Household servants whom Prestimion did not recognize, no doubt the sons and daughters of the ones he had known, were on hand to help the Pontifex and his family settle in. This caused a minor clash with Prestimion’s own staff, for custom required that the Pontifex bring his own servants with him wherever he traveled, and they guarded that prerogative jealously. “You may not enter,” said sturdy strapping Falco, who had the title of First Imperial Steward now, and took his promotion very seriously. “These rooms belong to the Pontifex, and you may not look upon him.” It saddened Prestimion to see these good people of Muldemar staring timidly at him over Falco’s shoulder in awe and wonder, as though he were not a man of Muldemar himself but had descended into their midst from some other planet; and he instructed Falco that it was his intention, in this house, to waive the usual Pontifical prerogatives and allow ordinary common citizens to have access to his presence. Falco did not like that at all.
Varaile and Prestimion would share the master bedroom; Varaile put Tuanelys, who awakened often now crying in the night, in the room just adjacent. Taradath, Akbalik, and Simbilon were left to shift for themselves beyond. It was a suite of many rooms.
“I wish I could have Fiorinda nearby me as well,” Varaile said.
Prestimion smiled. “I know you’re accustomed to her presence close at hand. But this apartment was not designed to provide space for a lady-in-waiting when I lived in it. Would that it had been, but that was not how things were done.”
“It’s not for myself that I want Fiorinda near,” said Varaile, with a bit of snap in her voice. “She’s the one in need of comfort, and I wish that I could give it.”
“They’ll have put her in the rooms she and Teotas usually had when they were here. No doubt she’ll have a maid of her own to look after her there.”
But Varaile could not put Fiorinda from her mind. “How she suffers, Prestimion. And I as well. Teotas would never have undertaken that walk in the night if she had been beside him. But Fiorinda and Teotas were apart all those weeks before he—died, and the fault was mine. I should never have taken her with me from the Castle.”
“The separation was meant to be only temporary. And who could guess that Teotas had it in him to destroy himself?”
Varaile threw a strange look his way. “Is that what he did?”
“Why would a man climb out onto a dangerous and almost inaccessible tower in the middle of the night, if not to destroy himself?”
“The Teotas I knew was not a suicidal man, Prestimion.”
“I agree. But what was he doing out there, then? Sleepwalking? No one sleepwalks like that. Drunk? Teotas was never known as a heavy drinker. Under a spell, perhaps?”
“Perhaps,” Varaile said.
His eyes widened. “You sound almost serious.”
“Why not? Is it such an impossible idea?”
“Let’s assume that it isn’t, then. I’ll grant you that there are some magics that actually work. But who would lay a spell of self-destruction on the Pontifex’s brother, Varaile?”
“Who, indeed?” she replied sharply. “Isn’t that what you need to find out?”
Prestimion nodded absently. The mystery had to be unraveled, yes. But how? How? Who could look into dead Teotas’s mind and produce the needed answers? They were roaming into very mysterious territory now. “I need to discuss all this with Dekkeret,” he said. “Dekkeret was the last person to see Teotas alive, only a few hours before his death. Abrigant says he knows something about what happened.”
“You should speak to him, then. By all means, Prestimion.”
From Abrigant, Prestimion learned that Dekkeret was still at the Castle, but would be traveling down to Muldemar House later that day, now that he knew Prestimion had arrived. And in mid-afternoon came hubbub and hullaballoo from without, as a procession of royal floaters bearing the starburst emblem drew up outside. Prestimion looked out to see the towering figure of the Coronal, in full formal robes, entering the building. He noted with more than a little interest that the Lady Fulkari walked at his side.
Dekkeret seemed grim and determined, and very much in charge of things. It was evident that he had begun already to take on the intangible qualities of kingliness, here in the early months of his reign. Prestimion was pleased by that. He had never had any doubt of the wisdom of his choice of Dekkeret to succeed him, but that look of grandeur that Dekkeret wore now was a welcome confirmation all the same.
There was no chance before dinner for a conference with him, nor during the meal either. Coronals had not been uncommon visitors at Muldemar House over the centuries, and the princes of Muldemar maintained guest quarters for them in the east wing, as far from Prestimion’s present suite as was possible to be. Their first opportunity for a meeting was at the dinner table, but dinner was a somber, formal event at which private conversations were impossible. Prestimion and Dekkeret embraced, as it behooved the Pontifex and Coronal to do whenever they were present at the same event, and then they took their seats at opposite ends of the long table. Fulkari sat beside Dekkeret, Varaile adjacent to Prestimion, with Fiorinda next to her.
The rest of the gathering that was assembled in the great banquet hall was few in number. Abrigant and his wife Cirophan were accompanied by their two adolescent boys. Prestimion’s two older sons were there also. The only other guests were Septach Melayn and Gialaurys, who had come with the Pontifex to Muldemar. Abrigant spoke briefly of the solemn occasion that had brought them together this night, and they lifted their glasses in Teotas’s memory. Then dinner was served, a fine one; but it was an oddly assorted group, the prevailing mood was a subdued one, and there was little conversation.
Afterward Dekkeret came to Prestimion and said, “You and I should talk after dinner, your majesty.”
“We should, yes. Shall I bring Septach Melayn?”
“I think it should just be the two of us,” said Dekkeret. “You can share what I have to say with the High Spokesman later, if you wish. But Abrigant feels that you and I ought to discuss these things just between ourselves at first.”
“Abrigant knows what you’re going to tell me?” Prestimion asked.
“Some. Not all.”
Prestimion chose for the site of their meeting the tasting-room of Muldemar House, a place that had always exerted a strange charm over him, though there were those who said that they found the place gloomy. It lay at the mouth of a deep cool cavern of green basalt on the lowest level of the building, extending far underground into the bedrock of the Mount itself. Along both sides the entire passage was lined from floor to ceiling with a royal ransom in Muldemar wines, vintages stretching over hundreds of years, back through the mists of time. An ancient iron door sealed the room off from the rest of the building. There was no part of Muldemar House where he and Dekkeret could find greater seclusion.
He had requested that Abrigant’s cellarmaster leave a bottle of brandy for them on the tasting-room table. It was amusing to see that the bottle that the man had chosen, a big-bellied hand-blown globelet, was an outrageously precious one with what was surely more than a century of dust on it and a faded label dating it to the reign of Lord Gobryas, predecessor of Prankipin as Coronal. Prestimion poured two generous bowlfuls and they sipped for a time in silence, savoring the brandy reflectively.
At length Dekkeret said, “I feel great sadness at your loss, Prestimion. I loved Teotas greatly. How sorry I am that this wondrous liquor, if I’m ever fortunate enough to taste it again, will always summon the memory of his death for me.”
Prestimion nodded gravely. “I never thought that I’d outlive him. Even though he was aging quickly, and looked so much older than he was, there were many years between us. And then to have something like this happen—this—”
“Yes,” said Dekkeret. “But perhaps he was never meant to live a long life. As you say, he was aging quickly. There was always a fire burning within him. As though he had a furnace inside his breast, and was consuming himself for fuel. That tempe
r of his—his impatience—”
“I have some of those qualities myself, you know,” Prestimion said. “But only a tincture. He had the full dose.” He applied himself thoughtfully to his brandy for a time. Its texture was marvelously smooth, but its long-pent-up flavor erupted within one’s mouth like an exploding galaxy. Then he said, when he judged the silence to have gone on long enough, “He killed himself, didn’t he, Dekkeret? What else could it have been, but suicide? But why? Why? He was under great stress, yes, but what kind of stress is there that could possibly drive a man like Teotas to take his own life?”
Quietly Dekkeret said, “I think he was murdered, Prestimion.”
“Murdered?”
Prestimion could not have been more astounded if Dekkeret had slapped him in the face.
“Or, let us say, he was forced by something outside himself into a frame of mind in which dying seemed more attractive to him than living; and then he was maneuvered into a place where death was a very easy thing to find.”
Prestimion hunched forward, staring intently. Dekkeret’s words went through him like a whirlwind. This was not anything that he wanted to believe. But the world does not let one believe only the things one chooses to believe.
“Go on,” he said. “Let me hear it all.”
“He came to me in my office,” said Dekkeret, “on the last afternoon of his life. As you know, I had invited him to serve as my High Counsellor—that was how much regard I had for him, Prestimion—but he would neither say me yea or nay about taking the post, and finally I sent for him to press him on it.”
“Why was he so hesitant? Was it on Fiorinda’s account?”
“That was the reason he gave, yes. That the Lady Varaile had requested the Lady Fiorinda to be her companion at the Labyrinth, and Teotas would not let his own ambitions stand in the way of that. But also there were the dreams he was having. Every night, apparently, a siege of nightmares beyond all describing.”
“Yes. Varaile heard about that from Fiorinda.—There are a lot of bad dreams going around these days, you know. My own daughter Tuanelys has been troubled by them. And Varaile as well, lately.”
“Even she?” Dekkeret said. He seemed to register the news with the deepest interest. “Nothing so savage as the ones that afflicted Teotas, I do sincerely hope. The man was in ruinous condition when I met with him. Pale, bloodshot, trembling. He told me straight out that he dreaded going to sleep each night, for fear of the dreams. Whatever resolution of the Fiorinda problem we might have tried to work out became impossible to discuss, because those dreams of his had wrecked him so. He said that he had become convinced, through his dreams, that he was unworthy of being High Counsellor. He begged me to release him from the appointment. Which I suppose I simply should have done, considering the shape he was in. But I wanted him, Prestimion, I wanted him badly. I asked him finally to put the whole matter aside for one more week, and it seemed to me as he was leaving that he had agreed to that.”
“But instead, feeling terrible shame and guilt over having told you he wanted to decline the appointment, and not wanting to go through the whole thing again with you the following week, he headed straight from your office to some remote spire of the Castle, clambered out to the edge, and jumped off.”
“No.”
“That was what I was told that he did.”
“He jumped, yes. But not right after his meeting with me. It was in the afternoon that I saw him. It was in the middle of the night when he fell to his death.”
“Yes. I did know that, actually. There was talk that he’d been sleepwalking. Which would make it an accident, rather than suicide.”
“It was neither, Prestimion.”
“You really believe that he was murdered?”
“There is a device—a little metal helmet: do you remember it?—that allows one to reach across great distances and interfere with the workings of someone else’s mind. With my own eyes I beheld you using such a helmet fifteen years ago.”
“Of course. The one that your friend Dinitak stole from his father and brought to us to use against Dantirya Sambail.”
“Which was a copy of an earlier one, you recall, that Dinitak’s father Venghenar had stolen from the Vroon who invented it, and which he employed in the Procurator’s service.”
“All these deadly helmets have been kept under seal in the Treasury ever since those days. Is it your notion that someone’s made off with one of them and was using it against Teotas?”
“The Barjazid helmets are still at the Castle, where they belong, and all of them remain under our control,” Dekkeret replied. “But there are other Barjazids beside Dinitak in this world, Prestimion. And other helmets.”
“You know this to be a fact?”
“Dinitak is my source. His father’s younger brother, Khaymak Barjazid by name, still lives, and still understands the making of the helmets. It was this Khaymak who used to construct the things for Venghenar when they all lived in Suvrael long ago. He continues to possess the plans and sketches he used. While you were still Coronal, he came to the Castle to offer some new and improved model to you, but Dinitak found out about it first and turned him away, not wanting anyone of his sort sniffing around at court. So Khaymak took himself off to Zimroel and sold the helmet plans to a certain Mandralisca, whose name you will, I think, remember.”
Dekkeret’s words fell upon Prestimion with devastating impact. “The poison-taster? He’s still alive?”
“Evidently so. And in the service of five extraordinarily loathsome brothers who happen to be the nephews of our old friend Dantirya Sambail. And they, as I have only just begun to discover, have launched some sort of local insurrection against our rule in a desert district of central Zimroel.”
“This is beginning to move too quickly for me,” Prestimion said. He poured fresh bowls of brandy for them both, and took a long, slow sip. “—Let us go back a little. This Khaymak Barjazid has put a mind-controlling helmet in the hands of Mandralisca the poison-taster?”
“Yes.”
“And—surely this is where you have been heading with all of this—Mandralisca has used the helmet to reach into Teotas’s mind and drive him to the edge of insanity. Over the edge, indeed, to the point where he would take his own life.”
“Yes, Prestimion. Precisely so.”
“What’s your proof of this?”
“I authorized Dinitak to withdraw one of the old helmets from the Treasury and conduct a little investigation with it. He reports that mental broadcasts are emanating from somewhere in the vicinity of Ni-moya. He believes the operator is none other than Mandralisca, who appears to have been striking randomly all over the world. And not always randomly, since one of his broadcasts was aimed at Teotas, with the results that we all have seen.”
“You believe that what Dinitak says is true?”
“I do.”
“And how long have you known all this?”
“About three days.”
Once again Prestimion felt the whirlwinds of chaos roaring through his mind. “You heard me say that my little daughter Tuanelys has been having bad dreams. Varaile, occasionally, too. My brother, my daughter, my wife: can it be that this Mandralisca has found a way of making the Pontifex’s own family his target?”
“That could be so.”
“And the Pontifex next? Or the Coronal?”
“No one is safe, Prestimion. No one.”
My brother. My daughter. My wife.
Prestimion closed his eyes and pressed the tips of his fingers to the lids. A tumultuous welter of emotions surged through him: fury, foremost, but sadness, also, and a bleak sense of exhaustion of the spirit, and even fear. Had the Divine, he wondered, placed some curse on his entire reign? First the Korsibar usurpation, and then the plague of madness that had been the consequence of his high-handed act in wiping out the entire world’s memories of the civil war, and then the attempt by Dantirya Sambail to unseat him. Now these new vermin, these five brothers, spurred to yet
another rebellion by this devilish Mandralisca, who seemed to have a dozen lives—and, worst of all, an invisible threat reaching even into his family itself—
When he looked at Dekkeret again he saw that the younger man was regarding him worriedly, even tenderly. In haste Prestimion strove to restore his mantle of regal poise.
“I am reminded,” he said, slowly, calmly, “of Maundigand-Klimd’s prophecy that a Barjazid would somehow make himself a Power of the Realm. I told you of that, did I not? Yes. You thought he might have been speaking of Dinitak, and scoffed at that, and I warned you not to take the prophecy too literally. Well, we will have no Barjazids as literal Powers of the Realm, I think, but here is one who is certainly wielding power, in the abstract sense. We will locate him before he does further harm, and take his helmets from him, and see to it that he is able to build no more of them. And we’ll deal at last with that serpent Mandralisca, too, and pull his fangs.”
“That we will.”
“You will report to me daily, Dekkeret, concerning any further discoveries Dinitak may make.”
“Absolutely.” Dekkeret finished the last of his brandy. “The uprising, or whatever it is, in Zimroel needs handling also. I may go there in person to deal with it.”
Prestimion lifted an eyebrow. “Under the pretext of a grand processional, you think? So early in your reign? And so far?”
“I should do whatever seems appropriate, Prestimion. I’ve only just begun to consider what that will be. Let’s discuss this further, shall we, after the funeral.—Do you plan to remain here at Muldemar for any length of time?”
“A few days, only. At most a week.”
“And then back to the Labyrinth, is it?”