Sorcerers of Majipoor m-4 Read online

  There were others at the monument too, citizens of Amblemorn. He saw someone looking at him and imagined that person thinking, That was Prestimion who was to have been Coronal, but now is no one. And his blood ran hot in him for a moment, and his head was all aswirl with the fury of intolerable loss.

  But then his iron control reasserted itself. No, Prestimion told himself: no, they have no idea here who I am, and if they do, what of it? It is no shame not to be Coronal. And a time will come when the world is right-side up again perhaps, and all will be well: or else I will die attempting it, and none of this will matter any longer to me.

  * * *

  The travelers lost no time getting on the road once the floaters were assembled and ready.

  From Amblemorn there were various routes upward. The Fifty Cities were arrayed around the sides of the Mount in levels, forming four big rings, with great expanses of open space separating one ring from the next. Amblemorn was one of the twelve Slope Cities, as those of the bottommost ring were known. From it rose two main highways of approximately equal directness, one passing through its neighboring city to the west, Dundilmir, and the other going eastward past Normork and Morvole. They chose the Dundilmir road, which was less heavily traveled and took them around the gloriously strange zone of red lava flows and smoking fumaroles and spuming geysers known as the Fiery Valley, to a place where they could gain access to a good road leading farther upward.

  The angle of ascent beyond the Fiery Valley was a relatively gentle one, and it was a journey of a hundred miles along the flank of the Mount to the level of the nine Free Cities, the next urban ring. This road led them a quarter-turn around the haunch of the mountain even farther toward the west, where the chief cities were Castlethorn, Gimkandale, and Vugel.

  Septach Melayn argued for the Castlethorn road, but Svor pointed out that was a slow one because it wound back and forth upon itself so many times; and so Prestimion and his companions went up and around it, traveling by way of the next city to the west. That was Gimkandale, famous for its floating terraces that looked out toward the gray desert lands of middle Alhanroel. The travelers were some ninety degrees around Castle Mount from their starting point at the source of the Glayge, there. Again a choice of routes confronted them; and after some debate they took the steep path along the starkly serrated palisade of Stiamot Battlements, where the wild saber-fanged hryssa-wolves bayed night and day from the porches of their inaccessible caves, and thence through the forest of glassy-leaved trees that grew beside Siminave Highway, leading to Strave, Greel, and Minimool, which were the closest of the eleven Guardian Cities.

  There were further indications all along the way that the rise to power of Lord Korsibar was not unknown in these higher levels, and apparently had met with no opposition. Prestimion paid little notice. But Gialaurys, seeing the banners of Korsibar fluttering here and there, would mutter now and again and clench his fists and look upslope, eyes red with rage.

  He raised no new discussion, however, of his optimistic if implausible plan to take the throne for Prestimion by the mere declaration of his kingship as an accomplished fact. Prestimion had made it clear that he wanted such talk to cease. Plainly the scheme continued to simmer within Gialaurys, though, and even in Septach Melayn.

  They were nearly halfway up the Mount now. A dozen miles of vertical ascent and many hundreds of miles of lateral travel remained before they would come into the true high country, which was hidden from them down here by the mantle of white clouds that perpetually screened the midriff of the mountain. But already they were far above the lowlands of the continent. The air at this height was crisp and electric, with a quality of light that could not be duplicated at lower altitudes. In every direction the towers and battlements of the great Mount cities could be seen, clinging boldly to enormous ledges and scarps and outcroppings on the face of the mountain; and everything was outlined in a brilliant tracery of radiant color.

  Their road took them between Strave, where architects were looked upon as demigods and no building was in any manner like any other, and Greel, its very opposite of a place, limited by strict construction codes to five shapes for houses and no more. A straight ribbon of a highway, bright as glass in the midday sun, led onward from there, ever higher, into the level of the nine Inner Cities.

  The choice of route now was beginning to become limited for them: the mountain was narrowing rapidly here in the cloud-covered upper fringes of the midzone country. Any of the nine High Cities could be reached from any point below, but above the High Cities the landscape became so jagged that traversing it could be managed only in the most favorable places, and just a handful of roads continued beyond their level to that of the Castle itself. Of those, by far the best was the one that went via Bombifale to High Morpin, where the Castle road began. So they made their way on a long diagonal across the face of the Mount to the great tableland known as Bombifale Plain, below lovely Bombifale itself, the city of the Grand Admiral Gonivaul. A multitude of Korsibar banners oppressed them at every town along the road, all the way from Greel.

  The evening was already too far gone into moonless night when they came to Bombifale for them to feel the full beauty of the place, which was the work of Lord Pinitor of distant antiquity, the only Coronal in all of Majipoor’s history who had come from Bombifale. Pinitor had never ceased to expand and glorify his native city. Long plodding trains of pack animals had hauled untold tons of orange sandstone up the Mount from the desert back of Velalisier to build the scalloped city walls that thrust far out over the plain; and an even greater effort had gone into the mining and transportation of the imposing diamond-shaped slabs of blue seaspar that were inlaid in those walls, for seaspar was found only along the shores of the Great Sea on Alhanroel’s remote and inhospitable eastern coast. It was by the order of the Coronal Lord Pinitor, too, that scores of enormously tall slender towers sharp as needles had been erected atop the city battlements for many miles, giving Bombifale a profile unlike that of any other city in the world.

  But little of that was apparent to the tired travelers now. It was late and dark. The one conspicuous thing was the new star, shining high above them, burning fiercely against the blackness. “See, it follows us everywhere!” cried Svor jovially. That was the star which to Svor was a star of good omen. But Prestimion, looking up wearily at that hard insistent glare now, was much less certain of that. It had been too strange in the manner of its coming, and was too potent in its savage brightness.

  They found rooms for themselves and all their party at a small drab inn near the city’s outer edge. Once they were settled, they ordered up a meal from the surly, reluctant landlord, who agreed to serve them at this hour only when he realized that among this group of late-coming guests was no less a grandee than the Prince of Muldemar.

  A couple of sullen Hjort girls waited on them, along with a limping, one-eyed, black-bearded man whose scars and scowls gave indication that he had come out very much on the short side of some bloody brawl years ago. As he set Prestimion’s flask of wine and bowl of stewed meat down before him, he bent low and peered full in Prestimion’s face, staring intently at him with that lone bloodshot eye as though Prestimion were a being of a kind that never had been seen on Majipoor before.

  For an intolerably long moment he held that stare, and Prestimion looked levelly back. Then the man’s fingers shot out quickly in a hasty and rudimentary version of the starburst sign, and he grinned a broad ugly grin, showing yellow snaggled teeth, and went shuffling away toward the kitchen.

  Gialaurys, who had seen it, rose halfway from his seat. “I’ll kill him, my lord! I’ll rip his head from his shoulders!”

  Prestimion restrained him by the wrist. “Peace, Gialaurys. No pulling off of heads, and no calling me ‘my lord.’ ”

  “But he mocked you!”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps he is my secret adherent.”

  Gialaurys laughed a harsh bitter laugh. “Your secret adherent, yes. No doubt he is, and a fine
figure of a man too. Take down his name, then, and make him your High Counsellor when you are king.”

  “Peace,” Prestimion said. “Peace, Gialaurys.”

  But he was wounded and angry too; for there could have been no intention in the one-eyed man’s mind other than to mock. Had he fallen so far, that servants in a shabby inn felt free to make sport of him? Prestimion kept his feelings to himself; but he was glad to leave that place in the morning, and glad also that he had no cause to see that one-eyed man again before he left, for he knew that he might not be so forbearing at a second offense.

  It was only a long day’s journey up from Bombifale to the lowest reaches of the Castle. Gialaurys, sizzling still over the insult in the tavern, held forth much of the way once more on his notion that Prestimion must assert his right to the throne immediately and forcefully. Prestimion would not hear of it. “You can leave the floater and walk the rest of the way to the summit,” he said, “if you can find no other topic for discussion than this.” Gialaurys ungracefully subsided, though he began again an hour later and had to be silenced once more.

  This was familiar territory now: they had traversed it dozens, even hundreds, of times, often coming down from the Castle on this steep mountain road made of bright red flagstones to enjoy the many delights of the rich and luxury-loving cities in the heavily populated belt just below it. High Morpin was the chief pleasure-city of the Mount, where lords young and old amused themselves on the mirror-slides and the juggernauts and in the fantastic caverns of the power-tunnels, and sat afterward under canopies of spun gold to sip sweet wines and nibble cold sherbets.

  But there would be no rides on the juggernauts today, and no wines and sherbets. They bypassed High Morpin entirely and hastened onward along the ten-mile stretch of road called the Grand Calintane Highway, which ran through fields of ever-blooming flowers to the borders of the Castle domain.

  The summit of the Mount was in sight now.

  This was the farthermost realm of Majipoor, which once had stood far out into the eternal frigid night of space, before the construction of the weather-machines. But the weaving of a soft mild atmosphere around this ultimate peak of the Mount had done nothing to gentle its fierce sharp topography: the craggy summit was made up of an intricate array of slender, dagger-tipped subpeaks of hardest basalt, stabbing upward at the sky like myriad black stalagmites. In the center of all these stony spikes, rising up high above them, was one final great upwelling of granite, a huge rounded hump at the very tip of the mountain that formed the foundation for the Coronal’s royal residence.

  The Castle! The immense unchartable bewildering Castle of uncountable thousands of rooms, virtually a city in itself, that covered so many hundreds of acres! It clung to the mountaintop like a great sprawling chaotic monster of brick and masonry, sending random tentacles roaming in every direction down the slope.

  The Grand Calintane Highway came to the Castle at its southern wing, terminating in the great open space known as the Dizimaule Plaza. The pavement here was of smooth green porcelain cobblestones, and a huge starburst in golden tilework lay at its center. On its far side was the mighty Dizimaule Arch, through which all visitors to the Castle must pass when entering.

  There was a guard post here, just to the left of the arch, and a tall gate with elaborate iron grillwork mounted with giant hinges set in the sides of the arch itself. That gate was always open; it was purely ornamental, for no invading armies were expected ever to present themselves at the entrance to the Castle, on this world that had known only peace for so long.

  The gate was closed now. It stood shut in front of them like a palisade of spears embedded in the ground to block their forward path.

  “Do you see that?” Prestimion asked in a voice choking with wonderment. “Closed? Have you ever known that gate to be closed before?”

  “Never,” Gialaurys said.

  “Never,” said Svor. “It comes as news to me that it can be closed at all.”

  “Yet there it is,” rumbled Gialaurys. “It stands in our faces with its great padlock on it. What is this, my lord? How can they close the gate on us? The Castle is our home!”

  “Ah, is it?” said Prestimion softly.

  Septach Melayn, meanwhile, had stepped to the inner side of the plaza, just by the guardhouse door, and was rapping on it with the flat of his sword. There was no immediate response. Septach Melayn rapped again, more vigorously this time, and shouted to get the attention of those within.

  After a little while the guardhouse door slowly opened and two men dressed in the garb of officials of the Castle chancellery moved out into view. One was a Hjort, cold-eyed and somber, with an extraordinarily broad mouth and thick pebble-textured, olive-hued skin; the other, a human, was scarcely prettier, for his face was almost as flat and wide as the Hjort’s and he wore the sparse tufts of his reddish hair arrayed in stiff tall spikes all over his skull. Both wore swords, of the decorative kind that had come lately into great popularity at the Castle.

  “What game is this?” Septach Melayn asked at once. “Open the gate for us!”

  “The gate is closed,” replied the Hjort complacently.

  “I’ve already observed that it is, else I’d not waste my breath asking. Open it, and it would be wise not to make me ask a third time.”

  The spike-haired one said, “The Dizimaule gate is closed by order of the Coronal Lord Korsibar. We are told that it is to remain closed until he has reached the Castle himself and taken up residence in it.”

  “Is it, now?” said Septach Melayn. His hand went to the pommel of the sword that dangled at his side. “Do you have any idea who we are? I see plainly that you don’t.”

  “The gate is closed to all comers, no matter who they be,” said the Hjort, now with some tension in his tone. “Those are the orders we have received from the High Counsellor Duke Oljebbin, who is en route from the Labyrinth, traveling in the party of the Coronal. No one may enter until they are here. No one.”

  Gialaurys caught his breath sharply at that and took a step or two forward to put himself at Septach Melayn’s side; and Prestimion, though he remained in his place farther back, made a noise low in his throat like the growl of an angered dog. The two chancellery men looked increasingly uneasy. Some uniformed guardsmen now began to appear from within and take up positions alongside them before the gate.

  Speaking mildly, though restraining himself was an effort, Prestimion said, “I am the Prince Prestimion of Muldemar, as I think you know. I have apartments within the Castle and I wish to have access to them. As do my companions here, whose names I think you also know.”

  The Hjort made a Hjortish nod. “I know you, Prince Prestimion. But nevertheless I am not permitted to open this gate, not for you nor anyone, until the Coronal is here.”

  “You hideous toad, this is the Coronal who stands here before you!” Gialaurys shouted, and rushed toward him with the fury of a maddened bull. “Down and give worship! Down and give worship!”

  Two guardsmen moved quickly in to protect the Hjort. Gialaurys seized one of them without an instant’s hesitation and hurled him head first through the air so that he fetched up against the guardhouse door. He struck it with a terrible cracking sound and lay still.

  The other, who was armed with a vibration-sword, went for his weapon but was slow in activating it: Gialaurys caught him by the left arm, spun him around, and yanked the arm sharply upward, snapping it like a twig. As the man began to crumple in shock, Gialaurys struck him hard across the throat, a sharp powerful blow with the edge of his hand, and he fell down motionless also on the plaza pavement.

  “Come on, the rest of you!” Gialaurys cried to the other guards, who stared in awe and astonishment at their two dead comrades. Gialaurys beckoned them challengingly to come toward him, but none of them moved.

  Septach Melayn, meanwhile, had his sword out and was dancing in a cold but sportive rage about the Hjort and the other chancellery man, moving with a theatrical flamboyance: artf
ully nipping out again and again at them with the tip of his blade, menacing them with taunting grimaces and lightly pinking them here and there without actually inflicting a serious wound. His long thin spidery arms flashed like pistons, lashing out tirelessly. There was no defense against him. There never was. The two chancellery men had their own swords drawn too, but they were flimsy ornamental ones with scarcely any substance, and they held them like the utter novices that they were. Septach Melayn, laughing, flicked the Hjort’s sword from his hand with a quick sidewise swipe of his own, and disarmed the spike-haired man just as easily an instant afterward.

  “Now,” he said, “I will draw one nice stripe after another down your flesh, until someone quickly chooses to open that gate for us.” And he began by cutting open the Hjort’s blue official jerkin from shoulder to waistband.

  An alarm was sounding somewhere. Shouts could be heard from behind the gate.

  The second chancellery man had turned and was trying to get past Gialaurys and the clutter of motionless guards standing between him and the guardhouse door. Septach Melayn raised his sword and began to bring it slicing down between the man’s shoulder blades; but the blow was interrupted by Prestimion, who drew his own sword from its sheath and tapped it against Septach Melayn’s. Septach Melayn halted his stroke and whirled about, slipping automatically into a posture of defense. But upon seeing that it was Prestimion who had interfered with him, he lowered his weapon.

  “This is idiocy,” Prestimion told him. “Back to the floater, Septach Melayn! We can’t fight the whole Castle. There’ll be a hundred guards here in another five minutes.”

  “So there will indeed,” said Septach Melayn with a smile. He gave the red-haired chancellery man a thrust in the rear with his boot to send him lurching toward the guardhouse, whirled the astounded Hjort around and shoved him in the same direction, and caught Gialaurys by the arm in time to keep him from charging the guardsmen once more. Svor, who had watched the entire incident from his usual safe position on the sidelines, now trotted forth and took Gialaurys by the other arm; and he and Septach Melayn led him away, while Gialaurys continued loudly swearing that he would wreak havoc on all and sundry foes.