Prestimion, for all Gialaurys’s grumbling, was not yet ready to abandon the quest for the Procurator. They began, now, all of them, to search purposefully for Dantirya Sambail in dreams. That was often a useful way to gain access to information that could not be had by other means.
And indeed the method produced an immediate rich harvest of results. Too rich, in fact: for Abrigant, after commending himself to sleep and the mercy of his mother the Lady of the Isle, had a clear vision of the Procurator and his henchman encamped at a village of low, round, blue-tiled dwellings beside a swift stream, and awakened convinced that that place was no more than sixty miles north of their present position. But dreaming Gialaurys had seen the fugitives too, camped in that sweet meadowland to their rear where those flights of yellow-necked raptorial birds had passed overhead. The voice that spoke to Gialaurys in his dream told him quite explicitly that the expedition had gone unknowingly past its quarry in the night, weeks ago, and was already a thousand miles too far to the east. One of Prestimion’s captains, though, a man from the northwestern part of Alhanroel named Yeben Kattikawn, was just as positive that he had had a true vision of the Procurator moving rapidly ahead of them, traveling in a stolen floater; according to the dream of Yeben Kattikawn, Dantirya Sambail was almost to the shore of Lake Embolain of the silken-smooth water, which was the one place in eastern Alhanroel that everyone had heard of, though hardly anyone could tell you precisely where it was. And Prestimion himself, wrestling with the problem throughout an entire night of uneasy sleep, emerged with the conviction that Dantirya Sambail had bypassed them in the Dancing Hills, which Prestimion saw in the most vivid detail, quivering and swaying as the ground beneath them trembled, and the Procurator and his sinister companion riding steadily over their unstable crest, heading northward with the intent of turning at some point and making a great westerly loop back beyond Castle Mount to the other coast of the continent.
This welter of contradictions gave no guidance at all. At midday, while they were camped beside a grove of tall gray-leaved tree-ferns whose trunks were hairy with scarlet fur, Prestimion drew Maundigand-Klimd aside and asked him for a clarifying opinion, telling him that their night’s dreaming had produced only confusion; and the Su-Suheris, who had not taken part in the dream-quest, for his people did not seek information in that way, replied that he suspected sorcery at work. “These are false trails that your enemy has planted in all your minds, I think. There are certain spells of dispersion that a fleeing man can cast, to deflect those who seek him from his proper route. And these dreams give every evidence that the Procurator has cast just such spells, or had them cast for him.”
“And you? Where do you think he is?”
Maundigand-Klimd disappeared at once into a trance, one head communing with the other, and for a long while stood swaying before Prestimion without speaking. Seemingly he was in some other realm. A soft sweet wind blew from the south, but it barely stirred the fronds of the gray ferns. The world was still and silent for an endless long time. Then the four eyes of the magus opened all in the same instant and he said, looking more somber even than he ordinarily did, “He is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”
“And the meaning of that,” Prestimion prompted patiently, when no better explanation was forthcoming, “is—?”
“That we have let ourselves be badly deceived by him, my lord. That—just as I suspected—he, or some sorcerer in his pay, has spread confusion all over these empty provinces, so that the people we meet imagine him traveling this way or that, in a floater or upon mounts. The information they’ve given us is worthless. The same is true of what Abrigant has discovered in his dream, and Kattikawn also, I fear.”
“Did your trance show you where he is, then?”
“Alas, only where he is not,” said Maundigand-Klimd. “But I suspect the truth will prove to be closer to your dream and that of Gialaurys: Dantirya Sambail may never have come out this far at all. He may have only pretended to be heading east, allowing us to think he was going toward the Great Sea while actually traveling some other way entirely.”
Prestimion kicked angrily at the spongy golden turf. “Exactly as I thought he might from the beginning. Simply feinting a journey into these unknown eastern lands but actually doubling back after a short while toward the Mount, and then on to some western seaport and the voyage to Zimroel.”
“It appears that that is what he has done, my lord.”
“We’ll find him, then, wherever he is. We have a hundred sorcerers to his one.—You’re sure he’s not somewhere out there ahead of us?”
“I’m sure of nothing, my lord. But the probabilities are against it. The eastward route holds no benefit for him. My own intuitions, which I trust, tell me that he’s behind us, and getting further from us every day.”
“Yes. While we head the wrong way. This has all been nothing but a wild gihorna chase, I see.” And no justification whatever remained now for proceeding on the journey, other than his hunger to explore new lands. That was not sufficient. He clapped his hands together.—"Gialaurys! Abrigant!”
They came running at Prestimion’s call. Quickly he set forth for them all that Maundigand-Klimd had just told him.
“Good,” said Gialaurys immediately, with a fierce grin of satisfaction. “I’ll send word down the line that we’re starting back to the Mount.”
Abrigant still argued valiantly for his village of blue-tiled cottages sixty miles away. But Prestimion knew that it would be foolish to go searching after what was surely yet another phantom; and—not without some sadness at the thought of giving up the venture here—he gave permission for Gialaurys to sound the order for retreat.
That night they camped in a wooded place where purple mists seeped from the moist ground, so that the gray clouds that moved in at sunset quickly turned deep violet and the sun, as it dropped toward the west, lit the shining leaves of the forest trees to a magical translucent red. Prestimion stood for a long while looking westward into this strange light, until at last the sun disappeared behind the far-off bulk of Castle Mount and darkness came gliding over him out of the east, out of that remote land by the shores of the Great Sea whose immensity, he knew, he would never in this life behold.
Behold it he did, though, just a few hours later, in a dream of exquisite vividness that came to him almost as soon as he had closed his eyes in sleep. In that dream they had not given up the eastward trek, but somehow had ventured on, and on and on and on, past the last outpost of explored territory, the place called Kekkinork, where the blue seaspar with which Lord Pinitor of ancient times had bedecked the walls of Bombifale city was mined. Just beyond Kekkinork lay the Great Sea itself, shielded behind great cliffs that stretched off parallel to the shore as far to north and south as anyone could see, a formidable and seemingly endless barrier of gleaming black stone shot through with dazzling veins of white quartz. But there was a single opening in that unending cliff, a narrow sliver through which the glint of the new day’s sunlight came, and in his dream Prestimion went running toward that opening and through it, and onward, down to the waiting sea, and waded out into the gentle pink surf of the ocean that occupied close to half of the planet.