Robert Silverberg - Sorcerers of Majipoor

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 go one day, after some great battle. And I dreamed it also,” said Svor. “He must have expected that Triggoin was where we would all go, after the catastrophe by the dam. In any case, it’s certainly Triggoin where he has taken himself now: the Ghayrogs said he left here bound on a northward track.”

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.”

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.