“He knew,” said Abrigant harshly. “Of course he knew! He just didn’t want to get himself into a quarrel with Dantirya Sambail. Who would? But it was his responsibility to detain the Procurator until—”
“No,” Prestimion said. “We were too dainty in our announcements. We sent word to port officials to detain him if they saw him, but we never said any such thing to people like Thaszthasz who hold authority inland across Dantirya Sambail’s most probable route to the sea. And now we see the result of our delicacy. By failing to name Dantirya Sambail openly as a fugitive from the law, we’ve made it possible not only for him to slip through to the coast, but for him to enjoy the hospitality of princes along the route.”
But Abrigant persisted. “Thaszthasz should have known that we wanted him. He should be punished for his negligence in—”
“In what?” Gialaurys demanded. “In inviting the ruler of the entire western continent to sit down and have a meal in his palace? If we don’t come out and say that Dantirya Sambail’s a criminal who needs to be brought to trial, why should we expect anybody to assume that he is?” Gialaurys shook his head heavily. “Even if he knew, why would he meddle? Dantirya Sambail’s big trouble for anyone, and Thasthasz obviously has no stomach for trouble. He may not even have had an inkling of the whole affair. He lives out here in his jungle listening to the lovely rain come down, and nothing else matters to him at all.”
“There is still the hope,” said Maundigand-Klimd, “that someone has been bold enough to seize Dantirya Sambail at one of the coastal ports.” And, since no one cared to deny that possibility, they put the subject aside.
They were entering the territory of Aruachosia, now, along the southern coast of Alhanroel. The sea was only a few hundred miles away, and every breeze brought them its salty tang and sultry warmth. This was a humid, steamy land; great stretches of it, swampy and insect-plagued and covered by tangled thickets of saw-edged manganoza palms, were virtually uninhabitable. But in the western part of the province there was a cone-shaped domain of relatively temperate country leading down to Sippulgar, the main seaport of the southern coast, which lay athwart the boundary between Aruachosia and its neighbor to the west, the province of Stoien.
Golden Sippulgar, it was always called. This has been a golden journey indeed, thought Prestimion: the golden bees of Bailemoona, the yellow sands of Ketheron, the golden hills of Arvyanda, and now golden Sippulgar as well. All very picturesque; but thus far they had little to show for their efforts other than fool’s gold. Dantirya Sambail had hopped blithely on and on ahead of them, unhindered in any way, and by now very likely had slipped through the port blockade as well and was on the high seas, heading home for his own private kingdom in Zimroel, where he would be virtually impregnable.
Did this continued pursuit make any sense? Prestimion wondered. Or should he halt at this point and hasten back to the Castle? The duties of kingship awaited him there. Dantirya Sambail’s defiance was not the only problem confronting him; there was a real crisis in the land, evidently, a plague, an epidemic. But the Coronal and his closest advisers were off once again in outlying districts engaged in a fruitless search that might better be carried on by other means.
And then—Varaile—the great unanswered question of his life—
For a moment, then and there, Prestimion resolved to turn at once from his quest for the Procurator. But no sooner had the thought come to him than he thrust it from him. He had followed Dantirya Sambail’s track this far, through desert and jungle, through one golden land after another: he would keep going, he decided, at least until he reached the coast, where he might obtain some reliable account of the Procurator’s movements. Golden Sippulgar would be the last point on his journey. To Sippulgar it was, then; and then homeward, homeward to the Castle, homeward to his throne and his tasks, homeward to Varaile.
Sippulgar was called “golden” because the facades of its multitude of sturdy two- and three-story buildings were fashioned without exception from the golden sandstone that was quarried in the hills just to its north. Just as the metallic leaves of the trees of Arvyanda, gleaming under the potent tropical sun, turned that region into a realm of brilliant gold, so too did the warm mellow stone of Sippulgar, glinting with bits of micaceous matter, yield a dazzling golden glow in the full brightness of the day.
It was in every way a city of the far south. The air was moist and heavy; the plantings that lined the streets and clustered about the houses were superabundantly lush, and offered up a riot of bewilderingly colorful blooms in a hundred different shades of red, blue, yellow, violet, orange, even dark maroon and a pulsating, shimmering black so intense that it seemed the quintessence of color rather than the total absence of it. The people were black, too, or, at least, dark, their faces and limbs all showing evidence of the sun’s hot touch. Sippulgar was beautifully situated, in a curving bay along the blue-green shore of the Inner Sea, crowded with ships from every part of the world. This stretch of southern Alhanroel was known as the Incense Coast, for everything that grew here was fragrant in one way or another: the low plants right along the shore that produced khazzil and the balsam known as himmam, and the forests not far inland of cinnamon trees and myrrh, thani-bong trees, scarlet fthiis. All of these exuded such a plenitude of aromatic oils and gums that the air itself about Sippulgar seemed perfumed.
Prestimion’s arrival in Sippulgar was not unexpected. He had known from the beginning of this southern journey that no matter which route he took from the Labyrinth, he would eventually have to reach the coast here, unless information were to reach him along the way that led him to follow Dantirya Sambail in some other direction. And so the city’s highest official, who bore the title of Royal Prefect, had a majestic suite ready for him in the governmental palace, a substantial building of the local sandstone with a sweeping view of the bay.
“We are, my lord, prepared to meet your every need, both material and spiritual,” the Prefect said at once.
Kameni Poteva was his name: a tall, hawk-faced man with not an ounce of fat on him, whose white robe of office was decorated with a pair of jade amulets of the kind known as rohillas and a sewn band of holy symbols. Sippulgar was a superstitious city, Prestimion knew. They worshipped a god who represented Time here, in the form of a winged serpent with the ferocious toothy snout and blazing eyes of the little omnivorous beast called a jakkabole: Prestimion had seen representations of it in several great plazas on his way into the city. There were exotic cults here, too, for Sippulgar was home to a colony of various expatriate beings from the stars, folk whose entire populations on Majipoor were no more than a few hundred all told. One entire street of the Sippulgar waterfront, he had heard, was given over to a row of temples to the gods of these alien people. Prestimion made a mental note to have a look at them before he moved along.
Septach Melayn came to him that evening as he was making ready for the formal dinner that the Prefect was giving in his honor. “A message from Akbalik, in Ni-moya,” he said, holding out an already-opened envelope. “Very strange news. Young Dekkeret has signed on with the Pontifical bureaucracy and taken himself off to Suvrael.”
Prestimion stared in bewilderment at the paper in Septach Melayn’s hand without reaching for it. “What did you say? I don’t think I understand.”
“You remember, don’t you, that we sent Akbalik out to Zimroel to check on whether Dantirya Sambail was fomenting trouble over there? And that at the last moment I suggested that Dekkeret go with him to pick up a little diplomatic experience?”