No one, it seemed, had questioned the appropriateness of such a transfer. The Barjazids had walked out of the tunnels without any difficulty whatever. For a month or more they lived quietly in their new quarters, attracting no attention to themselves. Until, that is, it was discovered one morning that they had managed not only to arrange an escape for themselves—complete with a fine floater to take them wherever they wished—but also to take with them the entire set of mind-control devices and models that the elder Barjazid had acquired from the Vroonish wizard, Thalnap Zelifor, in the course of escorting the Vroon into exile in Suvrael.
Prestimion passed a hand across his face and muttered dark curses. “And they’ve gone to join Dantirya Sambail, have they? How does anyone know that? They left a little explanatory note behind in their room, did they?”
“No, sir. Of course not, sir.” Dekkeret forced a bleak little grin. “But an inquiry was held following their disappearance, and their confederate’s identity was uncovered, and his lordship Prince Navigorn placed the man under close interrogation. Very close, my lord. Prince Navigorn has been extremely distressed by this entire incident.”
“I can imagine he would be,” said Prestimion drily.
“What was learned from the interrogation, my lord, is that the confederate—Morteil Dikaan was his name, sir—”
“Was?”
“Unfortunately he did not survive the interrogation,” Dekkeret said.
“Ah.”
“The confederate, lordship, had obtained possession of one of the mind-control devices from the storeroom where they had been placed. He brought it to Barjazid in the Sangamor tunnels. And Barjazid used it to make everyone who examined his papers of release accept them as genuine. In the same way he was able to order one of the Castle floaters to be put at his disposal when he was ready to begin his journey south.”
“This device of his,” said Prestimion in a tone of funereal somberness, “has an absolutely irresistible force, then? It makes someone who wears it capable of compelling anyone in his path to do his bidding?”
“Not exactly, my lord. But it is extremely powerful. I’ve felt its power myself, sir—in Suvrael, in the place that is known as the Desert of Stolen Dreams. Which was given that name because Barjazid lurked there, entering the minds of wayfarers and altering their mental perceptions so that they were no longer able to tell true from false, illusion from reality: I explained all this to the lady Varaile, my lord. I told her of my own experience with the device’s effects while traveling with Barjazid down there, and explained the potential dangers of it.”
Varaile said, “Yes, he did, Prestimion. You may recall, I tried to tell you the story, the day you came back from the festival at Muldemar—but you were so busy, of course, with the plans for the trip to the Isle—”
Prestimion winced. It was true. He hadn’t even taken the trouble to question Dekkeret himself about what had befallen him in Suvrael. He had brushed the whole thing aside very quickly, filing Dekkeret’s tale for future reference and never giving it a moment’s thought again.
A machine that controls minds! And Barjazid on his way to turn it over to Dantirya Sambail.
It was another terrible blunder in a reign that was beginning to seem pockmarked with them. A Coronal, he thought, must never allow himself even to sleep, for fear that disaster will envelop the world if he closes his eyes for the merest moment. How, Prestimion wondered, had Confalume succeeded in keeping everything on an even keel for better than forty years? But of course Confalume hadn’t had a civil war and its aftermath to deal with, and Dantirya Sambail, may demons blast his soul, had elected to wait until the end of Confalume’s reign before beginning to make trouble.
He looked toward Dekkeret. The boy was staring at him with respect verging on adoration. Dekkeret had no clue, it seemed, that the Coronal’s mind was boiling with uneasiness and bitter self-accusation.
“Describe for me in detail,” Prestimion said, “the sort of things that Barjazid’s machine was able to do to your mind.”
Dekkeret gave Varaile an uncertain look. She responded with a firm nod.
To Prestimion he said, after a moment’s further hesitation, “At first it was just a nightmare. I thought I was being summoned to the Lady, and that was a glorious thing; but as I ran toward her she disappeared and I was left looking down into the crater of a burned-out volcano. It’s never possible for one person to feel the real force of someone else’s dream, is it, my lord? You must experience it from within. I can describe it to you as a bad nightmare, very bad, and you may think you understand, remembering certain bad dreams of your own. But no one else can ever understand how terrifying another person’s dream actually was. Still, I tell you, sir, this was the worst imaginable experience. I felt invaded—drained—violated. Barjazid knew what had happened. He tried to question me, afterward, to get details of my dream from me. He was carrying out experiments on people’s minds, you see: testing his equipment, sir.”
“That was it, then? He sent you a nasty dream?”
“If only that were all, my lord. But a nasty dream was only the beginning. I dreamed again the next time I slept. There was this woman I met in Tolaghai, someone in the Pontifical service. She came to me in my dream; we were both naked; she was leading me through a lovely garden. I should say that in Tolaghai this woman and I were lovers for a little while. So I followed her gladly enough; but once again everything changed, and the garden became a frightful desert with ghostly figures lurking in it, and I thought I would die there of the heat and the ants that had begun to sting me. So I woke up and found that Barjazid had caused me to walk in my sleep and I was lost in the desert at the worst time of the day, naked, far from camp, without any water, sunburned and swollen from the heat. A Vroon who was traveling with us found me and rescued me, or else I would have died. I am no sleepwalker, sir. Barjazid made it happen. He gave me the command to get up in my sleep and walk, and I got up. I walked.”
Prestimion, frowning deeply, nibbling at his lower lip, gestured without a word for Dekkeret to go on. There was more, he knew. He was certain of it.
Yes. “Then, my lord, the third dream. In the Khyntor Marches, that time when I was hunting steetmoy with Prince Akbalik, I committed an atrocious sin. We had guides with us, March-men, and my guide was struck down by the steetmoy I was hunting, but I was so obsessed with the hunt that I left her lying where she fell and ran off after the animal I was chasing. And when I came back to her much later I discovered that she had been killed and partly eaten by some scavenger-beast.”
“So that was it,” Prestimion said.
“That was what, sir?”
“The thing you did. The reason you went to Suvrael. Akbalik sent word that you had done something in Khyntor that you felt great shame about, and had gone off to Suvrael hoping that somehow you would suffer enough there to make atonement.”
Dekkeret’s face was bright red. “I would rather not have spoken of this. But you asked me to tell you what Barjazid’s machine did to my mind. With its help he went into it, my lord, and found the tale of the steetmoy hunt there, and made me live through it again; only it was ten times as painful as the real event had been, because this time I knew all along what was going to happen, and had no way of preventing it from happening again anyway. At the climax of the dream Barjazid was there with me in the snowy forest, questioning me about my having ignored the guide-woman for the sake of following after my steetmoy. He wanted to know every detail of it, what I felt about putting the pleasures of hunting ahead of a human life, was I ashamed, how was I going to cope with my guilt. And I said to him, still in the dream, ‘Are you my judge?’ And he said, ‘Of course I am. See my face?’ And pulled his own face apart, removing it the way you’d remove a mask; and under it there was another face, a mocking laughing face, and the face was my own, my lord. The face was my own.”