Sorcerers of Majipoor

1

There had been omens all year, a rain of blood over Ni-moya and sleek hailstones shaped like tears falling on three of the cities of Castle Mount and then a true nightmare vision, a giant four-legged black beast with fiery ruby eyes and a single spiraling horn in its forehead, swimming through the air above the port city of Alaisor at twilight. That was a beast of a sort never before seen on Majipoor, not anywhere in the land and certainly not in the sky. And now, in his virtually inaccessible bedchamber at the deepest level of the Labyrinth, the aged Pontifex Prankipin lay dying at last, surrounded by the corps of mages and wizards and thaumaturges that had been the comfort of the old man’s later years.

Throughout the world it was a time of tension and apprehension. Who could tell what transformations and hazards the death of the Pontifex might bring? Things had been stable for so long: four full decades, and then some, since there had been a change of ruler on Majipoor.

As soon as word of the Pontifex’s illness had first gone forth, the lords and princes and dukes of Majipoor began to gather at the vast underground capital for the double event—the sad passing of an illustrious emperor, and the joyous commencement of a new and glorious reign. Now they waited with increasing and barely concealed restlessness for the thing that everyone knew must shortly come.

But the weeks went by and still the old Pontifex clung to life, dying by the tiniest of increments, losing ground slowly and with the most extreme reluctance. The imperial doctors had long since acknowledged the hopelessness of his case. Nor were the imperial sorcerers and mages able to make any use of their arts to save him. Indeed, they had foretold the inevitability of his death many months ago, though not to him. They waited too, as all Majipoor waited, for their prophecy to be confirmed.

Prince Korsibar, the splendid and universally admired son of the Coronal Lord Confalume, was the first of the great ones to arrive at the Pontifical capital. Korsibar had been hunting in the bleak deserts just to the south of the Labyrinth when the news came to him that the Pontifex did not have long to live. At his side was his sister, the dark-eyed and lovely Lady Thismet, and an assemblage of his usual princely hunting companions; and then, a few days after, had come the Grand Admiral of the kingdom, Prince Gonivaul, and the Coronal’s cousin Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, whose rank was that of High Counsellor, and not far behind them the fabulously wealthy Prince Serithorn of Samivole, who claimed descent from no less than four different Coronals of antiquity.

The vigorous, dynamic young Prince Prestimion of Muldemar—he who was generally expected to be chosen as Majipoor’s new Coronal once Lord Confalume succeeded Prankipin as Pontifex—had arrived also, traveling down from his home within the Coronal’s castle atop great Castle Mount in Serithorn’s party. With Prestimion were his three inseparable companions—the hulking wintry-souled Gialaurys and the deceptively exquisite Septach Melayn and slippery little Duke Svor. Other high potentates turned up before long: Dantirya Sambail, the brusque and formidable Procurator of Ni-moya, and jolly Kanteverel of Bailemoona, and the hierarch Marcatain, personal representative of the Lady of the Isle of Sleep. Then Lord Confalume himself made his appearance: the great Coronal. Some said he was the greatest in Majipoor’s long history. For decades he had presided in happy collaboration with the senior monarch Prankipin over a period of unparalleled worldwide prosperity.

So all was in place for the proclamation of succession. And the arrival of Lord Confalume at the Labyrinth surely meant that the end must be near for Prankipin; but the event that everyone was expecting did not come, and did not come, and went on not coming, day after day, week after week.

Of all the restless princes, it was Korsibar, the Coronal’s robust and energetic son, who appeared to be taking the delay most badly. He was a man of the outdoors, famous as a huntsman: a long-limbed, broad-shouldered man whose lean hard-cheeked face was tanned almost black from a lifetime spent under the full blaze of the sun. This dreary sojourn in the immense subterranean cavern that was the Labyrinth was maddening to him.

Korsibar had just spent close to a year planning and equipping an ambitious hunting expedition through the southern arc of the continent of Alhanroel. That was something he had dreamed of for much of his life: a far-ranging enterprise that would have covered thousands of miles and allowed him to fill the trophy room that he kept for himself at Lord Confalume’s Castle with a grand display of new and marvelous beasts. But after only ten days in the field he had had to abort the project and hurry here, to the somber and musty place that was the Labyrinth, that sunless, joyless hidden realm deep beneath the skin of the planet.

Where, apparently, he would be compelled, for his father’s sake and the sake of his own conspicuous station, to pace and fidget idly in that many-leveled infinity of endlessly spiraling passageways for weeks or even months. Not daring to leave, interminably awaiting the hour when the old Pontifex breathed his last breath and Lord Confalume succeeded to the imperial throne.

Meanwhile, other men less nobly born were free to range the hunting grounds far above his head to their heart’s content. Korsibar was reaching the point of not being able to bear it any longer. He dreamed of the hunt; he dreamed of looking upward into the bright clear sky, and feeling cool, sweet northerly breezes against his cheek. As his idle days and nights in the Labyrinth stretched on and on, the force of the impatience within him was building toward an explosion.

The waiting, that’s the filthy worst of it,” Korsibar said, looking around at the group assembled in the big onyx-roofed antechamber of the Hall of Judgment. That antechamber, three levels up from the imperial chambers themselves, had become a regular place of assembly for the visiting lordlings. “The everlasting waiting! Gods! When will he die? Let it happen, since there’s no preventing it! Let it happen, and let us be done with it.”

“Everything will come in the fullness of time,” said Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar in rotund and pious tones.

“How much longer must we sit here?” Korsibar rejoined angrily. The whole world is thrown into a paralysis by this business as it is.” The morning’s bulletin on the state of the Pontifex’s health had just been posted. No change during the night; his majesty’s condition remained grave but he continued to hold his own. Korsibar pounded his balled fist into the palm of his hand. “We wait, and we wait, and we wait. And wait some more, and nothing happens. Did we all come here too soon?”

“The considered opinion of the doctors was that his majesty did not have long to live,” said the elegant Septach Melayn. He was Prestimion’s closest friend, a tall and slender man of foppish manner but fearsome skill with weapons. “Therefore it was only reasonable for us to come here when we did, and—”

A stupendous belch and then a mighty booming laugh erupted from the huge and heavyset Farholt, a rough uproarious man of Prince Korsibar’s entourage who traced his lineage back to the Coronal Lord Guadeloom of distant ancient days. “The opinion of the doctors? The opinion of the doctors, you say? God’s bones, what are doctors except false sorcerers whose spells don’t work right?”

“And the spells of true sorcerers do, is that what you would claim?” asked Septach Melayn, drawling his words in his laziest, most mocking way. He eyed the massive Farholt with unconcealed distaste. “Answer me this, good friend Farholt: someone has put a rapier through the fleshy part of your arm in a tournament, let us say, and you lie bleeding on the field, watching your blood flow from you in bright wondrous spurts. Would you rather have a sorcerer run out to mutter incantations over you, or a good surgeon to stitch up your wound?”

“When has anyone ever put a rapier through my arm, or any other part of my body?” Farholt demanded, glaring sullenly.

“Ah, but you quite overlook my point, don’t you, my dear friend?”

“Do you mean the point of your rapier or the point of your question?” said quick-witted little Duke Svor, that sly, mercurial man, who for a long while had been a companion to Prince Korsibar but now was reckoned among Prestimion’s most cherished comrades.

There was a brief flurry of brittle laughter. But Korsibar, with a furious roll of his eyes, threw his arms upward in disgust. “An end to all this idle chatter, now and forever! Don’t you see what foolishness it is to be passing our days like this? Wasting our time in this dank airless prison of a city, when we could be up above, living as we were meant to live—”

“Soon; Soon,” Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar said, raising his hand in a soothing gesture. He was older than the others by twenty years, with a thick shock of snowy hair and deep lines in his cheeks to show for those years; he spoke with the calmness of maturity. “This can’t go on much longer now.”

“A week? A month? A year?” Korsibar asked hotly.

“A pillow over the old man’s face and it would all be done with this very morning,” Farholt muttered.

That provoked laughter again, of a coarser kind this time, but also stares of amazement, most notably from Korsibar, and even a gasp or two at the big man’s bluntness.

Duke Svor said, with a chilly little smile that briefly bared his small wedge-shaped front teeth, “Crude, Farholt, much too crude. A subtler thing to do, if he continues to linger, would be to suborn one of the Pontifex’s own necromancers: twenty royals would buy a few quick incantations and conjurations that would send the old man finally on his way.”

“What’s that, Svor?” said a new and instantly recognizable voice from the vestibule, resonant and rich. “Speaking treason, are we, now?”

It was the Coronal Lord Confalume, entering the room on the arm of Prince Prestimion. The two of them looked for all the world as if they had already succeeded to their new ranks and now, with Confalume as Pontifex and Prestimion as Coronal, had been merrily reshaping the world to their own liking over breakfast. All eyes turned toward them.

“I beg your pardon, lordship,” said Svor smoothly, swinging about to face the Coronal. He executed a graceful if abrupt bow and a quick flourish of the starburst gesture of respect. “It was only a foolish jest. Nor do I believe that Farholt was serious a moment ago, either, when he advocated smothering the Pontifex with his own pillow.”

“And were you, Farholt?” the Coronal asked the big man. His tone was light but not without menace.

Farholt was not known for the quickness of his mind; and while he was still struggling to frame his reply, Korsibar said, “Nothing serious has been said in this room for weeks, Father. What is serious is the endless delay in this matter. Which is greatly straining our nerves.”

“And mine as well, Korsibar. We must all be patient a little longer. But perhaps a medicine for your impatience—a better one than Svor’s or Farholt’s—is at hand.” The Coronal smiled. Easily, he moved to the center of the room, taking up a position beneath a scarlet silken canopy that bore the intricately repetitive Pontifical emblem in a tracery of golden filigree and black diamonds.

Confalume was a man of no more than middle height, but sturdily built, deep-chested and thick-thighed, true father to his stalwart son. From him there emanated the serene radiance of one who has long been at home in his own grandeur. This was Lord Confalume’s forty-third year as Coronal, a record matched by very few. Yet he still seemed to be in the fullness of his strength. Even now his eyes were bright and his high sweep of chestnut hair was only just starting to turn gray.

To the collar of the Coronal’s soft green jersey a little astrological amulet of the sort known as a rohilla was fastened, delicate strands of blue gold wrapped in an elaborate pattern around a nugget of jade. He touched it now, the quickest of little pats and then another, as though to draw strength from it. And others in the room touched amulets of their own in response, perhaps without conscious thought. In recent years Lord Confalume, taking his cue from the ever more occult-minded Pontifex, had come to show increasing sympathy for the curious new esoteric philosophies that now were so widely embraced on all levels of Majipoori society; and the rest of the court had thoughtfully followed suit, all but a stubbornly skeptical few.

The Coronal seemed to be giving his intimate attention to everyone in the room at once as he spoke: “Prestimion has come to me this morning with a suggestion that has much merit, I think. He is aware, as are we all, of the strain that this period of enforced idleness is causing. And so Prince Prestimion proposes that instead of our waiting for his majesty’s death to initiate the traditional funeral games, we set about holding the first round of competition immediately. It will be a way of passing the time.”

From Farholt came a grunting sound of surprise mixed with an undertone of approbation. But the others, even Korsibar, were silent for a moment.

Then Duke Svor asked very quietly, “Would such a thing be proper, my lord?”

“On grounds of precedent?”

“On grounds of taste,” said Svor.

The Coronal regarded Svor with undiminished amiability. “And are we not the world’s arbiters of taste, Svor?”

There was a stirring now in the little group of Prince Korsibar’s close friends and hunting companions. Mandrykarn of Stee whispered something to Count Venta of Haplior, and Venta drew Korsibar aside and spoke briefly to him. The prince appeared troubled and surprised by what Venta had to say.

Then Korsibar looked up and said abruptly, “May I speak, Father?” Uneasiness was evident on his long strong-featured face, which was tightened and twisted by a heavy scowl; he tugged at the ends of his thick black mustache, wrapped one powerful hand over the back of his neck and squeezed. “I see it in the same way as Svor: the thing seems improper. To launch into the funeral games before the Pontifex is even in his grave—”

“I find nothing wrong with that, cousin,” offered Duke Oljebbin. “So long as we save the parades and the feasting and the other such celebrations for afterward, what does it matter if we get the contests under way now? Prankipin’s finished: that’s undeniable, is it not? The imperial sorcerers have cast their runes and tell us the Pontifex is soon to die. His doctors predict the same thing.”

“With, let us hope, more substantial evidence than the sorcerers,” put in Septach Melayn, who was notorious for his scorn of magics of all sorts, even in this most superstitious of ages.

Korsibar made an irritable brushing gesture in the air as though Septach Melayn were no more than a buzzing gnat. “You all know that no one is more eager than I am to end this time of grinding inaction. But—” He halted a moment, frowning deeply and letting his nostrils flare, as if finding the right words involved him in a terrible struggle. Glancing quickly as if for support toward Mandrykarn and Venta, Korsibar said at last, “I beg the great Duke Oljebbin’s pardon if I offend him by disagreeing. But there are proprieties, Father. There are issues of appropriate conduct here. And—yes, by the Divine, Svor is right!—issues of taste.”

“You astonish me, Korsibar,” Lord Confalume said. “I thought you of all people would leap at the idea. But instead—this unexpected fastidiousness of yours—”

“What, Korsibar, fastidious?” came a raucous blustery voice from the entrance to the chamber. “Yes, and water is dry, and fire is cool, and sweet is sour. Korsibar! Fastidious! Two words I’d never have thought to hear yoked in a single sentence.”

It was Dantirya Sambail, the abrasive and ferocious prince who held the title of Procurator of Ni-moya. Into the antechamber now he strode, hard-soled boots clacking against the black marble of the floor, and instantly he was the center of all attention.

The Procurator, offering no gesture of homage to Lord Confalume, fixed his eyes steadily on those of the Coronal and said, “What is it that we are discussing, pray tell, that has brought forth this implausible linkage of opposing concepts?”

“What has happened,” Lord Confalume replied, matching Dantirya Sambail’s choleric loudness with his own sweetest and most pleasant tone, “is that your kinsman of Muldemar has suggested the immediate inception of the funeral games, because we are all becalmed here unhappily as Prankipin keeps his grasp on life. My son appears to oppose the idea.”

“Ah,” said Dantirya Sambail, in seeming fascination. And then again, after a moment: “Ah!”

The Procurator had taken up his characteristic spread-legged stance, squarely facing Lord Confalume beneath the central canopy. He was an imposingly sizable man of about fifty, who might have been the tallest in the room had his stubby legs not been so oddly disproportionate to his long, thick torso; as it was, he was second here only to Farholt in bulk, a commanding figure.

But a repellent one. Dantirya Sambail was strikingly, almost magnificently, ugly. His head was a huge glossy dome thickly furred with coarse orange hair; his skin was pale and flecked with myriad flaming freckles; his nose was bulbous, his mouth wide and savagely downturned, his cheeks fleshy and drooping, his chin strongly jutting. Yet out of this violent and disagreeable face stared incongruously sensitive and tender violet-gray eyes, the eyes of a poet, the eyes of a lover. He was Prestimion’s third cousin twice removed, on his mother’s side, and by virtue of his authority over the far-off continent of Zimroel, was subordinate only to the Pontifex and Coronal among the high ones of Majipoor. The Coronal was known to detest him. Many people did. But he was too powerful to ignore.

“And why, I wonder, does the good Korsibar object to beginning the games?” Dantirya Sambail asked the Coronal. “I would think he’d be more eager than any man here to get them under way.” A lively glint of mischief flickered suddenly across those beguilingly poetic eyes. “Can the problem be simply that the idea came from Prince Prestimion, perhaps?”

Even Lord Confalume was startled into silence by the audacity of that remark.

There had lately sprung up a certain unvoiced tension, to be sure, between Korsibar and Prestimion. Here was Korsibar on the one hand, the Coronal’s only son and a man of lordly grace in his own right, respected and even beloved throughout the land, but he was barred by age-old custom from succeeding his father on the throne; and here on the other was Prestimion, far less grand by birth and much less imposing in his person, who in all probability would be the outgoing Coronal’s choice as his successor. There were those who privately regretted the constitutional necessities that would block Korsibar from taking possession of the Coronal’s seat when shortly it became vacant. No one spoke openly of that, though: no one. Especially not in the presence of Korsibar, and Prestimion, and Lord Confalume himself.

Prestimion, who had remained silent since his entry into the room, now said mildly, “If I may speak, my lord?”

Confalume, in what was very nearly an absentminded way, granted permission with a wave of his left hand.

The prince was a compact, trimly built man of surprisingly small stature but extraordinary physical strength. His hair was of a golden tone but without much sheen, and he wore it cut short, an unfashionable style in these years. His eyes were of unusual keenness and intensity, light greenish-blue in color and set perhaps a shade too close together; his face was pale and narrow, his lips thin.

It was easy to overlook Prestimion in any gathering of the princes of Castle Mount because of his unprepossessing size; but what he lacked in height he made up for in agility, muscular power, innate shrewdness, and energy. In Prestimion’s childhood and even in young manhood no one would have predicted any sort of distinction of rank for him; but gradually, in recent years, he had moved to a position of preeminence at the court of the Coronal. By now he was widely recognized throughout the precincts of the Castle as the Coronal-designate, though only unofficially, for it would not have been appropriate for Lord Confalume to make that choice formally known while the old Pontifex was still alive.

Coolly, the prince acknowledged the Coronal’s permission to speak. The undiplomatic and indeed flagrantly provocative words of his kinsman of Ni-moya did not appear to have ruffled Prestimion in any way. But, then, he rarely appeared to be ruffled by anything. He gave the impression always of being governed by premeditation, a man who took no action without much thought and calculation. Even Prestimion’s most impulsive moments—and there were many of them—often somehow aroused the suspicion in those who did not entirely admire him that they had been planned.

He offered a calm smile to Korsibar and another to the Procurator, and said, addressing his words to nobody in particular, “What is it, after all, that we commemorate in the games that we traditionally hold upon the death of a Pontifex? The end of a great monarch’s life, yes, to be sure. But also the commencement of a new reign, the advancement of a distinguished Coronal to the even higher authority of the Pontificate, the selection of a promising prince of the realm as the world’s Coronal Lord. One cycle closes, another begins. Therefore the games should have a double purpose: to welcome the new monarchs of the world to their seats, yes, but also to celebrate the life of the one who is leaving us. And so I feel that it is right and proper and natural to embark on the games while Prankipin still lives. By doing so we create a bridge between the old reign and the new one.”

He ceased to speak, and the room was utterly still.

Then the quiet was broken by the sharp sound of Dantirya Sambail’s loudly clapping hands.

“Bravo, cousin Muldemar! Bravo! Brilliantly argued! My vote is for the games, at once! And what does the fastidious Korsibar have to say?”

Korsibar, his dark eyes smoldering with only partly suppressed rage, glowered at the Procurator.

“I would be pleased to start the games this very afternoon, if that be the sense of the group,” he said tautly. “I never voiced any objection to that. I simply raised the question of propriety. Of unseemly haste, shall we say?”

“And that question has been prettily disposed of by Prince Prestimion,” said Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar. “So be it. I move the question, my lord. I further suggest that we announce the games to the citizens of the Labyrinth not as funeral games but merely as games held in honor of our beloved Pontifex.”

“Agreed,” Korsibar said.

“Do I hear opposition?” Lord Confalume asked. “No. Good. So be it. Make your preparations, gentlemen, for what we will call the Pontifical Games. The ancient and traditional Pontifical Games. By the Divine, who’ll know there’s never been such a thing before? It’s forty years and some since last a Pontifex has died, and who will remember how these matters are supposed to go, and of those who remember, who will dare speak out, eh?” The Coronal smiled broadly, letting his gaze rest on each member of the company in turn; only when he came to Dantirya Sambail did it seem as if the warmth of his smile cooled somewhat. Then he made as though to leave; but, pausing at the place where the room gave way to the vestibule he looked back at his son and said, “Korsibar, attend me in my suite in ten minutes, if you please.”

2

Reports of the Pontifex’s critical condition had traveled all up and down the immensity of Majipoor, from city to city and shore to shore—from the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount throughout all of far-spreading Alhanroel, and across the Inner Sea to the Isle of Sleep from which the beloved Lady sent forth her soothing dreams, and farther west to the giant cities of the younger and wilder continent Zimroel, and downward into the torrid zone and the hot dry wastelands of the southern continent, Suvrael. The Pontifex is dying! The Pontifex is dying! And there was scarcely anyone, among all of Majipoor’s innumerable billions of people, who did not in some way feel uneasiness over the consequences of his death. For there was hardly anyone alive who was able to remember a time when Prankipin had not occupied one or the other of Majipoor’s two thrones; and who knew what would life be without him?

Indeed, fear was general in the land: fear of the dismantling of hierarchies, the disruption of order, the unleashing of chaos. It was so long since a change in the government had occurred that the people had forgotten how strong the bonds of tradition can be. Anything seemed possible once the old emperor was gone; they feared the worst, some dire transformation of the world that would engulf land and sea and farthest heaven.

An abundance of sorcerers and mages stood ready on all sides to guide them in this difficult moment. The time of the Pontifex Prankipin was a time when sorcery had flourished and proliferated luxuriantly on Majipoor.

No one could have expected, when the strapping young Duke Prankipin of Halanx became Coronal long ago, that ultimately he would cause the world to be inundated by a flood of wizardry and magic. The occult arts had always been a significant element in the life of Majipoor, most notably in the area of the interpretation of dreams. But until Prankipin’s time it was only the lower levels of society that had embraced such arcane disciplines as lay beyond simple dream-speaking: that huge population of fishermen and weavers and gatherers of wood, of dyers and chariot-makers and potters and smiths, of sausage-sellers and barbers and slaughterers and acrobats and jugglers and boatmen and peddlers of dried sea-dragon meat, that formed the broad base of the giant planet’s bustling economy.

Curious cults had always thrived among such people—strange beliefs, often savage and violent, in powers and forces beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals. The believers in these things had their prophets and their shamans, yes, and their amulets and their talismans, and their feasts and rituals and processions; and those who dwelled in the loftier regions of Majipoori life, the merchants and manufacturers and the members of the aristocracy above them, saw no serious harm in any of that. Perhaps, they said, there might even be some value in it for the poor folk who had faith in such things. On the other hand, very few of those more prosperous people tended to dabble themselves in what they regarded as the fantasies and superstitions of the lower classes.

But the Coronal Lord Prankipin’s enlightened trade policies had led Majipoor into a splendid golden age of economic expansion that brought widespread abundance of wealth at every level of society; and with increasing affluence often comes increased insecurity and fear of losing what one has attained. Such feelings frequently breed a longing for supernatural protection. The new wealth also brought an increase in self-indulgence, a hatred of boredom and a willingness, even an eagerness, to experiment with novel and remarkable things.

What had come to Majipoor also, with the access of this new prosperity, was not only greater credulity, but also a certain measure of greed, dishonesty, sloth, cruelty, debauchery, a love of wild excess and luxury, and other such vices for which the big planet had not been particularly known before. These things too created changes in Majipoori society.

So a fascination with the occult spread upward in Lord Prankipin’s time to the propertied classes, fostered by the multitudes of nonhuman Vroon and Su-Suheris folk, who arrived on Majipoor at this time—both of them much given to the practice of the mantic and prognostic arts. And through the devices and cunning of these sorcerers, people who were already eager for miracles were made to see not only the shape of things to come, but also a great host of wonders, gorgons and cockatrices, salamanders and winged serpents, feathered basilisks that spit hissing flame; and they were allowed to look through chasms of dark smoke and doors of white fire into universes beyond the universe, and the domains of all manner of gods and demigods and demons. Or so it seemed, to those who had faith in the evidence of what was before their eyes, though there were those skeptics that said it was all a fraud and a snare and a delusion. But the number of those sour cold-eyed onlookers grew ever fewer all the time.

Amulets and talismans were worn everywhere, and the scent of incense was ubiquitous in the land, and brisk trade was done in ointments with which to anoint doorposts and thresholds against the forces of evil. Also it became the fashion among certain of the newly rich to consult soothsayers concerning matters of business and investment, and then the more respectable of the new cults and mysteries received the approbation also of the educated and nobly born. The women of the aristocracy, and soon afterward the men as well, began to hire personal astrologers and seers; and ultimately Lord Prankipin himself gave his formal blessing to many of these exotic predilections by devoting more and more of his time to the company of mages, diviners, thaumaturges, and the like. His court came to have a full complement of sorcerers and wizards, whose wisdom was regularly employed in the course of governmental business.

By the time Lord Prankipin had moved on to the Labyrinth to assume the duties of Pontifex, and Confalume succeeded him as Coronal, these policies were too deeply entrenched for anyone, even the new Coronal, to speak out against them. Whether the new Lord Confalume maintained the occult disciplines in their supremacy at first out of inner conviction or mere shrewd tolerance of the status quo, was something that he had never revealed even to his closest advisers; but as the years passed he became as wholehearted an advocate of the wiz-ardly philosophies as ever Prankipin had been. With Pontifex and Coronal united on this point, sorcery was a universal practice on Majipoor now.

And so, in this uncertain time, a good many practitioners of dark arts that once might have been deemed curious and strange indeed were available to offer strange and curious consolations to the millions—the billions—of frightened citizens whose souls were uneasy over what might be about to happen.

In Sisivondal, the busy mercantile center through which all the overland caravans of western Alhanroel passed on their way to the wealthy cities of Castle Mount, the Mystery of the Beholders was the rite by which the people hoped to hold back the dread demons that might burst loose at the hour of the Pontifex’s death.

No visitors came to Sisivondal for its beauty or its elegance. It was set in the midst of a bare featureless plain. One could set out from it and travel a thousand miles in any direction and see nothing but dry, dusty, flat lands. It was a flat dull city in the midst of a flat dull region, and its only distinction was that it was a place where a dozen major highways met.

Like the spokes of a giant wheel were the wide roads that crossed those dreary plains to intersect here, one coming in from the major port of Alaisor to the west, three running down from the north, three from the south, and no less than five connecting Sisivondal with mighty Castle Mount off in the distant east. The boulevards and avenues of Sisivondal were laid out as concentric circles that allowed easy connection from any of the incoming highways to any other. All along the streets that ran between the circular avenues were rows of flat-roofed nine-storied warehouses,, each very much like its neighbor, in which goods destined for transshipment to other zones of the continent could temporarily be stored.

It was an uninteresting but necessary place, and its appearance was in keeping with its function. Located as it was in a district of Alhanroel where little rain fell except for a couple of months in the winter, Sisivondal did without the grand and lavish ornamental gardens that were a distinctive mark of nearly all the cities of Majipoor. The monotony of its broad bare streets, dry and dusty under the constant golden-green eye of the sun, was relieved here and there only by plantings of rugged undemanding shrubs and trees, usually arrayed in long regular rows along the curbsides: squat thick-trunked camaganda palms with drooping grayish-purple fronds, somber lumma-lumma bushes that looked like boulders with leaves and grew so slowly they might just as well have been carved from stone, and spiky garavedas that flowered only once every hundred years, each one sending up a single ominous black spike three times the height of a man.

No, not a pretty city. But here the cult of the Beholders had taken root, and the Beholders, when they held the Procession of their Mysteries, did indeed bring for a brief time an unfamiliar beauty to the drab streets of Sisivondal.

They came forth now, dancing and singing and chanting as they marched past the long stolid rows of identical warehouses that lined Grand Alaisor Avenue. At the head of the procession ran scores of young women in immaculate white garments who strewed the ground with the bright crimson-and-gold petals of halatinga blossoms that had been brought in at monumental expense from Castle Mount. Young men with sparkling mirrors sewn to their jerkins danced after them, sprinkling the streets with balsams and unguents. Next came the massed ranks of sturdy chanters, accompanied by the shrill cries of pipes and flutes as they bellowed over and over, “Make way for the holy things! Make way! Make way!”

Now, marching by herself, there advanced the terrifying figure of a giantess in red boots with soles a foot thick, carrying an enormous two-headed wooden staff that she gripped with both her hands and raised again and again above her head. To her huge shoulders a pair of powerful dark wings was strapped, which fluttered slowly in time to the pounding rhythms of two masked drummers who followed her at a respectful distance. Behind this group came initiates of the cult, walking six abreast, their faces hidden by loose black veils. Their heads had been shaven closely and waxed, those of men and women both, so that the tops of their skulls rose above the swirling veils like domes of polished marble.

Those in the forefront of this group bore the seven artifacts that the Beholders held to be among their most sacred possessions, things which they displayed only at occasions of the highest gravity. One held aloft an elaborately carved stone lamp of curious design, from which a fearsome, roaring yellow-tipped flame spurted far into the sky; the next, a palm branch interwoven with strands of gold in the form of a coiling serpent with gaping jaws; the one beyond that, the giant image of a disembodied human hand with the middle finger bent backward in an impossible and menacing way; then a fourth with a silver urn in the shape of a woman’s breast, from which he poured an inexhaustible stream of steaming, fragrant golden milk into the streets; and a fifth with a huge fan made of wood, which he swept from side to side in a manner that caused onlookers at the edge of the throng to leap back in fright. A sixth bore the effigy of a plump little pink-fleshed deity whose face had no features, and a seventh came staggering along under the weight of a monstrous male genital organ carved from a long curving slab of purple wood.

“Behold and worship!” the marchers cried.

And from the onlookers came an answering cry: “We behold! We behold!”

More dancers followed—frenzied ones now, in a delirious, ecstatic furor, leaping crazily from one side of the street to another as though tongues of flame were bursting from the pavement all about them, and uttering brief wordless cries like the yippings of demented beasts. They moved on, giving way to a pair of grim towering Skandars who carried slung between them on a stout wooden pole the Ark of the Mysteries, said to contain the most potent and holy objects of the cult, though these would not be revealed to anyone until the final hours of the world.

And then, at last, borne on a resplendent gleaming cart of ebony inlaid with silver, came the terrifying figure of the high priest, the masked Messenger of the Mysteries. He was a slim naked man of phenomenal height whose rippling body was painted black down one side and gold down the other; he wore over his head the carved visage of a furious-looking yellow-eyed hound with fierce elongated muzzle and long narrow ears standing stiffly erect; and he held in one hand a narrow staff around which golden serpents with swollen necks and red staring eyes were entwined, and in the other a leather whip.

Screams of joy went up from those who lined the path of the procession as he went by, nodding his blessings to the multitudes at every step and occasionally flicking his whip at them. And they fell in behind him, hundreds of them, thousands, the ordinary citizens of Sisivondal, sober, hardworking citizens, now ecstatic, sobbing, laughing eerily, prancing wildly, flinging high their arms, throwing back their heads as they begged the empty vault of the sky for some sign that mercy would be forthcoming. Spittle flicked their faces. Their eyes rolled in their heads, and on some only the whites could be seen. “Spare us!” they cried. “Spare us!” But what it was from which they wanted to be spared, or from whom they expected their salvation to come, very few in that jostling throng that lined Grand Alaisor Avenue would have been able to say, or perhaps none at all.

On that same day, in the windswept hilltop city of Sefarad on the western coast of Alhanroel, a little group of mages clad in saffron-colored chasubles, surplices of bright purple silk, and yellow shoes led the way to the sharp ridge known as Lord Zalimox’s Chair, overlooking the roughly tossing waters of the Inner Sea. They were five men and three women of the human kind, stately and tall, with a look of nobility and grandeur about them. Their faces were dabbed with spots of blue powder and their eyesockets were painted a brilliant scarlet, and they carried long white staffs fashioned from sea-dragon ribs carved along every inch of their length with mysterious runic figures in what was said to be the script of the Elder Gods.

A long, winding procession of the citizens of Sefarad followed after them, murmuring prayers to those unknown ancient deities. As they moved steadily forward to the sea, they made the sign of the sea-dragon over and over again with their hands, fingers simulating the beating of the voluminous leathery wings, wrists curving to imitate the swooping of the mighty necks.

Many of those who followed the mages to Lord Zalimox’s Chair were Liimen, the humblest folk of the town, slender rough-skinned people with dark flat faces much wider than they were high, out of which three circular eyes stared like glowing coals. These simple fishermen and farmers and street-sweepers and sausage-vendors had for many centuries looked toward the huge winged dragons of Majipoor’s seas as semidivine beings. For them the dragons occupied a station midway between the mortal people of Majipoor and the gods who once had ruled this giant planet and had unaccountably departed long ago; and they felt that those gods would one day return to take possession of what was rightfully theirs. Now, in clustering groups of fifty or a hundred, the Liimen of Sefarad hastened to the edge of the sea to beg their vanished gods to hasten their return.

But they were far from alone today. Word had gone about that a herd of sea-dragons would be coming close to shore here this day. That was startling in itself, for the dragons in their long maritime migrations were never a common sight along this coast of Alhanroel; and the notion that this visitation might be a miraculous one, that the immense beasts might somehow have the ability to establish contact with those mysterious ancient gods of which the Liimen had long babbled, had spread like fire in dry brush through every race of the city. Humans, Hjorts, Ghayrogs, and even a handful of Vroons and Su-Suheris, were also to be found in the band of pilgrims that came scrambling up the rocky road to the beach.

And shapes were visible today, far out to sea, that might have been the shapes of dragons, unless they were something else. “I see them!” one pilgrim cried to the next in surprise and delight. “A miracle! The dragons are here!” And perhaps they were. Humped gray forms like bulky barrels floating in the sea? Dark wide-spreading wings? Yes, dragons. Maybe so. Or maybe just illusions, born of the glinting and flashing of sunlight against the churning tops of the waves.

“I see them, I see them!” the pilgrims continued to cry, shouting it until their voices grew hoarse and ragged, each one spurring his neighbor on toward desperate certainty.

And at the very summit of the rock known as Lord Zalimox’s Chair the mages in their saffron chasubles and surplices of bright silk lifted their staffs of smooth white bone one by one and held them toward the sea and in tones of the greatest solemnity called out words in a language that no one understood:

“Maazmoorn… Seizimoor… Sheitoon… Sepp!”

From the congregation at the water’s edge resounded the answering cry:

“Maazmoorn… Seizimoor… Sheitoon… Sepp!”

And from the sea came, as ever, the rhythmic murmuring boom of the surf, saying things that the assembled worshipers were free to interpret in whatever way they wished.

In wondrous Dulorn, the shining diamond-bright city of crystalline stone that the reptilian-looking Ghayrogs had built in western Zimroel, the amusements and entertainments of the Perpetual Circus had temporarily been put aside in this troubled hour, so that the huge circular building that housed the Circus could be employed for holier matters.

All the buildings of Dulorn were airy sparkling things of fantasy, but for this one. The white mineral out of which the Ghayrogs had constructed Dulorn was a dazzling light calcite of high refractiveness. They had employed it with surpassing ingenuity in fashioning slender lofty towers of fanciful form, richly ornamented with faceted sides and flying buttresses, with leaping minarets and dizzying diagonal embrasures, everything bright as if lit by sheets of lightning in the midday sun.

But the building of the Perpetual Circus, at the eastern edge of town, was a simple and unadorned circular drum, ninety feet high and in diameter of such an amplitude that it could easily contain an audience of hundreds of thousands. Here, because the snaky-haired forked-tongued Ghayrogs slept only a few months out of the year and were voraciously eager for diversion the rest of the time, theatrical performances of all sorts were held—jugglers, acrobats, teams of clowns, trained-animal shows, prestidigitators, levitators, gobblers of live animals, anything at all that someone might deem amusing, a dozen or more acts at once on the huge stage—continuously, every hour of the day and every day of the year.

Now all that had, however, been put aside in favor of a circus of a different sort. In this city of unique and striking loveliness, deformity had lately come to be looked upon as sacred, and monsters of all sorts were brought forth into the arena from every part of Majipoor so that they could be worshiped and implored to intercede with the dark powers that threatened the world.

So here, strutting about like demigods, were pygmies and giants, pinheads and human skeletons, hunchbacks and gnomes, all manner of genetic detritus, the sad prodigies of a hundred kinds of miserable unfortunate births. Every nightmare distortion was on show here, monsters of unthinkable sorts, things so bizarre that no one would ever have dared to dream them: humans, Ghayrogs, Skandars, Hjorts, no species being spared, all packed one up against another. Here were two Ghayrogs whose bodies were joined at the back from shoulder to buttock, but one inverted in regard to the other, heads and feet in opposite ways; here was a woman whose boneless arms writhed like serpents, and a man whose fiery-hued head bore a ravenous orange bird bill that was curved like the beak of a milufta but even more savagely sharp. A man who was broader-bodied than he was tall, with arms like flimsy little flippers—a quartet of gaunt Liimen who were linked one to the next by a long ropy black umbilicus—a man with one giant eye in the center of his forehead; another with only a single leg, like a pedestal, proceeding from both his hips—another with feet at the ends of his arms, and hands sprouting from his ankles—

All this was displayed in turn to every sector of the immense auditorium, for the entire stage floated in a pool of quicksilver and turned slowly on hidden bearings, making a complete revolution in not much more than an hour. During regular performances of the Circus, those sitting in the circular tiers that rose in sloping circles to the roof of the building had only to sit where they were and it all would come to them.

But this was not a performance. It was a sacrament. Therefore the audience was allowed to come down out of the stands and mingle on the stage, as never was permitted ordinarily. A corps of Skandar wardens maintained order, keeping the swarming mass of worshipers filing from the seats in a single line with stinging blows of long batons, and prodding them swiftly onward from the stage once they had received the blessing for which they had come. Slowly, patiently, the members of the audience shuffled forward, knelt before this grotesque creature or that one, solemnly touched its knee or its toe or the hem of its robe, and then moved on.

In five locations only, equidistantly arranged around the great stage to form the points of a giant star, were there any open spaces in this multitude of monstrosities and their adorers. These five open places on the stage had been left clear for the holiest beings of all, the androgynes—those who combined in themselves the attributes both of male and female, and who thus represented the unity and harmony of the cosmos, which was the commodity that everyone on Majipoor most fervently wished to preserve.

No one knew the origin of the androgynes. Some said that they were from Triggoin, that half-mythical city in the northern reaches of Alhanroel where only wizards lived. Some had heard that they came from Til-omon or Narabal or Ni-moya or some other city of Zimroel, and some that they were from Natu Gorvinu in remotest Suvrael, while others claimed they were native to one of the grand cities of Castle Mount itself; but though there was no agreement over where it was they had come into the world, it was universally believed that they had been born at a single birthing to a witch-woman who had engendered them herself, entirely unaided, simply through the casting of powerful spells.

They were frail, pallid little creatures, these androgynes. But though they were no taller than children, their bodies were mature. Three had the gentle faces of women and distinct womanly bosoms, though small ones, but the well-developed genitalia of men below. The other two had the wiry, muscular upper bodies of men, with broad shoulders and flat, hard chests, but their hips were wide flaring female ones, their buttocks and thighs were full and plump, and at the joining of their legs they showed no trace of the male organs of generation.

Naked, impassive, they displayed themselves all day long and all night too at the five points of the imaginary star that linked them on the stage, protected from the eagerly reaching arms of the gaping multitudes by circular boundary lines of cool red sorcery-flame that no one dared to cross, and by platoons of dour-faced baton-wielding Skandars as well, just in case.

The androgynes stood staring at the crowds that passed before them in a distant, uncaring way, silent and aloof, like visitors from some other plane of existence. And throughout the long hours of the day and the night, the fearful people of Dulorn filed ceaselessly through the drum-shaped building of the Perpetual Circus, thousands and hundreds of thousands paying homage to the sacred monsters, reaching their hands out imploringly to the uncaring androgynes and crying out their prayer in staccato shrieks sharp enough to pierce the sky, and the message that they repeated was the same one going up to the heavens from the marchers in the streets of Sisivondal: “Spare us… Spare us … ”

Far to the south, half a vast continent away in the humid city of Narabal on Zimroel, where winter was unknown and vegetation grew with violent abandon in the cloak of soft, dense, sultry air, the cult of flagellant! held sway. Men in white robes crisscrossed by broad yellow stripes ran through the streets in maniacal bounding leaps, brandishing swords and maces and knives. From time to time they would halt and throw their heads forward until their long hair covered their faces, and dance first on one foot and then the other while wildly rotating their necks, and bite themselves savagely on their forearms with no show of distress, as though they were unaware of pain. Then, eyes wild with glee, they slashed their own flesh with their knives, or presented their bared backs to women who rushed upon them bearing whips made of thokka vines strung with the knucklebones of blaves. Blood flowed freely in the streets, mixing with the rain of Narabal’s fine, steady downpours and carried away with it in the cobblestone gutters. “Yamaghai! Yamagha!” they shouted, over and over. Nobody knew what those words meant, but they were deemed to be words of notable power, for one was immune to the pain of the knives and the whips so long as one shouted them. “Yamaghai! Yamagha! Yamaghai! Yamagha!”

It was the blood of bull-bidlaks with which they hoped to purify themselves in great glistening Ni-moya, grandest of the cities of the western continent, seven thousand miles to the east of the crystalline city of Dulorn. By hundreds they crowded into newly built underground sanctums, huddling shoulder to shoulder beneath the slitted gratings that covered these dank musty chambers and looking upward to the mages in ornate ritual vestments and golden helmets topped with quivering crests of red feathers who stood chanting in the street above them. And the slow heavy-thighed bidlaks were led forth over the grates; and the long knives flashed; and the blood came running down in bright rivulets upon the worshipers below, who crowded forward, shoving one another roughly aside as they strived to receive it on their upturned faces and tongues, to catch it in their hands and smear it over their eyes, to drench their clothing in it. With grunting cries of ferocious joy they received the bloody sacrament and were dizzied and inflamed by it; and then they moved along, some dancing, some merely lurching, and others taking their places as new bidlaks were led into position on the grates above.

In golden Sippulgar on the sunny Stoien coast of Alhanroel on the other side of the world, it was Time, the remorseless winged serpent that flies ever onward, whose face was the face of a ravening, all-devouring jakkabole, to whom the people turned as suppliants. Weeping, praying, chanting, they drew his image through the streets on a wheeled platform made of freshly tanned volevant skin stretched over a framework of bright green gabela-wood, accompanied by a thunder of kettledrums and an ear-splitting clash of cymbals and the screeching of hoarse-throated horns. And behind those privileged ones who drew the platform of the god came the other good citizens of golden Sippulgar, stripped to loincloths and sandals, their sweating bodies bright with gaudy streaks of paint and their faces turned rigidly toward the sky.

In Banglecode, high up on Castle Mount, it was the fancied disappearance of the moons, and especially the Great Moon, that was the thing most deeply dreaded. Few nights went by when someone did not reach the conclusion that the light of the moons was waning and rush wild-eyed out into the streets to howl forth his contagious terror. But there were archimages in Banglecode who specialized in the encouragement of the moons. When the people began to weep and gibber over the vanishing of the moons, these mages came forth and made a clattering with brass instruments, they blew loud blasts on trumpets, they clapped cymbals together and waved holy staffs on high. “Sing!” they cried, and the people sang, and gradually—gradually, gradually—the moons seemed to regain the brightness that they had earlier lost, and the crowds went, still weeping but grateful now for their deliverance, to their homes. And the next night it would all be the same way again.

“What a troubled time this is, this time of mysteries and wonders,” said Kunigarda, the Lady of the Isle of Sleep; and the hierarch Thabin Emilda, the closest of the Lady’s associates at Inner Temple, simply sighed and nodded, for they had had this conversation often enough in recent days.

It was the task of the Lady of the Isle of Sleep to bring comfort and wisdom to the minds of sleeping millions each night, and in these times she was striving with all her formidable energies to restore peace to the world. From the ancient mechanisms installed in the great stone chambers of her isle the sweet sendings of the Lady and her many acolytes went forth, urging calm, patience, confidence. There was no reason for alarm, they told the world. Pontifexes had died before, on Majipoor. Prankipin had earned his rest. The Coronal Lord Confalume was prepared to assume his new tasks; there would be another Coronal in his place, as capable as Confalume had been; everything would go on harmoniously as it had before, and would forever, world without end.

So the Lady Kunigarda knew, and so she sought nightly to announce. But all her striving was futile, for she herself was a living reminder of the changes that were coming, and the dreams she sent produced as much anxiety as anything else, simply because she was a presence in them.

Her own term as Lady of the Isle was reaching its inevitable end as the Pontifex’s life ebbed. By long tradition the mother of the Coronal, or else his closest living female relative, held the Ladyship. So it was that the mother of Lord Confalume had come to the Isle upon his accession; but Prankipin had ruled as Pontifex so long that Lord Confalume’s mother had died in office, and the Ladyship had passed to Kunigarda, the Coronal’s older sister. Kunigarda had held the post for twenty years now. But soon she must give way to the Princess Therissa, mother of the new Lord Prestimion, and instruct her in the secret of the mechanisms of the Isle, and then take up residence herself on the Terrace of Shadows where the former Ladies went to live; everyone knew that; and that was one more cause for insecurity and apprehension in the world.

“One thing is sure, that peace and truth will prevail,” said the Lady to the hierarch Thabin Emilda. “The old emperor will die, and the new Coronal will come, and the new Lady as well; and perhaps there will be difficulties, but in time all will be well. I believe that, Thabin Emilda, with all my soul.”

“And I also, Lady,” said Thabin Emilda. But once more she sighed, and turned away so that the Lady would not see the sorrow and doubt in her eyes.

So there was no contending against the tide of magic and fear. In a thousand cities furious confident mages came forth, saying, “This is the way of salvation, these are the spells that will restore the world,” and the people, doleful and frightened and hungry for salvation, said, “Yes, yes, show us the way.” In each city the observances were different, and yet in essence everything was the same everywhere, processions and wild dances, shrieking flutes, roaring trumpets. Omens and prodigies. A brisk trade in talismans, some of them loathsome and disgusting. Blood and wine freely flowing and often mixing. Incense; abominations; the droning chants of the masters of the Mysteries; the propitiation of demons and the adoration of gods. Flashing knives and whips whistling through the air. New strangenesses every day. Thus it was, in this feverish epoch of new beliefs, that the myriad citizens of the huge planet awaited the end of the time of Prankipin Pontifex and the Coronal Lord Confalume, and the coming of the time of Confalume Pontifex and the Coronal Lord Prestimion.

3

The chambers where the Coronal had his lodgings at those times when it was necessary for him to visit the capital city of the Pontificate were located on the deepest level of the Labyrinth’s imperial sector, halfway around the perimeter of the city from the secluded bedroom where Pontifex Prankipin lay dying. As Prince Korsibar advanced along the winding corridor leading to his father’s rooms, a tall, angular figure stepped smoothly from the shadows to his left and said, “If you would, prince, a moment’s word.”

Korsibar recognized the speaker as the aloof and frosty Sanibak-Thastimoon, a man of the Su-Suheris race whom he had taken into his innermost circle of courtiers: his personal magus, his caster of runes and explicator of destinies.

“The Coronal is expecting me,” said Korsibar.

“I understand that, sir. A moment, is all I ask.”

“Well—”

’To your possible great advantage.”

“A moment, then, Sanibak-Thastimoon. Only a moment. Where?”

The Su-Suheris gestured toward a darkened room within a half-ajar doorway on the other side of the corridor. Korsibar nodded and followed him. It turned out to be a storeroom of some sort, low-ceilinged and cramped and musty, cluttered with tools and cleaning implements.

“In a service closet, Sanibak-Thastimoon?”

“It is a convenient place,” the Su-Suheris said. He shut the door. A dim glowlight was the only illumination. Korsibar valued Sanibak-Thastimoon’s counsel, but he had never been at such near quarters with the Su-Suheris before, and he felt a quiver of discomfort verging on mistrust. Sanibak-Thastimoon’s slender, two-headed figure loomed above him by some seven inches, an uncommon thing for the long-legged prince to experience. A crisp, dry aroma came from the sorcerer, as of’ fallen leaves burning on a hot autumn day, not an unpleasant odor but one that at this close range was oppressively intense.

The Su-Suheris folk were relative newcomers to Majipoor. Most of them had come as a result of policies established sixty years or so back, early in Prankipin’s time as Coronal, that had encouraged a period of renewed migration of nonhuman peoples to the giant world. They were a smooth, hairless race, slim and tapering in form. From their tubular bodies rose foot-long columnar necks that divided in a forking way, each of the two branches culminating in a narrow, spindle-shaped head. Korsibar doubted that he would ever be fully comfortable with the strangeness of their appearance. But in these times it was folly not to have a reliable necromancer or two on one’s staff, and it was commonplace knowledge that the Su-Suheris had a full measure of skill in the oracular arts, necromancy and divination, among other things.

“Well?” Korsibar asked.

Usually it was the left-hand head that spoke, except when the Su-Suheris was delivering prophecies. In that case he employed the cold, precise voice that emerged from the right-hand one. But this time both heads spoke at once, smoothly coordinated but in tones separated by half an octave. “Troubling news has been brought to your father’s attention concerning you, sir.”

“Am I in danger? And if I am, why does the news come to his attention before it reaches mine, Sanibak-Thastimoon?”

“There is no danger to you, excellence. If you take care not to arouse anxieties in your father’s breast.”

“Anxieties of what sort? Explain yourself,” said Korsibar curtly.

“Do you recall that I cast a horoscope for you, sir, some months back, that indicated that greatness awaits you in days to come? You will shake the world, Prince Korsibar,’ is what I told you then. You remember this?”

“Of course. Who’d forget a prophecy like that?”

The same prediction now has been made for you by one of your father’s oracles. In the very same words, which is a powerful confirmation: ‘He will shake the world.’ Which has left the Coronal exceedingly troubled. His lordship is contemplating his withdrawal from the active world; he would not look kindly on any shaking of it at this time.—This has come to me by trustworthy sources within your father’s own circle, sir.”

Korsibar sought to meet the sorcerer’s gaze; but it was an infuriating business, not knowing which pair of icy emerald-hued eyes to look at. And having to look so far upward, besides. Tautly he said, “I fail to see what there might be to trouble him in a prophecy like that. I mean him no mischief: he knows that. How could I? He is my father; he is my king. And if by my shaking the world it’s meant that I’ll do great things some day, then he should rejoice. I’ve done nothing but hunt and ride and eat and drink and gamble all my life, but now, apparently, I’m about to achieve something important, is that what your horoscope says? Well, then, three cheers for me! I’ll lead a sailing expedition from one shore of the Great Sea to the other; or I’ll go out into the desert and discover the lost buried treasure of the Shapeshifters; or maybe I’ll—Well, who knows? Not I. Something big, whatever it is. Lord Confalume ought to be very pleased.”

“What he is afraid of, I suspect, is that you will do something rash and foolish, your excellence, that will bring much harm to the world.”

“Does he?”

“So I am assured, yes.”

“And does he regard me, then, as such a reckless child?”

“He places much faith in oracles.”

“Well, and so do we all. ‘He will shake the world.’ Fine. What’s there in that that needs to be interpreted so darkly? The world can be shaken in good ways as well as bad, you know. I’m no earthquake, Sanibak-Thastimoon, that will bring my father’s castle tumbling down the side of the Mount, am I? Or are you hiding something from me of which even I myself am unaware?”

“I want only to warn you, sir, that his lordship is apprehensive concerning you and your intentions, and may ask you bothersome difficult questions, and that when you go before him now it would be best if you took care to give him no occasion whatsoever for suspicion.”

“Suspicion of what?” cried Korsibar, in some vexation now. “I have no intentions! I’m a simple honorable man, Sanibak-Thastimoon! My conscience is clear!”

But the Su-Suheris had nothing more to say. He shrugged, which for him was a gesture that amounted to drawing his long forked neck halfway down into his chest and hooking his six-fingered hands inward on his wrists. The four green eyes became implacably opaque; the lip-less, harsh-angled mouth-slits offered no further response. So there was no use pursuing the issue.

You will shake the world.

What could that mean? Korsibar had never wanted to shake anything. All his life he had desired only simple straightforward things: to rove the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount in quest of this pleasure or that one, and to go forth along the remote wilderness trails in quest of the fierce beasts he loved to hunt, and to play at quoits and chariot-racing, to spend the long nights at the Castle itself drinking and carousing with his comrades. What more could there be for him in life? He was a prince of royal blood, yes, but the irony of his lineage was that he could never be more than he already was, for no Coronal’s son had ever been permitted to follow him to the Coronal’s throne.

By ancient tradition the junior monarchy was an adoptive one; always had been, always would be. Lord Confalume, when he finally became Pontifex a week or three hence, would officially designate Prestimion of Muldemar as his son and heir, and Korsibar, the true flesh-and-blood son, would be relegated to some grand and airy estate high up on the Mount. There he would spend the rest of his years as he had spent the first two decades of them, living a comfortable idle existence among the other pensioned-off princes of the realm. That was his destiny. Everyone knew that. He had been aware of it himself ever since his boyhood, ever since he could understand that his father was a king. Why had Sanibak-Thastimoon chosen to trouble him now with this oracular nonsense about shaking the world? Why, for that matter, had the chilly-spirited, austere sorcerer been urging him so strongly of late to rise above his pleasant life of luxury and idleness and seek some higher fulfillment? Surely Sanibak-Thastimoon understood the impossibility of that.

You will shake the world. Indeed.

Impatiently, Korsibar gestured to Sanibak-Thastimoon to stand aside, and went out into the hall.

The immense outer door of the Coronal’s suite, all agleam with dazzling golden inlays of the starburst emblem and with his father’s LCC monogram—which would have to be changed soon enough to Prestimion’s LPC—confronted him. Three prodigious swaggering Skandars in the green and gold uniform of the Coronal’s royal guard stood before it.

Korsibar craned his neck to look up at the shaggy four-armed beings, nearly half again as tall even as he, and said, “The Coronal has asked me to come to him.”

At the Castle, sometimes, the guardians of the Coronal’s office would make him wait like any young knight-initiate, Coronal’s son though he might be, because his lordship was busy with his ministers of state, or his intimate counsellors, or perhaps some visiting regional administrators. The son of the Coronal had no formal rank of his own, and those others took precedence over him. But today the guards moved aside instantly and let him go in.

Lord Confalume was at his desk, a broad polished platform of glossy crimson simbajinder-wood rising from a thick podium of black geli-maund. The only illumination was the bright orange glow emanating from a trio of thick spiral-shafted candles of black wax set in heavy iron sconces, and the air was sweet and steamy with the rank piercing fragrance of burning incense, rising in two gray-blue coils of smoke from golden thuribles on either side of the Coronal’s seat.

He was involved in a conjuration of some sort. Charts and works of reference covered his desk, and interspersed among them were all manner of instruments and devices having to do with the geomantic arts. Korsibar, who kept people like Sanibak-Thastimoon on hand to deal with such matters for him, had no idea what the purpose of most of those objects might be, though even he recognized the whisk-broomlike ammatepala that was used to sprinkle the water of perception across one’s forehead, and the shining coils and posts of an armillary sphere, and the triangular stone vessel known as a veralistia, in which one burned the aromatic powders that enhanced one’s insight into the future.

Korsibar waited patiently while his father, not looking up, carried out what seemed to be the conclusion of some lengthy and elaborate tabulation of numbers. And said quietly, when Lord Confalume appeared to be finished, “You wanted to see me, Father?”

“A moment more. Just a moment.”

Three times in a clockwise way the Coronal rubbed the rohilla that was pinned to his collar. Then he dipped both his thumbs in an ivory vessel containing some bluish fluid and touched them to his eyelids. With bowed head and closed eyes the Coronal murmured something that sounded like the words “Adabambo, adabamboli, adambo,” which meant nothing at all to Korsibar, and pressed the tips of his little fingers and thumbs together. Lastly, Lord Confalume let his breath come forth from his nostrils in a long series of quick sighing exhalations, so that after a time his lungs were emptied and his head rested on his sunken chest, shoulders slumped, eyes rolled up toward the top of his head.

Korsibar’s own belief in the powers of magic was as strong as anyone’s. And yet he was surprised and a bit dismayed to see his royal father so deeply enmeshed in these arcane practices, at the cost of who knew what quantity of his waning energies. The expenditure was all too obvious. Lord Confalume’s face was drawn and gray, and he seemed tired, though it was still only mid-morning. There were lines of stress along his brow and cheeks that appeared unfamiliar to Korsibar.

The prince and his sister Thismet were the children of the Coronal’s late middle age, and there was a gap of many decades between his age and theirs; but that difference in age was only now making itself apparent. Indeed, the Coronal had seemed a good deal younger to Korsibar earlier that day in the antechamber to the Hall of Justice than he looked at this moment; but perhaps that look of youthful middle age had been a mere pretense, a facade he was capable of donning while in the presence of the other princes and dukes, and which he no longer had the strength to maintain in the privacy of this meeting with his son.

Seeing his father this wearied, Korsibar’s heart went out to him. The Coronal, he knew, had every reason to be weary, and not just from the exertions of these sorceries. For the past forty-three years, a span of time unimaginable to Korsibar, the Coronal Lord Confalume had had the task of reigning over this giant planet. To be sure, he reigned in the name of the Pontifex, and it was the Pontifex in whom all ultimate responsibility for decision was vested. But the Pontifex lived hidden away in the secrecy and security of the Labyrinth. It was the Coronal who had to remain endessly on public display, holding open court at the Castle atop the Mount, and going forth into the world as well, every six or eight years, to fulfill the custom of the grand processional by which the Coronal presented himself in person in every major city of all three continents.

In making the grand processional it was the junior monarch’s task to convey himself beyond the Fifty Cities of the Mount, and onward across the sea to distant Zimroel and its great metropolis of Ni-moya, and grim Piliplok of the terrifyingly straight streets, and Khyntor and Dulorn and flowery Til-omon and Pidruid and all those other faraway places whose existence was barely more than legendary to Korsibar: displaying himself to the multitudes as the living symbol of the system that had governed this gigantic world since the dawn of its historic period so many thousands of years before. Small wonder Lord Confalume looked tired. He had lived long enough to have made the grand processional not once but five times. He had carried all of Majipoor on his shoulders for some years longer than four full decades.

Korsibar stood a long time waiting, and said nothing. And waited some more. And still the Coronal busied himself with his sorcery-things, as though he had forgotten Korsibar was there. And Korsibar waited.

And went on waiting. When the Coronal required one to wait, one waited, and did not question the waiting. Even if he were one’s own father.

After a long while Lord Confalume looked up at last, and blinked a couple of times at Korsibar as though he were surprised to see him in the room. Then the Coronal said, with no preamble, “You amazed me more than a little this morning, Korsibar. I never imagined you’d have the slightest objection to starting the games early.”

“I confess some amazement at your amazement, Father. Do you perceive me as such a shallow thing? Do you look on me as having no sense whatever of proper conduct?”

“Have I ever given you reason to think so?”

“You give me no reason to think otherwise. All my adult life I’ve simply been left free to amuse myself, like some oversized child. Am I invited to sit in on councils? Am I given high responsibilities and duties? No. No. What I’m given is a happy life of leisure and sport.—‘Here, Korsibar: how do you like this fine sword? This saddle, this bow of Khyntor workmanship?—These fiery-tempered racing-mounts have just been sent to us from the breeders at Marraitis, Korsibar: take your pick, boy, the best is none too good for you.—Where will you hunt this season, Korsibar? In the northern marches, perhaps, or will it be in the jungles of Pulidandra?’ And so it has been, Father, all my life.”

The Coronal’s tired face seemed to sag into an even deeper weariness as Korsibar’s verbal barrage went on and on.

“That was the life you wanted for yourself,” he said, when the prince had subsided. “Or so I believed.”

“And indeed I did. But what other kind of life could I have chosen to have?”

“You could have been whatever you pleased. You had the finest of princely educations, boy.”

“A fine education, yes! And for what purpose, Father? I can name a hundred Pontifexes from Dvorn to Vildivar, all in the proper order, and then name fifty more. I’ve studied the codes of the law, the Decretals and the Synods and the Balances and all the rest of that. I can draw you maps of Zimroel and Alhanroel and put all the cities in their proper locations. I know the pathways of the stars and I can quote you inspiring passages from all the best epic poets from Furvain to Auliasi. What of it? What good does any of it do me? Should I have written poetry myself? Should I have been a clerk? A philosopher, perhaps?”

The Coronal’s eyelids fluttered and closed for a moment, and he pressed the tips of his fingers to his temples. Then he opened his eyes and stared balefully at his son, a hooded, rigorously patient look.

“The Balances, you say. You’ve studied the Balances. If that’s so, then you understand the inner rhythms of our governmental structure and you know why you’ve been given swords and saddles and fine mounts instead of high public responsibilities. We have no hereditary monarchy here. You picked the wrong father, boy: for you alone, of all the princes of Castle Mount, there can never be any place in the government.”

“Not even a seat on the Council?”

“Not even that. One thing leads to another, they would say: put you on the Council and soon you’d want to act as Regent when I’m away from the Castle, or you would propose yourself as High Counsellor, or you’d even aspire to be made Coronal yourself when my turn arrives to move on to the Labyrinth. I would constantly be forced to defend myself against accusations of—”

“Father?”

“—no end of whispering and innuendo, or outright insurrection, even, if—”

“Father, please.”

Confalume halted in mid-flow, blinking. “Yes?”

“I do understand all these things. I resigned myself long ago to the realities of my situation. Prestimion will be Coronal, not me: so be it. I never expected to be Coronal, never. Nor wanted it, nor hoped for it. But let me bring you back to the point where this wrangling discussion started, if I may. I asked you whether you really believed I was so stupid that the only thing on my mind was the desire to escape the boredom of this miserable hole by getting on a mount and waving my sword around in some tournament, without a scrap of thought given to custom or tradition or propriety.”

The Coronal made no immediate response. His eyes now grew dull with inattention; his face, which had become very grim, seemed to go entirely blank.

At length he said, keeping his voice very low, “Do you resent it that Prestimion is going to become Coronal, Korsibar?”

“Do I envy him, do you mean? Yes. He’ll be a king, and who would not envy the man who is to be king? But as for resenting that he will be Coronal in my place—no. No. That place was never mine to occupy. I know that. There are nine billion men on this planet, and I am the only one of whom it was known, from the moment of his birth, that he could never become Coronal.”

“And does that make you bitter?”

“Why do you keep asking me these things, Father? I understand the law. I yield my nonexistent claim on the throne gladly, unhesitatingly, unconditionally, to Prestimion. All I meant to assert before is that I believe that there’s more substance to me than I’m generally given credit for having, and I wish I could be allowed more responsibilities in the government. Or to be more accurate, be allowed some responsibilities at all.”

Lord Confalume said, “What’s your opinion of Prestimion, actually?”

Now it was Korsibar’s turn to pause awhile before speaking.

“A clever man indeed,” he said cautiously. “Intelligent. Ambitious.”

“Ambitious, yes. But capable?”

“He must be. You’ve chosen him to succeed you.”

“I know what my opinion of Prestimion is. I want to know yours.”

“I admire him. His mind is quick, and for a small man he’s remarkably strong, and exceedingly agile besides. Good with a sword, better even with a bow.”

“But do you like him?”

“No.”

“Honestly put, at any rate. Do you think he’ll make a good Coronal?”

“I hope so.”

“We all hope so, Korsibar. Do you think so?”

Another pause. After that moment of deep fatigue, Lord Confalume’s eyes had regained their usual brightness; they searched Korsibar’s mercilessly.

“Yes. Yes, I think he probably will.”

“Probably, you say.”

“I’m no soothsayer, Father. I can only guess at what is to come.”

“Indeed.—The Procurator, you know, thinks that you’re Prestimion’s sworn enemy.”

A muscle throbbed in Korsibar’s cheek. “Is that what he’s told you?”

“Not in so many words. I refer to his comment of a little while ago, upstairs, about your opposing the games because holding them was Prestimion’s idea.”

“Dantirya Sambail is a dangerous troublemaker, Father.”

“Agreed. But also a very shrewd man. Are you Prestimion’s sworn enemy?”

“If I were, Father, would I tell you? But no. No. I’ve been frank with you about Prestimion. I think he’s a calculating and manipulative man, a cunning opportunist who can argue on either side of an issue with equal skill, and who has maneuvered himself up out of no position at all and now is about to attain the second highest rank on Majipoor. I find it hard to like men of that sort. But that isn’t to say that he doesn’t deserve the second highest rank on Majipoor. He understands the art of governing better than most Certainly better than I. Prestimion will become Coronal, and so be it, and I will bow my knee to him like everyone else.—This is an ugly conversation, Father. Are these the things you called me here to talk about?”

“Yes.”

“And the conjuring you were doing when I came in? What was that?”

The Coronal’s hands moved flutteringly among the devices on his desk. “An attempt, merely, to determine how much longer the Pontifex is likely to live.”

Korsibar smiled. “Are you really so adept a sorcerer now, Father?”

“Adept? No, that’s not a claim I’d make. But, like many others, I’ve made a study of the art. I keep measuring my skills against events as they unfold, to see whether I’ve actually mastered any knack of foretelling the future.”

“And have you? You have the true oracular skill, do you think?” Korsibar thought of the reports of him that the sorcerers were said to have brought to his father, that strange prediction: He will shake the world. Perhaps it was the Coronal himself who had cast that rune, and now was staring at some singular destiny for his son that Korsibar himself had no way of seeing. “Can we put it to the test?” he asked, happy to see the subject of discussion changing. “Tell me your results, and we’ll see what comes to pass. What is the date that you arrived at for the end of Prankipin’s lingering?”

“Not any precise one. I’m not that good: perhaps no one is. But it will come, I calculate, within the next nineteen days. Let us keep count, you and I, Korsibar.”

“Nineteen days, or even less. And then finally all the waiting will be over, and we can have the ceremonies and Prestimion will be Coronal and you will be Pontifex, and we can all get out of this vile cistern of a place and back to the sweet air of Castle Mount.—All but you, Father,” Korsibar added in a softer voice.

“All but me, yes. The Labyrinth will be my home now.”

“And how do you feel about that, may I ask?”

“I’ve had forty years to get myself used to the idea,” Lord Confalume said. “I am indifferent to it.”

“Never to emerge into the light of day—never to see the Castle again—”

The Coronal chuckled. “Oh, I can come forth now and then, if I feel like it. Prankipin did, you know. You were only a boy the last time he did: perhaps you’ve forgotten it. But the Pontifex isn’t compelled to stay belowground one hundred percent of the time.”

“Still, I wouldn’t care for it even so much as one percent of the time. My stay here these weeks past has been quite enough for me.”

Lord Confalume smiled. “Luckily for you, Korsibar, living here won’t ever be asked of you. The best part of not becoming Coronal is that you know you’ll never become Pontifex.”

“I should be grateful, then.”

“You should.”

“And you feel you are ready to take up your new life down here, Father?”

“Yes. Completely ready.”

“You will be a great Pontifex,” said Korsibar. “As you were a great Coronal.”

“I thank you for those words,” said Lord Confalume. He smiled; he stood. It was a tight, unreal smile, and the Coronal’s left hand, clenched at his side, was trembling perceptibly. Something was being left unsaid: something painful to the Coronal, something explosive.

What did the Coronal know, what was it that the Coronal had refrained from telling him?

You will shake the world.

It had to have to do with that. But whatever Sanibak-Thastimoon had imagined that Lord Confalume might be going to say to him concerning that mysterious oracular uttering had not been mentioned.

Nor would it be, now. Korsibar was aware that he had been dismissed. He made the formal starburst gesture before his father as Coronal; and then they embraced as father and son, and he turned to leave. He heard the Coronal once again puttering among the geomantic devices on his desk even before he stepped through the doorway.

4

Septach Melayn entered the room known as the Melikand Chamber, a narrow curving hall in the imperial sector of the Labyrinth, adjacent to Prestimion’s suite of rooms, that had been set aside for the use of the companions of the Coronal-designate. Duke Svor and Gialaurys of Piliplok were already there. “Well,” said Septach Melayn as he came in, “I have a little news, at least. Three names have now emerged as candidates for Master of the Games: the Grand Admiral, the Procurator, and our little friend Svor. Or so I have it from one of the Pontifical lackeys.”

“Who is a person whom you trust implicitly, I suppose?” Svor asked.

“As much as I would trust my mother,” replied Septach Melayn. “Or yours, if I had ever had the pleasure of knowing her.” He drew his ornately embroidered cloak, dark blue silk lined with lashings of silver thread, tight about him, and paced with the catlike lazy grace that was his manner up and down the brightly burnished floor of smooth gray stone in quick, almost mincing steps. As he moved about, Svor and Gialaurys looked at him in their varying ways—Svor with wry amusement, Gialaurys with his usual melancholy suspicion of Septach Melayn’s elegance and flamboyance.

They were oddly assorted men, these three dearest friends of the Coronal-designate. In no way did they resemble one another, neither in physique nor manner nor temperament. Septach Melayn was slim and lanky, with arms and legs so exorbitantly long that they seemed almost attenuated. His humor was volatile, his style delicate and witty. His skin was very fair and his eyes were a pale glittering blue; his golden hair tumbled in carefully constructed ringlets to his shoulders, in what was almost a girlish way; and he affected a small pointed beard and a dandyish little mustache, a mere chiseled line of gold on his upper lip, that were the cause of much knightly amusement behind his back—though never to his face, for Septach Melayn was ever quick to challenge slights and was a relentless foe in any sword-fight.

Gialaurys, on the other hand, was a man of ponderous mass, not unusually tall, but extraordinarily thick through the chest and shoulders, with a flat, wide face that confronted the world with a look of the utmost steadiness, like a side of beef. His upper arms were the width of another man’s thighs; his fingers had the thickness of fat sausages; his dark hair was close-cropped and his face was clean-shaven except for bristly brown sideburns that descended in thick ominous stripes past his cheekbones.

He too had a reputation as one to be treated with caution—not that he was a swordsman of Septach Melayn’s wicked skill, but so great was his physical strength that no opponent could withstand his anger. Gialaurys was dark and brooding in temperament, as befitted one whose foster kin in the unlovely city of Piliplok in Zimroel, the land of his birth, had been a family of bleak-spirited Skandars. Prestimion had met him in Piliplok on his one visit to the western continent, ten years earlier, and by some unpredictable affinity of opposites they had become fast friends at once.

As for Svor, who held the title of Duke of Tolaghai but had no land or wealth to go with it, he was no more than a speck beside the other two: a flimsy, frail little man of inconsequential size, swarthy almost to the point of blackness, as men born under the terrible sun of the southernmost continent often are, with an unruly tangle of dark hair and dark, mischievous eyes, and a dark, tangled soul. His nose was thin and sharp and sly, with a hook to it, and his mouth was too narrow for all his teeth, and a short tight beard rimmed his face, though he kept his upper lip shorn. No warrior was Svor, but a politician and schemer and avid lover of women, who dabbled somewhat in sorcery on the side.

In years gone by he had been a companion of the young Korsibar—a kind of pet, in a way, or court jester, whom the big athletic prince liked to keep about him for amusement’s sake—but once Prestimion had begun to emerge as the probable next Coronal, Svor drifted ever so subtly in his direction, until by now he was a constant figure in Prestimion’s entourage. The shift of allegiance was a fact much remarked upon at the Castle—again, only in private—as an example of Svor’s well-known passion for sen-aggrandizement and of his expedient looseness of loyalty.

Utterly different though the three men might be from one another, a curious bond of mutual affection linked them all, and each in his way was devoted to the welfare and service of Prestimion. No one doubted that they would emerge as the high lords of the kingdom once Prestimion wore the starburst crown.

Septach Melayn said, “If we speak up now in this business of who is to preside over the games, we might well be able to influence the choice. But does it matter to us?”

“It matters to me,” said Gialaurys unhesitatingly, “and it should to you.” He spoke in the flat broad accent of eastern Zimroel that seemed so comical elsewhere, but not when it came from Gialaurys’s lips, and his voice was a deep gritty rumble that seemed to rise up out of the core of the world. “The Master of the Games determines the pairings. Are you willing to be sent into the field against a series of fools because the Master wishes to embarrass you with mismatches? I don’t want the Master using the games to play games of his own. And whenever there’s a close call in some contest, we want our own man to be the one who decides the fine points. Lives can depend on it.”

“Then you would advise us to put our support behind Duke Svor, I take it,” Septach Melayn said.

“Declined,” said Duke Svor instantly from the far corner of the room, where he was engaged in a study of esoteric charts inscribed on long rolls of tawny parchment. “I have no idea what the proper pairings ought to be, and—”

“We could tell you,” Gialaurys said.

“—and in any event,” Svor continued, “I want no part of your silly brawls. The contending sides will forever be shouting in the Master’s face; let it be someone else’s face.”

Septach Melayn smiled. “Very well, Svor. Let it be so.” Playfully he said to Gialaurys, “And what do you mean, pray tell, by ‘our own man’? Do we have factions here, so that someone can be considered plainly to be Prestimion’s man, and someone might be considered altogether unfriendly to him? Are we not all united in the celebration of the new reign?”

“You talk like a fool,” Gialaurys grunted.

Septach Melayn was unbothered by that. “Surely you’d consider Svor to be our own man, if anyone is; I understand that. But is the Procurator our enemy? Or Admiral Gonivaul?”

“They might be. Either one.”

“I fail to understand you.”

“There’s never a smooth transition from reign to reign. There are always those who have objection, secret or otherwise, to the chosen new Coronal. And may show their objections in unexpected ways.”

“Listen to him!” Septach Melayn cried. “The scholar! The learned historian! Give me examples of such treachery, friend Gialaurys!”

“Well—” Gialaurys pondered for a while, sucking his lower lip deep into his mouth. “When Havilbove became Pontifex,” he said after a long while, “and he said that Thraym would be his Coronal, I understand it that some disgruntled lord who bore no love for Thraym launched a conspiracy to put Dizimaule on the throne instead of him, and very nearly—”

“In fact Lord Kanaba was Havilbove’s Coronal,” said Svor quietly. “Thraym was Coronal three reigns later. Dizimaule lived a thousand years earlier than any of them.”

“So I forget the true names or the order of the kings,” Gialaurys said, with some heat in his tone now. “But it happened all the same, if not with them, then with others. You could look it up. And then there was another case, involving Spurifon, I think, or was it Siminave—”

“All this thinking ill becomes you,” Septach Melayn said, and grinned into the back of his beautifully manicured hand. “I assure you, dear friend, that regardless of the private ambitions of the rejected candidates, the new Coronal is always swept up into office by wholehearted acclamation. It has never been any other way. We are a civilized people on this world.”

“Are we?” said Prestimion, coming into the room just then. “How good to hear you say so, sweet Septach Melayn. What are you discussing, may I ask?”

“Whom to choose to be Master of the Games. I’m told that it’s between Gonivaul and Svor and your dear cousin the Procurator. Gialaurys has been arguing that we can’t trust anybody but ourselves even in something like the games, and wants Svor to be Master so that we can be sure that we’ll be put up against the proper people to fight, and that the verdicts will all come down in our favor.”

Prestimion glanced at Gialaurys. “Is this so? Are you so apprehensive, Gialaurys?”

“Septach Melayn twists my words, as usual, my lord. But if it’s put to me all over again, yes: I would prefer someone I trust as Master to someone that I don’t.”

“And you trust Svor?” Prestimion said, laughing.

“Svor has already said he will not be it. In that case I would like to see the Procurator Dantiya Sambail given the post.”

“The Procurator!” Prestimion cried, bursting into laughter all over again. “The Procurator! You would trust the Procurator, Gialaurys!”

“He’s a cousin of yours, my lord, is he not?” said Gialaurys stolidly. “And therefore would make no decision harmful to you or to your friends, or so I would assume.”

“He is a cousin much removed,” Prestimion answered, as he often did when his relationship to the Procurator was mentioned to him. “And you’ve called me ‘my lord’ twice now in half a minute’s time. That term belongs to Lord Confalume, at least until a new Coronal has been chosen.—As for my cousin the Procurator, he is truly my kinsman, yes. But if you think you might have anything to fear from the one who is chosen Master of the Games, I would suggest that you throw your support to someone other than he.”

“Well, then, Admiral Gonivaul,” said Gialaurys without much grace.

“Agreed,” Septach Melayn said quickly. “Gonivaul will at least be neutral, if there’s any bickering. He cares for nothing and nobody, except, I suppose, for Gonivaul. May we get on now to a discussion of the various events?”

“Will there be wrestling?” Gialaurys asked.

“There’s always wrestling. Farholt would insist on it.”

“Good. I’ll wrestle Farholt.”

Septach Melayn said, “I had thought we’d put Svor up to that job. You could oppose Farquanor in the fencing-matches.”

“Sometimes you fail to be amusing, Septach Melayn,” said Gialaurys.

“But no! No!” Svor put in. “Let’s confuse everyone. Let us bewilder and bedazzle! Seriously. I will indeed face great hulking Farholt in the wrestling, if only to see the look on his face when I come out against him, and we’ll let Gialaurys try his luck with swift-wristed Farquanor in the fencing, and you, Septach Melayn, you can be our lead man next to Prestimion in the two-man chariot races against Korsibar’s team.”

“I intend to be, as a matter of fact,” said Septach Melayn.

“Not the fencing?” Prestimion asked.

“Both,” Septach Melayn said. “If there are no objections. And in the chariot races we can—”

There was a tap at the door. Prestimion opened it and peered into the corridor. A woman wearing the narrow mask that marked the servants of the Pontificate stood there, one of those who had been placed in charge of assisting the guests from Castle Mount.

“Are you the Prince Prestimion?” she asked.

“I am.”

“There is a Vroon here, sir, one Thalnap Zelifor, who asks present audience of you. He says he has information that will be of great use.”

Prestimion’s brows furrowed. Looking back over his shoulder, he said to the others, “Were any of you aware that Thalnap Zelifor was at the Labyrinth?”

“Not I,” said Septach Melayn.

“He’s so small, how could anyone notice him?” Gialaurys said.

“He came in with Gonivaul’s people,” said Svor. “I’ve seen him around once or twice.”

“By the Divine, I have no use of any kind for that one,” Septach Melayn declared. “If you’re wise, Prestimion, you’ll continue to keep him away from you. We have enough sorcerers buzzing about us as it is, haven’t we?”

“He is said to be a seer of exceptional powers,” Gialaurys observed.

“Be that as it may,” said Septach Melayn. “I dislike even the sight of Vroons. And their smell, for that matter. Beyond which, we all know, this little Thalnap Zelifor is a troublesome treacherous man who tacks in every breeze and who may well be a source of peril to us. He has the soul of a spy.”

“But a spy for whom? We have no enemies!” Gialaurys said, with a hearty guffaw. “You explained that to me no more than five minutes ago, is that not so? We are a civilized people on this world, and all of us united in loyalty to those set in authority over us.”

Prestimion held up his hand. “Enough, gentlemen, enough! It’s a sad affair when we must worry about danger from the likes of Thalnap Zelifor. I think we can spare the creature a moment of our time.” To the woman from the Pontificate he said, “Tell the Vroon he can come in.”

Thalnap Zelifor was diminutive even for one of his race: a tiny being hardly more than shin-high to a human. The Vroon, fragile and insubstantial of body, had a multitude of flexible rubbery limbs and a narrow, tapering head, out of which sprang two blazing golden eyes and a sharp hooked beak of a mouth. From him came the faint, sweet, wistful odor of flowers pressed long ago in a book.

There had been Vroons on Majipoor almost as long as human beings. They were among the first of the various nonhuman races invited to settle there by the Coronal Lord Melikand, to whom it had become apparent that the human population of the immense world could not grow quickly enough to meet all the needs of a developing civilization. That had been many thousands of years ago, almost in the dawn of Majipoor’s history. Vroons had significant and unusual skills: they could link their minds to the minds of others and penetrate deep thoughts, they could move objects about by the power of their inner force alone, and they had given evidence, even in ages less credulous than the present one, of an ability to discern the shape of coming events.

Like most of his people, Thalnap Zelifor claimed to have the gift of second sight, and so far as anyone knew he earned his living primarily by peddling oracles; but no one could ever be quite sure of anything concerning Thalnap Zelifor. At the Castle he was considered to be in the service of Prince Gonivaul the Grand Admiral, but he was just as often found among Korsibar’s hangers-on, and more than once before this he had presented himself with some offer of service to Prestimion.

Which had always routinely been declined: Prestimion had never been a man to surround himself with wizards in any significant way. It was surprising to see Thalnap Zelifor popping up yet again.

“Well?” said the prince.

Thalnap Zelifor extended one ropy tentacle. On its tip lay a small, highly polished oval plaque, fashioned of the precious green stone known as velathysite. It glowed brightly, as if lit by an inner fire. Runes so minute that they were almost invisible to the eye were engraved upon the face of it.

“A gift, excellence. A corymbor, it is, that bears inscriptions of power; it has the capacity to bring you aid in a time of trouble. Wear it on a chain at your throat; touch it when need is upon you, and it will give you the solace that you require.”

Septach Melayn snorted. “Gods! Will there never be an end to these fantasies among us? We’ll all drown in this tide of superstitious madness!”

“Gently,” Prestimion said to him. And to the Vroon: “You know I put little faith in such objects as this.”

“I know that, excellence. That is, perhaps, an error on your part.”

“Perhaps so.”

Prestimion bent forward to take the little green amulet from Thalnap Zelifor. He rubbed it gingerly this way and that with his fingertip, staring at it warily all the while, as if he suspected that by handling it in such fashion he might conjure up some unsettling thing before his eyes. But he was smiling also, to say that his show of caution was all pretense; and in any event nothing happened.

Prestimion turned the amulet on edge, commenting admiringly on the fine workmanship of it, and peered briefly at its reverse side, which was blank. Then he tossed it into the air as one might toss a coin, catching it with a quick snap of his wrist and dropping it casually into a pocket of his tunic. “I thank you,” he told the Vroon, with deep formality if not with any particular effort at seeming sincere. “And will the need for this be upon me soon, do you think?”

“Forgive me, excellence, but I do.”

Septach Melayn snorted again, and turned his back.

The Vroon said softly, so softly that it was necessary to strain to hear him, “What I have come to tell you this day, excellence, is for all Majipoor’s sake as much as it is for yours. I know that you yourself have only scorn for me, and for the whole of my profession besides; but I think you have the welfare of the world at your heart nonetheless, and will hear me out if only for that reason.”

“And just how much must I pay you to hear your revelations, Thalnap Zelifor?”

“I assure you, Prince Prestimion, that I have no hope of personal gain in this matter.”

Septach Melayn threw back his head and roared his laughter to the vaulted roof of the chamber. “No cost! The advice is free! And dear even at that price, I would say.”

Prestimion said, “You should ask me for money, Thalnap Zelifor. I’m suspicious of soothsayers who offer their wares for nothing.”

“My lord—”

“That is not my title yet,” said Prestimion.

“Excellence, then. I tell you, I did not come here in the hope of earning a fee. Pay me ten weights, if you feel you must pay something.”

“Barely enough for a platter of sausages and a glass of beer,” Prestimion said. “You value your wisdom very lightly, my friend.” He snapped his fingers at Duke Svor. “Pay him.”

Svor produced a small square copper-hued coin and handed it over.

“Now, then,” said Prestimion.

Thalnap Zelifor said, “What I have to say is this: I looked upon the Great Moon last night, and it was of a scarlet color, as though its face streamed with human blood.”

“He saw the Great Moon,” came scornfully from Septach Melayn, who was still standing with his back to the others, “although it’s on the far side of the world now, where nothing whatsover that might be in the sky can be seen from this hemisphere, and he saw it from the bottom of the Labyrinth, no less, from down here a mile below the surface. Well done, Vroon! Your sight is sharper even than mine!”

“It was by second sight I saw, my good master. That is a different kind of sight from yours.”

Patiently Prestimion said, “And what does it mean, do you think, this show of blood streaming across the face of the Great Moon?”

“A coming war, excellence.”

“War. We have no wars on Majipoor.”

“We will,” said Thalnap Zelifor.

“Pay heed to him, I beg you!” Gialaurys called out, for Prestimion suddenly was displaying signs of annoyance with this game. “He sees things, prince!”

Septach Melayn came forward abruptly, looming over the Vroon as though about to squash him with the heel of his boot, and said, “Who sent you here, little pest?”

“I came of my own accord,” Thalnap Zelifor replied, staring up directly into Septach Melayn’s eyes far above him. “For the benefit and welfare of all. Yours included, my good master.”

Septach Melayn spat, missing the Vroon by very little, and once more turned away.

In a distant voice Prestimion said, “A war between whom and whom?”

“I can give you no answer to that, excellence. I can tell you only that you do not have a clear path to the throne. There are strong omens of opposition to your candidacy: I read them on every side. The air down here is thick with them. A struggle is brewing. You have a mighty enemy, who waits his time now in secrecy; he will emerge and contend with you for the Castle; all the world will suffer from the strife.”

“Ha!” cried Gialaurys. “You hear him, Septach Melayn?”

Prestimion said, “Do you often have such terrible dreams, Thalnap Zelifor?”

“Not so terrible as this one.”

’Tell me who this mighty enemy of mine might be, so that I may go to him and embrace him as a friend. For whenever I lose someone’s love, I want always to strive to regain it.”

“I am unable to give you any names, excellence.”

“Unable or unwilling?” Duke Svor asked, from his place across the room.

“Unable. I saw no one’s face clearly.”

“Who can it be, this rival, this enemy?” Gialaurys asked musingly. His ever-somber visage was dark with concern. Belief ran deep in Gialaurys’s nature: the predictions of sorcerers were serious matters to him. “Serithorn, maybe? He has such great estates already that he is practically a king: he may fancy himself as a Coronal as well, descended as he is from so many. Or your cousin the Procurator. He’s your kinsman, yes, but we all know what a tricky sort he is. And then, on the other hand, possibly the Vroon’s meaning is that—”

“Stop this, Gialaurys,” Prestimion said. “You’re being too free with these speculations. And as ever much too willing to expend your credulity in unworthy places.” Coldly he asked the Vroon, “Is there any other aspect of this revelation you want to share with me?”

“There is nothing else, excellence.”

“Good. Then go. Go.”

Thalnap Zelifor made a gesture among his many tentacles that might have been some bizarre version of the starburst sign, or might simply have been a stirring of his upper limbs. “As you wish, excellence.”

“I thank you for your information, such as it is. And for the amulet.”

“I beg you, excellence, take the warning seriously.”

“I’ll take it as seriously as it deserves,” replied Prestimion, and made a curt gesture of dismissal. The Vroon went out.

As the door closed, Gialaurys slapped his hand down hard against his meaty thigh. “Korsibar!” he exclaimed with sudden explosiveness.

“Of course!”

“What?” said Prestimion.

“The enemy. The rival. Korsibar: he’s the one! If not Serithorn, if not Dantirya Sambail, it must be Korsibar. Don’t you see? It’s not so strange to want to be king, if your father before you was one. And so we have a Coronal’s son, unwilling to allow someone whom he regards as an upstart to take the throne that he sees as rightly belonging to him.”

With a sharpness in his tone that was unusual for him, Prestimion said, “Enough and more than enough, Gialaurys! This is all contemptible nonsense.”

“I would not be so quick to say so.”

“All of it! Nonsense, nonsense, absolute nonsense! The scarlet moon, the secret enemy, the prophecy of war. Who are the demons who provide such dependable word of things to come? Where do they live, what’s the color of their eyes?” He shook his head sadly. “War, on Majipoor! This is not a world where wars are fought. Not one, Gialaurys, not one war ever in all the thousands of years since the Shapeshifters were defeated. And these preposterous guessing games of yours! Serithorn, you think, is hungering for the throne? Oh, no, no, not him, my friend. His blood is quite sufficiently royal as it is, and he has no liking for toil of any kind. My cousin the Procurator? He enjoys making trouble, yes. But not, I think, that kind of trouble. And Korsibar? Korsibar?”

Gialaurys said, “He is a kingly man indeed, Prestimion.”

“On the outside, yes. But there’s nothing within. A sweet empty-headed man surrounded by a swarm of flatterers and scoundrels. Who has not an idea of his own, and depends on those around him to tell him what to think.”

“An exact assessment,” said Septach Melayn. “I would have put it in those very words myself.”

“In any case,” Prestimion continued, “he’d never dream of making a move toward the throne. The son of a Coronal, doing such a thing? It violates all tradition, and Korsibar is no man for defying tradition. He’s a dull decent lordling and nothing more, without the necessary spark of evil for such a thing. What he wants from life is sport and pleasure, not the cares of power. The idea’s absurd, Gialaurys. Absurd. Put it from your mind.”

“What Gialaurys suggests may be absurd, yes,” said Duke Svor, “but there’s definitely something strange in the air, Prestimion. I can feel it myself: a thick dark ominous cloud gathering close about us.”

“You too, Svor?” Prestimion exclaimed, with a gesture of vexation.

“Indeed.”

“Oh, how I wish all this flood of incantations and prognostications had never been let loose on Majipoor! These talismans and harbingers, these monstrous conjurings! We were a rational people once, so I understand it. Would that we were again. We have Prankipin to blame for this. He was the one that swayed the world toward witchcraft and magic.” Prestimion looked gloomily toward Duke Svor. “You try my patience very sorely with these superstitions, friend. You and Gialaurys both.”

“Perhaps we do,” said Svor. “For that I beg your pardon, Prestimion. Nonetheless, cutting ourselves off from any source of information, esoteric though it may be, seems a mistake to me. That you see no substance in the arcane practices, prince, may not mean that they’re altogether devoid of truth. I propose that we put the Vroon on the payroll, for something more than ten weights this time, and ask him to come to us with any further insights he may have.”

“Which is exactly what he came here to achieve,” Septach Melayn said. “He’s obviously looking for a new employer, and who better than the incoming Coronal? No. No. I vote against having anything to do with him. We don’t need him and we don’t want him. He’ll sell himself six times over the same day, if only he can find enough buyers.”

Svor held up one hand, palm outward, in disagreement. “In a time of the changing of kings, those in high places should tread cautiously, I think. If there’s substance to these Vroonish whisperings, and we spurn him out of mere mistrust of the man himself or of witchery in general, more fools we. There’s no need to make him party to our innermost councils: only to toss him a royal or two to retain access to his visions. To me that seems simply prudent.”

“And to me,” said Gialaurys.

Septach Melayn scowled. “You are both of you much too willing to give credence to such stuff. It’s a perilous wizardy time, when lunatic nonsense like this infests even shrewd men like you, Svor. I could gladly take that Vroon and—”

“Calmly, calmly, Septach Melayn,” said Prestimion, speaking com-mandingly but in his most gentle manner of command, for blood and fire had come into Septach Melayn’s pale elegant face. “I’m no more eager to have him flapping about us than you are. Nor can I put any faith in this talk of a challenger rising up against me. Such a thing is not going to happen.”

“So we all hope and pray,” Septach Melayn said.

“So we profoundly believe.” Prestimion shuddered, as if he had stepped in something unclean. “By the Divine, I regret having allowed that Vroon to assault our ears with all that foolishness!” He looked toward Duke Svor. “Keep your distance from him, is what I say to you, my friend.” And then, looking to the other side: “But do him no harm, Septach Melayn, do you hear? I will not have it.”

“As you wish, prince.”

“Good. Thank you. And now, if we may, shall we return to the matter of the pairings for the games?”

5

The Lady Thismet, sister to Prince Korsibar, had been given one of the most luxurious suites in the Labyrinth’s imperial sector for her private chamber, one that ordinarily was reserved for the use of the Coronal’s own consort on those rare occasions of state when she might visit the underground capital. But it was an open secret to all the world that the Lady Roxivail, who was wife to Lord Confalume, had long lived apart from the Coronal in a palace of her own on the southerly island of Shambettirantil in the tropical Gulf of Stoien. Though her husband was soon to ascend to the title of Pontifex, she had sent no response to the invitation to attend his investiture, nor did anyone expect her to be present for the ceremony. And so the suite that would have been Roxivail’s had been assigned to her daughter Thismet instead.

Within it lay Princess Thismet now, taking her ease in the great glossy tub of porphyry inlaid with patterns of wine-yellow topaz that stood at the center of her bathchamber. From the smooth tubes of green onyx that were its spigots ran a steady pale pink stream of heated water, the fragrant and silken water of far-off Lake Embolain, carried across two thousand miles of marble piping for the pleasure of the guests of the Pontifex. A triple pair of iridescent green lamps hung above her. The princess lay prettily disposed, breast-deep in the tub with her arms hanging relaxed over its curving rim, so that the two serving-women who knelt just to either side of it could carry out their nightly task of caring for her hands and fingers, the flawless elongated nails of which were enameled afresh each evening in a gleaming platinum hue. Behind her, gently kneading the slender column of her neck, was the Princess Thismet’s chief lady-of-honor, Melithyrrh of Amblemorn, her companion since childhood, a woman as fair as Thismet was dark, with a great swirl of golden hair and pale cheeks lightly dappled with a perpetual fine blush.

Usually she and Thismet chattered endlessly; but tonight thus far very little had been said, and that with long periods of silence between each remark. After one of these Melithyrrh said, “The muscles of your back are very tense tonight, lady.”

“When I had my rest this afternoon I dreamed, and the dream stays with me and grips me all along my spine.”

“It must not have been a very beguiling dream.”

To this the Princess Thismet offered no reply.

“A sending of some sort?” asked Melithyrrh, after a few moments more.

“A dream,” said Thismet shortly. “Only a dream. Dig your fingers more deeply into my shoulders, would you, good Melithyrrh?”

Again there was silence, while Melithyrrh steadily worked. Thismet closed her eyes and let her head loll backward. Her body was a slender one, sinewy for a woman’s, and the muscles lay close to the surface: often, when she had dreamed a disturbing dream, they were knotted and painful for long hours thereafter.

She was Prince Korsibar’s twin, born only a few minutes after him, and the kinship between them showed in her shining ebony hair and dark glittering eyes, her prominent sharp-edged cheekbones, her full lips and strong chin, and in the long-limbed proportions of her frame. But whereas Korsibar was a man of towering height, the Lady Thismet was cut to a smaller scale, having her brother’s rangy proportions but nothing like his size, and where his skin was leathery and blackened by long exposure to fierce sunlight, hers was extraordinarily smooth and had the stark whiteness of one who lived only by night. Her whole appearance was one of great delicacy of form and almost a sort of boyishness, other than in the fullness of her breasts and the womanly breadth of her hips.

A third serving-maid entered the chamber and said, “The magus Sanibak-Thastimoon is outside, saying he has been urgently summoned, and asks to be admitted. Shall I show him in?”

Melithyrrh laughed. “Has he lost his mind? Have you? Milady is in her bath.”

The girl reddened and stammered something inaudible.

Icily, Thismet said, “I requested his immediate presence, Melithyrrh.”

“Surely you didn’t intend—”

“Immediate,” she said. “Am I required by you to maintain my modesty in front of creatures of every sort, Melithyrrh, even those who could never feel desire for women of the human kind? Let him come in.”

“Indeed,” said Melithyrrh with ostentatious cheeriness, signaling to the serving-maid. The Su-Suheris appeared almost at once, a thin, tall, sharp-angled figure tightly wrapped in a rigid sheathlike tunic of orange parchment bedecked with shining blue beads, from which his pair of narrow emerald-eyed heads jutted like twin conning-towers. He took up a position just to the left of the massive porphyry tub, and, though he was looking down directly at Thismet’s clearly revealed nakedness, he displayed no more interest in it than he did in the tub itself.

“Lady?” he said.

“I need your guidance, Sanibak-Thastimoon, in a certain delicate matter. I hope I can rely upon you. And on your discretion.”

From the leftmost head came a quick, barely perceptible nod.

She went on, “You told me once, not long ago, that I was destined for great things—though whether they were great good things or great bad things, you could not or would not say.”

“Could not, my lady,” said the Su-Suheris. The voice that spoke was the crisp and precisely inflected one of the necromancer’s right head.

“Could not. Very well. The omens were ambiguous, as such omens all too often are. You told me also that you could see the same ambiguous kind of greatness in my brother’s future.”

Again Sanibak-Thastimoon briefly nodded, both heads at once.

“This afternoon,” Princess Thismet said, “I had a strange dark dream. Perhaps you can speak it for me, Sanibak-Thastimoon. I dreamed that I was home again, that I had somehow returned to the Castle; but I was in some part of the Castle that was unknown to me, on the northern side where almost nobody ever goes. It seemed to me that I was wandering across a broad platform of badly chipped brick that led to a dismal half-ruined wall, and thence to a kind of parapet that gave me a view out to such towns as Huine and Gossif, and whatever city may be beyond those—Tentag, I suppose. There I was, anyhow, in this old and crumbling corner of the Castle, looking outward to cities I had never visited and then in toward the summit of the Mount rising high above me, and wondering how I was ever going to find my way toward those parts of the building where I knew my way around.”

She fell silent, and stared at the ceiling of the bathchamber, where an ornate frieze of interwoven flowers and leaves and stalks, eldiron blossoms and tanigales and big fleshy shepitholes, had been carved from sleek curving slabs of sapphire targolite and pale chalcedony.

“Yes, lady?” said Sanibak-Thastimoon, waiting.

Through the Lady Thismet’s mind a thousand turbulent images flowed. She saw herself running to and fro on that somber balcony at the edge of the immense sprawling Castle atop the mightiest mountain of Majipoor—the Castle that had been the residence of the Coronals of Majipoor these seven thousand years past, the ever-growing Castle of twenty thousand rooms, or perhaps it was thirty thousand, for who could number them? The Castle that was a great city unto itself, where each Coronal in turn added new rooms of his own to what was already so intricate a building that even residents of many years’ standing easily found themselves lost in its seemingly infinite byways. As she herself had become lost, this very day, while she wandered the Castle’s unfathomable vastnesses in her dream.

By and by she began to speak again, describing for the Su-Suheris how she had made her way, with the aid of this passerby and that one, through that enormous maze of stony galleries and musty tunnels and corridors and staircases and long echoing courtyards toward the more familiar inner bastions. Again and again the perplexing paths doubled back on themselves and she discovered herself entering someplace she had left only a little while before. But always there was someone to help her on her way, and always one of nonhuman origin. It seemed that persons of every race but her own were there to offer guidance to her: first a pair of scaly forked-tongued Ghayrogs, and then a bright-eyed little Vroon who danced ahead of her on its multitude of ever-recoiling tentacles, and some Liimen, and a Su-Suheris or two, and Hjorts, and a massive Skandar, and someone of a species she could not identify at all. “And even, I think, a Metamorph: for it was very thin, and had that greenish skin of theirs, and hardly any lips or nose at all. But what would a Metamorph be doing inside the Castle?”

The two manicurists were finished with her now. They rose and left the room. Briefly the princess inspected her gleaming fingernails and found them acceptable; then, indicating to Melithyrrh that she had bathed long enough, she clambered to her feet and stepped from the tub, smiling faintly at the frantic haste with which Melithyrrh rushed to wrap a towel about her. But the towel was gossamer stuff that scarcely hid the contours of her breasts and thighs, nor did the Su-Suheris display so much as a flicker of excitement at the sight of the Lady Thismet’s body so skimpily wrapped.

Casually, Thismet blotted herself dry and tossed the towel aside. Immediately Melithyrrh came forward to clothe her in a light robe of ivory-colored cambric oversewn with pink strands of tiny, fragile ganibin-shells.

“Imagine me now passing under the Dizimaule Arch and into the Inner Castle,” she said to Sanibak-Thastimoon. “And suddenly I was all alone, no one in sight, not any Hjorts nor Ghayrogs nor human people, no one. No one. The Inner Castle was utterly deserted. There was a frightening silence, a ghastly silence. A cold wind was blowing across the plaza and strange stars were in the sky, of a kind that I had never seen before, huge bearded stars, stars that trailed bright streams of red flame.

“I was within the heart of the Inner Castle, now, coming up the Ninety-Nine Steps and entering into the centralmost precincts. What I found there was not disposed exactly as the real Inner Castle is, you understand: Lord Siminave’s reflecting pool was on the wrong side of the Pinitor Court, and I couldn’t see the Vildivar Balconies at all, and somehow Lord Arioc’s Watchtower was even more bizarre-looking than it is in fact, with eight or nine tall peaks instead of five, and long looping arms sticking out from every side of it. But I was in the Inner Castle, all right, however much my dreaming mind had changed things around. I could see Stiamot Keep rising up over everything, and Lord Prankipin’s big black treasury building in all its spectacular ugliness, and there was my father’s garden-house, where all the peculiar plants grow; and then the great door to the royal chambers was before me. All this while, as I walked on and on, I saw no one else. It was as if I was the only person in the entire Castle.”

Sanibak-Thastimoon stood statue-still before her, saying nothing, focusing the full concentration of both his heads upon her words.

Steadily, though with an increasing huskiness of voice, the Lady Thismet continued to tell him her tale, describing how in that awesome dreadful solitude she had advanced from room to room within the most sacrosanct precincts of the Castle until at last she stood at the threshold of the throne room itself.

That was a room she knew very well, for it had been built by the command of her father Lord Confalume at the midpoint of his long, distinguished reign, and all through her girlhood she had watched it under construction, month by month, year by year. The old throne room, which was said to go back to the very foundation of the Castle in Lord Stiamot’s time, had long since been deemed too small and plain for its function; and Lord Confalume had resolved, once the greatness of his achievements was apparent to all, to replace it with a site of true magnificence in which the grandest and most solemn ceremonies of the realm might be held, and for which his name would be remembered through all of time to come. And so he had, amalgamating half a dozen inner rooms of no particular significance into the breathtaking high-vaulted throne room that was to be his distinctive contribution to the fabric of the Castle.

The floor of it was fashioned not of the usual slabs of polished stone but rather from the remarkable yellow wood of the gurna, a rare tree of the Khyntor peaks of northern Zimroel that had the radiant glow of a slow-burning fire and the sheen and grace of fine amber. The beams of the room, gigantic square-timbered ones that jutted out with tremendous force from its ceiling, were gilded with delicately hammered sheets of the fine pink gold that came from the mines of eastern Alhanroel, and inset with huge clustering masses of amethysts, sapphires, moonstones, and tourmalines. And on the walls were hung vivid tapestries woven by the most skillful craftsmen of Makroposopos, in which were depicted scenes of the history of Majipoor: its earliest settlement by the voyagers who came across the sea of stars from Old Earth, and then panels that showed the time of the building of the cities and the final conquest of the native Shapeshifters by Lord Stiamot, and finally a group of scenes illustrative of the wondrous expansion of the kingdom under its most recent rulers, who had brought it to its present state of overflowing abundance.

But the heart of the throne room, the core of the Castle itself, was the grand and lordly Confalume Throne. Atop a grand mahogany pedestal cut with many steps it rested, a high curving seat carved from a single mighty block of black opal in which fiery natural veins of blood-scarlet ruby stood forth in an astonishing tracery. Its sides were flanked by massive silver pillars that supported an overarching canopy of gold lined with blue mother-of-pearl, and looming above all else was the starburst that was the symbol of the Coronal’s power, blazing in a splendor of shining white platinum that was tipped at every extremity by spheres of milky-streaked purple onyx.

“The strangest thing of my dream,” said the Lady Thismet to the utterly still Sanibak-Thastimoon, “was that there wasn’t just the one throne in the throne room, but two, both of them of identical aspect, facing each other across the entire expanse of the room. One throne was empty; and the other was occupied by a man who wore the robes and starburst crown of a Coronal. His face was in shadows, but even from some distance away I could tell that he was neither my father nor Prestimion; for plainly he was a much bigger man than either one of them, a man of great size and strength indeed.

“He beckoned me forward; and I came to the center of the room and halted there, unsure of what I should do, a little frightened, even, and when I began to make the starburst sign before him, he raised one hand as though to make me stop. And said to me, in a deep voice that I knew very well, ‘Why do you not take your proper seat, Lady Thismet?’ By which he plainly meant the throne at the opposite side of the room. I went to it and climbed the stairs and placed myself upon that opal seat; and in that moment a brilliant light burst down on the room from the highest point of the roof, and I was able then to see that the man wearing the Coronal’s crown, the man who was seated on the throne facing mine, was my brother Korsibar.”

Once again the Lady Thismet fell silent.

There it was, out in the open at last. Had she been too obvious, too blatant? The silence lingered on and on, and she waited for Sanibak-Thastimoon to offer her his interpretation of her dream; but no interpretation was forthcoming.

Her eyes were bright with yearning. Come, she thought: comprehend my hidden message, you who comprehend everything. Seize the hint I’ve provided, give me the encouragement to go forward to what I most desire, tell me the thing I want so passionately to hear from you!

But the Su-Suheris remained silent.

“That was the dream, Sanibak-Thastimoon. It ended there. I awoke in the moment of that great light, and my soul was deeply troubled by what I had seen.”

“Yes, lady. I understand that.”

She waited hopefully once more; and again the Su-Suheris did not speak.

“You have nothing to tell me?” she asked. “Speak me my dream, Sanibak-Thastimoon! Let me know its meaning!”

“You know its meaning already, my lady.” And he smiled the Su-Suheris version of a smile with both his faces.

So he perceived, then, the pattern of the tapestry she was weaving! But still, she knew, she had to goad him on to the final revelation. It had to come from him first, that statement of the thing that seethed within her.

Well, she could coax, she could beguile, she could hint. In feigned innocence and puzzlement she said, “Ah, but the most obvious meaning is one that defies all law and logic. Dreams often show visions of what is to come, is that not so? Especially dreams as vivid as this. But this dream goes too far. It seems to say that Korsibar is destined to be Coronal, and not Prestimion. Which is a monstrous impossibility. Everyone knows that such a thing may not be.”

“Some dreams are born from our deepest hopes, lady. They show the future we yearn to see, not necessarily the one that is to be. I think this one may have been of that kind.”

“And this deep hope, what is that?”

“You wandered long in the Castle, down many a strange path; and ultimately you came to a familiar place, and there you saw your brother crowned and seated on your father’s throne. Can it be that you feel within yourself that Prince Korsibar should become Coronal?” the Su-Suheris asked, giving her a sharp close look out of the left pair of eyes.

Thismet felt joy rising within her. But she held to her game. “What are you saying? Do you dare put such wildly seditious words in my mouth?”

“I put nothing in your mouth, my lady, except that which I see is already in your soul. Can it be, lady, that in the secrecy of your heart you regret that the choice will not fall upon your brother?” His inflection was flat and even; both of his two faces were entirely without expression. But a terrible pressure was coming from him all the same. “Tell me, lady: is that not the case?”

Yes. Yes.

It was out at last.

Like everyone else, Thismet had taken it for granted that Prestimion would be Coronal; for how could it be otherwise, with the throne forbidden to Korsibar by ancient custom? And yet, and yet, gradually she had come to question the necessity of Prestimion’s ascent. Why Prestimion? Why should her mighty brother of the shining brow not be king in succession to their father? Surely he merited the crown, all issues of tradition aside.

These were dangerous thoughts. Thismet had kept them hidden in the sealed fastnesses of her spirit. But as Prankipin’s days dwindled, and the imminence of Prestimion’s crowning rose on the horizon like Castle Mount itself, she found herself no longer able to suppress the fierce intensity of her feelings. Korsibar should be Coronal, yes! Korsibar, and no other prince. Korsibar! Korsibar!

Where to begin the campaign, though? For that she needed the advice of someone whose range of vision was far broader than her own. Who better than this cold-blooded magus, who served her brother and at times herself? He was the one. He could tell her the path to follow.

He was waiting for her to respond. He knew the nature of the game she had invited him to play with her: that was obvious.

He said, once more, “Is that not true, lady? You think he should be king.” Thismet smiled and drew a deep breath, and the strength to speak out came flooding into her, and boldly she said, “Yes! I will be honest with you, Sanibak-Thastimoon: that is precisely what I believe! It makes no sense to me that Prestimion should be my father’s choice instead of Korsibar. Prestimion in place of his own son—his magnificent kingly son—”

She paused. What joy, what relief, finally to have let it all pour forth!

Sanibak-Thastimoon said nothing.

“Custom. Law. I know these things,” said Princess Thismet. “But even so—” She shook her head. “There’s such a thing as a higher justice in the world, justice that goes beyond mere custom. And by the law of that justice it’s right that Korsibar be Coronal. That seems utterly clear to me.”

Again she looked questioningly to the Su-Suheris. The four green alien eyes that faced her remained implacably enigmatic.

“Yes,” he said, after an eternity. “I do agree, lady.”

Her first convert, her first ally. It was a moment for exhilaration and exultation. She could almost have embraced him. Almost.

But there was another matter too, even more delicate than the other, to thrash out with him.

Thismet breathed deeply once more and said, “The two thrones of my dream. What of that, Sanibak-Thastimoon? My brother beckoned me to take the other throne for myself. But even if Korsibar should somehow become Coronal—I have no idea how, but there must be a way—there’d be no place in the government for me. The sister of the Coronal is without rank in her own right. It was you that told me, remember, that I was destined for greatness, long before I ever dreamed this dream. But in the waking world what throne would there be for me to have?”

“There is greatness in helping one’s brother to attain a throne. There is power to be had by standing beside one’s brother as he sits upon the throne. You take your dream of two thrones too literally perhaps, lady.”

“Perhaps I do,” Thismet said.

She looked toward the richly tiled wall of the chamber as if she were able to see clear through it, and upward also through each of the rings of the Labyrinth, beyond all those ancient subterranean structures—the Court of Pyramids and the Place of Masks and the Hall of Winds and all the rest of them—outward into the open, and off toward the colossal bulk of Castle Mount bestriding the world far to the north. And abruptly all the exhilaration that had possessed her just a moment before departed from her, and she came crashing down out of her joy, and the world went dark for her as though there had been a sudden eclipse.

These fantasies of her dream, she realized, were mere foolish phantoms. None of the things her wanton sleeping mind had imagined would ever come to pass. It was absurd to think that they could. There would be no great position in the realm for her, no, and none for her brother either. The Prince of Muldemar would be king. That was as good as signed and sealed; the inevitability of Prestimion’s rule fell like a sword across her soul.

The pattern that her life would surely take once the new reign had begun rose bleakly before her: a soft, empty comfort-swaddled life, a meaningless existence of baths and manicures and massages and jeweled idleness, far from the levers of power in the land. Had she been born for nothing more than that? What a sad waste, then!

She knew she must fight it. But how? How?

After a time she said, in a steely tone, “In any event there is no justice in the world, is there, Sanibak-Thastimoon? I know as well as you that it’ll be Prestimion who becomes Coronal, and not Korsibar.”

“That is something that might reasonably be expected, lady,” said Sanibak-Thastimoon placidly.

“And when the throne goes to Prestimion, Korsibar and I leave the Castle, he to his estate and I to mine; or I might become wife to some powerful prince, I suppose. But there’ll be no power in that for me, will there? I will be a great lady, yes, but I am that now; after Prestimion is king I will be a wife, at best. A wife, Sanibak-Thastimoon.” She spoke the word as though it were an imprecation. “I’ll have no voice in anything of any importance outside my own house, and perhaps not even there. It’ll be little better for my brother. Our family’s influence in this castle ends in the moment when Prestimion puts the crown upon his head.”

“The great prince you might marry,” the Su-Suheris said, “might well be that same Lord Prestimion, princess, if it is indeed Prestimion who is to be Coronal. And then your power and influence would by no means be at an end.”

That suggestion brought a sudden half-smothered gasp of astonishment from the Lady Melithyrrh, who had been standing to one side throughout this entire interchange. She looked toward Thismet, who silenced whatever Melithyrrh might have been about to say with a furious glare and replied, “Are you seriously proposing, Sanibak-Thastimoon, that I give myself in marriage to the very man who is going to take the throne from my brother? The one who’s destined to push him into obscurity?”

“I merely raised the possibility, lady.”

“Well, see that you raise it never again, if you’d like to keep both those pretty heads attached to that neck of yours.” Thismet’s eyes flashed him a look of fiery ferocity. Strength and determination were gathering in her again.—“There is another possibility,” she said, less severely, in a new and deeper voice.

“Yes, lady?” said Sanibak-Thastimoon, with the most extreme patience. “And what is that?”

Her heart was beating in an astounding thunderous way. Thismet felt herself swaying with an odd vertigo, for she knew she stood now at a precipitous brink. But she compelled herself to maintain an outward appearance of calmness. Moistening her lips thoughtfully, she said, “You agree with me, you say, that Korsibar is better fitted for the throne. Very well. My intention is to see that he attains it.”

“And how will you achieve that?” asked the Su-Suheris.

“Consider this, if you will. What the dream was telling me, let me propose, is that what I must do is go to Korsibar and strongly urge him to put himself forth before our father as a candidate for the throne—now, while everything is still in flux: before the old Pontifex dies, before Prestimion is formally named. And our father will yield to him, I think, if Korsibar only makes his case strong enough; and then Korsibar will be Coronal; and in gratitude my brother will name me as one of his High Counsellors, so that I may have some role after all in governing the world. Would you not say that that’s a plausible interpretation of my dream?” And again, when the Su-Suheris offered no reply: “Would you not say so?”

He nodded, one head after another. And blandly he said, “I will not deny that it is, lady.”

Thismet smiled. “It must be, beyond all question,” she said all in a rush. She was ablaze now, flushed and panting. “There can be no other road to greatness for me—is there? How can there be?—but through Korsibar. And it’s a known fact that I’m destined for great things. You’ve told me so yourself. Or do you retract that prophecy now?”

“I retract none of it, lady,” said the Su-Suheris quietly. “Tour future is displayed in your stars, and obscurity and retirement play no part in the pattern of what is beyond any doubt to come. That is quite certain.—The same is true of your brother’s horoscope. ‘You will shake the world, Prince Korsibar.’ Those were my words to him, some months ago. Did he never share them with you?”

“No,” said Thismet, with some surprise. “I heard nothing about that from him.”

“Nevertheless, I did make it known to him. And in recent days your father’s own oracles have independently told him the same thing.”

“Well, then,” she said, “it all becomes clear. The omens converge and confirm one another: all lines lead us to the throne. Tradition will give way to reason; the better man will be chosen. I’ll speak with Korsibar this very day.”

But then a curious expression passed across both Sanibak-Thastimoon’s faces, as if his heads had exchanged glances with one another, though she had not seen his eyes move at all.

Thismet said, “Do you see anything unwise in that?”

“I think it might be wiser, lady, to speak with his friends first, before you bring the matter directly to him.”

“Mandrykarn, you mean? Venta? Navigorn?”

“No, not those. They would be worse than useless. I mean the other ones, those two ill-matched brothers, the giant and the little snake. They’ll serve the purpose better, I suspect.”

Thismet contemplated that for a moment.

“Farholt and Farquanor,” she said. “Yes. Yes, perhaps so.” To Melithyrrh she said, “I’ll go to my sitting-room now, I think. Send for the brothers; tell them to wait upon me there.”

6

Korsibar said, “We are agreed, then.” He looked to the list in his hand, then to the assembled lords. They had gathered that day in the room of the Labyrinth’s imperial sector known as the Old Banquet Hall, which was cut at angles that diminished and swelled curiously from one end to the other, and had many a strangely painted drapery on the wall to enhance the effect of discomforting illusions of distance. “The footraces and the dueling with batons, first. Following which, the hurdles and hoops and the hammer-throw, both for the men and the women. The archery contest next, and then the mounted jousting; and after that the mock battle, and then the boxing and the wrestling matches, with the chariot-racing to come at the very end. Which will be followed by the ceremonial parade upward through the various levels from the Arena to the Court of Globes, where the Master of the Games will award the prizes in the presence of Lord Confalume. And then—”

“It was my understanding that we would have the wrestling earlier in the program,” said Gialaurys testily. He had only just arrived in the hall minutes before. “So it says here on the slip of paper that you see in my hand. The wrestling after the batons, and before the hurdles.”

Korsibar looked with an uncertain frown toward Farholt, who had played a closer role in the planning than he had. “That was before,” said Farholt, stepping forward and taking Korsibar’s list from him. “It was changed just two hours past, while you were still lingering over your midday ale.” Farholt tapped the list and offered Gialaurys a defiant glowering stare. “The lighter sports first, and then the things for sturdier folk.”

“I was not consulted,” Gialaurys said. “I would rather have it the earlier way.” There was a rumble of something close to menace in his voice. He moved a couple of paces closer to the heavy-sinewed Farholt, who bristled visibly and drew himself up to his fullest height. They were the two most sizable figures in the group, both of them mountainous in bulk, Farholt the taller man but Gialaurys of a greater thickness of body, even, than the other. “I prefer to win my wreath sooner rather than later.”

“And are you so sure of winning, then?” Farholt asked. “What if it goes against you, and then you must sit sorrowfully through all the rest of the games with the mark of defeat on you, while wreaths are won by others all around?”

Fury gleamed in Gialaurys’s eyes. “So that’s why you’d prefer to hold back the wrestling closer to the end, Farholt?”

“That was no decision of mine,” Farholt retorted. His face, always somewhat florid, had turned a bright red. “But if you mean to suggest—”

“One moment, friends,” said Prestimion, moving between the two big men just as it was beginning to seem that the gathering heat of their words would lead to actual strife right here and now. Dwarfed though he was by their huge forms looming above him, he pressed them each lightly on the chest with his fingertips and pushed them gently apart. “Please, let there be peace in this place, where a Pontifex lies dying close at hand. This is too small a matter for such quarreling. What do you say here, Prince Korsibar?”

“I say that if there’s a disagreement, let the Master of the Games decide.”

“A good point.” Prestimion glanced in the direction of the Grand Admiral Prince Gonivaul, who had been chosen to be Master that morning by a slender margin over the only other candidate, the Procurator Dantirya Sambail.

The Admiral, one of the senior peers of the land, was linked by ties of blood to the family of Amyntilir, the Pontifex who had held sway three reigns prior to Prankipin. Prince Gonivaul was a tight-faced man of stubborn and parsimonious nature, whose sumptuous private domain lay not far outside the burnt-orange sandstone walls of many-spired Bombifale, which was by general agreement deemed the most beautiful of the cities of Castle Mount. He was long and narrow through the jaw, very much like his famous ancestor, and showed scarcely anything but hair above the shoulders, for a dense and coarse black beard thick as fur covered him cheek and jowl, upward almost to the lower lids of his eyes and the other way deep and heavy down his throat to vanish into his collar; and the hair of his head, of the same thick, rank kind and worn very long, descended across his forehead nearly to his eyebrows. His title of Grand Admiral was a purely ceremonial one; the commerce of the ports lay in his official jurisdiction, but so far as anyone knew, he had never gone to sea, not even for the journey to Zimroel that most of the princes of the Mount undertook at least once in their lives.

Prestimion said, “Good Admiral and Master, you’ve heard Prince Korsibar. Will you give us a ruling in this?”

Gonivaul grunted in his beard. His brows lowered and his cheeks screwed upward into a squint until his eyes had all but disappeared within the dark fur that covered so much of his face; and for an inordinate time he seemed lost in what was plainly meant to pass for thought. At long last he said, “Which is the later of the two lists?”

“Mine,” Farholt said instantly. “There is no disputing that.”

Gonivaul took the slip from him, and the other from Gialaurys, and studied them both another endless while. Then at length the Admiral said, “We have room for compromise here. The wrestling is moved to the middle of the games, between the hammer-throw and the archery.”

Farholt quickly signaled his acceptance; but from Gialaurys there came a grumbling sound, and there might have been something more from him had Prestimion not silenced him with a hiss.

Once the wrangling was over and the preliminary planning for the games completed, servitors entered the room with refreshments for the assembled lords. Others of the Labyrinth’s highborn guests who had played no part in the planning session came in now also, for there was to be a general festivity here today in celebration of the impending commencement of the games.

The various princes and dukes and counts moved apart about the hall by twos and threes, gathering by the quaint and curious bits of ancient statuary that were scattered throughout it. They were, supposedly, portraits of Pontifexes and Coronals of ages gone by. While waiting for the wine to be served, the guests studied one statue and another, touching them, tracing the outline of a sharp nose or an outthrust chin, speculating on the identities of those whom they were meant to represent. “Arioc,” said Gialaurys, pointing at a particularly preposterous-looking one. No, said Duke Oljebbin, that was Stiamot, the conqueror of the Shapeshifters, which led to an extensive dispute between him and Prince Serithorn, who was pleased to count Stiamot among his numerous royal ancestors. Then the scrawny little Farquanor, huge Farholt’s brother, identified a statue of a tall man imbued with sublime dignity and nobility as being that of one of his ancestors, the Pontifex Guadeloom, bringing a skeptical chuckle from Prince Gonivaul, and so it went from one to another.

“That was done well, your passing that disagreement so quickly to the Admiral,” Korsibar said to Prestimion. They stood together at one sharp angle of the seven-sided room beneath a broad sky-blue arch touched with borders of red autumn fire. “Those are two devilish short-tempered men, and they have no tolerance for one another at all. Let the one say ‘spring’ and the other will instantly say ‘winter’; let one say ‘black’ and from the other will come ‘white’; and so on through the dictionary for sheer love of contrariness. When they come together in the wrestling, it’ll be a spectacle indeed.”

“My cousin of Ni-moya expressed the belief the other day that it might be just such a way between you and me as it is between Farholt and Gialaurys,” said Prestimion, smiling a little, though barely drawing back his lips. “That is to say, he thinks that we are contrary to the essence; that there’s an innate tension between us that creates automatic conflict; that you might be expected to oppose a certain thing only because I was the one who had advocated it.”

“Ah, no, Prestimion,” returned Korsibar, smiling also, and with rather more warmth to it. “Do you really believe that to be so?”

“It was the Procurator that said it.”

“Yes, but you and I know that it isn’t like that with us at all. Do you feel a tension as you stand here beside me? I’m not aware of any. And why should there be? There’s no rivalry where rivalry isn’t possible.” Korsibar clapped his hands to a passing servitor. “Hoy, some wine here!” he called. “The good strong Muldemar wine, from the prince’s own vineyard!”

Many others around the room were watching them closely. Among them was Count Iram of Normork, a slender red-haired man famous for his prowess in chariot-racing: a kinsman of Prince Serithorn’s, he was related also to Lord Confalume’s family by marriage. Iram plucked at Septach Melayn’s sleeve and said, cocking an eyebrow toward Korsibar and Prestimion, “How strained their smiles are, how hard they work at seeming friendly to each other! And look how gingerly they clink their wine-bowls! As though both of them fear that there’d be an explosion if they were to hit them together a trifle too hard.”

“I think those are two men who fear very little,” said Septach Melayn.

But Iram persisted. “Beyond question they hold themselves in a very stiff fashion. As well they ought to, I suppose; for what a tremendous lot of awkwardness there must be between them! Prestimion pays deference to Korsibar, since after all Korsibar is the Coronal’s son and therefore somewhat royal himself. But Korsibar for his part knows that he has to show respect to Prestimion, who very soon will be a king in his own right and therefore a higher man than Korsibar.”

Septach Melayn laughed. “Prestimion will be king, yes. But never, I suspect, will he be a higher man than Korsibar.”

Count Iram seemed perplexed at that. His mind was not of the quickest. But then he grasped the point of Septach Melayn’s words; for it was plain to see that the long-legged Korsibar rose up far above Prestimion, who came not much more than breast-high to him. Which was all that Septach Melayn had intended, a mere idle jest.

“Higher in that sense, yes,” the count said. “I take your meaning.” He offered a polite chuckle for Septach Melayn’s feeble play on words.

“It was not a very profound observation,” said Septach Melayn.

Indeed he felt a little abashed at his own vapidity. How could anyone speak of Prestimion as inconsequential beside the Coronal’s son, even in jest? The smaller man’s sturdy breadth of shoulder and invariable air of unshakable aplomb gave him a commanding look all out of keeping with the meagerness of his stature. And this day in particular Prestimion seemed to glow with the radiance of his advancing destiny. He was dressed in a regal robe of glossy crimson silk belted with emerald-green, with a massy golden pendant in the form of a bright-eyed crab hanging from a thick chain on his breast; whereas Korsibar wore only a simple knee-length tunic of white linen that any sausage-vendor might have worn, and open sandals of the most common design. For all his noble height and grandeur of form, Korsibar just now seemed eclipsed, cast into shadow by the flood of light that streamed from Prestimion.

“Be that as it may,” Iram went on, “but tell me this, Septach Melayn: does Prestimion privately feel himself more worthy than Korsibar, or does he have secret doubts? And, more to the point: does Korsibar truly think that Prestimion’s fit to have the throne? There’s much talk going around that Prestimion’s coming greatness doesn’t sit very well with the Coronal’s son.”

“And who talks this talk?” asked Septach Melayn.

“Procurator Dantirya Sambail, for one.”

“Well, yes, Dantirya Sambail. I heard his famous remark. But there’s no substance to it. Venom drips as easily from the Procurator’s lips as rainfall does from the sky in the forests of Kajith Kabulon. The moist heavy clouds there have no choice but to let their surplus water spill out each day; and so it is with Dantirya Sambail. He’s a mass of hatefulness within, and from time to time he has to vent some of it into the air.”

“Dantirya Sambail is the only one who has said it aloud. But everyone thinks it.”

“Thinks that Korsibar is resentful of Prestimion?”

“Well, and is there any way for him not to be? When he’s such a grand figure of a man, and so much held in esteem everywhere, and the son of a great and beloved king besides?”

“No Coronal’s son has ever followed his father to the throne,” said Septach Melayn. “None ever will, without bringing calamity down upon us all.” Idly he twirled the tip of his little golden beard, and after a moment said, “I agree, Korsibar is very impressive-looking, yes. If Coronals were chosen for their looks, he’d have the job without question. But the law very clearly states that we have no hereditary kingship here, and Korsibar’s a law-abiding man. Never has he given any indication of harboring dishonorable ambitions of any sort.”

“So you think all’s well between him and Prestimion?”

“I have no doubt of it.”

“All the same, the air these days is heavy with portents, Septach Melayn.”

“Is it, now? Well, better portents in the air than a swarm of dhiims, eh? Because the bite of a dhiim is real, and hurts; but no one’s ever seen a portent, let alone been injured by one. Let the loathsome mages chatter all they like. I can see the future every bit as clearly as the best of them, Irani, and this is what I have to tell you: in due time Prestimion is going to come serenely to the throne, and Korsibar will gladly pay homage to him along with all the rest of us.”

Count Irani nervously fingered a small bright amulet of gold and sea-dragon ivory that he wore dangling by a little silver chain from the breast of his tunic. “You are very lighthearted about these matters, Septach Melayn.”

“Yes. I’m lighthearted about most matters, I suppose. It’s my character’s biggest flaw.” Septach Melayn gave Count Irani a good-humored wink and turned away to find some other conversational partner among a group of younger princes that had collected about the table of wines.

At the opposite end of the room a new figure now appeared, toward whom the attention of a great many instantly began to flow: the Lady Thismet, accompanied by her lady-of-honor Melithyrrh and a little group of her handmaidens. Sanibak-Thastimoon was with her also, garbed in the formal red and green livery of Korsibar’s service, and the sight of the Su-Suheris magus caused no little whispering in the hall. There were few who failed to find the Su-Suheris folk sinister and forbidding, if only for the strangeness of those double heads.

Like her brother, Thismet had chosen to dress in uncomplicated manner this day, a light cream-white gown of a matte texture, belted in red, with a tracery of red pearls woven into it along her left shoulder to her breast, and for other ornament merely a single sharp manculain spine thrust through the glossy tight-curled darkness of her hair. The simplicity of her costume made a striking effect in this congregation of formally robed lordlings. It was as though she stood in a brilliant spotlight, attracting all eyes to her; and yet she had done nothing at all other than enter the room, smile at this one and at that, and beckon for a bowl of wine.

She spoke for a time with her brother’s dear friend Navigorn of Hoikmar, who was regarded almost as Korsibar’s equal as a stalwart huntsman, and with Mandrykarn and Venta, those other close hunting-companions of Korsibar’s. Then she dismissed them smoothly from her and with one quick imperious glance summoned Farholt to her side, and Farholt’s smaller and more malevolent younger brother also, the serpentine Farquanor. These two had been standing with the Procurator Dantirya Sambail and the Coronal’s white-haired cousin, Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, but they came to her at once, lithe little Farquanor taking up a position at her left hand and big blocky Farholt stationing himself immediately in front of her like a one-man mountain, altogether concealing her from the view of those behind him.

It required some effort to believe that this pair had sprung from the same womb. They were opposites in all ways, hot raucous bellowing Farholt given to all forms of excess and impulse, and icy little Farquanor a quiet man of cunning and caution, who advanced inch by inch through life from one carefully constructed scheme to another. Farholt was huge and fleshy and ponderous of movement, Farquanor slim and taut-skinned and quick. But their kinship could be seen in their eyes, which were of the same flat deadly gray hue, and in the ruddiness of their complexions, and in the prominent jut of their noses, which seemed to spring at a straight line from the midpoint of their foreheads. They had royalty in their ancestry: the long-ago Lord Guadeloom, he who had abruptly and surprisingly been made Coronal as a result of certain curious events surrounding the sudden abdication of the Pontifex Arioc.

Like Lord Confalume, Lord Guadeloom had had a son of more than usual splendor and nobility, Theremon by name. A tradition persisted in the family of Farholt and Farquanor that Guadeloom’s son Theremon had been far more deserving to be Coronal after him than any other man. But when it was Lord Guadeloom’s time to become Pontifex, he had named a mediocre bureaucrat called Calintane to succeed him, putting aside his own son just as all Coronals before him had done. That decision had rankled in Theremon’s descendants throughout the succeeding generations. The hereditary resentment of the family had descended through the long centuries to Farholt and Farquanor, who often when in their cups would hold forth on the fire that still coursed in them when they considered the ancient injustice done their ancestor. The Lady Thismet had long been aware of the passion those two felt on the subject; she found it of special interest at the present moment. They had talked about it most earnestly in her sitting-room only the day before, Farquanor and Farholt and she. “Concerning the matter that you and I discussed a little while ago—” Thismet said now.

The brothers were instantly attentive, though the flatness and dead-ness of their eyes seemed to bely the alertness of their features.

She said, with the serenity of a smooth-flowing stream, “Sanibak-Thastimoon has cast the auguries. The moment is auspicious for making a beginning of great endeavors: the time has arrived to commence our project.”

“Here? Now?” Farquanor asked. “In this room?”

“This very room, this very instant.”

Farquanor looked warily toward his brother, then to the Su-Suheris, whose faces were as inscrutable as ever, and lastly at Thismet.

“Is this wise?” he asked.

“It is. I am determined.” Thismet gestured toward the far side, where Prestimion and Korsibar were still engrossed in their talk, looking like nothing so much as a pair of old friends who had not seen one another in many months and were warmly renewing their acquaintance. “Go to him. Draw him aside. Say to him the things we agreed yesterday you would say.”

“And if I’m overheard?” Farquanor asked, his lean hard-angled face clouding, his eyes coming to life with the glint of uncertainty. “What then for me, publicly uttering subversive and indeed seditious notions under Prestimion’s very nose?”

“I would assume that you’d utter your utterances in a low guarded voice,” Thismet said. “No one’s going to overhear you amidst all this noise. And I’ll see to it that Prestimion himself is busy elsewhere while you speak with Korsibar.”

Farquanor nodded. His moment of unsureness was gone; already, Thismet could see, he was eager for the task. With a flick of her fingertips she sent him on his way, and she watched intently as Farquanor set out across the room, approached Korsibar and Prestimion, spoke briefly with them, doing some pointing and nodding in her direction. Then Prestimion, smiling, broke away and began to head through the crowd toward her. “Leave me,” Thismet murmured to Farholt. But she asked Sanibak-Thastimoon to remain with her.

Farquanor and Korsibar, she saw, had now withdrawn a little way deeper into the room, to a quiet alcove at the next angle of the wall, where the immense hideous flat-faced bust of some primordial Coronal partly concealed them from view. The way they stood, face-to-face, presenting themselves in profile to the rest of the room, it was impossible for anyone to read their lips. She could see Farquanor saying something to Korsibar, and Korsibar’s brow lowering in a heavy frown, and Farquanor speaking on, with many a quick gesture of his hands, while Korsibar leaned forward from the waist as though to hear more clearly what the smaller man was telling him.

Watching them, Thismet felt the rate of her heartbeat accelerating and her throat going dry. The pattern of the years to come—for Korsibar, for her, for the entire world—would very likely be shaped by the words Farquanor was speaking now. For better, for ill, the thing was being set in motion. She stole a quick glance at Sanibak-Thastimoon beside her. He was smiling an eerie double smile at her, as though to say, All will be well, have no fear.

Then Prestimion was at her side and saying, with the courteous little gesture of formal obeisance due to her as daughter of the Coronal, “The Count Farquanor tells me you have something you wish me to hear, lady.”

“Indeed,” she said.

She studied him with carefully hidden care. They had, of course, known each other ever since they were children, but to Thismet, Prestimion was just one of the many young lords who thronged the Castle, and not nearly the most interesting of those: she had paid little attention to him over the years. He had always seemed to her nothing more than a self-absorbed lordling on the make, earnest and studious and ambitious, and perhaps a trifle too short to be really attractive, though certainly he was good-looking enough. It was only after Prestimion had begun to emerge a few years ago as the probable candidate for her father’s throne that she had given him any serious scrutiny. Mainly, Thismet found him irritating these days; but how much that was because of anything he did or said, and how much simply because she disliked him for the likelihood that he was going to occupy the throne that she wished her brother would have, she could not say.

What surprised her this day, as he stood beside her now perhaps a trifle too closely, was something that she had never in any way felt before: a faint troublesome stirring of response to Prestimion as a man.

He was no taller than he ever was, and he wore his fair hair, as always, in an unflattering way. But he was different today in other ways. Already he had begun to hold himself in a truly regal fashion, but without seeming to be working hard at it, and there was a kingly glint in his eyes, and it seemed almost as though a sort of electricity were playing about his brow. Perhaps the rich splendid garb he wore today had something to do with it: but Thismet knew it was something else that was drawing her, something more elemental, which was nothing but the gathering force of Prestimion’s imminent rise to power. There was a magnetism in that. She could feel its pull. A strange pulsation came sweeping upward through her from her loins to her breast, and onward to her head.

Thismet wondered whether Prestimion might feel any corresponding pull himself that came from her. It seemed to her that she detected the signs of that—the movements of his eyes, the shifts of color in his face. It gave her a moment’s giddy pleasure.

Which gave way to anger, turned against herself. What absurdity this was! Every atom of her being must be devoted from this time onward to preventing this man from attaining the very power whose mere prospect was so deplorably unsettling her. For him to be drawn to her might be useful to her purpose; for her to be drawn at all to him, nothing but wild folly.

“You know Sanibak-Thastimoon, I think?” Thismet asked, inclining her head slightly in the direction of the Su-Suheris standing just behind her. “Magus to my brother, and occasionally to me as well?”

“I know of him, yes. We have not actually spoken.”

Sanibak-Thastimoon bowed to Prestimion, lowering his right head rather more than his left.

Thismet said, “In recent days he has been peering long and hard at the stars, prince, seeking omens for the new reign. He tells me now that he’s found auguries that will be of considerable interest to you.”

“Has he, now?” said Prestimion, with what seemed like no more than well-mannered formality. Too late, Thismet remembered that Prestimion was said to be skeptical toward all forms of wizardry and omen-seeking. But no matter: her only intention at the moment was to distract him from the conversation between Farquanor and Korsibar that was taking place across the room.

She gestured to the Su-Suheris to speak. Sanibak-Thastimoon made no show of dismay or surprise, although Thismet had not given him any warning of what would be required of him. “What I have determined,” said Sanibak-Thastimoon unhesitatingly, “is this: many great surprises are in store for you, prince—and for us all—in the times that lie ahead.”

Prestimion managed a slight elevation of his eyebrows, by way of showing mild curiosity.

“Pleasant surprises, I hope,” he said.

“Oh, yes, some of those as well,” said Sanibak-Thastimoon.

The prince laughed. “I’m not entirely sure I’m pleased with the sound of that.”

He invited the magus to be more specific; and Sanibak-Thastimoon replied sonorously that he would, so far as it was in his power to do so.

Thismet, meanwhile, was looking past Prestimion’s shoulder and outward toward her brother and Farquanor. She noted an expression of intense animation on Korsibar’s face: he was speaking quickly and with many firm chopping gestures of his hand, while Farquanor, rising almost on tiptoe to reduce the gulf of height between them, appeared to be trying to mollify Korsibar, to soothe him, to reassure him. Suddenly Korsibar turned and stared across the room, directly at Thismet. She fancied that she saw astonishment and bewilderment—and perhaps anger—in her brother’s eyes; and she felt a great yearning to know without delay what had occurred between him and Farquanor.

Closer at hand, Sanibak-Thastimoon was sharing portents of things to come with Prestimion as fast as he could invent them; but his utterances were couched in the cloudy generalities of his trade, with much murky talk of the stars traveling retrograde in their courses and brazen serpents devouring their own tails, such-and-such happenings and configurations implying the possibility of such-and-such an event and such-and-such a corollary consequence, unless of course they were countermanded by the contrary omen implied by thus and so, and so on, none of this being phrased with any great clarity or specificity.

Prestimion showed increasing signs of distinct inattention. At an appropriate pause in the narration he thanked the Su-Suheris most graciously for his guidance and excused himself. Then, looking toward Thismet, he gave her a quick dazzling smile and a startling intimate stare that made her feel both flattered and furious at the same time. And then he was gone.

Farquanor now was on his way back to her side of the room.

Her forehead throbbed with apprehension; her brain was spinning in her skull. “Well?” she demanded fiercely.

He seemed drained and wilted, like a plant left too long in the sun. Thismet had never seen him look so shaken. He held up a hand to forestall further pressure from her. Grabbing a bowl of wine from the tray of a passing servitor, he gulped it down before making any answer. She compelled herself to be patient, watching him regain strength and poise until he was again the Farquanor she knew, fearless, resourceful.

“It was very difficult,” he said at last. “But I think we have made a start.”

Eagerly she gripped him by one forearm. “Quickly! Tell me everything!”

Farquanor paused a long maddening moment. Then at last he said, “I began by observing to him that everyone here was talking about the Procurator’s remark, that your brother might feel hostility toward Prestimion and any idea that might come from him. To which your brother responded this, lady: that if the meaning of the Procurator’s words was that he felt your brother was inflamed with the desire to be Coronal in Prestimion’s stead, then the Procurator was implying treason to him, which is a dastardly charge that your brother utterly rejects.”

“Indeed,” said Thismet, feeling her spirit sinking within her. “Treason. He used that word. And you said—?”

“I said to him that he himself might not feel that he deserved the throne more than Prestimion, but that there were many others here that did, and that I was proud to say I was among them. That is treason too, said he, and grew very angry.”

“And gave no sign that he might be flattered, as well as angered, by hearing that important people thought that he was worthy of the throne?”

“Not then,” Farquanor said.

“Ah. Not then”

“I said next that I begged his pardon if I had offended him,” Farquanor went on, “and assured him I had no wish whatever to espouse treason, nor the Procurator neither, and most surely not to attribute treasonous thoughts to him. But I asked the good prince your brother to consider that treason is in fact a concept that alters and varies with the circumstances. None would dare call a thing treason, I said, if it were to bring about a worthwhile end. Which made him even more angry, lady. I thought he might strike me.

“I begged him to be calm; I told him again how many there are who believe in his right to have the throne, and that those people felt the succession law is unjust. I spoke of all those famous princes of the past who had been passed over for the Coronal’s seat on account of that law, and named a few. They were great names; I was very eloquent on their behalf and in comparing his virtues with theirs. And gradually I could see him warming to the concept. Toying with it, you might say. Revolving it again and again in his mind as though it were something completely new to him. And finally he said, Yes, Farquanor, many a great prince has had to step aside on account of this custom of ours.’”

“Ah. So he has taken the bait, then. The hook is in him.”

“Perhaps it is, lady.”

“And how was it left between you when you parted from him?”

“You didn’t see? There, at the very end of our talk?”

“I was busy at just that moment speaking with Prince Prestimion.”

A muscle quivered in Farquanor’s fleshless cheek and his eyes betrayed a surge of remembered pain. “I may have moved things along a trifle too swiftly just then, perhaps. I said to him that I was glad to see we were in accord, and that we might profitably hold further discussions on the subject. And also I said that there were those who would be glad to meet with him this afternoon to discuss a course of action leading toward constructive goals.”

Thismet leaned eagerly forward, so close that Farquanor’s nostrils quivered at the fragrance of her breath.

He said, “The prince reacted badly. It was too much too soon, I think, that final remark. A terrible look came into your brother’s eyes, and he reached down and laid his fingertips along both sides of my neck, like this, lady, very lightly, so that from a distance one might think it was but a friendly touch. But I knew from the strength of him and the pressure of his hands against me that all he needed to do was flick his wrists and he’d snap my spine as you would a fish bone, and might well do it. And he said to me that he would have no part in any treason against Prestimion and that I must never speak to him of such things again; and then he sent me from him.”

“And this, you say, is a good start?”

“I think it is, lady.”

“It seems a very bad one to me.”

“He was angered at the end, yes, and angry also in the beginning. But betweentimes he was giving the idea serious consideration. I saw that in him. He goes this way and that, lady: it is his nature.”

“Yes. I know my brother’s nature.”

“The thing is planted in him. He’ll strive to resist its pull, for as we all know the prince your brother is not one for rising up against the established order. But also it pleases him inwardly that others see him as a king. That was something he may not have allowed himself to dare to believe, but when it comes to him from others, that alters the case for him. He can be turned, lady. I’m certain of it. It would be easy enough for you to see that for yourself. You only need go to him; praise him for the kingliness that you see in him; and watch him closely. His face began to shine with a rosy glow when I spoke to him in that fashion. Oh, yes, lady, yes, yes. He can be turned.”

7

On the first day of the Pontifical Games the leaders of the kingdom presented themselves formally at the bedside of the Pontifex, who still hovered between life and death, obstinate in his refusal to pass onward and return to the Source of All Things. It was as though they felt a need to ask his permission to commence the games that were by ancient custom supposed to commemorate his departure from the world.

The dying Pontifex lay with eyes closed, face upward, an almost insignificant figure in the great expanse of the canopied imperial bed. His skin had gone gray. The long lobes of his ears had acquired a pendulous droop. His features were expressionless, as though sealed behind bands of bone. Only by his slow, virtually imperceptible breathing did he indicate in any way that he was still alive, and even that appeared to cease for long moments at a time.

It was time for him to go. Everyone was agreed on that. He was unthinkably ancient, with well over a century of life behind him. Forty-odd years as Pontifex, twenty or so as Coronal before that: it was enough.

Prankipin had been a man of tremendous vigor and physical resilience, romantic and visionary of nature, buoyant and joyous of spirit, famous for the warmth and infectious power of his smile. Even his coins portrayed him smiling that wondrous smile; and he appeared to be smiling now as he lay on his deathbed, as though the muscles of his face had long since forgotten any other expression. The Pontifex seemed oddly youthful too, here in extreme old age. His cheeks and forehead were smooth, almost childlike, all the furrows and corrugations of his long life having vanished in these final weeks.

In the darkened chamber where the old Pontifex lay dying, a luminous hush prevailed. Blue smoke flecked with red sparks coiled upward from tripods in which alien incenses burned, and tables in the shadowy corner of the room were piled high with books of spells and potions and the movements of the stars that the monarch had studied, or had pretended to study. More such volumes lay about him on the floor. A Vroon and a Su-Suheris and a steely-eyed Ghayrog stood sternly beside the bed, unendingly chanting in low soft tones the mysterious incantations that were intended to protect the Pontifex’s departing soul as it made itself ready for its voyage.

Everyone in the inner circles of the government, both at the Castle and in the Labyrinth, knew the names of those three aliens. The Vroon was Sifil Thiando; the Ghayrog, Varimaad Main; the Su-Suheris, Yamin-Dalarad. The three sepulchral-looking beings were the commanders of that immense troop of seers, haruspicators, necromancers, conjurers, and sortilegers that Prankipin had gathered about himself in the final two decades of his reign.

Bedecked with the insignia of their kind, clutching the wands of their art, they held themselves lofty and aloof, clothed in the dark forbidding aura of their own magics, as the members of the Coronal’s party prepared to enter the imperial bedchamber. For many years now these three had guided the aging Pontifex in all his most significant decisions; and in recent times it had become apparent to all that they—and not any of the officials of the Pontifical bureaucracy, nor, perhaps, even the Pontifex himself—were the real figures of authority at the court of the Labyrinth. By their imperious stance and commanding mien they left no doubt of that today.

But the three highest ministers of the Pontifical court were also on hand for the ceremony, clustered grimly to the left of the dying man’s pillow as if standing guard against the trio to the other side: Orwic Sarped, the Minister of External Affairs; Segamor, the Pontifex’s private secretary; and Kai Kanamat, the High Spokesman of the Pontificate. They were a somber-faced and dismal group. Those three had held their posts for immemorial years and were all three aged and withered, with Kai Kanamat the most shriveled of all, a man who gave the appearance of having been mummified while still alive, mere wizened skin stretched across a flimsy armature of fragile bone.

Once they, and not Prankipin’s team of wizards, had been the true wielders of power here. But that time was long gone. Beyond doubt they would all be glad to lay down whatever was left of their responsibilities and disappear into retirement as soon as Prankipin had given up the ghost.

In the room also were the two chief physicians to the Pontifex, Baergax Vor of Aias and Ghelena Gimail. Their time of glory, too, was over. No longer could they claim the gratitude of the entire Labyrinth bureacracy for their skill at sustaining and extending the Pontifex’s Me. The Pontifex was beyond any kind of repair now; the administration of the Labyrinth was on the verge of undergoing inevitable change, and all the cozy official niches would be swept clean. Now, standing quite literally in the shadow of the three mages, Baergax Vor and Ghelena Gimail looked like nothing more than hollowed husks, their skills exhausted and their occupation nearly gone from them.

As for the Pontifex himself, he lay like a waxen image of himself, motionless, unseeing, while the great ones of Majipoor made ready to offer him what they all passionately hoped would be their final act of homage.

In the hallway outside the Pontifex’s chamber they formed their procession. Lord Confalume, arrayed in the starburst crown and his robe of office, would go in first, of course, with the High Counsellor Duke Oljebbin just behind him, and then the other two senior lords, Serithorn and Gonivaul, side by side. Behind them would walk the hierarch Marcatain, representing the Lady of the Isle of Sleep, who was the third of the three Powers of the Realm; and after her the Procurator Dantirya Sambail, followed by Prince Korsibar and Duke Kanteverel of Bailemoona. Only when all of these had passed into the room would Prince Prestimion at last come in.

That was a thing that would set many tongues to wagging that day, that Korsibar and the rest should have gone in first, and Prestimion after them. But protocol permitted nothing else. All of those who had gone before Prestimion were high officials of the kingdom except for Korsibar, and Korsibar’s prominent place in the procession was assured by the fact of his royal birth. Prestimion held no significant place in the government at this point and had not yet been formally named as Coronal-designate. Until the moment that he was, Prestimion was merely a prince of Castle Mount, one of many; his power and prestige lay all in the future.

The signal to enter the Pontifex’s chamber was given. Confalume stepped forward, and then Duke Oljebbin, and the rest one by one. And as the grandees of the realm filed past the royal bedside, each in turn kneeling and making the sign of submission and blessing, a strange thing happened. The Pontifex’s eyes fluttered open as Korsibar came before him. Agitation was visible on the old man’s face. The fingers of his left hand trembled against the bedcovers; he seemed to be trying to move, even to sit up; a thick, bubbling, incoherent sound came from his lips.

Then, most astounding of all, his arm lifted, ever so slowly, and his gaunt quivering hand reached shakily out toward Korsibar, fingers spread wide. Korsibar stood stock-still, staring down in confusion. From old Prankipin came another sound, a deeper one, almost a groan, amazingly prolonged. He appeared to be trying to clutch at Korsibar’s wrist. But he could not reach that far. For a long moment that clawlike hand jutted upward into the air, jabbing fiercely toward Korsibar, jerking convulsively, and then it fell back. The Pontifex’s eyes filmed over and closed again, and once more the old man in the bed lay still, breathing so lightly that it was almost impossible to tell whether he was still alive.

There was an immediate hubbub in the room.

Prestimion, waiting at the door to the bedchamber for his moment to enter, watched astonished as the three mages moved frantically toward the bed from one side and the two physicians from the other, bending low over the old emperor, their heads close together, each group conferring in urgent whispers in the jargon of its profession. “They’ll smother him with all that attention,” Prestimion murmured to Count Iram of Normork as the bedside conference grew more intense. He could hear a frantic clicking of amulets and the almost panicky-sounding recitation of spells, while the doctors appeared to be trying to push the mages away, and one of them finally succeeded in putting a flask of some bluish medicine to the Pontifex’s lips.

Then the crisis seemed to pass, perhaps from the medicine, perhaps the spells: who could say? Slowly the wizards and the physicians backed away from the bed. The Pontifex had subsided once again into the depths of his coma.

The Ghayrog magus, Varimaad Klain, beckoned brusquely to Prestimion to enter the room.

He knelt as he had seen the others do before him. And made the sign of the Pontifex, and waited, half afraid that the old man would rise up again in that terrifying way and reach out for him also.

But Prankipin did not move. Prestimion put his head close to him, listening to the faint hoarse sound of his ragged breathing. He muttered the words of the blessing; Prankipin did not respond. Behind the closed lids his eyes were without movement. His waxen-looking face was smooth again, tranquil, smiling that eerie smile.

This is death-in-life, thought Prestimion, appalled. A horror. A horror. A storm of pity and revulsion swept through him. He rose abruptly from the Pontifex’s bedside and strode with swift brusque steps toward the room’s rear door.

Prestimion’s face was bleak as he emerged from the imperial bedchamber. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys met him on the ramp leading upward to the Arena, where the games would commence in little more than an hour; and, seeing the expression on the prince’s features, they glanced quickly at each other in alarm.

“What is it, Prestimion, has his majesty died?” Septach Melayn asked. “You look to be half a dead man yourself!”

“Poor Prankipin still lives, more or less,” Prestimion replied, grimacing. “More’s the sorrow for that. And as for me, no, not dead even by half, only a trifle sick to my stomach. The Pontifex lies there like a marble statue of himself, completely still, eyes closed, hardly breathing, kept alive by the Divine only knows what sorts of tricks. But you can see that he’s ready to move along, ready and eager. When Korsibar went past him he came alive for a moment, and actually reached out and tried to grab his wrist—it was an awful moment, that hand of his sticking up from the bed, and the sound he made—like a cry of pain, it was—”

“He’ll be at peace soon enough,” said Septach Melayn.

“And those wizards,” Prestimion said. “By the Divine, friends, my gullet is full of wizardry today, and more than full! If only you had seen them standing there—those three weird ghostly sorcerers, hovering over him as though they owned him, swaying from side to side like serpents about to strike as they muttered their unending gibberish—”

“Only three?”

“Three,” said Prestimion. “A Vroon, a Ghayrog, and one of the double-headed ones. They are the three who are said to rule him. And the room all in shadows, and choking with the reeking smoke of incense—books of magic stacked like firewood on every table, and more of them overflowing onto the floor—and the old man altogether lost in dreams in the middle of it all, except for that moment when Korsibar went by him, when it seemed that he briefly awakened, and that rusty horrible screeking noise came from him and he tried to wrap his fingers around Korsibar’s wrist—” Prestimion clapped his hand to his throat. “I tell you, I came away nauseated with disgust. The stink of that incense is in my nostrils to this very minute. I feel befouled by it and all else that I saw in that chamber just now. It seems to me as though I’ve been crawling through a dark tunnel, a place where spiders make their lair.”

Septach Melayn touched Prestimion’s shoulder comfortingly and held him there for a moment. “You take it much too hard, friend. There’ll be time enough for you to scrape all these sorcerous cobwebs from the world once you’re Coronal. But until then you must simply look upon them as the mere vaporous nonsense they are and not allow them—”

Gialaurys broke in then, red-faced: “Just halt you there, and wait you a moment! You know nothing of these matters, Septach Melayn. Cobwebs, you say? And nonsense? Ah, how simple it is to scoff when you’ve had no experience of the higher wisdoms.”

“The higher wisdoms indeed,” said Septach Melayn lightly.

Gialaurys ignored him. Turning toward Prestimion, the big man said, “And you, prince, who speaks so harshly of these things: be truthful with me, has it been privately agreed between you and Septach Melayn that sorcery will be prohibited when you have the crown? Because if it has been, I ask you to think again. By the Lady, I tell you, Prestimion, these are no mere cobwebs, nor will you sweep them away as readily as you may believe.”

“Easily, easily, good Gialaurys,” Prestimion said. “Banning wizardry from the land is Septach Melayn’s idea, not mine, and I’ve never said I’d attempt such a thing, however I may feel about it in the inwardness of my heart.”

“And in the inwardness of your heart, what?” asked Gialaurys.

“You know that already, good friend. To me these magics are foolish and empty, a mere fraud.”

A stormy aspect darkened Gialaurys’s face. “A fraud? A mere fraud, prince? You can see nothing real in any of it? Oh, Prestimion, how wrong you are in that! On every side its truths are validated every day. You can deny that if you wish. But that doesn’t make it any the less so.”

“Perhaps. I am in no position to say,” replied Prestimion uncomfortably.

Indeed, even he had from all sides heard reports of inexplicable things, seeming miracles that might well be considered the work of mages. But he clung to the opinion that rational explanations could somehow be had, that these supposed miracles were achieved by the methods of science. Much scientific knowledge had been lost and forgotten in the course of Majipoor’s many thousands of years of history, and perhaps some of that had lately been recovered and put to use: the results might well look like magic to people ignorant of the technical means used to produce them.

Then, too, he was willing to concede that the Vroons and Su-Suheris might have certain special powers of mind, no more magical than eyesight or hearing were among other races, that allowed them to work some of their supposed wonders. But no more than that. And in general Prestimion preferred to reserve his judgment on all these questions.

And so he held up one hand when Gialaurys seemed eager to press the debate further.

“Let there be no more of this,” Prestimion said, with the most amiable smile he could muster. “There’s no need for us to debate the matter here and now, is there? Let me only say—begging your pardon for any offense to your beliefs, my friend—that I assure you it verged very close on sickening me to behold those parasites clustered around old Prankipin, and very happy I am to be out of that place.” He shook his head with vigor, as though to clear it of that stifling haze of incense. “Come: the games will be starting. We should be in the Arena now.”

Upward they went through the spiraling levels; and came in time to that huge open space which the Pontifex Dizimaule of ancient times had bestowed upon the Labyrinth, where the Pontifical Games were to be held.

No one knew why Dizimaule had caused this incomprehensible emptiness to be constructed in one of the middle levels of the Labyrinth. He had offered no reason, said the historians of the underground city: had coolly given orders for the clearing of whole acres of existing buildings, and in their place had built—nothing. One could stand in it and look across to the far side and not be able to see the opposite wall, so broad was its span. No interior columns supported its distant ceiling, a fact that had baffled generations of Majipoori architects. When you cupped your hand and shouted, it took half an eternity for the echoes to begin to return, though when they did they went on tumbling and crashing about you for a marvelously long time.

Ordinarily the Arena remained unoccupied and unused. By statute of Dizimaule Pontifex it was forbidden to build anything in it, and no succeeding Pontifex had cared to repeal that law; so there it sat, century after century, purposeless, mystifying. Only upon the death of a Pontifex did anything occur there, for there was no other site in the Labyrinth but the Arena where the traditional Pontifical funeral games could be held.

An enormous many-layered grandstand for the common citizens had sprung up in it virtually overnight, like some fungal growth in a moist forest, all along the Arena’s western wall. In the space before it were the structures of the games themselves, the chariot-racing track at the center, with the sandy track for footraces alongside it, and smaller arenas for boxing and wrestling and the games of special skill up toward the northern end, and an archery course to the south. On the eastern side was the special seating for the visitors from Castle Mount, with an ornate box for the Coronal and his family in the place of honor at the center. Overhead, somewhere midway between the floor and the dimly visible ceiling, clusters of high-powered glowlamps drifted freely, casting brilliant beams of red and golden illumination in this usually dim-lit place.

An usher in a purple robe trimmed with a collar of orange fur, with the little half-mask across his eyes and the bridge of his nose that was the quaint symbol of the Pontifical officials, showed Prestimion and his companions to their place, a booth just to the left of the Coronal’s box. Duke Svor was there already, and Prince Serithorn with some members of his staff. Just beyond them the Coronal was smiling and waving to the citizenry from his seat at the center, with Prince Korsibar on one side of him and the Lady Thismet on the other. The Lady Melithyrrh accompanied Thismet; the Su-Suheris mage Sanibak-Thastimoon sat just behind Korsibar.

On the other side of the royal box Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar shared a booth with the Counts Farholt and Farquanor, Mandrykarn of Stee, Iram of Normork, and several others. The Procurator Dantirya Sambail arrived moments after Prestimion, very grandly arrayed in bejeweled orange robes more splendid even than Lord Confalume’s; he stood for a time studying the arrangements of the seating, and then found a place for himself in Duke Oljebbin’s box, along the side closest to Prince Korsibar’s seat in the box adjacent.

Prince Gonivaul, as Master of the Games, had a place all to himself, high above everything and set at an angle to the grandstand. He stood looking calmly this way and that, awaiting the proper moment for the start of the games. Then he lifted a silken scarf of dazzling crimson and green and waved it briskly three times over his head.

There was an answering flourish of trumpets and drums and horns and pipes, and from some entranceway in a far-off corner of the Arena came the competitors for the first day’s events, riding toward the center of the stadium in a little fleet of floaters. The footraces would be the opening contest, and then the dueling with batons, both of these being pastimes mainly for the youngest princelings of the Castle.

But as the contestants emerged from their floaters and arranged themselves in parallel lines along the field, kneeling and rising and stretching and dancing in place to ready themselves for their races, other figures appeared and came forward on the field before the Coronal’s box. “Look,” Prestimion said, giving Septach Melayn a sharp nudge in the ribs. “Even here, the sorcerers!”

Indeed. They were ubiquitous. There was no escaping the reach of the mages any more, not anywhere in the world.

Prestimion watched in deep disgust as brazen tripods were set up, as colored powders were poured and ignited, as seven long-legged figures clad in the impressive costume of the geomancers who flourished in the High City of Tidias on Castle Mount—the shining robe of golden brocade that was the kalautikoi, the richly woven cloak called the lagustri-more, the towering brass helmet known as the miirthella—struck their stately poses and loudly and resonantly uttered their mystic spells.

“Bythois… Sigei… Remmer… Proiarchis…”

“What are they saying?” Prestimion whispered.

Septach Melayn laughed. “How would I know?”

“These are wizards of Tidias, I think, and you are a man of that very city, as I recall.”

“I spent no time carousing with wizards when I lived there, nor learning their dark arts,” said Septach Melayn. “Gialaurys is your man if you want a translation.”

Prestimion nodded. But he could see big Gialaurys down on his knees, muttering devoutly along with the geomancers as they intoned their incantation. Out of love of Gialaurys, Prestimion forced himself to curb his irritation with the lengthy rite that was going on before them.

In any case it was a waste of breath for him to rail against wizardry with anyone other than Septach Melayn. It had begun to seem to Prestimion that he and Septach Melayn were the last two men of Majipoor who had not yielded to the spells of the enchanters. And even the two of them, Prestimion was coming to see, might find it politic to start being more tactful about their distaste for such things. It was wise, he realized, for a Coronal not to place himself too openly in opposition to the temper of the times.

He looked toward the field. The sorcerers and their equipment were gone now, and the footraces were under way: the sprints first, over almost as soon as they had begun, and then the longer races, up and and around the track and back, one lap, two laps, six laps, ten.

Prestimion recognized very few of the contestants. A great many young knights and guardsmen had come down from Castle Mount as escorts to the royal family and the dukes and lords, and it was from their ranks that most of the footracers had come; but he knew only a handful of them by name. His attention quickly wandered. Off to the left he could see them getting ready for the baton-dueling. That sport was more to his taste than the running; he had been a capable hand with the batons himself when he was a boy.

Duke Svor, at Prestimion’s side, touched his sleeve. In a low and oddly throaty voice he said, “Did you sleep well last night, prince?”

“About as usual, I suppose.”

“Not I. I dreamed a very troublesome dream.”

“Ah,” said Prestimion, without much interest. “It’s known to happen, I suppose. I’m sorry to hear it.” He pointed toward the gathering group of baton-wielders. “Do you see that one on the far side, Svor, in the green? And you, Septach Melayn? Notice how he stands, as though there are coiled springs in his feet. And watch the movements of his wrists. In his mind he’s already at work with his baton, and the signal not even given.—I’ll put my wager on him, I think. Who’ll say five crowns on the first match, and I take the one in the green?”

Gialaurys said doubtfully, “Is it respectful to wager on these games, prince?”

“Why not? Respectful to whom, Gialaurys? The Pontifex? I hardly think he’d care just now. Five crowns on the green!”

“His name is Mandralisca,” said Septach Melayn. “He’s one of your cousin’s men. A nasty piece of work, like most of those that your cousin likes to have about him.”

“The Procurator, you mean? A very remote cousin, that one.”

“But your cousin all the same, as I understand it. This Mandralisca is his poison-taster, I’m told.”

“His what?”

“Stands beside him, sips his drink to make sure that it’s safe. I saw him doing it only the other day.”

“Indeed. Well, then, I put five crowns on Dantirya Sambail’s poison-taster! Mandralisca, you said his name was?”

“I’ll readily put five against him, out of sheer loathing for the man,” said Septach Melayn, holding forth a bright coin. “This Mandralisca, I hear, would just as soon stab a man as move aside for him in the road. My money’s on the boy in scarlet.”

“Concerning this dream of mine, Prestimion,” Svor continued, in the low tense voice he had used before. “If I may—”

Prestimion glanced toward him impatiently. “Was it such a dreadful one, then, that you need to spill it forth right this instant? Well then, Svor, go ahead. Go ahead! Tell it to me, and let there be an end on it.”

The little man knotted his fingers into the tight curls of his short black beard and screwed his face into the most sour of expressions, so that his thick heavy brows met at the middle in a single dark line. “I dreamed,” he said after a bit, “that the old Pontifex had finally died, and Lord Confalume had come forth in the Court of Thrones and named you to be Coronal before us all, and had removed the starburst crown from his head and was holding it out to you in his hand.”

“This is not very dreadful so far,” said Prestimion.

On the field four pairs of batonsmen were facing one another in perfect stillness, tautly awaiting the signal, gripping the thin pliant wands of nightflower wood that were their weapons.

“Challenge!” called the referee. “Post! Entry!” Prestimion sat forward as the contests began, his upper body weaving about in his seat as he became attuned to the lively rhythms of the swiftly flashing batons. This was a sport that required quickness of movement and sight, and deftness of wrist, rather than any special degree of strength. The wooden batons were so light that they could be moved back and forth faster than the lightest rapier. It was necessary to anticipate one’s opponent’s moves almost as though reading his mind, if one were to have any hope of parrying his thrusts.

Svor, speaking very softly with his head close beside Prestimion’s, said, “Prince Korsibar was standing opposite you in the hall, and his hands were raised in readiness to make the starburst sign at you the moment that Lord Confalume had placed the crown upon your brow. But before that could be done, the dead Pontifex Prankipin entered the hall.”

“How very unusual,” said Prestimion, listening now with only half an ear. “But of course it was a dream.” Turning away from Svor, he tapped Septach Melayn with his elbow and grinned. “Do you see how the poison-taster whips that baton around now? Your boy in scarlet’s a lost cause. And so are your five crowns, I’m afraid.”

In a harsh insistent voice that was all rough edges, Svor said, “What I saw, prince, was that the old Pontifex came to Lord Confalume and took the Coronal’s crown lightly out of his hand. And went not to you but to Prince Korsibar, and gave the crown to him, putting it right in his upraised hands, so that all Korsibar need do was bring the crown toward his forehead and place it there. Which Korsibar proceeded without hesitation to do, and we all stood stunned at the sight of it, but he was wearing the crown, and he who wears the crown is king, and so there was nothing else for us then but to bow down to him and hail him with the old cry, ‘Korsibar! Lord Korsibar! Long life to Lord Korsibar!’ And suddenly the hall was alight with a glow the color of flame—no, the color of blood, it was, bright fresh blood—and I awoke, sweating from head to foot. But after a time I slept again, and dreamed, and it was the same dream again. The very same.”

Scowling, Prestimion said, “Lord Korsibar indeed. In dreams anything is possible, Svor.”

On his other side Septach Melayn was shouting, “Scarlet! Yes, Scarlet! Go it, Scarlet!” And then a groan and a curse as the poison-taster suddenly executed a deft double-feint that left his scarlet-clad opponent caught out of position and pivoting on the wrong leg, and sent him down beneath a dizzying barrage of lightning-fast strokes of his baton. “By the Divine, you have it, Prestimion!” said Septach Melayn. With a rueful smile he flipped the five-crown piece into Prestimion’s hand.

“I could see his skill at once, from the way he moved even before the contest started. He would be three steps ahead of the other boy at every moment, that I knew.” And, leaning again to Svor, Prestimion said, “Forget this miserable dream of yours, and watch the batons, Svor! Who’ll give me ten crowns on the poison-taster’s next match?”

“One moment more, if you would, Prestimion—” Svor said in that same low conspiratorial tone.

Prestimion was beginning to find Svor’s nagging persistence exasperating. “If I would what?”

“Matters are more precarious than you understand, I think. Attend me: your future and mine are darkened by the shadow of this dream. Go to the Coronal, I beg you. You must force his hand, or we’re surely all lost. Tell him that you fear treachery; ask him to declare you to be Coronal-designate before another day goes by. And if he refuses, stay by his side until he yields to you. Give him no peace so long as he continues to delay. If need be, tell him that you’ll openly proclaim yourself his heir without waiting for him if he won’t do it.”

“This is unthinkable, Svor. I’ll do no such thing.”

“You must, Prestimion.” Svor’s voice was shredded to a hoarse whisper.

“I find your advice unacceptable and unworthy. Force the Coronal’s hand? Harass him on my own behalf? Threaten to declare myself the heir, which would be an infamous thing, against all law and precedent? Why? Simply because you ate too many eels last night and had a bad dream? What are you saying, man?”

“And if Korsibar were to seize his father’s crown in the moment of Prankipin’s death, what then?”

“What’s this? Seize the crown?” Prestimion’s eyes were wide with amazement. “That’s a thing he’d never do!—You make him out most perfidious, Svor. There’s nothing of that in him at all. Besides, his father’s crown doesn’t interest him. Never has. Never will.”

“I know Prince Korsibar very well,” Svor said. “I was of his company for years, have you forgotten? Perfidious he is not, I agree; but he flutters easily in any breeze. Flattery quickly sways his mind. There are those with grand ambitions of their own who think he should be Coronal, and perhaps already have been at work telling him so. And if he has such things poured in his ear often enough—”

“No!” Prestimion cried. “That will never happen!” Angrily, he swept the air before his face with both his outspread hands. “First that Vroon brought me these omens, and now you. No. I’ll not be driven by omens, like some credulous peasant. Let me be, Svor. I love you with all the warmth of my soul, but I tell you that you bother me very greatly just now.”

“There was virtue in that dream, prince, I promise you that. ”

“And if you refuse to put this insufferable dream of yours away this instant,” said Prestimion, fuming now, as his wrath began to spill over in him, “I’ll take you by that beard of yours and swing you through the air and pitch you clear over the side of this box. I promise you that most sincerely, Svor. An end on it now. Do you hear me? An end on it!” He glared furiously at Svor, then turned his back on him and looked toward the field.

But Svor’s words still rattled in his head. That was, he thought, no fitting advice for the little duke to have given him: inciting him to treasonous insurrection on no evidence other than the urgings of a dream. It was a coward’s advice—a traitor’s advice, ignoble and bizarre. And foolish besides; for no one forced a Coronal’s hand, and the formidable Confalume would surely destroy him if he were to attempt it. No, it was a sorry thing, for Svor to have advocated such rashness—such wild impudence—merely on account of a dream—

Prestimion struggled to cleanse his mind of it.

8

The hurdle-racing and the hoop-jumping and the hammer-throw and other such minor sports were the features of the second day, and the third, and the fourth, of the Pontifical Games. Each day, the visiting lords and some thousands of the citizens of the Labyrinth assembled in the Arena for that day’s diversions. And each day, too, the bulletins from the imperial bedchamber were the same, his majesty the Pontifex’s condition remaining unchanged. It was as though his majesty’s condition, like the weather in the Labyrinth, was inherently incapable of change, and would vary not in the slightest from here to the end of time.

The fifth and sixth and seventh days were set aside for the wrestling bouts. Two dozen contestants had enrolled. But all attention focused on the final match, the great struggle between the famed wrestlers Gialaurys and Farholt. The stands were full for that contest, and complete silence reigned in the Arena as the two hulking men entered the wrestling ring.

Each had brought a magus with him. Farholt’s man was a dark puffy-faced Hjort, one of the many sorcerers of Lord Confalume’s retinue, and Gialaurys had chosen one of the brass-helmeted geomancers from Tidias. These two took up positions before the ring with their backs to each other and set about an elaborate and greatly prolonged procedure of casting of spells, with much chanting and drawing of invisible lines on the ground and invocations of unseen forces overhead.

Septach Melayn pointed toward Gialaurys, who knelt with eyes closed and head bowed, making mystic gestures as his geomancer spun his long skein of rituals. With some annoyance in his tone he said, “Our friend truly takes these matters to heart, eh?”

“Rather more so than his opponent, it seems,” answered Prestimion:

for in fact Farholt appeared to be waiting as impatiently as Prestimion himself for the magical rigmarole to end. At last the mages withdrew and Farholt and Gialaurys slipped off their robes, revealing their powerful bodies clad in nothing more than loincloths. Each had oiled his skin with sea-dragon oil to keep his opponent from getting a secure purchase on him; and under the brilliant lights of the Arena the contours and ridges of their arms and backs stood out in startling relief, drawing gasps and exclamations of wonder from the onlookers.

“You will wrestle three falls,” announced the referee, a Pontifical official named Hayla Tekmanot, no small man himself but diminished into insigificance by the great bulk of the contestants. He slapped each man once on the shoulder with the flat of his hand. “This is the signal that you have won and are to release your hold. And this—” He slapped again, twice in succession, “—is the signal that your opponent is unable to continue because of injury, and you are to step back from him at once. Understood?”

Farholt went to the north side of the ring, Gialaurys to the other. The shrill brassy din of gabek-horns sounded in the Arena. Each man performed his obeisance to the Coronal in the center box and bowed to the boxes on either side of Lord Confalume where the other high lords were seated, and, lastly, to the Master of the Games, Prince Gonivaul, high up in his solitary station.

“Let the match begin,” declared Hayla Tekmanot, and they came rushing at each other as if they intended not to wrestle but to kill.

Their giant forms collided in the center of the ring with an impact that could be heard from one end of the Arena to the other. Both men appeared staggered by that bone-cracking crash of flesh against flesh; but they quickly recovered and took up positions nose-to-nose, legs firmly planted, each locking his arms about the other’s shoulders, each struggling in vain to send the other down to a quick fall. There they stood, stiff, immobile, for many a moment. Farholt could be seen to whisper something in a harsh, rough voice to Gialaurys, who stared at him as though astonished at his words; and then a fierce look of anger came over Gialaurys’s features and he replied, something just as coldly and harshly spoken but likewise too low in tone to be heard by any of the onlookers.

The long stasis held. Neither could get the advantage. They were too evenly matched.

Farholt was the taller by a head and his arms were longer, but Gialaurys was somewhat heavier of body and even broader than Farholt across the shoulders, deeper through the chest. Minutes passed; but, try as they could, neither was able to make his rival give ground. Mighty grunts came from them. The muscles of their arms and backs stood out in terrible bulges as though they would leap out through the skin. Sweat ran in torrents down their oiled bodies. Gialaurys seemed to find leverage over Farholt, but Farholt resisted and held his footing, and then it was Gialaurys who swayed ever so slightly against the pressure Farholt exerted.

The deadlock went on and on. A steady rising clamor came from the crowd. Nearly everyone in the royal boxes was standing now, calling out the name of one or the other. Prestimion looked across to the Coronal’s box and saw Prince Korsibar on his feet, wide-eyed, transfixed, shouting, “Farholt! Farholt!” with frenzied zeal, and then he realized that he was shouting too, perhaps just as frenziedly, crying the name of Gialaurys.

“Look you there,” Septach Melayn said. “I think Farholt budges him.”

It was so. Farholt’s eyes were wild and veins were standing out like thick ropes on his ruddy-hued forehead, but he had indeed managed to pry one of Gialaurys’s feet upward from the ground and was straining to lift the other one free. Prestimion saw sudden pallor on Gialaurys’s face. He had become as white as Farholt was florid, so that his bristly sideburns stood out as heavy brown bars against his newly bloodless cheeks.

For an instant it seemed that Farholt would succeed in lifting Gialaurys entirely, like a tree pulled up by its roots, and hurl him to the floor of the ring.

But just as Gialaurys’s left foot was a moment away from rising, he quickly brought around the one that was already raised from the ground and kicked Farholt with it in the hollow of his leg so savagely that Farholt’s balance was broken and he was forced to bend that leg forward at the knee. Now it was Farholt who was in danger of toppling. Desperately seeking some sort of grip, he wedged his right hand inside Gialaurys’s gaping mouth and tugged at Gialaurys’s lower jaw as though he had it in mind to rip it from Gialaurys’s face. A dark rivulet of blood ran down Farholt’s arm; but whether it was the blood of Gialaurys or Farholt’s own, none of the watchers could say.

Svor said, almost to himself, “This should be halted. It is not sport but a disgrace: they will murder each other.”

Gialaurys maintained his hold. Grasping Farholt by both shoulders and twisting, he gave him a shove that was meant to send him over on his back.

Farholt spun sideways as he fell. Seizing Gialaurys around the neck with his free left hand, he pulled him down with him. Each locked in the other’s grip, they toppled together, falling headlong and landing side by side, both of them hitting the ground with horrendous force.

“Pin him, Gialaurys!” Prestimion cried. And from the adjoining box came a bellowing from Korsibar: “Farholt! Now! Now! Get him, Farholt!” Farholt’s brother Farquanor, who was seated in the royal box today, just behind Prince Korsibar, was on his feet and calling out encouragement to Farholt too, and his narrow face was agleam with a glow of imminent victory.

But, as before, neither wrestler was able to seize advantage over the other. Both men were stunned by the heavy landing they had made; they lay like two felled logs for a long while, then began to stir and slowly came to sitting positions, staring befuddledly at each other. Gialaurys rubbed his jaw and the side of his head; Farholt kneaded his knee and thigh. They were watchful, each poised as if to leap up if the other one did, but neither seemed capable of arising just yet. Hayla Tekmanot knelt between them, briefly conferring with them both. Then the referee rose, walked to the edge of the ring and looked up at Prince Gonivaul.

“I declare the first fall to be a draw,” he called. “The contestants will rest for five minutes before proceeding.”

“A word with you, prince?” said the Procurator Dantirya Sambail during the interlude between the bouts, inclining his upper body halfway across the low barrier between his box and the one in which Prince Korsibar sat.

Korsibar, his mind still whirling from the heat and intensity of that desperate struggle just concluded, peered up into the Procurator’s massive bellicose face and waited for the other to speak.

In an overly amiable tone of man-to-man camaraderie, Dantirya Sambail said, “I have a hundred royals riding on your man. Will he prevail, do you think?”

That unwarranted note of easy intimacy caused some anger in Korsibar. He replied steadily, though, “I have fifty on him myself. But I have no more idea than you do who will prevail.”

The Procurator pointed toward the box on the far side, where Prestimion was deep in conversation with Septach Melayn and Prince Serithorn. In the same manner of unearned congeniality as before he said, “Prestimion, so I’ve been told, has five hundred royals on Gialaurys.”

“A princely sum, if that’s true. But are you sure? Prestimion’s not much of a gambler. Fifty crowns would be more his kind of wager.”

“Not crowns but royals, and not fifty but five hundred,” said Dantirya Sambail. “I am not mistaken in this.” He held a cold roast leg of bilan-toon in his hand; he paused now to bite off a chunk of the delicate white meat and to spit out some bits of skin and gristle. After wiping his lips with the sleeve of his jewel-bedecked robe, he said casually, giving Korsibar a slow, icy, malicious stare, “It’s not really gambling if you know the outcome in advance, is it?”

“Are you saying that Farholt’s been bribed to lose? By the Lady, Dantirya Sambail, you don’t know Farholt at all if you think that he—”

“Not bribed. Drugged, so I hear. A potion designed to work in a gradual way, and to weaken him as the bout proceeds. Of course, it’s only a rumor. My cup-bearer Mandralisca heard it, during the batons.” The Procurator smiled silkily. “You’re right, Korsibar: there’s probably no truth to it. And even if there is, well, what’s the loss of fifty or a hundred royals to men like ourselves?” He winked and said, once more using the quiet, insinuating voice he had employed at the outset, “In any case, how much like Prestimion it would be to have arranged the outcome in favor of his friend. He looks after his friends, that one, by any means available.”

Korsibar made a gesture of indifference, as though to say that these theories were no affair of his and that he disliked such slanderous talk as the Procurator was offering.

He had never cared for the company of Dantirya Sambail. There were few who did. The Procurator had a certain ferocious air of majesty about him, yes, but to Korsibar he merely seemed base, swinish, a venomous monster of self-regard. Yet of course Dantirya Sambail ruled an immense hereditary domain on the other continent with absolute force, and had to be accepted into the ranks of the great princes on that account: he was the Coronal’s subject, at least in name, but he controlled vast wealth and huge resources, and one did not lightly reject his company. Nevertheless Korsibar wished that the Procurator would return to his seat.

“Well,” said Dantirya Sambail cheerfully, “we’ll see soon enough whether the tale is true. And look, now: our gladiators seem to be getting ready to try a second fall.”

Korsibar only nodded.

“I’d pay more attention to Prestimion’s antics, if I were you,” Dantirya Sambail said, making no move to withdraw. “I hear many strange tales about him, and not just concerning the drugging of wrestlers.” His heavy eyelids fluttered with a curious daintiness. “For example, has anyone told you yet that he plans to have you removed once he’s become Coronal?”

The calm words fell upon Korsibar like javelins.

“What?”

“Oh, yes. The story’s been going around. As soon as he’s got the crown on his head, a convenient accident is arranged for you, something during a hunt perhaps. He can’t afford to let you live, you know.”

Korsibar felt deep shock that verged on disgust. “These are very offensive lunacies that you’re spouting, Dantirya Sambail.”

Color came to the Procurator’s fleshy face. His lips grew thin; he drew his head downward so that his neck swelled and thickened; and those oddly tender and thoughtful violet-gray eyes of his turned suddenly hard. But his smile remained unwavering. “Ah, no need to be angered at me, dear prince! I’m only repeating what I hear, because perhaps it may be of use to you. And what I hear is that you’re a dead man once Majipoor’s in his hand.”

“This is absurd,” Korsibar said curtly.

“Look: if you live, and Prestimion’s reign does not go so well, you’ll always be a threat to him. Does he want all the world muttering about Lord Confalume’s glorious son, who might have been Coronal himself, but was passed over? Oh, no, no, no. If times grow hard, and that may very well happen sooner or later, someone will surely cry, ‘Put Prestimion aside, make Korsibar Coronal,’ and soon they all will be screaming it. You said yourself that Prestimion’s no gambler. Your continued existence carries risks for him, for you are perilous to him. He’s no man to tolerate risks, or threats, or rivals, or any sort of obstacles. And so—the unfortunate hunting accident, the balcony railing that suddenly isn’t there, the collision on the highway, some such thing. Believe me: I know him. He and I are of the same blood.”

“I know him too, Dantirya Sambail.”

“Perhaps. But I tell you this: if I were Prestimion, I would have you removed from the world.”

“If Prestimion were you, very likely he would,” said Korsibar. “I praise the Divine that he isn’t.” The sound of the gabek-horns could be heard across the field, none too soon for Korsibar. He had heard far too much already; he was sickened and revolted by these ugly hypotheses of the Procurator’s, and his fingers were trembling with rage, as if they longed by independent will to wrap themselves around Dantirya Sambail’s meaty neck. “It’s time for the second fall,” Korsibar said, swinging brusquely away from the other man. “Speak no more to me of these things, Dantirya Sambail.”

Farholt came out from his corner this time plainly bent on Gialaurys’s immediate destruction. He sprang at once at the heavier man, pushing him back toward the far corner of the ring with sudden unstoppable fury. Gialaurys, who appeared to be puzzled at the wild rage of Farholt’s onslaught, planted one foot fore and one aft in a resolute attempt at bracing himself. Farholt backed away a little at that and swung his left elbow around, ramming it savagely into the middle of Gialaurys’s face. That brought a howl of pain from him and sent a bright stream of blood running down his face. Gialaurys pressed both his hands to the bridge of his nose.

“Foul!” cried Prestimion, enraged by the blatant stroke. “For shame! Foul!”

But Hayla Tekmanot made no move to halt the contest. He appeared not to have noticed at all. As for Gialaurys, he stood growling and shaking his head to clear it while at the same time reaching forth one upraised hand to keep Farholt at bay.

Farholt grabbed it just at the wrist and twisted hard. Gialaurys was forced to pivot so far around that he turned his back on Farholt, who instantly slipped both his arms beneath Gialaurys’s armpits and clasped them at Gialaurys’s breastbone; and then Farholt pressed his forehead against the back of Gialaurys’s skull as though intending to force the head of the shorter man downward until his neck snapped.

A keening scream came from the public grandstands. Svor rose from his seat and called out, “Stop him! Stop him! This is murder!” And Prestimion, gripping the front of the box with both his hands, stood frozen in horror as the relentless downward pressure of Farholt’s head against Gialaurys’s grew and grew.

Lord Confalume looked toward his son and said, “Your friend the count fights like a wild beast, Korsibar.”

“They are two wild beasts, I would say. But ours is the stronger one, I think.”

“I care very little for this match,” said the Coronal. “There’s too much brutality in it. Who planned this? And why doesn’t Hayla Tekmanot do something? Or Prince Gonivaul?” Rising halfway to his feet, Confalume lifted one arm as though to signal the Master of the Games for a halt; but Korsibar caught his father’s arm and pulled it back. And indeed Gialaurys was too thick through the chest for Farholt to contain in this way, and was flexing and reflexing his arms and shoulders now, writhing mightily in an effort to release himself from Farholt’s grip. Farholt, despite the great length of his arms, was unable to maintain his hold on Gialaurys’s body. In another moment Gialaurys succeeded in breaking free.

The two men lurched back from one another, each circling about the other and making ready for a new assault. Gialaurys appeared to be about to spring when Farholt’s open hand flicked out, serpent-quick, to ram itself hard against Gialaurys’s already bloodied nose. Farholt thrust all his weight forward. Gialaurys, shocked and numbed by the pain, stood bewildered just long enough for Farholt to take him by the shoulders and spin him with enormous force to the ground. He lay helpless there while Farholt pounced on him and pinned him in place.

“Foul!” Prestimion yelled, outraged, pounding madly on the railing of his box. And Korsibar looked across to Dantirya Sambail in his box beyond and smiled with one eyebrow lifted, as though to remind the Procurator that certain malignant medicines of Prestimion’s had been supposed to be hampering Farholt’s performance by this stage in the match.

“This fall goes to Farholt,” Hayla Tekmanot announced. “Yes!” Korsibar called. “Yes!” And from Farquanor, near him in the royal box, came a sharp triumphant whoop of pleasure and approbation. “No,” Prestimion said in a soft voice. “How can it be? Anyone could see that Farholt fouled Gialaurys twice at least.”

“It was a bad call,” said Septach Melayn. “But look at Gialaurys’s eyes. He’ll kill Farholt in the third bout.”

“Kill him in literal truth,” said Svor dourly, “or the other way around. One of them will surely destroy the other. What sort of sport is this? What sort indeed? These men go at it with true blood-hatred for each other, not just the rivalry of sport. Something unusual is happening here today, Prestimion.”

Nor would Gialaurys and Farholt wait for the referee to announce the third bout. They were at it already, Gialaurys brushing the surprised Hayla Tekmanot aside with one sweep of his arm and leaping toward Farholt with a terrifying roar. But what they were doing now was no longer even a pretense at wrestling. They struck at each other with their fists, one immense hammer-blow following another. Farholt’s mouth was bloodied. He spat out teeth. Roaring still, Gialaurys rushed in close to him, only to be met by a knee rising sharply upward into his groin. He grunted and lurched backward; instantly Farholt fell upon him, clawing at his face and chest with his fingernails; Gialaurys, growling like some truculent steetmoy of the northern mountains, fought back with elbows and chin, and then, coiling himself tightly, reared upward and smashed the top of his head against Farholt’s with bone-jarring force, sending Farholt reeling half stupefied off to the edge of the ring.

Duke Svor, urgently grasping Prestimion’s arm, said once again, “This needs to be stopped, prince!”

“Yes. I agree.” He looked across to the royal box and called out to the Coronal to bring an end to the contest. Lord Confalume nodded. He signaled to Gonivaul.

From the box on the far side, though, came the jeering voice of Dantirya Sambail: “Ah, I pray you, let it continue, Cousin Prestimion! There’s such pleasure in seeing two brave strong men having at it this way!”

As for Prince Gonivaul, he was looking down at the wrestling ring in a detached, almost absent way, as if he were contemplating creatures swimming in some pond in a valley far below him. He stroked his thick beard reflectively, he ran his fingers through the furry hair that tumbled across his forehead; but he offered no response to the Coronal’s order. It seemed only now to have come to Prince Gonivaul’s attention that anything was going on in the ring at all.

As Gonivaul stood there hesitating, Farholt and Gialaurys came rumbling slowly back toward each other from opposite corners of the ring. They arrived simultaneously at its center and each man, breathing heavily, reached one hand tentatively out toward the other in an uncertain probing way.

They looked like two drunkards far gone in their cups. There was no vitality in their movements. Plainly both of them were at the verge of collapse. Gialaurys touched his fingertips lightly to Farholt’s chest and pushed; Farholt swayed and seemed almost to totter, and took two faltering steps backward.

Then he shambled forward again and reached out to give Gialaurys a similar shove. It was Gialaurys’s turn to sway and totter. The two men seemed dazed, at the last extremity of exhaustion. Now Gialaurys shoved again, not at all vigorously, and this time Farholt crumpled immediately to the ground. Gialaurys dropped down on top of him, looking barely conscious as he lay across Farholt’s chest in a groggy travesty of a grip.

Hayla Tekmanot, kneeling beside them, gave Gialaurys the slap of victory in this fall. Then the referee looked up at Prince Gonivaul’s box.

“One fall to Gialaurys and one to Farholt,” he said, “and the first one a draw. So it is an even split, and they are in no condition to continue.”

“Is that your opinion?” Gonivaul asked sternly.

Hayla Tekmanot gestured to the two motionless sprawled figures in the ring. “You see them there before you, prince.”

Prince Gonivaul appeared for some while to be debating within himself the likelihood of somehow continuing the match. Then he said at last, “Very well. We divide the prize. They are each equal champions in this contest.”

Gialaurys rose uncertainly, Farholt a moment later. They stood wobbling in the ring, blinking slowly, as Hayla Tekmanot explained to them the decision of the Master of the Games. With visible reluctance they touched hands; and then they swung about and made their separate ways out of the ring, walking very carefully, as though they were in some danger of falling again.

Gialaurys was undergoing repair by one of the surgeons of the games when Prestimion and his companions arrived in the dressing-room. He looked battered and woebegone, and his nose seemed somewhat out of proper line, but he was conscious and even managed a feeble smile as Prestimion entered.

“How badly are you hurt?” Prestimion asked anxiously.

“Everything bruised and somewhat bent, nothing broken, no permanent harm done.” Gialaurys spoke thickly through swollen lips. “But I will tell you straight out that I’ve had gentler ticklings than this one. What do you hear of Farholt? Did he survive?”

“It would seem so,” answered Septach Melayn.

“A pity,” said Gialaurys. “He wrestles in a most unchivalrous way. This was not how I was taught to play the sport.”

Prestimion put his head close and said in a low tone, “Tell me this, Gialaurys: what was the thing Farholt whispered to you, as you stood face-to-face with him at the beginning of the first bout? It seemed to amaze you greatly, and then to make you angry.”

“Oh,” said Gialaurys. “That.” His broad face darkened with a deep frown, which plainly cost him some pain. Slowly he shook his head. “It was a very odd thing, Prestimion. What Farholt said to me was that I was your man—which is true enough—and that he hated all that had to do with you, and therefore would destroy me this day. As he then proceeded nearly to do, when I thought we were only there to wrestle. But he got from me as good as he gave, I think, and perhaps a little more than that.”

“He said that? That he hates all that has to do with me?”

“Those were his words, yes. And would destroy me because I am your man.”

“We have become two camps already, the camp of Korsibar and the camp of Prestimion,” said Duke Svor in a black, dismal voice. “If the wrestling is like this, what will the boxing be, and the jousting? We’ll swim in blood before this all is over.”

“How strange,” Prestimion said, addressing Gialaurys, just as though Svor had not spoken. “How extremely strange, that Farholt would say such a thing.” He glanced about at the others. Septach Melayn’s face was more somber than usual, and his left hand was uneasily caressing the hilt of the little dress-sword that he had chosen to wear today. As for Duke Svor, his dark eyes had become hard and bleak, and he was looking at Prestimion in a way that communicated the deepest foreboding. “How strange,” said Prestimion once more.

9

The games were now approaching their midway point; and still the old Pontifex lived on. Korsibar, calling upon the Coronal in his suite, said, “This is the eighteenth day since that time when I visited you here, Father, and you told me then that Prankipin would be dead within nineteen.”

“He lingers and lingers, I know,” said Lord Confalume.

“Not that I doubt your skill at prognostication. But even the greatest sages have occasionally made errors of calculation. What if he lives another ten days, or twenty?”

“Why, then, the waiting will go on.”

“And the games? We’re nearly half done with them. Tomorrow will be the archery; the day after tomorrow, the fencing; after that the mounted jousting; then the boxing, then the chariot-racing and we’re done and there must be a grand celebration, with feasting and the bestowing of prizes. This is the problem I saw from the first, Father. How can we have a grand celebration, with feasting and parades and all, with Prankipin still on his deathbed? We said when the decision to begin was agreed upon that we’d draw the games out so that they wouldn’t finish until after the Pontifex had died. But it may not happen that way.”

“I made my calculation again last night,” said the Coronal. “It was not perfectly correct before, though close. Now I have more confidence. The Pontifex will die within five days.”

“How certain are you?”

“The calculation of my experts is the same as mine.”

“Ah.”

“And, I suspect, that of the Pontifex’s own mages also, though they’ve said nothing on the subject these four days past. But their very silence and withdrawal is suspicious.”

“Within five days,” said Korsibar. “And then you’ll be Pontifex at last. After all these years on the other throne.”

“After all these years, yes.”

“And Prestimion will be our Coronal.”

“Yes,” Lord Confalume said. “Prestimion.”

The next day was the day of the archery contests. This was Prestimion’s particular sport, in which he had always excelled beyond all measure, and no one expected to best him at it. But a contest needs contestants; and so a dozen of the finest archers of the realm gallantly stepped up to the mark alongside the Prince of Muldemar to try their skill.

Count Iram of Normork went first, and acquitted himself creditably enough, after which Mandrykarn of Stee managed a comparable score, and Navigorn of Hoikmar bettered that by some. The next to shoot was the bluff, hearty Earl Kamba of Mazadone, Prestimion’s own teacher at the art. Kamba, discharging one arrow after another while scarcely seeming to look at his target, swiftly filled the eye at the center with his shafts, doffed his cap to the royal box, and merrily left the field.

Now Prestimion stepped forward. The targets were cleared, and he nocked the first of his arrows. His style was very little like Kamba’s: he studied the target with care, rocked back and forth a few times on his heels, finally lifted the bow and drew and sighted along it and let fly.

The Lady Thismet, who had come to the games this day and was seated beside her brother in the Coronal’s otherwise empty box, felt a shiver of reluctant admiration as Prestimion’s arrow completed its flawless journey. She had no liking for the man but she could not deny his skill. It was a pretty sport, archery, a proper mix of art and bodily coordination and keenness of sight, very much more to her liking than such foolish measures of brute strength as the hammer-toss and certainly more pleasing than wrestling. Her lady-of-honor Melithyrrh had been to see the vile contest between Gialaurys and Farholt, and had tried to tell her of it, with much emphasis on the ferocity and the gore, but Thismet had cut her off after no more than five sentences.

There Prestimion stood at the baseline, trim and lean and so unexpectedly short—she was always surprised to discover how short he was, only a few inches taller than she was herself—but the breadth of his shoulders spoke of the strength of him, and his every movement was the embodiment of grace. She studied him now, taking unanticipated pleasure in the way he selected his arrow and methodically positioned it, and sent it coursing on its unerring way to the target.

Maddeningly, astonishingly, the sudden unwanted image of herself coupling with Prestimion blazed up in her mind like a fire rising to great conflagration out of the merest spark. His fair-skinned body encompassed her darker one; his mouth was pressed tight against hers; her platinum fingernails fiercely raked his back in the wildest throes of ecstasy. Furiously she banished that image and replaced it with one of Prestimion’s body hanging from a hook on the wall of the Castle, dangling over an abyss.

“Extraordinary,” Korsibar said.

“What is?” said Thismet, taken by surprise.

“His archery, of course!”

“Yes. Yes. The others were good, but Prestimion’s in a class by himself, isn’t he? You get the feeling that he could hit a bird on the wing and then put a second arrow through his first one while the bird is still falling.”

“I think he could do that,” said Korsibar. “I think perhaps I’ve seen him do it.”

“Has he always been as good as this?”

“From the first. That bow he uses: it’s Kamba’s own. Kamba gave it to Prestimion when he was twelve, saying that it was Prestimion’s by right, for he was already the better archer. You could never draw that bow in a million years. I’d be sorely pressed to pull it myself. And the way he makes the arrows go precisely where he wants—”

“Yes,” said Thismet. Prestimion had shot the last of his allotted shafts now, and all of them stood clustered at the center of the target, packed so close together that it was a marvel how he had found room to get the last one in.

“I think there’s sorcery in it,” said Korsibar. “He must have had a spell put on him when he was a boy, that lets him do such magic with the arrows.”

“As I’ve heard it reliably told, Prestimion is no believer in magic.”

“Indeed, I’ve heard it so as well. But what other explanation could there be for skill like his? It must be wizardry at work. It must.”

Prestimion, looking pleased with himself, went from the field. His place at the line was taken by Kent Mekkiturn, a Skandar of the Procurator’s retinue, who wielded a bow at least two yards long from tip to tip as though it were a child’s toy. He held it already drawn with his upper arms while fitting the arrow into its place with his lower ones, and when he released his shaft, it sped into the target with a loud thudding impact that nearly knocked the bull’s-eye from its stand. But the huge Skandar was all strength and little finesse: in no way was he able to match the precision of Prestimion’s shooting.

Korsibar said, “I must tell you, Thismet, of a peculiar thing that Dantirya Sambail said to me while we were watching the wrestling the other day.—Hoy, there, sister, look at this clownish fellow!”

A knight in the costume of Duke Oljebbin’s people had come forward to shoot. Evidently he saw himself as something of a comedian: he sent his first arrow high into the air to descend on a curving trajectory into the target, and shot the second one while standing with his back to the mark. For his third, he stood straddle-legged and discharged the arrow from between his thighs. All three reached the target, though not in any greatly accurate fashion; but it was wonder enough that they reached it at all.

“This is a shameful business,” Thismet said, looking away. “He disgraces one of the finest of arts.—What was that remark of the Procurator’s that you began to mention a moment ago?”

“Ah. That. A strange and ugly thing.”

“Yes, so he is. But what did he say?”

Korsibar smiled grimly. “Your tongue is too wicked, sister.”

“Forgive me. I have little enough to do, you know, except practice my wit.”

The clown was aiming now while lying on his belly. Korsibar shook his head in displeasure. To Thismet he said, leaning close and keeping his voice low, “He told me that he’s heard whisperings to the effect that Prestimion will try to have me put to death after he’s Coronal. To make it seem like an accident, of course. But to remove me one way or another, because I’d be a threat to his reign if I lived.”

Thismet sharply caught her breath. “Whisperings, you say? Whose whisperings?”

“He didn’t say. Very likely the idea exists nowhere but in his own feverish imagination, for Dantirya Sambail’s just the sort that would imagine such bestial atrocities. I told him it was a lunatic notion, preposterous and despicable. And asked him not to speak of such stuff to me again.”

She stared at him gravely. Then after a moment she said, “If I were in your place, I’d take this thing a little less lightly, Korsibar. Whether he’s really heard it whispered about or merely hit upon it all by himself, what the Procurator has told you is sound.”

Korsibar said, startled, “What, you also?”

“Indeed. There’s logic and substance aplenty in it, brother.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“But surely you know that there are a great many people who’d prefer to see you as Coronal and not Prestimion.”

“Yes. I know that. Count Farquanor was speaking of that very thing to me not so long ago, the day we all took wine together in the Banquet Hall just before the games began. Offered to start a conspiracy on my behalf, in fact.”

“My new young handmaid Aliseeva would join that conspiracy, if ever it was launched,” said Thismet, with a little laugh. “And many another. She told me just yesterday that it was a pity you would not be Coronal, for you were ever so much more kingly and handsome than Prestimion. And wished there were some way Prestimion could be set aside in your favor.”

“She said that, did she?”

“She and others besides.”

“Do they all of them think I’m without the least shred of honor and decency?” demanded Korsibar heatedly. And then, in an altogether different tone: “Aliseeva? The red-haired one with the very pale skin?”

“I see that you’ve already noticed her. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose.—What did you tell Count Farquanor that day in the Banquet Hall?”

“What do you think I told him? He was advocating treason!”

“Is it treason to stand by like a fool and be murdered so that Prestimion can be Coronal?”

Korsibar gave her a close, searching look. “You actually do seem to believe that there’s something to take seriously, then, in this insane notion of Dantirya Sambail’s.”

“He’s Prestimion’s kinsman, remember. He could perhaps be privy to Prestimion’s inner mind. And yes, I think it might well be very much in Prestimion’s interest to get you out of the way once he has the throne. Or even before.”

“Prestimion is a man of decency and honor!”

“Prestimion can counterfeit decency and honor the way he can imitate anything else, I suppose,” said Thismet.

“This is very harsh of you, sister.”

“Perhaps it is, yes.”

Korsibar threw up his hands and looked away.

The clownish archer had gone from the field now, and his place had been taken by one of Prince Serithorn’s sons, a long-limbed young man who set about his shooting with efficiency and skill that came close to matching Prestimion’s own. But he too failed to equal the supreme accuracy of Prestimion’s work, and his final arrow went astonishingly far astray, grazing the edge of the target and skittering off to the ground, which disqualified him entirely for a prize. The young man left with tears glimmering on his cheeks. The ninth contestant appeared, and the tenth and the eleventh, and then one more. Korsibar and Thismet watched them all come and go without speaking, without even looking toward each other.

As the final archer began his work, Korsibar turned once again to Thismet and said abruptly, “Let’s say, purely for the sake of the hypothesis, that it is Prestimion’s plan to have me put out of the way. What would your advice to me be, in that case?”

Instantly Thismet replied, “Put him out of the way first, of course.”

Korsibar gave her a startled look. “I can hardly believe that those words came from your lips, sister. Kill Prestimion, you say?”

“What I said is to put him out of the way. I said nothing about killing.”

“Put him out of the way how?”

“By making yourself Coronal before he can get the crown. He’ll have no means of striking at you then. The army and the people will be yours.”

“Making myself Coronal,” Korsibar said wonderingly.

“Yes! Yes! Listen to your friends, Korsibar! They all feel as I do.” The words, so long pent up, came pouring from Thismet in a wild rush now. “You were made to be a Coronal; you were destined for it; and we’ll see to it that you are. You are a prince of a quality very rarely seen before in this world. Everyone knows it; everyone is saying it, wherever I turn. And everyone will rise up for you as soon as the signal is given. We’ll strike in a single day. Farquanor will gather support for you among the princes. Farholt and Navigorn will rally the troops behind you. Sanibak-Thastimoon stands ready to weave powerful enchantments to quell all opposition. The moment Prankipin dies, you make your move. You proclaim yourself; you stand before the people as their king and let them hail you; and then you go to Father with the whole thing already done and show him that you had no alternative but to stand aside and be slain.”

“Hush, Thismet. These are evil words.”

“No! No! Listen to me! The omens all point to you! Hasn’t Sanibak-Thastimoon told you what he—”

“Yes. Hush. Say no more. I beg you.”

“Lord Korsibar is what you will be!”

“Enough, Thismet!” Korsibar held both his clenched fists pressed together at his middle. The muscles of his jaw were knotted as though he were in pain. “No more of this! No more!” Once again he turned from her. His back and shoulders rose like a wall beside her.

But he was beginning to weaken, Thismet knew. She had seen, as Count Farquanor had seen before her, the momentary glint of temptation in his eyes as she had cried out that acclamation of him as Lord Korsibar. How close was he to yielding? Would one final push suffice?

Perhaps. But not just now. She understood the volatility of her brother’s character; she knew when he could be nudged toward action and when he would pull himself back into utter immobility. For the moment she had gone as far as she dared.

“Look,” she said. “Prestimion’s coming back. Why is that? To claim his prize, I suppose.”

“All the prizes will be given at the final celebration,” said Korsibar.

“Then why is he out here again now? And he looks as though he’s ready to shoot all over again.”

That was true enough. Prestimion had his bow in his hand and a full quiver over his shoulder. And now one of the judges was rising with an announcement: the winner of the archery competition, he declared, was Prince Prestimion of Muldemar, who at this time, by universal request, would offer a special additional demonstration of his skills.

’This is very unusual,” Korsibar remarked quietly.

“It has to be purely political,” said Thismet. “They’re making a point of putting him on display, do you see? Letting the people get another little look at their wonderful next Coronal. It’s all for show, Korsibar!”

Korsibar’s only answer was a wordless sound of acknowledgment.

The same enthusiastic cry was coming at once from many parts of the stands: “Prestimion! Prestimion!” He smiled, saluted the boxes of the nobility, waved toward the crowd with one upraised outspread hand. That radiant, regal glow was on him again. Lifting his bow, he began now a demonstration of the most extraordinary archery, issuing volley after volley with none of his former deliberation, but a series now of rapid shots, coming at the target from a variety of distances and angles and unfailingly achieving his mark.

“Prestimion! Prestimion!” came the cry, over and over.

“They love him,” Thismet said bitterly.

Korsibar uttered another little grunting affirmation, as though he could not bring himself to speak in actual words. He was staring down rigidly at Prestimion’s performance.

Indeed it was a splendid show that Prestimion was putting on, a spectacular demonstration of skill; and the onlookers were responding to it accordingly. Despite herself, Thismet still could not help but react with a certain measure of admiration as well.

But hatred coursed through her also as she watched the compact little prince performing his wonders on the field. His boundless confidence—his sublime smugness—most of all the fact that he was down there at all, making a public show of himself in this way, at what was supposed to be a competitive event, not some theatrical exhibition of one man’s prowess—how she detested him for all that! How profoundly she wished that one of those arrows would circle around back on him and skewer him through the throat!

She stole a cautious look at her brother and saw what seemed to be cold rage on his face as well; or annoyance, at least, at Prestimion’s arrogance in having allowed himself to be brought forth for this display.

“This offends you, doesn’t it?” Thismet said.

“He behaves as if he’s Coronal already!”

“As well he might. He will be, soon enough.”

“Yes,” said Korsibar gloomily. “Four more days and the crown is his.”

“You say that as though it’s a certainty.”

“Father’s sure of it. He’s cast the runes for Prankipin: four days and the old man’ll be dead. Father’s completely confident of that. His own mages have confirmed the calculation.”

“Four days, then,” said Thismet. “And how much time will you have to live, yourself, after that?”

She shot him a wary glance, fearful that it might have been far too soon for her to have returned to the theme of Dantira Sambail’s prediction. But no: no. Korsibar only shrugged.

“He’s too proud,” Korsibar muttered. “He ought not to be Coronal.”

“Who’ll stop him, if not you?”

“It would shake the world if I did.” Korsibar looked toward her and smiled strangely. “Those were Sanibak-Thastimoon’s own words,” he said, in an odd way, as though he had forgotten all about them until just now. “ ‘You will shake the world.’ ”

“Shake it, then,” said Thismet.

Korsibar stared down at Prestimion, who had just sent two arrows at once speeding toward the target. He said nothing.

“Shake it, then!” Thismet cried. “Shake it or die, Korsibar! Come. Come with me to Sanibak-Thastimoon. There’s planning for us to do, and spells to be cast.”

“Thismet—”

“Come,” she said. “Now. Now!”

There were no surprises in the fencing matches the following day. Septach Melayn quelled all rivals with his unsurpassable handling of the rapier, besting Count Farquanor in the final contest by a series of blind-ingly swift strokes that brought the entire host of onlookers to their feet in homage. The quick-wristed Farquanor was no trifling fencer himself, and yet Septach Melayn was everywhere around him at once, mincing and prancing in his most disdainful way as he slipped past Farquanor’s guard again and again. He made it look almost too easy.

Korsibar, too, had an expected triumph in the saber contests, battering his opponents’ heavy weapons aside with ease. In the special contests for Skandars—who were too big and had too many arms to compete fairly against humans—it was Habinot Tuvone, the famed fencing-master of Piliplok, who carried off the trophy in the two-sword competition, as had been virtually preordained. And so it went.

The jousting was to be the next day’s event, and the atmosphere among the visiting lords was tense and controlled as the time for it approached. No one wanted a repetition of the bloody spectacle that the wrestling match between Gialaurys and Farholt had been; and it would be only too easy, when the armed men were atop their swift battle-mounts, for more carnage to take place under the guise of zeal in the chivalrous arts.

A list of the competitors had been carefully drawn up by the senior lords in such a manner that each team of jousters would consist of an equal mix of men known to be loyal to Prestimion and those who were plainly in Korsibar’s entourage. But there would be no way to keep individual princes from attacking opponents of the other camp with the same murderous ferocity with which Farholt had attacked Gialaurys and with which Gialaurys had responded.

The plan was for the ninety contestants to assemble in the Court of Thrones fully armored for the bout, and to be transported in a group to the Arena. Septach Melayn was the first to arrive in that great dungeon-like room of black stone walls that rose to pointed arches, with Count Iram close behind him, and then Farholt and Farquanor together, Navigorn, Mandrykarn, Kanteverel of Bailemoona. There was much joking among them, but of a stiff, clanking, stilted sort. To Septach Melayn it seemed that an overheavy array of Korsibar’s people was in the hall thus far, though Korsibar himself had not yet arrived, nor the Coronal his father.

Gradually other competitors filtered in: Venta of Haplior and Sibellor of Banglecode, and then the Procurator Dantirya Sambail with three or four of his men, and Earl Kamba of Mazadone; still mainly Korsibar’s men. Septach Melayn looked about for Prestimion and Gialaurys, but they were not yet here, nor Svor, who was unlikely to come: Svor was no jouster.

Dantirya Sambail, who wore conspicuous showy armor of gleaming gold inlaid in red and blue gems with horrific designs of dragons and monsters, and a heavy brazen helmet bedecked with tall green plumes, looked to Septach Melayn and said, “Has your prince overslept himself today, friend?”

“That is not his habit. Perhaps he’s misplaced his helmet plumes and is searching hard for them: for such plumes are all the fashion this year, I see,” said Septach Melayn with a pointed glance at the Procurator’s high-soaring ornaments. “But he’ll be in time for the jousting, I think. Being on time is ever his way. For that matter, I see no sign of our great prince Korsibar, or his royal father.”

“And yet Korsibar’s Su-Suheris wizard is here,” Dantirya Sambail said, indicating with a jab of his helmet-plumes the presence of Sanibak-Thastimoon, whose two heads rose up into view in the midst of Farholt, Farquanor, and Navigorn. “Will he be jousting with us, I wonder? He doesn’t seem to be in armor. But perhaps sorcerers don’t need any.”

Septach Melayn frowned. “He has no business in this room today. Why, I wonder, is—”

“Now his lordship comes,” said Dantirya Sambail. And the old ceremonial cry went up: “Confalume! Confalume! Lord Confalume!”

The Coronal, in his formal robe of office, green and gold with ermine trim, acknowledged the cheers with brusque little gestures of greeting as he entered the hall. A little group of his court ministers accompanied him, a Vroon and a Hjort and some others. The Hjort, Hjathnis by name, who was unusually officious-looking even for a Hjort, trotted along close beside him carrying the starburst crown on a pillow of maroon velvet.

Iram said, “How weary he looks. This waiting for the change of rule to come has greatly tired him.”

“He’ll have time to rest soon enough, once Prankipin’s gone,” said Septach Melayn. “It’s a much quieter life being Pontifex than Coronal.”

“But when will that be?” asked Kamba. “It begins to look as if the Pontifex Prankipin intends to live forever.”

“Cures are available for such intentions, my lord Kamba,” Dantirya Sambail said, with a laugh and an ugly grin.

A retort for the Procurator’s crassness was on Septach Melayn’s lips; but instead he found himself putting his hand to his head and shutting his eyes a moment, for a mysterious fogginess had come suddenly over him. His eyelids felt heavy, his mind was a blur. After a moment it passed.

How very odd, he thought, shaking his head to clear it.

“Make way for Prince Korsibar!” a loud voice called. “Make way! Make way!”

In that instant Korsibar appeared in the entryway to the hall, looking flushed and excited.

“News!” he cried in the first moment of his entry. “I bring you news! The Pontifex Prankipin is dead!”

“You see?” said Dantirya Sambail, grinning his most evil grin. “A solution can always be found, even for immortality!”

“Look you,” said Iram to Septach Melayn, with a nod toward Lord Confalume. “The Coronal himself doesn’t seem to know anything about this. And where’s Prestimion? He should be here for the passing of the crown.”

In truth Lord Confalume seemed to have been caught off guard by the news Korsibar had brought. Every aspect of his expression reflected astonishment and consternation. His hand went to the rohilla he wore at his collar, that ever-present little amulet of strands of gold twined about a bit of jade, and he rubbed the gem at its center again and again with fitful anxious energy.

Septach Melayn said, “Yes, this is Prestimion’s moment to be here. A pity that he chose to be late. But I suppose that he—” He halted, perplexed, and swayed a little as a powerful new wave of dizziness swept him. “What? My head, Irani—some kind of damned fuzzy-mindedness coming over me—”

“And me,” said Iram.

All around the room it was the same. The entire hall seemed engulfed in a dark cloud. The assembled lords were stumbling about as though asleep on their feet, befogged, hazy-brained, lost in that strange mist of uncomprehension. They spoke, if at all, in murky mumbles.

Then, as abruptly as it had come, the mist cleared. Septach Melayn blinked incredulously at the scene he now beheld.

Korsibar had moved to the rear of the hall and taken up a position on the steps of the grand seat next to the Pontifex’s own throne—the one that the Coronal used when he was present at functions of state in this room. He had seized the starburst crown from Hjathnis the Hjort and was holding the slender, shining royal diadem lightly in his hands, resting on his fingertips. Flanking him like a guard of honor and looking defiantly outward at the rest of the group were Farholt, Farquanor, Navigorn of Hoikmar, and Mandrykarn. The two heads of Sanibak-Thastimoon could be seen jutting up just behind Count Farquanor, very close beside the prince.

Lord Confalume appeared stunned at what had taken place. His face was very pale; his eyes seemed almost glassy. He had come a few uncertain steps toward his son, his jaws agape and his hands turned helplessly outward in a gesture of shock and astonishment. He stared at Korsibar, and at the empty cushion on which the crown had lately rested, and at his son once more. But for a moment no sound could escape his lips except a rasping croak.

Then he pointed a wavering hand in Korsibar’s direction and said to him in a hoarse rusty voice, “What are you doing?”

“The Pontifex is dead, Father. You are Pontifex now, and I am your Coronal.”

“You are—what?” Confalume said, with a gasp that was echoed by a host of others around the room.

He looked like a man who had been shattered by a single blow. He stood dumbstruck in front of his son, his head and shoulders slumped forward, his arms dangling limply at his sides. Where were the force and power of the mighty Lord Confalume now? Gone, all gone in one numbing instant; or so it would seem.

Korsibar held his arms out toward his father in a grand sweeping gesture.

“All hail his majesty Confalume Pontifex!” he cried. It was a cry loud enough to be heard at Castle Mount. “All hail! Confalume Pontifex!”

“All hail his majesty Confalume Pontifex!” the others shouted, or most of them, a very ragged chorus indeed, for the impact of the news was sinking in upon them at a varying rate.

Then Farholt bellowed in a voice that could bend stone walls, “And all hail the Coronal Lord Korsibar! Korsibar! Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!”

There was a moment of astounded silence.

And then: “Korsibar! Korsibar!” went up the cry, from all except a few for whom it was very plainly a difficult matter to give voice to the thing that Farholt wished them to proclaim. “Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!”

In a smooth solemn gesture Korsibar raised the starburst crown high, held it forth to show it to all who stood before him, and serenely placed it on his own forehead. Whereupon he sat himself on the seat of the Coronal and coolly beckoned to his father to take the Pontifex’s throne adjoining him.

“Do you believe this?” Septach Melayn asked.

“We must, I think,” replied Count Iram. “Look over there.”

Others were pushing their way into the room now, a swarm of troops of the Coronal’s guard, who evidently had taken up positions outside during that time when the minds of everyone within had been embraced by that dark cloud. They were all of them armed. Some deployed themselves along both sides of Korsibar with the plain intention of defending him against any who might raise objection to the sudden coup d’etat; the rest formed two enfilades down the borders of the room. Two, at a gesture from Korsibar, gently took the astounded Confalume by the elbows and prodded him toward the Pontifical throne.

“Come, Father,” Korsibar said, speaking very tenderly. “Sit beside me for a while, and we will talk; and then we will perform the proper rituals and see old Prankipin into his grave. And then you will take up your new home in this place and I will go back to Castle Mount to assume the responsibilities that now are to be mine.”

The guards who were guiding Confalume toward the throne eased him up the three steps that led to it and sat him carefully down. He offered no resistance. He appeared to be without volition of his own, as though he were under some spell; and he had the look of a man who had aged twenty years in ten minutes.

Then came the sounds of a scuffle in the corridor outside, “feet out of my way!” a loud angry voice cried. “Let me in! Let me in!”

“Prestimion, at last,” Septach Melayn murmured.

A louder and even angrier voice could be heard next, stormily threatening mayhem and general destruction if the guards blocking the entrance to the hall did not step aside. It was that of Gialaurys.

Quickly Septach Melayn cut a path for himself to the door, deftly slipping between guardsmen who seemed unwilling to block his movements, or incapable of managing it. Prestimion, looking sweaty and disheveled, said as Septach Melayn approached him, “What’s been happening here? I was on my way toward this hall, and I fell into a sort of swoon—and Gialaurys also, both our minds clouded over—and when we returned to ourselves, the corridor was full of the Coronal’s men, who blocked me from going forward, so that I had to threaten them with all manner of vengeance—”

“Look you there, and see wonders,” broke in Septach Melayn, taking him by the arm and swinging him quickly about to face the crowned Korsibar on the Coronal’s seat and the bewildered and thunderstruck Confalume on the Pontifical throne beside him.

“What is this?” Prestimion asked in wonder.

Calmly Korsibar said, rising from his royal seat, “The Divine has spoken, Prestimion. Prankipin is dead and my father Confalume now is Pontifex, and I—” He touched his hand lightly to the crown resting on his brow. “I—”

“No!” Gialaurys bellowed. “This is thievery! Thievery! This thing will not be!” Holding his arms upraised and his fingers stiffly outthrust as though he meant to throttle Korsibar with his own hands, he began to move forward with his head lowered like a rumbling bull, only to find himself confronted by the halberds of the front row of Korsibar’s guards.

“Step back, Gialaurys,” Prestimion said in a low stern voice. And then, more sharply: “Back! Away from the throne!” And reluctantly Gialaurys gave ground.

Then, looking toward Korsibar, Prestimion said, with taut self-control, “You claim to be Coronal, is that it?”

“I am Coronal.”

To Confalume, Prestimion said in an equally quiet tone, “And this is acceptable to you, your majesty?”

Confalume’s lips moved but no words came out. He turned his hands outward and upward in a pathetic gesture of defeat and bewilderment.

Now Prestimion’s rage flared high. “What is this, Korsibar, have you put some spell on him?” he demanded fiercely. “He’s nothing more than a puppet!”

Farholt, stepping forward, said now with a shameless grin, “You will address him now as Lord Korsibar, prince.”

Prestimion looked stunned for a moment. Then he smiled, but the smile was a very thin one. “Lord Korsibar, then,” he said, quietly again, with a barely concealed tinge of mockery imparting an edge to his tone. “Was that properly spoken, Lord Korsibar?”

“I’ll kill him!” Gialaurys howled. “I’ll tear him apart!”

“You’ll do no such thing,” said Prestimion as the line of halberds bristled. He clamped his hand tight about Gialaurys’s thick wrist and held him firmly in his place. Smoothly, Septach Melayn moved in to press himself up against Gialaurys and restrain him on the other side.

Gialaurys trembled like a shackled titan, but remained where he was.

“Svor saw something very much like this in a dream,” Prestimion said in a low voice to Septach Melayn. “I laughed at him. But now we see it also.”

“This is not any dream, I fear,” Septach Melayn replied. “Or if it is, there’ll be no quick awakening from it for us.”

“No. And we appear to be friendless in this room today. This is not any place for us to be just now.” Prestimion looked across to Korsibar. The world was whirling wildly on its axis, but he forced himself to plant his feet firmly and stand staunchly upright. To Korsibar he said, keeping all that he felt at this dark moment under the tightest of reins and speaking through barely parted lips, “In this time of great loss and mourning, I would prefer to reflect in solitude on these great events. I ask your gracious permission to withdraw from the hall, your—lordship.”

“Granted.”

“Come, then,” Prestimion said sharply to Gialaurys, who still looked stunned and numb with fury. “Out of here, now, quickly. And you also, Septach Melayn. Come. Come.” And added, under his breath: “While we still can.” Prestimion’s fingers flicked out toward Korsibar in the starburst sign, which he performed so swiftly that it was little more than a parody of the gesture. Then he swung about and went quickly with his two companions from the room.