Lord Prestimion Read online

  Now came the start of the ceremony itself. The ringing of bells. The prayers and incantations. The endless toasts. Prestimion merely sipping at his wine, careful not to seem ungracious, but wary of drinking too much during this taxing event.

  Then, at long last, the meal. A procession of delicacies from every region of the world, prepared by the most skillful of chefs. Prestimion barely picked at his food. Afterward, a round of poetic recitations: the resounding verses of Furvain’s great epic, The Book of Changes, on and on with the account of the semi-mythical Lord Stiamot’s conquest of the aboriginal Shapeshifter race, and then the chanting of The Book of Powers and The Heights of Castle Mount and any number of other historical sagas of Pontifexes and Coronals of centuries gone by.

  The after-dinner singing, then. Thousands of voices raised in ancient hymns. Prestimion chuckled at the sound of Gialaurys’s uncouth heavy basso groaning along beneath the others nearby.

  There was much more, ancient rituals prescribed by musty lore. The ceremonial display of the Coronal’s shield, with the starburst rendered in shining silver embellished with rays of gold, and Prestimion’s ceremonial placing of his hands on it. Confalume rising to deliver a longwinded blessing on the new Coronal, and ceremonially embracing him before all the gathering. The Lady Kunigarda doing the same. The Princess Therissa accepting the circlet of the Lady of the Isle from Kunigarda. And so on and so on, interminably. Prestimion patiently endured it all, though it was far from easy.

  But to his great surprise he discovered that somewhere along the way, during the course of this long and arduous event, he had shed the strange leadenness of heart that had come over him earlier. All that dejection and bitter cheerlessness had dropped away, somehow. Tired as he was, here at the very end of the banquet, he had found his way back to joyfulness at last. And more than joyfulness: for, somewhere in the course of the evening, he had felt a sense of being truly kingly coming over him for the first time.

  One supreme fact had been established today. His name had at last been enrolled in the long roster of Coronals of Majipoor now, after many a travail in the course of his path to the throne.

  Coronal of Majipoor! King of the most wondrous world in all the universe!

  And he knew that he would be a good Coronal, an enlightened Coronal, whom the people would love and praise. He would do great things, and he would leave Majipoor a better place for his having lived and reigned. And this was what he had been born to accomplish.

  Yes. Yes. So all was for the best this glorious day, despite the momentary cloud of gloom that had dimmed its glory for him for a time a few hours before.

  Septach Melayn saw the change come over him. During a lull in the festivity he came to Prestimion’s side and said, looking at him warmly, “The despair you spoke of a little while ago in the Hendighail Hall has gone from you, has it not, Prestimion?”

  Unhesitatingly Prestimion replied, “We had no conversation in Hendighail Hall this day, Septach Melayn.”

  There was something new in his tone, a strength, even a harshness, that had never been there before. Prestimion himself was taken unawares when he heard it ringing in his ears. Septach Melayn heard it too; for his eyes widened an instant, and the corners of his mouth quirked in surprise, and he caught his breath in sharply. Then he inclined his head in a formal way and said, “Indeed, my lord. We did not speak in the Hendighail Hall.” And made the starburst sign, and returned to his seat.

  Prestimion signaled for his wine-bowl to be refilled.

  This is what it means to be a king, he thought. To speak coldly even to your best-beloved friends, when the occasion demands. Does a king even have friends? he wondered. Well, he would find that out in the weeks ahead.

  The banquet was at its climactic moment. Everyone was standing now, hands aloft in the starburst salute. “Prestimion! Lord Prestimion!” they were crying. “Hail, Lord Prestimion! Long life to Lord Prestimion!”

  And then it was over. The hour had come for the breaking-up of the banquet into smaller gatherings, groups filtering themselves apart by rank and affinity of friendship. At long last, with dawn approaching, the time arrived when the newly consecrated Coronal Lord of Majipoor was permitted to seek his rest, and could tactfully declare the revels ended, and withdraw, finally, to the privacy and peace of his own apartments, his own bedroom.

  His empty apartments. His lonely bed.

  Thismet, he thought, as he tumbled down in utter exhaustion toward the pillow. In the midst of his great joy he could not find a way to hide from the unending pain of losing her. I am king of the world tonight, and where are you, Thismet? Where are you?

  3

  In the great city of Stee, well down the slopes of Castle Mount, there was trouble in the household of the immensely wealthy merchant banker Simbilon Khayf.

  A fourth-floor chambermaid of the house of Simbilon Khayf had fallen victim suddenly to a fit of madness and flung herself from an attic window of the banker’s grand mansion, killing not only herself but two passers-by in the street below. Simbilon Khayf himself was nowhere near the scene when this occurred: he was away at the Castle, attending Lord Prestimion’s coronation ceremonies as the guest of Count Fisiolo of Stee. And so it had become the task of his only daughter, Varaile, to deal with the grisly tragedy and its consequences.

  Varaile, a tall, slender, dark-eyed woman with jet-black hair that fell to her shoulders in a shining cascade, was only in her nineteenth year. But her mother’s early death had made her the mistress of the great house when she was still a girl, and those responsibilities had given her a maturity beyond her years. When the first strange sounds from the street reached her ears—a horrible cracking thud, and then another, less distinct, a moment later, followed by shouts and piercing shrieks—she moved calmly and purposefully toward the window of her own third-floor study. Quickly she took in the grim scene: the bodies, the blood, the gathering crowd of agitated witnesses. She headed at once for the stairs. Servants of the house came rushing up toward her, all crying out at once, gesticulating, sobbing.

  “Lady—lady—it was Klaristen! She jumped, lady! From the top-story window, it was!”

  Varaile nodded coolly. Within herself she felt shock and horror and something close to nausea, but she dared not allow any of that to show. To Vorthid, the chamberlain of the house, she said, “Summon the imperial proctors immediately.” To the wine-steward, Kresshin, she said, “Run and get Dr. Thark as fast as you can.” And to Bettaril, the strong and sturdy master of the stables, she said, “I have to go out there to see after the injured people. Find yourself a cudgel and stand beside me, in case matters become unruly. Which very possibly they will.”

  Of the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, Stee was by far the grandest and most prosperous; and Simbilon Khayf was one of the grandest and most prosperous men of Stee. Which made it all the more startling that such a misfortune could strike his house. And a great many envious folks both within and without Stee, resentful of Simbilon Khayf’s phenomenal rise to wealth and power out of the back streets of the city, secretly rejoiced at the difficulties that his fourth-story chambermaid’s lunatic plunge had entangled him in. For Stee, ancient as it was, was looked upon by its neighbors on the Mount as something of an upstart city, and Simbilon Khayf, the wealthiest commoner in Stee, was himself, beyond any doubt, an upstart among upstarts.

  The fifty magnificent cities that occupied the jagged sides of immense Castle Mount, the astounding mountain that swept upward to a height of thirty miles above the lowlands of the continent of Alhanroel, were arranged in five distinct bands situated at varying altitudes—the Slope Cities near the bottom, then the Free Cities, the Guardian Cities, the Inner Cities, and, just below the summit itself, the nine that were known as the High Cities. Of the Fifty Cities, the ones whose citizens had the highest opinions of themselves were those nine, the High Cities that formed a ring that encircled the Mount’s uppermost reaches, almost on the threshold of the Castle itself.

  Because they we
re closest to the Castle, these were the cities most often visited by the glittering members of the Castle aristocracy, lords and ladies who were descended from Coronals and Pontifexes of the past, or who might someday attain to those great titles themselves. Not only did the Castle folk often journey down to such High Cities as High Morpin or Sipermit or Frangior to partake of the sophisticated pleasures that those cities offered, but also there was a steady upward flow from the High Cities to the Castle: Septach Melayn was a man of Tidias, Prestimion had come from Muldemar. Therefore many folk of the High Cities tended to put on airs, regarding themselves as special persons because they happened to live in places that stood far up in the sky above the rest of Majipoor and rubbed elbows on a daily basis with the great ones of the Castle.

  Stee, though, was a city belonging to the second band from the bottom—the Free Cities, they were called. There were nine of them, all quite old, dating back at least seven thousand years to the time when Lord Stiamot was Coronal of Majipoor, and probably they were much older than that. No one was quite certain what it was that the Free Cities were free from. The best scholarly explanation of the name was that Stiamot had awarded those cities an exemption from some tax of his day, in return for special favors received. Lord Stiamot himself had been a man of Stee. In Stiamot’s time Stee had been the capital city of Majipoor, until his decision to build a gigantic castle at the summit of the Mount and move the chief administrative center to it.

  Unlike most of the cities of Castle Mount, which were tucked into various craggy pockets of the colossal mountain, Stee had the advantage of being located on a broad, gently sloping plain on the Mount’s northern face, where there was enormous room for urban expansion. Thus it had spread out uninhibitedly in all directions from its original site along the swift river from which it had taken its name, and by Prestimion’s time had attained a population of nearly twenty-five million people. On Majipoor it was rivaled in size only by the great city of Ni-moya on the continent of Zimroel; and for overall wealth and grandeur, even mighty Ni-moya had to take second place to Stee.

  Stee’s magnitude and location had afforded it great commercial prosperity, a prosperity so great that citizens of other cities tended to regard Stee and its barons of industry as more than a little vulgar. Its chief mercantile center was the splendid row of towering buildings faced with facades of reflective gray-pink marble that were known as the Riverwall Buildings, which ran for miles along both banks of the River Stee. Behind these twin walls of offices and warehouses lay the thriving factories of industrial Stee on the left bank, and the palatial homes of the rich merchants on the right. Further back on the right bank were the great country estates of the Stee nobility and the parks and game preserves for which Stee was famous throughout the world, and on the left, for mile after mile, the modest homes of the millions of workers whose efforts had kept the city flourishing ever since the remote era of Lord Stiamot.

  Simbilon Khayf had been one of those workers, once. But earlier he had been even less than that: a street-beggar, in fact. All that, though, was forty and fifty years in his past. Luck, shrewdness, and ambition had propelled him on a swift climb to his extraordinary position in the city. Now he consorted with counts and dukes and other such great men, who pretended to regard him as a social equal because they knew they might someday have need of his banking facilities; he entertained at his grand mansion the high and mighty of many other cities when business dealings brought them to Stee; and now, even as the hapless housemaid Klaristen was hurling herself to her death, he was mingling cheerfully with the most exalted members of the Majipoor aristocracy at Lord Prestimion’s great festival.

  Varaile, meanwhile, found herself kneeling in blood in the street just outside her house, staring down at grotesquely broken bodies while a hostile and ever-growing crowd exchanged sullen muttered comments all around her.

  She gave her attention to the two fallen strangers, first. A man and a woman, they were; both handsomely dressed, obviously well-to-do. Varaile had no idea who they were. She noticed an empty floater parked by the grassy strip across the street, where sightseers who had come for a look at Simbilon Khayf’s mansion often left their vehicles. Perhaps these people were strangers to Stee, who had been standing in the cobblestoned plaza outside the west portal, admiring the finely carved limestone sculptures of the house’s facade, when the body of the housemaid Klaristen had come smashing down out of the sky upon them.

  They were dead, both of them. Varaile was certain of that. She had never seen a dead body before, but she knew, crouching down and peering into the glazed eyes of the two victims, that no impulse of life lurked behind them. Their heads were at grotesque angles. Klaristen must have dropped directly down on them, snapping their necks. Death would have been instantaneous: a blessing of sorts, she thought. But death all the same. She fought back instinctive terror. Her hands moved in a little gesture of prayer.

  “Klaristen is still breathing, lady,” the stablemaster Bettaril called to her. “But not for long, I think.”

  The housemaid had evidently ricocheted from her two victims with great force, landing a dozen or so feet away. When Varaile was convinced that there was nothing she could do for the other two, she went to Klaristen’s side, ignoring the onlookers’ sullen stares. They seemed to hold her personally responsible for the calamity, as though Varaile, in a moment of pique, had thrown Klaristen out the window herself.

  Klaristen’s eyes were open, and there was life in them, but no sign of consciousness. They were set in a fixed stare like those of a statue; and only when Varaile passed her hand before them, which produced a blink, did they give any indication that her brain was still functioning. Klaristen looked even more broken and twisted than the other two. A two-stage impact, Varaile supposed, shuddering: Klaristen hitting the two strangers first, rebounding from them, coming down again and landing hard, perhaps head first, against the cobblestoned street.

  “Klaristen?” Varaile murmured. “Can you hear me, Klaristen?”

  “She’s leaving us, lady,” said Bettaril quietly.

  Yes. Yes. As she watched, Varaile could see the expression of Klaristen’s eyes changing, the last bit of awareness departing, a new rigidity overtaking them. And then the texture of the eyes themselves altered, becoming weirdly flat and strangely flecked, as if the forces of decay, though only just unleashed, were already taking command of the girl’s body. It was a remarkable sight, that transition from life to death, Varaile thought, greatly astonished at her own analytical coolness in this terrible moment.

  Poor Klaristen. She had been no more than sixteen, Varaile supposed. A good, simple girl from one of the outlying districts of the city, out by the Field of Great Bones, where the fossil monsters had been discovered. What could have possessed her to take her own life this way?

  “The doctor’s here,” someone said. “Make way for the doctor! Make way!”

  But the doctor very quickly ratified Varaile’s own diagnosis: there was nothing to be done. They were dead, all three. He produced drugs and needles and attempted to jolt them back to life, but they were beyond rescue.

  A big rough-voiced man called out for a magus to be fetched, one who could witch the dead ones alive again with some potent spell. Varaile glared at him. These simple people, with their simple faith in wizards and spells! How embarrassing, how annoying! She and her father employed mages and diviners themselves, of course—it was only sensible, if you wanted to steer clear of unpleasant surprises in life—but she hated the modern credulous popular faith in occult powers that so many people had embraced without reservation or limit. A good soothsayer could be very useful, yes. But not in bringing the dead back to life. The best of them did seem to be able to glimpse the future, but the working of miracles was more than their skills could encompass.

  And why, come to think of it, Varaile asked herself, had their household magus, Vyethorn Kamman, given them no warning of the dreadful deed that the housemaid Klaristen was planning to enact?
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br />   “Are you the Lady Varaile?” a new voice asked. “Imperial proctors, ma’am.” She saw men in uniforms, gray with black stripes. Badges bearing the pontifical emblem were flashed. They were very respectful. Took in the situation at a glance, the bodies, the blood on the cobblestones; cleared the crowd back; asked her if her father was home. She told them that he was attending the coronation as Count Fisiolo’s guest, which produced an even deeper air of deference. Did she know any of the victims? Only one, she said, this one here. A maid of the house. Jumped out of a window up there, did she? Yes. Apparently so, said Varaile. And had this girl been suffering from any emotional disturbance, ma’am? No, said Varaile. Not that I know of.

  But how much could she really ever know, after all, of the emotional problems of a fourth-floor chambermaid? Her contact with Klaristen had been infrequent and superficial, limited mostly to smiles and nods. Good morning, Klaristen. Lovely day, isn’t it, Klaristen? Yes, I’ll send someone up to the top floor to fix that sink, Klaristen. They had never actually spoken with each other, as Varaile understood the term. Why should they have?

  It quickly became clear, though, that things had been seriously amiss with Klaristen for some time. The team of proctors, having finished inspecting the scene in the street and gone into the house to interview members of the household staff, brought that fact out into the open almost at once.

  “She started waking up crying about three weeks ago,” said plump jolly old Thanna, the third-floor maid, who had been Klaristen’s roommate in the servants’ quarters. “Sobbing, wailing, really going at it. But when I asked what the matter was, she didn’t know. Didn’t even know she’d been crying, she said.”

  “And then,” said Vardinna, the kitchen-maid, Klaristen’s closest friend on the staff, “she couldn’t remember my name one day, and I laughed at her and told it to her, and then she went absolutely white and said she couldn’t remember her own name, either. I thought she was joking. But no, no, she really seemed not to know. She looked terrified. Even when I said, ‘Klaristen, that’s your name, silly,’ she kept saying, ‘Are you sure, are you sure?’”