There was no end to the recitation. “That’s the Opera House, there on the hill,” said Akbalik, indicating a many-faceted building gleaming so brightly that it made Dekkeret’s eyes ache to look at it. “With a thousand-instrument orchestra, creating a sound you can’t begin to imagine. That big glass dome over there with the ten towers sprouting from it, that’s the municipal library, which holds every book that’s ever been published. Over there, that row of low buildings right at the water’s edge, with tiled roofs and turquoise and gold mosaics on their fronts, the ones you might think are the palaces of princes, those are the customs buildings. And then, just above and to the left of them—”
“What’s that one?” Dekkeret broke in, pointing toward a structure of great size and transcendent beauty, a good way down the shore, that rose above everything else in supreme majesty, imperiously summoning the attention of every eye even amidst this phenomenal concatenation of architectural wonders.
“Oh, that,” said Akbalik. “That’s the palace of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail.”
It was a white-walled building of unthinkable splendor and grace: not of such prodigious size as Dekkeret knew Lord Prestimion’s Castle to be, but quite large enough to meet almost any prince’s requirements, and of such wondrous elegance that it dominated the waterfront by its sheer perfection.
The Procurator’s palace appeared to hover in mid-air, floating above the city, although in actuality, Dekkeret saw, it was situated atop a smooth white pedestal of stupendous height—a more modest version, in its way, of Castle Mount itself. But instead of sprawling off in all directions, as the Castle did, this building was a relatively compact series of pavilions and colonnaded porticos that made ingenious use of suspension devices and cantilevered supports to give the appearance of complete defiance of gravity. The uppermost floor was a series of transparent bubbles of clearest quartz, with a row of many-balconied chambers below it, and a wider series of galleries in the next level down, reached by a cascading series of enclosed staircases that bowed outward like knees and swung sharply back inward again in a manner that seemed to defy all geometry. Squinting into the glare of Ni-moya’s radiantly white towers, Dekkeret could make out hints of other wings flanking the building on both sides below. At its gleaming base a single sturdy octagonal block of polished agate, at least as big as an ordinary person’s house, jutted from the facade like an emblazoned medallion.
“How can any one person, even the Procurator, be allowed to live in anything so grand?”
Akbalik laughed. “Dantirya Sambail is a law unto himself. He was only twelve, you know, when he inherited the procuratorial fief of Ni-moya. Which had always been an important fief, you understand, the most important one in Zimroel, but that was before Dantirya Sambail took control of it. Everyone assumed there would have to be a regency, but no, not at all, he disposed of his cousin the regent in about two minutes and took power in his own right, and then, thanks to at least three marriages and half a dozen informal alliances and a lot of very desirable inheritances from an assortment of powerful kinsmen, he put together what amounts to a private empire. By the time he was thirty he held direct rule over a third of the continent of Zimroel and indirect influence over just about all the rest of it except the Metamorph reservation. If he could have figured out some way of taking that over too, he probably would have done it. As it is, he rules Zimroel pretty much as its king. A king needs a decent palace: Dantirya Sambail has spent the last forty years improving the one he inherited into what you see before you now.”
“What about the Pontifex and the Coronal? Didn’t they have any objections to all this?”
“Old Prankipin’s main concern, at least before he fell in with the sorcerers, was always commerce: constant economic expansion and the free flow of goods from one region to another, with everybody making a nice profit and the money going around and around. I think he saw the rise of Dantirya Sambail as a favorable contributing factor. Zimroel was a pretty fragmented place, you know, so far from the centers of government across the sea that the local lords mostly did whatever they pleased, and when the interests of the Duke of Narabal clashed with the interests of the Prince of Pidruid, it wasn’t always healthy for the regional economy. Having someone like Dantirya Sambail in charge, capable of telling all the local boys what they should do and making it stick, played right into Prankipin’s plan. As for Lord Confalume, he was even more enthusiastic about the unification of Zimroel under Dantirya Sambail than the Pontifex. Neither of them liked Dantirya Sambail, you under-stand—who could?—but they saw him as useful. Indispensable, even. So they tolerated his power grab and in some ways even encouraged it. And he was smart enough not to tread on their toes. Traveled often to the Labyrinth and the Castle, he did, paid his respects, loyal subject of his majesty and his lordship, et cetera, et cetera.”
“And Lord Prestimion? Is he going to go along with the arrangement also?”
“Ah. Prestimion.” A cloud appeared to cross Akbalik’s face. “No, things are different now. There’s some trouble between Lord Prestimion and the Procurator. Fairly serious trouble, in fact.”
“Of what sort?”
Akbalik looked away. “Not of any sort that I’m able to discuss with you right now, boy. Serious, is all. Extremely serious. Perhaps we’ll have an opportunity to go into the details some other time.—Ah: we’re landing in Ni-moya, it seems.”
The section of the city where the riverboat came to shore was called Strelain, which Akbalik told him was the name of Ni-moya’s central district. A government floater was waiting for them; it took them up and up through the hilly streets of the great city, and deposited them at last at the tall building that was to be their home for the next few months.
Dekkeret’s little apartment was on the fifteenth floor. That a building could have so many floors was something that had never occurred to him. Standing by the wide window, peering out at the tops of the buildings below, and at the river farther on, and the dark line of the Zimr’s southern shore so far off that he could barely make it out, he had the giddy feeling that the building might at any moment pitch forward purely of its own unsustainable height and tumble down the hill, scattering its component bricks far and wide as it fell. He turned away from the window, shuddering. But the building stood firm.
The next day he began work at the Office of Documentary Appeal. That was a subdivision of the Bureau of the Treasury, housed in a back wing of the rambling thousand-year-old governmental complex of blue granite known as the Cascanar Building, in south-central Strelain.
It was meaningless work. Dekkeret had no illusions about that. He was supposed to interview people who had had important documents—important to them, anyway—garbled somehow by the bureaucracy, and help them straighten out the confusion. From his first day he found himself attempting to unravel disputes about erroneous listings of birth-dates, improper delineation of property boundaries, muddied self-contradictory statements inserted into legal depositions by careless stenographers, and a host of other such things. There was no reason in the world why it had been necessary to ship him thousands of miles to handle such drab and trifling matters, which any career civil servant already working here could be dealing with.