“I have heard tell that the lady is betrothed to a great prince of Castle Mount,” said the Vroon. “Can it be that when she returned to her proper senses she was smitten by a sense of obligation to her prince? By guilt, by shame, by terrible remorse?”
“I had hoped that her night with me would leave her with no farther interest in that other person.”
“As well you might, your grace. But the potion was specifically designed to obtain her surrender on that one occasion when it was administered, and so it did. It would not necessarily have a lingering effect after it had left her body.”
As he spoke the door opened behind the marquis and Shostik-Willeron, arriving for the night, stepped into the shop. The eyes of the Su-Suheris flickered quickly from Ghambivole Zwoll to the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran to the marquis’s unsheathed sword, and a look of terrible dismay crossed his faces. The Vroon signalled to him to be still.
“Literature is full of examples of similar cases,” Ghambivole Zwoll said. “The tale of Lisinamond and Prince Ghorn, for example, in which the prince, after at long last consummating the great desire of his life, discovers that she—”
“Spare me the poetic quotations,” the marquis said. “I don’t regard a single night’s success, followed by icy repudiation the next day, as in any way a fulfillment of your guarantee. I require fuller satisfaction.”
Satisfaction? What did he mean by that? A duel, perhaps? Ghambivole Zwoll, appalled, did not immediately reply. In that moment of silence Shostik-Willeron stepped forward. “If you will pardon me, your grace,” said the Su-Suheris, “I must point out to you that my partner did not stipulate anything more than the assurance that the potion would secure you the lady’s favors, and it does appear that this was—”
The Marquis Mirl Meldelleran whirled to face him and flicked his sword savagely through the air from side to side before him. “Be quiet, monster, or I’ll cut off your head. Just one of them, you understand. As a special favor I’ll allow you the choice of which it is to be.”
Shostik-Willeron moved into the shadows and said nothing further.
The marquis went on, “To continue: I regard the terms of our agreement as having been breached.”
“A refund, milord, would be very difficult for us to—”
“I’m not interested in a refund. Make me a second potion. A stronger one, much stronger, one that will obliterate all other affections from her mind and bind her to me forever. You make it and I’ll find some way to get it to her and all will be well, and my account with you will be quits. What do you say, wizard? Can you do that?”
The Vroon pondered the question a moment. Shostik-Willeron was right, he knew: Shostik-Willeron had been right all along. They never should have had anything to do with this grimy business. And they should refuse now to continue with it. Like all his kind, he had some slight power of foretelling the future, and the images that came to him by way of such second sight were not encouraging ones. Whether or not the law was on their side, the great lords of Castle Mount certainly were unlikely to be, and if this slippery marquis continued his pursuit of the Lady Alesandra he would sooner or later bring down the vengeance of those mighty ones not only upon him but upon those who had aided and abetted him in his quest.
On the other hand, that consideration was a relatively abstract one, at least when compared with the sharp and gleaming reality of the sword in the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran’s hand. The great lords of Castle Mount were far away; the sword of the marquis was right here and very close. That alone was incentive enough for the Vroon to plunge ahead with this new task that the marquis required of him, regardless of the obvious riskiness of it.
The hard blue eyes were bright with menace. “Well, little magus? Will you do it or won’t you?”
In a low, weak voice the Vroon said, “I suppose so, your grace.”
“Good. How soon?”
Again Ghambivole Zwoll hesitated. “Eight days? Perhaps nine? The task will not be an easy one, and I realize that you will accept nothing less than complete success. I’ll need to consult many sources. And beyond doubt a great many rare ingredients must be obtained, which will take some little while.”
“Eight days,” said the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran. “Not an hour more.”
Compounding such a powerful potion, far more intense than the one he had given the marquis, would be perfectly feasible, of course. It was years since he had made such a thing, but he had not forgotten the art of it. It would call for the utmost in technical skill, Ghambivole Zwoll knew, and would require, just as he had asserted, some rare and costly ingredients: they would have to go back to the moneylenders once again to cover the expense.
But he had no choice. Doubtless Shostik-Willeron was right that there was great peril in meddling in the romantic affairs of the aristocracy; the marriage of a Coronal’s son to a princess of Muldemar must surely be a matter not just of romance but of high political intrigue, and woe betide anyone who sought to undo such a match for his own sordid purposes. Still, Ghambivole Zwoll wanted to believe, even now, that whatever consequences might befall such meddling would fall upon the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran, not on the lowly proprietors of some unimportant sorcerers’ shop in the Midnight Market. The real peril he and Shostik-Willeron faced, he told himself again and again, was not from so remote a thing as the displeasure of the great lords of the Castle, but rather from the uncontrolled anger of the rash, reckless, and frustrated marquis.
Gloomily Shostik-Willeron concurred in this reasoning. And so they floated a new loan, which left them almost as deep in debt as they had been before the marquis and his twenty-royal commission had come to plague their lives. Ghambivole Zwoll sent orders far and wide to suppliers of precious herbs and elixirs and powders, the bone of this creature and the blood of that one, the sap of this tree, the seed of another, potations of a dozen sort, galliuc and ravenswort, spider lettuce and bloodleaf, wolf-parsley and viperbane and black fennel, and waited, fidgeting, until they began to arrive, and began, once the proper ingredients for the basis of the drug were in his hands, to mix and measure and weigh and test. He doubted very much that he would have the stuff ready by the eighth day, and in truth he had never regarded that as a realistic goal; but the marquis had insisted. The Vroon hoped that when the marquis did return on the eighth day and found the potion still incomplete, he would see that the magus was toiling in good faith and did indeed hope to have the job done in another day or two, or three, and would be patient until then.
The eighth day came and midnight tolled, and the market was thrown open for business. As Ghambivole Zwoll had expected, the drug was not quite ready. But, to his surprise, the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran did not appear to claim it. He was hardly likely to have forgotten; but something pressing must have cropped up to keep him from making the short journey downslope to Bombifale to pick up his merchandise tonight. Just as well, the Vroon thought.
Nor did the marquis show up on the ninth night either, though Ghambivole Zwoll had brought the stuff to the verge of completion by then. The following afternoon, by dint of having worked all through a difficult sleepless day, the Vroon tipped a few drops of the final reagent into the flask, saw the mixture turn to a rewarding amber hue shimmering with highlights of scarlet and green, and knew that the job was finished. If the marquis came here at last this evening to claim his potion, Ghambivole Zwoll would be ready to make delivery. And the marquis would have no complaints this time. The new potion did not even require the recitation of a spell, so powerful was its effect. So the poor highborn simpleton would be spared the effort of memorizing five or six strange words. Ghambivole Zwoll hoped he would be grateful for that.
With midnight still a few hours away, the market had not yet opened for business. Ghambivole Zwoll waited, alone in the shop, tense, eager to have this hazardous transaction done with at last.
A little while later he heard the sounds of some commotion in the hall: an outcry from the warders, someone’s angry response, a further protes
t from one of the warders. In all likelihood, the Vroon thought, the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran had finally come, and in his usual blustering way was trying to force his way into the market before regular hours.
But the noise outside was none of the marquis’s doing this time. Abruptly the door of Ghambivole Zwoll’s shop burst open and two sturdy-looking men in fine velvet livery brightly emblazoned across the left shoulder with the image of the Muldemar Ruby, the huge red stone that was the well-known emblem of that great princely house, came thundering in. They were armed with formidable swords: no foppish dress swords these, but great gleaming grim-looking military sabers.
Ghambivole Zwoll understood at once what must have happened. Some Muldemar House maid had confessed, or had been made to confess, that her lady had had an illicit nocturnal visitation. One question had led to another, the whole story had come out, the identity of the sorcerer in question had somehow been revealed, and now these thugs had come on their princely master’s behalf to take revenge.
The way they were glaring at him seemed to leave no doubt of that. But from the manner in which they held themselves, not merely threatening but at the same time wary, ill at ease, it appeared likely that they feared he would use some dark mantic power against them. As if he could! He cursed them for their stupidity, their great useless height and bulk, their mere presence in his shop. What madness it had been, Ghambivole Zwoll thought, for his forebears to have settled on this world of oafish oversized clods!
“Are you the magus Ghambivole Zwoll?” the bigger of the two demanded, in a voice like rolling boulders. And he slid his great sword a short way into view.
Ghambivole Zwoll, swept now with a terror greater than any he had ever known in his life, shrank back against his desk. If only he could have used some magical power to thrust them out the door, he would have done so. If only. But his powers were gentle ones and these two were huge bulky ruffians, and he did not dare make even the slightest move.
“I am,” he murmured, and did what he could to prepare himself for death.
“The Prince of Muldemar will speak with you,” the big man said ominously.
The Prince of Muldemar? Here in the marketplace, in Ghambivole Zwoll’s own shop? The fifth or sixth highest noble of the realm?
Incredible. Unthinkable. The man might just as well have said, The Coronal is here to see you. The Pontifex. The Lady of the Isle.
The two huge footmen stepped aside. Into the shop came now a golden-haired man of fifty or so, short of stature and slender but broad-shouldered and regal of bearing. His lips were thin and tightly compressed, his face was narrow. It could almost have been the face Ghambivole Zwoll had often seen on coins of long ago, the face of this prince’s royal ancestor five generations removed, the great monarch Prestimion.
There was no mistaking the searing anger in the prince’s keen, intense greenish-blue eyes.
“You have supplied a potion to a certain unimportant lordling of Castle Mount,” the prince said.
Not a question. A statement of fact.
Ghambivole Zwoll’s vision wavered. His tentacles trembled.
“I am licensed, sir, to provide my services to the public as they may be required.”
“Within discretion. Are you aware that you went far beyond the bounds of discretion?”
“I was asked to fulfill a need. The Marquis Mirl Meldelleran requested—”
“You will not name him. Speak of him only as your client. You should know that your client, who committed a foul act with the aid of your skills, has taken himself at our request this very day into exile in Suvrael.”
Ghambivole Zwoll shivered. Suvrael? That terrible place, the sun-blasted, demon-haunted desert continent far to the south? Death would be a more desirable punishment than exile to Suvrael.
In a hoarse croak Ghambivole Zwoll said, “My client asked me to fulfill a need, your grace. I did not think it was my responsibility to—”
“You did not think. You did not think.”
“No, your grace. I did not think.”
There was no possibility of success in disputing the matter with the Prince of Muldemar. Ghambivole Zwoll bowed his head and waited to hear his sentence.
The Prince said sternly, “You will forget that you ever had dealings with that client. You will forget his very name. You will forget the purpose for which he came to you. You will forget everything connected with him and with the task you carried out on his behalf. Your client has ceased to exist on Castle Mount. If you keep records, Vroon, you will expunge from them all indication of the so-called service you performed for him. Is that understood?”
Seeing that he evidently was going to be allowed to live, Ghambivole Zwoll bowed his head and said in a husky whisper, “I understand and obey, your grace.”
“Good.”
Was that all? So it seemed. The Vroon gave inward thanks to the half-forgotten gods of his forefathers’ ancestral world.
But then the prince, turning, took a long glance around the cluttered shop. His gaze came to rest on the handsome flask on Ghambivole Zwoll’s desk, the flask containing the new and potent elixir that the Vroon had prepared for the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran.
“What is that?”
“A potion, your grace.”
“Another love potion, is it?”
“Merely a potion, sir.” Then, in agony, when the prince gave him a terrible glare: “Yes. One could call it a love potion,”
“For the same client as before? So that he might compound the damage he has already done?”
“I must reply that I am bound by the laws of confidentiality, sir, not to reveal—”
The Prince of Muldemar responded with a somber laugh. “Yes. Yes! Of course. What a law-abiding thing you are, wizard! Very well. Pick up the flask and drink the stuff yourself.”
“Sir?”
“Drink it!”
Aghast, Ghambivole Zwoll cried, “Sir, I must object!”
The prince nodded to one of the footmen. From the corner of his eye Ghambivole Zwoll saw the ugly glint of a saber’s blade coming once more into view.
“Sir?” he murmured. “Sir?”
“Drink it, or you’ll join your former client in Suvrael, and you’ll count yourself lucky that your fate is no worse.”
“Yes. Yes. I understand and obey.”
There could be no refusing the prince’s command. Ghambivole Zwoll reached for the flask and shakily lifted it to his beak.
Dimly the Vroon watched the Prince of Muldemar and his two footmen leaving the shop, a moment later, slamming the door behind them. It was all he could do to cling to consciousness. His head was whirling. A bright crimson haze whirled about him. He was scarcely able to think coherently.
Then through the fog that engulfed his brain he saw the shop door open again, and the huge Skandar woman Hendaya Zanzan entered to begin her evening’s work of tidying and sweeping. Ghambivole Zwoll stared at her in awe and wonder. Instantly a sudden all-consuming passion overwhelmed him. She was radiant; she was glorious; she glowed before him like a dazzling flame. He had never seen anyone more beautiful.
He ran to her, reached up, clasped his tentacles tightly around her enormous calf. His heart pounded with a great surge of desperate love. His vision blurred as tears of joy dimmed his blazing yellow eyes.
“Oh, beloved – beloved – !”
6
The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar
I had always yearned to visit Sippulgar, that golden city of the southern coast. Every schoolchild hears tales of its extraordinary beauty. But there are many places on Majipoor I yearn to visit – the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, or at least a few of them, and marvelous Dulorn, the shining city of crystalline stone that the Ghayrog folk built in far-off Zimroel, and mighty Ni-moya on that same distant continent, and many another. Our world is a huge one, though, and life is short. I am a man of business, an expediter of merchandise, and business has kept me close to my native city of Sisivondal for most of my days. br />
It was the strange disappearance and presumed death of Melifont Ambithorn, my wife Thuwayne’s elder brother, that finally brought me to Sippulgar. I had hardly known Melifont at all, you understand: I had met him just twice, once at my wedding and once perhaps ten years later, when one of his many unsuccessful business ventures brought him to Sisivondal for a few days. He was fifteen years older than my wife and she seemed to regard him more as an uncle than as a brother; but when word came to her that he was thought to have perished in some mysterious and unpleasant way, she was deeply affected, far more than I would have thought, asking me to go at once to Sippulgar to see if I could discover what had happened to him, and to lay a memorial wreath on his grave, if he was indeed dead. Thuwayne herself is no traveler; she dislikes the upheavals and discomforts of even the shortest trip most intensely. But she could not bear to leave her brother’s death a mystery, and I think she entertained some hope that I would actually find him still alive. She begged me to go, and I knew that I had no choice but to do it.
For all my fascination with the fabled marvels of Sippulgar, it was not an especially good time for me to be setting out on such a long excursion. Sisivondal is the chief mercantile center of western Alhanroel, where all roads that cross the heart of the continent meet, and we were coming now into the busiest season of the year, when caravans travel from all directions to unload their goods into our warehouses and to buy merchandise for their return journeys. But I will refuse Thuwayne nothing. I cherish her beyond all measure. And so, after just a few mild expressions of uneasiness about undertaking such a venture at this time of year, I put my business affairs into the hands of my most trusted assistant and made my arrangements for my visit to Sippulgar. This was in the time of Lord Confalume, who was then about thirty years into his long and glorious reign as Coronal. Prankipin was our Pontifex. In those days, you know, we enjoyed a time of great prosperity; and also it was the period when all sorts of esoteric new philosophies – sorcery, necromancy, prognostication, the worship of supernatural spirits of every kind, the opening of doors into hidden universes populated by gods and demons – were taking hold on Majipoor.