Mandralisca moved on. He came to Agavir Toymin and struck him quickly with the crop also, almost without pausing to think about it, and, reaching the end of the row where Stravin of Til-omon stood, hit him also. He had put his mark on the three oldest men, the leaders, the ones who should have had enough sense not to fight. To the others it was a sufficient lesson; there was no need actually to strike them.
And then it was done. Punishment had been administered. Mandralisca stepped back and scrutinized them all with unconcealed disdain.
Thastain once more tried to shrink himself down into invisibility. The intensity of Mandralisca’s frosty glare was a frightful thing.
“Will someone tell me what was happening here, now?” The Count’s gaze came to rest once again on Thastain. Thastain shivered; but there was no recourse but to meet those appalling eyes. “You, boy. Speak!”
With extreme effort Thastain forced a husky half-whisper out of himself: “We have found the enemy keep, your grace. It lies in the valley just below us.”
“Go on. The fighting—”
“There was a dispute over whether to go down to it immediately and set it on fire, or to return to your camp for further orders.”
“Ah. A dispute. A dispute.” A look that might almost have been one of amusement came into Mandralisca’s stony eyes. “With fists.” Then his visage darkened again. He spat. “Well, then, here are the orders you crave. Get yourselves down there at once and put the place to the torch, even as we came here to do.”
“It is guarded by Shapeshifters, your grace,” Thastain said, astonishing himself by daring to speak out unbidden. But there it was: his words hung before him in the air like puffs of strange black smoke.
The Count gave him a long slow look. “Is it, now? Guarded by Shapeshifters. What a surprise.” Mandralisca did not sound surprised, though. There was no expression whatever in his tone. Turning toward Criscantoi Vaz, he said, “Well, they will burn along with everyone else. You: I place you in charge. Take three men with you. The enemies of the Five Lords must perish.”
Criscantoi Vaz saluted smartly. He seemed almost grateful. It was as though the blow across the face had never occurred.
He glanced around at the group of waiting men. “Agavir Toymin,” he said. Agavir Toymin, looking pleased, nodded and touched two fingers to his forehead. “Gambrund,” said Mandralisca next. And, after a brief pause: “Thastain.”
Thastain had not expected that. Chosen for the mission! Him! He felt a great surge of exhilaration. The thumping in his chest was almost painful, and he touched his hand to his breastbone to try to still it. But of course he would have been chosen, he realized, after a moment. He was the quickest, the most agile. He was to be the one who would run forward to hurl the firebrands.
The four men descended in a triangular formation, with Thastain at the apex. Gambrund, just behind him, carried the bundle of firebrands; flanking him were Criscantoi Vaz and Agavir Toymin, armed with bows in case the sentries saw them.
Thastain kept his head down and went forward with great care, mindful of the helgibor he had seen and such other low-slung predators of the grassland that might be lurking hidden in all this thick growth. The bright glassy sheen of the tawny grass, he realized now, was not just a trick of the eye; the blades did not simply look glassy, but actually felt like glass, stiff and sharp-edged, unpleasant to move through, making a harsh whispering sound as he pushed them aside. They provided a slippery surface to walk on when they were crushed underfoot. Every step Thastain took was a tense one: it would be all too easy, sliding and slithering as he was, to lose his footing and go stumbling headlong down into the enemy camp.
But he negotiated the slope safely, halting when he reached a position that he judged was within throwing range. Moments later the other three came up behind him. Thastain pointed toward the keep. No sentinels were in sight.
Criscantoi Vaz indicated what he wanted done with quick urgent gestures. Gambrund held out a firebrand; Agavir Toymin produced a little energy-torch and ignited it with a quick burst of heat; Thastain took it from him, ran forward half a dozen steps, and threw it toward the keep, turning himself in a nearly complete circle for greater velocity at the moment of release.
The blazing brand flew in a high, arching curve and landed in a bed of dry grass no more than five feet from the keep. There was the crackling sound of immediate ignition.
Burn! thought Thastain jubilantly. Burn! Burn! So perish all the enemies of the Five Lords!
Criscantoi Vaz followed Thastain’s brand a moment later with a second, throwing it with less elegance of form than Thastain but with greater force: it soared splendidly through the air and came down on the thatched roof itself. A pinkish spiral of flame began to rise. Thastain, flinging the next firebrand more emphatically, reached the group of black-trunked glossy-leaved shrubs closest to the building’s wall: they smoldered for a moment and burst into vivid tongues of fire.
The occupants of the keep, now, were aware that something was up. “Quickly,” Criscantoi Vaz cried. They still had two firebrands left. Thastain seized one with both hands as soon as Agavir Toymin had it lit, ran a few steps, whirled around, and flung it: he too reached the roof this time. Criscantoi Vaz placed the last one in a patch of dry grass outside the door, just as three or four men began emerging from it. Several of them set to work desperately trying to stamp out the blaze; the others, shouting in a kind of frenzy, started to make their way up the slope toward the attackers. But the climb from the valley floor was practically a vertical one and they had brought no weapons with them. After a dozen yards or so they gave up and turned back toward the keep, which with astonishing swiftness was being engulfed by fire. Like madmen they ran inside, though the whole entranceway was already ablaze. The front wall fell in after them. They would all roast like spitted blaves in there, the rebels and their tame Shapeshifters as well. Good. Good.
“We’ve done it!” Thastain cried, exulting at the sight. “They’re all burning!”
“Come, boy,” said Criscantoi Vaz. “Get yourself moving.”
He planted himself solidly and covered the retreat of the other three with drawn bow. But no one emerged now from the burning building. By the time Thastain had reached the safety of the crest, the rebel keep and much of the surrounding grassland were on fire, and a black spear of smoke was climbing into the sky. The blaze was spreading with awesome rapidity. The whole valley was sure to go up: there would be no survivors down there.
Well, that was what they had come here to accomplish. The Vorthinar lord, like so many of the little local princelings across the vast face of the continent of Zimroel, had defied the decrees of the five Sambailid brothers who claimed supreme authority in this land; and so the Vorthinar lord had had to perish. This continent was meant to be Sambailid territory, had been for generations until the overthrow of the Procurator by Lord Prestimion, now was Sambailid again. And this time must remain so for all eternity. Thastain, born under Sambailid rule, had no doubts of that. To permit anything else would be to open the door to chaos.
Count Mandralisca seemed mightily pleased with the work they had done down there. There was something almost benign about his quick frigid smile as he greeted them on the crest, his brief, fleeting handclasp of congratulation.
They stood together for a long while at the cliff’s edge, gleefully watching the rebel keep burn. The fire was spreading and spreading, engulfing the dry valley from end to end. Even when they were back at camp, miles away, they could still smell the acrid tang of smoke, and black drifting cinders occasionally wandered toward them on the southward-trending wind.
That night they opened many a flagon of wine, good coarse red stuff from the western lands. Later, in the darkness, feeling as tipsy as he had ever been though he had taken care to stop drinking before most of the others, Thastain went stumbling toward the ditch where they relieved themselves, and discovered the Count already there, with his aide-de-camp, that stubby little man Jacomin Halefice. So
even the Count Mandralisca needed to make water, just as ordinary mortals did! Thastain found something pleasantly incongruous about that.
He did not dare approach. As he hung back in the shadows he heard Mandralisca say in quiet satisfaction, “They will all die the way the Vorthinar lord died today, eh, Jacomin? And one day there will be no lords in this world other than the Five Lords.”
“Not even Lord Prestimion?” the aide-de-camp asked. “Or Lord Dekkeret, who is to come after him?”
Thastain saw Mandralisca swing about to face the smaller man. He was unable to see the expression on the Count’s face, but he could sense the bleak icy set of it from the tone of Mandralisca’s voice as he replied:
“Your question provides its own answer, Jacomin.”
5
Asleep in his bed in the royal lodging-house in the Guardian City of Fa, Prestimion dreamed that he was back in the swarming, incomprehensibly vast collection of buildings atop Castle Mount that went by the name of Lord Prestimion’s Castle. He was wandering like a ghost through dusty corridors that he had never seen before. He was taking unfamiliar pathways that led him down into regions of the Castle that he had not even known existed.
A little phantom led him onward, a small floating figure drifting high up in the air before him, beckoning him ever deeper into the maze that was the Castle. “This way, my lord. This way! Follow me!”
The tiny phantom had the form of a Vroon, one of the many nonhuman peoples that had dwelled on Majipoor almost since the earliest days of the giant planet’s occupation by humans. They were doll-sized creatures, light as air, with a myriad of rubbery tentacular limbs and huge round golden eyes that stared forth on either side of sharply hooked yellow beaks. Vroons had the gift of second sight, and could peer easily into minds, or unerringly determine the right road to take in some district altogether unfamiliar to them. But they could not float ten feet off the ground, as this one was doing. The part of Prestimion’s slumbering mind that stood outside itself, watching the progress of his own dreams, knew from that one detail alone that he had to be dreaming.
And he knew also, taking no pleasure in the knowledge, that this was a dream he had dreamed many times before, in one variation and another.
He almost recognized the sectors of the Castle through which the Vroon was leading him. Those ruined pillars of crumbling red sandstone might belong to Balas Bastion, where there were pathways leading to the little-used northern wing. That narrow bridge could perhaps be Lady Thiin’s Overpass, in which case that spiraling rampart faced in greenish brick would lead toward the Tower of Trumpets and the Castle’s outer facade.
But what was this long rambling array of low black-tiled stone hovels? Prestimion could put no name to that. And that windowless, free-standing circular tower whose rough white walls were inset with row upon row of sharpened blue flints, sharp side outward? That diamond-shaped desert of gray slabs within a palisade of pink marble spikes? That endless vaulted hall, receding into the infinite distance, lit by a row of giant candelabra the size of tree-trunks? These places could not be real parts of the Castle. The Castle was so huge that it would take forever to see it all, and even Prestimion, who had lived there since he was a youth, knew that there must be many tracts of it that he had never had occasion to enter. But these places where his sleeping self was roaming now surely had no real-world existence. They had to be dream-inventions and nothing more.
He was going down and down and down a winding staircase made of planks of some gleaming scarlet wood that floated, like the Vroon, without visible means of support in the middle of the air. It was clear to him that he must be leaving the relatively familiar upper reaches of the Castle now and descending into the auxiliary zones lower on the Mount where the thousands of people whose services were essential to the life of the Castle dwelled: the guards and servitors, gardeners and cooks, archivists and clerks, road-menders and wall-builders and game-keepers, and so on and so on. Neither waking nor dreaming had he spent much time down there. But these levels were part of the Castle too. The Castle, big as it was, grew even greater from year to year. It was like a living creature in that regard. The royal sector of the great building nestled atop the uppermost crags of the Mount, but it had layer upon layer of subterranean vaults beneath, cutting deep into the stony heart of the giant mountain. And also there were the outer zones, sprawling downward for many miles along every face of the Mount’s summit like long trailing arms, extending themselves farther down the slope all the time.
“My lord?” the Vroon called, singing sweetly to him from overhead. “This way! This way!”
Puffy-faced Hjorts lined his path now, bowing officiously, and great thick-furred Skandars made the starburst salute with all the dizzying multiplicity their four arms afforded, and whistling greetings came to him from reptilian Ghayrogs, and flat-faced three-eyed little Liimen acknowledged him also, as did a phalanx of pale haughty Su-Suheris folk—representatives of all the alien races that shared vast Majipoor with its human masters. There were Metamorphs here as well, it seemed, long-legged slinking beings who slipped in and out of the shadows on every side. What, Prestimion wondered, were they doing on Castle Mount, where the aboriginal species had been forbidden since the long-ago days of Lord Stiamot?
“And now come this way,” said the Vroon, leading him into a building that was like a castle within the castle, a hotel of some sort with thousands of rooms arranged along a single infinitely receding hallway that uncoiled endlessly before him like a highway to the stars; but the Vroon was a Vroon no longer.
This was the version of the dream that Prestimion most dreaded.
There had been a transformation. His guide now was dark-haired Lady Thismet, daughter to the Coronal Lord Confalume and twin sister to Prince Korsibar, Thismet whom he had loved and lost so long ago. As buoyant as the Vroon and just as swift, she danced along before him with her bare toes a few inches above the ground, remaining always just out of his reach, turning now and then to urge him along with a luminous smile, a wink of her dark sparkling eyes, a quick encouraging flutter of her fingertips. Her matchless beauty speared through him like a blade. “Wait for me!” he called, and she answered that he must move more quickly. But, fast as he went, she was always faster, a slim lithe figure in a rippling white gown, her gleaming jet-black hair fanning out in back of her as she retreated from him down that unending hall. “Thismet!” he cried. “Wait, Thismet! Wait! Wait! Wait!” He was running with desperate fervor now, pushing himself to the last extreme of his endurance. Ahead of him, doors were opening on either side of the endless corridor; faces peered out, grinned, winked, beckoned to him. They were Thismet too, every one of them, Thismet again and again, hundreds of Thismets, thousands, but as he came to each room in turn its door slammed shut, leaving him only the tinkling laughter of the Thismet behind it. And still the Thismet who was guiding him moved forward serenely, constantly turning to lure him onward, but never letting him catch up.
“Thismet! Thismet! Thismet!”
His voice became a tremendous clamoring roar of agony and rage and frustration.
“My lord?”
“Thismet! Thismet!”
“My lord, are you ill? Speak to me! Open your eyes, my lord! It’s me, me, Diandolo! Wake up, my lord. Please, my lord—”
“This—met—”
The lights were on now. Prestimion, blinking, dazed, saw the young page Diandolo bending over the bed, wide-eyed, gaping at him in shock. Other figures were visible behind him, four, five, six people: bodyguards, servitors, others whose faces were completely unfamiliar. He struggled to come fully up out of sleep.
The sturdy figure of Falco now appeared, nudging Diandolo aside, bending forward over Prestimion. He was Prestimion’s steward on all his official travels, twenty-five or so, a fine strapping fellow from Minimool with an enviable head of thick glossy black hair, a wonderfully melodious singing voice, and a bright-eyed look of invincible good cheer.
“It was only a dream you we
re having, my lord.”
Prestimion nodded. His chest and arms were drenched with sweat. His throat felt rough and raw from the force of his own outcries. There was a fiery band of pain across his forehead. “Yes,” he said hoarsely. “It was—only—a—dream—”
6
Three of Varaile’s four children were waiting for her in the morning-room when she entered it. They rose as she entered. It was the family custom for them to take the first meal of the day with her.
Prince Taradath, the eldest, was accompanying his father on his current journey, and therefore it was the second son, Prince Akbalik, who formally escorted Varaile to her seat. He was twelve, and already tall and sturdy: he had inherited his father’s yellow hair and powerful build, but he had his mother’s height. In two or three years he would be taller than either of his parents. His soft eyes and thoughtful manner, though, belied his stature and heft: he was destined to be a scholar, or perhaps a poet, most definitely not any sort of athlete or warrior.
Prince Simbilon, ten years old, still round-faced in a babyish way, terribly solemn of demeanor—priggish, even—elaborately offered Varaile the tray of fruits that was her usual first course. But the Lady Tuanelys, who was eight and had a conspicuous lack of interest in the routines of politeness, gave her mother nothing more than the quickest of nods and returned to her seat at the table, and to the plate piled high with cheese covered with honey that she had already provided for herself. It was folly to expect courtesy from Tuanelys. She was a pretty child, with a lovely cloud of golden hair that she wore in a beaded net, and finely sculpted features that foretold the feminine beauty that would be hers in six or seven more years; but her lean little body was as straight and long as a strap, just now. She was a runner, a climber, a fighter, a tomboy in every way.
The King of Dreams Page 4