Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

Dekkeret said, “So this is the imperial throne-chamber! I’ve always wondered what it was like.”

Prestimion made a flamboyantly grandiose gesture. “Take a good look. It’ll be yours someday.”

With a rueful smile Dekkeret said, “Have mercy, my lord! I’m barely accustomed to wearing a Coronal’s robes and here you are already opening the doors of the Labyrinth for me!”

“I see you still call me ‘my lord.’ That title is yours now, my lord. I am ‘your majesty.’ ”

“Yes, your majesty.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

Neither man made any attempt to smother his laughter. This was their first formal meeting as Pontifex and Coronal, and neither of them could deal with the magnitude of that fact without a certain leavening of amusement.

They were in the uttermost level of the Labyrinth, the site of the Pontifex’s private residence and of the great public chambers of the imperial branch of the monarchy, the throne-chamber and the Great Hall of the Pontifex and the Court of Thrones and the rest. Dekkeret had arrived at the subterranean capital late the previous evening. He had never had reason to go to the Labyrinth before, though he had heard tales of it all his life: the grimness of it, the airlessness, the sense that it gave you of being cut off from all life and nature, condemned to live down deep, out of sight of the world, in a realm of eternal night lit by harsh, glittering lamps.

At first view, though, the place struck him as far less forbidding than he had anticipated. The upper rings had the rich, bustling vitality of a mighty metropolis, which was, after all, what the Labyrinth in fact was: the capital of the world. And then there were the architectural wonders deeper down, the myriad strangenesses with which ten thousand years of Pontifexes had bedecked their city. Finally, there was the grandeur and richness of the imperial sector itself, where such magnificence had been lavished that even the opulence of the Castle was put in the shade.

Dekkeret had spent the night in the chambers reserved for Coronals during their visits to the court of the senior monarch. It was the first time he had occupied any of the Coronal’s residences anywhere. He had halted a moment, struck by awe at the sight of the great door to the suite that now was his, with its intricate carvings and the swirling starburst symbols done in gold and the royal monogram repeated again and again, LPC, LPC, LPC, Lord Prestimion Coronal, which soon would be replaced by the LDC of his own ascension. Only one step remained for that. He had been proclaimed by Prestimion, and he had been confirmed by the Council; now he needed only to return to the Castle for his coronation ceremony. But the funeral of Confalume and the coronation of the new Pontifex must take precedence over that.

The new Pontifex had already gone through the ancient rite of taking possession of his new home. Since Prestimion had already been traveling on the Glayge when the news had come to him of Confalume’s death, he had returned to the Labyrinth by the river route; but instead of entering the capital by way of the Mouth of Waters, the customary entrance from the Glayge, he was required by tradition this time to go entirely around the city to the far side, the one that faced the southern desert, and come in via the much less congenial Mouth of Blades.

That was simply a stark gaping hole in the desert floor, walled about with bare timbers to keep the drifting sands from filling it in. Across the front of it was a row of antique rusted swords, said to be thousands of years old, set tip-upward in a matrix of concrete. Behind that unwelcoming entrance waited the seven masked guardians of the Labyrinth—by custom, two Hjorts, a Ghayrog, a Skandar, and even a Liiman were included among them—who soberly went through the ritual of inquiring after Prestimion’s business in this place, ostentatiously conferred among themselves to decide whether to let him in, and then demanded from him the traditional entry-offering, which had to be something of his own choice. Prestimion had brought with him the cloak that the people of Gamarkaim had sent to him as a coronation gift when he became Coronal, woven of the cobalt-blue feathers of giant fire-beetles and said to give its wearer protection against harm from flame. By surrendering it here, to be housed forever in the museum where such gifts were kept, he was declaring that in the Labyrinth he would always be safe from every external menace.

Then he entered; and custom now obliged him to descend through each of the levels of the spiraling city on foot. That was no small journey. Varaile walked beside him all the way, and his three sons and his daughter, though the Lady Tuanelys, too young to keep pace, was borne on a Skandar guard’s back for much of the distance. At each stage great crowds gathered around him, tracing the Labyrinth symbol in the air with their fingertips and crying out his new name: “Prestimion Pontifex! Prestimion Pontifex!” He was Lord Prestimion no longer.

Meanwhile his succession to the senior throne had been proclaimed at each of the levels below, first at the Court of Columns, then in the Place of Masks, and then the Hall of Winds, the Court of Pyramids, and upward as far as the Mouth of Blades. So when he reached each of these places it was already consecrated to his reign. And at last Prestimion came to the imperial sector, where he knelt first beside the embalmed body of his predecessor Confalume where it lay in state on the dais of the Court of Thrones, and then went to his own new dwelling-place, and there received from the High Spokesman of the Pontificate the spiral emblem of his office and the scarlet-and-black robes. The rest could not be done until Dekkeret arrived.

And now Dekkeret had come. The age-old custom called for Prestimion to receive the new Coronal in the imperial throne-chamber. And so the High Spokesman Haskelorn called on Dekkeret at the Coronal’s suite the morning after his arrival, and they rode together in a small floater through the long and winding passages of the imperial sector down an ever-narrowing tunnel to a point where not even the little vehicle could enter. Walking side by side, now, they advanced through a passageway that was sealed every fifty feet by bronze doors, until they came to the final door, emblazoned with the Labyrinth sign and the newly inscribed monogram of Prestimion Pontifex where Confalume’s had been only hours before. Old Haskelorn touched his palm to the monogram and the door swung open and there stood Prestimion, smiling.

“Leave us,” he said to Haskelorn. “This meeting involves just the two of us.”

Prestimion showed Dekkeret the throne-chamber itself, first.

It was a great globe of a room, its curving sides covered from floor to ceiling with smooth, gleaming yellow-brown tiles that seemed to burn with an inner light of their own. But the throne-chamber’s only illumination came from a single massive glowfloat that hovered in midair and emitted a steady ruby luminosity. Directly below it stood the Pontifical throne, on a platform reached by three broad steps: an enormous high-backed chair with long, slender legs that were tipped with fierce claws, so that they seemed like those of some giant bird. It was entirely covered over with sheets of gold, or, perhaps, for all Dekkeret could tell, made of one solid mass of the priceless metal. Amid the simplicity of the huge room the throne itself blazed with a dreadful power.

One might easily think Confalume had designed this chamber, since it was the Labyrinth’s counterpart of the resplendent throne-room that Confalume had built for himself at the Castle when he was Coronal. But this room was not Confalume’s work. It bore no sign of the late monarch’s taste for baroque extravagance of style. The throne-chamber of the Labyrinth was a room so ancient that no one quite knew who had built it: the common belief was that it went back to a time even before the reign of Stiamot.