Sorcerers of Majipoor

  Prestimion, though, alone on the Termagant’s deck at this late hour, pacing back and forth, his eyes brilliantly alert, all his senses tuned and receptive, felt little joy at the beauty of the night, its mingled lights and its host of conflicting shadows. Joy was a quality that seemed to have gone from him. His great anger over the events in the Court of Thrones had subsided into a calm steady sense of ongoing disappointment, a sort of perpetual inner chill replacing the earlier hot rage; but the price of that stark self-control was, it seemed, a general loss of emotion, an absence of the ability to respond to pleasure as well as to pain.

  He watched the sun go down at last. The Great Moon moved across the sky until it disappeared beyond the eastern hills, and the stars took possession of the sky, the lesser ones now as well as the mighty red trio of Cantimpreil. That strange new blue-white one drilled unyieldingly down out of the center of the heavens like a blazing spike. For a time he dozed in a deck chair, and then, seemingly only moments after sundown, it was morning again and the coppery-pink light of dawn was moving toward him across the valley of the Upper Glayge.

  The river was very wide here. Off to Prestimion’s left, where darkness still held sway, a nest of deeply eroded canyons rose one upon another beyond the water’s edge in muddied mists, with bright streams of vapor beginning to boil off their rims like unfurling banners as the sunrise reached them. In the other direction lay the great riverfront city of Pendiwane, its multitude of conical red-tiled roofs ablaze in the glory of the onrushing morning. Not far beyond, a little way on to the north, lay something dark along the river’s western side that he knew must be the shoreline of Makroposopos, the center of the textile arts. Tapestries and draperies and weavings of many other sorts emanated from there that were eagerly sought after throughout the world.

  Captain Dimithair Vort was managing a good pace for them up the river. Castle Mount itself would be in view before much longer; and, soon enough, they would be commencing the ascent of its incomprehensible bulk, making their way to the royal dwelling at its summit, where—where—

  Svor appeared suddenly beside him, rising up as if out of nowhere. “You are up and about very early this morning, Prestimion,” Svor said.

  “I seem to have spent the night on deck.”

  “Did kindly spirits visit you here?”

  Without even trying to feign amusement Prestimion said, “I saw only stars and moons, Svor, and also sunlight to an extraordinary hour. No spirits whatever, none.”

  “Ah, but they saw you.”

  “Perhaps they did,” said Prestimion in a flat cool tone meant to indicate an utter lack of interest.

  “And afterward they came to me as I slept. May I tell you my dream, Prestimion?”

  Prestimion sighed. “If it pleases you to do so, Svor.”

  Svor said, “It was as a manculain that the spirit came to me, the fat little red-spined sort of manculain that we have in Suvrael, with a thousand sharp daggers jutting from its back and two big yellow eyes looking out almost sadly amidst that mass of dangerous needles. I was crossing a great sparse lonely plain, and it came scurrying up beside me, all bristling and threatening. But I could see that it meant no real harm, that that was simply the way it looked; and it said to me in the most friendly way, ‘You seek something, Svor. What is it that you seek?’ I told the manculain what I sought was a crown, not for myself but the crown that you had lost in the Labyrinth, which I would find for you again. To which it replied—are you listening to me, Prestimion?”

  “Certainly. You have my most complete attention.”

  Svor let that pass. “It said to me, ‘If you would find it, inquire after it in the city of Triggoin.’”

  “Triggoin.”

  “You know of Triggoin, Prestimion?”

  He nodded somberly. “The wizards’ own city, so I’ve heard, where the mages flock and swarm together in perpetual coven, and all manner of witchcrafts hold sway, and spirit-fires burn blue in the air by day and by night. Somewhere deep in the far north, beyond the desert, it is: by Sintalmond or Michimang, as I understand it. It’s not a place I’ve ever thought of visiting.”

  “It is a place of many fascinations and wonders.”

  “Ah, you’ve been there, Svor?”

  “In dreams only. Three times now my sleeping mind has been to Triggoin.”

  “Perhaps tonight once you’ve closed those beady eyes of yours you’ll be kind enough to undertake a fourth journey to it, then. And ask questions there on my behalf in regard to my lost crown, as the kindly manculain told you to do. Eh, Svor?” Prestimion laughed, but his eyes were empty of all jollity. “And what you’ll learn from the good sorcerers of Triggoin, I very much suspect, is that the crown we seek is just a few thousand miles behind us on the Glayge, and we need only send word nicely and courteously to Lord Korsibar and he’ll ship it ahead to us.”

  Gialaurys emerged then on deck and said, with a look of keen attention, “What’s this about Triggoin?”

  “The good Duke Svor has discovered in his slumbers that we must make inquiries there concerning ways of recovering the crown, and they will inform us as to how we may find it,” Prestimion explained. “But of course, Svor, we haven’t actually lost the crown, because we never had the crown, and what was never ours can hardly be said to be capable of recovery. This carelessness in the use of words can be dangerous to a sorcerer, I’m told. Misplace a single trifling word in one of your spells, or even a syllable, and you may find one of your own demons rending you limb from limb, in the erroneous belief that you instructed him to do so.”

  Gialaurys said, unceremoniously brushing aside Prestimion’s heavy attempt at drollery with a brusque swipe of his hand, “I would listen to Svor. If he’s had a dream telling us that we can get help in Triggoin, we should go to Triggoin.”

  “And if the dream had told us to make inquiries of the Metamorphs in Ilirivoyne, or to seek the aid of the wild men in the snowy mountains of the Khyntor Marches, would you be just as eager to go to one of those places?” Prestimion asked, once more with a mocking edge to his voice.

  “The dream said Triggoin,” Gialaurys said doggedly. “I would surely go to Triggoin, if we don’t find the support we hope for at the Castle.”

  He clung to that idea, endlessly expounding and elaborating on it, as the Termagant made its swift way past Pendiwane and began its approach to Makroposopos, where Dimithair Vort proposed to stop briefly for provisions. Svor’s dream of Triggoin had inflamed Gialaurys with enthusiasm and hope. His eyes took on a brightness and fervor that they had not shown in weeks, at the mere thought of that place in the far north.

  The wizards of Triggoin would put the troubled world to rights, Gialaurys insisted. His faith in them, he said, was boundless. The mastery of all secrets of power was to be had at Triggoin. He had long intended, in fact, some day to make a pilgrimage to that place, purely for the good of his spirit, and to give himself over there to one high magus or another as a humble body-servant, so that he might learn something of the arts himself as fee for his employ. Surely Prestimion would not reject the help of Triggoin out of hand, if all else failed: surely not! Surely! The force of all those potent sorcerers joined in a single endeavor would provide Prestimion with the strength he needed to restore the commonwealth to its proper condition. He believed that with all his soul, did Gialaurys. And so on and on in that vein until the riverboat was almost into Makroposopos harbor.

  But then came an ugly surprise. For the weavers of Makroposopos had been busy of late, it seemed; all along the waterfront hung billowing flags bearing portraits that were recognizably portraits of Korsibar, with banners beside them in the royal colors, green and gold. Plainly, the arrival of the new Coronal was imminent in Makroposopos, and they were hurriedly making ready to greet him in fitting style.

  Prestimion said to Dimithair Vort, “Can we call at some other city farther upstream for the things you need?”

  “At Apocrune, yes, or Stangard Falls. We can wait even until Nim
ivan, maybe. Though the others would be better.”

  “Let it be Apocrune or Stangard Falls, then,” Prestimion instructed the captain. “Or Nimivan, or one of those places, whatever you say.” And they sailed onward without stopping at Makroposopos.

  The sight of those innumerable portraits of Korsibar fluttering along the piers of Makroposopos aroused Gialaurys’s temper even more. All fantasies of Triggoin’s wizardly aid went from his mind; what he advocated now was that they go on to the Castle as swiftly as they could, and simply and straightforwardly lay claim to it as the rightful seat of the Coronal Lord Prestimion, striking with the same preemptive boldness as Korsibar had shown that day in the Labyrinth.

  “We will fashion a crown for you somehow,” he told Prestimion, “and you’ll walk right through the Dizimaule Arch wearing it on your head, with us beside you, armed to the teeth and making starbursts at every step of the way.”

  “A crown,” said Prestimion. “Starbursts.”

  “Yes. A crown! And when they come out from within to see who is arriving, you’ll proclaim yourself before them all as Lord Prestimion the authentic Coronal, as was intended all the while by Lord Confalume, and make them kneel down before you, which they will do when they see the true kingliness of you. In that moment it will become clear to them that Korsibar’s actions have no force of law and he is a false king. And you will seat yourself on the throne and accept the homage of the Castle and there will be an end to all this foolishness.”

  “So easily achieved,” said Svor softly. “Bravo, Gialaurys!”

  “Yes, bravo!” cried Septach Melayn in an altogether different tone. His eyes flashed as though with lightning. It was plain that he too was for the moment swept up in the rude audacity of the scheme. His rage at the usurpation had from the first moment of it been nearly as strong as that of Gialaurys.

  The plan could not fail, said Septach Melayn. The Castle officials were mere spineless cowards and idlers, he said, who had no more courage among them than a herd of blaves and less stiffness to their bones than a swamp-dwelling gromwark. It made no difference to them who was Coronal, Lord Korsibar or Lord Prestimion; they required only someone to tell them what to do, and whichever man got there first would fill that need for them. While Korsibar dallied along the Glayge, enjoying the pleasures of royal feasts as the guest of the people of Pendiwane or Makroposopos or Apocrune, Prestimion could snatch the Castle and the throne as easily as plucking thokka-berries from a vine.

  This hearty show of support kindled fresh excitement in Gialaurys. For some minutes the two of them spoke back and forth between themselves in rising fervor, until they had made it seem for each other that it would be the easiest thing in the world to turn Prestimion into an anointed Coronal merely by an appeal to justice and reason.

  Then finally, after long minutes of harangue, when they had begun to lose some of their heat and momentum, Svor turned to them and said, his eyes glittering with devastating scorn, “This is the maddest nonsense and folly, my lords. Have you both taken leave of your senses? If the throne could be had by any prince who walked in and demanded it, we’d have a new Coronal every time the old one departed from the Castle for as much as a day.”

  They stared at him, startled at the force of his mocking tone, making no response.

  “Consider also,” Prestimion added, “that the Pontifex Confalume has not openly condemned his son’s seizure of the throne, and never will. ‘The thing is done,’ is what the Pontifex told me when we were in the Labyrinth. ‘Korsibar holds the power now.’ And so he does.”

  “Illegally,” Septach Melayn said.

  “And what legal claim do I have, pray tell? Was I ever publicly named as Coronal-designate? Korsibar, at least, has the Pontifex’s blessing. In the eyes of the people I would be the one who’d be regarded as the usurper, not Korsibar, if I somehow managed to take possession of the Castle. If.”

  Septach Melayn and Gialaurys looked blankly at each other, and once more said nothing; and after a time Septach Melayn reluctantly acknowledged with a little shrug the wisdom of what Prestimion had said.

  To them both Svor said sharply, “Attend me here. We have a strategy in place already, which is to go to the Castle as loyal subjects of the Coronal Lord Korsibar and pretend to bow the knee to him, and all the while slowly and quietly attempt to build support for his overthrow and replacement by Prince Prestimion. That will take time: years perhaps, until Korsibar’s inadequacies are fully demonstrated. But I pray you, let us follow our plan, for it’s the best that we have; and let there be no more hotheaded talk of simply announcing Prestimion to be the king and expecting the Castle folk to lie down and yield.”

  More Korsibar banners were on show at Apocrune, and at Prestimion’s orders they sailed on past, but Dimithair Vort pointed out that it was necessary now for her to reprovision the riverboat somewhere, and the best thing was to make landfall at the town of Stangard Falls. Prestimion gave his assent. But he was pleased to note that no Korsibar faces greeted them there as the Termagant dropped its anchor at the pier.

  There were two wondrous things to be seen at Stangard Falls. One of them was the falls itself: for here there was a tremendous rift in the surface of the world, with the land falling away sharply toward the west. Whatever colossal geological event had shattered the terrain at Stangard had also thrust a giant mile-long boulder upward in the midst of the river’s course: a single smooth slab of pink granite that had the shape of a fat loaf of bread resting on its side, which divided the Glayge here into two flows. One, east of that titanic monolith, was the river proper, sweeping smoothly and grandly on southward beyond the town in its majestic progress toward the distant sea. The other, the western branch, was a much lesser but still powerful stream that went plunging off swiftly at a sharp angle to the river’s main bed. The course followed by that secondary stream carried it over the edge of the rift, thus creating a cascade that had an unbroken milky drop of seven thousand feet, uncountable millions of tons of water per second hurtling down that great declivity into a basin far below.

  The roaring of the waters at Stangard Falls, the sound of that great plunge and the terrible crashing impact it made when it struck the stony bed below, could be heard far up and down the river, hundreds of miles away: and at close range, anywhere within a mile or so of the point where that western fork of the Glayge went over the edge, that sound was intolerable. Observation platforms were mounted to either side of that place where that river began its mad descent, so that visitors could stand there and look downward as the foaming waters fell on and on and onward still to be lost in the spuming rainbow-flecked turbulence at the bottom. But they had to cover their ears with thick padding as they watched, or they would be irreparably deafened by the noise of it all.

  Prestimion and his companions had no special interest in experiencing the majesty of Stangard Falls just then. It was the other noteworthy sight of Stangard Falls that drew them now: for here, on the side of the river away from the falls themselves, travelers were granted the first awesome view of Castle Mount rising in the northeast.

  You needed only to take an eastward turn on the river just opposite the shining pink monolith that created the falls, and there it was, standing unanswerably before you, dominating beyond all measure the great sloping plateau from which it rose. Up and up and up went the land as you looked to the north, and then came that sudden heart-stopping leap to supreme height, imparting a mysterious visionary grandeur to the scene. At Stangard Falls the glittering gray-white mass of stone that was Castle Mount seemed to float in the air as though it belonged to some other world, a world that was lowering itself by gradual stages into the sky of Majipoor.

  It was by far the greatest mountain of Majipoor, and perhaps the largest of any world in all the universe. Farther upriver the Mount had the look of a vast wall hanging overhead and blotting out the heavens like a vertical continent. But in this part of the Glayge Valley the traveler was still separated from it by a thousand miles or mo
re. From here one might to some degree comprehend it as an actual mountain that tapered upward from a broad base to the narrow summit, with a band of cloud about its middle. And even, almost, to persuade oneself that one could make out glinting hints of some of the fifty mighty cities that clung to its flanks, and the sprawling Castle atop its highest peak, thirty miles up.

  “At last!” Gialaurys cried. “Can there be anything else so splendid anywhere? I feel such a chill of wonder whenever I look upon it that I could weep.” And he struck Svor, who was standing beside him, a great wallop between the shoulder blades that nearly flung him flying through the air. “Eh, my brave Svor? What do you say? Is that not the grandest sight in the universe! Lift up your eyes to it, Svor! Lift up your eyes!”

  “It is a very fine sight indeed, extremely splendid,” said Svor, coughing, and hitching up first one shoulder and then the other as if putting them back into their proper alignment. “It is truly a magnificent sight, my friend, and I admire it most considerably, even though you have perhaps loosened my teeth somewhat in your enthusiasm.”

  Prestimion’s eyes were glistening as he looked toward that monarch of mountains. He said nothing, only stared, as minutes passed. Septach Melayn, coming up behind him, lowered his head to the shorter man’s ear and said quietly, “Behold your Castle, my lord.”

  Prestimion nodded. Still he said nothing.

  * * *

  Their stay in the town of Stangard Falls was brief, as brief as they were able to make it. Nilgir Sumanand, who went ashore with the captain, reported that portraits of Lord Korsibar were on display here too. They were not as common as at Makroposopos, but they were indication enough that the people had been apprised of the change of reign and had accepted it with good enough grace.