looking Barjazid, were only a short distance behind him.

Dekkeret had worn his green-and-gold robes of state to the meeting, and the slender golden circlet that he often used in the place of the star-burst crown. Gialaurys, beside him, was in full armor, but without a helm. Septach Melayn was content with a doublet and bright leggings. The spiral Labyrinth symbol on his breast was his only ornament. Dinitak wore his usual simple tunic, and Fulkari had chosen simple garb also. A row of Dekkeret’s hand-picked guardsmen stood some distance to the rear. Gaviral had an honor guard behind him as well, at the same distance.

“An auspicious day, my lord!” cried Gaviral, as Dekkeret approached. “A day when harmony is to be attained!”

His voice was cheery, but sounded forced and strained; and there was a generally edgy look about him, a fidgeting of his lips, a flickering instability of his gaze. Well, thought Dekkeret, he has a great deal at stake here: he has brought the Coronal Lord far into this unfamiliar territory to demand unheard-of concessions from him, and the Coronal has given every indication that he will listen to the Sambailid demands seriously and perhaps even to accede to them, but he has no certain assurance of what the Coronal actually has in mind. Nor do I of him, Dekkeret thought. We are both playing here with closely guarded hands.

“Harmony, yes. Let us hope that that is what we fashion here today,” said Dekkeret, giving Gaviral the warmest of smiles.

As he spoke he allowed his eyes to rest steadily on Gaviral’s, which were bloodshot and uneasy; but the Sambailid looked quickly away, and busied himself fussing among the papers and writing apparatus laid out on the table, as though he were some sort of amanuensis rather than the self-styled Pontifex of Zimroel. Dekkeret’s gaze moved onward toward Mandralisca, who offered an altogether different response, a cold, unwavering stare, full of menace and loathing, which Dekkeret admired for its unconcealed sincerity if for nothing else.

“Shall we drink to a successful conclusion to our talks, lordship, before we get to the work of setting forth our proposals and hearing your response?” Gaviral said.

“I see no reason why not,” replied Dekkeret, and the wine-bowls were filled. Once again—he could not help himself—Dekkeret kept surreptitious watch to see whether his bowl and Gaviral’s were filled from the same flask, which once again they were. Indeed, the bowls were being filled so indiscriminately up and down the table that there was no way that poison could be involved, not unless Gaviral cared to take some of his own men down with the visitors.

Gaviral offered the same toast to amity and concord as he had the night before, and they all took light sips of their wine, mere symbolic tastes. Mandralisca, as before, did not drink.

Then Gaviral said, “We have prepared this document for your examination, my lord.—This is our privy counsellor, as you know, the Count Mandralisca. He will show you the text, of which he is the author, and he will deal with any questions that may arise, clause by clause.”

Dekkeret nodded. Mandralisca, followed as ever by his three minions, marched ostentatiously around the end of the long table and up Dekkeret’s side of it. Dekkeret saw now that the aide-de-camp was carrying tucked under his arm a rolled parchment scroll, which he brought forth and handed to Mandralisca. The privy counsellor, opening it, held it out in front of himself and studied it as if wishing to ascertain that the aide-de-camp had indeed brought the right one; and finally, seemingly satisfied, leaned forward and laid it down on the table in front of Dekkeret.

“If you will, my lord,” said Mandralisca, with an odd tone in his voice that was a mixture, Dekkeret thought, of willed obsequiousness and barely throttled rage.

There was a great silence all around as Dekkeret began to read the document through.

It was not an easy business, reading that scroll. The text was close-packed and verbose, and the calligraphy was ornate and of an antiquarian sort, with many an irritating curlicue and decorative swirl. It called for close concentration, verging almost on decipherment. Dekkeret, struggling with it, soon discovered that it opened with a lengthy and circumlocutory preamble, implying, perhaps, that the Sambailids were asking for nothing more than provincial autonomy and a revival of the procuratorial title. But it was followed by other clauses that contradicted that, clauses seeming to assert that what they actually wanted was a good deal more—in fact an end to all imperial rule everywhere in the continent of Zimroel, complete independence, total withdrawal of the existing regime.

“Is there a problem, my lord?” asked Mandralisca, hovering by Dekkeret’s shoulder and leaning close.

“A problem? No. But I find a certain lack of clarity in your opening statements. I’ll look at them again, I think.”

Frowning, he went back to the beginning, sought to disentangle clause from clause, separating each statement from its carefully mated opposite. It was a task that called for the deepest concentration, and deep concentration was what Dekkeret endeavored to give it.

Not so deep, though, that he failed to see from the corner of his eye the bright flash of the blade that Mandralisca had suddenly pulled from that tasseled pouch at his waist, nor heard Fulkari’s immediate gasp of alarm. But it was all happening so swiftly that he could do nothing more than lean backward, away from the thrust that was heading his way from the rear.

But then in one split second the long-haired boy, Mandralisca’s own aide, reached his hand forward, swooped up the wine-bowl at Dekkeret’s elbow, and hurled its contents into his master’s eyes. At the same time with his other hand he made a grab at Mandralisca’s descending arm. Mandralisca, eluding the boy’s grasping hand, whirled about blindly and swept the dagger-blade in a furious gesture across the boy’s throat, drawing a spurt of red. The boy seemed to crumple and disappear. And then, amid the general uproar, Septach Melayn appeared at Dekkeret’s side, his drawn sword in his hand, ordering Mandralisca in a terrible roaring cry to stand back from the Coronal’s presence.

Mandralisca, half blinded, his face streaming with wine, did back away, but only as far as the place where the Lord Gavahaud stood gaping in astonishment and terror. From Gavahaud’s scabbard he yanked the elaborately chased dress-sword with which the vain Sambailid had furnished his outfit, and swung quickly around, still trying to blink the wine out of his eyes as he confronted the onrushing Septach Melayn.

“Here,” said Septach Melayn coldly, halting and tossing to Mandralisca a kerchief that he was carrying tucked in his sleeve. “Wipe your face. I will not kill a man who is unable to see.” He gave the surprised Mandralisca a moment to blot away the wine; and then he came forward again, his rapier in swift motion.

Dekkeret, still stunned and bewildered by all that had taken place, half rose from his seat at the conference table. But no intervention was possible. Septach Melayn and Mandralisca were already hard at it, moving steadily out in the meadow as they fought. Dekkeret had never seen two swords moving so swiftly. Septach Melayn was the swiftest man alive with a sword; but Mandralisca met him thrust for thrust, parry for parry, a wild display of virtuoso swordsmanship, feinting, pivoting, moving always with lightning speed. There was no stroke that Septach Melayn could not deal with and deflect, but still—still—to see Septach Melayn held at a standstill, unable to break through the other’s defense—

And then Mandralisca, turning abruptly away from Septach Melayn, reached down and snatched up a handful of the soft, loose meadow soil and flung it into Septach Melayn’s face. Unlike Septach Melayn, he had no compunctions about fighting with a man who could not see. The earthen clod broke up as it struck Septach Melayn, some going to his eyes, some to his nostrils, some to his mouth; and as he stood baffled for a moment, coughing and spitting and wiping at his eyes, Mandralisca rushed forward in a furious frenzied onslaught, driving his blade toward the center of Septach Melayn’s chest.

Dekkeret watched in horror. Mandralisca’s sword and Septach Melayn’s moved with blurring speed. For an instant it was impossible to see what was happening. Then Dekkeret caught sight of Septach Melayn parrying Mandralisca’s desperate attack, sweeping Mandralisca’s sword aside with a grand upstroke of his own. An instant later Septach Melayn lunged and thrust, and took Mandralisca through the throat with his stroke.

The two men stood frozen for an instant.

There was an utterly weird look, a strange thing that was almost a look of triumph, on Mandralisca’s face as he died. Septach Melayn pulled his blade free of the toppling Mandralisca and swung about so that he was facing toward the conference table and Dekkeret. But then Dekkeret realized that somewhere in the final melee Septach Melayn had been wounded also. Blood was streaming down the front of his doublet, a trickle at first, then more, so much that the little golden Labyrinth emblem was completely hidden in the weltering flow.

The whole meadow was in chaos now, concealed Sambailid troops emerging from their hiding places in the forest, Dekkeret’s own guard rushing forward to protect him, and the rest of Dekkeret’s soldiers, coming in now from the outskirts of the field where they had been waiting for a signal from their king, joining the fray also when they heard the bellowed command that came from Dekkeret. In the midst of all this the Coronal ran toward Septach Melayn, who was staggering and lurching, but still contriving somehow to remain on his feet.

“My lord—” Septach Melayn began. And halted, for some spasm of pain seemed to overtake him; but then he recovered himself a little and said, smiling, “The beast is dead, is he not? How glad I am of that.”

“Oh, Septach Melayn—”

Dekkeret would have caught him then, for it seemed that he was about to fall. But Septach Melayn waved him away. “Take this, my lord,” he said, handing Dekkeret his sword. “Use it to defend yourself against these barbarians. I will not need it again.” And added, with a glance at the fallen Mandralisca: “I have achieved what I was put into this world to do.”

Now Septach Melayn tottered and began to topple. Dekkeret seized him by the shoulders and held him upright in a tender embrace. It seemed to him that Septach Melayn weighed next to nothing, tall as he was. Dekkeret held him that way long enough to hear a quiet little sigh come from him, and then the death rattle. And then he eased him gently to the ground.

Swinging about, now, Dekkeret took in the madness all around him in a single glance. One swarm of his guardsmen stood in a circle of swords about Fulkari; she was safe. A second group had formed a wall around his own self. Gialaurys loomed like a mountain beside the conference table, clutching the Lord Gaviral by the throat with one huge hand, and the Lord Galahaud the same way with the other. Dinitak had found a poniard somewhere and was brandishing it at his uncle’s breast, and Khaymak Barjazid had his hands raised high to show that he was his nephew’s prisoner. All over the field the Sambailid warriors, realizing now that their leaders were taken, were throwing down their weapons and lifting their hands in similar gestures of surrender.

Then Dekkeret looked down and saw the boy who had thrown the wine in Mandralisca’s face, lying practically at his feet, with Mandralisca’s plump little aide-de-camp kneeling over him. He was streaming with blood from that terrible wound to the throat.

“Is he alive?” Dekkeret asked.

“Barely, my lord. He has only moments left.”

“He saved me from death,” said Dekkeret, and an eerie chill came over him as there entered into his mind the recollection of another day long ago, in Normork, and another Coronal faced with an assassin’s blade, and the casual unthinking swipe of that blade that had taken his cousin Sithelle’s life and in a strange way simultaneously set him on his path to the throne. So it had all happened again, a life sacrificed so that a Coronal might live. Dekkeret, looking across to Fulkari, saw the ghost of Sithelle instead, and trembled and came close to weeping.

But the boy was still alive, more or less. His eyes were open and he was staring at Dekkeret. Why, Dekkeret wondered, had he mysteriously turned against his master in this fatal way in that decisve moment? And had his answer at once, exactly as if he had asked his question aloud. For in the softest of voices the boy said, “I could not bear it any longer, my lord. Knowing that he meant to kill you here today—to kill the lord of the world—”

“Hush, boy,” Dekkeret said. “Don’t try to speak. You need to rest.”

But he did not appear to have heard. “And knowing also that I had taken the wrong turn in life, that I had foolishly given myself to the most evil of masters—”

Dekkeret knelt by him and told him again to rest; but it was no use, now, for the faint voice had trickled off into silence, and the staring eyes were unseeing. Dekkeret glanced up at the aide-de-camp and said, “What was his name?”

“Thastain, my lord. He came from a place called Sennec.”

“Thastain of Sennec. And yours?”

“Jacomin Halefice, lordship.”

“Take him to the lodge, then, Halefice, and have his body laid out for burial. We’ll give him a hero’s funeral, this Thastain of Sennec. The sort one would give a duke or a prince who fell fighting for his lord. And there will be a great monument in his name erected in Ni-moya, that I vow.”

He walked across then to the place where Septach Melayn lay. Gialaurys, still gripping the two Sambailids as though they were mere sacks of grain, had gone there too, dragging his captives with him, and stood looking down at his friend’s body. He was weeping great terrible silent tears that flowed in rivers down his broad fleshy face.

Quietly Dekkeret said, “We will take him away from this loathsome place, Gialaurys, and return him to the Castle, where he belongs. You will carry his body there, and see to it that he is given a tomb to match those of Dvorn and Lord Stiamot, with an inscription on it saying, ‘Here lies Septach Melayn, who was the equal in nobility of any king that ever lived.’ ”

“That I will do, my lord,” said Gialaurys, in a voice that itself seemed to come from beyond the grave.

“And also we will find some bard of the court—I charge you with this task too, Gialaurys—to write the epic of his life, which schoolchildren ten thousand years from now will know by heart.”

Gialaurys nodded. He gestured to a pair of guardsmen to take charge of his two prisoners, and dropped to his knees, and scooped up Septach Melayn and slowly carried him from the field.

Dekkeret pointed next at the body of Mandralisca, face down in the grass. “Take this away,” he said to his captain of guards, “and see that it is burned, in whatever place the kitchen trash of this place is burned, and have the ashes turned under in the forest, where no one will ever find them.”

“I will, my lord.”

Dekkeret went at last to Fulkari, who stood white-faced and stunned beside the conference table. “We are done here, my lady,” he said quietly. “A sad day this has been, too. But we will never know a sadder one, I think, until we come to the end of our own days.” He slipped his arm around her. She was trembling like one who stands in an icy wind. He held her until the trembling had abated somewhat, and then he said, “Come, love. Our business here is done, and I have important messages to send to Prestimion.”

19

From her many-windowed room high up atop the Alaisor Mercantile Exchange, Keltryn stood staring out to sea, watching the great red-sailed ship from Zimroel as it entered the harbor. Dinitak was aboard that ship. They had hurried her by swift royal floater in a breathless chase across the width of Alhanroel so that she would be here in Alaisor when he arrived, and they had installed her in royal magnificence in this huge suite that they said was ordinarily reserved only for Powers of the Realm; and now here she was, and there he was, aboard that majestic vessel just off shore and coming closer to her with every passing moment.

It still amazed her that she was here at all.

Not just that she was in the fabled city of Alaisor, so far from Castle Mount, with those extraordinary black cliffs behind her and the gigantic monument to Lord Stiamot in the plaza just below her room. Sooner or later, she supposed, she would have found some reason to see the world, and her travels might well have brought her to this beautiful place.

But that she had come running here at Dinitak’s behest, after all that had passed between them—

She could remember only too well saying to Fulkari, upon learning that he was leaving her behind when he went to Zimroel, “I never want to see him again!”

And Fulkari smugly saying, “You will.”

She had thought then that Fulkari was wrong, simply wrong. She could never swallow such humiliation. But time had passed, days and weeks and months, time in which she had the leisure to dwell in memory on those hand-in-hand strolls in the hallways of the Castle, those candlelit dinners, those nights of astounding passion. Time to reflect, also, on Dinitak’s unique nature, his strangely intense sense of right and wrong. Time to think that perhaps she could almost comprehend his reasons for going to Zimroel without her.

And then, by special courier, those two messages from abroad—

Dinitak Barjazid, to Keltryn of Sipermit, saying, in that odd formal manner of his, I am returning by way of Alaisor, and I beg you most urgently to be there when I arrive, my dearest one, for we have things of the greatest importance to discuss, and they will be best discussed there. “I beg you most urgently!” That did not sound much like Dinitak, to beg at all, and most urgently at that. “My dearest one.” Yes.

The second message, in the same pouch, was from Fulkari, and what Fulkari said was, He will ask you to meet him at Alaisor. Go to him there, sister. He loves you. He loves you more than you could possibly believe.

She could not repress the instantaneous flare of anger that was her first reaction. How dare he? How dare she? Why fall into the same old trap again? Go all the way to Alaisor, no less, at his behest, for his convenience? Why? Why? Why?

He loves you.

He loves you more than you could possibly believe.

And Dinitak:

I beg you most urgently.

My dearest one. My dearest one. My dearest one.

A knock at her door. “My lady?” It was Ekkamoor, the chamberlain from the Castle who had looked after her on this frantic journey to the continent’s edge. “The ship is about to dock, my lady. Is it your wish to be at the pier when it does?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course!”

It flew the Coronal’s green-and-gold banner, and the Coronal’s star-burst emblem was on its prow. But there was a yellow flag of mourning flying from its mast as well, and Keltryn, watching from the waiting-room as the gangplank was fixed in place, stared frowning as a solemn-faced honor guard came from the vessel first, bearing a coffin, by the looks of it a coffin of the most costly make. Walking behind it was a heavy-shouldered, powerfully built man whom she recognized, after a moment, as the Grand Admiral Gialaurys, Septach Melayn’s old friend and companion-in-arms, but a Gialaurys who seemed to have aged a hundred years since she last had seen him at the Castle at the time of Lord Dekkeret’s coronation. His head was bowed, his face was dark and grim. As the procession bearing the coffin went past her, he did not appear to notice her at all. But why should he? If he knew her at all, it was only as one of the innumerable young ladies of the court. And he was obviously so preoccupied with his grief that he could spare no attention for those he passed while coming ashore.

But who is it that is dead? she wondered, looking back at the somber procession as it vanished from view.

And then a familiar voice cried, “Keltryn! Keltryn!”

“Dinitak!”

He had changed, somehow. Not outwardly: he was the same slender, compact man, with the same sun-darkened face and the same look of taut-coiled intensity. But something was different. There was—what?—a kind of grandeur about him now, an almost regal air of attainment and purpose. Keltryn saw it right away. She ran to him, and he opened his arms to her, and she pressed herself tight against him, and the sensation of contact brought warm, good memories to life in her, but there was also, even now, that puzzling sense of changes that had taken place within him.

Of course. He had gone to Zimroel with the Coronal. He had taken part in some kind of terrible struggle against the enemies of the throne.

After a time she stepped back from him and said, “Well, here I am, Dinitak!”

“Here you are, yes. How wonderful that is.”

“And Zimroel—you’ll tell me all about it—?”

“In time. It is a very long story. And there is so much else to tell too.” A curious smile traveled like a flickering flame across his dark features. “I am to be a Power of the Realm, Keltryn. And if you will have me, you will be, like your sister, the consort of a Power.”

The words made no sense at all to her. She stood there, saying them over and over in her mind, and in no way could she draw a meaning from them.

He said, “It is agreed, by Dekkeret and Prestimion and the Lady. I am to wear the helmet, and enter minds as the Lady does, and seek out those who would do harm to others. And with the helmet I am to warn them of the consequences of their actions, and to punish them if they proceed in spite of the warning. The King of Dreams is to be my title; and it will descend to my children, and to my children’s children forever, who will be trained in the helmet’s use. So there will be no more Mandraliscas in the world. You see, then, I am to be a Power. But will you be a Power’s wife, Keltryn?”

“You’re asking me to marry you?” she said, dumfounded.

“If the King of Dreams is to have children who will inherit his tasks, he must have a queen, is that not so?—We will live in Suvrael. That is Prestimion’s decision, not mine, that the new Power must make his home far from those of the other three; but it is not the worst place in the world, Suvrael, and I think you will get used to it much quicker than you think. If you like, we can return to the Castle to be married, or go to the Labyrinth and have Prestimion perform the ceremony, but Dekkeret and I are agreed that it is best for me to go to Suvrael as quickly as I can, in order that I can—”

She was barely listening, and scarcely understanding at all. A Power of the Realm? King of Dreams? Suvrael? It was all whirling madly in her mind.

“Keltryn?” Dinitak said.

“So much—so strange—”

“Tell me this, at least: will you marry me, Keltryn?”

That much she could focus on. There would be time later to comprehend the rest of it, King of Dreams and Suvrael and all of that, and what had happened while he and Dekkeret and the others were over in Zimroel, and whose body it was that Gialaurys had escorted from the ship.

“Yes,” she said, understanding that much. He loves you. He loves you more than you could possibly believe. “Yes, Dinitak, yes, yes, yes, yes!”

Prestimion said, glancing down at the dispatch that had just been brought to him, “Gialaurys has come from Alaisor to Sisivondal with the body, and is setting out on his way back to the Mount. So we will have to set out ourselves for the Castle in a day or two also, Varaile.”

She smiled. “I knew you’d have to find some excuse to get yourself away from the Labyrinth before much longer, Prestimion. I don’t think we’ve ever spent as many consecutive months anywhere as we have since we got back here from Stoien.”

“In truth I’ve grown quite accustomed to life in the Labyrinth, my love. Confalume said I would, sooner or later; and he was right in that, as he was in so many things. It’s when you’re Coronal that you’re a rover. The blood is hot in you, then. The Pontifex prefers a quieter life, and the Labyrinth has a way of growing on one, don’t you think?” He gestured about him with one hand and then the other, indicating all the familiar possessions of their Castle household, everything now comfortably installed in the apartments of the Labyrinth that once had been Confalume’s and now were theirs, and looking as though they had been in place for decades rather than months. “—In any case, it wasn’t my decision to bury Septach Melayn at the Castle. It was Dekkeret’s. To which I gladly defer.”

“He was your friend, Prestimion. And High Spokesman to the Pontifex, as well. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for him to be laid to rest here at the Labyrinth?”

Prestimion shook his head. “He was never a man of the Labyrinth, was Septach Melayn. He came here only out of loyalty to me. Castle Mount was his place, and there he will lie. I will not overrule Dekkeret on that. He died saving Dekkeret’s life; that act alone gives Dekkeret claim on where to bury him.”

He realized that he was speaking quite calmly of these details of Septach Melayn’s burial, as though it were merely some ordinary piece of business of the realm, and for a moment Prestimion actually thought that the pain of his friend’s death might be starting to heal. But then it all came sweeping back upon him, and he grimaced and turned away. His eyes were stinging. That Septach Melayn, of all men, should have been lost in the struggle against Mandralisca—that he should have given up his own life for the sake of ridding the world of that—that—

“Prestimion—” said Varaile, reaching a hand toward him.

He fought to regain his control, and succeeded. “We needn’t discuss this, Varaile. Shouldn’t. Dekkeret has decreed a Castle funeral and a Castle burial, and Gialaurys is bringing him there, and the monument is already being designed, and I will officiate at the ceremony, and so you and I should start packing for our trip up the Glayge. And so be it.”

“I wonder what sort of burial Dekkeret decreed for Mandralisca.”

“I’ll ask him, if I think of it whenever he returns from his processional. I’d have fed the body to a pack of hungry jakkaboles, myself. Dekkeret’s a kindlier man than I am, but I like to think he’d do the same.”

“He is a kingly man, is Dekkeret.”

“Yes. Yes, that he is,” said Prestimion. “A king among kings. I have left the world in good hands, I think. He told me he would crush Mandralisca without going to war, and he has done that, and pushed those five ghastly brothers back into the box out of which they sprang, and all Zimroel sings Lord Dekkeret’s praises, now, apparently.” Prestimion laughed. The thought of Dekkeret’s deeds in Zimroel had brightened his spirit. “Do you know, Varaile, what it is that I will be famous for, in the years ahead? The great thing that they will remember about me? It will be that I came upon the boy who was to become Lord Dekkeret, one day while I was in Normork, and that I had the good sense to gather him to me and make him my Coronal. Yes. What they will say of me is that I was the king who gave the world Lord Dekkeret.—And now let us get ourselves ready for this journey to the Castle, love, and for the one bit of sad business we must do there, before we enter into the happy times of our reign.”

They had been traveling up the Zimr for weeks and weeks, city upon city, Flegit and Clarischanz, Belka and Larnimisculus and Verf, and now they were in Ni-moya at last, were Dekkeret and Fulkari, installed in the great palace that once had belonged to Dantirya Sambail, wandering in amazement through its multitude of rooms, exclaiming over the splendor of its design.

“He did indeed live like a king,” Fulkari murmured. They had reached the westernmost wing of the building, where a colossal window of a single pane provided a sweeping view that ran from the waterfront on their left to the white towers of the Ni-moyan hills on the right, and the great bosom of the giant river rolling on before them far into the remote regions of the continent. “What will you do with this place now, Dekkeret? You aren’t going to have it torn down, are you?”

“No. Never. I can’t hold this building guilty of the crimes of Dantirya Sambail and his five pitiful nephews. Those crimes will be forgotten, sooner or later. But what a crime against beauty it would be to destroy the Procurator’s palace.”

“Yes. Quite so.”

“I’ll appoint a duke to reign over Ni-moya—I don’t know who it will be, but he’ll be someone without a drop of Sambailid blood in him—and he and his heirs can live here, knowing they do so by grace of the Coronal’s generosity.”

“A duke. Not a procurator.”

“There’ll be no more procurators here, Fulkari. That was Prestimion’s decree, which I will renew. We’ll remake the government of Zimroel to decentralize it again: a single authority here’s too dangerous, too threatening to the imperial government itself. Provincial dukes, loyalty to the crown, frequent grand processionals to underscore the allegiance of Zimroel to the constitution—that’s how it will be, yes.”

“And the Five Lords?” she asked.

“Lords no more, you can be sure of that. But it would be a sin to put such fools to death. When they’ve done enough penance for their little uprising, they can go back to their palaces in the desert, and there they’ll stay forever. I doubt they’ll make any further trouble. And if the thought of it even comes into their minds, the King of Dreams will take care of that.”

“The King of Dreams,” Fulkari said, smiling. “Our brother Dinitak. A brilliant scheme, that was. Although you’ve cost me a sister by sending him off to Suvrael.”

“And cost myself a friend,” said Dekkeret. “It can’t be helped. Prestimion insisted: the King of Dreams must make his headquarters down there. We can’t have three of the four Powers clustered in Alhanroel. He’ll do the job well, I think. He was born for it.—Did you ever think, Fulkari, that your wild tomboy of a sister would marry a Power of the Realm?”

“Did I ever think I would?” she asked, and they laughed, and moved closer to each other by the great window. Dekkeret stared outward. Night was beginning to fall, now. Somewhere out there to the west was a further world of marvels that they were yet to visit: Khyntor of the great steaming geysers, and crystalline Dulorn where the Perpetual Circus offered its carnival of wonders night and day, day and night, and ancient cobblestoned Pidruid beyond it on the coast, and Narabal, Til-omon, Tjangalagala, Cibairil, Brunir, Banduk Marika, all those fabled cities of the distant west.

They would visit them all. He was determined to go everywhere. To stand before the people and say, Here I am, Dekkeret your Coronal Lord, who will devote his life to your service.

“What a beautiful sunset,” Fulkari said softly. “So many colors: gold, purple, red, green, all swirling together.”

“It is. Very beautiful.”

“But it’s still only the middle of the day in Khyntor, isn’t it? And morning in Dulorn. And the middle of the night before, out in Pidruid. Oh, Dekkeret, the world is so very big! The Castle seems so far away, just now!”

“The Castle is far away, my sweet.”

“How long will we be gone on this processional, do you think?”

Dekkeret shrugged. “I don’t know. Five years? Ten? Forever?”

“Seriously, Dekkeret.”

“I tell you, Fulkari: I don’t know. As long as it takes. The Castle will get along without us, if it has to. I am the Coronal Lord wherever I happen to be on Majipoor. And we have an entire world to visit.” The sky was changing as they watched, the colors deepening, red giving way to bronze, purple shading into a dark maroon. Soon it would be night here, and twilight in the west. The stars were beginning to appear. One of the lesser moons came into view and cast a silver strand of light on the waters of the river. Dekkeret’s arm tightened around Fulkari’s shoulders, and they stood silently for a time. “Look you there,” he said then, when at last all the colors had faded to black. “There is Majipoor before us, and the night is as beautiful as the day.”