Sorcerers of Majipoor

  Getting off the Mount was the first task. They needed to go west once they were in the flatlands: that meant leaving the Mount by the Dundilmir side, Thismet knew. But Dundilmir was a Slope City; far down near the bottom of the Mount. To get there they had to make their way first through the three higher levels, the Inner Cities, the Guardian Cities, the Free Cities. She had a vague idea of a route that ran down through Banglecode to Hoikmar or Greel and another that led downward from there to Castlethorn or Gimkandale, which ought to take them to Dundilmir and thence to ground leveL But her knowledge of Mount geography was imperfect and did not at all include an awareness of the intricate spires and secondary peaks that complicated travel up and down the sides of the immense mountain. One couldn’t simply go from Point A to Point B because they were in a straight line on a map; one had to find a road that actually connected them, and sometimes that involved going halfway around the Mount. And so they spent their first night, unexpectedly, at an inn in the city of Guand, which Thismet had never visited in her life, and which they arrived in under the mistaken impression that they had taken the Banglecode road out of Halanx.

  The inn was the best they could find, but it was something less than luxurious. From the innkeeper came impertinent stares, even though they had dressed as unflatteringly as they knew how, with all color washed from their faces and their hair pulled severely back. The room was small and bleak and there were stains on the walls and the bedding did not seem fresh. The dinner they bought for themselves there was unthinkably bad, unknown pale meat fried in grease. All night there were sounds of laughter and bedsprings from adjacent rooms.

  “Will it be like this, do you imagine, all the way to Gloyn?” Thismet asked.

  “Worse, my lady. This is still Castle Mount.”

  When the time came to pay the reckoning, Thismet discovered she had brought no money with her. Money was not something a Coronal’s sister was accustomed to carrying. Fortunately, Melithyrrh had a purse of royals with her; but it seemed a small purse, and Thismet began to think they would be pawning her jewelry to pay for these miserable lodging-houses as the journey went on. Things would get worse, yes, Thismet saw.

  Somehow they found their way down the Mount. Somehow they located roads that would take them westward, though they had no maps and no skill at traveling. “We should look for highway signs that say ‘Alaisor,”’ Thismet said. “Alaisor is in the west.” But Melithyrrh pointed out that Alaisor was thousands of miles away—eight thousand miles, ten, perhaps, all the way out by the sea—and was not likely to be shown on highway signs this far inland. So they tried to think of other cities closer to the Mount that lay in the right direction. “Arkilon,” Thismet suggested, remembering that there had been a big battle there the year before and that she had seen on the map it was west of the Mount. So they went to Arkilon.

  There they found a traveler staying at their inn who suggested that they go south to Sisivondal next, and drew a little chart for them showing how it would avoid the difficult crossing of the Trikkala Mountains if they did that. “You are very kind,” said Thismet, smiling, a phrase and a smile which he mistook, putting his hand boldly on her thigh as they sat together at table, so that she had to let him see the dagger strapped within the sleeve of her blouse. After that he was more polite. But the imprint of that roaming hand burned against her skin for hours thereafter.

  They went to Sisivondal. It was the ugliest place Thismet had ever seen. Not even in nightmares had she conceived anything more hideous. This time their hotel room was a barren stuffy box. It seemed all but airless; but when they opened the window, a fine rain of sand came sifting in on them.

  Roads led from Sisivondal in all directions. A maze of signs confronted them.

  “Which way is Gloyn?” Thismet asked, dispirited. “I never imagined that Majipoor was so big!”

  “It is the biggest world in all the heavens,” said Melithyrrh. “The biggest where people of the human sort can live, at least.”

  “And we must travel it alone, two pampered women.”

  “It was our choice, lady.”

  “Yes. There was no other, was there?”

  No. No choice. She knew she had come to the end of her time at the court, that place which once had been so lovely and had somehow been transformed into a place of disappointment and rebuke. Already the Castle and all its horrors seemed far away: the skulking leering Farquanor, the snorting bestial Procurator, the treacherous mages, the noble brother who had treated her so ignobly when she had asked him for a place in his government. She scarcely missed her jade drawing room and her alabaster tub, her robes and bangles, her whole luxurious empty life. She was done with all that. It was dead. Over. A new life was what she sought now, and would find in the west. But still—this endless wearying journey—that impudent hand on her thigh, burning like a flame—the shabby hotels, the dreary roads, the ghastly food—

  The territory around Sisivondal was a vast dusty wasteland. A dry hot dusty wind blew across it all the time. They kept the floater sealed tight, and yet, when Thismet glanced at Melithyrrh, she could see Melithyrrh’s golden hair coated with a sandy film, and knew that hers must be like that also. Grit in her eyes, grit between her teeth, grit along her arms and down between her breasts. Her skin was dry; her throat was dry. Her soul itself was parched. She had never felt so filthy, so bedraggled, so unglamorous, so little like anything that anyone would recognize as the Lady Thismet of Lord Confalume’s Castle. They drove on and on, praying that this grim sandy plain would come to an end eventually; and eventually it did, and the air grew sweet and the world became Majipoor-beautiful again.

  “We are nearing Gloyn at last, I hope,” Thismet said one magnificent sunlit morning as they passed through a land of glistening green fields.

  They stopped for information at a farm where some mysterious-looking plant with purple leaves was being grown in fields that stretched onward, one after another, out of sight. Gloyn? Gloyn? Ah, yes, Gloyn! That was on the road to Marakeeba, was it not? Well, then, they had passed the highway for Gloyn seven hundred miles ago. Go back to Kessilroge, turn right there and go three hundred miles, watch for signs for Gannamunda, and at Gannamunda look for the Hunzimar Highway—Very well. Back to Kessilroge.

  The Vale of Gloyn was the place where Prestimion’s army lay encamped, a great broad savanna in west-central Alhanroel, almost equidistant between the Mount and the seacoast at Alaisor. All this flat peaceful land was covered by huge carpets of coppery-hued, shin-high gattaga-grass, the blades of which were so close-knit and thick that when you walked upon ityou left a trail that could be seen half an hour afterward; and those hundreds of miles of gattaga-grass were home to immense herds of grazing animals that lived there as they had a hundred thousand years before, or a million.

  Duke Svor, who had ridden out of camp alone that day, was standing near the sharp peak of one of the dwarf mountains that were scattered across the plain, ship-sized piles of rock eighty or a hundred feet high rising like little stony islands above the grass. From that vantage point he looked out now on these herds in wonder.

  The gattaga-grass spread to the limits of his vision. Here, close at hand, were ten or twenty or fifty thousand of the large, stocky, flat-faced quadrupeds called klimbergeysts, whose hides were dappled with shifting patterns of red and gold. They looked like so many thousands of sunsets wandering freely in the plain. Off to his left was a glade of tall, spiky gray trees where dozens of long-necked browsers that stood close to fifty feet high were feeding on the tender top leaves. He had no idea of the name of these animals. Their long slender legs were rigid and angular, with three sets of equidistant knees; their necks were as flexible as serpents, topped by heads that were little more than gigantic mouths and dim, uneasy eyes. Untiringly, they ripped the soft growth from the towering trees, and just as untiringly the trees put forth new leaves as soon as the browsers passed by.

  On the other side of him Svor observed a squat tank-shaped thing with gleaming armored
hide, not very different in appearance from a mollitor but obviously much less warlike, moving placidly along the margin of a swampy area where the pink shoots of some water plant were sprouting. Beyond it, at the opening of a secondary valley that had two of the little island-mountains serving as its gateway, he saw another huge grazing herd, these being the broad-nosed piglike animals called vongiforin, snuffling about in the gattaga for the small sweet seeds on which they fed. The sun was warm and mild; fleecy clouds drifted overhead; a light soft breeze was blowing out of the south.

  An idyllic scene, Svor thought.

  Almost idyllic anyway. He noted the presence, atop one of the nearby island-mountains, of a trio of slim, tawny hunting-animals, kepjitaljis, who were eyeing the grazing vongiforin with interest. The kepjitaljis—a mother and two cubs, he supposed—were long and tapering, with harsh wedge-shaped heads, bright eyes like red stars, fierce-clawed forearms, and great powerful hind legs that could propel them swiftly forward in inexorable hopping motions. He had seen the same trio two days before, lying growling and bloody-mouthed in a heap of gnawed ribs. No doubt they would be feeding again before very long.

  Behind him, on the far side of the miniature mountain that he had made his lookout post, was Prestimion’s camp.

  This new army was bigger than any of its predecessors, and continued to grow daily as volunteers from every part of Alhanroel came flocking to the rebel banner. Survivors of Prestimion’s shattered army from the Iyann had been the first to enroll, and there were more of those than Prestimion had dared to suspect gathered here, once again, were Duke Miaule of Hither Miaule, and golden-haired Spalirises of Tumbrax, and sturdy Gynim of Tapilpil with his band of sling-casters, and many others of that hardy crew, every one of them brimming with tales of their escape from the raging floodwaters and all athrob with desire for vengeance on the cowardly enemy who had brought the reservoir tumbling down upon them.

  But there were others now, myriad others: a legion of men from the southern lands, Stoien and Aruachosia and Vrist, and a host from misty Vrambikat, which was far to the east on the other side of Castle Mount, and men of towns at the base of the Mount itself, Megenthorp and Bevel and Da, and troops of the city of Matrician, where Fengiraz, whose mother had been the dearest childhood friend of Prestimion’s mother, had his flourishing dukedom, and Gornoth Gehayn and his fearless sons, with their trained hieraxes, out of the west country to serve as airborne spies. And still more came every day; and every day Prestimion and Gialaurys and Septach Melayn toiled from dusk to dark to weld them into a single force that would shortly begin its march eastward to make war against the false Coronal.

  Some of these men had come to Gloyn out of love of Prestimion, and some out of anger over the illicit taking of the throne by Korsibar, and a good many because they had heard the whispered tales now circulating of Korsibar being a Metamorph in disguise, and they would not allow such a thing to stand. Some were only looking for adventure; some hoped to better their lot. And more than a few had given allegiance to Prestimion’s force of rebels out of simple repugnance for Korsibar’s dastardly breaking of the Mavestoi Dam. In that last group was a contingent of farmers of the Iyann Valley, all of whom had lost kinsmen in the flooding, and who, although they were not in any way soldierly by inclination or training, had come to Gloyn bearing hatchets and spades and pitchforks and whatever other implements of husbandry they thought could be put to good use against the usurper and his army.

  It was a wondrous fine army that was coming together here, and Svor, looking back upon it from his hilltop place, was greatly gladdened to see it spread out below him, parading up and down and practicing its maneuvers of attack and defense. The knowledge that Prestimion had regained his sense of purpose after those dark months in Triggoin gave Svor great joy, for it was the hope of his heart that his friend would prosper and triumph and take his rightful place on the Confalume Throne.

  But for his own part, Svor had lately had a sufficiency of observing these military matters and wanted a little respite from them. Since he was no soldier himself, he had little role in this drilling and marching and drawing up of battle plans, nor did he take much pleasure in the responsibilities assigned to him; and his own idleness was coming to chafe him. He longed for his rooms in the Castle, for his books and his charts of the stars, and for his ladies. Especially for them, for great energy coursed through Duke Svor’s wiry little body, energy that he long ago had learned was most readily released in a woman’s arms. In his day he had had covert romantic passages with many a great lady of the Castle, and many a tryst in the surrounding cities of the Mount, and even in the grim Labyrinth he had managed to find companions in pleasure.

  But there were no women in Prestimion’s camp at Gloyn, nor were there cities nearby where he might find any. Restlessness was growing in Svor now on that account. Which was why he had gone riding out this day by himself into the savanna that lay north and west of the camp, not with any goal in mind, but only to rid himself, if he could, of the tension that idleness and his solitary nights in this place had engendered in him.

  Borrowing a mount from the cavalry stockade, he had come up here atop this little mountain to look out into the open country beyond the camp; and now, choosing his destination randomly, Svor went riding off into the adjacent valley where the herd of vongiforin was grazing.

  It was low-lying, somewhat moist country in there. The vongiforin were innumerable, a sea of them stretching off to the horizon, with occasional subherds of klimbergeysts and other animals grazing among them. They were all peaceful beasts, and they moved obligingly aside, making unmusical little snorting sounds as Svor’s mount made its way through their midst. He rode for perhaps half an hour in a northwesterly direction. Then, seeing another of the little island-mountains before him, he tethered his mount at its base and scrambled up the side of it to survey the terrain that lay still farther beyond him.

  A surprising sight greeted him there.

  Another valley lay below, a broad expanse of coppery gattaga-grass divided here and there by small streams. In the midst of it, some three hundred yards to the north, Svor was startled to behold a dusty and somewhat dented floater sitting at a sorry angle in a boggy patch, as though it had been allowed to drive too close to the surface of the land and had fouled its rotors with mud. Two women stood beside it—young ones, from the looks of them. There did not seem to be anyone else. One was fair-haired, one was dark; and even at this distance Svor could see by their stance that they were troubled and perplexed by the plight of their vehicle.

  Two women, traveling alone by floater in this unpopulated trackless countryside of vongiforins and klimbergeysts and sharp-clawed kepjitaljis? An unlikely sight, but one that definitely bore investigation.

  Svor hurried back to his mount and rode quickly toward the stranded floater.

  7

  THERE WAS NO vegetation here other than grass, and the women saw him coming when he was still some distance away. They stared and pointed at him, and moved cautiously together against the flank of the floater as Svor approached. Yes, definitely young, Svor saw now. Shabbily dressed, but both of them quite shapely, and they carried themselves well. The dark-haired one in particular, he thought, held herself with great elegance and self-possession. But what in the name of the Divine were they doing here? This was no place for women. The only likely explanation was that they had journeyed here unbidden to be with their lovers or husbands in Prestimion’s army, which was a rash and unwise thing for them to have done.

  And then he was close enough to make out their faces. “By all the gods and demons!” Svor cried hoarsely, astonished beyond all reckoning. “My lady,” he said. “How did you come to be—”

  “Get down from that mount and stand beside it with both your hands in the air,” Thismet said. She gripped a small energy-thrower in her hand, aimed at the midpoint of his chest.

  “My lady, I am unarmed,” Svor said, quickly dismounting. “And I would mean you no harm in any case. Pl
ease—that weapon is dangerous—”

  “Just stand where you are, my lord duke.” Her face seemed cold and hard. “I’m looking for Prestimion’s camp.”

  “Behind us.” He gestured with his head. The energy-thrower struck cold dread into him; he wished she would put it aside.

  “Far?”

  “Less than an hour’s ride.”

  “Take us there, Svor.”

  “Of course, my lady. If you please, the weapon—there is no need—”

  “I suppose.” She lowered the energy-thrower and slipped it into a holder at her side. Her voice softened alittle. “I was afraid you might slay us out of hand, thinking I was doing some spying for my brother. But spying is hardly my purpose in coming here.”

  Svor wondered if he dared ask her what that purpose was. Her presence here was altogether mystifying. They had not had an easy journey of it, that much was sure. Both Thismet and Melithyrrh were grimy and drawn and disheveled to a degree that made them almost unrecognizable. The simple peasant clothes that they wore were dirty and torn; their faces were stained, their hair was all asnarl; they both looked badly undernourished and they did not seem to have slept for several days. The intensity of Thismet’s great beauty, shining through the blowsiness, was undiminished. But she was a frightful sight, and the Lady Melithyrrh no better. Why in the world had they come? Could their presence here be part of some deadly trick that the enemy had devised? He could see the little dagger fastened along the inside of her arm, showing through where the sleeve of her blouse was torn. But even if she had no sinister ideas in mind, the sudden appearance of Korsibar’s sister at Gloyn was incomprehensible.