“Would you wrestle again, my good lord, or shall we have it out with broadswords?” Gialaurys asked. “For now is your last moment at hand, one way or the other.”
Farholt’s answer was a harsh grunt and a great sweeping downward blow with his sword that Gialaurys barely managed to block as it emerged at him out of the dark; but Farholt struck again and again and yet again in devilish heat, three great clanging strokes that Gialaurys managed somehow to defend against, and then a fourth that rang against his helmet and knocked him staggering, as he had staggered that day when he wrestled with Farholt at the games in the Labyrinth. His mind was sent awhirl and he wentwandering afew paces away, so that Farholt lost sight of him, and called out in the strange midday night, “Where are you, Gialaurys? Come: we have old business to finish here. For this is the final bout, and your carcass will feed the milufta-birds tonight.”
“Business to finish indeed,” said Gialaurys, still dizzied and awry, but inflamed now with red fury as never ever before. “Your corpse or mine, Farholt, meat for the miluftas in all truth. We will not both walk away from here.” And went lurching back to the place where he thought Farholt to be, and grasped his sword with both hands and swung it around sideways through the air in the darkness with such force as can be mustered only once of a lifetime, for he was riven through and through with hatred and loathing and contempt for this man who had dogged his days so long. And felt his blade connect with the sword of Farholt that was trying to parry, and turn it And went driving onward in that same single motion, and onward still, slicing through the armor about Farholt’s waist as though it were mere paper, and cutting deep into Farholt’s side and almost to his spine. Farholt made a single liquid sound and fell doubled up, and Gialaurys, standing over him, raised his sword up high again, but then even in the darkness came to understand there was no need to strike, for he had cut Farholt nearly in half with that one maddened swing.
In another part of the field Duke Svor, who had entered the battle because he saw no decent way to remain out of it, found himself jostling up against someone no taller than himself, and without pausing to think caught the man by his shoulder with one hand and pulled him up close against him, so that he could see into his face. And by the hard glint of his eyes he knew him to be none other than the icy-souled High Counsellor Farquanor, whom he had always detested more than any man in the world.
“I would not have thought to find you on this battlefield,” Svor told him. “For you are no warrior, are you, Farquanor?”
“Nor you either, I would say. And yet we are here. Why is that, do you think?”
“I because I am loyal to my friend. And you, I suppose, because you hoped to win some further advantage from Korsibar by displaying your valor to him, such valor as there may be within you. Is that it, would you say?”
All this while Svor continued to hold the squirming Farquanor by the side of his collar, pressing down on the collarbone beneath.
“Let go of me, Svor. We have no quarrel, you and I. Let these great belching animals here slaughter each other, but why should we fight? We are natural allies of the spirit.”
“Are we, now?” Svor laughed. “Tell me this, my dear beloved ally: was it you put Gonivaul up to pimping Thismet to me in the parley as the price of my defection? For that had the marks of your hand all over it.”
“Let me go,” said Farquanor again. “We can discuss these things some other time in some other place. Come, Svor, let’s flee this field, and leave these madmen to their destruction.”
“Ah, no. I will be a hero at last, I think. For the time has come for me to show that I can be valiant, at least when dealing with the likes of you.”
With that he drew the sword that he had used so infrequently in his life and took a step backward to run it through Farquanor; but just as Svor came lunging forward, Farquanor produced a poniard that he had worn at his hip, and brought it upward at Svor’s belly in a quick swift jab. It was only to be expected, Svor thought sadly, that Farquanor would have a little hidden weapon to call upon. But there was no avoiding it, and so he took the sharp point in his unguarded middle and felt the fire of it coursing like a river of molten metal through his vital organs. “Well done,” Svor murmured. “You are yourself to the very last, Farquanor.” And, saying that, drove his sword through Farquanor’s gut so that its tip emerged on the far side, which drew them together in a close embrace. They fell to the ground together, still locked in that strange hug, and their bloods mingled on the battlefield.
Prestimion had lost his second mount, the one given him by Gialaurys, slain out from under him as he wheeled through the black noontime calling to his men. He continued on foot, slinging his bow across his back and taking his sword in hand. Some light now had begun to come through once more as the spell of darkness weakened, and he saw all about him on the battlefield men dead and dying, and little battles going on here and there within the broader melee, and it seemed to him that his side had all the tide running with it. There was no sign any longer of that wall of men with shields Korsibar had stationed atop the hill, nor any fixed formations in back of them; the two armies had come together in mid-slope, muddled and chaotic, and the rebel forces appeared to be forming themselves in a circle around the shaken loyalists, pushing them ever tighter into a trap from which there was no escaping.
He sought for Septach Melayn, for Gialaurys, for Abrigant, for any familiar face. None of those could he find, but indeed shortly found someone familiar indeed, though not one to give him any joy. Coming up toward him out of the thinning darkness was Dantirya Sambail, in splendid armor somewhat marred by mud and scratches. He carried a bare sword in one hand and some rough farmer’s axe in the other. First the lackey and now the master, thought Prestimion. He was meeting with a surfeit of evil this day.
In the midst of that gory field Dantirya Sambail let forth a cheerful whoop.
“Well, cousin Prestimion, here we are! Shall we fight? Winner gets to be Coronal; for surely Korsibar has choked on his own bile by now, seeing his certain victory turned to ashes by your Triggoin sorcerers, and that leaves only you and me to contend for the crown. Sorcerers, Prestimion! Who would ever have thought it of you?” And the Procurator laughed his most raucous laugh, and lifted the axe up on high, and swung it through the air.
The strong sweeping blow would have cut through Prestimion’s arm at the shoulder, had it landed. But quickly Prestimion stepped forward and in and put his sword up so that the hilt of it clanged against the handle of the descending axe and turned it aside; and then thrust his face up against that of Dantirya Sambail, with his eyes staring deep into the beautiful, treacherous amethyst eyes of that ugly diabolic man.
In a low voice he said, “Put down the axe, cousin, and let there be an end to war between us. It is not in me to take your life; but I will if you force me to it.”
“You are a generous man, Prestimion. Your soul is very large,” said the Procurator with another boisterous guffaw, and his eyes became orbs of fierce purple fire. He leaned forward and down with his shoulder against Prestimion, intending to throw him to the ground, for Dantirya Sambail was half a head taller than Prestimion and had perhaps twice the bulk. But Prestimion leaped swiftly back. His sword, a light rapier to the Procurator’s heavy saber, had the same disadvantage of size that he himself did; but it was what he had, and he would use it.
You are not Prestimion of Muldemar now, he told himself. You must be Septach Melayn, or else you are a dead man.
For years Prestimion had studied Septach Melayn’s swordsmanship with keen pleasure. It was a thing of utter beauty. It was poetry; it was music; it was mathematics. It was also a matter of quickness of wrist and keenness of eye and intelligent extension of arm. And Septach Melayn’s natural grace and preternaturally elongated limbs gave him an innate advantage in all those aspects. Prestimion, short and compact and sturdy, was built to a different plan. But he would do what he could.
Before him stood the true author of all his grie
f—that much he understood now. Nothing unhappy had befallen him that Dantirya Sambail had not had a hand in, somewhere. Prestimion felt himself grow hot with fury. Strike at him, he thought, and you are striking at all your misfortunes in a single thrust.
Dantirya Sambail came rushing at him with the axe again, and the saber held ready for the killing stroke after it. Prestimion stepped slightly to one side and pivoted, and then went darting boldly in under his ponderous opponent’s onslaught, coming so close that the axe could not strike him. And even in those close quarters was able deftly to bring the tip of his sword straight upward into the pit of the Procurator’s arm, piercing a path through nerve and muscle and tendon.
“Ha!” cried Dantirya Sambail in surprise and pain, and let the axe go clattering from his numbed hand. But there was enough presence of mind and sheer ferocity in him to bring the saber in his other hand around and strike Prestimion a terrible blow in the ribs with the flat of it, even jammed up against each other as they were. It knocked the breath from Prestimion and darkened his senses a moment, so that he went reeling back some five or six steps and came close to falling.
The Procurator ran heavily toward him and loomed over him, flushed and excited with the thrill of impending triumph, and jabbed at him with the saber. But it was a left-handed thrust poorly launched. Prestimion, though he was wincing from the pain in his battered side and the wound he had received earlier from Mandralisca, lifted his sword and brought it dancing through Dantirya Sambail’s guard, probing for his heart and forcing him to move the saber aside to parry. And then with a quick reversal of direction that would have brought applause from Septach Melayn, he drew the tip of the rapier along the inside of the Procurator’s sword-arm, cutting a long bright red line down it from elbow to wrist.
Dantirya Sambail’s sword fell clattering to the ground. Instantly Prestimion had the point of his own against the underside of his opponent’s out-thrust jaw, where the soft flesh was.
“Go ahead,” the Procurator said. “Shove it home, cousin!”
“What a pleasure that would be,” said Prestimion. “But no. No, cousin, no.” Not like this; not the slaughter of a prisoner, even this one. He could not. He would not. All his wrath had turned away. There had been enough killing for now. And Dantirya Sambail, evil though he was, was somehow much beloved in his own land of Zimroel. Prestimion would not want the hatred of the millions of people of Zimroel when he was Coronal.
He saw his brother Abrigant coming up out of the chaos of the field toward him, and Rufiel Kisimir of Muldemar, and four or five other men of his city with them. The poison-taster Mandralisca was with them, wounded and a prisoner, his wrists tied behind his back and one side of his face streaming red. He was glaring sullenly, as though he would gladly spit forth a tide of venom upon them all.
They observed Prestimion holding Dantirya Sambail at bay, and sped up beside him now, Abrigant seizing one of the Procurator’s bloodied arms and Rufiel Kisimir the other and pulling them around hard behind his back.
“Strike, brother!” Abrigant cried. “What are you waiting for?”
“This is not the appointed hour of his death,” said Prestimion quietly, putting down his sword. He drew breath, grimacing, and rubbed at his aching ribs. “Take him and bind him and put him under safe guard. He’ll rest a time in the tunnels of Sangamor, and then the courts can have him. On some other day will he die, and not at my hands. Take the poison-taster too. But see to it that they are kept in separate places far from one another.” And he walked away, leaving Dantirya Sambail astounded and gaping behind him.
Navigorn said, “We are lost, and no question of it. Our army is reduced to a rabble that can’t even find the proper way to flee; Prestimion’s men are everywhere around us and they know that victory is theirs. I see Farholt dead on the field, and Farquanor too, and many another. We should go to Prestimion and yield to him before more lives are lost, including our own.”
Korsibar gave him an incredulous stare. “What? Surrender, is that what you advise, Navigorn?”
“I see no other path for us.”
“This is not the first battle we’ve lost in this war.”
“This is our worst defeat. And this time he’ll take us both prisoner, and your whole Council as well.”
“You no longer call me ‘my lord,’ I notice.”
Navigorn made a sorrowful gesture. “What can I say? We have thrown our dice and the fall is against us. The game is over, Korsibar.”
They were unbearable words. In his first hot rage, Korsibar came close to raising his sword against Navigorn. But he held his hand and said simply, in the darkest and bleakest of voices, “I am still Coronal, Navigorn. There will be no surrender. And you are dismissed from my service.”
“Yes,” Navigorn said. “That I am.”
He turned and walked swiftly away across the muddy bloodied field. Korsibar let his gaze follow after him for a long moment. He felt nothing. Nothing. He was moving into a place beyond all feeling now. There was a cold numbness stealing over his body, traveling upward from his legs toward his heart, and from there to his brain.
I never wanted to be king, he thought. It was put in my path, and I snatched it up as if in a dream.
“What have you all done to me?” he said aloud. And then: “What have I done?”
It was a catastrophe beyond all prediction. Dead men lay all around him. His maguses had told him that this would be a day of victory, that all the final reckonings would be made this day, that by nightfall Majipoor would have only one Coronal and the world would be at peace again. In his rashness he had allowed himself to draw a dear assurance of his triumph from those prophecies.
But now—look—look—
He moved numbly onward through the scene of the disaster, his face set like stone. Then the unmistakable form of Sanibak-Thastimoon rose up before him in the shadowy afterdawn of the muddy darkness that Prestimion’s sorcerers had called down upon them.
“You,” Korsibar said. Some heat returned to his soul. His voice was thick with rage. “You lied to me!”
“Never, my lord.”
“A day of victory, you said. A day of final reckonings.”
“And so it is,” said the Su-Suheris coolly. “Were we not correct in our prognostication? For surely there has been a victory here today.”
Korsibar’s eyes widened. He saw now how Sanibak-Thastimoon had gulled him: or rather, how he had gulled himself by reading what he wished to hear into the mage’s words.
He swept his arm across the field before them. “How did you allow this to befall us? Was there nothing you could have done to protect us? Look, Sanibak-Thastimoon, look! We are entirely put to rout’ ”
“He had the mightiest sorcerers of Majipoor arrayed among his troops. I am not invincible, my lord.”
“You could have warned me that he’d somehow snuff out the sun at noon. We might have taken some steps to hold our line when the darkness came.”
“May I remind you, my lord, that your line had already broken of its own accord, before Prestimion’s wizards had even brought the darkness down upon—”
It was too much. Korsibar felt all the woe of this dreadful day falling upon him like a crumbling mountain dropping from the sky, and pain and sorrow and guilt overflowed in him beyond control. They had all led him into this disaster, had seduced him into it step by step—this alien magus, first and foremost of all—and now they had left the monstrous shame of it to stain his name forever.
His sword sprang into his hand; he plunged wildly forward, slashing at the sorcerer, only to find nothing before him but a curtain of blackness, a zone of deeper darkness within the artificial dusk all about them. “Where are you?” he called. “Where did you go, Sanibak-Thastimoon!”
It seemed to him that he saw a movement at his side, and began to turn. But he was too late. The Su-Suheris, still half concealed by his spell, had come around behind him: and now, as Korsibar flailed furiously at shadows with his sword, the sorcerer??
?s dagger slipped into his back just below the cage of his ribs, gliding upward until it touched the tip of his heart.
All strength left him at that touch. Korsibar fell forward and knelt in the mud, choking and gasping, looking dazedly downward at the sight of his own blood cascading from his lips.
Through the thickening mists of his consciousness he heard a voice calling to him.
“Brother? Brother!”
It was Thismet, suddenly swirling up out of nowhere like an apparition. Korsibar raised his head—it was a terrible effort—and stared at her with dimming eyes.
She knelt beside him.
“What are you—doing—here?” he asked indistinctly.
“I came to urge you to yield to Prestimion while there was still a chance,” she said.
He smiled and nodded, but said nothing.
Her arm was about his shoulder, but he was sagging heavily and she barely had the strength to hold him upright. Three harsh gusts of breath came from him, and then the death-rattle. Gently Thismet released him, and he sprawled out before her. “Oh, Korsibar—Korsibar—so it was all for nothing, brother, all for nothing—”
She looked toward Sanibak-Thastimoon, who still stood to one side, arms folded, watching in silence.
“You!” she cried. “You’re responsible for all this, with all your talk of how he was born for greatness, how he’d shake the world. Well, he shook it, all right. But now look! Look!” She snatched up Korsibar’s sword, which had fallen from his nerveless hand, and brandished it frenziedly at the sorcerer in a wild thrust. Sanibak-Thastimoon, towering far above her, swept it aside with his own as though it were a mere stick. And, stepping swiftly toward her, drove deep into her the dagger with which he had killed Korsibar, plunging it home between her breasts. She fell without a sound.
Then someone said nearby, “What, Sanibak-Thastimoon? Both of them dead, brother and sister too? And at your hand, is it?”