Sorcerers of Majipoor
The whole thing had taken no more than a few moments. But the noise coming from his maimed victims was attracting other guardsmen now; Septach Melayn could see them overhead, heading down the spiral rampart toward him. He circled quickly to his left, past the ruined eastern face of the Tower of Trumpets, and was gratified to find a huge dry underground cistern there, running deep and long, with a glimmer of daylight showing at its far end. Crawling quickly into it, he ran some fifty paces and scrambled up into the light, emerging on a lower level in a place he could not at first recognize, but which he saw to be the back end of Spurifon Parapet. That was the very place he sought.
There was no sign of Gialaurys. Very likely he had been here already, and gone onward upon seeing that his companion was going to be late; but on the off chance that Gialaurys might be even tardier yet, Septach Melayn lingered at the parapet a few minutes, until he caught sight of a fresh group of guardsmen moving about two levels higher up.
It was foolish to stay longer. The residential quarters of the guardsmen were close by this district. A party of them might come upon him without even looking for him, simply while going off duty, and then he would have to spill more blood. Better to move along, and swiftly.
Septach Melayn darted down the slope of the parapet and through the small, ancient arched gateway that gave exit from the Castle on its little-used northern side. The road to Huine stretched before him. If he took it down-slope a little way and then went circling about eastward, it would bring him to the juncture with the Gossif road, and Gossif was adjacent among the Inner Cities to Tidias, which was Septach Melayn’s own birthplace; and not far beyond Tidias was Muldemar. It was his deeply felt hope to see Gialaurys again when he reached there. The task of springing Prestimion free of Korsibar’s grasp was not one that he would care to tackle by himself.
He looked back. Still no Gialaurys. Let him be safe out of the Castle already, thought Septach Melayn. May the Divine speed him on his way. And turned his own lanky legs toward the road that led down the Mount’s long shoulder.
1
NO ONE HAD any idea what use Lord Sangamor had had in mind for the tunnels that came to bear his name when he ordered the construction of them three and a half thousand years earlier. They were situated on the western face of the Mount in a middle level of the Castle, where a tall spire of rock that was virtually a mountain in its own right jutted from the main formation. That high spire—it too was named for Sangamor—was so angular and sharp that it was unusable, and in fact next to unclimbable; but at its base Lord Sangamor had installed a series of low-roofed underground chambers, each connected to the next, that ran from the Castle proper to Sangamor Peak and completely encircled that spire where it sprang from the Mount.
The material out of which these chambers had been constructed was as mysterious as their purpose. Their walls and roofs were lined with paving-blocks of some radiant synthetic stone that gave off, of its own accord, vivid emanations of color. One chamber was constantly lit by a pulsating maroon glow, another by a brilliant emerald, another saffron, another a powerful rufous hue, another sulfur-toned, another a bright bursting orange, and so on and on.
The secret of the inherent luminosity of these blocks, which had not dimmed in the slightest in all the millennia since Lord Sangamor’s distant time, was one of the many that had been lost by the craftsmen of Majipoor over the centuries. The effect of the lights and colors of Lord Sangamor’s tunnels was an extremely beautiful one, but also, since they never dimmed even for a moment, by day or by night, it very quickly became exhausting and even distressing to experience it: there was always that great inescapable throbbing sweep of color coming from those walls, hour after hour, day after day, so powerful that it was visible even when one closed one’s eyes to it. That perpetual radiance was, in fact, a torment if one had to endure it for any great length of time.
And so—since the tunnels were set apart from all the rest of the Castle by the peculiar topography of this region of the Mount, and no other use had ever been found for them, and comfort was not an important factor to consider where prisoners were concerned—they came after some centuries to be employed from time to time as dungeons for the storage of individuals whom the Coronal regarded as excessively obstreperous, or too inconvenient in some other way to be left at large.
Prestimion had seen the Sangamor tunnels once, long ago, while touring odd corners of the Castle in his boyhood under the auspices of his late father. No one was imprisoned in them then; no one had been, apparently, for some two or three hundred years, not since the time of the Coronal Lord Amyntilir. But the endless waves of color were impressively beautiful if somewhat overwhelming, and the rows of empty shackles mounted against the walls were impressive also in a different way, and so too were the tales that Prestimion’s father told him of this rebellious prince and that hot-headed young duke who had been chained up here in the time of some ancient Coronal desirous of restoring decorum at his court.
It had never occurred to Prestimion that he might find himself chained up here himself one day. This place was a medieval relic, not something that was in everyday use. But here he was, dangling from a wall that radiated a spectacularly vibrant ruby tone, with his arms spread wide and manacles clamped tight about his wrists and ankles. It struck him almost as funny, now and again. Korsibar, blustering with rage, ordering him off to the dungeons! What was next? The headsman’s block?
But of course there was nothing funny about it. He was at Korsibar’s mercy. Nobody knew what went on down here. At any moment some henchman of the Coronal’s might come in and slit his throat, and there would be nothing he could do to defend himself. He had been here, he supposed, six or eight hours by now, in unbroken solitude. Perhaps they simply meant to leave him here until he starved to death. Or, perhaps, until those unyielding pulsating waves of red, red, red, endlessly bounding and rebounding from every surface about him, drove him into screaming insanity.
So it would seem. The hours passed, and no one came.
Then, astonishingly, a small quiet furry voice said out of the maddening sea of color opposite him, “Do you happen to have your corymbor with you, Prince Prestimion?”
“What?” His voice was husky from disuse. “Who said that? Where are you?”
“Just across the way. Thalnap Zelifor. Do you remember me, excellence?”
“The Vroonish wizard, yes. I remember you all too well.” Prestimion, peering into that obstinate light, blinked, and blinked again, and struggled to focus his eyes. But all he could see was that surging ocean of redness. “If you’re there, you’ve made yourself invisible somehow.”
“Oh, no. You could see me if you tried. Close your eyes for a time, and open them very quickly, excellence, and you’ll make me out. I’m a prisoner here too, you see. —It amazed me no end when they brought you in here,” the voice out of the red glow continued. “I knew the pattern of your stars was an unfavorable one, but I didn’t think it was that unfavorable. Do you see me yet?”
“No,” Prestimion said. He shut his eyes, counted to ten and opened them, and saw nothing but the waves of redness. He closed his eyes again, and counted this time to twenty, and decided to count twenty more. When he opened them then, he was able just barely to make out the indistinct shape of the little many-tentacled creature straight across the room from him, manacled to the wall even as he was, with the gyves fastened about two of his biggest tentacles. Thalnap Zelifor was hanging, though, three or four feet off the floor, because he was so small and the manacles had been installed for the purpose of restraining individuals of normal human size.
The redness closed in again.
“I saw you for a moment, at least,” Prestimion said. He stared somberly into the pulsating radiance. “It was definitely you,” he said. “You who came to me to tell me in the Labyrinth that I had no clear path to the throne, that you saw omens of opposition on all sides, that I had a mighty enemy who was waiting in secrecy to overthrow me. You knew—by what means, I
dare not guess—what was going to happen. It’s fitting, I suppose, that we’d meet next in the same dungeon. You could predict my downfall, but not your own, eh?” He narrowed his eyes, trying without success to make out the Vroon across the way. “How long have you been in here?”
“Three days, I think. Perhaps four.”
“Have they fed you?”
“Occasionally,” said the Vroon. “Not terribly often. I asked you before, prince: do you happen to have your corymbor with you? The little green amulet I gave you, is what I mean.”
“Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. On a chain about my throat.”
“When they come to give you your food, they’ll have to free your hands so you can eat. Rub the corymbor then, and implore the force it controls to smile upon you. That should dispose the guards more favorably to you, and perhaps they’ll feed you more often, or even bring you something better than the usual swill. I should tell you that the food here is abominable, and the guards are utter ruffians.”
“Your corymbor wasn’t much help to me a little while ago when I was in the throne-room with Korsibar. I touched it once, as he and I were just beginning our dispute. But things only got worse and worse.”
“You touched it with the intention of using its power, did you? You commended yourself to its strength, and told it your specific need?”
“I did none of that. It never occurred to me. I merely touched it, as one might scratch at an itch while one is talking.”
“Well, then,” said Thalnap Zelifor, as though to say that Prestimion’s error was manifestly obvious.
They were silent for a time.
“Why have they locked you up in here?” asked Prestimion eventually.
“That isn’t clear to me. It’s through some grievous act of injustice, of that I