—Victory is ours! Iniriis?
—I am Iniriis. The root-weevils thrive and spread in the fields of Zimroel. They will devour the ricca and the milaile.
—When will the effects be visible?
—They are visible now. Victory is ours, Faraataa!
—We have won Zimroel. The battle now must shift to Alhanroel, Iniriis. Begin shipping your weevils across the Inner Sea.
—It will be done.
—Victory is ours, Iniriis! Y-Uulisaan?
—This is Y-Uulisaan, Faraataa.
—You follow the Coronal still?
—I do. He has left Ebersinul and makes for Treymone.
—Does he know what is happening in Zimroel?
—He knows nothing. The grand processional absorbs his energies completely.
—Bring him the report, then. Tell him of weevils in the valley of the Zimr, of lusavender blight in the Rift, of the death of niyk and glein and stajja west of Dulorn.
—I, Faraataa?
—We must get even closer to him. The news must reach him sooner or later through legitimate channels. Let it come from us first, and let that be our way of approach to him. You will be his adviser on the diseases of plants, Y-Uulisaan. Tell him the news; and aid him in the struggle against these blights. We should know what counterattacks are planned. Victory is ours, Y-Uulisaan.
—Victory is ours, Faraataa!
14
The message was more than an hour old when it finally reached the high spokesman Hornkast in his private lair far uplevel, just outside the Sphere of Triple Shadows:
Meet me in the throne room right away.
The high spokesman glared at the messengers. They knew he was never to be disturbed in this chamber except for a matter of the greatest urgency.
“What is it? Is he dying? Dead already?”
“We were not told, sir.”
“Did Sepulthrove seem unusually disturbed?”
“He seemed uneasy, sir, but I have no idea—”
“All right. Never mind. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
Hastily Hornkast cleansed himself and dressed. If it has truly come, he thought sourly, it comes at a most inconvenient moment. Tyeveras has waited at least a dozen decades for his dying; could he not have held off another hour or two? If it has truly come.
The golden-haired woman who had been visiting him said, “Shall I stay here until you come back?”
He shook his head. “There’s no telling how long this will take. If the Pontifex has died—”
The woman made the Labyrinth sign. “The Divine forbid!”
“Indeed,” said Hornkast drily.
He went out. The Sphere of Triple Shadows, rising high above the gleaming obsidian walls of the plaza, was in its brightest phase, casting an eerie blue-white light that obliterated all sensations of dimensionality or depth: the passersby looked like mere paper dolls, floating on a gentle breeze. With the messengers beside him and hard pressed to keep up with his pace, Hornkast hastened across the plaza to the private lift, moving, as always, with a vigor that belied his eighty years.
The descent to the imperial zone was interminable.
Dead? Dying? Inconceivable. Hornkast realized that he had never taken into account the contingency of an unexpected natural death for Tyeveras. Sepulthrove had assured him that the machinery would not fail, that the Pontifex could be kept alive, if need be, another twenty or thirty years, perhaps as much as fifty. And the high spokesman had assumed that his death, when it came, would be the outcome of a carefully arrived at political decision, not something awkwardly happening without warning in the middle of an otherwise ordinary morning.
And if it had? Lord Valentine must be summoned at once from the westlands. Ah, how he would hate that, dragged into the Labyrinth before he had fairly begun his processional! I will have to resign, of course, Hornkast told himself.
Valentine will want his own high spokesman: that little scar-faced man Sleet, no doubt, or even the Vroon. Hornkast considered what it would be like to train one of them in the duties of the office he had held so long. Sleet full of contempt and condescension, or the wizardy little Vroon, those huge glittering eyes, that beak, those tentacles—
That would be his last responsibility, to instruct the new high spokesman. And then I will go away, he thought, and I suspect I will not long survive the loss of my office. Elidath, I suppose, will become Coronal. They say he is a good man, very dear to Lord Valentine, almost like a brother. How strange it will be, after all these years, to have a real Pontifex again, actively working with his Coronal! But I will not see it, Hornkast told himself. I will not be here.
In that mood of foreboding and resignation he arrived at the ornately embellished door to the imperial throne room. He slipped his hand into the recognition glove and squeezed the cool yielding sphere within; and at his touch the door slid back to reveal the great globe of the imperial chamber, the lofty throne upon the three broad steps, the elaborate mechanisms of the Pontifex’s life-support systems, and, within the bubble of pale blue glass that had held him for so many years, the long-limbed figure of the Pontifex himself, fleshless and parched like his own mummy, upright in his seat, jaws clenched, eyes bright, bright, bright still with inextinguishable life.
A familiar crew of grotesques stood beside the throne: ancient Dilifon, the withered and trembling private secretary; the Pontifical dream-speaker; the witch Narrameer; and Sepulthrove the physician, hawk-nosed, skin the color of dried mud. From then, even from Narrameer, who kept herself young and implausibly beautiful by her sorceries, came a pulsing aura of age, decay, death. Hornkast, who had seen these people every day for forty years, had never before perceived with such intensity how frightful they were: and, he knew, he must be just as frightful himself. Perhaps the time has come, he thought, to clear us all away.
“I came as soon as the messengers could reach me,” he said. He glanced toward the Pontifex. “Well? He’s dying, is he? He looks just the same to me.”
“He is very far from dying,” said Sepulthrove.
“Then what’s going on?”
“Listen,” the physician said. “He’s starting again.”
The creature in the life-support globe stirred and swayed from side to side in minute oscillations. A low whining sound came from the Pontifex, and then a kind of half-whistled snore, and a thick bubbling gurgle that went on and on.
Hornkast had heard all these sounds many times before. They were the private language the Pontifex in his terrible senility had invented, and which the high spokesman alone had mastered. Some were almost words, or the ghosts of words, and within their blurred outlines the original meanings were still apparent. Others had evolved from words over the years into mere noise, but Hornkast, because he had observed those evolutions in their various stages, knew what meanings were intended. Some were nothing but moans and sighs and weepings without a verbal content. And some seemed to have a certain complexity of form that might represent concepts that had been perceived by Tyeveras in his long mad sleepless isolation, and were known to him alone.