“But he was right about that.”
“Yes. So it would seem. A direct line, connecting that boy who came running out of the crowd to save Lord Prestimion with the man who’ll sit someday where Prestimion sits now on the Confalume Throne.” Dekkeret laughed harshly. “Me: Lord Dekkeret! Isn’t that astounding, Dinitak?”
“Not to me. But I do sometimes think you have trouble believing you’re actually going to be Coronal.”
“Wouldn’t you, if you were the one?”
“But I’m not the one, and never will be, the Divine be thanked. I’m quite content being who I am.”
“As am I, Dinitak. I’m in no hurry to take over Prestimion’s job. If he went on being Coronal for the next twenty years, that would be perfectly all right with—”
Dinitak caught at Dekkeret’s sleeve. “Hold it a moment. Look—there’s something odd going on over there.”
He followed the line of Dinitak’s pointing arm. Yes: some sort of altercation seemed to be under way about fifty feet farther down the wall, just outside the protective circle of Considat’s security force. Half a dozen of the guardsmen were surrounding someone. Arms were waving. There was a lot of angry incoherent shouting.
“It’s too improbable that there would be another assassination attempt,” Dinitak said.
“Damned right it is. But those halfwits—” Dekkeret raised himself on tiptoe for a better view. A gasp of outrage burst from him. “By the Lady, it’s a messenger from the Castle that they’re making trouble for! Come on, Dinitak!”
They rushed over. An overwrought-looking guardsman thrust himself in Dekkeret’s face and said, “A suspicious stranger, my lord. We attempted to interrogate him, but—”
“Blockhead, don’t you recognize the badge of the Coronal’s couriers? Step aside!”
The courier was no one Dekkeret recognized, but the golden star-burst that was his badge of office was authentic enough. The man, though more than a little worse from wear after the security guards’ intervention, pulled himself together stalwartly and held forth to Dekkeret an envelope prominently sealed in scarlet wax with the sigil of the High Counsellor Septach Melayn. “My lord Dekkeret, I bear this message—by order of Prince Teotas, on behalf of the Council, I have ridden from the Castle day and night to give it to you—”
Dekkeret snatched it from him, gave the seal a cursory glance, ripped the envelope open. There was just a single scrawled page within, in Teotas’s bold, square, boyish lettering. Dekkeret’s eyes traveled quickly over the words, and then over them again, and again.
“Bad news?” Dinitak asked, after a while.
Dekkeret nodded. “Indeed. The Pontifex is ill. He may have had a stroke.”
“Dying, is he?”
“That word is not used here. But how can it fail to come to mind, when a man ninety years old is taken ill? I’m summoned immediately back to the Castle.” Dekkeret forced a chuckle. “Well, at least we won’t have to suffer through another of Count Considat’s dreadful banquets tonight: thanks be to the Divine for small mercies. But what might happen after that—” He looked away. He did not know what to think. A dizzying torrent of contradictory feelings rushed through him: sadness, excitement, dismay, euphoria, disbelief, fear.
Confalume ill. Possibly dying. Perhaps already dead.
Did Prestimion know? He was supposed to be off traveling also, just now. As usual. Dekkeret wondered what sort of scene was unfolding back at the Castle in the absence both of the Coronal and the Coronal-designate.
“It may be only nothing,” he said. His voice, usually so resonant, was hollow and hoarse. “Old men get ill from time to time. Not everything that seems to be a stroke is one. And one doesn’t necessarily die of a stroke.”
“All this is true,” said Dinitak. “But even so—”
Dekkeret held up his hand. “No. Don’t say it.”
Dinitak would not be halted. “You remarked just a moment ago that you hoped Prestimion went on being Coronal for the next twenty years. And I know you were sincere in hoping that. But you didn’t seriously believe that he would, did you?”
9
The first pungatans were coming into view, dotting the wasteland before them.
“These filthy plants!” Jacomin Halefice muttered. “How I loathe them! I would take a torch to the lot of them, if I were allowed!”
“Ah,” said Mandralisca. “They are our friends, those plants!”
“Your friends, perhaps, your grace. Not mine.”
“They guard our domain,” the Count said. “They keep us safe from our enemies, our lovely pungatans.”
So they did. This was a wild, cruel desert, and the only traversable road through it was a mere stony track. Venture off it even a dozen yards and you were at the pungatans’ mercy—those evil whip-leaved plants that were the only things that flourished here. It would be a major logistical task to guide an army of any size through this land of little water and nothing in the way of wood or edible crops, where what vegetation there was struck out savagely and lethally at all passersby.
But Mandralisca knew the way through this grim plain. “Beware the whips!” he called out, glancing back over his shoulder at his men. “Keep yourselves in line!”
He gave his mount the spurs and rode onward into the pungatan grove.
They were actually quite beautiful, the pungatans, or so it seemed to Mandralisca. Their thick gray stubby trunks, smooth and columnar, rose from the rust-red soil to a height of three or four feet. From the summit of each sprouted a pair of wavy ribbonlike fronds, extending in opposite directions for two yards or so with their tips trailing down prettily along the ground into an intricate coiling tangle of frayed ends. These fronds seemed delicate and soft; they were so nearly transparent that they were hard to see except at certain favorable angles. As they fluttered in the breeze, they might almost seem to be strands of clear seaweed, surging with the tides.
But one merely had to pass within fifteen or twenty feet of one of the plants and a deep wash of reddish-purple color came flooding into those fluttering fronds, and they grew turgid and began to tremble at their tips; and then—whack!—they would uncoil to their full startling length and strike, a whiplash blow of astonishing swiftness and horrific force. It was a savage lateral swing that sliced with the power of a sharp sword through any creature rash enough to have ventured within their range. That was how they nourished themselves, in this infertile soiclass="underline" they killed, and then they fed on the nutrients that leached into the ground from the decomposing bodies of their victims. One could see fragmentary skeletons scattered all around, the ancient remains of incautious beasts and, evidently, a good many unwary travelers.
Someone had long ago laid out a safe track through this unappealing wilderness, a narrow zone that passed between the places where the plants tended to grow. It was marked only by a sparse border of rocks on either side, and the careless wayfarer could all too readily stray outside its limits. But Count Mandralisca was not one much given to carelessness. He guided his little convoy through the deadly plain without incident and thence up the narrow, interminably switchbacking trail that took one to the top of the riverfront bluffs and to the compound of palaces where his masters the Five Lords awaited his return.
What sort of foolishness, Mandralisca wondered, had they managed to get themselves into in his absence?
He was greeted, as he and his party came riding into the broad colonnaded plaza that fronted the three central buildings, by a sight so very much in accord with his expectations that he was hard put to choke back bitter laughter, and to conceal his loathing and disgust.