Sorcerers of Majipoor Read online

  In golden Sippulgar on the sunny southern coast of Alhanroel on the other side of the world, it was Time, the remorseless winged serpent that flies ever onward, whose face was the face of a ravening, all-devouring jakkabole, to whom the people turned as suppliants. Weeping, praying, chanting, they drew his image through the streets on a wheeled platform made of freshly tanned volevant skin stretched over a framework of bright green gabela-wood, accompanied by a thunder of kettledrums and an ear-splitting clash of cymbals and the screeching of hoarse-throated horns. And behind those privileged ones who drew the platform of the god came the other good citizens of golden Sippulgar, stripped to loincloths and sandals, their sweating bodies bright with gaudy streaks of paint and their faces turned rigidly toward the sky.

  In Banglecode, high up on Castle Mount, it was the fancied disappearance of the moons, and especially the Great Moon, that was the thing most deeply dreaded. Few nights went by when someone did not reach the conclusion that the light of the moons was waning and rush wild-eyed out into the streets to howl forth his contagious terror. But there were archimages in Banglecode who specialized in the encouragement of the moons. When the people began to weep and gibber over the vanishing of the moons, these mages came forth and made a clattering with brass instruments, they blew loud blasts on trumpets, they clapped cymbals together and waved holy staffs on high. “Sing!” they cried, and the people sang, and gradually—gradually, gradually—the moons seemed to regain the brightness that they had earlier lost, and the crowds went, still weeping but grateful now for their deliverance, to their homes. And the next night it would all be the same way again.

  “What a troubled time this is, this time of mysteries and wonders,” said Kunigarda, the Lady of the Isle of Sleep; and the hierarch Thabin Emilda, the closest of the Lady’s associates at Inner Temple, simply sighed and nodded, for they had had this conversation often enough in recent days.

  It was the task of the Lady of the Isle of Sleep to bring comfort, and wisdom to the minds of sleeping millions each night, and in these times she was striving with all her formidable energies to restore peace to the world. From the ancient mechanisms installed in the great stone chambers of her isle the sweet sendings of the Lady and her many acolytes went forth, urging calm, patience, confidence. There was no reason for alarm, they told the world. Pontifexes had died before, on Majipoor. Prankipin had earned his rest. The Coronal Lord Confalume was prepared to assume his new tasks; there would be another Coronal in his place, as capable as Confalume had been; everything would go on harmoniously as it had before, and would forever, world without end.

  So the Lady Kunigarda knew, and so she sought nightly to announce. But all her striving was futile, for she herself was a living reminder of the changes that were coming, and the dreams she sent produced as much anxiety as anything else, simply because she was a presence in them.

  Her own term as Lady of the Isle was reaching its inevitable end as the Pontifex’s life ebbed. By long tradition the mother of the Coronal, or else his closest living female relative, held the Ladyship. So it was that the mother of Lord Confalume had come to the Isle upon his accession; but Prankipin had ruled as Pontifex so long that Lord Confalume’s mother had died in office, and the Ladyship had passed to Kunigarda, the Coronal’s older sister. Kunigarda had held the post for twenty years now. But soon she must give way to the Princess Therissa, mother of the new Lord Prestimion, and instruct her in the secret of the mechanisms of the Isle, and then take up residence herself on the Terrace of Shadows where the former Ladies went to live; everyone knew that, and that was one more cause for insecurity and apprehension in the world.

  “One thing is sure, that peace and truth will prevail,” said the Lady to the hierarch Thabin Emilda. “The old emperor will die, and the new Coronal will come, and the new Lady as well; and perhaps there will be difficulties, but in time all will be well. I believe that, Thabin Emilda, with all my soul.”

  “And I also, Lady,” said Thabin Emilda. But once more she sighed, and turned away so that the Lady would not see the sorrow and doubt in her eyes.

  So there was no contending against the tide of magic and fear. In a thousand cities furious confident mages came forth, saying, “This is the way of salvation, these are the spells that will restore the world,” and the people, doleful and frightened and hungry for salvation, said, “Yes, yes, show us the way.” In each city the observances were different, and yet in essence everything was the same everywhere, processions and wild dances, shrieking flutes, roaring trumpets. Omens and prodigies. A brisk trade in talismans, some of them loathsome and disgusting. Blood and wine freely flowing and often mixing. Incense; abominations; the droning chants of the masters of the Mysteries; the propitiation of demons and the adoration of gods. Flashing knives and whips whistling through the air. New strangenesses every day. Thus it was, in this feverish epoch of new beliefs, that the myriad citizens of the huge planet awaited the end of the time of Prankipin Pontifex and the Coronal Lord Confalume, and the coming of the time of Confalume Pontifex and the Coronal Lord Prestimion.

  3

  THE CHAMBERS WHERE the Coronal had his lodgings at those times when it was necessary for him to visit the capital city of the Pontificate were located on the deepest level of the Labyrinth’s imperial sector, halfway around the perimeter of the city from the secluded bedroom where Pontifex Prankipin lay dying. As Prince Korsibar advanced along the winding corridor leading to his father’s rooms, a tall, angular figure stepped smoothly from the shadows to his left and said, “If you would, prince, a moment’s word.”

  Korsibar recognized the speaker as the aloof and frosty Sanibak-Thastimoon, a man of the Su-Suheris race whom he had taken into his innermost circle of courtiers: his personal magus, his caster of runes and explicator of destinies.

  “The Coronal is expecting me,” said Korsibar.

  “I understand that, sir. A moment, is all I ask.”

  “Well—”

  “To your possible great advantage.”

  “A moment, then, Sanibak-Thastimoon. Only a moment. Where?”

  The Su-Suheris gestured toward a darkened room within a half-ajar doorway on the other side of the corridor. Korsibar nodded and followed him. It turned out to be a storeroom of some sort, low-ceilinged and cramped and musty, cluttered with tools and cleaning implements.

  “In a service closet, Sanibak-Thastimoon?”

  “It is a convenient place,” the Su-Suheris said. He shut the door. A dim glowlight was the only illumination. Korsibar valued Sanibak-Thastimoon’s counsel, but he had never been at such near quarters with the Su-Suheris before, and he felt a quiver of discomfort verging on mistrust. Sanibak-Thastimoon’s slender, two-headed figure loomed above him by some seven inches, an uncommon thing for the long-legged prince to experience. A crisp, dry aroma came from the sorcerer, as of fallen leaves burning on a hot autumn day, not an unpleasant odor but one that at this close range was oppressively intense.

  The Su-Suheris folk were relative newcomers to Majipoor. Most of them had come as a result of policies established sixty years or so back, early in Prankipin’s time as Coronal, that had encouraged a period of renewed migration of nonhuman peoples to the giant world. They were a smooth, hairless race, slim and tapering in form. From their tubular bodies rose foot-long columnar necks that divided in a forking way, each of the two branches culminating in a narrow, spindle-shaped head. Korsibar doubted that he would ever be fully comfortable with the strangeness of their appearance. But in these times it was folly not to have a reliable necromancer or two on one’s staff, and it was commonplace knowledge that the Su-Suheris had a full measure of skill in the oracular arts, necromancy and divination, among other things.

  “Well?” Korsibar asked.

  Usually it was the left-hand head that spoke, except when the Su-Suheris was delivering prophecies. In that case he employed the cold, precise voice that emerged from the right-hand one. But this time both heads spoke at once, smoothly coordinated but
in tones separated by half an octave. “Troubling news has been brought to your father’s attention concerning you, sir.”

  “Am I in danger? And if I am, why does the news come to his attention before it reaches mine, Sanibak-Thastimoon?”

  “There is no danger to you, excellence. If you take care not to arouse anxieties in your father’s breast.”

  “Anxieties of what sort? Explain yourself,” said Korsibar curtly.

  “Do you recall that I cast a horoscope for you, sir, some months back, that indicated that greatness awaits you in days to come? ‘You will shake the world, Prince Korsibar,’ is what I told you then. You remember this?”

  “Of course. Who’d forget a prophecy like that?”

  “The same prediction now has been made for you by one of your father’s oracles. In the very same words, which is a powerful confirmation: ‘He will shake the world.’ Which has left the Coronal exceedingly troubled. His lordship is contemplating his withdrawal from the active world; he would not look kindly on any shaking of it at this time. —This has come to me by trustworthy sources within your father’s own circle, sir.”

  Korsibar sought to meet the sorcerer’s gaze; but it was an infuriating business, not knowing which pair of icy emerald-hued eyes to look at. And having to look so far upward, besides. Tautly he said, “I fail to see what there might be to trouble him in a prophecy like that I mean him no mischief: he knows that. How could I? He is my father, he is my king. And if by my shaking the world it’s meant that I’ll do great things some day, then he should rejoice. I’ve done nothing but hunt and ride and eat and drink and gamble all my life, but now, apparently I’m about to achieve something important, is that what your horoscope says? Well, then, three cheers for me! I’ll lead a sailing expedition from one shore of the Great Sea to the other, or I’ll go out into the desert and discover the lost buried treasure of the Shapeshifters; or maybe I’ll— Well, who knows? Not I. Something big, whatever it is. Lord Confalume ought to be very pleased.”

  “What he is afraid of, I suspect, is that you will do something rash and foolish, your excellence, that will bring much harm to the world.”

  “Does he?”

  “So I am assured, yes.”

  “And does he regard me, then, as such a reckless child?”

  “He places much faith in oracles.”

  “Well, and so do we all. ‘He will shake the world.’ Fine. What’s there in that that needs to be interpreted so darkly? The world can be shaken in good ways as well as bad, you know. I’m no earthquake, Sanibak-Thastimoon, that will bring my father’s castle tumbling down the side of the Mount, am I? Or are you hiding something from me of which even I myself am unaware?”

  “I want only to warn you, sir, that his lordship is apprehensive concerning you and your intentions, and may ask you bothersome difficult questions, and that when you go before him now it would be best if you took care to give him no occasion whatsoever for suspicion.”

  “Suspicion of what?” cried Korsibar, in some vexation now. “I have no intentions! I’m a simple honorable man, Sanibak-Thastimoon! My conscience is clear!”

  But the Su-Suheris had nothing more to say. He shrugged, which for him was a gesture that amounted to drawing his long forked neck halfway down into his chest and hooking his six-fingered hands inward on his wrists. The four green eyes became implacably opaque; the lipless, harsh-angled mouth-slits offered no further response. So there was no use pursuing the issue.

  You will shake the world.

  What could that mean? Korsibar had never wanted to shake anything. All his life he had desired only simple straightforward things: to rove the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount in quest of this pleasure or that one, and to go forth along the remote wilderness trails in quest of the fierce beasts he loved to hunt, and to play at quoits and chariot-racing, and to spend the long nights at the Castle itself drinking and carousing with his comrades. What more could there be for him in life? He was a prince of royal blood, yes, but the irony of his lineage was that he could never be more than he already was, for no Coronal’s son had ever been permitted to follow him to the Coronal’s throne.

  By ancient tradition the junior monarchy was an adoptive one; always had been, always would be. Lord Confalume, when he finally became Pontifex a week or three hence, would officially designate Prestimion of Muldemar as his son and heir, and Korsibar, the true flesh-and-blood son, would be relegated to some grand and airy estate high up on the Mount. There he would spend the rest of his years as he had spent the first two decades of them, living a comfortable idle existence among the other pensioned-off princes of the realm. That was his destiny. Everyone knew that. He had been aware of it himself ever since his boyhood, ever since he could understand that his father was a king. Why had Sanibak-Thastimoon chosen to trouble him now with this oracular nonsense about shaking the world? Why, for that matter, had the chilly-spirited, austere sorcerer been urging him so strongly of late to rise above his pleasant life of luxury and idleness and seek some higher fulfillment? Surely Sanibak-Thastimoon understood the impossibility of that.

  You will shake the world. Indeed.

  Impatiently, Korsibar gestured to Sanibak-Thastimoon to stand aside, and went out into the hall.

  * * *

  The immense outer door of the Coronal’s suite, all agleam with dazzling golden inlays of the starburst emblem and with his father’s LCC monogram—which would have to be changed soon enough to Prestimion’s LPC—confronted him. Three prodigious swaggering Skandars in the green and gold uniform of the Coronal’s royal guard stood before it.

  Korsibar craned his neck to look up at the shaggy four-armed beings, nearly half again as tall even as he, and said, “The Coronal has asked me to come to him.”

  At the Castle, sometimes, the guardians of the Coronal’s office would make him wait like any young knight-initiate, Coronal’s son though he might be, because his lordship was busy with his ministers of state, or his intimate counsellors, or perhaps some visiting regional administrators. The son of the Coronal had no formal rank of his own, and those others took precedence over him. But today the guards moved aside instantly and let him go in.

  Lord Confalume was at his desk, a broad polished platform of glossy crimson simbajinder-wood rising from a thick podium of black gelimaund. The only illumination was the bright orange glow emanating from a trio of thick spiral-shafted candles of black wax set in heavy iron sconces, and the air was sweet and steamy with the rank piercing fragrance of burning incense, rising in two gray-blue coils of smoke from golden thuribles on either side of the Coronal’s seat.

  He was involved in a conjuration of some sort. Charts and works of reference covered his desk, and interspersed among them were all manner of instruments and devices having to do with the geomantic arts. Korsibar, who kept people like Sanibak-Thastimoon on hand to deal with such matters for him, had no idea what the purpose of most of those objects might be, though even he recognized the whisk-broomlike ammatepala that was used to sprinkle the water of perception across one’s forehead, and the shining coils and posts of an armillary sphere, and the triangular stone vessel known as a veralistia, in which one burned the aromatic powders that enhanced one’s insight into the future.

  Korsibar waited patiently while his father, not looking up, carried out what seemed to be the conclusion of some lengthy and elaborate tabulation of numbers. And said quietly, when Lord Confalume appeared to be finished, “You wanted to see me, Father?”

  “A moment more. Just a moment.”

  Three times in a clockwise way the Coronal rubbed the rohilla that was pinned to his collar. Then he dipped both his thumbs in an ivory vessel containing some bluish fluid and touched them to his eyelids. With bowed head and closed eyes the Coronal murmured something that sounded like the words “Adabambo, adabamboli, adambo,” which meant nothing at all to Korsibar, and pressed the tips of his little fingers and thumbs together. Lastly, Lord Confalume let his breath come forth from his nostrils in along
series of quick sighing exhalations, so that after a time his lungs were emptied and his head rested on his sunken chest, shoulders slumped, eyes rolled up toward the top of his head.

  Korsibar’s own belief in the powers of magic was as strong as anyone’s. And yet he was surprised and a bit dismayed to see his royal father so deeply enmeshed in these arcane practices, at the cost of who knew what quantity of his waning energies. The expenditure was all too obvious. Lord Confalume’s face was drawn and gray, and he seemed tired, though it was still only mid-morning. There were lines of stress along his brow and cheeks that appeared unfamiliar to Korsibar.

  The prince and his sister Thismet were the children of the Coronal’s late middle age, and there was a gap of many decades between his age and theirs; but that difference in age was only now making itself apparent. Indeed, the Coronal had seemed a good deal younger to Korsibar earlier that day in the antechamber to the Hall of Justice than he looked at this moment, but perhaps that look of youthful middle age had been a mere pretense, a facade he was capable of donning while in, the presence of the other princes and dukes, and which he no longer had the strength to maintain in the privacy of this meeting with his son.