Lord Prestimion

  “There is one I know, named Galielber Dorn. He has the skills we would need.”

  “And where’s he to be found?”

  “High Morpin, my lord. He has a mind-reading concession there, at the park of the mirror-slides.”

  “That’s not far. Get word to him right away that he’s to present himself at the Castle by tomorrow afternoon. Offer him whatever fee he thinks he needs for serving as our guide.”

  The thought came to Prestimion then of what it would be like to go into the east-country, where he had never been, where hardly anyone ever went. The excitement of venturing into territory so little known as this region of Alhanroel throbbed suddenly within him; and he felt himself overcome once more by that powerful wanderlust, that irresistible desire to leave the Castle’s multitude of echoing rooms behind him and set forth into the infinite wonder that was Majipoor, that had come to be for him the one consolation for the absence of his true consort.

  He would not let them go into those strange lands yonder without him.

  Could not.

  And if he needed to provide a plausible pretext for allowing himself once more to be drawn from the Castle, why, this search for Dantirya Sambail would serve the purpose well enough, he told himself.

  And so he said, flashing a sudden smile at them after another pause: “Do you know, Septach Melayn, I think I’ll want you to serve as regent again. Because I mean to be part of this expedition also.”

  2

  He knew almost at once that he had made the right choice. This was uncommonly beautiful country, out here east of the Mount. Prestimion was not the only member of the party to whom this was a new land. None of them had ever gone into the east-country, except perhaps the little Vroon, Galielber Dorn, who was their guide. It was not clear whether the Vroon had actually traveled in these parts before, but certainly he behaved as if he had, calling out the landmarks to them one after another with the confident air of one who has been here many times. But that was a special skill of Vroons, Prestimion knew: their near-infallible sense of direction, their all-knowing awareness of the relationship of places. It was as though they came into the world with detailed maps of every region of the universe already in place behind their great golden eyes. Yet in fact Galielber Dorn might be just as much a stranger to the east-country as they were themselves.

  The mighty pedestal of Castle Mount filled the sky behind them. Just ahead lay the misty valley of Vrambikat; and beyond that was the unknown. Already they were able to spy strangenesses and wonders in the distance, for the land was still sloping away from the Mount, and their view extended for many miles to north and south and east.

  “That patch of red, Galielber Dorn,” said Abrigant, pointing off to the southeast, where there was a startling dot of bright color against the horizon. “What’s that? A place that’s rich in iron ore, is it? For iron has that reddish hue.”

  Prestimion chuckled. “He looks for metals everywhere,” he said quietly to Gialaurys. “It is his obsession now.”

  “Only sand, that is,” the Vroon replied. “Those are the blood-red dunes of Minnegara that you see, which border on the scarlet sea of Barbirike. The sand is made up of the myriad shells of the tiny creatures that give the sea its ruddy tint.”

  “A scarlet sea,” Prestimion murmured, shaking his head. “Blood-red dunes.”

  Which came into clearer view three days later: parallel rows of crescent dunes as sharp along their crests as scimitars, and so vivid in color that the air shimmered red above them; and, farther on, stretching beyond sight, a long narrow body of water that seemed like nothing so much as a great pool of blood. It was a handsome and startling sight, but ominous as well. Abrigant, ever eager for sources of metals, was all for a side journey to explore it; but the Vroon maintained that no iron would be found there, and Prestimion peremptorily told his brother to put the project from his mind. They were on a different quest just now.

  In Vrambikat city they interviewed the three citizens who had reported seeing Dantirya Sambail. Commoners, they were, two women and a man, all of them so tongue-tied at finding themselves summoned before people of such obvious high rank that it was almost impossible for them to get their story out. Had they known that they were facing the Coronal and his brother, and the Grand Admiral of the Realm, they very likely would have fallen down fainting. As it was, the best they could do was fumble and stammer.

  But again Galielber Dorn proved himself useful. “Allow me,” the Vroon said, and stepped forward, extending his ropy, twining tentacles toward the jabbering trio.

  He was a tiny creature, no more than knee-high to the shorter of the women, yet they backed away uncertainly as the Vroon approached them. Three clipped clicking sounds came from his curving golden beak and they halted, shifting their weight uncertainly from leg to leg. Galielber Dorn went from one to the next, reaching out with two delicate, intricately branched tentacles and wrapping them about their wrists, and with each one he maintained his grip for some moments while staring upward into their eyes.

  By the time he was done with the last of them, all three were as calm as though they had been given some soothing potion. And when, under further prompting from Prestimion, they began finally to speak, the story came from them in a copious flow.

  They had indeed encountered a pair of brusque, disagreeable men who answered well to the descriptions of Dantirya Sambail and his minion Mandralisca. The one man was long-limbed and slim, with an athlete’s wiry grace about him and a dour, hard face, cheekbones like knifeblades, eyes like polished stones. The other, a shorter and sturdier-looking man, had worn a kerchief over his face as though to protect himself from wind and sun, but they had seen his eyes, and they were even more remarkable in their way than those of the other man: lovely violet-hued eyes, as gentle and tender and warm as the taller man’s dark ones had been cold and hostile.

  “There can be no doubt, can there?” said Gialaurys. “There are no other eyes in the world like the Procurator’s.”

  The fugitives had come riding into Vrambikat city on two plump mounts that looked as if they had been driven to the last extremes of exhaustion. They needed to sell these creatures, they explained, and to purchase new ones with which to continue their journey, and they had no time to waste. “I laughed,” said the man, “and told them that no stableman would pay fifty weights for two half-dead beasts like that, The tall one struck me and knocked me to the ground, and I think would have put an end to me right then, if the other hadn’t stopped him. Then Astakapra here”—he indicated the older of the women—“told him where he could find a stable nearby, and off they went, and good riddance, say I.”

  “Where is this stable?” Prestimion asked, “Is it easy to reach from here?”

  “Nothing easier, sir,” the man said. “This wide street here, that’s Eremoil Way. Two blocks, corner of Amyntilir, turn right, second building in from the corner on your left, with the bales of hay out front. Can’t miss it.”

  “Pay them something,” said Prestimion to Abrigant, and they moved along.

  The ostlers at the stable remembered their visitors only too well. It had not been difficult for them to identify the mounts on which Mandralisca and Dantirya Sambail had been traveling as stolen ones, for they bore the markings of a well-known mount-breeder of the foothill city of Megenthorp on their haunches, and the Megenthorp man had sent word out into the hinterlands not long before that two strangers had broken into his compound and taken a pair of valuable mares. Which were these two beasts before them now, sadly reduced by days of harsh usage; and the two men who had come to the stable, the fierce-looking gaunt one and the other, shorter one with the strange purple eyes, had proceeded at once to draw weapons on the ostlers and relieve them of two fresh animals, leaving the winded ones from Megenthorp in their place.

  “So they have swords now too,” said Abrigant. “Supplied by the accomplices in their escape, I wonder, or acquired along the way?”

  “Along the way, it would seem,” Pr
estimion said. “As with the mounts.” To the ostlers he said, “Do you have any idea which direction they were heading in as they went out of town?”

  “Oh, yes, my lord, yes. East. They asked us where the main eastward highway could be found; and we told them, oh, yes, we told them truly, as who would not, with a sword’s tip at his throat?”

  East.

  How far east? As far as the Great Sea? That was untold thousands of miles away. Surely, surely, they weren’t insane enough to be thinking of getting back to Zimroel that way. Where, Prestimion wondered, were they really heading?

  “Come,” he said. “Time’s wasting.”

  “We’re riding in floaters and they on mounts,” said Gialaurys. “We’re bound to overtake them sooner or later.”

  “They can find floaters for themselves the same way they found mounts,” Prestimion said. “Let’s get moving.”

  Beyond Vrambikat the countryside grew emptier, only widely scattered little towns now and the occasional camp of imperial troops on maneuvers, and lonely watchtowers along the rim of hills flanking the road. No one had seen two strangers on mounts come riding this way lately, although it would have been easy enough for Dantirya Sambail and Mandralisca to slip by these places unnoticed under cover of darkness. And in dreams the next two nights both Prestimion and Gialaurys had a sense of their quarry moving swiftly and steadily through the territory ahead of them. “Dreams must be trusted,” said Gialaurys, and Prestimion did not dispute him.

  Eastward, then. What else could be done?

  Scenes of extraordinary beauty unfolded before their eyes as they journeyed on. The long scarlet sea became a mere slit in the landscape that lay off to their right, and then it vanished altogether; but now, in the same direction, they saw pale green mountains soft as velvet that ran through the rising spine of the land, and, when they looked down over the other way, into the low country of the north, the travelers beheld a chain of small, perfectly round lakes, black as the darkest onyx and just as glistening, that stretched on and on in a triple row to the limits of their vision. It was as if the hand of a master artist had distributed them in the landscape with the greatest of care.

  A lovely sight, but an inhospitable place. “The Thousand Eyes, they are called,” Galielber Dorn told them. “Where those lakes are, that is entirely a barren zone. There are no settlements in the district before us down there. Nor wild animals either, for no living thing can abide that black water. It burns one’s skin like fire, and to drink of it means death.”

  Four days later they came to the mouth of a great serpentine chasm that angled off to the northeast, toward the place where earth and sky met. Its steep walls, forbiddingly vertical, were shining like gold in the midday sun. “The Viper Rift,” said the Vroon. “It runs three thousand miles, or somewhat more, and its depth is immeasurable. There’s a river of green water at its bottom, but I think no explorer has ever been able to climb down those mountain walls to reach it.”

  And then a place of trees with long, many-angled red needles that sang like harps in the breeze, and one where boiling-hot streams came pouring down out of a cliff a thousand feet high, and a district of vermilion hills and purple gullies bridged by glistening spider-threads strong as powerful cables, and one where the scarlet energy of a tireless volcano rushed with a great roaring whoosh far up into the sky from a triangular rupture in the ground.

  All very fascinating, yes. But this territory was vast and empty. In much of it a terrifying silence ruled. Dantirya Sambail could be anywhere in it, or nowhere. Did it make sense to continue his seemingly hopeless pursuit? Prestimion began to give some consideration to turning back. It was irresponsible of him to go on and on for mere curiosity’s sake, when vital tasks awaited him at the Castle and this quest seemed ever more unlikely to meet with success.

  But then, at last, unexpectedly, came some word of the fugitives: “Two men on mounts?” a phlegmatic flat-faced villager said, in a shoddy little town that sat square in a crossroads between two highways that bore no traffic at all. Maundigand-Klimd had found him. He seemed to take the fact that a Su-Suheris had suddenly manifested himself in his remote town utterly for granted; but evidently he took everything utterly for granted. “Oh, yes, yes. They came this way. A tall lean man and one who was older and heavier. Ten, twelve, fourteen days ago.” He pointed toward the horizon. “Heading east, they were.”

  East. East. Always east.

  But the east seemed to go on forever.

  They rode on. It was, at any rate, a lovely district to be traveling in. The air was clear and pure, the weather mild, the winds gentle. The soil looked fertile. Every day’s sunrise was a golden-green delight. But there were only the tiniest, most forlorn towns out here, each one dozens of miles from its neighbor; and the inhabitants stared in amazement at the sight of well-born travelers venturing among them in a procession of glossy floaters bearing the starburst crest.

  It was almost unthinkable, Prestimion told himself, that after all the thousands of years of human existence on Majipoor there should be such near-emptiness out here, not very many weeks’ journey east of Castle Mount. He knew that great tracts of central Zimroel were still unoccupied; but to see this silent realm of immense open spaces virtually in the shadow of the Mount—that was unexpected, and strange. And humbling, too. It taught one, once again, the meaning of size. Even after all these thousands of years of human settlement, the vastness of Majipoor was such that ample room for expansion still remained.

  Surely this region was one that could be usefully developed. A project for the future, Prestimion thought. As though he did not have enough before him already.

  The road they were following, a broad, straight highway, veered slightly to the south now, though it still ran predominantly eastward. The few villages were even farther apart, here, tiny collections of straw-roofed huts with scruffy kitchen-gardens around them. Green meadows and forest gave way to the dark blur of wilderness to the north and a line of rocky blue hills in the south. Straight ahead, still, lay a grassy land of streams and small lakes, quiet, peaceful, inviting.

  But there was evidence that this place was not altogether a bucolic paradise. Flights of big dusky-winged raptorial birds often passed by high overhead—khestrabons, they were, or perhaps the even larger and fiercer surastrenas—with their long yellow necks at full extension and their beady eyes hungrily taking in all that lay below them. Now and again, far in the distance, they could be seen swooping down by twos and threes as though to snatch up some hapless migratory creatures of the ground. There were some fearsome insects here, too, beetles twice the size of thuvna eggs, with six horns an inch long on their heads and black armor spotted with sinister blotches of red covering their wings. An army of them, half a mile in length, came marching five abreast along the edge of the road one morning, making a terrifying clacking sound with their huge beaks as they advanced.

  “What are these things called?” Gialaurys wanted to know, and the Vroon replied: “Calderoules, they are. Which in the dialect of eastern Alhanroel means ‘poison-spitters’—for they’ll throw fiery acid at you out of spouts under their wings from ten feet away, and woe betide you if any of it touches your lips or nostrils.”

  “I think this pretty place is less charming than it looks,” observed Abrigant, with a hiss of displeasure, and Prestimion had word sent to the floaters behind theirs in the convoy that no one was to set foot outside of his vehicle until they had left these insects well behind them.

  As for the plants in this region, they were like no plants Prestimion and his companions had ever seen. Confalume, when he was Coronal, had been deeply interested in botany as in so many other things, and Prestimion had often strolled with him through one or another of the glass-roofed garden-houses that the older man had caused to be built at the Castle, admiring the strange and wonderful plants that had been collected for him in every part of the world; and in time something of Lord Confalume’s passion for horticultural curiosities had passed to him.
At Prestimion’s request, Galielber Dorn put names to as many of the plants they were seeing now as he could: these are moonvines, this is gray carrionfurze, that low stubby weed is mikkusfleur, that is barugaza, this with the white trunk and fruit like globes of green jade is the kammoni tree. Perhaps the Vroon was inventing the names as he went, perhaps they were the true ones; but after a time even he could name them no more, and replied with a shrug of his many tentacles whenever he was asked to identify some curious specimen spied by the roadside.

  Yet he still knew the names of the natural features they were passing. There was a surprising place that he called the Fountain of Wine, where, he said, creatures too small to see carried out natural fermentation in a subterranean basin, and a geyser sprayed the product of their labors into the air five times a day. “You would not want to taste it, though,” the Vroon warned, when Gialaurys expressed an interest.

  And then, the Dancing Hills—the Wall of Flame—the Great Sickle—the Web of Jewels—

  The miles fled behind them. Days went by. Weeks. Ever eastward ran their course, the Mount now beginning to drop from sight to the rear of them, no villages at all along the way any more, nothing at all to be seen except broad flat fields of grass, each of a different color: a great swath of topaz grass, then one where the jutting blades were deep cobalt, and then claret, indigo, creamy primrose, saffron, chartreuse. “We must be coming to the Great Sea,” Abrigant said. “Look how low the land lies here. And only grass will grow, as though the ground is a sandy swamp. The sea can’t be very far off.”

  “I doubt this very much,” Gialaurys said gruffly. He had long since lost all appetite for continuing this expedition, which had come by now to strike him as a foolhardy if not downright impossible endeavor. Gialaurys looked questioningly toward the Vroon. “The sea’s a year’s journey from us yet, if it’s a day. What do you say, little one?”

  “Ah, the sea, the sea.” Galielber Dorn made a small percussive sound with his beak, the Vroonish equivalent of a smile, and gestured vaguely toward the east. “Far, yet,” he said. “Very, very far.” And soon the last of the grassy savannahs was behind them and they were in a district of purplish granite hills, not in any way resembling a coastal landscape, which gave way to a dense forest of rich black soil where big bright globular fruits of some unknown kind clung to every bough of the thick-leaved trees like golden lamps in a green night.