Robert Silverberg: Sorcerers of Majipoor

Once again, for Ralph

There had been omens all year, a rain of blood over Ni-moya and sleek hailstones shaped like tears falling on three of the cities of Castle Mount and then a true nightmare vision, a giant four-legged black beast with fiery ruby eyes and a single spiraling horn in its forehead, swimming through the air above the port city of Alaisor at twilight. That was a beast of a sort never before seen on Majipoor, not anywhere in the land and certainly not in the sky. And now, in his virtually inaccessible bedchamber at the deepest level of the Labyrinth, the aged Pontifex Prankipin lay dying at last, surrounded by the corps of mages and wizards and thaumaturges that had been the comfort of the old man’s later years.

Throughout the world it was a time of tension and apprehension. Who could tell what transformations and hazards the death of the Pontifex might bring? Things had been stable for so long: four full decades, and then some, since there had been a change of ruler on Majipoor.

As soon as word of the Pontifex’s illness had first gone forth, the lords and princes and dukes of Majipoor began to gather at the vast underground capital for the double event—the sad passing of an illustrious emperor, and the joyous commencement of a new and glorious reign. Now they waited with increasing and barely concealed restlessness for the thing that everyone knew must shortly come.

But the weeks went by and still the old Pontifex clung to life, dying by the tiniest of increments, losing ground slowly and with the most extreme reluctance. The imperial doctors had long since acknowledged the hopelessness of his case. Nor were the imperial sorcerers and mages able to make any use of their arts to save him. Indeed, they had foretold the inevitability of his death many months ago, though not to him. They waited too, as all Majipoor waited, for their prophecy to be confirmed.

Prince Korsibar, the splendid and universally admired son of the Coronal Lord Confalume, was the first of the great ones to arrive at the Pontifical capital. Korsibar had been hunting in the bleak deserts just to the south of the Labyrinth when the news came to him that the Pontifex did not have long to live. At his side was his sister, the dark-eyed and lovely Lady Thismet, and an assemblage of his usual princely hunting companions; and then, a few days after, had come the Grand Admiral of the kingdom, Prince Gonivaul, and the Coronal’s cousin Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, whose rank was that of High Counsellor, and not far behind them the fabulously wealthy Prince Serithorn of Samivole, who claimed descent from no less than four different Coronals of antiquity.

The vigorous, dynamic young Prince Prestimion of Muldemar—he who was generally expected to be chosen as Majipoor’s new Coronal once Lord Confalume succeeded Prankipin as Pontifex—had arrived also, traveling down from his home within the Coronal’s castle atop great Castle Mount in Serithorn’s party. With Prestimion were his three inseparable companions—the hulking wintry-souled Gialaurys and the deceptively exquisite Septach Melayn and slippery little Duke Svor. Other high potentates turned up before long: Dantirya Sambail, the brusque and formidable Procurator of Ni-moya, and jolly Kanteverel of Bailemoona, and the hierarch Marcatain, personal representative of the Lady of the Isle of Sleep. Then Lord Confalume himself made his appearance: the great Coronal. Some said he was the greatest in Majipoor’s long history. For decades he had presided in happy collaboration with the senior monarch Prankipin over a period of unparalleled worldwide prosperity.

So all was in place for the proclamation of succession. And the arrival of Lord Confalume at the Labyrinth surely meant that the end must be near for Prankipin; but the event that everyone was expecting did not come, and did not come, and went on not coming, day after day, week after week.

Of all the restless princes, it was Korsibar, the Coronal’s robust and energetic son, who appeared to be taking the delay most badly. He was a man of the outdoors, famous as a huntsman: a long-limbed, broad-shouldered man whose lean hard-cheeked face was tanned almost black from a lifetime spent under the full blaze of the sun. This dreary sojourn in the immense subterranean cavern that was the Labyrinth was maddening to him.

Korsibar had just spent close to a year planning and equipping an ambitious hunting expedition through the southern arc of the continent of Alhanroel. That was something he had dreamed of for much of his life: a far-ranging enterprise that would have covered thousands of miles and allowed him to fill the trophy room that he kept for himself at Lord Confalume’s Castle with a grand display of new and marvelous beasts. But after only ten days in the field he had had to abort the project and hurry here, to the somber and musty place that was the Labyrinth, that sunless, joyless hidden realm deep beneath the skin of the planet.

Where, apparently, he would be compelled, for his father’s sake and the sake of his own conspicuous station, to pace and fidget idly in that many-leveled infinity of endlessly spiraling passageways for weeks or even months. Not daring to leave, interminably awaiting the hour when the old Pontifex breathed his last breath and Lord Confalume succeeded to the imperial throne.

Meanwhile, other men less nobly born were free to range the hunting grounds far above his head to their heart’s content. Korsibar was reaching the point of not being able to bear it any longer. He dreamed of the hunt; he dreamed of looking upward into the bright clear sky, and feeling cool, sweet northerly breezes against his cheek. As his idle days and nights in the Labyrinth stretched on and on, the force of the impatience within him was building toward an explosion.

“The waiting, that’s the filthy worst of it,” Korsibar said, looking around at the group assembled in the big onyx-roofed antechamber of the Hall of Judgment. That antechamber, three levels up from the imperial chambers themselves, had become a regular place of assembly for the visiting lordlings. “The everlasting waiting! Gods! When will he die? Let it happen, since there’s no preventing it! Let it happen, and let us be done with it.”

“Everything will come in the fullness of time,” said Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar in rotund and pious tones.

“How much longer must we sit here?” Korsibar rejoined angrily “The whole world is thrown into a paralysis by this business as it is.” The morning’s bulletin on the state of the Pontifex’s health had just been posted. No change during the night; his majesty’s condition remained grave but he continued to hold his own. Korsibar pounded his balled fist into the palm of his hand. “We wait, and we wait, and we wait. And wait some more, and nothing happens. Did we all come here too soon?”

“The considered opinion of the doctors was that his majesty did not have long to live,” said the elegant Septach Melayn. He was Prestimion’s closest friend, a tall and slender man of foppish manner but fearsome skill with weapons. “Therefore it was only reasonable for us to come here when we did, and—”

A stupendous belch and then a mighty booming laugh erupted from the huge and heavyset Farholt, a rough uproarious man of Prince Korsibar’s entourage who traced his lineage back to the Coronal Lord Guadeloom of distant ancient days. “The opinion of the doctors? The opinion of the doctors, you say? God’s bones, what are doctors except false sorcerers whose spells don’t work right?”