It looked as though the boulevard that had brought them in from the west would take them straight to the center of town. Varaile saw now that the incoming roads were like the spokes of a great wheel, linked by circular avenues that diminished in sweep as they moved inward. The public buildings would be at the center. There had to be a major hospital among them.
Akbalik was dying. She was certain of that now.
He was only intermittently conscious. Very little of what he said made sense. He had one lucid moment in which he opened his eyes and said to her that the swamp-crab’s poison must finally have reached his heart; but the rest of the time he babbled of things that she could not comprehend, jumbled accounts of tournaments and duels, hunting trips, even fist-fights—boyhood memories, perhaps. Sometimes she heard the name of Prestimion, or that of Septach Melayn, or even Korsibar’s. That was odd, that he would be speaking of Korsibar. But her father had done the same in the throes of his madness, she reminded herself.
The hospital, at last. To her dismay Varaile found that the chief doctor was a Ghayrog, a terribly alien thing to encounter at such a time. He was dour-faced and aloof, remarkably unimpressed at finding the wife of the Coronal standing before him and urging him to drop everything he might be doing so that he could look after the nephew of Prince Serithorn.
The forked reptilian tongue moved in and out with disconcerting rapidity. The gray-green reptilian eyes displayed little compassion. The calm and measured voice might have been that of a machine. “You come at a very difficult moment, milady. The operating rooms are all in use now. We have been overwhelmed with all manner of unusual problems here, which—”
Varaile cut him off. “I’m sure that that’s so. But have you heard of Prince Serithorn of Samivole, doctor? By the divine, have you heard the name of Lord Prestimion? This man is Serithorn’s nephew. He is a member of the Coronal’s inner circle. He needs immediate treatment.”
“The Messenger of the Mysteries is among us today, milady. I will ask him to intercede with the gods of the city on behalf of this man.” And the Ghayrog beckoned to a mysterious, sinister figure in the hallway, a man who wore a strange wooden mask, that of a yellow-eyed hound with long pointed ears.
She felt a surge of fury. The gods of the city? By the Divine, what was the creature talking about? “A magus, you mean? No, doctor, not a magus. Medical help is what we came here for.”
“The Messenger of the Mysteries—”
“Can bring his message to someone else. You will place Prince Akbalik in your care this moment, doctor, or I tell you, and I swear it by whatever god you may happen to believe in, that I will have Lord Prestimion shut this hospital and transfer every member of its staff to the back end of Suvrael. Is that clear enough?” She snapped her fingers at one of her Skandar escorts. “Mikzin Hrosz, I want you to go through this place and get the name of every doctor in it, and everyone else’s name, too, down to the Liimen who swab down the operating tables. And then—”
But the recalcitrant Ghayrog had had enough. He was giving orders of his own, now; and suddenly there was a gurney to place Akbalik on, suddenly there were earnest-faced young interns, Ghayrogs and humans both, gathered around it. They wheeled Akbalik away. The Messenger of the Mysteries marched along beside the gurney as though it was the plan to give him the benefit not only of conventional medical treatment but also of the fantastic religious cult that seemed to have taken hold of this city.
Varaile herself was offered a comfortable room in which to wait. But she did not have to wait long. The Ghayrog doctor returned soon. His mien was as frosty as ever; but when he spoke there was a gentleness in his tone that had not been there before. “What I was trying to tell you, milady, was simply that no useful purpose would be served in interrupting the care of some other seriously ill patient to look after Prince Akbalik, because I could see immediately that the prince’s condition was already so critical that—that—”
“That he’s dead?” she cried. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
But she could read the answer in his face even before he managed to speak the words.
13
Not even in the most unfettered dreams of his boyhood had Dekkeret ever imagined himself in the midst of a scene such as this. A palatial royal suite atop a towering building in Stoien city, halfway across the world from his native city of Normork on Castle Mount. Standing just to his right: the Coronal Lord of Majipoor, Prestimion of Muldemar, with a dark and brooding expression on his face. Behind the Coronal his Su-Suheris sorcerer, Maundigand-Klimd, on whom he seemed to rely for advice in all things. On his other side, the sublime Lady of the Isle of Sleep, the Princess Therissa, with the silver circlet of her office around her brow. Across the room, the boy Dinitak Barjazid of Suvrael, holding in his hands the sinister thought-controlling helmet that he had stolen from his treacherous father in the rebel camp.
The fate of the world was in the hands of these people. And somehow Dekkeret of Normork found himself in their midst as everything unfolded. No, not even in a dream would he have indulged in such a fantasy. Nevertheless, here he was. Here he was.
“Let me see that thing again, boy,” the Princess Therissa said to Dinitak Barjazid.
He brought the helmet to her. His hands trembled as he put it in hers. He too, Dekkeret thought, is astonished to find himself in the thick of events such as these.
She had already examined it extensively, its metallic wires and its crystal and ivory attachments. And she and the boy had had a long discussion, utterly incomprehensible to Dekkeret and evidently to the Coronal as well, of its technical aspects.
The device was beautiful, in its sinister way. It reminded Dekkeret of some of the implements of sorcery that that deranged magus had destroyed, just before jumping overboard himself, during the riverboat journey that he and Akbalik had made from Piliplok to Ni-moya.
But this helmet was a scientific instrument, not any kind of magical apparatus at all. Perhaps that made it all the more frightening. Dekkeret did not have much faith in the workings of magic, though he was well aware that some mages—not all—had genuine powers. Most of what the sorcerers did, he was convinced, was fraud and charlatanry designed to awe the credulous. Maundigand-Klimd himself had said as much more than once. But this helmet was something other than a charlatan’s gimcrack. Dekkeret had heard the Lady and Dinitak Barjazid speaking of the instrument not in terms of the demons one could invoke through it by uttering certain spells, but in terms of its ability to amplify and transmit brain-waves by electrical means. That did not sound like sorcery to him. And he knew that the Barjazid helmet worked. He had felt its terrible power himself.
The Lady put her own circlet aside and held the helmet above her head.
Prestimion said, “Mother, do you think you should?”
She smiled. “I’ve had more than a little experience with devices of this sort, Prestimion. And Dinitak has explained the basic principles of this one to me:”
She donned it. Touched the controls, made small adjustments.
Dekkeret could hardly bear to watch as she allowed the power of the device to enter her. She was, he thought, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, ageless, glorious, altogether superb. Her regal grace of bearing, her serene features, her splendid lustrous black hair, her elegantly simple robe with that astonishing purple-red jewel gleaming in its golden hoop on her bosom—oh, truly she was the queen of the world! What if this monstrous machine of the Bar-jazids were to damage her mind as it lay upon her brow? What if she were to cry out and turn pale before them, and crumple and fall?