Lord Prestimion

1

The coronation ceremony, with its ancient ritual incantations and investitures and ringing trumpet-calls, and the climactic donning of the crown and the royal robes, had ended fifty minutes ago. Now came a space of several hours in the festivities before the celebratory coronation feast. There was a furious, noisy bustling and hustling throughout the vastness of the great building that from this day onward would be known to the world as Lord Prestimion’s Castle, as the thousands of guests and the thousands of servitors made ready for that evening’s grand banquet. Only the new Coronal himself stood apart and alone, in a sphere of echoing silence.

After all the strife and turmoil of civil war, the usurpation and the battles and the defeats and the heartbreak, the hour of victory had come. Prestimion was the anointed Coronal of Majipoor at last, and eager to take up his new tasks.

But—to his great surprise—something troublesome, something profoundly unsettling, had surfaced within him in this glorious hour. The sense of relief and achievement that he had felt at the knowledge that his reign was finally beginning was, he realized, being unexpectedly tempered by a strange core of uneasiness. Why, though? Uneasiness over what? This was his moment of triumph, and he should be rejoicing. And yet—even so—

A powerful hunger for privacy amid all the frenzy of the day had come over him toward the end of the coronation ceremony, and, when it was over, he had abruptly gone off to sequester himself in the immensity of the Great Hall of Lord Hendighail, where he could be alone. That huge room was where the celebratory gifts that had been arriving steadily all month, a river of wonderful things flowing toward the Castle without cease from every province of Majipoor, lay piled in glittering array.

Prestimion had only the haziest notion of when Lord Hendighail had lived—seven, eight, nine hundred years before, something like that—and none at all of the man’s life and deeds. But it was obvious that Hendighail had believed in doing things on a colossal scale. The Hendighail Hall was one of the biggest rooms in the entire enormous Castle, a mighty chamber ten times as long as it was wide, and lofty in proportion, with a planked ceiling of red ghakka-timber supported by groined vaults of black stone whose intricately interwoven traceries were lost in the dimness far overhead.

The Castle, though, was a city in itself, with busy central districts and old, half-forgotten peripheral ones, and Lord Hendighail had caused his great hall to be built on the northern side of Castle Mount, which was the wrong side, the obscure side. Prestimion, although he had lived at the Mount most of his life, could not remember ever having set foot in the Hendighail Hall before this day. In modern times it had been used mainly as a storage depot, where objects that had not yet found their proper places were kept. Which was how it was being employed today: a warehouse for the tribute coming in from all over the world for the new Coronal.

It was packed now with the most astounding assortment of things, a fantastic display of the color and wonder of Majipoor. The custom was, when a new ruler came to the throne, for all the myriad cities and towns and villages of Majipoor to vie with one another in bestowing gifts of great splendor upon him. But this time—so said the old ones, the ones whose memories went back more than forty years to the last coronation—they had outdone themselves in generosity. What had arrived thus far was three, five, ten times as much as might have been expected. Prestimion felt stunned and dazed by the profusion of it all.

He had hoped that inspecting this great flow of gifts from all the farflung districts of the world might lift his spirits in this unexpectedly cheerless moment. Coronation gifts, after all, were meant to tell a new Coronal that the world welcomed him to the throne.

But to his distress he discovered immediately that they were having the opposite effect. There was something disturbing and unhealthy about so much excess. What he wanted the world to be saying to him was that it was happy to have a bold and vigorous young Coronal taking the place of the old and weary Lord Confalume atop Castle Mount. This extraordinary torrent of costly presents was altogether too great a display of gratitude, though. It was extreme; it was disproportionate; it indicated that the world was undergoing a kind of wild frenzy of delight over his accession, altogether out of keeping with the actual fact of the event.

That worldwide overreaction mystified him. Surely they had not been that eager for Lord Confalume to go. They had loved Lord Confalume, who had been a great Coronal in his day, although everyone knew that Confalume’s day now was over and it was time for someone new and more dynamic to occupy the seat of kingly power, and that Prestimion was the right man. Even so, this outpouring of gifts upon the transfer of authority seemed almost as much an expression of relief as one of joy.

Relief over what? Prestimion wondered. What had triggered such a superfluity of jubilation, verging on worldwide hysteria?

A fierce civil war had lately come to a happy outcome. Were they rejoicing over that, perhaps?

No. No.

The citizens of Majipoor could not possibly know anything about the sequence of strange events—the conspiracy and the usurpation and the terrible war that followed it—that had brought Lord Prestimion by such a roundabout route to his throne. All of that had been obliterated from the world’s memory by Prestimion’s own command. So far as Majipoor’s billions of people were aware, the civil war had never happened. The brief illegitimate reign of the self-styled Coronal Lord Korsibar had vanished from memory as though it had never been. As the world understood things, Lord Confalume, upon the death of the old Pontifex Prankipin, had succeeded to Prankipin’s title, whereupon Prestimion had serenely and uneventfully been elevated to the Coronal’s throne, which Confalume had held for so long. So, then, why this furor? Why?

Along all four sides of the huge room the bewildering overabundance of gifts rose high, most of them still in their packing-cases, mountains of stacked treasure climbing toward the distant roof-timbers. Room after room of this rarely used northern wing of the Castle was filled with crates from far-off districts whose names meant little or nothing to Prestimion . Some of them were familiar to him only as notations on the map, others not known to him at all. New loads of cargo were arriving even now. The chamberlains of the Castle were at their wits’ end to deal with it all.

And what lay before him here was only a fraction of what had come in. There were the live gifts, too. The people of the provinces had sent an extraordinary assortment of animals, a whole zoo’s worth of them and then some, the most bizarre and fantastic beasts to be found on Majipoor. The Divine be thanked, they were being kept somewhere else. And strange plants as well, for the Coronal’s garden. Prestimion had seen some of those yesterday: some huge trees with foliage like swords of gleaming silver, and grotesque succulent things with twisted spiky leaves, and a couple of sinister carnivorous mouthplants from Zimroel, clanking their central jaws to show how horrendously eager they were to be fed, and a tub of dark porphyry filled with translucent gambeliavos from Stoienzar’s northern coast, that looked as if they were made of spun glass and gave off soft tinkling sighs when you passed your hand over them—and much more besides, botanical splendors beyond enumeration. All those too were elsewhere.

The sheer volume of all this, the great size of the offering, was overwhelming. His mind could not take it all in.

To Prestimion it seemed as if this great piled-up mass of objects was Majipoor itself in all its size and complexity: as if the entire massive world, largest planet in the galaxy, had somehow forced its way into this one room today. Standing in the midst of his mounds of gifts, he felt dwarfed by the lavishness of the display, the dazzling extravagant prodigality of it. He knew that he should be pleased; but the only emotion he could manage, surrounded by so much tangible evidence of his new grandeur, was a kind of numbed dismay. That unexpected and baffling sense of hollowness that had been mounting in him throughout the lengthy formalities of the rite that had made him Coronal Lord of Majipoor, leaving him mysteriously saddened and somber in what should have been his hour of triumph, now threatened to engulf his entire soul.

As though in a dream Prestimion wandered around the hall, randomly examining some of the packages that his staff had already opened.

Here was a shimmering crystal pillow, within which could be seen a richly detailed rural landscape, green carpets of moss, trees with bright yellow foliage, the purple roof-tiles of some pretty town unknown to him, everything as vivid and real as though the place portrayed were actually contained within the stone. A scroll attached to it declared it to be the gift of the village of Glau, in the province of Thelk Samminon, in western Zimroel. With it came a scarlet coverlet of richly woven silken brocade, fashioned, so the scroll said, of the fine fleece of the local water-worms.

Here was a casket brimming with rare gems of many colors, which gave off a pulsating glow in gold and bronze and purple and crimson like the finest of sunsets. Here was a glossy cloak of cobalt blue feathers—the feathers of the famous fire-beetles of Gamarkaim, said the accompanying note, giant insects that looked like birds and were invulnerable to the touch of flame. The wearer of the cloak would be as well. And here, fifty sticks of the precious red charcoal of Hyanng, which when kindled had the ability to drive any disease from the body of the Coronal.

Here, an exquisite set of small figurines lovingly carved from some shining translucent green stone. They depicted, so their label informed him, the typical wildlife of the district of Karpash: a dozen or more images of unfamiliar and extraordinary beasts, portrayed down to the tiniest details of fur and horns and claws. They began to move about, snorting and scampering and chasing one another around the box that held them, as soon as Prestimion’s breath had warmed them to life. And here—

Prestimion heard the great door of the hall creaking open behind him. Someone entering. He would not be allowed to be alone even here.

A discreet cough; the sound of approaching footsteps. He peered into the shadows at the far end of the room.

A slender, lanky figure, drawing near.

“Ah. There you are, Prestimion. Akbalik told me you were in here. Hiding from all the fuss, are you?”

The elegant, long-legged Septach Melayn, second cousin to the Duke of Tidias, it was: a peerless swordsman and fastidious dandy, and Prestimion’s lifelong friend. He still wore his finery of the coronation ceremony—a saffron-hued tunic embroidered in golden chasings of flowers and leaves, and gold-laced buskins tightly wound. Septach Melayn’s hair, golden as well and tumbling to his shoulders in elaborately arranged ringlets, was bedecked with three gleaming emerald clasps. His short, sharply pointed yellow-red beard was newly trimmed.

He came to a halt some ten feet from Prestimion and stood with arms akimbo, looking around in wonder at the multitude of gifts.

“Well,” he said, finally, in obvious awe. “So you’re Coronal at last, Prestimion, after all the fuss and fury. And here’s a great pile of treasure to prove it, eh?”

“Coronal at last, yes,” said Prestimion in a sepulchral tone.

Septach Melayn’s brow furrowed in puzzlement. “How dour you sound! You are king of the world, and yet you don’t sound particularly pleased about it, do you, my lord? After what we’ve been through to put you here!”

“Pleased? Pleased?” Prestimion managed a half-chuckle. “Where’s the pleasure in it, Septach Melayn? Tell me that, will you?” He felt a sudden strange throbbing behind his forehead. Something was stirring with him, he knew, something dark and furious and inimical that he had never known was in him at all. And then, pouring out of him uncontrollably, came a most surprising cascade of singularly intense bitterness. “King of the world, you say? What does that mean? I’ll tell you, Septach Melayn. Years and years of hard work face me now, until I’m as dried out as an old piece of leather, and then, whenever old Confalume finally dies, I go to live in the dark dismal Labyrinth, never to see the light of day again. I ask you: What pleasure? Where?”

Septach Melayn gaped at him in amazement. For an instant he seemed unable to speak. This was a Prestimion he had never seen before.

At length he managed to say, “Ah, what a dark mood is this for your coronation day, my lord!”

Prestimion was astounded himself by that eruption of fury and pain. This is very wrong, he thought, abashed. I am speaking madness. I must do something to change the tone of this conversation to something lighter. He wrenched himself into some semblance of his usual self and said, in an altogether different manner, consciously irreverent, “Don’t call me ‘my lord,’ Septach Melayn. Not in private, anyway. It sounds so stiff and formal. And obsequious.”

“But you are my lord. I fought hard to make you so, and have the scars to prove it.”

“I’m still Prestimion to you, all the same.”

“Yes. Prestimion. Very well. Prestimion. Prestimion. As you wish, my lord.”

“In the name of the Divine, Septach Melayn—!” cried Prestimion, with an exasperated grin at that last playful jab. But what else could he expect from Septach Melayn, if not frivolity and teasing?

Septach Melayn grinned as well. Both of them now were working hard to pretend that Prestimion’s startling outburst had never happened. Extending a pointing hand toward the Coronal, a lazy, casual gesture, he said, “What is that thing you’re holding, Prestimion?”

“This? Why, it’s—it’s—” Prestimion consulted the scroll of tawny leather that had come with it. “A wand made of gameliparn horn, they say. It will change color from this golden hue to a purplish-black whenever waved over food containing poison.”

“You believe that, do you?”

“The citizens of Bailemoona do, at any rate. And here—here, Septach Melayn, this is said to be a mantle woven from the belly-fur of the ice-kuprei, that lives in the snowy Gonghar peaks.”

“The ice-kuprei is extinct, I think, my lord.”

“A pity, if it is,” said Prestimion, idly fondling the thick smooth fabric. “The fur is very soft to the touch.—In here,” he went on, tapping a square bale bound in ornate seals, “here we have an offering from someplace in the south, strips of the highly fragrant bark of the very rare quinoncha tree. And this handsome cup is carved from the jade of Vyrongimond, which is so hard that it takes half a lifetime to polish a piece the size of your fist. And this—” Prestimion struggled with a half-opened crate out of which some shimmering marvel of silver and carnelian was protruding. It was as though by rummaging so frantically amongst these crates he might somehow pull himself out of the edgy, half-despondent mood that had driven him to this room in the first place.

But he could not deceive Septach Melayn. Nor could Septach Melayn maintain his studied indifference to Prestimion’s earlier show of anguish any longer.

“Prestimion?”

“Yes?”

The swordsman came a step or two nearer. He towered over Prestimion, for the Coronal was a compact man, strong-shouldered but short in the leg, and Septach Melayn was so slim and lengthy of limb that he seemed almost frail, though in fact he was not.

Quietly he said, “You need not show me every one, my lord.”

“I thought you were interested.”

“I am, up to a point. But only up to a point.” In a tone that was quieter still, Septach Melayn said, “Prestimion, just why have you gone slinking away by yourself to this room just now? Surely not to gloat over your gifts. That’s never been your nature, to covet and fondle mere objects.”

“They are very fine and curious objects,” said Prestimion staunchly.

“No doubt they are. But you should be dressing for tonight’s feast now, not prowling around by yourself in this storehouse of strangenesses. And your peculiar words of a few minutes past—that cry of pain, that bitter lament. I tried to ignore it as some odd aberration of the moment, but it keeps echoing in my mind. What did all that mean? Were you sincere, crying out against the burden of the crown? I never thought to hear such things from your lips. You’re Coronal now, Prestimion! The summit of any man’s ambition. You will rule this world in glory This should be the most splendid day of your life.”

“It should be, yes.”

“And yet you withdraw to this dismal hall, you brood in solitude, you distract yourself with these silly pretty trinkets in your own great moment of attainment, you cry out against your own kingship as though it’s a curse someone has laid upon you—”

“A passing mood.”

“Then let it pass, Prestimion. Let it pass! This is a day of celebration! It’s not two hours since you stood before the Confalume Throne and put the starburst crown on your forehead, and now—now—if you could see your own face, now, my lord—that look of gloom, that bleak and tragic stare—”

Prestimion offered Septach Melayn an exaggerated comic smile, all flashing teeth and bulging eyes.

“Well? Is this better?”

“Hardly. I am not in any way fooled, Prestimion. What can possibly distress you this way, on this day of days?” And, when Prestimion made no response: “Perhaps I know.”

“How could you not?” And then, without giving Septach Melayn a chance to answer: “I’ve been thinking of the war, Septach Melayn. The war.”

Septach Melayn seemed caught by surprise for an instant. But he made a quick recovery.

“Ah. The war, yes. The war, of course, Prestimion. It marks us all. But the war’s over. And forgotten. No one in the world remembers the war but you and Gialaurys and I. All those who are gathered here at the Castle today for your coronation rites: they have no memory whatever of that other coronation that took place in these halls not so long ago.”

“We remember, though. We three. The war will stay with us forever. The waste, the needlessness. The destruction. The deaths. So many of them. Svor. Kanteverel. My brother Taradath. Earl Kamba of Mazadone, my master in the art of the bow. Iram, Mandrykarn, Sibellor. And hundreds more, thousands, even.” He closed his eyes a moment, and turned his head away. “I regret them all, those deaths. Even the death of Korsibar, that poor deluded fool.”

“You have left one name unspoken, and not a trivial one,” said Septach Melayn; and delicately he provided it, as if to lance an inflamed and swollen wound. “I mean that of his sister the Lady Thismet.”

“Thismet, yes.”

The name that could not be avoided, hard as Prestimion had tried. He could hardly bear to speak of her; but she was never absent long from his mind.

“I know your pain,” said Septach Melayn softly. “I understand. Time will heal you, Prestimion.”

“Will it? Can it?”

They were both silent for a time. Prestimion let it be known by his eyes alone that he wished not to speak further of Thismet now, and so for the moment they spoke of nothing at all.

“You know that I do rejoice in being Coronal,” said Prestimion finally, when the strain of not speaking out had grown too great. “Of course I do. It was my destiny to have the throne. It was what I was shaped by the Divine to be. But did there have to be so much bloodshed involved in my coming to power? Was any of it necessary? All that blood pollutes my very accession.”

“Who knows what’s necessary and what is not, Prestimion? It happened, that’s all. The Divine intended it to happen, and it did, and we dealt with it, you and I and Gialaurys and Svor, and now the world is whole again. The war’s a buried thing. We saw to that ourselves. No one alive but us has any idea it ever took place. Why dredge it all up today, of all days?”

“Out of guilt, perhaps, at coming to the throne over the bodies of so many fine men.”

“Guilt? Guilt, Prestimion? What guilt can you mean? The war was all that idiot Korsibar’s fault! He rebelled against law and custom! He usurped the throne! How can you speak of guilt, when he alone—”

“No. We must all have been at fault, somehow, to bring down a curse like that upon the world.”

Septach Melayn’s pale-blue eyes went wide with surprise once again. “Such mystic nonsense you speak, Prestimion! Talking so seriously of curses, and allowing yourself to take even a scintilla of blame for the war on yourself? The Prestimion I knew in other days was a rational man. He’d never utter such blather even in jest. It would never enter his mind.—Listen to me. The war was Korsibar’s doing, my lord. Korsibar’s. Korsibar’s. His sin alone, his and no one else’s. And what’s done is done, and you are Majipoor’s new king, and all is well on Majipoor at last.”

“Yes. So it is.” Prestimion smiled. “Forgive me this fit of sudden melancholy, old friend. You’ll see me in a happier frame of mind at the coronation feast tonight, I promise you that.” He walked up and down the room, lightly slapping at the sealed crates. “But for the moment, Septach Melayn—these gifts, this warehouse full of stuff—how it all oppresses me! These gifts weigh upon me like the weight of the world.” He said, with a grimace, “I ought to have it all taken out and burned!”

“Prestimion—” said Septach Melayn warningly.

“Yes. Forgive me again. I fall too easily into these lamentations today.”

“Indeed you do, my lord.”

“I should be grateful for these presents, I suppose, instead of being troubled by them. Well, let me see if I can find some amusement in them. I’m much in need of amusement right now, Septach Melayn.” Prestimion moved away and went rambling once more through the aisles of stacked-up boxes, pausing to peer into those that lay open. A fire orb, here. A sash of many colors, constantly shifting its hues. A flower fashioned from precious bronze, from whose petaled depths came a low humming song of great beauty. A bird carved from a vermilion stone, that moved its head from side to side and squawked at him indignantly. A scallop-edged cauldron of red jade, satin-smooth and warm to the touch. “Look,” said Prestimion, uncovering a scepter of sea-dragon bone, carved with infinite cunning. “From Piliplok, this is. See, here, how well they’ve encircled it with—”

“You should come away from here now,” said Septach Melayn sharply. “These things will wait, Prestimion. You need to dress for the banquet.”

Yes. That was so. It was wrong to sequester himself in here like this. Prestimion knew he must throw off the altogether uncharacteristic access of sadness and desolation that had overtaken him in these past few hours, rid himself of it like a cast-off cloak. He would have to show the banqueters this evening the radiant look of contentment and fulfillment that was proper and befitting to a newly crowned Coronal.

Yes. Yes. And that he would do.

2

Prestimion and Septach Melayn went from the Hendighail Hall together. The two great burly Skandar guards on duty outside the storeroom offered Prestimion an excited flurry of starburst salutes, which he acknowledged with a nod and a wave. At a word from Prestimion Septach Melayn tossed a silver coin to each of them.

But as they made their way through the innumerable drafty winding passages and corridors of the Castle’s northern wing, Prestimion found himself sliding back into bleakness. The task of regaining his poise was proving harder than he had expected. That dark shroud clung to him relentlessly.

He should have risen to the Coronal’s throne without difficulties. He had been the unquestioned choice of his predecessor, Lord Confalume. It was understood by all that the crown would be his when the old Pontifex, Prankipin, died, and Lord Confalume moved on to the Labyrinth to take up Prankipin’s post of senior monarch. But when Prankipin did eventually die, it was Korsibar, Lord Confalume’s impressive-looking but slow-witted son, who had seized the royal power, at the urging of his pack of sinister companions and with the aid of an equally sinister magus. It was unlawful for a Coronal’s son to succeed his father on the throne, and so there had been civil war, from which Prestimion emerged in time in possession of his rightful crown.

But such unnecessary destruction—so many lives lost—such a scar slashed across Majipoor’s long and peaceful history—

Prestimion had healed that scar, so he hoped, by decreeing the radical act of obliteration by which a phalanx of sorcerers had wiped all recollection of the war from the minds of everyone in the world. Everyone, that was, other than he and his two surviving companions-at-arms, Gialaurys and Septach Melayn.

But one scar would not heal, nor could he ever obliterate it. That was from the wound he had suffered at the climactic moment of the final battle. A wound to the heart, it was: the murder of the rebel Korsibar’s twin sister, the Lady Thismet, the great love of Prestimion’s life, at the hands of the sorcerer Sanibak-Thastimoon. No magic would bring Thismet back, and none would replace her in Prestimion’s affections. There was only a void where their love had been. What had it profited him to be made Coronal, if in the attaining of the throne he had lost the person who mattered most to him?

Prestimion and Septach Melayn were at the entrance now to the courtyard that led to Lord Thraym’s Tower, where most Coronals of modern times had had their private apartments. Septach Melayn paused there and said, “Shall I leave you here, Prestimion? Or do you want me to remain with you while you prepare yourself for the banquet?”

“You’ll need to change your outfit also, Septach Melayn. Go. I’ll be all right.”

“Will you, now?”

“I will. My word on that, Septach Melayn.”

Prestimion went inside. The grand apartments that were his official residence now were mostly still bare. Lord Confalume, he who was Confalume Pontifex now, had shipped his incomparable collection of rarities and wonders off to his new residence in the depths of the Labyrinth. During the time of his usurpation Korsibar had furnished these rooms to his own taste—a host of highly ordinary things, some flashy and vulgar, some drab and common, all of them un-interesting—but the same act of sorcery that had wiped Korsibar’s illicit reign from the world’s memory had cleared away all of Korsibar’s possessions. Korsibar had never existed, now. He had been deleted retroactively from existence. In due time Prestimion would have some of his own things transferred to the Castle from his family estate at Muldemar, but he scarcely had had the opportunity yet for thinking about that, and he had little about him now except some furnishings brought over from the lesser apartment that he had occupied in former times in the Castle’s eastern wing, where high princes of the realm were allotted residential quarters.

Nilgir Sumanand, the gray-bearded man who had long been Prestimion’s aide-de-camp, was waiting for him, fretting in obvious impatience. “The coronation banquet, lordship—”

“Yes. Yes, I know. I’ll bathe quickly. As for what I’ll wear tonight, you probably already have it waiting, right? The green velvet banqueting robe, the golden stole, the star-burst brooch that I wore this afternoon, and the lighter crown, not the big formal one.”

“All is ready for you, my lord.”

A ceremonial guard of high lords of the realm escorted him to the banquet hall. The two senior peers led the way—Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, the outgoing High Counsellor, and the immensely wealthy prince Serithorn of Samivole—and the pompous Prince Gonivaul of Bombifale, the Grand Admiral of Majipoor, marched just behind them. These three had thrown their considerable influence to Korsibar at the time of the civil war; but they no longer were aware of that, and Prestimion felt that it would be useful for him to forgive them for their disloyalty, now that it had been rendered null anyway, and treat them with the respect that was owing to men of their positions and power.

Septach Melayn flanked Prestimion on his right and the hulking mountainous warrior Gialaurys was on his left. To the new Coronal’s rear walked his two surviving younger brothers, the hotheaded young Teotas and the tall, vehement Abrigant. The cunning and thoughtful third brother, Taradath, had perished in the war at the disastrous battle of the Iyann Valley, when Korsibar’s men had breached Mavestoi Dam and buried thousands of Prestimion’s troops under a wall of water.

The coronation banquet, as ever, was being held in the Grand Festival Hall in the Tharamond wing of the Castle. That was a room bigger even than the Hendighail Hall, and much more centrally located; but even so huge a space as that was incapable of holding all the invited guests, the princes and dukes and counts of so many hundreds of cities, and the mayors of those cities as well, and the miscellaneous nobility of Castle Mount, descendants of scores of Coronals and Pontifexes of years gone by. But Lord Tharamond, one of the most cunning builders among the many Coronals who had left their imprint on the Castle, had so designed things that his great hall led to a chain of others, five, eight, ten lesser feasting-halls in a row, whose connecting doors could be opened to make a single linked chamber of truly Majipoorian size; and in these, room after room after room, the attendees of the coronation banquet were distributed according to carefully measured weightings of rank and protocol.

Prestimion had little liking for such inflated events as these. He was a straightforward and unpretentious man, practical and efficient, with no special desire for self-aggrandizement. But he understood the proprieties very clearly. The world expected a great coronation festival from him; and so there would be one, the formal ceremony of crowning this afternoon, and now the great banquet, and tomorrow the speech to the assembled provincial governors, and the day after that the traditional coronation games, the jousting and the wrestling and the archery and all the rest of that. After which Prestimion’s coronation festival would end, and the heavy task of governing the giant world of Majipoor would begin.

The banquet seemed to last ten thousand years.

Prestimion greeted and embraced old Confalume and led him to his seat of honor at the dais. Confalume was still a sturdy and stalwart man even here in the eighth decade of his life, but much diminished in vigor and alertness from the heroic Confalume of old. He had lost both his son and his daughter in the civil war. Of course he had no notion of that, or even that Korsibar and Thismet had ever existed at all; but some sense of a vacancy in his spirit, an absence of something that should have been there, seemed evident in the often muddled expression of his eyes in these latter days.

Did he ever suspect the truth? Prestimion wondered. Did any of them? Was there ever a moment when someone, be he a high lord of the realm or a humble farmer, stumbled by happenstance across some outcropping of the hidden reality that underlay the false memories implanted in his mind, and came up frowning in bewilderment? If so, no one gave any indication of it. And probably never would. But even if the sorcery that had altered the history of Majipoor might not hold true in every last case, it was the sort of thing that one would think wisest to keep concealed, Prestimion supposed, for fear of being thought a madman. He profoundly hoped so, at any rate.

Another place of honor at the long dais went to Prestimion’s mother, the vivacious and sparkling Princess Therissa, who by virtue of her son’s ascent to the throne would soon herself assume the title of Lady of the Isle of Sleep, and take charge of the machinery by which guidance and solace were dispensed to the citizenry of Majipoor while they slept. Beside her on the dais sat the formidable Lady Kunigarda, Confalume’s sister, who had held the rank of Lady of the Isle during Confalume’s reign as Coronal, and now was about to retire from her duties. Then the various high lords of the Council, with Septach Melayn and Gialaurys among them. And at the end of the row were the high magus Gominik Halvor of Triggoin and his wizardly son Heszmon Gorse, smiling at him thoughtfully. Those smiles, he knew, indicated the claim they had on him: for, little as he cared for sorcery and the other esoteric phenomena, he could never deny that the skill at magicking that these two possessed had played no small part in his gaining of the throne.

Prestimion went to each of these people in turn, formally welcoming them to this banquet that honored him.

And then, after he had taken his own seat but before the food was served, it was the turn of the lesser but still major lords to make their obeisance to him—this great one and that, humbly coming up to offer their felicitations to Prestimion , their hopes for the era just dawning—

Now came the start of the ceremony itself. The ringing of bells. The prayers and incantations. The endless toasts. Prestimion merely sipping at his wine, careful not to seem ungracious, but wary of drinking too much during this taxing event.

Then, at long last, the meal. A procession of delicacies from every region of the world, prepared by the most skillful of chefs. Prestimion barely picked at his food. Afterward, a round of poetic recitations: the resounding verses of Furvain’s great epic, The Book of Changes, on and on with the account of the semi-mythical Lord Stiamot’s conquest of the aboriginal Shapeshifter race, and then the chanting of The Book of Powers and The Heights of Castle Mount and any number of other historical sagas of Pontifexes and Coronals of centuries gone by.

The after-dinner singing, then. Thousands of voices raised in ancient hymns. Prestimion chuckled at the sound of Gialaurys’s uncouth heavy basso groaning along beneath the others nearby.

There was much more, ancient rituals prescribed by musty lore. The ceremonial display of the Coronal’s shield, with the starburst rendered in shining silver embellished with rays of gold, and Prestimion’s ceremonial placing of his hands on it. Confalume rising to deliver a longwinded blessing on the new Coronal, and ceremonially embracing him before all the gathering. The Lady Kunigarda doing the same. The Princess Therissa accepting the circlet of the Lady of the Isle from Kunigarda. And so on and so on, interminably. Prestimion patiently endured it all, though it was far from easy.

But to his great surprise he discovered that somewhere along the way, during the course of this long and arduous event, he had shed the strange leadenness of heart that had come over him earlier. All that dejection and bitter cheerlessness had dropped away, somehow. Tired as he was, here at the very end of the banquet, he had found his way back to joyfulness at last. And more than joyfulness: for, somewhere in the course of the evening, he had felt a sense of being truly kingly coming over him for the first time.

One supreme fact had been established today. His name had at last been enrolled in the long roster of Coronals of Majipoor now, after many a travail in the course of his path to the throne.

Coronal of Majipoor! King of the most wondrous world in all the universe!

And he knew that he would be a good Coronal, an enlightened Coronal, whom the people would love and praise. He would do great things, and he would leave Majipoor a better place for his having lived and reigned. And this was what he had been born to accomplish.

Yes. Yes. So all was for the best this glorious day, despite the momentary cloud of gloom that had dimmed its glory for him for a time a few hours before.

Septach Melayn saw the change come over him. During a lull in the festivity he came to Prestimion’s side and said, looking at him warmly, “The despair you spoke of a little while ago in the Hendighail Hall has gone from you, has it not, Prestimion?”

Unhesitatingly Prestimion replied, “We had no conversation in Hendighail Hall this day, Septach Melayn.”

There was something new in his tone, a strength, even a harshness, that had never been there before. Prestimion himself was taken unawares when he heard it ringing in his ears. Septach Melayn heard it too; for his eyes widened an instant, and the corners of his mouth quirked in surprise, and he caught his breath in sharply. Then he inclined his head in a formal way and said, “Indeed, my lord. We did not speak in the Hendighail Hall.” And made the starburst sign, and returned to his seat.

Prestimion signaled for his wine-bowl to be refilled.

This is what it means to be a king, he thought. To speak coldly even to your best beloved friends, when the occasion demands. Does a king even have friends? he wondered. Well, he would find that out in the weeks ahead.

The banquet was at its climactic moment. Everyone was standing now, hands aloft in the starburst salute. “Prestimion! Lord Prestimion!” they were crying. “Hail, Lord Prestimion! Long life to Lord Prestimion!”

And then it was over. The hour had come for the breaking-up of the banquet into smaller gatherings, groups filtering themselves apart by rank and affinity of friendship. At long last, with dawn approaching, the time arrived when the newly consecrated Coronal Lord of Majipoor was permitted to seek his rest, and could tactfully declare the revels ended, and withdraw, finally, to the privacy and peace of his own apartments, his own bedroom.

His empty apartments. His lonely bed.

Thismet, he thought, as he tumbled down in utter exhaustion toward the pillow. In the midst of his great joy he could not find a way to hide from the unending pain of losing her. I am king of the world tonight, and where are you, Thismet? Where are you?

3

In the great city of Stee, well down the slopes of Castle Mount, there was trouble in the household of the immensely wealthy merchant banker Simbilon Khayf.

A fourth-floor chambermaid of the house of Simbilon Khayf had fallen victim suddenly to a fit of madness and flung herself from an attic window of the banker’s grand mansion, killing not only herself but two passers-by in the street below. Simbilon Khayf himself was nowhere near the scene when this occurred: he was away at the Castle, attending Lord Prestimion’s coronation ceremonies as the guest of Count Fisiolo of Stee. And so it had become the task of his only daughter, Varaile, to deal with the grisly tragedy and its consequences.

Varaile, a tall, slender, dark-eyed woman with jet-black hair that fell to her shoulders in a shining cascade, was only in her nineteenth year. But her mother’s early death had made her the mistress of the great house when she was still a girl, and those responsibilities had given her a maturity beyond her years. When the first strange sounds from the street reached her ears—a horrible cracking thud, and then another, less distinct, a moment later, followed by shouts and piercing shrieks—she moved calmly and purposefully toward the window of her own third-floor study. Quickly she took in the grim scene: the bodies, the blood, the gathering crowd of agitated witnesses. She headed at once for the stairs. Servants of the house came rushing up toward her, all crying out at once, gesticulating, sobbing.

“Lady—lady—it was Klaristen! She jumped, lady! From the top-story window, it was!”

Varaile nodded coolly. Within herself she felt shock and horror and something close to nausea, but she dared not allow any of that to show. To Vorthid, the chamberlain of the house, she said, “Summon the imperial proctors immediately.” To the wine-steward, Kresshin, she said, “Run and get Dr. Thark as fast as you can.” And to Bettaril, the strong and sturdy master of the stables, she said, “I have to go out there to see after the injured people. Find yourself a cudgel and stand beside me, in case matters become unruly. Which very possibly they will.”

Of the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, Stee was by far the grandest and most prosperous; and Simbilon Khayf was one of the grandest and most prosperous men of Stee. Which made it all the more startling that such a misfortune could strike his house. And a great many envious folks both within and without Stee, resentful of Simbilon Khayf’s phenomenal rise to wealth and power out of the back streets of the city, secretly rejoiced at the difficulties that his fourth-story chambermaid’s lunatic plunge had entangled him in. For Stee, ancient as it was, was looked upon by its neighbors on the Mount as something of an upstart city, and Simbilon Khayf, the wealthiest commoner in Stee, was himself, beyond any doubt, an upstart among upstarts.

The fifty magnificent cities that occupied the jagged sides of immense Castle Mount, the astounding mountain that swept upward to a height of thirty miles above the lowlands of the continent of Alhanroel, were arranged in five distinct bands situated at varying altitudes—the Slope Cities near the bottom, then the Free Cities, the Guardian Cities, the Inner Cities, and, just below the summit itself, the nine that were known as the High Cities. Of the Fifty Cities, the ones whose citizens had the highest opinions of themselves were those nine, the High Cities that formed a ring that encircled the Mount’s uppermost reaches, almost on the threshold of the Castle itself.

Because they were closest to the Castle, these were the cities most often visited by the glittering members of the Castle aristocracy, lords and ladies who were descended from Coronals and Pontifexes of the past, or who might someday attain to those great titles themselves. Not only did the Castle folk often journey down to such High Cities as High Morpin or Sipermit or Frangior to partake of the sophisticated pleasures that those cities offered, but also there was a steady upward flow from the High Cities to the Castle: Septach Melayn was a man of Tidias, Prestimion had come from Muldemar. Therefore many folk of the High Cities tended to put on airs, regarding themselves as special persons because they happened to live in places that stood far up in the sky above the rest of Majipoor and rubbed elbows on a daily basis with the great ones of the Castle.

Stee, though, was a city belonging to the second band from the bottom—the Free Cities, they were called. There were nine of them, all quite old, dating back at least seven thousand years to the time when Lord Stiamot was Coronal of Majipoor, and probably they were much older than that.

No one was quite certain what it was that the Free Cities were free from. The best scholarly explanation of the name was that Stiamot had awarded those cities an exemption from some tax of his day, in return for special favors received. Lord Stiamot himself had been a man of Stee. In Stiamot’s time Stee had been the capital city of Majipoor, until his decision to build a gigantic castle at the summit of the Mount and move the chief administrative center to it.

Unlike most of the cities of Castle Mount, which were tucked into various craggy pockets of the colossal mountain, Stee had the advantage of being located on a broad, gently sloping plain on the Mount’s northern face, where there was enormous room for urban expansion. Thus it had spread out uninhibitedly in all directions from its original site along the swift river from which it had taken its name, and by Prestimion’s time had attained a population of nearly twenty-five million people. On Majipoor it was rivaled in size only by the great city of Ni-moya on the continent of Zimroel; and for overall wealth and grandeur, even mighty Ni-moya had to take second place to Stee.

Stee’s magnitude and location had afforded it great commercial prosperity, a prosperity so great that citizens of other cities tended to regard Stee and its barons of industry as more than a little vulgar. Its chief mercantile center was the splendid row of towering buildings faced with facades of reflective gray-pink marble that were known as the River-wall Buildings, which ran for miles along both banks of the River Stee. Behind these twin walls of offices and warehouses lay the thriving factories of industrial Stee on the left bank, and the palatial homes of the rich merchants on the right. Further back on the right bank were the great country estates of the Stee nobility and the parks and game preserves for which Stee was famous throughout the world, and on the left, for mile after mile, the modest homes of the millions of workers whose efforts had kept the city flourishing ever since the remote era of Lord Stiamot.

Simbilon Khayf had been one of those workers, once. But earlier he had been even less than that: a street beggar, in fact. All that, though, was forty and fifty years in his past.

Luck, shrewdness, and ambition had propelled him on a swift climb to his extraordinary position in the city. Now he consorted with counts and dukes and other such great men, who pretended to regard him as a social equal because they knew they might someday have need of his banking facilities; he entertained at his grand mansion the high and mighty of many other cities when business dealings brought them to Stee; and now, even as the hapless housemaid Klaristen was hurling herself to her death, he was mingling cheerfully with the most exalted members of the Majipoor aristocracy at Lord Prestimion’s great festival.

Varaile, meanwhile, found herself kneeling in blood in the street just outside her house, staring down at grotesquely broken bodies while a hostile and ever-growing crowd exchanged sullen muttered comments all around her.

She gave her attention to the two fallen strangers, first. A man and a woman, they were; both handsomely dressed, obviously well-to-do. Varaile had no idea who they were. She noticed an empty floater parked by the grassy strip across the street, where sightseers who had come for a look at Simbilon Khayf’s mansion often left their vehicles. Perhaps these people were strangers to Stee, who had been standing in the cobblestoned plaza outside the west portal, admiring the finely carved limestone sculptures of the house’s facade, when the body of the housemaid Klaristen had come smashing down out of the sky upon them.

They were dead, both of them. Varaile was certain of that. She had never seen a dead body before, but she knew, crouching down and peering into the glazed eyes of the two victims, that no impulse of life lurked behind them. Their heads were at grotesque angles. Klaristen must have dropped directly down on them, snapping their necks. Death would have been instantaneous: a blessing of sorts, she thought. But death all the same. She fought back instinctive terror. Her hands moved in a little gesture of prayer.

“Klaristen is still breathing, lady,” the stablemaster Bettaril called to her. “But not for long, I think.”

The housemaid had evidently ricocheted from her two victims with great force, landing a dozen or so feet away.

When Varaile was convinced that there was nothing she could do for the other two, she went to Klaristen’s side, ignoring the onlookers’ sullen stares. They seemed to hold her personally responsible for the calamity, as though Var-aile, in a moment of pique, had thrown Klaristen out the window herself.

Klaristen’s eyes were open, and there was life in them, but no sign of consciousness. They were set in a fixed stare like those of a statue; and only when Varaile passed her hand before them, which produced a blink, did they give any indication that her brain was still functioning. Klaristen looked even more broken and twisted than the other two. A two-stage impact, Varaile supposed, shuddering: Klaristen hitting the two strangers first, rebounding from them, coming down again and landing hard, perhaps head first, against the cobblestoned street.

“Klaristen?” Varaile murmured. “Can you hear me, Klaristen?”

“She’s leaving us, lady,” said Bettaril quietly.

Yes. Yes. As she watched, Varaile could see the expression of Klaristen’s eyes changing, the last bit of awareness departing, a new rigidity overtaking them. And then the texture of the eyes themselves altered, becoming weirdly flat and strangely flecked, as if the forces of decay, though only just unleashed, were already taking command of the girl’s body. It was a remarkable sight, that transition from life to death, Varaile thought, greatly astonished at her own analytical coolness in this terrible moment.

Poor Klaristen. She had been no more than sixteen, Varaile supposed. A good, simple girl from one of the outlying districts of the city, out by the Field of Great Bones, where the fossil monsters had been discovered. What could have possessed her to take her own life this way?

“The doctor’s here,” someone said. “Make way for the doctor! Make way!”

But the doctor very quickly ratified Varaile’s own diagnosis: there was nothing to be done. They were dead, all three. He produced drugs and needles and attempted to jolt them back to life, but they were beyond rescue.

A big rough-voiced man called out for a magus to be fetched, one who could witch the dead ones alive again with some potent spell. Varaile glared at him. These simple people, with their simple faith in wizards and spells! How embarrassing, how annoying! She and her father employed mages and diviners themselves, of course—it was only sensible, if you wanted to steer clear of unpleasant surprises in life—but she hated the modern credulous popular faith in occult powers that so many people had embraced without reservation or limit. A good soothsayer could be very useful, yes. But not in bringing the dead back to life. The best of them did seem to be able to glimpse the future, but the working of miracles was more than their skills could encompass.

And why, come to think of it, Varaile asked herself, had their household magus, Vyethorn Kamman, given them no warning of the dreadful deed that the housemaid Klaristen was planning to enact?

“Are you the Lady Varaile?” a new voice asked. “Imperial proctors, ma’am.” She saw men in uniforms, gray with black stripes. Badges bearing the pontifical emblem were flashed. They were very respectful. Took in the situation at a glance, the bodies, the blood on the cobblestones; cleared the crowd back; asked her if her father was home. She told them that he was attending the coronation as Count Fisiolo’s guest, which produced an even deeper air of deference. Did she know any of the victims? Only one, she said, this one here. A maid of the house. Jumped out of a window up there, did she? Yes. Apparently so, said Varaile. And had this girl been suffering from any emotional disturbance, ma’am? No, said Varaile. Not that I know of.

But how much could she really ever know, after all, of the emotional problems of a fourth-floor chambermaid? Her contact with Klaristen had been infrequent and superficial, limited mostly to smiles and nods. Good morning, Klaristen. Lovely day, isn’t it, Klaristen? Yes, I’ll send someone up to the top floor to fix that sink, Klaristen. They had never actually spoken with each other, as Varaile understood the term. Why should they have?

It quickly became clear, though, that things had been seriously amiss with Klaristen for some time. The team of proctors, having finished inspecting the scene in the street and gone into the house to interview members of the household staff, brought that fact out into the open almost at once.

“She started waking up crying about three weeks ago,” said plump jolly old Thanna, the third-floor maid, who had been Klaristen’s roommate in the servants’ quarters. “Sobbing, wailing, really going at it. But when I asked what the matter was, she didn’t know. Didn’t even know she’d been crying, she said.”

“And then,” said Vardinna, the kitchen-maid, Klaristen’s closest friend on the staff, “she couldn’t remember my name one day, and I laughed at her and told it to her, and then she went absolutely white and said she couldn’t remember her own name, either. I thought she was joking. But no, no, she really seemed not to know. She looked terrified. Even when I said, ‘Klaristen, that’s your name, silly,’ she kept saying, ‘Are you sure, are you sure?’ ”

“And then the nightmares began,” Thanna said. “She’d sit up screaming, and I’d put the light on and her face would be like the face of someone who had just seen a ghost. Once she jumped up and tore all her nightclothes off, and I could see she was sweating all over her body, so wet it was like she’d gone for a bath. And her teeth chattering loud enough to hear in the next street. All this week she had the nightmares real bad. Most of the time she couldn’t tell me what the dreams had been, just that they were awful. The only one she could remember, it was that a monstrous bug had sat down over her face and started to suck her brain out of her skull, until it was altogether hollow inside. I said it was a sending of some kind, that she ought to go and see a dream-speaker, but of course people like us have no money for dream-speakers, and in any case she didn’t believe she was important enough to be receiving sendings. I never saw anyone so frightened of her dreams.”

“She told me about them too,” Vardinna said. “Then, the other day, she said she was starting to have the nightmares while she was awake, also. That something would start throbbing inside her head and then she’d see the most horrid visions, right in front of her eyes, even while she was working.”

To Varaile the head proctor said, “You received no report of any of this, lady?”

“Nothing.”

“The fact that one of your housemaids was apparently having a mental breakdown on your premises was something that you never in any way noticed?”

“Ordinarily I saw very little of Klaristen,” said Varaile coolly. “An upstairs maid in a large household—”

“Yes. Yes, of course, lady,” said the proctor, looking flustered and even alarmed, as though it was only belatedly dawning on him that he might be seeming to lay some share of responsibility for this thing upon the daughter of Simbilon Khayf.

Another of the proctors entered now. “We have identities of the dead people,” he announced. “They were visitors from Canzilaine, a man and a wife, Hebbidanto Throle and his wife Garelle. Staying at the Riverwall Inn, they were. An expensive hotel, the Riverwall: only people of some substance would stay there. I’m afraid there will be heavy indemnities to pay, ma’am,” he said, glancing apologetically toward Varaile. “Not that that would be any problem for your father, ma’am, but even so—”

“Yes,” she said absently. “Of course.”

Canzilaine! Her father had important factories there. And Hebbidanto Throle: had she ever heard that name before? It seemed to her that she had. The thought came to her that he might have been some executive in her father’s employ, even the manager of one of the Canzilaine operations. Who had come to Stee with his wife on a holiday, perhaps, and had wanted to show her the stupendous mansion of his fabulously wealthy employer—

It was a chilling possibility. What a sad ending for their journey!

Eventually the proctors were finished asking questions, at least, and were huddling off in one corner of the library conferring among themselves before leaving. The bodies had been removed from the street outside and two of the gardeners were hosing away the bloodstains. Bleakly Varaile contemplated the tasks immediately ahead of her.

First, to get a magus in here to purify the house, cleanse it of the stain that was on it now. Suicide was a serious business; it brought down all sorts of darknesses upon a house. Then to track down Klaristen’s family, wherever they might live, and convey condolences and the information that all burial expenses would be paid, along with a substantial gift as an expression of gratitude for the dead girl’s services. Next, to get in touch with someone on her father’s staff in Canzilaine, and have him find out just who Hebbidanto Throle and his wife had been, and where their survivors could be reached, and what sort of consolatory gesture would be appropriate. Some large sum of money at the very least, but perhaps other expressions of sympathy would be required.

What a mess! What an awful mess!

She had been very bitter about being left at home while her father went off to the coronation with Count Fisiolo. “The Castle will be too wild and drunken a place this week for the likes of you, young lady,” Simbilon Khayf had said, and that was that. The truth of it, Varaile knew, was that her father wanted to be wild and drunken himself this week, he and his lordly aristocratic friend the foul-mouthed and blasphemous Count Fisiolo, and didn’t care to have her around. So be it: no one, not even his only daughter, ever defied the will of Simbilon Khayf. She had obediently remained behind; and how lucky it was, she thought, that she had been here to cope with this thing today, rather than having left the house and its responsibilities to the servants.

As the proctors were leaving, the head man said in a low voice to her, “You know, lady, we’ve had several cases like this lately, though nothing quite as bad as this one. There’s some kind of epidemic of craziness going around. You’d do well to keep a close eye on your people here, in case any of the others happens to start going over the edge.”

“I’ll bear that in mind, officer,” said Varaile, though the thought of monitoring the sanity of her staff was unappealing to her.

The proctors departed. Varaile felt a headache now beginning to come on, but went up to the study to set about what needed to be done. Everything had to be under control before Simbilon Khayf returned from the coronation.

An epidemic of craziness?

How odd. But these were unusual times. Even she had felt uncharacteristic moments of depression and even confusion in recent days. Some hormonal thing, she supposed. But moods of that sort had never been a problem for her before.

She sent for Gawon Barl, the head steward of the house, and asked him to set about arranging for the purification rites immediately. “Also I need to have the address of Klaristen’s father and mother, or some kin of hers, at least,” she said. “And then—these poor people from Canzilaine—”

4

Once again the Castle was the scene of coronation games, the second time in the past three years. Once again grandstands had been constructed along three sides of the great sunny greensward that was Vildivar Close, just downhill from the Ninety-Nine Steps. Once again the greatest ones of the realm, the other two Powers and the members of the Council and the earls and dukes and princes of a hundred provinces, were gathered to celebrate the accession of the new king.

But no one but Prestimion and Gialaurys and Septach Melayn was able to remember those earlier games, the ones that had been held in honor of the Coronal Lord Korsibar, any more than anyone remembered Korsibar himself. The foot races, the jousting, the wrestling, the contests at archery and all the rest—forgotten by winners and losers alike. Removed from memory. Obliterated by Prestimion’s team of sorcerers, acting together in one mighty effort of the magical art. All that had happened in that other round of games had been unhappened. Today’s games were the games of Lord Prestimion, lawful successor to Lord Confalume. Lord Korsibar had never been. Even the sorcerers who had worked the unhappening had had to forget their own deed, by Prestimion’s command.

“Let the archers come forth!” cried the Master of the Games. Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar held that honorary title this day.

As the contestants filed onto the field, a little murmur of wonderment went up from the crowd. Lord Prestimion himself was among them.

No one had expected the new Coronal to be on the field this day. But it should not have been a huge surprise, really. Archery had ever been Prestimion’s great sport: he was a master of the art. And also a man within whose breast the fires of competition burned fiercely at all times. Those who knew him well knew that it would not have been at all like him to pass up a chance to demonstrate his skill. But even so—for the Coronal to compete in his own coronation games—how strange! How unusual!

Prestimion had gone out of his way today to seem like nothing more than an eager seeker for the prize at archery. He was clad in the royal colors, a close-fitting golden doublet and green breeches, but he wore no circlet about his forehead, nor any other badge of office. Some stranger who had no idea which of these dozen men who carried bows was Coronal might perhaps have identified him by the look of great presence and authority that had always been the mark of his demeanor; but more likely the short statured man with the close-cropped dull-yellow hair would have gone unnoticed in that group of robust, heartily athletic men.

Glaydin, the long-limbed youngest son of Serithorn of Samivole, was the first to shoot. He was a skillful archer, and Prestimion watched approvingly as he let his arrows fly.

Then came Kaitinimon, the new Duke of Bailemoona, who still wore a yellow mourning band about his arm in honor of his father, the late Duke Kanteverel. Kanteverel had died with Korsibar at the bloody battle of Thegomar Edge; but not even Kaitinimon knew that. That his father was dead, yes, that much he understood. But the true circumstances of Kanteverel’s death were clouded, as were the deaths of all who had fallen in the battles of the civil war, by the pattern of sorcery that Prestimion’s mages had woven around the world.

That spell of oblivion had been cunningly designed to allow the survivors of the war’s numberless victims to weave explanatory fantasies of their own that would fill the inner void created by the bare knowledge, unadorned by any factual detail, that their kinsmen no longer were among the living. Perhaps Kaitinimon believed that Kanteverel had died of a sudden seizure while visiting his western estates, or that a swamp-fever had taken him off during a tour of the humid south. Whatever it was, it was anything but the truth.

Kaitinimon handled his bow well. So did the third competitor, the tall hawk-faced forester Rizlail of Megenthorp, who, like Prestimion, had learned the art of bowmanship from the famed Earl Kamba of Mazadone. Then a stir went through the crowd when the next archer stepped forward, for he was one of the two members of the contending group that came from non-human stock, and a Su-Suheris at that, a member of that strange double-headed race that had lately begun to settle in some numbers on Majipoor. His name was announced as Gabin-Badinion.

How would someone with two heads take proper aim? Might the heads not disagree about the best placement of the bow? But it was no problem, evidently, for Gabin-Badinion. With icy precision he ably filled the inner rings of the target with his shafts, and gave the crowd a brusque two-headed nod by way of acknowledging its applause.

It was Prestimion’s turn now.

He carried with him the great bow that Earl Kamba had given him when he was still a boy, a bow so powerful that few grown men could draw it, though Prestimion handled it with ease. In the battles of the civil war he had worked much destruction with this bow; but how much better, he thought, to be employing it in a contest of skill, instead of taking the lives of honorable men!

Upon reaching the base-line Prestimion paid homage, as all the earlier archers had done, to the high Powers of the Realm who were looking on. He bowed first to the Pontifex Confalume, who was seated in a great gamandrus-wood throne at the center of the grandstand along the right-hand side of Vildivar Close. The ceremony by which a Pontifex chose a new Coronal was essentially one of adoption, and so, by the custom of Majipoor, it was proper for Prestimion now to regard Confalume as his father—his true father was long dead, anyway—and behave with appropriate reverence.

Prestimion’s next bow of obeisance went to his mother, the Princess Therissa. She sat on a similar throne in the left-hand grandstand, with her predecessor as Lady of the Isle of Sleep, the Lady Kunigarda, beside her. Prestimion swung about then and saluted his own vacant seat in the third grandstand, by way of making an impersonal acknowledgement of the majesty of the Coronal, a gesture to the office itself, not to the man.

Then he took the great bow firmly in hand, Kamba’s bow, the bow that he had cherished so long. It was a source of distress to Prestimion that the good-hearted, ever-cheerful Kamba, that supreme master of archery, was not here to take part in this contest today. But Kamba was one of those who had thrown in his lot with the usurping Korsibar, and he had died for it, with so many other brave warriors, at Thegomar Edge. The spells of the mages had been able to cause the war itself to be forgotten, but they could not bring fallen soldiers back to life.

Standing quietly at the base-line, Prestimion held himself altogether still for a time. He was often impulsive, but never when he stood before a target. With narrowed eyes he scrutinized his goal until at last he felt his soul at perfect center. He raised his bow then, and sighted along the waiting shaft.

“Prestimion! Prestimion! Lord Prestimion!” came the cry from a thousand throats.

Prestimion was aware of that great roar, but it was of no consequence to him just now. The thing that mattered was staying attuned to the task at hand. What pleasure there was in this art! Not that sending a shaft through the air was of any great importance in itself; but to do a thing with supreme excellence, to do it perfectly, whatever that thing might be—ah, there was joy in that!

He smiled and released his arrow, and watched it travel straight and true to the heart of the target, and heard the satisfying thump as it embedded itself deep.

“There’s no one to equal him at this, is there?” asked Navigorn of Hoikmar, who was sitting with a group of men of high rank in one of the boxes on the Coronal’s side of the field. “It isn’t fair. He really ought to sit back and let someone else win an archery title, just for once. Quite aside from the fact that it’s of somewhat questionable taste for a Coronal to be competing in his own coronation games.”

“What, Prestimion sit back and allow another to win?” said the Grand Admiral of the Realm, Gonivaul of Bombifale. Gonivaul, a dour man whose dark beard was so dense and his thick black hair so low across his forehead that the features of his face could scarcely be seen, offered Navigorn a look that was in fact the Grand Admiral’s version of a smile, though a stranger might have taken it to be a scowl. “It’s just not in his nature, Navigorn. He seems a decent well-bred sort, and so he is, but he does insist on winning, does he not? Confalume saw that in him right away, when he was only a boy. Which is why Prestimion rose through the Castle hierarchy as quickly as he did. And why he’s Coronal of Majipoor today.”

“Look at that, now! He has no shame,” said Navigorn, more in admiration than criticism, as Prestimion split his first arrow with his second. “I knew he’d try that trick again. He does it every time.”

“I understand from my son,” said Prince Serithorn, “that Prestimion isn’t actually competing for the prize today, but is performing only for the pure pleasure of the art. He’s asked the judges not to calculate his score.”

“And that means,” Gonivaul said sourly, “that the winner, whoever he turns out to be, must understand that he’s simply the best archer on the field who happens not to be Prestimion.”

“Which taints the glory of winning a bit, wouldn’t you say?” asked Navigorn.

“My son Glaydin made a similar comment,” said Serithorn. “But you show the man no mercy. Either he competes and, most likely, wins, or he disqualifies himself and thereby casts a shadow on the winner. So what is he to do?—Pass the wine, will you, Navigorn? Or do you mean to drink it all yourself?”

“Sorry.” Navigorn handed the flask across.

On the field, Prestimion was still running through his flamboyant repertoire of fancy shooting, to the accompaniment of uproarious approval from the crowd.

Navigorn, a powerfully built dark-haired man of impressive stature and confident nature, watched Prestimion’s performance with ungrudging approval. He appreciated excellence wherever he encountered it. And he admired Prestimion immensely. For all his lordly bearing, Navigorn himself had never had royal ambition; but it did please him to be near to the fount of power, and Prestimion had told him just yesterday that he had chosen him to be a member of the incoming Council. That had been unexpected. “You and I have never been particularly close friends,” Prestimion had said. “But I value you for your qualities. We need to come to know each other better, Navigorn.”

Prestimion at last yielded up his place on the field, to thunderous applause. He went running off, grinning, in a bouncy, boyishly jubilant stride. A slim young man wearing tight blue leggings and a brilliant scarlet-and-gold tunic typical of the distant west coast of Zimroel came forth next.

“He looked so happy just now,” Prince Serithorn observed. “Far more so than he was at the banquet the other night. Did you see how preoccupied he seemed then?”

“There was a black look about him that night,” said Admiral Gonivaul. “Well, he’s never happier than when he’s at his archery. But perhaps his long face at the banquet was meant to tell us that he’s already begun to take a sober view of what being Coronal actually involves. Not just grand processionals and the cheers of the admiring multitudes. Oh, no, no, no! A lifetime of grueling toil is what’s in store for him now, and the truth of it must be starting to sink in.—You know what ‘toil’ means, don’t you, Serithorn? No, why would you? The word isn’t in your vocabulary.”

“Why should it be?” replied Serithorn, who despite his considerable age was smooth-skinned and trim, an elegant, light-hearted man, one who rejoiced unabashedly in the enormous wealth that had descended to him from a whole host of famous ancestors going back to Lord Stiamot’s time. “What work could I possibly have done? I never thought I had much to offer the world in the way of useful skills. Better to do nothing all one’s life, and do it really well, than to set out to do something and do it badly, eh, my friend? Eh? Let those who are truly capable do the work. Such as Prestimion. He’ll be a marvelous Coronal. Has real aptitude for the job. Or like Navigorn here: a natural-born administrator, a man of genuine ability.—I hear he’s named you to the Council, Navigorn.”

“Yes. An honor I never sought, but am proud to have received.”

“Plenty of responsibility, being on the Council, let me tell you. I’ve put in more than my share of time on it. Prestimion’s asked me to stay on, matter of fact. What about you, Gonivaul?”

“I long for retirement,” the Grand Admiral said. “I am no longer young. I will return to Bombifale and enjoy the comforts and pleasures of my estate, I think.”

Serithorn smiled lightly. “Ah? You mean Prestimion hasn’t reappointed you as Admiral, is that it? Well, we’ll miss you, Gonivaul. But of course it’s a lot of ghastly drudgery, being Grand Admiral. I can hardly blame you for being willing to lay the job down.—Tell me, Gonivaul, did you ever set foot on board a seagoing vessel so much as once, during your entire term of office? No, surely not. A risky thing it is, going to sea. Man can drown, doing that.”

It was an old business, the duels of sarcastic byplay between these two great lords.

The part of Gonivaul’s face that was visible turned bright red with wrath.

“Serithorn—” he began ominously.

“If I may, gentlemen,” said Navigorn, cutting smoothly across the banter just as matters were threatening to become unruly.

Gonivaul backed off, grumbling. Serithorn chuckled in satisfaction.

Navigorn said, “I’ve not yet officially come into my new post, and already I’ve been handed a most peculiar problem to deal with. Perhaps you two, who know all the ins and outs of Castle politics as few others do, can advise me.”

“And what problem may that be?” said Serithorn, making no great show of interest. He was looking not at Navigorn but at the field below.

The second of the day’s two non-human contestants was at the baseline now, a great shaggy Skandar wearing a soft woolen jerkin boldly striped in black and orange and yellow. His bow, broader and more powerful even than Prestimion’s, dangled casually from one of his four huge hands like a plaything. The herald’s announcement gave his name as Hent Sekkiturn.

“Do you recognize the colors this archer wears, by any chance?” asked Navigorn.

“They are those of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail, I believe,” said Serithorn, after a moment’s inner deliberation.

“Exactly. And where is the Procurator himself, do you think?”

“Why—why—” Serithorn looked around. “You know, I don’t actually see him. He should be sitting right up here near us, I’d say. Do you have any idea of where he is, Gonivaul?”

“I haven’t laid eyes on him all week,” said the Grand Admiral. “Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I did see him. He’s not what you’d call an inconspicuous man, either. Could it be that he’s skipped the coronation altogether and stayed home, back there in Ni-moya?”

“Impossible,” Serithorn said. “A new Coronal is being crowned for the first time in decades, and the most powerful prince in Zimroel doesn’t bother to show up? That would be absurd. For one thing, Dantirya Sambail would want to be on the scene when the new appointments and preferences are handed out. And so he was, I’m quite certain, during the months when old Prankipin was dying. He’d have stayed for the coronation, certainly. Besides, Prestimion would surely take mortal offense if the Procurator were to snub him like this.”

“Oh, Dantirya Sambail’s at the Castle, all right,” said Navigorn. “That’s precisely the problem I want to discuss. You haven’t noticed him at any of the festivities because he happens to be a prisoner in the Sangamor tunnels. And now Prestimion’s set me in charge of him. I’m to be his jailer, it seems. My first official duty as a member of the Council.”

A look of incredulity appeared on Serithorn’s face. “What are you saying, Navigorn? Dantirya Sambail, a prisoner?”

“Apparently so.”

Gonivaul seemed equally amazed. “I find this altogether unbelievable. Why would Prestimion put Dantirya Sambail in the tunnels? The Procurator’s his own cousin—well, some sort of relative, anyway, right? You’d know more about that than I do, Serithorn. What is this, a family quarrel?”

“Perhaps it is. More to the point,” Serithorn said, “how could anybody, even Prestimion, succeed in locking up someone as blustering and obstreperous and generally vile as Dantirya Sambail? I’d think it would be harder than locking up a whole pack of maddened haiguses. And if it’s actually been done, why haven’t we heard about it? I’d think it would be the talk of the Castle.”

Navigorn turned his hands outward in a shrug. “I have no answers for any of this, gentlemen. I don’t understand the least thing about it. All I know is that the Procurator’s in the lockup, or so Prestimion assures me, and the Coronal has assigned me the job of making sure he stays there until he can be brought to judgment.”

“Judgment for what?” Gonivaul cried.

“I don’t have the slightest idea. I asked him what crime the Procurator was accused of, and he said he’d discuss that with me some other time.”

“Well, what’s your difficulty, then?” asked Serithorn crisply. “The Coronal has given you an assignment. You do as he says, that’s all. He wants you to be the Procurator’s jailer? Then be his jailer, Navigorn.”

“I hold no great love in my heart for Dantirya Sambail. He’s little more than a wild beast, the Procurator. But even so—if he’s being held without justification, purely at Prestimion’s whim, am I not an accomplice to injustice if I help to keep him in prison?”

Gonivaul said, amazed, “Are you raising an issue of conscience, Navigorn?”

“You might call it that.”

“You’ve taken an oath to serve the Coronal. The Coronal sees fit to place Dantirya Sambail under arrest, and asks you to enforce it. Do as he says, or else resign your office. Those are your choices, Navigorn. Do you believe Prestimion’s an evil man?”

“Of course not. And I have no desire to resign.”

“Well, then, assume that Prestimion believes there’s just cause for locking the Procurator away. Put twenty picked men on duty in the tunnels round the clock, or thirty, or however many you think are necessary, and have them keep watch, and make sure they understand that if Dantirya Sambail manages to charm his way out of his cell, or to bully and bluster his way out, or to get out in any other way at all, they’ll spend the rest of their lives regretting it.”

“And if men of Ni-moya, the Procurator’s men, that unsavory crew of murderers and thieves that Dantirya Sambail likes to keep about him, should come to me this afternoon,” said Navigorn, “and demand to know where their master is and on what charges he’s being held, and threaten to start an uproar from one end of the Castle to the other unless he’s released immediately—?”

“Refer them to the Coronal,” Gonivaul said. “He’s the one who put Dantirya Sambail in jail, not you. If they want explanations, they can get them from Lord Prestimion.”

“Dantirya Sambail a prisoner,” said Serithorn in a wondering tone, as though speaking to the air around him. “What a strange business! What an odd way to begin the new reign!—Are we supposed to keep this news a secret, Navigorn?”

“The Coronal told me nothing about that. The less said the better, I’d imagine.”

“Yes. Yes. The less said the better.”

“Indeed,” said Gonivaul. “Best to say no more.” And they all nodded vigorously.

“Serithorn! Gonivaul!” a hearty, raucous voice cried just then, from a couple of rows above. “Hello, Navigorn.” It was Fisiolo, the Count of Stee. With him was a short, stocky, ruddy-faced man with dark, chilly eyes and a high forehead. A formidable mass of stiff silvery hair swept upward from that forehead to a prodigious and somewhat alarming height. “You know Simbilon Khayf, do you?” Fisiolo asked, with a glance toward his companion. “Richest man in Stee. Prestimion himself will be coming to him for loans before long, mark my words.”

Simbilon Khayf favored Serithorn and Gonivaul and Navigorn with a quick, bland, beaming inclination of his head, studiedly modest. He seemed very much flattered to find himself in the presence of peers of such lofty position. Count Fisiolo, a square-faced, blunt-featured man who was never one to stand on ceremony, immediately beckoned Simbilon Khayf to follow him down into the box that the other three occupied, and he lost no time in doing so. But he gave the distinct impression of being someone who knew that he was far out of his depth.

“Have you heard?” Fisiolo said. “Prestimion’s got Dantirya Sambail penned up in the tunnels! Has him hanging on the wall in heavy irons, so I’m told. Can you imagine such a thing? It’s the talk of the Castle.”

“We’ve only just learned of it,” said Serithorn. “Well, if the story’s true, no doubt the Coronal had good reason for putting him there.”

“And what could that have been? Did nasty Dantirya Sambail say something dreadfully rude? Dantirya Sambail make the starburst sign the wrong way, maybe? Dantirya Sambail break wind at the coronation ceremony?—Come to think of it, was Dantirya Sambail even at the coronation ceremony?”

“I don’t remember seeing him arrive at the Castle at all,” Gonivaul said. “When we all came back here after Prankipin’s funeral.”

“Nor I,” said Navigorn. “And I was here when the main caravan from the Labyrinth arrived. Dantirya Sambail wasn’t with it.”

“Yet we are reliably informed that he is here,” said Serithorn. “Has been for some time, it seems. Long enough to offend Prestimion and be imprisoned, and yet nobody remembers seeing him arrive. This is very strange. Dantirya Sambail creates whirlwinds of noise about himself wherever he goes. How could he have come to the Castle, and none of us know it?”

“Strange, yes,” said Gonivaul.

“Strange indeed,” added Count Fisiolo. “But I confess that I like the idea that Prestimion has managed somehow to put that repulsive loathsome monster in irons. Don’t you?”

5

The Procurator of Ni-moya was much on Prestimion’s mind, too, in the days that followed the coronation festival. But he was in no hurry to deal with his treacherous kinsman, who had betrayed him again and again in the twistings and turnings of the late civil war. Let him languish some while longer in the dungeon into which he had been cast, Prestimion thought. It was necessary first to figure out some way of handling his case.

Beyond any question Dantirya Sambail was guilty of high treason. More than anyone, except, perhaps, the Lady Thismet herself, he had spurred Korsibar on to his insane rebellion. The breaking of the dam on the Iyann had been his doing, too, a savage act that had caused unthinkable destruction. And in the battle of Thegomar Edge he had lifted his hand against Prestimion in single combat, jeeringly offering to let the contest decide which of them would be the next Coronal and attacking Prestimion with axe and saber. Prestimion had prevailed in that encounter, though it was a close thing. But he had been unable to slay his defeated kinsman then and there on the battlefield, which was what he deserved. Instead Prestimion had had Dantirya Sambail and his malevolent henchman Mandralisca hauled away as prisoners, to be brought to judgment at a later time.

But how, Prestimion wondered, could the Procurator be put on trial for crimes that nobody, not even the accused man himself, was able to remember? Who would stand forth as his accuser? What evidence could be adduced against him? “This man was the chief fomenter of the civil war,” yes. But what civil war? “It was his treasonous intention to seize the royal throne for himself once he had arranged the death of his puppet Korsibar.” Korsibar? Who was Korsibar? “He is guilty of menacing the life of the legitimate Coronal on the field of battle with deadly weapons.” What battle, where, when?

Prestimion had no answers to these questions. And there were, anyway, more pressing problems to deal with first, here in the early weeks of his reign.

The coronation guests, most of them, had scattered far and wide to their homes. The princes and dukes and earls and mayors had gone back to their own domains; the former Coronal who now was Confalume Pontifex had taken himself down the River Glayge on the long somber voyage that would deliver him to his new subterranean home in the Labyrinth; the archers and jousters and wrestlers and swordsmen who had come to show their skills at the coronation games were dispersed as well. The Princess Therissa had gone back to Muldemar House to prepare for her journey to the Isle of Sleep and the tasks that awaited her there. The Castle was suddenly a much quieter place as Prestimion entered into the tasks of the new regime.

And there was so much to do. He had desired the throne and its duties with all his heart; but now that he had had his wish, he was awed by the boundless tasks he faced.

“I hardly know where to begin,” he confessed, looking up wearily at Septach Melayn and Gialaurys.

The three of them were in the spacious room, inlaid everywhere with rare woods and strips of shining metal, that was the core of the Coronal’s official suite. The throne-room was for the pomp and grandeur of state; these chambers were where the actual business of being Coronal took place.

Prestimion was seated at his splendid starburst grained desk of red palisander, and long-legged Septach Melayn lounged elegantly beside the broad curving window overlooking the sweeping, airy depths of the abyss of space that bordered the Castle on this side of the Mount. The thick-bodied, heavy-sinewed Gialaurys sat hunched on a backless bench to Prestimion’s left.

“It’s very simple, lordship,” said Gialaurys. “Begin at the beginning, and then continue to the next thing, and the next, and the one after that.”

Coming from Septach Melayn, such advice would have been mockery; but big steadfast Gialaurys had no capacity for irony, and when he spoke, in that deep, slow, gritty rumble of a voice of his, the words flattened by the blunt accents of his native city of Piliplok, it was always with the greatest seriousness. Prestimion’s mercurial little companion, the late and much lamented Duke Svor, had often mistaken Gialaurys’s stolidity for stupidity. But Gialaurys was not stupid at all, just ponderously sincere.

Prestimion laughed amiably. “Well said, Gialaurys! But which thing is the first one, and which the next? If only it were that easy to know.”

“Well, Prestimion, let us make a list,” said Septach Melayn. He ticked things off on his fingers. “One: appointing new court officials. On which we’ve made a fairly good start, I’d say. You’ve got yourself a new High Counsellor, thank you very much. And Gialaurys here will be a superb Grand Admiral, I’m sure. Et cetera et cetera. Two: repairing the prosperity of the districts that suffered damage during the war. Your brother Abrigant has some thoughts on that subject, incidentally, and wants to see you later in the day. Three—”

Septach Melayn hesitated. Gialaurys said at once, “Three: doing something about bringing Dantirya Sambail to trial.”

“Let that one go for a while,” Prestimion said. “It’s a complicated matter.”

“Four,” went on Gialaurys, undaunted: “Interviewing everyone who fought on Korsibar’s side in the late war, and making certain that no lingering disloyalties remain that could threaten the security of—”

“No,” said Prestimion. “Strike that from the list. There never was any war, remember? How could anyone still be loyal to Korsibar, Gialaurys, when Korsibar never existed?”

Gialaurys offered a scowl and a grunt of displeasure. “Even so, Prestimion—”

“I tell you, there’s nothing to worry about here. Most of Korsibar’s lieutenants died at Thegomar Edge—Farholt, Mandrykarn, Venta, Farquanor, all that crowd—and I have no fear of the ones who survived. Navigorn, for instance. Korsibar’s best general, he was. But he begged forgiveness right on the battlefield, do you recall, when he came up to surrender just after Korsibar was killed? And sincerely so. He’ll serve me well on the Council. Oljebbin and Serithorn and Gonivaul—they sold out to Korsibar, yes, but they don’t remember doing it, and they can’t do any harm now in any case. Duke Oljebbin will go to the Labyrinth and become High Spokesman for the Pontifex, and good riddance. Gonivaul gets sent into retirement in Bombifale. Serithorn’s useful and amusing; I’ll keep him around. Well, who else? Name me the names of people whom you suspect of being disloyal.”

“Well—” Gialaurys began, but no names came to his lips.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Prestimion,” said Septach Melayn. “There may not be any Korsibar loyalists left around, but there isn’t anybody at the Castle, other than the three of us, who’s not seriously confused in some way by the witchery that you invoked at the end of the war. The war itself is wiped from everyone’s mind, yes. But they all know that something big happened. They just don’t know what it was. A lot of important men are dead, whole huge regions of Alhanroel are devastated, the Mavestoi Dam has mysteriously given way and flooded half a province, and yet everybody has been given to understand that there’s been a smooth and uneventful transition from Confalume’s reign to yours. It doesn’t add up right, and they know it. They keep running up against that big throbbing blank place in their memories. It bothers them. I see mystified looks coming over people’s faces right in the middle of a sentence, and they stop speaking and frown and press their hands against the sides of their heads as if they’re groping in their minds for something that isn’t there. I’ve begun to wonder if it was such a good idea to remove the war from history like that, Prestimion.”

This was a subject Prestimion would have preferred not to discuss. But there was no avoiding it now that Septach Melayn had wrestled it out into the open.

“The war was a terrible wound to the soul of the world,” said Prestimion tautly. “If I had left it unexpunged, grievances and countergrievances would have been popping up forever between Korsibar’s faction and mine. By having all memories of the war wiped clean, I gave everyone a chance to make a fresh start. To borrow one of your own favorite phrases, Septach Melayn, what’s done is done. We have to live now with the consequences, and we will, and that’s all there is to it.”

Inwardly, though, he was not so sure. He had heard disquieting reports—everyone had—of strange outbreaks of mental imbalance here and there on the Mount, people attacking strangers without motive in the streets, or bursting into uncontrollable sobbing that went on for days and days, or throwing themselves into rivers or off cliffs. Such tales had come in lately from Halanx and Minimool, and Haplior also, as though some whirling eddy of madness could be spiralling outward and downward from the Castle to the adjacent cities of the Mount. Even as far down the Mount as Stee, it seemed, there had been a serious incident, a housemaid in some rich man’s mansion who had leaped from a window and killed two people standing in the street below.

What reason was there, though, to link any of this to the general amnesia that he had had his sorcerers induce at the end of the war? Perhaps such things inevitably happened at the time of the changing of kings, especially after so long and happy a reign as that of Lord Confalume. People thought of Confalume as being a loving father to the entire world; they were unhappy, perhaps, to see him disappearing into the Labyrinth; and hence these disturbances. Perhaps.

Septach Melayn and Gialaurys were going on and on, extending into a host of new areas the already sufficient list of problems that were awaiting solutions:

He needed, they told him, to integrate the various magical arts, which had come to take on such importance on Majipoor in Confalume’s time, more fully into the fabric of society. This would require conversations with such folk as Gominik Halvor and Heszmon Gorse, who had remained at the Castle for just that purpose, said Gialaurys, rather than return to the wizards’ capital at Triggoin.

He needed also to do something about a horde of synthetically-created monsters that Korsibar had planned to use against him on the battlefield if the war had lasted just a little longer: according to Gialaurys, a number of them had escaped from their pens and were rampaging through some district north of Castle Mount.

Then, too, he ought to deal with some complaint that the Metamorphs of Zimroel had raised, having to do with the boundaries of the forest reservation on which they were required to live. The Shapeshifters were complaining of illegal encroachments on their domain by unscrupulous land-developers out of Ni-moya.

And also there was this to do, and this, and that—Prestimion was barely listening, now. They were so insufferably sincere, these two, Septach Melayn in his elegant knightly way, Gialaurys in his own blunter style. Septach Melayn had always posed as one who never took anything seriously, but it was, Prestimion knew, only a pose; and as for Gialaurys, he was nothing else but stolid seriousness, a great massive sturdy lump of it. Prestimion felt, more keenly than ever, the loss of the slippery little Duke Svor, who had had many faults but never the one of excessive sincerity. He had been the perfect mediator between the other two.

How idiotic it had been of Svor to step out onto the battlefield of Thegomar Edge, when his proper place had been behind the scenes, scheming and plotting! Svor had not been any sort of warrior. What lunacy had driven him to take part in that murderous battle? And now he was gone. Where, Prestimion wondered, will I find a replacement for him?

And for Thismet, also. Especially, especially, Thismet. The biting pain of that loss would not leave him, would not so much as diminish with the passing weeks. Was it Thismet’s death, he wondered, that had cast him into this miserable despondency?

Much work awaited him, yes. Too much, it sometimes seemed. Well, he would manage it somehow. Every Coronal in the long list of his predecessors had faced the same sense of immense responsibilities that had to be mastered, and each had shouldered those responsibilities and played his part, for good or ill, as history related—as history would one day relate also of him. And most of them had done the job reasonably well, all things considered.

But he could not shake off that mysterious, damnable sense of weariness, of hollowness, of letdown and dissatisfaction, that had poisoned his spirit since the first day of his reign. He had hoped that the taking up of his royal duties would cure him of that. It did not seem to be working out that way.

Very likely the tasks before him would seem far less immense, Prestimion thought, if only Thismet had lived. What a wonderful partner of his labors she would have been! A Coronal’s daughter herself, aware of the challenges of the kingship, and doubtless more than capable of handling many of them—Thismet would have been ever so much more capable of governing, he was sure, than her foolish brother: she would gladly have shared a great deal of his burden. But Thismet, too, was lost to him forever.

Still talking, Septach Melayn? And you, Gialaurys?

Prestimion toyed with the slim circlet of bright metal that lay before him on the desk. His “everyday” crown, as he liked to call it, to distinguish it from the exceedingly magnificent formal crown that Lord Confalume had had fashioned for himself, with those three immense many-faceted purple diniabas gleaming in its browband, and its finials of emeralds and rubies, and its inlaid chasings of seven different precious metals.

Confalume had loved to wear that crown; but Prestimion had worn it only once, in the first hours of his reign. He meant to reserve it henceforth for the very highest occasions of state. He found it mildly absurd even to have this little silver band around his head, hard though he had fought for the right to wear it. But he kept it constantly by him, all the same. He was Coronal of Majipoor, after all.

Coronal of Majipoor.

He had set his goal high, and after terrible struggle he had attained it.

As his two dearest friends droned on and on with their seemingly unending recitation of the tasks that awaited him and their interminable discussion of priorities and strategies, Prestimion was no longer even pretending to be paying attention. He knew what his tasks were: all of these, yes, and one that Septach Melayn and Gialaurys had not mentioned. For above all else he must make himself, here at the outset, the master of the officials and courtiers who were the real heart of the government: he must demonstrate his kingliness to them, he must show them that Lord Confalume, with the guidance of the Divine, had chosen the right man for the post.

Which meant that he must think like a Coronal, live like a Coronal, walk like a Coronal, breathe like a Coronal. That was the prime task; and all else would follow inevitably from the doing of it.

Very well, Prestimion: you are Coronal. Be Coronal.

The husk of him remained where it was, behind his desk, pretending to listen as Septach Melayn and Gialaurys earnestly laid out an agenda for the early months of his reign. But his soul flew upward and outward, into the cool open sky above the tip of Castle Mount, and journeyed toward the world, traveling in miraculous simultaneity to all directions of the compass.

He opened himself now to Majipoor and let himself feel its immensity flowing through him. Sent his mind roving outward across the vastness of the world that in these days just past had been entrusted to his care.

He must embrace that vastness fully, he knew, take it into himself, encompass it with his soul.

—The three great continents, sprawling, vast, many-citied Alhanroel and gigantic lush-forested Zimroel and the smaller continent of Suvrael, that sun-blasted land down in the torrid south. The giant surging rivers. The countless species of trees and plants and beasts and birds that filled the world with such beauty and wonder. The blue-green expanse of the Inner Sea with its roving herds of great sea-dragons moving unhurriedly about their mysterious migrations, and the holy Isle of Sleep that lay in its center. The other ocean, the enormous unexplored Great Sea that stretched across the unknown farther hemisphere of the world.

—The marvelous cities, the fifty great ones of the Mount and the uncountable multitude beyond, Sippulgar and Se-farad and Alaisor and wizardly Triggoin, Kikil and Mai and Kimoise, Pivrarch and Lontano, Da and Demigon Glade, and on and on, across to the far shore of the Inner Sea and the distant continent of Zimroel with its multiplicity of ever-burgeoning megalopolises, Ni-moya, Narabal, Til-omon, Pi-druid, Dulorn, Sempernond, and all the rest.

—The billions and billions of people, not only the humans but those of the other races, Vroons and Skandars, Su-Suheris and Hjorts and the humble slow-witted Liimen, and also the mysterious shape-shifting Metamorphs, whose world this had been in its entirety until it was taken from them so many thousands of years ago.

All of it now placed in his hands.

His.

His.

The hands of Prestimion of Muldemar, yes: who now was Coronal of Majipoor.

Suddenly Prestimion found himself feverishly yearning to go forth not merely in a vision but in the flesh, and explore this world that had been given into his charge. To see it all; to be everywhere at once, drinking in the infinite wonders of Majipoor. Out of the pain and loneliness of his strange new life as Coronal came, in one great turbulent rush, the passionate desire to visit the lands from which those coronation gifts had come. To repay the givers, in a sense, with the gift of himself.

A king must know his kingdom at first hand. Until the time of the civil war, when he had trekked back and forth across Alhanroel from one battlefield to another, his life had been centered almost entirely on Castle Mount, and at the Castle itself. He had been to some of the Fifty Cities, of course; and there had been the one journey to the eastern coast of Zimroel when he was hardly out of boyhood, that time when he had met and fallen into friendship with Gialaurys at Piliplok, but otherwise he had seen little of the world.

The war, though, had given Prestimion an appetite for traveling. It had taken him up and down the heartland of Alhanroel, to cities and places he had never expected to see: he had beheld the astonishing might of the Gulikap Fountain, that uncheckable spume of pure energy, and had crossed the forbidding spine of the Trikkala Mountains into the lovely agricultural zones on the other side, and had impelled himself across the grim dread desert of the Valmambra to reach the remote city of the wizards, Triggoin, far in the north. And yet he had seen only a tiny sliver of the magnificence that was Majipoor.

He longed, abruptly, to experience more. He had not realized, until this moment, how powerful that longing was. The desire seized him and took full possession of him. How much longer could he remain holed up in isolated majesty in the luxurious confines of the Castle, drearily passing one day after another in such matters as interviewing potential members of the Council and reviewing the legislative program that he had been handed by Lord Confalume’s administration, when the whole glorious world beyond these walls beckoned to him, urging him to go forth into it? If he could not have Thismet, well, he would have Majipoor itself to console him for the loss. To see all that it held, to touch, to taste, to smell. To drink deep; to devour. To present himself to his subjects, saying, Look, see, here I am before you, Prestimion your king!

“Enough,” he said suddenly, glancing up and interrupting Septach Melayn in full spate. “If you will, my friends, spare me the rest of it for now.”

Septach Melayn peered down at him from his great height. “Are you all right, Prestimion? You look very strange, suddenly.”

“Strange?”

“Tense. Strained.”

Indifferently Prestimion said, “I’ve slept badly these few nights past.”

“That comes of sleeping alone, my lord,” said Septach Melayn, with a wink and a little sniggering leer.

“No doubt that’s so,” said Prestimion icily. “Another problem to be solved, at another time.” He allowed Septach Melayn to see plainly that he was not amused. Then he said, after a long chilly moment of silence, “The true problem, Septach Melayn, is that I feel a great restlessness churning within me. I’ve felt it since the hour this crown first touched my forehead. The Castle has begun to seem like a prison to me.”

Septach Melayn and Gialaurys exchanged troubled glances.

“Is that so, my lord?” said Septach Melayn cautiously.

“Very much so.”

“You should talk to Dantirya Sambail about what being a prisoner is really like,” Septach Melayn said, giving Prestimion an exaggerated roll of his eyes.

The man is irrepressible, Prestimion thought.

“In due time I will certainly do just that,” he replied unsmilingly. “But I remind you that Dantirya Sambail’s a criminal. I’m a king.”

“Who dwells in the greatest of all castles,” said Gialaurys. “Would you rather be back on the battlefield then, my lord? Sleeping in the rain beneath a bower of vakumba-trees in Moorwath forest? Struggling in the mud by the banks of the Jhelum? Making your way through the swamps of Beldak marsh? Or wandering about deliriously in the desert of Valmambra once more, perhaps?”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Gialaurys. You don’t understand what I’m saying. Neither of you do. Is this the Labyrinth, and I the Pontifex, that I’m required to stay in one place forever and ever? The Castle’s not the boundary of my life. These few years past all my efforts have been spent on making myself Coronal; and now I am; and it seems to me now that all I’ve achieved for myself is to make myself the king of documents and meetings. The coronation festivities have come and gone. I sit in this office, grand as it is, day after day, yearning with all my heart to be anywhere else.—My friends, I need to get out into the world for a time.”

In some alarm Septach Melayn said, “Surely you’re not thinking of a grand processional, Prestimion! Not yet! Not in the first month of your reign—nor even the first year, for that matter.”

Prestimion shook his head. “No. It’s much too soon for that, I agree.” What did he want, though? It was far from clear even to himself. Improvising hastily, he said, “Short visits somewhere, perhaps—not a grand processional but a little one, through half a dozen of the Fifty Cities, let’s say—two or three weeks going here and there on the Mount. To bring myself closer to the people, to get to know what’s on their minds. I’ve been too busy in these years of war to pay any attention to anything except raising armies and making battle plans.”

“Yes, certainly, travel to some of the nearby cities. Yes, by all means, do,” said Septach Melayn. “But it’ll take time—weeks, even months—to arrange even the simplest of official journeys. Surely you know that. The arrangements for proper royal accommodations, the programs of events to be drawn up, the receptions, the banquets that must be organized—”

“More banquets,” said Prestimion glumly.

“They are unavoidable, my lord. But I have a better suggestion, if you merely want to escape from the Castle for quick visits to the neighboring cities.”

“And what is that?”

“Korsibar, I’m told, also wanted to travel about on the Mount while he was Coronal. And did so secretly, in disguise, making use of some shapechanging device that the sneaky Vroon wizard Thalnap Zelifor invented for him. You could do the same, taking on this guise or that one, as it pleased you, and no one the wiser.”

Prestimion looked at him dubiously. “I remind you, Septach Melayn, that at this very moment Thalnap Zelifor is on his way to exile in Suvrael, and all of his magical devices have gone with him.”

Frowning, Septach Melayn said, “Ah. In truth I had forgotten that.” But then his eyes brightened. “Yet there’s really no need of such magic, is there? I understand it failed one day for Korsibar anyway, while he was in Sipermit, I think, and he was seen changing to his true semblance. Which gave rise to the silly fable that Korsibar was a Metamorph. If you were to wear a false beard, though, and a kerchief around your head, and dressed yourself in commoner’s clothing—”

“A false beard!” said Prestimion, with a guffaw.

“Yes, and I would go with you, or Gialaurys, or the two of us both, also in disguise, and we’d sneak off to Bibiroon, or Upper Sunbreak, or Banglecode or Greel or wherever it is you want to go, and spend a night or two sniffing around having high sport far from the Castle, and no one would ever know? What do you say to that, Prestimion? Would that ease this restlessness of yours at least a little?”

“I do like the idea,” Prestimion said, feeling a spark of joy rising within his breast for the first time in more weeks than he cared to count. “I like it very much!”

And would gladly have set forth from the Castle that very evening. But no, no, there were more meetings to attend, and proposals to consider, and decrees that must be signed. He had never fully comprehended until now the meaning of the old saying that it was folly to yearn to be the master of the realm, for you would discover in short order that you were in fact its servant.

“Lordship, it is Prince Abrigant of Muldemar to see you,” came the voice of Nilgir Sumanand, who held the post of major-domo to the Coronal now.

“Admit him,” Prestimion said.

Tall slender Abrigant, seven years Prestimion’s junior and the elder of his two living brothers, came striding into the royal office. The Prince of Muldemar, he was, now, having succeeded to Prestimion’s old title upon Prestimion’s becoming Coronal. Prestimion was seriously thinking of giving him a seat on the Council as well, not at once, perhaps, but after young Abrigant had had a chance to ripen into his maturity a little further.

Abrigant might more readily have been Septach Melayn’s brother than Prestimion’s, so different in physical type was he. He was slim where Prestimion was stocky, and lanky where Prestimion was short statured, and his hair, though golden like his brother’s, had a sheen and a radiance that Prestimion’s had never had. He cut a fine figure, did Abrigant: dressed this evening as though for a formal public occasion of court, with a tight-fitting, high-waisted pinkish-purple doublet of rich Alaisor make, and soft long-legged breeches of the same color, tucked into high boots of the distinctive yellow leather of Estotilaup that were topped with fine lace ruffles.

He offered his brother not only the starburst gesture but a grand sweeping bow, greatly overdone. Irritatedly Prestimion made a quick brushing motion with his hand, as if to sweep the effusive obeisance away.

“This is a little too much, Abrigant. Much too much!”

“You are Coronal now, Prestimion!”

“Yes. So I am. But you are still my brother. A simple starburst will be sufficient. More than sufficient, indeed.” He began once more to toy with the slender crown lying on his desk. “Septach Melayn tells me you have ideas to put before me. Dealing with, so I understand it, the matter of bringing some relief to the regions currently suffering from crop failures and other such disruptions.”

Abrigant looked puzzled. “He said that, did he? Well, not exactly. I know that certain places here and there around Alhanroel are in bad shape, all of a sudden. But I don’t know the whys and wherefores of any of that, except for a few obvious things like the collapse of the Mavestoi Dam and the flooding of the Iyann Valley. The rest’s a mystery to me, what might be causing these sudden local outbreaks of food shortages, or whatever. The will of the Divine, I suppose.”

Statements of that kind troubled Prestimion, and he was hearing them more and more often. But what could he expect, when he had kept everyone around him in ignorance of the major event of the era? Here was his own brother, one of his most intimate friends, whom he hoped would also become, eventually, one of his most useful advisers, a member of the Royal Council. And he knew nothing of the war and its effects. Nothing!

A great civil war had devastated great sectors of Alhanroel for two whole years, and Abrigant had no inkling that it had ever occurred. Living in such darkness, how could he be expected to make rational decisions about public affairs? For a moment Prestimion was tempted to confess the truth. But he checked himself. He and Septach Melayn and Gialaurys had agreed most vehemently that they should be the only ones to know. There could be no revelations after the fact, not now, not even for Abrigant.

“You’re not here to talk about remedies for the afflicted provinces, then?”

“No. What I have are ideas concerning ways to increase the general economic well-being of the entire world. If all the world grows wealthier, then the distressed districts will be helped along with everyone else. Which must be what led Septach Melayn to misunderstand my purpose.”

“Go on,” said Prestimion uncomfortably.

This new earnestness of Abrigant’s was very strange in his ears. The Abrigant he knew was energetic, impetuous, even somewhat hotheaded. In the struggle against the usurping Korsibar he had been a valiant, ferocious warrior. But a man of ideas, no. Prestimion had never known his brother to show much aptitude for abstract thought. An athlete, was what he was. Hunting, racing, sport of all kinds: that was where Abrigant’s interests always had lain. Perhaps maturity was coming upon him faster than Prestimion had expected, though.

Abrigant hesitated. He seemed uncomfortable too. After a moment he said, as if reading his brother’s mind, “I’m well aware, Prestimion, that you think I’m a pretty shallow sort. But I do a lot of reading and studying now. I’ve hired experts to tutor me on matters of public affairs. I—”

“Please, Abrigant. I realize that you’re not a boy any longer.”

“Thank you. I just want you to know that I’ve given a lot of thought to these things.” Abrigant moistened his lips and drew his breath in deeply. “What I have to say is simply this. We’ve enjoyed, of course, a great economic upturn on Majipoor all through Lord Confalume’s years as Coronal, and through Lord Prankipin’s reign before that. A case could be made that we’ve been living through a golden age. But even so, we’re not nearly as prosperous as we ought to be, considering the wealth of natural resources we have here, and the overall tranquility of our political system.”

Overall tranquility?

With a terrible war only a few weeks in the past? Prestimion wondered whether there was some irony there—whether Abrigant might remember more of the recent events than he was letting on. No, he thought. There was not the slightest trace of ambiguity in Abrigant’s steady, earnest gaze. His eyes, sea-green like Prestimion’s own, were focused on him with solemn uncomplicated intensity.

“The big stumbling-block,” Abrigant was saying, “is the scarcity of metals here, of course. We’ve never had enough iron on Majipoor, for example, or nickel, or lead, or tin. We’ve got some copper, yes, and gold and silver, but not much else in the way of metal. We’ve been greatly shortchanged in that regard. Do you know why that’s so, Prestimion ?”

“The will of the Divine, I suppose?”

“You could say that, yes. It was the will of the Divine to provide most worlds of the universe with good heavy cores of iron or nickel, and those worlds have plentiful supplies of such metals in their crusts, too. But Majipoor’s much lighter within and without. We’ve got light rock, or great airy caverns, where other worlds have those masses of solid metal. And there’s not much metal in our world’s crust, either. This is why gravity doesn’t have a really powerful pull here, even though Majipoor is so big. If this planet was composed of as much metal as other worlds are, people like us would probably be crushed flat by the tremendous force of gravity. Even if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be sufficiently strong to lift a single finger. Not a single finger, Prestimion! Do you follow me so far?”

“I understand something of the laws of gravity,” said Prestimion, amazed at being lectured in such matters by Abrigant, of all people.

“Good. You’ll agree with me, then, that this lack of metals has been something of an economic handicap for us? That we’ve never been able to build spacegoing vessels, or even an adequate system of air and rail transport, because of it? That we’re dependent on other worlds for a lot of the metal we do use, and that this has been costly to us in all sorts of ways?”

“Agreed. But you know, Abrigant, we haven’t really done too badly. No one goes hungry here, big as our population is. There’s ample work for all. We have splendid cities of enormous size. Our society’s been remarkably stable under a worldwide government for thousands of years.”

“Because we have a wonderful climate almost everywhere, and fertile soil, and any number of useful plants and animals both on land and sea. But plenty of people are going hungry right now, so I hear, in places like the Iyann Valley. I hear about bad harvests elsewhere in Alhanroel, empty granaries, factories having to shut down because something has been strange lately about the shipment of raw materials from place to place, and so forth.”

“These are temporary problems,” said Prestimion.

“Maybe so. But such things will put a great strain on the economy, won’t they, brother? I’ve been doing a lot of reading, I told you. I’ve come to understand how one disruption over here can lead to another over there, which causes troubles in a third place entirely that’s very far away, and before you know it the problem has spread all across the world. Which is something you may find yourself facing before you’ve spent many months on the throne, I’m afraid.”

Prestimion nodded. This conversation was getting tiresome.

“And what do you suggest, then, Abrigant?”

Eagerly Abrigant said, “That we bring about an increase in our supply of useful metal, particularly iron. If we had more iron, we could manufacture more steel for use in industry and transportation, which would permit a great expansion of trade both on Majipoor itself and with our neighboring worlds.”

“How is this to be achieved, exactly? By sorcery, perhaps?”

Abrigant looked wounded. “I beg you, brother, don’t be condescending. I’ve been doing a great deal of reading lately.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“I know, for example, that there’s said to be a district somewhere deep in the south, and off to the east of Aruachosia Province, where the soil is so curiously rich in metal that the plants themselves contain iron and copper in their stems and leaves. Which need only to be heated to yield a rich harvest of useful metal.”

“Skakkenoir, yes,” Prestimion said. “It’s a myth, Abrigant. No one’s ever been able to find this wonderful place.”

“How hard has anyone ever tried? All I can turn up in the archives is an expedition in Lord Guadeloom’s time, and that was thousands of years ago. We should go looking for it again, Prestimion. I’m quite serious. But I have other suggestions to make, too. Do you know, brother, that there are ways of manufacturing iron, zinc, and lead out of baser substances such as charcoal and earth? I don’t mean through wizardry, although science of this sort certainly seems to verge on wizardry; but it is science all the same. Research has already been done. I can bring you people who have achieved such transformations. On a small scale, yes, a very small scale—but with proper backing, generous funds appropriated from the royal treasury—”

Prestimion gave him a close look. This was a new Abrigant, all right.

“You actually know of such people?”

“Well, at second hand, I have to admit. But reliable second hand. I urge you most strongly, brother—”

“No need for further urging, Abrigant. You pique my interest with this. Bring me your metal-making wizards and let me speak with them.”

“Scientists, Prestimion. Scientists.”

“Scientists, to be sure. Though anyone able to conjure iron out of charcoal sounds very much like a magus to me. Well, mages or scientists, whatever they may be, it’s worth an hour of my time to learn more about their art. I do agree with your basic argument. A greater store of metal will make for great economic benefits for Majipoor. But can we really obtain the metal?”

“I’m confident of it, brother.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Prestimion.

He rose and led Abrigant across the richly inlaid floor, artfully decorated with stripes of ghazyn and bannikop and other precious woods, to the door of the office. Abrigant paused there and said, “One more thing, Prestimion. Is it true that our kinsman Dantirya Sambail is a prisoner here in the Castle?”

“You’ve heard about that, have you?”

“Is he?”

“He is, yes. Hidden away snugly in the Sangamor tunnels.”

Abrigant made a holy sign. “You can’t be serious, brother! What insanity is this? The Procurator’s too dangerous a man to treat this way.”

“It’s specifically because he is dangerous that I’ve put him where he is.”

“But to offend a man who wields so much power, and who is so free with his wrath—”

“The offense,” said Prestimion, “was from him to me, not the other way around, and merits what I’ve done to him. As for the circumstances of the offense, those are of no concern to anyone but me. And however much power Dantirya Sambail may wield, I wield more. In the fullness of time I’ll deal with his case as it deserves, I assure you, and justice will be served.—I thank you most warmly for this visit, brother. May it lead to good things for us all.”

6

“And the new Coronal,” Dekkeret said. “What do you think of him, now?”

“What is there to think?” his cousin Sithelle replied. “He’s young, is all I know. And quite intelligent, I hear. We’ll find out the rest as time goes along.—They do say that he’s very short, I understand.”

“As if that matters,” said Dekkeret scornfully. “But I suppose it does, at least to you. He’d never marry you, would he? You’d be much too tall for him, and that wouldn’t do.”

They were walking along the broad rim of the immense impregnable wall of black stone monoliths that surrounded their home city of Normork, which was one of the twelve Slope Cities of the Mount, a long way down the giant mountain from Lord Prestimion and his Castle. Dekkeret was not quite eighteen, tall and strapping, with a powerful broad-shouldered frame and an air of strength and confidence about him. Sithelle, two years younger, was nearly of a height with him, though of a lithe and willowy build that made her seem almost fragile beside her sturdy cousin.

She laughed, a silvery, tinkling sound. “Me, marry the Coronal? Do you suppose any such thing has ever entered my mind?”

“Of course I do. Every girl on Majipoor is thinking the same thing these days. ‘Lord Prestimion is young and handsome and single, and he’ll be taking a consort sooner or later, and why not a girl like me?’ Am I right, Sithelle? No. No, of course not. I’m always wrong. And you’d never admit that you were interested in him if it was so, would you?”

“What are you saying? Coronals don’t marry commoners!” She slipped her arm through his. “You’re being silly,” she said. “As usual, Dekkeret.”

He and Sithelle were the best of friends. That was the problem. Their families had always hoped that they would marry some day; but they had grown up together, and looked upon each other almost as brother and sister. She was a handsome girl, too, with long springy hair the color of fire and bright, mischievous gray-violet eyes. But Dekkeret knew that he was no more likely ever to marry Sithelle than—well, than Sithelle was to marry Lord Prestimion. Less likely, indeed, because it was at least conceivable that she would somehow meet and marry the Coronal, but Dekkeret knew that Sithelle could never be his own choice as a wife.

They strolled along in silence for a time. The wall’s rim was so wide that ten people could walk abreast on the road that ran along it, but there were few others up there now. The hour was getting late, the hour of long shadows. The green-gold orb of the sun was low in the sky and in just a short while it would move around behind the tremendous upjutting mass of Castle Mount and be lost to their view.

“Look there,” Dekkeret said. He pointed downward into the city. They were at the place where the wall, as it followed the craggy contours of the Mount, made a great curve outward to carry past an out-thrusting rocky spur. The ancient palace of the Counts of Normork was tucked into that sweeping bulge.

A low, squat, almost windowless square building of gray basalt, it was, topped by six menacing-looking minarets. It seemed more like a fortress than a palace. Everything in Normork had that look—secure, inward-looking, well guarded—as though the city’s builders had looked upon the likelihood of invasion from some neighboring city as a perpetual threat. The outer wall, Normork’s most famous landmark, enclosed the city like a tortoise’s shell. It was so great a wall that it might almost be fair to call Normork itself an appendage to the wall, rather than speaking of the wall as an aspect of the city.

There was just one gate in the wall that so supremely enfolded Normork, and that was a mingy little thing that since time immemorial had been sealed tight every evening, so that if you didn’t enter the city before dark, you waited until morning. Normork’s wall, so it was said, was patterned after the great one of huge stone blocks, now mostly in ruins, that once had protected the prehistoric Metamorph capital of Velalisier. But thousands of years had gone by since there last had been war on Majipoor. Who were the enemies, Dekkeret often wondered, against whom this colossal rampart had been erected?

“The palace, you mean?” Sithelle said. “What about it?”

Long yellow streamers were draped across the palace’s featureless face. “They’ve still got the mourning badges hanging from the facade,” said Dekkeret.

“Well, why shouldn’t they? It isn’t all that long since the Count and his brother died.”

“It seems like a long time to me. Months.”

“No. Just a few weeks, in fact. I know, it does seem much longer. But it’s not.”

“How strange,” Dekkeret said. “That the two of them should be dead so young.” A boating accident on Lake Roghoiz, so it had been announced, where the princes had been sport-fishing. “Can it be true that the thing really happened the way we were told it did?”

Sithelle gave him a mystified look. “Is there any reason to doubt it? The nobility get killed in fishing and hunting accidents all the time.”

“We are asked to accept that Count Iram hooked a scamminaup so big that it pulled him right into the lake and drowned him. That scamminaup must have been as big as a sea-dragon, Sithelle! I can’t help wondering why he didn’t simply let go of the line. And then Lamiran going in after him to rescue him, and drowning also? It’s all very hard to believe.”

Sithelle said, shrugging, “What purpose would anyone have in lying about it? And what difference would it make? They’re dead, aren’t they, and Meglis is Count of Normork, and that’s that.”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose so. Odd, though.”

“What is?”

“So many deaths all about the same time. Significant deaths, dukes and earls and counts. But plenty of ordinary people too. My father travels pretty widely up and down the Mount on business, you know. Bibiroon, Stee, Banglecode, Minimool, all sorts of places. And he tells me that wherever you go, you see the mourning badges hanging from important public buildings and private residences. A lot of people have died recently. A lot. That’s hard to explain.”

“I suppose,” Sithelle said. She didn’t seem very interested.

Dekkeret persisted. “It bothers me. A lot of things do, lately. It’s all been something of a blur, these last weeks, wouldn’t you say? Not just the death of the Count and his brother. The old Pontifex dying too, Lord Confalume taking his place, Prestimion becoming Coronal. Everything seemed to happen so fast.”

“Things weren’t happening fast while his majesty was dying. That seemed to take forever.”

“But once he did die—whiz, bang, all manner of things going on at once, Prankipin’s funeral one week and Lord Prestimion’s coronation practically the next—”

“I don’t think they were actually so close together,” said Sithelle.

“Maybe not. But it seemed that way to me.”

They were beyond the palace, now, coming around to the side of the city that faced outward from the flank of the Mount, affording a glimpse of nearby Morvole on its thrusting promontory. A watchtower set into the wall provided a viewing-point here from which one could see, to the left, the highway winding down through the serrated rocky spine of Normork Crest into the foothills of the Mount, and in the other direction, looking upward, the cities of the next ring. There was even the merest shadowy hint, impossibly high above, of the lofty circlet of perpetual mist that cloaked the upper zones of the great mountain, hiding the summit and its Castle from the eyes of those below.

Sithelle scrambled swiftly up the narrow stone steps of the tower, leaving him well behind. She was a slim, leggy girl, enormously quick and agile. Dekkeret, following her, climbed in a more plodding way. His limbs were relatively short in proportion to his solid, massive torso, and he usually found it wisest to move carefully and unhurriedly.

When he joined her, she was holding the rail and peering out at nothing in particular. Dekkeret stood close beside her. The air was clear and cool and sweet, with just a taste of the light rain that would be coming, as it did every day, later in the evening. He let his eyes rove upward, up to where he imagined the Castle lay, clinging to the highest crags of the Mount, miles overhead and invisible from here.

“I hear the new Coronal’s going to pay us a visit soon,” he said, after a bit.

“What? A grand processional already? I thought Coronals didn’t do that until they’d been on the throne at least two or three years.”

“Not a full processional, no. Just a brief visit to some of the Mount cities. My father said so. He hears a lot of news as he travels around.”

Sithelle turned toward him. Her eyes were glowing. “Oh, if only he would! To see an actual Coronal—!”

Her breathless eagerness bothered him. “I saw Lord Confalume once, you know.”

“You did?”

“In Bombifale, when I was nine. I was there with my father, and the Coronal was a guest at Admiral Gonivaul’s estate. I watched them come riding out together in a big floater. You can’t mistake Gonivaul—he’s got a great shaggy beard all over his face and nothing shows through it but his eyes and his nose. And there was Lord Confalume sitting next to him—oh, he was splendid! Radiant. He was in his prime, then. You could practically see light streaming from him. As they went past I waved to him, and he waved back, and smiled, such an easy calm smile, as if to tell me how much he loved being Coronal. Later that day my father brought me to Bombifale Palace, where Lord Confalume was holding court, and he smiled at me again, by way of saying to me that he recognized me from seeing me before. It was an extraordinary sensation just to be in his presence, to feel the strength of him, the goodness. It was one of the great moments of my life.”

“Was Prestimion there?” Sithelle asked.

“Prestimion? With the Coronal, you mean? Oh, no, no, Sithelle. This was nine years ago. Prestimion wasn’t anybody important then, just one of the young princes of Castle Mount, and there are plenty of those. His rise to the top came much later. But Confalume—ah, Confalume! What a wonderful man. Prestimion will have a lot to live up to, now that he’s Coronal.”

“And do you think he will?”

“Who can say? At least everyone agrees that he’s bright and energetic. But time will tell.” The sun was gone now. A few sprinkles of rain were beginning to fall, hours before the customary time. Dekkeret offered her his jacket, but she shook her head. They began to descend from the watch-tower.—"If Prestimion’s really coming to Normork, Sithelle, I’m going to make every effort to meet him. Personally, I mean. I want to speak with him.”

“Well, then, just walk right up to him and tell him who you are. He’ll invite you to sit right down and have a flask of wine with him.”

Her sarcasm bothered him. “I mean it,” he said. The rain already seemed to be giving out, after having pattered for just a moment or two. It had left a pleasant touch of fragrance in the air. They continued on their westward route along the black spine of the wall. “You can’t suppose that I want to spend the rest of my life in Normork, working at my father’s trade.”

“Would that be so awful? I can think of worse things.”

“No doubt you can. But it’s my plan to become a Castle knight and rise to a high government position.”

“Of course. And become Coronal some day, I suppose?”

“Why not?” Dekkeret said. She was being very annoying. “Anyone can be.”

“Anyone?”

“If he’s good enough.”

“And has the right family connections,” said Sithelle. “Commoners don’t usually get chosen for the throne.”

“But they can be,” Dekkeret said. “You know, Sithelle, it’s possible for anybody at all to get to the top. You just have to be chosen by the outgoing Coronal, and nothing says he absolutely has to choose someone from among the Castle nobility if he doesn’t want to. And what’s a nobleman, anyway, if not the descendant of some commoner of long ago? It isn’t as though the aristocracy is a separate species.—Listen, Sithelle, I’m not saying that I expect to be Coronal, or even that I want to be Coronal! The Coronal thing was your idea. I simply want to be something more than a small-scale merchant who’s required to spend his entire life wearily traveling up and down the Mount from one city to the next peddling his wares to indifferent customers, most of whom treat him like dirt. Not that there’s anything disgraceful about being a traveling merchant, I mean, but I can’t help thinking that a life of public service would be ever so much—”

“All right, Dekkeret. I’m sorry I teased you. But please stop making speeches at me.” She touched the tips of her fingers to her temples. “You’re giving me a headache, now.”

His irritability vanished instantly. “Am I?—You complained of a headache yesterday, too. And I wasn’t making speeches then.”

“Actually,” said Sithelle, “I’ve been having headaches a lot of the time, the last couple of weeks. Terrible pounding ones, some of them are. I’ve never had that problem before:”

“Have you seen anyone for it? A doctor? A dream-speaker?”

“Not yet. But it worries me. Some of my friends have been having them, too.—What about you, Dekkeret?”

“Headaches? Not that I’ve noticed.”

“If you haven’t noticed, you aren’t having them.”

They came to the broad stone staircase that led downward from the top of the wall into Melikand Plaza, the gateway to Old Town. The city here was a warren of ancient narrow streets paved with oily-looking gray-green cobblestones. Dekkeret much preferred the broad curving boulevards of the New City, but he had always thought of Old Town as quaint and picturesque. Tonight, though, it seemed oddly sinister to him, even repellent.

He said, “No headaches, no. But I have had some odd moments now and then, of late.” He groped for words. “How can I express this, Sithelle? It’s like I feel that there’s something very important hovering right at the edge of my memory, something that I need to think about and deal with, but I can’t get a handle on what it is. My head starts to spin a little whenever that happens. Sometimes it spins a lot. I wouldn’t call it a headache, though. More like dizziness.”

“Strange,” she said. “I get that same feeling, sometimes. Of something that’s missing, something that I want to find, but I don’t know where to look for it. It gets to be very bothersome. You know what I mean?”

“Yes. I think I do.”

They paused at the parting of their roads. Sithelle gave him a warm smile. She took his hand in hers. “I hope you get to see Lord Prestimion when he comes here, Dekkeret, and that he makes you a knight of the Castle.”

“Do you mean that?”

She blinked. “Why wouldn’t I mean it?”

“In that case, thank you. If I do get to meet him, do you want me to tell him about my beautiful cousin who’s somewhat too tall for him? Or shouldn’t I bother?”

“I was trying to be nice,” Sithelle said ruefully, letting go of his hand. “But you don’t know how to do that, do you?” She stuck her tongue out at him and went sprinting away into the tangle of little streets that lay before them.

7

“The midnight market of Bombifale!” said Septach Melayn grandly, and beckoned Prestimion forward with a sweeping gesture of his broad-brimmed hat.

Prestimion had visited Bombifale many times before. It was one of the closest of the Inner Cities, just a day’s journey below the Castle, and no one would dispute its rank as first in beauty among the cities of the Mount. Once, many hundreds of years earlier, it had given Majipoor a Coronal—Lord Pinitor—and Pinitor, a hyperactive and visionary builder, had spared no expense in transforming his native city into a place of wonder. The burnt orange sandstone of its scalloped walls had been brought from the forbidding desert country back of the Labyrinth by countless caravans of pack-animals; the spectacular four-sided slabs of blue seaspar inlaid in those walls came from an uninhabited district along Alhanroel’s eastern coast that had rarely been explored before or since; and all along the perimeter of the city the walls were crowned with an uncountable series of slim, graceful towers of the most delicate design, giving Bombifale the magical look of a city that has been built by supernatural creatures.

But not all of Bombifale was magical and delicate and fantastical. Where Prestimion and Septach Melayn stood just now—on a patch of cracked and furrowed pavement sloping sharply downward into a dimly lit district of slant-roofed warehouses at the city’s outer rim, no great distance within Lord Pinitor’s fabled walls—was as squalid and dank-smelling a place as one might expect to find in some fifth-rate port town.

Something about this neighborhood seemed familiar. Perhaps the bundles of loosely wrapped trash piled against the building walls, Prestimion thought. Or the stench of stagnant sewage too close nearby. And the ramshackle look of the nearby brick-walled buildings, ancient ones leaning crookedly up against one another, rang chimes in his memory.

“I’ve been in this part of town before, haven’t I?”

“Indeed you have, my lord.” Septach Melayn indicated a small, shabby inn on the far side of the street. “We stayed here one night not long before the war, when we were coming back from the Labyrinth after the Pontifex’s funeral as outcasts, returning to the Castle to see whether Korsibar could make good on his seizure of the throne.”

“Ah. I do remember. We had churlish unwilling hospitality at yonder hostelry that night, as I recall.” And added, speaking very softly, “You shouldn’t call me ‘my lord’ in this place, Septach Melayn.”

“Who’d believe it, in such a place, looking as you do?”

“Even so,” said Prestimion. “If we come in secrecy, let’s be secretive about all things, is that agreed? Good. Come, now: show me this midnight market of yours.”

It was not that Prestimion feared for his safety. No one would dare raise a hand against the Coronal in this place, he was certain, if his true identity should be discovered. In any event he could look after himself in any brawl, and the swordsman had not yet been born who could deal with Septach Melayn. But it would be deeply embarrassing to be found out—Lord Prestimion himself, skulking around this seamy, disreputable place in a grease-stained cloak and patched leggings, with half his face muffled up in a beard as black as Gonivaul’s and a wig of rank, mushroom-colored hair falling to his shoulders? What possible reason could he offer for such an excursion? He’d be the butt of Castle jokes for months, if the story ever got around. And it would be a long time before Kimbar Hapitaz, the commander of the Coronal’s guard, permitted him to slip away from the Castle so easily again.

Septach Melayn—he was in disguise too, a hideous mop of red hair stiff as straw hiding his immaculate golden ringlets, and a shaggy, ragged black neckerchief concealing his elegantly tapered little beard—led him down the weed-speckled road toward a huddle of dilapidated buildings at the end of the street. There were only the two of them. Gialaurys had been unable to accompany them on this adventure; he was off in the north, chasing after the artificially-created war-monsters that Korsibar had never had a chance to use in the war. Some of them had broken loose and were devastating the unfortunate Kharax district.

“In here, if you will,” Septach Melayn said, pulling a heavy, creaking door aside.

Prestimion’s first impressions were of dimness, noxious fumes, noise, chaos. What had appeared from the outside to be a group of buildings was actually one long, low structure divided into narrow aisles that stretched on and on until their farthest reaches were lost to sight. A string of glowfloats bobbing near its rafters provided the primary lighting, which was far from adequate. An abundance of smoldering torches mounted in front of the various booths provided little additional illumination and a great deal of foul black smoke.

“Whatever sort of thing you may care to buy,” Septach Melayn murmured in his ear, “it will be available for purchase somewhere in here.”

Prestimion had no doubt of that. It seemed that an infinite array of merchandise lay before him.

Much of what he saw at the booths closest to the entrance was the sort of stuff one might find in any marketplace anywhere. Huge burlap bags of spices and aromatics—bdella and malibathron and kankamon, storax and mabaric, gray coriander and fennel, and many more besides; various kinds of salt, dyed indigo and red and yellow and black to distinguish them from one another; fiery glabbam powder for the hot stews beloved of Skandars and sweet sarjorelle to give flavoring to the sticky cakes of the Hjorts, and much more. Beyond the spice-peddlers were the meat-vendors, with their offerings dangling in great slabs from huge wooden hooks, and then the sellers of eggs of a hundred different kinds of birds, eggs of all hues and some startling shapes, and after them the tanks where one might purchase live fishes and reptiles, and even young sea-dragons. Deeper yet and they were peddling baskets and panniers, fly-whisks and brooms, palm mats, bottles of colored glass, cheap beads and badly made bangles, pipes and perfumes, carpets and brocaded cloaks, writing-paper, dried fruits, cheese and butter and honey, and on and on and on, aisle after aisle, room beyond room.

Prestimion and Septach Melayn passed through a place of wickerwork cages, where live animals were being sold for uses which Prestimion did not care even to guess. He saw sad little bilantoons huddled together, and snaggle-toothed jakkaboles, and mintuns and droles and manculains and a horde of others. At one point he turned a corner and found himself staring into a cage of sturdy bamboo that contained a single smallish red-furred beast of a kind he had never beheld before, wolf-like, but low and wide, with enormous paws, a broad head that was huge in proportion to its body, and thick curving yellow teeth that looked as though they could not only rip flesh but easily crush bone. Its yellow-green eyes glared with unparalleled ferocity. A stale smell came from it, as of meat that had been left too long to dry in the sun. As Prestimion looked at it in wonder, it made a deep ugly sound, midway between a growl and a whine, throbbing with menace.

“What is that thing?” he asked. “It’s the most hideous beast I’ve ever seen!”

“A krokkotas, it is,” said Septach Melayn. “It roves the northern desert-lands, from Valmambra eastward. They say it has the power of imitating human speech, and will call a man’s name by night in the wastelands, and when he approaches, it pounces and kills. And devours its victim down to the last scrap, bones and hair and toenails and all.”

Prestimion made a sour face. “And why would such an abomination be put up for sale in a city marketplace, then?”

“Inquire of that from the one who offers it,” Septach Melayn said. “I myself have no idea.”

“Perhaps it’s best not to know,” said Prestimion. He stared at the krokkotas once more; and it seemed to him that its whining growl had intelligible meaning, and that the beast was saying, “Coronal, Coronal, Coronal, come to me.”

“Strange,” Prestimion murmured. And they moved along.

But then the merchandise grew even stranger.

“We are entering the market of the sorcerers,” said Septach Melayn quietly. “Shall we stop here first, do you think, for something small to eat?”

Prestimion had no idea what was being sold from the little group of food-stalls that now confronted them; nor, so it appeared, did Septach Melayn. But the aromas were enticing. Some questioning revealed that this stall offered minced bilantoon meat mixed with chopped onions and palm tips, that this one had peppered vyeille wrapped in vine leaves, that the one next to it specialized in the flesh of a red gourd called khiyaar, stewed with beans and tiny morsels of fish. The vendors all were Liimen, the impassive flat-faced three-eyed folk to whom the humblest tasks of Majipoor invariably fell, and they answered Septach Melayn’s queries about their offerings in husky, thickly accented monosyllables, or sometimes not at all. In the end Septach Melayn bought a little array of items more or less at random—Prestimion, as was his custom, carried no money—and they paused at the entrance to the sorcerers’ market to eat. Everything was remarkably tasty; and at Prestimion’s urging, Septach Melayn bought them a flask of some rough, vigorous wine, still bubbling with youth, to wash it down.

Then they went forward.

Prestimion had seen sorcerers’ markets in the city of Triggoin during his time of exile: places where strange potions and ointments could be bought, and amulets of all sorts, and spells deemed to be efficacious in a host of situations. In dark and mysterious Triggoin such places had seemed altogether appropriate and expectable, a natural sort of merchandise for a city where sorcery was the center of economic life. But it was eerie to find such things being sold here in pretty Bombifale, hardly a stone’s throw beneath the walls of his Castle. This place showed him once again what great inroads the occult arts had made in recent years into the everyday existence of Majipoor. There had not been all this sorcery and magicking going on when he was a boy; but the mages called the tune now, and all Majipoor danced to it.

The outer zone of the midnight market had been only sparsely occupied compared with this part. Out there, a scattering of people whose daily lives were lived at unusual hours, or those who had neglected to do their everyday marketing at everyday times, could be seen shopping in a desultory way for the next day’s meat and vegetables. But back here, where goods of a more esoteric kind were sold, the aisles were choked with buyers to the point where it was difficult for Prestimion and Septach Melayn to make their way through them.

“Is it like this every night, I wonder?” Prestimion asked.

“The sorcerers’ market is open only on the first and third Seadays of the month,” the swordsman replied. “Those who need to buy do their buying then.”

Prestimion stared. Here, too, were booths bounded by rows of burlap sacks, too, but not sacks of spices and aromatics. In this place, so the vendors tirelessly chanted, one could obtain all the raw materials of the necromantic arts, powders and oils galore—olustro and elecamp and golden rue, mastic pepper, goblin-sugar and myrrh, aloes and vermilion and maltabar, quicksilver, brimstone, thekka ammoniaca, scamion, pestash, yarkand, dvort. Here were the black candles used in haruspication; here were specifics against curses and demonic possession; here were the wines of the resuscitator and the poultices that warded off the devil-ague. And here were engraved talismans designed to invoke the irgalisteroi, those subterranean prehistoric spirits of the ancient world whom the Shapeshifters had locked up under dire spells twenty thousand years before, and who could sometimes, with the right incantation, be induced to do the bidding of those who called upon them. Prestimion had learned of these beings and others akin to them during his stay in Triggoin, when he was a fugitive taking refuge from Korsibar’s armies.

It was dizzying to behold this infinity of bizarre amulets and mantic instruments and simples and specifics laid out all about him for sale; it was disturbing to see the citizens of Bombifale moving through this marketplace of strangenesses by the hundreds, jostling against each other in their eagerness to put down their hard-earned crowns and royals for such things. They were ordinary folk, modestly dressed; but they were throwing their money about like a throng of earls.

“Is there more?” Prestimion asked in astonishment.

“Oh, yes, yes, much more.”

The floor of the building that housed the market now seemed to take on a downward slant. Evidently they were entering a part of the structure that lay beneath the surface of the street.

It was even smokier here, and more musty. In this sector was a mixture of vendors and entertainers; Prestimion saw some jugglers at work, a group of four-armed Skandars with grayish-red fur energetically flinging knives and balls and lighted torches to each other with high abandon, and musicians with coin jars in front of them grinding away grimly at their viols and tamboors and rikkitawms amidst all the other noise of the place, and ordinary sleight-of-hand magicians who made no pretense at sorcery doing age-old magical tricks with snakes and bright-colored kerchiefs and padlocked chests and knives seemingly passed through throats. Scribes called out, offering to write letters for those who lacked that art; water-carriers with gleaming copper panniers begged to ease the thirst of those around them; bright-eyed little boys invited passersby to gamble at a game that involved the impossibly quick manipulation of small bundles of twigs.

In the midst of all this hubbub Prestimion became aware of a zone of sudden silence, a perceptible avenue of hushed-ness cutting down the center of the crowd. He had no idea at first what could be causing this extraordinary effect. Then Septach Melayn pointed; and Prestimion saw two figures in the uniforms of officers of the Pontificate advancing through the marketplace, creating apprehension and unease as they went.

The first was a Hjort, rough-skinned and puffy-faced and bulging of eye like all his kind, and carrying himself in the exaggeratedly upright stance that always made Hjorts seem pompous and self-important to their fellow inhabitants of Majipoor, though their posture was simply a matter of the way their thick, middle-heavy bodies were constructed. From the Hjort’s shoulders dangled a large pair of scales, which struck Prestimion as being more a badge of office than anything that might have practical use.

It was the second figure, though, that seemed to be the cause of the consternation. A man of the Su-Suheris race, this one was: tremendously tall, nearly as tall, in fact, as a Skandar, and bearing his pair of cold-eyed, hairless, immensely elongated heads atop a narrow, forking neck more than a foot in length. He was a disconcerting sight. His kind always was. Just as a Hjort could not help seeming squat-looking and coarse-featured and comically ugly to people of other races because of his protuberant eyes and ashen-hued pebbly skin, so too did the two gleaming pallid heads of the Su-Suheris unfailingly give them a sinister and utterly alien air.

“The inspector of weights and measures,” said Septach Melayn, in response to an unspoken question from Prestimion.

“In here? I thought you said that no governmental agency regulates this market.”

“None does. Yet the inspector comes, all the same. It is his own private enterprise, which he carries out after the normal hours of his work. He orders each shopkeeper to prove that he gives fair measure and honest price; and whoever fails to pass muster is taken outside and flogged by the other vendors. For this he gets a fee. The dealers here want no improper business activities.”

“But it’s all improper here!” Prestimion cried.

“Ah, but not to them,” said Septach Melayn.

Indeed. This was a world in and of itself, this midnight market of Bombifale, thought Prestimion. It existed outside the normal bounds of Majipoor, and neither Pontifex nor Coronal had any authority here.

The inspector of weights and measures and his Hjort herald moved solemnly onward, deeper into the marketplace. Prestimion and Septach Melayn followed in their wake.

Dealers in divination devices had their stalls here. Prestimion recognized some of their wares from the training he had undertaken while in Triggoin. This sparkling stuff in small cloth packets was zemzem-dust, to sprinkle on those who were gravely ill in order to know the course that their malady would take. Its source was Velalisier, the haunted ruined capital of the ancient Metamorphs. These charred-looking little loaves were rukka-cakes, which had the capacity to influence the course of love-affairs; and this slimy stuff was mud of the Floating Island of Masulind, that had the power of guiding one in commercial transactions. This was the powdered delem-aloe, that told when it was a woman’s fertile time of the month by bringing out thin red circles around her breasts. And this curious device—

“That is of no value whatever, my lord,” said someone suddenly to his left, someone with a deep, resonant voice that reached Prestimion from a point high above. “You would do well not to squander your attention on it.”

Prestimion was holding, just then, a little machine in the form of a magic square, which, when manipulated by an adept, was reputed to give answers to any question in numerical form that required decoding. He had picked it up idly from a table. At the unexpected comment from the stranger at his side he tossed it down again as though it were as hot as a burning coal, and glanced up at the speaker.

It was, he saw, another of the Su-Suheris kind: a towering ivory-skinned figure clad in a simple black robe belted with a red sash, whose high-vaulted leftward head was staring down at him with a cool dispassionate gaze, while the other one was looking off in a different direction entirely.

Prestimion felt an instant sense of innate discomfort and distaste.

It was hard to feel at ease with these tall two-headed beings, so strange was their appearance, so frosty their mien. One could far more easily adapt to the presence of great furry four-armed Skandars, or tiny many-tentacled Vroons, or even the reptilian Ghayrogs that had settled in such numbers on the other continent. Outworlders like Skandars and Vroons and Ghayrogs were no more human than Su-Suheris folk, but at least they had just one head apiece.

Prestimion had his own reasons for antipathy toward the Su-Suheris race, besides. Sanibak-Thastimoon, Korsibar’s private magus, had been a Su-Suheris. It was the icy-souled Sanibak-Thastimoon, perhaps more than anyone else, who had prodded the malleable, foolish Korsibar onward to his catastrophic usurpation with false predictions of a glorious success. It was by virtue of spells cast by Sanibak-Thastimoon that Korsibar’s forces had managed to keep the upper hand in the civil war for so long. And it was in the final moments of that war, when all was lost for Korsibar, that Sanibak-Thastimoon, finding himself under attack by his defeated and now desperate puppet-Coronal, had slain Korsibar and had taken the life of his sister Thismet as well, when in fury she had rushed at him brandishing the fallen Korsibar’s sword.

But Sanibak-Thastimoon had perished moments later at the hand of Septach Melayn, and the very fact of his existence had been swept away, along with so much else, by the sorcerers who had blotted the civil war from the world’s memory. This Su-Suheris here, whoever he might be, was a different one entirely, who could hardly be held accountable for the sins of his kinsman. And the Su-Suheris people, Prestimion reminded himself, were citizens of Majipoor with full civil rights. It was not for him to treat them with disdain.

Therefore he answered calmly enough, “You have reason, I suppose, to mistrust these little machines?”

“What I feel for them, my lord, is contempt, rather than mistrust. They are useless things. As are most of the devices offered for sale in this place.” The two-headed being swept his long gaunt arm about the room in a wide-ranging gesture. “There is true divination and there is the other kind, and these are, by and large, contemptible useless products manufactured for the sake of deceiving foolish people.”

Prestimion nodded. Very softly he said, gazing up far above him into the alien creature’s chilly emerald-hued eyes, “You called me ‘my lord.’ Twice. Why?”

Those eyes narrowed in surprise. “Why, because it is fitting and proper, my lord!” And the Su-Suheris flicked his bony fingers outward in the starburst gesture. “Is that not so?”

Septach Melayn moved closer in, hand to the pommel of his sword, face dark with displeasure. “I tell you, fellow, you are much mistaken. This is a line of chatter you’d be wisest not to pursue any further.”

Now both heads were trained on Prestimion from that great height, and all four eyes were focused keenly on the Coronal’s sturdy, compact figure. In a voice that could not have been heard by anyone but Prestimion and his companion the left-hand head said, “Good my lord, forgive me if I have done anything wrong. Your identity is obvious. I had no idea you meant to go undetected.”

“Obvious?” Prestimion tapped his false beard, tugged at his black wig. “You see my face, do you, beneath all this stuff?”

“I perceive your nature and standing quite easily, my lord. And that of the High Counsellor Septach Melayn beside you. These things cannot be hidden by wigs and beards. At least, not from me.”

“And who may you be, then?” Septach Melayn demanded.

The two heads inclined themselves in a courteous bow. “My name is Maundigand-Klimd,” the Su-Suheris said suavely. It was the right head that spoke, this time. “A magus by profession. When my calculations showed that you would be in this place tonight, it behooved me, I felt, to place myself in your presence.”

“Your calculations, eh?”

“Rather different ones, I must tell you, from the ones performed with such devices as these.” Maundigand-Klimd laughed frostily and pointed to the magic-square machines on the table before them. “They make a pretense at magic, and a worthless pretense at that. What I practice has the true mathematics at the heart of its divining.”

“It is a science, then, your prognosticating?”

“Most distinctly a science, lordship.”

Prestimion glanced across, at that, at Septach Melayn. But his countenance studiously revealed nothing at all.

To Maundigand-Klimd he said, “So there was nothing accidental, then, about your being here next to me in this place just now?”

“Oh, my lord,” said Maundigand-Klimd, with the closest thing to a smile that Prestimion had ever seen on the face of a Su-Suheris. “There is no such thing as an accident, my lord.”

8

“Follow this way if you please, Lord Prestimion,” said Navigorn of Hoikmar. He and Prestimion were at the entrance to Lord Sangamor’s tunnels, that tangled maze of underground chambers with brilliantly glowing walls that a Coronal of thousands of years before had caused to be constructed on the western face of Castle Mount. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever had occasion to be in this place before, your lordship,” Navigorn said. “It’s quite extraordinary, really.”

“My father brought me here once, when I was a small boy,” said Prestimion. “Just to let me see the show of colors in the walls. The tunnels hadn’t been used as a prison, of course, for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

“Not since the time of Lord Amyntilir, in truth.” The sentry on duty stepped aside as they approached. Navigorn touched his hand to the shining metal plate in the door and it swung obediently open, revealing the narrow passageway that led to the tunnels proper. “What a perfect site for dungeons, though! As you can see, the only access is through this easily guarded corridor. And then we continue underground right out to Sangamor Peak, which juts up from the Mount in such a way that it’s impossible to scale, impossible to reach in any way except from beneath.”

“Yes,” Prestimion said. “Very ingenious.”

He did not trouble to tell Navigorn that this was his third visit to the tunnels, not his second; that only two years before, in fact, he had been a prisoner in these chambers, the first such captive in centuries, sent here by order of the Coronal Lord Korsibar, as Korsibar then was pleased to style himself. And had hung by his wrists and ankles from the wall of a stone chamber whose every square inch emitted great sweeping blasts of brilliant red color, visible even when he closed his eyes. That inexorable outpouring of light had pounded and throbbed against his brain in a way that had come close to driving him mad.

Prestimion had no idea how long Korsibar had kept him imprisoned. Three or four weeks, at least, though it had felt like months to him. Years, even. He had emerged from the tunnels feeble and shaken, and had been a long while recovering.

Navigorn, though, lacked any awareness of that. Prestimion’s stay in the Sangamor tunnels was another thing that had been expunged from everyone’s remembrance. Everyone’s, that is, but his own. If only he could forget it, too! But the memory of that terrible time would stay with him forever.

But he was here now as Coronal, not as a prisoner. Navigorn led him inward through the tunnel vestibule, chattering like a tour guide. Prestimion was amused to see how well Navigorn had taken to the jailer’s role.

“The walls, you see, are faced with a substance much like stone, though it’s actually of an artificial nature. It is the special quality of that substance, my lord, that it unceasingly gives off great quantities of colored light. A scientific secret of the ancients which, alas, we have lost in modern times.”

“One of many,” said Prestimion. “Though I confess I don’t see much utility to this one.”

“There’s great beauty in these colors, my lord.”

“Up to a point. I imagine they could become infuriating after a while, those tremendous pulsing jolts of light that can’t be turned off.”

“Perhaps so. But over a short period of time—”

Well, when he had been imprisoned here by Korsibar it had not been for any short period of time, not short at all, and the cumulative impact of his cell’s interminable pulsing jolts of ruby light had seemed well-nigh lethal as the long days dragged on. Prestimion had not found it within himself to do to Dantirya Sambail what Korsibar had done to him; and so, although the tunnels were the most secure prison that the Castle had, and there had been no choice but to put the Procurator away in them, Prestimion had seen to it that Dantirya Sambail was placed in one of the more comfortable chambers.

The rumor was loose in the Castle, Prestimion knew, that Dantirya Sambail lay chained day and night in some dismal desolate hole where he suffered the worst torments that the tunnel walls could hurl at him. That was not so. Instead of being manacled to the walls as Prestimion had been, the Procurator had a good-sized room with plenty of space in it for him to roam freely about, and a bed, and a couch, and his own table and desk. Nor was the emanation from this cell’s wall of the kind that battered your mind and stunned your very soul; it was a gentle lime-green, where Prestimion had had to endure those constant unrelenting pounding waves of brilliant red.

Prestimion had not bothered to contradict the rumors, though. Let them believe what they liked. He would discuss the status of Dantirya Sambail with no one. It was not a bad thing for a new Coronal to arouse a little uneasiness in those around him in the Castle.

He and Navigorn passed through a zone where a dull, throbbing jade-colored light, heavy as the waters at the bottom of the sea, came pulsating forth, and beyond it a place of a sizzling pink as keen as knifeblades, and then one of somber, overwhelming ochre with the force of steady muffled drumbeats. Upward now they went, spiraling around the flank of the upthrust stone dagger that was Sangamor Peak, and Prestimion had a glimpse, quick but sickening, of the crushing rubyred light of the cell that once had been his own. Adjacent to it was one with the stinging brightness of newly smelted copper. Then the colors became more mellow: cinnamon, hyacinth blue, aquamarine, mauve.

And at last a soft chartreuse, and Prestimion found himself at the threshold of the place where the Procurator of Ni-moya was being detained.

Prestimion had put this visit off as long as possible, but it could be avoided no longer, he knew. At some point it was necessary to confront the fact that Dantirya Sambail was held prisoner for high crimes and misdemeanors of which the Procurator had no knowledge at all. Prestimion was still unsure of the way to deal with the paradoxes inherent in that situation. But he understood that they must now at last be addressed.

“Well, cousin!” cried Dantirya Sambail with implausible heartiness, when Navigorn had gone through the lengthy series of intricate procedures that opened the door of the Procurator’s chamber. “They told me you’d be coming to pay me a visit today; but I thought it was only out of playfulness or mischief that they said it. What a delight it is to behold your handsome young face again, Prestimion!—But I should call you ‘Lord Prestimion,’ should I not? For I understand that your coronation day has come and gone already, although through some misunderstanding I was not invited to the ceremony.”

And the Procurator, smiling, held out both his hands, which were girded together at the wrists by a metal band, and waggled his fingers comically in a jovial semblance of the starburst gesture.

Prestimion had been aware that he might expect almost anything from Dantirya Sambail when they first came face to face, but a show of joviality was not high on the list. Which was why he had ordered the Procurator’s wrists to be manacled before his arrival; for Dantirya Sambail was a man of bull-like strength, who might well be so furious over his incarceration that he would launch himself at Prestimion in a murderous frenzy the moment that the Coronal entered his cell.

But no. Dantirya Sambail was all smiles and twinkles, as if this were some charming inn where he had taken up lodging, and Lord Prestimion were his guest this day.

To Navigorn Prestimion said, “Unlock his shackles.”

After a moment’s hesitation Navigorn obeyed. Prestimion held himself poised and ready in case Dantirya Sambail’s joviality should turn instantly to wrath once his bonds were taken from him. But the Procurator remained where he was on the other side of the room, standing between the long, low couch and a desk of curving contours on which half a dozen books were casually stacked. He seemed utterly at ease. Prestimion knew only too well, though, what roiling fires roared through his kinsman’s soul.

The calm, unflickering pale-green glow flowed steadily from the walls. It swathed and enfolded everything in a cool benign presence. “I’m pleased to see that your chamber is a pleasant one, cousin. There are worse accommodations to be had in these tunnels, I think.”

“Are there, Prestimion? I wouldn’t know about that.—But yes, yes, quite pleasant. The delicate viridescence that comes from the walls. This fine furniture; these charming flagstone floors across which I stroll during my daily walks from that side of the room to this. You could have been far less kind.”

The voice was a purr; but there was no mistaking the rage that lay just beneath.

Prestimion studied Dantirya Sambail with care. He had not looked upon the Procurator’s face since that horrific day at Thegomar Edge, when, with Korsibar already beaten and very likely dead, Dantirya Sambail had presented himself before him with a sword in one hand and a farmer’s hatchet in the other, and challenged him to single combat with the throne as the prize. And had come close to striking him down before Prestimion, although bruised by a flat-sided blow in the ribs, prevailed with a sudden quick thrust of his rapier that cut the tendon of the arm holding the axe, and another that sliced a bloody line across the Procurator’s sword-arm. There were signs that Dantirya Sambail was wearing poultices on those wounds beneath his loose, billowing blouse of golden silk even now, though they must be nearly healed.

The Procurator was splendid in his ugliness: a heavy-bodied man of middle years, with a massive head set atop a thick neck and heavy shoulders. His face was pale, but spotted everywhere with a horde of brilliant red freckles. His hair was orange in hue, rank and coarse, forming a dense fringe around the high curving dome of his forehead. His chin was a powerful jutting one, his nose broad and fleshy, his mouth wide and savage, drawn far out to its corners. It was the face of some dire beast. But out of it stared strangely gentle violet-gray eyes, eyes improbably warm with tenderness and compassion and love. The contrast between the sensitivity of those eyes and the ferocity of his features was the most frightful thing about him: it marked him as a man who encompassed the whole range of human emotion and was willing to take any position at all in the service of his implacable desires.

He stood now in his customary posture, his great head thrust forward, his chest inflated defiantly, his short thick legs splayed apart to provide him with a base of maximum stability. Dantirya Sambail was ever in a mode of attack, even when at rest. In his native continent of Zimroel he had ruled virtually as an independent monarch from the vast city of Ni-moya over a domain of enormous size; but he had not been content with that, it seemed, and hungered for the throne of Majipoor also, or at least the right to name the man who held it. He and Prestimion were distant relatives, third cousins twice removed. They had always pretended to a cordiality between them that neither of them felt.

Some moments went by, and Prestimion did not speak.

Then Dantirya Sambail said, still in that quiet sardonic tone of formidable self-control, “Would you do me the honor, my lord, of telling me how much longer you plan to offer me your hospitality in this place?”

“That has not yet been determined, Dantirya Sambail.”

“There are duties of state awaiting me in Zimroel.”

“Undoubtedly so. But the question of your guilt and punishment must be answered first, before I can allow you to resume them. If ever I do.”

“Ah,” said Dantirya Sambail gravely, as though they were discussing the making of fine wines, or the breeding of bidlak bulls. “The question of my guilt, you say. And my punishment. What is it, then, that I’m guilty of? And what punishment, precisely, do you have in mind for me? Eh, my lord? It would be kind of you to explain these little things to me, I think.”

Prestimion gave Navigorn a quick sidelong glance. “I’d like to speak with the Procurator privately a moment, Navigorn.”

Navigorn frowned. He was armed; Prestimion was not. He shot a glance toward Dantirya Sambail’s discarded fetters. But Prestimion shook his head. Navigorn went out.

If Dantirya Sambail meant to attack him, Prestimion thought, this was the moment. The Procurator was bulkier by far than the relatively slight Prestimion and stood half a head taller. He seemed, though, to have no such madness in mind. He held himself as aggressively as before, but remained where he was, far across the room, his deceptively beautiful amethyst eyes regarding Prestimion with what looked like nothing more than amiable curiosity.

“I’m perfectly willing to believe that I’ve committed dreadful deeds, if you say I have,” said Dantirya Sambail equably, when the cell door had closed. “And if I have, why, then I suppose I should suffer some penalty for them. But why is it that I know nothing about them?”

Prestimion remained silent. He realized that his silence was beginning to extend too far. But this was all even more difficult than he had anticipated.

“Well?” Dantirya Sambail said, after a time. There was an edge on his tone, now. “Will you tell me, cousin, why it is that you’ve put me away down here? For what cause, by what law? I’ve committed no crime that merits any of this. Can it be just on the general suspicion that I’ll make some sort of trouble for you, now that you’re Coronal, that you’ve jailed me?”

Further procrastination was impossible. “It’s well known from one end of the world to the other, cousin,” said Prestimion, “that you’re a perpetual danger to the security of the realm and to the man who sits on the throne, whoever he may be. But that’s not the reason why you’re here.”

“And what is, then?”

“You are imprisoned not for anything you might do, but for things you have done. Namely, acts of treason against the crown and violence against my person.”

A look of total bewilderment crossed Dantirya Sambail’s face at that. He gaped and blinked and lowered his head as though the weight of it was suddenly too much for him to carry. Prestimion had never seen him look so utterly dum-founded. For a moment he felt something very close to sympathy for the man.

Hoarsely the Procurator said, “Are you insane, cousin?”

“Far from it. The peace was breached. Unlawful deeds were done. You happen to be without awareness of the sins of which you’re guilty, that’s all. But that doesn’t mean that they weren’t committed.”

“Ah,” said Dantirya Sambail again, without even the most minimal show of comprehension.

“There are wounds on your body, are there not? One here, and one here?” Prestimion touched his left armpit, and then ran his hand along the inside of his other arm from elbow to wrist.

“Yes,” said the Procurator grudgingly. “I meant to ask you about—”

“You received those wounds at my hands, when you and I fought on the field of battle.”

Dantirya Sambail slowly shook his head. “I don’t have any recollection of that. No. No. Such a thing never happened. You are insane, Prestimion. By the Divine! I’m the prisoner of a madman.”

“On the contrary, cousin. Everything that I tell you here is true. There were acts of treason; there was strife between us; I barely escaped with my life. Any other Coronal would have sentenced you to death for what you did without hesitating as long as a moment. For some unfathomable reason, perhaps growing out of our kinship, such as it is, I find myself unwilling to do that. But neither can I set you free—at least not without some understanding between us of your unquestioning loyalty henceforth. And would I trust that, even if you gave it?”

Color was coming to Dantirya Sambail’s face now, so that his myriad freckles stood out like the fiery marks of some irascible pox. His fingers were curling fretfully in a gesture of frustration and rising anger. An odd growling sound, distant and indistinct, seemed to be coming from the depths of his huge chest. It reminded Prestimion of nothing so much than the growl of the caged krokkotas in the midnight market of Bombifale. But Dantirya Sambail did not speak. Could not, perhaps, just then.

Prestimion went on: “The situation’s a very strange one, Dantirya Sambail. You have no knowledge of your crimes, that I know. But you should believe me when I tell you that you are guilty of them nevertheless.”

“My memory has been tampered with, is that the story?”

“I’ll not respond to that.”

“Then it has been. Why was that? How could you dare? Prestimion, Prestimion, Prestimion, do you think you’re a god of some sort, and I nothing more than an ant, that you can feel free to hurl me into prison under trumped-up charges, and to meddle with my mind in the bargain?—But enough of this farce. You want my loyalty? You can have as much of it as you deserve. I’ve been incredibly patient, Prestimion, all these days or weeks or months, or however long it is that you’ve had me in this place. Let me out of here, cousin, or there’ll be war between us. I have my supporters, you know, and they’re not few in number.”

“There has already been war between us, cousin. I keep you here to make certain that there never will be again.”

“Without trial? Without so much as lodging a charge against me, except this vague mumbling about treason, and crimes against your person?” Dantirya Sambail had recovered his poise, Prestimion saw. The baffled look was gone from him, and so, too, was the outward show of fury. He had his old terrible calmness back, the calmness that Prestimion knew to hide volcanic forces kept under control by ferocious inner strength. “Ah, Prestimion, you vex me greatly. I would lose my temper, I think, if not for my certain feeling that you’ve taken leave of your senses, and that it’s folly to be angry with a madman.”

A predicament. Prestimion pondered it. Should he tell the Procurator the full truth of the great obliteration? No, no: he would simply be handing Dantirya Sambail an unsheathed blade and telling him to strike. The tale of what had been done to the world’s memory was a secret that must never be revealed.

Nor could he lock Dantirya Sambail up in here indefinitely without bringing him to trial. The Procurator had not been speaking idly when he said he had his supporters. Dantirya Sambail’s power spread far and wide over the other continent. Quite conceivably Prestimion might find himself embroiled before long in a second civil war, this one between Zimroel and Alhanroel, if he went on holding the Procurator without explanation in this seemingly arbitrary and even tyrannical way.

But a man lacking all awareness of his crimes could not be brought fairly to justice for committing them. That was a puzzle of Prestimion’s own making. And he was, he realized, as far from a resolution of it as ever.

The time had come to withdraw, to regroup, to seek the counsel of his friends.

“I had a man who stood by my side to serve me,” Dantirya Sambail was saying. “Mandralisca was his name. Good and true and loyal, he was. Where is he, Prestimion? I’d like him sent to me, if I am to be kept here longer. He tasted my food for me, you know, to be sure there was no poison in it. I miss his wondrous jollity. Send him to me, Prestimion:”

“Yes, and the two of you can sing merry songs together all the night long, is that it?”

It was almost comical to hear Dantirya Sambail calling the poison-taster Mandralisca jolly. Him, that thin-lipped hard-eyed villain, that spawn of demons, that stark skull-and-crossbones of a man?

But Prestimion had no intention of bringing those two scorpions together. Mandralisca too had played an evil role at Thegomar Edge, and had been hauled in, wounded and a prisoner, spewing venom with every breath, after engaging Abrigant in a duel. He was in another cell, much less pleasant than Dantirya Sambail’s, in another part of the tunnels. And there he would stay.

This conversation was leading nowhere. Moving toward the door, Prestimion said, “I bid you farewell, cousin. We’ll speak again another time.”

The Procurator gaped at him. “What? What? Did you come here simply to mock me, Prestimion?”

There was that rumbling krokkotas growl again. There was untrammeled rage on Dantirya Sambail’s face, though the strange eyes were as soft and gentle as ever within the contorted mask of fury. Coolly Prestimion opened the cell door, stepped through, closed it just as Dantirya Sambail began to lurch toward him with upraised arms.

“Prestimion!” the Procurator cried, hammering clangorously against the door as it slammed in his face. “Prestimion! Damn you, Prestimion!”

9

It was rare for any travelers to approach the Castle by the northwestern road, which came up the back side of the Mount by way of the High City of Huine, and thence to the road known as the Stiamot Highway, a wide but poorly maintained thoroughfare, old and rutted, that reached the Castle at the infrequently used Vaisha Gate. The usual way to go was through the gently rising plateau of Bombifale Plain to High Morpin, and up the ten flower-bordered miles of the Grand Calintane Highway to the Castle’s main entrance at the Dizimaule Plaza.

But someone was definitely coming up the northwestern road today—a little group of vehicles, four of them, moving slowly, with a particularly bizarre one at the head of the procession. That one was a sight of such surpassing strangeness that the young guard captain who had been stuck with the dreary assignment of patrolling the Vaisha Gate station gasped in wonder as it came into view, seven or eight turns below him along the winding road. He stood agog a moment, not believing the evidence of his eyes. A huge flatbed wagon of strange antique design, it was, so broad it filled the width of Stiamot Highway from one shoulder to the other—and that fluid, rippling wall of light surrounding it on all sides with a cold white pulsing glow—that cargo of dimly glimpsed monsters, half hidden behind that shield of dizzying brightness—

The captain of guards at Vaisha Gate was twenty years old, a man of Amblemorn at the foot of Castle Mount. His training had not fitted him for dealing with anything remotely like this. He turned to his subaltern, a boy from Pendiwane in the flatlands of the Glayge Valley. “Who’s the officer of the day today?”

“Akbalik.”

“Find him, fast. Tell him his presence is required out here.”

The boy went sprinting inside. But finding anyone in the virtually infinite maze of the Castle was far from an easy task, even the officer of the day, who was supposed to make himself readily accessible. Some thirty minutes went by before the boy returned, Akbalik in tow. By then the flat-bed wagon had pulled up in the spacious gravel-strewn tract in front of the gate; the three floaters that had accompanied it in its journey up the Mount were parked beside it; and the captain of guards from Amblemorn found himself in the extraordinary situation of standing with drawn sword against no less a figure than the formidable warrior Gialaurys, Grand Admiral of the Realm. Half a dozen grim-faced men, Gialaurys’s companions, were arrayed just behind him, frozen into positions of imminent attack.

Akbalik, the nephew of Prince Serithorn and a man much respected for his common sense and steady nature, took the scene in quickly. With no more than a single startled blink at the cargo of the wagon he said in a crisp voice to the guard captain, “You can put your weapon down, Mibikihur. Don’t you recognize the Admiral Gialaurys?”

“Everyone knows the lord Gialaurys, sir. But look at what he’s got with him! He has no permit to bring wild animals into the Castle. Even the lord Gialaurys needs a permit before he can drive a wagonload of things like this inside!”

Akbalik’s cool gray eyes surveyed the wagon. He had never seen a vehicle so big. Nor had he seen, ever before, such creatures as were being transported in it.

It was difficult to make them out, for they were constrained from leaving the wagon by some kind of bright curtain of energy that completely encircled it—a curtain that was like a sheet of lightning rising from the ground, but lightning that stayed and stayed and stayed. It seemed to Akbalik that lesser energy-walls within the wagon divided the creatures one from another. And those creatures—those revolting, hideous monsters!—

Gialaurys seemed in high fury. He stood with clenched fists, his great-muscled arms rippling with barely contained strength, and the look of rage on his face could have melted rock. “Where is Septach Melayn, Akbalik? I sent word ahead for him to meet me at the gate! Why are you here, and not him?”

Imperturbably Akbalik said, “I came because I was summoned by a guardsman, Gialaurys. A truckload of weird monsters was coming up the highway to the Castle, I was told, and these men here hadn’t been given any instructions to expect such a thing, and they wanted to know what to do.—By the Lady, Gialaurys, what are these beasts?”

“Pets to amuse his lordship,” Gialaurys said. “I captured them for him out Kharax way. More than that is of no immediate to concern to you or anyone else.—Septach Melayn was supposed to receive me here! This cargo of mine needs to be properly stowed, and I charged him with the task of arranging it. I ask you again, Akbalik, where is Septach Melayn?”

“Septach Melayn is here,” came the light, easy voice of the swordsman, appearing just then at the Castle’s gate. “Your message was a little slow getting to me, Gialaurys, and by error I came by way of Spurifon Parapet, which took me somewhat out of the way.” Languidly he strolled through the gate and gave Gialaurys a quick, affectionate tap on the shoulder by way of welcome. Then he stared into the wagon.

“These are what were running loose in Kharax?” he said, in a voice congested with astonishment. “These, Gialaurys?”

“These, yes. Hundreds of them. Running free all over Kharax Plain. It was a bloody terrible task, my friend, tracking those creatures down and slaughtering them. Our Coronal owes me something for it.—But do you have a place ready for these fellows, Septach Melayn? A very secure place? They are some samples of what I encountered there.”

“I have one, yes. In the royal stables, it is. Will this wagon of yours pass through the gate, though?”

“Through this one, yes. Not through the Dizimaule, which is why I arrived at this side of the Castle.” Gialaurys turned to his men. “Here, now! Get that wagon moving! Into the Castle with it, now! Into the Castle!”

It took an hour to convey the creatures to the hold that Septach Melayn had prepared for them and to settle them in, each in its own cage, safely locked away behind sturdy bars that would not be easily sundered. Septach Melayn had found a disused wing of the Castle stables: a great stone barn deep down beneath the ancient Tower of Trumpets that must have been employed for housing royal mounts a thousand or two years ago, in Lord Spurifon’s time, or Lord Scaul’s, when this part of the Castle was more frequently used than it had been of late. Craftsmen working with great speed had transformed it under Septach Melayn’s direction into a receiving chamber for Gialaurys’s pleasant specimens.

When the job was done, Gialaurys and Septach Melayn dismissed Akbalik and the others who had helped them with the work. Just the two of them remained behind. Septach Melayn said, staring in wonder and horror at the baleful things pacing and snorting within their cages, “How would we have fared in the war, I’d like to know, if Korsibar had succeeded in turning such atrocities as these loose against us?”

“You can thank the Divine that he never did. Perhaps even Korsibar had wisdom enough to know that once they were set free to attack us, they’d continue on through the world, a menace to everyone ever after.”

“Korsibar? Wisdom?”

“Well, there is that point,” Septach Melayn conceded. “But what held him back from using them, then? I suppose it was that the war came to an end before he could.” He peered into the cages and shuddered. “Foh! How they stink, these beasts of yours! What a pack of monstrosities!”

“You should have seen them when they were wandering about all over Kharax Plain. Wherever your eye came to rest there was something hideous to behold, snarling at something even more hideous. Like a scene out of your worst nightmare, it was. A lucky thing for us that the plain is closed on three sides by granite hills, so that we were able to drive them into a trap, and even get them to set upon one another, while we were picking them off at the edges.”

“You killed them all, I hope?”

“All the loose ones, one by one, until none remained,” said Gialaurys. “Except these, which I brought back as souvenirs for Prestimion. But there are hundreds more still in their pens that never broke free. The keepers have no idea what they are, you know. Having no memory of Korsibar, or of the war, how could they? All they understood was that out there in Kharax—and a gray ugly place Kharax is, too, my friend, not a tree for miles—there was this huge pen of horrors, which are supposed to be kept under guard, only something went wrong and some of them got out. Do you want to hear their names?”

“The names of the keepers?” Septach Melayn asked.

“Of the animals,” said Gialaurys. “They do have names, you know. I suppose Prestimion will want to know them.” He drew from his tunic a dirty, folded scrap of paper, which he pondered in a laborious way, reading not being one of Gialaurys’s great skills. “Yes. This one here"—he indicated a long white bony thing like a serpent made of a string of razor-sharp sickles welded together, that lay writhing and fiercely hissing in the cage on the far left—"this one’s a zytoon. And this, with the pink baggy body and all those legs and red eyes and that disgusting hairy tail with the black stingers in it, that’s the malorn. Behind it we have the vourhain"—that was a green, pustulent-looking bear-like creature with curving tusks as long as swords—"and then the zeil, the min-mollitor, the kassai—no, that’s the kassai, with the crab-legs, and that one’s the zeil—and can you make out the weyhant back there, the one with the mouth so big it could swallow three Skandars at once—” Gialaurys spat. “Oh, Korsibar! You should be killed all over again for having even dreamed of letting these things loose against us. And we should find the wizards who made them and eradicate them also.”

Turning away with a grimace from the caged monsters, Gialaurys said, “Tell me, Septach Melayn, what new and interesting things have happened at the Castle while I was off among the zeils and the vourhains?”

“Well,” said the swordsman, grinning wickedly, “the Su-Suheris is new and interesting, I suppose.”

Gialaurys gave him a perplexed look. “What Su-Suheris do you mean?”

“Maundigand-Klimd is his name. We met him, Prestimion and I, in the midnight market of Bombifale. Or, rather, he met us: saw through our disguises, walked right up to us, greeted us for who we really were.” Once more the wicked grin. “It will amuse you to learn that he’s Prestimion’s new court magus.”

“He’s what? A Su-Suheris, you say? I thought Heszmon Gorse was to be head magus here.”

“Heszmon Gorse goes back shortly to Triggoin, where he’ll rule over the wizards there as adjutant to his father, and eventually succeed him. No, Gialaurys, this Su-Suheris has been awarded the job at court. He impressed himself upon the Coronal at once, that night in Bombifale market. Was summoned to the Castle, a day or two later, at Prestimion’s express order. And now they are fast friends. It’s not just that he’s a master of his arts, although evidently he is. Prestimion is captivated by him; loves him as he loved Duke Svor, I think. It’s plain, Gialaurys, he needs someone about him that has a darker soul than yours or mine. And has found one now.”

“But a Su-Suheris—” Gialaurys threw up his hands in bewilderment. “To have those two repellent snaky heads looking down at you all the time—those cold eyes—! And the treacherous nature of the race, there’s a consideration too, Septach Melayn! How can Prestimion have forgotten Sanibak-Thastimoon so quickly?”

“I must tell you,” the swordsman said, “that this one is a different pot of ghessl from Sanibak-Thastimoon. There was the reek of evil about that other one. It came boiling up from his pallid skin like a noxious fume. This man is steady and straightforward. Dark he is within, yes, I suppose, and very sinister to behold; but that’s the nature of his kind. Still, one is tempted to put one’s trust in him. Why, he even shows Prestimion the secret of his geomantic spells.”

“Does he? Can that be so?”

“Yes, and makes it seem so mathematical and pure that even Prestimion is impressed, skeptical of mind though the Coronal is, beneath all his pretended acceptance of sorcery. I, too, as a matter of fact, must admit that I—”

“A Su-Suheris in the inner circle,” Gialaurys said, grumbling. “I like this very little, Septach Melayn.”

“Meet the man, first, and judge him afterward. You’ll sing a different tune.” But then Septach Melayn frowned and said, taking his sword from its sheath and drawing its tip in a thoughtful way across the earthen floor of the old stable, making idle patterns that were something like the mystic symbols of the geomancers of his native city of Tidias, “There is, I must say, one bit of advice he’s given Prestimion already that makes me a trifle uneasy. They were speaking yesterday, Prestimion and Maundigand-Klimd, of the problem of Dantirya Sambail; and the magus came forth with the idea of restoring the Procurator’s memories of the war.”

Gialaurys started at that.

“To which,” continued Septach Melayn, sweeping serenely onward, “the Coronal responded quite favorably, saying, yes, yes, that might very likely be the right thing to do.”

“By the Lady!” Gialaurys howled, throwing up his hands and making half a dozen holy signs in one feverish blur of incantation. “I leave the Castle for just a few weeks, and madness instantly takes root in it!—Restore the Procurator’s memories? Prestimion’s gone unhinged! This wizard must have sprung him entirely free of his wits!”

“Do you think so, now?” came the Coronal’s voice just then, echoing across the huge stables toward them from the rear of the room. Prestimion stood by the entrance, beckoning. “Well, Gialaurys, come close, and look me in the eye! Do you see any vestige of lunacy lurking in my gaze? Come, Gialaurys! Come, let me embrace you and welcome you back to the Castle, and tell me whether you still think I’ve gone mad.”

Gialaurys went toward him. He saw now the Su-Suheris, looming behind the Coronal: a towering formidable figure in the richly brocaded purple robes, shot through with bright golden threads, of a magus of the court. His long, forking white neck and the two hairless elongated heads that it bore rose above his heavy, jewel-encrusted collar like an eerily carved column of ice. Gialaurys, with a quick hostile glance at the alien, opened his arms to Prestimion, and held the smaller man tightly for a long moment.

“Well?” Prestimion said, stepping back. “What do you say? Am I a madman, do you think, or is this the Prestimion you knew before you went off to Kharax?”

“You speak of restoring Dantirya Sambail’s memories of the war, I hear,” Gialaurys said. “That seems very like madness to me, Prestimion.” And glanced sullenly, again, at the Su-Suheris.

“Seems like madness, perhaps, but whether it is is yet to be determined, I think,” said Prestimion. The Coronal paused and sniffed and made a face.—"What a fetid offensive stench this place has! It’s these pretty animals of yours, I suppose. You must show them to me in a moment or two.” Then his face took on an easier look. “But introductions are in order, first.” The Coronal indicated his companion. “This is our newly appointed magus of the court, Gialaurys. Maundigand-Klimd’s his name. I assure you he’s made himself more than useful already.” And to the Su-Suheris he said, “And this is our famous Grand Admiral, Gialaurys of Piliplok. Though surely you must know that already, Maundigand-Klimd.”

The Su-Suheris smiled with the left head, nodded with the right one. “In truth I did, lordship.”

Prestimion said, “We’ll talk of Dantirya Sambail later, Gialaurys. But the simple essence of the thing, I tell you now, is the issue we’ve discussed before amongst us—our inability to put a man on trial for crimes that he can’t remember, that indeed no one in the world knows anything about save us. Who is to stand up in court as his accuser? And how, once accused, can he plead his cause? Even a murderer’s entitled to defend himself. Then, how can he repent, once we find him guilty? There’s no repentance when there’s no cognizance of guilt.”

“We already know of these problems, Prestimion,” said Gialaurys.

“So we do. But we’ve found no solution to them. Now Maundigand-Klimd proposes that we put a counterspell on him that undoes the obliteration, so that we can try him while he’s in full consciousness of his deeds. And then, afterward, wipe his memory clean again.—But, as I say, we’ll talk of all that later. Show me your precious lovely creatures, now.”

“Yes,” Gialaurys said. “Yes, I will,” but made no move toward the cages. Something else had belatedly occurred to him. After a little pause he said, in the bleak, ponderous way by which he communicated high displeasure, “It seems evident from what you tell me, my lord, that your new magus has been made privy to knowledge of the obliteration. Which, as I understood our compact, was not to be made known to anyone, not to anyone at all.”

Now it was Prestimion’s turn to be silent for a time.

Plainly he was abashed. A touch of ruddiness came to his face, and uneasiness to his eyes. He replied, finally, “Maundigand-Klimd had already worked out the secret for himself, Gialaurys. I merely confirmed that which he suspected. Technically it was, I agree, a violation of our oath. But in fact—”

“Are we to have no secrets from this man, then?” Gialaurys demanded, with some heat in his tone.

Prestimion held up one hand in a soothing gesture. “Peace, Gialaurys, peace! He is a great magus, is Maundigand-Klimd. You understand much more of the arts of the magus than I do, friend. Surely you know that keeping secrets from a true adept is no simple matter. Which is why I thought it wisest to bring him into my service, eh?—I tell you, Gialaurys, we’ll speak of all this afterward. Let me see what you’ve brought back for me from Kharax.”

Gruffly Gialaurys led Prestimion to the front of the cages and showed the Coronal his prizes, drawing forth his tattered slip of paper and reading off the monsters’ names, explaining to Prestimion which the malorn was, and which the min-mollitor, and which the zytoon. Prestimion said very little. But it was obvious from his demeanor that he was appalled by the surpassing ugliness of the things, and the pungent, acrid smells that came from them, and the aura of menace conveyed by their various fangs and claws and stingers. “The zeil,” Prestimion said, half to himself. “Ah, there’s a nasty one! And the vourhain—is that what that pestilent bloated one is called? What sort of mind would devise such things? How loathsome they are. And how strange!”

“These were not the only strange things I discovered in the north, your lordship. I must tell you: I saw people laughing aloud in the streets.”

Prestimion looked amused. “They must have been happy, then. Is happiness such a strange thing, Gialaurys?”

“They were alone, my lord. And laughing very loud. I saw two or three who were laughing in this fashion, and not a happy laugh, either. And one other that was dancing. All by himself, very wildly, in the public square of Kharax.”

“I’ve been hearing more such tales myself,” said Septach Melayn. “Odd behavior everywhere. There’s more madness abroad in the land these days than ever there used to be, I think.”

“You may well be right,” Prestimion said. His voice held a note of concern. But there was a certain remoteness in his tone, too, as though his mind was focused on three or four things at once and none held his full attention. He moved away from the others and walked up and down before the cages, shaking his head, solemnly murmuring the names of the synthetic killer-beasts to himself in the manner of an incantation. “Zytoon ... malorn ... min-mollitor ... zeil.” There could be no doubt he was strangely affected by the disagreeable shapes and unquestionable ferocity of the odious beasts that Korsibar’s mages had devised for use in the war. By the overwhelming hideousness of their appearance, by the very needlessness of their mere existence, they seemed to conjure back to life the spirit of the terrible war itself.

He stepped back from the cages after a time, and gestured with his head and shoulders in away that indicated he wanted to clear his mind of what he had just seen.

“What do you say, Prestimion, should we destroy the lot of them, now that you’ve had a look?” Gialaurys asked.

At first the Coronal seemed not to have heard the question. Then he said, speaking as though from a great distance, “No. No, I think not. We’ll keep them, I think, as reminders of what might have been, if only Korsibar had lasted a little while longer.” And, after another pause: “Do you know, Gialaurys, I believe we can use these things to test the valor of our young knights.”

“How so, my lord?”

“By setting them up against your malorns and zytoons in straightforward combat, and seeing how well they cope. That should show us who the really resourceful and courageous ones are. What do you think? Is that not a splendid idea?”

Gialaurys could not find the words for a response. The idea seemed grotesque to him. He glanced toward Septach Melayn, who offered only a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head.

But the thought seemed to amuse Prestimion. He looked off toward the monsters’ lairs for a moment, smiling strangely, as though in the eye of his mind he already saw the lordlings of the Castle facing these hissing horrors in the arena.

Then the Coronal returned from whatever strange place he had entered and said, in a far more businesslike tone of voice, “Let’s address this so-called epidemic of madness, now, shall we? Perhaps we have a problem here that bears closer investigation. I need a first hand look at the situation, I suspect.—Septach Melayn, what progress has been made on arranging that processional for me through the cities of Castle Mount?”

“The plans are nearly complete, my lord. Another two months and everything should be in order.”

“Two months is a very long while, if people are laughing by themselves and dancing crazily in the streets of Kharax. And hurling themselves from upper-story windows, too—has there been any more of that sort of thing, I wonder? I want to go out and have a look at things right now. Tomorrow, or at worst the day after tomorrow. Get new disguises made for us, Septach Melayn. Better ones than last time, too. That wig was atrocious, and that preposterous beard. I want to go to Stee, I think, and then Minimool, say, and maybe Tidias—no, not Tidias, someone will recognize you there—Hoikmar, it’ll be. Hoikmar, yes. That lovely place of the quiet canals.”

A great howling and bellowing came from the cages. Prestimion looked around.

“The weyhant, I suspect, would like to eat the zeil. Do I have the names right, Gialaurys?” Once again he shook his head. Revulsion was plain on his face. “Kassai... malorn ... zytoon! Foh! What monsters! May the man who devised them sleep uneasily in his grave!”

10

Coming into the Free City of Stee by the landward route around the face of Castle Mount would have been an impracticably protracted journey for Prestimion and his companions; for so great was Stee that its outskirts alone took three days to traverse in that fashion. Instead they went overland only as far as golden-walled Halanx, not far downslope from the Castle, where they boarded the snub-nosed thick-walled high-speed ferry that carried travelers down the swift River Stee to the city of the same name. No one paid the slightest heed to them. They were dressed in coarse linen robes, dull and flat in hue, the sort favored by traveling merchants; and Septach Melayn’s hairdresser had ingeniously transformed their appearances with wigs and mustaches and, for Prestimion, a sleek little beard that ran tightly along the line of his jaw.

Gialaurys, who, like his predecessor as Grand Admiral of Majipoor had never felt much fondness for travel by water, had a foul time of it almost from the moment the ferry was under way. After the first few plunging moments he shifted about so that he was sitting with his broad back to the porthole, and muttered a series of prayers under his breath, all the while devoutly rubbing with his thumbs two small amulets that he held folded into the palms of his hands.

Septach Melayn showed him little mercy. “Yes, dear man, pray with all your might! For it’s well known that this ferry sinks almost every time it attempts the voyage, and hundreds of lives a week are lost.”

Anger flashed in Gialaurys’s eyes. “Spare me your wit for once, will you?”

“The river does certainly move quickly, though,” said Prestimion, to put an end to the banter. “There can’t be many swifter ones in all the world.”

He felt none of Gialaurys’s queasiness. But their vessel’s velocity here in the upper reaches of the Mount was indisputably startling. It seemed at times as if the ferry were taking a completely vertical path down the mountain. After a while there was a leveling-off, though, and the ferry’s pace grew less alarming. It made stops to discharge passengers and collect new ones at Banglecode of the Inner Cities and Rennosk in the Guardian ring, and then proceeded by a wide westward swing to the next level down. By the time it was among the Free Cities and drawing close to Stee, late that afternoon, the river’s course had flattened so much that its flow seemed almost tranquil.

The towers of Stee now rose up tall before them on both sides of the river. With twilight coming on, the pinkish-gray marble walls of the right bank towers had acquired the bronze hue of the setting sun, and the equally lofty buildings that lined the opposite bank were already shrouded in darkness.

Septach Melayn consulted a glistening map of blue and white tiles inset into the curving side of the ferryboat’s hull. “I see here that there are eleven quays in Stee. Which one shall we take, Prestimion?”

“Does it matter? One’s as good as another, for us.”

“Vildivar, then,” said Septach Melayn. “That’s just this side of the center of town, or so it would seem. The fourth quay from here, it is.”

The ferry, moving now at an unhurried pace, cruised smoothly from slip to slip, discharging a cluster of passengers at each; and in a little while a glowing sign on shore told them that they had arrived at Vildivar Quay. “None too soon,” muttered Gialaurys darkly. His face was three shades more pale than usual, so that the brown bristles of his long dense sideburns stood out like angry bars against his cheeks.

“Come, now!” Septach Melayn cried cheerfully. “Great Stee awaits us!”

It was everyone’s fantasy to visit Stee at least once in his life. When Prestimion was a small boy his father had taken him there, as he had to so many other famous places, and Prestimion, overwhelmed by the sight of those miles of mighty towers, had vowed to return for a longer look when he was older. But then his father’s unexpected death had delivered the duties of Prince of Muldemar to him while he was still quite young, and soon after that his rise to importance among the knights of the Castle had begun, and Prestimion had had little time for pleasure-travel after that. Now, staring at the splendor of Stee through the eyes of a grown man, he was astounded to see that the city looked every bit as awesome to him today as it had when he was a child.

But Vildivar Quay turned out to be not quite as central as Septach Melayn had calculated. The towers flanking the river in this section of the city were industrial factories, and they had begun to close for the day. Workers bound for their homes in the residential districts on the opposite side of the water were streaming aboard the commuter ferries and small passenger-boats that served in lieu of bridges across the immensity of the river. Soon the neighborhood in which they had come ashore would be deserted. “We’ll hire a boatman to take us along to the next quay,” Prestimion decided, and they made their way back down to the water’s edge.

Indeed there was a riverboat waiting in the section of the quay where private craft were allowed to tie up. It was a small, sturdy-looking vessel of the kind known as a trappagasis, made of grease-caulked planks fastened together not with nails but thick black cords of guellum fiber. At bow and stern it bore weatherbeaten figureheads that might once have been representations of sea-dragons. Its captain—most likely its builder, too—was a sleepy-looking old Skandar whose gray-blue fur had faded almost to white. He sat slouchingly in the stern, looking patiently upward at the darkening sky, with his four arms wrapped about his barrel of a chest as though he were thinking of settling in for a nap.

Gialaurys, who was fluent in the Skandar dialect, went to him to speak about booking passage. And returned, after a brief discussion that did not appear to have gone well for him, wearing a very strange expression on his face.

“What is it, Gialaurys?” asked Prestimion. “Is it that he’s not for hire?”

“He tells me, lordship, that it’s unwise to travel downriver at this time of day, because this is the hour when the Coronal Lord Prestimion usually sails upstream in his great yacht toward his palace.”

“The Coronal Lord Prestimion, you say?”

“Indeed. The newly crowned master of the world: none other than the Coronal Lord Prestimion. The Skandar advises me that he has taken up residence of late in Stee, and makes the river journey every night from his friend Count Fisiolo’s palace to his own. There are some evenings, he says, when the Coronal Lord is in exuberant spirits and pleased to hurl purses full of ten-crown pieces to the boatmen that he passes on the way; but on other evenings, when his mood is more somber, the Coronal Lord has been known to order his pilot to ram into any boats that take his fancy the wrong way, and sink them. No one interferes with this, because he is the Coronal, after all. Our Skandar here prefers to wait until Lord Prestimion has gone past before taking on any passengers. For safety’s sake, he says.”

“Ah. The Coronal Lord Prestimion has a palace in Stee?” Prestimion said, bemused. This was all very curious. “Why, I had no idea! And diverts himself at sundown by sinking riverboats at random?—We need to know more about this, I think.”

“In truth we do,” said Septach Melayn.

This time all three of them went down to the quay. Gialaurys once again told the Skandar they wished to engage his services; and when the Skandar threw both his upper arms upward in a gesture of refusal, Septach Melayn drew forth his velvet purse and allowed the glint of silver-hued five-crown pieces to be seen. The boatman stared.

“What’s your usual fare for the journey up to the next quay, fellow?”

“Three crowns fifty weights. But—”

Septach Melayn held up two bright shining coins. “Here we have ten crowns. That is a tripling of your fare, eh? Will that entice you, perhaps?”

Morosely the Skandar said, “And if the Coronal Lord takes it into his head to sink my boat? Just last Twoday he sank Friedrag’s, he did, and three weeks past it was Rhez-megas’s that went down. If he sinks mine, what becomes of my livelihood, then? I’m not young, good sire, and the task of building boats is far too much for me now. Your ten crowns will do me precious little good if I lose my boat.”

Prestimion made a quick sign, just the littlest flick of his fingertips. Septach Melayn jingled his purse again and a heavy silver coin of impressive size, one that made the five-crown pieces look like trifles, dropped into his palm. He held it up. “Do you know what this thing is, friend?”

The Skandar’s eyes grew wide. “A ten-royal piece, is it?”

“Ten royals, yes. One hundred crowns, that is to say. And look: here’s a second one, and a third. No need to build a new trappagasis, eh? You should be able to buy yourself another one, don’t you think, with thirty royals? That’ll be your indemnity, if the Coronal Lord’s in a ship-sinking mood tonight. Well? What do you say, fellow?”

Hoarsely the Skandar replied, “May I see one of those things, lordship?”

“I’m no lord, fellow, simply a well-to-do merchant come over from Gimkandale town with my friends, here to see the wonders of Stee.—You think the money’s false, do you?”

“Oh, no, lordship, no, no!” A busy fluttering of deprecatory gestures, all four hands touching forehead, came from the Skandar. “It’s only that I’ve never as much as seen a ten-royaler, never once ever in my life! Let alone possessing one. May I have a look? And then I’ll take you where you want to go, sure enough!”

Septach Melayn handed one of the big coins across. The Skandar studied it with awe, as though it were some gem of rare hue: turning it over and over, rubbing his hairy fingers across the faces it bore, the Coronal Lord Confalume on the obverse and the late Pontifex Prankipin on the other side. Then, with a trembling hand, he returned it. “Ten royals! What a sight that is to me, I can hardly tell you! Get in, lordships! Get in, get in!”

When the three of them were aboard, the huge old man rose and pushed out into the stream. But he could not seem to get over having handled a coin of such great value. Again and again he shook his head and stared at the fingers that had handled the shining piece.

As the trappagasis moved out into the river, Prestimion, who like most of the lords of Castle Mount had never had much occasion to handle money, leaned across toward Septach Melayn and murmured, “Tell me, what will one of those coins buy?”

“A tenner? A fine thoroughbred mount, I’d say. Or a few months’ lodging at a decent hostelry, or enough of the good wine of Muldemar to satisfy a year’s thirst, at least. It’s probably as much as our boatman’s able to earn in six or seven months. And probably near as much as this boat of his is worth.”

“Ah,” said Prestimion, struggling to grasp the dimensions of the gulf that separated this Skandar’s existence from his. There were, he was aware, coins of higher denomination even than the tens, a fifty-royal piece and a hundred-royal one also, actually: he had just the other day approved the designs for the whole series of new coins that would soon bear his own visage along with that of the Pontifex Confalume.

One hundred royals, though—represented by a single thick coin that Septach Melayn might be carrying in his purse even now—why, that was an inconceivable fortune for the common folk of the world, who dealt in humble bronze weight pieces and shiny one-crown coins that contained just a bit of silver much alloyed with copper. The royal-denominated coinage might just as well be the money of some other world, for all the bearing it had on the everyday lives of these people.

It was sobering and instructive for him to contemplate that, in view of all the times he had seen the likes of Dantirya Sambail or Korsibar casually wagering fifty and a hundred royals at a time at the Castle games. There is much I still need to learn, he thought, about this world that has made me its king.

The creaking old trappagasis made its leisurely way downstream, the Skandar, in the stern, now and then putting a hand on the tiller to keep it in mid-channel. The river was inordinately wide and almost sluggish here, though Prestimion knew that matters changed beyond the city, where the great stream shattered against the row of low jagged hills known as the Hand of Lord Spadagas and broke up into a multitude of unimportant riverlets that lost themselves in the lower reaches of the Mount.

“Where shall we go, then, lordships?” the boatman called out to them. “Havilbove Quay’s the next, and then Kanaba, and the one after that’s the Guadeloom Quay.”

“Take us to the center of things, wherever that may be,” replied Prestimion.

And to Septach Melayn he said, “What do you suppose he could have been talking about, this business of Lord Prestimion going out in his yacht and sinking boats? It made no sense to me. These people must surely be aware that Lord Prestimion hasn’t had time yet even to pay an official visit to Stee, and that there’s no likelihood at all that he’d be living here and riding up and down the river by night making trouble for people.”

“Do you think they give much thought to the realities of the Coronal’s life, lordship?” Gialaurys said. “He’s a myth to them, a legendary figure. For all they know, he has the power to be in six places at once.”

Prestimion laughed. “But still—to imagine that the Coronal, even if he were here, would run down ships in the channel just for sport—”

“Trust me in this, my lord. I know more of the common folks’ minds than you ever will. They’ll believe anything and everything about their kings. You have no idea how remote from their lives you are in every way, living far above them atop the Mount as you do. Nor can you imagine what wild fables and fantasies they spin about you.”

“This is something other than a fable, Gialaurys,” said Septach Melayn impatiently. “This is simply a delusion. Don’t you see that the old man’s as mad as all those people you saw laughing to themselves in Kharax? Solemnly telling us that the new Coronal goes about sinking riverboats! Why, what can that be, if not one more example of this new insanity that’s spreading through the populace like a plague?”

“Yes,” Gialaurys said. “I think you’re right. Madness. Delusion. The man doesn’t seem stupid. So he must be crazy, then, and no question about it.”

“A most peculiar delusion, though,” said Prestimion. “Comic, in its way, of course. And yet I would have hoped they’d have had more love for me than to suppose me capable of—”

Just then came a sharp cry from the boatman. “Look, my lords, look!” He was pointing frantically forward with all four arms. “There! Just upstream from us!”

A disturbance of some kind, not at all imaginary, was quite definitely going on up ahead.

The river was churning with activity. Ferries and river-boats of all sizes were scurrying busily about, cutting toward one shore or the other at sharp angles as if making hasty alterations to their routes. And it was possible to see, a little farther on, a large and luxurious vessel—a ship of virtually regal grandeur—making passage toward them down the center of the channel with all its lights ablaze.

“It is the Coronal Lord Prestimion, come to sink my boat!” the Skandar moaned in a strangled-sounding voice.

This no longer seemed as amusing as it had been. It needed to be investigated. “Steer us toward him,” Prestimion commanded.

“Lordships! No—I beg you—”

’Toward him, yes,” said Gialaurys firmly, and added a couple of rough Skandar expletives.

Still the terrified boatman hesitated, imploring their mercy. Septach Melayn, grinning a broad shameless grin, turned and lifted his hand, showing it agleam with great round ten-royal coins. “For you, fellow, if there’s any trouble! Full indemnity for your losses! Thirty royals here, do you see? Thirty!”

The poor Skandar looked miserable; but he acceded gloomily and put a couple of his hands to the tiller, and kept the trappagasis on its course.

It was all alone, now, solitary and exposed: the only vessel, other than the yacht of the supposed Lord Prestimion, that still remained in midchannel. And it was bringing them nearer, moment by moment, to the majestic and overbearing ship that held dominion over this section of the river.

They were very close to it, now. Unsettlingly close; for it would be a very easy business, Prestimion was beginning to realize, for this great ship to pass right over their little boat and grind it to matchsticks, and sail away from the encounter without having felt the slightest tremor.

He was no expert on maritime matters; but it was obvious enough to him that this craft looming up loftily before them in the channel was built on a grand princely scale, the sort of yacht that a Serithorn or an Oljebbin might own. Its hull was fashioned of some black glistening wood bright as burnished steel, and abovedecks it bristled everywhere with a host of fanciful spars and booms and stays and banner-bedecked masts and glowlamps in a dozen colors, and from its bow rose the fanged and gaping head of some imaginary monster of the deep, elaborately carved and vividly painted in scarlet and yellow and purple and green. The whole effect was dazzling, awe-inspiring, just a little frightening.

As for the flag that it flew, Prestimion saw to his amazement that it was the Coronal’s own sea-going flag, a green starburst on a field of gold.

“Do you see it?” he cried, tugging furiously at Gialaurys’s arm. “That flag—that starburst flag—”

“And there is the Coronal himself, I think,” said Septach Melayn coolly. “Although I had heard that Lord Prestimion was a better-looking man than that; but perhaps it was only rumor.”

Prestimion gazed wonderstruck across the way at the man that claimed to be his very self. He stood proudly on the foredeck of this grand ship clad in robes of the Coronal’s colors, staring out in regal manner into the night.

He looked, indeed, nothing at all like the man whom he pretended to be. He seemed taller than Prestimion, as many men were, and much less sturdy through the shoulders and chest. His hair was a golden brown, not the flat yellow of Prestimion’s, and he wore it in curving waves, not simply and straight, as Prestimion did. His face was fleshy and full and not at all pleasing, the eyebrows too heavy, the nose too sharply hooked. But he bore himself with a prideful kingly stance, his head thrown back and one hand stiffly thrust into the slit of his green velvet surcoat.

Behind him stood a tall slender man in a buff jerkin and flaring red breeches, who perhaps was meant to be this Coronal’s version of Septach Melayn, and on his other side was a heavyset slab-jawed fellow in breeches of Piliplok style, surely intended to represent Gialaurys. Their presence made this bizarre masquerade all the more troublesome; it extended it into new levels of duplicity that destroyed the last trace of Prestimion’s earlier bemusement, and awoke in him something now approaching anger.

He had already lived through one usurpation; he had no tolerance in his soul for another, if that was in fact what this strange affair was intended to be.

The Skandar boatman’s teeth were chattering with fear. “We will die, lordships, we will die, we will die—please, I beg you, let me turn the boat—!”

Turning was beside the point now, though. The two vessels were so close that the false Lord Prestimion could easily run them down in the channel, if that were his wish. But his mood appeared to be a kindly one tonight. As the riverboat went past the great yacht on its starboard side the supposed Lord Prestimion cast his glance downward, and his eyes met those of Prestimion far below, and for a long moment the two men stared at each other in deep, intense contemplation. Then the grandly dressed Prestimion on the deck smiled to the simply garbed Prestimion in the humble riverboat far below, as a king may sometimes smile to a common man, and nodded in a grand courtly way, and the hand came forth from the surcoat clutching a small round bag of green velvet, which he flung casually outward in Prestimion’s general direction.

Prestimion was too flabbergasted even to reach for it. But Septach Melayn of the lightning-swift reflexes leaned forward and snapped the fat bulging bag from the air just as it was about to hurtle past into the water. Then the yacht continued splendidly onward, leaving the Skandar’s little boat by itself in mid-river, wallowing in the great ship’s wake.

For a moment there was a stunned silence aboard the riverboat, broken finally by the low droning of the Skandar’s prayer of thanks for having escaped destruction, and then by an angry shout from Prestimion. “Bythois and Sigei!” he cried, in fury and shock. “He threw money to me! He threw me a purse of money! Me! Who does he think I am?”

“He plainly must not have any idea, my lord,” said Septach Melayn. “And as for who he thinks he is, well—”

“Remmer take his soul!” Prestimion cried.

“Ah, my lord, you should not invoke those great demons,” said Gialaurys worriedly. “Not even in jest, my lord.”

Prestimion nodded indulgently. “Yes, Gialaurys, yes, I know.” Those awesome names were just noises to him, mere empty imprecations. But not so to Gialaurys.

His sudden burst of anger began to ease. This was too baroque to be seriously threatening; but he had to know what it all signified.

Looking toward Septach Melayn, he said, “Is it real money, at least?”

Septach Melayn extended a hand brimming with coins. “Looks adequately real to me,” he said. “Ten-crown pieces, they are. Two or three royals’ worth, I’d say. Would you like to see?”

“Give them to the boatman,” Prestimion said. “And tell him to take us to shore. The right bank. That’s where Simbilon Khayf would live, isn’t it? Have him put us down at whichever quay is closest to the home of Simbilon Khayf.”

“Simbilon Khayf? You intend to visit Sim—”

“He’s the most important man of commerce in Stee, or so I’ve been told. Anyone who possesses money on a scale that allows him to hurl bags of ten-crown pieces at strangers in riverboats would be known to Simbilon Khayf. He’d certainly be able to tell us who this proud yachtsman is.”

“But—Presthnion, the Coronal can’t possibly impose himself on a private citizen without warning! Not even one as wealthy as Simbilon Khayf. Any sort of official visit needs great preparation. You don’t really think that you can drop in just like that, do you? ‘Hello, Simbilon Khayf, I happened to be in town, and I wanted to ask you a few questions about—’ ”

“Oh, no, no,” Prestimion said. ‘We won’t tell him who we are. What if there’s a conspiracy of some kind, and he’s part of it? This false Prestimion here may be his cousin, for all we know, and it’ll be the last the world sees of us if we present ourselves in our true guises. No, Septach Melayn, we are so beautifully disguised today: we’ll come as modest merchants asking a loan. And tell him what has just befallen us, and see what he says.”

“My father will be down shortly,” said the lovely young dark-haired woman who greeted them in the downstairs parlor of Simbilon Khayf’s great mansion. “Will you have some wine, gentlemen? We favor the wine of Muldemar, here. From Lord Prestimion’s own family’s cellars, so my father says.”

Her name was Varaile. Prestimion, studying her covertly from his seat at the side of the imposing room, could not fathom how someone as coarse-featured and disagreeable-looking as Simbilon Khayf, a man who was scarcely more handsome than a Hjort, could ever have spawned a daughter so beautiful.

And beautiful she was. Not in the mysterious, delicate way of Thismet; for Thismet had been small, almost tiny, with slender limbs and a startlingly narrow waist above the dramatic flare of her hips. Her superb features were perfectly chiseled, with dark and fiery eyes that sparkled with a lustrous mischievous gleam out of a face as pale as that of the Great Moon, and her skin was of a surpassing whiteness. This woman was much taller, as tall as Prestimion himself, and did not have that look of seeming fragility masking sinewy strength that had made Thismet’s beauty so extraordinary. There had been a radiance about Thismet that Simbilon Khayf’s daughter could not equal, nor did she move with Thismet’s coolly confident majesty.

But these comparisons, he knew, were unfair. Thismet, after all, had been a Coronal’s daughter, reared amidst the trappings of great power. Her life at court had enfolded her in a glow of royal dignity that could only have enhanced the innate shapeliness of her striking form. And beyond all dispute this Varaile was a woman of extraordinary beauty in her own way, sleek and elegant and finely made. She seemed calm and poised within, too, a woman—a girl, re-ally—of unusual self-assurance and grace.

Prestimion found it surprising that he was so fascinated by her.

He was still in mourning for his lost love. He had been granted only those few weeks of surpassing passion with Thismet on the eve of the deciding battle of the civil war—Thismet who had been his most potent enemy, until her abandonment of her foolish feckless brother and her journey to Prestimion’s side—and then she had been taken from him just as their life together was beginning to unfold. One did not recover quickly from such a loss. Prestimion thought, at times, that he never would. Since Thismet’s death he had scarcely looked at another woman, had put completely out of his mind any thought of involving himself with one, even in the most superficial way.

Yet here he was taking wine from this Varaile’s hand—the good rich wine of his own family’s vineyards, yes, though she had no way of knowing that—and looking upward at her, and meeting her eyes with his; and what was that if not a little shiver of response traveling down his back, and a minute tremor of speculation, even of desire—?

“Do you plan to be in Stee for very long?” she asked. Her voice was deep for a woman’s, rich, resonant, musical.

“A day or two, no more. We have business in Hoikmar also to pursue, and after that, I think, in Minimool, or perhaps it’s Minimool first and Hoikmar afterward. And then we return to our homes in Gimkandale.”

“Ah, you three are men of Gimkandale, then?”

“I am, yes. And Simrok Morlin here. Our partner Ghev-eldin"—Prestimion looked toward Gialaurys—"is from Piliplok, originally.” There was no concealing Gialaurys’s broad accent, which marked him at once as a man of eastern Zimroel; best not to pretend otherwise where pretense was needless, Prestimion thought.

“Piliplok!” Varaile cried. A glint of yearning came into her eyes. “I’ve heard so much of that place, where all the streets run so straight! Piliplok, and of course Ni-moya, and Pidruid and Narabal—like names out of some legend, they are to me. Will I ever visit them, I wonder? Zimroel’s so very far away.”

“Yes, the world is large, lady,” said Septach Melayn piously, giving her the solemn stare of one who utters profundities. “But travel is a wonderful thing. I myself have been as far as Alaisor in the west, and Bandar Delem in the north; and one day I too will set sail for Zimroel.” And then, with a salacious little smirk: “Have you been to Gimkandale, Lady? It would be my great pleasure to show you my city, should you ever care to visit it.”

“How splendid that would be, Simrok Morlin!” she said.

Before he could halt himself Prestimion shot Septach Melayn an astounded glance. What did the man think he was up to? Offering her a tour of Gimkandale, was he? And with such a flirtatious leer? It was a risky tactic. They were in this house as supplicants, not as suitors. Since when was Septach Melayn so flirtatious with women, besides, even one as handsome as this?—And, Prestimion wondered in some astonishment, could that be a trace of jealousy that I feel?

Simbilon Khayf’s daughter poured more wine for them. She dispensed the costly stuff with a very free hand, Prestimion observed. But of course this was a house of great wealth. From the moment of their entrance into it they had seen trappings and furnishings that were worthy of the Castle itself: doors of dark thuzna-wood inlaid with filigree of gold, and a hall of royal opulence where a jetting plume of perfumed water spumed ceiling-high from a twelve-sided fountain of crimson tiles edged with turquoise, and this parlor here, furnished with costly carpets of tight-knit Makroprosopos weave and thickly brocaded cushions. And this was only the first floor of four or five. It looked as though it had all been put together in the last three years; but whoever had done the job for Simbilon Khayf, he had done it very, very well.

“Ah, here’s my father now,” Varaile said.

She clapped her hands and instantly a liveried servant entered by a door to the left, carrying a chair so elaborately inlaid with jewels and rare metals that it seemed very much like a throne; and at the same moment, through a door at the opposite side of the parlor, Simbilon Khayf entered briskly, offered curt nods to his unexpected guests, and took the noble seat that had been provided for him. He was uglier even than Prestimion remembered from the one quick glimpse of him he had had during Coronation week: a hard-faced little man with a big nose and thin cruel lips, whose most conspicuous feature was a great excessive mound of silvery hair that he wore absurdly piled up atop his head. He was dressed with pretentious formality, a maroon waistcoat shot through with glittering metallic strands over close-fitting blue breeches trimmed with red satin braid.

“Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together in what was perhaps the involuntary gesture of a hungry tradesman scenting a deal, “so there’s been some confusion about an appointment, is there? Because, I tell you plainly, I can recall nothing whatsoever about having agreed to see three merchants of Gimkandale this evening at my home. But I didn’t get where I was by turning away honest business out of false pride, eh? I am at your service, gentlemen.—My daughter has been treating you well, I hope?”

“Magnificently, sir,” said Prestimion. He raised his glass. “This wine—the best I’ve ever tasted!”

“Of the Coronal’s own cellars,” replied Simbilon Khayf. “The finest Muldemar, it is. We drink nothing else.”

“How enviable,” said Prestimion gravely. “I am named Polivand, sir; my partner to the left is Simrok Morlin, and over here, sir, is Gheveldin, who comes originally from Piliplok.”

He paused. This was a tense moment. Simbilon Khayf had attended the coronation banquet; since he had been in the company of Count Fisiolo that day, he must have been seated reasonably close to the high dais. Could the thought be dawning in him that the three merchants before him in his parlor were in fact the Coronal Lord Prestimion, the High Counsellor Septach Melayn, and the Grand Admiral Gialaurys, all of them tricked out in ridiculous disguise? And, if he had seen through their false whiskers, was he even now on the verge of blurting out some stupid question about their reasons for this remarkable attempt at deception? Or would he hold back to see what hand the Coronal might be playing?

He gave no clue. He looked complacent and even a bit bored, as a man of his stature in the world of business might well be when finding himself in the uninvited and unanticipated presence of such a trio of nobodies. Either he was a superb actor—which was altogether conceivable, considering his astounding ascent to immense wealth in just a few years—or he did in fact believe that his visitors were what they claimed to be and nothing more, earnest businessmen of Gimkandale with a proposition to set before him, and that they did indeed have an appointment with him that he somehow had forgotten.

Prestimion proceeded smoothly onward. “Shall I tell you why we’re here, good Simbilon Khayf? It is that we have developed a machine for keeping business accounts and other financial records, a machine far more efficient and swift than any now available.”

“Indeed,” said Simbilon Khayf, without much display of interest. He rested his hands on his belly and steepled his fingers. His eyes, which were icy and unpleasant, showed the beginnings of a glare. Evidently he had come to an instant appraisal of the prospects that these visitors offered, and found not much here to interest him.

“There’ll be immense demand for it once it’s on the market,” Prestimion continued fervently, with a show of eager need. “Such immense demand that great quantities of borrowed capital will be required to finance the expansion of our factory. And therefore—”

“Yes. I see the rest. You have brought with you, of course, a working model of your device?”

“We had one, yes,” said Prestimion, sounding stricken. “But there was an unfortunate accident on the river—”

Septach Melayn took up the tale. “The boat which we hired to take us from Vildivar Quay to a landing nearer to your house came perilous close to overturning, sir, in a collision that we almost had with a great ship of the river that charged right down upon us, giving us no room, no room whatever,” he said, with such hayseed earnestness that it was all Prestimion could do to keep from bursting into laughter. “We might have drowned, sir! We clung hard to our seats, sir, and managed to stay inside the boat and save ourselves; but two pieces of our luggage went over the side. Including, sir, I am most regretful to tell you, the one—”

“That contained the model of your device. I see,” said Simbilon Khayf drily. “What an unfortunate loss.” There was little sympathy in his tone. But then he chuckled. “You must have had an encounter with our mad Coronal, is what it sounds like to me. A great garish ludicrous-looking yacht, with lights all over it, was it, that tried to run you down in the middle of the river?”

“Yes!” cried Prestimion and Gialaurys, both at once. “Yes, that’s it exactly, sir!”

“True enough,” added Septach Melayn. “It come a foot or two closer to us and we’d have been smashed to smithereens. To utter absolute smithereens, sir!”

“The Coronal is mad, is that what you said?” Prestimion asked, evincing an expression of the keenest curiosity. “I fail to take your meaning, I think. The Coronal Lord, surely, is atop Castle Mount at this moment, and we have no reason to believe his mind’s in any way impaired, do we? For that would be a terrible thing, if the new Coronal should be—”

“You must realize that my father’s not speaking of Lord Prestimion, now,” Varaile put in smoothly. “As you say, there’s every reason to believe that Lord Prestimion’s as sane as you or I. No, this is a local madman he means, a young kinsman of our Count Fisiolo, whose reason has entirely fled from him in recent weeks. There’s much insanity loose in Stee these days. We had a dreadful event ourselves a month or two ago, a housemaid losing her mind and leaping from a window, killing two people who happened to be passing by below—”

“How awful,” said Septach Melayn, with an exaggerated gesture of shock.

“This kinsman of the Count,” Prestimion said. “He’s deluded, then? And it’s his particular delusion that he’s our new Coronal?”

“That it is,” Varaile replied. “And therefore can do as he pleases, just as though he owns the world.”

“He should be locked in some deep dungeon, no matter whose kinsman he might be,” Gialaurys said emphatically. “Such a man should not be loose on the river to the endangerment of innocent travelers!”

“Ah, I quite agree,” said Simbilon Khayf. “There’s been a great disruption of commerce lately, as he rampages up and down with that gaudy ship of his. But Count Fisiolo—who is, I should tell you, a dear friend of mine—is a merciful man. Our lunatic is his wife’s brother’s son, Garstin Karsp by name, whose father Thiwid died suddenly not long ago in the full flower of health. His father’s unexpected death quite knocked young Garstin from his moorings; and when the word came forth that the old Pontifex had also died and that Prestimion would be Coronal after Lord Confalume went to the Labyrinth, Garstin Karsp let it be known that Prestimion was not in fact a man of Muldemar, as was commonly given out, but actually one of Stee. And that indeed he himself was Prestimion, who as Coronal would make his capital here in Stee, as Lord Stiamot did in the ancient days.”

“And is that claim generally accepted here?” Septach Melayn asked.

Simbilon Khayf shrugged. “Perhaps by some very simple folk, I suppose. Most of the citizenry understand that this is only Thiwid Karsp’s son, who has gone insane with grief.”

“The poor man,” said Septach Melayn, and made a holy sign.

“Ah, not so poor, not so poor! I am banker to the family, and it is no great breach of confidence when I tell you that the vaults of the Karsps overflow with hundred-royal coins the way the skies overflow with stars. He spent a small fortune on that ship of his, did Garstin Karsp. And hired a huge crew to sail it nightly up and down our river for him while he terrifies the riverboat men. Some nights he tosses rich purses full of coins to the boats he passes, and other nights he ploughs right through them as though they aren’t visible. No one knows what his mood will be from one night to the next, so everyone flees when his craft approaches.”

“And yet the Count spares him,” Prestimion said.

“Out of pity, for the young man has suffered so from the loss of his father.”

“And the boatmen whose livelihood he wrecks? What about their sufferings?”

“They are compensated by the Count, so I understand.”

“We lost our own merchandise. Who will compensate us? Shall we apply to the Count?”

“Perhaps you should,” said Simbilon Khayf, frowning a little, as though Prestimion’s sudden forcefulness of speech had indicated to him that he was not quite so humble a person as he had previously shown himself to be.—"Oh, I agree, my man, this can’t be allowed to go on much longer. So far no one has actually been drowned; but before long someone will, and then Fisiolo will tell the boy that it’s time to end this masquerade, and he’ll quietly be sent away for treatment somewhere, and things will get back to normal on the river.”

“I pray they do,” said Septach Melayn.

“For the time being,” Simbilon Khayf went on, “it would appear that we have a Coronal of our very own amongst us in Stee, and so be it, such as he is. As my daughter mentioned, many things are not right nowadays. The sad incident in our household here is evidence of that.” He rose from his little throne. The interview, quite clearly, was ending. “I regret the inconvenience you suffered on the river,” he said, though there was not a shred of regret in his tone. “If you will be so good as to return with a new model of your device, and make another appointment with my people, we’ll see about making an investment in your company. Good day, gentlemen.”

“Shall I show them out, father?” Varaile asked.

“Gawon Barl will do it,” said Simbilon Khayf, clapping for the servant who had brought him his chair.

“Well, at least we have no conspiracy in this city to unseat me,” Prestimion said, when they were outside. “Only a wealthy lunatic whom Count Fisiolo unwisely indulges in his insanity. There’s some relief in knowing that, eh? We’ll send word to Fisiolo when we get back that these crazy voyages of young Karsp must come to an end. And all his talk of his being Lord Prestimion, as well.”

“So much madness everywhere,” Septach Melayn murmured. “What can be going on?”

“Did you notice,” said Gialaurys, “that we were here simply to ask for a loan, and very quickly he was talking of ‘making an investment’ ? If we actually had a company that produced anything worthwhile, I see, he’d have controlling ownership of it in short order. I think I understand more clearly now how he came by such great wealth so swiftly.”

“Men of his sort are not famous for gentle business dealings,” said Prestimion.

“Ah, but the daughter, the daughter!” said Septach Melayn. “Now, there’s gentility for you, my lord!”

“You’re quite taken by her, are you?” Prestimion asked.

“I? Yes, in an abstract way, for I respond to beauty and grace wherever I find it. But you know I feel little need for the company of women. It was you, I thought—you, Prestimion—who’d come away from there singing her praises the loudest.”

“She is a very beautiful woman,” Prestimion agreed. “And marvelously well bred, for the child of such a boorish rogue. But I have other matters on my mind than the beauty of women just now, my friend. The Procurator’s trial, for one. The famines in the war-smitten districts. And also these strange incidents of madness cropping up again and again. This kinsman of Count Fisiolo’s, this other Lord Prestimion, who’s allowed to go free to terrorize the river! Who’s the bigger madman, I wonder, the boy who says he’s me, or Fisiolo who tolerates his lunacy?—Come. Let’s find a hostelry; and in the morning it’s on to Hoikmar, eh? We may discover three Prestimions holding court there!”

“And a couple of Confalumes as well,” said Septach Melayn.

From the window of her third-floor bedroom the daughter of Simbilon Khayf followed the three visitors with her eyes as they made their way across the cobbled plaza and into the public park beyond.

There was something unusual about each of them, Varaile thought, that set them apart from most of the men who came here to get money from her father. The one who was so very tall and slender, whose movements were as graceful as a dancer’s: he spoke like a bumpkin, but it was plainly only a pretense. In reality he was sharp and quick, that one—you could see it in that piercing blue stare of his, which took in everything at a glance and filed it away for future use. And sly and cunning too; there was a note of mockery underlying everything he said, however straightforward it was meant to seem on the surface—a shrewd and playful and perhaps very dangerous man. And the second one, the big man who had said very little, but spoke with that thick Zimroel accent when he did: how strong he seemed, what a sense of tremendous power under tight restraint he showed! He was like a great rock.

And then, that third man, the short broad-shouldered one. How compelling his eyes were! How magnificent his face, though the oddly inappropriate beard and mustache did him no credit. I suspect he would be quite beautiful without them, though, Varaile thought. He is a splendid man. There is a lordly presence about him. It is hard for me to believe that such a man is merely a dreary merchant, a grubby manufacturer of accounting devices. He seems so much more than that. So very much more.

11

They went up the Mount to the ring of Guardian Cities, with Hoikmar as their first stop. There, in a public garden abloom with tanigales and crimson eldirons, alongside a quiet canal bordered by short red-tinged grass soft as thanga fur, they encountered a beggar, a ragged and tattered old gray-haired man, who gripped Prestimion’s wrist with one hand and that of Septach Melayn with the other and said with a strange urgency in his voice, “My lords, my lords, give me a moment’s heed. I have a box of money for sale at a good price. A very good price indeed.”

His eyes were bright with a look of great intensity and even, perhaps, keen intelligence. And yet he wore a beggar’s foul rags, torn and stinking. An old pale-red scar crossed the entirety of his left cheek and vanished near the corner of his mouth. Septach Melayn glanced across the top of the man’s head to Prestimion and smiled crookedly as though to say, Here we have another sorry madman, I think, and Prestimion, distressed by the thought, nodded solemnly.

“A box of money for sale?” he said. “What can you mean by that?”

The old man meant just that, apparently. He brought forth from a shabby cloth bag at his waist a rusted strongbox, much encrusted with soil and bound with sturdy straps of faded crumbling leather. Which he opened to reveal that the box was packed to its brim with coins of high denomination, dozens of them, royals and five-royal pieces and a few tens. He dug his gnarled fingers into the horde and stirred the coins about, making a silvery chinking sound. “How pretty they are! And they are yours, my lords, at whatever price you care to pay.”

“Look,” Septach Melayn said, scooping up one silver piece and tapping it with his fingernail. “Do you see this lettering of antique style at the edge? This is Lord Arioc here, whose Pontifex was Dizimaule.”

“But they lived three thousand years ago!” Prestimion exclaimed.

“Somewhat more than that, I think. And who is this? Lord Vildivar, I believe it says. With Thraym’s face on the other side.”

“And here,” said Gialaurys, reaching past Prestimion to pull a coin out of the box, and puzzling over the inscription on it. “This is Lord Siminave. Do you know of a Siminave?”

“He was Calintane’s Coronal, I think,” said Prestimion. He looked sternly at the old man. “There’s a fortune in this box! Five hundred royals, at the least! Why would you sell this money to us for a quick price? You could simply spend the coins one by one and live like a prince for the rest of your life!”

“Ah, my lord, who would believe that a man like me could have amassed a treasure like this? They’d call me a thief, and lock me away forever. And this is very ancient money, too. Even I can see that, though I can’t read; for these are strange faces, these Coronals and Pontifexes here. People would be suspicious of money this old. They’d refuse it, not knowing the faces of these kings. No. No. I found the box by a canal, where the rain had washed away the soil. Someone buried it long ago for safe keeping, I suppose, and never returned for it. But it does me no good, my lords, to have such money as this.” The old man grinned slyly, showing a few snaggled teeth. “Give me—ah, let us say two hundred crowns, in money I can spend—give it me in ten-crown pieces, or even smaller coins—and the box is yours to deal with as you wish. For I see that you three are men of consequence, my lords, and will know how to dispose of money of this sort.”

“Is a babbling old moon-calf,” said Gialaurys, tossing his coin back in the box and tapping his forefinger to his forehead. “No one would refuse good silver royals, however old they be.” And Septach Melayn nodded and smiled and twirled his forefinger in a little circle.

With which opinion Prestimion found himself in agreement. He felt pity for the dirty, bedraggled old man. That burning brightness in his gaze was insanity, not intelligence.

Surely this was one more dismaying instance of the strange madness that seemed to be polluting the world. He might indeed be a thief, yes, who had taken these coins from some collector of antiquities. Or, what was more likely from the looks of the box that held them, he really had found them beside the canal. But either way it was a madman’s act to be offering them so cheaply, the merest fraction of their true value, to strangers met by happenstance.

Nor did Prestimion want any entanglement in these dealings. How could he, of all people in the world, be party to a transaction by which he bought hundreds of royals’ worth of silver from a beggar for a double handful of crowns? He felt a touch of horror at standing this close to madness. Longing profoundly to be gone from this place, he told Septach Melayn to give the man fifty crowns and let him keep the treasure for some other buyer.

The beggar looked astonished as Septach Melayn counted out five ten-crown pieces and passed them across. But he took the money and tucked it in a belt beneath his robe. Then his crafty eyes widened and an expression that might have been fear flashed across his face. “Ah, but one must ever give value for money.” He snatched three coins from his own horde. Seizing Prestimion once more by the wrist, the old man pressed them into the palm of his hand, and went scurrying rapidly away, clutching his box of coins to his bony bosom.

“What a strange business,” Prestimion said. The sour aroma of the old lunatic’s tattered garments lingered after him. He poked gingerly at the ancient coins with his fingertip, turning them from side to side. “They’re odd-looking old things, aren’t they? Kanaba and Lord Sirruth, I think we have here, and Guadeloom and Lord Calintane, and this one—no, I can’t make these names out at all. Well, no matter. Here, take care of these for me,” he said, giving them to Septach Melayn. They moved along.—"Two hundred crowns for the whole box?” Prestimion said, after a time. “He could have asked twenty times as much. A fool, do you think, or a thief, or a madman?”

“Why not all three?” said Septach Melayn.

Putting the episode from their minds, they spent two days more in languid Hoikmar, drifting about the taverns and markets of that serene lakeside city. Two other troublesome incidents disturbed the tranquility of the visit. A lanky raddled-looking woman with utterly vacant eyes drifted up to Septach Melayn in the main avenue and draped a costly stole of scarlet gebrax hide around his shoulders, murmuring that the Pontifex had instructed her to give it to him. Upon saying which, she turned instantly and lost herself in the busy traffic of the street. And a little later that day, while they were buying a meal of grilled sausages from a Liiman in the city plaza, a well-dressed man of middle years quietly waiting on line behind them, a man who might have been a university professor or the proprietor of a prosperous jewelry boutique, suddenly cried out in a wild voice that the Liiman was selling poisoned meat. Shouldering his way forward, he up-ended the cart onto the pavement, sending hot coals and skewers of half-cooked sausages spraying everywhere about, and went marching furiously away growling to himself.

These were disquieting things. Prestimion’s purpose of going out with his companions in disguise had been to see at first hand the other side of Majipoor life, something other than that of the Castle and its gilded lords. But he had not anticipated so much darkness and strangeness, such a welter of irrational behavior.

Had it always been this way out in the cities? he wondered—open displays of madness, public manifestations of the bizarre? Or, as Septach Melayn had sometime ago suggested, was all this some sort of aftereffect of the obliteration of the memory of the war upon the minds of the most sensitive and vulnerable citizens? Either way the thought was distasteful. But Prestimion felt particular alarm at the possibility that he himself, by his desire to cleanse in an instant way the wound that the Korsibar insurrection had inflicted on the world, was responsible for this entire epidemic of madness, this strange plague of mental derangement, that appeared to be increasing in virulence from one week to the next.

In Minimool, Hoikmar’s neighbor in the Guardian Cities, further signs of such things made themselves manifest. Prestimion found two days there more than sufficient for him.

He had heard that Minimool was a place of distinctive and arresting appearance, but in his present mood he found it oppressively strange: a huddled-together city made up of clumps of tall narrow buildings with white walls and black roofs and tiny windows, crowded one up against another like so many bundles of spears. Steep vertiginous streets that were little more than alleyways separated one clump from the next. And here, too, he heard weird shrill laughter out of open windows high overhead, and saw more than a few people walking in the streets with fixed expressions and glassy eyes, and collided in a doorway with someone in a frantic hurry who burst into gulping breathless sobs as she went sprinting frenetically away.

His sleep was punctuated by troubled dreams as well. In one the beggar with the coin-box from Hoikmar came to him, grinning his evil snaggle-toothed grin, and opened the box and showered him with coins, hundreds of them, thousands, until he was half buried beneath their weight. Prestimion woke, trembling and sweating; but later he slept again, and another dream came, and this time he stood at the edge of a lovely pearly-hued lake at sunrise with This-met, quietly admiring a sky suffused with pink and emerald streaks, and Simbilon Khayf’s dark-haired daughter came up to them out of nowhere and swiftly thrust the silent unresisting Thismet into the water, where she vanished without a trace. This time Prestimion cried out harshly as he awakened, and Septach Melayn, lying on a nearby cot in the hostelry where they were spending the night, reached across and gripped him by the forearm until he was calm.

There was no more sleep for him that night in Minimool. From time to time strange tremors of distress came over him, and for a moment, just before dawn, it seemed to him almost as though the general madness were reaching up and engulfing him with its dread contagion. Then he brushed the feeling aside. It would not touch him, whatever it might be. But O! The people! The world!

“I have had enough of this tour, I think,” Prestimion said in the morning. “Today we return to the Castle.”

Plainly much was amiss out there in the world of everyday life; and Prestimion, once he was back, gave orders for the planning for his official visit to the cities of the Mount to be accelerated. No more skulking around in false whiskers and shabby costumes, not now. In the full panoply of the Coronal Lord he would go forth to six or seven of the most important cities among the Fifty, and confer with dukes and counts and mayors, and take the measure of the crisis that seemed to be enveloping the world with such rapidity here in the opening months of his reign.

First, though, the problem of Dantirya Sambail’s continued captivity needed a resolution of some sort.

He paid a call on the magus Maundigand-Klimd, who by now had established his headquarters in a group of vacant rooms on the far side of the Pinitor Court that had been the apartment of Korsibar before his seizure of the throne. Prestimion had expected to find the place filled by this time with all the arcane gear of the sorcerer’s trade, astrological charts on the walls, and heaps of mysterious leather-bound folios full of magical lore, and enigmatic mechanical instruments of the sort he had seen in the chambers of Gominik Halvor, the master of wizardry with whom he had studied the dark arts during his time in Triggoin: phalangaria and ambivials, hexaphores and ammatepilas, armillary spheres and astrolabes and alembics, and all of that.

But there were none of those things here. Prestimion saw just a few small unimportant looking devices laid out in indifferent order on the upper shelves of a simple unpainted bookcase that was otherwise empty. Their nature was unknown to him; they might easily have been calculating machines or other items of prosaic arithmetical function, not very different from those that Prestimion had pretended to deal in when he was in Stee. Or the cheap little geomantic devices that he had seen for sale in the midnight market of Bombifale, that night when he first had met Maundigand-Klimd, and which the Su-Suheris had scornfully dismissed as fraudulent and worthless. Maundigand-Klimd was not likely to have such things here, Prestimion decided. He was surprised by such sparseness, though.

Maundigand-Klimd had furnished the apartment only in the most stark and minimal way. In the main room Prestimion saw a sleeping-harness of the sort used by the Su-Suheris folk, and a couple of chairs for the benefit of human visitors, and a small table on which a handful of books and leaflets of little apparent significance lay casually strewn. There seemed to be little, if anything, in the rooms beyond, and throughout the place the ancient stone walls were altogether bare of ornament. The effect was sterile and chilling.

“This was a troubled trip for you, I think,” the magus said at once.

“You can see that, can you?”

“One scarcely needs to be a master of the mantic arts to see that, your lordship.”

Prestimion smiled grimly. “It’s that apparent? Yes. I suppose it is. I saw things I’d rather not have seen, and dreamed things I’d have been better off not dreaming. It’s exactly as I was told: there’s madness out there, Maundigand-Klimd. Much more of it than I had supposed there to be.”

Maundigand-Klimd replied with his disconcerting double nod, but made no other response.

“There were some who walked as though asleep in the streets, or laughed to themselves, or cried or screamed,” Prestimion said. “A kinsman of Count Fisiolo in Stee calls himself Lord Prestimion, and randomly sinks boats that he meets along the river for his own pleasure. In Hoikmar—” He had with him the three coins that the beggar had pressed into his hand, and, remembering them now, he brought them out and laid them before Maundigand-Klimd. “I had these of a poor sad crazy old man there, who came upon us all eager to sell us a rusty box heavy with good silver royals for a handful of crowns. Look you, Maundigand-Klimd: these coins are thousands of years old. Lord Sirruth, this is, and Lord Guadeloom, and here—”

The Su-Suheris set the three coins out in a precise row in the palm of his own gaunt white hand. The left head gave Prestimion a quizzical look. “You bought the whole box of them, did you, my lord?”

“How could I? But we gave him a little money for charity’s sake, and he forced these three on us in return, and turned and fled.”

“He was not so mad as you suppose, I think. And you did well not to make him an offer. These coins are false.”

“False?”

Maundigand-Klimd placed one hand over the other, closing the coins between, and held them that way for a time. “I can feel the vibration of their atoms,” he said. “These coins have cores of bronze, and just a thin wash of silver over them. I could easily scrape through to the base metal with my fingernail. How likely is it that Lord Sirruth’s ten-royal pieces had bronze cores?” The Su-Suheris handed back the coins. “There are madmen galore roaming the world, my lord, but your poor old man of Hoikmar is not one of them. A simple swindler is all he is.”

“There’s some comfort in that,” Prestimion said, in as light a tone as he could manage just then. “At least there’s one out there who still has his wits!—But where’s all this madness coming from, do you suppose? Septach Melayn says it may be connected with the obliteration. That there’s a vacuum in people’s minds where the memories of the war once were, and strange things go rushing in when vacuums are created.”

“I find a degree of wisdom in that notion, my lord. On a certain day some months past I felt what I thought of as an emptiness entering me, though I had no idea of its cause. As it happened I was strong enough to withstand its effects. Others evidently are not so fortunate.”

A pang of guilt and shame seared through Prestimion at the Su-Suheris sorcerer’s words. Could it be? Was the whole world to be infected with madness because of his spur-of-the-moment decision on the battlefield at Thegomar Edge?

No, he thought. No. No. No. Septach Melayn’s theory is wrong. These are isolated, random instances. A world of many billions of people will always have a great many madmen among those billions. It is only coincidence that so much of this is coming to our attention just now.

“Be that as it may,” Prestimion said, pushing back his discomfort, “we’ll look into the truth of it at some other time. Meanwhile: I’ll shortly be leaving the Castle again for some weeks, or even months, to make formal visits to several of the cities of the Mount. The unfinished matter of Dantirya Sambail has to be dealt with before I go.”

“And what is your pleasure, my lord?”

“You spoke not long ago of giving him back his memory of the civil war,” Prestimion said. “Can such a thing actually be done?”

“Any spell can be reversed by the one who cast it.”

“It was Heszmon Gorse of Triggoin, and his father Gominik Halvor. But they have gone off to their home in the north, and would be many weeks in returning if I summoned them back now. And in any case they themselves no longer have any inkling of what it was I asked them to do.”

A flicker of surprise crossed Maundigand-Klimd’s faces. “Is that so, my lord?”

“The obliteration was complete, Maundigand-Klimd. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys and I were the only ones excepted from it. And since the day it was done you are the only one who’s been told that it happened.”

“Ah.”

“I’m not eager to allow knowledge of it into the possession of anyone else, not even Gominik Halvor and his son. But Dantirya Sambail was the prime agent of the usurpation, and for that he has to be punished, and it’s evil to punish a man for something he doesn’t know he’s done. I want to see some shred of remorse from him before I pronounce sentence. Or some awareness, at the very least, that he deserves what I intend to impose on him. Tell me this, Maundigand-Klimd: could you undo the obliteration in him?”

The Su-Suheris took a moment to reply.

“Quite probably I could, my lord.”

“You hesitated. Why?”

“I was contemplating the consequences of doing such a thing, and I saw—well, certain ambiguities.”

Prestimion gave him a puzzled frown. “Make yourself perfectly clear, Maundigand-Klimd.”

Another brief pause. “Do you know how I see into the future, my lord?”

“How could I possibly know that?”

“Let me explain it, then.” The Su-Suheris touched his right hand to his right forehead, and then to the other one. “Alone among all intelligent species of the known universe, my lord, my race is constructed with a double mind. Not a double identity, despite our custom of carrying a pair of names apiece; merely a double mind. One self divided between two brain-cases. I may speak with this mouth or that, as I please; I may turn this head, or that one, to observe something; but I am a single self none the less. Each brain has the capacity to carry on an independent train of thought. But they are also capable of joining in a united effort.”

“Indeed,” said Prestimion, scarcely understanding at all, and mystified by where this might be heading.

“Do you think, lordship, that our insight into things to come is brought about by lighting incense and muttering incantations, invoking demons and dark forces, and such? No, my lord. That is not how it is done by us. Such folk as the geomancers of Tidias may rely on such methods, yes, their bronze tripods and colored powders, their chanting, their spells. But not us.” He passed one hand, long fingers outspread, before both his faces. “We establish a linkage between one mind and the other. A vortex, if you will: a whirlpool of tension as the neural forces meet and swirl round each other. And in that vortex we are thrust forward along the river of time. We are given glimpses of what lies ahead.”

“Reliable glimpses?”

“Usually, my lord.”

Prestimion tried to imagine what it was like. “You see actual scenes of the future? The faces of people? You hear the words they speak?”

“No, nothing like that,” said Maundigand-Klimd. “It’s far less concrete and specific, my lord. It is a subjective thing, a matter of impressions, inferences, subtle sensations, intuitions. Insight into probabilities. There’s no way I could make you really understand. One must experience it. And that—”

“Is impossible for someone who has only one head. All right, Maundigand-Klimd. At least it sounds rational to me. You know I have a bias in favor of rationality, don’t you? I’m not truly comfortable with the sorcery of incantations and aromatic powders, and I don’t expect I ever will be. But there’s an aspect of science, or something like science, in what you say. A telepathic communion of your two minds—a temporal vortex, a whirlpool that carries your perceptions forward in time—that’ s easier for me to swallow than the whole superstitious rigmarole of ammatepilas and pentagrams and magical amulets.—So tell me, Maundigand-Klimd: What do you see, when you cast the auguries for restoring the Procurator’s lost memories?”

Again that little moment of hesitation. “A multitude of forking paths.”

“I can see that much myself,” Prestimion said. “What I need to know is where those paths lead.”

“Some, to complete success in all your endeavors. Some to trouble. Some to great trouble. And then there are some whose destinations are utterly unclear.”

“This is not helpful, Maundigand-Klimd.”

“There are sorcerers who will tell a prince whatever he wishes to hear. I am not one of those, my lord.”

“I understand that, and I’m grateful for it.” Prestimion let out his breath in a soft whistling sound.—"Give me a reasonable assessment of risk, at least. I feel the moral necessity of making Dantirya Sambail’s mind intact again as a prerequisite to passing sentence on him. Do you see anything inherently dangerous in that?”

“Not if he remains your prisoner until the sentence is carried out, my lord,” said Maundigand-Klimd.

“You’re certain of that?”

“I have no doubt.”

“Well, then. That sounds good enough for me. Let’s go to the tunnels and pay him a little visit.”

The Procurator was in a far less amiable mood than on the occasion of his last interview with Prestimion. Obviously the additional weeks of confinement had told on his patience and temper: there was nothing in the least affable or jovial about the basilisk glance that he gave Prestimion now. And when the Su-Suheris entered his cell a moment after the Coronal, stooping low to negotiate the arching entrance, Dantirya Sambail looked altogether vitriolic.

Along with rage, though, there seemed to be a certain expression of fear in his amethyst-hued eyes. Prestimion had never before seen the slightest flicker of dismay on the Procurator’s features: he was a man of utter self-confidence, ever in command of his soul. But the sight of Maundigand-Klimd appeared to have shaken that command now.

“What is this, Prestimion?” Dantirya Sambail asked acidly. “Why do you bring this alien monstrosity into my lair?”

“You do him an injustice with such harsh words,” said Prestimion. “This is Maundigand-Klimd, high magus to the court, a man of science and learning. He’s here to repair your injured mind, cousin, and bring you back to full consciousness of certain deeds that have been stripped from your recollections.”

The Procurator’s eyes went bright as flame. “Aha! You admit it then, that you tampered with my mind! Which you denied, Prestimion, on your last visit.”

“I never denied it. I simply made no reply when you accused me of it. Well, cousin, you were indeed tampered with, and I regret that now. I come here today to see that it’s undone. And we will now proceed.—How will you go about this, Maundigand-Klimd?”

Fury and terror in equal proportion made Dantirya Sambail’s fleshy face redden and swell. His great spreading nostrils widened like yawning chasms and his eyes shrank down to slits, so that their strange beauty was concealed and only his malevolence could be seen. He shrank back against the green-glowing wall of the cavernous cell, making angry throttling gestures with his hands as though defying the Su-Suheris to approach him. Something like a snarl came from his throat.

But that ugly sound died away suddenly into a placid murmur, and his puffed-up features relaxed, and his meaty shoulders slumped and went slack. He stood as though bewildered before the looming form of the towering sorcerer and made no further attempt at resistance.

Prestimion had no idea what kind of transaction was passing between the two of them. But it seemed clear that one was in progress. Maundigand-Klimd’s heads stood forward in eerie rigidity at the summit of the long massive column that was his neck. The two tapering skulls appeared to be touching, or almost so, along their crests. Something invisible but undeniably real hovered in the air between the Su-Suheris and Dantirya Sambail. There was a terrible crackling silence in the room. There was a sense of almost unbearable tension.

Then the tension broke; and Maundigand-Klimd stepped back, nodding that weird double nod of his in what looked very much like satisfaction.

Dantirya Sambail seemed stunned.

He took a couple of staggering steps backward and slipped limply into a chaise along the wall, where he sat slumped for a moment with his head in his hands. But quickly the formidable strength of the man appeared to be reasserting itself. He looked up; gradually the old demonic power returned to his expression; he smiled ferociously at Prestimion, the clearest sign that he was his full self again, and said, “It was a close thing, I see, that day by Thegomar Edge. A little better aim with that axe and I’d be Coronal right now instead of a prisoner in these tunnels of yours.”

“The Divine guided me that day, cousin. You were never meant to be Coronal.”

“And were you, Prestimion?”

“Lord Confalume, at least, thought so. Thousands of good men died to back his choice. All of whom would be alive today, but for your villainies.”

“Am I such a villain? If that’s the case, then so were Korsibar and his magus Sanibak-Thastimoon. Not to mention your friend the Lady Thismet, cousin.”

“The Lady Thismet lived long enough to see the error of her ways, and amply demonstrated her repentance,” said Prestimion coolly. “Sanibak-Thastimoon had his punishment on the battlefield at the hands of Septach Melayn. Korsibar was a mere dupe; and in any event he’s dead also. Of the shapers of the insurrection, cousin, you’re the only one who lives on to contemplate the foolishness and wickedness and shameful wastefulness of the entire infamous thing. Contemplate it now. The opportunity to do so is yours.”

“Foolishness, Prestimion? Wickedness? Wastefulness?” Dantirya Sambail laughed a great boisterous laugh. “The foolishness was yours, and bloody foolishness it was, at that. The wickedness and the wastefulness: they were yours as well, not any of my doing. You talk of insurrection, do you? That was your insurrection, not Korsibar’s. Korsibar was Coronal, not you! He had been crowned in this very Castle; he was on the throne! And you and your two henchmen willingly chose to launch a rebellion against him, to the cost of how many lives, I could not begin to tell you!”

“You believe that, do you?”

“It was nothing but the truth.”

“I won’t argue the legalities with you, Dantirya Sambail. You know as well as I that a Coronal’s son does not succeed his father. Korsibar simply grabbed the throne, with your encouragement, and Sanibak-Thastimoon bamboozled old Confalume with some wizardly hypnosis to make him accept it.”

“And it would have been better off for everyone, Prestimion, if you’d let things stand that way. Korsibar was an idiot, but he was a good uncomplicated man who would have run things in the proper way, or at least would have let those who know how to run things in the proper way do so without interference. Whereas you, determined to put your mark on every little thing, determined in your pathetic boyish fashion to be a Great Coronal Who Will Be Remembered in History, will manage to bring the whole world down into calamity and ruin by insistently getting in the way of—”

“Enough,” Prestimion said. “I understand completely how you would have liked the world to be run. And have devoted several difficult years of my life to making certain that it isn’t going to happen that way.” He shook his head. “You feel no remorse at all, do you, Dantirya Sambail?”

“Remorse? For what?”

“Well done. You’ve condemned yourself out of your own mouth. And therefore I find you guilty of acts of high treason, cousin, and hereby sentence you—”

“Guilty? What about a trial? Where’s my accuser? Who speaks in my defense? Do we have a jury?”

“I am your accuser. You choose not to speak in your own defense, and no one else will. Nor is there need of a jury, though I can call in Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, if you prefer.”

“Very amusing. What will you do, Prestimion, have my head cut off before a mob in the Dizimaule Plaza? That’ll put you into the history books, all right! A public execution, the first one in—what? Ten thousand years? Followed, of course, by a civil war, as all of irate Zimroel rises against the tyrannical Coronal who dared to put the legitimate and anointed Procurator of Ni-moya to death for reasons that he was entirely unable to explain.”

“I should put you to death, yes, and damn the consequences, Dantirya Sambail. But that’s not what I plan to do. I lack the necessary barbarity.” Prestimion gave Dantirya Sambail a piercing look. “I pardon you of the capital crimes of which you are guilty. You are, however, stripped forever of the title of Procurator, and deprived for the rest of your life of all authority beyond the confines of your own estate, though I leave you your lands and wealth.”

Dantirya Sambail gazed at him through half-closed eyelids. “That is very kind of you, Prestimion.”

“There’s something more, cousin. Your soul’s a cesspool of poisonous thoughts. That must be altered, and will be, before I can allow you to leave the Castle and return to your home across the sea.—Maundigand-Klimd, would it be possible, do you think, to adjust this man’s mind in such a way as to make him a more benign citizen? To strip him of wrath and envy and hatred as I’ve just stripped him of rank and power, and send him out into the world a more decent person?”

“For the love of the Divine, Prestimion! I’d rather you cut off my head,” bellowed Dantirya Sambail.

“Yes, I believe you would. You’ll be a total stranger to yourself, won’t you, once all that foul venom has been pumped out of you?—What do you say, Maundigand-Klimd? Can it be done?”

“I think it can, yes, my lord.”

“Good. Get about it, then, as quickly as you can. Wipe away these memories of the civil war that you’ve just restored, now that he has seen what he did to merit the sentence I pronounced—wipe those away now, immediately—and then do what you must to transform him into a being fit for life in civilized society. I’ll be leaving very soon, you know, on a journey to Peritole and Strave and several other cities of the Mount. I want this man rendered harmless, and I want it done quickly.—And after I’ve come back, Dantirya Sambail, we’ll have one more little chat, and if I decide then that I can take the risk of setting you free, why, free you’ll surely be! Is that not kind of me, cousin? And merciful, and loving?”

12

It was not a grand processional, not in the strict sense of the term, for that would have required him to let himself be seen in the farthest-flung regions of the realm, not merely the cities of Alhanroel but also those of the other continents, places he knew of only in the sketchiest way, Pidruid and Narabal and Til-omon on Zimroel’s far coast, and Tolaghai and Natu Gorvinu, at least, in burning Suvrael. The full journey would take years. It was too soon in his reign for such a prolonged absence from Castle Mount.

No, not a grand processional, only a state visit to some neighboring cities. But it was certainly a processional, and very grand in its own way. Out through the Dizimaule Gate and down the Grand Calintane Highway the Coronal went, aboard the first of a long succession of ornate royal floaters, and with him went his brothers Abrigant and Teotas and half the high officials of his young administration, the Grand Admiral Gialaurys and the Counsellors Navigorn of Hoikmar and Belditan the younger of Gimkandale and Yegan of Low Morpin, and Septach Melayn’s kinsman Dembitave, Duke of Tidias, and many more. Septach Melayn himself had remained behind as regent at the Castle: it seemed best not to leave the place entirely bereft of its major figures, even for the few weeks of this tour.

Prestimion meant to stop in one city of each of the five rings of the Mount. The various host city mayors had, of course, been notified weeks before, and were ready to meet the high and crushingly costly responsibility of providing lodgings and proper festivities for a Coronal and his entourage.

Muldemar was the chosen stop among the High Cities: Prestimion’s own native place, where he could sleep once more at his family’s great estate of Muldemar House, and hunt sigimoins and bilantoons in his own game preserve, and embrace the loyal retainers who had served his parents and his grandparents before them, and accept the homage of the good people of Muldemar City, to whom he was not only their Coronal but their prince and their friend. Here he quietly asked the stewards and chamberlains whether there had been any problems among the workers of late; and was told, yes, yes, a few strange things had occurred, people complaining of a kind of forgetfulness of trivial and non-trivial things, and even some serious instances of deep confusion and inner distress verging on—well, on madness. But it was only a passing thing, Prestimion was told, and no reason for great concern.

Then it was on to Peritole of the Inner Cities, where seven million people lived in splendid isolation amid some of the most spectacular scenery of the upper Mount: subordinate mountain ranges of wild beauty, and strange purple conical peaks rising to great heights out of gray-green graveled plains, and above all the magnificent natural stone staircase of Peritole Pass, that gave access from above to the long sloping sprawl of the tremendous mountain’s midsection. In Peritole, too, Prestimion heard tales of breakdown and mental confusion, though those who told these stories to him brushed them quickly aside as insignificant, and urged the Coronal to sample another tray of the pungent smoked meats that were the specialty of the city.

Downward. Strave of the Guardian Cities, a place of the grandest architectural exuberance, no two structures remotely alike, great palaces chock-a-block defying one another in their glorious excess, profusions of towers and pavilions and belvederes and steeples and belfries and cupolas and rotundas and porticos sprouting madly everywhere like giant mushrooms. The city had only recently emerged from a period of official mourning, for Earl Alexid of Strave had died not long before—of a sudden seizure, it was said. The new earl, Alexid’s son Verligar, was hardly more than a boy, and plainly overawed by the presence of the Coronal at his side. But he pledged his loyalty most graciously. That was a taxing moment for Prestimion, who was privately aware that his one-time friend and hunting companion Earl Alexid had died not of any inward failing of his flesh but in fact under the sword of Septach Melayn, in the battle of Arkilon plain, during the early days of the Korsibar insurrection.

There had been some outbreaks of mental disturbances in Strave as well, it seemed, though neither Earl Verligar nor anyone else was greatly eager to speak of them. The subject seemed an embarrassment to them, as it had been in Muldemar.

When the feasting was done in Strave the Coronal and his companions moved on to their next destination. That was white-walled Minimool, of the Guardian Cities; and from there, after a few days, a journey of seventy miles down the long sloping flank of the lower Mount brought Prestimion to Gimkandale of the Free Cities, and then another hundred miles of zigzagging highways at the mountain’s widespreading base took him to the final city of his tour, ancient Normork, second oldest of the Slope Cities.

“This is a dark heavy place,” Gialaurys murmured to Prestimion, as their floater passed through the curiously inconspicuous gate that was the single opening in Normork’s gigantic wall of black stone. “I feel its weight on me already, and we’re scarcely inside the town!”

Prestimion, who was leaning from his floater’s window, waving and smiling to the crowd that lined the road, felt it also. Normork clung to the dark fangs of the range known as Normork Crest the way some hunted animal clings to a precarious perch that it knows to be beyond its enemies’ reach. The great black wall that protected the city—against whom? Prestimion wondered—was entirely out of proportion to the towers of gray stone behind it, a fantastically overbearing fortification impossible to justify by any rational means. And that lone tiny gate—what a strange statement that made! Was this not Majipoor, where all peoples lived in peace and harmony? Why hide yourselves like frightened mice in such a miserable inward-turning fashion as this?

But he was Coronal of all Majipoor, the strange cities as well as the beautiful ones, and it was not for him to disapprove of the way any place cared to display itself to the world. And so he favored the Normork folk with dazzling smiles and enthusiastic salutes, and made starbursts to them as they made them to him, and let them see by every aspect of his demeanor how pleased he was to be entering their splendid city. And to Gialaurys he said, hissing under his breath, “Smile! Look happy! This place is much beloved by those who dwell here, and we are not here as its judges, Gialaurys.”

“Beloved, is it? I’d sooner embrace a sea-dragon!”

“Pretend you are in Piliplok,” said Prestimion. A sly remark, that was; for Gialaurys’s own native city, somber Piliplok where no street deviated so much as an inch from the rigid plan that had been laid out thousands of years before, was itself widely considered a grim and depressing place by those who did not happen to have been born there. But Prestimion’s light-hearted gibe slipped easily past the Grand Admiral, as such gibes often did, and in his diligent way Gialaurys summoned up the closest thing he could manage to a sunny smile and thrust his head out the window on his side of the floater to show the Normork folk what delight he felt at beholding their pretty town.

It was a bright golden day, at least, and the gray stone blocks out of which the buildings of Normork were constructed took on a pleasantly radiant shimmer. Once one is inside the wall, Prestimion thought, the city has a certain kind of ponderous charm.

There was nothing charming, though, about the fortresslike palace of the Counts of Normork. It was a solid mass of stone, crouching in a curving bay of the wall like a great predatory beast about to spring upon the city it dominated. The plaza in front of it was packed with people, thousands of them, with untold thousands more jammed into the narrow streets beyond. “Prestimion!” they were shouting. “Prestimion! Lord Prestimion!” Or so he supposed the words to be; but the outcry blurred into chaotic incoherence as it rebounded from the rough stone walls all around, and became merely a dull booming rhythmic sound.

Count Meglis—a new man; Prestimion did not know him well; he was some distant relative of Iram, the former count who had been slain in the civil war—came out to greet him. This Meglis was a swarthy man, wide and blocky and built low to the ground like the palace of which he was now the possessor, with unpleasant little bloodshot eyes and a great startling space between his front teeth both above and below. There was something about his square-sided frame and solidly anchored stance that reminded Prestimion uncomfortably of Dantirya Sambail. It would have been much more pleasing to be received here today by the good-hearted red-haired Count Iram, that superb chariot-racer and more than able archer.

But Iram had fallen fighting in the service of Korsibar, and so had his lithe young brother Lamiran; and the welcome that this Count Meglis offered seemed genuine and warm enough. He stood firmly planted on the lowest steps of his palace, arms outspread, grinning a great snaggle-toothed grin that conveyed complete and absolute delight at the idea that the Coronal of Majipoor was to be his guest at dinner tonight.

Prestimion stepped from his floater. Gialaurys was just to his left; capable gray-eyed Akbalik, Prince Serithorn’s nephew, was the officer of the guard at his right. To Prestimion’s surprise, Count Meglis did not stir from his spot. Protocol called for the Count to come forward to the Coronal, not for the Coronal to go to the Count; but Meglis, still grinning, still holding his arms out wide, stood where he was, twenty or thirty paces away, as though he expected Prestimion to ascend the palace steps to him in order to receive his embrace.

Well, why not stand there, fool that he obviously was? What would this man, catapulted upward with so little preparation into his title by the premature deaths both of Iram and his brother, know of court protocol? But someone should have coached him. Prestimion, though rarely a stickler for proper procedure, nevertheless could hardly make the first move himself, and Meglis did not seem to understand what was required of him.

So each maintained his position, and the moment of stasis stretched on and on. Then, just as it began to seem to Prestimion that the deadlock would never end, something unexpected happened. A high female voice from the crowd called out, “Lordship! Lordship!” Prestimion saw a pretty young woman—no, a girl; she was fifteen, sixteen at most detach herself from the front row of the crowd and set out in his direction, carrying an elaborate floral bouquet, crimson-and-gold halatingas and bright yellow morigoins and deep-green treymonions and many more blooms that he could not have named, all woven together in the most beautiful way.

Prestimion’s guards moved immediately to cut off her approach. But her boldness amused him. He shook his head and beckoned for her to advance. Since the squat, ugly Count Meglis was still stupidly waiting up there with grinning face and widespread arms, and seemed to intend to wait like that there forever, it would be a pleasant and diverting interruption of the present awkwardness, Prestimion thought, to accept these splendid flowers from this lovely girl.

She was very attractive: tall and slender—a bit taller than he was himself, he saw—with a great mass of reddish-gold curls cascading about her face and shining gray-violet eyes. Her expression was a charming mixture of fear and awe and eagerness and—yes—love. That was the only word for it. He had never seen such unqualified adoration in a person’s eyes, never.

She was trembling as she extended the bouquet.

“How marvelous they are,” Prestimion said, taking them from her. “I’ll keep them beside my bed tonight.” She flushed a bright scarlet and made a fluttering starburst at him and began to back away, but Prestimion, captivated by the shy and innocent loveliness of her, was not ready to have her go. He took a step or two in her direction. “What’s your name, girl?”

“Sithelle, your lordship.” Her voice was husky with terror. She could barely get the sounds out.

“Sithelle. A lovely name. You live here in Normork, do you? Are you still at school?”

She began to make some sort of reply. But Prestimion was unable to hear whatever she might have said, because in that moment chaos descended on the scene. Out of the multitudes packed close in the plaza a second person abruptly emerged, a thin wild-eyed bearded man who came prancing forward, screaming wildly, bellowing clotted unintelligible words, the gibberish of a lunatic. He was brandishing in his upraised right hand a farmer’s sickle, honed to glittering sharpness. The girl was all that separated Prestimion from him. As the madman came bearing down upon them she turned automatically in the direction of the disturbance and virtually collided with him as she stepped forward.

“Look out!” Prestimion cried.

She had no chance. Unhesitatingly, almost without giving it a thought, the man slashed at her with the sickle, a quick impatient chopping swipe as though he wanted merely to clear her from his path. The girl fell away to one side and slumped to the pavement, kicking convulsively and clutching desperately at her throat. With the peculiar intense clarity that comes over one at such moments Prestimion saw unceasing streams of blood flowing between her clamped fingers.

An instant later the madman rose up before him, the bloody sickle lifted high. Gialaurys and Akbalik, aware by now of what was taking place, rushed toward him. But someone else reached Prestimion first. A burly young man of impressive size had burst out of the crowd only seconds behind the man with the sickle, and now, acting with startling speed, he caught up with the assassin, seized his right arm by the wrist, and bent it sharply backward. The sickle dropped from his hand, hit the ground with a tinny clatter, and skittered harmlessly away. The young man, crooking his other arm, wrapped it around the madman’s throat and closed it on him with remorseless twisting force.

There was a sharp snapping sound. The madman went limp, his head lolling loosely. The big young man hurled him contemptuously away from him like a discarded doll.

He knelt then beside the wounded girl, whose entire upper body was covered in bright blood. She was no longer moving. A great moan came from the boy as he inspected her frightful wound. For a moment he seemed overwhelmed by shock and grief. Then, tenderly scooping her into his arms, he rose and walked off into the crowd with his burden.

The whole extraordinary event had taken no more than a few seconds. Prestimion felt dazed by it all. He struggled to regain his poise.

Akbalik was standing grim-faced above the fallen and motionless assassin, now, pinning him to the ground with the tip of his sword as if expecting him to rise and begin swinging the sickle again. The other guardsmen arrayed themselves in a close formation in front of the astounded townspeople, cutting the Coronal off from their view. Gialaurys loomed up like a wall in front of Prestimion.

“Lordship?” he cried, wide-eyed with alarm. “Are you safe?”

Prestimion nodded. He was badly shaken, but the sickle had come nowhere near him. Quickly he turned and trotted up the palace steps toward Meglis, who was still standing there, gaping like a drowned habbagog. The royal party hurried inside. Someone brought a bowl of chilled wine, and Prestimion gulped it greedily. The vision of that bloodied girl—struck down before his eyes, dying, perhaps already dead—blazed in his mind. And the lunatic assassin: his wild howls, those crazed eyes, that flashing blade! But for the accident that the girl had happened to be standing right in front of him, Prestimion knew, he would probably be lying dead in the plaza this very moment. Her presence there had saved him, yes, and that of the sturdy young man who had grabbed the assailant’s arm.

How strange, he thought, to be the target of an assassination attempt! Had a Coronal ever died in such a way? Cut down in front of the cheering populace by a man swinging a blade? He doubted it. It went against all reason. The Coronal was the embodiment of the world; to kill him was to shatter a continent, to send all of Alhanroel, say, to the bottom of the sea. Korsibar’s seizing of the throne was something he could almost understand: it was one prince asserting a claim, however invalid it might be, against the rights of another. Not this: this was new. This was madness: an emptiness in someone’s soul driving him to create an emptiness in the world. Prestimion gave thanks to the Divine that it had failed. Not merely for his own sake; that was too obvious to be worth thinking about. But for the world’s. The world could not afford to have the Coronal struck down in the street like some beast in a slaughterhouse.

Prestimion turned to Akbalik. “Find that boy, and bring him here right away. I want to know how the girl is, too.” And, to Gialaurys: “What’s become of the assassin?”

“Dead, lordship.”

“Damnation! I didn’t want him killed, Gialaurys. He should have been held for questioning.”

Akbalik, who had reached the palace door, paused and turned. “Nothing could be done, my lord. His neck had been broken. I was standing over a corpse.”

“Let’s get some information about who he was, at any rate. Just a solitary lunatic? Or do we have a conspiracy here, I wonder?”

Meglis now came bumbling up, muttering imbecilic apologies, inarticulately craving the Coronal’s pardon for this unfortunate incident. He was an altogether contemptible person, Prestimion decided. Another hard consequence of Korsibar’s terrible folly: the flower of Majipoor’s aristocracy had perished in the war, and all too many of the great titles were in the hands of fools or boys.

In late afternoon Akbalik returned to the palace. The young man who had saved Prestimion’s life was with him.

“This is Dekkeret,” Akbalik said. “The girl was his cousin.”

“Was?”

“She died within moments, my lord,” said the boy. His voice quavered just a little. He was very pale, and could barely meet Prestimion’s gaze. The overpowering grief he felt was obvious; but he appeared to have it under tight control. “It is the most terrible loss. She was my best friend. And talked for weeks of nothing else but your visit, and how badly she wanted to have a glimpse of you at close range when you were here. And for you to have a glimpse of her, my lord. I think she was in love with you.”

“I think so too,” Prestimion said. He gave the boy a long, careful look. He seemed very impressive. Prestimion had learned long ago that there are some people whose qualities are instantly apparent, and that was the way with this Dek-keret: no doubt but that he was intelligent, sensitive, strong within and without. And, perhaps, ambitious. The boy was behaving very well, too, under the impact of his lovely cousin’s awful death.

An idea began suddenly to form in him. “How old are you, Dekkeret?”

“Eighteen last Fourday, sir.”

“Are you in school?”

“Two more months, my lord.”

“And then?”

“I haven’t decided, sir. Governmental service, possibly. At the Castle, if I can manage it, or else some post with the Pontificate. My father’s a salesman, who goes from city to city, but that has no appeal to me.” And then, as if speaking of himself were of no interest to him:—"The man who killed my cousin? What is going to happen to him, my lord?”

“He’s dead, Dekkeret. You pulled his neck back a little too far, I’m afraid.”

“Ah. I don’t always know my own strength, sir. Is it a bad thing that I killed him, lordship?”

“In fact I would have preferred to have had the opportunity of asking him a question or two about why he felt the way he apparently did about me. But in the heat of the moment you could hardly have been expected to handle him with any special delicacy. And it was good that you moved as quickly as you did.—Are you serious about a career at the Castle, boy?”

Color rose to Dekkeret’s cheeks. “Oh, my lord! Yes, my lord! Yes. Yes. There’s nothing I would want more in life than that!”

“If only everything could be arranged so easily as this can,” Prestimion said, with a genial smile. He glanced toward Akbalik. “When we head back to the Castle, he comes with us. Enroll him as a knight-initiate and see that he’s given accelerated training. Take him under your wing. I put you in charge of him, Akbalik. Set him on his way.”

“I’ll look after him well, my lord.”

“Do that. Who knows? We may have found the next Coronal here today, eh? Stranger things have happened.”

Dekkeret’s face was a fiery red and he was blinking rapidly, as though this astonishing fulfillment of his wildest fantasies had brought him to the edge of tears and he was struggling to fight them back. But then he regained his poise. With great dignity he dropped to his knees before Prestimion and made a solemn starburst, and offered his thanks in a low, unsteady voice.

Prestimion gently told him to stand. “You’ll do well among us, I know.—And I’m deeply sorry about your cousin. I could tell, just in those few moments of speaking with her, what a wonderful girl she must have been. Her death will haunt me for a long time to come.” Those were no empty words. The ghastly purposeless murder of that beautiful child had stirred grim memories in him. Rising, he said to Gialaurys, “Send word to Meglis that the banquet for tonight is canceled, if he hasn’t managed to figure that out himself. Have a light dinner brought to me in my quarters. I don’t want to see anyone or talk to anyone, is that clear? In the morning we’ll set out for the Castle.”

The Coronal spent a dark, brooding evening alone. The sight of that flashing sickle, those spurting gouts of blood, would not leave him. The girl’s gentle face, wide-eyed with adoration and fear, kept blurring into a swirling mist before him and transforming itself into Thismet’s very different features. Again and again his tormented mind conjured up for him the grim scene that had come bursting into his mind so many times before, the bloody field of Beldak marsh in the final moments of the battle of Thegomar Edge, the sorcerer Sanibak-Thastimoon rearing up before Thismet with the dagger in his hand—

He dared not sleep, knowing what dreams were likely to come. A few books were in his baggage. He chose one at random and sat up reading far into the night. The Heights of Castle Mount, it was, that creaky old epic of the long-ago past, rich with tales of valiant Coronals riding forth into remote and perilous corners of the planet. Gladly he lost himself in its pages. Had any of them really existed, those ancient glorious heroes, or were they only names out of fantasy? And would someone, someday, write a poem about him, the tragic and heroic Lord Prestimion, who had loved and lost his enemy’s sister, and then—A knock at the door. This late?

“Who’s there? What is it?” Prestimion said, not troubling to conceal his annoyance. “Gialaurys, my lord.”

“I wanted no company tonight.”

“I know that, Prestimion. But there’s an urgent message from Septach Melayn at the Castle. For your eyes alone, immediate response required. I couldn’t let it wait until morning.”

Prestimion sighed. “Very well.” He flung his book aside and went to the door.

The letter bore Prestimion’s own seal. Septach Melayn had sent it in his capacity as regent, then. Urgent indeed: connected, perhaps, to this afternoon’s attempt on his life? Hastily he cracked the blob of red wax and unfolded the letter.

“No,” he said, after scanning it a moment. A drumbeat pounding started at his temples. He closed his eyes. “By all the demons of Triggoin, no!”

“My lord?”

“Here. Read it yourself.”

The message was a brief one. Even Gialaurys, carefully tracing out the words with his fingertip, speaking them silently aloud as he moved along the line, needed only an instant or two to absorb its import.

He looked up. His stolid face was gray with shock.

“Dantirya Sambail has escaped from the Castle? And Mandralisca too? Heading for Zimroel, so it says here, to set up a government in opposition to yours. But this is impossible, my lord! How can it be?—Do you think this is Septach Melayn’s idea of a joke, Prestimion?”

Prestimion managed a somber smile. “Not even his notion of wit could stretch as far as this, Gialaurys.”

“Dantirya Sambail!” Gialaurys cried, prowling restlessly now about the room. “Always Dantirya Sambail!—There’s been some treason here, my lord. If only we’d put him to death without hesitation, right there on the battlefield, this would never have—”

“If only, yes. If only. That is not a useful thought, Gialaurys.” Prestimion took back the letter and stared numbly at it, reading it again and again as though he expected to find its message changing after a time into something less horrific.

But it was ever the same. And he could hear Maundigand-Klimd’s words now echoing in his ears, from that day when they had spoken of what the magus had seen as he pondered the possible consequences of giving Dantirya Sambail back his lost memories: I saw—well—certain ambiguities. A multitude of forking paths.

Yes, Prestimion thought. A multitude of forking paths. And now I must traverse them all.