Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

“Yes. I know I am.”

“Then stop it! Stop! Stop!” Fulkari was crying now. “Oh, Keltryn—Keltryn—”

“Fulkari—”

Keltryn rushed toward her. Held her tight. Felt her own tears coursing down her cheeks.

Jacomin Halifice said, “The Lord Gaviral respectfully requests your presence at his palace, Count Mandralisca.”

Mandralisca looked up. “Is that how he said it, Jacomin? ‘Respectfully requests’?”

Halefice smiled for perhaps half a second. “The phrase was my own, your grace. I thought it sounded more courtly to say it so.”

“Yes. I dare say you did. It didn’t seem like Gaviral’s style at all.—Well, tell him I’ll be there in five minutes. No, let’s make it ten, I think.”

Let Gaviral respectfully wait. Mandralisca glanced down at the Barjazid helmet, lying before him on his desk in a little glittering heap. He had been playing with it all afternoon, donning it and sending his mind out into the world, testing the powers of the thing, trying to coax from it more knowledge of what it could do, and he wanted a little time to review what he had achieved.

He had so little control over it, so far. He could not direct it toward any particular region of the world, nor could he choose to make contact with any specific individual. Barjazid had assured him several times that they would eventually solve the directionality problem. Aiming the power of the helmet at any one person was a more difficult challenge, but Barjazid seemed to think that in time that could be achieved also. Certainly both things had been possible with earlier models, such as the one that Prestimion had used to strike down Barjazid’s brother Venghenar. This newer one had greater range and delicacy of effect—it was a rapier, not a saber, capable not simply of inflicting massive injury but of inducing light deflections in the minds it touched—but certain other qualities of precision had been lost.

Meanwhile, Barjazid said, it would be a good idea for Mandralisca to practice using the helmet daily, to accustom himself to its operation, to build up in himself the mental resilience needed to withstand the strains it imposed on the operator. And so he had. Day after day, he had visited citizens of Majipoor at random, sliding into their minds, tickling their souls with little unpleasant suggestions. It was interesting to see what kind of impact it was possible to have, even on a well guarded mind.

He had found that he was able to enter almost anyone he chose, though sleeping minds were much more vulnerable than waking ones. He could break down the defenses of the soul with a few deftly placed jabs, just as he had been able to do so splendidly in his baton-dueling days, when his agility of movement and his superior reflexes had brought him championship after championship in the tournaments, and, what was even more valuable, the great approbation of Dantirya Sambail. Using the helmet was very similar. In the tournaments, one did not wield the baton as a bludgeon; one baffled and bewildered one’s opponent with it, besieging him so with lightning-swift flicks of the pliant nightflower-wood stick that he left himself open for the climactic attack. Here, too, Mandralisca had discovered, it was best to undermine the victim’s own sense of purpose and security with a few light prods and nudges, and let him continue the process of destruction on his own. The gardener in Lord Havilbove’s park, the custodian of the bamboo palace at Ertsud Grand, the hapless calendar-keeper at that Hjort village, and all the rest of them—how easy it had been, really, and how pleasing!

Why, just today—

But the Lord Gaviral had respectfully requested his presence at his palace, Mandralisca reminded himself. One must not keep the Lords of Zimroel waiting unduly long, or they grow petulant. He slipped the helmet into the pouch at his hip where it resided whenever it was not in use, and set out up the path to Gaviral’s hilltop palace.

The palaces of the Five Lords appeared impressive from the outside, but their interiors reflected not only the haste with which the entire outpost had been constructed but the general tastelessness of the brothers. The architect—a Ghayrog from Dulorn, Hesmaan Thrax by name—had designed them to inspire awe in viewers approaching them from below: each of the five buildings was a huge dome of smooth and perfectly set tile, gray with a red undercast, rising to a great height and topped with the red crescent moon that was emblematic of the Sambailid clan. Within, though, they were bare echoing halls with rough unfinished walls and oddly mismatched furnishings badly placed.

Gaviral’s home was the best of the sorry lot. Its main hall was a vast soaring space that a great man like Confalume would have expanded easily into, and further enhanced with his own grandeur—he had never seemed out of place amidst the immensity of the throne-room he had built for himself at the Castle—but a petty creature like Gaviral was diminished by it. He seemed an irrelevance, an afterthought, in his own high hall.

As the eldest son of Dantirya Sambail’s brother Gaviundar, he had been entitled to first choice of the rich possessions that once had adorned the Procurator’s superb palace in Ni-moya. To him had fallen the most admirable of the statuary and hangings, the floor-coverings woven from the pelts of haiguses and steetmoy, the strange sculptures fashioned of animal bone that Dantirya Sambail had brought back from some expedition into the chilly Khyntor Marches of northern Zimroel. But all these treasures had suffered some abuse over the years, especially during the time following the death of Dantirya Sambail when mountainous drunken Gaviundar had inhabited the procuratorial palace. Many of the finest things were battered and chipped and stained, mountings had come unsprung, cracks had developed in delicate and irreplaceable objects. And now that they had descended to Gaviral’s custody they were negligently, almost randomly, displayed, strewn here and there about the echoing oversized chambers of the building like the neglected toys of some indifferent child.

Gaviral himself lounged in the midst of this shabby disheveled array in a broad thronelike chair that looked as though it had been designed for one of his four brothers, all of whom were much larger men than he was. A couple of his women crouched at his feet. All five of the Sam-bailids had furnished themselves with harems, in defiance of all custom and propriety. A flask of wine was clutched in his hand. Compared with his brothers, Gaviral was a model of sobriety and polite deportment; but he was a heavy drinker, nonetheless, like all his tribe.

Behind Gaviral’s left shoulder stood a second of the brothers. The Lord Gavdat, this one was, the plump, heavy-jowled, ineffably stupid one who liked to play with sorcery and prognostication. He was garbed today, absurdly, in the manner of a geomancer of the High City of Tidias, far away on Castle Mount: the tall brass helmet, the richly brocaded robe, the elaborately figured cloak. Mandralisca could not recall when he had last seen anything so ludicrous.

He made a formal gesture of obeisance. “Milord Gaviral. And milord Gavdat.”

Gaviral held out his flask. “Will you have some wine, Mandralisca?”

After all this time they had still not succeeded in learning that he detested wine. But he declined politely, with thanks. There was no use trying to explain such things to these people. Gaviral himself drank deeply, and, with a courteousness of which Mandralisca would have thought him incapable, handed the flask to his shambling uncouth brother. Gavdat tipped his head so far back that Mandralisca marveled that his brass helmet did not fall off, drained the flask almost to the bottom, and indolently tossed it to the side, where it spilled its last dregs on what once had been a dazzlingly white steetmoy rug.