The King of Dreams Read online

  “But he was right about that.”

  “Yes. So it would seem. A direct line, connecting that boy who came running out of the crowd to save Lord Prestimion with the man who’ll sit someday where Prestimion sits now on the Confalume Throne.” Dekkeret laughed harshly. “Me: Lord Dekkeret! Isn’t that astounding, Dinitak?”

  “Not to me. But I do sometimes think you have trouble believing you’re actually going to be Coronal.”

  “Wouldn’t you, if you were the one?”

  “But I’m not the one, and never will be, the Divine be thanked. I’m quite content being who I am.”

  “As am I, Dinitak. I’m in no hurry to take over Prestimion’s job. If he went on being Coronal for the next twenty years, that would be perfectly all right with—”

  Dinitak caught at Dekkeret’s sleeve. “Hold it a moment. Look—there’s something odd going on over there.”

  He followed the line of Dinitak’s pointing arm. Yes: some sort of altercation seemed to be under way about fifty feet farther down the wall, just outside the protective circle of Considat’s security force. Half a dozen of the guardsmen were surrounding someone. Arms were waving. There was a lot of angry incoherent shouting.

  “It’s too improbable that there would be another assassination attempt,” Dinitak said.

  “Damned right it is. But those halfwits—” Dekkeret raised himself on tiptoe for a better view. A gasp of outrage burst from him. “By the Lady, it’s a messenger from the Castle that they’re making trouble for! Come on, Dinitak!”

  They rushed over. An overwrought-looking guardsman thrust himself in Dekkeret’s face and said, “A suspicious stranger, my lord. We attempted to interrogate him, but—”

  “Blockhead, don’t you recognize the badge of the Coronal’s couriers? Step aside!”

  The courier was no one Dekkeret recognized, but the golden starburst that was his badge of office was authentic enough. The man, though more than a little worse from wear after the security guards’ intervention, pulled himself together stalwartly and held forth to Dekkeret an envelope prominently sealed in scarlet wax with the sigil of the High Counsellor Septach Melayn. “My lord Dekkeret, I bear this message—by order of Prince Teotas, on behalf of the Council, I have ridden from the Castle day and night to give it to you—”

  Dekkeret snatched it from him, gave the seal a cursory glance, ripped the envelope open. There was just a single scrawled page within, in Teotas’s bold, square, boyish lettering. Dekkeret’s eyes traveled quickly over the words, and then over them again, and again.

  “Bad news?” Dinitak asked, after a while.

  Dekkeret nodded. “Indeed. The Pontifex is ill. He may have had a stroke.”

  “Dying, is he?”

  “That word is not used here. But how can it fail to come to mind, when a man ninety years old is taken ill? I’m summoned immediately back to the Castle.” Dekkeret forced a chuckle. “Well, at least we won’t have to suffer through another of Count Considat’s dreadful banquets tonight: thanks be to the Divine for small mercies. But what might happen after that—” He looked away. He did not know what to think. A dizzying torrent of contradictory feelings rushed through him: sadness, excitement, dismay, euphoria, disbelief, fear.

  Confalume ill. Possibly dying. Perhaps already dead.

  Did Prestimion know? He was supposed to be off traveling also, just now. As usual. Dekkeret wondered what sort of scene was unfolding back at the Castle in the absence both of the Coronal and the Coronal-designate.

  “It may be only nothing,” he said. His voice, usually so resonant, was hollow and hoarse. “Old men get ill from time to time. Not everything that seems to be a stroke is one. And one doesn’t necessarily die of a stroke.”

  “All this is true,” said Dinitak. “But even so—”

  Dekkeret held up his hand. “No. Don’t say it.”

  Dinitak would not be halted. “You remarked just a moment ago that you hoped Prestimion went on being Coronal for the next twenty years. And I know you were sincere in hoping that. But you didn’t seriously believe that he would, did you?”

  9

  The first pungatans were coming into view, dotting the wasteland before them.

  “These filthy plants!” Jacomin Halefice muttered. “How I loathe them! I would take a torch to the lot of them, if I were allowed!”

  “Ah,” said Mandralisca. “They are our friends, those plants!”

  “Your friends, perhaps, your grace. Not mine.”

  “They guard our domain,” the Count said. “They keep us safe from our enemies, our lovely pungatans.”

  So they did. This was a wild, cruel desert, and the only traversable road through it was a mere stony track. Venture off it even a dozen yards and you were at the pungatans’ mercy—those evil whip-leaved plants that were the only things that flourished here. It would be a major logistical task to guide an army of any size through this land of little water and nothing in the way of wood or edible crops, where what vegetation there was struck out savagely and lethally at all passersby.

  But Mandralisca knew the way through this grim plain. “Beware the whips!” he called out, glancing back over his shoulder at his men. “Keep yourselves in line!”

  He gave his mount the spurs and rode onward into the pungatan grove.

  They were actually quite beautiful, the pungatans, or so it seemed to Mandralisca. Their thick gray stubby trunks, smooth and columnar, rose from the rust-red soil to a height of three or four feet. From the summit of each sprouted a pair of wavy ribbonlike fronds, extending in opposite directions for two yards or so with their tips trailing down prettily along the ground into an intricate coiling tangle of frayed ends. These fronds seemed delicate and soft; they were so nearly transparent that they were hard to see except at certain favorable angles. As they fluttered in the breeze, they might almost seem to be strands of clear seaweed, surging with the tides.

  But one merely had to pass within fifteen or twenty feet of one of the plants and a deep wash of reddish-purple color came flooding into those fluttering fronds, and they grew turgid and began to tremble at their tips; and then—whack!—they would uncoil to their full startling length and strike, a whiplash blow of astonishing swiftness and horrific force. It was a savage lateral swing that sliced with the power of a sharp sword through any creature rash enough to have ventured within their range. That was how they nourished themselves, in this infertile soil: they killed, and then they fed on the nutrients that leached into the ground from the decomposing bodies of their victims. One could see fragmentary skeletons scattered all around, the ancient remains of incautious beasts and, evidently, a good many unwary travelers.

  Someone had long ago laid out a safe track through this unappealing wilderness, a narrow zone that passed between the places where the plants tended to grow. It was marked only by a sparse border of rocks on either side, and the careless wayfarer could all too readily stray outside its limits. But Count Mandralisca was not one much given to carelessness. He guided his little convoy through the deadly plain without incident and thence up the narrow, interminably switchbacking trail that took one to the top of the riverfront bluffs and to the compound of palaces where his masters the Five Lords awaited his return.

  What sort of foolishness, Mandralisca wondered, had they managed to get themselves into in his absence?

  He was greeted, as he and his party came riding into the broad colonnaded plaza that fronted the three central buildings, by a sight so very much in accord with his expectations that he was hard put to choke back bitter laughter, and to conceal his loathing and disgust.

  Gavinius, the brother for whom Mandralisca cared least of all, was wandering at large in the plaza, drunk—no surprise that!—and reeling around in a blundering rampage. Flushed and sweaty, clad only in a loosely flapping linen apron, he was roaming from one stone column to the next, blowing kisses to them as though they were pretty maidens, all the while bawling some raucous song. A leather flask of brandy dangled f
rom one shoulder. A couple of his women—his “wives,” Gavinius liked to call them, but there was no evidence that that was so in any formal sense—followed along cautiously behind him as though they hoped somehow to steer him back inside the palace. But they were taking care not to get too close. Gavinius was dangerous when he was drunk.

  He came to a lurching, staggering halt as the Count came into view.

  “Mandralisca!” he bellowed. “At last! Where have you been, fellow? Been looking for you all day!”

  The big man went stumbling forward. Mandralisca swung himself quickly to the ground. It would not be the part of wisdom to remain astride his mount in the presence of the Lord Gavinius.

  Of the five brothers, Gavinius was the one who most closely resembled their late father Gaviundar: a huge big-bellied red-faced man with a wide, florid face, unpleasant little blue-green eyes, and great fleshy ears that sprang out at acute angles from the nearly bald dome of his head. Though Mandralisca was a tall man, the Lord Gavinius was even taller, and very much greater in bulk. He took up a stance that was almost nose to nose with Mandralisca and stood rocking alarmingly back and forth on the massive tree trunks that were his legs, squinting at him blearily. “You want a drink, Count? Here. Here. Look at you, you’re dusty all over! Where have you been?” Clumsily he unfastened the strap of his brandy flask, nearly dropping it in the process and catching it only by a desperate swipe of his huge paw, and pushed it toward Mandralisca.

  “I thank you, milord Gavinius. But I have no thirst just now.”

  “No thirst? Ah, but you never do. Damn you, why not? What a sorry stick of a man you are, Mandralisca! Have some anyway. You should want to drink. You should love to drink. How can I trust a man who hates to drink? Here. Here. Drink!”

  Shrugging, Mandralisca took the flask from the bigger man, held it to his lips without quite touching it, pretended to take a swig, and handed it back.

  Gavinius corked the flask and flipped it casually over his shoulder. Then, leaning close into Mandralisca’s face, he began thickly to say: “I had a dream last night—the most amazing—it was a sending, Mandralisca, a true sending, I tell you! I wanted you to speak it for me, but where were you? Damn you, where were you? It was such a dream—”

  “He was away north of the Zimr, you booby, carrying out a punitive mission against the Vorthinar lord,” came a dry, hard voice suddenly from one side. “Isn’t that so, Mandralisca?”

  Gaviral, it was. The only really clever one of the bunch: the future Pontifex of Zimroel, if Mandralisca had his way.

  The interruption was a welcome one. Dealing with Gavinius, drunk or sober, was always an irritating business, and it could be perilous besides. Gaviral was capable of being dangerous in his own cunning way, but at any rate there was no risk of his grabbing you up in some bone-crushing demonstration of manly affection, or simply crashing down drunkenly upon you like a toppling tree.

  “I have been in the north, yes, milord,” said Mandralisca, “and the mission has been accomplished. The Vorthinar lord and all his men went up in flames these five days past.”

  Gaviral smiled. Alone in this brotherly herd of great uncouth oxen he was a wiry man, small and fidgety, with quick flickering eyes and a narrow, twitchy mouth. He was built on such a different scale from the others that quite possibly he was not his father’s son at all, Mandralisca sometimes suspected. But he did have the reddish hair of the whole Sambailid clan, and the distinctive coarseness of feature, and their irrepressible rapacity of spirit. “Dead, are they?” Gaviral said. “Splendid. Splendid! But I had no doubt. You are a good staunch faithful man, Mandralisca. What would we ever do without you? You are a jewel. You are our strong right arm. I commend you with all my heart.”

  There was profound condescension in Gaviral’s effusive tone, an airy insincerity, a lurking disingenuousness, that blared forth in every syllable. He spoke as one might speak to a servant, to a lackey, to a minion—that is, one might speak that way if one were a fool and did not understand the proper ways of addressing those upon whom you are dependent, inferiors though they might be.

  But Mandralisca betrayed no sign of taking offense. “Thank you, milord,” he said softly, with a grateful little smile and a nod of his head, as though he had been honored with a golden chain, or a knighthood, or the gift of six villages in the fertile north. “I will cherish these words of yours. Your praise means a great deal to me—more, perhaps, than you can realize.”

  “It is not so much praise, Mandralisca, as a simple statement of the truth,” said Gaviral, seeming very pleased with himself.

  He was the brightest of the five brothers, yes. But what Mandralisca knew, and Gaviral did not, was that Gaviral was not half so bright as he thought he was. That was his great flaw. He was easy enough to deceive: merely let him think you were in awe of his superb mind, and he was yours.

  Gavinius now broke in abruptly. “I dreamed,” he said, returning to his theme as though Mandralisca and Gaviral had not been speaking with each other at all, “such a dream! The Procurator came to me, will you believe it? Walked up and down before me, looked me in the eye, said marvelous things to me. It was a sending, I know it was, but whose was it? Surely not the Lady’s. Why would the Lady send the Procurator’s spirit to me? Why would the Lady send me a dream in the first place?” Gavinius belched. “You have to explain it to me, Mandralisca. I’ve been hunting for you all day. Where have you been, anyway?” Then he turned away, scuffing about for his flask in the red sand of the plaza. “And where has my brandy gone? What have you done with my flask?”

  “Go inside, Gavinius,” Gaviral said in a low but insistent tone. “Lie down. Close your eyes for a while. The Count will speak your dream later for you.” The little man gave his hulking brother a sharp thump on the breastbone. Gavinius looked down, blinking in astonishment, at the place where he had been struck. “Go. Go, Gavinius.” And Gaviral thumped him again, tapping a little harder this time. Gavinius, still blinking, went lumbering off toward his palace like a befuddled bidlak, with his women tagging along just behind.

  The Lords Gavdat and Gavahaud had by this time appeared in the plaza, and Mandralisca saw Gavilomarin coming toward them over the ridge that separated his palace from the others. The brothers clustered around their privy counsellor.

  Soft, jowly-faced Gavdat of the cavernous nostrils, as soon as he learned of the successful result of Mandralisca’s mission, let it be known that his casting of a thaumaturgic horoscope had made that outcome a certainty. He fancied himself a wizard of sorts, did Gavdat, and dabbled ineptly in magecraft and spells. Vain bull-necked Gavahaud, as ugly as his brothers but convinced to a marvelous degree of his own beauty, offered Mandralisca congratulations with a dainty foppish salute, doubly grotesque in so heavyset a man. Big flabby Gavilomarin, a pallid-souled negligible person who obligingly agreed with anything any of the others might say, clapped his hands in a simpleminded way and giggled happily at the news of the burning of the keep.

  “So may they all perish, those who oppose us!” said Gavahaud sententiously.

  “There will be many of those, I fear,” Mandralisca said.

  “The Coronal, you mean?” asked the Lord Gaviral.

  “That will be later. I mean others like the Vorthinar lord. Local princes, who see themselves as having a chance to break away from everyone’s authority. Once they behold lords like yourself openly defying the Coronal and the Pontifex and succeeding in that defiance, they see no reason to continue to pay taxes to other administrations. Including your own, my lords.”

  “You will burn them for us, then, as you burned this one,” Gavahaud said.

  “Yes. Yes. So he will!” cried Gavilomarin, and gleefully clapped his hands again.

  Mandralisca threw him a quick baleful smile. Then, tapping his fingertips to the golden paraclet of his office that hung at his breast and glancing swiftly from one brother to the next, he said, “My lords, I have had a long journey this day, and I am very weary. I ask your permissi
on to retire.”

  As they made their way toward the village a little distance south of Gaviral’s palace where the highest-level retainers lived, Jacomin Halefice said hesitantly to Mandralisca, “Sir, may I offer a personal observation?”

  “We are friends, are we not, Jacomin?” said Mandralisca.

  The statement was so far from the truth that Halefice had difficulty hiding his astonishment. But he recovered after a moment and said, “It seemed to me, sir, that the brothers, when they were speaking with you just now—and I have noticed this before, in truth—you will forgive me for saying so, I hope, but—” There he hesitated. “What I mean to say—”

  “Come out with it, will you?”

  Halefice said, “Just that they are so very patronizing when they address you. They speak to you as though they are grand and mighty noblemen and you are insignificant, treated like nothing more than a vassal, a mere flunkey.”

  “I am their vassal, Jacomin.”

  “But not their servant.”

  “Not precisely, no.”

  “Why do you abide their insolence, then, sir? For that is what it is, and, forgive me, your grace, but it pains me to see a man of your abilities treated that way. Have they forgotten that you and only you have made them what they are?”

  “Oh, no, not so. You give me too much credit, Jacomin. It was the Divine that made them what they are, and also, I suppose, their glorious father Prince Gaviundar, with some help from their lady mother, whoever that may have been.” Mandralisca flashed his quick frosty smile again. “All I did was show them how they could make themselves lords of these few unimportant provinces. And, if all goes well, lords of all Zimroel, perhaps, one day.”

  “And it troubles you not in the least that they treat you with such contempt, sir?”

  Mandralisca surveyed his bandy-legged little aide-de-camp with a long, slow, curious look.

  He and Jacomin Halefice had been together for more than twenty years, now. They had fought side by side against the forces of Prestimion at Thegomar Edge, when Korsibar had perished at the hands of his own Su-Suheris magus, and the Procurator Dantirya Sambail had been defeated and made a prisoner by Prestimion, and Mandralisca himself, who had fought to the last stages of exhaustion, was wounded and taken prisoner also by Rufiel Kisimir of Muldemar. And the two of them had been near each other again at the time of the second great defeat, among the manganoza thickets of Stoienzar, that time when Dantirya Sambail was slain by Septach Melayn: Halefice had helped Mandralisca slip off into the underbrush and vanish, when Navigorn of Hoikmar was pursuing him and would have put him to death. It was with Halefice’s assistance that Mandralisca had been able to make his escape from Alhanroel and find his way into the service of Dantirya Sambail’s two brothers.