Voices. Footsteps outside, now. Coughing sounds. Someone stamping his feet, two someones, Kekkedis and Malchio knocking snow off their boots.
“Boy! Where are you, boy? Let us in! Do you have any idea how cold it is out here?”
Mandralisca leans his baton against the wall. Rushes to the door, fumbles with the latch. Two tall men on the threshold, one older than the other, two bleak scowling lantern-jawed faces, long greasy black hair, angry eyes shining through. Mandralisca can smell the brandy on their breath. There is the smell of fury about them, too: a sharp, musky stink, boiling out from beneath their fur robes. Something must have gone wrong. They stomp past him, brushing him aside. “Where’s the fire?” Kekkedis asks. “Why is it so damnably cold in here? You should have had a fire ready for us, boy!”
No way to deal with that. Denounced if he prepares a fire, denounced if he doesn’t. The old story.
Mandralisca hurries to bring in some kindling from the pile on the back porch. His father and his brother, still in their coats, stand in the middle of the room, rubbing their hands to warm them. They are talking about their journey. Their voices are harsh and bitter. Evidently the venture has been a failure; the agents for the other wine-merchant’s estate have been too sharp for Kekkedis, the cheap and easy purchase of distress-sale merchandise has fallen through, the whole trip has been a waste of time and money. Mandralisca keeps his head down and goes about his business, asking no questions. He knows better than to call attention to himself when his father is in a mood like this. Best to stay out of his way, cling to the shadows, let him vent his rage on pots and pans and stools, not on his youngest son.
But it happens anyway. Mandralisca is half a step too slow performing some task. Kekkedis is displeased. He snarls, curses, abruptly sees Mandralisca’s baton leaning against the wall not far from where he stands, grabs it up, prods the boy sharply in the gut with its tip.
That is unbearable. Not so much the pain of being prodded by the baton, although it nearly takes his breath away, but that his father should be handling his baton at all. Kekkedis has no business touching it, let alone using it against him. The baton is his. His only possession. Bought with his own money, carved into shape with his own hands.
Without stopping to think, Mandralisca reaches out for it as Kekkedis is drawing it back for a second thrust. Lightning-fast, he steps forward, seizes the baton by the tip, pulls it toward him, trying to yank it from his father’s hand.
It is a terrible mistake. He knows that even as he is committing it, but for all his quickness he is unable to stop himself. Kekkedis stares at him, wild-eyed, sputtering with astonishment at so flagrant an act of defiance. He rips the baton from Mandralisca’s grasp, twisting laterally with vicious force that Mandralisca’s slender wrist cannot resist. Grabs the baton by each end, grinning, snaps it easily over his knee, grins again, holds the broken pieces up to display them for him, and casually tosses them into the fire. All of it takes only a moment or two to accomplish.
“No,” Mandralisca murmurs, not yet believing it has happened. “Don’t—no—please—”
A year’s savings. His beautiful baton.
Thirty-five years later and a thousand miles or so to the north and east, the man who calls himself Count Mandralisca of Zimroel sits in a small circular room with an arched roof and burnt-orange mud-plastered walls on a ridge overlooking the desert wastes of the Plain of Whips. He wears a helmet of metal mesh on his brow; his hands are clenched beside him as though each one grips one of the sundered halves of the broken baton.
He sees his father’s face before him. The triumphant vindictive grin. The pieces of the baton held aloft—tossed into the flames—
Mandralisca’s searching mind soars upward—outward—remembering—hating—
Don’t—no—please—
Teotas, defeated by sleep yet again, sleeps. He can do nothing else. His spirit fears sleep but his body demands it. Each night he fights, loses, succumbs. And so now, despite the nightly struggle, once more he lies sleeping. Dreaming.
A desert, somewhere, nowhere real. Hallucinations rise like heat waves from the rocks. He hears groans and occasional sobs and something that could be a chorus of large black beetles, a dry rustling sound. The wind is hot and dusty. The dawn has a blinding brilliance. The rocks are bright nodes of pure energy whose rich-textured red surfaces vibrate in patterns that continually change. On one face of every stony mass he sees golden lights circling gracefully. On the opposite face pale bluish spheres are unceasingly born and go bubbling into the air. Everything shimmers. Everything shines with an inner light. It would all be marvelously beautiful, if it were not so frightening.
He himself has been transformed into something hideous. His hands have become hammers. His toes are hooked claws. His knees have eyes but no eyebrows. His tongue is satin. His saliva is glass. His blood is bile and his bile is blood. A brooding sense of imminent punishment assails him. Creatures made of vertical ribs of gray cartilage make dull booming noises at him. Somehow he understands their meaning: they are expressing their scorn, they are mocking him for his innumerable inadequacies. He wants to cry out, but no sound will leave his throat. Nor can he flee the scene. He is paralyzed.
“Fi—o—rin—da—”
With a supreme effort he manages to utter her name. Can she hear him? Will she save him?
“Fi—o—rin—da—”
He plucks at the twisted and disheveled coverlet. Fiorinda lies beside him like someone’s discarded life-size doll, cut off from him behind the wall of sleep—he knows she’s there, can’t reach out to her, can’t make any sort of contact. One of them is on some other world. He has no way of telling which of them it is. Probably me, he decides. Yes. He is on another world, asleep, dreaming, dreaming that he lies in his bed in the Castle, asleep, next to the sleeping Fiorinda, who is beyond his reach. And he is dreaming.
“Fiorinda?”
Silence. Solitude.
He realizes now that he must be dreaming that he is awake. He sits up, reaches for the night-light. By its faint green glow he sees that he is alone in the bed. He remembers, now: Fiorinda has gone to the Labyrinth with Varaile, not a permanent separation, only a postponement of the decision, a short visit to help Varaile get herself established in her new home. And then they will decide which one of them is to take the position that has been offered, whether Fiorinda is to be lady-in-waiting to the wife of the new Pontifex or he to be High Counsellor to Lord Dekkeret. But how can he be High Counsellor, when he is nothing more than the most loathsome of insects?
Meanwhile he is alone at the Castle. Assailed by merciless dreams.
Night after night… terror. Madness. Where can he hide? Nowhere. There is no place to hide. Nowhere. Nowhere.
“Do you hear something?” Varaile asked. “One of the children crying, perhaps?”
“What? What?”
“Wake up, Prestimion! One of the children—”
He made a further interrogative noise, but showed no sign of being willing to awaken. After a moment Varaile realized that there was no reason why he should. The hour was very late. He was exhausted; since their arrival at the Labyrinth his days, and many of his nights as well, had been taken up in meetings, conferences, discussions. The officials of the departed Confalume’s Pontificate had to be interviewed and assessed, the new people that Prestimion had brought with him from the Castle had to be integrated into the system here, there were applications for favor to study, petitions to grant—
Let him sleep, Varaile thought. This was something she could handle by herself.