But he said nothing of that. He replied simply, “I don’t want to make war on Zimroel. I don’t want to kill innocent people, I don’t want to burn towns and villages, I don’t want to knock down the gates of Ni-moya.”
“And Mandralisca?”
“Must be stopped. Destroyed, to use Prestimion’s word. I have no quarrel with that. But I want to find some other way to bring it about, something short of waging total war against the people of Zimroel.” Dekkeret looked toward the sideboard and the remaining wine, but decided against taking a third bowl. “I’m going to send for Dinitak. I need to talk with him.”
“Now?” Fulkari asked, giving him a look of mock horror.
“He’ll have valuable things to say. He’s as close to a High Counsellor as anyone I have right now, Fulkari.”
“You also have me. And I give you this bit of high counseclass="underline" it’s two and a half hours now since we arrived in this place, or a little more, and we haven’t managed to find time to have anything to eat yet. Food is a good thing when one is hungry. Food is important. Food is a pleasing concept.”
“We’ll invite him in to join us, then.”
“No, Dekkeret! No.”
“What’s this? Do we have open defiance here?” he said, more amused by her audacity than annoyed.
Fulkari’s eyes also were flickering with a gleam of amusement. “That might be the word for it. Outside this room you are my Coronal Lord, yes, but in here—here—oh, Dekkeret, don’t be so foolish! You can’t be Coronal your every waking moment. Even a Coronal needs some rest, and we’ve been traveling all day. You’re too tired to think usefully about these things now, or to discuss them with Dinitak. I say let’s have dinner sent in, at long last. And then let’s go to bed.” A different sort of gleam entered her eye now. “Sleep on all this. Pray for a useful dream. You can talk to Dinitak in the morning.”
“But Prestimion is expecting—”
“Shush.” Her hand covered his mouth. She pressed herself close against him, and despite himself he slipped his arms around her and let himself melt into her embrace. Her lips rose to meet his. His hands traveled down the length of her smooth, slender back.
Fulkari is right, he thought. Nothing requires me to be Coronal my every waking moment.
Dinitak can wait. Prestimion can wait. And Mandralisca can wait as well.
In the night, as Dekkeret slept, fragments of memory came floating up out of the deep well of his spirit and went dancing about in his mind, stray bits and pieces out of the recent past that seemed to be trying to assemble themselves into some coherent whole.
***
—He is in Shabikant, kneeling before the two oracular trees, the ancient Trees of the Sun and the Moon. And from those trees comes the faintest of sounds, a far-off rusty grinding sound, as though the trees after the silence of ages are trying to muster their powers once more and speak out to the newly crowned king and tell him something he must know.
—He is in Kesmakuran, at the tomb of Dvorn the first Pontifex, this time kneeling before the ancient monarch’s great smiling statue, and the sweet hazy smoke of the herbs burning in the pit before him fills his lungs and invades his mind, and he closes his eyes and hears a voice within his head speaking in some strange wordless way, telling him, until it all dissolves into a meaningless boum, boum, boum, that he is destined to bring about great change, that he will work a transformation in the world nearly as great as that which was worked by Dvorn himself when he created the Pontificate.
—He is in the marketplace at Thilambaluc, he and Dinitak, and a tawdry marketplace astrologer is telling Dinitak’s fortune for a price of fifty weights, but the fortune-telling has hardly begun when the man’s eyes bulge with shock and alarm and he thrusts Dinitak’s coins back into his hands, claiming that he is unable to offer a prediction of his future and will not take his money, and runs swiftly away. “I don’t understand,” Dinitak says. “Am I so frightening? What did he see?”
—He has been wandering the Castle alone in the first days of his reign, and he is standing outside the judgment-hall that Lord Prestimion built, and the Su-Suheris magus Maundigand-Klimd comes upon him and asks for a private audience, and tells him that he has had a mysterious revelation in which he saw the Powers of the Realm gathered before the Confalume Throne to perform some ritual of high importance, but a mysterious fourth Power was present in the Su-Suheris’s vision along with the Pontifex and the Coronal and the Lady of the Isle. Dekkeret is perplexed by that, for how can there be a fourth Power of the Realm? And Maundigand-Klimd says, “I have one other detail to add, my lord.” The aura of that unknown fourth, the Su-Suheris declares, carries the imprint of a member of the Barjazid family.
In Dekkeret’s dreaming mind these fragments of memory drifted round and round and round again, until suddenly they were united into a single strand and the pattern came clear—the mysterious distant sound coming from the shifting roots of the oracular trees, the wordless words of the statue of the first Pontifex, the fear in the eyes of the marketplace astrologer, the revelation that had been visited upon Maundigand-Klimd—
Yes.
He sat upright, wide awake, as awake as he had ever been, heart pounding, sweat streaming from every pore.
“A fourth Power!” he cried. “A King of Dreams! Yes! Yes!”
Fulkari, lying beside him, stirred and opened her eyes. “Dekkeret?” she asked foggily. “What is it, Dekkeret? Is something wrong?”
“Up! Bathe yourself, dress, Fulkari! I need to speak with Dinitak immediately.”
“But it’s the middle of the night. You promised, Dekkeret—”
“I promised to sleep on it, and to pray for a useful dream. And so I have, and the dream has come. And brought me something that can’t wait until morning.” He was out of bed and searching for his robe. Fulkari was sitting up, now, blinking, rubbing her eyes, muttering to herself. He kissed her lightly on the tip of the nose and went out into the hall to find the steward of the night.
“Get me Dinitak Barjazid,” Dekkeret called. “I want him right away!”
It seemed to take no time at all for Dinitak to arrive. He was fully dressed and entirely awake. Dekkeret wondered whether he had been to sleep at all. Dinitak was such an ascetic in so many ways: sleep must seem a waste of time to him.
“I would have summoned you right after I met with Prestimion,” Dekkeret began, “but Fulkari was able to talk me into waiting until I had had a chance to rest a little while. It was just as well I did.”
Quickly he sketched for Dinitak a summary of his conference with
Prestimion the night before. Dinitak seemed surprised at none of it, neither Prestimion’s unconcealed hatred for Mandralisca nor the Pontifex’s fierce desire to destroy the Sambailid rebellion by force of arms. It was, he said, exactly what one would expect of a man who had been tried by the Sambailid clan as the Pontifex Prestimion had been tried.
“I tell you bluntly, I detest the idea of going to war against Zimroel,” Dekkeret said. “The Lady Taliesme surely will be opposed to it also. I think Prestimion secretly feels the same way.”
“I suspect you may be right there. He has no love for war.”
“But he’s so troubled by the attacks on his own family that obliterating Mandralisca is his highest priority and he doesn’t care how the job gets done. Go to Zimroel, Dekkeret, he said to me. Take the biggest army you can. Set things to rights there. And destroy Mandralisca. War is what he means, Dinitak. It’s my hope that I can get him to soften his mind on this.”