He was very tall and thin, almost flimsy-looking, and dressed in a peculiar way, a coarse and heavy black overjacket thickly padded with down above a light tunic of faded green silk. The look in his eyes, somehow both arrogant and uneasy at the same time, was peculiar. The eyes themselves were peculiar too, almost yellowish where they ought to have been white, and an eerie purple at their centers. Peculiar also was his face, broad and pale with small features all jammed together in the middle. The way he held his shoulders, hunched up against his ears. The way he walked, as if he suspected that his head might be in imminent danger of coming loose at the neck. Even his name: Vi-itheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp. What kind of name was that? Everything about this man was mystifying. But it was not Thastain’s job to pass judgment on Mandralisca’s visitors, only to show them to the Count’s office.
“Is an excellent city, Ni-moya,” Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp remarked, as Thastain led him down the inland side of the palace. They were passing through a gallery linking one wing and the next that had one long window of clear quartz, affording a stunning view of the metropolitan core that rose in level upon level up into the hills. “Much have I heard concerning it. Is one of best cities in world, I think.”
Thastain nodded. “The best, they say. Nothing to rival it even on Castle Mount.” He slipped easily into his tour-guide mode. Somehow that eased the tensions that this unsettling stranger had evoked in him. “—Have you had much of a chance to see the place yet? That’s the Museum of Worlds, over on that hill up there. And the Gossamer Galleria, down there to the left. You can just barely make out the dome of the Grand Bazaar from here, with the beginning of the Crystal Boulevard beyond it.”
He felt almost like a native, casually pointing out the great attractions like that to this visitor from afar. In truth Thastain was as much in awe of Ni-moya and its wonders now as when the Five Lords had moved their capital here from the Gornevon desert many months before. But in his heart he liked to pretend that he was a genuine child of the great city, quick-witted and worldly-wise and sophisticated.
When they came to the end of the quartz gallery Thastain turned left and headed out onto the covered walkway that would bring them to the riverfront side of the palace, which was Mandralisca’s sector of the building. “We go this way,” Thastain said, as the visitor started to stray off into the private quarters of the Lord Gaviral. Officially the procura-torial palace now was Gaviral’s residence, but Mandralisca had taken half the southern wing, with the best river views, for his own uses. There had been a time when the Five Lords had treated Mandralisca more or less as they treated their servants, but that time was over now. It seemed to Thastain that these days Mandralisca gave the orders and the Five Lords did pretty much as he said.
Another guard waited at the end of the walkway: a Skandar, he was, none other than Thastain’s old nemesis Sudvik Gorn, who had made such a nuisance out of himself long ago when they had gone up north to burn the keep of the Vorthinar lord. Thastain gave him the merest glance, now. The course of time had raised Thastain up to become a member of Count Mandralisca’s inner circle of aides, and Sudvik Gorn was nothing but a hallway guard.
“Visitor for the Count,” Thastain told the Skandar. And, to Viitheysp Uuvitheysp Aavitheysp, once again: “We go this way.” He indicated a spiral ramp leading toward a dizzying series of elbow-bend staircases that went up and up and up.
At the beginning Thastain had feared he would never learn his way around inside the procuratorial palace. But, huge though it was, he had taken the measure of it by this time.
The first time he saw it from the river it had seemed as immense as he imagined the Coronal’s castle to be, but he knew now that much of the palace’s height came from the shining white pedestal that lifted it far above the riverfront level. The host of external galleries and staircases that one viewed from below gave the place the appearance of a formidable maze, but that was misleading. The building itself, a complex series of interlocking pavilions and balconies and porches, was certainly a vast one, but its interior plan was strikingly logical and Thastain had quickly mastered the routes that traversed its interior.
Mandralisca had taken for his office the magnificent chamber in which the Procurator Dantirya Sambail had lorded it in the days when he ruled with almost regal splendor over the continent of Zimroel. Dantirya Sambail had been dead more than twenty years now—longer than Thastain had been alive—but the presence of that larger-than-life man still seemed to linger in the enormous room. The splendor of its gleaming floor, a burnished slab of pink marble inlaid with crisscrossing swirling slashes of some dazzling jet-black stone, and the shining crescent arc of the great curving desk of crimson jade, and the brilliant white wall-hangings of thick rich steetmoy fur, all spoke eloquently of the Procurator’s fabled taste for luxury.
The entire wall of the chamber on its riverfront side was a single great bubble of quartz of the finest quality, as clear as air itself. Through it one had a view of the great sweeping curve of the River Zimr, which at this point was so wide that one was just barely able to see all the way across to the green suburbs on the farther bank. A string of huge brightly painted riverboats laden with passengers and freight coursed serenely along the river’s main channel. Directly below the window, a long row of low buildings with brilliantly tiled roofs and ornate mosaic ornaments on their walls lined the river quay for a considerable distance, glittering in the midday sun: humble customs-houses, they were, which Dantirya Sambail had had redecorated at a cost of many thousands of royals so that they would be more pleasing to his eye as he looked out on them from high overhead.
The Count Mandralisca was behind his desk when Thastain entered. The little helmet of bright metal mesh that he always kept close by him was at the Count’s elbow. His other two constant companions were beside him: to his left, sorting through a pile of documents, the little bandy-legged aide-de-camp Jacomin Halefice, and to his right that shifty-eyed Suvraelinu, Khaymak Barjazid, he who designed and built Mandralisca’s thought-helmets for him.
We three, Thastain told himself, are the only people in the world that Count Mandralisca trusts—as much as he trusts anyone at all.
“Well,” Mandralisca said, with the false joviality that he often liked to affect. “It is Duke Thastain. And who have you brought me this time, my good duke?”
Back in the earliest weeks of Thastain’s time in the service of Count Mandralisca, when he was nothing more than a green boy up from the provinces, the Count, in that darkly playful way of his that could sometimes seem so threatening, had arbitrarily bestowed an honorary title of nobility on him: Count of Sennec and Horvenar. And thereafter he would often address Thastain as “Count Thastain.” It was a meaningless thing, just another example of Mandralisca’s mocking, sardonic sense of humor. Thastain knew better than to be offended by it. That was simply Mandralisca’s style, cold and often cruel, and always capricious. Thastain had quickly come to see that for the Count, coldness and cruelty and capriciousness were simply useful ways of sustaining his power and authority. There was no way he could make people love him, but engendering fear through unpredictability could be just about as effective.
Lately, though, Mandralisca had taken to calling Thastain “duke” instead. More of his capriciousness, Thastain wondered, or was it something else? Perhaps it could be a sign that he was advancing in Mandralisca’s favor. Or maybe it was simply an indication that Mandralisca remembered only that once upon a time he had amused himself by giving the boy from Sennec a make-believe title, but had forgotten which title it was.