Out here in the hinterlands, though, one could do as one wished, even proclaim oneself sovereign over vast domains, and it might be years before word of it filtered back to the Coronal atop Castle Mount or to the Coronal’s own overlord, the Pontifex, in his underground lair. Majipoor was so huge that news often traveled slowly even when carried on swift wings.
And thus the five brothers had taken themselves out to this remote outpost and had given themselves resounding new titles: they named themselves the Lords of Zimroel, true successors by right of blood to the Procurators of old. And they had gradually let the word go forth, village by village throughout the adjacent regions of Zimroel on both sides of the river, that they held supremacy here now. They had left the river cities themselves alone, so far, because the river was the main highway across the continent, and any attempt to interfere with commerce on the Zimr would bring quick retribution from the central government.
But they had claimed and won allegiance in the farming communities north and south of the river for some hundreds of miles, reaching to the east as far as Immanala, to the west almost to Dulorn. That provided them with a domain from which they could eventually expand.
It was Mandralisca himself, long the second-in-command to Dantirya Sambail and now the chief adviser to his five nephews, who had suggested their new titles to them.
“You cannot call yourselves Procurators,” he said. “It would be like an instant declaration of war.”
“But ‘lords’—?” said Gaviral, who was the eldest one, and the quickest-witted of the lot. “Only the Coronal may call himself ‘lord’ on Majipoor, is that not so, Mandralisca?”
“Only the Coronal can take it as part of his name: Lord Prankipin, Lord Confalume, Lord Prestimion. But any count or prince or duke is a lord of sorts in his own territory, and one can quite properly say, in addressing him, ‘my lord.’ So we will make a little distinction here. You will be the Five Lords of Zimroel; but you will not try to speak of yourselves as Lord Gaviral, Lord Gavinius, Lord Gavdat, and so on. No: you will be ‘the Lord Gaviral,’ ‘the Lord Gavinius,’ ” et cetera, et cetera.”
“It seems to me a very fine distinction,” said Gaviral.
“I like it,” said Gavahaud, who of the five was the most vain. He grinned a broad toothy grin. “The Lord Gavahaud! All hail the Lord Gavahaud! It has a fine sound, would you not say, eh, Lord Gavilomarin?”
“Be careful,” said Mandralisca. “You have it wrong already. Not Lord Gavilomarin, but the Lord Gavilomarin. When one speaks to him directly one can call him ‘milord,’ and say, ‘Milord Gavilomarin,’ but never ‘Lord Gavilomarin’ alone. Is that clear?”
It took them a while to get it. He was not surprised. In Mandralisca’s estimation they were, after all, nothing more than a pack of buffoons.
But they embraced their new titles gladly. In the course of time they made themselves known in this district and several surrounding provinces as the Five Lords of Zimroel. Not everyone accepted the resurgence of Sambailid power gladly: the Vorthinar lord, for one, a petty princeling with lands to the north of the Zimr, had had ideas of his own about establishing authority independent of the Alhanroel regime, and had refused the Sambailid overtures so rudely and categorically that it had been necessary for the brothers to send Mandralisca to deal with him. But there were plenty of men who had loved Dantirya Sambail and resented his overthrow by the outlander Prestimion, and they came from many parts of the western continent to throw in their lot with the Five Lords. Very quietly a shadow Sambailid administration had emerged out here in rural Zimroel.
In their slowly expanding dominion the Five Lords appointed officials and decreed laws. They succeeded in diverting local taxes from the Pontifical tax-collectors to their own. They built five fine palaces for themselves opposite Horvenar atop the red bluffs of Gornevon. The dwellings of Gavdat and Gavinius and Gavahaud were side by side in a single group, with Gaviral’s somewhat to the west of the others on a little promontory with a better view of the river than his brothers had, and Gavilomarin’s off on the eastern side, separated from the rest by a low lateral ridge; and from those five palaces did they propose very gradually to extend their rule over the continent that their potent uncle once had ruled virtually as a king.
Up to this time the government of the Pontifex Confalume and the Coronal Lord Prestimion in far-off Alhanroel had paid no heed to what had begun to take shape in Zimroel. Perhaps they were still unaware of it.
The Five Lords knew what risks they were running. But Mandralisca had shown them how difficult it would be for the imperial government to take any kind of serious punitive action against them. An army would have to be raised in Alhanroel and transported somehow to the other continent across the great gulf that was the Inner Sea. Then the imperial troops would have to commandeer virtually the entire fleet of Zimr riverboats to carry them upriver to the rebel-held territory, or else march thousands of miles overland, through one probably hostile district after another.
And even if they succeeded in that, and brought the rebellious farmers of the region back under control, it would not be easy to dislodge the Five Lords themselves from their hilltop eyrie high above the Zimr. There was no possibility at all of scaling those red bluffs from the river side. That left only the desert approach from the south—the very district through which Mandralisca and his party were riding now. And that was a hellish road indeed.
8
In the evening the Justiciar Corde called for Dekkeret and Dinitak at their hostelry and escorted them to the palace of the Count for a formal banquet, the first of several such events planned for Dekkeret’s stay in Normork.
Dekkeret had seen the palace often enough when he was growing up: a blocky building of gray stone, squat and nearly windowless, that clung like some huge limpet to the city wall in a place where the wall made a wide outward curve to get past a jutting spur of Castle Mount. It was a dark, grim-looking place, fortresslike, uninviting. Even the six slim minarets that sprang from its roof, which the architect probably had meant to add a touch of lightness to the palace’s appearance, seemed like nothing so much as an array of barbed spears.
The interior was every bit as somber as the outside. The building seemed twice as big inside as without, and perhaps four times as ugly. Dekkeret and Dinitak were conducted down long stretches of shadowy bewildering corridors lit only by smoldering torches and inadequate glowlights, past radiating clusters of spokelike hallways of unadorned stone walls, through rooms with walls of black brick decorated with nothing more than the occasional preposterous statue of some unknown ancient figure or clumsily designed tapestries portraying forgotten lords and ladies of the city engaged in their lordly amusements; and eventually they arrived at the dark, drafty banqueting-hall of Count Considat, where an assortment of Normork’s notables awaited them.
It was a dreary evening. Considat spoke first, welcoming Normork’s most famous son back to his native city. The Count was young and had succeeded to his title only the year before, and was an amiable and almost diffident man rather more appealing in look and manner than his coarse, ill-bred father had been. But he was a dreadful speaker who droned on and on as though he had no idea of how to bring his speech to an end, unleashing a torrent of fatuous platitudes. At one point Dekkeret dozed off, and only a sharp rap under the table from Dinitak brought him back to the scene.