But let that day not come soon, she prayed.
She loved the Castle. She had lived in that unfathomably complex array of thirty thousand rooms, perched here atop the astounding thirty-mile-high splendor of Castle Mount that jutted up like a colossal spike out of the immense curve of the planet, for half her life. It was her home. She had no desire to leave it, as leave it she knew she must on the day that Lord Prestimion ascended to the title of Pontifex and Dekkeret replaced him as Coronal.
This morning, with Prestimion off somewhere in one of the downslope cities dedicating a dam or presiding over the installation of a new duke or performing one of the myriad other functions that were required of a Coronal—she was unable to remember what the pretext for this journey had been—the Lady Varaile awoke alone in the great bed of the royal suite, as she did all too often nowadays. She could not follow the Coronal about the world on his unending peregrinations. His boiling restlessness kept him always on the move.
He would have had her accompany him on his trips, if she could; but that, as both of them realized, was usually impossible. Long ago, when they were newly wed, she had gone everywhere at Prestimion’s side, but then had come the children and her own heavy royal responsibilities besides, the ceremonies and social functions and public audiences, to keep her close to the Castle. It was rare now for the Coronal and his lady to travel together.
However necessary these separations were, Varaile had never reconciled herself to their frequency. She loved Prestimion no less, after sixteen years as his wife, than she had at the beginning. Automatically, as the first dazzling shafts of daylight came through the great crystal window of the royal bedroom, she looked across to see that golden-green light strike the yellow hair of Prestimion on the pillow beside hers.
But she was alone in the bed. As always, it took her a moment to comprehend that, to remember that Prestimion had gone off, four or five days ago, to—where? Bombifale, was it? Hoikmar? Deepenhow Vale? She had forgotten that too. Somewhere, one of the Slope Cities, perhaps, or perhaps someplace in the Guardian ring. There were fifty cities along the flanks of the Mount. The Coronal was in ever-constant motion; Varaile no longer bothered to keep track of his itinerary, only of the date of his longed-for return.
“Fiorinda?” she called.
The warm contralto reply from the next room was immediate: “Coming, my lady!”
Varaile rose, stretched, saluted herself in the mirror on the far wall. She still slept naked, as though she were a girl; and, though she was past forty now and had borne the Coronal three sons and a daughter, she allowed herself the one petty vanity of taking pleasure in her ability to fend off the inroads of aging. No sorcerer’s spells did she employ for that: Prestimion had once expressed his loathing for such subterfuges, and in any case Varaile felt they were unnecessary, at least so far. She was a tall woman, long-thighed and lithe, and though she was strongly built, with full breasts and some considerable breadth at the waist, she had not grown at all fleshy with age. Her skin was smooth and taut; her hair remained jet-black and lustrous.
“Did milady rest well?” Fiorinda asked, entering.
“As well as could be expected, considering that I was sleeping alone.”
Fiorinda grinned. She was the wife of Teotas, Prestimion’s youngest brother, and each morning at dawn left her own marital bed so that she could be at the service of the Lady Varaile when Varaile awoke. But she seemed not to begrudge that, and Varaile was grateful for it. Fiorinda was like a sister to her, not a mere sister-in-law; and Varaile, who had had no sisters of her own nor brothers either, cherished their friendship.
They bathed together, as they did every morning in the great marble tub, big enough for six or eight people, that some past Coronal’s wife had found desirable to install in the royal chamber. Afterward Fiorinda, a small, trim woman with radiant auburn hair and an irreverent smile, threw a simple robe about herself so that she could help Varaile with her own costuming for the morning. “The pink sieronal, I think,” said Varaile, “and the golden difina from Alaisor.” Fiorinda fetched the trousers for her and the delicately embroidered blouse, and, without needing to be asked, brought also the vivid yellow sfifa that Varaile liked to drape down her bosom with that ensemble, and the wide red-and-tan belt of fine Makroposopos weave that was its companion. When Varaile was dressed Fiorinda resumed her own garments of the day, a turquoise vest and soft orange pantaloons.
“Is there news?” Varaile asked.
“Of the Coronal, milady?”
“Of anyone, anything!”
“Very little,” said Fiorinda. “The pack of sea-dragons that were seen last week off the Stoien coast are moving northward, toward Treymone.”
“Very odd, sea-dragons in those waters at that time of year. An omen, do you think?”
“I must tell you I am no believer in omens, milady.”
“Nor I, really. Nor is Prestimion. But what are the things doing there, Fiorinda?”
“Ah, how can we ever understand the minds of the sea-dragons, lady?—To continue: a delegation from Sisivondal arrived at the Castle late last night, to present some gifts for the Coronal’s museum.”
Varaile shuddered. “I was in Sisivondal once, long ago. A ghastly place, and I have ghastly memories of it. It was where the first Prince Akbalik died of the poisoned swamp-crab bite he had had in the Stoienzar jungle. I’ll let someone else deal with the Sisivondal folk and their gifts.—Do you remember Prince Akbalik, Fiorinda? What a splendid man he was, calm, wise, very dear to Prestimion. I think he would have been Coronal someday, if he had lived. It was in the time of the campaign against the Procurator that he died.”
“I was only a child then, milady.”
“Yes. Of course. How foolish of me.” She shook her head. Time was flowing fiercely past them all. Here was Fiorinda, a grown woman, nearly thirty years old; and how little she knew of the troublesome commencement of Lord Prestimion’s reign, the rebellion of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail, and the plague of madness that had swept the world at the same time, and all the rest. Nor, of course, did she have any inkling of the tremendous civil war that had preceded those things, the struggle between Prestimion and the usurper Korsibar. No one knew of that tumultuous event except a chosen few members of the Coronal’s inner circle. All memory of it had been eradicated from everyone else by Prestimion’s master sorcerers, and just as well that it had. To Fiorinda, though, even the infamous Dantirya Sambail was simply someone out of the storybooks. He was a thing of fable to her, only.
As we all will be one day, thought Varaile with sudden gloom: mere things of fable.
“And other news?” she asked.
Fiorinda hesitated. It was only for an instant, but that was enough. Varaile saw through that little hesitation as if she were able to read Fiorinda’s mind.
There was other news, important news, and Fiorinda was concealing it.
“Yes?” Varaile urged. “Tell me.”
“Well—”
“Stop this, Fiorinda. Whatever it is, I want you to tell me right now.”
“Well—” Fiorinda moistened her lips. “A report has come from the Labyrinth—”
“Yes?”
“It signifies nothing in the slightest, I think.”
“Tell me!” Already the news was taking shape in Varaile’s own mind, and it was chilling. “The Pontifex?”
Fiorinda nodded forlornly. She could not meet Varaile’s steely gaze. “Dead?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that, milady.”
“Then tell me!” cried Varaile, exasperated.
“A mild weakness of the leg and arm. The left leg, the left arm. He has summoned some mages.”
“A stroke, you mean? The Pontifex Confalume has had a stroke?”
Fiorinda closed her eyes a moment and drew several deep breaths. “It is not yet confirmed, milady. It is only a supposition.”
Varaile felt a burning sensation at her own temples, and a spasm of dizziness swept over her. She controlled
herself with difficulty, forcing herself back to calmness.
It is not yet confirmed, she told herself.
It is only a supposition.
Coolly she said, “You tell me about sea-dragons off the far coast, and an insignificant delegation from an unimportant city in the middle of nowhere, and you suppress the news of Confalume’s stroke so that I need to pull it out of you? Do you think I’m a child, Fiorinda, who has to have bad news kept from her like that?”
Fiorinda seemed close to tears. “Milady, as I said a moment ago, it is not yet known as a certainty that it was a stroke.”
“The Pontifex is well past eighty. More likely past ninety, for all I know. Anything that has him summoning his mages is bad news. What if he dies? You know what will happen then.—Where did you hear this, anyway?”
More and more flustered, Fiorinda said, “My lord Teotas had it from the Pontifical delegate to the Castle late last night, and told me of it this morning as I was setting out to come to you. He will discuss it with you himself after you’ve breakfasted, just before your meeting with the royal ministers.—My lord Teotas urged me not to thrust all this on you too quickly, because he emphasizes that it is truly not as serious a matter as it sounds, that the Pontifex is generally in good health and is not deemed to be in any danger, that he—”
“And sea-dragons off the Stoien coast are more important, anyway,” Varaile said acidly. “Has a messenger been sent to the Coronal?”
“I don’t know, milady,” said Fiorinda in a helpless voice.
“What about Prince Dekkeret? I haven’t seen him around for several days. Do you have any idea where he is?”
“I think he’s gone to Normork, milady. His friend Dinitak Barjazid has accompanied him there.”
“Not the Lady Fulkari?”
“Not the Lady Fulkari, no. Things are not well between Prince Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari these days, I think. It was with Dinitak he went, on Twoday. To Normork.”
“Normork!” Varaile shuddered. “Another hideous place, though Dekkeret loves that city, the Divine only knows why. And I suppose you have no idea whether anyone’s tried to inform him yet, either? Prince Dekkeret might well find himself Coronal by nightfall and yet nobody has thought of letting him know that—”
Varaile realized that she was losing control again. She caught herself in mid-flight.
“Breakfast,” she said, in a quieter tone. “We should have something to eat, Fiorinda. Whether or not we’re in the middle of a crisis this morning, we shouldn’t try to face the day on an empty stomach, eh?”
3
The floater came around the last curve of craggy Normork Crest and the great stone wall of Normork city rose up suddenly before them, square athwart the highway that had brought them down from the Castle to this level on the lower reaches of the Mount’s flank. The wall was an immense overbearing barrier of rectangular black megaliths piled one upon another to an astonishing height. The city that it guarded lay utterly concealed from view behind it. “Here we are,” Dekkeret said. “Normork.”
“And that?” Dinitak Barjazid asked. He and Dekkeret traveled together often, but this was his first visit to Dekkeret’s native city. “Is that little thing the gate? And is our floater really going to be able to get through it?” He stared in amazement at the tiny blinking hole, laughably disproportionate, tucked away like an afterthought at the foot of the mighty rampart. It was barely wide enough, so it would seem, to admit a good-sized cart. Guardsmen in green leather stood stiffly at attention to either side of it. A tantalizing bit of the hidden city could be seen framed within the small opening: what appeared to be warehouses and a couple of many-angled gray towers.
Dekkeret smiled. “The Eye of Stiamot, the gate is called. A very grand name for such a piffling aperture. What you see is the one and only entryway to the famous city of Normork. Impressive, isn’t it? But it’s big enough for us, all right. Not by much, but we’ll squeak through.”
“Strange,” Dinitak said, as they passed beneath the pointed arch and entered the city. “Such a huge wall, and so wretched and paltry a gate. That doesn’t exactly make strangers feel that they’re wanted here, does it?”
“I have some plans for changing that, when the opportunity is at hand,” said Dekkeret. “You’ll see tomorrow.”
The occasion for his visit was the birth of a son to the current Count of Normork, Considat by name. Normork was not a particularly important city and Considat was not a significant figure in the hierarchies of Castle Mount, and ordinarily the only official cognizance the Coronal would be likely to take of the child’s birth would be a congratulatory note and a handsome gift. Certainly he would not make it the occasion for a state visit. But Dekkeret, who had not seen Normork for many a month, had requested permission to present the Coronal’s congratulations in person, and had brought Dinitak along with him for company. “Not Fulkari?” Prestimion had asked. For Dekkeret and Fulkari had been an inseparable pair these two or three years past. To which Dekkeret had replied that Count Considat was a man of conservative tastes; it did not seem proper for Dekkeret to visit him in the company of a woman who was not his wife. He would take Dinitak. Prestimion did not press the issue further. He had heard the stories—everyone at the court had, by now—that something had been going amiss lately between Prince Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari, though Dekkeret had said not a word about it to anyone.
They had been the closest of friends for years, Dekkeret and Dinitak, though their temperaments and styles were very different. Dekkeret was a big, deep-chested, heavy-shouldered man of boundless energy and unquenchable robust spirit, whose words tended to come booming out of him in a cheerful resounding bellow. The events of his life thus far had predisposed him to optimism and hope and limitless enthusiasm.
Dinitak Barjazid, a man a few years younger with a lean, narrow face and dark, glittering, skeptical eyes, was half a head shorter and constructed on an altogether less substantial scale, compact and trim, with an air of taut coiled muscularity about him. His skin was darker even than his eyes, the swarthy skin of one who has lived for years under the frightful sun of the southern continent. Dinitak spoke much more quietly than Dekkeret and took a generally darker view of the world. He was a shrewd, pragmatic man, raised in a harsh sun-baked land by a tough and wily scoundrel of a father who had been a very slippery sort indeed. Often there was a questioning edge on what Dinitak said that caused Dekkeret to think twice about things, and sometimes more than twice. And he was governed always by a harsh, strict sense of propriety, a set of fierce moral imperatives, as though he had decided early in life to build his life around a philosophy of doing and believing the opposite of whatever his father might have done or thought.
They held each other in the highest estimation. Dekkeret had vowed that as he rose to prominence within the royal government of Majipoor, Dinitak would rise with him, although he did not immediately know how that would be accomplished, considering the clouded and notorious past of Dinitak’s father and kinsmen. But he would find a way.
“Our reception committee, I think,” said Dinitak, pointing inward with a jab of his upturned thumb.
Just within the wall lay a triangular cobblestoned plaza bordered along each side by drab wooden guardhouses. The emissary of the Count of Normork was waiting for them there, a small, flimsy-looking black-bearded man who seemed as though he could be blown away by any good gust of wind. He bowed them out of their floater, introduced himself as the Justiciar Corde, and in flowery phrases offered Prince Dekkeret and his traveling companion the warmest welcome to the city. The Justiciar indicated a dozen or so armed men in green leather uniforms standing a short distance away. “These men will protect you while you are here,” he declared.
“Why?” Dekkeret asked. “I have my own bodyguard with me.”
“It is Count Considat’s wish,” replied the Justiciar Corde in a tone that indicated that the issue was not really open to discussion. “Please—if you and your men will follow me, ex
cellence—”
“What is that all about?” said Dinitak under his breath as they made their way on foot, escorted fore and aft by the black-clad guardsmen, through the narrow, winding alleys of the ancient city to their lodging-place. “I wouldn’t think that we’d be in any danger here.”
“We’re not. But when Prestimion was here on a state visit not long after he became Coronal, a madman tried to assassinate him right out in front of the Count’s palace. That was in the time of Count Meglis, Considat’s father. Madness was a very common thing in the world back then, you may recall. There was an epidemic of it in every land.”
Dinitak grunted in surprise. “Assassinate the Coronal? You can’t be serious. Who would ever do a wild thing like that?”
“Believe me, Dinitak, it happened, and it was a very close thing, too. I was still living in Normork then and I saw it with my own eyes. A lunatic swinging a sharpened sickle, he was. Came rushing out of the crowd in the plaza and ran straight for Prestimion. He was stopped just in time, or history would have been very different.”
“Incredible. What happened to the assassin?”
“Killed, right then and there.”
“As was right and proper,” Dinitak said.
Dekkeret smiled at that. Again and again Dinitak revealed himself as the ferocious moralist that he was. His judgments, driven by a powerful sense of right and wrong, were often severe and uncompromising, sometimes surprisingly so. Dekkeret had taken him to task for that, early in their friendship. Dinitak’s response was to ask Dekkeret whether he would prefer him to be more like his father in his ways, and Dekkeret did not pursue the issue after that. But often he thought that it must be painful for Dinitak, forever seeing sloth and error and corruption on all sides, even in those he loved.
“Prestimion was unharmed, of course. But the whole event was a tremendous embarrassment for Meglis, and he spent the rest of his days trying to live it down. Nobody outside Normork thinks about it at all, but here it’s been a blemish on the reputation of the entire city for almost twenty years. And even though it’s hardly likely that such a thing would happen again, I suppose that Considat wants to make absolutely certain that nobody waving a sharp object gets anywhere near the Coronal-designate while we’re here.”