Lord Prestimion

by Robert Silverberg

  It was dizzying to behold this infinity of bizarre amulets and mantic instruments and simples and specifics laid out all about him for sale; it was disturbing to see the citizens of Bombifale moving through this marketplace of strangenesses by the hundreds, jostling against each other in their eagerness to put down their hard-earned crowns and royals for such things. They were ordinary folk, modestly dressed; but they were throwing their money about like a throng of earls.

  “Is there more?” Prestimion asked in astonishment.

  “Oh, yes, yes, much more.”

  The floor of the building that housed the market now seemed to take on a downward slant. Evidently they were entering a part of the structure that lay beneath the surface of the street.

  It was even smokier here, and more musty. In this sector was a mixture of vendors and entertainers; Prestimion saw some jugglers at work, a group of four-armed Skandars with grayish-red fur energetically flinging knives and balls and lighted torches to each other with high abandon, and musicians with coin-jars in front of them grinding away grimly at their viols and tamboors and rikkitawms amidst all the other noise of the place, and ordinary sleight-of-hand magicians who made no pretense at sorcery doing age-old magical tricks with snakes and bright-colored kerchiefs and padlocked chests and knives seemingly passed through throats. Scribes called out, offering to write letters for those who lacked that art; water-carriers with gleaming copper panniers begged to ease the thirst of those around them; bright-eyed little boys invited passersby to gamble at a game that involved the impossibly quick manipulation of small bundles of twigs.

  In the midst of all this hubbub Prestimion became aware of a zone of sudden silence, a perceptible avenue of hushedness cutting down the center of the crowd. He had no idea at first what could be causing this extraordinary effect. Then Septach Melayn pointed; and Prestimion saw two figures in the uniforms of officers of the Pontificate advancing through the marketplace, creating apprehension and unease as they went.

  The first was a Hjort, rough-skinned and puffy-faced and bulging of eye like all his kind, and carrying himself in the exaggeratedly upright stance that always made Hjorts seem pompous and self-important to their fellow inhabitants of Majipoor, though their posture was simply a matter of the way their thick, middle-heavy bodies were constructed. From the Hjort’s shoulders dangled a large pair of scales, which struck Prestimion as being more a badge of office than anything that might have practical use.

  It was the second figure, though, that seemed to be the cause of the consternation. A man of the Su-Suheris race, this one was: tremendously tall, nearly as tall, in fact, as a Skandar, and bearing his pair of cold-eyed, hairless, immensely elongated heads atop a narrow, forking neck more than a foot in length. He was a disconcerting sight. His kind always was. Just as a Hjort could not help seeming squat-looking and coarse-featured and comically ugly to people of other races because of his protuberant eyes and ashen-hued pebbly skin, so too did the two gleaming pallid heads of the Su-Suheris unfailingly give them a sinister and utterly alien air.

  “The inspector of weights and measures,” said Septach Melayn, in response to an unspoken question from Prestimion.

  “In here? I thought you said that no governmental agency regulates this market.”

  “None does. Yet the inspector comes, all the same. It is his own private enterprise, which he carries out after the normal hours of his work. He orders each shopkeeper to prove that he gives fair measure and honest price; and whoever fails to pass muster is taken outside and flogged by the other vendors. For this he gets a fee. The dealers here want no improper business activities.”

  “But it’s all improper here!” Prestimion cried.

  “Ah, but not to them,” said Septach Melayn.

  Indeed. This was a world in and of itself, this midnight market of Bombifale, thought Prestimion. It existed outside the normal bounds of Majipoor, and neither Pontifex nor Coronal had any authority here.

  The inspector of weights and measures and his Hjort herald moved solemnly onward, deeper into the marketplace. Prestimion and Septach Melayn followed in their wake.

  Dealers in divination devices had their stalls here. Prestimion recognized some of their wares from the training he had undertaken while in Triggoin. This sparkling stuff in small cloth packets was zemzem-dust, to sprinkle on those who were gravely ill in order to know the course that their malady would take. Its source was Velalisier, the haunted ruined capital of the ancient Metamorphs. These charred-looking little loaves were rukka-cakes, which had the capacity to influence the course of love-affairs; and this slimy stuff was mud of the Floating Island of Masulind, that had the power of guiding one in commercial transactions. This was the powdered delem-aloe, that told when it was a woman’s fertile time of the month by bringing out thin red circles around her breasts. And this curious device—

  “That is of no value whatever, my lord,” said someone suddenly to his left, someone with a deep, resonant voice that reached Prestimion from a point high above. “You would do well not to squander your attention on it.”

  Prestimion was holding, just then, a little machine in the form of a magic square, which, when manipulated by an adept, was reputed to give answers to any question in numerical form that required decoding. He had picked it up idly from a table. At the unexpected comment from the stranger at his side he tossed it down again as though it were as hot as a burning coal, and glanced up at the speaker.

  It was, he saw, another of the Su-Suheris kind: a towering ivory-skinned figure clad in a simple black robe belted with a red sash, whose high-vaulted leftward head was staring down at him with a cool dispassionate gaze, while the other one was looking off in a different direction entirely.

  Prestimion felt an instant sense of innate discomfort and distaste.

  It was hard to feel at ease with these tall two-headed beings, so strange was their appearance, so frosty their mien. One could far more easily adapt to the presence of great furry four-armed Skandars, or tiny many-tentacled Vroons, or even the reptilian Ghayrogs that had settled in such numbers on the other continent. Outworlders like Skandars and Vroons and Ghayrogs were no more human than Su-Suheris folk, but at least they had just one head apiece.

  Prestimion had his own reasons for antipathy toward the Su-Suheris race, besides. Sanibak-Thastimoon, Korsibar’s private magus, had been a Su-Suheris. It was the icy-souled Sanibak-Thastimoon, perhaps more than anyone else, who had prodded the malleable, foolish Korsibar onward to his catastrophic usurpation with false predictions of a glorious success. It was by virtue of spells cast by Sanibak-Thastimoon that Korsibar’s forces had managed to keep the upper hand in the civil war for so long. And it was in the final moments of that war, when all was lost for Korsibar, that Sanibak-Thastimoon, finding himself under attack by his defeated and now desperate puppet-Coronal, had slain Korsibar and had taken the life of his sister Thismet as well, when in fury she had rushed at him brandishing the fallen Korsibar’s sword.

  But Sanibak-Thastimoon had perished moments later at the hand of Septach Melayn, and the very fact of his existence had been swept away, along with so much else, by the sorcerers who had blotted the civil war from the world’s memory. This Su-Suheris here, whoever he might be, was a different one entirely, who could hardly be held accountable for the sins of his kinsman. And the Su-Suheris people, Prestimion reminded himself, were citizens of Majipoor with full civil rights. It was not for him to treat them with disdain.

  Therefore he answered calmly enough, “You have reason, I suppose, to mistrust these little machines?”

  “What I feel for them, my lord, is contempt, rather than mistrust. They are useless things. As are most of the devices offered for sale in this place.” The two-headed being swept his long gaunt arm about the room in a wide-ranging gesture. “There is true divination and there is the other kind, and these are, by and large, contemptible useless products manufactured for the sake of deceiving foolish people.”

  Prestimion nodd
ed. Very softly he said, gazing up far above him into the alien creature’s chilly emerald-hued eyes, “You called me ‘my lord.’ Twice. Why?”

  Those eyes narrowed in surprise. “Why, because it is fitting and proper, my lord!” And the Su-Suheris flicked his bony fingers outward in the starburst gesture. “Is that not so?”

  Septach Melayn moved closer in, hand to the pommel of his sword, face dark with displeasure. “I tell you, fellow, you are much mistaken. This is a line of chatter you’d be wisest not to pursue any further.”

  Now both heads were trained on Prestimion from that great height, and all four eyes were focused keenly on the Coronal’s sturdy, compact figure. In a voice that could not have been heard by anyone but Prestimion and his companion the left-hand head said, “Good my lord, forgive me if I have done anything wrong. Your identity is obvious. I had no idea you meant to go undetected.”

  “Obvious?” Prestimion tapped his false beard, tugged at his black wig. “You see my face, do you, beneath all this stuff?”

  “I perceive your nature and standing quite easily, my lord. And that of the High Counsellor Septach Melayn beside you. These things cannot be hidden by wigs and beards. At least, not from me.”

  “And who may you be, then?” Septach Melayn demanded.

  The two heads inclined themselves in a courteous bow. “My name is Maundigand-Klimd,” the Su-Suheris said suavely. It was the right head that spoke, this time. “A magus by profession. When my calculations showed that you would be in this place tonight, it behooved me, I felt, to place myself in your presence.”

  “Your calculations, eh?”

  “Rather different ones, I must tell you, from the ones performed with such devices as these.” Maundigand-Klimd laughed frostily and pointed to the magic-square machines on the table before them. “They make a pretense at magic, and a worthless pretense at that. What I practice has the true mathematics at the heart of its divining.”

  “It is a science, then, your prognosticating?”

  “Most distinctly a science, lordship.”

  Prestimion glanced across, at that, at Septach Melayn. But his countenance studiously revealed nothing at all.

  To Maundigand-Klimd he said, “So there was nothing accidental, then, about your being here next to me in this place just now?”

  “Oh, my lord,” said Maundigand-Klimd, with the closest thing to a smile that Prestimion had ever seen on the face of a Su-Suheris. “There is no such thing as an accident, my lord.”

  8

  “Follow this way if you please, Lord Prestimion,” said Navigorn of Hoikmar. He and Prestimion were at the entrance to Lord Sangamor’s tunnels, that tangled maze of underground chambers with brilliantly glowing walls that a Coronal of thousands of years before had caused to be constructed on the western face of Castle Mount. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever had occasion to be in this place before, your lordship,” Navigorn said. “It’s quite extraordinary, really”

  “My father brought me here once, when I was a small boy,” said Prestimion. “Just to let me see the show of colors in the walls. The tunnels hadn’t been used as a prison, of course, for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

  “Not since the time of Lord Amyntilir, in truth.” The sentry on duty stepped aside as they approached. Navigorn touched his hand to the shining metal plate in the door and it swung obediently open, revealing the narrow passageway that led to the tunnels proper. “What a perfect site for dungeons, though! As you can see, the only access is through this easily guarded corridor. And then we continue underground right out to Sangamor Peak, which juts up from the Mount in such a way that it’s impossible to scale, impossible to reach in any way except from beneath.”

  “Yes,” Prestimion said. “Very ingenious.”

  He did not trouble to tell Navigorn that this was his third visit to the tunnels, not his second; that only two years before, in fact, he had been a prisoner in these chambers, the first such captive in centuries, sent here by order of the Coronal Lord Korsibar, as Korsibar then was pleased to style himself. And had hung by his wrists and ankles from the wall of a stone chamber whose every square inch emitted great sweeping blasts of brilliant red color, visible even when he closed his eyes. That inexorable outpouring of light had pounded and throbbed against his brain in a way that had come close to driving him mad.

  Prestimion had no idea how long Korsibar had kept him imprisoned. Three or four weeks, at least, though it had felt like months to him. Years, even. He had emerged from the tunnels feeble and shaken, and had been a long while recovering.

  Navigorn, though, lacked any awareness of that. Prestimion’s stay in the Sangamor tunnels was another thing that had been expunged from everyone’s remembrance. Everyone’s, that is, but his own. If only he could forget it, too! But the memory of that terrible time would stay with him forever.

  But he was here now as Coronal, not as a prisoner. Navigorn led him inward through the tunnel vestibule, chattering like a tour guide. Prestimion was amused to see how well Navigorn had taken to the jailer’s role.

  “The walls, you see, are faced with a substance much like stone, though it’s actually of an artificial nature. It is the special quality of that substance, my lord, that it unceasingly gives off great quantities of colored light. A scientific secret of the ancients which, alas, we have lost in modern times.”

  “One of many,” said Prestimion. “Though I confess I don’t see much utility to this one.”

  “There’s great beauty in these colors, my lord.”

  “Up to a point. I imagine they could become infuriating after a while, those tremendous pulsing jolts of light that can’t be turned off.”

  “Perhaps so. But over a short period of time—”

  Well, when he had been imprisoned here by Korsibar it had not been for any short period of time, not short at all, and the cumulative impact of his cell’s interminable pulsing jolts of ruby light had seemed well-nigh lethal as the long days dragged on. Prestimion had not found it within himself to do to Dantirya Sambail what Korsibar had done to him; and so, although the tunnels were the most secure prison that the Castle had, and there had been no choice but to put the Procurator away in them, Prestimion had seen to it that Dantirya Sambail was placed in one of the more comfortable chambers.

  The rumor was loose in the Castle, Prestimion knew, that Dantirya Sambail lay chained day and night in some dismal desolate hole where he suffered the worst torments that the tunnel walls could hurl at him. That was not so. Instead of being manacled to the walls as Prestimion had been, the Procurator had a good-sized room with plenty of space in it for him to roam freely about, and a bed, and a couch, and his own table and desk. Nor was the emanation from this cell’s wall of the kind that battered your mind and stunned your very soul; it was a gentle lime-green, where Prestimion had had to endure those constant unrelenting pounding waves of brilliant red.

  Prestimion had not bothered to contradict the rumors, though. Let them believe what they liked. He would discuss the status of Dantirya Sambail with no one. It was not a bad thing for a new Coronal to arouse a little uneasiness in those around him in the Castle.

  He and Navigorn passed through a zone where a dull, throbbing jade-colored light, heavy as the waters at the bottom of the sea, came pulsating forth, and beyond it a place of a sizzling pink as keen as knifeblades, and then one of somber, overwhelming ochre with the force of steady muffled drumbeats. Upward now they went, spiraling around the flank of the upthrust stone dagger that was Sangamor Peak, and Prestimion had a glimpse, quick but sickening, of the crushing ruby-red light of the cell that once had been his own. Adjacent to it was one with the stinging brightness of newly smelted copper. Then the colors became more mellow: cinnamon, hyacinth blue, aquamarine, mauve.

  And at last a soft chartreuse, and Prestimion found himself at the threshold of the place where the Procurator of Ni-moya was being detained.

  Prestimion had put this visit off as long as possible, but it could be avoided n
o longer, he knew. At some point it was necessary to confront the fact that Dantirya Sambail was held prisoner for high crimes and misdemeanors of which the Procurator had no knowledge at all. Prestimion was still unsure of the way to deal with the paradoxes inherent in that situation. But he understood that they must now at last be addressed.

  “Well, cousin!” cried Dantirya Sambail with implausible heartiness, when Navigorn had gone through the lengthy series of intricate procedures that opened the door of the Procurator’s chamber. “They told me you’d be coming to pay me a visit today; but I thought it was only out of playfulness or mischief that they said it. What a delight it is to behold your handsome young face again, Prestimion!—But I should call you ‘Lord Prestimion,’ should I not? For I understand that your coronation day has come and gone already, although through some misunderstanding I was not invited to the ceremony.”

  And the Procurator, smiling, held out both his hands, which were girded together at the wrists by a metal band, and waggled his fingers comically in a jovial semblance of the starburst gesture.

  Prestimion had been aware that he might expect almost anything from Dantirya Sambail when they first came face to face, but a show of joviality was not high on the list. Which was why he had ordered the Procurator’s wrists to be manacled before his arrival; for Dantirya Sambail was a man of bull-like strength, who might well be so furious over his incarceration that he would launch himself at Prestimion in a murderous frenzy the moment that the Coronal entered his cell.