“You see, sir,” Nilgir Sumanand said, “he rousted me up and very insistently declared—”
“Yes. I quite understand. It’s not a problem. You can go, Nilgir Sumanand.”
Prestimion beckoned Dekkeret into his suite.
“I very much regret the earliness of the hour, my lord,” Dekkeret began. “But in view of the gravity of the situation and the importance of this new development, I felt that it would be wrong to wait until—”
“Never mind all that, Dekkeret, and get to the point. If I hear one more groveling apology I’ll explode. Just tell me what all this is about.”
“Someone has come to us in the night from the Procurator’s camp. I think you’ll be very interested in what he’s brought us. Very interested indeed, lordship!”
“Ah, will I be, now?” said Prestimion, ashen-voiced. Already he regretted having allowed himself to be burst in upon this way. Dantirya Sambail had sent a message, evidently. An ultimatum, perhaps. Well, whatever it was, it probably could have kept a little longer.
But Dekkeret was throbbing with barely contained excitement; and that, too, made things worse. Suddenly Prestimion felt an almost paralyzing sense of tremendous fatigue. The sleepless night, the strain of the recent weeks, the onslaught of self-doubt and self-accusation that he had lately launched against himself, all were taking their toll. And there was something about Dekkeret’s youthful bubbling exuberance, his awkward coltish eagerness to please, that intensified Prestimion’s own sense of exhaustion. He was still a relatively young man himself; but right now he felt at least as old as Confalume. It was as if Dekkeret, bounding in here full of energy and vigor and hope, had in just these few moments drained him of whatever vitality he still had left.
It would be cruel and foolish, he knew, to dismiss Dekkeret out of hand. And this ostensible message from the Procurator, though it probably was just some mocking screed, was at least worth hearing about. Wearily Prestimion signaled Dekkeret to proceed.
“When we were at Inner Temple, my lord, you told me that you had donned the silver circlet of your mother the Lady, and had looked out into the mind of the world as she does every night. It was like being a god, you said. The circlet permits the Lady to be everywhere on Majipoor in a single moment, is what you told me. And yet, you said, there are limitations to the godhood of the wearer of the circlet. The Lady can enter the mind of a dreamer and take part in his dream, and interpolate certain thoughts of her own, offer guidance, even a degree of solace. But to shape the dream herself, or to create a dream and implant it in a sleeping mind—no. To give commands to the sleeper that must be obeyed—no. Do I have it correctly, my lord?”
Prestimion nodded. He was maintaining his patience through a supreme effort of self-control.
“And what I told you then, sir, is that the device that Venghenar Barjazid used on me in Suvrael is far more powerful than anything that is available to the Lady, and that if he allies himself with Dantirya Sambail, together they will shake the world to pieces. And as we have recently discovered, lordship, Barjazid has reached the Procurator’s camp, and has begun to use his devilish device on Dantirya Sambail’s behalf.”
Prestimion offered a second curt nod. “You tell me a great many things I already know, Dekkeret. Where are you going with all this? There’s been a message, you said, from Dantirya Sambail?”
“Oh, no, lordship, I never said that. What has come is not from Dantirya Sambail but from his camp, and it is not a message but a messenger. May I ask him to come in here, my lord? He’s waiting just outside.”
More and more mystifying. Prestimion assented with a perfunctory wave of his hand.
Dekkeret went to the door and called someone in from the hall.
A boy, it was, fifteen or perhaps sixteen years old, slender and hard-eyed and self-possessed. There was something oddly familiar about his features—those thin lips, that narrow jaw. He looked like a street-beggar of some sort, deeply tanned, dressed in little more than tattered rags, his cheeks and forehead marked by the scars of newly healing scratches as though he had been scrambling through brambles not very long before. Dangling from his left hand was a bulging burlap sack.
“My lord,” said Dekkeret, “this is Dinitak Barjazid. Venghenar Barjazid’s son.”
Prestimion made a spluttering sound of astonishment. “If this is some sort of joke, Dekkeret—”
“Not at all, lordship.”
Prestimion stared at the boy, who was looking back at him with a curious expression that seemed to be compounded equally of awe and defiance. And—yes, by the Divine—he was plainly his father’s son! These were the elder Barjazid’s features that Prestimion saw before him. All of Venghenar Barjazid’s savage determination and fiery drive were mirrored in the taut lines of the boy’s face. But that face lacked some key aspects of his father’s. It was insufficiently crafty, Prestimion thought; it did not project the disingenuous subtlety of Venghenar Barjazid; there was no glint of treachery in the boy’s eyes. Time, no doubt, would put those things there. Or perhaps old Barjazid had created an improved model of himself in this boy, one that knew better how to conceal the darkness within.
“Will you explain?” Prestimion said, after a time. “Or shall we just go on standing here like this?”
But there was no rushing Dekkeret, it seemed. He was evidently determined to do this at his own rhythm. “I know this boy well, my lord. I met him for the first time in Suvrael, on that journey I took through the desert, the time when his father amused himself by playing with my mind. And when I seized the dream-stealing machine from the father and said I would bring it—and him—to Castle Mount to show to the Coronal and the Council, it was this boy who urged old Barjazid to cooperate. ‘We should go,’ he said. ‘It is our great moment of opportunity.’”
“An opportunity to carry their mischief right into the Castle, eh?”
“No, lordship. Not at all. The old man, my lord, is a rascal. He has nothing but evil on his mind. The boy you see here is something quite different.”
“Is he, now?”
“Let him tell you himself,” said Dekkeret.
Prestimion felt his eyes beginning to sag shut. What he really wanted more than anything was to have these two go away and permit him to get some sleep. But no: no, he must get to the heart of this mystery. He indicated to young Barjazid that he should speak.
“My lord—” the boy began.
He looked toward Prestimion, then to Dekkeret, then to Prestimion again. It was curious, Prestimion thought, how his face changed as he turned from one to the other. For Prestimion he donned a look of deep respect, almost subservience. But it was a desultory and mechanical expression, a subject’s automatic acknowledgment that he was in the presence of the Coronal Lord of Majipoor and nothing more; and Prestimion thought he saw a subtext even of resentment there, a hidden unwillingness to concede full acceptance of the power that the Coronal indeed wielded over him.
When Dinitak Barjazid looked at Dekkeret, though, a glow came into the boy’s eyes that spoke of sheer worship. He seemed mesmerized by Dekkeret’s personal force, his charisma, his vibrant strength. Perhaps it is because they are closer in age, Prestimion thought. He sees me as a member of some senior generation. But it was a distressing demonstration of the erosion of his own youthful vigor that just these few years at the summit of power had brought about.
“My lord,” the young Barjazid was saying, “when my father and I came to the Castle, it was my hope that we could offer the dream-machine to you, that we could enroll ourselves in your service and make ourselves of value. But through some error we were imprisoned instead. This left my father greatly embittered, though I said again and again that it was a mistake.”
Yes, Prestimion thought. And I could tell you whose mistake it was, too.
“Then we escaped. It was through the help of an old friend of my father’s that we did. But the Procurator of Ni-moya’s people were also involved. He has his influence among the Castle guards, you
know.” Prestimion exchanged a glance with Dekkeret at that, but said nothing. “And so it was to the Procurator, who seemed to be our only ally, to whom we fled,” the boy continued. “To his camp in the Stoienzar Peninsula. And there we learned that it is the Procurator’s plan to wage war against your lordship and against his majesty the Pontifex, and make himself the master of the world.”
That phrase had a fine resonant sound, Prestimion thought: master of the world. He speaks very well, Prestimion told himself. No doubt the boy’s been rehearsing this little speech for weeks.
But it was a struggle to pay attention. Another wave of weariness had come over him. He realized that he had begun rocking rhythmically back and forth on his feet in an effort to keep himself awake.
—“My lord?” the boy said. “Are you not well, my lord?”
“Just a little tired, is all,” he said. Mustering all his self-control, he brought himself up toward something close to wakefulness again. It was very shrewd of the boy to have noticed, in the midst of his own narrative, that I was flagging, Prestimion thought. He poured a drink of water for himself. “How old did you say you were, boy?”
“Sixteen next month, sir.”
“Sixteen next month. Interesting. All right, go on. Dantirya Sambail wants to be master of the world, you were saying.”
“I said to my father when we heard that, ‘There is no future for us in this place. We will only find trouble here.’ And also I said to him, ‘We should not be part of this rebellion. The Coronal will destroy this man Dantirya Sambail, and we will be destroyed along with him.’ But my father is full of anger and bitterness. It is not that he is an evil man so much as he is an angry one. His soul is full of hatred. I could not tell you why that is. When I said that we should leave the camp of Dantirya Sambail, he struck me.”
“Struck you?”
Prestimion could see the fury in the boy’s eyes, even now.
“Indeed, my lord. Lashed out at me the way you might lash out at a beast that had nipped at your foot. Told me I was a fool and a child; told me I was incapable of seeing where our true advantage lay; told me—well, no matter what he told me, my lord. It was nothing very pretty. That night I left the Procurator’s camp and slipped away through the jungle.” Again the boy glanced at Dekkeret, that same worshipful glance. “I had heard, my lord, that Prince Dekkeret was in Stoien city. I decided that I would go to Prince Dekkeret and enroll in his service.”
“In his service,” Prestimion said. “Not mine, but his, eh? How flattering that must sound to you, Dekkeret. Prince Dekkeret, I should say. Since everyone seems to think you’re a prince, I suppose I’ll have to make you one when we get back to the Castle, won’t I?”
A look of shock appeared on Dekkeret’s usually stolid face. “My lord, I have never aspired—”
“No. No. Forgive my sarcasm, Dekkeret.” I must be very tired indeed, Prestimion thought, to be saying such things as that. Once more he glanced toward Dinitak Barjazid. “And so. To continue. You made your way through the jungle—”
“Yes, my lord. It is not a pleasant journey, my lord. But it was one that I had to make.—Shall I show it to him now, Prince Dekkeret?” he asked, looking aside.
“Show it, yes.”
The boy reached down and scooped up the burlap sack, which had been lying at his feet all this while. He drew from it an intricate circular object fashioned of rods and wires of several different metals delicately woven together, gold and silver and copper and perhaps one or two more, with a series of glittering inlaid stones and crystals, sapphire and serpentine and emerald and what looked like hematite, affixed along its inner surface within an ivory frame. It had something of the look of a royal crown, or perhaps some talismanic instrument of magery, on the order of a rohilla, though much larger. But what it actually was, Prestimion saw, was a mechanism of some sort.
“This,” the boy said proudly, holding the thing forth for Prestimion’s inspection, “is one of the three working models of the dream-machine. I took it from my father’s tent in the jungle and brought it safely here. And I am willing to show you how to use it in your war against the rebels.”
The coolly delivered statement struck Prestimion like a bolt from on high.
“May I see it?” he asked, when he had regained a little of his steadiness.
“Of course, my lord.”
He placed it in Prestimion’s hands. It was a beautiful gleaming thing of complex and elegant design, scarcely heavier than a feather, that seemed almost to be throbbing with the force of the power locked up within it.
Prestimion realized that this was not the first time he had seen something like this. During the civil war, when they were camped in the Marraitis meadowlands west of the Jhelum River on the eve of the great battle that soon would be fought there, he had gone into the tent of the Vroon Thalnap Zelifor and observed him working over an object of somewhat similar design. It was, the Vroon had explained, a device that would enable him when it was perfected to amplify the waves coming from the minds of others, and read their inmost thoughts, and place thoughts of his own into their heads. In time he had indeed perfected it, and eventually it had fallen into the hands of Venghenar Barjazid, and now—now—
Abruptly Prestimion lifted the instrument toward his own forehead.
“My lord, no!” the young Barjazid cried.
“No? Why is that?”
“You must have the training, first. There is tremendous strength in the instrument that you hold. You’ll injure yourself, my lord, if you simply put it to your head like that.”
“Ah. Perhaps so.” He handed the thing back to the boy as though it were about to explode.
Could it be, he wondered, that this youngster had actually brought him the one weapon that might give him hope of countering the uprising that confronted him?
To Dekkeret he said, “What do we have here, do you think? Is this boy to be trusted? Or is it all some new plot of Dantirya Sambail’s to send him here among us?”
“Trust him, my lord,” Dekkeret said. “Oh, I beg you, Lord Prestimion: trust him!”
12
Travelers returning to Castle Mount from Stoien began their eastward journey by going up along the coast to Treymone, where they could take a boat up the River Trey as far as it was navigable. Then it was necessary to swing to the north to avoid the grim desert that surrounded the ruins of the ancient Metamorph capital of Velalisier. The route led up into the broad, fertile valley of the River Iyann, which they would traverse as far as Three Rivers, where the Iyann took off on its northward journey. There one turned slightly to the south again, entering the grassy plain known as the Vale of Gloyn, and crossed west-central Alhanroel to the midlands mercantile center of Sisivondal, where the main highway to the Mount could be found. From there it was a straight path across the heart of the continent to the foothills of the mighty peak.
Prestimion had provided Varaile and Akbalik with a floater of the most capacious sort for their homeward journey to the capital. They rode in cushioned comfort while platoons of tireless Skandar drivers guided the big swift vehicles as they hovered just above the bed of the highway. An armed escort of Skandar troops occupying half a dozen armor-shelled military floaters accompanied them, three vehicles preceding theirs and three traveling aft, as safeguards against any disturbances that the convoy might encounter. Not that any sane man would dare to lift his hand against the Coronal’s consort, but sanity was beginning to be a commodity in short supply in these districts, and Prestimion intended to take no chances. Again and again, as the floaters halted briefly for supplies in some town or village along the way, Varaile saw wild, distorted faces peering at her from the roadside, and heard the harsh cackling cries of the demented. The Skandars, though, kept all these troubled folk at a safe distance.
They were beyond Gloyn now, moving along through a series of unfamiliar places with such names as Drone, Hunzimar, Gannamunda. So far Varaile had had a fairly easy time of the journey. She had expected much mor
e discomfort, especially as the passing days brought her ever closer to the hour when the new Prince Taradath would enter the world. But aside from the growing heaviness of her body, the sagging weight of her swelling belly, the occasional throbbings in her legs, the pregnancy had little effect on her well-being. Varaile had never given much thought to motherhood—she had not even had any lovers, before Prestimion had come like a whirlwind into her life and swept her away—but she was tall and strong and young, and she could see now that she was going to withstand whatever stresses were involved in childbirth without serious challenge.
Akbalik, though—it was clear to Varaile that he was finding the trip east very much of an ordeal.
His infected leg seemed to be getting worse. He said nothing about it to her, of course, not a word of complaint. But his forehead glistened with sweat much of the time, now, and his face was flushed as though he suffered from a constant fever. Now and again she would catch him biting his lower lip to hold back pain, or he would turn away from her and let a stifled groan escape his lips while she pretended not to notice. It was important to Akbalik, Varaile saw, to maintain a pose of good health, or at least of steady recovery. But it was easy enough to tell that all that was a mere facade.
How sick was he, really? Could his life be in danger, perhaps?
Varaile knew what high regard Prestimion had for Akbalik. He was a bulwark of the throne. It was possible, even, that Prestimion saw Akbalik as a likely choice for Coronal in case anything should happen to old Confalume and it became necessary for Prestimion to move along to the senior throne. “A Coronal has to keep the succession in mind all the time,” Prestimion had said to her more than once. “At any moment he can find himself transformed into a Pontifex—and it’ll go badly for the world if there’s no one ready to take over for him at the Castle.”