Sorcerers of Majipoor

1

This was surely the bleakest place in all the world, Prestimion thought, save only those terrible deserts of the continent of Suvrael where no one in his right mind would ever want to go.

It was a gray land that he was walking through in this black hour. The sky overhead was gray, the dry ground beneath his feet was gray, the very wind was gray with a burden of fine silt as it swept roaring out of the east. The only color in this place came from the plants, which seemed to be striking back against the universal grayness with some furious determination of their own. Big rigid dome-shaped fungi, a deathly yellow in hue, exploded into clouds of brilliant green spores whenever he trampled on one; the tough sparse saw-edged grass was an angry carmine; the trees, tall and narrow as spears, had gleaming blue leaves shaped like spines and constantly dropped a rain of viscous pink sap that burned him like acid whenever he passed incautiously within reach of it.

Low chalky hills that had the look of stubby teeth formed chains across the far horizon. The open country between them was flat and dry and unpromising, no lakes, no streams, only an occasional brackish spring oozing out of some salt-encrusted crack in the ground.

He had been walking for days, so many that he lost count of them. His tongue was thick and swollen from thirst and his eyelids were so puffed that he looked out between them as if through slitted windows. Sweat streamed on him constantly; caked dust clung everywhere to his sticky skin; the force of the sun became a metallic clangor sounding in his head. And through his mind ran, over and over without cease, the remembered images of the cataclysm that had destroyed his army and, for all he knew, robbed him of his dearest friends.

That merciless white wall of water riding down the hillside toward them, with the great sundered chunks of Mavestoi Dam coming down with it—

The terrified mounts bucking and rearing—scattering in every direction—the infantrymen desperately running, seeking high ground—screams in the night—the sound of that falling water, the inexorable sound of it, like the Great Moon itself rushing down upon them through the air to crush them all—

Prestimion had scarcely any recollection of how he himself had managed to survive the destruction of the dam. He remembered the first tongue of foaming water swirling along the ground toward him clearly enough, and remembered too the greater rush of water behind it. His mount struggling to stay upright and failing, pitching over, kicking frantically in the sudden lake that had begun to engulf it. Then his memories were unclear for a time. He knew he had been unable to right the animal or to steady it in any way, and that eventually he was swept out of the saddle and away from the sinking mount by the force of the water. And then—swimming? Yes, he must have made his way somehow across the breast of the rising flood, through all the turbulence of it, great masses of water constantly falling on him like boulders and smashing him under. Being hurled down deep, his lungs filling, and fighting his way up again, again, again. But he had no memory of that at all. Remembered, only, emerging at last onto dry land, crawling up on some rocky outcropping that must have been, an hour earlier, part of the cliff below the dam, and lying there for an endless time, gasping and puking, fighting for breath, sick and dizzy from all the water he had gulped down.

Then—Korsibar’s men coming down into the flood zone, seeking out the dazed survivors, slaughtering them like pigs.

He had no idea how he had escaped that. His weapons had all been lost in the water. Perhaps he had found safety under some overhanging ledge, or behind some bush. All he remembered was that he had come through it alive, somehow. Making his way from the battle scene, from that place along the water’s edge where shouting warriors ran about, where the figures of dead or gravely wounded men lay strewn across the land like straws.

That was not the first time Prestimion had beheld that grim landscape of death. He had seen it once before, he knew: long ago in Muldemar House, in the pleasant peace and privacy of his mother’s reading-gallery, that time when the magus Galbifond had had him look into a bowl of some pallid fluid. Galbifond had muttered incantations and shown him that very battlefield, that same scene of frightful chaos. Prestimion had not known, then, whose armies contended there: but now it was clear that one was Korsibar’s and the other his, and that Korsibar by working a monstrously evil deed had been the victor.

But he himself had survived the flood and the debacle that followed it. In the eye of his mind he saw himself limping away from the battlefield where nothing now remained but the evidence of disaster. Coming forth at last into a quieter place where no one was in sight anywhere, neither friend nor foe. Climbing some steep rocky path that took him upward along the course of the river, past the shattered dam, past the palisades of Korsibar’s encampment.

Alone, as the dreadful dawn after that dreadful night had arrived, Prestimion had looked down and behind him, thinking, Taradath? Abrigant?And thinking then, also: Svor? Gialaurys? Septach Melayn?

Why had he ever wanted to be Coronal? Had he not been happy enough as Prince of Muldemar? Two of his brothers almost certainly dead, his three dear friends swept away in that deluge, the lives lost of thousands of men who had supported his cause, and for what? For what? So that he might sit upon a great ruby-streaked block of black opal instead of some other man, and have people kneel and make inane gesticulations before him, and listen solemnly as he issued decrees?

He was numbed, stunned, by the death and destruction that his determination to wrest the crown from Korsibar had caused. How many had perished for his sake? His overweening ambition had made martyrs of thousands of good people. Majipoor had never been a warlike world; since the pacification of the Shapeshifters seven thousand years before, its people had lived placidly, in happy harmony, and those who were of a warring nature could find release on the jousting-fields and other such rough sports. But now, behold! Because of his determination that he and not the other man should rule, war had come to the world, and men were in their graves who should have had long lives ahead.

Now there was nothing left for him but to march onward into this unknown country in the hope of avoiding the fury of Korsibar’s men, and reach some safe place where he might rest and recover himself, and then he would consider how he meant to spend whatever time might remain to him in the world.

In the days that followed, and for days after that, roots and leaves and little white acrid fruits were the only food Prestimion had. Then at last, on the far side of the chalky hills, the country changed a little, the land becoming pale brown streaked with red: a sign, perhaps, of fertility. There was a grayish silty little river running here from east to west that was split into three forks. Along the riverbanks the plants had shining green foliage, and some of them carried fat purplish fruits with wrinkled skins. Prestimion tried one and it did him no harm, so he ate several others before sleeping, and when he found himself still alive and unpoisoned in the morning, he had some more, and collected others to carry with him in a fold of his jerkin.

This was a harsh untamed land. He had no idea what it was called. Danger lurked everywhere. He stumbled across some loose boughs and nearly fell, and when he caught his balance he looked down and saw himself at the verge of a pit, with glittering red eyes and flashing yellow claws waiting below. Later in the day a long swaybacked beast covered in thick brown scales that looked as hard as rock rushed wildly out of nowhere, swinging its small dull-eyed head from side to side like a club; but it went running past him as though in search of juicier prey. And afterward he saw a comic hopping creature with merry golden eyes and absurd tiny forearms, but from its tail there sprang a spike that squirted poison into the plump gray lizards that it hunted. A day or two later came a swarm of winged insects, as dazzling as colored jewels, that filled the air with a milky spray, and when a bird flew into that deadly mist it let its wings droop and plummeted groundward like a stone.

Farther on the terrain changed again. Now it was broken land, cut by gullies and steep canyons. The bones of the world lay exposed here, great dark stripes cutting through the soft reddish rocks of the hillsides. Sprawling shrubs with white woolly leaves clung to the ground like a dense coating of fur. There were great trees with thick black trunks and wide-spreading crowns of yellow leaves.

And there was a village here, in a sheltered place at the floor of a narrow canyon. The people were all Ghayrogs, the gray-scaled reptilian-looking folk with forked, flickering scarlet tongues. There were a few hundred of them, living widely scattered up and down the canyon along a stretch a couple of miles long. This dry country seemed to be what they liked: Ghayrogs often settled in inhospitable parts of Majipoor that reminded them of their home districts on their native world.

They were friendly enough here. They gave Prestimion a place to sleep, and food that was edible enough, though strange, and he was able even to acquire a bow and some arrows to hunt with once he continued along his journey, and a pack to store provisions in when he wandered onward.

Of Coronals and civil wars, these people knew nothing at all. The names “Prestimion” and “Korsibar” and even “Confalume” and “Prankipin” had no significance for them. They lived out here as though on a planet of their own.

He asked them where he was, and they said, in thick hissing accents that he could barely comprehend, “This is the town of Valmambra, where the desert of the same name begins.”

It was like the turning of a key in a door, hearing that name, Valmambra.

Once again Prestimion’s mind went back, far back into what seemed like another life, to that quiet hour spent in his mother’s reading-gallery in Muldemar House. His mother there, and the stoop-shouldered white-haired magus Galbifond. The bowl of slate-colored fluid in which Galbifond had shown him—how?—that all-too-accurate vision of the battle by the shores of the Iyann, the slaughter of his army by Korsibar’s.

But that vision had had a second part, Prestimion remembered now. The battlefield image had faded; the bowl had shown him some grim and bleak landscape, bleaker even than the one he had recently passed. A scattering of isolated jagged hills. Reddish soil, wedge-shaped boulders. The twisted sparse-leaved form of a single szambra-tree writhing before him against the cloudless sky. A tree of the Valmambra Desert and nowhere else, was the szambra-tree. And look! That tiny figure of a man, plodding wearily through the wasteland, every step an effort for him: that short square-shouldered man, golden hair cut short, ragged jerkin, carrying a pack, a bow, a few arrows: himself. Galbifond had let him see it all, there in Muldemar House. Himself, a lonely weary refugee, setting out on foot across the Valmambra toward the wizard-city of Triggoin. Triggoin, where Svor, in a dream, had once been told that Prestimion might learn how to gain the crown that he had lost.

Galbifond had shown all this to him long ago in the depths of that bowl—the battle, the defeat, the trek northward through the desert—and now those very things were coming to pass.

So he must follow his destiny, willy-nilly.

“I have business in the city of Triggoin,” he said to the Ghayrogs of this village that lay at the edge of the desert he knew now he must cross. “Can you tell me how to find the road that leads there?”

The Valmambra was in every way identical to the place Galbifond had shown him in the vision of the bowl—the hills, the boulders, the few twisted trees growing in the reddish soil. But the bowl had been able only to show him the desert; it could not make him feel it. And Prestimion felt it now. It had seemed to him that he had been marching through a desert almost all the time since beginning his northward journey, but he saw now that what he had taken for a desert was a gentle park, a paradise, even, compared with the Valmambra. For the terrain that lay behind him had merely been dry broken country, empty because hardly anybody cared to live there. The Valmambra was true desert indeed, and it was empty because it was virtually uninhabitable.

Triggoin, the Ghayrogs told him, lay in a straight track to the north, on the far side of the desert. He need only guide himself by the stars at night, keep Phaseil to his right and Phasilin to his left and head constantly for the white gleam of Trinatha in the northern sky. After a time he would come to a little village called Jaggereen, another Ghayrog town, which was the only settlement within the Valmambra proper. They would tell him at Jaggereen how to proceed onward to Triggoin.

All that sounded uncomplicated enough. But the Ghayrogs had not prepared him, any more than Galbifond had, for the austerities of the Valmambra. Had not prepared him for the merciless dryness of the land, where you could go three days at a time without finding a source of water, and what you found then would be brackish. For the air, as dry as the sand beneath his feet, so that breathing it parched the nostrils and made the tongue raw and tender. For the heat of day, which seemed as fierce to Prestimion as he supposed the fabled heat of Suvrael must be. For the chill of night, when the clear air released to the sky all the warmth that had poured in by day, and left him huddled and shivering in whatever shelter he managed to find. For the scarcity of anything to eat, nothing at all for two or three days at a time, then only miserable little dry berries and the stems of some low crooked plant with spiny leaves and—occasionally, very occasionally—the stringy meat of the small gray hopping creature with great curving ears the size of its own head that was the only kind of animal life that seemed to live here. Their hearing was so sensitive that it was impossible for Prestimion to stalk them. But now and again he saw one motionless on a hillside across some barren ravine, and by releasing his arrow swiftly in the direction which he thought the animal would run once it heard the sound of the singing shaft heading its way, he was able to bring it down.

Triggoin was supposed to be on the far side of the desert, but the desert appeared to have no end. Prestimion grew weaker and weaker as the demands the Valmambra placed on his already overtaxed body far exceeded the quantity of food and water he was able to find. He was assailed by fever and dizziness, so that the landscape rocked and lurched before him like the breast of a wild sea; his vision grew blurred, so there was no way for him to use his bow; his feet and legs swelled, making every step an aching torment. The clangor coming from the sun’s inexorable light began again, and would not cease. He imagined the sound of thunder in a place that knew no rainstorms. Great oscillating rings of green light surrounded the sun, filling half the sky, or so it seemed to him. Sun-blisters sprang up along his back and shoulders, and after he lay dozing face downward on the sand for a time when he felt too dizzy to go forward, he arose reddened and swollen from neck to ankles, feeling half cooked, or more than half.

A day or two later he ate something hard and blue, a nut of some kind, that stung his mouth and made his eyelids puff to three times their thickness. He was set upon by a cloud of small golden flies, like a mist of bright metal, that bit him in a hundred places and raised blisters. He came to a tangle of impassable brambles many miles wide that barred his path, so that he had to go a long distance to the east before he found a way to continue on his northward route.

He dreamed of Muldemar House, his bed, his stone bathtub, his wine, his soft clean clothes. He dreamed of his friends. One night in his dreams Thismet came to him and danced and opened her bodice to show him small round breasts tipped with hard dark nipples.

He woke retching, one morning, and spent what seemed like an hour vomiting thin white fluid. He woke sobbing once, which astonished him. The leather of his boots began to split. His toes stuck out; he stubbed one and it bled for two days.

He tried not to think of where he was or what was happening to him. He did not want to consider the prospect that he would die out here, forgotten and unburied.

For a whole day he thought he was Coronal, and wondered why he was not at the Castle. Then he remembered the truth.

Three lean-shanked animals squatted beside him one night as he waited for sleep at the edge of a dry gully, and made cackling sounds that seemed almost like laughter. They had sharp teeth; he wondered if they would fall upon him and eat him. But they did not. They laughed at him some more, and walked in circles around him, and one by one emitted little piles of bright green turds. Then they moved along. They had no use for him.

He came to a river of sand running through the desert. In the midday sun it blazed like a long line of white fire from the quartz crystals that were in it. He knelt and scooped it up in his hands as though it were water, and let it run through his fingers, and once again wept.

He stumbled over a gnarled shrub and twisted his leg. His knee swelled like a balloon. For two days he could put no weight on it, nor could he walk. He crawled. In a broad open place under the merciless sun, he was attacked by a huge carrion-bird, a thing somewhat like a milufta, with terrible bloodshot eyes and a long bare red neck that had loose skin hanging from it in ruffled folds, and a beak like the edge of a scythe. It came flapping down out of the sky, shrieking as though it had eaten nothing in a month, and tried to wrap him in its great ragged-edged wings. “Not dead yet!” Prestimion cried, and rolled over and kicked at it with his good leg. “Not dead, not dead, not dead!”

Evidently it didn’t care. The bird seemed crazed. It must have gone without food so long that it was willing to kill to eat, though it was plainly a carrion-bird. It clawed at him with curved yellow talons and drew blood from him in half a dozen places. It snapped at his throat, at his eyes. It tore at him and ripped a strip of flesh from his arm, and came back for more. “Not dead yet!” Prestimion kept saying as he struggled to beat the bird away from him. “Not dead!” It was the first time he had spoken aloud in days.

The reek of its breath sickened him and the pain where it had ripped him was like a line of white fire. He lay on his back and kicked and pummeled at it as it fluttered and flurried about him. If it would only fly upward a little way, he would try to put an arrow through its belly; but no, no, it hovered close against him, frantically biting and clawing,, wounding him again and again, until somehow in a burst of desperate fury he caught it by its long scrawny neck, wrapped one arm about it and brought a rock down against its skull over and over with his other hand.

It fell away from him and lay limply, flapping its wings slowly for a time, and then no longer moving. When it was done with the last of its death-spasms, Prestimion rose and walked over to it, and saw that it was a monster nearly as big as he was. The thought came to him that its meat might be edible; but the thought of eating that creature was so revolting to him that he began to vomit once again, and vomited up the emptiness that was within him for an endless time.

Afterward he bandaged the deepest wound with cloth torn from his undershirt. And then he arose and went limping onward. Before long he ceased to note the pain, though blood seeped through all day to his outer garments. He had begun to forget how to feel pain.

But then one day he was simply unable to go on at all.

It seemed to him that he must have been heading in the proper direction all this while, but there was no sign yet of the village of Jaggereen, and he had had nothing at all to eat in several days, no leaves, no roots, no insects or crawling things, even, and no water except what he had been able to lick from a flat rock that had a tiny trickle running along its face from somewhere. And now his strength was exhausted. This was, he knew, the end. All his proud ambitions would reach their termination in this forlorn place, and no one would ever know what had become of him, and in time the world would forget that there had ever been such a person as Prestimion of Muldemar, who might once have had his name inscribed in the list of kings.

He lay down in the shade of a tall rock, placed his pack on one side of him and his bow on the other, and closed his eyes, and waited. How long, he wondered, would it take death to come for him? An hour? A day? Already he felt time slowing to a halt. His mouth had the taste of dust and his breaths came so infrequently that each one was a surprise to him. Once in a while he opened his eyes and saw only a vague reddish swirl before him. Then for a long time he lay quite still, and the mere idea of movement struck him as impossible of fulfillment, and it occurred to him that he might already be dead. But no, no, he heard himself draw another breath.

I should write my name beside my body, he told himself, so that when they find my bones they will know whose bones these were. He opened his eyes. Impossible to focus them. The red swirl, again. Behind it, the glare of the sun, resounding in his consciousness like a metal gong in the sky. Turned slightly toward the left. Extended a trembling finger, slowly and shakily traced the first letter of his name in the sand. The second letter, the third. Halted there, tried to remember what the fourth letter was. A voice from overhead said, “You write an S next.”

“Thank you,” Prestimion said.

“And after it a T,” said another, deeper voice, in the heavy accents of the city of Piliplok.

“I know that voice,” Prestimion murmured.

“Yes. You do. And you know mine also.—Pick him up, Gialaurys. Let’s waste no time getting him to the village.”

“Svor? Is that you?”

“Yes. And Gialaurys.”

“So you died also? And are we at the Source together, then?”

“If the village of Jaggereen is the Source, then we are at the Source, yes,” said Svor. “Or three hundred yards away, for that is how close you are to Jaggereen.” Prestimion felt himself being lifted and cradled in powerful arms. It seemed to him he had no weight at all. “Do you have him securely, Gialaurys?” The voice of Svor again. “Good. Hold him well. If you drop him, I think he’ll break into a hundred pieces.”

He was two weeks healing at Jaggereen, which was a town of flimsy wickerwork shacks sprouting from the Valmambra sands at the one place in all that desert land where fresh water rose to the surface from hidden springs. For the first week he lay on a bed of twigs, sleeping most of the time, awakening now and then to take sips of some strange sweet soup that Svor spooned out to him or to nibble at bits of a curious spongy Ghayrog bread. Then his strength began to return, and he left the bed and walked slowly about the room leaning on Gialaurys’s arm, and after a week of that he felt ready to move about on his own power, though he still was far from well.

“It was Gialaurys that saved me when the dam broke,” Svor told him. “Snatched me up from the water, carried me away on his back as we fled Korsibar’s men. And sustained me in the desert. But for him I’d have died ten different times between there and here.”

“As usual he lies,” said Gialaurys, though there was no rancor in his stolid voice. “Is a much tougher creature than he’d like us to think, is Svor. Needs no food to speak of and precious little water, and scrambles like a zamfigir over rocks and gullies, and half a dozen times caught little animals with his bare hands that made dinner for us both. We had a hard time coming through this way, but it would have been much harder, but for him. And you had the hardest journey of all, looks like. Another hour, and—well, we found you, is the important thing. And we three still live, when so many have perished.”

Svor said, “Korsibar will have much to answer for, breaking that dam. I saw men being swept away by the force of the water on every side, or carried under because they had never learned to swim. Many thousands are dead, I fear. And those just in our own army; but the water will have flooded out into the countryside, where unsuspecting farmers must have been drowned in their beds.”

“Not only Korsibar will be called to account,” said Gialaurys. “Surely it was Dantirya Sambail that put him up to the breaking of the dam: Korsibar would never have hatched such evil of his own.”

“Dantirya Sambail?” said Prestimion. “Why would he have—?”

And then he remembered: the eerie moment of the first explosions, when he had thought it was merely thunder he heard, and his brother Taradath had come to him to report that Gaviad’s army was on the march. Marching away from the river, as though Gaviad had been warned of what was to befall the dam. In the chaos of the moment Prestimion had put that from his mind, and had not thought of it again until it was recalled to him now. “Yes,” he said. “Of course! Playing each side against the other for his own advantage. Very likely it was he who counseled Korsibar to take up a position behind that dam; and the Procurator also who kindly sent us those hierax-men, so we would know Korsibar was there, and follow him toward the dam in order that we’d be below it when the lake fell upon us. While telling his two despicable brothers to pull their armies away at the last moment before the breaking of the dam and save their worthless selves. Who else but Dantirya Sambail could conceive such a plan? By the Lady, I’ll cut him apart inch by inch if ever I capture him!”

“You shouldn’t shout like that,” Svor said. “You’re quite weak yet.”

Prestimion ignored that. “Who else survives? Do you know?”

“Of those who were west of the river, a good many, I think,” said Svor. “Korsibar’s troops were slower coming down that side than on ours, and there was time for Miaule and his people to get away, if they were able to stay ahead of the rushing water.”

“Then there’s hope for Septach Melayn?”

“Ah, much more than hope,” Svor said. “The Ghayrogs have told us of him, both at Valmambra and here at Jaggereen. He came dancing through the desert well ahead of us, cool and lively as though it were a quick, pleasant journey such as the one from the Castle to High Morpin, and has long since gone on beyond here. He’ll be waiting for us at Triggoin.”

’Triggoin?” Prestimion said. “Why would he have gone to Triggoin?”

“The vision you were shown at Muldemar House said that Triggoin was where you would go one day, after some great battle. And I dreamed it also,” said Svor. “He must have expected that Triggoin was where we would all go, after the catastrophe by the dam. In any case, it’s certainly Triggoin where he has taken himself now: the Ghayrogs said he left here bound on a northward track.”

Prestimion laughed. “And is there already, most likely. Septach Melayn among the sorcerers—what a curious idea that is! Will we see him wearing a wizard’s robes, do you think, when we get there, and making mystic signs at us by way of greeting? It would be his idea of amusement.” And then he said, in a darker tone, “I wonder how my brothers fared.”

“Abrigant, surely, escaped with Miaule,” Gialaurys said. “Things went much easier for those who were on that side of the river, as Svor has already told you.”

There was an uncomfortable silence then.

“And Taradath?” Prestimion asked finally. “He was with me when the dam began to break. I never saw him after the water separated us.”

Quietly Gialaurys said, “I tried to save him, I swear before the Divine that I did. I had one arm about him and the other about Svor. But then came another surge of the water, and he was ripped from my grasp.—I tell you, Prestimion, I would have held him if I could, but it would have cost me my arm, and then he would have been swept away anyway.”

Prestimion felt a leaden weight suddenly where his heart had been. But he hid his feelings and put the best face on things he could, saying, “Even though the water was so very strong, it may yet be that he swam to safety.”

“Yes. Maybe so,” said Gialaurys carefully, in a voice that left no doubt how unlikely he thought that was.

“You ought to rest now,” said Svor, before Prestimion could make any further inquiries. “Your strength is not yet what it should be. And a difficult journey still awaits us, once you are ready to travel again.”

2

Triggoin of the sorcerers lay well beyond the desert’s northern margin, nestled pleasantly in a green valley beside a circular lake bright as glass, with a heavily wooded double-humped mountain rising in back of it. Viewed from the last turn of the hilltop highway that approached it from the south, it seemed no more than an ordinary place, one that could have been any medium-sized city at all, anywhere on Majipoor. A gentle breeze was blowing, cool and fresh and sweet, and the grassy borders of the road were glistening from the fall of a recent light rain. All his life Prestimion had heard dire tales of Triggoin, of the flame-red sky and the blue spirit-fires that burned in its air by day and by night and the strange shrieks and sobs of disembodied entities that resounded constantly there. But he could detect no sign of such things now as he and Svor and Gialaurys made their descent toward the cheerful-looking and even pretty city below them. After the bleakness and horrors of the Valmambra, though, almost any place would have looked cheerful and pretty, he reflected.

“So we are here at last,” Gialaurys said. “And here we will find magicians to hire to our service, and perhaps will even learn a trick or two of magic ourselves that will send Korsibar running in fright to his mother, eh?”

“I envy you the certainty of your faith in magic,” said Prestimion. “Even here at the very borders of Triggoin I still resist the idea that there’s any merit to it.”

“Ah, just accept the evidence of your eyes, Prestimion! Wherever you look about you in the world, you see sorcery at work, and the work it does is real!”

“Wherever I look I see deceit and illusion, Gialaurys, which lead the world ever deeper into darkness.”

“Was it deceit when your mother’s magus showed you your very self pictured in that bowl, crossing the Valmambra? Was it deceit when Thalnap Zelifor came to us in the Labyrinth to warn you of the secret enemy who would contend with you for the Castle, and of the terrible war that would break out? Was it deceit when—”

“Spare me the rest,” Prestimion said, holding up one hand. “It will be a wearisome story, rehearsing all the omens I failed to heed on the road that brought us from there to here, and I’m weary enough these days as it is. Let me be, Gialaurys. My soul relinquishes its doubt very slowly, it seems. But perhaps I’ll experience a great conversion out of my skepticism here: who knows?”

“I’ll pay some magus a rich fee to give me a spell that will bring you to your senses,” said Gialaurys.

“Yes,” Prestimion said. “I think you have the solution now: use sorcery to lead me to belief in sorcery’s merits. That may be the only way it can be done.” And all three of them laughed. But they laughed in different ways, for Svor and Gialaurys had long been believers, and the robust tone of their laughter seemed to express their confidence that Prestimion would go out of Triggoin a different man from the one who was entering it. But Prestimion’s laughter was thin and hollow. Any laughter that came from him these days was forced. There was little mirth left in him after the calamity of the Mavestoi Dam.

The city looked less cheery and innocent once they were inside its walls. A cobbled plaza just within the gate led to a dark chaos of medieval streets that went winding off in a dozen directions, all of them coiling tightly in upon themselves so that it was impossible to see more than a few dozen yards down any of them.

The style of construction here ran to narrow five-story mustard-colored buildings of an ancient-looking sort, all jammed one against another, most with gabled roofs and blank-looking facades pierced only by the tiniest of windows. Now and then a shadowy passageway separated two buildings, and these passageways seemed occupied. Whispers could be heard coming from them, and occasionally hooded eyes, bright and keen-looking and unfriendly, peered out of them. Sometimes two pairs of green eyes looked out, for there were many Su-Suheris folk in these streets, and also an unusually great number of Vroons. But everyone, human and alien alike, carried himself with an air of being privy to the great mysteries of the universe. These are people, Prestimion thought, who walk and talk daily with invisible spirits, and have no doubts of themselves as they consort with phantoms. He had never felt so profoundly ill at ease in his life.

“You seem to know where you’re going,” he said to Svor as they marched single file through the streets, which were too narrow and crowded to let them walk three abreast. “I thought you’d never been here except in dreams.”

“But they were vivid dreams,” said Svor. “I have some idea of what to expect. Look, here’s a hostelry. We should take rooms, first.”

“Here?” Prestimion cried. It was a dark, grimy, slouch-sided building that looked to be five thousand years old. “This would be no fitting place for pigs!”

“We are not in Muldemar now, O Prestimion,” said Svor very softly. “This place will do, I think, and it’s not likely that we’ll find a better one hereabouts.”

The rooms were small, with low ceilings and small windows that admitted the barest nip of light, and they smelled of rank spices and stale meat, as though previous boarders had been in the habit of cooking their meals in them. But the lodgings Prestimion had had in the Valmambra left him little disposed to quibble over these, which seemed palatial enough in comparison with lying half frozen under the open sky in the desert, or sleeping in some wickerwork Ghayrog hut through which sandy winds blew all night. The place was reasonably clean, at least, with decent lavatory facilities just down the hall, and Prestimion’s mattress, though it rested right on the stone floor and seemed both stiff and clammy, had clean sheets on it and a relatively insignificant population of bugs and ticks.

“I’ll return shortly,” said Svor after they were settled. He was gone an hour and a half. When he came back, he brought with him a frail white-haired man clad in simple dark robes, who from the look of him might have been two hundred years old, or even two thousand: so thin that any vagrant wind might have carried him away, and with pale skin whiter than the whitest paper and almost transparent. Svor introduced him as Gominik Halvor, who had been, he said, his instructor in the wizardly arts long ago; and added that he was the father of Heszmon Gorse, who was chief magus to the former Coronal Lord Confalume.

“His father!” Prestimion blurted, astonished. It had always seemed to him that the somber and aloof Heszmon Gorse must be the fifth or tenth oldest man in the world, and it had never occurred to him that Heszmon Gorse’s father too might still be alive. But Gominik Halvor seemed incurious about the reason for Prestimion’s outburst. He merely smiled and studied Prestimion a moment with small dark eyes, very bright and shining, that were half buried within the wrinkles and folds of his ancient face.

Svor said, indicating Prestimion, “This is Polivand of Muldemar. And this,” with a nod toward Gialaurys, “is Gheveldin of Piliplok. There will be a fourth student also, who has not yet joined us, but we believe he is somewhere in Triggoin. We are ready to begin our course of studies at any time.”

“The seventh hour of the night will be an auspicious time to start,” said Gominik Halvor. His voice was another surprise: not the faint reedy whistling one might expect from someone so ancient, but the strong and deep voice of a man in the prime of life. Looking from Prestimion to Gialaurys, he said, “You, Gheveldin: I see that you have had some initiation already into our mysteries. But Polivand here has the aura of an utter novice.”

“That is what I am,” said Prestimion. “I have no skills at magic whatever, nor any knowledge of its secrets.”

“So I see, if you call our arts ‘magic.’ We prefer to speak of them as our ‘philosophy,’ or else as our ‘science.’ ”

“Philosophy, then. I stand corrected and beg your pardon.”

“Are you fully prepared, do you think, to open your mind to our disciplines?” the old man asked.

“Well—” Prestimion hesitated. He was not at all prepared for that, or for any other aspect of this conversation: Svor had led him without warning into some scheme beyond his understanding.

And indeed it was Svor who quickly spoke over Prestimion’s uncertain pause: “Count Polivand is deeply interested in every aspect of the great philosophy, master. He has never had opportunity to study it before; but he has come to Triggoin for that express purpose now. As have we all. And dedicate ourselves now to be your most devoted pupils.”

Prestimion remained silent as arrangements were concluded for the beginning of their education in wizardry. But then, when Gominik Halvor was gone, he whirled on Svor and said, “What’s all this about our studying magic with this man? I thought we were going to hire sorcerers here, not apprentice ourselves to them! And why these names—Polivand, Gheveldin?”

“Peace, Prestimion. A certain amount of pretense is necessary for us now. Orders have been issued for the arrest of all those who rebelled against the government of Lord Korsibar: aren’t you aware of that? Even in Triggoin, we aren’t completely beyond his grasp. You can’t simply come sauntering in here and announce yourself to be Prince Prestimion of Muldemar, and call for sorcerers to flock to your side and give you aid in your rebellion, without bringing down trouble upon yourself.”

“And if this Gominik Halvor is such a powerful magus, how, then, will he fail to discern our true identities?”

“Of course he knows who you are,” Svor said.

“But—then—”

“We have to take care not to implicate him. Suppose the authorities go to him and say, ‘Do you know anything of the whereabouts of the proscribed fugitive rebel Prince Prestimion, who is thought to be in this city?’ No, he can say: he has never had contact with anyone of that name. And so forth.”

“I see. So I am Polivand and Gialaurys is Gheveldin. Very well. And by what name are we supposed to call you?”

“Svor,” said Svor.

“But you just said—”

“My name is not posted on the list of wanted fugitives, Prestimion. Korsibar has promised me immunity from prosecution, out of respect for the old friendship between him and me. Since I’m not sought for and Gominik Halvor knows who I am anyway, I’ve not bothered to assume any pretended identity with him. Does that trouble you, that Korsibar’s willing to overlook my allegiance to you? Does it make you suspect my loyalty in any way?”

“Korsibar’s a fool, and you are my friend, and I have no doubts of where your loyalties lie. If he wants to exempt you from the proscription, so be it. But why have you signed me up for a course of studies in magic, Svor? Is this some little prank of yours?”

“We’ll need to stay hidden here until we know it’s safe to emerge, and the city authorities will require some plausible reason for our presence. Studying sorcery’s not only a way of passing the time, it gives us some appearance of legitimacy in our residence here. You might find it illuminating, besides.”

“I might, yes. And blaves would fly too, if only you knew how to grow wings on them. So now I am to be a scholar of the mysterious arts! Ah, Svor, Svor—”

A knock at the door interrupted his words.

A ringing voice outside, a voice they all knew very well, called, “Are these the lodgings of Count Polivand of Muldemar!”

Gialaurys reached the door first and threw it wide. A slender and extremely tall man in the elegant clothes of a courtier of the Mount—a doublet of green velvet in the Bombifale style, with high-standing collar and a small ruff above—stood smiling there.

“Septach Melayn!” Gialaurys cried.

He bowed gracefully and entered. Prestimion rushed to him and embraced him. “Svor and Gialaurys told me you had survived,” Prestimion said. “But still—I was afraid for so long that you had drowned in the flood—”

“I move quickly when dying’s the alternative. How have you fared, Prestimion?”

“Not entirely well, to speak the truth.”

“No. I’m not surprised.”

“And you must not call me ‘Prestimion’ here. I’m Count Polivand of Muldemar. Gialaurys is now Gheveldin. Svor will explain. He’s still Svor, by the way. We are all enrolled as students of wizardry, I’ll have you know, and our tutor is—I am speaking nothing but the truth, Septach Melayn, however strange it may sound—the father of Confalume’s ancient magus Heszmon Gorse. The father.”

“Students of wizardry,” said Septach Melayn in a musing way, as though Prestimion had just announced that they were all soon to become women, or Skandars, or sea-dragons perhaps. “A quaint pastime for you, Prestimion. I wish you joy of it.”

“You’ll be enrolled in our scholarly pursuits also, Septach Melayn,” said Svor. “Your name is now Simrok Morlin, and you are a man of Gimkandale, not of Tidias.” He explained the reason for these subterfuges; and Septach Melayn, in high good humor, gave his assent to the plan and swore to be the most assiduous student of them all, and to come away from Triggoin a true master in the diabolic sciences.

Then Prestimion asked him how he had known where to find them; to which Septach Melayn replied that a messenger had come to him a little while before in his own lodgings, which by coincidence were just three streets away, and told him the address where certain great friends of his were to be found. The messenger had given him the card of his employer, which Septach Melayn now produced and showed Prestimion. It was the card of the magus Gominik Halvor.

“We never told him your name!” said Prestimion. “How would he have known—?”

“Ah, Prestimion,” Gialaurys said. “What did I tell you? The evidence lies all about you, and still you refuse to credit the reality of what these mages do!”

Prestimion shrugged. He had no wish to debate the issue any further with Gialaurys, now or ever again.

The inn where they had lodged had a dining hall, where they went for some meat and wine before their first lesson with Gominik Halvor was to commence. Septach Melayn regaled them with tales of his escape from the flood and his swift journey north and of his lighthearted adventures in Triggoin while waiting for them to arrive, for, he said, he had never once doubted that they would show up here sooner or later. He made everything sound like the easiest and lightest of exploits, which was his style in everything; but Prestimion could see that he was deliberately making light of it all—the awful debacle of the breaking of the dam, the hardships of his journey through the desert, the uneasy -hours of his time alone in Triggoin. It was plain that Septach Melayn had already perceived the darkness of Prestimion’s mood and did not want to darken it further with tales of losses and suffering.

Prestimion ate little and drank less. Though he had struggled constantly since his recovery in Jaggereen against the doleful bleakness that had enfolded his soul, he found himself making little headway with it.

He had no idea what he would do now. For the first time in his life he was utterly without a plan.

For the time being he wanted only to live quietly, far from the Castle, far from all exercise of power, far from everything he had been in the days when he was Prestimion of Muldemar. He saw it as fitting that the shipwreck of his destiny should have cast him up in Triggoin, this place so antithetical to his nature and all his beliefs. It would be an appropriate penance, having to take refuge here among the magicians.

“Penance?” Septach Melayn cried, when after a time Prestimion began to give voice to some of these somber thoughts. “Penance for what? For serving the cause of righteousness against that of evil?”

“You think that was it? That I rose up against Korsibar purely because I believed I was the rightful Coronal and he a wicked usurper?”

’Tell me it was anything else,” said Septach Melayn, “that it was sheerly out of the lust for power that you did it, say, and then I’ll give you the sword that I wear here on my hip, and you can put it through my gut, Prestimion. Pardon me: Polivand. I know you and I know why you did as you did. Korsibar’s theft of the crown was a crime against all civilization. You had no choice but to stand up in opposition to it. No guilt attaches on that account, Prestimion: no blame whatever.”

“Listen to him, and take his words into your heart,” Gialaurys said. “You belabor yourself for no sensible reason, Prestimion.”

“Polivand,” Svor corrected. “Come, now, gentlemen. It’s time for our first lesson in sorcery.”

Gominik Halvor’s lodgings were plainly those of a personage of consequence. He occupied seven or eight large rooms, or even more, at the top of a lofty stone tower in central Triggoin that looked down on the entire panorama of the city. There, Gominik Halvor had brought together a great collection of equipment of strange and esoteric nature, alembics and crucibles, flasks holding curious fluids and powders, metal boxes containing ointments and creams, iron plates on which cryptic characters were inscribed, retorts and beakers, hourglasses, weighing-scales, armillary spheres and astrolabes, ammatepilas, hexaphores, phalangaria, ambivials. Besides these things—and there were many more devices also, of all manner of strange sorts—there were whole rooms of shelves lined with the great leatherbound books of the kind that Prestimion had already seen at the late Pontifex’s bedside and in his mother’s own reading-gallery, and which no doubt were highly valued everywhere in the world by the cognoscenti of these arts. And there were still other rooms in which they were not invited to look.

“I address myself first to your skepticism,” is how Gominik Halvor began, glancing in Prestimion’s direction and then in Septach Melayn’s. “You needn’t deny your feelings: I see them revealed plainly enough in your faces. They need not be a hindrance to your studies here. Listen to my words, and test them against the results I achieve. What we of Triggoin practice is a science, which is to say, its methods follow strict discipline, and the results we attain are capable of empirical analysis. Reserve your judgment; watch and examine; do not be too quick to challenge that which you do not understand.”

He launched now into a tale of his own studies and travels, which seemed to have taken him to every region of the world, though Prestimion knew it would take five lifetimes as long as Gominik Halvor’s to accomplish that. But he spoke of voyaging in the Great Sea to a place where the sky was lit bright as day with the strange ghostly light of the stars Giskhernar and Hautaama, which were never seen over land, and watching the giant blue serpents of the depths wrestling with twenty-legged monsters that dwelled in perpetual whirlpools. He spoke of his journey to the Isle of Gapeligo, of which Prestimion had never heard, where the fires of the inner world burst forth unceasingly in a deafening upsurge of white flame. He spoke of his explorations in the dank and steaming rain-forests of Kajith Kabulon, gathering certain herbs of immeasurable value that were unknown even to the residents of that district. And he told also of the time he had spent among the Piurivars, the Metamorph aborigines, in their jungled province of Piurifayne on Zimroel, where Lord Stiamot had penned their ancestors up long ago at the conclusion of the Shapeshifter War.

The old mage’s improbably deep and sturdy voice had been rolling on and on, lulling them into complacency; but this mention of living among the Metamorphs brought Prestimion up short with surprise.

The Metamorphs had little commerce with the outside world and did not welcome visitors of the human sort into their reservation. Yet Gominik Halvor gave them to believe that he had spent years among them.

“These demons everyone speaks of,” he said: “We know now of what nature they are, and I will share that knowledge with you. They are the prehistoric inhabitants of this world, its first masters, in fact—undying creatures of the ancient days before mankind ever came to Majipoor, who roamed free until the Shapeshifters locked them up under terrible spells twenty thousand years ago. Those locks can be opened with the right words, and those spirits can be made to do our bidding; and then we send them back to the dark place from which we pulled them. Watch,” said Gominik Halvor, and spoke words in no language Prestimion had ever heard. “Goibaliiud yei thenioth kalypritiaar,” he said, and, “Idryerimos uriliaad faldiz tilimoin gamoosth,” and there was a stirring in the air, and a dimly visible, half-translucent figure appeared in the middle of the room before them, something with spikes for hair and pools of light for eyes. “This is Theddim,” said the magus, “who presides over the coursing of the blood through our hearts.” And indeed Prestimion felt his own heart beginning to pound and thump, though whether it was the doing of the demon Theddim or merely his dismay at being present at such a rite, he could not say. Then the magus uttered other words and the apparition was gone.

Gominik Halvor told them of other demons also, Thua Nizirit the demon of delirium, and scaly-faced Ginitiis, and Ruhid of the great dangling snout, who brought ease from fever, and Mimim, who facilitated the recapture of lost knowledge, and Kakilak, the benign demon who soothed those who were troubled by seizures. These beings, the magus said, could be only imperfectly controlled; but even so, they were often of great service to those who understood the techniques of summoning them.

He offered his four students, at their nightly lessons, some hint of those techniques—merely skimming the surface of his science, he told them, for they were still in the preliminary phases of their studies. “These are the three classes of demons,” he said: “the valisteroi, who escaped the power of the Metamorph spells and live beyond the sphere of the sun, and will not heed our commands under any circumstances; and the kalisteroi, who are partly free, and are the spirits whose dwelling place is between the air and the Great Moon, and who sometimes favor us with their sympathies; and the irgalisteroi, who are the demons of the subterranean world whom the Metamorphs subjugated, and whom we can sometimes turn to our uses, though they are dangerous angry beings and must be invoked only by the adept, for they will devour any others.”

As they returned from that lesson, Prestimion said quietly to Septach Melayn, “We should tread carefully, for there are irgalisteroi under our feet. Did you ever realize, Septach Melayn, that we shared our world with so many invisible beings?”

“I would take them all to this tavern here for flasks of wine at my expense, if they would show themselves to me this moment,” said Septach Melayn. And Gialaurys, walking a few paces ahead, called back angrily to them not to blaspheme, lest in their brazenness they call trouble down upon themselves, when they had already experienced trouble enough.

Patiently Gominik Halvor unfolded his mysteries before them, night after night. He told them of amulets and knots and ligatures, and of the magical powers of stones, and how to concoct healing potions; he taught them a spell for walking through fire, and a way to banish warts, and recipes for ridding oneself of coughs, of headaches, of pains in the bowels, of the sting of a scorpion. He explained the rules of gathering herbs, how certain plants must be picked before sunrise, and others only under the light of one of the lesser moons, and others only with the thumb and forefinger of the left hand. Prestimion yearned to ask why that was so, what would befall if one used the other hand and other fingers; but he had pledged himself to listen and observe, and not to express doubt or scorn.

The course went on and on. How to interpret the movements of the stars in their courses; how to cast the sticks to tell the shape of things to come; how to detect the lies of perjurers by making them hold certain white reeds in their hands; words of power to use against the attack of beasts in the forest; using senior demons to threaten and control junior ones; neutralizing the spells of rival magicians with devices made of wax and hair; which plants to use in testing the purity of metals, and which to make tinctures from for long life or great sexual vitality, and how to ensure a bountiful harvest, and how to ward off the depredations of thieves. There was even a spell to reverse the flow of rivers. (“Quickly, quickly,” Prestimion said, but only silently, to himself: “Let it be done at the Iyann, and let all those dead men walk again as the lake runs back into itself from below the dam.”) He instructed them in the use of rohillas and veralistias, and in the merits of corymbors, and made Prestimion bring his own amulet forth from beneath his jerkin, using it to illustrate his lecture with some quick conjurations that caused—or so he hinted—a rainstorm that had begun an hour before to dwindle and reach an end.

There was no end to the wonders that Gominik Halvor paraded before them, although his actual demonstrations of technique were few and far between. And to Prestimion’s way of thinking, the results he attained could almost always be explained away, if one were willing to work at it, in some mundane fashion not involving incantations and charms.

Prestimion and Septach Melayn had much private sport with all this at first, often making up witchcrafts of their own when the other two were out of earshot. “Cure toothache,” said Septach Melayn, “by spitting in a gromwark’s mouth and turning three times left to right.” And Prestimion: “A slowness of digestion is dealt with by counting falling stars in the sky, and squatting down on the ground just as the eleventh star of the night streaks past.” Then Septach Melayn: “To keep one’s nose from running, kiss the nose of a steetmoy precisely at the stroke of noon.” And there were many more, until they grew tired of the game.

It was good diversion for Prestimion, these early unhappy days in Triggoin, to go night after night to the magus and listen to his recitations. But gradually, as Gominik Halvor not only expounded on the arts of divination and the summoning of spirits, but led his pupils to make modest experiments of their own in such things, Prestimion began feeling a strange sense of distress. While much of what Gominik Halvor had to say still struck him as the wildest of lunatic fantasy, he kept encountering odd little examples of the apparent efficacy of certain spells. Those were hard to explain away.

And also, looking back over all that had befallen him, it was hard for him any longer to argue away all the various dire prophecies and forecasts that Svor had made for him, and Thalnap Zelifor, and this one and that one, in the days before Korsibar’s taking of the crown. Then too there was the vision given him by his mother’s magus, Galbifond, which had plainly showed him the battle of the Mavestoi and his flight into the Valmambra. All of which he had scoffed at, and all of which, ignored, had paved the way to his present disaster.

Under Gominik Halvor he was arriving at certain misty forecasts of his own. Once again he looked into a bowl of the kind Galbifond had showed him; and though the things it showed him now were far murkier than that other vision, they hinted at his going forth from Triggoin eventually and resuming his quest for the throne, and of further great battles, and of many more deaths, and of some immense ultimate event whose nature he could not comprehend at all but which seemed almost to hint at the end of the world, a time of blankness and blackness beyond which nothing could be seen.

“What is this?” he said to Gominik Halvor, of that last apocalyptic revelation. “What am I seeing here?”

But Gominik Halvor peered into the bowl for no more than half a second, and said in a tone of the greatest indifference, “Sometimes what looks inexplicable is merely meaningless, my good Count Polivand. And not everything that a novice conjures up has meaning. I advise you to put this from your mind.”

Which Prestimion attempted to do. But it stayed with him, that swirling vortex of nothingness churning in the bowl. The fact that he was working small sorceries of his own had already begun to unsettle him; the fact that they showed him, and Gominik Halvor, things that were incomprehensible but ominous, unsettled him even more. He felt feverish and strange much of the time now. He sometimes felt that his mind might be breaking up. To Septach Melayn, who had been his only ally in skepticism, and who remained invincibly closed-minded even now, Prestimion said one rainy night when they had sat up late together and had shared some bowls of wine, “I have built all my life about the certainties of reason, Septach Melayn, and I find that my faith in those certainties is threatened now.”

“Is it, Prestimion? Are you succumbing to your own incantations, then?”

“I confess that much of what Gominik Halvor says is beginning to make sense to me. But that statement itself makes no sense to me!”

“A sad plight, to be driven into madness by contradictions of your own devising. Relax, old friend. What these wizards spout is half madness and half fraud, and there’s no need to take either half seriously. I never have, and never will, and neither should you. Since I was a boy I’ve discarded and cast off from myself everything that didn’t seem to fit my understanding of how the world really is.”

“I can no longer do that,” said Prestimion. “Or perhaps my understanding of how the world really is has begun to change, here in this city of sorcerers. I do think I’m coming to believe these folks, at least somewhat.”

“Then I pity you.”

“Spare me that,” Prestimion said. He hunched forward, so that his face was close to Septach Melayn’s, across the table. In a quiet voice he said, “Day by day I try to find the strength to leave here and resume my struggle with Korsibar. I’m a long way from that now, but the desire has begun to possess me again. Korsibar must not be allowed to hold his stolen crown: of that I’m as convinced as ever. The fate of the world may depend on what I do, once I’ve gone from here; and I may well need the help of sorcerers, which once I foreswore, in gaining my purposes.”

“Well, then, use them, Prestimion! I never said that I discarded anything that might be of use.”

“But you have no faith in sorcerers, Septach Melayn. So how can you advise them for me?”

“You have the faith. What I believe is unimportant.” “Faith? I said only that I believe a little of what they—” “If you believe any at all, you are converted to their creed. You’ve hooked yourself as deeply as Svor or Gialaurys or any of the rest of them. You’ll be wearing a tall brass hat next, and robes with mystic symbols on them.”

“Are you mocking me?” Prestimion asked, feeling himself grow heated.

“Would I do such a thing?”

“Yes. Yes, I think you would. You’re sitting here laughing at me, Septach Melayn.”

“Do you take offense? Shall we go outside and fight?”

“With swords perhaps?”

“Any weapon you prefer, Prestimion. Swords, yes, if you’re in a suicidal mood. Or rocks, or pieces of raw meat. Or we could stand in the street and cast spells at each other until one of us falls down with a paralytic ague.” And with that he began to laugh, and after a moment Prestimion also, and then with one impulse they reached their hands across the table and clasped them, still laughing.

But behind his laughter Prestimion was still heartsore and full of confusion, and it was a long time that night before sleep found him. Somehow, he thought, he had lost his path, and was wandering in a desert far more bewildering and hostile, even, than the one he had crossed a month or two before, in coming here to Triggoin.

3

The High Counsellor Farquanor said, “The wizard Thalnap Zelifor is outside, and asks an audience with you, lordship. Shall I send him away?”

The High Counsellor’s face had a curdled look. He had never made any attempt to disguise his distaste for the little Vroon.

But Korsibar said, “He’s here at my request. Let him come in. And take yourself away afterward.”

That last did not make Farquanor’s expression any sweeter. He stalked without a word to the door—it was the stark and severe little Stiamot throne-room, where Korsibar spent most of his working hours nowadays—and went out, holding the door open just long enough for Thalnap Zelifor to slip inside.

“Lordship?” the Vroon said, his yellow eyes going wide as he made his starburst before the Coronal. “Lordship, are you well?”

That took Korsibar aback, that his distress should be so easily seen. He had been awake all this night past, turning restlessly and unable to find a position of comfort, and more than a few other nights recently before that one.

“Do I look ill, Thalnap Zelifor?”

“You look—weary. Pale. Dark borders beneath your eyes. I have a spell to improve sleep, my lord.”

“Does it give a sleep without dreams?”

“There is no spell for that,” said the Vroon.

’Then I’ll do without it. My dreams are dreadful ones, that bring me awake and sweating with fear again and again; and when I’m awake things are no better.” Korsibar’s brow was clouded and his jaw was clenched; he sat over at one side of Lord Stiamot’s ancient unadorned marble throne, his shoulders hunched high with tension, his fisted hands pressing against each other, clamped knuckle to knuckle. “A thousand times a night I see that dam breaking,” he said bleakly, looking off toward the bare stone wall. “The water spilling forth below me, flooding into nearby farms along the river, into villages—so many dead, Thalnap Zelifor, Prestimion’s men and all those villagers also—”

“The dam was Dantirya Sambail’s doing, my lord.”

“The dam was his idea, which he slipped into my mind like a trickle of poison to infect my soul; but I gave the order. The guilt is mine.”

“Guilt? My lord, you were fighting a rebellion!”

“Yes,” Korsibar said, looking away, closing his eyes a moment. “A rebellion. Well, Prestimion’s dead now, or so it’s generally thought. The rebellion’s over. But when will I sleep again? And still I have Dantirya Sambail wandering around here, plaguing me with his schemes, and my sister also, who smolders with wrath against me and won’t be pacified, and the secret faction of my enemies too—I know there’s one; I know I’m being conspired against; for all I know, Farquanor and Farholt, or maybe Oljebbin, or some others whose names I’ve never heard, are at this moment scheming to replace me with some brother of Prestimion, or with the Procurator himself—”

“My lord—”

’Tell me,” Korsibar said, “do you conspire against me too?”

“I, my lord?”

“You come and go, you move from one side to another, you always have: you sell yourself now to Gonivaul, to Thismet, to Prestimion. And now you come back to the Castle claiming to have defected from Prestimion’s side and sell yourself again to me. What is there about me that causes such swarms of tricky folk to attach themselves to me? First there was sly little Svor, whom I loved and who leaped from me to Prestimion’s bosom, and then Farquanor, who’ll say anything to anyone so long as it does him some good, and then Dantirya Sambail, who managed to betray both his cousin Prestimion and do great harm to me at the same time by talking me into bringing down that dam, a thing which I would gladly undo if I could undo any act of my life.”

“My lord—”

But Korsibar could not halt his flow. “Even my own magus, Sanibak-Thastimoon: he seems loyal enough, but there’s treachery in him somewhere, that I know. And Oljebbin. Gonivaul. I trust none of them. Navigorn, I suppose: he’s a true friend. And Mandrykarn. Venta perhaps. Iram. But even they seem to have turned from me since the dam, though they pretend still to love me as before.” He paused at last, and stared balefully down at the Vroon. “Shall I trust you, Thalnap Zelifor? Why should I?”

“Because no one else but you in this Castle or outside it will protect me, my lord. You are my bulwark. My own self-interest leads me to be your faithful servant.”

Korsibar managed a faint smile at that. “Good. That has some ring of honesty to it.” He gave the Vroon a sidelong look and said, “Have you heard the rumors that Prestirnion survived the flood, and lives in hiding somewhere in the north at this very moment?” “Yes, my lord, I have.”

“Do you think it’s true? Sanibak-Thastimoon does. He’s cast the runes and uttered his spells and sent his mind forth, roving, and he says it’s very likely Prestimion’s alive.”

“Sanibak-Thastimoon is a master of these arts, my lord.” “Yes. So he is. He’s being tactful; but if he says he thinks there’s a possibility that Prestirnion lives, then what he means is he knows perfectly well that he does. Well, I’m not troubled by that. I never wanted Prestimion dead. I was fond of him: do you know that, Thalnap Zelifor? I admired him. I would have named him to my Council. But no, no, he had to refuse, and tell me that I’m an unlawful Coronal, and start an uprising against me. None of that was necessary. He could have had his Council seat and a happy life at his vineyards.” A second time Korsibar closed his eyes, for a longer while now. They ached. They ached all day and all night, from the pounding of his fevered mind behind them.

He looked out toward the Vroon after a time and said, very quietly, “Do the people hate me, do you think?” “What, my lord?” said the Vroon, surprised.

“In the cities. Up and down the Mount, and outward across the land: what are they saying about me? Do they think I’m a tyrant? A monster? They know about the dam: do they understand that it was an act of war, that Prestimion’s uprising had to be stopped, or do they think I’m a criminal for having done it? My getting the throne: what do they think about that? Are they coming to feel Prestimion should have had it? I fear what they may be whispering out there. I dread it. What can you tell me about that, Thalnap Zelifor?”

“I have not left the Castle, my lord, since I came back to it from Prestimion’s camp. And that was before the event at Lake Mavestoi.”

“Can you cast your mind out there by means of some sorcery, as Sanibak-Thastimoon does, and tell me what the people say about me?”

“I can do better than that, my lord. I can make it possible for you to go into the world yourself and move secretly among them, so that you can listen with your own ears.”

Korsibar sat forward, his heart suddenly racing. “What? Outside the Castle, secretly?”

“Indeed. To Bombifale for half a day, let’s say, or Halanx, or Minimool. In perfect safety, no one aware that it’s the Coronal who’s in their midst.”

“How is this possible?”

Thalnap Zelifor said, “You know, my lord, that in my workshop in the Tampkaree Tower are many devices of my own design, not magical devices but scientific ones, all of which have to do with the transmission of thought from one mind to another?”

“Yes. So you’ve told me.”

“They are, unfortunately, incomplete, most of them. But I’ve finished one lately that would, I think, be of great value to you in precisely the regard you’ve mentioned. One that casts an illusion—that allows a perfect deception of identity—”

Arranging for his departure from the Castle was no simple thing, Coronal though he was. It was necessary first to let word go forth to all his staff that he would be retiring to his bedchamber at the hour of thus-and-so on the evening of thus-and-so for a period of solemn meditation on the condition of the world, and that he must not be disturbed by anyone under any circumstances whatever until he had emerged, even if a day or more were to elapse.

Korsibar needed also to have one of the court secretaries order a high-speed floater to be made available at the south gate, on demand, for the use of the Vroon Thalnap Zelifor and his driver. Another essential step was the invention of a Su-Suheris on the Coronal’s staff who had a certificate providing him with the right of departure and access at the Castle. Thalnap Zelifor had designed his machine to give its user the guise of a member of the two-headed folk, for the sake of better mystification, since they all looked very much alike to people of other races.

Each of these steps had to be carried out in independence of all the others, so that no one would think to connect the retreat of the Coronal to his bedchamber with the comings and goings of the Vroon wizard and his Su-Suheris driver. Several days were required to put everything in place. But that gave Korsibar time to master the trick of Thalnap Zelifor’s shapechanging device.

It was a small instrument, shaped much like a decorative dagger, that a man could wear at his hip without attracting attention. In using it, one had first to sweep the mind free of all distraction and inner noise, so that the device might attune itself to its user’s mental functioning. Then one merely put one’s hand over the hilt of the little dagger and slid downward on the switch that activated it; and took care to hold the switch in the downward position all the while the machine was in use.

“Is there no way to lock it in place?” Korsibar asked. “None. I am still working on that aspect of it. But it’s no great thing to keep your hand on that little lever for a few short hours, is it, lordship?” “I suppose not. Let me try it now.” “Clear your mind of thought, my lord.”

“Not so easily done. But I’ll try,” said Korsibar. He strapped the device to his side, and closed his eyes, and set his mind adrift in a featureless sea where all was gray above and below, and there was nothing whatever to behold. When he thought he had properly quieted all the noises of his mind, he moved the switch downward and held it there.

Across the room from him was a mirror, and after a time he thought to glance into it But he saw only his own reflection. He tried again, dipping again into that gray sea and drifting calmly on the breast of it, and after a time he was so calm that he nearly forgot what he was trying to do; but then it came to him and he moved the switch again, and again the face of Lord Korsibar looked back at him from the mirror across the way. “It isn’t working, Thalnap Zelifor.”

“On the contrary, my lord. To my eyes you are the Su-Suheris Kurnak-Munikaad, precisely as it says on this official certificate. And quite a splendid figure you are, as Su-Suheris figures go. You look like the very twin of Sanibak-Thastimoon.”

“I see only myself in the mirror.” He touched his hand to his head. It felt like his own. Mustache, beard: Su-Suheris folk had no beards. Nor was there any second head that he could detect. “Nothing has changed in me,” said Korsibar. “I have only one head. My flesh feels like human flesh.”

“Of course, lordship! You are not changed at all. What has changed is the way you appear to others. To any onlooker you are—but come, let me show you—”

They went into the hall. Korsibar kept his hand pressed to the switch at his hip. A chambermaid passed just then, and Thalnap Zelifor said to her, “Lord Korsibar has entered into his retreat, and no one is to approach his door until he comes forth again.”

“I’ll send the word around, sir,” said the chambermaid. She glanced without sign of recognition at Korsibar, and looked away. She gave no indication whatever that she saw the Coronal of Majipoor standing beside the Vroon at that very moment.

“So I am a Su-Suheris now,” said Korsibar, feeling the first flicker of amusement he had known in many weeks. “Or seem that way to others, at any rate. Well done, Thalnap Zelifor! Let’s be on our way!”

Thalnap Zelifor had already ordered up the floater, and it was waiting at Dizimaule Plaza when he and Korsibar emerged from the Castle. None of the Castle servants whom they had encountered as they moved outward through the building had paid any attention to them: no starbursts, no genuflections. It was only a Vroon and a Su-Suheris, members of the Castle staff like themselves, bound on some errand of their own.

Korsibar did not want to be absent overlong on this first excursion, and so they directed themselves to High Morpin, which was the city of the Mount closest to the Castle itself, a ride of less than an hour away. A sense of great relief and freedom came over him as the floater went soaring down the Grand Calintane Highway and the fantastic many-limbed monster that was the Castle dwindled behind him. He had not been at the controls of a floater since becoming Coronal, and it was pleasant to be guiding one now. He scarcely ever was allowed to do anything for himself any longer: there were people to drive for him, people to cut his meat for him and pour his wine, even people to dress and undress him. For the moment, at least, he was a free man again.

He had reverted to his own appearance once they left the Castle. But Thalnap Zelifor reminded him that he would have to be in the Su-Suheris form if any floaters came near them on the road. “I understand,” Korsibar said, and every few minutes he would reach down to touch the little switch. “Is it still working? Did I turn into a Su-Suheris?”

“You are the very image of one, my lord,” declared Thalnap Zelifor.

Soon the golden airy webwork out of which the streets of the pleasure-city of High Morpin were constructed could be seen gleaming on the slope of the Mount to their left. They parked the floater at the edge of the city, near the great fountain that had been built in the reign of Korsibar’s father, which unendingly sent spears of tinted water shooting hundreds of feet into the air, and walked into the heart of the city. “Am I all right?” Korsibar asked nervously again and again. “I have no way of telling, you know, whether this thing of yours is functioning correctly.”

“When people begin kneeling down before you and making star-bursts, my lord, you’ll know that something is wrong. But for the moment you seem to be unnoticed here.”

It was nearly midnight, but the pleasure-city bustled with eager throngs of amusement-seekers. Korsibar allowed the Vroon to perch on his shoulder, to spare him from being trampled. Although tempted, Korsibar did not try any of the rides and games himself—it seemed inappropriate, somehow, for a stern and dour Su-Suheris to be disporting himself on the mirror-slides or in the power-tunnels—but simply moved about through the crowds, one hand kept constantly on the switch of the Vroon’s device, marveling that it was possible for the Coronal of Majipoor to walk here undisturbed.

More than once he caught sight of some holidaying gentleman of the court—Woolock Fals of Gossif, Count Gosbeck, Irani of Normork—and braced himself to be hailed by them, but they went by him with nothing more than the most casual of fleeting glances. This was indeed a wondrous magic, Korsibar thought. Or else the work of science, as Thalnap Zelifor insisted: but he was hard pressed to comprehend the difference. As he walked, he listened to what was being said. The Coronal and his policies were not the most common topics of conversation in High Morpin that night. At least an hour had gone by before Korsibar heard his name at all. But then, stopping in the doorway of a tavern, he heard someone call out lustily, “Let’s drink to the Coronal!” And from elsewhere in the hall came the cry, “Lord Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!” and cheers, and the clinking of glasses. Had they recognized him amongst them? No. No. They all were looking the other way. They were simply drinking toasts to his name. But if they were offering toasts to the Coronal’s health in the pleasure-city of High Morpin, could there be much substance to the rumors he had heard of a general displeasure with his administration?

Several more times in the course of the night Korsibar heard his name mentioned, and even smatterings of political talk. Someone said in a knowing tone that he had heard Dantirya Sambail was hoping to make himself High Counsellor in place of Farquanor, with an eye toward becoming Coronal himself someday when old Confalume died and Korsibar went to be Pontifex. But another replied just as knowingly, “Lord Korsibar’ll never put the Procurator so high. Never. Procurator’s too dangerous: Korsibar will send him packing home to Ni-moya. He knows how to deal with troublesome characters, Korsibar does. Look what he did to Prestimion!”

When Korsibar and Thalnap Zelifor slipped back untroubled by the guards into the Castle in the hours just before dawn, his mood was one of exhilaration and triumph. What he had heard at High Morpin had allayed his worst fears. “You have rescued me from the depths of despair,” Korsibar told the Vroon, and handed him a purse of silver royals. “But for that machine of yours—ah, I’d have been lost indeed.” And walked off whistling happily to his chambers, having taken on once more his own form.

But new doubts came creeping in, in the days that followed. The reassurance that Korsibar had found in High Morpin quickly faded; he needed to go forth once more, and make certain that those words of affection and loyalty that he had heard there were not mere exceptions and anomalies in a climate of general disapproval of his government.

And so go forth he did, arranging everything as he had before, setting out this time in mid-afternoon and spending a long evening in Bombifale of the orange sandstone walls, where for hours and hours he listened with care but overheard nothing that mattered in any way to him, and then once more caught scraps of a conversation devoted to a flattering estimation of his reign.

So, then! His fears were all for nothing!

It was clear to him now and unarguably certain that he was a proper Coronal, that he had the support of the populace, that even the dreadful stroke by which he had shattered the armies of Prestimion had not cost him the love of the people.

For Korsibar now it became an addiction, these ventures into the cities of the Mount by stealth to hear himself being praised. He made a third trip, to glowing Halanx, and a fourth to High Morpin again, and then to Sipermit just below the Castle on the side of the Mount opposite to High Morpin. It was in Sipermit that Korsibar slipped up at last, and let his hand stray from the switch of Thalnap Zelifor’s device, one moonlit night in the statuary garden of Lord Makhario as he leaned forward straining his ears to pick up some bit of talk of current affairs that was just beyond the range of his hearing.

“Lordship!” Thalnap Zelifor whispered urgently.

“Please,” said Korsibar. “Can’t you see I’m trying to listen to what they’re—”

“Lordship! The switch!”

“Ah, the switch!” Korsibar cried, appalled at his own stupidity. “For the love of the Divine!” Both his hands, he realized, were free, and he was standing in plain view in the bright moonlight not far from twelve or fifteen citizens of the city of Sipermit, not as the two-headed saunterer of a moment before, but as the Coronal Lord Korsibar in his green and white robe of office. Hastily he thrust his hand down to the device at his side and shoved the switch into place. But not before he saw the incredulous gapes and stares of half a dozen onlookers nearby.

“You are concealed again. But we should leave here quickly, lordship,” said Thalnap Zelifor.

“Yes. Yes. Cast a spell on them, will you? Make their minds grow cloudy, so they come to disbelieve what they just saw.”

“I will try to do that,” the Vroon said. But there was an element of uncertainty in his tone, a certain disturbing lack of confidence that aroused great disquiet and apprehension in Korsibar as he strode hastily from the park.

4

In the third month of his stay in Triggoin, Prestimion felt that he had come to the point of desperation, the utter low ebb of the troublesome voyage through the world on which he had been bound since the day that Korsibar had snatched the starburst crown from him in the Labyrinth.

His mind was full of hazy sorceries now, half digested, minimally understood. Gominik Halvor’s nightly teachings had both illuminated and muddled him; for Prestimion by this time had come both to believe and disbelieve in that world of invisible spirits that so many people had told him lay just beyond the wall of human perception. Here in Triggoin he had seen, again and again and again, the apparent inexplicable efficacy of certain spells and enchantments, of certain amulets and devices, of ointments and potions and herbal powders and mixtures of powdered minerals. He saw stones that glowed strange colors in the dark and gave off heat. He watched bizarre demons dancing in the white light of black candles. He saw much more besides, much of it maddeningly plausible. And, seeing all this, it was ever harder for him to say, “This is unreal, this is pretense, this is delusion, this is folly,” when the evidence of his eyes told him otherwise.

And yet—yet—

Prestimion noted evidence also of everything he had always denounced: frauds of all sorts, things that beyond any doubt were unrealities, pretenses, delusions, follies. He peered into factories in this town where crude statuettes and portraits of imaginary gods and demons were manufactured by bored squatting craftsmen in untold quantities for sale to the credulous, and watched their products being boxed and taken to the loading piers to be shipped everywhere in the world. He leafed through cheap, badly printed books of curses intended to harass one’s enemies and incantations to bring prosperity or a child of a desired sex or some other yearned-for thing, that plainly were turned out by unscrupulous hacks to be sold to credulous fools.

He heard Gominik Halvor admit that it was useful for a successful magus to study certain techniques of sleight-of-hand and hypnotism. And he listened also to young boastful student mages in the taverns speaking of the tricks they had lately mastered, the making of waxen image-figures that stood unharmed in fireplaces and sang in unknown tongues, the spell that seemed to open doors into adjacent universes, the conjuring of levitations and disappearances and wondrous appearances, all of them by their own admission managed by deceptive mechanical means. These youths offered to sell their fraudulations to one another for stiff prices: “Fifty royals for the dancing waters!” they cried. “Sixty for the floating ghosts!” All of which confirmed and reconfirmed Prestimion’s original innate skeptical views. But against that he had to place the new knowledge he had acquired himself from Gominik Halvor, incomplete and misunderstood though it was, that did indeed seem to open real doors into real places that lay beyond reality. And this new knowledge, the things he could in no way refute even though they contradicted all that he had always believed, shook him to the core.

By night came turbulent dreams in which malevolent and horrific creatures coursed through his mind. He saw a great black crab biting the corner of the sun, and a giant serpent with a thousand legs slithering up over the edge of the world onto the land, and swarms of insects with the faces of wolves, and many other things of that kind, so that often he awoke sweating and trembling, and a time came when he feared sleeping altogether.

But on other nights, sometimes, there were kindlier dreams, send-ings from the Lady of the Isle. These were puzzling to him in their own way, for he had heard that Korsibar’s mother, the Lady Roxivail, was now installed on the Isle of Dreams and had taken command of the machineries by which sendings went forth to the world, and the former Lady Kunigarda had fled instead of taking up residence in the Terrace of Shadows on the Isle, where former Ladies were supposed to dwell. But these sendings that came to Prestimion now were unquestionable sendings of the Lady Kunigarda. He recognized her firm but gentle touch, the iron purity of her spirit. Were there now two Ladies of the Isle, each of them equipped with the transmitting devices by which the Lady sent her visions into the minds of the world’s sleepers?

In the dreams that came from Kunigarda, he found himself wandering again in the Valmambra, a ragged weary man staggering at the outer edge of exhaustion from one hideous szambra-tree to the next in that endless desolation. But instead of the blazing clangorous sun in the sky, there was the shining smiling face of the Lady Kunigarda, and her voice came to him, saying, “Yes, Prestimion, go onward, go on to the place you are meant to reach, you are not yet at the end of your energy.” And she would say to him also, “You must go on. You are the world’s redeemer, Prestimion, from whom we will have our salvation.” And then also, as he tottered at the brink of collapse in his journey through that dread land of little water and burning sand, crying out that he had no more strength, that he would perish here: “Walk on, Lord Prestimion our true Coronal, until you reach the throne.”

Madness, was it? The megalomaniacal follies of his own troubled mind? He reminded himself that Korsibar was Coronal, and he a bewildered fugitive hiding under a name he often could not remember in this eerie city of wizards.

He was lost in confusions.

And becoming estranged from his friends as well. His partial embrace of sorceries had put him apart from Septach Melayn, whose irreverent wit and dancing-master mannerisms no longer amused him. But even Svor and Gialaurys, for all their love of him and their joy at seeing him come over at least a little way to their beliefs, had grown very distant from his soul. Prestimion held them guilty in a fashion for having brought this torrent of incomprehensible contradiction down upon him. Why had he chosen believers to be his companions? Why had he not limited himself to the company of cheerful materialist men like Septach Melayn? He was doing Svor and Gialaurys a great injustice by this, he knew; but so frayed were the moorings of his heart that he shrank away even from them, which was something they were altogether unable to understand.

No question of it, he had lost his way entirely. He was wandering hopelessly in a terrible desert. His only comfort was in the sendings that came from Kunigarda; and they were few and far between, and gave him no help in fulfilling the high destiny whose compulsions, he was coming to admit, still plagued him.

Then one night there came to him in a dream not the Lady Kunigarda, but the magus Gominik Halvor, who stood before him as he lay sleeping in his dismal little room and said to him, “This must not go on any longer. The time has come for you to seek guidance.” And when Prestimion awakened, he knew it had been a true dream: that he had wandered long enough without purpose or understanding in this chaos, and guidance now must be sought.

On a night when no moons were in the sky, but only the potent cold blaze of the ten million million stars, Prestimion rose in the hour after midnight and quietly left his little low-ceilinged room, carrying under his arm a small bundle of things that he had been collecting over the previous ten days. He went out from the inn and made his way through the tangled winding streets of Triggoin, no longer as much of a mystery to him as when he first came here, and left the city by the gate known as Trinatha Gate at the northern side of town, which faced the white star of that name.

There was a pleasant open park here, up against the double-humped mountain that lay just north of the city, a place of meadows and streams and some copses of leafy trees. No one, or hardly anyone, went to that park at this hour. And he wanted to be away from the city and its inhabitants, its crowded narrow old buildings impregnated with five thousand years of magic, its multitude of sorcerers casting spells day and night, its jostling invisible hordes of demons and ghosts and spirits. The park, close though it was by sorcerous Triggoin, was a peaceful place. Prestimion needed to be calm: as calm as was possible for him to be just now.

In a quiet grassy place between two little groves of trees, where a trickling stream so narrow that he could hop across it went flowing by, he set down his bundle and knelt beside it. He did not dare allow himself to think. Thinking, now, would be fatal to his purpose.

The strange new star that had burst into the sky while he was making the journey between the Labyrinth and the Castle was almost directly overhead, bathing him in the great intensity of its light. He could feel its blue-white fire streaming down upon him. It was a welcome sensation, a purifying sensation. “Lord Korsibar’s Star” was what they were calling it, or so he had heard, but to Prestimion it seemed there was nothing at all of Korsibar in its brilliant radiance. It was a star of change, a star of great transformation, yes: but it was not Lord Korsibar’s Star and never would be.

“Help me,” he whispered.

Prestimion understood that he was praying, a thing he had never done before in his life. He did not ask to know to whom he prayed.

He knelt a long while in that prayer, first looking down at the soft thick dewy grass, which looked almost black in the starlight though in fact its true color was closer to scarlet, and then very slowly lifting his head, looking up, straight up, into the eye of the new star.

“Help me.”

He had learned some words, and he spoke them now. “Voro liuro yad thearchivoliia,” he said, and said them backward too, “Thearchivoliia yad liuro vow.” And heard a rumbling in the distance, as of thunder, though the night was clear and dry. He said then also the Five Words that had never been written down, and the Three Words that could never be written down. Then he took from his bundle the balls of colored twine that he had brought with him, and carefully laid out strips of different colors according to certain patterns he had learned.

When the patterns were complete, he looked up at the sky again, but this time with his eyes closed, and he uttered Names that he had heard others utter before, but never had expected to be speaking himself.

“Bythois!” he said, and waited a moment, and said also, “Proiarchis!” There were two loud rumbles of thunder. Prestimion did not ask himself why. “Sigei!” he said, and waited.

And then:

“Remmer!”

At that last and most puissant of Names there was a crack of thunder and a flash of lightning that danced across the sky, of such a brightness that he could see it even behind the lids of his closed eyes.

From his pack now he took the herbs he had brought with him, the powdered circaris leaves and the seeds of the cobily and the dried jan-gars, and sprinkled them into the palm of his hand and licked them into his mouth. Which smarted and stung for a moment, until he found the flask that contained the oil of gallicundi, and drank that down, which eased the stinging somewhat. There was only the pardao-berry to eat after that, which he did; and then he waited. Sweat rose in beads on his forehead and streamed down his face. A powerful dizziness overcame him, so that his head reeled and spun and the world was whirling three ways at once. And still he waited, kneeling in the soft grass, head turned to the sky, eyes shut.

After a time he opened his eyes and saw that a greenish-yellow mist had arisen and that there were four moons in the sky that he had never seen before, three small pale angular ones that were like white slivers and a greater, redder one in the midst of those. That fourth one was diamond-shaped, and from its four sharp corners came a sparkling blue-white radiance much like the light of the new star. Prestimion fixed his eyes on that and after a little while felt himself beginning to rise. He drifted up above the feathery hilltops of the two-humped mountain that overlooked Triggoin, and shortly saw the city spread out far below him, flat, like a mere sketch of itself. And went higher still, so that distant Castle Mount stood out against the night like a lantern, and a bright bronzy glow appeared to him in the east beyond it where the cities on the other side of the Mount were already opening to the new day.

Higher yet. He was above the realm of clouds. The world billowed like a carpet of thick fog beneath him.

The stars here burned with a brilliance beyond all comprehension. The air, which had for a time during his ascent been engulfed in a dazzling whiteness, grew dark again, and then darker than dark, and became very cold. He was in a kingdom of perpetual night. This was, he knew, the border of heaven; and as he soared through it he saw apparitions and portents all about him, great armies of fierce men wielding spears and swords who were battling on every side, and streaks of bloody lightning coursing among them, and swirling lights like comets ripped from the firmament plunging wildly down toward the world below.

He was freezing now. His hair, streaming out behind him, was stiff with ice. His blood had ceased to move in his veins. But there was no pain for him, and fear was wholly absent from his spirit. He was in a kind of ecstasy. Upward and upward he continued, until a band of blackness had closed around him and not even the stars were visible. There was nothing in the sky but Majipoor itself, like a child’s ball beneath him, turning slowly, a thing all green and blue and brown, and he could make out the great dark wedge that was Alhanroel and the long wide green continent that was Zimroel and the little Isle of Dreams lying between them, with tawny Suvrael hanging below; and then the world turned and he saw only the Great Sea, that no one had ever crossed from one side to the other, a vast emerald scar spanning the world’s middle. And then Alhanroel came into view again; for the world was turning ever faster and faster, the continents and the sea that lay between them spinning by again and again and again.

It was his. It was meant to be his, and he was meant for it. All doubts of that dropped forever from his soul. This was the thing he sought; this was what he had come to find, up here at reality’s edge. His. The world was his, and he was the world’s, and it hovered before him in the air within his reach.

Prestimion reached down and touched it.

It hopped up into his hand, that little ball that was the world, and he held it carefully there, and looked at it closely, and breathed upon it. And said to it, “I am Prestimion who would heal you. But first I must heal myself.” And knew that he would. A great door had swung open in his soul that had been closed until now by iron bars.

He was very cold now, almost frozen; yet even so there still were rivers of sweat running down his body. But his way was clear. He saw the path that would carry him to the warmth, if only he had the will and the strength to follow it. And he knew that he did.

He released the little world and let it go spinning away from him in the darkness.

Then he saw a light above him. The new star was shining again, but now it had a face, and its face was that of the Lady Kunigarda, and he could hear her voice, saying softly, “Come, Prestimion. A little farther. I’m not so far away. A little farther yet. Farther. Farther—”

“Farther. Farther.”

“This is far enough, I would think,” a deep and robust voice above him said. “Come, Prestimion. Open your eyes.”

For a moment he was unable to see; and then he perceived Gialaurys standing beside him, with Svor and Septach Melayn a short distance away. It was mid-morning, at least. The sun was high; the dew was gone from the grass. There was a griping anguished grumbling in his stomach, as though he had not eaten for weeks, and his throat was dry and his eyes felt swollen.

’Take my hand,” said Gialaurys. “Up. Up.”

“We’ve been searching for you since before dawn,” Svor said. “Finally we asked Gominik Halvor, and he said to look in the park. But it’s a big park.”

Prestimion rose and took a few wobbling steps. Then he stumbled and nearly fell into the stream nearby, but Septach Melayn came forward quickly and gracefully caught him and steadied him on his feet.

“You’ve been playing with dangerous toys, haven’t you, Prestimion?” he said, and gestured toward the array of herbs and the patterns of twine on the ground, making no attempt at concealing his scorn. “But you’ll be all right, I think. A good meal, and some rest—”

“You should try these things, Septach Melayn,” said Prestimion, managing a thin smile. He spoke with some difficulty: his voice was rusty and harsh, not yet fully under his control again. “You’d be in for some surprises. Circaris leaves and cobily and some dried jangars, to start with, and then—”

“Thank you, no. Would take the edge off my swordsmanship, I think, to dabble in such medicines as those. What nonsense have you been amusing yourself with out here, Prestimion?”

“Let him be,” said Gialaurys gruffly. “Come. Let’s go back to the inn.”

“Can you walk?” Svor asked, peering into Prestimion’s face in an anxious way.

“I’m fine, Svor.” He held his arms outstretched before himself. “Look: a straight line, step step step step. Is that satisfactory to you?” Prestimion laughed. He gathered up the things he had brought with him and stuffed them into his pack. He felt very calm, very peaceful, after the night’s adventure. His path was altogether clear. He need only take the first step, and then the second. A straight line, yes, step step step step.

“Would you like to hear the news?” Svor said as they walked back together toward town.

“What news is that?” Prestimion asked.

“The proclamation of the Lady Kunigarda, concerning the state of the government. Septach Melayn heard it announced in a tavern last night, and we came to your room to tell you, but you were gone; and then began the business of searching for you all over town. How will we get our night’s sleep back that you owe us, Prestimion?”

’Tell me the proclamation, Svor!”

“Oh, yes. That. It seems that the Lady has fled from the Isle, taking with her the mechanisms by which sendings are made; and announces that by means of those devices she will continue to guide the souls of the world, naming herself Lady-in-Exile. And also she has spoken out against Korsibar, and against her brother the Pontifex Confalume too. She gives the name of usurper to Korsibar. The false Coronal, the usurper Korsibar,’ is what she calls him. Her own nephew! As for Confalume, she denounces his supine acceptance of Korsibar’s taking of the throne. They have brought the displeasure of the Divine upon the world, she says. She’s called on all citizens of Majipoor to rise up at once and cast Korsibar aside. She means to make war on him herself, by sendings and other methods also.”

“All this from Kunigarda?” Prestimion said, amazed. It seemed to him that this was still part of his dream, that he lay yet asleep on the grass beside the stream, holding the little ball that was Majipoor in his hand. “And what has become of Kunigarda, I wonder? Has she been proscribed too?”

“She’s left the Isle,” said Septach Melayn. “She’s somewhere in southern Alhanroel right now, and making her way north. She has announced that she means to find you and join forces with you: for you are the rightful Coronal of Majipoor, Prestimion—so says the Lady Kunigarda. Which we would have been happy to tell you last night, my friend, except that you felt it needful to spend a night sleeping in the park with a belly full of—what did you say? Circaris leaves and cobily?” A great gust of roaring derisive laughter came from him. “Has all this been achieved by means of witchcraft, I wonder, this making of an alliance with Confalume’s own sister? Did you come out here to invoke Proiarchis and Remmer on your behalf, and did those great beings look upon you with favor, Prestimion, and give you the world to hold in your hand like a toy?”

Prestimion made no reply. But a secret smile played quickly across his face.

5

It was in Lord Makhario’s statuary garden in Sipermit that I saw it, when I was on holiday there,” said Sebbigan Kless of Perimor, who was a manufacturer of doublets and hose in that busy city on the lower slope of Castle Mount. His companion, who was listening as intently as though Sebbigan Kless had just told him that the Mount was about to break loose from the planet and drift off into space, was the jobber and wholesaler Aibeil Gammis of Stee, an important distributor of Sebbigan Kless’s products in several of the Free Cities a little way higher on the mountain. “There was this Su-Suheris walking in the garden, with the smallest Vroon you could imagine sitting on his shoulder. Well, you can’t help stealing a glance at a Su-Suheris whenever you see one, can you?—such weird bastards, those two pointy heads sticking up out of that neck—and for one to have a Vroon riding on his shoulder was pretty strange too, but, let me tell you, that was nothing at all compared to seeing the Su-Suheris flicker all of a sudden, and then—”

Two days later, when Aibeil Gammis had returned to Stee and was going over inventories at his warehouse with his accountant, a man named Hazil Scroith who claimed some sort of tenuous kinship with a younger brother of the Duke of Alaisor, he said, “If we were smart, you know, we’d start getting up a line of goods to sell to the Metamorphs. After all, we’ve got one as our Coronal now.”

“A Metamorph? What are you talking about?”

“Well, I had this from Sebbigan Kless himself, and Sebbigan Kless is no tippler, you know, so I doubt that he was making it up. It seems he was visiting Sipermit, you know, to see that jiggly little Zimroel girl that he doesn’t want his wife to find out about, and they were in the park where the sexy statues are when just as you please the Coronal comes strolling through, Korsibar himself, only he’s disguised as a Su-Suheris. Well, you ask, how does a human being manage to make himself look like a seven-foot-tall monster with two heads, and how did Sebbigan Kless manage to discover that the seven-foot-tall monster was in fact our beloved Coronal? And the answer, my friend, is that the Coronal isn’t a human at all, but has to be a Shapeshifter, because Sebbigan Kless actually saw him change form—it was just for a moment, mind you, but Sebbigan Kless isn’t a man whose eyes deceive him—the Su-Suheris turned into the Coronal, who looked very surprised to find himself revealed that way, and turned himself back into a Su-Suheris just as fast as I can tell you the story! But it was done and seen. A Shapeshifter! No wonder Korsibar was able to put the hex on Confalume and all those lords in the Labyrinth! He wasn’t Korsibar at all, was he, but some kind of thing out of the Metamorph country! Or can it be that Confalume’s a Shapeshifter too? That we’ve had a whole family of Shapeshifters running the world for the last forty years? And if that’s true, let me tell you—”

Which revelations Hazil Scroith duly reported in his next letter to his wife’s nephew Jispard Demaive, who was not the younger brother of the Duke of Alaisor at all but who did indeed have a clerical post in the duke’s Ministry of Prisons and Warehouses. “We are all buzzing here with the news,” wrote Hazil Scroith, “that the Coronal Lord Korsibar is in fact a Metamorph, the real Korsibar evidently having been done away with while his father was still Coronal. Word of this comes from an absolutely reputable source in Stee who was able to observe the supposed Lord Korsibar changing shape in a public park—is that not incredible?—and turning himself very quickly from human form to that of a Su-Suheris and immediately back again. Why he would do such a thing in plain view of others is hard to understand, dear nephew, but who has ever understood the way the minds of the Metamorphs work?

“Anyway, the tale is all over the Mount now, and nobody is discussing anything else. Just yesterday a salesman who was here from Normork told me the latest bit of news, which is that the Su-Suheris sorcerer Sanibak-Thastimoon, who has been standing at our new Coronal’s elbow ever since he came to the throne, is a Metamorph also! Both of them are impostors, the king and his magus too, and where will it end? Will we find that the whole government is shot through and through with Shapeshifters pretending to be human? It stuns the mind. The whole crowd of them up there at the Castle nothing but masquerading Metamorphs!”

And in Sisivondal they were saying—

In Bailemoona—

In Sefarad—

In Sippulgar—

Korsibar, pacing endlessly, whirled without warning and advanced toward Farquanor as though he meant to rend him limb from limb. Farquanor, quailing, took a quick couple of steps backward, then felt himself butting against the wall of the throne-chamber.

“These stories, Farquanor! These impossible ridiculous stories about me—”

“Lies, my lord,” said Farquanor, trembling. “Every one of them, a lie!”

Korsibar stared, wonderstruck.

“Thank you,” he said acidly after a little while. “I had begun to believe the truth of them myself, but you have greatly reassured me, Count Farquanor. How pleased I am to know I’m not a Shapeshifter after all.”

“I only meant, my lord, that—”

“You meant! You meant! You meant!”

“My lord, I beg you, take hold of yourself!”

“I’ll take hold of you, and hurl you from here to Zimroel if you don’t stop spouting nonsense. You are my High Counsellor, Farquanor. I call upon you for advice, and you spout platitudes instead. Tell me: what are we to do about these lunatic tales that are heard suddenly on all sides?”

“Ignore them, my lord.”

“Ignore? Not deny?”

“They are too contemptible to deny. Can you imagine it, going before the world and saying, ‘I am not a Shapeshifter’? Such a denial only gives life to the thing. Let it die of its own absurdity, my lord.”

“You think it will?”

Farquanor took a deep breath. He felt uncomfortably confined, with Korsibar’s great bulk looming before him and the wall only inches behind him. And the Coronal seemed to be almost at the edge of madness: face rigid with tension, eyes bulging, altogether looking like a man driven to distraction by the responsibilities of the office he had seized for himself and by the annoyance of this most curious of rumors concerning him. It would not take much to cause him to snap entirely and erupt into wild violence. One wrong word, Farquanor thought, and he will squash me against this wall like a bug.

Carefully he said, forcing a look of urgent concern and deep sympathy to his face, “My lord, I have no doubt of it. It’s no more than the momentary madness of the season. Let it dry up and blow away; and the people will hail you gladly as their lord, as they have since the beginning. This I promise you, my lord. Remain true to your own self, and no lies will attach themselves to you.”

“Ah,” said Korsibar in relief. And then, almost as though he had caught the habit from Dantirya Sambail, said again, after a moment, “Ah.”

Oljebbin said, “Serithorn, may I have a word with you?”

Serithorn, who was examining a tray of ancient carved kebbel-stones that had been brought to him an hour before by a dealer in antiquities from Gimkandale, glanced up at the former High Counsellor and said pleasantly, “You look very hot and bothered, old man. Is anything wrong?”

“Wrong? Wrong? Oh, no, nothing at all!” Oljebbin came fully into Serithorn’s study—both men still maintained their lavish suites at the Castle, though they no longer held significant posts in the government—and slapped his hand down on the desk so fiercely that the kebbel-stones leaped about in the tray. “Do you see this hand, Serithorn? Does that look to you like a Metamorph’s hand?”

“For the love of the Divine, Oljebbin!”

“Does it? Can I make it wriggle and shift? Sprout another seven or eight fingers, maybe? Turn it into a Skandar’s hand if I feel like it? What about you, Serithorn? Let’s see your hand! If I twist it hard enough, will it change?”

“You’re overwrought, Oljebbin. Sit down and have some wine with me. This absurd tale about Lord Korsibar—”

“Not just Korsibar. Gonivaul’s been to see me. The thing is spreading like a plague. Do you know what they’re telling each other in places like Alaisor and Sisivondal? That we’re all Metamorphs, every last one of us, you and me and Gonivaul and Farquanor and Farholt and Dantirya Sambail—”

“Well,” said Serithorn, “I wouldn’t care to speak for Farquanor and Farholt, and Gonivaul may very likely be a Metamorph for all I know, although if he is he’s a deucedly hairy one; and as for Dantirya Sambail, I never thought he was a human being in the first place—but I tell you flat out that I am myself and nothing other than myself, as incapable of changing shapes as I am of making love to twenty women the same night, and I’m reasonably confident that you are quite genuine too. Reasonably confident, I say. I don’t have serious doubts of you. I’d be willing to accept at face value any oath that you’d care to swear as to your humanity, old friend, and never once hereafter would I let anyone try to make me believe that you were actually—”

“Serithorn, for once in your life be serious!” cried Oljebbin explosively.

“Very well.” The little smile that was Serithorn’s usual expression gave way to a look of dour glowering intensity worthy of Farholt or Gialaurys. “I am serious now.”

“Thank you. Listen to me: of course I don’t believe that Korsibar’s a Metamorph, or that you are, or that I may be one myself and simply haven’t noticed. It’s all too ridiculous for words. But the fact is that five or ten billion people out there seem to think he is. Gonivaul’s been making inquiries, and the story’s all over Alhanroel by now, in at least a dozen different permutations, each one more preposterous than the next. What effect do you think this is having on Korsibar’s legitimacy in the eyes of those five billion people? Don’t you think he’s hideously compromised by it? He takes the throne by unconstitutional means, for which he’s already being denounced up and down the land by nobody less than the former Lady of the Isle, Kunigarda herself, who’s spouting subversive sendings day and night. And then it becomes widely believed that he’s not only not human but is in fact a Shapeshifter who’s disguised himself as Korsibar—” Oljebbin ran both his hands agitatedly through his thick shock of white hair. “Prestimion’s alive, did you know that?” he asked. “And is about to make a second try at claiming the throne.”

Serithorn’s elegant facade of unshakable poise gave way to a gasp of astonishment.

“Alive?”

“Yes. This is confirmed, just today. I don’t think the Coronal knows it yet: Farquanor’s afraid to tell him, apparently. Prestimion has been in Triggoin, it seems, but now, according to Gonivaul, he’s out and marching around again somewhere in western Alhanroel, patching together those pieces of the rebel army that Korsibar didn’t drown, and recruiting a new—”

There was a knock at the door.

“Gonivaul,” Oljebbin said. “I asked him to join me here.”

“Come in, admiral!” Serithorn called, and Prince Gonivaul strode into the room. His shaggy-bearded face was grim and stormy.

“Has Oljebbin told you—” he began.

“Yes,” Serithorn said. “We’re all supposed to be Metamorphs. Well, we aren’t, and that’s that. But what’s this business about Prestimion being alive? ”

“He is. That’s definite. He’s come out of the north—Triggoin, I hear—and has set up headquarters for himself in the plains between Gloyn and Marakeeba, which are places somewhere on the far side of the Trikkalas. He’s collecting a new army there, with the notion of marching to Castle Mount, gathering up a billion or so rebel soldiers along the way, and pushing Korsibar off the throne.”

“Is he the one behind this lunatic thing of Korsibar’s being a Metamorph?” Serithorn asked.

Gonivaul shrugged. “I can’t say. There’s probably no connection. But certainly he’ll be willing to make damaging use of it as propaganda. ‘Accept me as your true Coronal in place of this creature who pretends to be Korsibar,’ he’ll say. The person you take for Korsibar is not only an unlawful Coronal but an evil Metamorph impostor!’ And people will gobble it up.—There’s a germ of truth, I think, in this Metamorph fable, anyway.”

“There is?” said Oljebbin and Serithorn at one and the same instant.

“Oh, not literally,” Gonivaul said. “But Korsibar’s been very thick these last few months with the Vroon Thalnap Zelifor, who used to work for me once upon a time, and who, as you may recall, got himself into big trouble with Korsibar last year by putting some kind of wild ideas into the Lady Thismet’s head and after that by running off to join Prestimion. When the Vroon came scooting back here after Prestimion’s defeat at Stymphinor, he managed somehow to talk his way into Korsibar’s good graces, don’t ask me how, and has been right up there in prestige with Sanibak-Thastimoon on his staff of mages ever since.

“Well, this Thalnap Zelifor is very good with gadgets, and I happen to know that something he was working on when he was in my pay was a device that would allow the wearer to seem to change shape. Not actual shapeshifting, mind you, just the illusion of it. Now, there definitely seems to be some escapade of Korsibar’s at the bottom of all these stories—he was seen changing shapes in Bombifale or Bibiroon or somewhere by a vacationing businessman who doesn’t seem to have had any reason to be inventing the tale, and he says Korsibar had a Vroon with him at the time. My guess is that he and Thalnap Zelifor slipped away from the Castle to experiment with this machine, and got careless with it just as the businessman happened by. After which the story started circulating that—”

“All right,” Oljebbin said. “Whether it did or didn’t happen that way, the main thing is that the story’s traveling like wildfire and doing Korsibar a lot of harm. Metamorphs are feared and detested everywhere. He’ll have a hard time scrubbing away the taint. True or false, this business is bound to weaken Korsibar’s position with the common folk, which is weak enough already now that Kunigarda’s been speaking out against him. With Prestimion suddenly back in the picture, what I want to know from you two is this: is this the moment for us to withdraw our support from Korsibar too?”

“In favor of Prestimion?” Serithorn asked, eyebrows lifting in surprise.

“No,” said Oljebbin sharply. “In favor of Prankipin’s embalmed corpse. In favor of the statue of Lord Stiamot, maybe. Who do you think I’m talking about, Serithorn?”

“Prestimion doesn’t have a chance of becoming Coronal, not now, not ever,” said Serithorn in a quiet emphatic tone.

“You say this?” asked Oljebbin. “You, his good friend for so long, his mother’s very good friend?”

Serithorn reddened faintly at that. But his voice remained calm as he replied, “There’s a curse of some sort on Prestimion. Anybody who couldn’t keep an idiot like Korsibar from nudging him aside when the throne became vacant and the whole world was expecting him to become Coronal is plainly marked by the gods for misfortune. Now that he’s back in view and heading this way, something will go wrong again. Korsibar will dump another reservoir on him or a stray arrow will get him or he’ll be eaten by vorzaks as he comes over the mountains. Mark my words, Prestimion won’t have any more success this time than he did before.”

“So if we were to back him,” Oljebbin said, “we’d be cutting our own throats?”

“Essentially,” said Serithorn.

“But that would leave us with a Coronal who half the world believes is a Metamorph! There’s no way Korsibar can stand up in front of everybody and prove he isn’t one, is there? This numbskull rumor will eventually do irreparable harm to his ability to govern, if it hasn’t already, and then—”

“You’re forgetting someone,” Gonivaul said.

Oljebbin stared. “What do you mean?”

“The name of Dantirya Sambail hasn’t been mentioned at all since I entered the room. Korsibar’s done for, I agree: these wild stories never get properly contradicted, and sooner or later everybody out there will have been made permanently suspicious of him. As for Prestimion, I share Serithorn’s view of him: he’s simply a poor unlucky devil and I can’t believe he’ll ever manage to get the throne he so richly deserves to have. That leaves the Procurator. Since the Mavestoi business he’s quietly pushed Farquanor and everybody else aside and has made himself Korsibar’s chief adviser, at least unofficially. Now Korsibar is having political problems in the provinces because of this bizarre Metamorph thing. All right: either Dantirya Sambail will very shortly overthrow Korsibar himself—’for the good of Majipoor,’ as he’ll piously tell everybody—or else, in the coming war with Prestimion, Dantirya Sambail will advise Korsibar right into some terrible calamity. One way or the other, Korsibar goes out of the picture before long and Dantirya Sambail emerges on top. If we’re smart, and we are, we’ll cultivate the friendship of Dantirya Sambail at this particular point in time.—What do you think, Serithorn?”

“I agree completely. Korsibar’s position is suddenly very wobbly, not that it was tremendously strong in the first place, because of the legalities, Coronal’s son becoming Coronal, and all that. Prestimion’s isn’t any better. He was never officially named Coronal-designate, after all. So, even if he’s the winner in this new war that’s shaping up, he’s got no very valid claim himself. Dantirya Sambail, on the other hand, can argue that as Procurator of Ni-moya he stands second only to the Pontifex Confalume, and therefore is the logical and legitimate heir to the Coronal’s throne.”

“Very well thought out,” said Oljebbin. “At last I make out a pattern in all this chaos. Our strategy, my lords, is to pledge our undying support in the coming challenge for the throne to our beloved Lord Korsibar and his loyal ally the Procurator of Ni-moya, and roundly condemn the audacity of the criminal upstart Prestimion. If Korsibar somehow survives and remains on the throne, he’ll be indebted to us forever. If he doesn’t, he’ll almost certainly be replaced as Coronal by Dantirya Sambail, who also will be grateful to have had our help. Either way, we’re on the winning side. Are we agreed, gentlemen?”

“Absolutely,” said Gonivaul at once.

“Let us drink to it,” said Serithorn, pulling a dusty bottle of wine from his cabinet. “Good Muldemar wine, as it happens, Prestimion’s own. Fifteen years old.—To peace, gentlemen! To everlasting peace and harmony in the world!”

6

Thismet said, “Have you heard these stories, Melithyrrh, that say that my brother is a Metamorph?” “What foolishness they are, my lady!”

“Yes. Foolishness indeed. If he is a Metamorph, then what am I, who was hatched in the same womb as he?”

“The stories, as I hear them, have it that he was replaced by a Metamorph secretly as a grown man, not that he was born one. But all of it is nonsense. You should pay no attention, my lady.”

’True. I shouldn’t. But it’s so hard, Melithyrrh!”

Thismet rose from her divan and crossed the room to the octagonal window that gave a view of Lord Siminave’s dazzling reflecting pool, and then, pivoting restlessly, went to the other side, opening her wardrobe’s fragrant doors of shimmak-wood to reveal all her wealth of clothing within, the scores of brocaded robes and jeweled gowns and bodices and chemises and cassocks and all the rest, everything fashioned from her own design by the most skilled clothing-makers of Majipoor. She had worn many of them only once or twice, some not at all; and now they needed to be refitted, so lean and gaunt had she become in these sour days. She barely ate any longer; she scarcely slept. Korsibar’s coming to the throne, which had seemed such a glorious thing to her once, had been the ruination of them both.

Melithyrrh said, “My lady, please—this pacing, this constant fretting of yours—”

“I’ve had to swallow too much, Melithyrrh! Traitors and villains on all sides. The sorcerer Sanibak-Thastimoon, who deludes me into thinking great things are in store for me, and turns his back on me at the first opportunity! The other sorcerer, Thalnap Zelifor, who goads me into giving offense to my brother, and then leaves me altogether, and when he returns is suddenly my brother’s devoted servant! Or the vile Farquanor, who comes right into these rooms—he stood over there, in the jade drawing room—I should have had the floor scrubbed with acid afterward—and says to me, cool as ice, ‘Marry me, Thismet, it will improve your social standing at the Castle.’ Calling me Thismet, as though I were a serving-wench! And going unpunished for it when I denounced him to Korsibar.”

“My lady—”

“And Korsibar,” Thismet went on. “My wonderful heroic brother, who made himself Coronal simply because I told him to do it, and who rewards me by making me an exile within the very walls of the Castle, ignored, excluded, shunted about with impunity, while he surrounds himself with cheats and liars and treacherous traitors who are leading him to destruction, men like Dantirya Sambail lording it around the Castle now as though he were Coronal and Pontifex both at once—too much, Melithyrrh, much too much! I can abide this place and these people no longer.” She drifted on into the room adjacent, where her treasures of jewelry were housed, her wondrous rings and pendants and necklaces that were the equal of the best that any Coronal’s consort had ever possessed, and stood with her delicate white hands plunged deep amongst them as though it was some hoard of buried treasure that she had just uncovered. After a time she said in a much quieter voice, “Melithyrrh, will you accompany me on a little journey?”

“Of course, my lady. A few days in High Morpin, perhaps—they’ll do you a world of good. Or a visit to the gardens at Tolingar—a holiday in Bombifale—”

“No,” Thismet said. “Not Bombifale, not Tolingar. Nor High Morpin neither. A longer journey is what I have in mind. Do you know where Gloyn is, Melithyrrh?”

“Gloyn?” Melithyrrh repeated blankly, as though Thismet had spoken the name of some other planet.

“Gloyn. It’s a city, or maybe a town, in western Alhanroel, across the Trikkala Mountains, but this side of Alaisor.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” said Melithyrrh, mystified.

“No. Nor I, before this day. But I have a mind to go there now. To leave tomorrow, just you and I together. Come, let’s pack some things. You can operate a floater, can’t you? And I’m fairly sure I can. I can’t tell you how eager I am to get away from this place—out into the fresh air, a little adventure of our own, the first one I’ve ever had: just you and me, Melithyrrh—”

“May I ask, lady, what attraction there is in Gloyn?”

“Prestimion,” Thismet said.

In the end she took much less with her than she would have imagined possible to travel with, almost none of her elegant robes and gowns, only simple rough clothes that would be useful in the place where she was going, and just a handful of baubles, a few rings and necklaces to remind her that she was the owner of such things. But also she took a small jewel-handled dagger that she could strap along the inside of her left arm, and, after some thought, an energy-thrower she had borrowed in a moment of foresight from the weapons storehouse, a month before. She had no clear idea of how to use it, and had heard that the things were terribly unreliable in any case, but she supposed it would serve to frighten away anyone who might think that two young women traveling by themselves were easy prey.

Operating the floater was the most challenging part. She had never driven one herself or even paid much attention to what the driver was doing as she was taken about. Nor, as it developed, had Melithyrrh had any experience in driving. But there couldn’t be much to it, could there? Start, stop, up, down, slower, faster—that was about it, she thought. At an hour when Korsibar and the others were having another of their interminable Council meetings—they were always having long meetings nowadays, what with Prestimion’s new rebellion gathering strength in the west and this absurd ongoing crisis of the Metamorph rumors—Thismet requisitioned a pleasure-floater from the captain of the guards, and she and Melithyrrh went down to Dizimaule Plaza together to pick it up.

The guardsman who brought the floater around looked at them a little strangely when he realized they had no driver of their own with them. But it was not his place to ask questions of the Coronal’s sister. He helped them load their baggage in the storage compartment, and held the door open for them.

“You drive it first,” Thismet whispered.

“Me? But—my lady—”

“They’ll think something’s really wrong if I sit down in front of the controls. Go on!”

“Yes, my lady.”

Melithyrrh studied the panel of controls for a moment. Eight or nine knobs, none of them identified. She took a long deep breath and touched one. Nothing happened. The guardsman was staring open-mouthed at them. Surely he had never seen two ladies of rank get into a floater before on their own.

Melithyrhh pressed another knob. A humming sound came from below them.

“Those are the rotors starting up,” said Thismet. “Now touch the knob to the left of it.”

It was only a guess, but a good one. The nose of the floater came up six inches from the ground, eight inches, ten. And kept on rising.

“Let go of it!” Thismet cried. The floater descended a bit and leveled off. “Now the next knob to the left!” That one sent the floater jolting violently backward. Thismet snatched Melithyrrh’s hand from the knob and put her own on the one just to the right of the rotor control. Just as violently, the floater began moving forward. The guardsman, who had backed away from the vehicle at its first lurch, stood off to one side, mouth gaping even wider. “Here we go!” Thismet exclaimed as the floater went cruising uncertainly off toward the Grand Calintane Highway.

“I think I have the essence of the thing now,” Melithyrrh said. “This one makes it go faster, this one slows it down. And this one turns it to the—right? No, the left, I guess. So this one must be—”

“You’re doing very well,” Thismet said. And indeed she was. The floater was remaining level in relation to the ground now, and moving smoothly down the center of the highway track. A sign loomed up. High Morpin to the left, Halanx to the right. “Take the Halanx road,” Thismet ordered. Melithyrrh touched a knob. The floater veered to the right, not too jerkily. “You see?” said Thismet. “Nothing to it at all. We’re on our way.”

Getting off the Mount was the first task. They needed to go west once they were in the flatlands: that meant leaving the Mount by the Dundilmir side, Thismet knew. But Dundilmir was a Slope City, far down near the bottom of the Mount. To get there they had to make their way first through the three higher levels, the Inner Cities, the Guardian Cities, the Free Cities. She had a vague idea of a route that ran down through Banglecode to Hoikmar or Greel and another that led downward from there to Castlethorn or Gimkandale, which ought to take them to Dundilmir and thence to ground level. But her knowledge of Mount geography was imperfect and did not at all include an awareness of the intricate spires and secondary peaks that complicated travel up and down the sides of the immense mountain. One couldn’t simply go from Point A to Point B because they were in a straight line on a map; one had to find a road that actually connected them, and sometimes that involved going halfway around the Mount. And so they spent their first night, unexpectedly, at an inn in the city of Guand, which Thismet had never visited in her life, and which they arrived in under the mistaken impression that they had taken the Banglecode road out of Halanx.

The inn was the best they could find, but it was something less than luxurious. From the innkeeper came impertinent stares, even though they had dressed as unflatteringly as they knew how, with all color washed from their faces and their hair pulled severely back. The room was small and bleak and there were stains on the walls and the bedding did not seem fresh. The dinner they bought for themselves there was unthinkably bad, unknown pale meat fried in grease. All night there were sounds of laughter and bedsprings from adjacent rooms.

“Will it be like this, do you imagine, all the way to Gloyn?” Thismet asked.

“Worse, my lady. This is still Castle Mount.”

When the time came to pay the reckoning, Thismet discovered she had brought no money with her. Money was not something a Coronal’s sister was accustomed to carrying. Fortunately, Melithyrrh had a purse of royals with her; but it seemed a small purse, and Thismet began to think they would be pawning her jewelry to pay for these miserable lodging-houses as the journey went on. Things would get worse, yes, Thismet saw.

Somehow they found their way down the Mount. Somehow they located roads that would take them westward, though they had no maps and no skill at traveling. “We should look for highway signs that say ‘Alaisor,’ ” Thismet said. “Alaisor is in the west.” But Melithyrrh pointed out that Alaisor was thousands of miles away—eight thousand miles, ten, perhaps, all the way out by the sea—and was not likely to be shown on highway signs this far inland. So they tried to think of other cities closer to the Mount that lay in the right direction. “Arkilon,” Thismet suggested, remembering that there had been a big battle there the year before and that she had seen on the map it was west of the Mount. So they went to Arkilon.

There they found a traveler staying at their inn who suggested that they go south to Sisivondal next, and drew a little chart for them showing how it would avoid the difficult crossing of the Trikkala Mountains if they did that. “You are very kind,” said Thismet, smiling, a phrase and a smile which he mistook, putting his hand boldly on her thigh as they sat together at table, so that she had to let him see the dagger strapped within the sleeve of her blouse. After that he was more polite. But the imprint of that roaming hand burned against her skin for hours thereafter.

They went to Sisivondal. It was the ugliest place Thismet had ever seen. Not even in nightmares had she conceived anything more hideous. This time their hotel room was a barren stuffy box. It seemed all but airless; but when they opened the window, a fine rain of sand came sifting in on them.

Roads led from Sisivondal in all directions. A maze of signs confronted them.

“Which way is Gloyn?” Thismet asked, dispirited. “I never imagined that Majipoor was so big!”

“It is the biggest world in all the heavens,” said Melithyrrh. “The biggest where people of the human sort can live, at least.”

“And we must travel it alone, two pampered women.”

“It was our choice, lady.”

“Yes. There was no other, was there?”

No. No choice. She knew she had come to the end of her time at the court, that place which once had been so lovely and had somehow been transformed into a place of disappointment and rebuke. Already the Castle and all its horrors seemed far away: the skulking leering Farquanor, the snorting bestial Procurator, the treacherous mages, the noble brother who had treated her so ignobly when she had asked him for a place in his government. She scarcely missed her jade drawing room and her alabaster tub, her robes and bangles, her whole luxurious empty life. She was done with all that. It was dead. Over. A new life was what she sought now, and would find in the west. But still—this endless wearying journey—that impudent hand on her thigh, burning like a flame—the shabby hotels, the dreary roads, the ghastly food—

The territory around Sisivondal was a vast dusty wasteland. A dry hot dusty wind blew across it all the time. They kept the floater sealed tight, and yet, when Thismet glanced at Melithyrrh, she could see Melithyrrh’s golden hair coated with a sandy film, and knew that hers must be like that also. Grit in her eyes, grit between her teeth, grit along her arms and down between her breasts. Her skin was dry; her throat was dry. Her soul itself was parched. She had never felt so filthy, so bedraggled, so unglamorous, so little like anything that anyone would recognize as the Lady Thismet of Lord Confalume’s Castle. They drove on and on, praying that this grim sandy plain would come to an end eventually; and eventually it did, and the air grew sweet and the world became Majipoor-beautiful again.

“We are nearing Gloyn at last, I hope,” Thismet said one magnificent sunlit morning as they passed through a land of glistening green fields.

They stopped for information at a farm where some mysterious-looking plant with purple leaves was being grown in fields that stretched onward, one after another, out of sight. Gloyn? Gloyn? Ah, yes, Gloyn! That was on the road to Marakeeba, was it not? Well, then, they had passed the highway for Gloyn seven hundred miles ago. Go back to Kessilroge, turn right there and go three hundred miles, watch for signs for Gannamunda, and at Gannamunda look for the Hunzimar Highway—

Very well. Back to Kessilroge.

The Vale of Gloyn was the place where Prestimion’s army lay encamped, a great broad savanna in west-central Alhanroel, almost equidistant between the Mount and the seacoast at Alaisor. All this flat peaceful land was covered by huge carpets of coppery-hued, shin-high gattaga-grass, the blades of which were so close-knit and thick that when you walked upon it you left a trail that could be seen half an hour afterward; and those hundreds of miles of gattaga-grass were home to immense herds of grazing animals that lived there as they had a hundred thousand years before, or a million.

Duke Svor, who had ridden out of camp alone that day, was standing near the sharp peak of one of the dwarf mountains that were scattered across the plain, ship-sized piles of rock eighty or a hundred feet high rising like little stony islands above the grass. From that vantage point he looked out now on these herds in wonder.

The gattaga-grass spread to the limits of his vision. Here, close at hand, were ten or twenty or fifty thousand of the large, stocky, flat-faced quadrupeds called klimbergeysts, whose hides were dappled with shifting patterns of red and gold. They looked like so many thousands of sunsets wandering freely in the plain. Off to his left was a glade of tall, spiky gray trees where dozens of long-necked browsers that stood close to fifty feet high were feeding on the tender top leaves. He had no idea of the name of these animals. Their long slender legs were rigid and angular, with three sets of equidistant knees; their necks were as flexible as serpents, topped by heads that were little more than gigantic mouths and dim, uneasy eyes. Untiringly, they ripped the soft growth from the towering trees, and just as untiringly the trees put forth new leaves as soon as the browsers passed by.

On the other side of him Svor observed a squat tank-shaped thing with gleaming armored hide, not very different in appearance from a mollitor but obviously much less warlike, moving placidly along the margin of a swampy area where the pink shoots of some water plant were sprouting. Beyond it, at the opening of a secondary valley that had two of the little island-mountains serving as its gateway, he saw another huge grazing herd, these being the broad-nosed piglike animals called vongiforin, snuffling about in the gattaga for the small sweet seeds on which they fed. The sun was warm and mild; fleecy clouds drifted overhead; a light soft breeze was blowing out of the south. An idyllic scene, Svor thought.

Almost idyllic anyway. He noted the presence, atop one of the nearby island-mountains, of a trio of slim, tawny hunting-animals, kepjitaljis, who were eyeing the grazing vongiforin with interest. The kepjitaljis—a mother and two cubs, he supposed—were long and tapering, with harsh wedge-shaped heads, bright eyes like red stars, fierce-clawed forearms, and great powerful hind legs that could propel them swiftly forward in inexorable hopping motions. He had seen the same trio two days before, lying growling and bloody-mouthed in a heap of gnawed ribs. No doubt they would be feeding again before very long.

Behind him, on the far side of the miniature mountain that he had made his lookout post, was Prestimion’s camp.

This new army was bigger than any of its predecessors, and continued to grow daily as volunteers from every part of Alhanroel came flocking to the rebel banner. Survivors of Prestimion’s shattered army from the Iyann had been the first to enroll, and there were more of those than Prestimion had dared to suspect: gathered here, once again, were Duke Miaule of Hither Miaule, and golden-haired Spalirises of Tumbrax, and sturdy Gynim of Tapilpil with his band of sling-casters, and many others of that hardy crew, every one of them brimming with tales of their escape from the raging floodwaters and all athrob with desire for vengeance on the cowardly enemy who had brought the reservoir tumbling down upon them.

But there were others now, myriad others: a legion of men from the southern lands, Stoien and Aruachosia and Vrist, and a host from misty Vrambikat, which was far to the east on the other side of Castle Mount, and men of towns at the base of the Mount itself, Megenthorp and Bevel and Da, and troops of the city of Matrician, where Fengiraz, whose mother had been the dearest childhood friend of Prestimion’s mother, had his flourishing dukedom, and Gornoth Gehayn and his fearless sons, with their trained hieraxes, out of the west country to serve as airborne spies. And still more came every day; and every day Prestimion and Gialaurys and Septach Melayn toiled from dusk to dark to weld them into a single force that would shortly begin its march eastward to make war against the false Coronal.

Some of these men had come to Gloyn out of love of Prestimion, and some out of anger over the illicit taking of the throne by Korsibar, and a good many because they had heard the whispered tales now circulating of Korsibar being a Metamorph in disguise, and they would not allow such a thing to stand. Some were only looking for adventure; some hoped to better their lot. And more than a few had given allegiance to Prestimion’s force of rebels out of simple repugnance for Korsibar’s dastardly breaking of the Mavestoi Dam. In that last group was a contingent of farmers of the Iyann Valley, all of whom had lost kinsmen in the flooding, and who, although they were not in any way soldierly by inclination or training, had come to Gloyn bearing hatchets and spades and pitchforks and whatever other implements of husbandry they thought could be put to good use against the usurper and his army.

It was a wondrous fine army that was coming together here, and Svor, looking back upon it from his hilltop place, was greatly gladdened to see it spread out below him, parading up and down and practicing its maneuvers of attack and defense. The knowledge that Prestimion had regained his sense of purpose after those dark months in Triggoin gave Svor great joy, for it was the hope of his heart that his friend would prosper and triumph and take his rightful place on the Confalume Throne.

But for his own part, Svor had lately had a sufficiency of observing these military matters and wanted a little respite from them. Since he was no soldier himself, he had little role in this drilling and marching and drawing up of battle plans, nor did he take much pleasure in the responsibilities assigned to him; and his own idleness was coming to chafe him. He longed for his rooms in the Castle, for his books and his charts of the stars, and for his ladies. Especially for them, for great energy coursed through Duke Svor’s wiry little body, energy that he long ago had learned was most readily released in a woman’s arms. In his day he had had covert romantic passages with many a great lady of the Castle, and many a tryst in the surrounding cities of the Mount, and even in the grim Labyrinth he had managed to find companions in pleasure.

But there were no women in Prestimion’s camp at Gloyn, nor were there cities nearby where he might find any. Restlessness was growing in Svor now on that account. Which was why he had gone riding out this day by himself into the savanna that lay north and west of the camp, not with any goal in mind, but only to rid himself, if he could, of the tension that idleness and his solitary nights in this place had engendered in him.

Borrowing a mount from the cavalry stockade, he had come up here atop this little mountain to look out into the open country beyond the camp; and now, choosing his destination randomly, Svor went riding off into the adjacent valley where the herd of vongiforin was grazing.

It was low-lying, somewhat moist country in there. The vongiforin were innumerable, a sea of them stretching off to the horizon, with occasional subherds of klimbergeysts and other animals grazing among them. They were all peaceful beasts, and they moved obligingly aside, making unmusical little snorting sounds as Svor’s mount made its way through their midst. He rode for perhaps half an hour in a northwesterly direction- Then, seeing another of the little island-mountains before him, he tethered his mount at its base and scrambled up the side of it to survey the terrain that lay still farther beyond him.

A surprising sight greeted him there.

Another valley lay below, a broad expanse of coppery gattaga-grass divided here and there by small streams. In the midst of it, some three hundred yards to the north, Svor was startled to behold a dusty and somewhat dented floater sitting at a sorry angle in a boggy patch, as though it had been allowed to drive too close to the surface of the land and had fouled its rotors with mud. Two women stood beside it—young ones, from the looks of them. There did not seem to be anyone else. One was fair-haired, one was dark; and even at this distance Svor could see by their stance that they were troubled and perplexed by the plight of their vehicle.

Two women, traveling alone by floater in this unpopulated trackless countryside of vongiforins and klimbergeysts and sharp-clawed kepji-taljis? An unlikely sight; but one that definitely bore investigation.

Svor hurried back to his mount and rode quickly toward the stranded floater.

7

There was no vegetation here other than grass, and the women saw him coming when he was still some distance away. They stared and pointed at him, and moved cautiously together against the flank of the floater as Svor approached. Yes, definitely young, Svor saw now. Shabbily dressed, but both of them quite shapely, and they carried themselves well. The dark-haired one in particular, he thought, held herself with great elegance and self-possession. But what in the name of the Divine were they doing here? This was no place for women. The only likely explanation was that they had journeyed here unbidden to be with their lovers or husbands in Prestimion’s army, which was a rash and unwise thing for them to have done.

And then he was close enough to make out their faces. “By all the gods and demons!” Svor cried hoarsely, astonished beyond all reckoning. “My lady,” he said. “How did you come to be—”

“Get down from that mount and stand beside it with both your hands in the air,” Thismet said. She gripped a small energy-thrower in her hand, aimed at the midpoint of his chest.

“My lady, I am unarmed,” Svor said, quickly dismounting. “And I would mean you no harm in any case. Please—that weapon is dangerous—”

“Just stand where you are, my lord duke.” Her face seemed cold and hard. “I’m looking for Prestimion’s camp.”

“Behind us.” He gestured with his head. The energy-thrower struck cold dread into him; he wished she would put it aside.

“Far?”

“Less than an hour’s ride.”

’Take us there, Svor.”

“Of course, my lady. If you please, the weapon—there is no need—”

“I suppose.” She lowered the energy-thrower and slipped it into a holder at her side. Her voice softened a little. “I was afraid you might slay us out of hand, thinking I was doing some spying for my brother. But spying is hardly my purpose in coming here.”

Svor wondered if he dared ask her what that purpose was. Her presence here was altogether mystifying. They had not had an easy journey of it, that much was sure. Both Thismet and Melithyrrh were grimy and drawn and disheveled to a degree that made them almost unrecognizable. The simple peasant clothes that they wore were dirty and torn; their faces were stained, their hair was all asnarl; they both looked badly undernourished and they did not seem to have slept for several days. The intensity of Thismet’s great beauty, shining through the blowsiness, was undiminished. But she was a frightful sight, and the Lady Melithyrrh no better. Why in the world had they come? Could their presence here be part of some deadly trick that the enemy had devised? He could see the little dagger fastened along the inside of her arm, showing through where the sleeve of her blouse was torn. But even if she had no sinister ideas in mind, the sudden appearance of Korsibar’s sister at Gloyn was incomprehensible.

Lowering his arms, Svor caught hold of the reins of his mount.

“I can carry only one of you at a time, my lady.”

“I’ll wait here by the floater,” Melithyrrh said immediately. “Take my lady, and send someone back here quickly for me.”

“Is this agreeable to you?” he asked Thismet.

“It will have to be,” she said. “Tell me, Svor: how does Prince Prestimion fare?”

“Well, my lady. Very well.”

“He has a goodly army assembled by now, does he?”

“I ask your pardon. You’ll have to judge that for yourself. I must regard you as an enemy, lady, and I ought not be telling you details of—”

“I’m not an enemy, Svor.”

He stared and said nothing.

“My brother’s a fool and his advisers are villains. I want no further part of any of them. Why do you think Melithyrrh and I have come traveling halfway across Alhanroel to be here? A nightmare of a trip it was too. Sleeping in the most horrid of hovels, eating the most dreadful slop, fending off the advances of any number of coarse, vulgar—” She paused. “And then to wreck the floater just a few miles from the end of our journey! We were at our wits’ end, Svor, when you came along.—Is there a place nearby, do you think, where I could wash myself a little before you take me before Prestimion? This coating of filth I have on me disgusts me. I haven’t bathed in two days, or perhaps three. Never before in my life have I been as dirty as this.”

“A stream lies just over there,” Svor said, nodding to his left.

“Show us.”

He led them a hundred feet through the thick grass. It was the stream that fed the bog in which they had stranded their floater; its flow was swift and clean.

“Stand over there by your mount,” said Thismet. “Turn your back and keep it turned.”

“I give you my word,” Svor said.

Only once while they were bathing did he steal a look at them, and that when he could no longer force himself not to. A single glance over his shoulder showed him the two of them knee-deep in the stream, incandescently naked, Melithyrrh with her back to him scooping up water in her shirt and pouring it over Thismet, who stood turned to one side. The sight of Melithyrrh’s pale full buttocks and the Lady Thismet’s round flawless breasts seared itself unforgettably into Svor’s mind, and after all these weeks of solitary life it left him weak-kneed and trembling.

“Are you all right, Svor?” asked Thismet when she and Melithyrrh, looking cleaner and much refreshed, returned from the stream’s edge. “You seem sickly all of a sudden.”

“I had an ague last week,” he said. “I am not fully recovered from it, I suppose.” He assisted Thismet into the saddle of the mount, and hopped up close behind her, his thighs against her haunches, his arm tight around her waist. This too stirred him close to madness. He called out to the Lady Melithyrrh not to wander from the place, but to remain by the floater until someone had come for her, and spurred the mount forward.

As they made their way through the thick herds of vongiforin and klimbergeyst, Svor said, after a time, “You are completely estranged from your brother, my lady?”

“It would not be far wrong to put it that way. I left the Castle without notifying him, but Korsibar must know by now where I’ve gone. A day came, suddenly, when I could no longer stand being there among them all. A loathing for the place rose in my throat, and I thought, We were wrong to take the throne from Prestimion. It was a terrible sin against the will of the Divine. I’ll go to him and tell him that, and beg his forgiveness.’ Which is what I mean to do. Do you think he’ll accept it, Svor?”

“Prince Prestimion has only the kindest thoughts for you, my lady,” Svor said mildly. “I have no doubt he’ll be pleased and delighted beyond all measure to hear of your change of heart.”

But he wondered again if this were all some elaborate scheme of Korsibar’s against Prestimion—or, what was more likely, a plot of Dantirya Sambail’s on Korsibar’s behalf. How could it be, though? What possible benefit could accrue to Korsibar from sending his sister and her lady-of-honor across thousands of miles by themselves to Prestimion’s camp? Did she have some wild notion of thrusting that dagger of hers into Prestimion’s heart the moment she came within reach of him? Somehow Svor did not want to believe that of her. Especially when he sat here like this astride the mount, staring at the slender nape of her neck, with his thighs pressed up against her flesh and his arm grasping her middle just below her breasts.

His mind was lost for a moment in a frenzied swirl of desire and impossible yearning. And then he found herself saying softly, into the lovely ear that was only inches from his lips, “My lady, may I tell you something?”

“What is it, Svor?”

“If you are truly of our faction now, lady, then it may be that I can offer you my protection in this unkind place.”

“Your protection, Svor?” Her head was turned away from him; but it seemed to him that she was smiling. “Why, what protection would you be, in this camp of rough soldiers?”

He chose not to take offense. “I mean that you would have my company, that you would not be left alone to be troubled by others who might come upon you, my lady. Do I make myself fully clear?” He was trembling like a lovesick boy, he who had made his way through life always with a clear confident sense of how to attain his destination. “Let me tell you, lady, that ever since I first came to the Castle, I have felt the deepest and most honorable love for—”

“Oh, Svor. Not you too!”

That was not encouraging. But he pushed desperately onward, letting the words spill out unchecked. “Of course I could say nothing of it, especially after the coolness began to develop between your brother and the prince. But at all times, lady, have I looked upon you with unequaled delight—with great love in my heart—with a sincere and eager and all-consuming desire to claim you for my own—”

With surprising gentleness in her tone, Thismet said, “And to how many women before me, Svor, have you professed the same sincere and eager desire?”

“I speak not only of desire but of marriage, my lady. And the answer to your question is, not one, not a single one.”

She was silent for a time that seemed to tick on for ten thousand years. Then she said, “This is a passing odd place to be asking for my hand, my lord duke: crunched together as we are on this mount, riding through the back end of nowhere with wild animals snorting and snuffling all about us, me in rags and you clutching me from behind. Farquanor, at least, made his proposal in more appropriate surroundings.”

“Farquanor?” In horror.

“Oh, don’t worry, Svor. I refused him. Indignantly, as a matter of fact. I refuse you more kindly, for you are a better man than Farquanor by far. But you are not for me. I’m not sure whether there’s a man who is; but at any rate I know you are not the one. Take that without bitterness, Svor, and let’s speak no more of this ever again.”

“So be it,” said Svor, as amazed at his own temerity in having let all this pour forth from him as he was by the softness of her response.

“You might apply yourself to the Lady Melithyrrh,” Thismet said a little while afterward. “Now that she and I are no longer at court, she feels greatly adrift; and she might look favorably on your advances. Whether she wants a husband, I can’t say; but whether you truly want a wife is equally doubtful. I think you might do well to approach her, at least.”

“I thank you for the suggestion, my lady.”

“I wish you well with it, Svor.” And then, a bit later, as though she had not already asked it just a short time before: “Will Prince Prestimion believe that my repentance is sincere, do you think?”

Prestimion had not felt such astonishment since the day so long ago when he had come striding into the Court of Thrones to see Korsibar seated on the Coronal’s seat with the starburst crown on his head. Thismet here in the camp? Asking to see him now, alone in his tent?

It seemed unreal that she could be here in this remote place. Surely it must be the work of sorcerers, this apparition that stood before him now. But no, she was real, he felt no doubt of that. Dressed in little more than rags, she was. Her hair unkempt. Devoid of all jewelry, all cosmetic adornment. Her face drawn and weary. She looked now more like a scullery-maid than the daughter of one king and the sister of another; but the regal grace of her, the fiery eyes, those lips, the finely molded features, all told him that this was the undeniable Thismet. Here. Against all probability, here in Gloyn.

“I should tell you, my lord, that I come into your presence armed,” she said. She drew back her tattered sleeve, revealing the little scabbard that was attached to her arm. Unclipping it, she tossed it casually across to Svor. “That was only to defend myself while I traveled, my lord. I am not here to do you harm. There are no other weapons on me.” She smiled, in a sly inviting way that sent shivers through him. “I am willing to be searched, if you wish it.”

But something other than her flirtatiousness had caught his attention. “Twice now you have called me ‘my lord.’ What do you mean by that phrase, Thismet?”

“Why, what everyone means by it, my lord. The same that is meant by this.” And she raised both her hands in the starburst gesture, smiling all the while and staring directly into Prestimion’s eyes.

He said slowly, after a bit, “You repudiate your brother’s claim, do you, Thismet?”

“That I do most sincerely, my lord.”

“Call me Prestimion, as before.”

“Prestimion, then. As before.” Her eyes flashed. It was like staring into lightning. “But I recognize you as Coronal Lord of Majipoor. Those clownish men at the Castle—those fools and villains—I have no allegiance to them any longer.”

“Come closer,” Prestimion said.

Svor, who was watching from a discreet distance, said, “Perhaps it would be a good idea to search her first, my lord.”

’You think?” Prestimion smiled. “Another dagger hidden on her somewhere, is that it?”

“Come and search me, then, Prestimion!” Thismet said, her eyes bright as beacons. “Who knows? I may have a second dagger hidden here”—and she placed her hand between her breasts—“or here.” With her hand against the base of her belly, fingers splayed out wide. “Come look, my lord! See whether I’m still armed!”

’You have weapons enough on you, I think,” said Prestimion, “and those are indeed the places where you carry them. And I do believe I’m in great peril from them.” He grinned and said, “Since I have your leave to do it, Thismet, I think I will conduct a little search for them, yes.”

“My lord—” said Svor.

“Peace,” Prestimion said to him. And to Thismet: “But first tell me truly why you’re here.”

“Why, to forge an alliance with you,” she said, blunt and outspoken now, not an atom of coquettishness in her tone. “There was a time when I wanted Korsibar to be king in your place, not because I thought you were unworthy of it, but only because I was hungry to see my brother on the throne. That was a great error, and it shames me now to think of the role I played in bringing it about. He is still my brother and I still have a sister’s love for him; but he should never have been king. I’ll proclaim that gladly before all the world. Standing by your side, Prestimion, I’ll hail you as Coronal Lord.”

He thought he understood her now.

“And what role do you see for yourself,” he asked carefully, “when I am on the Confalume Throne?”

“I have been a Coronal’s daughter and a Coronal’s sister,” she said. “No one in all our history could have said such a thing before me. I would set myself apart even further from all others by becoming a Coronal’s consort as well.”

From Svor came a gasp. Prestimion himself was taken aback by her straightforwardness. There was no coy diplomacy here, only the directness of ultimate will.

“I see,” he said. “An alliance of the most literal sort.” And saw in the eye of his mind not the weary travelworn Thismet who stood before him now, but the radiant glorious Thismet of the Castle, dressed in some fine gown of thin white satin with glittering bands of gold about her throat; and then, still in his mind’s eye, the light of tall tapers came shining through that gown from behind her and laid bare to him the supple curves of breast and belly and thigh. Such a torrent of passion came crashing through his soul in that instant that for a moment Prestimion thought he was below the Mavestoi Dam once again and the reservoir was pouring down upon him a second time.

Then he glanced toward Svor. Saw the warning look; the troubled frown. Svor, the man of ladies, so knowing in all the ways of desire, telling him, no doubt, to beware the sorceries of this woman’s body, which might well be more powerful than the most potent spell known to the high magus Gominik Halvor or any of his colleagues in the realm of magic.

Yes. Very likely. But still—still—

Then Thismet said, into the continuing silence, “My lord, if I might have an hour to myself, and a basin of warm water, and my clean clothes brought to me from the floater that lies wrecked in the valley beyond this one—”

“Of course. To be done at once. Go into my tent, Thismet.”

“We already have sent for the baggage from the floater,” Svor said. “And also for the Lady Melithyrrh, who waits there with it.”

Prestimion nodded. “Good.” And to the aide-de-camp Nilgir Sumanand, who was nearby, he said, “See to it that the Lady Thismet is given all that she needs to refresh herself. She’s had a long and difficult journey here.”

Svor said, when the others had gone inside, “What will you do, Prestimion?”

“What do you think I’ll do? What would you do yourself, in my place?”

“I understand,” said Svor. “Who would resist?” A thin rueful smile. Softly, he went on, “I won’t conceal from you, my friend, that I’m in love with her myself. Long have been. As has everyone else at the Castle, I suppose. But I’ll content myself, like the good subordinate I am, with the Lady Melithyrrh.”

“One could do worse,” said Prestimion.

“Indeed.” Svor glanced toward the tent. “You trust yourself alone with her?”

“I think so. Yes. I don’t really expect her to try to murder me.”

“Very likely not. But she is dangerous, Prestimion.”

“Perhaps so. It’s a risk I’ll take.”

“And if all goes well, will you actually make her your consort, do you think?”

Prestimion smiled and clapped Svor on the shoulder. “One thing at a time, Svor, one thing at a time! But it would make good political sense, wouldn’t it? The triumphant Lord Prestimion taking the daughter of the Pontifex Confalume as his bride, to close the breach in the commonwealth that foolish Korsibar has opened? I like that idea. Good political sense, yes. But also—the lady, purely for her own sake—”

“As you said just now, Prestimion, one could do worse.”

“One could indeed.”

He told Svor then that he wanted some time alone; and Svor withdrew.

Drawing his cloak about him, Prestimion paced by himself undisturbed through the camp, revolving in his mind this strange new turn of events.

Thismet!

How odd, how unexpected. She was using him, of course, for some manner of revenge against Korsibar; no doubt Korsibar had disappointed her in something, or perhaps had tried to force her into a marriage that was not to her liking, or in any event had created enough displeasure in her to send her racing across the world to the arms of his great enemy. Well, so be it. It was surely possible for them to come to terms, for their mutual benefit. They understood each other, Thismet and he. She would use him, and he would use her. There was no better match for him to make, and all the world knew it.

And then, of course, questions of politics aside, there was Thismet herself to weigh into the bargain. That fiery, passionate woman whom he had watched hungrily from a distance for so long: coming to him at last, here, now. Offering herself to him. He had lived like a monk long enough. This was not something lightly to be refused.

“Prestimion? Is that you, all muffled up in that cloak?”

Septach Melayn, it was, coming up behind him. “Yes,” he said. “You’ve spied me out.”

“Svor has told me about Thismet.”

“Yes.”

“She’s the most beautiful woman in the world, I suppose. I do congratulate you. But trouble follows her wherever she goes.”

“I know that, Septach Melayn.”

“Do we want that trouble following us right into the midst of our army, Prestimion? Here on the eve of battle, practically?”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“Gialaurys and I have just been speaking of this and—”

“Well, speak no more. She’s bathing in my tent, and when she’s ready to be visited, I intend to go to her there, and let such trouble follow me as it will. But speak no more.” Prestimion laid his hand on Septach Melayn’s arm, just by the wrist. Gently he said, smiling all the while, but there was more than a little force in his tone also, “Listen to me, old friend. I don’t instruct you in how to use your sword. Pray don’t instruct me in the use of mine.”

And then at last they stood face-to-face, alone in his tent. Thismet had bathed, and had changed into a simple sheer white gown, with nothing beneath. He could see the dark points of her nipples rising against its thin fabric, and the deeper darkness at her loins. Yet without her jewelry and cosmetic adornments, there was a strange purity about her now: an odd word to use in connection with Thismet, purity, but there it was. The bravado she had displayed an hour before, inviting him to search her for concealed weapons and all of that, seemed entirely gone. To Prestimion she appeared tense, uncertain, almost frightened. He had never seen her like that before, not ever. But he understood. He felt somewhat like that himself. The possibility suddenly took wing in him that there might be something more to their coming together than blunt conspiratorial power-hunger, and something more to it too than mere physical gratification. Perhaps. Perhaps.

She said, “I was the one put Korsibar up to taking the crown. Did you know that, Prestimion? I stood behind him and pushed. He would never have done it, but for me.”

“Dantirya Sambail said something of the sort to me about that,” he said. “It makes no difference. This is not the moment to speak of it.”

“It was a great mistake. I know that now. He was not a fitting man to be king.”

“This isn’t the moment to speak of such matters,” Prestimion said again. “Leave them for the historians to discuss, Thismet.” He took a step toward her, arms outstretched. Coolly, she waved him away, telling him with a quick gesture to remain where he was. And then, with a smile that was like the sun emerging after a storm, she slipped the sheer white gown from her body and stood bare before him.

She seemed so small: scarcely breast-high to him, with slender limbs, and a waist that emphasized the fragility of her body by the sharpness of its inward curve above the flaring hips. And yet even so, her body looked taut and trim and strong, an athlete’s body, wide shoulders like her brother’s, lean sinewy muscles, elegant graceful proportions. But for all that, she was utterly feminine. Her breasts were small, but full and round and high, with little hard nipples, virginal-looking ones. Her skin was dusky. Her hair below had the same glossy glint as above, a dense, curling black thatch.

She was perfect. He had never imagined such beauty.

“So many years we were strangers to each other,” she murmured. “ ‘Good morning, Lady Thismet,’ you would say, and I, ‘Hello, Prince Prestimion,’ and that was all. All those years at the Castle, nothing more than that. What a waste! What a sad and foolish waste of our youth!”

“We’re still young, Thismet. There’s plenty of time to make new beginnings now.” Once more he stepped close to her, and this time she made no retreat. His hands ran across the satin smoothness of her skin. She pressed her lips tight to his and he felt the fiery dart of her tongue, and her fingers raking his back.

“Prestimion—Prestimion—”

“Yes.”

8

Two more weeks passed in the camp at Gloyn. Then came word from the scouts Prestimion maintained all across the land that Lord Korsibar had come down out of the Mount with an enormous army and begun marching westward. The hierax-riding sons of Gornath Gehayn went aloft on the backs of their giant birds and confirmed it: a great troop of warriors, coming this way.

A pair of messages reached Prestimion’s camp not long afterward, written on the crisp parchment paper used by Coronals and bearing the starburst seal.

One was addressed to Prestimion himself, and warned him to end his rebellion once and for all and surrender himself immediately to the nearest agents of the government so that he might be put on trial for treason. The penalty for failure to surrender, Prestimion was told, was death upon capture for him and for all his high captains who claimed allegiance to him; if he alone yielded himself now, the lives of his chief officers would be spared.

The other message was for the Lady Thismet. It informed her that her august and gracious brother the Coronal Lord Korsibar forgave her for her transgression in having gone to consort with the enemy, and was herewith offering her a pledge of safe conduct across the continent if she chose to return to the Castle and resume her former life of ease and content at the court.

“Well, then,” Prestimion said lightheartedly, when he had read both these documents aloud to his officers, “our choices are clear, aren’t they? I’ll leave for the eastern provinces at once, and go before Korsibar wherever I find him and throw myself upon his mercy. And I’ll take his sister with me and deliver her up safely to him, notifying him with solemn oaths that I return her in the same condition in which she came to me.”

There was laughter from all sides of the campfire, and the loudest of all came from Thismet.

The wine, no fine Muldemar stuff now but only the good rough blue-gray wine of nearby Chistiok Province that came in long flasks made of klimbergeyst-leather, was passed around the circle once again, and they all sat quietly for a while, drinking. Then Gialaurys said, “Do you intend to wait here for Korsibar to come here to us, Prestimion, or do you think it’s better to carry the war to him wherever we find him?”

’To him,” said Prestimion unhesitatingly. “This flat country is no place to fight a great battle. We’d all go running foolishly hither and yon.”

“And it would disturb the animals of these pleasant plains,” said Septach Melayn. “They’ve had enough trouble on our account already. Prestimion’s right: we go to him.”

Prestimion looked about the group.

“Is there opposition? I hear none. Very well: we break camp at dawn tomorrow.”

That was a massive task, for it was a mighty army now that had come together in the peaceful Vale of Gloyn. It took more than a single day to strike the tents and load the floaters and wagons and assemble the pack-animals and get the great eastward journey under way.

But a far mightier army, by all reports of Prestimion’s agents in the field, was heading toward them. Not only had Korsibar mobilized the general army of the provinces surrounding the Mount, but also he had at his service the armies brought from Zimroel by Dantirya Sambail under the command of his brothers Gaviad and Gaviundar, and, furthermore, the private forces controlled by the lords Oljebbin, Gonivaul, and Serithorn.

“Even Serithorn!” Prestimion said. “Gonivaul I can understand: he’s never been a great friend of mine. Oljebbin, well, he’s cousin to Korsibar’s father, after all. But Serithorn—Serithorn—”

“This is Dantirya Sambail’s doing,” said Septach Melayn. “Since the breaking of the dam, he’s been at the Castle, stirring up the lords into confusion. Surely they’re all frightened of opposing him. If Dantirya Sambail has cast in his lot with Korsibar, how can they dare do otherwise?”

“Which says much for the power of family ties,” Duke Svor observed. “For the Procurator, as I recall, is some cousin of yours, is he not, Prestimion?”

“A very distant one,” replied Prestimion. “And growing more distant every hour. Well, it makes no difference, a few more private armies here and there standing with Korsibar. The people are with us, eh? The world’s had nothing but trouble since Korsibar made himself Coronal, and everyone knows it. The hands of citizens lifted against citizens, the crops falling off because men are marching up and down bearing weapons when they should be tilling the fields, the government in paralysis—an inept Coronal and a bewildered Pontifex—”

“There’s the most pitiful thing of all,” said Gialaurys. “Old Confalume who was such a splendid Coronal, now reduced to wreck and ruin as he hides in the Labyrinth while his magnificent worthless son brings the world down around himself! What must he think? I feel such sorrow, that Confalume’s great reign should have ended in this miserable turmoil.”

Svor said, “Perhaps he perceives very little of what’s been going on. I like to think that some magus of Korsibar’s—Sanibak-Thastimoon, most likely—has cast a perpetual veil over his mind, and the old man goes through his days and nights as though in a dream. But it’s sad all the same, for those of us who remember what Confalume once was.”

“Sad indeed, Svor. What a strange road we’ve all traveled since then!—Yes, boy?” Prestimion said.

A messenger had come running up, bearing a rolled scroll in his hand. Prestimion took it from him and read it through.

“A new edict from Lord Korsibar, is it?” Septach Melayn asked.

“No, nothing like that. It’s from our venerable maguses Gominik Halvor and his son. They’ve cast the runes for our enterprise. The most auspicious place for us to engage Korsibar in battle, they say, is between the Trikkalas and the Mount, at a place called Thegomar Edge, by Stifgad Lake in the province of Ganibairda.”

“I know that place,” said Gynim of Tapilpil. “We reach it by way of Sisivondal, and southeastward from there in the direction of Ludin Forest. The people there raise stajja and lusavender, and other such basic things. That’s where your strongest support lies, my lord, with the farming folk who want nothing more than for the world to return to normal.”

“Then we’ll take ourselves to Thegomar Edge,” Prestimion said, “and invite Korsibar to visit us there.”

’Tell me, Prestimion,” said Septach Melayn, “do the good mages offer us any reading of the omens foretelling the success of our venture?”

“Oh, yes,” Prestimion said, with the quickest of glances at the scroll in his hand, a mere flick of his eyes. “Everything augurs favorably for us. On our way, then! The province of Ganibairda! Stifgad Lake! Thegomar Edge!”

The eastward march had something of the character of a grand processional about it for Prestimion. The people of the cities along his path hailed him almost everywhere as a liberator as he rode in an open floater in their midst with Thismet beside him, and cheered him onward to his rendezvous with Korsibar.

These were the people who had felt such fear when news first went out that the Pontifex Prankipin was dying; and those fears had proved to be justified. Trouble of some sort would follow the old emperor’s death, they had believed; and the trouble had come. Their maguses had told them there would be chaos, and there was. From every province came reports of factional strife, diminished crops, widespread anxiety and even panic.

It was clear to Prestimion that the people of Majipoor were sorely weary by now of the strife between the rival kings, which had brought such harm to the general prosperity in this time of uncertainty and hostility. And also he saw that the enormity of Korsibar’s sin in appointing himself Coronal had belatedly had its impact on the common folk of the world. A growing number of them now understood Korsibar to be the author of their troubles, and not just those who subscribed to the tale of his being a secret Shapeshifter, though there were plenty enough of those. There was no one who did not desperately want the world to be restored. They looked to Prestimion as the one to put things in balance.

And also there were the nightly sendings of the Lady Kunigarda, attacking Korsibar and Confalume and praising Prestimion. Kunigarda’s words still carried great weight in the world, especially since the new Lady of the Isle, Roxivail, had not yet begun to speak to their minds. Roxivail had taken possession of the Isle, it seemed, but she had not yet managed to establish herself there in the functions of the Lady.

Despite all these things in his favor, Prestimion felt no assurance that the crown of Majipoor was going to topple into his hand like ripe fruit from a tree. The people might be with him, yes. Popular support for his cause might well be increasing every day. But there was no automatic victory in that. It still remained for him to deal with the full power of Korsibar’s army. An awesome foe waited for him in the east.

The journey east retraced of necessity much of the route that Thismet and Melithyrrh had taken during their flight from the Castle. The women were not at all pleased at seeing all those drab rural places that once again stirred such dark memories of hardship in them, but there was no help for it, and at least they were traveling this time in more comfort and safety than before. One city after another went by: Khatrian, Fristh, Drone, Hunzimar—Gannamunda, Kessilroge, Skeil—they were in the dry dusty plateau of Sisivondal now, and then Sisivondal city.

At Sisivondal, that dreary place of giant warehouses of a single design, where the streets were lined with grim dull camaganda palms and prosaic lumma-lumma bushes by way of decoration, the cultists who went by the name of the Beholders staged a great festival for Prestimion, what they called the Procession of the Mysteries. It would have been a grave insult to refuse, and so he let himself be given the place of honor as the singers and dancers came forth, the girls in white who scattered halatinga blossoms on the ground, the giantess in winged costume who bore the two-headed holy wooden staff, the veiled initiates with waxed and shaven heads.

The mayor of the city explained each step in the ceremony to him, and Prestimion nodded solemnly and watched with the greatest show of deep interest. Impassively he looked on, saying little, as the sacred implements of the Beholders were carried before him, the lamp of flame, the serpent of palm fronds, the disembodied human hand with the middle finger bent backward, and the enormous male organ carved from wood, and all the rest. Even after Triggoin, Prestimion found these things unsettling. There was a madness to the frenzy of the dancers, and a strangeness to the objects they revered, that were difficult for him to accept.

“Behold and worship!” the marchers cried.

And, while Prestimion watched in silence, from the onlookers came an answering cry: “We behold! We behold!”

The Ark of the Mysteries was next, carried on a wooden pole by two great Skandars, and then, on his cart of ebony and silver, the masked Messenger of the Mysteries himself, naked, painted black down one side and gold down the other, carrying the serpent-entwined staff of his power in one hand and a whip in the other.

“Behold and worship!” the Messenger cried.

And from the Mayor of Sisivondal at Prestimion’s side came the response: “We behold! We behold!”

Thismet cried it also, this time: “We behold! We behold!” And nudged Prestimion sharply with her elbow, and nudged him again, until at last he cried it out too: “We behold!”

And nowThegomar Edge, by Stifgad Lake, in Ganibairda.

In this place a high hill, steep and heavily forested on its eastern face, sloped down more gently to the west into a broad marshy region called Beldak, which had the lake lying at its back. The road from the west came running around the border of the lake and traversed the marsh to ascend the Thegomar hill, going across the summit of it near its southern side.

All during the night Prestimion marched eastward through the farming land of Ganibairda Province toward Thegomar, and just at dawn, as he was nearing the western shore of the lake, news was brought to him that Korsibar was already here with his formidable force and in position on the hill.

“How did they know we were heading this way?” Septach Melayn demanded angrily. “Who is the spy in our midst? Smoke him out, and flay him alive!”

“We are not the only ones with scouts in the field,” said Prestimion calmly. “Or maguses to search for the omens, for that matter. We have our information and Korsibar has his. It makes no difference.”

“But he holds the high ground,” Septach Melayn pointed out.

Prestimion was undisturbed even by that. “We’ve charged high places from below before, haven’t we? And this time he has no reservoir to drop on us.”

He gave the command, and they continued their advance into Beldak marsh as the morning was born above them.

By first light they could see Korsibar’s forces on high. The whole crest of the hill seemed to be bristling with the spears of an infinite sea of men. At the center, two gigantic banners were unfurled: the green and gold one that marked the presence of the Coronal of Majipoor, and just to its side a second one in royal blue and vivid scarlet on which was emblazoned the dragon emblem of the ancient family to which Korsibar belonged. Other banners fluttered elsewhere on the hill: one at the northern end that Prestimion recognized as Serithorn’s, with Oljebbin’s a little way to the south of it, and the banner of Gonivaul beyond that.

And on the far side of Korsibar’s dragon-banner, down by the southern end of Thegomar Edge, there rose a rippling banner of pale crimson nearly as great in size as Korsibar’s own, with a blood-red moon in its center. It was the banner of the clan of Dantirya Sambail. Prestimion had never thought to see that banner arrayed against him.

He ordered the deployment of the troops to begin at once. In mid-morning, while this was still under way, a man came riding out from Korsibar’s side of the field bearing a herald’s white flag. The message he carried was from the Grand Admiral Gonivaul, who called upon Prestimion to send a representative to midfield for an immediate parley. He suggested Duke Svor as an appropriate choice, indeed particularly requested that Svor be sent.

“Gonivaul’s forsworn six times over,” Gialaurys said at once. “Why waste breath parleying with any such as he?”

“And what will he offer us?” Septach Melayn asked. “Pardons for all, and great estates at the Mount, if we swear to be good children and make no more trouble in the land? Send him your glove, Prestimion.”

But Prestimion shook his head. “We should hear what they have to tell us. It does us no harm to listen. Svor, will you go?”

The little duke shrugged. “If you wish me to, of course I will.”

So Svor rode out to a point in the middle of the open field, and waited there a time, and eventually he caught sight of Gonivaul descending the hill road and approaching him over the marshy ground. The Grand Admiral was so bulked out in armor that he seemed more burly even than Farholt or Gialaurys, and his helmet came down over his forehead so that nothing showed of his face except his eyes and dense black beard. His long jutting jaw thrust outward at Svor like a javelin.

He dropped down heavily beside his mount and for a time simply stood staring at Svor, who waited in silence. Then the Admiral said, “I come at Korsibar’s request, and he specifically asked that I speak with you. He loves you still, Svor: do you know that? He talks often of the friendship that there was between the two of you in days gone by. He greatly fears that harm will come to you in the battle today. That possibility much disturbs him.”

“Why, then,” said Svor, “if that’s how he feels, he can disband his troops and take himself elsewhere in peace, and all will be well.”

Gonivaul did not seem amused. “The Coronal Lord Korsibar has sent me out here because he offers his hand to you in peace, Svor. For once, put your mockery aside. It may save your life.”

“Is that what this parley is about? Nothing more than a personal invitation to me to surrender?”

“Not to surrender, but to return your allegiance to the great lord who once was your friend. Prestimion’s doomed, Svor. We know that, and in your heart you must surely know that too. Look at our army, and the position it occupies. Look at his. You know what today’s outcome will be. Why die for him? When we die, we are dead forever, Svor. The dead drink no wine and they know no lovers’ embraces.”

“The last time I saw you,” said Svor, “it was in Muldemar House, where we all drank wine aplenty, especially you, and I listened to you pledge yourself most warmly to Prestimion. You would do your duty, you told him, and help return the world to the proper path. You would do so at whatever risk to your personal position might be entailed. Those were your own words, Admiral. Of course, you were a little tipsy when you spoke them, but that was what you said. I see that the pursuit of your duty has somehow brought you to the side of the field opposite Prestimion’s. And now you want me to do the same? To turn my back on him and come back over to the other side with you this minute?”

“Hardly that, Svor,” said Gonivaul in a stony voice. “Nothing so blatant.”

“What, then?”

“Remain on your side of the field during the battle. You can hardly do otherwise. But in the thick of the fray, go among Prestimion’s captains and let them know one by one that they’ll be treated well by Korsibar if they cast off their allegiance to Prestimion as the day goes along. Tell them there’s no reason to give up their lives in a lost cause, and that rewards await them if they abandon it. Do it quietly; but do it. Provide us your cooperation, and Korsibar will reward you beyond your wildest dreams, Svor. You need only make your request of him, and it will be yours. Nothing will be denied you. Nothing. Not even a place in the Coronal’s own family, should you want that. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Svor?”

“I think that I do.”

“Or else continue on your present course, and you’ll surely die today on the battlefield, along with Prestimion and Septach Melayn and all the rest. That much is certain. The stars have shown us our victory. There can be no doubt of the outcome.”

“None, eh?”

“None.” Gonivaul undid his helmet, so that the thick fur of his head sprang from its confinement, and extended his hand to Svor. “You have our offer. Say to me that you’ll give it thought; and then we should return to our places.”

Svor touched his hand briefly to Gonivaul’s.

“It will have the most careful consideration,” he said. “Tell that to the Coronal Lord Korsibar. And tell him also that I remember the old days of our friendship with the greatest warmth.”

He turned away, clambered atop his mount, and rode back toward Prestimion’s lines, thinking with some astonishment of what it would be like to be brother-in-law to the Coronal and husband to the Lady Thismet; and all he would have to do to achieve it was to commit an act of treason against Prestimion no greater than those already done by Gonivaul, Oljebbin, Serithorn, and Dantirya Sambail. A nice transaction, that would be. Treason was epidemic these days.

“Well?” Prestimion asked when Svor had returned. “What was it that he told you?”

“That I would be well rewarded if I defected and brought some of your captains over to Korsibar’s side with me.”

“Ah,” said Prestimion. “He told you that. How well rewarded, exactly?”

“Very well indeed,” said Svor simply, and no more than that.

“And what did you tell him, then?” asked Septach Melayn.

“Why, that I would give his offer the most careful consideration,” said Svor. “No sensible man would have said anything else.”

9

All that day and far into the night the two armies faced each other across Beldak marsh without moving; and as dawn drew near, Prestimion gave the order for the ascent of Thegomar Edge.

“They are well set forth,” said Septach Melayn.

“So I see. We’ll strike again at their strongest point: break them there, and the rest will yield quickly enough.”

The loyalist forces were ranged in one great solid mass from end to end of the hill’s crest, packed shoulder-to-shoulder to form a solid wall of shields. Korsibar’s frontmost men, clad in chain mail and wielding spears, javelins, two-edged swords, and heavy long-handled axes, were a fearsome sight. It was still too early to see what lay behind them, but Prestimion had intimations of an enormous horde of men, stretching on and on into the forest on the eastern side of Thegomar, and when the hierax-men went up on their birds, they confirmed that guess: troops stretched out to the east as far as could be seen.

“The Divine be with you today,” said Thismet as he made ready to enter the field; and she kissed him tenderly in front of all the men. But he could see conflict and tension on her face, and fear lurking in her eyes, and he knew that her fear was not only for him. There was a bond between this brother and sister that he could only just begin to understand.

Prestimion’s own force was drawn up in three divisions. In the center were the battle-hardened men of the earlier contests, under his own command, with Septach Melayn and Gialaurys beside him. To his left were the troops of Spalirises of Tumbrax and the men of six foothill towns, with Prestimion’s brother Abrigant in general charge, and on the other flank was Gynim of Tapilpil and his band of sling-casters at the apex of a mass of more recently recruited warriors. In each division the light-armed foot-soldiers armed with bows and crossbows were in the front, heavy-armed infantry with spears in the second rank, and cavalry in the rear.

“Up the slope now,” Prestimion ordered. “Smash through that wall of shields in our first assault, and we’ll drive them panicking into the woods.”

At first light the advance began, covered by Prestimion’s archers. The arrows flew: uphill only, with little reply from above, for Korsibar evidently had very few archers in his force. The rebel foot-soldiers went running joyously toward the enemy, with Prestimion’s heavier infantry pounding along behind them, bellowing a raucous chant of victory.

But the shield-wall held. That line was stronger and far more determined than Prestimion had supposed.

His front line crashed against it and it staunchly stood its ground, an impenetrable barrier, and the attackers were met with a fierce tumult of missiles of every kind, javelins, lances, axes, spears, the whole ancient armamentarium of weaponry, more suited to some primitive land than to this great kingdom. And then in one place near its left end the wall of shields suddenly parted and there came forth a battery of energy-throwers hurling bright red bolts into the rightmost wing of Prestimion’s force. That was a frightening sight. Clumsy and difficult to use though the energy-throwers were, as likely to explode in the faces of their own handlers as to do damage to an enemy, nevertheless they raised a great clamor, and where they were effective at all they did terrible damage.

“Hold firm!” Prestimion cried. “They are untrustworthy things, those machines! It’s scarcely possible to aim them straight!”

But it was hard to hold firm, and all but impossible to go forward, in the face of those bright destructive blurts of raw power, random and wild though they seemed to be. Few of Prestimion’s men had faced energy-throwers before. The confidence that had carried them swiftly and eagerly uphill wavered and slipped from them. There was uncertainty among them; and soon there was disruption and then chaos on the rebel right flank, men giving way, breaking formation, turning and fleeing down the hill into the marshy land at the foot of the slope.

Prestimion could feel the turning of the tide almost as a tangible thing. It seemed to him that his entire force might be transformed in a moment from a confident advancing army into one in frantic retreat, and the battle lost right here. Already Korsibar’s cavalry had come out from behind gaps in the shield-wall and was beginning a slow and steady advance down the hill, doing terrible damage as they came.

He rode back and forth, trying to be everywhere at once, even the front line, urging his men to hold steady. Then he heard his mount make a soft sighing sound of a kind he had never heard a mount make before, and it sank down on its forequarters so suddenly that he nearly was pitched forward over its head. A fountain of blood rushed from its breast where some lucky stroke of a spear had caught it. Prestimion freed himself from his stirrups just in time, leaping to the ground as the animal fell to its side.

“Prestimion! Behind you!”

He whirled with all his speed. And saw the cold eye and hatchet face of Mandralisca the poison-taster, rushing fiercely upon him with upraised sword. Prestimion managed a quick lunging parry, and parried another thrust instantly afterward. And another, and another, and another, without pause.

Dantirya Sambail has sent his man down into the heart of the battle particularly to kill me, Prestimion realized. I will bear that in mind later, if there is a later for me.

This Mandralisca, plainly, was a demon of a swordsman, every bit as good with steel as he had been that day at the Labyrinth games with the wooden baton. Prestimion had not forgotten the poison-taster’s deft movements then, the dizzying feints and pivots, the swiftness of his wrists, the baton-strokes quick as lightning. Those skills of Mandralisca’s had won Prestimion five crowns from Septach Melayn that day. But he had never expected to have them turned against him in deadly battle.

Mandralisca launched a new flurry of thrusts. Prestimion parried, and parried again, and managed a quick thrust of his own, which the poison-taster avoided with the greatest agility. Now Prestimion pressed his moment of advantage. Mandralisca was better on the attack than he was on defense, but his speed served him well enough in that quarter too; and after each parry he came back on the attack, as ferocious as before. Septach Melayn himself would have been hard put to deal with him. Prestimion knew of no one else about whom that could be said.

They moved back and forth across the crowded noisy field in a private little arena entirely their own. Quick as Prestimion was, it was all he could do to ward off Mandralisca’s diabolically swift thrusts. Again, again, again the sword came at him; each time Prestimion managed to parry, but only barely fast enough, and his own thrusts fell ever short of the mark as Mandralisca darted mockingly away from them. The poison-taster’s speed was formidable; his handling of his weapon was unorthodox but masterly. It was impossible for Prestimion to pay heed to the battle while his own life was in jeopardy. He had a distant sense of swirling forces, of chaos everywhere; but for him the struggle had come down to a single opponent.

And for a moment it seemed that all was up for him. The poison-taster came at him with such a dazzling flurry of thrusts, seemingly from five directions at once, that Prestimion for all his whirling and bobbing could not avoid them all. A hot line of pain ran along his left arm as Mandralisca’s blade sliced into him. He swung about and dropped into a purely defensive stance as the poison-taster came at him again for a finishing stroke; and succeeded this time in beating the blade away, and even in regaining the offensive.

Mandralisca seemed suddenly to be tiring now. He was like a spirited racer who was at his best in brief spurts, Prestimion discovered. His blinding speed was not matched by an equal stamina. The poison-taster had gambled everything on a terrifyingly intense all-out onslaught, but had expended himself without reaching his goal. His parries were less assured, his offensive thrusts fewer and farther between. The malevolence of his gaze was tempered now by fatigue.

Sensing his advantage, Prestimion pressed forward, hoping to land a deciding stroke. For a moment he thought he had Mandralisca at his mercy. But then the battle line surged incoherently about him; he found himself swallowed up in the roaring madness of it and separated from the poison-taster by five or six shouting brawling men who passed between them. They swept him casually to one side as they hacked in a frenzy of blood-lust at each other and moved on, all in a single group locked together by their fury; and when things cleared again, there was no sight of his opponent.

As Prestimion paused to draw in deep breaths and look around the field in the midst of this confusion, he heard a great despairing cry suddenly go up, and a voice call out, “Prestimion is fallen! Prestimion is fallen!”

“Prestimion is fallen!” In an instant the cry was all over the field. “Prestimion is fallen!”

It was like a cold wind blowing across the battlefield. Its effect was felt everywhere. In an instant all the momentum of the battle, which had already been running toward Korsibar, shifted emphatically to his side. Hordes of his men now were moving downhill in triumph, and those of Prestimion, disorganized and dispirited, were helplessly giving ground before them. What had merely been a retreat until now abruptly threatened to turn into a rout.

Gialaurys rode up from somewhere and leaned down toward Prestimion, who was watching in dismay, leaning on his sword, for he was not quite recovered yet from the exertions of his contest with Mandralisca. “Quick! Show yourself to them!” Gialaurys cried. And descended from his mount in a quick leap and thrust Prestimion up into its saddle as easily as if lifting a child.

Prestimion bared his head and stood high in his stirrups as he rode up and down along the ragged ranks of his men. “Here I am!” he shouted in a voice to split the sky, and found strength somewhere and drew his bow and sent a shaft uphill that brought one loyalist down, and then slew a second and a third, all three almost in a single instant. His arm trembled from the wound he had had at Mandralisca’s hand, but the bow held steady.

Gialaurys too ran to and fro, shouting and pointing to show that Prestimion still lived. As the men caught sight of Prestimion’s golden hair and saw him wielding his great bow, another cry went up: “Prestimion! Prestimion! Lord Prestimion lives!” They began to rally their courage. The disorderly retreat on the right was continuing; but elsewhere the rebel lines began to form again, and on the strong left flank Spalirises and Abrigant were beginning to move upward, toward the massed ranks of the loyalist force.

But they would only be thrown back a second time, of that Prestimion was certain. He felt a moment of despair. His confidence had led him to overreach himself in planning this attack. There was no way to take the high ground from Korsibar. Some new strategy was needed on the spot.

And then Septach Melayn came riding by and said in Prestimion’s ear, “Look you there, where our right flank’s falling back. Can you believe it? Korsibar’s infantrymen are following them down the hill!”

Prestimion stared, incredulous. It was like a gift from Providence.

“Why, then this is our moment,” he said.

Indeed, the whole side of Korsibar’s shield-wall opposite the fleeing rebels had rashly broken its impenetrable rank and was giving pursuit down the slope, which forfeited them the great advantage of their position. A gift, yes, a gift of the Divine!

Prestimion sent word for the retreat to continue on the right and even to intensify, everyone without exception in that entire wing instructed to turn and flee, giving every sign of terror and panic. The feigned retreat drew the enemy, sensing victory, down the hill with them.

But at the same time Prestimion brought a host of fresh archers up on the left, ordering them to shoot their arrows high into the air so that they would come down behind the loyalists’ shields. And at a signal, Duke Miaule’s cavalrymen came into the fray, riding swiftly uphill to surround those loyalists who had left their line, cutting them off from hope of escape.

The tide, which had run so strongly in Korsibar’s favor only moments before, began quickly to turn back the other way.

In moments Korsibar’s entire force was hovering on the brink of utter chaos as Miaule’s men came at them unexpectedly from the side. That intimidating battery of energy-throwers had ceased its fire: in the frenzied melee the gunners no longer could distinguish friend from foe, and some had perished from the malfunctions of their own badly constructed instruments. And as the glare of their last few bolts died away, rebels on mountback came sweeping in over their fortification and fell upon them, slashing furiously with their swords. The loyalist ranks were broken and scattered in an instant. Everywhere on the field men were being trampled and cut down. Some, unable to rise, crawled toward safety. Others ran.

This was the time, Prestimion knew, to bring his ultimate weapon into play.

“The maguses!” he called. “Let them come forward!”

They marched forward from the camp in a single group: old Gominik Halvor, whom Prestimion had summoned down from Triggoin for this, and his son Heszmon Gorse, and ten or a dozen other high wizards of the northern city, men famed throughout the world for their skill at the mystic arts. All of them were clad in their most solemn regalia and bore the implements of their trade in their arms. A great gasp of dismay went up from Korsibar’s men higher on the hill as they saw this procession emerge from Prestimion’s rear lines. Protected every step of the way by a phalanx of Prestimion’s most trusted warriors, they advanced across the lowland plain. Then, to the accompaniment of trumpets and blaring kannivangitali, they gathered in a circle and set up a solemn droning chant and sent pyres of blue flame rising to the sky.

It was mid-morning now. The sun was bright overhead. But in a moment the sky began to grow thick with clouds and the sun seemed to dim, and then the blackness of a moonless midnight came over the field, and all those who fought there were wrapped so deep in that descending dark that they could barely see a dozen paces beyond their noses.

Prestimion’s men had been warned of this. Korsibar’s had not, and tumbled into a terrible confusion.

“Now!” Prestimion cried. “Now! Now! Up the hill again, and cut them to pieces!”

And from elsewhere on the battlefield, as the last shred of discipline among the bewildered loyalists was lost and they began to mill and churn in helpless disarray, came the roaring cry from Prestimion’s captains: “Now! Now! Now! Now!”

Gialaurys, in the darkness, saw a place before him that was darker even than the rest; and as his eyes adjusted to the change that had come over the battlefield, he realized that the darkness in front of him was a man who had the width of a wall, and he knew him to be his old nemesis, the brutish Farholt.

“Would you wrestle again, my good lord, or shall we have it out with broadswords?” Gialaurys asked. “For now is your last moment at hand, one way or the other.”

Farholt’s answer was a harsh grunt and a great sweeping downward blow with his sword that Gialaurys barely managed to block as it emerged at him out of the dark; but Farholt struck again and again and yet again in devilish heat, three great clanging strokes that Gialaurys managed somehow to defend against, and then a fourth that rang against his helmet and knocked him staggering, as he had staggered that day when he wrestled with Farholt at the games in the Labyrinth. His mind was sent awhirl and he went wandering a few paces away, so that Farholt lost sight of him, and called out in the strange midday night, “Where are you, Gialaurys? Come: we have old business to finish here. For this is the final bout, and your carcass will feed the milufta-birds tonight.”

“Business to finish indeed,” said Gialaurys, still dizzied and awry, but inflamed now with red fury as never ever before. “Your corpse or mine, Farholt, meat for the miluftas in all truth. We will not both walk away from here.” And went lurching back to the place where he thought Farholt to be, and grasped his sword with both hands and swung it around sideways through the air in the darkness with such force as can be mustered only once of a lifetime, for he was riven through and through with hatred and loathing and contempt for this man who had dogged his days so long. And felt his blade connect with the sword of Farholt that was trying to parry, and turn it. And went driving onward in that same single motion, and onward still, slicing through the armor about Farholt’s waist as though it were mere paper, and cutting deep into Farholt’s side and almost to his spine. Farholt made a single liquid sound and fell doubled up, and Gialaurys, standing over him, raised his sword up high again, but then even in the darkness came to understand there was no need to strike, for he had cut Farholt nearly in half with that one maddened swing.

In another part of the field Duke Svor, who had entered the battle because he saw no decent way to remain out of it, found himself jostling up against someone no taller than himself, and without pausing to think caught the man by his shoulder with one hand and pulled him up close against him, so that he could see into his face. And by the hard glint of his eyes he knew him to be none other than the icy-souled High Counsellor Farquanor, whom he had always detested more than any man in the world.

“I would not have thought to find you on this battlefield,” Svor told him. “For you are no warrior, are you, Farquanor?”

“Nor you either, I would say. And yet we are here. Why is that, do you think?”

“I because I am loyal to my friend. And you, I suppose, because you hoped to win some further advantage from Korsibar by displaying your valor to him, such valor as there may be within you. Is that it, would you say?”

All this while Svor continued to hold the squirming Farquanor by the side of his collar, pressing down on the collarbone beneath.

“Let go of me, Svor. We have no quarrel, you and I. Let these great belching animals here slaughter each other; but why should we fight? We are natural allies of the spirit.”

“Are we, now?” Svor laughed. “Tell me this, my dear beloved ally: was it you put Gonivaul up to pimping Thismet to me in the parley as the price of my defection? For that had the marks of your hand all over it.”

“Let me go,” said Farquanor again. “We can discuss these things some other time in some other place. Come, Svor, let’s flee this field, and leave these madmen to their destruction.”

“Ah, no. I will be a hero at last, I think. For the time has come for me to show that I can be valiant, at least when dealing with the likes of you.”

With that he drew the sword that he had used so infrequently in his life and took a step backward to run it through Farquanor; but just as Svor came lunging forward, Farquanor produced a poniard that he had worn at his hip, and brought it upward at Svor’s belly in a quick swift jab. It was only to be expected, Svor thought sadly, that Farquanor would have a little hidden weapon to call upon. But there was no avoiding it, and so he took the sharp point in his unguarded middle and felt the fire of it coursing like a river of molten metal through his vital organs. “Well done,” Svor murmured. “You are yourself to the very last, Farquanor.” And, saying that, drove his sword through Farquanor’s gut so that its tip emerged on the far side, which drew them together in a close embrace. They fell to the ground together, still locked in that strange hug, and their bloods mingled on the battlefield.

Prestimion had lost his second mount, the one given him by Gialaurys, slain out from under him as he wheeled through the black noontime calling to his men. He continued on foot, slinging his bow across his back and taking his sword in hand. Some light now had begun to come through once more as the spell of darkness weakened, and he saw all about him on the battlefield men dead and dying, and little battles going on here and there within the broader melee, and it seemed to him that his side had all the tide running with it. There was no sign any longer of that wall of men with shields Korsibar had stationed atop the hill, nor any fixed formations in back of them; the two armies had come together in mid-slope, muddled and chaotic, and the rebel forces appeared to be forming themselves in a circle around the shaken loyalists, pushing them ever tighter into a trap from which there was no escaping.

He sought for Septach Melayn, for Gialaurys, for Abrigant, for any familiar face. None of those could he find, but indeed shortly found someone familiar indeed, though not one to give him any joy. Coming up toward him out of the thinning darkness was Dantirya Sambail, in splendid armor somewhat marred by mud and scratches. He carried a bare sword in one hand and some rough farmer’s axe in the other. First the lackey and now the master, thought Prestimion. He was meeting with a surfeit of evil this day.

In the midst of that gory field Dantirya Sambail let forth a cheerful whoop.

“Well, cousin Prestimion, here we are! Shall we fight? Winner gets to be Coronal; for surely Korsibar has choked on his own bile by now, seeing his certain victory turned to ashes by your Triggoin sorcerers, and that leaves only you and me to contend for the crown. Sorcerers, Prestimion! Who would ever have thought it of you?”

And the Procurator laughed his most raucous laugh, and lifted the axe up on high, and swung it through the air.

The strong sweeping blow would have cut through Prestimion’s arm at the shoulder, had it landed. But quickly Prestimion stepped forward and in and put his sword up so that the hilt of it clanged against the handle of the descending axe and turned it aside; and then thrust his face up against that of Dantirya Sambail, with his eyes staring deep into the beautiful, treacherous amethyst eyes of that ugly diabolic man.

In a low voice he said, “Put down the axe, cousin, and let there be an end to war between us. It is not in me to take your life; but I will if you force me to it.”

“You are a generous man, Prestimion. Your soul is very large,” said the Procurator with another boisterous guffaw, and his eyes became orbs of fierce purple fire. He leaned forward and down with his shoulder against Prestimion, intending to throw him to the ground, for Dantirya Sambail was half a head taller than Prestimion and had perhaps twice the bulk. But Prestimion leaped swiftly back. His sword, a light rapier to the Procurator’s heavy saber, had the same disadvantage of size that he himself did; but it was what he had, and he would use it.

You are not Prestimion of Muldemar now, he told himself. You must be Septach Melayn, or else you are a dead man.

For years Prestimion had studied Septach Melayn’s swordsmanship with keen pleasure. It was a thing of utter beauty. It was poetry; it was music; it was mathematics. It was also a matter of quickness of wrist and keenness of eye and intelligent extension of arm. And Septach Melayn’s natural grace and preternaturally elongated limbs gave him an innate advantage in all those aspects. Prestimion, short and compact and sturdy, was built to a different plan. But he would do what he could. Before him stood the true author of all his grief—that much he understood now. Nothing unhappy had befallen him that Dantirya Sambail had not had a hand in, somewhere. Prestimion felt himself grow hot with fury. Strike at him, he thought, and you are striking at all your misfortunes in a single thrust.

Dantirya Sambail came rushing at him with the axe again, and the saber held ready for the killing stroke after it. Prestimion stepped slightly to one side and pivoted, and then went darting boldly in under his ponderous opponent’s onslaught, coming so close that the axe could not strike him. And even in those close quarters was able deftly to bring the tip of his sword straight upward into the pit of the Procurator’s arm, piercing a path through nerve and muscle and tendon.

“Ha!” cried Dantiya Sambail in surprise and pain, and let the axe go clattering from his numbed hand. But there was enough presence of mind and sheer ferocity in him to bring the saber in his other hand around and strike Prestimion a terrible blow in the ribs with the flat of it, even jammed up against each other as they were. It knocked the breath from Prestimion and darkened his senses a moment, so that he went reeling back some five or six steps and came close to falling.

The Procurator ran heavily toward him and loomed over him, flushed and excited with the thrill of impending triumph, and jabbed at him with the saber. But it was a left-handed thrust poorly launched. Prestimion, though he was wincing from the pain in his battered side and the wound he had received earlier from Mandralisca, lifted his sword and brought it dancing through Dantirya Sambail’s guard, probing for his heart and forcing him to move the saber aside to parry. And then with a quick reversal of direction that would have brought applause from Septach Melayn, he drew the tip of the rapier along the inside of the Procurator’s sword-arm, cutting a long bright red line down it from elbow to wrist.

Dantirya Sambail’s sword fell clattering to the ground. Instantly Prestimion had the point of his own against the underside of his opponent’s outthrust jaw, where the soft flesh was.

“Go ahead,” the Procurator said. “Shove it home, cousin!” “What a pleasure that would be,” said Prestimion. “But no. No, cousin, no.” Not like this; not the slaughter of a prisoner, even this one. He could not. He would not. All his wrath had turned away. There had been enough killing for now. And Dantirya Sambail, evil though he was, was somehow much beloved in his own land of Zimroel. Prestimion would not want the hatred of the millions of people of Zimroel when he was Coronal.

He saw his brother Abrigant coming up out of the chaos of the field toward him, and Rufiel Kisimir of Muldemar, and four or five other men of his city with them. The poison-taster Mandralisca was with them, wounded and a prisoner, his wrists tied behind his back and one side of his face streaming red. He was glaring sullenly, as though he would gladly spit forth a tide of venom upon them all.

They observed Prestimion holding Dantirya Sambail at bay, and sped up beside him now, Abrigant seizing one of the Procurator’s bloodied arms and Rufiel Kisimir the other and pulling them around hard behind his back.

“Strike, brother!” Abrigant cried. “What are you waiting for?”

“This is not the appointed hour of his death,” said Prestimion quietly, putting down his sword. He drew breath, grimacing, and rubbed at his aching ribs. “Take him and bind him and put him under safe guard. He’ll rest a time in the tunnels of Sangamor, and then the courts can have him. On some other day will he die, and not at my hands. Take the poison-taster too. But see to it that they are kept in separate places far from one another.” And he walked away, leaving Dantirya Sambail astounded and gaping behind him.

Navigorn said, “We are lost, and no question of it. Our army is reduced to a rabble that can’t even find the proper way to flee; Prestimion’s men are everywhere around us and they know that victory is theirs. I see Farholt dead on the field, and Farquanor too, and many another. We should go to Prestimion and yield to him before more lives are lost, including our own.”

Korsibar gave him an incredulous stare. “What? Surrender, is that what you advise, Navigorn?”

“I see no other path for us.”

“This is not the first battle we’ve lost in this war.”

“This is our worst defeat. And this time he’ll take us both prisoner, and your whole Council as well.”

“You no longer call me ‘my lord,’ I notice.”

Navigorn made a sorrowful gesture. “What can I say? We have thrown our dice and the fall is against us. The game is over, Korsibar.”

They were unbearable words. In his first hot rage, Korsibar came close to raising his sword against Navigorn. But he held his hand and said simply, in the darkest and bleakest of voices, “I am still Coronal, Navigorn. There will be no surrender. And you are dismissed from my service.”

“Yes,” Navigorn said. “That I am.”

He turned and walked swiftly away across the muddy bloodied field. Korsibar let his gaze follow after him for a long moment. He felt nothing. Nothing. He was moving into a place beyond all feeling now. There was a cold numbness stealing over his body, traveling upward from his legs toward his heart, and from there to his brain.

I never wanted to be king, he thought. It was put in my path, and I snatched it up as if in a dream.

“What have you all done to me?” he said aloud. And then: “What have I done?”

It was a catastrophe beyond all prediction. Dead men lay all around him. His maguses had told him that this would be a day of victory, that all the final reckonings would be made this day, that by nightfall Majipoor would have only one Coronal and the world would be at peace again. In his rashness he had allowed himself to draw a clear assurance of his triumph from those prophecies.

But now—look—look—

He moved numbly onward through the scene of the disaster, his face set like stone. Then the unmistakable form of Sanibak-Thastimoon rose up before him in the shadowy afterdawn of the muddy darkness that Prestimion’s sorcerers had called down upon them.

“You,” Korsibar said. Some heat returned to his soul. His voice was thick with rage. “You lied to me!”

“Never, my lord.”

“A day of victory, you said. A day of final reckonings.”

“And so it is,” said the Su-Suheris coolly. “Were we not correct in our prognostication? For surely there has been a victory here today.”

Korsibar’s eyes widened. He saw now how Sanibak-Thastimoon had gulled him: or rather, how he had gulled himself by reading what he wished to hear into the mage’s words.

He swept his arm across the field before them. “How did you allow this to befall us? Was there nothing you could have done to protect us? Look, Sanibak-Thastimoon, look! We are entirely put to rout!”

“He had the mightiest sorcerers of Majipoor arrayed among his troops. I am not invincible, my lord.”

“You could have warned me that he’d somehow snuff out the sun at noon. We might have taken some steps to hold our line when the darkness came.”

“May I remind you, my lord, that your line had already broken of its own accord, before Prestimion’s wizards had even brought the darkness down upon—”

It was too much. Korsibar felt all the woe of this dreadful day falling upon him like a crumbling mountain dropping from the sky, and pain and sorrow and guilt overflowed in him beyond control. They had all led him into this disaster, had seduced him into it step by step—this alien magus, first and foremost of all—and now they had left the monstrous shame of it to stain his name forever.

His sword sprang into his hand; he plunged wildly forward, slashing at the sorcerer, only to find nothing before him but a curtain of blackness, a zone of deeper darkness within the artificial dusk all about them. “Where are you?” he called. “Where did you go, Sanibak-Thastimoon!”

It seemed to him that he saw a movement at his side, and began to turn. But he was too late. The Su-Suheris, still half concealed by his spell, had come around behind him: and now, as Korsibar flailed furiously at shadows with his sword, the sorcerer’s dagger slipped into his back just below the cage of his ribs, gliding upward until it touched the tip of his heart.

All strength left him at that touch. Korsibar fell forward and knelt in the mud, choking and gasping, looking dazedly downward at the sight of his own blood cascading from his lips.

Through the thickening mists of his consciousness he heard a voice calling to him.

“Brother? Brother!”

It was Thismet, suddenly swirling up out of nowhere like an apparition. Korsibar raised his head—it was a terrible effort—and stared at her with dimming eyes.

She knelt beside him.

“What are you—doing—here?” he asked indistinctly.

“I came to urge you to yield to Prestimion while there was still a chance,” she said.

He smiled and nodded, but said nothing.

Her arm was about his shoulder; but he was sagging heavily and she barely had the strength to hold him upright. Three harsh gusts of breath came from him, and then the death-rattle. Gently Thismet released him, and he sprawled out before her. “Oh, Korsibar—Korsibar—so it was all for nothing, brother, all for nothing—”

She looked toward Sanibak-Thastimoon, who still stood to one side, arms folded, watching in silence.

“You!” she cried. “You’re responsible for all this, with all your talk of how he was born for greatness, how he’d shake the world. Well, he shook it, all right. But now look! Look!” She snatched up Korsibar’s sword, which had fallen from his nerveless hand, and brandished it frenziedly at the sorcerer in a wild thrust. Sanibak-Thastimoon, towering far above her, swept it aside with his own as though it were a mere stick. And, stepping swiftly toward her, drove deep into her the dagger with which he had killed Korsibar, plunging it home between her breasts. She fell without a sound.

Then someone said nearby, “What, Sanibak-Thastimoon? Both of them dead, brother and sister too? And at your hand, is it?”

It was Septach Melayn. He came darting forward in an easy lope, sword in hand, long body already stretching into the posture of attack. The Su-Suheris retreated once more behind his spell of darkness; but Septach Melayn unhesitatingly swept his blade like a scythe through that zone of night before him, at the last moment imparting a twist to his wrist with the utmost of his dexterity and executing a horizontal cut into the dark nothingness. At once the black cloud vanished and Sanibak-Thastimoon stood revealed before him, with the eyes of his leftward head gaping wide in shock and the other fork of the long column of his two-pronged neck ending in nothing but a bloody stump.

Septach Melayn’s sword flashed once more, and the job was done. Pensively, he looked down at the bodies of Korsibar and Thismet, lying side by side in the bloody mud of Beldak marsh. The starburst crown of Majipoor lay in the mud also, just next to Korsibar. Septach Melayn snatched it up, and wiped the mud from it as best he could with the cuff of his sleeve, and slung it around his left forearm as though it were a quoit. And went trudging across the field to look for Prestimion. There was much news he had to tell him, both good and sad.

10

All the remainder of that day and the next, and the one after that, the gathering of the dead went on and the burials took place, one grave next to another all across the marsh of Beldak below Thegomar Edge. For there was no way to transport such a great host of corpses to their native cities for interment. It was best simply to let them rest here.

Prestimion felt little joy over his victory. They had brought him the lists of those lost that day, and he studied them in sorrow. On his side the Count of Enkimod had fallen, and Earl Hospend, Kanif of Kanifimot, Talauus of Naibilis, and some threescore more, at least, among his captains; and who knew how many soldiers of the line? And above all others there was Svor, whose body had been found entangled with that of dead Farquanor. That loss alone stung Prestimion more than all the rest together who had fallen in the battle that day, except for one.

He had heard from Septach Melayn how that one had died: as strangely as she had lived, encircled to the last by treason and betrayal. So he would never learn what his life with her might have been. He found a flower somewhere and laid it on her grave, and tried to seal away in some corner of his heart the pain that he knew he would always feel.

Korsibar he buried by Thismet’s side, feeling as much regret for the one as for the other, though it was a different quality of regret for each: for one had been a great man wasted, and the other had been a woman he had learned unexpectedly and too late to love. But there had been greatness in her too, and it was gone now.

Farquanor—Farholt—well, who would miss them? But a whole host of Korsibar’s other captains had fallen with them, such men as Mandrykarn and Venta; Gapithain, Duke of Korsz; the good-hearted Kanteverel of Bailemoona; Sibellor of Banglecode; and also Count Iram, and good Earl Kamba of Mazadone, who had taught the art of archery to him, and Vimnad Gezelstad, among many another. Prestimion would have had them all alive again, if he could, for they had each in their own way been ornaments to the world, and he pitied them for the fatal decision they had made to cast in their lots with Korsibar.

A waste, a waste, a ghastly terrible waste. And all of it unnecessary, Prestimion thought.

If only it could all be undone—if only—

Of those of Korsibar’s faction who had survived the battle, he pardoned all. The war was over: there were no more enemies, and the world had but one Coronal. Navigorn of Hoikmar came before him first, and knelt and made the starburst with unfeigned sincerity. He had seen his error and repented of it, he said; and Prestimion believed him. After him came Oljebbin and Serithorn and Gonivaul, and Prestimion pardoned them too, though he had no illusions concerning those three. But he was determined that the bitterness of this war would be washed away. The faster these seething hatreds were put to rest, the better for all.

“And you,” Prestimion said, looking down at the Vroon, Thalnap Zelifor. “How many more shifts of allegiance can you make, now that there’s only one allegiance to have?” And laughed, for there was no malice in his heart today. “You told me when we were in the west country that you were going back to the Castle, as I recall, only for the sake of fetching your mind-reading devices, and then would return with them to help me in my war.”

“I cast the runes for you, and they said you were doomed,” replied the Vroon. “And the report from Lake Mavestoi confirmed it: you had been lost in the flood. Why, then, should I go to the aid of a dead man? But my runes were wrong, and so were the reports.”

“How glib you are, Thalnap Zelifor. You always have an answer. Well, I’ll put you and your machines where they can do no more harm.” He beckoned forth an evil-faced little thin-lipped man with shifty eyes, who had been in Duke Svor’s service. Prestimion had never liked having him around, and there was no need to keep him now. “You,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Barjazid, my lord.”

“Barjazid. Very well, Barjazid. Escort this Vroon to the Castle, Barjazid, and clean out his entire workshop of mysterious mind-reading devices, and pack them and him up and take them both to Suvrael.”

“To Suvrael, my lord?”

“To Suvrael. To distant torrid Suvrael. On pain of your life, Barjazid, get him to Suvrael, and let him play no tricks on you along the way. I’ll punish nobody for what has happened in this war, but there are some I would not like to have about me any closer than Suvrael, and Thalnap Zelifor’s one of them. He can’t be trusted, even in a world that has no enemies. Take him to Suvrael for me, Barjazid. And see that he stays there.”

The little man gave Prestimion a starburst and a squinty-eyed look of devotion.

“It will be done, my lord.”

He gathered Thalnap Zelifor up and moved away.

Prestimion stood for a time in silence, looking out once more over the battlefield. A great weariness was on him, as though he had crossed the parched sun-smitten Valmambra two or three times this one day. He was Coronal of Majipoor now: the world had been given into his hand. Why was there no joy in that thought?

Well, the joy would come, he supposed. He would see vast Majipoor green and glowing, as he had in his vision when it was only a little ball he could hold in his hands; he would cherish it and nurture it and protect it and its people until the day of his death. But just for now, this day of triumph and loss, there was only the weariness, and the sadness. He understood that he had been through a strange test these past few years, and he would be a while recovering from it. Had he expected to have the crown handed to him on a platter, as it had been to so many Coronals before him? That had not been his destiny, apparently. He had discovered that it was necessary to earn that crown a thousand times over, through all that he had suffered in the Labyrinth and in the desert and on the field of battle, and no doubt he must go on earning it and earning it all the days of his life to come.

A test, yes, all of it. Of his strength, of his will, of his patience, of his skill. Of his quality as a man. Of his right to be king. If he had suffered more than most of his predecessors to become Coronal, there must have been a reason for it. And out of his suffering would come something of value. He could not dare to believe otherwise. He would not. There had been a purpose to it all. It was unthinkable that there had not been.

Unthinkable.

And as Prestimion stood at the edge of the battlefield thinking these things, and reflecting on all he had experienced in this long harsh quest for the crown, and all he had learned, and all the ways he had changed, a strange idea came to him that sent a shiver of astonishment along his spine: a way to return the world, as much of it as could be returned, to what it had been before Korsibar had seized the throne.

Perhaps—perhaps, however difficult, however immense the task might be—

Surely it was worth the attempt, at any rate.

Turning to Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, he said, “Clear this place of everyone but you two, and bring Gominik Halvor and his son Heszmon Gorse before me. I have one last chore for them to do before we begin our march to Castle Mount.”

It was night now. The new star that had come into the heavens after the death of Prankipin stood high in the sky, bathing them in its eerie blue-white light. Lord Korsibar’s star, men had called it when it first appeared. But it was Lord Prestimion’s star now.

The two mages took their places before him and waited, and Prestimion, when he had arranged his thoughts to suit himself, said, “I will ask a thing from you now that will be the greatest conjuration that has ever been worked in all the history of the world; and it is my hope that you will not refuse me.”

“We already know what you want, my lord,” said Heszmon Gorse. “Yes. You would, I suppose. And can it be done?” “It will be an even greater effort than you can suppose.” “Yes,” said Prestimion. “Even now I have no real knowledge of what’s possible and what is not in your art, your science, whatever I must call it. But the thing has to be done. The world has suffered a terrible wound. We have never had such a war as this; and I want it expunged wholly from our history, which means from the minds of all who live today, and all those who follow after. I want the bloody stain of it to be wiped away as though it never had been.”

“This will take our every skill,” said Heszmon Gorse, “and even more, perhaps.”

“You’ll have the Lady Kunigarda of the Isle to assist you: her dream-machinery, all the personnel at her command at the Isle of Dreams, who have the means for reaching into many millions of minds at once. She is on our way toward us now with her special devices in her train, I am told, and will be with us soon. And also you will have the services of every magus you require: every last one of them will be at your command, if you desire it, the grandest convocation of the masters of your arts that has ever been brought together. You will see to it that when the task is done, what has happened will never have happened. No one will have memory of the existence of Korsibar and Thismet, the children of Confalume and Roxivail: no one. This usurpation will have been unhappened. The world will believe that I have been Coronal from the day of Prankipin’s death. And those who died in the battles of these civil wars will be deemed to have died in other ways, for other reasons—it matters not what they are, except that they must not have died on the field of battle. The world must forget this war. The world must come to believe it never occurred.”

“A universal obliteration, that is what you require of us,” said Gominik Halvor.

“Universal except for myself, and Gialaurys here, and Septach Melayn. We three must remember it to our last days, so that we can be sure that nothing like it will happen again. But we are to be the only ones.”

“Even we, we are to forget, once the job is done?” the old magus asked. Prestimion gave him a long steady look. “Even you,” he said.

And so it was done; and so the world was born clean and fresh again out of the blood and ashes of the war between the rival Coronals; and in the springtime of the new year Lord Prestimion made the journey once more down the River Glayge from the Castle to the Labyrinth to pay his respects to the Pontifex Confalume, whom insofar as anyone knew he had succeeded several years before as Coronal, in the hour of the death of the old Pontifex Prankipin.

He found Confalume robust and full of vigor, looking like a man only a little beyond the prime of his years, who might still be forceful enough to carry the responsibilities of a Coronal if time had not moved him along to the senior throne. This was the strong vital Confalume that Prestimion remembered from the old days at the Castle, not the shattered one of the early hours of his reign that only a few recalled.

Yes, this was a thriving Confalume, a Confalume rejuvenated. Most joyously did he embrace Prestimion, and they sat side by side on the thrones that were maintained for the two monarchs in the underground city, and spoke for a long while of such urgent matters of the realm as presently needed to be discussed between them. “You will not be so long in coming the next time, will you?” Confalume asked, when those matters had been satisfactorily dealt with. He rose and put his hands on Prestimion’s shoulders and looked squarely into Prestimion’s eyes. “You know what pleasure it gives me whenever I see you, my son.”

Prestimion smiled at that. And Confalume said, “Yes, ‘my son,’ is what I said. For I had always wanted a son, but the Divine would never send me one. But now I have one. For by law the Coronal is deemed the son by adoption of the Pontifex, is he not? And so you are my son, Prestimion. You are my son!” And then Confalume said, after a time, “You should marry, Prestimion. Surely there’s a woman somewhere who’d be a fitting consort for you.”

“Surely there is,” said Prestimion, “and may it be that I find her, someday. And let us say no more on that subject now, eh, Father? In time there’ll be a wife for me, that I know. But I am not quite ready just yet, I think, to set about searching for her.” And the thought came to him of the woman that he and only two others in all the world knew had once existed. But of her he could say nothing, and never would again.

So it was that the great war of the usurpation had its end and vanished from the minds of the people of Majipoor, and the world’s great age began anew. The reign of Confalume and Lord Prestimion together lasted many years, until Confalume in the immensity of his years was gathered to the Source, and Prestimion became Pontifex himself after a long and glorious time as Coronal, which the world would long remember and cherish. And the man Lord Prestimion chose to be Coronal when it was time for him to go to the Labyrinth was named Dekkeret, whose reign would be a glorious one also. But that is another story.