The three dancers who were to play the guilty sinners sat to one side, watching the spectacle with everyone else. Their time to take the stage was still hours away; the storyteller must first relate in full detail the arrival of other demons, the one-winged bird and the one-legged dragon and the creature that eats its own entrails, and many more. He must speak of demonic orgies, and the drinking of blood. He must tell of transformations, the beasts that interchanged shapes. He must tell of the beautiful young women who wordlessly make obscene overtures to young men on lonely roads late at night. He must—
As the old tale unfolded Erb Skonarij, watching from the seat of privilege that was his by virtue of his decades as the village’s keeper of the calendars, felt a sudden searing pain within his skull, as though a band of hot iron had been clamped around his brain.
It was a fearful sensation. He had never known such pain.
He began to think that the hour of his death had come at last. But then, as it went on and on without surcease, the thought came to him that perhaps he would not die, that he would simply be forced to suffer like this forever.
And it was, he realized after a time, an agony not of the body, but of the spirit.
Something was striking a knife into his soul. Something was whipping his innermost self with a whip of fire. Something was hammering at the substance of his being with a massive jagged boulder.
He was the sinner. He had brought the fury of the demons down upon the village. He, he, he, the keeper of the calendars, the guardian of the ceremonies: he had failed in his task, he had violated his trust, he had betrayed those who depended on him, and unless he confessed his guilt right here and now the entire village would suffer for his iniquities.
Rising from his place of honor, he came tottering forward into the center of the stage.
“Stop!” he cried. “I am the one! I must be punished! For me, the flails! For me, the whips! Drive me out! Cast me from your midst!”
The music died away in a confusion of discordance. The humming of the choristers ceased. The storyteller’s cadenced voice cut off in mid-phrase. They were all staring at him. Erb Skonarij looked out into the audience and saw the wide bewildered eyes too, the open mouths.
The throbbing in his skull was unrelenting. It was splitting him apart.
Someone’s hand was around his arm. A voice close by his right ear-membrane said, “You must sit down, old man. The ceremony will be spoiled. You of all people—”
“No!” Erb Skonarij pulled himself free. “I am the one! I bring the demons!” He pointed toward the storyteller, who was gaping at him in amazement and fright. “Tell it! Tell it! The treason of the calendar-keeper, tell it! Set me free, will you? Set us all free! I can no longer bear the pain!”
Why would they not listen to him?
A desperate lurch brought him up before the two demons, the Rangda Geyak, the Tjal Goring Geyak. They had halted now in their dance. Erb Skonarij scooped up the flails that they were meant to use at the climax of the ceremony and thrust them into their hands.
“Beat me! Whip me! Drive me out!”
The two masked figures still stood motionless. Erb Skonarij pressed his hands to his pounding forehead. The pain, the pain! Did no one understand? They were in the presence of real sin: they must expel it from the village, and all would suffer, he most of all, until it was done. But no one would move. No one.
He uttered a muffled cry of despair and rushed toward the roaring bonfire. This was wrong, he knew. The sinner must not punish himself. He must be forced from their midst by the united effort of all the villagers, or the exorcism would have no value to the village. But they would not do it; and he could no longer bear the pain, let alone the shame or the grief.
He was amazed at how soothing the warmth of those flames was. Hands clutched at him, but he knocked them aside. The fire…the fire…it sang to him of forgiveness and peace.
He cast himself in.
2
Mandralisca lifted the helmet from his head. Khaymak Barjazid sat facing him, watching him avidly. Jacomin Halefice stood near the door of Mandralisca’s chamber, with the Lord Gaviral beside him. Mandralisca shook his head, blinked a couple of times, rubbed the center of his brow with his fingertips. There was a ringing in his ears, a tightness in his chest.
For a time no one spoke, until at last Barjazid said, “Well, your grace? What was it like?”
“A powerful experience. How long did I have the thing on?”
“Fifteen seconds or so. Perhaps half a minute at most.”
“That’s all,” Mandralisca said, idly fondling the smooth metal mesh. “Strange. It seemed like a much, much longer time.” The sensations that had just gone coursing through him still reverberated in his spirit. He realized that he had not yet entirely returned from his journey.
In the immediate aftermath of the experiment an odd jangling restlessness gripped him. Every nerve was sensitized. He felt the beating of the hot sun against the walls of the building, heard the whistling of the desert wind across the plain of pungatans far below, had an oppressive sense of the thick musky atmosphere of the air about him in here.
Rising, he roved the perimeter of the circular room, cruising it like some caged beast. Halefice and even Gaviral stepped to the side, scuttling out of his way as he strode past the place where they were standing. Mandralisca barely noticed them. To his mind in its currently elevated state they seemed like nothing more than little scurrying animals to him, droles, mintuns, hiktigans, unimportant creatures of the forest. Insects, even. Mere insects.
He had gone down into that little metal helmet, somehow. His entire mind had entered it; and then, in a way he could not begin to comprehend, he had been able to hurl himself outward, like a burning spear soaring through the sky—
Barjazid said, “Do you have any idea how far you went, or where?”
“No. Not at all.” How curious to be holding a conversation with an insect. But he forced himself to pay attention to Barjazid’s query. “I perceived it as a considerable distance, but for all I know it was no farther than the city on the other side of the river.”
“It was probably much farther, your grace. The reach is infinite, you know: there’s no more effort involved in reaching Alaisor or Tolaghai or Piliplok than there is in going next door. It’s the directionality that we can’t control. Not yet, anyway.”
“Could it reach the Castle, do you think?” asked the Lord Gaviral.
“As I have just told his grace the Count Mandralisca,” Barjazid said, “the reach is infinite.” Mandralisca noticed that Barjazid had already learned to be extremely patient with Gaviral. That was a very good idea, when dealing with someone who is very stupid but who has a great deal of power over you.
“So we could reach out with it and hit Prestimion, then?” asked Gaviral avidly. “Or Dekkeret?”
“We might, in time,” Barjazid replied. “As I have also just observed, we do not yet have real directionality. We can only strike randomly thus far.”
“But eventually,” Gaviral said. “Oh, yes, eventually—!”
It was all that Mandralisca could do to keep himself from cutting Gaviral down with some contemptuous remark. Reach out and hit Prestimion? The fool. The fool. That was the last thing they wanted to do. The boy Thastain had a shrewder grip of political strategy than any of these five brainless brothers. But this was not the moment to foment a breach with one of the men who were, at least in theory, his masters.
He considered what Barjazid’s helmet had just allowed him to accomplish. That was more interesting to him than anything these people might have to say.
He had cast forth his mind and hurt someone with the helmet. Of that he was certain. He had no idea clear idea of whom, or where; but he had no doubt that he had encountered another mind someplace far away, a priest of some kind, perhaps, at any rate someone who was officiating at a ritual, and had penetrated it, and had damaged it. Extinguished it, perhaps. Certainly done great harm. He knew what it w
as like to injure someone: a very distinctive feeling of pleasure, almost sexual in nature, which he had experienced many times in his life. He had felt it just now, with a new and astounding intensity. Some distant stranger, recoiling in pain and shock at his thrust—
—he had flown like a spear, a burning spear soaring halfway across the world—
Like a god.
“Your brother would never let me try the helmet,” Mandralisca said to Khaymak Barjazid. Returning to his desk, he tossed the device down in the middle of it. “I asked him more than once, while we were camped there in the Stoienzar. Just to find out what it was like, you know. The kind of sensation it was. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I would not dare risk it, Mandralisca. The power is too great.’ He meant that I might injure myself, I assumed. But as I thought about it afterward I saw a different meaning in the phrase. ‘The power is too great for me to trust you with it,’ is what he was really saying. I think he feared I might go poking around in his mind.”
“He was constantly afraid of something like that—that the helmet might be used against him.”
“Was I not his ally?”
“No. My brother never saw anyone as an ally. Everyone was dangerous. Remember, his own son turned against him during Dantirya Sambail’s rebellion, and brought one of the helmets to Prestimion and Dekkeret. No one could ever have persuaded Venghenar to let anyone else get near a helmet after that.”
“I watched Prestimion destroy him with the helmet that Dinitak brought him,” Mandralisca said.
His voice sounded strange in his own ears. He understood that he must still not have fully shaken off the effect of having donned that helmet. These three men still seemed like insects to him. They had no significance whatsoever.
“Your brother,” he said to Barjazid, speaking as though the other two were not in the room, “was standing right next to me, with his own helmet on. He and Prestimion were having a duel of some sort with their helmets, hundreds of miles apart, thousands, maybe. I saw your brother collecting himself for one final thrust; but before he could unleash it, Prestimion hit him with the helmet-force and knocked him to his knees. ‘Prestimion,’ your brother said, and started to moan, and Prestimion struck him once or twice more, and I could see then that his mind was altogether burned out. An hour or two later Septach Melayn and Gialaurys burst upon us. One of them came upon him and slew him.”
“As we will slay Prestimion,” said the Lord Gaviral grandly.
Mandralisca acted as though Gaviral had not said anything. Slay Prestimion? That was no answer to the problem of attaining freedom for the western continent. Constrain Prestimion, yes. Control him. Use him. That was what this helmet would achieve, in the fullness of time. But why kill him? That would only put Dekkeret into the high seat of power at the Labyrinth and bring some other Coronal to the summit of Castle Mount, and they would have to start the process of extricating Zimroel from the grip of Alhanroel all over again. It was hopeless, though, to expect any of the Five Lords to understand such things before they were explained to them.
“The helmet will give us our revenge, yes,” said Khaymak Barjazid.
Mandralisca ignored that too. It was such a commonplace thing to say. And it was not even sincere, Mandralisca thought. Barjazid had no interest in revenge. His brother’s death at Prestimion’s hand did not seem to matter greatly to him. He would just as readily have sold himself to his brother’s killers as to his brother’s killers’ enemies, if the price had been right. The selling was all that mattered. What interested this Barjazid most was money, security, comfort: petty unimportant things, all three. There was a bright spark of malevolence in Barjazid that Mandralisca appreciated, a chilly malign intelligence, but the man was fundamentally trivial, a little bundle of unusual marketable skills and very ordinary hungers.
Mandralisca’s restlessness had returned. The stink of other human flesh in the room was becoming unendurable now. The heat. The pressure of other consciousnesses too close against his own.
He gathered up the flimsy little helmet and tucked it like so much pocket-change into a pouch at his hip. “Going outside,” he said. “Too warm in here. Some fresh air.”
The long shadows of afternoon were beginning to creep westward across the ridge. The palaces of the Five Lords, up there on the summit of the hill overlooking the village, were bathed in ruddy light. Mandralisca walked through the village in long strides, no particular destination in mind. The other three men followed along behind, struggling to keep up with him.
Such small men, he thought. Gaviral. Halefice. Barjazid. Small of stature, small of soul as well. Halefice, for one, knew it: he wanted only to serve. Gaviral dreamed of reigning as a king here in Zimroel, and was no more fitted for it than a rock-monkey would be. And ugly little Barjazid—well, he had his merits, he was tough and smart, at least. Mandralisca did not entirely despise him. But essentially he was nothing. Nothing.
“Your grace?” Halefice had caught up with him. The aide-de-camp said, “Begging your pardon, your grace, but perhaps your use of that device has tired you more than you realize, and you should rest for a time, instead of—”
“Thank you, Jacomin. I’ll be all right.” Mandralisca kept on moving, not even facing toward Halefice as he spoke. They were in the thick of the village, now, among the smiths and the pot-sellers, with the wine-shops just beyond, and then the market of breads and meats.
It had not been an easy matter, building a self-sufficient village out here in this dry desolate land, where crops had to be coaxed from the unwilling red earth with the aid of water pumped drop by drop from the maddeningly unreachable river just over the hill, but they had done it. He had done it. He knew nothing about farming, nothing about raising livestock, nothing about creating villages out of thin air, but he had done it, he had drawn the plans and given the orders and made it happen, even to the lavish palaces of the Five Lords at the top of the ridge, and now, striding through it this strange afternoon, he felt—what?
A sense of anticipation. A sense of standing at the threshold of a new place, a strange and wonderful place.
Already he held the Five Lords of Zimroel in his hands, whether they knew it or not. Soon he would hold Prestimion and Dekkeret as well. He would be the master of all Majipoor. Was that not a fine thing, for a country boy of the snowy Gonghar land who had started out in life with no assets other than a quick mind and lightning-swift reflexes?
He passed the wine-shops, shaking off flasks that the merchants there eagerly implored him to take, and went on through the bread-market. One of the bread-sellers put a biscuit into his hand with a reverent bow and a murmured prayer. There was awe in his eyes, as though he and not Gaviral were a Lord of Zimroel. The wine-merchants and bread-sellers understand, Mandralisca thought, where the real power resides in this place. He bit into the biscuit—it was one of the little round ones called a lorica, with a topknot on the upper side to make it seem something like a crown. A good choice, thought Mandralisca. He devoured it in three bites.
On the far side of the bread-market the ridge rose sharply to a point where one could see the river far below, boiling and churning against the foot of the cliff. He strode toward it. Halefice still walked along beside him on the left, a step or two to the rear. Barjazid was on the other side. The Lord Gaviral did not seem to have followed them up the hill from the marketplace.
Mandralisca stood staring at the river for a long while without speaking. Then he drew the helmet from his pouch. It rested in the palm of his open hand, a bunched-up little mass of metal mesh. Barjazid gave him a worried look, as though wondering if Mandralisca might have it in mind to hurl it into the water below.
To the Suvraelinu he said suddenly, “Barjazid, did you ever want to kill your father?”
That drew a startled glance. “My father was a kindly man, your grace. A merchant who dealt in hides and dried beef, in Tolaghai city. It would never have entered my mind—”
“It entered mine, a thousand times a day. If my father w
ere still alive now I’d put this helmet on and try to kill him with it right now.”
Barjazid was too astounded to answer. He and Halefice were both peering at him strangely.
Mandralisca had never spoken of these things with anyone. But those few seconds of using the Barjazid helmet had opened something in his soul, apparently.
“He was a merchant too,” he said. He looked straight out into the river gorge, and the hated past swam before his eyes. “In Ibykos, which is a muddy trifling little town in the scarp country of the Gonghars, a hundred miles west of Velathys. It rains there all summer and snows all winter. He dealt in wines and brandies, and was his own best customer, and when he was drunk, as almost always he was, he would hit you just as readily as look at you. That was how he talked to you, with his hands. It was in my boyhood that I learned to move as quickly as I do. To jump back fast—out of his reach.”
Even after nearly forty years Mandralisca could see that grim face, so much now like his own, in the eye of his mind. The long lean jaw, the clamped lips, the black scowl, the gathering brow; and the merciless hand flashing out, swift as a pungatan-whip, to split your lip or swell your cheek or blacken your eye. Sometimes the beatings had gone on and on and on, for the slightest of reasons, or for no reason at all. Mandralisca barely could summon up a recollection of his pallid, timid mother, but the monstrous brutal irascible father still rose like a mountain in his memory. Year after year of that, the curses, the backhand slaps, the sudden pokes and jabs and smacks, not only from him but from the other three too, his older brothers, who imitated their father by hitting anyone smaller than themselves. There had never been a day without its bruise, without its little ration of pain and humiliation.
He shut his fist on the helmet, squeezing it tight.
“Each night I sent myself to sleep by imagining I had murdered him that day. A knife in the gut, or poisoned wine, or a trip-wire in the dark and a hidden noose, I slew him fifty different ways. Until the day I told him out loud that I would do it if I got the chance, and I thought he was going to kill me there on the spot. But I was too fast for him, and when he had chased me from one end of the town to the other he gave up, warning me that he’d break me in half the next time he got his hands on me. But there never was a next time. A carter came by who was setting forth to Velathys, and he gave me a ride, and I have not seen the Gonghars since. I learned many years later that my father died in a brawl with a drunken patron in his shop. My brothers too are dead, I believe. Or so do I profoundly hope.”