Gavdat seemed to recoil almost in shock, his head snapping back so sharply that his soft cheeks jiggled like puddings. Very likely he had made use of his instruments of prognostication to arrive at a very different expectation. Haughty Gavahaud, obviously also startled and disappointed, glared at Mandralisca in astonishment, as though Mandralisca had spat in his face. Only Gaviral took Mandralisca’s reply calmly, looking first to one brother and then the other in a smug self-congratulatory way that could mean only one thing: There! Did I not tell you so? It’s important to wait and check things out with Mandralisca. It was the mark of Gaviral’s intellectual preeminence, in this mob of loutish thick-brained brothers, that he alone had some glimmering of self-awareness, some knowledge, perhaps, of how stupid they all really were, how badly they needed their privy counsellor’s guidance in any matter of significance.
“May I ask,” Gaviral said carefully, “just why you feel as you do?”
“Several reasons, milord.” He enumerated them on his fingers. “The first: this is a time of general mourning throughout Majipoor, if I recall correctly the reaction to the Pontifex Prankipin’s death twenty years ago. Even in Zimroel the Pontifex is a revered and cherished figure, and in this case the Pontifex was Confalume, the most highly regarded monarch in centuries. I believe it would seem tasteless and offensive to undertake a revolutionary break with the imperial government in the very hour when people everywhere are expressing, as I have no doubt they are, their grief at the death of Confalume. It would forfeit us a great deal of sympathy among our own citizens, and would stir an unprofitable degree of anger among the people of Alhanroel.”
“Perhaps so,” Gaviral conceded. “Go on.”
“Second: a proclamation of independence needs to be accompanied by a demonstration that we are capable of making good on our words. I mean by that that we are only in the most preliminary stages of organizing our army, if indeed we have come as far even as the preliminary stages. Therefore—”
“You foresee a war with Alhanroel, do you?” the Lord Gavahaud asked, in a lofty tone. “Is it possible that they would dare to attack us?”
“Oh, yes, milord. I very much think they would attack us. The much-beloved Prestimion is in fact a man of strong passions and no little fury when he is crossed: I have ample evidence of that out of the experience of your famous uncle Dantirya Sambail. And Lord Dekkeret, from what I know of him, will not want to begin his reign by having half his kingdom secede. You can be quite certain that the imperials will send a military force our way as soon as they’ve digested our proclamation and can levy a body of troops.”
Gavdat said, “But the distances are so great—they’d have to sail for many weeks just to reach Piliplok—and then, to march across hostile territory all the way to Ni-moya—”
It was a reasonable point. Perhaps Gavdat was not quite so much of a fool as he seemed, Mandralisca thought.
“You’re right, milord, that operating a line of supply that stretches all the way across the Inner Sea from Castle Mount to Ni-moya will be a very challenging task. That is why I think we’ll ultimately be successful in our revolt. But they will have no choice, I think, but to try to regain their grasp of us. We must be fully prepared. We must have troops waiting at Piliplok and all the other major ports of our eastern coast, possibly as far south as Gihorna.”
“But there’s no harbor good enough for a major landing in Gihorna!” Gavahaud objected.
“Exactly so. That’s why they might attempt it: to take us by surprise. There’s no big harbor there, but there are minor ones all up and down the province. They might make several landings at once in places so obscure they don’t expect us to think of them. We must fortify the whole coast. We must have a second line of defense inland, and a third at Ni-moya itself. And we’ll need to assemble a fleet to meet them at sea in the hope of preventing them from reaching our shores in the first place. All this will take time. We should be well along in the task before we tip our hand.”
“You should know,” Gavdat said, “that I have cast the runes very carefully, and they predict success in all our endeavors.”
“We expect no other outcome,” said Mandralisca serenely. “But the runes alone won’t ensure our victory. Proper planning is needed also.”
“Yes,” said Gaviral. “Yes. You see that, brothers, do you not?”
The other two looked at him uncomfortably. Perhaps they sensed in some dim way that quick little Gaviral was somehow outflanking them, allying himself suddenly with the voice of caution now that he realized that caution might be required.
“There is a third point to be considered,” Mandralisca said.
He made them wait. He had no desire to overload their brains by piling too many arguments together too quickly.
Then he said, “It happens that I am testing a new weapon, one that is vital to our hopes of victory. It is the helmet that the little man Khaymak Barjazid brought to me, a version of the one that was used—unsuccessfully, alas—by Dantirya Sambail in his struggle against Prestimion long ago. We are making improvements in the weapon. I am extending my mastery over it day by day. It will do terrible destruction, once I’m ready to unleash it. But I am not quite ready, my lords. Therefore I ask you for more time. I ask you for time enough to make the great victory that milord Gavdat so accurately predicts a certainty.”
8
As though in a dream Dekkeret roamed the myriad halls of the Castle that would from now on bear his name, examining everything as though seeing it for the first time.
He was alone. He had not made a special point of asking to be left alone, but his manner, his expression, had left no doubt of his need for solitude. This was the fourth day since Dekkeret’s return from the festivities at the Labyrinth that had confirmed Prestimion’s ascent to the imperial throne, and every moment up till now had been taken up in planning for his own coronation. Only this morning had an opening developed in the press of business, and he had taken the opportunity to wander out into the Pinitor Court and go drifting off by himself through some few of the many levels of the Castle’s topmost zone.
He had lived at the Castle more than half his life. He had been eighteen when his thwarting of the attempt on Prestimion’s life had earned him the award of knight-initiatehood, and now he was thirty-eight. Though he still signed his name, when official duties required it of him, “Dekkeret of Normork,” it would be more accurate to call himself “Dekkeret of the Castle,” for Normork was only a boyhood memory and the Castle was his home. The eerie tower of Lord Arioc, the harsh black mass of the Prankipin Treasury, the delicate beauty of the Guadeloom Cascade, the pink granite blocks of Vildivar Close, the spectacular sweep of the Ninety-Nine Steps—he passed through these things every day.
He passed through them now. Down one hall and up the next. He turned a bend in a corridor and found himself staring through a giant crystal window, a window so clear as to be essentially invisible, providing a sudden stunning view of open air—an abyss that descended mile after mile until it was sealed at its lower end by a thick layer of white cloud. It was a vivid reminder that they were thirty miles high, up here at the Castle, sitting at the tip of the biggest mountain in the universe, provided with light and air and water and all other necessities by ingenious mechanisms thousands of years old. You tended to forget that, when you spent enough time at the Castle. You tended to begin to think that this was the primary level of the world, and all the rest of Majipoor was mysteriously sunken far below the surface. But that was wrong. There was the world, and then there was the Castle; and the Castle loomed far above all.
The gateway before him led back into the Inner Castle. On his left lay Prestimion’s archival building, rising behind the Arioc Tower; to his right was the white-tiled hall where the Lady of the Isle resided when she came to the Castle to visit her son, and just beyond that Lord Confalume’s garden-house, with its bewildering collection of tender plants from tropical regions. He went through the gate that lay beside the Lady’s hall
and found himself in the maze of hallways and galleries, so bewildering to newcomers, that led to the core of the Castle.
He avoided going near the halls of the court. They were all very busy in there, officials both of the outgoing regime and his own still only partly formed administration—discussing matters of protocol at the coronation ceremony, making lists of guests according to rank and precedence, et cetera, et cetera. Dekkeret had had enough of that, and more than enough, for the moment. Left to his own devices, the coronation rite would have at best an audience of seven or ten people, and would take no longer than the time necessary for Prestimion to take the starburst crown from its bearer and place it on the brow of his successor, and cry, “Dekkeret! Dekkeret! All hail Lord Dekkeret!”
But he knew better than to think it could be as simple as that. There had to be feasting, and rituals, and poetry readings, and the salutations of the high lords, and the ceremonial showing of the Coronal’s shield, and the crowning of his mother the Lady Taliesme as the new Lady of the Isle of Sleep, and whatever else was required to invest the incoming Coronal with the proper majesty and awesomeness. Dekkeret did not intend to interfere with any of that. Whatever innovations his reign would bring, and he certainly intended that there would be some, he was not going to expend his authority this early over trivial matters of ceremony. On the other hand, he took care now to keep away from the rooms where the planning was taking place. He turned instead toward the very center of the royal sector, deserted now in this time of transition from one reign to another.
A pair of great metal doors, fifteen feet high, confronted him now. These were Prestimion’s doing, a project that had been in progress for a decade or more and was still a long way from completion. The left-hand door was covered, every square inch of it, with scenes from the events of Lord Confalume’s reign. The door opposite it still presented only a smooth blank surface.
I will have that door engraved with the deeds of Prestimion, done in a matching style by the same artisans, Dekkeret told himself. And then I will have both doors gilded, so that they will shine forever down the ages.
He touched one of the heavy bronze handles and the door, precisely and delicately calibrated, swung back to admit him to the Castle’s heart.
The simple little throne-room of Lord Stiamot was the first thing he came to. He moved on past it, still wandering without a plan, into yet another hodgepodge of little corridors and passageways that he could not remember ever having ventured into before; he was just beginning to conclude that he was lost when he turned to his left and discovered that he was staring into the grand vaulted chamber that was Lord Prestimion’s judgment-hall, with the numbing extravagance of the Confalume throne-room just beyond it.
It is wrong, Dekkeret thought, to have to approach these great rooms through such a maze of chaos. Prestimion had carved his judgment-hall out of a dozen or so ancient little rooms; Dekkeret resolved now to do the same with the hallways he had just come through, clearing them all away to create some new formal room, a Chapel of the Divine, perhaps, in which the Coronal might ask for the gift of wisdom before going into the judgment-hall to dispense the law. The Dekkeret Chapel, yes. He smiled. Already he saw it in the eye of his mind, a stone archway over there, and the passage connecting it to the judgment-hall emblazoned with brilliant mosaics in green and gold—
Bravo! he thought. Not even crowned yet, and already launched on your building program!
It surprised him, how easily he was taking to this business of becoming the Coronal Lord of Majipoor. There still remained concealed within him, somewhere, Dekkeret the boy, only child of the struggling merchant Orvan Pettir and his good wife Taliesme, the boy who had roamed the hilly streets of walled Normork with his lively young cousin Sithelle and dreamed of becoming something more than his father had managed to be—a Castle knight, perhaps, who one day would hold some high place in the government: how could that boy not be flabbergasted to find his older self about to accede to the very highest place of all?
He denied none of that. But his older self was less easily awed by such things. A Coronal, he knew by now, is only a man who wears a green robe trimmed with ermine, and on certain formal occasions is permitted to don a crown and occupy a throne. He is still a man, for all that. Someone must be Coronal, and, through an unlikely chain of accidents, the choice had fallen upon him. That chain had passed through Prestimion’s long-ago visit to Normork and Sithelle’s death; through his own unhappy hunting trip in the Khyntor Marches and the impulsive journey of penance to Suvrael that had followed it, leading to his discovery of the Barjazids and their mind-controlling helmets; and through the war against Dantirya Sambail and Akbalik’s death, which had removed the expected heir to the crown. Thus it had come down to him. So be it, then. He will be Coronal. He will nevertheless remain a man, who must eat and sleep and void his bowels and one day die. But for the time being he will be Lord Dekkeret of Lord Dekkeret’s Castle, and he will build the Dekkeret Chapel over there, and in Normork he will, as he had told Dinitak Barjazid what was beginning to seem like a hundred years ago, eventually build the Dekkeret Gate, and perhaps also—
“My lord?”
The voice, breaking into his ruminations this way, startled him more than a little.
Nor did Dekkeret believe at first that he was the one being addressed. He was still not used to that title, “my lord.” He looked around, thinking to find Prestimion somewhere in the vicinity; but then he realized that the words had been intended for him. The speaker was the Su-Suheris Maundigand-Klimd, High Magus to the court of Prestimion.
“I know I intrude on your privacy, my lord. I ask your forgiveness for that.”
“You do nothing without good reason, Maundigand-Klimd. Forgiveness is hardly necessary.”
“I thank you, sir. As it happens, I have something of importance to bring to your attention. May we confer in some place less public than this?”
Dekkeret signalled the two-headed being to lead the way.
He had never quite understood how Prestimion, a man of the most dogged and ingrained skepticism when it came to all matters mystical and occult, happened to maintain a magus among his circle of intimates. Confalume had been a man much given over to sorcery, yes, and Dekkeret understood that Prankipin before him had had the same irrational leanings; but Prestimion had always seemed to him to be someone who relied on the evidence of his reason and his senses, rather than on the conjurings and prognostications of seers. His High Counsellor, Septach Melayn, was if anything of a more realistic cast of mind yet.
Dekkeret did know that Prestimion, for all his skepticism, had spent some time at the wizards’ capital of Triggoin in the north, an episode in his life of which he was most unwilling to speak; and that he had made use of the services of certain master wizards of Triggoin in his war against the usurping Korsibar, and from time to time on other occasions during his reign. So his attitudes toward the magical arts were more complex than it appeared at first glance.
And Maundigand-Klimd seemed never to be far from the center of things at court. Dekkeret did not get the impression that Prestimion kept the Su-Suheris around simply as a sop to the credulity of all those billions of common folk in the world who swore by soothsayers and necromancers, nor was he just a mere decoration. No, Prestimion actually consulted Maundigand-Klimd on matters of the highest importance. That was something that Dekkeret meant to discuss with him before the handover of power was complete. Dekkeret himself had only the most casual interest in the persistence of the mantic arts as a phenomenon of modern culture, and no belief whatever in their predictive value. But if Prestimion thought it was useful to keep someone like Maundigand-Klimd close at hand—
And keep him close at hand is what he had done. The Su-Suheris led him now to the private apartments that he had occupied since the earliest days of Prestimion’s reign: just across the Pinitor Court from the Coronal’s own residence, indeed. Dekkeret had heard that these rooms had belonged to Lord Confalume’s forgotte
n son Prince Korsibar before his usurpation of the throne, that dark deed that had been wiped from the memories of almost everyone in the world. So they were important chambers.
Dekkeret had never had reason to enter them before. He was surprised at how starkly they were furnished. None of the claptrap gadgetry of professional sorcery here, the ambivials and hexaphores, the alembics and armillary spheres, with which the charlatans in the marketplaces awed the populace; nor any of the thick leather-bound volumes of arcane lore, printed in black letter, that stirred such fear among those who feared such things. Dekkeret saw only a few small devices that might have been the calculating machines of a bookkeeper, and quite probably were, and a small library of books that had nothing whatever mystical about their outer appearance. Otherwise Maundigand-Klimd’s rooms were virtually empty. Of beds, chairs, Dekkeret saw nothing. Did the Su-Suheris sleep standing up? Evidently so.
And carried on conversations the same way. It was going to be an awkward business, Dekkeret saw. It always was, with a Su-Suheris. Not only were they so inordinately tall—their foot-long necks and elongated spindle-shaped heads brought them to rival Skandars in height, if not in overall bulk—but there was the weirdness of them, the inescapable alienness of them, to contend with. The two heads, primarily: each with its own identity, independent of the other, its own set of facial expressions, its own tone of voice, its own intensely penetrating pair of emerald-hued eyes. Was there another two-headed race anywhere in the galaxy? And their pale skins, hairless and white as marble, their perpetually somber miens, the hard-edged lipless slits that were their unsmiling mouths—it was all too easy to perceive them as terrifying icy-souled monsters.
Yet this one—this two-headed sorcerer—was Lord Prestimion’s counsellor and friend. That required explanation. Dekkeret wished he had sought it long before this moment.