Robert Silverberg - Sorcerers of Majipoor

It was beyond comprehension. The Procurator of Nimoya, in magnificent traveling robes of lustrous green velvet over flaring yellow breeches, was grinning diabolically at him from out of the midst of a bewildered-looking group of Castle guardsmen, some of whom were holding drawn weapons. For all the splendor of his garb, the Procurator looked dusty-faced and creased as though from a long hard journey. Five or six men in the boldly colored livery worn by Dantirya Sambail’s people were nearby, as travel-worn as their master. They were being pressed against the wall by even more guardsmen. Farquanor recognized Mandralisca, the sharp-faced poison-taster, among them.

“What is this?” Farquanor demanded, turning to the highest-ranking guardsman in the group, a Hjort named Kyargitis, who had the perpetually glum face and bulging eyes of his kind. Kyargitis looked more than usually unhappy just now. His thick orange tongue was flicking nervously back and forth over the many rows of rubbery chewing-cartilage that filled his capacious mouth.

“The Procurator and these men of his obtained admission to the Castle through Dizimaule Gate—I will make full investigation, Count Farquanor, I promise you that—and succeeded in getting all the way to the vestibule of the Pinitor Court before they were challenged,” said the Hjort, puffing with chagrin. “He insisted on seeing you. There was a scuffle—it was necessary to restrain him physically—”

Farquanor, altogether baffled by this inexplicable materialization outside his door of the last man he might have expected to see in this hallway today—the audacity of Dantirya Sambail’s marching into the Castle with this little handful of men and expecting anything other than immediate arrest—gave the Procurator a sharp look. “Have you come here to assassinate me?”

“Why would I do that?” said Dantirya Sambail, all charm and friendliness now. “Do you think I covet your post?” The Procurator’s mysterious amethyst eyes fastened on Farquanor’s, giving him such a fierce blast of that strange outreaching tenderness of his that Farquanor had to struggle to keep from flinching before it. “No, Farquanor, my business is not with you, except indirectly. I’m here to speak with the Coronal on a matter of the highest importance. And so, since protocol requires that I apply myself to the Coronal’s High Counsellor—my congratulations, by the way, on your appointment: he took his time about it, eh?—I came up here to the Pinitor to see if I could find you, and—”

“Protocol?” Farquanor said, still bemused with amazement at the sight of this man here at a time like this. “There’s no protocol for granting audience to rebels against the crown! You are proscribed, Dantirya Sambail: are you not aware of that? The only appointment you have is in the Sangamor tunnels! How could you imagine anything else?”

“Tell Lord Korsibar I’m here and would see him,” rejoined the Procurator coolly, in a tone one might use in speaking with a footman.

“Lord Korsibar is busy at present with—”

“Tell him that I’m here and that I bring him his means of victory in the present insurrection,” Dantirya Sambail said, and he was even less cordial now than he had been a moment before. “Tell him those exact words. And I promise you, Farquanor, if you do me any interference in bringing about my conference with the Coronal, if you delay me by so much as another heartbeat and a half, I will see to it ultimately that you not only are removed from your present high office but are very slowly flayed of every inch of your skin, which will be wrapped in strips about your face until you smother from it. This is my very solemn promise, Count Farquanor, which I am most unlikely to fail to keep.”

Farquanor stared a moment, and then another, without replying. It seemed to him that behind the Procurator’s usual arrogance and bluster lay some extraordinary intensity of tension and unease. Nor was a threat of that nature from a man of Dantirya Sambail’s sort to be taken casually.

This strange visit was a matter, Count Farquanor began to realize, that went beyond his scope of office. It would be wisest not to interpose any pretensions of his own. In a formal frosty tone he said, “I will notify Lord Korsibar that you are in the Castle, and he will see you or not, as he chooses, Dantirya Sambail.”

“Why are you here?” Korsibar asked, as surprised as Farquanor had been just a short while before. “I never wanted to see you again, after you forced Prestimion from my grasp. And I hardly thought to have you come calling at a time like this. Should you not be fighting against me now beside your loathsome brothers in Salinakk?”

“I am not your enemy, my lord,” said Dantirya Sambail. “Nor are they.”

“You call me ‘my lord’?”

“I do.”

The meeting was taking place not in the throne-room or in the Coronal’s private office, but in Lord Kryphon’s Grand Hall, a long and dark and narrow room much less grand than its name suggested, where wall-charts of the campaign against Prestimion were hung and constantly updated.

Korsibar spent much of his time in this room these days. He sat slouched now in a low chair of some antique kind, with twining lizards of wrought iron for its arms. The only movements he made were those of his eyes, which shifted restlessly from side to side in their deep sockets; other than that he was utterly still. With one hand he gripped the yawning fanged head of the lizard that was the left-hand arm-rest, and with the other he held his head propped upright with a finger pressed against his cheekbone, hidden deep within his thick beard. Korsibar had let his beard grow in full lately, something he had never done before, though Aliseeva and other women of the court had told him that it made him look much older than his years; indeed, there were even a few bright strands of white glistening in its blackness. That was something new. But this was a taxing time beyond anything for which his comfortable early life had prepared him.

Sanibak-Thastimoon was with him, and Prince Serithorn and Count Iram and Venta of Haplior, and several of his other close advisers. Two Skandar guardsman hovered close beside Korsibar in case the Procurator had some mischief in mind. Dantirya Sambail stood squarely before the Coronal in that customary cocky spread-legged stance of his, arms pulled back behind him and head thrust forward. Count Farquanor, looking sour-faced and strangely sallow, stood just behind him.

Slowly, for he was very tired this day, Korsibar said, “I am your lord, so you say, and you are not my enemy, so you also say, and yet your armies hold the field against mine. Why is it that they don’t seem to know you’re not my enemy, Dantirya Sambail?”

The Procurator nodded toward the wall-charts. “Have my brothers’ soldiers done your troops much harm?”

“At the Jhelum battle they did. I have this from Farholt.”

“And at the battle by Stymphinor, what there?”

“That battle was a short one. Navigorn had Prestimion beaten in the first half hour. We had few casualties there.”

“Send to Navigorn, my lord, and ask him whether the troops of Zimroel saw action against him at all at Styinphinor. Tell him that I claim it is the case that the armies under the command of my brothers Gaviad and Gaviundar never entered the fray that day, but held back, rather, until the issue was settled against Prestimion, and see what he says.”

Korsibar knotted his fingers in his beard and tugged at it somewhat after the fashion of Duke Svor, from whom, so he suspected, he had learned that mannerism. There was a terrible hammering behind his eyes. After a little while he replied, “If there were soldiers of yours at Stymphinor pledged to Prestimion, then why were they not fighting that day?”