He hunched his shoulders high and looked away. He seemed appalled even now by the mere recollection.
Varaile said, “You didn’t go into these details the first time you told me the story. The hunt, the guide-woman, the removal of the mask.”
“No, milady. I thought it was all too horrible to speak of. But it was the Coronal’s request that I—that I tell—”
“Yes. It was,” Prestimion said. “What happened then?”
“I awoke. In great pain. Saw Barjazid with the machine still in his hands. Seized him, forced an explanation out of him, told him that I was taking him into custody and bringing him back to the Castle so that I could make all of this known to you.”
“But I was too busy with other things to listen,” said Prestimion. “And now Barjazid’s on the verge of handing this thing over to Dantirya Sambail.”
“I have explained everything to the lord Septach Melayn, sir. He has given orders for Barjazid and his son to be intercepted if at all possible.”
“If at all possible, yes. But he’s equipped with a machine that lets him fool around with realities, isn’t he? He’ll walk through the patrol lines the way he walked out of the tunnels, and then out of the Castle itself.”
Prestimion rose. “Come with me, both of you. It would be a good idea for me to discuss this business with my mother, I think.”
The Lady Therissa, sitting at her desk in her little private study, listened in sober silence as Prestimion sketched the outlines of Dekkeret’s story for her. She was quiet for a time even after he had finished.
Then she said, “There is real danger here, Prestimion.”
“Yes. I see that.”
“Has he joined forces with the Procurator yet?”
“That’s something I have no way of knowing. But I suspect that he hasn’t. Even with that diabolical gadget of his to help him, he’ll still have a difficult job getting down through Kajith Kabulon and locating Dantirya Sambail on the Stoien coast.”
Varaile said, “I think you’re right. He probably isn’t there yet. If he had reached Dantirya Sambail, they’d be using the mind-control machine to amplify the madness by now. We’d be hearing about whole cities going crazy, don’t you think?”
“I’m sure of it,” said Dekkeret, who had been standing to one side, visibly awed at finding himself in the innermost sanctuary of the Lady of the Isle. Even as he spoke, he seemed astonished by his own audacity at opening his mouth unbidden in the presence of two of the three Powers of the Realm, and he made a little gesture with his head and neck as if to pull himself back out of view. But the Lady Therissa smiled and beckoned him to continue, and he said, “I don’t know much about the Procurator, though nothing I’ve heard about him is anything but bad; but I know Barjazid only too well. I think he’s capable of using the machine in any way that Dantirya Sambail would want him to.”
The Lady said, “Can it really be as powerful as you make it seem, though? We have devices here at the Isle, you know, that can reach very deeply into minds. But nothing that can compel someone to rise up in his sleep and walk out into a lethal desert. Nothing that can take a dream of one kind and transform it into another.”
“The one you allowed me to try, mother—the silver circlet that I wore, when we had the dream-speaker wine—is that the most powerful instrument you have here?”
“No,” said the Lady Therissa. “There are stronger ones, ones which not only can make contact with minds but also are able to instill sendings in them. I didn’t dare allow you to experience their power, not without the months of training that their use requires. But even those things aren’t nearly as powerful as the device that this Barjazid evidently uses.”
“You’ve used the equipment of the Isle?” Dekkeret asked him. “Tell me what it was like, my lord!”
“What it was like,” Prestimion said, in a musing tone. He cast his mind back to that strange journey, feeling the potent memory of it returning to him. “What it was like. Oh, Dekkeret, that gets us into the same problem you raised when you said that no one can really feel the force of someone else’s dream. The only way you could really know that was to wear the circlet yourself.”
“But tell me, my lord, anyway. Please.”
Prestimion stared far into the distance, as though looking through the walls of Inner Temple, out across the three cliffs of the Isle, off to the sea beyond, glittering golden in the midday light. Very quietly he said, “It was like being a god, Dekkeret. It gave me the power of having mental communion with millions of people at once. It allowed me to be everywhere on Majipoor at the same time. The way the atmosphere is everywhere, the way weather is, the way gravity is.”
He narrowed his eyes to slits. The room, his mother, his wife, Dekkeret, all disappeared from his ken. It seemed to him that he heard the sound of a rushing wind. For a dizzying moment he imagined that he had the circlet on his forehead again and was soaring upward and outward, rising higher than the Mount itself, expanding into the vastness of the world by taking on an incomprehensible vastness of his own, touching minds everywhere, thousands of minds, hundreds of thousands, millions, billions, the healthy minds of the world and the poor sad sick disrupted ones also, reaching into them, offering a word here and a caress there, the comfort of the blessed Lady, the healing power of the Isle.
Everyone in the room was looking at him now. He realized that he had drifted off into some strange remote state of consciousness while standing here before them. Another moment passed before he felt that he had fully returned.
Then to Dekkeret he said, “What I learned, wearing that silver circlet, is that when the Lady is at her tasks she ceases to be an ordinary human being and becomes a force of nature—a Power, a true Power, in the way that neither the Coronal nor the Pontifex, mere elected monarchs that we are, could ever be. I haven’t said this to you, mother. But the day I wore the circlet I saw very clearly, and now can never forget, how important your function is to the world. And I understood how it must have transformed your life to become the Lady of the Isle.”
“But,” Dekkeret persevered, “as you traveled around the world using the power of the circlet, did you ever think there might be some way to implant dreams in people’s minds? Or to have such power over them that they would automatically have to obey your commands.”
“No. I don’t think so.” Prestimion turned toward the Lady. “Mother?” She shook her head. “It is as I said: the sending of dreams, yes. Commands, no. Not even with our most powerful devices can I do that.”
Dekkeret nodded grimly. “Then what Barjazid has, and is about to give to Dantirya Sambail, is the deadliest of weapons, my lord. And if those two are not stopped they will shatter the peace of the world. Which is why I brought my message in person, sir, instead of using the ordinary channels of communication. For no one who has not felt the force of the Barjazid device could possibly understand the threat that it holds. And I am the only one who has done that and lived to tell the tale.”
9
From his office high above the Stoien waterfront Akbalik watched the royal fleet arrive. Three swift ships, flying the Coronal’s banner and the banner of the Lady of the Isle.
“I should go down there and be waiting on the pier when they land,” he said. “I will go down there. I have to.”