Lord Prestimion Read online

  “Do you see it?” Septach Melayn asked.

  “Do I see what? Where?”

  “Why, the Procurator’s camp! Open your eyes, man! It’s right over there—”

  But as he turned to point it out for Navigorn, Septach Melayn blinked uncomprehendingly, clapped his hand to his mouth, grunted in astonishment.

  It was all gone. Or, perhaps, never had been at all. There was no road crossing their path. No clearing; no encampment; nothing but the familiar solid green wall of manganoza palms.

  “What are you talking about, Septach Melayn? What do you see?”

  “I see nothing at all, Navigorn. That’s the problem. I saw it—Gialaurys did too, just a moment ago—and now—now—”

  Within his soul Septach Melayn cried out to the Lady for an explanation. At first no answer came. She did not seem to be with him at all.

  Then he felt her with him again. But when she came to him, her presence felt distant and unclear, as if she had suffered some great diminution of her strength. It was with the greatest difficulty that he derived any meaning from the uncertain pulse of the wordless contact that ran between them.

  Slowly, though, he came to understand.

  What he had experienced just before, the sight of the roadway in the jungle and the tent camp beyond it, had been no illusion. The enemy they had sought so long was indeed hidden right behind those nearby trees. And for one brief tantalizing moment it had become possible for his eyes to penetrate the cloud of unknowingness that had concealed the Procurator from them for so long.

  But the means by which that cloud had been stripped away had lost its force. The effort had proven too great. The cloud had descended once more.

  They could, of course, attempt an attack against the nearby position where they now knew Dantirya Sambail to be hiding. But it would be like fighting a battle blindfolded. The Procurator and all his men would be invisible to them. And they themselves would be in plain view as they launched a charge against a foe they could not see.

  It was plain to Prestimion that Dinitak was faltering, now. His face was strangely pallid despite the darkness of his Suvrael-tanned skin, his eyes were bleary, his thin cheeks were sagging with monstrous fatigue. He seemed to be shivering. Now and again he pressed his fingertips against his temples. His helmet was slightly askew, but he did not seem to notice.

  The operation was hardly two hours old, and already they were on the verge of losing the key player.

  “Will he hold out, mother?” Prestimion asked quietly.

  “He’s weakening very quickly, I think. He has been able to disrupt his father’s power of illusion but not to overcome it. And now his strength is beginning to flag.”

  The Lady, too, was showing signs of the strain. Since well before sunrise she had maintained contact through her circlet with Septach Melayn deep in the Stoienzar jungles, had observed at a careful distance the camp of Dantirya Sambail, and had linked herself to Dinitak Barjazid also, while the boy endeavored to use his helmet against his father. The effort of keeping three bridges of perception open at once had to be draining her strength.

  Is our attack on Dantirya Sambail going to fail, Prestimion wondered, before we have even struck our first blow?

  He looked toward Dinitak again. No question of it: the boy was on the edge of collapse. His face was gleaming with sweat and his eyes seemed not to be in focus. They were rolling wildly around, so that now and again only the whites were showing. He had started to sway erratically back and forth, rocking eerily on the balls of his feet. A low droning sound came from him.

  There was no way that Dinitak could be acting effectively against his father any longer. More likely he was taking a frightful buffeting from Venghenar Barjazid through that helmet. And at any moment—

  Yes. Dinitak swung about to the side, froze for a moment in a kind of huddled crouch, quivered wildly from head to toe, and began to topple.

  Dekkeret, at Prestimion’s side, cried out and moved toward the boy with the same swiftness of reaction that he had shown long ago when that madman with the sickle had erupted from the crowd in Normork. Dinitak, pivoting as he fell, was already crumpling to the ground. With a quick lunge Dekkeret caught him about the shoulders and eased him the rest of the way toward the floor.

  Dinitak had knocked the helmet from his forehead in that last convulsive movement before falling: for one dismaying moment the fragile thing seemed almost to be floating across the room. Prestimion, snatching at it almost unthinkingly as it flew past, plucked it from the air with two hooked fingers. He stood staring at it in awe for an instant as it lay in his hands.

  Then he realized what must be done in this moment of crisis.

  “It is my turn with it now,” he said. Without waiting for a reaction from any of the others, he raised the helmet high over his head, looked upward at it for the merest moment, and pulled it down into place.

  This was not the first time he had worn it. At Prestimion’s stubborn insistence, Dinitak Barjazid had given him three sessions of training with the device over the last two weeks: the most minimal kind of exploration, mere brief tastes of what the helmet was capable of doing. He had learned how to operate the controls in a rudimentary sort of way and he had made short hopping excursions to the outer reaches of Dinitak’s own mind and Dekkeret’s. But there had been no opportunity for any real experience at long-range use.

  There would be now.

  “Help me, if you can,” he said to Dinitak, who lay sprawled in a heap on the floor, propped up against Dekkeret. “How do I find the Stoienzar?”

  “The vertical ascent dial first,” the boy said. His voice, faint and reedy with exhaustion, was next to impossible to hear. “Go up. Up and out. Then choose your path from above.”

  Up and out? Easy enough to say. But what—how—

  Well, there was nothing for it but to begin. Prestimion touched the vertical ascent dial, giving it just the lightest of twists, and was caught up instantly and carried on high. Like riding the lightning, yes. Or a climbing rocket. His mind went soaring upward at infinite velocity through the steel-blue band that was the atmosphere and out into the blackness beyond, heading toward the sun.

  Its great blazing golden-green bulk hung before him in the pure emptiness of space, terrifyingly close, sending bursts of flame outward in every direction. By its stunning light Prestimion saw Majipoor far below him, the merest tiny globe, slowly revolving. The single jagged peak of Castle Mount that came thrusting out from one side of it looked from here like nothing more than a slender needle; but Prestimion knew that it was the most colossal of needles, pushing high up through the envelope of air that surrounded the world, extending deep into the dark night-realm outside it.

  The planet turned and Castle Mount moved beyond his view. That shining blue-green expanse below him now was the Great Sea, whose shores so few explorers had seen. He saw the coast of Zimroel, then; there was the Isle of Sleep, and the Rodamaunt Archipelago, and now, as Prestimion hovered for a timeless time suspended between the stars and the world, he perceived Alhanroel coming back into view once more, the side that faced Zimroel, this time. From a position somewhere over the midpoint of the Inner Sea he saw it clearly, up ahead. There was the long southward-tending sweep of its western coast, and there, the slender jutting thumb that was the peninsula.

  I am much too high, he told himself. I must descend. Already I have stayed far too long. Years have been going by, centuries, while I soar out here. The battle is over; the world has moved along; the history of my reign has been told.

  I have stayed too long; I must descend.

  He let himself drift downward. With surprising ease he moved himself toward the coast of Alhanroel.

  Steady, now. There is Stoien city. We are in it at this moment, somewhere, even though I am out here as well. And now let us go eastward along the southern shore. Yes. Yes. The peninsula. The jungle.

  From a million miles away came a voice that might have been Dinitak Barjazid’s, saying, “
Search for the point of flame, my lord. That is where you will find them.”

  The point of flame? What was that supposed to mean?

  All was chaos before him. The closer Prestimion came to the surface of the world, the more incomprehensible everything became. But he found the helmet’s lateral control and forced himself forward through the thick shroud of haze and murk that confronted him, cutting into it like a living sword, and gradually the confusion gave way to some degree of clarity. The effort was enormous. His brain was ablaze. He was entering the zone of Venghenar Barjazid’s defensive screen, now. Great rocking waves of explosive force went shuddering through the firmament all about him, so that he had to fight to keep from tumbling like a spent meteor into the sea, which leaped and foamed like new milk below him.

  He regained his balance. Held himself in perfect equipoise. Pushed himself deep into the dark barrier and struggled on toward its farther side.

  He could see blazing light beyond.

  A point of flame, yes, just as young Barjazid had said, a searing zone of brightness shining through the incomprehensible cloud that still was wrapped about him.

  “There they are!” he cried. “Yes! Yes! I see them. But how do I reach—”

  Suddenly Prestimion felt support: a friendly hand at his elbow, holding him upright. He sensed that his mother was reaching out to him through her circlet, touching his mind, lending her own strength and wisdom. And she in turn must be drawing on whatever instructions Dinitak Barjazid was able to gasp out to her.

  Now was his way clear.

  With one of the fine dials on the helmet he centered his mind on that point of flame and the fiery glow thinned and dimmed, and he clearly saw the jungle camp as though he were down there on the ground in the middle of it. The tents, the heaped-up weapons, the bonfires, the floaters and mounts.

  Through whose eyes was he seeing all this? he wondered. The answer came immediately. He probed his host’s mind and quickly discerned a bright core of malevolence, burning with terrible intensity; and shuddered at the feel of it, for he recognized within instants that he was touching the soul of the Procurator’s second-in-command, the odious Mandralisca.

  To be within that mind was like swimming in a sea of molten lava. It was impossible for Mandralisca to harm him, he supposed, not without one of these helmets. But any sort of contact with the man at all was a foul experience that ought not to be prolonged.

  Prestimion shoved. Mandralisca went reeling away and was gone.

  It is Venghenar Barjazid that I want. And then Dantirya Sambail.

  “Mother? Help me to find the man with the helmet.”

  No need. Venghenar Barjazid had already found him, and was fighting back against the intruder in the camp.

  The opening defensive move came quickly and stunningly. Prestimion felt a sensation as of a powerful blow on the back of his head, and another at the base of his stomach. He gasped and reeled, tottering under the onslaught. Desperately he fought for breath. But Barjazid was unrelenting. He had the more powerful helmet. And he was a master of his device and Prestimion was a novice.

  Prestimion, his consciousness divided, part of him in a room in Stoien city with his mother and Dekkeret and Dinitak and Maundigand-Klimd, and part of him in a clearing in the jungles of Stoienzar, began to doubt, in the first fury of the struggle, that there was any means at all by which he could fend off this ferocious assault. It looked certain that he must inevitably be destroyed.

  But then he pushed, as he had pushed against Mandralisca, and Barjazid seemed to yield to the pressure, and Prestimion pushed again, harder; and this time the force of Barjazid’s fury seemed to diminish, either because Prestimion had succeeded in shoving him back or, perhaps, because he had simply drawn aside to gather his strength for a more conclusive blow. Whichever it was, the lull gave Prestimion a much-needed respite.

  But he knew it would not last long. He could see the little man as though he were actually standing before him: thin-lipped, sly-eyed, an old necklace of poorly matched sea-dragon bones around his neck and the dream-helmet on his brow. Barjazid looked supremely confident. His eyes were gleaming with malign pleasure. Prestimion had no doubt that he was readying himself to deliver a second and perhaps final thrust.

  He braced himself for it.

  —Are you still with me, mother? I need you now.

  Yes. Yes. She was still there. Prestimion felt her unquestionable presence at his side.

  And now, abruptly, he became aware of a second potent power joining the effort also, a new bulwark for him in his battle. A strange force came from this ally, nothing at all like the gentle and loving radiance that emanated from the Lady. Through the eyes of the newcomer he seemed to be seeing in some other dimension of perception altogether. After an instant Prestimion recognized the source of that odd alteration of his field of view, that strange doubleness of vision that had come over him just now. It had to be Maundigand-Klimd who had linked himself somehow to the chain of attack. What other explanation could there be, if not the entry of the Su-Suheris magus into the conflict?

  Now, Prestimion. Strike!

  Yes. He struck. Even as Barjazid was gathering his strength for the blow that would finish the struggle, Prestimion rushed at him with all the might at his command.

  Barjazid’s skill with these devices was far greater than Prestimion’s; but the spirit that had propelled Prestimion to the throne of Majipoor was a stronger one than the dark soul that sizzled and flared within Venghenar Barjazid. And Prestimion had the Lady and Maundigand-Klimd standing at his side, adding their power to his. He lashed out at Barjazid with a tremendous thrust of force and knew at once that he had broken through the other man’s defenses with it. Barjazid went reeling backward, thrown off balance by that single great rush of strength coming from his opponent. He swayed and spun about, striving frantically to remain upright.

  Again. Again, Prestimion!

  Again, yes. And again and again and again.

  Barjazid crumbled. Fell. Lay with his face against the marshy soil, making soft moaning sounds.

  Nothing now guarded the path to Dantirya Sambail.

  15

  “Can you see it now?” Septach Melayn cried. “The tents? The floaters? Is that not Dantirya Sambail himself? Come on, before it vanishes a second time!”

  He had no real understanding of what had happened, or why, for the Lady no longer rode within his conscious mind. All that was certain was that the Procurator’s camp, which only a little while before had been cloaked once again in renewed invisibility, had burst into view before their astounded eyes and lay open and undefended before them. Now the world was churning with a mighty strangeness, the web of destiny crossing and recrossing upon itself, and Septach Melayn knew that this was the moment to bring matters to a conclusion. There might not be another opportunity.

  It seemed strange, to have the barriers drop away so easily like this. But Septach Melayn greatly suspected that making such a thing happen had been no simple matter, that some tremendous unseen battle had cleared the way.

  “There—yes,” Navigorn said, looking baffled. “I see the camp. But how—”

  “This is Prestimion’s doing,” said Septach Melayn. “I feel him at work here. He stands close beside us now. Come, brothers! Quickly!”

  He ran forward into the clearing, sword already in his hand. Gialaurys was at his right shoulder, Navigorn to his left, and the troops they had brought with them from the north came rushing up behind them from their floaters to join the fray. This was not to be a carefully structured battle but simply a wild raid, headlong and fierce.

  “Find the Procurator!” Gialaurys cried in a voice like a great crack of thunder. “Get him first!”

  “And Mandralisca also,” Septach Melayn called. “Those two must not escape!”

  But where were they? All was in confusion in here. The camp was full of bewildered soldiers milling in such hectic tumult and disarray that there was no telling who was where.

&nb
sp; As they advanced into the camp a thin, parched old man who had been sprawled on the ground rose uncertainly to his feet and shambled aimlessly up toward them, his eyes dull and almost blank, his face distorted, one side of his face drawn downward as though he had lately suffered a stroke. Some sort of metallic instrument was on his head—a magical device, perhaps. The man was making thick unintelligible sounds, mere incoherent gabblings. He reached out with trembling hands toward Navigorn, who was the closest to him. Navigorn flung him contemptuously to one side and sent him sprawling out on the ground like a heap of discarded clothing.

  “Ah, but don’t you know him?” Gialaurys said. “The Barjazid, it is! The damnable maker of all this mischief! Or what’s left of him.” And he turned to run the man through. But Septach Melayn, ever quicker, had already despatched him with the quickest flick of his sword.

  “That is Mandralisca there, now, I think,” said Navigorn, pointing to the far side of the clearing.

  And indeed the Procurator’s poison-taster could be seen lurking there, creeping along the wall of manganoza palms, searching for some opening through which he could escape. “He is mine,” Navigorn said, and ran off toward him.

  “The Procurator, there,” cried Septach Melayn. “I claim him for my own!”

  Yes. Dantirya Sambail stood fifty yards away, smiling at him across the tumultuous uproar of the battlefield that his camp had become. He did not appear to be prepared for combat: all he wore was a simple linen tunic, belted at the waist, and soft leather shoes with peaked tips jutting far out in front. But he had obtained a sturdy saber from somewhere and also a long narrow dagger. He held one weapon in each hand as he looked toward Septach Melayn and beckoned him on toward single combat. The Procurator’s strange purple eyes were gazing almost lovingly at him out of that fleshy and florid face.

  “Yes,” Septach Melayn said. “Let us try our skills, shall we, Dantirya Sambail?”

  They moved slowly toward each other, each man’s gaze fixed rigidly on his opponent as though there were no one else anywhere around them in the clearing. The Procurator had his stiletto in his right hand, the saber in his left. Which was odd, Septach Melayn thought, for as far as he knew Dantirya Sambail was right-handed, and a massive saber was always his weapon of choice. What was he planning to do? Try to knock Septach Melayn’s own sword aside with a swinging side-stroke of the saber, and strike for his undefended heart with the dagger?