“There has already been war between us, cousin. I keep you here to make certain that there never will be again.”
“Without trial? Without so much as lodging a charge against me, except this vague mumbling about treason, and crimes against your person?” Dantirya Sambail had recovered his poise, Prestimion saw. The baffled look was gone from him, and so, too, was the outward show of fury. He had his old terrible calmness back, the calmness that Prestimion knew to hide volcanic forces kept under control by ferocious inner strength. “Ah, Prestimion, you vex me greatly. I would lose my temper, I think, if not for my certain feeling that you’ve taken leave of your senses, and that it’s folly to be angry with a madman.”
A predicament. Prestimion pondered it. Should he tell the Procurator the full truth of the great obliteration? No, no: he would simply be handing Dantirya Sambail an unsheathed blade and telling him to strike. The tale of what had been done to the world’s memory was a secret that must never be revealed.
Nor could he lock Dantirya Sambail up in here indefinitely without bringing him to trial. The Procurator had not been speaking idly when he said he had his supporters. Dantirya Sambail’s power spread far and wide over the other continent. Quite conceivably Prestimion might find himself embroiled before long in a second civil war, this one between Zimroel and Alhanroel, if he went on holding the Procurator without explanation in this seemingly arbitrary and even tyrannical way.
But a man lacking all awareness of his crimes could not be brought fairly to justice for committing them. That was a puzzle of Prestimion’s own making. And he was, he realized, as far from a resolution of it as ever.
The time had come to withdraw, to regroup, to seek the counsel of his friends.
“I had a man who stood by my side to serve me,” Dantirya Sambail was saying. “Mandralisca was his name. Good and true and loyal, he was. Where is he, Prestimion? I’d like him sent to me, if I am to be kept here longer. He tasted my food for me, you know, to be sure there was no poison in it. I miss his wondrous jollity. Send him to me, Prestimion:”
“Yes, and the two of you can sing merry songs together all the night long, is that it?”
It was almost comical to hear Dantirya Sambail calling the poison-taster Mandralisca jolly. Him, that thin-lipped hard-eyed villain, that spawn of demons, that stark skull-and-crossbones of a man?
But Prestimion had no intention of bringing those two scorpions together. Mandralisca too had played an evil role at Thegomar Edge, and had been hauled in, wounded and a prisoner, spewing venom with every breath, after engaging Abrigant in a duel. He was in another cell, much less pleasant than Dantirya Sambail’s, in another part of the tunnels. And there he would stay.
This conversation was leading nowhere. Moving toward the door, Prestimion said, “I bid you farewell, cousin. We’ll speak again another time.”
The Procurator gaped at him. “What? What? Did you come here simply to mock me, Prestimion?”
There was that rumbling krokkotas growl again. There was untrammeled rage on Dantirya Sambail’s face, though the strange eyes were as soft and gentle as ever within the contorted mask of fury. Coolly Prestimion opened the cell door, stepped through, closed it just as Dantirya Sambail began to lurch toward him with upraised arms.
“Prestimion!” the Procurator cried, hammering clangorously against the door as it slammed in his face. “Prestimion! Damn you, Prestimion!”
9
It was rare for any travelers to approach the Castle by the northwestern road, which came up the back side of the Mount by way of the High City of Huine, and thence to the road known as the Stiamot Highway, a wide but poorly maintained thoroughfare, old and rutted, that reached the Castle at the infrequently used Vaisha Gate. The usual way to go was through the gently rising plateau of Bombifale Plain to High Morpin, and up the ten flower-bordered miles of the Grand Calintane Highway to the Castle’s main entrance at the Dizimaule Plaza.
But someone was definitely coming up the northwestern road today—a little group of vehicles, four of them, moving slowly, with a particularly bizarre one at the head of the procession. That one was a sight of such surpassing strangeness that the young guard captain who had been stuck with the dreary assignment of patrolling the Vaisha Gate station gasped in wonder as it came into view, seven or eight turns below him along the winding road. He stood agog a moment, not believing the evidence of his eyes. A huge flatbed wagon of strange antique design, it was, so broad it filled the width of Stiamot Highway from one shoulder to the other—and that fluid, rippling wall of light surrounding it on all sides with a cold white pulsing glow—that cargo of dimly glimpsed monsters, half hidden behind that shield of dizzying brightness—
The captain of guards at Vaisha Gate was twenty years old, a man of Amblemorn at the foot of Castle Mount. His training had not fitted him for dealing with anything remotely like this. He turned to his subaltern, a boy from Pendiwane in the flatlands of the Glayge Valley. “Who’s the officer of the day today?”
“Akbalik.”
“Find him, fast. Tell him his presence is required out here.”
The boy went sprinting inside. But finding anyone in the virtually infinite maze of the Castle was far from an easy task, even the officer of the day, who was supposed to make himself readily accessible. Some thirty minutes went by before the boy returned, Akbalik in tow. By then the flat-bed wagon had pulled up in the spacious gravel-strewn tract in front of the gate; the three floaters that had accompanied it in its journey up the Mount were parked beside it; and the captain of guards from Amblemorn found himself in the extraordinary situation of standing with drawn sword against no less a figure than the formidable warrior Gialaurys, Grand Admiral of the Realm. Half a dozen grim-faced men, Gialaurys’s companions, were arrayed just behind him, frozen into positions of imminent attack.
Akbalik, the nephew of Prince Serithorn and a man much respected for his common sense and steady nature, took the scene in quickly. With no more than a single startled blink at the cargo of the wagon he said in a crisp voice to the guard captain, “You can put your weapon down, Mibikihur. Don’t you recognize the Admiral Gialaurys?”
“Everyone knows the lord Gialaurys, sir. But look at what he’s got with him! He has no permit to bring wild animals into the Castle. Even the lord Gialaurys needs a permit before he can drive a wagonload of things like this inside!”
Akbalik’s cool gray eyes surveyed the wagon. He had never seen a vehicle so big. Nor had he seen, ever before, such creatures as were being transported in it.
It was difficult to make them out, for they were constrained from leaving the wagon by some kind of bright curtain of energy that completely encircled it—a curtain that was like a sheet of lightning rising from the ground, but lightning that stayed and stayed and stayed. It seemed to Akbalik that lesser energy-walls within the wagon divided the creatures one from another. And those creatures—those revolting, hideous monsters!—
Gialaurys seemed in high fury. He stood with clenched fists, his great-muscled arms rippling with barely contained strength, and the look of rage on his face could have melted rock. “Where is Septach Melayn, Akbalik? I sent word ahead for him to meet me at the gate! Why are you here, and not him?”