“All right. So Teotas is having very bad dreams. That’s not a trivial thing. But dreams, in the end, are just dreams. We generate them out of the darkness of our own souls, unless they’re put into us from outside, and the only one who’s able to do that is the Lady of the Isle. Who certainly would never send anyone dreams of the sort that you say Teotas is getting. And you yourself have just agreed that we control the only other machine that can do such a thing, which is the helmet that your father used to use.”
“How sure can you be,” Dinitak asked, “that the devices you keep locked in the Treasury are the only ones in existence? I am familiar with the workings of the helmet, lordship. I know what it can do. What is happening to Teotas is the sort of thing it can do.”
For the first time Dekkeret began to see where Dinitak had been trying this whole while to lead him. “And just who is it, do you think, who owns this other helmet and is bedeviling poor Teotas with it?”
A gleam came into Dinitak’s eyes. “My father’s younger brother Khaymak was the mechanic who constructed my father’s mind-controlling helmets for him. Khaymak has remained in Suvrael all these years, going about whatever slippery business it is that he goes about. But you may recall that he turned up on Castle Mount only last year—”
“Of course,” said Dekkeret. “Of course!” It was all starting to fall into place now.
“Turned up on Castle Mount,” Dinitak continued, “seeking to enroll himself in the service of Lord Prestimion. I myself saw to it—disliking the embarrassment, I will admit, of having such an unsavory kinsman around the place—that he was denied permission to come anywhere near the Castle. I see now that this was a huge mistake.”
“You think that he’s built another helmet?”
“Either that, or he’s designed one and was searching for a patron who would finance the construction of a working model. I was fairly sure that that was why he was coming to Prestimion; and I saw nothing good coming from any of that, and so the gates of the Castle were closed to him. But I think he’s found a patron somewhere else, and has fashioned a new helmet by now, and is using it on Teotas. And, it could be, on many others as well.”
Dekkeret felt a chill.
“Just before my coronation,” he said slowly, “Prestimion’s Su-Suheris magus came to me and told me that he had had some sort of vision in which some member of the Barjazid clan somehow made himself a Power of the Realm. The whole thing seemed nonsensical to me, and I put it out of my mind. I never said anything to you about it because to me it carried treasonous implications, that you might be thinking of overthrowing me and making yourself Coronal in my place, which seemed too absurd even to think about.”
“I am not the only Barjazid in this world, my lord.”
“Indeed. And Maundigand-Klimd cautioned me against interpreting his vision too literally. But what if it meant, not that this Barjazid was going to become a Power—and what other Power could he become, if not Coronal?—but that he was going to attain power, power in the general sense of the word?”
“Or that he was going to sell his helmet and his services to some other person who would wield that power,” Dinitak said.
“But who would that be? The world’s at peace. Prestimion dealt with all our enemies years ago.”
“The poison-taster of Dantirya Sambail still lives, my lord.”
“Mandralisca? I haven’t so much as thought of him in years! Why, he must be an old man now—if he’s still alive at all.”
“Not so old, I think. Perhaps fifty, at most. And still quite dangerous, I suspect. I touched his mind with mine, you know, when I wore the helmet the day of that final battle in the Stoienzar. Only briefly, but it was enough. I will never forget it. The hatred coiled within that mind like a giant serpent—the anger aimed at all the world, the lust to injure, to destroy—”
“Mandralisca!” murmured Dekkeret, shaking his head. He was lost in the wonder and horror of the recollection.
Dinitak said, “He was, I think, a greater monster than his master Dantirya Sambail. The Procurator knew when to rein in his ambitions. There was always a certain point that he was unwilling to go beyond, and when he reached that point, he would find someone else to undertake the task on his behalf.”
Dekkeret nodded. “Korsibar, for example. Dantirya Sambail, though always hungry for more power, didn’t try to make himself Coronal. He found a proxy, a puppet.”
“Exactly. The Procurator preferred ever to remain safely behind the scenes, avoiding the worst risks, letting others do his dirty work for him. Mandralisca was of a different sort. He was always willing to risk everything on a single throw of the dice.”
“Serving as a poison-taster, for instance. What sane man would take a job like that? But he seemed heedless of the risk to his own life.”
“I think he must have been. Or perhaps he felt it was a risk worth taking. By letting his master know that he was willing to put his life on the line for him, he would worm his way into Dantirya Sambail’s heart. That must have seemed a reasonable gamble to him. And once he found himself at the Procurator’s elbow, I think he led Dantirya Sambail on, from one monstrous deed to the next, possibly just for the sheer amusement of it.”
“Such a person is beyond my understanding,” said Dekkeret.
“Not mine, alas. I’ve had closer acquaintance with monsters than you. But you’re the one who will have to stop him.”
“Ah, but wait! We are moving very quickly here, Dinitak, and these conjectures carry us a great distance.” Dekkeret jabbed a forefinger at the smaller man. “What are you telling me, in fact? You’ve conjured up that old demon Mandralisca; you’ve put your father’s thought-control weapon in his hands again; you’ve suggested that Mandralisca is gearing up to launch yet another war against the world. But where’s the proof that any of this is real? To me it seems that it’s all built out of nothing more than Teotas’s bad dreams and Maundigand-Klimd’s ambiguous vision!”
Dinitak smiled. “The original helmet is still in our possession. Let me get it out of the Treasury and explore the world with it. If Mandralisca still lives, I’ll find out where he is. And for whom he’s working. What do you say, my lord?”
“What can I say?” Dekkeret’s head was throbbing. He had been on the throne barely more than a month, Prestimion was far away and ignorant of all this, and he had no High Counsellor to turn to. He was entirely on his own, save for Dinitak Barjazid. And now the possibility of an ancient enemy stirring somewhere far away suddenly lay before him. In a voice grim with apprehension and frustration Dekkeret said, “What I say is this: find him for me, Dinitak. Discover his intentions. Render him harmless, in whatever way you can. Destroy him, if necessary. You understand me. Do whatever must be done.”
13
Fulkari was crossing the Vildivar Balconies, heading in the direction of the Pinitor Court, when the moment she had been dreading for weeks finally arrived. Through the gateway from the Inner Castle and onto the Balconies at the far end came the Coronal Lord Dekkeret, magnificent in his robes of office and surrounded, as he always was these days, by a little group of important-looking men, the inner circle of his court. Her only path led her straight toward him. There was no avoiding it, now: they must inevitably confront each other here.
She and Dekkeret had not spoken at all in the weeks that had gone by since his ascent to the throne. Indeed she had seen him just a handful of times, and then only at a great distance, at court functions of the kind that highborn young ladies of Fulkari’s sort, descendants of former royal families of centuries gone by, were expected to attend. There had been no contact between them. He had scarcely looked toward her. He behaved as if she were invisible. And she had sidestepped any possibility of contact as well. One time at a royal levee when it seemed that his path across the great throne-room would certainly bring them face to face, she had taken care to slip away into the crowd before he came anywhere near her. She feared what he might say to her.
It was obvious to
everyone that whatever relationship once had existed between them was over. Perhaps he was unwilling to say so to her in so many words, but Fulkari had no doubt that it was at an end. Only the fact that he had not yet brought himself to make a formal break with her kept it alive in her heart. Yet she knew how foolish that was. They had kept company for three years, and now they did not speak at all. Could anything be more clear than that? Dekkeret had asked her to marry him and she had refused him. That had ended it. Was it really necessary, she wondered, for him to acknowledge formally something that was plain to all?
Yet there he was, no more than a hundred yards away and coming straight toward her.
Would he continue to pretend she was invisible when they encountered each other on this narrow balcony? That would be agony, Fulkari thought. To be humiliated like that in front of Dinitak and Prince Teotas and the Council ministers Dembitave and Vandimain and the rest of those men. An agony of her own making—she had no doubts about that—but an agony all the same, marking her as nothing more than a discarded royal mistress. And not even that, actually. Dekkeret had not yet become Coronal the last time they had made love. So all she was was someone who had been the lover of the new Coronal when he was still only a private individual, one of the many women who had passed through his bed over the years.
She resolved to address the situation squarely. I am no mere discarded concubine, she thought. I am Lady Fulkari of Sipermit, in whose veins flows the blood of the Coronal Lord Makhario, who was king in this Castle five centuries ago. What had Lord Dekkeret’s ancestors been doing five centuries ago? Did he even know their names?
She and Dekkeret were no more than fifty feet apart now. Fulkari looked straight toward him. Their eyes met, and it was only with great effort that she kept herself from glancing aside; but she held her gaze.
Dekkeret appeared tense and weary. And wary, as well: gone now was the cheerful open countenance of the lighthearted man who had been her lover these three years past. He seemed under great strain now. His lips were closely clamped, his forehead was furrowed, there was a visible throbbing of some sort in his left cheek. Was it the cares of his high office that had done this to him, or was he simply reacting to the embarrassment of this accidental encounter in front of all his companions?
“Fulkari,” he said, when they were closer. He spoke softly and his voice seemed as rigid and tightly controlled as was the expression of his face.
“My lord.” Fulkari bowed her head and offered him the starburst salute.
He halted before her. She was close enough to him, here in the tight confines of the little balcony promenade, that she was able to observe a thin line of perspiration along his upper lip. The two men who had been walking closest to the Coronal, Dinitak and Vandimain, stepped back from him and seemed to fade into the background. Prince Teotas, who looked terribly weary and tense himself, bloodshot and haggard, was staring at her as though she were some sort of phantom.
Then Teotas and Dinitak and Vandimain faded back even farther, so that they appeared to vanish altogether, and Fulkari could see only Dekkeret, occupying an immense space at the center of her consciousness. She faced him steadily. Tall woman though she was, she came barely breast-high to him.
There was a silence between them that went on and on and on. If only he would reach out his hand to her, she told herself, she would hurl herself into his embrace in front of all these others, these great men of the realm, these princes and counts and dukes. But he did not reach out.
Instead he said in that same tight tone, after what felt like years but more likely had been only five or six seconds, “I’ve been meaning to send for you, Fulkari. We need to speak, you know.”
Fatal words. The words she had hoped not to hear.
We need to speak? Of what, my lord? What is there left for us to say?
That was what she wished she could say. And then move past him and walk swiftly on. But she kept her gaze level and maintained a cool tone of high formality in her reply: “Yes, my lord. Whenever you wish, my lord.”
Dekkeret’s forehead was glistening now with sweat. This must be as hard for him as it was for her, Fulkari realized.
He turned to his chamberlain. “You will arrange a private audience for the Lady Fulkari for tomorrow afternoon, Zeldor Luudwid. We will meet in the Methirasp Hall.”
“Very good, sir,” the chamberlain said.
“He wants to see me, Keltryn!” Fulkari said. They were in Keltryn’s modest, cluttered apartment in the Setiphon Arcade, two flights down from the more imposing suite that Fulkari herself occupied. She had gone straight to Keltryn’s place after her encounter with Dekkeret. “I was passing through one of the Vildivar Balconies, and he was coming the other way with Vandimain and Dinitak and a lot of other people, and we had no choice but to walk right up to each other.” Quickly she described the brief meeting, Dekkeret’s uneasiness, her own conflicting emotions, the arm’s-length nature of the quick conversation, the appointment for her to see him the following day.
“Well, why shouldn’t he want to see you?” Keltryn asked. “You aren’t any uglier than you were last month, and even a busy man like the Coronal likes to have someone next to him in bed now and then, I’d imagine. So he saw you there in front of him, and he thought, ‘Oh, yes, Fulkari—I remember Fulkari—’”
“What a child you are, Keltryn.”
Keltryn grinned. “You don’t think I’m right?”
“Of course not. The whole notion is contemptible. Obviously you must think that both he and I are completely trivial people—that he sees nothing more in me than a handy plaything for lonely nights, and that all it would take for me to go running to him is a quick snap of his fingers—”
“But you’re going to go to see him, aren’t you?”
“Of course. Am I supposed to tell the Coronal of Majipoor that I can’t be bothered to accept his invitation?”
“Well, then, you’ll find out fast enough whether I’m right or not,” Keltryn said. Her eyes were sparkling triumphantly. She was enjoying this. “Go to him. Listen to what he has to say. I predict that within five minutes he’ll be sliding his hands all over you. And you’ll turn to jelly when he does.”
Fulkari stared at her sister in mingled fury and amusement. She was such a child, after all. What did she know about men, she who had never given herself to one? And yet—yet—standing as she did outside the whole sweaty business of men and women, Keltryn just might have a certain perspective that Fulkari herself, caught in the thick of all this intrigue, did not.
After all, Keltryn at seventeen wasn’t all that callow and raw. There was a no-nonsense wisdom about her that Fulkari was beginning to come to respect. It was a mistake to go on regarding her as a little girl forever. Changes were taking place. You could see it in her face: Fulkari was startled to see that she looked less boyish, suddenly, as though she were finally making the transition from coltish girl to real womanhood.
Fulkari roamed around the room, restlessly picking up and putting down one and another of the cut-glass bottles that Keltryn liked to collect. A flood of contradictory thoughts roared through her.
At length she turned and said, the words coming out in a high-voiced fluty tone that gave her that odd feeling once more that Keltryn was the older sister and she the younger one, “How can he seriously want to start it all over again, Keltryn? After what I said to him when he asked me to marry him? No. No, it just isn’t possible. He knows there’s no point in stirring everything up a second time. And if he’s merely interested in a bedmate, with no complications involved, the Castle is full of other women, much more suitable than I am, who’d be happy to oblige. He and I have too much history to allow anything of that sort to happen now.”
Keltryn gave her a wide-eyed, serious stare. “And if he does still want you, anyway? Isn’t that what you want also?”
“I don’t know what I want. You know I love him.”
“Yes.”
“But he’s looking for a wife,
and I’ve already said I don’t want to marry a Coronal.” Fulkari shook her head. She felt some measure of clarity returning to her troubled mind. “No, Keltryn, you’re wrong. The last thing Dekkeret wants is to get entangled with me again. I think that the reason he’s asked for me to come to him is because he’s realized that he never did get around to telling me formally that it’s over, and he feels a little guilty about it, because he owes me that much at a minimum. He’s been so busy being Coronal that he’s left me dangling, essentially, and it’s time for him to do the right thing. And when we ran into each other like that on that balcony he must have thought, ‘Oh, well, I really can’t let things drift on like this any longer.’”
“Maybe so. And how do you feel about that? That he’s summoned you just to finish everything off? Truthfully.”
“Truthfully?” Fulkari hesitated only an instant. “I hate it. I don’t want it to be over. I told you: I still love him, Keltryn.”
“Yet you told him you wouldn’t marry him. What do you expect him to do? He has to get on with his life. He doesn’t need mistresses now: he needs a wife.”
“I didn’t refuse to marry him. I refused to marry the Coronal.”
“Yes. Yes. You keep saying that. But it’s the same thing, isn’t it, Fulkari?”
“It wasn’t, when I said it. He hadn’t been officially proclaimed, yet. I suppose I hoped he’d give it all up for me. But of course he didn’t.”
“It was a crazy thing to ask, you know.”
“I realize that. He’s been preparing himself for the past fifteen years to succeed Lord Prestimion, and when the moment comes I say, ‘No, no, I’m much more important than all that, aren’t I, Dekkeret?’ How could I have been so stupid?” Fulkari turned away. This was giving her a headache. She had come running to Keltryn, she saw, in some kind of frenzy of muddled girlish excitement—“He wants to see me!”—and Keltryn had methodically exposed the full extent of her confusions. That was valuable, but also very painful. She wanted no more of this discussion.
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