Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

“There is a third point to be considered,” Mandralisca said.

He made them wait. He had no desire to overload their brains by piling too many arguments together too quickly.

Then he said, “It happens that I am testing a new weapon, one that is vital to our hopes of victory. It is the helmet that the little man Khaymak Barjazid brought to me, a version of the one that was used—unsuccessfully, alas—by Dantirya Sambail in his struggle against Prestimion long ago. We are making improvements in the weapon. I am extending my mastery over it day by day. It will do terrible destruction, once I’m ready to unleash it. But I am not quite ready, my lords. Therefore I ask you for more time. I ask you for time enough to make the great victory that milord Gavdat so accurately predicts a certainty.”

As though in a dream Dekkeret roamed the myriad halls of the Castle that would from now on bear his name, examining everything as though seeing it for the first time.

He was alone. He had not made a special point of asking to be left alone, but his manner, his expression, had left no doubt of his need for solitude. This was the fourth day since Dekkeret’s return from the festivities at the Labyrinth that had confirmed Prestimion’s ascent to the imperial throne, and every moment up till now had been taken up in planning for his own coronation. Only this morning had an opening developed in the press of business, and he had taken the opportunity to wander out into the Pinitor Court and go drifting off by himself through some few of the many levels of the Castle’s topmost zone.

He had lived at the Castle more than half his life. He had been eighteen when his thwarting of the attempt on Prestimion’s life had earned him the award of knight-initiatehood, and now he was thirty-eight. Though he still signed his name, when official duties required it of him, “Dekkeret of Normork,” it would be more accurate to call himself “Dekkeret of the Castle,” for Normork was only a boyhood memory and the Castle was his home. The eerie tower of Lord Arioc, the harsh black mass of the Prankipin Treasury, the delicate beauty of the Guadeloom Cascade, the pink granite blocks of Vildivar Close, the spectacular sweep of the Ninety-Nine Steps—he passed through these things every day.

He passed through them now. Down one hall and up the next. He turned a bend in a corridor and found himself staring through a giant crystal window, a window so clear as to be essentially invisible, providing a sudden stunning view of open air—an abyss that descended mile after mile until it was sealed at its lower end by a thick layer of white cloud. It was a vivid reminder that they were thirty miles high, up here at the Castle, sitting at the tip of the biggest mountain in the universe, provided with light and air and water and all other necessities by ingenious mechanisms thousands of years old. You tended to forget that, when you spent enough time at the Castle. You tended to begin to think that this was the primary level of the world, and all the rest of Majipoor was mysteriously sunken far below the surface. But that was wrong. There was the world, and then there was the Castle; and the Castle loomed far above all.

The gateway before him led back into the Inner Castle. On his left lay Prestimion’s archival building, rising behind the Arioc Tower; to his right was the white-tiled hall where the Lady of the Isle resided when she came to the Castle to visit her son, and just beyond that Lord Confalume’s garden-house, with its bewildering collection of tender plants from tropical regions. He went through the gate that lay beside the Lady’s hall and found himself in the maze of hallways and galleries, so bewildering to newcomers, that led to the core of the Castle.

He avoided going near the halls of the court. They were all very busy in there, officials both of the outgoing regime and his own still only partly formed administration—discussing matters of protocol at the coronation ceremony, making lists of guests according to rank and precedence, et cetera, et cetera. Dekkeret had had enough of that, and more than enough, for the moment. Left to his own devices, the coronation rite would have at best an audience of seven or ten people, and would take no longer than the time necessary for Prestimion to take the starburst crown from its bearer and place it on the brow of his successor, and cry, “Dekkeret! Dekkeret! All hail Lord Dekkeret!”

But he knew better than to think it could be as simple as that. There had to be feasting, and rituals, and poetry readings, and the salutations of the high lords, and the ceremonial showing of the Coronal’s shield, and the crowning of his mother the Lady Taliesme as the new Lady of the Isle of Sleep, and whatever else was required to invest the incoming Coronal with the proper majesty and awesomeness. Dekkeret did not intend to interfere with any of that. Whatever innovations his reign would bring, and he certainly intended that there would be some, he was not going to expend his authority this early over trivial matters of ceremony. On the other hand, he took care now to keep away from the rooms where the planning was taking place. He turned instead toward the very center of the royal sector, deserted now in this time of transition from one reign to another.

A pair of great metal doors, fifteen feet high, confronted him now. These were Prestimion’s doing, a project that had been in progress for a decade or more and was still a long way from completion. The left-hand door was covered, every square inch of it, with scenes from the events of Lord Confalume’s reign. The door opposite it still presented only a smooth blank surface.

I will have that door engraved with the deeds of Prestimion, done in a matching style by the same artisans, Dekkeret told himself. And then I will have both doors gilded, so that they will shine forever down the ages.

He touched one of the heavy bronze handles and the door, precisely and delicately calibrated, swung back to admit him to the Castle’s heart.

The simple little throne-room of Lord Stiamot was the first thing he came to. He moved on past it, still wandering without a plan, into yet another hodgepodge of little corridors and passageways that he could not remember ever having ventured into before; he was just beginning to conclude that he was lost when he turned to his left and discovered that he was staring into the grand vaulted chamber that was Lord Prestimion’s judgment-hall, with the numbing extravagance of the Confalume throne-room just beyond it.

It is wrong, Dekkeret thought, to have to approach these great rooms through such a maze of chaos. Prestimion had carved his judgment-hall out of a dozen or so ancient little rooms; Dekkeret resolved now to do the same with the hallways he had just come through, clearing them all away to create some new formal room, a Chapel of the Divine, perhaps, in which the Coronal might ask for the gift of wisdom before going into the judgment-hall to dispense the law. The Dekkeret Chapel, yes. He smiled. Already he saw it in the eye of his mind, a stone archway over there, and the passage connecting it to the judgment-hall emblazoned with brilliant mosaics in green and gold—

Bravo! he thought. Not even crowned yet, and already launched on your building program!

It surprised him, how easily he was taking to this business of becoming the Coronal Lord of Majipoor. There still remained concealed within him, somewhere, Dekkeret the boy, only child of the struggling merchant Orvan Pettir and his good wife Taliesme, the boy who had roamed the hilly streets of walled Normork with his lively young cousin Sithelle and dreamed of becoming something more than his father had managed to be—a Castle knight, perhaps, who one day would hold some high place in the government: how could that boy not be flabbergasted to find his older self about to accede to the very highest place of all?