And then, finally, he found himself on the high dais of Lord Apsimar’s Chapel, which someone had determined was the traditional place for such events, with the hierarch Marcatain standing to his right on behalf of the Lady of the Isle and the representative of the Pontifex Confalume at his left and Varaile facing him, and a host of grandees of the realm in magnificent garb looking on, and Septach Melayn beaming in smug self-satisfaction at the job of matchmaking that he had achieved; and the traditional words were being spoken and the rings were being exchanged and the familiar old wedding anthem that went back to Lord Stangard’s day was resounding in his ears.
It was done. Varaile was his wife.
Or would be, in a truer sense of the word, some hours later, when all the night’s feasting and celebration was over and they could at last be alone.
There was a lavish suite of rooms adjacent to Prestimion’s own that had belonged to the Lady Roxivail in the days of her marriage to Lord Confalume. In accordance with the wish of Lord Confalume it had not been used by anyone since Roxivail’s departure from the Castle. The court chamberlains, expecting that those rooms would be occupied now by Varaile and used by the royal couple on their wedding night, had gone to great effort to restore and refurbish them after their two decades of neglect.
But Prestimion regarded the Roxivail suite as an unlucky place for their first night together. He chose, instead, the apartments in Munnerak Tower, the white-brick building in the Castle’s eastern wing, where he had lived in his days as one of the many princes of the Castle. Those chambers lacked the majesty and splendor of the ones set apart for the use of the Coronal; but Prestimion felt no great need for the ultimate in majesty and splendor this night, and, he suspected, neither did Varaile. It was a handsome enough suite in its way, with spacious rooms that had a marvelous down-slope view through their curving many-faceted windows of the abyss known as the Morpin Plunge, and an oversized bathing-tub fashioned from huge blocks of black Khyntor marble that had been so cunningly set in place by the artisans that it was impossible to detect the joinings between one block and the next. To this suite Prestimion brought his bride; and here he waited, in the little room that had been his study and library, while she bathed away the fatigue of the long day of wedding rituals.
What seemed like ten years went by before she summoned him. But then came the call at last.
She was waiting for him in the room where the nuptial bed had been installed, a magnificent bed of imperial dimensions, carved from the darkest Rialmar ebony and canopied with the sheerest lace of Makroposopos. As he went down the corridor toward it Prestimion felt a sudden maddening burst of terror at the thought that the ghost of This-met would somehow interpose itself between him and his bride in this moment of moments; but then he opened the bedroom door, and saw Varaile standing beside the bed in the soft golden glow of three scarlet waxen tapers taller than herself, and Thismet at that instant became only a name, a cherished but distant memory, the mere ghost of a ghost.
Varaile was clad, after her bath, in a filmy gown of fine white silk, fastened at her left shoulder by a clasp of woven gold. Prestimion admired the reticence that had led her to cover herself for his arrival in the bedroom. But he noted also the lush and supple contours of her body glimmering through the gossamer fabric, and knew that modesty was not its only purpose. He caught his breath in delight and stepped toward her.
There was, for just an instant, a look of anxiety, even fear, in her eyes. It vanished, though, as quickly as it came. “The consort of the Coronal,” Varaile said, as though in wonder. “Can this be real?” And answered herself before he could speak. “Yes. Yes. It can. Come to me, Prestimion.”
She touched a drawstring at her shoulder.
The gown fell away like a cobweb.
2
A three-day honeymoon in the pleasure-city of High Morpin, an hour’s ride by floater below the Castle, was all that he could allow himself. He had been away from the seat of power too much of the time already since attaining the throne.
In his youth Prestimion had come often to that happy glittering playground of a place to go on dizzying juggernaut rides and let himself be catapulted through the power-tunnels and dance on the baffling, challenging mirror-slides. Such amusements were beyond his grasp now. A Coronal could not allow himself to put his body even to the slight risk that such games afforded, nor would the populace be pleased to see him cavorting like a boy in public. That he had become the prisoner of his own royal majesty was a fact beyond all denying.
But there were compensating delights in High Morpin for those whose high place in the realm denied them the freedom to move openly among the populace. Prestimion and Varaile stayed at the Castle Mount Lodge, a knifeblade-sharp slab of white stone set aside for the use of the nobility, and there they occupied the many-chambered penthouse known as the Coronal’s Suite, which was not so much a suite as a miniature palace that clung to the upper levels of the towering hotel much as the Castle itself wraps itself about the summit of the Mount.
The uppermost level of their suite was a transparent bubble of clearest quartz, which served as their bedchamber. From it they had a view of the entire sparkling city, all the way across to the immense fountain that Lord Confalume had had built at the city’s edge, which constantly hurled thick plumes of water, ever-changing in color, to an enormous height. One floor down was their robing-room, a hornlike excrescence of some shining white metal boldly cantilevered out from the other side of the building to provide a view of the lovely suburb of Low Morpin and the stupefying dark emptiness of the Morpin Plunge, where the face of the Mount fell away for a sheer drop of thousands of feet. Just below that was a room carved from a single gigantic green globe of jade, where soft musical tones emerged without apparent source from the air: the harmonic retreat, that room was called. Then a long white-vaulted passageway led at a steeply descending angle to the private dining-quarters, a small, elegantly appointed room where the Coronal and his consort could take their meals. A cascading series of balconies gave them access to the clear, pure air of the Mount and a third view, this one of the dark intricate bulk of the Castle rising high above them.
A second passageway in a different direction opened into an elaborate pleasure-gallery supported by pillars of golden marble. Here the residents of the suite could swim in a shimmering pool lined with garnet slabs, or suspend themselves in a column of warm air and permit streams of unquantified sensation to flood their senses, or put themselves in contact—through appropriate connectors and conduits—with the rhythms and sighing pulses of the cosmos. Here also were kept patterned rugs for focused meditation, banks of motile light-organisms for autohypnosis, a collection of stimulatory pistons and cartridges, and a host of other devices for the royal couple’s amusement.
From there the structure made an undulating swaybacked curve and sent two wings back up the building at differing levels. One contained an array of soul-paintings that had been collected by various Coronals of the the previous two centuries, and the other was a gallery for the housing of antiquities, bric-a-brac, and a miscellany of small sculptures and decorative vases. Centrally positioned between these two groups of rooms was the suite’s grand dining hall, a single sturdy octagonal block of polished agate thrusting far out into the abyss for the delight of such guests as the Coronal and his consort might care to entertain.