It was coming for him now, despite everything.
“Yes, Teotas, yes, sleep…” Fiorinda was stroking his forehead, his cheeks, his throat. “Relax. Let go, Teotas, let go of everything.”
What could he say? I dare not sleep. I fear demons, Fiorinda? I am unwilling to put myself at their mercy?
Her embrace was sweet and soothing. He rested his head against her soft warm breasts. What was the use of fighting? Sleep was necessary. Sleep was inevitable. Sleep was…
A tumbling downward, a free descent, a willy-nilly plummeting.
And then he is crossing a bare blackened plateau, a place of clinkers and ash, of gaping crevasses, of gaunt dead trees, and he is growing older, much older, with every step he takes. He is inhaling old age like some poisonous fume. His skin puckers and becomes cracked and wrinkled. He sprouts a coat of coarse white hair on his chest and belly and loins. His veins bulge. His ankles complain. His eyes grow bleary. His knees are bent. His heart races and slows. His nostrils wheeze.
He struggles forward, fighting the transformation and always losing, losing, losing. The pallid sun begins to slip below the horizon. The path he is following, he knows not why, is ascending, now. Every step is torment. His throat is dry and his swollen tongue is like a lump of old cloth in his mouth. Gummy rheum drips from the rims of his eyes and trickles across his chest. There is a drumming in his temples and a coldness in his gut.
Creatures that are little more than filmy vapors dance through the air about him. They point; they laugh; they jeer. Coward, they call him. Fool. Insect. Pitiful creeping thing.
Feebly he shakes his fist at them. Their laughter grows more raucous. Their insults become more vicious. They lay bare his utter worthlessness in fifty different ways, and he lacks the strength to contradict them, and after a time he knows that no contradiction is possible, because they are speaking the simple truth.
Then, as though they are no longer able to sustain interest in any entity as trivial and contemptible as he, they melt away and are gone, leaving only a trailing cloud of tinkling merriment behind them.
He staggers on. Twice he falls, and twice he claws his way to his feet, feeling the harsh scratch of bone on bone, the thick rustle of dark blood pushing through narrowed arteries. He would not have believed that being old could be such agony. Darkness comes swiftly. He finds himself deep in starless moonless night and is grateful that he no longer has to look upon his own body. “Fiorinda?” he croaks, but there is no response. He is alone. He has never been anything but alone.
A light, now, blinks into being in the distance, and rapidly intensifies to become a cone of luminous green, widening to fill the heavens, a geyser of pale radiance spurting aloft. As the wind sweeps through it, it stirs swirls of a grayer color, whirlpools of light within light. Accompanying this outburst of brightness is a rushing, whispering sound, like the murmur of distant water. He also hears what sounds like subterranean laughter, resonant, slippery. He goes forward, entering a sort of green cloud that seeps from the ground. The air is electric. His pores tingle. A sour smell drifts upward in his nostrils. His bent and aching body sweats and steams. There is what seems to be a mountain ahead, but as he moves on through the cloud Teotas realizes that what he sees is a giant living thing, squat and enormous and incomprehensible, sitting upright on a kind of throne.
A god? A demon? An idol? Its brown, leathery skin is thick and glossy, and ridged like a reptile’s hide. Its massive body is low and long, blunt-snouted, goggle-eyed, with a high vaulting back, fat sides, bulging belly, pedestal-like underparts. Teotas has never seen a creature so huge. That mouth alone—
That mouth—
That gaping mouth—
Teotas is unable to halt himself. The mouth yawns like the entrance to the cavern of caverns, and he marches onward, no longer moving with difficulty: gliding, rather, speeding toward that mouth, rushing toward it—
Wider and wider. That great cavern fills the sky. A terrible bellowing comes from it, loud enough to shake the ground. Landslides begin; rocks fall in thundering avalanches; there is no place to take refuge except within the mouth itself, that waiting mouth, that eternally gaping mouth—
Teotas rushes forward into the blackness.
“It’s all right,” someone is saying. “A dream, only a dream! Teotas—please, Teotas—”
He was bathed in sweat, shivering, a huddled heap. Fiorinda cradled him in her arms, murmuring an unending flow of soothing words. Gradually he could feel himself coming back from the nightmare, though its residue, like an oily slick, still laps at the edges of his mind.
“Only a dream, Teotas! It wasn’t real!”
He nodded. What could he say, how to explain? “Yes. Only a dream.”
10
Prestimion said, “So now it’s finally over and done with, all the jolly festivals and amusements. Now the real work begins, eh, Dekkeret?”
It had taken him back to earlier days, these weeks of formal ceremonies that marked the end of the old reign and the beginning of the new. He had been through all this once before, only that time he was the one whose ascent to the throne was being celebrated. The influx of coronation gifts from all over the world—had he ever actually unpacked more than a fraction of those myriad boxes and crates?—the rite of the passing of the crown, the coronation banquet, the recitals from The Book of Changes, the chanting of The Book of Powers, the passing and repassing of the wine-bowls, the gathered lords of the realm rising to make the starburst salute and cry out the greeting to the new Coronal—
“Prestimion!” they had cried. “Lord Prestimion! Hail, Lord Prestimion! Long life to Lord Prestimion!” So long ago! It seemed to him now that his entire reign as Coronal had gone by in the twinkling of an eye, and now here he was mysteriously transformed into a man of middle years, no longer as buoyant and impulsive as he once had been, nor as good-humored, either—a little testy at times, indeed, he would admit—and now they had done it all once again, the immemorial rituals played out anew, but this time the name they called was that of Dekkeret, Dekkeret, Lord Dekkeret, while he himself looked on from one side, smiling, willingly surrendering his share of glory to the new monarch.
But some part of him would always be Coronal, he knew.
His boyish younger self stood before him in the mirror of his memory like some other person, that youthful, agile Prestimion of two decades ago: that endlessly resilient young man who had survived the humiliation of the Korsibar usurpation and the ghastly bloodlettings of the civil war, to make himself Coronal despite all. How he had fought for it! It had cost him a brother, and a lover, and much bodily suffering besides, nights camped on muddy shores, days spent trekking through the deadliest desert this side of Suvrael, mounts shot out from beneath him on the battlefield, wounds whose scars he still carried. Dekkeret was fortunate to have been spared any of that, let alone anything like a repetition of it. His rise to the throne had been orderly and normal. It was a much simpler way to become king.
Everything should have been simple for me, too, Prestimion thought. But that was not the fate that the Divine had in mind for me.
He stood with Dekkeret—Lord Dekkeret—in the Confalume throne-chamber, just the two of them, amid the echoes. As they looked far across the floor of brilliant yellow gurnawood to the throne itself, that massive block of ruby-streaked black opal rising on its stepped pedestal of dark mahogany, Dekkeret said, “You’ll miss it, I know. Go on, Prestimion: climb up there one last time, if you like. I’ll never tell.”