“Lady—lady—it was Klaristen! She jumped, lady! From the top-story window, it was!”
Varaile nodded coolly. Within herself she felt shock and horror and something close to nausea, but she dared not allow any of that to show. To Vorthid, the chamberlain of the house, she said, “Summon the imperial proctors immediately.” To the wine-steward, Kresshin, she said, “Run and get Dr. Thark as fast as you can.” And to Bettaril, the strong and sturdy master of the stables, she said, “I have to go out there to see after the injured people. Find yourself a cudgel and stand beside me, in case matters become unruly. Which very possibly they will.”
Of the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, Stee was by far the grandest and most prosperous; and Simbilon Khayf was one of the grandest and most prosperous men of Stee. Which made it all the more startling that such a misfortune could strike his house. And a great many envious folks both within and without Stee, resentful of Simbilon Khayf’s phenomenal rise to wealth and power out of the back streets of the city, secretly rejoiced at the difficulties that his fourth-story chambermaid’s lunatic plunge had entangled him in. For Stee, ancient as it was, was looked upon by its neighbors on the Mount as something of an upstart city, and Simbilon Khayf, the wealthiest commoner in Stee, was himself, beyond any doubt, an upstart among upstarts.
The fifty magnificent cities that occupied the jagged sides of immense Castle Mount, the astounding mountain that swept upward to a height of thirty miles above the lowlands of the continent of Alhanroel, were arranged in five distinct bands situated at varying altitudes—the Slope Cities near the bottom, then the Free Cities, the Guardian Cities, the Inner Cities, and, just below the summit itself, the nine that were known as the High Cities. Of the Fifty Cities, the ones whose citizens had the highest opinions of themselves were those nine, the High Cities that formed a ring that encircled the Mount’s uppermost reaches, almost on the threshold of the Castle itself.
Because they were closest to the Castle, these were the cities most often visited by the glittering members of the Castle aristocracy, lords and ladies who were descended from Coronals and Pontifexes of the past, or who might someday attain to those great titles themselves. Not only did the Castle folk often journey down to such High Cities as High Morpin or Sipermit or Frangior to partake of the sophisticated pleasures that those cities offered, but also there was a steady upward flow from the High Cities to the Castle: Septach Melayn was a man of Tidias, Prestimion had come from Muldemar. Therefore many folk of the High Cities tended to put on airs, regarding themselves as special persons because they happened to live in places that stood far up in the sky above the rest of Majipoor and rubbed elbows on a daily basis with the great ones of the Castle.
Stee, though, was a city belonging to the second band from the bottom—the Free Cities, they were called. There were nine of them, all quite old, dating back at least seven thousand years to the time when Lord Stiamot was Coronal of Majipoor, and probably they were much older than that.
No one was quite certain what it was that the Free Cities were free from. The best scholarly explanation of the name was that Stiamot had awarded those cities an exemption from some tax of his day, in return for special favors received. Lord Stiamot himself had been a man of Stee. In Stiamot’s time Stee had been the capital city of Majipoor, until his decision to build a gigantic castle at the summit of the Mount and move the chief administrative center to it.
Unlike most of the cities of Castle Mount, which were tucked into various craggy pockets of the colossal mountain, Stee had the advantage of being located on a broad, gently sloping plain on the Mount’s northern face, where there was enormous room for urban expansion. Thus it had spread out uninhibitedly in all directions from its original site along the swift river from which it had taken its name, and by Prestimion’s time had attained a population of nearly twenty-five million people. On Majipoor it was rivaled in size only by the great city of Ni-moya on the continent of Zimroel; and for overall wealth and grandeur, even mighty Ni-moya had to take second place to Stee.
Stee’s magnitude and location had afforded it great commercial prosperity, a prosperity so great that citizens of other cities tended to regard Stee and its barons of industry as more than a little vulgar. Its chief mercantile center was the splendid row of towering buildings faced with facades of reflective gray-pink marble that were known as the River-wall Buildings, which ran for miles along both banks of the River Stee. Behind these twin walls of offices and warehouses lay the thriving factories of industrial Stee on the left bank, and the palatial homes of the rich merchants on the right. Further back on the right bank were the great country estates of the Stee nobility and the parks and game preserves for which Stee was famous throughout the world, and on the left, for mile after mile, the modest homes of the millions of workers whose efforts had kept the city flourishing ever since the remote era of Lord Stiamot.
Simbilon Khayf had been one of those workers, once. But earlier he had been even less than that: a street beggar, in fact. All that, though, was forty and fifty years in his past.
Luck, shrewdness, and ambition had propelled him on a swift climb to his extraordinary position in the city. Now he consorted with counts and dukes and other such great men, who pretended to regard him as a social equal because they knew they might someday have need of his banking facilities; he entertained at his grand mansion the high and mighty of many other cities when business dealings brought them to Stee; and now, even as the hapless housemaid Klaristen was hurling herself to her death, he was mingling cheerfully with the most exalted members of the Majipoor aristocracy at Lord Prestimion’s great festival.
Varaile, meanwhile, found herself kneeling in blood in the street just outside her house, staring down at grotesquely broken bodies while a hostile and ever-growing crowd exchanged sullen muttered comments all around her.
She gave her attention to the two fallen strangers, first. A man and a woman, they were; both handsomely dressed, obviously well-to-do. Varaile had no idea who they were. She noticed an empty floater parked by the grassy strip across the street, where sightseers who had come for a look at Simbilon Khayf’s mansion often left their vehicles. Perhaps these people were strangers to Stee, who had been standing in the cobblestoned plaza outside the west portal, admiring the finely carved limestone sculptures of the house’s facade, when the body of the housemaid Klaristen had come smashing down out of the sky upon them.
They were dead, both of them. Varaile was certain of that. She had never seen a dead body before, but she knew, crouching down and peering into the glazed eyes of the two victims, that no impulse of life lurked behind them. Their heads were at grotesque angles. Klaristen must have dropped directly down on them, snapping their necks. Death would have been instantaneous: a blessing of sorts, she thought. But death all the same. She fought back instinctive terror. Her hands moved in a little gesture of prayer.
“Klaristen is still breathing, lady,” the stablemaster Bettaril called to her. “But not for long, I think.”
The housemaid had evidently ricocheted from her two victims with great force, landing a dozen or so feet away.
When Varaile was convinced that there was nothing she could do for the other two, she went to Klaristen’s side, ignoring the onlookers’ sullen stares. They seemed to hold her personally responsible for the calamity, as though Var-aile, in a moment of pique, had thrown Klaristen out the window herself.