Teotas gasped. “Can that be so?”
“At this moment Dinitak is searching for proof of his theory. And will take the necessary action, if he finds that what he suspects is true.”
“I find myself perplexed at this, my lord. Why would anyone want to be sending me bad dreams? Your friend Dinitak wastes his time, I think.”
“Be that as it may, I’ve authorized him to look into it.”
Teotas felt that he was coming to the limits of his reserve of strength. He had to make an end of this. “Whatever he finds will make no difference to our discussion here,” he said. “The real issue is what has become of my marriage.—You know, I think, that Fiorinda is at the Labyrinth with Varaile?”
“Yes.”
“She is as important to Varaile as you claim that I am to you. But I will not live apart from her indefinitely, my lord. There is no solution, then, other than for one of us to give up the royal appointment, and it has been my rule always to place Fiorinda’s needs and desires above my own. Therefore I will not serve you as High Counsellor.”
“You may think differently about this,” said Dekkeret, “once we have freed you from these dreams. Giving up the High Counsellorship is no light matter. I promise you, I’ll release you if you feel, even after the dreams are gone, that you don’t want the job. But can we hold the decision in abeyance until then?”
“You are inexorable, my lord. But I am adamant. Dreams or no dreams, I want to be with my wife, and she wants to be with Varaile at the Labyrinth.”
He moved again toward the door.
“Give it one more week,” Dekkeret said. “We’ll meet again a week from now, and if you feel the same way, I’ll name someone else to the post. Can we agree on that? One more week?”
Dekkeret’s tenacity was maddening. Teotas could bear it no longer. “Whatever you say, my lord,” he muttered. “One week more, yes. Whatever you say.” He made a hasty starburst salute and rushed from the room before the Coronal could utter another word.
That night Teotas lies awake for hours, too tired even to sleep, and he begins to hope that just this once he will be spared, that he will go through the night from midnight to dawn without descending even for a moment into the realm of dreams. Better not to sleep at all, he thinks, than to endure the torture that his dreams have become.
But somehow he passes without knowing it, once again, from wakefulness to sleep. There is no sudden transition, no sense of crossing a boundary. Somehow, though, he has entered yet another strange place, where he knows he will suffer. As he moves forward into it, the power of the place only gradually makes itself known to him, gathering slowly, mounting with each step he takes, oppressing him only a little at first, then more, then much more.
And now Teotas finds himself under the full stress of this place. He is in a region of thick-stemmed gray shrubs, broad-leaved and low. A thick mist hovers. The general tone here is a colorless one: hue has bled away. And there is the awful pull coming from the ground, that clamp of gravity clinging with inexorable force to every part of him. His eyelids are leaden. His cheeks sag. His gut droops. His throat is a loosely hanging sac. His bones bend under the strain. He walks with bent knees. What does he weigh here? Eight hundred pounds? Eight thousand? Eight million? He is unthinkably heavy. Heavy. Heavy.
His weight nails his feet flat to the ground. Each time he pulls one upward to take another step, he hears a reverberating sound as the planet recoils against the separation. He is aware of the blood lying dark and sleepy along the enfeebled arteries of his chest. He feels a monstrous iron hump riding on his shoulders. Yet he walks on. There must be an end to this place somewhere.
But there is no end.
Halting, Teotas kneels, just to regain his breath. Tears of relief burst forth as some of the stress is lifted from his body’s bony framework. Like drops of quicksilver the slow tears roll down his cheek and thump into the ground.
When he feels that he is ready to go on, he attempts to rise.
It takes him five tries. Then he succeeds, rocking himself, levering himself up on his knuckles, rump in air, intestines yanked groundward, spine popping, neck creaking. Up. Up. Another push. He stands. He gasps. He walks. He finds the path he had been following a little while ago: there are his footprints, nearly an inch deep on the sandy soil. He fits his feet into the imprints and moves onward.
The gravitational drag continues to increase. Breathing has become a battle. His rib cage will not lift except under duress; his lungs are stretched like elastic bands. His cheeks hang toward his shoulders. There is a boulder in his chest. And it all keeps getting worse. He knows that if he remains here much longer he will be squeezed flat. He will be squeezed until he is nothing more than a film of dust coating the ground.
The effect continues to worsen. He can no longer remain upright. He has become top-heavy, and the mass of his skull turns his back into a curved bow; his vertebrae slide about, grinding and cracking. He yearns to lie down flat, surrendering to the awful force, but he knows that if he does, he will never be able to rise again.
The sky is being pulled down on top of him. A gray shield presses against his back. His knees are taking root. He crawls. He crawls. He crawls. He crawls.
“Help me!” he cries. “Fiorinda! Prestimion! Abrigant!”
His words are like pellets of lead. They spill from his mouth and plummet into the ground.
He crawls.
There is a ghastly pain in his side. He fears that his intestines are breaking through his skin. His bones are separating at the elbows and knees. He crawls. He crawls.
He crawls.
“Pres—tim—i—on!”
The name emerges as an incoherent gargle. His gullet is stone. His earlobes are stone. His lips are stone. He crawls. His hands sink into the ground. He wrenches them free. He is at the end of his resources. He will perish. This is the finish: he is about to die a slow and hideous death. The gray mantle of the sky is crushing him. He is caught between earth and air. Everything is impossibly heavy. Heavy. Heavy. Heavy. He crawls. He sees only the rough bare soil eight inches from his nose.
Then, miraculously, a gateway appears before him, a shimmering golden oval in the air just ahead of him.
Teotas knows that if he can reach it, he will free himself from this realm of unendurable pressure. But reaching it is a challenge almost beyond his means. Every inch that he gains represents a triumph over implacable forces.
He reaches it. Inch by inch by inch he pulls himself forward, clawing at the ground, digging his nails in and hauling his impossibly heavy body toward that golden gateway, and then it hovers just in front of him, and he puts his hands to its rim and drags himself to his feet, and thrusts one shoulder through, and his head and neck just afterward, and somehow manages to raise one leg and move it across the threshold. And he is through. He feels himself falling, but the drop is only a couple of feet, and he lands all asprawl on a platform of brick and lies there gasping for breath.
His weight is normal, here on the other side. This is the real world out here. He is still asleep, but he senses that he has left his bedroom and is wandering around on some outer parapet of the Castle.
Nothing looks familiar. He sees spires, embrasures, distant towers. He is on a narrow winding path that appears to be going up and up, spiraling around a tall upjutting outbuilding of the Castle that he cannot even begin to identify. The black sky is speckled with a dazzle of stars, and the cold light of two or three of the moons shines along the horizon. He continues to climb. He imagines that he can hear a dire shrieking wind whipping past the summit of the Mount, though he knows he should not hear any such thing in these privileged altitudes.
The brick pathway that he is following grows ever steeper, ever narrower. The steps are cracked and broken beneath his feet, as though no one has bothered to come up here in centuries and the brickwork has simply been left to erode. It seems to him that he is climbing up the external face of one of the watchtowers along the Castle’s per
iphery, ascending a terrifying precarious track with an infinitely long drop on either side of him. He grows a little uneasy.
But there is no going back. Following this track is like climbing the spine of some gigantic monster. The path is too narrow here to allow him to turn, and to try to descend it walking backward is inconceivable, so no retreat is possible. Icy sweat begins to trickle down his sides.
He turns a bend in the path and the Great Moon suddenly fills the sky. It is crescent tonight, dazzlingly brilliant, a gigantic bright pair of white horns hanging in front of him. By its frosty blaze he sees that he has clambered out onto a solitary spire of the colossal Castle and has reached a point close to its tip. Far away to his right he sees what he thinks are the rooftops of the Inner Castle. To his left is only a black abyss.
There is no going higher from this position. Nor is there any turning back. He can only stand here shivering on this dizzying upthrust point, whipped by the howling wind, waiting to awaken. Or else he can choose to step out into the emptiness and float downward to whatever awaits him below.
Yes. That is what he will do.
Teotas turns to his left and looks out toward the darkness, and then he puts one foot over the course of bricks that marks the edge of the path, and steps across.
But this is no dream. He is really falling.
Teotas does not care. It is like flying. The cool air from below brushes his hair like a caress. He will fall and fall and fall, a thousand feet, ten thousand, perhaps all the way to the foot of Castle Mount; and when he reaches the bottom, he knows, he will be at peace. At last. Peace.
III
The Book of Powers
1
The Pontifex Prestimion had not been expecting to return to Castle Mount so soon, nor had he anticipated any such sad occasion as the funeral of a brother. Yet here he was once more hastening upriver from the Labyrinth, choking with grief, for Teotas’s burial rites. The ceremony would not be held at the Castle itself, but rather at Muldemar House, the family estate, the place where Teotas had been born and where he would rest now forever beside a long line of his princely ancestors.
It was years since Prestimion had been to Muldemar. There was no real reason for him to visit it. He had often gone there during his days as a prince of the Castle to visit his mother the Lady Therissa, but his accession to the Coronal’s throne had automatically brought her the title and duties of Lady of the Isle of Sleep, and she had been a resident of that island ever since. And likewise Prestimion’s coming to the throne had made Muldemar House his brother Abrigant’s domain, and Prestimion was not eager to overshadow his brother’s authority in his own house.
But then had come the bewildering, agonizing news of Teotas’s death; and Prestimion had come hurrying back to the ancestral home. Abrigant himself, an imposing figure in a dark blue doublet and a cloak striped with black and white, with a yellow mourning badge pinned to his shoulder, greeted him when the Pontifical party arrived at the gateway to Muldemar city. His eyes looked red and raw from sorrow. He was a tall man, the tallest by a head and shoulders of the four brothers who had grown up here together decades ago, and when he wrapped the Pontifex in a close and long embrace it was a well-nigh smothering one.
He released Prestimion and stepped back. “I bid you welcome to Muldemar, brother. Think of this place as being as much your home now as ever it was.”
“You know how grateful I am for those words, Abrigant.”
“And now that you’ve come, we can proceed with our burying.”
Prestimion nodded grimly. “Has there been word from our mother?”
“She sends a warm message of love, and tells us that she joins with us in our grief. But she will not be with us here.”
That news came as no surprise. There had never been any likelihood that the Lady Therissa would attend the ceremony. She was too old now for the arduous journey by sea and land from the Isle of Sleep to Castle Mount, and in any case the distance was so great that she could not have arrived here quickly enough. Abrigant had delayed the rite considerably as it was, in order to make it possible for Prestimion to be there. The Lady Therissa would mourn her youngest son from afar.
Prestimion was startled at how much older Abrigant seemed than when they last had met. That had been at the crowning of Dekkeret, not very long ago. Just as Teotas had, Abrigant had begun very quickly to show his years. He stood a little stoopingly, now. The luster of Abrigant’s glistening golden hair appeared to have dimmed greatly in just the past few months, and the vertical lines of age that had just been beginning to emerge on either side of his nose now seemed very deeply etched. Obviously the death of Teotas had fallen heavily upon him. Abrigant and Teotas, the third son and the fourth, had been extremely close, especially in these recent years when Prestimion’s royal responsibilities had kept him apart from the others.
“We are the only two left now,” Abrigant said, with a kind of wonder in his words, as though he could not believe his own statements. The tone of his voice was dark and sepulchral, like the gusting of a distant wind. “And so strange, so wrong, that our brothers should be dead this young! How old was Taradath when he fell in the Korsibar war? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? And now Teotas, who was younger even than myself, and is gone so much before his time—!”
The haunted look in Abrigant’s eyes was an awful thing to behold.
“Do you have any idea what could have driven him to it?” Prestimion asked. He had barely begun to come to terms with the whole thing himself.
In a guarded voice Abrigant replied, “It was a fit of madness, of a kind that had been coming upon him more and more often. That is all I would care to say, brother. Dekkeret will speak with you about it in more detail later. But come: here are the floaters that will take us to Muldemar House.” He gestured toward Varaile and Fiorinda, who had taken up a place just to Prestimion’s left throughout the conversation, and were standing silently while Prestimion and Abrigant spoke. “Here, my sisters—”
The two women had rarely left each other’s side during the journey from the Labyrinth. Both of them were swathed in the yellow robes of mourning, and both seemed so grief-stricken still that there was no way a stranger could have told which one was the widow of the late prince, and which merely the sister-in-law. Fiorinda’s three small children, two girls and a boy of five, huddled behind their mother, peeping out shyly, showing little comprehension of the tragedy that had overtaken their family. “This floater is yours,” Abrigant told them. He ushered them toward it. The Lady Tuanelys and young Prince Simbilon would travel with their mother and aunt and cousins also. “And I will ride with the Pontifex in this one,” he said, indicating his own floater. Prestimion entered it, and his two older sons climbed in beside him, and Abrigant gave the vehicle the command to proceed.
Abrigant seemed to unwind and expand during the course of the journey from Muldemar city to the estate itself. Perhaps he was relieved, at this dark time, to have his elder brother arrive to assume some of his burdens.
He complimented Prestimion on how much his children had grown and how well they looked. Young Taradath was indeed beginning to look quite princely, and Prince Akbalik also, though Simbilon still seemed far from getting his growth. And it did not seem to Prestimion that the Lady Tuanelys, who had been suffering lately from nightmares that had a troublesome resemblance to the dreams of the sort Teotas had supposedly been having, looked at all well. Disturbing dreams had begun to afflict Varaile also, lately. But Prestimion said nothing about that to Abrigant.
“And this year’s wines!” Abrigant was saying. He sounded almost exuberant now. “Wait until you sample them, Prestimion! A year of years, a year for the ages! The red in particular, as I was saying to Teotas only—last—month—”
His voice slowed and then halted in mid-sentence. All exuberance vanished and the haunted look abruptly returned to his eyes.
Prestimion said quickly, “Ah, look there, Abrigant: Muldemar House! How beautiful it is! How much I’ve misse
d being here!” It was as though he felt it was his task, not only as Pontifex but as the eldest of the family, to keep Abrigant from sinking into despondency.
To his two sons he said: “I was born here, you know. This evening I’ll show you the rooms where I used to live.” As if they had never seen the place before; but his concern now was merely to distract Abrigant from his sorrow.
Prestimion himself, laboring under his own sharp sense of great loss, felt lifted from his dark mood by the sight of his boyhood home.
Who could fail to respond to the extraordinary beauty of the vale of Muldemar? Amidst all the varied splendors of Castle Mount it stood out as a place of grace and calm. It was bordered on one side by the broad face of the Mount itself, and on the other by Kudarmar Ridge, a secondary peak of the Mount that would, anywhere else in the world, have been regarded as a mountain of majesty and grandeur in its own right. Lying as it did in the sheltered pocket between those two lofty peaks, Muldemar vale was favored all the year round by soft breezes and gentle mists, and its soil ran rich and deep.
Prestimion’s ancestors had settled here even before the Castle itself existed. They were farmers, then, who had come up from the lowlands with cuttings of the grapevines they grew down there. Over the centuries their wines had established a reputation for themselves as the foremost ones of Majipoor, and grateful Coronals, over the centuries, had ennobled the vintners of Muldemar, bringing them upward eventually to be dukes and then princes. Prestimion was the first of his line who had gone on to hold the Coronal’s throne, and after it the Pontifical seat.
The family lands ran for many miles through the choicest zone of the vale, a broad green realm stretching from the Zemulikkaz River to the Kudarmar Ridge. Deep within the estate lay the white walls and soaring black towers of Muldemar House itself, a domain of two hundred rooms laid out in three sprawling wings.
Abrigant had been thoughtful enough to provide Prestimion with the rooms that once had been his, a second-level apartment that looked out through gleaming windows of faceted quartz to the great vista of Sambattinola Hill. Little had changed here since he last had occupied it, more than twenty years before: the walls still bore the same subtle murals in quiet shades of amethyst and azure and topaz pink, and the window seat in which the young Prestimion had spent so many pleasant hours was furnished with some of the same books that he had read there long ago.
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