It was all gone. Or, perhaps, never had been at all. There was no road crossing their path. No clearing; no encampment; nothing but the familiar solid green wall of manganoza palms.
“What are you talking about, Septach Melayn? What do you see?”
“I see nothing at all, Navigorn. That’s the problem. I saw it—Gialaurys did too, just a moment ago—and now—now—”
Within his soul Septach Melayn cried out to the Lady for an explanation. At first no answer came. She did not seem to be with him at all.
Then he felt her with him again. But when she came to him, her presence felt distant and unclear, as if she had suffered some great diminution of her strength. It was with the greatest difficulty that he derived any meaning from the uncertain pulse of the wordless contact that ran between them.
Slowly, though, he came to understand.
What he had experienced just before, the sight of the roadway in the jungle and the tent camp beyond it, had been no illusion. The enemy they had sought so long was indeed hidden right behind those nearby trees. And for one brief tantalizing moment it had become possible for his eyes to penetrate the cloud of unknowingness that had concealed the Procurator from them for so long.
But the means by which that cloud had been stripped away had lost its force. The effort had proven too great. The cloud had descended once more.
They could, of course, attempt an attack against the nearby position where they now knew Dantirya Sambail to be hiding. But it would be like fighting a battle blindfolded. The Procurator and all his men would be invisible to them. And they themselves would be in plain view as they launched a charge against a foe they could not see.
It was plain to Prestimion that Dinitak was faltering, now. His face was strangely pallid despite the darkness of his Suvrael-tanned skin, his eyes were bleary, his thin cheeks were sagging with monstrous fatigue. He seemed to be shivering. Now and again he pressed his fingertips against his temples. His helmet was slightly askew, but he did not seem to notice.
The operation was hardly two hours old, and already they were on the verge of losing the key player.
“Will he hold out, mother?” Prestimion asked quietly.
“He’s weakening very quickly, I think. He has been able to disrupt his father’s power of illusion but not to overcome it. And now his strength is beginning to flag.”
The Lady, too, was showing signs of the strain. Since well before sunrise she had maintained contact through her circlet with Septach Melayn deep in the Stoienzar jungles, had observed at a careful distance the camp of Dantirya Sambail, and had linked herself to Dinitak Barjazid also, while the boy endeavored to use his helmet against his father. The effort of keeping three bridges of perception open at once had to be draining her strength.
Is our attack on Dantirya Sambail going to fail, Prestimion wondered, before we have even struck our first blow?
He looked toward Dinitak again. No question of it: the boy was on the edge of collapse. His face was gleaming with sweat and his eyes seemed not to be in focus. They were rolling wildly around, so that now and again only the whites were showing. He had started to sway erratically back and forth, rocking eerily on the balls of his feet. A low droning sound came from him.
There was no way that Dinitak could be acting effectively against his father any longer. More likely he was taking a frightful buffeting from Venghenar Barjazid through that helmet. And at any moment—
Yes. Dinitak swung about to the side, froze for a moment in a kind of huddled crouch, quivered wildly from head to toe, and began to topple.
Dekkeret, at Prestimion’s side, cried out and moved toward the boy with the same swiftness of reaction that he had shown long ago when that madman with the sickle had erupted from the crowd in Normork. Dinitak, pivoting as he fell, was already crumpling to the ground. With a quick lunge Dekkeret caught him about the shoulders and eased him the rest of the way toward the floor.
Dinitak had knocked the helmet from his forehead in that last convulsive movement before falling: for one dismaying moment the fragile thing seemed almost to be floating across the room. Prestimion, snatching at it almost unthinkingly as it flew past, plucked it from the air with two hooked fingers. He stood staring at it in awe for an instant as it lay in his hands.
Then he realized what must be done in this moment of crisis.
“It is my turn with it now,” he said. Without waiting for a reaction from any of the others, he raised the helmet high over his head, looked upward at it for the merest moment, and pulled it down into place.
This was not the first time he had worn it. At Prestimion’s stubborn insistence, Dinitak Barjazid had given him three sessions of training with the device over the last two weeks: the most minimal kind of exploration, mere brief tastes of what the helmet was capable of doing. He had learned how to operate the controls in a rudimentary sort of way and he had made short hopping excursions to the outer reaches of Dinitak’s own mind and Dekkeret’s. But there had been no opportunity for any real experience at long-range use.
There would be now.
“Help me, if you can,” he said to Dinitak, who lay sprawled in a heap on the floor, propped up against Dekkeret. “How do I find the Stoienzar?”
“The vertical ascent dial first,” the boy said. His voice, faint and reedy with exhaustion, was next to impossible to hear. “Go up. Up and out. Then choose your path from above.”
Up and out? Easy enough to say. But what—how—
Well, there was nothing for it but to begin. Prestimion touched the vertical ascent dial, giving it just the lightest of twists, and was caught up instantly and carried on high. Like riding the lightning, yes. Or a climbing rocket. His mind went soaring upward at infinite velocity through the steel-blue band that was the atmosphere and out into the blackness beyond, heading toward the sun.
Its great blazing golden-green bulk hung before him in the pure emptiness of space, terrifyingly close, sending bursts of flame outward in every direction. By its stunning light Prestimion saw Majipoor far below him, the merest tiny globe, slowly revolving. The single jagged peak of Castle Mount that came thrusting out from one side of it looked from here like nothing more than a slender needle; but Prestimion knew that it was the most colossal of needles, pushing high up through the envelope of air that surrounded the world, extending deep into the dark night-realm outside it.
The planet turned and Castle Mount moved beyond his view. That shining blue-green expanse below him now was the Great Sea, whose shores so few explorers had seen. He saw the coast of Zimroel, then; there was the Isle of Sleep, and the Rodamaunt Archipelago, and now, as Prestimion hovered for a timeless time suspended between the stars and the world, he perceived Alhanroel coming back into view once more, the side that faced Zimroel, this time. From a position somewhere over the midpoint of the Inner Sea he saw it clearly, up ahead. There was the long southward-tending sweep of its western coast, and there, the slender jutting thumb that was the peninsula.
I am much too high, he told himself. I must descend. Already I have stayed far too long. Years have been going by, centuries, while I soar out here. The battle is over; the world has moved along; the history of my reign has been told.
I have stayed too long; I must descend.
He let himself drift downward. With surprising ease he moved himself toward the coast of Alhanroel.
Steady, now. There is Stoien city. We are in it at this moment, somewhere, even though I am out here as well. And now let us go eastward along the southern shore. Yes. Yes. The peninsula. The jungle.
From a million miles away came a voice that might have been Dinitak Barjazid’s, saying, “Search for the point of flame, my lord. That is where you will find them.”