Robert Silverberg - The King of Dreams

But he negotiated the slope safely, halting when he reached a position that he judged was within throwing range. Moments later the other three came up behind him. Thastain pointed toward the keep. No sentinels were in sight.

Criscantoi Vaz indicated what he wanted done with quick urgent gestures. Gambrund held out a firebrand; Agavir Toymin produced a little energy-torch and ignited it with a quick burst of heat; Thastaine took it from him, ran forward half a dozen steps, and threw it toward the keep, turning himself in a nearly complete circle for greater velocity at the moment of release.

The blazing brand flew in a high, arching curve and landed in a bed of dry grass no more than five feet from the keep. There was the crackling sound of immediate ignition.

Burn! thought Thastain jubilantly. Burn! Burn! So perish all the enemies of the Five Lords!

Criscantoi Vaz followed Thastain’s brand a moment later with a second, throwing it with less elegance of form than Thastain but with greater force: it soared splendidly through the air and came down on the thatched roof itself. A pinkish spiral of flame began to rise. Thastain, flinging the next firebrand more emphatically, reached the group of black-trunked glossy-leaved shrubs closest to the building’s wall: they smoldered for a moment and burst into vivid tongues of fire.

The occupants of the keep, now, were aware that something was up. “Quickly,” Criscantoi Vaz cried. They still had two firebrands left. Thastain seized one with both hands as soon as Agavir Toymin had it lit, ran a few steps, whirled around, and flung it: he too reached the roof this time. Criscantoi Vaz placed the last one in a patch of dry grass outside the door, just as three or four men began emerging from it. Several of them set to work desperately trying to stamp out the blaze; the others, shouting in a kind of frenzy, started to make their way up the slope toward the attackers. But the climb from the valley floor was practically a vertical one and they had brought no weapons with them. After a dozen yards or so they gave up and turned back toward the keep, which with astonishing swiftness was being engulfed by fire. Like madmen they ran inside, though the whole entranceway was already ablaze. The front wall fell in after them. They would all roast like spitted blaves in there, the rebels and their tame Shapeshifters as well. Good. Good.

“We’ve done it!” Thastain cried, exulting at the sight. “They’re all burning!”

“Come, boy,” said Criscantoi Vaz. “Get yourself moving.”

He planted himself solidly and covered the retreat of the other three with drawn bow. But no one emerged now from the burning building. By the time Thastain had reached the safety of the crest, the rebel keep and much of the surrounding grassland were on fire, and a black spear of smoke was climbing into the sky. The blaze was spreading with awesome rapidity. The whole valley was sure to go up: there would be no survivors down there.

Well, that was what they had come here to accomplish. The Vorthinar lord, like so many of the little local princelings across the vast face of the continent of Zimroel, had defied the decrees of the five Sambailid brothers who claimed supreme authority in this land; and so the Vorthinar lord had had to perish. This continent was meant to be Sam-bailid territory, had been for generations until the overthrow of the Procurator by Lord Prestimion, now was Sambailid again. And this time must remain so for all eternity. Thastain, born under Sambailid rule, had no doubts of that. To permit anything else would be to open the door to chaos.

Count Mandralisca seemed mightily pleased with the work they had done down there. There was something almost benign about his quick frigid smile as he greeted them on the crest, his brief, fleeting handclasp of congratulation.

They stood together for a long while at the cliff’s edge, gleefully watching the rebel keep burn. The fire was spreading and spreading, engulfing the dry valley from end to end. Even when they were back at camp, miles away, they could still smell the acrid tang of smoke, and black drifting cinders occasionally wandered toward them on the southward-trending wind.

That night they opened many a flagon of wine, good coarse red stuff from the western lands. Later, in the darkness, feeling as tipsy as he had ever been though he had taken care to stop drinking before most of the others, Thastain went stumbling toward the ditch where they relieved themselves, and discovered the Count already there, with his aide-decamp, that stubby little man Jacomin Halefice. So even the Count Mandralisca needed to make water, just as ordinary mortals did! Thastain found something pleasantly incongruous about that.

He did not dare approach. As he hung back in the shadows he heard Mandralisca say in quiet satisfaction, “They will all die the way the Vorthinar lord died today, eh, Jacomin? And one day there will be no lords in this world other than the Five Lords.”

“Not even Lord Prestimion?” the aide-de-camp asked. “Or Lord Dekkeret, who is to come after him?”

Thastain saw Mandralisca swing about to face the smaller man. He was unable to see the expression on the Count’s face, but he could sense the bleak icy set of it from the tone of Mandralisca’s voice as he replied: “Your question provides its own answer, Jacomin.”

Asleep in his bed in the royal lodging-house in the Guardian City of Fa, Prestimion dreamed that he was back in the swarming, incomprehensibly vast collection of buildings atop Castle Mount that went by the name of Lord Prestimion’s Castle. He was wandering like a ghost through dusty corridors that he had never seen before. He was taking unfamiliar pathways that led him down into regions of the Castle that he had not even known existed.

A little phantom led him onward, a small floating figure drifting high up in the air before him, beckoning him ever deeper into the maze that was the Castle. “This way, my lord. This way! Follow me!”

The tiny phantom had the form of a Vroon, one of the many non-human peoples that had dwelled on Majipoor almost since the earliest days of the giant planet’s occupation by humans. They were doll-sized creatures, light as air, with a myriad of rubbery tentacular limbs and huge round golden eyes that stared forth on either side of sharply hooked yellow beaks. Vroons had the gift of second sight, and could peer easily into minds, or unerringly determine the right road to take in some district altogether unfamiliar to them. But they could not float ten feet off the ground, as this one was doing. The part of Prestimion’s slumbering mind that stood outside itself, watching the progress of his own dreams, knew from that one detail alone that he had to be dreaming.

And he knew also, taking no pleasure in the knowledge, that this was a dream he had dreamed many times before, in one variation and another.

He almost recognized the sectors of the Castle through which the Vroon was leading him. Those ruined pillars of crumbling red sandstone might belong to Balas Bastion, where there were pathways leading to the little-used northern wing. That narrow bridge could perhaps be Lady Thiin’s Overpass, in which case that spiraling rampart faced in greenish brick would lead toward the Tower of Trumpets and the Castle’s outer facade.

But what was this long rambling array of low black-tiled stone hovels? Prestimion could put no name to that. And that windowless, freestanding circular tower whose rough white walls were inset with row upon row of sharpened blue flints, sharp side outward? That diamond-shaped desert of gray slabs within a palisade of pink marble spikes? That endless vaulted hall, receding into the infinite distance, lit by a row of giant candelabra the size of tree-trunks? These places could not be real parts of the Castle. The Castle was so huge that it would take forever to see it all, and even Prestimion, who had lived there since he was a youth, knew that there must be many tracts of it that he had never had occasion to enter. But these places where his sleeping self was roaming now surely had no real-world existence. They had to be dream-inventions and nothing more.