Tales of Majipoor (collection)

6 The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar

I had always yearned to visit Sippulgar, that golden city of the southern coast. Every schoolchild hears tales of its extraordinary beauty. But there are many places on Majipoor I yearn to visit—the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, or at least a few of them, and marvelous Dulorn, the shining city of crystalline stone that the Ghayrog folk built in far-off Zimroel, and mighty Ni-moya on that same distant continent, and many another. Our world is a huge one, though, and life is short. I am a man of business, an expediter of merchandise, and business has kept me close to my native city of Sisivondal for most of my days.

It was the strange disappearance and presumed death of Melifont Ambithorn, my wife Thuwayne’s elder brother, that finally brought me to Sippulgar. I had hardly known Melifont at all, you understand: I had met him just twice, once at my wedding and once perhaps ten years later, when one of his many unsuccessful business ventures brought him to Sisivondal for a few days. He was fifteen years older than my wife and she seemed to regard him more as an uncle than as a brother; but when word came to her that he was thought to have perished in some mysterious and unpleasant way, she was deeply affected, far more than I would have thought, asking me to go at once to Sippulgar to see if I could discover what had happened to him, and to lay a memorial wreath on his grave, if he was indeed dead. Thuwayne herself is no traveler; she dislikes the upheavals and discomforts of even the shortest trip most intensely. But she could not bear to leave her brother’s death a mystery, and I think she entertained some hope that I would actually find him still alive. She begged me to go, and I knew that I had no choice but to do it.

For all my fascination with the fabled marvels of Sippulgar, it was not an especially good time for me to be setting out on such a long excursion. Sisivondal is the chief mercantile center of western Alhanroel, where all roads that cross the heart of the continent meet, and we were coming now into the busiest season of the year, when caravans travel from all directions to unload their goods into our warehouses and to buy merchandise for their return journeys. But I will refuse Thuwayne nothing. I cherish her beyond all measure. And so, after just a few mild expressions of uneasiness about undertaking such a venture at this time of year, I put my business affairs into the hands of my most trusted assistant and made my arrangements for my visit to Sippulgar. This was in the time of Lord Confalume, who was then about thirty years into his long and glorious reign as Coronal. Prankipin was our Pontifex. In those days, you know, we enjoyed a time of great prosperity; and also it was the period when all sorts of esoteric new philosophies—sorcery, necromancy, prognostication, the worship of supernatural spirits of every kind, the opening of doors into hidden universes populated by gods and demons—were taking hold on Majipoor.

Thuwayne had been informed that her brother had begun dabbling in certain of those philosophies, and possibly had met his death as a result. I am a man of business, a practical man, concerned with shipping costs and bills of lading, not with the propitiation of demons, and I regard all these new philosophies essentially as lunacy. A few little protective amulets and talismans suffice for me, purely on the off chance that they might do some good; I go no farther into any of this occult stuff. Sippulgar was known to be a spawning-ground for the new cults, and that made me apprehensive. But, as I say, I will refuse Thuwayne nothing.

She asked me to go to Sippulgar to investigate her brother’s disappearance and probable death; and so to Sippulgar I went.

Cities are far apart on Majipoor and the road from anywhere to anywhere is usually a long one; but Sippulgar is a port city on the southern sea, and Sisivondal is a heartland city set in the midst of a bare featureless plain some thousands of miles across, far to the north, and so I found myself embarking on what I knew would be the great journey of my lifetime.

Plotting my route was easy. A dozen great highways meet in Sisivondal, intersecting like the spokes of a giant wheel: one coming in from the great port of Alaisor in the west, five going eastward toward Castle Mount, three descending from the north, and three connecting us with the south. Sisivondal’s boulevards and avenues are laid out in concentric circles that allow easy connection from one highway to another. All along the streets that run between the circular avenues are rows of warehouses where goods destined for transshipment to other zones of the continent are stored. The group of warehouses I control is close by the Great Southern Highway, the one which would carry me toward my goal, and so, after issuing a last set of instructions to my staff, I set out from there early one morning on my journey toward the sea.

Sisivondal has been called “a thousand miles of outskirts.” That is unkind, but I suppose it is true. The central sector is devoted entirely to commerce, many miles of warehouses and not much else; then one passes through the suburban residential district, and beyond that lies a zone of customs sheds and repair shops, gradually trickling off into the parched treeless plain beyond. Our climate is an extremely dry one and our only vegetation is of necessity sturdy: huge lumma-lummas that look like big gray rocks, and prickly garavedas that take a whole century to bring forth their black flower-spikes, and purple-leaved camaganda palms that can go years without a drop of water. Beyond town there is no vegetation at all, only a barren, dusty plain. Not a pretty place, I suppose, but essential to the economy of our continent; and in any case I am used to it.

Gradually, as I left central Alhanroel behind, the world grew more gracious. I spent a day or two in lovely Bailemoona, which I had visited years before, a city famous for its subtle cuisine and its swarms of shining bees, large as small birds and nearly as intelligent. There I hired a carriage to take me southward through the Sulfur Desert, that region of surpassing yellowness, where amidst fantastic eroded spires of soft cream-colored stone the bizarre city of Ketheron was set, a place of twisted yellow towers that could have been the pointed caps of witches. I had been there once before too. Beyond, though, everything was new to me. The air very shortly took on a tropic moistness, becoming soft as velvet, and rain-showers fell frequently. Our caravan rode past the Cliff of Eyes, a white mountain pockmarked with hundreds of dark shining boulders that stared down at us like disapproving orbs, and then we were at the Pillars of Dvorn, two sharp-tipped blue-gray rocks set athwart the highway to mark the boundary between central and southern Alhanroel. On the far side lay Arvyanda of the golden hills: here the slopes were covered by stubby trees whose stiff oval leaves had a metallic texture and yielded a brilliant glint in the strong tropical sunlight. Already I felt very far from Sisivondal, almost on another world entirely.

Gradually the sky grew dark with a thick cover of clouds. We were coming into the jungles of Kajith Kajulon, a green empire where rain falls constantly, more rain in a week than I had seen in the past ten years, and the trunks of the trees were bright with the red and yellow splashes of enormous fungi. There was no end to the rain, nor to the clouds of insects that swarmed around us, and we were besieged by armies of scarlet lizards and loud flat-headed toads. Long chains of blue spiders hung down from every branch, eyeing us in a sinister way. We rode through Kajith Kajulon for many days. I thought my bones would melt in the humid air.

But at last we left that dense forest and emerged into the coastal province of Aruachosia, of which Sippulgar is the capital. Now we were just a few hundred miles from the sea, and the air, though warm and moist and heavy, was tempered by salty breezes out of the south. Just ahead lay the breathtaking wonder that is Sippulgar.

Everyone always calls it golden Sippulgar. Now I saw why. Its buildings, which are no more than two and three stories high, are made from a golden sandstone, flecked with bits of mica, that gleams with a dazzling brightness when the sun comes up out of the southern sea. I was amazed by the intensity of that brightness, and by the lushness of the decorative plantings that lined the streets: a hundred different kinds of tropical shrubs, all of them unknown to me, whose blossoms blazed forth in orange and green and scarlet and blue and gold, with darker ones in maroon and even jet-black interspersed among them for contrast. They exuded such a wealth of fragrance that the air itself seemed perfumed. Small wonder this district is known as the Incense Coast. I could not tell one plant from another, but I knew from a lifetime spent among bills of lading and customs forms that the region around Sippulgar was rich in cinnamon and khazil, the balsam called hinnam, thanibong trees and scarlet fhiiis, and many another scented plant, from which were produced a host of aromatic oils and gums.

I had booked a room in a hotel close to the city center, so that it would be easy for me to consult the official documents and records I needed in my quest. It was situated just a couple of blocks from the waterfront; and on my way there it was my bad luck to become entangled in a religious procession, of a sort that I soon learned was ubiquitous here. And so I stood for an hour and a half waiting amidst my baggage before I was able to cross the street and continue on to my lodgings.

Even in this era of multitudinous cults and sorceries, Sippulgar stands out for its abundance of strange creeds. Perhaps it is the heavy tropical air that spawns such credulity. At home in Sisivondal only one of these superstitions holds sway, the cult of the Beholders. All too frequently I have seen its worshippers dancing ecstatically down Grand Alaisor Avenue, strewing costly imported fiower-petals everywhere and blowing on pipes and flutes as the grotesque statuettes that are their seven sacred artifacts are carried on high, preceding the great box that they call the Ark of the Mysteries and the ebony cart that carries their high priest, who wears a mask with the visage of a terrifying yellow-eyed hound. What it is that the Beholders seek, and what they find, I will never know; but at least we have only that one cult to interrupt the smooth flow of commerce with its antics. In Sippulgar, I soon would learn, there were dozens.

From a distance I heard the shrill shriek of bellhorns, the crashing of cymbals, the tremendous uproar of a platoon of kettle-drums. When I drew nearer I saw my route blocked by a horde of marchers wearing nothing but loincloths and sandals, striding along with their heads upraised to the sky. There seemed to be millions of them. The people of Sippulgar are dark-skinned, mostly, no doubt some adaptation to the intense sunlight, but the sweat-shiny bodies of the marchers were streaked with bright splotches of red and green and purple that echoed the gaudiness of the shrubs in bloom all about them. There was no hope of crossing the street. I stood and waited. Eventually a group of weeping, chanting worshippers came down the boulevard pulling a massive platform on which stood the wooden image of a winged serpent that had the frightening toothy-snouted blazing-eyed face of a jakkabole, that ravenous, angry beast of the eastern highlands. I turned to the man who stood beside me. “I am a stranger here,” I said. “What god is that they worship?”

“It is Time,” he told me. “The devourer of all.”

Yes. The winged serpent that flies ever onward, jaws agape, engulfing everything in its path, as even the maddened jakka-boles do when they descend on the farms of the Vrambikat Valley in their ravening hunger. I watched the good folk of Sippulgar, lost in their madness, march on and on and on until at last the boulevard was clear, and I went across to my hotel and sank down gratefully on the softest of beds.

What I knew about my brother-in-law Melifont’s life, and of his supposed fate, was this:

He was one of those unhappy men fated to fail at every enterprise he turned his hand to, despite the advantages of intelligence, zeal, and energy. At an early age he had left Sisivondal for the southlands to seek his fortune. He involved himself first in a mining project in the lava country back of the port of Glystrintal, where since time immemorial bold fools had sought for rumored mines of silver and gold. Melifont found neither silver nor gold, and when he moved on to search for the equally fabulous iron mines of Skakkenoir of the red soil, he returned so damaged from his adventures that his recovery took over a year. Hoping then for a quieter life, he settled next on the Stoienzar Peninsula, where he worked for a time as a tavernkeeper but appears also to have helped to found a bank that prospered greatly for a time, though ultimately it came to grief in a spectacular way. It was during his period of prosperity that I married his younger sister, and he returned to Sisivondal for the first time in many years to attend the ceremony. He was then about forty, a tall, handsome man with a florid face and sleek black hair, who limped a little, a souvenir of his mining project in Skakkenoir. I found him charming—magnetic, even—and Thuwayne, who had not seen her swaggering brother since she was a little girl, looked at him constantly in wonder and fascination. He presented us with a wedding gift of surprising generosity, which I put to good use in the expansion of my warehousing business.

Next we heard of him, his bank had failed—the malfeasance of a conniving partner, we were told—and he was off to Zimroel to sell rope to the Shapeshifters, or some such thing. Very little news travels from remotest Zimroel to our part of the world, and I have no idea how Melifont occupied himself for the decade that followed; but then he turned up in Sisivondal once again, looking very much older, his hair now gray and sparse, his limp more pronounced, but he was still charismatic, still full of ambition and optimism. His new endeavor was a shipping company that proposed to run a ferry service across the Inner Sea between Piliplok in Zimroel and the port of Tolaghai in our sun-blasted southern continent of Suvrael. I thought it was a crazy idea myself—Suvrael is a terrible place, and produces almost nothing useful—but in my relief at not being asked to finance his company out of my own pocket I gladly introduced him to several bankers of my acquaintance, whom he charmed into putting up a huge sum to underwrite his shipping operation. That was the last I saw of my brother-in-law Melifont. Now and again I asked my friends in shipping circles what they had heard of his ferry company, and in time I learned that it, too, had gone bankrupt. We heard from him only once more: a letter, three years back, that let us know that he had settled now in Sippulgar and had some interesting ideas for capitalizing on business conditions there. After that, only silence, until the puzzling next-of-kin letter from the Prefecture of Sippulgar inviting my sister to collect her brother’s effects.

The letter did not actually say he was dead. He was simply “no longer in Sippulgar,” she was told, and there was unclaimed property which would revert to the province if not collected by a member of his family. Certainly the implication of death was there, but not the certainty. I made inquiries in official circles and learned, after much patient probing, that Melifont Ambithorn had vanished under mysterious circumstances, was not expected to return, and his property in Sippulgar, such as it might be—undescribed—was formally considered to have been abandoned by him. Further inquiry yielded me nothing. “Mysterious circumstances,” was all anyone would say, and though I used my best political and commercial connections to get some more detailed explanation, the mystery remained a mystery. He had disappeared, and so far as the Prefecture of Sippulgar was concerned there was no likelihood of his turning up again, but no one would say explicitly that he was dead. Thuwayne could not accept such vagueness. Thus my journey to Sippulgar.

My first call was at the Prefecture. I bore documents establishing my family connection with Melithorn and informing me of the procedure I was supposed to follow when in Sippulgar, but even so it took me two hours to reach any official with authority to assist me in the case. He was, of course, a Hjort, puffy-faced and rough-skinned, with an enormous toadlike head. I do not like those officious creatures—who does?—but Hjorts populate our bureaucracy to such a degree that it is impossible for me to avoid frequent contact with them, and I have learned to be patient with their superciliousness and coarseness. The Hjort spent a long time pondering my papers, muttering to himself and jotting down copious notes, and said, finally, “Why are you here in place of his sister?”

I said with some restraint, “His sister—my wife—is not in a state of health that permits such a long journey. But I believe these documents make it clear that I am her officially designated representative.”

The documents I had shown him said so in the very first sentence. I refrained from pointing that out. The Hjort muttered to himself some more and at length, scowling—and when a Hjort scowls, it is with a mouth that stretches from Alhanroel to Zimroel—he scribbled something and applied his stamp of office to it and shoved it across the desk to me. It was a permit to receive the personal effects of Melifont Ambithorn, citizen of Sippulgar, legally presumed to be deceased.

His effects weren’t to be had at the Prefecture, of course. I had to cross half the city, a journey that entangled me in two more religious processions, noisy and fervid, before I reached the government storehouse where Melifont’s things were being kept. After the predictable official delays I was given three goodsized boxes, which I took back to my hotel to inspect.

One of them contained some clothing, a little cheap jewelry, and a small collection of books. There was nothing useful there. The second box, I was displeased to see, was crammed with what even I could recognize as the apparatus used in the practice of sorcery: ambivials, crucibles, alembics, ammatepilas, an astrolabe, a pair of phalangaria, stoppered flasks containing oils and powders of many colors, and various other instruments whose names I did not know. I sorted through this stuff with mounting distaste. Why had my brother-in-law, that restless, energetic man whose ambitions had driven him into all those ill-fated ventures in mining, banking, and shipping, gathered about himself such a hodgepodge of useless claptrap, such a huge collection of instruments and materials suitable only for exploiting the delusions of a credulous populace?

The answer to my question was right there in the question itself. But—perhaps it was the fatigue of my long day’s quest, or some effect of the close, humid air—it was some long while before I saw what should have been instantly obvious.

I opened the third box. In it were papers, arranged in no perceptible order: documents relating to Melifont’s many defunct business enterprises of years gone by, travel brochures, extracts from technical books, and so on, everything jumbled hopelessly together. I picked through it and was rewarded, after a time, with a small handwritten journal, practically illegible, the first entry of which was dated just eighteen months before. I leafed through it, but found my brother-in-law’s scribbled writing difficult to make out and the entries themselves cryptic to the point of incoherence, and set it aside for further study. Then came another great wad of obsolete commercial records, and, below these, the one useful find in the whole messy mass: a leather binder in which were kept a group of contracts and municipal licenses and other material, all of it just a couple of years old, pertaining to the partnership between Melifont Ambithorn and a certain Nikkon Flurivole, citizen of Sippulgar, with whom Melifont proposed to organize a firm devoted to “the enhancement and farthering of the spiritual welfare of the people of Sippulgar and the entire Aruachosian coast.”

And instantly I saw it all. My brother-in-law, having spent thirty years of his life failing at this promising project and that one, had in a desperate moment begun to dabble in sorcery, and very likely had gone on from that to set himself up in the business of starting a new religion.

Locating his partner, this Nikkon Flurivole, was my obvious next step. But there were no Flurivoles listed in the municipal directory, and a visit to the Prefecture got me nowhere, since the civic government was plainly not going to provide information about its citizens merely to gratify the curiosity of strangers from Sisivondal. In vain did I display the writ that allowed me to investigate the fate of Melithon Ambithorn, and the legal papers that showed that this Flurivole had been his partner in the last known commercial undertaking of his life. My writ, I was told, extended to information about Melithon Ambithorn and no one else.

I know how to handle such bureaucratic obfuscation. Bribing Hjorts is a fool’s game—they will take your money and report you for attempted bribery—but the city administration was not made up entirely of Hjorts, and after a couple of attempts I found a chatty little undersecretary in the Registry of Names who, for the price of a couple of bowls of good Muldemar wine looked Flurivole up for me and reported that he was, like Melifont, “no longer in Sippulgar,” that he was carried in the registry as “disappeared under mysterious circumstances,” and that his personal effects were available for claiming by the next of kin, but to date no one had filed a request for them. My jolly new friend even supplied me with Flurivole’s last known address; but when I went there—it was a residential hotel in a not very golden corner of the city—I learned that his rooms had been rented to someone else quite some while back, that the rental agent could not or would not tell me anything about Flurivole at all, and that the new tenant knew nothing about his predecessor in the building. Nor did the name of Melifont Ambithorn mean anything to him.

I was stymied. But I am a persistent man.

Often, when desired knowledge is difficult or impossible to find, it is best to stop looking for a time, and give the information a chance to come looking for you instead. I settled down to follow that tactic. I longed to be home, to dine at my own table, to sleep in my own bed, above all to hold my wife in my arms once again. Never had we spent so many days apart, and the separation was a torment to me. But I could not abandon my quest now. I had already missed the heart of the shipping season at home anyway; I did not want to return to Thuwayne with the mystery of her brother’s disappearance unsolved; and I was confident that I would sooner or later stumble upon the next clue in the puzzle.

For a week I wandered Sippulgar as a tourist might do. It is, after all, one of our most beautiful cities, well worth seeing. We of Sisivondal have learned to get along without municipal beauty in our lives, but that does not mean we are indifferent to it. So I visited the botanical gardens that Lord Tharamond had founded somewhere in the mists of antiquity, and saw more horticultural wonders in half an hour than I had in all the years of my life. I clambered to the observation deck of the immense Hendighail Tower and peered out over the Inner Sea, imagining I could see all the way to Suvrael. I looked at the masterpieces of art in the prefectorial museum. And one day I drifted down to the waterfront and discovered a street that held, cheek by jowl, half a dozen temples to the gods of alien worlds.

Sippulgar, for some reason, is home to a great many expatriate beings from other worlds. I don’t mean Hjorts or Ghayrogs or Skandars or the three or four other non-human species that have dwelled alongside us on Majipoor for thousands of years, and whose populations are thoroughly integrated into our own; I mean later comers whose numbers can be counted in the hundreds at best, scatterings from one world and another who, having come here for some commercial reason, have chosen never to return to their home planets. It may be that the mild humid climate of Sippulgar is appealing to these folk; at any rate, there are plenty of them there, of ten or a dozen different kinds, and that one particular street along the waterfront has been designated as their religious district. They have built a row of temples to their gods there, most of them small buildings, but, I discovered, dramatic and startling in their appearance, since their architecture owes nothing to Majipoori custom but is derived instead from the styles of the worshippers’ native worlds. So one building that looks like a collection of interlocking pink bubbles stands precariously close to another that is a cluster of threatening black spikes, an inverted green triangle is neighbor to a set of yellow insectoid legs reaching in suppliant fashion to the sky, and so forth.

I suppose I am more tolerant of alien religions than I am of the home-grown creeds that have sprung up all over Majipoor in the past generation. Aliens are, as hardly needs to be said, alien, and it is quite reasonable to think that the strange workings of their minds have given rise to strange beliefs deeply rooted in their ancient civilizations. But belief in the supernatural is something new to us, and, it seems to me, quite extrinsic to our established nature. We acknowledge the existence of what we call the Divine, yes, but we have never backed that acknowledgment with scriptures or rituals; yet suddenly a new credulity has swept the world, a passionate and almost pathetic willingness to believe in the unbelievable, and I for one, dull prosaic businessman that I am, am not comfortable with it. So I feel disdain and even scorn for the frantic processions of the Beholders and the sea-dragon worshippers and the flagellantes and the blood-drinkers, for the installation in the plazas of our cities of huge idols with ten heads and twenty arms, for the believers in omens and prodigies, demons and goblins, for those who fill their homes with amulets and holy images, and all the rest of it; but, standing in front of this row of alien temples, I experienced only a sort of aesthetic pleasure, what one feels whenever one travels through the world and sees something attractive, something altogether different from what one sees at home.

I fall easily into conversations with strangers; and so it was, as I stood across the street watching strange-looking beings coming and going at the outworlders’ temples, I found myself discussing—warily, at first, then more openly—my attitude toward our current spate of religiosity with a fellow curiosity-seeker, an onlooker who, by the hue of his skin, was probably a native of this region. He was a small, finely built man with brightly gleaming eyes that shined like beacons out of his purple-black face, and he seemed to know which planet each of the different outworld types we were watching had come from. I complimented him on his knowledge, to which he replied, after telling me that his name was Vundafor Thorb and that his home was in the nearby town of Bekadu, that it was his business to know such things: he was an importer whose specialty was supplying these aliens with the foodstuffs and beverages of their native worlds. He said it in a casual way that told me that he actually disliked the presence of all these outworlders in Sippulgar, but that he saw it as a prime business opportunity.

“My late brother-in-law, I think, took the same attitude toward our new religions,” I said. “I have reason to think he saw all this feverish piety as nothing more than a good thing suitable for exploitation.”

“Oh?” And he gave me a sharp look, as though I had offended him by implying that I thought his own attitude revealed a cynical love of profit, which in fact I did. Not that I saw anything wrong with that. But then he smiled and said, “So he went into the religion business, your brother-in-law?”

“Apparently so.” And, bit by bit, I told him what little I could: the nature of Melifont’s character, his repeated failure in a series of grandiose enterprises, and the final letter telling my wife and me that he had embarked on some new project in Sippulgar, followed in time by the official notice of his disappearance. “I’ve been given three boxes full of his effects,” I said. “I found a diary in them that I’ve barely been able to decipher, but which talks about a partner of his named Nikkon Flurivole, and some legal papers indicating that he and this Flurivole were starting a company that was intended to bring ‘spiritual benefits’ to the people of Sippulgar. I translate that as meaning that they were going to trump up some lucrative new religion, don’t you?”

“Surely that must be it,” said my new friend.

“And in another box was a whole sorcerers’ shop full of the claptrap devices that wizards use—crucibles and alembics and ambivials and whatnot. You know what I mean.”

“Melifont Ambithorn was his name, you said?”

“Yes. And his partner was Nikkon Flurivole.”

“Indeed. I knew them, actually. Had some business dealings with them, as a matter of fact. A tall, dramatic-looking man, who walked with a limp? And the other one short, round-faced, sleepy-looking? ”

“I don’t know anything about the other one. But the tall man with a limp—yes, that was Melifont!” I could have wept with delight. If I had been a believer in any of the new gods, I would have given thanks to him. “What can you tell me about them?” I asked eagerly.

Thorb shrugged. “Not very much. I sold them velvet hangings for their chapel, two, two-and-a-half years ago. And some very fine carpets. They spared no expense, you know.”

“That would be like Melifont,” I said. “So they had a chapel. What sort of religion were they running?”

“I don’t know much about it. I even forget the name of their creed. There are so many nowadays, you know. I think it was one of the wonder-working ones: predict the future, cure the ailing, maybe even raise the dead. They had quite a following for a while. It all ended badly for them, of course.”

“Tell me!”

“Well, now, I don’t really know. They both disappeared, is all I can say. Loud noises were heard. Outcries in the night. Some say they were carried off by their own demons, creatures they had summoned themselves.” He grinned, flashing teeth white as ivory. “Not that I give much credence to that, of course. Nor, I suspect, would you. But they vanished. Leaving me, I might add, with unpaid invoices to the amount of close to four hundred royals. I recovered what I could from their cult, but I assure you that I’m still out of pocket to the tune of no small sum.”

“You can have that whole box of wizards’ equipment if you like,” I heard myself saying. My offer, the generosity of which took me by surprise, was an indication of the rush of joy I felt just then at actually having through great good luck come across a clue to this mystery. “Some magus might want to purchase it, and that will help you recover the rest of your loss. Carried off by their own demons, is that the story? Well, hardly likely. Skipping out on their own creditors, I suspect! But at least you’ve provided me with something to start on. I wonder where I could find some members of their cult to talk to.”

“I can’t help you with that,” he said. “But you might try hunting up their high priest. He’s still around, you know. Macola Endrago is the name. He’ll tell you a thing or two!”

Macola Endrago.

I hurried back to my hotel and pounced on Melifont’s journal, which had been becoming gradually less impenetrable to me as I grew more familiar with the idiosyncrasies of his handwriting. Endrago? Endrago? Yes! “M.E. suggests increase in payments.” Could that be anyone else? Their employee, their hired high priest, wanting his salary raised. Then I found the entire name, Endrago, followed by an irritated-looking squiggle. Six pages later, “Macola very difficult today.” My heart was pounding.

Again, again, again: M.E., M.E. “A troublesome man. These damned fanatics!” I think the word was fanatics. Another entry: “He is impossible. I cannot cope with his … ” The last word of the sentence was unreadable. Scarcely anything in the journal that had to do with Endrago was legible, and what there was was maddeningly incomplete—perhaps the journal was mostly in code, or perhaps Melifont was simply one of those untidy men who could not be bothered to write with care. But I knew that my fortuitous encounter with Vundafor Thorb of Bekadu had set me on the right trail. Already I was beginning to form a hypothesis: this Endrago, this priest, obviously had been an annoyingly contentious man, ever hungry for a greater share in the profits from the fraudulent cult that my wife’s brother and his equally shifty friend had put together for the sake of exploiting the naive and easily gulled people of this overly trusting city. Knowing that he was essential to the operation, Endrago must have been forever demanding higher wages for his services, and the two harried partners, perhaps already behind on their bills, had stalled him with one prevarication after another until he had boiled over with rage and murdered them. It would not have seemed implausible, in Sippulgar’s present climate of superstition and gullibility, for the priest to claim that he had seen or heard them being torn to pieces by demons who had carried their bodies off to some other sphere. And now the income from the chapel would be all his to keep.

Vundafor Thorb had taken my offer of Melifont’s magical equipment seriously. I suppose I would have done the same if I had been in his position. The next day he came to call for it. I would rather have kept those things to sell on my own behalf, since the costs of my journey to Sippulgar were beginning to mount. But there was no help for it: I had offered, I must make good. And he had brought me the address of the priest Macola Endrago, so I was able, in my mind, to write off the loss of the equipment as the price of this valuable information.

I knew better than to approach this Endrago immediately I felt as though I had reached into my purse and come forth with the winning ticket for the Sisivondal municipal lottery.

I found the Temple of Eternal Comfort without much difficulty: it was a ten-minute walk from the tavern. Despite its resonant name, it was drab and unprepossessing: a long, bare, narrow room, probably a converted shop, with a simple painted sign above its door. I saw none of the carpets and velvet hangings of which Vundafor Thorb had spoken, only some rows of wooden benches. He must have repossessed his merchandise. No one was there but a haggard, weary-looking man in shabby clothes, who was slowly sweeping the chapel floor.

I said that I wanted to speak with the priest Macola Endrago. “He comes toward evening,” the man said. “What sort of business do you have with him?”

Once again I explained that I was a stranger in Sippulgar, lonely and in need of healing, and told him that a sympathetic innkeeper had suggested I come here.

The man, who identified himself as the sexton of the chapel, Graimon Sten by name, looked surprised at that. “We get very few new communicants these days,” he said. “We have had certain difficulties, you know. Because of what happened here. But that ought not to discourage you. Macola Endrago will give you the help you need.”

I maintained my guise of ignorance. “Because of what happened here? And what was that?”

The sexton Graimon Sten hesitated a moment. Then he said, with a slight twitch of his lips, “Our founders have left us, and no one knows where they are. That shouldn’t be of any real concern: we still have our Macola Endrago, who is the heart and soul of our faith. But of course, when there’s the least hint of scandal about a chapel, or even what is suspected to be scandal—”

“Yes, the innkeeper I mentioned did speak highly of this Endrago. But what’s this about a scandal? The founders—what about them? They’ve left you, you say?” Trying to sound merely casually curious, I said, “Left you to go where? And why did they go?”

Plainly the entire topic was distressing to him. He looked downward, concentrating pointedly on his sweeping. But I persevered.

“They disappeared. Not a trace.” He paused, still avoiding my glance. Then he said, almost under his breath, “One story has it that they were murdered by a member of the congregation who held a grudge against them. His wife had died, and he was sick with grief and asked them to bring her back from the dead. He was willing to pay a huge sum of money if they would. They promised to do it, so it’s said. But they couldn’t.”

“So he went insane and killed them? You think that’s what happened to them?”

“I don’t think anything,” the sexton said. He looked up and let his eyes meet mine, but only for a moment. “Nobody pays me to think. I told you because you asked. Listen, it’s just something that I heard someone say.”

“Someone reliable?”

“How would I know. It sounds pretty wild to me. The man is still a communicant here. He doesn’t have the look of a murderer about him.”

I risked pressing him a little harder. “Even so: is it possible that the story’s true?”

“It’s possible that anything’s true. Life is full of disappointments; anger may rise up in the most surprising people. And restoring the dead was never any part of our creed here. If that was what he expected, he didn’t have any chance of getting it, did he? And that could have upset him. But what does it matter? The men are gone. We struggle on without them. Macola Endrago will be here in two hours, and I know he will give your soul the ease it needs.”

Now I had three theories: that Macola Endrago had murdered Ambithorn and Flurivole in a dispute over money, that one of their own communicants had killed them in rage because they had failed to perform a miracle for him, or that they had indulged in some rash conjuring-up of demons and had been destroyed by the very spirits they had summoned. The Endrago theory was supported to some extent by my brother-in-law’s own journal. The sexton had not put forth the angry-communicant theory with much conviction, in fact did not seem really to believe it at all. And the third, the carried-off-by-demons notion, I rejected out of hand, of course. Which left the Endrago theory as the only likely one.

But five minutes in the presence of Macola Endrago and I knew that all my conjectures about him were wrong. The man was a saint.

He was very tall, very thin, almost frail, a spidery, fleshless figure of a man, older than I had expected. His dark Sippulgaru skin seemed to have faded with the years to a light pale violet. He had a long rectangular face from which emanated the kindest of smiles and a gaze of the utmost gentleness and benevolence, and he was surrounded by such an aura of love and warmth and purity that at the mere sight of him I felt a crazy yearning to drop to my knees before him and kiss the hem of his threadbare robe. There was no mistaking his goodness: that sort of thing can’t be counterfeited. He held out both his hands to me and clasped them about mine, and murmured some sort of blessing in the softest, most whispery of voices. The Temple of Eternal Comfort might have been the shameless concoction of two callous entrepreneurs in quest of easy money, but this man Endrago, I knew at once, was the embodiment of true holiness, sincere in his beliefs, genuinely good. How my brother-in-law must have hated him! In every aspect of his character, by word and deed, this Endrago had displayed the greatest possible contrast to his employers’ crass materialistic ways.

I trust such flashes of insight when they come to me. Confronted with such incontrovertible sanctity, I was unable to spin any false stories about my visit to Sippulgar. I simply told him that my wife had asked me to come here to learn the details of her brother Melifont’s fate.

“Ah,” said Macola Endrago softly, softly: a mere faint gust of breath. “How sad it was! They summoned the irgalisteroi, your Melifont and his friend; and the irgalisteroi destroyed them. I had warned them, again and again: these spirits are real, they are dangerous. They would not listen. They thought they could use the irgalisteroi for their private profit. But they wove the spells better than they knew, and they were punished terribly for their greed and their impetuousness. As a man of your sort is surely aware, it is hard to protect fools from their own folly.”

“The irgalisteroi?”

“Yes. Proiarchis, it may have been whom they invoked. Or Remmer, more likely. I came in just as it was ending. I heard the screams: the most terrible cries of agony, they were, and there was the sound of the atmosphere collapsing around them—it is like thunder, you know, thunder right there in the room. The air grows dark. The whole world seems to shake. The sky itself is split apart. I opened the door and found that the two men had already been carried off. If I had arrived any sooner, I would have died with them.”

“You will pardon me, father,” I said, “but I am only a merchant of Sisivondal, a plain worldly man, and I know nothing of supernatural matters. Proiarchis, Remmer, irgalisteroi—these names are only names to me.”

“Ah,” he said again. “Of course.”

And he told me. There are, he explained, three classes of demons. That was the word he used, demons, and what he meant by it was the inhabitants of the invisible world, a concept that seemed not to have any fantastical connotations for him: he accepted without the least hint of skepticism the presence of unknown and unknowable worlds immediately adjacent to our own. These demons were the original prehistoric inhabitants of our planet, before even the Shapeshifters had come here. In ancient times the Shapeshifters had mastered them, though, confining them under powerful spells. The valisteroi, he said, were a group that had somehow escaped those spells and live now beyond the sphere of the sun, invulnerable to all conjuring. The kallisteroi, who dwell between the sky and the Great Moon and have a certain degree of freedom of action, are sympathetic to us and will sometimes agree to do services for us when properly asked by the adept; in any case they never do harm. And then there are the irgalisteroi, the demons of the subterranean world, who can be compelled to perform many duties, but who are angry, dangerous beings entirely capable of turning on an unskillful summoner and destroying him.

It says much for the spiritual force that lay behind this saintly man’s mild demeanor and the incantatory power of his gentle voice that I was able to accept as factual data, for the moment, all that he was telling me about these various categories of nonexistent phantoms. As he spoke I went leaping ahead of him to the conclusion that Ambithorn and Flurivole, perhaps as a drunken irresponsible prank or possibly with the wild hope of discovering that the irgalisteroi actually were real and could be commanded to heap them with riches, had incautiously brought some potent demon out of the land of the invisible, using a borrowed spell, but had not been able to control it. Not only didn’t I doubt his belief in such entities, I think I felt, just for the moment, under the irresistible strength of his incandescent sincerity, some belief in them myself.

“I can give you a glimpse of them,” he said. “I would prefer not to meddle with Remmer or Proiarchis myself, though if I brought them here they might confirm what I have told you of your brother-in-law’s end. But I can call up for you some of the less dangerous spirits, if you are curious about such things: Minim, say, who restores lost knowledge, or Ruhid, who brings relief from fever. Theddim, if you wish, who can control the coursing of the blood through our hearts—”

He mentioned several more, each with some highly specialized function. All those imaginary creatures! Such madness to believe in their existence! And yet I could not really scoff. Despite myself I was impressed by how much ingenuity had gone into devising and naming them. And part of me, just a part, began to wonder just how imaginary they actually were. That shook me more than I know how to tell: that I could even begin, for the moment, to believe.

“Thank you, no, father,” I said hoarsely. “I’m not ready, I think, for such sights.” And I could not tell, just then, whether I was refusing the demonstration to avoid embarrassing the good man when his nonsense failed to produce results, or out of fear that his spells and gestures just might present me with a vision of Minim or Ruhid or Theddim right there in the room before my scornful unbelieving eyes.

That Macola Endrago might be responsible for the deaths of Melithorn and Flurivole in some disagreement over wages now seemed inconceivable to me. Whatever disputes between the three men Melithorn’s journal alluded to could much better be accounted for by the fact that Endrago actually believed in the tenets of the Temple of Eternal Comfort, whatever those might be, while his two employers had regarded the chapel merely as a money-making enterprise. Endrago’s mere presence there each day would have been a constant silent reproach to them, and they might well at last have let him know in some blunt and mocking way that they had nothing but contempt for his unworldly faith in the creed that they had pasted together out of bits and scraps of other religions. But could that have led him to murder them? No, never. If a murderous impulse lurked anywhere in Macola Endrago’s soul, then I am no judge of men.

Which left me nothing to fall back on, then, but the conjecture offered to me by the sexton Graimon Sten that a disgruntled worshipper had killed them, and not even the sexton seemed to take that idea very seriously. Of course there was also the death-at-the-hands-of-angry-demons hypothesis, but of course that was not an idea I was capable of embracing. Endrago apparently was the only witness to that event, and even he had come upon the scene after the demons had done their work. I doubted that he had fashioned the tale out of whole cloth. But a man who can believe in invisible demons in the first place is likely to believe in other theories as well that men of my sort are unable to accept.

My longing to quit this place and return to Thuwayne was all but overwhelming by now. But I knew I could not give up at this point, for I felt a strange certainty that I would have the answer I sought before much longer. So each day I continued to go, toward the middle of the afternoon, to the Temple of Eternal Comfort. There was always a handful of worshippers there, kneeling on the bare floor, eyes closed, deep in meditation. I imitated them. From time to time a deacon in a white robe trimmed with scarlet would appear and ring a little bell, and the congregation would rise and sing a hymn, and participate in a sort of contrapuntal ritual chant, and incense would be burned and mysterious lights would glow in the corners of the long room, and sometimes misty, shimmering apparitions would briefly make themselves visible. At the climax of the ceremony Macola Endrago would emerge from a back room and deliver a brief, sweet sermon, counselling us to let the troubles of the world slide from our shoulders like water, and calling upon this spirit or that one to aid us in that task, and one by one we would approach the altar beside him and drink from a common vessel containing a thick, almost viscous wine.

It all was a bit of a strain on my patience; but I did come every day, I knelt and rose and pretended to chant the chants, and listened to Endrago’s sermon and I drank from the cup of communion, and I must say that I would leave the chapel feeling released from the ordinary tensions of the moment. And each day I waited for Jaakon Gameel—that was the name of the man who, so rumor had it, had been responsible for the disappearance of the two founders—to make an appearance at the chapel. Graimon Sten had promised to point him out to me. But four days passed, and five, and six, and I told myself that a murderer never does return to the scene of the crime, whatever the popular belief may be.

Then in the second week of my vigil someone I had not seen before was present in the chapel when I arrived, and Graimon Sten, passing close beside me, murmured, “That’s the one.”

A great sadness came over me at that. For I am, I do maintain, a capable judge of men; and, I thought, if the plump, placid dumpling of a man who was Jaakon Gameel could have been responsible for the deaths of Melifont Ambithorn and Nikkon Flurivole, then I will be the next Coronal of Majipoor.

I studied him carefully. The people of Sippulgar are generally lean and bony, but this one was round-faced, fat-cheeked, a stubby cabbagy blob of a man with a mild, innocent face. Plainly he was a true believer in the teachings of his faith. When he knelt in prayer he passionately pressed his forehead hard against the floor. Sometimes I heard him sobbing. When the time came to chant, he chanted with a sort of desperate fervor. When Endrago delivered his sermon he responded to each familiar point with a short, sharp nod, like one who has been struck by unarguable revelation. When we went up to the altar for the cup of communion, he held it with both hands and drank deeply. After the ceremony he sat for a long while, as though stunned, and eventually left without a word to anybody.

Day after day I waited and left the chapel when he left; and on the fifth day I hailed him in the street, and told him I was a stranger in town, a lonely visitor who felt the need for company, and in one way and another I was able to persuade him to come with me to that nearby tavern. There I brought forth for him the sad though altogether fictional tale of the tragic events that had befallen my family in Sisivondal and propelled me into this journey southward to Sippulgar. He listened with care and such obvious sympathy for a fellow sufferer that I felt a bit ashamed of my own crafty mendacity.

But he did not respond at once with the story of his own bereavement, as I had expected. He fell silent, as though some dam within him was holding him back. I waited, urging him with my eyes to confide in me, and before long I could see the dam beginning to break.

Quickly, then, his tale came pouring out of him. A young and beautiful wife, apple of his eye, his treasure, his only joy, a paragon among women, a wife far beyond his true deserts, the envy of all his friends—struck down in the second year of their marriage, carried off in a trice by the sting of some venomous tropical insect. Inconsolable, half dead with sorrow, he had gone from one creed’s chapel to another, he said, seeking the one that might have the power to restore her to him; but of course there was none that did. Someone had told him of the Temple of Eternal Comfort, and he had made his last attempt there. He had spoken most earnestly with the two founders, and with the high priest Endrago, begging them to work the miracle for him. Each of them had said it could not be done: in our world death is final and there is no coming back from it. Yet he had persisted. He was a man of some means; one day he came to Melifont and Flurivole and offered them half his wealth if they would intercede with the spirit world on his behalf for the return of his wife from the dead.

“And they attempted it, did they?”

He was silent a long moment, looking downward. Then he raised his face to mine and a look of terrible regret bordering on agony came into his eyes. He seemed to be staring past me into the darkest of abysses.

“Yes,” he said, barely audibly. “Finally they agreed. They asked the spirits, yes. And—and—”

He faltered. He fell silent.

I prodded him. “Nothing happened, of course.”

“Oh, yes, something happened,” he said, in that same soft, quavering voice. “But not the return of my wife.” And he looked away again, shivering as though in the grip of irremediable guilt and shame, and began to weep.

Macola Endrago said to me, when I told him that I was about to take my leave of Sippulgar, “It is for the best, I think. Seek your solace at home. We can give you no help here, for you are a man without belief.”

“You see that, do you?”

“I saw it from the first. When I told you how your wife’s brother met his death, you looked at me as though I were telling you children’s fables. When you pray in the chapel, you hold yourself like a man who wishes he were almost anywhere else. When you come up to take the cup you have no presence of the god about you. None of this is hard to see.” His voice came to me as though from far away, gentle, kindly, infinitely sad. “Return to your wife, my friend. You came here to solve a mystery, and I provided you with the information you needed, and you are unable to accept it. So you may as well go.”

“I’d be pleased to believe that the men were torn apart by those demons—Remmer, Proiarchis, are those the names?—if only I could. But I can’t. I can’t. There are no such beings.”

“No?”

“No,” I said. “Everything in my soul tells me that.”

He smiled his gentle, loving smile. “I offered to summon Theddim or Minim for you. You refused. Shall I give you another chance? I could bring up Remmer or Proiarchis, even. There would be risks, but I could do it, and then you would know the truth. Shall I? I would do that for you, my friend. I would embrace the risk, so that your eyes might be opened.” For a moment I wavered in the face of the inexorable force of his belief.

Again he smiled—that mild, sweet, saintly smile of his. And in his eyes, which were not mild or sweet or saintly at all, I saw the implacable will, the utter conviction, the invincible strength, that sustained his faith.

“Let me show you what you are so unwilling to see.”

I gasped and struggled for breath. Melifont may have been a fraud, but not this Endrago. I was burning in the awful fire of his sincerity. In that moment I felt sure that this man really had walked with demons. And now he will take me by the hand and lead me to them. I shuddered under the inexorable force of his belief. It fell upon me like a hammer. I wanted to run from him, but I was frozen where I stood.

“No,” I said once more, even as I stared bewilderedly into the darkness of the chapel.

That shape—that shadowy form with blazing eyes—

At that instant it seemed to me that the dread figure of Proiarchis was rearing up before me to tell me why Melifont Ambithorn and his partner had had to be slain.

I began to tremble. A door was opening. Fiercely I slammed it shut. I slammed it and held it with all my strength. As Macola Endrago reached out toward me I backed away. “Please. No.” And I said, though it was a lie and he surely was aware of that, “I know nothing about demons, and I want to know nothing about them. If such things as demons do exist.”

The saintly smile yet again. My heart shriveled under the heat of that smile. “If, indeed.”

“But let me say that if they do—if they do—I would never presume to ask you to take so great a risk on my behalf. If anything went wrong, I could never forgive myself.”

He showed no anger, no disappointment, no surprise.

“Very well,” he said, and our meeting was over.

The next day I left Sippulgar, hiring an express courier to get me back to Sisivondal as quickly as possible. And when at last I was with my wife Thuwayne again I told her that no one in Sippulgar had any real idea of what had happened to her brother, but that he had vanished and after the appropriate legal period had elapsed he had been declared officially dead, and the most probable explanation was that he had failed in business one last time, failed so completely that he had taken his own life to escape his creditors. More than that, I said, we will never know. And I think that that last part, at least, is the truth.