Lord Confalume appeared stunned at what had taken place. His face was very pale; his eyes seemed almost glassy. He had come a few uncertain steps toward his son, his jaws agape and his hands turned helplessly outward in a gesture of shock and astonishment. He stared at Korsibar, and at the empty cushion on which the crown had lately rested, and at his son once more. But for a moment no sound could escape his lips except a rasping croak.
Then he pointed a wavering hand in Korsibar’s direction and said to him in a hoarse rusty voice, “What are you doing?”
“The Pontifex is dead, Father. You are Pontifex now, and I am your Coronal.”
“You are—what?” Confalume said, with a gasp that was echoed by a host of others around the room.
He looked like a man who had been shattered by a single blow. He stood dumbstruck in front of his son, his head and shoulders slumped forward, his arms dangling limply at his sides. Where were the force and power of the mighty Lord Confalume now? Gone, all gone in one numbing instant, or so it would seem.
Korsibar held his arms out toward his father in a grand sweeping gesture.
“All hail his majesty Confalume Pontifex!” he cried. It was a cry loud enough to be heard at Castle Mount. “All hail! Confalume Pontifex!”
“All hail his majesty Confalume Pontifex!” the others shouted, or most of them, a very ragged chorus indeed, for the impact of the news was sinking in upon them at a varying rate.
Then Farholt bellowed in a voice that could bend stone walls, “And all hail the Coronal Lord Korsibar! Korsibar! Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!”
There was a moment of astounded silence.
And then: “Korsibar! Korsibar!” went up the cry, from all except a few for whom it was very plainly a difficult matter to give voice to the thing that Farholt wished them to proclaim. “Korsibar! Lord Korsibar!”
In a smooth solemn gesture Korsibar raised the starburst crown high, held it forth to show it to all who stood before him, and serenely placed it on his own forehead. Whereupon he sat himself on the seat of the Coronal and coolly beckoned to his father to take the Pontifex’s throne adjoining him.
“Do you believe this?” Septach Melayn asked.
“We must, I think,” replied Count Iram. “Look over there.”
Others were pushing their way into the room now, a swarm of troops of the Coronal’s guard, who evidently had taken up positions outside during that time when the minds of everyone within had been embraced by that dark cloud. They were all of them armed. Some deployed themselves along both sides of Korsibar with the plain intention of defending him against any who might raise objection to the sudden coup d’etat, the rest formed two enfilades down the borders of the room. Two, at a gesture from Korsibar, gently took the astounded Confalume by the elbows and prodded him toward the Pontifical throne.
“Come, Father,” Korsibar said, speaking very tenderly. “Sit beside me for awhile, and we will talk; and then we will perform the proper rituals and see old Prankipin into his grave. And then you will take up your new home in this place and I will go back to Castle Mount to assume the responsibilities that now are to be mine.”
The guards who were guiding Confalume toward the throne eased him up the three steps that led to it and sat him carefully down. He offered no resistance. He appeared to be without volition of his own, as though he were under some spell; and he had the look of a man who had aged twenty years in ten minutes.
Then came the sounds of a scuffle in the corridor outside. “Get out of my way!” a loud angry voice cried. “Let me in! Let me in!”
“Prestimion, at last,” Septach Melayn murmured.
A louder and even angrier voice could be heard next, stormily threatening mayhem and general destruction if the guards blocking the entrance to the hall did not step aside. It was that of Gialaurys.
Quickly Septach Melayn cut a path for himself to the door, deftly slipping between guardsmen who seemed unwilling to block his movements, or incapable of managing it. Prestimion, looking sweaty and disheveled, said as Septach Melayn approached him, “What’s been happening here? I was on my way toward this hall, and I fell into a sort of swoon—and Gialaurys also, both our minds clouded over—and when we returned to ourselves, the corridor was full of the Coronal’s men, who blocked me from going forward, so that I had to threaten them with all manner of vengeance—”
“Look you there, and see wonders,” broke in Septach Melayn, taking him by the arm and swinging him quickly about to face the crowned Korsibar on the Coronal’s seat and the bewildered and thunderstruck Confalume on the Pontifical throne beside him.
“What is this?” Prestimion asked in wonder.
Calmly Korsibar said, rising from his royal seat, “The Divine has spoken, Prestimion. Prankipin is dead and my father Confalume now is Pontifex, and I—” He touched his hand lightly to the crown resting on his brow. “I—”
“No!” Gialaurys bellowed. “This is thievery! Thievery! This thing will not be!” Holding his arms upraised and his fingers stiffly outthrust as though he meant to throttle Korsibar with his own hands, he began to move forward with his head lowered like a rumbling bull, only to find himself confronted by the halberds of the front row of Korsibar’s guards.
“Step back, Gialaurys,” Prestimion said in a low stern voice. And then, more sharply “Back! Away from the throne!” And reluctantly Gialaurys gave ground.
Then, looking toward Korsibar, Prestimion said, with taut self-control, “You claim to be Coronal, is that it?”
“I am Coronal.”
To Confalume, Prestimion said in an equally quiet tone, “And this is acceptable to you, your majesty?”
Confalume’s lips moved but no words came out. He turned his hands outward and upward in a pathetic gesture of defeat and bewilderment.
Now Prestimion’s rage flared high. “What is this, Korsibar, have you put some spell on him?” he demanded fiercely. “He’s nothing more than a puppet!”
Farholt, stepping forward, said now with a shameless grin, “You will address him now as Lord Korsibar, prince.”
Prestimion looked stunned for a moment. Then he smiled, but the smile was a very thin one. “Lord Korsibar, then,” he said, quietly again, with a barely concealed tinge of mockery imparting an edge to his tone. “Was that properly spoken, Lord Korsibar?”
“I’ll kill him!” Gialaurys howled. “I’ll tear him apart!”
“You’ll do no such thing,” said Prestimion as the line of halberds bristled. He clamped his hand tight about Gialaurys’s thick wrist and held him firmly in his place. Smoothly, Septach Melayn moved in to press himself up against Gialaurys and restrain him on the other side.
Gialaurys trembled like a shackled titan, but remained where he was.
“Svor saw something very much like this in a dream,” Prestimion said in a low voice to Septach Melayn. “I laughed at him. But now we see it also.”
“This is not any dream, I fear,” Septach Melayn replied. “Or if it is, there’ll be no quick awakening from it for us.”
“No. And we appear to be friendless in this room today. This is not any place for us to be just now.” Prestimion looked across to Korsibar. The world was whirling wildly on its axis, but he forced himself to plant his feet firmly and stand staunchly upright. To Korsibar he said, keeping all that he felt at this dark moment under the tightest of reins and speaking through barely parted lips, “In this time of great loss and mourning, I would prefer to reflect in solitude on these great events. I ask your gracious permission to withdraw from the hail, your—lordship.”
“Granted.”
“Come, then,” Prestimion said sharply to Gialaurys, who still looked stunned and numb with fury. “Out of here, now, quickly. And you also, Septach Melayn. Come. Come.” And added, under his breath: “While we still can.” Prestimion’s fingers flicked out toward Korsibar in the starburst sign, which he performed so swiftly that it was little more than a parody of the gesture. Then he swung about and went quickly with his
two companions from the room.
1
DID YOU SEE his face?” Thismet cried. It was the dazzling hour of triumph. “Like a stone slab, it was. No expression at all, and absolutely gray. A dead man’s face.” And she squared her shoulders and thrust out her chin and did a scathing imitation of Prestimion’s stolid exit from the Court of Thrones, muttering gruffly in a decent counterfeit of Prestimion’s strong tenor, “‘Come, then, Septach Melayn, Gialaurys. Out of here, while we can.’”
The room shook with laughter. Then Farholt jumped up. Moving stiffly; for he was still badly battered and bruised from that horrendous wrestling match with Gialaurys, he shambled ponderously back and forth before them in the clumsy dangle-armed posture of a great ape of the Gonghar Mountains, pummeling his chest and grunting in a fair semblance of Gialaurys’s dark rumbling voice, “I’ll kill him! I’ll tear him apart!’”
A couple of others began now to mimic Septach Melayn’s dainty walk, comically exaggerating his feline litheness and overfastidious precision of movement. “Enough of this,” said Korsibar, though he was laughing just as heartily as any of the others. “It’s bad grace to mock one’s fallen rivals.”
“A good point, my lord,” said Count Farquanor unctuously. “Wisely put, my lord.” And the others echoed him: “Wisely put, my lord. A good point, my lord. A very good point, my lord.” The temporary quarters of the new Coronal had been established in the generous suite on the imperial level of the Labyrinth where the former Prince Korsibar had resided since his arrival; and here the new Lord Korsibar was holding court for the first time on the afternoon of his assumption of the crown, seated on an improvised throne while the members of his immediate entourage clustered about him to pay him homage.
One by one they had come forward and knelt and made the starburst sign to him: the Lady Thismet first, and then the brothers Farquanor and Farholt together, and Navigorn and Mandrykarn and Venta and the rest. And Sanibak-Thastimoon as well; for Korsibar was Coronal Lord of the Su-Suheris people of Majipoor now too, and of all the Ghayrogs and Liimen and Hjorts and Vroons and Skandars as well, and even the shapeshifting Metamorphs of the distant Piurifayne forests.
“My lord,” they said over and over, greatly relishing the sound of it, interspersing it between every third word they addressed to him: “My lord, my lord, my lord, my lord.” And the new Coronal heard and graciously smiled and nodded his acknowledgment of their deference, just as he had seen his father doing since he was a small child. Korsibar had had a better education in being Coronal, perhaps, than anyone who had ever come to the throne before him, at least in the matter of understanding the formalities of the post; for he had had an entire lifetime to study a Coronal’s deportment, beginning at his father’s knee.
Count Farquanor, eyes bright with the pleasure of victory, approached him and said, “The word has gone out everywhere, my lord, of what has occurred here today. They will all learn of it soon, in every city, on every continent.”
He waited, half crouching beside Korsibar as if expecting to be tossed a coin. Korsibar knew what was in Farquanor’s mind: he yearned to be named High Counsellor to the Coronal, which was the highest rank at the Castle below that of Coronal itself. Very likely Korsibar would so name him, when the time for making appointments had come; but it was not yet that time, not this soon. One did not discard the former Coronal’s close advisers so hastily: especially when one had come to the throne as irregularly as he had. And his reign was still only in its first moments, after all.
Even now, the news of the change of government was only just beginning to spread—erupting outward upon the world from the claustrophobic confines of the Labyrinth like a column of fiery lava spouting from the black ashy cone of a volcano. Of course it had come by this time to the Castle, where the myriad officials of the Coronal’s administrative staff were doubtless looking at one another with astonishment and asking each other in helpless dumbstruck repetition, “Korsibar? How could it have been Korsibar?” And to the fifty glorious cities of the Mount that lay spread out below the Castle, High Morpin of the mirror-slides and juggernauts, and Normork of the great stone wall, and Tolingar where Lord Havilbove’s miraculous garden was, and Kazkaz, Sipermit, Frangior, Halanx, Prestimion’s own city of Muldemar, and all the rest of them.
And the astonishing news would be continuing onward and onward across the whole continent of Alhanroel, through the teeming valley of the Glayge and the innumerable stilt-legged villages scattered along the silver immensity of Lake Roghoiz, and out to Bailemoona and Alaisor and Stoien and Sintalmond and the airy towns that clung to the grotesque spires of the Ketheron district, and those of the golden hills of Arvyanda, and across the sea to the tremendous cities of Zimroel, the far western continent, cities that were more the stuff of myth and legend than real places to those who dwelled at the Castle—Ni-moya and Til-omon, Pidruid and Piliplok, Narabal, Khyntor, Sagamalinor, Dulorn. And to parched fiery Suvrael also, and the Isle of the Lady. Everywhere. Everywhere.
Mandrykarn, approaching Korsibar now, said, “If I may ask your majesty—”
“No, not ‘your majesty,’” Farquanor interrupted. “‘Your lordship.’ ‘Your majesty’ is what one would say to the Pontifex.”
“A hundred thousand pardons!” said Mandrykarn with exaggerated punctiliousness, drawing himself up stiffly and looking displeased. Mandrykarn was deep-shouldered and substantial, a man nearly as robustly built as Korsibar himself, and he scowled down at the wiry little Farquanor in unconcealed annoyance. Then, to Korsibar again: “If I may ask your lordship a question—?”
“Of course, Mandrykarn.”
“What is to be done about the games?”
“Why, we’ll continue them where we left off, of course. But first we’ll have the funeral for old Prankipin, with all the pomp and grandeur this gloomy place can muster, and then some sort of formal installation ceremony, I suppose, for my father and myself. And then—”
“If I may, my lord—” Mandrykarn said.
Both Farquanor and Korsibar looked surprised at that, for Mandrykarn had interrupted the Coronal in mid-sentence, and one was not supposed to do that. But Korsibar quickly smiled to show that he had taken no offense. They were all very new at this business: it was too early to be finicky over protocol.
Korsibar signaled Mandrykarn to continue.
“It occurs to me, lordship, that it might be the part of wisdom to abandon the remainder of the games and begin our journey to Castle Mount as quickly as possible. We can hold more games once we’re there. We have no way of knowing what Prestimion’s next move may be, my lord. If he should return to the Castle before we do, and raises a dispute against your assumption of power—”
“Do you think Prestimion would do such a thing?” Korsibar asked. “Not I. He respects the law. Under the law, I am Coronal now.”
“Nevertheless, my lord,” Mandrykarn said. “With all respect for your judgment, my lord. If he chooses to challenge the assumption on the grounds that a Coronal’s son may not become Coronal after him—”
“That’s not law,” said Farquanor sharply. “That’s merely precedent.”
“Precedent that has hardened into law over the past seven thousand years,” replied Mandrykarn.
“I stand with Farquanor and his lordship in this,” said Navigorn of Hoikmar. “If there’s precedent here, it’s that the outgoing Coronal chooses and ratifies the ascendance of his successor. Prestimion may argue that the element of choice on the part of Lord Confalume may have been defective, but certainly ratification was there: for did not Confalume sit willingly down on the Pontifical throne beside the crowned Lord Korsibar—”
“Willingly?” Farquanor asked.
“Well, more or less willingly, let us say. And thereby giving implicit recognition to Lord Korsibar by the very fact of making no protest over the assumption.”
There was something of a stir in the room at Navigorn’s words, not so much over their content as for the fact that he had said
them at all. The dark-haired brawny Navigorn was a man of tireless strength and formidable skill in the hunt, but he had never demonstrated much gift for abstract thought before. Nor, for that matter, had Mandrykarn. Korsibar hid his amusement over this sudden dispute behind his hand. Was the coming of the new regime going to transform all his rough-and-ready hunting comrades into lawyers?
“Still,” said Farholt, glowering out from under his massive brows, “what we think the law says and what Prestimion thinks may not be the same. I’m with Mandrykarn here: I vote for calling off the rest of the games and getting ourselves back to the Castle as fast as we can.”
Korsibar looked toward the Lady Thismet. “Sister?”
“Yes. Cancel the games. We have more important things to do now. As for Prestimion, he’s no danger to us. We control the army. We control the machinery of government. What action can he take against us? Point a finger at you, my lord, and say that you have stolen his crown? It never was his crown. And now it’s yours. It’ll remain that way, my lord, no matter how Prestimion feels about today’s events.”
“I would go so far as to offer Prestimion a post in the new government,” said Farquanor thoughtfully. “To neutralize him—to minimize his resentment—and also to ensure his loyalty.”
“Why not High Counsellor?” Mandrykarn suggested, and everyone laughed, all but Farquanor.
Korsibar said, “Yes. A shrewd idea. I’ll send for Prestimion in a day or two and ask him to take some Council post. Certainly he’s worthy of one, and if he’s not too proud to accept, it’ll give us a way of keeping a close eye on him. As for the games, Thismet’s right: we won’t resume them, not here. There’ll be time for chariot-racing and jousting later on, at the castle. We bury Prankipin; we consecrate the new Pontifex; we do whatever urgent business must be done and we leave for the Mount. So be it.”