The King of Dreams

1

The moist, humid lands beyond the Kinslain Gap were Hjort territory. It was the sort of land where few other people cared to live, but the Hjorts were native to a steamy world of spongy soil and constant torrid fog, and they found conditions here ideal. Besides, they knew that they were not well liked by the other races that inhabited Majipoor, who found their appearance unattractive and their manner abrasive and irritating, and thus they preferred to have a province of their own, where they could live their lives as they pleased.

Their chief center was the small, densely packed city of Santhiskion. It contained two million of them, or perhaps even more. Santhiskion was a breeding-ground for minor bureaucrats, for there was something in the temperament of urban, well-educated Hjorts that inclined them favorably toward becoming customs collectors and census-takers and building-inspectors and the like. Hjorts of a different sort lived in the valley of the Kulit that lay to the west of the city—people who were simpler folk in the main, villagers, farmers, who kept to themselves and patiently went about the business of raising such crops as grayven and ciderberries and garryn that they shipped to the populous cities of western Alhanroel.

Just as the Hjorts of Santhiskion city were given by nature to painstaking list-making and record-keeping and report-writing, the rural Hjorts of the valley were lovers of ritual and ceremony. Their lives revolved around their farms and their produce; everywhere about them lurked invisible gods and demons and witches, who might be threats to the ripening fields; it was necessary constantly to propitiate the benevolent beings and to ward off the depredations of unfriendly ones by acting out the rites appropriate to the day of the year. In each village there was a certain official who kept the calendar of rites, and every morning announced the proper propitiations for the week ahead. Knowing how to keep the calendar was no easy matter; lengthy training was involved, and the calendar-keeper was revered for his skills the way a priest would be, or a surgeon.

In the village of Abon Airair the calendar-keeper was named Erb Skonarij, a man so old that his pebbly-textured skin, once ashen-colored, had faded to a pale blue, and whose eyes, once splendidly huge and gleaming, now were dull and sunken into his forehead. But his mind was as alert as ever and he performed his immensely involuted cal-endrical tasks with undiminished accuracy.

“This is the tenth day of Mapadik and the fourth day of Iyap and the ninth of Tjatur,” Erb Skonarij announced, when the elders of the village came to him in the morning to hear the day’s computations. “The demon Rangda Geyak is loose among us. Thus it is incumbent on us to perform the play of the contending geyaks this evening.” And the storyteller whose responsibility it was to narrate the play of the contending geyaks began at once to make ready for the show, for among the Hjorts of the Kulit Valley no distinction was made between ritual and drama.

They had brought with them from their home world a complex calendar, or series of calendars, that bore no relation to the journey of Majipoor around its sun or to the movements of any other heavenly body: their year was 240 days long, divided into eight months of thirty days by the reckoning of one calendar, but also into twelve months of twenty days by a different reckoning, and likewise six months of forty days, twenty-four months of ten days, and 120 months of two days.

Thus any given day of the year had five different dates in the five different calendars; and on certain special conjunctions of days, especially involving the months named Tjatur in the twelve-month calendar, Iyap in the eight-month calendar, and Mapadik in the twenty-four-month calendar, particularly important holy rites had to be celebrated. And this night the conjunction of dates was such that the rite of Ktut, the war between the demons, must be enacted.

The people of Abon Airar began to gather by the storytellers’ mound at dusk, and by the time the sun had dropped behind Prezmyr Mountain the entire village was assembled, the musicians and actors were in place, the storyteller was perched atop his high seat. A great bonfire blazed in the fire pit. All eyes were on Erb Skonarij; and precisely at the moment when the hour known as Pasang Gjond arrived, he gave the signal to begin.

“For many months now,” the storyteller sang, “the two factions of the geyaks have been at war…”

The old, old story. Everyone knew it by heart.

The musicians lifted their kempinongs and heftii and tjimpins and sounded the familiar melodies, and choristers with greatly distended throat-sacs brought forth the familiar repetitive bass drone that would continue unbroken throughout the performance, and the dancers, elaborately costumed, came forth to act out the dramatic events of the tale.

“Great has been the sorrow of the village as the demons make war against each other,” sang the storyteller. “We have seen green flames darting by night among the gerribong trees. Blue flames have danced atop gravestones in the cemetery. White flames move along our roof-beams. The harm to us has been great. Many of us have fallen ill, and children have died. The garryn we have gathered has been ruined. The fields of grayven are devastated. Harvest time is almost upon us and there will be no grayven to harvest. And all of this has befallen us because there is sin in the village, and the sinners have not given themselves over to be purified. The demon Rangda Geyak moves among us—”

Rangda Geyak moved among them even as the storyteller spoke: a huge hideous figure costumed to look like an ancient female of the human kind, with a coarse mop of white hair and long, dangling breasts and great yellow crooked teeth that jutted like fangs. Red flames darted from her hair; yellow flames sprang from her fingertips. Back and forth she strode along the edge of the mound, menacing those who sat in the front rows.

“But now, the sorcerer Tjal Goring Geyak comes, and does battle with her—”

A second demon, this one a giant equipped with the four arms of a Skandar, pranced forward out of the shadows and confronted the first. Together now they danced in a circle, face to face, taunting each other and jeering, while the storyteller recited the details of their combat, telling how they hurled fiery trees at each other, and caused immense pits to open in the village square, and made the waters of the placid River Kulit surge above their banks and flood the town.

The essence of the tale was that the contest of the geyaks brought great grief and woe to the village as it raged, for the demons were unconcerned by the incidental damage they were inflicting as they struggled up and down the town and the surrounding fields. Only when the sinners who had brought this calamity upon the townsfolk came forth to confess their crimes would the demons cease their warfare and turn against the evildoers, taking up flails and wielding them as weapons to drive them out of the village.

The three dancers who were to play the guilty sinners sat to one side, watching the spectacle with everyone else. Their time to take the stage was still hours away; the storyteller must first relate in full detail the arrival of other demons, the one-winged bird and the one-legged dragon and the creature that eats its own entrails, and many more. He must speak of demonic orgies, and the drinking of blood. He must tell of transformations, the beasts that interchanged shapes. He must tell of the beautiful young women who wordlessly make obscene overtures to young men on lonely roads late at night. He must—

As the old tale unfolded Erb Skonarij, watching from the seat of privilege that was his by virtue of his decades as the village’s keeper of the calendars, felt a sudden searing pain within his skull, as though a band of hot iron had been clamped around his brain.

It was a fearful sensation. He had never known such pain.

He began to think that the hour of his death had come at last. But then, as it went on and on without surcease, the thought came to him that perhaps he would not die, that he would simply be forced to suffer like this forever.

And it was, he realized after a time, an agony not of the body, but of the spirit.

Something was striking a knife into his soul. Something was whipping his innermost self with a whip of fire. Something was hammering at the substance of his being with a massive jagged boulder.

He was the sinner. He had brought the fury of the demons down upon the village. He, he, he, the keeper of the calendars, the guardian of the ceremonies: he had failed in his task, he had violated his trust, he had betrayed those who depended on him, and unless he confessed his guilt right here and now the entire village would suffer for his iniquities.

Rising from his place of honor, he came tottering forward into the center of the stage.

“Stop!” he cried. “I am the one! I must be punished! For me, the flails! For me, the whips! Drive me out! Cast me from your midst!”

The music died away in a confusion of discordance. The humming of the choristers ceased. The storyteller’s cadenced voice cut off in mid-phrase. They were all staring at him. Erb Skonarij looked out into the audience and saw the wide bewildered eyes too, the open mouths.

The throbbing in his skull was unrelenting. It was splitting him apart.

Someone’s hand was around his arm. A voice close by his right ear-membrane said, “You must sit down, old man. The ceremony will be spoiled. You of all people—”

“No!” Erb Skonarij pulled himself free. “I am the one! I bring the demons!” He pointed toward the storyteller, who was gaping at him in amazement and fright. “Tell it! Tell it! The treason of the calendar-keeper, tell it! Set me free, will you? Set us all free! I can no longer bear the pain!”

Why would they not listen to him?

A desperate lurch brought him up before the two demons, the Rangda Geyak, the Tjal Goring Geyak. They had halted now in their dance. Erb Skonarij scooped up the flails that they were meant to use at the climax of the ceremony and thrust them into their hands.

“Beat me! Whip me! Drive me out!”

The two masked figures still stood motionless. Erb Skonarij pressed his hands to his pounding forehead. The pain, the pain! Did no one understand? They were in the presence of real sin: they must expel it from the village, and all would suffer, he most of all, until it was done. But no one would move. No one.

He uttered a muffled cry of despair and rushed toward the roaring bonfire. This was wrong, he knew. The sinner must not punish himself. He must be forced from their midst by the united effort of all the villagers, or the exorcism would have no value to the village. But they would not do it; and he could no longer bear the pain, let alone the shame or the grief.

He was amazed at how soothing the warmth of those flames was. Hands clutched at him, but he knocked them aside. The fire… the fire… it sang to him of forgiveness and peace.

He cast himself in.

2

Mandralisca lifted the helmet from his head. Khaymak Barjazid sat facing him, watching him avidly. Jacomin Halefice stood near the door of Mandralisca’s chamber, with the Lord Gaviral beside him. Mandralisca shook his head, blinked a couple of times, rubbed the center of his brow with his fingertips. There was a ringing in his ears, a tightness in his chest.

For a time no one spoke, until at last Barjazid said, “Well, your grace? What was it like?”

“A powerful experience. How long did I have the thing on?”

“Fifteen seconds or so. Perhaps half a minute at most.”

“That’s all,” Mandralisca said, idly fondling the smooth metal mesh. “Strange. It seemed like a much, much longer time.” The sensations that had just gone coursing through him still reverberated in his spirit. He realized that he had not yet entirely returned from his journey.

In the immediate aftermath of the experiment an odd jangling restlessness gripped him. Every nerve was sensitized. He felt the beating of the hot sun against the walls of the building, heard the whistling of the desert wind across the plain of pungatans far below, had an oppressive sense of the thick musky atmosphere of the air about him in here.

Rising, he roved the perimeter of the circular room, cruising it like some caged beast. Halefice and even Gaviral stepped to the side, scuttling out of his way as he strode past the place where they were standing. Mandralisca barely noticed them. To his mind in its currently elevated state they seemed like nothing more than little scurrying animals to him, droles, mintuns, hiktigans, unimportant creatures of the forest. Insects, even. Mere insects.

He had gone down into that little metal helmet, somehow. His entire mind had entered it; and then, in a way he could not begin to comprehend, he had been able to hurl himself outward, like a burning spear soaring through the sky—

Barjazid said, “Do you have any idea how far you went, or where?”

“No. Not at all.” How curious to be holding a conversation with an insect. But he forced himself to pay attention to Barjazid’s query. “I perceived it as a considerable distance, but for all I know it was no farther than the city on the other side of the river.”

“It was probably much farther, your grace. The reach is infinite, you know: there’s no more effort involved in reaching Alaisor or Tolaghai or Piliplok than there is in going next door. It’s the directionality that we can’t control. Not yet, anyway.”

“Could it reach the Castle, do you think?” asked the Lord Gaviral.

“As I have just told his grace the Count Mandralisca,” Barjazid said, “the reach is infinite.” Mandralisca noticed that Barjazid had already learned to be extremely patient with Gaviral. That was a very good idea, when dealing with someone who is very stupid but who has a great deal of power over you.

“So we could reach out with it and hit Prestimion, then?” asked Gaviral avidly. “Or Dekkeret?”

“We might, in time,” Barjazid replied. “As I have also just observed, we do not yet have real directionality. We can only strike randomly thus far.”

“But eventually,” Gaviral said. “Oh, yes, eventually—!”

It was all that Mandralisca could do to keep himself from cutting Gaviral down with some contemptuous remark. Reach out and hit Prestimion? The fool. The fool. That was the last thing they wanted to do. The boy Thastain had a shrewder grip of political strategy than any of these five brainless brothers. But this was not the moment to foment a breach with one of the men who were, at least in theory, his masters.

He considered what Barjazid’s helmet had just allowed him to accomplish. That was more interesting to him than anything these people might have to say.

He had cast forth his mind and hurt someone with the helmet. Of that he was certain. He had no idea clear idea of whom, or where; but he had no doubt that he had encountered another mind someplace far away, a priest of some kind, perhaps, at any rate someone who was officiating at a ritual, and had penetrated it, and had damaged it. Extinguished it, perhaps. Certainly done great harm. He knew what it was like to injure someone: a very distinctive feeling of pleasure, almost sexual in nature, which he had experienced many times in his life. He had felt it just now, with a new and astounding intensity. Some distant stranger, recoiling in pain and shock at his thrust—

—he had flown like a spear, a burning spear soaring halfway across the world—

Like a god.

“Your brother would never let me try the helmet,” Mandralisca said to Khaymak Barjazid. Returning to his desk, he tossed the device down in the middle of it. “I asked him more than once, while we were camped there in the Stoienzar. Just to find out what it was like, you know. The kind of sensation it was. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I would not dare risk it, Mandralisca. The power is too great.’ He meant that I might injure myself, I assumed. But as I thought about it afterward I saw a different meaning in the phrase. ‘The power is too great for me to trust you with it,’ is what he was really saying. I think he feared I might go poking around in his mind.”

“He was constantly afraid of something like that—that the helmet might be used against him.”

“Was I not his ally?”

“No. My brother never saw anyone as an ally. Everyone was dangerous. Remember, his own son turned against him during Dantirya Sam-bail’s rebellion, and brought one of the helmets to Prestimion and Dekkeret. No one could ever have persuaded Venghenar to let anyone else get near a helmet after that.”

“I watched Prestimion destroy him with the helmet that Dinitak brought him,” Mandralisca said.

His voice sounded strange in his own ears. He understood that he must still not have fully shaken off the effect of having donned that helmet. These three men still seemed like insects to him. They had no significance whatsoever.

“Your brother,” he said to Barjazid, speaking as though the other two were not in the room, “was standing right next to me, with his own helmet on. He and Prestimion were having a duel of some sort with their helmets, hundreds of miles apart, thousands, maybe. I saw your brother collecting himself for one final thrust; but before he could unleash it, Prestimion hit him with the helmet-force and knocked him to his knees. ‘Prestimion,’ your brother said, and started to moan, and Prestimion struck him once or twice more, and I could see then that his mind was altogether burned out. An hour or two later Septach Melayn and Gialaurys burst upon us. One of them came upon him and slew him.”

“As we will slay Prestimion,” said the Lord Gaviral grandly.

Mandralisca acted as though Gaviral had not said anything. Slay Prestimion? That was no answer to the problem of attaining freedom for the western continent. Constrain Prestimion, yes. Control him. Use him. That was what this helmet would achieve, in the fullness of time. But why kill him? That would only put Dekkeret into the high seat of power at the Labyrinth and bring some other Coronal to the summit of Castle Mount, and they would have to start the process of extricating Zimroel from the grip of Alhanroel all over again. It was hopeless, though, to expect any of the Five Lords to understand such things before they were explained to them.

“The helmet will give us our revenge, yes,” said Khaymak Barjazid.

Mandralisca ignored that too. It was such a commonplace thing to say. And it was not even sincere, Mandralisca thought. Barjazid had no interest in revenge. His brother’s death at Prestimion’s hand did not seem to matter greatly to him. He would just as readily have sold himself to his brother’s killers as to his brother’s killers’ enemies, if the price had been right. The selling was all that mattered. What interested this Barjazid most was money, security, comfort: petty unimportant things, all three. There was a bright spark of malevolence in Barjazid that Mandralisca appreciated, a chilly malign intelligence, but the man was fundamentally trivial, a little bundle of unusual marketable skills and very ordinary hungers.

Mandralisca’s restlessness had returned. The stink of other human flesh in the room was becoming unendurable now. The heat. The pressure of other consciousnesses too close against his own.

He gathered up the flimsy little helmet and tucked it like so much pocket-change into a pouch at his hip. “Going outside,” he said. “Too warm in here. Some fresh air.”

The long shadows of afternoon were beginning to creep westward across the ridge. The palaces of the Five Lords, up there on the summit of the hill overlooking the village, were bathed in ruddy light. Mandralisca walked through the village in long strides, no particular destination in mind. The other three men followed along behind, struggling to keep up with him.

Such small men, he thought. Gaviral. Halefice. Barjazid. Small of stature, small of soul as well. Halefice, for one, knew it: he wanted only to serve. Gaviral dreamed of reigning as a king here in Zimroel, and was no more fitted for it than a rock-monkey would be. And ugly little Bar-jazid—well, he had his merits, he was tough and smart, at least. Mandralisca did not entirely despise him. But essentially he was nothing. Nothing.

“Your grace?” Halefice had caught up with him. The aide-de-camp said, “Begging your pardon, your grace, but perhaps your use of that device has tired you more than you realize, and you should rest for a time, instead of—”

“Thank you, Jacomin. I’ll be all right.” Mandralisca kept on moving, not even facing toward Halefice as he spoke. They were in the thick of the village, now, among the smiths and the pot-sellers, with the wineshops just beyond, and then the market of breads and meats.

It had not been an easy matter, building a self-sufficient village out here in this dry desolate land, where crops had to be coaxed from the unwilling red earth with the aid of water pumped drop by drop from the maddeningly unreachable river just over the hill, but they had done it. He had done it. He knew nothing about farming, nothing about raising livestock, nothing about creating villages out of thin air, but he had done it, he had drawn the plans and given the orders and made it happen, even to the lavish palaces of the Five Lords at the top of the ridge, and now, striding through it this strange afternoon, he felt—what?

A sense of anticipation. A sense of standing at the threshold of a new place, a strange and wonderful place.

Already he held the Five Lords of Zimroel in his hands, whether they knew it or not. Soon he would hold Prestimion and Dekkeret as well. He would be the master of all Majipoor. Was that not a fine thing, for a country boy of the snowy Gonghar land who had started out in life with no assets other than a quick mind and lightning-swift reflexes?

He passed the wine-shops, shaking off flasks that the merchants there eagerly implored him to take, and went on through the bread-market. One of the bread-sellers put a biscuit into his hand with a reverent bow and a murmured prayer. There was awe in his eyes, as though he and not Gaviral were a Lord of Zimroel. The wine-merchants and bread-sellers understand, Mandralisca thought, where the real power resides in this place. He bit into the biscuit—it was one of the little round ones called a lorica, with a topknot on the upper side to make it seem something like a crown. A good choice, thought Mandralisca. He devoured it in three bites.

On the far side of the bread-market the ridge rose sharply to a point where one could see the river far below, boiling and churning against the foot of the cliff. He strode toward it. Halefice still walked along beside him on the left, a step or two to the rear. Barjazid was on the other side. The Lord Gaviral did not seem to have followed them up the hill from the marketplace.

Mandralisca stood staring at the river for a long while without speaking. Then he drew the helmet from his pouch. It rested in the palm of his open hand, a bunched-up little mass of metal mesh. Barjazid gave him a worried look, as though wondering if Mandralisca might have it in mind to hurl it into the water below.

To the Suvraelinu he said suddenly, “Barjazid, did you ever want to kill your father?”

That drew a startled glance. “My father was a kindly man, your grace. A merchant who dealt in hides and dried beef, in Tolaghai city. It would never have entered my mind—”

“It entered mine, a thousand times a day. If my father were still alive now I’d put this helmet on and try to kill him with it right now.”

Barjazid was too astounded to answer. He and Halefice were both peering at him strangely.

Mandralisca had never spoken of these things with anyone. But those few seconds of using the Barjazid helmet had opened something in his soul, apparently.

“He was a merchant too,” he said. He looked straight out into the river gorge, and the hated past swam before his eyes. “In Ibykos, which is a muddy trifling little town in the scarp country of the Gonghars, a hundred miles west of Velathys. It rains there all summer and snows all winter. He dealt in wines and brandies, and was his own best customer, and when he was drunk, as almost always he was, he would hit you just as readily as look at you. That was how he talked to you, with his hands. It was in my boyhood that I learned to move as quickly as I do. To jump back fast—out of his reach.”

Even after nearly forty years Mandralisca could see that grim face, so much now like his own, in the eye of his mind. The long lean jaw, the clamped lips, the black scowl, the gathering brow; and the merciless hand flashing out, swift as a pungatan-whip, to split your lip or swell your cheek or blacken your eye. Sometimes the beatings had gone on and on and on, for the slightest of reasons, or for no reason at all. Mandralisca barely could summon up a recollection of his pallid, timid mother, but the monstrous brutal irascible father still rose like a mountain in his memory. Year after year of that, the curses, the backhand slaps, the sudden pokes and jabs and smacks, not only from him but from the other three too, his older brothers, who imitated their father by hitting anyone smaller than themselves. There had never been a day without its bruise, without its little ration of pain and humiliation.

He shut his fist on the helmet, squeezing it tight.

“Each night I sent myself to sleep by imagining I had murdered him that day. A knife in the gut, or poisoned wine, or a trip-wire in the dark and a hidden noose, I slew him fifty different ways. Until the day I told him out loud that I would do it if I got the chance, and I thought he was going to kill me there on the spot. But I was too fast for him, and when he had chased me from one end of the town to the other he gave up, warning me that he’d break me in half the next time he got his hands on me. But there never was a next time. A carter came by who was setting forth to Velathys, and he gave me a ride, and I have not seen the Gonghars since. I learned many years later that my father died in a brawl with a drunken patron in his shop. My brothers too are dead, I believe. Or so do I profoundly hope.”

“Did you go straight into the service of Dantirya Sambail, then?” Halefice asked him.

“Not then, no.” His tongue was loose, now. His face felt strangely flushed. “I went first to the western lands, to Narabal in the south, on the coast—I wanted to be warm, I wanted never to see snow again—and then to Til-omon, and Dulorn of the Ghayrogs, and many another place, until I found myself in Ni-moya and the Procurator chose me to be his cupbearer. I was in his bodyguard then, and he saw me at a demonstration of the batons—I am quick with the singlesticks, you know, quick with any sort of duelling weapon—and he called me out to talk with me after I had beaten six of his guardsmen in a row. And said to me, ‘I need a cupbearer, Mandralisca. Will you have the job?’ ”

“One did not refuse a man like Dantirya Sambail,” said Halefice piously.

“Why would I have refused? Did I think the task was beneath me? I was a country boy, Jacomin. He was the master of Zimroel; and I would stand at his side and hand him his wine, which meant I would be in his presence constantly. When he met with the great ones of the world, the dukes and counts and mayors, or even the Coronals and Pontifexes, I would be there.”

“And did you become his poison-taster then, also?”

“That came later. There was a whispered tale, that season, that the Procurator would be done to death by one of the sons of his cousin, who had been regent in Zimroel when Dantira Sambail was young, and had been put aside by him. It would be by poison, they said, poison in his wine. This talk came to the Procurator’s own ear; and when I handed him his wine-bowl the next time, he looked into it and then at me, and I knew he mistrusted it. So I said, by my own free will, because I mattered not at all to myself and he mattered a great deal, ‘Let me taste it first, milord Procurator, for safety’s sake.’ I have no liking for wine, on account of my father, you understand. But I tasted it, while Dantira Sambail watched, and we waited, and I did not fall down dead. And after that I tasted his wine with every bowl, to the end of his days. It was our custom, even though there were never any threats against him ever again. It was a bond between us, that I would sip a bit of his wine before I gave him the bowl. That is the only wine I have ever had, the wine I tasted on behalf of Dantirya Sambail.”

“You weren’t afraid?” asked Khaymak Barjazid.

Mandralisca turned to him with a scornful grin. “If I had died, what would that have mattered to me? It was a chance worth the taking. Was the life I was leading so precious to me that I would not risk it for the sake of becoming Dantirya Sambail’s companion? Is being alive such a sweet wondrous thing, that we should cling to it like misers clutching their bags of royals? I have never found it so.—In any case there was no poison in the wine, then or ever, obviously. And I was at his side forever after.”

If he had ever loved anyone, Mandralisca thought, that person was Dantirya Sambail. It was as if they shared a single spirit divided into two bodies. Though the Procurator had already managed to bring the entirety of Zimroel into his power before Mandralisca entered his service, it was Mandralisca who had spurred him on to the far greater enterprise of encouraging Confalume’s son Korsibar to seize the throne of Majipoor. With Korsibar as Coronal, and indebted to Dantirya Sambail for his crown, Dantirya Sambail would have been the most powerful figure in the world.

Well, it had not worked out, and both Korsibar and the Procurator were long gone. Dantirya Sambail had played and lost, and that was that. But for Mandralisca there were other games yet to play. He gently stroked the helmet in his hand.

Other games to play, yes. That was all existence was, really: a game. He alone had seen the truth of that, the thing that others failed to realize. You lived for a time, you played the game of life, ultimately you lost, and then there was nothing. But while you played, you played to win. Great wealth, fine possessions, grand palaces, feasting and the pleasures of the flesh and all of that, those things meant nothing to him, and less than nothing. They were only tokens of how well you had played; they had no merit in and of themselves. Even the wielding of power itself was a secondary thing, a means rather than an end.

All that mattered was winning, he thought, for as long as you could manage it. To play and to win, until the time came when, inevitably, you lost. And if it had meant risking the chance of drinking poison that was meant for the Procurator, if that was the price of entering the game, why, surely the risk was worth the reward! Let other men wear the crowns and hoard up great stockpiles of treasure. Let other men surround themselves with simpering women and drink themselves blind with tingling wine. Those were not things that he needed. When he was a boy, everything that had been of any importance to him was denied to him, and he had learned to live with nothing whatsoever. Now there was very little that he wanted, except to see to it that no one could ever again place himself in a position to deny him anything.

Barjazid was staring at him again as though reading his mind. Mandralisca saw that he had, once again, revealed too much of himself. Anger rose in him. This was a weakness he had never indulged in before. He had said enough, and more than enough.

Swinging abruptly around, he said, “Let’s go back to my chamber.”

If I ever catch him using his helmet on me, Mandralisca told himself, I will take him out into the desert and stake him down between two pungatans.

“I will try this toy of yours again, I think,” he said to Barjazid, and quickly slipped the helmet over his brow, and felt its force seize hold of him; and he sent his mind soaring forth until it made contact with another, not troubling to determine whether it belonged to a human or a Ghayrog, a Skandar or a Liiman. Probed it for a point of entry. Entered it, then, piercing it like a sword. Slashed it. Left it in ruins. Mastery. Ecstasy.

3

Dekkeret said, “So this is the imperial throne-chamber! I’ve always wondered what it was like.”

Prestimion made a flamboyantly grandiose gesture. “Take a good look. It’ll be yours someday.”

With a rueful smile Dekkeret said, “Have mercy, my lord! I’m barely accustomed to wearing a Coronal’s robes and here you are already opening the doors of the Labyrinth for me!”

“I see you still call me ‘my lord.’ That title is yours now, my lord. I am ‘your majesty.’ ”

“Yes, your majesty.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

Neither man made any attempt to smother his laughter. This was their first formal meeting as Pontifex and Coronal, and neither of them could deal with the magnitude of that fact without a certain leavening of amusement.

They were in the uttermost level of the Labyrinth, the site of the Pontifex’s private residence and of the great public chambers of the imperial branch of the monarchy, the throne-chamber and the Great Hall of the Pontifex and the Court of Thrones and the rest. Dekkeret had arrived at the subterranean capital late the previous evening. He had never had reason to go to the Labyrinth before, though he had heard tales of it all his life: the grimness of it, the airlessness, the sense that it gave you of being cut off from all life and nature, condemned to live down deep, out of sight of the world, in a realm of eternal night lit by harsh, glittering lamps.

At first view, though, the place struck him as far less forbidding than he had anticipated. The upper rings had the rich, bustling vitality of a mighty metropolis, which was, after all, what the Labyrinth in fact was: the capital of the world. And then there were the architectural wonders deeper down, the myriad strangenesses with which ten thousand years of Pontifexes had bedecked their city. Finally, there was the grandeur and richness of the imperial sector itself, where such magnificence had been lavished that even the opulence of the Castle was put in the shade.

Dekkeret had spent the night in the chambers reserved for Coronals during their visits to the court of the senior monarch. It was the first time he had occupied any of the Coronal’s residences anywhere. He had halted a moment, struck by awe at the sight of the great door to the suite that now was his, with its intricate carvings and the swirling starburst symbols done in gold and the royal monogram repeated again and again, LPC, LPC, LPC, Lord Prestimion Coronal, which soon would be replaced by the LDC of his own ascension. Only one step remained for that. He had been proclaimed by Prestimion, and he had been confirmed by the Council; now he needed only to return to the Castle for his coronation ceremony. But the funeral of Confalume and the coronation of the new Pontifex must take precedence over that.

The new Pontifex had already gone through the ancient rite of taking possession of his new home. Since Prestimion had already been traveling on the Glayge when the news had come to him of Confalume’s death, he had returned to the Labyrinth by the river route; but instead of entering the capital by way of the Mouth of Waters, the customary entrance from the Glayge, he was required by tradition this time to go entirely around the city to the far side, the one that faced the southern desert, and come in via the much less congenial Mouth of Blades.

That was simply a stark gaping hole in the desert floor, walled about with bare timbers to keep the drifting sands from filling it in. Across the front of it was a row of antique rusted swords, said to be thousands of years old, set tip-upward in a matrix of concrete. Behind that unwelcoming entrance waited the seven masked guardians of the Labyrinth—by custom, two Hjorts, a Ghayrog, a Skandar, and even a Liiman were included among them—who soberly went through the ritual of inquiring after Prestimion’s business in this place, ostentatiously conferred among themselves to decide whether to let him in, and then demanded from him the traditional entry-offering, which had to be something of his own choice. Prestimion had brought with him the cloak that the people of Gamarkaim had sent to him as a coronation gift when he became Coronal, woven of the cobalt-blue feathers of giant fire-beetles and said to give its wearer protection against harm from flame. By surrendering it here, to be housed forever in the museum where such gifts were kept, he was declaring that in the Labyrinth he would always be safe from every external menace.

Then he entered; and custom now obliged him to descend through each of the levels of the spiraling city on foot. That was no small journey. Varaile walked beside him all the way, and his three sons and his daughter, though the Lady Tuanelys, too young to keep pace, was borne on a Skandar guard’s back for much of the distance. At each stage great crowds gathered around him, tracing the Labyrinth symbol in the air with their fingertips and crying out his new name: “Prestimion Pontifex! Prestimion Pontifex!” He was Lord Prestimion no longer.

Meanwhile his succession to the senior throne had been proclaimed at each of the levels below, first at the Court of Columns, then in the Place of Masks, and then the Hall of Winds, the Court of Pyramids, and upward as far as the Mouth of Blades. So when he reached each of these places it was already consecrated to his reign. And at last Prestimion came to the imperial sector, where he knelt first beside the embalmed body of his predecessor Confalume where it lay in state on the dais of the Court of Thrones, and then went to his own new dwelling-place, and there received from the High Spokesman of the Pontificate the spiral emblem of his office and the scarlet-and-black robes. The rest could not be done until Dekkeret arrived.

And now Dekkeret had come. The age-old custom called for Prestimion to receive the new Coronal in the imperial throne-chamber. And so the High Spokesman Haskelorn called on Dekkeret at the Coronal’s suite the morning after his arrival, and they rode together in a small floater through the long and winding passages of the imperial sector down an ever-narrowing tunnel to a point where not even the little vehicle could enter. Walking side by side, now, they advanced through a passageway that was sealed every fifty feet by bronze doors, until they came to the final door, emblazoned with the Labyrinth sign and the newly inscribed monogram of Prestimion Pontifex where Confalume’s had been only hours before. Old Haskelorn touched his palm to the monogram and the door swung open and there stood Prestimion, smiling.

“Leave us,” he said to Haskelorn. “This meeting involves just the two of us.”

Prestimion showed Dekkeret the throne-chamber itself, first.

It was a great globe of a room, its curving sides covered from floor to ceiling with smooth, gleaming yellow-brown tiles that seemed to burn with an inner light of their own. But the throne-chamber’s only illumination came from a single massive glowfloat that hovered in midair and emitted a steady ruby luminosity. Directly below it stood the Pontifical throne, on a platform reached by three broad steps: an enormous high-backed chair with long, slender legs that were tipped with fierce claws, so that they seemed like those of some giant bird. It was entirely covered over with sheets of gold, or, perhaps, for all Dekkeret could tell, made of one solid mass of the priceless metal. Amid the simplicity of the huge room the throne itself blazed with a dreadful power.

One might easily think Confalume had designed this chamber, since it was the Labyrinth’s counterpart of the resplendent throne-room that Confalume had built for himself at the Castle when he was Coronal. But this room was not Confalume’s work. It bore no sign of the late monarch’s taste for baroque extravagance of style. The throne-chamber of the Labyrinth was a room so ancient that no one quite knew who had built it: the common belief was that it went back to a time even before the reign of Stiamot.

The effect was awe-inspiring and somehow preposterous at one and the same time.

“What do you think?” Prestimion asked.

Dekkeret had to fight back more giggles. “It’s extremely—majestic, I’d say. Majestic, that’s the word. Confalume must have loved it. You aren’t really going to use it, are you?”

“I have to,” Prestimion said. “For certain high functions and sacred ceremonies. Haskelorn’s going to draw up a guidebook for me. We have to take these things seriously, Dekkeret.”

“Yes. I suppose we do. I noticed long ago how seriously you take the Confalume Throne. How many times have I seen you sitting in it, over the years—five? Eight?”

Prestimion looked a bit ruffled. “I took the Confalume Throne very seriously indeed. It is the symbol of the Coronal’s grandeur and power. A little too grand for my own private tastes, which is why I preferred to use the old Stiamot throne-room most of the time. I would never have built a thing like the Confalume Throne, Dekkeret. But that doesn’t mean I underestimate its importance in sustaining the power and majesty of the government. Neither should you.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that I would. Only that when I think of you sitting here on this great golden chair, and me up there at the Castle atop old Confalume’s big block of opal—” He shook his head. “By the Divine, Prestimion, we’re just men, men whose bladders ache when we go too long without pissing and whose stomachs growl when we don’t get fed on time.”

Quietly Prestimion said, “Yes, we are that. But also we are Powers of the Realm, two of the three. I am this world’s emperor, and you are its king, and to the fifteen billion people over whom we rule we are the embodiment of all that is sacred here. And so they put us up on these gaudy thrones and bow down to us, and who are we to say no to that, if it makes our job of running this immense planet any easier? Think of them, Dekkeret, whenever you find yourself performing some absurd ritual or clambering up onto some overdecorated seat. We are not provincial justices of the peace, you know. We are the essential mainsprings of the world.” Then, as if realizing that his tone had grown too sharp, Prestimion grinned broadly. “We, and the fifty million unimportant public officials who actually have the job of doing all the things that we in our grandeur command them to do.—Come, let me show you the rest of this place.”

It was an extensive tour. Prestimion led him along quickly. Though Dekkeret’s legs were considerably longer than Prestimion’s, he was hard-pressed to keep up with the older man, who set a pace that was in keeping with the lifelong restlessness and impulsiveness of his nature.

They went first through a concealed door at the rear of the throne-chamber, and then down a long hallway into the vast dark space known as the Court of Thrones, where somber walls of black stone swept together high overhead to meet in pointed arches. The only light within the Court of Thrones was provided by half a dozen wax tapers along the walls, set far apart in sconces shaped like upstretched hands. The two large thrones of red gamba-wood that gave the room its name, not so numbingly grand as the one in the throne-chamber but imposing enough in their own way, rose side by side on stepped platforms at the rear of the room. One bore the starburst symbol of the Coronal, and the other, the greater one, the spiraling maze that was the Pontifical sign.

Shuddering, Dekkeret said, “It appears more fit to be a torture-chamber than a throne-room, if you ask me.”

“In truth I do agree. I have no good memories of this room: it is the place where Korsibar’s sorcerers bamboozled us all, and as we stood stunned by their magic he seized the crown and put it on his own head. I wince even now, whenever I come in here.”

“It never happened, Prestimion. Ask anyone, and that’s what they’ll tell you. The whole episode is gone from everyone’s mind. You should thrust it out of yours.”

“Would that I could. But I find that some painful memories don’t want to fade. For me it’s still quite real.” Prestimion ran his hand uneasily through his thin, soft golden hair. His expression was bleak. He seemed to be wrenching himself by sheer force of will away from that moment of the past.—“Well, there is where we will sit, the two of us, a couple of days from now, and I’ll put the crown on you myself.”

“I should take this opportunity to tell you,” said Dekkeret, “that once I am on the throne I plan to ask your brother Teotas to be my High Counsellor.”

“You say it as if you’re asking my permission. The Coronal chooses whomever he wishes for that post, Dekkeret.” There was a certain brusqueness in Prestimion’s tone.

“You know him better than anyone in the world. If you think there’s some flaw in him that I’ve overlooked—”

“He has a very short temper,” Prestimion said. “But that’s not a flaw anyone who spends five minutes in his company could possibly overlook. Other than that, he’s perfect. A wise choice, Dekkeret. I approve. He’ll serve you well. That is what you wanted me to say, isn’t it?” It was clear from his impatience with this discussion that Prestimion had other things on his mind. Or perhaps merely wanted to conceal the pleasure he felt at having so great an honor descend on his brother.—“Look here, now. There’s something else in here for you to see.”

Dekkeret followed Prestimion through the shadows to an alcove on the left, in which he perceived a sort of altar covered with white damask, and then, as he went closer, a figure lying atop it, facing upward, hands clasped across his breast.

“Confalume,” said Prestimion in the lowest of tones. “Lying in the place where I’ll lie myself, twenty or forty years from now, and you yourself will be, twenty or forty years after that. They’ve embalmed him to last a hundred centuries or more. There’s a secret vault in the Labyrinth where the last fifty Pontifexes are buried—did you know that, Dekkeret? No. Neither did I. A long, long line of imperial tombs, each with its own little marker. Tomorrow we put Confalume in his.”

Prestimion knelt and pressed his forehead reverently against the side of the altar. Dekkeret, after a moment, did the same.

“I met him once when I was a boy: did I ever tell you that?” Dekkeret said, when they had risen. “I was nine. It was in Bombifale. We were there because my father was showing samples of his goods—agricultural machinery, I think, is what he was dealing in then—to the manager of Admiral Gonivaul’s estate, and Lord Confalume was Gonivaul’s guest at the same time. I saw them go out riding together in Gonivaul’s big floater. They went right past me in the road, and I waved, and Confalume smiled and waved back. Just the sight of him made me tremble. He seemed so strong, Prestimion, so radiant—practically godlike. That smile of his: the warmth, the power of it. It’s a moment I’ll never forget. And then, that afternoon, I went with my father to Bombifale Palace, and the Coronal was holding court, and once again he smiled at me—”

He broke off his story and looked toward the still, shrouded figure lying there atop the altar. It was not easy to accept the fact that a monarch of so much force and grandeur could have vanished from the world between one moment and the next, leaving only this husk behind.

Prestimion said, “He may have been the greatest of them all. Flawed, yes. His vanity, his love of luxury, his weakness for wizards and soothsayers. But what trifling faults those were, and how wonderful his accomplishments! Guiding the world for sixty years—the heroic power of him—as you say, almost godlike. History will be very kind to him. Let’s hope we’re remembered half as warmly as he will be, Dekkeret.”

“Yes. I pray that we are.”

Prestimion began to move toward the exit of the great hall. But as he reached the door he halted and once more indicated the two thrones, the entire length of the room away, with a quick taut nod, and then looked back at the alcove where the dead Pontifex lay. “The single worst moment of his reign took place over there, right in front of those thrones, when Korsibar grabbed the starburst crown.” Dekkeret followed

Prestimion’s pointing arm. “I was looking straight at Confalume, just then. He seemed numb. Staggered by it—broken, shattered. They had to take him by the elbows and lead him up the steps and seat him on the Pontifical throne, with his son sitting up there beside him. There. Those very thrones.”

All so long ago, Dekkeret thought. Ancient history, buried and forgotten by all the world. Except Prestimion, it seemed.

Who was caught up now in the grip of his own tale. “I had an audience with Confalume a day or two later, and he still appeared to be dazed by the thing that Korsibar had done. He seemed old—weak—beaten. I was furious at having been done out of the throne, and that he had acquiesced in the theft; yet, seeing him in that state, I could only feel compassion for him. I asked him to call out the troops against the usurper, and I thought he was going to weep, because I was asking him to launch a war against his own son. He would not do it, of course. He told me that he agreed that I was the one who should have been Coronal, but that now he had no other path but to accept Korsibar’s coup. He begged me for mercy! Mercy, Dekkeret! And out of pity for him I went away without pressing him further.” There was a sudden startling look of torment in Prestimion’s eyes. “To see that great man in ruins, like that, Dekkeret—that this was mighty Confalume with whom I was speaking, now only the pathetic shadow of a king—”

So he will not let go of it, Dekkeret thought: the usurpation and all its consequences still resonated in Prestimion’s spirit down to this very moment.

“What an awful thing that must have been to witness,” he said, since he felt he must say something, as they emerged into the vestibule.

“It was an agony for me. And for Confalume also, I would think.—Well, eventually my sorcerers carved all memory of Korsibar’s little bit of mischief from his mind, and from everyone else’s as well, and he returned to being his old self and lived on happily for many years thereafter. But I still carry the memory of it in my soul. If only I could have forgotten it too!”

“There are certain painful memories that don’t want to fade, is what you told me only a minute ago.”

“True enough.”

Dekkeret realized in dismay that a painful memory of his own had unexpectedly begun to stir in him. He tried to push it back down into the place from which it had come. But it would not be pushed.

Prestimion, seeming more cheerful now, opened another door. A giant Skandar guard stood just within. Prestimion waved him aside. “Beyond here,” he said, in an easier tone, “the private dwelling of the Pontifex begins. It goes on and on: dozens of rooms, three score of them, at least. I still haven’t been all the way through the whole place. Confalume’s collections are here, do you see?—all his toys of magic, his paintings and statues, the prehistoric artifacts, the ancient coins, the stuffed birds and mounted bugs. The man scooped up every manner of thing with both hands throughout his life, and here it all is. He’s left everything to the nation. We’ll give him an entire wing in the new Archive building at the Castle. Look—here, do you see this, Dekkeret—?”

Dekkeret, who was barely paying attention, said, “I also have an unpleasant memory that refuses to fade.”

“And what is that?” Prestimion asked. He seemed disconcerted by the interruption.

“You were there when it happened. That day in Normork when the madman tried to assassinate you, and my cousin Sithelle was killed instead—?”

“Ah. Yes,” said Prestimion, sounding a little vague, as though he had not given the incident a moment’s thought in twenty years. “That lovely girl. Yes. Of course.”

It all came rushing back yet again. “I carried her through the streets, bleeding all over me, dead in my arms. The worst moment of my life, bar none. The blood. That pale face, those staring eyes. And later in the day they brought me before you, because I had saved your life, and you rewarded me with a knight-initiate’s post, and everything began for me in that moment. I was just eighteen. But I’ve never fully been able to break free of the pain of Sithelle’s death. Not really. It was only after she was dead that I realized how much I loved her.” Dekkeret hesitated. He was not sure, even after having gone this far, that he wanted to share this with Prestimion, for all that the older man had been his guide and mentor these nearly twenty years. But then the words came surging forth as if by their own volition: “Do you know, Prestimion, I think that it’s on account of Sithelle that I took up with Fulkari? I think I was drawn to her at the outset, and am held by her still, because when I look at her I see Sithelle.”

Prestimion still did not appear to comprehend the depth of his feelings. To him this was just so much conversation. “You think so, do you? How interesting, that the resemblance should be so strong.” He did not sound interested in the slightest. “But of course I’m in no position to know. I saw your cousin only that once, and for just an instant. It was a long time ago—everything was happening so quickly—”

“Yes. How could you possibly remember? But if there were some way of standing them next to each other, I know you’d think that they must be sisters. To me, Fulkari looks more like Sithelle than she does her own actual sister. And so—the root of my obsession with her—”

“Obsession?” Prestimion blinked in surprise. “Wait, there! I thought you were in love with her, Dekkeret. Obsession is something else again, something not quite as pretty and pure. Or are you telling me that you think the two terms are synonymous?”

“They can be, yes. Yes. And in this case I know that they are.” There was no turning back from this, now. “I swear it, Prestimion, the thing that drew me to Fulkari was her resemblance to Sithelle, and nothing else. I knew nothing about her. I had never spoken a word with her. But I saw her, and I thought, There she is, restored to me, and it was like a trap closing on me. A trap that I had set for myself.”

“Then you don’t love her? You’ve simply been using her as a surrogate for someone you lost long ago?”

Dekkeret shook his head. “I don’t want to think that’s true. I do love her, yes. But it’s very clear that she’s the wrong woman for me. Yet I stay with her even so, because being with her seems to call Sithelle back into life. Which is no reason at all. I’ve got to get free of this, Prestimion!”

Prestimion seemed puzzled. “The wrong woman for you? Wrong in what way?”

“She doesn’t want to be a Coronal’s consort. The whole idea of it terrifies her—the duties, the demands on my time and hers—”

“She told you this?”

“In just so many words. I asked her to marry me, and she said she would, but only if I didn’t let myself be made Coronal.”

“This is astounding, Dekkeret. Not only do you love her for the wrong reasons, you say, but she’s not suited to be your queen in any case—and yet you refuse to break with her? You have to, man.”

“I know. But I can’t find the strength.”

“Because of your memories of your lost Sithelle.”

“Yes.”

“These confusions of yours add up to a very unhealthy business, Dekkeret. They are two different people, Sithelle and Fulkari.” Prestimion’s voice was stern, and as close to fatherly as Dekkeret had ever heard it sound. “Sithelle’s gone forever. There’s no way that Fulkari can be Sithelle for you. Put that out of your mind. And she’s not even a good choice for a wife on her own terms, it seems.”

“What am I supposed to do, though?”

“Part with her. A complete break.” Prestimion’s words fell upon him like boulders. “There are plenty of other women at this court who’ll be glad to keep company with you until you decide you want to marry. But this relationship is one that has to be severed. You should thank the Divine that Fulkari refused you. She’s obviously not right for you. And it makes no sense to marry a woman simply because she reminds you of someone else.’’

“Don’t you think I know that? I do. I do. And yet—”

“Yet you can’t free yourself of this obsession with her.”

Dekkeret looked away. This was becoming shameful, now. He had diminished himself woefully in Prestimion’s eyes, he knew. In a small and very unkingly voice he said, “No. I can’t. And you can’t possibly comprehend it, can you, Prestimion?”

“On the contrary. I think I can.”

There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment or two. All this while they had continued to walk between the rows of Confalume’s showcases of treasures, but neither of them was looking at anything.

In a different, more intimate tone, Prestimion said, “I can understand how the line between love and obsession can become blurred. There was a woman in my life once also, whom I loved and who was taken from me by violence—Confalume’s daughter, she was, the twin sister of Korsibar—it’s a long story, a very long story—” Prestimion seemed to be having trouble finding the words. “She was killed in the last hour of the civil war, slain right on the battlefield by Korsibar’s treacherous magus. I mourned her for years, and then, more or less, I put her behind me. Or thought I did. In time I found Varaile, who is right for me in every respect, and all was well. Except that Thismet—that was her name, Thismet—haunts me still. Hardly a month goes by when I don’t dream of her. And wake up in a cold sweat, bellowing in pain. I have never told Varaile why that is. No one has any knowledge of this. No one except you, now.”

Dekkeret had not expected any such confession. It was an astonishing thing. “We all have our ghosts, I see. Who will not quit their hold on our souls, no matter how many years may go by.”

“Yes. I thank you for sharing these private things with me, Dekkeret.”

“You don’t think the less of me for all that I’ve said?”

“Why would I? You’re human, aren’t you? We don’t expect our Coronals to be perfect in every regard. We’d put marble statues on the throne instead, if we did. And this suffering of yours can be healed, perhaps. I could have Maundigand-Klimd try to cleanse your mind of all memory of your dead cousin.”

“The same way he’s cleansed yours of Thismet?” responded Dekkeret sharply, without a moment’s pause.

Prestimion gave him a startled look. Dekkeret realized that in the depths of his shame he had suddenly felt impelled to strike back at the very man who was striving to ease his pain, and his hasty words had been hurtful ones.

“Forgive me. It was a wicked thing to say.”

“No, Dekkeret. It was a truthful thing to say. You were well within your rights to say it.” Prestimion made as if to slip his arm around Dekkeret’s shoulders, but the younger man was too tall for that. He took Dekkeret lightly by the wrist instead. “This has been a valuable conversation: one of the most important you and I have ever had. I know you much better now than ever I did before, in all these years.”

“And do you think that a man who carries a burden of this sort is worthy of being Coronal?”

“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that, I think.”

“Thank you, Prestimion.”

“And my remark a moment ago, about Maundigand-Klimd—obviously it upset you. I’m sorry for that. As you say, we all have our ghosts. And perhaps it is true that we’re condemned to carry them around with us to the end of our days. But I meant only that your memories of your dead cousin seem to be causing you great pain, and you have a world to govern, and a consort to choose, and much else facing you now, for which you’ll need the full powers of your spirit, without distraction. I think that perhaps Maundigand-Klimd could heal you of your loss. But you may very well not want to surrender your memories of Sithelle despite all the pain they cause you—just as I, I suppose, want to cling to what remains to me of Thismet. So let’s say no more of this, eh? I’m confident that you’ll heal yourself in your own way. And will deal properly with this matter of Fulkari, too.”

“I hope so.”

“You will. You’re a king now. Indecision is a luxury allowed only to the common folk.”

“I was one of those, once,” said Dekkeret. “It’s not something one ever fully escapes.” Then he smiled. “But you’re right: now I must learn to be a king. That’s a subject I fear I’ll spend the rest of my life studyⁱⁿg.”

“So you will, and you’ll never feel you’ve mastered it all. Don’t let that worry you. I felt the same way, and Confalume before me, and Prankipin, very likely, as well, and so on and so on back to Stiamot and the kings who came before him. It’s a thing that goes with the job. We are all common folk, Dekkeret, under our crowns and robes. The test for us is how well we rise above that. But you’ll have me to call on, when doubts arise.”

“I know that, Prestimion. I give thanks daily for that.”

“And also I’ve arranged that you’ll have my chamberlain Zeldor Luudwid for your own, when you get back to the Castle. He knows more about how to behave like a Coronal than I do myself. If there’s a problem, simply ask him. He’s yours as my gift.”

“Thank you—your majesty.”

“Say nothing of it—my lord.”

4

“Even a self-maintaining garden needs a certain degree of maintenance,” Dumafice Moal told his visiting nephew, as they set out together into the uppermost terrace of the magnificent park that Lord Havilbove had laid out three thousand years before. “Hence my continuing employment, dear nephew. If the park were as really perfect as people commonly believed, I’d be selling sausages in the streets of Dundilmir this day.”

The garden sprawled for forty miles along the lower slopes of Castle Mount. It began at Bibiroon Sweep, below the city of Bibiroon in the Free Cities ring, and angled down the Mount in a broad eastward-reaching curve toward the uppermost cities of the Slope Cities group, approaching at its downslope end the cities of Kazkas, Stipool, and Dundilmir. The site that the garden occupied was known as Tolingar Barrier, though nowadays it was a barrier no longer. Once it had been an almost impenetrable zone of black sharp-edged spiky hillocks, the outcropping remnants of a million-year-old flow of lava from some volcanic vein deep within the Mount. But the Coronal Lord Havilbove, who had devoted much of his reign to the construction of this garden, had had the lava hills of Tolingar Barrier ground down to fine black sand, which proved a fertile soil for the great garden that would be planted there.

Lord Havilbove, a native of the lowland city of Palaghat in the Glayge Valley, was a fastidious and orderly man who loved plants of all kinds but disliked the ease with which even the finest of gardens quickly became unruly and departed from its plan if not given constant finicky care. Therefore, while his platoons of brawny laborers were toiling to pulverize the lava beds of Tolingar Barrier, craftsmen in the workshops of the Castle were striving, through experiments in controlled breeding, to create plants and shrubs and trees that needed no touch of a gardener’s shears to maintain their graceful forms.

It was a time when the science of such biological miracles was still understood on Majipoor. The efforts of Lord Havilbove’s technicians met with gratifying success. The plants intended for his garden achieved a perfect symmetry as they grew, and when they reached a size that was appropriate in relationship to the plants about them, they held that size ever after.

Superfluous leaves and even whole unnecessary boughs dropped away automatically, and quickly crumbled into a compost that enhanced the fertility of the lava soil. Enzymes in their roots suppressed the growth of weeds. Every plant bore flowers, but the seeds that those flowers produced were sterile; only when a plant reached the natural end of its life cycle did it bring forth fertile ones, so that it could replace itself with another that soon would have the same size and form. Thus the garden remained in unchanging balance.

Whenever he learned of a beautiful tree or shrub anywhere in the world, Lord Havilbove sent for specimens of it, with roots and soil attached, and gave them to the genetic surgeons of the Castle so that they could be modified for self-maintenance. Truckloads of bright-hued ornamental minerals came to the garden also—the yellowish-green stone known as chrysocolla, and the blue one called heart-of-azure, and red cinnabar, and golden crusca, and dozens more. Each of these was used as a ground cover in a different level of the garden, the differing colors being deployed by Havilbove with a painter’s eye, so that as one stood upon the peak at Bibiroon Sweep and looked down over the entirety of the garden one saw a great splash of pale crimson here, and one of vivid yellow there, and zones of scarlet, and blue, and green, all of them with plantings complementary to the color of the ground.

Lord Havilbove’s successor, Lord Kanaba, was equally devoted to the garden, and Lord Sirruth, who came after him, was sympathetic enough to it to keep its staff in place and even expand its budget. Then came the Coronal Lord Thraym, who was at first preoccupied with ambitious building projects of his own at the Castle, but who was smitten with love for Lord Havilbove’s garden upon his first visit there. He saw to it that funds were provided to carry it to its final state of perfection. Thus it took a century or more to bring the great garden into being; but then it remained ever after as one of the treasures of the Mount, a famed sight that every inhabitant of Majipoor yearned to have the privilege of beholding at least once.

Dumafice Moal had been born in Dundilmir, just downslope from the garden’s lower tip, and from boyhood on he visited it at every opportunity he had. He never doubted that it was his destiny to be part of the garden’s staff; and now, at the age of sixty, he had more than forty years of devoted service behind him.

Self-maintaining though the garden was, it nevertheless required a staff of considerable size. Millions of people visited the garden every year; a certain amount of damage was unavoidable; paths and fountains had to be repaired, ornamental plazas tidied, stolen plants replaced. Nor was the garden safe from marauding animals that came in from outside. There was plenty of open space on Castle Mount in the districts between the Fifty Cities, where wild creatures still thrived. The forested slopes of the Mount teemed with beasts of many kinds, from hryssa-wolves and jakkaboles and slinking long-fanged noomanossi to such lesser creatures as sigimoins and mintuns and beady-eyed droles. Jakkaboles and hryssa-wolves, dangerous things that they were, posed no threat to the elegant plantings. But a pack of little burrowing droles, poking their long toothy snouts into the ground in search of grubs, could uproot an entire bed of eldirons or tanigales between midnight and dawn. An infestation of tentworms could spread ugly canopies of coarse silk over half a mile of blooming thwales and swiftly reduce the plants to naked stubs. A flock of hungry vulgises settling in the treetops to build their nests—or a swarm of ganganels—spotted cujus—

So it was Dumafice Moal’s daily task to patrol the garden from sunrise onward, searching out the enemies of the plants. It was constant warfare. For a weapon he carried a long-handled energy-thrower, tuned to its lowest power; and when he came upon some work of destruction in progress, he would apply just enough heat to drive out the forces of destruction without damaging the plantings themselves.

“Often it starts very inconspicuously,” he told his nephew. “A trace of upturned soil leads you to a tiny parade of little red insects, and if you follow along it you discover a small mound, something that a visitor wouldn’t give a second look to—but those of us who know what to look for understand that these are the hatchlings of the harpilan beetle, which, if left to its own devices for long, will—ah—see here, boy—”

He poked at the border of a row of Bailemoona khemibors with the tip of his energy-thrower. “Do you see it, Theriax—right there—?”

The boy shook his head. The boy, Dumafice Moal was beginning to believe, was not particularly observant.

He was his youngest sister’s child, from Canzilaine, virtually at the foot of the Mount. Dumafice Moal himself had never married—his devotion was to the garden—but he came from a large family, brothers and sisters and cousins scattered from Bibiroon and Sikkal down the Mount to Amblemorn, Dundilmir, and several other of the Slope Cities. From time to time some relative of his would come to see the garden. Dumafice Moal liked to take them on private tours, early in the day before the gates were open to the public, while he was making his morning rounds.

The khemibors were a southern species with bright blue flowers and glossy leaves of the same color, and they had been planted in beds of vivid orange rock, to wondrous visual effect. Dumafice Moal’s practiced eye had noted a certain dulling of the gleaming surfaces of the leaves of the plants closest to the path: a sure sign that himmis-bugs had taken up residence on their undersides. He slipped his energy-thrower under the nearest row, checking its adjustment slide carefully to make certain that the power was switched to the lowest level.

“Himmis-bugs,” he said, pointing. “We used to spray for them, but it never did much good. So we cook them instead. Watch how I proceed to make things hot for the little vermin.”

Just as he began to move the long rod about, a curious sensation at the back of his skull started to afflict him.

It was a very odd thing. It was somewhat like an itch, though not quite. He felt a mild warmth back there, and then something not so mild. A sharp stinging pain, then, as if some disagreeable insect were attacking him. But when he brushed the back of his head with his free hand he detected nothing.

He continued to prod the soil beneath the khemibors with his energy-thrower. The stinging sensation grew more intense. It became a fierce burning feeling now, highly localized—like a hot beam of light focused on a single point of his head, drilling, trying to cut its way through—

“Theriax?” he said, lurching, nearly falling.

“Uncle? Are you all right?”

The boy reached out to steady him. Dumafice Moal shrugged him away. He was beginning to feel a different sort of pain: an inward one, a bewildering distress that he could only describe to himself as a pain of the soul. A sense of his own inadequacy, of having performed his lifelong tasks poorly, of having failed the garden.

How odd, he thought. I always worked so hard.

But there was no hiding from the feeling of shame that now was pervading every corner of his spirit. It engulfed him entirely; he was sinking into it as into a dark deep pit, an abyss of guilt.

“Uncle?” the boy said, from very far away. “Uncle, I think you may be burning the—”

“Hush. Let me be.”

He saw only too clearly how poorly he had done his work. The garden was hopelessly infested with ravenous enemies. Pests of all sorts lurked everywhere: blights, molds, rusts, murrains, chewing creatures, sucking creatures, chafing creatures, burrowing creatures, biting creatures. Swarms of flies, clouds of gnats, armies of beetles, legions of worms. The thunderous sound of a billion tiny jaws chomping at once roared in his ears. Wherever he looked he saw more of them, and even more on the way: eggs, cocoons, nests, preparing to release new predators by the millions. And all of it his fault—his—his—

They all must burn.

“Uncle?”

Burn! Burn!

Dumafice Moal turned the energy-thrower to a higher level, and a higher one still. A dull rosy glow sprang up in the bed of khemibors. Burn! Let the himmis-bugs cope with that! He went quickly from row to row, from bed to bed, from terrace to terrace. Spirals of greasy blue smoke began to rise from newly created heaps of ash. The trunks of trees were turning black with the scars of combustion. Vines hung in angular, disheveled loops.

There was much to do. It was his duty to purify the garden, all of it, here and now. He would work at it all day, and far into the night if necessary, and onward to the following dawn. How else could he cope with the unbearable burden of guilt that roiled the deepest recesses of his soul?

He moved on and on, torching this, blasting that. Clouds of ash now leaped up with every step he took. Black haze veiled the morning sun. An acrid carbonized taste invaded his nostrils. The boy followed along behind him, astounded, dumbstruck.

Someone was calling down to him from a higher terrace: “Dumafice Moal, have you gone insane? Stop it! Stop!”

“I must,” he called back. “The garden is shameful to me. I have failed in my duties.”

Sparks were flying all around, now. Trees blossomed into bright flame. Here and there, huge blazing limbs broke free and toppled, shrouded in red, into the plantings below. He was aware that he was doing some damage to the gardens, but not nearly so much as these insects and animals and fungoid pests had achieved. And it was necessary damage, purgative damage. Only through fire could the garden be purified—could he be absolved of his shame—

He went on, beyond the alluailes and the flask-trees, deep into the navindombe bushes now. Behind him rose a dark, red-flecked mist of smoking embers. He aimed the energy-thrower here, here, here. Trees crashed in the distance. Enormous boughs landed with the soft sighing impact of wood that has burned from the inside out: dream-branches, dream-light. Cinders crunched underfoot. The ash was a thick, soft black powder that rose in choking puffs. The sky was turning red. A savage gloom prevailed everywhere. He no longer felt the pain at the top of his skull, no longer felt the guilt, even, of his failure—only the joy of what he was achieving now, the triumph of having restored purity to what had become impure, of having negated negation.

Angry voices cried out behind him.

He turned. He saw stunned faces, goggling eyes.

“Do you see?” he asked them proudly. “How much better it all is, now?”

“What have you done, Dumafice Moal?”

They came rushing through the cinder-beds toward him. Seized him by the arms. Threw him down, bound him hand and foot, while all the while he protested that his work was still unfinished, that much remained yet to be done, that he could not rest until he had saved the entire garden from its foes.

5

Word was beginning to spread up and down Castle Mount and outward into the lands beyond: the old Pontifex Confalume was dead, Lord Prestimion had gone to the Labyrinth to take the senior throne, Prince Dekkeret of Normork was to become the new Coronal. Already the portraits of the late Pontifex were being brought out of storage and put on display, bedecked now with the yellow streamers of mourning: Confalume as a vigorous young lord with bright keen eyes and a thick sweep of chestnut hair, Confalume the beloved gray-haired Coronal, Confalume the regal old Pontifex of the past two decades, whatever people could lay their hands on. Soon portraits of the new Lord Dekkeret would be generally available, and they would go up too on every wall and in every window, and, alongside them, pictures of the former Lord Prestimion, now Prestimion Pontifex, wearing the scarlet-and-black robes of his newly assumed high office.

Everywhere, preparations for great celebrations were getting under way: festivals, parades, pyrotechnic displays, tournaments, a worldwide holiday of joy. The arrival of a new Coronal on the scene was something of a novelty for modern-day Majipoor.

Over the thirteen thousand years of Majipoor’s history it normally happened only two or three times in a person’s life that a Pontifex died and new rulers came to the two capitals. But in the past century a change of monarchs had been even more of a rarity than that. Confalume had been Pontifex for the past twenty years, and Coronal for the forty-three before that. So more than sixty years had gone by since the

Pontifex Gobryas had died and was succeeded by the dashing young Lord Prankipin, who had chosen Prince Confalume to be his Coronal; and very few were still alive who remembered that day. Prankipin himself, dead some twenty years now, was only a name to the billions of younger folk who had come into the world during the Pontificate of Confalume.

The new Lord Dekkeret was not widely known outside the confines of the Castle—new Coronals rarely were—but everyone knew that he was a close and trusted associate of Lord Prestimion, and that was good enough. Lord Prestimion, like Lord Confalume before him, had been a greatly beloved Coronal, and there was general faith that he would choose a successor wisely and well.

Most people were aware that Dekkeret was of common birth, a young man of Normork who had first come to the attention of Lord Prestimion by thwarting an attempt on the Coronal’s life, back at the beginning of Prestimion’s reign. That was a most unusual thing, a commoner chosen to be Coronal, but it did happen every few hundred years. They knew that Dekkeret was a man of imposing stature and lordly mien, sturdy and handsome. Those who had had any contact with him in his travels through the world in his years as Prestimion’s designated heir had discovered that he was good-natured and easy of spirit, a man of open heart and generous soul. More than that, what sort of Coronal he would be, they would learn soon enough. Prestimion, throughout his years as king, had often left the Mount to visit cities far and wide. Very likely Dekkeret would do the same.

In the city of Ertsud Grand, midway up Castle Mount, the custodians of the Summer Palace began to make plans for an early visit by the new Coronal to the auxiliary residence that was maintained there for his use.

At this point such talk was, they knew, mainly wishful thinking. Ertsud Grand, a city of nine million people in the circle of the Mount known as the Guardian Cities, had been a favorite secondary residence of Coronals for centuries; but Lord Gobryas, who had come to the throne almost ninety years ago, had been the last one to make any regular use of the beautiful dwelling that was set aside for him there. Lord Prankipin had visited the Summer Palace no more than half a dozen times in his twenty years on the Mount. Lord Confalume, though, had gone there only twice in a reign two times as long. As for Lord Prestimion, he had never been to Ertsud Grand at all, and seemed altogether unaware that the Summer Palace existed.

Yet it was a beautiful palace in a beautiful city. Ertsud Grand was known as the City of Eight Thousand Bridges, though its citizens would always tell wondering visitors, “Of course, that’s an exaggeration. Probably there are no more than seven or eight hundred.” Streams from three sides of the Mount met and mingled there, providing the city with a watery underbedding before draining downward to create the Huyn River, one of the six that descended the slopes of Castle Mount.

A network of canals connected the various sectors of Ertsud Grand, so that it was possible to go all about the city by boat. All the main canals flowed toward the Central Market—which in fact was in the eastern half of the city, rather than being truly central—where, in a gigantic cobble-stoned plaza bordered by tall warehouses of white stone, luxury goods from every part of Majipoor were bought and sold. Here were dealers in unusual meats and fishes, in exotic spices, in voluptuous furs from the cold northern marches of Zimroel, in the green pearls of the tropical Rodamaunt Archipelago and the transparent topaz that was mined by night at Zeberged, in the wines of a hundred regions, in the small animals and strange insects that the people of Ertsud Grand favored as pets, and much more besides.

To provide the western sector of the city with a focal point that would be as important an attraction in its way as the Central Market was on the eastern side, the ancient planners of Ertsud Grand had dammed up half a dozen of the larger streams, creating the body of water known as the Great Lake. It was perfectly circular and a rich sapphire blue in color, ten miles in circumference and glinting like a giant mirror in the midday sun. All around its shores were the palaces and mansions of wealthy merchants and the city’s nobility, and a host of pleasure-pavilions and sporting parlors. Boats and flat-bottomed barges of the most elaborate sort, painted in bright colors, went back and forth among these buildings all day long.

The Summer Palace, the masterwork of the long-ago and otherwise forgotten Lord Kassarn, was situated on a large artificial island in the Great Lake’s precise center. It was, in fact, two palaces, one within another: an outer one made of pink marble and an inner one fashioned entirely of bamboo canes.

The marble palace was a kind of habitable continuous wall: a joined series of pavilions, their roofs supported by columns inlaid with gold and lapis lazuli, with a multitude of apartments and colonnaded cloisters and banquet-halls and courtyards. The guest rooms—there were scores of them, spacious and airy—were decorated with fanciful murals of the lives of the early Coronal Lords. Here, once upon a time, Coronals seeking respite from the routines of the daily business of the Castle would come in summer to hold court and give lavish feasts for their chief lords, the nobility of the cities of the Mount, and visiting dignitaries.

Within this ringlike marble building, which occupied the entire perimeter of the island, was an extensive park where wild animals of many sorts were allowed to roam—gibizongs, plaars, semboks and dimilions, shy and dainty bilantoons, prancing spiral-horned gambulons, small furry krefts that ran around like animated balls of fluff with stiff upraised tails, and a herd of fifty white kibrils whose red eyes blazed in their broad foreheads like huge rubies. And at the very heart of the park was the Summer Palace proper, intended as the Coronal’s private refuge.

It was most elegantly designed, made of the sturdy black bamboo of Sippulgar, which has canes nearly as hard as iron. The canes were six inches in diameter, cut to twenty-foot lengths, gilded, and bound by silken cords. Not a single nail had been used anywhere. The roof also was made of bound lengths of Sippulgar cane, varnished annually with the red sap of the grifafa tree, which preserved it against all decay. Interior columns, these likewise of bamboo canes tied three together, formed its supports. Sea-dragon emblems in red surmounted each column.

The Summer Palace stood on a little hillock that lifted it above the rest of the island, affording the Coronal a vista of the distant shores of the Great Lake. So artfully had the building been constructed that it would be only the work of a single day, supposedly, to dismantle it and shift it to face in a different direction, in case the Coronal should tire of the view from his bedroom and request another. Those who had been allowed to tour the palace in modern times—visiting dukes and counts, members of the families of former Coronals, important captains of industry who had come to Ertsud Grand leading trade missions—were inevitably told of this special feature of its design. In Lord Kassarn’s day, so the story went, the palace was taken down and repositioned every year just before the Coronal came to Ertsud Grand for his summer retreat. Sometimes, at the Coronal’s request, it had been done more frequently than that. But no one actually could remember the last such occasion.

Though visits by Coronals to the Summer Palace had become uncommon events in modern times, and no Coronal at all had gone there during the past thirty-five years, the municipality of Ertsud Grand kept both structures, the marble pavilion and the one of bamboo, constantly in readiness for his lordship’s imminent arrival. Maintenance of the buildings was entrusted to a curator with the title of Major-Domo of the Palaces, and he had a staff of twenty full-time employees who swept the hallways, dusted the paintings and statues, trimmed the shrubbery, fed the beasts of the park, repaired what needed to be repaired, and each week put fresh linens on the beds in all the innumerable rooms.

The position of major-domo was hereditary. For the past five hundred years it had been a perquisite of the family of Eruvni Semivinvor, who had been a kinsman of a famous ancient mayor of Ertsud Grand. The current major-domo—Gopak Semivinvor, the fourth of that name—had held the post for almost half a century, and so it had fallen to him to greet Lord Confalume on the occasion of the second of his two visits to the Summer Palace.

That visit, which had lasted four days, was the high point of Gopak Semivinvor’s life. Again and again he relived it in the years that followed: hailing the Coronal and his wife the Lady Roxivail as they disembarked from the royal barge, conducting them through the marble outer palace and the game park to the bamboo palace, opening their wine for them and personally serving them their first meal, then leaving them together in splendid regal privacy. Public rumor had it that the Coronal’s marriage was a troubled one; Gopak Semivinvor was convinced that Lord Confalume and Lady Roxivail had come to Ertsud Grand in an attempt at reconciliation, and he never ceased to believe that such a reconciliation had indeed taken place during those four days, despite all the subsequent evidence to the contrary.

During the remaining years of Lord Confalume’s reign and the whole of Lord Prestimion’s, Gopak Semivinvor had lived eternally in expectation of the next royal visit. He arose each dawn—the major-domo lived in a cottage in a quiet corner of the game park—and conducted a full inspection of the outer palace and then the inner one, compiling a long list of work for his staff to do before the visiting Coronal’s party arrived. It was a source of great disappointment to him that that visit never came. But still the inspections went on; still the bamboo roofs received their yearly coat of varnish; still the stone-floored halls of the outer palace were swept and the marble building-blocks repointed. Gopak Semivinvor was eighty years old, now. He did not intend to die until he had once more played host to a Coronal in the Summer Palace of Ertsud Grand.

When news of the impending ascension of Prince Dekkeret to the royal throne reached the ears of Gopak Semivinvor, his first response was to consult his magus for a prognostication of the likelihood that the new Coronal would visit the Summer Palace.

Like many people of the era of the Pontifex Prankipin and the Coronal Lord Confalume, Gopak Semivinvor had developed a profound faith in the ability of soothsayers to foretell the future. The particular school of shamans to which he subscribed was based in Triggoin, the capital city of Majipoori sorcery, in northern Alhanroel beyond the desolate Valmambra desert. It was known as the Advocacy of the Four Names; in recent years it had won a wide following in Ert-sud Grand and several neighboring cities of the Mount. Gopak Semivinvor patronized a tall, preternaturally pale Four Names sorcerer named Dobranda Thelk, who was very young for a practitioner of his trade, but had a cold intensity in his gaze that carried a sense of absolute conviction.

Would the Coronal, Gopak Semivinvor asked, soon come calling at the Summer Palace?

Dobranda Thelk closed his glittering eyes for a moment. When he reopened them he seemed to be peering deep into Gopak Semivinvor’s soul.

“It is quite clear that he will come,” said the magus. “But only if the palace is in in good order, and all is in full accordance with expectation.”

Gopak Semivinvor knew that it could never be otherwise so long as he was in charge of the palace. And such a wild throb of joy ran through him that he feared that his breast would burst.

“Tell me,” he said, laying a royal on the sorcerer’s tray and then, after a moment’s consideration, putting a five-crown piece beside it, “what particular things must I do to ensure the complete comfort of Lord Dekkeret when he is at the Summer Palace?”

Dobranda Thelk mixed the colored powders that he used in divination. He closed his eyes again and murmured the Names. He spoke the Five Words. He sifted the powders through his hands, and said the Names a second time, and then the Three Words that could never be written down. When he looked up at Gopak Semivinvor those potent eyes of his were as hard as auger-bits.

“There is one thing above all else: you must see to it that the Coronal sleeps in proper relationship to the powerful stars Thorius and Xavial. You are able to locate those stars in the sky, are you not?”

“Of course. But how am I to know which position of the palace is the one that provides the proper relationship?”

“That will be revealed to you in dreams,” replied Dobranda Thelk.

“By a sending, do you mean?”

“It could be in that form, yes,” said the magus, and from the coolness of his tone Gopak Semivinvor knew that the consultation was at an end.

Three times in his long life Gopak Semivinvor had experienced sendings of the Lady of the Isle, or so he believed: dreams in which the kindly Lady had come to him and offered him reassurance that his life’s journey followed the correct path. There had been no specific information for him to use in any of those three dreams, only a general feeling of warmth and ease. But that night, as he made ready for bed, he knelt briefly and asked the Lady to grace him with a fourth sending, one that would guide him in his desire to serve the new Coronal in the best possible way.

And indeed, not long after he had given himself over to sleep, Gopak Semivinvor felt the sensation of warmth in his scalp that he regarded as the portent of a sending. He lay perfectly still, suspended in that condition of observant receptivity that everyone learned as a child, in which the sleeper’s mind was simultaneously lost in slumber and vigilantly aware of whatever guidance the dream might bring.

This seemed different from his previous sendings, though. The sensations were not particularly benign. He felt a touch, definitely a touch, from outside, but not a kindly one. The pressure against his scalp was greater than it had been those other times, was even painful, in a way; the air seemed to grow chill around his sleeping body; and there was no trace of that feeling of well-being that one always expected to have from contact with the mind of the Lady of the Isle of Sleep. Yet he maintained his receptivity to what was to come, holding his mind open and allowing it to be flooded with an awareness of—

Of what?

Discontinuity. Disparity. Incongruity. Wrongness.

Wrongness, yes. A powerful sense that the hinges of the world were coming undone, that the joints of the cosmos were loosening, that the gate of terror stood open and a black tide of chaos was pouring through.

He awakened then, sitting up, holding himself tightly in his own arms. Gopak Semivinvor was sweating and trembling so distemperately that he wondered if his last moments might be upon him. But gradually he grew calm. There was still a strange pressure in his brain, that feeling as of something pushing from without—a disturbing feeling, a frightening one, even.

Some moments passed, and then clarity of mind began to return, and a certain degree of ease of soul; and with that came the conviction that he understood the meaning of the oracle’s words.

You must see to it that the Coronal sleeps in proper relationship to the powerful stars Thorius and Xavial. Plainly the present configuration of the bamboo palace was an improper one, unluckily aligned, out of tune with the movements of the cosmos. Very well. The building was designed to be dismantled and reconstructed along a different axis. That was what must be done. The palace needed to be turned on its foundation.

That the palace had not been dismantled and moved in hundreds of years—maybe as much as a thousand—did not trouble the major-domo for more than an instant. Some small prudent voice within him suggested that the project might be more difficult than he suspected, but against that tiny objection came the insistent clamor of his desire to get on with the work. Desperate haste impelled him: the magus had spoken, the troubling dream had somehow provided reinforcement, and now he must make the palace ready, in accordance with the commandment that had been laid upon him, and lose no time about it. Of that he had no doubt. Doubt did not seem an option in this enterprise.

Nor did it concern him that he did not, at the moment, know which orientation of the building would be more desirable than the present one. It had to be moved, that was clear. The Coronal would not come unless it was. And he had every reason to think that the appropriate positioning would be revealed to him as he set about the task. He was the Major-Domo of the Palaces, and had been for nearly fifty years; it had been given into his hands to care for this wonderful building and keep it ready at all times for the use of the anointed Coronal; one might even say that destiny had chosen him to perform that special task. He was confident that he would perform it correctly.

Gopak Semivinvor rushed out into the night—a mild one and warm, Ertsud Grand’s climate being one of almost unending summer—made his way through the game park to the bamboo palace’s front gate, scattering nocturnal mibberils and thassips as he ran, and sending big-eyed black menagungs fluttering up into the treetops. Panting, dizzy with exertion, he leaned against the gatepost of the building and stared upward until he located the brilliant red star Xavial, which marked the midpoint of the sky, the great axis of the universe. Its mighty counterpoise, bright Thorius, lay not far to the left of it.

Now—how to determine the right position for the building, the one that represented the proper relationship to Thorius and Xavial—?

He turned, and turned, and, unsure, turned again, and yet again. His mind began to reel and swirl. It seemed to Gopak Semivinvor after a time that he was standing still, and the whole vault of the sky was whirling furiously about him. East, west, north, south—which direction was the right one? This way, and the Coronal’s bedroom would face the row of great mansions along the eastern shore of the lake; this, and he would be looking toward the pleasure-houses of the western shore; turn like this, and his rooms would yield the sight of the dense forest of furry-leaved kokapas trees that rimmed the lake’s southern edge. Whereas to the north—

To the north, equidistant between the stars Xavial and Thorius, was the blazing white star Trinatha, the sorcerers’ star, the star that rested in the heavens above the city of wizards, Triggoin.

Into the soul of Gopak Semivinvor came flooding the ineluctable certainty that Trinatha was the key to what the magus Dobranda Thelk had meant by the “proper relationship.” He must swing the building around until the Coronal’s bedroom pointed along the line that ran between Thorius and red Xavial to holy Trinatha, the white star of wizardry, Dobranda Thelk’s own guiding star.

Yes. Yes. It was precisely the midnight hour, the Hour of the Coronal. What could be more auspicious? He caught up a sharp stick and began scratching deep gouges in the soft velvet of the lawn that ringed the bamboo palace, ugly brown lines that indicated the precise configuration to which the building must be shifted. He worked with frantic urgency, trying to finish the task of sketching his plan before the stars, as they journeyed through the night sky, had moved on into some other pattern of relationship.

In the morning Gopak Semivinvor summoned his entire crew, the twenty men and women who had worked under his supervision for so long, some of them nearly as long as he himself had been major-domo. “We will dismantle the building at once, and reposition it by ninety degrees, a little more or a little less, so that it faces in this direction,” he said, holding his hands out in parallel along the lines gouged in the lawn to indicate how he meant the palace to be turned.

They were obviously dismayed. They looked at one another as though to say, “Is he serious?” and “Can the old man have lost his mind?”

“Come,” Gopak Semivinvor said, clapping his hands impatiently. “You see the patterns in the grass. These two long lines: they mark the place where the Coronal’s bedroom window must face when the rebuilding is complete.” To his foreman he said, “Kijel Busiak, you will have a row of stakes driven immediately into the ground along the lines I’ve drawn, so that there’ll be no chance of confusion later on. Gorvin Dihal, you will arrange at once for the weaving of a complete set of new binding-cords for the canes, since I fear the ones that exist will not survive the dismantling. And you, Voyne Bethafar—”

“Sir?” said Kijel Busiak timidly.

Gopak Semivinvor stared toward the foreman in annoyance. “Is there some question?”

“Sir, is it not true that the story that the building was designed to be taken apart and quickly reassembled is nothing but a myth, a legend, something that we tell to visitors but don’t ourselves believe?”

“It is not,” Gopak Semivinvor said. “I have studied the history of the Summer Palace deeply for many decades, and I have no doubt not only that it can be done, but that it has been done, over and over again in the course of the centuries. It simply has not been done recently, that is all.”

“Then you have some manual, sir, which would explain the best way of carrying out the work? For of a certainty no one alive has any memory of how the thing is done.”

“There is no manual. Why would such a thing be necessary? What we have here is a simple structure of bamboo canes joined by silken cords and covered with a roof of the same sort. We unfasten the cords; we part the roof-beams, remove them, and set them aside; we take down the outer walls cane by cane. Then we draw a careful plan of the interior and remove the interior walls also, and restore them in the same relative positions, but facing the new way. After which, we reinsert the canes of the walls in their foundation-slots and reconstruct the roof. It is simplicity itself, Kijel Busiak. I want the work to commence at once. There is no telling when Lord Dekkeret will choose to appear in our midst, and I will not have a half-finished palace sitting here when he does.”

It did seem to him, as he contemplated the task, that the old tales of taking the building down and putting it back together in a single day must be just that: old tales. The job appeared rather more complicated than that. More likely it would take a week, ten days, perhaps. But he foresaw no difficulties. In the heat of the excitement that suffused his spirit at the thought that a royal visit was at last imminent, he could not doubt that it would be child’s play to dismantle the palace, shift every orientation by ninety degrees, and re-erect it. Any provincial architect should be capable of handling the job.

There were some other mild protests, but Gopak Semivinvor was short with them. In the end his will prevailed, as he knew it must. The work began the next day.

Almost at once, unanticipated problems cropped up. The roof-beams turned out to be slotted together most intricately at the building’s peak, and the jointures by which they were fastened to the supporting columns and the upper tips of the canes that formed the building’s walls were similarly unusual in design. Not only was the style of them antiquated but the technique of fitting the tenons into the mortises was oddly and needlessly baffling, as if they had been designed by a builder determined to win praise for his originality. Gopak Semivinvor heard little about this from his workmen, for they feared the old man’s wrath and suffered under the lash of his impatience. But the work of disassembling the building went on into a second week, and a third. Gopak Semivinvor now was heard to say that it might be best to dismiss the whole batch of them and bring in younger workers who might be more cunning practitioners.

The ends of many of the beams broke as they were pulled apart. The unusual slots cracked and could not be repaired. An entire interior wall crashed down unexpectedly and the canes were shattered. Word went forth to Sippulgar for replacements.

Eventually, though—the whole process took a month and a half—the Summer Palace had been transformed into a heap of dismembered canes, many of them too badly damaged to be re-used. The foundation, laid bare now, proved to be also of cane, badly disfigured by dry rot. A number of the slots into which the canes of the wall had been inserted swelled through an uptake of humid air as soon as the canes they had held were removed, and it did not appear as if the old canes could be inserted in them again.

“What do we do now?” Kijel Busiak asked, as he and Gopak Semivinvor surveyed the site of the devastation. “How do we reassemble it, sir? We await your instructions.”

But Gopak Semivinvor had no idea of what to do. It was clear now that the Summer Palace of Lord Kassarn was by no means as simple in form as everyone had thought; that it was, rather, a complex and marvelous thing, a little miracle of construction, the eccentric masterpiece of some great forgotten architect. Taking it apart had inevitably caused great damage. Few of the original components of the palace could be employed in the reconstruction. They would have to construct a new palace, a flawless imitation of the first one, from the beginning. Who, though, had the skill to do that?

He understood now that he had, driven by that strange and irresistible pressure at the back of his skull, that eerie sending which had not been a sending of the benevolent Lady, destroyed the Summer Palace in the process of dismantling it. It would not, could not, now be shifted to a more auspicious orientation. There was no Summer Palace at all, any more. Gopak Semivinvor sank down disconsolate against one of the piles of roof-beams, buried his face in his hands, and began to sob. Kijel Busiak, who could not find any words to speak, left him there alone.

After a time he rose. Walking away from the ruined building without looking back, the major-domo took himself to the rim of the island, and stood for a long while at the edge of the Great Lake with his mind utterly empty of thought, and then, very slowly, he stepped out into the lake and continued to walk forward until the water was over his head.

6

Septach Melayn said, “Again, milady. Up with your stick! Parry! Parry! Parry!”

Keltryn met each thrust of the tall man’s wooden baton with a quick, darting response, successfully anticipating every time the direction from which he would be coming at her, and getting the baton where it needed to be. She had no illusions about her ability to hold her own in any sort of contest with the great swordsman. But that was not expected of her, or of anyone. What was important was the development of her skills; and those skills were developing with remarkable speed. She could tell that by the way Septach Melayn smiled at her now. He saw real promise in her. More than that: he seemed to have taken a liking to her, he who was reputed to have no more interest in women than a stone would. And so, since his return from the Labyrinth, he had begun affording her the rare privilege of private tutoring in the art.

She had done as much as she could without him throughout the weeks of his absence at the Labyrinth for the funeral of the old Pontifex and the ceremonies that marked Prestimion’s succession to the imperial throne. During that time Keltryn had sought out members of Septach Melayn’s class in swordsmanship and made them drill with her, one on one.

Some, who had never reconciled themselves to the anomalous presence of a woman in the class, simply laughed her off. But a few, perhaps for no other reason than that they saw it as an opportunity to spend some time in the company of an attractive young woman, were willing enough to humor her in that request. Polliex, the Earl of Estotilaup’s handsome son, was one of that group. He was tremendously good-looking—indeed, the handsomest boy Keltryn had ever known—and only too aware of that fact himself. He interpreted Keltryn’s invitation to practice at rapier and singlesticks with him as a portent of conquest.

But Keltryn, at the moment, was not looking to become anybody’s conquest, and Polliex’s flawlessly contoured face was irrelevant anyway when hidden behind a fencer’s mask. After several sessions with him at which he insisted on asking her, more than once in the face of her polite refusal, to join him for a weekend in riding the mirror-slides and enjoying other amusements at the pleasure-city of High Morpin, just downslope from the Castle, she canceled further drills with Polliex and turned instead to Toraman Kanna, of Syrinx, the prince’s son.

He was a striking-looking young man too, slim and sinuous, with olive-hued skin and long dark hair. In fact he had an almost feminine beauty about him, so much so that it was generally assumed he was one of Septach Melayn’s playmates. Perhaps he was; but Keltryn quickly found out that he found women attractive too, or, at at any rate found her to be. “You should hold your weapon like this,” Toraman Kanna said, standing behind her and lifting her arm. And then, after he had corrected her position, he let his hand slide up the side of her fencing jacket and rest lightly on her right breast. Just as easily, she pushed it aside. Possibly he thought it was his princely prerogative to touch her like that. They did not drill together a second time.

Audhari of Stoienzar provided her with no such complications. The big freckle-faced boy seemed hearty and normal enough, but what concerned him when he was with her in the gymnasium was fencing, not flirtation. Keltryn had already discovered that he was the most proficient fencer in the class. Now, meeting with him day after day, she concentrated on learning from him how to master Septach Melayn’s trick of dividing each moment into its component parts and then subdividing those, until time itself was slowed and one could step between the partitions that kept each moment from the next, thus making oneself easily capable of matching and often of anticipating the actions of one’s opponent. It was not an easy science to master. But Audhari, because he was not the awesomely perfect swordsman that Septach Melayn was, was able by the very flaws in his technique to give Keltryn access to his considerable knowledge of the method.

By the time Septach Melayn returned from the Labyrinth, she was nearly as good as Audhari, and superior to all the rest in the class. Septach Melayn noticed that at once, the first time the group met; and when she approached him, somewhat timidly, to ask for private instruction, he agreed without hesitation.

They met for an hour, every third day. He was patient with her, kindly, tolerant of the mistakes that she inevitably made. “Here,” he said. “This way. Look high and thrust low, or vice versa. I can read your intentions. You signal too much with your eyes.” Their blades met. His slipped easily past hers and touched her lightly on the clavicle. If this were in earnest she would have been slain five times a minute. Never once did she break through his own guard. But she did not expect to. He was the complete master. No one would ever touch him. “Here!” he cried. “Watch! Watch! Watch! Hup!”

She worked at stopping time, tried to turn his smooth movements into a series of discontinuous leaps so that she could enter the interval between one segment of time and its successor and finally touch the tip of her blade to him, and almost managed to do it. But even so he always eluded her, and then he had that wonderful knack of seeming to come back at her from two sides at once in the counterthrust, and she had no way of defending against that.

She loved drilling with him. She loved him, in a way that had nothing to do with sex. She was seventeen and he was—what? Fifty? Fifty-five? Old, anyway, very old, though still dashing and elegant and extremely handsome. But he was not at all interested in women, so everyone said. Not in that way, anyhow, though he seemed to like women as friends, and was often seen in the company of them. That was fine with Keltryn. All she wanted from men, at this point in her life, was friendship, nothing more. And Septach Melayn was a wonderful friend to have.

He was charming and funny, a playful, buoyant man. He was wise: had not Lord Prestimion chosen him to be High Counsellor of the Realm? He was said to be a connoisseur of wines, he knew much about music and poetry and painting, and no one at the Castle, not even the Coronal, had a finer wardrobe. And of course he was the best swordsman in the world. Even those to whom swordsmanship was a meaningless pastime admired him for that: you had to admire someone who was better than everyone else at something, regardless of what the something was.

Also Septach Melayn was kind and good, liked by all, as modest as his great attainments permitted him to be, famously devoted to his friend the Coronal. He was altogether a paragon, the happiest and most enviable of men. But as she got to know him better, Keltryn began to wonder whether there might not be a core of sadness somewhere within him that he worked hard to keep concealed. Doubtless he hated growing old, he who was such a masterly athlete and so beautiful to behold. Perhaps he was secretly lonely. And maybe he wished that there was someone, somewhere among the fifteen billion people of this giant planet, who could give him an even match on the dueling-grounds.

In the third week of their private lessons Septach Melayn removed his mask suddenly, after she had carried out an especially well handled series of interchanges, and said, peering down at her from his great height, “That was quite fine, milady. I’ve never seen anyone come along quite as fast as you have. A pity that we’ll have to bring these lessons to a halt very soon.”

He could not have hurt her more if he had slashed her across the throat with the edge of his rapier.

“We will?” she said, horrified.

“The Pontifex will be arriving at the Castle shortly for Lord Dekkeret’s coronation ceremony, and after that the real changes of the new regime will begin. Lord Dekkeret will want his own High Counsellor. I think he plans to appoint Prestimion’s brother Teotas. As for me, I’ve been asked to continue in Prestimion’s service, this time as High Spokesman to the Pontifex. Which means, of course, that I’ll be leaving the Castle and taking up residence at the Labyrinth.”

Keltryn gasped. “The Labyrinth—oh, how terrible, Septach Melayn!”

With a graceful shrug he said, “Ah, not so bad as it’s credited with being, I think. There are decent tailors there, and some estimable restaurants. And Prestimion doesn’t plan to be one of those reclusive Pontifexes who hides himself away at the bottom of the whole thing and doesn’t come out into daylight for the rest of his life. The court will do a good deal of traveling, he tells me. I imagine he’ll be shuttling up and down the Glayge as often as any Pontifex ever has, and going farther afield, too. But if I’m down there with him, and you’re up here, milady—”

“Yes. I see.”

He paused ever so slightly. “It would not occur to you, I suppose, to move to the Labyrinth yourself? We could continue our studies, of course, in that case.”

Keltryn’s eyes widened. What was he saying?

“My parents sent me to the Castle to get a broader education, excellence,” she replied, almost whispering it. “I don’t think they ever imagined—that I would go—that I would go there—”

“No. The Castle is all light and gaiety; and the Labyrinth, well, it is otherwise. This is the place for young lords and ladies. I know that.” Septach Melayn seemed oddly uncomfortable. She had never seen him other than perfectly poised. But now he was fidgeting; he was tugging nervously at his carefully trimmed little beard; his pale blue eyes were having trouble meeting hers.

It could not be that he felt bodily desire for her. She knew that. But all the same he plainly did not want to leave her behind when he followed Prestimion to the underground capital. He wanted the lessons to continue. Was it because she was such a responsive pupil? Or was it their unexpected friendship that he cherished? He is a lonely man, she thought. He’s afraid that he’ll miss me. She was astounded by the idea that the High Counsellor Septach Melayn might feel that way about her.

But she could not go with him to the Labyrinth. Would not, could not, should not. Her life was here at the Castle, for the time being, and then, she supposed, she would return to her family at Sipermit, and marry someone, and then—well, that was as far as she could carry the thought. But the Labyrinth fit nowhere into the expected course of her future.

“Perhaps I could visit you there now and then,” she said. “For refresher courses, you know.”

“Perhaps you could,” said Septach Melayn, and they let the subject drop.

Her sister Fulkari was waiting for her in the recreation-hall of the sector of the Castle’s western wing known as the Setiphon Arcade, where they both had their apartments, and their brother Fulkarno as well. Fulkari used the swimming pool there almost every day. Keltryn usually joined her there after her fencing lesson.

It was a splendid pool, a huge oval tank of pink porphyry with an inlay of bright malachite in starburst patterns running completely around it just beneath the surface of the water. The water itself, which came warm and cinnamon-scented from a spring somewhere far below the surface of the Mount, was of a pale rosy hue and seemed almost like wine. Supposedly this sector of the Castle had been a guesthouse for visiting princes from distant worlds in the reign of some long-forgotten Coronal at a time when commerce between the stars was more common than it had later become, and this was part of their recreational facilities. Now it served the needs of royal guests from closer at hand.

No one was at the pool but Fulkari when Keltryn arrived. She was moving back and forth with swift, steady strokes, tirelessly swimming from one end of the pool to the other, turning, starting on the next lap. Keltryn stood at the pool’s edge, watching her for a time, admiring the suppleness of her sister’s body, the perfection of her strokes. Even now, at seventeen, Keltryn still looked upon Fulkari as a woman and saw herself as a mere gawky girl. The seven years’ difference in their ages seemed an immense gulf. Keltryn coveted the ripeness of Fulkari’s hips, the greater fullness of Fulkari’s breasts, all those tokens of what she regarded as her sister’s superior femininity.

“Aren’t you coming in?” Fulkari called.

Keltryn stripped off her fencing costume, threw it casually aside, and slipped into the water beside Fulkari. The water was silky and soothing. They swam side by side for some minutes, saying little.

When they wearied of swimming laps, they bobbed up together and floated, paddling gently about. “What’s bothering you?” Fulkari asked. “You’re very quiet today. Did badly in your fencing lesson, did you?”

“Quite the contrary.”

“What is it, then?”

Keltryn said in a stricken tone, “Septach Melayn told me that he’s going to be moving to the Labyrinth. They’re going to hold the coronation ceremony soon, and then he’ll become Prestimion’s High Spokesman down there.”

“I suppose that ends your career as a swordsman, then,” said Fulkari, with no particular show of sympathy.

“If I stay here, yes. But he’s asked me to move to the Labyrinth so we can continue our lessons.”

“Really!” Fulkari exclaimed, and chortled. “To move to the Labyrinth! You!—He didn’t ask you to marry him, too, did he?”

“Don’t be silly, Fulkari.”

“He won’t, you know.”

Keltryn felt anger rising in her. There was no reason for Fulkari to be so cruel. “Don’t you think I know that?”

“I just wanted to make sure you weren’t getting any funny ideas about him.”

“Becoming Septach Melayn’s wife is something that has never entered my mind, I assure you. And I’m quite certain it’s never entered his.—No, Fulkari, I just want him to go on training me. But of course I’m not going to move to the Labyrinth.”

“That’s a relief.” Fulkari clambered from the pool. Keltryn, after a moment, followed her. Putting her hands behind her, Fulkari leaned back and stretched voluptuously, like a big cat. Languidly she said, “I never understood this thing of yours with swords, anyway. What good is being a swordsman? Especially a female one.”

“What good is being a lady of the court?” Keltryn retorted. “At least a swordsman has some skill with something other than her tongue.”

“Perhaps so. But it’s a skill that can’t be put to any purpose. Well, you’ll grow out of it, I suspect. Let some prince catch your fancy and that’s the last we’ll all hear of your rapiers and your singlesticks.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Keltryn tartly, and made a face. She leaped nimbly to her feet, ran down the margin of the pool to the far end, and dived in again, making such a shallow jump that the sting of hitting the water ran painfully through her breasts and belly. Swimming with short, choppy, angry strokes, she swam back to where Fulkari was sitting and popped her head up into view.

“Is that Coronal of yours going to get us good seats at the coronation?” she asked, flashing a malicious toothy smile.

“My Coronal? In what way is he my Coronal?”

“Don’t be cute with me, Fulkari.”

Primly Fulkari said, “Prince Dekkeret—Lord Dekkeret, I should say—and I are simply friends. Just as you and Septach Melayn are friends, Keltryn.”

Keltryn scrambled up over the side of the pool and stood above her sister, dripping on her. “We’re not exactly friends in the same way as you and Dekkeret, though.”

“What ever could you mean by that?”

“You’re doing it with him, aren’t you?”

Flashes of color appeared in Fulkari’s cheeks. But there was only a moment’s delay before she replied, almost defiantly, “Well, yes. Of course.”

“And therefore you and he—”

“Are friends. Nothing more than friends.”

“You aren’t going to marry him, Fulkari?”

“This is really none of your business, you know.”

“But are you? Are you? The Coronal’s wife? Queen of the world? Of course you are! You’d be a fool to say no! And you won’t, because you’re not a fool. You aren’t a fool, are you?”

“Please, Keltryn—”

“I’m your sister. I have a right. I just want to know—”

“Stop it! Stop!”

Abruptly Fulkari stood up, searched about her for a towel, slung it around her shoulders as though she felt the need for a garment of some sort, however useless, and began to pace stormily about. She was obviously very annoyed, and flustered as well. Keltryn could not remember the last time her sister had seemed flustered.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said, making an attempt to sound conciliatory. “You’re the best friend I have in the world, Fulkari. It doesn’t strike me as being out of line for me to ask you if you’re going to marry a man you’re obviously in love with. But if it bothers you so much to talk about these things, I’ll stop. All right?” Fulkari cast the towel aside and walked back toward her. She sat down once more beside her. The storm seemed to have passed. After a little bit Keltryn said, eyes bright with fresh curiosity, “What is it like, Fulkari?”

“With him, you mean?”

“With anyone. I don’t have any real idea, you know. I haven’t ever—”

“No!” said Fulkari, genuinely amazed. “Are you serious? Never? Not at all?”

“No. Never.”

Fulkari appeared to be having trouble believing that. It had seemed harmless enough a thing to admit, but Keltryn found herself wishing that she could call back her own words. She felt herself blushing all over. Ashamed of her innocence, ashamed to be naked like this now with her own sister, ashamed of the thinness of her thighs, the boyish flatness of her buttocks, the meagerness of her small, high breasts. Fulkari, sitting here face to face with her, looked by comparison like some goddess of womanhood.

But Fulkari’s tone was gentle, loving, tender as she said, “I have to tell you that this is a real surprise. Someone as outgoing and lively as you—taking a fencing class with a bunch of boys, no less—I thought, certainly she’s been with two or three by now, maybe even more—”

Keltryn shook her head. “Not so. Not one. Nobody at all.”

With a twinkle Fulkari said, “Don’t you think it’s time, then?”

“I’m only seventeen, Fulkari.”

“I was sixteen, the first time. And I thought I was getting a slow start.”

“Sixteen. Well!” Keltryn tossed her head, shaking water from the moist red-gold curls. “But we’ve always been different, you and me. I’m much more of a tomboy than you ever were, I bet.” She leaned close to Fulkari and said in a low voice, “Who was it?”

“Madjegau.”

“Madjegau?” The name emerged in such a derisive shriek that she clapped her hand over her own mouth. “But he was such a—nincompoop, Fulkari!”

“Of course he was. But they can be nincompoops and still be attractive, you know. Especially when you’re sixteen.”

“I’ve never felt much attraction for nincompoops, I have to confess.”

“You wouldn’t understand. It’s a matter of hormones. I was sixteen and ripe for it, and Madjegau was tall and handsome and in the right place at the right time, and—well—”

“I suppose. I confess I can’t see the attraction.—Does it hurt, the first time, when they go inside you?”

“A little. It’s not important. You’re concentrating on other things, Keltryn. You’ll see. One of these days, not too far in the future—”

They were both giggling now, all animosities gone, sisters and friends.

“After Madjegau, were there many others? Before Dekkeret, I mean?”

“There were—some.” Fulkari glanced over doubtfully at Keltryn. “I don’t really think I ought to be talking about this.”

“You can tell me. I’m your sister. Why should we have secrets?—Come on. Who else, Fulkari?”

“Kandrigo. You remember him, I think. And Jengan Biru.”

“That’s three men, then! Plus Dekkeret.”

“I didn’t mention Velimir yet.”

“Four! Oh, you’re shameless, Fulkari! Of course I knew there had to be some. But four—!” She threw Fulkari a flashing inquisitorial look. “There aren’t any more, are there?”

“I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. But no, no others, Keltryn. Four lovers. That’s not really a lot, over the course of five years, you know.”

“And then Dekkeret.”

“And then Dekkeret, yes.”

Keltryn leaned toward Fulkari again, staring raptly into her eyes. “He’s the best one, isn’t he? Better than all the others put together. I know he is. I mean, I don’t know, but I think—I’m quite sure—”

“Enough, Keltryn. This is absolutely not something I’m going to discuss.”

“You don’t need to. I see the answer on your face. He’s wonderful: I’m certain of that. And now he’s Coronal. And you’re going to be queen of the world. Oh, Fulkari—Fulkari, I’m so happy for you! I can hardly tell you how much I—”

“Stop it, Keltryn.” Fulkari rose in one quick, brusque motion and began to gather up her clothing. Crisply, irritably, she said, “I think it’s about time for us to go.”

Keltryn saw that she had struck a nerve. Something was wrong, definitely wrong. But she couldn’t let matters drop here.

“You aren’t going to marry him, Fulkari?”

A chilly silence. Then: “No. I’m not.”

“He hasn’t asked? He has someone else in mind?”

“No. To both questions.”

“He’s asked, and you’ve turned him down?” said Keltryn incredulously. “Why, Fulkari? Why? You don’t love him? Is he too old for you? Do you have someone else in mind?—I can’t help it, Fulkari. I know all this is bothering you. But I just can’t understand how you can—”

To Keltryn’s amazement, Fulkari suddenly seemed close to tears. She tried to hide it, turning quickly away, standing with her face toward the wall and fumbling furiously with her clothes. But Keltryn could see the quivering movements of Fulkari’s shoulders, as of sobs barely being repressed.

In a dark, hollow voice Fulkari said, with her back still turned, “Keltryn, I do love Dekkeret. I do want to marry him. It’s Lord Dekkeret I don’t want to marry.”

Keltryn found that mystifying. “But—what—”

Fulkari turned to face her. “Do you have any idea what it involves, being the Coronal’s wife? The endless work, the responsibilities, the official dinners, the speeches? You ought to take a look at the schedule they post for the Lady Varaile. It’s a nightmare. I don’t want any part of it. Maybe I’m foolish, Keltryn, maybe I’m shallow and silly, but I can’t do anything about what I’m like. Marrying the Coronal seems to me very much like volunteering to go to prison.”

Keltryn stared. There was real torment in Fulkari’s voice, and Keltryn had no doubt of her pain. She felt a rush of compassion for her; but then, almost immediately after, came annoyance, anger, even outrage.

She had always thought of herself as the child, and Fulkari as the woman, but all of a sudden everything was reversed. At twenty-four, Fulkari seemed to think that she was still a girl. But did she believe she was going to be a girl all the rest of her life? Did she want nothing more for herself than going riding in the meadows, and flirting with handsome men, and sometimes making love with them?

Keltryn knew that it was best not to continue pressing her sister on any of this. But words came pouring out of her despite herself.

“Forgive me for saying this, Fulkari. But I’m amazed by what you’ve just told me. You’re in love with the most desirable and important man in the world, and he loves you and wants to marry you. But he’s about to become Coronal, and you say it’s just too much trouble to be the Coronal’s wife? Then I have to tell you you are a fool, Fulkari, the biggest fool that ever was. I’m sorry if that hurts you, but it’s true. A fool. And I’ll tell you something else: if you don’t want to marry Dekkeret, I will. If I can ever get him to notice me, that is. If I could put on ten or fifteen pounds, I’d look just like you, and I’ll learn to do whatever it is that men and women do with each other, and then—”

Coldly Fulkari said, “You’re talking nonsense, Keltryn.”

“Yes. I know I am.”

“Then stop it! Stop! Stop!” Fulkari was crying now. “Oh, Keltryn—Keltryn—”

“Fulkari—”

Keltryn rushed toward her. Held her tight. Felt her own tears coursing down her cheeks.

7

Jacomin Halifice said, “The Lord Gaviral respectfully requests your presence at his palace, Count Mandralisca.”

Mandralisca looked up. “Is that how he said it, Jacomin? ‘Respectfully requests’?”

Halefice smiled for perhaps half a second. “The phrase was my own, your grace. I thought it sounded more courtly to say it so.”

“Yes. I dare say you did. It didn’t seem like Gaviral’s style at all.—Well, tell him I’ll be there in five minutes. No, let’s make it ten, I think.”

Let Gaviral respectfully wait. Mandralisca glanced down at the Barjazid helmet, lying before him on his desk in a little glittering heap. He had been playing with it all afternoon, donning it and sending his mind out into the world, testing the powers of the thing, trying to coax from it more knowledge of what it could do, and he wanted a little time to review what he had achieved.

He had so little control over it, so far. He could not direct it toward any particular region of the world, nor could he choose to make contact with any specific individual. Barjazid had assured him several times that they would eventually solve the directionality problem. Aiming the power of the helmet at any one person was a more difficult challenge, but Barjazid seemed to think that in time that could be achieved also. Certainly both things had been possible with earlier models, such as the one that Prestimion had used to strike down Barjazid’s brother Venghenar. This newer one had greater range and delicacy of effect—it was a rapier, not a saber, capable not simply of inflicting massive injury but of inducing light deflections in the minds it touched—but certain other qualities of precision had been lost.

Meanwhile, Barjazid said, it would be a good idea for Mandralisca to practice using the helmet daily, to accustom himself to its operation, to build up in himself the mental resilience needed to withstand the strains it imposed on the operator. And so he had. Day after day, he had visited citizens of Majipoor at random, sliding into their minds, tickling their souls with little unpleasant suggestions. It was interesting to see what kind of impact it was possible to have, even on a well guarded mind.

He had found that he was able to enter almost anyone he chose, though sleeping minds were much more vulnerable than waking ones. He could break down the defenses of the soul with a few deftly placed jabs, just as he had been able to do so splendidly in his baton-dueling days, when his agility of movement and his superior reflexes had brought him championship after championship in the tournaments, and, what was even more valuable, the great approbation of Dantirya Sambail. Using the helmet was very similar. In the tournaments, one did not wield the baton as a bludgeon; one baffled and bewildered one’s opponent with it, besieging him so with lightning-swift flicks of the pliant nightflower-wood stick that he left himself open for the climactic attack. Here, too, Mandralisca had discovered, it was best to undermine the victim’s own sense of purpose and security with a few light prods and nudges, and let him continue the process of destruction on his own. The gardener in Lord Havilbove’s park, the custodian of the bamboo palace at Ertsud Grand, the hapless calendar-keeper at that Hjort village, and all the rest of them—how easy it had been, really, and how pleasing!

Why, just today—

But the Lord Gaviral had respectfully requested his presence at his palace, Mandralisca reminded himself. One must not keep the Lords of Zimroel waiting unduly long, or they grow petulant. He slipped the helmet into the pouch at his hip where it resided whenever it was not in use, and set out up the path to Gaviral’s hilltop palace.

The palaces of the Five Lords appeared impressive from the outside, but their interiors reflected not only the haste with which the entire outpost had been constructed but the general tastelessness of the brothers. The architect—a Ghayrog from Dulorn, Hesmaan Thrax by name—had designed them to inspire awe in viewers approaching them from below: each of the five buildings was a huge dome of smooth and perfectly set tile, gray with a red undercast, rising to a great height and topped with the red crescent moon that was emblematic of the Sambailid clan. Within, though, they were bare echoing halls with rough unfinished walls and oddly mismatched furnishings badly placed.

Gaviral’s home was the best of the sorry lot. Its main hall was a vast soaring space that a great man like Confalume would have expanded easily into, and further enhanced with his own grandeur—he had never seemed out of place amidst the immensity of the throne-room he had built for himself at the Castle—but a petty creature like Gaviral was diminished by it. He seemed an irrelevance, an afterthought, in his own high hall.

As the eldest son of Dantirya Sambail’s brother Gaviundar, he had been entitled to first choice of the rich possessions that once had adorned the Procurator’s superb palace in Ni-moya. To him had fallen the most admirable of the statuary and hangings, the floor-coverings woven from the pelts of haiguses and steetmoy, the strange sculptures fashioned of animal bone that Dantirya Sambail had brought back from some expedition into the chilly Khyntor Marches of northern Zimroel. But all these treasures had suffered some abuse over the years, especially during the time following the death of Dantirya Sambail when mountainous drunken Gaviundar had inhabited the procuratorial palace. Many of the finest things were battered and chipped and stained, mountings had come unsprung, cracks had developed in delicate and irreplaceable objects. And now that they had descended to Gaviral’s custody they were negligently, almost randomly, displayed, strewn here and there about the echoing oversized chambers of the building like the neglected toys of some indifferent child.

Gaviral himself lounged in the midst of this shabby disheveled array in a broad thronelike chair that looked as though it had been designed for one of his four brothers, all of whom were much larger men than he was. A couple of his women crouched at his feet. All five of the Sam-bailids had furnished themselves with harems, in defiance of all custom and propriety. A flask of wine was clutched in his hand. Compared with his brothers, Gaviral was a model of sobriety and polite deportment; but he was a heavy drinker, nonetheless, like all his tribe.

Behind Gaviral’s left shoulder stood a second of the brothers. The Lord Gavdat, this one was, the plump, heavy-jowled, ineffably stupid one who liked to play with sorcery and prognostication. He was garbed today, absurdly, in the manner of a geomancer of the High City of Tidias, far away on Castle Mount: the tall brass helmet, the richly brocaded robe, the elaborately figured cloak. Mandralisca could not recall when he had last seen anything so ludicrous.

He made a formal gesture of obeisance. “Milord Gaviral. And milord Gavdat.”

Gaviral held out his flask. “Will you have some wine, Mandralisca?”

After all this time they had still not succeeded in learning that he detested wine. But he declined politely, with thanks. There was no use trying to explain such things to these people. Gaviral himself drank deeply, and, with a courteousness of which Mandralisca would have thought him incapable, handed the flask to his shambling uncouth brother. Gavdat tipped his head so far back that Mandralisca marveled that his brass helmet did not fall off, drained the flask almost to the bottom, and indolently tossed it to the side, where it spilled its last dregs on what once had been a dazzlingly white steetmoy rug.

“Well, then,” Gaviral said finally. His quick little eyes flickered from side to side in that characteristic manner of his that was so like a small rodent’s. He brandished some papers that he held crumpled in one hand. “You’ve heard the news from the Labyrinth, Mandralisca?”

“That the Pontifex is seriously ill following a stroke, milord?”

“That the Pontifex is dead,” Gaviral said. “The first stroke was not fatal, but there was a second one. He died instantly, so say these reports, which have been some time in reaching us. Prestimion has already been installed as his successor.”

“And Dekkeret as the new Coronal?”

“His coronation will soon take place,” said Gavdat, intoning the words as though he were transmitting messages from some invisible spirit. “I have cast his auspices. He will have a short and unhappy reign.”

Mandralisca waited. These remarks did not seem to call for comment.

“Perhaps,” said the Lord Gaviral, running his fingers through his thinning reddish hair, “this would be an auspicious moment for us to proclaim the independence of Zimroel under our rule. The formidable Confalume gone from the scene, Prestimion preoccupied with establishing his administration at the Labyrinth, an untried new man taking command at the Castle—what do you say, Mandralisca? We pack up and return to Ni-moya, and let it be known that the western continent has lived long enough under the thumb of Alhanroel, eh? We present them with an accomplished fact, poof! and defy them to object.”

Before Mandralisca could reply there came a loud clattering and crashing in the outside hall, and some hoarse shouts. Mandralisca assumed that these noises were harbingers of the arrival of the blustering bestial Lord Gavinius, but to his mild surprise the newcomer was bulky thickset Gavahaud, he who fancied himself a paragon of elegance and grace. The interruption was a welcome one: it gave him a moment to find the most diplomatic way of framing his response. Gavahaud came in muttering about encountering an unexpected obstacle in the sculpture-hall outside. Then, seeing Mandralisca, he glanced toward Gaviral and said, “Well? Does he agree?”

No question that they were seething with the yearning to unleash their war against Prestimion and Dekkeret. They wanted only for him to pat them on their heads and praise them for their high ambitions and warlike souls.

All three brothers had their attention focused intently on him now: gimlet-eyed Gaviral, bloodshot Gavahaud, moist-eyed foolish Gavdat. It was almost poignant, Mandralisca thought, how dependent they were on him, how terribly eager they were to have him confirm whatever pitiful shreds of strategy they had contrived to work out for themselves.

He said, “If you mean, milord, do I agree that this is the proper time to announce ourselves independent of the imperial government, my answer is that I do not believe it is.”

Each of the three reacted in his own way to Mandralisca’s calm declaration. Mandralisca observed all three reactions in a single glance, and found them instructive.

Gavdat seemed to recoil almost in shock, his head snapping back so sharply that his soft cheeks jiggled like puddings. Very likely he had made use of his instruments of prognostication to arrive at a very different expectation. Haughty Gavahaud, obviously also startled and disappointed, glared at Mandralisca in astonishment, as though Mandralisca had spat in his face. Only Gaviral took Mandralisca’s reply calmly, looking first to one brother and then the other in a smug self-congratulatory way that could mean only one thing: There! Did I not tell you so? It’s important to wait and check things out with Mandralisca. It was the mark of Gaviral’s intellectual preeminence, in this mob of loutish thick-brained brothers, that he alone had some glimmering of self-awareness, some knowledge, perhaps, of how stupid they all really were, how badly they needed their privy counsellor’s guidance in any matter of significance.

“May I ask,” Gaviral said carefully, “just why you feel as you do?”

“Several reasons, milord.” He enumerated them on his fingers. “The first: this is a time of general mourning throughout Majipoor, if I recall correctly the reaction to the Pontifex Prankipin’s death twenty years ago. Even in Zimroel the Pontifex is a revered and cherished figure, and in this case the Pontifex was Confalume, the most highly regarded monarch in centuries. I believe it would seem tasteless and offensive to undertake a revolutionary break with the imperial goverment in the very hour when people everywhere are expressing, as I have no doubt they are, their grief at the death of Confalume. It would forfeit us a great deal of sympathy among our own citizens, and would stir an unprofitable degree of anger among the people of Alhanroel.”

“Perhaps so,” Gaviral conceded. “Go on.”

“Second: a proclamation of independence needs to be accompanied by a demonstration that we are capable of making good on our words. I mean by that that we are only in the most preliminary stages of organizing our army, if indeed we have come as far even as the preliminary stages. Therefore—”

“You foresee a war with Alhanroel, do you?” the Lord Gavahaud asked, in a lofty tone. “Is it possible that they would dare to attack us?”

“Oh, yes, milord. I very much think they would attack us. The much-beloved Prestimion is in fact a man of strong passions and no little fury when he is crossed: I have ample evidence of that out of the experience of your famous uncle Dantirya Sambail. And Lord Dekkeret, from what I know of him, will not want to begin his reign by having half his kingdom secede. You can be quite certain that the imperials will send a military force our way as soon as they’ve digested our proclamation and can levy a body of troops.”

Gavdat said, “But the distances are so great—they’d have to sail for many weeks just to reach Piliplok—and then, to march across hostile territory all the way to Ni-moya—”

It was a reasonable point. Perhaps Gavdat was not quite so much of a fool as he seemed, Mandralisca thought.

“You’re right, milord, that operating a line of supply that stretches all the way across the Inner Sea from Castle Mount to Ni-moya will be a very challenging task. That is why I think we’ll ultimately be successful in our revolt. But they will have no choice, I think, but to try to regain their grasp of us. We must be fully prepared. We must have troops waiting at Piliplok and all the other major ports of our eastern coast, possibly as far south as Gihorna.”

“But there’s no harbor good enough for a major landing in Gihorna!” Gavahaud objected.

“Exactly so. That’s why they might attempt it: to take us by surprise. There’s no big harbor there, but there are minor ones all up and down the province. They might make several landings at once in places so obscure they don’t expect us to think of them. We must fortify the whole coast. We must have a second line of defense inland, and a third at Ni-moya itself. And we’ll need to assemble a fleet to meet them at sea in the hope of preventing them from reaching our shores in the first place. All this will take time. We should be well along in the task before we tip our hand.”

“You should know,” Gavdat said, “that I have cast the runes very carefully, and they predict success in all our endeavors.”

“We expect no other outcome,” said Mandralisca serenely. “But the runes alone won’t ensure our victory. Proper planning is needed also.”

“Yes,” said Gaviral. “Yes. You see that, brothers, do you not?”

The other two looked at him uncomfortably. Perhaps they sensed in some dim way that quick little Gaviral was somehow outflanking them, allying himself suddenly with the voice of caution now that he realized that caution might be required.

“There is a third point to be considered,” Mandralisca said.

He made them wait. He had no desire to overload their brains by piling too many arguments together too quickly.

Then he said, “It happens that I am testing a new weapon, one that is vital to our hopes of victory. It is the helmet that the little man Khaymak Barjazid brought to me, a version of the one that was used—unsuccessfully, alas—by Dantirya Sambail in his struggle against Prestimion long ago. We are making improvements in the weapon. I am extending my mastery over it day by day. It will do terrible destruction, once I’m ready to unleash it. But I am not quite ready, my lords. Therefore I ask you for more time. I ask you for time enough to make the great victory that milord Gavdat so accurately predicts a certainty.”

8

As though in a dream Dekkeret roamed the myriad halls of the Castle that would from now on bear his name, examining everything as though seeing it for the first time.

He was alone. He had not made a special point of asking to be left alone, but his manner, his expression, had left no doubt of his need for solitude. This was the fourth day since Dekkeret’s return from the festivities at the Labyrinth that had confirmed Prestimion’s ascent to the imperial throne, and every moment up till now had been taken up in planning for his own coronation. Only this morning had an opening developed in the press of business, and he had taken the opportunity to wander out into the Pinitor Court and go drifting off by himself through some few of the many levels of the Castle’s topmost zone.

He had lived at the Castle more than half his life. He had been eighteen when his thwarting of the attempt on Prestimion’s life had earned him the award of knight-initiatehood, and now he was thirty-eight. Though he still signed his name, when official duties required it of him, “Dekkeret of Normork,” it would be more accurate to call himself “Dekkeret of the Castle,” for Normork was only a boyhood memory and the Castle was his home. The eerie tower of Lord Arioc, the harsh black mass of the Prankipin Treasury, the delicate beauty of the Guadeloom Cascade, the pink granite blocks of Vildivar Close, the spectacular sweep of the Ninety-Nine Steps—he passed through these things every day.

He passed through them now. Down one hall and up the next. He turned a bend in a corridor and found himself staring through a giant crystal window, a window so clear as to be essentially invisible, providing a sudden stunning view of open air—an abyss that descended mile after mile until it was sealed at its lower end by a thick layer of white cloud. It was a vivid reminder that they were thirty miles high, up here at the Castle, sitting at the tip of the biggest mountain in the universe, provided with light and air and water and all other necessities by ingenious mechanisms thousands of years old. You tended to forget that, when you spent enough time at the Castle. You tended to begin to think that this was the primary level of the world, and all the rest of Majipoor was mysteriously sunken far below the surface. But that was wrong. There was the world, and then there was the Castle; and the Castle loomed far above all.

The gateway before him led back into the Inner Castle. On his left lay Prestimion’s archival building, rising behind the Arioc Tower; to his right was the white-tiled hall where the Lady of the Isle resided when she came to the Castle to visit her son, and just beyond that Lord Confalume’s garden-house, with its bewildering collection of tender plants from tropical regions. He went through the gate that lay beside the Lady’s hall and found himself in the maze of hallways and galleries, so bewildering to newcomers, that led to the core of the Castle.

He avoided going near the halls of the court. They were all very busy in there, officials both of the outgoing regime and his own still only partly formed administration—discussing matters of protocol at the coronation ceremony, making lists of guests according to rank and precedence, et cetera, et cetera. Dekkeret had had enough of that, and more than enough, for the moment. Left to his own devices, the coronation rite would have at best an audience of seven or ten people, and would take no longer than the time necessary for Prestimion to take the starburst crown from its bearer and place it on the brow of his successor, and cry, “Dekkeret! Dekkeret! All hail Lord Dekkeret!”

But he knew better than to think it could be as simple as that. There had to be feasting, and rituals, and poetry readings, and the salutations of the high lords, and the ceremonial showing of the Coronal’s shield, and the crowning of his mother the Lady Taliesme as the new Lady of the Isle of Sleep, and whatever else was required to invest the incoming Coronal with the proper majesty and awesomeness. Dekkeret did not intend to interfere with any of that. Whatever innovations his reign would bring, and he certainly intended that there would be some, he was not going to expend his authority this early over trivial matters of ceremony. On the other hand, he took care now to keep away from the rooms where the planning was taking place. He turned instead toward the very center of the royal sector, deserted now in this time of transition from one reign to another.

A pair of great metal doors, fifteen feet high, confronted him now. These were Prestimion’s doing, a project that had been in progress for a decade or more and was still a long way from completion. The left-hand door was covered, every square inch of it, with scenes from the events of Lord Confalume’s reign. The door opposite it still presented only a smooth blank surface.

I will have that door engraved with the deeds of Prestimion, done in a matching style by the same artisans, Dekkeret told himself. And then I will have both doors gilded, so that they will shine forever down the ages.

He touched one of the heavy bronze handles and the door, precisely and delicately calibrated, swung back to admit him to the Castle’s heart.

The simple little throne-room of Lord Stiamot was the first thing he came to. He moved on past it, still wandering without a plan, into yet another hodgepodge of little corridors and passageways that he could not remember ever having ventured into before; he was just beginning to conclude that he was lost when he turned to his left and discovered that he was staring into the grand vaulted chamber that was Lord Prestimion’s judgment-hall, with the numbing extravagance of the Confalume throne-room just beyond it.

It is wrong, Dekkeret thought, to have to approach these great rooms through such a maze of chaos. Prestimion had carved his judgment-hall out of a dozen or so ancient little rooms; Dekkeret resolved now to do the same with the hallways he had just come through, clearing them all away to create some new formal room, a Chapel of the Divine, perhaps, in which the Coronal might ask for the gift of wisdom before going into the judgment-hall to dispense the law. The Dekkeret Chapel, yes. He smiled. Already he saw it in the eye of his mind, a stone archway over there, and the passage connecting it to the judgment-hall emblazoned with brilliant mosaics in green and gold—

Bravo! he thought. Not even crowned yet, and already launched on your building program!

It surprised him, how easily he was taking to this business of becoming the Coronal Lord of Majipoor. There still remained concealed within him, somewhere, Dekkeret the boy, only child of the struggling merchant Orvan Pettir and his good wife Taliesme, the boy who had roamed the hilly streets of walled Normork with his lively young cousin Sithelle and dreamed of becoming something more than his father had managed to be—a Castle knight, perhaps, who one day would hold some high place in the government: how could that boy not be flabbergasted to find his older self about to accede to the very highest place of all?

He denied none of that. But his older self was less easily awed by such things. A Coronal, he knew by now, is only a man who wears a green robe trimmed with ermine, and on certain formal occasions is permitted to don a crown and occupy a throne. He is still a man, for all that. Someone must be Coronal, and, through an unlikely chain of accidents, the choice had fallen upon him. That chain had passed through Prestimion’s long-ago visit to Normork and Sithelle’s death; through his own unhappy hunting trip in the Khyntor Marches and the impulsive journey of penance to Suvrael that had followed it, leading to his discovery of the Barjazids and their mind-controlling helmets; and through the war against Dantirya Sambail and Akbalik’s death, which had removed the expected heir to the crown. Thus it had come down to him. So be it, then. He will be Coronal. He will nevertheless remain a man, who must eat and sleep and void his bowels and one day die. But for the time being he will be Lord Dekkeret of Lord Dekkeret’s Castle, and he will build the Dekkeret Chapel over there, and in Normork he will, as he had told Dinitak Barjazid what was beginning to seem like a hundred years ago, eventually build the Dekkeret Gate, and perhaps also—

“My lord?”

The voice, breaking into his ruminations this way, startled him more than a little.

Nor did Dekkeret believe at first that he was the one being addressed. He was still not used to that title, “my lord.” He looked around, thinking to find Prestimion somewhere in the vicinity; but then he realized that the words had been intended for him. The speaker was the Su-Suheris Maundigand-Klimd, High Magus to the court of Prestimion.

“I know I intrude on your privacy, my lord. I ask your forgiveness for that.”

“You do nothing without good reason, Maundigand-Klimd. Forgiveness is hardly necessary.”

“I thank you, sir. As it happens, I have something of importance to bring to your attention. May we confer in some place less public than this?”

Dekkeret signaled the two-headed being to lead the way.

He had never quite understood how Prestimion, a man of the most dogged and ingrained skepticism when it came to all matters mystical and occult, happened to maintain a magus among his circle of intimates. Confalume had been a man much given over to sorcery, yes, and Dekkeret understood that Prankipin before him had had the same irrational leanings; but Prestimion had always seemed to him to be someone who relied on the evidence of his reason and his senses, rather than on the conjurings and prognostications of seers. His High Counsellor, Septach Melayn, was if anything of a more realistic cast of mind yet.

Dekkeret did know that Prestimion, for all his skepticism, had spent some time at the wizards’ capital of Triggoin in the north, an episode in his life of which he was most unwilling to speak; and that he had made use of the services of certain master wizards of Triggoin in his war against the usurping Korsibar, and from time to time on other occasions during his reign. So his attitudes toward the magical arts were more complex than it appeared at first glance.

And Maundigand-Klimd seemed never to be far from the center of things at court. Dekkeret did not get the impression that Prestimion kept the Su-Suheris around simply as a sop to the credulity of all those billions of common folk in the world who swore by soothsayers and necromancers, nor was he just a mere decoration. No, Prestimion actually consulted Maundigand-Klimd on matters of the highest importance. That was something that Dekkeret meant to discuss with him before the handover of power was complete. Dekkeret himself had only the most casual interest in the persistence of the mantic arts as a phenomenon of modern culture, and no belief whatever in their predictive value. But if Prestimion thought it was useful to keep someone like Maundigand-Klimd close at hand—

And keep him close at hand is what he had done. The Su-Suheris led him now to the private apartments that he had occupied since the earliest days of Prestimion’s reign: just across the Pinitor Court from the Coronal’s own residence, indeed. Dekkeret had heard that these rooms had belonged to Lord Confalume’s forgotten son Prince Korsibar before his usurpation of the throne, that dark deed that had been wiped from the memories of almost everyone in the world. So they were important chambers.

Dekkeret had never had reason to enter them before. He was surprised at how starkly they were furnished. None of the claptrap gadgetry of professional sorcery here, the ambivials and hexaphores, the alembics and armillary spheres, with which the charlatans in the marketplaces awed the populace; nor any of the thick leather-bound volumes of arcane lore, printed in black letter, that stirred such fear among those who feared such things. Dekkeret saw only a few small devices that might have been the calculating machines of a bookkeeper, and quite probably were, and a small library of books that had nothing whatever mystical about their outer appearance. Otherwise Maundigand-Klimd’s rooms were virtually empty. Of beds, chairs, Dekkeret saw nothing. Did the Su-Suheris sleep standing up? Evidently so.

And carried on conversations the same way. It was going to be an awkward business, Dekkeret saw. It always was, with a Su-Suheris. Not only were they so inordinately tall—their foot-long necks and elongated spindle-shaped heads brought them to rival Skandars in height, if not in overall bulk—but there was the weirdness of them, the inescapable ali-enness of them, to contend with. The two heads, primarily: each with its own identity, independent of the other, its own set of facial expressions, its own tone of voice, its own intensely penetrating pair of emerald-hued eyes. Was there another two-headed race anywhere in the galaxy? And their pale skins, hairless and white as marble, their perpetually somber miens, the hard-edged lipless slits that were their unsmiling mouths—it was all too easy to perceive them as terrifying icy-souled monsters.

Yet this one—this two-headed sorcerer—was Lord Prestimion’s counsellor and friend. That required explanation. Dekkeret wished he had sought it long before this moment.

Maundigand-Klimd said, “I’ve long been aware of your distaste for the so-called occult sciences, my lord. Permit me to begin by telling you that I share your attitude.”

Dekkeret frowned. “That seems a very strange position for you to take.”

“How so?”

“Because of the paradox it contains. The professional magus claims to be a skeptic? He speaks of the occult sciences as the ‘so-called’ occult sciences?”

“A skeptic is what I am, yes, though not quite in the sense that you are, lordship. If I read you correctly, you take the position that all prediction is mere guesswork, hardly more reliable than the flipping of a coin, whereas—”

“Oh, not all prediction, Maundigand-Klimd.” It was unnerving, looking from one head to the other, attempting to maintain eye contact with only one pair at a time, trying to anticipate which head would speak next. “I concede that Vroons, for example, have a curious knack for choosing the proper fork in the road to take, even in completely unfamiliar territory. And your own long affiliation with Lord Prestimion leads me to conclude that much of the advice you’ve given him has been valuable. Even so—”

“These are valid examples, yes,” said the Su-Suheris—it was the left head, the one with the deeper voice, that spoke. “And others could be provided, things difficult to explain except by calling them magical. Undeniably they are effectual, however mystifying that is. What I refer to, when I say we share a certain outlook toward sorcery, involves the multitude of bizarre and, if you will, barbaric cults that have infested the world for the past fifty years. The folk who flagellate one another and douse themselves in the blood of bidlaks butchered alive. The worshippers of idols. The ones who put their faith in mechanical devices or fanciful amulets. You and I both know how worthless these things are. Lord Prestimion, throughout his reign, has quietly and subtly attempted to let such practices go out of vogue. I’m confident, my lord—” somewhere along the way, Dekkeret realized, the right head had taken over the conversation “—that you will follow the same course.”

“You can be sure that I will.”

“May I ask if it is your plan to appoint a High Magus when your reign officially begins? Not that I am applying for the job. You should know, if you are not already aware of the fact, that the new Pontifex has asked me to accompany him to the Labyrinth once the ceremonies of your coronation are behind us.”

Dekkeret nodded. “I expected as much. As for a new High Magus, I have to tell you, Maundigand-Klimd, that I haven’t given the matter a bit of thought. My present feeling is that I don’t have any need of one.”

“Because you would regard whatever he told you as essentially useless?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“It is your choice to make,” said Maundigand-Klimd, and from his tone it was clear that the matter was one of utter indifference to him. “However, for the time being there still is a High Magus in the Coronal’s service, and I feel obliged to inform the new Coronal that I have had a perplexing revelation that might have some bearing on his reign. The former Lord Prestimion advises me that it would be appropriate for me to bring this revelation to your attention.”

“Ah,” said Dekkeret. “I see.”

“Of course, if your lordship prefers not to—”

“No,” Dekkeret said. “If Prestimion thinks I should hear it, by all means share it with me.”

“Very well. What I have done is cast an oracle for the outset of your reign. The omens, I regret to say, were somewhat dark and inauspicious.”

Dekkeret met that with a smile. “I’m grateful, then, for my lack of belief in the mantic arts. It’s easier to handle bad news when you don’t have much faith in its substance.”

“Precisely so, my lord.”

“Can you be more specific about these dark omens, though?”

“Unfortunately, no. I know my own limitations. Everything was shrouded in a haze of ambiguities. Nothing had real clarity. I picked up only a sense of strife ahead, of refusals to offer allegiance, of civil disobedience.”

“You saw no faces? You heard no names named?”

“These visions do not function on such a literal level.”

“I confess I can’t see much value in a prediction so murky that it doesn’t actually predict anything,” said Dekkeret. He was growing impatient with this now.

“Agreed, my lord. My visions are highly subjective: intuitions, impressions, sensations of the most subtle kind, glimpses of probability, rather than concrete details. But you would do well to be on guard, all the same, against unexpected reversals of circumstance.”

“My historical studies tell me that a wise Coronal should always do just that, with or without the advice of mages to guide him. But I thank you for your counsel.” Dekkeret moved toward the door.

“There was,” said Maundigand-Klimd, before Dekkeret had quite managed to take his leave, “just one aspect of my vision that was clear enough for me to be able to describe it to you in any meaningful way. It involved the Powers of the Realm, who had gathered at the Castle for a certain ceremony of high ritual importance. I sensed their auras, all clustered around the Confalume Throne.”

“Yes,” Dekkeret said. “We do have all three Powers at the Castle just now: my mother, and Prestimion, and I. And what exactly were we doing in this dream of yours, the three of us?”

“There were four auras, my lord.”

Dekkeret looked puzzledly at the magus. “Your dream misleads you, then. I know of only three Powers of the Realm.” He counted off on his fingers: “The Pontifex, the Coronal, the Lady of the Isle. It’s a division of authority that goes back thousands of years.”

“Unmistakably I felt a fourth aura, and it was the aura of a Power. A fourth Power, my lord.”

“Are you saying that a new usurper is about to proclaim himself? That we’re going to play out the Korsibar business all over again?”

From the Su-Suheris came the Su-Suheris equivalent of a shrug: a partial retraction of the forked column of his neck, a curling inward of his long-clawed six-fingered hands. “There was no evidence in my vision that favors such a possibility. Or that denies it, either.”

“Then how—”

“I have one other detail to add. The person who carried the aura of the fourth Power of the Realm carried also the imprint of a member of the Barjazid family.”

“What?”

“It was unmistakable, sir. I have not forgotten that you brought the man Venghenar Barjazid, and of course his son Dinitak, to the Castle as prisoners, though it was twenty years ago. The pattern of a Barjazid soul is extraordinarily distinctive.”

“So Dinitak’s going to be a Power!” cried Dekkeret, laughing. “How he’ll love to hear that!” The nonsensical revelation, coming at the climax of this lengthy and baffling conversation, struck him as wonderfully laughable. “Will he push me aside and make himself Coronal, do you think? Or is it the post of Lady of the Isle that he’s got his eye on?”

Nothing disturbed Maundigand-Klimd’s impenetrable gravity. “You give insufficient credence, lordship, to my statement that my visions are subjective. I would not say that the Barjazid who was cloaked in a Power’s majesty was your friend Dinitak, nor could I say that he was not. I can only tell you that I felt the Barjazid pattern. I caution you against too literal an interpretation of what I tell you.”

“There are other Barjazids, I suppose. Suvrael may still teem with them.”

“Yes. I remind you of the man Khaymak Barjazid, who not long ago attempted to enter Lord Prestimion’s service, but was turned away at the advice of his own nephew Dinitak.”

“Right. Venghenar’s brother—of course. He’s the one who’s going to be a Power, then, you think? It still makes no sense, Maundigand-Klimd!”

“Again I caution you, lordship, against seeking so literal an explanation. Obviously it’s absurd that there can be a fourth Power of the Realm, or that a member of the Barjazid clan could so much as aspire to that distinction. But my vision cannot be dismissed out of hand. It has symbolic meanings that at this point not even I can interpret. But one thing is clear: there will be trouble in the early part of your reign, my lord; and a Barjazid will be involved in it. More than that, I cannot say.”

9

“Are you still awake?” Fiorinda asked.

Teotas, beside her, muttered an affirmative. “What hour is it, anyway?”

“I don’t know. A very late one. What keeps you up?”

“Too much wine, I suppose,” he said. The pre-coronation banquet that evening had gone on and on, everybody carrying on like drunken roaring fools, Prestimion and Dekkeret side by side at the high table, Septach Melayn, Gialaurys, Dembitave, Navigorn, and half a dozen other members of the Council, everyone in a rare good humor. Abrigant had come up from Muldemar for the occasion, bringing with him ten cases of wine of a glorious vintage dating far back into the time of Lord Confalume, and doubtless all ten cases contained nothing but empty bottles now.

But it was an evasive answer. Teotas knew that the wine was not to blame for his wakefulness. He had had as much to drink as anybody, he supposed. The irony was that wine was wasted on him—and he a prince of Muldemar, a member of the family that made the finest wines in the world! He might just as well be drinking water. His intense, churning soul burned the alcohol as fast as it could enter him: it had no effect on him at all. He had never really been drunk in his life, never even pleasantly tipsy, and that was a heavy price to pay for being spared from hangovers as well.

What was bothering him, he knew, had nothing to do with last night’s debauchery. It was, in good part, uneasiness over the vastness of the changes that were about to come over his existence, now that Prestimion’s time as Coronal was over and his brother’s new life in the Labyrinth was about to commence.

In theory, Teotas thought, he himself would feel no great impact from any of that. He was the youngest of the four princely Muldemar brothers, with no hereditary obligations, free to live out his life as he pleased. Prestimion, the eldest, had always been destiny’s darling, rising swiftly and inevitably to the throne of the world. Taradath, the brilliant second brother, had perished in the Korsibar war. To sturdy Abrigant, the third, the family fief at Muldemar had descended, and he lived there now at Muldemar House, as princes of Muldemar had for centuries, presiding over the winemakers and dispensing justice to his adoring citizens.

Teotas, though, had lived the life of a private citizen until Prestimion had chosen him for the Council. He had taken to himself a wife, the excellent Lady Fiorinda of Stee, a childhood friend of Prestimion’s wife Varaile, and together they had reared three admirable children; and when Prestimion named him to the Council, he made himself one of its most useful members. All in all, he had created a satisfying life for himself, though there was that unhappy quirk in his character that prevented him from taking full pleasure even in the utter fulfillment of all ambition and desire.

And now—now—

The to-ing and fro-ing of these coronation ceremonies was finally coming to an end. Soon everyone would have settled down in his proper place. For Prestimion and Varaile, that place would be the Labyrinth. And Varaile wanted Fiorinda—her sister-in-law and chief lady-in-waiting—to live there with her.

Did Varaile understand that that would mean, for Fiorinda, the uprooting of her entire family? Of course she did. But the two women were inseparable friends. It must seem to Fiorinda and to Varaile as well that it was better for Fiorinda and her family to move to the subterranean capital in the south than for them to be parted from one another.

Teotas, though, had lived at the Castle since he was a boy. He knew no other home, except only the family estate at Muldemar House, and that was Abrigant’s property now. The Castle’s thousands of rooms were like extensions of his own skin. He roved far and wide through the meadowlands outside, he hunted in the forest preserves of Halanx, he enjoyed the giddy pleasures of the juggernauts and mirror-slides of High

Morpin, he wandered now and again down to Muldemar to reminisce about old times with Abrigant. As his sons grew toward manhood he took them with him in his wanderings among the cities of the Mount, bringing them to see the stone birds of Furible in their mating flight, and the lovely burnt-orange towers of Bombifale, and the festival of the flaming canals of Hoikmar. Castle Mount was his life. The Labyrinth held no appeal for him. That was no secret to anyone.

He had always indulged Fiorinda in every whim. This was more than a whim; but he would, if he could, indulge her in this too. But this one was very hard.

There was a final twist in the situation that made his yielding well-nigh impossible. Dekkeret, upon returning from Prestimion’s coronation, had asked him to serve him as High Counsellor of the Realm. “It will provide continuity,” Dekkeret had said. “Prestimion’s own brother, taking the second highest post at the Castle, and who else is better qualified than you, a key member of Prestimion’s own Council—?”

Yes, it made sense. Teotas was honored and flattered.

But was Dekkeret aware that Varaile had already summoned Fiorinda to be her companion at the Labyrinth? Apparently he was not. And the two appointments were irreconcilable.

How could he be Lord Dekkeret’s High Counsellor at the Castle while Fiorinda was the Lady Varaile’s chief lady-in-waiting at the Labyrinth? Were Dekkeret and Varaile expecting them simply to rip their marriage apart? Or were they supposed to divide their time, half the year at one capital and half at the other? That was plainly unworkable. The Coronal needed his High Counsellor at his side all the time, not off for months communing with the Pontifex in the Labyrinth. Varaile would not want to be parted that long from Fiorinda, either.

One of them would have to make a great sacrifice. But which one?

Thus far Teotas had shied away from discussing the matter with Fiorinda, hoping forlornly that some easy miraculous solution would present itself. He knew how unlikely that was. It was ever his inclination to yield to her wishes, yes. But to decline the post of High Counsellor—it would be almost treasonous; Dekkeret needed and wanted him; there was no other obvious choice. Varaile could surely find other ladies-in-waiting. It was not as if—but then, on the other hand—

He saw no answer, and it was tearing him asunder.

That was one part of Teotas’s anguish. But also there were the dreams.

Night after night, dreams so terrible that he had come by now to fear falling asleep, because once he plunged into that dark land beyond his pillow he became prey to the most monstrous horrors. It helped not at all to tell himself after he had awakened that it had merely been a dream. There was nothing mere about dreams. Teotas knew that dreams hold powerful significance: that they are the harbingers of the invisible world, tapping for admission at the boundaries of our souls. And dark dreams like his could only be the tappings of demons, of lurking forces beyond the clouds, the ancient beings that once ruled this world and might one day seize it from those who had come to possess it.

Sleep now terrified him. Awake, he could defend himself against anything. Sleeping, he was as helpless as a child. That was infuriating, that he should have no defense. But he could not fight off sleep forever, try as he might.

It was coming for him now, despite everything.

“Yes, Teotas, yes, sleep…” Fiorinda was stroking his forehead, his cheeks, his throat. “Relax. Let go, Teotas, let go of everything.”

What could he say? I dare not sleep. I fear demons, Fiorinda? I am unwilling to put myself at their mercy?

Her embrace was sweet and soothing. He rested his head against her soft warm breasts. What was the use of fighting? Sleep was necessary. Sleep was inevitable. Sleep was…

A tumbling downward, a free descent, a willy-nilly plummeting.

And then he is crossing a bare blackened plateau, a place of clinkers and ash, of gaping crevasses, of gaunt dead trees, and he is growing older, much older, with every step he takes. He is inhaling old age like some poisonous fume. His skin puckers and becomes cracked and wrinkled. He sprouts a coat of coarse white hair on his chest and belly and loins. His veins bulge. His ankles complain. His eyes grow bleary. His knees are bent. His heart races and slows. His nostrils wheeze.

He struggles forward, fighting the transformation and always losing, losing, losing. The pallid sun begins to slip below the horizon. The path he is following, he knows not why, is ascending, now. Every step is torment. His throat is dry and his swollen tongue is like a lump of old cloth in his mouth. Gummy rheum drips from the rims of his eyes and trickles across his chest. There is a drumming in his temples and a coldness in his gut.

Creatures that are little more than filmy vapors dance through the air about him. They point; they laugh; they jeer. Coward, they call him. Fool. Insect. Pitiful creeping thing.

Feebly he shakes his fist at them. Their laughter grows more raucous. Their insults become more vicious. They lay bare his utter worthlessness in fifty different ways, and he lacks the strength to contradict them, and after a time he knows that no contradiction is possible, because they are speaking the simple truth.

Then, as though they are no longer able to sustain interest in any entity as trivial and contemptible as he, they melt away and are gone, leaving only a trailing cloud of tinkling merriment behind them.

He staggers on. Twice he falls, and twice he claws his way to his feet, feeling the harsh scratch of bone on bone, the thick rustle of dark blood pushing through narrowed arteries. He would not have believed that being old could be such agony. Darkness comes swiftly. He finds himself deep in starless moonless night and is grateful that he no longer has to look upon his own body. “Fiorinda?” he croaks, but there is no response. He is alone. He has never been anything but alone.

A light, now, blinks into being in the distance, and rapidly intensifies to become a cone of luminous green, widening to fill the heavens, a geyser of pale radiance spurting aloft. As the wind sweeps through it, it stirs swirls of a grayer color, whirlpools of light within light. Accompanying this outburst of brightness is a rushing, whispering sound, like the murmur of distant water. He also hears what sounds like subterranean laughter, resonant, slippery. He goes forward, entering a sort of green cloud that seeps from the ground. The air is electric. His pores tingle. A sour smell drifts upward in his nostrils. His bent and aching body sweats and steams. There is what seems to be a mountain ahead, but as he moves on through the cloud Teotas realizes that what he sees is a giant living thing, squat and enormous and incomprehensible, sitting upright on a kind of throne.

A god? A demon? An idol? Its brown, leathery skin is thick and glossy, and ridged like a reptile’s hide. Its massive body is low and long, blunt-snouted, goggle-eyed, with a high vaulting back, fat sides, bulging belly, pedestal-like underparts. Teotas has never seen a creature so huge. That mouth alone—

That mouth—

That gaping mouth—

Teotas is unable to halt himself. The mouth yawns like the entrance to the cavern of caverns, and he marches onward, no longer moving with difficulty: gliding, rather, speeding toward that mouth, rushing toward it—

Wider and wider. That great cavern fills the sky. A terrible bellowing comes from it, loud enough to shake the ground. Landslides begin; rocks fall in thundering avalanches; there is no place to take refuge except within the mouth itself, that waiting mouth, that eternally gaping mouth—

Teotas rushes forward into the blackness.

“It’s all right,” someone is saying. “A dream, only a dream! Teotas—please, Teotas—”

He was bathed in sweat, shivering, a huddled heap. Fiorinda cradled him in her arms, murmuring an unending flow of soothing words. Gradually he could feel himself coming back from the nightmare, though its residue, like an oily slick, still laps at the edges of his mind.

“Only a dream, Teotas! It wasn’t real!”

He nodded. What could he say, how to explain? “Yes. Only a dream.”

10

Prestimion said, “So now it’s finally over and done with, all the jolly festivals and amusements. Now the real work begins, eh, Dekkeret?”

It had taken him back to earlier days, these weeks of formal ceremonies that marked the end of the old reign and the beginning of the new. He had been through all this once before, only that time he was the one whose ascent to the throne was being celebrated. The influx of coronation gifts from all over the world—had he ever actually unpacked more than a fraction of those myriad boxes and crates?—the rite of the passing of the crown, the coronation banquet, the recitals from The Book of Changes, the chanting of The Book of Powers, the passing and repassing of the wine-bowls, the gathered lords of the realm rising to make the starburst salute and cry out the greeting to the new Coronal—

“Prestimion!” they had cried. “Lord Prestimion! Hail, Lord Prestimion! Long life to Lord Prestimion!” So long ago! It seemed to him now that his entire reign as Coronal had gone by in the twinkling of an eye, and now here he was mysteriously transformed into a man of middle years, no longer as buoyant and impulsive as he once had been, nor as good-humored, either—a little testy at times, indeed, he would admit—and now they had done it all once again, the immemorial rituals played out anew, but this time the name they called was that of Dekkeret, Dekkeret, Lord Dekkeret, while he himself looked on from one side, smiling, willingly surrendering his share of glory to the new monarch.

But some part of him would always be Coronal, he knew.

His boyish younger self stood before him in the mirror of his memory like some other person, that youthful, agile Prestimion of two decades ago: that endlessly resilient young man who had survived the humiliation of the Korsibar usurpation and the ghastly bloodlettings of the civil war, to make himself Coronal despite all. How he had fought for it! It had cost him a brother, and a lover, and much bodily suffering besides, nights camped on muddy shores, days spent trekking through the deadliest desert this side of Suvrael, mounts shot out from beneath him on the battlefield, wounds whose scars he still carried. Dekkeret was fortunate to have been spared any of that, let alone anything like a repetition of it. His rise to the throne had been orderly and normal. It was a much simpler way to become king.

Everything should have been simple for me, too, Prestimion thought. But that was not the fate that the Divine had in mind for me.

He stood with Dekkeret—Lord Dekkeret—in the Confalume throne-chamber, just the two of them, amid the echoes. As they looked far across the floor of brilliant yellow gurnawood to the throne itself, that massive block of ruby-streaked black opal rising on its stepped pedestal of dark mahogany, Dekkeret said, “You’ll miss it, I know. Go on, Prestimion: climb up there one last time, if you like. I’ll never tell.”

Prestimion smiled. “I never cared to sit on it when I was Coronal. It would feel even wronger for me to sit on it now.”

“But you took your place on that throne often enough when you were king, and you put a good face on it then.”

“It was my job to put a good face on it, Dekkeret. But now the job’s yours. I have no business up there, even for sentiment’s sake.”

He continued to ponder the great throne, though, for a time. He could not help, even now, but be amused by the pretentiousness of the astoundingly costly throne-room Confalume had so grandly thrust into the heart of the Castle, and the throne itself that was its jewel. But at the same time he honored it for the symbol of rightful power that it was, and for the way it summoned up in his mind the memory of Confalume himself, who in some senses had been more of a father to him than his own.

At length he said, “You know, Dekkeret, we have to take the old man’s gaudy throne very seriously while we’re seated upon it. We need to believe with every fiber of our souls in its majesty. Because what we really are are performers, you know, and there’s our stage. And for the little time we strut that stage, we need to believe that the play is real and important: for if we don’t seem to believe it, who else will want to?”

“Yes. Yes, I do comprehend that, Prestimion.”

“But now I have a different stage for myself, and no one will see me moving back and forth upon it.—Let’s get ourselves out of this place, shall we?” Prestimion gave the great throne a final, almost fond, glance.

They crossed from the throne-room into to the judgment-hall, a room of his own making. It was of no trifling degree of splendor itself. Would they think, someday, that the ancient Lord Prestimion had been a man as much given to ostentatiousness and grand display as his predecessor Lord Confalume? Well, let them think it, then. That was nothing for him to concern himself over. History would invent its own Prestimion, as it had invented its own Stiamot, its own Arioc, its own Guadeloom. It was a process with which no man could interfere. He was probably well on his way toward becoming mythical already.

Dekkeret said, “These rooms beyond here—I’m going to clear them away, and build a chapel for the Coronal, I think. I feel it’s needed here.”

“A good idea.”

“A chapel right here, you mean?”

“The general idea of building things. I like it that you already have that in mind. If you want a chapel here, build one. Put your mark on the Castle, Dekkeret. Take it in your hands. Shape it as you will. This place is the sum of all the kings who have lived in it. We’ll never be finished building it. So long as the world lasts, there’ll be new construction up here.”

“Yes. Majipoor expects it of us.”

It pleased Prestimion to be making this last tour of these sacred rooms with the sturdy, strong-willed man whom he had picked to succeed him. Dekkeret would be a splendid Coronal, of that he was sure. It was a necessary thing for him to know that he had bestowed such a successor upon the world. However great his own accomplishments had been, history would not forgive him if he provided Majipoor with a weakling or a fool as the next king.

Great Coronals had made such mistakes in the past. But Prestimion was confident that no one would ever lay that charge against him.

Dekkeret would live up to all expectations. He would be a different sort of king from his predecessor, yes, earnest and straightforward where Prestimion had often relied on craftiness and manipulation. And Dekkeret cut a grand and heroic figure, who commanded respect merely by walking into a room, whereas Prestimion, built by the Divine on a much smaller scale, felt that he had had to achieve kingliness by sheer force of personality.

Well, these differences would make it easier for the people of future years to tell one of them from the other, anyway. “In the time of Prestimion and Dekkeret,” they would say, hearkening back as if to a golden age, the way sometimes people spoke of the times of Thraym and Vildivar, or Signor and Melikand, or Agis and Klain. But those kings existed only as interchangeable paired names, not as individuals in their own right. Prestimion hoped for a kinder fate. So different was he from Dekkeret that those who lived in time to come would of necessity always see in the eyes of their minds the image of the quick, supple little Prestimion, the master archer, the great planner, and the broad-shouldered big-bodied form of Dekkeret beside him, and they would know, forever, which one was which. Or so Prestimion hoped.

“Shall we stroll out to the Morvendil Parapet?” he asked, gesturing toward the northwestern gate. “The view from there by night is one I’ve often enjoyed.”

“And will again, many times,” said Dekkeret. “You will come visiting often?”

“As often as is appropriate for a Pontifex to show his nose at the Castle, I suppose. But that’s not often at all, is it? And you won’t want me here, anyway. However you may feel right now, you’ll not want me snooping around the premises once you start believing that the place is really yours.”

Dekkeret chuckled, but made no other response.

They went quickly through the halls, out into the dusk. Distant guards saluted them. Others, shadowy figures who might have been princes of the realm, peered at them from afar also, but no one dared approach: who would interrupt the private conference of the Pontifex and the Coronal? A covered walkway that carried an inscription from Lord Dulcinon’s time took them into the Gaznivin Court, which had a balcony at its lower end that gave access to Lord Morvendil’s Parapet.

What sort of ruler Lord Morvendil had been, or even when he had lived, were matters of which Prestimion had no knowledge, but the parapet itself, a long and narrow breastwork of black Velathyntu stone, had long been one of Prestimion’s private places of refuge from the cares of the crown. Here the Mount tapered to a narrow point, falling away below the Castle wall in a steep declivity that gave a spectacular view of several of the High Cities and part of the band of Inner Cities just below. Darkness was coming on quickly down there, and islands of light were springing up against the giant mountain’s flank. It was always instructive to consider that this small spot of light off to the left was actually a city of six million people, and that dot there the home of seven million more. And that one down there, pressed up snugly against the side of the mountain and surrounded by a semicircle of inky blackness, was Prestimion’s own lovely Muldemar.

Memories stirred in him of his youth in that beautiful city, his happy family life, the warm and loving mother and the strong noble father, taken so early by death, who had seemed as kingly as any Coronal. What a warm community, what a satisfying existence! He had never known a moment of sadness or despair. If the Castle had not called to him, he would be Prince of Muldemar now, busy and content among the grapes and wine-cellars.

But it had seemed a natural and normal thing for him to move outward from the bosom of his family and the princely responsibilities of the city of his birth to the service of mankind. So the yearning had come over him to be Coronal, and thus to hold all of Majipoor in warm familial embrace, he the focus of everyone’s dreams, he the benign leader, he the father of the world.

Was that how he had seen it then, or was it simple power-hunger that had impelled him to the throne? He could not say. There had, of course, been some component of the desire for mastery in his rise through the Castle hierarchy. But that had been far from his dominant motive, he was certain—very far. Prestimion had learned that in the Kor-sibar war.

He had fought then for the throne, yes, fought desperately, but not so much because he simply wanted it, as Korsibar had, but because he was sure he deserved it, that he was needed for it, that he was the necessary and unique man of his era. No doubt many a dread tyrant and monstrous villain had felt the same way precisely about himself, in the long course of human history going back to the all but forgotten times of Old Earth. Well, so be it; Prestimion had faith in his own understanding of his own motives. And so, he knew, did all of Majipoor. He was beloved by all, and that was the confirmation of everything. He had served ably as Coronal; so would he serve now, now that he was Pontifex.

He looked toward Dekkeret, who was standing a little apart, plainly unwilling to intrude on his reflections. “Have you given thought yet to how you will begin?”

“New decrees and laws, you mean? Overturning ancient precedents, repealing existing protocols, standing the world on its head? I thought I might wait some little while before setting out on that course.”

Prestimion laughed. “A wise position, I think. The Coronal who governs wisest is the one who governs least. Lord Prankipin put the world back on its course by lessening the grip of government; Confalume followed that course, and so have I. The benefits can be seen on every side.—But no, no, I wasn’t speaking of legislative matters, only symbolic ones. Is it your intention to sequester yourself here at the Castle until you’ve fully settled into your tasks, or will you show yourself to the people?”

“If I hide here until I feel I’ve fully settled into my tasks, I may grow old and die before the world sees my face. But surely it’s too soon for a grand processional, Prestimion!”

“I would say that it is. Save the processional for the traditional fifth year, unless circumstances force it sooner. But once I became Coronal I lost little time in visiting the nearby cities, if nothing farther. Of course, I was ever a restless man: you are more content to see the same set of doors and windows several weeks running, I think. Still, there’s something to be said for a Coronal’s getting himself away from the Castle as often as is seemly. One gets a damned narrow view of the world from thirty miles up.”

“So I would think,” said Dekkeret. “Where did you go, in your first months?”

“In the very beginning, I simply slipped away with Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, saying nothing about it to anyone, going in the night to places like Banglecode or Greel or Bibiroon. We wore wigs and false whiskers, even, and kept our ears open, and learned much about the world that had been given us to govern. The Night Market of Bombifale—ah, now that was a time! We tasted foods no Coronal may ever have eaten before. We visited the dealers in sorcery-goods. It was there that I met Maundigand-Klimd, who had no difficulty seeing through my disguise.—Not that I recommend such subterfuges to you.”

“No. Such things as wigs and false whiskers are not my style, I suspect.”

“A little later I journeyed in a more formal way. I would take Teotas or Abrigant with me, Gialaurys, Navigorn, various members of my Council. And visit the cities of the Mount—Peritole, Strave, Minimool, down the Mount even to Gimkandale—never imposing myself on any one place for long, because of the expense it would involve for them, merely arriving and making a speech or two, listening to complaints, promising miracles, and moving along. It was in this phase of my reign that I came to Normork, you may recall.”

“How could I ever forget it?” said Dekkeret gravely.

“Finding Maundigand-Klimd on one trip, and you on another; and there was a third journey, a visit to Stee, where I met the Lady Varaile. Fortuitous meetings, all three, the merest of accidents, and yet how they transformed my reign, and my life! Whereas if you remain sequestered at the Castle—”

Dekkeret nodded. “Yes. I do take the point.”

“One more question, and then we should go in,” Prestimion said. “Maundigand-Klimd came to you, did he not, with his tale of perceiving a Barjazid as a Power of the Realm? What did you make of that story?”

“Why, very little, if anything.” Dekkeret indicated surprise that Prestimion would so much as mention anything so fantastic. “The three positions are filled, and let us hope no vacancies develop for many years to come.”

“You take his words very literally, I see.”

“The Su-Suheris made the very same comment. But how else am I to look upon words, other than as things with meanings? You seem to find it diverting to listen now and then to the murmurings of sorcerers, but to me they are all worthless idlers and parasites, even your cherished Maundigand-Klimd, and their prognostications are mere vapor to me. If a magus comes to me and says that in his dreams he has seen a Barjazid wearing the aura of a Power of the Realm, why should I search for hidden meanings and buried subtleties? I look first at the message itself. That particular message strikes me as foolishness. So I put it out of mind.”

“You do yourself an injustice by ignoring Maundigand-Klimd’s warning.”

A certain note of exasperation came into Dekkeret’s voice now. “We should not quarrel on this happy day, Prestimion. But—forgive me—what sense can there be in his prophecy? The Barjazids are all loathsome scoundrels, my friend Dinitak aside. The world would never embrace them as kings.”

“But Dinitak might, you think?”

“It would be very far-fetched. I grant you I could choose to name him as my successor, which would indeed make him a Power of the Realm, and if I did, I think he’d be a capable ruler, if perhaps somewhat stern. But I assure you most assuredly, Prestimion, that it’ll be many years before I begin fretting about finding a replacement for myself, and when I do I doubt very much that my choice would ever land on Dinitak. Two commoners in a row may be more than the system can stand. Dinitak has many virtues and is, I suppose, my closest friend, but he’s not, I think, generous enough of soul to be considered even in jest as a potential Coronal. He is a hard man, without much charity in him. Therefore—”

Prestimion held up one hand. “Enough! I beg you, Dekkeret, put aside the Power of the Realm part of this prophecy entirely. You’ve just ruled Dinitak out, and as for Khaymak Barjazid, I have as much trouble imagining him as Coronal as you would. Focus instead on Maundigand-Klimd’s warning that there will be difficulties in the early days of your reign, and that some Barjazid will be involved in them.”

“I’m prepared to deal with whatever arises. First let it arise, though.”

“You will remain alert, though?”

“Of course I will. It should go without saying. But I will not take up arms against phantoms, for all that you tell me about the wisdom of your magus. And I tell you, Prestimion, I will be reluctant to take up arms at all, no matter what troubles may arise, if there’s a peaceful solution available to me.—Shall we drop this discussion now, Prestimion? We have our farewell dinner to prepare ourselves for.”

“Yes. So we do.”

In any case, Prestimion saw, there was no point in continuing this. It was clear to him that what he was trying to do was about as fruitful as butting his head against the great wall of Normork. Butt all you pleased; the wall would never yield. Neither would Dekkeret.

Perhaps I am too sensitive on this, Prestimion thought, having had two doses of insurrection one upon another in the early years of my own reign. I am conditioned by my own unhappy experiences always to expect trouble; when it is absent, as it has been these many years since the death of Dantirya Sambail, I mistrust its absence. Dekkeret has a sunnier spirit: let him deal with Maundigand-Klimd’s gloomy prophecy as he pleases. Perhaps the Divine will indeed grant him a happy start to his reign despite everything. And dinner is waiting.

11

Khaymak Barjazid said, “I have a thought, your grace.—You mentioned, some time back, your difficult relationship with your father and your brothers.”

Mandralisca shot him a startled, angry look. For the moment he had forgotten altogether that he had ever spoken of his painful childhood to Barjazid, or anyone else. And he was not at all accustomed to being addressed in a way that ventured to breach the walls he had erected around his inner life.

“And if I did?” he said, in a voice tipped with blades.

Barjazid squirmed. Terror came into the little man’s mismatched eyes. “I mean no offense, sir! No offense at all! Only that I see a way of intensifying the power of the helmet you hold in your hands, a way which would make use of—certain of your—experiences.”

Mandralisca leaned forward. The sting of the sudden intrusion into his soul still reverberated in him, but he was interested all the same. “How so?”

“Let me see how to put this,” said Barjazid carefully. He held himself like a man setting out to have a philosophical dialogue with a snarling, infuriated khulpoin, all yellow fangs and blazing eyes, that he has unexpectedly encountered on a quiet country road. “When one uses the helmet, one generates the power from within oneself,” said Barjazid. “It is my belief that one would be able to increase the device’s power if one were to draw on some reservoir of pain, of fury, of—I could almost say ‘hatred.’ ”

“Well, say it, then. Hatred. It’s a word I understand.”

“Hatred, yes. And so certain things occurred to me, sir, remembering what you had told me that day concerning your boyhood—your father. Your—early unhappiness—” Barjazid chose his words painstakingly, obviously aware that he was treading on dangerous ground here. He understood that Mandralisca might well not want to be reminded of the things that he had blurted out, so very much to his own surprise, that day that he and Barjazid and Jacomin Halefice were walking through the marketplace. But Mandralisca, controlling himself, signalled to him to go on. And Barjazid most artfully did: he hinted, he alluded, he talked in euphemisms, all the while painting the portrait of the boy Mandralisca eternally in fear of his savage drunken father and his blustering bullying brothers, suffering daily at their hands and storing up a full measure of loathing for them that would, one day, overflow upon the world. Loathing that could be turned into an asset, that could be harnessed, that could become a source of great power. And offered some suggestions concerning how that might be achieved.

This was all very valuable. Mandralisca was grateful to Barjazid for sharing it with him. But he regretted, all the same, having parted even for a moment the veil that shrouded his early life. He had always found it useful to have the world perceive him as a monster carved out of ice; there were great risks in giving someone a glimpse of the vulnerable boy of long ago who lay hidden somewhere behind that chilly facade. He would gladly call back, if he could, all that he had told this little man that strange afternoon.

“Enough,” Mandralisca said, finally. “You’ve made your point clear. Now go, and let me get down to work.” He reached for the helmet.

Late autumn in the Gonghars, shading into early winter. The light but unending rain of the warm season has begun to give way to the cold and equally endless rain of autumn, heavy with sleet, that will yield in another few weeks to winter’s first snows. This is the cabin, the squalid shack, the tumbledown ill-favored house, where the wine-seller Kekkedis and his family live, here in the sad little mountain town of Ibykos. The hour is far along in the afternoon, dark, cold. Rain drums on the rotting lichen-encrusted roof and drips through the usual leaky places, landing in the usual buckets with a steady pong pong pong. Mandralisca does not dare to light a fire. Fuel is not wasted in this household, and any fuel not consumed on behalf of his father is deemed a waste of fuel; no one matters here but his father, and fires are lit when his father returns from his day’s toil, not before.

Today that may be hours from now. Or, perhaps—the Divine willing—never.

For three days now Kekkedis and his oldest son Malchio have been in the city of Velathys, a hundred miles away, arranging to buy up the stock of some fellow wine-merchant who has died in an avalanche, leaving half a dozen hungry babes. They are due back today; indeed, are already more than a little overdue, because the floater that runs between Velathys and Ibykos leaves at dawn and reaches Ibykos by mid-afternoon. It is almost dark, now, but the floater has not arrived. No one knows why. Another of Mandralisca’s brothers has been waiting at the station since noon with the wagon. The third is at the wine-shop, helping their mother. Mandralisca is alone at home. He diverts himself with luxurious fantasies of cataclysms befalling his father. Perhaps—perhaps, perhaps, perhaps!—something bad has happened on the road. Perhaps. Perhaps.

His other way of passing the time, and keeping warm, is by practicing with the singlestick baton that he has carved from a piece of night-flower wood. That is the finest kind of baton, a nightflower-wood baton, and Mandralisca saved all last year, one square copper at a time, to buy himself a decent-sized stave, which he has whittled and whittled until it is of the perfect length and weight, and fits his hand so well that one might think a master craftsman had designed the hand grip. Now, holding the baton so that it rests lightly in his palm, he moves deftly back and forth through the room, feinting at shadows, jabbing, parrying. He is quick; he is good; his wrist is strong, his eye is keen; he hopes to be a champion some day. But right now he is mainly interested in keeping warm.

He imagines that his opponent is his father. He dances round and round the older man, mockingly prodding at him, tapping him at the point of each shoulder, beneath the chin, along his cheek, playing with him, outmaneuvering him, humiliating him. Kekkedis has begun to growl with fury; he lashes out with his own baton with a two-handed grip, as though swinging an axe; but the boy is ten times as fast as he, and touches him again and again and again, while Kekkedis is unable to land a single blow.

Perhaps Kekkedis will never come home at all. Perhaps he’ll die somewhere on the road. Let it be, Mandralisca prays, that he is already dead.

Let him have had an avalanche too.

The hills above Ibykos are snow-covered already, the wet heavy snow typical of the cusp of the season. Mandralisca, closing his eyes, pictures the rain pounding down, imagines it striking the black granite bedrock, slicing at an angle into the accumulated snowdrifts, working like little knives to cut them loose and send them gliding in billowy clouds down the side of the hill toward the highway below, just as the Velathys floater goes by—hiding it altogether from sight until spring—Kekkedis and Malchio buried beneath a thousand tons of snow—

Or let a sudden sinkhole open in the highway. Let the floater be swallowed up in it.

Let the floater swerve wildly off the road. Let it plunge into the river.

Let the engine die halfway between Velathys and here. Let them be caught in a blizzard and freeze to death.

Mandralisca punctuates each of these hopeful thoughts with furious thrusts of his baton. Jab—jab—jab. He whirls, dances, turns lightly on the tips of his toes, strikes while his body is facing more than halfway away from his foe. Comes in overhead, a descending angle, impossible to defend against, bolt of lightning. Take that! That! That!

The sound of the wagon pulling up, suddenly. Mandralisca wants to weep. No avalanche, no sinkhole, no fatal blizzard. Kekkedis is home again.

Voices. Footsteps outside, now. Coughing sounds. Someone stamping his feet, two someones, Kekkedis and Malchio knocking snow off their boots.

“Boy! Where are you, boy? Let us in! Do you have any idea how cold it is out here?”

Mandralisca leans his baton against the wall. Rushes to the door, fumbles with the latch. Two tall men on the threshold, one older than the other, two bleak scowling lantern-jawed faces, long greasy black hair, angry eyes shining through. Mandralisca can smell the brandy on their breath. There is the smell of fury about them, too: a sharp, musky stink, boiling out from beneath their fur robes. Something must have gone wrong. They stomp past him, brushing him aside. “Where’s the fire?” Kekkedis asks. “Why is it so damnably cold in here? You should have had a fire ready for us, boy!”

No way to deal with that. Denounced if he prepares a fire, denounced if he doesn’t. The old story.

Mandralisca hurries to bring in some kindling from the pile on the back porch. His father and his brother, still in their coats, stand in the middle of the room, rubbing their hands to warm them. They are talking about their journey. Their voices are harsh and bitter. Evidently the venture has been a failure; the agents for the other wine-merchant’s estate have been too sharp for Kekkedis, the cheap and easy purchase of distress-sale merchandise has fallen through, the whole trip has been a waste of time and money. Mandralisca keeps his head down and goes about his business, asking no questions. He knows better than to call attention to himself when his father is in a mood like this. Best to stay out of his way, cling to the shadows, let him vent his rage on pots and pans and stools, not on his youngest son.

But it happens anyway. Mandralisca is half a step too slow performing some task. Kekkedis is displeased. He snarls, curses, abruptly sees Mandralisca’s baton leaning against the wall not far from where he stands, grabs it up, prods the boy sharply in the gut with its tip.

That is unbearable. Not so much the pain of being prodded by the baton, although it nearly takes his breath away, but that his father should be handling his baton at all. Kekkedis has no business touching it, let alone using it against him. The baton is his. His only possession. Bought with his own money, carved into shape with his own hands.

Without stopping to think, Mandralisca reaches out for it as Kekkedis is drawing it back for a second thrust. Lightning-fast, he steps forward, seizes the baton by the tip, pulls it toward him, trying to yank it from his father’s hand.

It is a terrible mistake. He knows that even as he is committing it, but for all his quickness he is unable to stop himself. Kekkedis stares at him, wild-eyed, sputtering with astonishment at so flagrant an act of defiance. He rips the baton from Mandralisca’s grasp, twisting laterally with vicious force that Mandralisca’s slender wrist cannot resist. Grabs the baton by each end, grinning, snaps it easily over his knee, grins again, holds the broken pieces up to display them for him, and casually tosses them into the fire. All of it takes only a moment or two to accomplish.

“No,” Mandralisca murmurs, not yet believing it has happened. “Don’t—no—please—”

A year’s savings. His beautiful baton.

Thirty-five years later and a thousand miles or so to the north and east, the man who calls himself Count Mandralisca of Zimroel sits in a small circular room with an arched roof and burnt-orange mud-plastered walls on a ridge overlooking the desert wastes of the Plain of Whips. He wears a helmet of metal mesh on his brow; his hands are clenched beside him as though each one grips one of the sundered halves of the broken baton.

He sees his father’s face before him. The triumphant vindictive grin. The pieces of the baton held aloft—tossed into the flames—

Mandralisca’s searching mind soars upward—outward—remembering—hating—

Don’t—no—please—

Teotas, defeated by sleep yet again, sleeps. He can do nothing else. His spirit fears sleep but his body demands it. Each night he fights, loses, succumbs. And so now, despite the nightly struggle, once more he lies sleeping. Dreaming.

A desert, somewhere, nowhere real. Hallucinations rise like heat waves from the rocks. He hears groans and occasional sobs and something that could be a chorus of large black beetles, a dry rustling sound. The wind is hot and dusty. The dawn has a blinding brilliance. The rocks are bright nodes of pure energy whose rich-textured red surfaces vibrate in patterns that continually change. On one face of every stony mass he sees golden lights circling gracefully. On the opposite face pale bluish spheres are unceasingly born and go bubbling into the air. Everything shimmers. Everything shines with an inner light. It would all be marvelously beautiful, if it were not so frightening.

He himself has been transformed into something hideous. His hands have become hammers. His toes are hooked claws. His knees have eyes but no eyebrows. His tongue is satin. His saliva is glass. His blood is bile and his bile is blood. A brooding sense of imminent punishment assails him. Creatures made of vertical ribs of gray cartilage make dull booming noises at him. Somehow he understands their meaning: they are expressing their scorn, they are mocking him for his innumerable inadequacies. He wants to cry out, but no sound will leave his throat. Nor can he flee the scene. He is paralyzed.

“Fi—o—rin—da—”

With a supreme effort he manages to utter her name. Can she hear him? Will she save him?

“Fi—o—rin—da—”

He plucks at the twisted and disheveled coverlet. Fiorinda lies beside him like someone’s discarded life-size doll, cut off from him behind the wall of sleep—he knows she’s there, can’t reach out to her, can’t make any sort of contact. One of them is on some other world. He has no way of telling which of them it is. Probably me, he decides. Yes. He is on another world, asleep, dreaming, dreaming that he lies in his bed in the Castle, asleep, next to the sleeping Fiorinda, who is beyond his reach. And he is dreaming.

“Fiorinda?”

Silence. Solitude.

He realizes now that he must be dreaming that he is awake. He sits up, reaches for the night-light. By its faint green glow he sees that he is alone in the bed. He remembers, now: Fiorinda has gone to the Labyrinth with Varaile, not a permanent separation, only a postponement of the decision, a short visit to help Varaile get herself established in her new home. And then they will decide which one of them is to take the position that has been offered, whether Fiorinda is to be lady-in-waiting to the wife of the new Pontifex or he to be High Counsellor to Lord Dekkeret. But how can he be High Counsellor, when he is nothing more than the most loathsome of insects?

Meanwhile he is alone at the Castle. Assailed by merciless dreams.

Night after night… terror. Madness. Where can he hide? Nowhere. There is no place to hide. Nowhere. Nowhere.

“Do you hear something?” Varaile asked. “One of the children crying, perhaps?”

“What? What?”

“Wake up, Prestimion! One of the children—”

He made a further interrogative noise, but showed no sign of being willing to awaken. After a moment Varaile realized that there was no reason why he should. The hour was very late. He was exhausted; since their arrival at the Labyrinth his days, and many of his nights as well, had been taken up in meetings, conferences, discussions. The officials of the departed Confalume’s Pontificate had to be interviewed and assessed, the new people that Prestimion had brought with him from the Castle had to be integrated into the system here, there were applications for favor to study, petitions to grant—

Let him sleep, Varaile thought. This was something she could handle by herself.

And there it came again: a weird throttled sound that seemed to be trying to be a shriek, but was emerging instead as a moan. From its pitch, she thought she recognized the voice as that of Simbilon, who although he was nearly eleven still had a clear, pure contralto. So it was to his room that she went first, making her way uncertainly through the bewildering complex of rooms that was the imperial residence. A bobbing globe of orange slave-light drifted just overhead, illuminating her path.

But Simbilon lay sleeping peacefully amidst his clutter of books, a dozen or more scattered all around him on the bed and one still open, the pages flattened across his chest where the book had fallen when sleep overtook him. Varaile lifted it from him and set it beside his pillow, and went from the room.

The strange sound came to her again, more urgent, now. It frightened her to think that one of her children might be making a sound like that. Hastily she crossed the hall and entered the room where Tuanelys slept in a tumbled heap of stuffed animals, her bed mounded high with furry blaves and sigimoins and bilantoons and canavongs and ghalvars, and even a long-nosed manculain, her current favorite, transformed by the maker’s hand into something cuddly and charming, though the real manculains of the jungles of Stoienzar, covered all over by poisonous yellow spines, were as far from cuddly as animals could be.

But no stuffed animals surrounded her now. Tuanelys apparently had flung them pell-mell in all directions, as if they were nasty vermin that had invaded her bed. Even the beloved manculain had been discarded: Varaile saw it across the room, lying upside down on the little girl’s dresser, where, as it landed, it had jostled aside a dozen or so of the pretty little glass vessels that Tuanelys liked to collect. Several seemed to be broken. As for Tuanelys herself, she had kicked off her coverlet and lay in a tight little huddled heap, knees drawn up almost to her chin, her whole form rigid, her nightgown pulled up and bunched under her arms so that her small slim body was bare. She was glossy as though with fever. A pool of sweat had stained the sheet about her.

“Tuanelys, love—”

Another moan that wanted to be a shriek. A ripple of convulsive force ran through the girl: she grimaced, shuddered and shivered, kicked out with one leg and then the other, clenched her fists, pulled her head down into her shoulders. Varaile lightly touched her shoulder. Her skin was cool, normal: no fever. But Tuanelys shrank away at the touch. She began to moan again, a moan that turned swiftly into a racking sob. Her features were distorted into a hideous mask, eyes tight shut, nostrils flaring, lips pulled back, teeth bared.

“It’s only me, sweetheart. Shhh. Shhh. Nothing’s wrong. Mother’s here. Shhh, Tuanelys. Shhh.”

She tugged at the girl’s nightgown, drew it down over her waist and thighs, turned her so that she lay on her back, and gently stroked her forehead, all the while continuing to murmur gently to her. Gradually the tension that had gripped Tuanelys seemed to ease a little. Now and again a ripple of response to some horrendous inner vision still went through her, but such things were beginning to come farther apart, and the terrible mask that her face had become relaxed into her normal visage.

Varaile became aware of someone standing over her shoulder. Prestimion? No: Fiorinda, Varaile realized. She had awakened and come down the hall from her own lodgings to see what was the matter. “A nightmare,” Varaile said, without looking around. “Fetch a bowl of milk for her, will you?”

Tuanelys’s eyes fluttered open. She seemed dazed, disoriented, more bewildered even than one might expect a child to be who had been awakened in the middle of the night. This was only her second week of living in the Labyrinth. They had tried to arrange her room here to be as much as possible like the one she had had at the Castle, but, even so—the disruption of her life, the magnitude of the upheaval—

“Mommy—”

Her voice was hoarse. The word was one that she hadn’t used in two years or more.

“It’s all right, Tuanelys. Everything’s all right.”

“They had no faces—only eyes—”

“They weren’t real. You were dreaming, love.”

“Hundreds and hundreds of them. No faces. Just—eyes. Oh, mommy—mommy—”

She was quivering with fear. Whatever vision had impinged upon her sleeping mind was still alive within her now. Bit by bit she began to describe to Varaile what she had seen, or tried to, but the descriptions were fragmentary, her words largely incoherent. She had seen something awful, that was clear. But she lacked the ability to make the nightmare real for Varaile. White creatures—mysterious pallid things—a marching horde of faceless men—or were they giant worms of some sort?—thousands of staring eyes—

The details scarcely mattered. A little girl’s nightmares would have no significant meaning; the thing that was significant was that she was having nightmares at all. Here in the safety of the Labyrinth, in these coiling chambers at the very bottom of the imperial sector, something dark and fearful had succeeded in reaching down to touch the mind of the daughter of the Pontifex of Majipoor. It was not right.

“They were so cold,” Tuanelys was saying. “They hate everything that has warm blood in its veins. Dead men with eyes. Sitting on white mounts. Cold—so cold—you touched them and you froze—”

Fiorinda reappeared, bearing a bowl of milk. “I warmed it a little. The poor child! I wonder if we should put a drop of brandy in it.”

“Not this time, I think. Here, Tuanelys, let me pull the covers up over you. Drink this, sweetheart. It’s milk. Just sip it—slowly, a little at a time—”

Tuanelys sipped from the bowl. The strange fit seemed to be passing from her. She was looking around for her stuffed animals. Varaile and Fiorinda gathered them up and arranged them beside her on the bed. She found the manculain and thrust it under the coverlet, up close against herself.

Fiorinda said, “Teotas also, all last month, the most horrible nightmares. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s having one of them right now.—Do you want me to stay with her, Varaile?”

“Go back to sleep. I’ll look after her.”

She took the emptied milk bowl from Tuanelys’s hand and lightly eased the little girl’s head down against her pillow, holding her there, stroking her to guide her onward, back into sleep. For a moment or two Tuanelys seemed completely calm. Then a fresh shudder went through her, as though the dream were returning. “Eyes,” she murmured. “No faces.” That was where it ended. Within minutes she was peacefully sleeping. Light little-girl snores came from her. Varaile stood watch over her for a time, waiting to be completely sure that all was well. It seemed to be. She tiptoed out and went back to her own bedroom, where she found Prestimion still sound asleep, and lay by his side, awake, until the Labyrinth’s sunless dawn arrived.

Standing before the Lord Gaviral in the great hall of Gaviral’s palace, Mandralisca idly tossed the Barjazid helmet from one hand to the other, a gesture that had virtually become a tic for him in recent weeks.

“A progress report, my lord Gaviral,” he said. “The secret weapon of which I’ve spoken, this little helmet here? I’ve gone far in mastering its use.”

Gaviral smiled. His smile was not a heartwarming thing: a quick twitch of his meager little lips, baring a ragged facade of largely triangular teeth, and a chilly glow flashing for an instant in his small deep-set eyes. He ran his hand through his coarse and thinning covering of dull-red hair and said, “Are there any specific results to report?”

“I’ve penetrated the Castle with it, milord.”

“Ah.”

“And the Labyrinth.”

“Ah. Ah!”

That had been a favorite locution of Dantirya Sambail, that double “ah,” with a moment’s pause between them and a whiplash emphasis on the second one. Gaviral could not have been very old when Dantirya Sambail died, but he had managed to copy the Procurator’s intonation perfectly. It was odd and not in any way amusing to hear that double “ah” coming from Gaviral’s lips, as though by some act of ventriloquy beyond the grave. The Lord Gaviral had more than a touch of his famed uncle’s ugliness, but scarcely any at all of his dark wit and black devious shrewdness, and it did not sit well with Mandralisca to be treated to so accurate an imitation of the Procurator’s manner. Those were feelings that he kept to himself, though, as he did so many others.

“I am ready now,” Mandralisca said, “to propose an alteration of our strategy.”

“And that would be—?”

“To move ourselves somewhat more aggressively into a position of visibility, milord. I suggest that we quit this place out here in the desert and transfer our center of operations to the city of Ni-moya.”

“You perplex me, Count. This is a step you have warned us against since the beginning of our campaign. It would, you said, send an immediate signal to the Pontifical officials that swarm everywhere in Ni-moya that a revolt had broken out in Zimroel against the authority of the central government. Only last month you warned us against tipping our hand prematurely. Why, now, do you contradict your own advice?”

“Because I have less fear of the central government now than I did last year, or even last month.”

“Ah. Ah!”

“I still believe we should proceed with immense caution toward our goal. You will not hear me counselling any declarations of war against the government of Prestimion and Dekkeret: not yet, at any rate. But I see now that we can afford to take greater risks, because the weapons at our disposal”—and he hefted the helmet—“are more substantial than I had earlier imagined. If Prestimion and Company attempt to harm us, we can fight back.”

“Ah!”

Mandralisca waited for the second one, glaring fiercely at Gaviral in expectation. But it failed to come.

After a moment he said, “We will go to Ni-moya then. You will re-occupy the procuratorial palace, although you will not, at any time, attempt to reclaim the title of Procurator. Your brothers will take possession of dwellings nearly as grand. For the present you will live there purely as private citizens, however, claiming authority only over your family’s own estates. Is that understood, milord Gaviral?”

“Does that mean we’re not to be regarded as lords any more?” said Gaviral. It was evident from his expression that that possibility was distressing to him.

“In the inwardness of your own households, you will still be the Lords of Zimroel. In your intercourse with the people of Ni-moya you will be the five princes of the House of Sambail, and nothing more—for the time being. Later on, milord, I have a finer title even than ‘Lord’ for you, but that will have to wait some while longer.”

An excited gleam came into Gaviral’s ugly face. He leaned forward eagerly. “And what would that finer title be?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Pontifex,” said Mandralisca.

12

“My lord,” Dekkeret’s chamberlain said, “Prince Dinitak is here.”

“Thank you, Zeldor Luudwid. Ask him to come in.”

It amused him to hear the chamberlain promoting Dinitak to the principate. No such title had ever been conferred on him, and Dekkeret had no particular plan for doing so, nor had Dinitak shown the slightest desire to be raised to the nobility. He was still Venghenar Barjazid’s son, after all, a child of the Suvrael desert who once had collaborated with his disreputable father in swindling and exploiting travelers who had hired them as guides through that forbidding land. The Castle Mount aristocracy had accepted Dinitak as Dekkeret’s friend, because Dekkeret gave them no choice in that. But they would never abide Dekkeret’s thrusting him in among them as a member of their own exalted caste.

“Dinitak,” Dekkeret said, rising to embrace him.

In recent weeks Dekkeret had adopted as his headquarters one of the segments of the Methirasp Long Hall, which was not a hall at all, but rather a series of octagonal chambers within Lord Stiamot’s Library. The library itself was a continuous serpentine passageway that wound back and forth around the summit of Castle Mount to a total length of many miles, and, according to legend, contained every book that had ever been published in any world of the universe. At one point directly beneath the greensward of Vildivar Close it opened out into the twelve chambers of the Methirasp Hall. They were set aside for the use of scholars; but it was a rare day when more than one or two of them were occupied.

Dekkeret, coming upon the rooms in one of his explorations of the Castle, had taken an immediate fancy to them. They were lofty chambers two stories high, their walls covered with mural paintings of sea-dragons and fanciful beasts of the land, knights in tournament, natural wonders, and much else, all rendered in a delightful medieval style. Far overhead, brightly colored ceilings, done in vermilion and yellow and green and blue and covered with a fine, clear varnish that made them gleam like crystal, provided warm reflected light. Connecting corridors lined on both sides with rows of books led to the library proper. Dekkeret found himself coming back again and again to this pleasing sanctuary within the Castle, and eventually had chosen to have the segment of it known as Lord Spurifon’s Study closed off and made into an auxiliary office for himself. It was here that he received Dinitak Barjazid this day.

They talked quietly of idle things for a time—a visit Dinitak had lately made to the great city of Stee, and Dekkeret’s plans for a journey to that city and some of its neighbors on the Mount, and the like. It was not hard for Dekkeret to see that some suppressed inner tension was at work within his friend’s soul, but he let Dinitak set the pace for the conversation; and gradually he came around to the matter that had led him to seek this private audience with the Coronal.

“Have you seen much of Prince Teotas of late, your lordship?” Dinitak asked, with a new sort of intensity entering into his tone.

Dekkeret was jarred by the unexpected mention of Teotas’s name. The problem of Teotas had become a touchy one for him.

“I see him now and again, but not very often,” Dekkeret replied. “With the business of who is to be High Counsellor still up in the air, he seems to be avoiding me. Doesn’t want to refuse the post, but can’t bring himself to accept it, either. I blame Fiorinda for that.”

Dinitak’s cool penetrating eyes registered surprise. “Fiorinda? How is Fiorinda involved in your choice of a High Counsellor?”

“She’s married to the man I’ve chosen, isn’t she, Dinitak? Which gives us a layer of complication that I never took into account. I suppose you’re aware that she’s gone off to the Labyrinth to be with the Lady Varaile, leaving Teotas behind.” Dekkeret riffled irritatedly through the piles of papers on his desk. It bothered him to be discussing the increasingly troublesome Teotas problem, even with Dinitak. “I would never have supposed that she’d ask Teotas to decide between being High Counsellor and parting with his wife.”

“Is it as serious as that, do you think?”

Angrily Dekkeret swept the papers into a stack. “How do I know? Teotas barely speaks to me at all nowadays. But why else is he hesitating to accept the appointment? If Fiorinda has given him some sort of ultimatum about her living at the Labyrinth, he can’t very well stay here and become High Counsellor, not if he wants to keep his marriage together. Women!”

Dinitak smiled. “They are difficult creatures, are they not, my lord?”

“It never for an instant occurred to me that she’d place remaining as lady-in-waiting to Varaile above her husband’s chance to hold a position at the Castle that’s second only to my own. Meanwhile Septach Melayn has already taken himself off to the Labyrinth to be Prestimion’s High Spokesman and the post of High Counsellor goes unfilled here.—Teotas looks like a wreck, besides. All of this must be pulling him apart.”

“He looks very bad, yes,” Dinitak agreed. “But it’s my belief that his problem with Fiorinda is not the only thing that’s at work on him.”

“What are you saying? What else is going on?”

Dinitak’s gaze rested squarely on Dekkeret. “Teotas has sought my company more than once, recently. I think you know that he and I have never had much to do with each other. But now he is in pain and crying out for help, and he dares not go to you because of this High Counsellor business, for which he sees no resolution. So he has come to me instead. Hoping, perhaps, that I will speak to you about him.”

“As you are now doing. But what kind of help can I provide? You say he’s in pain. But if a man can’t make up his own mind about something as important as the High Counsellorship—”

“This has nothing to do with the High Counsellorship, my lord. Not in any direct way.”

Dekkeret, mystified and growing impatient now, said sharply, “Then what else can it be?”

“He is receiving sendings, Dekkeret. Night after night, the most terrible dreams, the most agonizing nightmares. It has reached the point where he’s afraid to allow himself to sleep.”

“Sendings? Sendings are benevolent things, Dinitak.”

“Sendings of the Lady, yes. But these are not from her. The Lady does not send dreams of monsters and demons who chase people across a blasted landscape. Nor does the Lady send you dreams that convince you of your own total worthlessness and make you believe that every act of your life has been fraudulent and contemptible. He says that some nights he awakens actually despising himself. Despising.”

Dekkeret began to toy fretfully with his papers again. “Teotas should see a dream-speaker, then, and get his head cleared around. By the Divine, Dinitak, this is maddening! I offer the most important post in my government to a man who seems to me to be eminently qualified for it, and now I discover that he can’t accept it because his wife won’t let him, and that he’s all in a fluster over a few bad dreams besides—! Well, it’s simple enough. I’ll retract my offer and Teotas can go scuttling down to the Labyrinth to be with Fiorinda. Maybe old Dembitave wants to be High Counsellor. Or perhaps I can drag Abrigant up here from Muldemar to take the job. Or else I suppose I can ask one of the younger princes, Vandimain, perhaps—”

“My lord,” said Dinitak, cutting in brusquely, “I remind you that I said Teotas was receiving sendings.”

“Which is a statement that makes no sense to me.”

“What I mean is that someone is thrusting these terrible dreams into the mind of Teotas from afar. You continue to think that the Lady of the Isle is the only person in the world with the capacity to enter someone’s sleeping mind.’’

“Well? Isn’t that so?”

“Do you remember a certain helmet, Dekkeret, a little thing of metal mesh, that my late father used on you long ago when you were trekking with us through the Desert of Stolen Dreams in Suvrael? Do you recall a later version of the same device that I myself used in your presence, and Lord Prestimion used also, when we were fighting against the rebel Dantirya Sambail? That helmet gives one the capacity to enter minds at a great distance. Prestimion himself could confirm that, if you were to ask him.”

“But those helmets and all the documents associated with their construction and operation are kept under lock and key in the Treasury of the Castle. No one’s been near those things in years. Are you trying to tell me that they’ve been stolen?”

“Not at all, my lord.”

“Then why are we discussing them?”

“Because of the dreams Teotas is having.”

“All right. So Teotas is having very bad dreams. That’s not a trivial thing. But dreams, in the end, are just dreams. We generate them out of the darkness of our own souls, unless they’re put into us from outside, and the only one who’s able to do that is the Lady of the Isle. Who certainly would never send anyone dreams of the sort that you say Teotas is getting. And you yourself have just agreed that we control the only other machine that can do such a thing, which is the helmet that your father used to use.”

“How sure can you be,” Dinitak asked, “that the devices you keep locked in the Treasury are the only ones in existence? I am familiar with the workings of the helmet, lordship. I know what it can do. What is happening to Teotas is the sort of thing it can do.”

For the first time Dekkeret began to see where Dinitak had been trying this whole while to lead him. “And just who is it, do you think, who owns this other helmet and is bedeviling poor Teotas with it?”

A gleam came into Dinitak’s eyes. “My father’s younger brother Khaymak was the mechanic who constructed my father’s mind-controlling helmets for him. Khaymak has remained in Suvrael all these years, going about whatever slippery business it is that he goes about. But you may recall that he turned up on Castle Mount only last year—”

“Of course,” said Dekkeret. “Of course!” It was all starting to fall into place now.

“Turned up on Castle Mount,” Dinitak continued, “seeking to enroll himself in the service of Lord Prestimion. I myself saw to it—disliking the embarrassment, I will admit, of having such an unsavory kinsman around the place—that he was denied permission to come anywhere near the Castle. I see now that this was a huge mistake.”

“You think that he’s built another helmet?”

“Either that, or he’s designed one and was searching for a patron who would finance the construction of a working model. I was fairly sure that that was why he was coming to Prestimion; and I saw nothing good coming from any of that, and so the gates of the Castle were closed to him. But I think he’s found a patron somewhere else, and has fashioned a new helmet by now, and is using it on Teotas. And, it could be, on many others as well.”

Dekkeret felt a chill.

“Just before my coronation,” he said slowly, “Prestimion’s Su-Suheris magus came to me and told me that he had had some sort of vision in which some member of the Barjazid clan somehow made himself a Power of the Realm. The whole thing seemed nonsensical to me, and I put it out of my mind. I never said anything to you about it because to me it carried treasonous implications, that you might be thinking of overthrowing me and making yourself Coronal in my place, which seemed too absurd even to think about.”

“I am not the only Barjazid in this world, my lord.”

“Indeed. And Maundigand-Klimd cautioned me against interpreting his vision too literally. But what if it meant, not that this Barjazid was going to become a Power—and what other Power could he become, if not Coronal?—but that he was going to attain power, power in the general sense of the word?”

“Or that he was going to sell his helmet and his services to some other person who would wield that power,” Dinitak said.

“But who would that be? The world’s at peace. Prestimion dealt with all our enemies years ago.”

“The poison-taster of Dantirya Sambail still lives, my lord.”

“Mandralisca? I haven’t so much as thought of him in years! Why, he must be an old man now—if he’s still alive at all.”

“Not so old, I think. Perhaps fifty, at most. And still quite dangerous, I suspect. I touched his mind with mine, you know, when I wore the helmet the day of that final battle in the Stoienzar. Only briefly, but it was enough. I will never forget it. The hatred coiled within that mind like a giant serpent—the anger aimed at all the world, the lust to injure, to destroy—”

“Mandralisca!” murmured Dekkeret, shaking his head. He was lost in the wonder and horror of the recollection.

Dinitak said, “He was, I think, a greater monster than his master Dantirya Sambail. The Procurator knew when to rein in his ambitions. There was always a certain point that he was unwilling to go beyond, and when he reached that point, he would find someone else to undertake the task on his behalf.”

Dekkeret nodded. “Korsibar, for example. Dantirya Sambail, though always hungry for more power, didn’t try to make himself Coronal. He found a proxy, a puppet.”

“Exactly. The Procurator preferred ever to remain safely behind the scenes, avoiding the worst risks, letting others do his dirty work for him. Mandralisca was of a different sort. He was always willing to risk everything on a single throw of the dice.”

“Serving as a poison-taster, for instance. What sane man would take a job like that? But he seemed heedless of the risk to his own life.”

“I think he must have been. Or perhaps he felt it was a risk worth taking. By letting his master know that he was willing to put his life on the line for him, he would worm his way into Dantirya Sambail’s heart. That must have seemed a reasonable gamble to him. And once he found himself at the Procurator’s elbow, I think he led Dantirya Sam-bail on, from one monstrous deed to the next, possibly just for the sheer amusement of it.”

“Such a person is beyond my understanding,” said Dekkeret.

“Not mine, alas. I’ve had closer acquaintance with monsters than you. But you’re the one who will have to stop him.”

“Ah, but wait! We are moving very quickly here, Dinitak, and these conjectures carry us a great distance.” Dekkeret jabbed a forefinger at the smaller man. “What are you telling me, in fact? You’ve conjured up that old demon Mandralisca; you’ve put your father’s thought-control weapon in his hands again; you’ve suggested that Mandralisca is gearing up to launch yet another war against the world. But where’s the proof that any of this is real? To me it seems that it’s all built out of nothing more than Teotas’s bad dreams and Maundigand-Klimd’s ambiguous vision!”

Dinitak smiled. “The original helmet is still in our possession. Let me get it out of the Treasury and explore the world with it. If Mandralisca still lives, I’ll find out where he is. And for whom he’s working. What do you say, my lord?”

“What can I say?” Dekkeret’s head was throbbing. He had been on the throne barely more than a month, Prestimion was far away and ignorant of all this, and he had no High Counsellor to turn to. He was entirely on his own, save for Dinitak Barjazid. And now the possibility of an ancient enemy stirring somewhere far away suddenly lay before him. In a voice grim with apprehension and frustration Dekkeret said, “What I say is this: find him for me, Dinitak. Discover his intentions. Render him harmless, in whatever way you can. Destroy him, if necessary. You understand me. Do whatever must be done.”

13

Fulkari was crossing the Vildivar Balconies, heading in the direction of the Pinitor Court, when the moment she had been dreading for weeks finally arrived. Through the gateway from the Inner Castle and onto the Balconies at the far end came the Coronal Lord Dekkeret, magnificent in his robes of office and surrounded, as he always was these days, by a little group of important-looking men, the inner circle of his court. Her only path led her straight toward him. There was no avoiding it, now: they must inevitably confront each other here.

She and Dekkeret had not spoken at all in the weeks that had gone by since his ascent to the throne. Indeed she had seen him just a handful of times, and then only at a great distance, at court functions of the kind that highborn young ladies of Fulkari’s sort, descendants of former royal families of centuries gone by, were expected to attend. There had been no contact between them. He had scarcely looked toward her. He behaved as if she were invisible. And she had sidestepped any possibility of contact as well. One time at a royal levee when it seemed that his path across the great throne-room would certainly bring them face to face, she had taken care to slip away into the crowd before he came anywhere near her. She feared what he might say to her.

It was obvious to everyone that whatever relationship once had existed between them was over. Perhaps he was unwilling to say so to her in so many words, but Fulkari had no doubt that it was at an end. Only the fact that he had not yet brought himself to make a formal break with her kept it alive in her heart. Yet she knew how foolish that was.

They had kept company for three years, and now they did not speak at all. Could anything be more clear than that? Dekkeret had asked her to marry him and she had refused him. That had ended it. Was it really necessary, she wondered, for him to acknowledge formally something that was plain to all?

Yet there he was, no more than a hundred yards away and coming straight toward her.

Would he continue to pretend she was invisible when they encountered each other on this narrow balcony? That would be agony, Fulkari thought. To be humiliated like that in front of Dinitak and Prince Teo-tas and the Council ministers Dembitave and Vandimain and the rest of those men. An agony of her own making—she had no doubts about that—but an agony all the same, marking her as nothing more than a discarded royal mistress. And not even that, actually. Dekkeret had not yet become Coronal the last time they had made love. So all she was was someone who had been the lover of the new Coronal when he was still only a private individual, one of the many women who had passed through his bed over the years.

She resolved to address the situation squarely. I am no mere discarded concubine, she thought. I am Lady Fulkari of Sipermit, in whose veins flows the blood of the Coronal Lord Makhario, who was king in this Castle five centuries ago. What had Lord Dekkeret’s ancestors been doing five centuries ago? Did he even know their names?

She and Dekkeret were no more than fifty feet apart now. Fulkari looked straight toward him. Their eyes met, and it was only with great effort that she kept herself from glancing aside; but she held her gaze.

Dekkeret appeared tense and weary. And wary, as well: gone now was the cheerful open countenance of the lighthearted man who had been her lover these three years past. He seemed under great strain now. His lips were closely clamped, his forehead was furrowed, there was a visible throbbing of some sort in his left cheek. Was it the cares of his high office that had done this to him, or was he simply reacting to the embarrassment of this accidental encounter in front of all his companions?

“Fulkari,” he said, when they were closer. He spoke softly and his voice seemed as rigid and tightly controlled as was the expression of his face.

“My lord.” Fulkari bowed her head and offered him the starburst salute.

He halted before her. She was close enough to him, here in the tight confines of the little balcony promenade, that she was able to observe a thin line of perspiration along his upper lip. The two men who had been walking closest to the Coronal, Dinitak and Vandimain, stepped back from him and seemed to fade into the background. Prince Teotas, who looked terribly weary and tense himself, bloodshot and haggard, was staring at her as though she were some sort of phantom.

Then Teotas and Dinitak and Vandimain faded back even farther, so that they appeared to vanish altogether, and Fulkari could see only Dekkeret, occupying an immense space at the center of her consciousness. She faced him steadily. Tall woman though she was, she came barely breast-high to him.

There was a silence between them that went on and on and on. If only he would reach out his hand to her, she told herself, she would hurl herself into his embrace in front of all these others, these great men of the realm, these princes and counts and dukes. But he did not reach out.

Instead he said in that same tight tone, after what felt like years but more likely had been only five or six seconds, “I’ve been meaning to send for you, Fulkari. We need to speak, you know.”

Fatal words. The words she had hoped not to hear.

We need to speak? Of what, my lord? What is there left for us to say?

That was what she wished she could say. And then move past him and walk swiftly on. But she kept her gaze level and maintained a cool tone of high formality in her reply: “Yes, my lord. Whenever you wish, my lord.”

Dekkeret’s forehead was glistening now with sweat. This must be as hard for him as it was for her, Fulkari realized.

He turned to his chamberlain. “You will arrange a private audience for the Lady Fulkari for tomorrow afternoon, Zeldor Luudwid. We will meet in the Methirasp Hall.”

“Very good, sir,” the chamberlain said.

“He wants to see me, Keltryn!” Fulkari said. They were in Keltryn’s modest, cluttered apartment in the Setiphon Arcade, two flights down from the more imposing suite that Fulkari herself occupied. She had gone straight to Keltryn’s place after her encounter with Dekkeret. “I was passing through one of the Vildivar Balconies, and he was coming the other way with Vandimain and Dinitak and a lot of other people, and we had no choice but to walk right up to each other.” Quickly she described the brief meeting, Dekkeret’s uneasiness, her own conflicting emotions, the arm’s-length nature of the quick conversation, the appointment for her to see him the following day.

“Well, why shouldn’t he want to see you?” Keltryn asked. “You aren’t any uglier than you were last month, and even a busy man like the Coronal likes to have someone next to him in bed now and then, I’d imagine. So he saw you there in front of him, and he thought, ‘Oh, yes, Fulkari—I remember Fulkari—’ ”

“What a child you are, Keltryn.”

Keltryn grinned. “You don’t think I’m right?”

“Of course not. The whole notion is contemptible. Obviously you must think that both he and I are completely trivial people—that he sees nothing more in me than a handy plaything for lonely nights, and that all it would take for me to go running to him is a quick snap of his fingers—”

“But you’re going to go to see him, aren’t you?”

“Of course. Am I supposed to tell the Coronal of Majipoor that I can’t be bothered to accept his invitation?”

“Well, then, you’ll find out fast enough whether I’m right or not,” Keltryn said. Her eyes were sparkling triumphantly. She was enjoying this. “Go to him. Listen to what he has to say. I predict that within five minutes he’ll be sliding his hands all over you. And you’ll turn to jelly when he does.”

Fulkari stared at her sister in mingled fury and amusement. She was such a child, after all. What did she know about men, she who had never given herself to one? And yet—yet—standing as she did outside the whole sweaty business of men and women, Keltryn just might have a certain perspective that Fulkari herself, caught in the thick of all this intrigue, did not.

After all, Keltryn at seventeen wasn’t all that callow and raw. There was a no-nonsense wisdom about her that Fulkari was beginning to come to respect. It was a mistake to go on regarding her as a little girl forever. Changes were taking place. You could see it in her face: Fulkari was startled to see that she looked less boyish, suddenly, as though she were finally making the transition from coltish girl to real womanhood.

Fulkari roamed around the room, restlessly picking up and putting down one and another of the cut-glass bottles that Keltryn liked to collect. A flood of contradictory thoughts roared through her.

At length she turned and said, the words coming out in a high-voiced fluty tone that gave her that odd feeling once more that Keltryn was the older sister and she the younger one, “How can he seriously want to start it all over again, Keltryn? After what I said to him when he asked me to marry him? No. No, it just isn’t possible. He knows there’s no point in stirring everything up a second time. And if he’s merely interested in a bedmate, with no complications involved, the Castle is full of other women, much more suitable than I am, who’d be happy to oblige. He and I have too much history to allow anything of that sort to happen now.”

Keltryn gave her a wide-eyed, serious stare. “And if he does still want you, anyway? Isn’t that what you want also?”

“I don’t know what I want. You know I love him.”

“Yes.”

“But he’s looking for a wife, and I’ve already said I don’t want to marry a Coronal.” Fulkari shook her head. She felt some measure of clarity returning to her troubled mind. “No, Keltryn, you’re wrong. The last thing Dekkeret wants is to get entangled with me again. I think that the reason he’s asked for me to come to him is because he’s realized that he never did get around to telling me formally that it’s over, and he feels a little guilty about it, because he owes me that much at a minimum. He’s been so busy being Coronal that he’s left me dangling, essentially, and it’s time for him to do the right thing. And when we ran into each other like that on that balcony he must have thought, ‘Oh, well, I really can’t let things drift on like this any longer.’”

“Maybe so. And how do you feel about that? That he’s summoned you just to finish everything off? Truthfully.”

“Truthfully?” Fulkari hesitated only an instant. “I hate it. I don’t want it to be over. I told you: I still love him, Keltryn.”

“Yet you told him you wouldn’t marry him. What do you expect him to do? He has to get on with his life. He doesn’t need mistresses now: he needs a wife.”

“I didn’t refuse to marry him. I refused to marry the Coronal.”

“Yes. Yes. You keep saying that. But it’s the same thing, isn’t it, Fulkari?”

“It wasn’t, when I said it. He hadn’t been officially proclaimed, yet. I suppose I hoped he’d give it all up for me. But of course he didn’t.”

“It was a crazy thing to ask, you know.”

“I realize that. He’s been preparing himself for the past fifteen years to succeed Lord Prestimion, and when the moment comes I say, ‘No, no, I’m much more important than all that, aren’t I, Dekkeret?’ How could I have been so stupid?” Fulkari turned away. This was giving her a headache. She had come running to Keltryn, she saw, in some kind of frenzy of muddled girlish excitement—“He wants to see me!”—and Keltryn had methodically exposed the full extent of her confusions. That was valuable, but also very painful. She wanted no more of this discussion.

“Fulkari?” Keltryn said, when some time had passed in silence. “Are you all right?”

“More or less, yes.—What about going for a swim?”

“I was just going to suggest the same thing.”

“Fine,” Fulkari said. “Let’s go.” And then, to change the subject: “Are you still keeping up with your fencing, now that Septach Melayn’s gone to the Labyrinth?”

“Somewhat,” Keltryn said. “I meet twice a week in the gymnasium with one of the boys from Septach Melayn’s class.”

“Audhari, is it? The one from Stoienzar that you told me about?”

“Audhari, yes.”

That was interesting. Fulkari waited for Keltryn to say something more about Audhari, but nothing was forthcoming. She scrutinized Kel-tryn’s face with care, wondering if some telltale sign of embarrassment or discomfort would show through, something that would reveal that her little virgin sister had finally taken herself a lover. But none of that was visible. Either Keltryn was a more accomplished actress than Fulkari had given her credit for being, or there was nothing more than innocent fencing-practice going on between her and this Audhari.

Too bad, she thought. It was time for a little romance in Keltryn’s life.

Then abruptly Keltryn said, as they reached the pool, “Tell me, Fulkari. Do you know Dinitak Barjazid at all well?”

Fulkari frowned. “Dinitak? What makes you ask about him?”

“I’m asking because I’m asking.” And now, to her immense surprise, Fulkari saw the signs of tension that had been absent when Audhari’s name had come up. “Is he a friend of yours?” Keltryn said.

“In a very casual way, yes. You can’t spend much time around Dekkeret without getting to know Dinitak too. He’s usually to be found not very far from Dekkeret, you know. But he and I have never been particularly close. Acquaintances, really, rather than friends.—Will you tell me what this is about, Keltryn? Or is it something I’m not supposed to know?”

Keltryn now wore an expression of elaborate indifference. “He interests me, that’s all. I happened to run into him yesterday over by Lord Haspar’s Rotunda, when I was on my way to fencing practice, and we talked for a couple of minutes. That’s all there is. Don’t get any ideas, Fulkari! All we did was talk.”

“Ideas? What ideas would you mean?”

“He’s very—unusual, I thought,” Keltryn said. She seemed to be measuring her words very carefully. “There’s something fierce about him—something mysterious and stern. I suppose it’s because he’s from Suvrael originally. Every Suvraelinu I’ve ever met has been a little strange. The hot sun must do that to them. But he’s strange in an interesting way, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do,” Fulkari said, calibrating the gleam that had come into her sister’s eyes just then. She knew as well as anyone did what a gleam like that in the eyes of a seventeen-year-old girl meant.

Dinitak? How odd. How interesting. How unexpected.

Dekkeret said, “I owe you an apology, Fulkari.”

Fulkari, out of breath after a long frantic sprint through the interminable coils and twists of Lord Stiamot’s Library, was slow to reply. She had arrived twenty minutes late for her audience with the Coronal, having taken one wrong turn after another in the endless miles of the collection. She had never seen so many books in her life as she had just now while running through those corridors. She had no idea that there were that many books in existence. Had anyone ever read any of them? Would there be no end to these thousands of shelves? Finally an ancient, fossilized-looking librarian had taken pity on her and guided her through the maze to Lord Dekkeret’s secluded little study in the Me-thirasp Long Hall.

“An apology?” she said at last, if only to be saying something at all.

Dekkeret’s desk was a barrier between them. It was piled high with official documents, long parchment sheets formidably festooned in ribbons and seals. They seemed to be marching across the brightly polished surface of the desk toward him, an encroaching army demanding his attention.

Dekkeret looked tired and ill at ease. Today he wore no fine regal robes, only a simple gray tunic loosely belted at the waist.

“An apology, yes, Fulkari.” He appeared to be forcing the words out. “For having drawn you into such an unhappy, impossible relationship.”

She found his statement baffling. “Impossible? Perhaps. But I was the one that made it that way. Why should you feel that you have to apologize for anything?—And why call it ‘unhappy,’ Dekkeret? Was it really such an unhappy relationship? Is that how it seemed to you?”

“Not for a long while. But you have to agree that it ended unhappily.”

The phrase went reverberating through her soul. It ended. It ended. It ended.

Yes. Of course it had ended. But she was unwilling to hear the words themselves. Those few crisp syllables, spoken aloud, had the finality of a descending blade.

Fulkari waited a moment for the impact to lessen. “Even so,” she said. “I still don’t understand what it is that you feel you need to apologize for.”

“You couldn’t possibly know. But that’s why I asked you to come here today. I can’t conceal the truth from you any longer.”

Restlessly she said, “What are you talking about, Dekkeret?”

She could see him groping for words, struggling to organize his reply.

He seemed to have aged five years since they had last been together. His face was pale and drawn, and there were shadows under his eyes, and his broad shoulders were hunched as though sitting up straight was too much of an effort for him today. This was a Dekkeret she had never seen before, this tired, suddenly indecisive man. She wanted to reach out to him, to stroke his brow, to give him whatever comfort she could.

Hesitantly he said, “When I first met you, Fulkari, I was instantly attracted to you. Do you remember? I must have looked like a man who had been struck by a bolt of lightning.”

Fulkari smiled. “I remember, yes. You stared and stared and stared. You were staring so hard that I began to wonder if there was something wrong with the way I was dressed.”

“Nothing was wrong. I simply couldn’t stop staring, that was all. Then you moved along, and I asked someone who you were, and I arranged to have you invited to a levee that the Lady Varaile was holding the following week. Where I had you brought forward to be introduced to me.”

“And you stared some more.”

“Yes. Surely I did. Do you remember what I said, then?”

She had no clear memory of that. Whatever he had told her then, it was lost to her now, swept away in the confusion and excitement of that first moment. Uncertainly she replied, “You asked if you could see me again, I suppose.”

“That was later. What did I say first?”

“Do you really suppose that I can remember everything in such detail? It was so long ago, Dekkeret!”

“Well, I remember,” he said. “I asked you if you were of Normork blood. No, you replied: Sipermit. I told you then that you reminded me very much of someone I had known in Normork long ago—my cousin Sithelle, in fact. Do you recall any of that? An extraordinary resemblance, your eyes, your hair, your mouth and chin, your long arms and legs—so much like Sithelle that I thought I was seeing her ghost.”

“Sithelle is dead, then?”

“These twenty years. Slain in the streets of Normork by an assassin who was trying to reach Prestimion. I was there. She died in my arms. I never realized until many years later how much I had loved her. And then, when I saw you that day at court—looking at you, knowing nothing whatever about you, thinking only, Here is Sithelle restored to me—”

He broke off. He glanced away, abashed.

Fulkari felt her cheeks flaming. This was worse than humiliating: it was infuriating. “You weren’t attracted to me for myself?” she asked. There was heat in her voice, too, that she could not suppress. “You were drawn to me only because I looked like somebody else you once had known? Oh, Dekkeret—Dekkeret—!”

In a barely audible tone he said, “I told you that I owed you an apology, Fulkari.”

Tears crowded into her eyes—tears of rage. “So I was never anything to you but a kind of flesh-and-blood replica of someone else you weren’t able to have? When you looked at me you saw Sithelle, and when you kissed me you were kissing Sithelle, and when you went to bed with me you were—”

“No, Fulkari. That’s not how it was at all.” Dekkeret was speaking more forcefully now. “When I told you I loved you, it was you I was telling it to—Fulkari of Sipermit. When I held you in my arms, it was Fulkari of Sipermit that I was holding. Sithelle and I never were lovers. We probably never would have been, even if she had lived. When I asked you to marry me, it was you I was asking, not Sithelle’s ghost.”

“Then why all this talk of apologies?”

“Because the thing I can’t deny is that I was drawn to you originally for the wrong reason, no matter what happened later. That instant attraction I felt, before we had ever spoken a word to each other—it was because some foolish part of me was whispering that you were Sithelle reborn, that a second chance was being given to me. I knew even then that it was idiotic. But I was caught—trapped by my own ridiculous fantasy. So I pursued you. Not because you were you, not at first, but because you looked so much like Sithelle. The woman I fell in love with, though, was you. The woman I asked to marry me: you. You, Fulkari.”

“And when Fulkari refused you, was that like losing Sithelle a second time?” she asked. Her tone was one of mere curiosity, only. It surprised her how quickly the anger was beginning to fade.

“No. No. It wasn’t like that at all,” said Dekkeret. “Sithelle was like a sister to me: I never would have married her. When you refused me—and I knew you would; you had already given me a million indications that you would—it tore me apart, because I knew I was losing you. And I saw how my original crazy notion of using you as a replacement for Sithelle had led me step by step into falling in love with a real living woman who didn’t happen to want to be my wife. I wasted three years of our lives, Fulkari. That’s what I’m sorry about. The thing that drew me to you in the first place was a fantasy, a will-o’-the-wisp, but I was caught by it as though by a metal trap; and it held me long enough for me to fall in love with the true Fulkari, who wasn’t able to return my love, and so—a waste, Fulkari, all a waste—”

“That isn’t so, Dekkeret.” She spoke firmly, and met his gaze evenly, calmly. Every trace of anger was gone from her now. A new assurance had come over her.

“You don’t think so?”

“Maybe it was a waste for you. But not for me. What I felt for you was real. It still is.” Fulkari paused only a moment, then plunged boldly onward. What was there to lose? “I love you, Dekkeret. And not because you remind me of anyone else.”

He seemed astonished. “You love me still?”

“When did I ever tell you I had stopped?”

“You seemed furious, just a moment or two back, when I was telling you that what first led me to pursue you was the image of Sithelle that I still carried in my mind.”

“What woman would be pleased to hear such a thing? But why should I allow it to continue to matter? Sithelle’s long gone. And so is the boy who may or may not have been in love with her—even he wasn’t sure—a long time ago. But you and I are still here.”

“For whatever that might be worth,” said Dekkeret.

“Perhaps it could be worth a great deal indeed,” said Fulkari.—“Tell me something, Dekkeret: just how difficult would it really be, do you think, to be the Coronal’s wife?”

14

“My lord?” Teotas said, peering through the open doorway.

He stood at the threshold of the threshold of the Coronal’s official suite, that great room whose giant curving window revealed the breathtaking abyss of open space that abutted this side of the Castle.

Dekkeret, when Teotas had asked him for this meeting, had proposed that Teotas come to him in the chamber in the Methirasp Long Hall that he seemed to be using as his main office these days. But Teotas had felt uncomfortable with that. It was irregular. This was the room that he associated with the grandeur and might of the Coronal Lord. Again and again during the reign of his brother Prestimion had he met here with the Coronal in some time of crisis. What he wanted to discuss with Lord Dekkeret now was a matter of the highest concern, and it was in this room, only in this room, that he wanted to discuss it. One did not ordinarily make demands upon Coronals. But Dekkeret had yielded gracefully to his request.

“Come in, Teotas,” Dekkeret said. “Sit down.”

“My lord,” Teotas said a second time, and offered the starburst salute.

The Coronal was seated behind the splendid ancient desk, a single polished slab of red palisander wood with a natural grain resembling the starburst emblem that Coronals since Lord Dizimaule’s day had used—a span of five hundred years or more. For Teotas there was something of a shock in seeing Lord Dekkeret actually sitting at that desk that Lord Prestimion had occupied for so many years. But he needed that shock.

It was important for him to remind himself at every opportunity that presented itself that the great imperial shift had occurred once more, that Prestimion had gone off to the Labyrinth to become Pontifex, that this beautiful desk, which had been Lord Confalume’s before it was Prestimion’s, and Lord Prankipin’s before it was Confalume’s, was Lord Dekkeret’s now.

Dekkeret fitted it well: better, in truth, than Prestimion had. The desk had always seemed too huge for the small-framed Prestimion, but the much bigger Dekkeret was a more appropriate match for the desk’s majestic dimensions. He was dressed in the traditional royal way, robes of green and gold with ermine trim, and he radiated such strength and confidence now that Teotas, weary unto exhaustion and close to the limits of his strength, felt suddenly aged and feeble in the presence of this man who was only a few years younger than he was himself.

“So,” Dekkeret said. “Here we are.”

“Here we are, yes.”

“You look tired, Teotas. Dinitak tells me that you’ve been sleeping badly of late.”

“I’d rather have it that I wasn’t sleeping at all. When I give myself over to sleep it brings me the most terrible dreams—dreams so frightful I can barely believe that my mind is capable of inventing such things.”

“Give me an example.”

Teotas shook his head. “No point in trying. I’d have difficulty describing it. Not much remains in my mind after I awaken except a sense that I’ve been through a terrifying experience. I see strange hideous landscapes, monsters, demons. But I won’t try to portray them. What seems so terrifying to the dreamer himself has no power over anyone else.—And in any event I haven’t come here to talk about my dreams, my lord. There’s the matter of my pending appointment as High Counsellor.”

“What about it?” Dekkeret asked, in so cool and casual a way that Teotas could see that he had been anticipating some discussion of that very topic. “I remind you, Teotas, I’ve had no formal acceptance of the post from you.”

“Nor will you,” Teotas said. “I’ve come to you to ask you to withdraw my name from consideration.”

Quite clearly Dekkeret had anticipated that. The Coronal’s voice was still very calm as he said, “I would not have chosen you, Teotas, if I didn’t think that you were the man most suited for the post.”

“I’m cognizant of that. It’s a matter of the deepest regret to me that I can’t accept this great honor. But I can’t.”

“May I have a reason?”

“Must I provide one, my lord?”

“Not ‘must,’ no. But I do think some explanation would be appropriate.”

“My lord—”

Teotas could not go on, for fear of what he might say. He felt a stirring, deep within himself, of the famous temper that once had been so widely feared. Why would Dekkeret not simply release him from the offer and let him be? But the heat of his fury had been much diminished by time and the weariness that comes with despair. He was able now to find nothing more within himself than a crackle of annoyance, and that quickly passed, leaving him drained and desolate and numb.

He covered his face with his outspread hands. After a little while he said again, “My lord—” in a faint, indistinct way. Dekkeret waited, saying nothing. “My lord, do you see how I look? How I conduct myself? Is this the Teotas you remember from earlier times? From six months ago, even? Do I seem to you like a man fit to undertake the duties of the High Counsellor of the Realm? Can’t you see that I’m half out of my mind? More than half. Only a fool would choose an unstable person like me for such an important post. And you are anything but a fool.”

“I do see that you seem ill, Teotas. But illnesses can be cured.—Have you discussed this matter of refusing the post with his majesty your brother?”

“Not at all. I don’t see any need to burden Prestimion with my troubles.”

“If the Divine had granted me a brother,” Dekkeret said, “I think I would be ready and willing to hear of any troubles of his, at any hour of the day or night. And I think it would be the same for Prestimion.”

“Nevertheless, I will not go to him.” This was becoming a torment, now. “In the name of the Divine, Dekkeret! Find yourself some other High Counsellor, and let me be done with it! Surely I’m not indispensable.”

It seemed to occur to the Coronal, finally, that Teotas was in agony. Gently he said, “No one is indispensable, including the Pontifex and the Coronal. And I’ll withdraw the appointment, if you give me no choice about it.”

“Thank you, my lord.” Teotas rose as if to go.

But Dekkeret was not done with him. “I should tell you, though, that Dinitak believes that these dreams of yours, which must truly be appalling, are not the work of your own brain at all. He thinks they’re being sent in by an enemy from outside—a kinsman of his, a Barjazid, he suspects, who is using some version of the thought-control helmet that we once employed against Dantirya Sambail.”

Teotas gasped. “Can that be so?”

“At this moment Dinitak is searching for proof of his theory. And will take the necessary action, if he finds that what he suspects is true.”

“I find myself perplexed at this, my lord. Why would anyone want to be sending me bad dreams? Your friend Dinitak wastes his time, I think.”

“Be that as it may, I’ve authorized him to look into it.”

Teotas felt that he was coming to the limits of his reserve of strength. He had to make an end of this. “Whatever he finds will make no difference to our discussion here,” he said. “The real issue is what has become of my marriage.—You know, I think, that Fiorinda is at the Labyrinth with Varaile?”

“Yes.”

“She is as important to Varaile as you claim that I am to you. But I will not live apart from her indefinitely, my lord. There is no solution, then, other than for one of us to give up the royal appointment, and it has been my rule always to place Fiorinda’s needs and desires above my own. Therefore I will not serve you as High Counsellor.”

“You may think differently about this,” said Dekkeret, “once we have freed you from these dreams. Giving up the High Counsellorship is no light matter. I promise you, I’ll release you if you feel, even after the dreams are gone, that you don’t want the job. But can we hold the decision in abeyance until then?”

“You are inexorable, my lord. But I am adamant. Dreams or no dreams, I want to be with my wife, and she wants to be with Varaile at the Labyrinth.”

He moved again toward the door.

“Give it one more week,” Dekkeret said. “We’ll meet again a week from now, and if you feel the same way, I’ll name someone else to the post. Can we agree on that? One more week?”

Dekkeret’s tenacity was maddening. Teotas could bear it no longer. “Whatever you say, my lord,” he muttered. “One week more, yes. Whatever you say.” He made a hasty starburst salute and rushed from the room before the Coronal could utter another word.

***

That night Teotas lies awake for hours, too tired even to sleep, and he begins to hope that just this once he will be spared, that he will go through the night from midnight to dawn without descending even for a moment into the realm of dreams. Better not to sleep at all, he thinks, than to endure the torture that his dreams have become.

But somehow he passes without knowing it, once again, from wakefulness to sleep. There is no sudden transition, no sense of crossing a boundary. Somehow, though, he has entered yet another strange place, where he knows he will suffer. As he moves forward into it, the power of the place only gradually makes itself known to him, gathering slowly, mounting with each step he takes, oppressing him only a little at first, then more, then much more.

And now Teotas finds himself under the full stress of this place. He is in a region of thick-stemmed gray shrubs, broad-leaved and low. A thick mist hovers. The general tone here is a colorless one: hue has bled away. And there is the awful pull coming from the ground, that clamp of gravity clinging with inexorable force to every part of him. His eyelids are leaden. His cheeks sag. His gut droops. His throat is a loosely hanging sac. His bones bend under the strain. He walks with bent knees. What does he weigh here? Eight hundred pounds? Eight thousand? Eight million? He is unthinkably heavy. Heavy. Heavy.

His weight nails his feet flat to the ground. Each time he pulls one upward to take another step, he hears a reverberating sound as the planet recoils against the separation. He is aware of the blood lying dark and sleepy along the enfeebled arteries of his chest. He feels a monstrous iron hump riding on his shoulders. Yet he walks on. There must be an end to this place somewhere.

But there is no end.

Halting, Teotas kneels, just to regain his breath. Tears of relief burst forth as some of the stress is lifted from his body’s bony framework. Like drops of quicksilver the slow tears roll down his cheek and thump into the ground.

When he feels that he is ready to go on, he attempts to rise.

It takes him five tries. Then he succeeds, rocking himself, levering himself up on his knuckles, rump in air, intestines yanked groundward, spine popping, neck creaking. Up. Up. Another push. He stands. He gasps. He walks. He finds the path he had been following a little while ago: there are his footprints, nearly an inch deep on the sandy soil. He fits his feet into the imprints and moves onward.

The gravitational drag continues to increase. Breathing has become a battle. His rib cage will not lift except under duress; his lungs are stretched like elastic bands. His cheeks hang toward his shoulders. There is a boulder in his chest. And it all keeps getting worse. He knows that if he remains here much longer he will be squeezed flat. He will be squeezed until he is nothing more than a film of dust coating the ground.

The effect continues to worsen. He can no longer remain upright. He has become top-heavy, and the mass of his skull turns his back into a curved bow; his vertebrae slide about, grinding and cracking. He yearns to lie down flat, surrendering to the awful force, but he knows that if he does, he will never be able to rise again.

The sky is being pulled down on top of him. A gray shield presses against his back. His knees are taking root. He crawls. He crawls. He crawls. He crawls.

“Help me!” he cries. “Fiorinda! Prestimion! Abrigant!”

His words are like pellets of lead. They spill from his mouth and plummet into the ground.

He crawls.

There is a ghastly pain in his side. He fears that his intestines are breaking through his skin. His bones are separating at the elbows and knees. He crawls. He crawls.

He crawls.

“Pres—tim—i—on!”

The name emerges as an incoherent gargle. His gullet is stone. His earlobes are stone. His lips are stone. He crawls. His hands sink into the ground. He wrenches them free. He is at the end of his resources. He will perish. This is the finish: he is about to die a slow and hideous death. The gray mantle of the sky is crushing him. He is caught between earth and air. Everything is impossibly heavy. Heavy. Heavy. Heavy. He crawls. He sees only the rough bare soil eight inches from his nose.

Then, miraculously, a gateway appears before him, a shimmering golden oval in the air just ahead of him.

Teotas knows that if he can reach it, he will free himself from this realm of unendurable pressure. But reaching it is a challenge almost beyond his means. Every inch that he gains represents a triumph over implacable forces.

He reaches it. Inch by inch by inch he pulls himself forward, clawing at the ground, digging his nails in and hauling his impossibly heavy body toward that golden gateway, and then it hovers just in front of him, and he puts his hands to its rim and drags himself to his feet, and thrusts one shoulder through, and his head and neck just afterward, and somehow manages to raise one leg and move it across the threshold. And he is through. He feels himself falling, but the drop is only a couple of feet, and he lands all asprawl on a platform of brick and lies there gasping for breath.

His weight is normal, here on the other side. This is the real world out here. He is still asleep, but he senses that he has left his bedroom and is wandering around on some outer parapet of the Castle.

Nothing looks familiar. He sees spires, embrasures, distant towers. He is on a narrow winding path that appears to be going up and up, spi-raling around a tall upjutting outbuilding of the Castle that he cannot even begin to identify. The black sky is speckled with a dazzle of stars, and the cold light of two or three of the moons shines along the horizon. He continues to climb. He imagines that he can hear a dire shrieking wind whipping past the summit of the Mount, though he knows he should not hear any such thing in these privileged altitudes.

The brick pathway that he is following grows ever steeper, ever narrower. The steps are cracked and broken beneath his feet, as though no one has bothered to come up here in centuries and the brickwork has simply been left to erode. It seems to him that he is climbing up the external face of one of the watchtowers along the Castle’s periphery, ascending a terrifying precarious track with an infinitely long drop on either side of him. He grows a little uneasy.

But there is no going back. Following this track is like climbing the spine of some gigantic monster. The path is too narrow here to allow him to turn, and to try to descend it walking backward is inconceivable, so no retreat is possible. Icy sweat begins to trickle down his sides.

He turns a bend in the path and the Great Moon suddenly fills the sky. It is crescent tonight, dazzlingly brilliant, a gigantic bright pair of white horns hanging in front of him. By its frosty blaze he sees that he has clambered out onto a solitary spire of the colossal Castle and has reached a point close to its tip. Far away to his right he sees what he thinks are the rooftops of the Inner Castle. To his left is only a black abyss.

There is no going higher from this position. Nor is there any turning back. He can only stand here shivering on this dizzying upthrust point, whipped by the howling wind, waiting to awaken. Or else he can choose to step out into the emptiness and float downward to whatever awaits him below.

Yes. That is what he will do.

Teotas turns to his left and looks out toward the darkness, and then he puts one foot over the course of bricks that marks the edge of the path, and steps across.

But this is no dream. He is really falling.

Teotas does not care. It is like flying. The cool air from below brushes his hair like a caress. He will fall and fall and fall, a thousand feet, ten thousand, perhaps all the way to the foot of Castle Mount; and when he reaches the bottom, he knows, he will be at peace. At last. Peace.