She had gone into a small room brightly illuminated by natural light pouring through carved lacy tesselations in the marble ceiling. It appeared to be her private study. In it were a desk made of a single brilliantly polished slab of some colorful mottled stone, a low couch, a couple of small tables.
Three alabaster vases against the far wall held a lovely display of cut flowers, scarlet and purple and yellow and cobalt blue.
It did not seem to trouble her that Varaile had come to this room with him. But all her attention was turned toward Prestimion. From a shallow, elegantly inlaid wooden box on her desk she took a slender silver circlet similar to the one she wore and handed it to him.
“Put this on, Prestimion.”
He obeyed without questioning. He could barely feel that it was there, so finely made and slight was it.
“And now,” she said, setting two little wine-flasks on the table before him. She pushed one toward him. “This is no wine of our vineyard, but perhaps you’ll recognize the flavor. Drink it down all at once.”
Now he did question, at least with a puzzled glance. But she opened her own flask and drained it at a single draught, and after a moment he did the same with his. It was a dark wine, thick and pungent, and sweet with an aftertaste of spices. He had tasted something like it before, he knew, but where? And then Prestimion realized what it was: the wine that dream-speakers employed in consultations, so that the minds of those who came to them for help would be open to them. There was a drug in it that dissolved the barriers between one mind and another. It was years since he last had been for a speaking—he preferred to puzzle out his own dreams rather than have a stranger help him with their meaning—but he was sure that this was the wine.
“You know what this is?” she asked.
“Speaking-wine, yes. Shall we lie down now?”
“This is not a speaking, Prestimion. You will be awake for this, and you will see things you’ve never seen before. Frightening things, I’m afraid. Give me your hands.” He extended them toward her. “Ordinarily one must have months of training in the technique before one is permitted to do this,” she said. “The power of the vision is simply too great: it can burn out an unprepared mind in a moment. But you will not be traveling on your own. You’ll merely be accompanying me on my own voyage, the one I take every day across the world. You’ll see, through my eyes, the things I see on those voyages. And I will protect you from overflow effects.”
Gently she took his hands in hers. Then she laced her fingers between his and tightened her grasp with sudden and surprising force.
It was like being struck in the forehead by a hammer.
He could no longer focus his eyes. Everything was blurred. He lurched backward and thought he might fall, but she held him upright, seemingly without effort. The room churned and wheeled about him: Varaile, his mother, the desk, the flower vases, everything in motion, swinging dizzyingly in wild orbits around his head. His mind was swirling as it would have been if he had put away five flasks of wine in half an hour.
Then came calmness again, a blessed moment of balance and stability, and he felt himself rising wraithlike from the floor, passing easily through one of the carved lacework openings in the ceiling, drifting upward and upward into the sky like an untethered balloon. It reminded him of the drug-vision he had had long ago in the sorcerers’ city of Triggoin, when by the use of magical herbs and the uttering of powerful Names he had risen beyond the kingdom of the clouds and looked down on Majipoor from the edge of space.
But the effect was very different now.
That other time he had viewed the world from on high with the cool objectivity of a god. He had seen the whole giant planet as nothing more than a little ball turning slowly in the sky, a toy model of a world, with its three continents standing out as dark wedges no bigger than one of his fingernails, and he had carefully taken that little ball upon the palm of his hand and, gently, curiously, touched it with his finger, examining it with fascination and love, all the while standing outside it, at a distant remove from the lives of its people.
Now, though, he was at one and the same time far above the world and inextricably enmeshed in the inner reality of what lay below him. He looked down upon it from on high and yet was intimately linked to the broiling, turbulent energies of its billions of people.
He perceived himself soaring at infinite speed through some region of the upper air, and in the darkness below the myriad cities and towns and villages of Majipoor blazed like beacons, each distinct and easily identifiable: there was the immense Mount, with its Fifty Cities and its Six Rivers, there was the Castle clinging to the tip of that great rock and sprawling far down its sides, and there, limned in the same wondrous clarity, were Sisivondal and Sefarad and Sippulgar, Sintalmond, Kajith Kabulon, Pendiwane and Stoien and Alaisor, and all the rest of Alhanroel as well, and Zimroel’s cities just as clear, Ni-moya and Piliplok and Narabal and Dulorn and Khyntor and their many neighbors; and there was the Isle beneath him now, and Suvrael coming up to the south with cities he had not seen even in dreams, Tolaghai and Natu Gorvinu and Kheskh. He recognized each one now by sight, intuitively, as though they bore labels.
But also it seemed to him that he was traveling just above the rooftops of all these places, so close that he could touch the souls of their inhabitants the way he had touched the little turning ball of the world that time in Triggoin.
Potent psychic emanations were coming upward to him like heat out of a chimney, and what he felt was terrifying. No protective membrane separated him from the lives of the swarming billions of people who lived in those cities. Everything reached him in a mighty rush. He felt the outcries that told of pain and sorrow and utter despair; he felt the anguish of souls so isolated from their fellow beings that they might well have been encased in blocks of ice; he felt the bewildered throb of minds that moved in fifty directions at once and therefore could not move at all. He felt the stabbing agony of those who were struggling to make sense of their own thoughts and failed to comprehend. He felt the nightmare dread of those who looked into their minds to find their own pasts, and discovered only gaping canyons.
Over and over he experienced the terror that inner anarchy brings. He felt the desperate turbulence of the wounded spirit. He felt the horror of heart-blindness and the shame of heart-deadness. He felt the bleakness of irrevocable loss.
He felt chaos everywhere.
Chaos.
Chaos.
Chaos.
Madness.
Madness, yes, an irresistible river of it, spilling out across the land like some hideous tide of sewage set free. A great blight, an overwhelming unstoppable disaster, a juggernaut of calamitous pandemonium wheeling through the world, a scourge far greater in scope than anything he had imagined.
“Mother—” he gasped. “Mother!”
“Drink this,” Varaile said softly, and offered him a goblet. “Water, that’s all it is. Just water.”
His eyes fluttered open. He was, he saw, seated on the couch in his mother’s study, leaning back against the pillow. The white robe they had given him to wear was drenched with perspiration, and he was trembling. He gulped the water. It made him shiver. Varaile touched her hand lightly to his forehead: her fingers felt cold as ice against his feverish brow. He saw his mother across the room, standing with arms folded beside her desk, watching him calmly.