Sorcerers of Majipoor

1

“Did you see his face?” Thismet cried. It was the dazzling hour of triumph. “Like a stone slab, it was. No expression at all, and absolutely gray. A dead man’s face.” And she squared her shoulders and thrust out her chin and did a scathing imitation of Prestimion’s stolid exit from the Court of Thrones, muttering gruffly in a decent counterfeit of Prestimion’s strong tenor, “ ‘Come, then, Septach Melayn, Gialaurys. Out of here, while we can.’ ”

The room shook with laughter. Then Farholt jumped up. Moving stiffly, for he was still badly battered and bruised from that horrendous wrestling match with Gialaurys, he shambled ponderously back and forth before them in the clumsy dangle-armed posture of a great ape of the Gonghar Mountains, pummeling his chest and grunting in a fair semblance of Gialaurys’s dark rumbling voice, “Til kill him! I’ll tear him apart!’”

A couple of others began now to mimic Septach Melayn’s dainty walk, comically exaggerating his feline litheness and overfastidious precision of movement. “Enough of this,” said Korsibar, though he was laughing just as heartily as any of the others. “It’s bad grace to mock one’s fallen rivals.”

“A good point, my lord,” said Count Farquanor unctuously. “Wisely put, my lord.” And the others echoed him: “Wisely put, my lord. A good point, my lord. A very good point, my lord.” The temporary quarters of the new Coronal had been established in the generous suite on the imperial level of the Labyrinth where the former Prince Korsibar had resided since his arrival; and here the new Lord Korsibar was holding court for the first time on the afternoon of his assumption of the crown, seated on an improvised throne while the members of his immediate entourage clustered about him to pay him homage.

One by one they had come forward and knelt and made the starburst sign to him: the Lady Thismet first, and then the brothers Farquanor and Farholt together, and Navigorn and Mandrykarn and Venta and the rest. And Sanibak-Thastimoon as well; for Korsibar was Coronal Lord of the Su-Suheris people of Majipoor now too, and of all the Ghayrogs and Liimen and Hjorts and Vroons and Skandars as well, and even the shapeshifting Metamorphs of the distant Piurifayne forests.

“My lord,” they said over and over, greatly relishing the sound of it, interspersing it between every third word they addressed to him: “My lord, my lord, my lord, my lord.” And the new Coronal heard and graciously smiled and nodded his acknowledgment of their deference, just as he had seen his father doing since he was a small child. Korsibar had had a better education in being Coronal, perhaps, than anyone who had ever come to the throne before him, at least in the matter of understanding the formalities of the post; for he had had an entire lifetime to study a Coronal’s deportment, beginning at his father’s knee.

Count Farquanor, eyes bright with the pleasure of victory, approached him and said, “The word has gone out everywhere, my lord, of what has occurred here today. They will all learn of it soon, in every city, on every continent.”

He waited, half crouching beside Korsibar as if expecting to be tossed a coin. Korsibar knew what was in Farquanor’s mind: he yearned to be named High Counsellor to the Coronal, which was the highest rank at the Castle below that of Coronal itself. Very likely Korsibar would so name him, when the time for making appointments had come: but it was not yet that time, not this soon. One did not discard the former Coronal’s close advisers so hastily: especially when one had come to the throne as irregularly as he had. And his reign was still only in its first moments, after all.

Even now, the news of the change of government was only just beginning to spread—erupting outward upon the world from the claustrophobic confines of the Labyrinth like a column of fiery lava spouting from the black ashy cone of a volcano. Of course it had come by this time to the Castle, where the myriad officials of the Coronal’s administrative staff were doubtless looking at one another with astonishment and asking each other in helpless dumbstruck repetition, “Korsibar? How could it have been Korsibar?” And to the fifty glorious cities of the Mount that lay spread out below the Castle, High Morpin of the mirror-slides and juggernauts, and Normork of the great stone wall, and Tolingar where Lord Havilbove’s miraculous garden was, and Kazkaz, Sipermit, Frangior, Halanx, Prestimion’s own city of Muldemar, and all the rest of them.

And the astonishing news would be continuing onward and onward across the whole continent of Alhanroel, through the teeming valley of the Glayge and the innumerable stilt-legged villages scattered along the silver immensity of Lake Roghoiz, and out to Bailemoona and Alaisor and Stoien and Sintalmond and the airy towns that clung to the grotesque spires of the Ketheron district, and those of the golden hills of Arvyanda, and across the sea to the tremendous cities of Zimroel, the far western continent, cities that were more the stuff of myth and legend than real places to those who dwelled at the Castle—Ni-moya and Til-omon, Pidruid and Piliplok, Narabal, Khyntor, Sagamalinor, Dulorn. And to parched fiery Suvrael also, and the Isle of the Lady. Everywhere. Everywhere.

Mandrykarn, approaching Korsibar now, said, “If I may ask your majesty—”

“No, not ‘your majesty,’ ” Farquanor interrupted. “ ‘Your lordship.’ ‘Your majesty’ is what one would say to the Pontifex.”

“A hundred thousand pardons!” said Mandrykarn with exaggerated punctiliousness, drawing himself up stiffly and looking displeased. Mandrykarn was deep-shouldered and substantial, a man nearly as robustly built as Korsibar himself, and he scowled down at the wiry little Farquanor in unconcealed annoyance. Then, to Korsibar again: “If I may ask your lordship a question—?”

“Of course, Mandrykarn.”

“What is to be done about the games? ”

“Why, we’ll continue them where we left off, of course. But first we’ll have the funeral for old Prankipin, with all the pomp and grandeur this gloomy place can muster, and then some sort of formal installation ceremony, I suppose, for my father and myself. And then—”

“If I may, my lord—” Mandrykarn said.

Both Farquanor and Korsibar looked surprised at that, for Mandrykarn had interrupted the Coronal in mid-sentence, and one was not supposed to do that. But Korsibar quickly smiled to show that he had taken no offense. They were all very new at this business: it was too early to be finicky over protocol.

Korsibar signaled Mandrykarn to continue.

“It occurs to me, lordship, that it might be the part of wisdom to abandon the remainder of the games and begin our journey to Castle Mount as quickly as possible. We can hold more games once we’re there. We have no way of knowing what Prestimion’s next move may be, my lord. If he should return to the Castle before we do, and raises a dispute against your assumption of power—”

“Do you think Prestimion would do such a thing?” Korsibar asked. “Not I. He respects the law. Under the law, I am Coronal now.”

“Nevertheless, my lord,” Mandrykarn said. “With all respect for your judgment, my lord. If he chooses to challenge the assumption on the grounds that a Coronal’s son may not become Coronal after him—”

“That’s not law,” said Farquanor sharply. “That’s merely precedent.”

“Precedent that has hardened into law over the past seven thousand years,” replied Mandrykarn.

“I stand with Farquanor and his lordship in this,” said Navigorn of Hoikmar. “If there’s precedent here, it’s that the outgoing Coronal chooses and ratifies the ascendance of his successor. Prestimion may argue that the element of choice on the part of Lord Confalume may have been defective, but certainly ratification was there: for did not Confalume sit willingly down on the Pontifical throne beside the crowned Lord Korsibar—”

“Willingly?” Farquanor asked.

“Well, more or less willingly, let us say. And thereby giving implicit recognition to Lord Korsibar by the very fact of making no protest over the assumption.”

There was something of a stir in the room at Navigorn’s words, not so much over their content as for the fact that he had said them at all. The dark-haired brawny Navigorn was a man of tireless strength and formidable skill in the hunt; but he had never demonstrated much gift for abstract thought before. Nor, for that matter, had Mandrykarn. Korsibar hid his amusement over this sudden dispute behind his hand. Was the coming of the new regime going to transform all his rough-and-ready hunting-comrades into lawyers?

“Still,” said Farholt, glowering out from under his massive brows, “what we think the law says and what Prestimion thinks may not be the same. I’m with Mandrykarn here: I vote for calling off the rest of the games and getting ourselves back to the Castle as fast as we can.”

Korsibar looked toward the Lady Thismet. “Sister?”

“Yes. Cancel the games. We have more important things to do now. As for Prestimion, he’s no danger to us. We control the army. We control the machinery of government. What action can he take against us? Point a finger at you, my lord, and say that you have stolen his crown? It never was his crown. And now it’s yours. It’ll remain that way, my lord, no matter how Prestimion feels about today’s events.”

“I would go so far as to offer Prestimion a post in the new government,” said Farquanor thoughtfully. “To neutralize him—to minimize his resentment—and also to ensure his loyalty.”

“Why not High Counsellor?” Mandrykarn suggested, and everyone laughed, all but Farquanor.

Korsibar said, “Yes. A shrewd idea. I’ll send for Prestimion in a day or two and ask him to take some Council post. Certainly he’s worthy of one, and if he’s not too proud to accept, it’ll give us a way of keeping a close eye on him. As for the games, Thismet’s right: we won’t resume them, not here. There’ll be time for chariot-racing and jousting later on, at the castle. We bury Prankipin; we consecrate the new Pontifex; we do whatever urgent business must be done and we leave for the Mount. So be it.”

“What about your mother, lordship?” Farquanor said.

Korsibar gave him a baffled look. “My mother? What about my mother?”

“She now becomes the Lady of the Isle, my lord.”

“By the Divine!” Korsibar cried. “That slipped my mind entirely! The mother of the Coronal—”

“The mother of the Coronal, yes,” said Farquanor. “When the Coronal happens to have a living mother, that is, and now that’s the case again. So at last old Aunt Kunigarda gets her pension, and the Lady Roxivail will be the Lady of us all.”

“The Lady Roxivail,” said Mandrykarn in amazement. “What will she say when she finds out, I’d like to know!”

“And who’ll be brave enough to be the one to tell her?” Thismet asked, fighting back a giggle.

The Lady Roxivail was no one’s idea of a fitting Lady of the Isle of Sleep. Lord Confalume’s beautiful, vain, and imperious wife had separated from the Coronal not long after the birth of her two children and withdrawn to the luxury of her shimmering palace far to the south on the tropic isle of Shambettirantil. Surely never even in her most grandiose dreams had she imagined that the responsibility of becoming a Power of the Realm would ever descend upon her. And yet—law and precedent—the Ladyship would indeed have to be offered to her—

“Well,” Korsibar said, “we can reserve that problem for a later discussion. Someone who knows more history than I do can tell us tomorrow how long a period of transition is usually allowed between one Lady and the next, and Kunigarda can continue to send dreams to the world until we figure out what to do about replacing her.”

“My lord,” Farquanor went on, “you will also need to deal quickly with the problem of the senior peers.”

“And what problem is that? It seems to me you’re finding a great many problems very quickly, Farquanor.”

“I mean ensuring their loyalty, lordship. Which involves assuring them of your love and confirming them in their continued posts.”

“For the time being, at least,” said Mandrykarn.

“For the time being, yes,” Farquanor said, eyes glinting with sudden covetousness. “But it would be rash to make them insecure in any way at the outset. I would summon your kinsman Duke Oljebbin within the hour, my lord, and the princes Gonivaul and Serithorn immediately after, and tell them that their role in the government is unchanged.”

“Good. See that they’re invited here.”

“And finally—”

There was a knock, and a servitor appeared. “My lord, the Procurator Dantirya Sambail is here and seeks admission.”

Korsibar gave Thismet an uneasy glance, and looked to Farquanor next and saw that he was frowning also. But he could hardly turn the powerful Procurator away from his door.

“Let him come in,” Korsibar said.

Dantirya Sambail was still clad in the splendiferous golden armor in which he had attended the gathering in the Court of Thrones, but he held his green-plumed brazen helmet now under his arm in what was perhaps a sort of gesture of deference to the new king. His great freckled ruddy-faced head, topped with its fluffy corona of orange hair, jutted bluntly before him into the room like a battering ram as he made his striding entrance.

He took for himself the place directly in front of Korsibar, which required Farquanor and Mandrykarn to give ground slightly, and stood for a long moment, face-to-face with the new Coronal, staring at him as though openly taking the measure of him, not as subject before king, but as one equal prince to another.

“So,” he said finally. “It does seem that you actually are Coronal now.”

“So it seems, and so I am,” said Korsibar, pointedly looking toward the floor in front of Dantirya Sambail.

But the Procurator ignored the unambiguous instruction to kneel and render up the sign of homage. “What has your father had to say about this, I wonder?” he asked.

“You saw my father sit down beside me in the Court of Thrones. There’s implicit recognition in that.”

“Ah. Implicit.”

“Recognition,” said Korsibar irritably. A certain amount of insolence was to be expected from Dantirya Sambail; but he was beginning to exceed expectations.

“You haven’t spoken with him since leaving the hall?”

“The Pontifex has withdrawn to his suite,” said Korsibar. “I’ll visit him in due course. In these early moments of my reign I have much to do, Procurator, decisions to make, responsibilities to discharge—”

“I quite understand that, Prince Korsibar.”

“I am Coronal now, Procurator.”

“Ah. Of course. Lord Korsibar, I should have said.”

There were exhalations of relief in the room at that. Did that concession from Dantirya Sambail mean that he had chosen not to make trouble over Korsibar’s accession? It was a good sign, at any rate.

Again Korsibar glanced down, once more inviting the Procurator to kneel and give homage. A slanting smile spread slowly across Dantirya Sambail’s broad heavy-featured face, and he said, “I beg you, my lord, to be forgiven the genuflection. This armor of mine will not easily allow it.” And he offered instead, in the most perfunctory way, a quick flashing of fingers in a semblance of the starburst sign.

With a mordant inflection in his tone, Korsibar said, “Is there some special purpose to this visit, Procurator, other than to offer your formal greeting to the new Coronal Lord?”

“There is.”

“Then I await hearing it, Dantirya Sambail.”

“My lord,” the Procurator said, managing to impart the merest minimum of submissiveness to his dry uncongenial voice, “I assume that there will be festivities of some sort in your honor shortly at the Castle, as is usual at the commencement of a reign.”

“I expect so, yes.”

“Very good, my lord. I ask to be forgiven if I am not in attendance. It is my hope to withdraw to my own lands of Zimroel for a while.” Which caused an immediate sensation, gasps and murmurs and exchanges of meaningful glances. But Dantirya Sambail went on to explain, after a moment, that he intended no disrespect: he was suffering greatly from homesickness, he said, the journey was long, he wanted to get on his way as quickly as possible. “I have been at the Castle these past several years, you know, and it seems appropriate, in a time of the transfer of power, for me to return to the region over which I have responsibility, and look after my duties there. Therefore I humbly request permission to take my leave of you as soon as I have put my affairs at the Castle in order.”

“You may do as you wish about that,” said Korsibar.

“And furthermore: I ask that when you undertake your first grand processional, you reserve at least a month’s time for me, to be my guest at my estate in Ni-moya, so that I can show you some of the extraordinary pleasures that the greatest city of the younger continent has to offer.” And added, plainly as an afterthought: “My lord.”

“It will be some while before I’ll have the opportunity of making the grand processional,” Korsibar said.

“I may well be planning a stay of considerable length in Ni-moya, my lord.”

“Well, then,” said Korsibar. “When I’m ready for the journey, I’ll inquire at that time concerning the availability of your hospitality.”

“I will await you—my lord.”

Again Dantirya Sambail smiled his disagreeable smile, and bowed without attempting to kneel, grandly flourishing his plumed helmet before him, and went from the room, metalled boots clanking heavily against the floor.

“Let him stay in Ni-moya for a hundred years!” Thismet exclaimed when the Procurator was gone. “Who wants him at the Castle, anyway? How did he get to become Father’s perpetual houseguest?”

“I think it would be best to have him close at hand, where I can watch him,” Korsibar replied. “Perhaps Father had something similar in mind. But he’ll go where he chooses, I suppose.” He shook his head. Something began to pulse behind his eyes and forehead, and a mysterious weariness seemed abruptly to afflict him. The Procurator was an exhausting man. Enduring his insolence without showing rage had been tiring. “Prestimion—Dantirya Sambail—and no doubt others like them too—I must watch them all, it seems. Eternal vigilance will be necessary. There’s more to this thing than I think I realized.”

With an edgy impatient gesture he beckoned toward the tall flask of wine on the table beside Navigorn. “Quick, quick, give it to me!”

Between sips he said softly, to Thismet alone, “It seems I have climbed aboard the back of a wild beast, sister, and now I must ride it the rest of my days or it will devour me.”

“Do you regret having done it, then?”

“No! Not in the slightest!”

But there must have been some lack of conviction in Korsibar’s voice, for she bent her head close to his and said in his ear, “Remember, all this has been foretold.” Then, with a glance toward the inscrutable Sanibak-Thastimoon, who was standing alone at the far side of the room: “This is your destiny, brother.”

“My destiny, yes.” Korsibar waited for the hot flood of enthusiasm that that word had come to kindle in him in recent days; but this time it was very slow in coming, and he held the bowl out again for wine. The second drink of the young foaming wine warmed him and somewhat drove this sudden weariness from his spirit. He felt that surge of excitement for which he had searched in vain a moment or two before. My destiny. Yes. To which everything else must be subordinate: everything. Everything.

2

Under the new scheme of things, they had at least allowed the former Lord Confalume to remain for the time being in the suite of rooms that he had occupied as Coronal. But signs of the sudden metamorphosis that the government of Majipoor had undergone were evident to Prestimion even in the hallway outside.

The gigantic Skandars who guarded the Coronal’s suite were still on duty, but now, absurdly, they wore the tiny eye-masks that marked them as members of the Pontifical staff. And half a dozen members of the Pontifical bureaucracy were milling about as well in the throng outside Confalume’s door.

One of them, a masked Ghayrog with pearl-hued scales, gave him a supercilious look and said, “You claim to have an appointment with his majesty?”

“I am Prince Prestimion of Muldemar. There’s an emergency in the land; the Pontifex has agreed to see me, and this is the hour at which I’m to meet with him.”

“The Pontifex has sent word that he is very tired and wishes his appointment schedule to be curtailed.”

“Curtail it after I’ve seen him, then,” said Prestimion. “Do you know who I am? Do you know what has happened here today? Go on. Go! Tell his majesty that Prince Prestimion is waiting outside to see him!”

A lengthy conference ensued among the Pontifical officials; then the Ghayrog and another masked figure disappeared into Confalume’s suite, where, very likely, still another lengthy conference took place. Then at last the two officials emerged and the Ghayrog said, “The Pontifex will see you. You may have ten minutes with him.”

The great door, glistening with its bright golden LCC monograms that now had become obsolete, swung back and Prestimion stepped within. Confalume sat in deep dejection with his elbows against his sim-bajinder-wood desk and his head propped morosely against his fists. All about him were his strange implements of sorcery, scattered higgledy-piggledy, some of the elaborate devices overturned and others pushed negligently into untidy heaps.

Very gradually the new Pontifex looked up. His eyes, reddened and raw, met Prestimion’s gaze only with the greatest difficulty, held themselves there no longer than a moment, and became downcast again.

“Your majesty,” Prestimion said in a frigid voice, making the sign of submission.

“My—majesty, yes,” said Confalume.

He was no more than the shadow of his former self. His face was bleak and sagging, his whole mien one of confusion and despair. Poor pitiful man, emperor of the whole world who could not command his own son.

“Well?” said Prestimion sharply. He struggled to contain the anger that he felt, and the pain. The sudden unimaginable loss of all that he had been working toward was like a blade within him. And even now the reality of it was just beginning to sink in: he knew it would be worse for him, much worse, later on. “Are you actually going to allow this ridiculous business to stand?”

“Please, Prestimion.”

“Please? Please? The crown is unlawfully stolen from me, from us all, by your own son and you say ‘Please, Prestimion’ to me, and nothing more than that?”

“The high spokesman should be here. Kai Kanamat, that’s his name, until I’ve appointed my own.” Confalume’s voice was thin and faint and hoarse, veering occasionally into an inaudible whisper. “The Pontifex is not supposed to speak directly to citizens, you know. Questions must be addressed to the high spokesman, who will inform the Pontifex—”

“I know these things,” Prestimion said. “Save them for later. If you are truly Pontifex, Confalume, what do you plan to do about this usurpation of the crown?”

“This—usurpation—”

“Do you know a better term for it?”

“Prestimion—please—”

Prestimion stared. “Are those tears, your majesty?”

“Please. Please.”

“Has Korsibar been to see you yet, since making himself Coronal?”

“He’ll come later,” said Confalume huskily. “He has appointments to make—meetings—decrees—”

“So you do intend to let it stand, then!”

Confalume made no reply. Randomly, he picked some conjuring device from his desk, a thing of silver wires and golden coils, and fondled it in an absentminded way, as a child might fondle a toy.

Relentlessly Prestimion said, “Did you have any advance knowledge of what Korsibar had in mind to do?” “None. None whatever.”

“It came like a bolt of lightning, is that it? There you were, and there he was, and you just stood there and let him take the crown from your own head and put it on his, without a word of protest. Is that what happened?”

“Not from my head. It was resting on a cushion. I felt dizzy for a moment and found myself unable to see, and when I was all right again, I saw that he had the crown in his hands. I knew nothing before the fact, nothing, Prestimion. I was as surprised as anyone else. More so, even. And then it was done. He had the crown. He had the Coronal’s seat. And the hall was full of his soldiers.”

“Septach Melayn said that a dizziness came over him too. And I the same, out in the corridor. That was done by sorcery, wouldn’t you say?” Prestimion paced furiously back and forth before the desk. He said, wonderstruck, “By the Divine, I don’t even believe that true sorcery exists, and here I am crediting this coup to it! But what else could it have been, if not some witching of us all by that two-headed magus of his, casting us into a fog while Korsibar’s troops moved into the room and he put his thieving hands on the crown? Such things are impossible: that I know. But what could be more impossible than the stealing of the throne, and look! It has happened!” He came to a halt in front of the former Coronal, leaning down with his knuckles resting on the surface of the desk, and said vehemently, staring with implacable force into Confalume’s eyes, “You are Pontifex of Majipoor now. You have the power to put an end to this monstrous affair with a single command.”

“Do I, Prestimion?”

“Who would dare disobey you? You are the Pontifex! Condemn this seizure of the throne by Korsibar; order the imperial guard to reclaim the crown from him; proclaim me the rightful Coronal. I’ll do the rest.”

“What will you do, Prestimion?”

“Reestablish order. Remove the conspirators from authority and reverse whatever decisions they may already have made. Restore the tranquility of the kingdom.”

“He has the army with him,” Confalume said.

“The Coronal’s guard perhaps. Not necessarily the general army, and possibly not even the guard. It goes against all reason that your own guardsmen, who were loyal to you unto death only this morning, would now refuse to obey your orders.”

“They love Korsibar.”

“We all love Korsibar,” said Prestimion acidly. “But we have a government of reason and law on this world! No one names himself Coronal and is allowed to have it! Have you forgotten, Confalume, that the Pontifex is the superior monarch, and that the Pontifex has troops as well as the Coronal, and those troops are entirely under your command?”

“Yes. I know that,” Confalume said.

“Order them out, then! Send them against the usurper!”

Confalume looked up at him and stared in silence for a long while. Then he said in the dullest and deadest of tones, “In that case there would be the most bloody of wars, Prestimion.”

“Do you think so?”

“I’ve taken counsel with my own mages,” Confalume said. “They say there would be resistance, that if force is used to make Korsibar relinquish what he’s taken, he’ll use force in return. The omens they cast are all evil ones. Have mercy on me, Prestimion!”

“Mercy?” Prestimion asked, astounded.

But then he understood.

It was folly to think that this Confalume who sat slumped before him now had anything more in common than a name with the great Lord Confalume who had ruled Majipoor with such forcefulness and panache these forty years past. That other Confalume had perished, shattered in a moment by his son’s unthinkable treason; this pitiful broken old man here, this remnant, this empty shell, did indeed hold the title of Pontifex of Majipoor, but there was no strength left in him at all. He had collapsed within like some mighty building whose timbers had all slowly gone weak with the dry rot, while still looking grand and splendid on the outside. All his famed vigor and resilience had fled from him.

Confalume, Prestimion realized now, had come to see that civil war might well be the only way to repair the yawning gulf that Korsibar’s audacity—his madness—had opened in the commonwealth. But the price of the restoration of order would almost certainly be the death of his only son. And that was something Confalume could not face.

And so—and so—

“You ask me to accept this criminal act of insurrection in good faith, then, and bow down to Korsibar and accept him as king?”

“I have no other path, Prestimion.”

“I was to have been Coronal, not Korsibar.”

“The appointment was never formally made.”

“Do you deny that you intended it?”

“No—no.” Confalume could not meet Prestimion’s hot gaze. “You would have been Coronal.”

“But instead Korsibar is.”

“Yes. Yes. Korsibar. You were the better choice, Prestimion. But what can I do? My blessings go with you, boy. And nothing more. The thing is done. Korsibar holds the power now.”

Gialaurys said in a throbbing access of fury, when they were gathered soon afterward in Prestimion’s suite, “And are you going to let them put such shame and mockery on you, Prestimion? Is this actually to be borne? If you hadn’t stopped me, I’d have struck him down right where he sat on the Coronal’s seat in the Court of Thrones. And torn the crown from his head and placed it on your own.”

“Three of us, unarmed, and how many of them?” Prestimion asked wearily.

’Tell me again what the new Pontifex plans to do about all this,” Svor said.

“He plans to do nothing. He’s going to hole himself up here in the Labyrinth and let Korsibar have his way.”

“Was he privy to the conspiracy, do you think?” asked Septach Melayn.

“No,” said Prestimion, with a vigorous shake of his head. “Beyond all doubt, Confalume knew nothing at all. It was as much of a surprise to him as it was to you or me. And it has been the complete destruction of him. Look upon his face, if you will: he’s a broken man. I saw only the ruins of Confalume in there.”

“Nevertheless, he holds the highest authority in the land. We must maneuver him toward our side,” Septach Melayn said, laying his hand lightly on Prestimion’s arm. “This is an unsupportable outrage! We dare not allow it to stand!” His cool blue eyes suddenly became hard and fierce with anger, and two fiery patches of color, standing out like beacons against his fair skin, emerged along the sharp ridges of his cheekbones, and that look of amused contemptuous disdain that was Septach Melayn’s usual expression gave way to one of barely contained rage. “We will go to him, you and I, Prestimion, and thrust our faces into his, and make it utterly clear to him that he must immediately—”

“No, my friend,” said Prestimion. “No. Don’t talk to me of thrusting my face into that of a Pontifex and telling him what he must or must not do. That’s blasphemous talk. And in any case it would be useless.”

“So Korsibar will be Coronal?” Septach Melayn said, throwing up his hands.

“And we go politely down on our knees before him?” Gialaurys asked. “With a ‘Yes, Lord Korsibar,’ and a ‘No, Lord Korsibar,’ and a ‘May I lick your boots, Lord Korsibar?’ ” He clapped his hands together with a sound that could have summoned the dead. “No! I will not abide it, Prestimion!”

“And what will you do, then?”

“Why—Why—”

Gialaurys sputtered into puzzled silence. Then he looked up, eyes brightening. “I’ll challenge him to a wrestling match! Yes! That’s it! Man-to-man, with the throne of Majipoor as the stake! Three falls, and Oljebbin and Serithorn and Gonivaul as the referees, and—”

“Yes,” said Svor wryly. “That certainly is the solution.”

“Do you have a better one?” demanded Gialaurys of the little man.

’To leave the Labyrinth as fast as we can, as a first step.”

“You were ever a coward, Svor.”

Svor smiled a bleak smile. “Careful, friend. There’s a considerable difference between cowardice and prudence. But how would you know, having neither of those qualities? It will occur to Korsibar, sooner or later, that he would do well to be rid of us, for Prestimion here is a great impediment to his clear title to the throne. And what better place for achieving our disappearance than this dark and mysterious Labyrinth, where all is levels upon levels that no one understands, and if we were to be taken during the night and led away somewhere into the warrens behind the Hall of Winds to have our throats slit, let’s say, or quietly pushed face down into the black lake of the Court of Columns, it would be a very long time before our bodies were found.”

“And you think Korsibar would countenance any such damnable thing?” Prestimion asked. “By the Divine, Svor, you have a black view of the human soul, don’t you?”

“I have traveled some, and seen a few things.”

“And so you believe that Korsibar has the capacity for murder in him.”

“Despite his shameless taking of the crown, Korsibar may indeed in other matters be as honorable as you would like to think he is,” Svor said coolly. “But there are those in his party who are not. I speak particularly of Count Farquanor. And I remind you also of the Su-Suheris wizard who casts the prince’s spells for him. His handsome sister, I think, has a sinister influence over him as well. Korsibar seems wondrous strong and majestic to look upon, but we know that there’s a certain lightness within him, and it takes but a gentle breeze to move him easily from one place to another. The same folk who pushed him into seizing the throne can push him into taking our lives.”

Prestimion nodded. “Perhaps so,” he said, looking darkly downward. His hands opened and closed on air. “You warned me of all this, Svor, and I told you to hold your tongue, that time when you came to me with that dream of dead Prankipin’s taking the crown from Confalume and putting it on Korsibar’s head. I spurned and ignored you then, to my great cost. You have greater credit with me now. So be it: we are in danger here, I agree.” To the other two he said, “I stand with Duke Svor on this. We’ll leave here as soon as is seemly, the moment the old Pontifex is buried.”

“Where would you suggest we go?” asked Septach Melayn, addressing Svor.

“We have homes at Castle Mount. I would go there,” said Svor, “and test the strength and depth of Korsibar’s support within the Castle, and subtly forge such alliances as we can, with this high lord and that one. All the while making great pretense of accepting what has happened, and, yes, freely bending the knee to Korsibar whenever it’s required of us.”

“And the risk of our being murdered in the night?” Septach Melayn asked.

“There’d be little chance of that at the Castle. That’s something that might more easily happen in the Labyrinth than there, where the sun shines brightly on all deeds and we’d have so many more of our friends about us. And as time goes along, perhaps we will find the opportunity—”

“As time goes along!” Gialaurys cried. “Time! Time! Time! How long do you think we could contain ourselves, under those conditions? What life would there be for us, with Korsibar lording it over us day after day and month after month? You may bend your knees to him if you wish, Svor, but mine are of stiffer stuff! No, let me go to him now, and smash him down where he stands, even if they kill me on the spot. Majipoor will get its proper Coronal then.”

“Gently,” Prestimion told him. “Pay attention to Svor’s advice.”

“Perhaps in due time once we are in residence again at the Castle we will find the opportunity,” Svor went on, just as smoothly as though he had not been interrupted at all, “to put together a sufficiency of backers, and then to overthrow Korsibar of a sudden by some quick unexpected stroke. Taking him by surprise at a time when he has come to think of us as loyal subjects, even as he surprised us all this day.”

“Aha!” cried Septach Melayn with a grin. “How dependable you are, Svor! We can always count on you to fall back eventually on the treachery that’s so dear to your heart.”

“Well, then,” said Svor, still unperturbed, “if what I suggest seems despicable to you, let us then be decent law-abiding men, and grovel eagerly before Lord Korsibar every day of our lives and trust to his mercy that he’ll allow us to live yet one day more, and one after that. Or, contrariwise, let’s have the bold and mighty Gialaurys go to him this very day, whether on the suicidal mission he has just proposed or else, as he offered before, to challenge him to wrestle for the throne.”

Septach Melayn said, “Ah, you misunderstand me greatly, Svor. You have my full agreement here: my vote is for treachery also, the blacker the better. We leave the Labyrinth with all dispatch; we take up our comfortable lives once more at Castle Mount; we wait for our moment, and then we strike. What do you say to all this, Prestimion?”

“We will leave here, yes,” said Prestimion, who in the past few moments had wandered into some private realm of thought, where all this making and unmaking of kings meant nothing to him, and he had attained a happy, quiet, fruitful life as prince and husband perhaps, and as a father someday, amidst the serenity of his estate in Muldemar. “We’ll go quickly, before our lives can be placed in jeopardy, if it’s not already too late for that. And as we journey toward the Castle we’ll endeavor to read the will of the people who live along our route, and see whether there’s any way we can regain the high place that was meant for us to occupy.”

He thrust his hands into the pockets of his tunic and looked from one to the other of them to see whether they were in agreement. And murmured, “Hoy, what’s this?” as the fingers of his right hand closed on something small and smooth and unfamiliar in his pocket. He drew it out. It was the little amulet of polished green stone that the Vroon sorcerer Thalnap Zelifor had given him that day which now seemed so long ago, just before the commencement of the games, when he had paid a call on Prestimion to warn him of impending calamity. “I forget how this thing is called. A magic-thing, it is. A gift from Thalnap Zelifor.”

“A corymbor,” Svor said. “They’re said to be useful in time of trouble.”

“Yes. Yes, I remember now. Put it on a chain, the Vroon said. Wear it about my throat; stroke it with my finger when I was in need and it would give me aid.” Somberly Prestimion shook his head. “Thalnap Zelifor! There was another one that saw trouble coming, and I paid him no heed. All these visions! All this wizardry! And I paid no heed.”

“Blood on the moon, that was what he saw,” said Gialaurys. “Do you remember? Omens of war. A secret enemy who would reveal himself and strive against you for the Castle. I said it was Korsibar who was that secret enemy: do you remember, Prestimion? I said it the moment that the Vroon left us.”

“And I paid no heed to you either,” Prestimion said. “How blind I was! And how clear it all seems to me now, in hindsight. But hindsight is ever clearer than the other kind, is it not so?” He rested the sleek amulet in the palm of his hand a moment and lightly touched the tip of his finger to the row of minuscule runes inscribed on its face. Then he flipped it through the air to Septach Melayn, who deftly caught it. “You have a good many fine golden chains in your collection of baubles, eh, my lord Septach Melayn? Let me have one for this corymbor, I pray. I’ll wear this thing next to my breast from now on, even as Thalnap Zelifor advised. Who knows? There may be virtue in those tiny lines of sorcery it bears. And surely I need all the help I can get now. We can have no doubt of that.” Prestimion laughed. “Come: let’s make ourselves ready to depart from the Labyrinth. And none too soon will it be.”

3

The way out of the Labyrinth began with the lengthy and circuitous journey upward through the underground city’s many levels. There was indeed a special direct route to the surface that took just a short while to traverse, but that route was reserved entirely for Powers of the Realm; and Prestimion, though he had had high expectations once of leaving the Labyrinth as one of those Powers, was nevertheless still nothing more than one of the many princes of the Castle peerage as he set out now for home.

So for Prestimion and his three companions, and all their comrades and aides and baggage-handlers that had come down with them from the Castle, it was up and up and up the long way—level upon level, ring upon ring, a plodding interminable trek requiring many hours even by floater as they ascended the narrow spiraling roads out of the imperial sector where they had all been lodging these many weeks, and onward through all the strange and musty and darkly lit zones of the famous Labyrinth landmarks. The Court of Globes and the House of Records, where the names of all the Coronals and Pontifexes of Majipoor’s thirteen thousand years of recorded history were displayed on a great glowing screen, the Place of Masks, the Court of Pyramids, the Hall of Winds, the Pool of Dreams. And upward still, into the densely populated sectors of the city where the common people lived, that multitude of pale and drably clad folk who dwelled forever jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into the upper circles of the subterranean metropolis. And out, finally, into the world of sunshine and air, of rain and wind, of trees and birds and rivers and hills.

“And may it be a while,” said Gialaurys fervently, “before we see that dreary place again!”

“Ah, we’ll be back in it gladly when Prestimion is Pontifex,” Septach Melayn said, gaily prodding him in the shoulder. “But we’ll all be old men with long gray beards by then!”

“Pontifex!” Prestimion snorted. “Let me be Coronal a little while first, if I may, once the present little obstacle is cleared away, before you send me hastening on to the next throne!”

“Oh, yes. By all means, Prestimion: first things first,” said Septach Melayn. “Coronal, and then Pontifex!” And they all laughed loudly. But it was more out of relief of being out of the Labyrinth than anything else, for there was little mirth in them just then, but only a great emptiness, and dark uncertainty over what might lie ahead. Just before their departure from the Labyrinth, Korsibar had made some surprising noises, yes, about appointing Prestimion to the new government when they had all reached the Castle. But who could say how sincere those promises would turn out to be, once the fluidities of the new situation had hardened into harsh reality?

They had emerged at the northernmost of the seven gateways of the Labyrinth, the one known as the Mouth of Waters, where the River Glayge that descended out of the distant foothills of Castle Mount ran past the city. The usual route north from the Labyrinth to the Mount was by riverboat along the Lower Glayge to the place where it emerged from Lake Roghoiz, and from the far side of Roghoiz onward via the Upper Glayge to the point where the land began to rise significantly and the river was no longer navigable. From there one proceeded by floater-car up through the steepening foothills to the high cities of the great mountain.

The Glayge was a swift and powerful river, but the stretch of it that flowed from Roghoiz southward to the Labyrinth was a mere tame thing, more of a canal than a river. Its banks had been paved long ago, in the remote era of Lord Balas and the Pontifex Kryphon, to control its flow and keep the waters of occasional winter floods from escaping over the barriers that protected the Labyrinth. So the early part of their voyage was a placid one, a sleepy uneventful trip by hired boat through the broad and virtually flat agricultural plain that was the valley of the Lower Glayge.

It was high summer here, a warm bright time when the golden-green sun of Majipoor hung directly overhead and its brilliance filled all the land. They had almost forgotten about the seasons during their sojourn underground. It had been late spring when they had gone down into the Labyrinth, already a balmy time of the year, for the climate in this entire section of central Alhanroel was never anything but mild. But now the full heat of midyear was on the valley. Off to the west, where the ruins of Velalisier, the ancient stone capital of the Metamorphs, lay in the midst of a dry barren wasteland, the sun must now be a monstrous frightful eye of flame; and in the far south, along the moist and torrid Aruachosian coast where the Glayge finally emptied into the sea, the air surely was thick with almost tangible humidity.

Here, though, the days were bright and warm but not in any way uncomfortable. To the men so long imprisoned in the joyless artificial depths of the Labyrinth, it was a splendid thing to feel the touch of sunlight against their cheeks. To fill their lungs with the sweet gusts of air that came riding on the southerly breezes, carrying the perfume of the myriad flowers of the far-off coastal jungles, yes! Or to stare upward wonderstruck at the immense transparent dome of the sky and watch in admiration as great gliding pink-bellied hieraxes, those huge free-souled birds of the highest zones of the atmosphere, went coasting serenely by overhead, displaying enormous wings that were more than twice the length of a tall man’s body in their spread from tip to tip.

They looked constantly to the north too, searching for the first sign of Castle Mount rising on the horizon. But that was only hopeful fantasy on their part. Castle Mount stood thirty miles high in the sky, piercing through the atmosphere and jutting up into the other empire that was space; but even so there was no seeing it from this far away.

“Do you espy it yet?” Gialaurys would ask, for he was less well-educated than the rest and knew little of scientific things, and Septach Melayn, ever playful, would say, “I wonder, could it be that grayish bit of darkness on our right-hand side?” To which Svor would then reply, “A cloud, Septach Melayn, only a cloud! As you know full well.”

And Gialaurys: “If the Mount is so high, why can’t it be seen from everywhere on Majipoor?”

To which Prestimion, making a sphere in the air with the outstretched fingers of both hands, said: “This is the shape of the world, Gialaurys. And this”—now extending his rigid arms outward from his sides as far as they could go—“is the size of the world, if you are able to imagine it. They say there’s no world larger, of any on which mankind can live. They say that Majipoor has ten times the size around the middle of Old Earth, from which we all came so many hundreds of centuries ago.”

“What I hear is that it’s even bigger still. I’m told that it’s twelve or fourteen times greater about the middle than Earth,” said Svor.

’Ten times or twelve or fourteen, that makes no important distinction,” Prestimion said. “Whichever one it be, this is a huge world, Gialaurys, and as we move across it, it curves like this”—making the sphere with his fingers again—“and we are unable to see things that are a great distance from us, because the curve is so vast, and they are hidden on the far side of it. Even the Mount.”

“I see no curve,” said Gialaurys sulkily. “Look, we sail along the Glayge, and everything lies flat as a board before us, nor are we traveling up a curve as we go, not any that I am able to detect.”

“But the top of Castle Mount is higher in the air than we are now, is it not?” Septach Melayn asked.

“The top of Castle Mount is higher than anything.”

“Well, then,” said Septach Melayn, “the world must curve downward to us from Castle Mount to here, for the Mount is high and we are not. Which is why this river flows only in one direction, down from the Mount toward the Labyrinth and on to Aruachosia, and never up from Aruachosia across the land to the Mount, for how can water flow uphill? But the curve is very gentle because the world is so great, and in making the rim of the circle it must go so and so and so, a gradual extension, so that much of the land looks flat to us, though in fact it is always slightly curving. And slight as it is, over many miles the curve becomes great. Therefore the Mount can’t be seen from this far away, concealed from us as it is by so many thousands of miles of the bulging world’s curving belly that lie between there and here.—Do I tell it properly, Prestimion?”

“With great elegance and accuracy,” Prestimion said. “As you conduct yourself in all things.”

“And when will we begin to see Castle Mount, then?” asked Gialaurys, who had been following all this in an ill-tempered, frowning way.

“When we’re farther along the curve, closer to home: beyond Pendiwane, certainly, beyond even Makroposopos, possibly not until Mitripond.”

“Those cities all are far from here,” Gialaurys said.

“Indeed.”

“Then if there’s no hope of the Mount until Makroposopos, which is so far up the river, tell me this, Prestimion: why did I observe you looking in a northerly direction yourself this morning, just where that darkness is that Svor tells us is nothing but a cloud?”

There was laughter at that; and Prestimion said, grinning also, “Because I’m as eager as you are to look upon the Mount again, Gialaurys, or even more so, and I look toward it even when I know it’s too soon to see.”

“Then the Divine grant we see it soon,” Gialaurys said.

Though towns in great number and even a few cities of some magnitude were clustered along both banks of the Lower Glayge, Prestimion ordered the pilot of his riverboat to pass them by. It was tempting to go ashore and find out how the people of these places had responded to Korsibar’s seizure of the crown, yes; but Prestimion preferred to carry out that research farther upstream. He had no idea how much longer Korsibar would linger at the Labyrinth now that Prankipin was in the ground and Confalume had taken possession of the Pontifical duties, and he wanted no risk of coming into contact with the usurper and his retinue on the way north.

The faster they traveled through the valley of the Lower Glayge, the better: the new Coronal very likely would be pausing at some of these towns and cities to receive homage, and that would provide Prestimion, if he hurried, with an opportunity to return to the Mount well before him. Where, perhaps, if he were the first to arrive, he might find a warm welcome from those who opposed the usurpation.

There was no choice, though, but to halt awhile when they reached the shores of Lake Roghoiz. They would have to change vessels there, for the bargelike flat-hulled riverboats that plied the placid waters of the lower river between Roghoiz and the Labyrinth were unfit to negotiate the swifter and more turbulent stream that was the Upper Glayge. And in all likelihood several days would be needed to arrange to charter a boat to take them the rest of their way upriver.

They came to Lake Roghoiz at dawn, the best time, when the whole broad surface of the immense lake gleamed like a dazzling mirror in the early morning light. Just after sunrise their boat passed through the final lock of the canal and made one last turn where the river took a sharp bend to the east, and then the lake was there before them. It was almost blindingly brilliant in its stunning whiteness as the potent bright glow of daybreak came sweeping out of a gap in the low hills in the distance and went skipping and bounding across the wide expanse of the water, transforming it into a single sheet of silvery splendor.

Roghoiz was gigantic. Whole nations of some smaller world could have been submerged in it, with margin to spare. Every stream of the southwestern slope of Castle Mount drained into the Glayge, which carried all that immeasurable volume of water tumbling down the long steep gradient of the foothill country for thousands of miles, descending through ledge after ledge, terrace after terrace, until at last it came to a place where the land widened into a wide plain. In the center of that plain lay a shallow basin great enough for the river to deliver its burden into it; and that enormous basin was the bed of Lake Roghoiz.

Along the margins of this region of the lake were broad banks of bright orange mud. Here the famous stilt-houses of Lake Roghoiz abounded, forming a string of small fishing villages, hundreds of them—thousands perhaps—that were home to a lakeside population reaching up into the millions.

In part these stilt-houses of the Roghoiz shore were natural structures, something like the even more renowned tree-houses of Treymone on Alhanroel’s western coast. The Treymone people actually lived within their trees, though, forming the rooms they occupied out of pliant branches joined together, but those of Roghoiz merely used theirs as platforms upon which to build.

For in the fertile orange silt of the lake’s southern shore—and only in that place, in all of Majipoor—there thrived the dyumbataro-tree, whose branches and boughs sprouted not from a single central trunk but at the crown of an immense mass of close-packed pink aerial roots that rose like stilts out of the shoreline ooze. Up came these bare woody roots, scores of them for each tree, to heights of fifteen, twenty, sometimes even thirty feet above the ground; and there, whenever the tree chose to begin its crown, the root-mass widened out into a great wild profusion of ropy vinelike shoots covered with glossy saucer-sized leaves and flowering stalks that sent scarlet spears thrusting outward at acute angles.

The people of the lakeshore had discovered long ago that if a young dyumbataro-tree’s upward growth were interrupted by topping at the crown-point—if it were cut there, just as the first growth of leaf-bearing shoots was beginning to appear—it would continue to grow laterally at that point, ultimately creating a flat woody platform eighteen or twenty feet across, the ideal foundation for a house. These they would build from translucent sheets of a thin glossy mineral that was peeled from the sides of cliffs a few miles to the east: they bent this stuff into domes, which they fastened down with wooden hoops and pegs atop the platforms. Inside these they made their dwellings. They were, most of them, crude simple hovels of no more than three or four rooms; but at sunset, when streams of golden-bronze rays struck these domed buildings along their western faces, an effect of extraordinary beauty was created by the blood-red glint of reflected light that rebounded from them.

Prestimion and his companions took lodgings in a modest lakeside hostelry for traveling merchants in the first of these stilt-villages to which they came, a place called Daumry Thike, where they were told they could make their arrangements for a change of transport. It seemed wisest not to advertise his identity, but simply to remain in and about the hostelry in the anonymous guise of a group of young Castle aristocrats heading homeward to the Mount after a visit to the Labyrinth.

The village was situated no more than a hundred yards from the edge of the lake. Here, the silty ground beneath the buildings was perpetually moist. When the storms of the rainy season arrived—they came in autumn in this region—the lake sometimes expanded well beyond its normal bounds, if the year happened to be an unusually wet one, so that its waters came right up into the village, lapping at the pink stilts and making it necessary to get from one place to another in Daumry Thike by canoe. And in a very wet year, of the sort that might come only once in many centuries, the water might reach almost to the lower stories of the houses: so said the chambermaid who brought them their simple meals of grilled lake-fish and tart young wine.

There had been a flood of that sort in the days of Setiphon and Lord Stanidar, she told them, and another during the time of Dushtar and Lord Vaisha. And in the reign of the Coronal Lord Mavestoi there had been such a deluge that the village had been submerged clear to its rooftops for three days, just when the Coronal himself was here while making his grand processional.

Nilgir Sumanand, who was Prestimion’s aide-de-camp, was about to go into the village to set about the task of chartering a riverboat. Since even the chambermaids of this place seemed so well versed in ancient history, Prestimion asked him to try to learn whether these people were equally familiar with current events. When he returned at nightfall, Nilgir Sumanand brought word that the citizens of Daumry Thike did indeed seem to be aware of the recent change of regime. Portraits of the late Pontifex Prankipin were on display outside a goodly number of houses, with the yellow streamers of mourning affixed to them.

“And the new Coronal? What about him?”

“They know that Korsibar has taken the throne. I saw no portraits of him out, though.”

“No, of course not,” said Prestimion. “Where would they have come from, so soon? But you heard his name mentioned often, did you?”

“Yes.” Nilgir Sumanand looked away, abashed. He was a full-bearded gray-haired man of medium height, who had been in the service of Prestimion’s father before him in Muldemar. “They were speaking of him, some of them. Not all, but some. A good many, I would say.”

“And were they calling him Lord Korsibar when they spoke of him?”

“Yes,” Nilgir Sumanand said in a husky whisper, wincing as though Prestimion had just uttered some terrible gross obscenity. “Yes, that is what they called him.”

“And did they express surprise, would you say, that Korsibar had become Coronal and not someone else? Or distress, or any sort of dismay at all?”

Nilgir Sumanand was slow to reply.

“No,” he said after an awkward span of time had passed. He moistened his lips. “In truth I heard no surprise expressed, sir. There is a new Coronal, and he is Prince Korsibar: and they had no comments to make concerning what has happened, beyond that simple fact.”

“Even though Korsibar’s the son of the former Coronal?”

“I heard no surprise over that fact, sir,” said Nilgir Sumanand again, almost too softly to be heard, and still not looking directly at Prestimion as he spoke.

Septach Melayn said, “There’s little to wonder at in this. These are fishermen here, not constitutional lawyers. What do they know of the customs of transition? Or care, so long as the fish continue to take their bait?”

“They know that it isn’t a usual thing for a Coronal’s son to become Coronal after him,” said Gialaurys, biting angrily at his own words.

“They also know,” said Svor, “if they know anything much at all about the lordlings of the Castle, that Prince Korsibar cuts a grand and illustrious figure, and looks very much the way they imagine a king ought to look, holding himself well and speaking in a clear kingly voice that has great power and richness, and what better reason can there be for making him Coronal, in the eyes of humble people like these? And they know also that if Lord Confalume chose his own son to be his successor, why, it must have been with the welfare of the populace in mind, for Lord Confalume is beloved everywhere for his wisdom and benevolence.”

“No more of this talk, if you will,” said Prestimion, for he felt a dark cloud of gloom coming over him, and he loathed that. “Perhaps things will be different as we get nearer to the Mount.”

It would be another two days yet before a vessel of the proper sort to take them onward would pass this way. Prestimion, Svor, Gialaurys, and Septach Melayn waited out their time in Daumry Thike, spending the long hours peering down from the veranda of their stilt-house at the fat-legged blue-eyed crabs that went crawling across the orange mud, and wagering on which one would be the first to reach a line that they had drawn across their path. In due course the riverboat that Nilgir Sumanand had chartered for them arrived, anchoring a few hundred yards off shore where the water was deep enough. A small creaking ferry carried Prestimion and his companions out to it.

The riverboat was a far sleeker craft than the barge that had brought them up the Glayge from the Labyrinth: narrow-beamed and low-sided and sharply tapered fore and aft, with a triple mast whose brightly painted spars were festooned with garish witch-signs. It was smaller and rather less imposingly appointed than the vessels in which princes of Castle Mount normally made journeys between the Mount and the Labyrinth, but it would do. Termagant was the riverboat’s name, emblazoned in flaming red letters of jagged baroque style against the lemon-hued wall of its hull, and its captain was Dimithair Vort, a lean, hard-bodied plain-faced woman of Ambleborn, with muscles like a stevedore’s and a thick uncouth mop of kinky black hair, to the tips of which she had attached a jingling multitude of small amulets and charms.

“Prestimion,” she said, glancing at the names on the passenger manifest. “Which one of you’s Prestimion?”

“I am.”

“Prestimion of Muldemar?”

“The same.”

“Brother of mine once took you hunting gharvoles, out in the Thazgarth country back of Mount Baskolo. You and some other great important lords. He’s a guide there, my brother, name of Vervis Aktin.” She gave Prestimion a coolly appraising look. “I thought you’d be a much taller man.”

“I thought I would be too. The Divine had other plans for me.”

“My brother said you were the best man with a bow he’d ever seen. Himself excepted, of course. He’s the finest archer in the world. Vervis Aktin: do you remember him?”

“Very clearly,” said Prestimion. It had been seven years before; Korsibar, with whom he had been more friendly then, had invited Prestimion to join him on a jaunt into the Thazgarth hunting preserve, a dense forest of northeastern Alhanroel, fifteen hundred miles across, where the deadliest of predators were left to roam freely. Septach Melayn had been with them also, and the young and overly wild Earl Belzyn of Bibiroon, who would be killed the following year in a climbing accident.

Vervis Aktin, Prestimion recalled now, had hair of much the same frizzled sort as his sister’s, and the same wiry but powerful build, and the same blunt indifference to aristocratic prestige. By the campfire at night he had boasted freely to them of his amatory exploits, his casual seduction of any number of highborn huntresses during the course of expeditions in the preserve; Korsibar had had to silence him before he named actual names. Prestimion remembered him as a tireless guide and, yes, a superb bowman, though not perhaps as supremely gifted as Dimithair Vort claimed.

She led them to their quarters, small simple cabins just below the bridge, where they would make their homes for many days to come. Prestimion would share his with Gialaurys, Duke Svor with Septach Melayn.

“What is your brother doing now?” Prestimion asked her as she lingered in the doorway, idly watching them.

“Still a guide in Thazgarth. Lost a leg when he got between a mother gharvole and her cub, but that hasn’t slowed him down. He was very impressed by you, you know. Not just on account of what you did with a bow. Said that you’d be Coronal some day.”

“Perhaps I will,” said Prestimion.

“Of course, we’re not ready for another one so soon, are we? This new Lord Korsibar’s only just settling in. You know him, I suppose?”

“Quite well. He was with your brother and me that time in Thazgarth.”

“Was he, now? Old Confalume’s son, he is, so I hear. That right? Well, why not, keep it in the family! Divine knows, I’d do the same. You great lords understand how to look out for yourselves.” She grinned, showing fierce, sharp-pointed teeth. “My brother always used to tell me—”

But Septach Melayn intervened then, for he disliked such a degree of familiarity as this woman was assuming with Prestimion and the conversation had long since ceased to amuse him. He sent Dimithair Vort on her way and the travelers set about installing themselves in their cabins.

After a time there came the sound of chanting outside. Prestimion peered out and saw half a dozen members of the crew huddled on deck, the captain and some others, passing small stones from hand to hand according to some complex predetermined pattern as they sang. He had seen this done before. It was some sort of ceremony intended to ensure the safety of the voyage, a routine bit of conjuring. The stones were sacred ones, blessed by some shaman whose power the captain trusted.

Prestimion watched the sailors almost tenderly. His rational self was repelled as ever by this further show of superstition, this naive trust in dead stones, but even so he was awed by the purity and intensity of the faith implied in it, a faith in benevolent watchful spirits who could be persuaded to look after one. They were capable of belief in things unseen; he was not; the difference in outlook between him and them was like a wall. Prestimion found himself yearning to share that faith of theirs, which he had never been able even for a moment to feel: and was conscious all the more of the lack, now that the great prize had been snatched from him, and no way visible in the world of reason and natural phenomena by which he could reclaim it. Spirits offered consolation at a time when worldly goals eluded one’s grasp. But only if you thought that the spirits existed.

Svor appeared beside him. Prestimion pointed toward the ceremony in progress and touched a finger to his lips. Svor nodded.

The chanting came to an end and the crewmen silently dispersed.

“How real it is to them!” said Prestimion. “How seriously they take the power of those stones!”

“And with good reason,” said Svor. “Believe or disbelieve as you choose, I tell you, Prestimion, there are mighty forces to be commanded, if only one knows how. ‘I can displace the sky,’ ” he intoned, “ ‘elevate the lands, melt mountains, freeze fountains. I can raise ghosts and bring the gods down to walk among us. I can extinguish the stars and illuminate the bottomless pit.’ ”

“Can you, now?” Prestimion said, looking at him strangely. “I had no idea you were such a powerful sorcerer, my lord Svor.”

“Ah,” said Svor, “I’m merely quoting poetry. Very famous poetry, actually.”

“Of course.” It came immediately to his mind, now that Svor had given him the hint. “Furvain, isn’t it? Yes, of course, Furvain. I should have realized.”

“The Book of Changes, fifth canto, when the Metamorph priestess appears before Lord Stiamot.”

“Yes,” Prestimion said, abashed. “Of course.” What child had not read that grand epic tale, thousands of years old, that related in such stirring verse the heroic battles of Majipoor’s dawn? But extinguishing the stars and illuminating the bottomless pit was the stuff of fable. He had never mistaken Furvain’s great poem for historical fact. “I thought you were claiming those powers for yourself,” he said, laughing. “Ah, Svor, Svor, if only someone would witch things back the way they should have been for me, with Korsibar spending his days out hunting in the wilderness and the government safely in my hand! But who can do that for me?”

“Not I,” said Svor. “I would if I could.”

4

On the ninth day of Lord Korsibar’s journey northward up the Glayge from the Labyrinth, a blue-white star appeared high overhead, one that no one had ever seen before, burning diamond-bright in the forehead of the sky, a great blazing gem that dazzled the eye like a second sun.

Mandrykarn was the first to spy it, half an hour after the evening meal. He was standing by himself on the foredeck of the lead vessel of the nine-ship flotilla, the Lord Vildivar. That was the Coronal’s own Lower Glayge riverboat, the most splendid of flat-bottomed barges, which had carried the former Lord Confalume to the Labyrinth in the spring and now was carrying the new Lord Korsibar toward the Castle in midsummer. Suddenly, in the mildness of the night, as Mandrykarn stood drinking cool gray wine while the darkness gathered and deepened and he gazed idly outward in a tranquil mood over the flat monotonous valley, he felt a chill about his head and shoulders. He looked up, and there was the star brilliantly ablaze in a place where no star had been a moment earlier.

Letting out a whoop of surprise and dismay, he brought his hand up so hastily toward the rohilla pinned to the breast of his tunic that he spilled his wine over himself.

A new star? What could that mean, if not impending doom and calamity? For surely that star must be the sign of powerful and dangerous forces that were on the verge of breaking through the walls of the cosmos, and shortly to descend upon the world.

Stroking the amulet briskly, Mandrykarn murmured a spell against evil that he had learned only the day before from Sanibak-Thastimoon, all the while staring at the strange new star and experiencing such an access of uncontrollable fear and trembling that after a time he felt acrid shame at his own cowardice.

Count Farquanor materialized from somewhere to stand at his elbow. “Are you taken ill, Mandrykarn?” the serpentine little man asked, with a wicked touch of slyness in his tone. “I heard you cry out. And here you are all pale and shaken.”

Mandrykarn said, fighting back that shameful tremor of his body and mastering with furious effort a quaver that had stolen into his voice, “Look above you, Farquanor. What do you see?”

“The sky. Stars. A flock of thimarnas flying homeward very late to their nests.”

“You are no astronomer, Farquanor. What is that blue-white star just to the west of the polar meridian?”

“Why, Trinatha, I suppose,” said Farquanor. “Or perhaps Phaseil. One or the other, at any rate.”

’Trinatha is on the northern horizon, where she belongs. That’s Phaseil, there in the east. You are no astronomer, Farquanor.”

“And you no drinker. Look, you’ve spilled your wine all over your front. Boy! Boy! A towel for Count Mandrykarn!—Are you drunk, Mandrykarn?”

“That star in the west was born three minutes ago. I saw it arrive in the sky. Have you ever known such a thing to happen, a star to be born before your eyes?”

Farquanor snickered, a short derisive laugh. “You are drunk.”

Then came excited shouts from the far side of the deck, and a wild-eyed crewman ran past, pointing skyward and hoarsely calling on everyone to look upward and behold, and other sailors came by just afterward, doing much the same. Sanibak-Thastimoon now emerged on deck also, with the Coronal’s sister just a pace or two behind him. They stood together near the rail, peering into the sky, scanning this way and that.

“No, a little more to the west,” Mandrykarn called to them. “There. There. Do you see?” He seized the Su-Suheris’s arm and aimed it upward, and the mage’s two heads followed along the line that Mandrykarn indicated.

Sanibak-Thastimoon was silent for a time, taking in the sight of that sudden star. “What evil sign do we have here?” Mandrykarn asked him.

“Evil? Why, this is no evil,” said Sanibak-Thastimoon. He made a soft sighing sound of satisfaction. “It is the coronation star,” he said. “Summon Lord Korsibar.”

But Korsibar had already arrived on deck. “What’s all this fuss? A new star, someone said. What does that mean? How can there be a new star?”

“You are the new star, my lord,” declared the Su-Suheris resonantly, both his heads speaking at once in unsettling half-harmony. “You come into the heavens to bring glory to the world. That is your starburst in the sky, which honors your advent.” And with ferocious vigor he made the starburst sign himself, first at the blue-white star and then at Korsibar himself, doing it three, four, five times in succession, each time calling out, “Korsibar! Korsibar! All hail Lord Korsibar!” Which brought a like response from everyone on deck, so that the air reverberated with the sound of it, “Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!”

In the midst of this clamor Korsibar remained motionless, scarcely even breathing, his eyes riveted on the star. After a moment he took from his forehead the crown, which he had worn almost constantly from the moment of his accession, and pressed it lightly and reverently against his breast. Turning to Thismet, he said, speaking very softly, “Who could have expected this? It means I am truly king!”

“Had you doubted it, brother?”

“No. No, never.”

She dropped to her knees beside him, took the hem of his tunic in her hand and kissed it. The others followed in turn: Mandrykarn first, still so shaken by what he had seen that he nearly lost his balance and toppled forward as he lowered his big body to the deck, and then Farquanor, and Venta, and Earl Kamba, and a moment afterward Farholt and Navigorn and the ship’s master, Lynkamor, and five or six more who had come up on deck one by one to see what was happening and discovered a solemn ceremony taking place. Only Sanibak-Thastimoon held himself off to one side, watching the scene with a look of evident approbation, but making no move to take part in it.

When all the rest were done with their homage, Korsibar said to the master, “Where are we now, Lynkamor?”

“Just north of Terabessa, my lord, and five hours’ journey south of Palaghat.”

“Excellent. Palaghat’s a good place to make our first public appearance. The coming of that star is a sign that the time has arrived for us to present ourself to the people and be acclaimed by them. Have word sent ahead to Palaghat, then, that in the morning we will go ashore there to offer our blessing and receive the good wishes of the citizenry.”

Earl Kamba of Mazadone, who was standing beside Kanteverel of Bailemoona, said quietly, “He speaks of himself now in the plural, I see.”

“He is a king,” Kanteverel replied. “Kings may speak that way if they wish.”

“Confalume was content to say I and me and my, not we and us and our, when he was Coronal.”

Kanteverel cast his eyes heavenward. “Confalume was given no new stars to mark the start of his reign. And Korsibar’s still tasting the first pride of kingship. Who can blame him for being full of his own importance, seeing a thing like that come into the sky?”

“So be it,” Kamba said with a chuckle. “Let him speak any way he likes, I suppose, these early days. He’s in his finest moments now. The real work of the job hasn’t descended on him yet: all he can see so far is the glamour and the glory, the starbursts and the genuflections. He’ll find out later about things like the endless, long dull reports from pompous provincial governors that he must read, and regulating the supply of grain in far-off places altogether unknown to him, and drawing up a budget for next year’s highway and bridge repairs, and appointing chamberlains and masters of ceremonies and tax-collectors and ministers and subministers of the royal correspondence and of prisons and frontier forts and weather statistics and weights and measures and on and on through all the rest of it.”

Mandrykarn, coming up alongside them but hearing nothing of Kamba’s words, laughed and said, “The coronation star, it is! How bright it is, how beautiful! And to think that I took it for an evil omen. Look at me: I spilled my drink all over myself, I was so frightened at the sight of it! But what do I know of such things?” And he laughed again. “See the Coronal now! His eyes are shining as brightly as that star.”

Korsibar stood for a long while staring stiffly upward, his gaze trained on the star as though he could never have enough of the sight of it. Then he offered his arm to the Lady Thismet, and together they went below.

Gialaurys, too, saw the new star appear that night, some thousands of miles to the north, where the riverboat Termagant was making its way up the Glayge on the far side of Lake Roghoiz. He and Septach Melayn lay sprawled out at their ease on the deck, amusing themselves with a game of tavern dice. It was a calm and pleasant evening, with a soft moist wind blowing down the broad valley toward them from Castle Mount. The engines of the riverboat hummed steadily: the river ran swiftly southward here, descending steeply in its channel as the narrow vessel beat northward against it.

It was Septach Melayn’s roll. He swung the cup in his usual showy manner, bringing his arm around in a wide circle and releasing the dice with a dramatic twist of his wrist. They came clattering out, one two three, arranging themselves in a line so precise that it might well have been drawn with a ruler. “The eyes, the hand, the fork,” Septach Melayn announced, slapping his hand against the deck in satisfaction. “Ten once again, my mark exactly. You lose two royals, Gialaurys.—Gialaurys? What are you staring at up there?”

“Do you know that star, Septach Melayn?”

“Which? That one, the very bright one out there toward the west? What star is that, Gialaurys?”

“No star at all that I have ever seen. Do new stars suddenly pop into the sky from out of nowhere? For it is a certainty that that one did!”

Septach Melayn, frowning, scrambled to his feet. Pulling his little decorative dagger from his waistband, he held it out at arm’s length against the western sky as though measuring something.

“What are you doing?” Gialaurys asked.

“Spanning the stars, taking their calculation. Look, here’s Thorius, and here’s big red Xavial, and the distance is one dagger’s length from one to the other, exactly as should be. But here’s the new one midway between them, where no star ever was of which I know. It is just as you say, Gialaurys. A star out of nowhere.”

“A witch-star, is it?”

“A star that has caught on fire, I would sooner say.”

“But the stars are fire, or so I’ve heard,” said Gialaurys, giving Septach Melayn an uncomprehending look.

“Some fires burn dimly, though, and some very bright. The same with stars: sometimes a dim star flares up greatly of its own accord, and burns ten times as hot as it did before, or perhaps ten thousand times. As with this one, I think. It was there all along, but too faint to reach our notice, and now it has exploded into white-hot flame and probably charred every world that was close about it into ash, and we see it here like a beacon-light suddenly bursting out above us in the night. I’ll talk with Svor about this: he knows of such things.” And he began to call out to Svor, who was belowdecks. “Come forth, you philosopher! Look you at this mystery in the skies!”

“A witch-star, it is,” said Gialaurys again, darkly. “A demon’s omen.”

“Portending what, do you think?” asked Septach Melayn. “Tell me what this star says to you, for I have no skill at comprehending such things myself. Oh, riddle me this riddle, sweet Gialaurys! What message is for us in that star, if a bringer of omens is what it is?”

“Are you mocking me again, Septach Melayn, as so often you do?”

“No—no,” said Septach Melayn. “I mean no mockery.”

“Of course you do,” said Svor, stepping through the hatch. “You play with poor Gialaurys as though he’s a simpleton. Which in truth he’s not, though I suppose he lacks some degree of your guile—as do most people, I should say. But play with me instead, my lord Septach Melayn. I’m not so easy.”

“Well, then. A new star is in the sky.”

“So there is, yes. I see it plain overhead, a little to the west of Thorius. It burns bright and strong.”

“And what does such a thing mean to you, Svor, you who give so much credence to wizardry? Tell me, since I have no eyes to see such things myself. Gialaurys calls it a demon’s omen. What is the demon trying to tell us, do you think? Do we have harder losses ahead for us, we who have already lost so much?”

“Ah, quite the opposite,” said Svor, smiling archly and tugging his fingers hard through the close-clinging curls of his beard. “I am no diviner, O splendid Septach Melayn, but even so I think I can read the skies well enough for an amateur. That star that comes upon us tonight shines out to show the anger of the spirits at the evil thing that Korsibar has done. That star is our salvation. It means the death of Korsibar and the rising of Prestimion.”

“And what about it tells you that?” asked Septach Melayn.

“If you have to ask, sweet friend, you will never understand the answer.”

To which Septach Melayn responded with nothing more than a grin and a shrug. But from Gialaurys came a quiet wordless sound of agreement with Svor’s interpretation. He lowered his head until it touched the planks, and reached forth his hands and made signs to the star, signs of propitiation, signs of welcome.

The city of Palaghat, on the eastern bank of the Glayge, was the largest along the river between the Labyrinth and Lake Roghoiz: an agricultural center where the farmers of the three adjacent provinces brought their produce for shipment to other depots upstream and downstream. Though all this land hereabouts was flat, Palaghat itself stood on a low promontory above the river, which on account of the flatness of everything surrounding it and the dramatic green backdrop of tall, leafy mengak-trees behind the city made Palaghat seem to dominate the landscape for many miles about, as though it rose atop a veritable Castle Mount.

Coronals and other high officials passing this way often broke their river-journeys at Palaghat, which had better facilities for such exalted guests than any of the other cities of the Lower Glayge. The four-laned brick-paved road that ran from Palaghat’s capacious and busy harbor to the center of the city was grandly planted with showy red-boled Havilbove palms along both sides, and bore the ambitious name of the Royal Highway. Today, in honor of the visit of the new Coronal, the trees were bedecked along the entire length of the road with green-and-gold banners bearing the starburst crest. Posters bearing the features of Lord Korsibar might also have been an appropriate part of the roadside display, if only there had been any available in Palaghat; but the choice of Korsibar to be Coronal had not, of course, been in any way expected or expectable, and no portraits of him were yet to be had for copying and general distribution.

Still, it was an impressive enough reception, for all the hasty improvisation of its planning: much clashing of cymbals and blowing of trumpets, and flowers and garlands strewn everywhere along the way, and an escort from port to town comprising hundreds of municipal officials, from the mayor in his velvet robes of state down to bureau chiefs and their clerks, and troupes of solemnly chanting mages in richly brocaded gowns, and thousands of common citizens along the route craning their necks for a look at their new king and lustily crying out, “Korsibar! Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!”

He had almost grown accustomed to it by now.

It had seemed unreal enough in those early days, dreamlike, the constant making of the starburst sign at him, and that yoking of the unfamiliar title “Lord” with his name instead of the “Prince” he had worn all his life, and the secret awe and reverence in the eyes of all those who glanced at him from the corners of their faces, thinking he was looking elsewhere. Each morning when he awoke he expected to find his father standing by his bedside, saying gravely, “Very well, now, Korsibar, it’s time to end this little masquerade.”

But each day was very much like the one before, a day of starbursts and grovelings, “my lord” this and “yes, lordship” that, and when he had encountered his father, those final days in the Labyrinth, scarcely any words passed between them whatever, those that did being of the most trivial and conventional sort: Confalume, downcast and beaten, showed no sign of desiring to overthrow the strange new state of affairs that his son had brought about in that bold swift stroke in the Court of Thrones.

Even when they said their farewells, just before Korsibar made his departure from the underground city to begin his triumphant journey northward to claim his throne, there had been only one moment when the new Pontifex betrayed any anguish over all these events—when he stared into the eyes of his son and allowed a single blazing flash of fury and mad despair to show, that he who had been the mightiest man in the world just a few weeks earlier should be so overmastered in an instant by his own child. Yet he said nothing overt to indicate repugnance for what Korsibar had done, nor made any kind of remonstration or challenge. It was done; it could not be changed; the power in the world had passed, as it never had before, from father to son.

Palaghat was far from grand, not a patch on the least splendid of the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount. But in its provincial way it was a decent pretty place, high white terraces along its riverfront side, luxuriant greenery, a sturdy city wall fashioned of pink granite blocks, with a great abundance of ornamental parapets and embrasures and crenella-tions and machicolations, and heraldic dragons and great-horned gabalungs delineated along its face in gold and lapis lazuli.

The mayor of the city was Ildikar Weng, a plump, perspiring, red-faced, thick-lipped man with an absurd continuous fringe of curling golden hair all about his head and cheeks and chin. He sat beside Korsibar during the floater ride uphill from the harbor to the hostelry that had been set aside for the royal party, his gaze trained unwaveringly on the Coronal in a look of utter admiration and servile regard, while at the same time he waved and nodded constantly to the people flanking the road as though their cheers were directed not to Lord Korsibar but to him.

In an unending flow of babbling chatter the mayor labored to demonstrate to Korsibar that he was a man comfortable in the company of Coronals as well as lesser lords—sprinkling his conversation with reminiscences of the visits that other grandees had made to Palaghat during his administration, with much talk along the lines of how “the magnificent Lord Confalume your father always preferred a certain wine, that I will gladly provide also for you,” and that “we have always found it a time of special pleasure when the High Counsellor Duke Oljebbin is in Palaghat,” and “as I said to the Grand Admiral, when he questioned me about a certain rare fish of these waters that was very much to his taste—” Ildikar Weng boasted even of a visit from the late Pontifex, for Prankipin had been given to leaving the Labyrinth occasionally, at least to travel as far as here, though not in many years.

Korsibar found his patience quickly ebbing. Was this what it meant to be Coronal, to listen to the prattle of fools such as this, wherever he might go from this day forward?

He forced himself to listen politely enough, for a time. But then the mayor went too far. “And then,” Ildikar Weng said, “two years past we enjoyed a visit from the splendid and charming Prince Prestimion, in which the prince said, as I remember it—”

“Spare us what the splendid and charming prince said, if you will,” said Korsibar untenderly, with an imprecation under his breath.

Ildikar Weng turned pale at the Coronal’s rough tone, and then a moment later flushed bright red. He blinked and goggled at Korsibar.

“Lordship? Have I given offense in some way?”

“If it is offensive that we are required to hear anecdotes about every petty idiot of a Castle lordling who’s ever belched or puked at one of your dreary feasts, yes, you have given offense. Do you think our ear never grows weary of this kind of noise being poured into it?”

“Lordship, lordship, lordship!” the mayor cried, flinging his hands about in the air. He was so agitated that he seemed on the verge of tumbling out of the open-topped floater. “I meant no harm, lordship! A thousand pardons! A hundred thousand! I understood Prince Prestimion to be your dear friend, and so I thought you would want to hear—” Korsibar stared at him even more stonily. Ildikar Weng’s eyes bulged with horror. He let his voice trickle off into silence. He seemed about to weep.

Korsibar saw that he had been too hard. But what now? Apologize? Offer soothing reassurances that no offense had been given or taken? A Coronal could hardly apologize; and, if he did, it would only guarantee a fresh torrent of this stuff in the mile or so that remained before they reached their destination.

Thismet, who was seated on the mayor’s far side, rescued the moment by saying, “His lordship is very weary now, good sir mayor, and perhaps would prefer to be left in silence for a time. He was awake far into the night signing decrees and papers of appointment, and you know what heavy toil that can be, especially at the beginning of a term of office.”

“I am covered in shame for my thoughtlessness.”

“No need. But speak with me instead, for now. Tell me: these handsome palm trees by the side of the road, with the red trunks? Something similar, I think, grows in Lord Havilbove’s garden, by Tolingar Barrier on Castle Mount.”

“It is the very same tree, lady, whose seeds we were given in Lord Tharamond’s time,” said Ildikar Weng, and he launched into a lengthy disquisition on how and why the seeds had been obtained, and what difficulties of culture had been met with in the process of establishing them here in Paraghat. Korsibar, in great relief, sat back against his soft cushion of crimson leather and let himself slip into a dozing trance, thinking of nothing very much at all, as the shouts of “Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!” blew past him on the breeze that rose from the river.

And then they were at the guest-palace, and he was alone in his room at last. The royal suite was altogether worthy of a king, five grand rooms with glistening walls of green jasper lightly dotted with bloodred spots, and draperies of Gemmelthrave weave, so fine that spiders might have done it, framing the great windows through which a spectacular view of the city, the port, and the river could be had.

This was his chance to slip out of his clothes for a time, and bathe and rest before the inevitable banqueting and speechifying was begun. He was wearing a white stole of steetmoy fur over a green doublet, the Coronal’s usual colors; but there had been no time for proper tailoring, and the costume was ill-fitting, and too heavy for this summer day besides. Lifting the stole from his shoulders, he set it aside on a wooden rack, thinking that he would have few enough chances to dress and undress himself once he was at the Castle, with myriad royal servitors attending him constantly.

As Korsibar began to undo the lacings of his doublet, his eye fell upon a mirror beside the bed, and he paused to study his features in it, searching to see whether he had taken on the full commanding lineaments of royalty yet. To be a successful king, he knew, it was important as a bare minimum at least to look like a king. His father, though not a man of grand stature, had that look. It had often been said of Lord Confalume that a visitor from another planet could appear in a crowded reception at the court, and he would know at once which man in the throng was the Coronal, whether or not Lord Confalume had bothered to wear his crown that day.

Of course, the crown helped. Korsibar moved it slightly, straightening it, for it had become somewhat atilt during the ride from the harbor.

Thismet’s voice came from behind him suddenly: “You like the look of it, do you, brother? But you should take it off and let it rest from time to time, don’t you think?”

“And you should knock before entering the Coronal’s chambers, even if he is your own twin brother.”

“Ah, but I did knock, twice. You were so busy admiring yourself that you didn’t hear, I suppose. And when I got no answer, I thought I would come in. Or shall we have shame between us now that you are king, that never existed between us before?”

Korsibar took off the crown and laid it on the bed.

“Perhaps I wear it too much,” he said with a grin. “But I’m not yet so much at home in it that I like to be without it.”

“Father wore it only now and then.”

“Father was Coronal for twice as many years as either of us has been alive, Thismet. Let me be king six months, at least, before I begin taking this crown for granted.”

“As you wish, my lord,” Thismet said with a gesture of exaggerated submissiveness. She came to his side, looking up at him far above her with excited glowing eyes and taking hold of him by both his wrists, and said, “Oh, Korsibar, Korsibar, do you believe it yet?”

“Only some of the time.”

“The same for me. Lord Korsibar! Coronal Lord of Majipoor! How easy it all was! Oh, we will put our mark on this world, won’t we, you and I! We will do such marvelous things, Korsibar, now that all this has been given into our hands!”

“So we will, sister.”

“But you must take care not to be so haughty, brother.”

“Haughty, am I?”

“You were very cruel to that fat red-faced mayor.”

“He chewed too long on my ear, with his tales of playing host to father, and Prankipin, and Oljebbin, and this one and that one, and finally Prestimion—ah, that was too much, mentioning Prestimion!”

“He thought you loved Prestimion.”

“Certainly I hold no hatred for him, and never have. But to throw his name at me just then—what slyness was meant there, what hidden implication?”

“None, I think.”

“When it was known everywhere that Prestimion was to have been the next Coronal?”

“No,” Thismet said. She lifted her hand and ticked off points on her fingers. “One, what is known everywhere at the Castle is not necessarily general knowledge in the valley of the Lower Glayge. Two, there’s no reason in the universe for the mayor to be sly and mocking with you about Prestimion. He has everything to lose and nothing to gain from such mockery. Three, the mayor’s much too stupid to have any hidden motives at all. And four—pay attention to me, brother!—four, kings must be tolerant of having their ears chewed by fools, because every fool in the kingdom will try to do it, and some will of necessity succeed. Your father didn’t win the love of the world’s people by snarling and snapping at them. No great Coronal ever has. I want you to be a great Coronal, Korsibar.”

“And so I will be.”

“Well, then,” she said. “Suffer fools more gladly. The Divine made millions and millions of them, and gave you to them to be their king.”

She made the starburst at him again, more sincerely than before, and kissed the tips of her fingers to him and went from the room.

He enjoyed two hours’ respite before his duties came seeking him again. Hardly had he bathed and dressed when Oljebbin came to see him with some papers that had to be signed and dispatched to the Castle, which he did without reading them, for Oljebbin said they were only matters of routine. And then it was Farholt, who had brought plans with him for the seating arrangements at that evening’s municipal banquet in his honor; and after Farholt, Farquanor, who lingered for a time, once more irritatingly angling for the High Counsellorship by indirection and innuendo, so that Korsibar wanted to cry out to him in fury to be gone. Then came Dantirya Sambail, who had heard a crude foul joke about Prestimion and Septach Melayn and felt the need of sharing it with the Coronal that very minute.

In the afternoon, Korsibar held court in the garden of the guest-palace—doing without his crown this time, just to see what it was like to leave it off, whether he would still feel fully royal without it—and received homage from a delegation of landowners and great farmers from the surrounding countryside. Then he had a little while to enjoy a quiet drink in his rooms with Mandrykarn and Venta and a few other intimate friends, and after that it was time for the banquet, and too much heavy wine and too much rich food, piles of stewed vegetables and great slabs of some pale meat marinated in spicy wine and sweetened thereafter by jujuga-fruit, and then an elaborately diplomatic speech by the very much chastened Mayor Ildikar Weng that mentioned Prankipin and Confalume and other previous distinguished visitors to Paraghat not at all, and dwelled with inordinate optimism on the grand achievements that the Coronal Lord Korsibar would accomplish. To which Korsibar responded courteously enough, though briefly. He left the main task of speaking to Gonivaul and Oljebbin and Farquanor, all of whom spoke in artfully empty words of the great things that the new regime proposed to bring about and the wonderful benefits that would surely accrue for the citizens of the district of the Lower Glayge Valley.

No speaker failed to mention the new star that had come into the sky the night before. “Lord Korsibar’s star,” they called it. All hailed it as a sign of the greatness of the hour, the bright promise of the wondrous new era now commencing. Afterward, when they gathered for a time under the night sky before retiring to their rooms, Korsibar looked toward it again and again, fixing his eyes on its brightness and thinking, Lord Korsibar’s star. Lord Korsibar’s star. And was flooded once more with a sense of the grandness of the destiny that had swept him to this high place, and would carry him onward through all his life as Coronal, past whatever obstacle he might be called upon to face.

During the night, Korsibar had a sending of the Lady, the first such that he had had in many years.

It was rare for the Lady to direct her attention to princes of the Mount. Her chief responsibility was to the ordinary citizens, who looked to her sendings for comfort and guidance. But she came to him now. The moment he closed his eyes, Korsibar felt himself drawn downward into a vortex of swirling blue with an eye of gold at its farther end; he knew that resistance was futile, and he let himself drift freely, passing through that golden eye into a place of mist and shadow.

The Lady Kunigarda was in that place, which was the octagonal chamber with walls of white stone that lay at the center of her dwelling at Inner Temple, atop the highest terrace of the Isle of Sleep. She was strolling by the eight-sided pool in the middle of that chamber: a woman of advanced years, strikingly like her brother Confalume in appearance, strong-featured, with gray eyes set far apart and broad cheekbones and a wide, commanding mouth.

He knew her at once. His father’s elder sister, she was, who had been elevated to the rank of Lady of the Isle when Korsibar and Thismet were still small children, and whose reign as a Power of Majipoor must now end with the coming of the new regime. He had met her only three times in his life. She was a person of formidable strength and determination, every bit as regal as her royal brother Confalume.

She stared at him now through veils of dream with some severity in her gaze and said, “You sleep in the bed of a king, Korsibar. Tell me, how is that?”

“I am a king, Lady,” he replied, using the voice of dreams that he had been taught to use in childhood. “Did you see my star? It’s a king’s star. Lord Korsibar’s star.”

“Yes,” she said. “Lord Korsibar’s star. I have seen it too, Korsibar.” And began to speak of its coming, and of him, and his sister also, and of his father the newly made Pontifex, and of the comings and goings of Coronals and Pontifexes across thousands of years, and of many other things. But there were such twists and turns in the pattern of her long discourse that Korsibar could barely grasp the logic of her words with his sleeping mind, and then was unable to follow it at all. She seemed to be speaking always of two or three contradictory things at once, so that every sentence had its own antithesis and cancellation buried somewhere within it and would not let him discern any thread running consistently from front to back.

Then she stopped and gave him a long cool steady look and was gone, leaving him staring into an empty room; and moments later he awoke, confused and troubled. It seemed to Korsibar that the stern old woman’s presence was still resonating in his soul, like the afterclamor of a great bell once the bell itself has ceased tolling. He struggled to wring some sense from the dream, attempting to retrace in his mind the tortuous path that her words had taken.

She had acknowledged him as legitimate Coronal, he was sure of that; for she had referred to him several times as Lord Korsibar, had she not, and to Confalume as Pontifex? On the other hand she had made reference once to his father as a “prisoner.” The prisoner of the Labyrinth, as the Pontifex was sometimes said to be, or the prisoner of recent events? The meaning was ambiguous. There were other ambiguities too, blurry and indeterminate fragments of augury, possibly implying coming hardships and reverses. But hardships and reverses for whom? Was she talking about Prestimion, who had already experienced them, or about him, or about someone else entirely?

The dream left Korsibar frightened and uneasy. Though he could not say why, because he had understood so little of it, it seemed to open mysterious abysses of dark possibility for him, harbingers of a transformation of his fortunes for the worse; here at the summit of Majipoor, the only direction he could go now was downward, and as he reflected on the dream, it seemed to him that it was warning him of troublesome shoals ahead. But was that so, or was he merely giving way to a sudden spate of doubt to balance his supreme success? He did not know. It was so long since he had paid attention to a dream of any sort, or had consulted a dream-speaker to help him understand one, that he had forgotten whatever he might once have known of the technique of interpreting them.

He toyed with the idea of calling in Sanibak-Thastimoon and asking for a speaking of the dream. But he realized that the details of it were fleeing so rapidly from his mind that there would soon be nothing for the Su-Suheris to work with. And gradually the discomfort went from him.

The dream is a good omen, he told himself firmly, upon some further reflection when morning came.

It means that the Lady Kunigarda recognizes my ascendancy, and will lend me her hand in these the early days of my reign.

Yes. Yes. A good omen, definitely a good omen.

Yes. Yes!

“Did you sleep well, brother?” Thismet asked him at breakfast.

“I had a sending of the Lady,” he said. She looked at him in sudden alarm; and, farther down the long table, the heavy domed head of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail turned his way also, with an expression of deep interest. Korsibar smiled. “All is well,” he said calmly. “The Lady gave me assurances of her love and full support. We will flourish and prevail: there is no doubt of that, none whatever.”

5

Midsummer eve, a magical night, the sun high in the sky far into the evening watch, the Great Moon and two of the smaller ones shining brightly as well, and in the loftiest vault of the heavens the three immense red stars that formed the buckle of the constellation known as Cantimpreil plainly visible despite the competing radiance of sun and moons. The new star was there too, the fierce white one burning blue through all the competing illumination, the star that Svor had prophesied was the star of good omen for Prestimion’s cause.

Prestimion, though, alone on the Termagant’s deck at this late hour, pacing back and forth, his eyes brilliantly alert, all his senses tuned and receptive, felt little joy at the beauty of the night, its mingled lights and its host of conflicting shadows. Joy was a quality that seemed to have gone from him. His great anger over the events in the Court of Thrones had subsided into a calm steady sense of ongoing disappointment, a sort of perpetual inner chill replacing the earlier hot rage; but the price of that stark self-control was, it seemed, a general loss of emotion, an absence of the ability to respond to pleasure as well as to pain.

He watched the sun go down at last. The Great Moon moved across the sky until it disappeared beyond the eastern hills, and the stars took possession of the sky, the lesser ones now as well as the mighty red trio of Cantimpreil. That strange new blue-white one drilled unyieldingly down out of the center of the heavens like a blazing spike. For a time he dozed in a deck chair; and then, seemingly only moments after sundown, it was morning again and the coppery-pink light of dawn was moving toward him across the valley of the Upper Glayge.

The river was very wide here. Off to Prestimion’s left, where darkness still held sway, a nest of deeply eroded canyons rose one upon another beyond the water’s edge in muddled mists, with bright streams of vapor beginning to boil off their rims like unfurling banners as the sunrise reached them. In the other direction lay the great riverfront city of Pendiwane, its multitude of conical red-tiled roofs ablaze in the glory of the onrushing morning. Not far beyond, a little way on to the north, lay something dark along the river’s western side that he knew must be the shoreline of Makroposopos, the center of the textile arts. Tapestries and draperies and weavings of many other sorts emanated from there that were eagerly sought after throughout the world.

Captain Dimithair Vort was managing a good pace for them up the river. Castle Mount itself would be in view before much longer; and, soon enough, they would be commencing the ascent of its incomprehensible bulk, making their way to the royal dwelling at its summit, where—where—

Svor appeared suddenly beside him, rising up as if out of nowhere. “You are up and about very early this morning, Prestimion,” Svor said.

“I seem to have spent the night on deck.”

“Did kindly spirits visit you here?”

Without even trying to feign amusement Prestimion said, “I saw only stars and moons, Svor, and also sunlight to an extraordinary hour. No spirits whatever, none.”

“Ah, but they saw you.”

“Perhaps they did,” said Prestimion in a flat cool tone meant to indicate an utter lack of interest.

“And afterward they came to me as I slept. May I tell you my dream, Prestimion?”

Prestimion sighed. “If it pleases you to do so, Svor.”

Svor said, “It was as a manculain that the spirit came to me, the fat little red-spined sort of manculain that we have in Suvrael, with a thousand sharp daggers jutting from its back and two big yellow eyes looking out almost sadly amidst that mass of dangerous needles. I was crossing a great sparse lonely plain, and it came scurrying up beside me, all bristling and threatening. But I could see that it meant no real harm, that that was simply the way it looked; and it said to me in the most friendly way, ‘You seek something, Svor. What is it that you seek?’ I told the manculain what I sought was a crown, not for myself but the crown that you had lost in the Labyrinth, which I would find for you again. To which it replied—are you listening to me, Prestimion?”

“Certainly. You have my most complete attention.”

Svor let that pass. “It said to me, ‘If you would find it, inquire after it in the city of Triggoin.’ ”

’Triggoin.”

“You know of Triggoin, Prestimion?”

He nodded somberly. “The wizards’ own city, so I’ve heard, where the mages flock and swarm together in perpetual coven, and all manner of witchcrafts hold sway, and spirit-fires burn blue in the air by day and by night. Somewhere deep in the far north, beyond the desert, it is: by Sintalmond or Michimang, as I understand it. It’s not a place I’ve ever thought of visiting.”

“It is a place of many fascinations and wonders.”

“Ah, you’ve been there, Svor?”

“In dreams only. Three times now my sleeping mind has been to Triggoin.”

“Perhaps tonight once you’ve closed those beady eyes of yours you’ll be kind enough to undertake a fourth journey to it, then. And ask questions there on my behalf in regard to my lost crown, as the kindly man-culain told you to do. Eh, Svor?” Prestimion laughed, but his eyes were empty of all jollity. “And what you’ll learn from the good sorcerers of Triggoin, I very much suspect, is that the crown we seek is just a few thousand miles behind us on the Glayge, and we need only send word nicely and courteously to Lord Korsibar and he’ll ship it ahead to us.”

Gialaurys emerged then on deck and said, with a look of keen attention, “What’s this about Triggoin?”

“The good Duke Svor has discovered in his slumbers that we must make inquiries there concerning ways of recovering the crown, and they will inform us as to how we may find it,” Prestimion explained. “But of course, Svor, we haven’t actually lost the crown, because we never had the crown, and what was never ours can hardly be said to be capable of recovery. This carelessness in the use of words can be dangerous to a sorcerer, I’m told. Misplace a single trifling word in one of your spells, or even a syllable, and you may find one of your own demons rending you limb from limb, in the erroneous belief that you instructed him to do so.”

Gialaurys said, unceremoniously brushing aside Prestimion’s heavy attempt at drollery with a brusque swipe of his hand, “I would listen to Svor. If he’s had a dream telling us that we can get help in Triggoin, we should go to Triggoin.”

“And if the dream had told us to make inquiries of the Metamorphs in Ilirivoyne, or to seek the aid of the wild men in the snowy mountains of the Khyntor Marches, would you be just as eager to go to one of those places?” Prestimion asked, once more with a mocking edge to his voice.

“The dream said Triggoin,” Gialaurys said doggedly. “I would surely go to Triggoin, if we don’t find the support we hope for at the Castle.”

He clung to that idea, endlessly expounding and elaborating on it, as the Termagant made its swift way past Pendiwane and began its approach to Makroposopos, where Dimithair Vort proposed to stop briefly for provisions. Svor’s dream of Triggoin had inflamed Gialaurys with enthusiasm and hope. His eyes took on a brightness and fervor that they had not shown in weeks, at the mere thought of that place in the far north.

The wizards of Triggoin would put the troubled world to rights, Gialaurys insisted. His faith in them, he said, was boundless. The mastery of all secrets of power was to be had at Triggoin. He had long intended, in fact, some day to make a pilgrimage to that place, purely for the good of his spirit, and to give himself over there to one high magus or another as a humble body-servant, so that he might learn something of the arts himself as fee for his employ. Surely Prestimion would not reject the help of Triggoin out of hand, if all else failed: surely not! Surely! The force of all those potent sorcerers joined in a single endeavor would provide Prestimion with the strength he needed to restore the commonwealth to its proper condition. He believed that with all his soul, did Gialaurys. And so on and on in that vein until the riverboat was almost into Makroposopos harbor.

But then came an ugly surprise. For the weavers of Makroposopos had been busy of late, it seemed; all along the waterfront hung billowing flags bearing portraits that were recognizably portraits of Korsibar, with banners beside them in the royal colors, green and gold. Plainly, the arrival of the new Coronal was imminent in Makroposopos, and they were hurriedly making ready to greet him in fitting style.

Prestimion said to Dimithair Vort, “Can we call at some other city farther upstream for the things you need?”

“At Apocrune, yes, or Stangard Falls. We can wait even until Nimivan, maybe. Though the others would be better.”

“Let it be Apocrune or Stangard Falls, then,” Prestimion instructed the captain. “Or Nimivan, or one of those places, whatever you say.” And they sailed onward without stopping at Makroposopos.

The sight of those innumerable portraits of Korsibar fluttering along the piers of Makroposopos aroused Gialaurys’s temper even more. All fantasies of Triggoin’s wizardly aid went from his mind; what he advocated now was that they go on to the Castle as swiftly as they could, and simply and straightforwardly lay claim to it as the rightful seat of the Coronal Lord Prestimion, striking with the same preemptive boldness as Korsibar had shown that day in the Labyrinth.

“We will fashion a crown for you somehow,” he told Prestimion, “and you’ll walk right through the Dizimaule Arch wearing it on your head, with us beside you, armed to the teeth and making starbursts at every step of the way.”

“A crown,” said Prestimion. “Starbursts.”

“Yes. A crown! And when they come out from within to see who is arriving, you’ll proclaim yourself before them all as Lord Prestimion the authentic Coronal, as was intended all the while by Lord Confalume, and make them kneel down before you, which they will do when they see the true kingliness of you. In that moment it will become clear to them that Korsibar’s actions have no force of law and he is a false king. And you will seat yourself on the throne and accept the homage of the Castle and there will be an end to all this foolishness.”

“So easily achieved,” said Svor softly. “Bravo, Gialaurys!”

“Yes, bravo!” cried Septach Melayn in an altogether different tone. His eyes flashed as though with lightning. It was plain that he too was for the moment swept up in the rude audacity of the scheme. His rage at the usurpation had from the first moment of it been nearly as strong as that of Gialaurys.

The plan could not fail, said Septach Melayn. The Castle officials were mere spineless cowards and idlers, he said, who had no more courage among them than a herd of blaves and less stiffness to their bones than a swamp-dwelling gromwark. It made no difference to them who was Coronal, Lord Korsibar or Lord Prestimion; they required only someone to tell them what to do, and whichever man got there first would fill that need for them. While Korsibar dallied along the Glayge, enjoying the pleasures of royal feasts as the guest of the people of Pendiwane or Makroposopos or Apocrune, Prestimion could snatch the Castle and the throne as easily as plucking thokka-berries from a vine.

This hearty show of support kindled fresh excitement in Gialaurys. For some minutes the two of them spoke back and forth between themselves in rising fervor, until they had made it seem for each other that it would be the easiest thing in the world to turn Prestimion into an anointed Coronal merely by an appeal to justice and reason.

Then finally, after long minutes of harangue, when they had begun to lose some of their heat and momentum, Svor turned to them and said, his eyes glittering with devastating scorn, “This is the maddest nonsense and folly, my lords. Have you both taken leave of your senses? If the throne could be had by any prince who walked in and demanded it, we’d have a new Coronal every time the old one departed from the Castle for as much as a day.”

They stared at him, startled at the force of his mocking tone, making no response.

“Consider also,” Prestimion added, “that the Pontifex Confalume has not openly condemned his son’s seizure of the throne, and never will. The thing is done,’ is what the Pontifex told me when we were in the Labyrinth. ‘Korsibar holds the power now.’ And so he does.”

“Illegally,” Septach Melayn said.

“And what legal claim do I have, pray tell? Was I ever publicly named as Coronal-designate? Korsibar, at least, has the Pontifex’s blessing. In the eyes of the people I would be the one who’d be regarded as the usurper, not Korsibar, if I somehow managed to take possession of the Castle.”

Septach Melayn and Gialaurys looked blankly at each other, and once more said nothing; and after a time Septach Melayn reluctantly acknowledged with a little shrug the wisdom of what Prestimion had said.

To them both Svor said sharply, “Attend me here. We have a strategy in place already, which is to go to the Castle as loyal subjects of the Coronal Lord Korsibar and pretend to bow the knee to him, and all the while slowly and quietly attempt to build support for his overthrow and replacement by Prince Prestimion. That will take time: years perhaps, until Korsibar’s inadequacies are fully demonstrated. But I pray you, let us follow our plan, for it’s the best that we have; and let there be no more hotheaded talk of simply announcing Prestimion to be the king and expecting the Castle folk to lie down and yield.”

More Korsibar banners were on show at Apocrune, and at Prestimion’s orders they sailed on past; but Dimithair Vort pointed out that it was necessary now for her to reprovision the riverboat somewhere, and the best thing was to make landfall at the town of Stangard Falls. Prestimion gave his assent. But he was pleased to note that no Korsibar-faces greeted them there as the Termagant dropped its anchor at the pier.

There were two wondrous things to be seen at Stangard Falls. One of them was the falls itself: for here there was a tremendous rift in the surface of the world, with the land falling away sharply toward the west. Whatever colossal geological event had shattered the terrain at Stangard had also thrust a giant mile-long boulder upward in the midst of the river’s course: a single smooth slab of pink granite that had the shape of a fat loaf of bread resting on its side, which divided the Glayge here into two flows. One, east of that titanic monolith, was the river proper, sweeping smoothly and grandly on southward beyond the town in its majestic progress toward the distant sea. The other, the western branch, was a much lesser but still powerful stream that went plunging off swiftly at a sharp angle to the river’s main bed. The course followed by that secondary stream carried it over the edge of the rift, thus creating a cascade that had an unbroken milky drop of seven thousand feet, uncountable millions of tons of water per second hurtling down that great declivity into a basin far below.

The roaring of the waters at Stangard Falls, the sound of that great plunge and the terrible crashing impact it made when it struck the stony bed below, could be heard far up and down the river, hundreds of miles away; and at close range, anywhere within a mile or so of the point where that western fork of the Glayge went over the edge, that sound was intolerable. Observation platforms were mounted to either side of that place where that river began its mad descent, so that visitors could stand there and look downward as the foaming waters fell on and on and onward still to be lost in the spuming rainbow-flecked turbulence at the bottom. But they had to cover their ears with thick padding as they watched, or they would be irreparably deafened by the noise of it all.

Prestimion and his companions had no special interest in experiencing the majesty of Stangard Falls just then. It was the other noteworthy sight of Stangard Falls that drew them now: for here, on the side of the river away from the falls themselves, travelers were granted the first awesome view of Castle Mount rising in the northeast.

You needed only to take an eastward turn on the river just opposite the shining pink monolith that created the falls, and there it was, standing unanswerably before you, dominating beyond all measure the great sloping plateau from which it rose. Up and up and up went the land as you looked to the north, and then came that sudden heartstopping leap to supreme height, imparting a mysterious visionary grandeur to the scene. At Stangard Falls the glittering gray-white mass of stone that was Castle Mount seemed to float in the air as though it belonged to some other world, a world that was lowering itself by gradual stages into the sky of Majipoor.

It was by far the greatest mountain of Majipoor, and perhaps the largest of any world in all the universe. Farther upriver the Mount had the look of a vast wall hanging overhead and blotting out the heavens like a vertical continent. But in this part of the Glayge Valley the traveler was still separated from it by a thousand miles or more. From here one might to some degree to comprehend it as an actual mountain that tapered upward from a broad base to the narrow summit, with a band of cloud about its middle. And even, almost, to persuade oneself that one could make out glinting hints of some of the fifty mighty cities that clung to its flanks, and the sprawling Castle atop its highest peak, thirty miles up.

“At last!” Gialaurys cried. “Can there be anything else so splendid anywhere? I feel such a chill of wonder whenever I look upon it that I could weep.” And he struck Svor, who was standing beside him, a great wallop between the shoulder blades that nearly flung him flying through the air. “Eh, my brave Svor? What do you say? Is that not the grandest sight in the universe! Lift up your eyes to it, Svor! Lift up your eyes!”

“It is a very fine sight indeed, extremely splendid,” said Svor, coughing, and hitching up first one shoulder and then the other as if putting them back into their proper alignment. “It is truly a magnificent sight, my friend, and I admire it most considerably, even though you have perhaps loosened my teeth somewhat in your enthusiasm.”

Prestimion’s eyes were glistening as he looked toward that monarch of mountains. He said nothing, only stared, as minutes passed. Septach Melayn, coming up behind him, lowered his head to the shorter man’s ear and said quietly, “Behold your Castle, my lord.”

Prestimion nodded. Still he said nothing.

Their stay in the town of Stangard Falls was brief, as brief as they were able to make it. Nilgir Sumanand, who went ashore with the captain, reported that portraits of Lord Korsibar were on display here too. They were not as common as at Makroposopos, but they were indication enough that the people had been apprised of the change of reign and had accepted it with good enough grace.

They went onward. City after city thronged this fertile valley: Nimivan and Threiz, Hydasp and Davanampiya and Mitripond and Storp. The shores of the Glayge were home to millions of people. But now the valley began to shade into the foothills of the Mount. The land was rising perceptibly here as the broad plateau that bore Castle Mount commenced its steep upward tilt toward the colossal upthrust limb that was the mountain itself. When they looked northward at the river, it appeared now to be descending toward them out of the sky, and at times the Termagant seemed to be sailing straight upward, valiantly climbing a wall of water.

Tributaries could be seen coming into the Glayge now on both sides, subsidiary rivers and riverlets running down from the higher reaches of the Mount. As they proceeded past each of these confluences the Glayge itself dwindled, becoming a much narrower stream, for the river on which they now traveled was in essence only one of the many that flowed together to constitute the main body of the Glayge behind them. The river towns—Jerrik, Ganbole, Sattinor, Vrove—were different here too, mere fishing villages mostly, instead of great thriving cities, all but hidden in the dense blackish-green foliage of foothill forests that came right down to the river’s edge.

At Amblemorn the part of the journey that they could make by river-boat ended. The Glayge no longer existed as a coherent river beyond this point: this was its source, where it was born out of a tangled swarm of small shallow rivulets coming down from many regions of the Mount. They bade farewell to Dimithair Vort and her crew and set about hiring floater-cars to take them the rest of the way to the Castle.

Arranging that took several days. There was no choice for them but to cool their heels in Amblemorn, a huge ancient city where the narrow winding streets wove one upon another in dense intricate snarls and the cobbled walls were thickly overgrown with woody-trunked vines.

Of the Fifty Cities that bespeckled the breast of the Mount, Amblemorn was the oldest. Pioneering settlers had begun the conquest of the Mount here some twelve thousand years before, clambering up the naked rocks and putting into place the machines that brought warmth and light and a breathable atmosphere to these formerly bleak heights. Bit by bit they had extended their upward sway until eventually the whole gigantic Mount lay wrapped in an eternal balmy springtime, even the uppermost realm that jutted into the darkness of space. There was in the center of Amblemorn a monument of jet-black Velathyntu marble, set in a garden of smooth-trunked halatinga trees perpetually crowned with a glory of crimson and gold flowers, that bore lettering on it announcing that this was the place where the old timberline had been:

Green-and-gold banners of the new Coronal were flying everywhere in Amblemorn. Someone had attached one, even, to the pedestal of the monument.

Prestimion attempted to ignore it. He focused his attention on that tall and glossy marble shaft and let his mind wander back across the thirteen thousand years of Majipoor, back to the founding of the world, the coming of the first settlers, the planting of the early cities; and then this conquest of the Mount, the extension of the human sphere into the once-uninhabitable high reaches, raw and stony and airless, of this unthinkably huge mountain. What an achievement that had been! And then to live in peace and harmony all these thousands of years on this giant planet, this warm and beautiful world, building city after city of such size and splendor and magnificence, finding room for fifteen billion souls without despoiling the marvelous richness of the land—

There were others at the monument too, citizens of Amblemorn. He saw someone looking at him and imagined that person thinking, That was Prestimion who was to have been Coronal, but now is no one. And his blood ran hot in him for a moment, and his head was all aswirl with the fury of intolerable loss.

But then his iron control reasserted itself. No, Prestimion told himself: no, they have no idea here who I am, and if they do, what of it? It is no shame not to be Coronal. And a time will come when the world is right-side up again perhaps, and all will be well: or else I will die attempting it, and none of this will matter any longer to me.

The travelers lost no time getting on the road once the floaters were assembled and ready.

From Amblemorn there were various routes upward. The Fifty Cities were arrayed around the sides of the Mount in levels, forming four big rings, with great expanses of open space separating one ring from the next. Amblemorn was one of the twelve Slope Cities, as those of the bottommost ring were known. From it rose two main highways of approximately equal directness, one passing through its neighboring city to the west, Dundilmir, and the other going eastward past Normork and Morvole. They chose the Dundilmir road, which was less heavily traveled and took them around the gloriously strange zone of red lava flows and smoking fumaroles and spuming geysers known as the Fiery Valley, to a place where they could gain access to a good road leading farther upward.

The angle of ascent beyond the Fiery Valley was a relatively gentle one, and it was a journey of a hundred miles along the flank of the Mount to the level of the nine Free Cities, the next urban ring. This road led them a quarter-turn around the haunch of the mountain even farther toward the west, where the chief cities were Castlethorn, Gimkandale, and Vugel.

Septach Melayn argued for the Castlethorn road, but Svor pointed out that was a slow one because it wound back and forth upon itself so many times; and so Prestimion and his companions went up and around it, traveling by way of the next city to the west. That was Gimkandale, famous for its floating terraces that looked out toward the gray desert lands of middle Alhanroel. The travelers were some ninety degrees around Castle Mount from their starting point at the source of the Glayge, there. Again a choice of routes confronted them; and after some debate they took the steep path along the starkly serrated palisade of Stiamot Battlements, where the wild saber-fanged hryssa-wolves bayed night and day from the porches of their inaccessible caves, and thence through the forest of glassy-leaved trees that grew beside Siminave Highway, leading to Strave, Greel, and Minimool, which were the closest of the eleven Guardian Cities.

There were further indications all along the way that the rise to power of Lord Korsibar was not unknown in these higher levels, and apparently had met with no opposition. Prestimion paid little notice. But Gialaurys, seeing the banners of Korsibar fluttering here and there, would mutter now and again and clench his fists and look upslope, eyes red with rage.

He raised no new discussion, however, of his optimistic if implausible plan to take the throne for Prestimion by the mere declaration of his kingship as an accomplished fact. Prestimion had made it clear that he wanted such talk to cease. Plainly the scheme continued to simmer within Gialaurys, though, and even in Septach Melayn.

They were nearly halfway up the Mount now. A dozen miles of vertical ascent and many hundreds of miles of lateral travel remained before they would come into the true high country, which was hidden from them down here by the mantle of white clouds that perpetually screened the midriff of the mountain. But already they were far above the lowlands of the continent. The air at this height was crisp and electric, with a quality of light that could not be duplicated at lower altitudes. In every direction the towers and battlements of the great Mount cities could be seen, clinging boldly to enormous ledges and scarps and outcroppings on the face of the mountain; and everything was outlined in a brilliant tracery of radiant color.

Their road took them between Strave, where architects were looked upon as demigods and no building was in any manner like any other, and Greel, its very opposite of a place, limited by strict construction codes to five shapes for houses and no more. A straight ribbon of a highway, bright as glass in the midday sun, led onward from there, ever higher, into the level of the nine Inner Cities.

The choice of route now was beginning to become limited for them: the mountain was narrowing rapidly here in the cloud-covered upper fringes of the midzone country. Any of the nine High Cities could be reached from any point below, but above the High Cities the landscape became so jagged that traversing it could be managed only in the most favorable places, and just a handful of roads continued beyond their level to that of the Castle itself. Of those, by far the best was the one that went via Bombifale to High Morpin, where the Castle road began. So they made their way on a long diagonal across the face of the Mount to the great tableland known as Bombifale Plain, below lovely Bombifale itself, the city of the Grand Admiral Gonivaul. A multitude of Korsibar banners oppressed them at every town along the road, all the way from Greel.

The evening was already too far gone into moonless night when they came to Bombifale for them to feel the full beauty of the place, which was the work of Lord Pinitor of distant antiquity, the only Coronal in all of Majipoor’s history who had come from Bombifale. Pinitor had never ceased to expand and glorify his native city. Long plodding trains of pack animals had hauled untold tons of orange sandstone up the Mount from the desert back of Velalisier to build the scalloped city walls that thrust far out over the plain; and an even greater effort had gone into the mining and transportation of the imposing diamond-shaped slabs of blue seaspar that were inlaid in those walls, for seaspar was found only along the shores of the Great Sea on Alhanroel’s remote and inhospitable eastern coast. It was by the order of the Coronal Lord Pinitor, too, that scores of enormously tall slender towers sharp as needles had been erected atop the city battlements for many miles, giving Bombifale a profile unlike that of any other city in the world.

But little of that was apparent to the tired travelers now. It was late and dark. The one conspicuous thing was the new star, shining high above them, burning fiercely against the blackness. “See, it follows us everywhere!” cried Svor jovially. That was the star which to Svor was a star of good omen. But Prestimion, looking up wearily at that hard insistent glare now, was much less certain of that. It had been too strange in the manner of its coming, and was too potent in its savage brightness.

They found rooms for themselves and all their party at a small drab inn near the city’s outer edge. Once they were settled, they ordered up a meal from the surly, reluctant landlord, who agreed to serve them at this hour only when he realized that among this group of late-coming guests was no less a grandee than the Prince of Muldemar.

A couple of sullen Hjort girls waited on them, along with a limping, one-eyed, black-bearded man whose scars and scowls gave indication that he had come out very much on the short side of some bloody brawl years ago. As he set Prestimion’s flask of wine and bowl of stewed meat down before him, he bent low and peered full in Prestimion’s face, staring intently at him with that lone bloodshot eye as though Prestimion were a being of a kind that never had been seen on Majipoor before.

For an intolerably long moment he held that stare, and Prestimion looked levelly back. Then the man’s fingers shot out quickly in a hasty and rudimentary version of the starburst sign, and he grinned a broad ugly grin, showing yellow snaggled teeth, and went shuffling away toward the kitchen.

Gialaurys, who had seen it, rose halfway from his seat. “I’ll kill him, my lord! I’ll rip his head from his shoulders!”

Prestimion restrained him by the wrist. “Peace, Gialaurys. No pulling off of heads, and no calling me ‘my lord.’ ”

“But he mocked you!”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps he is my secret adherent.”

Gialaurys laughed a harsh bitter laugh. “Your secret adherent, yes. No doubt he is, and a fine figure of a man too. Take down his name, then, and make him your High Counsellor when you are king.”

“Peace,” Prestimion said. “Peace, Gialaurys.”

But he was wounded and angry too; for there could have been no intention in the one-eyed man’s mind other than to mock. Had he fallen so far, that servants in a shabby inn felt free to make sport of him? Prestimion kept his feelings to himself; but he was glad to leave that place in the morning, and glad also that he had no cause to see that one-eyed man again before he left, for he knew that he might not be so forbearing at a second offense.

It was only a long day’s journey up from Bombifale to the lowest reaches of the Castle. Gialaurys, sizzling still over the insult in the tavern, held forth much of the way once more on his notion that Prestimion must assert his right to the throne immediately and forcefully. Prestimion would not hear of it. “You can leave the floater and walk the rest of the way to the summit,” he said, “if you can find no other topic for discussion than this.” Gialaurys ungracefully subsided, though he began again an hour later and had to be silenced once more.

This was familiar territory now: they had traversed it dozens, even hundreds, of times, often coming down from the Castle on this steep mountain road made of bright red flagstones to enjoy the many delights of the rich and luxury-loving cities in the heavily populated belt just below it. High Morpin was the chief pleasure-city of the Mount, where lords young and old amused themselves on the mirror-slides and the juggernauts and in the fantastic caverns of the power-tunnels, and sat afterward under canopies of spun gold to sip sweet wines and nibble cold sherbets.

But there would be no rides on the juggernauts today, and no wines and sherbets. They bypassed High Morpin entirely and hastened onward along the ten-mile stretch of road called the Grand Calintane Highway, which ran through fields of ever-blooming flowers to the borders of the Castle domain.

The summit of the Mount was in sight now.

This was the farthermost realm of Majipoor, which once had stood far out into the eternal frigid night of space, before the construction of the weather-machines. But the weaving of a soft mild atmosphere around this ultimate peak of the Mount had done nothing to gentle its fierce sharp topography: the craggy summit was made up of an intricate array of slender, dagger-tipped subpeaks of hardest basalt, stabbing upward at the sky like myriad black stalagmites. In the center of all these stony spikes, rising up high above them, was one final great upwelling of granite, a huge rounded hump at the very tip of the mountain that formed the foundation for the Coronal’s royal residence.

The Castle! The immense unchartable bewildering Castle of uncountable thousands of rooms, virtually a city in itself, that covered so many hundreds of acres! It clung to the mountaintop like a great sprawling chaotic monster of brick and masonry, sending random tentacles roaming in every direction down the slope.

The Grand Calintane Highway came to the Castle at its southern wing, terminating in the great open space known as the Dizimaule Plaza. The pavement here was of smooth green porcelain cobblestones, and a huge starburst in golden tilework lay at its center. On its far side was the mighty Dizimaule Arch, through which all visitors to the Castle must pass when entering.

There was a guard post here, just to the left of the arch, and a tall gate with elaborate iron grillwork mounted with giant hinges set in the sides of the arch itself. That gate was always open; it was purely ornamental, for no invading armies were expected ever to present themselves at the entrance to the Castle, on this world that had known only peace for so long.

The gate was closed now. It stood shut in front of them like a palisade of spears embedded in the ground to block their forward path.

“Do you see that?” Prestimion asked in a voice choking with wonderment. “Closed? Have you ever known that gate to be closed before?”

“Never,” Gialaurys said.

“Never,” said Svor. “It comes as news to me that it can be closed at all.”

“Yet there it is,” rumbled Gialaurys. “It stands in our faces with its great padlock on it. What is this, my lord? How can they close the gate on us? The Castle is our home!”

“Ah, is it?” said Prestimion softly.

Septach Melayn, meanwhile, had stepped to the inner side of the plaza, just by the guardhouse door, and was rapping on it with the flat of his sword. There was no immediate response. Septach Melayn rapped again, more vigorously this time, and shouted to get the attention of those within.

After a little while the guardhouse door slowly opened and two men dressed in the garb of officials of the Castle chancellery moved out into view. One was a Hjort, cold-eyed and somber, with an extraordinarily broad mouth and thick pebble-textured, olive-hued skin; the other, a human, was scarcely prettier, for his face was almost as flat and wide as the Hjort’s and he wore the sparse tufts of his reddish hair arrayed in stiff tall spikes all over his skull. Both wore swords, of the decorative kind that had come lately into great popularity at the Castle.

“What game is this?” Septach Melayn asked at once. “Open the gate for us!”

“The gate is closed,” replied the Hjort complacently.

“I’ve already observed that it is, else I’d not waste my breath asking. Open it, and it would be wise not to make me ask a third time.”

The spike-haired one said, “The Dizimaule gate is closed by order of the Coronal Lord Korsibar. We are told that it is to remain closed until he has reached the Castle himself and taken up residence in it.”

“Is it, now?” said Septach Melayn. His hand went to the pommel of the sword that dangled at his side. “Do you have any idea who we are? I see plainly that you don’t.”

“The gate is closed to all comers, no matter who they be,” said the Hjort, now with some tension in his tone. “Those are the orders we have received from the High Counsellor Duke Oljebbin, who is en route from the Labyrinth, traveling in the party of the Coronal. No one may enter until they are here. No one.”

Gialaurys caught his breath sharply at that and took a step or two forward to put himself at Septach Melayn’s side; and Prestimion, though he remained in his place farther back, made a noise low in his throat like the growl of an angered dog. The two chancellery men looked increasingly uneasy. Some uniformed guardsmen now began to appear from within and take up positions alongside them before the gate.

Speaking mildly, though restraining himself was an effort, Prestimion said, “I am the Prince Prestimion of Muldemar, as I think you know. I have apartments within the Castle and I wish to have access to them. As do my companions here, whose names I think you also know.”

The Hjort made a Hjortish nod. “I know you, Prince Prestimion. But nevertheless I am not permitted to open this gate, not for you nor anyone, until the Coronal is here.”

“You hideous toad, this is the Coronal who stands here before you!” Gialaurys shouted, and rushed toward him with the fury of a maddened bull. “Down and give worship! Down and give worship!”

Two guardsmen moved quickly in to protect the Hjort. Gialaurys seized one of them without an instant’s hesitation and hurled him head first through the air so that he fetched up against the guardhouse door. He struck it with a terrible cracking sound and lay still.

The other, who was armed with a vibration-sword, went for his weapon but was slow in activating it: Gialaurys caught him by the left arm, spun him around, and yanked the arm sharply upward, snapping it like a twig. As the man began to crumple in shock, Gialaurys struck him hard across the throat, a sharp powerful blow with the edge of his hand, and he fell down motionless also on the plaza pavement.

“Come on, the rest of you!” Gialaurys cried to the other guards, who stared in awe and astonishment at their two dead comrades. Gialaurys beckoned them challengingly to come toward him, but none of them moved.

Septach Melayn, meanwhile, had his sword out and was dancing in a cold but sportive rage about the Hjort and the other chancellery man, moving with a theatrical flamboyance: artfully nipping out again and again at them with the tip of his blade, menacing them with taunting grimaces and lightly pinking them here and there without actually inflicting a serious wound. His long thin spidery arms flashed like pistons, lashing out tirelessly. There was no defense against him. There never was. The two chancellery men had their own swords drawn too, but they were flimsy ornamental ones with scarcely any substance, and they held them like the utter novices that they were. Septach Melayn, laughing, flicked the Hjort’s sword from his hand with a quick sidewise swipe of his own, and disarmed the spike-haired man just as easily an instant afterward.

“Now,” he said, “I will draw one nice stripe after another down your flesh, until someone quickly chooses to open that gate for us.” And he began by cutting open the Hjort’s blue official jerkin from shoulder to waistband.

An alarm was sounding somewhere. Shouts could be heard from behind the gate.

The second chancellery man had turned and was trying to get past Gialaurys and the clutter of motionless guards standing between him and the guardhouse door. Septach Melayn raised his sword and began to bring it slicing down between the man’s shoulder blades; but the blow was interrupted by Prestimion, who drew his own sword from its sheath and tapped it against Septach Melayn’s. Septach Melayn halted his stroke and whirled about, slipping automatically into a posture of defense. But upon seeing that it was Prestimion who had interfered with him, he lowered his weapon.

“This is idiocy,” Prestimion told him. “Back to the floater, Septach Melayn! We can’t fight the whole Castle. There’ll be a hundred guards here in another five minutes.”

“So there will indeed,” said Septach Melayn with a smile. He gave the red-haired chancellery man a thrust in the rear with his boot to send him lurching toward the guardhouse, whirled the astounded Hjort around and shoved him in the same direction, and caught Gialaurys by the arm in time to keep him from charging the guardsmen once more. Svor, who had watched the entire incident from his usual safe position on the sidelines, now trotted forth and took Gialaurys by the other arm; and he and Septach Melayn led him away, while Gialaurys continued loudly swearing that he would wreak havoc on all and sundry foes.

They reentered their floater, and Prestimion signaled to those in the other vehicles farther across the plaza to turn quickly and head back down the highway.

“Where shall we go?” asked Septach Melayn.

“Muldemar,” Prestimion said. “At least there the gate will be open for us.”

6

The High City of Muldemar lay nestled in a soft and greatly favored zone of the upper reaches of Castle Mount on the southeastern face of the mountain. Here a secondary peak, which in any other region of the planet would have been a considerable mountain in its own right, jutted up from the flank of the Mount to create on its inner slope a broad sheltered pocket, a great hollow fold where the soil was rich and deep and the waters that flowed from within the giant mountain came forth generously in a plenitude of springs and streams.

The ancestors of Prince Prestimion’s ancestors had settled in this part of Castle Mount nine thousand years before, when the Mount was still a place where newcomers could stake out domains for themselves, and the Castle itself had not yet been begun. There were no princes in Muldemar then, only a family of ambitious farmers who had come up from the lowlands around Gebelmoal bearing grapevines of good quality that they hoped could be transplanted to the Mount.

At Gebelmoal those vines had yielded a decent red wine of fair body and character; but on the Mount the alternation of sunlight and periods of cool mist was perfect for their cultivation, and it became quickly apparent, even from the earliest vintages, that the wine of Muldemar was going to be extraordinary in nature, thick and strong and complex, a wine for kings and emperors to cherish. The harvests were abundant, the yield of the grapes lavish, their flavor uniquely pungent and bright. And yet, so popular did the wine of Muldemar prove to be, it was centuries before the vineyards there could be expanded sufficiently to meet the demand, despite every effort of the proprietors to expand production. Until that day came when supply and demand were at last in balance, one had to place one’s order for Muldemar wine a decade or more in advance, and wait in turn, hoping that that year’s vintage would be up to the quality of its predecessors. It always was.

Plain hardworking farmers will eventually turn into knights, and knights into counts and earls and dukes, and dukes into princes and sometimes kings, if only they stay prosperous and hold their land long enough. When that great hero of antiquity Lord Stiamot had in his later years transferred the royal capital from the High City of Stee on the slopes to the very summit of the mountain and built the first Castle there atop the Mount to celebrate his conquest of the Metamorph Shapeshifters, the ancestors of the ancestors of Prestimion had already come to hold noble rank as a reward for the quality of their wine and, perhaps, for the quantities of it that they had supplied to some earlier Coronal’s festivities. Lord Stiamot it was who transformed the Count of Muldemar into the Duke of Muldemar, supposedly out of delight over some special cask of wine that was served at the Castle’s dedication ceremony.

Some later Coronal—the historical record was uncharacteristically unclear on the point, and no one was quite sure whether it had been Lord Struin or Lord Spurifon or even Lord Thraym—had further ennobled the Muldemar duke of his time by making him a prince. But there were no greater titles to be seen on the family escutcheon. Never had there been a Coronal from the Muldemar line. Prestimion would have been the first, but for the intervention of Korsibar.

“So I am not to be Lady of the Isle after all, it seems,” said Prestimion’s mother the Princess Therissa, with a smile that betrayed relief as well as regret, when Prestimion and his party had arrived at his family’s great hillside estate looking down over the broad sprawling acres of the huge Muldemar vineyard. “And I had already resigned myself to leaving this place too, and was beginning even to pack a few things for the journey. Well, it will be no hardship for me to remain here. Is it a great disappointment to you, Prestimion?”

“I have had worse ones,” he said. “I was promised a racing-mount once, and then Father changed his mind and I received some set of fat history-books instead. I was ten years old then; the wound still festers in me.”

They both laughed heartily. It had always been a close and loving family here. Prestimion embraced his mother, who was twelve years a widow now but still seemed beautiful and young, with a serene oval face and glossy black hair that she wore tightly drawn back and braided behind. A simply designed jewel of the highest beauty and value rested on the bosom of her white gown: a huge and flawless pigeon’s-blood ruby, deep red tinged with purple, that was set in a hoop of gold with two sparkling little haigus-eye stones mounted as companions beside it.

It was the Muldemar Ruby, the gift of the Coronal Lord Arioc, that had been in the family four thousand years.

But Prestimion noticed also that his mother wore an unfamiliar talisman encircling her left sleeve just by her wrist, a golden band inlaid with shards of emerald. It was something that might have seemed merely to be another ornament but for the fact that the emerald shards spelled out mystic runes. They were much like the runes carved on the little corymbor amulet that the Vroon Thalnap Zelnifor had given him in the Labyrinth, and which, mainly to humor Gialaurys and Duke Svor, Prestimion wore now around his neck on Septach Melayn’s golden chain. She had not had any such thing when he last saw her in the early part of the year.

These witchery-things are everywhere now, Prestimion thought: even here, even on his own mother’s arm. And not worn in jest, he suspected, as was the corymbor dangling by his throat.

“What will you do now, Prestimion?” she asked as she walked with him to his rooms.

“Now? Now I’ll rest here, and eat well and drink well and swim and sleep, and watch how the Coronal Lord Korsibar conducts himself on his throne. And consider my options, carefully and with much thought.”

“You’ll abide by his stealing of the crown, then? For that is what he did, I hear: stole it, took it right out of his father’s own hand without the slightest show of shame. And Confalume allowing it just as shamelessly.”

“He took it from the Hjort crown-bearer Hjathnis, in fact, while his father stood to one side all dumbfounded and amazed. And the others too, for they were every one under some spell that clouded their minds as it happened. Septach Melayn was there and saw it. But no matter: Korsibar has the crown. Confalume is unwilling to raise objection, or incapable of it, or both. The deed is done. The world accepts it. The people have raised banners in honor of Korsibar all along the Glayge. The Castle guards themselves turned me away at Dizimaule Arch: why do you think I am here, Mother, instead of there? They turned me away!”

“That goes beyond all belief.”

“So it does. But believe it anyway, Mother. I do. Korsibar is Coronal.”

“I know that boy well. He’s brave and handsome and tall; but he lacks the capacity for the task. To look like a king is insufficient; he needs to be a king within. And he is not that.”

“This is true,” said Prestimion. “But he has the crown. The Castle and the throne await him.”

“A Coronal’s son may not follow his father that way. That is the ancient law.”

“A Coronal’s son is doing that very thing, Mother, even as we stand here talking. And it is not law, only custom.”

The Princess Therissa stared at Prestimion in flat amazement. “You astound me, Prestimion. Are you going to allow it to happen, without even a protest? You’ll do nothing at all?”

“I said I would consider my options, Mother.”

“Which means what?”

“What I intend to do,” he said, “is summon certain high men of the kingdom here to Muldemar and sound them out, and learn from them how strong their support of Korsibar really is. I mean such as Duke Oljebbin, and Serithorn, and Gonivaul. And also, I think, Dantirya Sambail.”

“That monster,” said the Princess Therissa.

“A monster, yes, but a bold and powerful monster, and also, I remind you, a kinsman of ours. I’ll speak with these men. I’ll fill them full of our finest vintages and see if they are in Korsibar’s pocket, or can be pried free of him, yes or no, if they will give me an answer. And then I’ll form some plan for my future, if I’m to have one. But for now I am only Prince of Muldemar, and that in itself is no little thing.” He smiled and touched the talisman at his mother’s wrist.—“Is this new?” he asked.

“I’ve had it these two months past.”

“Elegant work. Who is the goldsmith?”

“I have no idea. It was given me by the magus Galbifond. Did you know we have a magus here now?”

“No.”

’To help us foresee patterns of rainfall and mist, and to judge the proper day for picking the grapes. He’s an expert winemaker: knows all the true spells.”

“The true spells,” Prestimion said, wincing. “Ah.”

“He told me also that you would not become Coronal when the old Pontifex died. I learned that from him no more than five days after you set out toward the Labyrinth.”

“Ah,” said Prestimion again. “It seems that everyone knew that except me.”

There was no part of the vale of Muldemar that was anything less than lovely, but the vineyards and estate of the princes of Muldemar occupied the choicest position of all. The princely lands were situated in the best protected shelter, nestling up against the flank of the Mount itself, so close that it was impossible to see the Castle from the manor house, because one would have to look up almost straight overhead. Here only sweet winds blew and gentle mists came. And here, in the perpetually green domain between Kudarmar Ridge and the well-behaved little Zemulikkaz River, the lands of the princely family ran for mile after mile, culminating in the splendor and magnificence of Muldemar House itself, a great white-walled structure of two hundred rooms whose three main wings were topped with lofty black towers.

Prestimion had been born at Muldemar House, but like most of the princes of the high families, had lived much of his life at the Castle, taking his education there and returning here only a few months out of the year. Since his father’s death he was technically the head of the family, and took care to be here on all major family occasions, but his rapid rise to the status of heir-presumptive to Lord Confalume had required his presence at the Castle much of the time in recent years.

Now all that was over; and it was far from displeasing to be back in his own suite of rooms again. He had a generous private apartment within the house, on the second level, facing the sweeping vista of Sambattinola Hill. Long curving windows of faceted quartz carved by the subtlest craftsmen of Stee flooded the rooms with brilliant light; the walls of the rooms were lavishly covered with mural paintings in delicate pale tones, azure and amethyst and topaz pink, endless interwoven floral traceries in the intricate and curiously eye-tickling mode of the artisans of Haplior.

Here Prestimion bathed and rested and dressed, and received visits from his three younger brothers. They had become virtual strangers to him after his long absence, and had grown almost beyond recognition in just this one year.

Each of the three professed his fury at Korsibar’s villainous theft of the throne. Teotas, who at fifteen was the youngest, was the one most heated in his insistence that Prestimion make immediate war against Confalume’s lawless son, and most eager to die if need be in defense of his brother’s crown. Eighteen-year-old Abrigant, who stood head and shoulders above all his brothers, was nearly as vehement. Even the artful and paradox-loving Taradath, at twenty-three the closest to Prestimion’s age and thus far in life much more given to the writing of ironic verse than to mastering the skills of warfare, seemed aflame with a passion for vengeance.

Prestimion embraced them all, and assured each in turn that he would play a prominent role in any action that might be undertaken. But he sent them away from him without having offered any clear indication of what kind of action that might be.

In truth he had no idea. It was far too soon for the making of plans, if indeed there were any that needed making.

He spent the first weeks of his return in pleasant idleness, and at times felt the pain of his bitter disappointment giving way to a lighter mood, the first he had known since the events at the Labyrinth.

It seemed unwise to leave the estate at all and enter the great city of Muldemar adjacent to it, since he wanted neither to hear the people of Muldemar swearing allegiance to Lord Korsibar nor passionately urging him—for he would be easily recognized there—to make civil war on the usurper. So he passed his days swimming in the cool Zemulikkaz, and strolling in the park surrounding Muldemar House, and hunting bilantoons and khamgars in the family preserve. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys were in constant attendance on him; Svor also, a little later, for first he made a brief sojourn to the nearby city of Frangior, where there was a woman he liked to visit. When Svor came back from there he seemed dejected, and said to Prestimion, “It is all Korsibar out there. He has arrived at the Castle now and is kinging it in great glory there. His face is posted up everywhere in Frangior.”

“And in Muldemar city too?” asked Prestimion.

“Fewer posters there, but there are some. And some portraits of you also, though they keep getting taken down. There’s much sentiment in the city in your favor.”

“I would expect so,” Prestimion said. “But I intend to give it no encouragement.”

Sometimes in hours of solitude Prestimion browsed in Muldemar House’s capacious library, leafing through the books of history he had found so unwelcome as a boyhood gift. Their pages were full of vivid accounts of the deeds of heroes of ages past, the establishment of the Pontificate under Dvorn, and the bold exploration of Castle Mount in the days when it was still uninhabitable, and the war of Stiamot against the Shapeshifters, and the expeditions into the torrid south and the frigid north and across the uncrossable Great Sea. Prestimion’s eyes took on a blurry glaze as he turned past sheet upon sheet of the annals of Coronals and Pontifexes whose names meant little or nothing to him: Hernias, Scaul, Methirasp, Hunzimar, Meyk, and many a dozen more. But of previous usurpations of the throne he could find no mention at all.

“Can it be,” he said to Svor one day, “that we are such a virtuous people that never once in thirteen thousand years before this has someone wrongfully seized the throne?”

“Surely we are a kingdom of holy saints,” said Svor piously, rolling his eyes upward.

“Surely not,” said Prestimion.

“Well, then,” Svor said, tapping his knuckles against the dusty leatherbound book in Prestimion’s hand, “perhaps it’s the case that certain dark episodes of our history have somehow been lost along the way, and are missing from these heavy tomes?”

“Lost by accident, you think, Svor?”

“By accident or purpose. How can I say?” But it was clear from the roguish look in Svor’s dark eyes that he was hinting at some deliberate suppression of truth. Prestimion let the point pass. Svor was ever willing to postulate rascalry and conspiracies without foundation, simply because his own feverishly intense mind wheeled eternally in such devious circles. Nevertheless, even Prestimion found it difficult to believe that this was the first time in those thousands of years that there been an illicit taking of the Coronal’s crown.

There were, of course, the capsules of the Register of Souls, stored in the House of Records of the Labyrinth, where people had deposited imprints of their innermost memories ever since Lord Stiamot’s time. The unedited data of those capsules might yield truer accounts of ancient events than these massive but untrustworthy volumes of historical scholarship. But the Register of Souls was sealed against casual access, and in any event its capsules were so multitudinous, numbering up into the many billions, that unless one already knew where one wanted to look, one would probably be unable to find anything useful in them: there was no general index, no way of scanning through them for such a topic as “Royal Throne, usurpation of.” And a random search across an archive that was seven thousand years deep might well require seven thousand years to produce anything useful.

Prestimion put the issue from his mind. It was not really that important, after all. As the Pontifex Confalume had said most regretfully but emphatically, the thing was done. Korsibar held the power now. Seeing nothing else for it, Prestimion gave himself over to the pleasures of his home, the company of his family and the fellowship of his friends, biding his time.

The High Counsellor Duke Oljebbin, when the summons came to him from Prestimion inviting him to pay a call at Muldemar, happened to be in the presence of that other senior peer, Serithorn of Samivole. They were strolling together on the terrace of Oljebbin’s office just off the Pinitor Court, close to the core of the Castle, hard by Stiamot Keep, which was the oldest wing of all. Oljebbin and Serithorn and the Grand Admiral Gonivaul, along with some other high officials of the Confalume regime, would be lunching later this day with a few of the new men of Lord Korsibar’s government, Farquanor and Farholt, and Mandrykarn of Stee, and one or two others.

A knight-initiate in Oljebbin’s service approached him on the terrace bearing an envelope of gray vellum, sealed with a splash of bright purple wax. Duke Oljebbin took it without comment and slipped it into a fold of his robe.

“A love-letter from Prestimion?” Serithorn asked.

Oljebbin gave him a sour look. “If I could see through closed envelopes, I’d tell you. But I don’t have the knack. Do you?”

“It looks very much like a letter I had from Prestimion myself, no more than an hour past. Go on, Oljebbin. Open it. I’ll look the other way, if you prefer.”

It was always like this between them: a chilly sort of banter, a long friendship in which sharp teeth were showing in every smile. The Duke Oljebbin and the Prince Seritorn were both some years past the age of fifty, and had known each other, so it seemed, since before their births. They had both from an early age been important members of the Royal Council.

Oljebbin, whose great estate near Stoienzar in Alhanroel’s southern districts was a demesne of such extravagant luxury that even he felt almost abashed to visit it, was Confalume’s cousin on his mother’s side. Very likely he would have been Coronal himself had the Pontifex Prankipin not lived to such a great old age. But Prankipin had conducted himself as though he was all but immortal, and Confalume had put in forty-three years as Coronal instead of the customary fifteen or twenty; and Oljebbin, after two decades as Lord Confalume’s High Counsellor and heir-presumptive, had had to confess that he no longer had any yearning for the throne. That had been the beginning of Prestimion’s spectacular if abortive rise to prominence.

Oljebbin himself had suggested Prestimion to Confalume as a successor. To be a power behind the throne was one of the great pleasures of his life. He was a wide-shouldered, deep-voiced man much given to wearing elaborately brocaded robes of rich colors suitable as complements to his remarkable shock of thick white hair: his eyes were warm and shrewd, his features somewhat small and pinched in relation to the grandeur of that hair, and his manner was one of lordliness bordering on the extremes of self-admiration.

Serithorn, to the contrary, had never for an instant wanted to be Coronal, and therefore had spent all his life in the innermost circles of power, where everyone sought him out with confidences because he was no threat to anyone. He was a prince of one of Majipoor’s oldest families, tracing an impressive if somewhat tenuous line of ancestry back to Lord Stiamot, but also counting such ancient kings as Kanaba, Struin, and Geppin as ornaments of his family tree.

He had, so rumor maintained, courted Prestimion’s mother before Prestimion’s father married her; he remained a close friend of the family. Serithorn was the wealthiest private citizen of the realm, with estates in every part of Alhanroel and much land in Zimroel as well. His bearing was elegant, his style light and easy. He was fair-haired, smooth-skinned, and trim and compact of form, somewhat like Prestimion in that way, though his stance was more relaxed, lacking in that sense of energy compressed and contained that was so marked a characteristic of Prestimion. Never had Serithorn been seen to take any matter with great seriousness; but those who knew him well knew that that was only a pose. He had great properties to defend, and, like most men of that sort, he was profoundly conservative at heart, a stubborn defender of the ways he knew and cherished.

Duke Oljebbin scanned the letter once quickly, and then read it again rather more carefully before sharing its contents with Serithorn.

“From Prestimion, as you correctly supposed,” he said finally.

“Yes. And he invites you to dine with him at Muldemar?”

“Indeed. A tasting of the new vintage. And to hunt in his preserve.”

“It was the same with me,” Serithorn said. “Well, we know the quality of his wine.”

Oljebbin regarded the prince with care.

“You intend to go, then?”

“Why, yes. Is Prestimion not our friend, and is his hospitality something that can be nonchalantly refused?”

Tapping the letter lightly against the fingertips of his left hand, Oljebbin said, “These are the early days of a new reign. Would you not say that we owe it to Lord Korsibar to remain in constant attendance at the Castle at this time, so that we can offer him the benefits of our wisdom?”

Serithorn smiled naughtily. “You fear his displeasure, do you, if you go to Muldemar?”

“I fear nothing in this world, Serithorn, as you very well know. But I would not casually offend the Coronal.”

“In a word, then, the answer to my question seems to be Yes.’”

Oljebbin’s lips quirked in a quick cool smile that showed little in the way of amusement.

“Until we know what Lord Korsibar’s true attitude toward Prestimion is,” he said, “it could be construed as an act of provocation for us to be paying calls upon him.”

“Korsibar has offered Prestimion a post in the government. The offer was made while we all were still in the Labyrinth.”

“And declined, I hear. In any case the offer was an obligatory one, mere politeness. You know that, I know that, and obviously Prestimion knows that. I said we needed to know Korsibar’s true attitude toward Prestimion.”

“We can very readily guess what that is. But he’ll never dare act on it. He’ll try to neutralize Prestimion, but he wouldn’t dare harm him.—I hadn’t heard, by the way, that Korsibar’s invitation was rejected by Prestimion.”

“Not accepted, at any rate.”

“Not yet. Prestimion has some calculations of his own to make, don’t you think? Why else are we asked to Muldemar?”

With his voice kept low, Oljebbin said, taking Serithorn by the arm and leading him to the edge of the terrace, “Tell me this. What will you say if Prestimion should have some insurrection against Lord Korsibar in mind and wants to learn from us whether he has our backing?”

“I doubt that he’ll be so forthcoming so soon.”

“There’s already been that skirmish at the gates, when Prestimion found himself turned away by the guards. There’ll be other little skirmishes, wouldn’t you say? And then perhaps something bigger. Don’t you think he intends eventually to rise against Korsibar?”

“I think he detests what Korsibar has done. As do I, Oljebbin: as do I. And, I think, you as well.”

“Yes, I do understand the difference between right and wrong, Serithorn. I agree that Korsibar’s assumption of the crown was a rash and most improper thing.”

“Not just improper. Unlawful.”

Oljebbin shook his head. “I won’t go that far. There’s no formal law of succession. Which is a great omission in our constitution, we all now realize. But what he did was improper. Unwarrantable and unjustifiable. An astonishing contravention of tradition.”

“Well, at least you still have some shred of honesty left intact somewhere within you, Oljebbin.”

“How kind of you to say so. But you’re avoiding my question. Will Prestimion placidly accept the situation as it now exists, and, if he doesn’t, whose side will be you on?”

“I feel as you do that the seizure of the throne was a monstrous despicable thing, and I abhor it,” said Serithorn, speaking with a heat that was unusual for him. But he damped that fervor instantly with a simultaneous wry smile. “Of course, he’s a very popular monster. The people were fond of Prestimion too, but they’ve taken to Korsibar very quickly. And they lack our nice sense of precedent and custom when it comes to matters at Castle Mount: all they want is a sturdy, good-looking Coronal who can flash a bright smile at them when he rides in the processional through the streets of their city. Korsibar is that.”

In some annoyance Oljebbin said, “Give me a direct answer, Serithorn. Suppose Prestimion says he wants your help in a rebellion. What will you tell him?”

“This is very tactless of you to ask.”

“I ask it anyway. We are beyond tact here, you and I.”

’Take this as your answer, then. I have no idea what Prestimion has in mind to do. I’ve twice already said that I regard Korsibar’s usurpation as an abomination. But he is the anointed Coronal now, and an uprising against him is treasonous. One wrong can lead to another, and then to others, until all the world is turned on end; and I have more to lose than anyone.”

“So you’d try to remain neutral in any struggle between Prestimion and Korsibar for the throne?”

“At least until I see which faction’s likely to win. I think,” he went on carefully, “that that is your position too, Oljebbin.”

“Ah. Finally you speak in a straightforward way. But if you intend to remain neutral, why accept Prestimion’s invitation?”

“He hasn’t yet been proscribed, has he? I admire his wine; his hospitality is generous; he is my dear friend. As is his mother. If by some chance he determines one day to make war against Korsibar, and the Divine should smile upon him and bring him to victory, I wouldn’t want to have it on his mind that I snubbed him at a time that I knew must be difficult and painful for him. So I’ll go. A social call, with no political undertones.”

“I see.”

“You, on the other hand, are Lord Korsibar’s actual High Counsellor, and I realize that that makes your position more ticklish than mine.”

“Does it? In what way?”

“Nothing that the High Counsellor does is without its political implications, especially at a time like this. By going, you’d seem to be conferring more importance on Prestimion than Korsibar may want him to have just now. Korsibar wouldn’t appreciate that. If you want to continue to hold on to your post, you might not care to offend him.”

“What do you mean, if I want to continue to hold on to my post?” said Oljebbin, bristling.

Serithorn smiled benignly. “He’s carried you over from the Confalume government, yes. But for how long? Farquanor’s hungry for your position: you know that. Give him some excuse to undermine you with Korsibar, and he will.”

“I’m assured of my counsellorship as long as I want it. And—I remind you once more, Serithorn—I fear no one. Particularly not Count Farquanor.”

“Come with me to Muldemar, then.”

Oljebbin was silent for a time, glowering down with displeasure at Serithorn. Then he arrived abruptly at his decision.

“Done,” he said. “We’ll go there together.”

Prestimion said, “In this cask at my right hand is the famous wine of the tenth year of Prankipin and Lord Confalume, which by common agreement is the best this century. In this one is the wine of the year Thirty Prankipin Lord Confalume, which also is highly regarded by the connoisseurs, in particular for its unusual color and fragrance, although still relatively young and with much greatness yet to develop. And this cask—” He tapped an especially dusty barrel of archaic make, which tapered toward its ends at unusually sharp angles. “—In this is our last remaining stock of the oldest wine we have, which dates from, if I read this faded tag properly, Eleven Amyntilir Lord Kelimiphon, that is to say, two hundred and some years ago. Its body is perhaps a little thin by now, but I had it brought up, Admiral Gonivaul, so that you might sample a wine that was in its prime when your great ancestor was Pontifex.”

He looked about the room, singling out each of his guests in turn for a warm smile and a close intense look: Gonivaul first, who had been the first to arrive that afternoon, and then Oljebbin and Serithorn, who had come in the same floater an hour later.

“Finally,” said Prestimion, “we have here the first cask of this year’s vintage. It represents, of course, mere potential, rather than actual accomplishment, at this point. But I know that men of your perceptive-ness and experience of wine will understand how to judge this wine for what it promises, not for what it is at the moment. And I can tell you that my good cellarmaster here believes that when the wine of Forty-three Prankipin Lord Confalume has reached the summit of its destiny, it will be a match for the best that has ever been produced here. My lords, let us begin with this new wine first, and proceed backward in time until we come to the ancient one.”

They were gathered in the tasting-room of Muldemar House, a dark and cavernous subterranean vault of green basalt, where rack upon rack of bottles stretched on and on into the dimness. The room extended no little distance into the side of Castle Mount itself, and both sides of it were lined with the greatest wines of Muldemar, a treasure valued in the many millions of royals. Prestimion had with him Septach Melayn, Gialaurys, and Svor, and also his brother Taradath. His three guests had come unaccompanied. A fourth had been invited, the Procurator Dantirya Sambail, but he had sent word that he had been unavoidably delayed by responsibilities at the Castle and would arrive in a day or two.

“If you please, cellarmaster,” Prestimion said.

Abeleth Glayn was the cellarmaster at Muldemar House, and had been for over fifty years: a gaunt, skeletal man with the palest of blue eyes and straggly white locks, who liked to say that he had consumed more of the best wine in the world than any man who had ever lived. As he leaned forward to open the spigot on the first cask, he paused an instant to touch the rohilla mounted on his surplice over his breastbone, and to make a quick little witchery-sign with his left forefinger and thumb, and to whisper something incantatory under his breath. Prestimion allowed none of his annoyance over this display of superstition to show. He loved old Abeleth Glayn dearly, and tolerated him in everything.

The wine was drawn and passed around. They all imitated the cellarmaster in tasting the wine and spitting it out unswallowed, for they knew that was the wine-taster’s proper way; and in any event this wine was too green for drinking yet. But they nodded sagely and uttered their praise. “It will be a marvel,” said Oljebbin sonorously, and Serithorn said, “I’ll have ten casks for my cellar, if I may,” and dark shaggy-haired Gonivaul, whose palate was no more cultivated than a Ghayrog’s and who was widely believed not to be able to tell wine from ale nor either one from fermented dragon-milk, solemnly offered the opinion that this would be a vintage of inestimable virtue indeed.

Prestimion clapped his hands. Slabs of bread were brought, with which they could clear their mouths, and a light repast of smoked sea-dragon meat sliced very thin and sauced in a marinade of delicate meirva-blossom petals. When they had eaten a little, he ordered the pouring of the impressive second wine, which he said ought not to be spat out; and after that had been duly consumed and commented on, a course of spiced fish was served, along with Stoienzar oysters that still were slowly moving in their shells. With this they sampled the great wine of Ten Prankipin Lord Confalume, which drew the appropriate expressions of awe, and much talk of Dantirya Sambail’s misfortune at not being there to drink it.

Svor said privately to Septach Melayn, “If the same wine were to come out of each cask, would any of them, I wonder, know the difference?”

“Be quiet, O irreverent one,” Septach Melayn replied, affecting a look of extreme horror. “These are very great connoisseurs, and the wisest men of the realm besides.”

They went at last on to the antique wine of Amyntilir’s day, which somewhere in its two centuries of life had evidently parted with whatever merit it might once have had. This did not keep the Grand Admiral Gonivaul from praising it beyond all measure, and in fact coming close to tears of joy over Prestimion’s kindness in making available to him this tangible memorial to the greatest member of his family.

“Let us now go upstairs,” said Prestimion, “and join my mother and some other friends for dinner; and then afterward some brandy awaits us that I think you’ll find rewarding.”

The name of Korsibar had not yet been mentioned that evening. At dinner, with the great table in the banquet hall set for eighteen, and one rich course after another steadily arriving, the talk was all of hunting and the coming grape-harvest and the new season’s exhibition of soul-paintings, and not a syllable spoken concerning the change in government. Nor was it to be until very much later, many hours after dinner, when the original smaller group from the wine-tasting was gathered once more in the glass-paneled study where a century’s worth of Muldemar brandy was racked in lovely hand-blown globelets, and Prestimion had served a generous portion of his hundred-year-old stock to all.

“What news is there from the Castle?” he asked, very mildly, with no edge to his voice whatever, and addressing his question to no one in particular.

There was a long silence in the room. The three guests variously studied the contents of their brandy glasses or sipped at their drinks in extreme concentration. Prestimion smiled pleasantly, waiting for a reply as though he had asked something utterly innocent, a question about the weather perhaps.

“It is a very busy time there,” said Oljebbin finally, when the lack of response was beginning to become significant.

“Is it, now?”

“The housecleaning that always takes place when the regime changes,” said the duke. He seemed uncharacteristically uncomfortable at being the center of attention. “You can imagine it: the bureaucrats scuttling around, securing their places if they feel in danger of losing them, or striving for upward movement while all is still in flux.”

“And in which category do you place yourself, my lord Oljebbin?” asked Svor, taking a maidenly sip of his brandy. Oljebbin stiffened. “The High Counsellor is something more than a bureaucrat, would you not say, my lord Svor? But as a matter of fact I have been reconfirmed in my office by the new Coronal.”

“Well! We should drink to that!” cried Septach Melayn, and lifted his drink with a reckless flourish. “To the High Counsellor Oljebbin, once and again!”

“Oljebbin!” they all called, brandishing their brandy-bowls. “Oljebbin! The High Counsellor!” And drank deep to cover the inanity of that hollow toast.

Prestimion said afterward, “And the Coronal? He settles easily and well into his new duties, I hope?”

Again an uneasy silence. Again, great attention paid to the brandy-bowls.

Serithorn, upon receiving an urgent glare from Oljebbin, said somewhat restively, “He’s getting accustomed to the job bit by bit. It is, of course, a heavy burden.”

“The heaviest he’s ever lifted, and then some,” grunted Gialaurys. “Man should be careful what he picks up, if he knows not how strong he really be.”

Prestimion poured another round of brandy all around: newer stuff, dealt out with a free hand.

“Of course the people welcome Korsibar’s ascent,” he said as they tipped back their bowls once more. “I saw, all the way up the Glayge, how quick they were to put his portrait out and celebrate his coming. He is very well-received, I think.” And flashed his eyes from one to another of the visitors, quickly, as if to let them know that there were deeper currents to the bland stream of his conversation. But they already understood that.

Gonivaul, who looked flushed with excess of food and drink wherever his reddening face could be seen through his dense thatches of hair and beard, said in a thickened voice, “It is a honeymoon time for him now. Every new Coronal is accorded that. But when his decrees begin to fall upon the land, the common folk may be singing different songs.”

“Not only the common folk,” said Serithorn, reaching out to have his bowl filled yet again. He was growing flushed also, and inflamed about the eyes.

“Oh?” asked Septach Melayn. “Is there reason for such men as yourselves to be apprehensive?”

Serithorn shrugged. “Any great change such as this must be weighed and analyzed carefully, my lord Septach Melayn. Lord Korsibar is, after all, one of us. We have no reason to doubt that we’ll enjoy the same privileges under him that we’ve known before. But one never knows what reforms and rearrangements a new Coronal has in mind. None of us has ever experienced a change of Coronal before, let me remind you.”

“How true,” said Prestimion. “What a strange time this is for us all.—Let me introduce you to our special aromatic brandy, now, shall I? We store it six years in keppinong-wood casks after it’s distilled, with a couple of ganni-berries dropped into it to add a little spice.” He gestured to Septach Melayn, who brought out fresh drinking-bowls, and a new round went to each of them. Prestimion watched carefully as they drank, as if concerned that they appreciate it to the fullest. Then he said bluntly, “And you, my lords? How do you find the changes, personally? Tell me, are you fully contented with them?” Oljebbin looked warily to Serithorn, and Serithorn to Gonivaul, and the Grand Admiral to Oljebbin. Whose turn was it to make the awkward answer to the embarrassing question?

There were no clear replies, only temporizing mumbles.

Prestimion pressed onward. “And the mode of Korsibar’s accession: how did that strike you? Is it a good idea, do you think, for Coronals to elect themselves?”

Oljebbin let air escape slowly from his lips. This was coming down to the heart of the matter at last, and he was not in any way pleased by it. But he said nothing. Nor did Gonivaul.

Serithorn it was who spoke at last, after another endless while: “Does my lord Prestimion intend to have us speak treason here?”

Prestimion’s eyebrows rose. “Treason? What treason? I asked a straightforward question of political philosophy. I solicited your opinions on an issue of governmental theory. Should members of the government not hold beliefs concerning constitutional matters, and feel free to speak of them among friends? And certainly you’re among friends here, Prince Serithorn!”

“Yes. So loving a friend that he’s filled me full of great wine and fine food and splendid brandy until I’m near to bursting,” Serithorn said. He arose and yawned elaborately. “And more than ready for sleep also, I think. Perhaps it would be better to discuss these constitutional matters and issues of philosophy in the morning. If you’ll excuse me, prince—”

“Wait, Serithorn!” cried Gonivaul in a ferocious voice.

The usually cool and aloof Grand Admiral was on his feet, wobbling more than a bit from too much drink, holding himself erect with evident effort. His eyes were blazing, his face as hot and blustery as the irascible Count Farholt’s might have been in full wrath. Swinging about on Serithorn and hah” spilling his liquor as he did so, he said hoarsely, slurring his words a little, “We’ve been sitting here all night drinking Prestimion’s wines and playing these little games with him. Now the time of truth’s at hand, and you’ll stay for it.” And, looking toward Prestimion: “Well, prince? Where are we heading here? Are you telling us that it’s your intention not to abide by the crowning of Korsibar, and asking us where we will stand if you rise against him?”

Oljebbin instantly went as tense as a metal rod. He sat bolt upright and blurted, “You’re drunk, Gonivaul. For the love of the Divine, sit down, or—or—”

“Be quiet,” Gonivaul said. “We are entitled to know. Well, Prestimion? Give me an answer!”

Oljebbin, aghast, rose unsteadily to his feet and took a few weaving steps in Gonivaul’s direction as though meaning to silence him by direct force. Serithorn caught him by the hand and pulled him back to his seat. Then, to Prestimion, Serithorn said, “Very well, prince. I wish we had not reached this point, but I suppose it was where we were meant to go. I too would like to hear your answer to the Admiral’s question.”

“Good,” said Prestimion. “You will have it.” And calmly: “My position on Korsibar is precisely what you would suppose it to be. I regard him as an illegitimate Coronal, wrongfully come to power.”

“And mean to overthrow him?” Gonivaul asked.

“I would like to see him overthrown, yes. Yes. His rule will bring disaster upon us all, so I do believe. But putting him aside isn’t something that can be done with the waving of a wand.”

“Are you asking for our help, then?” said Serithorn. “Be straightforward with us.”

“I have never been anything other than straightforward with you, Prince Serithorn. And I remind you that I haven’t ever said I intend to make any move against Korsibar. But if there should be an uprising—if there should be one, I say—I would put all my energies and resources to it. I would like to think that you three would do the same.”

Prestimion’s eyes traveled from Gonivaul to Serithorn, from Serithorn to Oljebbin.

Slowly and uncomfortably Serithorn said, “You know that we share your distaste for the methods by which Korsibar reached the throne. We are men who love the old traditional ways, we three. We find it hard to approve of his unconscionable and, as you say, illegitimate acts.”

“Indeed,” said Oljebbin.

“Hear, hear!” Gonivaul cried, slumping back heavily into his chair.

“So I may think of you as being with me?” Prestimion asked.

“With you in what?” said Serithorn at once. “In disapproval of Korsibar’s usurpation? Absolutely! We deplore it.” Oljebbin nodded vociferously at that, and Gonivaul also. “Of course,” Serithorn went on, “we must move cautiously at present. Power resides with Korsibar, and he’s understandably on his guard in this transitional time. We’ll do nothing hasty or rash.”

“I understand,” said Prestimion. “But when the moment arrives, if it does—”

“Everything in my power to return this world to the proper path. I promise you that with all my heart.”

“I also,” said Oljebbin.

“And I,” Gonivaul said. “You know that, Prestimion. I will do my duty. At whatever risk to my personal position. What—ever—risk. What—ever.” His tongue was thick; he stumbled over his words. He sank back in his seat and closed his eyes. A moment later he seemed to be snoring.

“Perhaps this is enough for now,” Prestimion said quietly to Svor and Septach Melayn.

He got to his feet. “My lords—the time has come, I think, to conclude our brandy-tasting. My lords—?”

Gonivaul was deep in sleep. Oljebbin appeared to be nearly as far gone, and Serithorne, though still awake and in command of himself, was visibly struggling as he made his way toward the door. At Prestimion’s suggestion, Gialaurys raised the Grand Admiral to his feet and guided him from the room. Septach Melayn offered his assistance to the wobbly Oljebbin, and Prestimion instructed Taradath with a quick gesture to give Prince Serithorn such aid as he might need.

He and Svor remained after the others had gone, for one last drop of brandy before making an end to the evening.

“What do you think, my wily friend?” Prestimion said. “Are they with me or aren’t they?”

“Oh, with you, with you, by all means!”

“You think? Truly?”

Svor smiled and held up one hand. “Oh, yes, Prestimion, they are definitely with you, these three great and long-established lords. They said so themselves, and so it must be true. You heard them. That is, they are with you so long as they sit here in your house and drink your brandy. Once they’re back in the Castle, it might be a different story, I suspect.”

“I think so also. But will they betray me, do you think?”

“I doubt that. They’ll wait and see what you do, and keep all their options open. If you move against Korsibar, and seem to have a chance of winning, they’ll join you: but not until you’re plainly on your way to victory. And if you don’t appear to stand a chance, why, they’ll deny under oath that they ever said a word to you about lifting a finger on your behalf. Or so it seems to me.” “And to me,” said Prestimion.

Dawn promised a flawless early-morning day, and indeed the promise was fulfilled, but it was many hours after the dawn before any of Prestimion’s guests presented themselves. They breakfasted at a time best fitted for lunch, and in the afternoon, under warm emerald sunlight, they hunted happily in the Muldemar preserve, bringing down a host of bilantoons and sigimoins and other such small animals, which were carried off by Prestimion’s people to be prepared for that evening’s dinner. That night there was no mention of the subjects that had arisen the evening before, but only of light and easy things, as befitted wealthy lords enjoying a brief holiday in the countryside.

A day more and they were gone, back to the Castle. An hour after the last of them had left came an outrider to Muldemar House to announce that the Procurator of Ni-moya was approaching, and then shortly the Procurator himself, with an entourage of some fifty or sixty folk, or perhaps even a few more than that.

Prestimion felt only amusement at such cool audacity. “At least it wasn’t five hundred,” he remarked upon going to the gate to greet Dantirya Sambail and discovering him in the midst of this unexpected horde. “But I think we can find room for them all. Are you making a grand processional, cousin?”

“That would be premature of me, cousin. No one has yet offered me a crown.” The Procurator was richly dressed, as usual, bareheaded but with a gleaming and costly jerkin of black leather, covered all over with bright diamond-shaped sequins that rose almost to his chin, and a breastplate of gold chased with silver, on which were inscribed loose curvilinear symbols of some sort unknown to Prestimion. “But I won’t be taxing your resources unduly,” he said as they went within. “This will be only a brief visit. I expect to be on my way in the morning.”

“So soon?” Prestimion said. “Why, feel free to stay as long as you wish!”

“That is as long as I wish. I have a considerable journey ahead of me, which is why I come upon you with all this great number. I’m on my way back to Ni-moya.”

“Before the coronation ceremony?”

“The Coronal has graciously excused me from attending, on account of the length of the voyage. I haven’t been home for three years or thereabouts, you know, and I miss the place. Lord Korsibar believes it would be a good idea for me to make myself visible in Zimroel right now, by way of carrying the word of what’s been happening here. Korsibar isn’t well known on the other continent, you understand. I’m to vouch for his merits among my people.”

“Which you’ll do most loyally, with all your heart and soul, I know,” said Prestimion. “Well, come join me below, and let me try you with the new vintage, and one or two older ones. We had quite a grand feast here the other evening, Oljebbin and Gonivaul and Serithorn and I. A pity you missed it.”

“I think it was Gonivaul that passed me on the road, a little way back.”

“It was an interesting evening that we had.”

“Interesting? Those three?” Dantirya Sambail let out a gust of scornful laughter. “But in your position you need all the friends you can find, I suppose.” He turned to one of his servants and whispered something: the man ran off, and returned an instant later with a member of the Procurator’s following, a lean, swarthy, hawk-nosed tight-jacketed man. Prestimion was sure he had seen him somewhere before. “Where’s this wine of yours, Prestimion?” Dantirya Sambail asked.

“The best is in the cellar.”

“Let’s be for it, then. Come along with us, Mandralisca.”

Mandralisca. Prestimion remembered now. The poison-taster, the quick-eyed green-jacketed batonsman of the Labyrinth games on whom Prestimion had wagered five crowns with Septach Melayn. He was an evil-faced man, grim and bleak, with thin, austere lips and hard-angled cheekbones. The taster was staring coldly and levelly at Prestimion, as though assessing the probability that the prince had prepared a deadly draught for his master.

Prestimion felt a hot surge of fury run through him. For all his tight control, his voice was like a whiplash as he said, “We have no need of this man, Procurator.”

“He goes everywhere with me. He is my—”

“Poison-taster, yes. So I have already been told. Do you mistrust me that much, cousin?”

Dantirya Sambail’s pale fleshy cheeks went crimson. “This is my ancient custom, ever to have him taste for me first.”

“My ancient custom,” said Prestimion, “is to open my house only to those I love. And very rarely do I poison any of those.”

His eyes met Dantirya Sambail’s squarely, and remained locked against them a long moment, radiating anger and injured pride and searing contempt. Neither man spoke. Then the Procurator, as though having made some inward calculation, looked away, and smiled, and said in a soft conciliatory voice, “Well, then, Prestimion. I would not give offense to my dear kinsman. For you I will dispense with my ancient custom, and so be it.” He made a flicking gesture with his left hand, and the poison-taster, after throwing a chilly inquiring glance at Dantirya Sambail and one of utter malevolence at Prestimion, went slinking away.

“Come, now,” Prestimion said. “To the cellar, and I’ll let you have a bowl or two of our finest.”

Together they descended into the dark catacomb.

“You made reference upstairs to the position I am in,” Prestimion said, opening a flask and pouring. He was more tranquil now, and at his ease with the Procurator. “And what position would that be?”

“An indecently uncomfortable one, I would think. Crown snatched right out from under your nose: makes a man look a fool before fifteen billion people.” Dantirya Sambail drank heartily and smacked his lips. “At least you’ve got your vineyards to support you, though! Fill this again, will you?”

“So you are more trusting now, after the first taste? What if it’s a slow-acting poison?”

“Then you and I will go from the world in one and the same hour,” said Dantirya Sambail, “for I saw you drink of the identical stuff you gave me. But I never doubted you, cousin.”

“Then why Mandralisca?”

“I told you. It is my habit, my ancient custom. Forgive me, cousin,” said Dantirya Sambail, looking soulfully blave-eyed at him, all meek and repentant. “If this is poison, it is the finest for flavor the world has ever seen. I pray you give me another draught; for if it doesn’t kill me, it will give me keen pleasure.” The Procurator laughed again, thrusting his strong-featured face upward into Prestimion’s and grinning a broad savage grin as Prestimion refilled his bowl to the brim. “And where are those three comrades of yours, the spider-legged dandified swordsman whom no one can touch, and the great ape of a wrestler, and the other one, the sneaky little Tolaghai duke? I thought you were never apart from them.”

“They’ve gone off hunting. We had no notice of your coming, you know. But they’ll be with us presently. Meanwhile we can talk, kinsman to kinsman, with none of your flunkeys around to listen to us.” Prestimion contemplated his bowl a moment. “I look a fool, you said. Is that so? Do I really seem such a fool to all the world, Dantirya Sambail? I was never named Coronal-designate, you know. Korsibar stole the crown, sure enough: but can it be said that he stole it from me?”

“If it please you, cousin, he stole it from the air, then,” said Dantirya Sambail. He reached out and helped himself to yet another bowl of wine. Standing close by Prestimion, he seemed to loom, not so much on account of his height as from the massiveness of his torso and the confidence of his spread-legged stance. The pale skin of his heavy-featured face was already turning ruddy and glistening from the drink, making his dusting of orange freckles seem less apparent, and creating an even deeper contrast with his extraordinary violet-hued eyes. But the steadiness of those eyes told Prestimion that the Procurator was still altogether sober, however he might seem affected outwardly by the wine. In a cheerful, almost friendly tone he said, “What are your plans, eh, Prestimion? Will you try to knock Korsibar from his perch, do you think?”

“I had hoped you might advise me on that,” said Prestimion smoothly.

“You do have plans, then!”

“Not plans. Intentions. Not intentions, either: possible intentions.”

“Which will require a possible army, and powerful possible allies. Here, drink with me, cousin, keep pace, don’t leave me to do it all!—Tell me what’s in your heart, dear Prestimion!”

“Would that be wise of me?”

“I trusted you with my life when I drank your wine. Speak, and fear nothing, cousin.”

“I will be very blunt and plain with you, then.”

“Do be. By all means, do.”

It was no secret to anyone that Dantirya Sambail was the blackest of scoundrels; but Prestimion had long since learned that one good way to disarm a villain was to open your heart utterly to him. He was therefore resolved to be totally frank with the Procurator.

“Item one,” Prestimion said, “I should have been Coronal. There’s no one from one end of the planet to the other who would deny that. I am the best qualified candidate. Korsibar is far from that.”

“And item two?”

“Item two, Korsibar’s done something foul and dark and blasphemous by crowning himself like that. Such deeds inevitably are repaid on high. Perhaps, if luck is with us, he’ll undo himself swiftly through his own stupidity and arrogance: a very bad combination, that. But otherwise he will in time bring the anger of the Divine crashing down upon us all, if we allow him to reign unchecked.”

Dantirya Sambail said, with a comical blink, “The anger of the Divine, you say? The anger of the Divine? Ah, cousin, and all this time I mistook you for a rational, skeptical man!”

“It’s well known I have no use for sorcerers and suchlike flummery. To that extent I’m a skeptic; but that doesn’t mean I’m godless, Dantirya Sambail. There are forces in the universe that punish evil: this I do believe. The world will suffer if Korsibar’s left to go unopposed. My own private ambitions aside, I feel he must be taken down, for the good of all.”

“Ah,” said the Procurator, lifting his shaggy red brows high. And an instant later said again, as he often did: “Ah.—Is there an item three?”

“Those two are enough. There you have it, within the span of two minutes.” Prestimion helped himself to wine, and gave Dantirya Sambail more, when the bowl was held out to him for it. “My plans. My intentions. A profession of my faith even. What will you do, run back to Korsibar and give him warning now?”

“Hardly,” the Procurator said. “Am I such a treacherous pig that I’d give testimony against my own kinsman? But you face a perilous hard task here.”

“How hard, would you say?” Prestimion asked, staring once more into his wine-bowl and swirling it about. “Give me your most realistic assessment. Shield me from nothing.”

“I am ever a realistic man, cousin. Disagreeable perhaps, but realistic.” The Procurator held up his thick-fingered hand and ticked his points off one by one. “Item, as you would say: Korsibar holds the Castle, which is close on unassailable and has great value in people’s hearts all across the land. Item: with control of the Castle goes control of the Castle guard. Item: the army too is with him, for the army is a great headless beast, loyal to whichever man it is that wears the crown, and Korsibar is the one who wears it now. Item: Korsibar is a fine dashing fellow and the general populace seems to admire him. Item: he’s been well schooled in Castle protocols and routines all his life. All in all he’ll probably make a decent enough Coronal.”

“On that last we are not in agreement.”

“So I understand. But I’m less given to trusting to the mercy and wisdom of the Divine than you are. I think Korsibar can probably do the job, more or less. He’s got such as Oljebbin and Serithorn around him to remind him of the proper way, and crafty little Farquanor’s a shrewd asset too, whether you like him or not. That Su-Suheris magus of Korsibar’s is another clever architect of strategy, very dangerous indeed. And there’s also the sister to reckon with, don’t forget.”

“Thismet?” Prestimion said, in surprise. “What about her?”

“You don’t know? That one’s the true force in that family,” Dantirya Sambail said with a flash of his square stubby teeth. “Who was it, do you think, pushed poor blockhead Korsibar into grabbing for the crown in the first place? The sister! The lovely Lady Thismet herself! Whispering in his ear, all the while we were in the Labyrinth, poking him and prodding him and nudging him and chivvying him, filling what passes for his mind with much inflammatory talk of his surpassing virtues and lofty destiny, shoving him onward and onward until he had no choice but to make his move. Ah, she’s a fierce one, that sister.”

“You have this for a fact?”

The Procurator turned his hands outward in a gesture of pious sincerity. “I have it on the finest of authority, that is, my own. I overheard them conniving together myself, during the games. He’s as helpless as a grazing blave before her. She drives him like a herdsman, and he goes where she says.”

“He’s a secret weakling, that I know. But I never knew her to be so strong-willed.”

’You never knew her, cousin. She loves Korsibar above all else. Her twin, after all: entwined together in their mother’s womb. Would surprise me not if there were not something incestuous between them even. But also there’s her hatred for you to add to the equation.”

Prestimion was unexpectedly stung by that. That Thismet would have loyalty to her brother, and ambitions on his behalf, was no surprise. But loyalty and ambition for the one should not necessarily translate themselves into loathing for the other.

“Hatred—for me—?”

“Did you ever refuse her, Prestimion?”

“I’ve known her many years. But never in any close way. I admire her beauty and grace and wit, of course, as does everyone else. Perhaps more than most. Nothing’s passed between us, though, not ever, of an intimate kind.”

“That may be the problem. She may have been saying something to you all along that you’ve been unwilling to hear. They will hold terrible grudges against a man who does that to them, you know. But be that as it may: those are your obstacles. The world is with Korsibar. You have nothing to your own advantage but your conviction that you are the true and proper Coronal, and your superior intelligence and determination, and, I suppose, your faith that the Divine wants to see you sitting on the throne. Though I must say that in that case the Divine has taken a very strange way of putting you there. If the Divine were more direct in attaining the fulfillment of its will, Prestimion, it would be a duller world, I suppose, but I’d have less difficulty believing in the existence of such great supernatural forces that govern our destinies. Eh?”

“You think I’ll fail at gaining the throne?”

“I said only that it would be far from easy. But go, plunge into it, make the attempt. I am with you, if you do.”

“You? You’re on your way to Zimroel even now to make the way easier for Korsibar!”

“So he’s asked me to do. What I will really do there is a different matter.”

“Let me understand this. Are you actually offering me a pledge of support?” Prestimion asked, incredulous.

“There’s a bond of blood between us, boy. And also love.”

“Love?”

“Dantirya Sambail leaned toward Prestimion and smiled the warmest of smiles. “Surely you know I love you, cousin! I see my own beloved mother when I look at yours: they could have been sisters. We are nearly of one flesh, you and I.” Those strange violet eyes stared into Prestimion’s with incandescent intensity. There was terrible sinister force there: but also that mysterious tenderness. “You are all I would have wanted to be, if I could not have been myself. What joy it would give me to behold you atop the Castle in the place of that ninny Korsibar! And I will do all in my power to put you there.”

“What a fearsome monster you are, Dantirya Sambail!”

“Ah, yes, that too. But I am your monster, dearest Prestimion.” Yet again he refilled his bowl without being asked. “Come sail for Zimroel with me this very hour. Ni-moya will be the base from which you launch your war against Korsibar. Together we’ll raise an army of a million men; we’ll build a thousand ships; we’ll stand side by side as we cross the sea, and we’ll march together toward the Castle like the brothers we truly are, and not the distant and sometimes unfriendly cousins the world imagines us to be. Eh, Prestimion? Is that not a wonderful vision?”

“Wonderful, yes.” Prestimion chuckled. Coolly he said, “You want to goad me into strife with Korsibar so that he and I will destroy each other, which will leave a clear path to the throne for you. Is that not it?”

“If I had wanted the throne, ever, I would simply have asked Lord Confalume to give it to me when he was tired of sitting on it. I’d have done that long before you were old enough to get your hands all the way around a woman’s breasts.” The Procurator’s face was scarlet now, but his voice was steady; he seemed calm and merely amused. “Who else was in line for it? That fool of an Oljebbin? Confalume would have put the crown on a Skandar before he gave it to him. But no, no, I had no use for Castle Mount. The Coronal can have that, and I have Zimroel, and we are both content.”

“Especially if you can say that the Coronal owes his crown to you, eh?”

“Ah, you impugn me and impugn me, dear Prestimion. You waste too much precious breath attacking my motives, which sometimes in fact are pure ones. Perhaps this good wine of yours muddles your mind. Let us come to basics: you want to be king, and I offer you my help, both as your loving kinsman who would support you in all things, and also out of a powerful conviction that the throne is rightfully yours. The forces at my disposal are not inconsiderable. Tell me here and now: do you accept my offer or refuse it?”

“What do you think? I accept it.”

“What a sensible boy. Now, then: will you come with me to Zimroel and create a military base for yourself there?”

“No, that I will not. Once I leave Alhanroel it may not be so easy for me to return. And this is my home; I’m most at ease here. I’ll stay here, at least for the time being.”

“Whatever way you would have it, then.” Dantirya Sambail smiled broadly and brought one great hand down with a loud clap against the table. “There! Done! It’s wearisome hard work, offering you help. Will you feed me now, at least?”

“Of course. Come.”

As they left the cellar the Procurator said, “Oh, and one thing more. The Coronal Lord Korsibar intends to summon you shortly to the Castle to attend his coronation ceremonies.”

“Does he, now?”

“I have it from Farquanor himself. Iram of Normork will be carrying the invitation. Perhaps he’s already on his way to Muldemar. What will you tell him, cousin, when it comes?”

“Why, that I’ll go.” Prestimion threw him a quizzical look. “What would you have me do, cousin?”

’To go, of course. Anything else would be a coward’s course. Unless, that is, you plan to reveal your breach with Lord Korsibar so soon.”

“It’s far too early for that.”

“Then you have no choice but to go to the Castle, eh?”

“Exactly.”

“It pleases me greatly that we’re of a mind.—And now, Prestimion: food. No small quantity of it, if you please.”

“You have my promise on that, cousin. I know your appetites, I think.”

They feasted well at Muldemar House that night, though Prestimion had had more than enough to eat and drink already, these few days, with the guests who had been to him before Dantirya Sambail. But he held his own, and saw the Procurator and his retinue off in good grace the next day, after which he retired to his study with his three companions to assess the meaning of the meetings that had just been held. For hours they spoke, and might have gone on far into the evening without even troubling to have dinner; but then came an interruption, a servant knocking at the door with word for Prince Prestimion.

“Count Iram of Normork is here,” he said. “He bears a message for you from the Coronal Lord.”