Sorcerers of Majipoor Read online

  BOOK ONE OF THE PRESTIMION TRILOGY

  ROBERT

  SILVERBERG

  Contents

  Epigraph 1

  Ne plus ultra

  Sine qua non

  Epigraph 2

  ... the hour when safety leaves the throne of kings, the hour when dynasties change.

  Part I

  The Book of Games

  Chapter 1

  There had been omens all year, a rain of blood over Ni-moya and sleek hailstones...

  Chapter 2

  Reports of the Pontifex’s critical condition had traveled all up and down the immensity...

  Chapter 3

  The chambers where the Coronal had his lodgings at those times when it was necessary...

  Chapter 4

  Septach Melayn entered the room known as the Melikand Chamber, a narrow...

  Chapter 5

  The Lady Thismet, sister to Prince Korsibar, had been given one of the most...

  Chapter 6

  Korsibar said, “We are agreed, then.”

  Chapter 7

  On the first day of the Pontifical Games the leaders of the kingdom presented themselves...

  Chapter 8

  The hurdle racing and the hoop-jumping and the hammer-throw and other such minor sports...

  Chapter 9

  The games were now approaching their midway point, and still the old Pontifex...

  Part II

  The Book of Lord Korsibar

  Chapter 1

  “Did you see his face?” Thismet cried.

  Chapter 2

  Under the new scheme of things, they had at least allowed...

  Chapter 3

  The way out of the Labyrinth began with the lengthy and circuitous journey upward...

  Chapter 4

  On the ninth day of Lord Korsibar’s journey northward up the Glayge...

  Chapter 5

  Midsummer eve, a magical night, the sun high in the sky far into the evening...

  Chapter 6

  The high city of Muldemar lay nestled in a soft and greatly favored zone...

  Part III

  The Book of Changes

  Chapter 1

  Korsibar had been in residence at the Castle for five days before he first...

  Chapter 2

  Svor said, fingering the elaborately embellished invitation that Count Iram had brought, “Then you really...”

  Chapter 3

  The Lady Thismet’s private apartments at the Castle were close by the ones...

  Chapter 4

  And now atop Castle Mount it was the third day...

  Chapter 5

  Afterward, in Prestimion’s apartments, Gialaurys said furiously, “By the Lady, I should have...”

  Chapter 6

  Anger and fear and a rush of wild excitement coursed through Thismet...

  Part IV

  The Book of Reckonings

  Chapter 1

  No one had any idea what use Lord Sangamor had had in mind...

  Chapter 2

  After a long and arduous journey by foot down from the summit...

  Chapter 3

  After a week at Muldemar House, during which time he and his henchmen...

  Chapter 4

  Lord Korsibar was in his great bath of alabaster and chalcedony, disporting himself...

  Chapter 5

  In the hour of his defeat by Arkilon plain, the skies opened...

  Chapter 6

  They were thirteen days crossing the Ekesta Pass, which Nemeron Dalk said was faster...

  Chapter 7

  The battle by the riverbank had been a great victory for the rebel cause, but not...

  Chapter 8

  A sudden nasty disturbance of some sort was going on in the corridor...

  Chapter 9

  For Prestimion it was a time of steady retreat, and of the healing...

  Part V

  The Book of Wizards

  Chapter 1

  This was surely the bleakest place in all the world, Prestimion thought...

  Chapter 2

  Triggoin of the sorcerers lay well beyond the desert’s northern margin, nestled pleasantly...

  Chapter 3

  The High Counsellor Farquanor said, “The wizard Thalnap Zelifor is outside, and asks...”

  Chapter 4

  In the third month of his stay in Triggoin, Prestimion felt that he had come...

  Chapter 5

  “It was in Lord Makhario’s statuary garden in Sipermit that I saw it, when...”

  Chapter 6

  Thismet said, “Have you heard these stories, Melithyrrh, that say that my brother...”

  Chapter 7

  There was no vegetation here other than grass, and the women saw him coming...

  Chapter 8

  Two more weeks passed in the camp at Gloyn. Then came word...

  Chapter 9

  All that day and far into the night the two armies faced each other across Beldak marsh...

  Chapter 10

  All the remainder of that day and the next, and the one after that, the gathering...

  Maps:

  Majipoor

  Zimroel

  Alhanroel

  Castle Mount and Glayge Valley

  Isle of Sleep

  About the Author

  By Robert Silverberg

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Once again, for Ralph

  Ne plus ultra

  Sine qua non

  . . . the hour when safety leaves the throne

  of kings, the hour when dynasties change.

  —LORD DUNSANY

  The Sword of Welleran

  Maps

  1

  THERE HAD BEEN OMENS all year, a rain of blood over Ni-moya and sleek hailstones shaped like tears falling on three of the cities of Castle Mount and then a true nightmare vision, a giant four-legged black beast with fiery ruby eyes and a single spiraling horn in its forehead, swimming through the air above the port city of Alaisor at twilight. That was a beast of a sort never before seen on Majipoor, not anywhere in the land and certainly not in the sky. And now, in his virtually inaccessible bedchamber at the deepest level of the Labyrinth, the aged Pontifex Prankipin lay dying at last, surrounded by the corps of mages and wizards and thaumaturges that had been the comfort of the old man’s later years.

  Throughout the world it was a time of tension and apprehension. Who could tell what transformations and hazards the death of the Pontifex might bring? Things had been stable for so long: four full decades, and then some, since there had been a change of ruler on Majipoor.

  As soon as word of the Pontifex’s illness had first gone forth, the lords and princes and dukes of Majipoor began to gather at the vast underground capital for the double event—the sad passing of an illustrious emperor, and the joyous commencement of a new and glorious reign. Now they waited with increasing and barely concealed restlessness for the thing that everyone knew must shortly come.

  But the weeks went by and still the old Pontifex clung to life, dying by the tiniest of increments, losing ground slowly and with the most extreme reluctance. The imperial doctors had long since acknowledged the hopelessness of his case. Nor were the imperial sorcerers and mages able to make any use of their arts to save him. Indeed, they had foretold the inevitability of his death many months ago, though not to him. They waited too, as all Majipoor waited, for their prophecy to be confirmed.

  Prince Korsibar, the splendid and universally admired son of the Coronal Lord Confalume, was the first of the great ones to arrive at the Pontifical capital. Korsibar had been hunting in the bleak deserts just to the south of the Labyrinth when the
news came to him that the Pontifex did not have long to live. At his side was his sister, the dark-eyed and lovely Lady Thismet, and an assemblage of his usual princely hunting companions; and then, a few days after, had come the Grand Admiral of the kingdom, Prince Gonivaul, and the Coronal’s cousin Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, whose rank was that of High Counsellor, and not far behind them the fabulously wealthy Prince Serithorn of Samivole, who claimed descent from no less than four different Coronals of antiquity.

  The vigorous, dynamic young Prince Prestimion of Muldemar—he who was generally expected to be chosen as Majipoor’s new Coronal once Lord Confalume succeeded Prankipin as Pontifex—had arrived also, traveling down from his home within the Coronal’s castle atop great Castle Mount in Serithorn’s party. With Prestimion were his three inseparable companions—the hulking wintry-souled Gialaurys and the deceptively exquisite Septach Melayn and slippery little Duke Svor. Other high potentates turned up before long: Dantirya Sambail, the brusque and formidable Procurator of Ni-moya, and jolly Kanteverel of Bailemoona, and the hierarch Marcatain, personal representative of the Lady of the Isle of Sleep. Then Lord Confalume himself made his appearance: the great Coronal. Some said he was the greatest in Majipoor’s long history. For decades he had presided in happy collaboration with the senior monarch Prankipin over a period of unparalleled worldwide prosperity.

  So all was in place for the proclamation of succession. And the arrival of Lord Confalume at the Labyrinth surely meant that the end must be near for Prankipin; but the event that everyone was expecting did not come, and did not come, and went on not coming, day after day, week after week.

  Of all the restless princes, it was Korsibar, the Coronal’s robust and energetic son, who appeared to be taking the delay most badly. He was a man of the outdoors, famous as a huntsman: a long-limbed, broad-shouldered man whose lean hard-cheeked face was tanned almost black from a lifetime spent under the full blaze of the sun. This dreary sojourn in the immense subterranean cavern that was the Labyrinth was maddening to him.

  Korsibar had just spent close to a year planning and equipping an ambitious hunting expedition through the southern arc of the continent of Alhanroel. That was something he had dreamed of for much of his life: a far-ranging enterprise that would have covered thousands of miles and allowed him to fill the trophy room that he kept for himself at Lord Confalume’s Castle with a grand display of new and marvelous beasts. But after only ten days in the field he had had to abort the project and hurry here, to the somber and musty place that was the Labyrinth, that sunless, joyless hidden realm deep beneath the skin of the planet.

  Where, apparently, he would be compelled, for his father’s sake and the sake of his own conspicuous station, to pace and fidget idly in that many-leveled infinity of endlessly spiraling passageways for weeks or even months. Not daring to leave, interminably awaiting the hour when the old Pontifex breathed his last breath and Lord Confalume succeeded to the imperial throne.

  Meanwhile, other men less nobly born were free to range the hunting grounds far above his head to their heart’s content. Korsibar was reaching the point of not being able to bear it any longer. He dreamed of the hunt; he dreamed of looking upward into the bright clear sky, and feeling cool, sweet northerly breezes against his cheek. As his idle days and nights in the Labyrinth stretched on and on, the force of the impatience within him was building toward an explosion.

  “The waiting, that’s the filthy worst of it,” Korsibar said, looking around at the group assembled in the big onyx-roofed antechamber of the Hall of Judgment. That antechamber, three levels up from the imperial chambers themselves, had become a regular place of assembly for the visiting lordlings. “The everlasting waiting! Gods! When will he die? Let it happen, since there’s no preventing it! Let it happen, and let us be done with it.”

  “Everything will come in the fullness of time,” said Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar in rotund and pious tones.

  “How much longer must we sit here?” Korsibar rejoined angrily “The whole world is thrown into a paralysis by this business as it is.” The morning’s bulletin on the state of the Pontifex’s health had just been posted. No change during the night; his majesty’s condition remained grave but he continued to hold his own. Korsibar pounded his balled fist into the palm of his hand. “We wait, and we wait, and we wait. And wait some more, and nothing happens. Did we all come here too soon?”

  “The considered opinion of the doctors was that his majesty did not have long to live,” said the elegant Septach Melayn. He was Prestimion’s closest friend, a tall and slender man of foppish manner but fearsome skill with weapons. “Therefore it was only reasonable for us to come here when we did, and—”

  A stupendous belch and then a mighty booming laugh erupted from the huge and heavyset Farholt, a rough uproarious man of Prince Korsibar’s entourage who traced his lineage back to the Coronal Lord Guadeloom of distant ancient days. “The opinion of the doctors? The opinion of the doctors, you say? God’s bones, what are doctors except false sorcerers whose spells don’t work right?”

  “And the spells of true sorcerers do, is that what you would claim?” asked Septach Melayn, drawling his words in his laziest, most mocking way. He eyed the massive Farholt with unconcealed distaste. “Answer me this, good friend Farholt: someone has put a rapier through the fleshy part of your arm in a tournament, let us say, and you lie bleeding on the field, watching your blood flow from you in bright wondrous spurts. Would you rather have a sorcerer run out to mutter incantations over you, or a good surgeon to stitch up your wound?”

  “When has anyone ever put a rapier through my arm, or any other part of my body?” Farholt demanded, glaring sullenly.

  “Ah, but you quite overlook my point, don’t you, my dear friend?”

  “Do you mean the point of your rapier or the point of your question?” said quick-witted little Duke Svor, that sly, mercurial man, who for a long while had been a companion to Prince Korsibar but now was reckoned among Prestimion’s most cherished comrades.

  There was a brief flurry of brittle laughter. But Korsibar, with a furious roll of his eyes, threw his arms upward in disgust “An end to all this idle chatter, now and forever! Don’t you see what foolishness it is to be passing our days like this? Wasting our time in this dank airless prison of a city, when we could be up above, living as we were meant to live—”

  “Soon. Soon,” Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar said, raising his hand in a soothing gesture. He was older than the others by twenty years, with a thick shock of snowy hair and deep lines in his cheeks to show for those years; he spoke with the calmness of maturity. “This can’t go on much longer now.”

  “A week? A month? A year?” Korsibar asked hotly.

  “A pillow over the old man’s face and it would all be done with this very morning,” Farholt muttered.

  That provoked laughter again, of a coarser kind this time, but also stares of amazement, most notably from Korsibar, and even a gasp or two at the big man’s bluntness.

  Duke Svor said, with a chilly little smile that briefly bared his small wedge-shaped front teeth, “Crude, Farholt, much too crude. A subtler thing to do, if he continues to linger, would be to suborn one of the Pontifex’s own necromancers: twenty royals would buy a few quick incantations and conjurations that would send the old man finally on his way.”

  “What’s that, Svor?” said a new and instantly recognizable voice from the vestibule, resonant and rich. “Speaking treason, are we, now?”

  It was the Coronal Lord Confalume, entering the room on the arm of Prince Prestimion. The two of them looked for all the world as if they had already succeeded to their new ranks and now, with Confalume as Pontifex and Prestimion as Coronal, had been merrily reshaping the world to their own liking over breakfast. All eyes turned toward them.

  “I beg your pardon, lordship,” said Svor smoothly, swinging about to face the Coronal. He executed a graceful if abrupt bow and a quick flourish of the starburst gesture of respect.
“It was only a foolish jest. Nor do I believe that Farholt was serious a moment ago, either, when he advocated smothering the Pontifex with his own pillow.”

  “And were you, Farholt?” the Coronal asked the big man. His tone was light but not without menace.

  Farholt was not known for the quickness of his mind; and while he was still struggling to frame his reply, Korsibar said, “Nothing serious has been said in this room for weeks, Father. What is serious is the endless delay in this matter. Which is greatly straining our nerves.”

  “And mine as well, Korsibar. We must all be patient a little longer. But perhaps a medicine for your impatience—a better one than Svor’s or Farholt’s—is at hand.” The Coronal smiled. Easily, he moved to the center of the room, taking up a position beneath a scarlet silken canopy that bore the intricately repetitive Pontifical emblem in a tracery of golden filigree and black diamonds.

  Confalume was a man of no more than middle height, but sturdily built, deep-chested and thick-thighed, true father to his stalwart son. From him there emanated the serene radiance of one who has long been at home in his own grandeur. This was Lord Confalume’s forty-third year as Coronal, a record matched by very few. Yet he still seemed to be in the fullness of his strength. Even now his eyes were bright and his high sweep of chestnut hair was only just starting to turn gray.

  To the collar of the Coronal’s soft green jersey a little astrological amulet of the sort known as a rohilla was fastened, delicate strands of blue gold wrapped in an elaborate pattern around a nugget of jade. He touched it now, the quickest of little pats and then another, as though to draw strength from it. And others in the room touched amulets of their own in response, perhaps without conscious thought. In recent years Lord Confalume, taking his cue from the ever more occult-minded Pontifex, had come to show increasing sympathy for the curious new esoteric philosophies that now were so widely embraced on all levels of Majipoori society; and the rest of the court had thoughtfully followed suit, all but a stubbornly skeptical few.