“Korsibar’s a fool, and you are my friend, and I have no doubts of where your loyalties lie. If he wants to exempt you from the proscription, so be it. But why have you signed me up for a course of studies in magic, Svor? Is this some little prank of yours?”
“We’ll need to stay hidden here until we know it’s safe to emerge, and the city authorities will require some plausible reason for our presence. Studying sorcery’s not only a way of passing the time, it gives us some appearance of legitimacy in our residence here. You might find it illuminating, besides.”
“I might, yes. And blaves would fly too, if only you knew how to grow wings on them. So now I am to be a scholar of the mysterious arts! Ah, Svor, Svor—”
A knock at the door interrupted his words.
A ringing voice outside, a voice they all knew very well, called, “Are these the lodgings of Count Polivand of Muldemar!”
Gialaurys reached the door first and threw it wide. A slender and extremely tall man in the elegant clothes of a courtier of the Mount—a doublet of green velvet in the Bombifale style, with high-standing collar and a small ruff above—stood smiling there.
“Septach Melayn!” Gialaurys cried.
He bowed gracefully and entered. Prestimion rushed to him and embraced him. “Svor and Gialaurys told me you had survived,” Prestimion said. “But still—I was afraid for so long that you had drowned in the flood—”
“I move quickly when dying’s the alternative. How have you fared, Prestimion?”
“Not entirely well, to speak the truth.”
“No. I’m not surprised.”
“And you must not call me ‘Prestimion’ here. I’m Count Polivand of Muldemar. Gialaurys is now Gheveldin. Svor will explain. He’s still Svor, by the way. We are all enrolled as students of wizardry, I’ll have you know, and our tutor is—I am speaking nothing but the truth, Septach Melayn, however strange it may sound—the father of Confalume’s ancient magus Heszmon Gorse. The father.”
“Students of wizardry,” said Septach Melayn in a musing way, as though Prestimion had just announced that they were all soon to become women, or Skandars, or sea-dragons perhaps. “A quaint pastime for you, Prestimion. I wish you joy of it.”
“You’ll be enrolled in our scholarly pursuits also, Septach Melayn,” said Svor. “Your name is now Simrok Morlin, and you are a man of Gimkandale, not of Tidias.” He explained the reason for these subterfuges; and Septach Melayn, in high good humor, gave his assent to the plan and swore to be the most assiduous student of them all, and to come away from Triggoin a true master in the diabolic sciences.
Then Prestimion asked him how he had known where to find them; to which Septach Melayn replied that a messenger had come to him a little while before in his own lodgings, which by coincidence were just three streets away, and told him the address where certain great friends of his were to be found. The messenger had given him the card of his employer, which Septach Melayn now produced and showed Prestimion. It was the card of the magus Gominik Halvor.
“We never told him your name!” said Prestimion. “How would he have known—?”
“Ah, Prestimion,” Gialaurys said. “What did I tell you? The evidence lies all about you, and still you refuse to credit the reality of what these mages do!”
Prestimion shrugged. He had no wish to debate the issue any further with Gialaurys, now or ever again.
The inn where they had lodged had a dining hall, where they went for some meat and wine before their first lesson with Gominik Halvor was to commence. Septach Melayn regaled them with tales of his escape from the flood and his swift journey north and of his lighthearted adventures in Triggoin while waiting for them to arrive, for, he said, he had never once doubted that they would show up here sooner or later. He made everything sound like the easiest and lightest of exploits, which was his style in everything; but Prestimion could see that he was deliberately making light of it all—the awful debacle of the breaking of the dam, the hardships of his journey through the desert, the uneasy -hours of his time alone in Triggoin. It was plain that Septach Melayn had already perceived the darkness of Prestimion’s mood and did not want to darken it further with tales of losses and suffering.
Prestimion ate little and drank less. Though he had struggled constantly since his recovery in Jaggereen against the doleful bleakness that had enfolded his soul, he found himself making little headway with it.
He had no idea what he would do now. For the first time in his life he was utterly without a plan.
For the time being he wanted only to live quietly, far from the Castle, far from all exercise of power, far from everything he had been in the days when he was Prestimion of Muldemar. He saw it as fitting that the shipwreck of his destiny should have cast him up in Triggoin, this place so antithetical to his nature and all his beliefs. It would be an appropriate penance, having to take refuge here among the magicians.
“Penance?” Septach Melayn cried, when after a time Prestimion began to give voice to some of these somber thoughts. “Penance for what? For serving the cause of righteousness against that of evil?”
“You think that was it? That I rose up against Korsibar purely because I believed I was the rightful Coronal and he a wicked usurper?”
’Tell me it was anything else,” said Septach Melayn, “that it was sheerly out of the lust for power that you did it, say, and then I’ll give you the sword that I wear here on my hip, and you can put it through my gut, Prestimion. Pardon me: Polivand. I know you and I know why you did as you did. Korsibar’s theft of the crown was a crime against all civilization. You had no choice but to stand up in opposition to it. No guilt attaches on that account, Prestimion: no blame whatever.”
“Listen to him, and take his words into your heart,” Gialaurys said. “You belabor yourself for no sensible reason, Prestimion.”
“Polivand,” Svor corrected. “Come, now, gentlemen. It’s time for our first lesson in sorcery.”
* * *
Gominik Halvor’s lodgings were plainly those of a personage of consequence. He occupied seven or eight large rooms, or even more, at the top of a lofty stone tower in central Triggoin that looked down on the entire panorama of the city. There, Gominik Halvor had brought together a great collection of equipment of strange and esoteric nature, alembics and crucibles, flasks holding curious fluids and powders, metal boxes containing ointments and creams, iron plates on which cryptic characters were inscribed, retorts and beakers, hourglasses, weighing-scales, armillary spheres and astrolabes, ammatepilas, hexaphores, phalangaria, ambivials. Besides these things—and there were many more devices also, of all manner of strange sorts—there were whole rooms of shelves lined with the great leatherbound books of the kind that Prestimion had already seen at the late Pontifex’s bedside and in his mother’s own reading-gallery, and which no doubt were highly valued everywhere in the world by the cognoscenti of these arts. And there were still other rooms in which they were not invited to look.
“I address myself first to your skepticism,” is how Gominik Halvor began, glancing in Prestimion’s direction and then in Septach Melayn’s. “You needn’t deny your feelings: I see them revealed plainly enough in your faces. They need not be a hindrance to your studies here. Listen to my words, and test them against the results I achieve. What we of Triggoin practice is a science, which is to say, its methods follow strict discipline, and the results we attain are capable of empirical analysis. Reserve your judgment; watch and examine; do not be too quick to challenge that which you do not understand.”
He launched now into a tale of his own studies and travels, which seemed to have taken him to every region of the world, though Prestimion knew it would take five lifetimes as long as Gominik Halvor’s to accomplish that. But he spoke of voyaging in the Great Sea to a place where the sky was lit bright as day with the strange ghostly light of the stars Giskhernar and Hautaama, which were never seen over land, and watching the giant blue serpents of the depths wrestling with twenty-
legged monsters that dwelled in perpetual whirlpools. He spoke of his journey to the Isle of Gapeligo, of which Prestimion had never heard, where the fires of the inner world burst forth unceasingly in a deafening upsurge of white flame. He spoke of his explorations in the dank and steaming rain-forests of Kajith Kabulon, gathering certain herbs of immeasurable value that were unknown even to the residents of that district. And he told also of the time he had spent among the Piurivars, the Metamorph aborigines, in their jungled province of Piurifayne on Zimroel, where Lord Stiamot had penned their ancestors up long ago at the conclusion of the Shapeshifter War.
The old mage’s improbably deep and sturdy voice had been rolling on and on, lulling them into complacency; but this mention of living among the Metamorphs brought Prestimion up short with surprise.
The Metamorphs had little commerce with the outside world and did not welcome visitors of the human sort into their reservation. Yet Gominik Halvor gave them to believe that he had spent years among them.
“These demons everyone speaks of,” he said: “We know now of what nature they are, and I will share that knowledge with you. They are the prehistoric inhabitants of this world, its first masters, in fact—undying creatures of the ancient days before mankind ever came to Majipoor, who roamed free until the Shapeshifters locked them up under terrible spells twenty thousand years ago. Those locks can be opened with the right words, and those spirits can be made to do our bidding; and then we send them back to the dark place from which we pulled them. Watch,” said Gominik Halvor, and spoke words in no language Prestimion had ever heard. “Goibaliiud yei thenioth kalypritiaar,” he said, and, “Idryerimos uriliaad faldiz tilimoin gamoosth,” and there was a stirring in the air, and a dimly visible, half-translucent figure appeared in the middle of the room before them, something with spikes for hair and pools of light for eyes. “This is Theddim,” said the magus, “who presides over the coursing of the blood through our hearts.” And indeed Prestimion felt his own heart beginning to pound and thump, though whether it was the doing of the demon Theddim or merely his dismay at being present at such a rite, he could not say. Then the magus uttered other words and the apparition was gone.
Gominik Halvor told them of other demons also, Thua Nizirit the demon of delirium, and scaly-faced Ginitiis, and Ruhid of the great dangling snout, who brought ease from fever, and Mimim, who facilitated the recapture of lost knowledge, and Kakilak, the benign demon who soothed those who were troubled by seizures. These beings, the magus said, could be only imperfectly controlled; but even so, they were often of great service to those who understood the techniques of summoning them.
He offered his four students, at their nightly lessons, some hint of those techniques—merely skimming the surface of his science, he told them, for they were still in the preliminary phases of their studies. “These are the three classes of demons,” he said: “the valisteroi, who escaped the power of the Metamorph spells and live beyond the sphere of the sun, and will not heed our commands under any circumstances; and the kalisteroi, who are partly free, and are the spirits whose dwelling place is between the air and the Great Moon, and who sometimes favor us with their sympathies; and the irgalisteroi, who are the demons of the subterranean world whom the Metamorphs subjugated, and whom we can sometimes turn to our uses, though they are dangerous angry beings and must be invoked only by the adept, for they will devour any others.”
As they returned from that lesson, Prestimion said quietly to Septach Melayn, “We should tread carefully, for there are irgalisteroi under our feet. Did you ever realize, Septach Melayn, that we shared our world with so many invisible beings?”
“I would take them all to this tavern here for flasks of wine at my expense, if they would show themselves to me this moment,” said Septach Melayn. And Gialaurys, walking a few paces ahead, called back angrily to them not to blaspheme, lest in their brazenness they call trouble down upon themselves, when they had already experienced trouble enough.
Patiently Gominik Halvor unfolded his mysteries before them, night after night. He told them of amulets and knots and ligatures, and of the magical powers of stones, and how to concoct healing potions; he taught them a spell for walking through fire, and a way to banish warts, and recipes for ridding oneself of coughs, of headaches, of pains in the bowels, of the sting of a scorpion. He explained the rules of gathering herbs, how certain plants must be picked before sunrise, and others only under the light of one of the lesser moons, and others only with the thumb and forefinger of the left hand. Prestimion yearned to ask why that was so, what would befall if one used the other hand and other fingers; but he had pledged himself to listen and observe, and not to express doubt or scorn.
The course went on and on. How to interpret the movements of the stars in their courses; how to cast the sticks to tell the shape of things to come; how to detect the lies of perjurers by making them hold certain white reeds in their hands; words of power to use against the attack of beasts in the forest; using senior demons to threaten and control junior ones; neutralizing the spells of rival magicians with devices made of wax and hair; which plants to use in testing the purity of metals, and which to make tinctures from for long life or great sexual vitality, and how to ensure a bountiful harvest, and how to ward off the depredations of thieves. There was even a spell to reverse the flow of rivers. (“Quickly, quickly,” Prestimion said, but only silently, to himself: “Let it be done at the Iyann, and let all those dead men walk again as the lake runs back into itself from below the dam.”) He instructed them in the use of rohillas and veralistias, and in the merits of corymbors, and made Prestimion bring his own amulet forth from beneath his jerkin, using it to illustrate his lecture with some quick conjurations that caused—or so he hinted—a rainstorm that had begun an hour before to dwindle and reach an end.
There was no end to the wonders that Gominik Halvor paraded before them, although his actual demonstrations of technique were few and far between. And to Prestimion’s way of thinking, the results he attained could almost always be explained away, if one were willing to work at it, in some mundane fashion not involving incantations and charms.
Prestimion and Septach Melayn had much private sport with all this at first, often making up witchcrafts of their own when the other two were out of earshot. “Cure toothache,” said Septach Melayn, “by spitting in a gromwark’s mouth and turning three times left to right.” And Prestimion: “A slowness of digestion is dealt with by counting falling stars in the sky, and squatting down on the ground just as the eleventh star of the night streaks past.” Then Septach Melayn: “To keep one’s nose from running, kiss the nose of a steetmoy precisely at the stroke of noon.” And there were many more, until they grew tired of the game.
It was good diversion for Prestimion, these early unhappy days in Triggoin, to go night after night to the magus and listen to his recitations. But gradually, as Gominik Halvor not only expounded on the arts of divination and the summoning of spirits, but led his pupils to make modest experiments of their own in such things, Prestimion began feeling a strange sense of distress. While much of what Gominik Halvor had to say still struck him as the wildest of lunatic fantasy, he kept encountering odd little examples of the apparent efficacy of certain spells. Those were hard to explain away.
And also, looking back over all that had befallen him, it was hard for him any longer to argue away all the various dire prophecies and forecasts that Svor had made for him, and Thalnap Zelifor, and this one and that one, in the days before Korsibar’s taking of the crown. Then too there was the vision given him by his mother’s magus, Galbifond, which had plainly showed him the battle of the Mavestoi and his flight into the Valmambra. All of which he had scoffed at, and all of which, ignored, had paved the way to his present disaster.
Under Gominik Halvor he was arriving at certain misty forecasts of his own. Once again he looked into a bowl of the kind Galbifond had showed him; and though the things it showed him now were far murkier than that other visi
on, they hinted at his going forth from Triggoin eventually and resuming his quest for the throne, and of further great battles, and of many more deaths, and of some immense ultimate event whose nature he could not comprehend at all but which seemed almost to hint at the end of the world, a time of blankness and blackness beyond which nothing could be seen.
“What is this?” he said to Gominik Halvor, of that last apocalyptic revelation. “What am I seeing here?”
But Gominik Halvor peered into the bowl for no more than half a second, and said in a tone of the greatest indifference, “Sometimes what looks inexplicable is merely meaningless, my good Count Polivand. And not everything that a novice conjures up has meaning. I advise you to put this from your mind.”
Which Prestimion attempted to do. But it stayed with him, that swirling vortex of nothingness churning in the bowl. The fact that he was working small sorceries of his own had already begun to unsettle him; the fact that they showed him, and Gominik Halvor, things that were incomprehensible but ominous, unsettled him even more. He felt feverish and strange much of the time now. He sometimes felt that his mind might be breaking up. To Septach Melayn, who had been his only ally in skepticism, and who remained invincibly closed-minded even now, Prestimion said one rainy night when they had sat up late together and had shared some bowls of wine, “I have built all my life about the certainties of reason, Septach Melayn, and I find that my faith in those certainties is threatened now.”
“Is it, Prestimion? Are you succumbing to your own incantations, then?”
“I confess that much of what Gominik Halvor says is beginning to make sense to me. But that statement itself makes no sense to me!”
“A sad plight, to be driven into madness by contradictions of your own devising. Relax, old friend. What these wizards spout is half madness and half fraud, and there’s no need to take either half seriously. I never have, and never will, and neither should you. Since I was a boy I’ve discarded and cast off from myself everything that didn’t seem to fit my understanding of how the world really is.”
Sorcerers of Majipoor m-4 Page 48
