During the remaining years of Lord Confalume’s reign and the whole of Lord Prestimion’s, Gopak Semivinvor had lived eternally in expectation of the next royal visit. He arose each dawn—the major-domo lived in a cottage in a quiet corner of the game park—and conducted a full inspection of the outer palace and then the inner one, compiling a long list of work for his staff to do before the visiting Coronal’s party arrived. It was a source of great disappointment to him that that visit never came. But still the inspections went on; still the bamboo roofs received their yearly coat of varnish; still the stone-floored halls of the outer palace were swept and the marble building-blocks repointed. Gopak Semivinvor was eighty years old, now. He did not intend to die until he had once more played host to a Coronal in the Summer Palace of Ertsud Grand.
When news of the impending ascension of Prince Dekkeret to the royal throne reached the ears of Gopak Semivinvor, his first response was to consult his magus for a prognostication of the likelihood that the new Coronal would visit the Summer Palace.
Like many people of the era of the Pontifex Prankipin and the Coronal Lord Confalume, Gopak Semivinvor had developed a profound faith in the ability of soothsayers to foretell the future. The particular school of shamans to which he subscribed was based in Triggoin, the capital city of Majipoori sorcery, in northern Alhanroel beyond the desolate Valmambra desert. It was known as the Advocacy of the Four Names; in recent years it had won a wide following in Ert-sud Grand and several neighboring cities of the Mount. Gopak Semivinvor patronized a tall, preternaturally pale Four Names sorcerer named Dobranda Thelk, who was very young for a practitioner of his trade, but had a cold intensity in his gaze that carried a sense of absolute conviction.
Would the Coronal, Gopak Semivinvor asked, soon come calling at the Summer Palace?
Dobranda Thelk closed his glittering eyes for a moment. When he reopened them he seemed to be peering deep into Gopak Semivinvor’s soul.
“It is quite clear that he will come,” said the magus. “But only if the palace is in in good order, and all is in full accordance with expectation.”
Gopak Semivinvor knew that it could never be otherwise so long as he was in charge of the palace. And such a wild throb of joy ran through him that he feared that his breast would burst.
“Tell me,” he said, laying a royal on the sorcerer’s tray and then, after a moment’s consideration, putting a five-crown piece beside it, “what particular things must I do to ensure the complete comfort of Lord Dekkeret when he is at the Summer Palace?”
Dobranda Thelk mixed the colored powders that he used in divination. He closed his eyes again and murmured the Names. He spoke the Five Words. He sifted the powders through his hands, and said the Names a second time, and then the Three Words that could never be written down. When he looked up at Gopak Semivinvor those potent eyes of his were as hard as auger-bits.
“There is one thing above all else: you must see to it that the Coronal sleeps in proper relationship to the powerful stars Thorius and Xavial. You are able to locate those stars in the sky, are you not?”
“Of course. But how am I to know which position of the palace is the one that provides the proper relationship?”
“That will be revealed to you in dreams,” replied Dobranda Thelk.
“By a sending, do you mean?”
“It could be in that form, yes,” said the magus, and from the coolness of his tone Gopak Semivinvor knew that the consultation was at an end.
Three times in his long life Gopak Semivinvor had experienced sendings of the Lady of the Isle, or so he believed: dreams in which the kindly Lady had come to him and offered him reassurance that his life’s journey followed the correct path. There had been no specific information for him to use in any of those three dreams, only a general feeling of warmth and ease. But that night, as he made ready for bed, he knelt briefly and asked the Lady to grace him with a fourth sending, one that would guide him in his desire to serve the new Coronal in the best possible way.
And indeed, not long after he had given himself over to sleep, Gopak Semivinvor felt the sensation of warmth in his scalp that he regarded as the portent of a sending. He lay perfectly still, suspended in that condition of observant receptivity that everyone learned as a child, in which the sleeper’s mind was simultaneously lost in slumber and vigilantly aware of whatever guidance the dream might bring.
This seemed different from his previous sendings, though. The sensations were not particularly benign. He felt a touch, definitely a touch, from outside, but not a kindly one. The pressure against his scalp was greater than it had been those other times, was even painful, in a way; the air seemed to grow chill around his sleeping body; and there was no trace of that feeling of well-being that one always expected to have from contact with the mind of the Lady of the Isle of Sleep. Yet he maintained his receptivity to what was to come, holding his mind open and allowing it to be flooded with an awareness of—
Of what?
Discontinuity. Disparity. Incongruity. Wrongness.
Wrongness, yes. A powerful sense that the hinges of the world were coming undone, that the joints of the cosmos were loosening, that the gate of terror stood open and a black tide of chaos was pouring through.
He awakened then, sitting up, holding himself tightly in his own arms. Gopak Semivinvor was sweating and trembling so distemperately that he wondered if his last moments might be upon him. But gradually he grew calm. There was still a strange pressure in his brain, that feeling as of something pushing from without—a disturbing feeling, a frightening one, even.
Some moments passed, and then clarity of mind began to return, and a certain degree of ease of soul; and with that came the conviction that he understood the meaning of the oracle’s words.
You must see to it that the Coronal sleeps in proper relationship to the powerful stars Thorius and Xavial. Plainly the present configuration of the bamboo palace was an improper one, unluckily aligned, out of tune with the movements of the cosmos. Very well. The building was designed to be dismantled and reconstructed along a different axis. That was what must be done. The palace needed to be turned on its foundation.
That the palace had not been dismantled and moved in hundreds of years—maybe as much as a thousand—did not trouble the major-domo for more than an instant. Some small prudent voice within him suggested that the project might be more difficult than he suspected, but against that tiny objection came the insistent clamor of his desire to get on with the work. Desperate haste impelled him: the magus had spoken, the troubling dream had somehow provided reinforcement, and now he must make the palace ready, in accordance with the commandment that had been laid upon him, and lose no time about it. Of that he had no doubt. Doubt did not seem an option in this enterprise.
Nor did it concern him that he did not, at the moment, know which orientation of the building would be more desirable than the present one. It had to be moved, that was clear. The Coronal would not come unless it was. And he had every reason to think that the appropriate positioning would be revealed to him as he set about the task. He was the Major-Domo of the Palaces, and had been for nearly fifty years; it had been given into his hands to care for this wonderful building and keep it ready at all times for the use of the anointed Coronal; one might even say that destiny had chosen him to perform that special task. He was confident that he would perform it correctly.
Gopak Semivinvor rushed out into the night—a mild one and warm, Ertsud Grand’s climate being one of almost unending summer—made his way through the game park to the bamboo palace’s front gate, scattering nocturnal mibberils and thassips as he ran, and sending big-eyed black menagungs fluttering up into the treetops. Panting, dizzy with exertion, he leaned against the gatepost of the building and stared upward until he located the brilliant red star Xavial, which marked the midpoint of the sky, the great axis of the universe. Its mighty counterpoise, bright Thorius, lay not far to the left of it.