Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

The music died away in a confusion of discordance. The humming of the choristers ceased. The storyteller’s cadenced voice cut off in mid-phrase. They were all staring at him. Erb Skonarij looked out into the audience and saw the wide bewildered eyes too, the open mouths.

The throbbing in his skull was unrelenting. It was splitting him apart.

Someone’s hand was around his arm. A voice close by his right ear-membrane said, “You must sit down, old man. The ceremony will be spoiled. You of all people—”

“No!” Erb Skonarij pulled himself free. “I am the one! I bring the demons!” He pointed toward the storyteller, who was gaping at him in amazement and fright. “Tell it! Tell it! The treason of the calendar-keeper, tell it! Set me free, will you? Set us all free! I can no longer bear the pain!”

Why would they not listen to him?

A desperate lurch brought him up before the two demons, the Rangda Geyak, the Tjal Goring Geyak. They had halted now in their dance. Erb Skonarij scooped up the flails that they were meant to use at the climax of the ceremony and thrust them into their hands.

“Beat me! Whip me! Drive me out!”

The two masked figures still stood motionless. Erb Skonarij pressed his hands to his pounding forehead. The pain, the pain! Did no one understand? They were in the presence of real sin: they must expel it from the village, and all would suffer, he most of all, until it was done. But no one would move. No one.

He uttered a muffled cry of despair and rushed toward the roaring bonfire. This was wrong, he knew. The sinner must not punish himself. He must be forced from their midst by the united effort of all the villagers, or the exorcism would have no value to the village. But they would not do it; and he could no longer bear the pain, let alone the shame or the grief.

He was amazed at how soothing the warmth of those flames was. Hands clutched at him, but he knocked them aside. The fire… the fire… it sang to him of forgiveness and peace.

He cast himself in.

Mandralisca lifted the helmet from his head. Khaymak Barjazid sat facing him, watching him avidly. Jacomin Halefice stood near the door of Mandralisca’s chamber, with the Lord Gaviral beside him. Mandralisca shook his head, blinked a couple of times, rubbed the center of his brow with his fingertips. There was a ringing in his ears, a tightness in his chest.

For a time no one spoke, until at last Barjazid said, “Well, your grace? What was it like?”

“A powerful experience. How long did I have the thing on?”

“Fifteen seconds or so. Perhaps half a minute at most.”

“That’s all,” Mandralisca said, idly fondling the smooth metal mesh. “Strange. It seemed like a much, much longer time.” The sensations that had just gone coursing through him still reverberated in his spirit. He realized that he had not yet entirely returned from his journey.

In the immediate aftermath of the experiment an odd jangling restlessness gripped him. Every nerve was sensitized. He felt the beating of the hot sun against the walls of the building, heard the whistling of the desert wind across the plain of pungatans far below, had an oppressive sense of the thick musky atmosphere of the air about him in here.

Rising, he roved the perimeter of the circular room, cruising it like some caged beast. Halefice and even Gaviral stepped to the side, scuttling out of his way as he strode past the place where they were standing. Mandralisca barely noticed them. To his mind in its currently elevated state they seemed like nothing more than little scurrying animals to him, droles, mintuns, hiktigans, unimportant creatures of the forest. Insects, even. Mere insects.

He had gone down into that little metal helmet, somehow. His entire mind had entered it; and then, in a way he could not begin to comprehend, he had been able to hurl himself outward, like a burning spear soaring through the sky—

Barjazid said, “Do you have any idea how far you went, or where?”

“No. Not at all.” How curious to be holding a conversation with an insect. But he forced himself to pay attention to Barjazid’s query. “I perceived it as a considerable distance, but for all I know it was no farther than the city on the other side of the river.”

“It was probably much farther, your grace. The reach is infinite, you know: there’s no more effort involved in reaching Alaisor or Tolaghai or Piliplok than there is in going next door. It’s the directionality that we can’t control. Not yet, anyway.”

“Could it reach the Castle, do you think?” asked the Lord Gaviral.

“As I have just told his grace the Count Mandralisca,” Barjazid said, “the reach is infinite.” Mandralisca noticed that Barjazid had already learned to be extremely patient with Gaviral. That was a very good idea, when dealing with someone who is very stupid but who has a great deal of power over you.

“So we could reach out with it and hit Prestimion, then?” asked Gaviral avidly. “Or Dekkeret?”

“We might, in time,” Barjazid replied. “As I have also just observed, we do not yet have real directionality. We can only strike randomly thus far.”

“But eventually,” Gaviral said. “Oh, yes, eventually—!”

It was all that Mandralisca could do to keep himself from cutting Gaviral down with some contemptuous remark. Reach out and hit Prestimion? The fool. The fool. That was the last thing they wanted to do. The boy Thastain had a shrewder grip of political strategy than any of these five brainless brothers. But this was not the moment to foment a breach with one of the men who were, at least in theory, his masters.

He considered what Barjazid’s helmet had just allowed him to accomplish. That was more interesting to him than anything these people might have to say.

He had cast forth his mind and hurt someone with the helmet. Of that he was certain. He had no idea clear idea of whom, or where; but he had no doubt that he had encountered another mind someplace far away, a priest of some kind, perhaps, at any rate someone who was officiating at a ritual, and had penetrated it, and had damaged it. Extinguished it, perhaps. Certainly done great harm. He knew what it was like to injure someone: a very distinctive feeling of pleasure, almost sexual in nature, which he had experienced many times in his life. He had felt it just now, with a new and astounding intensity. Some distant stranger, recoiling in pain and shock at his thrust—

—he had flown like a spear, a burning spear soaring halfway across the world—

Like a god.

“Your brother would never let me try the helmet,” Mandralisca said to Khaymak Barjazid. Returning to his desk, he tossed the device down in the middle of it. “I asked him more than once, while we were camped there in the Stoienzar. Just to find out what it was like, you know. The kind of sensation it was. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I would not dare risk it, Mandralisca. The power is too great.’ He meant that I might injure myself, I assumed. But as I thought about it afterward I saw a different meaning in the phrase. ‘The power is too great for me to trust you with it,’ is what he was really saying. I think he feared I might go poking around in his mind.”

“He was constantly afraid of something like that—that the helmet might be used against him.”

“Was I not his ally?”

“No. My brother never saw anyone as an ally. Everyone was dangerous. Remember, his own son turned against him during Dantirya Sam-bail’s rebellion, and brought one of the helmets to Prestimion and Dekkeret. No one could ever have persuaded Venghenar to let anyone else get near a helmet after that.”

“I watched Prestimion destroy him with the helmet that Dinitak brought him,” Mandralisca said.