“Better sooner than later, I think,” she said.
“Please. I’m not minimizing its importance, Varaile. There are many other things to deal with right now, though.” He smiled to soften the tone of his words, but he did not try to conceal his impatience. “I’ll get to it when I get to it.”
“And Prince Dekkeret?” Varaile said. “He should have some reward for bringing this thing to your attention, shouldn’t he?”
“Prince Dekkeret? Oh, no, no, not yet! He’s still a commoner, just a bright boy from Normork who’s making his way up the ladder here. But you’re quite right: we ought to acknowledge his good services.—What do you say, Gialaurys? Promote him two levels, shall we? Yes. If he’s second level now, which I think he is, let’s up him to fourth. Provided he’s recovered from whatever strange fit of conscience it was that sent him racing off to Suvrael.”
“If he hadn’t gone there, Prestimion, he’d never have captured the mind-control machine,” Varaile pointed out.
“True enough. But the thing may not turn out to have any value. And this whole Suvrael exploit of his bothers me a little. Dekkeret was supposed to be working for us in Ni-moya, not going off on mysterious private adventures, even ones that turned out to be worthwhile. I don’t want him doing that again.—Now,” Prestimion said, as Gialaurys, excusing himself, saluted and left the room, “let’s turn to another matter, shall we, Varaile?”
“And that is?”
“A new journey that has to be undertaken.”
A flicker of displeasure crossed Varaile’s face. “You’ll be traveling again so soon, Prestimion?”
“Not just me. Us. This time you’ll be accompanying me.”
She brightened at that. “Oh, much better! And where will we be going? Bombifale, perhaps? I’d love to see Bombifale. Or Amblemorn, maybe. They say that Amblemorn’s very strange and quaint, narrow winding roads and ancient cobblestoned streets—I’ve always wanted to see Amble-morn, Prestimion.”
“We’ll be going farther than that,” he told her. “A great deal farther: to the Isle of Sleep, in fact. I’ve not seen my mother since my coronation, and she’s never seen my wife at all. We’re long overdue for a visit. She wants to meet you. And she says she has important matters to discuss with me. We’ll go by riverboat down the Iyann to Alaisor and sail to the Isle from there. This time of year that’s the best route.”
Varaile nodded. “When do we leave?”
“A week? Ten days? Will that be all right?”
“Of course.” Then she smiled: a little ruefully, perhaps, Prestimion thought. “The Coronal never does get a chance to stay home at the Castle for long, does he, Prestimion?”
“There’ll be all the time in the world for staying home later on,” he replied, “when I am Pontifex, and my home is at the bottom of the Labyrinth.”
In the city of Stoien, at the tip of the Stoienzar Peninsula in far southwestern Alhanroel, Akbalik sat before a thick sheaf of bills of lading and cargo manifests and passenger lists and other maritime documents, wearily leafing through them in search of some clue to the location of Dantirya Sambail. He had done the same thing every day for the last three months. A copy of every scrap of paper that had anything to do with vessels traveling between Alhanroel and Zimroel found its way to the intelligence-gathering center that Akbalik, by order of Septach Melayn, had set up here in Stoien. By now he knew more about the price of a hundredweight of ghumba-root or the cost of insuring a shipment of thuyol berries against klegworms than he had ever imagined he would learn. But he was no closer to finding out anything about Dantirya Sambail than he had been the day he arrived.
The dispatches he was sending back to the Castle each week were becoming increasingly terse and cranky. Akbalik had been away in the provinces for months, passing what had begun to seem like an endless skein of pointless days among all these dreary strangers, first Ni-moya, now here. He was a famously even-tempered man, but even he had his limits. He was beginning to miss his life at the Castle tremendously. Nothing was being accomplished out here; it was time, he thought, and well past time, for him to be transferred back to the capital, and in the last couple of dispatches he had made explicit requests to that effect.
But no answers came. Septach Melayn was probably too busy keeping his dueling skills polished to bother reading his correspondence. Akbalik had written once to Gialaurys, but that was like writing to Lord Stiamot’s statue. As for the Coronal, Akbalik had heard that he had decided to make a pilgrimage to the Isle of Sleep to introduce his new wife to his mother, and was somewhere on the River Iyann, midway between the Mount and Alaisor, just now. So there was no hope at all of arranging a recall order, it seemed. Akbalik had no choice but to go on sitting here day after day, interminably sifting through his mountains of shipping documents.
At least Stoien city was a cheery enough place to be stranded, if you had no alternative but to be stranded in some provincial outpost. Its climate was perfect, summertime warmth throughout the year, sweet air and cloudless skies, pleasant sea breezes from mid-morning through mid-afternoon, mild evenings, a delicious cooling sprinkling of rain every night precisely at midnight. The city itself was a thin strand spilling out for more than a hundred miles along the sweeping curve of its great harbor, so that a population of better than nine million was accommodated without any sense of crowding. And the place was a joy to look at. Because the whole of the Stoienzar Peninsula was entirely flat, never rising more than twenty feet above sea level at any point, the people of the port of Stoien had introduced topographical variety into their city by requiring that every building had to be erected atop a brick platform faced with white stone, and by decreeing wide variation in the dimensions of the platforms. Some were no more than ten or fifteen feet high, but others, farther back from the shore, were impressive artificial hills that rose to heights of hundreds of feet.
Certain buildings of special importance stood in splendid isolation far above street level atop individual foundations; elsewhere, whole neighborhoods covering a square mile or more shared a single giant pedestal. The eye was kept in constant motion, faced as it was by pleasing alternations of high and low in every direction. And the effect of so much brick was softened by an abundance of bushes and vines and plants growing with tropical extravagance at the base of every platform, along the ramps that led to the higher levels, and clambering up the loftier walls. Those lush plantings afforded a brilliant show of color, not only the myriad different greens of their leaves, but the splendid indigo and topaz and scarlet and vermilion and violet of their innumerable flowers.
A pretty place, yes. And Akbalik’s own office high up in the customs house at the harbor afforded him a delightful view of the Gulf of Stoien, pale blue here, and smooth as glass. He was able to look northward for hundreds of miles, thousands, maybe, until the horizon intersected the planet’s great curve and turned everything to a thin gray line. But he longed for home all the same. He began to compose yet another missive to Septach Melayn in his head:
“Esteemed friend and revered High Counsellor. Four months have passed, now, since I came to Stoien city at your behest, and in that time I have loyally and diligently labored at the task of—”