“Did you go straight into the service of Dantirya Sambail, then?” Halefice asked him.
“Not then, no.” His tongue was loose, now. His face felt strangely flushed. “I went first to the western lands, to Narabal in the south, on the coast—I wanted to be warm, I wanted never to see snow again—and then to Til-omon, and Dulorn of the Ghayrogs, and many another place, until I found myself in Ni-moya and the Procurator chose me to be his cupbearer. I was in his bodyguard then, and he saw me at a demonstration of the batons—I am quick with the singlesticks, you know, quick with any sort of dueling weapon—and he called me out to talk with me after I had beaten six of his guardsmen in a row. And said to me, ‘I need a cupbearer, Mandralisca. Will you have the job?’”
“One did not refuse a man like Dantirya Sambail,” said Halefice piously.
“Why would I have refused? Did I think the task was beneath me? I was a country boy, Jacomin. He was the master of Zimroel; and I would stand at his side and hand him his wine, which meant I would be in his presence constantly. When he met with the great ones of the world, the dukes and counts and mayors, or even the Coronals and Pontifexes, I would be there.”
“And did you become his poison-taster then, also?”
“That came later. There was a whispered tale, that season, that the Procurator would be done to death by one of the sons of his cousin, who had been regent in Zimroel when Dantirya Sambail was young, and had been put aside by him. It would be by poison, they said, poison in his wine. This talk came to the Procurator’s own ear; and when I handed him his wine-bowl the next time, he looked into it and then at me, and I knew he mistrusted it. So I said, by my own free will, because I mattered not at all to myself and he mattered a great deal, ‘Let me taste it first, milord Procurator, for safety’s sake.’ I have no liking for wine, on account of my father, you understand. But I tasted it, while Dantirya Sambail watched, and we waited, and I did not fall down dead. And after that I tasted his wine with every bowl, to the end of his days. It was our custom, even though there were never any threats against him ever again. It was a bond between us, that I would sip a bit of his wine before I gave him the bowl. That is the only wine I have ever had, the wine I tasted on behalf of Dantirya Sambail.”
“You weren’t afraid?” asked Khaymak Barjazid.
Mandralisca turned to him with a scornful grin. “If I had died, what would that have mattered to me? It was a chance worth the taking. Was the life I was leading so precious to me that I would not risk it for the sake of becoming Dantirya Sambail’s companion? Is being alive such a sweet wondrous thing, that we should cling to it like misers clutching their bags of royals? I have never found it so.—In any case there was no poison in the wine, then or ever, obviously. And I was at his side forever after.”
If he had ever loved anyone, Mandralisca thought, that person was Dantirya Sambail. It was as if they shared a single spirit divided into two bodies. Though the Procurator had already managed to bring the entirety of Zimroel into his power before Mandralisca entered his service, it was Mandralisca who had spurred him on to the far greater enterprise of encouraging Confalume’s son Korsibar to seize the throne of Majipoor. With Korsibar as Coronal, and indebted to Dantirya Sambail for his crown, Dantirya Sambail would have been the most powerful figure in the world.
Well, it had not worked out, and both Korsibar and the Procurator were long gone. Dantirya Sambail had played and lost, and that was that. But for Mandralisca there were other games yet to play. He gently stroked the helmet in his hand.
Other games to play, yes. That was all existence was, really: a game. He alone had seen the truth of that, the thing that others failed to realize. You lived for a time, you played the game of life, ultimately you lost, and then there was nothing. But while you played, you played to win. Great wealth, fine possessions, grand palaces, feasting and the pleasures of the flesh and all of that, those things meant nothing to him, and less than nothing. They were only tokens of how well you had played; they had no merit in and of themselves. Even the wielding of power itself was a secondary thing, a means rather than an end.
All that mattered was winning, he thought, for as long as you could manage it. To play and to win, until the time came when, inevitably, you lost. And if it had meant risking the chance of drinking poison that was meant for the Procurator, if that was the price of entering the game, why, surely the risk was worth the reward! Let other men wear the crowns and hoard up great stockpiles of treasure. Let other men surround themselves with simpering women and drink themselves blind with tingling wine. Those were not things that he needed. When he was a boy, everything that had been of any importance to him was denied to him, and he had learned to live with nothing whatsoever. Now there was very little that he wanted, except to see to it that no one could ever again place himself in a position to deny him anything.
Barjazid was staring at him again as though reading his mind. Mandralisca saw that he had, once again, revealed too much of himself. Anger rose in him. This was a weakness he had never indulged in before. He had said enough, and more than enough.
Swinging abruptly around, he said, “Let’s go back to my chamber.”
If I ever catch him using his helmet on me, Mandralisca told himself, I will take him out into the desert and stake him down between two pungatans.
“I will try this toy of yours again, I think,” he said to Barjazid, and quickly slipped the helmet over his brow, and felt its force seize hold of him; and he sent his mind soaring forth until it made contact with another, not troubling to determine whether it belonged to a human or a Ghayrog, a Skandar or a Liiman. Probed it for a point of entry. Entered it, then, piercing it like a sword.
Slashed it.
Left it in ruins.
Mastery. Ecstasy.
3
Dekkeret said, “So this is the imperial throne-chamber! I’ve always wondered what it was like.”
Prestimion made a flamboyantly grandiose gesture. “Take a good look. It’ll be yours someday.”
With a rueful smile Dekkeret said, “Have mercy, my lord! I’m barely accustomed to wearing a Coronal’s robes and here you are already opening the doors of the Labyrinth for me!”
“I see you still call me ‘my lord.’ That title is yours now, my lord. I am ‘your majesty.’”
“Yes, your majesty.”
“Thank you, my lord.”
Neither man made any attempt to smother his laughter. This was their first formal meeting as Pontifex and Coronal, and neither of them could deal with the magnitude of that fact without a certain leavening of amusement.
They were in the uttermost level of the Labyrinth, the site of the Pontifex’s private residence and of the great public chambers of the imperial branch of the monarchy, the throne-chamber and the Great Hall of the Pontifex and the Court of Thrones and the rest. Dekkeret had arrived at the subterranean capital late the previous evening. He had never had reason to go to the Labyrinth before, though he had heard tales of it all his life: the grimness of it, the airlessness, the sense that it gave you of being cut off from all life and nature, condemned to live down deep, out of sight of the world, in a realm of eternal night lit by harsh, glittering lamps.
At first view, though, the place struck him as far less forbidding than he had anticipated. The upper rings had the rich, bustling vitality of a mighty metropolis, which was, after all, what the Labyrinth in fact was: the capital of the world. And then there were the architectural wonders deeper down, the myriad strangenesses with which ten thousand years of Pontifexes had bedecked their city. Finally, there was the grandeur and richness of the imperial sector itself, where such magnificence had been lavished that even the opulence of the Castle was put in the shade.
Dekkeret had spent the night in the chambers reserved for Coronals during their visits to the court of the senior monarch. It was the first time he had occupied any of the Coronal’s residences anywhere. He had halted a moment, struck by awe at the sight of the great door to the s
uite that now was his, with its intricate carvings and the swirling starburst symbols done in gold and the royal monogram repeated again and again, LPC, LPC, LPC, Lord Prestimion Coronal, which soon would be replaced by the LDC of his own ascension. Only one step remained for that. He had been proclaimed by Prestimion, and he had been confirmed by the Council; now he needed only to return to the Castle for his coronation ceremony. But the funeral of Confalume and the coronation of the new Pontifex must take precedence over that.
The new Pontifex had already gone through the ancient rite of taking possession of his new home. Since Prestimion had already been traveling on the Glayge when the news had come to him of Confalume’s death, he had returned to the Labyrinth by the river route; but instead of entering the capital by way of the Mouth of Waters, the customary entrance from the Glayge, he was required by tradition this time to go entirely around the city to the far side, the one that faced the southern desert, and come in via the much less congenial Mouth of Blades.
That was simply a stark gaping hole in the desert floor, walled about with bare timbers to keep the drifting sands from filling it in. Across the front of it was a row of antique rusted swords, said to be thousands of years old, set tip-upward in a matrix of concrete. Behind that unwelcoming entrance waited the seven masked guardians of the Labyrinth—by custom, two Hjorts, a Ghayrog, a Skandar, and even a Liiman were included among them—who soberly went through the ritual of inquiring after Prestimion’s business in this place, ostentatiously conferred among themselves to decide whether to let him in, and then demanded from him the traditional entry-offering, which had to be something of his own choice. Prestimion had brought with him the cloak that the people of Gamarkaim had sent to him as a coronation gift when he became Coronal, woven of the cobalt-blue feathers of giant fire-beetles and said to give its wearer protection against harm from flame. By surrendering it here, to be housed forever in the museum where such gifts were kept, he was declaring that in the Labyrinth he would always be safe from every external menace.
Then he entered; and custom now obliged him to descend through each of the levels of the spiraling city on foot. That was no small journey. Varaile walked beside him all the way, and his three sons and his daughter, though the Lady Tuanelys, too young to keep pace, was borne on a Skandar guard’s back for much of the distance. At each stage great crowds gathered around him, tracing the Labyrinth symbol in the air with their fingertips and crying out his new name: “Prestimion Pontifex! Prestimion Pontifex!” He was Lord Prestimion no longer.
Meanwhile his succession to the senior throne had been proclaimed at each of the levels below, first at the Court of Columns, then in the Place of Masks, and then the Hall of Winds, the Court of Pyramids, and upward as far as the Mouth of Blades. So when he reached each of these places it was already consecrated to his reign. And at last Prestimion came to the imperial sector, where he knelt first beside the embalmed body of his predecessor Confalume where it lay in state on the dais of the Court of Thrones, and then went to his own new dwelling-place, and there received from the High Spokesman of the Pontificate the spiral emblem of his office and the scarlet-and-black robes. The rest could not be done until Dekkeret arrived.
And now Dekkeret had come. The age-old custom called for Prestimion to receive the new Coronal in the imperial throne-chamber. And so the High Spokesman Haskelorn called on Dekkeret at the Coronal’s suite the morning after his arrival, and they rode together in a small floater through the long and winding passages of the imperial sector down an ever-narrowing tunnel to a point where not even the little vehicle could enter. Walking side by side, now, they advanced through a passageway that was sealed every fifty feet by bronze doors, until they came to the final door, emblazoned with the Labyrinth sign and the newly inscribed monogram of Prestimion Pontifex where Confalume’s had been only hours before. Old Haskelorn touched his palm to the monogram and the door swung open and there stood Prestimion, smiling.
“Leave us,” he said to Haskelorn. “This meeting involves just the two of us.”
Prestimion showed Dekkeret the throne-chamber itself, first.
It was a great globe of a room, its curving sides covered from floor to ceiling with smooth, gleaming yellow-brown tiles that seemed to burn with an inner light of their own. But the throne-chamber’s only illumination came from a single massive glowfloat that hovered in midair and emitted a steady ruby luminosity. Directly below it stood the Pontifical throne, on a platform reached by three broad steps: an enormous high-backed chair with long, slender legs that were tipped with fierce claws, so that they seemed like those of some giant bird. It was entirely covered over with sheets of gold, or, perhaps, for all Dekkeret could tell, made of one solid mass of the priceless metal. Amid the simplicity of the huge room the throne itself blazed with a dreadful power.
One might easily think Confalume had designed this chamber, since it was the Labyrinth’s counterpart of the resplendent throne-room that Confalume had built for himself at the Castle when he was Coronal. But this room was not Confalume’s work. It bore no sign of the late monarch’s taste for baroque extravagance of style. The throne-chamber of the Labyrinth was a room so ancient that no one quite knew who had built it: the common belief was that it went back to a time even before the reign of Stiamot.
The effect was awe-inspiring and somehow preposterous at one and the same time.
“What do you think?” Prestimion asked.
Dekkeret had to fight back more giggles. “It’s extremely—majestic, I’d say. Majestic, that’s the word. Confalume must have loved it. You aren’t really going to use it, are you?”
“I have to,” Prestimion said. “For certain high functions and sacred ceremonies. Haskelorn’s going to draw up a guidebook for me. We have to take these things seriously, Dekkeret.”
“Yes. I suppose we do. I noticed long ago how seriously you take the Confalume Throne. How many times have I seen you sitting in it, over the years—five? Eight?”
Prestimion looked a bit ruffled. “I took the Confalume Throne very seriously indeed. It is the symbol of the Coronal’s grandeur and power. A little too grand for my own private tastes, which is why I preferred to use the old Stiamot throne-room most of the time. I would never have built a thing like the Confalume Throne, Dekkeret. But that doesn’t mean I underestimate its importance in sustaining the power and majesty of the government. Neither should you.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that I would. Only that when I think of you sitting here on this great golden chair, and me up there at the Castle atop old Confalume’s big block of opal—” He shook his head. “By the Divine, Prestimion, we’re just men, men whose bladders ache when we go too long without pissing and whose stomachs growl when we don’t get fed on time.”
Quietly Prestimion said, “Yes, we are that. But also we are Powers of the Realm, two of the three. I am this world’s emperor, and you are its king, and to the fifteen billion people over whom we rule we are the embodiment of all that is sacred here. And so they put us up on these gaudy thrones and bow down to us, and who are we to say no to that, if it makes our job of running this immense planet any easier? Think of them, Dekkeret, whenever you find yourself performing some absurd ritual or clambering up onto some overdecorated seat. We are not provincial justices of the peace, you know. We are the essential mainsprings of the world.” Then, as if realizing that his tone had grown too sharp, Prestimion grinned broadly. “We, and the fifty million unimportant public officials who actually have the job of doing all the things that we in our grandeur command them to do.—Come, let me show you the rest of this place.”
It was an extensive tour. Prestimion led him along quickly. Though Dekkeret’s legs were considerably longer than Prestimion’s, he was hard-pressed to keep up with the older man, who set a pace that was in keeping with the lifelong restlessness and impulsiveness of his nature.
They went first through a concealed door at the rear of the throne-chamber, and then down a long hallway into the vas
t dark space known as the Court of Thrones, where somber walls of black stone swept together high overhead to meet in pointed arches. The only light within the Court of Thrones was provided by half a dozen wax tapers along the walls, set far apart in sconces shaped like upstretched hands. The two large thrones of red gamba-wood that gave the room its name, not so numbingly grand as the one in the throne-chamber but imposing enough in their own way, rose side by side on stepped platforms at the rear of the room. One bore the starburst symbol of the Coronal, and the other, the greater one, the spiraling maze that was the Pontifical sign.
Shuddering, Dekkeret said, “It appears more fit to be a torture-chamber than a throne-room, if you ask me.”
“In truth I do agree. I have no good memories of this room: it is the place where Korsibar’s sorcerers bamboozled us all, and as we stood stunned by their magic he seized the crown and put it on his own head. I wince even now, whenever I come in here.”
“It never happened, Prestimion. Ask anyone, and that’s what they’ll tell you. The whole episode is gone from everyone’s mind. You should thrust it out of yours.”
“Would that I could. But I find that some painful memories don’t want to fade. For me it’s still quite real.” Prestimion ran his hand uneasily through his thin, soft golden hair. His expression was bleak. He seemed to be wrenching himself by sheer force of will away from that moment of the past.—“Well, there is where we will sit, the two of us, a couple of days from now, and I’ll put the crown on you myself.”