If Prestimion had already selected the man he would call upon in such an eventuality, he had never said a thing about it to her. Coronals did not like to talk about such matters, apparently—not even with their wives. But she saw already that Septach Melayn, though Prestimion loved him more than any other man in the world, was too whimsical a person to entrust with the throne, and Gialaurys, Prestimion’s other dear great friend, was too credulous and slow.
Who, then? Navigorn? A strong man, but troubled greatly by what looked very much like the onset of the madness. There was Dekkeret, of course: full of promise and ability and fervor. But he was ten years too young for a Coronal’s high responsibilities. Very likely he would be horrified if Prestimion were to turn to him tomorrow and offer him the starburst crown.
Which left only Akbalik, really. To lose Akbalik to the stupid bite of a vicious little Stoienzar crab, then, would be a terrible blow to all of Prestimion’s plans. Especially in a challenging time like this, when troubles seemed to sprout like mushrooms on every side.
We will be in Sisivondal before long, Varaile thought. That was an important city: her father had owned warehouses there, she remembered, and a bank, and a meat packaging company. Surely there would be competent doctors in a city like that. Would it be possible to persuade Akbalik to go to one of them for treatment? It would have to be handled very delicately. “Akbalik was so wonderfully sensible that we all used to go to him for advice about our problems,” Prestimion had told her. “But the wound has changed him. He’s turned touchy and strange. You have to be very careful not to offend him, now.” But certainly she had legitimate reasons of her own now for wanting to stop in Sisivondal for a medical checkup; and would it greatly upset him, she wondered, if she were to suggest in a mild sort of way that he might just as well get that leg of his looked at too, while they were there?
She would try it. She had to.
Sisivondal, though, was still many hundreds of miles away. It was too soon to bring the subject up.
They sat side by side in silence, watching for hour after hour as the flat monotonous landscape of west-central Alhanroel’s dusty drylands flowed past their windows.
“Can you tell me if any battles were fought here in the civil war?” Varaile asked him, finally, purely for the sake of having some sort of conversation at all.
Akbalik looked at her strangely. “How would I know, milady?”
“I thought—well—”
“That I fought in it? I suppose I did, milady. Many of us did. But no memory of it remains to me. You understand why that is, do you not?”
Fresh perspiration had broken out on his brow and cheeks. His deep-set gray eyes, nearly always bloodshot now, took on a haunted look. Varaile regretted having said anything at all.
“I know what the mages did at Thegomar Edge, yes,” she said. “But—listen, Akbalik, if talking about the war is something painful for you—”
He seemed scarcely to have heard her. “As I understand it, there were no engagements close by here,” he said, looking not at her but at the scene outside, a parched brown landscape punctuated by occasional sparse clumps of gray-green trees that grew in strange spiral coils. “There was a battle northwest of here, at the reservoir on the Iyann. And something by the Jhelum, off to the south, and one in Arkilon plain, I think Prestimion said. And of course the one at Thegomar Edge, which is far off to the southeast. But the war bypassed this region, so I do believe.” Akbalik turned suddenly in his seat to stare at her with wild-eyed intensity. “You know, do you not, milady, that I fought against Lord Prestimion in the war?”
Varaile would not have been more startled if he had revealed himself just then to be a Shapeshifter. “No,” she said, with as much control as she could muster. “No, I had no idea! You were on Korsibar’s side? But how can that be, Akbalik? Prestimion thinks the world of you, you know!”
“And I of him, milady. But even so, I believe I was on the other side during the rebellion.”
“You only believe that you were? You aren’t sure?”
Something that could have been a spasm of pain passed across his face. He tried to turn it into a wry smile. “I told you, no memory of the war remains to me, or to any of us, except for Prestimion and Septach Melayn and Gialaurys. But I was at the Castle when the war broke out, that much I know. Even though the manner of Korsibar’s coming to the throne would have to have been unusual and irregular, I still would have regarded him, I think, as the true Coronal, simply because he had been anointed and crowned. So if I had been asked to fight on his behalf—and certainly Korsibar would have asked me—I would have done so. Korsibar was at the Castle, and Prestimion was off in the provinces, raising armies from the local people. Most of the Castle princes would necessarily have served as officers in what would have been regarded as the legitimate royal army. I know that Navigorn did. And I, being Prince Serithorn’s nephew, would surely not have defied my powerful uncle by going off to join Prestimion.”
Varaile’s head was swimming. “Serithorn was on Korsibar’s side too?”
“You ask me about things I no longer remember, lady. But yes, I think he was, at least some of the time. It was a very complicated period. It was not easy to know who was on which side, much of the time.”
He half-rose, suddenly, wincing.
“Akbalik, are you all right?”
“It’s nothing, milady. Nothing. The healing process—a little painful, sometimes—” Akbalik managed another unconvincing smile. “Let us finish with the war, shall we?—Do you see, now, why Lord Prestimion wiped it all from our minds? It was the wisest thing. I would rather be his friend unto death than his former enemy; and now I have no recollection of ever having been his enemy, if indeed I ever was. Nor has Navigorn. Septach Melayn has told me that Navigorn was Korsibar’s most important general; but all that is forgotten, and Prestimion trusts him implicitly in all things. The war is gone from us. Therefore the war can never be a factor in our dealings with one another. And therefore—”
Another groan came from him now, one that he was altogether unable to conceal. Akbalik’s eyes rolled wildly in his head, and sweat seemed to burst from his every pore, coating his face with a bright sheen. He started to rise, spun about, fell back against the cushion of his seat, shivering convulsively.
“Akbalik—Akbalik!”
“Milady,” he murmured. But he seemed lost in delirium, suddenly. “The leg—I don’t know—it—it—”
She seized a pitcher of water, poured some for him, forced the glass between his lips. He gulped it and nodded faintly for more. Then he closed his eyes. For a moment Varaile thought he had died; but no, no, he still was breathing. A very sick man, though. Very sick. She dipped a cloth in the water and mopped his burning forehead with it.
Then, hastening to the fore cabin, she rapped on the frame of the door to get the driver’s attention. The driver, a brown-furred Skandar named Varthan Gutarz, who wore amulets of some Skandar cult around the meaty biceps of three of his four arms, was hunched over the floater’s controls, but he looked up quickly.
“Milady?”
“How long before we’re in Sisivondal?”
The Skandar glanced at the instruments. “Six hours, maybe, milady.”
“Get us there in four. And when you do, head straight for the biggest hospital in town. Prince Akbalik is seriously ill.”
Sisivondal appeared to be a thousand miles of outskirts. The flat dry central plain went on and on, practically treeless, now, the emptiness broken only by little clusters of tin-roofed shacks, then more emptiness, then another small group of shacks, perhaps twice as many as before, and then emptiness, emptiness, emptiness, with some scattered warehouses and repair shops after that. And gradually the outskirts coalesced into suburbs, and then into a city, a city of great size.
And great ugliness. Varaile had seen few ugly places in her recent travels about the world, but Sisivondal was somber indeed, a commercial city with no beauty of any sort. Many major roads met
here. Much of the merchandise being shipped from Alaisor port to Castle Mount or to the cities of northern Alhanroel had to pass through Sisivondal. It was a starkly functional city, mile after mile of gigantic warehouses fronting broad plain boulevards. Even the plants of Sisivondal were dull and utilitarian: stubby purple-leaved camaganda palms that could stand up easily to the interminable months of Sisivondal’s long rainless season, which lasted most of the year, and massive lumma-lummas, which could be mistaken for big gray rocks by the casual eye, and the tough prickly rosettes of garavedas, which took a whole century to produce the tall black spike that bore their flowers.
It looked as though the boulevard that had brought them in from the west would take them straight to the center of town. Varaile saw now that the incoming roads were like the spokes of a great wheel, linked by circular avenues that diminished in sweep as they moved inward. The public buildings would be at the center. There had to be a major hospital among them.
Akbalik was dying. She was certain of that now.
He was only intermittently conscious. Very little of what he said made sense. He had one lucid moment in which he opened his eyes and said to her that the swamp-crab’s poison must finally have reached his heart; but the rest of the time he babbled of things that she could not comprehend, jumbled accounts of tournaments and duels, hunting trips, even fist-fights—boyhood memories, perhaps. Sometimes she heard the name of Prestimion, or that of Septach Melayn, or even Korsibar’s. That was odd, that he would be speaking of Korsibar. But her father had done the same in the throes of his madness, she reminded herself.
The hospital, at last. To her dismay Varaile found that the chief doctor was a Ghayrog, a terribly alien thing to encounter at such a time. He was dour-faced and aloof, remarkably unimpressed at finding the wife of the Coronal standing before him and urging him to drop everything he might be doing so that he could look after the nephew of Prince Serithorn.
The forked reptilian tongue moved in and out with disconcerting rapidity. The gray-green reptilian eyes displayed little compassion. The calm and measured voice might have been that of a machine. “You come at a very difficult moment, milady. The operating rooms are all in use now. We have been overwhelmed with all manner of unusual problems here, which—”
Varaile cut him off. “I’m sure that that’s so. But have you heard of Prince Serithorn of Samivole, doctor? By the divine, have you heard the name of Lord Prestimion? This man is Serithorn’s nephew. He is a member of the Coronal’s inner circle. He needs immediate treatment.”
“The Messenger of the Mysteries is among us today, milady. I will ask him to intercede with the gods of the city on behalf of this man.” And the Ghayrog beckoned to a mysterious, sinister figure in the hallway, a man who wore a strange wooden mask, that of a yellow-eyed hound with long pointed ears.
She felt a surge of fury. The gods of the city? By the Divine, what was the creature talking about? “A magus, you mean? No, doctor, not a magus. Medical help is what we came here for.”
“The Messenger of the Mysteries—”
“Can bring his message to someone else. You will place Prince Akbalik in your care this moment, doctor, or I tell you, and I swear it by whatever god you may happen to believe in, that I will have Lord Prestimion shut this hospital and transfer every member of its staff to the back end of Suvrael. Is that clear enough?” She snapped her fingers at one of her Skandar escorts. “Mikzin Hrosz, I want you to go through this place and get the name of every doctor in it, and everyone else’s name, too, down to the Liimen who swab down the operating tables. And then—”
But the recalcitrant Ghayrog had had enough. He was giving orders of his own, now; and suddenly there was a gurney to place Akbalik on, suddenly there were earnest-faced young interns, Ghayrogs and humans both, gathered around it. They wheeled Akbalik away. The Messenger of the Mysteries marched along beside the gurney as though it was the plan to give him the benefit not only of conventional medical treatment but also of the fantastic religious cult that seemed to have taken hold of this city.
Varaile herself was offered a comfortable room in which to wait. But she did not have to wait long. The Ghayrog doctor returned soon. His mien was as frosty as ever; but when he spoke there was a gentleness in his tone that had not been there before. “What I was trying to tell you, milady, was simply that no useful purpose would be served in interrupting the care of some other seriously ill patient to look after Prince Akbalik, because I could see immediately that the prince’s condition was already so critical that—that—”
“That he’s dead?” she cried. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
But she could read the answer in his face even before he managed to speak the words.
13
Not even in the most unfettered dreams of his boyhood had Dekkeret ever imagined himself in the midst of a scene such as this. A palatial royal suite atop a towering building in Stoien city, halfway across the world from his native city of Normork on Castle Mount. Standing just to his right: the Coronal Lord of Majipoor, Prestimion of Muldemar, with a dark and brooding expression on his face. Behind the Coronal his Su-Suheris sorcerer, Maundigand-Klimd, on whom he seemed to rely for advice in all things. On his other side, the sublime Lady of the Isle of Sleep, the Princess Therissa, with the silver circlet of her office around her brow. Across the room, the boy Dinitak Barjazid of Suvrael, holding in his hands the sinister thought-controlling helmet that he had stolen from his treacherous father in the rebel camp.
The fate of the world was in the hands of these people. And somehow Dekkeret of Normork found himself in their midst as everything unfolded. No, not even in a dream would he have indulged in such a fantasy. Nevertheless, here he was. Here he was.
“Let me see that thing again, boy,” the Princess Therissa said to Dinitak Barjazid.
He brought the helmet to her. His hands trembled as he put it in hers. He too, Dekkeret thought, is astonished to find himself in the thick of events such as these.
She had already examined it extensively, its metallic wires and its crystal and ivory attachments. And she and the boy had had a long discussion, utterly incomprehensible to Dekkeret and evidently to the Coronal as well, of its technical aspects.
The device was beautiful, in its sinister way. It reminded Dekkeret of some of the implements of sorcery that that deranged magus had destroyed, just before jumping overboard himself, during the riverboat journey that he and Akbalik had made from Piliplok to Ni-moya.
But this helmet was a scientific instrument, not any kind of magical apparatus at all. Perhaps that made it all the more frightening. Dekkeret did not have much faith in the workings of magic, though he was well aware that some mages—not all—had genuine powers. Most of what the sorcerers did, he was convinced, was fraud and charlatanry designed to awe the credulous. Maundigand-Klimd himself had said as much more than once. But this helmet was something other than a charlatan’s gimcrack. Dekkeret had heard the Lady and Dinitak Barjazid speaking of the instrument not in terms of the demons one could invoke through it by uttering certain spells, but in terms of its ability to amplify and transmit brain-waves by electrical means. That did not sound like sorcery to him. And he knew that the Barjazid helmet worked. He had felt its terrible power himself.
The Lady put her own circlet aside and held the helmet above her head.
Prestimion said, “Mother, do you think you should?”
She smiled. “I’ve had more than a little experience with devices of this sort, Prestimion. And Dinitak has explained the basic principles of this one to me.”
She donned it. Touched the controls, made small adjustments.
Dekkeret could hardly bear to watch as she allowed the power of the device to enter her. She was, he thought, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, ageless, glorious, altogether superb. Her regal grace of bearing, her serene features, her splendid lustrous black hair, her elegantly simple robe with that astonishing purple-red jewel gleaming in its golden hoop o
n her bosom—oh, truly she was the queen of the world! What if this monstrous machine of the Barjazids were to damage her mind as it lay upon her brow? What if she were to cry out and turn pale before them, and crumple and fall?
She did not cry out. She did not fall. She stood as erect as ever, utterly motionless, transfixed by whatever she was experiencing: transported, it would seem, to some far-off realm.
There was no indication that the helmet was harming her. But a frown appeared on her smooth white forehead as the moments went on, and her lips tightened and turned downward in a grim expression that Dekkeret had never seen on her face before, and when, after what had seemed to him like an eternity, she finally raised the helmet from her brow and handed it back to Dinitak, there was the barest hint of a tremor in her fingers.
“Extraordinary,” she said. Her voice sounded deeper than usual, almost hoarse. She pointed to her circlet, lying before her on a table. “It makes this seem like a toy.”
“What was it like, mother? Can you describe it?” Prestimion asked.
“You would have to put it on yourself to understand. And you are far from ready for that.” Her gaze came to rest on young Barjazid. “I felt your father’s presence. I touched his mind with mine.” That was all she seemed to want to say about her contact with the elder Barjazid; but Dinitak’s face grew stern and dark as though he could understand precisely what she must have felt. Turning again to Prestimion, she added, “I encountered the Procurator’s mind too. He is a demon, that man.”
“You can actually identify individual minds, your worship?” Dekkeret asked.
“Those two stood out like beacons,” the Lady replied. “But yes, yes, I think I could find others, with some practice. I sensed the emanations of Septach Melayn farther to the east—I do think it was he I touched—and perhaps Gialaurys, or it might have been Navigorn. They are moving toward him through the most terrible of jungles.”
“What of my wife? And Akbalik?”