Robert Silverberg - Sorcerers of Majipoor

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 along 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.

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, sendings 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 Vahnambra, 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.”