He was freezing now. His hair, streaming out behind him, was stiff with ice. His blood had ceased to move in his veins. But there was no pain for him, and fear was wholly absent from his spirit He was in a kind of ecstasy. Upward and upward he continued, until a band of blackness had closed around him and not even the stars were visible. There was nothing in the sky but Majipoor itself, like a child’s ball beneath him, turning slowly, a thing all green and blue and brown, and he could make out the great dark wedge that was Alhanroel and the long wide green continent that was Zimroel and the little Isle of Dreams lying between them, with tawny Suvrael hanging below and then the world turned and he saw only the Great Sea, that no one had ever crossed from one side to the other, a vast emerald scar spanning the world’s middle. And then Alhanroel came into view again; for the world was turning ever faster and faster, the continents and the sea that lay between them spinning by again and again and again.
It was his. It was meant to be his, and he was meant for it. All doubts of that dropped forever from his soul. This was the thing he sought, this was what he had come to find, up here at reality’s edge. His. The world was his, and he was the world’s, and it hovered before him in the air within his reach.
Prestimion reached down and touched it
It hopped up into his hand, that little ball that was the world, and he held it carefully there, and looked at it closely, and breathed upon it. And said to it, “I am Prestimion who would heal you. But first I must heal myself.” And knew that he would. A great door had swung open in his soul that had been closed until now by iron bars.
He was very cold now, almost frozen; yet even so there still were rivers of sweat running down his body. But his way was clear. He saw the path that would carry him to the warmth, if only he had the will and the strength to follow it. And he knew that he did.
He released the little world and let it go spinning away from him in the darkness.
Then he saw a light above him. The new star was shining again, but now it had a face, and its face was that of the Lady Kunigarda, and he could hear her voice, saying softly, “Come, Prestimion. A little farther. I’m not so far away. A little farther yet. Farther. Farther—”
“Farther. Farther.”
“This is far enough, I would think,” a deep and robust voice above him said. “Come, Prestimion. Open your eyes.”
For a moment he was unable to see; and then he perceived Gialaurys standing beside him, with Svor and Septach Melayn a short distance away. It was mid-morning, at least. The sun was high; the dew was gone from the grass. There was a griping anguished grumbling in his stomach, as though he had not eaten for weeks, and his throat was dry and his eyes felt swollen.
“Take my hand,” said Gialaurys. “Up. Up.”
“We’ve been searching for you since before dawn,” Svor said. “Finally we asked Gominik Halvor, and he said to look in the park. But it’s a big park.”
Prestimion rose and took a few wobbling steps. Then he stumbled and nearly fell into the stream nearby, but Septach Melayn came forward quickly and gracefully caught him and steadied him on his feet.
“You’ve been playing with dangerous toys, haven’t you, Prestimion?” he said, and gestured toward the array of herbs and the patterns of twine on the ground, making no attempt at concealing his scorn. “But you’ll be all right, I think. A good meal, and some rest—”
“You should try these things, Septach Melayn,” said Prestimion, managing a thin smile. He spoke with some difficulty: his voice was rusty and harsh, not yet fully under his control again. “You’d be in for some surprises. Circaris leaves and cobily and some dried jangars, to start with, and then—”
“Thank you, no. Would take the edge off my swordsmanship, I think, to dabble in such medicines as those. What nonsense have you been amusing yourself with out here, Prestimion?”
“Let him be,” said Gialaurys gruffly. “Come. Let’s go back to the inn.”
“Can you walk?” Svor asked, peering into Prestimion’s face in an anxious way.
“I’m fine, Svor.” He held his arms outstretched before himself. “Look: a straight line, step step step step. Is that satisfactory to you?” Prestimion laughed. He gathered up the things he had brought with him and stuffed them into his pack. He felt very calm, very peaceful, after the night’s adventure. His path was altogether clear. He need only take the first step, and then the second. A straight line, yes, step step step step.
“Would you like to hear the news?” Svor said as they walked back together toward town.
“What news is that?” Prestimion asked.
“The proclamation of the Lady Kunigarda, concerning the state of the government Septach Melayn heard it announced in a tavern last night, and we came to your room to tell you, but you were gone; and then began the business of searching for you all over town. How will we get our night’s sleep back that you owe us, Prestimion?”
“Tell me the proclamation, Svor!”
“Oh, yes. That. It seems that the Lady has fled from the Isle, taking with her the mechanisms by which sendings are made; and announces that by means of those devices she will continue to guide the souls of the world, naming herself Lady-in-Exile. And also she has spoken out against Korsibar, and against her brother the Pontifex Confalume too. She gives the name of usurper to Korsibar. ‘The false Coronal, the usurper Korsibar,’ is what she calls him. Her own nephew! As for Confalume, she denounces his supine acceptance of Korsibar’s taking of the throne. They have brought the displeasure of the Divine upon the world, she says. She’s called on all citizens of Majipoor to rise up at once and cast Korsibar aside. She means to make war on him herself, by sendings and other methods also.”
“All this from Kunigarda?” Prestimion said, amazed. It seemed to him that this was still part of his dream, that he lay yet asleep on the grass beside the stream, holding the little ball that was Majipoor in his band. “And what has become of Kunigarda, I wonder? Has she been proscribed too?”
“She’s left the Isle,” said Septach Melayn. “She’s somewhere in southern Alhanroel right now, and making her way north. She has announced that she means to find you and join forces with you: for you are the rightful Coronal of Majipoor, Prestimion—so says the Lady Kunigarda. Which we would have been happy to tell you last night, my friend, except that you felt it needful to spend a night sleeping in the park with a belly full of—what did you say? Circaris leaves and cobily?” A great gust of roaring derisive laughter came from him. “Has all this been achieved by means of witchcraft, I wonder, this making of an alliance with Confalume’s own sister? Did you come out here to invoke Proiarchis and Remmer on your behalf, and did those great beings look upon you with favor, Prestimion, and give you the world to hold in your hand like a toy?”
Prestimion made no reply. But a secret smile played quickly across his face.
5
IT WAS IN LORD Makhario’s statuary garden in Sipermit that I saw it, when I was on holiday there,” said Sebbigan Kless of Perimor, who was a manufacturer of doublets and hose in that busy city on the lower slope of Castle Mount His companion, who was listening as intently as though Sebbigan Kless had just told him that the Mount was about to break loose from the planet and drift off into space, was the jobber and wholesaler Aibeil Gammis of Stee, an important distributor of Sebbigan Kless’s products in several of the Free Cities a little way higher on the mountain. “There was this Su-Suheris walking in the garden, with the smallest Vroon you could imagine sitting on his shoulder. Well, you can’t help stealing a glance at a Su-Suheris whenever you see one, can you?—such weird bastards, those two pointy heads sticking up out of that neck—and for one to have a Vroon riding on his shoulder was pretty strange too, but, let me tell you, that was nothing at all compared to seeing the Su-Suheris flicker all of a sudden, and then—”
Two days later, when Aibeil Gammis had returned to Stee and was going over inventories at his warehouse with his accountant, a man named Hazil Scroith who claimed some so
rt of tenuous kinship with a younger brother of the Duke of Alaisor, he said, “If we were smart, you know, we’d start getting up a line of goods to sell to the Metamorphs. After all, we’ve got one as our Coronal now.”
“A Metamorph? What are you talking about?”
“Well, I had this from Sebbigan Kless himself, and Sebbigan Kless is no tippler, you know, so I doubt that he was making it up. It seems he was visiting Sipermit, you know, to see that jiggly little Zimroel girl that he doesn’t want his wife to find out about, and they were in the park where the sexy statues are when just as you please the Coronal comes strolling through, Korsibar himself, only he’s disguised as a Su-Suheris. Well, you ask, how does a human being manage to make himself look like a seven-foot-tall monster with two heads, and how did Sebbigan Kless manage to discover that the seven-foot-tall monster was in fact our beloved Coronal? And the answer, my friend, is that the Coronal isn’t a human at all, but has to be a Shapeshifter, because Sebbigan Kless actually saw him change form—it was just for a moment, mind you, but Sebbigan Kless isn’t a man whose eyes deceive him—the Su-Suheris turned into the Coronal, who looked very surprised to find himself revealed that way, and turned himself back into a Su-Suheris just as fast as I can tell you the story! But it was done and seen. A Shapeshifter! No wonder Korsibar was able to put the hex on Confalume and all those lords in the Labyrinth! He wasn’t Korsibar at all, was he, but some kind of thing out of the Metamorph country! Or can it be that Confalume’s a Shapeshifter too? That we’ve had a whole family of Shapeshifters running the world for the last forty years? And if that’s true, let me tell you—”
Which revelations Hazil Scroith duly reported in his next letter to his wife’s nephew Jispard Demaive, who was not the younger brother of the Duke of Alaisor at all but who did indeed have a clerical post in the duke’s Ministry of Prisons and Warehouses. “We are all buzzing here with the news,” wrote Hazil Scroith, “that the Coronal Lord Korsibar is in fact a Metamorph, the real Korsibar evidently having been done away with while his father was still Coronal. Word of this comes from an absolutely reputable source in Stee who was able to observe the supposed Lord Korsibar changing shape in a public park—is that not incredible?—and turning himself very quickly from human form to that of a Su-Suheris and immediately back again. Why he would do such a thing in plain view of others is hard to understand, dear nephew, but who has ever understood the way the minds of the Metamorphs work?
“Anyway, the tale is all over the Mount now, and nobody is discussing anything else. Just yesterday a salesman who was here from Normork told me the latest bit of news, which is that the Su-Suheris sorcerer Sanibak-Thastimoon, who has been standing at our new Coronal’s elbow ever since he came to the throne, is a Metamorph also! Both of them are impostors, the king and his magus too, and where will it end? Will we find that the whole government is shot through and through with Shapeshifters pretending to be human? It stuns the mind. The whole crowd of them up there at the Castle nothing but masquerading Metamorphs!”
“Horpidan, Duke of Alaisor, to the esteemed Grand Admiral Prince Gonivaul:
Dear Uncle:
You will be astonished, I think, by the remarkable story that has been floating around Alaisor for the past few weeks. I had it from one of the chamberlains in my Customs office, who says that he’s heard it from at least two dozen people this week alone. The essence of it is that the entire pack of you at the Castle, from Korsibar and his Council on down, are a bunch of Metamorphs: we are asked to believe that a squadron of aboriginals secretly infiltrated the Castle sometime during Lord Confalume’s reign and one by one killed off the leading men of the realm and took their places. That includes Confalume himself, apparently. Which would explain why the former Coronal was so acquiescent when Korsibar, or the creature that we understood to be Korsibar, made his astonishing grab of the throne. It was all arranged between them—a Metamorph conspiracy to gain control of Majipoor! And, if you can believe the stories, it has brilliantly succeeded.
According to the newest versions of the story, the only one they didn’t manage to replace with one of their own was poor Prince Prestimion. He slipped out of their grasp somehow. But they were able, at least, to push him aside in favor of Korsibar when the Coronalship became vacant, and when Prestimion threatened to expose the whole foul conspiracy, they drove him into exile and eventually, so it seems, killed him by blowing up that dam when he was camped below it on the Iyann, getting ready to launch a campaign to set things to right. Seamier and seamier, uncle!
Of course it’s all crazy nonsense, this Metamorph thing, isn’t it? The mere gabble of ignorant provincial rumor-mongers? I would certainly hope so, although everybody who tells the story is willing to swear by all that’s holy that Korsibar was definitely seen changing shapes right out in the open in some public park in Stee or Halanx or one of the other big Mount cities. Supposedly there are witnesses, affidavits, et cetera.
Put my mind at rest, uncle, I beg you. If the story is true, then presumably you are a Metamorph in disguise too. Are you? I’d be saddened to hear that, because you have always been one of my favorite relatives, not to mention being the head of our family since the death of my father, and it would upset me terribly to learn that you are in fact some repellent soft-boned noseless thing out of the jungles of Ilirivoyne. Please let me know the truth, one way or another.
Your affectionate nephew—I hope—
Horpidan, Alaisor
* * *
And in Sisivondal they were saying—
In Bailemoona—
In Sefarad—
In Sippulgar—
Korsibar, pacing endlessly, whirled without warning and advanced toward Farquanor as though he meant to rend him limb from limb. Farquanor, quailing, took a quick couple of steps backward, then felt himself butting against the wall of the throne-chamber.
“These stories, Farquanor! These impossible ridiculous stories about me—”
“Lies, my lord,” said Farquanor, trembling. “Every one of them, a lie!”
Korsibar stared, wonderstruck.
“Thank you,” he said acidly after a little while. “I had begun to believe the truth of them myself, but you have greatly reassured me, Count Farquanor. How pleased I am to know I’m not a Shapeshifter after all.”
“I only meant, my lord, that—”
“You meant! You meant! You meant!”
“My lord, I beg you, take hold of yourself!”
“I’ll take hold of you, and hurl you from here to Zimroel if you don’t stop spouting nonsense. You are my High Counsellor, Farquanor. I call upon you for advice, and you spout platitudes instead. Tell me: what are we to do about these lunatic tales that are heard suddenly on all sides?”
“Ignore them, my lord.”
“Ignore? Not deny?”
“They are too contemptible to deny. Can you imagine it, going before the world and saying, ‘I am not a Shapeshifter’? Such a denial only gives life to the thing. Let it die of its own absurdity, my lord.”
“You think it will?”
Farquanor took a deep breath. He felt uncomfortably confined, with Korsibar’s great bulk looming before him and the wall only inches behind him. And the Coronal seemed to be almost at the edge of madness: face rigid with tension, eyes bulging, altogether looking like a man driven to distraction by the responsibilities of the office he had seized for himself and by the annoyance of this most curious of rumors concerning him. It would not take much to cause him to snap entirely and erupt into wild violence. One wrong word, Farquanor thought, and he will squash me against this wall like a bug.
Carefully he said, forcing a look of urgent concern and deep sympathy to his face, “My lord, I have no doubt of it. It’s no more than the momentary madness of the season. Let it dry up and blow away; and the people will hail you gladly as their lord, as they have since the beginning. This I promise you, my lord. Remain true to your own self, and no lies will attach themselves to you.”
??
?Ah,” said Korsibar in relief. And then, almost as though he had caught the habit from Dantirya Sambail, said again, after a moment, “Ah.”
Oljebbin said, “Serithorn, may I have a word with you?”
Serithorn, who was examining a tray of ancient carved kebbel-stones that had been brought to him an hour before by a dealer in antiquities from Gimkandale, glanced up at the former High Counsellor and said pleasantly, “You look very hot and bothered, old man. Is anything wrong?”
“Wrong? Wrong? Oh, no, nothing at all!” Oljebbin came fully into Serithorn’s study—both men still maintained their lavish suites at the Castle, though they no longer held significant posts in the government—and slapped his hand down on the desk so fiercely that the kebbel-stones leaped about in the tray. “Do you see this hand, Serithorn? Does that look to you like a Metamorph’s hand?”
“For the love of the Divine, Oljebbin!”
“Does it? Can I make it wriggle and shift? Sprout another seven or eight fingers, maybe? Turn it into a Skandar’s hand if I feel like it? What about you, Serithorn? Let’s see your hand! If I twist it hard enough, will it change?”