Several more times in the course of the night Korsibar heard his name mentioned, and even smatterings of political talk. Someone said in a knowing tone that he had heard Dantirya Sambail was hoping to make himself High Counsellor in place of Farquanor, with an eye toward becoming Coronal himself someday when old Confalume died and Korsibar went to be Pontifex. But another replied just as knowingly, “Lord Korsibar’ll never put the Procurator so high. Never. Procurator’s too dangerous: Korsibar will send him packing home to Ni-moya. He knows how to deal with troublesome characters, Korsibar does. Look what he did to Prestimion!”
When Korsibar and Thalnap Zelifor slipped back untroubled by the guards into the Castle in the hours just before dawn, his mood was one of exhilaration and triumph. What he had heard at High Morpin had allayed his worst fears. “You have rescued me from the depths of despair,” Korsibar told the Vroon, and handed him a purse of silver royals. “But for that machine of yours—ah, I’d have been lost indeed.” And walked off whistling happily to his chambers, having taken on once more his own form.
But new doubts came creeping in, in the days that followed. The reassurance that Korsibar had found in High Morpin quickly faded; he needed to go forth once more, and make certain that those words of affection and loyalty that he had heard there were not mere exceptions and anomalies in a climate of general disapproval of his government.
And so go forth he did, arranging everything as he had before, setting out this time in mid-afternoon and spending a long evening in Bombifale of the orange sandstone walls, where for hours and hours he listened with care but overheard nothing that mattered in any way to him, and then once more caught scraps of a conversation devoted to a flattering estimation of his reign.
So, then! His fears were all for nothing!
It was clear to him now and unarguably certain that he was a proper Coronal, that he had the support of the populace, that even the dreadful stroke by which he had shattered the armies of Prestimion had not cost him the love of the people.
For Korsibar now it became an addiction, these ventures into the cities of the Mount by stealth to hear himself being praised. He made a third trip, to glowing Halanx, and a fourth to High Morpin again, and then to Sipermit just below the Castle on the side of the Mount opposite to High Morpin. It was in Sipermit that Korsibar slipped up at last, and let his hand stray from the switch of Thalnap Zelifor’s device, one moonlit night in the statuary garden of Lord Makhario as he leaned forward straining his ears to pick up some bit of talk of current affairs that was just beyond the range of his hearing.
“Lordship!” Thalnap Zelifor whispered urgently.
“Please,” said Korsibar. “Can’t you see I’m trying to listen to what they’re—”
“Lordship! The switch!”
“Ah, the switch!” Korsibar cried, appalled at his own stupidity. “For the love of the Divine!” Both his hands, he realized, were free, and he was standing in plain view in the bright moonlight not far from twelve or fifteen citizens of the city of Sipermit, not as the two-headed saunterer of a moment before, but as the Coronal Lord Korsibar in his green and white robe of office. Hastily he thrust his hand down to the device at his side and shoved the switch into place. But not before he saw the incredulous gapes and stares of half a dozen onlookers nearby.
“You are concealed again. But we should leave here quickly, lordship,” said Thalnap Zelifor.
“Yes. Yes. Cast a spell on them, will you? Make their minds grow cloudy, so they come to disbelieve what they just saw.”
“I will try to do that,” the Vroon said. But there was an element of uncertainty in his tone, a certain disturbing lack of confidence that aroused great disquiet and apprehension in Korsibar as he strode hastily from the park.
4
In the third month of his stay in Triggoin, Prestimion felt that he had come to the point of desperation, the utter low ebb of the troublesome voyage through the world on which he had been bound since the day that Korsibar had snatched the starburst crown from him in the Labyrinth.
His mind was full of hazy sorceries now, half digested, minimally understood. Gominik Halvor’s nightly teachings had both illuminated and muddled him; for Prestimion by this time had come both to believe and disbelieve in that world of invisible spirits that so many people had told him lay just beyond the wall of human perception. Here in Triggoin he had seen, again and again and again, the apparent inexplicable efficacy of certain spells and enchantments, of certain amulets and devices, of ointments and potions and herbal powders and mixtures of powdered minerals. He saw stones that glowed strange colors in the dark and gave off heat. He watched bizarre demons dancing in the white light of black candles. He saw much more besides, much of it maddeningly plausible. And, seeing all this, it was ever harder for him to say, “This is unreal, this is pretense, this is delusion, this is folly,” when the evidence of his eyes told him otherwise.
And yet—yet—
Prestimion noted evidence also of everything he had always denounced: frauds of all sorts, things that beyond any doubt were unrealities, pretenses, delusions, follies. He peered into factories in this town where crude statuettes and portraits of imaginary gods and demons were manufactured by bored squatting craftsmen in untold quantities for sale to the credulous, and watched their products being boxed and taken to the loading piers to be shipped everywhere in the world. He leafed through cheap, badly printed books of curses intended to harass one’s enemies and incantations to bring prosperity or a child of a desired sex or some other yearned-for thing, that plainly were turned out by unscrupulous hacks to be sold to credulous fools.
He heard Gominik Halvor admit that it was useful for a successful magus to study certain techniques of sleight-of-hand and hypnotism. And he listened also to young boastful student mages in the taverns speaking of the tricks they had lately mastered, the making of waxen image-figures that stood unharmed in fireplaces and sang in unknown tongues, the spell that seemed to open doors into adjacent universes, the conjuring of levitations and disappearances and wondrous appearances, all of them by their own admission managed by deceptive mechanical means. These youths offered to sell their fraudulations to one another for stiff prices: “Fifty royals for the dancing waters!” they cried. “Sixty for the floating ghosts!” All of which confirmed and reconfirmed Prestimion’s original innate skeptical views. But against that he had to place the new knowledge he had acquired himself from Gominik Halvor, incomplete and misunderstood though it was, that did indeed seem to open real doors into real places that lay beyond reality. And this new knowledge, the things he could in no way refute even though they contradicted all that he had always believed, shook him to the core.
By night came turbulent dreams in which malevolent and horrific creatures coursed through his mind. He saw a great black crab biting the corner of the sun, and a giant serpent with a thousand legs slithering up over the edge of the world onto the land, and swarms of insects with the faces of wolves, and many other things of that kind, so that often he awoke sweating and trembling, and a time came when he feared sleeping altogether.
But on other nights, sometimes, there were kindlier dreams, send-ings from the Lady of the Isle. These were puzzling to him in their own way, for he had heard that Korsibar’s mother, the Lady Roxivail, was now installed on the Isle of Dreams and had taken command of the machineries by which sendings went forth to the world, and the former Lady Kunigarda had fled instead of taking up residence in the Terrace of Shadows on the Isle, where former Ladies were supposed to dwell. But these sendings that came to Prestimion now were unquestionable sendings of the Lady Kunigarda. He recognized her firm but gentle touch, the iron purity of her spirit. Were there now two Ladies of the Isle, each of them equipped with the transmitting devices by which the Lady sent her visions into the minds of the world’s sleepers?
In the dreams that came from Kunigarda, he found himself wandering again in the Valmambra, a ragged weary man staggering at the outer edge of exhaustion
from one hideous szambra-tree to the next in that endless desolation. But instead of the blazing clangorous sun in the sky, there was the shining smiling face of the Lady Kunigarda, and her voice came to him, saying, “Yes, Prestimion, go onward, go on to the place you are meant to reach, you are not yet at the end of your energy.” And she would say to him also, “You must go on. You are the world’s redeemer, Prestimion, from whom we will have our salvation.” And then also, as he tottered at the brink of collapse in his journey through that dread land of little water and burning sand, crying out that he had no more strength, that he would perish here: “Walk on, Lord Prestimion our true Coronal, until you reach the throne.”
Madness, was it? The megalomaniacal follies of his own troubled mind? He reminded himself that Korsibar was Coronal, and he a bewildered fugitive hiding under a name he often could not remember in this eerie city of wizards.
He was lost in confusions.
And becoming estranged from his friends as well. His partial embrace of sorceries had put him apart from Septach Melayn, whose irreverent wit and dancing-master mannerisms no longer amused him. But even Svor and Gialaurys, for all their love of him and their joy at seeing him come over at least a little way to their beliefs, had grown very distant from his soul. Prestimion held them guilty in a fashion for having brought this torrent of incomprehensible contradiction down upon him. Why had he chosen believers to be his companions? Why had he not limited himself to the company of cheerful materialist men like Septach Melayn? He was doing Svor and Gialaurys a great injustice by this, he knew; but so frayed were the moorings of his heart that he shrank away even from them, which was something they were altogether unable to understand.
No question of it, he had lost his way entirely. He was wandering hopelessly in a terrible desert. His only comfort was in the sendings that came from Kunigarda; and they were few and far between, and gave him no help in fulfilling the high destiny whose compulsions, he was coming to admit, still plagued him.
Then one night there came to him in a dream not the Lady Kunigarda, but the magus Gominik Halvor, who stood before him as he lay sleeping in his dismal little room and said to him, “This must not go on any longer. The time has come for you to seek guidance.” And when Prestimion awakened, he knew it had been a true dream: that he had wandered long enough without purpose or understanding in this chaos, and guidance now must be sought.
* * *
On a night when no moons were in the sky, but only the potent cold blaze of the ten million million stars, Prestimion rose in the hour after midnight and quietly left his little low-ceilinged room, carrying under his arm a small bundle of things that he had been collecting over the previous ten days. He went out from the inn and made his way through the tangled winding streets of Triggoin, no longer as much of a mystery to him as when he first came here, and left the city by the gate known as Trinatha Gate at the northern side of town, which faced the white star of that name.
There was a pleasant open park here, up against the double-humped mountain that lay just north of the city, a place of meadows and streams and some copses of leafy trees. No one, or hardly anyone, went to that park at this hour. And he wanted to be away from the city and its inhabitants, its crowded narrow old buildings impregnated with five thousand years of magic, its multitude of sorcerers casting spells day and night, its jostling invisible hordes of demons and ghosts and spirits. The park, close though it was by sorcerous Triggoin, was a peaceful place. Prestimion needed to be calm: as calm as was possible for him to be just now.
In a quiet grassy place between two little groves of trees, where a trickling stream so narrow that he could hop across it went flowing by, he set down his bundle and knelt beside it. He did not dare allow himself to think. Thinking, now, would be fatal to his purpose.
The strange new star that had burst into the sky while he was making the journey between the Labyrinth and the Castle was almost directly overhead, bathing him in the great intensity of its light. He could feel its blue-white fire streaming down upon him. It was a welcome sensation, a purifying sensation. “Lord Korsibar’s Star” was what they were calling it, or so he had heard, but to Prestimion it seemed there was nothing at all of Korsibar in its brilliant radiance. It was a star of change, a star of great transformation, yes: but it was not Lord Korsibar’s Star and never would be.
“Help me,” he whispered.
Prestimion understood that he was praying, a thing he had never done before in his life. He did not ask to know to whom he prayed.
He knelt a long while in that prayer, first looking down at the soft thick dewy grass, which looked almost black in the starlight though in fact its true color was closer to scarlet, and then very slowly lifting his head, looking up, straight up, into the eye of the new star.
“Help me.”
He had learned some words, and he spoke them now. “Voro liuro yad thearchivoliia,” he said, and said them backward too, “Thearchivoliia yad liuro vow.” And heard a rumbling in the distance, as of thunder, though the night was clear and dry. He said then also the Five Words that had never been written down, and the Three Words that could never be written down. Then he took from his bundle the balls of colored twine that he had brought with him, and carefully laid out strips of different colors according to certain patterns he had learned.
When the patterns were complete, he looked up at the sky again, but this time with his eyes closed, and he uttered Names that he had heard others utter before, but never had expected to be speaking himself.
“Bythois!” he said, and waited a moment, and said also, “Proiarchis!” There were two loud rumbles of thunder. Prestimion did not ask himself why. “Sigei!” he said, and waited.
And then:
“Remmer!”
At that last and most puissant of Names there was a crack of thunder and a flash of lightning that danced across the sky, of such a brightness that he could see it even behind the lids of his closed eyes.
From his pack now he took the herbs he had brought with him, the powdered circaris leaves and the seeds of the cobily and the dried jan-gars, and sprinkled them into the palm of his hand and licked them into his mouth. Which smarted and stung for a moment, until he found the flask that contained the oil of gallicundi, and drank that down, which eased the stinging somewhat. There was only the pardao-berry to eat after that, which he did; and then he waited. Sweat rose in beads on his forehead and streamed down his face. A powerful dizziness overcame him, so that his head reeled and spun and the world was whirling three ways at once. And still he waited, kneeling in the soft grass, head turned to the sky, eyes shut.
After a time he opened his eyes and saw that a greenish-yellow mist had arisen and that there were four moons in the sky that he had never seen before, three small pale angular ones that were like white slivers and a greater, redder one in the midst of those. That fourth one was diamond-shaped, and from its four sharp corners came a sparkling blue-white radiance much like the light of the new star. Prestimion fixed his eyes on that and after a little while felt himself beginning to rise. He drifted up above the feathery hilltops of the two-humped mountain that overlooked Triggoin, and shortly saw the city spread out far below him, flat, like a mere sketch of itself. And went higher still, so that distant Castle Mount stood out against the night like a lantern, and a bright bronzy glow appeared to him in the east beyond it where the cities on the other side of the Mount were already opening to the new day.
Higher yet. He was above the realm of clouds. The world billowed like a carpet of thick fog beneath him.
The stars here burned with a brilliance beyond all comprehension. The air, which had for a time during his ascent been engulfed in a dazzling whiteness, grew dark again, and then darker than dark, and became very cold. He was in a kingdom of perpetual night. This was, he knew, the border of heaven; and as he soared through it he saw apparitions and portents all about him, great armies of fierce men wielding spears and swords who were battling on every side, and streaks
of bloody lightning coursing among them, and swirling lights like comets ripped from the firmament plunging wildly down toward the world below.
He was freezing now. His hair, streaming out behind him, was stiff with ice. His blood had ceased to move in his veins. But there was no pain for him, and fear was wholly absent from his spirit. He was in a kind of ecstasy. Upward and upward he continued, until a band of blackness had closed around him and not even the stars were visible. There was nothing in the sky but Majipoor itself, like a child’s ball beneath him, turning slowly, a thing all green and blue and brown, and he could make out the great dark wedge that was Alhanroel and the long wide green continent that was Zimroel and the little Isle of Dreams lying between them, with tawny Suvrael hanging below; and then the world turned and he saw only the Great Sea, that no one had ever crossed from one side to the other, a vast emerald scar spanning the world’s middle. And then Alhanroel came into view again; for the world was turning ever faster and faster, the continents and the sea that lay between them spinning by again and again and again.
It was his. It was meant to be his, and he was meant for it. All doubts of that dropped forever from his soul. This was the thing he sought; this was what he had come to find, up here at reality’s edge. His. The world was his, and he was the world’s, and it hovered before him in the air within his reach.
Prestimion reached down and touched it.
It hopped up into his hand, that little ball that was the world, and he held it carefully there, and looked at it closely, and breathed upon it. And said to it, “I am Prestimion who would heal you. But first I must heal myself.” And knew that he would. A great door had swung open in his soul that had been closed until now by iron bars.
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