Immediately a loud cry of “Man overboard!” went up, and the riverboat halted and swung around in its path. Two burly crewmen went out in a dinghy and without much difficulty hauled the hapless lunatic from the water. They brought him back on board, dripping and spuming, and took him down belowdecks. That was the last Dekkeret saw of him until the riverboat pulled in, a day later, at a town called Kraibledene, where the fellow was put ashore and, so it appeared, turned over to the local authorities.
A day later came an even stranger thing. In early afternoon of a clear, warm day, as the riverboat was traversing a stretch of the river without settlements, a gaunt stern-faced man of about forty in a stiff, thickly brocaded robe descended from the passenger deck carrying a large and obviously heavy suitcase. He set the suitcase down in an unoccupied section of the main deck, opened it, and drew from it a series of odd-looking instruments and implements, which he proceeded to arrange with meticulous care in a perfect semicircle in front of him.
Dekkeret nudged Akbalik. “Look at all that weird stuff! It’s sorcerer’s equipment, isn’t it?”
“It certainly looks like it. I wonder if he’s going to cast some sort of spell right here in front of us all.”
Dekkeret knew little about sorcery and had even less liking for it. Manifestations of the supernatural and irrational made him uncomfortable. “Is that anything we need to worry about, do you think?”
“Depends on what kind of spell it is, I suppose,” Akbalik said, with a shrug. “But maybe he’s just planning to hold a bargain sale for amateur wizards. Nobody would ever use all those different things in a single spell.” And he began to point out and identify the different implements for Dekkeret. That triangular stone vessel was called a veralistia: it was used as a crucible in which powders were burned that permitted a view into things to come. The complex device with metal coils and posts was an armillary sphere, which showed the positions of the planets and stars so that horoscopes might be cast. The thing made of brightly colored feathers and animal hair woven closely together—Akbalik could not recall its name—was employed to facilitate conversations with the spirits of the dead. The one next to it, an arrangement of crystal lenses and fine golden wires, was called a podromis: wizards used it in restoring sexual virility.
“You seem to be quite the expert,” said Dekkeret. “You’ve had personal acquaintance with all of this, I take it?”
“Hardly. I don’t often have occasion to converse with the spirits of the dead, and I haven’t had much need of podromises, either. But you hear about these things wherever you turn, nowadays.—Look, he’s still got more! I wonder what that one is supposed to do. And that, with all the wheels and pistons!”
The suitcase was finally empty. A good-sized crowd had gathered by now. Word must be getting around the ship, Dekkeret thought, that some kind of demonstration of magic was about to get under way. You could always draw a big crowd for that.
The gaunt magus—for that was surely what he was, a magus—took no notice of his audience. He was seated crosslegged now before his neat semicircular row of strange glittering apparatus and appeared to be off in some other realm of consciousness, eyes half closed, head rocking rhythmically from side to side.
Then, abruptly, he rose. Raised his foot and brought it down with savage force on the fragile instrument that Akbalik had called a podromis. Mashed it flat, and went on to trample the armillary sphere, and the device of wheels and pistons, and the small, delicate machine of interlocking metallic triangles just beyond it. The onlookers gasped in amazement and shock. Dekkeret wondered if it might be blasphemous to destroy such things as these, whether doing so would bring down the vengeance of the supernatural spirits. If indeed such spirits existed at all, he added.
The magus now had systematically destroyed almost his entire collection of magical equipment. Those that he could not smash, like the veralistia, he hurled overboard. Then, calmly, purposefully, he walked to the rail and in a single smooth movement surmounted it and leaped into the river.
This time there was to be no rescue. The man had gone straight under, vanishing instantly from sight as though the pockets of his robe were filled with stones. Once again the riverboat came to a halt and crewmen went out in a dinghy, but they found no trace of the jumper, and returned after a time, grim-faced, to report their failure.
“Madness is everywhere,” Akbalik said, and shivered. “The world is turning very strange, boy.”
After that, members of the crew patrolled the deck two by two at all hours to guard against further such incidents. But there were no others.
The two bizarre events left Dekkeret in a somber, brooding mood. Madness was everywhere, yes. He could not now keep the memory of Sithelle’s incomprehensible terrible death, which for months he had worked hard to repress, from flooding back into his mind in all its full horror. That wild-eyed lunatic—those clotted, unintelligible cries of rage—Sithelle stepping forward—the flashing blade—the sudden startling spurt of blood—
And now a giggling clownish fellow jumps overboard in mid-river, and then a magus who has evidently reached the end of his tether. Could it happen to anyone at any time, the onset of irresistible madness, the utter unstoppable flight of all reason from the mind? Could it happen even to him? Worriedly Dekkeret searched his soul for the seeds of insanity. But they did not seem to be present within him, or, at any rate, he could not find them; and after a time his normal high spirits reasserted themselves, and he went back to his pastime of peering at the passing cities of the river-bank without fear that he would without warning be seized with the unconquerable urge to hurl himself over the rail.
When the splendor of Ni-moya burst abruptly upon him he was utterly unprepared.
For several days, now, the river had been growing wider. Dekkeret knew that a second great river joined the Zimr just south of the city—the Steiche, it was, coming up out of the wild Metamorph country—and where the two rivers flowed together, their union would of necessity form one much larger than either of its components. But he had not expected the joining of the rivers to create such a vast body of water. It made the mouth of the Zimr at Piliplok look like a trickling stream. Crossing that great confluence was much like being on the ocean again. Dekkeret was aware that Ni-moya was somewhere to the north; there were other great cities over on the other shore; but it was hard for his stunned mind to take in the immensity of the scene, and all he could see was the dark breast of the water stretching to the horizon, dotted everywhere by the bright pennants of the hundreds of local ferries that crossed it constantly in all directions.
He stared for what seemed like hours. Then, as he stood gaping, Akbalik took him by the elbow and turned him to one side.
“There,” he said. “You’re looking in the wrong direction. That’s Ni-moya up yonder. Some of it, anyway.”
Dekkeret was astounded. It was a magical sight: an endless backdrop of thickly forested hills, with an enormous city of shining white towers in the foreground, each one seeming taller than its neighbor, row upon row of titanic structures descending right to the shore of the river.
Was this a city? It was a world in itself. It went on forever, following the river’s course as far as he could see, and continuing onward, obviously, for a long distance beyond—hundreds of miles, maybe. Dekkeret caught his breath. So much! So beautiful! He felt like dropping to his knees. Akbalik began to speak like a tour guide of Ni-moya’s most famous sights: the Gossamer Galleria, a mercantile arcade a mile long that hovered high above the ground on nearly invisible cables; and the Museum of Worlds, where treasures from all over the universe were on display, even, so it was said, things from Old Earth; and the Crystal Boulevard, where revolving reflectors created the brilliance of a thousand suns; and the Park of Fabulous Beasts, full of wonders from remote and practically unknown districts—