Lord Prestimion

by Robert Silverberg

  Prestimion passed a hand across his face and muttered dark curses. “And they’ve gone to join Dantirya Sambail, have they? How does anyone know that? They left a little explanatory note behind in their room, did they?”

  “No, sir. Of course not, sir.” Dekkeret forced a bleak little grin. “But an inquiry was held following their disappearance, and their confederate’s identity was uncovered, and his lordship Prince Navigorn placed the man under close interrogation. Very close, my lord. Prince Navigorn has been extremely distressed by this entire incident.”

  “I can imagine he would be,” said Prestimion drily.

  “What was learned from the interrogation, my lord, is that the confederate—Morteil Dikaan was his name, sir—”

  “Was?”

  “Unfortunately he did not survive the interrogation,” Dekkeret said.

  “Ah.”

  “The confederate, lordship, had obtained possession of one of the mind-control devices from the storeroom where they had been placed. He brought it to Barjazid in the Sangamor tunnels. And Barjazid used it to make everyone who examined his papers of release accept them as genuine. In the same way he was able to order one of the Castle floaters to be put at his disposal when he was ready to begin his journey south.”

  “This device of his,” said Prestimion in a tone of funereal somberness, “has an absolutely irresistible force, then? It makes someone who wears it capable of compelling anyone in his path to do his bidding?”

  “Not exactly, my lord. But it is extremely powerful. I’ve felt its power myself, sir—in Suvrael, in the place that is known as the Desert of Stolen Dreams. Which was given that name because Barjazid lurked there, entering the minds of wayfarers and altering their mental perceptions so that they were no longer able to tell true from false, illusion from reality: I explained all this to the lady Varaile, my lord. I told her of my own experience with the device’s effects while traveling with Barjazid down there, and explained the potential dangers of it.”

  Varaile said, “Yes, he did, Prestimion. You may recall, I tried to tell you the story, the day you came back from the festival at Muldemar—but you were so busy, of course, with the plans for the trip to the Isle—”

  Prestimion winced. It was true. He hadn’t even taken the trouble to question Dekkeret himself about what had befallen him in Suvrael. He had brushed the whole thing aside very quickly, filing Dekkeret’s tale for future reference and never giving it a moment’s thought again.

  A machine that controls minds! And Barjazid on his way to turn it over to Dantirya Sambail.

  It was another terrible blunder in a reign that was beginning to seem pockmarked with them. A Coronal, he thought, must never allow himself even to sleep, for fear that disaster will envelop the world if he closes his eyes for the merest moment. How, Prestimion wondered, had Confalume succeeded in keeping everything on an even keel for better than forty years? But of course Confalume hadn’t had a civil war and its aftermath to deal with, and Dantirya Sambail, may demons blast his soul, had elected to wait until the end of Confalume’s reign before beginning to make trouble.

  He looked toward Dekkeret. The boy was staring at him with respect verging on adoration. Dekkeret had no clue, it seemed, that the Coronal’s mind was boiling with uneasiness and bitter self-accusation.

  “Describe for me in detail,” Prestimion said, “the sort of things that Barjazid’s machine was able to do to your mind.”

  Dekkeret gave Varaile an uncertain look. She responded with a firm nod.

  To Prestimion he said, after a moment’s further hesitation, “At first it was just a nightmare. I thought I was being summoned to the Lady, and that was a glorious thing; but as I ran toward her she disappeared and I was left looking down into the crater of a burned-out volcano. It’s never possible for one person to feel the real force of someone else’s dream, is it, my lord? You must experience it from within. I can describe it to you as a bad nightmare, very bad, and you may think you understand, remembering certain bad dreams of your own. But no one else can ever understand how terrifying another person’s dream actually was. Still, I tell you, sir, this was the worst imaginable experience. I felt invaded—drained—violated. Barjazid knew what had happened. He tried to question me, afterward, to get details of my dream from me. He was carrying out experiments on people’s minds, you see: testing his equipment, sir.”

  “That was it, then? He sent you a nasty dream?”

  “If only that were all, my lord. But a nasty dream was only the beginning. I dreamed again the next time I slept. There was this woman I met in Tolaghai, someone in the Pontifical service. She came to me in my dream; we were both naked; she was leading me through a lovely garden. I should say that in Tolaghai this woman and I were lovers for a little while. So I followed her gladly enough; but once again everything changed, and the garden became a frightful desert with ghostly figures lurking in it, and I thought I would die there of the heat and the ants that had begun to sting me. So I woke up and found that Barjazid had caused me to walk in my sleep and I was lost in the desert at the worst time of the day, naked, far from camp, without any water, sunburned and swollen from the heat. A Vroon who was traveling with us found me and rescued me, or else I would have died. I am no sleepwalker, sir. Barjazid made it happen. He gave me the command to get up in my sleep and walk, and I got up. I walked.”

  Prestimion, frowning deeply, nibbling at his lower lip, gestured without a word for Dekkeret to go on. There was more, he knew. He was certain of it.

  Yes. “Then, my lord, the third dream. In the Khyntor Marches, that time when I was hunting steetmoy with Prince Akbalik, I committed an atrocious sin. We had guides with us, March-men, and my guide was struck down by the steetmoy I was hunting, but I was so obsessed with the hunt that I left her lying where she fell and ran off after the animal I was chasing. And when I came back to her much later I discovered that she had been killed and partly eaten by some scavenger-beast.”

  “So that was it,” Prestimion said.

  “That was what, sir?”

  “The thing you did. The reason you went to Suvrael. Akbalik sent word that you had done something in Khyntor that you felt great shame about, and had gone off to Suvrael hoping that somehow you would suffer enough there to make atonement.”

  Dekkeret’s face was bright red. “I would rather not have spoken of this. But you asked me to tell you what Barjazid’s machine did to my mind. With its help he went into it, my lord, and found the tale of the steetmoy hunt there, and made me live through it again; only it was ten times as painful as the real event had been, because this time I knew all along what was going to happen, and had no way of preventing it from happening again anyway. At the climax of the dream Barjazid was there with me in the snowy forest, questioning me about my having ignored the guide-woman for the sake of following after my steetmoy. He wanted to know every detail of it, what I felt about putting the pleasures of hunting ahead of a human life, was I ashamed, how was I going to cope with my guilt. And I said to him, still in the dream, ‘Are you my judge?’ And he said, ‘Of course I am. See my face?’ And pulled his own face apart, removing it the way you’d remove a mask; and under it there was another face, a mocking laughing face, and the face was my own, my lord. The face was my own.”

  He hunched his shoulders high and looked away. He seemed appalled even now by the mere recollection.

  Varaile said, “You didn’t go into these details the first time you told me the story. The hunt, the guide-woman, the removal of the mask.”

  “No, milady. I thought it was all too horrible to speak of. But it was the Coronal’s request that I—that I tell—”

  “Yes. It was,” Prestimion said. “What happened then?”

  “I awoke. In great pain. Saw Barjazid with the machine still in his hands. Seized him, forced an explanation out of him, told him that I was taking him into custody and bringing him back to the Castle so that I could make all of this known to you.”

  “But I w
as too busy with other things to listen,” said Prestimion. “And now Barjazid’s on the verge of handing this thing over to Dantirya Sambail.”

  “I have explained everything to the lord Septach Melayn, sir. He has given orders for Barjazid and his son to be intercepted if at all possible.”

  “If at all possible, yes. But he’s equipped with a machine that lets him fool around with realities, isn’t he? He’ll walk through the patrol lines the way he walked out of the tunnels, and then out of the Castle itself.” Prestimion rose. “Come with me, both of you. It would be a good idea for me to discuss this business with my mother, I think.”

  The Lady Therissa, sitting at her desk in her little private study, listened in sober silence as Prestimion sketched the outlines of Dekkeret’s story for her. She was quiet for a time even after he had finished.

  Then she said, “There is real danger here, Prestimion.”

  “Yes. I see that.”

  “Has he joined forces with the Procurator yet?”

  “That’s something I have no way of knowing. But I suspect that he hasn’t. Even with that diabolical gadget of his to help him, he’ll still have a difficult job getting down through Kajith Kabulon and locating Dantirya Sambail on the Stoien coast.”

  Varaile said, “I think you’re right. He probably isn’t there yet. If he had reached Dantirya Sambail, they’d be using the mind-control machine to amplify the madness by now. We’d be hearing about whole cities going crazy, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sure of it,” said Dekkeret, who had been standing to one side, visibly awed at finding himself in the innermost sanctuary of the Lady of the Isle. Even as he spoke, he seemed astonished by his own audacity at opening his mouth unbidden in the presence of two of the three Powers of the Realm, and he made a little gesture with his head and neck as if to pull himself back out of view. But the Lady Therissa smiled and beckoned him to continue, and he said, “I don’t know much about the Procurator, though nothing I’ve heard about him is anything but bad; but I know Barjazid only too well. I think he’s capable of using the machine in any way that Dantirya Sambail would want him to.”

  The Lady said, “Can it really be as powerful as you make it seem, though? We have devices here at the Isle, you know, that can reach very deeply into minds. But nothing that can compel someone to rise up in his sleep and walk out into a lethal desert. Nothing that can take a dream of one kind and transform it into another.”

  “The one you allowed me to try, mother—the silver circlet that I wore, when we had the dream-speaker wine—is that the most powerful instrument you have here?”

  “No,” said the Lady Therissa. “There are stronger ones, ones which not only can make contact with minds but also are able to instill sendings in them. I didn’t dare allow you to experience their power, not without the months of training that their use requires. But even those things aren’t nearly as powerful as the device that this Barjazid evidently uses.”

  “You’ve used the equipment of the Isle?” Dekkeret asked him. “Tell me what it was like, my lord!”

  “What it was like,” Prestimion said, in a musing tone. He cast his mind back to that strange journey, feeling the potent memory of it returning to him. “What it was like. Oh, Dekkeret, that gets us into the same problem you raised when you said that no one can really feel the force of someone else’s dream. The only way you could really know that was to wear the circlet yourself.”

  “But tell me, my lord, anyway. Please.”

  Prestimion stared far into the distance, as though looking through the walls of Inner Temple, out across the three cliffs of the Isle, off to the sea beyond, glittering golden in the midday light. Very quietly he said, “It was like being a god, Dekkeret. It gave me the power of having mental communion with millions of people at once. It allowed me to be everywhere on Majipoor at the same time. The way the atmosphere is everywhere, the way weather is, the way gravity is.”

  He narrowed his eyes to slits. The room, his mother, his wife, Dekkeret, all disappeared from his ken. It seemed to him that he heard the sound of a rushing wind. For a dizzying moment he imagined that he had the circlet on his forehead again and was soaring upward and outward, rising higher than the Mount itself, expanding into the vastness of the world by taking on an incomprehensible vastness of his own, touching minds everywhere, thousands of minds, hundreds of thousands, millions, billions, the healthy minds of the world and the poor sad sick disrupted ones also, reaching into them, offering a word here and a caress there, the comfort of the blessed Lady, the healing power of the Isle.

  Everyone in the room was looking at him now. He realized that he had drifted off into some strange remote state of consciousness while standing here before them. Another moment passed before he felt that he had fully returned.

  Then to Dekkeret he said, “What I learned, wearing that silver circlet, is that when the Lady is at her tasks she ceases to be an ordinary human being and becomes a force of nature—a Power, a true Power, in the way that neither the Coronal nor the Pontifex, mere elected monarchs that we are, could ever be. I haven’t said this to you, mother. But the day I wore the circlet I saw very clearly, and now can never forget, how important your function is to the world. And I understood how it must have transformed your life to become the Lady of the Isle.”

  “But,” Dekkeret persevered, “as you traveled around the world using the power of the circlet, did you ever think there might be some way to implant dreams in people’s minds? Or to have such power over them that they would automatically have to obey your commands.”

  “No. I don’t think so.” Prestimion turned toward the Lady. “Mother?”

  She shook her head. “It is as I said: the sending of dreams, yes. Commands, no. Not even with our most powerful devices can I do that.”

  Dekkeret nodded grimly. “Then what Barjazid has, and is about to give to Dantirya Sambail, is the deadliest of weapons, my lord. And if those two are not stopped they will shatter the peace of the world. Which is why I brought my message in person, sir, instead of using the ordinary channels of communication. For no one who has not felt the force of the Barjazid device could possibly understand the threat that it holds. And I am the only one who has done that and lived to tell the tale.”

  9

  From his office high above the Stoien waterfront Akbalik watched the royal fleet arrive. Three swift ships, flying the Coronal’s banner and the banner of the Lady of the Isle.

  “I should go down there and be waiting on the pier when they land,” he said. “I will go down there. I have to.”

  “Your leg, sir—” said Odrian Kestivaunt.

  “Damn the leg! The leg’s no excuse! The Coronal is coming, and the Lady with him. My place is down there on the pier.”

  “At least let me change the poultice, sir,” said the little Vroon mildly. “There’s time enough for that.”

  It was a reasonable request. Akbalik lowered himself to the stool next to the window and offered his injured calf to the Vroon’s ministration. Deftly, tentacles flying so swiftly that Akbalik could scarcely follow their busy motions, Kestivaunt stripped away yesterday’s bandage, laying bare the angry red wound. It looked worse than ever: puffy, swollen, the area of its jurisdiction over his leg expanding steadily despite the medication. Kestivaunt bathed it in some cool and faintly astringent pale-blue fluid, gently probed the raw place surrounding the wound with the tip of a tentacle, very carefully spread the lips of the cut and peered within.

  Akbalik hissed. “That hurts, fellow.”

  “I ask your pardon, Prince Akbalik. I need to see—”

  “Whether any baby swamp-crabs are hatching in there?”

  “I told you, sir, there is very little likelihood that the one that bit you was old enough to—”

  “Ow! For the love of the Divine, Kestivaunt! Just give it a new poultice and make an end to this poking around, will you? You’re torturing me.”

  The Vroon apologized again and bent low over his toil. Ak
balik could not see, now, what the small creature was doing; but it hurt less than what he had been doing a moment before, at any rate. Applying some mental emanation with those little wriggling tentacles, a Vroonish spell of healing? Perhaps. And a sprinkle of dried herbs, and more of that cooling blue fluid. The clean bandage, next. Better, yes. For the time being, anyway. Momentary surcease from the furious throbbing, the burning pain, the stomach-turning sense that slender tendrils of infection and corruption were gliding along the hidden pathways of his leg, reaching up toward his groin, his gut, ultimately his heart.

  “All done,” Kestivaunt said. Akbalik rose. Gingerly he put his weight on the troubled leg, grimacing a little, catching his breath. He felt shafts of pain running up the entire left side of his body into his neck and onward to his cheek, his jawbone, his teeth. For the millionth time he saw the great purple swamp-crab, the hideous domed bulgy-eyed thing half as big as a floater, rising up menacingly out of the sandy muck before him. Saw himself adroitly turning away from the monster, smugly pleased with his swift response—stepping back from peril so quickly that he failed entirely to notice the other and much smaller crab, not much bigger across than the palm of his hand, slyly reaching one razor-sharp nipper toward his leg from its shelter in the crotch of a stinkflower bush—

  “The cane,” he said. “Where’s my damned cane? They’re practically in port already!”

  The Vroon indicated the cane, leaning against the wall by the door in its usual place. Akbalik limped across and took it and went out. As he reached the ground floor he paused, looking out into the bright sunlight, breathing deeply, composing himself. He didn’t want to seem like a cripple. The Coronal depended on him. Needed him.