Sorcerers of Majipoor by Robert Silverberg
The reek of its breath sickened him and the pain where it had ripped him was like a line of white fire. He lay on his back and kicked and pummeled at it as it fluttered and flurried about him. If it would only fly upward a little way, he would try to put an arrow through its belly; but no, no, it hovered close against him, frantically biting and clawing, wounding him again and again, until somehow in a burst of desperate fury he caught it by its long scrawny neck, wrapped one arm about it and brought a rock down against its skull over and over with his other hand.
It fell away from him and lay limply, flapping its wings slowly for a time, and then no longer moving. When it was done with the last of its death-spasms, Prestimion rose and walked over to it, and saw that itwas a monster nearly as big as he was. The thought came to him that its meat might be edible; but the thought of eating that creature was so revolting to him that he began to vomit once again, and vomited up the emptiness that was within him for an endless time.
Afterward he bandaged the deepest wound with cloth torn from his undershirt. And then he arose and went liniping onward. Before long he ceased to note the pain, though blood seeped through all day to his outer garments. He had begun to forget how to feel pain.
But then one day he was simply unable to go on at all.
It seemed to him that he must have been heading in the proper direction all this while, but there was no sign yet of the village of Jaggereen, and he had had nothing at all to eat in several days, no leaves, no roots, no insects or crawling things, even, and no water except what he had been able to lick from a flat rock that had a tiny trickle running along its face from somewhere. And now his strength was exhausted. This was, he knew, the end. All his proud ambitions would reach their termination in this forlorn place, and no one would ever know what had become of him, and in time the world would forget that there had ever been such a person as Prestimion of Muldemar, who might once have had his name inscribed in the list of kings.
He lay down in the shade of a tall rock, placed his pack on one side of him and his bow on the other, and closed his eyes, and waited. How long, he wondered, would it take death to come for him? An hour? A day? Already he felt time slowing to a halt. His mouth had the taste of dust and his breaths came so infrequently that each one was a surprise to him. Once in a while he opened his eyes and saw only a vague reddish swirl before him. Then for along time he lay quite still, and the mere idea of movement struck him as impossible of fulfillment, and it occurred to him that he might already be dead. But no, no, he heard himself draw another breath.
I should write my name beside my body, he told himself, so that when they find my bones they will know whose bones these were. He opened his eyes. Impossible to focus them. The red swirl, again. Behind it, the glare of the sun, resounding in his consciousness like a metal gong in the sky. Turned slightly toward the left. Extended a trembling finger, slowly and shakily traced the first letter of his name in the sand. The second letter, the third. Halted there, tried to remember what the fourth letter was. A voice from overhead said, “You write an S next.”
“Thank you,” Prestimion said.
“And after it a T,” said another, deeper voice, in the heavy accents of the city of Piliplok.
“I know that voice,” Prestimion murmured.
“Yes. You do. And you know mine also. —Pick him up, Gialaurys. Let’s waste no time getting him to the village.”
“Svor? Is that you?”
“Yes. And Gialaurys.”
“So you died also? And are we at the Source together, then?”
“If the village of Jaggereen is the Source, then we are at the Source, yes,” said Svor. “Or three hundred yards away, for that is how close you are to Jaggereen.” Prestimion felt himself being lifted and cradled in powerful arms. It seemed to him he had no weight at all. “Do you have him securely, Gialaurys?” The voice of Svor again. “Good. Hold him well. If you drop him, I think he’ll break into a hundred pieces.”
He was two weeks healing at Jaggereen, which was a town of flimsy wickerwork shacks sprouting from the Valmambra sands at the one place in all that desert land where fresh water rose to the surface from hidden springs. For the first week he lay on a bed of twigs, sleeping most of the time, awakening now and then to take sips of some strange sweet soup that Svor spooned out to him or to nibble at bits of a curious spongy Ghayrog bread. Then his strength began to return, and he left the bed and walked slowly about the room leaning on Gialaurys’s arm, and after a week of that he felt ready to move about on his own power, though he still was far from well.
“It was Gialaurys that saved me when the dam broke,” Svor told him. “Snatched me up from the water, carried me away on his back as we fled Korsibar’s men. And sustained me in the desert. But for him I’d have died ten different times between there and here.”
“As usual he lies,” said Gialaurys, though there was no rancor in his stolid voice. “Is a much tougher creature than he’d like us to think, is Svor. Needs no food to speak of and precious little water, and scrambles like a zamfigir over rocks and gullies, and half a dozen times caught little animals with his bare hands that made dinner for us both. We had a hard time coming through this way, but it would have been much harder, but for him. And you had the hardest journey of all, looks like. Another hour, and—well, we found you, is the important thing. And we three still live, when so many have perished.”
Svor said, “Korsibar will have much to answer for, breaking that dam. I saw men being swept away by the force of the water on every side, or carried under because they had never learned to swim. Many thousands are dead, I fear. And those just in our own army; but the water will have flooded out into the countryside, where unsuspecting farmers must have been drowned in their beds.”
“Not only Korsibar will be called to account,” said Gialaurys. “Surely it was Dantirya Sambail that put him up to the breaking of the dam: Korsibar would never have hatched such evil of his own.”
“Dantirya Sambail?” said Prestimion. “Why would he have—?”
And then he remembered: the eerie moment of the first explosions, when he had thought it was merely thunder he heard, and his brother Taradath had come to him to report that Gaviad’s army was on the march. Marching away from the river, as though Gaviad had been warned of what was to befall the dam. In the chaos of the moment Prestimion had put that from his mind, and had not thought of it again until it was recalled to him now. “Yes,” he said. “Of course! Playing each side against the other for his own advantage. Very likely it was he who counseled Korsibar to take up a position behind that dam; and the Procurator also who kindly sent us those hierax-men, so we would know Korsibar was there, and follow him toward the dam in order that we’d be below it when the lake fell upon us. While telling his two despicable brothers to pull their armies away at the last moment before the breaking of the dam and save their worthless selves. Who else but Dantirya Sambail could conceive such a plan? By the Lady, I’ll cut him apart inch by inch if ever I capture him!”
“You shouldn’t shout like that,” Svor said. “You’re quite weak yet.”
Prestimion ignored that. “Who else survives? Do you know?”
“Of those who were west of the river, a good many, I think,” said Svor. “Korsibar’s troops were slower coming down that side than on ours, and there was time for Miaule and his people to get away, if they were able to stay ahead of the rushing water.”
“Then there’s hope for Septach Melayn?”
“Ah, much more than hope,” Svor said. “The Ghayrogs have told us of him, both at Valmambra and here at Jaggereen. He came dancing through the desert well ahead of us, cool and lively as though it were a quick, pleasant journey such as the one from the Castle to High Morpin, and has long since gone on beyond here. He’ll be waiting for us at Triggoin.”
“Triggoin?” Prestimion said. “Why would he have gone to Triggoin?”
“The vision you were shown at Muldemar House said that Triggoin was where you would
Prestimion laughed. “And is there already, most likely. Septach Melayn among the sorcerers—what a curious idea that is! Will we see him wearing a wizard’s robes, do you think, when we get there, and making mystic signs at us by way of greeting? It would be his idea of amusement.” And then he said, in a darker tone, “I wonder how my brothers fared.”
“Abrigant, surely, escaped with Miaule,” Gialaurys said. “Things went much easier for those who were on that side of the river, as Svor has already told you.”
There was an uncomfortable silence then.
“And Taradath?” Prestimion asked finally. “He was with me when the dam began to break. I never saw him after the water separated us.”
Quietly Gialaurys said, “I tried to save him, I swear before the Divine that I did. I had one arm about him and the other about Svor. But then came another surge of the water, and he was ripped from my grasp. —I tell you, Prestimion, I would have held him if I could, but it would have cost me my arm, and then he would have been swept away anyway.”
Prestimion felt a leaden weight suddenly where his heart had been. But he hid his feelings and put the best face on things he could, saying, “Even though the water was so very strong, it may yet be that he swam to safety.”
“Yes. Maybe so,” said Gialaurys carefully, in a voice that left no doubt how unlikely he thought that was.
“You ought to rest now,” said Svor, before Prestimion could make any further inquiries. “Your strength is not yet what it should be. And a difficult journey still awaits us, once you are ready to travel again.”
2
TRIGGOIN OF the sorcerers lay well beyond the desert’s northern margin, nestled pleasantly in a green valley beside a circular lake bright as glass, with a heavily wooded double-humped mountain rising in back of it. Viewed from the last turn of the hilltop highway that approached it from the south, it seemed no more than an ordinary place, one that could have been any medium-sized city at all, anywhere on Majipoor. A gentle breeze was blowing, cool and fresh and sweet, and the grassy borders of the road were glistening from the fall of a recent light rain. All his life Prestimion had heard dire tales of Triggoin, of the flame-red sky and the blue spirit-fires that burned in its air by day and by night and the strange shrieks and sobs of disembodied entities that resounded constantly there. But he could detect no sign of such things now as he and Svor and Gialaurys made their descent toward the cheerful-looking and even pretty city below them. After the bleakness and horrors of the Valmambra, though, almost any place would have looked cheerful and pretty, he reflected.
“So we are here at last,” Gialaurys said. “And here we will find magicians to hire to our service, and perhaps will even learn a trick or two of magic ourselves that will send Korsibar running in fright to his mother, eh?”
“I envy you the certainty of your faith in magic,” said Prestimion. “Even here at the very borders of Triggoin I still resist the idea that there’s any merit to it.”
“Ah, just accept the evidence of your eyes, Prestimion! Wherever you look about you in the world, you see sorcery at work, and the work it does is real!”
“Wherever I look I see deceit and illusion, Gialaurys, which lead the world ever deeper into darkness.”
“Was it deceit when your mother’s magus showed you your very self pictured in that bowl, crossing the Valmambra? Was it deceit when Thalnap Zelifor came to us in the Labyrinth to warn you of the secret enemy who would contend with you for the Castle, and of the terrible war that would break out? Was it deceit when—”
“Spare me the rest,” Prestimion said, holding up one hand. “It will be a wearisome story, rehearsing all the omens I failed to heed on the road that brought us from there to here, and I’m weary enough these days as it is. Let me be, Gialaurys. My soul relinquishes its doubt very slowly, it seems. But perhaps I’ll experience a great conversion out of my skepticism here: who knows?”
“I’ll pay some magus a rich fee to give me a spell that will bring you to your senses,” said Gialaurys.
“Yes,” Prestimion said. “I think you have the solution now: use sorcery to lead me to belief in sorcery’s merits. That may be the only way it can be done.” And all three of them laughed. But they laughed in different ways, for Svor and Gialaurys had long been believers, and the robust tone of their laughter seemed to express their confidence that Prestimion would go out of Triggoin a different man from the one who was entering it But Prestimion’s laughter was thin and hollow. Any laughter that came from him these days was forced. There was little mirth left in him after the calamity of the Mavestoi Dam.
The city looked less cheery and innocent once they were inside its walls. A cobbled plaza just within the gate led to a dark chaos of medieval streets that went winding off in a dozen directions, all of them coiling tightly in upon themselves so that it was impossible to see more than a few dozen yards down any of them.
The style of construction here ran to narrow five-story mustard-colored buildings of an ancient-looking sort, all jammed one against another, most with gabled roofs and blank-looking facades pierced only by the tiniest of windows. Now and then a shadowy passageway separated two buildings, and these passageways seemed occupied. Whispers could be heard coming from them, and occasionally hooded eyes, bright and keen-looking and unfriendly, peered out of them. Sometimes two pairs of green eyes looked out, for there were many Su-Suheris foIk in these streets, and also an unusually great number of Vroons. But everyone, human and alien alike, carried himself with an air of being privy to the great mysteries of the universe. These are people, Prestimion thought, who walk and talk daily with invisible spirits, and have no doubts of themselves as they consort with phantoms. He had never felt so profoundly ill at ease in his life.
“You seem to know where you’re going,” he said to Svor as they marched single file through the streets, which were too narrow and crowded to let them walk three abreast. “I thought you’d never been here except in dreams.”
“But they were vivid dreams,” said Svor. “I have some idea of what to expect. Look, here’s a hostelry. We should take rooms, first.”
“Here?” Prestimion cried. It was a dark, grimy, slouch-sided building that looked to be five thousand years old. “This would be no fitting place for pigs!”
“We are not in Muldemar now, O Prestimion,” said Svor very softly. “This place will do, I think, and it’s not likely that we’ll find a better one hereabouts.”
The rooms were small, with low ceilings and small windows that admitted the barest nip of light, and they smelled of rank spices and stale meat, as though previous boarders had been in the habit of cooking their meals in them. But the lodgings Prestimion had had in the Valmambra left him little disposed to quibble over these, which seemed palatial enough in comparison with lying half frozen under the open sky in the desert, or sleeping in some wickerwork Ghayrog hut through which sandy winds blew all night The place was reasonably clean, at least, with decent lavatory facilities just down the hall, and Prestimion’s mattress, though it rested right on the stone floor and seemed both stiff and clammy, had clean sheets on it and a relatively insignificant population of bugs and ticks.
“I’ll return shortly,” said Svor after they were settled. He was gone an hour and a half. When he came back, he brought with him a frail white-haired man clad in simple dark robes, who from the look of him might have been two hundred years old, or even two thousand: so thin that any vagrant wind might have carried him away, and with pale skin whiter than the whitest paper and almost transparent. Svor introduced him as Gominik Halvor, who had been, he said, his instructor in the wizardly arts long ago; and added that he was the father of Heszmon Gorse, who was chief magus to the fo
“His father!” Prestimion blurted, astonished. It had always seemed to him that the somber and aloof Heszmon Gorse must be the fifth or tenth oldest man in the world, and it had never occurred to him that Heszmon Gorse’s father too might still be alive. But Gominik Halvor seemed incurious about the reason for Prestimion’s outburst. He merely smiled and studied Prestimion a moment with small dark eyes, very bright and shining, that were half buried within the wrinldes and folds of his ancient face.
Svor said, indicating Prestimion, “This is Polivand of Muldemar. And this,” with a nod toward Gialaurys, “is Gheveldin of Piliplok. There will be a fourth student also, who has not yet joined us, but we believe he is somewhere in Triggoin. We are ready to begin our course of studies at any time.”
“The seventh hour of the night will be an auspicious time to start,” said Gominik Halvor. His voice was another surprise: not the faint reedy whistling one might expect from someone so ancient, but the strong and deep voice of a man in the prime of life. Looking from Prestimion to Gialaurys, he said, “You, Gheveldin: I see that you have had some initiation already into our mysteries. But Polivand here has the aura of an utter novice.”
“That is what I am,” said Prestimion. “I have no skills at magic whatever, nor any knowledge of its secrets.”
“So I see, if you call our arts ‘magic.’ We prefer to speak of them as our ‘philosophy,’ or else as our ‘science.’ ”
“Philosophy, then. I stand corrected and beg your pardon.”
“Are you fully prepared, do you think, to open your mind to our disciplines?” the old man asked.
“Well—” Prestimion hesitated. He was not at all prepared for that, or for any other aspect of this conversation: Svor had led him without warning into some scheme beyond his understanding.