Gialaurys said, “He is a kingly man indeed, Prestimion.”
“On the outside, yes. But there’s nothing within. A sweet empty-headed man surrounded by a swarm of flatterers and scoundrels. Who has not an idea of his own, and depends on those around him to tell him what to think.”
“An exact assessment,” said Septach Melayn. “I would have put it in those very words myself.”
“In any case,” Prestimion continued, “he’d never dream of making a move toward the throne. The son of a Coronal, doing such a thing? It violates all tradition, and Korsibar is no man for defying tradition. He’s a dull decent lordling and nothing more, without the necessary spark of evil for such a thing. What he wants from life is sport and pleasure, not the cares of power. The idea’s absurd, Gialaurys. Absurd. Put it from your mind.”
“What Gialaurys suggests may be absurd, yes,” said Duke Svor, “but there’s definitely something strange in the air, Prestimion. I can feel it myself: a thick dark ominous cloud gathering close about us.”
“You too, Svor?” Prestimion exclaimed, with a gesture of vexation.
“Indeed.”
“Oh, how I wish all this flood of incantations and prognostications had never been let loose on Majipoor! These talismans and harbingers, these monstrous conjurings! We were a rational people once, so I understand it. Would that we were again. We have Prankipin to blame for this. He was the one that swayed the world toward witchcraft and magic.” Prestimion looked gloomily toward Duke Svor. “You try my patience very sorely with these superstitions, friend. You and Gialaurys both.”
“Perhaps we do,” said Svor. “For that I beg your pardon, Prestimion. Nonetheless, cutting ourselves off from any source of information, esoteric though it may be, seems a mistake to me. That you see no substance in the arcane practices, prince, may not mean that they’re altogether devoid of truth. I propose that we put the Vroon on the payroll, for something more than ten weights this time, and ask him to come to us with any further insights he may have.”
“Which is exactly what he came here to achieve,” Septach Melayn said. “He’s obviously looking for a new employer, and who better than the incoming Coronal? No. No. I vote against having anything to do with him. We don’t need him and we don’t want him. He’ll sell himself six times over the same day, if only he can find enough buyers.”
Svor held up one hand, palm outward, in disagreement. “In a time of the changing of kings, those in high places should tread cautiously, I think. If there’s substance to these Vroonish whisperings, and we spurn him out of mere mistrust of the man himself or of witchery in general, more fools we. There’s no need to make him party to our innermost councils: only to toss him a royal or two to retain access to his visions. To me that seems simply prudent.”
“And to me,” said Gialaurys.
Septach Melayn scowled. “You are both of you much too willing to give credence to such stuff. It’s a perilous wizardy time, when lunatic nonsense like this infests even shrewd men like you, Svor. I could gladly take that Vroon and—”
“Calmly, calmly, Septach Melayn,” said Prestimion, speaking commandingly but in his most gentle manner of command, for blood and fire had come into Septach Melayn’s pale elegant face. “I’m no more eager to have him flapping about us than you are. Nor can I put any faith in this talk of a challenger rising up against me. Such a thing is not going to happen.”
“So we all hope and pray,” Septach Melayn said.
“So we profoundly believe.” Prestimion shuddered, as if he had stepped in something unclean. “By the Divine, I regret having allowed that Vroon to assault our ears with all that foolishness!” He looked toward Duke Svor. “Keep your distance from him, is what I say to you, my friend.” And then, looking to the other side: “But do him no harm, Septach Melayn, do you hear? I will not have it.”
“As you wish, prince.”
“Good. Thank you. And now, if we may, shall we return to the matter of the pairings for the games?”
5
THE LADY THISMET, sister to Prince Korsibar, had been given one of the most luxurious suites in the Labyrinth’s imperial sector for her private chamber, one that ordinarily was reserved for the use of the Coronal’s own consort on those rare occasions of state when she might visit the underground capital. But it was an open secret to all the world that the Lady Roxivail, who was wife to Lord Confalume, had long lived apart from the Coronal in a palace of her own on the southerly island of Shambettirantil in the tropical Gulf of Stoien. Though her husband was soon to ascend to the title of Pontifex, she had sent no response to the invitation to attend his investiture, nor did anyone expect her to be present for the ceremony. And so the suite that would have been Roxivail’s had been assigned to her daughter Thismet instead.
Within it lay Princess Thismet now, taking her ease in the great glossy tub of porphyry inlaid with patterns of wine-yellow topaz that stood at the center of her bathchamber. From the smooth tubes of green onyx that were its spigots ran a steady pale pink stream of heated water, the fragrant and silken water of far-off Lake Embolain, carried across two thousand miles of marble piping for the pleasure of the guests of the Pontifex. A triple pair of iridescent green lamps hung above her. The princess lay prettily disposed, breast-deep in the tub with her arms hanging relaxed over its curving rim, so that the two serving-women who knelt just to either side of it could carry out their nightly task of caring for her hands and fingers, the flawless elongated nails of which were enameled afresh each evening in a gleaming platinum hue. Behind her, gently kneading the slender column of her neck, was the Princess Thismet’s chief lady-of-honor, Melithyrrh of Amblemorn, her companion since childhood, a woman as fair as Thismet was dark, with a great swirl of golden hair and pale cheeks lightly dappled with a perpetual fine blush.
Usually she and Thismet chattered endlessly; but tonight thus far very little had been said, and that with long periods of silence between each remark. After one of these Melithyrrh said, “The muscles of your back are very tense tonight, lady.”
“When I had my rest this afternoon I dreamed, and the dream stays with me and grips me all along my spine.”
“It must not have been a very beguiling dream.”
To this the Princess Thismet offered no reply.
“A sending of some sort?” asked Melithyrrh, after a few moments more.
“A dream,” said Thismet shortly. “Only a dream. Dig your fingers more deeply into my shoulders, would you, good Melithyrrh?”
Again there was silence, while Melithyrrh steadily worked. Thismet closed her eyes and let her head loll backward. Her body was a slender one, sinewy for a woman’s, and the muscles lay close to the surface: often, when she had dreamed a disturbing dream, they were knotted and painful for long hours thereafter.
She was Prince Korsibar’s twin, born only a few minutes after him, and the kinship between them showed in her shining ebony hair and dark glittering eyes, her prominent sharp-edged cheekbones, her full lips and strong chin, and in the long-limbed proportions of her frame. But whereas Korsibar was a man of towering height, the Lady Thismet was cut to a smaller scale, having her brother’s rangy proportions but nothing like his size, and where his skin was leathery and blackened by long exposure to fierce sunlight, hers was extraordinarily smooth and had the stark whiteness of one who lived only by night. Her whole appearance was one of great delicacy of form and almost a sort of boyishness, other than in the fullness of her breasts and the womanly breadth of her hips.
A third serving-maid entered the chamber and said, “The magus Sanibak-Thastimoon is outside, saying he has been urgently summoned, and asks to be admitted. Shall I show him in?”
Melithyrrh laughed. “Has he lost his mind? Have you? Milady is in her bath.”
The girl reddened and stammered something inaudible.
Icily, Thismet said, “I requested his immediate presence, Melithyrrh.”
“Surely you didn’t intend—”
“Immedi
ate,” she said. “Am I required by you to maintain my modesty in front of creatures of every sort, Melithyrrh, even those who could never feel desire for women of the human kind? Let him come in.”
“Indeed,” said Melithyrrh with ostentatious cheeriness, signaling to the serving-maid. The Su-Suheris appeared almost at once, a thin, tall, sharp-angled figure tightly wrapped in a rigid sheathlike tunic of orange parchment bedecked with shining blue beads, from which his pair of narrow emerald-eyed heads jutted like twin conning-towers. He took up a position just to the left of the massive porphyry tub, and, though he was looking down directly at Thismet’s clearly revealed nakedness, he displayed no more interest in it than he did in the tub itself.
“Lady?” he said.
“I need your guidance, Sanibak-Thastimoon, in a certain delicate matter. I hope I can rely upon you. And on your discretion.”
From the leftmost head came a quick, barely perceptible nod.
She went on, “You told me once, not long ago, that I was destined for great things—though whether they were great good things or great bad things, you could not or would not say.”
“Could not, my lady,” said the Su-Suheris. The voice that spoke was the crisp and precisely inflected one of the necromancer’s right head.
“Could not. Very well. The omens were ambiguous, as such omens all too often are. You told me also that you could see the same ambiguous kind of greatness in my brother’s future.”
Again Sanibak-Thastimoon briefly nodded, both heads at once.
“This afternoon,” Princess Thismet said, “I had a strange dark dream. Perhaps you can speak it for me, Sanibak-Thastimoon. I dreamed that I was home again, that I had somehow returned to the Castle; but I was in some part of the Castle that was unknown to me, on the northern side where almost nobody ever goes. It seemed to me that I was wandering across a broad platform of badly chipped brick that led to a dismal half-ruined wall, and thence to a kind of parapet that gave me a view out to such towns as Huine and Gossif, and whatever city may be beyond those—Tentag, I suppose. There I was, anyhow, in this old and crumbling corner of the Castle, looking outward to cities I had never visited and then in toward the summit of the Mount rising high above me, and wondering how I was ever going to find my way toward those parts of the building where I knew my way around.”
She fell silent, and stared at the ceiling of the bath-chamber, where an ornate frieze of interwoven flowers and leaves and stalks, eldiron blossoms and tanigales and big fleshy shepitholes, had been carved from sleek curving slabs of sapphire targolite and pale chalcedony.
“Yes, lady?” said Sanibak-Thastimoon, waiting.
Through the Lady Thismet’s mind a thousand turbulent images flowed. She saw herself running to and fro on that somber balcony at the edge of the immense sprawling Castle atop the mightiest mountain of Majipoor—the Castle that had been the residence of the Coronals of Majipoor these seven thousand years past, the ever-growing Castle of twenty thousand rooms, or perhaps it was thirty thousand, for who could number them? The Castle that was a great city unto itself, where each Coronal in turn added new rooms of his own to what was already so intricate a building that even residents of many years’ standing easily found themselves lost in its seemingly infinite byways. As she herself had become lost, this very day, while she wandered the Castle’s unfathomable vastnesses in her dream.
By and by she began to speak again, describing for the Su-Suheris how she had made her way, with the aid of this passerby and that one, through that enormous maze of stony galleries and musty tunnels and corridors and staircases and long echoing courtyards toward the more familiar inner bastions. Again and again the perplexing paths doubled back on themselves and she discovered herself entering someplace she had left only a little while before. But always there was someone to help her on her way, and always one of nonhuman origin. It seemed that persons of every race but her own were there to offer guidance to her first a pair of scaly forked-tongued Ghayrogs, and then a bright-eyed little Vroon who danced ahead of her on its multitude of ever-recoiling tentacles, and some Lumen, and a Su-Suheris or two, and Hjorts, and a massive Skandar, and someone of a species she could not identify at all. “And even, I think, a Metamorph: for it was very thin, and had that greenish skin of theirs, and hardly any lips or nose at all. But what would a Metamorph be doing inside the Castle?”
The two manicurists were finished with her now. They rose and left the room. Briefly the princess inspected her gleaming fingernails and found them acceptable; then, indicating to Melithyrrh that she had bathed long enough, she clambered to her feet and stepped from the tub, smiling faintly at the frantic haste with which Melithyrrh rushed to wrap a towel about her. But the towel was gossamer stuff that scarcely hid the contours of her breasts and thighs, nor did the Su-Suheris display so much as a flicker of excitement at the sight of the Lady Thismet’s body so skimpily wrapped.
Casually, Thismet blotted herself dry and tossed the towel aside. Immediately Melithyrrh came forward to clothe her in a light robe of ivory-colored cambric over-sewn with pink strands of tiny, fragile ganibin-shells.
“Imagine me now passing under the Dizimaule Arch and into the Inner Castle,” she said to Sanibak-Thastimoon. “And suddenly I was all alone, no one in sight, not any Hjorts nor Ghayrogs nor human people, no one. No one. The Inner Castle was utterly deserted. There was a frightening silence, a ghastly silence. A cold wind was blowing across the plaza and strange stars were in the sky, of a kind that I had never seen before, huge bearded stars, stars that trailed bright streams of red flame.
“I was within the heart of the Inner Castle, now, coming up the Ninety-Nine Steps and entering into the central-most precincts. What I found there was not disposed exactly as the real Inner Castle is, you understand: Lord Siminave’s reflecting pool was on the wrong side of the Pinitor Court, and I couldn’t see the Vildivar Balconies at all, and somehow Lord Arioc’s Watchtower was even more bizarre-looking than it is in fact, with eight or nine tall peaks instead of five, and long looping arms sticking out from every side of it. But I was in the Inner Castle, all right, however much my dreaming mind had changed things around. I could see Stiamot Keep rising up over everything, and Lord Prankipin’s big black treasury building in all its spectacular ugliness, and there was my father’s garden-house, where all the peculiar plants grow; and then the great door to the royal chambers was before me. All this while, as I walked on and on, I saw no one else. It was as if I was the only person in the entire Castle.”
Sanibak-Thastimoon stood statue-still before her, saying nothing, focusing the full concentration of both his heads upon her words.
Steadily, though with an increasing huskiness of voice, the Lady Thismet continued to tell him her tale, describing how in that awesome dreadful solitude she had advanced from room to room within the most sacrosanct precincts of the Castle until at last she stood at the threshold of the throne room itself.
That was a room she knew very well, for it had been built by the command of her father Lord Confalume at the midpoint of his long, distinguished reign, and all through her girlhood she had watched it under construction, month by month, year by year. The old throne room, which was said to go back to the very foundation of the Castle in Lord Stiamot’s time, had long since been deemed too small and plain for its function; and Lord Confalume had resolved, once the greatness of his achievements was apparent to all, to replace it with a site of true magnificence in which the grandest and most solemn ceremonies of the realm might be held, and for which his name would be remembered through all of time to come. And so he had, amalgamating half a dozen inner rooms of no particular significance into the breathtaking high-vaulted throne room that was to be his distinctive contribution to the fabric of the Castle.
The floor of it was fashioned not of the usual slabs of polished stone but rather from the remarkable yellow wood of the gurna, a rare tree of the Khyntor peaks of northern Zimroel that had the radiant glow of a slow-burning fire and the sh
een and grace of fine amber. The beams of the room, gigantic square-timbered ones that jutted out with tremendous force from its ceiling, were gilded with delicately hammered sheets of the fine pink gold that came from the mines of eastern Alhanroel, and inset with huge clustering masses of amethysts, sapphires, moonstones, and tourmalines. And on the walls were hung vivid tapestries woven by the most skillful craftsmen of Makroposopos, in which were depicted scenes of the history of Majipoor its earliest settlement by the voyagers who came across the sea of stars from Old Earth, and then panels that showed the time of the building of the cities and the final conquest of the native Shapeshifters by Lord Stiamot, and finally a group of scenes illustrative of the wondrous expansion of the kingdom under its most recent rulers, who had brought it to its present state of overflowing abundance.
But the heart of the throne room, the core of the Castle itself, was the grand and lordly Confalume Throne. Atop a grand mahogany pedestal cut with many steps it rested, a high curving seat carved from a single mighty block of black opal in which fiery natural veins of blood-scarlet ruby stood forth in an astonishing tracery. Its sides were flanked by massive silver pillars that supported an overarching canopy of gold lined with blue mother-of-pearl, and looming above all else was the starburst that was the symbol of the Coronal’s power, blazing in a splendor of shining white platinum that was tipped at every extremity by spheres of milky-streaked purple onyx.
“The strangest thing of my dream,” said the Lady Thismet to the utterly still Sanibak-Thastimoon, “was that there wasn’t just the one throne in the throne room, but two, both of them of identical aspect, facing each other across the entire expanse of the room. One throne was empty; and the other was occupied by a man who wore the robes and starburst crown of a Coronal. His face was in shadows, but even from some distance away I could tell that he was neither my father nor Prestimion; for plainly he was a much bigger man than either one of them, a man of great size and strength indeed.