When he joined her, she was holding the rail and peering out at nothing in particular. Dekkeret stood close beside her. The air was clear and cool and sweet, with just a taste of the light rain that would be coming, as it did every day, later in the evening. He let his eyes rove upward, up to where he imagined the Castle lay, clinging to the highest crags of the Mount, miles overhead and invisible from here.
“I hear the new Coronal’s going to pay us a visit soon,” he said, after a bit.
“What? A grand processional already? I thought Coronals didn’t do that until they’d been on the throne at least two or three years.”
“Not a full processional, no. Just a brief visit to some of the Mount cities. My father said so. He hears a lot of news as he travels around.”
Sithelle turned toward him. Her eyes were glowing. “Oh, if only he would! To see an actual Coronal—!”
Her breathless eagerness bothered him. “I saw Lord Confalume once, you know.”
“You did?”
“In Bombifale, when I was nine. I was there with my father, and the Coronal was a guest at Admiral Gonivaul’s estate. I watched them come riding out together in a big floater. You can’t mistake Gonivaul—he’s got a great shaggy beard all over his face and nothing shows through it but his eyes and his nose. And there was Lord Confalume sitting next to him—oh, he was splendid! Radiant. He was in his prime, then. You could practically see light streaming from him. As they went past I waved to him, and he waved back, and smiled, such an easy calm smile, as if to tell me how much he loved being Coronal. Later that day my father brought me to Bombifale Palace, where Lord Confalume was holding court, and he smiled at me again, by way of saying to me that he recognized me from seeing me before. It was an extraordinary sensation just to be in his presence, to feel the strength of him, the goodness. It was one of the great moments of my life.”
“Was Prestimion there?” Sithelle asked.
“Prestimion? With the Coronal, you mean? Oh, no, no, Sithelle. This was nine years ago. Prestimion wasn’t anybody important then, just one of the young princes of Castle Mount, and there are plenty of those. His rise to the top came much later. But Confalume—ah, Confalume! What a wonderful man. Prestimion will have a lot to live up to, now that he’s Coronal.”
“And do you think he will?”
“Who can say? At least everyone agrees that he’s bright and energetic. But time will tell.” The sun was gone now. A few sprinkles of rain were beginning to fall, hours before the customary time. Dekkeret offered her his jacket, but she shook her head. They began to descend from the watchtower.—“If Prestimion’s really coming to Normork, Sithelle, I’m going to make every effort to meet him. Personally, I mean. I want to speak with him.”
“Well, then, just walk right up to him and tell him who you are. He’ll invite you to sit right down and have a flask of wine with him.”
Her sarcasm bothered him. “I mean it,” he said. The rain already seemed to be giving out, after having pattered for just a moment or two. It had left a pleasant touch of fragrance in the air. They continued on their westward route along the black spine of the wall. “You can’t suppose that I want to spend the rest of my life in Normork, working at my father’s trade.”
“Would that be so awful? I can think of worse things.”
“No doubt you can. But it’s my plan to become a Castle knight and rise to a high government position.”
“Of course. And become Coronal some day, I suppose?”
“Why not?” Dekkeret said. She was being very annoying. “Anyone can be.”
“Anyone?”
“If he’s good enough.”
“And has the right family connections,” said Sithelle. “Commoners don’t usually get chosen for the throne.”
“But they can be,” Dekkeret said. “You know, Sithelle, it’s possible for anybody at all to get to the top. You just have to be chosen by the outgoing Coronal, and nothing says he absolutely has to choose someone from among the Castle nobility if he doesn’t want to. And what’s a nobleman, anyway, if not the descendant of some commoner of long ago? It isn’t as though the aristocracy is a separate species.—Listen, Sithelle, I’m not saying that I expect to be Coronal, or even that I want to be Coronal! The Coronal thing was your idea. I simply want to be something more than a small-scale merchant who’s required to spend his entire life wearily traveling up and down the Mount from one city to the next peddling his wares to indifferent customers, most of whom treat him like dirt. Not that there’s anything disgraceful about being a traveling merchant, I mean, but I can’t help thinking that a life of public service would be ever so much—”
“All right, Dekkeret. I’m sorry I teased you. But please stop making speeches at me.” She touched the tips of her fingers to her temples. “You’re giving me a headache, now.”
His irritability vanished instantly. “Am I?—You complained of a headache yesterday, too. And I wasn’t making speeches then.”
“Actually,” said Sithelle, “I’ve been having headaches a lot of the time, the last couple of weeks. Terrible pounding ones, some of them are. I’ve never had that problem before.”
“Have you seen anyone for it? A doctor? A dream-speaker?”
“Not yet. But it worries me. Some of my friends have been having them, too.—What about you, Dekkeret?”
“Headaches? Not that I’ve noticed.”
“If you haven’t noticed, you aren’t having them.”
They came to the broad stone staircase that led downward from the top of the wall into Melikand Plaza, the gateway to Old Town. The city here was a warren of ancient narrow streets paved with oily-looking gray-green cobblestones. Dekkeret much preferred the broad curving boulevards of the New City, but he had always thought of Old Town as quaint and picturesque. Tonight, though, it seemed oddly sinister to him, even repellent.
He said, “No headaches, no. But I have had some odd moments now and then, of late.” He groped for words. “How can I express this, Sithelle? It’s like I feel that there’s something very important hovering right at the edge of my memory, something that I need to think about and deal with, but I can’t get a handle on what it is. My head starts to spin a little whenever that happens. Sometimes it spins a lot. I wouldn’t call it a headache, though. More like dizziness.”
“Strange,” she said. “I get that same feeling, sometimes. Of something that’s missing, something that I want to find, but I don’t know where to look for it. It gets to be very bothersome. You know what I mean?”
“Yes. I think I do.”
They paused at the parting of their roads. Sithelle gave him a warm smile. She took his hand in hers. “I hope you get to see Lord Prestimion when he comes here, Dekkeret, and that he makes you a knight of the Castle.”
“Do you mean that?”
She blinked. “Why wouldn’t I mean it?”
“In that case, thank you. If I do get to meet him, do you want me to tell him about my beautiful cousin who’s somewhat too tall for him? Or shouldn’t I bother?”
“I was trying to be nice,” Sithelle said ruefully, letting go of his hand. “But you don’t know how to do that, do you?” She stuck her tongue out at him and went sprinting away into the tangle of little streets that lay before them.
7
“The midnight market of Bombifale!” said Septach Melayn grandly, and beckoned Prestimion forward with a sweeping gesture of his broad-brimmed hat.
Prestimion had visited Bombifale many times before. It was one of the closest of the Inner Cities, just a day’s journey below the Castle, and no one would dispute its rank as first in beauty among the cities of the Mount. Once, many hundreds of years earlier, it had given Majipoor a Coronal—Lord Pinitor—and Pinitor, a hyperactive and visionary builder, had spared no expense in transforming his native city into a place of wonder. The burnt-orange sandstone of its scalloped walls had been brought from the forbidding desert country back of the Labyrinth by countless caravans of pack-animals; t
he spectacular four-sided slabs of blue seaspar inlaid in those walls came from an uninhabited district along Alhanroel’s eastern coast that had rarely been explored before or since; and all along the perimeter of the city the walls were crowned with an uncountable series of slim, graceful towers of the most delicate design, giving Bombifale the magical look of a city that has been built by supernatural creatures.
But not all of Bombifale was magical and delicate and fantastical. Where Prestimion and Septach Melayn stood just now—on a patch of cracked and furrowed pavement sloping sharply downward into a dimly lit district of slant-roofed warehouses at the city’s outer rim, no great distance within Lord Pinitor’s fabled walls—was as squalid and dank-smelling a place as one might expect to find in some fifth-rate port town.
Something about this neighborhood seemed familiar. Perhaps the bundles of loosely wrapped trash piled against the building walls, Prestimion thought. Or the stench of stagnant sewage too close nearby. And the ramshackle look of the nearby brick-walled buildings, ancient ones leaning crookedly up against one another, rang chimes in his memory.
“I’ve been in this part of town before, haven’t I?”
“Indeed you have, my lord.” Septach Melayn indicated a small, shabby inn on the far side of the street. “We stayed here one night not long before the war, when we were coming back from the Labyrinth after the Pontifex’s funeral as outcasts, returning to the Castle to see whether Korsibar could make good on his seizure of the throne.”
“Ah. I do remember. We had churlish unwilling hospitality at yonder hostelry that night, as I recall.” And added, speaking very softly, “You shouldn’t call me ‘my lord’ in this place, Septach Melayn.”
“Who’d believe it, in such a place, looking as you do?”
“Even so,” said Prestimion. “If we come in secrecy, let’s be secretive about all things, is that agreed? Good. Come, now: show me this midnight market of yours.”
It was not that Prestimion feared for his safety. No one would dare raise a hand against the Coronal in this place, he was certain, if his true identity should be discovered. In any event he could look after himself in any brawl, and the swordsman had not yet been born who could deal with Septach Melayn. But it would be deeply embarrassing to be found out—Lord Prestimion himself, skulking around this seamy, disreputable place in a grease-stained cloak and patched leggings, with half his face muffled up in a beard as black as Gonivaul’s and a wig of rank, mushroom-colored hair falling to his shoulders? What possible reason could he offer for such an excursion? He’d be the butt of Castle jokes for months, if the story ever got around. And it would be a long time before Kimbar Hapitaz, the commander of the Coronal’s guard, permitted him to slip away from the Castle so easily again.
Septach Melayn—he was in disguise too, a hideous mop of red hair stiff as straw hiding his immaculate golden ringlets, and a shaggy, ragged black neckerchief concealing his elegantly tapered little beard—led him down the weed-speckled road toward a huddle of dilapidated buildings at the end of the street. There were only the two of them. Gialaurys had been unable to accompany them on this adventure; he was off in the north, chasing after the artificially-created war-monsters that Korsibar had never had a chance to use in the war. Some of them had broken loose and were devastating the unfortunate Kharax district.
“In here, if you will,” Septach Melayn said, pulling a heavy, creaking door aside.
Prestimion’s first impressions were of dimness, noxious fumes, noise, chaos. What had appeared from the outside to be a group of buildings was actually one long, low structure divided into narrow aisles that stretched on and on until their farthest reaches were lost to sight. A string of glowfloats bobbing near its rafters provided the primary lighting, which was far from adequate. An abundance of smoldering torches mounted in front of the various booths provided little additional illumination and a great deal of foul black smoke.
“Whatever sort of thing you may care to buy,” Septach Melayn murmured in his ear, “it will be available for purchase somewhere in here.”
Prestimion had no doubt of that. It seemed that an infinite array of merchandise lay before him.
Much of what he saw at the booths closest to the entrance was the sort of stuff one might find in any marketplace anywhere. Huge burlap bags of spices and aromatics—bdella and malibathron and kankamon, storax and mabaric, gray coriander and fennel, and many more besides; various kinds of salt, dyed indigo and red and yellow and black to distinguish them from one another; fiery glabbam powder for the hot stews beloved of Skandars and sweet sarjorelle to give flavoring to the sticky cakes of the Hjorts, and much more. Beyond the spice-peddlers were the meat-vendors, with their offerings dangling in great slabs from huge wooden hooks, and then the sellers of eggs of a hundred different kinds of birds, eggs of all hues and some startling shapes, and after them the tanks where one might purchase live fishes and reptiles, and even young sea-dragons. Deeper yet and they were peddling baskets and panniers, fly-whisks and brooms, palm mats, bottles of colored glass, cheap beads and badly made bangles, pipes and perfumes, carpets and brocaded cloaks, writing-paper, dried fruits, cheese and butter and honey, and on and on and on, aisle after aisle, room beyond room.
Prestimion and Septach Melayn passed through a place of wickerwork cages, where live animals were being sold for uses which Prestimion did not care even to guess. He saw sad little bilantoons huddled together, and snaggle-toothed jakkaboles, and mintuns and droles and manculains and a horde of others. At one point he turned a corner and found himself staring into a cage of sturdy bamboo that contained a single smallish red-furred beast of a kind he had never beheld before, wolf-like, but low and wide, with enormous paws, a broad head that was huge in proportion to its body, and thick curving yellow teeth that looked as though they could not only rip flesh but easily crush bone. Its yellow-green eyes glared with unparalleled ferocity. A stale smell came from it, as of meat that had been left too long to dry in the sun. As Prestimion looked at it in wonder, it made a deep ugly sound, midway between a growl and a whine, throbbing with menace.
“What is that thing?” he asked. “It’s the most hideous beast I’ve ever seen!”
“A krokkotas, it is,” said Septach Melayn. “It roves the northern desert-lands, from Valmambra eastward. They say it has the power of imitating human speech, and will call a man’s name by night in the wastelands, and when he approaches, it pounces and kills. And devours its victim down to the last scrap, bones and hair and toenails and all.”
Prestimion made a sour face. “And why would such an abomination be put up for sale in a city marketplace, then?”
“Inquire of that from the one who offers it,” Septach Melayn said. “I myself have no idea.”
“Perhaps it’s best not to know,” said Prestimion. He stared at the krokkotas once more; and it seemed to him that its whining growl had intelligible meaning, and that the beast was saying, “Coronal, Coronal, Coronal, come to me.”
“Strange,” Prestimion murmured. And they moved along.
But then the merchandise grew even stranger.
“We are entering the market of the sorcerers,” said Septach Melayn quietly. “Shall we stop here first, do you think, for something small to eat?”
Prestimion had no idea what was being sold from the little group of food-stalls that now confronted them; nor, so it appeared, did Septach Melayn. But the aromas were enticing. Some questioning revealed that this stall offered minced bilantoon meat mixed with chopped onions and palm tips, that this one had peppered vyeille wrapped in vine leaves, that the one next to it specialized in the flesh of a red gourd called khiyaar, stewed with beans and tiny morsels of fish. The vendors all were Liimen, the impassive flat-faced three-eyed folk to whom the humblest tasks of Majipoor invariably fell, and they answered Septach Melayn’s queries about their offerings in husky, thickly accented monosyllables, or sometimes not at all. In the end Septach Melayn bought a little array of items more or less at random—Pres
timion, as was his custom, carried no money—and they paused at the entrance to the sorcerers’ market to eat. Everything was remarkably tasty; and at Prestimion’s urging, Septach Melayn bought them a flask of some rough, vigorous wine, still bubbling with youth, to wash it down.
Then they went forward.
Prestimion had seen sorcerers’ markets in the city of Triggoin during his time of exile: places where strange potions and ointments could be bought, and amulets of all sorts, and spells deemed to be efficacious in a host of situations. In dark and mysterious Triggoin such places had seemed altogether appropriate and expectable, a natural sort of merchandise for a city where sorcery was the center of economic life. But it was eerie to find such things being sold here in pretty Bombifale, hardly a stone’s throw beneath the walls of his Castle. This place showed him once again what great inroads the occult arts had made in recent years into the everyday existence of Majipoor. There had not been all this sorcery and magicking going on when he was a boy; but the mages called the tune now, and all Majipoor danced to it.
The outer zone of the midnight market had been only sparsely occupied compared with this part. Out there, a scattering of people whose daily lives were lived at unusual hours, or those who had neglected to do their everyday marketing at everyday times, could be seen shopping in a desultory way for the next day’s meat and vegetables. But back here, where goods of a more esoteric kind were sold, the aisles were choked with buyers to the point where it was difficult for Prestimion and Septach Melayn to make their way through them.
“Is it like this every night, I wonder?” Prestimion asked.
“The sorcerers’ market is open only on the first and third Seadays of the month,” the swordsman replied. “Those who need to buy do their buying then.”
Prestimion stared. Here, too, were booths bounded by rows of burlap sacks, too, but not sacks of spices and aromatics. In this place, so the vendors tirelessly chanted, one could obtain all the raw materials of the necromantic arts, powders and oils galore—olustro and elecamp and golden rue, mastic pepper, goblin-sugar and myrrh, aloes and vermilion and maltabar, quicksilver, brimstone, thekka ammoniaca, scamion, pestash, yarkand, dvort. Here were the black candles used in haruspication; here were specifics against curses and demonic possession; here were the wines of the resuscitator and the poultices that warded off the devil-ague. And here were engraved talismans designed to invoke the irgalisteroi, those subterranean prehistoric spirits of the ancient world whom the Shapeshifters had locked up under dire spells twenty thousand years before, and who could sometimes, with the right incantation, be induced to do the bidding of those who called upon them. Prestimion had learned of these beings and others akin to them during his stay in Triggoin, when he was a fugitive taking refuge from Korsibar’s armies.