Sorcerers of Majipoor

1

No one had any idea what use Lord Sangamor had had in mind for the tunnels that came to bear his name when he ordered the construction of them three and a half thousand years earlier. They were situated on the western face of the Mount in a middle level of the Castle, where a tall spire of rock that was virtually a mountain in its own right jutted from the main formation. That high spire—it too was named for Sangamor—was so angular and sharp that it was unusable, and in fact next to unclimbable; but at its base Lord Sangamor had installed a series of low-roofed underground chambers, each connected to the next, that ran from the Castle proper to Sangamor Peak and completely encircled that spire where it sprang from the Mount.

The material out of which these chambers had been constructed was as mysterious as their purpose. Their walls and roofs were lined with paving-blocks of some radiant synthetic stone that gave off, of its own accord, vivid emanations of color. One chamber was constantly lit by a pulsating maroon glow, another by a brilliant emerald, another saffron, another a powerful rufous hue, another sulfur-toned, another a bright bursting orange, and so on and on.

The secret of the inherent luminosity of these blocks, which had not dimmed in the slightest in all the millennia since Lord Sangamor’s distant time, was one of the many that had been lost by the craftsmen of Majipoor over the centuries. The effect of the lights and colors of Lord Sangamor’s tunnels was an extremely beautiful one, but also, since they never dimmed even for a moment, by day or by night, it very quickly became exhausting and even distressing to experience it: there was always that great inescapable throbbing sweep of color coming from those walls, hour after hour, day after day, so powerful that it was visible even when one closed one’s eyes to it. That perpetual radiance was, in fact, a torment if one had to endure it for any great length of time.

And so—since the tunnels were set apart from all the rest of the Castle by the peculiar topography of this region of the Mount, and no other use had ever been found for them, and comfort was not an important factor to consider where prisoners were concerned—they came after some centuries to be employed from time to time as dungeons for the storage of individuals whom the Coronal regarded as excessively obstreperous, or too inconvenient in some other way to be left at large.

Prestimion had seen the Sangamor tunnels once, long ago, while touring odd corners of the Castle in his boyhood under the auspices of his late father. No one was imprisoned in them then; no one had been, apparently, for some two or three hundred years, not since the time of the Coronal Lord Amyntilir. But the endless waves of color were impressively beautiful if somewhat overwhelming, and the rows of empty shackles mounted against the walls were impressive also in a different way, and so too were the tales that Prestimion’s father told him of this rebellious prince and that hot-headed young duke who had been chained up here in the time of some ancient Coronal desirous of restoring decorum at his court.

It had never occurred to Prestimion that he might find himself chained up here himself one day. This place was a medieval relic, not something that was in everyday use. But here he was, dangling from a wall that radiated a spectacularly vibrant ruby tone, with his arms spread wide and manacles clamped tight about his wrists and ankles. It struck him almost as funny, now and again. Korsibar, blustering with rage, ordering him off to the dungeons! What was next? The headsman’s block?

But of course there was nothing funny about it. He was at Korsibar’s mercy. Nobody knew what went on down here. At any moment some henchman of the Coronal’s might come in and slit his throat, and there would be nothing he could do to defend himself. He had been here, he supposed, six or eight hours by now, in unbroken solitude. Perhaps they simply meant to leave him here until he starved to death. Or, perhaps, until those unyielding pulsating waves of red, red, red, endlessly bounding and rebounding from every surface about him, drove him into screaming insanity.

So it would seem. The hours passed, and no one came.

Then, astonishingly, a small quiet furry voice said out of the maddening sea of color opposite him, “Do you happen to have your corymbor with you, Prince Prestimion?”

“What?” His voice was husky from disuse. “Who said that? Where are you?”

“Just across the way. Thalnap Zelifor. Do you remember me, excellence?”

“The Vroonish wizard, yes. I remember you all too well.” Prestimion, peering into that obstinate light, blinked, and blinked again, and struggled to focus his eyes. But all he could see was that surging ocean of redness. “If you’re there, you’ve made yourself invisible somehow.”

“Oh, no. You could see me if you tried. Close your eyes for a time, and open them very quickly, excellence, and you’ll make me out. I’m a prisoner here too, you see.—It amazed me no end when they brought you in here,” the voice out of the red glow continued. “I knew the pattern of your stars was an unfavorable one, but I didn’t think it was that unfavorable. Do you see me yet?”

“No,” Prestimion said. He shut his eyes, counted to ten and opened them, and saw nothing but the waves of redness. He closed his eyes again, and counted this time to twenty, and decided to count twenty more. When he opened them then, he was able just barely to make out the indistinct shape of the little many-tentacled creature straight across the room from him, manacled to the wall even as he was, with the gyves fastened about two of his biggest tentacles. Thalnap Zelifor was hanging, though, three or four feet off the floor, because he was so small and the manacles had been installed for the purpose of restraining individuals of normal human size.

The redness closed in again.

“I saw you for a moment, at least,” Prestimion said. He stared somberly into the pulsating radiance. “It was definitely you,” he said. “You who came to me to tell me in the Labyrinth that I had no clear path to the throne, that you saw omens of opposition on all sides, that I had a mighty enemy who was waiting in secrecy to overthrow me. You knew—by what means, I dare not guess—what was going to happen. It’s fitting, I suppose, that we’d meet next in the same dungeon. You could predict my downfall, but not your own, eh?” He narrowed his eyes, trying without success to make out the Vroon across the way. “How long have you been in here?”

“Three days, I think. Perhaps four.”

“Have they fed you?”

“Occasionally,” said the Vroon. “Not terribly often. I asked you before, prince: do you happen to have your corymbor with you? The little green amulet I gave you, is what I mean.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. On a chain about my throat.”

“When they come to give you your food, they’ll have to free your hands so you can eat. Rub the corymbor then, and implore the force it controls to smile upon you. That should dispose the guards more favorably to you, and perhaps they’ll feed you more often, or even bring you something better than the usual swill. I should tell you that the food here is abominable, and the guards are utter ruffians.”

“Your corymbor wasn’t much help to me a little while ago when I was in the throne-room with Korsibar. I touched it once, as he and I were just beginning our dispute. But things only got worse and worse.”

“You touched it with the intention of using its power, did you? You commended yourself to its strength, and told it your specific need?”

“I did none of that. It never occurred to me. I merely touched it, as one might scratch at an itch while one is talking.”

“Well, then,” said Thalnap Zelifor, as though to say that Prestimion’s error was manifestly obvious.

They were silent for a time.

“Why have they locked you up in here?” asked Prestimion eventually.

“That isn’t clear to me. It’s through some grievous act of injustice, of that I’m sure. But who’s responsible has not been shown me. I only know that I’m innocent of the charge, whatever it may be.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Prestimion.

“I was, for a while,” said the Vroon, “employed as an adviser to the Lady Thismet, and perhaps some of the things I suggested she say to her brother may have been offensive or troubling to him, and he had me put away to keep me from giving her further advice. That could well be. On the other hand, there was the matter of a debt I had incurred, money owing to Prince Gonivaul, who had been financing some of my research. You know how Gonivaul is about money. He may have asked the Coronal to put me here in punishment for my failure to repay him his loan, though how doing that will get him his money back is far from clear to me.”

“It would seem,” said Prestimion, “that there’s a great deal unclear to you. For one of your profession, that’s not much of a recommendation. I thought all knowledge was an open book to you sorcerers. And yet you’re not even sure why you’ve been chained to this wall.”

“It is an imperfect science, excellence,” said Thalnap Zelifor dolorously.

“Oh, a science, is it?”

“Oh, yes, most assuredly a science. To you it may seem to be all demon-worship and conjuring, but to us it is a matter of understanding and obeying the basic laws of the universe, which are rooted in utterly rational foundations.”

“Indeed. Rational foundations, you say. You must teach me about this, if we are in here very long.—You would prefer to call yourself an engineer, I take it, rather than a wizard?”

’To me they are nearly the same thing, O Prince. Three hundred years ago an engineer is what I would have been, and no doubt of that. The very research I was doing for the Grand Admiral Gonivaul was purely technical in nature: the invention and construction of a mechanical device.”

“A mechanical device that would perform acts of sorcery?”

“A device that would allow one mind to make direct contact with another. Through scientific means, not through any kind of incantation or invocation of demons, I would be able to look into your mind, prince, and see what thoughts were there, and to place thoughts of my own devising in you.”

Prestimion felt a little shiver of fear. Perhaps it was for the best, he told himself, that Thalnap Zelifor was chained up here hanging on this wall.

“You’ve actually perfected such a thing?”

“The research, I fear, is not quite complete, excellence. It wanted still a little more work—but the shortage of funds, you see—Prince Gonivaul’s unwillingness to advance me the few additional royals I needed—”

“Yes. A great blow that must have been to you. And would you care to tell me what use the Grand Admiral Gonivaul was going to make of this device, once you had finished inventing it?”

“For that, I think, you would have to ask Prince Gonivaul.”

“Or use your mind-reading machine, more likely,” Prestimion said. “Gonivaul’s not one to bare his secrets freely to anyone.” For a time he was silent. And then: “Do you happen to have among your repertoire of spells one that will make this damnable red light a little less offensive to the eye?”

“The corymbor, I believe, could have that effect.”

“But of course my hands aren’t free to touch the corymbor, are they?”

“What a pity,” said Thalnap Zelifor. “But here—the guards are coming.” Indeed, Prestimion heard footsteps and the opening of gates. “You’ll be fed now, and your hands will be freed, at least for a little while. That will be your chance.”

Three guards, bristling with weapons, entered the chamber. One stood by the entrance with folded arms, watching grimly; one unlocked the manacles about Prestimion’s wrists and held out a bowl of cold nasty gruel to him to take and drink down; the third brought a plate of food to the Vroon, who scrabbled eagerly in it with one of his free tentacles. While Prestimion ate, and it was no easy thing to get that thin bitter stuff down, he surreptitiously slipped one hand within the bosom of his tunic and—feeling not only foolish but contemptible, a betrayer of all he believed—gave the corymbor a couple of perfunctory strokes with his finger, and then a couple of strokes more.

“Is this stuff the best you can find for me?” he asked his guard. “Do you think you could get me anything that doesn’t curdle in the stomach?”

The guard’s only reply was a cold, bleak stare.

When the bowl of gruel was empty, the guard took it from Prestimion and returned his hands to their manacles, and all three left the chamber. They had not spoken a word all the while.

“The lights are just as strong,” Prestimion said. “And the guards seemed not at all friendly.”

“You touched the corymbor, prince?”

“Several times, yes.”

“And asked the power that is resident in it to look favorably upon your needs, did you?”

“I simply stroked it,” Prestimion admitted. “To do more than that was something I could not bring myself to do. I confess that the invoking of imaginary powers is something that doesn’t come easily to me.”

“Well, then,” said Thalnap Zelifor again.

Svor, returning late that afternoon from his pleasant assignation with the voluptuous Heisse Vaneille of Bailemoona, found all his satisfaction turning immediately to dust when he learned, as he quickly did, that Prestimion was a prisoner in the Sangamor vaults and that Gialaurys and Septach Melayn were nowhere to be found anywhere in the Castle.

Prince Serithorn’s useful gray-eyed nephew Akbalik, who was his source for all this, suggested that Duke Svor might do well to flee the Castle himself without much further delay.

“Is there a proscription declared against the faction of Prestimion?” Svor asked him.

Akbalik, who was calm and judicious of nature, said only, “Not that I’ve heard. There was some dispute between the Coronal and Prince Prestimion in the throne-room, and Lord Korsibar ordered the prince to be imprisoned: that I can tell you absolutely. What became of the other two, I can only guess. Some guardsmen, I understand, were badly damaged in a sword-scuffle near one of the back gates. It’s not unreasonable to think they got in Septach Melayn’s way as they were leaving.”

“No doubt. So they are gone, and I am left here alone.”

“It might not be wise for you to stay either,” he said again.

Svor nodded. He sat quietly for a time, considering the range of possibilities that stretched before him, none of them cheerful and most of them perilous. That the interview between Korsibar and Prestimion had ended in calamity did not surprise him. It was disheartening to Svor to see how Prestimion insisted again and again on thrusting his head into demons’ lairs, despite the warnings he repeatedly offered the prince. But Prestimion was not a man to put much credence, or any, in omens and forecasts; and thrusting himself knowingly into the lairs of demons seemed to be an integral aspect of his personality. Svor was of a different cast of mind entirely: comprehending Prestimion was not always an easy thing for him.

Now it was his own future that had to be spied out and understood, Svor knew, or he was lost. The auguries were ambiguous.

At length he reached his decision. “I’ll seek immediate audience with Korsibar myself,” he told Akbalik.

“Do you think that’s wise?”

“Wiser than any other course. I’m not one for slashing my way out of the Castle like Septach Melayn, or throwing guardsmen around like twelvepins in the fashion of Gialaurys. If Korsibar wants to imprison me, so be it. But I think I can talk my way around that: and I see no other path for myself.”

And so Svor requested—and, somewhat to his surprise, was immediately granted—entry to the Coronal’s office. Two armed Skandar guardsmen stood protectively beside the Coronal’s palisander desk, as though Gialaurys’s brave talk of leaping upon Korsibar with a dagger had drifted through the corridors to Korsibar’s ears. Svor felt dwarfed before those giant aliens and the commanding figure of Korsibar between them. But that was no new thing for him, to be among bigger and stronger men. Slender and wiry and frail though he was, he had held his ground among them well enough thus far.

Korsibar himself looked drained and enervated, sallow-faced, with a stark, haunted look in his eyes. He had a string of amber beads in his left hand and was toying with them in a nervous, compulsive way, passing them one by one between his long powerful fingers. The crown lay in a corner of the desk like a discarded toy.

He said in a strange subdued way as Svor took up a position before the desk, “Have you come here to defy me too, old friend?”

“Is that what happened? Prestimion defied you?”

“I offered him a Council seat. He spurned me and told me to my face that I was an unlawful illegitimate Coronal. How could I tolerate that?—Give me a starburst, Svor, I pray you. I am king here, remember.”

This costs me nothing, Svor reflected. He brought his hands upward in the gesture of respect.

Korsibar’s face, which had been stern and tense and drawn, softened with relief. “Thank you. I wouldn’t want to have to imprison you also.”

“The rumor’s true, then? Prestimion is chained in the vaults?”

“For a little while. I’ll bring him up in a day or two and speak with him again. I want him to see reason, Svor. The world hails me as king. My father himself recognizes my accession. There’s nothing he can gain but grief by interposing himself between me and the throne now. Do you agree?”

“There will be grief, yes. I have no doubt of that.—Where are Gialaurys and Septach Melayn? In the vaults with Prestimion?”

“They are fled, I think,” replied Korsibar. “Certainly Septach Melayn is gone—he fought with four guardsmen as he left, and chopped them into sausage-meat—and no one’s seen Gialaurys since midday. I had no quarrel with either of them. I would only have asked a starburst or two from them, and that they call me ‘my lord’ when they spoke to me. You should say it too, Svor: ‘my lord.’ ”

“If it pleases you, my lord.”

“Not because it pleases me, but because it is my proper title of respect. One says those words when one addresses the Coronal.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Korsibar managed a pale smile. “Oh, Svor, Svor, you are the least trustworthy man who ever walked this planet, and I love you even so! Do you know how much I miss you? We were such warm friends; we drank of the same cup, we embraced the same women, we stayed up all through the night many a time telling wild stories, and ran to the river to swim at dawn. And then you went to Prestimion. Why did you leave me for him, Svor?”

“I never left you, my lord. You stand great in my heart, as much as ever. But I find much pleasure in Prestimion’s company. And that of Gialaurys, and Septach Melayn, for whom I feel a great fondness and a deep interest in the ways of their minds, though I have little in common with either of them. Nor does either of them have much commonality with the other of them, for that matter. They are of two very different kinds.”

“What they have in common is their feeling that Prestimion ought to be Coronal. And you also, I suppose.”

“I’ve made the starburst to you, my lord.”

“You would make it to these Skandars if you felt need of it.—What will you do now, Svor, with Prestimion in the vaults?”

“You said you would let him out in a day or two, my lord.”

“Or three or four. First I’ll want a starburst out of him too, Svor, and a little sincerity behind it.”

“He may be in the vaults a long while, then,” Svor said.

“So be it, then,” said Korsibar. “We can have only one Coronal at a time in this world.”

Svor said, after standing a moment in thought, “If it’s not your intent to release Prestimion shortly, my lord, and I suspect that it is not, then I ask your lordship’s permission to leave the Castle.”

“And go where? You have no estate anywhere, do you, Svor? Only the apartments I provided for you here, in the days of our friendship, is that right?”

“A small suite has also been set aside for me in Muldemar House. I would go there, I suppose.”

’To join Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, and conspire with them against me on Prestimion’s behalf?”

“I have no idea where Septach Melayn and Gialaurys have gone, my lord. I feel uncomfortable at the Castle now, is all, knowing that Prestimion is in chains somewhere beneath my feet, and that I myself am free only at your pleasure, which at any moment may be withdrawn. You say you love me, my lord: very well, let me go. Muldemar is a quiet pretty place, and the wine is good, and the Princess Therissa makes me feel welcome there. By your leave, my lord, I would go to Muldemar. I say nothing of conspiring against you.”

“But you will. I know that.”

“I say nothing of that, my lord.”

Korsibar tossed his beads aside and stretched both his arms across the table toward Svor in a gesture of surprising warmth and vulnerability. A flashing energy came briefly into his weary eyes. “Listen to me,” he said. “Go to Muldemar, if you like, Svor. You have my permission, and Farquanor will give you a scrip of safe-conduct, if you ask him. I would never do you harm. Do you understand that, Svor? We were friends once, and in the name of that friendship I tell you now, I would never do you harm. But do me no harm either. I am Coronal, not Prestimion. That has already been decided. Do me no treasons, Svor. Conspire me no conspiracies. And if one should spring up anyway, I pray you, Svor, bring it to my ear. If not out of some vestige of affection for the friendship that once existed between us, then for the loyalty that you owe me as your king, and for your love for this world of ours of Majipoor. For Prestimion to make war against me for the throne would do irreparable damage to all the world, whichever one of us were to emerge wearing the crown.”

“I have no doubt of that, my lord,” said Svor. He made the starburst again, unasked. “And I thank you for your many kindnesses to me, past and present. May I go?”

Korsibar dismissed him with a weary wave of his hand. Svor lost no time removing himself from the Coronal’s presence.

2

After a long and arduous journey by foot down from the summit of the Mount, Septach Melayn arrived grimy and ragged and footsore at Muldemar House, where news of Prestimion’s incarceration had already come, and was conveyed at once to one of the guest apartments. There he bathed and lightly supped and took some wine, and changed into a fresh doublet and hose that belonged to Abrigant, Prestimion’s second brother, who was nearly as tall as he was himself. Afterward in the great hall of the house, where heavy red draperies closed them in on all sides, Septach Melayn gave Prestimion’s mother and all his brothers such news as he had, which was very little: only that the prince and Korsibar had had hot words at a private meeting, and Korsibar had clapped him straightaway into the Sangamor tunnels. That did not come as news to them.

“It was little use our staying,” he told them. “Korsibar would only have put us away in chains also.”

“You did well to flee while you could,” agreed the Princess Therissa. “But this is very rash of Korsibar, so shamefully to detain a great prince of the realm this way. Can’t he see how this high-handedness threatens all the other lords of the Castle?”

“He gave no thought to what he was doing, I think. Svor saw the picture clearly, as so often he does: is a weakness in Korsibar’s soul, said Svor, will make him strike of a sudden where no strike is called for, sheerly out of the fear that’s in him. So he was ready to lash out overseverely, at any provocation Prestimion might give. And I think Prestimion may well have given him one.”

“Of what sort?” the Princess Therissa asked.

“Korsibar did offer Prestimion a Council seat, or some such high post as that, at that meeting between them in the throne-room: this much we know. And Prestimion, I would wager, did angrily throw the appointment back at him like a rotting fish.”

“Prestimion would have done that, yes,” said the warlike brother Abrigant, with glee in his eyes.

“Ah, was not wise to do, when Korsibar sits so high, and fears Prestimion so much,” said Septach Melayn. “But Prestimion’s more impulsive these days than he was before, and sometimes too fiery, to his great cost.”

“There’s always been hot fire in him,” said the Princess Therissa, “that with great effort he keeps banked and within its bounds; but it must have been too much for him to hold his control, seeing Korsibar on Lord Confalume’s throne, and deigning to give a mere Council seat to him whose seat should have been that same throne.”

Septach Melayn nodded. “You have it precisely, milady. We warned Prestimion not to go to the meeting at all, for it would only compromise and endanger him; or if he did, to withhold any immediate answer to whatever offer might come, but say he wanted to take counsel at Muldemar House over whether to accept it or no. That would have bought him a little time. Yet I think he could not hold his temper, Prestimion. It must have galled him even to make the starburst to Korsibar, or to bend the knee and call him ‘my lord.’ Yes. That’s where it all broke down, right there, I think right at the very beginning, when the homage was due.”

“I agree. He would never kneel gladly to Korsibar,” said Prestimion’s brother Taradath.

“No,” said Septach Melayn. “That he would not. His anger is too great, and his pain.”

“Pain?” asked the Princess Therissa.

“Oh, yes, milady. Prestimion is in terrible pain over the loss of the crown. You’d never know it, were you talking with him: is calm and easy, takes a philosophical approach. But within him all is wrath and fire.” Septach Melayn held forth his wine-bowl, and Taradath filled it brimming. “Korsibar will do no real harm to Prestimion, I think. Is full of confusion and uncertainty, Korsibar is, finding himself suddenly king who never should have been there. Follows this one’s advice and then that one’s, having no clear path of his own in mind. But I think his heart is warm toward Prestimion despite all, and would not ever bring himself to injure him. A few days more and he’ll see there’s no sense in keeping him in the vaults, and will let him come forth.”

“The Divine grant you be right in that,” the Princess Therissa said.

“Korsibar’s done him plenty of injury already, by stealing the throne from him,” said Abrigant. “I’d have lost my temper too, standing there before Korsibar and expected to make starbursts to him.”

“Prestimion should have had a knife with him,” said the fierce youngest brother, Teotas, “and gone up the steps of the throne and cut the thieving Korsibar’s throat with it!”

“You are not the first to suggest something of that sort,” Septach Melayn said, smiling. “Which reminds me: has any word come here from Gialaurys? We were separated as we left the Castle. This place was where we agreed to meet.”

“Nothing,” said the Princess Therissa.

“And Svor? From him, anything?”

She shook her head again. But Prince Taradath said, “Not so, Mother. Word has arrived within the hour from Duke Svor, who says that he is safe and has permission from Lord Korsibar to leave the Castle, and will be coming shortly to Muldemar House. He says there’s no news of Prestimion but he has strong reason to believe Korsibar has no thought of taking his life.”

Septach Melayn tapped the dark obsidian tabletop with pleasure. “Svor safe! So Korsibar’s not forgotten his old love for his slippery little friend of former days. This is good news: means, perhaps, that Korsibar’s softening after his burst of wrath, and Prestimion’s release will not be far behind. But I fear for Gialaurys even so. Is too quick to seek a battle, that one, and may have taken on more than even he could handle on the way to the Castle gate.”

But just then came a servant at the door, with word of another guest at Muldemar House; and it was Gialaurys, looking even more threadbare than Septach Melayn had been at his own arrival a little while earlier, and with a great swollen purplish welt down the left side of his face. He seemed cheerful enough, though, such as cheerful was to a man of Gialaurys’s brooding nature. He embraced Septach Melayn with bone-cracking joy and downed three bowls of ruby wine running within the first ten minutes of his presence there.

Septach Melayn told him of Svor’s message, and asked Gialaurys of his escape from the Castle. That had been easily enough accomplished, said Gialaurys, except that he had found the approach to the Gossif gate too thick with guardsmen, and had gone instead around to the Halanx side, where guards had had time to assemble also and were waiting for him. So there had been a brawl, and he feared that he had returned a few of the guardsmen to the Source, which he regretted, but they would not give him a free path and so had left him no choice. “You know the long-nosed lieutenant of the guards, Himbergaze?” Gialaurys asked. “I knocked him over the side of Canaberu Keep, and he made a very loud landing below. Will not, I think, be do much guarding again. That’s how I got this.” He tapped the great welt on his cheek.

“He struck you in the face?” Septach Melayn asked.

Gialaurys chuckled. “The other way round. I butted him with my head as he came at me to grapple. Went flying up all amazed, and over the parapet’s edge. I wish I’d done that to Farholt when we wrestled at the Pontifex’s games.” He rose and surveyed the tatters of his clothing unhappily. “On my way down the Mount I came through the thorn forest of Quisquis: not a pleasant route. Look at me now!”

“This is Prince Abrigant’s doublet I’m wearing,” said Septach Melayn, with a glance about at Prestimion’s three willowy brothers. “My journey here left me on the ragged side also. But I think there’s no clothing here vast enough for you, my friend. Perhaps one of the hostlers can fetch you a spare tent that milady’s seamstresses can stitch into trousers for you.”

“You are ever the jolly one,” Gialaurys said, with no jot of amusement in his voice.

But the Princess Therissa told them then that new garments could be fashioned for him swiftly enough; and they were, by morning. By morning, also, Duke Svor was at the gates of Muldemar House, having come at the head of a caravan of five pack-mounts, bringing a load of goods, among them a welcome array of clothing that he had fetched from the rooms of Gialaurys and Septach Melayn.

He told them of his conversation with Korsibar, and of his hopes of Prestimion’s imminent release.

“What are they saying at the Castle,” asked Septach Melayn, “about Korsibar’s arresting him? What does Serithorn say, or Oljebbin?”

“Not very much,” Svor replied. “You understand, I lost little time in getting myself away from there, and didn’t go about the place discussing the matter with a great many folk. But from what I did hear, it seems everyone is too astonished to speak out, and is pretending that all is proceeding in ordinary fashion, while waiting to see what Korsibar does next.”

“As it has been since this thing began,” said Gialaurys darkly. “Korsibar snatches the crown, and no one speaks out against him, not even Confalume himself, everybody waiting timidly to see what happens next. So Korsibar comes to the Castle and takes possession of the government unchallenged. Now Korsibar throws Prestimion in the dungeon, and it’s the same. Are they all such cowards? Why doesn’t Oljebbin rise up, or Gonivaul, or anyone, and cry out against these unlawful follies?”

Septach Melayn said, “You sat here in this very house and listened to the stirring words of the brave Oljebbin, and the fearless Gonivaul, and the courageous Serithorn too, with your own ears. One after another they told us they would wait and see, and observe the doings of Korsibar very carefully before taking any position, and make no moves against him until it was appropriate to do so. “We will do nothing hasty or rash,’ said Serithorn, or was it Gonivaul? I forget which one. But it was the same words out of all their mouths.”

“They promised to support Prestimion if he rose against Korsibar,” Gialaurys said.

“In a lukewarm pigeonhearted way,” said Svor. “Hedged all around with ifs and buts and maybes, and nothing said about supporting Prestimion if Korsibar rose against him. Ah, what do you think, Gialaurys? That those feeble-spirited comfort-loving old men will stand up and bluster and rage against the detention of Prestimion, when Korsibar need do nothing more than snap his fingers and they’ll be down in the Sangamor tunnels themselves a moment later? Korsibar holds all the advantage. The high lords fear him and mistrust each other. In all the land, there’s only one aside from Prestimion who dares to stand up to Korsibar and who might help us wrest Prestimion free of Korsibar’s grasp. Of course, he’s no angel himself.”

“The Procurator, you mean?” said Septach Melayn.

“Who else? If we’re to make any sort of opposition to Korsibar, it can only be done with the help of Dantirya Sambail. He’s Prestimion’s kinsman, after all: who better to demand Prestimion’s release? There’s a powerful man, with powerful armies at his back, and wealth and determination besides, and five times as clever as Korsibar as well.”

“And also much personal charm and sweetness of soul,” said Septach Melayn. “Not to mention his great beauty and love of small animals. What a fine ally he would be, Svor!”

“In any case, Dantirya Sambail is far out at sea at this moment, heading toward Zimroel,” Gialaurys said. “Even if he turned around the moment he landed at Piliplok, it would be months before he could get all the way back here. Assuming he would even want to do it.”

“Ah, no,” Svor said. “He’s not at sea at all. Is my understanding he went no more than halfway to Alaisor port, and word reached him of Prestimion’s being taken captive. Canceled his voyage at once and began to march immediately back toward the Mount.”

“You know this for fact?” Septach Melayn asked.

“I know nothing for fact except the number of my fingers and toes,” responded Svor, “and there are days when even that is in doubt. But I heard it from reliable people in Muldemar city, as I was coming through there this morning, that Dantirya Sambail with all his horde of followers is heading this way. Is it so? I could cast some runes on it, but you’d not believe those findings either, eh, Septach Melayn? So all we can do is wait. Here sit we, and Dantirya Sambail will come, or else he will not. I’ve told you what we know.”

“What price will he ask, do you think, for getting Prestimion out of that dungeon?” Gialaurys said. “He does nothing without exacting a good price.”

Septach Melayn said, “A good point. Prestimion will be greatly beholden to him, and the reckoning will be an expensive one. If Prestimion ever comes to power in the world, Dantirya Sambail will sit at his right hand. Well, and nothing can be done about it, unless we can magic Prestimion out of that cellar without the Procurator’s help, and we can’t. Here sit we, as Svor says, and wait to watch what unfolds.”

“It is a pleasant place to sit, at least,” said Svor. “And the wine is very good.”

The days passed, and news of varying sorts came daily to Muldemar House, not all of it totally trustworthy. Prince Prestimion, they were told, would be released on Seaday next; no, it would be Moonday; no, Threeday. But Prestimion was not released, not on Threeday nor on Fourday, nor on any day at all. From Akbalik came word that Prince Serithorn had visited Prestimion in the vaults, and that Prestimion seemed healthy enough, though much amazed at Korsibar’s temerity at holding him prisoner like that, and unhappy about the quality and quantity of the fare, which had given him a pale and somewhat haggard look. As for Lord Korsibar, he had been glimpsed very little of late: he kept to his private chambers, and Navigorn and Farquanor and Mandrykarn were often seen going to him, but life at court seemed to be at a standstill during this strange time of crisis. The Lady Thismet too was rarely seen in public. A tale had come forth, from one lady-of-honor to another and then through a circuitous chain of gossipers, that Thismet and her brother Lord Korsibar were estranged over some matter and that the breach was a deep and serious one.

“I have here a letter from my friend the Lady Heisse Vaneille of Bailemoona saying that the quarrel is over Prestimion,” reported Svor. “It seems the Lady Thismet has begged most tearfully for Prestimion to be set free, declaring that Prestimion is very close to her heart and she would not have him locked away like this. Which so infuriated the Coronal that he threatened to have her locked away too, in some other part of the tunnels.”

“They will all be chained up in the Sangamor if this continues,” said Septach Melayn with a grin. He gave Svor a questioning look. “Do you know anything about this, you man of the ladies? I mean this sudden affection that has sprung up between Thismet and Prestimion. It was my belief she detested him.”

“Anything’s possible, where men and women are concerned,” said Svor. “I tell you only what Heisse Vaneille told me.”

“A very reliable informant is she, this slut of yours?” Septach Melayn asked.

Svor peered sourly at the swordsman and said, “You do her a great injustice. She is a fine woman of the best family of Bailemoona. But let me continue my news, for there is more. The Pontifex Confalume has left the Castle to return to his duties in the Labyrinth.”

’Turning a blind eye once again to his son’s crimes,” said Septach Melayn.

Gialaurys said darkly, “He’s under some spell of sorcery, the Pontifex is. There’s no other explanation for the way he carries himself these days. This is not anything like the Confalume of old, to be such a supine thing; but Sanibak-Thastimoon, or some other wizard even more sinister in Korsibar’s employ, has put a magic on him. I know that for a surety.”

“You may well be right,” said Svor. “Further: the Lady Roxivail also is gone, on her way to Alaisor to take a ship to the Isle of Sleep and assume her role as Lady of the Isle.”

“May the Lady Kunigarda greet her with spears,” Septach Melayn said.

“There is also,” said Svor, “news of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail. Those earlier reports I had that he had turned back from Alaisor are correct. He is marching toward the Mount with all his followers. He and his party have been seen in Coragem, and Tedesca, and Klatre, and Bland. Word is that he’ll be at Pivrarch or Lontano in another week and will make his ascent of the Mount from that side, coming here to Muldemar to confer with us—he knows that we are safe, and here—before going to the Castle to confront Lord Korsibar. He’s already sent a message ahead to Korsibar, says the Lady Heisse Vaneille, who has it from Akbalik, notifying him of his displeasure at Prestimion’s internment.”

“If this is true,” said Septach Melayn, “he might send a message to us also, letting us in on some knowledge of his plans.”

But no message came. What came instead was Dantirya Sambail himself, presenting himself as he had before at Muldemar House without warning, a dark presence in the middle of a warm sunny afternoon, accompanied by his horde of followers and requesting food and wine and lodging for them all.

The Procurator, resplendent as always in his peacock clothes, high-waisted yellow doublet this time with winged sleeves and cuffs of lace above blue velvet breeches, and long-tipped turquoise shoes with trimming of yellow satin ribbon, gathered with Septach Melayn, Svor, Gialaurys, and the brothers of Prestimion in the long room that was known as the cabinet of arms, where a hundred ornate antique bows that Prestimion had collected, and a great assortment of fanciful arrows, were mounted along the white granite walls. The Procurator’s hatchet-faced poison-taster Mandralisca hovered as ever at his left elbow.

As chamberlains of the house poured cool wine of a fine vintage for them all, Dantirya Sambail said, after drinking deep and greedily once it had been pronounced safe for him, “What do you hear lately of my cousin Prestimion? Is he being treated well? Are there any plans for his release?”

“We have no direct news,” replied Septach Melayn. “Only the tales at secondhand, or third. We’re told that he’s reasonably well, but that news is several weeks old. No visitors have been permitted him lately.”

The Procurator sat heavily forward and dug his thumbs deep into his pink fleshy jowls, and ran his hand slowly up the great shining dome of his forehead. Then he beckoned for still more wine. His bowl was filled yet again; Mandralisca took his little sip; Dantirya Sambail drained the rest at a long voracious gulp. Displeasure and even disgust was evident on the faces of several of the brothers of Prestimion.

He said, at length, “You three are his beloved minions, and you three”—with a sour glare sweeping over Taradath and Abrigant and Teotas—“are his brothers. Yet all six of you sit lazily here at Muldemar House doing nothing. Why is that? Why are you not at the Castle filling the air with protests over the disgraceful treatment being given the Prince Prestimion? I never heard it said of you that you were lacking in courage, Septach Melayn. Or you in guile, Duke Svor.”

“We were waiting for you,” said Septach Melayn. “You are the missing piece in the puzzle. We go ourselves, and we’d be popped into the manacles faster than you can drink a bowl of Prestimion’s wine, for what are we but mere appurtenances to Prestimion? But you are no one’s appurtenance. This is not a matter of courage nor of guile, Dantirya Sambail, but of power. You alone have the power to make Korsibar relent. I speak of the army at your command in Zimroel.”

“Ah,” the Procurator said. “So this is my task. I suspected as much. You’ll come with me, at least?”

“If you think it’s best that we do, yes. Certainly,” Septach Melayn said.

“You three, then, come,” said Dantirya Sambail, indicating Septach Melayn, Svor, and Gialaurys.

“And what of us?” asked Abrigant, with some heat in his voice.

“I think not. Your work is to make Muldemar House safe and ready for your brother’s return. Begin gathering the men of your city and preparing them for the possibility of battle.”

“Battle?” said Septach Melayn and Gialaurys in the same breath, both of them instantly excited. Svor said nothing, but his gaze turned distant under his heavy brows.

“Battle, yes. If Korsibar won’t give us Prestimion willingly, we’ll take him by force. And then the fat will truly be in the fire, eh?” The Procurator grinned a wolfish grin. “I want thirty strong men-at-arms from among your people,” he said to Taradath and Abrigant, “and I want them dressed in the same livery as my own company.”

“Muldemar people in Ni-moya colors?” said the scholarly Taradath immediately, bristling. “How could we allow a thing like that?” And the tall fiery young Abrigant came halfway out of his seat in rage.

Dantirya Sambail waved one broad meaty hand. “Peace, cousins, peace. I mean no offense. I want only to achieve your brother’s freedom. Attend me, here: I have seventy-six men of my own. You give me thirty more, begins to seem an impressive force, enough to make Korsibar take notice. But if they wear my colors they are merely my traveling retinue, the ones I had with me at the Labyrinth to accompany me to the Pontifex’s funeral. Is innocent enough, that. I show up at the Castle now accompanied by a second troop of men in Muldemar colors, it seems more like we are mustering an army against the Coronal in his own home, which is a threat no Coronal could ever abide. You follow me, do you? The extra men will be useful, but we disguise them a little to avoid a premature onset of hostilities.”

The brothers still were restless and unsure.

“Do it,” Svor urged them. “It is a good plan.” And to Dantirya Sambail he said, “Take fifty instead of thirty, perhaps?”

“Thirty should be enough,” the Procurator replied. “For now.”

Svor had not expected to be back at the Castle so soon. But Dantirya Sambail was an irresistible force; and so here he stood with the Procurator before Korsibar in the old Stiamot throne-room, which the new Coronal apparently had begun using lately for most audiences instead of the far more imposing one that his father had built. It was an austere little room, stark and simple—a low throne of plain white marble, benches beside it for the Coronal’s ministers, a triangular floor of smooth gray paving-blocks covered by a purple and gray Makroposopos carpet that copied some ancient design.

Count Farquanor was seated to one side of Korsibar, and Sanibak-Thastimoon at the other. In the facing group, Svor and Septach Melayn stood at the Procurator’s right hand, and the poison-taster Mandralisca at his left. Gialaurys was not with them; he had announced defiantly beforehand that he would not bow and make starbursts to Korsibar, and so he was below, with the hundred men in Dantirya Sambail’s colors who had accompanied them to the Castle.

Korsibar seemed oddly diminished, after these additional weeks of his kingship. Much of his old swashbuckling vitality had vanished, and he looked wan and gray-faced now. His shoulders were slumped, his skin showed an indoor pallor and not its customary sun-darkened hue, his cheekbones stood out sharply. Though there still was an outward look of force and strength about him, his jaws were clenched and his eyes were ringed by dark shadows and rigidly set, as though he had been applying that strength lately to a burden far too great even for him. He seemed a haunted man.

It was Duke Svor’s task to guard against Sanibak-Thastimoon’s putting a mind-clouding spell on them as he had at the taking of the crown in the Labyrinth. For, as Dantirya Sambail had pointed out, Svor had the knack of sniffing out sorcery, even if he was unable to perform much of it himself, and so he would defend them against treachery Svor stared at the Su-Suheris now, offering him now and again a dark warning glance, as though to say, I am on to your tricks, try none of them this day! And Septach Melayn is here with his sword for those two necks of yours if you do.

Dantirya Sambail, standing splay-legged directly in front of Korsibar with his massive head thrust aggressively forward, began: “You received my message, I think, my lord, concerning the detention of my cousin Prestimion?”

“The message reached us, yes.” Korsibar delivered those words very coolly.

“It was some weeks ago I sent it. I am informed, my lord, that Prince Prestimion continues to be detained.”

“The prince is in a condition of rebellion against our authority. When he cures that condition, he’ll be released, Dantirya Sambail. Not before.”

“Ah,” said the Procurator. “And how may he accomplish that, my lord?”

“When you entered our presence, you made the starburst to us, and knelt, and greeted us as ‘my lord.’ The Duke Svor very kindly did the same, and even the Count Septach Melayn. We must have the same courtesy from the Prince Prestimion; and then he will be a free man again.”

Dantirya Sambail said, “He has refused you the ceremony due a Coronal? Is that it?”

“He has refused, yes. I sat upon the Confalume throne itself and asked him—more like a suppliant than like a king—to give me my due.” Anger glinted in Korsibar’s eyes. But, Svor noticed, for the moment he had stopped referring to himself in the royal plural. “As one old friend to another, I asked him, and said it was simply that which is due me, for I am king. And he said to me that I was not king.”

“He said that, did he?”

’To my face. My regime is unlawful, he said. The world has no legitimate Coronal at this time, he said.”

“Ah. He said those things.”

“He did, and I said to him to take back the words, and he left them untaken; and so he is in the vaults, and I will leave him there until such time as he tells me that he recognizes me as true Coronal.”

“Ah. Ah.” And then Dantirya Sambail asked: “May I have leave to speak with him, my lord?”

“No, you may not.”

“It might be,” said Dantirya Sambail, “that I could persuade him to yield in this matter.”

“I allowed him some visitors at first. But he has had no company of any kind for the past nineteen days, other than a certain highly annoying Vroon who is chained in the same vault as his. I prefer to keep him in this semisolitude until his resolve to defy me has melted entirely.”

“I might hasten its melting, my lord,” the Procurator said. “Show him where the path of reason lies, and—”

“No, Dantirya Sambail. No. No. No. Must I say the word yet again? Then I shall: no.” And Korsibar’s lips clamped tight shut on that final emphatic syllable.

It seemed to Svor, watching this exchange from his place at the side, that Korsibar had been on the verge of threatening the Procurator with imprisonment himself if he persisted in this course of argument, but had bit back the words at the last moment before uttering them. It seemed to Svor also that Dantirya Sambail had understood that the threat was imminent, and was ready for it. But the words went unspoken, and so did the hot response that Dantirya Sambail held in waiting for them.

In the little silence that followed, the Procurator, who had been standing motionless like a great block of stone before Korsibar, turned and spoke a word to Mandralisca. He nodded, made a hasty starburst to the Coronal and went from the room. Then Dantirya Sambail said, in a pleasant easy tone, just as if he and the Coronal had not a moment before been at loggerheads, “Tell me, then, my lord, is my beloved cousin reported to be in good state, after these weeks in the vaults? For he is very dear to me, and his well-being is of high importance to me.”

“We’re not starving him, Dantirya Sambail. Nor torturing him, nor harming him in any other way except to interfere with his freedom to come and go as he pleases. Which freedom he can have again readily enough in a moment, for the price of a starburst and a bended knee.”

“I would like assurances, my lord, that he’s been faring well under the stress of his confinement.”

Count Farquanor leaned across, at this, and whispered something to Sanibak-Thastimoon. The Su-Suheris responded with a double nod and turned to speak with Korsibar. But Korsibar shook him off and said icily to Dantirya Sambail, “You have just had such assurances, Procurator.”

Then Dantirya Sambail: “You told me only what you were not doing to him, my lord, not how he actually was faring.”

Farquanor now it was who said, in a cold, harsh voice, “Is it your purpose to give offense to the Coronal, Dantirya Sambail? Your precious cousin Prestimion—a very distant cousin, is that not so?—is intact and well. Be comfortable on that point, and give over this questioning. Not even the Procurator of Ni-moya may subject the Coronal to vexation of this sort.”

And from Korsibar: “Why are you here at all, Dantirya Sambail? You told me that you were returning to Zimroel out of a terrible homesickness, and to carry the word of Lord Korsibar’s accession to your people there. Instead we find you back at the Castle only a few months after taking your leave. Why is that?”

“You know why I’m here,” Dantirya Sambail replied evenly. “But it would vex the Coronal if I stated it once more, and I am forbidden by Count Farquanor’s own decree to vex the Coronal.”

“May I have leave to speak, lordship?” asked Septach Melayn, who had been silent all this while. “We are at an impasse here. But I have a compromise to propose.”

“Speak, then,” Korsibar said.

“Prestimion, so I understand it, has given offense by refusing you proper obeisance. Very well. But you hope to extract that obeisance from him under compulsion, my lord, and surely you know Prestimion well enough to realize that he’ll never give it that way.”

“He is an unyielding man, yes,” Korsibar acknowledged.

“Well, then: you have in return charged him with rebellion and sentenced him to imprisonment until he repents, and since he won’t repent, he’ll languish in the vaults until he dies, which may be sooner rather than later if that place is as wearisome as I’ve heard. Then the word will go out that the Coronal Lord Korsibar has done his former rival Prince Prestimion of Muldemar to death for sedition, and how will that look in the world, considering how well-loved Prestimion is in all the provinces of Majipoor? Forgive me, my lord, but I tell you it will be interpreted as a vile act, that can only injure the love that the people bear for you in these the earliest days of your reign.”

“Enough. I seek an end on this. What is the compromise you suggest, Septach Melayn?” asked Korsibar in a voice ragged with strain.

“That we will make no open protest against the treatment that Prestimion has received at your hands, but also that you give him to us this day, my lord, and let us go back to Muldemar with him. In that place it may well happen that his mother and his brothers and we can convince him of the grave error of his ways. You can never accomplish that in the dungeons, my lord, never, but we, perhaps, reasoning with him calmly and persuasively—”

And Korsibar: “This is your idea of compromise? You must think I’m a fool. There is no possibility whatever that—”

“Lordship!” cried a hoarse voice outside. The door burst open and two guardsmen came running in, panting and disheveled. “The prisoner—they’ve broken into the vaults—”

Korsibar, gaping, sat as if stunned. Farquanor was on his feet, red-faced, shouting. Even the impassive Sanibak-Thastimoon seemed swept by surprise and dismay. An instant later Mandralisca rushed into the room and to Dantirya Sambail’s side and whispered into his ear. Dantirya Sambail listened, frowning at first, and then smiling.

Serenely, the Procurator said, looking up now at Korsibar, “It seems there has been some sort of skirmish, my lord, between my men and a group of your guardsmen. It appears to have taken place at the entrance to Lord Sangamor’s tunnels, and during the unfortunate brawling the sealed gateway to the tunnels was damaged to a certain degree, so that entry became possible. I am saddened to say that I believe there have been casualties. Also a Skandar archer in my service evidently chose this opportunity to determine whether his fellow archer Prince Prestimion had been treated properly during his imprisonment, and, finding the prince not in completely satisfactory condition, has removed him from the vaults so that he can receive the medical care he apparently needs.”

The placid way he announced all this left Svor rapt with astonishment and admiration. Dantirya Sambail’s complacent calmness seemed to have wrapped Korsibar in some spell of remarkable acquiescence to the thing that had happened in the vaults. Korsibar’s mouth opened and closed again, but no words came forth. Inner conflicts made themselves apparent in the roiling of his features and the knotting of his forehead; and yet he offered, for the moment, no response to this amazing news, even though it connoted virtual insurrection against his authority. As Korsibar remained silent, Farquanor seemed to come to the verge of speaking out, but Korsibar waved him to silence with a brusque imperious gesture.

Dantirya Sambail spoke on, smoothly, easily, into the vacuum of authority that Korsibar was leaving for him: “It is a delicate situation, lordship. What I propose, therefore, is that we agree at once on the compromise just put forth by Count Septach Melayn. There will be peace between the faction of the Coronal and the faction of Prince Prestimion henceforward, and no recriminations on either side for what has occurred; and I will take Prince Prestimion into my own custody immediately, and will make myself personally responsible for his good behavior.”

Sanibak-Thastimoon stirred uneasily now as though considering some action. Svor, looking toward him, made a small threatening witchcraft-sign in the air with his forefinger and thumb. The Su-Suheris, subsiding, became once more as still as a statue. Farquanor, though still glowering at the edge of eruption, held himself also in check. All eyes went to Korsibar.

And Korsibar, taking this all in frozen-faced, stared the wide-eyed glassy stare of one who is face-to-face with a deadly serpent that has already begun to weave in readiness to strike. He was adrift like a dreamer, unable to move or respond; and the dream was not a good one.

For here he was being mocked and defied most outrageously in his own throne-room by Dantirya Sambail. And yet it seemed he dared not show that he was offended. That struck Svor as incredible. Perhaps because Korsibar was still insecure in his own stolen crown and incapable this day of going up against the wishes of the crass and violent and dangerous Procurator of Ni-moya, whose power was so great and who was capable, when provoked, of any action at all. Whatever the reason, Korsibar seemed paralyzed in the face of this monstrous show of contempt for his power.

Svor held his breath in amazement. He could scarce believe that this was taking place, for all that Dantirya Sambail had told them concerning his intentions just an hour before they had entered here.

The Procurator continued in the same tranquil way:

“It is my intention, my lord, to withdraw from this place at once and once more undertake my journey on your behalf to Zimroel; and it is my plan to permit Count Septach Melayn and his companion Duke Svor to remove Prince Prestimion at once from the Castle and take him to Muldemar House, where he can recuperate from his recent hardships at leisure. After which I’m altogether sure that every attempt will be made to persuade the prince to undertake the acts of homage that are incumbent upon him as your lordship’s obedient subject, and that these attempts will prove successful.”

With a splendid flourish, Dantirya Sambail presented the numbed-looking Korsibar with a flurry of starbursts and a deep bow. “I bid you good day and a long life, my lord, and I offer all regards for the success of your reign.” And he turned to go from the room.

Korsibar, who still seemed unable to speak, made a small gesture of acceptance and assent with his left hand, and sank back in a defeated way against his royal seat. Svor, feeling a sweeping admiration for Dantirya Sambail’s consummate audacity, of a sort he had rarely felt before, looked at the Procurator in wonder and awe.

So it came to pass, then, that they walked out of Korsibar’s presence unscathed, Svor and Septach Melayn and Dantirya Sambail, and also that Prestimion had his freedom, by gift of his fierce-hearted kinsman the Procurator. But for this gift, they all knew, there would be a good price exacted.

And when they were safely through the Castle gates, and riding down to Muldemar once more, the Procurator said to the pale and haggard Prestimion, “We are now at war with Korsibar, cousin, would you not think? For surely he will not long tolerate what I’ve just done. Collect you an army, and I will do the same.”

3

After a week at Muldemar House, during which time he and his henchmen ate and drank like a herd of snuffling insatiable hab-bagogs rooting through a field of succulent crops just come to ripeness, Dantirya Sambail took himself off toward Alhanroel’s western coast to await armies that he had called up by swift messengers out of his native continent. “I pledge you an enormous force of fighting men at your disposal, such as has never been seen on this world,” the Procurator told Prestimion grandiloquently. “My own stout brothers Gaviad and Gavundiar will be your generals, and you’ll have lieutenants of the most fearsome valor.”

Prestimion was glad to see him go. He bore a grudging fascinated fondness for his strange and ruthless kinsman, and was grateful, of course, for his rescue, but had no great love for extended doses of his company: especially not now, when he felt so weak and weary, and had such a heavy making of plans to do. The Procurator would only be a drain on his already impaired vigor at a time like this.

The prince’s face was lean and gaunt from the weeks of his captivity, his eyeballs sunken in on their sockets, his skin a drab grayish tone, his golden hair dull and lifeless. He had acquired a tremor of the hands, and dared not approach his archery-course at all, out of fear that his great skill had rusted away in Lord Sangamor’s vaults. Most of the day, those first few days, he rested in his bedchamber like a sick old man, with the draperies of heavy blue velour pulled back so he could enjoy the beauty of the green hill beyond the curving window of faceted quartz, and so the beneficent rays of the sun flooding in might speed the replenishing of his greatly lessened resources.

His friends had been aghast at the sight of him when he first came forth from the vaults. Gialaurys was incoherent with fury. Svor’s fingers coiled about one another like anguished serpents. But now they were in Muldemar, and as ever, Septach Melayn bubbled over with optimism. “A little decent food in you, a few sips of wine each day, Prestimion—fresh air, the river, the sun—look, you begin to heal already, and you’re only newly free!—Were they starving you in there, is that it?”

Prestimion smiled wryly. “Starving would have been no worse, I think, than eating the stuff they gave me. Such slops I wouldn’t feed to mintuns scavenging in the streets! A thin sour soup of old cabbage it was, most of the time, with fragments of the Divine only knows what sort of tired meat swimming in it—pfaugh! And the light: that terrible throbbing light, Septach Melayn, hammering at me out of the walls every hour and every minute of every day and every night! That was the worst of it, far beyond the awful food. If I never see anything red again, it’ll be a hundred years too soon.”

“They say the unending light of the tunnels was put in those stones by some ancient magic now forgotten,” Svor observed. “And the magic that turns it off has been forgotten also.”

Prestimion shrugged. “Magic, science—who knows where the distinction lies? It is a dreadful thing, that light. It hits you hard as a fist. There is no hiding it. You close your eyes and still you see it behind your lids, and you feel it day and night. I’d have gone mad altogether but for the little green amulet of Thalnap Zelifor, which gave me some defense.” A bemused look came over him. “He told me how it was used. I would stroke the thing with my fingertip, in this fashion, every mealtime when they unshackled my hands. And as I did so I said secretly, inside my head, as though I were praying to the Divine: ‘Let my eyes be eased, let me have some rest.’ And after a fashion it worked, do you know? Bad as things were for me, I think they would have been even worse without my having done that. Though who or what I was praying to, I could not guess: not the Divine, surely.—What became of that little Vroon, anyway?”

“He’s here at Muldemar House,” said Septach Melayn.

“Here? How did that happen?”

“He was freed when you were, and in the confusion attached himself to us, and came along with us from the Castle.”

“Well,” said Prestimion, smiling, “there’s no harm in that, I suppose. I came to like him more than a little, in all that time while we were penned up facing each other on the walls of our tunnel.”

“You are a very tolerant and kindly man,” said Svor. “You find things to like in the most surprising people.”

“Even the vile Korsibar,” said Gialaurys with a furious grimace. “You continued to have good words for him even after he did you out of your throne. But not, I think, any longer.”

“No.” And red wrath flared up in Prestimion’s eyes. He had reached some turning point in that prison, that much was evident. “For a long while I thought of him as a decent simple man who was pushed onward in an evil course by villains and monsters; but I see now that a man who pays heed to monsters ultimately makes himself one also. Korsibar had no mercy on me, merely because I’d not grovel before him as he sat on his stolen throne. And I’ll have none on him when things are reversed. There will be a reckoning now, and a heavy one, for all that has happened.”

“Well, now! Well! So the sweet Prestimion we love is now the savage vengeful Prestimion who will do battle to take his rightful seat at the Castle,” said Septach Melayn. “I take this for the best of news. Plainly it was Korsibar’s most foolish day, out of a great many such, when he thrust you into that dungeon. For now it will be war.”

“It will be war now, yes,” Prestimion said.

He drew from his bedside table a coiled chart and spread it out on his knees facing them to show them the plan. It was the map of Alhanroel, done in a multitude of bright colors, with many a fancy scrolling ornament and curlicue. He tapped it at the place where Castle Mount was drawn in deep stark purple rising high above all else.

“We must isolate the Castle before we attack its false Coronal. This we will do both by words and by deeds. There will be a proclamation, first, in my name and in that of the present Lady of the Isle of Dreams, to the effect that Korsibar holds the Castle against all law and precedent, by dint of having worked a sorcery against his father Lord Confalume in the hour of Prankipin’s death, and that he is a false usurper and traitor against the will of the Divine, who must be cast down from the great height that he has illicitly made his own.”

“The present Lady of the Isle?” Svor said. “You mean Kunigarda, I suppose, and not Roxivail. But do you actually have her support, Prestimion?”

“I will. She’s come to me three times in dreams, these past four weeks, to tell me so. I’ll have a message on its way to her quickly, confirming that I’m free and intend to challenge Korsibar’s claim to be Coronal. And I will request a public statement from her, declaring that she recognizes me as Coronal Lord and has vowed never to give up her own place at the Isle to the illegally designated Roxivail, but only to my own mother once I am installed at the Castle. To which I think she will agree.”

And Septach Melayn: “This business of claiming that Korsibar worked magic against Confalume when he grabbed the crown—do you believe that, Prestimion? Or are you only saying it for the sake of impressing the credulous?”

“It makes no difference what I believe in the privacy of my heart. You know that the mass of the people give credence to sorcery. If I charge that Confalume was ensorcelled, that’ll help turn them against Korsibar, which is my goal. No one wants a Coronal who improperly got his crown by dint of witchcraft.”

“But it was by magic anyway,” said Gialaurys. “Oh, Prestimion, when will you believe the evidence that rises in mountains on all sides of you?”

Prestimion merely smiled. But it was a very wan smile.

Turning stubbornly to Septach Melayn, Gialaurys said, “You were there when it happened. Your own mind was clouded by the spell. Do you deny there was magic at work?”

“Something put a mist over my mind, that I freely admit. Whether it was magic or something else, I’m in no position to tell you.” A wicked twinkle entered Septach Melayn’s eyes. “My mind was clouded, Gialaurys. Since that was so, how could I know what was clouding it?”

Impatiently Prestimion said, tapping his chart again, “To continue. We proclaim the illegitimacy of Korsibar’s reign, and descend the Mount to begin its encirclement. I’ll announce myself as Coronal first in the city of Amblemorn, by the black marble monument that marks the old timberline, where the ancient conquest of the Mount first began: for we will be commencing a new conquest of the Mount in that place. In Amblemorn I’ll call for volunteers for my army. We’ll have a host of Muldemar men with us, well armed, in case there’s any trouble with local troops; but I think that Amblemorn will come over to us easily enough. From Amblemorn we proceed down the rest of the way to the foot of the Mount, at the place where the Glayge has its source. Then we move this way, to the west, going steadily rightward around the base of the Mount through each of the great foothill cities in its turn, Vilimong, Estotilaup, Simbilfant, Ghrav, and onward clear around the entire circuit.” He jabbed his finger again and again to the chart, calling off the names. “Arkilon. Pruiz. Pivrarch. Lontano. Da. And here we come to Hazen, Megenthorp, Bevel, Salimorgen, Demigon Glade, and finally Matrician, where good Duke Fengiraz will open his arms to us, and Gordal, and then we are back at the Glayge, below Amblemorn, with the road to the Castle opening before us. How many people live in all those foothill cities? Fifty million? More, I would think. They’ll flock to our banner: I know they will. And at the same time Dantirya Sambail will have come from Zimroel with his armies, and his warlike brothers Gaviad and Gaviundar, to join forces with us at the western base of the Mount. Meanwhile atop the Mount itself they will hear what is happening, and will they rally behind Korsibar against me? I think not. They’ll tell each other that Lord Prestimion has the mandate of the Divine, and that Lord Korsibar is a false Coronal; and they will leave his side in droves. Then we begin to ascend the Mount.”

He burst out suddenly then in a fit of coughing, and groped for the bowl at his bedside. Gialaurys handed it to him. Prestimion drank deeply, and took breath deep into his lungs, and closed his eyes a moment to regain his poise.

“There. What do you think, my friends?”

“I think you should have more rest,” said Svor.

“Yes, and then? The plan?”

“Is no way it can fail,” said Septach Melayn.

“Agreed,” Gialaurys said. “The Divine is on our side.”

“Indeed,” said Svor when the others looked toward him. But there was just the smallest hitch of hesitation in his response. And he said then, “First you should rest, Prestimion, and restore yourself. Then we’ll march forth and see how it fares for us in this war.”

How it fared was cheering enough at first. At Amblemorn, where Prestimion and his family had always been much beloved, there was a delegation to greet him with warm enthusiasm when he came down the road from Dundilmir. “Prestimion!” they cried, with hands upthrust in starbursts. “Lord Prestimion! Long live Lord Prestimion!” That was the first time any of the citizenry had called him that and made the starburst, and, smiling, he accepted the homage with modesty and confidence.

The banners of Korsibar that had been all over Amblemorn at Prestimion’s last visit were gone now, and they had Prestimion banners up instead in the same royal colors of green and gold. No doubt these were the ones they had planned to hoist when Prankipin died, and had hurriedly stored away when the throne so surprisingly went to Korsibar. Prestimion stood by the black stone shaft of the timberline monument and solemnly pledged himself to restore the world to its proper state, and they cried out his name again and vowed to support his claim. And when he moved on down the Mount and made his westward turn to the foothill city of Vilimong with a great horde of men of Muldemar and some from Amblemorn at his back, everything was much the same, Vilimong hailing him gladly as the true Coronal and swelling his army by another regiment of fighters.

It was at Estotilaup, the next city beyond Vilimong at the foot of the Mount, that trouble first occurred.

Estotilaup was Confalume’s ancestral city, and they felt a fierce pride in him there, which had carried over to his son Korsibar. It was a city of tall narrow white towers with pointed tops of red tile, ringed around by a formidable high gate of black iron palisades; and when Prestimion arrived before it, the gate stood ajar, but not by much, and was blocked to him by fifty men in the uniform of the municipal proctors who stood with folded arms outside it. A larger party of somber-faced armed troops was visible behind them, just within the palisade.

Duke Svor went forward and said, “This is the Coronal Lord Prestimion, who seeks entrance to your city and a meeting with your mayor.”

“The Coronal Lord is Lord Korsibar,” the chief of proctors replied, peering unhappily at the multitudes of armed men who stood behind Svor on the plain, “and we know Prestimion only as a prince of one of the cities of the Mount. If he has come here to subvert the throne, he will not be admitted.”

Svor carried this news to Prestimion, who responded that they might well not care to recognize him as Coronal here, but even so they had no right to refuse entry to their city to the Prince of Muldemar. “Tell them that,” said Prestimion.

“And let them see that we’ll force entry if entry is denied us,” said Septach Melayn, with more than a little vigor.

He raised his arm as though to signal to the frontmost detachment of Prestimion’s troops that they should move closer to the gate. But Prestimion caught him midway between wrist and elbow and drew the arm downward. “No,” he said sharply. “We’ll force nothing here, not this soon. There’s time to draw blood later, if we must; but I have no yearning to make war on innocent uncomprehending folk at Estotilaup gates.”

“This is foolishness, my lord,” said Septach Melayn.

“You call me ‘my lord,’ and you call me a fool also, all in the same breath?”

“Indeed. For you are my Coronal, and I am pledged to you to the death,” the long-legged swordsman answered him. “But for all that you are a fool, if you think you can back away from conflict here, and force it at your convenience another day. Show these people of Estotilaup here and now that you are their king, who will not be turned away at their gate.”

“I am with Septach Melayn on this,” said Gialaurys.

“You both will quarrel with me?”

“When you are wrong, yes,” said Gialaurys. “And here you are most gravely wrong.”

“Well,” said Prestimion, and laughed. “If this is my beginning at kingship, when I am bearded and defied by my own dearest companions, it will be a rocky reign.” And to Svor he said, “Tell them that we will have entry, and no two ways about it.” And instructed Septach Melayn to stand behind Svor with a squadron of some two hundred men, but to refrain from launching any hostile action unless attacked.

He himself withdrew to one side and waited.

What happened then was unclear even to those who were in the thickest of it. Prestimion, standing apart, saw Svor in hot negotiation with the chief of proctors, the two men face-to-face and gesturing; and then suddenly there was an angry flurry of some sort, though hard to say where it began. The Estotilaup troops came rushing forward among the proctors, and Septach Melayn’s men charged toward the gate also in one and the same instant. Swords flashed and there was the thrusting of spears and here and there the bright flaring red beams of those unreliable but deadly weapons, energy-throwers. Prestimion saw Septach Melayn towering over all the rest, wielding his rapier in a blaze of furious activity, the blade flashing with such rapidity the eye could scarce follow it, and drawing blood with every thrust, while with the other hand he plucked little Duke Svor up high, out of the midst of the melee. Several soldiers of each force were down with flowing wounds on the field. A man of Estotilaup staggered out of the brawl, staring uncomprehendingly at the red stump of his arm.

Prestimion began to lunge forward, heading for the gate. But he had taken no more than three steps before Gialaurys caught him about the chest and held him back.

“My lord? Where are you going?”

“This has to be stopped, Gialaurys.”

“Then tell me so, and I will stop it. You are not to be put at risk here, my lord.” He released Prestimion and ran in thunderous steps to the gate, where he forced his way into the muddled throng and came to Septach Melayn’s side. Prestimion saw them conferring in the midst of the battle. The confusion continued another few moments more, until the order to withdraw had reached all of Prestimion’s men. Then, suddenly, the clangor and shouting ceased; the Estotilaup men went rushing back within their gate and slammed it shut, and Gialaurys and Septach Melayn returned at the head of Prestimion’s troops. Svor was huddled between them, looking pale and wan, for he was not built to a warrior’s scale and lacked all appetite for bloodshed.

“They will not admit us except we make them do it,” Svor reported.

“On this they are resolved. Men have died already today to keep us out of this place, and many more will perish on both sides, I think, if we make a further attempt.”

“Then we will give it over for now,” said Prestimion, with a sharp glare of warning meant for Septach Melayn. “The next time we come here, they will roll out a precious carpet of Makroposopos for me to tread upon as I enter. But for now I want no warfare made against my own people, is that clear? We will win their acceptance by the force of our righteousness, or else not at all.” And he gave orders to draw back and march on to Simbilfant, which was the next city in their circuit of the Mount. Two men of their company had been killed, one of Muldemar and one of Amblemorn, and four wounded, in the skirmish; of the men of Estotilaup there were at least five seen dead or dying on the field.

“This troubles me,” said Gialaurys quietly to Septach Melayn as they returned to their floaters. “Can it be that he has no stomach for battle?” And Septach Melayn frowned and nodded, and replied that he had the same concern.

But Svor had overheard, and he laughed and said, “Him? Is a fighter, no doubting it! And will slash and slaughter with the best of you, when the time comes. Is not yet the time, is what he thinks. Is not fully reconciled within his soul either, to the knowledge that he will reach the throne only by sailing on a river of blood.”

“Just as I say,” replied Gialaurys. “No love for battle.”

“No love for it, but a good willingness, when battle’s the only way,” Svor said. “Wait and see. I know the man at least as well as you. When battle’s the only way, even I will have a sword in my hand.”

“You?” cried Septach Melayn with a great guffaw.

“You will instruct me,” said Svor solemnly.

Matters went better for them at Simbilfant of the famous vanishing lake, which was a busy mercantile city through which much wine of Muldemar traditionally was shipped and held Prestimion in high favor. Word had already reached there of Prestimion’s claim to the crown, and the hegemon of the town, which was what their mayor was called, had a great banquet waiting for him, and green-and-gold banners everywhere, and two thousand men in arms ready to join his forces, with the promise of many more afterward. And, just as though he were a visiting Coronal, they staged a disappearance of the vanishing lake for him, rolling aside the great boulders that blocked the volcanic sluices beneath it so that the whole lake seemed to go gurgling down into the depths of the planet, leaving a bare gaping crater of sulfurous yellow rock ringed around with white granite ridges, only to come roaring back with tremendous force an hour later.

“This is like making a grand processional,” said Prestimion, “and here I am not even crowned yet.”

The reception was friendly also at nearby Ghrav, though not quite so warm or eager—it was plain that the mayor felt himself caught between Prestimion and Korsibar as between the two grinding-stones of a mill, and did not care for it. But he was hospitable enough, and, in a cautious way, sympathetic to Prestimion’s claim. Then they moved along toward Arkilon, where four million people clustered in a wide green valley flanked by low, wooded hills. There was a notable university there; it was a city of unworldly scholars and archivists and book-publishers, and there was no reason to expect much in the way of opposition there. But as they approached it under the brightness of a hot autumn sun, the sharp-eyed Septach Melayn pointed to the hilltop on the side closest to the Mount, and all up and down that hillside were troops of the Coronal’s force, like a horde of ants spilling everywhere over the sloping contours.

“They are ten men for every one of ours, I would hazard,” said Septach Melayn. “The whole western garrison is here, and some men from other districts too, it would seem. And they hold the high ground. Are we prepared for this?”

“Is Korsibar?” Gialaurys asked. “He’s brandishing a fist at us with this army. But will he do anything more than brandish?”

“Send forth a messenger,” said Prestimion, looking soberly up at that huge hilltop force. “Call him forth. We’ll have a parley.”

A herald duly went forth, and by twilight time riders came down from the hill to meet with Prestimion at an agreed point midway between the two armies. But Korsibar was not among them. The two chief lords who appeared were Navigorn of Hoikmar, in a grand and formidable warlike costume of stiff and glossy black leather tipped with scarlet plumes, and Kanteverel of Bailemoona, looking rather less belligerent in a loose flowing tunic of orange and yellow stripes, fastened about the waist with an ornate golden chain. Prestimion was surprised and in no way pleased to see the easygoing good-natured Kanteverel here at the head of Korsibar’s garrison-force. The round smooth face of the Duke of Bailemoona seemed strangely bleak now, with none of its customary good humor.

“Where is Korsibar?” Prestimion said at once.

Stonily Navigorn replied, looking down at Prestimion from his considerable height, “Lord Korsibar is at the Castle, where he belongs. He charges us bring you back with us so that you can defend your recent actions before him.”

“And what actions are those, pray tell?”

It was Kanteverel who replied, speaking calmly as always, but not showing now the warm easy smile that was his hallmark, “You know what they are, Prestimion. You can’t run all over the foothill towns proclaiming yourself Coronal and levying troops without getting Korsibar’s attention, you know. What do you think you’re up to, anyway?”

“Korsibar knows that already. I don’t recognize him as Coronal, and I offer myself before all the world as the legitimate holder of the throne.”

“For the love of the Lady, be reasonable, Prestimion!” Kanteverel said, letting a flicker of his old cajoling smile show. “Tour position’s absurd. No one ever named you king. However Korsibar may have come to the crown, there’s no question he’s Coronal now, which everyone concedes.” And Navigorn said, speaking over Kanteverel with a haughty crackle in his voice, “You are Prince of Muldemar, Prestimion, and nothing more, and never will be more. Lord Korsibar has the blessing of the Pontifex Confalume, who confirmed him in his kingship at the Labyrinth according to all the ancient laws.”

“Confalume’s his father. How does that fit with the ancient laws? And in any case Confalume doesn’t know what he’s doing. Korsibar’s had his conjurers wrap a mass of spells around Confalume’s mind that make him into a doddering senile idiot.”

That drew laughter from Kanteverel. “You, Prestimion, telling us that this has all been achieved by sorcery? Next we’ll hear you’ve hired a staff of mages yourself!”

“Enough. I have business in Arkilon,” Prestimion said coolly. He glanced toward the great army on the hill. “Do you mean to prevent me?”

“You have business at the Castle,” said Navigorn. He spoke firmly enough, though his look was an uneasy one, as though he disliked this situation and regretted the collision that both factions knew was coming. “When you were set free at Dantirya Sambail’s request, it was under his pledge of your good behavior, for which he made himself personally responsible. Now the Procurator is gone to Ni-moya, we hear; and your good behavior, it seems, consists of raising armies to bring civil war in the world. Your freedom is revoked, Prestimion. I order you in Lord Korsibar’s name to come with us at once.”

There was a moment of uncertain silence. Prestimion had been accompanied to the meeting only by Septach Melayn, Svor, Gialaurys, and five men-at-arms. With Navigorn and Kanteverel were the lords Sibellor of Banglecode and Malarich Merobaudes, and five men-at-arms also. The men of the two groups shifted about warily. Was there to be a scuffle right here on the field of parley? There had never been anything but friendship among them; but where was that friendship now? Prestimion stared levelly at Navigorn, whose dark face was a stony mask, and then threw a quick glance at Septach Melayn, who smiled and rested his hand on the hilt of his sword.

Prestimion wondered whether Navigorn might indeed have some wild idea of trying to seize him here. It would be a fool’s act, if so. The advantage, if it came to that, lay with him. His companions at the parley were the stronger; his troops, if he needed them, were not far away.

“I have no intention of going with you,” said Prestimion after a little. “You knew that when you came out here. Let’s waste no more breath on these formalities, Navigorn. We’ll need it for what is to follow.”

“And what is that?” Navigorn asked.

“How can I say? I tell you only that Lord Korsibar is not Lord Korsibar to me, but only Prince Korsibar, and I reject his authority over me. I would like now to end this meeting.”

“As you wish,” said Navigorn bleakly, and made no move to apprehend him as Prestimion turned to return to his own lines.

As they walked away, Prestimion said to Septach Melayn, “This is not going to be quite like a grand processional after all, is it? We will have the war, it seems, sooner than we bargained for.”

“Sooner than Korsibar bargains for either,” Gialaurys said. “If Navigorn and Kanteverel are the best generals he can find at short notice, we’ll beat them into surrender this very day.”

“Kanteverel’s here only to wheedle,” said Svor. “Navigorn’s the general, and he’s the one will call the tune, if there’s to be a battle today.”

“What is the plan?” Septach Melayn asked.

“We continue on to Arkilon,” said Prestimion. “They’ll have to come down the hill to stop us. If they do, we make them regret that they tried.”

4

Lord Korsibar was in his great bath of alabaster and chalcedony, disporting himself in the warm bubbling water with his sister’s handmaiden, the red-haired Aliseeva of the milky skin, when word was brought to him that Count Farquanor was waiting outside with important news. There had been a military engagement at Arkilon, it seemed, and Farquanor had had word from the field.

“I will be back quickly,” Korsibar told the girl. He robed himself and went out into the antechamber, where mosaic sea-dragons were inscribed on the white-tiled walls in many fine bits of blue and green and red glass, and saw at once from the look of smugness on little Farquanor’s lean and wolfish face that the news must be good.

“Well?” he said at once. “Is Prestimion taken?”

“Escaped into the open country, my lord. Navigorn was too merciful, I think. But the rebel force has suffered great losses and is in severe retreat.”

“Septach Melayn dead, at least? Gialaurys?”

Farquanor said, with apology in his voice, “None of those, lordship, nor Svor either. But a multitude of casualties for them—I have some names, but the only one I know is that of Gardomir of Amblemorn—and the back of the resistance broken. The war is over in its very first encounter, it would seem.”

’Tell me,” said Korsibar.

Farquanor ran his hand down the long sharp blade of his nose that sprang so startlingly from his brow. “Here is the valley of Arkilon,” he said, drawing pictures in the air. “The city, here. The Vormisdas hill, where our troops are situated, here. Prestimion over here on the plain, with a raggle-taggle army that he has put together out of Amblemorn and Vilimong and some other places, and a bunch of wine-makers from Muldemar at the center of it. There is a parley; Navigorn delivers the message; Prestimion defies it, as we all expected. And then—”

Prestimion, he said, having turned his back on Navigorn after the parley, had attempted to continue his march through the flatlands toward Arkilon. Navigorn had brought his army quickly down from its hilltop position, a battalion of small floaters at the center that were equipped with low-caliber energy-throwers, flanked by two squadrons of mounted spearsmen, and the mass of the infantry held back to the rear. Prestimion had no cavalry at all, and his troops were more of a casual aggregation than a trained army; the best he could do was give an order to scatter and surround, so that there would be no center for Navigorn’s floaters to attack, and try to throw Navigorn’s men into confusion by coming upon them from every side at once.

But that was of no avail. The early ferocity of Prestimion’s onslaught took Navigorn by surprise, but Navigorn’s men were better armed and better skilled, and very much more numerous; and after a few difficult moments they fought the rebel forces off with great success. The floaters held their formation, the spearsmen prevented any serious incursion into their ranks by the rebels, and even before the royal infantrymen had had a chance to reach the field, the tide of the battle had become clear and Prestimion’s men were in unruly retreat, fleeing helter-skelter, some toward Arkilon and others back in the direction of Ghrav and some off in a third direction entirely.

“But Prestimion and his three minions got safely away?” Korsibar asked when Farquanor paused.

“Alas, yes. Navigorn had given orders that none of them be harmed, only captured. It was too kind of him, lordship. Had someone like my brother Farholt had charge of the day, I think we’d have seen a different result. Surely Farholt would—”

“Spare me the advertisement of your brother’s virtues,” said Korsibar unsmilingly. “Capturing them would have been sufficient. But they failed even at that?”

“They had Septach Melayn held in close quarters in the middle of the field for a time, with Hosmar Varang, the captain of the spearsmen, giving him great menace, and Earl Alexid of Strave, on foot, penning him up from the other side with two other men.”

“But he got away even so?”

“He cut Hosmar Varang down from his mount and gave him a deep slice near the armpit that will take a year to repair, and killed Alexid outright and slashed the other two so that they were left counting their fingers and hard pressed to find ten between them. And—entirely untouched, himself—leaped upon Hosmar Varang’s mount, snatching up the loathsome little mongrel Duke Svor whom he loves like a baby, and off they went at high speed into the woods, seeing that the battle was lost and there was no sense in remaining.”

“Four of them against his one, and he prevails? The man is in league with demons. No, he is a demon himself! And Alexid dead?” Korsibar grew more somber at that. He had hunted with Alexid of Strave beside him many times, in the jungles of the south and on the bare purple slopes of the northern mountains: a lean restless man, quick and capable with a javelin. This was suddenly very real, to hear Alexid had perished. “What other losses did we suffer, of men I would know?” Korsibar asked; but then, seeing Farquanor unfolding what seemed to be a considerable list, hastily waved him into silence. “Prestimion, you say, is fled into Arkilon?”

“Into the forest to the west of it. They are all four of them in there, I think, with the other survivors, and thought to be moving farther westward yet.”

“Later today,” said Korsibar, “I will issue a proclamation naming Prestimion as traitor to the realm, with a price of three thousand royals to anyone who brings him in alive.”

“Dead or alive,” amended Farquanor immediately, with a ferocious gleam coming into his cool gray eyes.

“Has it come to that already?” Korsibar asked, pensive a moment. “Yes. Yes, I suppose it has. Well, then. Five thousand silver royals, dead or alive, for Prestimion, and three thousand for any of the other three. Send word to Navigorn that he’s to undertake close pursuit. And Farholt will have a second army, to chase Prestimion up the other side of the world if need be, and we’ll catch him between. This will all be over in another ten days, I think.”

“The Divine favors our cause, lordship,” said Farquanor in his oiliest tone. He made the starburst and withdrew, leaving Korsibar free to return to the bathchamber.

“Pleasing news?” asked red-haired Aliseeva, peering winsomely over the side of the tub.

“It might have been better,” Korsibar said. “But yes: yes. Pleasing news.”

From the royal chamber Count Farquanor made his way at once to the apartments of the Lady Thismet. She had asked him not long before to keep her apprised of news of the rebellion; and this first report of victory would serve as good pretext for other matters he hoped to put before her.

The Lady Melithyrrh admitted him. Thismet was in her nine-sided drawing room of the ice-green jade walls, with an array of golden rings set with various precious stones laid out before her on a low table as though she were choosing between them for the evening’s wear; and she was richly dressed in a dark hooded gown of green velvet hanging in heavy folds, with a high-waisted close bodice and close-fitting sleeves with great puffed wings at her wrists. But her lovely face was taut and drawn, as it so often was these days, with a bitter clenched set to her delicate jaw, and Farquanor saw the glitter of a perpetual anger shining in her eyes. What was it that angered her so?

He said, after a bow, “Navigorn and Kanteverel have clashed with Prestimion before Arkilon, lady. Prestimion’s forces are utterly ruined and your brother’s high cause has triumphed.”

Briefly Thismet’s nostrils flared with excitement and color rose in her face.

“And Prestimion? What of him?” she asked quickly, tensely.

“It was the first thing your royal brother wanted to hear from me too. And the answer is that he is escaped, he is. Off into the forest with Septach Melayn and the rest of that crew, more’s the pity. But his army is dispersed, and the rebellion, I think, at its end even in its beginning.”

She grew quickly calm again, lips curling under, color fading to her usual pallor. “Is it,” she said, without any questioning inflection to her tone. And looked at him blankly for a moment, and turned her attention back to her rings, as though she had no further interest in speaking with him.

But since she had not actually dismissed him, he continued to stand before her, and after a little while said, “I thought the news of our victory would please you, lady.”

“And so it does.” Tonelessly, once again, as though she was speaking in her sleep. “Many men are dead, I suppose, and blood satisfactorily distributed all over the field? Yes, this is very pleasing to me, Farquanor. I do so love to hear of the shedding of blood.”

That was very strange of her. But she had been nothing but strange since this bleak mood had come upon her these many weeks back. Well, then, he thought, enough of battle news. There was the other subject to deal with.

He counted off a few numbers in his mind, drew a deep breath and said, “Thismet, may I speak to you as a friend? For I think we have been friends, you and I.”

She looked up, amazed. “You call me Thismet? I am the Coronal’s sister!”

“You were another Coronal’s daughter, once, and I called you Thismet then, sometimes.”

“When we were children perhaps. What is this, Farquanor? You presume a great deal of a sudden.”

“I mean no offense, lady. I mean only to help you, if I can.”

’To help me?”

The musculature along the width of Farquanor’s shoulders tightened into a rigid iron constriction. Now he must make the leap, or forever despise himself. “It seems to me,” he said, weighing every word and judging its probable impact with all the craft at his command, “that you may have fallen somewhat out of favor in recent months with the Lord Korsibar your brother. Forgive me if I am in error here: but I am not the least observant man in this Castle, and to my way of thinking I see an estrangement lately between you and him.”

Thismet’s eyes flicked upward in a wary glance.

“And if there is?” she asked. “I don’t say that there is, but if it should be so, what then?”

Piously Farquanor said, “It would be a matter for great regret, royal brother and royal sister at odds with each other. And—forgive me, lady, if I speak too close to your soul—I think that something like that must be the case, for I no longer see you at the Coronal’s side at formal functions, nor does he smile when he speaks with you in public, nor do you ever smile these days, but hold yourself always tense and grim. It has been that way with you for more than one season now.”

She looked away, toying with her rings again. In a dull-toned voice she said, “And if the Coronal and I have had some small disagreement, what is that to you, Farquanor?”

“You know how I labored at your side to make Lord Korsibar what he is today. It made me feel a great closeness to the two of you, as I schemed and connived at your behest to nudge him toward the throne. If the result of all my scheming has been only to drive a wedge between brother and sister, the sorrow is on me for it. But I have a solution to propose, lady.”

“Do you?” she said distantly.

It was the moment to make the great attempt. How many times he had rehearsed this in his mind, he could not count. But now at last the words came streaming forth from him.

“If you were to marry me, lady, that could serve to bind up the breach that has opened between you and Lord Korsibar.”

She had put five rings into the palm of her hand, a ruby one and an emerald and a sapphire and one of many-faceted diamond and one of golden-green chrysoprase; and at Farquanor’s words she jerked so convulsively that the rings went clattering forth in a spill of brilliance to the floor.

“Marry you?”

There was no swerving from this now. He was resolved to hold firmly to his course.

“You are without a consort. It is widely said in the Castle that this is much to be regretted, considering your grace and beauty and high birth. And also it is said that of late you seem adrift, all moorings severed, no destination in view and no way of reaching any, now that so much power has devolved upon your brother and you yourself are left in no fixed position. But how can a woman without a husband, even the Coronal’s sister, find a proper place in the court? A significant marriage is the answer. I offer myself to you.”

She seemed stunned. But he had expected that. This was coming upon her without the slightest preparation. He waited, neither smiling nor scowling, watching the unreadable play of turbulent emotions come and go on her face, seeing the color rise there, the changing glintings of her eyes.

After a time she said, “Do you really have such an elevated opinion of yourself, Farquanor? You think that by marrying you I would raise my status at the court?”

“I leave my ancient royal ancestry out of consideration here. But since you speak so rarely with your brother these days, perhaps you are unaware that I am soon to be made High Counsellor, once old Oljebbin has reconciled himself to the retirement that is being thrust upon him.”

“You have my warmest congratulation.”

“The High Counsellor—and his wife—are second only to the Coronal in the social order of the Castle. Furthermore, as your brother’s most intimate adviser, I’d be in an excellent position to mediate whatever dispute it is that has damaged the affection that should prevail between you. But there’s more to it than that: the High Counsellor is in the plain line of succession to the throne. If Confalume were to die, I might well be named Coronal when Korsibar went to the Labyrinth; which would greatly enhance your own position, not merely the Coronal’s sister now, but the Coronal’s own wife—”

Thismet gave him a disbelieving stare. “This has gone on long enough,” she said, bending now to scoop up her fallen rings with one angry sweep of her hand. Then, looking up fiercely at him, she said, “Successor to my brother? I would not have you even if you were proclaimed successor to the Divine.”

Farquanor gasped as though he had been struck.

“Lady—” he said. “Lady—” And his voice trailed off into inaudibility.

In a tone of savage mockery she said, “Nothing has so amazed me as this present conversation since I was a child and was told of the method by which children are conceived. Marry you? You? How could you have imagined such a thing! And why would I accept? Are we in any way a fitting couple? Do you in truth see yourself as a match for me? How could you possibly be? You’re such a small man, Farquanor!”

He drew himself up as tall as he could. “Not of a size with your brother, say, or Navigorn, or Mandrykarn. But I am no dwarf either, lady. We would look well together, you and I. I remind you that you are not greatly large yourself. You come barely shoulder-high to me, I would say.”

“Do you think I’m speaking of height?” she said. “Well, then, an idiot as well.” She shook her hand in the air at him. “Go. I beg you, go. Quickly, now. I tell you: go. Before you make me say something truly cruel.”

Korsibar was in his private study, an hour later when the Lady Thismet came to him. It was the first meeting she had had alone with him in a very long while, not since she had shared with him the horoscope that Thalnap Zelifor had prepared for her. They had not spoken of that matter since. Plainly he was not going to yield to her request without a battle, and with Prestimion loose in the land and speaking of rebellion, she hesitated to tax him again with the matter just now. But it had not left her mind.

As she entered, he seemed uncertain and ill at ease, as though he feared she had come here to begin some new discussion of her having a throne of her own. Thismet suspected he would have preferred to forbid her his presence entirely, but did not care to impose so substantial a prohibition on his own sister. And in any case it was trouble of a different sort that she planned to make for him today.

He had some maps beside him, and a stack of official reports.

“News from the battlefield?” she asked. “Details of the great victory?”

“You’ve heard, then?”

“Count Farquanor was kind enough to bring me some word of it just now.”

“We’ll have Prestimion back here in chains by Seaday next, is my guess. And then a course of instruction in proper behavior will begin for him that he’ll hew to for the rest of his life.”

He returned to his scrutiny of his charts. She said, after watching him for a moment with displeasure, “Attend to me, Korsibar.”

’What is it, sister?” Without looking up. “I hope you haven’t chosen this moment to renew your demand for—”

“No, nothing to do with that. I want you to dismiss Farquanor and banish him from the Castle.”

Now he did look up indeed, and stared at her in complete astonishment.

“You are ever full of surprises, sister. You want me to dismiss—”

“Farquanor. Yes. That’s what I said, to dismiss him. He’s not deserving of any place in this court.”

Korsibar seemed to grope for words a moment.

“Not deserving of a place?” he said finally. “On the contrary, Thismet. Farquanor’s not a lovable man, but very useful, and I mean to use him. Oljebbin’s finally agreed to step down at the turn of the year, and Farquanor will be High Counsellor. I owe him that much, and ’twill shut him up, to have the thing he’s dreamed of so long.”

“Not shut him up enough,” said Thismet. “He’s just been to see me, Korsibar. Has asked me to marry him.”

“What?” Korsibar blinked and smiled as though in nothing more than mild surprise; and then, as he weighed her words again and the impact of them sank in, the smile turned to laughter, and the laughter to great heavy racking guffaws and a slapping of his thigh until he could get himself under control once again. “Marry you?” he said at last. “Well, well, well: bold little Farquanor! Who’d have thought him capable of it?”

“The man’s a snake. I never want to see his narrow little face again. You refuse me many things, Korsibar, but don’t refuse me this one: send him from the Castle.”

“Ah, no, sister, no, no! It would not do.”

“No?” she said.

“Farquanor is very valuable to me. He’s overreached himself here perhaps: should certainly have discussed this thing with me, at least, before he went sniffing off to you. It is a bold request, I agree. A match beyond his level perhaps. But he’s a shrewd and crafty counsellor. I couldn’t do without him, especially now, with Prestimion still at large out there, perhaps planning some new rampage now that he’s slipped away from Navigorn. I need a man like Farquanor, full of spite and mischief, to lay my plans for me: can’t only have great noble-souled clods around when you’re king, don’t you see?—You could do worse, in any case, than to marry him.”

“I would sooner marry some Liiman peddling sausages on the streets.”

“Oh. Oh. The flashing Thismet eye! The bared teeth! Well, then, reject him, sister, if that’s how you feel about him. By no means would I force him on you.”

“Do you think I haven’t rejected him already? But I want you to get him forever out of my sight.”

Korsibar pressed his fingertips against his temples. “I’ve explained to you how valuable he is to me. If you like, I’ll rebuke him, yes, tell him to put the idea entirely out of his mind forever, send him to you to crawl and snivel a little by way of apologizing for his impudence. But I won’t get rid of him. And you should marry, anyway. It’s time for it, and even a little past the time perhaps. Marry Navigorn, for example. Fine and noble and decent, that one.”

“I’m not interested in marrying anyone.” Thismet altered the tone of her voice, deepening it, putting somewhat of an edge on it. “You know what I want, Korsibar.”

She saw him quail. But she pushed onward all the same. If he would not satisfy her in the one matter, she would harry him on the other.

“Give me a crown,” she said. “Make me Coronal in joint reign with you.”

“That thing again?” He clamped his lips and his face grew dark with anger. “You know that that can never be.”

“A simple decree—as easily as you took the crown the day Prankipin died, you could—”

“No. Never, Thismet. Never. Never!” Korsibar gave her a long, deadly furious look, and then he sprang from his seat and paced in agitation before her. He was bubbling with rage. “By the Divine, sister, don’t plague me with this business of a crown again, or I tell you I’ll marry you to little Farquanor myself! I’ll put your hand in his and proclaim you man and wife before all the world, and if he has to strap you down to have his consummation of you, it’ll be no grief to me. This is a solemn pledge, Thismet. One more word about this lunacy of your being Coronal and you are Farquanor’s bride!”

She stared at him, horror-stricken.

He was silent a time. She saw the anger gradually subsiding in him, but his face now was stony. “Listen closely to me,” Korsibar said, more calmly now. “There is a rebellion in the land against my reign. I must destroy Prestimion, which I will do, which in fact I am well on my way to doing. When that’s done, I’ll stand unchallenged here as Coronal of Majipoor, and when I come fully into my kingship, it will be mine, and mine alone. Do you understand that, Thismet? I will not go before the world and say that I am building another throne at this Castle and that a woman will occupy it as my equal. For you to ask to be joint Coronal is as bizarre as for Farquanor to ask for you in marriage. He will not be your husband unless by your obstinacy you make me give you to him; and you will not be Coronal, not under any circumstances whatever. That is my final word on the subject. Final. And if you will excuse me now, sister, the good Sanibak-Thastimoon waits outside to see me on a matter of high importance, and I would not delay him any longer—”

5

“Win the hour of his defeat by Arkilon plain, the skies opened on i Prestimion and pelted him with one of the heavy rains of autumn L that were so common in these parts. So he rode long and hard under a driving deluge far into the night, accompanied by only a few dozen of his men; and he was soaked to the bone and in a sorry frame of mind indeed when he reached, finally, the forest of Moorwath by Arkilon’s western flank. This was the spot he and Septach Melayn had chosen as their gathering-place should the battle at Arkilon go badly for them. In his pre-battle mood of optimism he had never truly foreseen an outcome that might cause him to be spending this night beneath the tall and fat-trunked vakumba-trees of Moorwath; but here he was, lame and wet and weary in the darkness.

“There is somewhat more to making war, it seems,” he said sorrowfully to his aide-de-camp Nilgir Sumanand, “than merely proclaiming the righteousness of one’s cause.”

“It was only the first skirmish, my lord,” replied Nilgir Sumanand in a quiet tactful way. “There will be many more encounters on the field for us, and happier ones, before the task is done.”

Prestimion said dourly, “But look how badly we’re damaged already! Where’s Gialaurys? And Septach Melayn—I had a glimpse of him far across the field, in the midst of a pack of enemies. By the Divine, if Septach Melayn has fallen—”

“He is safe somewhere nearby in the forest, of that I’m certain, and will find us before long. The man’s not yet born who can lay a weapon to him, my lord.”

It was welcome reassurance. But Prestimion brushed it aside and snapped, with more anger in his voice than he would have preferred to display, “Enough of calling me ‘my lord’! It galls me to hear the phrase. Some Coronal am I, sitting here in the rain under these dripping vakumbas!” And then, quickly and in a softer tone, for he was abashed at having chafed this good loyal man with such harshness: “I’ve had to swallow down many an unpalatable thing, haven’t I, Nilgir Sumanand, since my fortunes changed? This was surely not the plan I charted for myself when I first set out to win greatness in the world.”

The rain seemed to be ending now. Through the huge heavy gray leaves overhead, leathery-skinned on their upper sides and furry below, he saw faint white shafts of moonlight peeping through. But the night was cold and the ground was sodden, and his thigh throbbed mercilessly; he had taken a sudden blow across the fleshiest part of it in one wild melee, one of Navigorn’s men galloping past and slashing him with a riding-crop as he went. Better that than the blade of a sword, Prestimion told himself, yet he was limping all the same.

“Do we have glowfloats with us?” he asked Nilgir Sumanand. “Tie them to these trees, if we do. They’ll guide others of our people toward us in the night who might be wandering hereabouts.”

“And if they guide Navigorn to us instead, excellence?”

“It would be a very rash general who led his troops into a dark forest like this by night, not knowing what sort of ambush is waiting for him. No, Navigorn and his men are getting grandly drunk in Arkilon just now. Put up some glowfloats, Nilgir Sumanand.” And soon there were globes of reddish light hanging from the lowest branches of the nearby trees; and in a little while, just as Prestimion had hoped, the lights began to draw the straggling fragments of his army, by twos and threes at first, or sometimes as many as a dozen.

It was midnight when Gialaurys appeared. He came alone. His sleeve was in tatters and a raw bloody cut showed through. His mood was so grim that even Prestimion hesitated to speak with him; shrugging off an offer to bind his wound, Gialaurys sat down by himself and took from his torn jacket the green fruit of a vakumba, one that he must have pulled from a low-lying branch or even picked off the ground, and began to gnaw and rip at it in a snarling frightful way, cramming the flesh of it into his mouth as though he were no more than a beast of the fields.

A little while after, Kaymuin Rettra of Amblemorn arrived, with a detachment of Skandars and some human men of his city, and then Nemeron Dalk from Vilimong, with fifty more, and almost on their heels was Count Ofmar of Ghrav, followed by many of his people, and some Simbilfant folk, and the three sons of the vineyard overseer Rufiel Kisimir, leading a whole host of men of Muldemar, who surrounded Prestimion with loud cries of joy. And the noise of all these as they gathered in the one encampment under the fat vakumba-trees brought others, on through the night. So the army was not as utterly destroyed as Prestimion had feared, and he took some heart from that. There was scarcely anyone who had not taken some injury in the battle, and some of those serious. But all of them came before Prestimion, even the wounded ones, and earnestly vowed to go on fighting in his cause until the end.

Of Septach Melayn and Svor, though, there was no sign.

Toward morning Prestimion slept a little. Dawn was slow coming in this latitude, for Castle Mount lay straight eastward of here, and the rising sun had to climb above that thirty-mile-high wall before its light could penetrate the forest. At last Prestimion felt warmth on his face; and when he opened his eyes the first he saw was Duke Svor’s hooked nose and devilish toothy grin, and then Septach Melayn, as cool and elegant as if he were on his way to a banquet at the Castle, with not a single golden hair out of place and his clothes unmussed. The Vroonish wizard Thalnap Zelifor was perched pleasantly on Septach Melayn’s left shoulder.

The swordsman smiled down at Prestimion and said, “Have you rested well, O peerless prince?”

“Not so well as you,” Prestimion said, coming creakily to a sitting position and brushing the mud from himself. “This hotel is less gracious, I think, than the luxurious inn where you must have spent the night.”

“Luxurious indeed. It was all of pink marble and black onyx,” replied Septach Melayn, “with sweet handmaidens galore, and a feast of bilan-toons’ tongues steeped in dragon-milk that I’ll not soon forget.” He knelt beside Prestimion, allowing the Vroon to jump down to the ground, and said in a less airy way, “Did you take any injury in the battle, Prestimion?”

“Only to my pride, and a bruise to my thigh that will have me aching a day or two. And you?”

Septach Melayn said, with a wink, “My thumb is sore, from pressing too tight against the hilt of my blade in the thick of the fray as I cut down Alexid of Strave. Otherwise nothing.”

“Alexid is dead?”

“And many others, on both sides. There’ll be more.”

Svor said, “You don’t ask me about my wounds, Prestimion.”

“Ah, and were you fighting valiantly too, my friend?”

“I thought I would test myself as a warrior. So I went into the midst. In the veriest heat and turmoil of it, I came up against Duke Kanteverel, my face right up against his.”

“And you bit his nose?” Prestimion asked.

“You are unkind. I drew on him—I had never drawn in anger before—and he looked at me and said, ‘Svor, do you mean to kill me, who gave you the lovely Lady Heisse Vaneille? For I have lost my weapon and am at your mercy.’ And nowhere in my heart could I find hatred for him, so I took him by the shoulder and spun him around, and shoved him with all my strength, and sent him staggering toward his own side of the field. Did I fail you greatly, Prestimion? I could have killed him there and then. But I am no killer, I think.”

Prestimion answered, with a shake of his head, “What would it have mattered, killing Kanteverel? He’s no more a fighter than you. But stay behind the lines, Svor, in our next battle. You’ll be happier there. So, I think, will we.” Prestimion looked toward Thalnap Zelifor and said, “And you, companion of my prison-chamber? Did you do mighty work with your sword?”

“I could wield five at once,” said the Vroon, waving his many tentacles about, “but they would be no greater than needles, and all I could achieve with them would be the pricking of shins. No, I shed no blood yesterday, Prestimion. What I did on your behalf was cast spells for your success. But for me, the outcome would have been even worse.”

“Even worse?” Prestimion said with a little chuckle. “Well, then, you have my gratitude.”

“Be grateful for this too: I’ve thrown the divining-sticks to see the outcome of your next battle. It was a favorable pattern. You will win a great victory against overwhelming odds.”

“Hear, hear!” cried Septach Melayn.

And Prestimion said, “I would embrace sorcery with all my heart, my friend, if I could hear prophesies of that kind from my mages all the time.”

The coming of a warm bright morning and the return of his dear friends gave a great lift to Prestimion’s spirit, and he began to put the grief of the battle at Arkilon behind him. All day stragglers continued to arrive, until he had something of the semblance of an army again, weary and battered and muddied though it was.

They would have to leave the forest quickly, Prestimion knew. It was rash to assume that Navigorn would let them camp here unchallenged for long. But where to go? They had no maps with them; and none of them had much acquaintance with the great open stretches of territory that lay west of Arkilon, but for the great and celebrated Gulikap Fountain just beyond the forest, which was well-known to all.

Some information came from Nemeron Dalk of Vilimong, a man of some years, who had traveled from time to time in those lands. He knew the names of rivers and hills, and roughly where they lay in relation to one another. Elimotis Gan, who hailed from Simbilfant, had some knowledge of the region also. And one of the skills that Thalnap Zelifor claimed was the casting of inquiry-spells that permitted the divining of correct roadways and routes. In mid-morning these three, with Septach Melayn and Prestimion and Svor, came together to draw up a route of march.

The Vroon lit some little cubes of a brown stuff that looked like sugar, but which he said was the incense of sorcery, and wriggled his tentacles and stared into the distance, murmuring softly to himself. And after a time he began to describe the lay of the land beyond them as he claimed to perceive it in his incense-visions, and Elimotis Gan and Nemeron Dalk provided amplification and correction, and Septach Melayn sketched out a rough chart of it from their words with the tip of his sword on a bare damp patch of soil, smoothing out his errors with the toe of his boot.

“These hills here—hills, are they, or mountains?—what are they called?” Prestimion asked, pointing to a line on Septach Melayn’s map that ran boldly for a great distance from north to south.

“The Trikkalas,” said Elimotis Gan. “More mountains than hills, I would say. Yes, very definitely mountains.”

“Can they be easily crossed if we were to march due west from here?”

Elimotis Gan, who was a short wiry man with a look of great vigor about him, exchanged a glance with the robust, sturdy Nemeron Dalk. It seemed to Prestimion that it was a very pessimistic look that passed between them.

Nemeron Dalk said, “The Sisivondal highway runs through here,” he said, pointing to the lower end of the line, which marked the southern end of the mountains, “and this is the Sintalmond road, here, in the north. In the middle, which is where you say you want to go, the range is at its highest and most jagged, and there’s only the pass known as Ekesta, which is to say, in the dialect of the region, ‘Accursed.’ ”

“A pretty name,” said Septach Melayn.

“Not a pretty road,” Elimotis Gan said. “A rough trail, very steep, I hear, little to eat along the way, and packs of hungry vorzaks to harass travelers at night.”

“But direct,” Prestimion said. “This is what I ultimately want to reach, this broad river here, on the far side of the mountains. It’s the Jhelum, isn’t it?”

“The Jhelum, yes,” said Nemeron Dalk.

“Good,” said Prestimion. “We head westward and take your accursed pass through the Trikkalas, and throw stones at the damned vorzaks if they bother us, and when we come out on the other side of the mountains we cross the river after what ought to be a much easier march below the pass. And then we can sit ourselves down here, beyond the Jhelum’s western bank, in what I think is the Marraitis meadowland, where the best fighting-mounts are bred and schooled. Do you see my drift?”

“We will need a cavalry, if we intend to fight again,” said Septach Melayn.

“Exactly. We requisition a host of mounts from the Marraitis folk, and we send off messengers to any city that may be favorable to our cause, asking for volunteers, and we build and train a real army, not just the sort of randomly assembled horde that Navigorn cut to pieces yesterday. Eventually Korsibar will find out where we are, and he’ll send an army after us. But he won’t send it over the mountain pass, if it’s as nasty a place as these two gentlemen say it is. They’ll go south or north of the mountains instead, which will take them many months; and so by crossing by way of the Ekesta ourselves, we’ll get ourselves a head start, bringing us into the western country far ahead of them and giving ourselves time to prepare, at the cost of just the little extra effort of traveling the hardest route.”

“How do you see this pass?” Svor asked Thalnap Zelifor. “Can it be taken, do you think?”

The Vroon lifted his tentacles again, and went through some sort of conjuring motions. “It will be difficult, but not impossible,” he replied after a bit.

“Difficult but not impossible: good enough,” said Prestimion with a smile. “I choose to believe that you have the true gift and I accept your findings as accurate and trustworthy.” He looked around at the others. “Are we agreed, then? Ekesta pass to the Jhelum, and across the river by some means that we’ll worry about later, and make our headquarters in the Marraitis meadows? And by the time we go into battle again, the Divine willing, we’ll have a proper army to throw against the usurper.”

“Not to mention the reinforcements that Dantirya Sambail will surely have sent us from Zimroel by then,” said Svor.

“There’s a wicked look in your’ eye as you say that,” said Septach Melayn. “Do you doubt that the Procurator’s armies will come?”

“There’s always a wicked look in my eye,” Svor answered. “It’s not my fault: I was born that way.”

“Spare us this byplay, if you please, both of you,” said Prestimion crisply. “The Divine willing, the Procurator will keep his word. Our task now is to get to Marraitis and make ourselves more ready for war than we were yesterday. What may come afterward is something to fret about in its appropriate hour.”

At midday their baggage-train came into the forest, such of it as remained intact, bearing the belongings and weaponry that had been following them through the foothills cities. It was good to have fresh clothing, and such other things that they had lacked in their night in the woods. Another few hundred stragglers found them also; and then, when it appeared certain that there was no one else who would be rejoining them here, Prestimion gave the order to begin the westward march toward the Trikkala Mountains and the Jhelum River beyond.

Beyond the forest all was ordinary farming land for a while, but soon the landscape grew strange, for they were approaching the famous Gulikap Fountain. First came the bubbling up of warm springs, which scalded the ground into moist brown bareness, and then spouting geysers, and chalky terraces, like clustered bathtubs, holding sheets of water pervaded by algae of many colors, red and green and blue and all mixtures thereof.

Prestimion paused in wonder to watch black steam spouting hundreds of feet from a purse-shaped fumarole. Then they crossed a dead plateau of glassy sediments, zigzagging to avoid gaping vents that were giving off foul rotting gases.

“Beyond doubt I could acquire a belief in demons in a place like this,” said Prestimion, and he was near halfway to being serious. “This countryside is like a piece out of some other world, brought here by some dread enchanter’s whim.”

Svor, who had been here before, only smiled, and told him to wait and see what lay ahead.

They were passing now around an intricate array of thermal pools that gurgled and heaved and moaned and seemed about to deluge them with boiling fluids. The sky here was gray-blue with smoke even at midday, and the air had a bitter chemical reek. The sun could not be seen. Their skins were covered quickly with dark grimy exhalations; Prestimion watched Septach Melayn draw his fingernails lightly across his cheek and leave pale tracks in the murk. Yet this place, horrid as it was, was inhabited. Many-legged slithering things with shining rosy hides moved about everywhere, close to the ground, looking up and studying them warily through rows of beady black eyes that bulged above their foreheads.

A shelf of blunt rock closed in this place of geysers and hot pools at its farther end, stretching off to north and south. They scrambled quickly up it, despite myriad loose stones that made footing tricky, and descended on the cliff’s western face into a zone so extraordinary that Prestimion knew they must be at the domain of the Fountain itself.

By the deep light of the smoke-filtered sun he saw a completely naked flatland: not a bush, not a tree, not a rock, only a level span of land running from the extreme left to the extreme right, and curving away from them over the belly of the world. The soil was brick-red. And straight ahead of them on the plain rose a tremendous column of light bursting from the ground and rising with perfect straightness, like a great marble pillar, losing its upper end in the lofty atmosphere. The column was half a mile in width, Prestimion guessed, and had the sheen of polished stone.

“Look you,” Svor said. “It is the Gulikap.”

Not stone, no, Prestimion realized: an upwelling of sheer energy, rather. Motion was evident within its depths: huge sectors of it swirled, clashed, tangled, blended. Colors shifted randomly, now red predominating, now blue, now green, now brown. Some areas of the column appeared more dense in texture than others. Sparks often detached themselves and fluttered off to perish. The column at its uncertain summit blended imperceptibly with the clouds, darkening and staining them. There was a constant hissing, crackling sound in the air, as of an electric discharge.

Prestimion found that single mighty rod of brilliance in the midst of this forlorn plain an overwhelming sight. It was a scepter of power; it was a focus of change and creation; it was an axis of might on which the entire giant planet could spin.

“What would happen to me, do you think, if I were to touch it?” he asked Svor.

“You would be dissolved in an instant. The particles of your body would dance forever in that column of light.”

They went as close as they dared. It was possible to see now that a broad calcified rim, bone-white, porcelain-smooth, surrounded the Fountain. The incredible surge of many-colored light came roaring up through that rim from some immense dark abyss. What forces were at play down there, Prestimion could scarcely begin to guess. But, staring wonderingly at this mighty thing that lay before them, he was struck as though for the first time with a sense of the majestic splendor of his native world, of the overwhelming beauty and grandeur of it, of Majipoor’s infinite variety of marvels. And felt great sadness that some of that beauty and grandeur must now be marred by warfare. Yet there was no choice. There was a disharmony in the world that had to be cured, and war was the only way.

He contemplated the Fountain a long while. Then he gave the order to move on around it and continue the westward march.

6

They were thirteen days crossing the Ekesta Pass, which Nemeron Dalk said was faster than any crossing of it that he had ever heard of; they marched day and night with scarcely any pause, as if Navigorn’s troops were treading on their heels. It was a considerable ordeal, but, as Thalnap Zelifor had predicted, not an impossible one, only very difficult.

The Trikkalas were rugged mountains that rose to jagged points like those of a lizard’s crest, and the road across the pass was nothing more than a rough trail, in some places much less than that. There was little up here to eat, and most of that provided not much in the way of nourishment and even less in the way of pleasure, and the air was dry and cool and thin, so that at times even breathing was painful. But they marched swiftly and without complaint, and carried out the crossing without incident. Even the much-dreaded vorzaks kept their distance, confining themselves to a furious yip-ping and baying from the safety of their hilltop caves. At last the travelers came down on the far side of the hills in a mood of gratitude and relief.

Now they were in open country, lightly wooded, with towns here and there sparsely scattered. The air was softer here, for they were entering the valley of the Jhelum, and tributary streams flowed past them on every side.

The Jhelum itself was broad and swift, too wide for bridging in this region. But there were no rapids or other evident hazards, and they set about building boats and rafts from the abundant trees that lined the shore. It took three days to get all the men and equipment across.

The only troublesome moment came when the great blunt shining head and long thick neck of a gappapaspe rose from the water no more than twenty yards in front of Gialaurys’s boat; the gigantic thing loomed up high above them like an ogre, filling the sky and bringing some of the men close to panic. But all it did was stare. Gappapaspes were harmless browsers on river-weeds and bottom-muck; the only danger they posed to the travelers was that if one of them should come to the surface directly beneath a raft or boat, it would shatter it like matchsticks and hurl them into the water, where less harmless creatures might be waiting. But they saw only the one lone behemoth, which after a time slid down out of view again and vanished in the gray-brown depths.

West of the river they found themselves in settled country again, bustling cities of medium size surrounded by agricultural zones; and here, as soon as Prestimion announced himself to the people, they greeted him as a deliverer and as their Coronal. In these parts people knew little of Korsibar, and found it hard to understand how he had been able to take possession of the throne, when a Coronal’s son was never supposed to follow his father to the kingship. Among these good conservative countryfolk Prestimion was gladly hailed as the rightful king and they flocked eagerly to his standard.

He set up his camp as he had planned, in the great Marraitis meadowlands, where for thousands of years the finest mounts of Majipoor had been reared. The best breeders came to him with their herds of strong fighting animals, and freely made the most spirited of them available for his cavalry.

Word went forth far and wide, too, that Prestimion was collecting an army to march on Castle Mount and overthrow the false Coronal; and the response was enthusiastic. Hardly a day went by without a detachment of troops from some city of the region arriving at his camp. “I would rather die here with you than abide that unlawful man in the Castle,” is what they told him, over and over again. And so Prestimion welcomed gladly into their midst such men as the white-bearded Duke Miaule of Hither Miaule, with some five hundred green-jacketed warriors skilled at handling mounts; and Thurm of Sirynx, with a thousand more all clad in that city’s turquoise stripes; and the radiant young golden-haired Spalirises, son of Spalirises of Tumbrax, at the head of a great force; and Gynim of Tapilpil, with a corps of sling-casters in purple jerkins; and bold Abantes of Pytho, and Talauus of Naibilis, and many more of that caliber; and also troops from Thannard and Zarang and Abisoane and two dozen other places that Prestimion had never heard of, but whose assistance he welcomed all the same. The outpouring of support amazed and gratified him greatly. His brothers Abrigant and Taradath came too, with what seemed like half the able-bodied men of Muldemar city. They said that Teotas, the youngest brother, would have joined them also, but that their mother the Princess Therissa refused to let him go.

And finally came the news Prestimion had anticipated most keenly, without ever quite daring to believe that he would ever hear it: word that a huge army under the command of Gaviad and Gaviundar, the brothers to Dantirya Sambail, had landed some weeks ago at Alaisor and was making its way quickly overland to Marraitis to join the growing rebel force. Dantirya Sambail himself, the message added, had been delayed in Ni-moya by the responsibilities he held as Procurator there, but would be leaving Zimroel shortly and would affiliate himself with Prestimion’s armies as quickly as he could.

Was it so? Yes. Yes. Hot on the heels of this message, the outriders of the Zimroel force appeared, and then the bulk of the army, with the Procurator’s two brothers riding at his head.

“This is quite a pair, these brothers of Dantirya Sambail,” said Gialaurys softly to Septach Melayn, watching them arrive. “They are of the same pretty breed as their elder brother, are they not?”

“Even prettier, far prettier,” said Septach Melayn. “They are true paragons of beauty.”

Gaviad and Gaviundar shared Dantirya Sambail’s ruddy orange hair and freckled complexion, and they were as gloriously ugly as he was, though in differing ways. Gaviad, the older of the two, was short and thick, watery-eyed and blubbery-faced, with a great red blob of a nose and a coarse fiery mustache jutting out like tufts of copper wire beneath it, above marvelously fleshy sagging lips; he was a heavy man, of monstrous appetites, with a chest like a drum and a belly like a swollen sack. His brother Gaviundar was much taller, of a height nearly approaching Septach Melayn’s, and his face was broad and perpetually flushed, with small cruel blue-green eyes flanked by the largest and thickest ears any human had ever been given, ears that were like wagon-wheels. He had gone bald very young: all that remained of his hair was two astonishing bristly tufts springing far out from the sides of his head. But as if to compensate, he had grown himself a dense and tangled reddish-yellow beard, so huge that birds could hide in it, that tumbled like a cataract down to the middle of his chest. He was, like Gaviad, an inordinate eater and a man with a colossal capacity for drink; but Gaviundar held his wine well, whereas stumpy little Gaviad, it quickly became evident, took great pleasure in drinking himself into a stupor as frequently as possible.

That could be tolerated, Prestimion decided, as long as the man could fight. And in any event the brothers had come with a great horde of troops that they had raised along the eastern coast of Zimroel, mainly from Piliplok and Ni-moya, but from twenty other cities as well.

All through the autumn and winter and on into spring, Prestimion labored to meld these variously assorted soldiers into a single effective fighting force. The one question now was when and how to move against Korsibar.

Prestimion inclined to his original strategy of marching through the foothills of Castle Mount, making the circuit once again from Simbilfant to Ghrav to Arkilon to Pruiz and all the way around past Lontano and Da back to Vilimong, this time at the head of a large and ever-increasing army that eventually would go swarming up the side of Castle Mount and demand Korsibar’s abdication. But Gialaurys had a different course in mind. “Let us wait here in the middle of Alhanroel for Korsibar to come out and chastise us,” he said. “We smash his army beyond all repair, out here far from the Mount; and then we proceed at will to the Castle, accepting the surrender of any troops we might encounter along the way.”

There was merit in both plans. Prestimion arrived at no quick decision.

Then one day Duke Svor came to him and said, “We have reliable dispatches from the other side of the Jhelum. Two large armies, far greater even than our own, are approaching us: one under Farholt, taking the southern route around the Trikkalas, and the other led by Navigorn, traveling the northern way. Farholt brings with him an enormous force of war-mollitors. Once they’ve crossed the river, they plan to come up behind us, one army from above and one from below, and catch us between them and grind us to pieces.”

“Then our strategy is settled,” Gialaurys said. “We’ll meet them here at Marraitis, as I proposed.”

“No,” said Prestimion. “If we wait for them here until they’ve joined forces, we’re lost. Big as our army is, we’re outnumbered by far, if we can believe reports. Either they’ll shatter us here in the meadowlands, if that’s so, or they’ll drive us eastward until they can shove us into the river.”

“What do you suggest, then?” asked Septach Melayn.

Prestimion said to Svor, “Which army is likely to reach the Jhelum first?”

“Farholt’s, I would say. The southern route is quicker.”

“Good. Let him come. We’ll feed him to his own monitors. What I propose is this: we cross the Jhelum first, while he’s still camped on the eastern shore building his boats, and come around behind him. The one thing Farholt isn’t going to be expecting from us is an attack on his eastern flank.”

“Can we get there quickly enough?” Septach Melayn asked.

“We got here quickly enough, didn’t we?” Prestimion said.

That night Prestimion wandered the camp by himself, pausing now to speak with Valirad Visto, who had charge of the mounts, and with Duke Miaule of Miaule, and Thurm of Sirynx and Destinn Javad of Glaunt, and even going over into the Zimroel force to pass some time with Gaviad and Gaviundar. Gaviad was long gone in drink by the time Prestimion got there, but big shaggy-bearded Gaviundar greeted Prestimion as though they were not simply distant kinsmen but actual brothers, giving him an enveloping embrace out of which emanated a great stink of garlic and dried sea-dragon meat. “We have waited much too long in life to get to know each other,” Gaviundar bellowed. “But we will be good close friends once you are installed at the Castle, eh, Prestimion?” He had been drinking too, it seemed. And he said also, “My brother the Procurator thinks you are the finest man in the world, bar none. He looks forward to the day you ascend the throne as keenly as though it were he who were being made Coronal rather than you.”

“I’m grateful for all his assistance,” said Prestimion. “And yours, and that of your brother too,” he added, with a glance at Gaviad, who sat in full armor, slumped forward with his face in his plate, snoring loudly enough to summon lovesick gappapaspes from the distant river.

And when he had returned to his own side of the camp, Prestimion went from this tent to that one, restless, far from any desire for sleep, though it was very late now. He spoke with his brother Taradath for a while, and then with Septach Melayn, and with young Spalirises, who could scarcely contain himself in his eagerness to see action.

A light was still shining in the tent of Thalnap Zelifor; when Prestimion looked in, he found the Vroon wizard at his worktable, bent intently over something that looked somewhat like a kind of rohilla—an intricate circular weavery of bright gold wires and bits of crystal, it was, but far too big to be any sort of an amulet, ten times a rohilla’s size, more like a crown than anything else. “What is this?” Prestimion asked. “Some new kind of witchery-device? Are you conjuring up success for us with this in our attack on Farholt?”

“No witchery here, O Prestimion. Do you remember that I told you, when we were prisoners together in the tunnels, that I was building a mechanism by which I could amplify the waves coming from people’s minds, and read their thoughts, and put thoughts of my own into their heads?”

“The thing that Gonivaul had hired you to devise, yes. Is this it?”

“That is an attempt to reconstruct it,” said the Vroon. “I left my half-finished trial model and all my notes behind in the Castle when we so suddenly took our leave of the place. But I have started again on it, and have been working at it all the while we’ve been here.”

“With what purpose in mind?”

“Why, the purpose of reaching out across the Jhelum and making contact with the minds of our enemies as they approach us, and perceiving their strategies and intentions.”

“Ah,” said Prestimion. “What a useful thing! And are you able do it?”

“Not yet,” the Vroon said sadly. “Certain essential parts remain in my room at the Castle with all my other machines both perfected and incomplete, and I have not yet found a way of replicating them here. But I continue to work. It is my great hope, O Prestimion, to present you with this wondrous device before long, as recompense for your saving my life at the Castle.”

“Was Dantirya Sambail who saved your life, not I,” said Prestimion, grinning. “And that only by accident, I think. He was the one forced Korsibar’s hand, and you were freed by the same stroke that sprang me from that dungeon. But no matter: finish your device, and you’ll be well-rewarded for it. We are not so numerous and mighty here that we wouldn’t benefit from being able to read our enemies’ minds.”

He bade Thalnap Zelifor good night, and left him still bent over his coils of golden wire. In his own tent Prestimion sat for a while, thinking about what was to come, and then in time he felt sleep steal over him at last, and dreams as well.

What he dreamed was that he held the planet that was Majipoor in the palm of his hand like an orb, and he looked down at the world in his hand and perceived it to be a vast and intricately embroidered tapestry that was hanging in some dim and shadowy stone hall where a fire flickered. Despite the gloomy darkness of that hall, the details of the tapestry stood out with marvelous clarity. By the flickering of the firelight he saw in it all manner of elaborately woven elves and demons and strange beasts and birds moving to and fro in dark forests and thickets of thorny scrub, and here and there a brilliantly blossoming glade. In its weave he made out glints of sunlight and starlight, and bright patches of gold, and the gleam of wondrous jewels, and the differing sheens of human hair and the scales of serpents. And everything was wondrous beyond all understanding, haloed around with an aura of supreme beauty.

The dream remained with him when he woke, holding him in an eerie magical grasp. But then he went to the door of his tent and looked out, and it was gray and raining out there, not at all magical. Not merely raining: pouring. A deluge.

Rains accompanied them all the way back to the Jhelum, day after day. The world seemed to have turned to an ocean of slippery mud. “I would rather cross that accursed Ekesta Pass ten times running than travel through this,” Gialaurys said, cursing; but they traveled onward anyway, through a dreadful realm of soggy dank marshland that had been easy fields on their journey westward the year before. Between one night and the next, winter had arrived in the Jhelum Valley, and winter was a season of never-halting rain in this region, it seemed.

Then they came to the Jhelum itself; and found it in wild spate, high above its old level and far outside its former boundaries, and running with a terrible turbulence where beforetimes it had merely been very swift.

The boats and rafts that they had left for themselves by the shore in the autumn had all been swept away by the flooding. But they were in need of new ones anyway, for they were vastly greater in number now than the army that had come across the river in the other direction; and so they set about once more building boats, and chopping saplings and lashing them into rafts. But would it be possible to cross at all, until after the rains? Already that looked doubtful; and the river grew ever higher every day.

Prestimion called for volunteers to make the crossing and spy out the situation on the far side. A thousand men stepped forward; he picked six, and sent them off on a sturdy little raft, and watched anxiously as they bobbed and tossed on the stormy swollen river. It was so wide now that it was nearly impossible to see all the way to the other shore through the unending rain; but Septach Melayn, posted in a watchtower, stared into the distant dimness and said finally, “Yes, they are across!”

They were gone six days. Then they returned with news that Farholt’s army had reached the Jhelum also and was camped by its edge, thirty miles downriver from them, waiting for the weather to improve.

“How many are there?” Prestimion asked.

“It would have taken all week again to count them.”

“And the mollitors?”

“They have hundreds with them,” said one of the spies. “A thousand, maybe.”

That was ominous news. Mollitors were the deadliest of all beasts-of-war: colossal armor-plated creatures of synthetic origin, first created, like mounts and energy-throwers and airborne vehicles and many other such things, in the ancient times when scientific skills had been greater on Majipoor, and sustained ever since by natural breeding of the old stock. Wide-bodied short-legged things with purple leathery hides hard as iron, they had savage curved claws that could rip a tree apart the way a child might pull leaves from a plant, and massive heads with huge, heavy irresistible jaws designed for rending and crushing. Though they had little intelligence, their strength was so formidable that it was all but impossible to withstand it. And Farholt had brought hundreds of them to the shore of the Jhelum. Thousands, it might be.

Prestimion said to Septach Melayn, “Take four battalions—no, take five, cavalry and foot-soldiers both—and get you down south to the riverbank opposite Farholt’s camp, with plenty of our best mounts. Set up fortifications there, and drill your troops, and make sure you’re seen and heard as you shout your commands. Let there be much clatter every day, and all night long too. Build boats, with all the hammering you can manage. Blow your trumpets; beat your drums, march up and down along the shore. Have your men sing battle-songs, if you can invent some, with all their might. Send spies out by night on the water to stare into Farholt’s encampment. Do everything, in short, that would announce to Farholt that you are on the verge of crossing the river and attacking him. Everything, that is, except actually to attack.”

“Great noise will come from us,” Septach Melayn vowed.

“On the third day, launch your boats toward Farholt by night, preferably in the rain, if it’s still raining, and take no pains to be silent about that either. But turn back after a hundred strokes of the oars. The next night, go out a hundred fifty strokes into the river, and turn back again. Do the same the following night as well. But that night the attack will be no feint.”

“I understand,” said Septach Melayn.

Prestimion, meanwhile, assembled his own assault group, seven battalions of his finest infantrymen and archers, with the remainder of the cavalry force to ride behind them. It took two days to make everything ready; the morning after that he led them seventeen miles upstream, to a place where his reconnaissance men had discovered a large and heavily wooded island in the midst of the river. That would make the crossing easier, having such a place midway to halt. Nor would they be seen there while they regrouped behind the trees, even if Farholt’s scouts were ranging that far up the river. By night, using boats and rafts, he crossed with all his troops over to the island, pausing there to survey and rearrange his force, then proceeding onward about two hours before midnight to the Jhelum’s eastern shore.

The night was moonless; there was no illumination except from the terrifying bolts of lightning that flashed again and again. Rain came in torrents, driven sidewise into their faces by the relentless wind. But that wind blew from the west and carried their little boats swiftly across. Prestimion made his crossing in one of the smallest boats, accompanied only by Gialaurys and his brother Taradath: they talked of nothing but the coming battle.

Forty-seven miles of muddy riverbank separated them now from Farholt’s encampment.

“Now,” Prestimion said, “we begin our march.”

There was no dry moment all the way south; slipping and sliding through the mud was the only mode of progress, and yet they marched. When they made camp, it was in miserable sodden mud; when they marched again, it was through driving rain. Yet they were all of good cheer.

Septach Melayn was in place by now; he had made his first feint across the river; Farholt, if he had any sense, would have his strongest forces lined up along the riverbank, looking outward toward Septach Melayn’s camp and ready to beat off the lunatic onslaught from the west whenever Septach Melayn actually deigned to launch it.

But first—first—

Under cover of darkness and storm Prestimion advanced steadily down the eastern shore until he was within striking distance of Farholt’s encampment. It was a heavy gamble: would Septach Melayn be a sufficient distraction? And would he, once he began his crossing of the river, be able to make it safely to the other side? And would the rest of the army be in the right place at the right time for the culminating stroke? Prestimion could only time his own attack with care and hope for the best.

He led the troop of archers himself, with Taradath at his side. Gialaurys, on his right flank, had charge of the javelin-men, and to his left were the long spears, under Thurm and golden Spalirises. Duke Miaule would lead the cavalry, holding back in the rear until the question of the mollitors was resolved, for even the finest war-mounts were in dire fear of mollitors and would be useless if the great monsters were to charge.

“Come now,” said Prestimion, and led the way forward against Farholt.

It was almost a perfect surprise attack.

Farholt indeed had deployed the heart of his force along the river-bank, waiting for Septach Melayn. For two nights the false crossings had put Farholt’s men on full alert, and then the supposed attack had come to nothing, so that it began to seem to the royalist forces that Septach Melayn intended merely to feint night after night. There was, inevitably, a decline of vigilance on Farholt’s side; but still he kept his line intact along the river, with the bulk of the mollitors in readiness to hurl the rebels back into the river if ever they attempted to come ashore.

This night, though, Septach Melayn’s attack was no feint. And while he led his boats past the midpoint of the river and toward the waiting royalists, Prestimion’s band of archers came down into Farholt’s camp from the other side. If it had been a complete surprise, the battle might have ended with a route in its first minutes; but some men of Farholt, happening by chance to be following some strayed mounts into the woods that lay just north of the camp, saw by the light of a lightning-bolt Prestimion’s men descending a low hill toward them, and ran screaming back to camp to sound the alarm. And so Farholt was granted just enough time to redeploy one segment of his force to meet the unexpected incursion from his rear.

“Look, brother,” said Prestimion to Taradath between two great thunderclaps. “They come running to their deaths.” And he drew and put an arrow into one of Farholt’s captains; and Taradath, aiming right after him, felled another.

The slaughter was fearful. A hail of arrows fell upon Farholt’s bewildered men as they charged uphill through the mud in the darkness. Of the mollitors, there was no sign: it seemed they were still down at the water’s edge, waiting for Septach Melayn. So it was safe for Prestimion to bring the cavalry into play, and he sent word to Miaule to move his division forward.

Farholt, aware now of the magnitude of the unexpected attack behind him, was desperately dividing his forces, sending battalion after battalion to meet the thrust of Prestimion’s men. Plainly, he had underestimated the size of the rebel army, nor had he expected them to come upon him from two sides at once; and most of his own men were still camped for the night, struggling slowly to make ready for battle. Prestimion now signaled Thurm and Spalirises to swing into action with the spearmen, and Gialaurys from the other side to enfold the royalists with his javelins. “We have them!” he called out to Prestimion in a great booming shout that could be heard from one side of the battlefield to the other. “Prestimion! Prestimion! All hail Lord Prestimion!”

Now Farholt’s men were falling back under the diabolical onslaught of Prestimion’s archers, while the infantrymen on both flanks herded the royalists toward the center of the camp. Septach Melayn was on shore now: that much was evident from the wild trumpeting of the mol-litors in the distance. Prestimion, standing in the thick of things, found himself wondering in an astounded bemused way whether they might be able to put the royalist army entirely to flight all at once, here at the very beginning of the struggle, as his force and Septach Melayn’s came together like the halves of a nutcracker with the royalists between them.

But that would be too simple to hope for, he knew. He pushed such thoughts from his mind and gave all his concentration to his bow. The arrows flew forth, and nearly every one found its mark.

Who these men were that he was bringing down, Prestimion attempted not to consider, though he could not help recognizing some. He saw the stunned look on the face of Hyle of Espledawn, and another who might have been Travin of Ginoissa, as he pierced them through. But there was no time to regret such things now. He aimed again, at a man holding an energy-thrower. There were a few such weapons in Farholt’s army, and very dangerous weapons they were; but they were wildly erratic also, for the art of making them, having been lost a thousand years before, was but newly revived and not yet with much skill. The man had the muzzle of his weapon pointed at Prestimion from fifty yards’ distance. But Prestimion put a shaft through his throat while he was still fumbling with the buttons and studs that controlled its beam.

Shouts came from Prestimion’s left. He glanced down that way and saw that the momentum of the battle, which had been all with his forces at first, had begun to change. Farholt’s people were rallying; or, at least, were holding their own.

No longer, now, was Prestimion’s band of archers gleefully advancing with utter freedom on Farholt’s camp. The sheer mass of Farholt’s army was too great. Caught between Septach Melayn’s landing-party and Prestimion’s rear-guard attack, they had no place to go; and now they were standing firm between the forest and the river. The suddenness of the double attack had turned them into little more than a mob, but they were an armed and sturdy mob, and they feared for their lives. So they held their ground, butting up against their attackers and refusing to yield an inch. They were locked face-to-face with them the way Farholt and Gialaurys once had been in that wrestling match long ago in the Labyrinth.

Archers were no longer of much use in this sort of struggle. Preeminence had passed to the battalions led by Gialaurys, Spalirises, and Thurm, who needed less space for the use of their weapons. They prodded and jabbed with their spears and javelins, while Miaule’s cavalrymen rode about the outside of the melee, hacking with swords and axes at Farholt’s men from above.

Prestimion made his way to Gialaurys’s side. “Clear a path for me to the waterfront,” he said. “My archers will be of more value down there.”

Gialaurys—grinning broadly, soaked through and through with rain and sweat—nodded and drew a platoon of his javelin-men from the main fray. Prestimion saw his brother Taradath just to his side, and pulled at his sleeve. “There’s work for us down by the water’s edge,” he said. And off they went, with their corps of archers behind them, around the left side of the camp under cover of the javelin platoon, and down the gentle muddy slope to the river.

It was madness down there. Septach Melayn had come ashore, as instructed, with his foot-soldiers only; the presence of cavalry battalions on the other bank had been intended only to mislead Farholt. But the invading force had been met, after its struggle with the roaring flood that was the river, with an implacable line of monitors. The ponderous war-beasts ranged up and down the shore, clawing, stamping, impaling. Septach Melayn’s men were fighting back with spears and javelins, striking upward in the hope of hitting some vulnerable spot beneath their body-armor. But all was mud and blood and driving rain, and Prestimion saw fallen soldiers everywhere.

“Aim for the mollitor-drivers,” he called to his men. For every molli-tor had its driver seated in the saddle formed by natural folds of the shoulder-armor, who by signals delivered with a mallet was able more or less to control his monstrous beast. Prestimion’s archers now began to pick them off, sending them tumbling one by one into the mud beneath their own animals’ clawed hooves. The mollitors, confused without their drivers and hemmed in an ever-narrowing space, moved in bewildered circles, trampling their own side; and then, unable to tell friend from foe, wheeled about and erupted in a charge away from the waterfront that carried them right into Farholt’s own cavalry, which was riding down to the shore in a counterattack.

Prestimion fought his way inward until he stood next to Septach Melayne. The tall swordsmen was fighting with wild exhilaration, slashing gleefully and to terrible effect. “I had not thought it would go so well,” he said, laughing. “They are ours, Prestimion! Ours!”

Yes. The battle was won. And now came the final blow. The regiments of Zimroel had been held in reserve; now, under Gaviad and Gaviundar, these troops were crossing the river in a multitude of boats and descending onto a shore no longer guarded by mollitors. Eyes agleam, their hideous faces shining with the joy of battle, the two ghastly brothers seemed transported with ecstasy as they led their men ashore.

What followed was butchery, not fighting.

The royalist army—an army no longer—went into wild retreat as this newest and most utterly unexpected of reinforcements appeared in their midst. The battlefield had become a bedlam of fallen mounts and wounded men and maddened uncontrolled monitors, and rebel warriors rising up on all sides. Farholt’s forces swirled about wildly in an attempt to break into retreat while the rebels mowed them down on all sides. This was war of a ferocity no one had expected, and they were unprepared to hold their places in the face of such a bloodletting. When an opening appeared to the east, the royalist army melted away into it, first by the tens and twenties, then hundreds at a time taking to their heels and disappearing into the rainy darkness.

Prestimion caught sight of Farholt himself, a gigantic furious figure wielding an immense sword and bellowing orders. Gialaurys had spied him too, and set out in his direction with murder in his eyes. Prestimion called to him to come back, but it was no use, for he had little voice left and Gialaurys was already beyond the range of it.

But then Farholt vanished in a swirl of confusion. Prestimion saw Gialaurys standing alone, looking about, searching for the man who was his particular enemy, unable to find him.

The first light of dawn was in the sky. It showed the muddy field red with blood, bodies everywhere, Farholt’s proud army streaming off in chaos toward the east, leaving mounts and mollitors and weapons behind.

“All done,” said Prestimion. “And done very well.”

7

The battle by the riverbank had been a great victory for the rebel cause, but not without high cost. By brightening day, as the rains gradually halted and the warm sun appeared, the victors tallied their dead. Kaymuin Rettra of Amblemorn had fallen, and Count Ofmar of Ghrav; and one of the sons of Rufiel Kisimir was dead, and another gravely wounded. That useful guide Elimotis Can of Simbilfant had perished also, and the master spearsman Telthyb Forst, and many more. Nor was Prestimion any less grieved when he saw the bodies of those who had died on the other side, for though they had chosen to oppose him for Korsibar’s sake, nevertheless they were men he had known for years, some since boyhood, and once had looked upon as good friends. Among them was Count Irani of Normork’s younger brother Lamiran, and Thiwid Karsp of Stee, who was close kin to Count Fisiolo, and also such great men as Belditan of Gimkandale and Viscount Edgan of Guand and Sinjian of Steppilor. But Farholt, it seemed, had escaped, he and most of his commanders, fleeing back in disarray toward Castle Mount.

“These are all grave losses, both ours and theirs, and I mourn them all,” Prestimion said somberly to Duke Svor after they had had the rites for them. “And how it galls me that they won’t be the last! How many deaths must there be, do you think, before Korsibar steps aside and allows us to prevail?”

“Korsibar’s, for one,” said Septach Melayn. “Do you seriously think, Prestimion, that he’s merely going to resign in your favor now that he’s lost a battle? Did you renounce your hopes that time he smashed us at Arkilon?”

Prestimion made no reply, but only stared. That this war could only end with Korsibar’s death, or his, was something that he had understood from the first; and yet he could not easily abide the reality of it. It was a formidable thing to contemplate, that Korsibar must die for peace to be restored. And when he thought of all else that must be accomplished before that time, it seemed to him as challenging as making the ascent of Castle Mount on foot.

“And also a second army under Navigorn waits for us by the Jhelum to the north,” Gialaurys pointed out. “We’ll be back in the field before we have time to catch our breaths, and it may not go as nicely for us the next time.”

But it appeared that they would have time to catch their breaths after all, for news soon came from messengers out of the east that Korsibar had withdrawn Navigorn’s army from its position along the riverbank, and was holding meetings at the Castle to discuss the best manner of prosecuting the campaign against the rebels. The winter rains were a hindrance to battle just now in any case. So there would be a respite. The next battle, whenever it came, would at least find Prestimion’s forces rested and ready.

Prestimion set about now replenishing his army, and winning the support of the citizenry here in the hinterlands.

Dantirya Sambail had failed to arrive as promised. That was a problem. The Procurator had sent messages instead: he was, he said, finding affairs at home more complex than he had expected, but he hoped to conclude matters there quickly and join the rebel forces no later than in spring. Meanwhile he offered Prestimion his felicitations over the great victory at the Jhelum, about which he had heard in full detail from his brothers, and expressed the firm belief that Prestimion’s road to the Castle and the throne would be marked by steady success all the way. Which was all well and good, but Prestimion found Dantirya Sambail’s absence troubling. He was capable of being on too many sides at once, was Dantirya Sambail.

After waiting out the wet season by the Jhelum, gathering provisions and receiving an additional complement of mounts from the Marraitis breeders, Prestimion began to move in a generally northward direction into the Salinakk district of central Alhanroel, a plateau region of mild breezes, low hills, and a dry, sandy terrain. His goal was the populous city of Thasmin Kortu, the capital of the province of Kenna Kortu, which lay just beyond Salinakk. Duke Keftia of Thasmin Kortu, who was related by ties of marriage to the Princess Therissa, had sent letters to Prestimion by the Jhelum declaring sympathy to Prestimion’s cause and inviting him to use his city as his home base as he prepared his campaign against the usurper.

Between the Jhelum and Thasmin Kortu, however, lay the many cities and towns of the Salinakk, and much of that region was loyal to Korsibar. The scouts Prestimion sent ahead had seen the banners of Korsibar widely displayed there.

But there was little overt opposition, at first, to Prestimion’s advance into that province. For one thing, he had Farholt’s corps of mollitors with him. It hardly seemed prudent to let the terrifying war-beasts go roaming loose along the banks of the Jhelum when he could make use of them himself. So he had them all rounded up, and impressed Farholt’s surviving mollitor-drivers into his own army.

The villagers of the Salinakk, seeing this formidable army approach, gave Prestimion a cordial enough welcome. At a place called Thelga they hailed him with seeming sincerity as Coronal, and showed him an easier route through the Salinakk than he had planned to take, via Hurkgoz and Diskhema and past the dreary salt-flats of Lake Guurduur.

There was only one engagement of any note along this way: at the hilltop fort of Magalissa, where a garrison of army troops was stationed. Prestimion sent word to them that as Coronal he claimed their services, to which they replied with a defiant shower of arrows.

“We should not tolerate such behavior,” said Septach Melayn pleasantly, and went out with five hundred men to deal with them. It was a tricky task—an uphill charge against an entrenched position, and with no cavalry support, the hill being too rough and steep for mounts to ascend—but the Magalissa garrison turned out to have little real longing for battle and its surrender came quickly.

After that the rebel force moved quickly northward over the sandy plateau, through a region of small streams cutting across bare tawny soil, and tiny villages screened by stands of narrow upright vribin-trees closely planted side by side. In time they came to Lake Guurduur, a grim dead lake covered by a whitish scum of salt. Baleful red-eyed salt-creatures with jointed legs and scorpion tails held high crawled slowly about there, defying them with clicking jaws to intrude on their domain; but Prestimion had no wish to be Coronal of the salt-creatures, and let them be. And in five days more he came to the crossroads town of Kelenissa, which guarded the approach to Kenna Kortu Province and the main road to Duke Keftia’s city farther to the north.

Two rivers began here, the Quarintis and the Quariotis, one flowing east and the other west and both of them emerging from the same huge limestone cavern that sat like a gaping white mouth against the sandy soil. Above it on the hillside where Kelenissa town was situated, all was green and lush and blooming, a welcome sight after the mud of the Jhelum Valley and the barrenness of the Salinakk plateau.

They found here an ancient stone palace of some Coronal earlier even than Stiamot, all in ruins, and a forest where strange wild animals wandered freely. A man of Kelenissa who was hunting there told Prestimion that the Coronal who had built the palace, whose name he did not know, had had a great park full of such beasts here. The park had been maintained for thousands of years after his time as a zoological preserve, but now the animals lived on their own, for the walls of the park had crumbled away.

The same man pointed to Septach Melayn, who was standing to one side carefully adjusting the hang of his sword in its baldrick in that finicky way of his, and said to Prestimion, “That very tall man there, with the fancy golden ringlets and the little pointed beard: can he be Prince Prestimion, who claims to be Coronal? For there’s something I should tell him, if that’s the case.”

Prestimion laughed. “He looks to be a kingly man, does he not? And in truth he’s Prestimion’s other self, or one of them, for that is Prestimion too over there, that dark little man with the beard so tightly curled, and that one there also, the great-shouldered one whose hair is cut so short. But in fact I am the one who was born to the name, so tell me whatever it is that you think Prince Prestimion needs to know.”

The Kelenissa man, bewildered by Prestimion’s airy and fanciful response, looked frowning from Septach Melayn to Svor to Gialaurys and then to Prestimion again; and then he said, “Well, whichever of you is indeed the prince, let it be known to him that two great armies of the other Coronal Lord whose name is Korsibar are marching at this moment toward this city to take him captive and return him to Castle Mount for trial as a rebel, and that we here have received orders from this Lord Korsibar instructing us to give all assistance to them when they arrive, and no help to the rebel Prestimion. Tell that to Prince Prestimion, if you will.” And the man turned and trudged away, leaving Prestimion sorry he had been so flippant and playful with him.

So their respite was over. Quickly Prestimion consulted Thalnap Zelifor, who did indeed seem to have some skill at casting his mind out into distant places and spying out knowledge. The Vroon gestured busily with his tentacles, bringing a dim bluish glow into the air before him, and after a few moments of intent concentration reported that two armies in fact were converging on them once more, forces even larger than the one Farholt had led. Mandrykarn and Farholt were the generals of the southern force, marching up through such places as Castinga and Nyaas and Purmande, while Navigorn was coming at them once more from the north.

“And which is closest to us now?” Prestimion asked.

“Navigorn. His is the greater army as well.”

“We’ll carry the war to him, without waiting for him to get here,” said Prestimion at once, for the victory at the Jhelum still coursed hot in his veins. “He hurt us once at Arkilon, but we’ll take him this time. And afterward deal with Mandrykarn and Farholt.”

Septach Melayn and Gialaurys were in agreement: strike quickly, before the two advancing armies could unite. The brothers Gaviad and Gaviundar were less eager for it. “It’s too soon to fight again,” said Gaviad, who even here at this morning hour had already been at his wine, or so it seemed from the thick-tonguedness of him. “Our brother the Procurator will come to us before long with additional men.”

“Wait, yes,” said Gaviundar. “He is a great wondrous asset to our cause, our brother is.”

“And have you any date for his arrival among us?” asked Septach Melayn a little testily. “He seems somewhat overdue already, would you not agree?”

“Be patient, lad, patient!” said Gaviad, peering up at Septach Melayn out of reddened bleary eyes and pulling at the wiry tufts of his mustache. “Dantirya Sambail won’t be much longer now: my oath upon it.” And he drew forth a new flask of wine and set to work.

Nor did the argument for immediate attack find favor with Svor. “We feel strong and high-spirited now, after the river-battle and this easy march north. But are we strong enough, Prestimion? Would it not be wiser to draw back into the west, perhaps as far as the coast, even, and build ourselves a bigger army yet, before we take them on?”

“Which would give them opportunity, also, to build their own forces,” said Gialaurys. “No. I say hit them now, flatten them with our monitors, send them slinking back to Korsibar in tatters as we did with Farholt’s army. Two such defeats running and the people will begin to tell each other that the hand of the Divine is against the usurper. Wait, and it’ll only give him more time to make himself look like a legitimate king.”

There was a silence then; and into it, in a low voice edged with melancholy, Svor said, “Legitimate—illegitimate—ah, my good lords, how much blood do we intend to shed over these words? How many wounds, how many deaths? If only Majipoor were not saddled with this devilish thing of a monarchy at all!”

“Saddled, Svor?” said Septach Melayn. “And devilish? A strange choice of words. What are you saying?”

“Let us suppose,” Svor replied, “that we had no lifelong kings here at all, but only a Coronal who served by the choice of the high lords and princes, perhaps for a term of six years, or perhaps eight. And then he would step down from the throne and another be chosen in his place. With such a system, we would tolerate Korsibar’s holding of the throne, irregular though it may be, with the agreement that after his six years, or eight, he would go his way, and Prestimion could have the crown. And after Prestimion, someone else, six or eight years farther on. If that were so, we would not have this war, and fine men dying on muddy fields, and before long cities burning as well, I think.”

“What you say is lunacy,” retorted Gialaurys. “A recipe for chaos and nothing else. Kingship should be embodied in one great man, and that man hold the throne so long as he lives, and then go to the Labyrinth and have the higher throne to the end of his life. It is the only way, if we are to have a stable government in the world.”

“And also,” said Septach Melayn, “consider this: under your scheme the Coronal would lose all power in the last year or two of his reign, as everyone came to see that he was soon no longer to be king; for why fear him, with his time almost up? And another thing: we would always have men jostling for the succession, hardly one Coronal on the throne but five or six others already angling to take his place after his term of office. Gialaurys is right, Svor: a crazy system. Let us hear no more of the idea.”

Prestimion called upon them then to return to the theme of their meeting, whether or not to launch an attack on Navigorn’s army. It was so resolved, though the brothers Gaviad and Gaviundar remained cool to it, and scouts were sent out in several directions. Soon Prestimion had word from them confirming the essence of Thalnap Zelifor’s spell-casting. Navigorn was five days’ march north and east of them, at a flat dry place called Stymphinor. He had with him an army of dismaying size, and, said the scouts, an entire large corps of wizards and mages as well.

“Give me one good man with a sword and another with a spear,” said Prestimion scornfully, “and they can handle a dozen wizards apiece. These men in brazen hats hold no terror for me.”

Let Navigorn use such things if he wished, he declared. He himself would depend on more conventional tactics: good sturdy weapons of bright sharp steel, and not such things as ammatelapalas and veralistias and rohillas and other such magical devices of the ignorant and credulous. “We’ll attack at once,” he said. “In surprise lies our best hope.” And they straightaway got themselves ready for battle.

They set out then to the east, following the course of the Quarintis as long as they could, then going up a little way into the hills north of the river that led into Stymphinor, where Navigorn lay encamped.

On the eve of the battle Thalnap Zelifor came to Prestimion, who sat going over the plan of attack in his tent with Septach Melayn, and asked the prince whether he wished him to cast a spell favorable to their cause that night. “No,” Prestimion replied. “Have you not heard me say again and again that such things are for Navigorn, perhaps, but not for me?”

“I had come to think that you were beginning in recent weeks to see merit in our art,” said the Vroon.

“I tolerate a little conjuring around me, yes,” Prestimion said, “but only because others whom I love wished me to permit it. I am far from a convert to your magic, Thalnap Zelifor. Military skill and plain good luck are worth more to me than a whole legion of demons and spirits and other such invisible and nonexistent forces.”

But to his surprise Septach Melayn took a different position. “Ah, let the spells be cast, Prestimion,” he said. “There’s no harm in it, is there? What will it cost us to have this Vroon wriggle his tentacles a bit, and make the air glow blue, and mutter some words that might help us on the field?”

Prestimion gave him a strange look. Never before had he heard Septach Melayn say a word in favor of sorcery. But Septach Melayn was right to the extent that such witchery cost nothing but a little effort on the part of the Vroon; and so Prestimion gave his permission. Thalnap Zelifor went off to his quarters to cast the spell; and Prestimion and Septach Melayn began once more to study their plan of battle.

An hour later the Vroon reappeared. His big yellow eyes seemed more than usually solemn and earnest, as though he had labored long and hard at his task.

“Well?” Prestimion said. “Is it done? Are all the demons properly invoked?”

“The runes are cast, yes,” said Thalnap Zelifor. “And now I come to you about another matter entirely.”

“Go on,” said Prestimion. “Speak, then.”

“I told you, my lord, that I had left the incomplete model of my thought-perceiving device at the Castle, and many another mechanism that could be of use to you in the struggle ahead. I ask your permission to return immediately to the Castle—setting out this very night if you will allow it—and fetch those things.”

Septach Melayn laughed. “You’ll be hanging by chains in the Sangamor tunnels again five minutes after you get there. And that’s if you’re lucky. Korsibar knows you’re with us; he’ll charge you with treason the moment he sees you.”

“Not if I claim to be defecting to his side,” said the Vroon.

“Defecting?” said Prestimion, startled.

“In pretense only, I assure you,” the Vroon said hastily. “I announce to him that I can see no merit in your claim to be Coronal, and offer him my services. Perhaps I’ll share with him, also, some purported strategic plans of yours—which I have invented myself. He won’t harm me then. And then I’ll go into my room and gather up all my devices and mechanisms, and when the time is right I’ll slip away again and come back to you with them. That will give you—after I’ve completed the last step or two of my research, of course—the power through me of looking into Korsibar’s mind, or Navigorn’s, or the mind of anyone you please, and seeing the innermost secrets hidden there.”

Prestimion looked uneasily toward Septach Melayn. “This is all too devious for me. Pretending to defect? Will Korsibar be so innocent as to believe that? And then managing to leave the Castle under his very nose, and coming back here with these magicky machines of yours?”

“I have explained,” said Thalnap Zelifor with dignity, “that there is no magic to them, but only science.”

“Let him go, if he thinks he can do it,” Septach Melayn said. “We have other things to deal with tonight, Prestimion.”

“Yes. Yes. All right, you can go to the Castle, Thalnap Zelifor.” Impatiently Prestimion waved the Vroon away. “Do you want an escort?” he asked as Thalnap Zelifor backed from the tent. “I can spare you two men of Muldemar who were wounded at the Jhelum and won’t be fighting tomorrow anyway. Speak to Taradath about them. And get you back here with your machines as quickly as you can.”

Thalnap Zelifor made a reverent starburst and departed.

The engagement began at sunrise: a bright clear sky, a brilliant hot sun. The whole formidable corps of mollitors was at the ready in the fore of the rebel force, each great beast with its rider perched above, ready to send the animal careering forward at the signal from Prestimion. The two armies were facing one another on a wide, flat, open field broken only by a few spindly bushes and occasional outcroppings of rock: a perfect place, thought Prestimion, for charging mollitors. He himself stood off to the left with his archers, set back a short distance from the line of battle; his spearsmen and slingers were in the center, led by Gialaurys and Septach Melayn, and they likewise were set back a little way. The cavalry, under Duke Miaule, waited hidden in a defile well over to the right.

It was Prestimion’s plan to be quick and economical about the battle, because they were so greatly outnumbered. Therefore he meant to strike the enemy not at his weakest but at his strongest point, in the very center.

An oblique advance was what he proposed: the center and left held back in the early moments, the mollitors coming on first to put Navigorn’s front line into disarray, and then, when a gap had developed there, to bring the cavalry in from the right for the decisive charge, with the other two wings pouncing in their wake. Overwhelming force at the decisive point: that would be their strategy. Once more the army from Zimroel under the command of the brothers of the Procurator would be kept in the rear to provide the final overwhelming assault and to do the mopping-up as Navigorn’s routed men retreated.

Prestimion could see Navigorn across the way, standing at the head of his forces: an imposing dark-haired figure very much like Korsibar himself in appearance, bold and swaggering, grinning with confidence, with green-cloaked shoulders thrown back, deep chest swelling proudly beneath armor of gleaming silver scales, eyes even from so far away visibly bright with the joy of battle and an eagerness to be moving forward. A worthy enemy, Prestimion thought. A pity that they must be enemies, though.

He gave the order for the charge. The mollitors moved forward. Their heavy hooves made a sound as of a thousand hammers striking a thousand anvils.

Then a dozen or more of Navigorn’s brazen-hatted sorcerers, impressively garbed in golden kalautikois and scarlet and green lagustrimores, came suddenly into view. Prestimion saw them standing side by side on one of the rocky ledges above the battlefield. They were holding in their left hands great coiling bronze horns of an unfamiliar kind; and as the mollitors began their charge, the mages put the mouthpieces of those horns to their lips and brought forth such a devilish screech that Prestimion thought the heavens would crack apart from it. It was as though some witchery were at work to amplify the noise of those horns beyond the capacity of human lungs to create. That sound—again, again, again—wailed all about them like the crack of doom.

And the mollitors, some of them, at least, were flung into confusion.

Those at the frontmost of the charge halted abruptly when that terrible blast of sound hit them, turning away from it and running wildly in any direction that would not take them closer to the evil screeching. Some ran to the left, bursting into the midst of Prestimion’s archers, who scattered before them. Some ran to the right, vanishing amidst clouds of dust into the gully where Prestimion’s cavalry lay concealed, which surely would drive the mounts into a panic of their own. And some, perhaps braver or simply more stupid than the others, went plunging on toward Navigorn’s front line; but the royalist army simply stepped aside, creating aisles through which the oncoming mollitors could pass and letting them go rampaging harmlessly on and on into the open fields beyond.

For an instant Prestimion stood stupefied by the utter failure of the charge. Then he lifted his bow and with the mightiest shot of his life, stretching the bow almost to its breaking point, struck one of Navigorn’s mages off his rock, the arrow making its way easily into the rich brocade of his kalautikoi and the shaft emerging a foot through on the other side. The man tumbled and fell without uttering a word and his horn of burnished bronze went clattering down beside him.

But Prestimion’s wondrous shot was the last happy moment of the day for the rebels. The real momentum lay with the royalist side. As the mollitors scattered, Navigorn’s cavalrymen came thundering forward, with the infantry just behind, wielding their javelins and spears with awful effect. “Hold your formations!” Prestimion shouted. Septach Melayn, far across the way, called out the same command. But the rebel front line was breaking up. Prestimion watched his men turning and flooding backward into the second line, and to his horror saw that for a time a bizarre struggle was raging among his own men. For the second line, unable in the heat of the fray to distinguish friend from foe, was striking at those who came rushing into them, not realizing that they were their own fleeing companions.

Prestimion looked about for a messenger and caught sight of his fleet-footed brother Abrigant. “Get yourself to Gaviundar,” he ordered. “Tell them that all’s lost unless they join the battle immediately.”

Abrigant nodded and ran off toward the rear.

Navigorn was a masterly general, Prestimion saw now. He had complete control of every instant of the battle. His cavalry had sent the rebel front line into rout; his infantrymen were going at it fiercely, hand-to-hand, with Prestimion’s second line, which by now had reconstituted itself and was offering strong resistance; and now Navigorn’s own second line was coming forward, not along the expected wide front but instead as a lethal concentrated wedge, smashing ruthlessly into the heart of the rebel line. There was no stopping them. Prestimion and his men filled the air with arrows, but the best archers in the world could not have halted that advance.

The slaughter went and on.

Where were Gaviundar and drunken Gaviad? Crouching over a flask of wine somewhere safe behind the lines? Prestimion had a glimpse of Gialaurys skewering men with his spear, and Septach Melayn’s tireless flashing sword hard at work elsewhere, but it was hopeless. It seemed to him even that blood was streaming down Septach Melayn’s arm, he who had never known a wound in his life. They were beaten.

“Sound the retreat,” Prestimion called.

Just as the signal to withdraw went out, Abrigant came running up alongside him. “The Zimroel army is coming!” the boy said, panting.

“Now? Where have they been all this while?”

“Gaviundar misunderstood. He thought you would not want him until after the cavalry had gone into action. And Gaviad—”

Prestimion scowled and shook his head. “Never mind. I’ve already called retreat. Get you to safety, boy. We’re done for here.”

8

A sudden nasty disturbance of some sort was going on in the corridor outside the High Counsellor Farquanor’s office in the Pinitor Court. The High Counsellor, looking up in annoyance at this interruption of his work, heard the clacking of boots against the stone floor of the hallway, blustering angry shouts, the clatter of running feet coming from several directions. Then an astonishingly familiar voice rose above the melee, an impossible voice, loud and raucous and harsh, crying out, “Easy, there, easy! Get those filthy hands off me or I’ll have them chopped from your wrists! I am no sack of calimbots to be thrust about by you this way.”

Farquanor rushed to the door, peered out, gaped in amazement.

“Dantirya Sambail? What are you doing here?”

“Ah, the High Counsellor. Ah. Please instruct your men in the proper courtesy due a high lord of the realm, if you will.”

It was beyond comprehension. The Procurator of Ni-moya, in magnificent traveling robes of lustrous green velvet over flaring yellow breeches, was grinning diabolically at him from out of the midst of a bewildered-looking group of Castle guardsmen, some of whom were holding drawn weapons. For all the splendor of his garb, the Procurator looked dusty-faced and creased as though from a long hard journey. Five or six men in the boldly colored livery worn by Dantirya Sambail’s people were nearby, as travel-worn as their master. They were being pressed against the wall by even more guardsmen. Farquanor recognized Mandralisca, the sharp-faced poison-taster, among them.

“What is this?” Farquanor demanded, turning to the highest-ranking guardsman in the group, a Hjort named Kyargitis, who had the perpetually glum face and bulging eyes of his kind. Kyargitis looked more than usually unhappy just now. His thick orange tongue was flicking nervously back and forth over the many rows of rubbery chewing-cartilage that filled his capacious mouth.

“The Procurator and these men of his obtained admission to the Castle through Dizimaule Gate—I will make full investigation, Count Farquanor, I promise you that—and succeeded in getting all the way to the vestibule of the Pinitor Court before they were challenged,” said the Hjort, puffing with chagrin. “He insisted on seeing you. There was a scuffle—it was necessary to restrain him physically—”

Farquanor, altogether baffled by this inexplicable materialization outside his door of the last man he might have expected to see in this hallway today—the audacity of Dantirya Sambail’s marching into the Castle with this little handful of men and expecting anything other than immediate arrest—gave the Procurator a sharp look. “Have you come here to assassinate me?”

“Why would I do that?” said Dantirya Sambail, all charm and friendliness now. “Do you think I covet your post?” The Procurator’s mysterious amethyst eyes fastened on Farquanor’s, giving him such a fierce blast of that strange outreaching tenderness of his that Farquanor had to struggle to keep from flinching before it. “No, Farquanor, my business is not with you, except indirectly. I’m here to speak with the Coronal on a matter of the highest importance. And so, since protocol requires that I apply myself to the Coronal’s High Counsellor—my congratulations, by the way, on your appointment: he took his time about it, eh?—I came up here to the Pinitor to see if I could find you, and—”

“Protocol?” Farquanor said, still bemused with amazement at the sight of this man here at a time like this. “There’s no protocol for granting audience to rebels against the crown! You are proscribed, Dantirya Sambail: are you not aware of that? The only appointment you have is in the Sangamor tunnels! How could you imagine anything else?”

’Tell Lord Korsibar I’m here and would see him,” rejoined the Procurator coolly, in a tone one might use in speaking with a footman.

“Lord Korsibar is busy at present with—”

’Tell him that I’m here and that I bring him his means of victory in the present insurrection,” Dantirya Sambail said, and he was even less cordial now than he had been a moment before. “Tell him those exact words. And I promise you, Farquanor, if you do me any interference in bringing about my conference with the Coronal, if you delay me by so much as another heartbeat and a half, I will see to it ultimately that you not only are removed from your present high office but are very slowly flayed of every inch of your skin, which will be wrapped in strips about your face until you smother from it. This is my very solemn promise, Count Farquanor, which I am most unlikely to fail to keep.”

Farquanor stared a moment, and then another, without replying. It seemed to him that behind the Procurator’s usual arrogance and bluster lay some extraordinary intensity of tension and unease. Nor was a threat of that nature from a man of Dantirya Sambail’s sort to be taken casually.

This strange visit was a matter, Count Farquanor began to realize, that went beyond his scope of office. It would be wisest not to interpose any pretensions of his own. In a formal frosty tone he said, “I will notify Lord Korsibar that you are in the Castle, and he will see you or not, as he chooses, Dantirya Sambail.”

“Why are you here?” Korsibar asked, as surprised as Farquanor had been just a short while before. “I never wanted to see you again, after you forced Prestimion from my grasp. And I hardly thought to have you come calling at a time like this. Should you not be fighting against me now beside your loathsome brothers in Salinakk?”

“I am not your enemy, my lord,” said Dantirya Sambail. “Nor are they.”

“You call me ‘my lord?’ ”

“I do.”

The meeting was taking place not in the throne-room or in the Coronal’s private office, but in Lord Kryphon’s Grand Hall, a long and dark and narrow room much less grand than its name suggested, where wall-charts of the campaign against Prestimion were hung and constantly updated.

Korsibar spent much of his time in this room these days. He sat slouched now in a low chair of some antique kind, with twining lizards of wrought iron for its arms. The only movements he made were those of his eyes, which shifted restlessly from side to side in their deep sockets; other than that he was utterly still. With one hand he gripped the yawning fanged head of the lizard that was the left-hand armrest, and with the other he held his head propped upright with a finger pressed against his cheekbone, hidden deep within his thick beard. Korsibar had let his beard grow in full lately, something he had never done before, though Aliseeva and other women of the court had told him that it made him look much older than his years; indeed, there were even a few bright strands of white glistening in its blackness. That was something new. But this was a taxing time beyond anything for which his comfortable early life had prepared him.

Sanibak-Thastimoon was with him, and Prince Serithorn and Count Iram and Venta of Haplior, and several of his other close advisers. Two Skandar guardsman hovered close beside Korsibar in case the Procurator had some mischief in mind. Dantirya Sambail stood squarely before the Coronal in that customary cocky spread-legged stance of his, arms pulled back behind him and head thrust forward. Count Farquanor, looking sour-faced and strangely sallow, stood just behind him.

Slowly, for he was very tired this day, Korsibar said, “I am your lord, so you say, and you are not my enemy, so you also say, and yet your armies hold the field against mine. Why is it that they don’t seem to know you’re not my enemy, Dantirya Sambail?”

The Procurator nodded toward the wall-charts. “Have my brothers’ soldiers done your troops much harm?”

“At the Jhelum battle they did. I have this from Farholt.”

“And at the battle by Stymphinor, what there?”

“That battle was a short one. Navigorn had Prestimion beaten in the first half hour. We had few casualties there.”

“Send to Navigorn, my lord, and ask him whether the troops of Zimroel saw action against him at all at Stymphinor. Tell him that I claim it is the case that the armies under the command of my brothers Gaviad and Gaviundar never entered the fray that day, but held back, rather, until the issue was settled against Prestimion, and see what he says.”

Korsibar knotted his fingers in his beard and tugged at it somewhat after the fashion of Duke Svor, from whom, so he suspected, he had learned that mannerism. There was a terrible hammering behind his eyes. After a little while he replied, “If there were soldiers of yours at Stymphinor pledged to Prestimion, then why were they not fighting that day?”

“Because I told them not to,” said the Procurator. “I will not deny, my lord, that I allied myself with Prestimion in the first days of his rebellion. He is my kinsman: you know that. The ties of blood drew me to him. But I never had any great love for his cause.”

“And yet you gave him troops.”

“I gave him troops, yes, because I had pledged him I would do so, and at the Jhelum I let them fight against your army. But it was only a pretense, to swell him up with pride over an easy victory, and make him ready for the crushing. At the next battle my soldiers came too late to fight, and that was at my order too.”

“What’s this?” cried Korsibar. “Oh, you serpent!”

“But your serpent, my lord. Prestimion’s cause is hopeless. That was clear to me from the start, and it seems beyond dispute now. He is one man against a world; you have the backing of the people, and you will prevail. He may win a battle here and there, but his doom is certain.”

“You have that from your soothsayers?” Korsibar asked, with a quick glance at Sanibak-Thastimoon.

“I have it from here, my lord,” replied Dantirya Sambail, tapping his great gleaming freckled forehead. “Every ounce of wisdom I have in here, and there’s more than a little, tells me that Prestimion is attempting the impossible by trying to overturn your regime. And so I withdraw my pledge of aid to him: for I am not one who is given to toiling at impossible tasks. I’ve come here to you—at great personal inconvenience, my lord, which you can see from my rumpled look; traveling back and forth with such speed across the vastness of Alhanroel as I’ve been doing all this year and last, not to mention crossing the sea a couple of times, is no easy thing for a man of my years—for the sake of presenting you with the key to victory and putting an end to the strife that embroils the world.”

“The key to victory,” Korsibar repeated tonelessly. “What can you mean by that?” This conversation was becoming abhorrent to him. Dealing with Dantirya Sambail was like wrestling with manculains: there were deadly spines all over the man. He looked around the room for guidance, to Sanibak-Thastimoon, Iram, Serithorn, Farquanor. But their faces were as rigid as masks and their eyes told him nothing. “What would you have me do, Dantirya Sambail?”

“For one thing, you must take the field yourself.”

“Will you bite us both?” Korsibar demanded. “First you work treachery against your cousin, and then you try to lure me out of the Castle into the open, where anyone who cares to aim a javelin at me can—”

Dantirya Sambail grinned a tigerish grin. “Put your suspicions aside, my lord. You’ll come to no harm. Let me show you what I have in mind.—Is this the map of the battle zone? Yes: good. Here’s Prestimion, somewhere between Stymphinor and Klorn and moving to the northwest, I assume with the goal of reaching Alaisor and recruiting new troops for himself along the coast. Here’s the army of Mandrykarn and Farholt, somewhere around Purmande and heading toward him from below; and here’s Navigorn, to his east, pursuing him also. Perhaps Mandrykarn and Farholt will trap him in central Alhanroel, perhaps not: more likely not, but they’ll force him northward. Do you agree?”

“Go on,” said Korsibar.

“As he runs from place to place, trying to elude the two armies coming after him from this side and from this, word now reaches him that you yourself, the Coronal Lord Korsibar, have assembled yet a third army and have gone into the field yourself at the head of it. Look, here is the River Iyann, my lord. Here is the great Mavestoi Dam, and here is the reservoir behind it, Lake Mavestoi. Now, my lord, you take up your position in the hills above the dam; and then you let the word leak out to Prestimion’s spies that you are camped there, planning to descend on him from the north and destroy him.” Dantirya Sambail’s violet eyes were glowing now with excitement: they seemed almost incandescent. “His position is desperate, but he sees one last hope for himself! If he can attack your camp and manage to kill or capture you, he has at one stroke ended the war. Ringed all about him are the hostile forces of Mandrykarn and Farholt and Navigorn, but with you removed from the scene they would have no choice but to yield the throne to him.”

“So you bait a trap for him with me,” said Korsibar. “And he comes marching up the Iyann to take the bait. Yes, but what if he succeeds in snatching it, Dantirya Sambail? What if he does overthrow me with his one desperate final stroke? I’m not within his reach so long as I remain at the Castle, but once I’m in the field he has a chance at me. Not that I fear him, or anyone; but it’s only prudent for me to stay beyond range of some sudden wild thrust until this affair is done with.”

“Ah, no, my lord, no need to fret over that. Prestimion will fall into the trap and be destroyed, and no risk to yourself at any time. Here, my lord—let me show you—”

9

For Prestimion it was a time of steady retreat, and of the healing of wounds.

The losses at Stymphinor had not been as great as he first had feared, but they were serious enough. Of his officers he had lost Abantes of Pytho and the fearless Matsenor son of Mattathis, and also Thuya of Gabell, the Ghayrog Vexinud Kreszh, and an old playmate of his Muldemar childhood, Kimnan Tanain. A good many soldiers of the line had perished also; but the core of his army was still intact, though battered and to some degree demoralized.

And also Septach Melayn had taken a deep cut in the upper part of his sword-arm, which was an event that caused much wonder and dismay among Prestimion’s men. It was like the humbling of a god. No one had ever touched steel to Septach Melayn’s skin before, in all his years of mastery of the sport of swordsmanship. But the battle at Stymphinor had not been any sort of sporting event; and now Septach Melayn sat shirtless and pale and grimacing while one of the surgeons closed the long red slash for him with glossy black thread.

Was that an omen of their ultimate defeat, the peerless Septach Melayn wounded? The men were muttering darkly and making conjure-signs to ward off the demons that they feared were closing in on them.

“I’ll go among them,” said Septach Melayn good-humoredly, “and show them I’m well, and tell them that I’m relieved to discover that I’m mortal after all. Will make me less cocksure next time I’m in a fray, I’ll say: for indeed over the years I’d come to think I could best any opponent in the world without half trying.”

“As surely you can,” said Prestimion, who had learned that morning that Septach Melayn had taken his wound while fighting four men at once, and, despite the hindrance to his arm, had slain all four of them before leaving the field with the greatest reluctance in order to seek a poultice for the cut.

The behavior of the Zimroel armies, which had been so slow to take the field at Stymphinor, was another concern for Prestimion. He summoned Gaviad and Gaviundar to berate them for their laxness; but the fleshy-faced brothers were so penitent and abject that he withheld most of the anger he had had in readiness for them. Stocky thick-bodied Gaviad of the pendulous lips and jutting mustache was cold sober, for a novelty, and said over and over that his troops had been ready but he had been waiting for news of the cavalry charge before sending them forward, since that had been the plan; and tall big-eared strutting Gaviundar of the bald head and great tangled orange beard actually wept in dismay for having failed to bring in his men in timely fashion. So Prestimion forgave them. But he kept in mind whose brothers they were, and, fearing always the trickiness that ran in the Procurator’s blood, warned them that he would tolerate no excuses at the next engagement with the royalists.

Which he prayed would not occur soon. His men needed time to rest and repair themselves; and he hoped also for additional troops to join his cause. Encouraging messages had reached him from Alaisor on the western coast, which was the port through which the family of Muldemar shipped its wine to Zimroel, and where he had many close connections both of business and of family: the leading folk of Alaisor, he was told, favored the rebel cause over Korsibar’s, and were raising an army to fight for him. Good news came from elsewhere in western Alhanroel too: all up and down the coast, in Steenorp and Kikil, in Klai, in Kimoise, in other cities too, people were debating the merits of the two claimants to the throne and more and more of them were giving the nod to Prestimion, for they had had time now to consider the means by which Korsibar had come to be Coronal, and that did not sit well with them.

All this was fine indeed; but those cities of the western provinces were very far away, and the armies of Mandrykarn and Farholt and Navigorn were close behind. What Prestimion needed now to do was head swiftly to the north and west, to the land of his supporters along the coast, and make rendezvous with them before the enemies to his rear could fall upon him and bring an end to his whole rebellion. With all possible haste, then, he took himself upward and outward across the continent, moving farther away from Castle Mount, and the throne he desired, with every passing day.

They were approaching the valley of the River Iyann, which flowed out of the north country and made a westward turn here that took it to the sea at Alaisor, when Duke Svor came to Prestimion and said, “I have found certain persons who can do some useful scouting on our behalf, I think. They claim to have learned certain information already that may be valuable for us to know about.”

“Do we have some shortage of scouts, Svor, that we need to hire strangers?”

“We have none like these,” Svor said. And beckoned forward a bony-faced man of extraordinary height, at least a head taller than any man in the camp, but so lean and long-limbed that he seemed as frail as a wand that could be snapped in two by a good heavy shove. His hair was very dark and cropped short, and his aspect was a dark one too, swarthy skin almost like Svor’s own, and a coarse thick beard blackening his heavy-jawed face. He gave his name as Gornoth Gehayn and said he was a man of the nearby town of Thaipnir on the tributary river of the same name. Behind him stood three more men almost identical to him in their great height and gauntness and dark aspects, but they seemed no more than half his age; and behind them was a long cart drawn by a pair of mounts. Four large square boxes covered by leather shrouds rested on the cart’s bed.

“What is this?” Prestimion asked brusquely, for he was in an uneasy mood and short of patience just then.

“Your lordship,” said Gornoth Gehayn in a thin, high reedy voice, “we be trainers of hieraxes, my sons and I, who make them fly where we will, and ride clinging to their backs. It is a secret art private to our family, which we have been a long while in mastering. We go far and wide, and see many strange things.”

“Hieraxes?” Prestimion said, taken aback. “You fly on hieraxes?”

Gornoth Gehayn made a grand sweeping gesture; and one of his sons leaped up on the cart and pulled back the shroud that covered the hindmost box. Which stood revealed as a steel cage that held a huge bird, one with vast gray wings folded over its body like a cloak, and big glittering blue eyes that gleamed outward between the bars of the cage like angry sapphires.

Prestimion caught his breath in surprise. He had seen hieraxes before, on many occasions, when traveling between Castle Mount and the Labyrinth. They were gigantic predatory creatures of the upper air, which glided lazily on the warm atmospheric currents high above the Glayge Valley, scarcely flapping their wings as they coasted from place to place and now and again snapping some unfortunate smaller bird out of the sky with a swift movement of their long beaks. In their way they were graceful and very beautiful, at least aloft, though they seemed nothing more than bony monsters huddled here in their cages. But he had never known a hierax to be taken captive, and the thought of men riding on their backs as though they were tame well-bred mounts was beyond belief.

“These are somewhat different from the hieraxes of the east,” Gornoth Gehayn explained as his son raised the portcullis of the bird’s great cage. “These are the black-bellied ones of the Iyann region, which are bigger and much stronger than the pink ones of the Glayge, and so intelligent that they can be trained to obey. We take their eggs from the nest, and raise them and train them to our will, all for the pleasure of going aloft. Shall I demonstrate, my lord?”

“Go on.”

At a cue from Gornoth Gehayn’s son, the huge bird came waddling awkwardly from its cage. It seemed barely to know how to unfurl the enormous wings that were wrapped tight about its body, and its long thin legs were plainly unaccustomed to movement on the ground. But after a moment it got its wings to open, and Prestimion emitted an astonished hiss as he saw those long and arching pinions unfold and unfold and unfold until they were spread out for an unthinkable distance on either side of the bird’s substantial elongated body.

Immediately the son of Gornoth Gehayn, a boy so long and lean and light that he seemed almost to be the bird’s own kin himself, sprang lithely forward and seized the hierax delicately but firmly just at the place where the powerful wings sprouted from the bird’s muscular shoulders, and lay himself down sprawling along its back with his head just beside its own. Then there was a flapping of wings, a wild thumping beating of them on the ground, and after a moment’s seeming struggle the hierax leaped up a short way above the ground, and then two instants later was coursing upward through the air, with Gornoth Gehayn’s son still clinging to it.

It swept strongly higher almost at a straight line, and circled once overhead far above them, and shot off northward with phenomenal speed so that bird and rider soon were lost to view.

Gialaurys, who had joined Prestimion and Svor just as the boy had let the bird from its cage, laughed and said to Gornoth Gehayn, “Will you ever see either of them again? For I think the bird will fly off to the Great Moon with him.”

“There is no danger,” the man replied. “He’s been flying these hieraxes of ours since he was six years old.” Gornoth Gehayn gestured toward the cart and said to Gialaurys, “We have three other birds, my good lord. Would you care to go aloft yourself?”

“Gladly would I, and I thank you for the invitation,” said Gialaurys with a bright gleeful grin that was far from typical of his wintry nature. “But I suspect I might be somewhat too heavy for the creature to bear.” And he tapped his bull-like chest and each of his powerful shoulders. “A smaller man, perhaps, would be better. Such as you, my lord Duke Svor.”

Prestimion joined in also: “Yes, Svor! Go up there, tell us what you see!”

“Some other day, I think,” said Svor. “But look—look—is that the boy returning?” He pointed toward the sky; and indeed it was possible now to see a dark spot high above, which resolved itself against the brightness of the air into the widespread curving wings and long black-feathered body of the hierax; then, as it descended, the son of Gornoth Gehayn could be seen still clinging to the bird’s back. They landed a few moments later, bird and boy, and the boy jumped off, flushed, beaming with pleasure, exhilarated by his flight.

“What have you seen?” his father asked him.

“The armies, again. Marching up and down, drilling beside the lake.”

“Armies?” Prestimion said quickly.

Svor leaned close to him. “I told you they’d discovered information that would be useful to us.”

The fliers had indeed been making reconnaissance flights up the valley of the Iyann all week, once they noticed the military movements north of their town, and they had learned a great deal already, all of which they were pleased to make available to Prestimion for just a few silver royals. A great force of men, they said, had come riding lately in floaters across the land out of the east, men with weapons and armor; and upon reaching the Iyann they had gone straight up along the part of the river that flowed down from the north, until they had reached Mavestoi Dam, at the foot of the great reservoir that held the water supply for much of this province.

They were camped now all along the dam’s rim, and up both sides of the lake behind it. Each day one of the sons of Gornoth Gehayn had flown up there to see what was taking place—Gornoth Gehayn himself no longer went aloft, he said; he was too old for the game—and each day they saw additional troops arriving and digging in.

“The interesting thing,” Svor said, “is that three days ago one of the boys swooped low and saw a man in the center of the camp, a tall dark-haired man wearing a Coronal’s clothes, the green and gold with trim of white fur; and it seemed to him that he saw something flashing on the dark-haired man’s brow that might just have been a crown.”

Prestimion gasped. “Korsibar? Korsibar himself is out here?”

“So it would appear.”

“Can it be? I thought he’d stay safe and snug in the Castle as long as he had men like Navigorn and Farholt to fight his battles for him.”

“It seems,” said Svor, “that he has come to fight this one himself. Or so our airborne spies tell us.”

“Why is it, I wonder,” said Prestimion, frowning, “that Korsibar’s men allow these birds to fly low and spy them out, and make no attempt to shoot them down? I suppose they see only the hierax from below, and not the rider clinging to its back, and give it no heed. Well, no matter: if this is true, Svor, opportunity’s in our grasp, would you not say? We’ll send word to our friend Duke Horpidan of Alaisor to hurry those troops, and gather them in, and make an attempt on Korsibar while he’s here. It’s our one great chance. Seize him and the war’s over, simple as that.”

“I’ll bring him as a prisoner to you myself,” said Septach Melayn, whose wound was healing quickly and who was eager to be wielding his sword once again.

Each day, now, the hieraxes went forth; and each day they returned with further reports of the activities at Lake Mavestoi. The army there, they said, was a considerable one, though all three of Gornoth Gehayn’s sons were of the opinion that Prestimion’s own army was larger still. They had set up tents and were chopping down the trees around the lake to use for fortifications; and, yes, the man in the vestments of a Coronal could readily be seen whenever they flew over the camp, moving vigorously about in the midst of the soldiers, directing things.

Prestimion longed to hop on the back of one of these hieraxes himself, and verify that with his own eyes: but when he spoke of it to Gialaurys and Septach Melayn, sounding more than half serious, they rose up in wrath against him and told him that they would slaughter Gornoth Gehayn’s birds with their own hands should he make any motion to go near them. And Prestimion promised them that he would not; but still he yearned for attempting it, both for what he might learn concerning his enemy and also for the sheer wonder and splendor of flying through the air.

There once had been airborne vessels on Majipoor, a very long time ago: Lord Stiamot, so it was said, had fought his war against the Shapeshifters from the air, setting fire to their villages by dropping burning brands on them and driving them into captivity. The skill of making flying machines had been lost in the distant past, though, and to get from place to place on the enormous planet it was necessary to crawl along by floater or mount-drawn vehicle, and no one but these bony lads from the district of the Iyann knew what it was like to go up above the surface of the world. Prestimion bitterly envied them.

But there would be no hierax-flying for him. He knew it was a skill you had to be born to, and learn as a child; and perhaps he was too sturdily built for the birds to carry. And in any event he had a war to fight, and soon.

They had decided not to wait for the reinforcements from the west. While they waited, Korsibar’s other armies would be coming upon them from the east, and if the forces of Mandrykarn and Farholt and Navigorn were given the opportunity to join with those under Korsibar’s command, they would have no hope against them. The thing to do was to strike at once, against an army apparently not as numerous as their own.

“Had Thalnap Zelifor not left us,” Gialaurys said, “we could be using his witcheries to see into Korsibar’s camp and count their number. And also to learn the best route by which to attack.”

“We see the camp through the actual eyes of these boys,” Prestimion told him, “which is better than glimpsing it by sorcery. As for the route, this is Gornoth Gehayn’s home country, and he has drawn good maps for us. Thalnap Zelifor will return one of these days, bringing those thought-reading devices of his. But we’ll finish Korsibar off without his help, I think.”

They bent low over the maps. There were paths through the forests on both sides of the river leading up to the dam. Come up by night, on a night when no moons were in the sky; station half the cavalry on the east bank, half on the west; at a signal, ride into Korsibar’s camp and attack from both sides at once. Prestimion would have his archers atop mounts for this engagement: come riding in, riddle the enemy with arrows as they came. That would be a sure producer of terror, men on mountback with bows. And then the heavy infantry, Gaviad coming in from the east side, Gaviundar from the west—the Divine preserve them if they were slow this time!—a series of massive strokes, one after another, Septach Melayn’s bright sword cutting a path into the royalist camp, Gialaurys with his spear—

Yes. Yes. What wild miscalculation of Korsibar’s was it that had delivered the usurper by his own free will into their hands?

“There’ll be no moons shining three days hence,” Svor announced, after consulting his almanacs and almagests.

“Then that’s our night,” said Prestimion.

The Iyann here was a narrow river, not very deep, easy to ford. Most of its flow out of the north was choked off by the dam that Lord Mavestoi had constructed eight hundred years before. It was simple enough for Prestimion to divide his forces, sending half to either bank. He took up a position on the eastern shore, with his mounted archers; Gialaurys was behind him with the heavy infantry, and Gaviad’s army in back of those. On the river’s western side was the regular cavalry detachment under Duke Miaule, with Septach Melayn’s battalions accompanying them, and the army of Gaviundar poised to the rear for the second thrust.

The night’s only illumination was that of the stars, which in this part of the world shined with particular brilliance. There were the great stars that everyone knew, Trinatha up to the north, and Phaseil in the eastern sky and its twin Phasilin in the west, and Thorius and blazing red Xavial marking the midpoint of the heavens. Somewhere out there, too, was the little yellow star of Old Earth, though there was no agreement on which one that really was; and then, too, the new star, the fierce blue-white star that had appeared to the world while Korsibar and Prestimion were making their separate journeys northward up the Glayge to Castle Mount, was in plain view straight overhead, piercing the sky like a furious staring eye.

By the light of those stars, and especially that of the new star, the long, narrow white band that was Mavestoi Dam could be seen at the head of the valley above them, running between the dark cliffs. It was there, Prestimion knew, that he and his men must climb this night, up into those forested bluffs, then inward and down upon the unsuspecting royalists in their camp. Looking upward now, Prestimion thought he could make out tiny figures moving along the dam’s concrete rim. Sentries, no doubt. Did they have any idea that twin armies were stealing toward them along both sides of the river below? Very likely not. There was no sense of urgency or alarm in their movements: just some men, tiny as matchsticks from here, steadily pacing up and down along the crest of the dam.

Prestimion checked the positions of the stars. Trinatha, Thorius, Xavial, all in alignment. Time to get going now. He raised his hand, held it high a moment, lowered it. Began to move forward, up the pathway beside the river. On the western shore Duke Miaule’s forces were in motion also.

Upward. Upward.

The Divine grant us its favor, Prestimion thought, and we will finish this struggle tonight and bring sanity back into the world.

“What’s that?” Svor said. “Thunder?”

Prestimion looked around, puzzled. A dull booming sound, indeed. But the night was clear, cloudless. There had been no lightning; there was no storm.

“Brother? Brotherr Taradath, coming up the path. “Not so loud!” Prestimion said in a harsh whisper. “What is it?”

“Gaviad—the Zimroel men—”

“Yes?”

Another boom, louder than the first.

“I’ve just had word—they’re heading out. Marching away from the river as fast as they can.”

“Heading—out?” said Prestimion. “But—what—”

Svor said, “Look up there. The dam!”

Boom. Boom. Boom.

No figures could be seen along the dam’s crest now. Only a quick burst of red, like a flare going off, and then a dark jagged crack, and what looked like a triangular chip taken out of the face of that white concrete wall.

Boom! Louder than all the others.

Svor cried, in a ragged voice, “They’re blowing up the dam, Prestimion! They’ll send the whole lake down on us!”

“But that would flood a hundred villages and—” Prestimion replied, and said no more after that, but only gaped in disbelief, for by the lurid light of the explosions above them he could see the whole face of the. dam crumbling, and a stupefying torrent of water descending through the darkness toward the valley below and all his men.