He stepped back from the cages after a time, and gestured with his head and shoulders in away that indicated he wanted to clear his mind of what he had just seen.
“What do you say, Prestimion, should we destroy the lot of them, now that you’ve had a look?” Gialaurys asked.
At first the Coronal seemed not to have heard the question. Then he said, speaking as though from a great distance, “No. No, I think not. We’ll keep them, I think, as reminders of what might have been, if only Korsibar had lasted a little while longer.” And, after another pause: “Do you know, Gialaurys, I believe we can use these things to test the valor of our young knights.”
“How so, my lord?”
“By setting them up against your malorns and zytoons in straightforward combat, and seeing how well they cope. That should show us who the really resourceful and courageous ones are. What do you think? Is that not a splendid idea?”
Gialaurys could not find the words for a response. The idea seemed grotesque to him. He glanced toward Septach Melayn, who offered only a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head.
But the thought seemed to amuse Prestimion. He looked off toward the monsters’ lairs for a moment, smiling strangely, as though in the eye of his mind he already saw the lordlings of the Castle facing these hissing horrors in the arena.
Then the Coronal returned from whatever strange place he had entered and said, in a far more businesslike tone of voice, “Let’s address this so-called epidemic of madness, now, shall we? Perhaps we have a problem here that bears closer investigation. I need a first hand look at the situation, I suspect.—Septach Melayn, what progress has been made on arranging that processional for me through the cities of Castle Mount?”
“The plans are nearly complete, my lord. Another two months and everything should be in order.”
“Two months is a very long while, if people are laughing by themselves and dancing crazily in the streets of Kharax. And hurling themselves from upper-story windows, too—has there been any more of that sort of thing, I wonder? I want to go out and have a look at things right now. Tomorrow, or at worst the day after tomorrow. Get new disguises made for us, Septach Melayn. Better ones than last time, too. That wig was atrocious, and that preposterous beard. I want to go to Stee, I think, and then Minimool, say, and maybe Tidias—no, not Tidias, someone will recognize you there—Hoikmar, it’ll be. Hoikmar, yes. That lovely place of the quiet canals.”
A great howling and bellowing came from the cages. Prestimion looked around.
“The weyhant, I suspect, would like to eat the zeil. Do I have the names right, Gialaurys?” Once again he shook his head. Revulsion was plain on his face. “Kassai... malorn ... zytoon! Foh! What monsters! May the man who devised them sleep uneasily in his grave!”
10
Coming into the Free City of Stee by the landward route around the face of Castle Mount would have been an impracticably protracted journey for Prestimion and his companions; for so great was Stee that its outskirts alone took three days to traverse in that fashion. Instead they went overland only as far as golden-walled Halanx, not far downslope from the Castle, where they boarded the snub-nosed thick-walled high-speed ferry that carried travelers down the swift River Stee to the city of the same name. No one paid the slightest heed to them. They were dressed in coarse linen robes, dull and flat in hue, the sort favored by traveling merchants; and Septach Melayn’s hairdresser had ingeniously transformed their appearances with wigs and mustaches and, for Prestimion, a sleek little beard that ran tightly along the line of his jaw.
Gialaurys, who, like his predecessor as Grand Admiral of Majipoor had never felt much fondness for travel by water, had a foul time of it almost from the moment the ferry was under way. After the first few plunging moments he shifted about so that he was sitting with his broad back to the porthole, and muttered a series of prayers under his breath, all the while devoutly rubbing with his thumbs two small amulets that he held folded into the palms of his hands.
Septach Melayn showed him little mercy. “Yes, dear man, pray with all your might! For it’s well known that this ferry sinks almost every time it attempts the voyage, and hundreds of lives a week are lost.”
Anger flashed in Gialaurys’s eyes. “Spare me your wit for once, will you?”
“The river does certainly move quickly, though,” said Prestimion, to put an end to the banter. “There can’t be many swifter ones in all the world.”
He felt none of Gialaurys’s queasiness. But their vessel’s velocity here in the upper reaches of the Mount was indisputably startling. It seemed at times as if the ferry were taking a completely vertical path down the mountain. After a while there was a leveling-off, though, and the ferry’s pace grew less alarming. It made stops to discharge passengers and collect new ones at Banglecode of the Inner Cities and Rennosk in the Guardian ring, and then proceeded by a wide westward swing to the next level down. By the time it was among the Free Cities and drawing close to Stee, late that afternoon, the river’s course had flattened so much that its flow seemed almost tranquil.
The towers of Stee now rose up tall before them on both sides of the river. With twilight coming on, the pinkish-gray marble walls of the right bank towers had acquired the bronze hue of the setting sun, and the equally lofty buildings that lined the opposite bank were already shrouded in darkness.
Septach Melayn consulted a glistening map of blue and white tiles inset into the curving side of the ferryboat’s hull. “I see here that there are eleven quays in Stee. Which one shall we take, Prestimion?”
“Does it matter? One’s as good as another, for us.”
“Vildivar, then,” said Septach Melayn. “That’s just this side of the center of town, or so it would seem. The fourth quay from here, it is.”
The ferry, moving now at an unhurried pace, cruised smoothly from slip to slip, discharging a cluster of passengers at each; and in a little while a glowing sign on shore told them that they had arrived at Vildivar Quay. “None too soon,” muttered Gialaurys darkly. His face was three shades more pale than usual, so that the brown bristles of his long dense sideburns stood out like angry bars against his cheeks.
“Come, now!” Septach Melayn cried cheerfully. “Great Stee awaits us!”
It was everyone’s fantasy to visit Stee at least once in his life. When Prestimion was a small boy his father had taken him there, as he had to so many other famous places, and Prestimion, overwhelmed by the sight of those miles of mighty towers, had vowed to return for a longer look when he was older. But then his father’s unexpected death had delivered the duties of Prince of Muldemar to him while he was still quite young, and soon after that his rise to importance among the knights of the Castle had begun, and Prestimion had had little time for pleasure-travel after that. Now, staring at the splendor of Stee through the eyes of a grown man, he was astounded to see that the city looked every bit as awesome to him today as it had when he was a child.
But Vildivar Quay turned out to be not quite as central as Septach Melayn had calculated. The towers flanking the river in this section of the city were industrial factories, and they had begun to close for the day. Workers bound for their homes in the residential districts on the opposite side of the water were streaming aboard the commuter ferries and small passenger-boats that served in lieu of bridges across the immensity of the river. Soon the neighborhood in which they had come ashore would be deserted. “We’ll hire a boatman to take us along to the next quay,” Prestimion decided, and they made their way back down to the water’s edge.