Robert Silverberg: The King of Dreams

The hillside, which descended rapidly in a series of swooping declines, was nearly featureless except where it was broken, here and there, by great jagged black boulders that rose out of it like dragons’ teeth. Thastain could make out a sleek short-legged helgibor creeping purposefully through the grass a hundred yards below him, its furry green head lifted for the strike, its arching fangs already bared. A plump unsuspecting blue vrimmet, the helgibor’s prey, was grazing serenely not far away. The vrimmet would be in big trouble in another moment or two. But of the castle of the rebellious lordling, Thastain was able to see nothing at all at first, despite the keenness of his vision and the aid that the spyglass provided.

Then he nudged the glass just a little to the west, and there the keep was, snugly nestling in a deep fold of the valley: a long low gray curving thing, like a dark scar against the tawny grassland. It seemed to him that the bottommost part of the structure was fashioned of stone, perhaps to the height of a man’s thigh, but everything above that was of wood, rising to a sloping thatched roof.

“There’s the keep, no doubt of it,” Thastain said, without relinquishing the spyglass.

Sudvik Gorn was right. In this dry season, it would be no great challenge whatever to set the place on fire. Three or four firebrands hurled from above and the roof would go up, and sparks would leap to the parched unmown grass that came clear up to the foundations of the building, and the gnarled oily-looking shrubs nearby would catch. There would be a roaring holocaust all around. Within ten minutes the Vorthinar lord and all his men would be roasted alive.

“Do you see sentinels?” Criscantoi Vaz asked.

“No. Nobody. Everybody must be inside. No—wait—yes, someone’s there!”

A strange figure, very thin and unusually elongated, coming into view around the side of the building. The man paused a moment and looked upward—straight at Thastain, so it seemed. Thastain dropped hastily to his belly and signalled with a furious sweep of his left hand for the men behind him to move back from the ridge. Then he peered over the edge once more. Cautiously he extended the glass. The man was continuing on his path, now. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed anything after all.

There was something exceedingly odd about the way he was moving. That swinging gait, that curious flexibility of movement. That strange face, like no face Thastain had ever seen before. The man looked weirdly loose-jointed, somehow—rubbery, one might say. Almost as though he were—could it be—?

Thastain closed one eye and stared as intensely as he knew how with the other.

Yes. A chill ran down Thastain’s spine. A Metamorph, it was. Definitely a Metamorph. That was a new sight for him. He had spent his whole short lifetime up here in northern Zimroel, where Metamorphs were rarely if ever encountered—were, indeed, practically legendary creatures.

He took a good look now. Thastain fined the focus of the glass and was able to make out plainly the greenish tint of the man’s skin, the slit-ted lips, the prominent cheekbones, the tiny bump of a nose. And the longbow the creature wore slung across his back was surely one of Shapeshifter design, a flimsy, highly flexible-looking thing of light wick-erwork, the kind of weapon most suitable for a being whose skeletonic structure was pliant enough to bend easily, to undergo almost any sort of vast transformation.

Unthinkable. It was like seeing a demon walking patrol before the keep. But who, even someone who was in rebellion against his own liege lords, would dare ally himself with the Metamorphs? It was against the law to have any traffic with the mysterious aboriginal folk. But, thought Thastaine, it was more than illegal. It was monstrous.

“There’s a Shapeshifter down there,” Thastain said in a rough whisper over his shoulder. “I can see him walking right past the front of the house. So the story we heard must be true. The Vorthinar lord’s in league with them!”

“You think he saw you?” said Criscantoi Vaz.

“I doubt it.”

“All right. Get yourself back from the edge before he does.”

Thastain wriggled backward without rising and scrambled to his feet when he was far enough away from the brink. As he lifted his head he became aware of Sudvik Gorn’s glowering gaze still fixed on him in cold hatred, but Sudvik Gorn and his malevolence hardly mattered to him now. There was a task to be done.

Morning in the Castle. Bright golden-green sunlight entered the grand suite atop Lord Thraym’s Tower that was the official residence of the Coronal and his consort. It came flooding in a brilliant stream into the splendid great bedroom, walled with great blocks of smooth warm-hued granite hung with fine tapestries of cloth of gold, where the Lady Varaile was awakening.

The Castle.

Everyone in the world knew which castle was meant, when you said “the Castle”: it could only be Lord Prestimion’s Castle, as the people of Majipoor had called it these twenty years past. Before that it had been called Lord Confalume’s Castle, and before that Lord Prankipin’s, and so on and so on back into the vague mists of time—Lord Guadeloom’s Castle, Lord Pinitor’s Castle, Lord Kryphon’s Castle, Lord Thraym’s Castle, Lord Dizimaule’s Castle, Coronal after Coronal across the endlessly flowing centuries of Majipoor’s long history, the great ones and the mediocre ones and the ones whose names and achievements had become totally obscure, king after king all the way back to the semi-mythical builder himself, Lord Stiamot of seventy centuries before, each monarch giving his name to the building for the duration of the time of his reign. But now it was the Castle of the Coronal Lord Prestimion and his wife, the Lady Varaile.

Reigns end. One of these days, almost certainly, this place would be Lord Dekkeret’s Castle, Varaile knew.

But let that day not come soon, she prayed.

She loved the Castle. She had lived in that unfathomably complex array of thirty thousand rooms, perched here atop the astounding thirty-mile-high splendor of Castle Mount that jutted up like a colossal spike out of the immense curve of the planet, for half her life. It was her home. She had no desire to leave it, as leave it she knew she must on the day that Lord Prestimion ascended to the title of Pontifex and Dekkeret replaced him as Coronal.

This morning, with Prestimion off somewhere in one of the down-slope cities dedicating a dam or presiding over the installation of a new duke or performing one of the myriad other functions that were required of a Coronal—she was unable to remember what the pretext for this journey had been—the Lady Varaile awoke alone in the great bed of the royal suite, as she did all too often nowadays. She could not follow the Coronal about the world on his unending peregrinations. His boiling restlesness kept him always on the move.

He would have had her accompany him on his trips, if she could; but that, as both of them realized, was usually impossible. Long ago, when they were newly wed, she had gone everywhere at Prestimion’s side, but then had come the children and her own heavy royal responsibilities besides, the ceremonies and social functions and public audiences, to keep her close to the Castle. It was rare now for the Coronal and his lady to travel together.

However necessary these separations were, Varaile had never reconciled herself to their frequency. She loved Prestimion no less, after sixteen years as his wife, than she had at the beginning. Automatically, as the first dazzling shafts of daylight came through the great crystal window of the royal bedroom, she looked across to see that golden-green light strike the yellow hair of Prestimion on the pillow beside hers.