Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

“Up! Bathe yourself, dress, Fulkari! I need to speak with Dinitak immediately.”

“But it’s the middle of the night. You promised, Dekkeret—”

“I promised to sleep on it, and to pray for a useful dream. And so I have, and the dream has come. And brought me something that can’t wait until morning.” He was out of bed and searching for his robe. Fulkari was sitting up, now, blinking, rubbing her eyes, muttering to herself. He kissed her lightly on the tip of the nose and went out into the hall to find the steward of the night.

“Get me Dinitak Barjazid,” Dekkeret called. “I want him right away!”

It seemed to take no time at all for Dinitak to arrive. He was fully dressed and entirely awake. Dekkeret wondered whether he had been to sleep at all. Dinitak was such an ascetic in so many ways: sleep must seem a waste of time to him.

“I would have summoned you right after I met with Prestimion,” Dekkeret began, “but Fulkari was able to talk me into waiting until I had had a chance to rest a little while. It was just as well I did.”

Quickly he sketched for Dinitak a summary of his conference with

Prestimion the night before. Dinitak seemed surprised at none of it, neither Prestimion’s unconcealed hatred for Mandralisca nor the Pontifex’s fierce desire to destroy the Sambailid rebellion by force of arms. It was, he said, exactly what one would expect of a man who had been tried by the Sambailid clan as the Pontifex Prestimion had been tried.

“I tell you bluntly, I detest the idea of going to war against Zimroel,” Dekkeret said. “The Lady Taliesme surely will be opposed to it also. I think Prestimion secretly feels the same way.”

“I suspect you may be right there. He has no love for war.”

“But he’s so troubled by the attacks on his own family that obliterating Mandralisca is his highest priority and he doesn’t care how the job gets done. Go to Zimroel, Dekkeret, he said to me. Take the biggest army you can. Set things to rights there. And destroy Mandralisca. War is what he means, Dinitak. It’s my hope that I can get him to soften his mind on this.”

“You will have a struggle there, I think.”

“I think so too. The Pontifex is not famous for his patience. He feels that his reign as Coronal was stained by the scheming of his enemies, and he believes, probably rightly, that this man Mandralisca has been behind most or perhaps all of the trouble. Now that trouble has burst out again, he wants to be rid of Mandralisca, once and for all. Well, who doesn’t? But war, to me, is a last resort. And I’d be the one who would have to command the troops, after all, not Prestimion.”

“That would not matter to him. You are the Coronal. The Pontifex decrees policy, and the Coronal carries out the decrees. It has always been thus.”

Dekkeret shrugged. “Nevertheless, if I can avoid this war, I will, Dinitak. I’ll go into Zimroel, yes. And I’ll see to it that Mandralisca’s days of troublemaking are brought to an end, just as Prestimion wants. It’s what happens after Mandralisca’s out of the picture that I want to discuss with you now.”

The bedroom door opened and Fulkari emerged, dressed in a handsome green morning robe. She gave Dinitak an amiable smile, as if to say that she saw nothing wrong with Dekkeret’s holding a policy conference at this hour of the night. Dekkeret threw her a grateful wink. Quietly she took a seat by the window. The first faint purplish streaks of dawn were visible in the east.

“Peacefully or otherwise,” Dekkeret said, “the Mandralisca problem has been solved, let us assume. The uprising of the five Sambailids has been curbed, and they’ve been made to see that they had better not get such ideas again. Without Mandralisca to do their thinking for them, they probably won’t. All right. The question that will remain, Dinitak, is this: what can we do to prevent future Mandraliscas from arising? He and his master Dantirya Sambail have given the world an entire generation of trouble. We can’t let anything like that happen again. And so—an idea, a very strange idea, in the middle of the night—”

“You are a duke?” the Shapeshifter asked, as Thastain led him from Mandralisca’s office. “Truly, a duke? You are so young to be a duke.”

Thastain grinned. “It amuses him to call me that. Or count, sometimes: he calls me that too. I’m not a duke or a count of anything, though. My father was a farmer in a place called Sennec, west of here. He died and we couldn’t pay the debts and we lost the farm, and I went into the service of the Five Lords.”

“But he calls you a duke,” said Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp. “You are a farmer’s son, and he calls you a duke. It is only a joke, you say. A strange joke, is what I think. It seems almost to be a kind of mockery. I do not understand human jokes. But, then, why should I? Am I in any way human?”

“Only in your appearance right now,” Thastain replied. “But of course that can change.—Come this way, sir. Down these steps, if you will.”

I am having a polite conversation with a Metamorph, he thought, astounded. I just called him ‘sir’. Life held no end of amazements, it seemed.

As his meeting with Mandralisca ended, the ambassador from the Danipiur—for that was what he was, Thastain realized, the ambassador from the Shapeshifter queen—had reverted to his assumed human form for the journey back to his lodgings. So now he was a peculiar-looking long-legged man once again, who walked as though he had learned how to walk only last week and spoke with a thick buzzing accent that was a struggle for Thastain to penetrate. It seemed to him that Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavistheyp was almost as strange in pseudo-human guise as when he was wearing his own form.

Like any farm boy of northern Zimroel, Thastain had been raised to fear and loathe the Shapeshifters. They were the dread alien beings of the Piurifayne jungles to the southeast, who seethed with hatred over the loss of their world to human invaders thirteen thousand years before, and would never rest until they had somehow recaptured control of it. Though Lord Stiamot had confined them to their rain-forest reservation, everyone knew that their form-changing abilities made it possible for them to slip out of Piurifayne at will and go secretly among humans, working every manner of mischief: poisoning wells, stealing mounts and blaves, kidnapping babies to be raised as slaves in their jungle villages. Or so Thastain had grown up believing.

He had never spoken to a Metamorph before, not knowingly. He had never so much as seen one at close range. And now —Come this way, sir. Down these steps, if you will. Wonder of wonders. Come this way, sir.

They emerged from the procuratorial palace into the clear, bright light of another perfect Ni-moyan day. The hostelry where Mandralisca kept his out-of-town visitors was a ten-minute walk away from the river—up the hill past the Movement headquarters and the apartment building where Thastain himself lived, turn left, enter an underground passageway that quickly turned into a broad stone staircase going up to the next level inland. And there was the hostelry, a great white tower, as most of the buildings of this sector of Ni-moya were, standing in a row of similar towers that formed a solid phalanx along the street known as Nissimorn Boulevard. Four of the Five Lords had mansions farther down Nissimorn Boulevard, where the apartment towers gave way to the private dwellings of the very wealthy. Everyone knew Nissimorn Boulevard. It was such a famous street that when he first saw it Thastain wondered if his feet would begin tingling as they came in contact with its pavement.

“The Count Mandralisca makes jokes of you,” the Metamorph went on as they ascended the stone staircase, “but even so you are one of his most important people. Is that not so, that you are a close aide?”