Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

Swinging about, now, Dekkeret took in the madness all around him in a single glance. One swarm of his guardsmen stood in a circle of swords about Fulkari; she was safe. A second group had formed a wall around his own self. Gialaurys loomed like a mountain beside the conference table, clutching the Lord Gaviral by the throat with one huge hand, and the Lord Galahaud the same way with the other. Dinitak had found a poniard somewhere and was brandishing it at his uncle’s breast, and Khaymak Barjazid had his hands raised high to show that he was his nephew’s prisoner. All over the field the Sambailid warriors, realizing now that their leaders were taken, were throwing down their weapons and lifting their hands in similar gestures of surrender.

Then Dekkeret looked down and saw the boy who had thrown the wine in Mandralisca’s face, lying practically at his feet, with Mandralisca’s plump little aide-de-camp kneeling over him. He was streaming with blood from that terrible wound to the throat.

“Is he alive?” Dekkeret asked.

“Barely, my lord. He has only moments left.”

“He saved me from death,” said Dekkeret, and an eerie chill came over him as there entered into his mind the recollection of another day long ago, in Normork, and another Coronal faced with an assassin’s blade, and the casual unthinking swipe of that blade that had taken his cousin Sithelle’s life and in a strange way simultaneously set him on his path to the throne. So it had all happened again, a life sacrificed so that a Coronal might live. Dekkeret, looking across to Fulkari, saw the ghost of Sithelle instead, and trembled and came close to weeping.

But the boy was still alive, more or less. His eyes were open and he was staring at Dekkeret. Why, Dekkeret wondered, had he mysteriously turned against his master in this fatal way in that decisve moment? And had his answer at once, exactly as if he had asked his question aloud. For in the softest of voices the boy said, “I could not bear it any longer, my lord. Knowing that he meant to kill you here today—to kill the lord of the world—”

“Hush, boy,” Dekkeret said. “Don’t try to speak. You need to rest.”

But he did not appear to have heard. “And knowing also that I had taken the wrong turn in life, that I had foolishly given myself to the most evil of masters—”

Dekkeret knelt by him and told him again to rest; but it was no use, now, for the faint voice had trickled off into silence, and the staring eyes were unseeing. Dekkeret glanced up at the aide-de-camp and said, “What was his name?”

“Thastain, my lord. He came from a place called Sennec.”

“Thastain of Sennec. And yours?”

“Jacomin Halefice, lordship.”

“Take him to the lodge, then, Halefice, and have his body laid out for burial. We’ll give him a hero’s funeral, this Thastain of Sennec. The sort one would give a duke or a prince who fell fighting for his lord. And there will be a great monument in his name erected in Ni-moya, that I vow.”

He walked across then to the place where Septach Melayn lay. Gialaurys, still gripping the two Sambailids as though they were mere sacks of grain, had gone there too, dragging his captives with him, and stood looking down at his friend’s body. He was weeping great terrible silent tears that flowed in rivers down his broad fleshy face.

Quietly Dekkeret said, “We will take him away from this loathsome place, Gialaurys, and return him to the Castle, where he belongs. You will carry his body there, and see to it that he is given a tomb to match those of Dvorn and Lord Stiamot, with an inscription on it saying, ‘Here lies Septach Melayn, who was the equal in nobility of any king that ever lived.’ ”

“That I will do, my lord,” said Gialaurys, in a voice that itself seemed to come from beyond the grave.

“And also we will find some bard of the court—I charge you with this task too, Gialaurys—to write the epic of his life, which schoolchildren ten thousand years from now will know by heart.”

Gialaurys nodded. He gestured to a pair of guardsmen to take charge of his two prisoners, and dropped to his knees, and scooped up Septach Melayn and slowly carried him from the field.

Dekkeret pointed next at the body of Mandralisca, face down in the grass. “Take this away,” he said to his captain of guards, “and see that it is burned, in whatever place the kitchen trash of this place is burned, and have the ashes turned under in the forest, where no one will ever find them.”

“I will, my lord.”

Dekkeret went at last to Fulkari, who stood white-faced and stunned beside the conference table. “We are done here, my lady,” he said quietly. “A sad day this has been, too. But we will never know a sadder one, I think, until we come to the end of our own days.” He slipped his arm around her. She was trembling like one who stands in an icy wind. He held her until the trembling had abated somewhat, and then he said, “Come, love. Our business here is done, and I have important messages to send to Prestimion.”

From her many-windowed room high up atop the Alaisor Mercantile Exchange, Keltryn stood staring out to sea, watching the great red-sailed ship from Zimroel as it entered the harbor. Dinitak was aboard that ship. They had hurried her by swift royal floater in a breathless chase across the width of Alhanroel so that she would be here in Alaisor when he arrived, and they had installed her in royal magnificence in this huge suite that they said was ordinarily reserved only for Powers of the Realm; and now here she was, and there he was, aboard that majestic vessel just off shore and coming closer to her with every passing moment.

It still amazed her that she was here at all.

Not just that she was in the fabled city of Alaisor, so far from Castle Mount, with those extraordinary black cliffs behind her and the gigantic monument to Lord Stiamot in the plaza just below her room. Sooner or later, she supposed, she would have found some reason to see the world, and her travels might well have brought her to this beautiful place.

But that she had come running here at Dinitak’s behest, after all that had passed between them—

She could remember only too well saying to Fulkari, upon learning that he was leaving her behind when he went to Zimroel, “I never want to see him again!”

And Fulkari smugly saying, “You will.”

She had thought then that Fulkari was wrong, simply wrong. She could never swallow such humiliation. But time had passed, days and weeks and months, time in which she had the leisure to dwell in memory on those hand-in-hand strolls in the hallways of the Castle, those candlelit dinners, those nights of astounding passion. Time to reflect, also, on Dinitak’s unique nature, his strangely intense sense of right and wrong. Time to think that perhaps she could almost comprehend his reasons for going to Zimroel without her.

And then, by special courier, those two messages from abroad—

Dinitak Barjazid, to Keltryn of Sipermit, saying, in that odd formal manner of his, I am returning by way of Alaisor, and I beg you most urgently to be there when I arrive, my dearest one, for we have things of the greatest importance to discuss, and they will be best discussed there. “I beg you most urgently!” That did not sound much like Dinitak, to beg at all, and most urgently at that. “My dearest one.” Yes.

The second message, in the same pouch, was from Fulkari, and what Fulkari said was, He will ask you to meet him at Alaisor. Go to him there, sister. He loves you. He loves you more than you could possibly believe.

She could not repress the instantaneous flare of anger that was her first reaction. How dare he? How dare she? Why fall into the same old trap again? Go all the way to Alaisor, no less, at his behest, for his convenience? Why? Why? Why?