“Twenty royals,” the left head said immediately. His voice was deep and rumbling.
It was a preposterous amount. Most people worked all year for less. An hour’s visit with a dream-speaker would cost no more than a couple of crowns; this was a hundred times as much. Akbalik began to protest, but a quivering of tentacles from the Vroon, and a whispered, “Sir—sir—” caused him to subside. The magus’s fee, Odrian Kestivaunt had told him several times already, was an essential part of the process. Any attempt to bargain would ruin the entire enterprise.
Well, they weren’t his twenty royals. Akbalik took four gleaming five-royal pieces from his purse, the new ones showing Confalume in the Pontifex’s robes with Prestimion’s handsome profile on the reverse, and laid them on the desk. Givilan-Klostrin snatched them up smoothly and lifted them to his faces, pressing the coins against his outer cheekbones and holding them there a moment as though to satisfy himself that they were genuine.
“Where are the documents?” the magus asked.
Kestivaunt had prepared a page-long transcript of the coded lines he had found in the group of cargo manifests. Akbalik handed that to the Su-Suheris. He shook both of his heads at once, an effect that Akbalik found dizzying, and demanded the originals. Akbalik looked toward Kestivaunt, who went scurrying out, tentacles thrashing in agitation, and returned a few moments later with the papers. Givilan-Klostrin took them from him. Akbalik had to fight back laughter at the sight of the seven-foot-tall Su-Suheris solemnly reaching far down toward the tiny Vroon, who was barely eighteen inches high.
Givilan-Klostrin now opened a case he had brought with him and began to set his conjuring apparatus out on a bench. Akbalik felt some surprise at that, for he knew that Maundigand-Klimd performed his own divinations without the aid of a lot of gadgetry, and in fact had often expressed scorn for such devices. Perhaps this was all part of the show, he thought, a justification for that staggering twenty-royal fee. He watched as Givilan-Klostrin put out five cones of incense and lit them, instantly filling the room with clouds of cloyingly sweet smoke. Next the magus brought forth a little metal dome and tapped a projection at its tip, which caused it to emit a steady bell-like tone. A second such device placed beside the first produced the deep, low sound of far-off chanting; a third yielded an eerie, reverberant sound that might have been created by blowing into conical sea-shells.
Givilan-Klostrin handed a fourth such dome to Akbalik, and a fifth to the Vroon. “You will touch their triggers,” he said gravely, “at the appropriate moment. You will know when that moment has arrived.”
Akbalik was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. The sickening aroma of the incense, the hypnotic music of the bells and shells, the chanting—it was all rapidly getting to be too much for him.
But there was no turning back. The process, the very expensive process, was under way.
Givilan-Klostrin was holding Kestivaunt’s stack of cargo manifests clasped between the outspread fingers of his hands, one hand above, one below. All four of his eyes were closed. From both his throats came a strange, unsettling gargling sound, its doubled rhythms and eerie harmonies coordinated in a weird way with the distant chanting. He seemed almost to have fallen asleep. Then, gradually, his body began to sway and his legs started to quiver. He leaned a long way backward, inclining his heads so that they pointed toward the floor behind him, and stood straight again, and leaned once more, repeating the movement over and over.
Suddenly Odrian Kestivaunt, without having received any perceptible cue, tapped the jutting tip of the little metal dome he was holding. From it there came the sonorous blast of giant trumpets, a sound that expanded through the room with a force that seemed capable of bending the walls. To his own surprise Akbalik felt himself impelled then by some powerful inner force to touch the trigger of his own dome, and, when he did, it gave off a series of tremendous deafening cymbal-clashes. The hubbub all around them was astounding. He felt as though he had somehow been whisked off into the very midst of the thousand-instrument orchestra of the Ni-moya opera house.
Rivers of sweat flowed down Givilan-Klostrin’s faces. Akbalik had never seen a Su-Suheris perspire before: he hadn’t known they even were capable of it. The magus’s breath was coming in harsh huffing gasps. Blood had begun to ooze from his nose and mouth. He was clutching the documents, now, tightly against his chest.
As the sounds emanating from the five metal domes mounted in intensity, Givilan-Klostrin went reeling drunkenly around the room, flinging his heads back and lifting his knees almost to his chest with every lurching stride. Savage growling sounds came from him. He went crashing into tables and chairs without appearing to notice. When one sturdy chair in particular seemed to draw his anger—he had stumbled into it three times—he raised one foot and brought it crashing down with such astonishing force that the chair went flying into a host of splintered pieces. It was an extraordinary feat. Truly he was a man possessed, Akbalik thought.
The room now was utterly filled with the sounds of trumpets, bells, gongs. Givilan-Klostrin had come to a halt by the window, and stood there now, leaning forward, breathing heavily, his whole body shaking convulsively. He rocked from side to side, again and again lifting one foot and carefully putting it down, then lifting the other. His heads shot outward on their shared neck, moved rapidly inward until they seemed almost to strike each other, shot outward again. His cheeks were puffed; his tongues were outthrust; he made frightful blowing noises. Then he opened his eyes a moment. They were rolling wildly in their sockets.
One minute, two, three, five: it went on and on. The rhythm was building toward a tension that could only end in some awesome eruption. But would this terrifying seizure ever end?
Suddenly there was a startling silence in the room as all five metal spheres ceased their noisemaking at the same instant. Givilan-Klostrin seemed deep in trance.
His shaking and rocking and foot-lifting all had ceased. Now he stood statue-still, utterly frozen in place, the right head dangling limply as though its neck-stalk were broken and the left one staring unblinkingly forward at Akbalik. The stasis held for a minute or more. Then from the drooping right head there began to come a low moaning wordless sound, a kind of rumbling whine that wandered up and down over five or six octaves, gradually cohering into a series of unaccented syllabic phrases as unintelligible to Akbalik as the coded lines on the cargo manifest.
After a moment the upright left head began to speak as welclass="underline" slowly declaiming a translation, apparently, of the oracular sounds coming from the other one, everything uttered clearly and precisely and understandably:
“The man whom you seek,” said the left head of Givilan-Klostrin, “is here in this very province. These are messages from his hidden camp in the southern part of the province of Stoien to his companions in another land. He has spent many months gathering an army in a far-off place; he will soon bring his forces together here; it is his desire to overthrow the king of the world.”
As he uttered the last of those words the Su-Suheris fell forward in exhaustion, collapsing with a tremendous crash almost at Akbalik’s feet. For a long moment he lay face down, trembling. Then he lifted each of his heads in turn and stared at Akbalik in a dazed, groggy way, as if uncertain of where he was or who the man might be that was standing before him.
“Is it over?” Akbalik asked.
The Su-Suheris nodded feebly.
“Good.” Akbalik made a brusque chopping gesture with one hand held sideways. “You will forget everything that was spoken here today.”
A look of bafflement appeared on both of Givilan-Klostrin’s icy-hued faces. In a weak voice the left head said, “Was anything spoken? By whom? I remember nothing, my lord. Nothing. The house of Thungma is empty.”