Lord Prestimion Read online

  Easily enough solved; but hardly a day went by without some new procedural problem arising.

  One was the issue of how many mages would be at the wedding other than Maundigand-Klimd, and of which schools of practice, and what roles, if any, they would play. If Prestimion had had his own way, there would have been none. But Gialaurys was able to convince him of the rashness of that position. In the end a full array of wizards was in attendance at the rite, although at Prestimion’s insistence they were kept at a circumspect distance from the dais and allowed to utter their incantations only as part of a general preliminary invocation.

  Then there was the matter of finding some function for Serithorn, as the senior peer of the realm, to perform, and the question of what to do about preventing another mountain of gifts from flowing toward the Castle when so many of the coronation presents still had not yet been unpacked, and of whether to hold another round of knightly games by way of celebrating the Coronal’s nuptials. Prestimion had not anticipated so many little details to deal with. But in a way he welcomed the distraction: for the time being, he was spared the need from fretting about the madness epidemic, or pondering the problem of finding the unfindable Dantirya Sambail, or dealing with any of the thousand routine questions that come before a Coronal in the course of an ordinary week. Everyone about him understood that the royal wedding took precedence, for the moment, over all of that.

  And then, finally, he found himself on the high dais of Lord Apsimar’s Chapel, which someone had determined was the traditional place for such events, with the hierarch Marcatain standing to his right on behalf of the Lady of the Isle and the representative of the Pontifex Confalume at his left and Varaile facing him, and a host of grandees of the realm in magnificent garb looking on, and Septach Melayn beaming in smug self-satisfaction at the job of matchmaking that he had achieved; and the traditional words were being spoken and the rings were being exchanged and the familiar old wedding anthem that went back to Lord Stangard’s day was resounding in his ears.

  It was done. Varaile was his wife.

  Or would be, in a truer sense of the word, some hours later, when all the night’s feasting and celebration was over and they could at last be alone.

  There was a lavish suite of rooms adjacent to Prestimion’s own that had belonged to the Lady Roxivail in the days of her marriage to Lord Confalume. In accordance with the wish of Lord Confalume it had not been used by anyone since Roxivail’s departure from the Castle. The court chamberlains, expecting that those rooms would be occupied now by Varaile and used by the royal couple on their wedding night, had gone to great effort to restore and refurbish them after their two decades of neglect.

  But Prestimion regarded the Roxivail suite as an unlucky place for their first night together. He chose, instead, the apartments in Munnerak Tower, the white-brick building in the Castle’s eastern wing, where he had lived in his days as one of the many princes of the Castle. Those chambers lacked the majesty and splendor of the ones set apart for the use of the Coronal; but Prestimion felt no great need for the ultimate in majesty and splendor this night, and, he suspected, neither did Varaile. It was a handsome enough suite in its way, with spacious rooms that had a marvelous downslope view through their curving many-faceted windows of the abyss known as the Morpin Plunge, and an oversized bathing-tub fashioned from huge blocks of black Khyntor marble that had been so cunningly set in place by the artisans that it was impossible to detect the joinings between one block and the next. To this suite Prestimion brought his bride; and here he waited, in the little room that had been his study and library, while she bathed away the fatigue of the long day of wedding rituals.

  What seemed like ten years went by before she summoned him. But then came the call at last.

  She was waiting for him in the room where the nuptial bed had been installed, a magnificent bed of imperial dimensions, carved from the darkest Rialmar ebony and canopied with the sheerest lace of Makroposopos. As he went down the corridor toward it Prestimion felt a sudden maddening burst of terror at the thought that the ghost of Thismet would somehow interpose itself between him and his bride in this moment of moments; but then he opened the bedroom door, and saw Varaile standing beside the bed in the soft golden glow of three scarlet waxen tapers taller than herself, and Thismet at that instant became only a name, a cherished but distant memory, the mere ghost of a ghost.

  Varaile was clad, after her bath, in a filmy gown of fine white silk, fastened at her left shoulder by a clasp of woven gold. Prestimion admired the reticence that had led her to cover herself for his arrival in the bedroom. But he noted also the lush and supple contours of her body glimmering through the gossamer fabric, and knew that modesty was not its only purpose. He caught his breath in delight and stepped toward her.

  There was, for just an instant, a look of anxiety, even fear, in her eyes. It vanished, though, as quickly as it came. “The consort of the Coronal,” Varaile said, as though in wonder. “Can this be real?” And answered herself before he could speak. “Yes. Yes. It can. Come to me, Prestimion.”

  She touched a drawstring at her shoulder.

  The gown fell away like a cobweb.

  2

  A three-day honeymoon in the pleasure-city of High Morpin, an hour’s ride by floater below the Castle, was all that he could allow himself. He had been away from the seat of power too much of the time already since attaining the throne.

  In his youth Prestimion had come often to that happy glittering playground of a place to go on dizzying juggernaut-rides and let himself be catapulted through the power-tunnels and dance on the baffling, challenging mirror-slides. Such amusements were beyond his grasp now. A Coronal could not allow himself to put his body even to the slight risk that such games afforded, nor would the populace be pleased to see him cavorting like a boy in public. That he had become the prisoner of his own royal majesty was a fact beyond all denying.

  But there were compensating delights in High Morpin for those whose high place in the realm denied them the freedom to move openly among the populace. Prestimion and Varaile stayed at the Castle Mount Lodge, a knifeblade-sharp slab of white stone set aside for the use of the nobility, and there they occupied the many-chambered penthouse known as the Coronal’s Suite, which was not so much a suite as a miniature palace that clung to the upper levels of the towering hotel much as the Castle itself wraps itself about the summit of the Mount.

  The uppermost level of their suite was a transparent bubble of clearest quartz, which served as their bedchamber. From it they had a view of the entire sparkling city, all the way across to the immense fountain that Lord Confalume had had built at the city’s edge, which constantly hurled thick plumes of water, ever-changing in color, to an enormous height. One floor down was their robing-room, a horn-like excrescence of some shining white metal boldly cantilevered out from the other side of the building to provide a view of the lovely suburb of Low Morpin and the stupefying dark emptiness of the Morpin Plunge, where the face of the Mount fell away for a sheer drop of thousands of feet. Just below that was a room carved from a single gigantic green globe of jade, where soft musical tones emerged without apparent source from the air: the harmonic retreat, that room was called. Then a long white-vaulted passageway led at a steeply descending angle to the private dining-quarters, a small, elegantly appointed room where the Coronal and his consort could take their meals. A cascading series of balconies gave them access to the clear, pure air of the Mount and a third view, this one of the dark intricate bulk of the Castle rising high above them.

  A second passageway in a different direction opened into an elaborate pleasure-gallery supported by pillars of golden marble. Here the residents of the suite could swim in a shimmering pool lined with garnet slabs, or suspend themselves in a column of warm air and permit streams of unquantified sensation to flood their senses, or put themselves in contact—through appropriate connectors and conduits—with the rhythms and sighing pulses of the cosmos. Here also were kept p
atterned rugs for focused meditation, banks of motile light-organisms for autohypnosis, a collection of stimulatory pistons and cartridges, and a host of other devices for the royal couple’s amusement.

  From there the structure made an undulating swaybacked curve and sent two wings back up the building at differing levels. One contained an array of soul-paintings that had been collected by various Coronals of the previous two centuries, and the other was a gallery for the housing of antiquities, bric-a-brac, and a miscellany of small sculptures and decorative vases. Centrally positioned between these two groups of rooms was the suite’s grand dining hall, a single sturdy octagonal block of polished agate thrusting far out into the abyss for the delight of such guests as the Coronal and his consort might care to entertain.

  But the Coronal and his consort did not care to entertain anyone, just now, except each other. There would be time later to carouse with Septach Melayn, to listen to old Serithorn’s tales of the court gossip of long ago, to play host to great princes and dukes. This was a time purely for themselves. They had much still to learn about each other, and this was the finest opportunity they would ever have. Prestimion and Varaile spent their three days moving from room to room, from level to level, examining the curious artifacts with which the place was filled, taking in the glorious views of the gleaming airy city outside, paddling up and down the pool, and, much of the time, exchanging thoughts, memories, ideas, caresses. Meals were brought to them by silent servants whenever they remembered to request them.

  On the third day, with the greatest regret, they came forth from their retreat. A royal floater waited outside the building to return them to the Castle; and thousands of people of every rank and station, those who had come to High Morpin on holiday and those whose role it was to serve their needs, sent up a great cry: “Prestimion! Varaile! Prestimion! Varaile! Long live Prestimion and Varaile!”

  But then it was back to work. For Prestimion, the million minutiae of government; for Varaile, the weighty task of taking command of the royal household.

  It was a busy time. Prestimion had had ample opportunity in recent years, sitting as he had at Lord Confalume’s right hand, to see how much work it was to be Coronal. But somehow the reality of it had never sunk in. Confalume, that robust and hearty man, had made it all look easy. To Confalume, the endless routine responsibilities of the throne had always been nothing but mere buzzing interruptions of the real work, which was to express the grandeur of the realm and its monarch by a glorious construction program: fountains, plazas, monuments, palaces, highways, parks, harbors. The lavishly conceived Confalume Throne and the awesome throne-room in which it was set would symbolize the reign of Lord Confalume for centuries to come. Even when he had been Coronal for forty years, and had largely withdrawn from active rule into a private world of mages and incantations, he still managed to keep up an outward show of gusto and vitality. Only those closest to him had any inkling of how weary he actually was toward the end, how relieved he was that the aged Pontifex Prankipin had died and allowed him at last to move on to the quieter life of the Labyrinth.

  Prestimion was hardly lacking in vitality himself. But his was of a kind different from Confalume’s. Confalume expended his energy in a steady calm radiant outpouring, like the sun itself. Prestimion, a more volatile man, taut and tense within, functioned by bursts of impulsive action, tempered by long periods devoted to the accumulating of strength. That was how he had handled the insurrection of Korsibar: a lengthy period of waitful calculation and planning, and then the sudden launching of the counterstrike that had swept the usurper away.

  But you could not reign as Coronal that way. You sat here atop the world, most literally, and the needs and hopes and fears and problems of the fifteen billion people of Majipoor found their way up the slopes of Castle Mount to you day after day after day. And although you delegated as much of the work as you could to others, the ultimate responsibility for every decision was always yours. Everything flowed through you. You were the world incarnate; you were Majipoor, in and of yourself.

  Had Korsibar realized that, when he foolishly decided to make himself Coronal? Had he thought that being king was an unending round of tournaments and feasts, and nothing more? Very likely he had, that shallow man.

  Prestimion could never have allowed himself to stand to one side and let Korsibar keep the throne: it was as much a matter of his sense of obligation to the world as it was his own desire to be Coronal himself.

  And so, when he might have had peace with Korsibar and a place for himself on the Council for the price of a starburst gesture and an oath of allegiance, Prestimion had not been able to do it, and Korsibar had thrown him into the Sangamor tunnels as a traitor, and the war between them had begun. Now Korsibar was forgotten and Prestimion was Coronal Lord of Majipoor; and here he was, plodding through a daily stack of petitions and resolutions and memoranda and acts of the Council so thick it would choke a gabroon. It was enough to make him nostalgic, almost, for the days of the civil war, when he was far from all this paperwork, living a life of pure action.

  Not that everything that crossed his desk was stultifyingly routine, of course.

  There was the madness plague, for one. Gibbering vacant-eyed victims roamed the streets of a thousand cities, most of them harmless, some not. Hospitals everywhere were filling with screaming lunatics. There were accidents, collisions, fires, even murders. What was causing it? Prestimion feared that he knew, but it was not something he could speak of to anyone. Nor could he see a solution. The constant reports of chaos out there weighed heavily on his spirit. But there was nothing he could do.

  Nothing he could do, either, about the dangers posed by his distant cousin Dantirya Sambail: the great adversary, the ever diabolical foe, malevolent and unpredictable, still at large. Where was he? What was he up to? All these months, and no one had seen or heard from him.

  It was easy and tempting to think that he had perished, that he and his demonic man Mandralisca lay dead and rotting in some roadside ditch in southern Alhanroel. But that was too easy; and it strained Prestimion’s imagination to believe that fate could so conveniently have removed Dantirya Sambail from his list of problems without the slightest effort on his part. Still, a network of spies on two continents had produced no information.

  The Procurator should surely have reached his headquarters in Ni-moya by now, but his throne there sat empty. Nor had he surfaced anywhere in southern or western Alhanroel. It was all very unsettling. Dantirya Sambail would reappear when least expected, Prestimion knew, and would cause maximum trouble when he did. But here, again, all that he could do was wait, and do his daily work, and wait. And wait.

  Maundigand-Klimd came to him and said, “Look at these, my lord.” The Su-Suheris magus had a cloth sack with him, bulging as though he had brought three pounds of ripe calimbots straight from the marketplace.

  It was Threeday morning, the day of the week when Prestimion customarily went down to the exercise-hall to engage in a little singlesticks contest with Septach Melayn. That was always an unequal match, for Septach Melayn had the reach on him by eight or ten inches, and had unparalleled mastery of any kind of hand-wielded weapon besides. But it was essential for the two men, bound now as they were to their desks so much of the time, to work at keeping their bodies in tune; and so on Threedays they dueled with batons, and on Fivedays they tested each other on the archery course, where the advantage lay with Prestimion.

  “What do you have here, and is it necessary for me to see it at just this moment?” Prestimion asked, in some impatience. “I have an appointment with the High Counsellor.”

  “It will take only a minute or two, my lord.”

  Maundigand-Klimd up-ended his bag and what looked like three dozen tiny severed heads fell out onto Prestimion’s desk.

  They were ceramic, he realized, after the first startled glance. But modeled in an extremely vivid and realistic manner, with terrifying grimacing faces—mouths gaping wide, eyes staring wildl
y, nostrils flaring—and a convincing swath of gore at the neck-stumps: cunning simulations of people who had died in the most frightful agony.

  “Very pretty,” Prestimion said bleakly. “I’ve never seen anything like them. Is this the latest fashion of jewelry among the ladies of the court, Maundigand-Klimd?”

  “I bought them last night at the sorcerers’ market in Bombifale. They are amulets, my lord, to guard one against the madness.”

  “The sorcerers’ market, as I recall, is open only on Seadays, and not even all of those. Yesterday was Twoday.”

  “The sorcerers’ market at Bombifale is open every night of the week now, lordship,” said the Su-Suheris quietly. “These things are sold at many of the booths. Five crowns apiece, they are: stamped from molds in great quantity. But exceedingly well done.”

  “So I see.” Prestimion poked at them with the tip of one finger. They were grisly things, all too convincingly real despite their miniature size. He saw the faces of men and women both, a few Ghayrogs, a couple of Hjorts, even a single Su-Suheris head that sent a particularly severe tremor of repulsion through him. Small metal fasteners were attached to them in back. “Magic against magic, is that it? One wears them, does one, for the sake of counteracting whatever witchcraft is causing the insanity plague?”

  “Exactly. It is what we call in the trade a cloaking-magic. The little image sends a message indicating that the person who wears it is already afflicted with the madness—screaming, wild-eyed, mutilated of soul, altogether deranged—and so there is no need for the agent that brings the malady to act on them.”