“May I remind you, your grace, we have an army too.”
“Ah, and will it fight? That’s the question, Khaymak: will it fight? What if Dekkeret comes marching up to our borders and says, ‘Here I am, your Coronal Lord,’ and our men fall down and start making star-bursts to him? That’s a risk I don’t feel comfortable taking. Not while we have this” He opened his clenched hand and held the helmet forth. “By the use of this I drove Prestimion’s brother over the edge of madness, and many another also. It’s time to go to work on Dekkeret. Take it, Khaymak. Put it on. Send your mind down to Piliplok and latch it onto Dekkeret’s, and begin taking him apart. It may be our only hope.”
Once more Khaymak Barjazid looked at the helmet in Mandralisca’s hand, but he made no move to reach out for it. Mildly he said, “It has been very clear for a long time, excellence, that your own powers of operating the helmet are superior to mine. Your greater intensity of spirit—your stronger force of character—”
“Are you telling me that you won’t do it, Khaymak?”
“Against such a powerful center of energy as the mind of Lord Dekkeret surely must be, it would perhaps be desirable that you be the one who—”
Mandralisca felt the whirlwinds starting up again within him. I must not allow that, he thought, clamping down. Stay calm. Calm. Calm.
Coldly, cuttingly, he said, “You told me only a few days ago that I may be using the helmet too much. And I do see certain signs of strain in myself that may very well be the result of just that.” His hand strayed toward the riding crop. “Don’t waste any more of my energy in discussing this, Khaymak. Take the helmet. Now. And go to work on Dekkeret with it.”
“Yes, your grace,” Barjazid said, looking very unhappy indeed.
Carefully he affixed the helmet, closed his eyes, seemed to enter the trancelike state with which one operated the device. Mandralisca watched, fascinated. Even now the Barjazid helmet still seemed like a miraculous thing to him: such a flimsy little webwork of golden wires, and yet one could use it to reach out over thousands of miles, enter other minds, any minds, even those of a Pontifex or a Coronal, and impress one’s will—take control—
Several minutes had passed, now. Barjazid was perspiring. His face had grown flushed beneath its heavy Suvrael tan. His head was bowed, his shoulders hunched together in a sign of obvious stress. Had he reached Dekkeret? Was he sending beams of red fury into the Coronal’s helpless mind?
Another minute—another—
Barjazid looked up. With trembling hands he lifted the helmet from his brow.
“Well?” Mandralisca demanded.
“Very strange, your grace. Very.” His voice was hoarse and ragged. “I did reach Dekkeret. I’m sure I did. A Coronal’s mind—surely it’s like no other. But it was—defended. That’s the only term I can use. It was as if he was shielding himself in some way against my entry.”
“Is this possible, technically speaking?”
“Yes, of course—if he’s wearing a helmet too, and knows how to use it. And he does, of course, have access to helmets, the ones confiscated from my brother long ago, that have been locked away at the Castle. It’s certainly possible that Dekkeret has brought one of those with him. But that he could use it with such mastery—that he would so much as know how to use it at all—”
“And that he would happen to be wearing it at the exact moment when you tried to attack him,” Mandralisca said. “Yes. A coincidence like that is the most unlikely thing of all. Maybe you were right, just now, that you simply don’t have enough inner force, mental strength, whatever it is, to break through Dekkeret’s defenses. Let me try, I suppose.”
Barjazid surrendered the helmet only too gladly.
Mandralisca held it cupped in both his hands for a moment, wondering whether this was really a good idea. It had been obvious all day that the pressures of this campaign had begun significantly to deplete his vitality. Using the helmet involved a great drain on one’s energies. A further expenditure of spirit at this time could well be damaging.
But it could be even more damaging to let Barjazid see how weary he was. And if he could manage, in one great stroke of mental force, to shatter the mind of the enemy who would otherwise soon be coming toward him out of Piliplok—
He put the helmet on. Closed his eyes. Entered the trance.
Sent his mind roving, southward, eastward, Piliplokward.
Dekkeret.
Surely that was he. A fiery red globe of power, like a second sun, out there by the coast.
Dekkeret. Dekkeret. Dekkeret.
And now—to strike—
Mandralisca summoned every bit of strength within him. This was the act from which he had held back so long, the direct attack on his primary foe, the outright onslaught against the single man who held the royal forces together. For reasons that had never been clear even to him—caution, strategy, perhaps even fear?—he had not struck at Prestimion when he was Coronal, and he had not struck at Dekkeret, either. He had sought to win his goals by more indirect means, gradually, rather than through one outrageous coup. It was, he supposed, his nature: silence, patience, cunning. But all those hesitations dropped away now. This was the moment to reach Dekkeret and destroy him—
The moment—
To—strike—
The moment—the moment—
He was striking, but nothing was happening. That fiery red globe was impossible to hit. It was not a matter of insufficient force, of that he was sure. But his angry lightning-bolts were glancing aside like feeble darts striking stone. Again, again, again he thrust; and each time he was rebuffed.
And then his last reservoir of energy was empty. He swept the helmet from his forehead and leaned forward against his desk, taut, quivering, resting his head on his arms.
After a moment he glanced up. The look on Khaymak Barjazid’s face was frightful. The little man was staring at him with eyes bulging with shock and horror.
“Your grace—are you all right, your grace?”
Mandralisca nodded. He was numb with exhaustion.
“What happened, your grace?”
“Shielded—just as you said. Impossible to get near him. Completely defended.” He pressed his fingertips to his aching eyes. “Can he be some kind of superman, do you think? I know this Dekkeret, this Coronal, only by repute—we have never met—but nothing I’ve ever heard about him would lead me to think he has any special powers of mind. And yet—the way he deflected me—the ease of it—”
Khaymak Barjazid shook his head. “I know of no power of the human mind that would let it fend off the thrust of the helmet. More likely they have come up with some new form of the device. My nephew Dinitak, you know, is with the Coronal’s party. He understands the helmets. And may have modified one in such a way that he can use it to protect his master.”
“Of course,” said Mandralisca. It was all completely clear now. “Dinitak, who sold his own father out to Prestimion by bringing him the helmets, and who has done it again these twenty years afterward. He has ever been a thorn in my side, that nephew of yours. Great is the mischief he’s done: and great will be his suffering, Khaymak, when I finally begin to pay him back for it!”
Thastain returned toward nightfall, rumpled and soiled from his day in the maze of tunnels and galleries and narrow arcades that was the Grand Bazaar of Ni-moya, and soaked through and through by the inexorable rain. Mandralisca could see at once that the boy must have failed in his mission, for he looked both glum and fearful, and he had returned alone, instead of bringing some Shapeshifter with him as Mandralisca had ordered. But he listened with a sort of weary patience to Thastain’s long recitation: his tour of the vast labyrinthine market, his conversations with this merchant and that one until finally he had won the cooperation of a certain Gaziri Venemm, a dealer in cheeses and oils, who after much hesitation and circumlocution agreed, upon payment of a purse full of royals, to arrange for Thastain to be conducted to one of his fellow merchants who was believed—believed—to be a Shapeshifter masquerading as a man of the city of Narabal.