“To meet you,” he said, and knew there would be no turning back from there.
6
The Labyrinth of Majipoor was a joyless place at best: a huge underground city, level upon level descending into the depths of the planet, with the hidden lair of the Pontifex at its deepest point, at the level farthest from the warming rays of the sun.
Prestimion had experienced some of the blackest moments of his life here.
It was in the great hall of the Labyrinth known as the Court of Thrones that Korsibar, in the moment of the announcement of the death of the Pontifex Prankipin, had carried out his astounding seizure of the starburst crown that was to have been Prestimion’s, right before Prestimion’s eyes and those of the highest figures of the realm.
And it was in the suite of rooms set aside for the Coronal’s use at the Labyrinth that Prestimion had come before Korsibar’s father, Lord Confalume, who had now become the Pontifex Confalume, to demand of him the throne that Confalume had promised to him; and had heard from the bewildered and broken Confalume that nothing could be done, that the usurpation was an irrevocable act, that Korsibar was Coronal now and Prestimion must slink away to make whatever he could out of his life without further hope of attaining the throne. Confalume had wept, then, when Prestimion had pressed him to take action against this out-rage—Confalume, weeping! But the Pontifex was paralyzed by fear. He dreaded a bloody civil war, which would certainly be the outcome of any challenge to Korsibar, too greatly to want to set himself in opposition to his son’s amazing and unlawful act. The thing is done, Confalume had said. Korsibar holds the power now.
Well, the thing that had been done had now been undone, and Korsibar had been blotted from existence as though he had never been, and Prestimion was Lord Prestimion now, returning in glory to this place from which he had crept away in shame and defeat. No one but he and Gialaurys and Septach Melayn knew anything of the dark events that had taken place in the subterranean metropolis in the days immediately after the death of the Pontifex Prankipin. But the Labyrinth was full of painful memories for him. If he could have avoided this journey, he would have. He had no wish to see the Labyrinth again until the day—let it be far in the future, he hoped!—when Confalume at last was dead and he himself must take up the title of Pontifex.
Staying away from the Labyrinth entirely, though, was impossible. The new Coronal must present himself, early in the reign, to the Pontifex from whom he had received his throne.
Here he was, then.
Confalume awaited him.
“Your journey was a pleasant one, I hope?”
“Fair weather all the way, your majesty,” Prestimion said. “A good breeze carrying us southward down the Glayge.”
They had had the introductory formalities, the embraces and the feasting, and now it was just the two of them together in quiet conversation, Pontifex and Coronal, emperor and king, nominal father and adoptive son.
The river route was what Prestimion had taken to get here: the usual one for a lord of the Castle who was making a visit to the Labyrinth. He had traveled aboard the royal barge down the swift, wide Glayge, which rose in the foothills of the Mount and made its way south through some of the most fertile provinces of Alhanroel to the imperial capital. All along the river’s banks the populace had been assembled to cheer him on his way: at Storp and Mitripond, at Nirnivan and Stangard Falls, Makroposopos and Pendiwane and the innumerable towns along the shores of Lake Roghoiz, and the cities of the Lower Glayge beyond the lake, Palaghat and Terabessa and Grevvin and all the rest. Prestimion had made this journey in reverse not many years before, returning from the Labyrinth to the Castle after the usurpation, and a far more somber trip it had been, too, with banners portraying the newly proclaimed Lord Korsibar fluttering in his face at every port. But that was then, and this was now, and as he went past each city the cry of “Prestimion! Prestimion! All hail Lord Prestimion!” echoed in his ears.
There were seven entrances to the Labyrinth; but the one that Coronals used was the Mouth of Waters, where the Glayge flowed past the huge brown earthen mound that was the only part of the Labyrinth visible aboveground. Here, a line so sharp that a man could step across it in a single stride marked the division between the green and fertile Glayge Valley and the lifeless dusty desert in which the Labyrinth lay. Here Prestimion knew he must put behind him the sweet breezes and soft golden-green sunlight of the upper world and enter into the mysterious eternal night of the underground city, the sinister descending coils of its densely populated levels, the hermetic and airless-seeming realm far below that was the home of the Pontifex.
Masked officials of the Pontificate were on hand to greet him at the entrance, with the Pontifex’s pompous white-haired cousin, Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, at the head of the group in his new capacity as High Spokesman to the Pontifex. The swift shaft reserved only for Powers of the Realm took Prestimion downward, past the circular levels where the Labyrinth’s teeming millions of population dwelled, those who served the Pontifical bureaucracy and those who simply performed the humble tasks of any great city, and onward to the deeper zones where the Labyrinth’s famed architectural wonders lay—the Pool of Dreams, the mysterious Hall of Winds, the bizarre Court of Pyramids, the Place of Masks, the inexplicable gigantic empty space that was the Arena, and all the rest—and with breathtaking swiftness delivered him to the imperial sector, and to the Pontifex. Who immediately dismissed his entire entourage from the room, even Oljebbin. Prestimion’s meeting would be with Confalume alone.
Nor was the Confalume who faced him now the Confalume that Prestimion was expecting to see.
He had feared that he would find the feeble ruined hulk of a man, the sorry and dismal remnant of the great Confalume of yore. The beginning of that collapse had already been in evidence at their last meeting. The Confalume with whom he had that fruitless, despondent meeting in the grim aftermath of the thunderbolt force of Korsibar’s power-grab, the man who had wept and trembled and begged most piteously to be left in peace, had been only a shadow of the Confalume whose forty-year reign as Coronal had been marked by triumph after triumph.
Although the later obliteration of specific knowledge of the usurpation and the civil war that had ensued would have spared Confalume from the grief he felt over his son’s actions, there was no reason to think he would ever recover from the damage that had been inflicted on his spirit. Even at Prestimion’s coronation, with the whole Korsibar event now relegated to oblivion, Confalume had seemed little more than an empty shell, still physically strong but befuddled of mind, haunted by phantoms whose identity he could not begin to understand. And, according to Septach Melayn, who had met with the legate Vologaz Sar during Prestimion’s absence in the east-country, the Pontifex now was still a greatly troubled man, confused and depressed, plagued by sleeplessness and nebulous free-floating distress.
And so Prestimion had thought that that charismatic Confalume of old surely would be gone, that he would meet a frail trembling man who stood at the edge of the grave. It was frightening to think that Confalume might not have much longer to live, for Prestimion himself had hardly commenced his own reign. He was far from ready to be pulled away from the Castle prematurely in order to immure himself in the dark pit that was the Labyrinth, although that was a risk that any Coronal faced when he succeeded one who had held his Castle throne as long as Confalume had.
But it was a Confalume reborn and revivified to whom Prestimion presented himself now in the Court of Thrones, that hall of black stone walls rising to pointed arches where Pontifex and Coronal were meant to sit side by side on lofty seats—the very place in which Korsibar had staged his coup-d’état. Here before him was Confalume, and he seemed to be the robust and forceful man Prestimion remembered from former days: jaunty and erect in the scarlet-and-black Pontifical robes, with a miniature replica of the ornate Pontifical tiara glittering bravely on one lapel and the little golden rohilla, the astrological amulet that he was so fond of wearing, mounted on the other. Nothing about him had the aspect of imminent death. When they embraced, it was impossible not to be impressed by the strength of the man.