The King of Dreams Read online

  “Do you think,” she asked him, “that Prestimion is ready in his heart to become Pontifex?”

  “Would you not know that better than I, milady?”

  “I never speak of it with him.”

  “Then let me tell you,” said Septach Melayn, “that he is as ready for it as ever a man could be. All these many decades, living first as Coronal-designate and then as Coronal, he’s known that the Pontificate must lie at the end of his days. He has taken that into account. He fought to become Coronal, remember. It wasn’t simply handed to him. For two full years he battled against Korsibar, and broke him, and took the throne back from him that he had stolen. Would he have striven so fiercely for the starburst crown, if he had not already made his peace with the knowledge that the Labyrinth waited for him beyond his time in the Castle?”

  “I hope you are right, Septach Melayn.”

  “I know I am, good lady. And you know it too.”

  “Perhaps I do.”

  “Prestimion would never see becoming Pontifex as a tragedy. It is part of his duty—the duty that was laid upon him in the hour Lord Confalume chose him to be the next Coronal. And you know that he has never shirked duty in any way.”

  “Yes, of course. But still—still—”

  “I know, lady.”

  “The Castle—we have been so happy here—”

  “No Coronal likes to leave it. Nor the Coronal’s consort. But it has been this way for thousands of years, that one must be Pontifex after one is Coronal, and go down into the Labyrinth, and live there beneath the ground for the rest of one’s days, and—”

  Septach Melayn faltered suddenly. Varaile, startled, saw a mist beginning to form in his keen pale-blue eyes.

  He would leave the Castle too, of course, when Prestimion’s time to go arrived. He would follow Prestimion even to the Labyrinth like all the rest of them. There was pain in that realization for him as well; and for a moment, only a moment, it was evident that Septach Melayn had been unable to conceal that pain.

  Then the dark moment passed. His bright dandyish smile returned, and he touched the tips of his fingers lightly to the golden curls at his forehead and said, “You must excuse me now, Lady Varaile. It is my hour for the swordsmanship class, and my pupils are expecting me.”

  He started to take his leave.

  “Wait,” she said. “One more thing. Your talk of your swordsmanship class puts me in mind of it.”

  “Milady?”

  “Do you have room in that class of yours for one more disciple? Because I have one for you: a certain Keltryn of Sipermit, by name, who is newly come to the Castle.”

  Septach Melayn’s expression was one of bafflement. “Keltryn is not generally thought to be a man’s name, milady.”

  “Indeed it isn’t. This is the Lady Keltryn of whom I speak, the younger sister of Dekkeret’s Fulkari. Who made application to me the day before yesterday on her sister’s behalf. She’s said to be quite capable at handling weapons, this Keltryn, and wants now to take advantage of the special training you alone can confer.”

  “A woman?” Septach Melayn spluttered. “A girl?”

  “I’m not asking you to take her as a lover, you know. Only to admit her to your classes.”

  “But why would a woman want to learn swordsmanship?”

  “I have no idea. Perhaps she thinks it’s a useful skill. I suggest you ask her that yourself.”

  “And if she is injured by one of my young men? I have no tyros in my group. The weapons we use have blunted edges, but they can do considerable harm even so.”

  “No worse than a bruise or two, I hope. She ought to be able to tolerate that. Surely you don’t mean to turn the girl away out of hand, Septach Melayn. Who knows? You may learn a thing or two about our sex from her that you had not known before. Take her, Septach Melayn. I make a direct request of it.”

  “In that case, how can I refuse? Send this Lady Keltryn to me, and I’ll turn her into the most fearsome swordsman this world has ever seen. You have my pledge on that, milady. And now—if I have your leave to withdraw—”

  Varaile nodded. He grinned down at her, and turned and bounded away like the long-legged boy he had been so many years ago, leaving her to herself in the now-deserted throne-room.

  She stood there alone for a time, letting all thought drain from her mind.

  Then, slowly, she went from the room, and down to her left, into the maze of passages that led out to the weird old five-peaked structure known as Lord Arioc’s Watchtower, from which one had such a wondrous view of the whole Inner Castle—the Pinitor Court and the reflecting pool of Lord Siminave with the rotunda of Lord Haspar beyond it, and the lacy, airy balconies that Lord Vildivar of that same impossibly ancient era had built, and everything else.

  How beautiful it all was! How marvelously did that the hodgepodge of curious structures, assembled here across seven thousand years, fit together into this immense, unequalled masterpiece of architecture!

  Very well, Varaile thought.

  Prestimion is still Coronal, and I still reside here at the Castle, at least for the time being.

  At last the hour had arrived when inexorable duty would pull them onward to the Labyrinth: that was the rule, and it had not varied since the time of the founding of the world. Every Coronal had had to go through this, and every Coronal’s wife.

  May the Divine preserve the Pontifex Confalume, she prayed.

  No question, though, that the Pontifex was approaching his end. But let us have a little more time here at the Castle, first. Just a little time more. Some few months. A year. Two, perhaps. Whatever we can have.

  7

  They were at the beginning of the Plain of Whips, now. Ahead, a red wall rising against the northern horizon, lay the narrow line of flat-topped sandstone bluffs on which the Five Lords had erected their five palaces, with the mighty eastward-flowing torrent of the River Zimr just beyond.

  “Look, sir,” said Jacomin Halefice, and pointed toward the red hills. “We are almost home, I think.”

  Almost home, thought Mandralisca, smiling wryly. Yes. For him there was only a somber irony in that phrase.

  He was at home, more or less, anywhere and everywhere and nowhere in the world. In his overarching indifference, all places were the same in that regard for him. He had looked upon the perilous jungles of the Stoienzar as his home for a while, and before that a cell in the dungeons of Lord Prestimion’s Castle, and fine lodgings in the rich sprawling metropolis of Ni-moya before that, and he had lived many another place as well, on and on back to his bitter childhood in a forlorn town amidst the snowy peaks of the Gonghar Mountains, a childhood that he would much prefer to forget. For the past five years this arid and obscure district in central Zimroel was the one that he had chosen to define as “home”; and so, looking up at those sun-baked red bluffs now from the border of the sandy inhospitable plain that stretched before him, he was able with some justice to agree with Halefice that he was almost home, for whatever little value that word might hold.

  “There are the lords’ palaces now, is that not so, your grace?” said Jacomin Halefice, jabbing a finger toward the high ridge. The aide-de-camp was riding just alongside the Count, astride a fat, placid, pale-lavender mount that was working hard to keep pace with Mandralisca’s more fiery steed.

  The Count shaded his eyes and stared upward. “Three of them, anyway. I see Gavinius’s house, and Gavahaud’s, and Gavdat’s.” The sleek gray domes of ceramic tile gleamed with a reddish glint in the hard midday sunlight. “Too soon to make out the other two, I think. Or are you telling me that you’re able to see them already?”

  “Actually, I don’t quite think I can manage it yet, sir.”

  “Nor I,” said Mandralisca.

  The Five Lords, when they had launched their strange and so far quite secretive break with the authority of the central government, had agreed not to make their headquarters in their uncle’s old capital of Ni-moya. That would have been wildly imprudent
of them. They were, all five, imprudent men by nature; but sometimes they did listen to reason. At Mandralisca’s suggestion they had agreed to come all the way out here to the sparsely populated and long neglected province of Gornevon, midway between Ni-moya and Verf on the south bank of the Zimr.

  The river, though it was readily navigable for its entire seven thousand miles of length, from the Dulorn Rift in the far west to the coastal city of Piliplok on the Inner Sea, was oddly contrary here. Everywhere else along its path fine anchorages abounded and great prosperous urban centers had sprung up in them, a host of rich inland ports—Khyntor, Mazadone, Verf, and any number more, of which group Ni-moya was the grandest, a sublime queen among the cities of the western continent.

  But here in Gornevon a line of steep red sandstone bluffs sprang up vertically right at the shoreline of the river’s southern bank. That created an imposing—indeed, impassable—waterfront palisade that stood as an inexorable wall between the river and the lands to the south. Nor was there anything remotely like an anchorage to be found along that stretch of the river, not even a place where small boats could dock.

  Which made the Zimr’s southern shore altogether inaccessible in this part of the country, and all commerce had forsaken it. On the other bank, directly opposite the site where the palaces of the Five Lords now stood, was the generous crescent harbor that had brought great wealth to the city of Horvenar; on this side, though, there was nothing but the flat-topped red cliffs, with something very much like a desert to the south of them, a parched useless land that no one had ever seen fit to settle, since there was no access from the river and the land approach from the south was extremely difficult. It was here that Mandralisca had persuaded the Five Lords to situate their capital.

  It was a cheerless unwelcoming terrain. Gornevon was an arid province. All of it lay in the shadow of the western branch of the mid-continental Gonghar range, and that long and towering chain of snowy-crested precipices prevented the summer rains that blew from the southeast, out of the Shapeshifter lands, from getting here. On the other side of the province stood the mile-high wall that was the Velathys Scarp, which intercepted the winter rains that traveled with the west wind out of the Great Sea; and so Gornevon was a sort of pocket desert in the midst of fertile, prosperous Zimroel, one of the driest places in the entire immense continent.

  “If only we were coming into Ni-moya now instead, eh?” said Halefice, with a chuckle.

  Mandralisca’s response was a thin cool smile. “You love your comforts, don’t you, my friend?”

  “Who but a madman—or the Five Lords—would prefer this place to Ni-moya, your grace?”

  Mandralisca shrugged. “Who but a madman, indeed? But we go where we must go. Our destiny has sent us here: so be it.”

  The five brothers would not have dared, of course, to use Ni-moya as the base for their insurrection, even though it was their family’s ancestral seat, from which their rapacious uncle the Procurator Dantirya Sambail had long ruled Zimroel as a king within the kingdom. Prestimion, having taken Dantirya Sambail prisoner on the battlefield of Thegomar Edge at the conclusion of the Korsibar war, had pardoned him, ultimately, for his perfidious role in the insurrection. The victorious Coronal had left him in possession of his lands and wealth. But he had stripped him of his title of Procurator, and had debarred him from wielding power beyond the boundaries of his own considerable estates. That had been some sixteen years ago. There had been no Procurators in Zimroel ever since.

  Dantirya Sambail’s second rebellion had brought him to a bloody end at the hand of Septach Melayn in the marshy forests of the Stoienzar. His lands had descended to his coarse, brutal brothers Gaviad and Gaviundar. Eventually, after their deaths, the properties had passed to Gaviundar’s five sons, who yearned to regain the sway over all of Zimroel that their great and terrible uncle once had had; for the central government and its two monarchs, the Pontifex and the Coronal both, were far away on the other and older continent of Alhanroel, where both its capitals were situated.

  On populous Zimroel most people felt only the most abstract sort of allegiance to that government. They gave lip service to the Coronal, yes; but it was the power of the Procurator, one of their own, that had always been far more real to them. They had grown accustomed to the reign of their ferocious Procurator. He had been a singularly unlovable man, but under his energetic rule Zimroel had attained much affluence and stability. And therefore it was very likely—so the five sons of Gaviundar told one another—that the people of Zimroel would even after a lapse of a decade and a half choose to accept the Procurator’s legitimate heirs, princes of the true Sambailid blood, as their masters.

  Naturally it would not have done to begin any such drive toward power in Ni-moya itself. Ni-moya was the administrative center of the western continent, a hive of Pontifical bureaucrats. Let any member of the Sambailid tribe announce that he intended once more to exercise the old family authority over anything other than the family’s private lands, and immediately word of it would go forth from Ni-moya to the Labyrinth, and from there to the Castle, and in short order a royal army under the Coronal’s command would be setting out for Zimroel to restore matters to their proper order.

  Out here in the hinterlands, though, one could do as one wished, even proclaim oneself sovereign over vast domains, and it might be years before word of it filtered back to the Coronal atop Castle Mount or to the Coronal’s own overlord, the Pontifex, in his underground lair. Majipoor was so huge that news often traveled slowly even when carried on swift wings.

  And thus the five brothers had taken themselves out to this remote outpost and had given themselves resounding new titles: they named themselves the Lords of Zimroel, true successors by right of blood to the Procurators of old. And they had gradually let the word go forth, village by village throughout the adjacent regions of Zimroel on both sides of the river, that they held supremacy here now. They had left the river cities themselves alone, so far, because the river was the main highway across the continent, and any attempt to interfere with commerce on the Zimr would bring quick retribution from the central government. But they had claimed and won allegiance in the farming communities north and south of the river for some hundreds of miles, reaching to the east as far as Immanala, to the west almost to Dulorn. That provided them with a domain from which they could eventually expand.

  It was Mandralisca himself, long the second-in-command to Dantirya Sambail and now the chief adviser to his five nephews, who had suggested their new titles to them.

  “You cannot call yourselves Procurators,” he said. “It would be like an instant declaration of war.”

  “But ‘lords’—?” said Gaviral, who was the eldest one, and the quickest-witted of the lot. “Only the Coronal may call himself ‘lord’ on Majipoor, is that not so, Mandralisca?”

  “Only the Coronal can take it as part of his name: Lord Prankipin, Lord Confalume, Lord Prestimion. But any count or prince or duke is a lord of sorts in his own territory, and one can quite properly say, in addressing him, ‘my lord.’ So we will make a little distinction here. You will be the Five Lords of Zimroel; but you will not try to speak of yourselves as Lord Gaviral, Lord Gavinius, Lord Gavdat, and so on. No: you will be ‘the Lord Gaviral,’ ‘the Lord Gavinius,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

  “It seems to me a very fine distinction,” said Gaviral.

  “I like it,” said Gavahaud, who of the five was the most vain. He grinned a broad toothy grin. “The Lord Gavahaud! All hail the Lord Gavahaud! It has a fine sound, would you not say, eh, Lord Gavilomarin?”

  “Be careful,” said Mandralisca. “You have it wrong already. Not Lord Gavilomarin, but the Lord Gavilomarin. When one speaks to him directly one can call him ‘milord,’ and say, ‘Milord Gavilomarin,’ but never ‘Lord Gavilomarin’ alone. Is that clear?”

  It took them a while to get it. He was not surprised. In Mandralisca’s estimation they were, after all, nothing more than a pack of buffoons.


  But they embraced their new titles gladly. In the course of time they made themselves known in this district and several surrounding provinces as the Five Lords of Zimroel. Not everyone accepted the resurgence of Sambailid power gladly: the Vorthinar lord, for one, a petty princeling with lands to the north of the Zimr, had had ideas of his own about establishing authority independent of the Alhanroel regime, and had refused the Sambailid overtures so rudely and categorically that it had been necessary for the brothers to send Mandralisca to deal with him. But there were plenty of men who had loved Dantirya Sambail and resented his overthrow by the outlander Prestimion, and they came from many parts of the western continent to throw in their lot with the Five Lords. Very quietly a shadow Sambailid administration had emerged out here in rural Zimroel.

  In their slowly expanding dominion the Five Lords appointed officials and decreed laws. They succeeded in diverting local taxes from the Pontifical tax-collectors to their own. They built five fine palaces for themselves opposite Horvenar atop the red bluffs of Gornevon. The dwellings of Gavdat and Gavinius and Gavahaud were side by side in a single group, with Gaviral’s somewhat to the west of the others on a little promontory with a better view of the river than his brothers had, and Gavilomarin’s off on the eastern side, separated from the rest by a low lateral ridge; and from those five palaces did they propose very gradually to extend their rule over the continent that their potent uncle once had ruled virtually as a king.

  Up to this time the government of the Pontifex Confalume and the Coronal Lord Prestimion in far-off Alhanroel had paid no heed to what had begun to take shape in Zimroel. Perhaps they were still unaware of it.