Lord Prestimion Read online

  Immediately a loud cry of “Man overboard!” went up, and the riverboat halted and swung around in its path. Two burly crewmen went out in a dinghy and without much difficulty hauled the hapless lunatic from the water. They brought him back on board, dripping and spuming, and took him down belowdecks. That was the last Dekkeret saw of him until the riverboat pulled in, a day later, at a town called Kraibledene, where the fellow was put ashore and, so it appeared, turned over to the local authorities.

  A day later came an even stranger thing. In early afternoon of a clear, warm day, as the riverboat was traversing a stretch of the river without settlements, a gaunt stern-faced man of about forty in a stiff, thickly brocaded robe descended from the passenger deck carrying a large and obviously heavy suitcase. He set the suitcase down in an unoccupied section of the main deck, opened it, and drew from it a series of odd-looking instruments and implements, which he proceeded to arrange with meticulous care in a perfect semicircle in front of him.

  Dekkeret nudged Akbalik. “Look at all that weird stuff! It’s sorcerer’s equipment, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly looks like it. I wonder if he’s going to cast some sort of spell right here in front of us all.”

  Dekkeret knew little about sorcery and had even less liking for it. Manifestations of the supernatural and irrational made him uncomfortable. “Is that anything we need to worry about, do you think?”

  “Depends on what kind of spell it is, I suppose,” Akbalik said, with a shrug. “But maybe he’s just planning to hold a bargain sale for amateur wizards. Nobody would ever use all those different things in a single spell.” And he began to point out and identify the different implements for Dekkeret. That triangular stone vessel was called a veralistia: it was used as a crucible in which powders were burned that permitted a view into things to come. The complex device with metal coils and posts was an armillary sphere, which showed the positions of the planets and stars so that horoscopes might be cast. The thing made of brightly colored feathers and animal hair woven closely together—Akbalik could not recall its name—was employed to facilitate conversations with the spirits of the dead. The one next to it, an arrangement of crystal lenses and fine golden wires, was called a podromis: wizards used it in restoring sexual virility.

  “You seem to be quite the expert,” said Dekkeret. “You’ve had personal acquaintance with all of this, I take it?”

  “Hardly. I don’t often have occasion to converse with the spirits of the dead, and I haven’t had much need of podromises, either. But you hear about these things wherever you turn, nowadays.—Look, he’s still got more! I wonder what that one is supposed to do. And that, with all the wheels and pistons!”

  The suitcase was finally empty. A good-sized crowd had gathered by now. Word must be getting around the ship, Dekkeret thought, that some kind of demonstration of magic was about to get under way. You could always draw a big crowd for that.

  The gaunt magus—for that was surely what he was, a magus—took no notice of his audience. He was seated crosslegged now before his neat semicircular row of strange glittering apparatus and appeared to be off in some other realm of consciousness, eyes half closed, head rocking rhythmically from side to side.

  Then, abruptly, he rose. Raised his foot and brought it down with savage force on the fragile instrument that Akbalik had called a podromis. Mashed it flat, and went on to trample the armillary sphere, and the device of wheels and pistons, and the small, delicate machine of interlocking metallic triangles just beyond it. The onlookers gasped in amazement and shock. Dekkeret wondered if it might be blasphemous to destroy such things as these, whether doing so would bring down the vengeance of the supernatural spirits. If indeed such spirits existed at all, he added.

  The magus now had systematically destroyed almost his entire collection of magical equipment. Those that he could not smash, like the veralistia, he hurled overboard. Then, calmly, purposefully, he walked to the rail and in a single smooth movement surmounted it and leaped into the river.

  This time there was to be no rescue. The man had gone straight under, vanishing instantly from sight as though the pockets of his robe were filled with stones. Once again the riverboat came to a halt and crewmen went out in a dinghy, but they found no trace of the jumper, and returned after a time, grim-faced, to report their failure.

  “Madness is everywhere,” Akbalik said, and shivered. “The world is turning very strange, boy.”

  After that, members of the crew patrolled the deck two by two at all hours to guard against further such incidents. But there were no others.

  The two bizarre events left Dekkeret in a somber, brooding mood. Madness was everywhere, yes. He could not now keep the memory of Sithelle’s incomprehensible terrible death, which for months he had worked hard to repress, from flooding back into his mind in all its full horror. That wild-eyed lunatic—those clotted, unintelligible cries of rage—Sithelle stepping forward—the flashing blade—the sudden startling spurt of blood—

  And now a giggling clownish fellow jumps overboard in mid-river, and then a magus who has evidently reached the end of his tether. Could it happen to anyone at any time, the onset of irresistible madness, the utter unstoppable flight of all reason from the mind? Could it happen even to him? Worriedly Dekkeret searched his soul for the seeds of insanity. But they did not seem to be present within him, or, at any rate, he could not find them; and after a time his normal high spirits reasserted themselves, and he went back to his pastime of peering at the passing cities of the riverbank without fear that he would without warning be seized with the unconquerable urge to hurl himself over the rail.

  When the splendor of Ni-moya burst abruptly upon him he was utterly unprepared.

  For several days, now, the river had been growing wider. Dekkeret knew that a second great river joined the Zimr just south of the city—the Steiche, it was, coming up out of the wild Metamorph country—and where the two rivers flowed together, their union would of necessity form one much larger than either of its components. But he had not expected the joining of the rivers to create such a vast body of water. It made the mouth of the Zimr at Piliplok look like a trickling stream. Crossing that great confluence was much like being on the ocean again. Dekkeret was aware that Ni-moya was somewhere to the north; there were other great cities over on the other shore; but it was hard for his stunned mind to take in the immensity of the scene, and all he could see was the dark breast of the water stretching to the horizon, dotted everywhere by the bright pennants of the hundreds of local ferries that crossed it constantly in all directions.

  He stared for what seemed like hours. Then, as he stood gaping, Akbalik took him by the elbow and turned him to one side.

  “There,” he said. “You’re looking in the wrong direction. That’s Ni-moya up yonder. Some of it, anyway.”

  Dekkeret was astounded. It was a magical sight: an endless backdrop of thickly forested hills, with an enormous city of shining white towers in the foreground, each one seeming taller than its neighbor, row upon row of titanic structures descending right to the shore of the river.

  Was this a city? It was a world in itself. It went on forever, following the river’s course as far as he could see, and continuing onward, obviously, for a long distance beyond—hundreds of miles, maybe. Dekkeret caught his breath. So much! So beautiful! He felt like dropping to his knees. Akbalik began to speak like a tour guide of Ni-moya’s most famous sights: the Gossamer Galleria, a mercantile arcade a mile long that hovered high above the ground on nearly invisible cables; and the Museum of Worlds, where treasures from all over the universe were on display, even, so it was said, things from Old Earth; and the Crystal Boulevard, where revolving reflectors created the brilliance of a thousand suns; and the Park of Fabulous Beasts, full of wonders from remote and practically unknown districts—

  There was no end to the recitation. “That’s the Opera House, there on the hill,” said Akbalik, indicating a many-faceted building gleaming so brightly
that it made Dekkeret’s eyes ache to look at it. “With a thousand-instrument orchestra, creating a sound you can’t begin to imagine. That big glass dome over there with the ten towers sprouting from it, that’s the municipal library, which holds every book that’s ever been published. Over there, that row of low buildings right at the water’s edge, with tiled roofs and turquoise and gold mosaics on their fronts, the ones you might think are the palaces of princes, those are the customs buildings. And then, just above and to the left of them—”

  “What’s that one?” Dekkeret broke in, pointing toward a structure of great size and transcendent beauty, a good way down the shore, that rose above everything else in supreme majesty, imperiously summoning the attention of every eye even amidst this phenomenal concatenation of architectural wonders.

  “Oh, that,” said Akbalik. “That’s the palace of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail.”

  It was a white-walled building of unthinkable splendor and grace: not of such prodigious size as Dekkeret knew Lord Prestimion’s Castle to be, but quite large enough to meet almost any prince’s requirements, and of such wondrous elegance that it dominated the waterfront by its sheer perfection.

  The Procurator’s palace appeared to hover in mid-air, floating above the city, although in actuality, Dekkeret saw, it was situated atop a smooth white pedestal of stupendous height—a more modest version, in its way, of Castle Mount itself. But instead of sprawling off in all directions, as the Castle did, this building was a relatively compact series of pavilions and colonnaded porticos that made ingenious use of suspension devices and cantilevered supports to give the appearance of complete defiance of gravity. The uppermost floor was a series of transparent bubbles of clearest quartz, with a row of many-balconied chambers below it, and a wider series of galleries in the next level down, reached by a cascading series of enclosed staircases that bowed outward like knees and swung sharply back inward again in a manner that seemed to defy all geometry. Squinting into the glare of Ni-moya’s radiantly white towers, Dekkeret could make out hints of other wings flanking the building on both sides below. At its gleaming base a single sturdy octagonal block of polished agate, at least as big as an ordinary person’s house, jutted from the facade like an emblazoned medallion.

  “How can any one person, even the Procurator, be allowed to live in anything so grand?”

  Akbalik laughed. “Dantirya Sambail is a law unto himself. He was only twelve, you know, when he inherited the procuratorial fief of Ni-moya. Which had always been an important fief, you understand, the most important one in Zimroel, but that was before Dantirya Sambail took control of it. Everyone assumed there would have to be a regency, but no, not at all, he disposed of his cousin the regent in about two minutes and took power in his own right, and then, thanks to at least three marriages and half a dozen informal alliances and a lot of very desirable inheritances from an assortment of powerful kinsmen, he put together what amounts to a private empire. By the time he was thirty he held direct rule over a third of the continent of Zimroel and indirect influence over just about all the rest of it except the Metamorph reservation. If he could have figured out some way of taking that over too, he probably would have done it. As it is, he rules Zimroel pretty much as its king. A king needs a decent palace: Dantirya Sambail has spent the last forty years improving the one he inherited into what you see before you now.”

  “What about the Pontifex and the Coronal? Didn’t they have any objections to all this?”

  “Old Prankipin’s main concern, at least before he fell in with the sorcerers, was always commerce: constant economic expansion and the free flow of goods from one region to another, with everybody making a nice profit and the money going around and around. I think he saw the rise of Dantirya Sambail as a favorable contributing factor. Zimroel was a pretty fragmented place, you know, so far from the centers of government across the sea that the local lords mostly did whatever they pleased, and when the interests of the Duke of Narabal clashed with the interests of the Prince of Pidruid, it wasn’t always healthy for the regional economy. Having someone like Dantirya Sambail in charge, capable of telling all the local boys what they should do and making it stick, played right into Prankipin’s plan. As for Lord Confalume, he was even more enthusiastic about the unification of Zimroel under Dantirya Sambail than the Pontifex. Neither of them liked Dantirya Sambail, you understand—who could?—but they saw him as useful. Indispensable, even. So they tolerated his power grab and in some ways even encouraged it. And he was smart enough not to tread on their toes. Traveled often to the Labyrinth and the Castle, he did, paid his respects, loyal subject of his majesty and his lordship, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “And Lord Prestimion? Is he going to go along with the arrangement also?”

  “Ah. Prestimion.” A cloud appeared to cross Akbalik’s face. “No, things are different now. There’s some trouble between Lord Prestimion and the Procurator. Fairly serious trouble, in fact.”

  “Of what sort?”

  Akbalik looked away. “Not of any sort that I’m able to discuss with you right now, boy. Serious, is all. Extremely serious. Perhaps we’ll have an opportunity to go into the details some other time.—Ah: we’re landing in Ni-moya, it seems.”

  The section of the city where the riverboat came to shore was called Strelain, which Akbalik told him was the name of Ni-moya’s central district. A government floater was waiting for them; it took them up and up through the hilly streets of the great city, and deposited them at last at the tall building that was to be their home for the next few months.

  Dekkeret’s little apartment was on the fifteenth floor. That a building could have so many floors was something that had never occurred to him. Standing by the wide window, peering out at the tops of the buildings below, and at the river farther on, and the dark line of the Zimr’s southern shore so far off that he could barely make it out, he had the giddy feeling that the building might at any moment pitch forward purely of its own unsustainable height and tumble down the hill, scattering its component bricks far and wide as it fell. He turned away from the window, shuddering. But the building stood firm.

  The next day he began work at the Office of Documentary Appeal. That was a subdivision of the Bureau of the Treasury, housed in a back wing of the rambling thousand-year-old governmental complex of blue granite known as the Cascanar Building, in south-central Strelain.

  It was meaningless work. Dekkeret had no illusions about that. He was supposed to interview people who had had important documents—important to them, anyway—garbled somehow by the bureaucracy, and help them straighten out the confusion. From his first day he found himself attempting to unravel disputes about erroneous listings of birthdates, improper delineation of property boundaries, muddied self-contradictory statements inserted into legal depositions by careless stenographers, and a host of other such things. There was no reason in the world why it had been necessary to ship him thousands of miles to handle such drab and trifling matters, which any career civil servant already working here could be dealing with.

  But the point, he knew, was that everyone in the government, from the Pontifex and Coronal on down, was a career civil servant. And every prince of Castle Mount who had any ambition toward high office was required to put in time doing routine work of just this sort. Even Prestimion, who had been born to the rank of Prince of Muldemar and might have spent a life of pleasant idleness puttering in his vineyards, had had to go through a round of chores like this by way of gathering the practical experience that had carried him to the throne.

  Dekkeret, a salesman’s son, had never had such grandiose ambitions. The starburst crown was no part of his plan; to be a knight of the Castle seemed as bold an aspiration as he could allow himself. Well, he was that, now, thanks to the happenstance of his having been standing close by the Coronal at the time of the assassination attempt: a knight-initiate, anyway. And therefore he found himself behind this desk at the Office of Documentary Appeal in Ni-moya, plodding th
rough day after day of foolish dreary work and hoping eventually to move on to grander things, closer to the summit of power. But this had to be done first.

  Akbalik, whom he never saw during his working hours and only occasionally in the evenings, was someone who already had gone on to grander things, though Dekkeret was not sure just what they were. Plainly Akbalik was a model worth patterning oneself after. He was very close to the Coronal’s inner circle, apparently, if not actually a member of it himself just yet. He was quite friendly with the High Counsellor Septach Melayn; he had the respect of the gruff and businesslike Admiral Gialaurys; he seemed to have easy access to Lord Prestimion. Surely he was destined to have a swift ascent to the highest reaches of the government.

  Of course, Akbalik was the nephew of the wealthy and powerful Prince Serithorn, and that surely helped. But although high birth could get you fairly easily to high places in the Castle hierarchy, Dekkeret knew that ultimately it was merit, intelligence, character, perseverance, that brought you to the top. Fools and sluggards didn’t become Coronals, although they might, by good luck and the accident of family connection, attain illustrious lesser posts despite their blatant deficiencies. Count Meglis of Normork was a good example of that.