“What about Prince Dekkeret? I haven’t seen him around for several days. Do you have any idea where he is?”
“I think he’s gone to Normork, milady. His friend Dinitak Barjazid has accompanied him there.”
“Not the Lady Fulkari?”
“Not the Lady Fulkari, no. Things are not well between Prince Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari these days, I think. It was with Dinitak he went, on Twoday. To Normork.”
“Normork!” Varaile shuddered. “Another hideous place, though Dekkeret loves that city, the Divine only knows why. And I suppose you have no idea whether anyone’s tried to inform him yet, either? Prince Dekkeret might well find himself Coronal by nightfall and yet nobody has thought of letting him know that—”
Varaile realized that she was losing control again. She caught herself in mid-flight.
“Breakfast,” she said, in a quieter tone. “We should have something to eat, Fiorinda. Whether or not we’re in the middle of a crisis this morning, we shouldn’t try to face the day on an empty stomach, eh?”
3
The floater came around the last curve of craggy Normork Crest and the great stone wall of Normork city rose up suddenly before them, square athwart the highway that had brought them down from the Castle to this level on the lower reaches of the Mount’s flank. The wall was an immense overbearing barrier of rectangular black megaliths piled one upon another to an astonishing height. The city that it guarded lay utterly concealed from view behind it. “Here we are,” Dekkeret said. “Normork.”
“And that?” Dinitak Barjazid asked. He and Dekkeret traveled together often, but this was his first visit to Dekkeret’s native city. “Is that little thing the gate? And is our floater really going to be able to get through it?” He stared in amazement at the tiny blinking hole, laughably disproportionate, tucked away like an afterthought at the foot of the mighty rampart. It was barely wide enough, so it would seem, to admit a good-sized cart. Guardsmen in green leather stood stiffly at attention to either side of it. A tantalizing bit of the hidden city could be seen framed within the small opening: what appeared to be warehouses and a couple of many-angled gray towers.
Dekkeret smiled. “The Eye of Stiamot, the gate is called. A very grand name for such a piffling aperture. What you see is the one and only entryway to the famous city of Normork. Impressive, isn’t it? But it’s big enough for us, all right. Not by much, but we’ll squeak through.”
“Strange,” Dinitak said, as they passed beneath the pointed arch and entered the city. “Such a huge wall, and so wretched and paltry a gate. That doesn’t exactly make strangers feel that they’re wanted here, does it?”
“I have some plans for changing that, when the opportunity is at hand,” said Dekkeret. “You’ll see tomorrow.”
The occasion for his visit was the birth of a son to the current Count of Normork, Considat by name. Normork was not a particularly important city and Considat was not a significant figure in the hierarchies of Castle Mount, and ordinarily the only official cognizance the Coronal would be likely to take of the child’s birth would be a congratulatory note and a handsome gift. Certainly he would not make it the occasion for a state visit. But Dekkeret, who had not seen Normork for many a month, had requested permission to present the Coronal’s congratulations in person, and had brought Dinitak along with him for company. “Not Fulkari?” Prestimion had asked. For Dekkeret and Fulkari had been an inseparable pair these two or three years past. To which Dekkeret had replied that Count Considat was a man of conservative tastes; it did not seem proper for Dekkeret to visit him in the company of a woman who was not his wife. He would take Dinitak. Prestimion did not press the issue further. He had heard the stories—everyone at the court had, by now—that something had been going amiss lately between Prince Dekkeret and the Lady Fulkari, though Dekkeret had said not a word about it to anyone.
They had been the closest of friends for years, Dekkeret and Dinitak, though their temperaments and styles were very different. Dekkeret was a big, deep-chested, heavy-shouldered man of boundless energy and unquenchable robust spirit, whose words tended to come booming out of him in a cheerful resounding bellow. The events of his life thus far had predisposed him to optimism and hope and limitless enthusiasm.
Dinitak Barjazid, a man a few years younger with a lean, narrow face and dark, glittering, skeptical eyes, was half a head shorter and constructed on an altogether less substantial scale, compact and trim, with an air of taut coiled muscularity about him. His skin was darker even than his eyes, the swarthy skin of one who has lived for years under the frightful sun of the southern continent. Dinitak spoke much more quietly than Dekkeret and took a generally darker view of the world. He was a shrewd, pragmatic man, raised in a harsh sun-baked land by a tough and wily scoundrel of a father who had been a very slippery sort indeed. Often there was a questioning edge on what Dinitak said that caused Dekkeret to think twice about things, and sometimes more than twice.
And he was governed always by a harsh, strict sense of propriety, a set of fierce moral imperatives, as though he had decided early in life to build his life around a philosophy of doing and believing the opposite of whatever his father might have done or thought.
They held each other in the highest estimation. Dekkeret had vowed that as he rose to prominence within the royal government of Majipoor, Dinitak would rise with him, although he did not immediately know how that would be accomplished, considering the clouded and notorious past of Dinitak’s father and kinsmen. But he would find a way.
“Our reception committee, I think,” said Dinitak, pointing inward with a jab of his upturned thumb.
Just within the wall lay a triangular cobblestoned plaza bordered along each side by drab wooden guardhouses. The emissary of the Count of Normork was waiting for them there, a small, flimsy-looking black-bearded man who seemed as though he could be blown away by any good gust of wind. He bowed them out of their floater, introduced himself as the Justiciar Corde, and in flowery phrases offered Prince Dekkeret and his traveling companion the warmest welcome to the city. The Justiciar indicated a dozen or so armed men in green leather uniforms standing a short distance away. “These men will protect you while you are here,” he declared.
“Why?” Dekkeret asked. “I have my own bodyguard with me.”
“It is Count Considat’s wish,” replied the Justiciar Corde in a tone that indicated that the issue was not really open to discussion. “Please—if you and your men will follow me, excellence—”
“What is that all about?” said Dinitak under his breath as they made their way on foot, escorted fore and aft by the black-clad guardsmen, through the narrow, winding alleys of the ancient city to their lodging-place. “I wouldn’t think that we’d be in any danger here.”
“We’re not. But when Prestimion was here on a state visit not long after he became Coronal, a madman tried to assassinate him right out in front of the Count’s palace. That was in the time of Count Meglis, Considat’s father. Madness was a very common thing in the world back then, you may recall. There was an epidemic of it in every land.”
Dinitak grunted in surprise. “Assassinate the Coronal? You can’t be serious. Who would ever do a wild thing like that?”
“Believe me, Dinitak, it happened, and it was a very close thing, too. I was still living in Normork then and I saw it with my own eyes. A lunatic swinging a sharpened sickle, he was. Came rushing out of the crowd in the plaza and ran straight for Prestimion. He was stopped just in time, or history would have been very different.”