Robert Silverberg - Sorcerers of Majipoor

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 Ponlifex’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 rainforests 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 Miinim, 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.