And so the summoning one last time of Gominik Halvor and his fellow mages, and the giving of the order for the tremendous incantation that would wipe the war from the world’s history. Korsibar, and his sister also, would never have been; those who had died as a result of Korsibar’s usurpation would be shown to have died in some way other than on the field of battle; no one would remember that there ever had been a war, not even the sorcerers who had brought about its obliteration from memory—no one but Prestimion himself, and Gialaurys, and Septach Melayn. And Lord Prestimion would have succeeded to the starburst crown immediately upon the end of Prankipin’s reign, with no Lord Korsibar intervening.
“There you have it all,” Prestimion said. He was trembling again, and his brow was hot as if with fever. “I thought I was healing the world. Instead I was destroying it. I opened the gateway for this madness that consumes it now, the full dimensions of which have only become apparent to me today.”
Varaile said, speaking for the first time in a long while, “You? But—how, Prestimion? How?”
“Do you know how it is, Varaile, when the hot sun beats down and warms the air, so that it rises, as warm air will, and creates a vacant zone behind it? Turbulent cool winds come rushing in to fill that void. Well, I created such a void in the minds of billions of people. I lifted a great slice of reality from their recollection and gave them nothing to replace it. And, sooner or later, turbulent winds came rushing in. Not to everyone, no, but to many. And the process is not done working yet.”
“My father—” she said softly.
“Your father, yes. And all too many others. The guilt for all that is mine. I meant only to heal, but—but—”
He faltered and could not go on.
The Lady said, after a time, “Come here, Prestimion.” She held forth her hands.
He went to her and knelt, and laid his cheek against her thigh and closed his eyes, and she held him and stroked his forehead, as she had years ago when he was a small boy and some cherished pet of his had died, or he had done badly at his archery, or his father had spoken too harshly to him. She had always been able to soothe him then and she soothed him now, taking his anguish from him not only as a mother does, but also with the power invested in her as Lady of the Isle, the power to absolve, the power to forgive.
“Mother, I had no choice but to act as I did,” he said, his voice muffled and thick. “The war had left great resentments. They would have stained my reign forever and ever.”
“I know. I know.”
“And yet—look what I’ve done, mother—”
“Shh. Shh.” She held him closer. Stroked his brow. He felt the force of her love, the strength of her soul. He began to grow calm. She gently signaled him, after a little while more, to rise. She was smiling.
Varaile said, “You told us at the outset that this has to remain a secret. But do you still feel that way? I wonder if you should let the world know the truth, Prestimion.”
“No. Never. It would only make things worse.” He was steadier now, purged by his confession, the trembling and the feverishness gone from him now, his head beginning to clear, though the impact of the vision he had had while wearing the Lady’s circlet would not leave him. He doubted that he would ever be free of it. But what Varaile was suggesting seemed impossible to him. “Not because it would make me look bad,” he said, “although it certainly would. But pile one confusion atop another—take away what little sense anyone may still have of where reality really may lie—I can’t, Varaile! You see that, don’t you? Don’t you, mother?”
“Are you certain?” Varaile asked. “Perhaps, if you spoke out about it at last, your doing it would drive away the nightmares and the fantasies and would establish everyone on solid ground once more. Or else, calling the mages down again, getting them to cast a second spell—”
He shook his head and looked in appeal toward the Lady.
Who responded, “Prestimion’s right, Varaile. There’s no undoing it now, neither by any public action of the Coronal nor by more wizardry. We’ve already seen the kind of unintended consequences that an entirely benevolent act has had. We can’t risk having that happen again.”
“Even so, mother, now we have to deal with those consequences,” said Prestimion. “Only—how, I wonder? How?”
8
They remained for a time at the Isle, and Prestimion made no immediate plan for leaving. The winds were still westerly out of Alhanroel, so that the return voyage would be slow and difficult if he were to set out now.
But also he felt weary and drained by his steadily increasing comprehension of the catastrophe he had caused and the likelihood that there would be no way of repairing the damage. The stain of that, he feared, would darken his name for all time to come.
It had gradually dawned on him, years ago, that it might be possible for him to become Coronal, and that he would be capable of handling the job if he did; and he had then begun to yearn for it with all his heart. And—despite the small interruption created by Korsibar—he had indeed attained the starburst crown, even as Stiamot and Damlang and Pinitor and Vildivar and Guadeloom and all the rest of those whose names were inscribed on the great screen in front of the House of Records in the Labyrinth had done before him. They had ascended to the throne and reigned, more or less gloriously, and each had made his mark on the world’s history and had left visible evidence of his moment of power by adding something tangible to the Castle: the Stiamot throne-room, Vildivar Close, the Arioc watch-tower, whatever; and then they had gone on to be Pontifex for a while, and in the fullness of time they had grown old and died. But had any of them ever brought about a disaster such as he had achieved? His place in history would be unique. He had wanted the reign of Lord Prestimion to go down in history as a golden age; and yet he had contrived to lose his throne before he ever had had it, and had fought a war for it that caused the deaths of uncountable and unthinkable numbers of fine men, along with a few worthless ones—and then, then, when the crown was finally his, he had in a moment of folly done a thing to heal the world of its wound that had made matters infinitely worse than they already were. Oh, Stiamot! he thought. Oh, Pinitor! What a pitiful successor I am to your greatness!
Prestimion drew great comfort in these dark hours from the proximity of the Lady. And so he told her that he had decided to stay at the Isle a little while longer, and a suite of rooms was provided for him and Varaile at Inner Temple.
Ten days passed quietly. Then news reached Third Cliff of the arrival at Numinor of a pilgrim-ship from Stoien. There was nothing unusual in that, in this season of westerly winds. But soon after came a second message from the harbor. An important dispatch for the Coronal had been carried from Stoien aboard that ship, and a courier was hastening up to Inner Temple with it now.
“It’s from Akbalik,” Prestimion said, as he severed the thick waxen security-seal. “He’s been in Stoien all year, you know, running a data-gathering operation, trying to turn up some sort of definite information on the location of Dantirya Sambail. Why would he bother to write to me here, I wonder, unless he’s—oh, Varaile! For the love of the Divine, Varaile—”
“What is it, Prestimion? Tell me!”
He jabbed his Anger against the page. “The Procurator’s alive, Akbalik says. And still in Alhanroel. He’s been hiding out all this time somewhere along the southern shore of Stoien province, skulking among the saw-palms and the swamp-crabs and the animal-plants. Making that his base, it seems, for a new civil war!”
Varaile was instantly aflutter with questions. Prestimion raised his hand for silence. “Let me finish reading,” he told her. “Mmm. Coded dispatches intercepted…A Su-Suheris magus going into some sort of a trance to decipher them…Full text attached herewith…” He rummaged through the sheaf of papers that Akbalik had sent.
He found it impossible, of course, to make any meaning out of the coded messages themselves, which apparently had been surreptitiously slipped into otherwise innocent cargo manifests. Em
ijiquk gybpij jassnin ys.? Kesixm ricthip jumlee ayviy? It would take a Su-Suheris with three heads, Prestimion thought, to find any sense in that. But Akbalik evidently had picked the right man for the job; for after his wizard had declared that the secret camp of Dantirya Sambail was located along the lower Stoien coast, Akbalik had sent agents to comb that entire region, and they had indeed come upon the Procurator’s camp in the very place where the decoded messages indicated it to be.
“But why do you think it’s gone unnoticed so long?” Varaile asked.
“Do you know what the southern Stoien coast is like? No, why should you? No one in his right mind goes there. No one ever thinks about it. Which is why he has chosen it for his hiding-place, I suppose. They say it’s hot as a steam-bath there. Your very bones will melt in that heat within an hour. There is a tree there, the manganoza, with sharp-bladed leaves—the saw-palm, they call it—that forms thickets so dense they’re impossible to enter. And then, giant insects wherever you walk, and enormous crabs that can snap an unwary man’s ankle in half with one bite. Was there ever a more appropriate place for Dantirya Sambail to take up lodgings?”
“You must hate that man very much,” Varaile said.
Prestimion was surprised by that. Hate? He didn’t think of himself as a hater. The word wasn’t an active part of his vocabulary.
Was there anyone, he wondered, whom he had ever hated? Korsibar, perhaps? No, certainly not him. He could make allowances for Korsibar. Korsibar’s astonishing grab for power had angered him greatly, yes, but nevertheless Prestimion had never seen him as anything but a big stupid good-natured blockhead of a prince who had been thrust into a situation far beyond his depth by a pack of sinister self-seeking companions.
And Farquanor and Farholt, then, Korsibar’s vile henchmen, whom the world was so much better off without? Had he hated them? he wondered.
Not really. Farquanor had been a nasty little schemer, and Farholt a great swaggering bully. Prestimion had disliked them very much. But hatred was not what he had felt for them. He doubted even that he had hated Sanibak-Thastimoon, whose dark conjurations had made so much trouble for the world, and who, in fact, was the one who had taken Thismet’s life. But there had been a sword in Thismet’s hand when she died. Would Sanibak-Thastimoon have killed her if she had not attacked him?
That hardly mattered now. But one did not hate people for being stupid, as Korsibar had been, or sly like Farquanor, or a blustering fool like Farholt. And Sanibak-Thastimoon had believed he was serving his master Korsibar’s best interests: should he have hated the Su-Suheris for that? One did not hate people at all, ideally: one simply disagreed with them, and prevented them from doing harm to you and yours, and went on about one’s business.
What about Dantirya Sambail, though, the real author of so many of the world’s misfortunes? Did the word apply to him?
“Yes,” Prestimion said. “That one I do hate. He’s evil through and through, that man. You can see it just by looking at him: those amazingly beautiful deceitful eyes, softly glowing at you out of that fat ugly face. He should never have been born. In a moment of idiotic foolishness I spared his life at Thegomar Edge, and in another I allowed his blotted-out memory of the war he waged against me to be restored; but I would gladly call both those decisions back, now, if only I could.”
He paced back and forth in mounting agitation. Merely thinking about the Procurator set him into a furious frenzy.
The treacheries of Dantirya Sambail had provided fresh support again and again for the Korsibar faction, when otherwise the usurper might have fallen through his own ineptitude. At every turn in the civil war, there Dantirya Sambail had been, devilishly engineering some new betrayal or defection. It was the Procurator who had sent his own two loathsome brothers, the drunken Gaviad and the great ugly Gaviundar, to lead armies on Prestimion’s side, covertly instructing them to transfer their allegiance at a critical moment. It was Dantirya Sambail who had incited Korsibar to the breaking of the Mavestoi Dam. It was he who—
“The man is a monster,” Prestimion said. “I might be able to understand it if he had rebelled out of simple greed, out of the crude and blatant hunger for power. But he already rules a whole continent; he has wealth beyond anyone’s comprehension. Nothing drives him except motiveless hatred, Varaile. He seethes without reason with an inner venom that poisons his every act. And he forces us to meet hatred with hatred. It’s hardly even two years since we’ve emerged from the civil war, and we still suffer the aftereffects of that; and here he is making ready for a second one! What else can one feel but hatred for such a man as that? I will destroy him, that I vow, Varaile, if ever I get the chance again.”
He was shaking with the force of his anger. Varaile poured wine for him, sweet golden wine of Dulorn, and pressed her fingertips against his temples until he grew more calm.
“You’ll be going to this Stoien place, then, won’t you, to make war on him?” she asked.
Prestimion nodded. “Akbalik’s sent a copy of these dispatches to Septach Melayn at the Castle by now. I don’t doubt that he and Gialaurys are already assembling an army to march down into the south-country. In any case I’ll have orders to that effect going off to them this very day.”
Already the strategy was taking form in his mind.
“One army coming in from the northwest by way of Stoien city, going down on a diagonal across the peninsula, and a second one south through Ketheron and Arvyanda and Kajith Kabulon to the Aruachosian coast, the route we took last year, and then westward from Sippulgar into Stoien province—yes. Yes. Hem him in from two sides at once. And then—”
There was a knock at the door. “Shall I answer?” Varaile said.
“Who would that be? Well, yes, answer it.—Meanwhile,” Prestimion continued, “I’ll sail for Stoien city as fast as I can and rendezvous with Akbalik there, and join the troops who’ll be setting out for—yes?” he said.
Varaile had gone to the door. An acolyte stood there, holding a message.
“What is it?”
Later word from Akbalik, perhaps? Prestimion broke the seal and scanned it quickly.
“Anything important?” Varaile asked.
“I’m not sure. Your young friend Dekkeret’s here. He’s made some kind of helter-skelter journey from the Castle to Alaisor and come racing across from Alaisor to the Isle aboard one of the express-mail ships. He’s asked special dispensation to come to you up here, and the Lady has granted it. Right now he’s on his way up Second Cliff. They expect him here later today.”
“Were you expecting him?”
“Not at all. I don’t have any idea at all why he’s come, Varaile. He says here that he has to meet with me immediately, but he doesn’t tell me why. Why is it that I doubt that the news he’s traveled halfway around the world at top speed to bring me is going to be anything cheerful?”
Dekkeret’s face, so earnest and boyish not so long ago, had hardened now. His whole demeanor was more reserved and poised. Since Prestimion’s first encounter with him at Normork, Dekkeret had traveled endlessly across the face of the world; and now, though he looked more than a little the worse for wear after the furious haste of his latest journey, he radiated an aura of strength and purpose as he entered into Prestimion’s presence and offered him the salute of allegiance.
“I bear greetings from the High Counsellor Septach Melayn and from the Grand Admiral Gialaurys, my lord,” was how he began. “They ask me to tell you that they have received certain information from Akbalik at Stoien city concerning Dantirya Sambail, and that they’ve begun to make preparations for military action while awaiting your explicit instructions.”
“Good. I’d have expected nothing less.”
“You yourself are aware, then, sir, of the Procurator’s location?”
“The news from Akbalik reached me only this morning. I’m preparing orders to send to the Castle.”
“There has been a new development, lordship. The Barjazids have escaped, and are on
their way to the Stoienzar to offer their services to Dantirya Sambail. They have the mind-controlling device with them.”
“What? But they were prisoners in the tunnels! Is that place such a sieve, that anyone can walk out of it at the snap of a finger?—Anyone but me, it would seem,” Prestimion added under his breath, remembering his own bitter time of captivity there.
“They had been released from the tunnels some time ago, sir. They were living as free men in the north wing of the Castle.”
“How could that have been possible?”
“Well, sir, apparently it happened like this—”
Prestimion listened in mounting disbelief and dismay as Dekkeret told him the tale.
That shifty-eyed little man Venghenar Barjazid, in the days before the civil war, had lived at the Castle in the retinue of Duke Svor. During his imprisonment in the Sangamor he had somehow made contact, so it seemed, with another former follower of the late duke, who had drawn up fraudulent papers ordering the release of Barjazid and his son from the tunnels and their transfer to modest accommodations in one of the residential sectors of the Castle.
No one, it seemed, had questioned the appropriateness of such a transfer. The Barjazids had walked out of the tunnels without any difficulty whatever. For a month or more they lived quietly in their new quarters, attracting no attention to themselves. Until, that is, it was discovered one morning that they had managed not only to arrange an escape for themselves—complete with a fine floater to take them wherever they wished—but also to take with them the entire set of mind-control devices and models that the elder Barjazid had acquired from the Vroonish wizard, Thalnap Zelifor, in the course of escorting the Vroon into exile in Suvrael.