“I don’t know what I thought. But the news out of the Labyrinth about you was very worrisome. It seemed appropriate to pay you a visit. A man of your age, suffering a stroke—”
“I actually thought I was dying myself, as I felt it hit. But only while it was happening. I’m a long way from finished, Prestimion.”
“May it truly be so.”
“Are you saying that for my sake, or yours?” the Pontifex asked.
“Do you know how unkind that sounds?”
Confalume laughed. “But it’s realistic, yes? You don’t at all want to be Pontifex yet.”
Prestimion cast a wary glance toward Taradath, who was practically at the end of the hall, now, probably beyond earshot. There was a touch of testiness in his voice as he responded, “All of Majipoor wishes you continued good health and long life, your majesty. I am no exception to that. But I do assure you that if the Divine should choose to gather you in tomorrow, I am in every way ready to do what will be asked of me.”
“Are you? Well, yes, you say you are, and I must take that at face value, I suppose.” The Pontifex closed his eyes. He seemed to be staring into some infinite recess of time. Prestimion studied the tiny fluttering pulses in the old man’s veined eyelids, and waited, and continued to wait. Had he fallen asleep? But then, abruptly, Confalume was looking straight at him again, and the keen gray eyes were as penetrating as ever. “I do remember sitting down here with you a long while ago, your first visit here after becoming Coronal, and telling you that after you’d had the job for forty years or so you’d be quite willing to move on to the Labyrinth. Do you recall that?”
“Yes. I do.”
“You’re halfway to that forty years, now. So you must be at least half sincere when you tell me you’re ready to take over. But have no fear, Prestimion. There’s still twenty years more to go.” Confalume pointed toward the tabletop that bore his collection of astrological devices. “It happens that I cast my horoscope only last week. Unless there was some serious error in my calculations, I’m going to live to the age of a hundred and ten. I’m going to have the longest reign of any Pontifex in the history of Majipoor. What do you say to that, Prestimion? You are relieved, aren’t you? Confess it! You are! At least right now, you are.—But I can tell you, my young friend, you’ll be utterly sick of being Coronal by the time I make my trip back to the Source. You won’t mind leaving the Castle at all. A time will come when you’ll be eager to be Pontifex, believe me. You’ll be more than ready to retire to the Labyrinth, believe me—more than ready!”
On the way back up the Glayge Prestimion pondered Confalume’s words. He had to admit that he had been deceiving himself, if nobody else, in claiming that he was fully ready to let the Pontificate descend upon him. His relief at finding Confalume in this unexpected state of well-being was the unanswerable proof of that. It was a reprieve, unquestionably a reprieve; which meant that he still thought of becoming Pontifex as a grim and inexorable sentence, rather than simply a matter of duty. Though he very much doubted the worth of Confalume’s astrological calculations, the evidence seemed to indicate that it still would be a matter of some years before the world had its next change of rulers.
There was no getting around the fact that his mood was very much lighter now. That told him all he needed to know about his insistent professions of readiness for life in the Labyrinth.
Before departing for the Castle, he took Taradath on a brief tour of the city. The boy had seen wonders aplenty already in his short life, but the strangeness of the Labyrinth was like nothing else in the world, these vast echoing halls of curious design that lay so far underground. “The Pool of Dreams, this is called,” Prestimion said, gesturing toward the calm greenish water in whose depths mysterious images constantly came and went, some of supernal beauty, some of nightmare repulsive-ness, one moment’s scene altogether different from another. “No one knows how it works. Or even which Pontifex put it here.”
The Place of Masks, where huge bodiless blind-eyed faces rose on marble stalks. The Court of Pyramids, a zone of thousands of close-set white monoliths, purposeless, inexplicable. The Hall of Winds, where cold air emerged in great bursting gusts from stone grids, though they were deep beneath the surface of the world. The Court of Globes—the Cabinet of Floating Swords—the Chamber of Miracles—the Temple of Unknown Gods—
The next day Prestimion and his son took the swift shaft to the surface and returned to the Mouth of Waters, where the royal barge was waiting to carry them upriver to the Castle. But they had only reached Maurix, three days’ journey north of the Labyrinth, when they were overtaken by a fast-moving rivercraft that flew the Pontifical flag.
The messenger who came on board had but to speak two words and Prestimion knew what had happened.
“Your majesty—”
It was the phrase one used when addressing a Pontifex. The rest of the story followed only too quickly. Confalume was dead, most suddenly, of a second stroke. Prestimion would have to return to the Labyrinth to preside over his final rites and begin the process of taking over the Pontifical duties.
13
The resemblance was an astonishing one, Mandralisca thought.
Venghenar Barjazid, the dead one, he of the devilish mind-controlling machines, had been an evil-looking little man whose eyes were not quite of the same size or color nor even set on a straight line in his head, and whose lips slid away sideways toward the left side to give him a permanent smirk, and whose skin, dark and leathery and thick from a lifetime of exposure to the ferocious Suvrael sunlight, was as wrinkled and folded as a canavong’s hide.
Mandralisca found this new Barjazid just as charmingly repellent as his elder brother had been. A powerful intuition told him, from his very first glimpse of the man, that he had found a significant ally in the contest for world power that lay ahead.
This one was every bit as mean and scrawny of form and disagreeable of visage as his late brother. His eyes too were mismated and misaligned and had the same harsh brightness; his lips too were drawn off into a mocking grimace; he too had the folded, blackened skin of one who has lived too long in barren sun-blasted Suvrael. He looked a shade taller than Venghenar had been, perhaps, and just a touch less self-assured. Mandralisca supposed that he was around fifty: older, now, than Venghenar had been when he had brought his pack of devices to Dantirya Sambail.
And he, too, seemed to have come bearing merchandise. He had brought with him into the room a shapeless, bulging leather-trimmed cloth bag, frayed at the center, which he set down very carefully by his side when he took the seat that Mandralisca offered. Mandralisca gave the bag a quick sidelong glance. The things must be in there, he felt certain: the new collection of useful toys that the Barjazid had brought here to sell to him.
But Mandralisca was never in a hurry to enter into any sort of negotiation. It is essential, he believed, that one must first determine who is going to have the upper hand. And that one will be the one who has the greater willingness to delay getting down to the heart of the matter.
“Your grace,” said Barjazid, with a smarmy little bow. “What a pleasure to meet at last. My late brother spoke of you to me with the highest praise.”
“We worked well together, yes.”
“It’s my fervent hope that you’ll say the same of me.”
“Mine as well.—How did you know where to find me? And why did you think I’d have any reason to want to see you?”
“In truth I thought you had perished long ago, on that same day in the Stoienzar when my brother died. But then word reached me that you had escaped, and were alive and well and living somewhere in this region.”