Sorcerers of Majipoor m-4

by Robert Silverberg

  ’Turning a blind eye once again to his son’s crimes,” said Septach Melayn.

  Gialaurys said darkly, “He’s under some spell of sorcery, the Pontifex is. There’s no other explanation for the way he carries himself these days. This is not anything like the Confalume of old, to be such a supine thing; but Sanibak-Thastimoon, or some other wizard even more sinister in Korsibar’s employ, has put a magic on him. I know that for a surety.”

  “You may well be right,” said Svor. “Further: the Lady Roxivail also is gone, on her way to Alaisor to take a ship to the Isle of Sleep and assume her role as Lady of the Isle.”

  “May the Lady Kunigarda greet her with spears,” Septach Melayn said.

  “There is also,” said Svor, “news of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail. Those earlier reports I had that he had turned back from Alaisor are correct. He is marching toward the Mount with all his followers. He and his party have been seen in Coragem, and Tedesca, and Klatre, and Bland. Word is that he’ll be at Pivrarch or Lontano in another week and will make his ascent of the Mount from that side, coming here to Muldemar to confer with us—he knows that we are safe, and here—before going to the Castle to confront Lord Korsibar. He’s already sent a message ahead to Korsibar, says the Lady Heisse Vaneille, who has it from Akbalik, notifying him of his displeasure at Prestimion’s internment.”

  “If this is true,” said Septach Melayn, “he might send a message to us also, letting us in on some knowledge of his plans.”

  But no message came. What came instead was Dantirya Sambail himself, presenting himself as he had before at Muldemar House without warning, a dark presence in the middle of a warm sunny afternoon, accompanied by his horde of followers and requesting food and wine and lodging for them all.

  The Procurator, resplendent as always in his peacock clothes, high-waisted yellow doublet this time with winged sleeves and cuffs of lace above blue velvet breeches, and long-tipped turquoise shoes with trimming of yellow satin ribbon, gathered with Septach Melayn, Svor, Gialaurys, and the brothers of Prestimion in the long room that was known as the cabinet of arms, where a hundred ornate antique bows that Prestimion had collected, and a great assortment of fanciful arrows, were mounted along the white granite walls. The Procurator’s hatchet-faced poison-taster Mandralisca hovered as ever at his left elbow.

  As chamberlains of the house poured cool wine of a fine vintage for them all, Dantirya Sambail said, after drinking deep and greedily once it had been pronounced safe for him, “What do you hear lately of my cousin Prestimion? Is he being treated well? Are there any plans for his release?”

  “We have no direct news,” replied Septach Melayn. “Only the tales at secondhand, or third. We’re told that he’s reasonably well, but that news is several weeks old. No visitors have been permitted him lately.”

  The Procurator sat heavily forward and dug his thumbs deep into his pink fleshy jowls, and ran his hand slowly up the great shining dome of his forehead. Then he beckoned for still more wine. His bowl was filled yet again; Mandralisca took his little sip; Dantirya Sambail drained the rest at a long voracious gulp. Displeasure and even disgust was evident on the faces of several of the brothers of Prestimion.

  He said, at length, “You three are his beloved minions, and you three”—with a sour glare sweeping over Taradath and Abrigant and Teotas—“are his brothers. Yet all six of you sit lazily here at Muldemar House doing nothing. Why is that? Why are you not at the Castle filling the air with protests over the disgraceful treatment being given the Prince Prestimion? I never heard it said of you that you were lacking in courage, Septach Melayn. Or you in guile, Duke Svor.”

  “We were waiting for you,” said Septach Melayn. “You are the missing piece in the puzzle. We go ourselves, and we’d be popped into the manacles faster than you can drink a bowl of Prestimion’s wine, for what are we but mere appurtenances to Prestimion? But you are no one’s appurtenance. This is not a matter of courage nor of guile, Dantirya Sambail, but of power. You alone have the power to make Korsibar relent. I speak of the army at your command in Zimroel.”

  “Ah,” the Procurator said. “So this is my task. I suspected as much. You’ll come with me, at least?”

  “If you think it’s best that we do, yes. Certainly,” Septach Melayn said.

  “You three, then, come,” said Dantirya Sambail, indicating Septach Melayn, Svor, and Gialaurys.

  “And what of us?” asked Abrigant, with some heat in his voice.

  “I think not. Your work is to make Muldemar House safe and ready for your brother’s return. Begin gathering the men of your city and preparing them for the possibility of battle.”

  “Battle?” said Septach Melayn and Gialaurys in the same breath, both of them instantly excited. Svor said nothing, but his gaze turned distant under his heavy brows.

  “Battle, yes. If Korsibar won’t give us Prestimion willingly, we’ll take him by force. And then the fat will truly be in the fire, eh?” The Procurator grinned a wolfish grin. “I want thirty strong men-at-arms from among your people,” he said to Taradath and Abrigant, “and I want them dressed in the same livery as my own company.”

  “Muldemar people in Ni-moya colors?” said the scholarly Taradath immediately, bristling. “How could we allow a thing like that?” And the tall fiery young Abrigant came halfway out of his seat in rage.

  Dantirya Sambail waved one broad meaty hand. “Peace, cousins, peace. I mean no offense. I want only to achieve your brother’s freedom. Attend me, here: I have seventy-six men of my own. You give me thirty more, begins to seem an impressive force, enough to make Korsibar take notice. But if they wear my colors they are merely my traveling retinue, the ones I had with me at the Labyrinth to accompany me to the Pontifex’s funeral. Is innocent enough, that. I show up at the Castle now accompanied by a second troop of men in Muldemar colors, it seems more like we are mustering an army against the Coronal in his own home, which is a threat no Coronal could ever abide. You follow me, do you? The extra men will be useful, but we disguise them a little to avoid a premature onset of hostilities.”

  The brothers still were restless and unsure.

  “Do it,” Svor urged them. “It is a good plan.” And to Dantirya Sambail he said, “Take fifty instead of thirty, perhaps?”

  “Thirty should be enough,” the Procurator replied. “For now.”

  * * *

  Svor had not expected to be back at the Castle so soon. But Dantirya Sambail was an irresistible force; and so here he stood with the Procurator before Korsibar in the old Stiamot throne-room, which the new Coronal apparently had begun using lately for most audiences instead of the far more imposing one that his father had built. It was an austere little room, stark and simple—a low throne of plain white marble, benches beside it for the Coronal’s ministers, a triangular floor of smooth gray paving-blocks covered by a purple and gray Makroposopos carpet that copied some ancient design.

  Count Farquanor was seated to one side of Korsibar, and Sanibak-Thastimoon at the other. In the facing group, Svor and Septach Melayn stood at the Procurator’s right hand, and the poison-taster Mandralisca at his left. Gialaurys was not with them; he had announced defiantly beforehand that he would not bow and make starbursts to Korsibar, and so he was below, with the hundred men in Dantirya Sambail’s colors who had accompanied them to the Castle.

  Korsibar seemed oddly diminished, after these additional weeks of his kingship. Much of his old swashbuckling vitality had vanished, and he looked wan and gray-faced now. His shoulders were slumped, his skin showed an indoor pallor and not its customary sun-darkened hue, his cheekbones stood out sharply. Though there still was an outward look of force and strength about him, his jaws were clenched and his eyes were ringed by dark shadows and rigidly set, as though he had been applying that strength lately to a burden far too great even for him. He seemed a haunted man.

  It was Duke Svor’s task to guard against Sanibak-Thastimoon’s putting a mind-clouding spell on them as he had at
the taking of the crown in the Labyrinth. For, as Dantirya Sambail had pointed out, Svor had the knack of sniffing out sorcery, even if he was unable to perform much of it himself, and so he would defend them against treachery Svor stared at the Su-Suheris now, offering him now and again a dark warning glance, as though to say, I am on to your tricks, try none of them this day! And Septach Melayn is here with his sword for those two necks of yours if you do.

  Dantirya Sambail, standing splay-legged directly in front of Korsibar with his massive head thrust aggressively forward, began: “You received my message, I think, my lord, concerning the detention of my cousin Prestimion?”

  “The message reached us, yes.” Korsibar delivered those words very coolly.

  “It was some weeks ago I sent it. I am informed, my lord, that Prince Prestimion continues to be detained.”

  “The prince is in a condition of rebellion against our authority. When he cures that condition, he’ll be released, Dantirya Sambail. Not before.”

  “Ah,” said the Procurator. “And how may he accomplish that, my lord?”

  “When you entered our presence, you made the starburst to us, and knelt, and greeted us as ‘my lord.’ The Duke Svor very kindly did the same, and even the Count Septach Melayn. We must have the same courtesy from the Prince Prestimion; and then he will be a free man again.”

  Dantirya Sambail said, “He has refused you the ceremony due a Coronal? Is that it?”

  “He has refused, yes. I sat upon the Confalume throne itself and asked him—more like a suppliant than like a king—to give me my due.” Anger glinted in Korsibar’s eyes. But, Svor noticed, for the moment he had stopped referring to himself in the royal plural. “As one old friend to another, I asked him, and said it was simply that which is due me, for I am king. And he said to me that I was not king.”

  “He said that, did he?”

  ’To my face. My regime is unlawful, he said. The world has no legitimate Coronal at this time, he said.”

  “Ah. He said those things.”

  “He did, and I said to him to take back the words, and he left them untaken; and so he is in the vaults, and I will leave him there until such time as he tells me that he recognizes me as true Coronal.”

  “Ah. Ah.” And then Dantirya Sambail asked: “May I have leave to speak with him, my lord?”

  “No, you may not.”

  “It might be,” said Dantirya Sambail, “that I could persuade him to yield in this matter.”

  “I allowed him some visitors at first. But he has had no company of any kind for the past nineteen days, other than a certain highly annoying Vroon who is chained in the same vault as his. I prefer to keep him in this semisolitude until his resolve to defy me has melted entirely.”

  “I might hasten its melting, my lord,” the Procurator said. “Show him where the path of reason lies, and—”

  “No, Dantirya Sambail. No. No. No. Must I say the word yet again? Then I shall: no.” And Korsibar’s lips clamped tight shut on that final emphatic syllable.

  It seemed to Svor, watching this exchange from his place at the side, that Korsibar had been on the verge of threatening the Procurator with imprisonment himself if he persisted in this course of argument, but had bit back the words at the last moment before uttering them. It seemed to Svor also that Dantirya Sambail had understood that the threat was imminent, and was ready for it. But the words went unspoken, and so did the hot response that Dantirya Sambail held in waiting for them.

  In the little silence that followed, the Procurator, who had been standing motionless like a great block of stone before Korsibar, turned and spoke a word to Mandralisca. He nodded, made a hasty starburst to the Coronal and went from the room. Then Dantirya Sambail said, in a pleasant easy tone, just as if he and the Coronal had not a moment before been at loggerheads, “Tell me, then, my lord, is my beloved cousin reported to be in good state, after these weeks in the vaults? For he is very dear to me, and his well-being is of high importance to me.”

  “We’re not starving him, Dantirya Sambail. Nor torturing him, nor harming him in any other way except to interfere with his freedom to come and go as he pleases. Which freedom he can have again readily enough in a moment, for the price of a starburst and a bended knee.”

  “I would like assurances, my lord, that he’s been faring well under the stress of his confinement.”

  Count Farquanor leaned across, at this, and whispered something to Sanibak-Thastimoon. The Su-Suheris responded with a double nod and turned to speak with Korsibar. But Korsibar shook him off and said icily to Dantirya Sambail, “You have just had such assurances, Procurator.”

  Then Dantirya Sambail: “You told me only what you were not doing to him, my lord, not how he actually was faring.”

  Farquanor now it was who said, in a cold, harsh voice, “Is it your purpose to give offense to the Coronal, Dantirya Sambail? Your precious cousin Prestimion—a very distant cousin, is that not so?—is intact and well. Be comfortable on that point, and give over this questioning. Not even the Procurator of Ni-moya may subject the Coronal to vexation of this sort.”

  And from Korsibar: “Why are you here at all, Dantirya Sambail? You told me that you were returning to Zimroel out of a terrible homesickness, and to carry the word of Lord Korsibar’s accession to your people there. Instead we find you back at the Castle only a few months after taking your leave. Why is that?”

  “You know why I’m here,” Dantirya Sambail replied evenly. “But it would vex the Coronal if I stated it once more, and I am forbidden by Count Farquanor’s own decree to vex the Coronal.”

  “May I have leave to speak, lordship?” asked Septach Melayn, who had been silent all this while. “We are at an impasse here. But I have a compromise to propose.”

  “Speak, then,” Korsibar said.

  “Prestimion, so I understand it, has given offense by refusing you proper obeisance. Very well. But you hope to extract that obeisance from him under compulsion, my lord, and surely you know Prestimion well enough to realize that he’ll never give it that way.”

  “He is an unyielding man, yes,” Korsibar acknowledged.

  “Well, then: you have in return charged him with rebellion and sentenced him to imprisonment until he repents, and since he won’t repent, he’ll languish in the vaults until he dies, which may be sooner rather than later if that place is as wearisome as I’ve heard. Then the word will go out that the Coronal Lord Korsibar has done his former rival Prince Prestimion of Muldemar to death for sedition, and how will that look in the world, considering how well-loved Prestimion is in all the provinces of Majipoor? Forgive me, my lord, but I tell you it will be interpreted as a vile act, that can only injure the love that the people bear for you in these the earliest days of your reign.”

  “Enough. I seek an end on this. What is the compromise you suggest, Septach Melayn?” asked Korsibar in a voice ragged with strain.

  “That we will make no open protest against the treatment that Prestimion has received at your hands, but also that you give him to us this day, my lord, and let us go back to Muldemar with him. In that place it may well happen that his mother and his brothers and we can convince him of the grave error of his ways. You can never accomplish that in the dungeons, my lord, never, but we, perhaps, reasoning with him calmly and persuasively—”

  And Korsibar: “This is your idea of compromise? You must think I’m a fool. There is no possibility whatever that—”

  “Lordship!” cried a hoarse voice outside. The door burst open and two guardsmen came running in, panting and disheveled. “The prisoner—they’ve broken into the vaults—”

  Korsibar, gaping, sat as if stunned. Farquanor was on his feet, red-faced, shouting. Even the impassive Sanibak-Thastimoon seemed swept by surprise and dismay. An instant later Mandralisca rushed into the room and to Dantirya Sambail’s side and whispered into his ear. Dantirya Sambail listened, frowning at first, and then smiling.

  Serenely, the Procurator said, looking up no
w at Korsibar, “It seems there has been some sort of skirmish, my lord, between my men and a group of your guardsmen. It appears to have taken place at the entrance to Lord Sangamor’s tunnels, and during the unfortunate brawling the sealed gateway to the tunnels was damaged to a certain degree, so that entry became possible. I am saddened to say that I believe there have been casualties. Also a Skandar archer in my service evidently chose this opportunity to determine whether his fellow archer Prince Prestimion had been treated properly during his imprisonment, and, finding the prince not in completely satisfactory condition, has removed him from the vaults so that he can receive the medical care he apparently needs.”

  The placid way he announced all this left Svor rapt with astonishment and admiration. Dantirya Sambail’s complacent calmness seemed to have wrapped Korsibar in some spell of remarkable acquiescence to the thing that had happened in the vaults. Korsibar’s mouth opened and closed again, but no words came forth. Inner conflicts made themselves apparent in the roiling of his features and the knotting of his forehead; and yet he offered, for the moment, no response to this amazing news, even though it connoted virtual insurrection against his authority. As Korsibar remained silent, Farquanor seemed to come to the verge of speaking out, but Korsibar waved him to silence with a brusque imperious gesture.

  Dantirya Sambail spoke on, smoothly, easily, into the vacuum of authority that Korsibar was leaving for him: “It is a delicate situation, lordship. What I propose, therefore, is that we agree at once on the compromise just put forth by Count Septach Melayn. There will be peace between the faction of the Coronal and the faction of Prince Prestimion henceforward, and no recriminations on either side for what has occurred; and I will take Prince Prestimion into my own custody immediately, and will make myself personally responsible for his good behavior.”