Lord Prestimion

by Robert Silverberg

  Prestimion had presided over a dozen or so of these events in his time as prince. Then, for two years running, there had been the distraction of the civil war to keep him from being present. Now he was Coronal and Abrigant had succeeded him at Muldemar. But last year there had been no banquet either, because he and Abrigant had been off in the east-country chasing after Dantirya Sambail at the customary time of the festival. So this would be Abrigant’s first festival since becoming Prince of Muldemar; and he would regard it as a high honor if Prestimion were to attend. The Coronal did not ordinarily attend the Muldemar festival. But no member of Prestimion’s family had ever gone on to become Coronal before, either. Prestimion felt obligated to be there. It would mean an absence of three or four days from the Castle altogether.

  Varaile, though, was a little unwell, and begged off attending. Even the short trip down to Muldemar seemed a little too much for her to deal with just now, she told him, and she certainly had no eagerness to take part in a lavish dinner where rich food and strong wines would be served far into the night. She asked Prestimion to bring Septach Melayn along as his companion instead. Prestimion was reluctant to go without her; but he was even more reluctant to disappoint Abrigant, who would be deeply hurt if he failed to appear. And so it happened that when the major-domo Nilgir Sumanand arrived at the Coronal’s residence with word that a young knight-initiate named Dekkeret had just returned to the Castle after a long absence overseas and was seeking an audience with Lord Prestimion on a matter of extremely great importance, it was to Varaile and not the Coronal to whom he delivered the message.

  “Dekkeret?” Varaile said. “I don’t think I know that name.”

  “No, milady. He has been away since before the time you came to live here.”

  “It isn’t usual for knight-initiates to request audiences with the Coronal, is it? How extreme is the importance of this extremely important matter, anyway? Important enough for you to send him down to Prestimion at Muldemar, do you think?”

  “I have no idea. He said it was quite urgent, but that he must deliver his report to the Coronal himself, or else to the High Counsellor, or, if neither of them is here, to Prince Akbalik. However, the Coronal is in Muldemar today, as you know, and the High Counsellor is down there with him, and Prince Akbalik has not yet returned from his own travels—he is in Stoienzar, I think. I hesitate to disturb Lord Prestimion’s holiday in Muldemar without your permission, milady.”

  “No. Quite right, Nilgir Sumanand.” And then, somewhat to her own surprise, for she had been feeling queasy all morning: “Send him here to me. I’ll find out from him myself whether it’s something worth bothering the Coronal about.”

  There was something generous and open-spirited about Dekkeret’s features and the straightforward gaze of his eyes that made Varaile take an immediate intuitive liking to him. He was obviously highly intelligent, but there did not seem to be anything sly or scheming or crafty about him. He was a big, ruggedly built young man, perhaps twenty years old or a year or two more, with wide, powerful shoulders and a general look of tremendous physical strength held under careful control. The skin of his face and hands had a tanned, almost leathery look, as though he had spent a great deal of time outdoors lately in some hot, harsh climate.

  The Coronal, she told him, would be away from the Castle for several days more. She made it quite clear that she would not intrude on her husband’s visit to Muldemar except for very good cause. And asked him what it was, exactly, that Knight-Initiate Dekkeret wished to bring to the Coronal’s attention.

  Dekkeret was hesitant at first in his reply. Perhaps he was disconcerted at finding himself in the company of Lord Prestimion’s consort instead of Lord Prestimion, or perhaps it was the fact that Lord Prestimion’s consort was so very close to his own age. Or else he was simply unwilling to reveal the information to someone he did not know: a woman, moreover, who was not even a member of the Council. He made no attempt, at any rate, to disguise his uncertainty about how to proceed.

  But then he appeared to decide that it was safe to tell her the tale. After some awkward false starts he began to offer her a long, rambling prologue. Prince Akbalik, he said, had taken him with him some time back on a diplomatic mission to Zimroel. He had not been entrusted with any important responsibilities himself, but was brought along only to gain a little seasoning, since he had only a short while before joined the Coronal’s staff. After spending some time in Ni-moya he had arranged, for reasons that he did not seem to be able to make very clear, to be transferred temporarily to the service of the Pontifex, and had gone off to Suvrael to investigate a problem involving cattle exports.

  “Suvrael?” Varaile said. “How awful to be sent there, of all places!”

  “It was at my own request, milady. Yes, I know, it is an unpleasant land. But I felt a need to go someplace unpleasant for a time. It would be very complicated to explain.” It sounded to Varaile almost as though he had deliberately been looking to experience great physical discomfort: as a sort of purgation, perhaps, a penitential act. That was hard for her to comprehend. But she let the point pass without attempting to question him on it.

  His task in Suvrael, Dekkeret said, had been to visit a place called Ghyzyn Kor, the capital of the cattle-ranch country, and make inquiries there about the reasons for the recent decline in beef production. Ghyzyn Kor lay at the heart of a mountain-sheltered zone of fertile grazing lands, six or seven hundred miles deep in the torrid continent’s interior, that was entirely surrounded by the bleakest of deserts. But upon his arrival at the port of Tolaghai on Suvrael’s northwest coast, he quickly learned that getting there was not going to be any easy matter.

  There were, he was told, three main routes inland. But one of these was currently being ravaged by fierce sandstorms that made it impassable. A second was closed to travelers on account of marauding Shapeshifter bandits. And the third, an arduous desert road that ran across the mountains by way of a place called Khulag Pass, had fallen into disuse in recent years and was in a bad state of repair. No one went that way any more, his informant said, because the route was haunted.

  “Haunted?”

  “Yes, milady. By ghosts, so I was told, that would enter your mind at night as you slept and steal your dreams, and replace them with the most ghastly terrifying fantasies. Some travelers in that desert had died of their own nightmares, I heard. And by day the ghosts would sing in the distance, confusing you, leading you from the proper path with strange songs and eerie sounds, until you drifted off into some sandy wasteland and were lost forever.”

  “Ghosts who steal your dreams,” said Varaile, marveling. Her innate skepticism bridled at the whole idea. “Surely you aren’t the sort to let yourself be frightened by nonsense like that.”

  “Indeed I’m not. But setting off by myself into that miserable desert, ghosts or no ghosts, was a different matter. I began to think my mission was doomed to end in complete failure. But then I came across someone who claimed that he often went inland by way of Khulag Pass and had never had any problems with the ghosts. He didn’t say that the ghosts weren’t there, only that he had ways of withstanding their powers. I hired him to serve as my guide.”

  His name, Dekkeret said, was Venghenar Barjazid: a sly, disreputable little man, very likely a smuggler of some sort, who extorted a formidable price from him for the job. The plan was to reverse the usual patterns of wakefulness, traveling by night and making camp during the burning heat of the day. They were accompanied by Barjazid’s son, an adolescent boy named Dinitak, along with a Skandar woman to serve as porter and a Vroon who was familiar with all the desert roads. A dilapidated old floater would be the vehicle in which they traveled.

  The journey out of Tolaghai and up into the hills leading to Khulag Pass was uneventful. Dekkeret found the landscape startling in its ugliness—dry rocky washes, sandy pockmarked ground, spiky twisted plants—and it grew even more forbidding once they had gone through the pass and began their descent into the Des
ert of Stolen Dreams beyond. He had never imagined that the world held any such fearsome place, so stark and grim and inhospitable. But, he said, he simply took that cruel, barren wasteland as it came, without feeling a flicker of dismay. Perhaps he even liked it in some perverse way, Varaile supposed, considering that he had gone to Suvrael in the first place in search of whatever gratification there might be in hardship and suffering.

  Then, though, the nightmares began. Daymares, rather. He dreamed that he was floating toward the benevolent embrace of the Lady of the Isle, at the center of a sphere of pure white light; it was a vision of peace and joy, but gradually the imagery of his dream changed and darkened, so that he found himself marooned on a bare gray mountainside, staring down at a dead and empty crater, and awakened trembling and weak with fear and shock.

  “Did you dream well?” Barjazid had asked him, then. “My son says you moaned in your sleep, that you rolled over many times and clutched your knees. Did you feel the touch of the dream-stealers, Initiate Dekkeret?”

  When Dekkeret admitted that he had, the little man pressed him for details. Dekkeret grew angry at that, and asked why he should allow Barjazid to probe and poke in his mind; but Barjazid persisted, and finally Dekkeret did provide a description of what he had dreamed. Yes, said Barjazid, he had felt the touch of the dream-stealers: an invasion of the mind, a disturbing overlay of images, a taking of energy.

  “I asked him,” Dekkeret told Varaile, “if he had ever felt their touch himself. No, he said, never. He was apparently immune. His son Dinitak had been bothered by them only once or twice. He would not speculate on the nature of the creatures that caused such things. I said then, ‘Do the dreams get worse as one gets deeper into the desert?’ To which he replied, very coolly indeed, ‘So I am given to understand.’”

  When they moved on at twilight, Dekkeret imagined he heard distant laughter, the tinkling of far-off bells, the booming of ghostly drums.

  And the next day he dreamed again, a dream that began in a green and lovely garden of fountains and pools but quickly transformed itself into something terrible in which he lay naked and exposed to the desert sun, so that he felt his own skin charring and crackling. This time, when he awakened, he discovered that he had wandered away from camp in his sleep and was sprawled out in the midday heat amid a horde of stinging ants. Nor could he find his way back to the floater, and he thought he would die; but eventually the Vroon came for him, bearing a flask of water, and led him to safety. There had been suffering aplenty in that adventure, more, in truth, than he was looking for; but the worst of it, he told Varaile, had been neither the heat nor the thirst nor the ants, but the anguish of being denied the solace of normal dreaming, the terror of having that cheerful and soothing vision turn to something gruesome and frightful.

  “So there really is some truth to these travelers’ tales, then?” asked Varaile. “This haunted desert actually does have deadly dream-stealing ghosts in it.”

  “Of a sort, yes, milady. As I will shortly explain.”

  They were almost out of the desert, now, following the bed of a long-extinct river through a violent terrain that had often been fractured by earthquakes. The land here rose gradually toward two tall peaks in the southwest, between which lay Munnerak Notch, the gateway to the cooler, greener lands of the cattle-country beyond. In another few days he would be at Ghyzyn Kor.

  But the worst dream of all still lay ahead for him. He would not describe it in any specific way to Varaile, saying only that it brought him face to face with the one evil deed of his life, the sin that had sent him on his voyage of penance to Suvrael in the first place. Stage by stage he was forced to re-enact that sin as he slept, until the dream culminated in a scene of the most horrific intensity, one that made him shiver and blanch even to think of it now; and at its climax he experienced a sudden piercing pain, an intolerable sensation as of a needle of searing bright light slashing down into his skull. “I heard the tolling of a great gong far away,” said Dekkeret, “and the laughter of some demon close at hand. When I opened my eyes I was almost insane with dread and despair. Then I caught sight of Barjazid, across the way, half hidden behind the floater. He had just taken off some kind of mechanism that he was wearing around his forehead, and was trying to hide it in his baggage.”

  Varaile gave a little start. “He was causing the dreams?”

  “Oh, you are quick, milady, you are very quick! It was he, yes. With a machine that enabled him to enter minds and transform thoughts. A much more powerful machine than those used by the Lady of the Isle; for she can merely speak to minds, and this Barjazid’s device could actually take command of them. All this he admitted, not very willingly or gladly, when I demanded the truth from him. It was his own invention, he said, a thing that he had been working on for many years.”

  “And carrying on experiments with it, is that it, using the minds of the travelers that he took into the desert?”

  “Exactly, my lady.”

  “You did well to come to the Coronal with this, Dekkeret. This device is a dangerous thing. Its use needs to be stopped.”

  “It has been,” said Dekkeret. A broad smile of self-satisfaction spread across his face. “I succeeded in taking Barjazid and his son prisoner then and there, and seized the machine. They are here with me at the Castle. Lord Prestimion will be pleased, I think. Oh, lady, I surely hope that he is, for I tell you, lady, nothing is more important to me than pleasing Lord Prestimion!”

  5

  “His name is Dekkeret,” Varaile said. “A knight-initiate, very young and a little rough around the edges, but destined, I think, for great things.”

  Prestimion laughed. They were in the Stiamot throne-room with Gialaurys. It was only an hour since his return to the Castle and Varaile had greeted him with this tale as though it were the most important thing in the world. “Oh, I know Dekkeret, all right! He saved my life in Normork long ago, when some lunatic with a sharp blade came charging out of a crowd at me.”

  “Did he? He didn’t say anything to me about that.”

  “No. I’d be very surprised if he had.”

  “The story that he told me was absolutely astonishing, Prestimion.”

  He had listened to it with no more than half an ear. “Let me see if I have it straight,” he said, when she was done. “He was with Akbalik on an assignment in Zimroel, that much I know, and then for some reason that was never made clear to me he went on by himself to Suvrael, and now, you tell me, he’s come back from there bringing what sort of thing?”

  “A machine that seizes control of people’s minds. Which was invented by some shabby little smuggler, Barjazid by name, who offers to guide travelers through the desert, but who actually—”

  “Barjazid?” Prestimion, frowning, glanced at Gialaurys. “It seems to me I’ve heard that name before. I know I have. But I don’t recall where.”

  “A shady fellow who originally came from Suvrael, with squinty eyes and skin that looked like old leather,” Gialaurys said. “He was in the service of Duke Svor for a couple of years: a very slippery sort, this Barjazid, much like Svor himself. You always detested him.”

  “Ah. It comes back to me now. It was right after that little trouble we had at Thegomar Edge, when we caught hold of that smarmy Vroon wizard, Thalnap Zelifor, who made all those mind-reading devices and had no hesitations about selling them both to us and to our opponents as well—”

  Gialaurys nodded. “Exactly so. This Barjazid happened to be standing right there at the time, and you told him to pack up the Vroon and his whole workshop of diabolical machines and escort him into permanent exile in Suvrael. Where, no doubt, he got rid of the wizard at the first possible opportunity and appropriated the mind-control devices for his own use.” To Varaile he said, “Where did you say this man Barjazid is now, lady?”

  “The Sangamor tunnels. He and his son, both.”

  Hearty laughter came from Prestimion at that. “Oh, I like that! A nice closing of the circle! The tunnels
were the very place where I first encountered Thalnap Zelifor, that time when he and I were prisoners chained side by side.” Which brought a puzzled glance from Varaile. Prestimion realized that all this discussion of episodes of the civil war had left her baffled. “I’ll tell you that story some other time,” he told her. “As for this gadget of his, I’ll give it a look when I have the chance. A machine that controls minds, eh? Well, I suppose we can find some use for it, sooner or later.”

  “Better sooner than later, I think,” she said.

  “Please. I’m not minimizing its importance, Varaile. There are many other things to deal with right now, though.” He smiled to soften the tone of his words, but he did not try to conceal his impatience. “I’ll get to it when I get to it.”

  “And Prince Dekkeret?” Varaile said. “He should have some reward for bringing this thing to your attention, shouldn’t he?”

  “Prince Dekkeret? Oh, no, no, not yet! He’s still a commoner, just a bright boy from Normork who’s making his way up the ladder here. But you’re quite right: we ought to acknowledge his good services.—What do you say, Gialaurys? Promote him two levels, shall we? Yes. If he’s second level now, which I think he is, let’s up him to fourth. Provided he’s recovered from whatever strange fit of conscience it was that sent him racing off to Suvrael.”

  “If he hadn’t gone there, Prestimion, he’d never have captured the mind-control machine,” Varaile pointed out.

  “True enough. But the thing may not turn out to have any value. And this whole Suvrael exploit of his bothers me a little. Dekkeret was supposed to be working for us in Ni-moya, not going off on mysterious private adventures, even ones that turned out to be worthwhile. I don’t want him doing that again.—Now,” Prestimion said, as Gialaurys, excusing himself, saluted and left the room, “let’s turn to another matter, shall we, Varaile?”