There was no more sleep for him that night in Minimool. From time to time strange tremors of distress came over him, and for a moment, just before dawn, it seemed to him almost as though the general madness were reaching up and engulfing him with its dread contagion. Then he brushed the feeling aside. It would not touch him, whatever it might be. But O! The people! The world!
“I have had enough of this tour, I think,” Prestimion said in the morning. “Today we return to the Castle.”
Plainly much was amiss out there in the world of everyday life; and Prestimion, once he was back, gave orders for the planning for his official visit to the cities of the Mount to be accelerated. No more skulking around in false whiskers and shabby costumes, not now. In the full panoply of the Coronal Lord he would go forth to six or seven of the most important cities among the Fifty, and confer with dukes and counts and mayors, and take the measure of the crisis that seemed to be enveloping the world with such rapidity here in the opening months of his reign.
First, though, the problem of Dantirya Sambail’s continued captivity needed a resolution of some sort.
He paid a call on the magus Maundigand-Klimd, who by now had established his headquarters in a group of vacant rooms on the far side of the Pinitor Court that had been the apartment of Korsibar before his seizure of the throne. Prestimion had expected to find the place filled by this time with all the arcane gear of the sorcerer’s trade, astrological charts on the walls, and heaps of mysterious leather-bound folios full of magical lore, and enigmatic mechanical instruments of the sort he had seen in the chambers of Gominik Halvor, the master of wizardry with whom he had studied the dark arts during his time in Triggoin: phalangaria and ambivials, hexaphores and ammatepilas, armillary spheres and astrolabes and alembics, and all of that.
But there were none of those things here. Prestimion saw just a few small unimportant looking devices laid out in indifferent order on the upper shelves of a simple unpainted bookcase that was otherwise empty. Their nature was unknown to him; they might easily have been calculating machines or other items of prosaic arithmetical function, not very different from those that Prestimion had pretended to deal in when he was in Stee. Or the cheap little geomantic devices that he had seen for sale in the midnight market of Bombifale, that night when he first had met Maundigand-Klimd, and which the Su-Suheris had scornfully dismissed as fraudulent and worthless. Maundigand-Klimd was not likely to have such things here, Prestimion decided. He was surprised by such sparseness, though.
Maundigand-Klimd had furnished the apartment only in the most stark and minimal way. In the main room Prestimion saw a sleeping-harness of the sort used by the Su-Suheris folk, and a couple of chairs for the benefit of human visitors, and a small table on which a handful of books and leaflets of little apparent significance lay casually strewn. There seemed to be little, if anything, in the rooms beyond, and throughout the place the ancient stone walls were altogether bare of ornament. The effect was sterile and chilling.
“This was a troubled trip for you, I think,” the magus said at once.
“You can see that, can you?”
“One scarcely needs to be a master of the mantic arts to see that, your lordship.”
Prestimion smiled grimly. “It’s that apparent? Yes. I suppose it is. I saw things I’d rather not have seen, and dreamed things I’d have been better off not dreaming. It’s exactly as I was told: there’s madness out there, Maundigand-Klimd. Much more of it than I had supposed there to be.”
Maundigand-Klimd replied with his disconcerting double nod, but made no other response.
“There were some who walked as though asleep in the streets, or laughed to themselves, or cried or screamed,” Prestimion said. “A kinsman of Count Fisiolo in Stee calls himself Lord Prestimion, and randomly sinks boats that he meets along the river for his own pleasure. In Hoikmar—” He had with him the three coins that the beggar had pressed into his hand, and, remembering them now, he brought them out and laid them before Maundigand-Klimd. “I had these of a poor sad crazy old man there, who came upon us all eager to sell us a rusty box heavy with good silver royals for a handful of crowns. Look you, Maundigand-Klimd: these coins are thousands of years old. Lord Sirruth, this is, and Lord Guadeloom, and here—”
The Su-Suheris set the three coins out in a precise row in the palm of his own gaunt white hand. The left head gave Prestimion a quizzical look. “You bought the whole box of them, did you, my lord?”
“How could I? But we gave him a little money for charity’s sake, and he forced these three on us in return, and turned and fled.”
“He was not so mad as you suppose, I think. And you did well not to make him an offer. These coins are false.”
“False?”
Maundigand-Klimd placed one hand over the other, closing the coins between, and held them that way for a time. “I can feel the vibration of their atoms,” he said. “These coins have cores of bronze, and just a thin wash of silver over them. I could easily scrape through to the base metal with my fingernail. How likely is it that Lord Sirruth’s ten-royal pieces had bronze cores?” The Su-Suheris handed back the coins. “There are madmen galore roaming the world, my lord, but your poor old man of Hoikmar is not one of them. A simple swindler is all he is.”
“There’s some comfort in that,” Prestimion said, in as light a tone as he could manage just then. “At least there’s one out there who still has his wits!—But where’s all this madness coming from, do you suppose? Septach Melayn says it may be connected with the obliteration. That there’s a vacuum in people’s minds where the memories of the war once were, and strange things go rushing in when vacuums are created.”
“I find a degree of wisdom in that notion, my lord. On a certain day some months past I felt what I thought of as an emptiness entering me, though I had no idea of its cause. As it happened I was strong enough to withstand its effects. Others evidently are not so fortunate.”
A pang of guilt and shame seared through Prestimion at the Su-Suheris sorcerer’s words. Could it be? Was the whole world to be infected with madness because of his spur-of-the-moment decision on the battlefield at Thegomar Edge?
No, he thought. No. No. No. Septach Melayn’s theory is wrong. These are isolated, random instances. A world of many billions of people will always have a great many madmen among those billions. It is only coincidence that so much of this is coming to our attention just now.
“Be that as it may,” Prestimion said, pushing back his discomfort, “we’ll look into the truth of it at some other time. Meanwhile: I’ll shortly be leaving the Castle again for some weeks, or even months, to make formal visits to several of the cities of the Mount. The unfinished matter of Dantirya Sambail has to be dealt with before I go.”
“And what is your pleasure, my lord?”
“You spoke not long ago of giving him back his memory of the civil war,” Prestimion said. “Can such a thing actually be done?”