The summer ticked along. The time soon would come, Dekkeret knew, when the season changed and the winds turned contrary, blowing so vigorously out of the west that departure would have to be postponed for many months. He wondered if he had misjudged the timing, had spent so much time assembling his fleet that the invasion must be delayed until spring, and his enemies given that much more time to dig themselves in.
But at last everything seemed propitious for departure, and the winds still were favorable.
His flagship was called the Lord Stiamot. Of course: the local hero, the Coronal whose name was a synonym for triumph. Dekkeret suspected the ship had formerly borne some less resounding name and had hastily been renamed on his behalf, but he saw no harm in that. “Let that name be an omen of our coming success,” Gialaurys said with gruff exuberance, pointing to the golden lettering on the hull as they went aboard. “The conqueror! The greatest of warriors!”
“Indeed,” said Dekkeret.
Gialaurys was exuberant also—indeed, he was the only one—when Piliplok harbor finally came into view, many weeks later, after a slow and windy crossing of the Inner Sea made notable by the presence of a great band of sea-dragons that stayed close at hand much of the way. The huge aquatic beasts frisked and frolicked about Dekkeret’s fleet with alarming playfulness day after day, lashing the choppy blue-green sea with their immense fluked tails and sometimes rising from the water, tail first, to display nearly their entire awesome bodies. The sight of them was exhilarating and frightening at the same time. But at last the dragons vanished to starboard, disappearing into the next phase of whatever mysterious journeys the sea-dragons were wont to make in the course of their endless circlings of the world.
Then the sea changed color, darkening to a muddy gray, for the voyagers had reached the point off shore where the first traces of the silt and debris carried into the ocean by the Zimr could be detected. The huge river, in its seven-thousand-mile journey across Zimroel, transported untold tons of such stuff eastward. At its gigantic mouth, sixty miles across and wider, all that tremendous load was swept into the sea, staining it for hundreds of miles out from shore. The sight of that stain meant that Piliplok city could not be far away.
And then, finally, the shore of Zimroel came into view. The chalky mile-high headland just north of Piliplok that marked the place where the great mouth of the Zimr met the sea stood out brightly against the horizon.
Gialaurys was the first to spy the actual city. “Piliplok ho!” he bellowed. “Piliplok! Piliplok!”
Piliplok, yes. Was a hostile fleet waiting there for him, Dekkeret wondered?
It did not appear that way. The only vessels in view were mercantile ones, moving about their business as though nothing at all were amiss. Evidently Mandralisca—unless he had some surprise up his sleeve—did not intend to deny the Coronal of Majipoor the right to land on Zimroel’s soil. To defend the continent’s entire perimeter against invasion was, after all, an enormous task, possibly beyond the rebels’ resources.
Mandralisca must be drawing a line somewhere closer to Ni-moya, Dekkeret decided.
Gialaurys could barely contain his delight as his birthplace came into view. Joyfully he clapped his hands. “Ah, there’s a city for you, Dekkeret! Take a good look, my lord! Is that a city, or isn’t it, eh, my lord?”
Well, he had every reason to smile at the sight of his native city. But Dekkeret, who had been to Piliplok before on his trip with Akbalik, knew what to expect of it, and he greeted the place with none of the old Grand Admiral’s glee. Piliplok was not his idea of urban beauty. It was a city that only its natives could love.
And Fulkari gasped in outright shock at her first glimpse of it as they entered the harbor. “I knew it wasn’t supposed to be beautiful, but even so, Dekkeret—even so—could it have been some lunatic who laid this place out? Some crazed mathematician in love with his own insane plan?”
That had been Dekkeret’s reaction too, that other time, and the city had grown no lovelier in the twenty-odd years of his absence. From the central point of its splendid harbor its eleven great highways fanned out in rigidly straight spokes, crossed with unerring precision by curving bands of streets. Each band delimited a district of different function—the marine warehouses, the commercial quarter, the zone of light industry, the residential areas, and so forth—and within each district every building was of an architectural style unique to that district, every structure looking precisely like its neighbor. Each district’s prevailing style had only one thing in common with the styles of its neighbors, which was that they all were characterized by a singular heaviness and brutality of design that oppressed the eye and burdened the heart.
“In Suvrael, where hardly any trees or shrubs of the northern continents can survive our heat and powerful sunlight,” said Dinitak, “we plant what we can, palms, tough succulents, even the poor scrawny things of the desert, for the sake of giving our cities some beauty. But here in this benevolent coastal climate, where anything at all will grow, the good folk of Piliplok seem to choose to grow nothing at all!” Shaking his head, he pointed toward shore. “Do you see a stem anywhere, Dekkeret, a branch, a leaf, a flower? Nothing. Nothing!”
“It is all like that,” said Dekkeret. “Pavement, pavement, pavement. Buildings, buildings, buildings. Concrete, concrete, concrete. I remember seeing a shrub or two, last time. No doubt they’ve had those removed by now.”
“Well, we aren’t coming here as settlers, are we?” said Septach Melayn lightly. “So let us pretend that we adore the place, if they should ask us, and then let us get ourselves far from it as soon as we can.”
“I second the motion,” Fulkari said.
“Look,” said Dekkeret. “Here comes our reception committee.”
Half a dozen vessels had put out from the harbor. Dekkeret, still uneasy, was relieved to see that they did not have the look of military ships—he recognized them as the strange-looking fishing vessels of Piliplok that were known as dragon-ships, lavishly ornamented with bizarre fanged figureheads and sinister spiky tails, with garish painted rows of white teeth and scarlet-and-yellow eyes along their sides, and intricate many-pronged masts carrying their black-and-crimson sails—and that they flew ensigns of welcome that showed the green-and-gold colors symbolic of the power and authority of the Coronal.
It could, of course, all be some deceptive maneuver of Mandralisca’s, Dekkeret supposed. But he doubted that. And he felt further reassurance when a huge voice came booming across the waters to him through a speaking-tube, crying out the traditional salute: “Dekkeret! Dekkeret! All hail Lord Dekkeret!” It was the unmistakable deep rumble of a Skandar’s voice. There was a greater concentration of the giant four-armed beings in Piliplok than anywhere else in the world. The Lord Mayor of Piliplok himself, Kelmag Volvol by name, was a Skandar, Dekkeret knew.
And that was unquestionably Kelmag Volvol now, an immense shaggy figure nearly nine feet high in the red robes of mayoralty, standing in the bow of the lead dragon-ship making clusters of starburst signs, four at a time, and then signalling that he wished to come aboard the Lord Stiamot for a parley. If this were a trap, Dekkeret thought, would the mayor of the city have been willing to bait it with his own person?