Sanibak-Thastimoon stirred uneasily now as though considering some action. Svor, looking toward him, made a small threatening witchcraft-sign in the air with his forefinger and thumb. The Su-Suheris, subsiding, became once more as still as a statue. Farquanor, though still glowering at the edge of eruption, held himself also in check. All eyes went to Korsibar.
And Korsibar, taking this all in frozen-faced, stared the wide-eyed glassy stare of one who is face-to-face with a deadly serpent that has already begun to weave in readiness to strike. He was adrift like a dreamer, unable to move or respond; and the dream was not a good one.
For here he was being mocked and defied most outrageously in his own throne-room by Dantirya Sambail. And yet it seemed he dared not show that he was offended. That struck Svor as incredible. Perhaps because Korsibar was still insecure in his own stolen crown and incapable this day of going up against the wishes of the crass and violent and dangerous Procurator of Ni-moya, whose power was so great and who was capable, when provoked, of any action at all. Whatever the reason, Korsibar seemed paralyzed in the face of this monstrous show of contempt for his power.
Svor held his breath in amazement. He could scarce believe that this was taking place, for all that Dantirya Sambail had told them concerning his intentions just an hour before they had entered here.
The Procurator continued in the same tranquil way:
“It is my intention, my lord, to withdraw from this place at once and once more undertake my journey on your behalf to Zimroel; and it is my plan to permit Count Septach Melayn and his companion Duke Svor to remove Prince Prestimion at once from the Castle and take him to Muldemar House, where he can recuperate from his recent hardships at leisure. After which I’m altogether sure that every attempt will be made to persuade the prince to undertake the acts of homage that are incumbent upon him as your lordship’s obedient subject, and that these attempts will prove successful.”
With a splendid flourish, Dantirya Sambail presented the numbed-looking Korsibar with a flurry of starbursts and a deep bow. “I bid you good day and a long life, my lord, and I offer all regards for the success of your reign.” And he turned to go from the room.
Korsibar, who still seemed unable to speak, made a small gesture of acceptance and assent with his left hand, and sank back in a defeated way against his royal seat. Svor, feeling a sweeping admiration for Dantirya Sambail’s consummate audacity, of a sort he had rarely felt before, looked at the Procurator in wonder and awe.
So it came to pass, then, that they walked out of Korsibar’s presence unscathed, Svor and Septach Melayn and Dantirya Sambail, and also that Prestimion had his freedom, by gift of his fierce-hearted kinsman the Procurator. But for this gift, they all knew, there would be a good price exacted.
And when they were safely through the Castle gates, and riding down to Muldemar once more, the Procurator said to the pale and haggard Prestimion, “We are now at war with Korsibar, cousin, would you not think? For surely he will not long tolerate what I’ve just done. Collect you an army, and I will do the same.”
3
After a week at Muldemar House, during which time he and his henchmen ate and drank like a herd of snuffling insatiable hab-bagogs rooting through a field of succulent crops just come to ripeness, Dantirya Sambail took himself off toward Alhanroel’s western coast to await armies that he had called up by swift messengers out of his native continent. “I pledge you an enormous force of fighting men at your disposal, such as has never been seen on this world,” the Procurator told Prestimion grandiloquently. “My own stout brothers Gaviad and Gavundiar will be your generals, and you’ll have lieutenants of the most fearsome valor.”
Prestimion was glad to see him go. He bore a grudging fascinated fondness for his strange and ruthless kinsman, and was grateful, of course, for his rescue, but had no great love for extended doses of his company: especially not now, when he felt so weak and weary, and had such a heavy making of plans to do. The Procurator would only be a drain on his already impaired vigor at a time like this.
The prince’s face was lean and gaunt from the weeks of his captivity, his eyeballs sunken in on their sockets, his skin a drab grayish tone, his golden hair dull and lifeless. He had acquired a tremor of the hands, and dared not approach his archery-course at all, out of fear that his great skill had rusted away in Lord Sangamor’s vaults. Most of the day, those first few days, he rested in his bedchamber like a sick old man, with the draperies of heavy blue velour pulled back so he could enjoy the beauty of the green hill beyond the curving window of faceted quartz, and so the beneficent rays of the sun flooding in might speed the replenishing of his greatly lessened resources.
His friends had been aghast at the sight of him when he first came forth from the vaults. Gialaurys was incoherent with fury. Svor’s fingers coiled about one another like anguished serpents. But now they were in Muldemar, and as ever, Septach Melayn bubbled over with optimism. “A little decent food in you, a few sips of wine each day, Prestimion—fresh air, the river, the sun—look, you begin to heal already, and you’re only newly free!—Were they starving you in there, is that it?”
Prestimion smiled wryly. “Starving would have been no worse, I think, than eating the stuff they gave me. Such slops I wouldn’t feed to mintuns scavenging in the streets! A thin sour soup of old cabbage it was, most of the time, with fragments of the Divine only knows what sort of tired meat swimming in it—pfaugh! And the light: that terrible throbbing light, Septach Melayn, hammering at me out of the walls every hour and every minute of every day and every night! That was the worst of it, far beyond the awful food. If I never see anything red again, it’ll be a hundred years too soon.”
“They say the unending light of the tunnels was put in those stones by some ancient magic now forgotten,” Svor observed. “And the magic that turns it off has been forgotten also.”
Prestimion shrugged. “Magic, science—who knows where the distinction lies? It is a dreadful thing, that light. It hits you hard as a fist. There is no hiding it. You close your eyes and still you see it behind your lids, and you feel it day and night. I’d have gone mad altogether but for the little green amulet of Thalnap Zelifor, which gave me some defense.” A bemused look came over him. “He told me how it was used. I would stroke the thing with my fingertip, in this fashion, every mealtime when they unshackled my hands. And as I did so I said secretly, inside my head, as though I were praying to the Divine: ‘Let my eyes be eased, let me have some rest.’ And after a fashion it worked, do you know? Bad as things were for me, I think they would have been even worse without my having done that. Though who or what I was praying to, I could not guess: not the Divine, surely.—What became of that little Vroon, anyway?”
“He’s here at Muldemar House,” said Septach Melayn.
“Here? How did that happen?”
“He was freed when you were, and in the confusion attached himself to us, and came along with us from the Castle.”
“Well,” said Prestimion, smiling, “there’s no harm in that, I suppose. I came to like him more than a little, in all that time while we were penned up facing each other on the walls of our tunnel.”
“You are a very tolerant and kindly man,” said Svor. “You find things to like in the most surprising people.”
“Even the vile Korsibar,” said Gialaurys with a furious grimace. “You continued to have good words for him even after he did you out of your throne. But not, I think, any longer.”
“No.” And red wrath flared up in Prestimion’s eyes. He had reached some turning point in that prison, that much was evident. “For a long while I thought of him as a decent simple man who was pushed onward in an evil course by villains and monsters; but I see now that a man who pays heed to monsters ultimately makes himself one also. Korsibar had no mercy on me, merely because I’d not grovel before him as he sat on his stolen throne. And I’ll have none on him when things are reversed. There will be a reckoning now, and a heavy one, for all that has h
appened.”
“Well, now! Well! So the sweet Prestimion we love is now the savage vengeful Prestimion who will do battle to take his rightful seat at the Castle,” said Septach Melayn. “I take this for the best of news. Plainly it was Korsibar’s most foolish day, out of a great many such, when he thrust you into that dungeon. For now it will be war.”
“It will be war now, yes,” Prestimion said.
He drew from his bedside table a coiled chart and spread it out on his knees facing them to show them the plan. It was the map of Alhanroel, done in a multitude of bright colors, with many a fancy scrolling ornament and curlicue. He tapped it at the place where Castle Mount was drawn in deep stark purple rising high above all else.
“We must isolate the Castle before we attack its false Coronal. This we will do both by words and by deeds. There will be a proclamation, first, in my name and in that of the present Lady of the Isle of Dreams, to the effect that Korsibar holds the Castle against all law and precedent, by dint of having worked a sorcery against his father Lord Confalume in the hour of Prankipin’s death, and that he is a false usurper and traitor against the will of the Divine, who must be cast down from the great height that he has illicitly made his own.”
“The present Lady of the Isle?” Svor said. “You mean Kunigarda, I suppose, and not Roxivail. But do you actually have her support, Prestimion?”
“I will. She’s come to me three times in dreams, these past four weeks, to tell me so. I’ll have a message on its way to her quickly, confirming that I’m free and intend to challenge Korsibar’s claim to be Coronal. And I will request a public statement from her, declaring that she recognizes me as Coronal Lord and has vowed never to give up her own place at the Isle to the illegally designated Roxivail, but only to my own mother once I am installed at the Castle. To which I think she will agree.”
And Septach Melayn: “This business of claiming that Korsibar worked magic against Confalume when he grabbed the crown—do you believe that, Prestimion? Or are you only saying it for the sake of impressing the credulous?”
“It makes no difference what I believe in the privacy of my heart. You know that the mass of the people give credence to sorcery. If I charge that Confalume was ensorcelled, that’ll help turn them against Korsibar, which is my goal. No one wants a Coronal who improperly got his crown by dint of witchcraft.”
“But it was by magic anyway,” said Gialaurys. “Oh, Prestimion, when will you believe the evidence that rises in mountains on all sides of you?”
Prestimion merely smiled. But it was a very wan smile.
Turning stubbornly to Septach Melayn, Gialaurys said, “You were there when it happened. Your own mind was clouded by the spell. Do you deny there was magic at work?”
“Something put a mist over my mind, that I freely admit. Whether it was magic or something else, I’m in no position to tell you.” A wicked twinkle entered Septach Melayn’s eyes. “My mind was clouded, Gialaurys. Since that was so, how could I know what was clouding it?”
Impatiently Prestimion said, tapping his chart again, “To continue. We proclaim the illegitimacy of Korsibar’s reign, and descend the Mount to begin its encirclement. I’ll announce myself as Coronal first in the city of Amblemorn, by the black marble monument that marks the old timberline, where the ancient conquest of the Mount first began: for we will be commencing a new conquest of the Mount in that place. In Amblemorn I’ll call for volunteers for my army. We’ll have a host of Muldemar men with us, well armed, in case there’s any trouble with local troops; but I think that Amblemorn will come over to us easily enough. From Amblemorn we proceed down the rest of the way to the foot of the Mount, at the place where the Glayge has its source. Then we move this way, to the west, going steadily rightward around the base of the Mount through each of the great foothill cities in its turn, Vilimong, Estotilaup, Simbilfant, Ghrav, and onward clear around the entire circuit.” He jabbed his finger again and again to the chart, calling off the names. “Arkilon. Pruiz. Pivrarch. Lontano. Da. And here we come to Hazen, Megenthorp, Bevel, Salimorgen, Demigon Glade, and finally Matrician, where good Duke Fengiraz will open his arms to us, and Gordal, and then we are back at the Glayge, below Amblemorn, with the road to the Castle opening before us. How many people live in all those foothill cities? Fifty million? More, I would think. They’ll flock to our banner: I know they will. And at the same time Dantirya Sambail will have come from Zimroel with his armies, and his warlike brothers Gaviad and Gaviundar, to join forces with us at the western base of the Mount. Meanwhile atop the Mount itself they will hear what is happening, and will they rally behind Korsibar against me? I think not. They’ll tell each other that Lord Prestimion has the mandate of the Divine, and that Lord Korsibar is a false Coronal; and they will leave his side in droves. Then we begin to ascend the Mount.”
He burst out suddenly then in a fit of coughing, and groped for the bowl at his bedside. Gialaurys handed it to him. Prestimion drank deeply, and took breath deep into his lungs, and closed his eyes a moment to regain his poise.
“There. What do you think, my friends?”
“I think you should have more rest,” said Svor.
“Yes, and then? The plan?”
“Is no way it can fail,” said Septach Melayn.
“Agreed,” Gialaurys said. “The Divine is on our side.”
“Indeed,” said Svor when the others looked toward him. But there was just the smallest hitch of hesitation in his response. And he said then, “First you should rest, Prestimion, and restore yourself. Then we’ll march forth and see how it fares for us in this war.”
* * *
How it fared was cheering enough at first. At Amblemorn, where Prestimion and his family had always been much beloved, there was a delegation to greet him with warm enthusiasm when he came down the road from Dundilmir. “Prestimion!” they cried, with hands upthrust in starbursts. “Lord Prestimion! Long live Lord Prestimion!” That was the first time any of the citizenry had called him that and made the starburst, and, smiling, he accepted the homage with modesty and confidence.
The banners of Korsibar that had been all over Amblemorn at Prestimion’s last visit were gone now, and they had Prestimion banners up instead in the same royal colors of green and gold. No doubt these were the ones they had planned to hoist when Prankipin died, and had hurriedly stored away when the throne so surprisingly went to Korsibar. Prestimion stood by the black stone shaft of the timberline monument and solemnly pledged himself to restore the world to its proper state, and they cried out his name again and vowed to support his claim. And when he moved on down the Mount and made his westward turn to the foothill city of Vilimong with a great horde of men of Muldemar and some from Amblemorn at his back, everything was much the same, Vilimong hailing him gladly as the true Coronal and swelling his army by another regiment of fighters.
It was at Estotilaup, the next city beyond Vilimong at the foot of the Mount, that trouble first occurred.
Estotilaup was Confalume’s ancestral city, and they felt a fierce pride in him there, which had carried over to his son Korsibar. It was a city of tall narrow white towers with pointed tops of red tile, ringed around by a formidable high gate of black iron palisades; and when Prestimion arrived before it, the gate stood ajar, but not by much, and was blocked to him by fifty men in the uniform of the municipal proctors who stood with folded arms outside it. A larger party of somber-faced armed troops was visible behind them, just within the palisade.
Duke Svor went forward and said, “This is the Coronal Lord Prestimion, who seeks entrance to your city and a meeting with your mayor.”
“The Coronal Lord is Lord Korsibar,” the chief of proctors replied, peering unhappily at the multitudes of armed men who stood behind Svor on the plain, “and we know Prestimion only as a prince of one of the cities of the Mount. If he has come here to subvert the throne, he will not be admitted.”
Svor carried this news to Prestimion, who responded that they might well not care to
recognize him as Coronal here, but even so they had no right to refuse entry to their city to the Prince of Muldemar. “Tell them that,” said Prestimion.
“And let them see that we’ll force entry if entry is denied us,” said Septach Melayn, with more than a little vigor.
He raised his arm as though to signal to the frontmost detachment of Prestimion’s troops that they should move closer to the gate. But Prestimion caught him midway between wrist and elbow and drew the arm downward. “No,” he said sharply. “We’ll force nothing here, not this soon. There’s time to draw blood later, if we must; but I have no yearning to make war on innocent uncomprehending folk at Estotilaup gates.”
“This is foolishness, my lord,” said Septach Melayn.
“You call me ‘my lord,’ and you call me a fool also, all in the same breath?”
“Indeed. For you are my Coronal, and I am pledged to you to the death,” the long-legged swordsman answered him. “But for all that you are a fool, if you think you can back away from conflict here, and force it at your convenience another day. Show these people of Estotilaup here and now that you are their king, who will not be turned away at their gate.”
“I am with Septach Melayn on this,” said Gialaurys.
“You both will quarrel with me?”
“When you are wrong, yes,” said Gialaurys. “And here you are most gravely wrong.”
“Well,” said Prestimion, and laughed. “If this is my beginning at kingship, when I am bearded and defied by my own dearest companions, it will be a rocky reign.” And to Svor he said, “Tell them that we will have entry, and no two ways about it.” And instructed Septach Melayn to stand behind Svor with a squadron of some two hundred men, but to refrain from launching any hostile action unless attacked.
He himself withdrew to one side and waited.
What happened then was unclear even to those who were in the thickest of it. Prestimion, standing apart, saw Svor in hot negotiation with the chief of proctors, the two men face-to-face and gesturing; and then suddenly there was an angry flurry of some sort, though hard to say where it began. The Estotilaup troops came rushing forward among the proctors, and Septach Melayn’s men charged toward the gate also in one and the same instant. Swords flashed and there was the thrusting of spears and here and there the bright flaring red beams of those unreliable but deadly weapons, energy-throwers. Prestimion saw Septach Melayn towering over all the rest, wielding his rapier in a blaze of furious activity, the blade flashing with such rapidity the eye could scarce follow it, and drawing blood with every thrust, while with the other hand he plucked little Duke Svor up high, out of the midst of the melee. Several soldiers of each force were down with flowing wounds on the field. A man of Estotilaup staggered out of the brawl, staring uncomprehendingly at the red stump of his arm.
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