This wondrous world, he thought, this place of miracles, that held enough surprises to last one for ten lifetimes—
But to see the famous golden bees had not been the primary purpose of the Coronal’s visit here, and it was Gialaurys, finally, who brought matters around to the essential topic.
“There was a report,” he said to the duke, “that the Procurator Dantirya Sambail and one or two of his men had passed this way not long ago. The Coronal has reason to speak with him and wishes to locate him. We wonder if you’ve had any contact with him.”
The duke showed no sign of surprise. Very likely word had reached him and no doubt many others, by this time, that Lord Prestimion was trying to locate the Procurator of Ni-moya and that a continent-wide manhunt was under way.
Which was, of course, news of the most sensational kind. But Duke Kaitinimon knew better than to raise whys and wherefores with Prestimion in such an affair. He asked no questions and offered only the most straightforward kind of response, telling the Coronal that he too had heard of the Procurator’s presence in the area, but had not been visited by him. That had puzzled him, that the Procurator would pass this way and not trouble to pay a call. He was certain, though, that Dantirya Sambail was no longer to be found anywhere in Balimoleronda province. More than that he could not say. And when Septach Melayn asked him whether he thought it more likely that the fugitive Procurator would have gone south or west from Bailemoona, Duke Kaitinimon could only shrug. “Plainly he’s trying to get home. What he seeks, I suppose, is the sea. He could reach it either way. Who am I to try to comprehend the mind of Dantirya Sambail?”
Prestimion decided on the southward route out of Bailemoona. There was never any such thing as a short journey on Majipoor, but the Procurator would have a shorter time of it reaching the sea by going to the south than toward the west; and, though the ports were supposed to be blockaded, Prestimion knew only too well how easy it would be for someone as wily as Dantirya Sambail to bribe his way through any blockade. He had, after all, bought his way out of the Sangamor tunnels. What challenge could it be for him to find some lazy and venal customs official in a southern port who would look the other way while he and Mandral-isca put themselves aboard a freighter heading toward Zim-roel?
Southward, then, for Prestimion. Toward Ketheron and its Sulfur Desert.
It was a logical choice, and an alluring one. The Sulfur Desert was neither a desert nor a place where sulfur was to be found; but from all reports it was one of the most striking sights in the world. Prestimion was grateful to Dantirya Sambail for having given him a pretext to visit it.
One more place that he would go without Varaile. He could not get her out of his mind.
Two days’ journey out of Bailemoona they began seeing the first outcroppings of yellow sand. At first there were only stray streaks and tailings of the stuff, mixed with ordinary dark soil that diluted the brilliance of its hue. But gradually the prevalence of it intensified until all the hillsides and valleys seemed stained with it; and then, when the travelers came to the Sulfur River itself, yellowness was all about them as though it were the only color in the universe.
It was easy to see why the first explorers of this district had believed they had stumbled upon a vast trove of sulfur. Surely there could be no other substance that had that same bright warm hue. But indeed there was; for the “sulfur” of the Sulfur Desert was nothing but powdery yellow sand, a fine calcareous sand given its striking pigmentation by grains of quartz and minute fragments of feldspar and hornblende. It had been formed, apparently, in some incalculably ancient era when much of central Majipoor had been a desert of the most arid kind, and great yellow mountains occupied the territory west of the Labyrinth. The potent action of hard winds over many millennia had scoured those mountains down into powder and carried it thousands of miles, depositing it finally in the region over the Gaibilan Hills behind Ketheron, where the Sulfur River had its source; and the river had done the rest, sweeping enormous quantities of the sand down out of the hills and distributing it across the entire broad valley where the travelers from Castle Mount now stood, a valley that had been known since time immemorial as the Sulfur Desert.
In most parts of it these unique yellow sands formed a superficial layer that rarely exceeded twenty or thirty feet in thickness. But there were some places where it had a depth of half a mile or more and had solidified under the pressure of the eons into a soft, porous rock that readily formed lofty vertical cliffs. It was in that zone of flat-faced yellow cliffs that the towns and cities of the Ketheron district had been built.
There were those who thought that Ketheron had a fairyland loveliness about it; but to others, the region was a grotesque and bizarre place, something one might imagine in a nightmare. Erosion had cut a network of sharp-sided gullies deep into the cliffs’ topmost strata, and weathering had created gnarled tapering spires of a hundred fanciful shapes in the exposed areas. By hollowing those spires out and punching tiny slit-windows through the soft rock of their walls, the Ketheron folk had transformed them into dwelling-places, dreamlike and odd, whole towns made up of tall narrow yellow buildings that looked like the pointed caps of witches.
The strangeness of Ketheron made it a favorite site for soul-painters, who had flocked here for centuries, unfurling their psychosensitive canvases and letting impressions of what they saw filter onto them through their trance-enhanced minds. Hauntingly atmospheric soul-paintings showing Ketheron’s twisted yellow towers were standard items in the houses of the newly rich who had not yet learned to shun the commonplace. Even in the Castle Prestimion had seen five or six Ketherons hanging in odd places about the premises, and they had so thoroughly accustomed him to the look of this place that he was afraid he might take the actuality of it for granted when he finally beheld it.
But the soul-paintings, he quickly came to see, had not prepared him in any way for Ketheron itself. That yellow landscape, with the muddy yellow river flowing serenely through its heart, and the skewed and contorted ogre-houses of Ketheron city rising spikily from the tops of the cliffs—how mysterious it all looked, how much like a piece of some alien world that had been set down here on Majipoor between Bailemoona and the Aruachosian coast!
Of course, Prestimion thought, any place you did not know had to be regarded as a place of mystery. And how much knowledge did you ever have, really, even of the places you thought you knew?
What he saw here, though, was truly strange. Ketheron city, which extended for some miles along the northern bank of the river in the heart of the valley, was the capital of the Ketheron district. It was small as the cities of Majipoor went, half a million people at best. Prestimion stared in wonder at the oddly shaped houses, at the unfamiliar faces of the townspeople who came out to peer at their Coronal as he rode past. Yes, Ketheron was unusual-looking to an extreme. The people themselves had a yellow cast to their features, or so he imagined, and they favored billowing baggy clothing and long floppy caps that gave them a gnomish look perfectly in keeping with the weirdness of their district.
But even if Ketheron had been as familiar to him in its contours and textures as Muldemar or Halanx or Tidias, Prestimion realized that he would be deceiving himself if he believed that he knew it. Every city was a world in itself, a world in miniature, with thousands of years of history locked up in its walls—more secrets than you could ever learn if you spent the rest of your life there. And Ketheron was just one city of all the multitudinous cities of this vast world that had been given into his care, a place that he would pass through this day, and never see again, and its essence would be as much of a riddle to him tomorrow as it had been the day before yesterday.